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Sir — In the article, “Nation on a hill” (Dec 31), Rudrangshu Mukherjee contrasts urban, educated and affluent India with underprivileged and oppressed Bharat. His analysis provides a holistic view of the economic factors that separate India and Bharat, and the role of the State in all this. However, given the backdrop of the ongoing protests in Delhi, we must also look at the sociological aspects of the divide. The divide is most stark in the value systems of the educated urban population and those of the rural or small-town populations. Country-to-city migration on a large scale inevitably leads to a clash of values and cultures.
It must be understood in this context that everyone in the rural areas is not underprivileged or oppressed. The countryside has received a large amount of government subsidies and pays minimal taxes. There is also a divide within rural Bharat between the rich beneficiaries who wield power and the poor. But the culture here is essentially feudal, and social power structures are guided by it. As a result, a derogatory attitude towards women prevails in society. Moreover, torture and oppression of women are supported by social institutions such as the khap panchayats. With migration, this feudal value system is transferred to the urban space. Further, political representation of the urban population has not kept pace with its increasing size. Rural Bharat still dominates political representation. So we should not be surprised at the feudal attitude of the political class and all that goes with it, including a discriminatory view of women. This is the reason behind India not being able to adopt constructive reforms that would help resolve its crises.
Bhaskar Majumdar, Kuwait
Sir — Hats off to The Telegraph for the well-timed editorial, “No harm if the slip shows” (Dec 29). It condemns a politician’s remarks, which, to say the least, are preposterous and outrageous. The attacks and counter-attacks among rival political parties across the country point to a shameful degradation of values. This phenomenon is most starkly evident in West Bengal, where politicians seem to be engaged in a mud-slinging frenzy.
It is simply unthinkable that the son of the president of the country — who is supposed to be an educated young member of parliament — could make a hideous remark about the women protesting against rape. He described the women in the street protests as “dented and painted.” This does not seem to be a mere slip of tongue. One is tempted to believe that he made the comment intentionally, perhaps because he wanted to gain publicity.
The same can be said about the sexist comment made by a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Anisur Rahman. Rahman made a filthy jibe at the chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, on the pretext of raising an objection to the recurrent incidents of rape in West Bengal. By doing this, Rahman has followed in the footsteps of CPI(M) leaders like Anil Basu, Benoy Konar and Sushanta Ghosh, who had made defamatory remarks in the past and were severely criticized for that.
The editorial has rightly said that such distasteful behaviour has almost become institutionalized in this state. That both Abhijit Mukherjee and Rahman accepted their fault and tendered an apology do not take away from the fact that the socio-political ambience of Bengal has become extremely polluted. This must not be condoned.
The system needs an immediate cleansing. For a start, the chief minister must herself desist from making untoward remarks in attacking her political opponents.
P.B. Saha, Calcutta
Sir — The comment made by Abhijit Mukherjee about the women who participated in the street protests at India Gate against the gang-rape of a student is shameful. The way in which he described the women as “sundari” (beautiful) and as being “dented and painted” is extremely offensive. It proves that our patriarchal society continues to view a woman as an object.
It is disgusting when a civilized and educated young man holding a responsible post in the administration makes such an undignified comment about women. The Congress MP from Jangipur must realize the extent to which he has hurt the sentiments of the women in his constituency.
Indrani Sengupta, Jalpaiguri
Sir — Indian society is now in a grave crisis. The Delhi rape case brings forth crucial questions about the security of women. Today, rape is not only a brutal assault on the rights and freedoms of women but a political weapon as well. Political parties constantly indulge in bitter squabbles over this issue instead of offering constructive solutions to the problem. Passing insulting remarks about female protestors and making indecent comments about the chief minister are ignominious acts. They show the vulgar side of political witticism. The situation has worsened because of the volatile ethics of the political class. It is revolting that our leaders use sensitive issues to their own advantage.
The leaders should learn to handle rape cases in a more sensible manner. They must strive to eradicate violence against women from society. Politicians cutting across party lines must work together to achieve this goal. And they should not politicize the matter. Formal apologies are meaningless until and unless our leaders are truly repentant about their attitude.
Soumya Bhattacharya, Calcutta
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The International Herald Tribune carried the story yesterday of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's latest gaffe. In response to the recent seeming increase in rapes in and around Rome, Berlusconi proposed to deploy 300,000 soldiers in the streets to fight crime. But he qualified this solution by saying, "You can't consider deploying a force that would be sufficient to prevent the risk. We would have to have so many soldiers because our women are so beautiful."
Giovanna Melandri of the opposition Democratic Party said Berlusconi's comments were "profoundly offensive," saying the pain of rape could never be joked about in such a way.
Berlusconi, in an effort to explain himself, said he was complimenting Italian women "because there are only about 100,000 people in law enforcement, while there are millions of beautiful women."
He stressed that rape was a serious and "disgraceful" crime. But he added that people should never forget a sense of "levity and good humor" whenever his comments are concerned.
This strange frivolous attitude is typical of the Prime Minister. Some feel it's because he thinks he's above the law and above the normal restraints people normally have to exercise in public life. He says whatever he wants. His background as one of the wealthiest businessmen in the world as a media mogul prior to entering politics might lend credence to this theory.
A few years ago he amazed the world and created an international incident when he said German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could play a Nazi in the movies. His reluctance to apologize for these gaffes, I suppose, is based on the fact that they're made in jest and it's not his fault if people don't have a sense of humor.
After 9/11 he made comments about Islam that were much more serious, at least when taken out of context. One of his famous quotes is this:
"We must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its value understanding of diversity and tolerance."Immediately after these remarks the rest of Europe denounced him as imprudent and reckless, perhaps endangering our countries unnecessarily. One response was to compare Berlusconi to bin Laden.
"The billionaire [Osama] Bin Laden and the billionaire Berlusconi are cut from the same anti-communist cloth. They both represent fundamentalism - one of the markets, the other of religion."
What's your opinion? Do you think Berlusconi is like bin Laden? Do you think his making a joke at the expense of the German Chancellor was so wrong? Do you think his making light of rape is acceptable?
Please leave a comment. Thanks to Bob S. for the idea.
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March is Minnesota FoodShare month. This is the time when donations made to Sibley County FoodShare keep on giving because the Minnesota Food Bank will match a certain percentage of the food and dollars that are donated to our Sibley County Food Shelf during the month of March. The Feinstein Foundation of Rhode Island will also match a percentage of food and dollars donated in March and April.
Often times the question is asked, “Does hunger really exist in Sibley County?” The answer is “yes.” In 2009, Sibley County FoodShare served 7,383 individuals. This is an increase of 24% over the number served in 2008. It is projected 2010 will find even more households seeking help from our food shelf.
Sibley County FoodShare has been serving the hungry in Sibley County for over 28 years. It has existed during this time on the donations and generosity of the people of our county. For this we thank the wonderful, caring people that have made this possible through sharing their blessings and by volunteering their time to help at the food shelf. We ask for your ongoing support as we continue to provide assistance to hungry children and adults.
Will you please join the March campaign and donate to help end hunger in Sibley County?
Your donations are tax deductible. Thank you.
Sibley County FoodShare
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Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is specific software that allows a company to measure and control contacts with customers. CRM can be used for controlling contacts with a customer either by phone, fax, mail and e-mail. The data collected can be used for research and analysis of the customer relationship.
The Customer Relationship Management is the procedure that is crucial for every business. As the customer is the most important part of the business, the CRM is the procedure that analyzes the contact with the customers in a call center for example.
There are four important characteristics that CRM system may offer you:
1. First it will track and report every interaction with a customer, describing the customer's purchase, interest or demand. It will report also the changing needs of the customer and the way your business reacts effectively to them.
2. Furthermore, the CRM will be a universal instrument for collecting data about the service requests, order entry, satisfaction and billing.
3. Third, the CRM will be able to measure the performance of the business on the basis of internal benchmarks.
4. Last the CRM will facilitate the working processes by emphasizing on the positive and exclude the negative practices in your customer relations center.
Check out our SugarCRM hosting and vTiger hosting for a complete solution for hosting the CRM application you have chosen to use
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Research in the Universities of the New Zealand
Actually the universities of the New Zealand are research based institutions and all the teaching staff always undertakes original research. These teaching staff has to develop a knowledge which is new in their respected fields. Actually the research based teaching is supposed to be the key character that distinguishes universities from all other tertiary education institutions and also enhance the depth and quality of the education that is based in the University of New Zealand.
The best thing that you will find in the universities of the New Zealand is that they maintain very high level of research activity which is recognized worldwide. The best proof that you will find in this research quality is the impression list of the publications and books. The education of the New Zealand is the best that is the reason the students of New Zealand get awards and many distinct achievements while studying in New Zealand.
For more information about Study in New Zealand please visit here:
About the Author
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'Matter of Laugh or Death,' a humor column
By Bill Dunn
Interesting observations on this thing we call life
(appearing each week in the Republican-American newspaper, Waterbury, CT)
IT’S IN THE WILL: DRESS TO THRILL
I hate to discuss a morbid topic, but my wife recently told me that if she dies before I do, I will not be allowed to own anything but plain clothing. No stripes, no plaids, no bright colors. This is indeed a morbid topic—you have no idea how awful I’d look if all wardrobe decisions were left entirely to me. Actually, the word morbid is not correct. A more appropriate phrase might be “clown college.”
(Oh, although it might be considered morbid to discuss the possibility of having your wife predecease you, in my wife’s mind, that’s nothing compared to what it would be like if I dressed myself.)
You see, I am 100-percent fashion impaired. I have no comprehension of how my clothes appear to others. It’s not even on my radar screen. It’s like asking a tone deaf person to sing in public. It’s like asking Stevie Wonder to read the eye chart. It’s like asking a chipmunk to solve algebra problems. It’s like asking a two-bit humor columnist to come up with funny “It’s like…” analogies.
I simply do not possess even a partial DNA strand of the universal “fashion sense” gene. My condition might even be covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Or at least the Americans with No Taste Act.
To me, here are the three most important considerations when choosing what to wear:
The following scenario has played out a billion times in the last quarter century: I’m in the bedroom getting dressed. After putting on a pair of pants and a shirt, I turn to my wife and say, “Well?”
She shakes her head and says, “Almost, dear. But try a different shirt, please.”
“Why?” I reply defensively. “What’s wrong with this shirt?”
With incredible patience and compassion, she answers, using the same tone and cadence one might use to explain to a kindergarten student that it’s not a good idea to eat a whole jar of paste, “Well, you see, orange stripes do not go very well with green plaid. Try a plain colored shirt, OK?”
This is why my wife recently had her last will and testament revised. If she goes first, her will now instructs the probate judge to visit our home and remove everything from my closet that even hints of stripes or plaid or any color more vibrant than beige. And her will clearly says this home visit MUST occur before her funeral, because even then, she’ll be embarrassed beyond measure if I am at the head of the receiving line wearing an outfit of my own choosing.
Of course, I’m sure she has nothing to worry about. My personal donuts-only diet and break-a-sweat-once-every-Leap-Year exercise program is designed to make sure I’m the one who goes first. But when that happens, my wife is still not out of the woods. I also had my last will and testament revised recently. When I go, it’s spelled out very clearly, in an official legal document, that the funeral director MUST lay me out for the wake wearing my comfortable orange striped shirt and green plaid pants.
When that happens, morbid crying in not allowed. But laughter is always welcomed.
|Home||Current Faith||Current Funnies||Faith Archive||Funnies Archive||Contact Bill|
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Meet us at the InnoTrans! 19-22 September 2006, Messe Berlin, Hall 4.1, Stand 129
The aerodynamics of trains is just one of the topics from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) that will be on display at InnoTrans, the international trade show for rail traffic technology, from 19-22 September 2006, in Berlin. In addition, DLR scientists will highlight wind tunnel research, which was used to design the shape of ICE 1 trains. Also on display will be the newest optical measuring techniques for wind tunnels, all as part of the "Rail Research at the German Aerospace Center" showcase.
During the four-day Berlin InnoTrans event, DLR will showcase a wide spectrum of rail transportation research activities. One highlight of recent research work will come from the DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology, in Göttingen. Institute scientists have equipped special wind tunnels with the latest modern optical measuring equipment. For the first time, air flow and density field surveys for high-speed train models are being tracked in the Cryogenic Wind Tunnel, in Cologne, and in the High-Pressure Wind Tunnel (HDG), in Göttingen (both are part of the German-Dutch Wind Tunnels (DNW) programme), providing a realistic simulation of the Reynolds number, a physical quantity used by engineers to characterise the flow of air around a moving object.
Numerical simulation of side wind effects on a high-speed train
Due to the increasing importance of high-speed rail transportation, DLR is now focusing not only on aerodynamic optimisation for trains, but also on sustaining and improving safety and boosting environmental friendliness. Significant aerodynamic investigations are thus being accomplished both in the context of framework programme research projects and in close co-operation with train manufacturers.
A second element of the DLR presence at InnoTrans will be provided by DLR's Institute of Traffic Management and Vehicle Control. Scientists from the Brunswick, Germany-based institute will showcase their activities directed at traffic management and safety technology, including their railway simulation laboratory, dubbed RailSiTe®, which provides modular real-time simulation.
RailSiTe® enables new systems and components to be tested for intercompatibility and safety, independent of individual manufacturers. The uniform European Train Control System, which is scheduled to replace the 16 different systems now in use in Europe, places emphasis on research and development in the face of diverse challenges. DLR aims to provide important enabling technologies, including new components and systems, and develop deployment strategies in which migration can take place efficiently and effectively
The Stuttgart-based DLR Institute of Vehicle Concepts will also display rail-running vehicles of the future. The aim is to inform InnoTrans visitors of their present state of development, new technologies and driving mechanisms. Included in the presentation will be the latest composite construction elements and modular train car structures. In Stuttgart and other research institutes, energy flows within vehicles are being successfully modelled with the aim of deploying a working hybrid energy storage system.
Innovative air flow and density field surveys in the CryoWind Tunnel
Further, train transportation applications based on the Galileo satellite navigation system are being developed by DLR's Institute of Traffic Management and Vehicle Control, working together with the Institute of Communications and Navigation, located in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. The Galileo system will be capable of providing precise location information, which, for example, could be used to validate train integrity or to avoid collisions.
Focusing on passenger and freight traffic, InnoTrans, with its prime focus on rail transportation technology, is considered to be the top international venue for vendor and user communities alike. DLR aims to promote itself at the trade show in Berlin, home to some 220 transportation engineering companies, as a reliable partner for a diverse and growing range of transportation research activities.
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Even Mr. Ropes
, in his championing of Buell
the soldier, omits Buell
the man. Now Buell
, sulking over his wrongs, declined, when invited, to come back and take a command again.
He found his dignity more important to him than the Union
, meeting singular injustice after winning Donelson
, has such words as these to say : “If my course is not satisfactory, remove me at once.
I do not wish to impede in any way the success of our arms.”
Good authority rates Buell
a more military soldier than Grant
, and very likely he was. But Buell
thought of himself and forgot his country, while Grant
thought of his country and forgot himself.
Out of this very contrast a bright light falls, and we begin to see Grant
Writing intemperately, his friends explain him as a sort of Napoleon
; his enemies, as a dull blunderer, accidentally reaping the glory which other people sowed.
These extremes meet in error.
We have not
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Darwinism/Darwinist: Now a term of reproach?
Regular readers of this space will note that I have recently been publishing a number of pieces on why I determined about three years ago that Darwinism was failing as a theory and that ID would become a hot controversy in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century.
If Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years? Yes! Despite a clear history of a century and a half of acceptance, a key Darwinist actually did his best to make it sound like an insult. Read on!
Some wonder why I, a mere journalist, sense that Darwinism is doomed.
Well, I observe and interview people and study how they behave.
One curious fact is that the venerable term Darwinism/Darwinist now makes Darwinists uncomfortable.
This problem hit the top of my intray last year a Canadian church bureaucrat took me to task for using the term "Darwinism/Darwinist" in By Design or by Chance?, because, she insisted, that I was "following the ID lead" when I used the term "Darwinism."
Now, in the early stages of research, I had made a careful study of the terminology used in the debate. I knew that "Darwinism" was commonly used among Darwinian evolutionists - probably only because Darwinism (and Darwinist) is easier and briefer.
So at the time, I dismissed the churchcrat summarily by pointing out the following:
- 0 -
See, for example, the following examples, where - for your convenience - I have highlighted the relevant words:
Here, for example, is Richard Dawkins:
I'm a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God ... ,
- Richard Dawkins
The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a minor gloss on Darwinism, one which Darwin himself might well have approved if the issue had been discussed in his time. As a minor gloss, it does not deserve a particularly large measure of publicity. (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker," , Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.250)
The famous evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr said,
The real core of Darwinism is the theory of natural selection. This theory is so important for the Darwinian because it permits the explanation of adaptation, the `design' of the natural theologian, by natural means, instead of by divine intervention. (p. 138 Ernst Mayr (Foreword to M. Ruse, Darwinism Defended, Reading, Mass. Addison-Wesley, 1982, pp. xi-xii))
H. Allen Orr, a committed Darwinian biologist and opponent of ID, trashing one of Dawkins's notions (the "meme"), says:
... , it is simply not true that Darwinism works with any substrate, no matter what. Indeed Darwinism can't even explain old-fashioned *biological* evolution if the hereditary substrate doesn't behave just right. Evolution would quickly grind to a halt, for instance, if inheritance were blending, not particulate. With blending inheritance, the genetic material from two parents seamlessly blends together like different colored paints. With particulate Mendelian inheritance, genes from Mom and Dad remain forever distinct in Junior. This substrate problem was so acute that turn-ofthe-century biologists -- all fans of blending inheritance -- concluded that Darwinism just can't work. ...." (Orr H.A., "Dennett's Strange Idea: Natural Selection: Science of Everything, Universal Acid, Cure for the Common Cold ... . Review of "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," by Daniel C. Dennett, Simon and Schuster. Boston Review, Vol. 21., No. 3., Summer 1996.)
And here is Lynn Margulis, Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts. Margulis is, I take it, a naturalistic evolutionist, but a fan of the Gaia hypothesis rather than of neo-Darwinism. She calls the latter 'a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology,' and has said of proponents of the theory, that they,
wallow in their zoological, capitalistic, competitive, cost-benefit interpretation of Darwin---having mistaken him.... Neo-Darwinism, which insists on (the slow accrual of mutations), is in a complete funk. (Mann, C. (1991) "Lynn Margulis: Science's Unruly Earth Mother," Science, 252, 378-381), Behe, Darwin's Black Box 1, p. 26)
Harold, Franklin, writing about the complexity of cell, says,
We should reject, as a matter of principle, the substitution of intelligent design for the dialogue of chance and necessity (16); but we must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations. There is room for discovery here, and for reflection too; nowhere is the appeal of Gould's "pluralistic Darwinism " more keenly felt than in the study of cell evolution. (The Way of the Cell, p. 204.)
All of these people are/have been pretty mainstream within the naturalistic movement in science over the last hundred years (unless you count Lyn Margulis out because she is a woman and an unruly Earth mother). In fact, for some (perhaps many) prominent Darwinian biologists, the terms Darwinism/Darwinist cover both the specific process of natural selection acting on random mutation and the philosophical view of naturalism that so many of them apparently believe:
I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn't all be right, so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realised the shattering complexity and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since. (Dawkins R., "You Ask The Questions," Independent, 23 February 2003)
- 0 -
However, I now think I may have been too hard on that churchcrat (or churchadmin? I don't mind raising her pay grade.)
You see, I have just discovered a most interesting fact from
Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design . The churchcrat might have been misled by Darwinists themselves on this point. Wells writes,
Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson recently claimed that the word “Darwinism” was coined by enemies of Darwin to make him look bad. “It’s a rhetorical device to make evolution seem like a kind of faith, like ‘Maoism’,” said Wilson in Newsweek in November 2005. “Scientists,” Wilson added, “don’t call it Darwinism.” (P. 10)
But, as I myself have shown above, they do.
And, as Wells notes, they have done so since 1864, when Darwin's bulldog, T.E. Huxley was first recorded using the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Wells, p. 10).
Wells notes that Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould used the term "extensively" in their writings and a host of biology hopefuls have also applied Darwinism's sacred name in the titles of their articles.
But come to think of it, while I was researching By Design or by Chance? "Christian evolutionists" used to fret when I used the term casually, in the very way that the Darwinists themselves use it.
Christian evolutionists, so far as I can tell, live in a sort of unreal world where one espouses Darwinism while pretending not to know what it means. So Ms. Churchcrat may have been honestly misled after all. She would be foolish to be more angry with me than with those who misled her, but you never know.
But if Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years?
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War hero guided Eastern Air Lines
A decorated military pilot who espoused big aviation dreams commanded one of the nation’s flagship airlines which once called Miami its home.
Eddie Rickenbacker, a World War I hero and race car driver, already had the taste of success when he began managing Eastern Air Lines in 1933. For the next 30 years, Rickenbacker would make an important contribution to South Florida’s growth and development.
Eastern, under Rickenbacker’s guidance, was one of the America’s early leading major airlines, especially in the 1940s and ’50s when South Florida was becoming a prime vacation destination as well as a year-round residence for an increasing number of northerners.
Five years after General Motors put Eastern Air Lines under Rickenbacker’s management, Rickenbacker, along with a group of investors, bought the company in 1938, and he became its first president.
Eastern became known for its innovations, including successful negotiations with the government to acquire air mail routes, a job previously performed by the Army. Rickenbacker is credited for developing new aircraft designs and improving salaries and working conditions for its employees.
Rickenbacker, whose sayings are included on “famous quotations” websites, once wrote: “Aviation is proof that, given the will, we have the capacity to achieve the impossible.”
It seems that Rickenbacker would spend most of his life pursuing – and often accomplishing – that goal.
Born in 1890 in Columbus, Ohio, to German-speaking Swiss immigrants, Rickenbacker worked at a car repair garage at age 12 after the death of his father. The job sparked his interest in machines and laid the foundation for Rickenbacker’s interest in race car driving, automobile production and aircraft.
Joining the Army in 1917 after the United States entered World War I, Rickenbacker shot down an enemy plane in April 1918 after only a few weeks of pilot training. Seven months later, by the end of war in November, Rickenbacker had shot down 26 planes. He became a national hero, celebrated as America’s most successful fighter pilot of the war. The “Ace of the Aces,” as he was nicknamed, was awarded a Medal of Honor in 1930 from President Herbert Hoover.
“He was the highest-scoring American ace in World War I and well into World War II where his score still stood,” said Stephen Sherman, an aviation and World War II expert. Rickenbacker is featured on Sherman’s website, Acepilots.com.
Before becoming a military hero, Rickenbacker was a national race car driver and a frequent challenger on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Of his 42 major races, he won seven, placed second in two, and came in third in three.
He was a bit of a “know-it-all,” Sherman said of Rickenbacker’s varied successes.
Following World War I, Rickenbacker went into car production and in 1920 created the Rickenbacker Motor Co. Although Rickenbacker pioneered the first four-wheel brake system that became the basis of design for other American car systems, the company went bankrupt in 1927. That same year he bought the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Rickenbacker operated the course for 10 years and in 1929 put an 18-hole golf course in the middle of the grounds. To save gasoline during World II, Rickenbacker closed the speedway in 1941 and later sold it in 1945 while he was at the helm at Eastern.
He resigned as president in 1959 when the company was experiencing an economic downturn, and as director and chairman of the board in 1963. After retirement, Rickenbacker and his wife, Adelaide Frost Duran, eventually settled in Key Biscayne. The couple previously had a winter home in Coconut Grove. Rickenbacker died in 1973 of pneumonia while in Switzerland seeking special medical treatment for his wife.
Two years after Rickenbacker’s death, Eastern Air Lines moved its headquarters from New York to Miami International Airport. After filing for bankruptcy in 1989, the company dissolved in 1991.
Rickenbacker is remembered in numerous ways. The causeway over Biscayne Bay that connects Miami to Virginia Key and Key Biscayne is named after him. Cartoonist Al Capp featured Rickenbacker as an airplane pilot character in his Li’l Abner series. “Cap’n Eddie Ricketyback” was a decrepit World War I aviator and proprietor of Dogpatch Airlines.
Rickenbacker was portrayed by Tom McKee in the 1955 film, “The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell,” a story of Gen. Billy Mitchell, a crusader for the Army’s fledgling air corps. Rickenbacker’s exploits are chronicled in a number of books, including his own work, “Fighting the Flying Circus, ’’ his memoir of World War I.
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Southern New Castle County has a land area of 190 square miles in north-central Delaware. It is predominantly a rural area with a population of about 9,000 people who are engaged chiefly in agriculture. By and large, the residents are dependent upon ground water as a source of potable water. This investigation was made to provide knowledge of the availability and quality of the ground-water supply to aid future development. The climate, surface features, and geology of the area are favorable for the occurrence of ground water. Temperatures are generally mild and precipitation is normally abundant and fairly evenly distributed throughout the year. The topography of the area is relatively flat and, hence, the streams have low gradients. The surface is underlain to a considerable depth by highly permeable unconsolidated sediments that range in age from Early Cretaceous to Recent.
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A food allergy is an immune system response to a food that the body mistakenly believes is harmful. Although an individual could be allergic to any food, such as fruits, vegetables, and meats, there are eight foods that account for 90% of all food-allergic reactions. These are: milk, egg, peanut, tree nut (walnut, cashew, etc.), fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat.
Ott Foods, LLC is committed to your health. Please insure you do not have an allergic reaction to any of our famous dressings.
Note: You will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file. You may download the program by clicking here.
What are Lycopenes?
Lycopenes are a very potent, naturally occurring antioxidant. They give ripe tomatoes their vibrant red color. Antioxidants have long been recognized for their potential health benefits.
The tomato paste in each 16 oz. bottle of Ott’s Famous Dressing contains lycopenes, and since Ott’s Famous Dressing contains vegetable oil, the lycopenes are readily absorbed by your body.
A good reason for you and your family to try Ott’s Famous Dressing today!
For more information on Lycopenes, visit this site: www.lycopene.org
Ott Food Products, LLC
705 West Fairview
Carthage, MO 64836
(417) 358-2585 • 800-866-2585
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Tue March 12, 2013
St. Louis County Council Approves Anti-Sweatshop Rules, Hears Concerns About Power Plant
On Tuesday night, the St. Louis County Council approved changes to its purchasing rules that prevent vendors from supplying it with garments made in so-called sweatshops.
Under the new rules sweatshop practices are defined in part as failing to comply with labor laws of the country where the garments were made and exposing workers to toxic chemicals.
Councilman Greg Quinn was the only member to vote against new procedures, saying the language of the ordinance is unclear, especially with regards to overtime pay.
In contrast, the bill’s sponsor, Councilman Pat Dolan, said the updated rules will protect the human rights of workers who make clothing purchased by the county.
Under the proposed rule changes, any vender that does not comply will be barred from doing business with the county for one year.
Power Plant Concerns
Several residents told council members they were concerned about emissions from the Meramec Power Plant in Oakville.
John Hickey, chapter director of the Sierra Club of Missouri, told the council that sulfur dioxide emissions from the power plant are well above standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The Meramec Coal Plant puts S02 into air in such concentrations that it causes public health problems like asthma and stroke,” Hickey said.
County Executive Charlie Dooley said that the county would take steps to ensure adequate monitoring of air quality near the plant.
“St. Louis County does not have that responsibility any more, it’s the Missouri Department of Natural Resources,” Dooley said. “We will write them a letter and indicate that we would like them to monitor air in that area.”
A representative with Ameren, which runs the plant, was not immediately available for comment after the meeting.
Follow Tim Lloyd on Twitter: @TimSLloyd
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|About this Recording
9.80003 - KARAJAN, Herbert von: Philharmonia Pop Concert (1953-1955)
Herbert von Karajan
JOHANN STRAUSS II
JOHANN STRAUSS I
JOHANN STRAUSS II
FRANZ VON SUPPÉ
The Viennese tradition of the waltz had its light-hearted French counterpart in Waldteufel, born Emile Levy in Strasbourg in 1837. He came to occupy a position similar to that of Strauss in Vienna as director of music for the court balls under the patronage of the Empress Eugenie, until the revolution after the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war. His career was resumed largely through the patronage of the Prince of Wales. His famous Skaters' Waltz (Les patineurs) belongs to this later period of his life.
On 24 November 1858, at one of his first concerts in Vienna, Strauss introduced a new piece as an encore, the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka. The new work proved a sensation, prompting the Wiener Allgemeine Theaterzeitung to say its review 3 days later: "Johann Strauss's enormously successful 'Tritsch-Tratsch-Polka', which has been received with the most tempestuous applause, will appear in the next few days from Carl Haslinger. No dance composition of such freshness, humorous colouring and piquant instrumentation can have appeared for years". Demand for the new work was so overwhelming that Haslinger was obliged to publish it immediate: the piano arrangement of the polka was written out in just a few hours and its first printed edition was announced on 1 December 1858. The first edition sold out immediately and was reprinted several more times to meet demand.
Johann Strauss's Radetzky March was written in 1848, the year before his death. It celebrated the victory of the Austrian Imperial army under Field-Marshal Johann Josef Wenzel, Count Radetzky von Radetz, against Italian forces at Custozza and was allegedly written in the space of two hours.
'A man of exquisite gentleness and sudden exuberance', 'the soul of a sentimental girl in the body of a water carrier', Emmanuel Chabrier is the great forgotten man of French music. Chabrier and his wife visited Spain in1882, a four-month stay which had an appreciable effect on the composer's life and which is the source of his most well known orchestral work: España. Performed on 4 November 1883 at the Société des Nouveaux Concerts, the rhapsody España is conceived for a full, colourful orchestra where the harp takes on melodies, the horns, trombones and tuba sing, the woodwind dazzle. All is contrast and delight. 'The musical qualities of both north and south are mingled or superimposed.' Chabrier used the rhythms and motifs noted in Spain without ever seeking to copy them exactly
Chabrier considered his Joyeuse marche (originally entitled 'Marche française' then 'Marche joyeuse') 'idiotically comical; the musicians were in stitches'. Dedicated to Vincent d'Indy, this 'masterpiece of high fantasy' is, according to Debussy, filled to overflowing with bold and colourful innovations, and with the good-natured humour characteristic of Chabrier. Let us hope that the audacious harmonics, the novel and quirky instrumentation, the almost grotesque consistency of sound, the constant rhythmic invention, at last do justice to this composer loved and admired by his peers and misunderstood by the public at large.
Unter Donner und Blitz (Thunder and Lightning) was written in 1868 for the annual Hesperus Ball and invokes the Thunder and Lightning of the title with the help of the percussion section. Thunderous timpani rolls and lightning cymbals crashes gives flashes of sound and fury above a humorous and light-hearted work.
Leichte Kavallerie ('Light Cavalry'), a comic operetta in two acts, with a text by C. Costa, was first staged at the Carltheater on 21 March 1866. The overture opens with a fanfare, echoed, before launching into the familiar music of sparkle and brilliance.
The Polka comes from Jaromír Weinberger's successful opera, Schwanda the Bagpiper. The opera was completed in 1927 and had its premier the same year – while the opera has fallen out of the repertoire, the polka is still a favorite.
It was not until 1855 that Offenbach was able to begin to make a success of his stage works. Three years later he put on the operetta that was to make his name, Orpheus in the Underworld, a parody of Gluck's famous opera. Act IV starts with a boring minuet which, much to everyone's enjoyment, escalades into a infernal dance more commonly known as the "Can-Can."
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---- — JEERS to people who can’t properly dispose of their cigarette butts. After a recent thaw, we spotted this scene in Elizabethtown. The receptacle is located on Park Street, across the street from the Horace Nye Nursing Home and the Essex County Government Center. The disgusting display continued in the gutters up and down the street and along the edge of an Essex County parking lot adjacent to a line of trees. Frankly, spent cigarettes are ugly enough without having them mar the landscape like this. We hope smokers will be more careful of how they dispose of the butts and that grounds crews will better clean up after those who don’t.
CHEERS to Hannaford for some well-placed signs in its parking lot. The signs we are referring to remind customer to bring their reusable grocery bags with them when they shop. How many well-intentioned customers have their reusable bags in the car but don’t remember that until they are well into their shopping trip, possibly already in line to pay for groceries. So instead of the green gesture they had intended, they wind up using store-provided plastic bags. That is worse for the environment and more costly for the store. Hannaford has strategically placed signs in the parking areas and near the entranceways asking people if they remembered the bags. It is a small measure — but an effective one.
JEERS to people who don’t RSVP. Wedding season is coming up, so it seems like a good time to send out this reminder: “RSVP” is not written on invitations just because it is a tradition. It is there so the people putting on the wedding, bridal shower, baby shower, retirement party or other celebration will know how many people plan to attend. That is an important piece of information. It helps the organizers plan the right amount of food, the seating, possibly gift bags. If people don’t RSVP, the result can be too little food to feed everyone or, just as bad, money wasted buying too much food for people who never intended to attend. It takes only a minute to pick up the phone and call or email a response. And if you are a parent with children in their 20s or 30s, please make sure they know what RSVP is all about. It seems few people are passing on this information.
— If you have a Cheers and Jeers suggestion that you want the Editorial Board to consider, email it to Editor Lois Clermont at firstname.lastname@example.org.
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MLK, Jr believed homosexuals could –and should– change
CNN Belief Blog reports that Martin Luther King, Jr believed that homosexuals could –and should– change. A snapshot in time recorded King’s advice to a boy who wrote to him about his homosexual feelings.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was writing an advice column in 1958 for Ebony magazine when he received an unusual letter.
“I am a boy,” an anonymous writer told King. “But I feel about boys the way I ought to feel about girls. I don’t want my parents to know about me. What can I do?”
In calm, pastoral tones, King told the boy that his problem wasn’t uncommon, but required “careful attention.”
“The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired,” King wrote. “You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.”
If Dr. King were alive today, he would be persecuted for these beliefs by liberal white organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, who claim that changing from homosexuality is “destructive”.
King’s own daughter has openly taken a strong stance against gay activism. In 2005, the Rev. Bernice King led a march to her father’s grave, asking for a constitutional ban on gay marriage.
Bernice, who once attended Bishop Eddie Long’s church, announced that she would begin her own ministry after a homosexual scandal developed in Long’s congregation.
“I’m going to launch a ministry. I’m not calling it a church right now,” she said during an interview with Atlanta radio station Praise 102.5 last year. “What God is showing me doesn’t look like what people are accustomed to.”
At a conference in New Zealand, Bernice spoke about her father’s position on homosexuality saying, “I know deep down in my sanctified soul that he did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”
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Acute Oak Decline is on the increase.
The disease causes the oak tree to bleed a black liquid and can kill it within five years.
To date there are 55 confirmed cases across southern and eastern England and the Midlands and experts say if we don't act now the consequences could be severe.
Peter Goodwin of Woodland Heritage says the disease "has the potential to change our landscape even more than Dutch Elm Disease".
Acute Oak Decline affects both the UK's native oaks - pendunculate and sessile. Forest owners and managers are worried that a lack of understanding of how the disease spreads means it will be hard to control.
The full story
Report new cases
Acute Oak Decline - an overview
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Histiocytosis is a rare blood disease that is caused by an excess of white blood cells called histiocytes. The histiocytes cluster together and can attack the skin, bones, lungs, liver, spleen, gums, ears, eyes and/or the central nervous system. The disease can range from limited involvement that spontaneously regresses to progressive multi-organ involvement that can be chronic and debilitating. In some cases the disease can be life threatening.
In some ways, histiocytosis is similar to cancer and has historically been treated by oncologists with chemotherapy and/or radiation. Unlike cancer, histiocytosis sometimes goes into remission without treatment. The vast majority of people diagnosed with histiocytosis are children under the age of ten, but it is also found in adults of all ages.
Histiocytosis affects roughly 1 in 200,000 children born each year in the United States. Histiocytosis is so rare that there is little research into its cause and treatment and is often referred to as an "orphan disease", meaning it strikes too few people to generate government-supported research.
For more information on Histiocytosis: www.histio.org
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Caribbean Risk Managers Ltd. (CaribRM) has published an updated report on the earthquake in Haiti, which gives precise details concerning the unfolding of the event. It continues with an examination of the damages it caused, both on the ground and from satellite observations, as well as illustrations of the severity (MMI) of the quake in different parts of the city and its surroundings.
In examining the severe structural damage that occurred CaribRM notes: “The widespread failure of older buildings (which had little or no lateral shear reinforcement) is understandable in MMI intensity of VII to VIII; however the failure of newer buildings suggests a lack of attention to basic earthquake design features in all but the largest and newest structures.”
The report is well illustrated with photos and charts, and can be viewed at:
CaribRM was formed in 2006 through the merger of GeoSY Ltd with the Risk Management Division of CGM Group. It provides “a broad range of bespoke risk management services throughout the Caribbean Basin and beyond.”
The company also points out that it “provides services and expertise to a wide variety of regional and global re/insurance brokers placing Caribbean risk as well as to individual private and public sector clients including the World Bank and many Caribbean Governments.”
It is also the “Facility Supervisor” (risk and operational managers) of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), which it notes is “the world’s only multi-national and parametric catastrophe risk pool.”
Source: Caribbean Risk Managers – www.CaribRM.com
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Break the cycle with new fiction at JCPL
A favorite childhood storybook is “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” by Laura Numeroff. The sequel to this story is “If You Give a Moose a Muffin.” This hilarious story has a young boy run ragged by a surprise guest.
The adult version of this story goes something like, “If you give a mom a muffin, she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it. She’ll pour herself some, only to have her 3 year old spill it. She’ll wipe it up, find dirty socks in the process and start the laundry, at which time, she’ll bump into the freezer and remember that dinner has to be planned. Taking out hamburger, she’ll look for her cookbook, buried under bills, and remember that the phone bill is due.
Looking for her checkbook, which has been dumped from her purse by her 2 year old, she’ll smell something funny and change the 2 year old, and as the phone rings at the same time, she’ll remember that she wanted to have a friend over for coffee, which reminds her that she would really like a cup of coffee, and pouring herself some, looks for the muffin she wanted in the first place, which has been eaten by her 2, 3, & 5 year olds.”
If you are a harried mom, or just need a break from the kind of day this mom is having, stop by the Jasper County Public Library, where the new fiction on the shelves will “take you away.” Check these out!
Tess is an aspiring seamstress, and when she is hired by famous designer, Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic, she feels she’s been given a great opportunity. When disaster strikes and lifeboats are filled to capacity, Tess is among the last to be saved from certain death as the tragedy of the Titanic’s fate unfolds. “The Dressmaker” by Kate Alcott recounts the historical sinking of the Titanic, but is told from a fresh angle, portraying the glitz, glamour and emotions of young love.
Jimmy McMullen, a fireman with the NYFD has been killed in the line of duty, leaving behind his wife, Jackie and his young son, Charlie. Trying to move forward after the tragedy, Jackie decides to take Charlie on an excursion to her island home in the Carolinas, where they share a summer with Annie Britt, Jackie’s mother, who is determined to make this visit perfect for her daughter and grandson in “Porch Lights” by Dorothea Benton Frank.
Following his unearthing of the corruption among his colleagues and superiors, NYPD detective Harry Corbin has been banned from working on homicide cases for nearly a year. When a young woman’s body is found mutilated, Corbin jumps at the chance to solve the case and redeem himself from the past year’s struggles, but finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into the dark and secretive world of illegal immigrants and the exploiting of human life in “The Cold Room” by Robert Knightly.
Terrorized, incoherent, and covered in blood, Sienna, a teenaged girl, shows up on Joe O’Louglin’s doorstep one night. At first glance, Joe isn’t sure whether the blood is hers or if she is the perpetrator of a crime. In time, he discovers that Sienna’a father, a celebrated former cop, has been murdered in his home, and what’s worse is that the blood on Sienna is confirmed to belong to her father. She claims to remember nothing, so it’s up to O’Loughlin to dig for the truth and uncover the facts about the murder before it’s too late for Sienna in “Bleed for Me” by Michael Robotham.
Holding only a scrap of paper with a stranger’s name and the hands of her own three small children, Sunny escapes what turns out to be a mass suicide from the Family of Superior Bliss. Showing up on the doorstep of Liesel Albright, nineteen year old Sunshine claims that Liesel’s husband, Chris, is her father. Liesel had always wanted to have a family of her own, but never bargained for a ready-made family, and Chris reacts to the situation with adamant denial. The teachings of the Family of Superior Bliss leave a lifelong scar on Sunny, though, and no matter how hard she tries to forget and change, the urge to finish what the Family started is too strong in “All Fall Down” by Megan Hart.
If you give a mom a muffin, chances are she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it, and as long as it doesn’t get spilled, she’ll probably want a good book, too. So get ready moms; put your feet up, pour that coffee, grab that muffin, find a cozy spot, hand your 2, 3 & 5 year olds a copy of “If You Give a Moose a Muffin,” and find your own great, new fiction for a solid afternoon of relaxing entertainment!
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Why bother exercising?
Knowing what you want out of exercise may motivate you to work out. Some benefits of exercising include:
- More energy
- Improved self-image
- Enhanced brain power
- Weight control without dieting
- Control over appetite
- Higher endurance or stamina
- Greater management of stress
- Better ability to fall asleep and stay asleep
- Toned muscles
- Quicker healing
How much should you work out?
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule here. You should build your routine gradually to help prevent sore muscles, injury or burnout. You won’t see conditioning results after one weekend of working out; usually your fitness level will start to improve after 2 to 3 weeks, with measurable improvement after 4 to 6 weeks of regular exercise. Most people, however, find they feel better mentally after only doing a little exercise.
Remember, an exercise program doesn't have to take hours you don't have. As little as 30 minutes a day, 3 days a week can start to improve your physical fitness.
Before starting, figure out how intense your workout needs to be in order to improve your cardiovascular system. Find your maximum heart rate (the fastest your heart can beat) and your target heart rate by using the formula below:
220 - your age = Maximum heart rate
(.60) x your Maximum Heart Rate = Lower target heart rate
(.85) x your Maximal Heart Rate = Upper target heart rate
Calculate the last two numbers to identify your target heart range for exercising. Try to keep your heart beating at a rate between these numbers for at least 20 minutes to improve your cardiovascular system.
Exercising at more than your target heart rate will not help to condition you heart or lungs and may, in fact, cause harm. On the other hand, exercising below 60% of your maximal heart rate doesn't work your cardiovascular system hard enough to produce conditioning benefits.
If you are exercising within your target heart rate, you should be able to carry on a conversation while your heart is beating fast, and you should be sweating. Take your pulse for ten seconds and multiply that number by 6 to find your heart beat per minute. Do this three times during your workout to see if you are working hard enough or if you are overworking your body.
Your workout should involve three phases: 5 minutes of warm-up, 20 or more minutes of exercising in your target range, and 5 minutes of cool down. A warm up helps loosen your muscles and helps your heart and lungs to slowly increase their level of functioning. For a warm up, try doing your activity at a slow motion pace, or do some slow easy stretches.
Make sure you cool down by repeating your warm up exercises or walking to allow your body to relax and avoid the muscle soreness that stopping abruptly can cause.
Drink water while working out. With each workout, you will be losing water (through sweat). To avoid fatigue or nausea from dehydration, drink at least 16 ounces every 10-20 minutes during your workout. Avoid alcohol and "athletic" drinks like Gatorade (or dilute with one to three parts water) that contain sugar and can be high in calories.
Make healthy eating choices. Give your body the balanced nutrition it needs by eating a variety of nutrient-packed foods daily. Just be sure to stay within your daily calorie needs.
A healthy eating plan is one that:
- Is high in fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products.
- Includes lean meats, poultry, fish, beans, eggs, and nuts.
- Is low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, salt (sodium), and added sugars.
Total Fitness Network
Fitness for Youth
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Beginning with 2011-12 school tax bills, the savings resulting from the Basic or Enhanced STAR exemptions are limited to a 2% increase over the prior year.
The maximum STAR savings for each school district is calculated by the Office of Real Property Tax Services (ORPTS) and available online.
When school districts initially calculate their tax bills, for each municipal segment they will compare the amount of STAR savings to the maximum. If the STAR savings exceed the maximum, the school district will use the maximum when calculating tax bills for that segment. For example:
In Town X in School District Y:
- School tax rate * Basic STAR exemption = $630
- ORPTS established a maximum for the Town X segment of $600
- The lower of these two figures is the prior year savings amount on which current year maximum savings amounts are based. (In this example, the amount established by ORPTS is the lower figure.)
- ORPTS establishes a maximum for the Town X segment of $612 (600 * 1.02)
- If the school tax rate * Basic STAR exemption is less than or equal to $612, the STAR savings and taxes due are computed the same as in prior years
- If the school tax rate * Basic STAR exemption is greater than $612, the maximum savings per exemption is $612
Information on your school tax bill
The amount of your STAR savings will continue to be displayed on your school property tax bill (Understanding Your Property Tax Bill). However, because the limit is on the STAR savings (rather than the exemption amount), your savings and exemption may not be directly reflective of each other.
In the past, you could calculate your STAR savings by multiplying your STAR exemption by the school tax rate (both of which are available on your tax bill). Where the limit is reached, that calculation will no longer yield your savings.
School district reimbursement
The Basic and Enhanced STAR exemptions are the only property tax exemptions funded by New York State. School districts are directly reimbursed for the savings taxpayers receive. The 2% STAR savings limit does not negatively impact school districts; under the new law they will continue to be reimbursed for the cost of the exemption.
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March 27, 2003
Many mothers struggle to balance employment and family to help cover bills.
Every day before Dina Goldstein (not her real name) leaves the house to take her two young children to day care and herself to work, she grabs two bagels and two boxes of orange juice. After buckling the kids into the car, she gives them the bagels and the juice, and they eat breakfast in the car on the way to school.
"I just don't have time to get them ready, myself ready and feed everyone before I leave the house," said Goldstein, who works as a religious day school teacher.
Like Goldstein, many women find maintaining a family and a job overwhelming. With over 75 percent of women in the United States between the ages of 25 and 54 working outside the home (according the International Labor Organization), it is very likely that at some point most women will have to do both things concurrently. While women choose to work for a variety of reasons, for many in the Jewish community, a woman's employment is not a matter of personal fulfillment but of financial necessity.
With high tuition fees, synagogue dues and mortgages in the Jewish neighborhoods, maintaining a presence in the community is difficult to do on one income alone -- meaning that the husband is no longer the sole breadwinner in the family.
But many women find that their careers give them not one job but two -- their paid employment and their nonpaid work inside the house, which seldom diminishes with the onset of employment. Few will say that the feminist ideal of "having it all" is viable unless certain sacrifices are made. Finding ways to produce calm out of the chaos requires innovation, skill, organization and lots and lots of help.
"The 'superwoman' is a myth," said Tova Hinda Siegal, a Pico-Robertson midwife who is on-call seven days a week while raising her six children. "It's tremendously tricky to try to do everything."
One of the ways that some women try to balance both job and family is by finding careers that allow them to work from home, which gives them close access to their family while still enabling them to bring in some extra money. While there is not necessarily the same kind of career advancement available to those who do not work in an office, many say that the sacrifice is worth it.
"It's a hugely satisfying feeling to know that I can be there for my kids when they need me, because I know how stressful it is for a mother in an office when her kids have an odd day off," said Judy Gruen, a mother of four, Journal contributor and Pico-Robertson writer on domesticity.
Other women make sure that their husbands are picking up the slack, and that paid help in the house is not a luxury, but a necessity. "I think it's more important to have part-time help in your house than to buy new clothes," Siegal said. "People who are working should not be fighting with each other over who does the laundry."
Siegal also said that it's up to a woman to train her husband to do his share of the work.
"I think you have to tell your husband, 'No, it's not a good idea to sit while I'm in the kitchen cleaning up,'"she said.
"In our house we made a rule that whoever cooks does not have to clean up," she continued. "That is an equitable division of labor. I also think it's fine that a mother gets up in the middle of the night to nurse her babies, but in the morning, the father should get up and take the baby out for a few hours and let her sleep. The husband should not feel that when he does something he is doing his wife a favor. Both need to feel that they are contributing to the family's welfare."
Even with a spouse's help, keeping your household together requires careful organization for it to run efficiently. Esther Simon, a Santa Monica mother of seven and a professional home organizer, said that there are a number of things one can do to help this process.
"You need to create a clutter-free home, where everything has a place," she said. "You should also have a family calendar day planner where you write down what you want to do each day and what things need to be done during the week, and then you work out what things can only be done by you and what things can be done by someone else. Only you can give love to your child; someone else can wash the floor."
Simon also suggests laying out all your children's clothes, preparing breakfast and putting backpacks by the door the night before to minimize the rush in the morning.
There is one upside to trying to do everything. "Working and taking care of a family definitely keeps you out of trouble," Siegal said. "You just don't have the time for anything else." Â
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Chickentranslate: The Hottest Blooper
When asked about the most popular or most favorite Turkish to English translation blooper, perhaps all translators would mention “chicken translate” as their all-time favorite. It is so popular that it became a real “classic” in translation bloopers. It had some media coverage too. Feature writers wrote about it, newspapers published it, and it is included in most of the web pages on translation bloopers. Even, there is a Yahoo group with that name. I myself registered a domain both with net and com versions for it: chickentranslate dot com and dot net (now expired, unfortunately due to lack of time to dedicate to that domain). Then, what is this chickentranslate?
Now, let us see the picture of the medium for the message hung over a busy street to attract the attention of foreigners:
Be it a small local restaurant, or a multinational giant corporation, being seen and heard is crucial for any business.
A busy street in a Turkish town. A local restaurant owner, being aware of the importance of visibility, hung this banner to attract foreign tourists to his restaurant serving, as the ads says, chicken translate (“rotisserie”) on charcoal to its customers. An exquisite taste if you are not a vegetarian! If only you could get the message.
“Çevirme” in Turkish means, inter alia, to translate, turn, rotate, etc. As a noun, it means rotisserie , or barbeque within the context of cooking, i.e., the name is derived from the technique.
It seems that our lay translator, perhaps the restaurant owner himself, picked up a dictionary, found the first English word for “çevirme,” and translated accordingly.
Having thus English version as well, the owner now can be sure that the message would be received by his potential foreign customers!
He has the medium, but unfortunately lacks the message!
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Gene therapy firm bluebird bio won a $9.3 million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to support a Phase I/II study evaluating bluebird’s LentiGlobin® treatment for β-thalassemia. The trial is scheduled to start in the U.S. next year. The CIRM grant is one of the first to have been made through the Institute’s new Strategic Partnership Awards initiative.
bluebird is leveraging its gene therapy platform to develop treatments for severe genetic disorders. The technology is based on introducing the corrected version of a disease-causing gene into bone marrow stem cells taken from the patient, and then reintroducing these engineered cells as therapy. The firm’s lead Phase III-stage program is an ABCD-1 gene therapy for treating childhood cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (CCALD), an inherited neurological disorder that in its most severe form causes damage to the myelin sheath and progressive dysfunction of the adrenal glands. bluebird raised $60 million in a series D financing round in July to support its clinical development programs.
The LentiGlobin candidate uses a patients’ own hematopoietic stem cells engineered to carry a fully functional human β-globin gene, which when transplanted back into the patient produce fully functioning red blood cells. Phase I/II trials of the product in the treatment of β-thalassemia and sickle cell disease are ongoing. Promising initial data were reported back in 2010, and showed that a single LentiGlobin treatment results in stable expression of functional β-globin, which has persisted for more than four years (results to date), and removes the need for blood transfusions.
“We are very encouraged by the clinical data generated to date demonstrating the potential of LentiGlobin as a one-time transformative gene therapy for patients with beta-thalassemia,” comments David Davidson, M.D., bluebird CMO. “Bluebird bio has made significant advances in lentiviral vector design, transduction efficiency, and, in our manufacturing process, enabling the production of gene-modified products that can be scaled and deployed for many different indications."
ViaCyte has also today announced the award of a $10.1 million Strategic Partnership Award from CIRM to support IND filing and initial clinical evaluation of an implantable cell therapy for treating diabetes.
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I am having students use Google Documents to write their assignments and then share the document with me. I can grade them at school or at home and can type my comments right into their document.
You can also open up the Google Doc and share it with classmate partners or teams of students for peer review. Google Docs will actually track the changes each Doc member makes, so you can even grade students on the quality of their editing by going back and looking through the history of each revision on an individual contributor level (sort of like what you can do on Wikipedia when you check the history of a wiki).
Good stuff, Kax!
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It is Christ the King Sunday this week. The New Year's Eve of the Christian year. It is the final Sunday of the year and we remind ourselves, before starting this journey over, that Jesus Christ is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. As Year B of the lectionary comes to a close we look at the scene in the passion story with Jesus standing in front of Pilate.
The part that struck me when reading this text [again] was the last verse, Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice. Belongs to the truth. We get lost in the kingly verbiage of this day because we are no longer ruled by a "king". Monarchs are simply fodder for the gossip rags in other countries. What stands out as completely relevant is the obsession with truth that we have in this country.
What is truth? Who has the truth? Is truth relative? Is there absolute truth?
Truth is what you make it seems to be the thought de jour. This is what seemed to happen as I watched Sarah Palin on Oprah yesterday. I watched a politician dance around the truth in her answers, never agreeing with anything that could be damning to her image and floating semi-truth grenades towards others along the way. This isn't unique to Palin, almost every politician does it. Yet isn't this what we witness Jesus do in this passage though. Artfully dancing around Pilate's questions? You say that I am a king.
There is another issue that arises, there are those who use this passage to claim the truth only to persecute others. If you claim to have the truth that automatically makes those who disagree with you don't and therefore are wrong. This is a huge no-no in our society these days. What about those peoples feelings? Don't they have the right to believe in what they believe in? As Christians we can't offend people?
This hits home in a couple of scriptures. I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. (John 10:7) I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6) This seems pretty definitive when you place it with the 37th verse of this week's text. So what do we do with these and how can we live it out in a way that is pleasing to God and nonjudgmental to the rest of the world?
With all this talk of truth I feel I have to throw in Jack Nicholason's quote from A Few Good Men, "The truth, you can't handle the truth." Jesus says he is the truth. He says that those who belong to the truth hear his voice. He says in John 8:32 the truth will set you free. When it smells like a fish, swims like a fish, breaths water like a fish, it is probably a fish.
Jesus points out to us, routinely in the Gospel of John, that if we desire the truth we need to know Jesus. For those who know Jesus we know the truth. What we do with this though truly paints the picture of how close our relationship is with Jesus.
We can bang this over the heads of everyone who doesn't believe, using these verses as a sword and shield but then are we following the Truth? We can simply sit quietly and let opportunities pass us by because we don't want to offend or bring conflict into a relationship but once again are we following the Truth? Or we can learn from the Truth and follow the Truth's lead. We can dive into the Word and try our hardest to live into the Truth and have the Truth live through us. We can have open and honest discussions through unconditional love with other children of God. We don't have to bang people over the head but if we live out the way the Truth tells us to live, people will be curious and we can tell them who the Truth is.
Will this bring conflict? Yes probably on occasion but conflict is not necessarily a bad thing. Does this mean we have permission to be rude and unkind to those who look at the world differently? Absolutely not. Jesus looks at Pilate and explains that this is the reason he is here. He understands the Truth and knows that not everyone will get it. He doesn't force Pilate to see his point nor does he condemn Pilate to hell because of it. He simply tells Pilate the Truth and Pilate is left to make his own decision.
We should stand firm in the Truth but not as a pedestal to launch attacks from, but a foundation in our lives. A place to better understand the world around us and to hear the voice of the one who is The Truth.
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I have always been a huge fan of sweet drinks. I put sweeteners in my teas, coffees, lemonades, etc., to satisfy my sweet tooth. After doing some research I realized how terrible for you a lot of these artificial sweeteners are. It is amazing how some of them, especially the ones that contain aspartame, even got approved by the FDA.
Recently my friend turned me on to a natural, alternative sweetener made from the Stevia plant. At first I was a bit skeptical because of how many products call themselves "natural" but when I looked into Stevia a little bit closer I realized how much better this sweetener is for you! Stevia is native to Paraguay and has been used for centuries without ANY side effects or health issues, but it has only recently been approved by the FDA as a diet supplement. And I say diet because Stevia has NO calories, NO carbs and NO glycemic index - ideal for just about anyone!
I've been using Stevia as a sweetener for my beverages for a little bit and have found that my favorite brand so far is SweetLeaf. It's the only product that has been approved as more than a supplement but as a food additive meaning it's safe to put in anything. On top of that, SweetLeaf has a wide range of products that suit any purpse. It can be used in hot drinks, cold drinks, is great on cereal, brings out flavors in fruits, can be used in cooking and baking, makes great-tasting desserts and is incredible in smoothies and blended drinks. I haven't tried anything yet that I like better and I definitely recommend it! Enjoy!
Also, I found these videos on Stevia and SweetLeaf while perusing YouTube if anyone wants to get more info:
I was very skeptical about using Stevia in place of real sugar. I refuse to use artificial sweeteners and was searching for a healthier, natural alternative to sugar. I have researched Stevia and apparently Stevia-based sweeteners have been used in Japan since the 1970s – ever since that country banned artificial sweeteners. To this date, after being used by tens of millions of people for more than 40 years, there has not been a single consumer complaint about Stevia.
I have been using the Sweetleaf brand for several months now and absolutely love it! You can now purchase it at any Whole Foods store.
This is my favorite drink recipe using Sweetleaf. A great summer drink, enjoy!
Mango Papaya Smoothie
This creamy treat is called Mango Lassi in India.
- 1 quart Mango or papaya juice or a blend
- 1 cup plain nonfat yogurt
- 1/3 to 1/2 Tsp SweetLeaf Stevia Extract Powder (to taste)
Mix the ingredients together in a blender until smooth
(Excerpted with permission from "Stevia: naturally sweet recipes for desserts, drinks and more!", by Rita DePuydt - Book Publishing Co.)
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By Loni Ingraham
Unhappy with the insurance-driven reimbursement system, he said, "I would rather have my teeth drilled without anesthesia than practice as an internist in the current insurance-based system."
But the "retainer practice" Lansdale established, which bills patients an annual, out-of-pocket, flat $1,500 fee to retain his services, freed him from having to deal with insurance companies. In exchange for the fee, it gave his patients personalized care, 24/7 access, house calls and reduced waiting times..
It also allowed Lansdale to limit his caseload to a very manageable 250 patients. That gave him time not only to treat their illnesses but to work with them to prevent them from becoming ill -- and still draw a salary commensurate with physicians in their prime who have been forced by insurance companies to carry a typical caseload of from 1,500 to 2,500 patients.
He became what he wanted to become: "the personal family physician ... who plays a meaningful role in his patients' lives."
Is Tom Lansdale's journey just a nice little story about a man finding happiness as a doctor, or is it a cautionary tale about the state of the medical profession?
How many primary care doctors will switch to retainer practices, and what will happen to the patients they leave behind? Are you going to become one of them? Part 2 seeks answers to these questions.
Retainer medicine -- also known as concierge or boutique medicine -- is controversial.
"My main objection is the practice discriminates against patients who don't have enough money," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group. "The concept is very bad; it's a betrayal of the ethics of physicians."
Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that Ralph Nader co- founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.
While proponents focus on how doctors and patients benefit from retainer medicine, Wolfe and other detractors cite the impact retainer medicine could have on the patients who can't afford or choose not to join a retainer practice, and on the health care system in general.
"If it's widely adopted," Wolfe said, "it is going to exacerbate the No. 1 health-care problem vexing the United States today, which is the multimillion load of Americans without medical resources of any kind except, perhaps, the dubious privilege of visiting an already crowded, publicly operated emergency room."
But Wolfe doesn't have a kind word for insurance companies either. "The entire insurance industry has to be destroyed, as it was in Canada 36 years ago," he said. "It would mean eliminating one of the biggest barriers to good care."
Meanwhile, Wolfe views "concierge medicine," as he calls it, as "a giant step backward in the quest for universal health care."
"We are the only developed country that doesn't provide health care as a fundamental right, he said."
Both Wolfe and the American Medical Association agree that retainer medicine adds another tier of medical care -- in addition to patients covered by insurance and patients with little or no insurance.
Having two tiers is bad enough, Wolfe says. But the AMA's Council on Medical Service points out that retainer medicine is not a radical departure from the way care is financed and delivered now.
A multitiered system of care already exists in the United States, the council points out, with higher levels of service for patients whose health insurance offers a wider array of benefits.
The AMA council is not getting involved in this dog fight. But it stands by physicians who make the transition, as long as they adhere to ethical principles.
"Retainer practice is consistent with longstanding AMA policy in support of the rights of physicians to freely contract with their patients, according to the council.
But Wolfe has other objections as well.
He says doctors' target incomes are too high, even as the American College of Physicians points out that the median indebtedness of medical school students graduating last year was $120,000 for public schools and $160,000 for private schools.
Wolfe also has strong words about what happens to patients whose doctors elect to make the transition to a retainer practice.
"Kicking out patients is unconscionable," he said.
On the other hand, Lansdale gave the patients in his old practice, which was owned by Greater Baltimore Medical Center, six months notice to find another internist.
MDVIP, a Boca Raton, Fla. company founded in 2000 that offers physicians in 16 markets across the country a package that assists them in establishing and maintaining a "concierge" practice goes even further.
MDVIP gives every patient who chooses not to join the doctor's retainer practice a list of other practices in the community that MDVIP feels is suitable for that patient.
Defenders of retainer medicine, including Towson resident Jim Turner, a financial manager for Johns Hopkins Health System, say it allows doctors the time to practice preventative medicine.
"There is a need to experiment in different models of health care delivery," Turner said. "Just because everyone at this time can't benefit from it doesn't mean that those who can afford it should be denied it.
"A model like this offers the potential for significant health care savings in populations that are currently underserved by preventing conditions from worsening that would end up costing the system more. It seems worthy of consideration."
The model already is working well for patients in the concierge practices that MDVIP franchises, according to its chief executive officer, Dr. Ed Goldman.
In 2005, in seven states, including Maryland, patients in MDVIP-affiliated practices experienced from 36 to 92 percent fewer hospitalizations than patients covered by top state insurers, Goldman claims.
MDVIP attributes the numbers to physicians having "the time to have much closer relationships with their patients."
"Most of us look at our health in terms of symptoms," Goldman said. "We wait until it hurts. But we are proving prevention really does work. We think we are in the early stages of what should be a national model."
The Internal Revenue Service -- and Congress, which writes the laws the IRS implements -- doesn't quite recognize the new medical model.
The IRS says the annual retainer fee does not qualify as a medical expense, even though it is paid to a doctor, "due to the uncertainty of medical care and timing." That is., it might turn out that the patient did not need a doctor that year.
The courts, according to the IRS, have qualified the prevention of disease as a medical expense, but only in so far as it applies to the imminent danger of contracting disease. Things you do for your general good health do not qualify.
The downside of Lansdale's happy move to a retainer practice is the number of patients who are very satisfied with their primary care physicians and their insurance who suddenly discover they are going to have to pay an additional $1,500 or more a year to continue the arrangement, improved as it might be.
That raises the question of how many primary care doctors are going to switch to retainer medicine in the future. Some imply there won't be that many.
The AMA council cites "economic realities," reasoning that the more physicians charge for their services, the smaller the demand for their services. While retainer medicine may mean higher costs for those who can afford to pay for it, it won't jack up the cost of services for those who can't afford it, and it won't adversely affect patients' access to care.
"It's a small subset of the vast majority of doctors," said Mohit Ghose, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans, which bills itself as "the voice of America's health insurers" and represents nearly 1,300 member companies providing health insurance coverage to more than 200 million Americans.
"They form a niche; they do so for their own financial reasons., but nine out of 10 physicians still continue to have at least one insurance contract."
Indeed, the financial risk and the work required to establish a retainer practice prohibit retainer practices from multiplying like rabbits.
Like Lansdale, some doctors do it on their own.
But MDVIP has formalized the process with screening, researching, interviewing and demographic studies as it searches for "excellent, excellent doctors with at least 15 years experience and a lot of patients who love them," according to spokeswoman Nancy Udell.
MDVIP takes only 12 of 100 doctors who are interested in making the transition, she says.
Then again, some physicians who meet the criteria are not interested in making such a move at the time.
Dr. George Karkar, an internist with more than 2,500 patients in practices he maintains at GBMC and in Eastpoint, is one of them.
He enjoys his patients, Karkar, said, but his work day has become very demanding with fielding 25 to 30 faxes and telephone calls a day as well as examining and interviewing patients.
"For the time being, switching to a retainer practice wouldn't be practical," Karkar said, "but it's something to consider."
"It's easy to limit your number of patients if you have a well-established clientele of well-to-do people," he said, "but in my Eastpoint practice, some people don't have that much money. Some can barely make the co-pay.
"There is a financial risk to eliminating so many patients. If you did make the change, and it didn't work out, how many patients would come back to you?"
Lansdale believes he's "ahead of the curve." He knows of six doctors serving patients in north central Baltimore County who have switched to retainer practices, and at least one who is on the brink.
And MDVIP, which had 24 retainer practice franchises in 2003, now has 160 franchises with a total of 55,000 patients and is growing eight practices per month, Goldman reports.
Marty Wasserman, a former state health commissioner who is now director of the Maryland State Medical Society, thinks Lansdale is right about the curve.
"It's a small percentage now," Wasserman said. "But I think this type of practice will increase in numbers as it becomes more difficult for primary care doctors to make a living.
"The current insurance market forces doctors to see too many patients too quickly and file too many forms. It doesn't pay properly, and it changes rules. It's not a good business model."
On the other hand, he said, the poor and the lower middle class don't have the dollars to pay a retainer fee. They may find they are dealing with an eventual shortage of doctors.
A 2003 study by the American College of Physicians documents the steep decline in the willingness of physicians to enter training for primary care.
It said that only 27 percent of third-year internal medicine residents in the United States planned to pursue careers in general medicine, down from 54 percent in 1998. That figure declined to 19 percent of first-year internal medicine residents.
As Lansdale said, "They have no happy role models."
Increased life expectancy in this country will only exacerbate the problem. The number of people 85 and older, who are most likely to require chronic care services for multiple conditions, will increase 50 percent from 2000 to 2010, and it will more than double by 2030, according to the same organization.
Wasserman said he is looking forward to the results of a study generated by Senate Bill 107. By request of the O'Malley administration, it established a task force staffed by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to look at health care access and reimbursement.
Its interim findings and recommendations are due Dec. 1. The final report is due June 30, 2008.
For those who don't want retainer practices to proliferate, Wasserman has some advice. "Make sure the physician is adequately compensated for the work he does," he said.
E-mail Loni Ingraham at email@example.com
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"Art making is a form of alchemy, in a way, because you are trying…to make gold from nothing. When it works very well is when you manage to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary."
From the series, "Exclusive"
"Beryl Korot discusses a recent work — ""Babel: the 7 minute scroll"" (2007) — which takes the form as both a large-scale print and an animated digital video. With pictographs that reference ancient Egypt and the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, Korot's work investigates the history of tools and technology, language and narrative.
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A. The only way to determine whether students master program goals and objectives is to make sure that what gets assessed is linked to what is taught. Alignment guarantees that assessment data will provide evidence of student mastery. Example: If data indicate student performance is low in one area, alignment means that it is possible to examine the goal, objective, and instruction related to that area. Since one can identify when, where, and how the goals/objectives are covered, specific changes can be made and those changes can be monitored through selected assessment practices.
Q. What is the best way to assess the mastery of skills?
A. In order to assess skill mastery, a performance is necessary for students to demonstrate that they can apply what is learned. For example: students may be able to list the components of a research paper, but that does not mean they can write one. They would have to actually write a paper in order to determine that they have mastered the skill. In baseball, a student may be able to explain what should be done at the plate in order to advance a runner from first to second base, but that does not measure the ability of the student to actually advance the runner. In order to assess that skill, the student would need to hit the ball properly in a game situation. Many departments use projects and other activities to assess mastery of skills.
Q. How can we detect problems before they show up on a major test?
A. Assessment should be ongoing. In other words, there should be checkpoints along the way that provide information with respect to student progress. For instance, if goal three of the program is addressed in four courses, there should be at least one objective in each of those courses related to that goal. Additionally, each course should include some form of assessment to determine student mastery of the objective(s). That way, a problem will be detected at the course level, and can be addressed before students take a major test.
Q. What can be done to make sure students take a serious approach to state mandated tests?
A. Faculty can talk with students about the purpose of the tests. Students may be ambivalent toward them because they do not understand why they have to be taken.
A: Remind students that their score on their Major Field Test (a graduation requirement) can be included on a resume if they do well on the test.
Q. Our problem is that the state/national tests measure things outside our program goals/objectives. What can be done about that?
A. Ultimately, a decision has to be made as to whether all items measured on the state tests should be addressed in the program. Those deemed worthy of coverage will need to be inserted into the program at the proper place. Consideration should be given to the goals and objectives that should be written for them, the course(s) in which they should be taught, and the best methods for teaching them. Assessments (ongoing and summative) of the new objectives will provide feedback regarding student mastery.
Q. Is there an evaluation model that would provide guidance for using the data available to us?
A. Some departments develop a matrix where they chart the following:
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This post originally appeared on Shareable.net
The Rainbow Mansion. Photo by dweekly on Flickr.
In 2006, Jessy Kate Schingler and four other young engineers landed
jobs at NASA’s Ames Research Center. They suddenly needed a place to
live in Silicon Valley, but rather than opt for cheap housing with a
long commute, they pooled their resources and rented a palatial 5,000
square foot property in Cupertino. The Rainbow Mansion was born.
It was more than just a luxury home full of brilliant young minds.
Dubbed “an intentional community”, The Rainbow Mansion was an experiment
in a new type of cohabitation. The house began hosting hackathons and
salons in its library, inviting Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to
participate. “Right away it set itself in motion,” Schingler says. “It
had this sort of accidental mystique about it.”
In the six years since, the Rainbow Mansion has housed 60 people from
12 countries, along with employees from Google, Apple, and Tesla. One of
Schingler’s cofounders, Chris Kemp, became CTO of IT at NASA. And
Schingler herself has become an advocate of coliving, the practice of
bringing extraordinary people under one roof to live, work, and change
the world together.
In today’s America, almost
50 percent of adults in the United States are single, and more than a
quarter of “households” are just an individual living alone. An increasing amount of social interaction happens online, rather than face-to-face.
Living alone may allow us to focus on our own goals without
distraction, but it robs us of the type of communication that only
happens when people are relaxed and at home together. The spaces between
work and life—which, in decades past, would have been filled with
conversations over the dinner table—are collapsing. Coliving hacks
this trend, infusing the blurring boundaries of work and leisure with
new opportunities for inspiration, learning, and social innovation.
Here, “home” is reinvented with a new purpose. It’s a community, an
ethos, a series of opportunities for collaboration. And while most young
professionals are flocking to urban centers like San Francisco to live
in modest apartments, some are building a new American dream in once empty suburban McMansions
and luxury downtown digs. In this new scheme, your network isn’t just
your Facebook friends or business contacts; It includes your friends,
influencers, ad hoc family, and your shared home.
Defining Coliving: What It Is and Isn’t
The underlying concept of coliving will be nothing new to anyone
who’s had roommates: sharing a house, sharing the rent, living with
near-strangers for a shared purpose. “Roommate situations are typically
based on who can afford to pay the rent and who has one or two things in
common,” says Chelsea Rustrum, an entrepreneur and coliving advocate.
In a coliving home, the connections are stronger. Even if residents
don’t know each other prior to moving in, “we have this vision in common
of how we want to change the world,” she says.
Inspired entrepreneurialism is a central tenet. Residents are
carefully chosen for their ambitions and ideas, and are often working on
individual projects. “We want to be around people who want to make a
difference,” says Schingler. But “making a difference” comes with
infinite possibilities. Within a single house there may be scientists,
artists, entrepreneurs, engineers and everything in between.
Coliving is influenced heavily by coworking, a practice in which
independent professionals share a workspace rather than working
individually at home. With no boss, no distractions and a building full
of inspiring peers, synergy is the quick result of this separate-yet-together environment.
Coliving spaces often include a coworking area. For example: TheGlint,
a hilltop townhouse in San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, has a dedicated
space furnished with desks and computers. But “it’s not just a live-in
coworking space,” says TheGlint cofounder Damian Madray. He points to
events like ArtFlux,
a “participatory art experience” hosted in TheGlint’s gallery. Coliving
houses regularly host events, from lectures to dance parties to
hackathons, all designed to enhance creativity, professional development
and good old-fashioned networking. Serendipity and collaboration
The coliving movement may freely use terms like “commune” and
“cooperative”, but this ain’t your grandma’s commune. Contemporary
coliving builds on communal living practices, embracing a networked
tech, business and science-fueled culture built upon innovation and
realizing a better world through collaborative design.
Entrepreneurialism With a Conscience
"We never really stop working," says Damian Madray. “I don't think an
entrepreneur life is like that — work and life — to be honest. You're
always working and you're always playing. You're always playing because
you love what you do.”
Madray, a young entrepreneur from Guyana, was inspired by his experience living Palo Alto’s Blackbox Mansion.
In 2011, he and some friends aimed to create a similar community in
Twin Peaks. Rustrum, inspired by her sojourn and research into Berlin’s Palomar5,
joined the community early. “If you put the right people there, I think
it has the potential to be very, very, very powerful,” she says.
But how to find those people? Schingler distills the issue into a
challenge: cultivating “eliteness” without being exclusive. “How do you
say, ‘I want people whom I consider elite around me, but I’m willing to
keep myself open-minded enough to find that eliteness in unexpected
For many coliving spaces, the simplest solution is an opt-in one: A
question for applicants to answer before they can be considered.
TheGlint asks applicants to explain how they will “redefine heroism”
with their work. Residents are carefully selected to feed the spirit of
socially responsible innovation.
In a culture dominated by gadgets, it takes a little extra passion to
come up with a business model that produces more than just profit.
“What does Instagram do?” Madray asks. “It applies filters and makes you
feel good. End of story. What if for every photo shared, some kid in
Africa gets a glass of water? What if you apply some social good to it?”
When you’re living with a group of people, Rustrum says, “you’re a
family whether you like it or not. That’s how we all relate to living
Once the barriers of unfamiliarity begin to break down, people begin
to work in harmony and think along similar lines. “You see through
people's outer shell and into more of who they are,” says Rustrum. “You
develop deeper, more real relationships and have the potential to
actually work together, actually help each other. Not just in
professional ways but in personal ways also.” This is the magic of
coliving: It connects people in a multitude of ways, building trust and
creating infinite opportunities for collaboration.
“It’s hard to explain the creative serendipity that goes on,” says
Todd Huffman. He cites his own startup, which he runs out of the Langton Labs
coliving space, as an example. His group is working to build a very
advanced 3D microscope; it just so happens that four of his Langton
roommates have PhDs relating to microscopy.
When a complex issue arises, he can simply walk down the hall and ask an expert.
The collaborative spirit created around the dinner table easily
extends to computer desks and lab tables. Huffman describes Langton as
“a commune with engineers instead of hippies.” A member of San
Francisco’s arts-driven warehouse community with a population of
scientists, artists, engineers and world travelers, Langton hosts events
ranging from TEDx to dance parties to dorkbot, a celebration of “people doing strange things with electricity.”
Coliving spaces develop unique cultures based on the location and
people chosen, their mission statement, and house activities. The
underlying culture gives birth to serendipitous connections between
residents who share similar values and passions.
Sharing the weight
From the ground up, the coliving movement is designed to offer
stability, inspiration and opportunity to independent, ambitious young
professionals — the backbone of tech startups, who are often expected to
live on peanuts and take huge risks with little chance of reward.
“I find that a lot of startup stuff is like, ‘All right, you're just a
lowly entrepreneur who hasn't made it yet. Therefore you deserve to
live in dorms, in hostels, and compete in competitions and eat ramen and
pizza.’ That's not my philosophy at all,” says Rustrum. “If you
surround yourself with a nice place and decent healthy food, the belief
that you’re able to do whatever you want to do.”
Like coworking spaces, coliving houses capitalize on a shaky economy,
locating in spaces that property managers can’t rent. In downtown San
Francisco, warehouse communities like Langton Labs are re-appropriating
vacant manufacturing spaces to offer residents private rooms and shared
workspace for around $1,000 a month, highly affordable for the city.
An International Coliving Network
The coliving community is likely to continue growing quickly. With
the success of Couchsurfing, AirBnB, and global coworking networks like Loosecubes, the time may be right for a network of coliving houses around the globe.
For location-independent professionals and those who travel
frequently, this is a fond dream: Imagine having a home wherever you go,
well-appointed and populated by people you can truly enjoy. Imagine
landing in a new city and having an extensive professional network
already in place, or scooting off to another country for a month to work
on a project in a new space. It’s all quite possible, and the concept
of a coliving network is already in development.
Jessy Kate Schingler’s Embassy Network
is preparing for an alpha run of houses in the fall of 2012. A
membership model designed for both long-term residents and short-term
travelers, the network will allow members to pay “rent” that gives them
reservation access to any home in the network.
Chelsea Rustrum, inspired by the effectiveness of coworking and
coliving as well as the power of travel, is spearheading a project
called Startup Abroad.
It’s designed to bring entrepreneurs outside their comfort zone and
daily distractions for an intensive, two- to four-week experience. The
first session is scheduled for August 2012 in Bali.
Damian Madray points out that an international network can help to
inform innovators, helping them to look beyond first-world applications
for their ideas. “If you solve a problem in a developing country, then
those solutions can be applied to other developing countries,” he says.
“Guess what? There are more developing countries than there are first
Coliving’s Past and Future
Coliving has clear similarities to traditional communes and co-ops.
Langton Labs, in particular, bears a strong resemblance to 20th-century
cooperative living. It has a flat organizational structure, and most
decisions are made on a group email list. “In building a community, we
didn't pick an existing model and emulate it,” says Todd Huffman. “We
designed everything from the ground up, and in doing so, have ended up
evolving in parallel and developing mechanisms that are very similar to
cooperatives or communes.”
Unlike many prior communal living experiments, coliving spaces are
externally oriented. They’re generally located in urban areas, often
open to the public on a regular basis, and easy to move in and out of.
The ideas brewing behind these doors are quickly realized and
implemented in the world outside.
Much of this is related to the 21st-century vision of sharing, which
allows for a high level of individualism and experimentation. Previous
community models were focused on equality, with participants renouncing
privileges to adopt a group-oriented mentality. In today’s open-source
world, collaboration relies on contributions from a diverse pool of
individuals, and welcomes exceptionality.
This phenomenon occurs across human culture: As our social
organization has morphed from tight-knit groups to loose,
technology-driven networks, we are supporting each other more and
competing less. Sociologist Barry Wellman calls this networked individualism: our new found ability to work together without losing sight of our internal goals.
Accordingly, the coliving movement seeks out exceptional people,
asking them not to give themselves up to a single cause, but to support
each other’s exceptionality. This may be the key to a new definition of
“home,” one which provides comfort and friends along with inspiration
As our social and professional landscapes shift, our concept of home
is shifting too. By rebuilding their homes on a foundation of creative
collaboration, coliving participants may next redefine the world by the
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How Betty Ford Helped Boomers Confront Their Demons
A fortysomething neighbor of mine recently posted a Facebook update in which he noted, "I have fourteen years today." He didn't have to explain that he was marking his years of sobriety, which is one indication of just how much former First Lady Betty Ford -- who died Friday at age 93 -- changed the world in a way that's particularly important for boomers.
Back in 1978, when Ford entered a treatment program at Long Beach, Calif., Naval Hospital to kick an addition to liquor and pills, she shocked the hell out of us. In those days, to many boomers, being a druggie was still a youth counterculture thing, a merit badge of rebellion against the establishment. Getting wasted was a way of showing one's allegiance to outlaw heroes William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey, of riding that train with Jerry Garcia and joining Lou Reed for a walk on the wild side. Of course, it was all an act of self-delusion; we were just as much conformist consumers of intoxicants as the previous generation, the ones whose scotch-gulping, chain-smoking lifestyle we find so quaintly fascinating on the TV series Mad Men.
But Betty Ford burst our bubble. Here was the accomplished, totally respectable spouse of the former President of the United States -- to us, back then, the epitome of squareness -- admitting that she, too, had a drug problem. In one fell swoop, she took the edgy coolness out of the drug subculture. Ford wasn't eating Benzedrine with Jack Kerouac so that she could hear jazz in her head and stay up for three weeks straight writing the Great American Novel. Instead, in her own frank words, she was "self-medicating," trying to blot out reality and dull her physical and mental pain. Now, she was determined to beat "an insidious thing" that was ruining her life.
Moreover, after being confronted by her family in one of the first highly publicized interventions, Ford was brave enough to take an honest look at herself in the mirror and resilient enough to do something about her problem. Taking that step wasn't easy. Ford showed America that getting sober didn't require being locked in a rubber room with a straight jacket, but was more about hard work and resolve.
And to borrow a phrase from the old-school rappers Gang Starr, there was no shame in her game. In 1982, Ford lent her name and prestige to a new facility, the Betty Ford Center, which has become the world's most renowned program for addition treatment. More than 90,000 people have worked to conquer their inner demons there.
I think it's safe to say that many boomers over the years have been influenced by Ford's example. Today, of the estimated 2 million people receiving treatment for drug abuse each year, 24 percent are over 45, according to this report from the federal government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. That's a 50 percent increase from a decade earlier. As this article from MSM Health details, today's boomer addicts tend to resemble Ford more than the hipster role models of their youth; increasingly, they're addicted to legal, easily obtainable substances -- booze and prescription narcotics -- and less likely to be smoking weed or snorting coke or meth. Instead of Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, today's boomer substance abuser is more likely to look like the 53-year-old grandmother from a small town in Idaho depicted in this recent Deseret News article, who says she became addicted to painkillers after she started taking them to cope with a hip injury she got while exercising.
But by the same token, Ford provided boomers with a classic template for both recovery and midlife self-reinvention. She not only cleaned up her act, but also went on to spend the final three decades of her life reaching out to others -- particularly midlife women, whom she felt were more likely, due to societal stigma, to conceal their problems -- and helping them to get sober, as well. As it turns out, she was a lot cooler than we ever realized.
BTW, if you've been touched by Betty Ford's example and activism, and want to let the world know, add your thoughts to this tribute book being compiled to honor her memory by the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.
Previous Post: Google+: Testing the Waters
Next Post: Jobless Rate Climbs For Older Workers
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Forty years ago this September, at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, Palestinian terrorists took hostage 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Village. Two of the athletes were executed, and after a 20-hour standoff, the remaining hostages were killed during a botched rescue attempt at a German military airfield.
Families of the victims requested they be remembered with a minute of silence Friday when the London Summer Olympics begin with the three hours of gaudy theatrical excess known as the Opening Ceremony. But for reasons that can only be called dubious, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge determined any 40-year reference to the “Black September” events – even a simple moment of silence – is inappropriate .
“We feel,” Rogge said during an IOC press conference Saturday, “that the Opening Ceremony is an atmosphere that is not conducive to remembering such a tragic incident.”
Rogge noted how IOC representatives are planning to meet with the Israeli Olympic Committee for a private commemoration next week in London, and that the IOC will visit the German airfield for a formal event of remembrance on Sept. 5.
But a minute of silence before an international TV audience of 4 billion? That wouldn’t be “conducive” to the “atmosphere.”
What Rogge really meant was it wouldn’t be conducive to the IOC’s relationship with nations that aren’t friendly with Israel. The IOC isn’t opposed to mourning the dead; it just depends on the homeland of those who died.
Eight hours before the Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, a Georgian luger died on a training run. A moment of silence was held in B.C. Place, and Canadian Mounties lowered the Olympic and Canadian flags to half-staff.
During the Opening Ceremony for the 2002 Winter Games at Salt Lake City – the first major international event held after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – eight U.S. athletes, accompanied by five policemen and four firefighters from New York City, carried the tattered Ground Zero flag into Rice-Eccles Stadium. Three minutes of silence ensued.
At the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Games, then IOC-president Juan Antonio Samaranch called for a moment of silence “in memory of the city of Sarajevo,” where a civil war was raging.
“Please stop killing,” Samaranch said in his Opening Ceremony remarks. “Drop your guns, please.”
In each of those instances, silence was requested amid spectacles that made the typical Super Bowl halftime show look no more gaudy than bingo night at the Elk’s Club. It’s not difficult for athletes and fans to devote a brief moment to reverence during three hours of relentless pageantry.
Devoting a minute to the memory of 11 Israeli Olympians murdered 40 years ago would’ve graced the Opening Ceremony in London with a brief measure of dignity, but the script is lengthy and time is tight, and besides, what would Israel’s neighbors think?
Without the horrific history of 1972 to intrude, the show phase of the first-night show in London will go on, apparently in three acts. Olympic ceremony plans are supposed to be as guarded as the minutes of a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, but according to the London Sunday Telegraph, the festivities on Friday will commence with a James Bond impersonator dropping in from a helicopter.
And then London will try to out-Beijing the Opening Ceremony of 2008, a production so lavish that it’s possible the last supporting-cast participant returned home only an hour ago.
“A stage backdrop of hills, streams, meadows and a thatched cottage will evoke Britain’s rural past,” the Telegraph reported. “The landscape will be dotted with live animals, including 12 horses, three cows, 70 sheep, three sheepdogs and a horse-drawn plough, along with milkmaids, picnicking families, an Edwardian village cricket team in flannels, caps and braces, and people dancing around maypoles.”
Did I mention this is only Act 1? In Act 3, it’s looking like the ceremony will take that inevitable turn in Bizarroville with a “parade of dancing nurses and ancillary staff pushing hospital beds to represent the NHS and the Welfare State.”
Not to critique a show I haven’t seen yet, but I’ve long believed that if you’ve seen one parade of dancing nurses and ancillary staff pushing hospital beds to represent the NHS and the Welfare State, you’ve seen ’em all.
Wait, there’s more.
There’s a roller derby team and a burlesque performer appearing with 12,000 dancers, drummers, skateboarders, acrobats and actors dressed as British historical figures.
NBC’s Bob Costas again has been assigned the hopeless job of trying to describe all this with a straight face for his American audience, but the telegenic youth Costas projects on camera belies the fact he is an old pro. He’ll do fine, and he’ll do it with a defiant disregard of IOC bureaucracy.
Costas is planning on devoting a minute of silence to the Israeli Olympians killed 40 years ago.
“I intend to note that the IOC denied the request,” Costas told reporters a few days ago. “Many people find that denial more than puzzling, but insensitive.”
Insensitive? Without a doubt. But the shabby disregard toward 11 Israeli families still grieving 40 years after the Munich massacre is not puzzling.
Consider the email@example.com
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Big data is a big topic these days, one that has made its way up to the C-suite. The CMO may not yet fully understand what big data is, exactly. But the CMO knows he or she needs a plan for how to use it.
In fact, three of IDC’s Top 10 predictions for CMOs in 2013 revolve around mastering this data explosion in marketing.
In many ways, this attention on big data is a breakthrough moment for marketing. Sure, data has always been present in certain corners of the marketing department — especially with you astute search marketers and conversion optimization pros. But marketing management and culture have thrived more generally around gut instincts, creative concepts, and compelling communications.
Marketing has been about big ideas. Big thinking. Big budgets.
But big data? That’s something new. What’s qualitatively different — and somewhat ironic — is that big data actually promises more visibility into ever smaller circles of customer segments, asymptotically approaching a fully personalized “segment of one.”
With the new tools that are emerging, marketers can crunch their petabytes of disparate data, pulled from owned, earned, and paid media, mingled with transaction histories, mixed with profiles from third-party exchanges, and combined with public and industry statistics to divine all kinds of interesting correlations.
The goal: uncover connections that appear to influence different subsets of your audience to take action more successfully.
The Big Hypothesis Generator
I choose the words “appear to influence” with care. Because correlation is not causation. The insights generated by big data are usually tentative at best — possible relationships, in the past, between our behaviors as marketers and the behaviors of our prospects and customers.
In other words, most of these insights are the seeds of hypotheses. There’s no guarantee that the correlations unearthed in big data can directly influence customer behavior.
There are many reasons for this. For one, while big data naturally implies a large amount data, it’s far from complete. There always remains a huge number of “confounding factors” out there in the world, not captured in our data, influencing customers in ways not represented in our closed big data models.
(In a way, this is good news for marketers: the CEO is unlikely to be able to replace you with a robot, at least, any time soon.)
But it does mean that we have work to do to harness the insights that big data nominates as possible opportunities. We should look to big data for inspiration — and combine it with our ability to distill those revelations into testable customer experiences.
That’s the powerhouse human-machine combination that lets us move from interesting correlations to actionable marketing.
Big Testing: Big Ideas, Big Team, Big Deal
However, to take advantage of this, marketing’s culture must shift towards testing.
For years, testing and optimization have been niche practices in the marketing department. A/B testing with a few direct mail pieces in the past. A/B testing with a few landing pages in the present. But, most marketing programs have been run on intuition.
But now, big data is opening the door to the executive suite for a more hybrid analytical-creative method. The questions big data raises — okay, how do we use this data to grow our business? — have an answer: broadly embrace testing and controlled experimentation as the new “operating system” of marketing.
The answer is big testing.
What exactly does “big testing” mean? Its bigness is a function of three things:
First, big testing is about experimenting with big ideas. This is best captured in an article by Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup: learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem). It actually points out that most landing page and website optimization programs, while useful in some ways, are not very helpful at learning how to build a better business.
“The right split-tests to run are ones that put big ideas to the test,” he writes. “For example, we could split-test what color to make the ‘Register Now’ button. But how much do we learn from that? Let’s say that customers prefer one color over another? Then what? Instead, how about a test where we completely change the value proposition on the landing page?”
Embracing big ideas in big testing is about fearlessly answering the question — Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bold Test? — with a resounding, “Not us!”
Second, big testing is about empowering many people in the marketing organization to do testing. It’s about giving them the training, the tools, and — most importantly — the mandate to test new ideas.
Historically, testing has been restricted to a small number of gatekeepers. But now that we have such a fragmented and fractured marketing landscape — and with big data helping us identify ever more granular opportunities within it — we need to tap more marketers on the team to run controlled experiments.
Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, has said that Google runs about 10,000 experiments each year. A large number of different people throughout the company are engaged in all kinds of different tests in parallel. It’s not the cult of a few; it’s the culture of the many.
Finally, big testing is about making a big deal about testing from the top down, fostering a culture of experimentation.
This last point will probably be the most challenging, as culture is not something that changes quickly. Executives need to make a conscious effort to encourage real testing — starting with the acknowledgement that good experiments prove or disprove hypotheses. Not every test will be a winner, but if the test was executed well, a negative result shouldn’t reflect poorly on the tester.
Marketing leaders need to make their teams feel good — not scared — about testing those big ideas.
Big data is like fuel. Big testing will be the engine that turns it into forward momentum.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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U.S. Builders Urge Canada to Reject Bad Lumber Deal
U.S. home builders on June 19 told Canadian lawmakers that a proposed managed trade softwood lumber agreement would distort the marketplace, harm Canadian companies and workers, and force American consumers to explore the use of alternative materials and look to other nations for a stable and reliable supply of this vital building material.
Testifying for NAHB before the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade in Ottawa, Barry Rutenberg, a home builder from Gainesville, Fla., urged Parliament to reject the tentative accord that would harm U.S. consumers and Canadian lumber firms.
Instead of rushing to complete a fatally flawed settlement, Rutenberg said the Canadians should continue to pursue free lumber trade and a refund of all duties collected, just as they have done in the past through their successful and ongoing legal cases before the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization and the U.S. Court of International Trade.
By rushing into a bad deal and abandoning its strong legal claims, Rutenberg said that Ottawa is sending the message that the U.S. lumber coalition’s claims are legitimate and that Canada has been at fault. “We don’t believe this to be true, and we don’t understand why Canada would want to create that impression.”
Complex Border Taxes and Quotas
The framework would result in a complicated system of border taxes and quotas that would force Canadian lumber producers to fight for a smaller U.S. market share.
During the next seven to nine years, the proposed duration of the settlement, NAHB expects the average number of annual housing starts to be about 200,000 lower than in 2005. The outlook is for construction rates similar to 2002 and 2003, when the average lumber price was $308 per 1,000 board feet, despite duties of 27%.
The slowdown in home building, enhanced lumber mill efficiency, increased imports from Europe and greater use of engineered wood products should mean lower prices.
Under the agreement, lumber prices would be higher than they would be under a free market, but may often fall below the $315 threshold where the most stringent fees and quotas would apply.
Pact Could Create Supply Bottlenecks
NAHB’s analysis indicates the pact could increase and destabilize prices and lead to bottlenecks as Canadian producers fight for limited market share and to supply shortages as firms delay shipments in anticipation of a change in duties.
Since quotas would be tied to total U.S. consumption, which is constantly changing and inaccurately measured, lumber mills would not know whether they could meet supply contracts without exceeding the quotas.
“That’s a peculiar notion of stability,” said Rutenberg, responding to proponents of the pact who have argued that it would actually promote supply and price stability.
Since the proposed framework provides no incentive or means for Canadian softwood lumber companies to exit from the terms of the agreement, there is little reasonable expectation that a transition to free trade will be permitted.
Faced with the prospect of new barriers to imports from Canada and increased volatility in supply and prices, Rutenberg told Canadian lawmakers that NAHB feels obligated to facilitate softwood lumber imports from Europe and the use of alternative materials to protect the interests of American home builders and consumers.
Stay the Legal Course
Rutenberg emphasized that the best strategy for Canada to achieve free lumber trade and a refund of all duties collected is to see its legal cases to their conclusions. Ottawa has already notched several key legal victories in the NAFTA process — at the World Trade Organization and in the U.S. Court of International Trade — that will ultimately realize these goals.
“Finishing the litigation would establish important precedents and make it much more difficult for the U.S. lumber coalition to successfully petition for new duties,” said Rutenberg. “We are very disappointed by the willingness of the Canadian government to sacrifice those gains, jeopardize Canada’s share in the U.S. market and effectively provide a handful of U.S. companies with veto power over provincial forest policies.”
In supporting Canada’s strong legal stance, NAHB has worked avidly to convince U.S. lawmakers and the American public that Canadian lumber is not unfairly traded and that barriers to lumber imports hurt U.S. consumers.
“Several major newspapers across the U.S. — including the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press and the Orlando Sentinel — have published editorials reflecting this view, and more than 100 members of Congress have gone on record in support of the consumer perspective,” said Rutenberg.
For more information, e-mail Michael Carliner at NAHB, or call him at 800-368-5242 x8376.
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The U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance (USFRA) brought together experts in Washington on Wednesday, March 7, for a panel discussion on the future of food and farming and the role of technology in helping to ensure a sustainable food supply-a topic particularly timely for today’s celebration of National Ag Day.
Dr. Roger Beachy explained that solutions must include genetic research aimed at improving plant disease resistance and enabling crops to last longer. “I’d like to see the day when disease resistance is king, not disease,” he said.
He emphasized the need for effectively leveraging public and private resources for scientific research, and called for harmonizing food safety guidelines globally and regionally to reduce barriers for approving new technologies and food products.
Watch the full video of yesterday’s panel discussion here.
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In-depth: Laying Landmines to Rest? Humanitarian Mine Action
IRAQ: Insecurity adds to huge southern demining task
Increased insecurity in Iraq is severely limiting humanitarian assistance including mine clearance
BASRA, 1 November 2004 (IRIN) - Work on clearing mines and unexploded ordnance (UXOs) in southern Iraq is continuing at a slow pace due to insecurity, with international NGOs and other partners of the Regional Mine Action Centre (RMAC) in the city of Basra just getting back to work after eight months of delays, a spokesman from RMAC told IRIN.
"Our plan is to develop a new training/operations centre based outside Basra," the spokesman said. The NGO has been targeted twice by explosive devices which killed a local aid worker and left another two badly injured.
"We are closing down physically in Basra," he added. A total of 9,574 items including UXOs and mines were recovered for demolition and a total of 9,660 items have already been destroyed this year.
"We are concerned with mainly three types of clearance; mines, unexploded ordnance and large quantities of unused ammunition from Iraqi stocks after the last war. But the border with Iran in the central and southern regions is one of the heavily mined [areas] from the Iraq-Iran war," the RMAC official said.
He added that the UXOs are common throughout the whole region, most of them from the Gulf war in 1991 and some from the recent conflict to oust Saddam Hussein early last year. "We have a number of programmes from the US Department of Defense to either eradicate those UXOs or decide what to do about them in the future," he added.
The RMAC was established in November 2003 to advise and train local Iraqis to clear mines and UXOs. According to the RMAC official, it was very difficult to estimate the number of mines and UXOs remaining on the ground in southern Iraq. "I can't say there is x thousand numbers of UXOs, but I can say there are a lot and they are widespread. Most of them are still in their original place and there are a lot of stocks people haven't found yet.”
German Shepherd 'Larry' being trained to detect mines in the northern Iraqi governorate of Arbil.
Very little is known about the impact of uncleared mines and UXOs on local communities, he explained. In one of the few surveys conducted on the problem in the country, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 2001 identified cluster bombs and other UXOs as the main threat to communities living in southern Iraq. The Iraq Landmine Impact Survey (ILIS), another partner with RMAC, organised by the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation and funded by the US State Department, began a socio-economic impact survey in May 2004 on the whole country to gather information on the distribution of mines and UXOs and their impact on people.
An aid worker from ILIS told IRIN that the programme started activities in Basra in August. "Right now, we are in the process of visiting communities [mainly villages and small towns] in Basra. It is difficult to fully document the extent of the contamination in these districts because large swaths of the land are almost completely abandoned," he explained.
RMAC is using the information from the survey to establish priorities to assist the most highly affected and engaged communities identified by the survey. The survey team is using different sources such as the Iraqi Red Crescent (IRC), the statistics directory, and the Basra governorate office in order to gather data and develop knowledge of contaminated villages.
"We ask officials in the villages about 170 questions to cover locations and other details about land mines or UXOs found. If there are any, we take digital pictures and then we use GPS [Global Positioning System] instruments to record the exact position [of the mines] so that teams can come later to destroy it or make it safe," the ILIS worker said.
According to the survey team, the most heavily affected community identified by the survey so far is the village of Jurf Al-Malh, close to Shat Al-arab waterway near the Iranian border. A local leader in the village told IRIN that the area was on the front line of the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war.
"People here are poor and they live on farming. They have to go to the fields because it is the only work they have but there are many incidents where people were killed or lost their legs because of the landmines," the Sheikh said.
In addition, there are reports that some people are digging for mines so they can sell them to earn a living, a highly dangerous job. A 21-year-old shepherd died a few weeks ago just days before the survey team arrived, the Sheikh said, adding that over the last year, around 120 people were either killed or injured by anti-personnel or anti-tank mines.
Mines, unexploded ordnance and arms caches litter Iraq presenting demining groups with huge challenges if they are to protect civilians.
Credit: MAG/Sean Sutton
According to the survey team, the majority of the mined areas are in open countryside. Other efforts to clear the area include those of the Iraqi National Guard (ING), who have carried out a number of ordnance disposal operations after being trained by the British army.
"Our battalion was formed nine months ago by the British army. We mainly work in Basra and through to the border with Iran to clear UXOs primarily in built up areas," Captain Firas Al-Tamimi, an ING spokesman, told IRIN.
There are around 750,000 mt of UXOs in and around Basra, mainly unused ammunition, bombs, rockets and mortars discarded by fleeing Iraqi troops last year. So far, around 400 mt have been cleared, according to Al-Tamimi.
British experts estimated that the work could be done in 60 years, he added. But they too are finding it tough due to a lack of maps and detectors, the captain said.
Right now, the ING battalion is working to clear an area of 110 km on the waterside in Al-Fao region south of Basra in order to clear the site for a project to build a new port.
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Choosing a Pre-Opt Major
According to Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry (ASCO):
"Most students major in the natural sciences in college (biology, chemistry, etc.) because the prerequisites for optometry school are science intensive. However, prospective students can major in any degree discipline as long as they complete all of the prerequisite courses for optometry."
(Schools and Colleges of Optometry: Admission Requirements 2009-2010)
University of Kentucky students with a broad range of majors have been successful in the optometry school admissions process.
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Daniel Schwanke, a electrical and controls engineer-in-training, recently returned home from a project trip to La-Accra, Ghana, where he and a team spent a week preparing the design of a hospital for La Mansaamo Kpee International (LMK).
Schwanke was part of a team of architects and engineers from all over North America, who volunteered their time with the Engineering Ministries International Canada.
It was the engineer-in-training’s first trip with EMI Canada.
Volunteers helped in developing concepts for the expansion of LMK’s already existing clinic into a maternal and child speciality hospital, which will serve the health needs of mothers and children in low-income families.
Schwanke worked out the electrical requirements for the site, which included services for medical equipment needs and back up power.
At the end of the week, the team presented a master plan and schematic building design to LMK, as well as phasing options.
Even after leaving, the team is continuing to work on more detailed ideas of the design, and will provide a final report in the upcoming months.
The team leader, Kevin Wiens, is also originally from Fort St. John. Wiens, a civil engineer, has been working in Calgary with Engineering Ministries International since 2007. Since then, he has led 15 teams of volunteer design professionals to countries like Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador and South Sudan.
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Globally, governments and businesses are discussing gender diversity on boards. This tool describes the different approaches countries have taken to increase women’s representation in the boardroom and summarizes the same key aspects of each approach, including:
While the advantages and disadvantages of each method are open to debate, the general consensus is that gender diversity on boards is good for business. This tool gives readers, including board directors, corporate leaders, and policy makers, a straightforward way to make comparisons.
We strive to keep this tool accurate and timely. If you have found that we have missed something or you have any questions, please email us.
Suggested Citation: Catalyst, Increasing Gender Diversity on Boards: Current Index of Formal Approaches (May, 2012).
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De Soto was a sidewheel steamer, one of the many taken over by the Confederate forces for use on the Mississippi and other rivers. In April of 1862 she was busy ferrying troops to evacuate the area near Island No. 10 and was used, under a flag of truce, to communicate with the Union gunboats. On 7 April 1862 she carried Confederate officers who surrendered possession of Island No. 10 to Flag Officer Foote. It was at night, and De Soto approached cautiously, giving four blasts of her whistle, repeatedly, until answered, whereupon Federal officers came on board to accept surrender.
She then became USS De Soto, with a later name change to General Lyon.
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It was Jung who conceived of the collective unconscious and the archetypes embedded universally in humanity, from mythology to psychology. Synthesizing the results of mechanistic science with an intuitive stance on evolution and the interconnectedness of life, Sheldrake asserts that a similar concept can be found in biology. In A New Science of Life, the British scientist theorizes that an immeasurable field superimposes and patterns biological structures of life and the reproductive process of all living things. Despite encountering continued skepticism since its publishing in 1981 (it was nominated as a “book for burning” by Nature), the idea has been developed in subsequent books and achieved wider acclaim and validity in the years since.
The parallels with Jungian archetypal theory obvious - particularly in how it informs across a variety of tiers - Sheldrake describes morphogenetic fields as being:
responsible for the characteristic form and organization of systems at all levels of complexity, not only in the realm of biology, but also in the realms of chemistry and physics. These fields order the systems with which they are associated by affecting events which… appear to be indeterminate or probabilistic. (13)
It is Sheldrake’s dependence on these unquantifiable aspects—the intuitive, non-rational nature of morphogenetic fields—which cause a stir in the community of evolutionary biology and science in general.
Not the first to use the idea of morphogenetic fields, Sheldrake’s theory is, however, the first to accord the idea unequivocal palpability. In explaining how current morphogenetic fields are derivative of past fields, he writes “the structures of past systems affect subsequent similar systems by cumulative influence which acts across both space and time” (13). Similar to Bohm’s theory of implicate order, morphogenetic fields are thus omnipresent and immeasurable, transcending time and space to inform the present. Based on the cumulative influence contained within morphogenetic fields, Sheldrake thus explains how an animal or a plant is both similar to and different from its predecessor, the newest variety more adapted to its surroundings yet possessing nearly entirely the same structure, the similarities a result of morphic resonance within the omnipresent morphogenetic field. Rooted in evolutionary biology, he breaks this transfer down into four levels: instinct, sign stimulus (a life form’s interaction and reaction to its environment and circumstance), learning (the manner in which organisms permanently adapt to new environments and perpetual circumstances over time), and memory (the morphogenetic aspect which allows a life form to transmit adaptations to succeeding generations).
In the end, Sheldrake’s theories remain on the dark side of Popper’s demarcation problem: it is unprovable in the terms of rational science. Sheldrake details some interesting experimentation in his book involving subsequent generations of rats and pigeons taught to perform certain tricks, yet his results are corroborated only to varying degrees by external research. That being said, rational science is neither able to offer provable explanations for the phenomena Sheldrake delves into, thus rendering his theories at least a step forward in the discovery of what truly lies beneath. Only time will tell, and so for now A New Science of Life remains interesting, alternative theory worth a read into the yet mysteries details of biological evolution.
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The Commission is an independent state agency responsible for enforcing the Tennessee Human Rights Act and the Tennessee Disability Act which prohibit discrimination in housing, employment, and public accommodation on the basis of race, color, creed, national origin, religion, sex, disability, familial status (housing only) and age (40 and over in employment). The Commission is also responsible for coordinating the State of Tennessee’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin by State agencies receiving federal financial assistance.
The Commission has cooperative agreements with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). These agreements allow the federal and state agencies to coordinate their investigations and avoid duplication of efforts in seeking to end discrimination.
The Commission is governed by a 15 member board of Commissioners appointed by the Governor representing the three Grand Divisions of the State. A list of the Commission members may be found here.
Complaints must be filed with the Commission within 180 days of the discriminatory act. Complaint forms may be completed on this site for your convenience and downloaded. Either sign the declaration statement on the complaint form or have the complaint notarized by a notary public.
The rules and regulations of the Commission governing complaints and investigations may be found here.
The Commission's Bylaws govern the meetings of the Commission and its administration. A copy may be found here.
Our mission to safeguard individuals from discrimination through enforcement and education. This mission is accomplished through a staff of investigators, attorneys and other professional support personnel. A list of the Commission's management staff may be found here.
The Commission maintains its central office in Nashville and has regional offices in Knoxville, Chattanooga and Memphis.
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It’s all about acorns, apparently. I’m a little surprised they didn’t bring up lack of wolves/coyote control leading to more foxes…
Climatologists have been warning us about the ongoing and impending consequences of global warming for years. But the results of climate change affect more than just polar bears and penguins – if you live anywhere in the northeastern, north-central or west coast states of the U.S.., you could be at a greater risk for contracting Lyme Disease.
Lyme disease is an infection of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium that is spread through black legged ticks (otherwise known as deer ticks) who feed on the white footed mouse species, also known as the wood mouse, which carries the bacteria. The symptoms of the disease itself include fever, headache, fatigue, and a telltale “bulls eye” rash near the site of the tick-bite. Left untreated, Lyme disease can spread to affect the joints (causing arthritis), heart, and nervous system – often causing irritability and mood swings.
Lyme disease transmission occurs in a Reservoir à Vector à Host cycle. A Reservoir is the habitat in which an infectious agent normally lives, grows and multiplies – in this case, it is the white-footed mouse. A disease vector is a carrier animal (usually an arthropod) that transfers an infective agent from one host to another- i.e. the blacklegged tick. And the host in this scenario is an organism that harbors an infective agent – us, our pets, and other animals.
Lyme disease is transmitted when a nymphal (young) tick feeds on a B. burgdorferi carrying white-footed mouse. The contaminated bloodmeal that it ingests allows the bacterium to live on in the tick (the vector), and the infected tick can then transmit the bacteria to its next host – a dog, your child, you, or any other animal roaming around in a wooded area.
Nearly a quarter of all Lyme disease cases are in children, as they play near to the ground, where host-seeking ticks are often waiting. The CDC reports that pet owners and outdoorsy types are also at higher risk, as dogs and people traipsing through thick brush can easily pick up a tick or two without realizing it.
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COLUMBUS COUNTY, NC (WECT) - With there being a corn shortage, due to bad weather in the Midwest earlier this year, the crop is costing a little more than in previous years.
Some farmers believe corn is at least $2.00 higher than it should be.
According to Chandler Worley, a farmer in Columbus County, due to a shortage some companies here in North Carolina are having corn imported from other places.
"With prices high, they're probably trying to buy corn overseas, while they can." Said Worley.
He says, since the price of corn has gone up, some feed companies are struggling because farmers can't afford to feed their livestock.
"I've heard bacon is predicted to be high as $10.00 a pack. The average consumer can't afford that. When the consumer backs off and get in the habit of not eating pork chops and bacon, it takes them a while to get back into eating it. That kills the demand for pigs, pork, and chickens." Said Worley.
Worley, tells us, the current price of corn could affect any farm bills lawmakers across the country pass. He says, that's because they're factoring in how much corn is now and that price will likely go down.
"In two or three years, we go back to two dollars and a half corn. Four or five dollar beans and three dollar wheat. You're going to have a bunch of busted farmers out there and there's not going to be any help." Added Worley.
This year some farmers in North Carolina actually grew corn early. So they could grow another batch before the weather changed.
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In a November 4 post, we asked your help in identifying game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years. We primed the pump with four examples:
- The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today
- Search technology – Where once we filed, today we search
- Cluster computing
- The transformation of science via computation
In this post, we summarize just a sample of your additions (we have grabbed text from your posted comments, without a lot of editing, so this will be loose – “it’s the thoughts that count”) and invite your further comments – cleaning up these additions, or providing others. Please let us hear from you!
Secure communication – the foundation of e-commerce
All of e-commerce relies on the results of computing research: the Internet, the World Wide Web, cluster computing, parallel relational database systems, cryptography and algorithms for secure credit card transactions. Here, we focus on the latter. Without secure communication – for example, the ability to conduct a credit card transaction with an online merchant – there would be no e-commerce. The complex of events (both theoretical advances and deployment of practical, useful software) that allow a user to type a credit card number into a web browser and be reasonably assured of its safety is a game-changer, making secure communication and secure commerce a reality for (potentially) all users of the Internet. Without these artifacts, we would have no Amazon.com, no eBay, no thriving online pornography industry, …
Mobile computing and communication
Twenty years ago, computing was a desktop experience. “Portable computers” were the size of a briefcase. Communication was via 9600 baud telephone modem. Contrast that to today: 2 pound laptops that fit in a mailing envelope, mobile phones with Web browsers that fit in a shirt pocket, and ubiquitous WiFi and 3G cellular at many millions of bits per second. Clearly, mobile computing and communication – the untethered lifestyle – is a game-changer.
Expert systems become ubiquitous
Thousands of routine decisions daily are made by computer systems that have specialized knowledge of a problem area. In the past, rule changes at a central office – e.g., the IRS, or the headquarters for a corporation – were incorporated slowly into practice. With expert systems, the people making the decisions have the benefit of codified knowledge bases that reflect current policy and practices.
Research on expert systems began in the 1970′s with support from DARPA, the National Institutes of Heath, and NSF. Expert systems have subsequently become an essential part of the IT toolkit for every major company. Help desks, credit checking and equipment troubleshooting are examples of systems that have been replicated many times over and are routinely saving money for business and public institutions.
Expert systems technology is a game-changer.
Robotics in everyday life
Twenty years ago, robots appeared in artificial intelligence laboratories, automated assembly lines, and science fiction movies. In recent years, iRobot Corporation has sold roughly 1,000,000 Roomba robotic home vacuum cleaners annually, and multiple robotic automobiles have completed the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, autonomously navigating a 150-mile desert course and a 60-mile urban course. Robots have entered the mainstream of society, integrating a wide variety of Artificial Intelligence technologies such as computer vision, sensing, and planning. This is a game-changer, and the best clearly is yet to come.
Today, almost no one thinks of photography in any form other than digital. The means by which we capture, edit, and share digital images are the result of multiple breakthroughs in computer science.
Similarly, digital compact disc audio – a breakthrough when it entered the mainstream only two dozen years ago – is going the way of the dinosaur, replaced by MP3 audio on personal devices such as iPods.
Our video entertainment is in digital form too – whether on a DVD, a personal video device, streaming media, or a video game.
Digital media is revolutionizing entertainment and the entertainment industry – a game-changer.
GPS, mapping, and navigation
GPS – the ability to pinpoint your position nearly anywhere on earth – is a marvel. But even more amazing are the algorithms that provide navigation – available on the Web, and in $200 self-contained portable devices from Garmin, TomTom, and others. GPS, mapping, and navigation are game-changers.
Collaborative filtering and recommender systems
Collaborative filtering and recommender systems dramatically altered how we think about computing applications by introducing the idea that the actions and preferences of other people could be a useful resource in computations intended to support someone else’s activities. This is easily appreciated by a broad audience – anyone who has used Amazon.com’s “people who bought this also bought…” or other social features; a somewhat narrower audience will also appreciate that a major improvement in search engine performance occurred when they started taking into account link structures and then click behaviors.
There’s a clear tie to computing research, both in work on algorithms for using data from other people, and in interfaces for collecting it and presenting predictions or recommendations. The idea was first articulated in CACM and in the ACM CSCW and CHI conferences, and there are now thousands of papers about it.
A few additional ideas that were suggested
These need fleshing out or weeding out! Our comments in [blue brackets] …
- Something related to applications of machine learning – the applications within computing (e.g., NLP, vision, graphics), to other sciences (with big data), to finance (credit card fraud, and dare I say Wall Street) abound [for sure - needs fleshing out]
- Something related to advances in software engineering, and the application of logic to analyzing both hardware and software designs and artifacts [the application of logic might work; we still have a "software crisis," though, and "there (still) is no silver bullet," so need to be careful with claims]
- Something related to scientific computing and large-scale computational science, simulations, etc. [we meant this to be covered by one of our original topics - "the transformation of science via computation"]
- Virtualization [can someone say "1960s"?]
- Network coding [would need to be painted larger]
- Compressed sampling/sensing [would need to be painted larger]
- Quantum computing [premature]
- Elliptic curve crypto [covered crypto under secure communication]
- Molecular computing [come see us in 10 years!]
- Randomized algorithms [would need to be painted larger - colored with applications]
- Theory of distributed computing: impossibility results, Byzantine generals [we meant to feature this under our "cluster computing" topic, which relies integrally on these algorithms; cluster computing is not a hardware breakthrough, it's a distributed algorithms breakthrough!]
- Wearable/ubiquitous/mobile computing [covered under mobile computing and communication, a new topic above]
- Sensor networks [tell me more]
- Human computation (Captchas, the ESP game, etc.) [maybe ...]
- Computational microeconomics: ad placement, automated mechanism design [sounds good - say more!]
Again, we invite your comments! Let us hear from you!
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Dissociation is the brain's defense mechanism related to stressful or traumatic situations. While everyone experiences dissociation at some point (i.e. when the mind wanders while driving a car), ongoing and more extreme cases may lead to diagnosis of the disorder.
A Dissociative Disorder alters the normal state of mental functioning and limits the awareness of identity, emotions, memory, perception and/or consciousness. Symptoms can present as mild, moderate, or debilitating, and vary based upon the type of the Dissociative Disorder.
Similar symptoms may be present in other disorders, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and in certain brain diseases.
Types of Dissociative Disoders:
1) Depersonalization Disorder: feelings of unreality concerning the self and environment, which may cause impairment in functioning. Symptoms may include:
- Derealization - a feeling that objects or people are distorted (i.e. objects or parts of the body seem larger or smaller than usual)
- Depersonalization - a feeling of detachment from your body or a situation; this can feel as if you are watching a situation from above when you are a participant, as if the world around you is in a movie that you are watching, or you may feel robotic as if something else is controlling your body
- Emotional numbing and/or mood disorders such as depression
- Memory interruption or loss
- Identity confusion
Episodes of depersonalization can be very intense and cause anxiety for the sufferer because the sufferer considers the depersonalization unnatural. This can also lead to depression, panic, or worry about going crazy.
The exact cause of the development of the disorder is unknown; however, it is likely that extreme emotional trauma (such as in cases of abuse or war) is a catalyst. Reminders (also called "triggers") of previous trauma can lead to episodes of depersonalization in one with the disorder.
Treatment for Dissociative Disorder:
Many sufferers are not as concerned with the disorder itself, but instead seek treatment for related mood disorders.
Medication can be given to address mood problems, and psychotherapy and/or cognitive therapy are usually recommended to address unresolved trauma. New coping techniques can be taught in cognitive/behavioral therapy.
2) Dissociative Amnesia: partial or total loss of important information, sometimes occurring suddenly after a particularly stressful event or situation.
A person struggling with Dissociative Amnesia may not remember critical information like age, name, address, friends or relatives, but is able to remember how to carry about daily life.
Dissociative Amnesia is not caused by a neurological issue or drug abuse or any of the other dissociative disorders (Dissociative Identity Disorder, Dissociative Fugue, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, etc).
Types of Dissociative Amnesia:
- Localized amnesia is the inability to remember all the events that happened in a relatively short period of time, often centered around a painful or traumatic event. Localized amnesia is the most common type of dissociation.
- Selective Amnesia is an inability to remember certain details of a situation or incident. An example of selective amnesia: a person may remember a car crash, but not that it killed a loved one.
- Generalized Amnesia is an inability to remember anything about one's past life.
- Systematized Amnesia is the loss of memory for specific types of information. An example of systematized amnesia: a person may be unable to recall anything about a particular person.
- Continuous Amnesia: inability to remember any events between a specific time in the past and the present. The person is alert and oriented but forgets each event after it occurs.
3) Dissociative Fugue (also known as Fugue State) is confusion over personal identity, often resulting in partial (or complete) adoption of a new identity, accompanied by travel away from home. Recovery from Fugue State is often abrupt and complete as gradual bits of information are remembered.
The Fugue State may range from hours to months but fugue periods are generally brief and self-limiting. In addition, Dissociative Fugue is rare.
During the Fugue State, the person will appear normal. Diagnosis is generally made retroactively. When the fugue ends, the person may suffer shame, depression and intense conflict over what has happened.
Symptoms of Dissociative Fugue:
- Sudden, unexpected travel away from home with an inability to recall the past.
- Confusion about personal identity or assuming a new identity.
- Disturbance not due to medical condition or substance abuse.
- Significant distress in social, work, or other areas of functioning.
Treatment for Fugue State:
- Hypnosis may help, but efforts to restore the memory of the events in the fugue state are rarely successful.
- Therapy - to explore reasons for the fugue state and work on conflict management.
4) Dissociative Identity Disorder (also known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a dramatic condition in which two or more relatively independent personalities appear to exist within a single person.
More information about Dissociative Identity Disorder can be found on the Dissociative Identity Disorder Resource Page.
Related Resource Pages on Band Back Together
Additional Dissociative Disorder Resources:
The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Disassociation (ISSTD) is an international organization for healthcare professionals who treat complex trauma and dissociation disorders.
Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists (book)
The Potteridge Centre of Dissociation and Trauma is a UK-based organization that provides information for professionals as well as potential clients.
The UK-based website Mind.org.uk offers an electronic booklet that may help in understanding Dissociative Disorders.
The Trauma Information Pages have research articles related to dissociation and trauma, which can be informative for patients and advocates.
An Infinite Mind provides a wealth of resources for trauma-related disorders.
Boston University's Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation provides a website dedicated to living well with a psychiatric disability in work and school.
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with Alan Stein, Professional Strength Coach
Five-part DVD with over 130 professionally-tested drills to improve speed, agility and quickness. Stein begins with a warm-up segment that includes drills. Part 2 is Stein's Dynamic Flexibility series. Part 3 features drills for speed development where Stein focuses on developing speed with starting, stopping, forward movement, back pedaling, shuffling and running laterally. In Part 4, Stein shares agility and quickness drills that train an athlete to start, stop and change direction as quickly as possible. In the final section, Stein adds a visual component to train and enhance an athlete's ability to react rather than anticipate. Stein's drills are simple and easy to implement and require only tennis balls and cones to perform.
90 minutes. 2009.
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- Special Sections
Life can take people in many directions. Wapakoneta resident Nancy Scott is a shining example.
Scott recently received the Award of Service medal from the Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth, for her service in the Women’s Land Army in England.
Scott finished attending school by the age of 14 in her hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. By 16, at the height of World War II, she had enlisted in the Women’s Land Army (WLA). The WLA was a British civilian organization created during the war to work in place of men in various agricultural aspects when men were called up to the military.
As a member of the WLA, Scott was shipped throughout the country to cut down trees.
Armed with a 3-pound axe, Scott’s unit cut down trees to be used for “pit props in 2-, 4- and 6-foot lengths, as well as 12-foot logs to be used for telephone poles. Pit props are commonly used to prop up roofs of tunnels.
She decided to join the WLA because she loved the outdoors, which many years later has led to her commendation.
“I was very impressed that they would remember this,” Scott said. “I was quite taken aback. My goodness, that was 66 years ago. I am kind of proud of it.”
Toward the end of 1943 destiny took Scott’s life on another interesting turn. While chopping trees in southern England near Charlbury, the American Army was camped nearby and came to the forest to get firewood from the WLA. It was then that Scott met Cpl. Robert Scott from nearby Fort Recovery.
“He was so handsome,” Scott said with a smile. “He asked me on a date.”
Six months later, at the Church of England, they were married on May 8, 1944. One month later, on D-Day, her husband was gone again.
“I just waited on the war to get over so I could come over and be with him,” Scott said.
The war eventually ended, and Robert Scott made his way home in September of 1945. Nine months later he was joined by his wife.
The couple spent 44 years of marriage until Robert’s death in 1989. Scott loves America but she has maintained dual citizenship like many war brides from that era. However, she also has retained her love for her home land.
“England is such a beautiful country,” Scott said.
However, with only some cousins still living in England, her visits have been few and far between.
She visited once in 1975, and again in 1986. Her connection, with the exception of memories, seemed to be forever disconnected until she was surprised with her commendation medal.
Scott’s granddaughter, Tory Scott, found out about the commendation and submitted the paperwork for her grandmother to receive the medal.
Scott showed the medal and other artifacts from the war in a scrapbook and recalled the memories.
“I remember there were bombs every night,” Scott said. “I remember when I was 14 and they took us out of school to move us to the coast. They weren’t thinking very well because that was always the first place they bombed.
She said despite the constant bombing, people typically stayed in their homes despite the constant danger.
“There were bomb shelters in the middle of the streets,” Scott said, “but they were cold and damp. After a while everyone just started staying in their homes and taking their chances.”
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Oxygen - O
Gaseous chemical element, symbol: O, atomic number: 8 and atomic weight 15,9994. It’s of great interest because it’s the essential element in the respiratory processes of most of the living cells and in combustion processes. It’s the most abundant element in The Earth’s crust. Nearly one fifth (in volume) of the air is oxygen. Non-combined gaseous oxygen normally exists in form of diatomic molecules, O2, but it also exists in triatomic form, O3, named ozone.
In normal conditions oxygen is a colourless, odourless and insipid gas; it condensates in a light blue liquid. Oxygen is part of a small group of gasses literally paramagnetic, and it’s the most paramagnetic of all. Liquid oxygen is also slightly paramagnetic.
Oxygen is reactive and will form oxides with all other elements except helium, neon, argon and krypton. It is moderately soluble in water (30 cm3 per 1 liter of water dissolve) at 20 Celsius.
Oxygen can be separated from air by fractionated liquefaction and distillation. The main applications of oxygen in order of importance are: 1) melting, refining and manufacture of steel and other metals; 2) manufacture of chemicals by controlled oxidation; 3) rocket propulsion; 4) medical and biological life support; 5) mining, production and manufacture of stone and glass products.
The crust of earth is composed mainly of silicon-oxygen minerals, and many other elements are there as their oxides.
Nearly every chemical, apart from the inert gasses, bind with oxygen to form compounds. Water, H2O, and silica, SiO2, main component of the sand, are among the more abundant binary oxygen compounds. Among the compounds which contain more than two elements, the most abundant are the silicates, that form most of the rocks and soils. Other compounds which are abundant in nature are calcium carbonate (limestone and marble), calcium sulphate (gypsum), aluminum oxide (bauxite) and various iron oxides, that are used as source of the metal.
Oxygen is essential for all forms of life since it is a constituent of DNA and almost all other biologically important compounds. Is it even more drammatically essential, in that animals must have minute by minute supply of the gas in order to survive. Oxygen in the lungs is picked up by the iron atom at the center of hemoglobin in the blood and thereby transported to where it is needed.
Every human being needs oxygen to breathe, but as in so many cases too much is not good. If one is exposed to large amounts of oxygen for a long time, lung damage can occur. Breathing 50-100% oxygen at normal pressure over a prolonged period causes lung damage. Those people who work with frequent or potentially high exposures to pure oxygen, should take lung function tests before beginning employment and after that. Oxygen is usually stored under very low temperatures and therefore one should wear special clothes to prevent the freezing of body tissues.
Highly concentrated sources of oxygen promote rapid combustion and therefore are fire and explosion hazards in the presence of fuels.
Read more on oxygen in water
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Imatek have recently completed the successful installation of an IM10R Impact Test System at the Nagoya site of Tokai Rubber Industries in Japan.The system will be primarily used for understanding and developing the impact and energy absorption characteristics of materials used on vehicles for pedestrian safety applications.
The system has two modes of operation, high-rate tensile tests on standard polymer specimens and dynamic compression testing of polymeric foams and structures containing the same.
In tensile mode the system can test tensile specimens at strain rates in excess of 1000s-1 and yield strengths up to 35KN.
In dynamic compression mode the system uses a light-weight alloy carriage that is fitted with a variety of profiled strikers including child, teen and adult leg-form and head-form strikers, in order to measure energy absorption characteristics of materials and structures at representative speeds of up to 50kph and acceleration of up to 500g.
Tokai is a global company with headquarters in Japan and a strong business network comprising 19 locations in 8 countries. The group employs over 12,000 people and has annual sales in excess of 274 million yen.
During its history, which spans some three quarters of a century, Tokai has become a market leader in the manufacture and sales of automobile components including anti-vibration rubber and hoses. Tokai are a principle supplier to Toyota cars. The company also manufactures rubber components for the IT industry.
Imatek’s IM10 range is extremely versatile and is able to accommodate a wide range of automotive test applications making it an extremely cost effective choice for customers within the automotive sector.
Typical automotive test applications include:
- Standard QC tests on polymers to meet mandatory test requirements. For example, to ensure against brittle failure of key parts such as those that could compromise supplementary safety systems or cause injury to occupants.
- Ensuring against embrittlement of polymers due to paint coatings.
- Testing of alternative materials for suitability, weight reduction and better performance at lower cost.
- Characterising the energy absorption efficiency of polymeric foams, alloys and crush tubes for safety applications such as bumper structures and head, leg and knee protection applications.
- Resilience tests and dynamic fatigue tests of rubbers, such as those used in suspension and steering components.
- Crush testing of structures to assess crash performance, for example structures that are adjacent to or surrounding fuel lines to check susceptibility to damage and therefore crash failure.
- High rate tensile testing of polymers and sheet steels at speeds representative of in-use conditions.
- Impact performance of key structures such as suspension and steering assemblies, alloy and steel castings.
Imatek is a leading UK based manufacturer of materials testing equipment primarily in the fields of impact testing and polymer melt rheology. Imatek’s products are used all over the world to test the properties of materials, components and assemblies in industries such as aerospace, polymer processing, steel production, automotive and academic research.
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Family describes Geithner ‘83’s youth
By Kate Farley, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Friday, October 3, 2008
Timothy Geithner '83, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is so drawn to athletics that he's been known to turn up at business meetings in Europe wearing ski boots and to start pick-up basketball games with colleagues in his New York office. Geithner's position at New York's Reserve Bank has made him a key player in the government's efforts to resolve the ongoing economic crisis.
Geithner, along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson '68 and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, has been a primary engineer of the government's response to the recent financial meltdown. As the government's primary representative on Wall Street, he brokered the Bear Stearns buyout in March 2008 and was instrumental in the government's decision to rescue American International Group.
Deborah Geithner, Timothy Geithner's mother, said her son's on-the-go nature became apparent "when he was crawling around on all fours."
"He used to chase me around when I was cleaning the house," she recalled.
Born in New York City, Geithner spent most of his childhood in foreign countries, including present-day Zimbabwe, India and Thailand, where he attended high school at the International School of Bangkok.
"Tim was always very adaptable to the changing locations in which we lived," his father, Peter Geithner '54 said. "I think [moving] allowed Tim and his siblings to get used to getting on planes, used to being in different situations."
An amateur photographer in high school, Geithner traveled to Cambodia and took "striking" black-and-white photos of refugees, according to his parents.
"He turned our bathroom in Bangkok into a darkroom," his mother said.
Geithner continued his pursuit of photography at Dartmouth, where he worked as an event photographer. A double major in government and Asian studies with a concentration in Chinese, he also was a Chinese drill instructor.
Susan Blader, Dartmouth professor of Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literature who instructed Geithner in Chinese during his first year at the College, said he was a "natural language learner."
"Tim was international, he was lively and he had this wonderful giggle," Blader said. "Everyone loved him."
The image Timothy Geithner projects in the media, Deborah Geithner said, is at odds with her son's personality.
"[In magazines] he looks so serious to me," she said. "He's really very lively and has a good sense of humor."
Justin Rudelson '83, senior lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern languages and literatures, participated in a study-abroad program at Beijing University with Geithner. Geithner's sense of humor and ability to "break the ice" were invaluable during their time in China, Rudelson said.
"Tim had a very wonderful way of getting to know people all over the place," he said. "He was good at breaking down the huge gap that existed because we were privileged Americans, and we were meeting people of more modest means."
Geithner's ability to connect with people, as well as his skills as a "behind-the-scenes" strategist, are strengths that Rudelson said he believes will help Geithner to resolve the current financial crisis.
Blader also expressed confidence in Geithner's abilities, claiming that he brings valuable perspective to his job because he does not have a traditional background in economics.
"Tim is a straight arrow, and he's a very upright person," she said. "I trust his judgment implicitly."
After graduating from Dartmouth, Geithner attended Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a master's degree in international economics.
He worked as a consultant for three years at Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C, before joining the International Affairs division of the Treasury Department in 1988.
He held a variety of positions in the department before being promoted to Under Secretary of International Affairs in 1999. Geithner moved to the International Monetary Fund in 2001 and assumed his current position at New York's Reserve Bank two years later.
"Tim's been the youngest undersecretary of the treasury, the youngest Federal Reserve president, which is kind of a paradox with traditional seniority," Peter Geithner said. "He's excelled in those roles, though."
The Dartmouth was unable to reach Timothy Geithner by press time.
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Abraham Lincoln is in the news again. A new biography by Harvard historian David Herbert Donald (Lincoln, published by Simon and Schuster) is on the bestseller list. It is a comprehensive and scholarly tome occupying Donald’s labors for thirty years. He argues that Lincoln was a sort of negative personality, that he "preferred to respond to the actions of others" rather than take the initiative and make bold plans. Lincoln was hesitant and without purpose. He let events control him. He argues that Lincoln’s essentially passive nature was driven almost entirely by chance and accident.
Professor Donald maintains that although Lincoln was highly ambitious, the purpose of his ambition was unclear. He was a pragmatist, without a solid set of core beliefs. He also says that Lincoln was one of the most poorly prepared men ever elected president. Oddly, Donald doesn’t deny that Lincoln became America’s greatest president. He just thinks that he became great as a result of more or less appropriate reactions to very large events. He was one of these guys who grew in office!
This is almost entirely the opposite of the real Lincoln. He was involved in politics out of principle. His principles were clear and simple and they never changed. He understood that slavery was wrong. Although it was tolerated by political or constitutional necessity, it was utterly incompatible with the moral idea on which America was founded. He saw that this "ancient faith" of the Founders was being questioned and that slavery was expanding: hence, the crisis of the house divided. And he understood that constitutionally its expansion could be prevented. He saw the problem very clearly and he never wavered. He knew that nothing less than the meaning of America was at stake. There was no growth here, no passivity, no pragmatism, no poor preparation. There was high statesmanship reflecting philosophic depth and moral decisiveness.
So why does Professor Donald present us with a Lincoln who is pragmatic, vague, and passive? Why does he present us with a man
who is able to frequently change his mind and is uncertain of the things for which he stands? In an interview Donald declared that he wanted to write a biography that would be comprehensible in the 1990’s, one that would resemble the current occupant of the White House, who is indeed able to change his mind, who is not guided by a steady rudder, and who is therefore, it seems, "capable of great growth." Perhaps that is why Bill Clinton asked Donald to help him draft his State of the Union address. Perhaps that is why that address seems to contradict Clinton’s first three years in office, perhaps that is why it seems more conservative than anything ever said by George Bush. I guess Donald would call this growth.
Maybe it is growth on Clinton’s part. Maybe it’s good politics on his part. But it’s not Lincoln, and Donald’s thesis is not history.
Peter Schramm is Director of Special Projects of the Ashbrook Center and Professor of Political Science at Ashland University. His new edition of Lord Charnwood’s classic biography of Lincoln will be published by Rowman and Littlefield this spring.
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Business school to host day camp for young innovators
June 12, 2012
By Darla Martin Tucker
RIVERSIDE, Calif. – (www.lasierra.edu) For centuries entrepreneurs and inventors have strived, metaphorically, to build better mouse traps. The same challenge inspires today’s young innovators who seek to change and improve things--how can a skateboard be morphed into something cool, new, different and marketable? What about a backpack, or any other product?
High school students who enroll in a new day camp this summer will address similar questions as they compete in groups to develop the most creative ideas for innovating existing products.
In collaboration with its Edward C. Allred Center and La Sierra’s international award-winning Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) team, the Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University will conduct an Innovation Day Camp, July 23 – 26. The camp will involve daily activities that will challenge participants to think outside the box, to work effectively in teams, and to unleash their creative energies for exciting and relevant product innovation. Participants will also learn team building, leadership, and effective presentation skills.
The goal of the camp is to teach “design thinking,” a method commonly used by designers, engineers, and business leaders to define and solve problems by merging creativity and intuition with information analysis and rational thought processes, according to John Thomas, dean of La Sierra’s business school. “We want to change the concept from an ordinary business camp—how to start your own business—to one that unleashes the creative energies of all attendees,” he said.
Camp participants will work in teams of seven or eight students, with two teams each assigned to innovate an existing product and present it to participating companies. Faculty and staff from the School of Business, together with local business executives, will lead group instruction and feedback sessions. Student leaders from La Sierra’s SIFE team will serve as team consultants and mentors.
Activities will include instruction in ideation and creativity, focused brainstorming, design thinking, and team field trips to the participating companies’ facilities to learn about product manufacturing and marketing processes. At the end of the camp, pairs of teams will competitively present their product innovation ideas to executives from the participating companies who may select one or both ideas to develop for the marketplace.
The cost to attend the Innovation Day Camp is $50 per participant. The camp will be held at the Zapara School of Business on the La Sierra University campus from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and will include lunch. Admission is limited to no more than 50 students. La Sierra University is located at 4500 Riverwalk Parkway, Riverside.
Registration is open through July 20, 2012. Innovation Camp application forms are available online at the School of Business website. For more information call 951-785-2064.
PR Contact: Larry Becker
Executive Director of University Relations
La Sierra University
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A 2007 recipient of the Urban Land Institute’s prestigious “Awards for Excellence”, Daniel Island is a national model of smart growth. In the above interview, Daniel Island Company president, Matthew Sloan, describes their vision to create a distinct community, while serving as an extension of Charleston, South Carolina. Twenty years later, with some 3,000 residences, scores of businesses and 8,000+ people, Daniel Island is delivering on its promise to Charleston.
Sloan, who is part of the Daniel Island Company’s founding team, describes the importance of its fiber to the home (FTTH) communications infrastructure in attracting residents and new businesses to this master-planned community. As a FTTH pioneer, Sloan, explains that they initially had implemented their own infrastructure, but found it challenging to stay current with technology and provide the service level necessary for business and residences alike.
“We entered into it with our own small technology company. It quickly became clear that it needed 100% focus and energy and that the world was changing and technology was changing and if was just a sideline business for us, we would not be able to keep up.”
He discusses how having a local provider, Home Telecom, provides a state-of-the-art service helps Daniel Island achieve its goals, while making the process, “incredibly easy.” Sloan says that,
“This is an upscale community and they [Home Telecom] provide an upscale service.”
Beyond residences, Sloan points out the importance of bandwidth and responsive customer support in enabling businesses and tele-work opportunities. With two of the largest Charleston technology companies headquartered on Daniel Island, reliable, high-speed bandwidth is an important asset to the community. He cites an example of a company that won’t look anywhere else for expansion, unless it is on the Home Telecom network.
Another, somewhat subtle, benefit to the fiber network is the improvement in reliability, thanks to its resistance to corrosion and lightning strikes as compared to copper and coaxial solutions. This robust communications infrastructure has been and will continue to be an essential element in the balanced business and residential growth of Daniel Island and its transformation from a master plan to a model community.
[Note: Thank you to Home Telecom for their commercial support of Viodi in the production of this video].
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This year, a news media consortium conducted exit polls nationally and in 30 states, although in Oregon and Washington they were telephone surveys since elections here are conducted entirely by mail.
Since the election, it's been much noted how racially polarized the voting was. President Barack Obama won a minority of the white vote but won big majorities among African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanic voters.
Oregon was one of only seven states where President Barack Obama won a majority of votes from whites -- and those states all have relatively low minority populations. Obama won 52 percent of the white vote in Oregon (and 53 percent in Washington), compared to 39 percent nationally.
"This is quite a curious phenomenon," noted New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who frequently writes about polling.
Perhaps not so much. These seven states (with the exception of Iowa) are clustered on the West Coast and in the Northeast, which are the most culturally liberal regions of the country and the heart of the Democratic base vote.
They may not be as ethnically diverse as California or New York -- to name two of the big states that voted strongly for Obama -- but they share much of the same political outlook.
That's clear when you look at some of the other key demographics.
For example, voters around the country with a family income of at least $100,000 a year favored Mitt Romney, 54 percent to 44 percent. But in Oregon, $100,000-plus voters favored Obama 62 percent to 35 percent.
Oregon voters who have a college education are also much more likely to favor Obama than voters nationally. Oregonians with a post-bachelor's degree sided with Obama, 64 percent to 33 percent, while Obama won this demographic nationally by a smaller 55-42 majority.
In short, you get this picture of Oregon's professional class being much more in tune with the president than in most states.
There was also a crucial age difference. Voters who are 65 and older make up an important part of the electorate. Nationally, 56 pecent went from Romney but here it was almost the reverse, with 52 percent supporting Obama.
Oregon was not terribly different from the rest of the country in one respect, and that is that women powered Obama to victory. Fifty-seven percent of women voters supported Obama in Oregon, compared to 55 percent nationally.
Men here were evenly divided between the two candidates while Romney won the male vote nationally, 52-45.
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October 16, 2009
Filed under Omaha, USA
Tags: brrr, chilly, climate, climate change, cold, cold October, cold record, coldest start to October, cool, global cooling, Global Freeze, global freezing, global warming, Kearney, Nebraska, Omaha, record cold, temperature, temperatures, unseasonably cold, unseasonably cold weather, unusual cold, unusually cold, USA, weather
October 16, 2009
You’ve turned the furnace on earlier than you wished, your golf game got canceled — and you’re already eyeing a new sweater.
If it gives you any comfort, you’ve been through the coldest start to October on record.
Regional offices of the National Weather Service crunched the numbers Thursday. They found that the combined average daytime-nighttime temperature in the first 14 days of the month was an astonishing 12 to 15 degrees below normal.
That’s based on records dating back from 50 to more than 100 years, depending on the time period evaluated by each office.
July 20, 2009
Filed under USA
Tags: brrr, chilly, climate, climate change, cold, cold record, cold summer, cold weather, cool, cool summer, cool weather, elusive summer, global cooling, Global Freeze, global freezing, global warming, record cold, summer, temperature, temperatures, unseasonably cold weather, unusual cold, unusually cold, USA, weather
Update 22 July 2009:
Further records have been broken!
1077 Lowest max temps and 856 Low temps for week ending Tue 21 July
Click here for details
HAMweather, July 20, 2009
|Record Events for Mon Jul 13, 2009 through Sun Jul 19, 2009|
|Lowest Max Temperatures:||868|
|Highest Min Temperatures:||317|
July 19, 2009
Filed under Minnesota, USA
Tags: climate, climate change, cold, cold summer, cool, cool summer, elusive summer, global cooling, Global Freeze, global freezing, global warming, Hubbard County, La Nina, summer, temperature, temperatures, unseasonably cold, unseasonably cold weather, unusual cold, unusually cold, unusually cold pattern, USA, weather
June 20, 2009
Filed under Canada, Manitoba
Tags: arctic, brrr, Canada, chilly, Churchill, climate, climate change, cold, cold June, cold snowy conditions, cold summer, Environment Canada, global cooling, Global Freeze, global freezing, global warming, Hudson Bay, ice blanket, late spring, Manitoba, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, Ontario, snow, snow cover, snowdrifts, snowfall, summer, temperature, temperatures, unseasonably cold weather, unusual cold, weather
May 1, 2009
Filed under australia, Tasmania
Tags: australia, BoM, brrr, Bureau of Meteorology, Butlers Gorge, chilly, climate, climate change, cold, cold record, cold snap, coldest April days on record, Dover, Fingal, Flinders Island Airport, freeze, freezing, Geeveston, global cooling, Global Freeze, global warming, Hobart, Launceston, Liawenee, Orford, record cold, Record low April temperatures, Scottsdale, Tarraleah, Tasmania, temperature, temperatures, unseasonably cold weather, weather
30 April 2009
Record low April temperatures at some sites: The last two mornings have seen Flinders Island Airport drop below its previous April lowest temperature of 0.1 °C, reaching zero on Wednesday and down to -0.3 °C on Thursday morning. Several other sites (including Fingal, Geeveston and Dover) have also registered record low April temperatures. Meanwhile, Orford, Scottsdale and Tarraleah are among those to have had their coldest April days on record.
Near-record April low for Tasmania: The temperature at Liawenee, on the Central Plateau, dipped to -7.5 °C on Wednesday morning. This is the second-coldest April temperature ever recorded in Tasmania, just short of the -7.7 °C at the same site in 2001. It is still well short of the annual record of -13 °C recorded at Butlers Gorge, Shannon and Tarraleah in June 1983.
Three cold days in Hobart: The maximum temperature at the Bureau of Meteorology’s observing site in Battery Point, Hobart on Monday was 11.5, on Tuesday 11.3 and on Wednesday 11.1 °C. This is the first time since 1952 that Hobart has recorded three consecutive April days with the temperature below 12 °C, and it has only occurred on six previous occasions since measurements with standard instrumentation began in 1896.
Two cold mornings in Hobart: The temperature at Hobart dropped to 1.3 °C just after 6 am this morning. On Wednesday morning it dropped to 1.7 °C. This is the first time since 1953 that Hobart has had two consecutive April nights below 2 °C.
Four cold days in Launceston: The temperature in Launceston only reached 11.6 °C on Sunday, as cloud kept temperatures down in the north of the state. On Monday it reached 13.5, on Tuesday 13.0 and on Wednesday 14.4 °C. This is the first time since 1986 that Launceston has had four consecutive April days below 15 °C.
Three cold nights in Launceston: Launceston recorded minimum temperatures of -0.3, -0.5 and -0.6 °C over the last three mornings. A run of three April nights below zero has not been recorded since the current observing site was established in 1980.
Cold weather interstate: Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT have also been experiencing unseasonably cold weather, with similar long runs of cold days and very low temperatures at some sites. Temperatures recorded on Wednesday morning at the alpine sites of Victoria’s Mount Hotham (-8.2 °C) and NSW’s Charlotte Pass (-13.0 °C) are both new record April lows for those states.
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Every dog owner likes to think they have the smartest, cleverest dog. Did you know there are actually some breeds of dogs that really are more intelligent? In this post, we'll look at the top 10 breeds based on intelligence. Don't worry if your dog's breed isn't found on the list. Believe it or not, having a dog that is smart as a whip isn't necessarily an advantage :-)
Dogs that possess a higher intelligence get bored easily if they don't have appropriate activites and stimulation. They tend to be more work because of this and not having daily stimulation can cause behavior problems.
Beginning with the 10th most intelligent dog, the results are...
10.) Australian Cattle Dog
As the breed name suggests, these dogs were originally herd dogs. This breed is happiest when given tasks or work to do, and require daily exercise and mental stimulation.
Many people view the Rottie as a fearsome dog that is prone to attack. The fact is, Rotties can make great family pets, and they're very intelligent as well. They do need to be trained, but most Rottweilers learn quickly.
Papillons are number 8 on our list. They tend to be easy to train and they are fiercely loyal and protective dogs.
7.) Labrador Retriever
For anyone that owns a Lab, it is probably no surprise that they're one of the top 10 smartest dogs. Labs are gentle and have a good nature. They socialize easily with family members and other pets, making them a great choice for a family dog. Like the other dogs on this list, they do need regular exercise and mental stimulation. Labs are prone to obesity if not given proper exercise.
6.) Shetland Sheepdog
Another breed that was originally bred for herding, the Shetland Sheepdog has been used for both cattle and sheep herding. This type of dog doesn't possess some of the better social skills that other breeds have. While still a great pet, they may do better in a home without other pets or small children.
Another dog that can strike fear in someone's heart, should you come across one that is loose, the Doberman can indeed be a tempermental breed. If trained properly, Dobermans can still make great family pets. They will do fine with children as well, despite their reputation.
4.) Golden Retriever
One of my favorite breeds, Goldens are much like Labrador Retrievers. They have a gentle, kind spirit and make terrific pets. You can trust them around children and other household pets, and being very intelligent, they are easy to train. Goldens are very loyal and loving companions and make a great addition to any home.
3.) German Shepherd
Often associated with K9 units and police work, Germans are extremely intelligent. They also make great family pets and are good with children. They are happiest when kept busy, and require some type of work or mental stimulation often to prevent boredom or depression. Germans, like all dogs, are pack animals. They especially need a strong pack leader from an early age to be the happiest.
This may actually be a surprise to a lot of people. Poodles are the 2nd smartest dog breed. Poodles are extremely protective of their owners and can become vicious if they feel their owner or territory is being threatened. Due to this, poodles aren't always the best choice for a family with small children. They will thrive in an environment where they receive a lot of attention, as they prefer not to be left alone.
1.) Border Collie
The fact that the Border Collie is the smartest dog breed is no surprise to me. My dog is half Black Lab, half Border Collie, and I can assure you, sometimes she's too smart for her own good! Because of their intelligence, Border Collies are extremely active dogs. They require plenty of playtime, as well as mental stimulation. Border Collies excel in trials and competitions and are happiest when they have a "job" to do. Congrats to all you Border Collie owners - you have the most intelligent dog in the world!
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An excerpt from www.HouseOfNames.com archives copyright © 2000 - 2013
Where did the English Josslin family come from? What is the English Josslin family crest and coat of arms? When did the Josslin family first arrive in the United States? Where did the various branches of the family go? What is the Josslin family history?The notable Josslin family arose among the Cornish People, a race with a rich Celtic heritage and an indomitable fighting spirit who inhabited the southwest of England. While surnames were well-known during the English medieval period, Cornish People originally used only a single name. The way in which hereditary surnames came into common use is interesting. As the population of medieval Europe multiplied, people began to assume an extra name to avoid confusion and to further identify themselves. Under the Feudal System of government, surnames evolved and they often reflected life on the manor and in the field. Patronymic surnames were derived from given names and were the predominant type of surname among the Celtic peoples of Britain. However, the people of Cornwall provide a surprising exception to this rule, and patronymic surnames are less common among them than other people of Celtic stock, such as their Welsh neighbors. This is due to the greater influence of English bureaucracy and naming practices in Cornwall at the time that surnames first arose. This type of surname blended perfectly with the prevailing Feudal System. One feature that is occasionally found in Cornish surnames of this type is the suffix -oe or -ow; this is derived from the Cornish plural suffix -ow. is a patronymic surname that came from the Germanic personal name Jocelyn, meaning Goth.
Cornish surnames are characterized by a multitude of spelling variations. The frequent changes in surnames are due to the fact that the Old and Middle English languages lacked definite spelling rules. The official court languages, which were Latin and French, were also influential on the spelling of a surname. Since the spelling of surnames was rarely consistent in medieval times, and scribes and church officials recorded names as they sounded rather than adhering to any specific spelling rules, it was common to find the same individual referred to with different spellings of their surname in the ancient chronicles. Moreover, a large number of foreign names were brought into England, which accelerated and accentuated the alterations to the spelling of various surnames. Lastly, spelling variations often resulted from the linguistic differences between the people of Cornwall and the rest of England. The Cornish spoke a unique Brythonic Celtic language which was first recorded in written documents during the 10th century. However, they became increasingly Anglicized, and Cornish became extinct as a spoken language in 1777, although it has been revived by Cornish patriots in the modern era. The name has been spelled Jocelyn, Gocelyn, Josselyn, Josselyne and others.
First found in Lanarkshire but one of the first records of the name was Josceline de Bohon (or Joscelyn fitz Richard de Bohon or Joscelin de Bohun) (c. 1111–1184) who was Bishop of Salisbury. His son, Reginald fitz Jocelin (sometimes Reginald Italus, Richard the Lombard, or Reginald Lombardus) was Bishop of Bath and an Archbishop of Canterbury-elect.
This web page shows only a small excerpt of our Josslin research. Another 237 words(17 lines of text) covering the years 1174, 1188, 1296, 1490, 1553, 1616, 1683, 1641, 1683, 1616, 1683, 1641, 1683, 1638 and 1675 are included under the topic Early Josslin History in all our PDF Extended History products.
Another 149 words(11 lines of text) are included under the topic Early Josslin Notables in all our PDF Extended History products.
A look at the immigration and passenger lists has shown a number of people bearing the name Josslin: Henry Jocelyn settled in New Hampshire in 1630.
The motto was originally a war cry or slogan. Mottoes first began to be shown with arms in the 14th and 15th centuries, but were not in general use until the 17th century. Thus the oldest coats of arms generally do not include a motto. Mottoes seldom form part of the grant of arms: Under most heraldic authorities, a motto is an optional component of the coat of arms, and can be added to or changed at will; many families have chosen not to display a motto.
Motto: Faire mon devoir
Motto Translation: To do my duty.
The Josslin Family Crest was acquired from the Houseofnames.com archives. The Josslin Family Crest was drawn according to heraldic standards based on published blazons. We generally include the oldest published family crest once associated with each surname.
This page was last modified on 15 May 2013 at 16:12.
houseofnames.com is an internet property owned by Swyrich Corporation.
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Moving Planet will be a day to put our demands for climate action into motion—marching, biking, skating—calling for the world to go beyond fossil fuels.
WHY: For too long, our leaders have denied and delayed, compromised and caved. That era must come to an end: it’s time to get moving on the climate crisis.
WHERE: All over the world [see map below for the event nearest you]
WHEN: September 24, 2011
WHO: You, your friends, your family, your neighbors
For more info, check the frequently asked questions page.
Bill McKibben of 350.0rg and TarSandsAction has more:
Hey friends –
We usually don’t send out emails on the weekend, but we’re just a week out from Moving Planet on September 24, and the excitement is really starting to build.
A few very cool actions are already underway — our friends in Indonesia have already started on the 350-hour bike ride that will carry them across much of the nation, and in India the Naya Swara Yatra (New Independence Journey) bike team has left Nagpur bound for Mumbai with their message, “it’s time to move past fossil fuels”.
Most places, though, people are still making last-minute plans: for the “human flood” of blue shirts across Cairo, for the parade of fuel-free floats across Cape Town, for the procession of the “Eco-lympic torch” across Rio de Janeiro via skateboard, foot, and pedal.
You will not want to miss out — here’s the map to help you find the event nearest you [see above].
If you find an event you want to join, take a moment to contact the organizer and see if you can help out in the final week.
If there’s no event near you to join, there’s still plenty of time to organize something quick and easy — and our team at 350.org headquarters has put together a guide to help you do just that: www.moving-planet.org/quick
And here’s the point of it all: if we’re going to win this global fight, we need a global movement. When you’re taking part in your hometown, millions of others will be doing the same thing: on different continents, in different languages, but with the same idea in their minds and hearts. We’re building local power and global power at the same time.
We know that the climate crisis is serious business — we know that even right now there are people suffering from drought and floods caused by climate change around the world. Our hearts are with them — and our bodies are going to be in motion, helping show our neighbors what the future can look like.
So: don’t just sign yourself up. Make sure everyone you know knows about it too.
Share the day however you can — and don’t forget to join us on Saturday. This will be too good to miss!
Bill McKibben for the 350.org Team
P.S. It’s heartening to think about people all over the world getting ready for the big day — making banners, putting up posters, fixing their bikes, and calling their friends, neighbors, media and politicians to get them out to local events. Check out the image below that just came in today from Copenhagen, Denmark, of people making stencils and signs. This network is strongest when we inspire each other — if you have an image you want to share with the 350.org network, send it to email@example.com.
Moving Planet art materials here: www.moving-planet.org/visuals)
– Bill McKibben of 350.0rg and TarSandsAction
- A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest
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WASHINGTON (AP).- More than 600 museums nationwide are offering free admission to military families all summer in a new partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
The list includes some of the nation's premier art museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as science centers, children's museums and other sites in all 50 states.
The program, called Blue Star Museums, is being announced Monday in San Diego, where 14 museums will participate. The offer for active duty military personnel and their families runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day.
It was the brainchild of Kathy Roth-Douquet, chairwoman of the group Blue Star Families. Her husband, Marine Corps Col. Greg Douquet, is on his third deployment to Afghanistan.
"You can feel a little alone in America right now, being part of the 1 percent that's involved in fighting these wars," she said, adding that the recession has changed priorities for many people. "When the kids and I go to museums this summer, we know we're being welcomed. It will make us feel less alone."
Roth-Douquet, who lives in Parris Island, S.C., said military bases are sometimes far from cultural centers, though museums can be a good escape.
The Defense Department is helping to promote the offer, and Roth-Douquet said some military bases may coordinate bus trips.
When her family was based in London for a time, she and her son and daughter spent an entire summer visiting museums because many were free. As a result, she said, her 8-year-old son Charlie now draws for hours each day.
This summer, they're planning a road trip along the East Coast to visit museums. Normally, a $20 ticket to MoMA in New York might rule it out, she said. Now they could also stop for free at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art or New York's Jewish Museum.
NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman said he was surprised by how many museums joined the effort, despite the poor economy, from the Alaska Aviation Heritage Museum to the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Nebraska.
"I think it is good karma for the museums," he said. "Long-term, it promotes museum-going and engagement with the arts."
Also, over Memorial Day weekend in New York City, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand has announced more than 50 museums and historic sites will offer free admission to military personnel and veterans.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.
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INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — After the May swoon stocks began a steady rebound, with the Dow and Sandamp;P 500 sitting at their yearly highs. Many analysts say this rally shouldn’t have happened. They point to low volume, or they say the move is “irrational.” Readers of this column know that I disagree.In April and May, during the height of the European debt worries and the slowdown here and in China, investors had priced in economic and financial conditions far worse than those likely to occur. Investors have done that before, in fact many times. At bear market bottoms it was always true, which is why Sir John Templeton said that the best buying opportunity is at “the moment of maximum pessimism.”We saw such a moment in March of 2009 when the stocks of some of America’s giants (GE, Alcoa, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, Citi, International Paper, for example) were trading near $5.00 or less. Since then the Sandamp;P 500 has more than doubled and many stocks have done even better.I am not saying investors are as negative today as they were in 2009, after the 1987 crash, in 1982 and at other times. Gloomy, yes, but not to that degree. Should we care? In a way, yes. Look back to this week 30 years ago. Times were tough, interest rates were sky high, we had double-digit inflation and many millions of people were out of work.Investors had every reason to be down on both stocks and bonds, both of which had done poorly for years. But in August, 1982, stocks began a huge bull market, as did bonds with Treasury yields falling from record highs to this year’s record lows. Why the trip down Memory Lane? Simply to remind you that real-time economic and financial conditions are seldom if ever good indicators of future stock market returns.More often, just the opposite is the case. The worse the environment (1982, 2009), the better the future returns. Watch out when all looks rosy (2000). Stocks will suffer.Many disagree with my optimism for the market. They see slow GDP and profit growth (if any) for years, potential blow-ups from a number of obvious problems here and overseas, the fiscal cliff, and other factors that would undermine a stock market that has more than doubled in three years. All true enough, but problems need not morph into the catastrophes so many see.Not necessarily. They can also be addressed, and smart money is betting they will be addressed since doing so is in everyone’s interest. That is one reason stocks are doing well. Another that I often mention -- alternative investments are unattractive.History shows that bull markets end when valuations are excessive (they aren’t), the Fed is tightening (it isn’t) and investors are giddy (they’re not). Today’s valuations are historically low, the Fed is by its own admission at least two years away from raising rates, and investors continue to sell stocks. In short, conditions are just the opposite of those typically seen at market tops. Let’s stay the course. — David Vomund is an Incline Village-based fee-only money manager. Information is found at www.ETFportfolios.net or by calling 775-832-8555. Clients hold the positions mentioned in this article. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult your financial advisor before purchasing any security.
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Prior to the annual live competition a workshop is conducted to prepare the children for presenting their inventions to the finalist judges. Teaching the workshop this year were USF assistant professor Dr. Emily Ryalls and EASA Software CEO and 5-time finalist judge Dr. Sebastian Dewhurst.
Dr. Ryalls advised finalists that being nervous was perfectly normal and actually gives speakers an edge with a rush of adrenaline. Everyone has “butterflies” when they give a big presentation…the key is to get those butterflies to “fly in formation.” Another key topic covered by Dr. Ryalls is how to organize their presentation into logical stages and keep things brief.
Dr. Dewhurst gave the audience and acronym to remember: NBAC which stands for “needs, benefits, advantages and costs.” Relaying each of these topics to a judge (or investor) conveys the value of the invention most efficiently. Both presenters advised the finalists to hold back on revealing their invention until they’ve established the problem they seek to solve and build some anticipation for the solution.
All those attending noted the inventions and presentations were some of the best ever presented in the competition and there is great anticipation for Monday night’s event.
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Just days after OB/GYNs called for the pill to be available over-the-counter, pediatricians are recommending that emergency contraception be more readily accessible for teens.
Last year, Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius refused to allow EC to be available without a prescription for women under 17. In doing so, she acted contrary to the guidance of the Federal Drug Administration and, you know, science. Now the American Academy of Pediatrics is backing up the FDA and advising doctors to prescribe Plan B in advance until the policy changes.
The pediatricians’ group points out that requiring young women to contact a physician for a prescription only after they realize they need emergency contraception presents a significant hurdle for those adolescents, potentially preventing them from being able to take emergency contraception in a timely manner. Providing adolescents with advance prescriptions for Plan B, on the other hand, ensures that they will have contraception readily available to them if they need it…
Previous research has shown that women can face barriers to obtaining Plan B even when they follow the current protocol for their age group. Some pharmacists incorrectly inform women over 17 that they can’t access emergency contraception over the counter, and some doctors refuse to provide women under 17 with a prescription for the medication. AAP’s research suggests that some doctors’ refusal to prescribe the morning after pill “may be related to the physician’s beliefs about whether it is OK for teenagers to have sex.” But the group noted that pediatricians “have a duty to inform their patients about relevant, legally available treatment options,” even those “to which they object.”
As we’ve written before, teens–even those who are over 17–often have a hard time accessing EC when they need it. The AAP reminds us that studies have shown that a prewritten prescription for EC doesn’t encourage young people to engage in risky sexual behavior (or to have sex at all) but does result in more effective use of the pill.
Reuters has a good round-up of the relevant history and research here, and make sure to sign the Reproductive Health Technology Project’s petition to HHS to “revisit the evidence and remove the restrictions on emergency contraception.”
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A view of the world from Russia
Valuable insights from a non-American perspective (an expat living in Russia): “(Back) Under the Volcano” (1.3 MB PDF), Eric Kraus, Truth and Beauty, 24 May 2010 — Posted with permission. Excerpt:
The frankly self-serving free-market orthodoxy, still taken as axiomatic by many in the financial industry, and which has recently acquired a status close to Holy Doctrine in much of the Anglo-Saxon world, implies at least one quasi-theological assumption – shared, oddly enough, by believers in the Earth Goddess Gaia, as well as by the wilder exponents of the organic foods movement: the assumption is the child-like faith that whatever is “natural4” is by definition “good”.
This can be a dangerous misconception. Both tetrodotoxin and botulism toxins are entirely natural; ingestion of even the tiniest speck will reliably cause death. Similarly, entirely “natural” financial montages can develop structural faults which very naturally lead to economic and thus political catastrophes blighting the lives of generations.
In Praise of Passivity?
One of the most pernicious intellectual sleights of hand of the Neoliberal/Austrian schools of economics is their attempt to ban the very discussion of the purpose of financial systems – i.e. whether or not any particular aspect of the market-economy actually benefits the people living in a given society, asserting instead that markets are natural phenomena which must be left to evolve freely, without any attempt at shaping or channelling them in the interests of “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Their standard assertion is that all attempts at regulation simply introduce inefficiencies, leading to a relative impoverishment of all, a claim that flies in the face of the most obvious evidence: 20th century economic history has seen the greatest increase in wealth in human history, attained during a period characterized by the ever-increasing weight of government.
Markets, and especially, the politico-economic context in which they develop and function, are man‟s creations: from private property to the limited liability corporation; eminent domain to taxation; direct vs. representative government; the various definitions of democracy; war and related means of asserting economic dominance; the role of the individual viz his society; regulation and the role of the state as arbitrator/owner of productive assets; social decisions are made – consciously or otherwise – which condition the economic evolution of each society.
… Perhaps the most vital conclusion is that one size does not fit all. Highly socialized systems seem to work best in the Nordic countries, characterized by a high degree of social consensus and a rather Calvinistic view of society and the obligations of the individual; in the more individualistic/anarchic Latin and Slavic cultures, laws and regulations tend to be seen as hurdles – to be gotten over, under or around. The “ideal social model” is thus one corresponding to the era, culture and economic conditions of a given country. …
The Twilight of the Ideologues
… We find that the ideology accompanying the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution meets most of the criteria for Dogma: a unitary ideology proposing one simple solution (Free Market Magic) to every conceivable problem, oblivious to any empirical evidence to the contrary. In brief, said evidence would include the observation that aggressive deregulation has resulted in the relative impoverishment of the Western middle-classes, that the best human development indices are to be found in Nordic countries practicing a relatively statist form of capitalism, but especially, the fact that none of the Asian Tigers undergoing the spectacular transformation from agrarian backwater to industrial powerhouse did so on the basis of laissez-faire – all employed complex, pragmatic mixtures of free-market capitalism with very substantial state involvement. The sad fate of those post-Soviet states which adopted the most extreme forms of liberalism – the Baltics – contrasts with the relatively better outcomes in the more moderate Central European countries – e.g. Poland, Slovakia, etc.
A Covent of Whores: The Economist
As we had expected, the Western press has begun to tone down its anti-Russian rhetoric, at long last displaying some measure of balance in its reporting. The great exception – the Economist – now confronted with the defeat of virtually everything it had shilled for (The Orange Revolution, Saakasvilli, “the Baltic miracle”, NATO expansion up to Russia‟s borders, Russia‟s pro-Western opposition, Russia‟s “isolation” by the West – all now reduced to ashes…) is growing increasingly hysterical. Despite their oft-reiterated predictions of doom and gloom, of fratricidal political wars (which, in fact, never broke out), of riots and revolutions (existing only in the fevered brains of the authors), and of the inevitable failure of what proved to be Russia‟s first successful economic model in a century at least, Russia is beginning her new decade on a very positive note. Although the effects of the global credit crunch were amplified by Kudrin‟s excessive reliance upon the global financial system, the economy has recovered, and is once again growing well above consensus.
More to the point, on the diplomatic front, the EU has abandoned the insanely confrontational policy of the Bush administration and is actively courting Russia; even the British have become suddenly solicitous as they watch Germany walk away with all the best contracts (with France and Italy bagging the rest.) NATO has resumed discussions with Russia, and has gone dead silent regarding Abkhazia and So. Ossetia, the de facto independence of which has now been recognized by all but the most clueless of observers. Significantly, negotiations have resumed in Brussels aimed at defining the “New European Security Architecture” – met with such scorn when first suggested by President Medvedev a year ago.
… The absurd prediction put forward by The Economist and its ilk that President Medvedev would mark the beginning of a new wave of Russian reform by releasing one of the men who most contributed to the catastrophic failure of the first post-Soviet government now lies in a cold grave, along with virtually every prediction they have made.
Other posts about Russia
- Forecasts – Why wait? Read tomorrow’s news … today! (part I), 11 July 2006 – Rise of the petro-empires
- More news about Russia’s demographic collapse, 6 June 2008
- Perhaps *the* question about the Georgia – Russia conflict, 10 August 2008
- Keys to interpreting news about the Georgia – Russia fighting, 12 August 2008
- What did we learn from the Russia – Georgia conflict?, 13 August 2008
- Comments on the Georgia-Russia fighting: Buchanan is profound, McCain is nuts, 15 August 2008
- Best insight yet about America and the Georgia-Russia fighting, 15 August 2008
- Georgia = Grenada, an antidote to Cold War II, 16 August 2008
- “The Medvedev Doctrine and American Strategy”, by George Friedman, 4 September 2008
- Rumors of financial war: Russia vs. US, 22 September 2008
- Before we reignite the cold war, what happened in Georgia?, 12 December 2008
- Rumors of financial war: Russia vs. US, 22 December 2008
- More weekend reading; information you want to have!, 23 December 2008 — Russia as the last man standing in a region of demographic collapse.
- A free lesson from Russia: how to manage a banking crisis, 6 February 2009
- “The Russian Economy and Russian Power” by George Friedman of Stratfor, 2 August 2009
- For more about this website, see the About the FM website page.
- You can subscribe to receive posts by email; see the box on the upper right.
- Contact us (WordPress keeps your contact information confidential):
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Food & Farm News
» September 26, 2012 «
A strong and growing consumer base bodes well for the California wine business, and a newly released survey of wine executives and winemakers shows cautious optimism. Wine professionals describe their customers as savvy and value-conscious wine drinkers. The annual survey also noted that demand for wine has not been matched by establishment of new vineyards in California, and that could lead to a long-term grape shortage.
One part of the Southern California date harvest is wrapping up this week, with the next part set to begin. Medjool-variety dates are most often eaten fresh, and growers say that the fruit looks juicy and plump. As harvest of Medjool dates ends, the harvest for the cooking-variety date, known as the Deglet Noor, will begin in the next two weeks. The California Date Commission says the state
A string of warm late-summer and early-autumn weather in the Central Valley has been mostly a benefit to farmers. For example, the heat and the fair weather help to dry raisins on the vine and as they lay in vineyards on racks and tarps. The heat has brought few reports of sunburn, which can affect grapes and other fruit. The dry weather also benefits nut growers as they harvest their crops, a process that involves shaking the trees and then collecting the nuts from the orchard floor.
Special vehicle license plates promoting California agriculture will hit the road in March of next year. Agricultural organizations succeeded in signing up more than 8,000 drivers for the plates. Funds from the special plates will benefit agricultural education, career training and youth leadership development programs. The design on the license plate includes a sunrise over a fertile green field and the words, “Food, Fiber, Fuel, Flora.”
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The dramatic and moving account of the struggle for life inside the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, when every minute counted.
At 8:46 AM on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers -- reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it -- until now.
New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn rely on hundreds of interviews; thousands of pages of oral histories; and phone, e-mail, and emergency radio transcripts. They cross a bridge of voices to go inside the infernos, seeing cataclysm and heroism, one person at a time, to tell the affecting, authoritative saga of the men and women -- the 12,000 who escaped and the 2,749 who perished -- who made 102 minutes count as never before.
Read by Ron McLarty
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by Ariel Brogno
When Nicholas Concklin started farming Kakiat Patent Lot #1 in 1711, farming was the mainstay of the local economy. Today, the 300 year-old Orchards of Concklin is now one of three active farms in the Rockland County.
Farm to Table fans can share that history as well as tasty baked goods and fresh produce every Thursday in The Orchards of Concklin tent at the Nyack Farmer’s Market.
Why shop at a Farmer’s Market? Co-owner Rich Concklin says merchants at a farmer’s market have a strong connection to their customers. ‘€œWe’re mindful of what’s going on,’€ he says. ‘€œWe watch everything to make sure we bring better products to the table.’€ Concklin says local food is better food because produce that doesn’t have to be shipped hundreds of miles will generally have a fresher flavor.
As far as small businesses go, Concklin says farming is relatively recession proof. However, farmers have other concerns about which most businesses don’t have to worry: hail storms, plant diseases, locusts, and the 17-year cicada. Despite these difficulties, Concklin’s has stood the test of time. “Sometimes it comes down to just getting through the hot days,” he says.
The Orchards of Concklin is a conventional farm, which, according to Concklin, is the mainstream of U.S. agriculture. They use both organic and inorganic pesticides depending on the weather. Concklin says it’s a common misconception that all pesticides are inorganic and are unhealthy. ‘€œOrganic doesn’t mean not sprayed,’€ he says. Concklin’s chooses pesticides that provide the most benefit to crops. For example, they’re fond of an organic sulfur spray that gets reapplied every couple of weeks.
Who shops at Farmer’s Markets? ‘€œIt’s a total mix,’€ says Concklin. ‘€œPeople come to these farmer’s markets to browse and shop.’€ Concklin says it’s a very competitive business, but it benefits everyone involved. Farmer’s markets give local farmers an additional distribution point and the consumers get fresher, better quality products.
You can find the Orchards of Concklin at the Nyack’s Farmer’s Market every Thursday through late November or at their Farm Store at the intersection of Route 45 and South Mountain Road in Pomona, NY.
At The Farmer’s Market is sponsored by the Chamber Of Commerce Of The Nyacks. The Nyack Farmer’s Market is open Thursdays from 8a-2p in the Riverspace parking lot at the corner of Main St and Artopee in Nyack, NY from May through late November.
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PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 30 — NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has spied hints of a mineral that typically forms in water — a finding that could mean the dry and dusty Red Planet was once wetter and more hospitable to life.
That is the very question Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, were sent to answer.
The preliminary discovery came on Friday, hours before Opportunity was to roll its six wheels onto the Martian surface for the first time. Engineers planned to command the rover to roll the 10 feet off its lander and onto Mars at 3:30 a.m. ET Saturday. Confirmation was expected three hours later.
NASA said the $820 million double-barreled mission should begin in earnest by Sunday, once Opportunity is on the ground and Spirit, on the other side of the planet, is cured of the software problems that have crippled it for more than a week.
“The fat lady has finally gotten onto the stage, but the time of her aria has not yet arrived,” project manager Pete Theisinger said at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The rovers face continuing perils, including bitter cold and rough terrain.
Looking for hematite
NASA scientists want Opportunity to find on the pebbly ground a mineral called gray hematite. The iron-rich mineral typically — but not always — forms in liquid water.
Scientists said the preliminary evidence suggests Opportunity has already spied the mineral in the ruddy soil around it by using its mini-thermal emissions spectrometer, or Mini-TES, an instrument that measures infrared radiation.
Confirmation should take a few days, while scientists check and double-check their data, said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, the deputy main scientist for the mission.
Even when pressed, Arvidsen declined to confirm that gray hematite had been detected. “But if you look at any Mini-TES team members, they have huge smiles on their faces,” he added.
The detection of gray hematite would not be a huge surprise, because orbital data have indicated that the area where Opportunity landed, in Meridiani Planum, is rich in the iron oxide mineral. Scientists believe the mineral covers an estimated 15 percent to 20 percent of the surface across an area hundreds of miles across. That's the very reason why Meridiani Planum was selected as Opportunity's destination.
A closer analysis of the rover's surroundings could help scientists determine whether the hematite was formed through interaction with liquid water or through volcanic processes. Those findings, in turn, would provide evidence for or against the theory that ancient Mars had liquid water for an extended period of time. On Earth, life has been found virtually anywhere liquid water exists.
Opportunity has completed a panoramic view of its surroundings, and that should be transmitted to Earth over the next couple of days, said Daniel Limonadi, a rover systems engineer at JPL.
Once Opportunity leaves its landing platform, scientists want the rover to strike out for an outcropping several yards to its left. High-resolution images have revealed the presence of fine layers in the bedrock. The layers could have been laid down by water, wind or the buildup of volcanic ash.
Eventually, scientists plan to steer Opportunity out of its crater to explore the plain beyond.
As for the ailing Spirit rover, half a world away, NASA deleted 1,700 files from its flash memory Friday and then rebooted the rover.
“I am pleased to report it appears to be working just fine,” said Glenn Reeves, chief engineer for the rover’s flight software. He said NASA should be able to declare Spirit “fully recovered” by Sunday.
Slideshow: Spirit's home Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres, the mission’s main scientist, said very little science will have been lost because of the setback. Squyres previously warned that each rover would probably lose one of every three days of work to unforeseen circumstances.
While on the mend, Spirit already has resumed its science work at Gusev Crater, snapping the first-ever microscopic image taken on Mars of the surface of a rock. Spirit should begin drilling into the rock, dubbed Adirondack, sometime in the next four days.
Initial measurements reveal the rock is an olivine-rich basalt. The volcanic rock is the most common type on the surface of Earth and does not require water to form. That disappointed scientists.
“It is not the kind of smoking-gun evidence we’re looking for,” Arvidson said.
NASA also showed new images taken by the rover’s panoramic camera of rocks that have been nicknamed Cake and Blanco.
This report includes information from The Associated Press and MSNBC's Alan Boyle.
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This great set of state report pages, focusing on state symbols and other state facts, is ready to be filled in and made into a booklet. Comes with teacher suggestions for use. A great tool for state reports!
"Use at least two news or reference sources to answer the questions below." This worksheet guides students in finding facts about a disaster. Good for opening class discussion in social studies, current events, etc.
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President Requests $242,605,000 for Institute of Museum and Library Services
February 14, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
IMLS Press Contacts
Natasha Marstiller, email@example.com
Mamie Bittner, firstname.lastname@example.org
Washington, DC—President Obama has requested $242,605,000 for fiscal year 2012 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
"Rapid societal shifts are challenging museums and libraries to reinvent themselves. With this budget, IMLS is rigorously examining all of its grant programs, research, and leadership initiatives to ensure that every dollar is helping libraries and museums meet this challenge," said Susan Hildreth, director of IMLS. "In a world where the ability to access and use information is essential to competitiveness, IMLS must help frontline institutions use new technology, adapt services to meet the needs of today’s information seekers, and work in partnership with a host of community organizations."
The years ahead will be critical ones for the nation’s libraries and museums; strategic leadership is needed to shape programs and services to most effectively meet community needs. The reauthorization of the Museum and Library Services Act of 2010 passed with broad bi-partisan support in Congress and signed by President Obama on December 23, 2010, provides an important roadmap for the work ahead and emphasizes education; economic, community and workforce development; civic engagement; and many other national priorities.
The President requested $193,223,000 for IMLS library programs. Of that amount, approximately 84 percent ($161.3 million) is distributed to the states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, and freely associated states, according to a population-based formula. These grants help libraries meet community needs, use technology to develop new service models and reach underserved populations. Library funding also supports the following programs:
- National Leadership Grants to support creation of new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances to shape tomorrow’s libraries.
- Native American and Native Hawaiian Library Services Grants to support improved access to library services for Native Americans, Alaska Native Villages, and Native Hawaiians.
- Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grants that build the professional capacity of libraries by improving staff knowledge and skills.
For IMLS museum programs, the President requested $32,318,000 for the following grant programs:
- Museums for America, a program that strengthens museums as active resources for lifelong learning and as community assets.
- The 21st Century Museum Professionals program, which supports projects that address the preparation of museum professionals for the future by updating and expanding their knowledge and skills.
- The Conservation Project Support program, which helps museums identify conservation needs and priorities and perform activities to ensure the safekeeping of their collections.
- National Leadership Grants to support creation of new tools, research, models, services, practices.
- The Conservation Assessment Program and the Museum Assessment Program are now incorporated under National Leadership Grants.
- The Native American and Native Hawaiian Museum Services program, which enables Native American tribes, Alaska Native villages or corporations, and organizations that primarily serve Native Hawaiians to benefit their communities and audiences through strengthened museum services.
- The Museum Grants for African American History and Culture program, which builds professional capacity in the African American museum community.
Research and Data Collection
The President’s budget includes $1,934,000 for research and policy activities, including funding for the Public Library Survey, the State Library Agency Survey and Museums Count. Recent studies include:
- Opportunity for All: How the American Public Benefits from Internet Access at U.S. Libraries
Estimates that 77 million people used library computers and Internet connections in 2009; top uses includes searches to meet workforce, education, health and government information needs.
- State Library Agency Service Trends: 1999–2008
Describes how state libraries are helping public libraries transform library service and embrace new technology to meet the information needs of the American public.
- Service Trends in Public Libraries 1997- 2007 demonstrates that the availability of Internet services has not diminished the need for public libraries. The study documents a steady increase in use of libraries over the past ten years.
- Connecting to the World's Collections: Making the Case for the Conservation and Preservation of our Cultural Heritage
A series of practical recommendations to ensure optimal collections conservation worldwide, gathered from sixty cultural heritage leaders from thirty-two countries, including representatives from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, South America, Australia, Europe, and North America.
- Connecting to Collections: A Report to the Nation
Offers solutions for libraries, museums and archives that hold endangered collections and issues a call to action for public-private partnership to save collections for future generations.
- Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills
A roadmap for creating libraries and museums that can deliver 21st century skills using 21st century methods.
- The Future of Museums and Libraries: A Discussion Guide
A concise synthesis of two-days of discussion by the nation’s leading voices in library and museum services that encourages new thinking about institutional roles, community engagement and a vision for the future.
The IMLS FY2012 Congressional Justification and a detailed table of President Obama’s budget request (PDF, 57KB) for IMLS with recent budget history accompanies this release.
About the Institute of Museum and Library Services
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. To learn more about the Institute, please visit www.imls.gov.
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In praise of plastic
A recent column by Margery Eagan fails to mention that the alternatives to plastic bags are much worse for the environment than the bags she hopes to ban (Nov. 18). Paper bags depend on cutting down trees, unlike plastic bags, which in the United States come from natural gas. Reusable bags may be even worse; they require so much more energy to produce than plastic bags that they must be used 131 times before they become equal in carbon consumption to a single plastic bag.
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These days, we take it for granted that we can just turn on the TV and watch live news, sport or entertainment from around the world. Only half a century ago, this would have been impossible.
Although there wasn’t much coverage of it in the UK media, exactly 50 years ago this week, Telstar 1, the first active communications satellite went into orbit. The day after the launch by NASA, on 10 July 1962, the first telephone call by satellite was made, then the first fax by satellite was sent, the first images and video were transmitted, and the first live transatlantic TV broadcast took place. The rest, as they say, is history…
To me, the legacy of Telstar, as well as Sputnik – the first artificial satellite launched in 1957 – and the other early satellites, is just mind boggling. In fact, I think it is impossible to overestimate the impact of satellites on our life today. They do so many things – from communications to navigation to meteorology and much, much more – but basically they just make transmitting information around the world faster and easier. Without satellites, global interaction would be a fraction of what it is today. Maybe I’m being a bit too ‘romantic’ about it all, but I think satellites are one of history’s greatest inventions.
And although I’m not old enough to remember its release in 1962, the Tornados’ song Telstar keeps going round in my head as I write this (you’ll know the tune if you hear it!) The song was inspired by the satellite and featured a clavioline – one of the first electronic keyboards – and various other sound effects to give it an ‘out of space’ feel. It was a massive hit worldwide and shows just what a big impact the first communications satellite had on the popular imagination at the time.
So the next time you pick up your mobile phone or turn on your sat nav, think of Telstar and the communications revolution it started!
Image courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Posted at 2:03pm on 12th July 2012
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Posted by ESC on May 19, 2003
In Reply to: Help pleasr posted by richardhowell on May 19, 2003
: Heaven to Betsy
: Where does this come from? What does it mean?
: Any help would be appreciated
: thank you
HEAVENS TO BETSY -- It's an exclamation like "Oh, my goodness." Nobody knows the origin for certain. There's a long discussion of the phrase in "Heavens to Betsy" by Charles Earle Funk. (He titled at least two of his books using origin-unknown phrases.) The only thing he knew for certain is that it's an old phrase. He didn't think the phrase relates to the first Queen Elizabeth since she was never called "Betsy" and the phrase is virtually unknown in England, at least when he was writing the book in 1955. And he didn't think it related to Betsy Ross. Mr. Funk's theory was that "It was much more likely to have been derived in some way from the frontiersman's rifle or gun which, for unknown reason, he always fondly called Betsy."
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AFTER a Muslim couple in the UK began a 25-year jail sentence yesterday for the murder of their 17-year-old daughter, Mohammed Shafiq, Chief Executive of the Manchester-based Ramadhan Foundation said of the sentence handed down at Chester Crown Court:
A strong message goes out and should be very clear: If you engage in honour killings – if you engage in forced marriages – you will be caught and brought to justice.
The report in which Shafiq was quoted makes for grim reading. Iftikhar Ahmed, 52, and his wife Farzana, 49, murdered their daughter Shafilea in September, 2003. During their trial that began in May, jurors heard evidence from Shafilea’s younger sister, Alesha, who said she witnessed the killing when she was 12.
After an argument about Shafilea’s mode of dress, her parents pushed her down on a couch, stuffed a thin white plastic bag into her mouth and held their hands over her mouth and nose until she died, Alesha testified.
As she was struggling, her mother said, “just finish it here,” according to Alesha.
Sentencing the couple – first cousins from the Pakistani village of Uttam – to a minimum of 25 years Justice Roderick Evans said of the victim:
She was being squeezed between two cultures – the culture and way of life that she saw around her and wanted to embrace, and the culture and way of life you wanted to impose on her.
The judge asked them:
What was it that brought you two, her parents, the people who had given her life, to the point of killing her? You chose to bring up your family in Warrington but, although you lived in Warrington, your social and cultural attitudes were those of rural Pakistan and it was those which you imposed upon your children.
Shafilea was a determined, able and ambitious girl who wanted to live a life which was normal in the country and in the town in which you had chosen to live and bring up your children. However, you could not tolerate the life that Shafilea wanted to live.
In Britain, more than 25 women have been killed in so-called “honour killings” in the past decade. Families have sometimes lashed out at their children on the belief that they have brought their household shame by becoming too Westernized or by refusing a marriage.
Shafilea was only ten when she began to rebel against her parents’ strict rules, according to prosecutor Andrew Edis.
The young girl would hide make-up, false nails and Western clothes at school, changing into conservative clothes before her parents picked her up. But it was the last year of her life that proved to be the most traumatic.
When Shafilea became a teenager, he interest turned to boys — and her parents reacted violently. School officials alerted social services in October 2002 after Shafilea came to school with injuries to her face. That same month, Shafilea told a social worker that she was to be married in Pakistan in February 2003.
In January 2003, she ran away, telling friends her parents would not leave her alone. She eventually returned.
In February 2003, she ran away again and pleaded with the authorities to allow her to move out of her parents’ house because, she said, they were abusive and trying to force her into an arranged marriage.
Some of Shafilea’s own words also proved compelling to jurors. In an application form to move out, she said she had suffered from regular domestic violence from the age of 15.
One parent would hold me whilst the other hit me.
Her father snatched her off the streets in the same month as the application. He bundled her into a car and took her to Pakistan against her will, Alesha said.
In protest, Shafilea drank bleach and was brought back to Britain in May 2003. She spent eight weeks in the hospital trying to recover from damage done to her throat.
Even in her weakened and desperate state, Shafilea’s parents were relentless.
Alesha said that after he sister was killed, her father carried her body to the car wrapped in a blanket. She was reported missing shortly after, with her parents making a teary-eyed media appeal for information leading to their daughter.
But police were suspicious — so much so that they bugged the house. Shafilea’s decomposed remains were eventually discovered in the River Kent in Cumbria in February 2004, but it wasn’t until 2010 that Alesha provided the key testimony.
Last year, the British government’s Forced Marriage Unit investigated more than 1,400 cases of forced marriages, most of which occur in Muslim communities. Britain is home to more than 1.8 million Muslims, most from Pakistani roots.
Hat tip: BarrieJohn
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The United Nations University Geothermal Training Programme and Orkustofnun publish a brochure
The mandate of the UNU-GTP is to assist developing countries with significant geothermal potential, to establish groups of specialists in geothermal exploration and development by offering six months specialized training for professionals employed in geothermal research and/or development.
The hallmark of the UNU-GTP is to give university graduates engaged in geothermal work intensive on-the-job training in their chosen fields of specialization. The trainees work side by side with geothermal professionals in Iceland. The training is tailor-made for the individual and the needs of his institution/country.
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Now-Ubiquitous LED Lights Invented 50 Years Ago
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
They are ubiquitous. They're in our cars, our computers, our TVs and the remotes that control them. They light up our streets and, increasingly, our homes. I'm talking about Light Emitting Diodes, better known as LEDs. It was 50 years ago this week that they were invented.
NICK HOLONYAK: In a way, I knew right away from how powerful this result was that we were in the right direction.
SIEGEL: That is Nick Holonyak, Junior, the father of the LED. In 1962, Holonyak was working in General Electric's semiconductor lab. And he was working on an alloy to produce visible light. His colleagues were skeptical.
HOLONYAK: They're sophisticated and they got good methods and all that, and here comes this punk electrical engineer who's fooling around with some simple screwy kind of ideas. And they're swearing at me with their nice New York street language and I'm giving it back to them...
HOLONYAK: ...in coal miner's and then, of course, I can even switch a little bit to some other swears from other lands.
SIEGEL: Those first LEDs threw off red light. But Holonyak saw the potential.
HOLONYAK: I think we're going to make this into the ultimate white light source.
SIEGEL: Which strikes you more: the fact that now the LED is becoming a preferred source of lightning, or that it's taken almost half a century for the LED to bump off the incandescent light bulb?
HOLONYAK: Well, (unintelligible) like the bulbs because I think what you folks who report on science and so forth don't get right, is that real quickly things happen. It takes a long time to play around with an idea, make the mistakes you're going to make, and then get to what you really want.
SIEGEL: And at age 83, Nick Holonyak is still playing around and making mistakes. He's at the University of Illinois and he's working on a laser transistor.
HOLONYAK: We're not done. And any old man that says to a young guy, we did it all, is a liar or a fool.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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Jewish World Review May 12, 2004 / 21 Iyar, 5764
Permission to gerrymander
In those North Carolina cases, O'Connor wrote that a districting plan that would be unconstitutional as racial discrimination would be just fine if it was designed for partisan purposes. O'Connor is the only member of today's court who was elected to a state legislature: She has been in the redistricting business herself. She knows that redistricting, when it is done by a legislature, is inherently political, and that there is no way you can take the politics out of it.
And that was essentially the conclusion that the court came to in the Pennsylvania case. Four justices, including O'Connor, ruled that there was no way to determine whether a redistricting plan is overly political. The justice with the deciding vote, Anthony Kennedy, said that there may be some plans that are unconstitutionally partisan, but that he could not say that this was one of them. He evidently found unconvincing Justice Stephen Breyer's 15-page attempt to set forth criteria of what was too political for the Constitution and what wasn't.
As a practical matter, this means that anything goes. The Pennsylvania plan was an obvious example of partisan districting by the Republicans who controlled the process; it is hard to imagine a plan that would be thrown out by a court that refused to throw out this one. Similar examples from this cycle of redistricting include Republican plans in Michigan and Florida and Democratic plans in Georgia and Maryland. There will be others in the 2010 cycle unless changes in the composition of the court suggest a different lineup on this issue.
Commentators both liberal and conservative have bemoaned the Pennsylvania decision. They complain as well about incumbent-protection plans that were adopted as the result of bipartisan deals in California, Illinois, and New York. These plans are made possible, they argue, by redistricting computer programs, which make it much easier to draw such plans. The result of partisan and incumbent-protection plans and of computerization, they argue, leaves too few seats uncompetitive, makes the House less accountable to voters, and increases the leverage of wingers in each party to nominate their kind of candidates in seats that their party cannot lose in November.
So far as I know, none of these commentators has ever done any redistricting. I have. In the late 1960s, I was working for the Oakland County Democratic Party in Michigan and, with a simple adding machine, drew up a redistricting plan for the County Board of Supervisors, which was later enacted and resulted in a Democratic majority on the board even though Republicans won most of the popular votes. The secret, of course, was to create a large number of districts with small Democratic majorities and a smaller number of districts with very large Republican majorities. This was pretty easy in those days, because most of the high-income parts of Oakland County voted overwhelmingly Republican (92 percent for governor in my Bloomfield Township precinct in a 1960s election that was decided statewide by a 51-to-48 percent majority).
Note that I did this redistricting with an adding machine; this was before the time of electronic calculators, much less redistricting computer programs. It was not very difficult for someone who knew the census numbers and the election results. Certainly, it was not difficult for California Rep. Phillip Burton, who drew several congressional and state redistricting plans in California in the 1970s and 1980s. He also kept close track of redistricting in other states. He came up to me once in the hall of the Capitol and said, in characteristically thundering tones, "They've given Kastenmeier too much of Grant County." He was referring to Rep. Bob Kastenmeier of the Second District of Wisconsin, a liberal who usually won re-election by narrow margins; Grant County, in the southwest corner of the state, was the most Republican county in the area. Some of Burton's Republican adversaries used a redistricting computer program to frustrate him. "I have something better than a computer," Burton replied. "My brain."
Burton died in 1983, but there are other people out there with redistricting brainsRepublican Rep. Tom Davis and California Democratic consultant Michael Berman, to name two. Computer programs make the process of drawing district lines faster and easier, but they have not radically transformed the process as critics claim.
What about the complaints that partisan and incumbent-protection plans have unduly reduced the number of marginal districts and have made the House unresponsive to the voters? Start with the complaint against partisan plans. In the past five House elections, Republicans have won the popular vote for the House five times, twice by solid and three times by narrow margins. All five times Republicans have also won a majority of House seats.
So the gross effect of partisan redistricting has not been to unduly reward either party. Democrats gained a small advantage out of redistricting in the 1990 cycle, and Republicans, in my judgment, gained a small advantage out of redistricting in the 2000 cycle (some Democrats argue that redistricting resulted in no net gain for either party; these are matters of fine judgment).
The states with heavily partisan plans in the 2000 cycle included both Republican (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, andsince 2003Texas) and Democratic (Georgia, Maryland) redistrictings. It is possible that one party will have a bigger advantage in the 2010 cycle. But if the country remains evenly divided between the parties along current lines, that seems unlikely. So we don't need to outlaw partisan districting to make sure that the party with the most votes gets a majority in the House.
We should note also that partisan redistricters do not always succeed in their purposes. The 17th District of Pennsylvania, which gave George W. Bush a solid majority in 2000, elected Democrat Tim Holden in a two-incumbent contest in 2002. The 12th District of Georgia, which has a nearly 50 percent black population and which voted for Al Gore in 2000, elected Republican Max Burns in 2002.
Moreover, over the course of a 10-year period between censuses, partisan alignments can change, so that districts that started out safely Republican or Democratic become marginal and can be captured by the other party. No one has any guarantee that the political alignments of 2000, on which the redistricters based their plans (except for the 2003 plan in Texas, whose shapers had the advantage of knowing the 2002 election results), will stay in place up through the 2010 election. In fact, during the 1982-90 and 1992-2000 intercensal cycles, there were such changes in partisan alignments. Southern California districts that were carried by Republicans in 1992 and 1994 were voting heavily Democratic by 1998 and 2000. Georgia districts that seemed safely Democratic in 1992 were safely Republican by 2000.
The nation abounds with such examples. We have passed through only one election with redistricting plans from the 2000 cycle. We will pass through four more. Would anyone like to bet $1,000 that the political alignments will not change in this decade as they did in the past two?
So I am less worried than many other commentators that the partisan and incumbent-protection redistricting plans in the 2000 cycle will seal incumbents in and prevent serious competition in a larger number of districts than the admittedly small numbers that were seriously contested in 2002 and are being seriously contested today. This is not necessarily an argument against the system of nonpartisan (or bipartisan) commissions that redistrict House seats under the state laws of Washington, Iowa, and Arizona. I suppose I could live with such systems in every state, though they do have the disadvantage of sometimes ousting seasoned or particularly talented or well-placed legislators whom politicians of both parties would like to see continue in office. But such plans are not likely to be adopted in most states. State legislators are not inclined to cede their authority to draw district lines for House districts and, even more, their own. Most states do not have an initiative or referendum process that would allow voters to adopt such commissions.
Yes, our system of redistricting is not ideal and has some arguably negative effects on the political process. But this is not as great a problem as those commentators conservative and liberal suggest. It is something we can, perhaps a little uncomfortably, live with. So long as the courts continue to enforce the equal-population standard, the partisan mischief politicians can do will be limited; we do not need the courts to step in and decide which redistricting plans are too partisan.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
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Video Source: www.youtube.com
In her remarks at the National Action Network's 14th Annual Convention in Washington, DC on Thursday, April 12, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis shared her personal experiences growing up in a Teamster household. Solis credited the union with providing her family the security of strong wages and benefits that allowed them to move up into the middle class and fondly recalled when her father became a steward for his bargaining unit at work. "One of the proudest moments I had was when he became the shop steward for his Teamster union and organized immigrant workers who couldn't speak English," Solis said. "He said -- I'm going to stand up for these workers." Solis shared how her father's work helped provide good wages, benefits and retirement plans for workers throughout the community. His job also provided her with the opportunity to become the first of her seven siblings to go to college. Her younger sisters followed in her footsteps, with some even receiving Teamster scholarships. "That's what put our foot in the door to be in the middle class," Solis said. "My father and us, we stood tall -- we were one of the first families in our neighborhood to own our own home. That gave us so much pride -- having a piece of the American Dream."
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A Captain's Berth
Buying or Building Your Own Yacht is a Risky Venture that Requires Long Months of Investigation
From the Print Edition:
Tom Selleck, Winter 95/96
One man wants to replace his "old lady." The other was simply looking for more power.
For Prince Charles and his coterie of advisers, a drama affecting the entire British Commonwealth is still being played out. Debated in Parliament and in the tabloids, the controversy concerns the royal yacht Britannia, whether this aging ship should be modernized or mothballed. In either event, a costly search to find the world's best naval craftsmen is about to begin. Will the work be done close to home in a yard like Scotland's Ailsa-Perth, or in Holland, at such famed yards as Royal Huisman or Feadship? The suspense continues to mount.
On a more modest scale, Steve Florio, president of The Condé Nast Publications, Inc., faced a similar quandary. Leaving The New Yorker magazine in 1994 to assume his new job, Florio, a longtime sailing enthusiast, realized that "my boat could cross the ocean, yet due to my new workload, I didn't have the time to cross the Long Island Sound."
Saddled with a sailboat that didn't fit his lifestyle (or that of most top-level executives), yet still craving the excitement of reaching distant ports, Florio had one option--buying a powerboat. That decision, coming after years of tending to beloved sailboats, was weighty enough for Florio. It was, however, his easiest choice. What followed was a tricky, and potentially financially devastating, journey to boat shows, shipyards and showrooms filled with fast-talking salesmen. He began a search that demanded the keenest of navigational skills, negotiating between his heart and his mind.
Whether yacht buyers have princely aspirations, want a $40 million "corporate tool" for entertaining purposes, or are in Florio's $1 million range, purchasing a new or used boat is a joy complicated by a range of perils and very easily mixed with disaster. That brokered used yacht may seem like an attractive buy in St.-Tropez or Portofino, but out on the open seas, the unschooled buyer may well be presented with a few harrowing surprises.
As for that custom-designed yacht, there's certainly a great feeling of fulfillment from visiting yards to watch craftsmen turn your blueprints into reality. "It's definitely a bit of an ego statement," says Florio, "to watch your own design being born."
Yet that statement can be out of sync with trends in the marketplace, or simply antithetical to efficiently operating a yacht. As for those picturesque boatyards, frequently shadowed by financial crises and unable to deliver at agreed prices, they, too, have spawned a caveat. All too often, buying a boat also means buying the yard.
They don't look like multimillion dollar mistakes. Sitting serenely in the water, their white fiberglass hulls gleaming in the midday sun, the yachts docked at the Derecktor Gunnell shipyard outside Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, seem ready for seagoing adventures. Their engines purr like Ferraris. Crews are busy at work in wide-body salons, polishing rosewood and teak trim that epitomize classical elegance. Even hearty captains appear, striding through pilot houses equipped with the latest electronics, to pronounce everything shipshape.
Brokers will come on board and tell unschooled clients that yachts like these $3 million to $10 million models are a great buy. In many cases it's difficult to determine whether the spiels are sheer flim-flam, or attributable to a broker's lack of experience. The brokerage business has its share of friendly "ushers"--wonderful men to have a drink with, who having recently sold houses or used cars, know little about a boat's interior sound levels, engineering, and true value.
But once all the talk fades, the shiny toys on board can't disguise the fact that many of the yachts here, whatever their price or pedigree, are still mistakes. Badly designed, they lack ample staterooms, quarters for crew, and at worst, are so overweighted with marble heads and flooring that their speed and fuel ranges are decidedly below standard.
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The sweeping regulatory reform implemented in Michigan over the past year is often couched as a response to the economic crisis. Decoupling rates from utility profits, the reasoning goes, will...
New York Negawatts
Balancing risks and opportunities in efficiency investments.
In June 2008, the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) established the electric energy-efficiency portfolio standards for New York’s investor-owned utilities. 1 In its order, the PSC directed utilities to file three-year energy-efficiency plans which, once implemented, would generate cumulative savings of nearly 2.1 GWh from 2009 to 2011 at a total cost of about $518 million. Later that year, the PSC issued a supplemental order approving shareholder incentives for utilities successfully implementing their portfolios. 2 If all goes according to plan, the six affected IOUs stand to earn about $27 million annually in performance incentives over three years (see Figure 1) .
The structure of the incentive mechanism approved by the PSC presents risk factors that might affect utilities’ ability to realize the full earning potentials the mechanism offers.
The Case for Incentives
The PSC order was issued in August 2008, 21 years after the July 1989 resolution of the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners’ (NARUC), which recognized the earnings implications of conservation and least-cost planning for utilities. 3 The NARUC resolution recognized the need for removing obstacles standing between the idea of least-cost planning and the practical realities of traditional ratemaking, which created a strong economic disincentive to the utilities’ implementation of it. The resolution urged NARUC member state commissioners to: consider the loss of earnings potential associated with conservation and demand-side management; adopt appropriate ratemaking mechanisms to encourage utilities to help their customers improve end use efficiency cost-effectively; and ensure the successful implementation of a utility’s least-cost plan as its most profitable course of action. 4
The resolution proved popular and effective. Within four years, by the end of 1993, shareholder incentives had been approved for over 50 utilities in 20 states, including Con Edison and NYSEG. 5 The hallmarks of these early incentive structures were assured recovery of prudent energy-efficiency investments, and financial incentives to offset the loss of revenues resulting from reduced sales.
However, as utilities in many regions dealt with regulatory reform and restructuring of the electric utility industry in the mid 1990s to early 2000s, these schemes were abandoned in most jurisdictions. Uncertainties related to restructuring in general and the potential risks of stranded investment resulting from open access (in particular) led many utilities to cut back, or in many cases, to altogether halt their energy-efficiency investments. The low activity levels and dwindling new investments in energy efficiency lessened the importance and, to some extent, relevance of shareholder incentive mechanisms.
The past few years have seen a significant resurgence in energy efficiency for a number of reasons, mainly due to a renewed interest in integrated resource planning and the adoption of energy-efficiency portfolio standards (EEPS) in many states given concerns over climate change or energy security. These developments have prompted many regulatory commissions to reconsider energy-efficiency incentives. Based on recent data compiled by the Edison Electric Institute, incentive formulas have been approved in 18 states
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As this has been a dilemma for quite some time now, we will try to explain in this article the “outsourcing software development” approach and how to decide if a company should go ‘internal’, or ‘external’. Most companies activating in different areas of business understand the importance of one or several internal software system as the basis of their business efficiency maximization.
Some companies have their own development departments producing software for the internal needs. This approach is known as ‘in-house development’ and was more used in the past.
But the business world is increasingly complex and undergoing massive transformation, with more players and diverse business models, solution bundles and more sophisticated, tech savvy business users, all these bringing new challenges to the managers. Such new business challenges, cannot always be supported in due time and cost effectively by internal software systems. The software departments were facing difficulties in aligning the varied business functional needs with multiproduct and multiphase developmental pipelines. Also companies were facing challenges in finding all skills needed to adopt latest technologies internally.
In order to solve quickly a broad range of requests, but also to adapt to new technologies, companies started to extend their internal software development departments. This brought new challenges in terms of budget control. Not only they were facing fixed costs with salaries increases, but also long term expenses made to cover new infrastructure needs (servers, special buildings, etc.).
Companies started to see the benefits of externalizing some of their IT services, including software development in order to lower these costs and become more efficient. There were 2 options for doing this:
- Offshore outsourcing – making a partnership with a company from another country
- Near-shore outsourcing – making a partnership with a company from the same country, or a near region.
These terms are now obsolete in my opinion as most of the companies (the big ones, for sure) are having offices in diverse geographical regions.
So, we are going to use from now on the term: outsourcing.
Here are some international figures released by Gartner Group related to our subject:
From 2011-2015, Gartner estimates that the IT outsourcing market will grow about 4% annually. Moreover, the application outsourcing segment is expected to reach $40.7 billion, a 2 percent increase from 2011 spending of $39.9 billion.
Nowadays, frequently companies are confronting with the decision: outsourcing product software development, or continue with the internal development team.
What are the pros and cons for outsourcing for a company ?
- Cost Effectiveness – Offshore outsourcing can significantly reduce the overhead and operational costs that must be otherwise incurred in internal development
- Risk-sharing – One of the most significant benefits of offshore outsourcing is that the risks can be shared. The specialized vendor helps you plan the risk mitigating factors in an effective manner.
- Access to latest technologies – Being the professional service provider in the industry, the companies are always updated with innovative and upgraded technologies. This not only allows you to serve the international clients better, but also puts you ahead, in front of your competitors.
- Improved Focus – Outsourcing allows you to focus on your core business needs instead of worrying about the internal resources needed to reach your goal.
- Lack of control in the status of development
- Dependency on a specific supplier
- Uncertainty about information confidentiality.
- Lack of proximity to staff.
All these cons can be properly transformed in Pros with a well planning and constant discussion with vendor.
But this will be another story….
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Nice coverage Richard.
A picturesque view of the Empire State Building framed by Grand Army Plaza’s iconic arch is in danger of being blocked forever.
The 102-story skyscraper perfectly bisects the Solders’ and Sailors’ Arch when viewed from a not-so-well-known vantage point just inside Prospect Park — but long-time Park Sloper Richard Kessler fears a proposed tower in the Atlantic Yards mega-development will obstruct his favorite vista before the borough can truly appreciate its grandeur.
“It’s a very beautiful sight that shouldn’t be lost,” said Kessler, 66, who started an online petition last month urging locals to “save the view.”
The development company Forest City Ratner plans to erect a 219-foot tall residential high-rise only half a mile from Grand Army Plaza on Atlantic Avenue near Sixth Avenue. When that building is finished, Kessler worries that tree branches and a light pole won’t be the only things in the foreground when he and other onlookers lean against a lamppost at the start of Prospect Park’s East Drive — the only spot where the vista reveals itself.
“It would perfectly block the Empire State Building,” said Kessler, who has taken to calling the vantage point “Brooklyn Mirador.” “If I put my back against that lamppost and I see an apartment building instead of the Empire State Building, I got no interest.”
The Solders’ and Sailors’ Arch was completed in 1892 — 40 years before the Empire State building climbed into the clouds — but this preservationist believes the fortuitous placement is no coincidence.
Though he has no documentation to back up his case, Kessler claims the arch — and an 1869 statue of Abraham Lincoln that once stood in front of it — points right at the former Astor mansion five miles away on Fifth Avenue in an attempt by architects to challenge the wealthy family because they opposed the Great Emancipator’s efforts to end slavery.
The Astor family’s home is now the site of the Empire State Building, and a number of later monuments — including the Grand Army Plaza’s 1932 Bailey Fountain and the park’s 1965 John F. Kennedy memorial — also line up with the viewing corridor, only bolstering its significance, according to Kessler.
“These things are in a straight line and nature doesn’t make straight lines like this. This is something that was done on purpose,” said Kessler, who suspects that Grand Army Plaza designers Frederick Olmsted and Calvert Vaux knew about the axis when the arch rose in the late 1800s.
As of press time, Kessler has gathered 51 signatures pushing for the preservation of the “Brooklyn Mirador” on Change.org. He is seeking an additional 99,949 backers.
Once he rounds up enough supporters, Kessler hopes to deliver the petition to the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian Institute, and the city’s Landmark’s Preservation Commission — which already ruled against his previous request to preserve the vista.
“We determined that the corridor is ineligible because it does not meet the definition of a New York City landmark,” said Landmarks spokeswoman Elisabeth De Bourbon.
Forest City Ratner spokesman Joe DePlasco would not comment on the viewing corridor, but said the entire Atlantic Yards plan already received an environmental review when “scale and size” were up for discussion.
But the history-obsessed fanatic will not give up.
“I know for sure this is a significant thing,” said Kessler. “It would be terrible to lose it.”
This isn’t the first time Brooklyn preservationists have fought to save a long-distance viewing corridor: history lovers battled a now-finished condo development they claimed would sully a Green-Wood Cemetery vista in which a statue of the goddess Minerva appears to wave at the Statue of Liberty.
And in DUMBO, neighbors and celebrities rallied against a planned tower they fear will block views of the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Face it! Like it or not, you are defined by the decisions you make.
Think of successful organizations and the people responsible for guiding their authority and well-being. Often, high performance is the result of an executive choosing the right move at the right time. It’s not purely a lucky streak.
Corporate strategy is not “Black Jack” nor 5-card stud poker.
Decision-making is a complex activity. And at times, it is a long process. Your ability to identify and excel in your decision-making tasks will greatly increase the chances that the choices you make will have a strong and positive impact on your organization.
So why take any more risks when you know instinctively that this is the case to sound growth and prosperity?
How To Get Started
Your first step is to understand the external and internal factors that affect decision-making, from aspects of the organizational environment to your personal decision-making preferences.
While you aren’t always able to control these influences, recognizing and identifying these factors will enable you to take them into consideration as you strive to make the best decision outcome.
Every day you make sense of what goes on around you by interpreting what you see and hear. You are continually taking into account your past experiences, values, needs, attitudes, and goals. Even your understanding of what another person says is only an estimate, as you can never completely share the viewpoint of someone else concerning the world.
Given the increasing complexity of organizational life, along with the quantity of information that must be processed, it is no wonder executives too often experience stress as they strive to balance agendas and please many of their people.
It can happen that you put a lot of time and effort into a decision study or a formal analysis, only to be disappointed in the results. When this happens, you need to re-evaluate both the information that went into the analysis including your expectations.
On one hand…
No process is any better than the information that goes into it and when you get a result that your experience suggests may be flawed or biased, this is a strong indication to probe.
On the other hand…
It’s extremely tempting to tinker with the data until you receive a result that you’re happier with – but this is a form of deception that can lead to an adverse outcome. In this case, it helps to remind yourself to keep up a high standard of accuracy and objectivity and to seek a reality-check from someone whose judgment you respect and who’s not personally involved in the decision.
The decisions you make are only as good as the process you use to make them. Asking yourself the following questions will help you to assess whether or not you are on the right track:
- Have I done adequate research and gathered all of the information for the subject matter at hand?
- Have I considered all of the stakeholders and their probable responses to various decision outcomes?
- Have I been honest in assessing my own decision making style and taken that into account?
- Have I recognized and acknowledged my personal agendas and bias?
- Have I considered the various options available to me in selecting the most appropriate decision-making method?
- Have I solicited the advice and assistance that was required?
- Am I ready to be accountable for the consequences of the decisions I make?
You have the responsibility for making decisions that deeply affect your employees’ performance, morale and your organization’s future. You cannot afford to rely on personal preferences or hunches alone.
Now that you are familiar with some practical, yet highly effective approaches offered here, your challenge is to develop a positive future possible through the decisions that you make today.
When It’s All Said And Done
Your decisions are only as good as the information you use to make them.
The cliché “Garbage in, garbage out” applies here.
Your ability to recognize bias and evaluate the reliability and validity of the information you gather can make a tremendous difference in the effectiveness of your decisions.
Do you really take seriously the decisions you make and how they impact you and your teams? Are you spending the time to contemplate the natural and obvious outcomes? In your decision-making processes, are you slowing down when you need to and speeding up when that is needed. What are you doing to regulate your thinking to map out the best decision-making regimen for you and your teams? I would love to hear your thoughts!
James D. Roumeliotis is Marketing & Entrepreneurial Advisor at Affluence Marketing
He helps clients increase client market presence, profile and bottom line performance
Email | LinkedIn | Web | Blog
Image Sources: andrew.cmu.edu, ralstonconsulting.com
- Leadership Hall of Fame: Who Is an Executive? (fastcompany.com)
- About Business Decision Making (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
- The Pain of Decision Making (customerthink.com)
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How much sugar do we eat in the Nordic Region, and what lifestyle diseases are caused by excessive sugar consumption? A major supervisory conference will discuss these and other issues in Lillehammer, Norway, 26-27 February.
The conference will bring together just over 200 participants from the whole of the Nordic Region, primarily food inspectors but also representatives from, for example, the food industry.
Sugar consumption is a highly topical issue, and one aspect that the conference will discuss is labelling the sugar content of various products. The use of sugar is also the subject of a major study by the Nordic Council of Ministers this year.
Misleading and downright false marketing are other important items on the conference agenda. The overall theme of is "The Weakest Link in the Food Chain" and issues such as food hygiene will also feature prominently on the agenda.
The conference is being organised by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority with the help of funding by the Nordic Council of Ministers.
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At a time when incomes are plunging for the private sector middle-class, More Federal Employees Get Six-Figure Salaries.
The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.How the $!!! can the department of transportation possibly justify 1,690 workers making in excess of $170,000?
Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.
Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.
Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.
When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.
The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker's pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.
The Federal Aviation Administration also has 1,700 workers making in excess of $170,000.
The Department of Transportation was established by an act of Congress on October 15, 1966. Now there are over 56,000 employees according to the Department of Transportation Fiscal Year 2010 Budget Highlights.
The fiscal insanity does not stop with numbers of employees and their salaries. One also needs to factor in pension benefits that private sector employees do not receive.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List
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The Haqqani network
Calling the Haqqanis terrorists, America puts pressure on Pakistan
EVEN stating the obvious can have consequences. On September 7th Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, said she would designate the Haqqani network, an Afghan militant group with its bases in the wild mountains of North Waziristan, in Pakistan, as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.
Why did it take so long? Of 52 groups on the list, including al-Qaeda and Hamas, none is involved in such direct, regular and violent attacks on Americans. The Haqqani network was behind a string of high-profile attacks on targets in eastern Afghanistan over the past year, including two assaults on Kabul’s embassy district and a huge raid on an American base, Salerno, in Khost.
America had already launched drone strikes at Haqqani lairs in Pakistan. One strike in late August killed Badruddin Haqqani, son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who founded the network decades ago. Afghan officials say they called for action against the Haqqanis for a decade, alleging they were an arm of the Pakistani state.
Individual Americans concurred, saying Pakistan’s main military spy network, the Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), worked with the Haqqanis to exert power inside Afghanistan. A year ago Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, called the Haqqanis a “veritable arm” of the ISI. The suggestion was that Pakistani officers helped to finance, advise and even direct Haqqani network operations.
He certainly overstated the relationship (the Haqqanis know better than the ISI what to target in Afghanistan). Yet the ties are evident. Pakistan’s army allows a safe haven and refuses any confrontation in North Waziristan because the Haqqanis broadly promote Pakistani interests over the border. Crucially the Haqqanis strike at India’s influence there. Saifullah Mahsud, a researcher in Islamabad, calls the Haqqanis “essential to Pakistan’s plans in Afghanistan”. The network also proves helpful in Pakistan’s badlands, patching up confrontations between long-haired hotheads and restraining a bewildering mixture of jihadist groups that might otherwise target the state.
The Americans thus held back from outright confrontation over the Haqqanis, for fear of putting further strains on troubled relations with Pakistan. Until recently they may also have hoped that the Haqqanis could be brought into some sort of talks over Afghanistan’s future. The group does not share al-Qaeda’s global jihadist ambitions. According to declassified American documents, the Haqqanis enjoyed amicable ties with America from the anti-Soviet campaign in the 1980s until 2001.
However the new terrorist designation, and fresh attempts to cripple the group’s finances (though much of these, from things such as kidnapping, extortion and drugs, are local), seem to indicate a shift of strategy. Any prospects of talks with the Haqqanis have dimmed. Anyway, the priority has always been to seek talks with the Taliban, which has looser ties to Pakistan.
Though the United States’ relations with Pakistan are under strain—especially after last year’s raid by American special forces on Osama bin Laden, hiding in a Pakistani military town—the reaction to the new designation in Islamabad, the capital, has so far been muted. American Congressmen might next seek to designate Pakistan itself as a state sponsor of terrorism, because of the Haqqanis. The administration would resist that. But pressure may yet grow for commercial sanctions or cuts in official aid.
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Upon the wall of my study hangs a picture. Two girls kneel at the graveside of their father, in the shadow of an ancient and unusual church. The man they mourn is John Palmer who died in 1750 aged 43. He is my great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.
The image is fake - created through the wonders of Photoshop - but the church, the headstone and the man himself were entirely real. Thanks to the technological resources available, I got to know him a little, and this is how I sketched out his vanished life.
I find it hard to cope with a computer that has only one monitor. For me two is a minimum when doing anything of any complexity. I have three monitors at home which allow me to view several resources at once and cross-reference names and dates without constantly jumping between applications.
On the left-hand monitor I keep the Ancestry website open - usually two tabs at least, so that I have my tree handy and their search page ready. The right-hand monitor has a browser window open with FreeBMD and FamilySearch sites. Despite Ancestry now including BMD information, I prefer the simplicity of the FreeBMD search and I like the ease with which I can run down their results pages. Plus old habits die hard.
The middle monitor I reserve for Photoshop. In my professional life I use Photoshop every day and despite there being applications better-designed for collating information, drawing diagrams, creating trees and dealing with maps, there is nothing I can work more quickly and easily with. When I'm starting out on a piece of research, I create a big, blank canvas, map out my known family members, and leave lots of space for notes around the edge.
On this particular day I am investigating my Nan's Shropshire heritage. In embarking on this line of enquiry, I have already used the FreeBMD information to order the 1848 marriage certificate of her paternal grandparents via the GRO website. This has given me the maiden name Palmer, and the certificate also tells me the bride's father is Benjamin Palmer, a "Waterman."
I find him in the censuses via a quick Ancestry search: 1841, a Waterman; 1851, Barge Owner; 1861 Captain of a Vessel. From these entries I get his birth year of 1799 and his birthplace of Broseley.
I start to run his name through FamilySearch's parish records looking for his parents. I narrow it down to two results in the right county and then switch to the other vital tool without which much would be impossible: Google Maps.
I enter the name of one of the candidate villages and 'get directions' to Broseley. Thirty miles. I try the other one called Much Wenlock. Three miles! They're neighbouring villages. Perfect. I'm happy that I now know Ben Palmer's father was born in 1765.
I repeat this with great success for three more generations in a row, each time finding an extremely probable father only a few miles away, and the trail moves a little further south through the county of Shropshire. I arrive at a man called John Palmer, born in 1707, in a village called Ditton Priors. I like the name. I manage another leap backwards and find that John's father Francis was born on my birthday in Ditton Priors in 1683. This is the only ancestor I have ever found to share my birthday. I manage one final leap to find his parents were married in 1671 but thereafter the trail cools off. I leave the line there, happy with four hundred years' progress in one evening.
I switch Google Maps to StreetView and have a virtual drive through the winding lanes. The village is centered around crossroads. An old pub sits across from an even older church. I screen-grab the place and drop it into Photoshop alongside the name John Palmer on the family tree I have been building up.
I also have a quick Google look for images of Ironbridge - the town which the later Palmer descendants moved towards and ultimately lived in. The waterman lived in an area called The Lloyds and when I return to Google StreetView I see that The Lloyds is a road that runs directly alongside the river Severn, only a short distance from the famous bridge. These men were in the heartland of the industrial revolution.
The time for armchair research is over and only a field-trip will satisfy my need to understand the lives of these people better. The indispensable tool for the journey is the iPhone. The Ancestry app allows for quick reference to all the necessary information about the tree, but I also copy over my Photoshop notes page to the phone for reference as I always like to have my tree formatted my own way.
The other thing which goes without saying is a good camera. Mine is a Nikon D-75 which is getting on a bit and pretty low resolution but takes a great picture.
I collate a set of postcodes, one of each Ancestor, and begin with Ditton Priors entered into the Sat-Nav. And off I go to Shropshire.
The weather is beautiful (just as the Weather App promised) and the view is gorgeous as I wind my way down the tiny lanes knowing that the closer I get to the village, the more likely my ancestors knew the roads intimately.
Arriving at the crossroads of the tiny village of Ditton Priors, I park up and take some photos of the picturesque place. Eager to investigate the graves, I creak open the gate to approach the 12th century church.
Walking around the edge of the stocky building with its tall, pyramid spire, I snap away on my DSLR, and start to look at gravestones as I go. By the time I complete a circuit I am left disappointed that there are no signs of the Palmer name.
As I walk the path close to the church I cast my eyes down and I am suddenly struck by a mixture of horror and optimism. The flagstones on which I am walking show hints of lettering. They are not normal paving stones - they are recycled headstones!
All the stones in the middle of the path are too worn to make out any words but as I creep towards the wall of the church where the path is less walked, I could read more. I check each one, all the way into the corner, with hope draining away as the numbers dwindled. I reach the very last one, tucked away. It is preserved from the eroding effect of foot-fall but is still incredibly old and hard to read. As I strain against the sun I can make out large and ancient letters ...
"... body of John Palmer who departed this life Dece 14: 1750 Aged 43 Years."
I grab my family tree and check the name as I simply can't believe my luck. I'm not a mathematical genius but I am able to subtract his age from his death year and sure enough it is the 1707 man I am looking for. The bottom of the stone is badly worn and much of the middle is hard to make out.
I have brought with me some sheets of paper and delving into my pocket for a good, old-fashioned pencil I take a rubbing of the stone. It helps tease out a little more of the wording. I can see the words "so must you" and also "do not delay." I pull out my iPhone and type these fragments into Google (in inverted commas to ensure the phrases are searched as a whole) and I add the word "grave" for context. Sure enough the first result reveals it as a known monumental inscription, of which mine is a slight variation. The others on the internet allow me to work out what has been written:
"Juft as I am So Muft you be
Therefore Prepare to Follow me
Repent in time Do Not Delay
For in my Prime I was Snatched away"
In his prime he certainly was snatched away. Just 43 years old.
I sit and reflect on the stone for a while, looking up at the church. It is quite something to read the words chosen at great expense by your ancestors to remember a man they loved. To touch the very stone they would have touched. To sit where they would have mourned. They could not have begun to understand the future in which I live. They could barely have guessed at the industrial changes which were to take place in the hundred years after John's death, but only another hundred years after that would see the dawn of the age of electronics. The world would become filled with gadgets which would seem both incomprehensible and impossible. Tiny, magical devices which would lead me back to Ditton Priors.
This is what I do it for. To find them, to remember them, and to connect to them. To learn the names they spoke every day, and find out whose DNA I carry centuries later.
After considerable musing on times past and present, I eventually jump back into the car with the next postcode ready. I make my way up towards Ironbridge to follow John Palmer's descendants - but that's a story for another day.
Once home I take the photos of the headstone into Photoshop and ramp up the brightness and contrast, allowing for a better view of the lettering. I redraw the entire inscription clearer, as it might have looked when freshly engraved.
Sad at the fact the headstone had fallen and been moved, I decide to Photoshop it back into a standing position outside the church. And after a little image-searching for some suitably sad-looking girls, a picture is formed to show a sad scene. It's not very realistic, but it is evocative. And so it ends up on my wall to remind me of that little village in which John Palmer lived and died.
As more resources become available online, I hope to find out more about his life. I want to investigate the tantalising prospect that John's great, great grandfather may have married in Boston, Massachusetts only 17 years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth. Is it possible I will find my distant cousins in the Palmer family still living in Massachusetts today?
As we leave those simpler times behind, we also enjoy new surges of technology which makes accessing the past easier. I can't wait for the next wave of innovation which will take us even closer to our ancestors and the lives they lived.
|
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Josh Milberg, First Deputy Commissioner for the City of Chicago discusses the energy efficiency retrofit initiatives that Mayor Daley and the city of Chicago have recently taken.
Amber Ayik: All right, we’re here today at the U.S. Conference of Mayors with Josh Milberg, the First Deputy Commissioner for the City of Chicago. Josh, please speak to us about your energy efficiency retrofit initiatives that you’ve taken with Mayor Daley and the city of Chicago.
Josh Milberg: Sure. In 2008, Mayor Daley launched the Chicago Climate Action Plan which is based in science, identified the major greenhouse gas emission sources in the city the Chicago, and buildings actually make up seventy percent of our greenhouse gas emissions in our city. So buildings are our key focus to the Climate Action Plan. As part of this plan partners were brought on to help the city develop a retrofit strategy along with key business and nonprofit partners. So we now have a retrofit steering committee that is responsible for looking at how do we think about energy efficient retrofits across the entire city in more of a portfolio perspective, really focused not only low-income, single-family, and multi-family but also businesses and other residential users.
Amber Ayik: And how did you fund these projects? Was this all through public funding or a mix of public and private?
Josh Milberg: It’s a mix of public and private. In the city of Illinois, we have energy efficiency portfolio standards whereby each of our utilities are responsible for putting a certain percentage of their revenues into reducing usage of their energy usage or reducing usage by their consumers.
Amber Ayik: As we’d discussed before, you actually came on as a consultant originally to the city. How is that you guys originally came to work with the city of Chicago?
Josh Milberg: We work with the city of Chicago through the City Consulting Alliance which is a nonprofit organization that really focuses on bringing together strategy consulting firms to help city organizations solve strategic problems. So we were originally partnered in that way.
Amber Ayik: And today what is the reduction in terms of, let’s talk electricity. So from a KWH standpoint, do you have any numbers that associate to the reduction in KWH with the city of Chicago through these initiatives?
Josh Milberg: I don’t have direct information right now. We are about to commence our next portfolio inventory of reduction. But we do know that we have retrofit 15,000 homes in the city of Chicago as well as 303 commercial and industrial buildings. So we are significantly eclipsing our current goals. We are on track to get to our 400,000 units and 2,000 commercial and industrial buildings by 2020.
Amber Ayik: And what to date has been the actual cost for these initiatives?
Josh Milberg: It’s difficult to share. It’s difficult to quantify exactly what the cost are because we are leveraging both public and private dollars as well as the dollars of the building owners because there is an economic provision to doing this type of work. There are real savings associated with it. And so we look for opportunities to make the business case more successful.
Amber Ayik: Okay, great. Thank you so much for your time.
Josh Milberg: Of course.Chi
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You don't always need to buy the latest and the greatest. A simple compatible BT machine and one or more chead/decent machines that can run windows and a Vmware images is a good start. Of course you will need some way for the machines to communicate on the network. A simple router can do this.
As for a good machine of course the more the merrier is generally a good bit of advice. But you don't need 8 gigs of ram. Plenty of HDD space, and for graphics most would probably recommend one that is compatible with cuda/pyrit.
This could go on for days and weeks but that should get you started.
There are also several threads on setting up home-made labs etc here on the forums.
See also de-ice and Damn Vulnerable Linux.
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Locally Delicious solar dehydrator for kids with adult supervision
Our design team, Fujis and Fugees, consists of four Humboldt State University engineering students. For our Engineering 215 class in Spring 2011 we were given the assignment of designing a solar powered food dehydrator which could be replicated at home by kids with the help of an adult. As a part of our assignment we worked closely with the group Locally Delicious. Our final design will be integrated into Locally Delicious's upcoming cookbook along with instructions on how to build our solar dehydrator. In the following page you can view our documented design process. If you would like to build our project, check out the Tear The Roof Off Solar Dehydrator Instructions page. Testing proved that our final design is effective at dehydrating food. On average our dehydrator was able to completely dehydrate sliced apples in 18 hours of sun exposure. Our design met and exceeded the criteria developed by our client and our group. But you don't have to take our word for it, feel free to build it for yourself!
The following appropedia page includes the objective of our project, the criteria for our design, an in depth analysis of our final design with cost tables, links to instructions for building our design and a video of our dehydrator in action.
The objective of our project is to design a simple, yet effective, solar dehydrator. Our model will have an efficient design and will be easily replicated by a child with the assistance of an adult. We hope that by designing this solar dehydrator we help children learn about solar energy and healthy food choices.
The following table is a sortable list of our design criteria, which were developed by both our design group and our client, Locally Delicious.
|Cost||9||Less than $100|
|Educational Value||8||Teach about measurements, solar radiation, solar dehydration, as well as healthy eating, at a 4th to 8th grade level|
|Reproducibility||9||Minimal tool usage, easily obtainable materials|
|Maintenance||6||Less than 30 minutes of maintenance required per usage|
|Durability||7||Must last at least 12 uses|
|Safety||10||Should not exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit, also must be structurally sound|
|Functional||10||Must be able to adequately dehydrate fruits and vegetables|
|Portability||5||Must be movable by two or less people|
Our design incorporates a simple but effective model which requires very little materials to construct, yet is very efficient for dehydrating a small to moderate amount of food. Our design is 2'x3'x4" and is built on a plywood base, with a 2"x4" frame, corregated roofing, removable nylon mesh food screens framed in 1/2"x1", with a clear acrylic glass cover held in place by L-brackets, and vent holes on the top and bottom to promote air flow. This model is simple to build and the materials are easily found at your local hardware store, or recycled material can be used to reduce costs. The adjustable angle of inclination allows for maximum sunlight capture throughout the year, for data on the angle of inclination of the sun in your particular area, check out this Calculator.
The following table is a list of the materials used to build our project and their relative retail cost. In our project we used recycled wood and corregated roofing which brought the cost of our project down significantly.
|Quantity||Material||Source||Cost ($)||Total ($)|
|1||Corrugated Roofing Sheet||Scrapyard||5.99||5.99|
|1||3'x6' Nylon Mesh||Jo-Ann's Fabrics||7.28||7.28|
|1||2'x4' Clear Acrylic||Ace||28.99||28.99|
|8||Sheet Metal Screws||Ace||.11||.88|
If you would like to build this project in your own home, please check out the Tear The Roof Off Solar Dehydrator Instructions.
Here is a video showing our design group and our solar dehydrator in action.
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Can cinnamon help lower blood glucose and cholesterol (yes or no)
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the health benefits of cinnamon, but can it lower cholesterol levels?
Scientists studying cinnamon say that it might have potential. Much of the information publicized about cinnamon mostly concerns its role in lowering blood sugar in diabetes. Proanthrocyanidin, an active molecule in cinnamon, functions by activating the insulin receptor within the cell, therefore enabling the cell to use glucose for its energy. During some of these studies, scientists also found evidence that, along with lowering glucose levels, cinnamon may also lower lipid levels.
What Have the Studies Proven?
A study conducted in 2003 noted that a daily intake of one-half teaspoon (1 gram) of cassia cinnamon not only lowered blood sugar levels in type II diabetics, it also significantly lowered LDL and triglyceride levels. HDL, or “good” cholesterol, was not affected by cinnamon in this study. However, more recent studies have concluded that consuming cinnamon does not change your cholesterol levels.
What Do the Results Mean?
The research conducted on cinnamon so far has not conclusively proven that it can lower cholesterol levels. Therefore, more studies are needed to determine how effective cinnamon would be in lowering cholesterol, which type of cinnamon to use, and the amount needed to lower cholesterol levels. Most of the studies used cassia cinnamon in their experiments, so it would probably be useful to see if true cinnamon was any different in lowering cholesterol levels. Additionally, the form of cinnamon may make a difference. For instance, some studies have used a powdered form of cinnamon, whereas other studies have used an extract of cinnamon.
So, if you have been diagnosed as having high cholesterol, taking cinnamon might not help lower your cholesterol levels, but it probably won’t hurt either.
Sources: Khan, MS, PHD, Alam, Safdar, MS, Mahpara, Ali Khan, MS, PHD, Mohammad Muzaffar, Khattak, MS, Khan Nawaz, and Anderson, PHD, Richard A.. “Cinnamon Improves Glucose and Lipids of People With Type 2 Diabetes.” Diabetes Care 26(2003): 3215-3218.
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Good Protesters, Bad Protesters and the Question of Nonviolence in Occupy
“We have to remember that [the police] are the ones shooting at us and using chemical weapons,” said Lisa Fithian of the Alliance of Community Trainers on a conference call Wednesday where, in the wake of last Saturday's action in Oakland, members of multiple occupations were discussing the movement’s commitment to nonviolence. “People can be upset about broken glass, but we also need to talk about what we’re going to do about the violence against our movement.”
Following mass arrests in Oakland, the mainstream media has largely shifted blame for police violence onto a group of protestors who burned flags, smashed display cases and sprayed-painted graffiti in City Hall. Yesterday, Alameda County prosecutors announced that they would only file charges against 12 demonstrators, releasing the more than 300 who were cited for “remaining at the scene of a riot” (and who the National Lawyer’s Guild says were kettled and illegally arrested.)
Now, Reuters is reporting on a broader “split over confrontational tactics” in the Occupy movement at large. The Christian Science Monitor has called this a “Hamlet moment” where the movement must decide whether “to be or not to be” nonviolent.
To be sure, this is a significant moment for the young movement, and some in Oakland have expressed frustration with the tactics employed by their co-demonstrators. Writing in Counterpunch today, Nick Robinson, a Bay Area resident who took part in Saturday’s action, argues:
A conversation in the language of street battle is rendered instantly one-sided by a well-funded, overwhelming, militarized police force because that is the only language they speak, and it is phrased adeptly. . .Our power is not in combat with the tools of Capital and the State. That is a losing battle, lost over and over. . . We, those of us marching in the streets in the USA, occupying plazas, parks, and buildings, are not at war, as anyone who has actually been at war would explain. Underpinning this romanticization of our situation is an understanding of the very real war on poor people, people of color, women, and LGBTQ identifying people in this city and throughout this world built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and hatred which continues to undergird so many of our economic and social relationships. But the battlefields of that war are not solely demarcated by lines of riot cops.
But is it fair or accurate to describe the strategic choice at hand the way much of the media is doing--along the lines of “violence vs. nonviolence?” Not really. But counterposing the two options is certainly an effective way to characterize the situation at hand according to a familiar narrative: that of “good protesters" vs. "bad protesters,” wherein the latter is the scary, unknown element that supposedly necessitates crackdowns on both groups.
This frame also encourages the “good” protestors to be responsible for reprimanding the “bad” protestors (see: Oakland Mayor Jean Quan's call for OWS to "disown" Occupy Oakland), thereby dragging movements into abstract but highly divisive debates about the meaning of violence and nonviolence. In the wake of the Oakland crackdown, activists on the national call to discuss nonviolence warned against shifting blame to their fellow activists.
The strategic decisions at hand for Occupy are not most usefully characterized as a choice between nonviolence and “violence.” There are myriad perspectives over the definition of nonviolence, particularly whether tactics such as property damage and verbal retaliation toward aggressors are compatible with a nonviolent strategy. There are also a number of perspectives critical of nonviolence that fall far from advocating offensive violence. Kingian nonviolence is, in part, about dramatizing the immorality of oppression--including, if necessary, by drawing out the oppressor’s violence onto one’s own body. Black intellectuals and activists such as Stokely Carmichael have praised King’s sacrifice but argued that his strategy puts too much of the burden on the oppressed.
Embracing a “diversity of tactics,” as is being discussed in Oakland and in New York would mark a shift from the movement’s general stance of nonviolence—but it’s wrong to conflate this with advocating violence.
What the fallout after Saturday’s action in Oakland has perhaps demonstrated, as has been noted previously by Nathan Schneider on Waging Nonviolence, is that Occupy’s commitment to nonviolence has not heretofore been very specific or strategic.
The Alliance of Community Trainers, prior to the Oakland arrests, called openly for the Occupy movement as a whole to commit itself to strategic nonviolence:
Within [the strategic nonviolent] framework, Occupy groups would make clear agreements about which tactics to use for a given action. This frame is strategic—it makes no moral judgments about whether or not violence is ever appropriate, it does not demand we commit ourselves to a lifetime of Gandhian pacifism, but it says, ‘This is how we agree to act together at this time.’ It is active, not passive. It seeks to create a dilemma for the opposition, and to dramatize the difference between our values and theirs.
Though noting that they had participated in coalitions embracing a diversity of tactics, they assert:
‘Diversity of tactics’ becomes an easy way to avoid wrestling with questions of strategy and accountability. It lets us off the hook from doing the hard work of debating our positions and coming to agreements about how we want to act together. It becomes a code for ‘anything goes,’ and makes it impossible for our movements to hold anyone accountable for their actions.
Thus far, Occupy's non-hierarchical structure and embrace of ideological diversity has often meant that direct actions serve as a locus for popular anger rather than a means to develop and build agreement on strategy. At stake is not so much "nonviolence" writ large as autonomy, and the degree to which disparate groups are willing to make and keep agreements that could allow them to act in greater coordination. There are advantages to allowing groups autonomy to organize their own actions within larger actions. But this can also inhibit growth and trust within movements.
While the mainstream media tells a story of good protesters and bad protesters fighting it out for the nonviolent soul of the movement, there are real questions about the autonomy of Occupiers with different ideological and strategic preferences—and how they can work together for the long-term.
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SW Best practices
Welcome to the SW Best practices area. Here you can find the information about best practices worlwide about the Scouts of the World Award.
Hannah Lord is a Rover from Erindale Rover Crew and Michael Freeman a Venturer from Stromlo-Forest Venturer Unit in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT). The ACT Branch is leading Australia in establishing the Scouts of the World Award, and Michael and Hannah are both actively involved as members of the Cottermouth Scouts of the World Base Committee. Michael ran the first Australian Discovery in July 2006, which focused on Peace and our local Indigenous community. Hannah was also the Team Leader of the first Australian Scouts of the World Voluntary Service. This youth-led project saw 42 people travel to the Solomon Islands in October 2006 to complete two weeks service with the local Scouting community and the Red Cross School for the Disabled.
Celso is a young Scout leader in Angola, a large but poor African country. Angola is one of only 8 countries in the world where the wild polio virus is still present. Many children are victim of this virus, which attacks the nervous system and provokes paralysis.
The Scout Association in Mongolia began as recently as 1991, with 39 Scouts making their Promise. The Scout Association now has over 8,000 members and in ten years over 56,000 Scouts have passed through its ranks. This success is primarily due to the strong social commitment of Scouting in Mongolia.
The Roma community, often referred as ‘gypsies’, is seen as a problem in most European countries, due in part to their nomadic and exotic culture. In eastern and central Europe the Roma community is the region’s most marginalised and vulnerable minority. In Slovakia, the Roma population is around half a million, from a total population of five and a half million people.
Scouts in France fight again the fire froma SW Base. Lise is 17 years old. She is team leader and member of a Venture-Scout unit in Belgium. Next summer, his unit will camp in Provence, in the south of France. This is a very attractive region for tourists: It is sunny most of the time, with beautiful old villages, large forests, good wine and the sea is not far.
Rose, Fatou, Poppin and Edward: two young women and two young men living in Nairobi. They are some of the key Scout leaders supporting the “Extension Scout Programme” in Kenya. Let us discover what they are doing.
Many young people in El Salvador are trapped in a culture of violence. This is due to the civil war maintained for many years until the peace treaties signed in 1992, and also to the lost of society values caused by the internal migration from land to the cities and the accelerated urban development from which the formation of youth gangs originated.
Gilbert was a young Rover leader when over one million Rwandan refugees streamed into Goma in 1996 from the genocide and terror of Rwanda and Burundi, from the long, arduous, barefoot walk from home villages which had been ethnically cleansed, and harassment by bands of soldiers and officials. The place allocated to the refugee camps was an unforgiving place, on the slopes of an almost dormant volcano. Within days, it turned to a death-trap, with insufficient water, food,
shelter and simply not enough space.
In Alexandria, Egypt, there is a well-equipped Sea-Scout centre, located in the West District of the city. When doing their activities, the Sea-Scouts noted that a number of young children were working in the various workshops established in this district, one of the most deprived of the city.
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"Now it happened that they all wished to comfort him. So for his pleasure they started a game of lacrosse 2 and played the game well. It was a bright and beautiful day and they brought him out so that he might see the play. Soon he desired to be taken back into the house." Eniaiehuk.
79:2 Games were often played to cheer and cure the sick. Special foods were given the players.
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The US military will for the first time allow its members to wear uniform at a gay pride march.
The permission was granted for the Gay Pride Parade in San Diego, California, on Saturday, a military-wide Pentagon directive said.
The memo said the move was a one-off exception for this year’s march only.
It comes after a longstanding ban on openly gay people serving in the US military – known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” – was ended last year.
“Based on our current knowledge of the event and current policies, we hereby are granting approval for service members in uniform to participate in this year’s parade,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence Rene Bardorf said in the directive.
Permission was given on condition that military personnel take part in a personal capacity only and adhere to the US military’s standards on uniform wear, he added.
Numerous service personnel marched at last year’s San Diego event, but wore T-shirts bearing the name of their service branch instead of uniforms.
Dwayne Crenshaw, executive director of San Diego LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) Pride, said he was delighted by the move.
“Today is a great day of pride! San Diego Pride is honoured to have the privilege of celebrating our country and our service members with dignity and respect,” he said in a statement.
“The fight for equality is not over and it is not easy, but this is a giant leap in the right direction.”
Under “don’t ask, don’t tell” (DADT), established in 1983, gay people could serve in the military only if they did not openly acknowledge their sexuality. Its abolition last September fulfilled a campaign pledge made in 2008 by President Barack Obama.
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Tunnels are a
Rich Part of Turnpike History...
By Lowman S. Henry
|In late 1934 as America struggled with the
Great Depression, Victor Lecoq, a Pennsylvania Planning
Board employee, William Sutherland of the Pennsylvania
Motor Truck Association and newly-elected State
Representative Cliff S. Patterson of Monongahela,
developed the idea of building a new highway along the
then-abandoned South Pennsylvania Railroad Company line
through the Allegheny Mountains.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration was looking for work-relief projects to jump start the U.S. economy, and the three visionaries thought the highway would fit the bill.
On April 23, 1935, Patterson introduced a bill in the State House to authorize a feasibility study for the new road. He was the only sponsor. But, the Associated Press picked up on the story and reporter David Fernsler began transmitting dispatches on the proposed "weather-proof tunnel highway."
The rest, as they say, is history. What legend suggests began as a late night dinner conversation that winter night in 1934 became America's first superhighway, the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Early promotional material billed the Pennsylvania Turnpike as the "tunnel highway" because the roadway ran through seven tunnels as it traversed the mountainous terrain between Carlisle and Irwin, Pennsylvania.
Initially, planners proposed nine tunnels. But, Quemahoning and Negro mountains near Somerset were both by-passed and seven tunnels made it from the drawing board to construction.
When the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened for business on October 1, 1940, it included two-lane tunnels at Laurel Hill, Allegheny, Ray's Hill, Sideling Hill, Tuscarora, Kittatinny and Blue Mountain. Rapidly increasing traffic volumes, far surpassing anything anticipated by early Turnpike planners, soon made the two-lane tunnels obsolete and prompted consideration of by-passing or "double tunneling" the seven original tunnels.
After exhaustive studies, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission decided to construct new parallel tunnels at Blue Mountain, Kittatinny Mountain, Tuscarora Mountain and Allegheny Mountain. The decision was made to by-pass the Ray's Hill, Sideling Hill and Laurel Hill tunnels.
William K. Vanderbilt, kingpin of the New York Central Railroad, and industrial baron Andrew Carnegie dreamed of building an east-west railroad across southern Pennsylvania to compete with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Over $10 million dollars was spent and 26 lives lost when the unfinished project was halted in 1886.
The Laurel Hill Tunnel near Donegal was one of the nine tunnels which were partly completed during construction of the ill-fated South Penn Railroad. Workers had bored through 813 feet of solid rock at the Laurel
|Hill site and had built some of the
approach grades when work stopped. Over the next 50
years, the site became a nesting place for snakes and
rats as water partly filled the tunnel.
After Governor George H. Earle signed an Act on May 21, 1937 establishing the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, the Laurel Hill Tunnel got a new lease on life. A contract for $1,578,493.00 was awarded to Hunkin-Conkley, Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio and the tunnel was extended another 3,555 feet. Traffic began flowing through Laurel Hill when the Turnpike opened on October 1, 1940.
But, the tunnel's days were numbered. On August 7, 1962, the Latrobe Construction Company began cutting a new four-lane bypass through Laurel Hill and on October 30, 1964, the tunnel was again abandoned.
The actual cut which carried the Turnpike through Laurel Hill is one of the deepest highway cuts in the eastern United States at 145 feet. Construction crews removed 5.5 million cubic yards of material in digging the cut.
Like their counterpart to the west, the Ray's Hill and Sideling Hill tunnels were part of the South Penn Railroad's initial efforts to establish a transportation link across Pennsylvania.
By the early 1960's, the York, Pennsylvania engineering firm of Buchart-Horn was called upon to study the traffic bottleneck at the two tunnels and recommended a 13.1 mile bypass that included reconstruction and relocation of the Breezewood Interchange and construction of a new east-west service plaza (Sideling Hill). The by-pass replaced 13 miles of the original Turnpike, so it did not add significantly to the length of the superhighway.
The Sideling Hill By-pass, completed at a cost of $17,203,000, opened on November 26, 1968, sending both the Ray's Hill and Sideling Hill tunnels into retirement. Portions of the vacated highway and the tunnels themselves still exist today and are used by the Turnpike for testing and research.
The closing of the Ray's Hill and Sideling Hill tunnels in 1968 left just four of the seven original Turnpike tunnels in operation. A fifth tunnel, the Lehigh Tunnel on the Northeastern Extension which had opened on November 7, 1957, now constitute the Turnpike's tunnel system.
All five existing Turnpike tunnels began as two-lane tunnels. Through the course of their history, companion tunnels have been built alongside the original facilities to accommodate the Turnpike's four lanes.
The Allegheny Tunnel was the only one of the original seven tunnels to be built in its entirety by Turnpike construction crews. There was a tunnel started in the mountain by the South Penn Railroad, but it was never completed. Water seepage in the original railroad tunnel caused the ceiling to crumble and parts of the tunnel filled with rock. Engineers decided to build a brand new tunnel 85 feet south and parallel to the old tunnel. It was built at a cost of $2,672,188.
By the late 1950's, the need for a second tunnel had become apparent. The second tunnel was built at a cost of $8,237,272 and contained many modern features -- such as fluorescent lighting and powerful ventilating systems -- which were not available in 1940. The older tunnel was renovated to include those systems at a cost of $3,460,934. The Allegheny tunnels, at 6,070 feet in length, are the longest tunnels still utilized by the Turnpike. (The decommissioned Sideling Hill Tunnel is 6,782 feet long.)
By 1996, Turnpike officials had once again begun to consider the status of the aging original Allegheny Tunnel. Turnpike engineers are currently in the process of determining whether to upgrade and rehabilitate, by-pass or build a new Allegheny Tunnel.
Work on the Blue Mountain and Kittatinny Mountain tunnels in Franklin County just west of Carlisle posed special environmental challenges. The short valley between the two tunnels is in the Shippensburg Water Authority's prime watershed. As a result, tunneling was carried out from only one end of each of the tunnels.
The second Blue Mountain and Kittatinny Mountain tunnels, along with the additional Tuscorara Mountain tunnel on the Franklin/Huntingdon county border, all opened to the motoring public on November 26, 1968. The Blue Mountain tunnel is, at 4,339 feet in length, the shortest tunnel currently in operation. (The closed 3,532 foot long Ray's Hill Tunnel is the shortest of the original seven tunnels.)
The last remaining two-lane tunnel on the Turnpike was the Lehigh Tunnel on the Northeastern Extension. Work got underway on the $37 million second Lehigh Tunnel with groundbreaking ceremonies on February 14, 1989. On June 13, 1990, crews working from both ends of the mountain "holed through" and completed their work by November 22, 1991, when the new Lehigh Tunnel opened for business.
The new Lehigh Tunnel is 4,380 feet long. The tunnel's opening was historic because for the first time there was a four-lane highway the entire 506-mile length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike system.
From 1930's wire dispatches to the opening of the second Lehigh Tunnel, tunnels have been an integral and interesting part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In mid-1997, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission adopted a 12-year capital expenditures plan which calls for continued upgrading and rehabilitation of the Turnpike's tunnels, ensuring safe, efficient travel for Turnpike motorists well into the 21st Century.
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Contact: Jason Jacobs, (323) 644-4273
The Los Angeles Zoo is excited to announce several new additions to the Zoo’s animal community which are now on exhibit just in time for the holidays!
At the top of the Winnick Family Children's Zoo, visitors can get up-close and touchable with our goats and sheep in the animal contact area known as Muriel's Ranch, made possible by a generous gift from the Max H. Gluck Foundation.
Fifteen sweet-tempered baby goats have been added to the Ranch. The goats, ranging in age from six to eight months old, are Nigerian Dwarf goats. This species only reaches around two feet, and the adults weigh in between 20 and 50 pounds. These colorful and curious babies are a kid-friendly size and can be seen in Muriel’s Ranch from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
Four lesser kudus, a species of antelope native to East Africa, have moved into a hillside habitat at the Zoo. These lesser kudus, born in 2010 and 2011, have spiral horns and a grayish tan fur with white stripes. The zoo’s four male lesser kudus establish a bachelor herd which is an important part of managing the population of many zoo animals.
The kudus were born at the San Diego Zoo and are part of a national consortium to breed this species. The Los Angeles Zoo and San Diego Zoo cooperate closely on this important project as the lesser kudu are a near threatened species.
The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens is located in Griffith Park at the junction of the Ventura (134) and Golden State (5) freeways, where it hosts over 1.6 million visitors each year. The Zoo is home to a diverse collection of 1100 animals, many of which are rare or endangered. New exhibits include The LAIR-Living Amphibians, Invertebrates and Reptiles, Elephants of Asia and Campo Gorilla Reserve. Admission is $17 for adults and $12 for children ages 2 to 12. The Zoo is open from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.daily. For information, call (323) 644-4200.
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LETU TO HOST TWO PREVIEW EVENTS FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
(LONGVIEW, Texas)—LeTourneau University is inviting high school students from across the nation to two Fall Preview events this month at the main campus at 2100 S. Mobberly Ave. in Longview, Texas.
The purpose of preview events is for high school students to discover what college life is like and explore the educational opportunities at LeTourneau University.
A Homeschool Preview is Friday, Nov. 9, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Students and their parents will have an opportunity to visit classes and tour the university. LETU is a homeschool friendly university, with one in five of students from a homeschool background. Deadline to register is Wednesday, Nov. 7.
The Fall Preview begins at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, with tours of the LeTourneau University campus. Students will have opportunity to spend the night in a residence hall and, on Friday, Nov. 15, will visit classes and experience the life of a LeTourneau student for a day. The Fall Preview is open for students interested in a variety of majors.
Cost for the Fall Preview $35 and includes all on-campus meals and a T-shirt. Parents are welcome to come, as well, to sit in on sessions about financial aid and student life.
To register, visit www.letu.edu/preview or call LETU Admissions Counselor Elizabeth Smith at (903) 233-4331 or toll free at (800) 759-8811. Space is limited and students will be accepted for the Fall Preview on a first-come, first-served basis. The deadline to register for the Fall Preview is Tuesday, Nov. 13.
“Visiting universities is an integral part of the student’s process of finding the right college for them,” said Carl Arnold, executive director for Enrollment Services. “Students should come and see if LeTourneau is a place where they could see themselves grow spiritually and be challenged academically. These visits give students a firsthand experience of what LeTourneau has to offer.”
LeTourneau University is an interdenominational Christ-centered university located in Longview, Texas, offering academic majors in aviation, business, communication, computer science, criminal justice, education, engineering, health care administration, health science-nursing, human services, kinesiology, the liberal arts, the sciences and psychology.
LeTourneau University also offers undergraduate and graduate programs online and at educational centers in Athens, Austin, Baytown, Bedford, Dallas, Harlingen, Houston, and Tyler.
Claiming every workplace in every nation as its mission field, LeTourneau University graduates are professionals of ingenuity and Christ-like character who see life’s work as a holy calling with eternal impact.
LeTourneau University news releases can be found online at www.letu.edu
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