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Bill Kowba’s announcement that he would retire on June 30 after three years as superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District prompted several tributes to the former Navy admiral for his role in stabilizing city schools.
But as much as we think highly of Kowba the man and admire his military service, the status quo he helped stabilize is not a healthy one. Acting at the behest of school board members in thrall to the teachers union that got them elected, the state’s second-largest school district continues to give far more emphasis to keeping adult employees happy than to the needs of its 131,000 students – and it does so in a way that punishes future students for decades to come.
The central goal of the school board is to preserve pay practices that award automatic raises to teachers for 15 of their first 20 years on the jobs, as well as raises for completing often-irrelevant graduate courses. Because of these policies, 92 percent of the operating budget is eaten up by employee compensation.
The board’s need to constantly free up money for teacher pay has led to a long series of abusive and irresponsible policies.
For years, parents and students were pressured to pay for educational supplies, violating the state Constitution.
A recent state Senate report found that the district improperly diverted $4.5 million in federal funds intended for school lunch programs in the 2010-11 school year, and apparently more federal dollars in other years.
But perhaps most egregious of all has been the district’s bond practices.
In 2010, facing a cash shortfall, San Diego Unified issued $164 million in exotic capital appreciation bonds that will end up costing nearly $1.2 billion because the terms prohibit the district from beginning to pay down the principal for decades.
What’s worse is San Diego Unified’s decision to use 30-year borrowing to pay for a wide range of expenses that have historically been covered by the operating budget. “Construction bonds” are supposed to be used for capital improvements – schools, gyms, things that last. But some of money from the $2.1 billion Proposition S bond measure in 2008 was used to buy nearly 100,000 laptops and iPads, which are only likely to last a few years. Bond funds were also used for the most routine maintenance, even on the newest schools. District officials are unapologetic and prepared to do the same with funds from the $2.5 billion Proposition Z bond measure approved last year.
And so school budgets in 2043 are going to still be paying for electronic devices that have been out of use for more than a quarter-century, and for basic upkeep of schools performed this year. That’s crazy.
If a publicly held private company operated in such fashion, the Securities and Exchange Commission would be deposing every executive in sight, and court dockets would fill up with shareholder lawsuits.
This is why it is our fervent hope that San Diego Unified adopts a responsible management model. Addressing short-term budget headaches with solutions that will cause problems for decades to come is the opposite of responsible.
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Every year, many people fall victim to injury, harm and even death through accidents on construction sites . These sites are rife with danger, can be resulted from a variety of causes. Accidents could stem from negligence of other site workers, inappropriate behavior of other site workers, defective machinery, mistakes and negligence caused by drinking or drugs taken.In many countries, occupational accidents represent a major problem in public health. This is usually involved with the situation that cannot be taken for granted at the workplace. With this serious scenario has also come a rise number of accidents in the need for martketing, and very limited academic literature on how to best determine the reasons and effects of accicents in the construction site. This book, therefore provides a guideline for the management in ensuring all the employees and employers are able to obey the rule OSHA. The analysis should help to create a safety and health enviroment for the workers and should be especially usefull for professionals and policy makers in creating the best practice in occupational safety and health in the workplace at large.
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Readers share their ideas for dealing with mean girls.
Why are adolescent girls so mean to each other, and what can parents do about it?
The new documentary, Bully, captures a wicked picture of what’s really going on in schools: rampant bullying and the utter failure of adults to stop it.
Eleven-year-old Ty Field-Smalley took his life after being harassed at school. Ever since, his father has made it his mission to fight bullying.
Most of these were done by kids, all of them will tug on your heart.
In her new book, author Emily Bazelon takes a close up look at bullying past and present -- and explores what it says about kids, parenting, and American culture.
My daughter just got glasses, and kids are already being mean to her. For the first time in her life, she has low self-esteem. She says that she's ugly and that everyone says she looks better without glasses. Any ideas on how I can handle...
How do I stop my third-grade son from teasing and bothering others at the bus stop?
My daughter is in the second grade and is having problems with some girls at the school excluding her from playing with them. It seems to be one girl, who gets other girls to do what she says. I have talked to the teacher several...
My second-grader does not want to go to school. She tells me there is a group of girls who constantly tease her and keep her away from her best friend. They tell her best friend not to play with her and make her choose sides...
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TNK-Uvat tested a mini-pilot hole drilling technology in its Ust-Teguss field to improve economic efficiency and reduce horizontal well drilling time. As a result, well construction time has been cut by 30 percent – from 46 days to 30 days.
One of the key fields in Uvat, Ust-Teguss is now in its first stage of commercial development, which involves large scope of development drilling in the field. As the J2 formation has very good reservoir properties (permeability of 150 mD, porosity of 0.19, gross thickness of 17 m, pay thickness of 10 m, good continuity, no wedgingout or shaling-out zones), horizontal drilling technology is widely used in Ust-Teguss. As of January 1, 2012, 23 horizontal wells were drilled in the field with the average initial flow rate of 350 tpd and the average length of horizontal section of about 600 m.
Initially, horizontal development wells in Pads #1 and #2 were drilled using conventional technology, with a pilot hole of 220 mm in diameter (Fig. 1), because of the high uncertainty about estimated structural surface, net pay thicknesses and reservoir properties of the J2 formation, which is the main productive horizon of the Tyumen suite. Verification of J2 subsurface parameters through drilling of a pilot hole allowed for directing the horizontal section through the best reservoir interval thus minimizing risks. This technology proved its worth but it took at least 45 days to drill one horizontal well with a pilot hole while its cost was almost as much as of two directional wells.
In terms of technology, all parameters and characteristics of the horizontal well drilling with a pilot hole were optimal and therefore, it was not possible to significantly reduce drilling time and cost. However, TNK-Uvat was determined to find a way to improve horizontal well drilling efficiency to reduce drilling time and bring forward start-up dates. In 2011, the team tested horizontal well drilling technology with a minipilot hole (152.4 mm), which goes without drilling of the main pilot hole, setting of abandonment and shut-off bridge plugs, “kicking-off” and drilling of tangent section.
Mini-Pilot Hole Drilling
The mini-pilot hole drilling technology is effective and simple. First, a 220.7-millimeter tangent section is drilled through the water-bearing J1 horizon of the Vasyugan suite down to the productive J2 horizon but not penetrating it, and a 178-millimeter casing string is run in and cemented. After that, the productive target is penetrated with a 152.4-millimeter bit equipped with an LWD (logging-while-drilling) tool. Importantly, a “ledge” is to be made at the beginning of the mini-pilot hole, which can later be used for safe drilling of the main horizontal section and running-in of a 114-millimeter slotted liner (Fig. 2). The minipilot hole logging is used to verify the J2 structure and geology, update the geologic model and design the horizontal section trajectory.
There is also a horizontal well drilling technology with no pilot. However, drilling of a mini-pilot hole helps verify the subsurface structure, pay thickness and heterogeneity of the production target, and so geologists can design an optimal trajectory for the horizontal section: run it through the best reservoir zone and avoid shale and low permeability interlayers in J2 horizon.
Less Time – More Profit
The main purpose of drilling mini-pilot holes is to significantly reduce well construction time and drilling costs. This technology was for the first time used for drilling Wells #2062G, #2063G, #2080G and #2050G, Pad #3,Ust-Teguss (Fig. 3). As a result, the average drilling time was reduced by 16 days, or 35 percent, – from 46 days with a pilot hole down to 30 days with a mini-pilot hole (Fig. 4, 5). The four wells were drilled 50 days faster than they would have been drilled with a pilot hole and this success cut TNK-Uvat’s drilling costs for these wells by 153.7 mln rubles. These wells were also put on stream earlier, which generated incremental oil production of about 29,000 t in 2011 only.
To use the mini-pilot technology effectively, the drilling region has to be studied with exploration or development wells verifying the target horizon geology: structural surface, pay thickness and reservoir properties. For that purpose, the pad drilling design shall include at least one directional well, which will helps minimize horizontal section drilling risks.
That is why the availability of exploration wells and the sequence of drilling were considered when developing the 2012-2014 drilling program. In Uvat Eastern Hub, 15 mini-pilot hole horizontal wells are planned to be drilled in Ust-Teguss, which will reduce well construction time by a total of 210 days, cut average drilling costs by $1.28 mln per well (a total of $19.2 mln) and ensure incremental oil production of about 180,000 t.
The mini-pilot hole horizontal well drilling technology can be used for both horizontal wells and sidetracks in virtually all TNK-BP subsidiaries that operate fields of similar depositional and structural characteristics. It is obvious that it can help reduce drilling time and costs and produce thousands of tons of incremental oil thus raising the value of the Company’s assets.
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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Unless you're buying a company's shares for income and a worthwhile dividend you're most likely buying because you believe the stock has significant upside growth potential.
There are many metrics and gauges that help us determine when a stock is a good value and has been unjustly overlooked by the investment community.
Some people listen to financial analysts, some receive information from their brokerage firm, and many rely on their own experience, research and instincts.
Those are all important ways that help us to find value in whatever asset class we want to invest in. Yet we also need to ask some important questions, especially when it comes to the shares of companies we're considering.Who is most likely to know the details of the financial condition of the company? Who spends each day guiding the decisions, knowing the business prospects and managing the expectations of the shareholders? Which individuals know the competition? Who is more likely to know the prospects for the industry sector that this company, the one you're considering investing in, is a part of? The answer is the insiders who work for that company, especially the operating officers who have to make the big decisions on a day-to-day basis. When they're willing to invest a meaningful amount of their net worth in their company's stock they're showing shareholders that their financial interests are aligned with them. This doesn't always mean that a company's share price is ready to turn around and head higher. It also doesn't mean that the officers and directors know where the stock's price bottom resides. It usually does mean the insiders believe the stock is worth more than the market is currently valuing it. With their inside awareness of the company's current operating environment and earnings they can often see far enough down the road to know that the stock will eventually be more fairly priced.
Ready to EnergizeOne sector where a number of quality companies are not currently being treated with much enthusiasm or respect is the energy sector. Many of these companies are trading at such low valuations that if you didn't know the ins and outs of how they make money you wouldn't realize that the stock should be priced more generously.
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Hepatitis DeltaStudies first reported in 1977 led to the realization that some patients with a more damaging form of Hep B infection were also infected with a second virus. This second virus is now known as hepatitis delta virus, hepatitis D virus or simply HDV.
S. Korea sends vaccines for N. Korean children South Korea has sent a batch of vaccines for more than 1 million North Korean children, a Seoul official said Tuesday, in the latest conciliatory gesture toward the communist neighbor.
The hepatitis B vaccines, worth 1.06 billion won (US$942,300), were delivered to the North through international relief agencies in the South in two installments, with the last one being sent on Monday, said the official at Seoul's Unification Ministry, which handles relations with Pyongyang.
New therapy for hepatitis B combats virus and stimulates immune systemScientists have developed a new treatment approach for chronic hepatitis-B infections that is set to improve the prospects of eliminating the infection and curing the disease.
Fish pedicures unlikely to cause HIV or HCV infectionThe Daily Mail and the Sun are alarming their readers today with articles alleging that “fish foot spa pedicures could spread HIV and hepatitis C” and that there is a "fish foot spa virus bombshell". The story has been picked up other media outlets, including Fox News, the Times of India and the Daily Telegraph. However the stories mostly twist and distort the source they are based on, a set of recommendations from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) on the management of fish pedicures and fish spas. Indeed, the HPA titled their press release: “Fish pedicures unlikely to cause infection.”
Liver Cancer Decreasing In High Risk Countries, Increasing In Low Risk CountriesA new study finds liver cancer incidence rates continue to increase in some low-risk parts of the world such as North America, and are decreasing in some of the highest risk countries of Asia. Despite this, the incidence rates in Asian countries remain twice as high as those in Africa and more than four times as high as rates in North America.
China: Where a blood test determines everythingWhile China is home to an estimated one-third of the world’s hepatitis B carriers, it’s also a place where those with the virus are routinely rejected by employers and schools, spurned by friends and romantic partners. And while discrimination isn’t going away, the nation’s hepatitis sufferers have new means, some legal and some deceitful, to battle bias.
Updated Hepatitis C Practice Guidelines Now Available from AASLDThe American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases published new guidelines for hepatitis C treatment due to the arrival of new FDA apporved drugs.
ACT jail not best for needle programHepatitis Australia chief executive Helen Tyrell said there was not a jail in the world that could declare itself drug free. Ms Tyrell said prisons were a high-risk environment for hepatitis C, with one in three males and two in three females of the 30,000 inmates incarcerated being infected with the virus. She said, prisoners return to the community and plainly prison health is a public health issue
GRAMMY® Winner Natalie Cole to Spotlight Hepatitis C Campaign at National Press ClubGRAMMY winner Natalie Cole, who was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C in 2008, will meet with leading patient advocates in Washington, D.C., and discuss the Tune In to Hep C national public health initiative, sponsored by Merck and the American Liver Foundation, at a National Press Club Speakers Luncheon, Wednesday, October 19.
India: Shortage of hep B vaccine derails plans to bring it under universal immunisationThe shortage of hepatitis B vaccine has derailed the plans of the Union health ministry to bring it under the universal immunisation programme (UIP) across the country from April this year.
Sources in the health ministry said it could not be implemented due to the severe shortage of vaccine for hep B in the country. In 2002, the government of India decided to provide hepatitis-B vaccine as a pilot in 33 districts and 14 cities. In 2007, hepatitis B vaccine was expanded to cover 10 states and five UTs beside the districts already covered in other states.
“It has been decided to expand hepatitis B vaccination to the entire country under the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) in 2011. However due to shortage of vaccines, universal expansion has not taken place,” an official said.
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Another healthy tip courtesy of Erena DiGonis
The truth is everyday is a fresh start and we don’t have to wait until 1/1.
What I have noticed with clients is that resolution is either very vague (I will lose weight or I will eat healthy) or too ambitious (I will run a marathon). I am a big believer in clearly stating your goal and creating gradual, realistic steps.
I would like to lose 15 pounds or a dress size by March.
I am incorporate healthier habits into my daily routine (drink 8 glasses of water, 5 servings of fruits and veggies, and will pack my lunch 4/5 days).
It is key to make a specific plan for your goal.
1) Re-evaluate your Priorities.
We lead overstimulated busy lives.
What you can take off your plate in order to make space for your New Year’s Resolution?
slow down and simplify!
2) Honest Inventory of what you are currently doing or not doing.
Write down what you eat, how you feel, energy level, are you going to the bathroom.
3) Liquid calories count!
When I was in graduate school, I had 2-3 over the top caramel lattes everyday. I couldn’t understand why I was gaining what so quickly.
Now I enjoy a cup of coffee with a splash of almond milk, stevia and cinnamon. I also put cacao on it some mornings.
4) Remain Mindful and Slow down.
How do you eat? Are you distracted by your computer or do you eat while you are driving? Very easy to consume extra food when you aren’t paying attention.
5) Prepare yourself to be successful.
Be realistic about your life. I know I spend a lot of time in my car. That is my reality. I have a big bottle of water, seltzer, snacks. I bring lunch.
6) Recognize your vulnerable times.
If it is very chaotic when you get home, this isn’t the best time to be hungry. Have something before you get home. That way you are less likely to stress eat.
7) Fill up on fiber.
Found in fruits, veggies, whole grains and beans, fiber will keep you fuller longer and reduce your risk of a variety of diseases. Gradually increase your daily intake to 25-35 grams, more is better. There are great fiber supplements as well. Drink plenty of water!
- Erena DiGonis, LMSW, CHC, Licensed Psychotherapist and Certified Health Coach
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The new world of farm animal care featured at expanded Livestock Care Conference, April 6–7Date posted: February 15, 2011
Alberta's Livestock Care Conference, the top forum on farm animal care in Canada, has expanded its format and added new features for this year's event April 6-7 in Red Deer. The conference is hosted by Alberta Farm Animal Care (AFAC), a partnership of Alberta's major livestock groups, with a mandate to promote responsible, humane animal care within the livestock industry.
"Innovation and progress in farm animal care has arguably never been more important to how the livestock industry prepares for a successful future," says AFAC Chair, Doug Sawyer, who runs a cow calf and backgrounder operation in the Pine Lake, Alta., area. "Animal care is our responsibility and our opportunity. It's something we take pride in. It's also something that is absolutely critical for the long term sustainability of Canada's livestock industry, both domestically and globally."
AFAC's role has always been to promote progress and dialogue on farm animal care, and the long running annual Livestock Care Conference is the showcase event of that effort, says Lorna Baird, AFAC Executive Director. This year's theme – Embracing Changes in Animal Welfare – captures that progressive attitude.
"The people who come to our conference share two things: They care about farm animals and care about our industry," says Baird. "It's a place where everyone from producers to community members can get an annual check-up on how we're doing, and learn from one another to keep getting better."
The Livestock Care Conference is open to anyone with an interest in farm animal care, typically drawing a broad cross section of producers, industry, researchers, students, government and others. Registration is available online at www.afac.ab.ca or by calling 403-662-8050. Early bird registration discounts are available before March 15. Group discounts are also available. The conference is held at the Red Deer Lodge Hotel and Conference Centre.
In addition to the event's traditional core, single-day speaker agenda on April 7, conference participants are also invited on April 6 to attend the AFAC AGM and an evening wine and cheese reception that will feature research posters presented by students from the University of Calgary and University of Alberta. This extended platform is aimed in part to encourage engagement in AFAC activities and highlight the critical importance of research progress.
The format is also designed to allow more time for networking and dialogue, says Baird. "A very important part of the conference is the opportunity for everyone to come together, to exchange experiences, knowledge and ideas. Often it is the conversations around the formal agenda that provide some of the best inspirations for innovation and progress."
Key topics on the conference agenda include progress toward new farm animal welfare codes of practice, issues in crisis management, and new opportunities in social media communications. Breakout and panel discussions including researchers and industry leaders are also featured. In addition, annual Awards of Distinction will be presented to recipients who have demonstrated outstanding contributions to farm animal care progress. More details on speakers and agenda will be available closer to the conference.
More information on AFAC and the Livestock Care Conference is available at www.afac.ab.ca. This includes information on poster proposal submissions, and sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities.
Reprintable with credit. This article is available for reprint, with acknowledgement of the source: Alberta Farm Animal Care Association (AFAC).
© Copyright 1996 – Meristem Information Resources Ltd.
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Count on Captain Wild Bill to get the
by Christine S. Lucas
Published in Richmond Hill Reflections, 2011
Contrary to his name, Captain Wild Bill isn’t crazy and doesn’t have hair that sticks out like Albert Einstein’s. He is a fanatic about one thing: fishing. He made sure I knew it, too.
While chatting at the clubhouse by the Yellow Bluff Marina located in Liberty County, Georgia, I wondered what constitutes a fanatic as it pertains to fishing. The licensed Captain who offers fishing and scenic charters to some of Georgia’s remote barrier islands used a fishing trip he and a friend took in bitter, wet weather to explain.
“It was drizzle to rain–drizzle to rain,” Captain Wild Bill said. “It was so cold you just wanted to curl up in a fireplace.” That didn’t matter to the man who was born in an animal hospital just outside Mount Airy, North Carolina. Water dripped down his face and he continued fishing with a big grin. They ended up catching 128 legal-size fish but kept just enough to eat. “[Fanatics] don’t feel the cold,” he said.
Captain Wild Bill learned to fish at the age of two, on his dad’s lap, both in North Carolina and Sarasota, Florida. One of the first fish he ever caught was bluegill, Lepomis macrochirus, a freshwater fish also referred to as Bream. A couple years later he moved to Long Island, New York with his mother. His parents had divorced and the four-year-old began earning the ‘Wild’ that would be added to his name years later. He was a little scamp who would run off without telling anyone. “I was like a dog you didn’t want to let out,” he laughed.
The young Captain was first called ‘wild’ by fellow players during sand lot football games–a full-contact version of the sport sans padding. It continued to ring true through his maneuvers on the high school wrestling team but even more when he joined the United States Marines after one year of college. “People never knew what I was going to do,” he said. He was sent to journalism school by the military and spent two years as a war correspondent from 1974 to 1976.
Captain Wild Bill considers himself a Southerner and moved to Savannah after the military. He worked at Delta Airlines–mostly as a ticket agent–for nineteen years. Downsizing was a concern. “I hung on like a tick,” he recalls and eventually downsized of his own accord by moving from Georgetown to the Cottages at Yellow Bluff.
Captain Wild Bill’s work at the Yellow Bluff Marina–lifting people’s boats from the water–helped him build a three hundred person subscriber list for the fishing report he began writing and self-published from 1997 to 1998, the Saltwater Journal. People want the scoop from a man whose charmed fishing career includes a flounder jumping onto the boat he was in and landing at his feet. This caught the attention of the Savannah Morning News who asked Captain Wild Bill to write a weekly fishing column. The formally-trained journalist also began conducting “Eat, Sleep, and Fish Seminars” and has found himself in the same league as accomplished anglers like Savannah’s Captain Judy and Hilton Head’s Captain Fuzzy Davis.
I called Captain Judy to chat about Captain Wild Bill, and asked if she remembered a certain story where he’d jumped off a perfectly good boat into water with a 4-foot shark swimming around.
“Was that the time with his clothes on or off?” she asked not sure if I was referring to a time when the Captain stripped and dove into 54 degree water to try and rescue an expensive pair of glasses.
Once clear, she explained bonnet sharks look down to feed. “His toes could have been in jeopardy with no problem,” she told me. “The way he fishes, he goes by a whole different theory,” Captain Judy went on to explain. “[He fishes] by watching a bloom on a tree or something, a leaf that might mean the redfish are biting.”
Being a fish magnet runs in Captain Wild Bill’s family. A while back he got a call from his mother who was in Sun City–near Bluffton, South Carolina–walking her dog when a bass weighing about a pound fell from the sky and landed between the sidewalk and the curb. How could that happen? Her son who is a member of the Ogeechee Audubon Society and Friends of Savannah Coastal Wildlife Refuges explained that it had to have been from an osprey that was forced to drop it by a bald eagle.
According to an April 2010 press release from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, nearly one third of Georgia’s 159 counties had bald eagles nesting in them in that year. The National Geographic website, http://animals.nationalgeographic.com, supports Captain Wild Bill’s claim in an article detailing our national bird’s thievery.
Captain Wild Bill sees abundance and works with nature. It’s what makes his Eco Adventures in as high demand as his fishing charters. He recalls on one such trip being amidst thousands of Common Green Darner dragonflies. Above them were Tree Swallows, and above them were fifty raptors called Mississippi Kites. Captain Wild Bill offers his clients, among other things, what he himself gleaned that day.
“This time I saw colors,” he said. “By me learning about the insects, the birds, and the fish, it adds color to my world.”
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Everywhere we turn, a Madison Avenue cocktail for the senses. It’s all around us: endless repetition and hypnotic pulsation lulling us into an intoxicating spell until we surrender to its inevitability. How might we disrupt, counter, and break this fantastic illusion?
We turn to Guy Dubord, founder of the French Situationist movement and author of the revolutionary treatise, The Society of the Spectacle, who wrote: “The main goal of the ideology of the ruling class is thus to sow confusion.” Debord was saying that through the narcosis of the spectacle, the ruling class lulls the masses into pleasureful submission: ads, political campaigns, cable news, billboards, sports, fashion, you name it. It’s all around us. Glitz and glam everywhere we turn.
The Situationist revolution introduced the radical new idea that it is the role of the artist to divert the spectacle towards the empowerment of the individual. Yes divert, or détournement as they called it in Paris. It was not the creation of mere objects, paintings, sculptures, and other aesthetic retinal pleasures that would change the world (they utterly despised the artworld). It was the appropriation and transformation of mass media and the subsequent critique of seduction and disinformation. They declared the remix a new political medium and a call to action! it was the transformation of the urban experience via collage, performance, political organization, demonstrations, and other forms of suversion. It was the altering of the psychological landscape of everyday life that they searched for: breaking the spell of the spectacle by turning the spectacle on its head. They often failed, but they generally turned minds. Their ideas permeate our contemporary culture, most obviously the Occupy Movement that has attempted to alter the political status quo through the disruption of the urban environment.
If Debord’s ruling class is now the 1%, what can we do today? How can we break the grip of corporate money and the inevitable onslaught of disinformation. While our democracy slowly recedes into a distant memory what is there to do? Stay tuned: this and more on The Post Reality Show: TALK MEDIA! Without a sponsor, beholden to no one, and a studio broadcasting to the world, now that’s power!
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http://www.randallpacker.com/in-glow-glam-spectacle/
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Handling long-term sickness absence is a major issue for many employers. They will, no doubt, be disheartened by the news that, in a recent study published in the journal Occupational Medicine, researchers found there was very low awareness and application of the Department for Work and Pensions' sickness certification guidelines.
According to that research, only one in 20 GPs follow government advice on sick leave, with employees often being signed off for far longer than the time recommended, and an enormous disparity between GPs in the amount of time signed off for the same conditions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same research also found that nearly two-thirds of the GPs surveyed had not received any training in sickness certification. Lastly, and equally concerning, is the fact that the study found most GPs felt that patients and GPs have equal influence on the length of the period covered by the sickness certificate. This is clearly unsatisfactory and extremely frustrating for employers.
The cost to the economy of absence and unemployment due to ill health is estimated to be £100bn each year. In March 2008, Dame Carol Black published her report Working for a Healthier Tomorrow following a comprehensive review of the approach taken to health at work. Her recommendations included an overhaul of the sickness certification process and the introduction of a new computerised certificate system to replace the paper sickness certificates currently filled in by GPs. The new electronic 'fit note' is due to be introduced in April this year. Where does this leave employers in light of the recent research, and will the new 'fit notes' make any difference in tackling long-term absence?
Fit notes (which are the subject of a government consultation which closed in August) are intended to change the focus, with an emphasis on fitness rather than sickness, by giving GPs another category on the form indicating that the individual "may be fit for some work now". If the GP completes this category, they will be asked to describe the functional effects of the employee's condition, with the option of setting out suggested arrangements which could help them back to work, such as a phased return, altered hours, amended duties or workplace adaptations.
However, the fit notes have already been subject to criticism on the grounds that GPs have not been sufficiently trained in occupational health to make an informed assessment of the employee's work-related capabilities. In addition, employers are not required to follow the GP's recommendations (subject to any obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act) and, therefore, this may not prove to be such a simple solution to helping people back to work.
In view of the lack of consistency from GPs revealed by the research, and the potential problems with the new fit notes, it continues, above all, to be essential for employers to have in place detailed sickness policies which clearly set out trigger dates for action, and for employers to follow those procedures rigorously.
A policy that promotes dialogue between the employer and employee, making it clear that the employer wants to try to get the employee back to work and giving support including, where appropriate, adjustments such as a phased return, will all help the employee to get back to work. Employers should also consider referral for an independent assessment from a specialist doctor or occupational health expert, and this is an important part of this process, depending on the illness concerned.
• Employers should take the initiative when it comes to managing sickness absence.
• A detailed sickness policy, which is followed through to maintain regular contact with the employee during their absence, and which is backed up by line manager training, is essential.
• Consider referral to an independent specialist, unless new fit notes provide enough information to enable you to make decisions about an employee's fitness to return to work, particularly if dismissal is a possibility.
Although the new fit notes may mean that the process of returning to work no longer requires 100% fitness and may result in a cultural shift, this will take some time, and training for GPs will be essential. Therefore in the meantime a clear and detailed policy including training for line managers in implementing that policy continues to be the most important tool for employers in tackling sickness absence.
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Monday, May 30, 2011
Leading an active lifestyle once again, Thanks to vascular procedure for narrow, clogged arteries
Wanda Clark, an anesthesia technician in the Surgery department at Methodist Medical Center, has spent the past seven years at the side of patients and their families. During the last year, Clark
Wanda Clark stands in the specialized endovascular surgical suite where she works as an anesthesia technician - and where she underwent a procedure by Dr. William Dallas to help restore blood flow to her legs. Following her surgery, Wanda was back at work within three days with a renewed stamina and an even deeper understanding for the needs of patients and families who come to Methodist for surgery. "It's a promise that we'll take care of you and your family."
has been both the patient and the family member of a patient in the very department where she works. It was an experience that not only brought her renewed stamina to enjoy the activities she loves, it reinforced her belief that the staff in surgery is not just a group of coworkers – they’re family.
Clark has a hereditary condition of abnormally small arteries in her legs. It is common between her and her mother. Clark has always led an active life; she was a basketball player in high school and now enjoys golf and bowling. Her job in the Surgery department at Methodist also keeps her on her feet. But Clark’s artery condition began causing more frequent leg problems, and she found herself increasingly compensating for the weakness that began to develop. Plaque build-up in the already narrow arteries prevented adequate blood flow through the legs, and Clark would find herself taking only a few steps before one of her legs would begin to drag. She began avoiding unnecessary movement.
“If I was playing golf and couldn’t walk to where I had hit the ball, I’d just play another,” says Clark who found herself adjusting her life to her condition.
Many years ago, she had undergone other procedures to put stents in her affected arteries, but it wasn’t until a recent procedure by surgeon William Dallas, MD, that she really began to enjoy the comfort and energy that comes with clear, open arteries.
Dr. Dallas used an atherectomy device to open Clark’s arteries in order to perform a more effective angioplasty. In the procedure, Clark’s arteries were cleared by grinding away atherosclerotic plaque build-up. This different application of the atherectomy tool can improve the success of balloon angioplasty and stenting.
Clark remembers, “When Dr. Dallas told me he had a new procedure, I said, ‘Let’s do it!’ I knew it was time.”
Clark also knew who she wanted taking care of her. “The Methodist spirit is just there… it’s the promise that we’ll take care of you, but we’re also going to take care of your family, too, so you can be at ease. I don’t hesitate to let any patient know, ‘We will take care of you; you are #1.’”
Clark, who is accustomed to providing that type of care, experienced what it’s like to receive it when her mother underwent the same procedure a few months later.
“My mother was scheduled for a similar surgery on New Year’s Eve. When the vascular staff found out that she was going to have surgery that day, they all changed their vacation schedules in order to be here. They are an amazing, dedicated staff.”
Following her own surgery, Clark was back to work after three days, and at her last check-up with Dr. Dallas, her blood flow had improved by 80%.
“It’s amazing what a difference there is,” said Clark. “I don’t have leg cramps at night and I have improved physical stamina, and that just improves your whole outlook. I want to get up and do.”
Clark, who before her surgery could only walk a few steps before her legs would start giving out, now walks an average of 15,000 steps every day. She uses a pedometer to measure her steps. It’s part of Covenant Health’s Wellness 4 LIFE employee wellness initiative, which offers incentives for employees to maintain active, healthy lifestyles.
Clark says she is ready for the spring so that she can get back on the golf course and walk the first nine holes. She’s already played in two golf tournaments since her surgery and she’s back to bowling, as well.
“I don’t have to compensate anymore,” says Clark. “When I’m on the golf course, I’m might not play any better shots, but I walk to my ball now.”
Clark now knows the full circle of care at Methodist Medical Center: from the inside as an employee, to being on the operating table as a patient, then in the waiting room as a patient’s daughter.
She knows the ins and outs of the hospital and can proudly say that she chooses Methodist Medical Center for her employment, her care, and her family’s care.
“It’s my family. My Methodist. We couldn’t ask for anything better.”
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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Employers accessing facebook: examining student attitudes and gender differences in posting faux pas
This study examines gender differences in student reports of the likelihood that they woulld post various types on their Facebook profiles and their attitudes regarding other non-students accessing their profiles. Significant gender differences were found. Males were more likely than females to be selfpromoting and extreme in the kinds of information they would be likely to post and less concerned if employers viewed their profiles. Students reported several items that they would be likely to post on their sites but were not comfortable with employers seeing. Implications of these results and recommendations for future research are discussed.
This record is in the process of being updated. Please contact us for more information.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://ro.uow.edu.au/commpapers/1347/
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Nastygram: Beware the NACHA gotcha
Cyber thieves on Thursday began blasting out millions of e-mails impersonating NACHA - The Electronic Payments Association, a not-for-profit group that develops operating rules for organizations that handle electronic payments, from payroll direct deposits to online bill pay services.
The missives in this latest scam arrive with various subject lines, but all complain about an unauthorized, rejected or failed ACH transaction. Most regular Internet users probably will ignore this message, as few people probably even know what ACH stands for (ACH, or "automated clearing house" refers to the electronic network used by banks to process credit and debit transactions in batches). That's likely just fine with the attackers, who appear to be targeting bookkeepers at small to mid-sized companies -- people who actually recognize what a failed or rejected ACH transaction can mean for their business's bottom line and reputation.
According to an alert at the real NACHA Web site, the bogus messages look something like this:
From: nacha.org [mailto:email@example.com] Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 10:25 AM To: Doe, John
Subject: Rejected ACH transaction, please review the transaction report
Dear bank account holder,
The ACH transaction, recently initiated from your bank account, was rejected by the Electronic Payments Association. Please review the transaction report by clicking the link below.
Unauthorized ACH Transaction Report (this is the how the link is presented)
Recipients who click the link in the e-mail are brought to a counterfeit NACHA Web site that offers a phony "transaction report" that harbors a copy of Zeus/Zbot. This same piece of malware has been responsible for attacks on thebanking accounts of dozens of businesses chronicled by Security Fix over the past few months, exploits that have cost individual companies hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham are tracking more than 30 fake NACHA sites that are serving malicious software in connection with this attack. The school reports that only about 16 out of 41 popular anti-virus products currently detect the "transaction report" as malicious.
November 12, 2009; 6:44 PM ET
Categories: Latest Warnings , Nastygram , Safety Tips | Tags: nacha, zeus
Save & Share: Previous: Brazilian Govt: Soot, not hackers, caused '07 blackouts
Next: Security update for Apple's Safari Web browser
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The comments to this entry are closed.
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<urn:uuid:26e6ecfe-cbab-4ea2-95d7-712e446631f9>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/11/in_the_past_few_weeks.html
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It is a model emergency communications system and its in Carbon County.
The new 911 communications system was officially unveiled last Wednesday in south Price during an open house and recognition ceremony.
Manager of the public safety dispatch program Marjean Hansen and supervisor Marty Estrada were on hand giving tours and sharing with a large number of county and city officials the intricacies and features of the new system.
"We are setting standards for all of rural southeastern Utah," indicated Hansen as she introduced key county and communication officials who were responsible for the installation.
"This was a join effort by state, city and county programs," added the dispatch program manager.
The final unveiling was a culmination of years of work, beginning back in 1985 when the 911 system first began.
The center operated on an enhanced system for 12 years prior to the new installation.
"It makes an incredible difference in efficiency," pointed out Estrada.
The dispatch center supervisor explained that a few of the many features include a data base containing all the names and telephone numbers of emergency units and law enforcement agencies as well as snow removal, animal control and wrecking services.
The system allows dispatchers to dial the numbers automatically with a quick touch.
"It is a very customer friendly system," added Estrada.
One of the key features is the tracking system. Records will indicate the number listed on the telephone used to contact the dispatch center, whether the caller was put on hold and for how long.
The system will be helpful for quality control and assurance checks.
Another modern feature includes the ability to communicate with people in the community who are hearing impaired. A special touch key program will alert dispatchers of the existing problem.
There are four stations at the center and a total of 11 employees, including two supervisors and the manager.
Money for the upgraded project was accumulated during the years through monthly fees and authorized by the county commissioners.
Since the equipment has been up and running, the local center has become a model for southeastern Utah, with other counties sending emergency personnel to Price to train on the system.
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http://www.sunadvocate.com/print.php?tier=1&article_id=252
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Old Wives' Tales
Radio & TV
Toxin du jour
Claim: At the farewell party thrown after the filming of the final episode Green Acres, the cast and crew barbequed and ate the porcine actor who played Arnold Ziffel.
Example: [Reputedly printed in Starweek, 16 September 1995]
Origins: The fate of animals (particularly of the barnyard variety) with prominent roles in television programs and films after production has shut down is common fodder for grim humor. Sardonic jokes have circulated about more than one beloved animal star who was allegedly eaten by unsentimental cast and crew members at the end of a shoot.
In many cases, since principal photography on a film or the run of a television series can span several months (or even years), animal characters of the "lesser" variety (i.e., pigs and chickens rather than dogs or horses) are portrayed by several different members of the species. Such was the case with Green Acres, which used several different pigs to fill the role of Arnold Ziffel over the course of its six-year run. Nobody knows for sure exactly how many porkers played Arnold (estimates place the number at about a dozen), but their trainer, Frank Inn, states that none of them was eaten. According to Inn, they were all allowed to live out their natural lives on farms after they could no longer be used on the show.
This same rumor began circulating in 1995 about one or more of the pigs used in the title role of the then-current film Babe, which reportedly employed some four dozen different piglets to play Babe.
Sightings: In an episode of the television sitcom The Nanny ("The Bird's Nest," original air date
Last updated: 8 August 2007
This material may not be reproduced without permission.
snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.
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DANBURY -- A program designed to give children from low-income families an educational boost has opened its doors.
Local, state and federal officials were on hand Monday for the opening of Early Head Start, a program to help children from infants to age 3.
Early Head Start was organized by the Connecticut Institute for Communities and funded with $1.6 million in federal stimulus money.
"This is an excellent use of stimulus money," said U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who was on hand for the program's opening day. "Not only will parents be able to maintain their employment now that their kids are being cared for, but it has also added new jobs to the community."
He said about 20 people were hired to work in the Early Head Start program, which is based at Mill Ridge
Staff will provide educational activities to benefit their health, social and physical development.
The program also offers an at-home component for another 30 children, Maloney said.
"All of us involved in this important project are delighted Early Head Start has come to Danbury," Maloney said.
Danbury's Superintendent of Schools Sal Pascarella said programs like Early Head Start help reduce the achievement gap that exists between students of different socio-economic levels.
"The more time we can spend with these youngsters before preschool, the better they will do as they move through the school system," he said. "It allows students to enter school at the same level as other students."
Pascarella added that the program also provides support to the Even Start program, which allows young mothers to complete their high school education.
Maloney said federal funding will provide enough operating revenue for the Early Head Start program for about two years.
After that time, he said, the hope is that the federal government will continue providing resources.
Contact Dirk Perrefort at
or at 203-731-3358.
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Jan. 17, 2011 Multidetector computed tomography (MDCT) provides an efficient, effective way to analyze wounds from bullets and explosive devices, according to a study published online and in the March issue of Radiology.
"The information provided by MDCT has the potential to improve patient care and aid in both military and civilian forensic investigations," said the study's lead author, Les R. Folio, D.O., M.P.H., from the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.
U.S. troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan face threats from increased sniper activity and the use of improvised explosive devices. Current clinical reports of wounds from bullets and bomb fragments do not include the progression of the trajectory or the direction of the wound path, despite the fact that ballistic injuries are not necessarily confined to a single anatomic structure.
While research has shown the value of CT in the analysis of ballistic wound paths, there is no widely accepted method for consistently and accurately pinpointing wound paths and determining the trajectory angles.
For the study, researchers evaluated the accuracy of MDCT-based ballistic wound path identification. They had a marksman shoot six shots from a rifle into two simulated legs made from various synthetic materials to optimally represent real tissue. The legs were tilted at six different angles based on common sniper heights and distances.
After the leg phantoms were scanned with 64-channel MDCT, several radiologists independently reviewed the CT images and recorded entrance and exit sites for the bullet trajectories. The angles measured on MDCT corresponded closely with those calculated from coordinates with actual shooting angles. Dr. Folio and his team concluded that radiologists could estimate the location of a sniper or an explosive device by extrapolating trajectories identified on MDCT when other factors, such as sniper distance and the victim's position, are known.
"Investigators want to know where the sniper was and where the bomb blast originated," Dr. Folio said. "MDCT allows us to see the path and help determine these answers."
MDCT-based calculations of wound paths and angles of trajectory have other potential benefits, according to Dr. Folio, including assistance in crime scene analysis and the triage and treatment of patients. The work can also be applied to records from the Joint Theater Trauma Registry, a U.S. Department of Defense database of penetrating injuries in fatally and catastrophically wounded soldiers.
"This technology allows us to analyze thousands of penetrating injuries, correlate them with external ballistics and use that data to help develop protective gear and prevent future injuries," Dr. Folio said.
Additional research into MDCT's potential to analyze trajectories and wound paths in other areas of the body, including the head, chest and abdomen, is ongoing. Dr. Folio is currently leading a study on automated trajectory analysis in Vietnam veterans with traumatic brain injuries.
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
- Les R. Folio et al. CT-based Ballistic Wound Path Identification and Trajectory Analysis in Anatomic Ballistic Phantoms. Radiology, (in press)
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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My choice is the third alternative.
Suppose you play a game with the rule that "forgotten privileges are lost", then that game might be less fun. So, in such games it would be good to make the previous(/next) players to remember their privileges.
If it will be a problem with the "forgotten privileges are lost" rule, then that game might probably be bad designed. Such a bad design can usually be easily fixed, using pen and paper.
On the other hand, any rule where "forgotten privileges are NOT lost", might still be worse than the lost rule, depending on the situation. So, there should be a third alternative:
- At least as long as no privilege is forgotten and no pen and paper are used, pay attention to the previous(/next) players and remind them of their privileges.
- First time any privilege is forgotten should go with the rule "forgotten privileges are NOT lost".
- Any time, a player forgets a privilege again, it should be lost. So, the general usage of pen and paper (for at least that player) should be established after the first time.
Dependent on the type of game, it is very irritating and therefore suboptimal to pay attention to the previous player: Oneself has to be reminded whenever it is the previous player's turn, and one cannot think about the own turn while paying attention to the previous player. So, at least in that case, it will be better to pay attention to the next player's turn instead. To do this is actually contra-intuitive, because one's stress is gone when the own turn ends; so, this has to be trained and secured by observing the observer: pay attention that the next player pays attention. If this is too bothersome, remember that pen and paper might be good alternatives to minimize the needed attention span.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/114/taking-back-turns-and-forgotten-privileges
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You may be unaware of the local ramifications of one of the proposals currently at play in the danse macabre that passes for fiscal negotiations in Washington.
This is the plan to cap federal tax deductions at either a set figure or a percentage of income. Either way, it would strike deepest and hardest mostly at residents of California, as well as other populous states with high levels of government services, high state and local taxes, and relatively expensive housing.
The mortgage interest and state and local tax deductions are among the most important tax breaks that would be capped under this sort of proposal. They're linchpins of middle-class tax planning in the most heavily affected states, which also include New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
These states, of course, are also of the deepest blue, politically speaking. They also tend to support the broadest range of public services, such as healthcare for the needy. That's what's under attack.
"This hasn't gotten much attention, and it really deserves a lot of attention," says Russell Goldsmith, chairman and chief executive of Los Angeles-based City National Bank. He points out that California's federal tax contribution of $281 billion in 2011 was the largest of any state, but we've traditionally ranked near the bottom in terms of how much flows back from Washington — "we're subsidizing the rest of the country," he says.
"It would be unfair to penalize the states that have the highest taxes, the highest services, the highest costs and tend to be more unionized by capping deductions for local taxes and mortgage interest," Goldsmith says. "The combination hits the residents of these biggest states much harder and much less fairly than what the president's saying, which is to raise rates across the board."
Goldsmith has been sounding the alarm about what a hard cap on these deductions might mean for the economies of California and the other big states. "This is a pivotal time for California's economy," he says, especially as the tax increases voted under Proposition 30 begin to appear. "The state's economic recovery does not need another 2% or 3% increase in its taxes versus other states," which could be the effect of a cap on deductions.
The virtue of the deduction cap, according to its supporters, is that it's simple. You don't have to tinker with marginal tax rates, you can dispense with complicated calculations to figure out what's deductible and by how much.
Republicans and conservatives are big fans: Mitt Romney plumped for a hard cap on deductions of $17,000 to $25,000 (depending on his mood, apparently) during his presidential campaign. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has offered it as a bargaining chip in the latest talks; President Obama has said he'd be open to applying a percentage dilution to deductions so that they'd deliver less of a break to higher-income taxpayers than others.
But it's not just the rich who would be hit. Consider the mortgage interest deduction on a Southern Californiahomeworth $321,000, the median home price in November. A $300,000 mortgage on that house at 4% yields a mortgage interest deduction of almost $12,000 in the first year. For a California taxpayer with about $80,000 in taxable income, add $5,000 in state tax and $3,200 in property tax.
Congratulations! If you're married and have two kids, you're barely in the middle class and you're out of deductions already. Anyone penciling out a "what-if" scenario can see that a nostrum supposedly aimed at the wealthy quickly spreads a lot of collateral damage.
The mortgage deduction is virtually the only housing program the Obama administration has. The housing industry has lagged far behind the rest of the economic recovery because federal efforts to support the housing market have been largely missing in action for four years.
Cut the mortgage deduction and you undermine an important pillar of home prices. Here, too, you hit the Obama electoral majority hard. According to figures provided by Jed Kolko, chief economist at the online real estate market Trulia, the largest mortgage interest deductions per household were claimed by nine states and the District of Columbia, which together accounted for 41% of Obama's winning electoral vote total. California ranks second, with $5,718 per household.
One common argument raised against the deduction for state and local taxes is that it forces the rest of the country to subsidize the high-tax predilections of a few high-spending states.
Yet the list of states with the lowest per-capita state tax burden on their own citizens is eerily similar to the list of those that receive the most federal money relative to their residents' federal tax contribution. So who's subsidizing whom?
In 2005, the latest year for which I have both sets of figures, of the 10 states levying the least on their citizens, all but two were in the top 20 in terms of return on the federal tax dollar, and all but one (New Hampshire) were on the plus side of the books. That year Mississippi, for instance, levied the lowest tax per-capita on its residents, while collecting $2.02 from the feds on every dollar they sent to Washington. That year California's levy on its citizens was the sixth-heaviest, per capita, but the state collected only 80 cents on the dollar from the feds.
Another virtue attributed to the deduction cap is that it allows taxpayers to choose where they want to spend their deduction credits. One problem here is that for many taxpayers, there's no choice about some deductions — they have to pay their mortgage, and they have to pay their state and local taxes. That places the charitable deduction at risk, because it's entirely discretionary.
One tax break that finally has landed on the table is the break on investment income, especially capital gains. In 2012, according to the tax committee, that break saved taxpayers and their heirs $130 billion; it bears repeating that this is the tax break that the wealthy are truly desperate to preserve, because it saves them so much money. For illustration, consider that in 2010, the average mortgage interest deduction claimed by taxpayers with $2 million to $5 million in income was less than $32,000. Their average tax break on long-term capital gains was about $220,000.
The return of the tax rate on long-term capital gains to its Clinton-era level of 20% from the current 15% would occur as part of the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, but even that would still mean a huge break for those who get a significant part of their income from investment returns.
Yet although Boehner is said to be amenable to allowing the rate to return to 20%, no one talks about placing a hard cap on these capital gains preferences, or requiring taxpayers to choose between the capital gains break and any of the others. The talk of taking a blowtorch to tax deductions will remain a concealed assault on the middle and working classes until and unless the preference for investment income is narrowed further or eliminated.
"People need to understand the ramifications of a simplistic solution that doesn't add up mathematically," Goldsmith says, "and doesn't meet a fairness test."
Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at email@example.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.
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You have been teleported to the doorway of a theatrette. Those who have arrived before you are seating themselves on rows of calico covered pillows on the floor. At the front of the room is a little stage with bright patchwork curtains, which are held to either side with yellow silk sashes. Over the stage in gold painted letters are the words "Nothing can withstand the powers of love, laughter and imagination." A lovely young woman dressed in motley, with bells tied into the ribbons in her hair and sewn into the tips of her shoes, comes jangling to centre stage. "Would you like to hear a story," she asks with a twinkle in her eyes.
Finally, an oracle that will give you genuinely good advice! Playing with it is also a good excuse for not doing the chores.
Miscellaneous Merriment & Mayhem
Adventures in Grade 5: Stories by Vikki Petraitis
Humour of All-Sorts
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If you thought Linux-based OSes were for back rooms, hardcore geeks, and computer science grad students, you’d be right. Recently, however, its made great strides toward becoming much more “user friendly,” even advancing to the point where they’re usable as phones. But what makes you want to pick a Linux smartphone?
There are a couple answers to that question: You’d want a smartphone running Linux instead of PalmOS, Symbian or Windows Mobile if you’re a big Linux fan. You’ve been using Linux for a while, and you’re dying to get the same building-block functionality in something a bit more portable. The second reason is if you’re a do-it-yourselfer that likes to tinker with new things. Linux for phones is a medium still in its infancy, but because of its “Open Source” nature, you’re free to write your own programs easily and quickly if you’re somewhat familiar with programming. Linux phones generally aren’t for the casual or business user yet, but within a few years they may get some substantial market share.
That’s all great, but what can you do with a Linux phone? Well, some of the more interesting functions on the Linux phones come from the fact that it runs Linux. Sure, you have all the normal smartphone functions like Office document editing, web browsing, emailing, instant messaging, and media playback. But you also have the advantage of many years, and nerds, standing behind you with their Linux experience. You’re free to go download and compile different packages to fit your phone.
Want to remotely control your PC from the road? Sure, grab VNC and make that happen. Want to make free phone calls? Get a SIP-based soft phone and you’re on the way to using 802.11b/g to talk to your wife. Want to do something? Write it yourself, or go on sourceforge and see if someone’s written it already. It’s that open.
This all sounds perfect for you, doesn’t it geek? There’s only one hang-up: the Linux smartphone is still in many ways a pipe dream. Sure, they exist, but not in nearly the numbers that other smartphones do. Our quick survey showed zero American providers currently offering smartphones running on Linux. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Indeed, the next version of the Palm OS is to be Linux based. Besides support for open-source Linux projects, it’s said to be backward compatible with popular and established Palm OS applications, a real boon for both platform. Also, there are rumors with meat to them that Motorola will be launching a Linux-based smartphone platform in the near future, and already has one handset with FCC certification.
If that’s still a little too uncertain for you, you can always brew your own. Enthusiasts have had moderate success in getting Linux to run on hardware designed for other smartphone OSes. For example, it’s been known for awhile that the Treo by Palm can run Linux quite nicely, and other hardware shouldn’t be too much harder to hack. Who knows, in the future we may purchase smartphones the way some people buy computer hardware, having no OS, with the plan to install their own.
One of the obstacles Linux faces in the smartphone market is intercompatibility with other smartphones. If mine has WiFi and I want to send you a contact, who’s to say your contact list will recognize my data? That’s where LIPS come in. LIPS is the Linux Phone Standards forum. Access (formerly Palm Source), makers of the Palm OS, are charter members of LIPS, and as the next rendition of its operating system is known to be Linux-based, it would give the growing standards forum the legs it will need to really take off and its standards used by other manufacturers.
This doesn’t mean that there isn’t serious support today for Linux smartphones. Motorola, NEC, Panasonic and Samsung have all had successful handsets running Linux, indeed the new Samsung SCH-i819, a smartphone aimed at Chinese businessmen, runs a specialized version of Linux with support for its touchscreen, ideal for inputing Chinese characters. In addition, it features BREW for support for most mobile downloads.
If you’re a first-time smartphone buyer, and have never owned a PDA of any kind, then the learning curve for Linux devices isn’t much different than that of Windows Mobile or Palm OS or Symbian devices: You point at what you want, and tell it what to do, it should do it fine. Unfortunately, no US manufacturers are shipping Linux-based smartphones in America, though due to the nature of Linux, but that’s set to change. For high-end users, though, it’s an ideal platform for packing as much power into a very small device.
LIPS forum [website]
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Pre-battle formations are transitions from march formations to attack formations. These transitions are drilled at the unit and sub-unit level. These drilled transitions facilitate tactical momentum, and command and control.
The following templates were taken from U.S. Army Field Manual 100-2-1 (1984). Left clicking on the images will expand them into new windows.
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Why Should I Care About Lime Quality?
Feb 07, 2011
Question: Why should I care about lime quality? I’ve always thought one source is as good as any other.
Answer: The foundation of a systems approach pyramid is soil pH. The keys to lime applications are quality and fineness. You do need to look at the purity of rock and how much neutralizing value the lime has, which requires lab analysis. The neutralizing value comes from the calcium carbonate, and the lab will compare the limestone sample to a product with 100% neutralizing value. Properties of limestone range in neutralizing power. In comparing one quarry over another there can be a $3 to $4 a ton difference in quality. Another part of the lime equation is that you need to pay attention to the fineness of the lime. The more fine the grind, the more neutralizing power that’s available because there is more surface area. You have to also weigh the spreadability of the lime, and have your equipment calibrated for the fineness of the product.
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- What is Business Aviation?
- Flight Department Administration
- Aircraft Operations
- Professional Development
- News & Publications
- Products & Services
NBAA Awards Numerous Scholarships at NBAA 62nd Annual Meeting & Convention
Contacts: Dan Hubbard, (202) 783-9360, firstname.lastname@example.org
Patrick Dunne, (202) 783-9263, email@example.com
Orlando, FL, October 21, 2009 – The National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) offers a range of scholarships in an effort to provide opportunities for Member employees to further their careers and to encourage young people to seek jobs in business aviation. At the NBAA 62nd Annual Meeting & Convention (NBAA2009) taking place from October 20 to 22 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL, several people received awards from the following NBAA scholarship programs: USAIG/PDP Scholarship, Lawrence Ginocchio Aviation Scholarship, William M. Fanning Maintenance Scholarship, NORDAM Dee Howard/Etienne Fage Scholarship, Alan H. Conklin Business Aviation Management Scholarship.
USAIG PDP Scholarship
The U.S. Aircraft Insurance Group (USAIG) PDP Scholarship provides funds for students to take NBAA Professional Development Program (PDP) courses.
Robert Webb, a junior majoring in aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, AZ, is the recipient of the 2009 USAIG PDP Scholarship. Webb has a 3.76 grade point average, earlier won the Presidential Scholarship and is a member of Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Lawrence Ginocchio Aviation Scholarship
The Lawrence Ginocchio Aviation Scholarship was created in 2001 by NBAA and the family and friends of the late Lawrence Ginocchio to honor his outstanding personal contribution to business aviation. Several people have received Ginocchio Scholarships this year:
Juliana Lindner, a sophomore at Purdue University with a 3.99 grade point average, is seeking a B.S. in professional flight technology and management. She has more than 400 total flight hours and has obtained commercial and instrument pilot licenses, with single- and multi-engine rating ratings. She is a flight instructor at Purdue and is a member of the university's Women's Air Race Team.
Kevin Rankin is a sophomore at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who soloed at 16 years of age. He is an instrument pilot with and single- and multi-engine ratings and more than 270 hours of flight time. He has volunteered at various aviation museums and was listed in Who's Who of American High School Students.
Shannon Roth is a senior at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale majoring in aviation management and flight. She has a private pilot's license with an instrument rating and more than 200 hours total flight time. Roth is a member of the SIU Flying Salukis Flight Team and is president of the SIU Women in Aviation.
Ryan Sanders, a senior at University of Central Missouri with at 3.61 grade point average, is majoring in flight operations management with a minor in business administration. He has served as an intern in a flight department, has taken an NBAA Professional Development Program course and was a student governor on the university's board of governors.
Gary Toth, a senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL, is majoring in aerospace engineering. Toth has attained a 3.94 grade point average while working on projects related to thrust reversers, materials analysis and fluid mechanics.
William M. Fanning Maintenance Scholarship
The Fanning Scholarship is named in honor of retired NBAA staff member William M. Fanning, who was active in maintenance issues during his nearly 20-year tenure at the Association.
Tonya Perinchief of Orlando, FL, has won the $2,500 entry-level Fanning Scholarship. This fall she entered the aviation maintenance science program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University after having worked for several companies in the industry.
Georgette Snell has won the $2,500 experienced-level Fanning Scholarship. A student at Sacramento City College, she plans to transfer to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is preparing to take the airframe and powerplant (A&P) test in the near future. She has been an aviation software consultant and worked as a Bell 47 helicopter mechanic's helper.
NORDAM Dee Howard/Etienne Fage Scholarship
The NORDAM Dee Howard/Etienne Fage Scholarship was created by The NORDAM Group to honor the lifetime achievements of two aerospace engineering pioneers, Dee Howard and Etienne Fage.
Matthew D. Gonitzke from Rockford, IL has received the 2009 NORDAM Scholarship. Gonitzke is majoring in aerospace engineering and hopes to earn an A&P certificate. A sophomore at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, he has had a private pilot's license since 2005 and was active in the FIRST Robotics Team competition in 2007.
Alan H. Conklin Business Aviation Management Scholarship
The Conklin Scholarship was created to honor the memory of Al Conklin, a U.S. Air Force veteran, business aviation leader and member of NBAA's Operations Committee for many years.
Charles Barrett Roy, a senior at Louisiana Tech University, is pursing a double major in aviation management and professional aviation, with a minor in business. As a student with a 3.89 grade point average, he is the top overall student in his school's Professional Aviation Department. A commercial pilot with an instrument rating and more than 275 hours total flight time, Roy's career goal is to run a FAR Part 135 flight operation.
To learn more about the numerous scholarship opportunities offered by the Association, contact NBAA's Jay Evans, director, operations, at (202) 783-9353 or firstname.lastname@example.org, or visit www.nbaa.org/scholarships.
For complete coverage of NBAA2009, visit www.nbaa.org/2009.
# # #
Founded in 1947 and based in Washington, DC, the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) is the leading organization for companies that rely on general aviation aircraft to help make their businesses more efficient, productive and successful. The Association represents more than 8,000 companies and provides more than 100 products and services to the business aviation community, including the NBAA Annual Meeting & Convention, the world's largest civil aviation trade show. Learn more about NBAA at www.nbaa.org.
Members of the media may receive NBAA Press Releases immediately via e-mail. To subscribe to the NBAA Press Release e-mail list, submit the online form at www.nbaa.org/news/pr/subscribe.
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I came across the amazing fact Generator a little while back which has a great collection of both useful and useful facts. The great thing about the amazing fact generator is that regardless of the facts being shared they generally produce a great deal of discussion with my students. Most of the time this leads to getting students to produce some quality writing based on the fact we have just looked at. Hope you like it - Access it here.
Free Lesson Plans for Teaching Reading and Writing. Reading Group Activities and Teaching Ideas
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Archive for Albert Camus
I grew up in the sea and poverty was sumptuous, then I lost the sea and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable. Since then, I have been waiting. I wait for the homebound ships, the house of the waters, the limpidity of day. I wait patiently, am polite with all my strength. Men see me walk by in fine and learned streets. I admire landscapes, applaud like everyone else, shake hands, but it is not me speaking. Men praise me, I dream a little, they insult me, I scarcely show surprise. Then I forget, and smile at the man who insulted me, or am too courteous in greeting the person I love. What can I do if all I can remember is one image? Finally they call upon me to tell them who I am, ‘Nothing yet, nothing yet…’
–Albert Camus, from The Sea Close By, Philip Thody trans.
You doubtless need to spend a long time in Algiers to understand how desiccating an excess of nature’s blessings can be. There is nothing here for people seeking knowledge, education or self-improvement. This land contains no lessons. It neither promises nor reveals. It is content to give, but does so profusely. Everything here is revealed to the naked eye, and is known the very moment it is enjoyed. Its pleasures have no remedies and its joys remain without hope. What it demands are clear-sighted souls, that is to say those without consolation. It asks us to make an act of lucidity as we make an act of faith. Strange country, which gives the men it nourishes both their wretchedness and their greatness! It is not surprising that the sensual wealth heaped on the man of feeling in this country should coincide with the most extreme deprivation. There is no truth that does not carry its bitterness within itself. Why then should it be surprising if I never love the face of this country more than in the midst of its poorest inhabitants?
–Albert Camus, from Summer in Algiers, Philip Thody trans.
Deserts themselves have taken on meaning, have been overladen with poetry.
They have become sacred places for all the sufferings of this world.
But what the heart requires at certain moments is, on the contrary, a place without poetry.
To escape from poetry and rediscover the peacefulness of stones, we need other deserts, and other places with neither souls nor resting places.
Text by Albert Camus, The Minotaur or the Halt at Oran
Photos © Stephen Shore
Poverty, first of all, was never a misfortune for me: it was radiant with sunlight. Even my revolts were lit up by the sun. These revolts were almost always, I think I can say this in all honesty, revolts on everyone’s behalf, aimed at lifting up everybody’s life into the light. Quite possibly my heart was not naturally disposed to this kind of love. But circumstances helped me. To correct my natural indifference, I was placed half-way between poverty and the sun. Poverty prevented me from thinking that all is well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history is not everything. Change life, yes, but not the world which I worshipped as my God. It is thus, no doubt, that I embarked upon my present difficult career, stepping innocently on to a tightrope along which I now move painfully forward, unsure of ever reaching the end. In other words, I became an artist, if it is true to say that there is no art without refusal or consent.
–Albert Camus, from the preface to Betwixt and Between, Philip Thody trans.
What always amazes me, when we are so swift to elaborate on other subjects, is the poverty of our ideas on death. It is a good thing or a bad thing, I fear it or I summon it (they say). But also this proves that everything that is simple goes beyond us. What is blue, and how can we think “blue”? The same difficulty arises for death. Death and colours are things we cannot discuss. And, nevertheless, the important thing is this man before me, heavy as earth, who prefigures my future. But can I really think about it? I say to myself: I am going to die, but this means nothing since I cannot manage to believe it and can experience only other people’s death. I have seen people die. Above all I have seen dogs die. It was touching them that overwhelmed me. I then think of flowers, smiles, desire for women, and realize that my whole horror of death lies in my fervour to live. I am jealous of those who will live and for whom flowers and desire for women will have their full flesh-and-blood meaning. I am envious because I love life too much not to be selfish. What does eternity matter to me? You can lie in bed one day and hear someone tell you: “You are strong and I owe it to you to be sincere: I can tell you that you are going to die”; lie there, with the whole of your life clasped in your hands, all your fear in your bowels and a look of stupidity in your eyes. What does the rest matter? Waves of blood come throbbing to my temples and I feel I could crush everything around me.
But men die in spite of themselves, in spite of their surroundings. They are told: “When you are cured…”, and they die. I want none of that. For if there are days when nature lies, there are others when she tells the truth. Djemila is telling the truth this evening, and with what sad and insistent beauty! In the presence of this world I have no desire to lie or for other people to lie to me. I want to keep my lucidity to the last, and gaze upon my death with all the fullness of my jealousy and horror. It is when I cut myself off from the world that I fear death most, attaching myself to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky. Creating conscious deaths means lessening the distance which separates us from the world, and entering joylessly into fulfilment, alert to the exalting images which belong to a world for ever lost. And the sad song of the Djemila hills plunges the bitterness of this lesson deeper into my soul.
–Albert Camus, from The Wind at Djemila, Philip Thody trans.
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Kerr v. Clampitt - 95 U.S. 188 (1877)
U.S. Supreme Court
Kerr v. Clampitt, 95 U.S. 188 (1877)
Kerr v. Clampitt
95 U.S. 188
1. This Court has no jurisdiction to revise the action of an inferior court upon the question of either granting or refusing a new trial, and the final judgment of such court cannot be examined through its rulings upon that question. If, when the final judgment is brought here for review by writ of error, no other documents are presented for consideration than such as were before the inferior court upon the application for a new trial, this Court cannot look into them, and if error is not otherwise disclosed by the record, the judgment will be affirmed.
2. This Court must have before it a bill of exceptions, or what is equivalent thereto, upon which the final judgment of the court below was reviewed, or it will not examine into any alleged errors except such as are otherwise apparent on the face of the record.
The record in this case shows that several issues of fact regularly made up were tried by a jury in the Third Judicial District Court of the Territory of Utah, that a verdict was returned in favor of the defendants in error for $3,583, and a judgment rendered thereon, Nov. 11, 1874, but it does not show that any exceptions were taken to the rulings of the court either admitting or rejecting evidence or to instructions given or to those refused, nor does it contain anything purporting to be a bill of exceptions.
It shows, however, that a motion for a new trial was made on that day, and that a "statement or motion for a new trial" was also filed on the 20th of March, 1875. At the foot of the statement is the following agreement, signed by attorneys for both parties: "It is hereby agreed that the foregoing shall constitute the statement on motion for a new trial in the above-entitled cause, and is correct." Endorsed on the statement is the following: "Settled statement on new trial, filed March 20, 1875."
This statement purports to give certain rulings of the court upon the admission and rejection of evidence and upon instructions to the jury given and refused, and exceptions which, it is said, were taken, but, by express agreement of the parties by their attorneys, the use of the statement is limited to the hearing of the motion for a new trial.
The record also shows that defendants below gave notice of
an appeal to the supreme court of the territory from the judgment entered on the verdict, as well as from that of the 1st of May, 1875, overruling the motion for new trial, and the bond recites an appeal from both judgments.
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The new laboratory complex will occupy a 281-acre site in Virginia, called Janelia Farm, located some eight miles north of Dulles International Airport. HHMI expects to spend at least $500 million over the next decade to construct and operate the facility.
Clearly a major, perhaps defining, project for his administration, Cech reasons that HHMI's uniqueness in the biomedical research world enables it, with financial resources second only to NIH itself and the flexibility that comes from being a private organization, to undertake projects that can transform the biomedical sciences, not just move them along a little faster.
David A. Clayton, a developmental biologist, began thinking along these lines shortly after he joined HHMI as a senior scientific officer in 1996, coming from Stanford University. "I had begun to realize how challenging a task it is to deploy state-of-the-art technologies to researchers in the field," recalls Clayton, who is now HHMI's vice president for science development. The initial cost is actually the least of it, he explainsalthough electron microscopes, tandem mass spectrometers and the like certainly aren't cheap. "First, you have to find the space to put the machineand there isn't any academic institution I know of where space is not at a premium. Then, you have to provide a protected environment for it, with air conditioning, seismic isolation and so forthwhich is very hard if you have an old building, as most university buildings are. You soon find that the environment is costing you several times the cost of the instrument itself.
"Finally," says Clayton, "you have to find the technicians and engineers who know how to operate the machine and keep it in repair. That's the real challenge because it's expensive and time-consuming to train these peopleand then if they're good, the pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies come knocking at their doors, offering them commercial-sector salaries that the academics can't hope to match."
Given that reality, he says, one obvious solution was consolidation: Use HHMI's considerable resources to establish a central campus equipped with an excellent staff and the best instrumentationand then bring the scientists to the machines instead of the machines to the scientists.
Cech was taken with Clayton's idea as soon as he heard it; establishing an HHMI research campus seemed to offer exactly the new direction he was looking for. "So David and I talked about it before I started as president," says Cech, "and then the idea matured as we continued to discuss it with lots of people."
An active participant in those discussions was geneticist Gerald M. Rubin, an HHMI investigator at the University of California, Berkeley whom Cech was in the process of recruiting as the Institute's vice president for biomedical research. "I liked the concept of doing something outside the usual process," says Rubin. "It made the job seem more intellectually challenging."
Rubin was especially intrigued by the evolving strategy for staffing the new campus. In addition to a resident staff of about 240 scientists, there would be an active program for visiting scientists. Some visitors would come for just a week or so to attend a workshop or to brush up on a new software technique. Other visitors would come for about a month and bring specimens and other materials for testing. Still others might come for a whole sabbatical year or longer. No one on the campus, however, would have anything like tenure; the expectation is that most would eventually move on.
Perpetual turnover would, presumably, help ensure the intellectual vitality of the campus, since new visitors would constantly bring fresh ideas with them. It would likewise ensure the rapid dissemination of any technologies developed there, since visitors would be taking ideas home with them.
Rubin saw another opportunity. "It's an experience we've all had," he explains. "You're at a meeting, maybe sitting around with some colleagues in a bar, and you get an idea for a great research project you could do togetherbut you can't just go out and do the project. First you've got to scrape up funding from government agenciesand then you've got to struggle to coordinate the efforts of team members who are scattered among home institutions all over the country, if not the world.
"So what's needed is a place for people to come togethernot just to have a meeting but to work together collaboratively over an extended period of time," says Rubin. The new HHMI campus can offer exactly that opportunity. By building enough capacity in the beginning, Rubin points out, HHMI can operate the new campus partially as a "research hotel," providing space and resources for scientists to come for several years and tackle a hot new idea as a group. With people rotating through instead of spending their entire careers there, the place would always have lab spaces opening up.
Cech took office as HHMI's president on January 1, 2000, the same day that Clayton and Rubin assumed their current posts. In the months that followed, says Cech, the HHMI Trustees also proved to be enthusiastic about the new program and a formal proposal was developed, followed by the site selection. Then, in December 2000, HHMI purchased Janelia Farm from the Dutch software maker Baan Companies for $53.7 million.
Plans for the new campus are continuing to evolve. Take the obvious issue of commercialization, for example: Will visitors who want to commercialize technologies they've developed at the campus be allowed or even encouraged by HHMI to form start-up companies? "We haven't gotten far enough along to answer that," says Clayton, "although obviously we'll have to work it through to make sure we're staying true to HHMI's mission and to the rules for not-for-profit organizations."
Some principles are settled, however. One is that the new campus will not be restricted to the existing cadre of HHMI investigators; instead, it will be open to researchers from all over the world. Another is that cooperative research and cross-disciplinary thinking really will be given the highest priority. "We'll be making every effort to mix engineers, biologists and so on," says Cech. "We'll even be working with the architects to make sure the physical layouts of the buildings are such that people can't pull away into isolated groups. . . . But we will also have to find people who genuinely buy into the cooperative model. It may not be for everyone; some researchers work best as loners. But if everyone on the campus is a loner, then this experiment will fail.
"At a typical university," Cech adds, "if someone's publications are all collaborations, he or she will often have trouble getting promoted. But at Janelia Farm, if we see that someone's papers are all collaborations, we can say, 'This is wonderful!'"
Photos: William K. Geiger, Kay Chernush, Paul Fetters
this story in Acrobat PDF format.
Reprinted from the HHMI Bulletin,
July 2001, pages 10-15.
©2001 Howard Hughes Medical Institute
HHMI Unveils Long-Range,
$500 Million Plan for
February 1, 2001
HHMI Purchases Land in
December 15, 2000
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Biogen Idec (BIIB) is one of the most successful biotechs. Founded in 1978, Biogen is the world's oldest and largest independent biotechnology company. Patients all over the world benefit from its multiple sclerosis (MS) therapies, and the company generates more than $5 billion in annual revenues, mostly from the treatment of MS.
The management is confident the company is well on the way to achieving its goals for 2012: to increase Tysabri's market share, stabilize Avonex's market share worldwide, and prepare the company for the launch of BG-12 as a therapy for MS and Factors VIII and IX for the treatment of hemophilia A and B.
Predicted to be number one in MS therapies by 2016
The multiple sclerosis market is currently estimated to be worth $12 billion and is dominated by injectables.
In 2011, Biogen Idec ranked behind Teva as the second highest grossing company in the MS segment by revenue. According to a recent Firstword Pharma survey, by 2016 Biogen may take over Teva's (TEVA) number one spot.
While Teva is dependent on a single product, Copaxone, Biogen Idec sells several drugs, including the leading interferon Avonex, the most effective MS therapy Tysabri, and the oral treatment Fampyra, which helps MS patients to walk. Biogen has a deep pipeline with several drugs, such as its potential blockbuster BG-12 and its monthly formulation of Avonex. Biogen also an interest in ocrelizumab, the anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody developed in cooperation with Genentech. .
There is still no cure for the 400,000 people in the U.S. and 2.1 million worldwide who suffer from MS but there is no question that substantial progress has been made.
M.S. was virtually untreatable only two decades ago, but today nine so-called "disease modifying" drugs are helping early-stage patients, and a half-dozen more therapies are in development.
Most patients in the early stage of the disease, a form called relapsing-remitting M.S., take drugs by injection. But polls show newly developed oral drugs could find favor among newly diagnosed patients.
Gilenya from Novartis (NVS) was the first oral disease-modifying therapy for MS, and was launched in 2010 in the US and 2011 in Europe. Cardiac problems have been encountered, but the drug is effective and its use is expected to slowly increase as neurologists gain more experience handling the safety issues.
The other oral pill Aubagio from Sanofi (SNY) was just approved by the FDA in September 2012, a possible blockbuster if it can take market share away from some tough competitors.
With that in mind, Sanofi is pricing the drug at $45,000 a year, making it 7% less than Teva's Copaxone and 28% less than Gilenya from Novartis.
Interferons, the drugs most commonly used in relapsing M.S., reduce relapses by about 30%, but do not slow the progression of the disease and disability. The newly approved Aubagio also reduces relapses by about 30%, and has the advantage of being an oral drug.
Not all analysts are bullish about Aubagio's potential. Datamonitor assessed peak sales at $350 million for the top global commercial markets.
Also, Aubagio contains a boxed warning to alert patients to the risk of liver problems, including death, and a risk of birth defects.
Biogen's BG-12, chemically called dimethyl fumarate, is the third oral pill awaiting approval.
In September 2012 scientists published results from two big phase 3 studies. In the studies, called Define and Confirm, patients were randomized into two groups, taking 240 milligrams of BG-12 either twice or three times a day. The combined results showed that the drug reduced the relapse rate by about 50%. There was very little difference between the twice-daily and thrice-daily regimens. As a comparison injecting 40 milligrams of Teva's Copaxone three times a week reduced relapse rates by 34.4%.
The twice-daily dose was also associated with a drop in brain lesions by 71% to 99%, and there was a 38% reduction in progression to disability.
Also, BG-12 delivered a relatively clean safety profile, a big concern in a field now dominated by treatments associated with some severe, and occasionally fatal, side effects. Flushing and gastrointestinal symptoms, like vomiting, were the most common side effects, but tended to taper off after the first two weeks of therapy.
BG-12 has been submitted for approval in the U.S., EU, Australia, Canada and Switzerland, and the FDA may make a decision before year's end.
Current analyst consensus forecasts that BG-12 will emerge as one of the industry's leading growth drivers over the next five years.
BG-12 is an anti-inflammatory drug that works by protecting nerves against injury. It is very similar to one widely used in Germany for the treatment of psoriasis, with a well-known safety track record.
Physicians have suggested BG-12 may be the first oral medication to be approved in the first-line setting that may actually be prescribed as a first-line drug. Currently, injectable drugs are used as front-line treatments because of their well-known safety profile. The two currently approved oral drugs have not been adopted as first-line treatments due to serious safety concerns associated with the drugs.
Biogen's Tysabri increases the risk of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML, a viral infection in the brain that usually leads to death or severe disability, according to a boxed warning the drug's label has carried since 2006.
The FDA recently added a notification to the label saying that patients who have antibodies against the JC virus are more likely to develop PML while taking Tysabri than people who don't. Biogen developed a blood test known as a JCV assay to determine whether a person has the antibodies.
So now doctors can test patients for the risk.
Statistics show that patients who test negative for the antibodies may have 1 chance in 10,000 of developing PML while taking the drug. Without taking the JCV test, the risk is 1.5 in a 1,000 after two years of treatment.
As of February 2011, 102 cases of PML had been reported among 82,732 patients treated with Tysabri worldwide.
According to Michael Yee, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in San Francisco, the existence of the test may push Tysabri's global sales from $2.5 to $3 billion by 2016. Without it, sales would reach $1.5 to $2 billion that year.
Biogen and Dublin-based Elan split the drug's revenue.
The expected success of BG-12 may mean trouble for Elan.
Unlike BG-12's oral preparation, Tysabri is administered in a hospital or clinic as a one hour IV infusion. Despite rising use of the JCV test, the number of "net new patients" taking Tysabri (new patient starts minus those discontinuing treatment) has been declining over the years on both an absolute basis as well as by percentage. Tysabri, Elan's primary revenue source, may not hold its ground facing BG-12.
Haemophilia is a hereditary genetic disorder that impairs the body's ability to stop bleeding by clotting the blood.
Biogen and its development partner Swedish Orphan Biovitrum have shown positive Phase III data for their long acting haemophilia B treatment rFIXFc. The potential fortnightly dosing provides a significant improvement over the current standard of care, as the drug is longer lasting, and therefore fewer injections are required.
The global haemophilia B market is currently valued at around $1 billion. Pfizer's BeneFIX is considered the gold-standard therapy, with global sales of $693 million in 2011.
By comparison, current treatment guidelines suggest dosing twice weekly with BeneFIX. Half of the patients in the phase III trial achieved twice-monthly dosing. This could mean reducing the number of injections for a patient to between 80 and 140 a year.
The investors's summary
Biogen Idec's second-quarter sales jumped 18% to $1.4 billion, boosted by increased revenue from Avonex and Rituxan. Net income for the period rose 34% year-over-year to $387 million.
CEO George A. Scangos noted that "Avonex performance was particularly strong," with sales of the product rising 16 % year-over-year to $762 million. "There has been strong uptake of the Avonex Pen and Avostartgrip titration dosing kit in both the US and EU," said Scangos.
Also, quarterly revenue from Rituxan (co-marketed with Roche) climbed to $285 million, a 31% increase over the prior-year period.
U.S. Rituxan sales were $784 million, up 5% from the prior year. Performance was solid in the maintenance setting in non Hodgkin's lymphoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, rheumatoid arthritis, and the new vasculitis indications.
Biogen's U.S. profit share was $259 million, and royalties and profit-sharing from sales outside the U.S. were $25 million.
Tysabri's worldwide sales were $395 million, an increase of 2% annually. Tysabri is co-marketed with Elan. Biogen's share of the revenue was $280 million. The drugmaker added that by the end of June, approximately 69,100 patients globally were receiving Tysabri.
Biogen's 52-week share price ranged from $87.72 to 157.18. The company's market cap is $35.27 billion. Analysts are mostly optimistic: 16 Buys, 9 Holds and 1 Underperform out of 26 opinions in Thomson/First Call survey.
Biogen Idec is clearly a super investment. The only question is a serious one: how high a price to pay for it?
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.
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Are Anti-Virus Programs Really Keeping You Safe Online?
As any organization knows, you need to protect your networks, computers, email, and any confidential information – which is virtually everything you produce – safe from corruption or intrusion. There are many ways that a company can implement IT security
, and one of those ways can be to install anti-virus software on every device you have.
Anti-virus software is a measure of IT security, but is it worth installing on – or removing from - mobile devices and cloud computing networks for mid-size companies? Below are eight points to consider about whether your anti-virus software is keeping your data safe and whether such programs are worth it:
- In the know: Anti-virus software can seem like a catch-all phrase. What is anti-virus software and what can it do? It is code that can recognize any sort of intrusion into any system that has the anti-virus software on it. Not just viruses, it can protect against Trojans, spyware, malware, key loggers – the attacks you want to prevent.
- Everyone has a weak moment: You would think that your employees know enough to open up an attachment from an unknown source, but everyone has a down moment. Sometimes that email looks genuine. Of course, your organization will be threatened by more than the typical lurking email attachment, but you need to protect against all possibilities.
- They won’t catch everything: No, one anti-virus software program won’t protect against every type of attack. Does that mean your devices shouldn’t have anti-virus software installed? Definitely not. You can choose the anti-virus software that is appropriate for each type of device that exists in your organization to ensure that best protection possible. Adjust for the situation and potential threat and you have reduced your risk.
- Affordability: Anti-virus software is an affordable solution to protect data – some are even free. Regardless of your company’s size or budget, there is a solution that fits your needs.
- Part of the plan: Should anti-virus software be your only measure of security? Certainly not. But it is one of the valid solutions that your company should incorporate into your overall IT security managed services to reduce any types of threats that exist.
- Awareness: The great thing about anti-virus software is that it keeps you and your IT department informed about the latest threats that have occurred, not necessarily to you, but to others. It also provides a forum for listing any threats that your organization may have encountered. Awareness is one of the keys to prevention even when your anti-virus software cannot.
- IT compliance: As any mid-size company knows, you need to stay current with IT best practices and policies. By documenting that anti-virus software has been installed and is kept current with the latest upgrades, any potential client will realize that your organization is not only serious about confidentiality and security, but that you are willing to back up that claim.
- Productivity: One final aspect about anti-virus software is that it allows your employees to be more productive – your main staff can focus on their work without issues arising, and your IT staff can minimize the amount of time dealing with the consequences of a cyber attack and therefore maintain your business continuity.
Be assured - computer viruses will attempt to infiltrate and attack your networks, so it' best to be prepared. Assessing your risk of attack and determining the solutions that match your organizational needs is the first step. Contact iCorps Technologies
, a leader in developing layered security that minimizes the risk of a successful attack,
who will help you determine the anti-virus and IT security solutions that are right for you and your organization.
Written by the IT technical staff at iCorps Technologies.
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Doug Bellfeuille / Minnesota Pollution Control Agency via Reuters
Crews work to recover an estimated 30,000 gallons of crude oil that leaked from three tanker cars involved in a derailment near Parkers Prairie in Minnesota on Wednesday.
A mile-long train hauling oil from Canada derailed, spilling 30,000 gallons of crude in western Minnesota on Wednesday, as debate rages over the environmental risks of transporting tar sands across the border.
The major spill, the first since the start of a boom in North American crude-by-rail transport three years ago, came when 14 cars on a 94-car Canadian Pacific train left the tracks about 150 miles northwest of Minneapolis near the town of Parkers Prairie, the Otter Tail Sheriff's Department said.
Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd, the country's second-largest railroad, said only one 26,000-gallon tank car had ruptured, adding it was a mixed freight train.
CP spokesman Ed Greenberg said he did not know if the crude was from Canada's tar sands or from conventional oil fields.
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency spokesman Dan Olson said up to three tank cars were ruptured and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 gallons - or 475 to 715 barrels - leaked out.
Cold weather had made the crude thicker, hindering the ability to recover the oil, Olson said, adding the initial cleanup was expected to continue for a day or two.
"We are focusing on drawing up the loose (oil) ... and once that has been taken up, they will then pump up the remaining oil in the tanks," Olson said. "Because of the winter conditions, the ground is frozen and there is not any damage to surface water or ground water. After the initial recovery we will see if the oil has soaked into the soil at all."
In an updated statement, CP said just one car was compromised and other two cars leaked while being moved during the response to the derailment and were contained.
Greenburg said that the safe clean-up efforts were progressing well and without concern.
"There have been reports that clean-up has been challenging. Our crews are taking appropriate steps in ensuring clean-up is conducted appropriately."
A photo provided by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency showed several large tank cars lying at the side of the railroad tracks in snow-covered fields, as clean-up crews examined the spill and maneuvered pump trucks into position.
"We have options to reroute traffic, so we've been able to continue to move trains while we do the thorough job of cleaning up the area," said Canadian Pacific's Greenberg.
A spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration said two representatives of the U.S. rail regulator are investigating the incident.
There has been a rapid increase in rail transport of crude in the last three years as booming North American oil production has outgrown existing pipeline capacity.
Canada is the top exporter of crude to the United States, due to rising output of crude from its vast tar sands deposits.
Around 40,000 barrels per day on average were shipped to the United States in 2012, according to data from Canada's National Energy Board.
Suncor Energy Inc SU.TO, Canada's largest oil company, pulled the plug on its long-delayed and partially built Voyageur oil sands upgrading project in northern Alberta on Wednesday, citing surging volumes of crude from the Bakken.
'Good business for the rails and bad safety for the public'
Environmentalists have complained about the impact of developing the reserves, and have sought to block TransCanada Corp's controversial Keystone XL project, which would carry oil produced from the oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast refining center.
Some experts have argued oil-by-rail carries a higher risk of accidents and spills.
"It is good business for the rails and bad safety for the public," said Jim Hall, a transportation consultant and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
"Railroads travel through population centers. The safest form of transport for this type of product is a pipeline. This accident could - and ought to - raise the issue for discussion."
Others noted that spills from rail cars are rare, and crude-by-rail has opened up opportunities for companies to develop huge volumes of oil production in places like the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota, which are not well served by pipelines.
Total shipments of petroleum on U.S. railroads rose more than 46 percent last year to 540,000 carloads, the Association of American Railroads said in January.
"It's not very good publicity, but railroads are incredibly safe, they don't spill often," said Tony Hatch, independent transportation analyst with ABH Consulting in New York who has done work for major railroads. "It should not change the opportunity railroads have to make us more energy independent."
Supporters of the Keystone XL pipeline were quick to jump on the derailment as a reason to build the pipeline.
"It should be clear that we need to move more oil by pipeline rather than by rail or truck," said Don Canton, spokesman for North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who has been one of the chief political proponents of the line. "This is why we need the Keystone XL. Pipelines are both safe and efficient."
Hoeven has supported the line as it would help carry oil produced in North Dakota to higher priced refining centers on the coast, and could help further expand production in the state that now pumps more oil than Alaska.Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.
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In previous articles about meditation you learned that meditation usually have an object. In some meditations like candle meditation or muscular meditation you learned about external and physical objects. Still, an object of meditation can be non-material, like word or though. Also, an object of meditation can be the inside visualization of the physical world.
Basically Introspective meditation is deep diving into your mind. Whatever is an object of your meditation it is interpreted only in you mind. During the introspective meditation you will chose the object or idea you will be meditation on. The object of the meditation should be something that you are close with or something that you have experienced. You should avoid meditation on other people. Here are the suggestions of some introspective meditation objects:
Your favorite color
Nature of the personal development
Shape of an Leaf
Idea or though
Simple, positive and natural ideas or shapes are the best introspective meditation objects. The mind has the tendency to easier focus and stay on objects that are not made by man. Now, since you have chosen your meditation object, prepare your self to begin introspective meditation.
Place yourself in comfortable and pleasant position in a private and quiet place. Since you are experimenting with the visualizations within your mind, try to detach from your surrounding. If it is necessary isolate yourself completely from the world around you. Lock the door, put the shades on the windows and plug in your ears with ear plugs. If you are laying than you should use the sheet or a blanket, in order to avoid coldness sensations that may distract you.
Close your eyes and breath slowly with the same rhythm. Listen to your breathing. If you are using the ear plugs you can hear your breathing very clearly, since you will not be receiving audio inputs from your surrounding, but only from your body. Count inhales and exhales from 10 down to 1. When you slowly come down to number one focus your meditation to the object of meditation.
What you need to do is to think about your object of meditation, nothing else. Your object of meditation is your prime interest and you will consider all meanings and associations awaken by the object of meditation. Still, do not let your self to be carried too far from the object. Meditation process is similar to observing the rock in the river. You try to focus on the water, but the motion of water is distracting you. What you need to do is to keep returning to the rock, since that is the object. If your thoughts are persistent in drifting away, than try to realize what is the connection of that thought with the object of meditation? Then return to the object of the meditation.
Do not be upset if you have problems of keeping attention on your object. Be aware of all your thoughts. Observe them, but always keep returning to the object of your meditation. Research thoroughly the flow of your mental process.
About Meditation Techniques
What is Necessary For Successful Meditation?
How to Meditate?
How to Meditate? – Candle Meditation
How to Meditate? – Bath Meditation
How to Meditate? – Muscular Meditation
How to Meditate? – Introspective Meditation
How to Meditate? - 5 Golden Rules Of Meditation
How to Meditate? - Mental Screen Meditation
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By: Ben Anderson
Although their research will occur on different parts of the globe, Warren Wilson College professors Amy Boyd (biology) and Siti Kusujiarti (sociology) share the distinction of receiving faculty development grants from the Appalachian College Association. The ACA has awarded the grants in support of the professors' sabbatical projects during the 2007-08 academic year.
Boyd, who received the college's 2006 award for faculty teaching excellence, will focus on a floristic study of the Warren Wilson campus and on enhancing the college herbarium (preserved plant collection). She also will visit other small-college herbaria to study their status, roles and potential for enhancing their usefulness and accessibility.
Kusujiarti will conduct participatory research on gender relations and social inequality among communities affected by an earthquake in the Bantul district of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her research will focus on the dynamics of social changes and survival strategies during recovery process.
Building on 10 years of research in the district, Kusujiarti will do comparative analyses of the changes before and after the earthquake. In addition to research, she will volunteer with a local non-governmental organization that has been active in supporting local communities facing the disaster.
The Appalachian College Association, based in Berea, Ky., is a consortium of 35 independent liberal arts colleges and universities in Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The association helps develop and share ideas, information, programs and resources in serving the people of Appalachia through higher education and related services. ACA institutions currently enroll a total of more than 39,000 students.
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Two marsh harriers were reported shot yesterday, as the spring hunting season controversially opened for business.
One of the protected migratory birds of prey, a juvenile, was found injured in Gozo yesterday morning, with fresh gunshot wounds to its wing.
A second marsh harrier, meanwhile, was found dead and in an advanced state of decomposition – indicating that the bird had been shot down in the days leading up to the season’s opening. The dead bird also carried a ring indicating it had come from Finland.
The injured bird was handed over to the Gozo police, and both incidents have been reported to the Administrative Law Enforcement (ALE) unit as well as to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority (Mepa).
Yesterday’s reported incidents follow last week’s discovery of two other protected birds, a pallid harrier and a purple heron – one shot in Malta and the other in Gozo.
In the meantime, international environmental lobby pressure continued to mount on the government yesterday as the spring hunting season opened, albeit with a slew of new penalties and fines appli-cable to those found breaking hunting laws.
Such fines and penalties have been doubled for first-time offenders, and stiffer fines – including the possibility of prison sentences, Lm6,000 fines and the permanent revocation of hunting and firearms licences – have been introduced for repeat offenders.
Bird conservation organisations from across Europe united in protest yesterday against the government’s controversial decision to open the spring hunting season for yet another year, in defiance of the European Commission, which insists the practice constitutes a continued breach of the Birds Directive.
The European Partnership of BirdLife International, which brings together 42 separate national conservation organisations, urged Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi yesterday to end spring hunting and “clamp down” on poaching, as wild birds, both protected and un-protected, make their way from Africa to their European breeding grounds.
Speaking yesterday on behalf of the BirdLife European Partnership, Konstantin Kreiser, EU Policy Manager at BirdLife International explained: “Malta is a vital stepping-stone for these birds on their exhausting journey northwards, hence this is not an issue just for Malta – it affects all European nations.
“Conservationists, citizens, organisations and governments across Europe have invested significant amounts of time and resources in protecting wild birds in their own countries. The fact that the Maltese government allows these birds to be killed during their journey to the breeding grounds is deeply shocking – particularly as this decision ignores the law and all scientific evidence and instead seems heavily influenced by upcoming elections.
“The Maltese hunters may not want to live up to their common responsibility as Europeans, but the Maltese government should.”
He added: “Malta and the whole European network of BirdLife International will continue to press Malta to stop spring hunting and to clamp down on poaching, otherwise the country risks not only a heavy fine from the European Court of Justice but also a
further deterioration of its
public reputation in the EU.”
The European Commission began legal action on the issue against Malta in June 2006 and the proceedings were recently extended to cover what the EC considers to be a violation of the Birds Directive not only in 2004 but also in 2005, 2006 and this year. Last month the European Parliament strongly endorsed the Commission’s stance and approved a resolution calling on Malta to immediately end spring hunting and trapping.
Sources close to the issue are of the opinion that the EC has stepped up its action against Malta with a view to bringing a consolidated case before the European Court of Justice as quickly as possible.
The government is reported to have replied to the Commission’s charges that it has broken the Birds Directive for now the fourth year
running, arguing autumn migrations are excessively
limited to provide for a worthwhile practice.
The government is to back up its stance with data from a scientific study, the methodology of which has been blasted, among a number of criticisms, as being designed in such a way as to lead to a skewed and misleading result favouring low migratory numbers for autumn and high figures for spring.
The spring hunting season closes on 20 May, and while the government insists that the spring hunting of turtledove and quail is justifiable in terms of its arguable derogation from the Birds Directive, all other species are clearly off limits.
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Body language of holding hands: Reading body language is all about looking at the person or the people and then taking the time to make an interpretation of what is going on. It really depends more about what the viewer thinks of the activities because the other person or people will react to what they think you believe is going on.
First off it’s a good reminder that it is important to baseline any situation that you are reading.
The nonverbal cues given by men and women holding hands can be read through a few different criteria:
- · The proximity or the distance between the two people holding hands
- · Where the hands are being grasped by the men and women
- · The pace or speed of walking of the men and women in question
- · Where the people are or the social surrounding
Body language of Proximity:
When reading the body language of holding hands it is important to look at how close the people are in relation to each other. It’s not just how close they are but it’s also how they hold each others hand. You have probably seen the guy holding the girls hand where he doesn’t really seem like he wants to hold the hand. Typically you will see a firm grasp but light grasp of the hand instead a lose grip on the fingers. You would see men and women in a loving relationship have a common grasp with each other.
Body language of relationships
When looking at how men and women hold hands you can get a feel for their relationship in some instances. There are times where one of the people has a scowl on their face, in some instances their may be the micro expression of contempt or possibly even the flash of anger. There are times where you may see one of the people holding the others hand with wrap around the wrist. Some men and or women in close relationships will hold or pull each other close as they walk together or even sit together.
Normally the men and the women who are getting along well or in a good relationship will have a natural glide. Sometimes when there are problems or issues in the relationship you may see one person pulling the other as they walk or the man be walking faster than the other. On the other hand you may see those who are in a loving relationship walking slow and looking or gazing at each other.
What you want to look for is a common stride or pace between the two whether fast or slow.
If the couple is sitting you may see the man or woman holding the other person hand close they may even have the hand pulled up onto a part of the body. There are times where the hand may be getting rubbed by either person.
Body language of possession
When looking at the proximity of the men and women holding hands there are times where the bodies of the men and or the women are just too close, at sometimes just flat out awkward to look at. You will see people in a relationship within the bell bubble but when the proximity becomes too close it is may of a sign of possession or a really close relationship. You would only be able to tell by looking at the two people and base lining what their actions are.
The body language of possessiveness may just go one step further and that is when the man or women will have a good arm lock around the shoulder of the other person with them. When the two people walk together the person who may be possessive is standing straight up while the other man or woman is pulled in almost to the point where the man or woman who is being possessed has to walk leaning into the possessor. You will typically see this type of possessive activity between younger couples.
You will want to look for jerky movements between the two and staring at others from one of the parties at the people around them.
Reading body language risks
There is always a risk in reading body language and that is you can make assumptions too quickly as to what is going on and you may have the possibility of being wrong. Learning how to read the nonverbal communication of others takes time and patience. While reading the body language of others it is important to baseline the actions nonverbally as to what the men and or the women are doing.
As always I would like to thank you in advance for your comments and or questions about reading the body language of holding hands.
Now go implement!
Scott Sylvan Bell
Body language expert Scott Sylvan Bell and how to read the body language of holding hands: Video credit
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The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, by Kersey Graves, , at sacred-texts.com
RECENT explorations in the field of oriental sacred history have revealed to the antiquarian some curious and deeply interesting facts appertaining to traditions founded on, and growing out of, astronomical phenomena and changes in the visible heavens, which throw much light on, and go far toward elucidating and furnishing a satisfactory explanation of many of the "mysteries" of the Christian bible. The works which we have consulted, containing the reports and results of researches of this character, tend to elucidate and establish the following conclusions:—
1. That anciently, in religious countries, time was divided into Cycles, Aetas, or Neros.
2. That these measures of time grew out of, and represented periodical changes, or periodically occurring phenomena in the astronomical heavens.
3. That some religious nations had three Cycular periods of different lengths, representing three orders and degrees of miraculous births. In India the length of the first or shorter Cycle was thirty days, the length of one moon or month. Every change of the moon marked an important event in their religions history. Each change was supposed to denote the birth of some angel or celestial being,
known as an Eon. The second Cycular period was of six hundred years’ duration, and was founded on a text of the sacred book of India, known as the Surya Sidhanta, which declares "the equinoctial point moves eastward one degree in thirty times twenty years" (thirty times twenty being 600). At every occurrence of this equinoctial change heightened by an eclipse of the sun or moon, or some other wonder-exciting phenomenon, a God was supposed to be born. Such a marvelous and terror-inspiring event, in the apprehensions of the credulous and superstitions populace of an unscientific age, could not be designed for anything less than the birth of a God or Divine Savior. Their theology teaches that such was the wickedness of man, that a God had to descend from heaven, and suffer and die for the people, in some way, every six hundred years.
And this period was announced by the God's causing a collision of the sun and moon, or some other terror-exciting phenomena in the heavens above or the earth beneath. When one of these six hundred Cycular periods was about to expire, and another commence, every remarkable phenomenon in the heavens was watched and interpreted as being connected with it. And some person born at that period, who exhibited any remarkable or extraordinary trait of character, was certain to be promoted to the Godhead, as being miraculously born and brought forth for the special occasion. He was the Avatar Savior or Messiah for that Cycle. There were two extraordinary events to be counted for—one was the display of unusual and terror-exciting phenomena in the heavens, and the other the birth of extraordinary men on earth. And it was natural for an ignorant age to associate them together, and make one aid in accounting for the other. And as these celestial phenomena were only witnessed at intervals distant apart, the thought naturally arose, and the conclusion was easily established, that they came periodically, and for the special purpose of heralding the birth of a God.
And as tradition reported that similar events were witnessed six hundred years before the conviction was fixed in the popular mind, this was the established period intervening between these great epochs. And thus the six hundred year Cycular tradition became established in India, and finally spread through all the Eastern countries. We find traces of it in Egypt, Syria, Persia, Chaldea, China, Italy, and Judea. And the proof that the deification of great men in some countries grew out of this Cycular tradition is found in the fact that many of them were born at the commencement of Cycles. The Hindoos are able to recount the names of ten sin-atoning Saviors who made their appearance on earth at these regular intervals of six hundred years. The name of the first Avatar Mediator and Savior who forsook the throne of heaven to come down and die for the people was Matsa. Tradition and the sacred books fix his birth at about six thousand years B.C. The names and advent of the other sin-atoning Saviors occur in the following order: 2. Vurahay, 3. Kurma, 4. Nursu, 5. Waman, 6. Pursuram, 7. Kama, 8. Chrishna, 9. Sakia, 10. Salavahana. The last named Savior was contemporary with Jesus Christ. The God and Savior Sakia was born six hundred years B.C. "Our Lord and Savior" and "Son of God," Chrisna, was immaculately conceived and miraculously born, according to Higgins, 1200 B.C.
A circumstance strongly confirming the conclusion that Cycular periods had much to do with the promotion of men to the dignity of Gods is, that most of the deified personages reported in history were, according to the best authorities, born near the commencement of Cycles. Recurring back to the eighth Cycle, we observe the advent of that period of Chrishna, Zoroaster 2d, Bali, Thammuz, Atys, Osiris, and several ethers. At the commencement of the ninth Cycle. appeared Sakia, Quexalcote, Zoroaster 2d, Xion, Quirinus, Prometheus, Mithra and many others.
The tenth Cycle brought in Jesus Christ, Salavhana, Apollonious, and others that might be named. Mahomet succeeded Jesus Christ just six hundred years (he was born in the year 600 A.D.), which inaugurated another Cycle. Many facts are recorded in history proving the prevalence and sacredness of the Cycle idea in different countries, The story in Egypt of the bird called the Phoenix, being hatched, according to tradition, just 600 years B.C., and living to be just six hundred years old, and having the power to renew itself every six hundred years, shows the prevalence of the Cycular tradition in that country.
We have the statement upon the records of history that when the first six hundred years after the foundation of Rome were about to expire, the people became greatly excited with the apprehension that some extraordinary event must attend the occasion. And but for the influence of the philosophers, some extraordinary man would have been hunted up and promoted to divine honor as being the God born for that Cycle. The writings of Plato, Plutarch, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, and Aristotle, all evince a belief in Cycles, and the belief that ten Cycles, or Aetas, were the measure, for the duration of the world. According to M. Faber, a new-born Savior was always expected to make his appearance at the commencement of one of these Cycles. Hence the deification of those personages above named, and many others that might be named. It is a remarkable circumstance that the Jewish bible should speak of Noah as being six hundred years old at the commencement of the flood, when it was a tradition amongst the ancient Egyptians that the ushering in of the six hundredth year Cycle was to be attended with a flood.
And the time antecedent to Noah after creation, was the measure of three Cycles, according to the chronology of the Samaritan bible, it being 600 + 600 + 600 = 1800 years from Adam to Noah. It is an interesting fact that those
enigmatical figures made use of by Daniel, as also some of those found in the Apocalypse, are susceptible of a Cycular explanation. These occult prophecies, as they are supposed to be, which have puzzled and bewildered many thousands of Christian minds and bible expounders in their attempt to evolve their signification, are susceptible of a Cycular explanation. They are of easy solution on a Cycular basis, or with the Cycular key.
Take, for example, Daniel's famous prophecy (so called) of the seventy weeks, as found in the ninth chapter, announcing the advent of a Messiah at the end of that period. We find by a calculation based on Tyson's "Historical Atlas," and Haskell's "Chronology and Universal History," that Daniel lived in the hundred and tenth year of the ninth Cycle, at which time the prefigure seems to have been used. Assuming this as a basis, and multiplying seventy weeks by seven, to convert it into years, as Christian essayists are accustomed to doing, and we have as the result 70 × 7 = 490, which being added to one hundred and ten, the year that gave birth to the prophesy, makes six hundred, which exactly completes the Cycle, and furnishes a simple and beautiful explanation of a mystical figure, on which many thousands of conjectures, speculations, and guesses have been founded, but on which they have failed to throw any light.
The 70 × 70 = 490 years, were wanting to complete the Cycle; and when this rolled away, it brought a new Cycle, and with it a new sin-atoning Savior was always expected in some countries (the country in which Daniel lived being one of this number); a new Messiah (or sin-atoning, Savior), and some great man born at that time, was fixed upon and deified as being that Messiah. Hence the Jews, in imitation of their neighbors, yielding to their strong proclivities to borrow from and copy after heathen nations, selected "the man Christ Jesus" as their Messiah and
[paragraph continues] Savior. The mystical era of Daniel, signified by "a time, times, and the dividing of time" (Dan. vii. 25), or, as St. John has it, "a time, times, and a half time" (see Rev. xii. 14) is explainable by the same Cycular key.
Some writers have conjectured that Daniel was a Chaldean priest. If so, he must have had a knowledge of their astronomical Cycle of two thousand one hundred and sixty years, which completed the period of the precession of the equinoxes. Explained by this Cycle, his "time, times, and dividing of time, or half time," or "a time, another time, and a half time," as some writers have rendered it, would be 2160 + 2160 + 1080 = 5400; nine Cycles exactly, as 600 × 9= 5400. Add this to the Cycle in which he lived, and we have 5400 + 600 = 6000, the great Millennial Cycle, when not only a new Savior and Messiah was to be born, but a new world also. Both the long and short Cycle (and one was a measure of the other) were expected to expire at that time, according to a Chaldean tradition. And thus is beautifully explained another "deep, dark and unfathomable mystery," which thousands of devout minds have exhausted their ingenuity in trying to find a meaning for. Again, look at the frightful nightmare visions of Daniel and the author of the Apocalypse, in which they saw a monstrous beast with seven heads and ten horns, though Daniel mentions only the horns. The seven heads were, in all probability, the seven auspicious months of the year in which some of the nations revealed in the enjoyment of, and praised and celebrated their fruitful, bountiful blessings, the year being divided into two seasons, seven summer months and five winter months.
Now, let it be noted, St. John lived near the tenth Cycle, which answers to the ten horns of the beast. Hence is most forcibly suggested that interpretation of the figure. Daniel's ten horns should have been translated eleven horns, as he lived in the ninth Cycle, though so near the
tenth, that he probably constructed his figure on the tenth. And Daniel's prophetic declaration (so considered), found in the eighth chapter, that it would be two thousand three hundred days until the sanctuary should be closed, is explainable in the same manner. According to Mr. Irving, Mr. Frere, and other writers, there was a large fraction over the three hundred days, making it nearer four hundred, and hence might have been so rendered, which would make 2000 + 400 = 2400; the exact length of four Cycles, 600 × 4 = 2400. And their are other mystical figures, frightful visions, and occult metaphors found in the Apocalypse susceptible of a Cycular solution. The Cycle is the true key for unlocking many of the ancient mysteries of various religions. The Chinese have always reckoned by Cycles of sixty years, instead of by centuries. (See New Am. Encyclop. vol. v. p. 105.)
We will now bestow a brief notice on the Millennial Cycle: the sacred period of 6000 years, composed of ten of the smaller Cycles, 600 × 10 = 6000. Dr. Hales says, "A tradition of Millennial ages prevailed throughout the east, and finally reached the west." (Chron. vol. i. p. 44.) We are told by astronomers that if the angle which the plane of the ecliptic forms with the plane of the Equator had decreased gradually, as it was once supposed to do, the two planes would coincide in about six thousand years—a period which comprises ten of the smaller Cycles, 600 × 10 = 6000. And it was very easy and very natural for an ignorant and superstitions age to conclude that such a prodigious, astounding, and awful event as that of two stupendous orbits or planes coming in contact with each other, should be attended with some direful and calamitous event, and with a tremendous display of divine power. Nothing less than an entire revolution, if not the total destruction of the world, could comport with the majesty and magnitude of such an event.
And this great crisis was to bring down the Omnipotent Divine Judge from the throne of heaven; that is, the Almighty being who caused it was to come down, or send his Son to call the nations to judgment, and drown the world, or set it on fire. The first destruction according to the tradition of the Chaldeans, Persians, Assyrians, Mexicans, and some other nations, was to be by water, and the next by fire, when the oceans, seas, and lakes were to be converted into ashes. And Christ's apostles seemed to have cherished this tradition. Peter says, "whereby the world that was then, being overflowed by water, perished. But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment," (2 Peter iii. 6.) This was a pagan belief long prior to the era of Peter. Josephus says, "Adam predicted that the world would be twice destroyed, once by water, next by fire." A writer says, "A glorious, blissful future attends the destruction of the world by fire, and the reappearance of Vishnu (i.e., eleventh incarnation of Vishnu) has been for several thousand years the hopeful anticipation of India." "The last coming of Vishnu in power and glory," says another writer, "to consummate the final overthrow of evil, sin, and death, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the devotees, that they have an annual festival in commemoration of their prophesy referring to it, at which they exclaim, in a loud voice, 'When will the Divine Helper come? when will the Deliverer appear?'"
At the consummation of this event, "a comet will roll under the moon and set the world on fire;" so affirms their bible. And the Persian bible, the Zend-Avesta, in like manner predicts that "a star, with a tail in course of its revolution, will strike the earth and set it on fire." Seneca predicts that "the time will come when the world will be
wrapped in flames, and the opposite powers in conflict will mutually destroy each other."
Ovid prophesies poetically,—
Lucian, in a like spirit, exclaims,—
The Egyptians marked their houses with red, to indicate that the world would be destroyed by fire. Orpheus, 1200 B.C., at the inauguration of the eighth Cycle, entertained fearful forebodings of the speedy destruction of the world by water or fire. Some nations held that the alternate destruction of the world by water and fire had already occurred, and would occur again. Theopompus informs us that some of the orientalists believed that "the God of light and the God of darkness reigned by turn every six thousand years (commencing with an astronomical Cycle of course), and that during this period the other was held in subjection, which finally resulted in 'a war in heaven;'" a counterpart to St. John's story. (See Rev. chap. xii.)
This accords with Volney's statement, that "it was recorded in the sacred books of the Persians and Chaldeans that the world, composed of a total revolution of twelve thousand periods, was divided into two partial revolutions of six thousand years each—one being the reign of good, and the other the reign of evil." (Ruins, p. 244.) This belief was disseminated through most of the nations. One of these revolutions was produced, some believed, by a concussion of worlds, which displaced the ocean and seas, and thus produced a general flood, which drowned every living thing on the earth. The next revolution will be caused by a collision of worlds, which will produce fire, and burn the earth to ashes.
Now, let it be noted that all of these grand epochs were founded on Cycles, and accompanied by the tradition of a God being born upon the earth (conceived by a virgin maid), or descending in person; that is, men were promoted to the Godhead. And in this way Jesus Christ was deified. Volney explains the matter thus: "Now, according to the Jewish computation, six thousand years had nearly elapsed since the supposed creation of the world (according to their chronology). This coincidence produced considerable fermentation in the minds of the people. Nothing was thought of but the approaching termination. The great Mediator and Final Judge was expected, and his advent desired, that an end might be put to their calamities." (Ruins, p. 168).
Mr. Higgins corroborates this statement, when he tells us that "about the time of the Cæsars, there seems to have been a general expectation that some Great One was to appear. And finally, when the Cycle had passed, the people, the Jew-Christians, began to look about to see who that Great One was. Some fixed on Herod, some on Julius Cæsar, and some on others. But finally public opinion settled on one Jesus of Nazareth, on account of his superiority in morals and intellect, while the Hindoos deified Salavahana, the Greeks Apollonious, &c. And thus science and history join hand in hand to explain most beautifully and conclusively the greatest mystery that ever brought two hundred millions of people daily upon their knees—the apotheosis, or deification of "the man Christ Jesus."
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Home wifi could be used for emergency responders
PARIS, Aug 21 — Wireless routers for homes and offices could be knitted together to provide a communications system for emergency responders if the mobile phone network fails, German scientists reported yesterday.
In many countries, routers are so commonplace even in medium-sized towns that they could be used by fire services, ambulance and police if cellphone towers and networks are down or overwhelmed by people caught up in an emergency, they say.
Kamill Panitzek and colleagues at the Technical University in Darmstadt, western Germany, walked around their city centre to pinpoint the location — but without invading privacy — of wireless routers.
In an area of just 0.5 square kilometres, using an Android application to locate wireless networks, they found 1,971 routers of which 212 were public routers, meaning they were non-encrypted.
This rich density means that an emergency network could piggyback on nearby routers, giving first responders access to the Internet and contact with their headquarters.
“With a communication range of 30 metres, a mesh network could be easily constructed in urban areas like our hometown,” say the team, whose mathematical model is published in the International Journal of Mobile Network Design and Innovation.
The team suggest that routers incorporate an emergency “switch” that responders can activate to set up a backup network, thus giving them a voice and data link through the Internet.
This could be done quite easily without impeding users or intruding on their privacy, the study argues. Many routers already have a “guest” mode, meaning a supplementary channel that allows visitors to use a home’s wifi.
“The emergency switch would enable an open guest mode that on the one hand protects people’s privacy, and on the other hand makes the existing communications resources available to first responders,” says the paper.
The population of Darmstadt is 142,000. The location scanned in the study comprised a rectangle of streets in the city centre, covering 467,500 square metres. — AFP-Relaxnews
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Cue the Charlie Brown music, and let's talk about pumpkins. Unlike Linus' ongoing vigil in the pumpkin patch waiting on the Great Pumpkin, we do in fact have this glorious fruit (yes, it is botanically a fruit) appear every year in the Fall. Pumpkins are loaded with all kinds of nutrients: they have high levels of Vitamin A, Folate and Fiber, low in calories and zero fat or cholesterol. Another one of our favorite "super foods!"
Pumpkins come in many shapes and sizes and are used in a variety of ways: baked, roasted and pureed. I considered doing a fun dessert, but that just seemed a little too easy. So putting my thinking cap on this week I came up with two different soups and a stew to share with you. This week was special not only because I was on a creative streak with my pumpkin recipes, but because Larry and I were having dinner with my fellow Small Bites blogger JL Fields, and her husband Dave.
JL and I were thrown together quite by chance and all thanks to Liz Johnson. We met this summer in a whirlwind Throwdown Competition that basically came out of an email exchange about recipes. She and Dave are on their “Farewell to NY Tour” at the moment, getting ready to move to Colorado in a few short weeks. While we’ve just become new friends it was an honor for me to have her dine with us recently.
I don’t profess to know all that it takes to be vegan, that is her bailiwick, but she has educated me on many things vegan, and I am so very grateful. Food is one of the few things in humanity that crosses all cultures, preferences and classes. We all need to eat to survive. Since I entered the world of food as a career I have such a different appreciation of ingredients and preparation.
That said, I was on a recipe-creating streak this week and I came up with three interesting ways to use two different types of pumpkins. Both that I used came directly from Gaia's Breath Farm, through my CSA Basket. However, you can easily use the store bought variety, and even substitute with butternut squash. The only thing I would suggest is using a smaller sized pumpkin. They are sweeter and less fibrous. The gigantic ones are really only good for carving, in my opinion. The flavor level is very low. The other suggestion would be to not use the canned variety in these recipes either.
Click here to read more about pumpkins and see my easy recipes!
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This is a diagram that illustrates a hub and spoke model for positioning a blog in relation to off-site social networks and media outposts. It's simple and effective.
Blog content provides more in depth, conversational content for more information. It can attract traffic on its own via search, RSS and links.
Rather than pointing links from Facebook or Twitter directly to corporate web pages, pointing them to information on a blog is less abrupt in the (casual to commercial) relationship that brands want with social customers.
The blog as hub also helps focus link acquisition and subsequent search visibility. If emphasis is placed on a mix of social networks and sharing sites without a hub, there's less opportunity for link signals to pinpoint for search engines which content is the best for inclusion in search results. Content from the blog can be promoted via social distribution channels resulting in exposure and the likelihood of organic link acquisition.
If a company has multiple blogs, they would do well to have a blog hub that centralizes blogs as well as other social destinations. Each blog has its own home page and if appropriate, might have its own ecosystem of social activity. Each outpost (Chris Broganism) or forward operating base (Eric Schwartzmannism) can exist reciprocally promoting the blog they are connected to.
Of course, any kind of content should be managed by an editorial plan that is thoughtful of keywords for SEO value.
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Whether or not men should have a simple blood test to look for hidden prostate cancer has long been a controversial and confusing issue. A new study from Europe does little to resolve it.
Dr. Harvey Simon, editor of the Harvard Men’s Health Watch, has written thousands of words, and counseled many of his patients, about PSA testing. In the March 2012 issue, he discusses his own decision not to have routine PSA testing.
In this study of 162,000 men, those tested for prostate-specific antigen (PSA) were less likely to have died of prostate cancer over the course of the 11-year study than men who didn’t have the test. Deaths from any cause, however, were the same in both groups—meaning that the test didn’t save lives.
The researchers (and most news reports) highlighted the 21% relative reduction in deaths due to prostate cancer. That sounds like a lot. But here’s what it means in absolute terms: among men who had the PSA test, there were 4 deaths per 10,000 men per year, compared to 5 deaths per 10,000 men per year in the group that didn’t have the PSA test. The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
What can be bad about a test for cancer?
On the surface, a relatively inexpensive test that can detect cancer in its earliest (and most treatable) stage looks like a winner. But the devil is in the details:
- Many men with prostate cancer are elderly and have no health problems related to the cancer. They may have other, more important health problems. For them, early detection of prostate cancer usually isn’t helpful.
- Prostate cancer often grows very slowly. Most men who have it die of something else. Some men live with the side effects of treatment—notably impotence and incontinence—for a cancer that would have had no effect on the length or quality of their lives.
- Since a high PSA does not always indicate cancer, a biopsy is needed to find out why the PSA is high. Prostate biopsy isn’t the most pleasant of procedures and it can be accompanied by complications such as bleeding or infection.
- Studies have not proven that PSA testing saves lives.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts whose recommendations help define high-quality health care for most Americans, has long recommended that men over age 75 not get routine PSA tests unless there is a good reason to do so. Last fall, the task force issued a preliminary recommendation (now awaiting public comment) saying no to routine PSA testing for all men.
Rethinking the PSA test
The new study is likely to strengthen the task force’s advice against yearly PSA testing. My own view is that we should reconsider the widespread use of PSA testing, especially the yearly screening that is common in the United States. To be worthwhile, a screening test should have clear benefits that strongly outweigh any risks. That hasn’t been proven for PSA testing.
This makes PSA testing a most individual decision. As my colleague Dr. Harvey Simon writes in the Harvard Men’s Health Watch, all men should talk about PSA testing with their doctors. Learn the risks, benefits, and limits of this test. Then decide with your doctor whether you should have the PSA test at all and, if so, how often.
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Thursday, November 6, 2008
This picture was taken in 1899 and shows a young black woman. The woman in dressed in nice clothes which was somewhat uncharacteristic of African Americans at this period in time. She appears more affluent than what was typical. I don't have any other information about her or her family, so her story is unknown.
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I just got an email from a writer who was checking to see if I had argued -- in a talk long ago -- that true innovations come from people who ignore customers. As I told her, I don't recall saying exactly that, but as I argued in Chapters 12 and 13 in Weird Ideas That Work, there are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process. At IDEO and the d.school, we talk about "the mind of the child" (see Diego's great post on this at Metacool). Also see this old article I wrote that draws on these chapters.
Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done. I once had a student who worked as an earlier employee at Invisalign (those clear braces that replace the ugly wire things), and he told me that none of the members of the original design team had any background in traditional braces or dentistry. Indeed, at least one history of the company suggests the initial idea came from one of the founders, who had no background in dentistry at all:
The company was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zia Chishti and Ms. Kelsey Wirth, who -- as graduate students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business -- realized the benefit of applying advanced 3-D computer imaging
graphics to the field of orthodontics. Like many breakthrough inventions, the idea for Invisalign® grew from happenstance.Mr. Chishti wore braces as an adult when working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, which was awkward and embarrassing. When his braces were removed he wore a clear plastic retainer. He noticed that when he neglected to wear the retainer for several days his teeth would shift back and upon reinsertion his teeth would shift back to their desired, straightened state. It was the observation that a clear plastic device was capable of moving his own teeth that led to Chishti’s conceptualization of a process that became the Invisalign System. A background in computer science gave Chishti the insight that it was possible to design and manufacture an entire series of clear orthodontic devices similar to the retainer he wore, using 3- D computer graphics technology. He and Ms. Wirth started Align Technology in 1997 to realize this vision. And the rest – as they say – is history.
In this vein, Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:
- During the early stages of a project, don’t study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.
- If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it. Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.
- Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you “know” the answer to or you can’t resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.
- Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved.
- Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.
- If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
- If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don’t assume they are right especially if they tell you they are right.
What do you think? Do you have more ideas for harnessing innovation? Do you know of other instructive cases? When is ignorance dangerous and destructive?
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Java vs .NET Security: Epilogue
by Denis Piliptchouk
Upcoming Security Features
Editor's Note: This series on security has been collected into a PDF eDocument, Java vs .NET Security, which is now available from O'Reilly Digital Publications. In this epilogue written for the PDF, Denis takes a look ahead to where the two platforms are headed in the near future.
This article serves as the epilogue to the ".NET vs Java Security" series that has been published by O'Reilly Network over the last several months. Both platforms (J2SE 1.5 and .NET "Whidbey") are expecting significant new releases in the current year, and a brief preview of the upcoming security features is attempted here.
As before, this publication will focus on the security features of the platforms themselves, avoiding more broad discussion of additional products and services. The security features will be reviewed by protection categories, to ensure that similar items are compared in each case and to see how they augment the existing functionality.
In terms of Java security, this is an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary release, because it does not bring any new, ground-breaking changes. The updates are mostly concentrated in the areas of cryptography and PKI.
Specifically, JSSE experiences a significant change:
- A new SSL/TLS abstraction layer is added to separate its logic from threading and I/O issues.
- JSSE will now use JCE providers exclusively.
- External provider pluggability will be allowed.
- By default, will use a X.509-PKIX-compliant
TrustManagerthat is based on
- Default SunJSSE provider will include support for Kerberos suites.
- AES_256 cipher suites will be enabled by default in the SunJSSE provider.
JCE is going to see some new functionality as well:
- A PKCS#11 provider will be included, which adds support for hardware-based accelerators and smartcards.
- New APIs for ECC will be added.
- The SunJCE provider will include RSA encryption and several additional algorithms.
- Several parameters will be added or enhanced to provide support for XML Encryption algorithms.
- On Solaris, better integration with the OS' cryptographic framework will result in significant performance improvements.
Java PKI is going to be updated as follows:
- Smartcard-based keystores are going to be available, thanks to the added PKCS#11 provider.
- Enhanced PKCS#12 implementation will be included.
- Client-side support for On-Line Certificate Service Protocol (OCSP) will be added, and APIs for indirect CRLs will be extended.
CertPathimplementation will be PKIX-compliant.
Finally, the JAAS Kerberos module in 1.5 will have an option for TGT renewals, which should help avoid unnecessary service re-authentications.
For .NET, more changes are in store in the upcoming release, which address existing shortcomings and add new types of functionality. These changes are quite broad in scope and make a number of significant new features available to .NET developers.
Application Identity-Based Security is a .NET buzzword for providing a restricted execution environment, based on information found in application and deployment manifests. New tools will be bundled with the next release to help determine the required application permission set. This identity-based schema is designed to fit into the newly introduced
ClickOnce programming model in Windows and allow deployment of semi-trusted applications.
CAS will be extended to include demand choices, which will allow for presenting several choices for satisfying demands, and
friend assemblies, similar to
friend classes in C++, will be introduced
PKI will be fully integrated in the upcoming release, so falling back on
CryptoAPI or WSE will no longer be necessary.
In addition to XML Signature, the upcoming release will include support for XML Encryption, both being fully integrated with the new PKI.
File-based Windows access control will be incorporated into the framework, which will allow setting file ACLs from managed applications.
Many of .NET's communication protection pitfalls are going to be fully or partially resolved in the upcoming release:
- Allowing decoupling from IIS via adding server-side HTTP listeners.
- Providing client and server classes for SSL conversation, and means of identity propagation over streams.
- The new messaging framework, codenamed "Indigo", will incorporate all functionality formerly found in WSE into the core framework.
Last, but not least, ASP.NET 2.0 will include enhancements that take care of the drudgery of programming forms-based authentication and authorization via its new server controls, as well as
Role Management APIs.
In its 1.5 release, Java extends its already quite rich offering in the cryptography space, described in Part 2 of this series, with several new features.
Probably the most important addition to JCE is a new PKCS#11 provider, which, in contrast to other existing JCE providers that contain cryptographic implementations themselves, simply serves as a bridge to the installed PKCS#11 v2.0 implementations, to enable support for hardware accelerators and smartcards in Java applications. Its introduction caused a number of updates/enhancements to the existing core JCA/JCE and PKI classes, as well as creating new ones, which will allow communication with hardware tokens and smartcard-based keystores. Tools like Keytool and
jarsigner have been updated as well to utilize the extended functionality available with the new provider. Additionally (though only on the Solaris 10 platform), JCE will take advantage of the Solaris Cryptographic Framework's PKCS#11 provider, which will result in significant (i.e., orders of magnitude) performance improvements.
JCE will be furnished with additional APIs to better support Elliptic Curves (ECC). Users, who previously have had to rely on external providers, can now use a number of standard ECC classes from the
Several classes will be added or extended to support OAEP and PSS padding schemas, as defined in PKCS#1 v2.1 and W3C Recommendations for XML Encryption, enabling full support for the RSA-OAEP Key Transport algorithm.
javax.crypto namespace, existing classes are updated to facilitate key-related operations:
javax.crypto.EncryptedPrivateKeyInfois extended with additional overloads of
getKeySpecmethod to enable easier retrieval of private key information.
javax.crypto.Cipherclass has new methods that allow retrieval of maximum values for key lengths and parameters.
The SunJCE default provider will have several new algorithms, which makes it a more attractive candidate for use in development: HmacSHA (256-512), RSA and RC2 encryption, and additional PBE algorithms.
Java's PKI implementation benefits from the improved PKCS#12 keystore implementation, which will have additional protection algorithms and support keystore read/write operations. This enhancement will substantially facilitate key and certificate exchange, especially when it comes to browsers, which tend to use PKCS#12 format for these operations.
Client-side support for the On-Line Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), conforming to RFC 2560, will be added to PKI. In case of problems with the OCSP operation, Java applications will fail over to the traditional CRL checking via Certification Path API, which now boasts full PKIX compliance after passing the Public Key Interoperability Test Suite (PKITS) .
.NET's history with PKI has been quite spotty up until now (see Part 3), to say the least. The upcoming release brings the long-overdue integration of full PKI into the .NET framework, exposing managed implementations of Windows APIs for X509 and PKCS#7. Support for the former includes the newly updated
X509CertificateEx, which essentially brings the features of X.509 certificate class from WSE into the core framework, and allows access to all certificate properties, as well as validation and chaining. Added support for PKCS#7 means easier interfacing to cryptography applications, written in other systems, particularly in Java, which already supports PKCS#7.
Continuing with its general XML push, .NET adds a fully W3C-compliant implementation of the XML Encryption recommendation. This implementation provides most popular symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, such as 3DES, multiple AES, and RSA, and is flexible enough to allow encryption of multiple sections inside one document with different keys. Both the existing classes for XML Digital Signature and the new ones for XML Encryption take advantage of functions in the integrated .NET PKI to utilize X.509 certificates for their operations.
Pages: 1, 2
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In their search for the lost grave of King Richard III, archaeologists unearthed a skeleton from underneath a parking lot last August. Today researchers announced that the skeleton is indeed that of England’s 500-year-deceased
king, and they have the DNA and radiocarbon dating to prove it.
Richard III is most famous for the Shakespeare play of the same name, which was written a century after his death. This English king reigned for just over two years, but his body was buried without record of its exact location. Researchers began digging up the vicinity of Greyfriars church in Leicester in 2011, and today’s announcement is the scientific evidence they needed to make their case for a definitive identification.
The parallels between the scientific findings and historical accounts of Richard III are many:
• Radiocarbon dating determined the body to have been been buried in the late 15th or early sixteenth century. Historians say Richard III died fighting in the War of the Roses in 1485.
• Skeletal examinations determined the body to be in its 20s or early 30s at the time of death. Richard III was apparently 32.
• The skeleton showed no signs of the withered arm portrayed in Shakespeare’s account, but it did fit the descriptions from Richard III’s contemporaries: short, slim and with a very crooked spine.
• The body shows evidence of ten wounds, including two fatal blows to the skull. Richard III was thought to have died from a blow to the back of the head.
But Richard III was not the only 30-something with scoliosis in the Middle Ages. The real proof of the skeleton’s identity came from the DNA analysis. Samples from the skeleton overlapped with the genomes of two living relatives descended from Richard’s maternal line.
Finally, then, the king can be put to rest in a proper burial spot – and for historians, a long winter of discontent comes to an end.
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Houston officials are uniting to combat crimes against convenience stores. City Mayor Bill White has put together a task forcededicated to reducing these crimes and making stores safer forboth employee and customers.
“We’re going to be looking into various crime prevention plansto help c-store owners,” said Officer Muzafar Siddiqi of theHouston Police Department.
A member of the task force himself, Officer Siddiqi is no stranger to c-store crime prevention in the area. After a series ofc-store murders in 2000, Houston’s former mayor appointedSiddiqi to serve as a convenience store liaison between the policeand retailers. Due to his dissent and multi-lingual skills, OfficerSiddiqi has been able to form a bond with the primarily Indian andPakistani storeowners in the area, frequently visiting and helpingthem with various crime awareness issues that can sometimesplague c-stores.
Because of his expertise, Siddiqi was a no-brainer for joiningthe task force made up of local police officers, council membersand, of course, c-store owners. The group will meet regularly to discuss what’s currently going on and what can be done to makec-stores safer in the community. After four months, the task forcewill report their findings to Mayor White.
“We’re going to look into the needs of c-stores owners,” saidSiddiqi. “Then our findings will be reported to Mayor White, who willdiscuss with us any changes that can be made.”
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The AOD (for automatic overdrive) is a four-speed automatic transmission with overdrive. Introduced in 1980, it was Ford’s first four-speed automatic overdrive transmission. The 4R70W stands for 4 gears, Rearwheeldrive, 70 stands for the 4th gear ratio, and Wide gear ratio. It has lower 1st and 2nd gear ratios for better take-off acceleration and improved gearset strength.
The AOD was used originally on ’80s and early-’90s Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury products and in the F-series pickups and E-series vans as well. Because the AOD is basically a retooled C-4, many classic car owners have discovered they can substitute this overdrive transmission into their ’60s and ’70s production vehicles relatively easily and reap the benefits of a lower final gear ratio and decreased wear and tear on their vintage small-block V-8 engine. Theres more parts to take off of this but I will do that when the rebuild kit gets here, just to make sure I get the right parts.
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Thursday, January 1st, 2009 | communication
Cell phones – or mobiles, as some prefer to call them – have uses. The man who stood five places ahead of me in the boarding queue at the airport used his cell phone to make him look important. “It is not acceptable,” he shouted several times. “I will not take any more of this from you.” And then the clincher: “I am taking my business elsewhere, and as you know, it is considerable.” The last statement was accentuated with a snap-shut of the device.
I felt annoyed. Have cell phones shifted the boundaries of public and private to the extent that it is acceptable for people to terminate “considerable” business deals in full hearing of a diverse audience? I certainly would not like to be told off in the hearing of a crowd of people.
But what I was most annoyed at was that my privacy was invaded. I was given no choice – my space was hijacked .
In the days of the wired telephone, conversations of this nature took place in a closed office. If I happened to be in a room and I sensed that a private discussion was brewing, I would discreetly take myself out of the room. Did the disappearance of the wire and the mobility of the cell phone throw ethical behaviour overboard?
The airport caller particularly irked me – maybe it was his brashness and the furtive look around from time to time, seeking affirmation of an audience. His may be an extreme case. But I am daily bombarded by people in public places shouting into their cell phones. What is worse is when they speak in a language I don’t understand. Perhaps this proves that I am a meddler – an indication that I am burning with curiosity about their private conversations. But if they do not have a loud and public conversation I would not be tempted to wonder what they are talking about. And sometimes I have no choice: I can’t get away. I am forced to listen.
Did a change in technology bring about a change in ethics as well? Are people perhaps acting in ignorance – new technology was foisted on them without giving them the opportunity to learn how to use it responsibly?
Or should good old-fashioned manners be enough to dictate how to use a new piece of technology?
Am I just getting old and grumpy … ?
2 Comments to Cell phone callers invade my privacy
- Publishers must provide content that FET colleges can put into their Learning Management Systems ... #motheoconf2013 Tweeted 4 days ago
- FET colleges must "e" ... says Malcolm of Macmillan. #motheoconf2013 Tweeted 4 days ago
- Seek an educational solution of an educaitonal problem, not a technology solution for an educational problem. #motheoconf2013 Tweeted 4 days ago
- Money can't put right what our sham education system has left out over the course of a learner's schooling ... #motheoconf2013 Tweeted 4 days ago
- He that does not know that he does not know, does not know that he does not know (Peter Mkhari) #motheoconf2013 Tweeted 4 days ago
A calender of all posts to date
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Thousands of people demonstrated in Spanish cities on Saturday pushing for a new law to end a wave of evictions of homeowners ruined by the economic crisis.
Several thousand marched yelling to the din of drums and horns in central Madrid, waving banners reading "Stop evictions" and yelling "We have no homes!"
Similar protests were called in Barcelona and 50 other Spanish cities, the latest of months of demonstrations driven by anger at Spain's recession and the conservative government, which is imposing austere economic reforms.
Campaigners passed a rare milestone on Tuesday when the Spanish parliament agreed to debate a popular bill of measures to protect poor homeowners, backed by a petition that received more than 1.4 million signatures.
The organisation that brought that petition, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), called Saturday's nationwide protests to pressure lawmakers to follow through and vote it into law quickly.
"I think it will pass, and it will not be thanks to the politicians but to pressure from citizens in the street," said one demonstrator in Madrid, Enrique Valdivieso, 27, holding up one end of a banner reading "Government resign".
PAH says hundreds of thousands of people have been evicted from their homes in the crisis brought on by the collapse of Spain's housing market in 2008.
The recession sparked by that collapse has driven the unemployment rate up to 26 percent, leaving many unable to pay mortgages on houses whose value has fallen.
The PAH's bill proposes to change the law to end evictions and to allow insolvent homeowners to write off their debts by surrendering their home.
Under the current law, a bank can pursue a mortgage holder to pay off the remaining balance of a loan if the value of the seized property isn't sufficient.
Outrage has been fanned by a string of suicides of people reportedly driven to despair by the prospect of eviction, including a retired couple in Mallorca on Tuesday.
"We will not stand by idle waiting for the initiative to come to parliament" to be debated, the PAH said in a statement.
"We call on all political parties to vote in favour of the initiative and proceed with it urgently," the PAH said. "If they do not, we will hold them responsible for the financial genocide we are suffering."
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Social Security: From Ponzi Scheme to Shell Game
A prejudiced primer on privatization.
Privatization enthusiasts sometimes admit to this as a transitional problem. But it is not a transitional problem. It is the entire problem. As Brookings economist Henry Aaron pointed out in the "Committee" discussion, if you could pour in enough money to pay for the "transition" to privatization, the system would no longer be out of balance. The problem, or crisis, would be solved. Privatization would not be needed.
You have to watch closely as the privatizers describe their schemes. They play a shell game: Take this part of the Social Security tax and convert it into a mandatory savings contribution; take today's benefit and divide it into two parts; give everybody this new account and that minimum guarantee; take this shell and put it there and bring that shell over here, and--hey presto! But no matter how you divvy it up, the same money can't be used twice. That is the problem with Social Security now, and it is the problem with privatization. All you've said when you endorse privatization is that if there were water, it should be used to make lemonade. Not obviously wrong, but not terribly helpful.
Privatization is a shell game in a second way. It is supposed to bring more money into the system because returns on private securities are generally higher than returns on government bonds. Even members of the recent commission who oppose full privatization supported investing part of Social Security's accumulated surplus in the private marketplace. But (as Stein pointed out in the "Committee"), every dollar Social Security invests privately, instead of lending to the Treasury (as happens now), is an extra dollar the government must borrow from private capital markets to finance the national debt. The net effect on national savings, and therefore on overall economic growth, is zilch. Every dollar more for Social Security is a dollar less for someone else.
If Social Security manages to achieve a higher return, by investing some or all of its assets privately, the rest of the economy will achieve a lower return, by having more of its assets in government bonds. In essence, the gain to Social Security will be like a tax on private investors--an odd thing for conservative think tanks to be so enthusiastic about. Also, the arrival of this huge pot of money looking for a home will depress returns in the private economy, while the need to attract an equally huge pot of money into the Treasury to replace the lost revenue will increase the returns on government bonds. Result? The diversion will be at least partly self-defeating.
The size and security of future retirement benefits ultimately depend on the country's general prosperity at that time in the future. Checks to be cashed in the year 2055 (whoops! there's a number) will be issued in 2055, whatever promises we make or don't make today. The most direct way for Social Security to affect future prosperity (as Aaron pointed out in the "Committee") is to increase national savings, of which the Social Security reserve is part, by trimming benefits and/or increasing revenues. Since we have to do that anyway--even as a prelude to privatization--why don't we do it first? Then we can argue about privatization at our leisure.
Michael Kinsley is a columnist for the Washington Post and the founding editor of Slate.
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Preserving the Past, Informing the Future
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Charles Ives, of the New Haven County Bar, died, December 31st, 1880, of paralysis of the brain, after an illness of only two days' duration. He went home from his office, as usual, towards the evening of December 29th, was taken sick that night, and early in the morning of the 31st was dead. Just prior to Christmas he had been engaged in the trial of causes, both to the jury and the court, and was in the midst of a full professional practice when he was so suddenly stricken down.
Mr. Ives was born September 18th, 1815. At the time of his death he had been practicing law uninterruptedly for over thirty-four years.
He represented the town of New Haven in the General Assembly of 1853, and the town of East Haven, where he resided since 1860, in the General Assemblies of 1865, 1867 and 1868. In 1867 he was chairman of the judiciary committee, and in 1868 was Speaker of the House. His long professional career was eminently successful, both to his own credit and gain, and to the benefit of his clients, whose interests he served with great zeal, tenacity and fidelity.
The physical infirmities of Mr. Ives - his bent figure - his face, refined and intellectual, yet indicating the ravages of physical suffering, courageously borne long years before - his slow and difficult walk, with the aid of the inseparable canes - all these are probably known to most lawyers throughout the state. They may not know, however, the fact that, until just after his majority, he was blessed with robust and vigorous health, and with a lithe, wiry, and perfect physical frame. A severe cold, followed by a sharp sickness, with poor and misdirected medical service, prematurely-developed the latent rheumatic tendencies of his system. Misfortunes seldom come singly. During his recovery, while riding out for the fresh air, the horse took fright, and he was thrown with great violence from the carriage and severely injured. This greatly aggravated the rheumatic trouble already rife in his system, and in consequence of it Mr. Ives was bed-ridden for nearly seven years. His chance of life was very small, and his friends often gave up all hopes of his recovery.
At length, however, a constitution, except for a rheumatic tendency, thoroughly sound, an indomitable will, a courage that never gave up, and a strong faith that he was to be and to do something worthy of note, raised him from his bed, and sent him again, though on crutches, into the world of active life. After a short period spent at Sharon Springs, White Sulphur Springs and other places, he gained sufficient strength to apply himself vigorously to work, and, for the remainder of his life, enjoyed as good health as, if not better than, most men of his age.
From boyhood to the time of his death Mr. Ives was led on by a laudable ambition to achieve something which would not soon be forgotten. He had, however, to rely entirely upon himself, for his widowed mother, so far from being able to help him, needed and received his assistance, during that part of his early life which preceded his long illness.
His first ambition, however, lay in the way of literary pursuits. For this reason, when a boy, he chose the trade of a printer, as giving him the means of a livelihood by work which, to some extent at least, he thought would assist him in the development of his literary tastes. Of course he availed himself of all the means of education, in the way of schools and debating clubs, within his reach, but of more consequence was his own zealous and vigorous study, without the aid of instructors. His long sickness did not deter him from his pursuit of literature. The rheumatic trouble did not affect the brain, and while confined to his bed he managed to prosecute his studies, and, among other things, to write various short poems, many of them of undoubted merit, which, in 1843, while still confined to his bed, he collected and published in a book entitled "Chips from the Workshop." The book had a considerable sale, and netted Mr. Ives a modest sum above the cost of publication.
Believing, however, that he was not always to be confined to his sickbed, the necessity of doing something which he could at once coin into money turned his attention, strange to say, to the law. He commenced his legal studies before he could leave his bed, and, as soon as he could, with the assistance of sympathetic and trusting friends, he entered the Yale law school, from which he graduated in 1846. In the same year he was admitted to the bar, and at once opened a law office in New Haven, where he continued to practice until his death.
His success was assured from the first, and he soon began to enjoy a comfortable income from his professional labors. As he has often told the writer, his original idea was not to apply himself entirely to the legal profession, but to acquire by it money enough to pay his debts and necessary expenses, and to devote the remainder of his time and energy to his cherished literary ambition.
In his case, however, it was inevitable that he could not serve both masters, and that, as years went by, all his strength was needed for his professional engagements, and the opportunity to gratify his literary ambition did not arise until just before his death.
The cases in which Mr. Ives was engaged in the Supreme Court, scattered through more than twenty-five volumes of the Connecticut Reports, and the public positions he held, have already made him known to the bar of the state as a man of professional ability, and but few words are needed on this point. It must go without question that no man in the legal profession can greatly succeed unless he greatly work, and Mr. Ives's success furnished no exception to this rule. It may be well, however, to notice briefly the special qualities of mind and character which largely contributed to his special success.
First should be mentioned his natural fitness for literary work. From the outset of his professional career Mr. Ives could always readily and aptly express his ideas, whether to his client at the office, or to the court or jury. Facility of expression, an easy command, of language, sometimes so difficult for others to attain, was with Mr. Ives his birthright.
In the next place he was thoroughly honest and candid in dealing with his clients. He never encouraged the litigious spirit. He was not always able to control or restrain it, but he always made a client feel that he was as truly working for him as if he had himself been the client.
Again, Mr. Ives was a very confident man in the advocacy of his opinions. He thoroughly believed his client to have the right of the cause and that the right would prevail. He could hardly argue any interlocutory motion without adverting to the merits of the case. No judge or jury was ever in doubt about the sincerity of his opinions.
He also possessed great versatility of mind. He was quick to see the answer to the arguments from the other side, quick to see the mental reservations of a reluctant witness, and to detect the inconsistencies of a swift witness. After the professional labors of the day he could readily apply his mind to other subjects, especially those of a literary character, which were his delight.
Mr. Ives was always very kind and generous to the junior members of the bar, especially to those who had been compelled to rely upon themselves for their education. No such young lawyer went to his office in vain. At the bar meeting, called to do honor to his memory, the most touching professional tribute there paid was the ready and hearty utterance, from many young lawyers, who had had occasion to appreciate his kindness, of their feeling of personal affection and gratitude.
While Mr. Ives remained in a full and laborious practice to the end, yet, in order to attain the rest required by advancing years, he spent a portion of the winters of 1879 and 1880 at Nassau, in the island of New Providence. He wrote a series of bright and sparkling letters concerning the place and its inhabitants, to a New Haven paper, and the favor with which they were received gave an additional impulse to his natural literary enthusiasm, and the result was a charmingly-written book entitled "Isles of Summer, or Nassau and the Bahamas," delayed in its issue, however, by various causes, until the day after his death.
Mr. Ives was married in 1851 to Catharine M. Osborne, of New Haven, who survives him. He left three children, two daughters, and a son, who bears his name, and is a promising young lawyer of the New Haven bar.
Mr. Ives led a consistent Christian life, and was from his early manhood and through life a communicant in the Congregational denomination.
One of the resolutions adopted by the bar in his memory is altogether too apt and fitting to be omitted from this notice:
"Resolved, That in the death of Charles Ives, Esq., the President of this Bar, the profession has to deplore the loss of one of its oldest and foremost members. A ready speaker, careful in the preparation of his cases, vigilant to protect the interests of his clients, always at his post and punctual to every engagement, his place is one which it will be difficult to fill, and his life furnishes a signal example to his younger brethren of what can be accomplished by earnest endeavor and faithful application to the duties of their calling."
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Advanced Measurement Laboratory Complex
To spy an individual molecule in a throng of millions, to seize it, and to manipulate it. ... To arrange atoms into an ordered nanotechnology landscape of precisely spaced steps and terraces. ... To determine the size of an electrical current by tabulating, one by one, the number of electrons flowing by. ... To gauge distances in increments tinier than the radius of an atom. ... To measure the strength of a chemical bond between an antibody and a virus particle.
These and other extreme capabilities are key to the nation’s high-technology future, the competitiveness of its industries, and the health and well-being of its citizens. They are essential for our nation to realize the societal benefits and seize the commercial promise of the nanotechnology discoveries now being made in laboratories around the world. And they are among the goals of more than 100 horizon-stretching research projects housed in the Advanced Measurement Laboratory (AML) Complex at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Completed in 2004, the AML Complex has few—if any—equals among the world’s research facilities. It offers an unprecedented combination of features designed to virtually eliminate environmental interferences that undermine research at the very tip of the leading edge of measurement science and technology.
Accomplishments at the AML Complex will translate into new high-accuracy measurement technologies, databases on the fundamental properties of “nano-structured” materials, and other essential supporting tools and capabilities. U.S. industry and its university and government partners require these infrastructural technologies if they are to succeed fully in scaling today’s feats of molecular science and engineering into nanotechnology products and processes for domestic and international markets.
Practical benefits will flow to diverse industries and areas of need—from environmental protection to homeland security to biotechnology.
Superlatively Stable Environment
Scientists and engineers working to push beyond the limits of today’s advanced technology crave stability. Even tiny variations in environmental conditions—a hundredth of a degree rise in temperature, vibrations from local traffic, a flutter in electrical current—can plunge the results of the most carefully designed experiment into ambiguity.
Consider the laser, one of the workhorse tools of modern research, used to analyze, print, scan, cool, heat, and more. Variations in temperature along the length of a laser beam distort the focus; vibrations misalign beam and molecular targets; and electromagnetic interference causes the wavelength to change, introducing errors that can dominate measurements and completely obscure the process being studied.
At the AML Complex, high levels of environmental control enable researchers to make the most of a growing assortment of powerful, but highly sensitive, instruments for exploring, innovating, and manufacturing.
Nearly eliminating external disturbances makes it easier to measure accurately—to know something for sure. It reduces uncertainties that obscure critical interactions occurring in exceedingly small spaces in the span of billionths or trillionths of a second.
The AML’s meticulously controlled environment permits researchers to focus directly on still-formidable challenges, such as teasing out cause and effect, definitively linking structure and function, or simultaneously achieving high levels of specificity, sensitivity, and spatial resolution in chemical analyses. Their results will provide clearer guidance on the road to nanotechnology commercialization and practical applications.
AML Complex Features
Consisting of five wings, including two that are entirely underground, the 49,843 square-meter (536,507 square-foot) AML Complex houses 338 reconfigurable laboratory modules, and over 5,600 square-meters (60,000 square-foot) of NanoFab laboratory space, including an 1,800 square-meter (8,000 square-foot) cleanroon, with 750 square meters (8,000 square-feet) at Class 100/ISO 5. While environmental-control requirements are tailored to categories of scientific need, no other facility of this size has so successfully achieved the combined features of strict temperature and humidity control, vibration isolation, air cleanliness, and quality of electric power.
The Ultimate in Control
The AML contains 48 laboratories to support research projects requiring the most exacting levels of temperature control. In 36 of these, the average room air temperature is controlled to ±0.1 degree Celsius; in another 12 to ±0.01 degree Celsius—a level of control never achieved in a project of this magnitude.
The AML’s high-accuracy, temperature-control laboratories are outfitted with arrays of high-precision thermistors and humidity sensors. Electronic devices that change resistance in response to changes in temperature, the thermistors serving the ±0.01 degree Celsius laboratories were individually calibrated by NIST researchers to ensure a tolerance of less than ±0.003 degree. This extreme accuracy is necessary for input into the precision direct-digital-control systems serving the AML laboratories, keeping them within the hundredth-of-a-degree margin.
To prevent jostling during the assembly of atomic structures and to shield ultrasensitive instruments from all but the slightest quiver, 27 specialized AML laboratories offer the ultimate in vibration isolation. These modules are located about 12 meters (40 feet) below ground level in structurally isolated building wings, a first line of defense against vibration. Instruments sit atop specially designed, heavy mass isolation slabs supported on pneumatic “air springs.” An isolated, raised floor system spans over the pit containing each isolation slab so that researchers can run their experiments without affecting the isolation systems.
Research: From Frontier to Factory Floor
The AML is designed to be the world’s best measurement laboratory. NIST and its partners will be able to produce the measurements and standards needed to move key 21st-century technologies from the research horizon on to the factory floor.
The AML’s Nanofabrication Facility, for example, will enable development, prototyping, and evaluation of dimensional references, specialized test structures, and nanotechnology tools and devices basic to efficient processing of real-world products containing essential nanotechnology components. To be operated as a user facility, it will provide NIST’s collaborators with access to expensive nanofabrication tools and specialized expertise in a shared-cost environment.
Freed from disruptive environmental influences, NIST scientists and engineers aim to develop tools and methods that will permit now extraordinary laboratory accomplishments to progress to the level of practical applications. For example, in ongoing and planned projects, researchers will:
Additional photographs and graphics are available at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/aml/aml_graphics_gallery.htm
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A startup business is a challenging undertaking.
At the SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubator, we offer our client entrepreneurs access to a unique facility, business resources, technology expertise as well as a range of highly qualified faculty, technology experts, business professionals and mentors.
Research shows businesses graduating from an incubator significantly increase their probability of long-term success. We provide our client entrepreneurs with the support, infrastructure, resources, guidance, and expertise necessary to successfully launch a new business. This site gives you an overview of these services and how you can get started growing your own business.
Get the Support you need to be Successful.
Business incubation is a business support process that accelerates the successful development of start-up and fledgling companies by providing entrepreneurs with an array of targeted resources and services. These services are usually developed or orchestrated by incubator management and offered both in the business incubator and through its network of contacts. A business incubator’s main goal is to produce successful firms that will leave the program financially viable and freestanding. These incubator graduates have the potential to create jobs, revitalize neighborhoods, commercialize new technologies, and strengthen local and national economies. SUNY Fredonia’s Technology Incubator leverages the strengths of New York’s State University system and the businesses and communities of Western New York to provide you with the support to launch and build your business.
The SUNY Fredonia Technology Incubation Program will help with flexible rental terms for office space, administrative support services, business center, and assistance in the form of coaching, counseling, mentoring and networking.
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Nefertiti hunts for flies inside her habitat on board the International Space Station. / NASA
Nefertiti, the space-traveling spider who seemed destined to spin out her retirement in an insect zoo, died over the weekend of natural causes, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History officials said on Monday.
"Neffi" was 10 months old at the time of her death. She left no survivors. Museum chief Kirk Johnson had just welcomed the jumping spider, who had recently returned from 100 days aboard the International Space Station, to the museum's O. Orkin Insect Zoo in a ceremony Thursday.
Jumping spiders normally live for about one year.
"The unexpected loss of this special animal who inspired so many imaginations will be felt throughout the Museum community," said spokeswoman Kelly Carnes in a statement. "The body of Nefertiti will be added to the Museum's collection of specimens where she will continue to contribute to our understanding of spiders."
Nefertiti was the first jumping spider to successfully return from space, where she had circled Earth about 1,580 times, and traveled approximately 41,580,000 miles, according to NASA.
The "Spidernaut" was part of a You Tube Space Lab experiment proposed by an 18-year-old student from Egypt, Amr Mohamed, who wanted to see if jumping spiders could adjust hunting techniques to the weightlessness of space. Nefertiti had indeed adjusted to microgravity and continued catching her prey, feats broadcast to students around the world.
Copyright 2013 USATODAY.com
Read the original story: 'Spidernaut' saga ends at Smithsonian
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GEORGETOWN, Texas -- Getting kids to eat their fruits and veggies can be a challenge, but one Central Texas school district is getting creative to make sure every student eats healthy.
There were some very interesting options Wednesday at the 10th Annual Food Serving and Taste Test for Georgetown ISD. The idea is to figure out which healthy foods the kids will actually eat so that it doesn't end up in the garbage.
The food at the taste test looked like typical cafeteria food. There was taco meat, macaroni and cheese, but little do the kids know, the food is actually made with vegetables.
"It has a little kick to it," one student remarked.
Sweet potato tater-tots, butternut squash macaroni and cheese, even the chocolate brownies are made with spinach.
"I mainly tasted the chocolate," said fourth grader London Van Raalte. "I would probably buy my lunch every day if that was in it."
"The kids are sometimes closed minded," explained parent Marilyn Simkin. "They get into a rut where they try the same thing every day, and it's good when they're willing to come here and try different foods."
"I don't really know what this is, but it's good," said fourth grader Greyson Doyle as he took a bite of taco meat.
"You can have nutritious food, and if the students don't eat it, it's not going to go in their bodies and help them," said Georgetown ISD Director of Child Nutrition Services Karen Kovach. "We need to make sure we're providing the most nutritious food that students will eat."
Under the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act, all schools are required to provide at least a half a cup of vegetables and fruit in each student's lunch.
"So with this food show we've got some very creative ideas on getting that half cup of fruit and vegetables in our meals," Kovach said.
Vegetable and fruit puree is one way to sneak in extra ingredients, and the kids don't seem to mind.
"So good!" exclaimed student Anissa Hilaire. "I just wanna get like five more of them!"
"I thought it was great," said Emma Simkin. "I loved every single bit of it."
Even the parents are on board.
"Try and stick some healthier stuff into the regular diet. It's a good thing," said Simkin.
"We want to give them something they're going to eat and that they're going to like," said Kovach.
So despite what you might remember from your school cafeteria experience, the students and parents KVUE spoke to say the school lunch menu's not so bad.
All of the students and parents at the taste test took a survey after each food station. The district will take a look at the results and decide what they want to add into next year's menu.
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The Why Here/Why Now Project has an opportunity to take the idea of sense of place and community documentation into the schools, working with Mills Lawn Elementary students in the After School Enrichment Program.
The class will run for 7 weeks in the Spring session, with an introductory open-house taking place on April 14th. More information will be available from MLS with the full schedule of Spring offerings.
From Where I Stand
A Sense of Place Photography Project
This after school arts program is a fun introduction to sense of place photography for kids. Proving that it is actually more fun to create media than it is to passively consume it, this class will give kids a chance to document the Mills Lawn School grounds from their own point of view. Camera and audio-recorder in hand, kids will work with Brooke Bryan, a new media folklorist and journalist, to locate what is unique and special about the place they call “school.”
And it doesn’t stop with the collection. Students will post a brief bio and their favorite photograph, with a recorded explanation, on the website of the Why Here/Why Now Project (www.whyherewhynow.org), an ongoing digital time capsule featuring the place and people of Yellow Springs. This valuable experience will leave kids empowered and inspired about the place they live, with a heightened sense of ownership and responsibility to their community.
*Model & Photography Release required
We will start with talking about the idea of place, or why thinking of a street lined with palm trees feels differently than a snowcapped mountaintop ridge or a field of wheat surrounded by grey skies. We will view pictures from different geographical regions, and talk about how photography of place can evoke feelings within us.
Next, we’ll take stock of our place in southwestern Ohio. What kind of landscapes (both natural and built) make the backdrop for our daily life? How do we feel about these things? We will look at trees, plants, local architecture, the playground structures, and the sky.
Once we have located what it is that makes our place unique from other landscapes, we will shoot pictures together as a group, finding interesting angles that explore the vantage point of the person who holds the camera. The pictures will tell the rest of us what this place looks like from where kids stand.
And if that wasn’t enough fun, we’ll spend the rainy days getting a snapshot of each student and writing a brief bio, because each student will choose their favorite picture for posting here, on the Why Here/Why Now Project site as a special contribution in the din of voices on what this town is and ought to be.
Should be fun!
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Children's Teeth: The Importance and the Precautions
Our teeth are one of the most important parts in our face. After all, they define our smile! But thats not all. Apart from adding the zing to your smile, your teeth and jaws also define your entire facial structure.
Taking care of teeth is not so difficult - it only requires brushing atleast once a day (after dinner) and simple measures, such as not taking sweets at the end of a meal, or in between meals. Unfortunately, out of lack of knowledge, or sheer laziness, we ignore to follow these guidelines.
The result is a decayed tooth. While we may still be a little cautious about our own teeth, we tend to be careless about our children's teeth, as long as they are 'just' milk teeth. This is where we go terribly wrong.
Why bother about milk teeth, we wonder. After all, no matter how bad it gets, it'll always be replaced with permanent teeth. Let our babies enjoy with all the sweets they want, right? WRONG.
Latest research has been increasingly proving this line of thought not only wrong, but also more and more dangerous for your child.
|Decayed Milk Teeth of a |
5 year old child
Here is why you should care for the milk teeth of your child:
To protect your child's face: Once the teeth are affected, it reduces the chewing capacity of the child. This seriously affects the development of the facial muscles of your child, and his/ her face shall remain underdeveloped and smaller than normal, for the rest of his/ her life.
To protect permanent teeth: This is uncommon knowledge, but affected milk teeth can infect the permanent teeth developing under them. Also, it is very painful to chew one's food without healthly teeth, and eating becomes a dreaded chore.
To protect your child's health: The lack of ability to chew properly affects digestion and subsequently leads to malnutrition in the child due to improper absorbption of nutrition by the body.
Infected teeth pump pus into the blood circulation system when he chews or swallows. The constant flow of pus into the blood has been proven to cause major problems like heart diseases, diabetes, arthritis, etc.
What Can We Do?
Some more useful info about your kids teething problems:
A baby's first set of teeth usually
starts to emerge at about 6 months of age. While discomfort and
irritability are common in teething babies, other symptoms may be
warning signs of another problem.
Brush After Dinner: Use a toothpaste with flouride (which means no gels - they usually do not contain flouride) - this helps strengthen teeth. Brush about 10 min after dinner, and on an average, you must brush for about 2 minutes. Do not eat anything after brushing.
Rinse your Mouth: After every meal, rinse your mouth thoroughly. This removes a major of the particles sticking to your teeth. If possible, it is recommended that you brush after breakfast too.
Don't eat sweets last: Eating sweets at the end of a meal is a damaging habit. It tends to make your saliva acidic, thereby increasing your risk to cavities. Always eat something salty after sweets, and then rinse your mouth properly.
Avoid Eating Between Meals: This habit will stand you in good stead for not only teeth, but for general health as well. Avoiding eating between meals helps the digestion process to be more effective, apart from regulating your weight. In case you do happen to eat in between, remember to rinse your mouth.
Home remedies: Drinking lots of milk will strengthen your teeth and bones. Onions when eaten raw, provide temporary protection against decay.
Here are some basics that parents should know about teething,
courtesy of the American Dental Association:
- Irritability, fussiness, drooling, and loss of appetite are
common symptoms of teething.
- Diarrhea, rash, and fever are not caused by teething, and
should be evaluated by a doctor.
- Small cysts near erupting teeth are common and harmless.
- Tender gums may be soothed with a teething ring, pacifier, or a
cream that helps numb the gums.
- Gums can also be massaged with a clean finger or damp piece of
Ignoring your kid's mouth is an easy way to Destroy him slowly, watch this video
Video presentation of your kids Oral/Dental Care
For more information about dental problems click on LINKS below
What to do when a Cavity starts to Hurt
Bad Breath- What you should know
Know Your Teeth
How to Brush & Maintain your teeth
Endodovgan.Com's Guide to Tooth Ache
©2008-2013, Healthmantra.com. All Rights Reserved.
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The General Assembly of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, ICOMOS, meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at its tenth session from July 30 to August 7, 1993;
Considering the breadth of the heritage encompassed within the concept of monuments, ensembles and sites;
Considering the great variety of actions and treatments required for the conservation of these heritage resources, and the necessity of a common discipline for their guidance;
Recognizing that many different professions need to collaborate within the common discipline of conservation in the process and require proper education and training in order to guarantee good communication and coordinated action in conservation;
Noting the Venice Charter and related ICOMOS doctrine, and the need to provide a reference for the institutions and bodies involved in developing training programmes, and to assist in defining and building up appropriate standards and criteria suitable to meet the specific cultural and technical requirements in each community or region;
Adopts the following guidelines, and Recommends that they be diffused for the information of appropriate institutions, organizations and authorities.
1. The aim of this document is to promote the establishment of standards and guidelines for education and training in the conservation of monuments, groups of buildings ("ensembles") and sites defined as cultural heritage by the World Heritage Convention of 1972. They include historic buildings, historic areas and towns, archaeological sites, and the contents therein, as well as historic and cultural landscapes. Their conservation is now, and will continue to be a matter of urgency.
2. Conservation of cultural heritage is now recognized as resting within the general field of environmental and cultural development. Sustainable management strategies for change which respect cultural heritage require the integration of conservation attitudes with contemporary economic and social goals including tourism.
3. The object of conservation is to prolong the life of cultural heritage and, if possible, to clarify the artistic and historical messages therein without the loss of authenticity and meaning. Conservation is a cultural, artistic, technical and craft activity based on humanistic and scientific studies and systematic research. Conservation must respect the cultural context.
4. There is a need to develop a holistic approach to our heritage on the basis of cultural pluralism and diversity, respected by professionals, craftspersons and administrators. Conservation requires the ability to observe, analyze and synthesize. The conservationist should have a flexible yet pragmatic approach based on cultural consciousness which should penetrate all practical work, proper education and training, sound judgement and a sense of proportion with an understanding of the community's needs. Many professional and craft skills are involved in this interdisciplinary activity.
5. Conservation works should only be entrusted to persons competent in these specialist activities. Education and training for conservation should produce from a range of professionals, conservationists who are able to:
- read a monument, ensemble or site and identify its emotional, cultural and use significance;
- understand the history and technology of monuments, ensembles or sites in order to define their identity, plan for their conservation, and interpret the results of this research;
- understand the setting of a monument, ensemble or site, their contents and surroundings, in relation to other buildings, gardens or landscapes;
- find and absorb all available sources of information relevant to the monument, ensemble or site being studied;
- understand and analyze the behaviour of monuments, ensembles and sites as complex systems;
- diagnose intrinsic and extrinsic causes of decay as a basis for appropriate action;
- inspect and make reports intelligible to non-specialist readers of monuments, ensembles or sites, illustrated by graphic means such as sketches and photographs;
- know, understand and apply Unesco conventions and recommendations, and ICOMOS and other recognized Charters, regulations and guidelines;
- make balanced judgements based on shared ethical principles, and accept responsibility for the long-term welfare of cultural heritage;
- recognize when advice must be sought and define the areas of need of study by different specialists, e.g. wall paintings, sculpture and objects of artistic and historical value, and/or studies of materials and systems;
- give expert advice on maintenance strategies, management policies and the policy framework for environmental protection and preservation of monuments and their contents, and sites;
- document works executed and make same accessible;
- work in multi-disciplinary groups using sound methods;
- be able to work with inhabitants, administrators and planners to resolve conflicts and to develop conservation strategies appropriate to local needs, abilities and resources;
6. There is a need to impart knowledge of conservation attitudes and approaches to all those who may have a direct or indirect impact on cultural property.
7. The practice of conservation is interdisciplinary; it therefore follows that courses should also be multidisciplinary. Professionals, including academics and specialized craftspersons, who have already received their normal qualification will need further training in order to become conservationists; equally those who seek to act competently in historic environment.
8. Conservationists should ensure that all artisans and staff working on a monument, ensemble or site respect its significance.
9. Training in disaster preparedness and in methods of mitigating damage to cultural property, by strengthening and improving fire prevention and other security measures, should be included in courses.
10. Traditional crafts are a valuable cultural resource. Craftspersons, already with high level manual skills, should be further trained for conservation work with instruction in the history of their craft, historic details and practices, and the theory of conservation with the need for documentation. Many historic skills will have to be recorded and revived.
11. Many satisfactory methods of achieving the required education and training are possible. Variations will depend on traditions and legislation, as well as on administrative and economic context of each cultural region. The active exchange of ideas and opinions on new approaches to education and training between national institutes and at international levels should be encouraged. Collaborative network of individuals and institutions is essential to the success of this exchange.
12. Education and sensitization for conservation should begin in schools and continue in universities and beyond. These institutions have an important role in raising visual and cultural awareness - improving ability to read and understand the elements of our cultural heritage - and giving the cultural preparation needed by candidates for specialist education and training. Practical hands-on training in craft work should be encouraged.
13. Courses for continuing professional development can enlarge on the initial education and training of professionals. Long-term, part-time courses are a valuable method for advanced teaching, and useful in major population centres. Short courses can enlarge attitudes, but cannot teach skills or impart profound understanding of conservation. They can help introduce concepts and techniques of conservation in the management of the built and natural environment and the objects within it.
14. Participants in specialist courses should be of a high calibre normally having had appropriate education and training and practical working experience. Specialist courses should be multidisciplinary with core subjects for all participants, and optional subjects to extend capacities and/or to fill the gaps in previous education and training. To complete the education and training of a conservationist an internship is recommended to give practical experience.
15. Every country or regional group should be encouraged to develop at least one comprehensively organized institute giving education and training and specialist courses. It may take decades to establish a fully competent conservation service. Special short-term measures may therefore be required, including the grafting of new initiatives onto existing programmes in order to lead to fully developed new programmes. National, regional and international exchange of teachers, experts and students should be encouraged. Regular evaluation of conservation training programmes by peers is a necessity.
16. Resources needed for specialist courses may include e.g.:
- an adequate number of participants of required level ideally in the range of 15 to 25;
- a full-time co-ordinator with sufficient administrative support;
- instructors with sound theoretical knowledge and practical experience in conservation and teaching ability;
- fully equipped facilities including lecture space with audio-visual equipment, video, etc. studios, laboratories, workshops, seminar rooms, and staff offices;
- library and documentation centre providing reference collections, facilities for coordinating research, and access to computerized information networks;
- a range of monuments, ensembles and sites within a reasonable radius.
17. Conservation depends upon documentation adequate for understanding of monuments, ensembles or sites and their respective settings. Each country should have an institute for research and archive for recording its cultural heritage and all conservation works related thereto. The course should work within the archive responsibilities identified at the national level.
18. Funding for teaching fees and subsistence may need special arrangements for mid-career participants as they may already have personal responsibilities.
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Discovered earlier this week, the newly discovered Flame malware virus was dubbed to be the most lethal cyberweapon to date and may have been running unnoticed for over 5 years.
The Flame virus (alternatively known as Flamer or sKyWIper) was found to have infected well over 5000 computer across seven Middle Eastern countries. It appears that the virus was specifically targeted and compromised computers in Iran, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. This newly found virus is estimated to be at least 20 times more powerful than the Stuxnet worm that was responsible for disabling Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010.
The virus was discovered by the Moscow based anti-virus company, Kaspersky Lab. Kaspersky states that the Flame virus has the ability to collect private data, take screen shots, copy instant messaging conversations, initiate Bluetooth connections, activate computer microphones for the purposes of recording conversations.
Experts state that the Flame went undetected for so long as it only infected a limited number of computers over a long period of time; which is indicative of a long-term surveillance scheme.
Popular anti-virus programs were unable to detect the virus as they rely on existing instances of a known virus in order to create a detection program that is based upon signatures developed by analyzing the behavioral patterns of the existing bad code.
The fact that the threat went for so long undetected, speaks of the existing state of virus detection and of the inherent flaws in cyber security and anti-virus software.
SEO news blog post by guestpost @ 11:40 am
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Shelly the Shell at the Seashore
Beginning Literacy Design
By: Hannah Dupre
Children's understanding of phonemes is vital to their survival as readers. Because of this necessity, we must teach children how to be phonemically aware. The problem is that children sometimes struggle to understand even the most basic phoneme concepts. One of the difficult concepts in phonemic awareness is the ability to understand digraphs. This lesson will specifically focus on the digraph sh=/sh/. It is important that students are able to recognize these two letters together and the sound that they make. In this lesson they will learn how to recognize sh=/sh/ by spelling and reading words with this correspondence.
1.Primary paper (1 per student)
2.Pencils (1 per student)
3.Chart with "She sells seashells by the seashore"
4.Class set of Elkonin boxes, one big set of Elkonin boxes and letters
5.Baggies with letters: sh, e, a, o, u, r, s, p, t
6.Chalk and chalkboard
7.Sheep on a Ship by Nancy E. Shaw
1.To begin the lesson I will talk about how we have already started learning about how one letter makes a certain sound, but now we are going to look at two specific letters that make a certain sound. I will tell them that when you put the s and h together, they will make the /sh/ sounds like in "shell." I will explain that we are going to become experts at spelling and reading the /sh/ sound in words.
2.Can anyone tell me what sound your mom or dad makes when they want you to quiet down? Your right! It is shh. Can we all practice saying shhh. Did you notice how your mouth moved to make that sound. Watch as I say shh again. You have probably also noticed that when someone says shh they usually put their index finger to their mouth. We are going to use this motion when we hear the /sh/ sound today.
3.Today we are going to try a tongue twister. There will be words in the tongue twister that make the sound /sh/, when you hear the sound I want you to put your index finger to your mouth like you would when you say shhh. Now I am going to read the tongue twister very slowly, "She sells seashells by the seashore." Good job! Will you say the tongue twister with me now?
4.Now, we are going to search to find the /sh/ in spoken words. I want you to tell me when you hear the sound. Do you hear it in shop or sip? Grape or shape? Push or pull? Shirts or pants? Shells or sand?
5.(Letterbox Lesson) Can everyone get their letterboxes out? I want you to fold them so that only three boxes are showing. I will pass out the baggies with only the letters they will need for the lesson. Next, I tell the students that I am going to say a few words and I want them to separate the words into the different sounds the makeup that word. First I will model by saying the word ship, then separating the words /sh/ /i/ /p/, and finally place the correct letters in the correct boxes. Did you notice how I had my s and h together in the same box? This is because they are one sound, which means they go together in one box. Now let's all try it! When I saw a word, I want you to put your letters in the right boxes according to the sounds in the word. I will say the words out loud to the children. The 3 phoneme words are shop, cash, dish and the 4 phoneme words are flesh. Now, since you all did such a wonderful job of spelling the words I want you to try to read the words. I will write the word on the board and I want you to read it aloud to me. I will model by writing the word shut on the board and then read it out loud. I will make sure all of the students wait a few seconds before blurting out the word so that everyone can have a chance to figure out the word.
6.Next, we are going to partner read Sheep on a Ship. I will introduce the book with a book talk. The book talk will be able the misadventures of a group of sheep that are stuck on a pirate ship. In order to find out if these sheep get away you will have to read the rest of the book. Once they are introduced to the book I will explain that they will take turns reading the book and when they come to a word with /sh/ in it I want them to write down the word. Once they have found all of the words in the book and both of them have read the book we will make a poster of all the words.
7.Finally, I will assess the students when they read new real words. The 3
phoneme words are ship, fish, sheep, shook, and shag. The 4 phoneme words are
brush and flush.
7.Finally, I will assess the students when they read new real words. The 3 phoneme words are ship, fish, sheep, shook, and shag. The 4 phoneme words are brush and flush.
Shaw, Nancy E. Sheep on a ship. Houghton Mifflin; Reprint edition 1992.
Edema, Katie. Ssshhelly the Ssshhark goes Sssshhopping. http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/constr/edemabr.html
Dekle, Natalie. Shhhiny Shhoes! http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/constr/deklebr.html
Cox, Allison. Shhhh!!!! http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/constr/coxbr.html
Return to the Caravans index.
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UNISON warns of 'a cold Christmas for millions'
(15/11/12) UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis has warned that rising energy and fuel bills, allied to rising inflation, will spell "a cold Christmas for millions".
As winter approaches, UNISON members are "dreading the pressure" of paying their gas and electricity bills, as prices go up and their wages stay the same.
And they're not alone. Fuel poverty in the UK is increasing. Today one in four households are in fuel poverty. UNISON can help. We've set up an energy switching scheme - a new way to save on gas and electricity bills. It works by getting as many UNISON members as possible to register their interest in taking part so that we can go to the energy companies and negotiate a competitive energy deal.
The more members that register, the better the offer we can get and the more money you can save, it's as simple as that.
There is no obligation when you register to sign up to the new offer, so please register your details so we can send you more information. You can find out more and register at unison-switch.co.uk. Registration closes on 25 November so please register now.
As a UNISON member you could also save up to £175 a year on your energy bills with free loft insulation, and up to £135 with free cavity wall insulation from British Gas. Call 0800 107 2547 quoting IUM001 or visit britishgas.co.uk/insulation for more information. You need to apply by 30 November. In addition, UNISON's charity There for You can help. There for You will be offering a winter fuel grants programme - members who are on a net household income of less than £18,000 can apply for help with their fuel payments. The application form will be available on our website at unison.org.uk in December.
UNISON's concern for its members has been underlined by the recent allegations of price-fixing in the wholesale gas market.
The Financial Services Authority and Ofgem are looking into the claims, which were made by a whistle-blower who was active in the market.
UNISON national officer Matthew Lay commented: "The energy price-fixing scandal demonstrates yet again that the market is not working and that its failings are being paid for by hard-working UNISON members up and down the UK.
"It is about time we had a thorough review of the energy prices being charged, with radical changes to ensure that we can keep the lights on and homes warm in the future, without being forced into poverty." In order to tackle the issue of high fuel costs head on, UNISON has joined forces with the Energy Bill Revolution alliance, to campaign to end fuel poverty. The campaign aims to use the billions of pounds raised by the government's carbon emissions tax to end fuel poverty, create jobs and help the economy to grow. Please take two minutes to sign our petition at energybillrevolution.org and ask all your friends and networks to do the same. This will help put real pressure on the government to sort out fuel poverty - and not a moment too soon.
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The Nu/Salween River is one of the region’s last largely free-flowing rivers and is shared by China, Thailand, and Burma. The river originates on the Tibetan Plateau and flows through China’s Three Parallel Rivers World Heritage Site, before becoming the Salween in Burma and Thailand and emptying into the Andaman Sea.
Dam Plans Revived in China
The World Heritage Site in China is known as the epicenter of Chinese biodiversity and contains over 6,000 plant species and is believed to support over 25% of the world’s and 50% of China’s animal species. This unique ecosystem and the communities that depend on it for their survival are threatened by plans to construct a 5-dam cascade on China’s portion of the river. The projects would displace 60,000 largely ethnic minority people. One village has already been relocated. News of the dams triggered UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to issue a warning to the Chinese government in 2005 that any dam construction within the World Heritage property "would provide a case for inclusion of the property in the List of World Heritage in Danger."
In an incredible victory for the burgeoning Chinese environmental movement, in 2004 Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced the suspension of all projects on the Nu River pending further scientific study. However, in February 2011, Chinese officials revealed plans to resume the Nu River dams as part of China's 12th Five-Year Plan, which aims to add up to 140 GW of new hydropower capacity to meet its renewable energy targets.
Groups Call for Halt to Burmese Dams
Communities living downstream in Burma and Thailand have voiced strong opposition to dam construction on the river both within China and on the lower stretch of the Nu/Salween in Burma. Seven large dams and a water diversion project are currently being pushed by the governments of Burma and Thailand for the lower Nu/Salween in Burma, despite recent conflicts near the dam sites. Thousands depend on the Nu/Salween for their livelihoods. Fisheries are a major source of dietary protein for communities, and the river’s nutrient-rich waters sustain vegetable gardens and farmlands. Six of these projects, including one on a major tributary, were approved in February 2013 according to Burma's Deputy Minister of Electric Power.
International Rivers is working with a coalition of NGOs to stop the dams in China and Burma, protect this precious resource, and find real solutions to climate change that don't sacrifice rivers and livelihoods.
Watch Double Threat on the Nu, our slideshow about the current threats to the Nu/Salween River:
- Learn more about the Nu/Salween dams in our fact sheet
- View our Flickr set on the Nu/Salween River
- Read about International Rivers' latest field visit
- "China's big hydro wins permission for 21.3GW dam in world heritage site," The Guardian, February 1, 2011
- Watch our latest 3 minute video about hydropower on the Nu River.
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Tea dying is a natural dying process that leaves a beautifully subtle color wash onto fabric. Dip dying is becoming a popular trend with soft furnishings. It not only provides a natural, handmade look; it is actually very simple to do yourself. I have made a set of three towels in two shades of tea. Black and raspberry transform natural, unbleached tea towels into soft, warm, and functional accents.
What You Need
- Unbleached Flour Sack Tea Towels: Easily found online in a variety of sizes. Prices range from $12.00 to $30.00 depending on size and count.
- 8 to 10 tea bags: I used black tea for a brown shade and raspberry tea for soft pink.
- Cooking pot: To boil your tea.
- Rubber Gloves
- Glass baking dish: Glass is preferred so that you can keep an eye on the dying process.
1. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil.
2. Turn off heat and immerse tea bags for 8 to 10 minutes until you have a solid color tea.
3. Remove tea bags and gently pour tea into your glass baking dish.
4. Prep your tea towels by rinsing them with water. If you are working with large tea towels you will need to vertically fold them so that they will fit nicely in the dish.
5. Wearing rubber gloves, dip half of the tea towel into the tea. Lay the other half over the side of the dish and let sit until your desired shade is achieved. While the towel is soaking, you can press it down into the tea from time to time just to make sure the half is fully submersed.
6. When your towel has reached the shade that you want, gently lift the tea towel out of the dye and wring excess tea over the dish.
*I soaked my towels for 15 minutes, then rinsed. I decided that I wanted to go darker and submersed them again for another 15 minutes. Due to the unbleached towels being a natural shade, you will want to let them soak longer than your common bleached white towel. It's all up to you. You can soak them as long as you want to reach the desired color.
7. Rinse your towel in cold water until water runs clear.
8. Line dry the tea towel.
Additional Note: Naturally dyed tea towels will have a longer life when hand washed. Commercial detergents can be too harsh for the soft color wash.
(Images: Rikkianne Van Kirk)
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|by Patrick J. McAlister '10 • March 28, 2008|
One of the most rewarding ways of understanding historical events is to quietly listen to those who experienced them firsthand. As time continually marches on and events remain stationary, experiencing firsthand accounts becomes more and more difficult.
In August 1945, 317 USS Indianapolis crew members of were alive with the ability to tell their incredible tale. In March 2008 there are 76. See photo album from the March 27 event.
Fortunately for those who came to the Chapel on Thursday evening, some of those affected by the loss of the USS Indianapolis were at Wabash to tell their individual and sometimes harrowing tale. The event, sponsored by the Experience Indiana program brought to Wabash a panel of four individuals with different connections with that historic ship. Each member of the panel made some remarks about their connections to a packed audience in the Chapel and allowed for question time at the end of the evening.
Mike Kruyla, Jimmy O’Donnell, two survivors of the Indianapolis, described to the audience in great detail their account of events on the aforementioned ship and how they ended up surviving to tell their tale.
O’Donnell, who was from Indianapolis, IN, was drafted into the Navy at the age of 23 in 1944. He had been working for Allison, a firm that manufactured engines for vehicles and aircraft. As this was an essential service for the military, O’Donnell had been deferred a couple of times before.
"Finally they ran out of deferments," O’Donnell said, "and low and behold I joined February 13, which was a Friday. They asked me where I wanted to go into and I said the Navy which was probably a big mistake I guess."
Kruyla, who was from Chicago, IL, was 17 when he quit school to join the Navy. In order to allow him to enlist, his father had to sign a release.
While each man took different paths to service, their recollections of the events involving the Indianapolis provided the audience with insight into some of the most important events during World War II. Each man remembered vividly the interesting crate that was loaded onto the ship while it was docked for repairs in San Francisco Bay.
"Come Sunday morning," O’Donnell said, "a truck backed up to the dock with Marine armed guards all around it. We looked over and they put these two crates on the hanger deck."
"We took off out of the gate a little fast," he continued, ‘it was a little unusual. We stopped in Hawaii, but that was the only time we stopped. I think we made a record run over there – 29 knots, about 35 MPH. You could see the ship vibrating."
The anonymous crate loaded on that Sunday in San Francisco was ‘Little Boy’, the Atomic Bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima.
Kruyla noted that an officer wanted some of the crew to understand at base what they had just delivered.
"‘I just want to let you know what’s going on,’" Kruyla told the audience the officer’s words. "‘You’re probably all wondering what all this activity with these crates coming aboard the ship. What we have aboard the ship is something that will help shorten the war.’ Well, all the sailors wondered, what the heck could that be in that crate? One guy said ‘I know what’s in that crate – its toilet paper for General MacArthur.’"
After delivering their cargo the Indianapolis steamed towards Guam. On July 30, a Japanese sub hit the Indianapolis in the side with two torpedoes sinking it to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench.
"I woke up and looked forward and all I could see is a big ball of fire," O’Donnell said. "I put a life jacket on, slipped into the water, swam a little ways, looked back and all you could see was the back end of the ship sinking. You got fuel all in your eyes and you threw up. Round your nose you couldn’t hardly breathe."
"I got in a group (of survivors) stayed there five days," he continued, "You’d see planes fly over you all the time but they couldn’t see you. Finally a plane was on submarine patrol and was flying low and saw a bunch of guys in the water."
Kruyla was on the deck at the time of the attack. After helping others get life preservers and rafts free, he found himself underneath the capsized ship with the deck of the ship in front of him and the bottomless ocean below. He attempted to swim down and to the left to get free of the part of the ship coming down on him.
"I kicked down and swam and she sucked me back," he said. "I kicked down and swam again and she sucked me back again. I was up against the deck. I figured, this is my end – I didn’t think I was going to make it.
"You know," he continued, "they say your life goes before you…I see my mother, my father, my six sisters and my kid brother go right past me. I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. I talked to God, I asked him for forgiveness and I blacked out. The next thing I know I’m up to the surface – I don’t know how I got up there."
Krulya and O’Donnell were two of the lucky ones who survived. They fought off thirst, hunger and sharks for four days and five nights and were rescued on August 8th.
Along with Krulya and O’Donnell’s stories, the Wabash community listened to the story of a son who never knew his father. Lt. Commander Early Henry Sr., father of Earl Henry Jr. died on the Indianapolis. Even though Henry Jr. never knew his father in person, the fantastic paintings, taxidermy, letters and sounds of his father communicated not only the father’s passion for ornithology but the son’s ability to connect with the father he never knew.
Henry showed a picture of his parents dining out in Memphis, TN few days before his father had to return to duty.
"They had dinner at the Peabody Hotel," he said, "and this is their last picture together. I think this picture is a thrill because my mother was carrying me. You can’t see me, but I was there.
"I was born six weeks premature," he added, "He left about two days after this picture was taken and I was born about two days after that. I do know my father better than many people do and I’m blessed for that."
Jeffrey Nance, executive vice president of the USS Indianapolis Museum, provided the audience with a brief understanding of the history surrounding the naval vessel and the mission of the institution dedicated to its study.
"We want to educate the younger generation about the history of this ship and we attempt to do that by collecting artifacts from anyone who was on that ship during its 14 year history," Nance said. "We hope to create a special place to locate all of the history about the USS Indianapolis."
The audience in the packed Chapel seemed to elicit great value from the stories..
"I think that it gives us a human context of the history that we may not even understand now," President Patrick White said. "It’s also a context for us of the human connection after all these years – a great liberal arts value to remember.
"To hear a man like Earl Henry talk about his father and the other men talk about their brotherhood and connection and the men they loss it extends their life through time. I think it is one of the things that is central to the liberal arts - that we won’t be caught up in the contemporary – just in our time, just in our moment."
"I thought it was really fantastic," said Kyle Cassidy ’08. "I think one of the best ways to understand and gain an appreciation for our shared history is to hear it from the people who lived through it.
"It's also especially important in cases like these where the storytellers are also war heroes, because I think the people tend to get a little hagiographical when they think of people like that."
In photos: Upper right, Krulya talks of his escape. Center, there was lots of memorabilia on displau. Lower right, O'Donnell shares his memories.
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By Rachael Rettner
Here's a reason to get your flu shot that you probably haven't considered: infection with swine flu may trigger baldness.
A new report from Japan suggests a link between alopecia areata, a condition in which patches of hair fall out, and swine flu. The researchers report that seven patients experienced hair loss one to four months after developing the illness.
The exact cause of alopecia areata is unknown, but it is thought to occur when the immune system attacks a person's hair follicles, causing the hair on their head to fall out. Rarely, patients may lose all the hair on their head, or on other parts of their body. While the condition may have a hereditary component, a "trigger" from the environment, such as a traumatic event or illness, may also be needed to set off the disease.
Previous studies have linked viral illnesses, including infections with the Epstein-Barr virus, and onset of alopecia areata. The new findings suggest flu infection may be another trigger of this form of baldness, said study researcher Dr. Taisuke Ito, an assistant professor of dermatology at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan.
Between 2009 and 2010, the researchers examined seven patients with hair loss following swine flu infection s that caused high fever. Four of the cases were recurrences of the condition, and three were first-time occurrences. On average, hair loss occurred 1.5 months after swine flu infection in those who experienced recurrences, and 2.7 months after swine flu infection in those who experienced first-time hair loss.
All of the patients were under 30 years old, and four were under 10. Three of the cases involved females.
In one case, a 4-year-old girl first experienced alopecia areata in 2006, but recovered completely. Then in 2010, she contracted swine flu and had hair loss two months later.
"I consider it very plausible," that a flu infection could trigger hair loss, said Nanette Silverberg, director of pediatric and adolescent dermatology at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City, who was not involved in the study. "I definitely have seen individuals develop autoimmune conditions," after infection with common viruses, Silverberg said. (An autoimmune condition is one in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues, rather than foreign germs.)
The fact that more than half of the cases were recurrences of alopecia areata further suggests that certain people are genetically predisposed to develop the condition, Ito said.
Individuals who have had alopecia areata in the past should consider getting their flu vaccination, Silverberg said.
The study was published online Dec. 5 in the Journal of Dermatology.
More from MyHealthNewsDaily
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A new survey from GfK MRI reports that four percent of adults have read a newspaper on a mobile app within the past 30 days. That compares with 3.7 percent who read a mobile magazine app. According to GfK, those percentages translate to less than 10 million adult app readers.
In line with another survey, released Thursday from the Reynolds Journalism Institute, GfK reports newspaper and magazine app users skew male and wealthy, with 69 percent of respondents likely to have household incomes greater than $100,000.
GfK also reports that Millennials, those currently 16 to 33 years old, are a potential bright spot for media companies. Those young adults are 73 percent more likely to have read a newspaper app in the last month.
Smart phone, tablet and mobile app usage is still too new, and confined to a largely affluent audience, to be necessarily predictive of future mobile consumer patterns.
However, it continues to be of interest that the mobile platforms may be developing to serve two distinct news audiences: affluent consumers, who are perhaps already traditional print readers; and young adults who may have never read a newspaper in print, but are comfortable doing so on a mobile app.
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Heat Wave to hit Thompson - Stay Cool
A heat wave is here -- and here to stay, until Sunday at least.
With the humidex expected to hit as high as 40 at points this week through to Sunday the Northern Regional Health Authority wants you to stay cool with the following tips.
- Stay hydrated, drink plenty of water before you get thirsty
- Stay inside in a cool place during the warmest part of the day 11AM - 3PM
- Take a cool bath or shower or swim to cool off
- Avoid using your oven or other appliances that will heat your home
- Check on family members, especialy older adults and those with chronic conditions
- Wear sunblock and loose fitting light coloured clothing
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Ten Tips for Launching Your Music Education Advocacy Effort
1. Engage your musicians, staff, and board in your education advocacy efforts.
Advocacy should be an integral part of the organization, and is part of everyone’s job description!
2. Recognize that the most effective education advocacy is local.
Education advocacy is primarily about local politics. Your school board was elected by people like you and the members of your audience. As elected officials, they should want to hear from their very own community citizens—including their orchestra.
3. Start an advocacy coalition now.
Partner with other arts organizations, local funders, arts agencies, and, most important, school districts. You need to have in common only one thing: that you want better music education in your schools. Where to begin? Use the relationships you already have to build a coalition. Existing program partnerships provide a great basis for advocacy, because they cement relationships, extend your network, and show results that you can use in persuading policy makers.
4. Recognize that the orchestra is only part of the puzzle.
Policy makers and the general public are less likely than arts insiders to distinguish among music, art, drama, and dance. What does make a difference is when arts educators and arts presenters—including orchestras—work together. Be sensitive to the needs of others in your coalition, especially the schools.
5. Hang in there.
All successful coalitions need a period of incubation.
6. Seize the moment – before there is a crisis.
Jumpstart your network and start advocating now. Do not wait for music education in your schools to be threatened before speaking up.
7. Make new friends.
Get to know your policy makers. Really get to know them, including their personal interests. You might be surprised to find enthusiasms that haven’t been tapped for advocacy.
8. Use online resources.
League of American Orchestras’s Music Education Advocacy Tools includes links to virtually every useful resource: Music Education Advocacy Tools. In addition, the Arts Education Partnership prepared an excellent resource to share with school principals, who play a key role in ensuring that every student receives a high-quality arts education as part of a complete education. What School Leaders Can Do to Increase Arts Education offers three concrete actions that school principals can take with little-to-no cost to increase arts education in their schools in a variety of grade levels
9. Use current research to build your case.
Sound research that demonstrates the positive influence of the arts on academic performance can get you the ear of a policymaker, even if the point you want to make about the benefits of music is much more complex.
10. Advocate for better data on student participation in music education.
Although there is research to support your case that music education improves learning in general, there is little information about how much music education is provided locally, statewide, or nationally. These facts will help you establish a baseline for improvement. So encourage your school board to provide accurate student participation data for music courses at individual schools and at the district level. A report from the Arts Education Partnership titled “From Anecdote to Evidence” provides twelve commonly-used indicators to assess the status and condition of arts education: http://www.aep-arts.org/publications-store/#id=1&cid=720&wid=401
Keep the League informed of your advocacy efforts.
Adapted from “Rally the Troops”
July/August 2005 issue of SYMPHONY Magazine
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Is your teen taking on too much? From part-time jobs to band and sports, too many activities can play havoc with your teen’s academic success.
Is your teen contemplating taking on a part-time job while attending school full time? The idea of part-time work is very appealing to young people, after all there’s nothing quite like having your own money to spend. But there is a danger to those after school jobs and that is, a student’s part-time job can take precedence over school work. When students are carrying full academic loads they need to be careful how many hours they put in at their part-time jobs otherwise “their school work begins to suffer; homework doesn’t get done, they don’t make it to school first thing in the morning because they’re too tired,” explains counselor Karen Turner.
Turner adds that “there’s an enormous pressure on young people today to have or earn money because it’s expensive to run cars, insurance is expensive, and a lot of parents can’t help out in a big way. I think parents need to watch out and ensure that students aren’t taking on too much and adding on more and more part-time work in order to have more and more things, when what’s really important is that they get their academic work done.”
Another area that teens need to be selective about is extra-curricular activities. While being active in school bands, drama clubs and sports are positive experiences for most teens, Turner says “it gets in the way when you take on too many things such as extra-curricular activities, plus work, along with a heavy academic load. Then the student experiences overload and the stress collapses them either in their studies, or forcing them to give something up. You are looking for balance.”
So encourage your teen to have a well rounded life, just ensure that it’s not so full that they become over taxed. The teen years should be a time of fun and freedom, balanced with responsibility.
Adapted from The Parent Report Radio Show. Any advice or information contained herein should never be a substitute for professional and/or medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. For more information please review Terms of Service.
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Domestic Violence also known as family violence and intimate partner violence can happen to anyone. However how to best support safety for the individual victim of violence may be very different depending on their culture, religion, race, nationality, gender, sexual preference, abilities and or age. The Utah Domestic Violence Council relies on our partnerships with diverse groups and communities of people to strengthen our understanding of how to best support victims of violence.
We believe that all people have the right to be safe in their own home and to be free of violence and other forms of abuse.
Utah Domestic Violence Council offers training throughout Utah concerning the basics of domestic violence and rights of victims. UDVC is recognized as the voice of expertise in Utah concerning Domestic Violence. UDVC and the UDVC staff recognize that there are other experts that can assist us in our understanding and response to domestic violence in Utah. UDVC staff travel throughout our beautiful state to local coalitions to provide technical and training. We have found that every training is an opportunity for UDVC to learn and expand our knowledge about how cultural and issues of diversity impact the dynamics of domestic violence. We believe that by taking the time to understand and honor these differences, while working together empowers us to create a safe and flourishing Utah for all families.
If you would like more information about our training and our work with diverse communities please call our office at (801) 521-5544.
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Psalms (Hebrew: תְהִלִּים, Tehillim, or "praises") is a book of 150 Hebrew poems in the Bible. The Book of Psalms is part of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, and it is also in the Old Testament of the Christian translations. People traditionally believe that many of the Psalms in the Bible were written by King David to God. Perhaps the most famous one is Psalm 23, which starts "The LORD is my shepherd". Psalm 23 is often used for funerals.
There are 150 Psalms in the Biblical canon of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, but there are also more poems that these religions do not think are holy. Psalm 151 is part of canon of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The names "Psalms" and "Psalter" come from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). There, they were about stringed instruments (for example, the harp, lyre and lute), then to songs sung with them. The traditional Hebrew title is tehillim. Tehillim means "praises", though many of the psalms are tephillot ("prayers"). One of the first collections in the book was titled "the prayers of David son of Jesse" (72:20, NIV).
Literary features [change]
The Psalter is poetry, though it has many prayers and not all Old Testament prayers were poetic. In fact, not all praise was poetic either. The Psalms are full of images, comparisons and metaphor. The Hebrew text often plays with words and repeats the same words, adding synonyms (words with the same meaning) to fill out the description. Important words show the main themes in the prayer or song.
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Common Cold (cont.)
Steven Doerr, MD
Steven Doerr, MD, is a U.S. board-certified Emergency Medicine Physician. Dr. Doerr received his undergraduate degree in Spanish from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He graduated with his Medical Degree from the University Of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado in 1998 and completed his residency training in Emergency Medicine from Denver Health Medical Center in Denver, Colorado in 2002, where he also served as Chief Resident.
William C. Shiel Jr., MD, FACP, FACR
Dr. Shiel received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors from the University of Notre Dame. There he was involved in research in radiation biology and received the Huisking Scholarship. After graduating from St. Louis University School of Medicine, he completed his Internal Medicine residency and Rheumatology fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.
In this Article
- What is the common cold, and what causes it?
- How is the common cold transmitted?
- What are the symptoms and signs of the common cold in adults, children, and infants?
- Does it have anything to do with exposure to cold weather?
- What is the difference between the common cold and influenza (the flu)?
- How is the common cold diagnosed?
- What is the treatment for the common cold? Are there any home remedies for the common cold?
- Are antibiotics a suitable treatment for the common cold?
- When should a physician or other health-care practitioner be consulted?
- How do you prevent the common cold?
- Common Cold At A Glance
- Common Cold FAQs
- Find a local Family Physician in your town
Does it have anything to do with exposure to cold weather?
Though the common cold usually occurs in the fall and winter months, the cold weather itself does not cause the common cold. Rather, it is thought that during cold-weather months people spend more time indoors in close proximity to each other, thus facilitating the spread of the virus. For this same reason, children in day care and school are particularly prone to acquiring the common cold.
What is the difference between the common cold and influenza (the flu)?
Many people confuse the common cold with influenza (the flu). Influenza is caused by the influenza virus, while the common cold generally is not. While some of the symptoms of the common cold and influenza may be similar, patients with the common cold typically have a milder illness. Patients with influenza usually appear more ill and have a more abrupt onset of illness with fever, chills, headache, substantial muscle and body aches, dry cough, and extreme weakness.
Though differentiating between the common cold and influenza can be difficult, there is laboratory testing available to confirm the diagnoses of influenza.
How is the common cold diagnosed?
Your physician or health-care practitioner will generally diagnose the common cold based on the description of your symptoms and the findings on your physical exam. Laboratory testing and imaging studies are generally not necessary unless there are concerns about another underlying medical condition or potential complications.
Viewers share their comments
Find out what women really need.
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Theory and Practice of Cooperative Wireless Networks
Investigator(s): Martin Haenggi
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Timeframe: 7/10 to 6/13
Abstract: Although theoretical results predict that significant gains can be achieved from node cooperation, current wireless systems are exclusively built on point-to-point communication, where transmissions are separated in time, frequency, or space. Before cooperative techniques can be implemented, two key questions need to be addressed: How do they perform in the context of a larger network, and how do they perform in actual
This project aims at providing answers to both these questions by combining theory and experimental work. On the theory side, the investigators use a rigorous analytic approach that combines tools from stochastic geometry and information theory. The stochastic geometry approach permits statements about ensembles of networks, rather than just a single fixed network geometry, which is often more tractable and leads to more general results. On the experimental side, performance measurements are taken on small cooperative networks of software radio devices. They are used to derive analytical models that can be used at higher layers in the protocol stack and to determine the overhead and control traffic required to set up the cooperation.
Based on the insight gained from both theory and experiments, novel cooperative protocols for wireless networks are derived. It is expected that the project will enable significant improvements in the performance of wireless systems, thereby helping to overcome the spectrum scarcity. The results are be disseminated in form of conference and journal articles, tutorials, and short courses, and some ideas will hopefully lead to patents.
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the downloadable documents on this site may be viewed or printed
using Adobe® Acrobat® software. Click on the icon below
to download Acrobat® Reader® directly from http://www.adobe.com.
Vaccines are safe, well-tested and effective in preventing some serious diseases like measles, pertussis (whooping cough) and polio. But, like any medicines, vaccines can have side effects. It’s understandable that people have questions about vaccine safety and effectiveness, especially with the coverage of these subjects by the media. We want to help answer your questions with accurate and reliable information. Not everything you see, hear or read about vaccines in the media or on the Internet is accurate. So, in addition to looking around our website, please visit these other sites for information you can trust:
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Careful what photos you tweet–and where you were when you snapped the shot. There’s another site designed to warn you against the hazards of over-sharing. This time it’s not related to active location-sharing, but instead accidental. The meta-data stored in your photos may be giving away where you live.
Awhile back, Please Rob Me was promoted awareness about Foursquare check-ins by scanning Twitter for Foursquare tweets. Then the site jokingly listed that user as available to rob, as they were likely not home. I Can Stalk U is a new cautionary site, in the same vein as Please Rob Me, using the EXIF location data your smartphone attached to your uploaded images, instead of Foursquare or Gowalla check-ins. The site works as you would expect, scanning popular Twitter-centric photo sharing services like Twitpic and yFrog (our Twitpic API profile), grabbing the images, and then scanning the images for their EXIF data and sharing the location data.
With geo-tagged tweets, Foursquare check-ins and now Facebook Place checkins, it’s clear that many users don’t mind letting people know where they are. The issue here is that the images being analyzed for location information may not have explicitly asked you if you wanted to share your location or not.
It’s not particularly difficult to scan an image for EXIF location data, either, so this doesn’t necessarily count as some sort of elite hacker skill. And with a quick pass through the Google Maps API, you can easily make GPS coordinates into a human-readable address.
What can developers do?
For now, I’ve yet to hear many people being concerned about EXIF location data, but privacy issues are always an ongoing concern when dealing with the web in general. As a developer, you may be able to help by removing the EXIF location data upon upload. If your application requires the location data, consider storing it in a secure database along with the other upload information. Otherwise, if you don’t need it, try to remove it.
Also, if your application uploads images, as always, ask the user if they want to attach their location to the upload. Ask again and again until the user tells you to never ask them again.
What can users do?
As with everything you post online, always be mindful of what you’re posting. Maybe it’s not a big deal if people can figure out what restaurant you’re at, but it may be an issue if strangers know where you live.
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Power failure leads to wastewater overflow near Lowman Beach
A power outage that hit the West Seattle area just before 2 a.m. Wednesday was largely unnoticed by thousands who slept through it, only to wake up with clocks reset and other items blinking, but it did affect the King County Murray Avenue Pump Station which overflowed an estimated 18,000 gallons of wastewater for 20 minutes through an emergency outfall into Puget Sound near Lowman Beach Park. This prevented raw sewage backups and equipment damage.
Wastewater Treatment Division utility crews responded quickly and deployed a portable emergency generator in the pump station as a source of temporary power.
Division employees notified health and regulatory agencies about the overflow. King County will install a permanent generator at the pump station as part the Murray Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) project.
The Murray Avenue station pumps wastewater from West Seattle to the West Point Treatment Plant in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood. West Point treats about 133 million gallons of wastewater daily, and up to 440 million gallons during rainy weather.
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Students’ Work on Electrically Conducting Polymers Highlighted
By Edwin L. Aguirre
Two chemical engineering undergraduate students ߞ; Mark Lalli and Neha Manohar ߞ; gave oral presentations of their research at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held in August in Boston. About 13,000 attendees participated in the technical sessions, which showcased cutting-edge research and discoveries in chemistry and other related fields.
“Both Mark and Neha have been working on summer internships with Prof. Sanjeev Manohar in Chemical Engineering,” says Engineering Dean John Ting. “Mark is a Commonwealth Scholar who is entering his sophomore year, while Neha is just entering her freshman year. She would have been a Commonwealth Scholar, too, if she lived in Massachusetts.”
Neha, 17, is the youngest of Manohar’s three daughters. The family lives in New Hampshire.
In his presentation, Mark described the studies that he and his co-researchers had performed on the surface morphology of thin films of material derived from polyaniline — a flexible, electrically conducting polymer — that were cast on glass using different solvents. His team observed significant differences in the electrical conductivity, water repulsion and spectroscopic properties of the film depending on the solvent used.
“This technique can potentially be used to fine-tune the solid-state properties of conducting polymers during processing,” he says.
For her part, Neha discussed the work that she and her co-investigators had done in synthesizing bulk quantities of nanostructured materials for use in energy storage and chemical/biological sensors. She reported on a new route they discovered in producing electrically conducting poly-2-ethylaniline microtubules using a chemical oxidation process.
“The tubules are composed entirely of nanofibers that have high gas uptake and charge storage capacity,” she says. “This opens new opportunities for the use of these microtubules in the electronics industry.”
The weeks of preparation and long practice sessions Mark and Neha put into their 20-minute presentations paid off.
“It was a great experience,” says Neha. “We were surprised at how smooth everything went.”
“This was their first oral presentation at a national meeting of the ACS,” says Manohar. “The event’s organizer was very happy with our undergrads. She says their presentations resembled those of senior grad students and postdocs in quality. She now feels very comfortable in recommending undergrad presentations in future ACS meetings.”
Manohar notes that Neha was the youngest participant at the Boston meeting.
“She just graduated from Nashua High so she was still technically a high-school student when she gave her talk,” he says.
Mark and Neha are in the process of preparing papers on their research for publication in a refereed journal. Neha already has four published research papers to her credit.
From the beginning, Mark has been interested chemical engineering, especially nanomaterials engineering.
“I come from a family of engineers ߞ; mechanical, biomedical and network engineers,” he says. “I’m the first to study chemical engineering.”
“I’ve been interested in science in general since I was young,” says Neha. “I initially wanted to be an astrophysicist.”
This is not surprising considering Neha’s dad comes from a family of distinguished physicists ߞ; the maternal uncle and cousin of Manohar’s grandfather were Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, respectively. Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, Chandrasekhar in 1983.
However, the allure of chemical engineering was stronger for Neha.
“I wanted more lab experience,” she says. “I enjoy the hands-on experience and seeing results firsthand. I want to follow the footsteps of my dad.”
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Open Source`s New Frontier
By now, every CIO should be aware of the enterprise potential of Linux and other popular open-source software offerings. But the number and breadth of open-source projects has increased steadily over the years, and organizations can apply these tools to virtually any type of business process.
Three emerging areas in which open source could make a dramatic difference for businesses are voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, customer relationship management (CRM) and mobility.
Today, companies generally employ open source in limited ways. "It's primarily being used in a tactical fashion in skunkworks projects and in internal infrastructure efforts," says Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, a systems integration and consulting firm that focuses on open source.
Some organizations overtly favor open- source implementations over proprietary options, using the latter only when necessary. But hardly any enterprises have begun to recast their IT strategy with open source at its foundation.
Industry research backs that up. Open source is not a high priority among strategic software initiatives today. Instead, businesses use it as a tactical tool for achieving mission-critical initiatives, such as implementing enterprise collaboration strategies, adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) and implementing Web 2.0, according to a December 2007 report by Forrester Research, an IT research and advisory firm.
Adoption of open source other than Linux remains limited. Forrester had surveyed North American and European software decision-makers in 2006 about their adoption of Linux and open source, and found that some one-third of North American respondents and 39 percent of European respondents indicated they were using open source. But when Linux was excluded in the 2007 survey, the numbers dropped to 17 percent in North America and 21 percent in Europe.
Why is Linux making headway in the enterprise while other open-source products are not? For one thing, the major Linux distributions are far more visible than the alternatives. For another, Linux technology is more mature than many other open-source projects.
Still, interest in the software remains high. Forrester's research revealed that two-thirds of the enterprises expressed at least some degree of interest in open source. And there's huge potential for open source to make inroads into business applications and processes.
"Open-source activity is taking place in almost every software segment," says Raven Zachary, open-source research director at the IT research firm The 451 Group. Golden agrees that open source is becoming increasingly pervasive in the software market. "Every area in which software plays a role in today's enterprise has open-source options," he says.
Deployment of open source offers clear cost advantages--many of the distributions are free to use--as well as scale and agility. That, Golden says, helps CIOs stretch their budgets even further.
Paul Hamerman, a research analyst at Forrester, adds: "Mature open-source projects are, in many cases, competitive, low-cost alternatives to commercial products. This is more often the case when there is a business model associated with the open-source solutions, including services and licensed enhancements."
While cost savings remains the No. 1 selling point for open-source adoption in the enterprise, IT executives also point to flexibility. "Flexibility in this case means the ability to adapt open source to your environment and to have access to source code to make changes, if necessary," says Zachary of The 451 Group.
The research director advises IT managers to "sell" open source on cost savings and to prepare a compelling financial projection proving those savings, even though there will be other benefits that come from open-source projects.
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COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES COMPLETES BASELINE STUDY OF
BLACK-TAILED PRAIRIE DOG
Denver--The Colorado Department of Natural Resources recently completed a study to gather baseline information on the black-tailed prairie dog. After months of exhaustive field work and data collection and analysis, the final report concludes that while there are still threats to the species that need to be appropriately managed, the prairie dog is still quite abundant on the Eastern Plains of Colorado.
On February 4, 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published notice in the Federal Register that the status of the black-tailed prairie dog warranted its listing, but that higher priority species deserving of more immediate attention precluded the listing of the prairie dog at that time. The Service based this decision on the existence of several threats to the species and on information that assumed the black-tailed prairie dog occupied only slightly more than 90,000 acres in Eastern Colorado.
After more than six months of study, the Department has found that the prairie dog occupies, at a bare minimum, more than 214,000 acres east of the Continental Divide. This is more than double the amount of occupied acreage assumed by the USFWS in its 12-month administrative finding.
"This study confirms what the State has been saying all along," said Greg Walcher, Executive Director of the Department of Natural Resources. "We need to do a better job of managing black-tailed prairie dogs in this state, but they are not in danger of extinction and should not be listed under the federal Endangered Species Act."
The study began in March 2000 and was performed by EDAW, an environmental consulting firm in Fort Collins. EDAW began their work by contacting species experts around the state to help them locate all current data sources on the black-tailed prairie dog in Colorado. The objective was to assemble all of these sources of data into a single GIS database, that when field verified, could serve as baseline data for the species. The database was re-worked after intensive field surveys. The field surveys were crucial to ensure that the database reflected current locations and status of prairie dog towns and colonies that had not been observed in recent years. EDAW estimates that there are nearly 2,600 active prairie dog colonies in Eastern Colorado, the largest of which covers more than 4,100 acres.
The study also recommends several courses of action to pursue to avoid the need to list the black-tailed prairie dog as a threatened or endangered species under federal law, including: additional field surveys and monitoring, additional biological research, some modification to hunting and control efforts, a landowner incentive program, and the establishment of prairie dog preserves.
"I think these recommendations are right on," said Walcher. "They will be implemented so that we can be sure we are headed in the right direction for the species, and for the people of this State."
Colorado Parks and Wildlife has already begun work on a state conservation and management plan for the black-tailed prairie dog. Recommendations from the EDAW report will be an integral part of its development and application. Following, are several components of the new management strategy currently under development.
- A working group has been established to set up a voluntary landowner incentives program to help farmers and ranchers recoup the costs they will incur by helping the state avoid further declines in the number of prairie dogs.
- A partnership is being formed between the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Transportation, and other agencies to acquire tracts of land on the Eastern Plains to set up grassland species preserves, where CPW will be able to manage several plains species of concern and do important biological research.
- Plans are being made to do more extensive aerial surveys to increase our knowledge about the distribution of the species. These efforts should be underway in early spring of 2001.
- The Colorado Wildlife Commission will consider regulations at their November meeting to restrict hunting of black-tailed prairie dogs.
"These actions demonstrate Colorado's commitment to proactive, voluntary species recovery efforts," said Walcher. We are implementing a model that I think other states will be excited to follow, and will want to join with us in our efforts to protect sensitive species without burdensome federal regulation."
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Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise, old fortified city© R. O.
Located in the Monts du Lyonnais, Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise lies at the heart of the triangle of Lyon, Saint-Etienne and Roanne, which was and still remains a hub of thriving trade and industry.
In particular it is known as the sausage capital of the world, with a weekly production of 700 tonnes. Local craftsmen reproduce the sausages in the same traditional way they have done for many years.
The old walled city dating from medieval times, is dominated by its fifteenth-century collegiate church, and is a real jewel of Gothic art. Built on a rock its classified as a historic monument.
Its also the birth place of Antoine Pinay who became the French Prime Minister in 1952.
With a population of 3500, Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise is referenced as one of the hundred cities to be found in the most beautiful corners of France.
Tourist Office: www.hautsdulyonnaistourisme.fr
Community Commons: www.monts-du-lyonnais.fr
A view from the village© City of Vernoux en Vivarais
Situated in the Ardeche and the Rhone Alpes, Vernoux en Vivarais is a mountain village with a population of 2000.
Overlooking the Rhone Valley, between Doux and Eyriex, it’s the gateway to the National Park of Monts d’Ardèche covering a region of 180,000 hectors.
With the main economy based around agriculture, the lively village of Vernoux en Vivarais is also a cultural area. And in addition has good sporting facilities, including an indoor pool, providing entertainment throughout the year.
The remains of the Château of La Tourrette still stands today, as well as the Château de Vaussèche, which dates back to the fifteenth century.
With its facilities and activities, Vernoux en Vivarais is looking forward to welcoming Paris-Nice and its visitors.
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Skin is the human body's largest sensory organ. Understanding how it works will help roboticists create more useful android skins. We're a step closer to understanding the skin's sensory system thanks to a new report announced by Johns Hopkins researchers. The scientists created detailed maps of the branching patterns of sensory nerves in mouse skin. The resulting maps revealed ten distinct groups that seem to correspond to differences in nerve functions. For example, some nerve types gather information from a single hair follicle while others branch into groups that collect averaged information from 200 or more different locations. From the new release:
Nathans says the images now in hand will help scientists “make more sense” out of known responses to stimulation of the skin. For example, if a single nerve cell is responsible for monitoring a patch of skin a quarter of an inch square, multiple simultaneous points of pressure within that patch will only be perceived by the brain as a single signal. “That is why we can’t read Braille using the skin on our backs: the multiple bumps that make up a Braille symbol are within such a small area that the axon branches can’t distinguish them. By contrast, each sensory axon on the fingertip occupies a much smaller territory and this permits our fingertips to accurately distinguish small objects.
For all the details on the research, including lots of diagrams and images of the nerve networks, see the paper, "Morphological diversity of cutaneous sensory afferents revealed by genetically directed sparse labeling" (PDF format). In a related new release, Johns Hopkins researchers announced the discovery of strong evidence that there are specific nerve cells responsible for itch signals, distinct from nerves involved in pain.
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Incarnation of the demonsThe incarnation of the demons has been a problem to Christian demonology and theology since early times. A very early form of incarnation of demons was the idea of demon possession, trying to explain that a demon entered the body of a person with some purpose or simply to punish that one for some allegedly committed sin. But this soon acquired bigger proportions, trying to explain how demons could seduce people to have sexual relationships with them or induce them to commit other sins. To Christian scholars demons had to manifest themselves in a visible and if possible tangible form.
Basil of Caesarea was, apparently, the first who wrote on this subject. He believed that demons, to materialise, had to condense vapours and with them form the body of a person or animal, then entering that body as if it were a puppet to which they gave life. Henry More supported this idea, saying that their bodies were cold due to the solidification of water vapour to form them (see below). Many authors believed that demons could assume the shape of an animal, preferably black.
It seems that until the first millennium, when the fear for the coming of the Antichrist reached proportions that were out of control, the appearance of demons was not a significant problem. But since this moment on, demons acquired a terrible appearance in the mind of those who believed to have seen them.
Raoul Glaber, a monk of Saint-Léger, Belgium, seems to have been the first in writing about the visit of a demon of horrible aspect in his Historiarum suis temporis, Libri quinque (History of his time, Book five).
Augustine thought that demons often were imaginary, but sometimes could enter human bodies, but later accepted the idea of the materialisation of demons. Thomas Aquinas followed Augustine's idea, but added that demonic materialisation had sexual connotations because demons tried to seduce people to commit sexual sins.
Concerning the weight of the demons, since the 17th century people affirmed that they were heavier than common humans.
About the colour of the demons' skin, since early times it was associated with black, thinking that they assumed the appearance of a black man, although not all descriptions agreed, giving demons very different aspects.
Ambrogio de Vignati, disagreeing with other authors, asserted that demons, besides of not to have a material body could not create it, and all what they seemed to do was a mere hallucination provoked by them in the mind of those who had made a diabolical pact or were "victims" of a succubus or incubus, including the sexual act.
The demons' behind, genitalia and sperm were a subject of dedicated study by Christian theologians, demonologists and inquisitors. The Inquisition seemed to have been particularly interested in this topic.
Concerning the demons' behind, there were confessions asserting that they were normal, others telling that instead of an anus they had another mouth and thus when kissing their behind during the Sabbath people received another kiss in exchange, and confessions telling that demons did not have buttocks.
About the demons' testicles, only one witch confessed to Pierre de Rostegny that the demon with whom she had sexual relationships had them. Other confessions denied that demons had them. Henri Boguet supported the idea that demons did not have sexual organs and Johann Meyfarth asserted that demons had not a penis.
The demons' penis was a terrible problem for inquisitors and scholars. All of them manifested a morbid interest in the demons' genitalia, but the penis reached pathological proportions. Many questions during the interrogatories in the witch trials referred to this theme. All persons confessed to have had sexual relationships with at least one demon, but the descriptions given of this particular part of their anatomy vary from a small phallus to a big one. Some confessions described a normal penis in the appropriate place, others a normal one in the behind, others two phalluses, one in its place and the other in the behind, and others a bifid one, like the tongue of a snake. Confessions that described two phalluses or a bifid one often added the particularity that the demon practised vaginal and anal coitus at the same time; Sylvester Prieras was a supporter of this idea. Even some confessions described three penises. Concerning the material of which it were made, there were confessions affirming that it was normal and flesh-made, others saying that it was iron or horn-made, others telling that it was half flesh and half iron, and others saying that it had scales and, being scaly, the sexual act was painful; even some confessions asserted that it was bone or wooden-made.
The sperm of the demons constituted another problem. Some persons confessed that this sperm was icy, meanwhile others felt it as that of a common man. But another problem arose among scholars to determine if demons had their own sperm or not. Ludovico Maria Sinistrari was one of the few authors that supported the idea that demons were corporeal entities that had their own sperm and with it could impregnate women and conceive children with them. But most scholars denied the idea that demons could have their own sperm, and concluded that they took sperm from men. The problem grew when these authors had to explain how did demons took that sperm, how did they put it into a woman's vagina, and if that sperm could conceive children or not.
Most theologians agreed in the fact that demons acted first as succubae to collect sperm from men and then as incubi to put it into a woman's vagina. But as many of them agreed also in the fact that demons' bodies were icy, they reached the conclusion that the frozen sperm taken first from a man could not have generative qualities. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote that demons acted in this way but could fecundate women. Ulrich Molitor and Nicholas Remy disagreed in the fact that women could be impregnated; besides, Remy thought that a woman could never be fecundated by another being than a man. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger (authors of the Malleus Maleficarum adopted again an intermediate position; they wrote that demons acted first as succubae and then as incubi, but added the possibility that incubi could receive semen from succubae, but they considered that this sperm could not fecundate women.
Peter of Paluda and Martin of Arles among others supported the idea that demons could take sperm from dead men and impregnate women. Some demonologists thought that demons could take semen from dying or recently deceased men, and thus death men should be buried as soon as possible to avoid it.
There is no biblical mention of the incarnation of demons in the New Testament, but according to the Matthew, Mark and Luke they could be seen and heard (there are several allusions). In the Old Testament Eve saw and heard the Devil incarnated in a serpent (Genesis 3:1-5)
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From the Old Palace of Knossos a model of the so-called "Dove Shrine Deposit" shows three pillars with capitals and beams, on which three doves are sitting. Two doves are incised in a stone vessel used as an offering table in Phaistos and some doves are pictured also sitting on the double axes at a sacrifice scene on the sarcophagus from Hagia Triada. Finally, the doves with the other sacred symbols are surrounding the clay figurines with upraised hands and cylinder-shaped bodies from the Late Minoan civic and rural shrines from Gortyn, Gournia, Knossos and Karphi. Some of these figurines with the birds sitting on their head or perching near of their body are called as a representation of the Dove Goddess. The doves are interpreted as an emblem of a celestial goddess and are a symbol of her heavenly power, contradictory to a snake, which has been regarded as an underworld aspect of the goddess and a symbol of her earthly power. But mainly in the Late Minoan period the sacerdotal symbols are mixed as the ritual objects and figurines, discovered from the shrines, are proving. The models of birds were found on the same places together with the snake tubes. One of the figurines from the shrine at Gortys is represented with a bird flying close to her cheek, while she is holding the snakes in her hands.
Unfortunately, we cannot identify the so-called Minoan Dove Goddess from Crete explicitly as a celestial goddess, having not enough material supporting this idea. But this is sure that the Dove Goddess was linked to the Snake and Poppy Goddesses, who are connected with the household role in Crete. All of these divinities were worshipped in the Late Minoan civic and rural shrines, where the traditional Minoan religious cults were kept alive.
It is not clear if the dove was only a symbol of a divinity or an attribute for a certain goddess in the Pre-Hellenic mythology. As well, we have no evidence if in the Minoan religion only one universal goddess was worshipped with various aspects, or if many goddesses shared a spiritual realm and governed over the sacred world of these people. The symbol of the dove spread out from Crete to the mainland of Greece and to Cyprus and to the other Aegean places.
In the Mycenaean iconography the doves appear as early as in the second half of the 16th century BCE. But the unique golden ornaments of a naked goddess and a tripartite shrine, surrounded by the doves from Mycenae, are interpreted as foreign imports. Bird pictures exists in the Mycenaean iconography more often from the end of 14th century BCE and were becoming a common decoration in the 12th century BCE. This motif is interpreted mostly as the symbol of epiphany of a goddess, similarly like in Crete. But we have no prove that in the Mycenaean mythology the same believing existed as in Crete and we can not attribute a dove to some Mycenaean goddess. Also it has to be mentioned that many different kinds of birds are represented in the Mycenaean memories, in which specially the water animals have a priority. Concluding we have to point out that the dove is connected with the sacred places and used as an offering, created from an expensive material in the Elamic culture in ancient Iran. So, we can suppose, that all of these sources mentioned here -- the Minoan, the Mycenaean and the Oriental played a role, when a dove came into the Greek and Roman mythology as one of the attributes of the goddess of Love - Aphrodite.
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- Evening News Photo by TOM HAWLEY
Dundee Elementary students listen closely as canine Michigan State Trooper Brad Martin of the canine team and his German shepherd, Kody,5 begin the short program. The program was part of the Village of Dundee Police Liaison Officer David Meyer education program.
DUNDEE — Students at Dundee Community Schools had a four-legged visitor Friday when a Michigan State Police tracking dog came to campus to display its special skills.
Trooper Brad Martin and his K-9 partner, Kody, walked the halls of the middle school checking lockers and all were found to be drug-free, said Dundee Liaison Officer David Meyer. Afterward Trooper Martin conducted a safety presentation in the gymnasium packed with students in grades K-4.
“I’m reaching out to the elementary students to show them that a police officer is their friend,” Officer Meyer said. “There are a lot of things we’re working on.”
The police K-9 demonstration was part of an overall school program being run by Officer Meyer, a retired State Police detective who began as the district’s liaison officer this winter. His part-time position was created when the Village of Dundee, the police department and the school district joined forces to bring the program back to school for the first time since 2007.
Officer Meyer said Trooper Martin walked Kody through the halls of the middle school just as a precaution. The same type of search was done earlier at the high school. Officer Meyer said his education program will continue with such topics as the dangers of texting and driving among high school students.
Meanwhile, the Dundee Police Department recently hired a part-time K-9 officer, who will be on-call for searches and drug detection. Police Chief Dave Uhl said Officer Matthew C. Schmidt was hired and already has used his golden lab, Linus, at scenes.
Chief Uhl said other local police departments have a tracking or drug-detecting dog, but adding Officer Schmidt is a valuable asset to his department.
“He gives us another option,” Chief Uhl said. “Sometimes other canines aren’t available.”
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Image: Stonehenge at sunset. (Credit: Jeffrey Pfau/Wikimedia Commons).
Stonehenge may have been a place for sun worship long before the iconic stones were erected more than 5,000 years ago, according to archaeologists who are carrying out the biggest-ever virtual excavation.
Using noninvasive technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and geophysical imaging, a team from the University of Birmingham's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Centre, known as VISTA, and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna, discovered evidence of two huge pits positioned on a celestial alignment at Stonehenge.
Measuring more than 16 feet across and at least 3 feet deep, the pits lie within the Cursus, a large enclosure north of Stonehenge, which predates the prehistoric monument by up to 500 years.
"This is the first time we have seen anything quite like this at Stonehenge," said project leader Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist from the University of Birmingham.
"When viewed from the Heel Stone, a rather enigmatic stone which stands just outside the entrance to Stonehenge, the pits effectively mark the raising and setting of the sun at midsummer days," he explained.
According to the archaeologists, the pits may have contained tall stones, wooden posts or even fires to mark the sun rising and setting. Most likely, they defined a processional route used to celebrate the passage of the sun across the sky at the summer solstice.
"It is possible that processions within the Cursus moved from the eastern pit at sunrise, continuing eastwards along the Cursus and, following the path of the sun overhead, perhaps back to the west, reaching the western pit at sunset to mark the longest day of the year," said Gaffney.
The hypothesis gained more weight when the researchers measured the walking distance between the two pits.
They discovered that the procession would reach exactly halfway at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge.
"This is more than just a coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance," said Henry Chapman, senior lecturer in archaeology and visualization at the University of Birmingham.
According to the researchers, the presence of the pits within the Cursus suggest that the Stonehenge area, which features England's densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, was already sacred before construction work began to build the enigmatic stone circle.
"Even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important, ritual focus," said Gaffney.
"The area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date. Other activities were carried out at other ceremonial sites only a short distance away," he continued.
The researchers have already found a henge-like monument, several other small monuments, and a new horseshoe arrangement of large pits northeast of Stonehenge, which may have also contained posts.
They believe that these structures functioned as minor shrines, perhaps serving specific communities visiting the ceremonial center.
The team is confident that the project will produce new discoveries soon.
"Our knowledge of the ancient landscapes that once existed around Stonehenge is growing dramatically as we examine the new geophysical survey results," said Paul Garwood, a lecturer in prehistory at the University of Birmingham.
"We can see in rich detail not only new monuments but entire landscapes of past human activity, over thousands of years, preserved in subsurface features such as pits and ditches."
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All menus are planned to meet nutritional requirements outlined by the federal government. These guidelines follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans which recommend no more than 30 percent of a person's calories come from fat and less than 10 percent from saturated fat. Lunch menus must also be designed to provide students with 1/3 of the key nutrients they need each day (calories, protein, Vitamin A and C, calcium and iron) averaged over one week. Breakfast menus must meet 1/4 of those same nutrients also averaged over the course of one week. Student preferences, variety and cost are also considered when planning menus.
Lunch Menus can be picked up in our information booth at the front of the office.
Middle School Lunch $3.00
Adult Lunch $3.75
Middle School Breakfast $1.75
Adult Breakfast $2.50
Last Modified on January 11, 2012
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I use the phrase "let me know" all the time in English. For example:
- Just let me know when you're free.
- Could you let me know whether you can come tomorrow?
- If you have any questions, just let me know.
- Let me know what you think.
What options are there in Spanish for expressing "let me know," and how are they normally used?
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Here’s an odd website that popped up in my news feed. It proclaims itself the “International Laboratory of ID Science“. Apparently it’s all about something called Information Input Theory. A phrase which apparently has been trade marked. And with supreme irony, given the text on the home page, the website is subtitled Evidence and Reason! According to the site,
IIT is a field of Intelligent Design science which predicts intelligent inputs, specified complexity and adaptation value in biological systems. IIT is a study of information, it overlaps studies in computer science, information theory, bioinformatics and biomechanics.
IIt is a recognised tool, a respected and trusted science.
I had a quick Google search of the phrase Information Input Theory. Nothing other than the site and its facebook page comes up, so I suspect it’s scarcely a recognised tool, or a respected and trusted science. Other hallmarks of a, shall we say, oddball site are the oddly written prose often using neologisms and words that are just plain wrong. Oh, and over-interpretations and misinterpretations of science.
On the off chance that this really is some kind of offshoot of Intelligent Design creationism, I Googled “Information Input Theory” + “Discovery Institute” since the Discotute have a bit of a track record in abusing information theory, but I only hit one page, an individual’s Facebook page. I didn’t fare much better replacing the Discotute with its UK equivalent, the centre for Intelligent Design. I presume therefore that whoever (or what) is behind this website is not overtly connected with either outfit.
So this looks to be a off-piste oddball site. Of course, it appears to be a website that’s still being built (it has lots non-functional links), but top of the list of “Reference Links” is a link to The Bible. Which probably explains a lot.
There’s not much content. On the front page are brief discussions of the famous Cairns paper of 1988 (Cairns J, Overbaugh J, Miller S. The origin of mutants. Nature. 1988;335:142-145. Link), neglecting to mention work that’s been done since (such as Hendrickson et al. Amplification-mutagenesis: evidence that “directed” adaptive mutation and general hypermutability result from growth with a selected gene amplification. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2002;99(4):2164-9. Link). Oh and a lot of poorly drafted verbiage that doesn’t make sense to me. Also on the front page is a brief discussion of a preprint paper by Gregory Chaitin on some sort of mathematical modelling of evolution, which I haven’t read, but about which this brief burst of gibberish is completely unilluminating.
There are a few pages of text, for example objecting to evolution (names here as Darwinism) which begins with a bonkers assertion:
The theory of evolution is not one theory but, a collection of theories, e.g. Natural Selection – DNA sequencing, coordination of sexual selection etc.
Darwinism or (Neo-Darwinism) is a subject of philosophy and in particular, a want, rather than actual science, which hinders the public from adopting the actuality of design in science.
And it gets worse! I’ve rarely read such inarticulate writings, even from creationists. Peculiarly, the link entitled ‘Science behind ITT’ take one to a page with the tab heading Jesus Loves You, with a ludicrous collection of gibberish the like of which I’ve only really seen on true nut-job alt-med sites.
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SilverStone has recently released a number of storage based products like USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures for 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives and even a NAS device for your home network. Today we’re reviewing a storage based accessory that’s a little bit different, the CP06 SATA power cable. This is more than just a power cable extension however, as the device includes two 2200μF capacitors to stabilize the power going to your drives. Capacitors have previously been added to power supply PCI-E cables to help protect graphics cards and are now here to protect your hard drives and SSD’s. Is this something that every build should have? Find out after the jump.
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by Pam Ford Davis
6/11/2010 / Devotionals
Are you a fan of Blues music? Do others hear you singing the blues? Depression gains a stronghold when fear and anxiety control us. Dark, foreboding clouds obscure the silver lining contained within. Each note we sound is sour and flat. Our tunes are not toe-tappers or sing along harmonies, and we should not expect a round of applause.
Reports reveal depression often encroaches upon us when we are weary, disappointed, hungry, or lonely. Personally, my two triggers are disappointment and fatigue. At the end of a long day when the blues show up as an uninvited guest, I remind myself I will feel better after a good night's sleep.
Prophet Elijah is a classic example of depression. (1 Kings 19:1-18) In faith in God, he confronted the worshipers of the false god Baal in a mountain top experience. Jehovah God gave a miraculous demonstration of his power through his servant, but fear of retribution by wicked Jezebel set Elijah off on a run for his life.
The man of faith wanted to die and fell asleep under a bush. An angel provided V.I.P. assistance to Elijah during his crisis situation. God's messenger awakened him and provided nourishment. After needed renewal, he walked for forty days and nights to Mount Horeb and sheltered in a cave. He met God in a personal encounter and began to sing the blues.
"Elijah answered, 'Lord God All-Powerful, I have always served you the best I can, but the Israelites have broken their agreement with you. They destroyed your altars and killed your prophets. I am the only prophet left alive, and now they are trying to kill me (1 Kings 19:10 ERV)!" God set the record straight; others remained faithful. He put Elijah back to work. Future rewards included a free ride to heaven. Swing Low Sweet Chariot would replace the blues!
With God all things are possible! Published articles in Mature Living Magazine, Secret Place, Daily Devotionals for the Deaf, Light from the Word Daily Devotional. Available now in book store: FORGET-ME-NOT DAILY DEVOTIONAL http:/ebooks.faithwriters.com/ebook-details.php?id=520
Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com
If you died today, are you absolutely certain that you would go to heaven? You can be! TRUST JESUS NOW
JOIN US at FaithWriters for Free. Grow as a Writer and Spread the Gospel.
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Spending time outdoors is an important component of the lifestyle valued so highly by many of the residents of Nevada. The image of squirrels hopping by a cabin or a chipmunk begging for food in a picnic area is common, and relaxing. Although these forest denizens belong in the natural landscape, they also serve to maintain diseases that are transmitted to humans and domestic animals that share these habitats.
Recent closures of state parks due to bubonic plague outbreaks serve as good examples of potential risks posed to human health and the loss to rural economies due to decreased tourism. Increased numbers of rodents often lead to higher rates of infection with zoonotic diseases such as hantavirus and plague. Chipmunks are commonly found in close association with humans in campgrounds and around rural cabins.
Research conducted by University of Nevada, Reno indicates that in the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, chipmunks are commonly infected by relapsing fever spirochetes and that chipmunks serve as an important link in disease transmission to humans.
The disease, relapsing fever, has affected citizens of Nevada and California alike and is transmitted to individuals through the bite of an infected tick. Wild rodents, especially chipmunks serve both to maintain tick populations and as reservoirs for the bacteria, Borrelia hermsii, which causes relapsing fever in humans.
Human induced changes to the natural environment, such as woodpiles, trash cans and homes uninhabited during the winter may serve to benefit wild rodents resulting in higher rodent survival and reproduction. Further research conducted by University of Nevada, Reno indicates that chipmunks serve as a reservoir for relapsing fever and appear to be in higher densities around rural/summer cabins than in areas without human habitation. The high rodent densities help to amplify the potential for disease transmission to humans.
In order to understand how rodent survival, reproduction and recruitment can affect the prevalence of disease around human habitations, this project will use chipmunks as model organisms to understand the transmission dynamics that occur to maintain relapsing fever in nature. Through the use of genetic techniques, investigator will test whether human habitation influences rodent dispersal by testing paired sites in Nevada and California that are endemic for relapsing fever. Chipmunk DNA from study sites where humans live for part of the year will be compared to chipmunk DNA collected from endemic sites in which humans recreate but do not live. We plan to test whether chipmunk dispersal is altered by human habitation and whether this influences the ecological maintenance of relapsing fever.
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When thinking of open source virtualization solutions, many seem to first think of Linux command lines that require lengthy complex lines of code to create and manage virtual machines (VMs).
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), despite being based on Linux and KVM, now offers the same capabilities as VMware to your customers for a much lower price.
There are at least two nodes in a typical RHEV environment, and in many cases there are many more. First there is the RHEV Manager. In version 2.3, RHEV Manager is an application that’s installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 and is used to create and manage the virtual environment. Because solution providers manage the environment from a browser, they can use any platform they prefer.
VARs can also use RHEV manager to manage the virtualization hosts. These are servers and are either running RHEV hypervisor or a full installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEV hypervisor can be best compared with VMware ESX and is a thin, minimal OS that uses KVM to host VMs. Like ESX, it works similar to a black box and you won’t get involved with it very often. VM creation and management happens completely in the RHEV Manager node, so the Linux part of the solution is almost invisible.
Another solution to host VMs is RHEL, which is a complete Linux server installation On the RHEL server, all typical Linux tools are easy to use if you encounter problems with VMs and need to, for example, open and repair a non-starting VM’s disk images. Keep in mind that you will hardly ever have to deal with the RHEL command line.
With RHEV, you can create complete virtual environments for servers and desktops. RHEV for servers includes features, such as high availability and load balancing, that other products only offer as additional purchases. RHEV for desktops also provides Active Directory (AD) integration to easily associate VMs with user accounts.
Future RHEV development
Red Hat has already received its share of criticism from the open source community for offering RHEV. It relies on Windows Server and AD in its current version, and a company using open source software as the core information and communication technologies environment doesn't typically like that. Windows is a required component in the current version because it has been purchased and was completely developed in .NET. At the moment, Red Hat engineers are working on a completely reengineered version that will be offered on Linux. In this new version, apart from AD, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-based directory servers can be used for authentication as well.
RHEV is a key product for Red Hat, and in coming years, Red Hat sees an increasing role for cloud computing with the Red Hat Enterprise Cloud solution using RHEV to easily deploy virtual servers. No dates have been made official but Red Hat employees have talked about "later this year." The upcoming release is no reason to wait on implementing RHEV for your customers because a fairly easy migration to the upcoming version is expected. At the back end, the RHEV hypervisor nodes won't change and it's just the management experience that will be different.
The current RHEV offering is an excellent solution for creating a virtualized IT infrastructure for customers without one. But it won’t replace many VMware environments because of the dependency on VMware is so high after installation and the huge investment that goes into VMware environments. That may just be among the most important reasons to offer RHEV to customers and give them the freedom to choose the software he or she wants to work with.
About the expert
Sander van Vugt is an independent trainer and consultant living in the Netherlands. Van Vugt is an expert in Linux high availability, virtualization and performance and has completed several projects that implement all three. He is also the writer of various Linux-related books, such as Beginning the Linux Command Line, Beginning Ubuntu Server Administrationand Pro Ubuntu Server Administration.
This was first published in July 2011
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Muhammad [s], though endeared and respected by Makkans for his wisdom and virtues, preferred solitude and kept his distance from the polytheist society. Disgusted with the corruption all around, he used to retire to the Cave of Hira, in a mountain a few kilometres from Makkah, meditating Allah's Majesty and worshipping Him. Initially he used to remain in the cave for a day or two and sometimes even 10 nights or more but the next few years saw him spending a whole month in that cave, praying to Allah and contemplating guidance for the deviated people.
Finally the day dawned which was change the history of the world. When he had reached the age of 40 and was engrossed as usual in praying to Allah at his retreat of cave Hira, suddenly that harbinger of Divine tidings, the Archangel Gabriel, appeared with the first verses of the Holy Qur'an:
"Recite in the name of your Lord Who created. Created man from a clot. Recite and your Lord is most Generous. Who taught (to write) with the pen. Taught man what he knew not."
Holy Qur'an (96:1-5)
With these verses, Gabriel [a] announced to Muhammad [s] that Almighty Allah had formally chosen him to be His last and final Messenger to humankind.
Muhammad's [s] heart was filled with joy, and he thanked Almighty Allah for bestowing this great honour upon him. He hurried to his house to tell his wife Khadija about his appointment to Prophethood.
Khadija on hearing the event at once believed in her husband's Prophethood and so did his young cousin Ali [a]. Consequently Ali and Khadija became the first ever male and female Muslims respectively. Thus started the beginning of a divine mission which was destined not only to cleanse the Arabian Peninsula of the filth of polytheism but whose radiance would eventually dispel darkness from all over the world.
Muhammad's [s] formal announcement of his Prophethood had a mixed reaction on Makkan society. While the oppressed classes hastened towards the call of Islam, happy that the day of deliverance had finally dawned, the Makkan oligarchy and those who felt a danger to their vested interests and hegemony; ganged up to ridicule the Prophet, in their desperate bid to nip in the bud the final revelation to the human race.
Undeterred by Jahiliyah's arrogant attempts, Muhammad [s] continued to propagate the great divine mission entrusted to him, and the next 23 years of his lifetime saw the gradual unfolding of the grand miraculous event; the Holy Qur'an, Allah's own words sent down through the Archangel Gabriel.
Even today after 14 centuries, Allah's book the Holy Qur'an stands as a living miracle for humanity. Its revelation was completed a couple of months before the Messenger's passing away, and besides containing the 'Shariah' (canonical laws) for the Muslims, it is a source of knowledge goading man to contemplate and discover the mysteries of science, inspiring high ethical values and morals in its readers and showing the perfect path for mankind's happiness both in this world and the hereafter.
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Negative Image Of People Produces Selfish Actions
Bonn, Germany (SPX) Apr 14, 2011
The expectations people have about how others will behave play a large role in determining whether people cooperate with each other or not. And moreover that very first expectation, or impression, is hard to change.
"This is particularly true when the impression is a negative one," says Michael Kurschilgen from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, summarising the key findings of a study in which he and his colleagues Christoph Engel and Sebastian Kube examined the results of so-called public good games.
One's own expectation thereby becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who expect people to act selfishly, actually experience uncooperative behaviour from others more often.
In previous studies, other researchers had successfully put participants in Bonn and London into a social dilemma with such games, which are very popular in experimental economics. Engel, Kube and Kurschilgen used them as a template for their study, which focuses on an aspect that ought to be of interest to social policymakers and town planners too.
"We wanted to find out whether the 'broken windows' theory held true in the lab as well," explained Michael Kurschilgen.
According to this theory, minor details, like broken windows in abandoned buildings or rubbish on the streets, can give rise to desolate conditions like the utter neglect of a district.
"Such signs of neglect give people the impression that social standards do not apply there," says Kurschilgen, explaining the idea behind the theory, which was the motivation behind New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's decision to embark on the zero-tolerance strategy he employed to clean up the city in the 1990s.
In their study, the three MPI scientists tested the theory in a scientific experiment. Using the kind of public good games that are often applied in the field of experimental economics, their aim was to find out the extent to which first impressions determine how people will behave, and the extent to which this can be influenced by selective information.
The games are set up around the classic dilemma of self-interest and socially minded behaviour: each member of a group of four players is given the sum of 20 tokens They can either keep these for themselves or invest them in a community project. Each player receives 0.4 tokens in return for each tokens they invest in the community project.
If all four group members invest their 20 tokens, each one of them receives 32 tokens, in other words 12 tokens more than if they all keep the money for themselves. But if only three of them invest their money in the community, the selfish fourth player gets 44 tokens.
So even the free rider profits from the other players' investment in the community fund. "The public good game thus creates a social dilemma," explains the economist. That's because it would be best for the community if everybody invested in the collective. However, on an individual level the free rider gets the best out of it. They ultimately receive the bonus without having made the investment.
Surprisingly, there are significant differences between Bonn and London in the willingness to invest in the common good. Londoners invested a mere 43 per cent, on average, in the common good. In Bonn, on the other hand, the figure was 82 per cent. "This is probably down to differing expectations of what constitutes normal behaviour," postulates Kurschilgen.
Individuals who assume that the others will act selfishly too are hardly likely to commit altruistic deeds themselves. "From that point of view, Londoners have a more pessimistic view of man than do the participants in Bonn," he concludes in respect of the Brits' reticence. Consequently, whether a person decides to behave cooperatively or not depends strongly on how that person thinks the other players will behave.
In their series of experiments, Engel, Kube and Kurschilgen told their newly recruited players from Bonn the results of the London study. The players in the new round of games evidently reacted very negatively to the information that few of the players in the previous experiments in London had exhibited cooperative behaviour.
Unlike the virtuous people of Bonn from the previous rounds, they showed far fewer pretensions of being good citizens: instead of investing more than 80 per cent in the common good, the participants in these experiments contributed just 51 per cent, on average.
Therefore, the negative information was enough to revise the previously positive image held by the Bonn residents. This model did not really work the other way around - good examples did not make bad teammates into goody two-shoes.
"Our findings demonstrate that the core of the 'broken windows' theory does actually hold true. Faced with a social dilemma, people are guided to a very great extent by their original expectations of what other people will do, but they are also particularly sensitive to negative impressions," says Kurschilgen, summing up the observations.
Given this conclusion, it is clear to him that every cent spent on maintaining residential districts does more than just make the neighbourhood look prettier - it also represents a sound investment against crime.
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All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here
Columbia, Mo. (UPI) Apr 12, 2011
An ongoing decline in newspaper readership among women isn't caused by common news writing styles used in news stories, U.S. researchers say. "We found that women are equally engaged in both 'inverted pyramid' and 'chronological narrative' news stories, so there must be another cause for the decline in female readership," said Miglena Sternadori, former doctoral student at the Missouri ... read more
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The year 2000 marked the 10th straight year of economic upswing, but it became a year of the Great Confrontation: Alan Greenspan vs. inflation. The issue: Are the good times too good? At a moment when the United States had seen its most prosperous moments ever, the Fed chairman feared that too much growth would ruin the economy. The nation's central bank wielded its power and leveled a series of quarter-point interest-rate hikes that hit the nation like karate chops; when those didn't work, Mr. Greenspan ordered a double dose, a half-point rate increase in May. The stock market corrected, credit card APRs spiked, and millions of dollars in assets were casualties in the fight for a soft landing.
But is it true that growth beyond expected levels always causes inflation? Opponents of this school of thought argue that with the world largely at peace and technology booming, Americans should be able to reap the full rewards of success. The argument is the loudest economic dispute since free-marketers rallied by Milton Friedman took on the tax-and-spend Keynesian establishment two decades ago.
This time around, Alan Greenspan has a trillion-dollar soapbox. He started the year complaining about the "wealth effect." With income and spending going up, there was more demand for more jobs at higher salaries, and inflation could result.
Many Americans thought 108 months of uninterrupted growth-and the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years-was a cause for celebration. Mr. Greenspan was cautious. In a March speech he proclaimed that "a vigilant Federal Reserve" must "effect the necessary alignment" of supply and demand. By the time the Fed was finished, the federal funds rate (that banks charge each other on overnight loans) was at the highest level in nine years. Tech stocks (real technology companies, not just dot-com stuff) trading on the Nasdaq exchange nose-dived, for that reason among many others.
By July, Mr. Greenspan announced that the economy was showing signs of slowing. Over the summer, a new problem popped up: Oil prices were soaring, hitting a 10-year high in September. By December, Mr. Greenspan said the U.S. economy had slowed "appreciably." He expressed concern that the economy was slowing too fast. Besides oil and stocks, he talked about reduced consumer and business spending.
"In periods of transition from unsustainable to more modest rates of growth," he said, "an economy is obviously at increased risk of untoward events that would be readily absorbed in a period of boom." Translation: Things may not be working as planned.
Here's a key question: Does a New Economy by its very nature create long-term positive effects so that some of the traditional cautions are no longer needed? Mr. Greenspan has even said that high-tech stocks could continue "to serve as an engine of strong productivity growth in the years ahead." This very point is precisely the one on which opponents attacked his anti-inflation saber-rattling.
Supply-side economist David Gitlitz of DG Capital Advisors proclaims that the truth is a zero-inflation reality. In an August report he argued that what experts see as the dollar's declining purchasing power is actually their inability to measure the forces fueling recent growth. "What is currently registering as inflation in the official data is in fact a statistical illusion," he said. Others beg to differ: The danger of inflation is real.
In just a few months, curiosity about a soft landing was replaced by fear of a recession. Credit is tightening. Corporate losses are rising. Stocks are down. A blanket of pessimism now covers cheerfulness about a long boom. Observers hope the Fed will lower rates soon to boost liquidity.
Some fear that deflation, not inflation, is a distinct possibility. The price of gold underperformed the Dow as usual this year. The dollar is still super-strong against other currencies, especially the struggling Euro. If Mr. Greenspan was pushing in the wrong direction, this is bad news. Rate changes take several months to filter through the economy; this means the hikes are still reverberating and any decreases won't necessarily reverse things quickly.
So far the economic fight has not moved over to the political arena. That may change soon. President-elect George W. Bush has promoted a $1.3 trillion tax cut as a bulwark against recession. An across-the-board reduction was a central plank of the Bush campaign, as he mocked his opponent's "targeted" tax cuts. Bills to eliminate the marriage penalty and change the estate tax were vetoed by President Clinton but will probably be revived soon.
The new president's plan is to drop the lowest tax rate to 10 percent from 15 percent and the highest to 33 percent from 39.6 percent. He would eliminate the inheritance tax, double the child tax credit to $1,000, and allow charitable deductions to non-itemizers. Mr. Bush also wants to allow young people to divert some Social Security taxes into private accounts.
Whether all this will become reality is uncertain. But if the economic noose tightens, look for public support to grow-despite the reticence of an evenly split Senate and a less-Republican House of Representatives.
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1. Moreover, we learn from the Scripture itself, that God gave circumcision, not as the completer of righteousness, but as a sign, that the race of Abraham might continue recognisable. For it declares:
God said unto Abraham, Every male among you shall be circumcised; and you shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, as a token of the covenant between Me and you. Genesis 17:9-11 This same does Ezekiel the prophet say with regard to the Sabbaths:
Also I gave them My Sabbaths, to be a sign between Me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord, that sanctify them. Ezekiel 20:12 And in Exodus, God says to Moses:
And you shall observe My Sabbaths; for it shall be a sign between Me and you for your generations. Exodus 21:13 These things, then, were given for a sign; but the signs were not unsymbolical, that is, neither unmeaning nor to no purpose, inasmuch as they were given by a wise Artist; but the circumcision after the flesh typified that after the Spirit. For
we, says the apostle,
have been circumcised with the circumcision made without hands. Colossians 2:11 And the prophet declares,
Circumcise the hardness of your heart. But the Sabbaths taught that we should continue day by day in God's service.
For we have been counted, says the Apostle Paul,
all the day long as sheep for the slaughter; Romans 8:36 that is, consecrated [to God], and ministering continually to our faith, and persevering in it, and abstaining from all avarice, and not acquiring or possessing treasures upon earth. Matthew 6:19 Moreover, the Sabbath of God (requietio Dei), that is, the kingdom, was, as it were, indicated by created things; in which [kingdom], the man who shall have persevered in serving God (Deo assistere) shall, in a state of rest, partake of God's table.
2. And that man was not justified by these things, but that they were given as a sign to the people, this fact shows—that Abraham himself, without circumcision and without observance of Sabbaths, James 2:23 Then, again, Lot, without circumcision, was brought out from Sodom, receiving salvation from God. So also did Noah, pleasing God, although he was uncircumcised, receive the dimensions [of the ark], of the world of the second race [of men]. Enoch, too, pleasing God, without circumcision, discharged the office of God's legate to the angels although he was a man, and was translated, and is preserved until now as a witness of the just judgment of God, because the angels when they had transgressed fell to the earth for judgment, but the man who pleased [God] was translated for salvation. Moreover, all the rest of the multitude of those righteous men who lived before Abraham, and of those patriarchs who preceded Moses, were justified independently of the things above mentioned, and without the law of Moses. As also Moses himself says to the people in Deuteronomy:
The Lord your God formed a covenant in Horeb. The Lord formed not this covenant with your fathers, but for you. Deuteronomy 5:2
3. Why, then, did the Lord not form the covenant for the fathers? Because
the law was not established for righteous men. 1 Timothy 1:9 But the righteous fathers had the meaning of the Decalogue written in their hearts and souls, that is, they loved the God who made them, and did no injury to their neighbour. There was therefore no occasion that they should be cautioned by prohibitory mandates (correptoriis literis), because they had the righteousness of the law in themselves. But when this righteousness and love to God had passed into oblivion, and became extinct in Egypt, God did necessarily, because of His great goodwill to men, reveal Himself by a voice, and led the people with power out of Egypt, in order that man might again become the disciple and follower of God; and He afflicted those who were disobedient, that they should not contemn their Creator; and He fed them with manna, that they might receive food for their souls (uti rationalem acciperent escam); as also Moses says in Deuteronomy:
And fed you with manna, which your fathers did not know, that you might know that man does not live by bread alone; but by every word of God proceeding out of His mouth does man live. Deuteronomy 8:3 And it enjoined love to God, and taught just dealing towards our neighbour, that we should neither be unjust nor unworthy of God, who prepares man for His friendship through the medium of the Decalogue, and likewise for agreement with his neighbour—matters which did certainly profit man himself; God, however, standing in no need of anything from man.
4. And therefore does the Scripture say,
These words the Lord spoke to all the assembly of the children of Israel in the mount, and He added no more; Deuteronomy 5:22 for, as I have already observed, He stood in need of nothing from them. And again Moses says:
And now Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul? Deuteronomy 10:12 Now these things did indeed make man glorious, by supplying what was wanting to him, namely, the friendship of God; but they profited God nothing, for God did not at all stand in need of man's love. For the glory of God was wanting to man, which he could obtain in no other way than by serving God. And therefore Moses says to them again:
Choose life, that you may live, and your seed, to love the Lord your God, to hear His voice, to cleave unto Him; for this is your life, and the length of your days. Deuteronomy 30:19-20 Preparing man for this life, the Lord Himself did speak in His own person to all alike the words of the Decalogue; and therefore, in like manner, do they remain permanently with us, receiving by means of His advent in the flesh, extension and increase, but not abrogation.
5. The laws of bondage, however, were one by one promulgated to the people by Moses, suited for their instruction or for their punishment, as Moses himself declared:
And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments. Deuteronomy 4:14 These things, therefore, which were given for bondage, and for a sign to them, He cancelled by the new covenant of liberty. But He has increased and widened those laws which are natural, and noble, and common to all, granting to men largely and without grudging, by means of adoption, to know God the Father, and to love Him with the whole heart, and to follow His word unswervingly, while they abstain not only from evil deeds, but even from the desire after them. But He has also increased the feeling of reverence; for sons should have more veneration than slaves, and greater love for their father. And therefore the Lord says,
As to every idle word that men have spoken, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment. Matthew 12:36 And,
he who has looked upon a woman to lust after her, has committed adultery with her already in his heart; Matthew 5:28 and, Matthew 5:22 [All this is declared,] that we may know that we shall give account to God not of deeds only, as slaves, but even of words and thoughts, as those who have truly received the power of liberty, in which [condition] a man is more severely tested, whether he will reverence, and fear, and love the Lord. And for this reason Peter says
that we have not liberty as a cloak of maliciousness, 1 Peter 2:16 but as the means of testing and evidencing faith.
Source. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103416.htm>.
Contact information. The editor of New Advent is Kevin Knight. My email address is feedback732 at newadvent.org. (To help fight spam, this address might change occasionally.) Regrettably, I can't reply to every letter, but I greatly appreciate your feedback — especially notifications about typographical errors and inappropriate ads.
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Tour du Monde
THE SACRED WORLD OF THE MAYA22.06.2010 / 16:55
What is the Tour du Monde? Click here and find out more
Text by Alex Marashian Photos by Yannick Dekeyser and Rainer Hosch
THE SACRED WORLD OF THE MAYA
The indigenous people of the Yucatán are descendants of what was — at its peak, some 1,400 years ago — arguably the most advanced civilization of the pre-Columbian Americas. The Maya created their own fully developed written language, the only one of its kind in the so-called New World. Their art, architecture and religion continue both to fascinate and challenge modern-day scholars. And their astronomical system was greater than or equal to that of any other world civilization observing with the naked eye.
Not an empire so much as a network of interdependent, often warring, city states, the Maya world spread out over large areas of what are now Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador. The Yucatán Peninsula remained a stronghold of Mayan culture and influence long after the passing of the so-called Classical Period (AD 250 - 925), and no trip to region would be complete without a visit to one or more of the many archaeological sites opening windows onto the Mayan past.
Our own archaeological tour begins with the ruins of the ancient fortress town of Tulum, about 10 minutes’ drive from the modern-day pueblo of the same name. Tulum means ‘wall’ in Mayan, and the walls on three sides of the site belie its strategic importance for trade and defense. On the fourth side is the sea, and the Mayans must be given credit for choosing some the most spectacular seaside real estate in the world. As it happens, the location is not merely breathtakingly beautiful but highly functional, positioned as it is directly in front of a break in the reefs, allowing easy access to trading boats.
The cliff rising over the beach afforded protection and was the ideal position for a pyramid watchtower, “el Castillo” as the Spaniards called it, the tallest structure in all Tulum. The sight of El Castillo towering over the white sands and turquoise waters below is so impressive you might be tempted to overestimate the importance of Tulum. In the end, it is a relatively minor ruin in a major setting. To get a better sense of the architecture and culture of the ancient Mayans, we move on to the more historically important ruins at Coba, some 45 minute’s drive inland from Tulum.
Coba’s setting deep in the jungle is a large part of its allure. At its pinnacle, the tail end of the Late Classical period (800 - 1000), the settlement is believed to have covered 50 square kilometers and housed some 40,000 Mayans. The vast majority of the ruins — indeed the vast majority of all ancient Maya cities — are still covered by jungle and have yet to be excavated. The few sections, known as groups, that have been unearthed since work began in the early 1970s are spread so far apart that bicycles are needed to get from one to the other, and despite the sweltering heat, it’s remarkable good fun peddling through the jungle among the ruins.
Obscure though it remains, the ancient Mayan world comes alive much more vividly at Coba than at Tulum. Highlights for us included the well-preserved ball courts — one from the Classical period, one from the post-Classical — at which not the losers but the winners were sacrificed to the gods (a great honor and means to reincarnation), and the pyramid temple of Nohuch Mul. At 42m, Nohuch Mul is the second highest Mayan building on the on Yucatán Peninsula and a hike to the top is well worth the effort. The view is of green jungle as far as the eye can see, and one can’t help but marvel at the awesome achievements of the Maya in such punishing climate and conditions.
As we leave Coba, the Maya are much on our minds. It’s easy to think of them in the past tense, especially after a visit to an archaeological ruin. But the fact is that the Maya, their language (eight dialects of it) and their culture (or at least some part of it) live on today, despite the unconscionable oppression they suffered, first at the hands of the Spanish colonizers, then of the Mexican state. Though the state no longer the problem, at least not directly, the threat to Mayan culture continues nowadays in the form of the tourism industry, which increasingly saps towns and villages of their young people, who tend to end up in the most menial of jobs in tourist traps like Cancun and, more recently, Playa del Carmen.
Shortly after returning to Tulum and the charming Coquí Coquí, we hear, through our growing network of expat contacts, of a British artist named Danny Harrington who is working on a project of epic proportions about the Maya — and one which deals with many of the issues we’ve been discussing. Danny agrees to meet us at a beach a few kilometers away, where our photo team is winding up a day of shooting, and we head out. Handsome, tan and armed with one hell of a machete, Danny has been living on the beach at Tulum with his wife and two daughters for about six years. The girls actually speak a bit of Maya, having picked up it from their school friends, and Danny himself is on a mission to learn at least a little. It’s all part of his project, titled “Walk the Walk.”
If the Maya are getting a bit of play in the media of late, it’s all thanks to their calendar. The winter solstice (December 21) of the year 2012 is supposed to mark the end of the “great cycle” of 13 b’ak’tuns — periods of 144,000 days each — that began on the Maya’s mythical day of creation. Some people, not least the blockbuster movie direction Roland Emmerich, have taken the close of this cycle to portend the end of the world. Others have seen it as the moment of a global shift and the world’s entry into a New Age.
For the Maya themselves, December 21, 2012, is clearly a date of significance, the beginning of a “great change”, as it is sometimes put. Many Mayans, says Danny, believe “that something’s going to happen” on the date. And if that something turns out to be disaster, the one place to be is right here on the Yucatan Peninsula. For the ancient Mayas, the town of Xocen, which still exists today, was the “center of the world.” According to myth, everything within a 120 mile radius of Xocen, including, by a hair’s breadth, Tulum, will be safe when the calendar cycle comes to an end.
Danny’s project uses Xocen and the “great change” as a point of departure. Literally. On August 12, 2010, Danny, his friend and collaborator, Olivier Pascalin, and a group of Mayans and non-Mayans alike will set off from Xocen down an ancient Mayan sacbe — a sacred, raised road, once paved with white limestone — that heads straight to Coba. The road itself, part of the vast network of sacbes connecting Mayan sites as far away as Costa Rica, has been lost to the jungle. But Danny and his machete-wielding team intend to uncover it. “It’s back the the jungle” says Danny of the adventure ahead. The heat will be brutal, the mosquitos merciless, the vegetation dense and dank, but that’s part of the point. The trip will be a form of purification — at many levels.
Danny sees the project as a re-opening “for the present-day Mayas” of a path once used for “communication, illumination and knowledge,” its history cut short 500 years ago by “the invaders.” He estimates that he and his team will be able to hack through five kilometers per day, making this a journey of about three weeks. In my brief encounters with the jungle at Coba and the relatively tame mosquitos on the coast, I find it hard to imagine keeping up such a pace. But I’ll be rooting for Danny and his fellow travelers. And for those who happen to be in the south of France in the coming weeks, you can get a foretaste of “Walking the Walk” at the AP’Art festival of contemporary art in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, which runs from 8 to 13 July. For that event, Danny will, in his words, “pre-create” a video installation that captures the spirit and sense of the journey itself.
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Punxsutawney Phil will make headlines again on Groundhog Day, Feb. 2, and The Humane Society of the United States is encouraging people to celebrate the day by learning more about our wild neighbors and ways to peacefully coexist. As Phil comes out of his hole after a long winter sleep, groundhogs everywhere are reemerging in gardens and yards throughout the country.
“People are excited to see Phil on Feb. 2, but within weeks, some homeowners will complain about groundhogs eating flowers and garden vegetables,” said Laura Simon, field director of Wildlife & Habitat Protection community programs for The HSUS. “With the right tools and a little tolerance, people can easily discourage unwanted groundhog activity in their gardens and peacefully coexist with them.”
Groundhogs – also known as woodchucks – hibernate from October through February and start breeding shortly thereafter. That means an abundance of groundhogs setting their sights on eating gardens, digging burrows and coming into conflict with their human neighbors.
Simple solutions to keep groundhogs from hogging their way into your garden
- Scare Them – To temporarily discourage frequent visits to your garden, place objects in the area that will reflect sunlight and continually move in the breeze, such as tethered Mylar party balloons, “animal scaring” balloons with faces and big eyes or dangling pieces of Mylar tape.
- Exclude Them – Since groundhogs do not like to climb unstable fences, installing a wobbly 3 to 4 foot-high mesh barrier around a garden keeps them away permanently. The HSUS recommends using regular green garden fencing, which comes in 16 gauge, 4-foot-tall mesh rolls. This mesh is available at most garden, hardware and home building stores. A trick for success when installing is to extend the bottom 12 inches of mesh outward, parallel to the ground, and pin this portion securely to the ground with landscaping staples. This “apron” will discourage them from digging under the fence. Also, make sure the top portion of the mesh is not taut when securing to fence posts, so it wobbles when challenged, which discourages the groundhogs from climbing over.
The HSUS Wild Neighbors Program promotes non-lethal means for resolving conflicts between people and wildlife and cultivates understanding and appreciation for wild animals commonly found in cities and towns.
The program's book, Wild Neighbors: The Humane Approach to Living with Wildlife is a useful reference for individuals and communities faced with resolving encounters with wild animals who find their way into yards, gardens, houses, parks and playgrounds.
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Remains of a large auditorium built in 123 AD by Emperor Hadrian have been uncovered under Piazza Venezia in Rome during excavations for the new underground metro line's station, according to this Guardian article. The building has a marble floor and is believed to have been used as an art center. Archeologists spent five years excavating the site which is now open to the public. Piazza Venezia is a main transportation hub in central Rome and site of the Victor Emmanuel II monument, Italy's first king. Nearby are the Capitoline Museums.
More Ancient Rome Sites
Victor Emmanuel II Monument in Piazza Venezia © by James Martin, Europe Travel
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After Delays, NJ Weighs Health Care Options
Wednesday, November 07, 2012
President Obama's re-election means that his signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, will be fully implemented over the next two years. The Christie administration had put off taking some of the required steps, instead waiting to see how the election played out.
One of the key requirements of ACA is a requirement that everyone purchase insurance, and that state’s are expected to set up a health insurance exchange, a marketplace where individuals can shot for health insurance benefits. Christie vetoed legislation that would have set up such an exchange.
Governor Chris Christie faces a November 16 deadline on whether to agree to set up an exchange or let the federal government take over the task.
Lee Keogh, a managing editor with our partner New Jersey Spotlight, tells WNYC’s Amy Eddings there will be an exchange one way or another, but New Jerseyans would prefer that it not be set up by the federal government.
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