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AkbarArticle Free Pass
These ranks were systematically graded from commanders of 10 persons to commanders of 5,000 persons, with higher ranks being allotted to Mughal princes. Officers were paid either in cash from the emperor’s treasury or, more frequently, by the assignment of lands from which they had to collect the revenue, retaining the amount of their salary and remitting the balance to the treasury. Such lands seem to have been transferred frequently from one officer to another; this increased the officers’ dependence on the emperor, but it may also have encouraged them to squeeze as much as they could from the peasants with whom their connection might be transitory. Politically, the greatest merit of the system was that it enabled the emperor to offer attractive careers to the able, ambitious, and influential. In this way, Akbar was able to enlist the loyal services of many Rajput princes.
Akbar’s reforms required a centralized financial system, and thus by the side of each provincial governor (sūbadār, later called nawab) was placed a civil administrator (dīwān, or divan) who supervised revenue collection, prepared accounts, and reported directly to the emperor. As a further safeguard against abuses, Akbar reorganized the existing network of newswriters, whose duty it was to send regular reports of important events to the emperor. Akbar also seems to have instituted more efficient revenue assessment and collection in an effort to safeguard the peasants from excessive demands and the state from loss of money. But such efficiency could only have been enforced in the areas directly administered by the central government. This excluded the lands under tributary rulers such as the Rajputs and also the lands assigned for the maintenance of Mughal officers.
Yet, notwithstanding Akbar’s reforms, travelers’ accounts indicate that the Indian peasants remained impoverished. The official elite, on the other hand, enjoyed great wealth; liberal patronage was given to painters, poets, musicians, and scholars, and luxury industries flourished. Akbar also supported state workshops for the production of high-quality textiles and ornaments.
Personality and assessment
Akbar maintained a luxurious and brilliant court at which elaborate ceremonies emphasized his distance from other men, though he was careful to cultivate public opinion outside court circles. Every morning at dawn he stood at an open window to be seen and reverenced by the people. Foreign observers commented on the graceful manner in which he accepted little gifts from the people and showed himself ready to hear the complaint of any man who dared to approach him.
Physically, he was strong and could withstand hardship on campaigns. Although he seems to have been no more than five feet seven inches tall, he impressed observers as a dominating personality. Clearly, although he was illiterate, he had a powerful and original mind. His unprejudiced inquiries into Christian doctrines misled the Jesuit missionaries he invited to his court into thinking that he was on the point of conversion. He persuaded the Muslim theologians at his court to accept him as arbiter on points of Islamic law in dispute among them. Although this seems to have been little more than an expression of his systematic approach to problems, the orthodox were offended. He gave further offense by the religious discussions he encouraged between Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, and Christians. These discussions were continued by a small group of courtiers who shared with Akbar a taste for mysticism. Although their doctrines and ceremonies, known as the Divine Faith (Dīn-e Ilāhī), assigned a central place to Akbar himself, it would be an oversimplification to ascribe political motives to these developments.
Begun in 1570 and abandoned in 1586, Akbar’s capital of Fatehpur Sikri, near Delhi, is evidence of the resources he could command. Its combination of Hindu and Muslim architectural styles symbolizes the contact of cultures that he encouraged. Similarly, he commissioned the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian, giving illustrated copies to his courtiers. He also received with enthusiasm the European pictures brought by the Jesuits, and his painters incorporated European techniques of realism and perspective into the distinctive Mughal style (characterized by a vivid treatment of the physical world) that began to develop during his reign. Akbar’s reign was an example of the stimulating effects of cultural encounter. It has also often been portrayed as a model for future governments—strong, benevolent, tolerant, and enlightened. Effective government in a country as geographically vast and as socially complex as India demands a wide measure of social support. Akbar understood this need and satisfied it.
What made you want to look up "Akbar"? Please share what surprised you most...
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In the 1960s and 1970s, we began to learn about specialized recombination processes independent of genetic homology: chiefly, virus insertion and excision by site-specific recombination and transposition (Bukhari 1977). These were different from the familiar homology-dependent recombination used to establish genetic maps. Because they were new, there was a tendency to name homology-independent processes "illegitimate recombination," implying they were very specialized and not of general importance. Today, of course, we know that the movement of mobile genetic elements by "illegitimate recombination" is ubiquitous and of major evolutionary importance.
We have also learned that cells can use "legitimate" recombination in many different ways. It begins with a double-strand (DS) break in one of two homologous DNA molecules. When such breaks occur accidentally, they trigger homologous recombination for DNA repair.
In many situations, cells need recombination when no accidents have occurred. They possess special enzymes, endonucleases, that make DS breaks to initiate the process. For example, homologous recombination holds chromosome pairs together in meiosis. My University of Chicago colleague, Rochelle Esposito, and her students discovered that there is a special endonuclease, Spo11, that makes the essential DS breaks. Without Spo11, yeast and other organisms cannot carry out a normal meiotic process to produce haploid spores or gametes.
Spo11, like all endonucleases, cleaves preferred sequences. So there is a non-random pattern to the sites where homologous recombination occurs preferentially ("hotspots") in yeasts, plants, and animals.
A very recent paper illustrates another kind of hotspot control. Mouse cells have a special chromatin-binding protein that alters recombination hotspots: it binds to highly evolved genome expression signals in mouse DNA and protects them from disruption by homologous recombination. Without the protective binding protein, they become recombination hotspots.
The ability to target homologous recombination by DS breaks has also been utilized by different kinds of cells as a means of altering the proteins they express. In this way, some cells use "legitimate" recombination in the way other cells use "illegitimate" recombination. The first example of this specialized use of homologous recombination was in yeast sex change operations.
When yeast cells undergo meiosis, they produce four haploid spores. Haploids have one copy of each chromosome, not two. Spores can reproduce as haploid cells but are more sensitive to DNA damage. Diploid cells with two copies of every chromosome are less sensitive because damage to one copy can be repaired by recombination using the second copy. Thus, yeasts benefit by propagating as diploids, and most yeast in nature are diploid.
Haploid yeasts become diploids by fusing with cells of opposite sex, or "mating type." Sometimes this occurs between adjacent spores of opposite mating type following meiosis. But if one spore becomes isolated, it only has single mating type. How can it become diploid? The answer is to undergo a sex-change operation or "mating-type switching." The switch produces haploid cells of the opposite mating type so that fusion and diploid formation can proceed among the descendants of a single haploid spore.
In both budding yeast and fission yeast, sex change occurs when copies of epigenetically silent mating type information replace expressed mating type information. The substitution occurs by a directional form of homologous recombination called "gene conversion," where information at one site is copied into another homologous site. Although the sequences for the two mating types must be different, the silent region and the expressed region to be replaced are located within homologous cassettes, which allow gene conversion to proceed.
The sex change operation is initiated by a DS break at a special site in the expressed cassette. This break and other recombination control functions target the gene conversion event so mating type changes with high probability. Interestingly, the DS break mechanisms in budding yeast and fission yeast are different. Budding yeast use a typical endonuclease called HO or SceI. But fission yeast use a modified transposase protein, normally associated with the "illegitimate" process of transposition. Thus, we know that this purposeful specialization of "legitimate" recombination has undergone at least two completely independent parallel evolutionary steps.
A somewhat different use of gene conversion between silent and expressed cassettes takes place in numerous disease microbes (pathogens), both bacteria and eukaryotes. These pathogens use gene conversion to alter the structure of their surface proteins to avoid recognition by the host immune system ("antigenic variation").
In the best-studied cases, the bacterial Lyme disease spirochaete Borrelia, and the sleeping sickness protist Trypanosoma brucei, the genome sequence evidence for cassette recombination is strong, but the process is not as well understood as the yeast mating-type switches. The reason is that rather than two silent and one expressed cassette, as in the yeasts, these pathogens use dozens or hundreds of cassettes to keep ahead of the immune system.
"Legitimate recombination" was assumed to be reasonably uniform in the early days of genetics. That was the basis of constructing genetic maps. We now know homologous recombination can be used "illegitimately" (i.e. targeted either positively or negatively). I think the molecular studies are remarkable in uncovering a striking variety of ways cells have adapted homologous recombination for diverse purposes. As the recent mouse paper shows, we have only begun to scratch the surface of what promises to be a rich vein of cellular inventiveness.
Bukhari, A. I., J.A. Shapiro, and S. L. Adhya (Eds.) (1977). DNA insertion elements, plasmids and episomes Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Cold Spring Harbor Press.
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Nearly 200 faculty, staff, students, and community members came to hear environmentalist and author Bill McKibben deliver a rousing keynote address on October 18 during Lewis & Clark’s fifth annual Environmental Affairs Symposium.
"Global warming is one of the defining moral questions of our time," said McKibben. "We are controlling the fate of our planet, both human and nonhuman life, in a way that we never have before."
In his 1989 book End of Nature, McKibben claimed that ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions would create unprecedented worldwide climate changes.
The College’s weeklong symposium featured nearly a dozen presentations and panel discussions on free trade, sustainability, old-growth logging, environmental justice, art and the environment, and the 30th anniversary of the Clean Water Act.
Back to Winter 2003 Chronicle
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Steven Rosenbaum, Contributor
I'm an entrepreneur & startup guy who loves building businesses.
Each year TED has an over-arching mood I think. Sometimes this mood comes from the wider world, or outside influences. Sometimes it’s a consensus from the group. But overall, I think it matters because TED is a wide ranging group of thinkers and doers from the worlds of science, medicine, design, media, the arts, music and more…
This year - just one day in – I’m confident that I can report the mood at ted is very much one of Optimism.
This wasn’t always the case. TEDsters still talk about a TED from years ago that is referred to -amongst some of us – as The Bird Flu TED. Don’t’ get me wrong -their were plenty of terrific talks that year. But the word pandemic was very much on the minds of the TED community.
This year – there’s a spirit of solutions in the air.
There are lots of reasons for this – but the one that I think may be the biggest change at TED is the growth and importance of the TED fellow’s program, which is now in it’s third year.
TED fellows is a program TED has designed to bring into the TED community young, innovative, world changing innovators. Here’s how TED explains it. TED Fellows is a group of “young world-changers and trailblazers who have shown unusual accomplishment and exceptional courage. The program targets individuals from the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East, though anyone from anywhere in the world, age 18 and over, is welcome to apply.”
TED fellows began in 2007, in Tanzania. The first TED Fellows were established in response to the fact that many of the most promising members of the new generation of African talent could not have attended without the help of a fellowship. 100 Fellows were gathered from all around Africa, and their remarkable ideas and presence made a huge contribution to TEDAfrica’s success. This group inspired a permanent TED Fellows program. Each year 20 new TED Fellows are chosen.
This year - I watched the entire TED Fellows presentations for the first time. They were extraordinary. There were four that were earthshaking for me – four I wanted to share with you.
Gregory John Gage calls himself a DIY neuroscientist, and co-founder of Backyard Brains, an organization teaching kids neuroscience through experiments with robotic control of ordinary cockroaches. Gage is turning a 13 year old’s love of things that crawl into a way to get kids excited about brain science.
Bre Pettis is known as a “Maker.” He is an Inventor, maker, and founder of MakerBot Industries, a company producing the Thing-O-Matic, the first affordable 3D printer. By giving people the tools to turn 3d creations into real things, Pettis has created a spark-plug for the 3d world. And, because sharing is part of creating – he built Thingiverse so creators could work as a team to create real world things from digital ideas.
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The curriculum in SCPS is built on Malcolm Knowles’ concept of andragogy, which is the art and science of helping adults learn. We believe that adult students are self-directed and have a problem-centered (versus subject-centered) orientation to learning. Therefore, our courses address student needs by providing direct, concrete experiences and instruction so that they can apply their learning. The faculty takes a developmental approach to teaching, and students are provided with ongoing feedback and given many opportunities to practice their learning.
A blended learning approach is practiced in the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, meaning that students have the benefit of traditional learning in a face-to-face environment as well enjoying the convenience of online instruction. All courses are taught in a combination of classroom and online learning. This flexibility is appreciated by busy, working professionals.
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The Twenty-One Balloons
The Twenty-One Balloons, written by William Pene du Bois, won the Newberry Medal in 1947. The story begins when Professor Sherman, who teaches high-school, becomes bored with his life and sets off on a journey in a hot air balloon called The Globe. He hopes the wind will blow him and his balloon all around the world. To his surprise, he instead has a crash landing on the mysterious island of Krakatoa, an island full of diamond mines and enormous wealth.
On the island dwells a society of twenty families who were brought together by a shipwrecked sailor. Each family owns a restaurant of different types of foreign foods and all members of the island eat together at a different house each night. Krakatoa is a volcanic island, and the families are aware of the danger that the volcano could erupt at any moment. Their escape plan consists of a platform made of balloons. Mr. F, one of the island dwellers, finds Professor Sherman on the island and takes him in.
The secret society of Krakatoa is based on values of greediness for wealth and inactivity. They believe their lives are perfect because they never have to worry about money. They live empty and unfulfilling lives and must learn the value of relationships, education and their own lives. They must learn how having extreme excess of money, or anything, is worthless. The book is full of drawings that help make complicated inventions and ideas clearer.
I would rate this book a 4. The plot illustrates important lessons by showing a society that does not function like the society we are used to living in today, but with critical parallels to the problems related to greed and excess,
Author: Katie Ransohoff, high school student writer
Reviewed by the Web Content
Committee of PAMF
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Janmashtami celebrates the birth of Krishna. He is not a vyakti or person but shakti or energy. Krishna was poornakalaavataran , a complete incarnation. The purpose of celebration is to realise that Krishna is in me. In the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna says, "One who sees everyone in Me and sees Me in everyone, for such a person, I shall never remain hidden and he shall never be far from me."
Krishna's life has all the nine rasas or flavours. For instance, he was naughty like a child, a warrior, joy personified and a source of knowledge. He was a perfect friend and guru. His birth on ashtami signifies his mastery of both spiritual and material worlds. He is a great teacher and spiritual inspiration as well as the consummate politician. On the one hand, he is Yogeshwara, the Lord of Yogas while on the other, he is a mischievous thief. His behaviour is a perfect balance of extremes - perhaps this is why his personality is so difficult to fathom. The avadhoot is oblivious to the world outside and a materialistic person, a politician or a king is oblivious to the spiritual world. But Krishna is both Dwarkadheesh and Yogeshwar.
To understand Krishna, simply become Radha, Arjuna or Uddhava. Three kinds of people seek refuge in God - the lover, the miserable and the wise. Uddhava was wise, Arjuna was miserable and Radha was love personified. Krishna's teachings are most relevant to our times as they neither let you get lost in material pursuits nor make you completely withdrawn. They rekindle your life, from being a burnt-out and stressed personality to a more centred and dynamic one. Krishna teaches us devotion with skill. To celebrate Gokulashtami is to imbibe extremely opposite yet compatible qualities and manifest them in your own life.
Krishna tells Arjuna, ''You are very dear to me'' and says he must surrender. Surrender begins with an assumption. You assume you are the most beloved of the Divine, and then surrender happens. Surrender is not an action; it is an assumption. Non-surrender is ignorance, an illusion. Surrender has to begin as an assumption and then it reveals itself as a reality. Finally, it reveals itself as an illusion. An illusion, because there are no two aspects, no duality. There is no independent existence of anyone. An individual has no independent existence.
So, in the Gita, Krishna says, ''He is dear to Me who neither goes on thanking people nor hates anyone." Thanking and feeling obliged indicates that you believe in someone else's existence rather than in the Divine who is ruling everything. When you feel obliged, then you are not honouring the principles of karma or the divine plan. Appreciate people for what they are; do not thank them for what they do. Otherwise your thankfulness is centred around the ego. You are grateful, but not for an act. You are grateful for what is.
Hence the most authentic way of celebrating Janmashtami is to know that you have to play a dual role - of being a responsible human being and at the same time to realise that you are above all events, the untouched Brahmn. Imbibing a bit of avadhoot and a bit of activism in your life is the real significance of celebrating Janmashtami. Awaken the Krishna in your consciousness - "Krishna is not far from me, not separate from me, He is within me'- this feeling will fill your life with Krishna.
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U.S. oil production will increase to 7.5 million barrels a day in 2019 from 5.7 million in 2011 on rising output from onshore shale formations, the Energy Department said.
Domestic crude output will then decline gradually to 6.1 million barrels a day in 2040 as producers develop “sweet spots” first and then move to less productive areas, the department said Wednesday in the early release of the annual Energy Outlook 2013 report.
“The growth results largely from a significant increase in onshore crude oil production, particularly from shale and other tight formations,” the department said.
Onshore production from tight oil formations, or shale oil with low permeability, will account for 51 percent of total output in the lower 48 states, up from 33 percent in 2011.
As a result of rising domestic oil output, imported liquid fuels as a share of total consumption will drop to 34 percent by 2019 from 45 percent in 2011 and rise to 37 percent by 2040, the department said.
The increasing production of oil, gas and renewable fuels will reduce the share of net imports in total U.S. energy consumption to 9 percent by 2040 from 19 percent in 2011.
The Energy Department shifted to Brent oil as the reference price in this year’s report. Brent spot prices will average $117.36 a barrel in 2025, $145.41 in 2035 and $162.68 in 2040 in 2011 dollars. West Texas Intermediate spot prices are expected to average $115.36 in 2025, $143.41 in 2035 and $160.68 in 2040.
“With a growing discrepancy between West Texas Intermediate prices and global crude prices, it was important for the EIA to use a global marker,” said Adam Sieminski, administrator of the department’s Energy Information Administration, in a webcast following the report.
Natural gas production will also increase as output from shale formation rises. Total output will reach 33.2 trillion cubic feet in 2040 versus 23.1 billion in 2011.
The U.S. will become a net exporter of liquefied natural gas starting in 2016 and will be a net exporter of natural gas by 2020, two years earlier than last year’s forecast.
The natural gas share of electric power generation will increase to 30 percent in 2040 from 24 percent in 2010, and renewable fuels will account for 16 percent, up from 13 percent in 2011. Natural gas prices at the Henry Hub in Louisiana will average $4.87 per million British thermal units in 2025, $6.32 in 2035 and $7.83 in 2040.
Total U.S. primary energy consumption will grow to 107.6 quadrillion British thermal units in 2040 from 97.7 quadrillion in 2011. The fossil fuel share of energy consumption falls to 78 percent in 2040 from 82 percent in 2011.
The report is based on the assumption that current laws and regulations remain unchanged. The agency uses the report to analyze market trends and potential changes in energy policy.
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Talking about image, it certainly causes us to think what is being discussed with the picture? And what does it mean? You know why?
Hmm. . Need you to know that image is something that is used to enhance a sense of curiosity. Let’s say you are a teacher then you bring a glass slipper in the classroom.
Imagine what would happen after that?
I think your students will definitely start to think when they saw it. Then they will try to guess what does it meant. So in this way can cause a sense of interest in something.
And the big question now, what is image skin care?
Well, here you must remember that image skin care is methods involve using a particular reference for a particular model of your skin; you need to take care of the preset condition of your skin. This makes sure that your skin condition improves bringing the best results to you.
In addition, need you note that image skin care requires you to have your skin in the proper ways.
What likes is it?
Some things must you consider first is food. Here you have to get used to consume food for beautiful skin, including a large number of vitamins and minerals that are most important.
That is by have a healthy diet consisting of fresh fruits and vegetables which helps in providing the glow and shine to the skin. In addition, you should also drink Drinking large amounts of water is also a must if you want to replenish your skin.
Do you know, what is the secret in the water?
Remember! Secrets of beautiful skin that was inaugurated today mostly use natural materials such as water, because by this way it can protect our skin from becoming old and bland.
In addition, if you have big body, so you must make vitamins such as B, A and C be a part of your diet. Why must it?
It is because they play a vital role in developing your skin into a healthy one. In addition, if you use it every day, it will give you all the necessary requirements for a glowing skin. The diet that you follow also helps in reducing skin disorders to a large extent.
And remember! Vitamin C rich fruits such as citrus fruits need to be consumed extensively as they help in reducing the free radical content in your skin. These free radicals are formed due to prolonged exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. That’s why you need to enter the food with vitamin C in your daily meals.
Then the important thing is if you want to look beautiful in an instant by using a particular product, it will be always wise to check the ingredients of a product before deciding on buying the product.
Do you know why?
It because it can helps in deciding the credibility of the product. Additionally, do not forget to always see figure sales are always the best skin care moisturizer contains ingredients such as grape seed oil, Babbassu oil, Avocado oil, Shea Butter, Vitamin E etc.
That is because you have chosen the right product. Imagine if you just try and not see image sales, is the same as you entered in the device to be a guinea pig. That’s why it’s important testimony in the sale.
If you do not have a friend who knows a particular product, then use the internet. By browsing, you will get whatever you want. By that way you can figure out how the product is.
Can it be trusted?
Or is it can’t be trusted?
Essentially, you must be smart to choose a product by looking for information first before trying it.
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In the state of Maharashtra, irrigation is sparking social unrest and political turmoil, and the battle for water is about to get worse.
Ajit Pawar, the Nationalist Congress Party leader and former Maharashtra deputy chief minister, resigned in September after the release of a report, from a committee commissioned by the state government and headed by the retired Principle Secretary of the Water Resources Department, Nandkumar Vadnere, that alleged far-reaching improprieties in water allocation and the implementation of irrigation projects in the state. Mr. Pawar was the Water Resources Minister for Maharashtra between 1999 and 2009.
On Thursday, a “white paper on irrigation” prepared by Maharashtra’s Water Resources Department was presented in the Maharashtra cabinet. The paper denies any wrongdoing by Mr. Pawar, saying that the state’s irrigation potential rose by 28 percent between 2001 and 2010.
But the white paper was quickly criticized because it fails to account for allegations made by activists against Mr. Pawar. He has been accused of sanctioning 38 irrigation projects, worth 20 billion rupees, or $365 million, without clearance from the governing council of Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation.
On Sunday, the anticorruption activist Arvind Kejriwal released a “black paper on irrigation” in response, which claims that the cost per hectare for irrigating land in Maharashtra is among the highest in India.
A report released by Greenpeace India on Monday examines the future availability of water in the drought-prone Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. The study, conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, examines the impact that allocating water to thermal power plants will have on the livelihood of farmers in Vidarbha.
Thermal power plants, powered by fossil fuels like coal, use large quantities of water for cooling purposes. A study released in August by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a trade group, in partnership with HSBC Knowledge Initiative said the thermal power sector uses more water than any other industrial sector. According to the report, power generation will require 33 billion cubic meters of water in 2025 and about 70 billion cubic meters in 2050.
According to the Greenpeace study, as of December 2010 there were 71 power plants, with a total installed capacity of nearly 55 gigawatts, in various stages of approval in the Vidarbha region. This planned increase in power production could worsen water shortages, raise pollution levels, eliminate farmland and cause environmental damage, said the report, which analysed present and future demands on the Wardha and Wainganga rivers.
According to the study, whose authors are Prof. A. K. Gosain, Dr. Rakesh Khosa and Jatin Anand from I.I.T. Delhi’s department of civil engineering, the proposed thermal plants will require 1.7 billion cubic metres of water per year, enough to irrigate more than 410,000 hectares of farmland. If the planned thermal power expansion is carried out, the water available in the Wardha River basin would drop by 40 percent, according to the report. In the Wainganga River basin, it would drop by 16 percent.
“There is clearly a crisis in water in the region, but that seems to have escaped the planners” when they decided where to put thermal power plants, said Jai Krishna, campaigner for climate and energy at Greenpeace India. “If the expansion of thermal power plants goes unchecked, in a decade there will be a power plant in Vidarbha nearly every 15 kilometers, which will be using water and releasing ash and pollution,” he said.
Government policies that make water and land cheap in the area seem to be the reason for location of the thermal plants, he said. None of the plants are expected to use coal from the region.
The Vidarbha region, in eastern Maharashtra, is among the state’s most underdeveloped areas. It is largely inhabited by impoverished cotton farmers who are reliant on the region’s scant rainfall for their crop. Uncertain rainfall and the rising costs of farming have made agriculture less and less sustainable in the region, leading to an increase in farmer suicides.
“This year, in the period between January and December, there have been 824 farmer suicides in Vidarbha,” said Kishore Tiwari, president of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a farmers’ rights group working in the region. “The farmers are caught in a cycle of debt which is policy-driven,” he said. “The government needs to rethink its policies towards rural and agrarian economy to safeguard the interests of farmers.”
Vidarbha is not the only area where water allocation has become a flashpoint between farmers and the government. “This problem is becoming increasingly common wherever there is a large concentration of thermal plants coming up,” said Shripad Dharmadhikary, founder of Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, a research center that focuses on water and energy issues. “In many places, such as in Maharashtra, water is earmarked and dams are created for irrigation – promising the local people benefits from these facilities – but are now being used for industries that do not benefit the local population.”
Farmers across India are staging protests against plans to locate thermal plants in their region. Farmers from the region around the Hirakud reservoir in Orissa, where several thermal plants are planned, have rallied for access to the water from the Mahanadi River. Water from the Rihand Dam in Uttar Pradesh and the region around the Narmada River in central India has also been allocated to thermal plants. “It is not that we are saying the government must not create thermal plants, as these will also contribute to the economic development of the country,” said Mr. Dharmadhikary. However, he said, “some thought must be given to the local communities when allocating the country’s precious resources.”
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From the author to the reader
This introductory chapter will provide you with a quick overview of several areas of scientific facts which obliterate evolutionary theory. If you will read this first chapter several times and begin telling others what you have learned, enough of these basic facts will be fixed in your mind that you will be prepared to intelligently explain to others why evolution is an unbelievable immense hoax. Most people—including schoolteachers and even college professors do not know these scientific facts.
From its very beginning, the spread of evolution has been based and spread through misinformation, error, and outright fraud. It is a theory without a basis in scientific fact, upon which has been erected a great mass of erroneous dates, conjectures, and assumptions.
A wealthy man in England, Charles Darwin, who had almost no training in the biological or physical sciences, spent his life measuring things with wooden rulers, talking to farmers about crops and pigeons, worrying about his ailments, and trying to devise a theory that might explain some way in which everything could come from nothing. He was sure that he was right because, on a South Seas island, he saw several different sub-species of the same sparrow. Surely, if a plant or animal could produce variants,—it must be able to jump across the species barrier and make something entirely different! But of that possibility, he never found any evidence. Neither did any of his followers in the years that followed.
Darwin’s quaint little theory, published in Origin of the Species in 1859, contained his reasons for his thinking. The book was so worthless that later evolutionists are ashamed of it.
Darwin’s idea was that "natural selection" must have changed one species into another. Evolutionists explain that by this is meant totally random changes which, according to the theory, always improve the creature—and produce wonderful new species.
However genuine scientists know that "random changes" could never do that. They also know that a given species can only produce sub-species (breeds of dogs or horses, varieties of roses, or sweet peas); it could never produce change resulting in a different species (dogs to cats, roses to oak trees, etc.).
Modifications within species are called microevolution; but, of course, that is not evolution at all. It is just change, back and forth, within a certain species. We all agree that there can be changes within species (bigger dogs and smaller dogs, larger or smaller bird bills). But changes from one species into another (fish to birds, or cows to horses) never occurs. This type of change—called macroevolution—is true evolution. Yet there is no evidence in our world today that it is occurring, and there is no evidence in the fossils and rock strata that it has occurred in the past.
Although "natural selection" is called "Darwinism," evolutionists do not want you to know that, later in life, Darwin repudiated natural selection! He said random changes could not produce new species. (Darwin never dared to publish a theory on the actual origin of the species—how life originated from sand and seawater. Like modern evolutionists, he had no idea how it could have occurred.)
But in the decades which have passed since Charles Darwin, an astounding array of new scientific discoveries have nailed the coffin lid over evolution.
At the time when Darwin lived, no one knew anything about what was in animal and plant cells—nothing! Nothing was known about genetics, DNA, microbiology, and a host of other discoveries within living cells—all of which disprove evolutionary theory.
However, the evolutionists did not lack weapons in the defense of their beloved theory. They have repeatedly used three things to suppress scientific facts pointing to Creation, from being taught in the schools and universities: fraud, ridicule, and academic and employment threats.
Ernst Haeckel, in Germany, produced fraudulent pictures of embryos in 1868, to bring evolution to the attention of European scientists. Faked etchings on stone of a half-bird were also used to win doubters to the cause.
Darwin’s theory captured British science at a meeting in London in 1860 when his friend, Thomas Huxley, ridiculed a scientist—and all the atheists in the audience hooted and shouted, and started a small riot. As a result, after that, creationists in Britain feared to assert themselves, and evolutionary theory took over British science.
Something similar happened in America at the 1925 "Monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, when Clarence Darrow ridiculed William Jennings Bryan,—while the press spread the word throughout the world that the State of Tennessee was ignorant and backward because it opposed the teaching of evolution in the schools. As a result, all across America, legislators feared to oppose the evolutionists.
After decades of attempts by scientists to prove that random changes ("natural selection") could produce macroevolution (change from one distinct species into another), many scientists abandoned it and switched over to mutations as the cause of evolutionary change.
Discovering that certain chemicals—and especially radiation—could cause abundant mutations, thus speeding up "the process of evolution," they were certain that soon they would prove their theory and wonderful new, robust species would be produced. But, instead, they discovered two unfortunate facts: (1) Mutations are always harmful and frequently lethal; and (2) mutations never, never change one species into another. All that was produced was weakened creatures which generally died soon after or, if they lived, did not produce offspring. Obviously, if mutations could cause outstanding new species, Hiroshima in 1945 would have produced millions of them. But all that resulted was people who died or were greatly injured.
The next theory, adopted in desperation in the early 1980s by many evolutionists, was that, every 50,000 years or so, millions of beneficial mutations occur in a single newborn creature—producing a totally new species. Conveniently, another creature, born nearby, also has those same millions of identically changed mutations! They mate and produce a new species. This fairy tale, known as "punctuated equilibrium," is the current theory.
But the evolutionists do not want you to know these devastating facts about evolution! They tell you over and over again that "evolution has been proven!" But this is an untruthful statement, and the evolutionists know it.
The book you now have in hand disproves each of the BASIC foundations upon which evolutionary theory is built.
In public, evolutionists always assume that the foundations of their theory are proven—because they fear to discuss them openly. They are well-aware that their theory has no foundation!
Then they go ahead and pile on top of it layer after layer of speculations, names, and dates.
For example, they tell you that the universe is so many billions of years old, and that the stars are so many millions of years old. But they do not discuss the fact that gas in outer space cannot possibly form itself into stars! Or that something moving in a straight line cannot by itself change directions or begin circling. Those are some of the many basic facts about astrophysics which you are not told.
They hide the fact that, with the exception of a couple documented solar eclipses a few hundred years before the time of Christ, they have no accurate way to date any ancient event.
They do not tell you that over a hundred years of research has failed to prove any means by which a so-called "primitive environment" on Earth could produce living creatures from sand and water.
The chapter in this book on DNA and Protein alone—totally blows away evolution! The millions of codes in DNA or in protein could not possibly evolve randomly—even if trillions and trillions and trillions of years were given to the task.
Then there is the cell. Every living creature—whether plant or animal—is composed of tiny boxes, called "cells." The new advanced field of microbiology, which did not exist before 1950, has made astounding discoveries about the utter complexity of the different things in those cells and the amazing things they do! Evolution could never produce this!
In addition, there is no evidence that macroevolution (change from one species to another) is happening now. But is there any evidence that it has occurred in the distant past?
The only evidence would be fossils. However, over 150 years of fossil collecting only reveals distinct species,—and no evidence of one changing into another. There are only distinct (different) species. There are no half-species (with the exception of one, Archaeopteryx, which has been shown to be a fraud). Indeed, if evolutionary theory was true, there would be no definite species at all—only a chaotic confusion of creatures!
As part of the fairy tale, evolutionists tell us that "vast amounts of time" might somehow produce the needed changes. Yet not only is there is no reliable way to date anything in the past (neither radioactive substances nor rock strata can do it), but an abundance of time could not do it anyway! An hour or a century in the past could not accomplish any more than an hour or a century today. It is not in the power of time to produce changes.
Then there is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which applies to everything about us, and teaches that everything is running down and wearing out. Yet evolution teaches the opposite: that everything is improving, becoming more complex, and inventing wonderful new things.
Historians tell us that evolutionary theory, based on the theory that violence and selfishness is the basis of change and improvement, has greatly worsened human morals and produced wars.
In reviewing the desolation which evolutionary theory has produced over the past 150 years, thoughtful scientists declare that the theory has greatly hindered the advance of scientific endeavor.
Not only does this theory, based on a falsehood, lead to many erroneous conclusions; but an immense amount of research money has been diverted into attempts to find scientific evidence supporting the foolish notion.
Chapter 1 will briefly survey the desperate efforts of evolutionists, for over 150 years, to defend a foolish, unworkable theory which runs counter to all basic scientific evidence.
Chapter 2 will incisively destroy the astrophysical basis of the theory,—and show that, based on all the evidence available, stars could only come into existence fully formed.
Chapters 3 through 7 will undercut the theoretical concept that our world was formed over billions of years from gas of primal elements,—and show that our planet could only come into existence fully formed.
Chapters 8 through 12 eliminate the possibility that life forms could evolve into existence,—and show that, based on the evidence, plants and animals could only come into existence fully formed.
Chapter 13 eradicates the concept that people evolved from lower forms of life,—and shows that all the available evidence reveals that men and women came into existence fully formed—normal human beings.
Chapters 14 through 24 deal with other intriguing aspects of the evolution controversy.
Chapter 25 will provide you with the latest developments in the ongoing creation-evolution battle, up to early 2006.
Additional quotations from recognized scientists have been included in this enlarged edition.
Dedicated — To the memory of George McCready Price, the most powerful anti-evolution writer of the first half of the 20th century, and to Henry M. Morris, the most influential creationist of the last half.
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MEXICO CITY — In the end, it took direct, explicit U.S. pressure to force the de facto government of Honduras to reverse the position it had clung to for nearly four months and agree to a deal that could reinstate deposed President Manuel Zelaya.
The agreement does not automatically put Zelaya back in office, and, given the erratic behavior of the principal players in the Honduran drama, no outcome is certain.
But both sides applauded the deal Friday and said it hailed a possible end to the crisis that has isolated and divided the impoverished Central American country since a military-backed coup on June 28.
Leaders around the world also voiced approval. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton praised the "historic agreement" and was "very proud" that the U.S. was "instrumental in the process."
Under the agreement, the Honduran Congress, following a "consultation" with the Supreme Court, will vote on whether Zelaya should be reinstated. Zelaya and the man who replaced him, Roberto Micheletti, reportedly each has confidence in victory.
Pressure to end the crisis has mounted in recent weeks from several sources, including the powerful Honduran business elite, which backed the coup but has been losing millions of dollars because of sanctions and interrupted trade.
Politicians involved in elections scheduled for Nov. 29 also have been pushing for a resolution, and the Honduran people have tired of sometimes violent instability and repression of many civil rights.
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UCLA professor David Jewitt wins prestigious Kavli and Shaw prizes in same week
By Alison Hewitt and Stuart Wolpert May 31, 2012 Category: Academics & Faculty
UCLA's David Jewitt, who earlier this week was awarded the Shaw Prize in astronomy, has also won the 2012 Kavli Prize in astrophysics for his role in the 1993 discovery of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, it was announced today. Each prize comes with a $1 million award.
The discovery of the Kuiper Belt, which contains more than a billion objects and was once believed to be empty space, has fundamentally changed the modern perception of the solar system.
That the Shaw and Kavli prize committees independently made the same choice in the same week is "pretty excellent," Jewitt said.
Jewitt shared the Shaw Prize with Jane X. Luu, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratories who was his former graduate student. The Kavli Prize was awarded to Jewitt, Luu and Michael E. Brown of the California Institute of Technology, "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system."
Jewitt, a professor in the UCLA Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, directs UCLA's Institute for Planets and Exoplanets. His research focuses on the exploration of the small bodies of the solar system, which provide clues to the origin and evolution of planets.
Jewitt and Luu spent six years making observations of the outer solar system. In 1992, they detected the first known object in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune's orbit. Since then, they and others have identified more than a thousand Kuiper Belt objects. Astronomers are particularly interested in these objects because their composition may be close to the primordial material that coalesced around the sun during the formation of the solar system.
"Prior to the detection of the first trans-Neptunian objects by Jewitt and Luu in 1993, little was known about the content of the solar system between the orbit of Neptune ... and the Oort cloud," the Shaw Prize's astronomy selection committee wrote. The committee selected Jewitt and Luu "for their discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system ... They provide our best record of the early stages of planet formation."
"It's a fantastic recognition of the work that Jane and I have done," Jewitt said Tuesday of the Shaw Prize. "It's completely amazing that this vast region of the solar system could have gone undiscovered for so long. It makes me wonder what else is out there."
The icy bodies Jewitt and Luu discovered are relics of the planet-formation phase of the solar system, Jewitt said. Scientists believe there are more than a billion objects in the Kuiper Belt that are more than a kilometer across, he said.
"People used to think that the outer solar system was empty, because it looked empty," he said. "Mostly, the objects were just very faint, and people weren't looking hard enough to see them. It's the repository of the most primitive material in the solar system. This discovery is what led to Pluto falling from grace."
People weren't too happy with him about the demotion of Pluto from planetary to dwarf-planetary status, he said. "I had a death threat one time. But it doesn't make any difference for Pluto. It's just a fact."
The Kavli Prizes — a partnership between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation in the U.S., and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research — are awarded bienially to scientists for "seminal advances" in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. They were initiated by and named for Fred Kavli, founder and chairman of the Kavli Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work.
Norway's King Harald will present the Kavli Prizes to the 2012 laureates at a ceremony in Oslo Sept. 4. For more information, visit www.kavliprize.no and http://worldsciencefestival.com/webcasts/kavli2012.
The Shaw Prizes are awarded by the Shaw Foundation, established by Run Run Shaw, a Chinese media mogul in Hong Kong, to honor significant breakthroughs in astronomy, the life sciences and medicine.
In addition to his roles at UCLA, Jewitt is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For more on UCLA research by Jewitt, see:
UCLA is California’s largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university’s 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
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Mitt Romney will call for a US change of course in the Middle East on Monday, saying President Barack Obama’s muddled strategy has failed to confront the challenges of extremism.
The Republican White House hopeful, offering a foreign policy vision that he and his campaign believe differs sharply from Obama’s, said he would keep Iran in check, chase terrorists in Libya, put conditions on US aid to Egypt and help arm Syrian rebels.
His speech at Virginia Military Institute highlights the need to put adversaries on notice that a Romney administration would not tolerate the anti-American unrest that has been allowed to fester under Obama.
“I know the president hopes for a safer, freer and a more prosperous Middle East allied with the United States. I share this hope. But hope is not a strategy,” Romney says in excerpts provided by his campaign.
“It is time to change course in the Middle East,” according to Romney.
“We cannot support our friends and defeat our enemies in the Middle East when our words are not backed up by deeds… and the perception of our strategy is not one of partnership, but of passivity.”
Romney will use the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, where the US ambassador and three other Americans were killed in a September 11 attack on the consulate there, as an example of how extremists are exploiting perceived US weakness.
“The attacks on America last month should not be seen as random acts. They are expressions of a larger struggle that is playing out across the broader Middle East,” Romney will say, adding that the Benghazi attack “was likely the work of the same forces that attacked our homeland on September 11th, 2001.”
“This latest assault cannot be blamed on a reprehensible video insulting Islam, despite the administration’s attempts to convince us of that for so long,” he will add, highlighting the Obama team’s shifting version of events.
Romney would “vigorously pursue the terrorists” who attacked in Benghazi, “recommit America” to the goal of a two-state solution with Israel and the Palestinians, and take a tougher line with Iran.
“For the sake of peace, we must make clear to Iran through actions, not just words, that their nuclear pursuit will not be tolerated.”
In Egypt, Romney said, he would use US influence — “including clear conditions on our aid” — to lean on Cairo to embrace democracy and maintain its peace treaty with Israel.
In Syria, Romney would seek to ensure that rebels fighting strongman Bashar al-Assad’s regime “obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets.”
And in Afghanistan, he will express support for a “real and successful transition” to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014, but warned against a “politically timed retreat.”
“I will evaluate conditions on the ground and weigh the best advice of our military commanders,” he will say.
Romney’s backers said Obama has departed from the “peace through strength” posture that has been embraced by nearly every US president since Harry Truman.
“It’s a recognition that strength is not provocative; it is weakness that’s provocative,” Rich Williamson, a former US ambassador to Sudan under president George W. Bush, told reporters Sunday.
With the slowly improving US economy providing less of a clear-cut case for new leadership barely four weeks from the November 6 election, Romney is seeking to muscle in on turf largely seen as the dominant preserve of the president.
Obama cites the killing of Osama bin Laden, extraction from Iraq, standing up to China, and the winding down of war in Afghanistan as foreign policy accomplishments, but Romney’s campaign insists the president has come up short.
“Benghazi shows that while drone attacks are helpful and the world is certainly better off that Osama Bin Laden is dead, the struggle between radical extremism and those who want moderation isn’t over,” Williamson said.
Obama’s campaign on Sunday had a message for Romney should he wish to have a foreign policy debate: “Bring it on.”
“To date, all Mitt Romney has offered is bluster and platitudes,” Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith said, adding that Romney has “erratically shifted positions on every major foreign policy issue.”
Smith said Romney’s desire to keep troops in Iraq, backing plans to explode defense spending levels for the Pentagon, and “insulting our allies and partners around the world on the campaign trail” is not mainstream policy.
Romney has ruffled feathers by denouncing countries like Greece and Spain as examples of why America should avoid European economic policies.
Raw Story is a progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media. While giving coverage to the big stories of the day, we also bring our readers' attention to policy, politics, legal and human rights stories that get ignored in an infotainment culture driven solely by pageviews.
Founded in 2004, Raw Story reaches 5 million unique readers per month and serves more than 19 million pageviews.
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Spring is almost here, did you submit your story of your British Home Child to share with other members. The newsletter is for sharing, find lost family members or make a connection you never knew you had. You may have pictures in a shoe box stored in the closet, get them out. The story does not have to be long, and then submit it for the newsletters. Remember, genealogists like to read about the life of families.
If you do not want to write a story the Members Only section can post your information, just scan the data, send it in and it can be posted. Check out the interesting items displayed.
Remember, it is only as good as you make it.
BRITISH HOME CHILD
A SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP of THE ONTARIO GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY
Welcome to the OGS British Home Child - Special Interest Group
From 1869 to 1939 various workhouses, sheltering homes, orphanages and child care organizations in Great Britain immigrated over 100,000 orphaned, abandoned, pauper children ages 1 to 18 to Canada. Known as the British Home Children (BHC), life for these children coming alone to Canada to work as domestics and farm labourers forging ahead in a new land was not always easy.
Of the over 50 sending agencies, some of the more well known names are Rye, Macpherson, Fegan, Quarriers, Barnardo, Middlemore, Catholic Emigration Society, Salvation Army, Church of England Waif & Strays.
It is estimated that 12%, over 4 million, of the Canadian population is a descendant of a Home Child. Home Children Descendants now live worldwide.
you have a report on a Home Child and would like to share? Let us know.
Email BHC-SIG BHC@ogs.on.ca
Web Master: Norma Hughson
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Hallstatt is located on the shores of a sleepy Austrian lake Hallstatter See , surrounded by high hills and the Dachstein Mountain Range. Similar to a fjord, Hallstatt Lake extends in front of the picturesque village that was one of the earliest and most unique settlements in this region.
Due to the early discovery of large salt deposits in the surrounding mountains, the village has a proud history that dates back a thousand years and archaeology has revealed that this area was inhabited from around 5000 BC. Long before Christianity came to Salzkammergut and prior to any churches being built, an independent prehistoric culture evolved.
The village contains a rich variety of historic buildings and its churches contain precious works of art such as a Late Gothic altar created by Leonhard Astl. The old marketplace and fountain is crowned by a trinity column that dates back to 1744. The welcoming facades of the dwellings have graced this atmospheric village since the 16th century and the market probably dates back to the 14th century.
In 1891, Lake Street played a vital role for the village’s busy commercial traffic and the impressive Countryside and Pre-History Museum displays the history of salt mining in the area and its importance to the village.
In 1846, the Salinen civil servant, Johann Georg Ramsauer, made a sensational discovery when he discovered a prehistoric burial ground in the village. During 17 years of excavation, a total of 20,000 objects were discovered in 980 graves. These discoveries subsequently led to the establishment of Hallstatt’s intriguing and fascinating culture.
Global Treasures - History's Most Protected Monuments - Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live today, and what we pass on to future generations. Our cultural and natural heritage are both irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration. Places as unique and diverse as the wilds of East Africa's Serengeti, the Pyramidsof Egypt, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Baroque cathedrals of Latin America make up our world's heritage. Join us as we explore one of these protected monuments.
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Quite simple. To create it, you can either use any PCLinuxOS live CD (any version) or, as an alternative, you can back up the contents of your PCLinuxOS installation into an ISO file. Should you choose to do the latter, I'll explain how it works in the next paragraph. If, OTOH, you'd rather just use one of PCLOS's stock ISO files that you can download from the PCLOS website, then skip to the paragraph after that.
Start MyLiveCD by going to a terminal and typing in "mylivecd" (without the quotes, of course). You'll be prompted for the root password, and once you enter that, it'll take a snapshot of your system and condense the whole thing into an ISO file. Be forewarned however, that it takes a LONG time for MyLiveCD to condense the contents of your system into an ISO file (mine took about 2 hours -- your mileage may vary).
Once that's done, look for a program in one of the menus (just exactly where it is, I don't recall -- I'm at work right now on a VERY slow day, and I'm on Windows and not by choice) called Live USB Creator. Start that, and again, you'll be asked for your root password. After you've entered that, follow all the on-screen instructions to the letter, including when to insert and remove your flash drive. Overall, this phase of the operation takes about 5 minutes.
At this point, you're ready to use your Live USB drive. All you do here is just plug it in to any computer that's capable of booting from a flash drive and turn on or reboot the computer. When you boot up, you'll be given the choice between the ISO you copied to the USB drive as-is or a persistent version of the above, which will keep track of all the files you've placed on the USB drive and other changes you've made since installing PCLOS onto it.
For the record, I keep a 4GB live USB in my pocket all the time that consists of PCLOS Phoenix (Xfce) plus Enlightenment if I should need an even lighter desktop than Xfce. Another advantage to this is that the live USB will be a bit faster than a live CD or DVD -- almost as fast as a hard-drive installation.
I should warn you, though -- there is a bug in PCLinuxOS where, on live USB installations, pressing the number 2 -- namely, the one that, when shifted, generates the "@" symbol -- causes you to go back to the login screen. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here, but as far as I know, this bug still has yet to be fixed. However, you can simply log in again and, interestingly enough, pressing the same button will not present the problem again. Please note that this problem is unique to live USB installations and does not affect live CDs or hard-drive installations.
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Federal Way students confront grading system | Slideshow
By GREG ALLMAIN
Federal Way Mirror reporter
December 15, 2011 · 4:39 PM
With the conversation swirling around Standards Based Education (SBE) and Standards Based Grading (SBG) since the start of the school year, one group that hasn't really been heard from so far is Federal Way students.
A few here and there have taken the time to share their thoughts at Federal Way School Board meetings, but the conversations have mostly been dominated by parents and teachers. The students made a stand during the Dec. 13 meeting, with a good chunk of the 22 public commenters being high school students from Federal Way. (click here for a slideshow of a student protest march)
Leading off the night, and perhaps providing the best explanation of the grading system, was Thomas Jefferson High School student Julie Huber. Using a visual aid, Huber explained her thoughts on the unfairness she perceives within the system.
"I believe there are many inequities with standards based grading, but today I will only address my most immediate concern. The unfairness of power standards," Huber said. "In the current set-up, a grade is composed of power standards and learning targets as you see here. Each power standard includes learning targets, with grades only taken from the number of power standards reached. And to receive credit for the power standard, the student must receive credit for every single learning target under it."
"This can be incredibly unfair to students, because if a student receives credit for all but one learning target under a power standard, he or she does not receive credit for the power standard. In other words, if you don't get this one, you don't get any of the rest of these," she said. "In this system, a difference between a B, C or D is not the amount of information a student knows, it's the classification of the information."
Huber said she feels a relatively easy fix for SBG would be to have students evaluated, and their grades determined by, the learning targets instead of the power standards.
"Using only learning targets, the system would look like this: Grades are determined by the percentage of content that the student understands, it has nothing to do with what type they are. This proves a much clearer reflection of a student's true achievement, it makes more sense to everyone. Not to mention, the sole use of learning targets would make it much easier to calculate semester grades," she concluded.
Decatur High School junior Ethan Coggins said he feels politics are being played by the district administration when it comes to SBE and SBG.
"We have a 70 percent graduation rate, and to fix this, I was told the school board implemented Standards Based Grading to help our graduation rate," he said. "Well, this has been a disaster. The students are less certain about their future than ever before. Misinformation is rampant, even among those who are in control."
Coggins said he had spoken with Superintendent Rob Neu, and assistant superintendent of teaching for learning, Dr. Josh Garcia, recently, and came away confused.
"(I had a meeting) with Superintendent Neu and Dr. Garcia yesterday, and Superintendent Neu said the retake policy is up to individual teachers. However on King 5 news, after one of the protests, assistant superintendent Josh Garcia said 'The policy affords students to retake an assessment at any time, so if the family wants to get an A, they have the right to get an A, and they know exactly what they want to do to get the A.' That is not true. Those are both contradictory and that is very concerning."
The Decatur junior feels this mixed messaging could be a sign that something has gone very wrong with SBG and its implementation in FWPS.
"It seems to me, instead of working hard to improve a poor grading system, the people in charge are being political, spreading the blame around, and are either misinformed or dishonest, and both possibilities are dire," Coggins said.
One of the arguments against both SBE and SBG is that it creates a sense of complacency among students, and that achievement isn't rewarded by the system. Student Virginia Green happily admitted she felt this was going to be to the case for herself under SBG, but has seen it only confuse and frustrate her fellow classmates.
"At the beginning, I didn't have a problem with this grading system. From the looks of it, you might not see me as a C student, but I am. To tell you the truth, I don't do hard in school…and there's other people who do that though," she said. "(This was) my rocket to an A. This is my chance to shine, without trying."
Green said she feels SBG is hurting students more than helping them, even students like herself who are content with C grades.
"I'm not a passing student. To tell you the truth, I'm not motivated at all. I failed my freshman year. My sophomore year, I was lucky, I got A's and B's. I thought this year would be my year to shine, to be able to show them, I'm made of something. But now, there's no chance I'm going to pass high school," she said.
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Religion Dispatches today features an article on the rise of the rhetoric of violent insurrection among members of the Christian right during the last few years, and particularly in the wake of the health care law and HHS mandate controversies (which of course ties back into conservative opposition to abortion).
Eric Metaxes is featured as one prominent example: An evangelical Christian who can appear with Barack Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, and then shortly thereafter make Godwin's law breaking comparisons between the United States today and Nazi Germany.
Of course, as the article points out, Metaxas's book, while popular, has been panned by actual Bonhoeffer scholars, and not the least of the problem is Metaxas's unhistorical and theologically problematic attempt to transform Bonhoeffer from what he was -- a reluctant participant in a conspiracy against a genuinely diabolical regime -- into a standard issue American evangelical culture warrior. This is why Clifford Green accused Metaxas of "hijacking Bonhoeffer".
But, as the article points out, this is hardly the worst of it. There are others who are more directly suggesting that conservative Christians should take up arms against the allegedly repressive government of the United States. Fr. C. John McCloskey is another example:
In his original essay, McCloskey’s avatar, Fr. Charles, explained how “the great battles over the last 30 years over the fundamental issues of the sanctity of marriage, the rights of parents, and the sacredness of human life have been of enormous help in renewing the Church and to some extent, society.”
McCloskey’s literary device allows him to avoid openly seditious language, while suggesting that conservative Catholics and allied evangelicals should prepare for civil war. Now a Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, which published his update, McCloskey repeated his vision of “the secession of the ‘Culture of Life’ states from the United States, precipitating a short and bloody civil war that resulted in a collection of the Regional States of America.” He also says that the Church of “2030” was “much smaller... and nary a dissenter to be seen.”
While there’s certainly no indication that anyone is following McCloskey’s script, if they did it would not be the first time in recent history that fiction was used to help people to imagine scenarios for domestic terrorism and insurrection. The neo-Nazi novel The Turner Diaries, which opens with the blowing-up of a federal building, has infamously been used as a blueprint for white supremacist revolution in the U.S. for a generation—Tim McVeigh had a copy when he was arrested.
The reference to McVeigh is a cautionary note. As the saying goes: It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. It's one thing to wield this kind of rhetoric from the comfort of a position as an author who is invited to share a stage with the President of the United States. It is one thing to offer these kinds of parables from the position of someone who isn't actually planning to lift a finger to bring about the kind of bloodshed and anarchy that they are so evidently hoping someone else will bring about on their behalf. It is another thing to stand in the midst of the chaos unleashed by anarchy and civil war and attempt to deal with the fallout. Little children should not play with high explosives. And from the perspective of both theological insight and personal bravery neither Metaxas nor McCloskey are much more than little children.
And the Nazi analogies are Exhibit A that this is so. Particularly Metaxas, who allegedly researched his book on Bonhoeffer, should understand the vast differences between the situation in the United States today, and that under the Nazis in the 1930s. That he should so blithely wield the Nazi analogy suggests a serious flaw in either his historical research or his rhetorical honesty. Probably both.
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A Bromance Made in Hell: When Mitt Met Bibi
"We can almost speak in shorthand. … We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar."
Thus does Michael Barbaro quote Mitt Romney in a New York Times article titled A Friendship Dating to 1976 Resonates in 2012. Of whom does Romney speak? Another Mormon deacon? Bain & Company founder Bill Bain? Barbaro explains.
… in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group [headed by Bill Bain before he founded Bain & Company], where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. … That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue.
Not to mention controversy (emphasis added).
Mr. Romney has suggested that he would not make any significant policy decisions about Israel without consulting Mr. Netanyahu. … In a telling exchange during a debate in December, Mr. Romney criticized Mr. Gingrich for making a disparaging remark about Palestinians, declaring: “Before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend Bibi Netanyahu and say: 'Would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do?'"
That even gives pause to Martin Indyk (one-time U.S. ambassador to Israel), no shrinking violet on Israel, who said "Mr. Romney's statement implied that he would 'subcontract Middle East policy to Israel.'"
Barbaro on the bromance's blossoming:
Mr. Romney, never known for his lack of self-confidence, still recalls the sense of envy he felt watching Mr. Netanyahu effortlessly hold court during the firm's Monday morning meetings, when consultants presented their work and fielded questions from their colleagues. The sessions were renowned for their sometimes grueling interrogations.
"He was a strong personality with a distinct point of view," Mr. Romney said. "I aspired to the same kind of perspective."
Once they both switched to politics:
The men reconnected shortly after 2003 when Mr. Romney became the governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Netanyahu paid him a visit, eager to swap tales of government life [and] regaled Mr. Romney with stories of how, in the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he had challenged unionized workers over control of their pensions, reduced taxes and privatized formerly government-run industries, reducing the role of government in private enterprise.
That both men are products of the same rapacious business environment is telling. On the other hand, that two such odd ducks -- Romney wrapped as tight as a drum; Netanyahu in the grips of his obsession with attacking Iran -- were able to find each other and become fast friends would be called heartwarming were the source of the heat anywhere but hell.
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Thinking of becoming a beekeeper? After you’ve built the hive, read this beginner’s guide on ways to obtain bees for your apiary.
Bees are social creatures. You can’t expect a queen to produce a whole colony by herself. Therefore, it’s important to know the basics of bee society. There are three levels in the bee community: the worker, the drone, and the queen. Worker bees are females and are responsible for a variety of activities, such as tending the queen, building comb, guarding the hive’s entrance, and collecting food. Drones are males, and their sole responsibility is to mate with the queen. The queen is responsible for all of the genetic traits within a colony.
Finding Bees in the Wild
The clusters of bees seen in the wild are called swarms. Often bees will divide their colonies because they are reproducing too quickly or the queen is injured or sick. Collecting a swarm isn’t hard, as the bees tend to be mild-mannered. Regardless, always be sure to wear proper clothing. It may also be a good idea to carry medicated syrup or a smoker to calm down any ill-tempered bees.
Bees on tree limbs can be collected by cutting the limb and gently placing or shaking the limb inside a container. Bees on a flat surface or fence post can be guided into a container by gently brushing them with cardboard, as you would with a dustpan. They can also be directed toward it by puffing smoke behind them, encouraging them to move in the opposite direction (toward the container). Transfer bees from the container to a hive by gently shaking them toward it.
However, sometimes free isn’t always better. Wild bees can carry disease or have weak genetic material. The queen may have been injured or killed and is often difficult to locate among wild bees. Also, just because you can see it doesn’t mean that you can take it. Some states may have laws about what is considered property, and if the tree limb is on your neighbor’s yard, taking those bees may be considered stealing. Check with your local ordinances before attempting to capture bees.
dSome beekeepers argue against buying bees because they believe that wild bees are better suited to natural diseases in the area. However, for the beginner beekeeper, buying is probably the easiest and safest way to start an apiary. There are two ways to receive bees: package bees and a nucleus.
1. Package: To order a package of bees, contact a local beekeeper. Most packages will contain a queen, multiple workers, and a feeder filled with sugar syrup or some other type of sweet food. There are two ways to introduce the queen bee to the workers, the indirect and the direct method.
The indirect method allows worker bees to become familiar with the queen slowly as they eat their way through the food to her.
The direct method releases the queen immediately into the bees. Since bees are packaged with a queen that is not their own, it is more likely that she will be attacked through the direct method. Without a queen, the hive will not survive. However, if they do accept her through the direct method, your hive will be able to start breeding and producing honey more quickly than through the indirect method.
2. Nucleus: You can also order a nucleus hive. These come already stocked with an established bee colony. The disadvantage to this approach is that the queen may be old or of poor stock, thus resulting in weak bees.
Now that you have your hive and bees, it's time to learn how to collect that liquid gold!
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OUR LITERACY PROGRAMMES
News Alert: Based on the succsess of Indigo Express Fund and having a child involved with Philanthropy- and the overwhelming feedback we had from other parents and kids about being involved in Philanthropy - on Sunday 27th May 2012 we launched a new fund called Kids In Philanthropy ( www.kip.org.au ) which will focus on developing a social conscience and practice of giving in children for children.
In May 2012 we launched the Lifelong Literacy Program in partnership with the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE). The program is an collaboration between Indigo Epxress Fund and:
We have sought the very best organisations in their field, NCIE from an Indigenous advocacy and excellence development perspective, MultiLit with an an unparalleled record in measurable literacy improvements in children and ALNF who have extensive experience in developing and delivering literacy programs to Indigenous people in regional and remote communities.
December 2012 Update
Donna Ingram conducted the Welcome to Country and Dr Anita Heiss addressed the audience noting how important it is to be able to read simply to function in society.
Cerificates of Merit were awarded to all children who had completed the NCIE Lifelong Literacy program funded by the Inidigo Express Fund.
Indigo read out her book, Indigo Solves the Pzuzle, to the other children, many of whom were deeply touched, having shared similar life experiences to Indigo.
The ceremony concluded with a brilliant song and dance session with a Torres Strait Islander women and children dance group.
It was an amazing experience for all involved.
August 2012 Update
To-date we have conducted literacy assessments for 40 primary school Indigenous children using the MultiLIt method.
We have also assessed 100 pre-school Indigenous children using the ALNF method.
Eight primary school children were invited to participate in MultiLit's online literacy training program. These children have two hours of one-on-one online literacy coaching twice a week for 20 weeks. This kids are now 10 weeks through the program.
In September we will be training 8-10 Indigenous and non-Indigenous early childhood teachers in the ALNF literacy course. This is a week long course which equips early childhood teachers with the skills to coach and tutor pre-school children in literacy. These teachers will then tutor and work with a number of the 100 pre-school children who have been assessed.
The Lifelong Literacy Program for Indigenous Children
The aim of the collaboration between Indigo Express and the NCIE has been to:
Create a best-practice, innovative literacy program based on research-informed and proven methodologies, evidence based impact measurement and a sustainable operations model that significantly improves the literacy competency of Indigenous children.
We will be assessing Indigenous childrens' literacy abilities and then funding individualised programs including one-on-one online tutoring of the children in both local and remote communities. We hope to assess at least 200 children during 2012.
The program involves:
2. Children who are assessed as having challenges in literacy will be offered to enter the Online Literacy Program.
For those wishing to donate to this program (all donations are tax deductable), a donation of AU$100 will provide a full literacy assessment and report and AU$6,000 will fund one child's assessment and an intensive 2 term (20 week) one-on-one tutoring program with a qualified literacy coach. This intense period should improve a child's literacy ability typically by 18-24months. i.e., if the child had a reading ability of 2 years below their age level (e.g. a 10 year old with the reading age of an 8 year old), then this program over 20 weeks should bring them up to their correct age literacy level.
Please contact us for more specific information on the different programmes.
Dr Catriona Wallace
Ph: +61 412 181 284
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This is a busy time of year for the sciences with the annual American Geophysical Union’s and the international Conference of Parties meetings occurring simultaneously. NOAA has issued a number of reports in recent days, none of which are overflowing with good news. Today, NOAA released their Global Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States National Climate Assessment. It was produced in response to a request from the U.S. National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee and consists of a review and synthesis of recent scientific publications examining global sea level change.
Why is this report important? “More than 8 million people in the US live in areas at risk of coastal flooding. Along the Atlantic Coast alone, almost 60 percent of the land that is within a metre of sea level is planned for further development, with inadequate information on the potential rates and amount of sea level rise.” The public, policymakers and planners need to know what to expect with respect to sea-level rise this century: where should development occur or be restricted and why?
The report is based on four plausible scenarios. Scenario 1 is simply a linear extrapolation of the historical sea-level rise (SLR) rate out to 2100. Scenario 2 is based only on projected ocean warming. Scenario 3 builds on 2 by adding recent ice sheet loss (land-based). Scenario 4 reflects ocean warming and the maximum plausible contribution of ice sheet loss and glacial melting. Scenario 1 is appropriate for communities which can assume high risk or for short-term projects. Scenario 4, in contrast, is meant for places which can’t accept risk.
Here are the scenario SLR values by 2100:
Note that these values are not predictions, but are projections. That is, NOAA isn’t saying that if X and Y happen, then the Intermediate-High scenario is a prediction. The scenarios present a framework for policymakers and the public to use to make decisions.
Here is a time series graph of historical and projected SLR:
The range of potential SLR shown in the table and figure above might lead some to conclude that ‘high confidence” in that range is misplaced by NOAA. This is a gross misinterpretation of what is presented. The level of uncertainty, which will always exist, is actually useful to policymakers. Given this range of projections, people can leverage local and regional knowledge to come to better decisions than they would without this range. Something quantified is better than a big shrug when planning, after all.
With the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut requesting $80 Billion to clean up and rebuild (better) after Hurricane Sandy, future projections of sea-level rise can obviously provide guidance regarding what and how to rebuild in addition to where to rebuild. Policy development and planning will have to take these and other projections into heavier account this century than they did last century. An estimate of how many billions of dollars can potentially be saved by incorporating this information would also be useful.
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Muslim rebels agree first step to peace in the Philippines
Muslim rebels and the Philippine government overcame decades of hostilities and took their first step toward ending one of Asia's longest-running insurgencies with the signing of a preliminary peace pact yesterday.
The framework agreement, also called a road map to a final peace settlement which is expected by 2016, grants minority Muslims in the southern Philippines broad autonomy in exchange for ending more than 40 years of violence.
It was signed in Manila's Malacanang Palace by government negotiator Marvic Leonen and his counterpart from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Mohagher Iqbal. There to witness the historic moment were President Benigno Aquino III, rebel chairman Al Haj Murad Ebrahim and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose country helped broker the deal. Mr Najib said the deal "will protect the rights of the Bangsamoro people and preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Philippines". But he also cautioned that it "does not solve all the problems, rather it sets the parameters in which peace can be found".
The 13-page document outlines agreements on major issues, including the extent of power, revenues and territory granted for a new Muslim autonomous region to be called Bangsamoro in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation.
Gay couple beaten in park urge MPs to moderate language on gay marriage
Strewth mate. Aussies wave goodbye to Britain as it becomes too pricey to stay
World news in pictures
Far-right French historian, 78-year-old Dominique Venner, commits suicide in Notre Dame in protest against gay marriage
Oklahoma tornado latest: Obama pledges support for 'as long as it takes' to rebuild the suburb of Moore
- 1 'He was lucky he didn't die' - George Michael fell out of speeding car onto M1 motorway, according to eye witness
- 2 Gay couple beaten in park urge MPs to moderate language on gay marriage
- 3 After woman sells virginity for $780,000, here are the results of our prostitution survey
- 4 Far-right French historian, 78-year-old Dominique Venner, commits suicide in Notre Dame in protest against gay marriage
- 5 'It was just like the movie Twister': Man survives Oklahoma tornado by taking refuge in horse stall
BMF is the UK’s biggest and best loved outdoor fitness classes
Find out what The Independent's resident travel expert has to say about one of the most beautiful small cities in the world
Win anything from gadgets to five-star holidays on our competitions and offers page.
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If you’re old enough, you may remember a series of Saturday Night Live skits that were popular back in the mid-80’s. They featured Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest as Willie and Frankie, two pals who work as overnight security guards in a big office building in the city. They pass the time describing to each other the odd, elaborate and excruciating ways they have found to inflict pain on themselves in their spare moments. What makes the skit funny is that they talk about these intentionally masochistic acts as though they were simple accidents, much like walking into a glass door, or stubbing a toe. And each vividly rendered description of self-inflicted suffering ends with some variation of, “Oooh, I hate when that happens…”
Note: Here you can read this transcript of one of the 'I hate when that happens' sketches. Or, you can watch a different one via hulu.
I always liked those sketches, not because I enjoy rolling in razor wire and then soaking in a hot tub filled with Listerine in my spare time, but because it does kind of point something out about human nature. About how sometimes we take things which are completely external to us and make them personal, and then proceed to hurt ourselves with them.
Let me give you a theoretical example from my own life. Wait. I guess it’s not theoretical if it really happened. Let’s turn it into a theoretical example of something that really happened.
Let’s say you’re in a crowded place where everyone is seated. It could be your child’s musical production, or church, or a corporate seminar on the subject of proper lifting techniques. You get the idea; anywhere like that will do. Let’s say it’s a movie theater, because I like movie theaters. Okay, so you’re in the movie theater, and the movie hasn’t started yet. In fact, the theater is playing that ubiquitous Jason Mraz song, and on the screen is the same rotating set of seven or eight of trivia questions, one of which is asking which of the following actors was originally approached to play the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost
a) Sean Connery b) Al
Pacino c) Tom Selleck
d) Benji. Well, you’ve seen those questions, and the answer, eighteen
zillion times, not just since you sat down, but before every movie you’ve seen
over the last six months, so your attention is anywhere but on the screen. You might notice a few of
the people as they come in, especially the ones looking for seats in the upper reaches
of the theater, who are slowly rebuffed all the way down until they have to
settle for one of the first three rows.
It’s pretty much a packed house.
But you’re not really focused on anything in particular; you’re just
casually observing the entire scene, waiting for the movie to start. Ark
Well, it randomly occurs that your vision happens to be in the vicinity of a woman maybe five rows in front of you who suddenly turns to look behind her. Your eyes, which were not on this particular person to begin with, are, however, attracted by the quick movement of her head, and since you were already looking in that general direction, by the time the person’s head is turned all the way around, your eyes are there first. It creates the appearance that you’ve been staring at her. Of course, you look away almost immediately, not wanting her to think you’ve been fantasizing about the back of her hairy head, which, let’s be clear, you haven’t; but she must think you have, because her silhouette is visibly disconcerted when she turns back to face the front. She leans towards her boyfriend, or husband, or brother, or whatever, you don’t know, nor do you care, and whispers something. He nods in a subtle, but not-so-subtle-as-to-not-be-noticed-especially-by-the-creep-she’s-claiming-offense-from way, and, after a pause, he twists his head back to see if he can locate you. You catch this out of the corner of your eye, but you’re being very careful to avoid directly looking at their half of the theater, because you don’t want to create what is known in life as ‘a situation.’
But now you’re uncomfortable because it’s obvious that some strange person thinks you’re a strange person. You can’t wait for the lights to go down because it’s very difficult to remember that you can only look at half a theater. You think back about the kind of expression you would have had on your face when your eyes met, and how it might have looked to her. You were smiling, you think. And you’re pretty sure you were smiling in a relatively innocent, genial way; after all, you’re genuinely happy to be there, and looking mean or grumpy or sadistic would just take too much effort. Then you start to think about your innocent, genial smile, and wonder if what you have always assumed to be a generally benevolent grin comes across to other people, especially the opposite sex, as some kind of leering, predatory smirk. That would explain why you never had many dates as a teenager.
It takes a few minutes to decide that you couldn’t have looked as horrible as you’re now certain you looked. Then there’s some kind of disturbance in the theater; a sudden noise like someone dropping something, or maybe a strong burst of laughter, or a loud sneeze. Distracted by the sound, you turn your head to look, and so does she, and it happens again. Your eyes lock onto each other as if by kismet. You start to shrug helplessly, but it’s too late; she’s whipped her head back and she’s talking to her friend again. They have a brief but intense conversation in abbreviated pantomime, and then, remarkably, she bends forward and begins gathering her things. They rise as one, and scrunch their way past the people in their row to the main aisle. Your seat happens to be on the walkway that divides the front from the back of the theater, and you watch them approach in disbelief. You don’t know if they’re just leaving, or if you, despite your best efforts to avoid it, are going to become embroiled in ‘a situation.’ Their scowling faces grow larger; you start to stammer a reflexive apology. “I-I’m-I’m sorry…I didn’t-”
“You should be, pervert,” she says to you as they pass, marching indignantly to the exit.
Pervert? is the question that echoes in your mind long after the lights have dimmed and throughout the coming attractions. I came into this place as a person, but I’m going to leave a pervert. And, try as you might, you can’t concentrate on anything except for the label that’s just been placed on you by someone you don’t know based on two unfortunate coincidences. You sit distracted through most of the film, puzzling out what she possibly could have believed you were looking at. Please, lady, you think sarcastically, I know I look like Superman, but I don’t have x-ray vision. And even if I did...
By the time you’re finally ready to move on, the movie has left you in its dust, and you find it impossible to close the distance. The whole point of you being there has now been nullified, and whatever entertainment value or edification you were supposed to derive from the experience has been completely eviscerated because you couldn’t stop thinking about how you made those two people get up and leave the theater.
I hate when that happens.
P.S. Oh, I almost forgot. The answer is c) Tom Selleck.
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*PEMB, PSS3B, PF02B
bog communities of Illinois are found almost exclusively in glaciated depressions
of the northeast corner of the state. Drainage is usually restricted, and
this, coupled with an abundance of sphagnum moss, results in conditions
which are highly acidic.
The soils of a bog are saturated throughout the growing season in most years, and small open water areas are common. Vegetation consists of a variety of emergents with shrubs and/or small trees occurring on more consolidated peat. Soils acidity and low nutrient levels inhibit the invasion of competing species. No specific classification code exists for these areas so therefore the wetland maps cannot be used exclusively to locate bogs. However, the saturated water regime (B) will provide a clue to the presence of a bog, since this regime was used most commonly in describing these areas.
The soils in this community consist of organic materials. The principal soil is Houghton peat. Other associated organic soils which are not highly acidic are Houghton muck, Aurelius muck, and Muskego muck.
*Used throughout the community descriptions to indicate the most commonly occurring code in Illinois
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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| 0.948959
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| 3.21875
| 3
|
3-D Printers Could Make Food for Astronauts
Several decades from now, an astronaut in a Mars colony might feel a bit hungry. Rather than reach for a vacuum-sealed food packet or cook up some simple greenhouse vegetables in a tiny kitchen, the astronaut would visit a microwave-sized box, punch a few settings, and receive a delicious and nutritious meal tailored to his or her exact tastes.
This is the promise of the rapidly maturing field of 3-D food printing, an offshoot of the revolution that uses machines to build bespoke items out of metal, plastic, and even living cells. Sooner than you think, 3-D printed designer meals may be coming to a rocketship, or a restaurant, near you.
“Right now, astronauts on the space station are eating the same seven days of food on rotations of two or three weeks,” said astronautical engineer Michelle Terfansky, who studied the potential and challenges of making 3-D printed food in space for a master’s thesis at the University of Southern California.
With 3-D printers coming of age, engineers are starting to expand the possible list of materials they might work with. The Fab@Home team at Cornell University has developed gel-like substances called hydrocolloids that can be extruded and built up into different shapes. By mixing in flavoring agents, they can produce a range of tastes and textures.
A 3-D printer could mix vitamins and amino acids into a meal to provide nutrients and boost productivity. There are limitations to the types of fresh foods that can be grown in space – NASA says some of the best crops for a Mars mission are lettuce, carrots, and tomatoes. With that you could make a salad, but a 3-D printer could manufacture croutons or protein-dense supplements. The device could take up less space than a supply of packets of food and, because each item is custom built, would help cut down on waste.
But 3-D food printing systems still have a long way to go, with most of the current limitations involving the printer’s extruding system. Some items, like frosting or processed cheese, are easy to make printable. A chocolate treat, for instance, is created using a syringe filled with melted chocolate to build up a shape specified by a computer layer by layer. But other materials – fruits, vegetables, and meats – are much more of a challenge.
In the earliest tests of the hydrocolloid 3-D food printer, the Cornell team produced different fake items — bananas, mushrooms, mozzarella – all with the appropriate texture and flavor. Because no one wants to eat something that looks and tastes bad, Terfansky said the best thing would be to focus on making sure things are delicious and then improving the visual aesthetics.
Within five to 10 years, she said the technology might get to the point where a single printer could produce lots of different food items that are both flavorful and look like what they’re supposed to be. Terfansky sees a day further in the future when most home kitchens include a 3-D printer simple enough for a child to go up and press the “hamburger” button in order to receive a meal. Such plans may seem like the food machine from The Jetsons but other researchers say they’re not out of the realm of possibility.
Source: Wired Science
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| 0.942654
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11.948 Power of Place: Media Technology, Youth, and City Design and Development (MIT)
This workshop provides an introduction to urban environmental design and explores the potential of information technology and the Internet to transform public education, city design, and community development in inner-city neighborhoods. Integration of comprehensive ("top-down") and grassroots ("bottom-up") approaches to design and planning is a major theme. Students will work in a real neighborhood with real people on a real project, putting theory into practice and reflecting on insights gain
6.829 Computer Networks (MIT)
How does the global network infrastructure work and what are the design principles on which it is based? In what ways are these design principles compromised in practice? How do we make it work better in today's world? How do we ensure that it will work well in the future in the face of rapidly growing scale and heterogeneity? And how should Internet applications be written, so they can obtain the best possible performance both for themselves and for others using the infrastructure? These are so
So You Want to Be President
This video includes text, narration, and pictures from the book So You Want to be President by Judith St. George. The book is part of the suggested reading material listed on the corestandards.org website for grades 2-3. (20:30)
HST.502 Survival Skills for Researchers: The Responsible Conduct of Research (MIT)
This course is designed to provide graduate students and postdoctoral associates with techniques that enhance both validity and responsible conduct in scientific practice. Lectures present practical steps for developing skills in scientific research and are combined with discussion of cases. The course covers study design, preparation of proposals and manuscripts, peer review, authorship, use of humans and non-human animals in research, allegations of misconduct, and intellectual property.
ESD.33 Systems Engineering (MIT)
Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems. It focuses on defining customer needs and required functionality early in the development cycle, documenting requirements, then proceeding with design synthesis and reliability improvement while considering the complete problem including operations, performance, test, manufacturing, cost, and schedule. This course emphasizes the links of systems engineering to fundamentals of decision
21W.777 The Science Essay (MIT)
Did Ben Franklin really fly that kite? What are the ethical dimensions of the creation of chimeras—and what should the public know in order to take part in the conversation about them? Is the science of nutrition really science? How did the technology of birth control end up in the delivery system that we know as "the pill"? Is it possible to time travel—and why would scientists even spend time thinking about it? In this class we celebrate, analyze and practice the art of writing abo
STS.428 Technology and Change in Rural America (MIT)
This course considers the historical dimensions of rural production from subsistence to industrialization, both in America and in an international context, with an emphasis on the role of science and technology. Topics include changing notions of progress; emergence of genetics and its complex applications to food production; mechanization of both farm practices and the food industry; role of migrant labor; management theory and its impact on farm practice; role of federal governments and NGOs i
War on climate change
In this podcast - Going to war for the environment? Dr Matthew Humphrey, Reader in Political Philosophy assesses a controversial theory by Australian academic Professor Robyn Eckersley. Professor Eckersley is among a group of experts who believe that military intervention may be reasonably used to protect natural resources.
OOER presentation given at JISC10, April 2010, London.
Organising Open Educational Resources: OOER Harnessing expertise and sharing good practice to promote change (Subject Strand). Given by Suzanne Hardy Project Manager & MEDEV Senior Advisor and Dr Megan Quentin-Baxter Project Director & MEDEV Director, Newcastle University, at the JISC10 conference, Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, Westminster, London. April 2010.
Intellectual Property Law and Policy
This module will examine the philosophy, social implications and practice of intellectual property law.
Leadership and Teams
This module aims to provide experiential practice and theoretical analysis of leadership in teams and team dynamics.
A practice-oriented final level undergraduate course (delivered 2005/06), covering: the methodology of applied econometrics; interactive econometrics software; model design and specification; estimation techniques; diagnostic and specification testing; structural stability; model evaluation; forecasting.
14.122 Microeconomic Theory II (MIT)
This course offers an introduction to noncooperative game theory. The course is intended both for graduate students who wish to develop a solid background in game theory in order to pursue research in the applied fields of economics and related disciplines, and for students wishing to specialize in economic theory. While the course is designed for graduate students in economics, it is open to all students who have taken and passed 14.121.
An Evening with Vikram Chandra
In the tradition of his favorite childhood writers, Dickens, Thackeray and the “curiously forgotten James Hadley Chase,” Vikram Chandra explores the seamier sides of human relations. In Chandra’s latest, sprawling novel, Sacred Games, his backdrop is Bombay, a city steeped in corruption from head to toe. Reading three s
11.333 Urban Design Seminar (MIT)
This course is a requirement for completion of the Urban Design Certificate Program. It investigates the complex nature of 'successful' urban design and attempts to identify and evaluate examples of urban design that are at the leading edge of practice, anticipating the future. The seminar will deal with two parallel questions: what are the key trends that will shape the future form and function of cities, and how will these changes affect the role of the urban designer? The first part of the se
HST.535 Principles and Practice of Tissue Engineering (MIT)
The principles and practice of tissue engineering (and regenerative medicine) are taught by faculty of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. The principles underlying strategies for employing selected cells, biomaterial scaffolds, soluble regulators or their genes, and mechanical loading and culture conditions, for the regeneration of tissues and organs in vitro and in vivo are addressed. Differentiated cell types and stem cells
22.56J Noninvasive Imaging in Biology and Medicine (MIT)
22.56J aims to give graduate students and advanced undergraduates background in the theory and application of noninvasive imaging methods to biology and medicine, with emphasis on neuroimaging. The course focuses on the modalities most frequently used in scientific research (X-ray CT, PET/SPECT, MRI, and optical imaging), and includes discussion of molecular imaging approaches used in conjunction with these scanning methods. Lectures by the professor will be supplemented by in-class discussions
Foundations in evidence based practice
This is a module framework. It can be viewed online for downloaded as a zip file. As taught in Spring Semester 2010. This module is taught on the Diploma/BSc in Nursing and covers an introduction to evidence-based practice; the nature of evidence; an introduction to the research process; reflective thinking and writing; portfolio development skills; searching/accessing information/literature; summarising literature; referencing literature sources; reviewing literature; an introduction to law and
PICT?RICA O CIENT?FICA? LA ACTIVIDAD DE GENERACI?N DE IM?GENES SINT?TICAS EN EL CONTEXTO DE ENSE?ANZ
This work is restricted to the field of Graphics Representation in Architecture, analyzing the use of illumination models which are present at the software usually used for the development of images to describe the architectural objects. The differences between the real scene and the equivalences structured into the world of computer graphics related to the illumination models and light, are specially specified. This work analyses the categories of architectural problems associated to each of th
Development of Digital City Models Using 3d GIS
?Digital city? is a copy of an actual city in the virtual space. It is expected to play an important role in urban planning, disaster simulation etc. Recent advanced remote sensing technologies, which are capable to quickly provide detailed information of city areas, ease the construction of 3D city models. Urbanization has evinced interest from a wide section of the society including experts, amateurs and novices. With the development and infrastructure initiatives mostly around the urban cente
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Scientists have developed technology that is able to reconstruct words heard by test subjects, through analyzing their brain activity (Photo: Elvert Barnes)
Electrodes on the temporal lobe of one of the test subjects (Image: UC Berkeley)
Last September, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley announced that they had developed a method of visually reconstructing images from peoples' minds, by analyzing their brain activity. Much to the dismay of tinfoil hat-wearers everywhere, researchers from that same institution have now developed a somewhat similar system, that is able to reconstruct words that people have heard spoken to them. Instead of being used to violate our civil rights, however, the technology could instead allow the vocally-disabled to "speak."
Other Images from this Gallery
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- Easily be 802.11 n !
The nQuicky PCMCIA/CardBus is a great way for PowerBook users to update their computers to the new 802.11 n draft! This means full compatibility with the new AirPort Extreme Base Station. The nQuicky brings the 802.11n draft which has a high speed yield of 300 mbit/second (far better than the 802.11g standard). Additionally the range is increased up to 3 times the range of 802.11 g.
This is all thanks to improvements over the previous standard and MIMO technology. MIMO is Multi-Input Multi-Output, meaning both the Base Station (or Router) and the Mac (or PC) must have multiple antennas to employ something called “spatial-multiplexing”. This is most important in the speed department, think of it as having a 4 lane highway instead of a 2 lane highway, and having plenty of traffic for the former!
The computer industry as a whole is embracing this new draft proposal, unsurprisingly Apple is at the forefront by including it in their new Base Station. Also keep in mind that 802.11 b/g Macs will still work with your new Base Station, with the caveat that the Base Station is forced to adhere all connected Macs to the lowest standard on the network. This is exactly why having all older Macs (and PCs) up to the 802.11 n standard is the way to go!
*Please note, for full 802.11 N speed, all active wireless devices must be 802.11 N Draft 2.0 compliant.
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|
How has social media changed the way brands approach CSR and sustainability initiatives and what will the future hold? What challenges and opportunities do brands face as they use new methods?
Discussing these issues and giving insight from their own recent experiences, our panel will include brand marketers and experts. Julia Monro of Marks & Spencer will talk about the M&S approach to sustainability featuring their recent Shwopping initiative with social media at its heart. And speaking about Waterworks, a groundbreaking charitable giving initiative from Unilever and PSI providing clean drinking water to millions of the world’s neediest, will be Conor Ryan, Betapond co-founder who led the development of the project on Facebook.
Chairing will be Giles Gibbons, CEO of Goodbusiness, founder of the Sustainable Restaurants Association and a noted expert on sustainability.
Register below for your free ticket to this event. If you’re a brand marketer, agency social media planner or just feel strongly about the rights and wrongs of Facebook,this is the Social Media Week London event you won’t want to miss.
But why wait to start the debate? If you’d like a question asked of our panel of experts in front of a live audience, put it in the comments below or tweet with the hashtag, #SMWSUSBRAND.
Sustainable Brands: Doing Good by Doing Well with Social
Wednesday, September 26, 4.30pm. Business & Enterprise @ HUB Westminster
Register now for your free ticket!
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1883 Election and Ouster of Black Aldermen
Just after the Emancipation Proclamation, black America suddenly flourished as freedmen gained access to paid jobs, education, and land and business ownership. Freedmen who led the march towards equal rights were largely those who had been freed or were able to buy their freedom before the Civil War and then went on to pursue their educations at institutions like Oberlin College in Ohio, which had admitted blacks since 1834.
Along with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, black (men) were also permitted to go to the polls for the first time after the Reconstruction Act of 1867. Raleigh’s first elected black politician was James Henry Harris, who was a member of the 1868 North Carolina constitutional convention. But as Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party grew and expanded with numerous black members entering the fold during the Reconstruction-era, their rivals, the Democrats, were cooking up ways to lash back at African American’s newly granted liberties. Our capital city was all too often the scene of such injustice.
One of the most egregious examples of the Democrat’s backlash was the May 1883 election of the Raleigh Board of Alderman. Of the seventeen seats, eleven elected were white Republicans, and six were Democrats, one white and five black. All seventeen were sworn in and seated the very next day. But because of changes that a majority-Democrat city government had made back in 1875, the diversity of the 1883 Board of Alderman was not going to last.
In 1875, the Raleigh city government was completely dominated by Democrats. In fact, all seventeen seats on the Board of Alderman were held by Dems. That board decided to revise the Raleigh city charter to make it more difficult for freedmen to vote, and to make the position of mayor electable by only the Board of Alderman and not the general public (convenient for the Dems, since about half of Raleigh’s population was African American). They also fired all of Raleigh’s black policeman, and left it so the only city job an African American could hold was the caretaker of Mt. Hope Cemetery. That would be the black cemetery, of course.
So having secured all that power back in 1875, the majority-Democrat Board of Alderman in 1883 decided the day after they had been sworn in to kick out as many of the black Republicans as they could. They asked the North Carolina Attorney General to decide if four of the black Republicans were ineligible since they already held government positions with the federal government. The attorney general’s office agreed with the Dems, and four black alderman, Stewart Ellison, James E. Hamlin, Armenius Hunter and James H. Young, plus one white alderman, James Doyle, were removed from office.
That decision left only one black alderman, Republican Charles W. Hoover. The white alderman who was kicked out, James Doyle, was quickly reinstated because it was decided that his position as night watchman for the U.S. Post Office was not a government title. Both Hoover and Doyle refused to attend any alderman meetings that year, waiting until they were re-elected the following year to serve on the board.
The “government offices or titles” that the black Republicans held making them ineligible according to the Democrats and the Attorney General were as follows; Stewart Ellison, post office custodian, James E. Hamlin, post office clerk, Armenius Hunter, mail collector, and James H. Young, clerk for the U.S. Revenue Department.
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en
| 0.985109
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|
Alleged acts of unfairness or any decision made by school personnel, except as otherwise provided
for under student suspension and expulsion, which students and/or parents/guardians believe to be
unjust or in violation of pertinent policies of the Board or individual school rules, may be appealed
to the school principal or a designated representative.
The following guidelines are established for the presentation of student complaints and grievances:
► The principals shall schedule a conference with the student and any staff members involved
to attempt to resolve the problem. Parents/Guardians may be involved in the conference, or
a later conference for parents/guardians may be scheduled at the discretion of the principal.
► If the problem is not resolved to the satisfaction of the student and/or parents/guardians, a
request may be submitted for a conference with the superintendent of schools. The
superintendent shall arrange a conference to consider the problem, and to inform participants
of the action that will be taken.
► If the student and/or parents/guardians are not satisfied with the action of the superintendent,
they may submit a written request to appear before the Board of Education. Unless required
by law, a hearing will be at the discretion of the Board. The decision of the Board shall be
All persons are assured that they may utilize this procedure without reprisal.
* * * * * * *
Note: The reader is encouraged to check the index located at the beginning of this section
for other pertinent policies and to review administrative procedures and/or forms for
Cross Refs: IGBC, Parent/Family Involvement in Instructional and Other Programs
IGBCA, Programs for Homeless Students
IGDBA, Distribution of Noncurricular Student Publications
KL, Public Complaints
Farmington R-7 School District, Farmington, Missouri
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://policy.msbanet.org/farmington/showpolicy.php?file=JFH-C.1C
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| 2
|
It is an ideal spot for the off-road enthusiast, punctuated by steep, rocky mountains, open valleys, dry lake beds and sandy washes.
It's not a place one would typically associate with America's so-called "War on Terrorism," but the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center is pushing to expand its base onto the bulk of this shimmering desert landscape for live-fire and manuever training.
The military cites rapidly evolving defense requirements due to the "global war on terrorism," "new emerging threats" and the introduction of new weapons systems as the basis for neccessitating the Marine base expansion. An application for the withdrawal of public lands was submitted to the Bureau of Land Management by the Department of the Navy in August.
It's part of an ambitious plan by the military to acquire about 420,000 acres of BLM and non-federally owned lands to the west, south and east of the world's largest Marine base for military training purposes.
If the bulk of Johnson Valley is lost to the military (about 135,000 of about 188,000 acres), officials say it would kill the tourism dollars that pour into desert communities from off-road recreators.
What makes this situation unique is that those who oppose the base's
"This is a very, very tough issue that we're facing, because the economy of Yucca Valley is affected by the Marine base, but it is also affected by the off-roaders," said Cheryl Nankervis, executive director for the Yucca Valley Chamber of Commerce.
One anticipated side effect of losing Johnson Valley would be an increase in illegal off-roading activity in and on the outskirts of established desert towns like Yucca Valley, Apple Valley and Lucerne Valley, officials said.
"We'll have more illegal off-roaders around town going onto private property. And that is a big concern as well," Nankervis said.
At its Dec. 11 meeting, the Yucca Valley Town Council approved a resolution granting it stakeholder status in the base expansion project, meaning town officials will be kept in the loop with the latest updates on the project and its potential impacts on Yucca Valley.
Mike Kelliher, chairman for the business advocacy task force of the Yucca Valley Chamber of Commerce, told councilmembers at the meeting that the base's expansion into Johnson Valley would mean a loss in revenue from film productions, as well as profit losses for off-highway vehicle suppliers, hotels and motels, restaurants and gas stations.
He said grant money associated with off-highway vehicle enforcement would dwindle from $50,000 a year to $5,000 a year.
"If the base decides to move with the plan of taking the Johnson Valley OHV area, it will create a double-edge sword for our community and the enforcement of OHV's," Kelliher said.
Marine Capt. Carl Redding stresses that nothing is set in stone. The Marines have held a series of public scoping meetings this month and will continue to take public comment until Jan. 31 on the project.
"We're going to take all the comments into consideration and go from there," Redding said.
Once the public comment period closes, an environmental impact statement will be prepared.
First District Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt, a former Marine and Desert Storm veteran, doesn't want to see the towns he represents at the county level hurt financially from the base's westwar expansion. And while there are some serious issues that would need to be mitigated if the base were to expand to the east, he still prefers that option.
One reason is because the area to the east is not being used, and the other reason is because it could serve the military's need for training, as it did from 1942-1944 and again in 1964.
"It would certainly be preferrable to me because those lands are not being used right now and Johnson Valley is," Mitzelfelt said.
The primary issue with the base expanding to the east would be Amboy Road, a county-maintained road that connects the eastern Mojave Desert to the Morongo Basin. It would require some kind of mitigation, perhaps a realignment of the road so the public could still use it, Mitzelfelt said.
"It will be a multi-year effort, and it will be a challenge," he said. "I want to see the Marines get their needs taken care of, but I want to minimize the impacts on the public."
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We know that the world isn't going to end on the 21st of December (or at least isn't more likely to end then than any other day), but it's always nice to remember that there's a firm precedent for the world not ending on schedule. It didn't end in 1844, when William Miller and Samuel S. Snow convinced the Millerites to give away all their possessions (resulting in the Great Disappointment). It didn't end with Y2K, and the Large Hadron Collider didn't suck us all into a black hole.
History is lousy with doomsday predictions, from the ancient Assyrians through this year's self-professed prophets of the endtimes. But while some preachers wait for the Rapture (the Western doomsday du jour) and other folks fear we've doomed ourselves with particle physics or nuclear technology, some apocalyptic predictions are a little stranger than others. Here are eight predictions that go beyond the Second Coming, with unlikely prophets, bizarre pseudoscience, and a few predictions that are way out there—even for doomsayers.
The Prophet Hen of Leeds (1806): Human prophets proclaiming the end of the world show up everywhere, but when a hen starts predicting the apocalypse, people take notice. The hen in question began laying eggs inscribed with the words "Christ is coming." According to Charles MacKay's book Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions Vol. I, Volume 1, this sparked a religious fervor in Leeds until its denizens learned the unpleasant truth: some hoaxster had been taking the eggs, inscribing them with corrosive ink, and reinserted them into the hen's body. I imagine that, if the hen truly could communicate through her eggs, she'd have some rather crude words for the fellow forcing eggs up her cloaca.
Isaac Newton's Doomsday (1733): This is a doomsday prediction that has raised some eyebrows not because of the prediction itself, which was pretty standard (if heretical) Biblical interpretation fare, but because of its author. While Isaac Newton is remembered primarily for his contributions to science and mathematics, he was also a noted theologian and a great believer in the occult, though his private papers on matters like Biblical scholarship and alchemy weren't generally available to scholars until 1991. Newton believed in the Bible as divine revelation, but he also believed that it contained prophesies in highly symbolic language that required a skilled interpreter (like Newton himself) to decode.
When Newton's apocalyptic predictions came to popular attention in 2003, many news outlets seized onto Newton's prediction that the world would end in 2060. While Newton did idly speculate on a date the world might end, he didn't really believe in setting dates; after all, human interpretation could be fallible. By his Anglican contemporaries' standards, however, Newton's religious views would have been unorthodox and even heretical. He was anti-Trinitarian and believed that worshipping Christ as divine was sinful. Stephen D. Snobelen, who has studied Newton's theological writings in great detail, has issued an interesting statement that sheds more light on Newton's beliefs and his apocalyptic prophesy.
Warning from the Planet Clarion (1954): Take one Chicago housewife, add a dash of Scientology and a fascination with UFOs, shake well, and you get one of the early UFO cults. Fifty-four-year-old Dorothy Martin claimed that she was receiving communications from aliens from the planet Clarion, warning her that a Supreme Being would cleanse the Earth on December 21st, 1954. Armed with this prediction and a few strands of Dianetics, Martin gathered her own group of followers, called the Seekers. Martin told the Seekers that a flying saucer would come for the true believers to save them from destruction. The Seekers had to show their faith by leaving their jobs and giving away their money and possessions in anticipation of their rapture. On the eve of December 21st, the Seekers gathered in the appointed place and removed all metallic objects from their bodies to keep from being incinerated by the UFO.
Fortunately, this story has a happier ending than a certain more recent UFO doomsday cult. When, after several hours, the flying saucer failed to arrive, Martin "received" another message from Clarion, claiming that the Supreme Being was so impressed by the Seekers' show of faith that it decided to postpone the apocalypse. What Martin and the other Seekers didn't realize at the time was that they had been infiltrated by social psychologist Leon Festinger. Festinger and his colleagues were interested in studying how the Seekers would resolve the dissonance that would result from the prophecy's failure. The results of the study were published in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.
Halley's Comet Spurs Sales of Gas Masks (1910): Speaking of UFO cults, we need to look only as far back as Hale-Bopp to see how a comet can spark predictions of the end of the world. But in 1910, the apocalyptic predictions came with a bit of extra authority. After Chicago's Yerkes Observatory announced that deadly cyanogen gas had been detected in the comet's tail, which the Earth would pass right through, the New York Times quoted French astronomer Camille Flammarion as saying the gas "would impregnate [the Earth's] atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet." More level-headed scientists attempted to assure the public that Flammarion was wrong and that the concentration of material in the tail wasn't enough to poison anyone, but that didn't stop the crazy for anti-comet products. Anti-comet pills were sold for a dollar a pop; anti-comet umbrellas promised to shield bearers; gas mask sales boomed. In cities, Americans greeted the not-quite-end of the world with rooftop comet parties. The uproar was apparently an inspiration for Sir Conan Arthur Doyle's 1913 novel, The Poison Belt. The Library of Congress details coverage about the comet's 1910 pass.
The Jupiter Effect Shakes the Publishing World, but Not the Real One (1974): Another doomsday prediction with a weirdly scientific pedigree is The Jupiter Effect, a bestselling book written by Cambridge-educated astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. The Jupiter Effect predicted that the alignment of the planets on March 10, 1982, would result in geological instabilities, triggering devastating earthquakes. Unlike most would-be prophets, however, Gribbin actually repudiated his predictions before the events in question. In 1980, he told The New Scientist that his predictions were "too clever by half." That doesn't mean he and Plagemann had completely rejected their notions; in 1982, they published The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, which argued that the titular effect had actually predated the planetary alignment and was responsible for the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens. It was also a bestseller, although by 1999, Gribbin confessed in his The Little Book of Science that he wished he'd never had anything to do with putting forth the Jupiter Effect claims.
Space God Appears on TV (1998): God and spaceships both pretty common components of a good apocalyptic prediction, and as we saw in the case of the Seekers, sometimes they blend. Hon-Ming Chen added a few extra layers of weird to his doomsday theology. The leader of the Taiwanese group Chen Tao (the "True Way"), also known as the God's Salvation Church, Chen predicted that God, who will look just like Chen, would appear on every television set in the world on March 25, 1998 on channel 18, ready to take Chen's followers to the afterlife. (A sizable portion of the remaining population would die, of course.) This by itself isn't quite enough to set Chen apart from other doomsday cultists (the New York Times published a convenient list of millennial doomsday sects in 1999), but for an extra bit of oddity, Chen predicted that God's spaceship would land in Garland, Texas, for no reason other than it kind of sounds like "God's Land." He moved hundreds of his Taiwanese followers to Texas, ordering them to wear white smocks and cowboy hats. When the appointed day arrived and God failed to appear, two-thirds of Chen's followers abandoned him. He moved the remaining faithful to a town outside Buffalo, where they continued to wear cowboy hats and anticipate the apocalypse.
A Punch in the Face from Planet X (1995): There are plenty of folks who claim inside knowledge on the apocalypse thanks to aliens, but Nancy Lieder's Nibiru cataclysm has managed to gain quite a bit of traction. By 1997, Lieder's claim that aliens known as Zeta Reticulans had warned her of a planetary object known as Planet X (later connected to the mythological planet Nibiru cooked up by ancient astronaut proponent Zecharia Sitchin) that would knock Earth off its axis, triggering a cataclysmic pole shift, was so well known that she was mentioned in the New York Times. Astronomers have repeatedly debunked Lieder's claims, but conspiracy theories persist, with Lieder's supporters claiming that NASA is covering up evidence of Nibiru's existence. CalTech professor of astronomy Mike Brown said in 2009 that Nibiru is the most common pseudoscientific topic he is asked about (although there was also a spike in "Planet X" questions thanks to marketing for the film 2012). Hopefully, this pseudoscientific claim will start to die off with the new year; our Melancholia end was predicted to come in 2012.
Safety in Bugarach (present): Many doomsday predictors of various sects believe that the "upside-down mountain," Pic de Bugarach, houses aliens who will rescue them from the December 21st apocalypse. What's especially odd about this prediction is that it's not clear exactly where it came from; New Agers have been flocking to the commune of Bugarach since the 1960s to bask in the mountain's alleged mystical qualities. Now the small town has become a destination for 2012 apocalypse believers of all stripes. The denizens of Bugarach aren't exactly thrilled about this dubious attention; the mayor announced that the village is closed to visitors until doomsday is safely behind us. That hasn't stopped some locals from making a killing renting out their apocalypse-proof homes.
What are some of your favorite offbeat apocalyptic predictions?
Photo credit: Tsekhmister/Shutterstock.
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David Bellos: Machine translation has a relatively short history. It’s only been going for 50 years or so and it has entered really quite a new phase in the last 10, 15 years....I think it’s an absolute miracle that linguists and computer engineers and other very clever people can now make and have for some time been able to make machines simulate human speech with these automatic answering things on the telephone. I think it’s a miracle that they have been able to make machines decode human speech and produce written transcript of it automatically. These incidentally are two key features that are used and will always be used in machines that simulate speech translation. There are some devices on the market already that do that and of course the way they do it is by effectively transcribing the speech in the source language into text and putting that text through a translation device, taking the text in the target language and then sounding it out just like your telephone answering device does.
So it’s not actually speech to speech. It’s really tertiary speech. It’s speech as the product of a program that takes text as input and that text is translated from something that has transformed speech into text in the first place. Okay, so it’s a structure like that.
But the real thing is this. There is science and then there is engineering. Translation machines both written and spoken, but the spoken is a purely derivative thing from the written, are extremely clever and give us a lot reasons for thought about what language is and how we may understand language better, but the way they work bears little resemblance, in fact, no resemblance at all to the way human beings both speak, use language and translate between languages and that’s fine. That’s what engineering if for. I mean the way airplanes fly resembles not at all the way birds fly. It doesn’t have to. What you want is the flight, but for that reason my personal view is that machine translation always requires the existence of human translators to feed of and that is how it works. It uses existing translations done by humans and computes the most probable match from the vast amount of paired texts that exist on the web.
Secondly, machine translation both of speech and of text will expand people’s general expectation of the availability of communication between languages and far from putting translators out of a job it will support the extension of translation as a major professional and a central part of global civilization. So the other question is what are the technical blocks in the way of improving the quality of machine translation? That I think you really have to ask a computer scientist because they are very technical and I'm not part of the team trying to solve such things, but the overall picture is this. The more machine translation there is the more translation will happen, the more people will expect to be able to communicate with other folk and the more they will realize that although machines can clear the ground the actual translation has to be done by somebody because language is human behavior. It’s machine simulated, but they’re not doing anything like what a human translator is doing.
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He was absent the day his group picked their book for their English project and they picked Deathly Hallows. He was trying to read the book in class and kept asking other kids "Who's Snape?" "Who's Dumbledore?" and "How do you say this girl's name?" (Hermione)
I did the un-teacher like thing and told him to watch the 1st 6 movies. I didn't think there was any way he was going to read the 6 books in time for the group project and I can't fathom trying to read Deathly Hallows and being able to analyze it for a project without having read/seen the 1st 6 parts of the series. The movies might not perfectly follow the books, but I figured he was still better off than trying to read that book blind and make any sense of it. Some series you can pick up in the middle and be fine. I think Deathly Hallows would have been confusing without the prior knowledge of the first 6 books.
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There comes a time when even the most well oiled mind gets rusty and stalls. What’s weird is that one can often recall bits and pieces of the distant past, even experiences that seemed insignificant at the time, and not remember what happened a week ago.
Reminiscences of “the days of wine and roses” ( way back to the movie with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick) bring tears to the eyes. For others it might be more like “the days of beer and pretzels, “ or “the days of lifestyle and diaper changes,” or maybe way out in the back forty in “the days of moonshine and shotgun weddings.”
“The days of Mom’s comforting arms and Jesus loves me:” Memories left to nostalgia explode like kaleidoscopic eruptions never exactly the same - familiar sidewalk cracks where roots of violets seemed to be stronger than concrete, and steep, wood bleachers echoing with youthful racket at school basketball games, swinging in the massive shadow of our backyard maple (with Mom on the fringe of sight hanging laundry on rows of clothesline) and scraped knees peeking from under our flowered cotton, church dresses.
“The days of fireflies and hayrides:” As flashbacks nudge and tease through stale, idle hours, they bring back those carefree antics with youthful “friends forever,” an escape from the chill of emptiness and a nagging grip of fear for an uncertain tomorrow. During frighteningly vacant nights, there’s little comfort that it’s always better in the light of day. Being alone is not always lonely all the time. Those with the most vivid memory banks smile more!
“The days of freckles and stolen kisses:” Those long-lost boys and girls of lackadaisical summers return in daydreams to mock elderly bodies, their vitality and will stranded back in those sensuous, starburst skies, the embracing, heady aromas of cool, evening grass and clover, rendezvous with fellow-adventurers, as their voices turned to whispers with forbidden notions, where moon shadows masked emotions rising to the surface of adolescence.
Impatience is a side effect of old age. Maybe the elderly have painfully waited in far too many lines in their lifetimes, and have been pushed aside by more faceless sneers than they care to recall, dismissed as worn rejects who have outlived productive and vital places in a careless, impetuous society. One could laugh at the absurdity of the deterioration of aging if only compassion would surpass cruelty. It seems disgraceful to end up retreating to “days of bedsores, wheelchairs, and contemptible stares.”
Every mind should harbor wild places to retreat to when life’s unsettling reality and ill health become unbearable. We must seek constructive solitude occasionally, at every season of living, in order to hone our own virtues. We can’t give what we don’t have.
Senior citizens aren’t always trusted by family to make their own decisions. In her book “Grace -Eventually,” Anne Lamott writes about an eighty-year-old friend who agreed to sell her beloved house because then her family and friends wouldn’t have to worry about her. She confided in Lamott, imploring her for advice.
Lamott writes, “Everything in me wanted to save her. But instead, I did an incredible thing, something I have not done nearly enough in life: I did nothing. Or at any rate, I did not talk. Miserable and desperate to flee, I listened instead.” Then Lamott asked her what she wanted to do. The confused woman’s gratitude soared as she was made to realize that she did have a choice…she would know when it’s time to let go.
It’s far more compassionate to kindly hold a hand, give an understanding hug, a reassuring pat on the back, or a comforting word, even if you might say the wrong thing, than it would be to stay away.
Seniors are our most loving, practical, knowledgeable, witty, devoted, amusing, candid, understanding, and gutsy individuals everywhere! Living from moment to moment, day-to-day, one learns to appreciate more and to expect less.
“The days of making outrageous memories” linger on their minds and in their hearts.
Janet Burns has lived in Lewiston all her life. She can be reached at email@example.com.
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Two spill restoration projects approved
Published: Monday, December 31, 2012 at 1:41 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, December 31, 2012 at 1:41 p.m.
Two new projects aimed at helping beach-nesting birds and sea turtles impacted by the 2010 BP oil spill will move forward this year.
Following a 30-day comment period, federal and state officials tasked with doling out $1 billion in early spill fine money for restoration work completed plans for the two projects.
That council approved a sea turtle nesting project in Alabama and Florida that aims to retrofit existing lights near beaches with lights that are dimmer or filtered. That's because baby sea turtles hatching on the beach may be drawn to bright lights on homes, parks and piers on their journey from the nest to the water. That can result in their death.
All five species of sea turtles in the Gulf are either endangered or threatened, and many turtles were oiled during the spill.
The second project aims to reduce disturbances to birds nesting on beach habitats in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi by better-protecting nesting grounds and increasing control on predators in the area.
Federal wildlife officials collected 7,258 oiled, injured or dead birds during the spill response. Environmental officials have said that many more birds could have been injured or killed by oil and never found by scientists.
The two projects together will cost $9 million.
The money is a down payment from the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, a years-long process that systematically catalogues damage to the environment from the oil spill and creates a plan BP must pay for to restore the environment to pre-spill conditions. Public meetings have been held around the coast to solicit ideas about how to spend those dollars.
Because that process is expected to take years, if not decades, BP agreed to pay $1 billion quickly and begin environmental-restoration projects along the Gulf Coast.
While none of these projects will take place in Louisiana, environmental officials said they are important because they address habitats for animals that travel a wide area of the Gulf.
"It is encouraging to see (Natural Resource Damage Assessment) projects that address both the coastal and marine restoration resources critical to supporting our Gulf way of life," said Bethany Kraft, director of Ocean Conservancy's Gulf Restoration Program. "It is essential that we continue to advance marine restoration projects, like these sea turtle and bird habitat protection projects, in order to fully recover from the BP oil disaster and address long-standing environmental degradation as well."
This is the second phase of early restoration money approved by the Natural Resources Damage Assessment council, which is made up of representatives of the Gulf states and federal environmental officials.
The first phase of restoration paid for $14.8 million in oyster restoration work in Louisiana, along with a $13.2 million marsh-creation project in Lake Hermitage in Plaquemines Parish.
Louisiana officials have complained in the past that the pace of the early restoration work has been too slow. It has been more than a year since the money was announced, and just $70 million of the $1 billion has been allocated. Members of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment Trustee Council agreed that was a problem.
"These additional projects are important steps in recovering from the oil spill, but they, along with the other phase-one projects, are just first steps," said Trudy Fisher, chairwoman of the council. "Use of the early restoration funding has not moved quickly enough to suit any of us. I want to stress that the NRDA trustees are working hard to see that restoration funding is used in a way that is in the best interest of our natural resources."
Officials said the nesting projects were fast-tracked because they had to get underway before the next nesting season in the spring. Additional early restoration planning is under way, and the Natural Resources Damage Assessment continues.
"We greatly appreciate both the public's engagement in this process and their support for these projects," said Rachel Jacobson, the Department of the Interior's principal deputy assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks. "Implementing projects as quickly as possible will benefit our precious natural resources, the uses they support and the local economy to which they are linked."
You can get updates on the early restoration projects at www.gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov.
Nikki Buskey can be reached at 857-2205 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
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John S. Bradway High School Mock Trial Competition
Mock Trial Competition/Law Camp Committee
Mock Trial Competition
Offered each spring, this program allows students to play the roles of lawyers and witnesses in a simplified mock trial. Approximately 40 public and parochial high school teams compete each year. Topics of previous programs have involved the suppression of evidence, hate crimes, constitutional issues, simple negligence matters and civil forfeitures in a criminal context. The teams compete in a round-robin tournament, with the champion representing Philadelphia at the state mock trial finals in Harrisburg, PA. Winners there go on to represent Pennsylvania in the national finals. Volunteers are needed to serve as judges for the preliminary rounds of the competition.
Interested in becoming a mock trial coach?
If you are interested in possibly becoming a mock trial attorney advisor/coach for one of the dozens of local Philadelphia high school mock trial teams participating in the 2013 Mock Trial Competition, please contact Kristina Littman via e-mail at LittmanAK@SEC.gov
, or Jim Nixon via email at email@example.com
Please note: The mock trial problem, rules and evaluating judges information can be found on the Pennsylvania Bar Association website:click here
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Join Date: Feb 2013
Help with troop deployment figures in small wars
I'm looking for numbers for troop deployments in a variety of small wars in the 20th and 21st century (approx. # of counterinsurgents vs approx.# of insurgents). Unfortunately military history encyclopedias seem to fall short on this, RAND doesn't seem to have anything and the USMC small wars center seems shut down. Does anyone know of a site or spreadsheet with basic deployment information for small wars?
Any insight would be appreciated.
Join Date: Mar 2006
I am sure that several well known books on COIN refer to the ratio between insurgents and counter-insurgents, so there must be some examples - probably Malaya, French Indo-China and Vietnam?
There are a number of threads within the linked website, which list troops deployed and some scurrying around will find the number of suspected insurgents:http://www.britains-smallwars.com/main/index1.html
From the British experience I'd pick out: Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Oman: Dhofar mainly, Sierra Leone and there are forty other operations to look at, some with less than a company deployed to a division; some lasting days and others years.
You may find that our 'Advanced Search' will bring back some responses: ratio + insurgency. I have not tried that option.
Join Date: Oct 2005
This sort of thing is going to be difficult to find in some instances based on the sort of conflicts we're discussing. In addition, it's always difficult to confirm the number of insurgents involved in a conflict with any precision. Vietnam will be especially difficult for you since there were really a number of conflicts (if you will) going on within that time frame.
"On the plains and mountains of the American West, the United States Army had once learned everything there was to learn about hit-and-run tactics and guerrilla warfare."
T.R. Fehrenbach This Kind of War
|Thread||Thread Starter||Forum||Replies||Last Post|
|dissertation help please! US military culture and small wars.||xander day||RFIs & Members' Projects||67||01-27-2010 02:21 PM|
|Small Wars Journal, Operated by Small Wars Foundation||SWJED||Small Wars Council / Journal||27||06-10-2008 03:19 AM|
|Small Wars Journal Magazine Volume 6 Posted...||SWJED||Small Wars Council / Journal||1||10-02-2006 12:37 PM|
|Book Review: Airpower in Small Wars||SWJED||Training & Education||0||05-07-2006 06:14 PM|
|Training for Small Wars||SWJED||RFIs & Members' Projects||0||11-02-2005 05:50 PM|
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Predicting ObamaCare Outcome
What was the best prediction of the outcome in the ObamaCare decision preceding its announcement on Thursday, June 27, 2012? 85% of experts predict that ObamaCare will be upheld - can so many experts be so wrong?
Yes, the experts are wrong, and here's why:
- ObamaCare does violate the limits in the Commerce Clause, and it is difficult to overcome that logic
- while 85% of experts think ObamaCare will be upheld, probably 90% are unwilling to criticize Obama, so when adjusted for bias it indicates disbelief that ObamaCare will be upheld
- So-called experts rarely live up to the expertise provided by the Best of the Public, who tend to think the individual mandate will be overturned.
- Barack Obama's recent rudeness to the Supreme Court may lead some of the more liberal justices, such as Anthony Kennedy, to turn towards logic and truth over politics.
- 95% of those same experts deny that logic/conservatism advances over time for the same reason technology does
- ObamaCare could have been upheld more easily and quickly than to invalidate it
- virtually all of the "experts" missed the boat, and continue to miss the boat, on Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge. Wrong about that, why would anyone expect them to be right about anything else?
- the liberal White House inappropriately used ObamaCare to interfere with religious liberty, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld by a 9-0 vote strong rights of religious organizations to fire workers for religious reasons
Update: the experts were wrong in predicting that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold ObamaCare under the Commerce Clause, but an unusual opinion by the Chief Justice on an issue barely argued in the case -- and expressly rejected by supporters of ObamaCare -- provided the fifth vote to uphold the statute as a tax.
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BETHLEHEM Bethlehem Town Board members listened to arguments for adopting an automated bill payment processing system on Wednesday, March 28, but will be taking more time to review the proposal before making a decision on using a Lockbox system.
A Lockbox is something many people already use, though they might not realize it. In this instance KeyBank offers the service. The bank would pick up payment checks mailed to a PO box, open them, scan the checks, make the deposits and electronically deliver the information to the town.
The proposal on the table is to use Lockbox for water and sewer payments, 70 percent of which are made by mail. At this time, Receiver of Taxes Nancy Mendick transports the checks to KeyBank for deposit after they’ve been processed at Town Hall.
The benefits, said Comptroller Michael Cohen, include the fact deposits would land in the bank at least a day faster and some labor would be taken off of the receiver’s office, where there are three full-time employees.
Using Lockbox wouldn’t cost the town anything, said Cohen, because KeyBank offers it as a service paid for by credits the town accumulates via non-interest-bearing accounts. In 2011, $32,000 worth of credits expired because they were not used, and the total annual cost for using Lockbox is $24,450. The town would be able to stop use of the service at any time without penalty.
The town has relationships with six different banks.
Mendick stood at the start of the meeting to voice her concerns about the Lockbox system. She said after speaking with other receivers she’s troubled about exactly how accurate the system would be.
She related her own experience, saying on one occasion a resident mailed an insurance payment of $50 into the town instead of a tax payment of $3,500, having mixed up the envelopes. While Mendick caught the error, the insurance company’s Lockbox service cashed the $3,500 check despite the fact it was made out to the town, tying up that money.
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Before you start
Learn what these tutorials can teach you and how you can get the most from them.
The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) certifies Linux system administrators at junior and intermediate levels. To attain each level of certification, you must pass two LPI exams.
Each exam covers several topics, and each topic has a weight. The weights indicate the relative importance of each topic. Very roughly, expect more questions on the exam for topics with higher weight. The topics and their weights for LPI exam 201 are:
- Topic 201
- Linux kernel (weight 5).
- Topic 202
- System startup (weight 5). The focus of this tutorial.
- Topic 203
- File systems (weight 10).
- Topic 204
- Hardware (weight 8).
- Topic 209
- File and service sharing (weight 8).
- Topic 211
- System maintenance (weight 4).
- Topic 213
- System customization and automation (weight 3).
- Topic 214
- Troubleshooting (weight 6).
The Linux Professional Institute does not endorse any third-party exam preparation material or techniques in particular. For details, please contact firstname.lastname@example.org.
Welcome to "System startup," the second of eight tutorials designed to prepare you for LPI exam 201. In this tutorial, you will learn the steps a Linux system goes through during system initialization and how to modify and customize those behaviors for your specific needs.
The tutorial is organized according to the LPI objectives for this topic, as follows:
- 2.201.1 Customizing system startup and boot processes (weight 2)
- You will learn to edit appropriate system startup scripts to customize standard system run levels and boot processes. This objective includes interacting with run levels and creating custom
initrdimages as needed.
- 2.201.2 System recovery (weight 3)
- You will be able to properly manipulate a Linux system during the boot process and during recovery mode. This objective includes using both the
This tutorial is at the border of Linux, strictly speaking. The previous tutorial (on topic 201) addressed the kernel, which is the core of Linux. This tutorial moves on to the ancillary tools and scripts that are necessary to get the kernel running and to initialize a system to the point where it does something meaningful. Note that the scripts and tools associated with initialization are maintained by the creators of Linux distributions or individualized by system administrators rather than developed as part of the Linux kernel per se. Still, every Linux system -- even an embedded one -- requires some basic initialization steps. We'll review those steps here.
In later tutorials, we'll look at a variety of tools for networking, system maintenance, manipulating files and data, and so on, which are important for a working Linux installation and part of almost every Linux distribution, but are even less part of Linux per se than are initialization scripts.
To get the most from this tutorial, you should already have a basic knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which you can practice the commands covered in this tutorial.
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Shooting the Witness, an exhibition by the Palestinian cartoonist Naji Al-Ali, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his assassination in London, is at the Political Cartoon Gallery in London from March 6 until April 12.
Naji Al-Ali was one of the most prominent cartoonists in the Arab world. He had no political affiliations and the absence of slogans and dogma in his work brought both success and criticism. His bold and illustrative cartoons, widely published over the past 20 to 30 years, reveal the tragic state of the Middle East. His work sadly still rings true today.
His cartoons portrayed the bitter struggle and plight of the Palestinian people against Israeli oppression. He also campaigned against the absence of democracy, widespread corruption, and gross inequality in the Arab world. He was said to have antagonized virtually everyone in the Middle East.
He produced around 40,000 drawings, on average two cartoons a day, working for various publications in the Arab world. Naji Al-Ali draws a critique of all sides in the conflict, and the world’s complicity in the prolonged occupation of the Palestinians.
For the first time in London, 60 of Naji Al-Ali’s original artworks will be exhibited. The Political Cartoon Gallery is organising the exhibition in cooperation with the SOAS Palestine Society, the Nakba60 group, Cartoon County and the family of Naji Al-Ali.
The Political Cartoon Gallery, 32 Store Street, London WC1E 7BS, is open Monday to Friday 9.30am – 5.30pm and on Saturdays between 11.30am – 5.30pm.
February 13, 2008 1 Comment
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- Wednesday, 18 February 2009 16:16 Chris York Hits: 5390
Who is the network for?
The Scottish Community Land Network is for anyone interested in the development of community-based land activities.
What does the network do?
All the activities of the network are channelled through this website – we have developed a range of interactive features to help people get the most out of the network. The aim is to make this network active in supporting groups and individuals by providing up to date news, opportunities to discuss ideas and ask questions as well as keeping track of who does what in the world of community land initiatives.
You will find the most recent articles on the front page, and we retain everything on the site - just browse through the categories on the left-hand 'Topics' menu, or you can use the search function. Each month we distribute an email 'digest' of all the activity, including news and forum discussions, to everyone who has registered.
How do I get involved?
The network is FREE to join – you just need a valid email address. Once you are registered, you can give us your opinion on any of the articles, create or reply to discussions on the forum and contact other members of the network.
If you would like to contribute articles to the site, please send us a message after you have registered and we will set things up - or you can submit articles by email.
Who looks after the network?
Walking-the-Talk is a small environmental consultancy based in Tarves, Aberdeenshire and we write and collate the articles and generally look after the website. Our work is funded through the Community Land Unit of Highlands and Islands Enterprise.
Want to put a link from your site to SCotLaNd?
We've created this little button, and the following 'code snippet' that you can include on your web page - just cut and paste the code below!
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St. Lawrence University opened its doors to the Canton community in order to attract young minds to science. Now in its fourth year, Brain Blast is still a hit. Local children who came to Johnson Hall of Science last Friday to learn about the brain.
In honor of Brain Awareness Week, Estevez initiated Brain Blast at St. Lawrence University in the spring of 2009.What started as 10 activity tables has grown to 20 and this year had one of the larger turnouts, mentioned Estevez. “I think it is because of word of mouth and a lot of faculty bring their kids every year; they make a point to come,” said Estevez. Brain Blast is also advertised to the North Country and to parents at Banford Elementary School. The efforts of professors and members of Beta Beta Beta Biology Honors Society continue to inspire youth to pursue science.
“Brain Blast helps bring science to the community and show that science is not a far-fetched thing, that it happens right here in Canton,” said Dr. Ana Estevez, assistant professor of biology and psychology at St. Lawrence University.
The goal of Brain Blast is to get children excited about careers in science and make them realize it is possible to study science. Estevez explained, “Last year a young boy who wanted to be a magician decided after Brain Blast that he would also be a scientist.”
Dr. Carol Bate, Director of Career Services at St. Lawrence University, brought both her son and daughter to Brain Blast Friday afternoon. Bate said, “My 6-year-old daughter, who was
captivated by holding a real baby mouse and touching a real cow brain made the assertion that it was the, ‘most fun EVER’.” Bate said later that night her daughter talked about the neuron she had built and how the myelin sheath helps keep the message from running away. “I was delighted that they had so much fun and learned a great deal about science,” said Bate. “The kids are already looking forward to next year.”
Later Friday evening, Estevez said that she saw children at a local bingo fundraiser still wearing hats made at Brain Blast. Estevez said that she has received many thank you emails from parents that said their children couldn’t stop talking about what they did. “Doing it every year is a reinforcing thing,” said Estevez, “The key is to do a range of activities so if the kids come back the next year they can progress from the easier to harder activities.”
As the chapter’s faculty advisor, Estevez has engaged Tri-Beta Biology Honor Society in the outreach event. “I think it is important for our students to give back to the community,” said Estevez, “I think our students enjoy doing it.”
Tri-Beta President, Erin Siracusa agreed that it is important for St. Lawrence students to participate in science outreach. “These young fresh minds are our future,” said Siracusa. “Educating
them and getting them involved in science at a young age is one of the greatest things we can give back to the community.” Siracusa acknowledged the time and effort Tri-Beta members devoted to making Brain Blast a memorable event and “to ensure that the kids and adults who come leave with their brains a little bit fuller than when they first arrived.”
“I loved seeing our students in charge and using their skills to excite kids such as my son Zain about the value of science and education,” said Musa Khalidi, director of International Admissions at St. Lawrence University.
Khalidi and his son took a smelling test, looked at a brain, used a microscope, and participated in activities related to the senses. “I must say that the SLU community should be very proud for organizing such an event because it promotes education and simultaneously builds bridges between the local community and campus,” said Khalidi. “It was one of the best educational and fun events I have ever attended with my son. I am grateful to be part of an educational community such as SLU which cares about its mission and about its local community.”
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A MAP-21 Checklist: Concrete Things You Can Do in the Next Month
It seems like an eternity since the new transportation law, MAP-21, was passed by Congress. But, it has been just two months—and we are now one month away from October 1, when the MAP-21 provisions go into effect. Rather than simply waiting for your state department of transportation to announce how they will operate Safe Routes to School, I wanted to give you some concrete action items for the next month. This will help you take ownership over the fate of Safe Routes to School and your program.
1. Get informed about MAP-21. We’ve put out a lot of resources on what MAP-21 is and how it affects Safe Routes to School. If you’ve tuned out so far, take some time to study up. All our resources are posted on our MAP-21 Resource Center. In particularl, take an hour to watch our webinar on the Safe Routes to School impacts of MAP-21. If you are coming to the Pro Walk Pro Bike conference next week, come to our Annual Meeting or one of two Pro Walk Pro Bike sessions on Navigating MAP-21.
2. Join the fight in your state to save bike/ped/Safe Routes to School funding. We are partnering with Advocacy Advance to make sure every state fully uses their Transportation Alternatives funds and spends remaining Safe Routes to School and Transportation Enhancements funds. Nearly all states have a lead contact identified who is spearheading the effort. Get in touch with your state’s contact and help with sign-on letters, media and meetings with high-level state officials.
3. Invite elected officials to a local Safe Routes to School event. Make sure that your mayor, school board members, MPO staff and more can see your program in action. This can help ensure they support your program when you apply for future funding or help advocate for the state to keep funding Safe Routes to School. We’ve got tools to help you – watch our September 6 webinar and see our newly revised toolkit, both on engaging elected officials through meetings and events.
4. Learn about other transportation funding sources. As discussed in our MAP-21 webinar, there are opportunities for states to fund Safe Routes to School out of other transportation programs, including the Surface Transportation Program (STP), the Highway Safety Improvement Program (HSIP) and the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality program (CMAQ). We will share more information as it becomes available, but for now you can learn the basics about these programs and review these excellent resources from the League of American Bicyclists.
5. Stay tuned. Over the next month, we will likely learn more from the US Department of Transportation about key questions on Safe Routes to School implementation, such as the federal match and the Safe Routes to School coordinators. And, information will start to trickle out from various states about how they will implement MAP-21, which will affect when and how funds will be available for Safe Routes to School. So, keep checking our MAP-21 Resource Center or subscribe to our blogs for updates.
For more information on MAP-21, see our MAP-21 Resource Center.
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Earl Scruggs, a pioneering banjo player and Flint Hill, N.C. native, died of natural causes in a Nashville hospital yesterday.
He was 88.
Born into a musical family in 1924, Scruggs is probably best known for composing iconic bluegrass themes for the TV show The Beverly Hillbillies and the movie Bonnie and Clyde, but those more familiar with his work will describe him as one of the driving forces behind modern country music.
With a five-string banjo, Scruggs began using a unique three-finger picking style at age 10 that made his sound as distinctive as any and allowed him to play with greater fluidity in his music.
Scruggs was only four when he first played a banjo and his career was a testament to the music he loved, earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
During his seven decade career, he worked with bluegrass inventor Bill Monroe, teamed up with Lester Flatt to form the Foggy Mountain Boys (later performing as Flatt and Scruggs) and even recorded with other iconic musicians like Johhny Cash, Bob Dylan, Elton John and even comedian turned banjo headliner Steve Martin.
Tributes and memorials have popped up all over since news broke of his death, here’s a roundup of some notable obits:
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Danish elections bring Social Democrats to power
19 September 2011
The Danish elections on September 15 led to a change of government, but the assumption of power by the so-called “Red block” under the leadership of the Social Democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt by no means represents a political shift to the left.
Thorning-Schmidt declared fulsomely at her victory celebration that “Denmark has voted for a new politics.” But the Social Democrats have taken power to continue the implementation, in the midst of the deepest economic crisis in decades, of the austerity policies of her conservative-liberal predecessors. Nor will she change the substance of their restrictive immigration policies.
Thorning-Schmidt belongs to the right wing of the Social Democratic party in Denmark. Her opponents call her “Gucci Helle” because of her fashion preferences. Before her tenure in the Danish parliament, the Folketing, she was a European MP.
Her career has included working as a consultant for the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions. On a personal level, she is the daughter-in-law of the right-wing former British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.
She achieved her election victory with the worst result for her party in 108 years. The Social Democrats received only 24.9 percent of the vote. Her future coalition partners increased their votes. The Sozialistische Volkspartei (Socialist People’s Party—SF) obtained 9.2 percent and the social-liberal Radikale Venstre (Radical Liberals) received 9.5 percent. The Linke Einheitsliste (Left Unity List) increased its share of votes from 2.2 percent to 6.7 percent.
The SF and the Einheitsliste, which present themselves as the “left,” were able to take votes from the Social Democrats because of voter discontent with the destruction of the welfare state. Many workers no longer trust the Social Democrats, believing quite correctly that they will not defend the social gains for which generations of workers fought.
The new ruling coalition between the Social Democrats, the social liberals and the Socialist People’s Party has a combined total of just 89 of the 179 parliamentary seats, meaning it lacks a majority. The Einheitsliste, which is supported by various petit-bourgeois parties and organisations, has made itself available to provide the needed votes to give the coalition a majority. With the help of the Einheitsliste, the ruling coalition will be able to count on a total of 92 votes in parliament.
The strongest party remains the previous ruling party, the conservative-liberal Venstre (Liberals), headed by Lars Løkke Rasmussen. However, its former coalition partner, the Conservatives, lost 10 seats, and the Liberal Alliance received just 5 percent of the vote.
The conservative-liberal minority government was unable to retain power, despite support from the right-wing populist Dänische Volkspartei (DF), led by Pia Kjaersgaard. The DF, which has been the driving force behind reactionary immigration policies in Denmark, remains the third largest party. It won 12.3 percent of the vote, a decline from its total in the previous election.
Denmark called early elections in response to the economic and financial crisis, as had Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. Rasmussen (Venstre) was hoping to win a clear mandate for his austerity measures. Now, he will delegate this task to the Social Democrats, who will be in a better position to use the trade unions to suppress working class opposition.
In response to pressure from right-wing populists, Rasmussen’s government came into conflict with the European Union (EU) when Denmark restored border controls that had been abolished under the Schengen agreement. This created problems for Danish business interests, as EU member states are important markets for the Danish export industry.
The Social Democrats are in agreement with most of the economic policies of the former government. They share the view that the working class must bear the costs of the financial crisis and the bank bailouts. Already last year, Thorning-Schmidt put pressure on the trade unions to accept a lengthening of the work week, a measure that has to date added 15 billion Kronen (€2.1 billion) to the state coffers.
Now, she wants to stimulate the stagnating economy through a “kick start” programme, proposing that it be initially funded with credit and later through a statutory lengthening of the work week by an additional hour, together with increased taxes for those earning more than €134,000 per year. The Sozialistische Volkspartei supports this policy.
Denmark’s socio-economic system had long been held up as a role model, but since 2008 it has taken a nosedive. According to a recent study by the Hamburg Stiftung für Zukunftsfragen (Institute for the Study of the Future), the Danish were judged to be the “happiest” people in Europe. But this situation has drastically changed over the last few years. After a period of boom and prosperity, Denmark has been harshly impacted by the economic and financial crisis.
Danish exports are suffering from the global recession, and the unemployment rate has risen from zero to 5 percent. The property market, an important economic factor, is in recession. Industrial production has fallen. The banking sector has had to write off €1.2 billion.
The Danish state budget deficit, caused primarily by the bank bailout programme, will be about 3.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, according to government forecasts. For 2012, the deficit is forecast to be even higher—4.6 percent.
The now-ousted centre-right government responded to the growing crisis by moving further to the right. Denmark has taken part in the imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This aggressive foreign policy was designed, in part, to distract people from domestic problems and help weld together the internally fractious ruling coalition.
In the summer of 2010, there were mass demonstrations in front of the parliament building against the radical austerity measures introduced by the Rasmussen government. Concern over the social cuts was the main reason for the high voter turnout of 87.7 percent in last week’s election.
The right-wing Radikale Venstre, which has offered its services as a coalition partner to the Social Democrats, is in broad agreement with most of the latter’s policies and will at most put forward a few cosmetic “green” variations. Between the two, there are no significant differences in policy concerning Europe, the economy and defence.
The other coalition party, the Sozialistische Volkspartei (SF), describes itself as being to the left of the Social Democrats. When the latter proposed a neo-liberal policy, many of its members left to join the SF. The SF has similar policies to those of the Green Party, to whose fraction it adheres in the European Parliament, even though, because of its critical stance regarding the EU, it enjoys only observer status in the European Green Party.
The SF emerged in 1959 from a faction of the Danish Communist Party that was critical of the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. At the European level, it has collaborated with the New European Left Forum (NELF), the German Left Party and the Greek Synaspismos movement. The SF increased its vote in the parliamentary elections of 2007, which the Social Democrats lost.
The incoming coalition will have to rely on the Einheitsliste to obtain a majority vote in parliament. The Einheitsliste promises its support but declines to formally join the coalition. Its votes had proved decisive at critical points during the previous Social Democratic government under Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. The Einheitsliste is, like the German Left Party, a member of the European Left Party (EL) and the European Anti-Capitalist Left (EAL).
The Einheitsliste presents itself as the parliamentary representative of the ecological and anti-globalisation movement. It was founded in 1989 as an electoral alliance between the Left Socialists (Venstresocialisterne—VS), the Communist Party (DKP) and the Socialist Workers Party (Socialistisk Arbejderparti—SAP) as well as other “left” organisations.
In 1991, it was joined by the former Maoist Communist Workers Party (Kommunistisk Arbejderparti—KAP) and the Aktive Socialist Forum (Aktivt Socialistisk Forum—ASF). The electoral alliance was a reaction to the collapse of the Stalinist parties, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the anti-globalisation movement.
The Left Socialists have been in the Danish Parliament for a long time. They emerged out of the student and anti-Vietnam War protest movement at the end of the 1960s. From 1967 to 1987, they consistently had between four and six parliamentary representatives. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe threw them into deep crisis. From 1994 to 2001, they developed their new role of serving as a prop for Social Democratic governments by ensuring that the Social Democrats obtained majority votes in parliament.
The DKP is a former Stalinist party, while the SAP is the Danish section of the Pabloite revisionist organisation that broke from the Fourth International in 1953—the so-called United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The SAP originated in 1980 as the Revolutionære Socialisters Forbund (RSF).
The Einheitsliste’s top candidate is the young Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen. She became prominent as an activist in the economic summit demonstrations in Prague, Brussels, Göteborg and Rostock. A partisan of gender and environmental politics, she gained a sufficient number of followers to obtain a seat in the Folketing in the last election.
The direction taken by the Einheitsliste is indicated by its opportunistic zig-zag responses to the NATO war against Libya. At first, it supported the war, but then made a U-turn when it realised that its “left” image could be harmed by being implicated in an imperialist blood bath. In the Danish parliament, the Einheitsliste will play the important role of giving the right-wing policies of the new government a “left” cover.
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FOR AUDIO VERSION CLICK HERE.
As we make our way through the beatitudes, which are really snapshots of what a Kingdom dweller looks like, we come now to the 4th. So far we have discussed: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." This means to reaffirm your poverty-your need for God--to have a right evaluation of yourself before God-both the wickedness and the wonder parts. "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." This means to reframe your weaknesses; it's mourning over whatever it is that keeps you from Jesus and the Kingdom lifestyle. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." This snapshot means renew your confidence-to develop a quiet, controlled strength that is not compelled to be reactionary.
What's interesting to me is that each of these first three snapshots speak of where you lack. After practicing these three disciplines, you are pretty much filleted. You are ready for anything that will fill you up. This is precisely what the 4th snapshot will do. Check it out. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied." This brings us to SECRET #10: The follower of Jesus hungers and thirsts to walk the walk of the Master.
NOTE the strong terms here-hunger and thirst, not simply desiring something or making it a high priority. This is desperation-the kind of desperation that has a full understanding of its need for God, a desperate kind of mourning and an attitude of meekness. At this point of desperation you are ready for hungering and thirsting for righteousness-for anything that is right and pure and good.
Hungering and thirsting for righteousness is a refocusing of your heart. To refocus your heart is to develop a passion for filling up the hole in your soul. Everybody is passionately seeking inner satisfaction. This fourth attitude or discipline is a kind of hungering and thirsting for what you want in your innermost being.
"Righteousness" is right living. It's walking consistently with God's standard. Jesus was the Righteous One Who walked most consistently with God's standard. In a very real sense, there is no other standard in the world. God's standard for living life is the only one you were created to follow. All other standards are not standards at all, but scattered attempts to live life without God. Many of these attempts are couched in what we know as RELIGION-religious systems of do's and don'ts to attain some level of approval by God-to reach some heavenly state and to avoid going to hell. Unfortunately, man's best attempts are like going to heaven on a six foot ladder. The problem with this method is that the ladder can only go up six feet.
Hungering and thirsting for righteousness has nothing to do with a religious system, whether Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish or even Christian. All of these religious persuasions are cultural in nature and each one can find its meaning and highest desires in the person of Jesus. Hungering and thirsting for righteousness rests in a personal relationship with the Righteous One-Jesus, Himself. This sort of relationship is not a plan for avoiding hell, but it says "I've been to hell and don't want to return." It's a relationship with Jesus-walking with Jesus every day-JESUS PLUS NOTHING!
NOTE what happens if you hunger and thirst this way-"for they who hunger and thirst for the Righteous One will be satisfied." The term "satisfied" is used to describe the fattening up of cattle-to fill them up so that they have no more wants. Do you want to find satisfaction in your soul? Then you must practice hungering and thirsting for Jesus everyday! It's the only possible way to this kind of serenity and satisfaction. This is what I mean by refocusing your heart!
It's only when sensing your emptiness revealed within the first three snapshots that you have access to spiritual fullness. These are the quiet cravings-the hungering and thirsting-for spiritual things, for the inner satisfaction of your soul! When you hunger and thirst for something, then you want it and will do most anything to satisfy these desires. Hungering and thirsting is not simply making it a higher priority or something you feel you really ought to do, but to hunger and thirst as if this is a life-sustenance issue!
Refocus your heart! On every flight you are instructed to put on your oxygen mask before helping those children alongside you. Part of the refocusing of your heart is just that-putting on your oxygen mask every day-talking to Jesus, listening to Him and seeking to please Him with your life throughout the day. Maybe you need to ask the simple question: "Jesus, what do you have for me to do today?" Believe me, that simple question will refocus your heart. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied." The follower of Jesus hungers and thirsts to walk the walk of the Master.
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Helaine Olen, Contributor
I like to write and report on subjects where life meets money.
I’m sure you have, by now, heard the news. Hostess Brands, the company that gave us such remembered childhood treats as Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Devil Dogs and other baked foodstuffs that have fallen into disfavor in our more gourmand age, announced today that it would be closing for business, effective immediately.
More than a few observers say they know who to blame for the demise of the iconic company: the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International union, which represents thousands of striking Hostess Brand workers who have refused to accept a new contract that would do everything from slash their salaries to their retirement benefits.
Time for a reality check.
Hostess has been sold at least three times since the 1980s, racking up debt and shedding profitable assets along the way with each successive merger. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2011. Little thought was given to the line of products, which, frankly, began to seem a bit dated in the age of the gourmet cupcake. (100 calorie Twinkie Bites? When was the last time you entered Magnolia Bakery and asked about the calorie count?)
As if all this were not enough, Hostess Brands’ management gave themselves several raises, all the while complaining that the workers who actually produced the products that made the firm what money it did earn were grossly overpaid relative to the company’s increasingly dismal financial position.
So now an estimated 18,500 workers will join the nation’s unemployment rolls. But while Hostess Brands might soon become a forgotten name from the past, it’s unlikely such a fate awaits such signature products as Twinkies. Company executives have already asked for bankruptcy court permission to begin the process of selling off their famed product lines to other companies.
Finally, a personal note: A few years ago, my husband picked our children up from a playdate at a home where, he said, it seemed like more food was banned than allowed, there was no television, and it was all too politically correct in the way all too many middle class childhoods are today. My husband’s response? Before bringing the boys home, he stopped in at a local grocery and introduced our ecstatic children to fine products of Hostess Brands. “Yodels,” he told me, “never tasted so good.”
Addendum: Since this has come up in the comments, I need to remind everyone that Hostess Brands acquired Drake’s Cakes in one the many of the misbegotten mergers it was involved in.
Related on Forbes:
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The recent news from Europe could hardly be more unsettling for those who desperately wanted to believe that the eurozone was finally finding its way out of the region's imbroglio. The collapse of the Dutch coalition government over budget cuts dramatically called into question the commitment of the staunchest supporter of the German hard line on the need for fiscal austerity. On the same day, the National Front, whose platform calls for an exit from the euro, gained a record 18 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections. And the results confirmed François Hollande, who wants to renegotiate the European Union's recent German-inspired fiscal pact to create room for growth policies, as a firm favorite to wrest the presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy. Not surprisingly, markets retreated and troubled countries such as Italy, Spain, and France itself saw their borrowing costs soar.
Indeed, every time Italy and Spain -- two of the world's largest economies, with a combined government debt that exceeds $3.5 trillion -- struggle to refinance their debt at acceptable interest rates, the eurozone and the global economy flirt with disaster. Yet while the commotion over bond spreads is entirely justified, it diverts attention from the main arena where the survival of the euro will ultimately be decided: the realignment of Europe's peripheral economies (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, or the "GIIPS") toward exports and import substitutes (think Spaniards buying fewer Japanese cars and more Spanish-made cars). Since domestic demand in the periphery is declining fast as finance dries up and budgets shrink, trade is the only hope for reigniting sustained growth in the region. Without growth, unemployment will keep rising from its extraordinarily high levels, political resistance to the monetary union will escalate, and it will become more and more difficult to service debts, with the very real risk that countries will be forced into default and -- possibly -- an exit from the euro.
Until recently, improved global economic conditions and large-scale liquidity injections by the European Central Bank (ECB) into European banks under its long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) program had reassured markets and kept Italian and Spanish bond yields well below their terrifying peak of last November. Global conditions can change quickly, however, and the policies adopted, however necessary they may have been, are more palliative than cure.
For example, Greece's debt remains unsustainable, and a second round of restructuring -- this time to include forgiving official debt as well as private debt -- will be needed. And the ECB's LTROs, which have so far shored up banks and supported government bond purchases, may backfire if, as is already happening, risk aversion returns and the prices of government bonds that banks have acquired fall again. While the periphery cannot avoid cutting government deficits, it may ultimately have trouble hitting its deficit targets if austerity stunts growth.
More important still, it is vital to recognize that the periphery's fiscal mess is not at the root of the euro crisis. The crisis, in other words, cannot be resolved with a fiscal fix alone, although a fiscal correction must be part of the solution. For example, Ireland almost halved its debt-to-GDP ratio (from 48 percent to 25 percent) between 1999 and 2007 and Spain nearly did the same (62 percent to 36 percent). These ratios were much lower than Germany's at the outbreak of the current crisis and, in Spain's case, they still are. Nor are weak banking systems the cause of the crisis in the periphery. When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, for instance, the Italian and Portuguese banking systems were in much better shape than their British, French, or German counterparts. Fiscal and banking problems, dangerous as they are, are a consequence of the crisis -- not their primary cause.
Fundamentally, Europe's so-called debt crisis is really more of a competitiveness crisis -- one that divides the eurozone's core (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Finland, and the Netherlands) from its periphery. The misalignment began in the mid-1990s as interest rates in the periphery declined to the lower levels found in the core, and domestic demand and inflation grew more rapidly in the periphery than in the core. This, combined with highly inflexible labor markets and limited competition in sectors ranging from pharmacies to banks, led to an erosion of competitiveness in the periphery -- reflected in wages outpacing productivity and prices in the sheltered sector (comprising everything from government to construction to coffee and barber shops) rising relative to the prices of exports and import substitutes, whose prices are determined in world markets. There followed a progressive reallocation of the periphery's production capacity toward the sheltered sector, most visibly toward construction in countries such as Ireland and Spain, which went on to experience the mother of all housing bubbles. Measures and estimates of the competitive misalignment in the eurozone vary. Typical estimates suggest that, in the periphery, the cost of labor, adjusted for productivity, is higher by 15 to 30 percent relative to Germany.
This competitive misalignment had significant consequences. From 1997 to 2007, housing expenditure as a share of GDP cumulatively increased by 2.7 percentage points in the periphery (excluding Greece, for which data is not available prior to 2000), compared with a 2.2 percentage-point decline in Germany. Meanwhile, exports of goods and services as a share of GDP increased by almost 20 percentage points in Germany, compared with an increase of less than 3 percentage points, on average, in the periphery. In the periphery, current account deficits -- the excess of imports over exports -- deteriorated by nearly 8 percentage points of GDP. In the core, current account surpluses rose by 0.9 percentage points.
Financial markets mistakenly supported the periphery's domestic demand-based growth model, only to go into sharp reverse -- as they are wont to do -- when the model became patently unsustainable. Greece and Ireland, for example, experienced capital outflows equivalent to 40 percent and 70 percent of 2007 GDP, respectively, from mid-2008 to mid-2011. Current account deficits in peripheral economies did not narrow correspondingly because euros were made available through the intra-European payment system among central banks and rescue programs. Outside the eurozone, by contrast, countries such as Latvia (which did not devalue its currency) saw a huge and immediate correction in their current account deficits. The workings of the monetary union, in other words, have inhibited the eurozone's ability to narrow the very competitiveness gap that the monetary union helped create.
The external and internal imbalances in the periphery still necessitate a large competitive adjustment that can only occur through deflation, since adoption of the single currency means that devaluation is no longer an option. Given the post-2007 plunge in domestic demand in the periphery, one would have expected to see price and unit labor cost containment (either through lower wages or higher productivity) and a shift toward exports by now. But almost three years after the euro crisis erupted, progress remains remarkably limited (see table). With the exception of Ireland, there has been little improvement in the competitiveness of the periphery (as measured by the decline in the real effective exchange rate, an indicator of labor cost adjusted for productivity and expressed in a common currency).
In fact, over the last year, the periphery has actually lost even more competitiveness relative to the core. These trends are reflected in the periphery's exports, which have hardly budged as a share of GDP, increasing by less than in Germany and the Netherlands. Italy's current account deficit has actually increased since the global financial crisis began. And while current account deficits have come down elsewhere in the periphery, this is largely due demand contraction, and the external deficits remain sizable (see chart). Greece is running a current account deficit that is 10 percent of GDP and showing no improvement in exports despite an 18 percent decline in domestic demand since 2007. Over the past year, the most notable changes that have occurred are further increases in the periphery's unemployment rate and (Italy excepted) government debt-to-GDP ratio.
More demand compression and recession are coming, and will place even more strain on the periphery's social fabric. Unemployment is excruciatingly high and headed in the wrong direction. The unemployment rate is already at around 24 percent in Spain, 21 percent in Greece, 15 percent in Portugal and Ireland, and 9.3 percent -- and rising fast -- in Italy.
With substantial fiscal contraction in store over the next two years, banks deleveraging, and consumers and investors scared, there is simply no possibility of growth from domestic demand in the periphery in the foreseeable future. Indeed, with structural reforms incomplete and slow to produce results, recession -- in containing wages and inflation -- is the main instrument to engineer the competitive realignment. And in economies where both the private and public sector have become highly externally indebted and competitiveness hasn't improved, any recovery of domestic demand will quickly run up against borrowing constraints as current account deficits widen.
In these dire circumstances, can the trade sector come to the rescue?
This currently appears least likely in Greece because its export sector is small and mostly based on tourism. Portugal has a bigger export sector, but one that still confronts Chinese competitors directly in sectors such as footwear and garments. Ireland, by contrast, has high-tech exports that amount to 100 percent of GDP and are funded and operated by foreign multinationals. For these reasons, Ireland has a chance of reigniting growth, but it may be hit again by large banking losses.
Spain, meanwhile, has several competitive international firms and, unlike the other peripheral countries, has maintained its share of European exports over the past decade. But its export sector is small at roughly 26 percent of GDP, its private sector is heavily and externally indebted, its unemployment is already extremely high, and its fiscal and housing sectors still require enormous adjustments. Spain's capacity to steer through more austerity is therefore questionable.
While Italy's public debt is larger than Spain's, it has a more diversified export base and smaller fiscal, housing, and labor market imbalances. Italy's austerity and liberalization measures, however, are still very recent, and there is no sign yet of a trade-led recovery.
How should Europe address these challenges? As many economists are advocating, a €2 trillion firewall could be erected to protect Italy and Spain, the ECB could provide unlimited support to governments, and eurozone governments could even jointly issue eurobonds that would be less liable to attack than those of individual countries. Yet even if the resolute German political resistance to these measures could conceivably be overcome in the event of a market panic, none of these approaches would deal with the underlying competitiveness issue, and could instead delay its resolution.
In any event, the political stars are not aligned at present for these ambitious steps and there is little alternative but to accelerate the adjustment process in the periphery through small steps. These could include tax changes that incentivize production and exports (such as cutting payroll taxes) and discourage consumption and imports (such as increasing value-added taxes), and more far-reaching labor and product market reforms such as reducing severance payments drastically and attacking price fixing with more determination. A less ideological approach to policy by Germany and less insistence on blanket austerity measures even in relatively healthy economies could also stoke demand in the eurozone's core, increase eurozone inflation, and lower the value of the euro, all of which would ease adjustment in the periphery.
If, however, all this and fiscal cuts are not enough to restore competitiveness in the periphery -- as has so far been the case -- and unemployment keeps climbing, new approaches must be considered. Should failing countries be assisted by healthier ones in the core, the ECB, and the IMF to restructure their debt and leave the eurozone? The complexity of doing so is daunting and great collateral damage would ensue, but there would at least be a light at the end of the tunnel. The alternative -- depression, chronic unemployment, deindustrialization, and depopulation of the afflicted countries, plus even more concentration of industry in northern Europe -- is not what anyone signed up for, or what electorates will accept.
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They were dug decades ago to provide clay for brick and pottery - and then abandoned.
Today, the clay-pit ponds along North Augusta's evolving riverfront hold the key to an unlikely alliance between scientists and developers.
"Originally, this was going to be a simple amenity - a lake that was dredged out and cleared," said Turner Simkins, the project director for the Hammond's Ferry mixed-use development that includes the former mining pits.
But Gene Eidson, the president of Southeastern Natural Sciences Academy, had a different vision for the ponds and their jagged shorelines.
"It's really a phenomenal habitat," Dr. Eidson said. "What I envision here, down the road, is a natural area with blooming water lilies, native yellow lotus and more. It will be quite stunning."
The academy, through a partnership with the developers and the city of North Augusta, plans to transform the silt-filled ponds into a constructed wetland that will fulfill many important purposes - including recreation.
"We're going to integrate our work with the existing Greeneway and include trails and access points," he said. "And it will also be a landmark project for urban ecology."
The clay pits are being redesigned to cleanse and filter huge volumes of stormwater that will accompany hundreds of homes and businesses - and a new city hall on Georgia Avenue - that are on the immediate horizon.
Stormwater, which contains everything from motor oil to nitrogen compounds from fertilizers, is a major pollutant that can have a negative impact on the nearby Savannah River, said Tanya Strickland, a stormwater inspector with North Augusta.
"What they had to do was design a system to take stormwater from here to the 13th Street Bridge," she said. "That's a big portion of North Augusta."
The academy has been successful with constructed wetlands that help filter and cleanse treated sewage that once flowed from Augusta's Messerly Wastewater Plant into the Savannah River.
The concept, which has been widely recognized by other institutions, includes the use of planted native grasses and plants that gradually filter pollutants and hasten evaporation.
The Hammond's Ferry project will follow a similar design, although its mission involves treating stormwater and not sewage, Dr. Eidson said, predicting the finished product will be much like the academy's Phinizy Swamp Nature Park in Augusta.
To accommodate the new project, the Hammond's Ferry parent company - Leyland Alliance LLC of New York - culled almost 100 lots from the 850-lot project's master plan, Mr. Simkins said.
"We'll have fewer houses, but now we see it as an opportunity to create an urban nature park," he said, noting that the wooded shorelines and vegetation will offer homeowners an opportunity to enjoy the natural areas.
The constructed wetlands project, costing about $500,000, will be aided by a $184,000 grant from the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation. The balance will be borne jointly by the city of North Augusta and the developers.
The concept of designing wetlands to cleanse stormwater and prevent the flow of silt and excess nutrients into the Savannah River is part of a broader scheme to improve water quality all the way to the coast.
The academy already is in the midst of a multiyear study called the Savannah River at Risk, which involves evaluating water quality in the river.
"Everything we do along the river can improve water quality in the river," he said. "This is going to be a model for how things will be done in the future."
Reach Rob Pavey at 868-1222, ext. 119, or email@example.com.
TO SEE IT
A series of exhibits describing the Hammond's Ferry "urban ecology" program will be featured during River Days, a two-day public event with house tours, kayak and bicycle demonstrations and refreshments.
WHAT: River Days
WHEN: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 21 and noon to 5 p.m. Oct. 22
WHERE: Hammond's Ferry subdivision, along the Savannah River in North Augusta, off Alta Vista Avenue
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A Major League Effort to Shortstop Siltation
Creating Partnerships to Clean Up a Recreation Source
By Richard W. Peterson
The 6300 acre Florida wildlife refuge named for Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist and pioneer environmentalist Jay Norwood Darling is, at last count, home to 238 species of birds, more than 50 reptiles, and 32 kinds of mammals. The size and complexity of this "major league" refuge on the barrier island of Sanibel in the Gulf of Mexico, is a fitting memorial to the visionary conservationist.
Lake Darling, nestled in farmland of Iowa, is another namesake of Darling, who passed away in 1962. This state park and its 305 acre lake built in 1950, near Brighton in southeast Iowa, may not have the same "major league" credentials as the Florida wildlife refuge, but it has been a place for swimmers, campers, boaters, and anglers, along with nature enthusiasts to spend much time over the years.
By the late 1990s the lake had shrunk to 287 acres. Sediment washing from surrounding watershed was filling the lake. Excess nutrients, pesticides and bacteria were washing in with sediment. Water became cloudy, fish habitat declined, and fecal contamination led to swimming advisories at the beach. It looked like a "major league" effort was needed to get the lake back in the "ball game."
The Iowa Department of Natural Resources identified fecal contamination (indicated by high E. coli bacteria levels) was a problem in the lake. While siltation wasn't the primary problem, it was the vehicle. "Shortstopping siltation" ended up going a long way to repairing the lake.
With the problem identified, the Washington County, Iowa Soil and Water Conservation District commissioners and the National Resources Conservation Service devised a plan. The plan was to build terraces, ponds and water management structures to slow the flow of water with more water storage area.
And while the team would have some great Success at the "bi-lake level." it also would provide some "minor league" entertainment for some. Increased pond acreage in the watershed area with improved conservation practices for the land added recreational resources for landowners. More ponds.
One interesting statistic shows total combined pond surface areas created by the project at 91.1 acres. Drainage areas treated with terraces and basins totaled 1,346 acres. This area, added to existing pond drainage, equals 4,978 acres controlled to help solve siltation.
Stan Simmons, with 36 years in the Natural Resources Conservation Service, was brought out of retirement to serve as part time consultant for Pathfinders RC&D. He was watershed coordinator or "general manager" for the project. "Lake Darling is a tremendous public resource and worth saving and protecting," Simmons said in review of the happenings of the 5 year reclamation period. "Without partnerships with various groups and landowners, you can't do what needs to be done,"
In the case of the rebirth of the lake, this was certainly the case. "You may have heard the term, 'it takes a village.' In Lake Darling's case, it took a watershed," Simmons said.
For Lake Darling, water clarity decreased in the mid-1970s as intensive agriculture tillage practices allowed sediment to deposit into the lake. "It was always darker colored then," said Don Kline, DNR fisheries biologist who has worked at the Lake for 35 years. "In the spring, the lake was the same color as hot chocolate." Kline's monthly water clarity testing since 1978 has shown the effect of sediment washing into the lake.
Conservation practices had been part of the Lake Darling watershed for years. Tile outlet terrace systems and water control basins were used in the watershed on a smaller scale since the 1960s. The new plan was more of the same. It worked.
Since all types of material attaches to soil washed toward the lake, slow release of runoff allows sediment to settle out before reaching a stream. Tile outlet terrace systems are designed to store water until the tile can take it away.
The cleaner lake is the result of hard work and partnership of many landowners, groups, and agencies. Land owner cooperation was important.
"The key people were the farmers," explained project director Simmons. "Many had to think on a collective watershed basis rather than a farm basis, and they had to be convinced that there needed to be a partnership approach to the problem."
A good example of a farmer who needed to be convinced was Donnie B. Dickinson, a Washington County farmer whose land is close to the lake. He has farmed in the watershed all his life. Selling him on no-till practices wasn't easy. "At first I wasn't very enthused about it. It was a big change for me. It seemed like a sloppy way of farming," Dickinson explained. Today he recognizes the benefits of different cropping practices. He has water conservation practices scattered throughout his farmland--tile outlet terraces, more than 10 ponds, and nutrient management. "It seems like the right thing to do. I figure it's the best for soil conservation, that's a big plus," he said. "Plus you save wear and tear on your machinery. Fewer trips in the field save fuel, and there's less erosion."
Dickinson also fishes in Lake Darling from time to time, and has noticed a change in the water.
Craig Wright, another member of the "farm team," works about 400 acres in the Lake Darling watershed and has installed a number of practices, including three ponds. "It means soil is staying where it's supposed to be," Wright said. One of his ponds is the largest installed by the lake Darling Watershed project. "Before, it was just a big ditch, not farmable ground," Wright continued. "However, funding from the project made the pond possible. It would have been hard for me to afford to do it without help." In addition to the lake's benefits, Wright is seeing cost savings from nutrient management and total no-till practices.
129 construction projects have been completed, involving 56 of 71 landowners in the watershed, and that's a heck of a batting average. Many were group projects, collaborations between the watershed project, multiple landowners and other agencies and organizations. The 12,500 acre drainage area into the lake consists of land in three counties, so the cooperation across county lines and agencies was a real plus. Also, of the 129 projects, 59 involved two or more landowners. This makes 46 percent of the projects that were involved in group effort and cooperation. The total cost of the 129 projects was $1,283,461 dollars, of which $919,046 dollars in cost share funding was spent. Of the 129 projects, 28 were erosion control ponds. The remainder were tile outlet terraces and tile outlet sediment and water control basins.
A detailed analysis of the drainage area indicates 72% of runoff from private lands either flows into tile outlet terraces and basins or erosion control ponds. Each of these permanent practices traps 95% of the sediment from the area flowing to the lake. Of the remaining 28% of private lands, some is non-highly erodable, some is in CRP, and some is grass and woodland. This means a large percentage of the highly erodible land in the watershed is controlled.
Without conservation practices, more than 16,000 tons of sediment were reaching Lake Darling every year. Initial conservation practices reduced that number to 10,444 tons per year by 1999. The watershed project over the last 6 years has brought the figure to 6,978 tons per year. And as used in the game of baseball, that is "pitching" a great "Earned Run Average."
In 2005, only three swimming advisories were posted, half the number of a year before, a significant decrease from 11 in 2002. As water quality has improved, camping and park usage rebounded.
Fish especially benefit from improved water quality at Lake Darling. And that's good news for anglers who come to Lake Darling for a shot at bass, bluegill, crappie, and catfish. With better water quality, the lake is seeing blooms of beneficial plankton. As fisheries biologist, Don Kline says, "It's fired up the food chain.
What does this success story mean to you, dear pondmeister? Pay attention to siltation. When a pond is built, it's often not enough. Pay attention to the entire watershed. The watershed influences your lake, your pond and its life.
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To give an example why this doesn't work lets consider three racquets, all 70 cm long and with a mass of 250 gram evenly distributed. Then:
to A: Add 50 g evenly distributed
to B: Add 50 g to the midpoint
to C: Add 25 g each to the top and bottom
You end up with three racquets that have that same mass (300 g) and the same balance point. So if you try to calculate the swing weight from these two values you will end up with the same swing weight, independent of which formula you use. With your method all three will be identical.
I misunderstood the matter at first:
If you add weights in one point you havd to add the Moment of inertia of that weight separately to get the right total SW.
In case of adding 25 gram at both ends: a
The added SW with pivot point at 10 cm= 25*(10^2 + (Length - 10)^2 gr >>> 25 * Length^2
In case of the 50 gram in the center
The added SW = 50 * (bal-10)^2
If the balance point is at 35 cm and the length is 70 cm the added SW's are 90 and 31250 kgcm^2.
So this is the same difference as you mention between 350 and 290 kg cm
This is what the last section of the SW advisor calculates when you add weight.
We are testing this system and comparing it with actual SW tests on for quite some time now and we think that it is quite accurate.
Hi Technatic - What is that 8 sided racquet? Is from late 80's? Any info would be appreciated! Thanks - Jack
It was a sample from a manufacturer, more than 20 years old, I don't think that it was ever produced.
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On Oct. 12, the F-15 Operational Flight Program Combined Test Force celebrates its 10-year anniversary.
The members of the unit, many of whom were there at the inception, recalled the major accomplishments and changes they’ve seen after 10 years.
The OTP CTF is a unit composed of active/reserve military, civilian and contractor personnel from the 53rd Wing and 96th Test Wing. OFP CTF personnel test F-15 software upgrades to enhance air-to-air and air-to-ground combat performance, improve weapons-avionics integration and simplify aircrew displays and controls. They also develop test concepts, prepare test plans, manage test execution, analyze data, and produce test briefings, reports, and recommendations on F-15 developmental and operational tests.
Prior to the CTF, small test teams operated on various test aspects of the F-15 mission; but once those teams were combined in 2002, everyone had a new mission to work toward, according to Ronald Bear, an original and current employee of the OFP CTF.
That mission became software “Suite” upgrades and updates for C, D and E model F-15s. The unit got its start fielding Suite 4.
As of now, OFP CTF has completed testing on Suites 5-7 resulting in major advances in the electronics and computer systems within these more than 30-year-old aircraft.
A significant step that made these advancements possible was the opening of the Richter Lab in 2003. The facility integrated four test facilities into a single laboratory.
“Missions could be conducted from the facility and test aircrew could receive hands-on experience with actual hardware and software in the loop,” said 1st Lt. Ruben Ihuit, an OFP CTF test engineer.
Bear agreed that it was a huge “boon” to their capabilities.
“We immediately saw big improvements in our ability to find problems and really nail down what exactly was wrong,” he said of the Richter Lab.
Some of the vast improvements the OFP CTF fielded were:
- Satellite communication developmental testing which led to a new radio for the F-15E. It provided the Strike Eagle with long-range communication capabilities beyond line of sight with ground and airborne command and control elements.
- The first flight of the Mode 5 Air-to-Air Interrogator/Identification Friend or Foe command and control element occurred November 2008. The F-15 Mode 5 was designed to provide positive, secure and reliable line-of-sight identification of friendly airborne, surface and sub-surface platforms, and is designed to be interoperable with IFF systems used by NATO allies and the Mark XII system used by non-NATO allies.
- Completed testing for F-15C advanced electronic scanned array radar.
- Executed developmental testing on F-15E radar modernization program.
- Completed testing for Suite 7E, which provided multiple enhancements, Small Diameter Bomb II capability, a radar modernization program software baseline and more in 2011.
With all of the technical advancements and updates, Craig Hall, of OFP CTF Raytheon, felt having help from developmental and operational test squadrons housed under the same roof was a huge asset not to be overlooked. The 40th Flight Test Squadron is Eglin’s developmental test unit, while the 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron is responsible for operational testing here.
“(It) allowed the OFP CTF to organize and conduct DT support missions flown by the OT pilots very early in the suite development,” he said. “Operational problems and required changes can be found and fixed much earlier and cheaper than in past suites, and the overall product is better.”
Currently, the unit is gearing up to begin testing Suite 8E for the F-15E and Suite 7C for the F-15C. OFP CTF’s continuous effort has laid the groundwork for new developments and technical advancements.
“Every block cycle upgrade can now be characterized as the biggest F-15 upgrade ever, and the combination of radar and central computer modernizations has enabled integration of virtually every new weapon that comes along,” said Ihuit. “We are the threshold platform-of-choice for most new weapon programs, and continue to be USAF’s fighter backbone as a result.”
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Niagara University earns silver medal at CFA Institute Research Challengeby jmaloni
A four-student team from Niagara University claimed the silver medal at the CFA Investment Research Challenge, held Feb. 19 at Canisius College.
Seniors Peter Pane, Brandon Gallegos and Steven Boyle teamed with MBA student Ling Zhou to finish second out of nine colleges and universities in the annual competition, which assesses students on their writing and presentation of a stock research report.
The Niagara team will share a $500 prize, and has also been offered scholarships to complete the chartered financial analyst level 1 exam.
Ed Hutton, CFA, assistant professor and director of the Financial Services Laboratory at Niagara University, served as faculty adviser while Steven Gattuso, CFA, assistant professor, acted as the team's industry mentor.
During this year's competition, the student teams were required to analyze Computer Task Group (NASDAQ: CTGX) of Buffalo. The research process began in October, when CTG presented its financial results and discussed its business strategy during a luncheon attended by the student teams.
The Niagara team then spent two months conducting a thorough analysis of the company, including the construction of a sophisticated spreadsheet valuation model of the factors affecting the price of the stock. The team also had to evaluate current and projected macroeconomic factors, such as gross domestic product, interest rates and capital spending. Due to the importance of emerging electronic medical records to CTG's business, the team also had to conduct an analysis of recent legislation requiring EMR adoption.
Altogether, the team estimates it spent more than 400 hours in its research.
In January, the Niagara team submitted its written report, containing more than 60 pages of financial calculations, to a panel of judges, all of whom were professional stock analysts or portfolio managers and CFAs. In their research report, the team had to recommend to buy, sell or hold on the stock of CTG, and forecast the stock price. The judges scoring of each report was sealed until the completion of the oral presentations.
In February, the Niagara team attended the Western New York Investment Research Conference. During the conference, the team heard a talk given by Dr. David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P 500 Index Committee, and several other academic and investment professionals. In addition, Hutton delivered a talk to the group titled "Seven Myths Regarding the Equity Risk Premium."
After the speakers concluded, each university team had to present a summary of its stock research report to the 110 conference attendees and a panel of CFA judges before answering questions to defend its findings. The judges rated each team's presentation style, format and delivery, and its ability to answer the questions.
The written report scores and the presentation scores were combined. At that point, Niagara and Canisius College were tied for first place, both teams having outscored SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Brockport, SUNY Fredonia, St. Bonaventure University and SUNY Oswego.
The Niagara and Canisius teams were subsequently required to present their findings again to a combined judging panel, and answer another round of difficult questions in defense of their conclusions. Canisius ultimately finished just ahead of Niagara.
The competition was sponsored by the CFA Institute, an organization of more than 100,000 members in 68 counties, as well as Standard & Poor's, Morningstar, Zacks Investment Research, Citigroup, Manning and Napier, Nottingham Investment Advisors and Kaplan Schweser.
For more information, contact Hutton at 716-286-8208 or [email protected].
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Google is taking steps to address the security of Android apps with the launch of an app verification service for devices running Android 4.2 (Jellybean).
The security feature can diagnose the risk an app may pose, whether it is downloaded from the Google Play Store or from third-party sites. If it's potentially dangerous, users are prompted by a message screen warning that the app could cause harm. If the app does contain malware, Google will block its installation completely and users will see a message screen explaining why Google is forbidding it.
The feature -- which sends Google log information as well as information about a user's device, its operating system and IP address -- works in conjunction with the Google Play app, meaning that users must have that app installed on their smartphone or tablet if they want to protect their device and their personal information. Some users may feel that they don't want to share that much information with Google for the sake of avoiding a potentially risky app, but a number of major malware reports have emphasized over the past 12 months that 75 percent of app malware is targeted at Android devices and that the current safeguards on Google Play are not very robust. In fact, a recent report by Bit9 discovered that nearly 25 percent of the 600,000 apps currently available on Google Play were ‘suspicious' or ‘questionable'.
Latest stories in this category:
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- FT website 'hacked by Syrians'
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Dependence on Initial Conditions
The behaviors of all dynamic systems are dependent
upon their initial conditions. In
classical mechanics, the initial conditions of systems are usually known. A very
simple example, of a small ball dropped onto the edge of a razor blade, as shown
in Figure 4, illustrates how
important initial conditions can be to a dynamic system
Figure 4. Ball Striking Razor Blade.
The ball can strike the blade in such a way that it can go off to the
left (center of Figure 4) or to the right (right of Figure 4). The initial
condition that will determine whether the ball goes to the left or right is
minute. If the ball were initially held centered over the blade (left of Figure
4), a prediction of which direction the ball will bounce would be impossible to
make with certainty.
Dynamic systems, that are highly dependent on their initial conditions,
are the main subjects of investigation in modern chaos theory. Kellert (1993)
points out that: “A dynamical system that exhibits sensitive dependence on
initial conditions will produce markedly different solutions for two
specifications of initial states that are initially very close together” (p.
12). The ball falling on a razor blade is a good example of such a dynamic
system because a very slight change in the initial conditions of the ball can
result in falling to the right or left of the blade.
According to Rosen (1991),
The natural evolution of
quasi-isolated systems should be analyzed by considering the evolution process
as a sequence of states in time. A state is the condition of the system at any
time, and this can be either discrete or continuous. At any time, we can
consider the system's state as the initial conditions for whatever processes
follow. (p. 78).
The initial conditions of a complex system can therefore be found by
making observations, at selected times, of the system’s state space.
Theoretically, this can even be done for the universe at large. Ruelle (1991 )
Newtonian mechanics gives a
completely deterministic picture of the world: if we know the state of the
universe at some initial time, we should be able to determine its state at any
other time. (p. 29)
This ability is called determinism
and it holds true for all dynamic systems.
However, the initial conditions of many complex systems cannot be
accurately determined. When systems
exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, they are no longer
predictable, and determinism no longer holds. One complex system that is often
used as a typical example, is the weather. Ruelle (1991) says,
It is conceivable that the
presence of Venus, or any other planet, modifies the evolution of the weather,
with consequences that we cannot disregard.
The evidence is that whether we have rain or not this afternoon depends
upon, among many other things, the gravitational influence of Venus a few weeks
ago! (p 23)
The state or condition of a complex system, over time, depends on its
initial conditions. This phenomenon has been labeled the Butterfly
Effect because it suggests that a butterfly, that beats its wings in Peking
today, can transform a storm system next month in New York. This is now known to
have some validity, especially with weather prediction.
In 1961, Edward Lorenz discovered that his computer gave him a different
answer when he started at the beginning of his calculations than when he took a
"short-cut" and started near the midpoint. Intuitively it should not
have mattered, because the differences were so very small they should have been
negligible. But the final result, he discovered, was highly dependent on the
In one computer run, he started with the number .506127. The short-cut
run began with the number .506, a rounded-off number. The rounding off made all
the difference. The calculations had to do with the weather, and the rounding
off error should not have made the difference of a small puff of wind, yet the
results of the two calculations were totally different.
One of the practical conclusions from his discovery is that long-range
weather forecasting is doomed to failure. This is not because we can't measure
good enough; but rather, like the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics,
there are distinct limits to how far we can predict future events with
certainty, even in our everyday macroscopic world.
For every event that occurs, small uncertainties multiply over time,
cascading upward into unpredictability (Briggs & Peat, 1989; Cohen &
Stewart, 1994; Gleick, 1987). Every human being is a complex system, both
physically and mentally. Our birth, and early development as a child, will
largely determine how we find ourselves as adults. This is because we do not
enter life as a "blank slate;" we enter life with pre-established
desires and traits (Darley, Glucksberg & Kinchla, 1981).
The early part of our lives can effect us in our later life.
Psychoanalysis argues that we must remember our early childhood, if we are to
find maturity in our adult life. Jung (1989) notes “the enormous influence
which childhood has on the later development of character” (p. 136). He also
points out that “most neuroses are misdevelopments that have been built up
over many years” (1985, p. 24).
We must come to grips with our childhood. The Butterfly Effect strongly
suggests the importance of remembering our past and assimilating all of our
childhood experiences in order to see clearly why we behave as we do today.
Jung (1978) taught that the ego rises up from the psyche shortly after
birth from friction between the body and the external environment. Jung (1954)
wrote that “the child’s psyche, prior to the stage of ego-consciousness, is
very far from being empty and devoid of content” (p. 44). How humans develop
and learn depends upon the interplay between genetic (nature) and environmental
(nurture) factors (Rubiner, 1997).
Our brain is not a tabula rasa on which anything can be imprinted. The central nervous system has tendencies that are reflected in a gravitation toward particular behaviors partly expressed in our rituals, mythologies, religions, and social structures. Superimposed on this biological backdrop is an equally inherited ability to reason. Reason appears to be possible because built-in feedback loops create a hierarchical progression with the capacity to always look back at previous levels of integration (Showbris, 1994, p. 386).
Once the ego has established itself as an individual identity, it goes on
developing by virtue of continuous friction with the outer world as well as
internal friction due to the need for assimilation of experiences. Furthermore,
the ego’s “stability is relative, because far-reaching changes
of personality can sometimes occur” (Jung, 1978, p. 6). Mental instability
is as much the cause of growth as it
is of illness or pathological behavior.
Jung (1989) recognized three primary phases of life as:
(1) the first few years of life, called the presexual
stage; (2) the later years of childhood up to puberty, called the prepubertal stage; and (3) the adult period from puberty on, called
the period of maturity.
He also taught that the ego develops from the Self
(the central archetype of the psyche) within the psyche during the first half of
life, and then returns to the Self by assimilating it during the second half of
life in what he calls the individuation
process (Edinger, 1974).
Jacobi (1973) says that: “Unless it is inhibited, obstructed, or
distorted by some specific disturbance, [the individuation process] is a process
of maturation or unfolding, the psychic parallel to the physical process of
growth and aging” (p. 107). How far the Self of any person matures by means of
the individuation process, during the second half of life, largely depends on
how well the ego develops during the first half of life. Thus, according to
Jung, the state of the psyche of any individual is highly dependent on its
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A century ago, California amended its constitution to allow voters to directly pass laws and recall elected officials. The intent was to give the public a way to do an end run around a Legislature controlled by railroad barons.
Now we’re seeing a determined effort to amend direct democracy. Senate President Darrell Steinberg and his allies want to put before voters a series of “reforms” that would give the Legislature authority to tinker with the language in proposed ballot initiatives, with the permission of proponents. Also in the discussion: allowing proposed tax hikes to be placed on the ballot with a simple majority vote of the Legislature and requiring that initiatives in certain categories expire after 10 or 15 years, meaning they would have to be reauthorized in new statewide votes.
There are a million reasons to be cynical about these purported “reforms.” The dishonest ballot language written by the Legislature for the 2008 ballot measure authorizing $9.95 billion in bullet-train bonds. The deceptive initiative descriptions approved by Attorney General Kamala Harris and her predecessor, Jerry Brown. The scandalous manipulation of the November 2012 ballot order so that tax-hiking Proposition 30 went first.
Given all these facts and many more, the Democrats who team with unions to control Sacramento have no credibility on this issue. Direct democracy is the only strong check on their power. Any attempt to “reform” the process is highly likely to be an attempt to weaken it – or subvert it.
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- About Coláiste Eoin
- Principal’s Message
- Sports & Extra Curricular
- Support Services
- Student Projects
- Student/Parent Interest
- Adult Education
- School Mail
- Our Location
CDVEC Finglas Adult Education Centre
Colaiste Eoin, Cappagh Rd, Finglas, Dublin 11
Tel: 01 8340893/087 7953235
All classes are free.
All our groups are small (6-8 people). We have men only & women only groups.
Did you leave school before you did any exams?
Does it make you feel less confident in work, about finding a job or helping the children with their homework?
Would you like to improve your reading, writing, numeracy, spelling or computer skills?
CDVEC Adult Education Centre in Finglas offers a range of part- time day and night courses. “I feel more confident”; “I can do things now that I never thought I could do before”. “My children have more choices now”. These are some of the things that our students said.
Our courses are for adults from 18 plus, although most of our students are 25 upwards.
We cater for everyone: for the complete beginner who needs help with reading to the person who wants to improve their writing skills to help in their job. You can work with a one to one tutor or in a small group of around six adults.
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Clarke University announced today that the university’s Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to construct a new state-of-the-art science facility on campus. Groundbreaking for the new facility is slated for this spring with an anticipated opening in fall 2013.
“Clarke University is a leader in preparing the science and health science leaders of tomorrow,” said Clarke President Joanne Burrows, SC, Ph.D. “This new facility will create a learning environment that matches the exceptional quality of the university’s science and health science programs.”
The three-story building will be located on Clarke Drive and will connect to Catherine Byrne Hall. The facility’s new flexible, modern spaces are designed to seamlessly integrate lecture and laboratory spaces while fostering a collaborative, hands-on learning environment. The result will be the ability to implement “pedagogies of engagement” – teaching practices designed for today’s learners and techniques that are difficult to deliver in the current science facilities.
In addition to formal learning spaces, the new facility is designed to enhance collaboration through informal gathering spaces. It will create an atmosphere in which students can move from a casual study group in a common area to a very specific research project in an advanced lab with little transition. It is in this flexibility that learning becomes truly integrated.
“This new facility will take Clarke’s ability to educate scientists and health practitioners to the next level,” said Carolyn Haupert, chair of the Clarke Board of Trustees. “Thousands of graduates from these programs are making a difference in the world and this building will ensure that future Clarke graduates are prepared to make an equally profound impact. The trustees are very pleased to see this project coming to fruition.”
Beyond science and health science majors, this new facility will also positively impact the experience of all Clarke students as they complete general education coursework in the sciences – coursework designed to broaden the perspectives of students in every major.
“This new facility will touch every student while greatly enhancing the ability to teach our students the science of tomorrow,” said Burrows. “It will be a beautiful facility that makes an immeasurable difference on campus.”
Designed by the Clark Enersen Partners, which specializes in science facility design, and with construction managed by Conlon Construction, the building will also incorporate green building characteristics including numerous energy efficient features and a greenhouse for environmental studies.
For more information, contact the Clarke University Marketing and Communication Office at (563)588-6318.
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Watertown is a city in the State of New York and the county seat of Jefferson County. It is situated near the Canadian border and the Thousand Islands. As of the 2000 census, it had a population of 26,705. The U.S. Army post Fort Drum is near the city. Named after the many falls located on the Black River, the city developed early in the 19th century as a manufacturing center. From years of generating industrial wealth, in the early 20th century the city was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other city in the nation. Residents of Watertown built a rich public and private architectural legacy. It is the smallest city to have a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated landscape architect who created Central Park in New York City. Geographically, Watertown is located in the central part of Jefferson County. It lies 72.0 miles northeast of Syracuse, New York and 31 miles south of the Canadian border. The city is served by Watertown International Airport. The city is known as the birthplace of the "Five and dime" and the safety pin. It manufactured the first portable steam engine. It has the longest continually operating county fair in the United States and holds the Red and Black football franchise, the oldest surviving semi-professional team in the United States.
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|
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|
According to the US Civil Rights Commission, Racism is any action or attitude, conscious or unconscious, that subordinates an individual or group based on skin colour or race. It can be enacted individually or institutionally.
This commission includes Abigail Thernstrom, Adjunct Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, Peter N. Kirsanow, Corporate Advisor in Public Policy and California State University Trustee, Gail Heriot, Professor of Law, University of San Diego, Todd F. Gaziano, Senior Fellow in Legal Studies, The Heritage Foundation
If you want to argue that this is just political, check out their web site, the commission is a mix of independents, republicans and democrats.
If you want, you can easily find dozens of other scholars or racism who us a similar working definition, such as this one http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/race08.htm
Differentiating between a racist and racism is the same as differentiating between a Mormon and Mormonism.
To waste time debating the difference, or lack there of, is stupid.
i am always interested in different opinons so, carolinajazz, you intrigue me.
this is america, if someone wants to be a racialist, they have a right to be a racialist.
how do you feel about the 3/5ths rule--gives blacks too much power, or just enough?
Hoprefully, you will at some point show sufficeint understanding to realize this is completely compatible with my point that racism is facet of a culture, not an individual. In particular, you mihgt consider the difference between "X has racism" and "X enacted racism".
Do you have an academic education in culture, One Brow? Anthropology, sociology, something similar?
Originally Posted by negative reputation giver
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|
Patterson Park: Baltimore, MD
Plug In to Grassroots Efforts
“In the nineties, you didn’t stop your car near Patterson Park because of the drug dealers and prostitutes,” says Michael Harmel, who owns Three, a restaurant across the street from the park. Many of the brick and stone row houses bordering the park were boarded up, burned out, or rented on the cheap. Beginning in the late nineties, grassroots efforts began to turn the park and the adjacent neighborhood from an eyesore into an oasis.
Future restoration of the community rests on the struggle between the housing downturn and energized homeowners rallying behind the community. “You’ve heard of sweat equity? We have fret equity,” says neighborhood association vice president Kimi Aghevli. “You move in and think, ‘What have I done?’ Then your neighbors reach out and bring you into the social circle, lifting this neighborhood house by house.”
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jQuery is highly focused on the DOM and provides a nice abstraction around it. In doing so, it makes use of various well known design patterns which just hit me yesterday. One obvious example would be the Decorator pattern. The jQuery object provides new and additional functionality around a regular DOM object.
For example, the DOM has a native insertBefore method but there is no corresponding insertAfter method. There are various implementations available to fill this gap, and jQuery is one such library that provides this functionality:
There are many other examples of the Decorator pattern being heavily used in jQuery.
What other examples, big or small, of design patterns have you noticed that are part of the library itself? Also, please provide an example of the usage of the pattern.
Making this a community wiki as I believe that various things people love about jQuery can be traced back to well known design patterns, just that they are not commonly referred to by the pattern's name. There is no one answer to this question, but cataloging these patterns will provide a useful insight into the library itself.
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OK, let’s face it giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) are just plain cool. Tall and lanky Manute Bols of the animal world covered in spots. In addition to being high on the list of must-see animals on an African safari, giraffes have served as poster children for evolution. Long before Darwin, that other evolutionist, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, speculated that the long-necked giraffe was descended from shorter-necked ancestors. According to Lamarck, all that stretching to get to juicy, tree-top leaves changed their necks in ways that they then passed on to their offspring.
“The giraffe lives in dry, desert places, without herbage, so that it is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees, and is continually forced to reach up to them. It results from this habit, continued for a long time in all the individuals of its species, that its fore limbs have become so elongated that the giraffe, without raising itself erect on its hind legs, raises its head and reaches six meters high (almost twenty feet).” Lamarck on giraffes taken from Alpheus Spring Packard. 1901. Lamarck, the founder of evolution: his life and work with translations of his writings on organic evolution. Longmans, Green and Co.
Along comes Darwin who bought into the idea that living things can change over time but didn’t buy into Lamarck’s mechanism for evolution. For Darwin the evolution of the giraffe’s elongated neck was due to selection. From the standpoint of Darwin’s natural selection individuals in ancestral giraffe populations varied in some intrinsic and immutable way, at least immutable in the lifetime of an individual. These ancestral giraffes not only varied in leg and neck length but they also varied in their propensity to survive and contribute offspring to the population. Variation in survival and reproduction was in turn correlated to some variation in physical traits. Proto-giraffes that survived and successfully bred (one usually is necessary for the other) then passed on their intrinsic “legginess” and “neckiness” to their progeny and the population changed over time, generation-by-generation getting a little taller and necks a little longer as selection sieved through that variation in the population that can be passed from parent to offspring. It’s remarkable that Darwin came up with natural selection while knowing next to nothing about exactly how traits were passed from parent to offspring. It wasn’t until nearly a century after Darwin that natural selection was reconciled with the viable model of biological inheritance we call genetics.
But where are we then left with giraffes? Clearly neck and leg length evolved and likely by some sort of Darwinian selection in giraffes. Giraffes’ closest living relatives, the equally cool, West-African forest dwellers, the Okapi (Okapia johnstoni), have comparatively short necks and the fossil record reveals many giraffes with short necks. Modern giraffes are nested in a family tree that therefore points to short-necked ancestors. But, if selection plays a role then what is the agent of that selection? Darwin posed two models of selection; good-ole-fashioned natural selection where predators, the physical environment, competition for food, parasites or some other agent act on survival and reproduction and sexual selection where the agent of selection lies in a species’ own gene pool. In sexual selection the variance in individuals contribution to the population stems from competition for mates, either competition with members of your own sex to access the opposite sex or competition imposed by a choosy opposite sex. These forms of selection, natural and sexual, are basically the same, both involve filtering through available variation to change the population, but in sexual selection the agent of selection lies specifically in competition for mates. Competition for mates can lead some some crazy characteristics, everything from a moose’s antlers to the gaudy flowers of orchids, and maybe giraffes necks?
In a new paper in the Journal of Zoology researchers at the University of Cape Town and the South African National Biodiversity Institute review the evidence for the relative contributions of natural and sexual selection to the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. Two hypotheses have attempted to explain long necks in giraffes. One invokes natural selection and says that competition with other browsers in Sub-Saharan Africa generates selection favoring those members of the population who can reach a little higher into the trees. The other explains neck size in terms of the dramatic contests that males have over access to females. Male giraffes in the breeding season line up side-to-side, brace themselves by spreading their front legs out and proceed to pommel one another with those massive necks. The force of the blow can shatter the ribs of an opponent and deaths in these contests are not unheard of. Additionally the females are apparently not passive trophies to be won as the result of some pounding between males but they may exercise some mate choice based at least partially on a long, handsome neck.
Here’s the rub. Contrary to what one would expect based on the natural selection scenario, giraffes are a good 2 meters taller than their closest competitors and, despite Lamarck’s musings on their feeding habits, in many giraffe populations individuals often feed at shoulder height rather than reaching for the tippy-top of the trees. Also, if the primary benefit to having a long neck, and long legs, was to reach higher to avoid competing with shorter rivals then both males and females should have similar sized necks, but they don’t. In populations studied in both Namibia and Zimbabwe, males are not only larger than females but have comparatively longer necks, and bigger heads, for their body size. While both males and females need to eat and browse leaves from trees, only males fight using that huge neck to club a rival to submission suggesting that the difference in size-corrected neck and head size in males is due to selection imposed on males from fighting. Also, giraffe necks are elongated due to virtue of longer vertebrae not necessarily more vertebrate and when compared to the Okapi and fossil giraffes the size of the neck bones in living giraffes is larger relative to the vertebrae in the rest of their body. During contests the combatant with the larger neck tends to come out on the winning side of the battle, although the relative contribution of large necked males to the next generation is not known. The absence of paternity data notwithstanding, there seems to be something about the neck per se rather than just overall height suggesting a role for sexual selection.
The authors state that a prediction of the natural selection or “competing browser’ hypothesis is that it is height, not necessarily neck length, that is under selection. This means that leg length and neck length should be under similar selective pressure and should evolve at the same rate. They don’t. When comparing modern giraffes, Okapi and their fossil relatives the authors report a rate of evolution for necks twice that of legs in the modern giraffe lineage. Of course a potential defense of the “competing browser’ idea is that it may be that it is easier for giraffe populations to respond to selection to be the tallest browsers on the savannah by growing their necks than their legs. Trade-offs in growth and development and limitations in the available genetic variation in the population can shift the population’s response to selection away from one where evolution of legs and necks occurs at equal rates.
All of the evidence is pointing towards an important role for sexual selection in the evolution of the giraffe neck, but, why do females have long necks? The authors cite this a major challenge for the sexual selection hypothesis, but, really it is easily explained by the fact that, unlike some structure unique to a male, both males and females have necks and heads and the genes to make necks and heads. Long necked males successful in the fighting arena not only pass on genes for long necks to their male offspring but to female offspring as well. Differential rate and timing of development between males and females, likely mediated by sex determining genes only on male Y-chromosomes then help contribute to the differences between males and females in size. The authors point out that more needs to be known about the heritability of neck length and the costs to females for having comparatively longer necks. Maybe the giraffe genome needs to be sequenced to start parsing out genes that influence growth and development? Sounds like a fun project to me.
Other unstudied aspects of giraffe neck evolution lie in the potential differences in foraging habits between males and females. Given that the dramatic differences in bill size and shape between male and female Purple-throated Caribs (Eulampis jugularis) are due to differences in flower preferences during foraging (Temeles et al. Science 2000) there is a precedent for this hypothesis in other animals. Also comparing different giraffe populations may be interesting. Selection may not be acting the same on all populations and the relative contributions of sexual selection and “competitive browsing” may differ substantially among populations. Brown et al. in a genetic study of giraffes published in the journal BMC Biology in 2000 found that different giraffe populations fall into at least 6 distinct genetic lineages and these lineages correspond with different spot patterns.
It is important to note that sexual and natural selection are not either-or rather both are a form of selection operating on the population, just in the case of sexual selection selection stemming specifically from competition for mating opportunities. Both sexual and natural selection operate simultaneously on an organism’s characteristics and often work in opposition to one another creating trade-offs between the best trait for competing for mates and the best trait for some other aspect of survival and reproduction.
So, what is cool about giraffes is not just their lanky good-looks but the fact that they have been telling us things about evolution ever since Lamarck.
Simmons, R., & Altwegg, R. (2010). Necks-for-sex or competing browsers? A critique of ideas on the evolution of giraffe Journal of Zoology, 282 (1), 6-12 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2010.00711.x
Temeles, E. (2000). Evidence for Ecological Causation of Sexual Dimorphism in a Hummingbird Science, 289 (5478), 441-443 DOI: 10.1126/science.289.5478.441
Brown, D., Brenneman, R., Koepfli, K., Pollinger, J., Milá, B., Georgiadis, N., Louis, E., Grether, G., Jacobs, D., & Wayne, R. (2007). Extensive population genetic structure in the giraffe BMC Biology, 5 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-5-57
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David Honig is a graduate student in marine science at Duke University in the lab of Dr. Cindy Van Dover. He is participating in LARISSA, a 2 month multinational expedition to study the causes and consequences of the ice shelf collapse. He will be posting regular updates on the expedition exclusively for Deep Sea News readers!
13 March 2010
Farewell Weddell Sea, Your Bubbling Clam Beds Will Have to Wait
The first LARISSA cruise is over. The Palmer has returned to port in Punta Arenas. Gear is offloaded, samples are shipped, and most scientists have returned home to the United States, Australia, Belgium, and elsewhere. Although we accomplished a number of our objectives (see map), we gave up trying to reach the Larsen B embayment after discovering that sea ice conditions in the Larsen A were unusually dangerous. Plains of snow-covered pack ice gave way to a groaning hellscape of house-sized icebergs and car-sized “growlers”. These low-lying iceberg fragments small enough to be easily overlooked but large enough to damage the hull and launch fifty-pound chunks of ice onto the back deck. No one onboard had ever seen anything like it. Some speculated that the now-destabilized Larsen B tributary glaciers must be hemorrhaging into the Weddell Sea at unprecedented rates to generate this kind of sea ice. After southward progress slowed to one knot our captain shared his thoughts on the matter: “We need to get out of here!”
It is with some disappointment that we retreat to our respective institutions, leaving behind a window into a world few have glimpsed. Collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf blew the lid off a previously mysterious and inaccessible marine ecosystem that we were eager to study. Floating Antarctic ice sheets cover a marine biome larger than the Russian taiga, yet prior to 2002 our view of this environment has been limited to a 50-centimeter-diameter borehole drilled through the Ross Ice Shelf in 1977. (See footage of the Palmer passing a “small” calved ice-shelf fragment). Incredibly, despite being 450 kilometers from open water, this drill site revealed that fish, swarms of crustaceans, and several new copepod species live under the Ross Ice Shelf. What other species await description deep beneath Antarctic ice shelves? How can these animals persist so far from a source of photosynthetic primary production? LARISSA intended to find out.
We were particularly interested in the bubbling clam beds discovered in the Larsen B embayment. While diatoms and strong currents observed under the Ross Ice Shelf suggest that photosynthetically-derived material transported from distant open waters supports sub-shelf consumers, initial surveys of the Larsen B embayment revealed that in situ chemosynthetic primary production may also contribute. Video surveys conducted in 2005 of a glacial trough 100 kilometers from the former edge of the Larsen B Ice Shelf recorded bacterial mats and vesicomyid clams associated with seafloor methane vents known as “cold seeps.” Similar-looking mats and symbiotic bacteria in vesicomyid gills are known from other areas to use chemical gradients (in the case of cold seeps, a methane-driven sulfate/sulfide gradient) rather than light to assemble biomass from simple inorganic constituents in a process called chemosynthesis.
Finding the methane source fueling these seeps, describing novel organisms the seeps support, and measuring how the seeps structured benthic diversity beneath the Larsen B Ice Shelf were major goals of LARISSA. We would tackle this challenge from five distinct but complementary angles:
- Geology. Marine geologists on our ROV team—Lieven Naudts, Katrien Heirman, and Dries Boone (Ghent University, Belgium)—and our marine and quaternary geosciences team planned to use a Kasten core to describe geology underlying Larsen B cold seeps and extrapolate how common cold seeps might be under other ice shelves such as the Larsen C. Seafloor observations and acoustic profiles of rising bubble columns and clam beds would have been used to systematically search for more seeps in glacially-scoured troughs throughout the Larsen B embayment.
- Microbiology. Dr. Michael McCormick (Hamilton College) planned to examine mud samples obtained via mega- and Kasten core in a nitrogen-filled glove box (an airtight, transparent cube with sealed armholes to maintain anoxic conditions) to describe microbial diversity in relation to sediment chemistry and deduce the source of the venting methane.
- Invertebrate diversity. Dr. Craig Smith and Dr. Laura Grange (University of Hawaii) planned to compare invertebrates living in seep and non-seep sediments to understand how methane venting structured benthic invertebrate diversity.
- Biogeography. Working with Dr. Cindy Van Dover (Duke University), I was going to compare Larsen B seep communities to those colonizing analogous habitats in the region such as whale falls and hydrothermal vents.
- Trophic ecology. The McCormick, Smith, and Van Dover labs would together describe food-web structure at the Larsen B cold seep, measuring consumer reliance on free-living (McCormick) and symbiotic (Van Dover) chemosynthetic microbes. Diets of the menagerie of minute invertebrates living in the sediment (Smith) would also be considered.
These projects will have to wait until the next LARISSA cruise in 2012, when ice conditions will hopefully be more amenable to ship transit. But how much longer will remnants of the sub-shelf ecosystem persist? In 2007, a second team briefly revisited the Larsen B clam bed but found only empty clam shells buried in “diatomaceous fluff.” While it is possible they simply visited the wrong site—after all, empty vesicomyid shells typically vastly outnumber occupied ones at cold seeps—it may be that Larsen B seep communities are in a state of decline. Authors of the paper reporting discovery of the Larsen B clam bed hypothesize that ice-shelf collapse and subsequent influx of photosynthetically-derived organic matter are ultimately detrimental to communities adapted to dark, food-limited conditions. If this is true, then how many new species will disappear unnoticed as ice-shelf collapse propagates south along the Antarctic Peninsula?
The author would like to thank the LARISSA science team: Chief Scientist Dr. Eugene Domack, and the extraordinarily capable, well-prepared, and good-natured marine ecosystems team of Dr. Michael McCormick, Dr. Maria Vernet, Dr. Craig Smith, Dr. Laura Grange, and Dr. Cindy Van Dover. Special thanks to Raytheon marine technicians Ross Hein, Buzz Scott, Dan Powers, Mike Lewis, and Jeremy Irons for their assistance with the less-than-pleasant task of deploying whalebone moorings. Thanks also to Captain Joe Borokowski III and the entire Edison Chouest Offshore group for their skill and superb professionalism in piloting and maintain the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer during her at times challenging two-month mission. Finally, thanks to Deep-Sea News for hosting this cruise blog and readers for their interest and questions.
Domack, E., Ishman, S., Leventer, A., Sylva, S., Willmott, V., & Huber, B. (2005). A Chemotrophic Ecosystem Found Beneath Antarctic Ice Shelf Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 86 (29), 269-276 DOI: 10.1029/2005EO290001
H. Niemann1, D. Fischer, D. Graffe, K. Knittel1, A. Montie, O. Heilmayer, K. Nöthen, T. Pape, S. Kasten, G. Bohrmann, A. Boetius1, & J. Gutt (2009). Biogeochemistry of a low-activity cold seep in the Larsen B area, western Weddell Sea, Antarctica Biogeosciences Discussions, 6, 2383-2395
To close, some images and video from the Antarctic:
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CONWAY, Ark. (March 6, 2008) – A research letter written by Hendrix assistant biology professor Dr. George R. Harper was published in a recent issue of Nature magazine, a prestigious honor for science scholars. Harper wrote the paper with Dr. David W. Pfennig from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Department of Biology.
Harper, an evolutionary biologist, studied mimicry whereby non-poisonous snakes take on the colorful characteristics of poisonous snakes in attempt to avoid predators that typically don’t harm poisonous snakes. His research focused on non-venomous scarlet king snakes that closely resemble highly venomous eastern coral snakes – both possess brightly colored rings of red, yellow and black encircling the body. Predators avoid such tri-colored ring patterns, possibly without previous experience, but Harper found the non-poisonous mimics were more likely to be attractive to predators because they reside outside an area where the poisonous snakes they mimic reside.
Harper’s results provide an evolutionary explanation for why the mimics he studied often occur in areas outside of where the poisonous snakes they mimic are located.
A snake enthusiast – Harper’s pet snake Ed, a costal plains milk snake, resides in his Hendrix College office – Harper said his research has already caught the attention of several of his undergraduate students who plan to continue the research.
Nature is the world's foremost weekly scientific journal and is the flagship journal for Nature Publishing Group (NPG). Launched in 1869, NPG publishes journals and online databases across the life, physical and applied sciences and, most recently, clinical medicine. Content encompasses daily news from award-winning journalists, expert opinion and practical methodology, and more high impact research and reviews than any science publisher. More than 30 journals are published in association with prestigious academic societies.
Hendrix, founded in 1876, is a selective, residential, undergraduate liberal arts college emphasizing experiential learning in a demanding yet supportive environment. The college is among 165 colleges featured in the 2008 edition of the Princeton Review America’s Best Value Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.
For more information, contact Mark Scott at email@example.com or 501-450-1462.
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The 13th International Conference on Mobility and Transport for Elderly and Disabled Persons (TRANSED 2012) is set to take place in Delhi, India, September 17-21, 2012. This year’s theme is “Seamless Access for All: Universal design for transport systems and infrastructure as a key element in the creation of livable cities.” Currently, conference organizers are calling for abstracts in the form of papers or posters that cover core research, policy issues or practical application methods. The deadline for submissions is one week from today, March 30.
TRANSED is a conference designed as a platform to discuss recent research, highlight international breakthroughs and explore technological innovations to improve the quality of life for aging populations and people with disabilities. The conference also aims to examine ways to address challenges associated with improving mobility and transportation needs for the elderly and disabled.
As we discussed in a previous post, in 2010, 10 percent of the world’s population had a moderate to severe disability; that is more than 650 million people. Of those that do have a disability, 80 percent lived in a developing country, and 80 percent to 90 percent of working age individuals with disabilities were unemployed. TheCityFix Blogger Victoria Broadus discussed how these statistics draw attention to the relationship between having a disability and extreme poverty, and how social exclusion and a lack of transportation options can perpetuate these issues.
TRANSED conferences are held every three years and are milestone events in the field of accessible transportation. By attracting researchers, policymakers, transport operators and consumers on a global stage, the conference encourages the sharing of innovations and best practices in accessible transportation and mobility.
Hosted by Svayam, an initiative of the S.J.Charitable Trust, the event is also co-sponsored by the Transportation Research Board. The event was previously held in China and Canada, in 2010 and 2007, respectively.
For more information, visit the official TRANSED website.
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George Washington died at age 67.
Alabama became the 22nd state in the United States.
DNA synthesized for the first time.
Wilma Mankiller became the first woman to lead a major American Indian tribe as she took office as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
Nobel Peace laureate Andrei D. Sakharov died in Moscow at age 68.
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Deafness cuts you off from people, said Helen Keller, and it’s so true. If you are used to communicating with speech and listening then should you go deaf you are cut off from your normal method of communication. Often people in this situation withdraw from socialising because it becomes so hard to be deaf in a normal hearing world.
With Christmas just around the corner most of us will be invited to a plethora of events – work functions, partner and children work and sports functions and family get togethers. I remember when I was deaf, I wanted to go to these things badly, but at the same time hated going. After a very short time as the parties and gatherings got going, the noise would build and I found it harder and harder to communicate. I would invariably end up in a corner by myself or (worse) in the kitchen doing the dishes. Most times I made my escape as fast as I could feeling a failure once more.
There is no doubt socialising if you are hearing impaired is a challenge and the temptation is simply to give up trying. But honestly, this is not the best thing. It really is better to go and brave it out because you do at least get some social contact. It is very important to keep active and interested.
There are some things you can do which will help you enjoy occasions such as this a little more.
(1) Tell people you are hard of hearing. It isn’t something to be ashamed of. Most people will have some experience with deafness (because it is so prevalent) and will be more than happy to converse with you in a way that will help you to understand.
(2) Take a pen and paper to get people to write things down if you can’t understand or the noise is too great.
(3) Seek some one else who seem to be alone in the crowd. Often there is an older person with low mobility who would be more than glad for your company.
(4) If you need to, withdraw for a while to get back the energy you need to keep socialising. I found concentrating on lip reading to be very tiring after about 45 minutes and I would need to take a break for a while.
(5) Accept that there will be some conversation and jokes that you will be left out of.
(6) Find a ‘buddy’ who can keep you up to date and tell you what is going on.
(7) If you don’t hear something and you think you need to – ask. Someone will tell you.
(8) Don’t be embarrassed if you make conversation mistakes. Hearing people do too…they just accept it as usual and don’t worry about it. If you make a gaffe – laugh at yourself. Other people will think you’re great if you do this.
I do know how hard it can be to socialise, but enjoy this Christmas and New Year. It’s another milestone and another year you can’t get back. Make the most of it.
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Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona, Spain
Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte would no doubt find it felicitous that I’m typing this review on the day that Apple launches its touchscreen tablet computer, the iPad. Titled The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow (2009), his new film grants the typewriter a fond place in a cycle of technological expectation and innovation, redundancy and nostalgia. Yet, unlike its ‘typewriter art’ antecedents – such as Marcel Duchamp’s Traveller’s Folding Item (1916), Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test (1967) or Rodney Graham’s Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) – the typewriter’s presence here is conjured by a vocal recitation of its operational noises alone.
Michael Winslow is the film’s star, an American comedian with a virtuoso skill for creating vocal sound effects, best known for playing the mischievous Sergeant Larvell ‘Motor Mouth’ Jones in the Police Academy movies (1984–94). For nearly 21 minutes, the camera moves gently around Winslow in a recording studio as he impersonates the noises of 32 typewriters. Inter-titles announce the dates of the respective machines’ manufacture, their brand and model number. It is an absorbing feat of mimicry. From the frantic clucking and strenuous creaking of his ‘1895 Barlock Mod. 4’, through to the ping-pong sounds of the ‘1954 Hermes Mod. Baby’, and concluding with the ‘1983 Olympia Monika Deluxe’, Winslow produces a percussive tour de force that could take its place alongside the Dada sound poetry of Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters and the cartoon exuberance of voice actor Mel Blanc. Although not apparent in the film itself, Uriarte filmed The History of the Typewriter … in the Berlin studio of the industrial noise band Einstürzende Neubauten, who pioneered the use of customized instruments and machinery in the early 1980s.
Winslow performs with precision and concentration, as if executing a particularly torturous piece of chamber music punctuated by moments of impish irreverence. His performance conjures images of a secretary trotting out a dictated letter on 1932’s cutting-edge technology (the inappropriately named Remington Noiseless Portable), or a hack bashing out copy on his newsroom Triumph. (In fact, Uriarte recorded Winslow’s imitations of vintage machines from collections in Germany and Switzerland as they were being used to type out the title of the film.) The techniques Winslow uses to achieve the ‘lost’ noises are fascinating to observe: by grasping the two microphones like twin pan pipes, gnawing them like corncobs, or grappling, swiping and variously pushing them against his teeth and lips, he produces a glorious vocabulary of fricative letter-hammering, space-bar thuds, platen-knob twisting and carriage-return shunts that seems to encompass chicken-pecking, machete-slashing, strangulation, tap-dancing and QWERTY beat-boxing.
Uriarte’s practice has frequently taken its inspiration from his former career in business administration. The Spanish artist has employed standard office supplies such as Biros, highlighters and jotters, for example, to create his monochrome series, animations and paper constructions. The ubiquitous spreadsheet tool Microsoft Excel, perhaps soon facing its own obsolescence, has been used to create a number of digital prints. Such works oscillate between bureaucratic delight, the futility of the nine-to-five grind and the serial work of Sol LeWitt – being formulaic is the point. Yet, with The History of the Typewriter ..., which tellingly culminates with the sounds of a machine from 1983, the year before the arrival of the first home computer with a graphical interface, Uriarte has created a work of new pathos, humour and complexity. As if a perverse variation of stories passed down through generations by memory and oral tradition, his high-definition footage preserves an obsolete analogue sonic universe.
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en
| 0.917969
| 887
| 1.539063
| 2
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By Philip Brooks 7 7/8"x10 5/8" (56 Pages)Ages 12+ Publisher: Heinemann, 2003 Part of the "The Holocaust Series" series.
Viewing the Holocaust Today shows how survivors, children of survivors, grandchildren of survivors, and everyday people deal with the legacy of the Holocaust. This book also discusses how the Holocaust is portrayed in today's books, movies, and music. A look at some Holocaust museums, memorials, education programs, and recent issues and events round out this contemporary look at the Holocaust.
This book includes: first-hand accounts from people involved in the Holocaust; an in-depth study of a key topic mentioned in the book; detailed timeline to help place important events; photos, maps, documents; index; and a further reading and sources section.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.judaism.com/display.asp?nt=aRHv&etn=GAFFJ
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en
| 0.90312
| 168
| 3.546875
| 4
|
Just because you are coping with the challenges of chronic illness or disability does not mean that your life cannot be filled with happiness, joy, or a sense of fulfillment. As Annette Funicello, who has multiple sclerosis, is quoted as saying, "Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful."
Everyone at Meeting Life's Challenges, LLC has a chronic illness or disability. In this section we share our strategies for coping with the loss, frustration, anger, and challenges. We also share how we find hope and happiness through humor and staying involved with family and community. We share the good times, the downs times, and the everything in between times, and hope in the process, you find understanding and inspiration for making your life easier.
If you face a challenge that you do not see discussed here, please email help@MakingLifeEasier.com or start a conversation on our Blog.
"You've got to accentuate the positive; eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative; and don't mess with Mister In-between!" ~ Bing Crosby - Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive song lyrics
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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en
| 0.948729
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| 1.789063
| 2
|
"If something bad can happen to even one child it shouldn’t be done" – paraphrased comment from meeting of a variety of DECS and AEU (Australian Education Union) representatives, Al Upton, and his Principal
In order to protect their beloved daughter, the King and Queen in "Sleeping Beauty" took the extraordinary step of banning spindles from their kingdom. Never having seen or handled such a tool, the young woman had no idea of either its utility or danger.
"The years went by, the little Princess grew and became the most beautiful girl in the whole kingdom. Her mother was always very careful to keep her away from spindles, but the Princess, on her sixteenth birthday, as she wandered through the castle, came into a room where an old servant was spinning.
"What are you doing?" she asked the servant.
"I'm spinning. Haven't you seen a spindle before?"
"No. Let me see it!" The servant handed the girl the spindle ... and she pricked herself with it and. with a sigh, dropped to the floor." - Charles Perault, La Belle au Bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood)
Sleep, ignorance, inexperience are no substitute for vigilance, knowledge, guided practice. Graham Wegner wonders about the nature of risks:
If one child could slip and possibly fall with injurious consequences, then there is risk. But the benefits of the playground far outweigh the negatives - the learning, the gaining of skills, the creation of games and the friendship of playing with your mates. And we are careful with the playground environment - no sharp edges, designs that cater for a variety of skill levels, soft fall on the ground, rules for safe play, teacher supervision - so that the risks are managed and lead to beneficial learning of physical skills.
Why would we treat the risks regarding, say, the use of blogs in the classroom any differently? Why do risks associated with technology seem to be so threatening that shutting down and banning is seen as the appropriate way to deal with it? And are those responsible for recommending or enforcing these methods really in touch with real or perceived risks?
Although both Al Upton and his Australian colleague, Sue Waters, stress that "They [Upton and his principal] are after constructive helpful comments and thoughts; and a balanced discussion of the issues," comments from the meeting seem to indicate that the miniLegends blog would have to be stripped of all interactive components to pass muster.
"Their key concerns are to make sure everyone is protected against all risks." Is such a thing possible?
The hedge of thorns that protected the sleeping princess will not spring up to shelter our students. The spindles in their world may not be as dangerous as the measures taken to ban them.
If schools are not allowed to teach children Internet safety and digital citizenship, how and when will they learn?
"Sharp Thorns" by katmere
"Familie mit Frau am Spinnrad" by Hermann Sondermann
"The Sleeping Beauty" by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
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<urn:uuid:2ccee2c3-d46b-4e91-a4c9-d420062b4107>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://dmcordell.blogspot.com/2008/04/spindles.html?showComment=1207449120000
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|
en
| 0.963948
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| 2.5625
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Dáil Éireann has its own specialised Committee system which advises on a wide range of legislative, social, economic and financial business.
Other work conducted by these Committees includes the processing of proposals for legislation (Bills) at Committee Stage and the examination of Government expenditure through scrutiny of Estimates.
The setting up of a well organised system of Joint Committees has resulted in Deputies and Senators having additional opportunities to participate to an even greater extent in specialised parliamentary work where they take evidence from interest groups, meet witnesses or invite key Departmental officials in on specific issues of interest.
A total of 1,300 witnesses gave evidence before Committees in 2008. On an ongoing basis Committees publish reports and results of investigations. These reports are available here; Committee Reports
Most Committees meet in public session and their proceedings are televised. Representatives of the media and members of the public may attend.
Link to Committees
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<urn:uuid:679a9b3e-1834-48a5-829e-8e560a062552>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/about/committees/
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en
| 0.950122
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OBJECTIVE: The high rate of co-occurrence of substance abuse and mental disorders renders the availability of psychiatric programs, or integrated service delivery, a vital quality-of-care issue for substance abuse clients. This article describes the availability of psychiatric programs and integrated care for clients with severe mental illness in the private substance abuse treatment sector and examines these patterns of service delivery by profit status and hospital status. METHODS: Survey data from the National Treatment Center Study, which is based on a nationally representative sample of privately funded substance abuse treatment centers, were used to identify the proportion of centers that offered psychiatric programs in 1995-1996, 1997-1998, and 2000-2001. Centers reported whether they treated clients with severe mental illness on-site or referred them to external providers. Repeated-measures general linear models were used to test for significant changes over time and to assess mean differences in service availability by profit status and hospital status. RESULTS: About 59 percent of private centers offered a psychiatric program, and this proportion did not significantly change over time. The proportion of centers that referred clients with severe mental illness to external providers increased significantly from 57 percent to 67 percent. For-profit centers and hospital-based centers were significantly more likely to offer psychiatric programs and were less likely to refer severe cases to other providers. CONCLUSIONS: Although the importance of integrated care for clients with dual diagnoses is widely accepted, data from the private substance abuse treatment sector suggest that this pattern of service delivery is becoming less available.
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<urn:uuid:0f8a0303-f16e-470a-8bc1-320f1e3d2613>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=88354
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| 0.954949
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| 1.679688
| 2
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Download "Understanding Vehicle Financing
"Understanding Vehicle Financing," produced by the American Financial Services Association Education Foundation (AFSAEF) and the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), and prepared in cooperation with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), provides information to help you learn about dealership financing and evaluate your own financial situation before buying a new or used vehicle. It also addresses vehicle leasing.
The 10-page brochure includes:
- A checklist of recommended actions to take before, during and after visiting the dealership;
- A worksheet to determine a monthly payment amount that the borrower can afford;
- A worksheet to allow borrowers to compare terms from up to three creditors;
- A glossary of common vehicle financing terms; and
- A list of federal laws regulating dealership financing and leasing.
*File requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.
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<urn:uuid:440c73c7-4b9c-4d64-9f73-ea278c46f9b2>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.nada.org/Advocacy+Outreach/Auto+Financing+Resources/UnderstandingVehicleFinancing/
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|
en
| 0.908884
| 178
| 2.46875
| 2
|
After having a(nother) conversation with someone regarding the factuality of the movie Paranormal Activity, I thought I would put my thoughts on what movies mean when they use the phrase “based on true (or actual) events.”
I will first admit my own ignorance and/or gullibility, not to mention reliving the embarassment, of believing that the Blair Witch Project was real. Perhaps not in terms of watching exactly what happened to the “real” victims, but in terms of watching someone else act out what really happened. Though my memory is not what it once was, that could be the way I want to remember it.
Anyway, there are a number of factors I take into consideration when analyzing a movie. The first of which is how much can be believed. In the movie the Matrix, the character Morpheus tells Neo that what he thinks is the real world isn’t, but basically a computer program. Does Morpheus saying it make it real? Of course not. If his name in the movie was actually Laurence Fishburne, does that make it real? Of course not. Well the same holds true for “based on actual events” movies as well.
Just because the first thing the movie displays is some sort of paragraph explaining that the movie was made by “found footage” or was “based on true events” does not make it so. For one thing, the “found footage” scenario has happened often enough in movies now that it has its own genre, including movies such as the Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, and one of the first, Cannibal Holocaust. Found footage tends to help blur the lines of reality for the audience. In a world where we have to base our knowledge on what we experience and what other people tell us, it’s extremely important for us to recognize the difference between entertainment and education. This doesn’t mean that things can’t be learned from entertainment, but there should be a conscious realization that the purpose of the movie is to make money for the people involved in creating and distributing it.
For movies that say are “based on true events,” this is an easy phrase to use to get people to believe there is more truth than there really is. As an example, if I tell you that when I was a child I thought I saw a ghost that resembled Abraham Lincoln, and then someone makes a movie about people being terrorized by a ghost that looks like Abraham Lincoln, well technically the movie producers can say it is based on true events. It is only based on my perception of an interaction with a ghost that someone was able to take “artist’s privilege” with and make it more interesting. Doesn’t even make what I thought happened real, but because I thought it was real it is “based on actual events.”
For the record, the example I just used was made up for the following reason: I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t think I would have ever thought that a movie monster would appear to be real to adults, but then again, religions, such as Christianity, utilize this same apparition in a benevolent way. If people thought about what a ghost is a little more clearly, then I believe it would be a lot easier to recognize fiction when we see or read it.
First of all, what is a ghost? In most people’s definition of a ghost, it is usually the essence of a human being who has died, and can act either in or out of character of that person, usually depending on how “evil” that person was or how gruesome of a death that person experienced. Movies tend to display this ghost as a transparent version of the person who died.
So let’s think about this version of ghosts. We know, or can prove, the degeneration of a person’s body. So the ghost we see is not the person as it is, otherwise it would look more like a zombie with less skin, eyes shrunken back, and definitely no brain. It should be knowledge to most people that a brain is required for the consciousness as welll as unaided mobility of a person. A ghost has none of these things.
The scary portions of the ghost are quite obviously necessary if the movie producer wants to have a desired effect of scaring you. Would a horror movie based on a ghost such as Casper succeed? Of course not, unless you are trying to scare children. So the only way for a movie producer to be able to scare adults is to use their fear, such as fear of death or a fear of helplessness which is usually the case with ghosts since you can’t just punch or shoot them. So obviously, a movie producer or writer, is going to use things in order to get the desired effect in an audience. And those that have strong fears or believe, usually due to religion though I’m not trying to knock religion in this article, that ghosts actually do exist will have stronger fear emotions kicking during these movies, and when relating them to others can sound more convincing in what they believe is the truth.
Unfortunately, television has a way of making these people sound more rational. They take advantage of people’s fears in a way to make ghosts sound real through the use of scientific instruments. Shows like Ghost Hunters use instruments that are supposed to be able to read paranormal activity. How does one actually measure paranormal activity? On these shows they usually utilize differences in temperature or the amount of electricity in the air. Differences in temperature can result for any number of reasons. For instance, it stands to assume that houses are not made perfectly considering they would need to be built by perfect beings and perfect materials, therefore it is reasonable to assume that certain houses, especially old ones, are drafty in certain areas. If that’s the case, then yes your thermometer will pick up cooler temps in certain parts of the house.
In the case of electricity in the air, we already know that everything from solids to gases are made of atoms which also contain electrons. Electrons are what electricity is made of and therefore it stands to assume that, although perhaps minimal, we are surrounded by electricity charges. Throw in the fact that our planet has a magnetic field around it and it’s easy to see why their instruments will pick up on “anamolies” in the amount of electricity in the air, just as it’s easy to understand the differences in temperature. But just as there used to be debate on whether or not the earth is flat or round, there could still be yet an even more rational explanation for the readings the Ghost Hunters instruments pick up. My more rational explanation is the deliberate misleading of their audience, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to get people to tune in each week.
Our emotions and perceived experiences also play a part. However, that doesn’t even make what we think happened is true. Have you ever thought somebody said something they didn’t say? How about saw something that either wasn’t there or not what you thought you saw? Most of you will say yes making our memories unreliable. So if our memories are unreliable, then what should we make of an experience we whole-heartedly believe as true? The person that I had the conversation with regarding this topic, had a ghost encounter. She held to the belief that what she saw was a ghost. I of course questioned her beliefs. The memory happened when she was 10 years old to begin with, which was over 25 years ago and happened at an age when we are unable to distinguish truth, especially when her emotions, mostly fear, were controlling her actions. So her belief that what she experienced was true, helped her to come to the conclusion that ghosts are real, even though rational people will be able to understand the unreliability of her memory.
Now us as human beings are in a predicament where not a single one of us knows what is real truth, making our inability to determine truth a regular occurence. Religion does play a part considering each religion relies on its adherents believing their particular religion is “true” while believing the rest are “false,” while they all rely on exaggerated or outright falsified stories. So this makes it reasonable to attribute a person’s beliefs on fiction being reality, to their belief that religious beliefs are truth. The question those people need to ask themselves though, is why do they believe something as true.
Why is it that just because a movie says it’s true, we believe it as true? Personally, I assume something is false until it’s proven true. More often than not, I’m right. It can be a confusing, depressing, and extremely difficult experience to deal with, but the question I ask myself is, “how reliable is the information I’m hearing, reading or seeing”? Human beings themselves are extremely unreliable, therefore any medium with which they use to communicate to the rest of us, is just as unreliable. In other words, don’t believe in ghosts until you have a rational reason to do so. Don’t believe someone else’s word for anything until you enough reason to do so. And never ever believe anything written by people who are no longer alive, unless it has been critically analyzed to be determined to be true. Ghost stories do not fit this category, therefore it’s usually in your best interest to keep those beliefs in the purely entertainment portion of your brain, where it can do little harm to how you live out the rest of your life and others, by not promoting that which you can’t prove.
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://stevelochner.wordpress.com/
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I've seen a few bee species already this year (inlcuding a few yet to be identified), but one that has stood out by spending a lot of time in our garden is the Hairy-footed Flower Bee Anthophora plumipes. Being about the size of a bumblebee, these are quite distinctive and show considerable sexual dimorphism. The males have yellowish-brown hairs and a pale yellow face, while the females are black apart from orange hind femora (which can be hidden). Since a single male appeared on 13th March, I've seen the level of activity increase, firstly with the arrival of a second male and then a couple of females. Most of their feeding has been on Lungwort - they have been seen investigating other flowers such as the ornamental Quince, but this does not seem popular and is regularly spurned. I wondered if it was a nectar-poor cultivar, but today I saw a different bee species (maybe an Osmia) feeding from it. Hopefully I'll be able to add more species photos, but they don't stay still for long...
|A. plumipes male on Lungwort|
|A. plumipes female approaching Lungwort - mmmm, tasty...|
|A. plumipes female approaching Fritillary flower|
|Andrena sp. showing plenty of white fluff plus white bands on the abdomen.|
|Andrena sp. investigating bare soil - is that a burrow?|
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<urn:uuid:b3dae7f4-baab-4ea6-afc7-a4a557eaee41>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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|
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| 0.965039
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| 2.5
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Curved Stair Lifts
Definition of a curved stair lift: Any shape other than a straight set of stairs from the bottom to the top landing. A stairlift that is not straight is custom made.
The easiest was to determine if you need a curved stair lift is to put a piece of wood on your stairs. If the wood can not go directly from the bottom of your stairs to the top without interuption then you need a curved stair lift.
Some straight stair lift manufacturers push two straight stair lifts as a viable option if your stairs consist of two straight componets with a landing. This is only a viable option if the stair lift user can safely transfer to the seat of one chair to another.
To be frank, if the family can afford the price and cost of a curved stair lift, this is usually the best solution to those in need of a stair lift for a curved set of stairs.
- It is very difficult to find used curved stair lifts to fit existing stairs.
- This is due to the fact that the angles of the stair segments and exact shape of the curved section must be within a close tolerance to enable a match.
- The 90° flat landing shape is the most likely shape to match when matching a used lift with another location.
- The most difficult shape to match is a spiral. It is not impossible to match a spiral but extremely unlikely.
- For a custom stairlift the wait time is usually 3-10 weeks.
- Curved lifts require more service over time.
- This may be due to the extra stresses of the chair going around the curve on the track, the manufacturer's ability to make a very precise product, and most important...the local dealers ability to measure accurately.
Why a Curved Stair Lift Would be a Necessity
- Two straight stair lift option would not work since lift user can not easily transfer to the seat of another stair chair at an intermediate flat landing.
- If the user has a hard time transferring mid way up the stairs to another seat then they will also have a hard time transferring to the seat at the top and bottom of the stairs.
- Stair shape is a constant curve.
- Shape of the stairs is such that only a curved stairway lift will work.
- Many wheelchair and scooter users with mobility issues find a home lift solves accessibility barriers in their home. Stairways present access issues if one is faced with the challenges of a disability. A list of curved stair lift manufacturers.
Note that some SILVER CROSS locations offer recycled curved stair lifts. A used curved stair lift would save you thousands of dollars.
stair lift - Home | chair lifts | stair lift comparisons | curved stair lifts | handicapped stairlift | self installed stair lifts | used stair lift | curved stair lift | electric stair lift | stair lift manufacturer | stair chair | stair chair lift | stair glide | stair lift specifications | straight stair lifts
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<urn:uuid:697941b9-22ca-466f-9afe-46c72c480d47>
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.silvercross.com/curvedstairlift.html
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|
en
| 0.935499
| 603
| 1.75
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The Clifton Colliery and the power station just across the
River Trent from Wilford, were easy to locate, prime industrial targets.
Bombs meant for the colliery damaged Wilford School, demolished a cottage
close to the village air raid shelter and an unexploded bomb had to be
defused by the army after it fell close to the large private house that
is now the 'Chateau' restaurant.
Wilford Air Raid Shelter On The Village Green
(Demolished In The Early 1970's )
||Wilford Air Raid
Nottingham was the target of a number of air attacks by
Germany during the 'Blitz' of World War II. Although certainly
not as heavily bombed as other industrial centers such as London and Coventry,
the cities suffered many casualties. The largest raid took place
on the 8th of May, 1941 in which 400 bombs and 60 incendiaries were estimated
to have hit the city and surrounding areas. Some of them landed in
Kieth Rivington recalled '...a landmine was dropped at
the first house at the end of the bee-bank opposite the school and another
was dropped right next to the air raid shelter at the botton of Coronation
Ave, opposite the Ferry Inn, with another one on the laundry over the
bridge. Also a returning bomber crashed in the tennis courts between
Coronation and Vernon Ave.'
The Evening Post recently quoted Patricia Murphey's account of the raid.
'...I also remember seeing a German parachutist whose plane crashed in a field near the Ferry Inn at Wilford. I was
at a friends house ... and we could see a parachute coming down. I went to see the crashed plane later, but I don't
know what happened to the pilot who baled out.'
The school clock was paid for by surplus flood
aid money raised to assist Wilford in 1875.
Wilford School, Novemeber 1996
Wilford benefited greatly from the generosity of Benjamin
Carter, the rector of St.Wilfrids Church in the early 18th century. He
spent a considerable amount of his own money improving the village. He
renovated the church, stocked it with expensive books, built a village
barn, a dovecote, a large rectory building and a village school.
The school was constructed in 1736. The Reverend
provided £400 for land investment to provide a permanent income for
the schools maintenance and running costs.
The building was substantially upgraded in 1886
and is still in use today as a primary school run by the
Nottinghamshire County Council.
|Gilbert Wakefield was a remarkable scholar educated at
the school. He has mastered complex spelling by the age of three! He went
on to write over fifty books and became a controversial and fanatical supporter
of well intentioned causes. He was so outspoken and careless of the consequences
that in 1799 he was prosecuted for libel and sent to prison for two years.
The Reverends dovecote was built in 1720 and acted as
a constant supply of fresh meat. Pigeons breed throughout the year and
therefore were invaluable during the winter months.
Wilford Rectory & The Dovecote
In The Foreground (Late 1996)
|The Smiths Of Wilford House
The Smith family were a prominant and well respected family
in Wilford for just under 100 years. The Smiths founded what is today the
National Westminster Bank. They lived at Wilford House, a large rectangular
Grade II listed building at the cross roads at Wilford Lane
Wilford House was renovated and expanded a few years ago and is now used
for business by one of Britains largest firm of Quantity Surveyors.
In 1960, a Mrs Bailey wrote an essay on her memeories
of Wilford village and describes the Smith family. 'The Smith
family played a large part in the life of the village. They were
very devout and had their own Chapel in the grounds ( of Wilford House
). The family employed a number of men to tour the district selling
Bibles. These "Colporteurs" were lodged in a house in Withans Yard,
called the "Pilgrims House". In a summer house in the gardens of
Wilford House are memorials to these men. The mansion was later bought
by the Forman family (the founders of the Evening Post) and is now
converted into flats. The old stables (opposite Wilford House) have
been turned into garages for the fleet of vans of the local newspaper'.
(1708-1874) Member Of Parliament for Aldborough & St. Ives.
Established the Lincoin & Hull Banks.
Built Wilford House in 1781.
Samuel Smith (1784-1874)
Member Of Parliament for St. Germain & Leicester
Henry Smith (1796-1874)
Sheriff Of Nottingham in 1841.
Lady Lucy Smith (1794-1865) Wife of Henry Smith who
throughout her life devoted her energies to those in
need. She would spend two hours each morning
on the steps of Wilford Hall
attending to the poor.
Henry Abel Smith (1826-1870) Held Position Of High Sheriff
Of Nottingham in 1886 and was very active in
charity work. It was Henry Smith who provided St. Wilfrid's church
with an organ.
Sir Henry Smith
Held post of Governor General of Australia from 1965 for a number of years.
Wilford Ghost Stories
On the southern outskirts of Wilford, near Silverdale
and the old (recently filled in ) railway bridge is a small, tidy, modern
industrial estate. One of the buildings is alleged to be haunted. Employees
have experienced unpowered machines operating themselves, lights switching
on and off and mysterious foot steps echoing on the ceiling.
Another ghost story is linked to the now long demolished
power station on the north bank of the Trent, not far from St.Wilfrids
Church. On the night shift of November 1967, Sam Pykett encountered
a small figure 'wearing a check shirt, a blue bib overall and a cap....(with)
wide-set blue eyes'. The figure smiled at him before it turned
away to disapear into a closed door. Others working in the plant
were to report sightings of the ghost at irregular intervals.
An area around Melbourne, Australia was allegedly named
Wilford in 1839 by two imigrants from Nottingham, Dr Godfrey Hewitt and
his brother Richard Hewitt. I have been unable to find a modern reference
to this but if you know better please drop me a line.
He donated £50,000 to the Nottingham hospital, purchased
the Nottingham war memorial, payed £200,000 for the construction
of a Nottingham boulevard, £50,00 for the purchase of Woodthorpe
Park and £150,000 for the construction of the Nottingham University
after paying for the University land. Phenomenal sums
of money for the time. His companies success and his charitable donations
contributed greatly to the prosperity, status and well-being of Nottingham.
His actions earned him a Knighthood and eventually a pierage as Lord Trent
in 1929. In 1908 his generosity extended to Wilford when he
payed for the construction of a set of Almhouses adjacent to Wilford Green.
The Almhouses were built for invalided or destitute soldiers returning
from the Crimean War and the Indian mutiny. To read more
about Almhouses, click on the Clifton
Green Page. Lord Trent died in 1931.
On the North banks of the Trent, to the North East of
Clifton Bridge is a monolithic, dark, aircraft hanger of a building which
serves as the Boots Pharmaceutical factory. Wilford is linked to
the site by the Nottingham businessman who built up Boots in the 19th century,
Jesse Boot. Jesse left school in 1860 at the age of ten to help run
the small Nottingham herbalist shop set up by his late father. Jesse
demonstrated a keen business sense and by 1917 he'd expanded the small
shop to 600 retail outlets. He shared in his success by donating
enormous sums of money to worthy causes both in and outside of Nottingham.
Wilford Alms Houses, 1997
Photographed By Colin Fossey
The village culture is well represented by the quaint
events that were organized to celebrate the coronation of Edward the VII
in 1902. The program of events listed below serve as a reminder to
the close community spirit that existed in villages such as Wilford before
the age of mass communication and commuter travel. It somehow
illustrates to me how the world seemed so much larger in those days.
In the pre-war years, a local newspaper called the Nottingham Journal used to hold
a 'Big Swim' contest. A day of events at Trent Bridge focused on a marathon
swimming race from the Wilford Church all the way to the finishing post at the Bridge.
Few people would be brave enougth to risk the strong currents today! In later years
speed boat racing also became a regular event. Nottingham people didn't seem to think of
the dangers the Trent presented in those days. Another popular contest
was a pillow fight where the combatants would suspend themselves over the river on a greasy pole!
The Wilford suspension Bridge was also a popular source of entertainment for children who in the summer would
use it as a spring-board to dive into the river. I wounder if todays sports and entertainment
will seem as hazardous to future generations!
For a flavour of village culture you might also find the Mayday celebrations
on my Clifton
Village Green page interesting.
CORONATION OF KING
South Wilford Celebrations
Friday, June 27th, 1902
3 Prizes Will Be Given For Each Event
10 O'Clock Children fall in at school, receive their
medals and parade up
village to the Top Green and return to Church.
11 O'Clock Service at Church
2 O'Clock Sports in Church Meadow
Maypole Dance by school children.
yards race (open)
yards race for men over 50.
yards race for boys under 10
yards sack race (open)
yards race for girls under 10
yards race for men over 30
yards egg & spoon race for women (open)
yards skipping race for girls over 11
yards wheelbarrow race
wheeler to be blindfolded (open)
yards race for boys over 10 & under 16
yards race for girls over 10 & under 16
mile race (open)
yards race for women under 30
yards race for women over 30
yards skipping race for girls under 11
A BAND WILL BE IN ATTENDANCE FROM 2 TO 10 P.M.
4 O'Clock Tea to commence. After tea finish events
on the sports list.
8 O'Clock Cinematograph Exhibition, by Mr. C. Taylor,
optician, Bridlesmith Gate, in the Rectory Barn.
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March 5, 2013 Tokyo
On Wednesday, 27 February 2013, the United Nations University (UNU) welcomed Mr. Jan Eliasson, UN Deputy Secretary-General, for a Town Hall meeting with UNU staff members, UNU postgraduate students and other UN agency officials.
Mr. Eliasson noted that Japan was his third destination on a three-country trip around Asia, after having visited the Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China. He underlined that these three countries are confronted with national and bilateral challenges and that especially the Republic of Korea and People’s Republic of China have become increasingly influential actors, not only towards their own citizens in terms of development, but also in the international community.
Too often a false dichotomy is drawn between national and international challenges, when in reality, they are two overlapping concepts influencing geopolitical instability. Mr Eliasson stressed the importance of international and bilateral cooperation and the vital role the UN plays as a mediator in these efforts. He stated that, “while the UN system may be seen as a mirror image of the world’s reality, it can also be perceived as a projection of what our world dreams of being and it is the UN’s goal to narrow down this discrepancy”.
Illustrating some of his life lessons and referring to his recent experiences, he inspired and animated the audience, thanking them for their meaningful work. He also used the opportunity to highlight some areas where the UN can improve and increase its effectiveness. For example, the numerous UN agencies need to enhance their transparency and cooperation, while mobilizing the young and talented to solve problems. He urged the younger generations to “try to change the world as soon as possible”. He also encouraged think tanks such as UNU to intensify their research in sociopolitical domains such as migration, organized crime, corruption and crisis prevention measures.
Mr. Eliasson expressed the necessity to focus on the highly interlinked priority triangle of poverty reduction, development and the rule of law, while reinforcing younger generations’ engagement to find innovative solutions to the multidisciplinary challenges our world is facing today and will be facing tomorrow. Mr. Eliasson finished with a reminder that “there is no peace without development and no development without peace, and there is neither peace nor development without the respect for human rights”.
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The Narkhokul alphabet was created by Katie Molnar to write a fictional language. The name Narkhokul means "the signs of the land," in reference to the fictional place where Draphei, the language Narkhokul is used to write, is spoken. That place is Narthrall, part of the fictional world Katie and others collaborate on as a setting for stories and role-playing games.
Most consonants are pronounced as they are in English. The non-obvious ones, /th/, /sh/, /kh/, and /r/, should be pronounced as in "thin," "ship," "loch," and "red," respectively. Alternatively, /r/ can be pronounced as an alveolar trill, as in Spanish rojo ("red") or Russian рыба ("fish"), or any similar rhotic sound. It is also permissible to pronounce any unvoiced consonant with its voiced form, e.g. /t/ can be pronounced like [d], /f/ like [v], and so on.
The vowels; /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/; are pronounced as in "father," "pet," "pizza," "bone," and "sue," respectively, but they may alternatively be pronounced with any similar vowels as long as they do not become ambiguous.
Si shenokai lan khenkalpe, tilom khun tetaimos lop khamkekekhi. Ma pe pakhte lan osetisate netherte pelent, ake shisa som o fulapente naron.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed
with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
Hosted by Kualo
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At the risk of getting the FDA involved, I wanted to point out a couple of recent articles about the health benefits of listening to music. Any kind of music, not just classical.
One study shows that listening to music can help stroke patients more quickly recover their memory and their ability to concentrate.
In another study, surgical patients who listened to music post-operatively spent less time in intensive care.
The doctor in the second study concludes, "The financial cost of utilizing music with ICU patients is relatively small compared to the potential economic benefits." Maybe classical radio stations can get in on health care reform somehow...
I am a firm believer in the healing power of music. I think that it should be incorporated into patient's treatment like physical or occuptaional therapy. Music is a very powerful thing that has the potential to heal many lives in many ways......
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T2T || FAQ || Ask T2T || Teachers' Lounge || Browse || Search || Thanks || About T2T
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From: Kristi <email@example.com> To: Teacher2Teacher Public Discussion Date: 2006121915:48:58 Subject: Re: schools Hello, I am just finishing my undergraduate degree in elementary education with a minor in mathematics, I student teach this spring. In the state of Wisconsin I will be licensed to teach 1st-6th grade in any content area/subject and will be able to teach 6th-8th grade math. In order to teach high school mathematics you will need to major in math education and get your teaching certificate. This will allow you to teach 7th-12th grade mathematics. I attended the University of Wisconsin-Superior. It is a well known school in this area and I feel very well prepared to teach math and elementary school. There are many searches on the internet for you to find a school near you if you wish to go to school in your area/state. There are various requirements from state to state so if I were you I would start with the options for college on the internet in the area you wish to live during college and go from there. Good luck! You are choosing a very rewarding career.
Math Forum Home || The Math Library || Quick Reference || Math Forum Search
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- Historic Sites
HOW A NATION BORN OUT OF A TAX REVOLT has—and especially hasn’t—solved the problems of taxing its citizens
May/June 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 3
In the first days of the new federal government, the Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, had hoped to accomplish two things with the tariff: First, of course, he wanted to establish a revenue stream that would fund both the operations of the government and the debts acquired in the Revolution, and second, he wanted to protect American industry until it was efficient enough to compete on even terms with the established industrial firms of Europe, especially Britain. This latter intent is a classic example of the second purpose of taxation, one that developed only in modern times: an effort to affect the workings of the national economy rather than to raise revenue—in other words, taxation for the purpose of economic engineering.
Far more often, economic engineering requires a benevolent—not to mention objective—despot to succeed. Any time it happens to benefit a particular segment of the population, the way tariffs protect manufacturers, that segment will always work hard to maintain its benefit long after the original purpose of the tax has been served. In the push and shove of democratic politics, meanwhile, economic engineering has also, of course, often served as a splendid refuge for scoundrels, providing cover for political favors to the rich and powerful.
Congress at first ignored Hamilton’s call for protective tariffs because there were few industries to protect and they had little political influence. The people who would have to pay the tariffs—the American population at large—loomed far larger in Congress’s political consciousness. That situation changed radically after the War of 1812. The British blockade during the war and laws such as the Embargo and Non-Intercourse acts that preceded it spurred a large jump in American manufacturing, much of it concentrated in New England. The traditional New England opposition to tariffs began to fade as the new American industries pushed for ones high enough to protect them from renewed foreign competition.
The South, ever more dependent on the export of cotton and the import of manufactured goods from both the North and Europe, fiercely resisted these increased tariffs, but with only limited success. The one passed in 1828—called, with typical Southern genius for political phrasemaking, the Tariff of Abominations—led directly to the nullification crisis of 1832, which threatened the Union itself. Tariffs were lowered in settling that dispute, and were lowered as well in 1857, but they remained far higher than revenue needs normally required. The tariff, then nearly synonymous with federal taxes, was a prime cause of the Civil War.
At the end of 1860 the federal government was spending money at the rate of about $173,000 a day. Three months later the War Department alone was spending $1 million a day. By the end of that year it was up to $1.5 million. A conflict unprecedented in scale in Western, let alone American, history, the Civil War placed wholly unprecedented demands upon the financial resources of the United States and the federal tax system.
Much of the cost of the war for the North was thrown off onto the future by the borrowing of nearly $3 billion from American citizens, many of modest means, in the world’s first bond drives. About $450 million was raised by the printing of greenbacks, legal tender not backed by gold. About $750 million was raised by taxation.
The act establishing the Bureau of Internal Revenue also moved to tax nearly everything. Excise taxes were slapped on most commodities; stamp taxes on licenses and legal documents. The gross receipts of railroads, ferries, steamboats, and toll bridges were taxed. Advertisements were taxed. The tariff was sharply raised.
Also imposed was a tax on all income “whether derived from any kind of property, rents, interest, dividends, salaries, or from any trade, employment or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere, or from any other source whatever.”
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The MBA in Sustainability program at Antioch University New England launched a chapter of Net Impact in 2007. Membership in the Antioch University New England chapter of Net Impact is open to all MBA in Sustainability students.
What is Net Impact, you might ask.
Net Impact is a global organization for graduate business students, who want to use business to create a positive change in the world. Net Impact provides networking opportunities for students and business leaders that share a vision of progressive business.
Membership in the organization gives students an opportunity to gain experience in business activities, while working with local companies and non-profits on projects to benefit them and their communities.
Net Impact also offers many educational resources and opportunities; from conference calls with experts discussing issues like Corporate Social Responsibility to the annual National Net Impact conference that offers workshops on a wide range of topics.
Another valuable resource available to members is the Net Impact “Career Center”. Benefits of the career center include; career advice, research potential employers, and search for jobs or internships and so much more.
In addition, each Net Impact chapter is responsible for organizing 6 events every year. Events range from happy hour with other regional Net Impact chapters for potential collaboration on future projects to movie discussion night to visiting speakers.
The central office is located in San Francisco with chapters all over the world. Antioch’s chapter joins the four other regional chapters, School of International Training (Brattleboro, VT), Southern New Hampshire University (Manchester, NH), Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (Hanover, NH), UMass Amherst.
Perpetual Food Drive - 2012 service project – Initiative to provide local food banks with a more reliable and sustainable supply of food year round.
Presentation by Laurie Caldwell, 2013 MBA candidate - Laurie gave a talk about the work she did with non-profit organization “Vermont Works for Women.” A documentary was shown about a program that connects incarcerated women back into the community by providing them the skills to build a house while they were in prison.
Stay in NH Strategy Breakfast - Hosted by Antioch University New England, this event was held to discuss ways to encourage New Hampshire’s young professionals working in state. The open discussion involved members from the New Hampshire Business for Social Responsibility, Stay Work Play, Keene Young Professionals of the Keene Chamber of Commerce, and AUNE’s Net Impact Chapter.
Sweden Talk - Students who attended the study abroad trip to Sweden talked about their experience and answered questions about the valuable learning opportunity.
To learn more about Net Impact visit their website, NetImpact.org
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People & Events
|Resource Bank Contents|
In some ways he was a lucky man. To be sure, finding yourself in bondage on a Virginia tobacco plantation was not the result of good luck, but Anthony Johnson would rise above his low status and undoubtedly become the envy of many colonists.
Anthony Johnson first arrived in Virginia in 1621. Referred to as "Antonio a Negro" in early records, Anthony went to work on a tobacco plantation. It's not clear whether he was an indentured servant (a servant contracted to work for a set amount of time) or a slave.
Anthony nearly lost his life in the spring of 1622. Virginia's Powhatan Indians, threatened by the encroachments of tobacco planters, staged a carefully-planned attack that took place on Good Friday. By the middle of the day, over three hundred and fifty colonists were dead. On the plantation where Anthony worked, fifty-two were killed. Only Anthony and four other men survived.
Anthony's luck continued. Several years later, "Mary a Negro" was brought in to work on the plantation -- she was the only woman on the plantation. At the time, Virginia was populated almost exclusively by men. Still, Anthony and Mary became husband and wife, and they had four children.
Anthony and Mary eventually bought their way out of bondage. They acquired their own land. During the 1640s Anthony and Mary lived at their own place, raising livestock. By the 1650s, their estate had grown to 250 acres. For any ex-servant -- black or white -- to own his own land was uncommon, despite the promise made by the Virginia Company to give a tract of land to each servant at the end of service. For an ex-servant to own 250 acres was rarer still.
In 1665 Anthony and his family sold their 250 acres and moved to Maryland, where they leased a 300-arce tract of land. Anthony died five years later, in the spring of 1670; Mary renegotiated the lease for another 99 years. That same year, a court back in Virginia ruled that, because "he was a Negro and by consequence an alien," the land owned by Johnson (in Virginia) rightfully belonged to the Crown.
Anthony Johnson lived a long life when, in America, disease and violent death by cruel overseers and Indian attacks resulted in low life expectancies. Court records reveal that he had the respect of his community -- a respect that would be denied African Americans in the years to come.
Portrait of a Negro
Portrait of the Moorish Woman Katharina
Court document regarding Anthony Johnson
Thomas Davis on Anthony Johnson
Part 1: Narrative | Resource Bank Contents | Teacher's Guide
Africans in America: Home | Resource Bank Index | Search | Shop
WGBH | PBS Online | ©
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Cylburn Arboretum is a 207 acre green space located in Baltimore City. Living collections include trees and plants from around the world. The Nature Museum contains over 250 mounted specimens, special focus- Birds of Maryland. On-site: Historic civil war mansion, formal gardens, and forest trails.
Exclusive tours at 12 noon and 2pm for Museum Day ticket holders. Spend an hour seeing the highlights of the collections and grounds while on a guided tour.
Participation in Museum Day is open to any tax-exempt or governmental museum or cultural venue on a voluntary basis. Smithsonian magazine encourages museum visitation, but is not responsible for and does not endorse the content of the participating museums and cultural venues, and does not subsidize museums that participate.
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- App Store Info
DescriptionThink you can recall all the numbers shown to you before they disappear?
Download Num Recall and put your memory to the test.
Num Recall is easy enough for young players and hard enough to challenge even the sharpest minds.
Game is fun for people of all ages. Don't be surprised if your kids may challenge you with their smart brains.
The object of the game is to find the number(s) that is being asked.
Users get to see all number(s) for couple of seconds before they disappears.
With clock ticking, user needs to find all numbers quickly.
To make it more interesting, tapping on wrong block will cut your points.
Game ends, when user is not able to find all numbers in time limit given.
Game gets challenging with each levels as numbers grow.
Game is a great way to sharpen your memory while having fun.
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| 0.939269
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September 29, 2003
“The United States is the world’s largest marketplace for queen conch, accounting for 80 percent of the legal trade,” said Service Director Steve Williams. “We are joining our CITES partners in implementing and enforcing this global conservation action to make sure queen conch is a sustainable and valuable commercial resource throughout the Caribbean region.”
A similar embargo on international trade under CITES is already in place for queen conch and conch products from four other Caribbean countries– Antigua and Barbuda; Barbados; Dominica; and Trinidad and Tobago. Before trade can resume, each of these seven countries must implement a number of long-term conservation measures, such as conducting population surveys and developing scientifically sound species management programs to ensure the sustainability of its conch population.
Queen conch, an edible marine snail recognized worldwide by its large, beautiful pink shell, is found throughout the Caribbean Sea, including Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands as well as in the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. Heavily fished for its meat, a tourist favorite, its shells and pearls are sought after by collectors and for jewelry, making queen conch one of the most important Caribbean fisheries. This species is vulnerable to commercial exploitation as once it is depleted, it can take many years to recover.
The Service is the federal agency responsible for implementing CITES in this country. Working with its Federal partners, the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Commerce Department’s NOAA-Fisheries, The Service promotes regional cooperation, scientifically-based management plans, and enhanced law enforcement capabilities. Marking its 30th anniversary this year, CITES is a treaty to which the U.S. and some 160 other nations belong, including Honduras and the Dominican Republic. The treaty provides for the monitoring and regulating of international commerce in wild animal and plant species through a system of permits.
Since the mid-1980's, the State of Florida and the Federal government have banned all harvest of native queen conch populations found in State of Florida waters and adjacent Federal waters. In 1992, the U.S. proposal to place queen conch on CITES appendix II was adopted by the CITES parties. An appendix II listing includes species that, although currently not threatened with extinction, may become so without trade controls. These controls ensure trade is legal and does not threaten the species’ survival in the wild.
“Although the U.S. is temporarily closing its doors to queen conch imports from these three countries in order to give these populations an opportunity to recover, Americans can still purchase this commodity from other countries where legal trade is allowed,” Williams said. “However, we are now asking U.S. tourists who visit the Caribbean to take care before purchasing any queen conch meat or souvenirs because they chance having it confiscated upon their return.”
To learn more about queen conch please visit the following websites:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting and enhancing fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 95-million-acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which encompasses 540 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. It also operates 69 national fish hatcheries, 64 fishery resources offices and 81 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Aid program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to state fish and wildlife agencies.
NOTE: You can view our releases or subscribe to receive them -- via e-mail -- at the Service's Southeast Regional home page at http://southeast.fws.gov. Our national home page is at: http://news.fws.gov/newsreleases/.
Atlanta, GA 30345
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The squad funds its services through donations, fundraising events and by billing insurance companies of the people it transports.
In 2008 the squad had a budget of $124,000.
The emergency squad hopes to sell the current building and use the money for the new facility, Johnson said. It is also looking for grants.
"We've had a great out pouring of people looking forward to helping us," Johnson said. "We're very optimistic."
Johnson declined to give a cost estimate for a new building. Once the squad receives the deed to the land, he said, a detailed proposal will be made public.
When the unit formed following World War II, patients were picked up in an old hearse donated by a local funeral home.
Today, the Ti Emergency Squad has state-of-the-art ambulances, equipment and training. In fact, the Ti squad is the only North Country unit with a "thumper," an auto-pulse cardiopulmonary resuscitation device.
It's roster has more than 50 members, including 28 emergency medical technicians.
In 2007 the squad responded to 615 calls - nearly two a day.
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|
Summer is just around the corner and with these warm temperatures, more and, more people are opting for open-toed heels, sandals, and flip-flops to stride into the season. Whether you’re struggling with foot pain or unsightly feet, or you just want to be comfortable, follow these tips from the Snyder Stuart Podiatry Centers.
1. Clear corns and foot calluses. Calluses are protective thickening of the skin which develop as a result of abnormal recurrent friction and pressure. Soaking your feet in an intense moisturizer foot soak will help soften the calluses for easy removal.
2. Treat nail fungus. Toenail fungus is caused by tiny organisms that infect nails. Toenails tend to attract fungus more often than fingernails because our feet supply it with a warm, moist, dark environment to grow in. There are multiple causes of toenail fungus, all of which can be treated, and often quickly.
3. Heal bunions. A bunion is a bony bump at the base of a big toe that is formed when the joint becomes swollen or enlarged, forcing it to crowd against the other toes. The most common cause for a bunion is wearing shoes that are too tight. For this reason, bunions tend to travel in pairs, one on each foot. While comfort surgery may be required, there are several non-surgical solutions that can relieve, even eliminate, bunion pain.
4. Dry feet blistering your summer fun? Treat dry feet with plenty of moisturizer. We recommend a moisturizer with tea tree oil or ureacin. The oils soak into your feet and won’t leave your skin feeling greasy.
5. Going barefoot: Maintain proper hygiene by using a cleansing spray on your shoes, in your bath, and in your shower on a regular basis. Remember that regular use of hygiene products can reduce the presence of bacteria, mold, yeast, virus and fungus.
Dr. Neil Snyder and Dr. Meredith Stuart have been practicing podiatry together for over 20 years. The husband and wife duo offer dynamic, cutting-edge technology for pain relief treatment. “To have pain free, clear, hydrated, feet will not only increase your overall health, it will also give you a confidence boost.” said Dr. Neil Snyder, DPM.
About the Snyder Stuart Podiatry Center
Snyder Stuart Podiatry Centers are based in Ellisville, St. Louis, and Wentzville, Missouri. Podiatrists Dr. Neil S. Snyder and Dr. Meredith B. Stuart are a husband-and-wife team dedicated to providing outstanding podiatric care in a people-friendly, caring and professional environment. Dr. Snyder and Dr. Stuart have state of the art podiatry centers to offer their patients the most accurate and complete care. The practice offers electronic charting, digital x-rays, and the best possible customer services, as well as performs surgical procedures at several of St. Louis' leading hospitals.
For more information, visit www.feetonline.net or call 636-230-3883.
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“We’ve always done design-build. Everybody’s done it. A customer calls you up and says, ‘We want to do this.’ They are usually doing remodels. That’s how it starts. Now we do complete projects, out of the ground. It’s a lucrative, competitive priced method that is fair to all,” said Jeffrey L. Withers, Stockton branch manager, Collins Electric Co. The company has more than 20 years of design-build project experience, including Raley Field AAA Baseball Stadium in Sacramento, Calif., and Stanislaus Surgery Center in Modesto, Calif.
“The first thing that is important to understand is the difference between design-bid and design-build,” Withers said. “Lots of times a contractor will come to us with a footprint for a building and some architectural plans and ask us to give them a bid on doing it as a design-build. They probably went to three other electrical contractors. We call that design-bid. It’s really a competitive bid situation. In true design-build, we go into partnership with a contractor, an architect and other subs. It is a team effort. Everybody understands costs and where they’re going. It’s pretty much an open book. You lay out your costs and markups then everybody negotiates that up front and works to a common goal. In a contracting sense, it is the best method for everybody.”
Design-build—as defined by the Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA)—is an integrated project delivery method, that can potentially be implemented by any contractor. For those electrical contractors just getting started or who want to expand their involvement in the design-build project delivery method, there are educational opportunities that make it possible to learn the specifics of incorporating design-build into business practices and ways to promote a design-build portfolio.
Design-build is a demanding method.
“You have to have engineering skills; it’s more than being an electrical contractor,” said Jim Mackey, president of Evergreen Power Systems, Seattle, who, with a degree in civil engineering, went to work years ago for an electrical contractor. “If you want to get into design-build and don’t have experience, rely on the old adage, ‘Hire someone who has experience.’ Find someone who has worked as a consultant on design-build projects and include their experience in your profile.”
Contractors can form liaisons with local engineering companies or electrical engineers and make associations with architects—all with the possibility that the contacts made can lead to future customer recommendations.
Electrical contractors going into design-build should research utility requirements, the jurisdiction of cities, state requirements and types of arrangements they can have with designers. They have to be aware of the subcontractors’ work requirements—for the HVAC, audio or fire alarm system—which can vary from city to city.
“Conference centers with sophisticated Internet connections are popular now,” Withers said. “We enlist quite a few voice-data or media subcontractors to help us.”
It is also important to consult an attorney.
“Electrical contractors will get subjected to design-build subcontracts from generals that have a lot of loopholes in them about indemnification as a designer,” Withers said. “You have to have things designers are required to have, like errors and omissions insurance. And you have a bit more responsibility in a [design-build] project, so having an attorney help with documents is a good idea.”
Sources of requirement information include state licensing boards for architects and engineers or the boards of technical professions.
“In some states, it may not be permissible for an engineer to work for the contractor,” said Thomas Glavinich, who designed and teaches Design-Build Methods, a seminar offered by the National Electrical Contractors Association’s (NECA) Management Education Institute (MEI) (www.neca-mei.org).
“It may be required to provide a professional engineers’ stamp on the drawings. These are the kinds of things electrical contractors need to know,” Glavinich said.
Anyone interested can take the one-day seminar available by request through NECA chapters. Cost of the seminar ranges from $225 to $295 per person, depending on the venue site and involvement of the local NECA chapter.
“Our design-build seminar is an excellent example of the customization of a course that covers the basic elements of design-build with specific examples and issues that are particularly germane to our members,” said Stuart Binstock, NECA, executive director, MEI.
The seminar provides a basic understanding of the design-build process and covers methods of procuring outside design services, design consideration and documentation, and the differences between design-build and traditional design-bid-build contracts.
It is also important for an electrical contractor to understand the importance of measurable performance criteria.
“With a bid contract, if the contractor installs per the plans and specifications, they are off the hook for performance. In design-build, they are responsible for both installation and performance. That’s the big difference between the two,” said Glavinich. “Let’s say the owner says, ‘I need a lighting system in this room.’ You need to have quantifiable performance criteria. I recommend that contractors go to the standards like those of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) that apply to the type of environment or room, to the system that will be used, to the age of the people using the room and so on.
“The standards list suggested foot-candle levels and the visual comfort probability index (VCPI). If the owner walks in at the end of the job and says, ‘It’s not what I thought I was going to get,’ the electrical contractor can point to the agreed-upon criteria. The contractor can then work with the customer to make changes, but they are not financially responsible for the changes.”
The DBIA also offers courses at various U.S. locations.
“Specialty contractors are critical to the design-build process, and many are already actively involved in DBIA,” said Lisa Washington, vice president, education and conferences, DBIA. “Electrical contractors are not only eligible to take the classes, but they are also eligible for our designation.”
The Designated Design-Build Professional is both for individuals in traditional careers (e.g., contractor, owner, design professional) and alternative careers (e.g., law, education, insurance). While it has education and experience requirements, the new Certificate of Mastery program does not. It is a way for individuals who take the courses to show that they have mastered the educational content of the courses.
Classes include Fundamentals of Project Delivery (1 day), Principles of Design-Build Project Delivery (1.5 days), and Design-Build Contract and Risk Management (1.5 days). Fees for the courses range from $325 to $450 for members. Nonmembers pay an additional $75 per course. Other fees apply for applications to programs and designations.
Some business practices can aid the design-build electrical contractor.
“You have to ask a lot of questions,” said Lewis Weinstock, president, NECA Northern New Jersey Chapter, and president, Linear Electric Co. Inc., Rockaway, N.J. His company has been doing design-build for more than 20 years.
“Someone has to take the concept to paper so you have to know the needs and wants. You need to listen. It’s a team effort—you, the client, and the engineer. I ask a lot of questions. I bring in catalogues to let them pick lighting fixtures. We recently did a job at Novartis Pharmaceuticals. There were standards in every building. Then there was a building that was unique and had other standards. So I had to ask lot of questions. Building the job is the easiest part.”
While most design-build projects may come to electrical contractors from existing clients, some contractors are beginning to brand and identify their companies as design-build firms in order to expand their business. They include their credentials in a company brochure or on a company Web site.
If your company doesn’t have a brochure or a Web site, and you want to develop one, do not fret. NECA’s latest effort is development of the Think NECA Marketing Toolkit. The member toolkit is available to NECA members through the online NECA store or supplied to workshop participants at half-day workshops offered through local NECA chapters. The kits include information about tools and strategies to expand business opportunities and marketing efforts, including prospect identification and Web site development. The toolkit was developed in a pilot project done by the Northern California NECA Chapter in Pleasanton, Calif., in conjunction with Collins Electric Co. Inc.
“We understand that our members aren’t marketing experts,” said Rob Colgan, executive director of marketing, NECA. “We’ve tried to provide tools that electrical contractors can use in a direct, step-by-step way to market their services and promote more profitable business for their companies.” EC
CASEY, author of "Kids Inventing! A Handbook for Young Inventors" and "Women Invent! Two Centuries of Discoveries that have Changed Our World," can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org or www.susancaseybooks.com.
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Donuts and Coffee good for the brain? 'Doh
Donut lovers rejoice! The food your brain needs to make it through a tough day? Donuts and coffee. Take that, Martha Stewart.
Gary L.Wenk, author of "Your Brain on Food" writes in Psychology Today that the brain needs a constant supply of sugar to produce energy. "Your neurons can only tolerate a total deprivation of sugar for a few minutes before they begin to die."
One key ingredient to keeping your brain alert and ready to learn is lecithin, which just happens to be found in chocolate, in donuts and in cupcakes (Ugh, not another reason to go to Georgetown Cupcake, please).
Wenk goes on to explain another trick to stave off the sleepiness: caffeine, which stops the chemical Adenosine from turning brain neurons off.
So, there you have it: chocolate donuts and coffee makes a brain happy. Too bad Wenk has to ruin the fun by reminding us, "what our brain wants is not always good for our bodies."
(It feels like a job-well-done kind of day when I have two reasons to use Homer Simpson photos on my blog.)
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Editors Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison
Secretary of State John Kerry was barely off the plane in Germany before he embarrassed himself—and all of us—with what is perhaps the worst defense of religious freedom ever offered. Kerry, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for president in 2004, said the United States protects religious freedom because: “In America , you have a right to be stupid.”
Sec. Kerry’s audience of German students laughed when he said that. He missed, of course, the perfect opportunity to share our deepest values with the rising generation that will have Europe ’s future in their hands.
Instead of talking of “tolerance” and how we “tolerate” ideas we think are stupid, Kerry might have told the young Germans about George Washington’s eloquent Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport . In 1790, President Washington told those Jewish Americans—who had so loyally supported our country’s bid for independence and freedom:
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
This was a world historical event. It was the first time in history that any national leader addressed the Jews as equal fellow citizens. Wouldn’t Germany —with its tragic history—have been an excellent place to reiterate President Washington’s deep beliefs?
Let us note well: President Washington says we do not speak of toleration. That’s because he understood that religious freedom is not the gift of the government, of the governing elites, or even of the majority of voters. Religious freedom is the gift of God. It is the foundation of our inalienable right to liberty.
Kerry could have quoted this eloquent Washington passage:
Must Watch: Senator Explains Why He Changed From Being a Democrat to Being a Republican | Katie Pavlich
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HTML::Mason is a full-featured web site development and delivery system. Mason allows web pages and sites to be constructed from shared, reusable building blocks called components. Components contain a mix of Perl and HTML, and can call each other and pass values back and forth like subroutines. Components increase modularity and eliminate repetitive work. HTML::Mason is most powerful when used in conjunction with mod_perl, but can be used in standalone applications as well.
WebTools is "system" of multiple modules and libraries. Along with template engine capabilities, it features session management, global variables support, cookies support, and various database interfaces. It also features a pure Perl mail client, categories management, form checking, and libraries such as a CGI-based downloading library, HTML parsers, and a library that makes PHP functions available to Perl for ease of development.
Catalyst is a Web application framework for Perl. It is based on Maypole, and adds many features from Ruby on Rails, Struts, Spring, and Tomcat. The development philosophy focuses on Don't Repeat Yourself, Lego-like components, Code Generation, and very strong testability. It supports a number of plugins, models, views, and controllers.
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