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The American people were sending you a message--don't mess with the
by Carl Pope
On a bleak afternoon in early 1995, New York Times reporter Jack
Cushman called me on the telephone. "Well," he sallied, "what
are environmentalists going to do about the blitzkrieg that the new Congress
is going to launch at you?"
"It's not a blitzkrieg," I responded. "It's the invasion
of Russia. Wait until next winter."
A year later the 104th Congress' War on the Environment was in full
rout, with Newt Gingrich's troops fleeing from their positions like the
German army after its march on Moscow. After the 1996 election, Gingrich's
majority in the House was drastically reduced.
How did it happen? The Sierra Club and the environmental movement played
a central role in the unmaking of this Congress. But the real credit goes
to the American people, who amid the clamor of 1990s politics sent some
brilliantly clear messages. It's worth reiterating them here. If politicians
remember why issues won and lost in the 104th Congress--and if the public
continues to remind them--we won't have to repeat history in the 105th.
Environmental protection is common sense and common ground.
Within days of casting their first votes for the Contract With America
(which came to be known as the Contract on America's Environment), members
of the 104th Congress realized their leadership and their campaign contributors
had seriously misled them. Industry lobbyists loved the War on the Environment
(disguised as "cost-benefit analysis," "risk assessment,"
and "unfunded mandates"), but from Long Island to Puget Sound,
constituents did not. Freshman members of Congress who blithely followed
Gingrich's lead were stunned by the public's anger.
Yet the congressional leadership soldiered on. Convinced that small
towns and rural areas would support other items on its agenda, such as
closing down national parks and weakening clean-water regulations, the
104th Congress went on the road. Alerted by the Sierra Club to the chance
to speak up, Main Street turned out in places like Salisbury, Maryland,
Casper, Wyoming, and Salt Lake City, Utah, and told the 104th Congress
that Americans--urban and rural alike--wanted to protect the environment.
Over the next year, at public gatherings and through letters, phone
calls, and e-mail, the public spoke out loudly enough to change the basic
chemistry of the debate. Proof came during the battle over FIFRA, the federal
pesticides law. Environmentalists like Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)
and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) were amazed: the pesticide industry,
the agribusiness lobby, and key Republican committee leaders suddenly wanted
a bill, almost any bill, that Waxman and Leahy would support. The 104th
Congress ended up strengthening most of FIFRA's provisions and enacting
legislation that chemical and agribusiness interests would have had killed
in any previous Congress. Public demand for strong environmental protection
was too powerful to ignore.
Americans have a right to clean air and clean water.
One of the dimmer ideas of the new Congress was banning "unfunded
mandates" such as federal legislation requiring states and cities
to meet environmental standards. The effect would have been disastrous;
federal taxpayers couldn't and shouldn't have to pay for polluters' messes.
The media in communities like Columbus, Georgia, pointed out that "what
looks like an unfunded mandate upstream looks like raw sewage downstream."
But the House ignored this danger, and passed legislation gutting the Safe
Drinking Water Act. The legislation included a "don't ask-don't tell"
policy: water departments would no longer be required to inform their customers
when water was contaminated. In response, the Sierra Club crafted radio
and television ads, organized community clean-water events, and prepared
and distributed a half-million voter guides that revealed how congressional
representatives had voted on this and other environmental issues. As the
public woke up to the danger, the House proposal was derailed in the Senate.
Retreating completely, Congress reauthorized a strengthened Safe Drinking
Water Act in the summer of 1996.
Money can't buy politicians love.
Midway through the 104th Congress it was clear that a major political
disaster loomed for the leadership. Some chemical-industry lobbyists even
warned that draconian proposals to cripple regulations, undermine Environmental
Protection Agency enforcement, and shut down parks were actually hurting
effortsto loosen environmental regulation. Moderate Republicans tried to
get the leadership to back off. But hundreds of millions of dollars in
industry campaign contributions had flowed to elect this Congress, and
front groups for polluters' coalitions with misleading names like the Alliance
for Reasonable Regulation and the National Wetlands Coalition still had
almost nothing to show for it. "We didn't get our money's worth,"
was how one California donor put it.
Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole repeatedly tried to persuade the Senate
to pass his bill to force taxpayers to pay landowners for the costs of
complying with federal environmental standards, and threatened to bring
to the Senate floor his bill to hamstring federal health, safety, and environmental
regulation. As long as he kept pushing, dollars from the beneficiaries
of these bills kept flowing into his presidential-campaign coffers.
On election day, though, Dole's dollars were of no use. Gingrich kept
his House majority--but just barely. An exit poll commissioned by the Republican
Party showed that the environmental issue had cost the Republicans twice
as many votes as any other, even Social Security and Medicare. Asked on
election night about the lessons learned, Republican Senator John McCain
(Ariz.) said, "We're going to have to change our approach to the environment."
Americans cherish wildlands.
In Minnesota, Republicans figured they could pick up a U.S. Senate seat
by going after Voyageurs National Park and Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Senator Rod Grams (R-Minn.) tried to help Republican candidate Rudy Boschwitz
defeat Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone by pushing for more motorized
use than currently allowed in parks and wilderness areas. The Republicans
saturated rural northern Minnesota radio and television stations with $500,000
worth of negative and misleading advertising. Sierra Club activists responded
by distributing more than 80,000 pieces of voter-education information,
dramatizing the attack against the park with media events, and volunteering
by the hundreds for the Wellstone campaign. Grams back-paddled, but held
on to his goal of allowing motorized vehicles on some of the portages in
Boundary Waters. Even at the end of the Congress he kept pressing the issue,
only to find Wellstone re-elected by a far larger margin than expected.
Weakening safeguards for parks and wildernesses turned out to be bad politics
as well as bad policy.
Representative James Hansen (R-Utah) and Senator Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska)
wore the black hats in the debate over the omnibus parks bill, a mélange
of national-park-protection measures. Hansen repeatedly stymied such popular
proposals as purchase of Sterling Forest in New York and New Jersey and
protection of the Presidio in San Francisco in an effort to add his anti-wilderness
Utah bill to the mix. Likewise Murkowski tried to tack on a wrongheaded
measure authorizing the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars to
subsidize clearcutting in Alaska's Tongass National Forest. He doggedly
held on until the last hours of Congress, refusing to allow a vote on the
measure unless he got his way. After the public protested the maneuverings,
Dole's successor as Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (Miss.), finally
told Murkowski enough was enough, that the Senate was going to vote and
go home having protected Sterling Forest and the Presidio and having ended
the outrageous Tongass boondoggle.
The Sierra Club's work letting Amer- icans know what was happening in
Congress also helped convince President Clinton to take a strong pro-environment
stand. By the end of 1995 he was vetoing every bill that contained anti-environmental
riders. In November he acted to protect our children's lungs by vetoing
Senator Dole's regulatory "reform" bill, which would have hamstrung
the EPA. In December he shut down the federal government to protect the
Arctic Wildlife Refuge from the oil industry. Every time he wielded his
eco-veto, the public cheered. (No one has ever accused Bill Clinton of
turning a deaf ear to a public cheer.)
Using his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, Clinton created
the 1.7-millionacre Grand StaircaseEscalante National Monument
a year later, setting aside with a single stroke of the pen the most threatened
landscape in Utah's redrock wilderness, and doing what no president had
ever done before--asserting the president's constitutionally undeniable,
but at times politically tenuous, authority over the public lands during
an election campaign.
Just before Clinton stood on the rim of the Grand Canyon and set aside
Grosvenor Arch, the Kaiparowits Plateau, the Paria/Hackberry Wilderness,
and the canyons of the Escalante, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) blustered
that there would be "hell to pay" if the President proceeded.
Clinton acted, and there was no hell to pay.
The lesson was clear for future politicians: the American landscape
belongs to the American people, not to those who want to pollute it for
profit. A political leader who stands with the people, and the land, will
Carl Pope is the Sierra Club's executive director and writes "Ways
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Dictionary of Scottish Building
In collaboration with the Scottish Civic Trust, the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and Historic Scotland, the SNDA worked with Glen L Pride to produce a new and enlarged edition of his earlier Glossary of Scottish Building, using SNDA methods and information. It is of use not only to planners, architects, surveyors and others in the construction industry, but also to lawyers, administrators and researchers who have occasion to consult Scottish documents of various kinds concerning buildings.
The Dictionary of Scottish Building can be ordered online from Amazon. The links below will take you directly to the appropriate page.
|United States||United Kingdom||Canada|
Amazon is an independent retailer and its prices may vary from those given on this website
Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
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Originally published on Zenwerks.com
Public relations is often one of the most overused phrases and least understood components of marketing and communications efforts within companies. There are still executives who believe it’s possible to “just go out there and get us some good PR” – as if it were that simple. Those in the profession know that building strong and effective public relations programs is not simply an overnight step.
There is even disagreement about what “Public Relations” really means – and all it encompasses. But for the sake of this post, we’re using PR interchangeably with media relations.
As is the case with so much in the business world, the role and impact of public relations has rapidly changed – especially the past 10-15 years. As recently as the late 1990s, companies (and PR agencies) could neatly segment media into clean buckets such as Local newspapers, National newspapers/magazines, Business magazines, Trade magazines, TV and Radio broadcast. Today? Well, most print publications are struggling (or disappearing). A huge percentage of the population now consumes news and information online (and increasingly via mobile devices). There are infinitely more media channels today – from increased cable channels to topic-specific blogs and podcasts.
So there is still a role for public relations – but the days of a successful product launch determined by a headline in the local newspaper is long gone. Now, more than ever, public relations needs to be an ongoing process and investment by companies. It takes time and knowledge to research the best channels (and contacts) for any given topic.
Obviously we are strong proponents of companies incorporating public and media relations programs into their ongoing marketing and communications efforts. Whether you try to handle it in-house (and if you do so, please hire a professional who has experience in the field – don’t treat it as something an intern or receptionist can handle) or hire a freelancer or firm, you want to make sure you follow best practices.
And so it’s in this spirit that we share the following from the good people at AllBusiness.com – who identified 10 no-no’s when it comes to public relations. Below, we look at the first 5. We’ll tackle the remaining 5 next week, same Bat time, same Bat channel.
1. Bad timing. PR folks are often “of the moment” types who have an unerring capacity to do two things: realize before anyone else that something is hot and trendy right now; neglect the fact that PR campaigns take time to bake, serve and eat. Be aware that campaigns take time – sometimes months. You don’t have to be precisely on the money; but if your timing is wildly off the mark, then your PR will stand out for all the wrong reasons (if it stands out at all).
2. Using jargon. You know what saturates tertiary markets more than a core value proposition that isn’t segmented with the right vertical and is offering the wrong brand candy? Jargon. Jargon is evil. Don’t use it in your PR campaigns. If you must, use it when you’re talking with peers, or just want your kids to think you’re a Really Intelligent Person. But keep it as far away from your campaigns as possible (your saturated tertiary markets will thank you).
3. Writing bad press releases. Thanks to the Internet, there are more awful examples of press releases to emulate than ever before. Don’t be the next victim creating a press release that is little more than a bloated infomercial (“But wait, there’s more!”). Remember: your press release shouldn’t be designed only for your target audience. It should also be ready-to-eat by the media types who will disseminate it. Make their job easy. Write a good release. Describe the what, who, when, how and why. Make it newsworthy.
4. Being unprepared. A lot of PR campaigns are tripped up not by the campaign itself, but by the brutally bad follow-up that stems from lack of preparation. Remember: a key goal of your PR campaign is to have strangers call you up and ask questions. And you can indeed always count on the kindness of strangers if you have the wisdom to be prepared with quality, clear answers to common questions. This doesn’t mean you should script yourself (“Hello your name here, thank you for your question”). But have something meaningful to say that will move towards closing the deal. If you aren’t a salesperson and don’t know how to do this…learn!
5. GOING OVERBOARD ON HYPE!!!! Hype is like sugar. It’s okay in appropriate doses. But if you go overboard, it makes you sick. Hype follows the same principle: if you go overboard, it makes your PR campaign sick. Remember, the mission of your campaign is to convey messages, facts, ideas and information. Hype can sometimes help, but it can’t replace the substance. Better yet, let your audience add their own hype, while you sit back and smile and feel the love.
Now, don’t feel singled out (or ashamed) if you’ve fallen victim to some, a few or even all of these PR pitfalls. It happens. But it doesn’t have to happen again if you remind yourself of what makes good PR go bad. We all learn from our (or others’) mistakes.
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The 5970 Clock Speed Debate
Now that youíve seen the Radeon 5970ís specs, youíre probably wondering why it isnít clocked as high as the Radeon 5870. The answer is actually pretty simple: power consumption.
If you rewind back to our coverage
of the Radeon 4890 launch, youíll remember that we asked ATI about the potential of introducing a Radeon 4890 X2 card. At the time ATI told us that they could certainly produce a 4890 X2 card if demand was there, but they didnít want to make such a card without the backing of OEMs and system vendors. ATI was apparently receiving some backlash against the amount of power such a card would generate; the 4890 X2 boardís TDP was pegged at over 300W.
After polling their partners, ATI ultimately couldnít find enough interest to potentially introduce a Radeon 4890 X2.
Now enter the 5870. Its max board power is actually pretty comparable to the 4890 (190W for the 4890 vs 188W for the 5870), leaving ATI with the same dilemma all over again -- a dual-GPU 5870 card is going to draw over 300W of juice. The 5850 on the other hand consumes just 10W more power than the 4870, making it a more feasible platform for ATI to work with.
Citing the 4890 X2 project as an example, we brought this up with ATI during our phone briefing regarding the 5970. Did OEMs kill the full-speed 5870 X2 as well?
At one foot long the 5970 is considerably longer than 4870 X2
ATI was adamant that OEMs didnít play the deciding role this time around. While OEMs feelings regarding a 300W+ board certainly were a concern, ATI says the primary reason why they decided not to opt for the full 5870 speeds and feeds for the 5970 was they wanted to maintain compatibility with the existing power supply infrastructure.
Quite simply, ATI didnít want users to potentially have to upgrade their PSU (power supply unit) just to run the 5970. They wanted the card to be compatible with as wide a variety of PSUs as possible.
Therefore in order to make the card work with as wide a variety of PSUs as possible, while still retaining as much of the 5870ís performance, ATI opted to deliver a card with the full 1600 shaders as the 5870, but with the 5850ís clock speeds.
This move brought the cardís power consumption just under their 300W budget. 294W to be exact (in comparison, the 4870 X2ís TDP was 286W). As such, just two power connectors are needed. One 8-pin PCIe 2.0 connector, and one 6-pin PCIe connector.
Power connections on 5970
Ironically enough, while ATI was able to maintain PSU compatibility with the 5970, the board is completely out of bounds with regards to its size. The 5970 board measures 12Ē in length from end-to-end. If you remember the NVIDIAís original Quad SLI board from 2006, the GeForce 7900 GX2
, ATIís Radeon 5970 is pretty similar in length.
Itís a little funny that ATIís so adamant about maintaining PSU compatibility considering that the Radeon 5970 will probably require many users to purchase a new system case just to get the card to fit. Between the two issues, we personally think the size of the 5970 is the bigger obstacle: two 8-pin PCIe 2.0 connectors are capable of supplying up to 300W of juice to the card. That plus the 75W sent up the PCIe interface itself should be more than enough for a full-speed 5970 card. Most high-end PSUs that have shipped in the last two years are outfitted with multiple 8-pin and
6-pin PCIe connectors.
In comparison, youíre going to need a really large full-tower case to house the 5970. It extends nearly 3Ē beyond our Gigabyte EX58-Extreme motherboard. Thatís right where the hard drive cage sits in most system cases. ATI will be offering a full list of compatible cases at http://game.amd.com/us-en/crossfirex_certification.aspx
. Youíll want to keep a close eye on this list if you plan to run a Radeon 5970 board.
As we mentioned on the previous page, in some ways the Radeon 5970 is ATIís first Black Edition GPU. Weíll explain why nextÖ
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28 Days of Black Nonprofit Leaders: Benjamin Jealous
In honor of Black History Month, this blog will highlight 28 black nonprofit leaders who are working to make our world a better and more hopeful place for generations to come.
This post is part of a special series by Rosetta Thurman entitled “28 Days of Black Nonprofit Leaders.” In honor of Black History Month, Rosetta will be “highlighting 28 Black nonprofit leaders who have done or are doing their part to make our world a bit better, a bit more hopeful for the generations that will come.”
In her introduction to the series on her blog, Rosetta writes, “I love Black History Month because it reminds me of how far we still have to go in this country in terms of race relations and giving everyone a fair chance to take part in the “American Dream.” How far we still have to go before Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of social justice and economic opportunity for everyone will be realized. Fortunately, there are countless leaders out there who are continuing to address so many aspects of social change.” The SSIR is proud to publish some of their stories.
Benjamin Jealous is President and CEO of the NAACP.
From the NAACP website:
Benjamin Todd Jealous grew up believing that there was no higher calling than to further the cause of freedom in this country and in the world. It is a mindset he inherited from of his parents and grandparents. Their drive for community betterment blazed the trail for Jealous’ own deep commitment to social justice, public service and human rights activism. Now, as the 17th President and Chief Executive Officer of the NAACP, and the youngest person to hold the position in the organization’s nearly 100-year history, Jealous is well positioned to answer the call.
During his career, he has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International and Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers. From his early days of organizing voter registration drives up until his nomination and election as NAACP president, Jealous has been motivated by civic duty and a constant need to improve the lives of America’s underrepresented. All things considered, Jealous’ leadership roles and active community involvement have well prepared him for his current duties as president of the NAACP. In fact, his path through journalism and the Black Press is not unlike several other former NAACP presidents, including Roy Wilkins, Walter White, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Dubois.
As a student at Columbia University, he worked in Harlem as a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. On campus, Jealous led school-wide movements, including boycotts and pickets for homeless rights, a successful campaign to save full-need financial aid and need-blind admissions when other national universities were cutting such programs, and an environmental justice battle with the University.
These protests ultimately led to the suspension of Jealous and three other student leaders. Jealous used this time off to work as a field organizer helping to lead a campaign that prevented the State of Mississippi from closing two of its three public historically black universities, and converting one of them into a prison. He remained in Mississippi to take a job at the Jackson Advocate, an African American newspaper based in the state’s capital. His reporting — for the frequently firebombed weekly — was credited with exposing corruption amongst high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman. His investigations also helped to acquit a small black farmer who had been wrongfully and maliciously accused of arson. His work at the Jackson Advocate eventually lead to his promotion to Managing Editor.
In 1997, Jealous returned to Columbia University and completed his degree in political science. With the encouragement of mentors, he applied and was accepted to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar where he earned a master’s degree in comparative social research.
Jealous eventually went on to serve as Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). While at the NNPA, he rebuilt its 90-year old national news service and launched a web-based initiative that more than doubled the number of black newspapers publishing online.
Most recently, Jealous was President of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private independent institution that funds civil and human rights advocacy to benefit California’s working families. Prior to that, he was Director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International. While there he led efforts to pass federal legislation against prison rape, rebuild public consensus against racial profiling in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, and expose the widespread sentencing of children to life without the possibility of parole.
Active in civic life, Jealous is a board member of the California Council for the Humanities, and the Association of Black Foundation Executives, as well as a member of the Asia Society. He is married to Lia Epperson Jealous, a professor of constitutional law and former civil rights litigator with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They presently reside in Washington, DC with their young daughter.
See also: Benjamin’s 2009 interview with the Chronicle of Philanthropy (video)
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How To Make A Checkerboard
Are you ready to learn how to make a checkerboard? This project uses beginner sewing and crochet skills. I made this for one of daughters for Christmas.
You don’t have to spend money on a present for it to be nice.
I apologize in advance for my longest video ever! This project has lots of steps but none of them are super hard. You’ll need scrap fabric, scrap yarn, an I crochet hook, a crewel needle, pins, and a sewing machine with matching thread.
How To Make A Checkerboard Part 1
How To Make A Checkerboard Part 2
If you don’t know how to crochet you can still do this project. All you need to do is watch and practice these videos to learn the basic crochet stitches.
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While today’s housing-starts data—up 7% from last month and a whopping 23.6% from last year—suggest a possible comeback in the battered sector, a new study of trends among older Americans suggests that housing “stops” are a factor once Americans hit 75.
The study by Sudipto Banerjee of the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), a nongovernmental grant-supported research center, found that homeownership peaks among 65-year-olds, then gradually declines till about 75, after which the rate steadily declines with age.
Banerjee, in an interview with AdvisorOne, says advisors should alert their clients to the financial implications of declining home equity.
“People who move from owning to renting typically have much lower income or much lower wealth,” he said. “So if someone wants not to tap into their housing equity or has any intention of leaving it to their children, then they should seriously think of other resources available.”
Driving the loss of income is often the death of a spouse, which would result in lost Social Security benefits. The EBRI study found that a spouse’s death accounted for the largest share, 42%, of housing transitions, with a drop in household income accounting for 31% of transitions. Banerjee pointed out that the two categories can overlap.
“It seems that people who have lower income eventually tap into their housing equity,” Banerjee says.
Interestingly, nursing home entries were the cause of just 10% of housing transitions.
The EBRI study was based on data from a long-term study by the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Survey, the most comprehensive national survey of older Americans.
The study showed a very definite correlation between housing and wealth, with median household incomes for 50- to 64-year-old homeowners at $79,758, while those who shifted from owning to renting among the same age cohort had household incomes of just $53,520.
The over-50 set has a high rate of ownership, the study found, 90% for couples and 60% for singles. The highest rate of transition between owning and renting occurs at age 90, when 4.7% of hoseholds make the move, Banerjee says.
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Local companies to work on unmanned vessel
It is aimed at stalking enemy submarines
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
A global defense company has received a $58 million contract to build an unmanned vessel that stalks enemy submarines, and two companies in the Portland-Vancouver region will benefit.
McLean, Va.-based SAIC Inc. received the contract — issued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Defense — to design, build and test a new unmanned vessel "with the ability to track a quiet diesel-electric submarine overtly for months" with "minimal human input," according to SAIC's news release.
The company said "key teammates" on the project include Oregon Iron Works — a Clackamas, Ore.-based company that operates a fabrication plant on the Columbia riverfront in Vancouver — and Vancouver-based Christensen Shipyards.
Those two companies will be involved in "ship design, construction and propulsion," SAIC said. NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Carnegie Mellon University also are involved in the project, SAIC said.
Oregon Iron Works and Christensen referred inquiries to SAIC, which could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
The contract awarded to SAIC has a three-year period of performance for phases two and three, with a total contract value of $58 million and a $1 million 18-month option for phase four.
SAIC conducted conceptual design work in the first phase of the unmanned vessel project.
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1939 - 1994
Click the picture above
Hartley's main topic was locally finite groups where he used his wide knowledge of finite groups in proving properties of infinite groups which were in a sense close to finite.
|Full MacTutor biography||[Version for printing]|
|A Reference (One book/article)|
Other Web sites
JOC/EFR © December 1996
The URL of this page is:
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Send an E-Postcard of:
(c) Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA. All rights reserved.
Contact us for information about using this image.
White did not become the traditional color for a woman to wear on her wedding day until the 20th century. Brides wore many different colors. A woman did not expect to use her wedding gown only once; damask and other fine textiles were too costly to invest in a one-event garment. Diadema Morgan (1764-1788) wore this blue wool gown at her wedding to Phineas Field of Northfield in 1785. The petticoat and kerchief are modern.
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. - Attention all parents! Is your child home for the summer and are you looking for exciting things to do? Not quite sure of the best ways to find safe but fun activities? Camp Little Victors is here to help!
For the first time ever, the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan Health System is offering a ‘virtual’ summer camp experience.
Camp Little Victors will last for six weeks, starting July 9, and includes a weekly email that details family-friendly activities, safety tips, information about nutrition, and kid-friendly recipes. Each email will include exciting videos, including a kid-friendly aerobics demonstration and cooking tutorials.
It’s all the fun of camp -- without sunburns or bug bites.
Anyone, anywhere, can sign up online for free until July 9. For those who live near U-M, there will also be a tent set up on Sunday, July 8, at Ann Arbor Summer Festival Top of the Park to help families sign up between 5 and 8 p.m. The first 500 participants in Camp Little Victors will get free “Hail to the (little) Victors” T-shirts by mail.
Patients interested in learning more about Camp Little Victors at the U-M Health System should visit http://www.mottchildren.org/camp
# # #
Written by Rebeka Cohan
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Listen to the audio (5 mins 13 secs)
“Church bells have been ringing in England for more than thirteen hundred years. The English ringing technique – in which a bell is swung through a full 180 degrees to allow it to sound mouth-up, projecting its voice upwards out of the tower – is quite unique; it can only be found in the British Isles, a few former colonies, and the area around Verona in Italy.
Traditionally, English bells are rung to summon the faithful to worship, to celebrate weddings and festivals, and to mark national thanksgivings. At funerals, and at times of disaster, the bells are sometimes muffled; during wartime, it’s agreed that church bells will not be rung except as a warning of invasion.
One cold January Saturday, I came across the oldest bell of this kind in the world, which dates back to the year 1260. It is a handsome treble bell, cast in solid bronze, its face mottled with the distinctive grey-green patina that has protected it from centuries of atmospheric corrosion.
Surprisingly enough, this bell is not kept in the British Museum, or in any museum for that matter. Instead, it still hangs in the belltower of the tiny Hampshire church for which it was originally intended more than seven hundred and fifty years ago . . .”
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The world’s population is getting older and is requiring more effective, often biological-based treatments for endemic diseases such as diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. “In emerging markets, governments are looking to vaccinate or treat diseases in larger numbers of their population. Many of the big pharmas don’t have blockbusters in their pipeline anymore; now it’s all about producing smaller quantities of a greater variety of targeted vaccines, biologicals, and biosimilars,” explained Scott Ripley, marketing leader EMEA, GE Healthcare Life Sciences.
These trends will drive the demand for greater access to biologicals and vaccines, which will put the emphasis on being flexible and cost-effective to ensure biomanufacturing facilities are working at full capacity.
To drive down manufacturing costs, pharmas need to operate flexible facilities to maximize facility utilization while minimizing the risks associated with multiproduct manufacturing at various stages of clinical development and licensed production.
“In today’s market, facility utilization is key. If you’re not sweating your asset and only making one or two batches of a biological per year, then the cost of goods of that product is going to be very high,” Ripley said. “For many CMOs, for example, every day they don’t use their bioprocessing facilities costs them up to $2 million per day in lost revenues.”
Using traditional stainless steel bioreactors and fixed chromatography and filter systems, it can take anywhere from two to seven years to design and build a plant for specific large-scale production of a monoclonal or vaccine. This is a major gamble because if the product fails at Phase III, manufacturers can be left with a plant they find difficult to reconfigure.
One solution to this capacity and flexibility conundrum is to implement single-use biomanufacturing technology that can be swapped around to adapt to different production campaigns. Single-use bioreactors, for example, are established technology that can increase operational efficiency by reducing change over time. With single-use bioreactors there is no need for cleaning in place and cleaning validation steps, or steam sterilization and cool-down time before a bioreactor can be used.
“Cleaning and sterilizing are not value-added steps in biomanufacturing, so it’s desirable that they are kept to a minimum or removed to improve efficiency,” explained Neil Ross, marketing manager—bioprocess EMEA, GE Healthcare Life Sciences. “The proof is in the application, and there are many examples of biologicals in clinical-stage manufacture being produced quicker than if a traditional stainless steel route was implemented.”
Single-use technology has developed rapidly in the past five years, and it is now possible to implement an end-to-end process from cell to biological using an entirely disposable set-up.
GE Healthcare’s ReadytoProcess™ platform now offers around 250 different types of configurations that scientists could put together for their manufacturing.
“ReadyToProcess is a bit like Lego—you take what you need to get your process up and running and put it all together,” said Jonathan Royce, bioprocess marketing program manager.
“Our complete ReadyToProcess factory in a box is made possible by the use of ReadyMate™ disposable aseptic connectors,” Ross added. “These don’t come as either male or female connectors, which is unique, and they come in a range of sizes for scalable operation. They can be operated at pressures up to 5 bar and the pressure drop can be as low as 0.2 bar at flow rates as high as 6,000 L/hr.”
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(January 7, 1998)
Men love in haste but they detest at leisure. Lord Byron
The 1929-like crash in Asia is causing misery on a biblical scale, threatening the solvency of banks, stockbrokers, margin calls undermining investors, while the crackpots running the central banks raise taxes and interest rates, wreaking havoc on the middle class and poor. They know not what they do. However at least our leaders are taking the subject of currencies seriously, for the first time, although they still do not grasp that this is yet another "Vesuvian tremor" of the gold crisis that we have long foreseen and predicted. They simply do not connect Mexico's currency crash in 1994 with what is going on today, or that it is the very absence of a link to the reality of gold that makes currencies inherently unstable. If all nations printed paper money at different rates, how could there possibly be stability? Why not double the amount of printed paper money, give it to the poor, and solve everybody's problems by making everyone rich? They simply do not grasp the nature of the relationship of paper money as a store of value that we outlined in withering detail in The Invisible Crash. We nonetheless intend to keep telling it as it is until somebody hears us and, later, when they say "Why didn't you tell us?" at least we can say "We did." So spread the word, anybody within eyeshot of TDL with access to the press or media. Or friends. There must be a limitation on the amount of paper money printed other than a bunch of old men sitting around a room deciding that they should print 10% more this year, or some other number that they concoct. We have been looking for intermittent currency crises, each one worse than the previous, until the whole paper house of cards comes tumbling down in a financial calamity that will reverberate for centuries to come. It is doubtful that they will heed the Hard Money Movement and link currencies to gold, but at least we can go on record so that amidst the ruins a new currency system could be built on rock that would remain for future generations. This would be a great service to humanity, well worth a lifetime of devotion and struggle.
What next? Our guess is that this phase of the currency crisis is ending, that this ramshackle "system" of paper currencies has weathered yet another storm, but at a huge cost both in money and psychological trauma. Hopefully, Asian politicians will not blame this on capitalism and revert to socialism back out of the fire into the frying pan. Especially since we are looking for a major political upheaval in the world anyhow, as outlined in the Futurology chapter of the Mass Psychology book (page 138) where there simply will not be enough work for everybody and a new political system will be required neither capitalism nor communism, but something without a name yet. Much will depend on how "The Coming Religious War" plays itself out.
Getting back to the near-term picture, the fact that the "international community" is making a huge loan to Korea shows that Clinton understands that if Korea goes down so will Japan, and we cannot imagine the second-largest economy in the world caving in without triggering an international financial calamity. The innocent American public does not realize that most of those so-called "international guarantees" by various institutions are US taxpayer money; the US is the largest contributor to the IMF. It's not only that such money could be better spent at home by cutting taxes drastically enough to get the homeless off the streets, but that bailing out foreign currencies is a waste of time because their absence of a link to gold means that "The Coming Currency Crisis" will return even greater next time.
Indeed, with our prediction of "The Coming Competing Currency Devaluations" coming true before your very eyes, making lethal competitors of foreign exporters, there can be little doubt that the United States will soon run monstrously large trade deficits that will shake the dollar to its roots, especially when the US Congress rebels at bailing out the whole world. Sadly, it is when the US dollar finally goes down that will end the world as we know it. At that time the strongest of all instincts survival will send those with capital into a panicky flight to safety on a scale never seen before.
Those with a "core position" in the precious metals should survive it, which is our "insurance" hedge. You don't cancel your fire insurance because you haven't had a fire, so golds should be held regardless of price action, as a hedge against monetary upheavals. Nobody knows when trouble will start, but we do believe that it will be rapid because that is the way Mass Fear works, and only those who have built their ark in advance will weather the storm. Nearly all of you own The Invisible Crash and Mass Psychology, so this might not be a bad time to re-read them and know them like a book.
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The word “collaboration” is creating lots of confusion these days. Global thought-leader Jane McConnell has seen different interpretations of “collaboration” trigge
r serious misunderstandings and even internal conflict. In a business setting, people use the word collaboration to describe very different things. Although the different collaboration purposes are not black and white, there are fundamental differences. Today we’re sharing Jane’s thoughts on why it’s important to clarify the kind of collaboration you want to achieve with your intranet.
Confusion and misunderstanding around “collaboration”
The word “collaboration” is creating lots of confusion these days. In several recent client projects, I’ve seen firsthand to what extent different interpretations of “collaboration” have triggered serious misunderstandings and even internal conflict. I can’t count the number of meetings I’ve been in where people use the word collaboration to describe quite different things.
It is important to clarify the type of collaboration you are talking about. Although the different types are not black and white, there are fundamental differences. Why is it important to clarify?
- It influences the coherence of your whole digital workplace, in particular your entry point strategy.
- It will reduce conflict among digital teams and bring understanding of how different pieces fit together to serve the people.
- To some extent, it impacts the roles and scopes of members of the digital teams. It partially answers the question of “who is in charge of what”.
Team collaboration- probably the oldest sense of “collaboration”
This refers to designated people working together on a project with deliverables and a timeline. This has long been part of what organizations do. Today, in many cases, senior management have taken a new interest in intranets because they now include collaboration as well as information. This type of collaboration gets their attention because they see it as “the way work gets done”.
Communities of practice for support functions- long established in most organizations
Most large organizations have long-established communities of practice for their support functions: finance, IT, communication and HR. Finance is almost always the leader because companies need to consolidate figures across the organization. IT and Communication sometimes struggle depending on how decentralized the company is. HR has a different challenge because the central function and the country functions need to work hard to clarify their complementary scopes.
These communities are “obligatory” in that if you have a job in finance or in communication, you are automatically part of the relevant group. Over the years, I’ve seen many global intranets built on the backbone of functional communities of practice. These communities are often strong allies for your change facilitation initiatives.
New for many organizations: social communities and collaboration
Informal networking around the water cooler and on business trips has long existed but, by definition, has geographical limitations. Online tools that enable people across organizations to discover each other, answer questions, discuss and so on, even if they never meet physically. This is bringing a new dimension of “collaboration” to organizations.
Communities around topics of interest are being created. They are voluntary. People join, participate, leave as they wish. Leaders emerge. There are no pre-defined deliverables. These communities are usually closely tied to social networking in that they may live inside the social networking platform and do a lot of their communication and collaboration using social tools.
The digital workplace where it comes together
I published my first diagram of the Digital Workplace in February 2011: “Snapshot of the Digital Workplace“. The purpose was to provide people with a visual way to communicate the digital workplace concept to management.
Over a year later in February 2012 I published a second version of the diagram. “Digital Workplace in Brief: 5 Fundamentals” where I emphasized the overlapping of the different dimensions and scopes.
A number of organizations now use these diagrams to explain how their “pieces” of the digital workplace fit together. They also use them to illustrate their entry point strategies. They help people talk about single or multiple entry point strategies. They also make it easier to define what is on the start page (as per the second diagram on the February 2011 version.
What does “collaboration” mean inside your organization?
Jane McConnell has over 14 years of intranet consulting experience and is a sought after leader in intranet research in our industry. Read her original blog post right here.
Continue to receive advice and real-world examples of successful social intranets by subscribing to our blog
Want to learn more about our popular Social Intranet Software? Try our Social Intranet Software Now
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On Wednesday, I attended a U.S. Department of Homeland Security “Bloggers Roundtable” convened in Washington, D.C. by Secretary Michael Chertoff to address the issue of cyber security.
The Roundtable took place at the Secretary’s ’satellite’ office at the Ronald Reagan Office Building near the White House. It was pegged to October’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month which according to DHS is “designed to educate the public on the shared responsibility of protecting cyberspace.” A full transcript can be found here.
Others attending the Roundtable were HLS Watch’s Jonah Czerwinski, CQ’s Jeff Stein, Consumer Reports’ Jeffrey Fox, Federal Computer Week’s Ben Bain, Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill, and Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez. (I attended a previous Bloggers Roundtable held by Secretary Chertoff on emergency preparedness in May.)
In his opening remarks, Chertoff called cyber security “perhaps an area of vulnerability we have that remains the greatest challenge in terms of addressing” and added:
“It’s not a secret that, you know, if you look at what happened in Estonia, looked at what happened in Georgia, if you look at that massive identity theft that occurred in California that I announced we had made some arrests this past August, we’re becoming more and more acutely aware of the vulnerability we have at all levels: denial of service, corruption of information, theft of identity, exfiltration of confidential information. All of these are critical issues.”
Though much of DHS’ cyber security effort is focused on federal systems and critical infrastructure (and that was the subject of most of the discussion during the Roundtable as HLS Watch nicely covers in its post), Chertoff says that the public has a significant role in cyber security both in their workplaces and at home:
“There’s public in your own personal life and there’s the business community. The business community obviously, to the extent they operate critical infrastructure, they have a role to be responsible not only to themselves and their own businesses, but to the wider community that depend upon them. Because we are interdependent. If the power grid goes down because somebody hasn’t adequately protected their systems from an IT denial of service attack, that’s going to have implications for everybody who relies on that power.”
“So there’s an awful lot the private sector has to do. It reminds me of the Y2K period when the private sector was required to step up and make sure it was protecting its assets. So part of what we’ve been in the process of doing is we’ve set up a committee with the private sector built upon the model that we’ve been using successfully over the past several years to create a national infrastructure protection plan. And the idea is to have a — it’s a critical infrastructure coordinating committee that looks in particular at computers and spans all of the sectors, recognizing that each sector is going to have unique challenges and is going to want to look at different kinds of issues.”
“From a homeowner standpoint or personal standpoint, you know, obviously you don’t want your computer turned into a — you know, taken over by bots and then converted into an attack vector. But on a more prosaic level, you don’t want your personal stuff, your financial records exfiltrated. You don’t want to have your computer become sluggish and unable to operate.”
“And, you know, this is really an area — it is like the disaster area where personal responsibility is important. If you don’t change your password periodically, if you don’t update your firewalls and your anti-virus, you’re just — you know what it’s like? It’s like taking your wallet and throwing out on the street. And no one would suggest doing that. No one suggests just leaving your door wide open without a lock.”
“For many people, that’s how they view the computer, and, you know, whether it’s — to make a larger point, whether it’s preparing yourself for physical disaster with water and food as we’ve talked about, John, or whether it’s taking reasonable security over your computer, people have got to do this. Because otherwise, they’re going to get victimized and then they’re going turn and say, well, who’s going to help me? And the answer is, it’s going to be a lot harder to help them after the fact than if they take reasonable precautions.”
Chertoff said that he thinks ultimately the key to cyber security at the consumer user level may be changing the security paradigm:
“…I would actually make the case — and this is not with the Cyber Security Initiative, but it’s another initiative we’ve talked about — that part of what we need to do is we need to change from a model in which your assets are controlled by your, for example, your Social Security number, which is a very weak way to control your assets, to a way in which your assets are controlled by some combination of a biometric, a token, and maybe some secret knowledge that isn’t kept in a database.
“If you — bear with me for a second. If you had a system where in order to access my bank account you had to use my biometric and a token as well as a number, it wouldn’t matter if you stole the number, because the number wouldn’t do anything for you. It would be like having my name. It doesn’t do anything for you. So I actually think we need to step out — I mean, in the short run, you want to protect the information by encrypting it and securing it.”
“But in the long run, I think you want to move away from a model which I consider inherently vulnerable, where the very information that you’re trying to protect is the information you have to disseminate in order to validate yourself. So as you — the more effective use you make of the information, the more vulnerable you become. I’m suggesting we paradigm shift.”
“On the issue of theft of data over the Internet, whether it’s wireless interceptions like we had out in California, there again, a lot of the key is encryption. It is a different architecture for how we validate and verify people so that we don’t have — so that getting a single piece of information about you doesn’t really do any good, because it’s not enough to get you into an ability to corrupt somebody. And of course, part of it is just doing what we can to secure the networks against hacking or intrusions.”
“But, mind you, you know, it’s not just about hacking. It can be about interception of wireless transmissions. It can be about theft of data by insiders. You know, someone told me that people stick a lot of data on a thumb drive. You’d be amazed how many thumb drives are found on the floor of airplanes, commercial airplanes, because people drop them out..”
“…What I’m saying is, there’s a whole spectrum of threats. And what I want to encourage is not just to think about the obvious thing or the thing that gets written about, but to look at what I call game changers, ways to actually organize protection of our identity so that we are not so vulnerable to the theft of a single piece of information or a Social Security number, because that is insufficient to allow someone to actually seal someone’s assets. And I think this is a huge issue. You can tell I’m interested in it because I’m talking about it a lot.”
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Nart Abdalkareem knew he was a marked man. For months the Syrian journalist had been shooting footage of massacres and bombed-out streets, and uploading it to al-Arabiyah Television, a channel based in Dubai, under the pseudonym Salam al-Hamui. But when the security police rounded up journalists late last year, Abdalkareem fled his home, and kept going, traveling to Jordan and finally to a city a galaxy away from Syria’s grim war: Paris. “I left with nothing,” says Abdalkareem, 39, sitting in the Maison des Journalistes in Paris, the world’s only safe house reserved for journalists fleeing their countries. “I left with no papers, no passport. Nothing,” he says. “The police had figured out who I was, and so I ran for my life.”
One year later, Abdalkareem is still reeling from the loss: His house in Damascus has been bombed, several friends are dead or in prison, and his work, for now, is over. Still, he is alive, and safe. And in 2012, that counts as good fortune.
Leaving aside the dozens of journalists killed this year—more than 60, in one of the deadliest years for journalists on record—there are dozens, too, like Abdalkareem, who have fled their countries, narrowly escaping imprisonment, torture or death. Having fled, their escape is often followed by years of legal limbo and deep isolation; about 50 or so journalists are known to have fled their countries this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, in New York.
Of those, the very lucky few have ended up in Paris’s Maison des Journalistes, a yellow-brick, former brush factory, which opened as a journalists’ sanctuary in 2002.
I first discovered this unique facility in July 2007, when one of my own translators fled his country—literally overnight. In a panicked call at dawn from Charles de Gaulle Airport, Allen Embalo, a journalist from the West African country of Guinea-Bissau, told me that he had escaped at a moment’s notice, after a diplomat warned him that he was about to be assassinated, in large part because of a TIME story I’d written one month before, using Embalo as a translator and guide, in which I described how the country’s officials were implicated in rampant cocaine trafficking. “The police were looking for whoever worked with the journalist as a fixer,” Embalo says. “Evidently it wasn’t very hard for them to find that it was me.”
Over breakfast in my apartment that morning in 2007, we called the French organization Reporters Without Borders, which within hours found Embalo a room at the Maison des Journalistes—a place I had never heard of—where he stayed for eight months, rent-free. Embalo still recalls the relief he felt walking into the “Maison” that day, and finding colleagues who instantly grasped the traumatic upheaval he was undergoing. “Going into exile is like jumping into nowhere,” he says. “And in the Maison we had brothers and sisters, colleagues with different cultures, different stories, different places in the world, all trying to build a new life in Paris.”
Founded by two French journalists, the Maison des Journalistes sits across the street from a cemetery in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, a block from the Seine. Despite its uniqueness, it is barely known even to its neighbors. With 14 bedrooms, it is funded by French TV networks and newspapers, and the City of Paris, on a tight budget of €350,000 a year. Although the residents sometimes include people from different political movements within the same country—there are currently three Syrians in the house—the director Darline Cothière says there are almost no political clashes; residents bond over common problems, chief among them their battle to gain political asylum in France. With reporters from countries as varied as Russia and Ethiopia, the staff is careful to stay politically neutral. “It is not our job to condemn abuses in their country,” says Cothière, who estimates about 250 people have lived there over the past decade. “We do that indirectly, but supporting freedom of the press.”
Besides free accommodation, which is usually for six months, the house offers French classes and legal advice, and a psychologist is on call to deal with the inevitable issue of post-traumatic stress disorder. In order to avoid guests slinking into isolation, the house keeps its only Internet connection in a large common room near the kitchen, making it the focal point for residents, who sit together for hours writing or chatting about their lives.
One recent evening, the room filled up with journalists from Turkey, Syria, Iran and Ethiopia, who shared their gripes about French bureaucracy, and tips about learning the language. Such communication, they say, feels like a lifeline while they attempt to adjust to a new country, and many still return frequently to the house years after they’ve moved out. “If it wasn’t for the Maison des Journalistes, how much more stress would there be in my life?” says Merid Estifanos, a well-known columnist from Ethiopia who fled that country in 2005, and has not lived in the Maison since 2007; sitting in the workroom, he says he comes every few days to use the Internet and socialize. He now lives in an overcrowded immigrant center, and says that if he dared return to Ethiopia, he would likely face years in jail, much like his former publisher, who was recently sentenced to 18 years. “I wasn’t planning to come to Paris,” he said. “But I was facing long years in prison or worse, death. I escaped for my life.”
Sadly, many others have not been as lucky—and 2012 could yet rank as the deadliest year for journalists on record. Of those killed so far, nearly half were in Syria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the worldwide total could rise to as high as 70 by Dec. 31, thanks in large part to the lethal job of covering the Syrian war.
There have been some well-known deaths, like that of the celebrated American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed alongside French photographer Rémi Ochlik last February in a rocket attack in Homs, Syria. But the vast majority killed in 2012—as every year—have been local journalists, who are unknown to the outside world, but whose work is crucial to Western media organizations, especially during a time of tight news budgets and growing concerns about dispatching staff to war zones. Compared to foreign correspondents, who return home after their assignments, “they are much more vulnerable,” says Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Local journalists cannot go anywhere,” Simon says. “And the bad guys know where they live.”
Such was the motivation for the Maison des Journalistes, which remains the only sanctuary of its kind in the world; it always has a waiting list. In a measure of how hazardous journalism has become, the Maison is set to open two other branches soon, in Berlin, and Cadiz, Spain. And while dozens more journalists will no doubt be forced to flee, a handful make their way home—often out of frustration at trying to rebuild meaningful lives. “We’ve seen journalists go back to very dangerous environments,” says Simon, “because they couldn’t bear not to work as journalists.”
One such person is Embalo, my translator from Guinea Bissau. Late last year, he finally flew home, after determining that his life was no longer in danger; ironically, the country’s president had himself been assassinated since Embalo fled for his life. “I felt like the only place for me was back home,” he says. But for those journalists whose return could mean death, the Maison is, for now, the safest of havens.
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According to ASAM(American Society of Addiction Medicine) there is a short version, listed here, or the complete version.
Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry. Dysfunction in these circuits leads to characteristic biological, psychological, social and spiritual manifestations. This is reflected in an individual pathologically pursuing reward and/or relief by substance use and other behaviors.
Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response. Like other chronic diseases, addiction often involves cycles of relapse and remission. Without treatment or engagement in recovery activities, addiction is progressive and can result in disability or premature death.
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A couple of days ago, I was discussing Michael Mandel’s Fake Productivity Hypothesis. In response to this, Tyler Cowen countered with the No Profits Here Hypothesis holding that:
[T]here was some productivity growth but much of it fell outside of the usual cash and revenue-generating nexus. Maybe you will live until 83 rather than 81.5 and your pain reliever will work better. In the meantime you will read blogs and gaze upon beautiful people using your Facebook account. Those are gains to consumer surplus, but they don’t prop up the revenue-generating sectors of the economy as one might have expected.
Good examples of this would have to include Wikipedia (which is hugely useful but doesn’t make anyone any money at all), Craigslist (which has revolutionized the way people do a lot of things but has done far more to destroy other firms’ revenue sources than to make money for itself), and much open-source software (where the absence of copyright-enforced monopoly profits make the product more useful, but less lucrative, than closed-source products). John Quiggin has been pondering the rise of social production for a while and has the following bullet points on the implications:
- If monetary returns are weakly, or even negatively correlated with the value of social production, there’s no reason to expect capital markets to do a good job in allocating resources to supporting innovation. (This point seems rather less controversial than when I made it in 2006.)
- As a corollary, it seems unlikely that large inequalities in income are beneficial to anyone except the recipients of high incomes (this issue is being discussed, in a much more abstract setting, at Crooked Timber)
- If improvements in welfare are increasingly independent of the market, it would make sense to shift resources out of market production, for example by reducing working hours. The financial crisis seems certain to produce at least a temporary drop in average hours, but the experience of the Depression and the Japanese slowdown of the 1990s suggest that the effect may be permanent.
- Creativity, broadly defined, seems likely to become more important, while markets, particularly financial markets, become less so. Firms that want to survive and prosper will have to behave quite differently from the way the did in the past. Google is an obvious example of a firm that is trying to do this, if not always succeeding.
I see two clear areas where the rubber may hit the road on this. One is in terms of working hours. Consider this chart:
Clearly, we’re going to be able to produce more market-value of stuff than the barely-working Dutch are. At the same time, if you visit the Netherlands it’s not as if people are starving in the street. They have plenty of stuff. And, obviously, they have more free time. That can be nice in its own terms, or it might just mean more washing dishes by hand. But in the brave new digital world where it’s possible to engage in endeavors that are useful to other people on a pretty large scale on a hobbyist basis, it also means they have more time to do non-market work—write open source code, record an album and have people download it on BitTorrent, improve Wikipedia entries, etc. Obviously, you couldn’t base an entire economy on this kind of thing, since you can’t produce any tangible goods this way. But 1,357 hours per year isn’t nothing, it’s just a lot less than 1,824 hours per years. And these days, more-and-more of what people are interested in are non-tangible goods.
It’s a bit of a cliché in politics to talk about the need to move from an “industrial age economy” to an “information age economy” but there’s relatively little thought given to what this might actually entail. But it might entail a lot! Among other things, it might entail that certain economic metrics developed for the industrial age are less-relevant, and therefore that appropriate tradeoffs aren’t what they once were. A friend of mine just twittered:
tinyurl is down. these URL shorteners are a real problem: essential but not a viable business, it’s a surefire recipe for tons of lost data.
The real “problem,” though, is broader than TinyURL. And the solution may be hoping that people have free time and, if bored, will be inspired to do something useful. It’s the vision of Marx’s early thought, or Star Trek.
A potentially related issue has to do with broadband infrastructure. My understanding is that the internet is radically faster in some Asian countries, notably South Korea and Japan, than it is here in part because the state has intervened in a more heavy-handed way to ensure that this is the case. Clearly, though, South Korea and Japan are not crushing the United States economically. One potential explanation for this is that all this talk about the Internet is way off-base, and digital communication isn’t actually all that important to the modern economy. I don’t find that especially plausible. Another explanation is the Cowen/Quiggen explanation—the consumer surplus associated with digital communication is only very partially captured as profits. That will predict that absent heavy-handed government intervention, capital markets will underfund broadband infrastructure and you’ll have less of it than would be socially optimal. This is, I think, a fairly reasonable interpretation of the broadband gap.
All that’s very left-wing, but there are also less left-wing implications for fiscal stimulus and the like. Although in either case “be more like Western Europe” turns out to be the prescription.
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Anonymously add a comment: (or register
|Great work. Nice overview.|
|Good, acurrate attention to detail.|
|you are learning from"Teach yourself C++ in 21 DAY"....why don't you put a link so that everybody could download the file?...it will be much easier|
|eat butt and suck a sack.
|Nice.....but more details required|
|good job but it would help if u inclided how to use the compiler|
|You know Assembler (basic ASM) isn't scary at all, I can understand the baics of ASM but not C++. Go figure.|
|wat does "and" "=" "|" mean in c?|
|Good tutorial. I have one question..... When I try to run the program I get this message:
------ Build started: Project: Ricks, Configuration: Debug Win32 ------
c:\documents and settings\rick\my documents\visual studio 2008\projects\ricks\ricks\Form1.h(99) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'iostream.h': No such file or directory
Build log was saved at "file://c:\Documents and Settings\Rick\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\Ricks\Ricks\Debug\BuildLog.htm"
Ricks - 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)
========== Build: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
I'm completely new to C++ (Been using Delphi and VB forever) and I'm not totaly sure where I'm suppose to add this code in at. I pasted the code right inside the buttom1_click (minus the numbers). I also get 120 (no joke) errors anytime I try to include the <windows.h> file. Maybe you can help me out a little. BTW I'm using MS Visual C++ 2008 Express.
My name is Rick, and you can email me at email@example.com. Or AIM at original m0rtis.
Thanks for any help in advance.
|I haven't done any C++ work in VS, but the compiler can't find iostream.h, a legacy module that deals with char I/O. try include <iostream>|
Thanks for the tutorial, really helpful.
I'm a beginner Game Designer, I have to learn and become pro at openGL/C++ in 2 years, also in future I would like to make a studio.
so I need to know people around london or close by, to join them for a successful future.
please add me at firstname.lastname@example.org
I would like to chat with some one with such talents:)
|Great starter tutorial man, Very accurate and in-depth explanation of what each line does and how it works.
I've just started trying to learn the basics of C++ (My first attempt at some coding) but all of the other websites I found assumed you had previous knowledge of some coding languages...
You should do some more of these tutorials :)
|What a waste of time lol, you don't know shit|
|Nice Work! Finally Someone Explain's The "Basic's" Of C++|
|Is there any tutorial available related to the use of header files in C++
please let me know, email@example.com
|Nice tut. There is a slight problem in the code though. You must add "using namespace std;" at the top or use std::cout.
Newbies (like me) would have a problem compiling and would receive a compiler error if typing the code as shown. Otherwise great job.
|I didn't get any errors doing it the way he showed but it just flashes on and off when running i tried using the getchar command but it didn't work!|
|It does run through command prompt though|
|Top marks .. this has helped me big time ....Martin Bristol uk|
|Thank you dude this is awesome sauce. It's cool that you explained every line, which is what I've been looking for like CRAZY. And you made it interesting with your "dripping sarcasm" :D|
|nice work mate.... would love to see more of c++ tutorials and examples, but great foundation to start c++ programming ;-)|
|Nice work! Yeah, the reason I believe the command prompt only appears for a few seconds is because the program is finished with the line "return 0;'=" If you want the command prompt to stay indefinitely so you can check everything work okay, replace "return 0;" with system("pause");|
|great tutorial but i got an error about an antiquated or deprecated header: (iostream.h)?
|C++ is hard :P - Dumbass American kid|
|@Dumbass American kid ....C++ is not hard. Its just your dumbass brain with IQ 0|
|me has 2 learned c++ in 1 months. who book did me uses? has somebody helping i. sorry english me bad broken . |
|Thank you for the explanation. Good job.|
|if yuo're getting the error saying that you ca't do it because of <iostream.h>
try only typing in #include <iostream>
some of the newer VC don't need/want the ".h" for some reason, i think 2008 and up.
|hope you will be sucsesful in life|
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- Dec 06, 2010 3:57 PM EST
- [num] Comments
"What are you feeling right now?" is what you'd expect a shrink to ask you, not your smartphone. Launching today, Dec. 6th the Awareness app for iPhone wants to do just that and help your work through your feelings in order to achieve improved mental health...without the $200 per hour bill.
The Lowdown: According to the developers, The Awareness app is the first tool to use mobile technology to randomly intercept individuals' daily routines, and prompt them to get in touch with what they are feeling; taking them out of their worries and bringing them to the present moment. It provides insight into what is causing the user's feelings, along with offering engaging, inspirational practices to release them. When used consistently, the Awareness application can actually transform people's quality of life, shifting them into a creative and peaceful awareness.
The way Awareness works is by going into the app and scheduling "reminders" at different intervals throughout the day. When you hear the reminder (via a soft 'gong') you are instructed to record what you are feeling at the moment from a list of feelings (excited, overwhelmed, energetic, etc.) and to note where you feel it (head, body or both). Based on your response, you are instructed to do a brief meditative exercise, and will leave you with a quote that relates to how you feel.
The more you use Awareness, the easier it will be to track your feelings and see patterns via Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly reports that will give you insight into your moods, feelings and associated activities.
Other features include:
- Brief video clips guide you back to the present moment
- Reveals how you distract yourself from unpleasant feelings and how you can constructively free yourself from them
- Works with or without a network connection
My Verdict: The Awareness app is available in iTunes for $3.99 (OS 4.1 and up). If you're looking for simple ways to improve you r mental and physical health, I say give Awareness a try before you sign up to look at ink-blots all day.
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Front Page Titles (by Subject) Is Philosophy Politically Subversive? - Literature of Liberty, July/September 1979, vol. 2, No. 3
The Online Library of Liberty
A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
Search this Title:
Also in the Library:
Is Philosophy Politically Subversive? - Leonard P. Liggio, Literature of Liberty, July/September 1979, vol. 2, No. 3
Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought was published first by the Cato Institute (1978-1979) and later by the Institute for Humane Studies (1980-1982) under the editorial direction of Leonard P. Liggio.
About Liberty Fund:
Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
This work is copyrighted by the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and is put online with their permission.
Fair use statement:
This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.
Is Philosophy Politically Subversive?
“The Offense of Socrates: A Rereading of Plato's Apology.” Interpretation 7 (May 1978): 1–21.
In 399 B.C. Socrates was found guilty by an Athenian court of the charges of corrupting the youth and religious irreverence through his practice of philosophy. Plato's Apology gives the indictment as follows: “Socrates does wrong corrupting the youth and not respecting the gods whom the city respects, but other, new half-divinities.” We need to appreciate the plausibility of the guilty verdict to appreciate the real threat posed perennially to politics and the “city” by philosophy. The nonliberal tradition of Burckhardt and Sorel perceived how politically subversive Socrates was as the prototype of the questioning philosopher. How would we today deal with an analogous court case involving the perennial Socratic issue of the freethinker in collision with various religious, moral, or patriotic beliefs that we may hold sacred and unexamined?
Was Socrates guilty as charged? Important issues of political philosophy lurk in this question. On the surface Socrates rebuts the specific charges of corrupting the youth and religious impiety; but he turns his defense into an offensive and defiant provocation. His counterindictment of the Athenians—that they lack philosophic self-examination—exposes the political subversion always latent in philosophy.
In a disturbing sense Socrates is “guilty,” at least from the perspective of the political city. The Athenian jurors were infuriated by Socrates' tone and style of defense that invited conviction. On the charge that Socrates had novel notions about the city's gods, the jurors might naturally suspect Socrates' very personal and unorthodox inner voice, his daimonion, which pitted private conscience against public law and authority. On the other charge of corrupting the youth, the jury understood that Socrates communicated a “corrupting” esoteric teaching to his inner circle. Socrates' negative teaching, his exposing politicians, poets, and craftsmen to embarrasing crossexamination became an object lesson in skeptical attack for the young.
Decent, nonphilosophic jurors might well be suspicious of how Socrates' damonion made him refrain from participating in politics (31d). “This is Socrates' negative politics: to deny that the public realm is the truly political realm and to assert his inner logos intransigently in the service of the city.” What public good could result from the Socratic questioning that ended in perplexity and undermined the old orthodoxies? In effect, Socrates' court defense recapitulates his offenses as a philosopher against the city. The Apology implies: “When philosophy comes upon the city it comes as a threat.” Plato no doubt sensed this danger but also felt that “The side resisting enlightenment also has something vital to defend and should be addressed.”
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Twitter Having A Big Impact on Web Traffic
TWITTER now having a real impact on search. Tweets are starting to show strongly in results while users are increasingly deploying the medium to highlight web items of interest. The shift is well summed by Steve Johnson in an article for Time. Here's an edited highlight:
Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.
Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web.
Australia's first Group Buying Summit was staged in Sydney on May 7, 2012. It was a good day with 135 delegates and lots great presentations. Speakers included:
Search Engine Room, Australia's original search event, is returning to Sydney in mid November, 2012.
Please subscribe to newsletter for event updates and if you have any queries, contact Martin Kelly.
Meanwhile, check out images from the last Search Engine Room below.
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Through their extensive experience in other careers, boomers may be the next generation of green workers. A recent study by The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and Civic Ventures, and sponsored by MetLife, identified eight roles boomers could potentially fill in the growing green sector.
"Green jobs are a natural fit for many boomers seeking encore careers (...) . Many skills from other fields easily transfer to the green economy, such as construction and maintenance; finance and planning; marketing and information technology; and engineering and entrepreneurship."
The study compares the green boom to the IT boom. While the growth in the information technology sector didn't meet everyone's expectations, it is a part of nearly every job.
"Green work has the same potential, though various factors - including the current economic recession and evolving energy policy - make it difficult to discern the true nature, shape and scale of the clean energy economy."
The roles identified by the study are weatherization installers and crew leaders, energy auditors, solar contractors and installation trainers, and advocates, consultants and outreach workers for conservation and sustainability.
The full report, "How Boomers Can Help the Nation Go Green," is available as a PDF.
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Wild City Safari has not received any gifts yet
Developed in partnership with multinational educators, performers, musicians, and visual artists, Wild City Safari is an interactive early learning program for toddlers 18-36 months.
Featuring a fun and exciting curriculum designed as a first step towards preschool, Wild City Safari helps toddlers develop language skills, conceptual thinking, logic, and motor skills while gently introducing them to the social environments and structures they will encounter as they enter preschool.
Classes begin January, 2012 in NY and NJ
Classes begin in Chicago September, 2012
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One of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) has left indelible marks on contemporary culture spanning film criticism, literary theory, political activism, theater, and education. From her prolific and penetrative essays to her novels to her production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a candlelit theatre during the Siege of Sarajevo, Sontag’s extraordinary work ethic and uncompromising cultural stance earned her numerous literary prizes and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.
In On Photography (1977), Sontag constructed a seminal critique of the role of visual culture in capitalist society; in Illness as Metaphor (1978), she confronted the “blame-the-victim” sensibility and its long history of shaming those suffering from disease by projecting onto them psychological failings in addition to their already debilitating physical pain; Against Interpretation (1966) endures as one of the most critically acclaimed essay anthologies in history.
Despite her daunting powers of reason, Sontag was also a woman of immense emotional capacity. Per her self-professed account, she had been in love nine times in her life — four with men, one of whom, the writer Philip Rieff, fathered her only child, David, and five with women, including legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom Sontag spent the last decade of her life.
From her poignant meditations on art, love, and writing to her formidable media diet of literature and film to her intense love affairs and infatuations to her meditations on society’s values and vices, Sontag’s recently published journals reveal an intimate glimpse of a woman celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable minds, yet one who felt as deeply and intensely as she thought, oscillating between conviction and insecurity in the most beautifully imperfect and human way possible as she settles into her own skin not only as a dimensional writer but also as a dimensional human being.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.”
~Robert Frost from The Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose
Photo by Stan Wiechers / Flickr, cc by-sa 2.0
A quick tutorial on how to curl your hair without using any heat. I can’t wait to try this!
A short documentary on the rise of (fun and exciting) webcomics.
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Party of the People: A History of the Democrats
By Jules Witcover, Random House, 758 pages, $35.00
Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans
By Lewis L. Gould, Random House, 588 pages, $35.00
Few institutions of any sort in American life have remained relevant for as long as the two national political parties. The Democratic Party traces its roots back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s. The Republican Party will celebrate its 150th anniversary next year. Not many other products on the shelf in 1854, much less the 1790s, are still attracting customers today.
Even more remarkable than the sheer longevity of the two parties is their dominance. No other major party has emerged since the Republicans replaced the Whigs as the principal rival to the Democrats in the 1850s, though a steady procession of third-party movements, breakaway insurgencies and charismatic leaders (from Theodore Roosevelt to Ross Perot) have regularly offered alternatives. Invariably, reports of the demise of either or both parties have proven premature. During the Civil War, Democrats seemed so tainted by the stain of rebellion that one pro-Republican newspaper editor dismissed them as "a myth, a reminiscence, a voice from the tomb, an ancient, fishlike smell." Both Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964 and Watergate 10 years later seemed to threaten the Republicans with marginalization. In the 1980s and 1990s, many commentators thought the rise in independent voters challenged the relevance of both parties.
Yet as the 21st century begins, the parties appear not only relevant but vital in shaping the way Americans look at politics. After all the focus on independent and swing voters in the early and mid-1990s (from soccer moms to Perotistas), America appears to have made a sharp turn into an era of intense partisanship. The gap in the approval ratings President Bush receives from Republicans (around 90 percent) and Democrats (usually less than 30 percent) is the widest ever recorded in polling. Party-line voting is rising in Congress. Crossover voting in presidential and congressional elections appears to be declining. In 2000, fully nine of 10 Republicans voted for George W. Bush, while nearly that high a percentage of Democrats voted for Al Gore.
Enough voters still call themselves independents that neither party can claim a stable majority of support. But many political operatives believe the number who don't at least lean strongly toward one party or the other is now much smaller -- perhaps less than 10 percent of the electorate -- than was commonly assumed 10 and 20 years ago.
In this climate of heightened partisanship and sharpening polarization, strategists in both parties have been shifting their emphasis from courting swing voters to mobilizing and exciting their bases. On virtually every major issue -- from the environment to taxes to the prosecution of the war in Iraq without broad international support -- Bush has chosen policies far more popular with his conservative base than among swing voters. The move toward the base isn't as uniform among the 2004 Democratic presidential contenders. But on a series of major issues -- from affirmative action to gay rights to free trade and the level of domestic spending they are willing to propose -- most of the leading candidates are perceptibly tilting away from the centrism associated with Bill Clinton and toward more traditionally liberal positions popular with the party core. In Congress, meanwhile, the ideological gap between the parties has widened to a chasm with the decline of both the northeastern center-left Republican and the southern center-right Democrat. Only a few years after some analysts worried that the two parties were converging into a bland middle, ideological differences appear sharper than they've been in decades.
For all of their continuing importance, however, the political parties have been slighted by historians. Excellent accounts of the electoral and intellectual competition between the parties are available in works that examine discrete periods in American history, such as David M. Potter's classic study of antebellum America, The Impending Crisis, or Arthur M. Schlesinger's monumental accounts of the Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt presidencies. But popular histories of the two political parties as institutions have been difficult to find.
Not anymore. In a hugely ambitious project, Random House is simultaneously publishing narrative histories of the Republican Party, by University of Texas historian Lewis L. Gould, and the Democratic Party, by veteran political journalist Jules Witcover. It's a grandly conceived effort written by two authors whose enormous knowledge of American politics is matched by their obvious affection for it. Still, the project is a mixed success.
Overall, Witcover has written a more sprightly and entertaining book. Yet the two works share many common strengths and weaknesses. The best thing about both books is their inclusiveness. These are by far the most comprehensive histories of the political parties I've seen under one cover. For political junkies, it's all here: all the highlights and many of the forgotten moments in the development of both parties and their 150-year rivalry -- everything from "Ma, Ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!" (the taunt Republicans aimed at Grover Cleveland over reports that he had fathered an illegitimate child) to "Where's the beef?" (the missile Walter Mondale fired to knock Gary Hart out of orbit during a debate in the 1984 Democratic primary). Free-soil advocates, copperheads, stalwarts, half-breeds, Mugwumps -- warriors in political fights long forgotten -- all parade through the pages of these books.
The long view both authors provide offers fresh perspective on many of today's political arguments. When Arnold Schwarzenegger complains that Democratic taxes dog Californians through every step of their day, I wonder if he knew he was channeling the Democratic attack on Republican high-tariff policies in the 1890s that Gould quotes: "The McKinley [tariff] is with us always, at the table, at the bedside, in the kitchen, in the barn, in the churches and to the cemetery." Those liberals who complain that the centrist Democratic Leadership Council has tried to usurp the proper role of the national party over the past 15 years might be surprised to learn that the liberal-dominated Democratic Advisory Council faced the same charge in the late 1950s when it tried to redefine a party then dominated by a conservative congressional leadership. And amid all of today's political bitterness in Washington, it's refreshing to be reminded that Thomas Jefferson once complained, "Men who have been intimate all their lives cross the street to avoid meeting, and turn their heads another way, lest they be obliged to touch their hats." That was during John Adams' presidency.
Witcover in particular has a knack for unearthing surprising facts; every few pages taught me something new. Did you know that a cartoonist named Rollin Kirby helped cement the identity of Franklin Roosevelt's 100-day agenda as the New Deal? Or that delegates for the presidential nominating convention were selected through primaries for the first time in 1912? Or that the Anti-Masons, a third party devoted to combating the Society of Freemasons, held the first national political convention in September 1831? Both books, but especially Witcover's, display a breathtaking amount of research.
The authors also advance some provocative judgments. Gould modestly attempts to refurbish the reputations of such middling GOP presidents as Rutherford B. Hayes and Calvin Coolidge. And he spikes his generally favorable history of the Republicans with the tough judgment that the party too often -- from the Civil War through Joe McCarthy -- has portrayed its Democratic rivals as not just wrong or misguided but unpatriotic and disloyal. For his part, Witcover is unsparing on the ideological confusion of today's Democrats.
Unfortunately, neither author spends enough time assessing the implications of the facts they have collected. Each focuses far more on narrative than analysis. Both books slight the intellectual history of the parties. Gould is more conscientious than Witcover about tracking the shifts in the two parties' thinking over time; but often Gould simply identifies the change (such as the rise in Republican isolationism after World War I) without explaining its cause. Both books could likewise have benefited from more social history that explored how demographic changes (such as the movement to the suburbs after World War II) have affected the parties' fortunes.
Instead, the emphasis in both books is on recounting elections, especially presidential elections. At times that produces significant rewards. Witcover offers a fascinating history of how presidential campaigns were conducted in the early 19th century. But the focus on the presidency is too constricting in both books. By dwelling so heavily on presidential races and the administrations they produce, the authors say too little about members of Congress -- much less governors or intellectuals -- who have been important in shaping their party's agendas and viewpoints over the years. Meanwhile, too much of the presidential history they recount has been covered, in greater depth, elsewhere.
Neither book spends much time addressing the threshold question of why the parties have endured for so long when so much in American life has changed around them. Yet both offer clues to the answer.
One obvious factor has been that the parties have also changed during their long lives. Both have been remarkably resilient and adaptable. Through almost all of the 19th century, the Democrats were the small-government, states-rights party. Meanwhile, the Republicans, born to resist the spread of slavery, offered an agenda of federal activism sweeping in its ambition. As Gould writes, "[T]hey established a national banking system, imposed an income tax, created a system for dispersing public land in the West, and started a transcontinental railroad." Today, of course, the two sides have completely reversed roles; it is Republican leaders in the executive branch, Congress and the courts who mouth the arguments of 19th-century limited-government Democrats.
These evolving positions, though, don't so much explain the parties' durability as point to the real secret of their success. In revising their views, the parties have followed the shifting interests of their core constituencies. Though each party's electoral coalition has evolved substantially over time, the Republicans have always been the party most identified with business, while Democrats focused most on courting average working people. Republicans favored activist government during the Lincoln administration, when business needed government assistance to build roads and railroads; when business later recoiled against government regulation and taxes, most Republicans followed. Likewise, the Democrats abandoned their resistance to federal activism at the turn of the 20th century when union leaders, agrarian activists and other social reformers flowing into the party came to see Washington as an indispensable counterweight to the growing power of corporate America.
So while the parties' views have evolved, their allegiances to the interests of their constituencies have remained constant. That may be the key to their survival. The most important divisions in American politics today aren't solely the class lines between capital and labor; cultural attitudes toward issues such as abortion, gay rights and gun control are now at least as important in driving voters' choices. But whether the cause is cultural or economic, the one guarantee in a society this big and diverse is that interests will clash. The parties endure, above all, because they have proven the most effective vehicles for those contending interests to advance their causes in the political arena where any democratic society resolves its disputes. Jefferson, again, got it right, in a letter that Witcover quotes: "In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties ... ."
It's telling that the greatest threats to the dominance of the parties have come when both have ignored a significant interest in society. The Republicans were born in 1854 when neither the Whigs nor Democrats would reflect the anti-slavery outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which cleared the way for slaveholding to spread through the territories. Likewise, the failure of both parties to respond to farmers and workers fearful of emerging corporate power during the Gilded Age led to the formidable challenge of the Populist Party (which Democrats eventually stifled by adopting much of their agenda). Perot's rise in the early 1990s, and the intense interest that swirled around potential third-party bids from Colin Powell and John McCain later, suggested the parties could theoretically open the door for a centrist competitor by diverging too sharply and alienating voters in the middle. But these twin histories show that in practice the parties have mostly run into trouble when they converge too closely and leave too many voters feeling disenfranchised by a cramped consensus.
By that test, the parties appear in strong shape today. The Democrats might not confront business aggressively enough for those attracted to the Greens, and Republicans might be too timid in slashing big government for the libertarians. But few Americans are likely to complain that they are being presented with an echo, not a choice, in 2004. President Bush and whichever candidate the Democrats nominate are on track for an election that will offer voters a stark choice on the full range of domestic and foreign issues (even the Democrats who supported the war in Iraq have been loudly condemning Bush's broader approach to international affairs). Everything points toward a presidential campaign that will be polarizing, acrimonious and probably quite bitter -- all the ingredients that make for the life of the parties.
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Choose a clear plastic or glass container, such as a fish bowl, glass jar or jug, or a container made especially for the purpose. Avoid colored or tinted glass, which will block sunlight. If you plan to grow plants that require high humidity, choose a terrarium that can be covered. Keep in mind that closed terrariums will be more susceptible to disease. Wash the container with warm, soapy water, and rinse it several times to be sure any trace of detergent has been removed.
Put damp commercial potting mixture in the bottom of the container. A general rule of thumb is to measure the width of the container, and use approximately 1/4 inch of potting mixture for every inch of width, up to 3 inches deep.
Choose plants for the terrarium. Slow-growing, dwarf plants are preferable, but larger plants can often be cut back to keep them small. As a general rule, terrarium plants shouldn't grow more than 12 inches tall at maturity. Avoid mixing plants with different needs. Tropical, humidity-loving plants shouldn't be combined with plants that prefer a drier environment. Choose plants that will be interesting because of differences in color, size and texture, but keep in mind that terrariums are too moist for most cacti and succulents.
Remove the plants from their containers. Start with the taller plants, and plant them in the back of the terrarium. Plant shorter, or rounded plants nearest the front. Don't crowd the plants or plant them to near the walls of the terrarium. Try to avoid getting potting mixture on the leaves, but any mixture that does end up on the leaves can be removed with a spray mister or an eye dropper filled with water. Don't use more water than possible, as the leaves won't dry as quickly in a terrarium.
Place the terrarium near a sunny window, but avoid placing it in direct sunlight. Heat will build up quickly in the terrarium atmosphere, and can overwhelm the plants. Temperatures in the room should be around 75 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, with nighttime temperatures about 10 degrees cooler. If you have filled your terrarium with woodland-type plants, the temperature should be around 10 degrees cooler overall, with daytime temperatures around 65 degrees Fahrenheit.
Water the terrarium sparingly. Keep an eye on the terrarium the first few weeks to determine how much moisture it will need. If your terrarium is covered, it may not need to be watered for three or four months. After watering, open the cover slightly if more than a light film of condensation forms on the inside of the glass. Open terrariums will need more water than covered terrariums, but much less than plants grown normally.
Begin feeding terrarium plants a weak fertilizer solution one year after planting. Use a liquid fertilizer for indoor plants as directed on the label, but dilute the solution to a tenth of the label suggested strength.
Decorate your terrarium with non-plant items, if desired. Stones, wood chunks, bark, or ceramic figurines can all be used, but be sure the items are clean so that bacteria and insects aren't introduced into the terrarium.
Keep the terrarium neat and tidy. Remove dead leaves immediately, and replace any dead plants with fresh plants.
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Federal and state investigators continue their inquiry into the causes of a commuter airplane crash early Tuesday night in the Manuel F. Correllus State Forest. Both the plane's pilot and its sole passenger remain hospitalized.
On Tuesday at about 6:30 p.m., Cape Air flight No. 1381, bound from Providence to the Vineyard was making an instrument approach to the Martha's Vineyard Airport when it crashed three quarters of a mile short of Runway 24. Miraculously, the pilot and passenger were able to extricate themselves from the plane before it was engulfed in flames. The pilot, Mark Trafton, 40, of Westport was listed in critical condition last night at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, suffering from first and second-degree burns.
The passenger, Sharon Stevens-Grunden, 44, of Oak Bluffs is at Martha's Vineyard Hospital in fair condition, according to her husband, Dave Grunden, an Oak Bluffs shellfish constable. "We are all very lucky she survived," said Mr. Grunden, yesterday. "The prognosis is that she will make a full recovery. The burns will heal."
Mrs. Stevens-Grunden was on her way back from Florida after spending a week taking care of her mother, Mary Stevens.
Mrs. Stevens-Grunden is a respected volunteer in the Island chapter of the Red Cross and is credited for keeping that organization going during difficult times. Mr. Grunden said his wife never lost consciousness during the accident. Yesterday, she opened her eyes for the first time. First and second-degree burns to her face caused swelling, which Mr. Grunden said has begun to recede.
Investigators do not know what caused the 20-year-old, twin-engine Cessna 402 to go down short of the runway. According to reports, the weather was not extreme, overcast with a cloud ceiling of 100 feet. The wind was out of the southwest between 15 and 20 knots. There had been fog earlier in the evening. Shortly after the crash, the moon came out.
On Wednesday, a lead investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board, along with representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Massachusetts Aeronautics Commission, were on the scene. A quarter-acre crash scene in the state forest was defined by yellow plastic ribbon. The plane sat amid broken oak and scrub oak, pointed away from the airport. In the late afternoon, a representative from of the engine manufacturer, Continental, was getting assistance from the Martha's Vineyard Airport staff to recover the two engines. The investigators included a representative from Cessna, the airframe manufacturer.
A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board won't be out for a week.
Yesterday, Dan Wolf, the president of Cape Air, visited the crash scene. Mr. Wolf said his company is conducting its own investigation into the cause of the plane crash, but for now the emphasis is to make sure his staff are okay. Because of the medical condition of the pilot, no one has yet spoken with him.
A crisis counselor has been talking to staff at the company office at Martha's Vineyard Airport. This is the first significant airplane crash in the company's 12-year history. Said Mr. Wolf: "We care about each other and the customers. This strikes at the heart of all of us. We are in a grieving process right now. While there wasn't a loss of life, it is very difficult time for us."
The story of the survival of the pilot and passenger is being told and retold. Mr. Grunden said his wife deliberately chose not to sit in the cockpit of the plane before it left T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I. Normally when there is no one else in the plane, the passenger is invited to sit in the cockpit with the pilot. Instead, she sat behind the pilot.
Mr. Grunden said that moments before the crash, his wife told him, she felt a bump and heard an alarm sound in the cockpit. The plane then straightened, the alarms went out, there was a violent shake and then the plane crashed. She told him the pilot broke through his window and with his help, she followed him out.
Mr. Grunden said: "I heard from people that the way the plane landed may have been what saved their lives." Others have commented that the plane cartwheeled, spinning around as it fell to the ground, which explains why it is pointed away from the airport.
Once away from the plane, the pilot made the call for help, dialing 911 from his cellular telephone.
Peter Forend, 43, Oak Bluffs assistant fire chief, was among the first firemen to arrive at the scene. Word came over the communications center radio that a plane had crashed in the woods and that the call had been made by the pilot. "I was sitting at my dinner table programming my cell phone when the call came in," said Mr. Forend. Within minutes he had grabbed his gear and driven his pickup truck to the Airport Road, where a fire had been spotted. Mr. Forend went into the forest with an Edgartown police officer and a fireman from Edgartown. State environmental police Sgt. William L. Searle was the first to spot the plane crash.
Mr. Forend carried his flash light into the darkness. "We were probably 100 yards into the forest when Sharon and the pilot met us. They came up to us. They startled us when we saw them. We confirmed with them that there were only two in the plane. They both wanted to get out of the forest."
Ambulances from Edgartown and Oak Bluffs were en route.
"It didn't look like that big a flame. It looked like a campfire," Mr. Forend said. He said the pilot's clothing hung in pieces from him.
"We wanted him to sit down," Mr. Forend said. "He didn't want to sit down, he wanted to get out of the forest. He was pretty determined considering how injured he was. First thing I asked him was how many: He said two."
A West Tisbury brush breaker was the first vehicle to get to the plane crash. Foam was sprayed on the burning plane, according to Antone Bettencourt, Edgartown fire chief.
Edgartown police officer Michael Gazaille said of the two survivors: "I saw them come out of the forest. When I saw the plane, I couldn't imagine those two people walking from it."
Mr. Grunden was driving to the airport along the Airport Road when he saw the public safety vehicles parked on the side of the road. "I saw the crash truck cross the road in front of me. First I thought the worst. I looked at the clock," he said. "I continued to the airport, hoping that it wasn't her plane."
When Mr. Grunden reached the Cape Air counter, he met Colin Ewing, the manager. "He was trying to verify whether it was the Cape Air plane that went down."
Mr. Grunden said: "A taxi driver had a scanner. He heard there were two survivors. Colin Ewing said there were only two on the plane."
Mr. Grunden drove straight to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital emergency room. "She was already there," he said.
Mr. Grunden said: "She told me she consciously tried to hold her breath while in the plane. She knew it wasn't good."
Since the accident, Mr. Grunden said he and his family have received dozens of calls from friends and family as far away as Tennessee and California. "We thank everyone for their concern."
And to no surprise, because his wife has been such an active person in the Red Cross, Mr. Grunden said they have gotten calls from the regional and national offices of the American Red Cross wanting to help.
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Commuters move slowly in Los Angeles. Studies show that talking to your car's voice technology impairs driving.
- Clifford Nass: More of our brain is devoted to speech than anything else; we love to talk
- Nass: Talking to technology in your car is not natural and it confuses your brain
- He says even with hands on wheel and eyes on road, talking to your car impairs driving
- Nass: Your brain works to fill in the blanks talking to an entity you can't see and doesn't listen
Editor's note: Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University and director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab. He is the author of "The Man Who Lied to his Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships," "Wired for Speech" and "The Media Equation."
(CNN) -- Speaking is profoundly human: More of the human brain is devoted to speech than any other activity. People can have an IQ of 50, or a brain that is only one-third the normal size and have difficulties with many simple tasks, but they can speak.
Humans are so tuned to words that from about the age of 18 months, children learn about eight to 10 new words a day, a rate that continues until adolescence.
Humans love to speak: When two hearing people encounter each other, they will speak, despite having other means of communication such as gesturing or drawing. Even when people speak different languages or come from different cultures, they will try to find common words and phrases.
One-day-old infants can distinguish speech from any other sounds and 4-day-olds can distinguish between their native language and other languages. Even in the womb, a fetus can distinguish her or his mother's voice from all other female voices. Adults can distinguish speech sounds at twice the rate of any other sounds, aided by special hair cells in the outer right ear.
Curbing distracted driving
NTSB: No cell phones while driving
Among all animals, only humans have the necessary breathing apparatus and musculature to be able to speak: despite the "Planet of the Apes," no primate could speak like a person, even if their brains grew. Even human ancestors such as the Neanderthal could not possibly speak: speech is a new and remarkably impressive ability.
So, there is nothing so human as speech -- at least until modern technologies came along. Through striking advances in a computer's ability to understand and produce speech, it is common to use your telephone to make airline reservations, answer questions and search the Web.
Because of the shrinking size and increasing speed of computers, it is also possible to speak directly to your automobile.
From putting up with the car intoning, "Your door is ajar," we have moved to navigation systems that can tell you where to find a latte and car interfaces that understand spoken commands and even allow drivers to dictate e-mails, texts and make phone calls.
What could be more simple and natural than talking, even to a technology? And speaking to cars seems particularly desirable. We don't have to take our eyes from the road or our hands from the wheel to select buttons or make choices: Why not let our mouths and our ears do all the work?
Unfortunately, it's not so simple or so desirable.
Recent research by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, conducted by David Strayer at the University of Utah, finds that the new technology can be so distracting it impairs the ability to drive. Studies found that while driving, our attention becomes overloaded by speaking. It basically takes our minds, if not our eyes, off the road.
Here are three reasons why talking while driving is so distracting, and not as safe and effective as you might think:
People like to picture who they are talking with. When you speak with someone face-to-face, you "hear lips and see voices": Your brain automatically and easily focuses on the person.
When you speak on the telephone, you use brainpower to create a mental image of the person you are talking with: The less you know the person, the more mental workload it takes. When you talk to a car, use a phone in a car or dictate a text message, your brain has to do a great deal of work to picture with whom you are communicating. When you're thinking that hard, it's very difficult to pay attention to the road.
That's why talking on a cell phone -- hands free or not -- is much more dangerous than talking to a passenger. The need to imagine steals from attention to the road.
People want to be understood. Although people love to speak, there are few more frustrating things than someone not listening. Listeners puts a great deal of energy into showing that they are listening: They nod their head, say "uh huh," open their eyes and change their posture. People are built to expect these signals of attention, but cars refuse to provide them.
As a result, drivers become overly concerned with whether the car understands or is even listening, and their attention is again drawn away from the road. In addition, the voice of the car does not have the rich vocal cues that indicate engagement and emotion, providing further evidence that the car isn't understanding.
Cars are not native speakers. When you encounter someone who isn't facile in your language, you have to put a great deal of time into selecting the right words, avoiding idioms and speaking slowly and clearly. Speech is no longer an easy and natural means of communication in these instances.
While it is remarkable that cars can understand something that took billions of years of human evolution, the typical car recognition rate of 85% to 95% makes it a mediocre second-language speaker. As a result, speech becomes effortful and demanding, stealing attention from the road.
Because of these problems, my laboratory and laboratories around the world are trying to find ways to support the driver in creating mental images, in showing that the car wants to understand and enabling the car to understand at levels equal to or even better than a person.
And soon cars will be driving themselves, so that people can ignore the road and multitask their way to fighting for attention from each other, just as they do outside the car.
Follow us on Twitter @CNNOpinion.
Join us on Facebook/CNNOpinion.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Clifford Nass.
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SPOTLIGHT ON: the City Council
By Christine Bruzzese
The City Council is the legislative branch of New York City. Established by law in 1937 as the successor to the Board of Aldermen, this entity makes decisions on land use, oversees legislation and the budgeting process and monitors the performance and functions of city agencies. This article highlights some resources in the City Hall Library collection focusing on the City Council.
Rules of the Council, published at various times, outlines the basic functions of the Council. Procedures for conducting meetings, appointing and overseeing committees and proposing legislation are given. Also included are duties of officers such as the Speaker and Presiding Officer. Holdings are from 1963 to 2002, although the Rules were not published annually.
The History of the New York City Legislature by Frederick Shaw was published in 1954. This book surveys the history of legislative bodies in New York City government and the city’s political history from 1851 to 1953. Among the issues discussed are the weaknesses of the Board of Aldermen, the concept of Home Rule, charter revision and reform, the establishment of the City Council, proportional representation and future of the Council.
Windows of Opportunity: Campaign Finance Reform and the New York City Council is a 1992 report from the New York City Campaign Finance Board. Effects of new campaign finance legislation and program on the City Council elections of 1991 are reviewed. Topics covered include analysis of elections in each borough, administration and utilization of the Campaign Finance Program, contributions and spending and recommendations for the future.
Principles of Council Reform: Ideas for a More Democratic and Effective City Council was prepared by the Citizens Union of New York City in 2006. It was written by Doug Israel and Naoma Nagahawatte. Focusing on five key concepts, the report proposed reforms that the authors believe would help the Council govern more effectively and fairly. Included are reviews of Councils in other cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. Various recommendations are given for implementing reform measures.
The City Council has prepared many reports on issues of concern to New Yorkers such as health, education, housing and public safety. A large collection of these can be found at the City Hall Library. Consult biographical files for background information on past and present Council members. Vertical files containing clippings on the City Council and related topics may also be of interest.
For more info on the City Hall Library,
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Romney Touts Business
Background in Presidential Bid
November 02, 2012
Former Massachusetts governor and Republican Party presidential nominee
Mitt Romney is running neck and neck with President Barack Obama in
advance of Tuesday's U.S. election. A profile shows more of the man who
would become the 45th president of the United States if he defeats Obama
on November 6.
The Republican ticket for 2012: Romney and Paul Ryan.
In his bid to become the USA's next president, Romney has highlighted
his business experience as ensuring his ability to fix the U.S. economy.
“I understand those things, and I want to bring that understanding to
make sure we can create good jobs for every American that wants a good
job,” said Romney.
If elected, Romney says he would lower taxes, cut government spending,
reduce the budget deficit and repeal the president's signature health
care law. He says he will create 12 million new jobs during his first
Romney made millions as a top executive with Bain Capital, one of the
world's largest private investment firms. He helped rescue the 2002
Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from financial distress and served one
term as Governor of Massachusetts.
Romney fell short in his first try for the Republican nomination four
But he prevailed this year over more conservative rivals Rick Santorum
and Newt Gingrich and overcame doubts about his Mormon religion.
Romney now leads a party committed to defeating Obama in November, said
analyst John Fortier.
“Mitt Romney may not be the most enthusiastic candidate, but the
prospect of beating Barack Obama, a person that Republicans disagree
with very strongly, is a very strong motivating factor,” said Fortier.
On foreign policy, Romney said Obama has damaged relations with longtime
ally Israel, and has not been tough enough with Iran, China and Russia.
He has criticized the president for his handling of the attack on the
U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans died in that attack.
“And in dealings with other nations [Obama] has given trust where it is
not earned, insult where it is not deserved and apology where it is not
due,” said Romney.
Romney has focused on the weak economy. In his first debate with Obama,
Romney also promised a bipartisan approach to governing if elected.
Republicans and Democrats both love America but we need to have
leadership, leadership in Washington that will actually bring people
together and get the job done and [I] could not care less if it is a
Republican or a Democrat. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again,” said
Romney’s poll numbers rose after the first debate and many analysts say
the race is now too close to call.
Some analysts say the portrait that is painted of Romney will define the
outcome on November 6.
“There is a race to define Mitt Romney to the American voter and the
race is between the Obama people who want to define him negatively and
the Romney people who want to define him positively," said Peter Brown,
a Quinnipiac pollster: "The campaign that does the best job defining
Mitt Romney is going to win.”
Mitt Romney is 65 and has been married to his wife Ann since 1969, and
they have five sons.
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In 2000, EPIX Pharmaceuticals harnessed cutting-edge technology developed at Tel Aviv University to create a computer-based approach to drug discovery for diseases and ailments involving membrane proteins. Recognizing that this approach might help open up novel avenues to study and ultimately correct the defective protein CFTR, the CF Foundation met with EPIX to explore a potential collaboration.
In 2005, with significant financial support and expertise from Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics (CFFT), the nonprofit drug discovery and development arm of the CF Foundation, EPIX researchers got to work.
Using EPIX proprietary PREDICT™ technology, researchers aimed to create a 3-D model of CFTR and then determine how small molecules could bind to the protein and reverse the effects of mutations in CFTR that cause cystic fibrosis. “With greater knowledge of the 3-D structure, we have a higher chance of identifying potential drugs to treat CF. We have applied our PREDICT™ technology to membrane proteins and have four clinical programs that resulted from our approach. Our CFTR program could one day have a meaningful impact on CF patients’ lives, and that is truly exciting,” said Chen Schor, chief business officer at EPIX.
Currently, EPIX scientists are working to identify sites within the CFTR protein that may be good targets for treatment and then EPIX expects to use their unique computer-based screening approach to search all EPIX’s compound libraries for drugs that may work on those sites. Already they are beginning to see the fruits of their labor. In 2006, EPIX scientists identified a potential binding site on the CFTR protein structure that lends itself to an in silico (computer simulation) screening approach. This past March, EPIX completed the first round of in silico screening, and has selected a set of more than 500 molecules for biological testing at a third party laboratory. By August, EPIX had successfully identified a potential compound through the application of their computational-medicinal chemistry approach to drug discovery and development. This compound could increase the levels of the CFTR protein, which may improve the activity of the CFTR protein. The discovery of this compound marks another milestone in the Foundation’s collaboration with EPIX.
“The scientific team has really pulled out all the stops to deliver results, and they have achieved two major milestones earlier than originally planned—one by nearly a year. With active compounds emerging already, our collaboration with EPIX is indeed promising. We hope to identify at least one and possibly several potential drug candidates, which would be designed to restore the proper function of the CFTR protein,” said Diana Wetmore, vice president of alliance management at the CF Foundation.
“We truly enjoy working with the Foundation team—they bring a lot of expertise to the table and this results in a very productive program focused on treating CF patients,” concluded Schor.
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Samuel and Margaret Irvine Todd are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter Sarah Armina Todd to Joseph Russell Donaldson, son of William and Catherine Scott Donaldson. Joseph and Sarah were married 19 November 1862 in Pittsburgh, Frontenac, Ontario.
We really do not know much about this family in terms of personality. We do know a few things about their lives from documents left behind. I thought I would write this article in hopes that other photos may be found, but at least I can share this picture of Joseph and his second wife, Agnes.
Sarah Armina Todd was born the first of five children born to Margaret Irvine and Samuel Todd 13 April 1839 in Cape Vincent, Jefferson, New York. We think the family had just barely arrived from Ireland. The family then settled in Pittsburgh where her father worked as a blacksmith and farmer. We also believe Margaret was of the Irvine Clan in Northern Ireland, but have yet to verify any of that. We do not even know if Margaret and Samuel knew each other before leaving to emigrate to Canada. They may have met in the United States or on the ship over the pond. No pictures of her to date have appeared, hopefully one will arise at some point.
Joseph Russell was born seventh of nine children we know of born to Catherine Scott and William Donaldson 12 April 1836 in Bredie, Tyrone, Northern Ireland. We still have to confirm the exact location, but this is from family history sources stretching to Joseph and Sarah’s sons. Joseph’s parents emigrated to Joyceville, Frontenac, Ontario we believe around 1842. We have yet to verify much of the information related to this family. I have posted some information on Joseph’s sister, Mary Hutton. I have also made mention of Joseph’s double nephew, William John.
Anyhow, Joyceville and Pittsburgh are about 1.25 miles apart and it is easy to imagine how Joseph and Sarah met. Both families were in the area long enough they were probably well acquainted with each other and the myriad of cousins living in the vicinity. However they met, the two were married in Pittsburgh in 1862 and went on to have eight children. Joseph worked as a farmer his entire life in the Pittsburgh area.
Margaret Emma Donaldson was born 6 February 1864 in Joyceville and died 11 June 1916. We do not know where she died or if she ever married.
William Scott Donaldson was born 18 June 1865 in Joyceville and died 12 September 1913 in Ogden, Weber, Utah. He worked for the Union Pacific Railroad, which took him west. There he met and married Mary Elizabeth Williams. I have written of their life at this link: Donaldson-Williams Wedding.
Samuel Gordon Donaldson was born 23 February 1867 in Joyceville and died 22 October 1933 in Cleveland, Cuyahoga, Ohio. He married Catherine Joyce 18 January 1899.
Joseph Russell Donaldson was born 15 September 1868 in Joyceville and died 19 October 1922 in Toronto, York, Ontario. He married Mary Elizabeth Connell 1 May 1899 in Joyceville.
George Donaldson was born 10 October 1871 in Joyceville and died 8 December 1943 in Watertown, Jefferson, New York. He married Florence Martha Carey 9 January 1896 in Clayton, Jefferson, New York.
Sarah Gertrude Donaldson was born 15 July 1873 in Joyceville. We do not know anything really more about her other than she married Harry Joseph Houghton 22 April 1903. As far as we can tell, they moved to Lakewood or Cleveland in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
Harriett Edith Donaldson was born 10 September 1875 in Joyceville. We do not know anything more about her other than she married Arnold Lovell 25 July 1903.
Robert John Donaldson was born 26 July 1877 in Joyceville and died 24 May 1878 in Pittsburgh.
Sarah then died 4 October 1880 in Pittsburgh and was buried in the Sandhill Cemetery in Joyceville.
Joseph remarried 15 July 1891 in Odessa, Lennox and Addington, Ontario. We do not know a whole lot about her other than it appears she was born 14 June 1842 in Quebec and died 20 February 1925. Her parents are listed on her death certificate as Henry Quirts and Ann Jane Farquar. Therefore, we assume Dunlop was the name of a previous husband. We have not found anything more definitive.
When retirement came, Joseph moved to Kingston, Frontenac, Ontario. It is here we presume he met Agnes. He lived in Kingston until he passed away in that city 19 January 1925. He was buried next to Sarah in Sandhill Cemetery in Joyceville.
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- 2013 BIAK Summit Recap
- A Study of Living with Traumatic Brain Injury in Rural Communities
- Fact Sheets
- Brain Injury
- Traumatic Brain Injury
- Gray Matters
- Terrill Scholarship Fund
- Survivors & Families
- Prevention & Safety
- Military & Veterans
- News & Events
- Quinlan Brain Tumor Foundation
- Winter 2013
What is Tramatic Brain Injury?
Brain injury is any injury to the brain. Sometimes it is referred to as a TBI - traumatic brain injury. This means that it is caused by a blow or jolts to the head or is a penetrating head injury that disrupts the function of the brain. Frequently you will hear the term ABI - acquired brain injury. This simply means a brain injury which is not hereditary, congenital or degenerative. What ever the term assigned, a brain injury is a devastating and life changing event.
The most frequent cause of brain injury in the US is falls. In Kentucky, the most frequent cause of brain injury and brain injury related death is motor vehicle traffic accidents. Teens, especially male are the most likely to sustain a brain injury or die of a brain injury because of a motor vehicle accident. Teens in Kentucky make up 1 in 10 deaths on Kentucky highways and one in 6 of the severe injuries.
Other causes of brain injury include:
Illnesses such as infections, tumors, seizures, strokes, vein disorders
Alcoholism and substance abuse
Too little oxygen to the brain from heart attack, near suffocation or drowning
Most injuries are the result of bleeding, twisting or tearing of brain tissue, known as shearing. Changes in the individual who suffers a brain injury depend on where the brain is injured.
Brain injuries are called mild, moderate and severe. Over 75% of all brain injuries are mild. Most people who experience mild brain injury have no loss of consciousness or very brief loss – less than 15 minutes. They may be dazed, have a vacant stare but have a normal neurological exam. Often people with mild brain injury do not even go to the hospital to seek treatment. Some symptoms may not appear until later. A moderate brain injury is one that results in a loss of consciousness that can last minutes or a few hours and is followed by a few days or weeks on confusion. Severe brain injury almost always results in prolonged unconsciousness or coma lasting days, weeks or even longer.
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Of the 10 different options presented to better utilize the school district’s 14 elementary schools and five support buildings, Twin Beach Elementary School would be closed under nine of them, according to an updated facility study presentation based on the findings of Plante Moran, the firm conducting the study for the Walled Lake Consolidated School District.
Plante Moran’s recent presentation of options to school board members is just one more step completed in the facility study initiative that has been ongoing for the past few months.
According to Walled Lake Schools Director of Community Relations Judy Evola, the district is conducting the study to “best ensure that we are utilizing our buildings’ space in the most cost-effective, efficient ways and that our facilities balance with our enrollment and curricular needs.”
According to Plante Moran’s preliminary findings that were released in January, the elementary schools are at 83 percent capacity with their current total enrollment of 6,618. The current enrollment capacity is 7,884.
Over the next five years, enrollment is projected to drop to 5,999 elementary school students. This would lower the enrollment to 76 percent of capacity, with most of the schools being under-utilized.
“With the decreasing enrollment trend, practically speaking, it would lead one to think that we would be under-utilized at some point,” said Bill Chatfield, the district’s director of operations.
Last month, a facility study update showed that most of the buildings would fall below a 70 percent utilization level within the next five years.
Although nothing is finalized as of yet, based on this month’s study update, the possibility exists that the district could decide to close one or more elementary school buildings.
In fact, the options presented to the Board of Education showed closing not just one but at least two elementary schools in every scenario to lower the number of classrooms from the current 317 to 259. And Twin Beach Elementary was at least one of the schools suggested for closure in every scenario except one.
Based on the results of a public online survey, the three most important criteria to consider when deciding which building to close were ranked as follows: age/condition of building; number of students attending; and cost of operating the building.
A little under 75 percent of those surveyed said they would support reconfiguration of grade levels into separate buildings, such as early elementary (K-2) and upper elementary (3-5) if it meant improved instruction and reduced expenses for the district.
Three of the 10 options, Options E, F, and H, call for balancing enrollment by restructuring this way. Option E has Guest and Twin Beach elementaries closing, while Option F has Dublin and Twin Beach shutting their doors. Option H, on the other hand, closes Maple, Twin Beach, the Twin Sun and Community Education Center (CEC) buildings based on closing the lowest composite EFI (Condition and Function) buildings and balanced enrollment.
All other options keep the traditional K-5 elementary school structure. Option A calls for closing the smallest buildings: Maple and Twin Beach. Option B would close those buildings with the lowest EFI (condition) buildings — Glengary, Twin Beach, and Walled Lake elementary schools. Option B1 also closes those schools, as well as the Twin Sun facility.
Buildings with the lowest EFI (function) — Commerce, Dublin, and Loon Lake elementaries — would close under Option C.
Guest, Maple, and Twin Beach, as the buildings with the highest operational costs, would close under Option D. Meanwhile, Option D1 would close the same schools and Twin Sun, while moving special services and preschools to the CEC.
Option G would close those schools with the lowest composite EFI (function and condition): Dublin and Twin Beach. in addition to the Twin Sun and CEC buildings.
The latest presentation didn’t include how much would be saved under each scenario.
All updated facility presentations can be found at www.wlcsd.org.
The facility study is taking place as the district prepares to make significant budget cuts for the 2011-12 academic year.
While the district initially expected to have to make reductions of $20 million for the upcoming budget year, that number has grown to $24 million after further analysis of several factors, including Gov. Rick Snyder’s state budget for the 2011-12 year by an average $470 per student.
After factoring in retirement rate increases, special education reductions, health insurance increases, temporary state and federal funds, state-funded programs, enrollment declines, additional unemployment, and Snyder’s budget, district officials now believe the district will lose $1,559 per pupil for the next school year.
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Design: The label name -- the initials beautifully drawn and perfectly adjusted for optical spacing -- are kept well clear of the large area allowed for imprinting details, jazz collectors being intensely interested in the details of the recording, such as the date and location of the original recording, the musicians involved, original matrix numbers etc.
History: According to collector Dave Dixon of Canada, "the records were only pressed by the American Record Corporation (ARC). Milt Gabler was the producer, and sold the discs through the Commodore record store in New York, which he owned. By 1941 Gabler pretty well had stopped issuing reissues, as he had his own Commodore record label going, issuing new recordings." Alternate colour label scan (below) courtesy of collector Georg Richter of Germany.
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With the swearing-in ceremony a little over 48 hours away, planning is moving along at full-tilt, including arranging the security measures required to keep the President and First Lady safe throughout. The Secret Service takes point in designing and implementing security plans during what are called National Security Special Events, gatherings of the size of the Inaugural that would be prove likely targets for terrorism. Partnering with local law enforcement and the military, the result is an estimated 20,000 law enforcement officials prepared to patrol the District of Columbia.
In conjunction with that effort, the FBI is prepared to handle crisis management should an incident incur, along with providing intelligence analysis ahead of the event. It’s in that role that Jacqueline McGwyer, an agent at the Washington Field Office of the FBI, confirmed to ThinkProgress that there is currently “no credible or corroborated threat” towards the President ahead of the Inaugural. In addition, according to McGwyer, there’s less chatter that would suggest a potential attack compared to the same period in 2009.
The decrease in overall noise tracks with what independent observers are seeing as well. What worries J.M. Berger more is the severity of what he’s seeing from the far right. Berger tracks terrorism in the form of both jihadi extremists and white supremacists through their Internet presence on his website Intelwire. According to Berger, “There are certain phrases that you see, that are always in the mix, but are more prominent now.” He described these phrases as calls to action, such as “The time is now,” that ebb and flow in their usage, but have peaked in the last few days.
Compounding the chatter surrounding the inauguration are the President’s recent proposals to reduce gun violence. Volume among the fringe right is as high today as it was immediately after the tragedy in Newtown, CT, Berger said. The real concern, he said, is that protesters will flow into the city in the hopes of setting off a confrontation with law enforcement. Berger described the feeling among the far right-wing internet communities as akin to a “powder-keg poised to go off.” Should the weekend pass without seeing that influx though, Berger predicted that the communities he monitors will calm down until the passage of any firearms legislation in Congress.
The possibility is still out there that a new threat may arise to the President along the same vein as the possible threat that arose during the last Inaugural. In 2009, law enforcement officials were reported to be tracking down leads of a potential threat from the Somalia-based jihadi group al-Shabaab. While that threat was never corroborated and clearly never came to pass, the intelligence community remains high alert.
At least one event scheduled for this weekend shows the potential for getting the far right further riled. Media Matters for America reported on Friday that the “Gun Appreciation Day” event due to take place on Saturday in protest of Obama’s gun proposals is being sponsored in part by a white nationalist group called American Third Position. Groups like American Third Position were the subject of a recent study by the Combating Terrorism Center highlighting the threat that fringe right-wing groups pose to the United States.
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by Khalid Amayreh
Sunday, July 1st, 2012
Mixed reactions characterise Vladimir Putin’s visit to Israel-Palestine, with Palestinians tired of empty words and Russia’s support for Bashar Al-Assad against the Syrian people”
writes Khaled Amayreh in Bethlehem
In a brief visit to Israel-occupied Palestine this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to reassert Russian influence in the region, especially in Israel where more than a million Russian immigrants live.
Putin received a warm welcome from his Israeli hosts who sought to influence the Russian leader’s thinking with regard to the Iranian nuclear programme.
Israeli President Shimon Peres drew analogy between Russia’s fierce resistance to Nazism during World War II and current efforts to stop Iran from enriching uranium and possibly possessing nuclear weapons.
“I am confident that under your leadership Russia will fulfil a key role in restoring security and peace,” he said.
However, it seems the excessive commendations Putin received in Israel failed to change his mind on the basic issues.
He told Israeli leaders that he wouldn’t advise them to carry out a hasty or rash strike on Iran since this would create more problems and complicate an already complicated situation.
Israel, which possesses a huge nuclear arsenal that includes 250-300 nuclear weapons, views Russia and China as “weak links” in the international front against Iran.
In his few and terse public remarks, the Russian president spoke in general terms about “changes in the region” and “the need to make peace”.
“Once again, we see that friendship and warm relations between our people is more than words,” Putin told Peres.
However, according to one Israeli newspaper, the warm handshakes and pleasantries that marked the visit hid a sharp division between the two countries on significant foreign policy issues, such as Iran and Syria.
Putin, who many observers argue has on his hands the innocent blood of many Syrians, thanks to his unwavering support for the Bashar Al-Assad regime, told an equally tainted Israeli president that Russia opposed the extermination of any people, including the Israeli people. (In 1996, Peres in his capacity as prime minister following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin ordered the Israeli army to commit a massacre in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon, murdering more than 100 women and children. He never apologised for the horrific carnage.)
Putin added that he was looking to make peace in the world and the region. “The region and the world are rapidly changing. We need to find ways to work together that will enable every one to live in peace,” he said.
The Russian leader again spoke in general terms following a lengthy meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, saying it was important to resolve ancient conflicts, especially the Palestinian issue.
“We call on all sides to resume negotiations. It is the only way to solve this problem.”
Russia is part of the International Quartet on Middle East Peace, which also includes the US, EU, and the United Nations.
On Monday, Putin was taken directly to Netanya where he participated in the dedication ceremony for a large memorial commemorating the Red Army’s victory over Nazi Germany.
For his part, Netanyahu asked Putin to make every possible effort to make sure that in the event of the collapse of the Syrian regime, Syria’s purported chemical arsenal won’t find its way into the wrong hands.
As to peace with the Palestinians, the Israeli premier said he was willing and ready to meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas at any time and in any place.
The latest phrase, often uttered by Israeli leaders, is widely thought to be a public relations ruse meant to divert attention from phenomenal Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, which many observers believe has effectively killed any remaining chances for pursuing a meaningful peace process based on the two-state solution formula.
In characteristic prevarication and verbal juggling, Netanyahu told Putin: “The key to peace is complex, but in the end it is very simple. Either President Abbas must come here or I must go to him, and I am willing for either of these possibilities to occur. However, we must begin to talk. I hope you will convey this message when you meet Abbas tomorrow.”
The truth, however, is that Palestinian and Israeli leaders met numerous times over the years, but without making any real progress towards ending the Israeli occupation, which began in 1967. The main reason for this failure stems from Israel’s recalcitrant refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 war.
Abbas and other Palestinian leaders on Tuesday received Putin in the city of Bethlehem where a gigantic wall erected by Israel is throttling the town, giving it the air of a detention camp.
Putin told his Palestinian hosts that Russia was still supporting endeavours to establish a viable state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
“Russia has no problem recognising a Palestinian state,” Putin told Abbas.
The Russian leader also praised Abbas for his “responsible” position in negotiations with Israel, an allusion to the Palestinian leader’s refusal to resume stalled peace talks with Israel until the latter halts settlement expansion activities.
Abbas surprised Putin by announcing that the city of Bethlehem intended to name one of the town’s streets after him. He was also awarded the Palestinian Authority (PA) Medal of Honour. The PA also refused to allow any demonstration against Putin, particularly protest against Russia’s support and backing of the Assad regime. A solid majority of Palestinians are believed to identify with the Syrian revolution against the minority-Alawite regime in power.
Given Russia’s clear complicity in the Syrian bloodbath, many Palestinians believe Putin stands to be condemned, not commended, for his alliance with the Assad regime.
However, for the Palestinian leadership, whatever happens in Syria must not interfere with the need to put Palestinian interests first.
It is unlikely that Putin’s visit to occupied Bethlehem and occupied Jerusalem will have a far-reaching impact on the basic elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the United States has a virtual monopoly on the so-called peace process.
source: Ahram Weekly
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The Taming of Wuthering Heights
There are movies we watch with a particular kind of divided attention: half following the action on screen, half trying to imagine the pitch meeting at which a producer was persuaded that the film would be (profitably) similar to a recent film that did well at the box office. During the many dull passages—lengthy shots of fluttering insects and of birds wheeling over the scenic British countryside—in the latest Wuthering Heights, directed by the British filmmaker Andrea Arnold and now being released in the United States, I found myself wondering how anyone could have been convinced that what the culture needed was yet another cinematic treatment of Emily Brontë’s novel. If one counts feature films, TV mini-series, Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión (1954), and Kiju Yoshida’s Arashi Ga Oka (1988), audiences have had more than twenty opportunities to watch Brontë’s doomed lovers race across the wind-swept moors.
Then, about an hour into the newest version, it struck me: it’s Twilight! Transplanted from the rainy Pacific Northwest to even rainier rural England, deftly substituting a ghost for a vampire, the film contains many of the elements that made the screen version of Stephenie Meyer’s novel such a hit: repressed adolescent passion, self-denial, questions of masculinity, sexual competition, renunciation, romance thwarted by restrictive tribal loyalties. That’s how I would have pitched the film, and the fact that I was thinking of it while watching Heathcliff and Catherine break each other’s hearts was an indication of Arnold’s failure to capture a fraction of Brontë’s genius.
The most recent adaptation of the 1847 novel is by no means the worst; it may be hard to find one sillier than the MTV Wuthering Heights, a 2003 musical in which a tow-headed Heathcliff is brought home by Dad in a pick-up truck. But none of the versions I’ve seen have been very good. In William Wyler’s 1939 production, the bouncy theatricality of Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff and Merle Oberon’s histrionic Cathy fail utterly to convey the chemistry of Brontë’s characters. The clips from Abismos de Pasión I’ve watched are weirdly fascinating, but its creepy necrophilia and gothic Catholicism owe more to Buñuel than to Brontë. The 1992 Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights—the title recalls the Hollywood joke about Mary Shelley trying to get her name taken off the picture when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appeared in 1994—includes the second half of the novel, which the new film and most other versions omit. Yet whatever benefit this rare fidelity to the book generates was subverted by the distractions of the outrageous black fright wig intended to make Ralph Fiennes’s Heathcliff look like a gypsy. Like most previous adaptations, Arnold’s film ends soon after Cathy’s death. We see Heathcliff gaining possession of Wuthering Heights, but are spared the novel’s disturbing portrayal of a second generation—Cathy’s daughter and Heathcliff’s son—living in squalid circumstances, bullied and tyrannized by Heathcliff.
United Artists/Plexus Film
All these filmmakers must have understood that bringing Wuthering Heights to the screen posed daunting challenges. But it was not in their interests to acknowledge that those aspects of the novel that make it so tricky to film—its wild originality, its immensely intricate narrative structure, its hyper-romanticism masquerading as naturalism, the dialogue that makes its characters seem always to be shouting even when they are conversing—are precisely what makes the book so great. Almost invariably, the novel’s most affecting scenes—Catherine’s description of the dream in which she looks down on Wuthering Heights from heaven and begs to be sent back to earth, the verbose and eloquent argument that erupts between Catherine and Heathcliff on her deathbed—seem more than slightly ludicrous when acted out in front of a camera.
One can imagine that the prospect of adapting the novel might appeal to film executives who had never read it but only the “coverage.” Presumably, this summary would emphasize the doomed love between two strong, memorable characters but would omit the poetry of Bronte’s language and the excesses of emotion and behavior that are entirely persuasive on the page but less convincing on the screen. One thinks of the ways in which the numerous film versions of Jane Eyre have retained the romance between Mr. Rochester and the impecunious governess, but sacrificed what is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the novel: its frank portrayal of female rage and class resentment.
Some of the problems involved in bringing Wuthering Heights to the screen result from its sheer formal complexity that makes the book at once more bizarre and more plausible than a straightforward narrative might be. Readers will recall that the book is structured as a series of interlocking stories within stories: The first narrator is a gentleman named Mr. Lockwood who takes up lodging at Thrushcross Grange; obliged by a storm to spend the night at nearby Wuthering Heights, he reads a passage from Catherine Earnshaw’s journal, then has a dream of—or a visitation from—her plaintive ghost, hovering outside the window and pleading to be admitted. Curious about this strange place and its inhabitants, he extracts their history—a narrative that makes up the body of the novel—from the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who is perhaps the only sensible member of the household and thus the most qualified to give Lockwood (and the reader) a reliable account of the high drama that has occurred there.
Also included in the novel is a letter from Isabella Linton, the sister of Catherine’s husband, describing her disastrous marriage to Heathcliff; a long penultimate section in which Heathcliff’s moral degeneration accelerates and in which Catherine’s daughter and Heathcliff’s son reenact, in even more dismal circumstances, their parents’ misery; and finally a coda in which Mr. Lockwood returns to hear (again from Nelly) how the story has turned out.
But these obstacles of form might be relatively simple to overcome (presumably a film could dispense with Lockwood and Nelly, though much would be lost). By contrast, the content of the book—the nature of its characters, and the lethal cocktail of psychology, destiny, and coincidence that Emily Brontë has brewed to ensure her protagonists’ downfall—is exceedingly difficult to capture. If Heathcliff and Cathy were filmed as Brontë wrote them, the result would be a love story without a conventional hero or a heroine. Their arrogance, willfulness, brutality, and self-destructive impulsivity are diluted and tamed into something more familiar and acceptable to the cinema audience: lovers who are flawed but likeable, troubled but sympathetic, more sinned against than sinning.
Filmed versions of the novel have attempted to normalize a relationship that is anything but normal. Perhaps overstating his case, but not by much, Georges Bataille wrote that Emily Brontë “has a profound experience of the abyss of Evil. Though few people could have been more severe, more courageous or more proper, she fathomed the very depths of Evil.” In the novel, Heathcliff is indeed an outcast, abandoned on the streets of Liverpool until Catherine’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, rescues him; he is subsequently mistreated by his adoptive brother, Hindley. But he is never the purely innocent victim, the sweetly brooding romantic rebel: the Hollywood hero. He is charismatic but intensely unpleasant, as is Catherine, and their mutual attraction is based partly on their inability or unwillingness to conform to the dictates of civilized society—social forms that go beyond good manners to include such “ordinary” moral qualities as kindness, generosity, and conscience. By the end of the novel, Heathcliff has become a monster—a lovelorn, heartbroken monster, but a monster nonetheless.
In what is perhaps the most talked-about aspect of Arnold’s adaptation, Heathcliff’s racial identity has been altered; he is no longer a gypsy, but is black. His child self, as played by a sweetly winning Solomon Glave, patiently endures the racist insults to which he is subjected. When as an adult, played by James Howson, he returns to Wuthering Heights, he has become not only more prosperous but more aggressive; we see him striking the hapless Isabella. But his transformation is here made to follow a basic principle of current psychology—the abused becomes the abuser—rather than to emerge from the depths of selfishness, calculated vengefulness, rage, and bitterness that Emily Brontë plumbed with such uncompromising bravery. Throughout the novel, the words “Satan” “evil” and “infernal” occur frequently enough to suggest the existence of forces in the universe—and in the psyche—that are more than simple legacies of one’s childhood sufferings. We can thank Bronte’s narrator, Nelly Dean, for keeping us apprised of the fact that, while Hindley’s aggression toward Heathcliff is enough “to make a fiend of a saint” the boy himself seems “possessed of something diaboloical…[he] became daily more notable for savage sullenness and ferocity.” Nearing his own death, Heathcliff tells Nelly, “I believe you think me a fiend…something too horrible to live under a decent roof.” And by that point in the novel, having witnessed his treatment of his son and Caherine’s daughter, we may be inclined to agree with him.
Throughout, the film involves more violence than any previous English-language version; with his shaved head, canine snarl, and fondness for profanity, Hindley Earnshaw, as played by Lee Shaw, resembles one of the thuggish droogs in A Clockwork Orange. Every few minutes, he is either beating or whipping the innocent Heathcliff. But the ramping up of the physical cruelty only emphasizes the extent to which the psychological brutality that gives the novel its essence and its originality has been lost. In the novel, Heathcliff tells Catherine how much he despises Isabella Linton even as he is courting her: “You’d hear of odd things if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face: the most ordinary would be painting on its white the colors of the rainbow, and turning the blue eyes black, every day or two…” In response, Catherine rants for almost a page (“I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all, when I am pushed to extremity!”) and proceeds to throw a fit—“dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, grinding her teeth”—that leaves her with blood on her lips.
In her adaptation, Arnold uses cinematic techniques designed to add verisimilitude. For the interior shots, she has opted for “natural” lighting, so that it is often hard to see what is transpiring on screen. Many of the action sequences are shot with a hand-held camera and from the perspective of the characters; when they ride across the moors, the horse’s mane appears to be blowing back, irritatingly, in our faces. Yet all this only underscores the fact that, despite the trappings of naturalism, the novel is in no way realistic; from the first appearance of Catherine’s ghost to the death of Heathcliff, the book more closely resembles a fever dream than a work of literary realism. And that, too, is part of its beauty and its achievement.
Like much great literature, Wuthering Heights changes and ages along with the reader; encountering it at sixteen is a very different experience from rereading it at sixty. And precisely because of its mysteriousness, because we are ultimately unable to explain exactly why the book so moves and haunts us, it takes on an intense and even talismanic importance for its fans. In the 1997 Mike Leigh film Career Girls, a pair of quirky university students divines the future and seeks advice about the present by opening Wuthering Heights at random to read a sentence that they parse for its oracular significance. It is impossible to imagine contemporary young people searching the DVD of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights for wisdom, guidance, or prognostication.
October 24, 2012, 1 p.m.
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Antiviral herbs are plentiful for those of us who prefer an antiviral natural immune system supplement over chemical drug treatments.
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* Garlic – Medicinal usage of garlic dates back to ancient Egypt. It contains many compounds that experts believe offer antiviral, antimicrobial, and antibacterial benefits. Studies have shown that garlic is an effective antiviral herb when used against the common flu virus as well as common bacteria such as Bacillus, Streptococcus, and Staphylococcus.
Garlic is a powerful antiviral herb and is most effective when used fresh. The bulb can be eaten whole, diced up, or juiced. For those who find the taste of garlic unappealing or are concerned about bad breath, garlic capsules and tablets are widely available. Read more about garlic.
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When used as an antiviral remedy, oregano can be taken in capsule form, made into herbal tea, or taken diluted in extract form. Simply using it in food for seasoning will offer some health benefits but will not provide the concentrated amounts of antiviral essential oils needed to combat a viral illness. More medicinal uses for oregano.
* Astragalus – Astragalus is another powerful antiviral herb that strengthens the immune system. It is a very effective antiviral herb for battling the common cold and flu. In addition to aiding the body in fighting off viruses, astragalus has a warming effect, which helps comfort the body. Astragalus is available in several forms. It can be sliced and boiled as part of a meal, made into an extract, or taken in capsule form. More benefits of astragalus.
* Echinacea – Echinacea is well known for its immune-boosting properties. It is believed that it can increase interferon production as well as stimulate white blood cell production, enabling the body to fight more effectively against viruses.
Echinacea, as well as the other antiviral herbs mentioned, is best taken early on when a viral illness is suspected in order to significantly enhance its effectiveness. Echinacea is generally available in capsule or extract form and can also be made into a delicious tea. Read further about echinacea benefits.
* Schizandra – Schizandra is commonly found in traditional Chinese medicine. It is highly antiviral and has been used successfully against viral hepatitis. Capsules are the most commonly found form of schizandra, but some herb markets may carry the dried berries. More about the schizandra berry herb.
* Mullein – A lot of health benefits can be derived from the mullein plant. It provides antiviral, anti-inflammatory, calming, expectorant, antihistamine, and emollient properties. For viruses that come with congestion, it is an excellent choice. Mullein is available as a tea, syrup, infusion, tincture, and decoction. More benefits of mullein.
* Elderberry – Elderberry has been used as an herbal remedy against colds, flus, and upper respiratory infections for nearly 3,000 years. Recent studies have shown that it is effective against all strains of the flu virus and can prevent the spread of viruses. While it is available in multiple forms, the most effective remedies are as lozenges or syrup. Read all about black elderberry extract.
* Green Tea – Studies of green tea have found that two catechins called epigallocatchin gallate (EGCG) and epicatechin gallate (ECG) were very effective in inhibiting replication of the influenza virus. Green tea is generally taken in tea form, although capsules are available as well. Green tea does contain caffeine, so those sensitive to caffeine should use it with caution. More information about green tea.
* Licorice – Licorice is a broad-spectrum antimicrobial effective against yeast, fungi, bacteria and viruses. Science has identified eight constituents of licorice with antiviral properties as well as twenty-five with antifungal properties. Like echinacea, licorice can boost interferon production. Individuals with high blood pressure should avoid using licorice, however, as it can raise blood pressure, cause sodium retention, and promote potassium loss. Learn more about the benefits of licorice.
Echinacea, schisandra, ginseng – all three of these antiviral herbs are in a wonderful supplement from Native Remedies called Immunity Plus.
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Antiviral Essential Oils
There are also some excellent antiviral essential oils that are helpful when fighting viral illnesses. Oils such as eucalyptus, tea tree, juniper, and lemon balm are great choices and also have other medicinal properties that are helpful when treating illness as well.
* Eucalyptus Oil – Eucalyptus contains three known antiviral compounds- quercetin, hyperoside, and tannic acid. There are multiple ways eucalyptus oil can be used. One of the most common uses is simply adding a few drops of oil to a warm bath. The scented steam is especially useful in viruses that cause congestion. You can also mix a few drops of eucalyptus oil into a carrier oil such as sunflower or canola oil and use as a massage oil or apply to pulse points.
* Tea Tree Oil – Tea tree oil is another effective herb with antiviral properties that is known to treat a wide variety of problems. The oil can be applied full strength to affected areas three times a day. For sore throats, mix a few drops of oil to half a cup of warm water and gargle.
* Juniper Oil – Studies have shown that juniper oil contains a potent antiviral called deoxypodophyllotoxi n. In studies, juniper oil has been found to be effective against both the herpes and flu viruses. It can be used in a diffuser, as a massage oil, in a soothing bath, rubbed on in lotion form, or applied as a compress. Use during pregnancy is not recommended, as juniper oil can stimulate the muscles of the uterus.
* Lemon Balm Oil – Another herb with antiviral properties, lemon balm oil has many uses. When researched as part of a study on treatments for cold sores and genital sores caused by the herpes simplex virus, researchers found that lemon balm oil helped heal sores and prevented the virus from spreading. Test subjects also reported that it provided relief from redness and itching as well. Lemon balm oil can be used topically, diffused, or taken internally.
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- 12-06-2012, 20:40 #1
- Join Date
- Jul 2003
- In the Centre
'Punching below our weight' by Frank Ledwidge
Frank Ledwidge is the author of the renowned book 'Losing small wars: British military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan' (reviewed by OldSnowy here) - a very well received but particularly scathing assessment of the British military's efforts over the last decade. He is an author with a good military pedigree: 15 years as a Naval Intelligence reservist with operational tours in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq as well as heading a joint service multi-national team searching for WMD in Iraq. Bearing all this in mind, the title of this work ''Punching below our weight' was only ever heading in one direction!
'Punching below our weight' is the first in a series of short e-books being published by Yale University Press - it is effectively an essay rather than a short book at around 5000 words. If this one is anything to go by, YUP are onto a good thing and I look forward to future publications.
PBOW examines the premise that the key reason the MOD never realises its true potential is inter-service rivalry. Ledwidge asserts that the primary objective of the individual services is their own preservation and advancement; this, in turn, leads to the services all pulling in different directions and expending precious effort and resources on parochial matters rather than the job in hand.
The three main examples he gives are the deployment into Helmand (to justify the army's large number of infantry battalions), the commissioning of the new new carriers with their attendant F35s (to justify having a navy) and the use of Typhoon in Libya (to justify the aircraft could be a bomber as well as a fighter). It should be noted that the principal target of Ledwidge's ire is the RAF - an amusing statistic given was that since the end of WW2, the RAF has only managed to shoot down 2 aircraft (both its own and one of those was actually shot down by itself via a richochet whilst practising ground attack). The navy meanwhile have shot down 23 aircraft in the same time frame...
Up to this point in the book, it is difficult to argue with the central tenet even if the exact detail leaves a little room for debate. Ledwidge rolls out the familiar line that we have too many senior officers; comparing the MOD's upper echelons with the US Marine Corps, a similar sized organisation but with far fewer generals. This has been argued before and here, as usual, it is conveniently forgotten that this comparison isn't really looking at like for like. The US Marine Corps is supported by the rest of the US military behemoth, for example the US military procurement system, whilst the figures for the MOD include all its additional supporting tasks.
Ledwidge goes on to target the new Joint Force Command. He believes that rather than being a step in the right direction towards true 'jointery', it is actually just another 4 star command, with its many starred hierarchy, which will add a fourth service rivalry into the equation. Ledwidge examines other countries' approaches to the problem, in particular the Canadian Defence Force and the Israeli military. Accepting that there probably isn't the appetite for such radical solutions, Ledwidge suggests following the advice of the Ismay-Jacob report of 1963 and forcing all senior officers of two star rank and above to abandon their service affiliation.
Overall this is an extremely well written and thought provoking essay - its only downfall is that I suspect most people will agree with the key theme and therefore it may not generate quite as much argument as his other works!
Well worth a read - it won't take long - and a snip at £1.19.
5 Mushroom Heads
PLEASE DON'T PUBLISH IN REVIEWS UNTIL THU 14 JUN 12 AS REQUESTED BY PUBLISHER
Last edited by Auld-Yin; 14-06-2012 at 12:52. Reason: Forgot about publishing embargo!"A stylish if somewhat eccentric young officer."
RSA course report
- 14-06-2012, 13:15 #2
- Join Date
- Apr 2005
- In front of the fire, wearing slippers with a brew at hand.
This eBook is linked to Frank Ledwidge's book "Losing Small Wars" as Capt Crusty mentions. On a similar subject and theme which Frank was involved with was the book and discussion about "Behavioural Conflict" by Steven Tatham and Andrew MacKay. Have a look also at the review for Behavioural Conflict and the forum started to try and keep the discussion going. Most of the discussion is in the comments are of the book review but some is contained in the Forum here.
I would suggest that you look at all three book reviews: Punching below our weight; Losing small wars and Behavioural Conflict plus the forum and comments to get a full flavour of the discussion. Then join in!!"Patience is counting down without blasting off."
- 14-06-2012, 13:48 #3
A host of minor loyalties & affectations, from assuring mess dinners of retired officers that they will fight for the regiment's interests, to stitching their new capbadge onto their old beret & cutting around in fancy trousers all accumulate to distract our cadre of strategic thinkers from combining to think afresh.
Perhaps a minor point, but I believe one which is indicative of the way we tacitly condone a culture which has failed us time & again.
- 14-06-2012, 15:32 #4
Is he the thinking man's Lewis Page? Or, given the inevitable "Lets mimic the USMC" simply another Lewis Page?
I am a big fan, but perhaps purely because he plays to my own prejudices.
- 18-06-2012, 18:11 #5
- Join Date
- Sep 2005
I have 2 possible thoughts (about all the single cell can manage today ;) )
a. Lewis Page could have been ahead of his time (published in 2006 remember) and saying things to an audience who perhaps didn't see the failures or defeat in Iraq, or considered that commonsense needs seniority/operational experience to be credible to a Military audience (if so, that's very expensive emperors new clothes - 406 dead since 1 July 2006 ). A number of his critics targeted the detail of his arguments, often refuting as a result that anything was wrong or any basis for significant change existed.
For Frank Ledwidge, he has the op background and experience in both theatres. The only significant criticism has been he didn't attend a "full course" at Shriv (or didn't have his full "groupthink" induction!).
Maybe after 6 years of lost blood and treasure in Afghan, even the most establishment of thinkers are having problems drinking the Koolaid and so he (ledwidge) has an acceptable profile/pedigree and puts across points that are difficult to dismiss out of hand.
b. Those who criticise Lewis Page in a knee jerk subjective and unargued manner without presenting valid alternatives or solutions are of a blinkered mindset/part of the whole bloody problem and indicative of the group that needs culling before progress can be made.....
(now where's blurry gumshield, helmet and Stage 3 trench c/w OHP??)
Last edited by smallbrownprivates; 18-06-2012 at 19:00. Reason: KlarityThe major didn't think of his superiors as fools, of course, since it would follow that everyone who obeyed them was a fool. He used the term 'unwise', and felt worried when he used it.
- 18-06-2012, 18:58 #6
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Despite massive national and international opposition, the UK Government is pushing ahead with its plans to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board (AWB) which sets minimum pay and conditions for farmworkers. The existence of the Agricultural Wages Board ensures that agricultural workers know that there is a system in place to help them exercise their rights and address power imbalances between rural workers and employers.
The U.S. based agricultural workers’ union Unite, has this week stepped up protests and actions in solidarity. We ask that you also step up to protect workers' rights for all farmworkers.
The action is not limited to UK residents so please take a moment to add your name to the international petition.
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You’d be fine in Reykjavik.
You may not be able to have easy access to every amazing soy meat analog product available, but there are plenty of markets that sell breads, produce, spreads, and what have you. And, last I checked, there are three vegetarian restaurants in Reykjavik as well.
But eating out is expensive, so if you can get used to cooking at home very often, and live in one of the bigger cities in the country, I think you’ll be fine. (Regardless of diet, most people in Iceland cook at home anyway.)
I was in Iceland this past August. I’m also a vegetarian. There were three veggie restaurants in Reykjavik which were well equipped. The restuarant pickings outside the capital were slim but manageable. I only went into one grocery store and found it to be the same set-up as back home in Canada (just an increase in prices).
Newcastle under Lyme
I am not a vegetarian anymore, but still don’t eat mammals and I look out for vege food as much as poss. Of course there’s lots of fish to eat if you get desperate.
Reykjavik is like any good city in Britain – a couple of vege restaurants and most other places serve at least one vege option, there’s lots of pizza for example.
Iceland is Europe’s largest grower of bananas as they grow lots of fruit and veg under plastic/ glass heated geothermally i.e.virtually cost free, so it’s easy to buy fruit and veg in supermarkets, although more expensive than home.
Your best bet will be to live near a large town or city and cook a lot.
“Europe’s largest grower of bananas”??
Well, I, uhm, tend to doubt that… Of course they grow stuff in geothermal greenhouses, but it’s not cost free at all. And I know of one banana plant in Hveragerði, but the only Icelandic fruits/vegetables I’ve ever seen sold were cucumbers, tomatoes and mushrooms. The latter I highly recommend, anyway :)
UNLESS you are planning to work on a fishing boat for a year, trust me: you will be fine. The supermarkets all over the Island (ahem, Iceland) are filled with things even vegetarians can eat safely ;) If you have a weak moment, try the fish.
I went years ago and couldn’t really remember— but I found this great blog that covers just this topic:
Oh God yes, you will be able to survive as a vegetarian there. The bigger cities like Reykjavik, Kopavogur and Akureyi are very metropolitan and cater to that lifestyle. Out in the smaller cities, I couldn’t always guarantee. Just know that vegetables there are VERY expensive (most of it is flown in) and the selection is not always big. Stores like Bonus and Hagkaup have good prices for veggies. Samkaup is not bad for prices and 10-11 (or was it 10-14? I can’t remember now….) is very pricy.
Do you like Thai food? One of our favorite restaurants was Krui Thai at Tryggvagata 14 in Reykjavik. They do serve vegan meals there.
here is another good resource for Iceland. It is the local English language Icelandic newspaper/magazine.
Enjoy!!!! I am missing Iceland already!!!!!!
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Even the Messiah Has a Dysfunctional Family
The degree of realism in the Torah is amazing. The author
is photographer, not a portrait painter. Warts, blemishes,
pimples, moles. He shows them all. There's no artificial
coloring. No rouge and lip gloss for pale cheeks and lips.
The Torah is a textbook, not a sales brochure. And though
the Patriarchs may schmooze with the Creator in the Heavens
above, they have feet of clay. If they were Catholic,
they'd never even sniff sainthood. They might even have
trouble getting into a warm, well-heated monastery with
its own garden and a chef who knew the secret of fluffy,
flavorful matzo balls.
Consider the amazing lineage, full of Moabites, Cannanites
and illicit love, of the Messiah, The Deliverer whose
"delight will be in the fear of the Lord".
He does not exactly drop down from the heavens, trailing
a cloud of divine glory. Why the blemishes? I don't
know- I'm only a Jewish humorist. Ask your Rabbi. Ask
yourself in your nightly 2:00am meditations on the meaning
of life. Maybe the message is just as important as the
messenger. Maybe the ancestry of the Messiah tells us
that the Tent of Israel covers perfect and imperfect,
Cannan, Moab, and Jerusalem.
He will come, says the Book of Books, from the House
of Jesse, the Line of David the King. OK, that's a nice
imperial start, but consider that the generational chain
contains the Judah and Tamar affair. (Boy, that would
sell a few magazines!) It also includes the tempestuous
love story featuring Ruth and Boaz.
First, Judah. He's lonely. His wife has passed on.
Meantime, his widowed daughter-in-law, having lost her
mate begs her father-in-law for the hand of her dead
husband's brother. Tamar, an unlucky lady, gets Onan,
who refuses to show his love in the traditional manner.
She needs a real hubby - a conventional baby maker will
do just fine. And what Tamar wants, Tamar gets. Eventually,
via trickery, she seduces Judah himself, though he is
unaware of her identity. Twins pop out of her, Perez
and Zerah. Perez, begat by Judah and his daughter-in-law,
is a key link in the messianic chain.
Now it's six generations later, and we've left Genesis
for the Book of Ruth, a charming love story worthy of
Hollywood in its benign heyday. The details are fascinating.
You can read them in the Book of Ruth, since I only
get 700-800 words to construct my humble homily. Ruth
and Boaz, a descendent of Perez, stand under a Chupah
in a field outside of Bethlehem.
(Why do all of our daughters prefer outdoor weddings,
disregarding the fragility of Chupahs in bad weather?
Why don't they feel the same passion for an outdoor
reception with bologna sandwiches and lemonade instead
of rib steak dinners and champagne at the Ritz?)
Next Story: Ruth,
the Moabite, Progenitor of the Messiah
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La Fille mal gardée: KS2 Schools Workshops in Birmingham
In February 2011, we worked with four schools across Birmingham to explore the ballet La Fille mal gardée. Rachel Hester, a former Birmingham Royal Ballet First Artist, and pianist Ian Richards visited Kingsland Primary School, Bourneville Junior School, Oval Primary School and Grendon Primary School and gave KS2 pupils an introduction to the classic ballet.
Through the workshop the children:
The project challenged the perceptions of ballet, inspired to children and teachers and gave them an insight into the world of ballet.
'The artists addressed the stereotypical view of dance and looked at the collaboration of music and dance very successfully, in an enjoyable environment. ' Teacher, Grendon Primary School
'What a fantastic experience for the children – it gave them a glimpse into another world. ' Year 6 Teacher, Grendon Primary School
'A small group of the boys thought that ballet was for girls. The workshops were effective in changing those stereotypical views.' Teacher, Grendon Primary School
'Now I think it’s like a martial art, only more graceful and with music!' Year 5 Pupil, Grendon Primary School
'Some children felt that ballet was too high brow or gender based. But they found it enjoyable and afterwards they were able to understand it.' Teacher, Grendon Primary School
'The boys thought ballet a bit ‘girly’. They were amazed by how hard it was.' Teacher, Kingsland Primary School
A number of teachers identified some of the skills that they saw their pupils using and developing within the workshops:
'Development of coordination, cooperation, musicality and rhythm.' Teacher, Grendon Primary School
'I saw huge amounts of enjoyment, and the children developed a range of movement skills, as well as collaboration and team work skills.' Headteacher, Kingsland Primary School
'Thank you once again, you now have even more enthusiastic supporters, many I feel for life.' Headteacher, Kingsland Primary School
'It was so fun to do it with a piano and not a CD! The ballet has inspired me to jump real high and learn to do a polka step.' Pupil, Grendon Primary School
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Fiber May Prevent Breast Cancer
The emphasis on healthy eating in the workplace may be good news when it comes to protecting women against breast cancer. Eating a diet high in fiber (which occurs naturally in vegetables, whole grains, beans, and fruit) may reduce the risk of developing the disease, according to one of the largest analyses of the literature, published online in the Annals of Oncology.
The research was funded by the World Cancer Research Fund as part of AICR/WCRF's Continuous Update Project (CUP), an ongoing review of cancer prevention research.
The study found that for every 10 grams of fiber consumed daily – slightly less than a cup of beans – the risk of breast cancer was 5 percent lower. Consuming 20 grams of fiber daily would mean a 10 percent lower risk, and so on.
When comparing women who ate the most fiber to those who ate the least, women who consumed the highest amounts of fiber had a 7 percent lower risk of breast cancer.
According to the study authors, there are several possible explanations as to how dietary fiber may prevent breast cancer, including reducing the amount of circulating estrogen. Fiber may also help with weight control, a known risk factor for postmenopausal cancer.
This new study comes on the heels of one published by AICR/WCRF in May 2011, which concluded that there was convincing evidence that dietary fiber protects against colorectal cancer.
AICR/WCRF will continue to monitor studies in this area, but in the meantime, we continue to recommend making sure that at least 2/3 of your plate is filled with plant foods (vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans) and 1/3 or less with meat and/or dairy foods. This simple, visual approach is called AICR's New American Plate.
For healthy recipes that help you add more fiber into your diet, visit AICR's Test Kitchen.
Coffee Linked to Reduced Endometrial Cancer Risk
Love your morning cup of joe? There has been a great deal of research in recent years looking at the potential benefits of drinking coffee when it comes to reducing the risk of cancer. One of the most recent investigations suggests that coffee may offer protection against endometrial cancer. Published in December 2011, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health evaluated the evidence on coffee and endometrial cancer risk and concluded that the results look promising: The authors found a 29 percent reduced risk for developing endometrial cancer when comparing individuals who drank the most coffee compared to those who drank the least. The researchers reported an 8 percent decrease in risk for each cup of coffee consumed daily.
Researchers say that coffee may protect against endometrial cancer in these ways:
- Chemicals in coffee, such as chlorogenic acid, have antioxidant properties that can prevent oxidative damage to DNA.
- Coffee consumption may reduce levels of estrogen in the bloodstream. Endometrial cancer is associated with elevated levels of estrogen.
- Drinking coffee has been associated with a decreased risk for diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is associated with increased risk for endometrial cancer.
Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer in the U.S. and AICR's expert report found that obesity is a cause of endometrial cancer and that physical activity reduces risk for this cancer.
So, enjoy your coffee, just remember – it's the coffee that's beneficial, not the cream and sugar!
Published on August 28, 2012
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Physicists of the University of Vienna together with researchers from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna developed nano-machines which recreate principal activities of proteins. They present the first versatile and modular example of a fully artificial protein-mimetic model system, thanks to the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), a high performance computing infrastructure. These "bionic proteins" could play an important role in innovating pharmaceutical research. The results have now been published in the renowned journal Physical Review Letters.
Proteins are the fundamental building blocks of all living organism we currently know. Because of the large number and complexity of bio-molecular processes they are capable of, proteins are often referred to as "molecular machines". Take for instance the proteins in your muscles: At each contraction stimulated by the brain, an uncountable number of proteins change their structures to create the collective motion of the contraction. This extraordinary process is performed by molecules which have a size of only about a nanometer, a billionth of a meter. Muscle contraction is just one of the numerous activities of proteins: There are proteins that transport cargo in the cells, proteins that construct other proteins, there are even cages in which proteins that "mis-behave" can be trapped for correction, and the list goes on and on. "Imitating these astonishing bio-mechanical properties of proteins and transferring them to a fully artificial system is our long term objective", says Ivan Coluzza from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna, who works on this project together with colleagues of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna.
Simulations thanks to Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC)
In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, the team presented the first example of a fully artificial bio-mimetic model system capable of spontaneously self-knotting into a target structure. Using computer simulations, they reverse engineered proteins by focusing on the key elements that give them the ability to execute the program written in the genetic code. The computationally very intensive simulations have been made possible by access to the powerful Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), a high performance computing infrastructure operated jointly by the University of Vienna, the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna.
Artificial proteins in the laboratory
The team now works on realizing such artificial proteins in the laboratory using specially functionalized nanoparticles. The particles will then be connected into chains following the sequence determined by the computer simulations, such that the artificial proteins fold into the desired shapes. Such knotted nanostructures could be used as new stable drug delivery vehicles and as enzyme-like, but more stable, catalysts.
Explore further: Cell research: enzyme questions important principle of evolution
More information: prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v110/i7/e075501
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Segway and Segway Recalls
Segway Inc., is the company that sells a two-wheeled personal transporter that was invented by Dean Kamen and introduced to the public in 2003. The personal transporter is built to balance arider on two wheels, whether it is moving or standing still, through a control system, sensors and propulsion mechanisms. The system and stabilization technology enables the Segway to balance a human and control the movement with shifting weight. The accelerometers are designed to distinguish changes in the terrain and the position of the body.
There were approximately 6,000 Segways recalled soon after their release to the public in 2003. The recall was due to a defect that caused the sudden stopping of the transporter when the batteries were discharged.
There was a second recall in 2006 of approximately 23,500 transporters for a defect that caused them to run in reverse at high speeds suddenly.
Segway has other safety issues that have not resulted in recalls, like software glitches that have been reported, manufacturing defects and product failures have all been reported. There have been reports of Segway accidents by users when the transporter did not act in response to controls. They have also been reported to cause users to be thrown from the unit when it stopped suddenly or jerked unexpectedly.
Injuries can be severe due to the high speeds the transporter can travel at, when there is a manufacturers defect. The injuries can include concussions, brain trauma, neck and back injuries or fractured arms or legs. If you were injured on a Segway, contact an experienced California Segway accident lawyer now at: 213-596-9642. Ehline Law Firm PC. A injury Lawyer at 633 W 5th St #2890, Los Angeles, CA 90071.
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Crying for Yee Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
By Saffiya Shillo
We all know the song about Bethlehem. It is sung all over the U.S. in schools, churches, and gatherings of every kind during the Christmas season. “O little town of Bethlehem; how still we see thee lie… The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight…” The song was written by Rector Phillips Brooks (1835-1903) of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He wrote the song in 1868, following a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It is said that he was inspired by the view of Bethlehem from the hills of Palestine. He rode by horseback at night from Jerusalem to assist in Bethlehem’s midnight mass in 1865. He is quoted as saying, “I remember standing in the old church in Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if I could hear voices I knew well, telling each other of the Wonderful Night of the Savior’s birth.”
How often do we think of Bethlehem these days in that way? Do you know the bleak stillness that haunts the Church of the Nativity? Do you know of its people, their history and devotion to Jesus? Do you know of the ugly 24 ft concrete Wall that has desecrated its beauty? Built under the pretense of security, it separates worshippers from their churches and families from each other and farmers from cultivating their land. Did you know that we, here in the U.S., help to subsidize that Wall and all the dysfunction in that region with out tax dollars? Do you know that the Christians living there are Palestinians, Arabs, and they cannot travel for holiday prayer to Bethlehem on Christmas or any other holiday or Sunday?
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict rages on and we, in America, think it has nothing to do with us. This conflict has everything to do with how we identify to Jesus, his message, his birthplace… no matter what faith we adhere to.
As an American, even though I am Muslim and Palestinian, I identify with all that is Christmas—especially Jesus, peace be upon him. I share in the belief of his holy conception and while I do not believe it designates him as God, my faith holds him as a revered Messenger of God—a prophet.
I enjoy the Christmas spirit, the songs, and all the trimmings. I have never felt left out or offended during Christmas. In fact, I feel even more connected as a Palestinian. What offends me is that Christmas has become a marketing event in America not a reflection upon Jesus and the message he tried so hard to instill. Christmas is America. Jesus is universal and he and I come from the same place.
My thoughts go directly to Jesus when I hear “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” I immediately picture him crying as I too want to cry when I see the song being mouthed joyfully as it falls upon deaf ears and empty hearts that sit complacent in its ruin.
I cry for the Jews that fight against the portrayal of being the persecutors of Jesus while Israeli policies enable young Jewish men and women enlisted as soldiers to persecute and oppress the people of the Holy Land. I cry for their sanity and loss of sensibility and consciousness. The humiliation and violence they inflict upon others will no doubt scar their souls and futures.
I cry for the children of Bethlehem and cities of the Holy Land when they learn hate and fear as their homes are demolished leaving them homeless, hungry and alone. They watch as family members are subjected to collective punishment and killed, maimed and tortured. All this within their minds eye while they try to live their lives controlled by another who is indifferent to their suffering and indifferent to their basic human rights.
I cry when I see people, some of my people, in the land where Jesus journeyed participate in violence against innocents; a violence that they themselves are continually subjected to and victimized by; a violence that begets more violence and stains the just cause of the Palestinian people. Israel and Israeli supporters need only ask themselves one question and act upon it: do they want peace or do they want land?
I cry for the children of America and their parents, my neighbors and local church communities that are oblivious to the suffering of fellow Christians on Christmas and everyday.
O little town of Bethlehem… How still we DO NOT see thee.
(Saffiya Shillo is a peace activist, domestic violence/sexual assault consultant and cultural sensitivity trainer on Muslim/Arab issues. Copyright Arab Writers Group Syndication, http://www.ArabWritersGroup.com )
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Letter: Legal Impediment to Non-Lethal Deer Control Methods
Hilltop Conservancy Treasurer Theresa Trapp pens Patch Letter to the Editor on deer control.
Anti-culling activists insist there are economical and effective non-lethal alternatives to control local deer populations. A previous letter explored the high cost ($3,000+ per deer) and low effectiveness of immuno-contraceptives like GonaCon. Surgical sterilization (either tubal ligation or ovariectomy) would be less expensive (~$1,800 per deer) and far more effective – however, given New Jersey’s current regulations, neither method is operationally feasible.
Under statute N.J.S.A. 23:4-42.4, a municipality wishing to conduct any kind of deer management program must first obtain a community-based deer management program permit from the DEP. Imbedded in this statute’s language is the requirement for prior written consent from surrounding landowners if access to their property might be needed to implement the program. This requirement doesn’t really impact sharpshooting programs like the County’s, where deer are either killed on the spot or do not travel far before dying.
However, per the DEP, any method involving tranquilization via mobile dart gun requires written permission from every property owner within 2,000 feet of the dart site. This is because in theory a darted deer could run for up to 1/3 of a mile and enter private property before succumbing, and program participants would need access to that property in order to retrieve the deer. As the rule stands today, if just one homeowner within 2,000 feet of a potential dart site refuses to give his / her consent – in advance – the DEP will not grant a permit.
Drop-netting or box-trapping could be used instead, but they are inefficient and expensive capture methods, risk injury and / or trauma to the deer, and are non-selective (meaning non-target deer can wander in). Nets and traps are also subject to interference and vandalism. Mobile tranquilization is needed to keep costs down and maximize the number of deer that can be captured and treated within the program timeframe.
Lastly, as the 2,000-foot restriction is essentially the radius of a circle, any potential program area must be almost 300 acres in size and devoid of houses to avoid the prior written permission requirement – and even then the program could only be implemented on land farther than 2,000 feet from any surrounding private property. Most tracts in Essex County do not meet that size requirement, and the few that do would have program activities limited to just the acreage at their center. Since deer tend to prefer edge habitat rather than deep forest, it is very unlikely that an immuno-contraception or surgical sterilization program could successfully treat the 90+% of female deer needed to reduce, or even stabilize, the herds in the County’s Reservations.
To my knowledge no other state has such legal impediments to using mobile tranquilization. If anti-culling activists are sincere about finding a non-lethal deer control alternative, they would do well to focus their efforts on amending New Jersey’s 2,000-foot prior written permission rule.
Theresa Trapp, Treasurer
Hilltop Conservancy, Inc.
- Theresa Trapp's Letter to the Editor on deer contraceptives.
- Deer Contraceptives: It's All About the Politics and Science
- Survey Reveals 50 Deer Per Square Mile in West Caldwell
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Today in the world we are faced with wars, civil wars, civil uprisings because it is my belief that people globally are just unhappy with their lot.
It is not in my view that simple we have Governments around the world under the control of dark forces (the NWO) who wish to enslave us while they continue to get rich off the fruits of our labour.
The Dollar, 40 years ago had more buying power that what it does today.
40 years ago, men worked and most women stayed at home supervising the children and running the household.
40 years ago we could discipline our children and they respected their elders.
The list of things is almost endless of how much things were different back then.
This is not a reminiscence, these are just simple facts. Our laws were much less complicated and the crime rate was lower per capita globally...so what went wrong?
Governments began legislating more and more, expanding it's powers to pervade our lives to such an extent that we are now enslaved (remember: "Show me a man who believes he is free and I will show that man is enslaved" (paraphrasing).
Terrorism, Crime Rates, Government Cover-ups etc. the list is almost endless from governments around the world and have caused the free to become freely enslaved because of propaganda we willingly give up our rights for freedom.
Losing your rights for freedom is not freedom at all, it is enslavement, pure and simple. The constitutions of nearly every country in the world today is not worth the paper it is written on, yet people think that their constitution still holds value..they don't. They only hold the value that those in power allow you to have to further their control over you, making you believe the constitution of your country is still alive and that natural government still exists.
Natural Government (my definition): A Government established by a constitution and remains and operates in a completely constitutional manner.
Today Government is not natural it is a Corporation. Do a US SEC Search and look up all the different Governments from around the globe...the results may surprise some of you.
A lot has been said about the Occupy Movement, The Tea party Patriots and even Anonymous and other groups calling for a return to old fashioned values etc..
Returning to Constitutionality all over the world is the only solution in my view however it poses this question:
Assuming that we win against the dark forces globally and we agree everyone is going back to constitutionality in their own countries. Given that we have so many millions of laws over us (over 7 million alone in Australia) how do we re-install the constitutions around the world?????????
I look forward to the answers of the thinkers on this forum as the question is simple enough but is the answer???
I am a ghost, I was never here, I am a figment of your imagination
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Just off Lougheed Highway, not far from Lake City Way, there's a small, nameless city park undergoing a major transformation. On an overcast Friday morning, a noisy backhoe claws through a clearing in the woods, leaving the scent of fresh earth in the cold, damp air. There's a murky pond filling with ground water, chunks of slate-grey clay piled on the banks and an eight-foot mound of tree stumps.
Burnaby resident Nick Kvenich has a vision for the landscape before him.
"Once it starts to grow in, it's going to be a vibrant area to support salmon fry, amphibians, insects," he says.
Kvenich, dressed in gumboots and an Australian bushman's hat, is part of the Eagle Creek Streamkeepers, a volunteer group dedicated to returning Eagle Creek to its natural salmon-bearing state.
Their latest project, in collaboration with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Metro Vancouver, is to create a salmonrearing pond.
"It's a shelter for salmon fry, giving them the best opportunity to survive," Kvenich says.
Eagle Creek has headwaters near Burnaby Mountain and winds south through a culvert below the Kinder Morgan tank farm, through the Burnaby Mountain Golf Course and beneath Broadway, then Lougheed, before draining into Burnaby Lake. From there, it's a short swim for salmon to reach the Brunette River on the east end, where salmon navigate the relatively new fish ladder at the Cariboo Dam. Then, roughly five kilometers down river, the Brunette empties into the Fraser, which leads to the open ocean.
The furthest salmon have made it upstream in recent memory is across the road from the new rearing pond on the south side of Lougheed, but Kvenich is hoping they'll use the shelter. The ultimate goal is to get the salmon as close to Broadway as possible, where Kvenich would like to see a fish ladder installed. The rearing pond is off to the side of the creek and measures roughly 100 metres in length. There's a little waterway under construction for fish to get in and out, and the stumps provide shelter for them to hide from predatory kingfishers and herons.
Pond construction started July 25 and wrapped up two days later. The Pacific Salmon Foundation and the Croatian Fish and Game Club provided nearly just over $10,000 in funding, while Fisheries and Oceans donated in-kind labour, and there were hundreds of hours behind the scenes sorting through red tape.
Metro Vancouver and Fisheries and Oceans Canada have been helping with the project, offering advice and handling the heavy construction. Jonathan Bulcock oversees the construction end of the project on behalf on Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
"This is critical off channel habitat for coho rearing," he says at the site.
The streamkeepers will volunteer their time planting native flora around the pond.
"This was a 10-year dream to get this in," Kvenich says.
The creek's already come a long way since the streamkeepers formed about 15 years ago.
"As far as we were concerned, it was a dead creek. We didn't see any salmon," Kvenich says. They started by clearing trash along the stream, which people used as a dumping ground and still do to some extent.
(They found mattresses, dishes, cellphones, VCRs, grass clippings, TVs. "We got enough stuff to furnish a house, and to add to that, a box of hollow point bullets," Kvenich says.) The members heard decades-old stories from residents who used to spot salmon and go fishing in Eagle Creek. After five years of cleaning, the group saw returning salmon, between 20 and 40 every year. Volunteers removed obstacles in the waterway, and the last two years have seen record numbers of salmon, upwards of 160, returning via the fish ladder at Cariboo Dam.
Now, Eagle Creek is a habitat for pink salmon, coho, chum, cutthroat trout, stickleback, crayfish and the occasional lamprey. The damp air is teeming with fat, juicy mosquitoes that fish like to feed on - a healthy sign of a robust ecosystem.
Like other local streamkeeping groups, Eagle Creek holds an annual salmon release event, where the community is invited to let 50,000 chum fry loose to help repopulate the waters.
Scientists don't fully understand the remarkable migration salmon make to spawn once they've reached sexual maturity. One hypothesis is that they use their sharp sense of smell to find their birthwaters. Kvenich and the streamkeepers plan to release future fry in the rearing pond in hopes they "imprint" high up the creek and find their way home.
Without a shelter, the salmon would flap continuously in the strong, rushing current, Kvenich says.
"In an environment like this, they don't have to do that. They fatten up and get stronger. I guess being in the creek with no shelter - it's a tough life," he says.
Kvenich hopes the pond makes that journey all the easier.
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Devenish Monastic Site was founded in the 6th century by Saint Molaise on one of Lough Erne’s many islands. During its history it has been raided by Vikings (837AD), burned (1157AD) and flourished (Middle Ages) as a parish church site and St Mary’s Augustine Priory.
There are ruins from different time periods on site; the earliest being St Molaise house (small church) and the round tower which are 12th Century. A second church from the 13th Century, which was extended over time, was the lower church. St Marys Augustinian Priory on the hilltop has been dated from the middle 15th Century to early 16th Century with a church, tower and small cloister. In the graveyard stands a distinctive, unusual, intricately carved stone cross from the 15th Century.
No unaccompanied children under the age of 16.
1st Oct 2011 – 31st Mar 2012 Open access
1st Apr – 31st May 2012 10am – 5pm daily
1st Jun – 30th Sept 2012 10am – 5pm daily
1st Oct – 31st Oct 2012 10am – 5pm Sat & Sun only
1st Nov 2012 – 28th Feb 2013 Open Access
1st Mar – 31st Mar 2013 10am – 5pm Sat, Sun & Public hols only
From the 1 July until the end of the summer, NIEA will run a five day ferry service from Thursday to Monday inclusive between Trory Point and Devenish Island.
The ferry leaves from Trory Point, down a short lane at the junction of the B82 to Kesh and the A32 to Ballinamallard 3 miles north of Enniskillen Town Centre. Alternatively a short stop on Devenish is included in the tour of Lower Lough Erne on the MV Kestrel from the 'Round O', Enniskillen.
Please note that the lane to the ferry is very narrow and is unsuitable for large vehicles.
Thursday - Monday throughout July and August
Sailing Times: 10am, 1pm, 3pm & 5pm (Possible additional sailings on request)
Adult fare £3
Concession/Child aged 5-16 £2
Under fives are free
For further enquiries please contact either:
Castle Archdale Country Park 028 68621588
Ferry Mobile 07702 052 873
Please contact Castle Archdale Country Park on 028 6862 1588 to confirm opening times and arrangements for the Visitor Centre and the Round Tower.
Commercial boat tours on Lower Lough Erne taking in Devenish operate from the Round O in Enniskillen (MV Kestrel) and from The Manor House Hotel, Killadeas (Lady of the Lake).
Fares – Adults 10, Senior Citizens £9, Children under 12 £6
Family Ticket £28 (2 adults and 2 children under 10)
Popular dinner cruise to Upper and Lower Lough Erne, Enniskillen on Saturday evenings operates May to September inclusive. Departs 6.15pm sharp from Killyhevlin Hotel(3 course meal),
Booking for dinner cruise essential Adults £25, Senior Citizens £23 Children U10 £15
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I made wine from muscadines and gave a bottle to a friend they said that it gave them heartburn. Can you tell me what is in wine that would do that and can I make the next batch better..??
That's a heck of a note. You give a friend a personalized wine gift like a bottle of your own personal wine stock. You probably had some customized wine bottle labels made up to make the bottles look all nice and everything, only to have your friend belch and say, "It gave me heartburn."
Seriously, we don't know for sure that your friend's heartburn was caused by the wine or not. They may not have realized that is was something he ate, or it could have been the fact that they decided to guzzle the whole bottle during a single episode of Law & Order. We just don't know. I'm also noting here that you did not say it gives you heartburn.
Regardless, the only thing you can really do to help your wine--and your friend-- is to take complete control of your wine's acidity. This can easily be done with an Acid Testing Kit. Simply put, this kit will tell you how much acid is in your wine; how much acid your wine should have; and how much Acid Blend you'll need to add to the wine, if any, for proper acidity.
You take a reading with the Acid Testing Kit before the fermentation to get the wine must into the proper range. Then you also take another reading before bottling to see if a final adjustment is needed.
The Acid Testing Kit is particularly important when learning how to make white wines. By tradition white wines are typically higher in acid than reds. One has to be careful not to go over the edge, so to speak, when getting these white wines into a proper acidity range.
In short, take control of the acidity in your wine with an Acid Testing Kit, and the next time you pass out your personalized wine gifts, and you won't be passing out the heartburn.
Happy Wine Making
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|Rediff India Abroad Home | All the sections|
Indo-US deal may die in Congress
October 25, 2005
Part I: That Obscure Object of Desire: Nuclear energy
On to the question of energy. Yes, it is abundantly clear that India is getting to be increasingly energy-deficient. India's hyper-active petroleum czars have been out there beating the bushes for good deals in hydrocarbons everywhere from Iran to Venezuela to the Sudan to Khazakhstan, with mixed results. There's a serious problem: India's projected growth rates will be seriously affected if energy is not available.
But this is an opportunity as well as a threat. Just as India leapfrogged generations of technology in telecommunications and went direct to wireless, at a huge saving in sunk cost, would it be possible to bypass expensive intermediate stages and move to what makes the most sense for India in the long run? After all, every year India is getting more and more addicted to hydrocarbons; America and others have demonstrated that this crack-like addiction is not good for any nation due to economics and geo-politics.
Is nuclear power the answer, then, to India's energy problems in the next decade or so? It is hard to believe this is the case, at least not conventional enriched-uranium technology. In the wake of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Sellafield and other disasters and environmental catastrophes, it is not clear that India should depend on dodgy western reactor designs.
Apart from their questionable safety records, there is also the question of the supply of nuclear material, particularly enriched uranium. India does not have large deposits of uranium ore. So if India goes in for this technology, it will forever be tied to the apron-strings of Western suppliers. And let us take a look at their past history of reliability. The Canadians cut off supplies when they decided that India had diverted material from an experimental CANDU reactor at Trombay.
And then the Americans. They had an agreement with India to supply reactor fuel to the Tarapur nuclear reactor till 1993. This agreement had the weight of an international treaty, but the Americans unilaterally abrogated this treaty; and they never resumed the supply of fuel to it despite thirty years of wrangling. Supplies of anything strategic from America can be, and will be, held hostage to domestic power-plays in the US, including the muscle-flexing of religious fundamentalists.
So it is hard to trust these suppliers as their geopolitical compulsions are outside the scope of what India can control. To be at their mercy would be no better than to be at Pakistan's mercy with the brain-dead Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline that is popular in certain quarters. What we are seeing here is supplier power in action, the obverse of the buyer power that India ought to be exerting. Cartels like OPEC and NSG are able to hold their hapless customers hostage to their whims and fancies.
There are also certain Orwellian terminological games played by Americans. There is one Stephen Cohen, proclaimed to be an American 'expert' on 'South Asia'. He recently made the startling comment that India is a serious proliferator. Cohen is indulging in nomenclature terrorism. The dictionary definition of proliferation is the act of shipping fissile material to other nations (especially dangerous, rogue nations). This is what China does on a regular basis, blatantly.
But according to Cohen and other 'experts', India is a major proliferator despite never once having shipped material to third countries. Deciphering Cohen-speak, what he means by 'proliferation' is India's indigenous development of nuclear technologies despite crippling embargoes. This reminds me of the story from the Panchatantra where several colluding thieves convince a simpleton who's taking his goat to market that it's not a goat but a dog, using the simple expedient of 'truth by repeated assertion.'
And that brings us to the crux of the matter. This is the fast-breeder technology that shows signs of being almost ready for commercial production. It has tremendous implications for India. For one, India is apparently at the forefront of this technology. Second, India has practically limitless natural resources to sustain this technology, in the form of the mineral coastal sands of Kerala. India has fully 31per cent of the world's known reserves of thorium. Since the reactor produces more fissile material than it consumes, this is a sustainable technology.
The target of the Indo-US agreement, therefore, is the Prototype Fast-Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu. The rest is all fluff, mere diversionary tactics.
It may well be the case that India is close to a commercial breakthrough on this leapfrog technology that renders the entire Nuclear Supplier Group redundant; hence it is important for the NSG to understand and preferably kill off the programme so that they can protect their awesome supplier power. Any bets that this is the sole reason behind the Bush administration's recent interest in palavering with India?
In that case, all the more reason to play hardball with Americans: they need the agreement more than India does, but the Indians, not being skilled game theorists and negotiators, are blowing a perfectly good poker hand and folding too soon. The fast-breeder reactor is a splendid bargaining chip: how many F-16s and P-3C Orions and what other goodies will they bid in order to get a look at this?
But I have another major concern: I am uncomfortable with the safety factor with nuclear power of any kind. It is not known how well the fast-breeder reactor will come out in the safety department, and therefore it behooves us to do a decade's-worth of testing before letting loose these monsters on unsuspecting civilians.
The only answer really is solar power. India is blessed with abundant sunshine for 300 days out of the year, and if it could be turned into electricity, India would instantly be one of the most energy-rich nations of the world. Therefore, India needs to put a crash programme in place, something like the Manhattan Project or the Man-on-the-moon-by-1969 programme, something that captures the public's imagination and involves turning the full creative energy of the nation's laboratories to the task.
And there is no time to waste. For, Indians are used to the boffins beavering away in the nation's defence and CSIR laboratories who eventually reverse-engineer whatever technology has been denied to India -- supercomputers, cryogenic rocket engines, high-performance aircraft engines, etc.
But that is no longer going to be the case. In an unintended consequence of globalisation and knowledge process outsourcing, science graduates who in the past gravitated towards the national laboratories now have other options to pursue far more lucrative and interesting work at labs that belong to MNCs. They are quitting the CSIR labs; they are even quitting the ISRO and other state-of-the-art labs and joining the likes of GE's John Welch lab in Bangalore.
Thus, it cannot be taken for granted that Indian boffins will eventually figure it out.
It is clear that the West has no major use for solar power -- just as their pharmaceutical companies refuse to do any research into tropical diseases, dismissing them as low-profit -- and so there will be no innovation coming out of America or Europe in the area of photo-voltaics. If anything does come up, Exxon and General Motors will buy up and kill them because their co-specialised assets are so large. It is India that has the incentive (no hydrocarbons, burgeoning import bill, no uranium, less investment in hydrocarbon infrastructure) and the skills to do it.
There is one final reason to cast a jaundiced eye over the proposed Indo-US nuclear deal. Let us set aside the concerns about one-sidedness and unilateral Indian commitments in exchange for vague American promises. The fact is that the Bush administration is in trouble. Indeed, some people are talking about 'lame ducks', which is extraordinary in the early years of a presidency. In the wake of the Katrina disaster, the rejuvenated Democratic Party is feeling its oats, and there is even some talk of a possible capture of the White House by -- unlikely though it will be -- Hillary Clinton.
Furthermore, the Bush White House is rife with scandal among top advisers as well as senior Republicans. Key strategist Karl Rove is under criminal investigation for having blown the cover of a CIA operative. House Majority leader Tom DeLay was indicted for violating campaign laws in Texas. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist is being investigated for insider trading.
There is a bruising battle ahead for Bush's new Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. George Bush's latest popularity numbers are at historic lows of 31%. These guys have their backs to the wall.
Given all this, just about the last thing the Bush administration will be willing -- or able -- to do is to twist arms to get a controversial bill through Congress that Atlanticists and non-proliferation fundamentalists such as the New York Times trumpet as a cave-in to Indian pressure and a violation of the purity of non-proliferation dogma.
So the Indo-US deal has just about a snowflake's chance in hell of getting through the US Congress. Indian negotiators should extract their pound of flesh from Nicholas Burns; since this agreement is not likely to be ratified anyway, there is no harm in taking extreme positions just to see how far India's bargaining power will go before the Americans just walk away from the deal. It is important to calibrate buyer power, and it is best to do it when you know the bargain is not going to be struck at all.Rajeev Srinivasan
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Video of bizarre coin-operated mortuary scene automaton that is to go to auction
Skinner will have its next Auction this Saturday, June 2, 2012 in Marlborough, Massachusetts. In addition to clocks, fossils, scientific instruments and antique weapons, the auction will feature a handful of antique automata. Probably the most interesting of these is this "St. Dennistoun Mortuary" coin-operated automaton.
This remarkable piece is attributed to Leonard Lee and dated to around 1900. Housed in a mahogany cabinet with glass front, the scene depicts a mortuary building, complete with grieving mourners just outside the entrance.
From the Skinner catalog description:
...when a coin is inserted, doors open and the room is lighted revealing four morticians and four poor souls on embalming tables, the morticians move as if busily at work on their grisly task and mourners standing outside bob their heads as if sobbing in grief...
The automaton measures 30 1/2 inches high by 24 inches wide and 17 1/4 inches deep. Its value is estimated to be between $4,000 to 6,000 USD. I would love to know where this thing was placed for coin-operated use! Most likely this was an arcade amusement.
Here are the auction details
Date: June 2, 2012, 10am
May 31, 2012, 12pm - 5pm
June 1, 2012, 12pm - 7pm
June 2, 2012, 8am - 9:30am
Location: 274 Cedar Hill Street, Marlborough, MA
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Whitney Benefits hosted a presentation Wednesday night at the Sheridan College CTEL where local Author Sam Western presented a brief history of the life story of Edward A. Whitney. Earlier this summer Whitney Benefits released two books, both authored by Western, that take a look at Whitney's life history, as well as the history of Whitney Benefits itself.
Western explains what surprised him the most while researching Whitney.
During the presentation, Western talked a little bit about how Whitney become so transfixed with working on his will.
Both books, Solace in Numbers – A Biography of Edward A Whitney, and The History of Whitney Benefits can be purchased in Sheridan at Sheridan Stationary Books and Gallery and at the Sheridan County Museum.
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Tax Treaty Overview
The United States has income tax treaties with a number of foreign countries. Under these treaties, residents (not necessarily citizens) of foreign countries are taxed at a reduced rate, or are exempt from U.S. income taxes on certain items of income they receive from sources within the United States. These reduced rates and exemptions vary among countries and specific items of income.
If the treaty does not cover a particular kind of income, or if there is no treaty between your country and the United States, you must pay tax on the income in the same way and at the same rates shown in the instructions for Form 1040NR (PDF). Also see Publication 519, U.S. Tax Guide for Aliens, and Publication 515, Withholding of Tax on Nonresident Aliens and Foreign Entities.
Many of the individual states of the United States tax the income of their residents. Some states honor the provisions of U.S. tax treaties and some states do not. Therefore, you should consult the tax authorities of the state in which you live to find out if that state taxes the income of individuals and, if so, whether the tax applies to any of your income, or whether your income tax treaty applies in the state in which you live.
Tax treaties reduce the U.S. taxes of residents of foreign countries. With certain exceptions, they do not reduce the U.S. taxes of U.S. citizens or residents. U.S. citizens and residents are subject to U.S. income tax on their worldwide income.
Treaty provisions generally are reciprocal (apply to both treaty countries). Therefore, a U.S. citizen or resident who receives income from a treaty country and who is subject to taxes imposed by foreign countries may be entitled to certain credits, deductions, exemptions, and reductions in the rate of taxes of those foreign countries. Treaty benefits generally are available to residents of the United States. They generally are not available to U.S. citizens who do not reside in the United States. However, certain treaty benefits and safeguards, such as the nondiscrimination provisions, are available to U.S. citizens residing in the treaty countries. U.S. citizens residing in a foreign country may also be entitled to benefits under that country's tax treaties with third countries. Foreign taxing authorities sometimes require certification from the U.S. Government that an applicant filed an income tax return as a U.S. citizen or resident, as part of the proof of entitlement to the treaty benefits. For information on this, refer to Form 8802, Application for United States Residency Certification – Additional Certification Requests. In addition, refer to the discussion at Form 6166 - Certification of U.S. Tax Residency.
Note: You should carefully examine the specific treaty articles that may apply to find if you are entitled to a tax credit, tax exemption, reduced rate of tax, or other treaty benefit or safeguard.
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If a CT is recommended, you did mention that it is wise to ask that a child-appropriate level of radiation be used, to cut the radiation risk in half.
So, the question is: What is the appropriate level of radiation used on a child? And if the level of radiation were to be reduced, will the procedure be as effective and the results be as accurate? How do parents know if the level of radiation has been reduced?
Dr. Greene’s Answer:
The amount of radiation used for a CT scan depends on the part of the body being examined and the level of detail needed. Far less radiation is needed to get the same image clarity in a child. Adult CT settings give four times as much radiation as is necessary to image a baby’s abdomen, and they give twice as much as is needed to scan its head.
A typical CT scan beam is set at 200 mAs (millampere-seconds) for a head CT. This would deliver about 60 mSv of radiation to a baby. A pediatric setting of 100 mAs would expose the baby to only about 30 mSv of radiation and would still provide excellent picture quality.
As a rule of thumb, the pediatric dose for a head CT should be about half that of an adult, but this should be individually adjusted for the child’s size.
Parents will only know if an adjustment has been made if they ask. If you ask, “Has the scanner been adjusted?” it might be easy for someone to answer, “Yes,” without thinking. You are more likely to get a thoughtful answer if you ask, “How will you adjust the scanner for my child?”
Read More From This Series:
CT Scan Defined
CT Scan, Ultrasound or MRI?
CT Scan Safety
CT Scans and Radiation Exposure
CT Scan Risks
Higher Risks in Children
Who Should Receive a CT Scan?
X-Ray or a CT Scan?
Alternatives to a CT Scan
When Should a CT Scan be Performed?
Important Tip to Reduce to Radiation
Questions to Ask before Every CT Scan
Other Radiation Exposures
Measures That Radiologists Should Adhere to When Administering a CT Scan
CT Scans and Cancer
When are MRIs not Practical?
What is Ionizing Radiation?
Who are Radiologists?
Last reviewed: February 14, 2008
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July 1, 2011 A new study shows that differences in the vulnerability of animals to a virus are crucial to understanding patterns of infection, and that variation in susceptibility to two marginally different viruses increases the number of infections when the two virus variants are present in the same animal.
This study, by researchers from the Netherlands and Spain, will be published on June 30th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Models of virus infection often fail to predict how many animals will become infected and which virus variants will be present in the infected animals, even under controlled laboratory conditions. To discover whether these models are fundamentally wrong or simply not detailed enough, the researchers created four mathematical models of virus infection. They subsequently tested the predictive ability of the models against data from laboratory experiments in which they exposed caterpillars, Lepidopteran larvae, to insect viruses.
"We were surprised to find that a relatively simple model could describe the data," says Mark Zwart, one of the study´s authors and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Instituto de Biología Molecular y Celular de Plantas, Spain. "The only ingredient we needed to add to an infection model was differences in caterpillar vulnerability to the virus. Our work confirms that virus particles independently infect animals, even in situations where we thought they might be working together."
The study improves our understanding of how virus particles interact with each other and the host animal during infection, and concludes that "Most deviations from [model] predictions may be caused by variation in host susceptibility." The extent to which this conclusion applies to other viruses and pathogens is not yet clear and a follow-up study on a wide range of different pathogens is currently being carried out.
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
- Wopke van der Werf, Lia Hemerik, Just M. Vlak, Mark P. Zwart. Heterogeneous Host Susceptibility Enhances Prevalence of Mixed-Genotype Micro-Parasite Infections. PLoS Computational Biology, 2011; 7 (6): e1002097 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002097
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Need to build a better vocabulary? Our 15 vocabulary wordlists will boost your vocabulary to the level of a highly educated reader.
The lists are suitable for high school students and older learners. Lists 1-10 are probably sufficient for a student taking SAT, for example. The full set of 1500 words is ideal for GRE, MAT and higher level tests.
Word Focus is our systematic approach to advanced vocabulary building. Find out more about Word Focus.
You can print out the word lists for your own use. You can also pass the lists on to your friends and relatives. You can use the lists in different ways:
You are free to print out copies of these lists for classroom use.
Do not obscure the majortests logo.
You are free to use the unedited lists in innovative ways but you must always acknowledge majortests.com.
For example, you could use the word lists as worksheets
You can also assign sentence completion mini tests from www.majortests.com/sat for homework. You can also consider assigning the antonym or analogy tests from www.majortests.com/gre for students who have reached a suitable level.
* Test names and other trademarks are the property of the respective trademark holders.
None of the trademark holders are affiliated with this website.
All content of site and tests copyright © 2013 Study Mode, Inc.
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Parshat Korach 5771
“...and we argued passionately but always rested assured that our arguments were indeed ‘for the sake of heaven.’”
These words, used to close the graduation ceremony for my cohort from Brandeis University’s Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program, struck me as especially thought provoking. The quote references a passage in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Ancestors, which reads: “Any dispute for the sake of heaven will have enduring value, but any dispute not for the sake of heaven will not have enduring value.”
As an ethical guide to our debates, arguments and discourse, this passage is quite enigmatic. What does it mean to argue for, or not for, ‘the sake of heaven’? Rabbi Jonathan Sacks interprets this distinction as a dichotomy between “an argument for the sake of truth” and “an argument for the sake of victory.” In other words, an argument for the sake of heaven is motivated by the pursuit of the greater good, while its inverse stems from a desire for personal gain.
Pirkei Avot itself references this week’s parshah it its illumination of the phrase, explaining that an example of an argument not for the sake of heaven can be found in “the dispute of Korach and all his company.” Parshat Korach opens with the Levite Korach challenging the authority of Moses and Aaron to lead the Israelite community. He says, “You have gone too far! For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst. Why then do you raise yourselves above the Lord’s congregation?” Infuriated by the confrontation, God opens the earth and swallows Korach and his followers.
What about Korach’s challenge to Moses and Aaron made it “not for the sake of heaven”? Checking the power of leaders to preserve equality within a community is generally positive. According to the consensus among traditional commentators, however, Korach was not seeking true equality. Rather, he actually sought to remove Moses and Aaron from leadership in favor of himself. His motivations were selfish and his actions ultimately were not designed to benefit the community as a whole.
As activists, this message is particularly relevant: our work is fundamentally based in disagreement, as we work to change or modify the status quo to create social change. Our strategies to accomplish this often take the form of argument, either explicitly or implicitly, with those who favor things the way they are or have a different vision for change. We write editorials, post to blogs and seek to organize others to promote our perspective; all the while, actively pushing for our vision of our community and the world.
In this age, when our words and actions are visible to everyone we know through social media, it is important to ensure that we remain motivated by truth and not victory. Indicators that our efforts have gained traction—like “likes” on our Facebook posts or comments on our blog posts—are a good thing, but tallying likes, tweets, views and comments as an end in itself inappropriately places us, as individuals, at the center of our work. Instead, we must be driven by a desire to create change for the sake of the community, rather than for the sake of our own reputations as changemakers. To be motivated by self aggrandizement leads to arguments without merit that ultimately damage the social justice community.
Pirkei Avot provides us with a model for the ideal debate, singling out the disagreements between Hillel and Shammai as illustrative of “arguments for the sake of heaven.” Though these dueling schools maintained conflicting opinions about everything from how to light Chanukah candles to what constitutes grounds for divorce, Pirkei Avot maintains that their vigorous rivalry was always motivated by the pursuit of truth, not glory. If those on both sides of our contemporary social justice struggles would be similarly driven, victory would become irrelevant and we could all unite in our desire to move our entire community forward.
Jimmy Taber is a recent graduate from Brandeis University’s Hornstein Program in Jewish Professional Leadership. After completing his BA in Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Jimmy served as an AmeriCorps Promise Fellow with KOREH L.A., the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles’s literacy program. He has also previously worked at the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Coalition for Service, Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, and JESNA. He is spending the year in Jerusalem serving in the Joint Distribution Committee’s Jewish Service Corps on issues related African refugees and migrant workers. Jimmy can be reached at email@example.com.
Pirkei Avot 5:17.
Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. The Koren Siddur. Jerusalem: Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 2009. p. 673.
Pirkei Avot 5:17.
Numbers 16:3.
Numbers 16:32.
Rabbi Charles Savenor. JTS Torah Commentary. 1 July 2006. http://www.jtsa.edu/PreBuilt/ParashahArchives/5766/korah.shtml
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SHANGQIU, China -- This is not the equivalent of Silicon Valley. There isn't a lab in sight or a high-tech industrial park in the area. What attracts most of the attention is a two-floor factory building with a signboard that reads "Shangqiu Sanli New Energy Demonstration."
Still, this is a noteworthy place. It is healing one of China's long-standing headaches.
That headache is straw, basically an agricultural waste collected from nearby farms. Workers here chop it, compress it, then heat it slowly in sophisticated, oxygen-free ovens to produce biochar, a sort of charcoal that can be used as soil amendments. What remains -- two types of liquids called wood tar and wood vinegar -- are removed to sealed vessels and are sold as eco-friendly pesticides and soil conditioners.
Through this, the factory produces industrial goods worth nearly $10 million per year. The process also produces a combustible gas that it converts into electricity -- to run the machinery.
China has lots of straw. The nation is scrambling for ways to dispose of this agricultural waste, and companies like Shangqiu Sanli New Energy Ltd. are among a few that have succeeded. But figuring out how to scale this up remains a daunting challenge.
At the end of harvest season, China's breadbaskets, from the Yangtze River Delta on the coast to the landlocked Sichuan Basin, turn into a sea of baled straw. In some places it can extend to the horizon.
Chinese farmers used to store straw for cooking and heating. But with their rising incomes and growing desire for an easier life, more rural families began buying coal briquettes and bottled liquefied petroleum gas instead. So they simply set fire to straw.
Burning straw is a major cause of smog. The smoky air also has a pungent odor that causes coughing and other health problems. Sometimes it even costs lives as dense, eye-smarting smoke clouds drift over roads and lead to car crashes.
Lawmakers here have tried to ban straw burning, but farmers in a hurry to clean fields for the next planting often ignore that. In places like eastern China's Anhui province, the government sent drones aloft to identify the straw burners.
Tapping into folk wisdom
In 2005, after hearing about farmers in neighboring villages being jailed for burning straw, Lin Zhenheng, then a 48-year-old entrepreneur, decided to seek a solution.
Lin's company, Shangqiu Sanli New Energy, first consulted farmers who have mastered the use of straw for years. Then it brought in some experts. About a year later, the company came out with a pilot facility in the heart of Henan province, one of China's major crop-producing regions.
The facility turns straw into biochar and wood tar, cleaner-burning alternatives to diesel fuel. It also produces wood vinegar out of straw -- a liquid that makes nonarable soil grow crops. The facility captures a large quantity of combustible gas from the process to meet its own energy needs and to heat a nearby hotel and a public bathroom -- a popular facility in rural China.
The company later found that its biochar can improve soil quality and its biodegradable wood tar can kill pests in farmland while doing little harm to Earth.
The discoveries have whetted Lin's appetite for more straw business. His company now runs seven such facilities across the region and disposes of 200,000 tons of straw every year.
Helping with jobs and climate change
As the means of reusing straw have increased, so have employment opportunities. The company provides more than 400 factory jobs to rural communities and helps turn wasteland into farmland so that more villagers can work in their hometowns rather than migrating to cities.
Last year, the company persuaded dozens of rural communities to stop using coal by supplying them with equipment that processes straw into pellets to compete with coal. Some farmers found using biochar can keep the same crop yield while cutting fertilizer use by a quarter.
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1/100 SCRATCH BUILT BISMARCK MODEL
(by Markus van Beek, Germany)
This impressive radio controlled model was built by Markus van Beek, and it is undoubtedly one of the best in the world.
Markus began to work on this model in 1976, at the age of 16, using only a single drawing and a photo book.
It took him 15 years to complete the model before it was finished in 1991.
During that long building period he acquired all original drawings and a huge collection of over 500 photographs.
After finishing with the Bismarck, Markus built the destroyer Z-38 from 1992 to May 2000, and now he is working on the Prinz Eugen, although we will have to wait about 12 years to see it complete.
As you can see it is not an easy job, and it can take as much as a life time to built a model of this characteristics especially if you are working by your own.
This 1/100 Bismarck model is in exact scale.
It is 2,510 mm in length, 360 mm in width, and has a maximum weight in water of 51 kilograms.
The upper deck is 0.5 mm cherry wood and has more than 9,000 planks, each 1.2 mm in width.
The thickness of the main armour plates is in scale, too, and, therefore, the front armour of the main battery turrets is 3.6 mm thick.
The propulsion plant consists of three Audi electric motors for heating a car, that, together with six 12V batteries, allow the ship to sail for a whole day.
The radio controlled functions include:
· The main turrets.
· The three range finder domes (DE-TE-Geräte).
· Running lights.
· The two search-lights over the hangar.
· The signal lamps on the Admiral's bridge make original light signs.
· CD player to play "Greetings to Kiel".
There are also some other manual functions such as pulling out the telescoping catapult, the movement the cranes, etc.
Discussions about warship models here
eBook: Battleship Bismarck.
The Complete History of a Legendary Ship.
Naval and military gifts and souvenirs.
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Vermont is a sparsely-populated state, with only one international airport at the time of publication. Many visitors are drawn to the Green Mountain State for its natural beauty, rich history and recreational possibilities. The White River separates Vermont from New Hampshire -- White River Junction sits on the Vermont side of the river. In the 19th century, White River Junction was a historic railroad town connecting Vermont and Boston. Today, White River Junction is easily accessible from international airports in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and upstate New York.
Burlington International Airport
The closest international airport to White River Junction is in South Burlington, some 70 miles to the northwest. Road travel to Burlington airport is easy, as Interstate 89 runs between the airport and White River Junction. Burlington's airport is a small facility, which is easy to access and navigate. Many travelers from Canada opt to fly in and out of Burlington airport as this can be quicker and easier than traveling through Montreal's larger airports. Airlines operating routes to and from Burlington airport include JetBlue, Delta, US Airways and Continental. Direct international flights operated between Burlington and Toronto at the time of publication. Most other international destinations are reached from Burlington after transferring in New York, Philadelphia or Detroit. Burlington airport offers free wireless Internet for all travelers, with a small selection of shops and food service options.
Albany International Airport
Albany, New York, is 98 miles southwest of White River Junction. Albany is one of the larger international airports in the region, with a wider selection and frequency of flights and destinations than Burlington International Airport. The airport has four concourses and at the time of publication flights were operated by Southwest, Delta, US Airways, United, Delta, Cape Air and Air Canada. Flights operate directly from Albany to Toronto, Canada -- other international destinations are served via transfers in other U.S. airports.
Boston Logan Airport
Boston Logan is 110 miles southeast of White River Junction. Boston is on Interstate 89 -- driving from White River Junction you can usually reach Boston more quickly than Albany. Logan is the largest airport in New England, serving some 28 million passengers during 2011. US Airways, Delta and JetBlue are some of Logan's busiest airlines, among many American and European airlines. From Logan you can fly directly to international destinations in Asia, Europe, Canada, Africa and Latin America.
Other Regional Airports
Portsmouth International Airport is 85 miles southeast of White River Junction, in the neighboring state of New Hampshire. Also known as Pease International Airport, the facility has traditionally been used by both military and civilian flights. At the time of publication, Portsmouth International Airport did not offer regular scheduled commercial passenger flights. Three and a half hours' drive north, Montreal offers two major airports -- Trudeau and Dorval -- with a full range of international flights.
- Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
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Neuroscientist David Eagleman's latest book, "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain," suggests that our brain's wiring dictates most of what we do, rather than any transcendent self. That goes for crime as well ... which leads him to suggest that the criminal mind is merely an outgrowth of a criminally structured brain.
Does that mean murderers or rapists can beat the rap by pleading that they had no choice but to do evil? Far from it. You are still responsible for your deeds, even if much of what you do happens on an unconscious level. But Eagleman argues that a better understanding of neuroscience should change our approach to crime and punishment, and perhaps even governance in general.
The founding fathers may have declared that all men are created equal, but science shows that all brains are not. And in Eagleman's view, we don't control the brain. The brain controls us ... whatever "us" means.
Eagleman is used to seeing things in a different light: His lab job at the Baylor College of Medicine focuses on how vision works, how our senses overlap each other to create the effect known as synesthesia, and how we perceive time. He's written works on a wide range of deep-think subjects, including "Sum," a series of fables about alternate afterlives.
You could also call Eagleman the prophet of possibilianism, a philosophy that advocates taking an open, inquisitive approach toward cosmic possibilities. "I think it's important, because it represents the scientific temperament: active exploration of different hypotheses without pretending we know what the right answer is in advance," he told me.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the message of "Incognito."
"Incognito" delves into the weird workings of our brain, including lighthearted explanations for visual and perceptual illusions (which are another of Eagleman's interests). But it's Eagleman's heavyweight discussion of neuroscience's social and philosophical implications that has attracted the most attention — and elevates "Incognito" above the usual gee-whiz fare.
That was the focus of my recent telephone interview with the author. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:
Cosmic Log: Do people really need to think of themselves and their brains in a different way? Or is this just a case of understanding what’s really going on all the time, and we shouldn’t change our lives because of what we read in "Incognito"?
David Eagleman: Well, I don’t know if people will change their lives, but I think that throughout history, there’s been a goal to know ourselves better, and I feel like in some sense, we are at a point in our history where we can understand ourselves at a much deeper level than we were able to previously, because now we’re looking inside the skull, at this alien totally foreign computational fabric that we call the brain, and it is … us. We can understand ourselves so much better by looking at the operations that are running under the hood, most of which have been inaccessible to us.
Q: Some people talk about the view that we have a "zombie brain," the unconscious part of the brain that takes care of everything that's done when you drive home along a familiar route, for example. A lot of the activity that we undertake day to day really is part of that zombie brain. Does that get us in trouble, to have so much going on in our brain that's below the level of consciousness?
A: I don't think it gets us in trouble so much as that it is the thing that "drives the boat." Almost everything that we think and do, act and believe is generated by these systems under the hood that we don’t have access to — whether it’s lifting a cup of coffee to your lips, or recognizing someone’s face, or falling in love.
"Incognito" delves into the frontiers of neuroscience and implications for society.
I wouldn’t say these systems get us in trouble. Your conscious mind, the part of you that switches on the light when you get up in the morning — that is the smallest bit of what’s happening in the brain. The analogy that I use is that the conscious mind is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steamship who is taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.
Q: One of the themes that comes out in the book is the idea about "who’s really to blame" for bad behavior. If there’s a criminal mind out there, it’s really more the brain’s fault, under the hood, than it is the conscious mind’s fault. What kind of reaction have you been getting to that idea?
A: The whole last half of the book is about what all this means for social policy. I argue that blameworthiness is the wrong question to ask. Brain development is the result of genes, and environment, and their very complicated interaction with one another. The important point is that you don’t choose your genes, and you don’t choose your childhood environment. And so for the kind of brain that you have in the end, it doesn’t really make sense to blame people or credit people, just as you wouldn’t take credit for having color vision or blame for having colorblindness.
The end result is that we have a big variety of brains in our culture. In the book, I say that brains are like fingerprints: They aren’t the same from person to person. So what we have in society is some numbers of people who are breaking laws. The issue really isn’t blameworthiness. It’s not a useful concept. That doesn’t forgive anybody. It doesn’t mean we’ll be putting criminals on the street. What it does mean is that with a biologically compatible system of jurisprudence, we could do customized sentencing, and customized rehabilitation, instead of turning to incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution.
Q: So would someone with a brain that really isn’t suited to society get a break out of this?
A: Nobody "gets a break." A rabid dog doesn’t get a break. It’s not the rabid dog’s fault that it’s rabid, but we don’t give it a break as a result of that. It’s the same thing with crime. But as we get a better understanding of the brain and behavior, that allows us to predicate sentencing on rational factors — for example, the probability of recidivism. Some people are really dangerous, some people are rabid dogs, and some people aren't. Right now we treat all these things equally, but we need to understand what’s different about different brains.
The other thing we should do is understand better what happens in rehabilitation. Lots of people in prison undergo behavioral changes because they have something wrong with their brain. We’ve never even measured that stuff. The main issue that our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. Thirty percent of our incarcerated population has mental illness. This is not only inhumane, but it’s not cost-effective. It’s criminogenic, which means it causes more crime. When you put people in prison, they end up going back to prison, because you’ve broken their social circle and limited their employment opportunities.
Q: Does neuroscience suggest that the solution is to warehouse people who are those "rabid dogs" of society? Are there particular therapies or strategies that are suggested for dealing with bad behavior?
A: Yeah, the idea is that wherever we can bring rehabilitative strategies to the table, we should be doing that. Sometimes you can't — for example, with people who are psychopaths. There is no rehabilitative strategy for psychopathy at the moment, so unfortunately, we just have to warehouse them if they’ve proven themselves to be violent criminals. Right now that’s our last resort. But in cases where we are able to help people, that’s what we should be doing.
Q: We should talk about the fun side of the book as well. You bring up some experiments that illustrate how weird our perceptive capabilities can be. In one experiment, a person started asking someone for directions, and while workers carried a door between the two people, a completely different person took the place of the questioner. And yet the direction-giver resumed giving directions without missing a beat, as if nothing had changed. Are there any mental exercises folks can do at home to discover the weirdness in themselves?
A: Well, all vision is an illusion, for example. It’s a construction in the brain. The brain is ensconced in darkness and silence in the vault of your skull. And yet you think you see light. Inside, internally, it’s all electrical and chemical signals. The book is full of visual illusions that demonstrate this sort of thing.
Q: Are there any other themes you want to emphasize from the book?
A: One of the frameworks that I synthesize in the book that’s really important is the fact that you are not one thing. The only way to understand the brain is as a neural parliament, where you have different political parties battling it out to control your behavior. This can now be measured in the brain with neural imaging. We can see that there are all these competing subpopulations in the brain that are always battling it out. You can call this a "team of rivals," and I think that’s a much more nuanced view of ourselves. You can get a real understanding how it is you can argue with yourself and cajole yourself. When you stop to think about it, you might ask yourself, which "you" is you? It’s all you.
I think this gives us a much more nuanced view of others' behavior as well. We don’t have to fall into this simplistic path of asking, "What are this person’s true colors? Is this person a racist or not a racist?" For better or worse, it’s perfectly possible that there are racist parts of your brain and non-racist parts. You get a much better understanding when you understand that, as Walt Whitman correctly surmised, "I am large, I contain multitudes."
He had the spirit of that exactly right. Freud had a similar idea with the concepts of id, ego and superego. What’s different now is that we can actually measure and understand the processes going on under the hood.
More about the brain:
- Interactive: Road map to the brain
- Neuroscientists refveal magicians' secrets
- 3-D images reveal how brain loses consciousness
- Identity crisis: You barely know yourself
- Decoding the secrets of your brain
- Gallery: Ten mysteries of the mind
- Still more about the brain from Cosmic Log
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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An Introduction to Struts
Welcome to the first in a series of articles on Jakarta Struts (or simply, "Struts"), the Java/JSP-based framework for building Web-based applications. While later articles will get deep into the technology behind Struts, this first article provides an introduction to Struts and evaluates the case for using it. It tries to cut through the technology and put its finger on the "value add" that Struts provides.
"What Is Struts and Why Should I Care?"
Struts is an application development framework that is designed for and used with the popular J2EE (Java 2, Enterprise Edition) platform. It cuts time out of the development process and makes developers more productive by providing them a series of tools and components to build applications with. It is non-proprietary and works with virtually any J2EE-compliant application server. Struts falls under the Jakarta subproject of the Apache Software Foundation and comes with an Open Source license (meaning it has no cost and its users have free access to all its internal source code).
In addition to helping you work faster and having no cost, Struts also helps make your end work products better. The main reason for this, to quote from Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (a classic book on open source development), is that "(g)iven a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone." In other words, so many people are using and developing Struts that bugs are found and get fixed quickly.
"Struts is a Web Application 'Framework'?"
The dictionary calls a framework "A structure for supporting or enclosing something else, especially a skeletal support used as the basis for something being constructed." This perfectly describes Struts—a collection of Java code designed to help you build solid applications while saving time. It provides the basic skeleton and plumbing; you focus on the layout and look of each room.
Interestingly, the dictionary offers an alternative definition of a framework: "A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality." This describes Struts as well—it's a way of looking at things. Struts saves you time by allowing you to view complex applications as a series of basic components: Views, Action Classes, and Model components.
"... And Frameworks Are Important Because?"
Using a framework means that you don't have to spend time building your entire application. You can focus on coding the business logic and the presentation layer of the application—not the overhead pieces like figuring out how to capture user input or figuring out how to generate drop-down boxes on a Web page.
Using a framework also helps you encode best practices. The framework developers have put a lot of thought into the best approaches to application building—why reinvent this yourself?
Another benefit of using a framework is that it allows your code (at least in the case of Struts) to be highly platform independent. For example, the same Struts code should work under Tomcat on an old Windows machine as runs using Weblogic on Linux or Solaris in production. And this can be accomplished without even recompiling in many cases—the same Web application (or ". war" file) can simply be copied from one server to another.
Another extremely important benefit—especially if you're relatively new to Web development—is that it gives you a place to start. Any developer will tell you it's easier to take a basic application and modify it than it is to build something from scratch. This feature of Struts can save you days or weeks of planning and development.
Today, I create virtually nothing from scratch. Almost no one who is an experienced developer does. In fact, some of the greatest successes in software development were based on this exact idea. For example, in 1991 when Linus Torvalds began building the operating system that today is Linux, he began with the operating system Minix. He got a copy of the Minix source code, looked it over in detail, and used it as the basis for Linux. And while the first launch of Linux contained none of the original Minix code, Linus surely went further, faster because he had it to start with.
How Does Struts Work?
Struts is based on the time-proven Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. The MVC pattern is widely recognized as being among the most well-developed and mature design patterns in use. By using the MVC design pattern, processing is broken into three distinct sections aptly named the Model, the View, and the Controller. These are described in the following subsections:
Model components provide a "model" of the business logic or data behind a Struts program. For example, in a Struts application that manages customer information, it may be appropriate to have a "Customer" Model component that provides program access to information about customers.
It's very common for Model components to provide interfaces to databases or back-end systems. For example, if a Struts application needs to access employee information that is kept in an enterprise HR information system, it might be appropriate to design an "Employee" Model component that acts as an interface between the Struts application and the HR information system.
Model components are generally standard Java classes. There is no specifically required format for a Model component, so it may be possible to reuse Java code written for other projects.
View components are those pieces of an application that present information to users and accept input. In Struts applications, these correspond to Web pages.
View components are used to display the information provided by Model components. For example, the "Customer" Model component discussed above would need a View component to display its information. Usually, there will one or more View components for each Web page in a Struts application.
View components are generally built using JavaServer Page (JSP) files. Struts provides a large number of "JSP Custom Tags" (sometimes referred to as Struts Tags) which extend the normal capabilities of JSP and simplify the development of View components.
Controller components coordinate activities in the application. This may mean taking data from the user and updating a database through a Model component, or it may mean detecting an error condition with a back-end system and directing the user through special error processing. Controller components accept data from the users, decide which Model components need to be updated, and then decide which View component needs to be called to display the results.
One of the major contributions of Controller components is that they allow the developer to remove much of the error handling logic from the JSP pages in their application. (After all, if errors in processing occur, the Controller component forwards to an error-processing View component, not the primary results View component.) This can significantly simplify the logic in the pages and make them easier to develop and maintain.
Controller components in Struts are Java classes and must be built using specific rules. They are usually referred to as "Action classes."
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Paleontologists now think they know how the predatory Tyrannosaur ate the well-protected Triceratops: by ripping its head off. The carnivore may have forcefully yanked on the bony frills around the neck of its horned prey in order to get to the rich meat beneath. The researchers, who reported their findings at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting last week, suggested this scenario after examining Triceratops skulls, where they found puncture and pull marks on the neck frills—along with bite marks on the head-neck joint that could only have been made on a severed head.
For a fuller explanation, replete with step-by-step illustrations, visit Nature News.
Drawing courtesy of Nate Carroll via Nature
Titanoceratops—it’s a fittingly majestic name for a monster dinosaur. That’s the moniker paleontologist Nicholas Longrich has bestowed on his new find, and he claims his 74-million-year-old discovery is the common ancestor of the famous Triceratops and its cousin in the triceratopsin family, the Torosaurus.
The species weighed in at around 6,800 kilograms [15,000 pounds] and had an enormous 8-foot skull — rivaling Triceratops for size. It is very similar to Triceratops, but with a thinner frill, longer nose and slightly bigger horns. Titanoceratops lived in the American Southwest during the Cretaceous period, about 74 million years ago, and is the earliest known triceratopsin. [Wired]
Actually, Titanoceratops is not a “new” discovery—but the fossil was mistakenly classified for years, Longrich says. The partial skeleton was turned up in 1941 in New Mexico, and left alone until 1995. At that point scientists dug it up and erected the skeleton in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History as a dinosaur called Pentaceratops sternbergi (in the right side of the image, the shaded parts represent missing pieces that were filled into to model the skull as Pentaceratops). The Pentaceratops lived about 73 to 75 million years ago, but it was much smaller overall than a triceratopsin.
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Infographic: The High Cost of iPhone Repair
Americans will do almost anything to save their technology from harm, especially if the damaged goods are made by Apple.
To wit, damaged iPhones have cost Americans $5.9 billion since the devices were introduced in 2007, according to SquareTrade.
Following a survey more than 2,000 iPhone users, the consumer electronics protection plan provider combined the cost of repairs, replacements, and insurance deductibles for cracked, dropped, pummeled, kicked, or water-damaged devices in extrapolating the nearly $6 billion final bill for iPhone repairs.
"Today's devices are racing to be thinner and lighter, with little regard for durability. And yet our lifestyles make them more vulnerable than ever to accidents," SquareTrade CMO Ty Shay said in a statement.
As reported by the surveyed iPhone users, the top five accident scenarios are dropping the device from your hand, letting it slip into a toilet, swimming pool, or lake, dropping it from your lap, knocking it off of a table, and drenching it with liquid.
"We were astonished at how many people drop their phones in the toilet as well as how frequently an innocuous drop from the hand actually killed the device," Shay said.
Accidental phone damage is ten times more common than loss or theft, SquareTrade reported, adding that younger users are clumsiest with their phonesone in two iPhone owners under 35 have suffered a mishap.
Not all iPhone users head immediately to the Apple Store when damage occurs, however. It's not uncommon for owners to buck the repair cost and resort to other measures, like walking around with a cracked device (11 percent of people) or taping up their handset (6 percent).
"We look forward to seeing what the new iPhone 5 users report with regards to durability," Shay said.
SquareTrade's full survey results are displayed in the infographic below.
For more from Stephanie, follow her on Twitter @smlotPCMag.
blog comments powered by Disqus
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U of S Scientists Find Plant Gene that Affects Stress Resistance
|U of S microbiologist Wei Xiao|
A University of Saskatchewan team of scientists has isolated a gene that has never before been identified in helping plants to resist stress.
The study—published this month in the top-ranked plant journal The Plant Cell—could pave the way for development of agricultural and forestry crops that are more tolerant to environmental stresses such as ultra-violet light and other types of radiation.
“Our next step is to see if plant genes we’ve isolated also play a similar role in fighting infections,” said U of S microbiologist Wei Xiao. “In previous research, our team and others have shown that similar genes in human and animal cells play an important role in protection against both viral and bacterial infections.”
In an unusual collaboration, Xiao teamed up with U of S biochemist Hong Wang, two post-doctoral fellows and three graduate students on the study. Doctoral student Rui Wen is the lead author on the paper.
|U of S biochemist Hong Wang|
Using Arabidopsis, a widely accepted research model plant closely related to canola, the team cloned and characterized four genes suspected of playing a role in the plant’s stress responses. The team found that when plants were subjected to a DNA-damaging stressor, the plants in which one of the four genes had been turned off produced seedlings that grew slower and often died, compared with a control group.
“This tells us that these genes likely play an important role in maintaining the genetic stability of the plant and protecting the plant from stress,” said Xiao.
The next step is to look at whether turning on or off any of the other three genes will affect the plant’s resistance to environmental stresses, including viral and bacterial infections.
Xiao’s previous research used cultured mammalian cells to study cancer and immunity. But since deletion of genes in living mammals would cause the embryos to die, the team turned to the plant model.
“This study demonstrates for the first time that we can study this group of genes at the whole organism level, rather than just at the cellular level, which could have applications down the road for human and animal medicine in fighting cancer and infections,” said Xiao, noting that plant, animal and human studies are increasingly converging around gene-based research.
In previous research using human cells, Xiao found that human genes similar to the four plant genes not only fight carcinogens but play a role in fighting viral and bacterial infections. “There are actually two closely related genes involved—one fighting against infections and the other against cancer,” said Xiao. “The two genes—Beauty and the Beast—complement each other when they work together, but if Beast is constantly being expressed to stimulate cells to uncontrollably reproduce, this situation can lead to cancer.”
Xiao’s discovery of the “Beauty and Beast” genes that may govern the development of cancer is cited in Milestones in Canadian Health Research: http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/35216.html
Ten years ago, Xiao discovered a gene in baker’s yeast that when inactivated causes cells to be more susceptible to DNA-damaging agents. His team then identified two similar human genes and found that when either of these was put into the yeast cells containing the inactivated gene, the problem was soon fixed and the cells grew normally.
The plant gene products under study by Xiao and Wang bind with a protein (Ubc13) which has recently been found to control activation of the immune response. This protein has also been linked to an increasing number of human diseases, including Parkinson’s and breast cancer.
Long term, the team’s goal is to develop screening tests for humans and animals that could detect a cancer-causing imbalance, allowing earlier treatment and prevention. Diagnostic antibodies suitable for such tests have been developed by Xiao and his U of S colleagues and have been licensed to California-based Zymed Laboratories, Inc., and Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc.
The study was funded by both the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. A copy of the team’s article is available upon request.
For more information, contact:
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Department of Biochemistry
U of S Research Communications
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14 killed in 2 drug-plagued Mexican states
Saturday - 3/23/2013, 9:39pm EDT
MORELIA, Mexico (AP) - Authorities say the bodies of seven men were found in plastic chairs placed along the side of a street in the drug-plagued Mexican state of Michoacan, while another seven people, including three federal agents, were killed in neighboring Guerrero.
Michoacan's Attorney General's Office said in a statement Saturday that the seven bodies had bullet wounds and had been placed individually in the sitting position in chairs near a traffic circle in the city of Uruapan. The office did not provide a motive for killings.
In Guerrero state, authorities said armed men opened fire in a bar in Ciudad Altamirano late Friday. Four civilians and three off-duty federal agents were killed.
Both states on Mexico's western coast have seen a surge of violence in recent years attributed to drug cartels.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
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World Economic Situation and Prospects as of mid-2012
8 June 2012, New York
The world economy is on the brink of another major downturn. Global economic growth started to decelerate on a broad front in mid-2011 and is estimated to have averaged 2.8 per cent over the last year. This economic slowdown is expected to continue into 2012 and 2013. The United Nations baseline forecast for the growth of world gross product (WGP) is 2.6 per cent for 2012 and 3.2 per cent for 2013, which is below the pre-crisis pace of global growth.Persistent high unemployment in the United States and low wage growth are holding back aggregate demand and, together with the prospect of prolonged depressed housing prices, this has heightened risks of a new wave of home foreclosures. Growth in the euro zone has slowed considerably since the beginning of 2011 and the ever-simmering sovereign debt crisis heavily weighs on consumer and business confidence across Europe. The failure of policymakers in developed countries to address unemployment and prevent sovereign debt distress and financial sector fragility from escalating has posed the most acute risk for the global economy in the outlook for 2012-2013, with renewed global recession being a distinct possibility.
Meanwhile, developing countries and economies in transition are expected to continue to stoke the engine of the world economy, growing on average by 5.4 per cent in 2012 and 5.8 per cent in 2013 in the baseline outlook. Among the major developing countries, growth in China and India is expected to remain robust. GDP growth in China slowed from 10.3 per cent in 2010 to 9.3 per cent in 2011 and is projected to further slow to below 9 per cent in 2012-2013. India’s economy is expected to expand by between 7.7 and 7.9 per cent in 2012-2013, down from 8.5 per cent in 2010.
Low-income countries have experienced only a mild slowdown. In per capita terms, income growth slowed from 3.8 per cent in 2010 to 3.5 per cent in 2011 and, despite the global downturn, the poorer countries may see average income growth at or slightly above this rate in 2012 and 2013. The same holds for average growth among the United Nations category of least developed countries (LDCs).
Against this background, the report discusses several policy directions which could avoid a double-dip recession, including: optimal design of fiscal policies to stimulate more direct job creation and investment in infrastructure, energy efficiency and sustainable energy supply, and food security; stronger financial safety nets; better coordination between fiscal and monetary policies; and the provision of sufficient support to developing countries in addressing the fallout from the crisis and the coordination of policy measures at the international level.
Buy or download the publication
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Interface Culture JAN 07 2004
How well does the 6 year-old analysis of how we use and will use information technology contained in the pages of Interface Culture hold up? Not too bad, actually. Consider the following paragraph from the "Windows" chapter on what metaforms the Web might be capable of supporting (paragraph breaks and links mine):
Over the next decade, this stitching together of different news and opinion sources will slowly become a type of journalism in its own right, a new form of reporting that synthesizes and digests the great mass of information disseminated online everyday. (Clipping services have occupied a comparable niche for years, though their use is largely limited to corporate executives and other journalists.)
Total News gives us a glimpse of what these new information filters will look like, but the site neglects the defining element of a successful metaform, which is an actual editorial or evaluative sensibility. Total News simply repackages the major online news services indiscriminately; it may be a more convenient format, but it adds nothing to the actual content of the information. More advanced news "browsers" will include a genuine critical temperament, a perspective on the world, an editorial sensibility that governs the decisions about which stories to repackage. The possibilities are endless: a filter for left-leaning economic and political stories; a filter for sports coverage that emphasizes the psychological dimension of professional athletics; a filter that focuses exclusively on independent film news and commentary.
The beautiful thing about this new meta-journalism is that it doesn't require a massive distribution channel or extravagant licensing fees. A single user with a Web connection and only the most rudimentary HTML skills can upload his or her overview of the day's news. If the editorial sensibility is sharp enough, this kind of metajournalism could easily find enough of an audience to be commercially sustainable, given the limited overhead required to run such a service.
When the whole blog thing blew up huge and then people like Rafat Ali, Andrew Sullivan, and Nick Denton started making money off of them, Johnson must have danced around the apartment in his underpants (perhaps like Tom Cruise in Risky Business) shouting, "I told you so, I told you so, I called the hell out of that one! In your face!"
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 828862.ece
A black Tibetan Mastiff, 80cm (31in) high and answering to the name of Yangtze River Number Two, is believed to have broken the world record as the most expensive dog after a Chinese woman paid 4 million yuan (£352,000) for the “priceless” canine.
In keeping with its record-shattering status, according to local reports the 18-month-old dog arrived at its new owner’s home in stupendously excessive style. A motorcade of 30 luxury cars cruised to the airport in Xi’an to take delivery of Yangtze. Enchanted onlookers gathered to fête the arrival of the city’s new resident.
If the figure of 4 million yuan is accurate, it makes Yangtze River Number Two possibly the most expensive pet dog in history. Earlier this year, a family in Florida paid $155,000 (£93,000) for a Labrador called Lancelot Encore. That price included the cost of cloning the original Lancelot.
The young millionaire, according to one report on a Chinese website, fell in love with the dog while on a breeding trip to Qinghai province. The woman, referred to only as Mrs Wang, had been travelling to the town of Yushu with a Tibetan Mastiff that she already owned with a view to mating it with the famously pure-blooded hounds of that region.
While there though she spotted a dog known as White Root and knew immediately that she had to make it hers. Another version of the story suggests that the woman had spent some years in the quest for the perfect Tibetan Mastiff and was satisfied that the dog she found in Yushu was it.
“Gold has a price, but this Tibetan Mastiff doesn’t,” the young woman reportedly said on her return home.
It remains unclear why she renamed the dog Yangtze River Number Two, though the process appears to have taken place while Mrs Wang and her dogs were returning from the breeders.
Before she left the northwestern province of Qinghai, Mrs Wang is understood to have alerted her wealthy friends to both the sum she had just paid for the dog and the timing of her arrival. Her friends, in an opulent show of solidarity, not only dispatched their cars to the airport but arranged for local Xi’an dog lovers to brandish welcome banners in honour of the new dog.
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Originally Posted by SmokedBoo
First off, this is your heart. >>
This is your mind. >>
Second, I think when people say "it comes from the heart" I think they mean the mind. Your heart just pumps blood and keeps your body functioning. It's metaphorical in a sense. "Coming from your mind" would be the rational/irrational half of you. "Coming from the heart" is the emotional half of you. They work hand in hand, and the majority of times your "mind" wins out over your "heart".
So I guess I'm going with neither.
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How To Make Fluffy Pancakes
Learn how to make fluffy pancakes and you'll never want to use a mix again! It's so easy to make them homemade in just a few steps. Serve with butter and pure maple syrup, or your other favorite pancake toppings.
To make fluffy pancakes, you need:
- 2 cups all-purpose flour, preferably unbleached
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 2 cups buttermilk
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil or melted butter
- 2 large eggs
- Whisk together the all-purpose flour, granulated sugar, baking powder and baking soda in a large mixing bowl. Set the dry mixture aside.
- Lightly beat the eggs. Add the beaten eggs to the dry ingredients, but don't stir yet.
- Add the vegetable oil or melted butter to the bowl. Measure the buttermilk and add it to the rest of the ingredients.
Stir all of the ingredients together. Keep stirring until the dry ingredients are combined with the wet ingredients, but try not to overmix. Small lumps should disappear as the batter rests.
- Set the pancake batter aside and let it rest while heating a skillet--cast iron works best to get good, evenly browned pancakes. Heat the skillet over medium-high heat until a water droplet dances on it's surface.
- Spray the skillet with non-stick cooking spray or lightly coat it with a swipe of melted butter. Use 1/4 cup pancake batter for large pancakes, or 1/8 cup for smaller. Measuring scoops are handy for measuring.
- Once the pancake edges begin to dry and small bubbles appear within the center of the pancake, it's time to flip. Use a thin spatula and carefully flip the pancake and brown the other side until lightly golden.
- Cook one test pancake to start with to check that the pan is not overly hot. If the pan is too hot, the outside of the pancake will burn before the inside has had a chance to fully cook, especially if making large pancakes.
- Keep cooked pancakes in a warm oven while preparing the remaining pancakes. Lay a clean dish towel over the cooked pancakes while they stay warm in the oven.
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Do you have leftover prescription drugs filling your medicine cabinet? You don’t exactly want to throw them in the trash because studies have shown the drugs can seep into our ground water. Experts suggest putting them in with coffee grinds and sealing them up in bags. Flushing them down the toilet is not a good idea either because the pills can still disintegrate and make their way into our ground water. This weekend there is an easy way to dispose of all those unwanted medications.
The Drug Enforcement Administration teams up with local police agencies to “Take Back” all those drugs. It not only keeps our environment safe, but it helps keep prescription medications out of the wrong hands. They can be deadly to children. Also, there is a huge problem with prescription drug abuse in many regions of the country including Northeast Ohio.
I have friends who’ve had their prescription drugs stolen from their home by someone who needs to feed their habit. So, it’s a serious problem. Why put yourself or someone else at risk? Dispose of the medications this weekend.
Click here for a list of sites across the country. The program runs this Saturday from 10 AM to 2 PM.
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Scientists need to see results from a chemical analysis of the sample to understand it better, but one theory is that this rock could have once been underwater, Hurowitz said.
The successful usage of the drill marks the final check-out of Curiosity's elaborate suite of instruments.
Back on Earth, however, scientists have encountered a potential problem in one of two terrestrial copies of the CHIMRA instrument, which NASA's Daniel Limonadi describes as a "martini mixer on the spacecraft."
CHIMRA has a sieve that filters out material that is bigger than 150 micrometers, because the CheMin instrument needs tiny particles for its X-ray diffraction work. One of the Earth-based units, the "edge welds are popping and slowly unziping the sieve from the primary structure in CHIMRA over time," Limonadi said.
The same problem has not been observed on its Martian counterpart, or in the second copy of CHIMRA.
Scientists have several theories about why this is happening, but there's no established root cause, Limonadi said. However, it's important to note that this copy of CHIMRA has been used more than Curiosity's CHIMRA unit will be used during its two-year prime mission.
Rover planners are taking precautions just in case the CHIMRA sieve on Mars is vulnerable. For example, they've reduced the sieving time of material in this instrument to expose it to less wear and tear, Limonadi said.
Sieving is the next step for the gray powder recovered from the drill. It will then be fed to the CheMin and SAM instruments to gain more insights about the geological history and potential habitability of Mars, Hurowitz said.
Previous analyses by Curiosity instruments determined that white veins seen in this kind of rock are made of calcium sulfate. The rover will soon use its chemistry experiments to see the full composition of the gray stuff found by the drill.
"Stay tuned, results are coming shortly," Hurowitz said.
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She was the daughter of the Hittite king Hattusili III and his wife Puduchepa. She married Ramesses II in his 34th year. From the evidence of the papyrus found at Gurob it is highly likely that she lived in the palace at Gurob.
Faience plaque bearing the name of Maathorneferura.(the object is perhaps a modern copy of an ancient original)
Troy 1986: 169, no. 19.7 (list of sources for the queen)
Copyright © 2002 University College London. All rights reserved.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s proposed space policy, introduced during a speech Thursday in Washington, has provided a lot of fodder for both people in the space industry and armchair analysts alike. Seeing any discussion of space by a candidate is newsworthy; having a candidate devote several paragraphs to the subject, months before the first primaries and caucuses and more than a year before the general election, is quite rare. So how does this policy look?
Earth science is clearly a big winner here, as Clinton devoted a full paragraph of her speech to her concerns that such programs had languished during the Bush Administration. She promises to “fully fund” Earth science programs, although she doesn’t say with respect to what (perhaps the National Academies’ decadal survey report published earlier this year). She also proposes a “Space-based Climate Change Initiative” to study global warming and “to prepare for extreme climate events”.
Aeronautics also wins in Clinton’s policy, which decries the sharp decline in funding NASA’s aeronautics program has suffered in recent years. While not making any specific financial commitments, the policy states that Clinton would “make the financial investments in research and development necessary to shore up and expand our competitive edge”.
Prize programs in the sciences in general would also appear to benefit under a new Clinton Administration. In her speech she promoted “competitive prizes to encourage innovation”, although there are no specific details about prize programs in the policy statement. It would seem, though, that she would look favorably on programs like Centennial Challenges.
Human spaceflight and exploration has mixed prospects, it seems. The policy statement calls for a “robust” human spaceflight program “to complete the Space Station and later human missions”. as well as robotic missions “leading to future human exploration”. She also calls for accelerating the “development, testing, and deployment of next-generation launch and crew exploration vehicles”, an apparent, but not explicit, reference to Ares and Orion. (Whether those programs can be substantially accelerated without massive additional funding, though, is a n open question.)
However, there is no specific mention of the Moon or Mars in the policy. According to a New York Times article today, that was not an accidental oversight:
But in a telephone interview afterward, she said that in the short term she would subordinate Bush administration proposals for human exploration of the Moon and Mars to restoring cuts in aeronautics research and space-based studies of climate change and other earth science issues.
Travel to the Moon or Mars “excites people,” she said, “but I am more focused on nearer-term goals I think are achievable.”
That suggests that the long-term Vision for Space Exploration as laid out by the Bush Administration in 2004 would effectively be truncated with Ares and Orion (or whatever alternatives a Clinton Administration would pursue).
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http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/10/05/looking-for-winners-and-losers-in-clintons-space-policy/
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| 2.765625
| 3
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Easy to learn, yet strong on strategy. Highly replayable. Great expansions. Suitable for all ages.
- Cons No online multiplayer mode. AI trading needs work.
Catan HD is a faithful iPad port of one of the most popular modern board games in the world, and it's great fun for kids and adults.
Settlers of Catan sparked a revolution in board games, as the first so-called Euro-game to blaze the trail for world-wide popularity. Catan HD is an excellent iPad port (there's also an iPhone version, called, simply, Catan). At $4.99 it's quite a bargain, considering that the boxed set costs $42. Catan HD is a highly recommended game that's suitable for kids and adults, though it's not without one big disappointment.
The Catan of the game is an uninhabited island that the players race to settle. Each time you play the game, the map is different. The hexagonal spaces ("hexes") that make up the map are arranged differently each time, and each represents a different kind of terrain—fields, forest, hills, mountains, pastureland, and desert—each of which produces a different type of resource—grain, lumber, bricks, ore, wool, and nothing, respectively.
The players build their settlements at the points where three hexes meet. Each hex has a number from two to twelve on it, and each of the three hexes that border your settlement can produce the resource in question any time the dice (which are thrown at the beginning of player's turn) turn up that number, no matter whose turn it is.
If you've ever played craps, you understand that hexes with twos and twelves on them represent less favorable terrain to settle. Sixes and eights are prime real estate. Just to make things more interesting, the sevens are always a desert at the center of the island. Choosing the right places for your settlements is a key element of strategy in Catan.
Each player gets two settlements at the start of the game. Depending on the dice, those settlements produce resources, and the players try to build more settlements, and roads to connect them, and eventually cities (which are upgrades to settlements). Different things you want to build cost different amounts of resources. Settlements, cities, and the longest road are all worth a certain number of victory points; when one player reaches a set amount of points (ten, by default), he or she wins.
Additional challenges include a robber who steals resources whenever you roll a seven: the active player decides who gets robbed of one resource of a random type, and anyone who's been hoarding resources (i.e., who has more than seven total resources) loses half of them. Also, there are development cards you can buy with resources that let you do things like monopolize resources, taking all the unspent resources of one kind from all the other players. There's also a trading system; you can trade with other players or with the bank. The bank offers pretty poor rates, but reliably, whereas the other players (at least the AI players) are exceedingly unreliable trading partners. (In fact, that's one minor complaint I have with the game: trading with the AIs is really a lot less fun than it should be, and the trading UI is pretty clunky.) Finally, settlements can't be less than two hexes from each other, and they must be connected by roads. All this adds up to a nerve-wracking race to develop, trade for, or steal the right mix of resources you need to conquer Catan.
Design and Gameplay
The maps are simple but well-illustrated, and there are a handful of skins to choose from, including some that are animated. The game plays smoothly and quickly—a game might take half an hour to an hour, depending on how much pondering the players do). You'll want to keep it at the default slow speed to follow your opponents' moves, at first, but eventually you'll want to speed up the gameplay to get to your own turns more quickly.
The AIs are all pretty good players—if you're not a real strategy gamer, it may take you a few tries to beat the first map if you're playing against all AIs. If you want to play against real players, however, you're limited to play-and-pass local gaming. There is no online multiplayer mode—a huge oversight, as far as I'm concerned. The iPad is a networked device, and any game that doesn't take advantage of that fact loses serious points.
There are a handful of basic maps to choose from, each of which is different each time you play on it. If that's not enough variety for you, there are tons of expansions for the original Settlers of Catan, and it looks like the developers are going to follow the same path with Catan on the iPad. The first expansion, Seafarers of Catan, is already out. Seafarers adds ships, pirates, the exploration of other islands, and gold to the equation, as well as a bunch of new maps and a campaign play mode in which you play a series of single-map scenarios. Seafarers is well worth its $4.99 price, and the next expansion pack Cities and Knights, is said to be coming soon.
Should You Settle for Catan?
The original Settlers of Catan is a great game; the original mechanics are extremely simple, yet there's enough variability and strategy possible that the game is endlessly replayable. Catan HD does a good job of replicating all the basic mechanics, with the possible exception of trading—at least if you're playing against AIs. The only real complaint I have with the game is the lack of an online multiplayer version, and the company says it's already working on that. Even as a local pass-and-play and AI game, however, Catan HD is an exceptionally fun experience, and well worth an Editors' Choice for iPad board gaming.
More Mobile Games Reviews:
Astro Shark HD (for Android)
Cubes Vs. Spheres (for Android)
Year Walk and Year Walk Companion (for iPhone)
Color Sheep (for Android)
PBS Parents Play & Learn (for iPhone)
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Drug Side Effects Explained
Louise Chang, MD
Dr. Chang completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and attended medical school at New York Medical College. She completed her internal medicine residency at Saint Vincent's Hospital in New York City, where she also served as a chief resident from 2001-2002. Dr. Chang is board-certified in internal medicine.
It doesn't matter whether we're talking about aspirin or the most sophisticated pharmaceutical on the market, all drugs come with side effects. Many are minor, some are just an inconvenience, a few are serious, and some are just plain strange.
Perhaps the most common set of side effects for drugs taken internally involves the gastrointestinal system. Nearly any drug can cause nausea or an upset stomach, though it may only happen to a handful of users. For drugs used externally, skin irritation is a common complaint.
Drug Side Effects: Types
Other side effects simply “come with the territory.” Some drugs can't help but trigger side effects because of their chemical structure. One example is the common allergy drug diphenhydramine (also known by the brand name Benadryl). Though it eases allergy symptoms, it also suppresses the activity of the body chemical acetylcholine, and that leads to drowsiness and a host of other side effects, including dry mouth.
Some drugs have barely noticeable side effects when dosed properly. For example, Warfarin (Jantoven, Coumadin) used to prevent blood clots, is usually well tolerated, but serious internal bleeding can occur.
Side effects may only pop up when certain drugs are mixed with certain other things. These might also be considered drug interactions. Drinking alcohol with narcotic painkillers can lead to trouble breathing. Drinking grapefruit juice can affect the blood levels of several drugs, including the heart drug digoxin.
To find more about a drug's side effects, information about them is available on the label of over-the-counter drug products and on package inserts or printed materials dispensed with prescription drugs. You can also talk to your pharmacist or doctor if you have any questions regarding a drug's side effects.
Find out what women really need.
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Looking for training to start a career?
We have many Apprenticeship and Foundation Pathway opportunities.
Call us today for an informal chat on Lincoln (01522) 532225 or
Boston (01205) 354171 or email us at firstname.lastname@example.org
Who is ISIS Training?
As one of Lincolnshire’s most respected learning providers we can provide new and existing staff with nationally recognised qualifications and assist young adults between the ages of 16 – 24 to find suitable apprenticeship qualifications. We also offer Foundation Learning Tier training for young adults between the ages of 16 – 19 which covers:
Personal and Social skills
We offer the latest QCF Standards: -
NVQ Level 2 Certificate (Foundation)
NVQ Level 3 Diploma (Intermediate)
NVQ Level 4 Diploma (Technician)
We Offer Many More Qualifications:
Business and Administration
Customer Service in Retail
IT (Information Technology) Both user and practitioner
Hospitality and Catering
Plus a variety of other specialist and bespoke training including:
Health and Safety
Employability Skills including CV Building/Interview Techniques
Adult Numeracy and Literacy Level 1/Level 2
Also a variety of other courses please contact ISIS Training for further information.
Lincoln Academy trading as ISIS Training is working with Ingeus to deliver the Work Programme, a government funded welfare to work programme which is match funded by the European Social Fund. The European Social Fund is investing in jobs and skills – focusing on people who need support the most and helping them fulfil their potential.
ISIS Training raised £152.50 for Comic Relief!
Winners of the Red Nose Day Raffle drawn 18th March 2011:
1st Prize – Love Links jewellery sponsored by Maude’s, The Jewellers – Richard Appleton
2nd Prize – £25 fresh flowers sponsored by Tina’s Tributes – Collette Steadman
3rd Prize – Canvas art prints sponsored by P&M Framing & Gallery – Cynthia Robinson
£15 facial sponsored by Cutting Mill – Suzanne Chambers
Hair care travel kit sponsored by Cutting Mill – Andrea Young
Meal for two sponsored by Taste of Europe – Grace Clark
Makeover sponsored by Scent – Amy Hinton
Meal for two sponsored by Tates Fish Restaurant Peter, Grammar School
£5 voucher sponsored by Archie Hardwisk’s Deli – Grace Clark
Chocolates sponsored by Britannia Smeeton Panton Removals – Vanessa Everington
Chocolates sponsored by Britannia Smeeton Panton Removals – Tracy Tuck
Suduko sponsored by Britannia Smeeton Panton Removals – Colin Ashmore
Wine sponsored by Beijing Buffet – Claire Panton
Bath goodies sponsored by Sparkledust Sanu Corke
Hair towels sponsored by Kayleigh Panton – Pip Whiteman
Calendar sponsored by Kayleigh Panton – Kyrilee Hall
Lush bath set sponsored by – Collette Steadman
Congratulations to Andrea Young who guessed the name of the bear as Lewis and to Kirsty Beresford who guessed Gok Wan in the sweepstake, winning £16.
Many thanks to everybody who contributed especially AllSigns Boston for printing the raffle tickets and Digital Printing Services for the donation of a poster.
The future of the Technology Exemplar Network, of which ISIS Training are one of the 16 Exemplar providers, was confirmed at the LSIS Embracing Technology Conference in Birmingham on 2nd Feb 2010. Support for the network will be transferred from Becta to the Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) and will continue to promote and support the use of technology throughout the FE sector through a peer support network consisting of 16 provider mini-networks, each lead by one of the Exemplar providers. The full press release detailing the transfer of support from Becta to LSIS is shown below.
Improving the use of technology across further education and skills
Understanding and sharing the benefits of using technology within the further education and skills sector is the cornerstone of the day-long Embracing Technology for Success conference which takes place today – 2 February 2011.
The event also sees the launch of the transfer of technology support for the sector from Becta to LSIS combined with the signing of a Concordat between LSIS and JISC Advance. The Concordat sets out how the two organisations will work together to ensure coherent support to the sector to maximize the benefits of technology. The functions transferring to LSIS offer real value and expertise to support learning and skills professionals. Becta and LSIS have had a close and effective working partnership and the fact that the work is continuing is a positive testament to that relationship.
Rob Wye, LSIS Chief Executive says: “The Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) is pleased to continue the provision of this support. Becta has provided this service to the sector over recent years, including providing strategic leadership of technology support, and leading the development of Generator and the Technology Exemplar Network (TEN) while JISC Advance’s Regional Support Centres, enriched by the specialised resources of JISC and the JISC Advance services, have been given direct advice and support to individual colleges and providers. “We aim to embed effective use of technology across all of LSIS’s services to FE colleges and training providers so that the benefits of technology in the 21st century can be truly realised. Our new formal partnership with JISC Advance will enable us to ensure the legacy of Becta’s work is embedded across JISC Advance’s services and our two organisations deliver a more joined up package of support that meets the sectors’ needs in the most cost-effective way”
Guy Lambert, the Managing Director of JISC Advance said “It is a particular priority of mine to ensure that by working together with other sector bodies in an open and co-operative manner, we maximize the benefits we can bring to learning providers and provide the best possible value for money. Supporting the sector to deliver excellent results for learners and the community is what we are here for.”
For information about our IAG service, please go to the ‘About Us’ section, where you will find the IAG Principles and a declaration of our services.
In 2011/2012 EMA will be replaced by an Enhanced Learners Support Fund which will be managed by schools, colleges, and training providers. A timetime for funding allocations will be made by the end of March 2011.
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MORPHEUS: “Do you want to know what it is, Neo? It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it? The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”
MindSplinter tracks some of our deep thinking and significant questions. These can range from theological content to economics. It is forum to talk about books that have altered our thinking, movies that have given us life, or concepts that have unnerved us. Simply see a list of recent articles below or search under the mindsplinter category to see more.
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WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Census Bureau, under fire from Congress for the high cost and inaccuracy of the 1990 count, is contemplating some radical changes in the next tabulation.
The planning is spurred by lawmakers' threats to reduce the census in the year 2000 to a simple population count, eliminating the data on housing, education, transportation and employment that has been used extensively by city planners, telemarketers, academics and others.
In the past, such information has been collected from one of every six households on a census "long form." In 1990, that form asked 99 questions and required 45 minutes to fill out. But lawmakers are increasingly unhappy with the forms, arguing that they burden citizens and mostly benefit commercial users hitching a free ride on government figures.
In response, Census Bureau officials are trying to find ways to preserve the data. Their leading proposal calls for gathering it in large-scale surveys conducted continuously throughout the decade.
The officials say the new surveys -- which would count such things as the number of people owning and renting homes and how they travel to and from work -- would be much more timely and just as accurate. However, statistical breakdowns on neighborhoods and small towns may not be provided if Congress chooses to cut costs, the officials say.
Under the proposal, a short form still would be mailed in the year 2000 to gauge the number of people in a household and their age, sex, race and other personal characteristics. That would meet the constitutional requirement of taking a census every 10 years to determine the reapportionment of seats in the House. It also would comply with various federal laws requiring a decennial count to allocate federal funds to states and localities.
"We are working on a reinvention of the census," said Susan Miskura, who is heading research into changing the methods of many decades.
Census officials are discussing their proposals with leaders of key House and Senate committees. Time is short because the Census Bureau wants to conduct trials in 1995 in preparation for the 2000 census. A panel of the National Academy of Sciences also has urged that the proposed large-scale surveys on housing, transportation and other subjects be started well before 2000.
Lawmakers have complained that the $2.6 billion cost of the 1990 census was more than double the 1980 figure and produced a less accurate count. As in prior censuses, the bureau acknowledged significant under-counts of blacks and Latinos, probably depriving many cities of millions of dollars in federal funds.
Rep. Neal Smith, D-Iowa, chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Census Bureau, and Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., the panel's ranking Republican, are "both unhappy with the bureau and want to see fundamental changes" in the 2000 census, an aide said.
Their subcommittee fired a shot across the bureau's bow by lopping $15 million from its $230 million budget request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Much of the sum may be restored in a Senate-House conference, "but we think the bureau got the message," the aide said.
"We need to get back to the basics," said Mr. Rogers. "Unfortunately, Congress and special interest groups have changed the decennial census from simple enumeration into a 19-page test that many Americans refuse to fill out.
"Instead of focusing on the number of people who live in a dwelling," he continued, "the 1990 census resembled a document that direct-mail companies use to develop customer profiles."
One problem with any alternative to the traditional long form is that it could wind up costing more. Officials say that estimates on various proposals are still being made.
Complicating the drive for change is the lack of strong political leadership at the Census Bureau. The Clinton administration has spent months trying to find a new director.
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Do you write within a structure?
By structure I mean things that control where your words go, like group writes: “It’s Thursday. Send in your funny poems.” Structure can be a poem with a predetermined form (haiku, cinquain), or simply a writing prompt that you respond to, like a photograph or theme.
Sometimes, structures provide a house for spirit—your words sheltered in a warm cave, like coming home to a well-lit space.
Sometimes, the structure of demand allows voice to spring free and be clothed.
Too much formation, too much restriction can on the other hand leave behind lines of form with no sustenance. So, be warned: like a bird trained to the hand, one day spirit constrained may become spirit that does not rise to your demand.
What does this mean for your writing? Simply to become aware of when writing to another’s prompt or format works in your favor, and when it becomes a way to avoid the bright words of your own deep truth.
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Activists doubt river gas study
The Lock the Gate Alliance has questioned the validity of a State Government investigation into gas seeping into a western Darling Downs river in the state's south.
The report found the gas, which is bubbling to the surface of the Condamine River, near Chinchilla, does not pose a threat to the environment or public health.
The alliance says the gas is linked to nearby coal seam gas (CSG) wells.
Secretary Sarah Moles says the Government has a vested interest in the CSG industry and cannot be trusted.
"Affected landholders and people in the vicinity have very little or no confidence in the independence of the Government's testing and the community should be involved in selecting a truly independent company or scientific organisation to undertake those tests so that everybody is confident," she said.
She says the report's findings are flawed.
"It seems inconsistent to be able to say there is no proof," she said.
"I'd further add that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and if they continue to test, which is a good thing, then it seems premature to ... claim that there are no risks."
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Suddenly you notice that someone – probably the motorcycle driver – is pinned underneath the car. He isn’t moving. For all you know, he might already be dead. But you don’t know for sure. And the fire is spreading toward him.
What are you going to do?
For 14 or so passers-by Monday, the answer was immediate and unflinching: they rushed in to help. They tried to get him out from under the car, but he was stuck under there, and the fire was moving ever closer. A few people tried to lift the car, but barely moved it. There was a moment of hesitation, and then a larger group — including several hard hat-wearing construction workers — moved as one to the side of the car, and with all their collective might they lifted the 3,000-pound burning vehicle up onto two wheels while another construction worker pulled the unconscious young motorcycle driver out from under the car.
I’m not making this up. Google “burning car lifted off trapped man.” You’ll see it’s true.
And please notice the flames lapping at the young man’s foot as they drag him to safety.
Miraculously, the young man survived, with only broken bones, some road rash and a few bruises to show for his brush with death.
Oh, and he has one other thing: a thankful heart.
A day after his dramatic rescue he was still in the hospital recuperating from his injuries. But he sent his uncle out to thank the people who risked their lives to save his.
“He knows that there are angels out there that saved his life,” his uncle said. “People came together, risked their lives, to save him.”
He paused, then added: “Just . . . thank you . . . from all of us in the family.”
In my mind, there were two remarkable things that happened in those few anxious moments from the time the accident occurred until the time the young motorcyclist was dragged to safety. First was the heroic rush of people – more than one – to offer assistance despite the very real possibility of harm to themselves. I think of the gallant police officers and fire fighters who rushed IN to the twin towers on 9/11 when everyone else was rushing OUT, the office workers on the upper floors who ran UPSTAIRS to help others instead of following their natural self-protective impulses to rush DOWN. I’m awed and inspired by such compassionate courage. I don’t know that I possess it – and quite frankly, it’s OK with me if I never find out for sure – but I’m grateful to live in a world in which so many do.
The second remarkable thing that happened that morning was that all of these brave, caring people managed to work together to save a life. It would not have happened if they had not. One or two people couldn’t lift that car. Even six or seven – they tried. It took all of them pushing together to get the car up on two wheels so the injured young man could be moved out of the way. There’s a lesson in that for all of us, I think. No matter how strong we are individually, we are infinitely stronger in the face of adversity if we work together.
Like the young man’s uncle said: “A lot of times things happen these days that shake our faith in humanity. But here we have not one person, not two people, but nearly a dozen people rushing together to a burning scene to lift a thousand-pound car. That is absolutely incredible.”
You don’t have to Google that to know it’s true.
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WASHINGTON -- Bombarded with media accounts of both the health benefits of fish and the possible dangers posed by contaminants such as methyl mercury and PCBs, consumers are becoming more interested in sustainable seafood practices, a panel of experts said here in a seminar at the Natural Products Expo East show.
Modern fishing methods have helped satisfy world demand for fish, but innovations such as bottom trawling and dredging have decimated many of the world's largest fisheries, according to Rebecca Goldburg, senior scientist for Environmental Defense, New York. Overfishing isn't purely an ecological concern, panelists said. When wild populations of popular fish decrease, they pose more of a challenge to harvest, driving supply down and prices up for consumers. As a result, aquaculture, or farm raising, has become an increasingly important solution to ensure that demand can be met. However, the fishmeal used to feed farm-raised fish sometimes can be high in pollutants, they said.
"Consumers are beginning to make more of a connection between what's going on in the environment and how that relates to public health," said Urvashi Rangan, project director at the Consumer Policy Institute, Washington. These concerns are leading many consumers to seek out sustainable seafood -- fish caught in the wild by fishermen intent on maintaining wild populations.
"The force for positive change in marine conservation is the consumer," agreed Henry Lovejoy, founder and chief executive officer of EcoFish, Portsmouth, N.H. Lovejoy also encouraged retailers who offer sustainable seafood options to "provide as much information to consumers as you can. It adds value."
The panelists said that the new U.S. Department of Agriculture country-of-origin labeling requirements, set to be enforced by April 2005, will provide oversight to existing labels such as "farm-raised" and "wild-caught." Also, following the lead of European certification agencies, the National Organic Standards Board has established a task force to study organic certification issues for fish.
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In the 2006 Idiocracy film (Wiki), an average soldier is hibernated and appears in the year 2505 AD to find out he is the brightest person in the world. So he is elected the U.S. president and tries to save the world that will have been plagued by centuries of deterioration and brainwashing.
The U.S. president in 2505 AD
Now, the geneticist Gerald Crabtree of Stanford has published two papers in Trends in Genetics:
The Guardian offers a clear summary of the papers:
Because the punishment for low intelligence was arguably severe and mostly lethal when humans were hunterers, people were smarter. The decline is linked to the appearance of agriculture. Well, in some regions, the agricultural revolution already began with the neolithic era, perhaps 20,000 years ago. But there are other complaints one could invent.
In particular, the choice of agriculture as the main culprit seems a bit arbitrary. There are lots of other achievements that have both simplified human lives as well as encouraged the people to be ever less intelligent. After all, agriculture also needs some thinking. In my opinion, nothing like agriculture or steam engine or computers can match the crippling effect that the modern welfare states and political correctness have on the genetic quality of the human population when it comes to the intelligence.
The timing is subtle and hard to measure and there may also be "different types of intelligence" that peaked at different moments. However, I think that the most universal assertion of the papers, namely that there is a point ("peak IQ") at which the people's intelligence starts to decline, has to exist, is valid.
I've been often thinking about the true intelligence of folks like Isaac Newton – who was arguably the smartest famous man who was ever walking on the surface of the globe. I included the word "famous" because it seems very plausible to me that there have been smarter folks who just weren't as lucky as Newton so they didn't make the same impact. But if one focuses on the famous folks, Newton was arguably #1.
It's interesting to guess how quickly Isaac Newton would be able to learn quantum mechanics, general relativity, string theory, and all the things needed to become the #1 physicist in the world of 2012 who would also discover new things we are unable to find. It seems more likely than not that he would have the potential to become a top physicist, I am slightly less certain that he would be considered #1 – of course, the folks who judge others may often be wrong – but it's also plausible that he would have trouble with the new physics in a similar way as Albert Einstein had trouble with quantum physics (and there are other examples). Some great personalities may have only been given the potential to lead a particular revolution or two but not "any revolution".
There are many theoretical questions about the actual behavior and evolution of the mankind's IQ distribution. And there are also many practical questions whether it matters and whether something should be done about it – and what should be done about it if the answer is Yes. I am agnostic about it. Any policies of this kind that would try to intervene into people's reproductive life look repulsive to me. On the other hand, if I were assured that the mankind would converge to the middle between current humans and chimps within 150 years, of course that I would prefer some mitigation policies. ;-)
What do you think about those matters?
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Similar in some ways to a major river providing passage to boats, Interstate 25 gives hundreds of thousands of drivers of cars, trucks and recreational vehicles the opportunity to travel north and south along the Front Range corridor. The coming decades are likely to see much more construction on I-25 now that the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has begun the design process for highway improvements between Fort Collins/Wellington and downtown Denver, and on highways U.S. 85 and U.S. 287.
Projects of this size require years of planning as well as hundreds of millions of dollars. Although it is not known exactly where all the funding will come from, it is estimated the cost will be $670 million (in 2009 dollars.) The work will not be completed until 2035. At the federal level, the Federal Highway Administration will play an active role. The highway administration on Dec. 29, 2011, signed a record of decision for the North I-25 Environmental Impact Statement.
In the projected first phase, the focus include:
Colorado 66 (Longmont) to Colorado 56 (Berthoud). An agency announcement on Nov. 2 says tolled express lanes are to be built, requiring a buffer to separate them in each direction of I-25 between the Longmont and Berthoud exits, and between 120th Avenue and U.S. 36 that will connect to the existing I-25 Express Lane to downtown Denver.
Interchange upgrades. Six interchanges along I-25, including Colorado 14, Prospect Road, U.S. 34, Colorado 56, Weld County Road 34 and Colorado 7. The work includes the construction of an interchange at U.S. 34 and Centerra Parkway.
Colorado 392 (Windsor) to Colorado 14 (north Fort Collins). According to the agency, "The project will include reconstruction and widening I-25 between SH 14 and SH 392 to add continuous acceleration/deceleration lanes that will ultimately become part of the eight-lane configuration."
The plans so far are partly in response to comments and suggestions offered by the public as well as traffic and growth analysis by government officials about what will be needed to continue to accommodate the region's growing population. A great amount of ongoing communication will be needed among local, state and federal governments, motorists and businesses to see that the work is done in the most efficient and effective way possible, with an emphasis on ease of travel, safety and protection of the environment to the greatest extent possible.
The date for beginning of construction is not known, but updates will be posted on the project's Web site: coloradodot.info/projects/NorthI-25.
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Last week brought an odd re-occurring pattern of sorts: Different people, from very different places pointed me toward two different photographers who both captured the past and present of Russian aerospace in a series of extraordinarily detailed and artistically poignant photo essays. This page in the past has explored the immediate post-Soviet era in commercial air transport, though photographers Lana Sator and Sergey Dolya each have taken another step in telling that story, illustrating both the decay and fledgling rebirth of the country's aerospace industry.
Sator strolled effortlessly into a former Soviet Roscosmos missile factory and what appears to be a facility once used by Illuyshin for static testing, while Dolya explores - in extraordinary detail - the process of fabricating and assembling the new Sukhoi Superjet in at the company's facilities in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Dolya, with the apparent permission of Sukhoi, brings to life the first metal cut for each aircraft all the way through final assembly to the flight line in what must be bordering on proprietary detail. In lieu of a moving Movie Monday, the 200 photos should occupy the eye for quite a while.
Photos Credit Lana Sator & Sergey Dolya
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Most Active Stories
Politics and Government
Cuomo, lawmakers meet on budget
With just three weeks and one day to go before a state budget deadline, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders met to assess how far they have to go to reach a deal.
In order to meet their self-imposed deadline of March 21 to complete a spending plan, Cuomo and lawmakers will have to work through some thorny issues like disagreements over the state’s minimum wage and how to expand casino gambling.
“We have a number of issues on the table that are challenging,” Cuomo said. “It’s going well, but am I concerned? Yes”.
Cuomo has raised the possibility of leaving out the more complicated issues, until later in the session, after the budget has passed. For now, neither the governor nor legislative leaders are willing to drop anything. Although Senate GOP Leader Dean Skelos says he continues to have reservations about a minimum wage hike.
“We still haven’t made a decision as to whether expanding the minimum wage is going to be counterproductive to job creation,” Skelos said.
Skelos spoke after a closed-door meeting between the governor and legislative leaders. The Republicans co-lead the Senate with five breakaway Democrats. Sen. Jeff Klein, the leader of the Independent Democratic Conference, was also at the private meeting. Klein is a major backer of the minimum wage increase.
“We need to increase the minimum wage quickly, I think it should be part of the budget,” said Klein who says the increase would pump money back into the economy, in the form of fatter paychecks for the working poor, and create 5,000 new jobs.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who was the first to propose the minimum wage increase over a year ago, says he’s fine with either timetable, as long as the minimum wage increase happens.
The speaker says he does have some issues with the budget proposed by Cuomo, including millions of dollars in cuts to services for the disabled announced by Cuomo’s budget director a few days ago.
“I have a lot of concerns in various parts of the budget, including disabled services,” Silver said.
The federal government has been charging that New York has been over billing Medicaid for years for state-run developmentally disabled centers. Cuomo cut $500 million out of the state’s Medicaid budget to comply -- $120 million would come from services to the disabled and $380 million would be saved by lowering spending caps for other Medicaid services.
Barbara Crosier, with the Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State, says the six percent across-the-board cuts, combined with earlier budget cuts, would mean staff cut backs and fewer programs for people with cerebral palsy, autism, and other disabilities. She says not for profit providers would be made to pay for a Medicaid billing mistake that they had nothing to do with.
“We absolutely feel like we’re being punished for something that we really had nothing to do with,” Crosier said.
Cuomo says he’s open to funding restorations in general, but he says lawmakers need to find the money.
“Everyone has a good idea on how to spend money, they’re not as creative on how to find the money,” said Cuomo, who also said he won’t agree to any new taxes in the budget. “It has to come from that set amount,” he said.
Silver predicts the revenue estimates, due out March 1, will find there is $400 million more than previously thought. Silver says the Assembly’s budget plan, due out March 11, will restore $260 million that Cuomo cut to New York City schools, after they failed to meet the governor’s deadline to agree on a teacher evaluation plan.
Later in the day, the Assembly Democrats released their revenue report, and found the additional revenue amounts to $484 million.
Cuomo, asked about the projections earlier in the day said it's possible that the money could be there, but not "probable."
Politics and Government
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By yaling998 0 Comments
Spring is the season of high incidence of an allergic, humid, high temperature suddenly valleys, coupled with the spring recovery of all things, plant pollen and Fei Xu easily dissipate in the air, resulting in a lot of people in the spring, "poisoned" the appearance of skin redness, itching, and other circumstances. But there are also a small number of people, only part of the body's allergic reaction, get to the bottom because you will find: feel free to leave the body is allergic to metal jewelry, the culprit!
What is the metal allergy?
So-called metal allergy, in fact, literally means to understand is that some people close prolonged exposure to some of the metal will cause the allergic reaction symptoms of the disease. Li Qilin, director of introduction, although the number of patients with metal allergies is not a lot, but in the out-patient clinics which still exist a lot of wearing jewelry cause allergic patients. Metal allergy occurs only in a small number of people, and there is no specific age, gender, and other limitations and differences, and personal constitution only. Most patients are wearing a gold and silver jewelry such as earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets and jewelery near the contact parts of the skin redness, itching symptoms. Metal allergy patients, not all patients have some kind of metal allergic reactions, some only of gold or of silver are allergic to, so "metal allergy in patients encountered in Li does not mean that all the metal has an allergic reaction, but rather refers to an allergic reaction to a particular metal.
Metal allergies and other allergy symptoms What is the difference?
Metal allergy and food allergy, the performance of pollen allergy and other allergic symptoms, like it? Li Qilin director, said, metal allergy is a contact dermatitis, that is, only after the special constitution of the population exposed to a specific metal will lead to allergy symptoms, and only come into contact with the metal parts of the body allergic. Food allergies, pollen allergies, atopic dermatitis is systemic allergic symptoms, erythema, itching appears. Therefore, to discern that he is due to metal allergy or other reasons, the range of allergies, just from allergy symptoms can be determined.
How can I stay away from metal allergy?
Li Qilin Director pointed out that actually allergic to the metal is not heavy symptoms, allergic to certain metals, and then away from the allergen, and topical anti-allergy cream a week to two weeks to eliminate allergy symptoms. Note, however, metal allergy is a physical disease, allergies to eliminate that does not mean that is no longer allergic to this metal, no longer contact with the allergen metal should also pay attention to the elimination of allergy symptoms, such as bracelets rings not should no longer wear, or may cause the condition of repeated and aggravated.
Jewelry Wholesale CN selection thousands fashion costume jewelry from China, high quality at wholesale price, mixed wholesale minimum just need $100, most minimum quantity just only 1 pcs. Items will be delivered within 2 days, fast shipping, save more, wholesale now!
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Researchers in Japan have developed a low-intensity light source that allows cell biologists to visualize and handle live cells without destroying them during prolonged exposure. In addition to laying the foundation for new cell manipulations, the development will make advanced biology requiring fluorescence microscopy accessible to underfunded laboratories. Led by Teruhiko Wakayama from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Kobe, the researchers developed an adapter, equipped with a halogen lamp, for a conventional microscope.
Typically, conventional microscopes used in live cell studies rely on powerful ultraviolet (UV) lamps or lasers to illuminate cells labeled with a fluorescent dye molecule. However, extended imaging times or continuous exposure to these high-intensity light sources results in harmful effects to cells. Although the problem seemed complex, Wakayama explains that simply lowering the strength of the light source via a halogen lamp solved the problem of phototoxicity.
The adapter developed by the researchers consisted of a small excitation filter and a diaphragm that allowed some light to leak around its periphery. They placed it on top of the microscopes condenser lens, which concentrates light from the lamp onto the samples. By closing the diaphragm, they channeled all the light through the filter, yielding only fluorescence. Opening the diaphragm produced a bright field image that merged with the fluorescent signal. The researchers found that they could tune the relative intensities of both images by varying this opening.
Wakayama and his colleagues tested the performance of their device for monitoring the enucleation, or the removal of metaphase chromosomes, from female reproductive cells called oocytes. They discovered that, unlike traditional enucleation approaches, the new method allowed them to successfully remove the chromosomes in quantitative yields. This made it unnecessary to use additional analytical techniques to confirm the absence of chromosomes (Fig. 1). Overall, compared to conventional approaches, the halogen lamp method significantly simplified fluorescent observation of the enucleation procedure and reduced processing times without affecting cell viability.
The team is currently planning to use their fluorescence imaging system to rapidly detect the fertilization of human oocytes. Previously, we could not observe these oocytes using fluorescence microscopy [owing] to UV lamp-induced cell damage, but now we can thanks to our adapter, says Wakayama. Moreover, the researchers are proposing to introduce their device to high schools, which use simple microscopes that lack fluorescence imaging capabilities. Our system will make it possible for all students to have access to advanced fluorescence microscopy without excessive costs, he adds.
Explore further: What the smallest infectious agents reveal about evolution
More information: Yamagata, K., et al. Fluorescence cell imaging and manipulation using conventional halogen lamp microscopy. PLoS ONE 7, e31638 (2012).
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I'm looking for a juvenile SF novel that was in my junior high school library (1959 - 1962). A family is surveying a new solar system intending to file a claim on it. The father is injured, but his teenage son continues the survey. On one of the planets he finds a cache of alien "power cubes". As part of the claims process he has to place a beacon on each planet and in orbit about the system's son. The beacons broadcast a unique ID registered to his father. The son takes their spaceship in dangerously close to the sun to place the solar beacon. They leave the new system just as some claim jumpers arrive. The son uses the "power cubes" in their spaceship's drive to get back to earth. The claim jumpers challenge their claim in claims court, but the jumpers loose. The claims court had a message from an outpost saying that they had observed the beacon IDs in the new system changing one by one from the father's ID to the claim jumpers' ID EXCEPT for the beacon orbiting the new sun. The claim jumpers had been too afraid to go as close to the sun as the son had gone in order to place the beacon.
If anyone can identify this story I will be most appreciative.
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In 1976 Margaret Elliot Murdock was interviewed about her father, printer Charles Albert Murdock (1841-1928), and early San Francisco and UC, B days for the Bancroft Library oral history program. From her responses, I have gleaned herstory. Part 1 (last week’s column) was mainly about her San Francisco childhood. Part 2 takes her to Berkeley and the University, and Part 3 (next week’s column) to the Sather Tower bells.
I had gone to the normal school to earn money and taught about a year and a half before I came to college. I took the San Francisco Civil Service examinations as needed to be a permanent teacher there. After I graduated, I decided I preferred working on the campus. So I returned to the campus and have been here ever since, one way or another.
Lucy Stebbins invited me to be in the Dean’s office. That was something that was kind of in the family tradition to be connected with the Stebbins family. I certainly enjoyed it. While I enjoyed teaching, I think I’ve been very lucky to be on the campus all these years.
The dean of women’s office, in California Hall, handled for women: housing, and employment, and scholarships, and loans, and academic advice, and a little of everything that s now scattered all over the campus. There were just three people: Miss Stebbins, the Dean, and Mary Davidson, the Assistant Dean, and the office girl who handled the window and the correspondence, and a little of everything, so it was quite a responsibility. Next door were the dean of men’s office and across the hall, the registrar s office, and at the end of the hall was the president’s office and the comptroller’s office. Practically the whole university was handled from the second floor of California Hall.
I stayed in Cal Hall for quite a while because I was moved into the president’s office as Assistant to the University Representative in Educational Relations, concerned with relations with junior colleges. That was centralized at that time in the president‘s office. Then we were moved over into the education department because we were mostly handling junior college staff to be sure that the University helped them get the best-trained people, whether they happened to be University of California graduates or not. So, that moved into a form of college placement office… from that I moved over into counseling and advising students, one thing sort of led to another.
It was an interesting time to be in touch with the junior college movement and development. First of all from the job aspect and then later, the preparation for service in the California schools, because the state credentials seemed complicated to people who didn’t try to keep track of them. It was much easier to have the advice centralized so that people from other states who would ask about teaching in California, whether in elementary or college, or somewhere between, would come over to be told what the state requirements were. And the University students who wanted to go into teaching were sent over by their own departments. They knew what they wanted to major in but, for the getting ready for the certificate, the sequence of education courses, or the appropriate minors to go with their particular major was something else it was much easier for people to say, Go see Miss Murdock than to try to remember credential regulations. Or a student who had thought he wanted to go into medicine and weakened, needed to re-cycle his courses to be a science teacher with math on the side.
I worked at the Women’s Faculty Club. I lived at the Women’s Faculty Club from 23 to 40 and was active on different boards and committees. So, I knew the Club, of course first through Miss Stebbins and Jessica Peixotto and the other founders. I was Miss Stebbins’ secretary when it was established. It gives me a real interest in the Women’s Faculty Club and pride in what the women have accomplished. Miss Patterson and Miss Hope Gladding both did a good deal in the early days on the furnishing and the general equipment of the Club. Many of those people collected oriental things that the Club naturally inherited.
I think that while universities were never very cordial to women, the University of California reluctantly accepted a few more than others did, and they were fortunate in having some very fine people like Jessica Peixotto who certainly had plenty of brains established herself in the economics department and Miss Stebbins herself, and Dr. Agnes Fay Morgan and some of the other women who got the Club started were also people that the University had reason to be very proud of.
The hospital services were much earlier than the Women’s Faculty Club. The Prytanean Society, back in the early 1900s, in fact, Dr. Mary Ritter and other women who were connected with student health. But I think Miss Stebbins and the dean of women’s office were concerned with women’s housing. There weren’t any dormitories at the time that I first worked in the dean of women’s office. It was something that was needed and they did a great deal for that.
[The Prytanean Club invited Margaret to be an honorary member.] Yes, and that was, I guess, because I was working in the dean of women’s office and knew the people of that generation pretty well. It’s been a wonderful organization as far as service to the University goes.
[In the summer of 1923, Margaret suddenly found herself a bell player of the Sather Tower] I never expected to find myself a bell player but I think that any of us who were on the campus in 17 and 18 were excited to be around when the tower was being built, when the bells were being installed, when we first heard them. So, before I took over from my friend, Edith Frisbee, I really had some interest but I never expected to be connected with them such a long time. I played more than three times a week. When I lived here at the Club, I’d chase over to play in the morning and right at noon.
1923 was quite a year. I was living here at the Club and playing duets with my friend Edith Frisbee, who had been successful in a try-out for the bell ringer. So I didn’t try out; I just inherited her job and started in that summer.
I was just finishing up her summer appointment under Dr. King but I think he found it handy to have a ringer who was living here, on the campus, and able to fill in for him on short notice if something happened in the morning he cut himself shaving, or his car wouldn’t start or … he’d ring here to the Club and I’d hurry up to the tower and do his morning assignment even if it wasn’t my regular day. That was the year that we played for President Harding, who died in San Francisco; we tolled the bell. That was the same year, of course, as the Berkeley fire for which we summoned the students…to get them to come and help.
… a little later, in 1933 Harmon Gymnasium took fire. It was being torn down anyway. It was just a kind of a wreck. I was up in the tower and there were quite obviously some flames starting down there. So, Scotland’s Burning seemed an appropriate thing to play. A few years later Lindbergh flew west and President Campbell, being an astronomer and liking the skies, wanted people to be able to come and watch and see when he appeared. So I spent most of one Saturday morning up in the tower watching to see just when his plane appeared over Berkeley.
It’s always been a kind of Box and Cox existence; if one’s there, the other isn’t. But Mr. King would make out the programs and I’d try to find in the miscellaneous music, just what he wanted me to play because it came out in the University Calendar. He loved to give me a hymn done by a composer [named] Redhead because I was a redhead and he thought that was very funny, to ask me to play some thing by a Redhead.
On March 8, 2012, International Women’s Day, the President of the UN General Assembly, H.E. Mr. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser and the Secretary-General of the UN H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon jointly proposed the convening of a United Nations Fifth World Conference on Women in 2015, 20 years after the last women’s summit in Beijing. They hope that the international community in general would welcome this joint initiative and that the Member-States who have the final authority to convene the proposed conference would take the necessary steps during the on-going 66th session of the General Assembly. For entire Joint Statement: see http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=5904
Chicago Tribune’s John Hilkevitch reports that, in response to public outrage over "granny pat-downs," the Transportation Security Administration will ease screening procedures for airline passengers age 75+ at O'Hare International Airport. The new screening will also be tested at Denver, Orlando, and Portland International Airports. Individuals may still be required to remove their shoes and undergo a pat-down if anomalies are detected during security screening that cannot be resolved through other procedures.
Prior to Super Tuesday, 15 national organizations representing the interests of senior citizens and individuals with disabilities and including the National Council on Aging (NCOA), invited presidential candidates to answer 5 questions about their views on long-term services and supports. The questionnaire was distributed to all major candidates for the Office of President of the United States, regardless of political party affiliation. Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum did not respond. Barack Obama and New Gingrich responded. See NCOA and candidates’ websites.
This month, SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders)'s National Resource Center on LGBT Aging released its first comprehensive guide for aging service professionals and agencies, offering a range of tools and tips on creating affirming services for LGBT older adults. Titled Inclusive Services for LGBT Older Adults: A Practical Guide to Creating Welcoming Agencies, this guide can help agencies foster a welcoming environment for many diverse populations, including LGBT older adults. Download a PDF of the guide, or request print copies.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR returns next week. Readers are welcome to share by email news of future events and deadlines that may interest boomers, seniors and elders. Daytime, free, and Bay Area events preferred. firstname.lastname@example.org.
Sunday, March 18. 2 – 3:15 P.M. San Francisco Shakespeare presents Macbeth. Central Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St. The touring company presents a 55 minute production of the "Scottish play" with costumes, props, sets and recorded music. Stay for a Q&A session with the actors. 510-981-6100.
Tuesday, March 20. 12:30 P.M. San Francisco Gray Panthers general meeting. “Let's Talk about Taxes: Tax the 1%!” Location: Fireside Room, Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin St. (at Geary). 415-552-8800.
Wednesday, March 21. 12:15 – 1 P.M. Noon concert, UC, B. Music Department. Hertz Concert Hall. UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, David Milnes, director. Weber: Bassoon Concerto, Drew Gascon, soloist. Debussy: Nocturnes. Tickets not required. 510-642-4864.
Wednesday, March 21. 7:00- 8:00 P.M. Albany branch library, 1247 Marin Av. Adult
Evening Book Group: Pat Barker's Regeneration. When poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon writes a letter critical of England's efforts in World War I, he is sent to a mental hospital where Dr. W. H. R. Rivers tries to help patients express their war memories as a means of healing their "nerves." Rosalie Gonzales facilitates the discussion. Come to one meeting, or all meetings. Books are available at the Library. 510- 526-3720.
Friday, March 23. 12:15-1 P.M. Bustan Quartet. Free Noon Concert Series. Lecture/demonstration: Co-sponsored event: Highlights: Hertz Concert Hall. Visiting Israeli group demonstrates their work in crafting new means of musical expression from diverse resources. Tickets not required. 510-642-4864.
Saturday, March 24. Berkeley Public Library North Branch final open day for BranchVan Service at Live Oak Park. See April 7.
Monday, March 26. 7 P.M. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Av. Book Club.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peal Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. Each meeting starts with a poem selected and read by a member with a brief discussion following the reading. New members are always welcome. Free. 510-524-3043.
Current-March 30. “Berkeley Women Vote: Celebrating California Suffrage 1911-2011.” An Exhibit at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center Street. 510-848-0181.
Tuesday, March 27. 3 – 4 P.M. Central Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St.,
Tea and Cookies at the Library. A book club for people who want to share the books they have read. 510-981-6100.
Wednesday, March 28-April 1. ASA Aging in America Conference, Washington, DC. 15% off registration fees through March 21. Use discount code DCNCoa15 when you register. You also can save by signing up to volunteer at the conference. Go to NCOA website.
Wednesday, March 28. 1:30 - 2:30 P.M. Great Books Discussion Group: Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Albany Library, 1247 Marin Av. Rosalie Gonzales facilitates the discussion. Come to one meeting, or all meetings. Books are available at the Library. 510- 526-3720.
Wednesday, March 28. 1:30 P.M. Berkeley East Bay Gray Panthers. North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst, corner MLK. Free. 510-548-9696.
Wednesday, March 28. 2-3 P.M. Moraga Library. 1500 St. Mary’s Road. Join a Berkeley Rep Theatre-trained docent to talk about the latest production, John Logan's Tony Award-winning two-character bio-drama about abstract impressionist, Mark Rothko, that's been called a "master class of questions and answers." Free. 925-376-6852. 925- 254-2184
Monday, April 2. 6:30 P.M. Castoffs knitting group. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Av. An evening of knitting, show and tell and yarn exchange. All levels are welcome and help will be provided. Free. 510-524-3043.
Saturday, April 7. 1 – 5 P.M. Berkeley Public Library North Branch, 1170 The Alameda. Grand Reopening Event. The final open day for BranchVan Service at Live Oak Park will be Saturday, March 24, 2012. Details at www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org.
Monday, April 9. 11:30 – 1:30 A.M. Older Adult Passover Seder. Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, Berkeley Branch 1414 Walnut Street. Kosher meal will include chicken and matzo ball soup, gefilte fish with horseradish sauce, fresh green salad w/ hard boiled eggs, roasted chicken, matzoh kugel, and wine. The Seder will be led by Ron Feldman. $10 JCC East Bay Member. $13 Non-Member. RSVP by March 29. Contact: Front DeskPhone: 510-848-0237. Email: email@example.com
Thursday, April 12. 7:00 P.M. El Cerrito Library, 6510 Stockton Avenue. Folk singer Tim Holt performs and discusses our heritage of traditional songs and sea chanteys. Some favorites he will sing are "Shenandoah,? "The Erie Canal,? and Woody Guthrie?s "Talkin' Columbia" and "Roll On Columbia." Holt will include a song with his own original lyrics, "Sailing Down My Mountain Stream," adapted from a Pete Seeger song about cleaning up the Hudson River. His version focuses on a more recent effort to restore wild salmon to the upper reaches of the Sacramento River. Sponsored by the Friends of the El Cerrito Library. 510-526-7512.
Saturday, April 14. Berkeley Public Library Claremont Branch’s final open day for BranchVan Service at St. John’s Presbyterian Church.
Monday, May 7. 6:30 P.M. Castoffs knitting group. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Av. An evening of knitting, show and tell and yarn exchange. All levels are welcome and help will be provided. Free. 510-524-3043.
Monday, May 14. 7:00 P.M. Identity Theft Program. Barbara Jue, an Associate with Legal Shield, will offer information and advice on how to prevent Identity theft and how to deal with it if it should happen. She will also talk about children and computer use and cyber bullying. A DVD will be shown; Q&A will follow. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Avenue. Free. 510-524-3043.
Monday May 21. 7 P.M. Kensington Library Book Club: Color of the Sea by John Hamamura. 61 Arlington Av. Each meeting starts with a poem selected and read by a member with a brief discussion following the reading. New members are always welcome. Free. 510-524-3043.
Monday, June 4. 6:30 P.M. "Castoffs" - Knitting Group. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Avenue. An evening of knitting, show and tell and yarn exchange. All levels are welcome and help will be provided. Free. 510-524-3043.
Monday, June 18. 7 P.M. Art historian Michael Stehr will discuss Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who was the Michelangelo of the Baroque. He will also present a slide show. Kensington Library, 61 Arlington Avenue. Free. 510-524-3043.
Monday June 25. 7 P.M. Kensington Library Book Club: The Chosen by Chaim Potok. 61 Arlington Av. Free. 510-524-3043.
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Michelle Obama captivated an audience at Howard University this morning in talking about the importance of study abroad. The First Lady’s speech was scheduled as part of President Hu’s State Visit at the White House and served to renew the Administration’s commitment to the “100,000 Strong” initiative that President Obama announced during his trip to China in November 2009. If you missed the speech, you can watch it in its entirety here.
In encouraging all students to break out of their comfort zone and study abroad, she said,
…studying abroad isn’t just an important part of a well-rounded educational experience. It’s also becoming increasingly important for success in the modern global economy. Getting ahead in today’s workplaces isn’t just about the skills you bring from the classroom. It’s also about the experience you have with the world beyond our borders — with people, and languages, and cultures that are very different from our own.
But let’s be clear: studying in countries like China is about so much more than just improving your own prospects in the global market.
The fact is, with every friendship you make, and every bond of trust you establish, you are shaping the image of America projected to the rest of the world. That is so important. So when you study abroad, you’re actually helping to make America stronger.
NAFSA commends the Administration for setting this goal to expand study abroad to China and couldn’t agree more with the First Lady’s statements this morning about how essential study abroad is today. We share the First Lady’s view that opportunities of study abroad are important not only for the significant educational experience they provide, but also for their ability to bring people and nations together. These values are constant regardless of where in the world that study abroad opportunity takes place, whether in China, Indonesia, England, Egypt, South Africa, or even Cuba.
When it comes to China, a strong global leader and one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, the need for more Americans to speak the language and understand Chinese culture is absolutely critical. The number of Chinese students who study in the United States is ten times higher than the number of Americans who study there. Given China’s growing role in the world, it is clear that many more U.S. students should have the opportunity to study there, learn Mandarin, and take in the rich culture and history that make China the country it is today.
In addition to encouraging institutions to pledge their efforts to double study abroad in China as part of Secretary Clinton’s “100,000 Strong” Challenge, NAFSA has also been engaged with a project of the U.S.- China Education Trust (USCET), called the USCET Student Leaders Exchange. As part of the Obama Administration’s “100,000 Strong” initiative, USCET awarded grants to four institutions – University of Arkansas, the University of North Alabama, Boston University, and San Francisco State University – to amplify existing programs by challenging institutions to use the grants to inspire other commitments on campus to increase study abroad to China. What is so dynamic about this project is how the grants have supported study abroad offices at those institutions in leveraging campus-wide partnerships and other university commitments.
By offering a competitive grant process in which institutions were asked to grow study abroad beyond what would otherwise have been possible, USCET has helped create new opportunities for students to study abroad in China. We hope this model will be replicated as the “100,000 Strong” initiative continues to gain momentum, so the initiative can serve as a catalyst for a broader national movement to greatly increase study abroad by American students at locations all around the world.
One crucial element is clear: all of this must start with leadership at the top. Not only leadership at the White House, the Department of State, or the Department of Education, but also at colleges and universities across the country. When introducing the First Lady this morning, the President of Howard University, Dr. Sidney Ribeau, said that every Howard student should have an international experience. We urge university presidents across the country to embrace similar goals for the education of the students on their campuses.
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The Mesothelioma Cancer Center provides up-to-date information to visitors in the hopes of spreading awareness about the dangers of asbestos cancer. This website offers a one-stop resource on all asbestos issues ranging from occupational exposure to mesothelioma treatment options.
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