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Google Sites released the option for horizontal navigation not too long ago. This new features greatly enhances the professional look of websites, and I have used it on all my new sites. Please refer to my post on background layout for easy integration of horizontal navigation into your web design.
Horizontal Navigation is more appealing because we process information best that way. It makes sense, we read from left to right. Another benefit from this feature is that it eliminates the need for a sidebar. While sidebars have their place in web design it is better to implement it on your terms, not because you have to for navigation purposes.
Also, horizontal navigation enables the use of dropdown boxes. These are links that appear when the category is hovered over. For instance, in my bakery website example. I have a page called Baked Goods, the sub-pages of which will be scones, muffins, cupcakes, etc. Those sub-pages, which you designate in Manage Site > Site Layout > Change Layout > Horizontal Navigation using the left and right arrows, are a nice option for less cluttered navigation.
For examples of horizontal navigation checkout: www.kirksvillehousingauthority.com, or www.pancakecitykirksville.com.
For a walkthrough watch this video below.
For more information Google has posted about this as well: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/10/tips-tricks-making-most-of-your-sidebar.html | <urn:uuid:13bb89fb-2a9a-4dd0-8b70-955bdeb8ca35> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.googlesiteswebdesign.com/2010/11/google-sites-tutorial-horizontal.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281331.15/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00219-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.878826 | 314 | 1.5 | 2 |
PBL’s are small group Problem Based Learning sessions that are included in your Friday didactic schedule. There are 13 PBL sessions. (Six taught by faculty and seven taught by teaching residents)
Students will be divided into four groups for the Teaching Resident PBL’s. You must come prepared for these sessions. 20% of your Clerkship grade depends upon your preparation and participation in the Resident PBL sessions. If you are shy, you will have to speak up if you expect to do well. If you must miss a session for any reason, you should turn in the answers to the questions to your teaching resident prior to the session. Attendance is mandatory (your absence must be approved and/or discussed with the surgery clerkship staff). | <urn:uuid:7539be75-716d-42b5-95c8-ff8afbff76c7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/surgery/Education/medical_students/PBL_home.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281151.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00114-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960941 | 156 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Supporting Sino-German dialogue on the rule of law
Title: Sino-German Legal Cooperation Programme
Commissioned by: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Lead executing agency: Ministry of Justice (MOJ) of the People’s Republic of China
Overall term: 2022 to 2025
The rapid economic and social change seen in China in recent decades has led to an enormous increase in prosperity, but also to new social tensions and environmental pressures. To develop a fair and environmentally sound economic model, Chinese leaders want to strengthen the structures that underpin the rule of law. Although the Chinese concept of the rule of law differs significantly from European models, China looks to Germany, in particular, when it comes to legal reforms.
This is not just about potential solutions for legislation. In China there are also calls for a German model of coherent, transparent and fair application of the law. Germany, too, has an interest in sharing with China its experience relating to the law, and thus jointly strengthen social structures, environmentally sound structures and those that underpin the rule of law. German companies also benefit when there is greater legal certainty and legal systems are compatible. At the same time, a good understanding of developments around the law in China allow German actors to react better to situations and identify potential for cooperation.
This requires the experts and managers concerned to be familiar with the legal situation in the other country and how the law is applied. The programme creates the necessary framework.
Legal cooperation and mutual understanding of the law between Germany and China has improved.
The legal cooperation programme operates on three levels:
First, dialogue platforms allow the judiciary, administration, parliament and civil society to engage with each other on issues of mutual interest. The prominent legal symposium involving the German and Chinese Ministries of Justice, which provides expert support for the legal programme, is laying important groundwork.
Second, the legal cooperation programme works with pro-reform figures in Chinese legislation and thus contributes principles of the German legal system to important legislative proposals, for example to strengthen legal certainty in the new civil code.
Third, since 2000 the legal programme has trained around 11,000 judges in the methodology of applying the law.
Last updated: May 2022 | <urn:uuid:b90e385b-7f04-4574-bbb4-eba025ba311a> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.giz.de/en/worldwide/15590.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571246.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811073058-20220811103058-00272.warc.gz | en | 0.939961 | 463 | 1.9375 | 2 |
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday that the U.S. is at risk of losing its position as the pre-eminent exporter of corn, soybeans and other commodities unless Congress steps up its investment in the country’s aging infrastructure and moves quickly to pass a farm bill, DesMoinesRegister.com reports.
“We’re in a global marketplace and whatever advantages we have can disappear pretty quickly because other countries have extraordinary opportunities,” Vilsack said in an interview from Brazil, where he is meeting with agricultural officials during a weeklong trip. “If our Congress … can’t pass a farm bill, the message that sends to the rest of the world is we can be caught.”
The U.S. is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with shipments this fiscal year expected to reach a record $139.5 billion.
Vilsack said that while the U.S. has long had the upper hand compared with other countries such as Brazil because of its ability to ship quickly and efficiently by rail, road and water, competitors are increasing their investment in their infrastructure. | <urn:uuid:29417606-25b9-4aa2-a46d-f4736d54d67b> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.croplife.com/management/legislation/vilsack-fast-action-needed-on-farm-bill/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719468.5/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00530-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966137 | 238 | 1.914063 | 2 |
Speaking to a nation engulfed in war, worry and idolatry, Isaiah proclaims the posture of faithfulness: 'You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You.' This captures the soul of Christian contemplation-'staying the mind' on God despite the intrusive character of modern life. Great teachers of the Faith have echoed Isaiah's words throughout history. 'Preserve a loving attentiveness to God' we are directed by St. John of the Cross, and St. Macarius says, 'secure [your mind] to our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the Rock.' It is unfortunate that sitting silently for prayer, meditative breathing, and training the attention-practices that aid in staying the mind on God-are almost universally associated with eastern religions. Laird's book reveals a depth of Christian teaching on these subjects, rooted in scripture and expressed by great pray-ers, from Egyptian ascetics to modern poets. This is a practical manual of the Church's contemplative tradition, a guide and encouragement for those who wish to enter the loving silence of God. 154 pp.
An Eighth Day View:
Sitting in stillness, the practice of meditation, and the cultivation of awareness are commonly thought to be the preserves of Hindus and Buddhists. Martin Laird shows that the Christian tradition of contemplation has its own refined teachings on using a prayer word to focus the mind, working with the breath to cultivate stillness, and the practice of inner vigilance or awareness. But this book is not a mere historical survey of these teachings. In Into the Silent Land, we see the ancient wisdom of both the Christian East and West brought sharply to bear on the modern-day longing for radical openness to God in the depths of the heart.
Laird's book is not like the many presentations for beginners. While useful for those just starting out, this book serves especially as a guide for those who desire to journey yet deeper into the silence of God. The heart of the book focuses on negotiating key moments of struggle on the contemplative path, when the whirlwind of distractions or the brick wall of boredom makes it difficult to continue. Laird shows that these inner struggles, even wounds, that any person of prayer must face, are like riddles, trying to draw out of us our own inner silence. Ultimately Laird shows how the wounds we loathe become vehicles of the healing silence we seek, beyond technique and achievement.
Throughout the language is fresh, direct, and focused on real-life examples of people whose lives are incomparably enriched by the practice of contemplation. | <urn:uuid:e22e2f82-7f56-4bcf-a2fa-3263f94eefda> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.eighthdaybooks.com/si/10727.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719079.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00034-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940947 | 520 | 2.4375 | 2 |
In recent weeks Americans have been aghast and disgusted to see the dangerous extent to which we rely on China for the personal protective equipment so vital to health care workers. Compounding this, we are also dependent on China for other critical medical supplies, including pharmaceuticals.
Unfortunately, medical items are not the only life-threatening supply chain vulnerability we have.
The U.S. electric system has become increasingly dependent on foreign suppliers for essential items, including software components that can easily be cyberattacked. When the hardware or software of the electric grid malfunctions or is attacked, there are power outages and often related chaos.
The good news is that the United States has taken clear and compelling steps to address these security vulnerabilities, though years of follow-through are also necessary.
On May 1, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect the bulk-power system. This is the critical energy infrastructure that supports national defense, emergency services, critical infrastructure and the economy, those things that ensure the quality of modern life.
Even though the bulk-power system is integral to our well-being, large components of it, including control systems, transformers and generators are increasingly being manufactured overseas. Especially disturbing is that 200 transformers, a pillar of the power grid, have come from China into the United States in the last 10 years, according to Charles Durant, deputy director of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy. Before then, none had entered the United States.
The executive order says, “The bulk-power system is a target of those seeking to commit malicious acts against the United States and its people, including malicious cyber activities, because a successful attack on our bulk-power system present significant risks to our economy, human health and safety.”
Moody’s, the credit rating agency, endorsed the executive order in a May 6 report saying it is “a credit positive for U.S. electric utilities because it addresses some of the cybersecurity risks that relate to the supply chain. The executive order also raises corporate governance priorities around cybersecurity defenses and promotes needed investments in cybersecurity preparedness.”
The crux of the order is to require a rigorous review of suppliers and the development of a prequalified vendor list. In addition, now prohibited equipment already in use is to be identified, isolated, monitored and, if necessary, replaced.
This will also provide a stimulus for the U.S. economy.
According to the Department of Energy, the United States spends $144 billion annually on electricity generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. This may rise significantly. Much of the power grid, including plants and transmission lines, is decades older and in need of modernization. There are also significant opportunities to sell power grid items abroad.
Today there is an aggressive push to make the grid smarter, using software and technology to handle functions like equipment monitoring so that components can be replaced before they break. Many consumers also want to adjust their electricity use remotely. These and other factors show the need for infrastructure investments while significantly reducing the likelihood that the software will be hacked by an adversary or embedded for future mischief.
The executive order, though, is a beginning and not an end in protecting America’s electric grid. Rules are to be issued in September. The administrative and political follow-through will remain important for years ahead and should be supported across the political spectrum.
Paul Steidler is a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Copyright 2020 Tribune Content Agency. | <urn:uuid:116aa475-199d-4d37-8e99-6cd92dadb6dc> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://scceu.org/counterpoint-a-critical-supply-chain-america-must-bring-home-columns/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571745.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812170436-20220812200436-00475.warc.gz | en | 0.949289 | 724 | 2.09375 | 2 |
India has seen rapid technological growth in recent times, especially in the areas of information technology and communication. Telecommunication has led the charge in the area of consumer technology with rapid penetration of mobile telephony amongst the masses. India is already one of the largest consumers of mobile phones, with an average nine million users being added every month. The telecom tariff rates offered in India are among the lowest in the world.
3G and WiMAX are the latest inclusions to the mobile and internet communication fold, promising to take user-experience to a higher level through interactivity, greater convenience, improved access, and quality of services offered. This article aims to capture the essence of these two technologies, analyze their impact on communication, and to conduct a comparative assessment of relevance, and hence acceptability, of the two to the masses.
Launch of 3G in India
Doors have opened for the much awaited 3G service in India. The introduction of advanced telecommunication services was proposed in the tenth five year plan, paving the way for funding and resource allocation for 3G services in the annual budget of the Department of Telecommunication (DoT). The electronic auctioning of the 3G spectrum is planned and done. This fresh initiative should pave the way for a wide range of products and mobile services being made available to the Indian consumer. 3G will facilitate high-speed internet access through mobile phones and provide mobility to a large number of services such as video conferencing, gaming, and large downloads.
The 2.1 GHz band has be auctioned for launching 3G services in India. License winners are expected to roll out 3G services in 90 per cent of metro areas and 50 per cent in other areas given to them (with a minimum 15 per cent rural coverage). This coverage is expected by the end of the fifth year, after spectrum allocation.
The 450 MHz band is currently being utilized for radio communication, while the 800 and 1,900 MHz bands are used for military communication purposes. They will be auctioned when they become free.
What is 3G?
“Third Generation wireless telecommunication technology”, or 3G, is an advanced radio communication technology which provides a marriage of high-speed internet access and high-quality mobile telephony. The technology enables simultaneous voice and non-voice data transfer.
1-G technology involves the use of analogue radio signals for communication. Voice data is modulated to a high frequency (usually beyond 150 MHz) for transmission. Information transfer between telephone towers takes place in the form of digital signals.
2-G differs from 1-G in the use of digital voice signals for communication. The analogue voice data is encoded into digital signals for transmission.
How does 3G compare with the available technology?
3G is a substantial enhancement over the current 2G technology, and is capable of facilitating high-speed internet access and data transfer. Adoption of 3G in India would involve substantial improvement in the existing cell phones to be able to support 3G services. The idea of launching 2.5G services was also considered due to the difficulty of moving over from 2G to 3G. But the delay in launching advanced telecom services and launch of phones with 3G capabilities made the choice easier.
High speed digital packet switching networks are the source of the high speed offered by 3G. Compared to the traditional circuit switching technology, packet switching offers better transmission bandwidth utilization, and hence higher data transfer rates. Additionally, advance multiplexing techniques add to network speed.
What changes can be expected due to 3G?
The emergence of 3G is likely to act as catalyst for enhanced product and services. Creative solutions evolving around user benefits are expected to emerge.
- Quality of text, audio and video communication would improve through: (a) Technology supporting more real-time, and next to real quality communication (b) Enhanced mobility and roaming (c) High quality e-mail and internet access
- 3G would enable heavy video broadcast (video conferencing, video lectures and virtual classrooms, video sharing, etc.) and data-intensive services (such as online monitoring/ surveillance, e-commerce, online education, telemedicine, music/software/data download, online gaming, etc.)
- High-end, light, feature intensive, and easy-to use terminals would come into the market with creative interfaces designed to suit customer preferences.
How has been the acceptability in other countries?
Japan was the first country to test and implement 3G. The acceptability has been good for 3G there, with internet access, gaming and music download being some of the prominent applications. The objective of launching 3G in Japan and Korea was to develop an internal communication network and hence the access charges for service providers were kept low, resulting in low 3G charges on consumers, and hence greater popularity and acceptance. 3G has done well in most countries due to its good features. It has been successfully launched and is being operated in more than 50 countries currently.
On the other hand, the financial performance of 3G operators has been poor in some regions due to high debts on service providers or high-access charges; especially in Europe. The actual performance of 3G in most places has been lower than the specified speed standards and has caused dissatisfaction among consumers, leading to lower acceptance rates for the service.
What are the major concerns involving 3G?
3G rollout in many countries has resulted in factors hindering acceptance of service among consumers and profitability of service providers; India would do well to learn from them. Additionally, we foresee certain issues the operators are likely to face in India:
- High revenue expectations from 3G services resulted in high input fee/access charges levied on service providers for 3G service licenses.
- The price of 3G mobile services (including internet access) was kept excessively high in some countries, especially Europe, reducing the attractiveness of the 3G offering.
- Heavy upfront capital investment is required for developing local infrastructure capable of supporting 3G services in any country.
- 3G phones are more expensive compared to 2G and other lower-end phones, making the switch to 3G financially unfavorable for common consumers, especially in India.
- In India a substantial proportion of the population does not require 3G voice and data services in hand-held devices; this would limit the spread of 3G in the short term.
- Health impact of electromagnetic waves would always remain a cause for concern.
- There is a general lack of awareness about 3G services even among the educated population in India. It would take time for 3G services to pick up, as has been the case globally.
Organizations worldwide are involved in a race to develop the next level of wireless communication, and hence to grab and maintain a substantial market share. Some of the possible new areas of communication standard evolution can be:
- Universal networking: development of architectures and middleware that support universal networking between all communication devices leading to smooth communication and data/application transfer from one device to another.
- Customized services: the user would have the power over which function can be served by which device (one device acting as the central controller for all other devices the user owns, music being played on one device while video on another, etc.)
- Higher network speeds: with better bandwidth utilization and multiplexing technologies, network speeds are expected to go up, enabling on-the-fly data transfer from one device to another.
- Other auxiliary services: other features and services, such as heightened network security through Bluetooth device-based protection, identification services, information services customized to user preferences, centralized billing, etc. would come up with the evolution of communication technology.
- 4G: An upgrade over the current 3G system involving some advanced features, such as better spectrum utilization, greater network speed, more simultaneous users per cell phone, better inter-operability across heterogeneous networks, etc.
Launch of WiMAX in India
The stage is set for the launch of WiMAX in India with the finalization of dates for the auction of the 2.5 / 3 GHz spectrum by the Department of Telecommunication (DoT).
In a recent announcement, the India chapter of the WiMAX Forum has made public its plans to set up an applications lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. In view of the high business potential of the Indian market, the WiMAX community places high importance on India; this is evident from the plan to set up this lab, only the third of its kind across the globe after USA and Taiwan.
According to the WiMAX forum, the market for WiMAX in India, which includes device and service sales, will reach $13 billion by the year 2012. The forum pegs the number of WiMAX users by 2012 at 27.5 million, an approximate 20 per cent share of the world’s total WiMAX user base at that time. According to independent research by Maravedis, a market research firm, the subscriber base for WiMAX in India is expected to reach 21 million by the year 2014.
Leading global WiMAX companies, such as Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola and Samsung, are starting their operations in India. Nokia has announced the launch of its first ever WiMAX enabled phone which is scheduled to be launched in India.
What is WiMAX?
WiMAX, or “Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access”, is a broadband wireless point-to-multipoint specification from the IEEE 802.16 working group, enabling wireless broadband networks with high speed. Leaps and bounds ahead of WiFi, WiMAX is designed to operate as a wireless metropolitan- area network.
WiMAX promises faster and superior performance, adaptability to various applications, advanced IP-based architecture (enabling integration of various applications with the internet) and reduced rates to consumers.
WiMAX supports a range of modulation algorithms to facilitate the realization of optimal bandwidth in all conditions. The theoretical maximum data bandwidth of 75Mbps can be achieved with WiMAX using 64QAM 3/4 modulation (only under optimal transmission conditions).
Fixed WiMAX is limited to providing wireless network access to fixed devices, a limitation eradicated by mobile WiMAX. WiMAX does not have the need for a direct line of sight between the source and endpoint of communication/ data transfer, unlike most other wireless technologies. Mobile WiMAX supports SOFDMA (Scalable Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access), an enhancement over OFDMA256 which facilitates non-line-of-sight communication. SOFDMA also brings in better throughput and minimized sound fading in multiple path scenarios.
What are the key highlights of WiMAX?
WiMAX has some important features that have attracted the attention of the whole information and communication community ranging from internet operators and mobile telecom operators to fixed line telecom service providers, and so on. The attraction of possible gains in the future has brought many technology firms into the WiMAX fold:
- IP-based network: WiMAX specifications are developed over IP and support IP-based applications. The need to unify various communication networks and to cut costs has inspired firms globally to shift telephony to VoIP, enhancing the importance of WiMAX. The shift to IP-based network enables much easier and cheaper network monitoring and management with standard tools for telecom operators.
- Flatter and simpler topology: a data network by design, WiMAX has a simpler topology compared to cellular networks which have undergone layer additions to accommodate data transmission capabilities. WiMAX also requires less time and fewer hardware, investment and human resource to set up than traditional cellular/ Wi-Fi infrastructures, resulting in lower service costs for end users. WiMAX also provides the capability to scale up and down according to the application requirements.
- Adaptability to a wide range of applications: with its IP-based architecture, WiMAX supports a wide range of communication and data transfer applications. WiMAX also provides the possibility of transforming the way a large number of services such as internet, telephony, cable TV, etc. are currently provided to consumers.
- Inexpensive interface: the costs involved in migrating existing hardware to WiMAX are low, owing to the low prices of the required chipsets and interfacing devices.
Even though a large number of comparisons are made between WiMAX and WiFi, the similarities are limited when compared to the performance differences between these two technologies. WiMAX provides a wide range of advantages over Wi-Fi:
- Wider reach: Wi-Fi is short range (30-100 meters) compared to WiMAX, which provides a coverage radius of about 50 kms. This leads to Wi-Fi being limited to providing access only within a shop or a floor of a building, while WiMAX in comparison can cover much wider spaces.
- Optimal bandwidth utilization: advanced multiplexing provides better bandwidth utilization in WiMAX compared to WiFi.
- Higher speeds: Wi-Fi hotspots are typically backhauled over ADSL. Due to this, Wi-Fi access has poor upload speeds between the router and the internet compared to WiMAX. Additionally, no traffic prioritization leads to farther systems being made to wait longer than the ones close by in a Wi-Fi network. Proper scheduling in WiMAX standards takes care of this issue.
- Limited hardware and manpower requirement: to service an area covered by WiMAX using Wi-Fi networks would need a large number of hotspots to be created through routers. This necessitates a much higher manpower and hardware requirement for Wi- Fi compared to WiMAX which only requires a tower to be installed.
- Noise reduction: with stronger encryption/ modulation, WiMAX performs better in noisy conditions.
- Security: with enhanced encryption, WiMAX offers better security than Wi-Fi networks which have been notorious for security breaches.
The bandwidth, reach and IP-based topology of WiMAX make it suitable for a large number of potential applications. Some of the possible applications of WiMAX which stand to transform the way the whole information and communication business operates globally are:
- Shifting telephony to VoIP: globally, fixed line telecom players are losing market share to mobile operators. WiMAX provides an opportunity for these players to transform their cable-based systems to IP-based VoIP system and provide additional high-speed data services.
- Last mile broadband connectivity: WiMAX is the ideal technology for providing a wireless alternative to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access to direct consumers.
- Connecting remote locations: remote locations with limited telecom infrastructure and sparse populations can be financially infeasible when connected through physical wire based infrastructure. WiMAX provides a viable option to provide connectivity in these areas
- Connecting Wi-Fi hotspots: WiMAX can be used to connect various Wi-Fi hotspots with each other and to other parts of the internet.
- High speed data and telecom services: WiMAX specifications can be used by telecom operators to design high speed communication and data services for consumers.
- Providing Nomadic connectivity: Mobile WiMAX would make it possible to provide good connectivity to communication devices in motion.
- Connectivity systems for disaster situations: during disasters and calamities physical infrastructure can become damaged, limiting connectivity in critical situations. WiMAX connectivity can be vital in such conditions.
- Physical infrastructure substitution: high speed data backhaul through WiMAX can lead to the transformation of many data intensive services by the substitution of the physical hardware by wireless connectivity. For example, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) can substitute traditional cable-based TV, backhaul for Wi-Fi hotspots can shift from DSL, evolution of mobile data TV, emergency response services, wireless backhaul as substitute for fiber-optic cable, etc.
Despite the mentioned advantages and the business potential, there are several potential issues and roadblocks for a WiMAX rollout in India:
- Spectrum Allocations Issues: globally, the rollout of WiMAX in many nations has been delayed due to the required frequency bands being occupied for other applications. The situation was similar in India with a substantial portion of the required frequency being used by the military. With the recently planned auctions for WiMAX the roadblocks seem to be lifting.
- Market downturn: due to the recent economic downturn, firms may find it difficult to pull in financial resources to make the necessary investments for WiMAX rollout.
- Other technologies: availability of existing technologies and required investments may deter many firms from making the shift to WiMAX. Additionally, the long delayed 3G would also compete for market share in India, possibly leading to restricted growth for WiMAX.
- Performance Issues: In addition, some of the frequencies utilized by WiMAX are subject to interference from rain fade. The unlicensed WiMAX frequencies are subject to RF interference from competing technologies and competing WiMAX networks.
Keeping in mind the technical superiority of WiMAX over other wireless networking technologies, the possibilities are rife that WiMAX would be used to develop higher generation data and communication technologies like 4G. For instance, the US based telecom firm Qualcomm has been pushing a standard for 4G known as 802.20, based on OFDMA, a multiplexing standard developed for WiMAX.
Further new technologies like 802.20 Mobile-Fi are expected to emerge challenging existing standards and providing better performance in terms of bandwidth, speed, reduced latency, encryption (noise reduction & security), et al.
3G vs. WiMAX
Comparison of existing wireless communication technologies
The communications space has seen an array of wireless technologies, each bringing in a new set of characteristics and raising performance standards. 3G, WiMAX, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, are the prominent ones.
In terms of data transmission capabilities, WiMAX leaves all the currently available wireless technologies far behind. LTE, a technology being backed by Ericsson, is similar to WiMAX and is expected to surpass WiMAX in terms of performance in future.
Comparison of 3G and WiMAX
Both 3G and WiMAX have been touted as the next big hopes for the communications sector and particularly telecommunications technology. Globally, 3G has been present in the market for a period of time and has acquired a market share, while WiMAX is still a very recent phenomenon which has had limited deployments across the globe. A comparative analysis of both follows:
- Existing infrastructure: in many nations large telecom players have invested heavily in 3G technology in the last few years, creating exit barriers for themselves. These players would find it economically unviable to shift to another technology such as WiMAX without having first gathered the fruits of their investments. But in India, with the delay in implementation of 3G, both WiMAX and 3G could start the race for market penetration on equal footing.
- Need: in a country like India where the penetration of broadband and dial-up has been limited due to the weak physical infrastructure, the need for newer technologies that could reduce costs and dependence on physical infrastructure, is even greater. While 3G is a strong technology, improving mobile communication standards substantially, it still trails behind advantages such as lower cost of last mile connectivity, limited dependence on physical infrastructure, faster networks, higher data hauling capabilities, limited data fade, and enhanced mobility, offered by WiMAX.
- Availability of supporting applications: In India most consumers still use phones, computers, laptops and other devices which do not support 3G or WiMAX. Due to talk of 3G being launched in India having been going on for some years, there are a number of 3G supporting phones now available in here, while the devices supporting WiMAX are yet to be launched in India. With big players such Nokia and IMB, supporting WiMAX in a big way and their plans for launching chips and gadgets supporting WiMAX in the near future, this issue will surely be taken care of.
- Cost of migration for consumers: As discussed, WiMAX is a relatively inexpensive technology being targeted for the masses by the big players. In the case of WiMAX, interfacing equipment is available helping old consumers shift to the new technology with their old hardware, and the cost for the transition is expected to be very low due to the low cost of related technology. Also, the cost of new hardware supporting WiMAX would be similar to that of their non-WiMAX versions. The same does not apply to 3G where most mobile phones supporting it are substantially expensive and require complete discard of old handsets.
- Telecom player’s perspective: (a) Fixed line: 3G is a threat for fixed line operators as it provides enhanced capabilities to the mobile operators, providing an opportunity for them to attract more consumers and take more market share away from fixed line. WiMAX provides an opportunity for fixed line players to improve their competitiveness through reduction of costs around the physical infrastructure, and improved performance capabilities by shifting to VoIP. (b) Mobile: Mobile operators worldwide have recognized the importance of 3G, yet WiMAX would remain attractive, owing to its enhanced data transmission capabilities, providing an opportunity to offer enhanced data and communication services.
- Applications: as discussed earlier, both 3G and WiMAX would support the evolution of enhanced communication products and services, but the impact of WiMAX is expected to be bigger and goes beyond cellular communication — affecting a wide range of services including cable TV, fixed line telecommunication, network data backhaul, etc. | <urn:uuid:6afe5cde-a67c-4ff2-b0f3-faa42462170e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.techquark.com/2010/10/3g-and-wimax.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00430-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938465 | 4,370 | 2.9375 | 3 |
We all understand what it means to virtualize CPU and memory (compute). This is what VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V have been doing for years. We are starting to get our arms around what it means to virtualize networking and storage, as VMware progresses down its path to virtualize all of the key resources in the data center as a part of its software-defined data center strategy. Now, along comes Intigua with an offering that virtualizes the management stack in your virtualized data center.
The Evolving Definition of Virtualization
Before we go into Intigua, lets take a step back and review the evolving definition of what it means to virtualize something:
- When VMware got started, virtualizing CPU and memory simply meant that the one-to-one correspondence between operating systems, their associated middleware and applications, and the server that they ran on was broken. It became possible to run many virtual servers (virtual machines) on one physical server. This seemingly simple innovation lead to huge hard dollar cost savings associated with server consolidation and drove the creation of an entire new category of data center software, led, of course, by VMware.
- As a part of virtualizing a server, the responsibility for scheduling the CPU and allocating the memory on the physical server moved from the operating systems to the hypervisor.
- What it meant to virtualize compute expanded to include things like being able to assign to VMs virtual resources, like virtual memory and virtual CPUs, that were independent of the actual composition of the underlying physical resources. This means that the configuration of how resources were allocated inside of hosts was now done in the virtualization software.
- Then, VMware announced Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control. These features allowed you to allocate network and storage bandwidth to your hosts and your virtual machines based upon the priority of the workloads. This meant that the control and scheduling of these resources moved into the virtualization software and become part of the definition of virtualization. Note that this happened before VMware actually announced and delivered either its official network virtualization offering (NSX) or its storage virtualization offering.
- Then VMware delivered VXLAN, and it announced NSX and VSAN. At this point, the definition of virtualization included configuring all of the resources in the data center and, crucially, making the virtualization platform responsible for doing at least some of the work. For example, in the case of both network virtualization and storage virtualization, some of the responsibility for doing the actual work lies with VMware’s virtualization software.
Intigua’s Virtualization of the Management Layer
When Intigua first arrived on the scene, it offered a variant of application virtualization that put the management agents from a variety of vendors into a bubble (think of ThinApp or App-V for Tivoli, CA, HP, and IBM management agents). This allowed those management agents to be isolated from the guest operating systems in which they ran, and it allowed Intigua to control the resources allocated to them and ensure that they were operating properly.
Today, Intigua announced a major expansion of its offering:
- The ability for organizations and service providers to use a new Intigua Self-Packager to make it easy for third parties to extend the management capabilities of Intigua
- Integration with OpenStack
- Enhancements to the existing integrations with VMware vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Orchestrator
- Support for Amazon Web Services.
The entire Intigua announcement.
Intigua’s strategy is to add virtualization, configuration, and control of the management stack in virtualized data centers and clouds to the existing virtualization of compute, networking, and storage. This means that the configuration, deployment, and control of the operation of the management stack can be moved from the disparate members of the management stack into Intigua’s software. This is a bold attempt to establish a new category of virtualization—which, if it succeeds, will solve a really important problem.
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- VMware vSphere 6 Attacks Amazon with “One Cloud, Any Application” - February 9, 2015
- VMware vSphere 6 Attacks Red Hat: VMware Integrated OpenStack - February 3, 2015
- Will the Public Cloud Be the Next Legacy Platform? - January 20, 2015 | <urn:uuid:64351f86-1d26-4376-b889-83d7283bd2a7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.virtualizationpractice.com/news-intigua-virtualizes-management-layer-25238/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280483.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00301-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932185 | 914 | 2.109375 | 2 |
|Finance Minister Michael Noonan.|
Ireland is to make a clean exit from the IMF/EU bailout when we leave the program on December 15. There will be no precautionary credit line negotiated with the European Central Bank or the IMF, no backstop, no insurance policy in case we get into financial trouble again in the months and years ahead.
We're going it alone. It's a brave move and we can only hope that it's the right one.
The decision not to seek a credit line came in a dramatic announcement by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny in the Dail last week. There is no doubt that the decision was based on political concerns more than on economic policy.
There were strong economic reasons why a credit line -- even if we never use it -- might have been a good idea. Our ability to fund ourselves going forward after we exit the bailout program depends on growth in the Irish economy in the next few years and the absence of any nasty surprises, especially from the banks. Neither of these things is certain.
Because we are an export-led economy, growth here is dependent on a sustained recovery in Europe and beyond, and that is far from guaranteed. We need a strong recovery in the global economy to increase demand for our exports. If the European economy and the world economy limp along with little or no growth then we will be in trouble.
The banks are also a real concern. Our banks are still basket cases, and there is a European wide stress test for banks coming next year which could expose just how weak they are. And because it's an EU stress test we won't be able to fudge the outcome.
There is a huge unresolved problem in our banks due to the number of domestic mortgages in crisis, and the number of people deep in negative equity after the property crash.
The potential losses involved have never been crystallized on the books of the banks. They have billions in property loans on their books which have not been written down to their current value.
So we have two major problems. If the European economy fails to grow then our exports won't increase and the growth we need in the Irish economy to enable us to fully fund ourselves again, including making our debt repayments, won't happen.
If the banks are forced to admit the real level of losses they face on domestic mortgages and write down the loans accordingly, then they are likely to need another big capital injection to meet EU solvency standards.
At present they are ignoring the reality, hoping that if they delay long enough the property market will recover sufficiently to solve the problem for them.
So we face an extremely uncertain future in the next couple of years. Things could pan out the way we want. But they might not.
Even the government admitted last week that it had been "a finely balanced decision" not to seek a credit line. I remember hearing Minister for Finance Michael Noonan just a couple of months back saying that it might be prudent to seek a backstop of around €10 billion. So why did he change his mind?
Several reasons have been put forward. We have built up a cash pile of around €20 billion in borrowings in the treasury piggybank here, enough borrowing to get us through 2014 and part of 2015.
So when we go back to the markets in the next few months we could cope even if they decided they wanted us to pay penal rates and we decided not to borrow. We can get through any short term difficulty.
Perhaps more important, the general economic picture in Europe at the moment is relatively benign in comparison with the chaos we saw over the past few years when several countries were on the verge of financial collapse. So it's a good time to be leaving the bailout and going back into the markets to borrow under our own steam.
In addition, we have shown an ability to cut spending and increase taxes to reduce the budget deficit, although we still have a way to go to get down to the three percent of GDP deficit that is our target and is the agreed maximum among the EU countries.
The reality is that we will have to go on borrowing for another few years as we balance the national books again. The more we can grow the economy the more tax revenue will increase and the less tax hikes we will have to impose , which is why growth is so important. But in the meantime we have to continue borrowing to keep state services going at an acceptable level.
The signs are good, with our state bonds now back at reasonable rates, which indicates that the markets have confidence in us. The government has been testing the water over the past year with small amounts of bonds being offered and taken up. There is unlikely to be a problem when we go back into the markets in the coming months to borrow on a serious level.
All of these are reasons why the government decided that we didn't need a backstop. They wanted to send out a clear message to the markets that we are back, and we are standing on our own two feet.
They also wanted to avoid the strings that would have come with a credit line which would have meant ongoing conditions and extra oversight from the EU.
In particular, a few other countries were making noises about the tax regime we use to bring so many foreign companies in here, companies that might otherwise go elsewhere in Europe. Rather than let anyone open that can of worms -- and to avoid a lot of other financial interference from Europe -- the government decided to avoid asking for backstop.
One can appreciate their reasoning. But that does not diminish the potential for it all to go wrong.
And if it does, we will have to go back to the EU and the IMF again for another bailout injection. It won't be on a Greek scale, but it won't look good.
So this "clean exit" from the bailout is a risk. It's a risk we did not have to take. And you might ask why the government choose to do so.
As we said above, the real reason is political, not economic. Asking for a credit line and accepting the conditions that would have been part of that would have taken the shine off the government's moment of glory, the big success in getting us to the point where we are ready to exit the bailout on time.
Instead of being able to declare that we are fully taking back our economic sovereignty on December 15, the government would have had to talk about the continuing external oversight of our economy that would have come with a backstop.
Given what the Irish people have been through with the austerity program, it is vital for the government to be able to say, without equivocation, that it was all worth it because we are the masters of our own economic destiny again. If they can get that clear message across, they have a chance of winning the next election, despite all the cutbacks and unemployment.
So you are going to hear a lot of triumphant speeches in the next few weeks as we exit the bailout. But it is important that everyone realizes exactly what the exit means.
It does not mean that we are home free, that the economy is about to bounce back, or that we are now able to run the country without the massive borrowing that is still going on.
It does mean that we are at the end of the program during which the IMF and the EU gave us billions so that we could keep the country going while we tackled the deficit. The program gave us a few years of breathing space to get our finances under control and get the deficit down enough so that the markets would start to lend to us again. (You will remember that it was the refusal of the markets to lend us any more funds that started the crisis.) We are now at that point.
But it doesn't mean everything in the garden is rosy. All the bailout money has to be paid back -- more than €65 billion euro of it.
It's costing us billions in interest payments every year. That dead weight is going to be a heavy drag on any recovery here for at least the next 10 years.
And remember that, apart from funding our budget deficits, a big chunk of the bailout money went to recapitalize the banks so that they could pay back all the foreign bondholders, even the unguaranteed bondholders. The decision to repay all the bondholders and dump the cost on the ordinary Irish taxpayer was forced on us by the European Central Bank, with the support of the Americans, because none of them wanted to see any bank failures here that could spread elsewhere.
It was a terrible mistake, the scale of which is almost unimaginable. We may be making a "clean exit" from the bailout. But we will be paying for that mistake for years. | <urn:uuid:c73da613-6b14-4cea-95aa-75b340d0b5c0> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/a-leap-of-faith-by-ireland-the-exit-from-the-imfeu-bailout-232646381-238261831 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281450.93/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00179-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974566 | 1,783 | 1.640625 | 2 |
There's something to be said for simplicity. Not to start off on a rant, but a lot of "AAA" games today have a whole lot going on with them. Video games continually push the limits of what players can do in games, from multiple levels of character customizations, to intricately designed levels that force players to use every part of their brain, even going so far as to create entire worlds to explore: games today have a lot going on with them. Again, there is something to be said for simplicity. "Thomas Was Alone" is simple, still manages to be compelling, and is even beautiful at times.
At first glance, there's not really much to "Thomas Was Alone," just some squares that feel the need to get "up and to the right." And really, that's most of the game. You play as Thomas, a red rectangle, who finds "himself" trapped in an odd situation, and wants to escape. As the levels progress Thomas meets up with other quadrilaterals that each have different features and abilities (or as the game puts it, "unique relationships with gravity") in order to support one another to make it the end each level. Overall, it's a very basic platformer with some puzzle elements layered on top, culminating in a pleasant blend of the two genres.
While the name might be a bit deceiving, "Thomas" isn't really the star of the game. The levels are broken up to include an entire cast of characters, and, in fact, many of the levels don't feature Thomas at all. However, having a central character isn't entirely necessary, since the game tells the story of the entire group. Each of the colored blocks is given a name, as well as independent thoughts, and, in most cases, emotions, that are expressed through the game's expert voice-over. This distinctive method of storytelling yet again, reinforces the idea that just about any story told in a British accent is riveting from beginning to end.
Much like the visuals, the gameplay is very simplistic, boiling down to just a couple of buttons. Use the d-pad to move your blocks around, and the trigger buttons to switch between them. All of the blocks can jump to varying degrees, and that is, in fact, one of main tenants of the game - figuring out how to assist each block traversing the levels. As the levels progress, and it gets harder and harder for certain blocks to make it to their designated destinations, the game becomes this interesting experiment in single-player co-op, which is much easier to concept to grasp in 2D (as opposed to in 3D).
The combination of short bits of inspired story, mixed with the basic gameplay, lets the player to meaningfully split their attention. This allows for the players to both connect with their characters as you read their inner dialogs, while working to solve each level. One of the very few drawbacks of the game is that the overarching story is told in bits and pieces at the beginning of each group of levels, but each tidbit from the real world is only on the screen for a few short seconds. It's almost as if the player is intentionally forced to read it quickly, or be left with an even more abstract story. Letting each bit linger just a little longer wouldn't have been detrimental to the game by any means.
Another nice feature of "Thomas Was Alone" is that it has been optimized for both the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita. Featured as part of the Spring Fever promotion (much like another great, recently released, indie game, "Guacamelee!"), "Thomas" offers Sony devotees Cross-Buy and Cross-Save bonuses. Both of these features are a great upsell for a game like this, offering both exposure and accessibility on multiple platforms.
Even though this isn't an original release (it first landed on Windows and Macs last July), "Thomas Was Alone" is yet another shining example of Sony's support of independent developers. A game like this could easily be lost in the shuffle, but instead Sony has thrown a bit of support behind it, allowing it to step into the well-deserved spotlight, even it is only for a moment. "Thomas" harkens back to the days of classic 2D platformers, and compliments its enduring gameplay style with a charming narrative that some how makes you feel connected to a group of colored blocks. "Thomas Was Alone" is a pleasant surprise from indie developer Mike Bithell, and for a game that is graphically one or two steps better than "Pong," it offers a lot more depth than most games on the market today. | <urn:uuid:06186fa6-a744-4524-b35f-a9e7b5271f70> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.mtv.com/news/2466966/thomas-was-alone-review/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00411-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976113 | 952 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Bread.jpg 1,768pages on this wiki Add New Page Edit History Talk0 No higher resolution available. Bread.jpg (125 × 105 pixels, file size: 10 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) About File History Metadata There is no description yet. Add a description. Appears on these pages of Bread See also: Solar restaurants and bakeries Use your favorite recipe, or frozen bread dough from... See full list > Appears on these wikis of Обсуждение:Рецепты Junk Jack вики Смотрите: Пшеница. С её помощью можно создать пугало, курятник, накормить некоторых животных… File history Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment current18:24, April 14, 2007125 × 105 (10 KB)Mosaicsbymariellen (Talk | contribs) Metadata This file contains additional information, probably added from the digital camera or scanner used to create or digitize it. If the file has been modified from its original state, some details may not fully reflect the modified file. Orientation Normal Horizontal resolution 72 dpi Vertical resolution 72 dpi Software used Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 File change date and time 11:24, April 14, 2007 Color space Uncalibrated Read more Below are the favorite recipes of many different solar cooks. You can use almost any standard... Recipes Guidelines and cooking tips 1 Eggplant (cut into 1/4 inch slices) 1 to 2 eggs Casseroles Retrieved from "http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/File:Bread.jpg?oldid=8837" Ad blocker interference detected! Wikia is a free-to-use site that makes money from advertising. We have a modified experience for viewers using ad blockers Wikia is not accessible if you’ve made further modifications. Remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected. | <urn:uuid:fd2d5587-615a-4c63-ac4c-75a09cf110c8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/File:Bread.jpg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281226.52/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00375-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.766682 | 510 | 1.867188 | 2 |
Todd Pitlik: humanely protecting the skies around LAX
Earlier this year a flock of wild geese met their demise when they crossed the path of a US Airways jet that quickly crash-landed in the Hudson River. Many looked at that incident as a rarity, but there is an encounter between an animal and a commercial plane at LAX almost every week, on average. People like Todd Pitlik of the USDA are paid to minimize such incidents.
His job is to control the wildlife populations at LAX, where more than 940 animal strikes involving commercial aircraft were reported between 1990 and 2008. About 4% of the collisions caused substantial damage to engines, wings and fuselages.
Pitlik's work isn't easy. LAX's 3,500 acres just east of the Pacific Ocean contain a menagerie of birds and small mammals that inhabit the drainage ditches, trees, dunes and grassy flats that surround the four runways of the nation's third-busiest airport.
Red foxes dash across the tarmac. Kestrels hover along the final approaches. Sea gulls rummage for scraps of food while red tail hawks and peregrine falcons dive for live prey. One year, young pelicans that had eaten toxic algae and fish were dropping on the runways.
"Wildlife situations can be unpredictable and potentially dangerous," said Pitlik, 46, who has worked at LAX since the late 1990s. "It is important to minimize the risk and liability, but it's also important to take care of the wildlife."
What does Pitlik do with some of the birds he traps? He gives the falcons and hawks to South Bay Wildlife Rehab, a local non-profit that cares for orphaned and injured birds and other animals.
Click here to read the whole article about LAX and its challenges with wildlife; it is currently the most-e-mailed story of the day.
-- Tony Pierce
USDA wildlife biologist Todd Pitlik holds a red-tailed hawk that was captured in a trap at LAX on July 8, 2009. Pitlik is responsible for controlling the bird, mammal and reptile populations at LAX, the nation's third-busiest airport. The hawk is tagged and will be relocated. Pitlik's work is designed to prevent the type of problem that forced a US Airways A320 into the Hudson River a few months ago. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) | <urn:uuid:ff787607-f2f7-45e9-a1c3-34acdcc7e0be> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/unleashed/2009/08/birds-lax-pitlik.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988721595.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183841-00477-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958037 | 507 | 2.796875 | 3 |
The branch of physics which deals with the study of transformation of heat energy into other forms of energy and vice-versa.
A thermodynamical system is said to be in thermal equilibrium when macroscopic variables (like pressure, volume, temperature, mass, composition etc) that characterise the system do not change with time.
An assembly of an extremely large number of particles whose state can be expressed in terms of pressure, volume and temperature, is called thermodynamic system.
Thermodynamic system is classified into the following three systems
(i) Open System It exchange both energy and matter with surrounding.
(ii) Closed System It exchanges only energy (not matter) with surroundings.
(iii) Isolated System It exchanges neither energy nor matter with the surrounding.
A thermodynamic system is not always in equilibrium. For example, a gas allowed to expand freely against vacuum. Similary, a mixture of petrol vapour and air, when ignited by a spark is not an equilibrium state. Equilibrium is acquired eventually with time.
Thermodynamic Parameters or Coordinates or Variables
The state of thermodynamic system can be described by specifying pressure, volume, temperature, internal energy and number of moles, etc. These are called thermodynamic parameters or coordinates or variables.
Work done by a thermodynamic system is given by
W = p * ΔV
where p = pressure and ΔV = change in volume.
Work done by a thermodynamic system is equal to the area enclosed between the p-V curve and the volume axis
Work done in process A-B = area ABCDA
Work done by a thermodynamic system depends not only upon the initial and final states of the system but also depend upon the path followed in the process.
Work done by the Thermodynamic System is taken as
Positive → 4 as volume increases.
Negative → 4 as volume decreases.
Internal Energy (U)
The total energy possessed by any system due to molecular motion and molecular configuration, is called its internal energy.
Internal energy of a thermodynamic system depends on temperature. It is the characteristic property of the state of the system.
Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics
According to this law, two systems in thermal equilibrium with a third system separately are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Thus, if A and B are separately in equilibrium with C, that is if TA = TC and TB = TC, then this implies that TA = TB i.e., the systems A and B are also in thermal equilibrium.
First Law of Thermodynamics
Heat given to a thermodynamic system (ΔQ) is partially utilized in doing work (ΔW) against the surrounding and the remaining part increases the internal energy (ΔU) of the system.
Therefore, ΔQ = ΔU + ΔW
First law of thermodynamics is a restatement of the principle conservation of energy.
In isothermal process, change in internal energy is zero (ΔU = 0).
Therefore, ΔQ = ΔW
In adiabatic process, no exchange of heat takes place, i.e., Δθ = O.
Therefore, ΔU = – ΔW
In adiabatic process, if gas expands, its internal energy and hence, temperature decreases and vice-versa.
In isochoric process, work done is zero, i.e., ΔW = 0, therefore
ΔQ = ΔU
A thermodynamical process is said to take place when some changes’ occur in the state of a thermodynamic system i.e., the therrnodynamie parameters of the system change with time.
(i) Isothermal Process A process taking place in a thermodynamic system at constant temperature is called an isothermal process.
Isothermal processes are very slow processes.
These process follows Boyle’s law, according to which
pV = constant
From dU = nCvdT as dT = 0 so dU = 0, i.e., internal energy is constant.
From first law of thermodynamic dQ = dW, i.e., heat given to the system is equal to the work done by system surroundings.
Work done W = 2.3026μRT l0g10(Vf / Vi) = 2.3026μRT l0g10(pi / pf)
where, μ = number of moles, R = ideal gas constant, T = absolute temperature and Vi Vf and Pi, Pf are initial volumes and pressures.
After differentiating P V = constant, we have
i.e., bulk modulus of gas in isothermal process, β = p.
P – V curve for this persons is a rectangular hyperbola
(a) Melting process is an isothermal change, because temperature of a substance remains constant during melting.
(b) Boiling process is also an isothermal operation.
(ii) Adiabatic Process A process taking place in a thermodynamic system for which there is no exchange of heat between the system and its surroundings.
Adiabatic processes are very fast processes.
These process follows Poisson’s law, according to which
From dQ = nCdT, Cadi = 0 as dQ = 0, i.e., molar heat capacity for adiabatic process is zero.
From first law, dU = – dW, i.e., work done by the system is equal to decrease in internal energy. When a system expands adiabatically, work done is positive and hence internal energy decrease, i.e., the system cools down and vice-versa.
Work done in an adiabatic process is
where Ti and Tf are initial and final temperatures. Examples
(a) Sudden compression or expansion of a gas in a container with perfectly non-conducting wall.
(b) Sudden bursting of the tube of a bicycle tyre.
(c) Propagation of sound waves in air and other gases.
(iii) Isobaric Process A process taking place in a thermodynamic system at constant pressure is called an isobaric process.
Molar heat capacity of the process is Cp and dQ = nCpdT.
Internal energy dU = nCv dT
From the first law of thermodynamics
dQ = dU + dW
dW = pdV = nRdT
Process equation is V / T = constant.
p- V curve is a straight line parallel to volume axis.
(iv) Isochoric Process A process taking place in a tlaermodynars system at constant volume is called an isochoric process.
dQ = nCvdT, molar heat capacity for isochoric process is Cv.
Volume is constant, so dW = 0,
Process equation is p / T = constant
p- V curve is a straight line parallel to pressure axis.
(v) Cyclic Process When a thermodynamic system returns to . initial state after passing through several states, then it is called cyclic process.
Efficiency of the cycle is given by
Work done by the cycle can be computed from area enclosed cycle on p- V curve.
Isothermal and Adiabatic Curves
The graph drawn between the pressure p and the volume V of a given mass of a gas for an isothermal process is called isothermal curve and for an adiabatic process it is called adiabatic curve .
The slope of the adiabatic curve
= γ x the slope of the isothermal curve
Volume Elasticities of Gases
There are two types of volume elasticities of gases
(i) Isothermal modulus of elasticity ES = p
(ii) Adiabatic modulus of elasticity ET = γ p
Ratio between isothermal and adiabatic modulus
ES / ET = γ = Cp / CV
where Cp and Cv are specific heats of gas at constant pressure and at constant volume.
For an isothermal process Δt = 0, therefore specific heat,
c = Δ θ / m Δt = &infi;
For an adiabatic process 119= 0, therefore specific heat,
c = 0 / m Δt = 0
Second Law of Thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics gives a fundamental limitation to the efficiency of a heat engine and the coefficient of performance of a refrigerator. It says that efficiency of a heat engine can never be unity (or 100%). This implies that heat released to the cold reservoir can never be made zero.
It is impossible to obtain a continuous supply of work from a body by cooling it to a temperature below the coldest of its surroundings.
It is impossible to transfer heat from a lower temperature body to a higher temperature body without use of an extemal agency.
It is impossible to construct a heat engine that will convert heat completely into work.
All these statements are equivalent as one can be obtained from the other.
Entropy is a physical quantity that remains constant during a reversible adiabatic change.
Change in entropy is given by dS = δQ / T
Where, δQ = heat supplied to the system
and T = absolute temperature.
Entropy of a system never decreases, i.e., dS ≥ o.
Entropy of a system increases in an irreversible process
A heat energy engine is a device which converts heat energy into mechanical energy.
A heat engine consists of three parts
(i) Source of heat at higher temperature
(ii) Working substance
(iii) Sink of heat at lower temperature
Thermal efficiency of a heat engine is given by
where Q1 is heat absorbed from the source,
Q2 is heat rejected to the sink and T1 and T2 are temperatures of source and sink.
Heat engine are of two types
(i) External Combustion Engine In this engine fuel is burnt a chamber outside the main body of the engine. e.g., steam engine. In practical life thermal efficiency of a steam engine varies from 12% to 16%.
(ii) Internal Combustion Engine In this engine. fuel is burnt inside the main body of the engine. e.g., petrol and diesel engine. In practical life thermal efficiency of a petrol engine is 26% and a diesel engine is 40%.
Carnot devised an ideal cycle of operation for a heat engine, called Carnot’s cycle.
A Carnot’s cycle contains the following four processes
(i) Isothermal expansion (AB)
(ii) Adiabatic expansion (BO)
(iii) Isothermal compression (CD)
(iv) Adiabatic compression (DA)
The net work done per cycle by the engine is numerically equal to the area of the loop representing the Carnot’s cycle .
After doing the calculations for different processes we can show that
[Efficiency of Carnot engine is maximum (not 1000/0) for given temperatures T1 and T2. But still Carnot engine is not a practical
engine because many ideal situations have been assumed while designing this engine which can practically not be obtained.]
Refrigerator or Heat Pump
A refrigerator or heat pump is a device used for cooling things. It absorb heat from sink at lower temperature and reject a larger amount of heat to source at higher temperature.
Coefficient of performance of refrigerator is given by
where Q2 is heat absorbed from the sink, Q1 is heat rejected to source and T1 and T2 are temperatures of source and sink.
Relation between efficiency (η) and coefficient of performance (β)
To get fastest exam alerts and government job alerts in India, join our Telegram channel. | <urn:uuid:0bf9ff8f-0644-4264-8b72-c660678199d8> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://schools.aglasem.com/51547/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573667.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819100644-20220819130644-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.904289 | 2,531 | 3.40625 | 3 |
When Chrissy Falletti was born, in 1975, she seemed healthy, but soon her father, a physician in Youngstown, Ohio, and her mother, a nurse, observed that she was losing weight. At six weeks old, Falletti was admitted to Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, in Cleveland. As part of her evaluation, she underwent a sweat test—electrodes were strapped to her forearms, and her perspiration was collected on a thin paper filter. The test showed abnormally elevated amounts of chloride, a component of the salt in sweat, which indicated a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis. Falletti’s mother quit her job to oversee her care. “No one in my family had cystic fibrosis, but my parents knew what to expect,” Falletti, now thirty-three, told me when we spoke by phone recently. “Parents want to fix everything. As a doctor and a nurse, they are trained to fix people. They tried to keep positive, but they had a child who couldn’t be fixed.”
Cystic fibrosis is the most common fatal genetic disorder in North America among Caucasians; some thirty thousand Americans have the disease, and about ten million Americans are silent carriers of the defective cystic-fibrosis gene. The normal gene produces a protein called CFTR, which channels chloride ions out of the cells that line the body’s cavities and surfaces. When the gene is mutated, the chloride ions cannot be moved, and regular body secretions become thick and congested. As the gastrointestinal tract and the pancreas become blocked, the absorption of fats and certain vitamins slows, starving the body of essential nutrients. (Sometimes the intestine must be opened surgically to remove a large blockage and help restore digestion.) In the lungs, the trachea, and the sinuses, the mucus becomes as thick as overcooked oatmeal, and the caked mucus provides a fertile field for bacterial growth. The mucus also impairs the function of the cilia, the fine hairlike projections on cells that are crucial to cleaning the airways. On average, people with cystic fibrosis lose two per cent of their lung function each year. Although antibiotics and pancreatic enzymes (which improve fat and vitamin absorption) have helped extend the average life span of patients into their late thirties, cystic fibrosis remains a uniformly fatal disease, with death often occurring as a result of pneumonia or respiratory failure.
Since childhood, Falletti has had a daily regimen that includes more than fifteen medicines and treatments. “Many days are exhausting,” she said. Twice a day, she uses an apparatus that resembles a life vest; hoses inflate the vest at specified frequencies and pressures to vibrate the chest wall and mobilize the mucus. At night, she does postural draining, a sequence of twelve inverted positions during which a partner claps her upper back, her sides, and the front of her chest in order to loosen the mucus. “It takes about three hours out of my day just to clear my airway,” Falletti explained. Even so, she has led an active life; until she was sixteen, she competed in gymnastics at state and national levels. A first-grade teacher now and married to an optician, she is keenly aware that she is approaching the age at which most people with the disorder die. She has suffered repeated bouts of pneumonia and a near-fatal collapse of one lung, which required emergency care, and she struggles to maintain a healthy weight. By 2007, her lung function had fallen to as low as fifty per cent of normal. “Because my lung function is so low, I am told that I shouldn’t have children, which makes me really sad, because my husband doesn’t have the gene and we really wanted kids,” Falletti said. Two of her close friends, also cystic-fibrosis patients, have died; so has a fellow sufferer and teacher from a nearby town, whose achievements she admired. “That really hit home,” she said. “It is heartbreaking to imagine my husband by himself.”
Last year, Chrissy was among a group of patients with cystic fibrosis who took part in a study of an experimental oral drug, produced by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, that is designed to restore function to the abnormal protein and permit the movement of chloride. “On the Vertex study, I just felt completely different,” Falletti said. “My sister said she used to know when I entered church because she could hear my cough. Then, when I was on the study, my nephew told me, ‘I can’t tell when you come in anymore.’ “ Within two weeks, her lung function had improved from a baseline of about fifty per cent to just over sixty per cent. She gained almost ten pounds, and after twenty-eight days her lung function had increased by eighteen per cent over all. The clinical trial ended, and all patients came off the therapy. Within a week, Chrissy’s lung function had begun to decline. “I call the cystic-fibrosis center all the time, asking, ‘Do you have any news?’ “ she said. “When you’ve finally felt what normal feels like, you kind of realize it’s not that much fun being your abnormal self.”
Last October, at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference, held in Orlando, Florida, Dr. Frank Accurso, of the Children’s Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, presented the results of the first two parts of the Vertex trial, which was placebo-controlled. (I served on a scientific-advisory board at Vertex from 1991 to 2000. I have no current connection to or financial interest in the company.) Of the nineteen patients who participated in the second part of the study, those who received a specific dose of the drug demonstrated a renewed ability to transport chloride and markedly improved lung function, with an average gain of more than ten per cent. Vertex is launching a long-term, placebo-controlled trial that could lead to F.D.A. approval this year. And, while this drug targets a very specific form of cystic fibrosis that occurs in only four per cent of patients, the fact that similar drugs—which are also intended to address the basic defect in the faulty CFTR protein and which have shown promising results in initial laboratory trials—are being developed by Vertex and other companies seems to signal a new treatment paradigm.
In the past, drugs have been developed that inhibited proteins that were toxic to cells or that stimulated proteins to counterbalance the symptoms from diseased proteins. But Vertex’s drugs are among the first that appear to be able to restore the normal function of a mutated protein like the one that causes cystic fibrosis. Researchers caution that further studies are needed, but the convergence of several drugs performing comparable functions might mean an entirely new approach to pharmaceutical research—with the potential to be applied to a wide range of genetic disorders, from Duchenne muscular dystrophy to Huntington’s disease and certain kinds of cancer.
The characteristics of cystic fibrosis have long been recognized, if not always understood. In medieval times, a baby who tasted “salty” when kissed would be predicted to die under an evil hex; the autopsy of an emaciated, “bewitched” eleven-year-old girl in 1595 in Leiden, the Netherlands, revealed that the pancreas was swollen, hard, and gleaming white. The name of the disease describes this effect: fluid-filled cavities, or cysts; and prominent scarring, or fibrosis. Dr. Dorothy Hansine Andersen, a pediatrician at Columbia University’s Babies & Children’s Hospital, in New York City, was the first to identify cystic fibrosis as a disease, in 1935. She also first hypothesized that the disease was a recessive disorder, and was the first doctor to treat children with pancreatic enzymes to improve their digestion.
In 1985, researchers in the United States and Canada discovered that the cystic-fibrosis gene was situated on the seventh chromosome. Two years earlier, Dr. Francis Collins, at Yale, had devised a technique to find a gene by “jumping” over segments of chromosomes. “It’s like looking for a burned-out light bulb in the basement of somebody’s house,” Collins told me. “You search the whole United States, and then you narrow it down to the right state, maybe even the right county, but you still have an awful lot of territory to search through for the burned-out light bulb. You needed a method that would allow you to do a house-to-house search—ideally, one that would allow you to start searching multiple city blocks at once. And that’s essentially what chromosome jumping allowed.”
The technology could identify mutations—the burned-out light bulb—in any genetic disorder, but Collins chose to focus on cystic fibrosis, in part because of a young woman he had treated as an intern, in 1977. “I became interested in the condition, and frustrated when I tried to learn more about its genesis, and there was nothing there,” he said. In 1984, Collins moved to the University of Michigan, and in 1987 he began to collaborate with Lap-Chee Tsui and Jack Riordan, researchers in Toronto, to find the exact nature of the cystic-fibrosis mutation. Two years later, the researchers identified the gene and determined its function. Their findings were published as a series of three papers in the journal Science.
The discovery of the gene set off a wave of euphoria, with many people convinced that cystic fibrosis would soon be cured. Collins recalled, “You know the affected organs, the lungs and pancreas, you deliver the normal gene, and, bingo! You’d be done.” The N.I.H. spent millions of dollars setting up gene-therapy centers to attempt just that. In 1990, a year after the gene was discovered, researchers published papers on successful laboratory tests in prestigious journals like Nature and Cell. The New York Times reported, “Scientists have cured cystic fibrosis cells in the laboratory by inserting a healthy version of the gene that causes the disease, an unexpectedly swift advance that left researchers almost giddy with delight. The results throw open the door to using human gene therapy to treat the deadly respiratory disorder, the most common fatal genetic ailment in the United States.” Yet, despite the successes in the laboratory, patients had an immune reaction to the procedure, rejecting the delivery system that held the normal gene.
For those who had invested their hopes in the therapy, the disappointment was devastating. Last November, I visited the Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at Children’s Hospital Boston with Dr. Ahmet Uluer, a pediatric pneumologist and the director of the adult cystic-fibrosis program. The mood was sombre: a few days earlier, Dean Barnett, a conservative columnist and political activist in Boston, who had cystic fibrosis, had died, at the age of forty-one. In one examination room, Sabrina Kelley, a twelve-year-old patient, and her father, Brian, a Massachusetts state trooper, were waiting for the doctor. Sabrina had been running a fever for several days; during the previous year, she had spent weeks on intravenous antibiotics for sinus infections and lung infections. “Sabrina was born in 1996, when it was all about gene therapy,” Brian Kelley said. He paused and looked at Dr. Uluer. “You doctors were supposed to fix it,” he said. Kelley has been following the trials of the new drugs, but, he told me, “I have no expectation.”
Dr. Robert Beall, a biochemist who had worked at the N.I.H., joined the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in 1980 as executive vice-president for medical affairs, and became the president and C.E.O. in 1994. He was determined to find a new approach to treating the underlying genetic defect in cystic fibrosis. “I was on a long plane ride and catching up on reading,” he recalled. “There was an article in Nature Medicine on high-throughput screening—using automated systems like robots to test hundreds of thousands of compounds in search of a drug.” Beall sought funding to apply this new technology to cystic-fibrosis research, and in 1998, he approached Roger Tsien, a biologist who was working on ways to track proteins and monitor signals in cells using fluorescence. (Tsien won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for this work.) Tsien had co-founded a biotech company, Aurora Biosciences, in San Diego, which utilized the high-throughput-screening technology.
Realizing that the research would be intensive, and that its results would have a relatively small market, Beall arranged for the foundation to provide Aurora with an initial grant of two million dollars. “Basically, we just wanted to see if they could get going,” Beall said. The company formatted a system to screen for the chemical compounds that facilitated chloride transport, but it would need a larger subsidy in order to continue with the research. In 1999, Beall approached the Gates Foundation. William Gates, Sr., then the head of the foundation, interviewed Beall about the unprecedented idea of correcting a mutated protein with a drug that could be taken orally, would work throughout the body, and would restore functioning of diseased organs. “We sat around his living-room table and wrote a proposal,” Beall told me. “They called us two weeks later and said they were giving us twenty million dollars to start the Aurora project.” The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation contributed seventeen million dollars, from the sale of patent rights to an aerosolized antibiotic. (The foundation often acts as an investor in cystic-fibrosis research done by for-profit companies, and sometimes retains the rights to patents on any drugs produced from such research.) “We knocked the socks off the biotech world,” Beall said. A few years ago, Beall recruited Joseph O’Donnell, a successful businessman whose twelve-year-old son had died of the disease, and who had served on the foundation’s board, to lead an effort to raise a hundred and seventy-five million dollars to contribute to more new drug development; so far, he has garnered a hundred and fifty-one million.
With more than sixteen hundred known mutations in the cystic-fibrosis gene, the process of finding drugs to address the disease’s pathology seemed formidable. But researchers soon realized that these mutations could be grouped into categories. One category of mutations produces a protein that is able to insert itself into the membrane of the cell but contains a “rusty gate” that closes off the passage of chloride. Another group of mutations, the most common, prevents the protein from reaching the membrane. A third category has a so-called “nonsense mutation,” which causes the cell to abruptly terminate production of the protein, making only a fragment.
With the grant from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, scientists on the Aurora team began screening more than half a million chemical compounds. Once a chemical was found to restore the movement of chloride, the team worked to modify the compound into potable forms that might serve as drugs. Eventually, Aurora identified several compounds that would either wedge open the rusty gate (potentiators) or repair the protein’s ability to reach the cell membrane (correctors). “It’s sort of molecular origami,” Paul Negulescu, who was one of the Aurora researchers, explained. “The CFTR protein has to fold in a certain order in a certain way to work properly, and the mutated cystic-fibrosis protein didn’t fold quite right. Just a little tweak, we believe, at one phase of that folding process gets it to the right shape, or otherwise it’s like a crumpled piece of paper you can throw away.” The drug that Falletti took, known as VX-770, is a potentiator; Vertex Pharmaceuticals (which acquired Aurora in 2001) has also developed a corrector, VX-809, which has been tested in small studies of healthy volunteers and cystic-fibrosis patients, and began a larger clinical trial in cystic-fibrosis patients this year.
At the Vertex offices, in Cambridge, Joshua Boger, the C.E.O., and the cystic-fibrosis research team showed me two videos, taken through a microscope, of cells from the lungs of cystic-fibrosis patients. In the first video, a layer of cystic-fibrosis lung cells had uncoördinated, slowly moving cilia that were unable to move mucus off the cell surface. The second video was of cystic-fibrosis cells that had been exposed to a corrector compound. In these cells, the cilia eventually began to beat in a synchronized fashion, like palm fronds swaying back and forth in the wind, showing how bacteria and mucus could be moved from the airways.
Other researchers are developing drugs that operate in similar ways and are also yielding positive results. One such drug targets the nonsense category of mutation. Normal genes contain so-called “stop signs” at the end of their DNA blueprint in order to produce proteins of an appropriate length. The nonsense mutations in cystic fibrosis create an additional, premature stop sign, which arrests synthesis of CFTR; researchers had to find a way to bypass the abnormal stop sign while respecting the normal one. Worldwide, some fifteen per cent of all patients with cystic fibrosis have this kind of nonsense mutation, but more than sixty per cent of patients in Israel carry it. PTC Therapeutics, a New Jersey development company, screened more than a million compounds and chemically optimized these compounds for several years before finding one that masks the abnormal stop sign while letting the cell recognize the normal point of termination.
In a clinical study conducted by PTC in Israel, nineteen patients underwent three months of treatment. Typically, these patients coughed nearly six hundred and fifty times per day. (Healthy people usually cough fewer than sixteen times per day.) During treatment, the nineteen study participants had their rate of coughing reduced by about two hundred times each day. In a study in Europe, lung function improved: pretreatment biopsies of the patients’ nasal tissue, which is similar to lung tissue, showed no CFTR protein; after treatment, the protein appeared in its normal place on the cell surface. The drug also restored chloride transport in the airways. Dr. Eitan Kerem, who directs the department of pediatrics at Hadassah Medical Center, in Jerusalem, and is the head of its cystic-fibrosis center, oversaw the pilot study in Israel. “We saw that it improved the physiology—that chloride now could be transported,” Kerem said. “But we need a placebo-controlled trial to really know its benefit.” An international, placebo-controlled study of two hundred cystic-fibrosis patients will begin in the coming months. “I don’t expect to see a complete cure,” Kerem, who plans to participate in the study, told me. “But if it can slow the progression of the disease, and patients can receive it at an early age, so they live much longer and much better, dayenu”—a Hebrew word meaning “it is enough for us,” traditionally used at the Passover seder to express gratitude for the exodus from slavery in Egypt.
These drugs may also have ramifications beyond cystic fibrosis. The drug produced by PTC Therapeutics, for instance, was designed to override any nonsense mutation—and could therefore be applied to a wide number of genetic diseases. (Nearly twenty-five hundred such disorders have been catalogued.) So far, the research team at PTC has provided data that suggest that the drug can bypass the stop mutation in mice genetically engineered to have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and pilot studies in patients with the disease have shown promising results.
Although the treatment of genetic disorders has long been considered too small a market for most pharmaceutical companies, an increasing number of biotech firms have found that genetic research can be used in broader ways than anticipated. By identifying common protein pathways, a number of researchers say, research conducted to develop drugs that treat relatively rare afflictions may also be applied to a spectrum of illnesses. Mark Murcko, Vertex’s chief technology officer, said, “We believe that misfolding diseases can be treated with small-molecule drugs”—these may be oral medications, like those developed for cystic fibrosis, which work throughout the body. Diseases associated with a misfolded protein include Alzheimer’s and more commonly occurring diseases, such as cancers that have the mutated p53 gene, thought to be important in certain cancers of the colon, pancreas, and lungs. In malignancies, tumor-suppressor genes, which normally restrain cell growth, acquire mutations, from carcinogens like tobacco smoke and radiation exposure, that eliminate the genes’ ability to halt growth. If the promise of corrector drugs like those in development for cystic fibrosis bears out, drugs could also be developed to restore the restraining function of the tumor-suppressor protein. Murcko is also interested in the future possibility that other drugs that facilitate chloride transport might be useful in enhancing the pulmonary function of patients with common lung diseases, such as chronic bronchitis from smoking.
This strategy—pursuing treatments for rare genetic disorders with the intention of finding ways to use them for more common ailments as well—has found adherents outside the biotech world. Dr. Mark Fishman, the president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, the pharmaceutical research arm of Novartis, a major global health-care company, has shifted his institute’s research program to focus on diseases with well-understood underpinnings, including rare genetic disorders. “If you understand the genetic mechanism, it becomes scientifically tractable to develop drugs,” he told me. Novartis, for example, is developing a treatment for Muckle-Wells syndrome, an extremely rare auto-inflammatory disease, which also has the potential to provide relief for those who suffer from gout, rheumatoid arthritis, and some kinds of diabetes. Fishman has been heartened by the advances made by Vertex and PTC in treating cystic fibrosis. “This approach to restoring the protein clearly changes the way you look at the world of drug development,” he said.
Francis Collins, who discovered the cystic-fibrosis gene and, until last year, was the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, at the N.I.H., has helped to establish federal programs to use high-throughput-screening technology to target a variety of mutated proteins, inspired in part by the success in finding new treatments for cystic fibrosis. “If we recognize that most inherited disorders do not have a foundation with the resources cystic fibrosis had, is it realistic to imagine that the same path of drug development could be travelled for other genetic diseases?” he asked. In the absence of private funding, Collins has urged the federal government to fill in the breach. “We have a robot screening three hundred thousand compounds in a span of forty-eight hours, each compound at seven different concentrations,” he told me. “There are four screening centers throughout the country. At N.I.H., there is the ability to do animal testing and to see if a compound is ready for human trials.” He added, “We have a unique opportunity with this cystic-fibrosis story to figure out how we can help other diseases.”
It seems likely that the treatment for cystic fibrosis will ultimately consist of combinations of these targeted therapies, much the way people with AIDS have gained longevity with multi-drug regimens. Because each parent, as a silent carrier, contributes one mutated gene, many children with the disease have two separate defects—for example, a misshapen CFTR mutation and a nonsense mutation, or a misshapen CFTR and a rusty-gate type of mutation. The clinical studies are still in the early stages, so neither the long-term benefits nor the potential side effects are known. Combining drugs might allow for synergy in restoring chloride movement, but it might also lead to toxic interactions, as with any combination therapy.
All the physicians and scientists I talked to who are working on the experimental agents emphasized the many unknown variables, but for the first time there is convincing evidence that the underlying defect in cystic fibrosis can be corrected. Dr. Susanna McColley, the director of the Cystic Fibrosis Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital, in Chicago, who did not participate in the Vertex or the PTC studies, told me, “These drugs are absolutely for real. It’s very striking, for example, that with the Vertex drug patients showed dramatic improvement and when it was stopped their lung function dropped back down.” It was particularly surprising, McColley said, because most experts believed that these patients’ lung function had been so destroyed over years of infection that they were incapable of such improvement. “The work with these drugs tells us that maybe we were not ambitious enough in our thinking,” she added.
McColley did take part two years ago in studies of denufosol, a drug produced by the biotech company Inspire that works in a different way from the Vertex and PTC drugs, by stimulating an alternative-chloride channel and bypassing the effects of the genetic mutations entirely. The drug, which increases hydration of lungs and helps open airways, is inhaled. In the placebo-controlled trial, involving three hundred and fifty-two patients, those on the drug showed a meaningful improvement in lung function. The study was not limited to a particular category of mutation, and the patients continued their standard therapies, such as antibiotics, during the trial. Dr. Accurso, at the Denver Children’s Hospital, acted as the lead principal investigator for denufosol’s Phase III clinical trial; one of his patients, Maya Nibbe, a seven-year-old with cystic fibrosis, participated in the study. (Another large clinical study is already under way.) Maya takes some forty pills a day, receives aerosol treatments with bronchodilators, to open her airways, and uses Pulmozyme, an enzyme-based treatment, to thin and loosen the viscous mucus. “During the cold weather, she needed supplemental antibiotics about once every month,” her mother, Jennifer Reinhardt, told me when we spoke by phone. While on the denufosol trial, which lasted forty-eight weeks, Maya needed such supplemental antibiotic therapy only once. She has been off the drug for eighteen months, and her lungs are now populated by resistant staphylococcus—MRSA—requiring two months of combination-antibiotic therapy. “It’s really hard on her,” Maya’s mother said. “It’s frustrating that we can’t have it.” ♦ | <urn:uuid:233ea5c1-dfdb-452c-b235-7af4b6b1bbd4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/04/open-channels | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282935.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00245-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967476 | 5,808 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Concering the Ordination of Women
to the Priesthood
Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth
Anglican Church of North America (ACNA)
INTRO: ORDINATION TO THE PRESBYTERATE AND EPISCOPATE A TRADITIONAL UNDERSTANDING
When media reporters and other writers discuss any aspect of sacred orders in the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., almost without exception a statement will be included to the effect that only three dioceses in the country do not ordain women to the priesthood. Why do the bishops of those dioceses refuse to “go with the flow”? After all, the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate was approved in 1976 and the General Convention of 2000 created the A045 Task Force to ensure compliance with the previously optional legislation; why the resistance to compliance? Does the traditional understanding of holy orders in the Church catholic have validity?
Because of these and other similar questions discussed at a number of meetings of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Fort Worth, Bishop Iker appointed a group of four parish priests to compose this compendium of essays in an effort to illuminate the traditional understanding of why only baptized males are considered as the proper subjects for ordination to the priesthood and episcopate. The essays include: 1) a synopsis of the current situation, 2) the witness of Holy Scripture, 3) the witness of sacred tradition, and 4) the place of reason in supporting the traditional understanding.
Here is the context in which these essays are written. Every candidate for holy baptism affirms the Apostles Creed in its entirety, which, of course, includes the articles “I believe in the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints ... ” These essays are written within this consideration of catholicity – wholeness – which must, because of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, include not only the Church Militant (the Church on Earth) but also the Church Expectant (Paradise) and the Church Triumphant (Heaven). By this we affirm that we are not detached or dislodged from those Christians who have preceded us for 20 centuries.
By virtue of the communion of saints, no generation of Christians is isolated, and the bishop never represents himself alone. He does not proclaim his own ideas. He is an ambassador of Jesus and as such must only teach “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). In fundamental matters of faith, the majority cannot be isolated into a particular convention or national group, but must rather extend across the ages into eternity. This is what it means to be apostolic and catholic. One of the chief tasks of the bishop is to be a spokesman for the majority across time, to be a true voice for the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. In this sense he is not free to embrace contemporary and novel ideologies that are at odds with apostolic faith and order.
Despite its embrace of women’s ordination, in a somewhat interesting manner the Episcopal Church still renders service to this catholic, apostolic, and cosmic understanding of the priesthood and episcopate being male only. In practice, men who have been ordained to the priesthood in Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches are received into the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church does not require re-ordination. Both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches adhere to the ancient and universal criteria of only baptized males as candidates for ordination.
While not intended to be an exhaustive work, we hope the reader will find this compendium of essays to be informative and to stimulate the desire for further study. The authors of these essays are parish priests in the Diocese of Fort Worth with broad pastoral experience. The Very Rev. Christopher T. Cantrell is rector of Church of the Holy Apostles, Fort Worth, Texas, and a graduate of Nashotah House. The Very Rev. William A. Crary Jr., also a graduate of Nashotah House, is rector of St. Laurence Church in Southlake, Texas. The Rev. Quintin Morrow, rector of St. Andrew Church, Fort Worth, Texas, is a graduate of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry. The Rev. Canon Robert L. Young is a graduate of the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest and is rector of St. Andrew Church, Grand Prairie, Texas. Gratitude is extended to Mrs. James Garrard and the Very Rev. Richard McHenry for assistance in editing and to Susan Steele and Suzanne Gill for production support.
The Very Rev. William A. Crary. Jr. Chairman
October 31, 2002
1. THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN TO THE PRIESTHOOD AND EPISCOPATE: WHERE ARE WE?
And they took hold of Paul, and brought him unto the Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new teaching is, which is spoken by thee? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. (Now all the Athenians and the strangers sojourning there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.) Acts 17:20-22 ASV
We sit at the beginning of the third millennium. It is a time of new things. The world around us is changing in myriad ways. Like it or not, it is a new age, a time of innovation and reinvention. As an example, in this new age we are supposed to embrace a new way of referring to the present time. Use of the term A.D. (“in the year of our Lord”) is discouraged; instead, C.E. (meaning “the Common Era”) is the new preferred way of speaking of the present age. Culturally and socially we are more and more in an environment that cares nothing for the things of the Church Catholic. In a time of new things, the Episcopal Church has embraced a number of “new things” of her own, not the least of which is the admittance of women into the ranks of the ordained ministry, specifically to the priesthood and episcopate.
How new is it, and how did we get here? In the early church there did appear to be an order of women ministers set apart for servant ministry in the Church, primarily for the purpose of ministering to women. Over time, along with the orders of virgins and widows (fourth century), the order of deaconesses disappeared (10th century in the West, 12th in the East). It was not until the mid-1800s that the restoration of the order of deaconesses was seen in the Anglican Communion.
In 1944, Bishop R.O. Hall of Hong Kong laid hands on a woman named Florence Li Tim-Oi, intending to ordain her to the sacred priesthood. The rest of the Anglican Communion reacted negatively to the news. As a result, Li Tim-Oi agreed not to function as a priest, in order to protect Bishop Hall from censure. Four years later the 1948 Lambeth Conference of the Bishops of the Communion responded negatively to the request of the Province of China for permission to experiment with the ordination of women to the priesthood for a period of 20 years. The Conference offered that “such an experiment would be against the tradition and order and would gravely affect the internal and external relations of the Anglican Communion” (1948, Resolution 113).
With the exception of the actions of Bishop Hall of Hong Kong, the subject appears to have been seen as one that would be acted upon by the Communion as a whole. The 1968 Lambeth Conference, taking up the matter, “affirm[ed] its opinion that the theological arguments as at present presented for and against the ordination of women to the priesthood are inconclusive” (1968, Resolution 34). Resolution 35 of the same Conference requested that careful study be made throughout the Communion. Resolution 37 requested that the Anglican Consultative Council consult with other churches that were ordaining women at the time. Resolution 38 recommended that “before any national or regional Church or province makes a final decision to ordain women to the priesthood, the advice of the Anglican Consultative Council (or Lambeth Consultative Body) be sought and carefully considered.”
In 1971 the Anglican Consultative Council was formed. At its first meeting a request was made by the Diocese of Hong Kong concerning its desire to begin ordaining women to the priesthood. The Council chose narrowly not to stand in the way of a diocese that, with the approval of its Province, chose to go ahead with the innovation. The vote was 24 to 22 in favor. The Council’s resolution included that it would “use its good offices to encourage all Provinces of the Anglican Communion to continue in communion with these dioceses [deciding to ordain women to the priesthood].” It is worth noting that the matter was still considered grave enough to warrant concern over maintaining communion throughout the Communion.
As a result,
The Episcopal Women’s Caucus was formed on Oct. 30, 1971, during a meeting of professional lay women and deacons. Notified that the House of Bishops had created yet another study committee on the ordination of women, without having taken action on its previous studies, the women informed the Presiding Bishop of their refusal to cooperate further and constituted themselves the EWC.
Regional organizing conferences were held in 1972, and EWC chapters were created in many parts of the country. Following the ordinations in Philadelphia and Washington in 1974 and 1975, a special conference was called to develop strategies for the 1976 General Convention. These strategies contributed to the action of the 1976 Convention making the ordination canon equally applicable to women and men. [From the EWC website: www.ecusa.anglican.org/ecw/ewc.our_story.htm]
On July 29, 1974, 11 women deacons participated in a priesthood ordination service at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia. Two retired and one resigned bishop performed the service. The reaction was immediate. Their bishops inhibited some of the women from priestly functions, and some from deacon’s service; others of the women agreed voluntarily to refrain from priestly ministry. Presiding Bishop John Allin called an emergency meeting of the House of Bishops in Chicago on Aug. 15 (ironically, the Feast of the Virgin Mary). At that meeting, the ordaining bishops were criticized for their “violation of collegiality.” The House asserted that the ordinations were not valid. The Philadelphia 11 (as the women came to be called) rejected the bishops’ action. The Vice President of House of Deputies, Charles Willie, resigned in protest. Ecclesiastical charges were filed against the Philadelphia bishops but were later turned away by a Board of Inquiry, saying that doctrinal issues needed to be resolved first. Some of the Philadelphia 11 continued to seek attention by traveling about and celebrating the Eucharist at various locations.
In September 1975 four more women deacons were illegally ordained to the priesthood by a retired bishop in Washington D.C. Shortly after that the House of Bishops censured all the bishops who participated in the illegal ordinations.
While this was going on in America, Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, corresponded over the issue. Pope Paul wrote:
Your Grace is of course well aware of the Catholic Church’s position on this question. She holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing his Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.
The Joint Commission between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church, which has been at work since 1966, is charged with presenting in due time a final report. We must regretfully recognize that a new course taken by the Anglican Communion in admitting women to the ordained priesthood cannot fail to introduce into this dialogue an element of grave difficulty which those involved will have to take seriously into account. [Emphasis mine]
This pronouncement was followed by a declaration from the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the ordination of men only. Archbishop Coggan sat on this exchange until after the General Convention.
In September 1976 General Convention approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate by changing the language of the ordination canons: “This canon shall be interpreted in its plain and literal sense, except that words of male gender shall also imply the female gender.”
Perhaps if the Convention had been aware of the communication between Pope Paul and Archbishop Coggan the vote might have gone differently. As it was, the result of the adoption of the practice radically changed the nature of The Episcopal Church’s ecumenical efforts with the Roman Catholic Church and with the Orthodox. The Polish National Catholic Church broke off communion with ECUSA over it. Prior to 1976 it was common for members of the Orthodox churches to be told by their clergy that if they found themselves in a community without an Orthodox Church they should worship with the Episcopalians. All that changed after the General Convention of 1976.
Within two months, the Anglican Church of Canada began ordaining women to the priesthood. Within a year of the passage of the permissive interpretation of the ordination canons, the House of Bishops, meeting at Port St. Lucie, Fla., adopted a document that came to be called the “conscience clause.”
It is, in actuality, a Statement on Conscience prepared by the Theology Committee of the House of Bishops and accepted by the House at their fall meeting in 1977. The statement spoke to several aspects of the situation including the legislative intent of the canon change:
(c) The meaning of a law involves not only the wording of the legislation, but also the intent of the legislation. Did General Convention intend (1) to make certain that dioceses prepared to ordain women were assured that they had the approval of the Episcopal Church in going ahead or (2) to require such action even by dioceses not yet prepared to act nor persuaded that they could rightly do so? By the nature of the case absolute proof is impossible, but majority opinion would seem to support the first understanding. At any rate there are adequate grounds for seeing at least sufficient doubt about the intent of the legislation, so as to inhibit insistence that women priests be accepted by all and at once.
The Statement’s concluding paragraph reads:
In the light of all this and in keeping with our intention at Minneapolis, we affirm that no Bishop, Priest, Deacon, or Lay Person should be coerced or penalized in any manner, nor suffer any canonical disabilities as a result of his or her conscientious objection to or support of the 65th General Convention’s action with regard to the ordination of women to the priesthood or episcopate.
In the atmosphere established by the Port St. Lucie Statement, the Episcopal Church moved forward with the innovation. Women were ordained to the priesthood by bishops who believed that it was right to do so, and those who were not so disposed were not compelled to conform. The statement was just that, a description of the Anglican position on matters of conscience particularly applied to the matter of the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. It was not framed as a canon or even presented to General Convention as a resolution. It did not need to be. It did, however, speak to every member of the Church and not just its bishops. [See sec. 3 of the statement]
The state of affairs resulting from the accommodation described by the Port St. Lucie Statement turned out to be the eventual position reached by the entire Communion a decade later. The 1988 Lambeth Conference, faced with the imminent possibility of a woman being consecrated a bishop, established what came to be known as the “Eames Commission,” (named for its chairman, the Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Rev. Robin Eames). The Eames Commission set about to encourage the various Provinces of the Communion to maintain the highest level of Communion possible, given disagreement over the practice of the ordination of women.
The Eames Commission described the situation within the Communion as a process of “Open Reception.” Not only had the introduction of this innovation radically hampered our ecumenical efforts [Paul VI correspondence], the Anglican Communion was faced with coming to terms with the notion of “impaired communion” within the Communion itself. It must be admitted that the introduction of the practice of the ordination of women has fractured the Anglican Communion.
The Eames Commission also upheld what the Port St. Lucie Statement had described:
Respect for the positions of those who are in favour and those who remain opposed has to be maintained within dioceses and Provinces, even after a decision is taken to consecrate women. In the continuing and dynamic process of reception, freedom and space must be available until consensus of opinion one way or the other has been achieved. Bishops and dioceses who accept and endorse the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate would need to recognise that, within a genuinely open process of reception, there must be room for those who disagree.
[Source: www.lambethconference.org/reports/report10.html, ¶41.]
In 1986 the Anglican Church of Canada, despite the Eames’ Commission’s rescinded its “conscience” provision and required acceptance in all its dioceses of women priests.
The first elections of women as bishops occurred in 1989. First, Barbara Harris was made Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts, and then Penelope Jamieson was made a Diocesan Bishop in New Zealand in early 1990. As things have played out, we now have bishops in office in parts of the Communion who are not recognized as such throughout the Communion.
In 1994 the Church of England (C. of E.) made provision for the ordination of women but in doing so institutionalized a system for respecting the consciences of all involved. Individual parishes are able to decide whether or not they will accept the ordination of women and are guaranteed episcopal oversight in keeping with that decision. As of this writing, there are no female bishops in the Church of England, but women do function as priests in every diocese in the C. of E.
In 1996 the House of Bishops of ECUSA took a straw vote on the interpretation of the ordination canons and discovered that a majority of them believed the canons should mandate full acceptance of women in Holy Orders. The General Convention of 1997 meeting in Philadelphia saw the amendment of Canon III.8.1, saying, “the provisions of the canons of the General Convention, insofar as they may relate to the ordination of women and the licensing and deployment of women clergy, are mandatory.” At that time there were four diocesan bishops who said they could not comply out of conscience. Currently there are three diocesan bishops who have said they cannot in good conscience license or ordain women in Holy Orders to function in their respective dioceses.
In its resolution AO45, the General Convention of 2000 directed “the Executive Council [to] establish a Task Force by January 1, 2001 to visit, interview, assess and assist the people and the Commissions on Ministry, Standing Committees and Bishops of the three dioceses in the development and implementation of an action plan for full compliance with the canon by September 1, 2002.”
In the fall of 2001 teams from the AO45 Task Force visited those dioceses with the cooperation of the three diocesan bishops. In March 2002, the team consisting of the Co-Chairs of the Task Force made a follow-up visit to the Diocese of Fort Worth over the objections of the Standing Committee and the Ordinary, the Rt. Rev. Jack L. Iker. One purpose of the visit was to work, meet with those members of the diocese who might be in disagreement with the leadership of the diocese. The Standing Committee, though not invited, attended the meeting in the interest of hearing from all involved and representing the interests of the Bishop, who was unable to attend.
Where are we now? In the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus prayed we might be one as he and the Father are one. He prayed that that unity would demonstrate to the world that the Father had sent him (John 17:20 ff.). In the face of our Lord’s high priestly prayer, ecumenically, our embrace of the “new thing” of women in the priesthood and episcopate has gravely hampered our conversations with the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox churches. Our great ecumenical achievement (so called) has been an agreement of full intercommunion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America that required our suspension of the preface to the Ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer. The Preface stated our intention to continue the three distinct orders of ordained ministers characteristic of Christ’s holy catholic Church. We have set that aside in the name of ecumenical progress. In doing so we have again parted ways with the rest of the Communion.
The energy and effort expended in the life of the Episcopal Church and throughout the Anglican Communion to “maintain the highest degree of Communion possible” given disagreement over the issue has also been very costly. Many have left the fellowship of ECUSA for Rome or Orthodoxy. Since 1976, because of women’s ordination and other innovations, there has also been a substantial movement of people into what are termed the “Continuing Churches.” Throughout the Episcopal Church there is still significant disagreement over the issue even though most dioceses ordain women. There are still clergy and parishes in the Anglican Church of Canada that cannot in conscience recognize the ordination of women. This past year has seen a flurry of lawsuits between parishes and dioceses and clergy over issues related to the ordination of women. The Diocese of Washington alone has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in pursuing a lawsuit against a priest primarily because of his inability to recognize the Acting Bishop because she is a woman. Twenty-six years of living with the “new thing” has not brought peace and harmony to the life of the Church, or numerical growth.1
The presence of bishops and priests in the Communion who are not recognized as such throughout the Communion, while indeed a “new thing,” cannot be considered a good thing. We have done violence to our understanding of conscience and its dictates. We have moved in ECUSA from permissiveness to coercion. The fruit of the introduction of the ordination of women has been further division. Ironically, in “division” and “diabolic” the root meaning is the same. The work of the Holy Spirit has always been to unite and build up.
- The Very Rev. Christopher T. Cantrell, SSC
# 2,333,624. Source: The Lee Clark Church Reporting Company
2. THE WITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE
The ordination of women to the presbyteral and episcopal ministries of the Christian Church was inaugurated under the aegis of “provisionality” and indeed has yet to find anything near universal acceptance. Nevertheless, meaningfully discussing the issue, without bias or passion, involved as it seems to the modern mind with matters such as equity and justice, is becoming increasingly difficult.
Often, the proponents of the novelty, when the debate turns to epistemology – especially Holy Scripture – argue that an appeal on either side of the question to a passage of the Bible is quite beside the point. But this is exactly the point. Accepting that the Christian Faith is a revealed religion; accepting that the preponderance of this revelation is found in the written pages of Holy Scripture, and that God Himself is the author of this revelation (II Tim. 3:16-17); and accepting that this revelation is coherent, non-contradicting and, as it has been faithfully preserved, authoritative, leads inevitably to the conclusion that what the Bible has to say about gender, gender roles, and the ordering of families, societies and the church is of the greatest importance.
What is the witness of Holy Scripture as it relates to the ordination of women to the presbyteral and episcopal offices of the Church? A comprehensive examination of the Bible on this subject can be meaningfully arranged accordingly: 1) the relationship of the sexes in the Creation narrative of the Torah; 2) the ministerial roles of women in the first covenant community of Israel; 3) the precedents of Jesus in the Gospels; and 4) the teaching of St. Paul.
As we examine the creation, relationship and ordering of the sexes in the Creation account in Genesis (Gen. 1:26-27; 2:7, 15-25), we immediately discover an ontological parity between the female and the male. The male is created first, and consequently becomes a type or representative of the race. This representation, however, does not imply superiority. Next, the woman is created – drawn physically from the man, but both beings receive their ruach, the breath of life, in equal measure from God. We find no hierarchical relationship of one sex over the other in the narrative; indeed, both male and female are described equally as being created “in the image of God.” The woman derives her name from man (literally in Hebrew she was called a ‘female man,’ “because she was taken from man,” Gen. 2:23b), and was created to be an equal complement to man (“a helper as a counterpart,” Gen. 2:18). Despite their ontological equality, however, the Creation account does not assume or reveal an interchangeability of the sexes. Both male and female are of the same essence, of equal dignity, but differ in role from each other. Indeed, it isn’t until after the Fall that a linear hierarchy appears – “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” – and this is established by God as a consequence of the woman’s disobedience (Gen. 3:16b).
The remainder of the Hebrew canon of Scripture (especially Leviticus, the historical books and the prophets) presents a consistent and divinely ordered view of the role of women in the religious and political life of Israel throughout her history—from the patriarchal period through the post-exilic return to the land. Both women and men were considered equal members of the covenant community, though the male, as representative of the race, alone received the sign of the covenant (Gen. 17:9-14). Both enjoyed covenant privileges for obedience (Deut. 28:1-14) and suffered the covenant consequences for disobedience (Deut. 28:15-68). Both were welcomed into worship, and both had related but separate ritual and purity requirements for access to common and divine assemblies (Leviticus 15). Moreover, in the functional life of the nation women served as prophetesses (Hulda in II Kings 22:14-20), judges (Deborah in Judges 4:4-24), and writers of Scripture (Miriam in Exodus 15:20-21; the mother of King Lemuel in Proverbs 31), all seemingly with complete parity with men.
This equality of access did not extend, however, to the offices of priest or Levite. As the word of the Lord to Moses makes clear in both Exodus and Leviticus, the requirements for admission to these two ministerial offices were stringent and specific. The priesthood was given by God “as a gift of service” (Num. 18:7) and was made vocationally responsible for three primary tasks. The first was mediatory and intercessory: The priest represented God to the people and pronounced His forgiveness and blessing to them; he also represented the people before God and prayed for them. The second was functional: The priest alone was authorized to offer the appointed sacrifices. The third was didactic: When not in service at the tabernacle or temple, the priest was to go amongst the people and teach them the Law. Admission to the priesthood required a male descendant of Aaron without disease or bodily defect, it involved total separation from the obligations of war and farming, and it demanded conformity to ritual, vestment and purity standards set out by God.
The Levite differed from the priest in that he need only be descended from Levi (and not Aaron specifically). His vocational obligations involved assisting the priest at the sacrifices and caring for the tent of meeting and worship precincts. The Scriptures make clear that the requirement that both priests and Levites be male was not incidental or culturally conditioned. Every other pagan religion in the Fertile Crescent, excluding Israel, had priestesses and temple prostitutes, and even as unfaithful to Yahweh as the descendants Abraham became, their continual violations of the first and second commandments never once included introducing women into the priestly or levitical offices of ministry.
At the moment we are introduced to the ministry of Jesus Christ we are immediately confronted with the reality that He is male. Moreover, this gender distinction is not of minor importance. Jesus of Nazareth, from at least His baptism by John in the Jordan River until His crucifixion, made the claim that He was the very Son of God incarnate. His miracles testified to this claim (John 3:2); His teaching likewise substantiated this claim (Matt. 7:28-29); and even His adversaries were aware of this claim (John 10:33). His incarnation was volitional and voluntary (Phil. 2:5b-8), and His maleness was intentional. Further, as the Gospels and the inscripturated apostolic writings make clear, Christ being a man had and has profound redemptive ramifications. First, as a man, Jesus, Emmanuel, “God with us,” represented God (who revealed Himself exclusively in masculine terms to the old covenant people) to us (John 14:9; Heb. 1:3). Second, as a man, Jesus becomes the head of a new race – the elect and redeemed – and is the instrumental cause of their salvation, so that, as St. Paul writes, as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all the redeemed be made alive (Rom. 6:12-19). And third, as a male, Jesus qualifies for His sacrificial, mediating double role as both priest and victim, offerer and offering (Heb. 10:5-14).
In addition, Christ’s itinerant teaching and healing ministry was not exercised in isolation but in concert with 12 disciples. These 12 disciples were exclusively Jewish men. It is frequently argued by proponents of women’s ordination that this fact either was societally demanded of Jesus (meaning that He could not have chosen a woman disciple had He desired to) or that this ethnic apostolic monopoly by Jews must then forever exclude Gentiles from assuming ministerial offices of the church. Both contentions are wrongheaded, but for different reasons. As to the first claim, Jesus, while declaring that He had not come to destroy the Law or the prophets but to fulfill them (Matt. 5:17), nevertheless exhibited a radical new relationship with women during His ministry. He ignored custom and spoke with women publicly (John 4:4-29). He forgave a woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). He allowed Himself to be touched by one woman who had “lived a sinful life” (Luke 7:37-50). Jesus did not regard the ritual impurity of the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5:25-34). He touched a dead girl’s body and brought her back to life (Mark 5:35-42). Women followed the Lord wherever He went (Luke 8:1-3) and even accompanied Him to the Cross (Luke 23:27). Finally, though women were not allowed to give evidence in a juridical matter in Jesus’ day, women were the first to witness and bear testimony to His resurrection (Matt. 28:1-10). As to the second, the ethnicity of the disciples – and later the apostles – is unrelated to the Lord’s gender requirements for inclusion in the Twelve; for, while the 12 disciples assume a quasi-patriarchal role in the new covenant mirroring that of the 12 sons of Jacob (and thus must be male), it was God’s clear intention from the beginning of salvation history to include Gentiles in the covenant of redemption (II Chron. 6:32- 33, Mal. 1:11, Rom. 1:16).
Because of his proclivity to systematize, some of the clearest teaching in Holy Scripture on men, women and ministry comes through the pen of the Apostle Paul. Like Jesus, Paul grounds his teaching on gender and roles in Creation (I Cor. 11: 3-12).
As Hauke points out,
The role of women in the Pauline communities is extremely significant. In many passages of his letters, the names of women occur who render assistance to the apostles even in the spreading of the Faith. His mention of the married couple Priscilla and Aquila makes evident the fact that the woman is always first, which indicates the outstanding degree of respect in which she was held.2
Additionally, Paul praises the women who labor with him in the Gospel, interacts with them in evangelism and church-planting, and won and baptized the first European convert to Christ – a noblewoman, Lydia – in Philippi (Acts 16:11-15). Furthermore, he teaches that men and women are justified equally before God by faith, are of equal dignity before God in salvation (Gal. 3:26-28), and equally, without distinction, receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit (I Cor. 12).
Nevertheless, the Apostle does not set apart women for apostolic or congregational oversight and ministry. He forbids the churches he started from doing so (I Tim. 2:11-12) and
2 Hauke, Manfred. Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption. Translated by David Kipp. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988. assumes that this practice will continue and succeed him (I Tim. 2, II Tim. 2:2). Paul’s reasons are threefold. The first is that man was created first and is the archetype and representative head of the human race, through whom and in whom God acts to save and bless it (I Cor. 11:3-16; I Tim. 2:13). Second, woman was deceived first, not man (I Tim. 2:14). And third, the institution of marriage and the ordering of the human family (of which man is the head) mirrors and reveals something of the mystery of the risen Christ’s relationship to believers and the ordering of God’s family, the Church (Eph. 5:22-33). Galatians 3:28 – “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” – is frequently cited as a biblical apologetic for the ordination of women. Exegetical gymnastics must abound to make this text contradict everything else St. Paul says on the issue, however, and nowhere in the passage – or indeed, in the entire Galatian letter – is a reversal of the order of Creation or the matter of ordination even alluded to.
The clear witness of Scripture is that God created man and woman ontologically equal, with equal worth, dignity, potential for obedience or disobedience, and access to covenantal mercies. God did not, however, make men and women interchangeable, but gave each sex differing roles in human society and the cosmic drama of redemption. What is more, because of the Fall from grace, He imposed differing consequences pertaining to the ordering and relationship of the sexes, and these will not be obviated until the Parousia and the final consummation of all things. Until then, we groan in anticipation of the redemption of our bodies and the reordering of creation.
Also, the Bible declares that there exist in human life hierarchal relationships which are divinely mandated (and ethically neutral) and give God glory, because this relationship of ontological equity but relational submission exists in the very godhead itself (Jesus said, “I and my Father are one,” John 10:30; and “The Father is greater than I,” John 14:28). Therefore, against the egalitarian argument, hierarchy is not inherently unjust.
The vocations of servant, steward and soul-winner are mandated for every regenerate believer. The offices of headship and teaching in the family and in God’s family, the Church, are restricted to males. The teaching of Holy Scripture concerning the ordination of women to the ministerial offices of the Christian church is coherent, compelling and unambiguous. It is not surprising, therefore, that current arguments for the ordination of women rarely appeal to Scripture any longer, but rather to pragmatics, rights and misplaced concerns for justice.
The Rev. Quintin Morrow
3. THE WITNESS OF SACRED TRADITION
Does Sacred Tradition support or admit the possibility of the ordination of women to the Christian priestly ministry? To deal with this question, we must first consider the nature of Christian tradition.
The Nature of Tradition
The term is derived from the Latin traditio – meaning the action of handing over, “to trade”; the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction. (Webster)
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church describes it thus:
In the early Christian Fathers, tradition (traditio) means the revelation made by God and delivered by Him to His faithful people through the mouth of His prophets and apostles. It does not mean something ‘handed down’ but something ‘handed over.’ Similarly in the New Testament the word, or its corresponding verb, is applied equally to be betrayal [handing over] of Christ by Judas to the Jews, and to the delivery [handing down] of Christian teaching by St. Paul to his converts. The tradition was at first called ‘apostolic’, because [it was] delivered by the apostles to the Churches which they founded, and later also ‘ecclesiastic’, because [it was] delivered again in each generation by the Church’s teachers to their people. Its substance was held to consist of the central facts and beliefs crystallized in the creeds of the great orthodox bishoprics. From the beginning of the third century, the tradition was something expressly identified with the Gospel record contained in Scripture.” The occasional references in early Christian literature to an ‘unwritten tradition’ left by the apostles appear to relate not to any body of information independent from Scripture, but to the evidence of primitive Christian institutions and customs which confirms Scriptural teaching. In a more modern sense, tradition means the continuous stream of explanation and elucidation of the primitive faith, illustrating the way in which Christianity has been presented and understood in past ages. It is the accumulated wisdom of the past. Sometimes, again, it means simply customs and ideas which have grown up imperceptibly and been accepted more or less uncritically. All tradition in these modern senses needs to have its true value proved by the double test - (1) whether it is in accordance with the principles embodied in divine revelation, and (2) whether it can be justified by the right reason.
Tradition in Scripture
Francis J. Hall’s Dogmatic Theology, vol. 2, says the following:
The New Testament is clear in regard to the function and duty of the Church to transmit that, and only that, which has been revealed. The Spirit’s guidance is to bring such things to remembrance (John 14:26); Christ’s ministers are stewards, not creators of divine mysteries (I Cor. 4:1-2; 15:3); Christians are to hold fast the traditions (2 Thes. 2:15; 3:6); the church is the pillar and ground, not the inventor (I Tim. 3:15); what is committed to our trust must be kept (I Tim. 6:20) even in the form of sound words (II Tim. 1:13-14, 3:14); what had been seen and heard was taught by the apostles (Heb. 2:3; I John 1:1-3); those who lack this doctrine are to be shunned (II John 10); the faith once for all delivered is to be contended for (Jude 3). On the other hand, the accretions of man made traditions is possible, and such “traditions” are condemned (cf. Matt. 12:1-8; 15:2-20; Mark 7:3-9; Luke 6:1-11; Col. 2:8; I Tim 1-4; 4-7; I Peter 1:18).
The patristic recognition of the importance and authority of tradition is emphatic. Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians 13:1, condemns innovation upon tradition. The Didache, chapter 4, urges “to keep what thou hast received, neither adding to it nor taking from it.” Teachers who do otherwise are not to be received (chapter 11). Ignatius, to the Magnesians, chapter 13, makes “the ordinances of the Lord and of the apostles” paramount. Irenaeus identifies heresies by their modernness (Against Heresies III, 4:3); and contrasts their waywardness to the sure and consentient traditions of the Church (V, 20:1), etc. [Francis J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. II, Authority, pp. 118-119.]
From the above it can be said that ecclesiastical tradition (Sacred Tradition) is something well known by the bishops and other teaching authorities, something that is necessary to the life of the Church, and something that is fixed with regard to its essentials.
The Concept of Evolving Tradition
In the 20th century in particular, the idea was advanced in some circles that tradition is evolving, in a parallel manner to Darwin’s theory of evolution. In many instances, proponents of an evolving tradition point to John Henry Newman’s idea of “development of doctrine.” To use this as a basis for an ever-changing, ever-expanding ecclesiastical tradition is to misunderstand the cardinal’s premises. Richard John Neuhaus, a contemporary writer, summarized Newman’s reflections on the development of doctrine in this way.
“Authentic” development has seven marks:
1. It preserves the church’s apostolic form.
2. It reflects continuity of principles in testing the unknown.
3. It demonstrates the power to assimilate what is true, even in what is posited against it.
4. It follows a logical sequence.
5. It anticipates future developments.
6. It conserves past developments.
7. Throughout, it claims and demonstrates the vigor of teaching authority
St. Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century held that in authentic development of doctrine nothing presents itself in the Church’s old age that was not latent in her youth. [emphasis mine] Such was the truth discovered by Augustine of Hippo, a truth “ever ancient, ever new.” [First Things, Number 122, April 2002, pg. 19].
Sacred Tradition and the Ordination of Women The Commandment of Christ
The sacred ministry, instituted by Christ himself in the calling of the 12 apostles and commissioning them to make him sacramentally present to current and subsequent generations (“on the night before He was betrayed ... Do this in remembrance of me.” I Cor. 11:23-25), is intended to act in the person of Christ (“He who hears you hears me” Lk. 10:16 ... “And he who sees me sees him who sent me” Jn. 12:45 ... “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide ... ” Jn. 15:16).
The Apostolic Tradition
The New Testament provides no exceptions to the male gender for apostolic ministries. “Now a bishop must be ... the husband of one wife ... ” (1 Tim. 3:2); “ ... and appoint elders in every town as I directed you, if any man is blameless, the husband of one wife ... ” (Titus 1:5-6). The apostolic ministry is conferred upon by men the laying on of hands (Acts 8:17; 9:17; 13:3; I Tim. 4:14; II Tim. 1:6). There are no exceptions to the recipient being male. It can be said that a male ministry, commissioned by Christ himself, is integral to the New Testament tradition. This is what was handed on to subsequent generations.
Later Sacred Tradition
Sacred tradition has unfailingly interpreted this to mean that the sacramental minister must therefore correspond to the maleness of Christ and provide absolute clarity as to his status as well as to fulfill the image of the bridegroom in relation to the Church as a bride described in Ephesians 5.
In the patristic period some heretics, notably Montanists, experimented with priestesses. They were soundly condemned by those who maintained Catholic faith and order. Tertullian even reiterated the Pauline prohibitions against women speaking and teaching in church. Tertullian also adds, “She is not allowed to teach, to baptize, to sacrifice or presume to the rank of male office, not to mention the priestly office” (Hauke, Women in the Priesthood, pg. 407). Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, fourth century, anchors the exclusion of women from the priesthood in the will of Jesus, which is the divine plan of salvation (Hauke, pg. 418).
Both St. Augustine of Hippo and St. John Damascene expressly categorize female priesthood as heresy. (Hauke, pg. 418). Hauke further states, “Whenever the Church Fathers have occasion to speak, directly or indirectly about “women in the priesthood,” they reject it clearly and unanimously” (pg. 425). Moving to the scholastic period, both Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure reject it. Duns Scotus, the subtle doctor, makes this astonishing statement: “I do not believe namely, that any office useful for salvation has been withheld from any person through institution by the Church or prescription of the Apostles, and much less still from an entire sex. If, then, the apostles or the Church cannot justly withhold from a person any office useful for salvation unless Christ as their head, has so determined, and much less still from the entire female sex, therefore Christ alone first prescribed this, He who instituted the sacrament” (Hauke, pg. 455, emphasis mine). The reformers, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli, though they had no use for the Mass and therefore no use for an apostolic priesthood as it was commonly understood, upheld the tradition of a male ministry.
Anglicans and Sacred Tradition
Do we as Anglicans have an obligation to uphold this tradition? First a male priesthood knows no exception for two millennia. It is rooted in the action of Christ himself. Even after separating from the See of Peter, the constant claim of Anglicans is that ours is not a new church, but a part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church as stated in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. At the Reformation, Anglicans appealed to Sacred Tradition, particularly the Fathers and the first four ecumenical councils, in order to strip away accretions and clarify authentic Catholic faith and practice. Anglican reformers were not seeking novelties; in fact, just the opposite! They sought to establish what they believed to be authentic tradition rooted in Holy Scripture.
In the Episcopal Church, the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer (1789) states, “It will also appear that this church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential point of doctrine, discipline, or worship; or further than local circumstances require.” In the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the candidate to be consecrated bishop is asked, “Are you ready, with all faithful diligence to banish and drive away from the church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word; and both privately and openly to call upon and encourage others to do the same?” The candidate for priesthood is asked a similar question.
Finally, the Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer describes sacraments to be “given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”
Q: What are the Sacraments?
A: The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace. (BCP, pg. 857) The outward sign consists of “matter” and “form.” It is the means whereby grace (an unmerited divine gift of favor) is imparted. The matter consists of the physical actions and materials which are required, and the form of the prescribed words that signify the intention of the sacrament. Thus the pouring of water (matter) over the recipient accompanied by the form “I baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” recited by the minister with the right intention constitutes the valid conferral of the sacrament of baptism. The minister must not only be officially competent but must intend to do what the church intends and has always intended in the sacrament. To substitute canola oil for water nullifies the sacrament. To change the form from the Name to a description (e.g., creator, redeemer, sanctifier) nullifies the sacrament.
In the celebration of the sacraments, it is Christ who celebrates them using the appropriate human ministers, and in this celebration the Church confesses the faith received from the apostles (“the faith once delivered to the saints,” Jude 3). Because “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8), no sacramental rite may be altered or changed or manipulated at the will of the community or the minister. To change the sacrament is to nullify its efficacy. The attempt to ordain women to the episcopate and presbyterate is currently being used as some justification for so-called same-sex marriages. If the recipients of holy orders can be arbitrarily changed from men to women, why cannot a man and man or woman and woman be the recipients of matrimonial grace? If one sacrament can be changed, they can all be changed and thus destroy forever the theology of a sure and certain sign given by Christ.
The Authority to Institute a Female Priesthood
If Christ established the apostolic ministry, and both scripture and unwavering tradition attest to this, then how can it be changed and by what authority? The current Bishop of Rome, John Paul II, echoed the words of his predecessor Pius XII when he stated that the church has no authority to change that which is given by Christ. Sacred Tradition will admit no change. The same must be true in Anglican practice if we profess to believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Altering the essential matter of sacraments and sacramental rites exceeds our sphere of competence and destroys those things given by Christ as “sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.”
Tradition speaks with one voice. The recipient of Holy Orders must be a baptized male.
The Very Rev. William A. Crary, Jr
4. REASON AND THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN
First impressions can be very powerful, but they can also be quite mistaken. When the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate emerged as a significant issue and serious possibility in the Episcopal Church, USA, the concept was accepted prima facie as reasonable by most Episcopalians.
Opponents of the practice of the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate cited its lack of consistency with the thrust of Holy Scripture, its incompatibility with holy tradition and its deleterious effects on ecumenical relations. However, there was a general willingness, even by those who doubted or disputed its validity, to concede that reason appeared to support the notion. After all, it could be argued, if a woman could be a head of state or hold any number of other leadership positions, why should her gender restrict her from the presbyterate or the episcopate?
Regarding this part of the argument traditionalists could cite only a vague, intuitive unease with the idea. These reservations were dismissed by its proponents as either simply a reflexive resistance to change or as an expression of paternalistic bigotry. It was assumed that the passage of time, the retirement and death of clergy who questioned the validity of women's ordination, and the experience of encountering women successfully acting in priestly and episcopal ministry would eventually sweep aside these objections.
However, now that the Episcopal Church has had 25 years of experience of the practice, a more measured assessment of the relationship between theological reason and women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate can now be made.
Based on the evidence now available, it is apparent that, surprisingly enough, the uncertain intuition that caused feelings of discomfort with women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate deserved to be heeded, researched, and taken far more seriously than they once were.
This conclusion is based upon the nature of theological reason, a comparison of the promises of women's ordination as opposed to the results, the concept of proportionality, and the Christian understanding of human nature.
THE NATURE OF THEOLOGICAL REASON
In the Anglican tradition, theological reason includes not only the cognitive processes but the contributions of experience and intuition as well. This may be seen in the Anglican acceptance of the Vincentian Canon's requirement that a doctrine have universal acceptance by the vast majority of orthodox Christians in order for it to be truly Catholic.
REASON AND THE NATURE OF HOLY ORDERS
Introduction: Both the Anglican Communion in general, and the Episcopal Church in particular, have repeatedly made it clear in their official pronouncements that they intend to be part of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. They have also expressed countless times that they intend to continue the three-fold Catholic ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons through the apostolic succession. Therefore we must ask, Is the ordination of women to the episcopate and presbyterate consistent with the oneness, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church?
Oneness, catholicity and apostolicity: It is extremely unlikely that the faithful throughout the world would accept the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church of Jesus Christ as valid. Whatever the practice is, it cannot reasonably be called catholic or apostolic, and it imperils the oneness of the Catholic Church.
Holiness: The question of whether the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate has enhanced the holiness of the Church depends for its answer upon whether one regards the notable changes in the moral and ethical standards of the Episcopal Church since 1976 as promoting the holiness of either individuals or of the Christian community. The Diocese of Fort Worth maintains that these changes have demonstrably decreased the holiness of both.
Conclusion: In brief, the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate is contrary to the very nature of the Church, its oneness, holiness and catholicity. It cannot be regarded as a sacramental rite of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
The Christian conception of human nature holds that human beings are inherently either male or female. There is no asexual human nature. Maleness and femaleness are both required for the full expression of human nature. This bi-fold sexual nature of human beings is not a choice; it is a part of the order of creation. Since sexual differentiation is fundamental to human nature, it is far different from and more significant than "accidentals" such as race, appearance, skill, talent, temperament, etc.
Consequently, an ontological sexual identity as male or female is an integral part of the dignity of every human being that Episcopalians vow to respect in the Baptismal Covenant (BCP, pg. 305). Maleness and femaleness each has a dignity that cannot be obliterated by falsely suggesting that the two are essentially synonymous in every way except physical attributes. Male and female human beings are not interchangeable but have distinctive gifts that make unique contributions to human life. To pretend otherwise is to diminish the dignity of every human being.
THE PROMISE OF WOMEN’S ORDINATION
When the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate was being championed in the 1970s its proponents maintained that it would:
o enhance the life of women in the Church
o benefit the Church at large by making it more relevant o make it attractive to modern people
It was asserted that the implementation of women's ordination would prevent erosion of the Church's membership caused by the disaffection of those opposed to a solely male priesthood. It was also held that the role of women would be enhanced by women's ordination, as women would be able to reach their full potential. Furthermore, justice would be served when women were no longer denied their equal civil right to ordination by what was portrayed as a patriarchal Church establishment.
Concomitant to this, the Church at large, having become a more just institution, would be viewed by society as more relevant to the prevailing culture of egalitarianism. It was maintained that any loss of membership from disaffected conservatives would be more than offset by gains among the younger (and, it was presumed, more liberal) generations.
Regrettably, on closer examination, each of these assertions has proven to be baseless or utterly false.
As has been shown elsewhere in the essay, it is disingenuous to suggest that when St. Paul declared the equality of all Christians in relation to salvation through Holy Baptism in his epistle to the Galatians that he meant to suggest that baptism obliterated any significant differences between men and women. St. Paul was reasonable enough to know that a baptized man still could not bear children. Sacramental grace, like all grace, does not change nature (in this case, human nature) but transforms it.
The recognition of genuine differences does not necessarily equate to positions of either inferiority or superiority. Reason and experience have made clear that being born with blue or brown eyes, pale or dark skin, small or large stature, does not make one of greater or lesser value. Such differences may affect how we live and in what ways we contribute to society, but they do not make us better or worse human beings. While both a short person and a tall person may be able to do most of the same things, a short person cannot reasonably expect to play for the NBA and a tall person cannot reasonably expect to serve as a Tunnel Rat in the military. However, both the tall and the short have made countless valuable contributions to human life and are judged by all reasonable people ultimately to be of equal worth.
Likewise, the differences between the sexes are not a matter of equality, since they do not make one sex superior or inferior. In fact, these differences are among the greatest assets of the human race. To claim that such differences do not exist is not to elevate womankind but to reduce it to something less than it is, to the detriment of all humanity.
The true dignity of women does not rest so much on their similarities with men as it does on their distinctive God-given gifts. For example, a woman, and only a woman, could have been the mother of Jesus Christ, for only females can be mothers. A man is not denied the fulfillment of his human potential because he cannot be a mother. That potential does not exist in the human male in the first place. A coherent, rational argument demonstrating with the sureness and certainty necessary to the validity of the sacraments (Catechism; BCP, 857) that women have the potential to be Christian priests and bishops has yet to be enunciated. Therefore it cannot be shown that an exclusively male priesthood prevents women from reaching their human potential. Ordination is not an issue of justice.
Likewise, it is unreasonable to suggest that the true dignity of the female sex depends upon whether women can be valid Christian priests and bishops or not. Men are not inferior to women because they cannot be mothers or sisters. Women are not inferior to men because they cannot be fathers or Christian priests.
Indeed, historically, religions in which women have been “priests” have accorded women far less status than Judaism and Christianity, faiths that have had no women “priests.” The cultures of the ancient world that competed with early Christianity combined having priestesses with sacred prostitution, the routine exposure of female infants, the practice of aborting girl babies, and easy divorces for men that frequently left women destitute. All of these bespeak a degraded place for women in society, and a near total lack of women's rights.
By contrast, Judaism and Christianity had no female “priests” but a greater regard for women as human beings. Both forbade the exposure of babies, abortion, easy divorces for men and sacred prostitution. History clearly demonstrates that priestly status is not directly related to an equal or elevated status for women.
ORDINATION AND CIVIL RIGHTS
Some regard the question of the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate as a matter of civil rights. This is to misunderstand the nature of civil rights. In fact, ordination is neither a civil matter nor a question of rights.
The sacramental rite of ordination came into existence as the Church's method for perpetuating the sacerdotal functions of Jesus Christ as our great high priest (Hebrews 3:1, 4:14 ff.) and bishop of our souls (I Peter 2:25) until the Second Coming. Consequently, ordination is an altogether ecclesiastical (church) matter and cannot be regarded as a civil one in a secular state such as the United States.
In addition, it cannot be a question of rights, since ordination is always a gift (II Timothy 1:6; I Tim 4:14) and therefore never a right. Neither graduation from seminary, long service to the Church, nor anything else confers a right to be ordained. A person can prepare to receive a gift, but no one has a right to demand one.
ORDINATION AND EXPERIENCE
Since 1976 Episcopalians have had three kinds of experience of women who are functioning as priests: individual experience, corporate experience and societal experience.
While some women who have functioned in the Episcopal Church as priests have been very poor examples, it must be acknowledged that others have made a very favorable impression as individuals. The teaching, preaching, administrative skills and pastoral care demonstrated by such women have been cited as examples of women excelling in priestly ministry and as experimental validation of women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate. However, to do so is to misunderstand the nature of the Christian priesthood and episcopate. Teaching, preaching, administration and pastoral care are all important ministries, but they are not distinctively priestly or episcopal functions.
Because ordination is a sacrament, it transcends these ministries, both individually and collectively. By including women as candidates for the priesthood and the episcopate, the sacrament has been changed (cf. “The Witness of Sacred Tradition,” preceding). However, catholic Christians hold that the sacraments were instituted by Christ. Thus we come to what appears to be a logical contradiction: If a human being presumes to alter a sacrament given by God, does the sacrament remain valid? If we are not certain about this point, then we cannot be certain that a woman (“ordained” under this altered sacrament) who performs the distinctively priestly acts of blessing, consecrating and absolving in the name of the Church is indeed confecting valid sacraments, sacramental rites and sacramentals. Whatever warm feelings may be generated in the hearts of those who behold a woman performing these acts, it has not yet been proved that women are sacramentally enabled to confect valid sacraments, sacramental rites and sacramentals. On the contrary, for the very reason that the sacerdotal function performed by women is of dubious validity in the minds of many, the women performing these acts not only introduce an element of doubt on the occasion, but they have reduced, rather than enhanced, the authority of the priesthood and episcopate.
In addition to the experience of the recipients of these ministrations there is also the experience of the women themselves to be considered. If the women who are functioning in the roles of priest and bishop are indeed not valid Christian priests and bishops, as remains to be conclusively proven, then they are living a lie. As we do not know with certainty that these women are valid priests and bishops, likewise we cannot calculate the harm they are doing their own psychological and spiritual health if they are not. It hardly seems to be a loving or pastoral act by the Church, which is called to be the pillar and bulwark of truth (I Tim. 3:13), to deceive a woman by an ordination ceremony of questionable validity, into living a life of dubious integrity at best and falsehood at worst. The Church has a pastoral responsibility to its female members not to put them in this dreadful dilemma, even if they seek to be placed there.
Women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate has been an ecumenical disaster. It has created a major stumbling block to inter-communion with the Roman Catholic Church and had a devastating effect on our relationship with the Eastern Orthodox. These communions show absolutely no sign of following our “lead” or accepting women as valid Catholic priests and bishops now or ever.
Has the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate enhanced the priesthood and episcopate? The only way to judge this is to look at the most significant development in regard to the priesthood and episcopate since the inception of women's ordination.
Currently there is such a degree of confusion over the nature of the catholic priesthood that in our recent Concordat with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America the Episcopal Church appears to have agreed that catholic priest in the apostolic succession and protestant pastor outside of it are equivalent terms, both able to confect a valid Eucharist. Otherwise, the inter-communion agreed upon is meaningless, except as a gesture of goodwill. To reduce the sacrament of eternal life to such a status cannot be regarded as an enhancement.
Since adopting the practice in 1976 there has been no flooding of Episcopal churches by disaffected women, no growth among teens and young adults. Instead, we experienced the schisms from the Episcopal Church of the various Continuing Anglican Churches, a division in the Body of Christ, against the express wishes of Jesus Christ, our the great high priest. In 1975 the membership of the Episcopal Church was officially recorded at 3,039,136. In the year 2,000 membership had shrunk to 2,333,624, a 22.88% decline. The last 10 years of this period was touted as a Decade of Evangelism in which ECUSA concentrated on numerical growth.
In the United States, during the same period, the Roman Catholic Church, with its exclusively male priesthood, has been growing dramatically. Evangelical denominations have been increasing at such a rate that a book entitled Why Conservative Churches are Growing was produced.
Overseas, the Nigerian Anglican Church, which does not attempt to ordain women as priests and bishops, has tripled during the Decade of Evangelism. Contrariwise, there has been a decline in all western Anglican provinces where it has been adopted.
Most organizations, after looking at these statistics, would have reconsidered the direction in which they were headed long before now.
It is difficult to judge whether the Episcopal Church is now accounted more relevant than it was before 1976. Societal perceptions often lag behind events in the Church, and women's ordination cannot reasonably be seen as the sole factor or issue which determines the view of society at large toward the Episcopal Church.
However, it is evident that whatever additional relevance women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate may have with some people, it clearly has not been sufficiently significant to motivate large numbers to join the Episcopal Church. There is also good reason to think that others may in fact regard the ECUSA as less relevant, since it appears to be unable to remain faithful under pressure to its own principles. Its voice has been gradually reduced to that of an increasingly discredited and irrelevant, although highly vocal, minority within American society.
Finally, women's ordination may well have had a deleterious effect on society itself, adding to the current confusion over gender roles and the myth of the interchangeability of the sexes rather than leading society to a more balanced view.
The promises of numerical growth and societal relevance by “ordaining” women to the priesthood and episcopate has proven not only illusionary but quite the reverse has been the effect.
Reason dictates that there be some proportion between the price paid for a given thing and the value of that entity. The Episcopal Church has paid an enormous price for the experiment of attempting to ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate. It is reasonable to expect that there be some proportionate gain in membership, in depth of faith and morals or the like, to make up for these losses.
Sadly, quite the opposite has been the case. Each has plummeted in the 25 years since the practice of ordaining women to the priesthood and episcopate was implemented. Bishops have gone on record repudiating key articles of the creeds, and General Convention has been asked to endorse flagrant immorality, a situation that was unimaginable in 1976. The degree to which women who have been ordained to the priesthood and episcopate have personally contributed to this precipitous decline cannot be gauged with any accuracy. While many have been vocal supporters of the most flagrant abuses of the radical agenda, others have bravely attempted to uphold Christian faith and morals.
However, the overall effect remains that the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate has not lived up to its promises. It has utterly failed to demonstrate that it was worth the exorbitant price paid for it. Clearly, women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate can no longer be regarded as reasonable.
REASON AND THE FUTURE
Is it reasonable to expect a reversal of women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate? Certainly it is not immediately likely, nor can it be expected in the foreseeable future. The idea is too firmly entrenched in the minds of those who control the Episcopal Church. Yet it is not hopeless to think that the time may come when reason will prevail over prejudice.
However, history indicates otherwise. Aryanism once appeared to be triumphant in theology. For centuries slavery and the divine right of kings were similarly regarded as “givens.” Likewise fascism, National Socialism and Soviet communism were at one time considered inevitable, irresistible forces in the modern world. A merciful God has seen to it that each of them has been consigned to history's dustbin.
It is reasonable then to hope that women's ordination may likewise come to be viewed as an experiment that failed, a concept that seemed rational enough at first, but eventually was recognized by more thoughtful generations as hollow and counter-productive.
The Rev. Canon Robert L. Young | <urn:uuid:11a79428-adef-48e8-999a-f78029053267> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.forwardministryonline.com/links/ordinationofwomen/fortworthessayswo.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572021.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814083156-20220814113156-00075.warc.gz | en | 0.963136 | 15,306 | 1.992188 | 2 |
Local Green Party Councillor for Athlone-Moate Municipal District, Cllr Louise Heavin, has welcomed two new heritage initiatives - a survey of barn owls and a survey of thatched buildings across Westmeath, both of which were discussed at the most recent local authority heritage forum meeting.
“It’s very exciting to see these two new surveys start up this year. Thatched buildings and barn owls are really important parts of our history and environment. It’s going to be really interesting to see what this survey uncovers and I for one hope it’s good news. The more people that can take part the more successful this will be and I encourage all members of the public to get involved in reporting. It’s important we cherish these great elements of our heritage,” Cllr Heavin stated.
A survey of the thatched buildings in Westmeath is commencing this month. The aim of this project is to create an up-to-date record of all the thatched buildings in the county, which were once typical in Ireland but are now a rare sight.
“Up until the 17th Century, thatch was the main type of roofing in Ireland but over the years other roofing materials became available and fashionable and now there are only a few thatched buildings in the country”, Heritage Officer, Melanie McQuade, remarked.
Westmeath County Council are delighted to be supporting Conservation Consultant, Bronagh Lanigan of AR&R (Architectural Recording and Research ), on this project, which is as an action of the Westmeath Heritage Plan, funded by The Heritage Council.
As well as recording the building details and history, the survey will involve the owners and get their views on the conservation needs of these thatched buildings and on the future use of thatch. The survey results will help to inform conservation priorities, including grant assisted works, for original thatched properties in Westmeath.
Bronagh is looking for the public’s help in finding the remaining unrecorded thatched houses in the county and any information on the history of thatch in Westmeath.
“If people have old photographs of thatched buildings, have thatching tools in a shed that haven’t been used or looked at in a while or any information about thatching in the county I’d love to hear from them,” Bronagh commented.
If you are the owner of a thatched building or if you know of a thatched building in your locality, that may not have been included on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH ) in 2004, (https://www.buildingsofireland.ie/ ) then the Heritage Office would like to hear from you - contact [email protected] or Melanie McQuade on 087 6074496.
Barn Owl Survey
In addition to a survey of the county’s built heritage, Cllr Heavin has confirmed that a survey of Westmeath’s natural heritage will take place.
BirdWatch Ireland are undertaking a survey of barn owls in Westmeath this summer and they are requesting the assistance of the public and landowners to report information on such birds to help direct the survey efforts.
Although barn owl populations have declined over recent decades, there seems to be early indications that such presence may be recovering in certain parts of their range, and BirdWatch Ireland want to establish if this is the case in Westmeath.
One of the reasons for this recovery may be due to the range expansion of non-native small mammal species, the greater white-toothed shrew and the bank vole, both of which are recent arrivals to Westmeath and are taken as prey by barn owls and other predators.
The barn owl survey in Westmeath aims to establish how the species are currently faring in the county. The findings of the survey will be used to ensure the protection of nest sites and to direct targeted conservation efforts which will include the provision of nest boxes in suitable areas to help the local barn owl population.
“We are excited to be working with Bird Watch Ireland on this barn owl survey which is funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Department of Housing, local Government and Heritage, through their National Biodiversity Action Plan Grant Scheme, with support from Westmeath County Council.
“Local information will be really valuable to the survey and we are encouraging people to report sighting of barn owls in Westmeath,” Melanie McQuade remarked. | <urn:uuid:934d4c2d-917d-4d81-b9f3-972442bb4aff> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.advertiser.ie/athlone/article/122642/local-green-party-councillor-formally-welcomes-two-new-heritage-initiatives?utm_source=related&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=readrelated | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570879.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808213349-20220809003349-00467.warc.gz | en | 0.959459 | 945 | 1.765625 | 2 |
We have one really good tool for predicting the rate of growth of solar. It exists because, in 1933, the US government asked for flying cars.
In 1933, Gene Vidal, head of the U.S. Bureau of Air Commerce, announced his vision for a “People’s Airplane.” Powered by a Ford engine and targeted to cost only $700 – the price of a Pontiac – this plane would open up air travel to the masses. To spur innovation, his Bureau offered a competition to US aircraft manufacturers: It would award two grants to subsidize production of an aircraft that could meet this cost target, at a production run of 10,000 planes.
The Hammond Model Y, winner of a grant for the “People’s Airplane”. Image: Smithsonian
Any engineer knows that the costs of manufacturing a product – aircraft or otherwise – go down as the volume goes up. Labor becomes proficient over time, as workers implement simple changes such as optimizing the position of a piece in need of welding. As production rises, companies invest in tooling, which simplifies assembly further. Materials are also purchased more cheaply as logistics become streamlined – delivery from a full truck costs less than delivery from a half truck; deliver by train costs less still.
But how cheaply could 10,000 planes be made?
For aircraft companies, the opportunity was both riveting and lunatic. For comparison, the Boeing 247 was released in 1933 as the first modern commercial aircraft, with a production run of 60 planes, at a unit price of $65,000. Ten thousand was more aircraft than had ever been produced for any model, military or civilian.
Was such a price possible? Could an assembly line be built? And how on earth should a company estimate the costs of 10,000 planes, when an order of 100 planes represented work beyond the dreams of any reasonable production manager?
To use modern terminology, airplane companies had no idea how to scale. No one had ever taken a leap of this sort. There was no template to work from.
Into this abyss stepped Theodore Paul Wright, chief engineer of the airplane division of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. Ted was the black sheep of an absurdly distinguished family: His father, Phillip, was a professor, inventor of a statistical technique that is still applied today. His eldest brother, Sewell, made key mathematical contributions to the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution. His middle brother, Quincy, co-founded the first International Relations program at a US university, and became the leading scholar of war of his generation.
But Ted was a doer, not an intellectual. While at MIT during WWI, he joined the Navy, and became an aircraft inspector. After the war a naval career became a dead-end, so Ted applied for work as an engineer at the Curtiss Aircraft Company.
Yet Ted shared in his family’s genetic bounty. By age 30, Ted was running the company’s engineering division. And by 1933, with a decade of experience leading design and build teams, Ted possessed reams of data on plane production and cost.
When the request came to quote costs for 10,000 planes, Ted had an idea of what to do. He charted airplane costs against volume for the numbers that he had, on logarithmic paper. And he drew a line.
From “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes“, TP Wright, Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences 3(4), 1936
What he found – later published in 1936 – was that the costs of both supplies and finished goods fell with astonishing regularity as production increased. With every doubling of the number of units produced, the cost of labor dropped by 20% (an “80% curve”, above). The cost of purchased materials dropped by 12%. The cost of raw materials fell by 5%. And the cost of a completed airplane – itself a combination of labor, supplies, and raw material – dropped by 13%.
With this relationship, predictions that would seem to require a crystal ball morph into a problem solved by middle school math.
To find out the cost of 10,000 planes, all Wright would need is the cost of the first unit, and the slope of the line. And he plotted this out, he saw that if a plane drops in costs by 13% per doubling – it’s called an “87% curve” in the graph – a production run of 10,000 planes will be 1/10th the price of the first. If you need the price in production to be $700, you had better be able to build a single unit for $7,000. If you can’t, don’t bother trying.
The Curtiss-Wright Corporation never made a flying car. Instead, it learned how to predict the future.
The experience curve
For those familiar with modern technology, Wright’s Law might sound strangely similar to Moore’s Law, which stated that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years. It too is plotted on a logarithmic graph, but it’s plotted against time instead of volume. And it too emerged remarkably straight.
In fact, you can reformulate Moore’s Law to plot the price of a transistor versus total production, or the price of transistors versus time, and both show up as a lines as well.
Moore’s Law, plotted as cost versus time. Original data set from the Santa Fe Institute’s Performance Curve Database
Prices fall over time, as production rises. And generally speaking, this is remarkably predictable – Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law are effectively the same thing, and apply to nearly every product, from transistors to airplanes to polystyrene to beer. Prices fall at different rates – semiconductor prices have dropped much faster than beer prices – but in every case when you plot price on a logarithmic scale versus time, you get a line.
Image from How Predictable Is Technological Progress?, JD Farmer and F Lafond, Research Policy 45(3), 2016
Applying one simple rule, you can predict the future. And the simple rule works great, right up until it doesn’t.
Why predicting solar has been so hard
Images have been released showing the sheer size of a new solar power plant in southern India. The facility in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, has a capacity of 648 MW and covers an area of 10 sq km. This makes it the largest solar power plant at a single location, taking the title from the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which has a capacity of 550 MW.
Al Jazeera, Nov 30, 2016
Built at a cost of about 6bn yuan (£721.3m) and in almost constant expansion since construction began in 2013, Longyangxia now has the capacity to produce a massive 850MW of power – enough to supply up to 200,000 households – and stands on the front line of a global photovoltaic revolution being spearheaded by a country that is also the world’s greatest polluter.
The Guardian, January 17th, 2017
Gordon Moore has always been clear that the steady rate of improvement of semiconductors was not from some natural principle. Carver Mead, a professor of engineering who became one of the earliest proponents of Moore’s Law, summarized the engine of Moore’s Law succinctly: Belief.
It’s not a law of physics, it’s about human belief, and when people believe in something, they’ll put energy behind it to make it come to pass… So here’s an example where Gordon [Moore], when he made this observation early on, he really gave us permission to believe that it would keep going. And so some of us went off and did some calculations about it and said, ‘Yes, it can keep going’. And that then gave other people permission to believe it could keep going. And [after believing it] for the last two or three generations, ‘maybe I can believe it for a couple more, even though I can’t see how to get there’
Prof. Carver Mead
A shared belief creates tremendous advantage – even with the field moving fast, if semiconductor manufacturers believe, then suppliers feel secure making long term investments in technology, and their costs and capabilities conform. Semiconductor customers feel secure designing products that require high power chips to thrive, so users for these new chips arrive just in time.
To call this belief is not to compare it to bloodletting, or homeopathy, or sprites. You cannot achieve lower manufacturing costs through the powers of positive thinking.
This belief is about certainty, about a benevolent form of industrial collusion. It’s a common frame of reference that lets even ruthlessly competitive industry move in lock step. A shared belief in the future – a belief firmly rooted in the real – benefits all.
But what happens when there is no coordination? What happens when not everyone believes?
Swanson’s Law, showing the relationship between module prices and the total produced over all time. Image: Wikipedia.
Swanson’s Law is the name given to these same price and volume trends by the solar industry. But Swanson has not been so lucky.
Solar prices followed a simple decline from 1979 through 2003; save for a few minor glitches, the industry behaved exactly as it should. But in 2004, expectations for prices hit a bump. And the reason why was simple: Disbelief.
In 2004, the price of a solar module was about $4/W, about ten times what it is today. Solar was a niche business, serving hippies living in mountain cabins and Polynesian islanders who could not get electricity any other way. It was totally uneconomical for anyone with a connection to the grid. But by 2000, rising concerns about global warming – most notably in Germany, where a “feed-in tariff” subsidized the cost of solar – led people, business, and governments to buy solar anyway.
This came as a shock to makers of high purity silicon, who had previously viewed solar as an afterthought to their main market, in semiconductors. The solar industry tried to warn silicon producers that demand was going to continue its increase. The silicon producers did not believe.
It takes 24-36 months to build a new silicon plant. As demand grew, there was a shortage of silicon, and prices rose for years before renewing their march downward in 2008.
But then something even weirder happened. Solar prices fell below their long term trend. By a lot.
Technology + belief = progress
The price of solar modules can fall for many reasons. Suppliers learn to purify silicon using less energy, and drop their prices. Panel manufactures learn to handle thinner wafers, which use less material. The simple act of scaling, with improved automation and logistics, drops prices further.
After 2008, solar manufacturers gained a new weapon in their battle against costs: Silicon makers built large plants to serve solar alone, and looked with new focus at how they could tune these plants to cut solar’s costs. And because, as Wright taught us, the rate of reduction for a product’s price is just the average of the rates for all of its components, that alone should have put solar on a sharper downward trend.
But the reason that got most of the attention of the industry – and politicians – was the simplest story: Solar manufacturers started to sell modules near, or below, cost.
In political circles, this practice is called “dumping”. When the companies doing the dumping are getting government subsidies, it’s considered an unfair trade practice because it forces competitors in less generous regimes out of the marketplace. And because most of the world’s solar manufacturing is in China, there is little question that these companies are getting some sort of generous treatment.
However, there can also be good, non-political reasons to sell at or below cost. The best modern example is Amazon, which for twenty years has barely booked a profit. Amazon’s investors tolerate this because the market for on-line retail is vast, and scale brings lower costs. Because consumers follow cost, the company who scales fastest wins the largest market share. Which gives the revenue needed to scale more still. A short term restraint turns, over time, into an insurmountable advantage.
LCD television makers did this in the mid-2000s – prices were dropping steadily at 20% per year, as boxy cathode ray TVs were slowly replaced by high end, flat panel displays. Finally, large-screen televisions reached a price point accessible for the average consumer. And consumers responded, in droves.
To keep up with market demand required billion-dollar investment in next-generation factories; to fill the factories required more market share. LCD companies did the only thing that made sense – they dropped prices by 35% per year instead. If you ever wondered what happened to the plasma and projection televisions that competed with LCD in 2004, this is the story. The LCD makers scaled first, lowered prices to fill their factories, and drove their competitors out of the business.
A 2009 Reuters summary of the TV market. In 2004, things did not look so bad for plasma TVs. Five years later, it was game over.
And so it is in solar.
Solar has reached the tipping point where demand is no longer sustained by government fiat, where investment will soon be an order of magnitude larger than in the past. And only companies that make that leap – companies that lower their prices to keep their market share, and invest every possible penny in cutting costs for the future – will survive.
Experts who looked at market trends in the early 2000s missed the bump that was caused by suppliers not believing. And they missed the drop today, caused by the solar panel companies themselves believing their time has finally arrived.
Now it’s time for all of us to believe.
How big could solar get? Big enough to impact my electricity bill? Big enough to save the climate? | <urn:uuid:3def4a1d-806d-492c-8ca3-76ea88229180> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://perspicacity.xyz/2017/02/13/how-solar-progress-progresses-solar-part-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570913.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20220809064307-20220809094307-00065.warc.gz | en | 0.960684 | 2,937 | 3.5 | 4 |
Subject: Re: Hi everyone..childhood meningitis link to rheumatoid arthritis?
Hi Nicky, congratulations on your DLA appeal and I hope the ESA tribunal goes well!
My rheumy is ace and always tries explaining things to me in a way that I can understand - he draws me pictures and all sorts lol.
As I understand it, you can have a genetic predisposition to RA and PA (which is what I have), which means you have a chance of becoming arthritic if an environmental factor, such as infection, triggers it.
These types of arthritis are auto-immune diseases which means the body's own immune system attacks the affected area. This is because, if you are predisposed and then get an infection it effectively short circuits the immune system and it goes a bit wrong!
So you can inherit the genes that could mean you get arthritis but unless your immune system gets a big old challenge when you are younger, you may not develop the condition.
My rheumatologist believes it was a series of ear infections that may have triggered my PA.
I hope I've explained that clearly enough
All the best | <urn:uuid:2b13d6e2-029c-4478-bdaf-beebbd09fb90> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.arthritisforum.org.uk/cgi-bin/showthread.pl?threadid=1498&offset=3250 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573760.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819191655-20220819221655-00677.warc.gz | en | 0.948027 | 247 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Presentation on theme: "Queen Elizabeth II is the 38th monarch of England. Her family goes back more than 1,000 years! It’s easy to forgot all the kings and queens of England."— Presentation transcript:
Queen Elizabeth II is the 38th monarch of England. Her family goes back more than 1,000 years! It’s easy to forgot all the kings and queens of England. We want to show you some more famous than others.
Six wives Henry really wanted to have a son to be king after him so he married a lot of times. Unfortunately he had only one son which died when he had 15 years. He had also two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth.
Religion Henry changed England’s religion from Catholic to Protestant because he want to divorce with his first wife. He became the head of England’s new religion. When he divorced with his wife he kept money insted gave it to the Pope.
Interests Henry was a clever man and he was in love with books and music. He was good looking, tall and strong man, he played many sports. He really loved food. Later in life he became very fat and ill. He died at the age of 56.
Golden Age Elizabeth I was one of Henry VIII’s daughter. She was one of the strongest monarchs ever. In her state goverance England became much richer and stronger in the world. It was also wonderful time for English music and drama.
Elizabethan Fashion Elizabeth I is famous for her beautiful clothes and big dresses. She started put white make-up on her face. Other women and some men copied her.
Empire Queen Victoria was queen for 64 years – the longest time for a British monarch. During that time, Britain became a very important and rich country. This country had a very big empire and Victoria ruled over 25% of the people in the world.
Family Victoria’s marriage to Albert was a real love story! His dead made her very sad. She wore black clothes for the rest of her life. They had nine children and thirty-seven great- grandchildren. Many of the royal families in Europe today have links to Victoria- the ’grandmother of Europe’. | <urn:uuid:84f9cb28-f7b6-435d-9f20-9538780eb9c1> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://slideplayer.com/slide/3786296/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280364.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00035-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989222 | 460 | 3.09375 | 3 |
Dear UN Committee on the Rights of the Child,
On behalf of The Foundation for a Clean Environment on Curaçao (SMOC) I like to inform you with this e-mail, nothing more, nothing less.
Curaçao is a tropical island that is part of the Dutch Kingdom. Curaçao has a lot of advantages for tourists like sun and coral reefs. Unfortunately, there is also an oil-refinery. This refinery emits tons of toxic compounds that are inhaled by the people living in the neighborhood of this refinery, including some 6.000 children and 19 schools. Due to the trade-wind, the people in this (poorest) neighborhoods inhale these toxic compounds every day and every night of the year, and have been doing this for their whole life (the refinery started operating in 1918) . Eco-RYS, a renowned Dutch research agency, conducted research to quantify the polluting activities of this refinery. For clearness’s sake, Eco-RYS did this research on request of the Curaçao government. This research elucidated that the polluting activities cause premature death to at least 18 people per year. Beside these premature deaths, thousands of people suffer several severe health complaints (an investigation by the government in 2007 showed that 85% of the people have complaints and want to visit a doctor, want to move away and are afraid). SMOC fights against the refinery and government who tolerates this pollution (no enforcement of the permits at all) and went to court many times, with success. We won many cases! The judge passed sentence on this polluting activities with reference to human rights, e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child (Art. 24). The judge decided what we have been thinking for many years: children rights are under pressure, and violated, because the children simply do not have a clean environment in which they can live and go to school. Schools that are evacuated many times a year, leaving thousands of children without a proper place for education. A bloody shame that needs international attention.
I am looking forward to your answer.
Arjan Linthorst (Board member and chemical advisor of SMOC)
Please visit our website: www.stichtingsmoc.org and facebook smoccuracao | <urn:uuid:a2251741-2af4-45e4-90f3-fefa3a383c7c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.stichtingsmoc.nl/2012/03/smoc-and-un-committee-on-the-rights-of-the-child/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570765.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808031623-20220808061623-00265.warc.gz | en | 0.963721 | 474 | 2.125 | 2 |
Letter: Who will save us?
Capitalism is the new bogeyman that allows the rich to take from the poor.
Capital is defined as "Wealth, in the form of money or property that is accumulated to form a business." I defy you to produce a 5 cent nail, a $30 computer chip or a $5 gallon of gasoline by yourself from the resources you have in your back yard. None of these things would be available at today's prices without business, capitalism and free trade. Perhaps they wouldn't exist at all. Capitalism is not the problem.
Instead, our increasing population is causing scarcities, and computers are wiping out jobs. Don't expect help from the government. It subsidizes children and poverty, giving us more of each. It subsidizes medicine -- hoping we can live longer and perhaps become immortal. They do so by piling on debt for the next generation to pay -- Keynesian economics. It works until the buck has no place left to stop.
The U.S. and other socialist countries are all heading toward the same place -- bankruptcy and payback time. And when it happens, who will we ask to save us? -- Them that brought us there.
LARRY LANG, Richland | <urn:uuid:351dba97-65d5-432c-b78f-4f104af73ef4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.tri-cityherald.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/article32174148.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280504.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00137-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952688 | 255 | 1.75 | 2 |
Ben Sira 4New American Bible (Revised Edition) (NABRE)
1 My child, do not mock the life of the poor;
do not keep needy eyes waiting.
2 Do not grieve the hungry,
nor anger the needy.
3 Do not aggravate a heart already angry,
nor delay giving to the needy.
4 A beggar’s request do not reject;
do not turn your face away from the poor.
5 From the needy do not turn your eyes;
do not give them reason to curse you.
6 If in their pain they cry out bitterly,
their Rock will hear the sound of their cry.
7 Endear yourself to the assembly;
before the city’s ruler bow your head.
8 Give a hearing to the poor,
and return their greeting with deference;
9 Deliver the oppressed from their oppressors;
right judgment should not be repugnant to you.
10 Be like a father to orphans,
and take the place of a husband to widows.
Then God will call you his child,
and he will be merciful to you and deliver you from the pit.
The Rewards of Wisdom
11 Wisdom teaches her children
and admonishes all who can understand her.
12 Those who love her love life;
those who seek her out win the Lord’s favor.
13 Those who hold her fast will attain glory,
and they shall abide in the blessing of the Lord.
14 Those who serve her serve the Holy One;
those who love her the Lord loves.
15 “Whoever obeys me will judge nations;
whoever listens to me will dwell in my inmost chambers.
16 If they remain faithful, they will possess me;
their descendants too will inherit me.
17 “I will walk with them in disguise,
and at first I will test them with trials.
Fear and dread I will bring upon them
and I will discipline them with my constraints.
When their hearts are fully with me,
18 then I will set them again on the straight path
and reveal my secrets to them.
19 But if they turn away from me, I will abandon them
and deliver them over to robbers.”
Sincerity and Justice
20 My son, watch for the right time; fear what is evil;
do not bring shame upon yourself.
21 There is a shame heavy with guilt,
and a shame that brings glory and respect.
22 Show no favoritism to your own discredit;
let no one intimidate you to your own downfall.
23 Do not refrain from speaking at the proper time,
and do not hide your wisdom;
24 For wisdom becomes known through speech,
and knowledge through the tongue’s response.
25 Never speak against the truth,
but of your own ignorance be ashamed.
26 Do not be ashamed to acknowledge your sins,
and do not struggle against a rushing stream.
27 Do not abase yourself before a fool;
do not refuse to do so before rulers.
28 Even to the death, fight for what is right,
and the Lord will do battle for you.
29 Do not be haughty in your speech,
or lazy and slack in your deeds.
30 Do not be like a lion at home,
or sly and suspicious with your servants.
31 Do not let your hand be open to receive,
but clenched when it is time to give.
New American Bible (Revised Edition) (NABRE)
Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner. | <urn:uuid:54a6e485-a38c-4b32-afbb-d88b373b236a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ben%20Sira+4&version=NABRE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281353.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00071-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.912885 | 844 | 1.859375 | 2 |
There are many scenarios that could trigger the need to seek counseling. A trained and certified counselor is equipped to help clients move through some of the most difficult chapters of their lives. Counseling can provide the participants with the tools they need to solve current problems as well as into the future when other difficult situations arise.
The therapists at Lindsey Hoskins & Associates are compassionate and knowledgeable mental health professionals who offer individual as well as family and couples counseling. As explained by an experienced Mclean VA therapist, a counseling team should include therapists who specialize in various areas so that no matter what challenges you’re facing, will be able to match you with someone who can help you.
Below are four instances in which many persons have benefited from the services offered by a trained therapist.
1. You are suffering from depression. Severe depression can affect all areas of a person’s life, and the lives of their loved ones. Depression can also negatively impact the immune system and this can leave the person vulnerable to developing serious health conditions. For many persons, depression may lead to self-harm, including suicide. Drug and alcohol addiction are often by-product behavior associated with depression. A counselor can help you turn this downward spiral around and reverse course to maintain a positive direction. By focusing on the causes and triggers of your depression, effective solutions can be identified and a strategy developed for helping you regain peace of mind.
2. You suffer from a form of mental illness. Whether it’s anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, or another type of mental illness, you are very likely experiencing significant distress. Even those who recognize that they are suffering from a serious mental illness do not always seek professional help for their condition. This is unfortunate as a trained clinical therapist can teach the individual self-care tools to recognize triggers and take proactive measures to improve their quality of life. Should the individual need prescription medications to treat their condition, the therapist can provide the appropriate referrals.
3. You are experiencing financial difficulties. Most Americans are but one paycheck away from being unable to meet all of their financial obligations. There are many possible reasons for why a person may find themselves behind in their bills. The Covid-19 shutdown has created significant challenges for Americans all across the country because they have been prevented from going to work. Regardless of why someone may have financial troubles, the resulting stress can lead to serious medical conditions, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, and other issues.
4. You are having suicidal thoughts. Whether these thoughts are in passing, or you have made detailed plans for ending your life, a therapist can help you. For many people, suicide seems to be their only option when they feel overwhelmed by one or more issues they are facing in their life. A therapist can help them see the light at the end of the tunnel and to tackle each issue with insight and an objective but caring approach.
A therapist can work with you to find clear strategies for growth and change. If you feel that you would benefit from therapy in any way, consider scheduling an appointment for a session today. | <urn:uuid:c68174f1-01e3-438c-97ba-0bed5763c9b8> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://healthcrafter.net/4-instances-when-seeing-a-counselor-may-be-beneficial/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570765.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808031623-20220808061623-00274.warc.gz | en | 0.97071 | 624 | 2.140625 | 2 |
Many Australians use proton pump inhibitors (PPIs)—such as omeprazole, esomeprazole and pantoprazole—to manage symptoms of gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD), often for extended periods of time. Common brand names include Losec, Nexium, and Somac.
Heartburn—which can be a symptom of GORD—is experienced by around one in five adults at least once each week. PPIs are among the most commonly prescribed medicines in general practice in Australia for treating symptoms of GORD.
NPS MedicineWise is encouraging people who take PPIs to have conversations with their doctor about whether stepping down (ie reducing) or stopping this treatment is appropriate for them.
Dr Jill Thistlethwaite, Medical Advisor, NPS MedicineWise, says, “GORD is diagnosed based on symptoms of reflux or heartburn that are occurring two or more times per week, or having a severe and significant impact on your life. People experiencing reflux may feel stomach acid coming up into their mouth, causing a sour, unpleasant taste. You may also have a burning chest pain or discomfort after eating, which can be a symptom of heartburn.
“As PPIs are prescribed frequently and are effective at reducing symptoms, some people may consider them as lifetime medicines. However, long-term regular PPI therapy is generally not necessary nor recommended for most people with GORD.
“After completing an initial course of daily PPI treatment, which is usually around four to eight weeks, many people can reduce and step down the amount of medicine they take and still maintain control of their symptoms. Up to 6 out of 10 people can also step down and stop taking PPIs without their symptoms returning.
“But it is really important you have a conversation with your doctor before stopping treatment to ensure this is done safely and effectively.
“In addition to talking to your doctor about whether you can reduce or stop taking PPIs, it can also be helpful to discuss possible lifestyle changes, such as losing weight, stopping smoking or reducing alcohol consumption, which could reduce symptoms or stop the need for future PPI treatment.”
The latest educational program from NPS MedicineWise—Starting, stepping down and stopping medicines—aims to equip people with evidence-based information about managing GORD, including resources to help support discussions with health professionals about safely and effectively reducing and stopping PPI treatment when appropriate. To find out more go to www.nps.org.au/ppis
For questions about medicines call Medicines Line (1300 MEDICINE or 1300 633 424), Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm AEST (excluding NSW public holidays). | <urn:uuid:93866e7d-f42c-4b68-a96d-a29e22b9a4c4> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.nps.org.au/media/taking-medicines-for-gastro-oesophageal-reflux-disease-gord | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570692.22/warc/CC-MAIN-20220807181008-20220807211008-00675.warc.gz | en | 0.950856 | 561 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Bangladeshi girl WOW Dance
Presentation of same-sex marriage laws has shifted by purview, being differently proficient through authoritative change to marriage laws, a court administering in view of sacred certifications of fairness, or by direct prevalent vote (by means of poll activity or choice). The acknowledgment of same-sex marriage is a political and social issue, furthermore a religious issue in numerous nations, and verbal confrontations keep on arising about whether individuals in same-sex connections ought to be permitted marriage or some comparable status (a common union). Same-sex marriage can give those in same-sex connections who pay their assessments with taxpayer driven organizations and make monetary requests on them equivalent to those stood to and required of those in inverse sex relational unions. Same-sex marriage additionally gives them lawful assurances, for example, legacy and healing center appearance rights. Various confidence groups far and wide backing permitting those of the same sex to wed, while numerous significant religions contradict same-sex marriage. Rivals of same-sex relational unions have contended that acknowledgment of same-sex relational unions would disintegrate religious flexibilities, undermine a privilege of youngsters to be raised by their organic mother and father or dissolve the establishment of marriage itself. | <urn:uuid:835da45e-41bb-4c0d-8d60-117daefd8195> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://newsbase.us/archives/1287 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281151.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00112-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944222 | 243 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Internships are something that should be taken seriously. University students are obliged to go through such process for them to graduate and get a diploma. Some people think that it’s just another burden considering graduating students already have so much in their table to deal with. What they don’t realize is that the school system is actually doing them a favour.
Internships can give them a ton of benefits, and here are just some of them:
First thing internships can do, is that it can open college students to bigger possibilities and opportunities. Most employers of today tend to hire college students who have gone through internships. It is because they know that these students would need less training and can handle bigger responsibilities compared to those who didn’t. Aside from that, some companies even offer work contracts to their interns once they find their performance excellent. Internships basically give students an edge.
Then, another benefit a student could get from internships is that it can help them make up their mind and feel more confident as they graduate. There is a ton of college students out there who are still not as sure of their courses as they should be. Once they get to experience what it’s like working in their respective fields in the future, it’d be easier for them to determine and decide if choosing such course really is the right path for them.
Another one they could get from going through such a process is being able to learn one’s strength and weaknesses. Internships test college students’ skills and knowledge. One would be able to figure out his/her strength and weaknesses through its supervisor’s feedback by the end of the internship period. This will help them improve their own skills through their own means. It basically prepares them better in facing their future professional jobs.
They could earn money from interning. Yes, this is correct. Companies offer a daily salary to their interns even if they are just temporary. We know that college is not cheap and it requires a great amount of money. The money they could earn from internships can be used to help fund their college tuitions. They could also use this for their allowances. There are just so many ways they could do to help themselves out financially through internship.
There are just so many benefits and advantages university college students could get from going through this process. It surely does make their future life. It would lessen the stress and hassle they’d have to go through just to get a job. Now all they have to worry about is to make sure they get in or passing the internship interview they’d have to go through to be able to intern in the different companies and institution they actually want.
College students must be prepared for this kind of stuff since just like applying for a job, they could also get denied.
It would be best for them to show enthusiasm to make them seem more interesting. They should also be able to dress properly during the interview to show professionalism. They should be able to charm the employers not just with their skills but also with their personality as well. Rest assured that if they do so, they’d get in easily.
Kerija is one of the best platform to look for internship jobs. Having this in your resume will also give one an edge over others. They just need to make sure that they perform well during the internship to guarantee a spot. This would surely make the process of getting a job less stressful and hassle.
Make sure to make your resume stand out too! Check this video out:… | <urn:uuid:603f58b3-f72c-4e0a-a161-96f4ae58d431> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://myartis.my/2020/05/04/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570868.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808152744-20220808182744-00078.warc.gz | en | 0.984946 | 724 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Anterior cruciate ligament tears are relatively common injuries to the knee of athletes. They occur most often in those who participate in sports that involve twisting and turning. They are usually caused by intact knee injuries, mainly due to sudden decelerations or after landing after a jump. It appears that women tend to have a higher incidence of anterior cruciate ligament tears than men.
The anterior cruciate ligament is a ligament located inside the knee that connects the femur to the tibia. It is considered one of the most important structures in the knee joint, as it resists anterior displacement of the tibia and rotational forces.
Rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament causes severe pain and immediate swelling in the knee. The patient feels unstable when loading the affected knee. Anterior cruciate ligament tears are usually accompanied by other injuries within the knee, such as meniscal tears, medial collateral ligament tears, bone swelling, cartilage lesions or posterior-external corner injuries.
The diagnosis is made by MRI of the knee. MRI has the advantage of providing a well-defined picture of all the anatomical structures of the knee. MRI can diagnose ruptures of the anterior cruciate ligament with an accuracy of more than 95%, as well as reveal coexisting injuries.
The anterior cruciate ligament is important for maintaining stability of the knee joint. The knee becomes unstable after an anterior cruciate ligament tear and the joint can become more damaged over time.
Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction is the surgical treatment of choice to restore stability to the knee joint. Conservative treatment (mainly physiotherapy and muscle strengthening) is preferred when the patient is over 35 years of age, has no other intra-articular injury and is not active. However, there is a higher risk of damage to the menisci and articular cartilage due to instability. Surgical treatment is preferred when the patient is under 25 years of age, has severe anterior tibial displacement, additional intradiscal damage and is very active. The majority of patients fall into these two sets of criteria, so treatment should always be evaluated on an individual basis.
Reconstruction techniques vary as do the grafts that can be used. The choice of surgical treatment can vary depending on the patient’s symptoms and their level and type of activity, i.e. whether the sport involves rotational movements. Anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction is done arthroscopically, with 2-3 small incisions around the knee. The graft to be used is chosen first, which is usually an autograft from the patient’s posterior femoral or patellar tendon. Through appropriate instruments and bone tunnels, the graft is placed into the knee and secured with sutures or absorbable pins.
Postoperatively, an appropriate physiotherapy programme is required. Return to sport should take place at 6-9 months after surgery to allow the necessary time for the graft to integrate into the bone. Complications of surgery include graft loosening, infection, arthrosis, algodystrophy and problems from the area where the graft was taken. | <urn:uuid:b60ad958-8f4d-47d5-b42a-53288d292ee1> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://drpettas.gr/en/anterior-cruciate-ligament-rupture/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570741.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808001418-20220808031418-00073.warc.gz | en | 0.922667 | 651 | 3.125 | 3 |
Microsoft, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, has taken on a unique partner – eighth grader Shubhamm Banerjee from Santa Clara, Calif.
Together, they will build the next generation of his Braille printer on the Windows operating system, which would be quite an upgrade from prototype that he built in 2013 out of Legos. It would fulfill Banerjee’s dream… to make life better for the blind.
The 2.0 version of his prototype, a lighter weight and cheaper printer named Braigo, will be developed and brought to market using Windows and the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft’s tablet. Braigo 2.0 is considered the first low-cost, internet-of-things enabled, silent and lightweight Braille printer.
On the Microsoft Windows blog, Banerjee posted, “Our relationship with Microsoft will help Braigo achieve a seamless experience for a visually impaired person who wants to use a computer at home or at the office to print documents for offline reading.”
At age 12, Banerjee started his own company called Braigo Labs (a combination of Braille and Lego). The Santa Clara, Calif. teen is the youngest entrepreneur ever to get venture-capital funding when Intel Capital invested in Braigo Labs. | <urn:uuid:2b0a88c4-6551-4f6a-be31-e88b30358f4b> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.business-opportunities.biz/2015/05/22/13-year-old-entrepreneur-teams-microsoft/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719027.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00302-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914765 | 265 | 2.625 | 3 |
A recently released three-minute film puts the spotlight on Vietnamese catfish farming practices. The footage — showing crowded, polluted growing conditions — was shot during the third week of April by a crew hired by Catfish Farmers of America.
To see the video, visit http://www.vimeo.com/11817894.
“They went straight to where the fish are being produced and processed before being sent (to the United States),” said Chip Morgan, executive vice-president of Mississippi’s Delta Council, which is calling for the USDA to ramp up inspections of seafood imports.
Despite long-time complaints, Vietnam continues to export catfish tainted by pollution and antibiotics. Morgan says video shot in 2003 shows the same fish-farming conditions captured on film just a few weeks ago. “Nothing has changed — and it isn’t going to change.”
Only 2 percent of imported seafood is inspected annually. Seeking to remedy that, the 2008 farm bill requires the USDA to begin inspecting imported seafood, a job that had been held by the Food and Drug Administration. However, for fear of igniting a trade dispute, U.S. trade representatives have prevented such inspections from taking place. A ruling on the inspections is expected soon.
“What we’re hearing is the rule that’s coming won’t be the one we most desire,” said Morgan. “But it’ll leave us with a fighting chance. What they’ll come out with is a ‘vanilla’ rule. They won’t fall on either side of the major issue: the definition of catfish.
“The family of catfish includes the Vietnamese fish (being exported to the United States). There are different types in the taxonomy of catfish. We produce channel catfish. The Vietnamese catfish, basa and tra, fall in the same family but not the same genus.
“So, the government won’t define taxonomically the catfish we’re talking about. They’ll let the U.S. farmers and the importers and lobbyists argue through the rulemaking process about which catfish should be included in the inspections.
“Obviously, we think all catfish should be included. If it doesn’t, the catfish you see on that film will continue to not be inspected.”
The most compelling argument for inspections — “and the only possible excuse you could use for not inspecting the fish on that video — is that you don’t want retaliation from the Vietnamese government. Our question is: When did we start trading food safety for trade? That’s the last straw.”
With the evidence gathered, “It’s hard for me to believe someone would consciously say, ‘We need to keep shipping in 200,000 pounds a year of (basa and tra) to sell, uninspected, to American families.’”
Beef, poultry and pork all must pass USDA inspections. Morgan says catfish needs the same scrutiny and the law should be followed.
“When are we going to stop this frenzy with trade over food safety? If we aren’t going to stop at food safety where will we stop?” | <urn:uuid:58eced2c-e9e4-43b7-8448-ad2abc775cde> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://southeastfarmpress.com/print/livestock/all-eyes-vietnamese-catfish-farming | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719155.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00333-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946659 | 687 | 2.484375 | 2 |
The Spring blooming Forsythia Bush will put early color in the garden. You can force stems into bloom for even earlier color. Read on to learn about growing and pruning a Forsythia plant.
This early blooming shrub shines like a beacon in your garden with bright yellow flowers. The Forsythia flowering bush is a very hardy bush that doesn't seem to be fussy about soil conditions.
The cheerful yellow flowers appear before the leaves, covering the bush in blossoms. Planting in full sun encourages even more flowering.
There are many varieties available from common yellow ones, to very cold hardy varieties with maroon colored leaves, dwarf ones, and even weeping varieties. Colors of yellow vary as well. (All beautiful!)
You should prune your Forsythia bush right after it has flowered. It forms the new buds for the following years flowers soon after, so if you wait to long, you will get few flowers next year. Cut out any older or dead branches at this time as well, because that will encourage the growth of new branches.
Some people shape the bush like a hedge, and still get suitable flowers, I like to let mine grow with that lovely weeping effect.
Prune hard, because the Forsythia grows incredibly fast! You'll be amazed at how much growth you get even after you prune it!
you have an old bush that doesn't produce many flowers, or none at all,
give it a really hard pruning. Watch for when other Forsythia's
bloom in your area, and do it then. | <urn:uuid:6038c3b1-4466-4956-ac25-00f51fc378b4> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.allaboutrosegardening.com/Forsythia-Bush.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280310.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00181-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948904 | 328 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Set Permissions for the Database
To enable Report Portal to write to the database that contains information needed to authenticate users, you must set the proper permissions for the database.
- On the machine where IIS is running, navigate to *PortalName*\data\users.mdb.
- Right-click the users.mdb file and select Properties.
- On the Security tab, in Groups or user names, click Users.
- In Permission for User, in the Write row, select Allow.
- Click OK and close the Properties dialog box. | <urn:uuid:4f141d4e-9ba0-42e5-883d-caecca91b917> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/data-workbench/using/report-server/install-report-portal/t-set-data-perm.html%3Flang%3Dde | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571472.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811133823-20220811163823-00678.warc.gz | en | 0.714014 | 127 | 1.78125 | 2 |
“Drink Water, Eat Fruits and Vegetables, Get Moving.” These were all lessons learned by the students of the Sangre Grande Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) and the Cunapo Roman Catholic (RC) School. Over 100 Students took part in the TTMoves School Health Bazaar hosted by the Eastern Regional Health Authority (ERHA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Health held at the Sangre Grande Civic Centre, Sukhram Street, Foster Road, Sangre Grande on October 02, 2019.
Members of the Health Education Department in an interactive session at the TTMoves School Health Bazaar as Ronald Tsoi-a-Fatt, Chief Executive Officer looks on.
Hydra Station offered free filtered water refills at the event and encouraged students to reuse and recycle their bottles instead of disposing of bottles and purchasing a new bottle daily.
The Eastern Division Community Police sensitized students about being street wise and the effect bullying have on individuals.
Students all got moving. | <urn:uuid:76cb86be-c29f-4377-98fd-e34f65f5cf79> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | http://www.erha.co.tt/ttmoves-school-health-bazaar/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571234.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811042804-20220811072804-00072.warc.gz | en | 0.951803 | 208 | 1.851563 | 2 |
The curriculum of Evangel Christian School is designed to provide a Christian education that meets the educational requirements set forth by Evangel Baptist Church. Graduation requirements meet or exceed the standards contained in the Virginia Educational Statutes.
Classes are self-contained, administered by a teacher and have a controlled student-teacher ratio. The curriculum draws upon quality materials from sources such as A BEKA Books (Pensacola Christian Schools), Bob Jones University, and others.
In some classes, books published by secular textbook companies are used. Evangel Christian School does not subscribe to any position in these textbooks that are in disagreement with a Biblical world-view.
Please take some time to explore the preschool, elementary, middle school and high school academic pages to gain a better insight into the areas that specifically relate to your child's level of education. | <urn:uuid:c2079c6f-27ef-4fd2-a032-a3de30f7360c> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.ecsdalecity.org/academics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281353.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00068-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948456 | 167 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Dassault Systèmes and Safran Enter Strategic Partnership for Additive Manufacturing
End-to-End Digital Continuity for the Additive Manufacturing of Aerospace Engine Parts
LE BOURGET (Paris Air Show), France — June 18, 2015 — Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, world leader in 3D design software, 3D Digital Mock Up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions today announced a partnership with Safran Group, a leading international high-technology group in aerospace, defense and security, to develop expertise in the virtual validation of the additive manufacturing process using Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing in other industries, uses computer-aided design, engineering, manufacturing and materials science software (CAD/CAE/CAM/CAMS) to create 3D models of parts and subsystems that are then built using successive layers of materials. The effective use of this manufacturing process in the aviation industry can enhance production times as well as product performance in terms of strength, weight and environmental impact—improvements that are impossible to obtain with traditional methods.
The partnership combines Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform with Safran’s expertise in innovative technologies, for the development of a world-class, end-to-end digital solution for additive manufacturing. This new end-to-end process will address upstream material design and downstream manufacturing processes and testing to provide digital continuity for all engineering parameters necessary for the additive manufacturing of an engine part: material science, functional specification, generative design, 3D printing optimization, multi-robotic production and certification.
“Dassault Systèmes’ long history of collaboration with Safran is now taking on a new dimension to embrace and integrate new materials and methods of engineering, production and maintenance that will significantly impact the aviation industry,” said Dominique Florack, Senior Executive Vice President, Research & Development, Dassault Systèmes. “Our 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s strategy covers all aspects of the additive manufacturing process, from material design to conceptual design, generative design to manufacturing, and certification to repair. Together with Safran, we can nurture virtual world processes for a complete approach in this field that will help revolutionize tomorrow’s manufacturing.”
“Research and technology is a fundamental part of Safran, allowing us to drive continuous improvements for safer and more environmental-friendly air travel,” said Pierre Fabre, Senior Executive Vice President R&T, Innovation, Safran. “Safran is currently leading the field in using 3D printing technology to manufacture its engines. By pooling expertise with Dassault Systèmes and its 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we can accelerate the innovation process and better meet customers' needs.”
Dassault Systèmes is attending this year’s International Paris Air Show (June 15-21), booth F183 (Hall 2B) and Chalet B 161 (by invitation only).
Safran is a leading international high-technology group with three core businesses: Aerospace (propulsion and equipment), Defence and Security. Operating worldwide, the Group has 69,000 employees and generated sales of 15.4 billion euros in 2014. Working alone or in partnership, Safran holds world or European leadership positions in its core markets. The Group invests heavily in Research & Development to meet the requirements of changing markets, including expenditures of 2 billion euros in 2014. Safran is listed on Euronext Paris and is part of the CAC40 index.
Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, provides business and people with virtual universes to imagine sustainable innovations. Its world-leading solutions transform the way products are designed, produced, and supported. Dassault Systèmes’ collaborative solutions foster social innovation, expanding possibilities for the virtual world to improve the real world. The group brings value to over 210, 000 customers of all sizes, in all industries, in more than 140 countries. For more information, visit www.3ds.com.
3DEXPERIENCE, the Compass logo and the 3DS logo, CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, ENOVIA, DELMIA, SIMULIA, GEOVIA, EXALEAD, 3D VIA, BIOVIA, NETVIBES and 3DEXCITE are registered trademarks of Dassault Systèmes or its subsidiaries in the US and/or other countries. | <urn:uuid:addaaacb-7c82-4ca8-b397-6bf79c1743e2> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.3ds.com/press-releases/single/dassault-systemes-and-safran-enter-strategic-partnership-for-additive-manufacturing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719027.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00303-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.876161 | 963 | 1.53125 | 2 |
East Timbalier Island Restoration Project
East Timbalier is a 400-acre island in LaFourche Parish, Louisiana and is part of an island chain that fronts Terrebonne/Timbalier Bay. Construction on East Timbalier was completed in December 1999 and involved the creation of emergent habitat to increase the longevity of the island using soft-structural techniques (sand placement) and hard structures (rubble mound revetment) where shoreline stabilization was needed. Almost three million cubic yards of sediment were utilized to establish a 200-foot wide dune and a 600-foot wide marsh along the length of the island. This created 170 acres of intertidal marsh and is helping to protect thousands of acres of existing fringing marsh to the north. To further stabilize the dredged sediments, 13,000 feet of sand fences and approximately 20,000 plugs of marsh grasses were added in May 2000 and June 2001 respectively. | <urn:uuid:9e567716-9b59-47fc-8ef4-484db0ab6662> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/habrest/cwppra_eti.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988717783.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183837-00076-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956065 | 192 | 2.671875 | 3 |
The international chip shortage has had a big impact on IT and knowledge facilities in every single place. At least one contributor to the shortage is the rising software of blockchain expertise, which consumes a considerable share of chip manufacturing consequently of its compute-intensive nature.
How consequential the chip shortage is perhaps and the way lengthy it would final are amongst the questions regarding IT practitioners and trade watchers alike.
Chip provide and demand
“Blockchain should be thought of as an application that runs on servers. And servers, in turn, run operating systems using microprocessor chips to provide processing power,” stated Ron Howell, software-defined WAN and Secure Access Service Edge architect for Capgemini America. There are solely so many microprocessor chips out there, they usually go to the highest bidders. Blockchain requires excessive numbers of distributed processing engines to function successfully.
“The popularity of cryptocurrency adds to the high demand for chips and contributes to the shortages we see today,” Howell stated.
While demand for semiconductors elevated 17% from 2019 to 2021, there was no commensurate improve in chip provide.
The overwhelming majority of semiconductor fabrication crops already function at about 90% of their capability to fabricate chips, which means they’ve little rapid means to extend their output, in line with current research.
Ron HowellSD-WAN and SASE architect, Capgemini America
“It is getting worse, and the effect is a slowing of the economy overall,” Howell stated. “The need for chips is expected to increase, as technologies that use vast amounts of semiconductors, like blockchain processing, cryptocurrency growth, 5G and electric vehicles, become more widespread.”
It boils down to provide and demand: There is at the moment extra demand than provide for particular microprocessor chips. Some corporations now stockpile chips in order to construct their merchandise for market.
Supply chain points
Some estimate that total provide chain constraints and shortages will final one other two years, till all the further fabrication capability comes on-line, stated Greg Schulz, founder and consulting analyst at Server StorageIO.
“All of a sudden, we needed more chips, but increasing production depended on expanding the factory, and that takes time to build,” Schulz stated.
That gradual response ripples up the provide chain, with the tools that produces the chips now in quick provide — tools that itself usually requires chips, producing a chicken-and-egg state of affairs.
Some of the disruption might be attributed on to the COVID-19 pandemic, however Schulz additionally believes there was too little funding in the sector to arrange to satisfy demand.
“The surge in all of these things, whether it is memory chips or general-purpose chips or GPUs or RISC or Arm chips — it is easy to point the blame at COVID, but COVID only exacerbated the situation,” Schulz stated. “You suddenly had more people who needed smart devices and computers, and on the production side, you had workers who couldn’t go to work.”
Although loads of chip manufacturing is automated, human involvement stays necessary.
Use circumstances for GPUs
For Chris Mattmann, chief expertise and innovation officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the greatest half of blockchain’s affect on the chip shortage is, in reality, its in depth use of GPUs. In the previous, GPUs have sometimes been reserved for complicated mathematical operations and AI processing.
“As it turns out,” Mattmann stated, “these chips also are quite useful in blockchain, since part of the design of the blockchain calls for dynamic new blocks to be written by linking the new blocks of transactions to previous blocks.”
The act of creating new blocks includes hashing and competing to seek out the finest, quickest and most resilient hash code. Hash code is pc code that capabilities as a compact illustration of a chunk of knowledge that may symbolize the new block. Nodes that discover the new hash code the quickest are rewarded with cryptocurrency, akin to Bitcoin or Ether.
Now, blockchain nodes, which energy nonfungible tokens, media and different widespread functions, more and more use these chips, driving chip consumption points alongside demand from AI and deep studying.
“Cryptocurrency mining is based on proof of work that is high computation intense and power-hungry, but mining chip design is much less complex compared to the microprocessor MPU, GPU or [Associative Processing Unit],” stated Samuel Wang, analysis vp at Gartner.
The wafer demand for cryptocurrency application-specific built-in circuit chips is “totally manageable,” at lower than 30,000 300-millimeter wafers monthly globally, Wang stated. It’s one thing that was arguably “never in shortage.”
Likewise, on the macro stage, Wang stated that blockchain operations are usually segregated from mainstream IT.
“On blockchain, there are companies specializing in the operation of data centers for handling blockchain for customers,” Wang stated. Because each PCs and knowledge facilities can function blockchain, when chip shortages hit each, the blockchain enterprise slows down.
“But I doubt blockchain was the cause of the shortage for PCs or data centers,” Wang stated.
Blockchain might be designed by one of two algorithms: proof of work (POW), which calls for energy, or proof of stake (POS), which has a decrease energy requirement.
“POS is a newer method for blockchain as it is faster, less expensive and more energy-efficient than the traditional POW used by cryptocurrency,” Wang stated. “My judgement is that more blockchains are moving toward POS; therefore, power consumption and chip demand can be minimized.” | <urn:uuid:1051362a-7d94-4dab-9fd2-731897f61dcf> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://cryptonews10.com/the-implications-of-blockchain-in-the-chip-shortage/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572286.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20220816090541-20220816120541-00268.warc.gz | en | 0.937684 | 1,203 | 2.703125 | 3 |
Historian Strathern (Napoleon in Egypt, 2008, etc.) explores the decisive influence of a ruthless Renaissance prince on both a diplomat and an artist.
Amid the shifting alliances and vulnerable kingdoms of 15th-century Italy, Cesare Borgia (1475–1507), the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, assumed unchecked power at a young age when his father put him at the head of the warring papal forces. Aided by the invading army of France’s Louis XII, Borgia was urged by his father to carve out his own power base in Romagna, and by 1500 he had duly subdued it, along with Urbino and other city states. Florence bordered this region and was essentially defenseless, so able negotiator Niccolò Machiavelli was sent as part of a three-man delegation to press for Florence’s protection. Up close, Machiavelli could observe this exemplary warrior, known for his treachery, depravity and brilliance, and the diplomat later made Borgia the subject of The Prince. As part of his effort to appease the rapacious ruler, Machiavelli offered the services of Florentine native Leonardo da Vinci, an expert military engineer as well as celebrated painter and designer. During the next eight months, da Vinci toured Borgia’s fortifications and suggested improvements, as evidenced by the notebook sketches reproduced here. At the same time, the artist/humanist was digesting the moral ramifications of aiding Borgia’s military engine and finding them deeply repugnant. Meanwhile, Machiavelli was using the experience derived from diplomatic duties in the service of purely self-interested rulers like Borgia to set forth a new “science” of statecraft. Both artist and philosopher were irreparably marked by personal contact with “humanity’s evil nature,” argues Strathern in this rigorous and scholarly yet readable study of the confluence of three major Renaissance figures.
Accessible and impressive in scope. | <urn:uuid:14183b54-617a-4356-96f2-1f5706aa5648> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-strathern/the-artist-the-philosopher-and-the-warrior/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280587.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00557-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967402 | 418 | 2.796875 | 3 |
Few people recognized how a simple ❤️ being sent via pager in the early 90s could take ? ? ? communication like??????.
But that is exactly what happen when Docomo, a pager company that was hugely popular with kids in Japan, invented a small 12×12 pixel icon that could be sent to any of its devices. Sending images with text in a world before smartphones and tablets was a revolutionary idea. Now we are beginning to see government PIOs and communications pros use these tiny pictures characters when they interact with the public.
So, when inspiration ⚡️, will you be ? or will your tweet look like ??
Did I emoji correctly? ?
I struggled for a while as I wrote this as I had to wrestle with the idea of using emoji in posts that would be sent to residents or community partners. Did I want this to be a post extolling the wonders of emoji in social media? Because there are some pretty creative things you can do when it comes to communicating via emoji. Kansas City does a great job of peppering in some emoji when they talk parks, baseball and summer fun in the city.
Today would be a good day for??? because an excessive heat warning is in effect from noon to 9 p.m. Stay cool as much as you can.
— Kansas City, MO (@KCMO) July 13, 2015
Even the White House used emoji in a presentation about millennials in the economy.
It gives your social media presence a lot more personality outside of just using text or hashtags. As governments and organizations break out of using social media as a broadcast tool and learn to use them more as social tools, emojis can be a nice way to show a little more fun side to city hall’s usually stuffy demeanor.
We are, undoubtedly, a visual society when it comes to online communication. It makes sense that we would want to use as many visual tools within our social media presence. Emojis are just one more way to accomplish that. The same way ELGL uses gifs, an emoji can add an extra layer to the conversation that can add emphasis or humor.
But that does not mean you can start using emoji for EVERY tweet. The joke can get old really quick. Chevy found this out when it issued a press release and media campaign using ONLY emoji.
What went wrong? ?
While writing, I also wondered if this article should be more about avoiding the dangers in using what is essentially slang in picture form in a venue that is typically pretty buttoned up?
Remember, using an emoji assumes that (1) you know what the emoji represents, (2) that your audience knows what it means and (3) that you both understand its context in the same way to get the point of your tweet or facebook post across successfully.
That involves a lot of assuming ? .
You don’t have to look very far to find companies and brands who used emoji for what seemed like something that was going to be a joke, but it ended up (at best) landing flat or (at worst) getting them in trouble with fans/customers.
It’s also good to know that Emoji have deep roots in Japanese culture and, thus, have some icons that allude to Japanese sexual culture that folks in the good ol’ US of A might not quite get at first. ? ?. Or if they do, they might not appreciate them on a city twitter account.
Apple itself even came under fire when they released their own emoji keyboard as many saw it as not being racially or gender inclusive. The arguments in that situation are well worth a read, especially in a broader conversation of how technology is still behind the curve when it comes to diversity in all fields. In April, Apple released another round of emoji hoping to stem some of the criticism, but it also was fraught with errors and problem.
In my opinion, these points are important to know because if you are tweeting with emoji and residents do not feel they are being accurately represented (even with something like an emoji) it can be perceived as negative or offensive.
Not rules, more like guidelines. ?
If I were to advise anyone on using emoji when it comes to social media, I would probably have you ask these five questions before posting (these, really, are the same five questions I ask myself before posting a gif or meme to our city account):
- Do you understand the image you are going to use?
- Is it plain enough that anyone would know what it is or what is happening in the emoji?
- Does the situation lend itself to this level of humor? You probably would not want to use emoji when you mayor is embroiled in a scandal or during a tense budget negotiation period.
- If misinterpreted, could it lead someone to think you are being offensive? You don’t tell bomb jokes to TSA employees, so why would you use weapon emoji in city tweets about police?
- Is it worth it? Does it really add anything to the conversation or are we just posting 10 winky faces to fill space and look cool?
Remember, using emoji at the wrong time or in the wrong way could make your PR efforts look like ?. | <urn:uuid:b5b288eb-8893-4957-a5d7-b9d7a4c37ec1> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://elgl.org/2015/07/20/%F0%9F%98%80%F0%9F%92%AC%F0%9F%92%BB-%F0%9F%8F%A0-%F0%9F%91%8D%F0%9F%8F%A1%F0%9F%92%A9/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281069.89/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00269-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959454 | 1,073 | 2.140625 | 2 |
This is the first of in a series of short posts about James Cameron's new blockbuster Avatar.
Make no mistake about it, out of the gate Avatar is a landmark science fiction film. People may argue whether it succeeds as a work of story-telling, but no one can deny that Cameron has orchestrated a combination of cutting-edge movie-making techniques to realize a vision of an alien world in a realistic and compelling way that will serve as the standard of comparison for science fiction films for years to come.
In this regard Avatar springs into the world full-blown, much as Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey did in 1968 - so different from its predecessors that it startles us, and demands we revise our expectations for the medium. Everything that came before is revealed to have been nothing more than cardboard spaceships sporting sputtering sparklers and bow-legged actors cavorting in foam-rubber monster costumes.
It's important to keep in mind that science fiction films, as much as they aspire to be movies about ideas, first and foremost strive to fabricate believable visions either of the future of our own planet or of the landscapes of others light-years away. With Avatar Cameron has triumphed by creating a marvelous new world for both his characters and his audience to inhabit.
In addition Avatar will likely establish itself as a watershed in the relentless march of cinema from its reliance on flesh-and-blood actors to the routine use of what may come to be called "synthetic" players. The melding of live action and CGI (computer generated imagery) through the use of motion-capture technologies will give way to the construction of genuinely autonomous virtual actors, informed, perhaps, by the smoky voice of Marlene Dietrich or the smoking curves of Marilyn Monroe.
So, with Avatar James Cameron has allowed us to glimpse another future world, one in which the film director has become a painter of characters, methodically composing actors from a palette of performers, some living, some dead, and some drawn solely from his or her imagination.
"Avatar" - James Cameron Dreams of Electric Actors by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com. | <urn:uuid:fc62c379-2a9d-427c-9e78-f4e856e86c47> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://blog.thoughtsarise.com/2009/12/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571097.39/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810010059-20220810040059-00270.warc.gz | en | 0.946261 | 470 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Raymond D. Gumb
We address the problem of interpreting sensor data under uncertainty, using temporal and spatial context to facilitate the identification of objects. We seek to identify the type of an object presented in an ambiguous image by reasoning about conditional probabilities and the possible movements objects can make. A conditional probability (that an object is of a certain type given that some of its properties have been recognized) is used in conflict resolution, and an object is assigned an alternative type when an impossible movement is detected. Think of a map as being a frame and a sequence of frames as being a film. The idea is to construct a consistent and plausible (coherent and highly probable) film in which an object of one type does not mysteriously change into an object of another type. | <urn:uuid:de3d52b5-768c-4c18-bcc5-9ffa511e5f5b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-021.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279650.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00440-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941031 | 153 | 2.078125 | 2 |
If you are suffering from anxiety or poor sleep, then you might want to seek relief by using essential oil aromatherapy. But what is aromatherapy? In aromatherapy, essential oils are used to activate the smell receptors that then send signals to the brain. Among different parts of the brain, the limbic system is activated too in the brain that controls our emotions. In short, the reactions of aromatherapy help us feel good.
Essential oil benefits:
- To improve sleep.
- Ease stress and anxiety.
- Help to overcome depression.
- Fights with bacteria when applied on the skin.
- Help improve the quality of life in people suffering from chronic illness.
- Help relieve knee and other joint pains.
How to use essential oil for aromatherapy
The key to getting the maximum benefits is to stay within a 15 – 60 minutes sweet spot. Remember, you shouldn’t be inhaling the oil for more than an hour. Stick to the instructions given on the bottle. You should also consult your doctor before using them if you’re suffering from any chronic illness. To gain maximum benefits, use an essential oil diffuser. Alternatively, you can drip the oil in a bowl of hot steaming water and inhale it for 10 – 15 minutes.
However, the most popular way of taking aromatherapy is through massage. During this process, you receive a massage using a few drops of essential oils. While you inhale the smell of the oil, it also gets absorbed by your skin. Each oil has its benefits. For example, some make you feel relaxed while some best smelling oils energize you.
Here is our list of best essential oils along with their aromatherapy benefits:
Lemongrass oil helps to soothe anxiety and stress. It also helps to keep the insects away. Use this therapy to see a slash down in your anxiety and stress level.
Rosemary oil can help you feel refreshed and rejuvenated mentally. A study was done on the effects of rosemary also shows that it helps to improve brain power too. So, are you in for a Rosemary aromatherapy?
Lavender is one of the best smelling essential oils. Research shows that the soothing scent of lavender helps to relax and feel an elevated mood level. Aromatherapy with lavender oil helps you to sleep better and wake up refreshed.
Cinnamon oil helps you to stay focused. Research study has revealed that drivers who had a cinnamon essential oil inhalation were more focused and less flustered.
Orange oil also helps to feel relaxed and less anxious.
If you have been feeling fatigued for some time, then a quick peppermint oil aromatherapy can help you feel relaxed. It also helps you to be more alert and boost your memory.
A blocked nose and headache? Combat your regular cold with this amazing oil. A drop or two is good enough to give you fast relief from the blocked nose while soothing your headache.
This oil is known as a mood enhancer, antidepressant, and sedative in nature. When used in aromatherapy, it is soaked by the skin and helps you to relax. It also helps to reduce elevated blood pressure.
Kalonji oil is a powerhouse of antioxidants along with a rich source of Vitamin A, D, E, and K. Regular aromatherapy massage with Kalonji oil will help to slow down the appearance of aging signs.
As we all know perhaps that lemon is refreshing. Lemon oil aromatherapy stimulates, detoxifies, and helps to calm the mind. It also has antifungal and antiseptic properties. A bonus!
What to expect in aromatherapy massage?
Although you can find aromatherapy massage in any clinic or spa nearby you, the effects may vary greatly depending upon many factors. For example, many massage specialists use different essential oils blends depending on your needs and health condition. For example, lavender oil helps in relaxation while rosemary oil helps to uplift your mood.
Remember, if you are planning to take a massage, avoid eating immediately before your massage session. Arrive in the clinic with time in hands. You need to give yourself some time to settle down before your session starts, especially if this is your first time.
We hope our guide to the best essential oils for aromatherapy will be a great help to you. Buy authentic and pure essential oil on our shelves. | <urn:uuid:ac93d376-18ab-4990-b6c9-59d6c6a024c2> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://mesmara.com/2019/11/20/10-best-essential-oils-for-aromatherapy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570879.37/warc/CC-MAIN-20220809003642-20220809033642-00671.warc.gz | en | 0.949593 | 916 | 2.03125 | 2 |
ASUS Triton 78 Reviewgotdamojo06 -
» Discuss this article (5)
When it comes to the build of the ASUS Triton 78, it has its own particular look that I have not seen before. Not only is it a single large tower that works to pull the heat off of your processor, it also has the design of two different heatsinks working together to remove as much heat as it possibly can. The Triton 78 has four heatpipes coming off of the base of the cooler that go though the array of 42 fins that fully encase a 120mm fan to suck in fresh air through one side and shoot it out the other side. This design is not something that I have seen before, and I am very curious to see how it will work. The front and back of the cooler look the same, and the sides look similar to each other; however, from the side you can see that there is a 120mm fan hidden between the two sections of the cooler. The fins are closed off on either side to keep any air from escaping or being sucked in through the sides, which could hurt the effectiveness of the cooler.
I am very curious to see what the actual fan looks like, because looking at it while it is mounted between the two sections of the heatsink makes it very difficult to see. When you pull it out, you are able to see that it is indeed a case-less fan that only contains nine fins, as well as the motor to spin them. The fan is an Everflow Technology R121225SL 120x120x25mm. The specifications of this particular fan are quite impressive, the operating voltage is 7~13.2V, while it is rated at 1500 RPMs to push about 66.55 CFM, with a static pressure of 1.42 mmH2O while operating around 30.5 decibels.
The last parts of the ASUS Triton 78 that I want to take a close look are the mounting hardware and the top of the cooler. The top of the cooler is where you are going to find out which way the fan is going to be blowing the air; this can be helpful when you are installing it in your system so that it's oriented like the other fans in your system. The mounting hardware that I am going to take a look at is the Intel type, as that is the kind of system that I am going to be installing it on. The two halves of the Intel mounting hardware are very simple to install; all you need to do is drop the four screws down through the four holes by the base of the cooler, and then hold the bracket behind the base and screw down tight - and you are done! Nice and simple installation is always good.
Well, the cooler looks pretty impressive, as does the fan that is mounted between its, two different sections. I'm curious to see what the rest of the specifications, are as well as how well the Triton 78 will be able to hold up against some of the other coolers on the market. | <urn:uuid:83aa0bcd-88bd-4e2b-a89d-fdd2e342ee23> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/asus_triton78/2.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284411.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00464-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96895 | 628 | 1.554688 | 2 |
August 3, 2004
Matt Lindsay: (202) 994-1423; email@example.com
GW RECEIVES $1.5 MILLION GRANT FROM W.M. KECK FOUNDATION TO DEVELOP INNOVATIVE NEW IN VIVO "PROTEIN MICROSCOPE"
For the First Time New Microscope Will Provide View of Proteins Interacting in Living Tissue to Help Researchers Combat Neurodegenerative Diseases
WASHINGTON - The George Washington University's Institute for Proteomics Technology and Applications (IPTA) announced today it has received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to develop a new in vivo "protein microscope" that will allow researchers for the first time to view how proteins interact in living tissue. The microscope is expected to enable researchers to identify protein targets that may advance the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and spinal muscular atrophy.
"This research has the potential to transform the field of proteomics," said John F. "Skip" Williams, University provost and vice president for health affairs. "The George Washington University is proud to be on the cutting edge of a dynamic field that has the opportunity to improve the quality of people's lives."
The research has two primary phases. First, researchers will create an in vivo "protein microscope" that provides images of protein distributions in living cells and tissues by combining a high-tech mass spectrometer and an optical microscope. Second, GW and Children's National Medical Center researchers will use the "protein microscope" to explore protein distributions in and around the neuromuscular junction in unprecedented detail.
"We thank the Keck Foundation for their support and look forward to breaking new ground in the study of the structure and function of proteins," said Donald R. Lehman, executive vice president for academic affairs. "This proposal for a 'protein microscope' is the kind of high-yield, multi-team research that is the future of the sciences not only at The George Washington University, but across the United States. We worked diligently to mold focused research groups into a cross-disciplinary team, which includes Children's National Medical Center, that will produce highly visible, unique research with the support of the Keck Foundation."
Akos Vertes, professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology, will serve as the principal investigator for the project. The broad objectives of the GW IPTA are to engage in research in developing new proteomics technology and in using that technology for proteomics research. The IPTA is an interdisciplinary research collaborative among the University's Departments of Chemistry, Biology and Physics at the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences; the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences; and the Department of Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The institute has received funding from GW's Research Enhancement Fund to seed its growth.
Based in Los Angeles, the W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late W.M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Company. The foundation's grant making is focused primarily on pioneering efforts in the areas of medical research, science and engineering. The foundation also maintains a Southern California Grant Program that provides support in the areas of civic and community services with a special emphasis on children.
For more information about the W.M. Keck Foundation, visit www.wmkeck.org.
For more information about the GW IPTA, visit www.bioinformatics.gwu.edu/academics/proteininstitute.php.
For more news about GW, visit the GW News Center at www.gwnewscenter.org.
- GW - | <urn:uuid:930d88dc-cca4-4849-b469-9db90a21879f> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www2.gwu.edu/~media/pressrelease.cfm?ann_id=12629 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00499-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.926769 | 788 | 2.125 | 2 |
Fount · Identify any web font you see. Tagxedo donne des formes à vos nuages de tags Soyouneedatypeface.jpg (Image JPEG, 1983x1402 pixels) - Redimens. Tools and Resources to Improve your Typography on the Web. 4th February, 2010 Tom Kenny Articles Typography on the web has previously been confined to a set of web-safe fonts due to their dependance of being on every computer but now that has changed.
It’s one of the most satisfying and rewarding aspects of web design when you get it right but can also be one of the most difficult to do so. Here are some tools, resources and free fonts to help you on your quest for quality typography. Font Embedding Font embedding has become the saviour of typography on the web. 20 Useful Typography Tools. Typography is a crucial component of a design.
When used effectively, it sets the mood and solicits emotion about the design. Working with typography can be challenging, but fortunately, there is a plethora of free tools on the web that can help you work with type. In this article, you’ll find 20 tools for working with typography. You’ll find an assortment of tools that’ll help you with testing, identifying, sizing, and even making, fonts. Wp-Typography. | <urn:uuid:2207a879-4531-49e9-9e7c-181f10f1fc87> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.pearltrees.com/mattgio/tools-typo/id1383280 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719677.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00561-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903452 | 287 | 1.960938 | 2 |
"Bírót nem festek."
Translation:I am not painting a judge.
10 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
This is a useful phrase in Hungarian? Here we don't paint judges yet we do occasionally frame them...
thanks! i guess i'm still a bit confused as to why/when the indefinate article 'egy' gets dropped. seems to generally get dropped for the plural, certainly when speaking categorically. but in singular situation like this one, its dissapearance seems mysterious. granted i've read the hungarian is not as demanding of articles as English.
I think it helps to remember that egy actually means "one". A lack of an article gives it a more general meaning and/or refers to "one or more".
On Hungarian being less demanding: that might be true for egy, that it's not used as often as the English "a", but the Hungarian a is much more used than the English "the". It appears in pretty much anything that's definite: "This woman" - "Ez a nő." | <urn:uuid:40aaec8e-29d9-438c-a49d-28542dbc2eec> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/16637637/B%C3%ADr%C3%B3t-nem-festek | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570871.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808183040-20220808213040-00266.warc.gz | en | 0.96126 | 229 | 2.046875 | 2 |
The pay bill is a significant part of public sector budgets and a halt in annual rises would reduce pressure to cut jobs. The latest Labour Market Outlook survey from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and KPMG shows that public sector pay is starting to freeze.
The survey finds that 1 in 5 public sector employers have frozen pay awards for the time being, identical to the proportion of private sector employers currently freezing staff pay. A further 6 per cent of public sector employers are deferring pay decisions until later in the year, only slightly fewer than the 10 per cent of private sector employers making deferrals.
Looking forward to the next 12 months, employers on balance expect pay increases in 2010 to be lower than this year. The recent inflation figures show that inflation is currently at -1.4% on the Retail Prices Index measure which is that most commonly used as a ‘cost of living’ benchmark in pay settlements. This confirmation that inflation remains in negative territory will effectively mean a rise in workers’ real living standards even if they are subject to a pay freeze.
Alan Downey, Partner and Head of Public Sector at KPMG, says: “Up to now, the private sector has borne the brunt of the recession, but financial pressure is starting to build in the public sector. Salaries represent a sizeable proportion of total public expenditure, and it is not surprising that employers are starting to squeeze the pay bill. While public servants may not welcome this move, the good news is that it should reduce the number of job losses that will be required.” | <urn:uuid:234ebd1d-a033-4703-8aee-c96aead8a5c5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.publicnet.co.uk/news/2009/08/20/fewer-public-sector-job-cuts-likely-as-pay-freezes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282926.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00402-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950386 | 320 | 1.75 | 2 |
The members of the Jewish Community of Estonia meet often, socialize a lot and spend a considerable amount of time together. They can participate in any programmes and projects of the Community and are eligible for a variety of benefits.
Membership of the Jewish Community of Estonia can be held by private individuals, Jewish or of Jewish origin, who are 13 or older, live in the Republic of Estonia and recognise the effective Charter of the organisation.
JCE members aged below 18 do not have the casting vote, cannot participate in elections and cannot be elected to the governing and supervising bodies of the JCE. JCE membership can also be held by a legal entity provided that its operation purposes and membership principles under its articles of association are consistent with the Charter of the Jewish Community of Estonia.
Admission to the membership of the JCE is granted on a case-by-case basis, following a personal application.
JCE members are to adhere to the Charter, pay regular membership fees, be actively involved in one of the JCE’s organisations where possible and contribute to the consolidation of JCE members. | <urn:uuid:ceebe236-1491-4ed5-bea8-6994a15a5d72> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://jewish.ee/membership/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571692.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812105810-20220812135810-00070.warc.gz | en | 0.952685 | 224 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Exploring New Uses for Rich Internet Applications for Education
About This Episode
Kellen Maicher from Purdue University demonstrates the development of several educational AIR applications that have resulted from integrating Flash, AIR, and Flex into the existing curriculum. Learn about the evolution of course material from primarily Flash-based content to the integration of other aspects of the Flash platform including AIR, Flex, and other technologies from the Adobe line of products. See demonstrations of various AIR applications developed by students including a 3D information visualization program, a multi-touch application for collaborative design, and a mixed reality video chat system. | <urn:uuid:b4bf0fac-72b3-498d-b3b5-03333044d85a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://tv.adobe.com/en/watch/adobe-education-leaders/exploring-new-uses-for-rich-internet-applications-for-education/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280504.74/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00143-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904844 | 119 | 2.34375 | 2 |
As fellow CNET blogger Elizabeth Armstrong Moore, a recent survey by researchers at Iowa State University found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth are more likely to experience cyberbullying than their heterosexual counterparts.
The survey found that 54 percent of LGBT youth reported having been cyberbullied within the past 30 days.
Study coauthor Warren Blumenfeld, an associate professor at Iowa State, pointed out during an interview that much of the bullying is taking place in chat rooms but also on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Many of the young people interviewed want to see these sites employ software and human monitoring "to delete messages that might be considered offensive," Blumenfeld said.
He also said that young people themselves can play a major role in combating bullying. "This is a youth leadership issue," he said in the podcast. Young people "want to see more training developed so that the peer leaders in the schools can be the ones who can act as positive role models to interrupt this kind of behavior in the schools and within the communities and...for the youths themselves to take more responsibility." | <urn:uuid:89ad6ed9-8206-4fc7-bfc2-a0c41d394ce8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.cnet.com/news/lgbt-researcher-calls-for-action-to-combat-cyberbullying-podcast/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282935.68/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00237-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973531 | 227 | 2.96875 | 3 |
The Internet changes so fast that even the stories from a few years back sounds like coming out of a history book; it quickly becomes a matter of “archaeology.” If you are millennial, you probably have been through the evolution of the early days of the Internet; much of it is similar for all of us, then there are the variations that comes from our individual exposures to technology over the last few decades. Add your stories in the comments!
The first computer I extensively used had a 256 megahertz Intel Pentium-1 processor with 32mb RAM and a 4gb hard disk back in 1997, it was my friend’s. I saved time everyday to visit their house to play with that machine. It made real noise while turning on, sssrrrhh whirrree, ghrrring ghrraang, crrrank, crrink—that noise sounded like euphoria. I developed a humane relationship with this machine as I could sense its happiness and pain as it kept making those noises.
I never had a computer of my own until 2007, I got one when I was busy working on my undergraduate thesis project. I bought a desktop computer with Pentium D processor, the first true dual core processor from Intel, back then it felt like blazing fast, beating anything else. I quickly had to move my several hundred thousand square feet masterplan project from pencil and pen to CAD, 3D and CG. Surprisingly or not, I bought that computer using the money I got as remuneration for making a website!
Yeah, I learned to code, CAD and CG several years before I owned a computer. The same reason, I couldn’t wait for the Internet to become more “device independent” and cloud based, way before the word “cloud” was probably coined. I was waiting for everything to go online, even the operating systems, softwares and entire file systems back in the late nineties, so that I never had to own a computer.
That probably also influenced my eagerness for adapting, comprehending and building new technologies, primarily for my own nomatic digital life. I wanted everything everywhere readily available as soon as I logged in to the Internet no matter which computer I am using. I expected something like Google Doc to exist back in 1998, thinking if two computers are connected over a network, why can’t we edit a Word document simultaneously, a simple thought—that took decades to become a reality. This line of thought is a byproduct advantage of not having a computer or any personal computing device. I always wanted to remain “device independent,” I still do. I can throw away any device I own, and resume working in full throttle within fifteen minutes.
Over the time, there are some tools and services I used that had some major impact on the way I perceive technology, and probably also the way technology has evolved overall for everyone. Here are some of the important ones from the archaeology as I see it:
Before all the web-mails got popular Eudora was the go to desktop email client for Windows. My first experience of sending an email was to my brothers then living in Bangalore, from a local shop in Rajshahi that offered sending and receiving emails for ৳25 per email, ৳10 for printing a received email. I am talking 1997 or so. The shop used to call our home landline when a new email came. I used to sit down next to the computer guy who typed in the email for me, he wouldn’t let me type 🙄
Much of my early days of coding, website building and maintenance were done from neighbourhood cyber cafes. When they first opened in Dhaka or Rajshahi it used to be 60 taka per hour for about 16kbps or less speed. Most of the places I vividly remember probably doesn’t exist anymore—Chartered Computers–Zero Point Rajshahi, Cafe Tu Tu Tango–Bashiruddin Road, Kalabagan, these two three cyber cafes in Nurjahan Road, Mohammadpur; significant times of my life have gone into the cubicles of these places.
When I was still trying to figure out how the URL structure, domain name etc work, Geocities came with the offer of 5mb free hosting space, they soon increased it to 15mb. I quickly wrote some html pages, uploaded to test, bam it worked! My first website, I can’t remember the name, but it was geocities.com/tauheed or something like that. Then Yahoo acquired Geocities, increased the hosting space to 30mb. I started using/abusing it as a cloud based file hosting that replaced my necessity and obsession of carrying floppy disks in my shirt’s pockets; this was probably between the late nineties to 2001. It was so fascinating to tell someone a URL to download something instead of giving them a floppy that kept flopping, breaking miserably at the most crucial times.
The Internet Relay Chat rooms were the big hype of Internet during the late nineties, early two thousands. IRC connected the world over random anonymous conversations and theme based chat rooms. There was no need for using real names, nobody did, everyone had an Internet nickname for IRC use.
The whole world was suddenly finding each other over random IRC chat rooms. I still cherish its “un-intelligent” randomness, connections that are not manipulated by any algorithm or personal preference. I made real friends completely randomly over IRC, people I would have otherwise never met.
One of the neatly moderated Bangladeshi IRC channels was BanglaCafe. BanglaCafe started their own email service, independently hosted IRC servers in Bangladesh, probably the first and biggest of this sort.
LifeLessPeople (L2P) and other bulletin boards
Bulletin boards or online discussion forums were probably the earliest versions of social media as we know it now. Much of the early forums were built on PHPBB or VBulletin open-source script packages that had some standard looks and facilities. Bulletin boards were our Reddit or Facebook.
I was a regular at this bulletin board called LifeLessPeople. They started this brilliant “point by writing” system, where if you write something in the forum you get points based on how long you wrote, how important the topic was etc. Later, you can buy various things using those points, including dot com domains and website hosting space.
My first real website was hosted on this L2P server, back in the days (2001–2006ish), they were highly regarded as the best Linux–Apache–PHP servers on the Internet that “money can not buy,” they only gave the hosting to those who were active in their bulletin board. I reached the threshold of 600 points to get a free hosting account, that was the day probably ArchSociety.com actually took off with a Russian domain archsociety.com.ru that I got free from L2P along with the hosting space. I learned so many things from this forum, and made many friends!
Orkut is one of the early glimpses of what social media can become. Orkut showed the way. Orkut groups played a big role in the propagation of all other projects that I was doing during the early 2000s. ArchSociety’s first major boost in the number of international users probably came from the architecture related niche groups inside Orkut in 2004-2007.
The Early WordPress and The BrainWitness
The first WordPress I installed on a server was WP 0.0.3 version, probably in 2003. I loved the attitude of the developers and the way they highlighted the “Code Is Poetry” slogan. I closely followed the development of the platform. There were several other very promising blogging focused cms back then, like TypePad. A whole new vocabulary was added to the technology sphere, ping back, track back, technorati listing, rss syndication—blogging became a vast new territory.
During this time multi-user blog was yet to be popular as a concept. I made an independently hosted personal blog called The Brainwitness, run on WordPress engine, it eventually turned out to be a “multi-author blog,” since a few of my friends also started writing there. I made real friends through Brainwitness’s comments section who later also joined as authors. BrainWitness had to be shutdown as it got into a big mess of personal relations over some blog posts. Sadly, I can not find its database or file backup.
I loved the era of “writing for the Internet,” writing for the public and the people of the world. Almost everything that I did online—was public. Each line of text I put up on a bulletin board or a blog meant something, it felt like I am contributing something to the global pull of information on the Internet—unlike today’s social media.
The Messengers: Yahoo, MSN, ICQ
Yahoo Messenger was immensely popular, while using MSN and ICQ was “cool.” I loved MSN for its design and the animated emojis. ICQ was neat, probably faster to connect and was more reliable over slow Internet connections.
The first time I went “live” on a camera from a mobile phone was with Qik. Qik quickly created a dedicated permanent URL for each user where they can live-stream, and the streams were archived for future viewing. It was very easy just to share that simple memorable URL—something like qik.com/yourname, and everyone can tune into your live streaming.
I went live for the first time from the Culver City area in greater Los Angeles to show my followers the architecture by Eric Owen Moss, from a Nokia E71 phone. Later, the next day, I was out with a bicycle in Santa Monica, I was staying two blocks away from Frank Gahry’s residence, I opened my Qik live streaming for a paparazzi video of Gehry’s odd house in the neighbourhood, followed by the beach and the pier. It was 2010, a decade ago, on a Google Nexus One phone, one of the earliest specimens of Android phones.
Both the E71 and the Nexus One I got for free from Nokia and Google at TED Conference in Long Beach, my entry devices to the smartphone era.
It was the go-to chat application for long. Fring allowed aggregating multiple messengers together, it brought MSN, Yahoo, Skype all in one list with voice and video calling. I used Fring on Nokia phones and later on Android—probably from 2008 to 2012ish. The mobile data was not as fast, yet calls over Fring became popular, and it worked great.
Twitter over SMS
Twitter became popular primarily because of its sms portability. You could tweet by sending sms, and receive sms from people or hash tags you follow as they tweet. You don’t have to have the Internet in your phone to use Twitter! Probably that was an important reason for Twitter to restrict the length of tweets to a single sms size, 160 characters.
I signed up for Twitter in 2009, the sms based Tweeting was still quite alive back then. I remember we used Twitter for disbursing group texts easily, since anyone following a specific hash tag would receive an sms for free, we used this hack to organise a trip in California with a bunch of friends.
The Nokia Ecosystem
Many services tried to build a complete ecosystem of services, starting with Yahoo, MSN, Google—Nokia was not falling behind either. Since Nokia was dominating the semi-smart mobile phone market with the Simbian OS, they developed a wide network of services, like contacts, calendars, maps etc that synced across Nokia devices and also had browser based web interfaces.
My first synced Contact book was on Nokia platform. I loved the way it automatically synchronised all my contacts in new phones, and made it accessible, downloadable, portable over computer browsers, back in 2005–2009ish.
Google used to accept Nokia portability, I synced my Nokia contacts with Gmail when Gmail first came into existence.
Nokia had extensive plans to take over everything under their umbrella. Map was one of their major focuses. I was selected as part of a beta testing program for one of their yet-to-be-released application for mobile phones, it was a Map based blogging app. It could easily record and plug in notes, blog posts, photos, GPS paths on a map as you travel, with a public page that you can opt for sharing easily. It was a fantastic travelogue app concept. They gave me a Nokia C6 phone for free to test the app with. Nokia died before the app could be launched to public.
Using a cellphones as modem over bluetooth
There was no real broadband connection in Dhaka for long. I used my Nokia E71 and later Google Nexus One as modem for using mobile data over Bluetooth tethered to my MacBook or my desktop computer. Grameenphone had a true unlimited EDGE pack for most probably ৳1,200 monthly, that was my go to deal, it was way faster than the available so-called broadband connections in the neighbourhood. The EDGE connection clocked at about 256kbps in 2009.
Technology Is Developing Exponentially—Umm Not really!
The way I see it—it is not; technology is not developing as fast as we often think it is. Much of the Internet is still based on the original protocols set in place in the late eighties and early nineties. Email for example, is still in use the same way with zero improvement in efficiency or security over the last 3–4 decades, other than some band-aid solutions like SPF, DKIM, DMARK etc. Collaborative work is still in infancy, still stuck in browsers. There is no platform-independent application-environment where high performance complex softwares can thrive in the cloud; Java Applet and Flash tried it, and failed. There is no better replacement yet that can take a complex software online. Google Docs, Sheets etcetera are fantastic, yet quite primitive to be honest.
There is no sign of other parts of the computer going to the cloud either, the operating systems are still pretty much in the local disks.
Much of the idea of “cloud computing” is yet to go that far even after two decades of progress, while the phrase is changing its meaning gradually, it now focuses more on servers and CDNs rather than individual collaborations. Still collaborating on a simple video editing project or a graphic design work on a computer is a nightmare, there is no editing tool that works well over the Internet, whereas video editing and other design works are tasks that require frequent feedback and collaboration. Meanwhile, softwares as complex as ArchiCAD BIM had a realtime collaboration service back in 2008! We designed a project where my colleagues were assigned to design and model different zones and floors of the same building’s virtual model over the LAN, everyone worked realtime in 3D and drawings in the same file.
There is almost no tech innovation inside the mighty social media industry, all that there is are minor tweaks here and there in user interfaces and experiences, no major leap in technology per se, the whole thing is still pretty much the same as it was back in early 2000s.
Maps and other location based technology have seen some big improvements. Everything else is falling behind, the progress is disappointing. The Internet and Computer technology did not go to the level we envisioned it would—back in the early two thousands. We need to stop overselling and exaggerating the progress, and admit the fact that we still can’t figure out the encryption for a group video call. And the fact that there is almost nothing that i can do on the Internet that I couldn’t two decades ago—nothing. | <urn:uuid:6fbdeccd-314d-4a6b-88b6-b9a99f77d397> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://tauheed.online/archaeology-of-internet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571584.72/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812045352-20220812075352-00669.warc.gz | en | 0.967639 | 3,355 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Russians are less dream of Moscow and St. Petersburg : the crisis has shown that it is cheaper to live in the periphery
Fewer Russians are tempted metropolitan life and prefer other towns or rural areas.On this trend, according to a survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) in 140 settlements of 46 regions of the country.Sociologists have tried to find out where the Russians see the perfect location for their children.Fewer and fewer Russians are tempted metropolitan life and prefer other towns or rural areas.On this trend, according to a survey conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) in 140 settlements of 46 regions of the country.Sociologists have tried to find out where the Russians see the perfect location for their children.
Number of choosing life in Moscow and St Petersburg has fallen compared to previous years.If in 2006 for living arrangements in the "heart" of the country expressed 19% of respondents now - only 16% and 9% respectively.
At the same citizens do not give up the advantages of the big cities, in principle, however, make a reservation, so that
At the same time, increasing the percentage of Russians who are considering as an ideal residence for their children small towns.Compared to 2006 their number has increased by 6% - from 20 to 26.
"These figures reflect two major trends," - said in an interview with "Vremya Novostei" VTsIOM Director General Valery Fyodorov.The first reason for the decline in popularity of two major metropolises of the country Fedorov welfare and overall economic growth is both capitals.
"The second, more recent trend is linked to the crisis - continues to Fedorov -. It is a strong blow not the boonies, and in Moscow and St. Petersburg Accordingly, guided by considerations about the possibility of career and financial growth, respondents preferred to other cities.".
Moreover, many Russians today do not feel hopeless and life in the villages.According to the study, over three years, the number of people who want their children to become rural residents has doubled, reaching 12%.
At the same preferences of the place of residence influences the level of education.According to VTsIOM, the higher it is, the more Russians want to see their children Muscovites (24% vs. 6% highly uneducated) and St. Petersburg (11% vs. 5%, respectively).
However, a small number of respondents no matter the level of education, or from welfare dream of their children have gone abroad.Fedorov said that this rate is always hovering in the range of 9-11%."What changes is little, is not due to economic circumstances, and with the mindset - explains the general director of VTsIOM -. Some regardless of the position in the society there is a setting that we can not build a real life, so they see the future of their children only abroad". | <urn:uuid:e5261b16-027d-44ad-a3ca-ce58cdd890cd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://wildtipsy.com/en/pages/1389716 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279169.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00212-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951139 | 611 | 1.8125 | 2 |
iOS 10 is finally out—and now is the time to start learning how to make apps with Apple’s latest mobile operating system. The following iOS 10 Projects course is on sale for 55% off in our Deals Store, for $45 USD.
What you’ll get is lifetime access to a course filled with 77 lectures and 10.5 hours of content, available anytime of the day. You’ll learn to master the new APIs in iOS 10, through seven projects.
- Access 77 lectures & 10.5 hours of content 24/7
- Create a Rich Media Photo Album using iOS 10’s voice transcription & search functionality
- Build a Group Scheduling app that integrates w/ Messages
- Integrate a Ride-Sharing app w/ SiriKit for voice activation
- Design an iOS 10 Lock Screen Widget that helps language learners memorize new vocabulary
- Create a Daily Alarm Planner using the new UserNotifications framework
- Code your own Board Game that implements an AI opponent, using the new GKMonteCarloStrategist from GameplayKit
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Stop trying to figure things out on your own, while struggling to grasp new concepts. Have this complete course show you every step of the way, in complete detail.
Click here to jump on the iOS 10 Projects Course while it’s still available. | <urn:uuid:e12cb07f-9f2b-4126-acb2-239d64cb9092> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/deals/ios-10-projects-course-deal/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284405.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00043-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.840935 | 299 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Social Media Risks
Most young people spend a large part of their day engaging on one or more social media platforms. However, research is showing that social media can also have a very negative affect on young people’s mental health.
According to the 2016 SA Social Media Landscape study, it was discovered that in South Africa there are:
Social media plays a major part in our everyday lives, and most young people spend a large part of their day engaging on one or more social media platforms.
Social media can have many positive aspects such as:
However, research is showing more and more that social media can also have a very negative affect on young people’s mental health. The #StatusOfMind survey, published by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society for Public Health, found that Instagram is the worst social media network for mental health and well-being.
How social media associates with mental illness
The social media site was associated with high levels of anxiety, depression, bullying and the ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO).
Another study in the United Kingdom of Facebook and Twitter users found that 62% of social media users reported feeling inadequate and 60% reported feelings of jealousy from comparing themselves to other users. The study also found that these negative feelings can lead to depression.
As we continue to use more and more social media, cyberbullying and harassment also increase. Just like physical bullying, cyber or online bullying: | <urn:uuid:7d3acae3-b7a8-4f4e-8374-7f98ff42d688> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.safmh.org/social-media-risks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572089.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20220814234405-20220815024405-00071.warc.gz | en | 0.95335 | 299 | 3.375 | 3 |
When your child is hospitalized, you want to understand exactly what’s happening and know that your child is in good hands. If your child needs to stay in the hospital, Nemours’ board-certified pediatric hospitalists and inpatient hospital care nurses are here to manage your child’s inpatient hospital care from admission through discharge.
Different from primary care physicians or pediatric specialists who have private practices and admitting privileges at various hospitals, pediatric hospitalists are completely devoted to caring for hospitalized infants, children and teens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Pediatric hospitalists coordinate your child’s care and share information, treatment plans and results using the latest in electronic health record technology. Working closely with you and your child’s specialists, our inpatient hospital care teams are here to help your child get back home as soon as possible.
Nemours Pediatric Hospitalists
During your child’s hospital stay, a Nemours pediatric hospitalist may serve as your child’s “attending physician” overseeing your child’s care, while also providing careful coordination of services and communication with your referring or primary care physician, as well as any other specialists your child may need.
Nemours' pediatric hospitalists and hospital care nurses treat hospitalized children with medical problems associated with chronic (ongoing) conditions and illnesses such as:
- gastroenteritis (a virus that’s also called the “stomach flu”)
- infections (cellulitis, pneumonia or kidney infections)
- unexplained abdominal pain
- persistent headaches
Here When and Where You Need Us
Our pediatric hospitalists are on staff at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., and Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando. And, thanks to partnerships with hospitals in major cities in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, you can get the same Nemours specialty pediatric hospital care closer to home.
- Bhandary, Sagar R. , MD
- Consolini, Deborah M. , MD
- Fingado, Emily , MD
- Fow, Fred A. , MD
- Fox, Michael D. , MD
- Jones, Chalanda E. , MD
- Leffler, Maureen G. , DO, MPH
- Levy, Carly D. , MD
- Malatack, J. Jeffrey , MD
- Petrini, Maria Eugenia , MD
- Phan, Thao-Ly T. , MD, MPH
- Poshoghlian, Hagop , MD
- Pressel, David M. , MD
- Raab, Christopher P. , MD
- Rappaport, David I. , MD
- Stubblefield, Samuel C. , MD
In cooperation with your child's primary physician, the pediatric hospitalists at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children are here to coordinate your child’s ongoing inpatient hospital care and communication with specialists, nurses, social workers, and other health care providers your child may see during a hospital stay.
Available around-the-clock, we may serve as the attending physician (overseeing your child’s care) or work in partnership with your attending physician/pediatric specialist. Our job is to:
- evaluate and treat pediatric emergencies
- provide newborn examinations
- care for our littlest patients in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)
- keep your primary care physician informed during and after your stay
- consult with Nemours pediatric specialists in more than 30 medical specialties
- help you identify a primary care physician if you don’t have one
- schedule appropriate follow-up care when required
- coordinate outpatient care with specialists, if needed
Nemours’ pediatric hospitalists also provide expert care after surgery for children with complex medical conditions and can help with sedation for procedures that don’t require the operating room.
Whatever brings your child to us for an overnight stay (or many), know that we do whatever it takes to give you and your child top-quality, coordinated inpatient hospital care from the time you check in until you’re ready to head back home. | <urn:uuid:e6bd485c-6ee4-4d23-806a-522b33bc1064> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.nemours.org/service/medical/inpatienthospitalcare.html?location=naidhc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560283689.98/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095123-00350-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.908775 | 883 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Last Report on the Miracles of Little No Horse
Last Report On The Miracles Of No Horse: A Review of the Literature The focal character in this novel had many different characters throughout this touching narrative. Though the main focus was on the priest, Father Damien Modeste, he began and was actually a woman. Beginning as a young girl, Agnes Vogel nee DeWitt, was also known as former Sister Cecilia of a convent in Wisconsin, widow of Berndt Vogel and lover of the piano and, more specifically, the Polish music composer, Chopin.
I am going to focus on her particular love of music, piano playing and her interest in Chopin which seemed to have caused many therapeutic effects on her. Being a pianist myself, I was compelled to ask the question throughout the book, how can music have such an impact and truly influence the consciousness and perception of a person like we see in DeWitt’s life story? I would like to conclude by paralleling this to my own experience using this instrument. Agnes Vogel DeWitt This novel begins with Agnes as young girl, around the age of eighteen who seems to be searching for her purpose and place in this world.
We aren’t told much of her family or background but it seems that she was one is need. This is when she ends up at her future lover, Berndt Vogel’s barn hungry and exhausted. Even in these moments of desperation she is thinking of finding a piano to play (Erdrich 19). Throughout the book when Agnes is facing difficult times and moments of utter desperation, we see her turn to Chopin, her music, her piano. After a series of tragedies with a flood, Agnes becomes Father Damien Modeste by placing his clothes on her.
From this time forward Agnes/Father Damien lives the life of a priest giving of herself to a Native tribe. She is shown to mix the cultures and learn so much from them (Erdrich 276). But throughout this time and the remainder of her life she is also secretly torn apart inside with her own identity. This is where music seems to come in and play a major role for her, helping her to deal with life. It seems that her religious background in Catholicism caused her to constantly be at war within herself over her love of this instrument.
She saw the piano as something that she thought God would disapprove of in her life. Something that she even thought would bring her to hell. When the devil appeared to her in the form of a dog, the author significantly had the dog speaking to her on top of the piano. The dog tries discouraging her, telling her that she wants to die. She responds tiredly asking if there is a “good piano in hell” and the dog responds that the “devil owns all of the finest makers of musical instruments” (Erdrich 309).
This gives the reader a sense of understanding that Agnes actually had a guilt and shame associated with her enjoyment of music. If Agnes could have only better understood the nature of music and had a proper perception of how it possessed a positive aspect on a person and could actually be used to help strengthen her spirit as well as others she could’ve felt even more liberated. Her ability to performing music was given to her as a beautiful gift and was used as an asset to others in a positive way.
This could and should be seen as something which God looks down upon favorably. Music: Therapeutic Effects Throughout History “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased. Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. Raze out the written troubles of the brain, And with some sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the full bosom of that perilous stuff, Which weighs upon the heart… ” – Macbeth, reflecting on music, In Macbeth, Shakespeare (Campbell 121) Throughout history, music has been understood and used in various ways for therapeutic purposes.
Consider for instance that the very word “music” derives from the Greek Muses, which were nine goddesses of the fine arts and sciences, all of which they saw were divinely inspired to bring love, pleasure, passion, heavenly sound, harmony etc (Schneck 23). In the book, Music Therapy, Edward Podolsky goes into depth on the historical origins of music being used and regarded therapeutically; “The Egyptians called music the “physic of the soul,” the Persians, who regarded music as an expression of the good principle Ohura-Mazda, are said to have cured various illnesses by the sound of the lute.
The ancient Hebrews employed music in several recorded cases of physical and mental illness. ” The Chinese thinker and social philosopher named Confucius “was a great lover of music; it was his belief that music was a definite aid to harmonious living. ” There were also Plato and Aristotle who regarded music very highly. Plato expressed in The Republic his belief that “health in mind and body could be obtained through music. ” (Podolsky). Shamanism has been studied in depth with the connection to use of music therapeutically (Wigram 17).
Music therapy in the United States began in the late 18th century. However, using music as a healing medium dates back to ancient times (MAM). One could continue to go on and on with so many historical examples of the therapeutic use of music on the human body. But from the humble beginnings of music, the art of composing has continued to grow drastically over time. Today there is much research and data proving scientifically that music is even more recognized for its benefits and even detriment on the physiological and psychological systems of the body (Cook).
Research recently, after about 250 years of separation, is once again uniting medicine, health psychology and music therapy together realizing that man is not merely a ‘machine’, but a complex, bio-psycho-social being: a unity of body mind and spirit and music has a comprehensive effect and meaning on all levels. We should look to our past, seeing and learning from these ancient cultures which have used resources such as music who have had understanding and knowledge of the healthy benefits it possesses. Benefits of Music
Whether it is inside the human body or outside, nature – as expressed through the laws of physics – works the same way. One way which nature is expressed is through music. Research has shown that music can and does influence central physiological variables like our blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, EEG measurements, body temperature and galvanic skin response. Music influences immune and endocrine function. The existing research literature shows growing knowledge of how music can ameliorate pain, anxiety, nausea, fatigue and depression (Myskja A).
There are ample testimonies and heart-warming stories of people being both physically and mentally healed with the use of music. The American Medical Association first mentioned music therapy in 1914 in a journal letter by a doctor who reported using a phonograph for “calming and distracting patients” during surgical procedures and several years later, the founder of the National Therapeutic Society predicted that “When the therapeutic value of music is understood and appreciated, it will be considered as necessary in the treatment of disease as air, water and food” (Campbell 122).
Musical Therapist, Lawrence Walters said that “Music very definitely produces measurable effects on the brain and mind. It is quite logical to maintain that when measurable results are produced on the brain, the mind is also in some way influenced” (Walters 36). Psychiatrists who have been using music to treat emotional disorders have also found additional benefits including having the ability of “relieving inner tensions and conflicts that give rise to the depressive mood”(Herman 115). Effects on Agnes DeWitt Agnes DeWitt’s strong love for music, for the piano, helped her to feel relief in moments of distress and unrest.
Her love for the Polish composer Chopin in particular was used to bring about this liberation in her. DeWitt’s character in the novel reveals that playing this instrument has significant effects on her. She is shown playing it so much that it brought about even a certain serenity and detachment from reality, even to the point of a sexual ecstasy. How can this all be achieved? It is unclear as to how this in particular can happen, but what is clear and even scientific that music does have a large impact on the body, affecting many of the major systems in our body.
DeWitt’s musical experience seemed to bring her into a realm of peace, serenity, and a sense of being “out of this world”. Erdrich explained her playing as though she was captivating, playing with the “utmost sincerity,” causing a sister listening nearby to even weep at the sound (Erdrich 14). The music that came from her playing seemed to become such a vital part throughout her life, it was possibly a means of separating herself from the anxiety she was experiencing while having to live two different people. Music seemed to have given her stability and consistency.
Also since DeWitt was constantly giving of herself to others; music seemed to be the one consistent love and obsession in her life that brought her contentment. Conclusion Music has been given to us as a great tool and instrument in our lives which can bring miraculous benefits to us. We have only just begun to truly understand its impact today. If we continue to learn from history, combining it with today’s understanding, we can then have a broader, and more improved perception to help people today and bridge the gap between the body, mind and spirit. I can relate to these experiences myself as a pianist.
I also find that when I feel overwhelmed and overtaken with the cares and concerns of life, I find much peace and serenity in listening to music and playing the piano. I found myself relating to Agnes throughout the book because of her strong love of this instrument. Having a chronic lung condition, there have been many times when I have turned to playing the piano as a comfort and strength to my mind and body. Without music we would simply have no art. It would be like looking at nature without any color. Agnes’s life story showed me a struggle of someone who desired the color in life.
Her life simply wouldn’t have been fulfilled without it. It seemed to be the one pleasure in her life that brought her happiness. For this reason I came away with the perspective that the piano was a positive element in her life that it seemed God wanted her to have. I was reminded of the story in the Bible where King Saul’s heart was tormented by an “evil spirit” and David would come to him and play the harp to sooth him and bring peace (NRSV 417). It is apparent to me that God has given us means of making melodies to bring us peace and serenity from things that may trouble us.
This is what DeWitt did and can be something we each do also. “And whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre (harp) and played it with this hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him” (I Samuel 16:23) Works Cited Cook, Janet D. “The Therapeutic Use of Music: A Literature Review. ” Nursing Forum: An Independent Voice For Nursing (1981): 252-266. Erdrich, Louise. The Last ReprotOn the Miracles At Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. Herman, E. P.
Music Therapy In Depression. New York: Philiosophical Library, 2006. MAM, Music As Medicine. 2011. ;http:/www. musicasmedicine. com/about/history. cfm;. Myskja A, Lindbaek M. How Does Music Affect The Human Body? Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen: Myskja; Lindbaek @ the University of Oslo, 2000. NRSV. The New Interpreter’s Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Nashville: Abington Press, 2003. Podolsky, Edward. Music Therapy. Kessinger Publishing, 2006. Walters, Lawrence. How Music Produces Its Effects On The Brain and Mind. New York, 2006. | <urn:uuid:bcfdd09f-858b-4267-92bc-efad8c0219e2> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://freebooksummary.com/last-report-on-the-miracles-of-little-no-horse | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571719.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812140019-20220812170019-00272.warc.gz | en | 0.970628 | 2,580 | 1.929688 | 2 |
Greenpeace's "Greener Electronics Guide" recently added the world's biggest TV and game console makers to their guide, with failing results. Microsoft, scored on their both their Xbox game console and MP3 player managed only a 2.7 rating, while Philips received a 2, the lowest of all the TV-makers. Nintendo received the lowest rank of all companies, with a zero, for not having information about the toxics in its products or plans to eliminate the hazardous materials.
Greenpeace scores manufacturers based on their policies and practices related to toxic chemicals in products and takeback opportunities. Sony Erricsson topped the rankings this time around, as Nokia and Motorola received penality points for the lack of practice in their pledges on global takeback in the countries where Greenpeace conducted checks.
Read Greenpeace's Guide here.
What You Can Do | <urn:uuid:728cd338-6aba-4f45-a012-945537204909> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cawrecycles.org/recycling-news/3207 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281746.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00281-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961214 | 170 | 1.617188 | 2 |
While many newcomers to the Arkansas River Valley admire the scenic beauty of rolling farmland and the bucolic peace of cattle grazing pastures, the fact is that farming is a business with real economic impact. Surviving as a farmer or rancher requires real knowledge and some risk. The recent Pasture Planning and Soil Health Workshop at Poncha Springs Town Hall featured keynote speaker Greg Judy and was packed with enthusiastic and note-taking members of the local farming community.
Judy, who with his wife Jan runs a grazing operation on 1,660 acres of leased and owned land in Missouri, is known the world over in farming circles. Author of three books on successful farming practices, Judy teaches the benefits of planned grazing, multi-species grazing, custom grazing, agroforestry and wildlife management.
Judy spoke several times during the conference, dispelling misconceptions about grazing, and in particular how mixed grazing of cattle, sheep and goats actually rejuvenates soils and pastures; the combination of hooves and different grazing modes complement each other. The information came in so quickly that many participants said they couldn’t take notes fast enough.
“The workshop was the result of several other projects we have underway as a collaboration between Central Colorado Conservancy and the Upper Arkansas Conservation District. Both organizations are involved in leading the watershed planning project of Upper Arkansas (UAWP),” said Natalie Allio, agricultural projects manager for the Central Colorado Conservancy.
Allio explains that there is an agricultural component to the watershed planning which has included a needs assessment. “As part of this assessment, we asked the farming community what topics they would like to know more about. The workshop program was the result of their preliminary comments.
The workshop was made possible by grants from Common Ground and sponsorships from NCAT-Soil for Water, Colorado Association of Conservation Districts, Chaffee County Cattlemen’s, NRCS, CSU-Extension, and Piñon Vacation Rentals.
“It was a big effort to organize this to focus on grazing and soil health planning,” Allio said. “We had excellent feedback from the participants.”
When asked if the type of planned grazing that works in Missouri could work in Colorado, she added, “It depends on where you do it. Look to the east side of Holman where Brady Everett is grazing. Jeff Williams does strip grazing with a small number of cattle. [Everett] also does so in the fall on his large lot off US 291 when he lowers cattle, using a single electric rope.
“We can’t do it as intensely here as in Missouri, but it works here,” she added. “You can improve forage in the field, but there’s a difference between soil that gets 13 inches of moisture and 40 inches.”
There is a difference between intensively grazing a field and intensively managing it. Letting the fields rest is essential so they can recover is essential. “You have to let him recover,” she added. “Here, we turn too early… this is where we risk the ground. The techniques must be adapted to our dry environment and our dry courses.
It all comes down to education, says Allio. “There are so many things we can learn. We’ve had feedback that it’s great, telling us they want to hear from someone who knows how to do it here. »
Not everything was classroom instruction; Workshop attendees also accompanied Judy on a field walk to Lewis’ ranch.
Josh Tashiro, Range Management Specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), was also presenter. Tashiro covers the western part of the Arkansas River Valley and South Park. He works with local farmers and ranchers on rangeland ecology and special projects in the western United States.
Rounding out the presenters, Todd Hagenbuch, CSU Agriculture Officer in Routt County, spoke about the importance of succession planning for farms and ranches so that the operation can stay in the family. | <urn:uuid:be567cf1-39d9-4ada-a711-7b2924fd9bf8> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://ilsh.info/agricultural-education-workshop-focusing-on-planned-grazing-and-soil-health-by-jan-wondra/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570871.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808183040-20220808213040-00272.warc.gz | en | 0.960667 | 848 | 2.171875 | 2 |
The back of this wooden chair, which belonged to the scribe Renyseneb, is handsomely veneered with ivory and embellished by incised decoration showing the owner seated on a chair of identical form. It is the earliest surviving chair with such a representation, and it is the only nonroyal example known. The scene and accompanying text have funerary import and may have been added following Renyseneb's death to make the chair a more suitable funerary object. The high quality of its joinery and the harmony of its proportions testify to the skill of ancient Egyptian carpenters. The mesh seat has been restored following to ancient models. | <urn:uuid:2165fed3-38cf-4e6b-a398-6c55f6f608cd> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/AMICO~1~1~106056~56774:Chair-of-Renyseneb | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572161.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815054743-20220815084743-00473.warc.gz | en | 0.971059 | 133 | 2.46875 | 2 |
British scientists have recently discovered that some hair dyes used by millions of women have chemicals in them that have been linked to cancer. It does not matter whether you buy a hair dying kit yourself from the store or have it done at an expensive salon; when the dye comes in contact with tobacco smoke or other air pollutants it has the ability to become toxic.
Researchers say that one-third of women dye their hair and so do one in ten men. It was not difficult for researchers from the Leeds-based company, Green Chemicals, to discover this connection. They researched the chemicals in the hair dye and just by doing that they were able to determine the potentially fatal connections.
“They warn that chemicals called secondary a | <urn:uuid:612d694d-7795-4cd9-90fa-60f321ba1b30> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://ynaija.com/beware-hair-dye-linked-to-cancer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279189.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00055-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984075 | 146 | 2.640625 | 3 |
At least 20 people have been killed in a fierce gun battle between Maoist rebels and police in the Indian state of Bihar, police said.
The dead are said to include 16 rebels, two police officers and two civilians.
Police said the overnight fighting took place when nearly 100 rebels attacked a police station and two state-run banks in a village in East Champaran.
They say the rebels belong to a leading Maoist group which operates in several Indian states.
They are also believed to have close links with Maoist rebels in Nepal.
"The bodies of seven Maoists have been recovered and a search is on for the rest," Bihar director-general of police, Ashish Ranjan Sinha, is quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
Mr Sinha also said they believed the attack was carried out by Maoist rebels operating in India and Nepal.
If confirmed, it will be the first time an attack involving Nepalese Maoists has taken place in India.
The rebels, said to be dressed in military fatigues, stormed a police station and several offices, including two state-owned banks.
The Maoists are active in several Indian states
The authorities say the rebels also attacked the house of a local MP, Sita Ram Singh, who represents the Rashtriya Janata Dal in the lower house of parliament.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal is a coalition partner of the Congress party-led Indian government.
Maoist groups operate in several Indian states and claim to represent the interests of the poor, mainly tribal communities.
Since 1980 they have been fighting for the creation of a communist state comprising tribal areas in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Bihar and Chhattisgarh.
India has an open border with Nepal and the rebels are thought to move in and out of both countries.
A number of Nepalese Maoists were recently arrested in the Bihar capital, Patna. | <urn:uuid:8e0ff649-a1dd-4656-9442-0f44a0f55399> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4617963.stm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281649.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00440-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973934 | 399 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Just as manual labourers were replaced by the machines of industry in the 19th century so certain IT roles will be swept away by cloud computing.
That’s the argument put forward by Gartner research director Gregor Petri – who believes that many roles managing IT infrastructure will all but disappear.
Manual management of IT infrastructure – for instance provisioning additional storage, servers or network capacity for a particular application – will increasingly be automated as software layers in the cloud automatically divert IT resources to where they are needed, he said.
“It is very much like industrialisation,” he said.
“Take the very old example given by Adam Smith of the pin makers who used to take a day to make four pins, then a factory is built that can make 10,000 pins in an hour.
“That is what cloud computing is making possible: you can carry out these computing tasks on an industrial scale.”
Petri said that just as people no longer make pins manually, so in general people won’t perform tasks like monitoring an app’s storage demands and purchasing and installing new storage for it.
“The cloud computing app is already programmed in a way that allows the application to access additional storage when it is needed, as a result nobody is needed to do that anymore,” he said.
“Cloud is allowing the industrialisation of IT, that is why to some people it is very scary.”
While Petri believes that traditional infrastructure management roles will become all but defunct, allowing IT systems to be run with fewer people, he said it doesn’t necessarily mean the individuals who carried out those roles will find themselves out of the job.
Instead he sees new roles being created that use that individuals’ technical skills to add value to the business, for instance working with managers in other departments to make company IT systems better fit the needs of staff or customers. “People in those roles need to flexible in the idea of what their role is,” he said.
The changing landscape of computing – for instance real-time big data analytics or the provision of scalable cloud services to always connected mobile computers – will also create new roles, he said.
When will it happen?
While today’s cloud platforms are already automatically provision these resources today, Petri said that the effect of this industrialisation of computing will not be felt until more applications are shifted to the cloud.
That could be some time off. Although adoption of cloud services is growing rapidly – Gartner predicts that the market for cloud compute services will grow 48.7 per cent in 2012 to $5bn, up from $3.4 billion in 2011 – spend on cloud services is still only a fraction of global IT spend. However, by 2020 the majority of organisations will rely on the cloud for more than half of their IT services, according to Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda Survey.
Will jobs really disappear?
Not everyone is convinced that cloud computing will have such a profound effect on the IT jobs landscape.
Some believe that while roles will likely transition from in-house IT teams to cloud providers as companies consume more cloud services, the roles and demand for skills will remain.
As a TechRepublic reader who works for a large cloud provider pointed out: “I still deal with the daily hands on from thousands of customers / clients, some pretty huge ones at that. Between dealing with their AD, LDAP, Windows / Linux deployments, configuration and code issues, I can say that server administrators will still be needed in fact more than ever.”
Other readers have pointed out that IT roles tend to endure far longer than expected and certain technical skills remain in demand. Old programming languages never die, as another reader points out:”Back in 1977 I attended a COBOL Summer class in my university. The first thing the instructor told us was that it was dead language, as new technologies were pushing it to extinction… Guess what, early this morning I reviewed (part of my duties as a DBA) some SQL embedded in a COBOL program to run in the z196 Mainframe”. | <urn:uuid:5b90e937-d30e-49ac-87a3-b785e25534ad> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cloud-computing-what-does-it-really-mean-for-it-jobs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572192.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20220815145459-20220815175459-00075.warc.gz | en | 0.953504 | 858 | 2.203125 | 2 |
Use your Interactive Student Notebooks to teach Literary Analysis!
interactive notebook and foldable ideas for secondary math - pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, pre-calculus, and calculus
Here's a post on interactive notebooks with downloads for a table of contents, notebook rubric, and grade tracker. I am SO doing this this year. Already printed and have 1/2 my classes with it glued in. PERFECT!
A HUGE bundle of foldable organizers for ELA interactive student notebooks!!
My Store-Musings from the Middle School on TpT
Ever use your Interactive Student Notebooks to teach Reading Comprehension? Once you start, you'll never look back! Try it out today!!
Samples of Interactive Notebooks | ... to excellence interactive notebooks overview of interactive notebooks
Learn all about how you can use Interactive Student Notebooks to facilitate close reading!
Get started with Interactive Student Notebooks today in your classroom with this **FREEBIE** that teaches the difference between quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing!
TpT FREE LESSONS
Interactive Student Notebooks--so many GREAT ideas here! ... from Adventures of a 6th Grade Teacher (blog) | <urn:uuid:2dd3068f-58c9-43ed-a2c0-6fecdb7d1770> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | https://nl.pinterest.com/explore/interactieve-studentenkladblokken-915758049591/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988720026.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183840-00456-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.855083 | 249 | 2.6875 | 3 |
June 23, 2011
Chatterjee is an expert on how pterosaurs flew.
A 3-D film featuring a Texas Tech paleontologist recently earned an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
The film is the first 3-D film ever to earn a BAFTA award in the Specialist Factual category, and it beat out the BBC’s “Human Planet.”
“Pterosaurs were highly successful flying reptiles that lived 228 to 65 million years ago from the late Triassic Period to the end of the Cretaceous Period,” Chatterjee said. “They dominated the sky, swooping over the heads of other dinosaurs. Their sizes ranged from that of a sparrow to a Cessna plane with a wingspan of 35 feet.”
Attenborough, 85, and one of the best-known natural history filmmakers, interviewed Chatterjee on the evolution of Pterosaurs, which were the earliest vertebrates to take to the skies and develop the power of flight.
The film opened in December 2010.
The Museum of Texas Tech University was established in 1929.
It consists of the main Museum building, the Moody Planetarium, the Natural Science Research Laboratory, the research and educational elements of the Lubbock Lake Landmark, and the Val Verde County research site.
The museum also offers masters degrees in Museum Science and Heritage Management and a wide variety of educational programs for the general public.Twitter | <urn:uuid:2b90f4ec-1e74-47ea-b298-61518bc70d9e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://today.ttu.edu/posts/2011/06/texas-tech-paleontologist-flies-high | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280872.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00310-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942689 | 305 | 3.21875 | 3 |
Relationship is key to business success and failure. The wrong kind of business relations brings failure while the right kind of business relations brings success.
We often hear that to be in a good relationship there has to be a “give and take” within the partners. But I think sometimes the “give and take” mentality can get old quick because it has a tendency to be selfish. I give so I can take. Their giving becomes an indirect egotism.
To build a good relationship takes time and sincere efforts without hidden agendas, in fact hidden agenda is the bedrock of bad business relationship.
We live in a time where “personal happiness” is the ultimate good. It has triumphed over all other goods, business men and woman have become so selfish that they fail to appreciate their partners and customers with a goal of seeking their welfare.
There is nothing wrong about personal happiness. But when personal happiness becomes king at the expense of our partners and even customers, that is where the problem starts.
When “I” goes before “You”, it becomes “selfishness”.
The “You” business agenda” is often promoted through ads. We watch an happy woman, man and even smiling children. But in actuality we see sad people, the “I” business agenda in practice. Just more selfishness.
The vision of successful and happy business relationship can only happen when you forget yourself and sincerely reach out to your partners and customers. It is in caring for them first and Yourself last, by so doing you invest in relationship and not products.
There is no successful business without people. And real business deals will always remain with delighted partners and customers. Be a person for all. Then, true happiness, real joy will happen behind your back.
Refurbished from: “In What Kind of a Relationship Are You In? Give and Take or Give and Give?” | <urn:uuid:7d873c0d-4574-4325-95d8-a2ce3c5d4ddd> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://hussletips.com/how-to-build-a-successful-business | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571758.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812200804-20220812230804-00673.warc.gz | en | 0.958109 | 418 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Fruit cake is an instant reminder of the Christmas season. We serve them to our guests during special occasions, and enjoy receiving them under Christmas trees. Every family has its own traditional version, and that’s why there are several recipes.
Christmas fruit cakes’ major ingredients are bits of candied and dried fruits and various nuts soaked in liquor, usually brandy or rum. This high alcohol content means that fruit cakes last for a long, long time.
About.com provides us with some useful tips on how to prepare Christmas fruit cake. Check out the list below:
- Try experimenting with various dried or candied fruits to discover the perfect combination for you.
- If the fruit cake will be served to kids, you may substitute fruit juices for alcohol while soaking the fruits. However, expect a shorter shelf life.
- If using liquor, keep the cake inside the refrigerator for about three weeks to allow the flavor to “ripen” before serving.
- It’s easier to slice the fruit cake while it’s cold, using a thin knife.
- While baking, place the loaf pan on a tray half-filled with hot water. This will prevent the cake from over-browning.
Christmas fruit cakes are best shared with friends and loved ones. Consider it a family heirloom, and pass your “secret” recipe to other generations!by | <urn:uuid:6db3d65a-0991-457c-9243-646c3dcfde7b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://blog.christmastreemarket.com/2011/11/christmas-fruit-cake-tips/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280835.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00475-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937246 | 288 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Environmental health encompasses all of the external factors that affect human health and wellbeing.
Environmental Health factors can range from the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, to the wider impact of human-made health hazards in the world around us. Hawkes Health support small, medium and larger businesses with their environmental health challenges.
We risk assess food hygiene practices, potable water integrity, air quality, hazardous substance hazards, communicable and public health concerns. In addition, to workplace noise and vibration hazards we also evaluate environmental noise concerns and undertake odour assessments.
An odour assessment survey is a qualitative assessment of the immediate surroundings of a proposed development or operation such as a restaurant. Its objective is to assess the possible odour impact that may be caused. The odour assessment is carried out in line with the EMAQ, (2018) Control of Odour and Noise from Commercial Kitchen Exhaust Systems. | <urn:uuid:6e90c899-a13f-461d-808f-541ef04174cf> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.hawkeshealth.com/services/environmental-health/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573104.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20220817183340-20220817213340-00465.warc.gz | en | 0.929008 | 193 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Celebrating the pipe organ, the King of Instruments
February 26, 2013
I've read several articles online about organs from the first part of the 20th century. The authors stated that these instruments sounded muddy, and unclear. Are there any recordings of such instruments, and do any of them still exist in their tonally unaltered state. I'd like to hear one, so I can judge for myself.
This is an area where much has been written, some of which makes sense and much does not. Beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through the 1930s, pipe organ designs emphasized 'unison tone' and down-played (or eliminated) higher-pitched stops, particularly mixtures. Given that many American churches (in particular) had moved away from being 'lofty, reverberant and cold' spaces and adopted what can only be called a 'living-room' aesthetic (carpeted floors, pew cushions), the environment in which the organ sounded had changed…and the tone-color of instruments changed to meet this new situation.
I had believed the 'muddy and unclear' business until I heard an instrument with a very rich, full-bodied, unison-centered tonal quality…in which every inner voice of complex counterpoint was totally clear. This intrigued me, because I had also heard numerous very bright and mixture-rich 'neo Baroque' organs on which the inner counterpoint was, in fact, quite garbled.
You can listen to the 100-year old Kotzschmar organ in Portland, Maine…or the 1932-1935 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota (program Part 2)…comparing these with traditional Baroque-period organs such as in the Netherlands…
They are very different, yes, but all are very musical. | <urn:uuid:92f422cb-22b8-4be3-9206-6e69b18f992e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/mailbag/2013/130226.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280242.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00072-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970831 | 385 | 2.390625 | 2 |
CAB Driving Force Behind Baby Shower For Young Mothers
Monday, June 28, 2010 9:52 am.
At the shower mothers received needed baby equipment, supplies, clothes, and information from public assistance agencies such as the Department of Human Services, Department of Children Services and SAVE.
Those in attendance heard stories of the issues faced by young mothers and the obstacles they have to overcome, along with information about how to find services that can assist them.
There were experienced sponsor/mentor mothers on hand to answer questions and give practical advice and information.
During one of the presentations, participants heard the story of one teen mother, Kelly Cosgrove, who said via a letter and YouTube video, "I look as things as a mom now, not as a teen ... the most beautiful things in our life can sometimes come from our most awful mistakes."
Perry Louden, who serves as the facilitator for CAB, said the event was one of the efforts the organization does to "give back to the community."
Jessica Tucker, who works for DCS, spoke about the Tennessee Early Intervention Services programs and other assistance offered by the agency. "We want to help you find resources in the community that can help you with those things that you and your child need," she said.
Lisa Baird, who is the director of SAVE, Cannon County's agency to assist victims of domestic violence, said, "Hopefully you will never need our services, but we are here if you do." Baird said SAVE could also help with diapers, clothing and educational materials.
Shirl Louden, who works with DHS and is station at Middle Tennessee Medical Center, talked about Tennessee's Families First program, which can help with signing families up for health insurance, transportation, clothing, food stamps and other necessities.
Perry Louden said CAB is still in need a car seat and two cribs for three of the girls.
Louden added, "We would like to thank these organizations for helping us make this possible: Woodbury Lions Club, Jenny Grady of River Park Hospital, Cannon Community Church, Adventist Community Services, Women’s Ministry of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Bags of Love, SAVE, Millennium Hair Salon, Hot-Spot Tanning and Briar Rose."
Any agency, organization, church or individual that would like to help people in our community is welcome to be members of the Cannon Co. CAB. Meetings are the first Tuesday of each month. Contact Perry Louden, CAB Facilitator, at 796-7020 or firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:7600ea82-3cd7-4102-a88b-bd9da671252d> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.cannoncourier.com/cab-driving-force-behind-baby-shower-for-young-mothers-cms-2908 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719843.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00292-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965376 | 546 | 1.523438 | 2 |
- freely available
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2013, 2(3), 665-679; doi:10.3390/ijgi2030665
Abstract: Sheep production is present on all continents and has been practiced in Brazil since the colonization. In this study, the multitemporal dynamics of sheep production in Brazil is examined using official government data (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics-IBGE) from 1976 to 2010. Maps of flock growth rates and growth acceleration maps by municipality were elaborated. The Southern states are seen to show a reduction in production mainly due to the wool crisis in the 1970s and 80s. The Northeast is seen to be important for meat production. More recently, centerwest and northern states have shown an increase in growth rates but this is still incipient. The maps of growth, acceleration and midpoint for sheep production showed a noticeable return to an increase in production in the South in recent years. The midpoint of production flow was in the northeast direction, which has stagnated. There was great dynamics in sheep production over the whole Brazilian territory, which affected supply chains due to the expansion of domestic and foreign markets. Areas with higher fluctuations in production are more vulnerable in terms of investment policies.
In Brazil, sheep farming has been practiced since the colonization, and is found throughout the country . Currently, Brazil has the 8th largest flock worldwide with an estimated flock size of approximately 16.05 million head . The Northeast region has 56% of the Brazilian sheep while the South has 32% and Southeast is third with 3.4% . According to , this has been accompanied by research focused on the production and processing of animal products, organization of farmers, increasing use of technology by farmers, participation of financial institutions to facilitate access to credit and higher demand for by-products from sheep and goats.
However, production still tends to be informal, making it difficult to consolidate data on the sector . This needs to be a sustainable activity due to its high socio-economic impact [6,7] especially in marginal land areas and low income rural families.
There is a large deficiency in national availability of sheep products, with insufficient production and a trade volume that does not support the industrialization of lamb which seriously affects the abattoirs working with small ruminants . Despite these difficulties, sheep farming can be profitable and is important for all production scales, especially with the increasing demand for healthy foods and preference for products with higher protein lower in cholesterol, saturated fats and calories .
The purpose of this paper was to analyze the spatial dynamics of sheep production in Brazil from 1976–2010 using official sheep production data from the Brazilian Federal Government . Specific objectives included: (1) generate maps of sheep production within each municipality in the five major regions of Brazil, (2) determine rate of growth and acceleration within each municipality, and (3) evaluate the spatial pattern and direction of changes in sheep production.
2. Material and Methods
Brazil is a continental sized country with distinct environmental characteristics, especially differences in latitude and relief [11,12]. This study considered all municipalities in the five (North, Northeast, Centerwest, South and Southwest) regions of Brazil (totaling 5,561 municipalities). Brazilian sheep production was obtained from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics from 1976 and 2010.
Maps were generated with the number of animals (production) for each year and then converted to raster format (GRID) and processed in ENVI software (Version 4.5, ITT Visual Information Solution, www.ittvis.com). To analyze the dynamics of production growth, maps were drawn for relative growth rate (%) of production by municipality in ArcGis 10 (ESRI, Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute). For this, the time interval analyzed was divided in to seven equal periods with intervals of 5 years (sum of the five years of production in each period considered: 1976 to 1980, 1981 to 1985, 1986 to 1990, 1991 to 1995, 1996 to 2000, 2001 to 2005, and 2006 to 2010). Relative growth rate was calculated as: ((PPsP − PPvP)/PPvP) × 100, where PPsP is the Production in Present Period and PPvP is the Production in Previous Period. Relative growth rate resulted in six maps.
Acceleration of growth rate was obtained by relative differences in the images resulting in five maps, calculated as GRPsP − GRPvP, where GRPsP is the Growth Rate in Present Period and GRPvP is the Growth Rate in Previous Period.
The spatial mid point of production in the country was calculated for each year to assess the direction of production in the country. The latitude and longitude midpoint were obtained by multiplying the sum of the geographic coordinates of the municipality and their production divided by the number of municipalities for each year as the equations (∑ latitude × ∑ production)/Number of municipalities, for the latitude midpoint, and (∑ longitude × ∑ production)/Number of municipalities, for the longitude midpoint.
The geographic coordinate represents the localization based on the mean longitude and latitude, and production represents the mean production of all municipalities in a certain year. Data was available on a municipality basis and not individual farmer. Therefore the midpoint of production is weighted by the municipal mean sheep production for that year.
Municipalities were clustered according to their production level in 1976. Three clusters were formed using PROC FASTCLUS of SAS® v.93 (Cary, NC, USA). Summary statistics of growth rates and acceleration of production by municipality were calculated.
From the 1970s and 1980s, municipalities with high growth in sheep production were seen throughout Brazil, with many municipalities were also stagnant. Between 1986 and 1995, there was a reduction in the growth of sheep production in the south, which up to then was the largest production region (Figure 1c). The municipalities of the North and Midwest from1986 to 1995 showed higher growth, while the southern counties continue their decline (Figure 1c,d), with a country-wide reduction in growth from 1990–1995 (Figure 1d).
From 1996 to 2010 growth in Northeastern municipalities are highlighted, this region being currently responsible for almost half the sheep flock in Brazil [10,13] (Figure 1e,f). The last period analyzed also points to the resurgence of growth in production of municipalities in the south (Figure 1f). Changes over the whole period (Figure 2) indicate high relative growth in dark green seen in municipalities of the North, Midwest and Northeast. Light and dark red highlight the reduced growth in the South. Table 1 demonstrated these results.
This shift in production of sheep toward the northeast of Brazil can be seen on the map of average point of production over the period analyzed (Figure 3), confirming that the dynamics of production move this activity to municipalities in the Northeast of the country. The distance is approximately 860 km (34 km per year), in a steady North-eastern direction. Especially evident is a large jump in production from 1995 to 1996. While up to 2003 the move to the Northeast is relatively fast, in more recent years it has stagnated (2006–2010).
Acceleration in production growth confirms the observations described above. In Figure 4 a high deceleration in dark brown is seen in Southern municipalities, in light blue acceleration of growth is represented in many municipalities in the Northeast as well as in the North and Midwest. Dark blue is mainly seen in the Northeast (Figure 4b) following the down turn of production in the south; however, there are a few municipalities in blue indicating an acceleration of production. It is worth noting the large number of stagnant municipalities in Figure 4a,b. In Figure 4c acceleration is seen in municipalities in Clara and Mato Grosso do Sul and in Figure 5d a resurgence of acceleration in the municipalities in the South. Figure 4e expresses a deceleration in several municipalities in the Northeast and South, with a notable slowdown in the limits between Bahia and Piauí.
Figure 5 shows the average acceleration of sheep production over the full period analyzed. The municipalities with greater acceleration in production growth are located in the Northeast region. It is also possible to observe that in the South there are a smaller number of municipalities with high acceleration and less intense acceleration occurred in large areas of the Midwest (Mato Grosso) and North (Pará).
Quantitative analysis of data showed that 948 municipalities were within the group of large producers of sheep (annual production from 5,638 to 5,609,001 head), 947 in the group of smallest producers (production from 1 to 404 animals) and 1,892 in the group of average producers (production from 406 to 5,624 head). Fluctuations in mean growth are greater in the average producing municipalities (Table 2). The larger farmers are reducing in size while in general the smaller and average are increasing in flock size. Nevertheless, the larger producing municipalities continue to produce much more sheep than the other groups.
|Acceleration of growth 1976–1990||801.7||−1,666,552||2,025,560||0.1||−3,804||14,835||94.4||−19,498||43,788|
|Acceleration of growth 1981–1995||−14,053.4||−4,801,695||750,869||−154.1||−29,500||4,743||−423.6||−87,506||18,950|
|Acceleration of growth 1986–2000||−13,937.8||−5,405,812||757,247||52.5||−16,893||15,742||−424.0||−51,281||55,315|
|Acceleration of growth 1991–2005||23,526.9||−339,844||3,481,311||143.7||−14,250||39,216||725.4||−51,718||50,467|
|Acceleration of growth 1996–2010||6,310.3||−498,779||728,605||246.2||−55,605||19,677||654.9||−45,100||42,826|
According to , meat production from small ruminants in Brazil depends on several components of the supply chain (inputs, production, processing, commercialization and the final consumer). Problems with any one of these sectors may affect the production level nationally or regionally. The analysis of changes in sheep production in Brazilian municipalities shows that the dynamics over the period between 1976 and 2010 varied greatly, especially when analyzed in different periods. These dynamics also influence future investments and confidence of members in the supply chain to have confidence and invest in the enterprise. While some farmers use more modern techniques of rearing, in the vast majority there still persists those who carry out this activity in the traditional manner, using animals with no breed standard in marginal areas. The latter are responsible for approximately 90% of the meat produced in Brazil . This low level of productivity is directly related to genetic and nutritional management, forage availability, inadequate funding and management systems for various stages of rearing, empowerment of the producer and low organization capacity. Although there has been an evolution in the number of inputs specific to the activity, there are still some basic items that are insufficient and inadequate to fully meet economic needs of the farmer in Brazil. For example, some types of feeds, mineral supplements and even machinery and equipment, still show questionable effectiveness and cost/benefit .
In the 1980s and 1990 the large production in the South was based on wool production but the entry of synthetic fabrics onto the market and also the use of restrictive measures to protect Australia’s wool production, caused extensive damage to other producing countries such as Brazil, resulting in a large reduction in sheep production at the time . Many farmers, in subsequent years, left the activity which caused a drastic reduction in the flock, especially in wool breeds. These farmers started investing in other more profitable sectors, giving room for the growth of specialized beef breeds in this region. This reduction is also attributed to problems such as foot rot, sanitary problems and reproductive problems such as high lamb mortality and low fertility . The shift towards the northeast also reflected a change in breed type, away from wool animals towards hair sheep which are generally less productive due to the lack of breeding programs , slower growth rates and produce with meat with different chemical and sensorial qualities than the wool breeds .
The average herd size for sheep in Brazil is approximately 29 animals. This varies regionally with those in the Northeast considerably smaller (Northeast—24; Centerwest—41; North—31; South—29; Southeast—37). Here average farm size is 13 ha, with 90% being classified as family farms. Over 50% is of natural pastures and these produce less than 30% of the total animal production. Farmers in this region of Brazil have few options which include crops such as cassava, corn, beans and pasture. Of these, small ruminants on pasture were shown to be the less labor intensive and therefore favor opportunities for farmers or family members to seek off-farm employment either for short periods or seasonally while still maintaining their farm . Therefore most of these farms are subsistence with little use of technology and investment, which makes them even more vulnerable to climatic factors thereby contributing to the fluctuations in production in the region. Northeast Brazil is seriously influenced by insufficient and unreliable rainfall. Adverse natural conditions, combined with underdevelopment in the region (low IDH scores, few industries, little infrastructure, high distances between urban centers) mean the rural population cannot support itself, especially in drought years . Other studies in the Northeast of Brazil [21,23] also showed a positive but low economic return for sheep farming in the semiarid. In this region, the opportunity cost is practically zero. The producers do not have many options and with small areas of land available, many of them uncultivable, sheep have advantages over other activities such as cattle. This is one of the reasons why these animals have been used by these smallholders for many decades.
The slowdown in production in some municipalities in the limit between Bahia and Piaui States may be a consequence of the construction of the Sobradinho dam, responsible for a large part of electricity generator in the Northeast. The dam was built in the late 70s and 4,214 km2 were flooded, forcing the relocation of approximately 12,000 families, interfering directly with economic activities in the region . Part of the sheep production in the region is still exploited by low productivity traditional and subsistence farmers, linked to a low level of technology, which results in high mortality of animals maintaining productivity low [25,26]. Thus, production is vulnerable to fluctuations in the economy and the action of speculators, especially in isolation, without the support of efficient associative structures. According to , from the socioeconomic point of view, the activity is negatively affected by the low level of managerial training of the farmer and lack of organizational structure. Although authors have pointed out that the Brazilian Northeast stands out in the farming of small ruminants, with a vocation for this kind of activity [27,28] animals are slaughtered at one year of age compared to six months in the centerwest [19,20] or even four months of age in intensive systems. This affects acceptability of the product in many markets.
The lack of reliable information sources leads farmers to take decisions conditional on their experience, the tradition, the region’s potential and the availability of financial resources and man power. When profitability is low, the farmer realizes this, but it is difficult to quantify and identify the bottlenecks of the production process . Farmers in Brazil over the last 20 years have been actively encouraged to invest in sheep farming, especially in regions where it is not traditional such as the centerwest and north. However, sheep are not small cattle and management systems should take this into account. This also affects questions such as where to buy input and sell the output as slaughterhouses are few and far between. This can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 4 where the centerwest and northern regions show high fluctuations (increase and decrease, acceleration and deceleration) over the period studied. This fluctuation means that confidence in the enterprise is low by investors and investments in construction of slaughterhouses and supply networks are not being developed.
Although abattoirs, slaughter houses and some meat processing industries have been installed, the maintenance of these is difficult. However, due to the seasonality in supply of animals and the quality of these, many of these establishments are closed or working with less than 50% of its capacity . This is mainly related to seasonal supply of low quality animals for slaughter; Competition with informal slaughter; high logistical costs mainly in collecting animals; Lack of tax laws that are suitable for installations of slaughterhouses; High sanitary inspection costs; Deficiency in technologies for a better use of meat in the making of sausages and derivatives.
An analysis of the Agroindustral Management System (AMS) looking at market and governance structure for sheep production, confirmed the lack of coordination in the system. The low quality of product information, a symmetry in the system, the presence of intermediaries, technological bottlenecks, sanitary barriers, lack of security of supply over the year, unfair competition with illegal slaughtering, lack of product flow between state markets, are consequences of lack of coordination between members of the AMS all influence the system. According to , outside Rio Grande do Sul State, most slaughter does not undergo federal inspection making marketing of the product more difficult, but it also shows a high variation in official slaughter numbers, variations which affect investments and confidence in the supply chain. As found, 22.2% of retail establishments selling mutton derived from illegal slaughter. These authors indicated that the main commercialization problems include lack of association between farmers, making it impossible to establish partnerships; Lack of logistics in the trade of animals and meat, and sector modernization; Insufficient production scale to meet the permanent market; Inefficiency of health surveillance, essential to curb the informal slaughter and Lack of a differentiated policy price for quality carcasses. This is reflected in the maps produced here and seriously affects farmer and retail confidence in the system.
According to the main concern of policy competitiveness practiced by different states in Brazil seems to be to attract businesses. It is, therefore more an attempt to offer advantages in order to displace flow of investment than effectively create conditions for improving the competitiveness of existing businesses. When taxes are used as instruments to modernize the livestock sector, usually incentives via tax cuts for the adoption of certain technologies, experience has shown that the impact of tariff reduction turns out to be small, depending on the magnitude of illegal slaughter . This means that several players do not remain in the business for a long period of time leading to lack of confidence and therefore fluctuations in production levels.
Notable differences appear among the populations of different countries and within a country, between regions and social classes in their preferences for animal products. The preferences depend on the habits consumption, culinary traditions and education in consumer tastes. Consumption of sheep meat (lamb or mutton) is not traditional outside the northeast and south of Brazil. A sector of the population of large cities is sporadically adopting the habit of consuming meat from small ruminants. Moreover, these consumers demand product of better quality. For , the quality criterion for meat is extremely varied in space (country, region, culture, etc.) and time (time, years, etc.). It is therefore not simple to define “quality”. From the producer to the consumer, the concept of quality acquires different meanings. This makes it more difficult for the establishment of new industries in non-traditional areas and accounts for the fluctuations in production. The type (hair or wool, age, feeding and management) of animals produced in different regions of Brazil varies widely meaning that incipient consumers may be put off by fluctuations in perceived quality and variations in the product offered.
According to thar also shows that the set of structural and cyclical changes undergone by the sheep activity in recent decades is reflected in the prices paid for their products, whether in the decline phase (1973 to 1994) as well as recovery (1995 to 2005), due to the economic stabilization of the Monetary Real Plan and its consequences on the domestic market.
From 1995 to 1996 there was a large jump in production towards the north-eastern states with a decrease in the South, represented by a high spatial distance between the points. This may be due to a small degree to some methodological changes in how these data were collected but this was not seen in other animal production systems. From 2004, production midpoint stagnated again, probably due to increased production in the South (slaughter lamb production) as well as some increase in flocks to the North and Midwest.
As noted, there was a great dynamics in sheep production over the whole Brazilian territory, which affected supply chains due to the expansion of domestic and foreign markets . However, according to , the seasonality of production, the lack of a steady market, the demand for a steady supply of animals, the need for market scale and the increasing demand for young animals by the abattoirs are difficulties that farmers face when marketing their animals for slaughter.
The use of maps showed a clear picture of the dynamics of sheep production in the municipalities of Brazil between 1976 and 2010. Municipalities in the South and Northeast remained at high levels throughout the period of production, reaffirming the tradition of sheep breeding in these regions. Nevertheless, the maps of growth acceleration and midpoint showed a noticeable reduction and slowing production in the South with a return to increase in more recent years. The Northeast has faced several problems with productivity but has shown stable production over the years.
The authors wish to thank CNPq (RFG, OAC, RATG, SRP, CMcM) and CAPES (PH) for scholarships and CNPq (Process Number 474330/2010-9; 556698/2010-0), INCT Pecuária (RM) (MCT/CNPq/FAPEMIG) and FAPDF (193.000.578/2009) for financing.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). | <urn:uuid:e14bc94f-739e-4d1f-9399-7ed02a1ac6a7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/2/3/665/htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279189.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00062-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.87602 | 7,451 | 2.734375 | 3 |
Diffstat (limited to 'core/pxelinux.asm')
1 files changed, 14 insertions, 5 deletions
diff --git a/core/pxelinux.asm b/core/pxelinux.asm
index ff0f36c8..929ab673 100644
@@ -255,12 +255,21 @@ _start1:
+%if 0 ; debugging code only... not intended for production use
; Clobber the stack segment, to test for specific pathologies
mov cx,STACK_LEN >> 1
+ ; Clobber the tail of the 64K segment, too
+ extern __bss1_end
+ mov di,__bss1_end
+ sub cx,di ; CX = 0 previously
+ shr cx,1
+ rep stosw
; That is all pushed onto the PXE stack. Save the pointer
; to it and switch to an internal stack.
@@ -2258,11 +2267,11 @@ do_reset_pxe:
-; Look to see if we are on an EFI CSM system. Some EFI
-; CSM systems put the BEV stack in low memory, which means
-; a return to the PXE stack will crash the system. However,
-; INT 18h works reliably, so in that case hack the stack and
-; point the "return address" to an INT 18h instruction.
+; Look to see if we are on an EFI CSM system. Some EFI CSM systems
+; (AMI CSM) put the BEV stack in low memory (just below 64K), which
+; means a return to the PXE stack will crash the system. However, INT
+; 18h works reliably, so in that case hack the stack and point the
+; "return address" to an INT 18h instruction.
; Hack the stack instead of the much simpler "just invoke INT 18h
; if we want to reset", so that chainloading other NBPs will work. | <urn:uuid:f9e7967b-f307-40f0-8b4c-4145365bf266> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://git.zytor.com/syslinux/syslinux.git/diff/core/pxelinux.asm?h=syslinux-3.85-pre10 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571538.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20220812014923-20220812044923-00469.warc.gz | en | 0.730614 | 555 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Upon completion of the undergraduate studies, the student receives a certificate stating the completion of studies and the acquisition of a title according to the course of studies: University degree of Bachelor (baccalaureus/baccalaurea) in Forest Engineering
Forestry is a profession, science and art of managing and preserving forest ecosystems for the permanent welfare of society, environment and economy. Accordingly, the students of undergraduate and graduate studies are instructed to manage forest ecosystems from the biological, ecological, technical and economic point of view.
Programme of Undergraduate Studies in Forestry is designed in a way that it leads the student in a logical sequence from the fundamental biological and technical disciplines, over the introductory disciplines to the components of the forest ecosystems and forest management techniques, to those disciplines that complete the knowledge about forest and forest land management.
The skills acquired by completing these programme studies: full proficiency as forest district manager, expert associates in forestry professions, duties in forest inventory, participating in the implementation of the forest management program, all professional field works on establishing, tending and regeneration of forest stands, knowledge of mechanical means, techniques and standard technologies applicable in forestry - first of all in forest harvesting from natural forests, forest cultures and plantations. Furthermore, a bachelor of forestry is qualified for expert works on melioration and landscaping of forest areas in the Mediterranean area, protection of forests from abiotic and biotic factors, especially from fires, management of professional activities related to the implementation of hunting management plans and programmes, organization of hunting grounds, collaboration in the preparation of the environmental studies and zoning plans, technique and technology of forest road construction, sales of wood assortments, organization of production in forestry, safety in forestry work. He/she has been trained for individual works in sectors of private enterprise and forest district management system, as well as for the teamwork in all other activities related to the professions in forestry, nature and environment protection.
With a Bachelor's degree of Forestry students are prepared for their professional development by participating in various seminars and workshops during their practical experience, and during their regular studies they get completely qualified to continue their studies at the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology in graduate studies with the programmes in Silviculture and Management Planning with Wildlife Management, and in Technique, Technologies and Management in Forestry.
New entrants to the undergraduate studies in forestry are getting qualified to be able to, under certain conditions, get involved in the undergraduate studies in Urban Forestry, Nature and Environment Protection at the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology and to the undergraduate studies of related faculties of Biotechnical Sciences. | <urn:uuid:83c77460-1e86-4883-a20b-5ca488d90465> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.sumfak.unizg.hr/en/study-programmes/forestry-studies/undergraduate-studies/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571950.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813111851-20220813141851-00675.warc.gz | en | 0.941032 | 524 | 2.046875 | 2 |
A million years or several months ago I started a ‘series’ (of one item so far…) on Magic Words, the brilliant and amazing phrases we use with kids that are particularly excellent at getting something or other across.
I have notes of a dozen Magic Words I want to write up, but to get the ball re-rolling, here’s a genius question from ‘Jane’ at Nothing By The Book.
I know it’s Magic Words material because it’s been echoing around my head all week. It sums up the kind of approach I’m keen on for SBJ and food, but whatever path you take with your kids (try just one bite/clean your plate/eat what you like) it provides a nice open-door invitation to try new things, or retry old things, without making dinner a battleground.
Never, ever take advice from me on potty training. Or weaning. Or cleaning house… But if you want, you can take advice from me about food. I’ve raised three garburators—by which I mean not children who eat junk food, but children whom no one can ever call picky eaters. They’ll eat anything.
But, wait. There’s a caveat. Not anything all of the time. Taste buds change, see, and sometimes kids don’t have the taste buds—or have taste buds that are just too sensitive—for the food we’re offering them.
One of the things we’ve always talked about as Cinder and then Flora didn’t like something / didn’t want to try something was that “taste buds change.” (Interlude: yes, it’s possible to know you won’t like something without tasting it. I will not eat steak tartare. You cannot make me. I will not taste it. I extend the same right of total refusal to my children. If they think it looks and smells gross, that’s enough. One day, they might think differently. Until they do, I will not force them. Back to tasting change buds… er, changing taste buds:) So when my eldest went off broccoli, when I’d make broccoli, I’d ask him if his broccoli taste buds changed yet–and he’d sniff it or look at it, and say no. And then one day he said, yes, but only in soup.
Point: when introducing children to food—offer. Put on the table. Eat it yourself. Make it again. Ask if they’d like to try it. Ask if their taste buds for [X] have come yet. But never, ever force. Not even one bite.
Unless, of course, you’re willing to reciprocate? When Jocelyn is making a yummy mud pie with dirt and worms and beetle carcases, would you need to take a bite to be able to assert that you don’t like it?
If that sounds handy for your household, here’s more of Jane’s food-and-kids policy.
I like her style because something we are prioritising with SBJ is helping him to listen to himself. When it comes to food, we want him to realise when he’s hungry and full and eat accordingly.
The two other jigsaw pieces that I’ve found most helpful in this puzzle of how to nourish children are from Nigel Latta, a New Zealand child psychologist who writes (etc) on parenting (etc), and an article I read in a Healthy Food Guide (a NZ magazine overseen by a board of nutritionists, dietitians and public health researchers), but of course can’t locate now.
Nigel Latta, in his appallingly-titled Politically Incorrect Parenting tells the story of a family who came to his psychology practice. I’m retelling this from memory, so don’t quote me on the details, but I think I’ve got the substance right. The mum had made the appointment because her kids refused to eat all vegetables except pea ice cream (the kids didn’t know their ‘lime’ ice cream had been doctored late at night by their desperate mother and looked pretty suspicious and aggrieved when he mentioned it in the consultation).
He said all sorts of sensible things, I’m sure, but the bit that has really stayed with me was the secret emergency advice he put in a sealed envelope for when the mother felt like giving in and providing the junk the kids would accept. When she was worried her kids would starve in the face of healthy food, she was to open the envelope and read the advice inside. It said: ‘Hungry children eat.’
The study that Healthy Food Guide was reporting – and I know it’s a bit dangerous to give you my remembered summary, so take this with a grain of salt – followed toddlers’ eating habits and observed that, left to make their own food choices from an array of healthy options, they ate an appropriately varied diet over the course of a two-week period. They might eat only tomatoes today and only bread tomorrow, but over a fortnight it all evened out. That has been helpful to keep in my head to temper the inevitable worry when SBJ wants to eat nothing but blueberries and corn crackers for days at a time.
If you’re on a roll and want some more inspiration or guidance, Healthy Food Guide has a great website, and you could start with one of these:
- Cindy Williams’ top 10 eating habits to give your kids
- Sophie Gray’s tips for getting kids to eat fruit and veges (focused on practicalities rather than philosophy; I find her slightly pessimistic about what kids will happily eat, but full of ideas to draw them in)
- Health psychologist Iris Fontanilla’s guide to mothers, daughters and healthy role modelling
Back to the main point, though: what Magic Words do you use around food and mealtimes to encourage healthy eating and development? Feel free to outline your approach more generally, or just stick to any useful sentences you have heard yourself – or a friend – utter. | <urn:uuid:9fde8ed4-e2ba-4037-bb8e-634bb8401211> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://sacraparental.com/2013/07/16/magic-words-have-your-taste-buds-changed-yet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882570879.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20220808213349-20220809003349-00478.warc.gz | en | 0.961235 | 1,308 | 1.554688 | 2 |
1. What does kira-kira mean, and why is it so important to Katie?
2. What happens when a dog attacks Katie and Lynn when they are young?
3. What does Lynn hope to do to make money when she is older?
This section contains 3,220 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page) | <urn:uuid:45c6713f-4112-472a-a09f-8a045ad5a69a> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.bookrags.com/lessonplan/kira-kira/shortessay.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284352.26/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00194-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.919016 | 75 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Banning cigarette filters is one of a number of policies recently put forward by U.S.-based researchers as a way of reducing or eliminating the environmental problems caused by carelessly discarded butts.
Such a policy might seem extreme, but those proposing it describe filtered cigarettes as a “farce” in terms of consumer safety. And they cite as evidence a recent National Cancer Institute review that apparently showed filtered cigarettes were “not healthier or safer than nonfiltered ones.”
The policy suggestions are those of Thomas Novotny of San Diego State University and Elli Slaughter, an advocate seeking to curb the environmental harm caused by the large-scale littering of cigarette butts, packaging and matches. The suggestions appeared in a review article published in Springer’s journal, Current Environmental Health Reports.
Novotny and Slaughter also suggest that filters/butts might be the subject of a deposit/return scheme, that cigarette manufacturers might be held responsible for cleanups, and that warnings about the impact of carelessly discarded butts might be placed on packs.
Category: Breaking News | <urn:uuid:5b8fb1d4-0284-4e34-a265-09e28a51eeb8> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.tobaccoreporter.com/2014/05/researchers-want-cigarette-filters-banned/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279224.13/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00479-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944462 | 223 | 2.5 | 2 |
Joaqlin Estus, KNBA – Anchorage
Dental disease is a serious health problem among Alaska Natives. A recent evaluation of about 400 Alaska Native people found untreated tooth decay in more than half the children, 60 percent of the teenagers, and 77 percent of adults. Among American Indian and Alaska Native 2-4-year-olds, tooth decay is five times the national average… however, as Joaqlin Estus reports, tribes are developing a program that may help fill the unmet need.
Download Audio (MP3) | <urn:uuid:559f72ab-f3e9-4e11-adec-9ff5a46b3fd7> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.alaskapublic.org/2010/10/27/alaska-native-children-experience-much-high-rates-of-tooth-decay/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279189.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00063-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929588 | 110 | 2.59375 | 3 |
These games teach valuable skills and have a high fun and educational rating.
Your child develops fine motor and strategic thinking skills in this fast stacking game.
Your child develops pattern recognition and fine motor skills in this fast paced arcade game.
Your child learns target and perception by focusing and targeting the energy balls.
Your child strengthens his or her fine motor skills by trying to create the biggest bubble out of balloons.
Your child develops fine motor skills by playing this Pokemon themed balance game.
Your child hones his or her motor skills by trying to catch acorns before they fall in this Pokemon-themed game. | <urn:uuid:2dd75be4-d4c7-44c2-9622-f3c16b339578> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.zoodles.com/free-online-kids-games/pokemon_7-year-old_fine-motor-skills | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280718.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00408-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948796 | 124 | 2.296875 | 2 |
We all wish that we can make more from our investments and we constantly on a look out for opportunities that can help us do so. Guess what, Birla Sun Life Banking and Financial Services Fund could be your answer. Here is why:
- As on October 31, 2013, CNX Finance has given compounded returns of 17.3% as against 12.9% given by Nifty. This effectively means it has outperformed Nifty by 34% for the said period.
(Returns calculated since earliest available computation of CNX Finance, i.e. January 01, 2004, Data Source: NSE; Computation: Internal. Past performance is no indication of future performance).
- Mobile Banking and Technology based banking have helped reach out to a large set of people.
- Rural focus and the rising middle class society are expected to play an important role in the growth of the banking and financial services sector.
There are 4 key reasons why Banking as an industry has potential in India.
- Robust Demand
- We often see an increase in demand for banking and related services with an increase in working population and growing disposable incomes
- A report by National Council for Applied Economic Research's (NCAER) Centre for Macro Consumer Research indicates that by 2015-16, India will be a country of 53.3 million middle class households, translating into 267 million people.
NCAER defines Indian middle class as the one with income level between INR 3.4 lakh-17 lakh at 2009-10 level.
- The rising middle class usually implies higher purchasing power and also the ability take on extra debt to meet their aspiring lifestyle.
- Emergence of Rural India
- Rural banking is expected to witness growth in the future. Only 1 in 6 villages in India have access to banking services. This is a strong representation of the unbanked opportunity in rural India.
(RBI Vision Documents on Payment Systems for 2012 – 2015)
- It presents a significantly large opportunity that is still at a nascent stage of being tapped by the banking industry. Recent regulatory interventions have required banks to penetrate deeper in rural markets with ultra small branches in villages with populations as low as 2000.
(Source: KPMG 5th ICC Banking Summit Report 2013)
- Technology and low cost innovation from banks could play a key role in reaching out to the growing rural economy.
- Innovation in Services
- The fast growing Mobile & Internet banking services and extension of facilities at ATM stations are expected to play an important role in reaching out to a much larger set of people.
- The number of mobile banking transactions has increased to over 7.1 million in September 2013 from about 3.8 million in September 2012.
- Vast unbanked population highlights scope for innovation in delivery
- Strong Business Fundamentals
- Leading banks in India are known to have strong governance & management practices
- With a significant presence of foreign banks in India, large set of global learnings are being applied across the sector.
- Indian Banking ranks amongst the Top 10 countries in the world in providing a positive customer experience, with over 75% people having a positive experience.
(Source: World Retail Banking Report 2013 by Capgemini & Efma)
Banking seems promising. What about the Non Banking Financial Services Companies (NBFC)?
With the growing importance assigned to financial inclusion, NBFCs have come to be regarded as important financial intermediaries particularly for the small-scale and retail sectors.
NBFCs are a suitable alternative for banks for meeting various financial requirements of a business enterprise. They are agile and are able to offer quick and efficient services.
The Micro, Small & Medium Enterprise (MSME) sector is often in need of services and NBFCs are considered to have a suitable setup to reach out to them effectively.
The MSME sector is one of the key drivers of growth for the Indian economy. In 2009-10, there were around 29.8 million registered and unregistered enterprises and it is estimated that only 33-34% of these companies have access to banking or institutional financing channels. (MSME as classified by the banking definition of companies with a turnover in the range of Rs. 20 to 200 crores, Source: KPMG 5th ICC Banking Summit Report 2013)
Views expressed herein should not be construed as investment advice to any party and are not necessarily those of Birla Sun Life Asset Management Company Ltd.(BSLAMC) or any of their officers, employees, personnel, directors and BSLAMC and its officers, employees, personnel, directors do not accept responsibility for the editorial content.. Wherever possible, all the figures and data given are dated, and the same may or may not be relevant at a future date and have been compiled from sources, which BSLAMC believes to be reliable, but cannot guarantee its accuracy or completeness. Forward looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties which could material impact or differ the actual results or performance from those expressed or implied under those statements
Where else does this scheme invest?
Other than Banking & NBFCs, the scheme will endeavor to invest in promising companies within the financial services sector, such as Housing Finance, Insurance, Rating Agencies, Stock Broking etc.
The portfolio of the scheme is subject to changes within the provisions of the Scheme Information Document (SID) of the scheme. Please refer to the SID for asset allocation, investment strategy and scheme specific risk factors.
Mutual Fund investments are subject to market risks, read all scheme related documents carefully. | <urn:uuid:2491b806-4414-4643-81c1-36ec79678a61> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://mutualfund.birlasunlife.com/Pages/Individual/Our-Solutions/WealthCreation-Funddetails.aspx?SchemeShortName=BSL%20Banking%20and%20Financial%20Services%20Fund%20&Highlighted=Yes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280900.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00006-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947621 | 1,140 | 1.914063 | 2 |
For the hardware part of the device, it has eight adders in groups of four. One group is used to check if the line enters the field of view and one group is used to check if the line exists the field of view. It also has one register which stores information like the edges and coordinates. The authors conclude that using a clipping divider in the display can enable to display a portion of a very large picture with a proper resolution.The second paper talks about the problems the authors were facing regards to the processing of 3D data. The common steps for the processing include Polygon Clipping. It is a process of clipping off those parts of the polygon that lie outside the volume. Earlier this process was done with respect to the edges of the polygon and cause problems doing so. The authors now describe a technique in which the polygon is defined by its vertices. The authors claim that this algorithm can be applied to any polygon may it be concave or convex or planar or non-planar. The authors describe the algorithm by first talking about the perspective projection which is done by using depth perception to check if how close are the objects to the observer. This assumes that the coordinates of the origin are not the observer’s eyes but the center of the screen. The advantage of doing so is that we can move the observer’s eyes can be moved far away from the screen. This algorithm considers input vertices for polygon in a single clipping plane. A new set of vertices is created depending on the how the vertices are placed according to the plane. This algorithm can also be applied to clipping lines with some minor modifications. The algorithm just needs to differentiate between the starting points and the ending points of the line. This algorithm can also be used with modifications to clip the polygon into 2 parts. The planes that divide the polygon into two parts should not be considered as clipping the polygon.
The authors have taken great efforts in explaining each and every bit of the algorithm in detail. This paper is a good read and does explain the concepts up to the mark. | <urn:uuid:f0a380e4-4c8a-4140-a8f0-8abae757fb05> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.brightwaterinc.com/essay/the-foundations-of-computer-graphics-52974 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571190.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810131127-20220810161127-00066.warc.gz | en | 0.942179 | 429 | 3.453125 | 3 |
My new industrial relations students will be learning for the first time about how we govern industrial conflict in Canada. The latest Air Canada dispute presents an opportunity to discuss the state’s role in collective bargaining in Canada. The Air Canada flight attendants are set to strike, and then to be immediately ordered back to work by Air Canada’s friends in the Conservative government in Ottawa. This isn’t how things usually work.
The legal right to strike (and lockout) is intended to steer the parties towards a negotiated solution, since a work stoppage is usually very costly to both sides. It is the threat of a strike that gives the workers bargaining power. Take it away, and the model no longer works as intended. When strikes have been prohibited, Canadian governments have substituted interest arbitration, a process in which an arbitrator, usually chosen by the parties, sets the collective agreement after hearing arguments from the employer and union. Interest arbitration is usually applied in the public sector, where workers perform “essential” public services.
The government’s aggressive interference in the collective bargaining at Air Canada is very unusual in several respects.
Firstly, Air Canada is not providing an essential public service. It is not a hospital, police, firefighter. It is not even a school, transit service, or garbage collector. It is a private, for profit corporation that sells shares and operates in a highly competitive industry. There are lots of other airlines that can fly people around if Air Canada is temporarily shut down because of a strike. In addition, flying is not even an essential requirement for business anymore. We have Skype, video-conferencing, email, trains, etc. So it is extremely unusual for a government to be intervening on behalf of a private corporation that does not perform an essential service.
Secondly, because Air Canada knows that if the workers strike, the government will come to their rescue, the incentive to bargain in distorted. Even when public sector employers know the dispute will go to interest arbitration (when strikes are banned), employers still usually have an incentive to reach a deal because interest arbitration is also unpredictable. In fact, interest arbitrators have been know to impose collective agreements that employers believe are better than what the workers would have been able to bargain if they had the right to strike. But the Conservatives have tried to alter this dynamic as well by trying to control the arbitration process in ways designed to favour of the employer.
They assumed unilateral control over selecting the arbitrator, instead of allowing the parties to try and agree on their own as is the usual approach. This is to ensure that the Tories can pick someone who will not be concerned about pissing off the union. Usually interest arbitrators are also grievance arbitrators, and they depend for their livelihood on appearing to be fair to both unions and employers. The Tories don’t want a person like that. They want someone who will care less about long-term labour relations implications, and will apply a more narrow interpretation of the statutory language than an experienced labour relations expert would be inclined to do. Someone like a judge, for instance, without labour relations expertise. Someone like the person the Tories appointed to hear the Canada Post arbitration, for example. Predictably, the union there is challenging the judge as an inappropriate selection.
The back-to-work legislation passed during the last Air Canada strike earlier this year also included a set of parameters to guide the government’s hand-picked arbitrator. These parameters emphasized the employer’s concerns over the employees. Here is the relevant language (section 11(2):
In making the selection of a final offer, the arbitrator is to be guided by the need for terms and conditions of employment that are consistent with those in comparable airlines and that will provide the necessary degree of flexibility to ensure the short- and long-term economic viability and competitiveness of Air Canada and the sustainability of its pension plan.
Can you see how this tends to emphasize the employer’s interests in keeping labour costs down over the employees’ interests in obtaining a larger share of the revenues? The legislation the government will introduce on Wednesday if no deal is reached today will almost certainly include the same (or very similar) language.
You can imagine a slightly different set of parameters that could change the emphasis. Like this for example:
In making the selection of a final offer, the arbitrator is to consider the ratio in executive pay at Air Canada to bargaining unit employees wages, the concessions given by bargaining unit employees in the previous decade, the economic competitiveness of Air Canada, and the sustainability of the pension plan.
Do you think that those parameters would alter the arbitrator’s impressions? Note that the CEO Robert Milton was paid over $80 million dollars between 2004 and 2009, a period in which unionized workers’ wages were mostly frozen or reduced.
The union will likely point that little fact out to the arbitrator during arguments about the “economic viability” of Air Canada.
Do you think the arbitrator should treat the huge salaries paid to Air Canada executives as relevant when he/she decides how much of a raise and benefit improvement to award the CUPE members? | <urn:uuid:4a8ccaa1-0d69-4825-80f8-50753b5017d5> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://lawofwork.ca/the-government-and-air-canada/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573163.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20220818033705-20220818063705-00069.warc.gz | en | 0.954207 | 1,051 | 2.265625 | 2 |
I am in the cattle business, as are many other people in the part of Tennessee where I live. In fact, some of us raise the same breed of cattle and they are extremely hard to tell apart. And if, for some reason, two herds happen to get mixed together, you could have a hard time telling yours from your neighbor's.
So, to prove ownership, I have a brand registered with the State of Tennessee that nobody else can use and any cow wearing that brand belongs to Twin Pines Ranch. That way, if you can read brands, no matter how many different herds get mixed together you can always tell who owns which cattle.
Branding cattle saves a lot of confusion and combats dishonesty and is a good thing when you're dealing with animals. However, when it comes to human beings and politics, people should never belong so completely to an ideology or political party that they are "branded," or taken for granted, completely blinded, totally convinced that there is absolutely no good in any alternative philosophy, that all ideas outside their narrow field of vision is against them, engineered to harm them.
"Branded" people believe exaggeration and hyperbole, and actually buy the idea that the other side wants to push grandma's wheelchair over a cliff, or starve children or destroy the environment.
God gave each one of us the ability to think for ourselves and nobody should be so sold-out to somebody else's thinking that they can't read between the lines or even seriously consider what the other side is saying.
People vote for bad candidates simply because of the "D" or "R" beside their names, or because that's just the way their family has always voted or because some campaign ad they saw says something totally unrelated to the issues at hand.
Behind the scenes, political movers and shakers have learned which buttons to push and when to push them to excite and motivate their base, to arouse anger, envy and fear to cause their faithful to believe that the lion's share of the problems in their lives is caused by the other side's greed, lack of empathy and desire to hoard all the good things for themselves.
It's been done over and over and always seems to work. Politicians make utopian promises and never really deliver, only to come back around next election cycle to elicit the same fear and claim that all they need to make good on their pie-in-the-sky promises is one more term.
This happens in both the conservative and liberal camps. Some people are so wedded, so bound, so blinded to one persuasion or another, so convinced of the evil intent of the other side that they would never consider anything they would ever propose.
Human beings have the God-given gift of being able to think for themselves, to make decisions that aren't based on what some charlatan can sell them, but on what their head and heart tell them.
They should never be predictable enough as to be taken for granted.
They should never be herded and branded.
What do you think?
Pray for our troops and the peace of Jerusalem.
God Bless America | <urn:uuid:8f5cb3b1-13a6-404f-8910-03d65c2bedea> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/charlie-daniels/letting-yourself-be-branded-will-steer-you-wrong | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988718285.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183838-00105-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974603 | 639 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Expungements Attorney in Midland, Michigan
The true definition of Expungement is the process of clearing your public criminal record. Just recently, the State of Michigan has changed the guidelines on what an individual can have expunged. At Slep Legal Group we are experienced at helping you figure out your eligibility for the Expungement also know as “setting aside a conviction”.
The Process . . .
The process to have a conviction set aside has many steps. One step to this process is filling out an Application to Set Aside Convictions. When preparing said document for the Expungement process you will need to be very specific with what crimes you are looking to have expunged. With this document, you will need to have specific documents prepared within the county court the crime was held in. Once receiving the documents and preparing your application, you will need to receive fingerprints and have all the proper documents sent to the correct court. After you receive the court hearing and true copied documents, you will need to properly notify the Michigan State Police, the Michigan Attorney General and the Prosecuting Attorney’s office that charged the crime.
After a Criminal Record is Expunged . . .
The biggest question we receive at Slep Legal Group is once I have the crime expunged will it be visible to anyone? The answer is only when an individual is seeking a position within Law Enforcement, Firefighters, EMS and certain government positions. Other than those agencies no one should be able to see a crime that has been expunged from someone’s criminal record. | <urn:uuid:96e89560-2f86-4fc4-8cbe-300872b07897> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.sleplegalgroup.com/practice-areas/expungements/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571472.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20220811133823-20220811163823-00670.warc.gz | en | 0.953298 | 323 | 1.65625 | 2 |
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There is no need to take cover - it is just part of the opening of Otago Museum’s latest exhibition called Code Breakers: Women in Games.
The exhibition is made by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and transforms the museum into an immersive and interactive game zone for Otago’s gamers, digital natives, and technophiles.
Visitors can get hands-on with an array of playable games - from indie through to commercial hits and new releases - all made by New Zealand and Australian women working in different capacities: as directors, programmers, developers, digital artists, writers, producers, and designers.
Museum marketing manager Kate Oktay said beyond just the fun of playing games, the exhibition also pondered bigger questions about women in gaming, and offered girls an example of how far they could go and what they could do in the industry.
"Given Dunedin’s huge gaming industry, and the fact that we are a university town, this is really important."
In Code Breakers, each game maker reflects on the sometimes-challenging journey they have made into this male-dominated industry, revealing the human stories behind their games via a custom-built exhibition audio tour.
PS4 Steam games programmer Rebecca Fernandez said the exhibition was an excellent way to give a peek behind the curtain of game development, and highlight women playing an integral role in the industry.
"I really hope it helps to inspire girls and women to begin making their own games."
Award-winning Dunedin independent game developer, publisher and exhibition sponsor Runaway Play will be at the museum, giving people an opportunity to try their new nature-inspired virtual reality games like Flutter VR. Team members will be available to chat to anyone interested in a game development career.
Dunedin gaming companies will be showcased so that visitors can see what is being created in the city right now.
The events run from 10am-4pm on both Saturday and Sunday. | <urn:uuid:fe7b50da-2c0d-4c08-8ced-7b6536a6fe53> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/women-game-developers-showcasing-skill-museum | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571190.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810131127-20220810161127-00070.warc.gz | en | 0.954895 | 429 | 1.71875 | 2 |
With another hot week forecast for large parts of the UK, Highways England has issued advice on how motorists can deal with the sweltering conditions.
With the easing of restrictions on Monday coupled with schools breaking up for the summer, roads are likely to be extremely busy in the coming days.
Earlier this week the Met Office issued a first ever amber alert for extreme hot weather covering the South West, large parts of Wales and parts of southern and central England lasting until later this week.
As a result the following advice has been given.
Before heading out on journeys:
- Take bottles of water with you to ensure you stay hydrated;
- Plan and leave plenty of time for journeys;
- Check the weather forecast for your destination;
- Check travel conditions before setting out and, where it is safe to do so, during journeys;
- Ensure you and your cars are fit for the journey - https://highwaysengland.co.uk/safetychecks/
"Safety is our top priority and we want all drivers to safely reach their destinations during the hot weather. I would urge people to prepare for their journey by stocking up on water, checking their vehicles, particularly tyre pressures and tread, oil levels and coolant," said Dan Lacey, Highways England National Network Manager.
"As a company, we are making preparations for the safety of our roadworkers operating in extreme heat, and we ask people travelling on our network to be equally prepared.
"During the pandemic and foreign travel restrictions, we are seeing a lot of people making staycation journeys, particularly to the South West. We and our recovery partners are responding to an increasing number of breakdowns, so we’re asking people to check their vehicles, assess travel conditions before they set off and be prepared."
Further weather advice and information can be found on the Met Office website here. Highways England will also be providing regular traffic updates on its regional Twitter feeds: @HighwaysSWEST, @HighwaysEAST, @HighwaysSEAST, @HighwaysWMIDS
To keep informed about driving conditions during their journeys, drivers are advised to follow messages on the overhead signs and listen to radio updates. Further information can be found by visiting the www.highways.gov.uk/traffic or calling the Highways England Information Line on 0300 123 5000.
For more stories from where you live, visit InYourArea. | <urn:uuid:08f6d06f-df15-494e-b7b5-d1d61d47c05c> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/highways-england-issues-plea-drivers-5678207 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573760.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819191655-20220819221655-00677.warc.gz | en | 0.941566 | 496 | 2 | 2 |
Mystery surrounds a rare “Burns” songbook donated to Special Collections
A rare collection of printed song sheets from the time of Robert Burns, compiled in a book belonging to ‘Agnes Burns’ has been donated to the University of Glasgow’s Archives and Special Collections by a University graduate and businessman.
The book comprises of 18th century songs sheets containing over 100 songs with music, many are Scottish standards as well as a large quantity of Irish songs.
The book has been donated to the University of Glasgow by businessman and former University student George Walker, in memory of his late wife Margaret.
The collection was originally discovered ten years ago in a street bookstall in Haddington, near Edinburgh.
It is commonly known that Robert Burns’ mother Agnes Burns, or Burnes as she was originally called, lived near Haddington for many years, where she finally died.
The book, which has a handwritten title 'Agnes Burn’s her book 1801' on the inside cover, was bought by a bookshop owner who spotted it in a collection of books at a local street bookstall.
Unsure about the authenticity of the 'Agnes Burn’s' inscription, the bookshop owner stored the book among other valuable collections where it lay awaiting a special buyer for many years. George Walker, a successful businessman and former student at the University of Glasgow, heard about the book and eventually offered to buy it, and has donated it to the University as a memorial to his late wife.
Academics at the University’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies are keen to study and research the book to determine its authenticity, in particular to establish if it was originally owned by Agnes Burns in 1801; and which ‘Agnes’ it could be as Robert Burns’ mother, sister and niece were all called Agnes.
Towards the back of the book there is handwriting referring to ‘whale fisheries’ followed by a series of financial figures, which might possibly be an excise entry in Robert Burns’ handwriting. It is possible they were part of Robert Burns’ own collection of song sheets, handed down to his sister.
Professor Kirsteen McCue, Centre for Robert Burns Studies, while commenting on the authenticity of the book, said: “Certainly all the markers are pointing in the direction that this could be Agnes Burns, Robert Burns’ sister, not his mother.
“Certainly the 1801 date would be more fitting. But we need to do a lot of research and investigative work, which is what we love doing, to try and determine who owned this book and how old it is. It’s very exciting.”
First published: 19 January 2017 | <urn:uuid:94ff3a05-c056-41ea-b10f-83a86990d4a7> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2017/january/headline_510155_en.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573197.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20220818124424-20220818154424-00674.warc.gz | en | 0.981134 | 569 | 2.4375 | 2 |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prepayment may refer to:
- Prepaid mobile phone, mobile phone use
- Prepayment for service, e.g. phone calls
- Prepayment of loan, repaying a loan ahead of schedule
- Deferred expense in accounting
- Stored-value card (see also: Credit card#Prepaid cards)
|This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Prepayment.
If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. | <urn:uuid:097ee7b5-3de0-4d73-8fd0-fa4c30d9e23b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepayment | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560284405.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095124-00037-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914895 | 116 | 1.640625 | 2 |
When a farmer starts noticing he has disease in a wheat field, it doesn’t matter how much water or nitrogen is applied, it can be a waste, said Dr. Charlie Rush, Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant pathologist in Amarillo.
“It’s a waste because the root system can’t take it up,” Rush said. “Anything you put on severely diseased wheat, you are wasting your time and resources and energy – it just doesn’t pay off for the current crop.”
But that doesn’t mean site-specific management isn’t possible, especially on plants infected later in the season that are still capable of producing good grain and forage yields.
Rush is leading a research team to study mite-vectored virus diseases—the main pathogenic constraints to economically sustainable to profitable wheat production, and transmitted by the wheat curl mite. The project is funded by the Ogallala Initiative and also by a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
Wheat plants infected with mite-vectored diseases, such as wheat streak and triticum mosaic, not only have reduced grain and forage yields, but also greatly reduced root weight and water-use efficiency, he said. Their progressive nature makes it difficult for producers to know when additional crop inputs, such as fertilization and multiple spring irrigations, are economically feasible
Rush said the study’s goal is to help producers develop some site-specific practices to make those critical economic decisions.
Wheat streak mosaic, one of the mite-vectored diseases, develops in gradients across the field, starting on one edge and spreading across the field. Almost every plant eventually becomes infected.
If you are enjoying reading this article, please check out Southwest Farm Press Daily and receive the latest news right to your inbox.
Because this is known, Rush and his plant pathology crew are studying the hot spots and making transects across the field, starting where the disease started and going into the center of the field where there is no disease yet. The study is being conducted at the AgriLife Research station near Bushland and in farmers’ fields.
Members of the team detect and quantify plant diseases using a variety of remote sensing devices. Most recently, a hand-held hyperspectral radiometer was used to quantify severity gradients in the field. By recording hyperspectral readings of disease symptom severity over time and associating each reading with GPS coordinates, it will be possible to determine how a specific reflectance reading, at a particular location and point in time, relates to grain and forage yields.
Knowing when specific crop inputs were made, in relation to disease severity at the time, will allow economic cost/benefit analysis and development of an economic threshold for irrigation of diseased wheat, Rush said.
“We take radiometer readings and also visual readings on how severe the disease is at that particular point,” he said. “We are making those ratings each week at the same spot over the entire season. At the end of the season, our statistical guys will be able to say ‘if you had a particular level of disease at a particular time of the season, then it is not going to pay off for you to put any more inputs into that wheat.’
“Or, if you have a disease level that is below a threshold, then we would say based on what we measured in the past, it would be economical for you to irrigate or apply that top-dress of nitrogen,” Rush said.
This year the study has been somewhat limited by the freeze damage and hail, but the wheat that is growing out of the damage is showing the same trends as the wheat prior to the freeze, he said.
“We are going to continue to do the study for three more years,” Rush said. “At the end, we believe we will be able to provide an economic threshold that will tell you when it is worth it to continue to irrigate or put nitrogen on if you have disease in a field.”
You may also like: | <urn:uuid:7995ec94-6bf6-47da-80fd-c22386ba526e> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.southwestfarmpress.com/print/grains/agrilife-research-determine-when-wheat-diseases-limit-input-effectiveness?intlink=rceoc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279933.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00125-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957695 | 870 | 3.28125 | 3 |
Effect of Regulatory Constraints and External Monitoring on Managers' Impairment decisions - E131
Accounting standards for the impairment of assets require managers to make a series of judgments and decisions when determining an asset’s recoverability, including estimating its future cash flows. It has been a concern for regulators in Australia and internationally that the various estimations required under the standards allow managers to avoid recognising the full impact of impairment losses.
This study investigates how regulatory requirements in accounting for impairment - namely, reversibility of impairment losses (possible under IFRS, but not under US accounting standards) and disclosure of impairment assumptions - influence managers’ bias in the processing of impairment information. The study also investigates the moderating role of disclosure on the reversibility of impairment losses. These issues are addressed by an experiment using managers who make impairment judgments based on the cases provided.
The findings of this project suggest that:
• Managers’ evaluation of impairment information is not biased when impairment losses are reversible. When impairment losses are not reversible, the direction of bias depends on whether managers are required by accounting standards to make a full or partial disclosure of the impairment assumptions.
• When managers are required to disclose all assumptions, regardless of their impairment decisions, they tend to exhibit favourable evaluation of positive information and unfavourable evaluation of negative information. However, if disclosure of assumptions is required only when impairment losses are recognized, managers are more prone to evaluate negative information favourably.
These findings suggest that the current accounting regime for impairment of assets in Australia, which allows reversibility of impairment losses, is likely to create an environment where managers will undertake a more balanced evaluation of impairment information. Despite the significant information processing bias, the study did not find a link between information bias and managers’ decisions regarding the recognition of impairment losses.
This research will also be presented at Research Forum, Centre for Accounting and Assurance Research, UNSW Australia (November 2014) and in the US later this year. | <urn:uuid:3d03d3f0-f528-42a1-ba17-60a6493f2cbd> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.cifr.edu.au/project/Managers_impairment_decisions.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281574.78/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00022-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93215 | 403 | 1.75 | 2 |
…Supporting homeless people this winter
Every homeless person in London is entitled to receive care that is consistent in quality and experience with that of the general population.
We believe that systems which support homeless people should be linked up as much as possible to improve communication and outcomes as people move around the capital.
Health needs assessment
Conducting a health needs assessment is key to developing and delivering integrated care. Local Authorities must do a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment of the health and wellbeing of their local population – this includes assessing health needs of people who are or have been homeless.
Use our London homeless health assessment toolkit
Duty to refer
The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 introduced a duty on specified public authorities to refer service users who they think may be homeless or threatened with homelessness to local authority homelessness/housing options teams.
The Government’s latest duty to refer guidance is designed for those working in a specified public authority, which is subject to the duty to refer.
See the full duty to refer guidance | <urn:uuid:b4f42f2b-56bc-4092-b02b-e7b449007202> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.healthylondon.org/resource/enews-12-december-2018/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571150.88/warc/CC-MAIN-20220810070501-20220810100501-00675.warc.gz | en | 0.96659 | 212 | 2.046875 | 2 |
A formula to increase wind turbines’ efficiency levelJune 17th, 2009 - 4:57 pm ICT by ANI
Washington, June 17 (ANI): A new study has provided a formula for calculating how much usable energy do wind turbines produce, which will help increase their efficiency level.
The study, carried out by Abolfazl Ahmadi and Mehdi Ali Ehyaei of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Iran University of Science and Technology-Arak Branch, in Arak, investigated the “exergy” of wind power.
Exergy is a term from thermodynamics that measures that the energy a system that is available to do work.
A single wind turbine can vary in size from a few kilowatts for small residential applications to more than 5 megawatts for industrial scale electricity generation.
Ahmadi and Ehyaei point out that wind turbines have to compete with many other energy sources, primarily fossil fuels but also other renewable energy sources such as solar and biomass technology.
As such, a wind turbine has to be cost effective in order to be environmentally effective. Turbine design must meet load requirements and produce energy at a minimal per dollar cost.
In order to address this cost issue, performance characteristics such as power output versus wind speed or versus rotor angular velocity must be optimized.
Exergy analysis looks at the “quality” of the energy produced by a system.
To be viable, there is little point in producing intermittent power at wildly varying levels, as this feeds only low-quality energy into the power supply system.
Usually, wind speeds of above 9 meters per second are considered irrelevant in exergy calculations of wind turbines and previous research has not taken all factors that are required for a holistic analysis into account, according to the Iranian team.
They have now developed an improved exergy analysis for wind turbines, which considers the kinetic exergy of the wind in much greater detail.
Their approach gives them a model of how the turbine’s potential for work can be lost.
This then offers a way to optimize a wind turbine’s three main parameters, cut-in, rated, and furling wind speeds, so that usable energy is maximized at any given wind speed from the gentlest breeze to a roaring gale; within the safe working parameters of the turbine.
The research team’s formula offers optimized values for wind turbine rotation speed, which can be altered depending on wind speed.
The results are a theoretical boost of 20 percent efficiency at both sites and a decrease in “wasted” energy of 80 percent. (ANI)
- Making wind-turbines more efficient - Nov 22, 2010
- Global warming cuts available wind energy: Study - Nov 10, 2010
- Dragonfly's stability in flight inspires micro wind turbine design - Feb 03, 2011
- Iran tests new home-made missile system - Apr 17, 2011
- Wind turbine produces water out of thin air - May 01, 2012
- Prince Philip blasts 'useless' wind farms - Nov 21, 2011
- 'Wind power can meet global energy demands' - Sep 10, 2012
- Soon, shape-shifting turbines to generate electricity at any wind speed - May 28, 2009
- Study shows utility of floating wind turbines - Jun 30, 2010
- Sailing ships could harvest energy from ocean winds - May 28, 2010
- Russia develops ammonia rocket engine - May 06, 2012
- Green power plants may not be far away - Nov 04, 2011
- Mexico's wind energy sector experiencing rapid growth - Feb 09, 2012
- Suzlon signs wind power deal worth $1.28 bn - Jan 28, 2011
- Don't scrap wind power banking: Manufacturers tell Tamil Nadu - Jun 28, 2012
Tags: abolfazl, ahmadi, angular velocity, biomass technology, efficiency level, electricity generation, exergy analysis, holistic analysis, iran university of science and technology, iranian team, kilowatts, mehdi ali, quality energy, renewable energy sources, residential applications, turbine design, usable energy, wind speeds, wind turbine, wind turbines | <urn:uuid:b89d773d-1a81-4315-b8a0-748f543b9575> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/feature/a-formula-to-increase-wind-turbines-efficiency-level_100206015.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560281353.56/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095121-00066-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.898338 | 857 | 3.25 | 3 |
Date: March 1998. Last edited: $Date: 2009/08/27 21:38:07 $
Status: . Editing status: incomplete first draft. This explains the rationale for XML namespaces and RDF schemas, and derives requirement on them from a discussion of the process by which we arrive at standards.
Up to Design Issues
(These ideas were mentioned in a keynote on "Evolvability" at WWW7 and this text follows closely enough for you to give yourself the talk below using those slides. More or less. If and when we get a video from WWW7 of the talk, maybe we'll be able to serve that up in parallel.)
The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in 1994 on the mandate to lead the Evolution of the Web while maintaining its Interoperability as a universal space. "Interoperability" and "Evolvability" were two goals for all W3C technology, and whilst there was a good understanding of what the first meant, it was difficult to define the second in terms of technology.
Since then W3C has had first hand experience of the tension beween these two goals, and has seen the process by which specifications have been advanced, fragmented and later reconverged. This has led to a desire for a technological solution which will allow specifications to evolve with the speed and freedom of many parallel deevlopments, but also such that any message, whether "standard" or not, at least has a well defined meaning.
There have been technologies dubbed "futureproof" for years and years, whether they are languages or backplane busses. I expect you the reader to share my cynicism when encountering any such claim. We must work though exactly what we mean: what we expect to be able to do which we could not do before, and how that will make evolution more possible and less painfull.
A rule explicit or implcit in all the email-like Internet protocols has always been that if you found a mail header (or something) which you did not understand, you should ignore it. This obviously allows people to add all sorts of records to things in a very free way, and so we can call it the rul of free extension. It has its advatage of rapid prototyping and incremental deployment, and the disadvantage of ambiguity, confusion, and an inability to add a mandatory feature to an existing protocol. I adopeted the rule for HTML when initially designing it - and used it myself all the time, adding elements one by one. This is one way in which HTML was unlike a conventional SGML application, but it allowed the dramatic development of HTML.
The development of HTML between 1994 and 1998 took place in a cycle, fuelled by the tension between the competitive urge of companies to outdo each other and the common need for standards for moving forward. The cycle starts simply simply bcause the HTML standard is open and usable by anyone: this means that any engineer, in any company or waiting for a bus can think of new ways to extend HTML, and try them out.
The next phase is that some of these many ideas are tried out in prototypes or products, using the fact free extension rule that any unrecongined extensiosn will be ignored by everything which does not understand them. The result is a drmatic growth in features. Some of these become product differentiators, during which time their originators are loth to discuss the technology with the competition. Some features die in the market and diappear from the products. Those successful features have a fairly short lifetime as product differetiators, as they are soon emulated in some equivalent (though different) feature in competeing products.
After this phase of the cycle, there are three or four ways of doing the same thing, and engineers in each company are forced to spend their time writing three of four different versions of the same thing, and coping with the software architectural problems which arise from the mix of different models. This wastes program size, and confuses users. In the case for example, of the TABLE tag, a browser meeting one in a document had no idea which table extension it was, so the situation could become ambiguous. If the interpretation of the table was important for the safe interpretation ofthe document, the server would never know whether it had been done, as an unaware client would blithely ignore it in any case. This internal software mess resulting from having to implement multiple models also threatens future deevlopment. It turns the stable consistent base for future development into something fragmented and inconsistent: it is difficult to design new features in such an environment.
Now the marketting pressure is off which prevented discussions, and there is a strong call for the engineers to get around the W3C table, and iron out a common way of doing things. As this happens, a system is designed which puts together the best aspects of each other system, plus a few weeks experience, so everyone is in the end happier with the result. The companies all go away making public promises to implement it, even though the engineering staff will be under pressure to add the next feature and startthe next cycle. The result is published as a common specification opene to anyone to implement. And so the cycle starts again.
This is not the way all W3C activities have worked, but it was the particular case with HTML, and it illustrates some of the advantages and disadvantages with the free extenstion rule.
The HTML cycle as a method of arriving at consensus on a document has its drawbacks. By 1998, there were reasons to change the cycle.The work in the W3C, which had started off in 1994 with several years backlog of work, had more or less caught up, and was begining to lead, rather than trail, developments. The work was seen less as fire fighting and more as consolitation. By this time the spec was growing to a size where the principle of modularity was seriously flaunted. Any new developments clearly had to be seperate modules. Already style information had been moved out into the Cascading Style Sheets language, the programming interface work was a seperate Document Object Model activity, and guidelines for accessibility were tackled by a seperate group.
Inthe future it was clear that we needed somehow to set up a modular system which would allow one to add to HTML new standard modules. At the same time, it was clear that with XML available as a manageble version of SGML as a base for anyone to define their own tag sets, there was likely to be a deluge of application-specific and industry-specific XML based languages. The idea of all this happening underthefree extension rule was frightening. Most applications would simply add new tags to HTML. If we continued the process of retrospectively roping into a new bigger standard, the document would grow without limit and become totally unmanageble. The rule of free extesnion was no longer appropriate.
Now let us compare this situation with the way development occus in the world of distributed computing, specifically remote rpocedure call (RPC) and distributed object oriented systems. In these systems, the distributed system (equivalent to the server plus the client for the web) is viewed as a single software system which happens to be spread over several physical machines. [nelson - courier, etc]
The network protocols are defined automatically as a function of the software interfaces which happen to end up being between modules on different machines. Each interface, local or remote, has a well documented structure, and the list of functions (procedures, methods or whatever) and parameters are defined in machine-processable form. As the system is built, the compiler checks that the interfaces required by one module is exactly provided by another module. The interface, in each version of its development, typically has an identifying (typically very long) unique number.
The interface defines the parameters of a remote call, and therefore defines exactly what can occur in a message from one module to another. There is no free extension. If the interface is changed, and a new module made, any module on the other side of the interface will have to be changed too, or you can't build the system.
The great advantage of this is that when the system has been built, you expect it to work. There is no wondering wether a table is being displayed - if you have called the table module, you know exactly what the module is supposed to do, and there is no way the system could be without that module. Given the chaos of the HTML devleopment world, you can imagine that many people were hankering after the well defined interfaces of the distributed computing technology.
With well-defined interfaces, either everything works, or nothing. This was in fact at least formally the case with SGML documents. Each had a document type definition (DTD) refered to at the the top, which defiend in principle exactly what could and could not be in the document. PICS labels were similar in that thet are self-describing: they actually have a URI atthe top which points to a machine-readable description of what can and can't be in athat PICS label. When you see one of these documents, as when you get an RPC mesaage with an interface number on it, you can check whether you understand the interface or not. Another intersting thing you can do, if you don't have a way of processing it, is to look it up in some index and dynamically download the code to process it.
The existence of the Web makes all this much smoother: instead of inventing arbitrary names for inetrfaces, tyou can use a real URI which can be dereferenecd and return the master definition of the interface in real time. The Web can become a decentralised registray of interfaces (languages) and code modules.
The need was clearly for the best of both worlds. One must be able to freely extend a language, but do so with an extension language which is itself well defined. If for example, documents which were HTML 2.0 plus Netscape's version of tables version 2.01 were identified as such, mcuh o the problem of ambiguity would have been resolved, but the rest ofthe world left free to make their own table extensions. This was the goal of the namespaces work in XML.
To be able to use the namespaces work in the extension of HTML, HTML has to transition from being an SGML application (with certain constraints) to being an XML based langauge. This will not only give it a certain ease of parsing, but allow it to build on the modularity introduced by namespaces.
In fact, already in April of 1998 there was a W3C Recommendation for "MathML", defined as as XML langauge and obviously aimed at being usable in the context of an HTML document, but for which there was no defined way to write a combined HTML+MathML document. MathML was already waiting for XML namespaces.
XML namespaces will allow an author (or authoring tool, hopefully) to declare exactly waht set of tags he orshe is using in a document. Later, schemas should allow a browser to decide what to do as a fall back when finding vocabulary which it does not understand.
It is expected that new extensions to HTML be introduced as namespaces, possibly languages in their own right. The intent is that the new languages, where appropriate, will be able to use the existing work on style sheets, such as CSS, and the existing DOM work which defines a programming interface.
Language mixing is an important facility, for HTML, for the evolution of all other Web and application technology. It must allow, in a mixed labguage document, for both langauges to be well defined. A mixed langage document is quiote analogous to a program which makes calls to two runtime libraries, so it is not rocket science. It is not like an RPC message, which in most systems is very strongly ytped froma single rigid definition. (An RPC message can be represented as a structured document but not, in general, vice-versa)
No longer can the Web tolerate the laxness which HTML and HTTP have been extended. However, it cannot constrain itself to a system as rigid as a classical disributed object oriented system.
The note on namespaces defines some requirements of a language framework which allows new schmata to be developed quite independently, and mixed within one document. This note elaborates on the sorts of things which have to be possible when the evolution occurs.
You may notice than nowhere in the architecture do XML or RDF specify what language the schema should be written in. This is because much of the future power of the system will lie in the power of the schema and related documents, so it isimportant to leave that open as a path for the future. In the short term, yo can think of a schema being written in HTML and english. Indeed, this is enough to tie the significance of documents written in the schema to the law of the land and mkae the document an effective part of serious commercial or other social interaction. You can imagine a schema being in a sort of SGML DTD language which tells a computer program what constraints there are on the structure of documents, but nothing about their meaning. This allows a certain crude validity check to be made on a document but little else.
Now let us imagine further power which we could put into a schema language.
A crucial first milestone for the system is partial understanding. Let's use the scenario of an invoice, like the scenario in the "Extensible languages" note. An invoice refers to two schemata: one is a well-known invoice schema and the other a proprietory part number schema. The requirement is that an invoice processing program can process the invoice without needing to understand the part description.
Somehow the program must find out that the invoice is from its point of view just as valid as an invoice with the details fo the part description stripped out.
One possibility is to mark the part description as "optional" on the text. We could imagine a well-known way of doing this. It could be done in the document itself [as usual, using an arbitrary syntax:]
<item> <partnumber>8137498237</> <optional> <xml:using href="http://aeroco.com/1998/03/sy4" as="A">
<a:partdesc> ... <a:partdesc> </xml:using>
There are problems with this. One is that we are relying on the invoice schema to define what in invoice is and isn't and what it means. It would be nice if the designer of the invoice could say whether the item should contain a part description of not, or whether it is possible to add things into the item description or not. But in general if there is something to be said we like to allow it to be said anywhere (like metadata). But for the optionalness to be expressed elsewhere would save the writer of every invoice the bother of having to explicitly.
The other more fundamental problem is that the notion of "optional" is subjective. We can be more precise about "partial understanding" by saying that the invoice processing system needs to convert the document which contains things it doesn't understand into a document which it does completely understand: a valid invoice. However, another agent may which to convert the same detailed invoice into, say, a delivery note: in this case, quite different information would be "optional".
To be more specific, then, we need to be able to describe a transformation from one document to another which preserves "valididy" in some sense. A simple form of transformation is the removal of sections, but obviously there can be all kinds of level of transformation language ranging from the cudest to theturing complete. Whatever the language, statement that given a document x, that some f(x) can be deduced.
In practice, this suggest that one should leave the actual choice of the transformation language as a flexibility point. However, as with most choices of computer language, the general "principle least power" applies:
|When expressing something, use the least powerful language you can.|
(@@justify in greater depth in footnote)
While being able to express a very complex function may feel good, the result will in general be less useful. As Lao-Tse puts it, "Usefulness from what is not there". From the point of view of translation algorithms, one usefulness is for them to be reversible. In the case in which you are trying to prove something (such as access to a web site or financial credibility) you need to be able to derive a document of a given form. The rules you use are the pieces of the web of trust and you are looking for a path through the web of trust. Clearly, one approach is to enumerate all the things which can be deduced from a given document, but it is faster to have an idea of which algorithms to apply. Simple ones have input and output patterns. A deletion rule is a very simple case
This is stream editor languge for "Remove "foo" from any string leaving what was on either side". If this rule is allowed, it means that "foo"is optional. @@@ to be continued
Optional features and Partial Understanding
The test of independent invention is a thought experiment which tests one aspect of the quality of a design. When you design something, you make a number of important architectural decisions, such as how many wheels a car has, and that an arch will be used between the pillas of the vault. You make other arbitrary decisions such as the color of the car, the side of the road everyone will drive, whether to open the egg at the big end or the little end.
Suppose it just happens that another group is designing the same sort of thing, tackling the same problem, somewhere else. They are quite unknown to you and you to them, but just suppose that being just as smart as you, they make all the same important archietctural decisions. This you can expect if you believe hat these decisions make logical sense. Imagine that they have the same philosophy: it is largely the philosophy which we are testing. However, imagine that they make all the arbitrary decisions differently. They complement bit 7. They drive on the other other side of the road. They use red buoys on the starbord side, and use 575 lines per screen on their televisions.
Now imagine that the two systems both work (locally), and being usccessful, grow and grow. After a while, they meet. Suddenly you discover each other. Suddenly, people want to work across both systems. They want to connect two road systems, two telephone systems, two networks, two webs. What happens?
I tried originally to make WWW pass the test. Suppose someone had (and it was quite likely) invented a World Wide Web system somewhere else with the same principles. Suppose they called it the Multi Media Mesh (tm) and based it on Media Resource Identifiers(tm), the MultiMedia Transport Protocol(tm), and a Multi Media Markup Language(tm). After a few years, the Web and the Mesh meet. What is the damage?
(see also WWW and Unitarian Universalism)
Obviously we are looking for the latter option. Fortunately, we could immediately extend URIs to include "mmtp://" and extend MRIs to include "http:\\". We could make gateways, and on the better browsers immediately configure them to go through a gateway when finding a URI of the new type. The URI space is universal: it covers all addresses of all accessible objects. But it does not have to be the only universal space. Universal, but not unique. We could add MMML as a MIME type. And so on. However, if we required all Web servers to synchronise though one and only one master lock server in Waltdorf, we would have found the Mesh required synchronisation though a master server in Melbourne. It would have failed.
No system completely passes the ToII - it is always some trouble to convert.
As the Web becomes the basis for many many applications to be build on top of it, the phenomenon of independent invention will recur again and again. We have to build technology so as to make it easy for systems to pass the test, and so survive real life in an evolving world.
If systems cannot pass the TOII, then we can only achieve worldwide interoperability when one original design has originally beaten the others. This can happen if we all sit down together as a worldwide committee and do a "top down"design of the whole thing before we start. This works for a new idea but not for the automation of something which, like pharmacy or trade, has been going on for centuries and is just being represented in the Semantic Web. For example, the library community has had endless trouble trying to agree on a single library card format (MARC record) worldwide.
Another way it can happen is if one system is dropped completely, leading to a complete loss of the effport put into it. When in the late 1980s Europe eventually abandoned its suite of ISO protocols for networking because they just could not interwork with the Internet, a huge amount of work was lost. Many problems, solved in Europe but not in the US (including network addresses of more than 32 bits) had to be solved again on the Internet at great cost. Sweden actually changed from driving on the left to driving on the right. All over the world, people have changed word processor formats again and again but only at the cost of losing access to huge amounts of legacy information. The test of independent invention is not just a thought experiment, it is happening all the time.
So now let us get more specific about what we really need in the underlying technology of the Semantic Web to allow systems in the future to pass the test of independent invention.
Our first assumption is that we will be smarter in the future. This means that we will produce better systems. We will want to move on from version 1 to version 2, from version n to version n+1.
What happens now? A group of people use version 4 of a word process and share some documents. One touches a document using a new version 5 of the same program. Oen of the other people tries to load it using version 4 of the software. The version 4 program reads the file, and find it is a version5 file. It declares that there is no way it can read the file,as it was produced in the future, and there is no way it can predict the future to know how to read a version 5 file. A flag day occurs: everyone in the group has to upgrade immediately - and often they never even planned to.
So the first requirement is for a version 4 program to be able to read a version 5 file. Of course there will be some features in version 5 that the version 4 program will not be able to understand. But most of the time, we actually find that what we want to achieve can be done by partial understanding - understanding those parts of the document which correspond to functions which exist in version 4. But even though we know partial understanding would be acceptable, with most systems we don't know how to do even that.
The philosophical assumption that we may not be smarter than everyone else (a huge step for some!) leads us to realise that others will have gret ideas too, and will independently invent the same things. It forces us to consider the test of independent invention.
The requirement for the system to pass the ToII is for one program which we write to be able to read somehow (partially if not totally) data written by the program written by the other folks. This simple operation is the key to decentralised evolution of our technology, and to the whole future of the Web.
So we have deduced two requirements for the system from our simple philosophical assumptions:
We are we with the requirements for evolvability so far? We are looking for a tecnology which has free but well defined extension. We want to do it by allowing documents to use mixed vocabularies. We have already found out (from PICS work for example) that we need to be abl eto know whether extension vocabulary is mandatory or can be ignored. We want to use the Web for any registry, rather than any central point. The technology has to be allow an application to be able to convert the output of a future version of itself, or the output of an equivalent program written indpendently, into something it can process, just by looking up schema information.
Now let us look at the world of data on the Web, the Semantic Web, which I expect we expect to become a new force in the next few years. By "data" as opposed to "documents", I am talking about information on the Web in a form specifically to aid automated processing rather than human browsing. "Data" is characterised by infomation with a well defined strcuture, where the atomic parts have wel ldefined types, such as numbers and choices from finite sets. "Data", as in a relational database, normally has well defined meaning which has rarely been written down. When someone creates a new databse, they have to give the data type of each column, but don't have to explain what the field name actually means in any way. So there is a well defined semantics but not one which can be accessed. In fact, the only time you tells the machine anything about the semantics is when you define which two columns of different tables are equivalent in some way, so that they can be used for example as the basis for joining the two databases. (That the meaning of data is only defined relative to the meaning of other data is of course quite normal - we don't expect machines to have any built in understanding of what "zip code" might mean apart from where you can read it and write it and what you can compare it with). Notice that what happens with real databases is that they are defined by users one day, and they evolve. They are rarely the result of a committee sitting down and deciding on a set of concepts to use across a company or an industry, and then designing the data schema. The schema is craeted on the fly by the user.
We can distinguish two ways in which tha word "schema" has been used:
|Syntactic Schema: A document, real or imagined, which constrains the structure and/or type of data. (pl.: Schemata).|
|Semantic schema: A document, real or imagined, which defines the infereneces from one schema to another, thus defining the semantics of one syntactic schema in terms of another.|
I will use it for the first only. In fact, a syntactic schema dedfines a class of document, and often is accompanied by human documentation which provides some rough semantics.
There is a huge amount ("legacy" would unfairly suggest obsolescence) of data in relational databases. A certain amount of it is being exported onto the web as virtual hypertext. There are many applications which allow one to make hypertext views of difeferent aspects of a database, so that each server request is met by performing adatabse query, and then formatting the result as a report in HTML, with appropriate style and decoration.
Information about information is interesting in two ways. Firstly, it is interesting because the Web society desperately needs it to be able to manage social aspects of information such as endorsement (PICS labels, etc), ownership and access rights to information, privacy policies (P3P, etc), structuring and cataloguing information and a hundred otehr uses which I will not try to ennumerate. This first aspect is discussed elsewhere. (See Metadata architecture about general treatment of metadata and labels, and the Technology and Society domain for overveiw of many of the social drivers and related projects and technology)
The second interest in metadata is that it is data. If we are looking for a language for putting data onto the Web, in a machine understandable way, then metadata happens to be a first application area. Also, because metadat ais fundamental to most data on eth web, it is the focus of W3C effort, while many other forms of data are regarded as applications rather than core Web archietcure, and so are not.
Suppose for example that you run a server which provides online stock prices. Your application which today provides fancy web pages with a company's data in text and graphs (as GIFs) could tomorrow produce the same page as XML data, in tabular form, for machine access. The same page could even be produced at the same URL in two formats using content negotiation, or you could have a typed link between the machine-understandable and person-understandable versions.
The XML version contains at the top (or soemewhere) a pointer to a schema document. This poiner makes the document "self-describing". It is this pointer which is the key to any machine "understanding" of the page. By making the schema a first class object, in other words by giving its URL and nothing else, we are leaving the dooropen to many possibilities. Now it is time to look at the various sorts of schema document which it could point to.
Computer languags can be classified into various types, with various capabilities, and the sort we chose for the schema document, and information we allow the schema fundamentally affects not just what the semantic web can be but, more importantly, how it can grow.
The schema document can, broadly, be one of the following:
We'll go over the pros and cons of each, because none of these should be overlooked, but some are often way better than others.
This may sound like a silly trivial example, but like many trival examples, it is not silly. If you just name your schema somewhere in URI space, then you have identified it. This deosn't offer a lot of help to anyone to find any documentation online, but one fundamental function is possible. Anyone can check compatability: They can compare the schema against a list of schemata they do understand, and return yes or no.
In fact, they can also se an idnex to look up information about the schema, including ifnromation about suitable software to download to add understanding of the document. In fact this level is the level which many RPC systems use: the interface is given a unique but otherwise random number which cannot be dereferenced directly.
So this is the level of machine-understanding typical of distributed ocmputing systems and should not be underestimated. There are lot sof parts of URI space you can use for this: yo might own some http: space (but never actually serve the document at that point) , but if you don't, you can always generate a URI in a mid: ro cid: space or if desperate in one of the hash spaces.
The next step up from just using the Schema identifier as a document tyope identifier is to make that URI one which will dereference to a human-readable document. If you're a computer, big deal. But as well as allowing a strict compatiability test (test for equality of the schema URI), this also allows human beings to get involed if ther is any argument as to what a document means. This can be signifiant! For example, the schema could point to a complete technical spec which is crammed with legalese about what the document does and does not imply and commit to. At the end of the day, all machine-understandable descriptions of documents are all very well, but until the day that they bootstrap themselves into legality, they must all in the end be defined in terms of human-readable legalese to have social effect. Human legalese is the schema language of our society. This is level 2.
Now we move into the meat of the schema system when we start to discuss schema documents which are machine readable. now we are satrting to enable some machine understanding and automatic processing of document types which have not been pre-programmed by people. Ça commence.
The next level we conside is that when your brower (agent, whatever) dereferences the namespace URI, it find a schema which defines the structure of the document. this is a bit like an SGML Doctument type Definition (DTD). It allows you to do everything which the levels 1 and 2 allowed, if it has sufficient comments in it to allow human arguments to be settled.
In addition, a system which has a way of defineing structure allows everyone to have one and only one parser to handle all manner of documents. Any document coming across the threshold can be parse into a tree.
More than that, it allows a document o be validated against allowed strctures. If a memeo contains two subject fields, it is not valid. Tjis is one fo the principal uses of DTDs in SGML.
In some cases, there maybe another spin-off. You canimagine that if the schema document lists the allwoed structrue of the document, and the types (and maybe names) of each element, then this would allow an agent to construct on the fly a graphic user interafce for editing such a document. This was theintent with PICS rating systems: at least, a parent coming across a new rating system would be be given a ahuman-readable descriptoin of the various parameters and would be able to select
The "optional" flag is a term I use here for a common crucial step which can make the difference between chaos and smooth evolution. All you need to do is to mark in the schema of a new version of the language which elements of the langauge can be ignored if you don't understand them. This simple step allows a processor which handled the old language, giventhe schema of the new langauge, to filter it so as to produce a document it can legitimately understand.
Now we have a technology which ahs all the benefits to date, plus it can handle that elusive version 2 to version 1 conversion problem!
Filters written in turing-complete languages generally have to be trusted, as you can't see what rules they are based on by looking at them. But they can do weird and wonderful things. (They can also crash and loop forever of course!).
A good language for conversion from one XML-based language to another is XSL. It lstarted off as a template-like system for building one document from another (and can be very simple) but is in fact Turning-complete.
When you do publish a program to convert language A to language B, then anyone who trusts it has that capability. A disadvantage is that they never know how it works. You can't deduce things about the individual components of the languages. You can't therefore infer much indirectly about relationships to other languages. The only way such a filter can be used is to get whatever you have into language A and then put it though the filter. This might be useful. But it isn't as fascinating as the option of blowing language A open.
What is fundamentally more exciting is to write down as explicitly as posible wahteth new language means. Sorry, let me take that back, in case you think that I am talking about some absulte meaning of meaning. If you know me, I am not. All I mean is that we write in a machine-processable logical way the equivalences and conversions which are possible in and out of language A from other languages. And other languages.
A specific case of course, is when we document the relationship betwen version 2 and version 1. The schema document for version 2 could explain that all the terms are synonyms, except for some new terms which can be converted to nothing (ie are optional) and some which affect the meaning of the document completely and so if you don't understand them you are stuck.
In a more general case, take a language like iCalendar in RDF (were it in RDF), which is for describing events as would be in a personal organizer. A schema for the language might declare equivalences betwen a calendar's concept of group MEMBER ship and an access control system's concept of group membership; it might declare the equivalence of eth concept of LOCATION to be the text description of a Geographical Information Systems standard's location, and it may declare an INDIVIDUAL to be a superset of the HR department's concept of employee. These bits of information of the stuff of the semantic web, as they allow inference to stretch across the gloabe and conclude things which we knew as whole but no one person knew. This is what RDF and the Semnatic Web logic built on top of it is all about.
So, what will semantic web engine be able to do? They will not all have the same inference abilities or algorithms. They will share a core concept of an RDF statement - an assertion that a given resource has a property with a given value. They will use this as a common way of exchanging data even when their inference rules are not compatible. An agent will be able to read a document in a new version of a language, by looking up on the web the relationship with the old version that it can natively read. It will be able to combine many documents into a single graph of knowledge, and draw deductions from the combination. And even though it might not be able to find a proof of a given hypothesis, when faced with an elaborated proof it will be able to check its veracity.
At this stage (1998) we need relational database experts in the XML and RDF groups, [2000 -- include ontology and conceptual graph and knowledge representation experts].
Examples abound of language mixing and evolution in the real world which make the need for these capabilities clear. There is a great and unused overlap in the concepts used by, for example, personal information managers, email systems, and so on. These capabilities would allow information to flow between these applications.
You just have to look at the history of a standard such as MARC record for library information to see that the tension between agreeing on a standard (difficult and only possible for a common subset) and allowing variations (quick by not interoperable) would be eased by allowing language mixing. A card could be written out in a mixture of standard and local terms.
The real world is full of times when conventions have been developed separately and the relationships have been deduced afterward: hence the market for third party converters of disk formats, scheduler files, and so on.
I have left open the discussion as to what inference power and algorithms will be useful on the semantic web precisely because it will always be an open question. When a language is sufficiently expressive to be able to express teh state of the real world and real problems then there will be no one query engine which will be able to solve real problems.
We can, however, guess at how systems might evolve. No one at the beginning of the Web foresaw the search engines which could index almost all the web, so these guesses may be very inaccurate!
We note that logical systems provide provably good answers, but don't scale to large problems. We see that search engines, remarkably, do scale - but at the moment produce very unreliable answers. Now, on a semantic web we can imagine a combination of the two. For example, a search engine could retrieves all the documents which reference the terms used in the query, and then a logical system act on that closed finite world of information to determine a reliable solution if one exists.
In fact I thing we will see a huge market for interesting new algorithms, each to take advantage of particular characteristics of particular parts of the Web. New algorithms around electronic commerce may have directly beneficial business models, to there will be incentive for their development.
Imagine some questions we might want to ask an engine of the future:
All these involve bridging barriers between domains of knowledge, but they do not involve very complex logic -- except for the tax form, that is. And who knows, perhaps in the future the tax code will have to be presented as a formula on the semantic web, just as it is expected now that one make such a public human-readable document available on the Web.
There are some requirements on the Semantic Web design which must be upheld if the technology is to be able to evolve smoothly. They involve both the introduction of new versions of one language, and also the merging of two originally independent languages. XML Namespaces and RDF are designed to meet these requirements, but a lot more thought and careful design will be needed before the system is complete.
The Space Within
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes that make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Imagine that the EU and the US independently define RDF schemata for an invoice. Invoice are traded around Europe with a schema pointer at the top which identifies the smema. Indeed, the schema may be found on the web.
Next: Metadata architecture
Up to Design Issues | <urn:uuid:f2eef7dd-c100-41a1-a3e2-834bf9244236> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Evolution.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279368.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00330-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952478 | 8,589 | 2.109375 | 2 |
Mr. Lee Mingwei, the first pregnant man.
The website MalePregnancy.com
, which first appeared online in 1999, claimed to document the case of Mr. Lee Mingwei, who was supposedly the first human male to become pregnant. Visitors to the site could inspect a variety of documentary evidence about Mr. Mingwei's pregnancy. There were news reports, pictures, video clips, Mr. Mingwei's EKG, ultrasound images, and blood-pressure measurements. The site stated that the delivery date of Mr. Mingwei's child had not yet been determined. The site has now stated this for nine years (as of 2009).
The site was a hoax created by artist/filmmaker Virgil Wong, who described it as an "art installation." Wong's work, especially his art projects on the internet, often explores themes arising from contemporary medicine. The site received extensive media attention in 2000. Wong has claimed that it fooled thousands of people, and that he was contacted by numerous men seeking to become the next pregnant man.
Is male pregnancy possible?
A fake U.S. News & World Report cover, featured on malepregnancy.com
The malepregnancy.com site provided a detailed description of exactly how Mr. Mingwei supposedly became pregnant. First, the site said, he received large oral doses of female hormones in order to make his body receptive to a pregnancy. Then a fertilized embryo was implanted into his abdominal cavity. The embryo itself secreted hormones to maintain its growth and development. Finally, when the fetus was ready, doctors would deliver it by caesarean section.
Medical doctors have speculated for decades about the possibility of male pregnancy, and the procedure detailed by malepregnancy.com is the one that is typically envisioned. Basically, it would involve creating an ectopic pregnancy in a man an ectopic pregnancy being the term to describe the development of a fetus outside the uterus. Such conditions do, very rarely, occur in women. However, they are considered to be very dangerous. For a man to attempt to have an ectopic pregnancy would involve very high risks, which is why it has never been attempted.
However, there have been rumors of doctors experimenting with male pregnancy. During the 1960s, Dr. Cecil Jacobson, a researcher at George Washington University Medical School, was said to have claimed that he successfully implanted a fertilized egg into a male baboon and allowed the egg to develop for four months before terminating the pregnancy. However, Dr. Jacobson never showed his pregnant male baboon to other scientists, nor did he publish his results.
In 2002 a Beijing doctor, Chen Huanran, based at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, apparently recruited volunteers to participate in a "male mother" study. He said his goal was to help transsexuals realize their dreams of giving birth. However, his project had not been approved by Chinese authorities.
MalePregnancy.com is only one of a number of medical-themed hoax websites created by Virgil Wong. All his sites explore themes suggested by modern biotechnology, and they all share the same setting the fictional RYT Hospital, Dwayne Medical Center.
Wong's other sites include genochoice.com
, which invites visitors to create their own genetically healthy child online; clyven
, the world's first transgenic mouse with human intelligence; and nanodocs
, a site that allows visitors to monitor their health in real-time via nanotech robots.
Links and References | <urn:uuid:c232b79d-b287-4a40-bd43-24615f2087e5> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/malepregnancy.com | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280791.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00356-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979224 | 718 | 2.0625 | 2 |
Dakar/Brussels, 27 February 2013: The opposition’s recent suspension of its participation in preparations for the May legislative elections illustrates the tensions threatening Guinea’s fragile democratic transition. Worse still, they may undermine its brittle internal peace. The immediate reasons for the walkout – legal and technical concerns over the revision of voter rolls – should not distract from the country’s deep divisions. The May vote, if it takes place, will do so amid severe distrust among political elites, heightened ethnic tensions and pervasive allegations of fraud. The potential for a failed electoral process to become a pretext for worse – protests degenerating into bloody clashes, communal violence, and perhaps even the return of military interference in civilian politics – is real. To avoid this, all parties need to step back, engage in genuine dialogue and work together to create an atmosphere in which election results have some chance of being accepted by all involved.
On 23 February, the two main Guinean opposition coalitions, together with a number of other parties, announced that they would withdraw from preparations for the legislative elections, finally scheduled for 12 May this year. They criticise the internal workings of the electoral commission, raise fears of fraud and contest the procedures for overhauling voter rolls, demanding that a new company for this task be selected through a competitive tender. They also denounce the exclusion of Guineans abroad, whose participation is provided for in the constitution and who cast ballots in the 2010 presidential polls – overwhelmingly for the opposition. New demonstrations have been called for today.
Guinea’s recent political upheaval has meant repeated delays to the legislative vote, which should have taken place in 2007. The death of the long-serving dictator President Lansana Conté in 2008 opened the way for a further brutal spell of military rule. In 2010, the country’s first free presidential election successfully ended military rule, but was marked by fierce competition, eighteen violent deaths and a rise in ethnic politicking. More than two years after assuming office, the winner of those polls, President Alpha Condé, a long-time democracy advocate, has not yet held the legislative elections. This is deliberate, say opposition politicians. They accuse President Condé of having won fraudulently in 2010 and, because his ethnic group is a minority, of using delays to the parliamentary vote to prepare the ground for rigging. For its part, the president’s camp argues it tried to launch deep and important electoral reforms, which it was forced to abandon so as to accommodate the opposition, and that, even now, the opposition – which it portrays as a bunch of corrupt plutocrats – irresponsibly obstructs the holding of elections. Both sides’ charges are grave.
Thus far, repeated national and international efforts to forge political consensus on the electoral system have failed. A “consultation” at the presidential palace, to which “all actors of socio-political life” have been invited, has been tabled for 4 March. Given that the 12 May date itself is contested, and that for a vote on that date President Condé must convene the election on 3 March, this meeting appears to be taking place too late. Moreover, its vague details, the bloated list of invitees, and the fact that it was called by the territorial administration minister rather than the president itself offer scant reassurance to opposition politicians that the government – thus far reluctant to engage them in meaningful dialogue – suddenly intends to do so.
The opposition’s withdrawal bodes ill for a peaceful and legitimate vote. The precise implications of the election commission pushing ahead with a May date – as the commission’s chair Bakary Fofana promises – without the consent of opposition-aligned commissioners, are troubling, if unclear. Nor is it clear what the opposition means by withdrawing from the current process while insisting it will not boycott the polls, or by its oft-repeated threat to “block” the vote. Non-participation rarely proves a successful strategy. The opposition risks being left without a voice in decisions related to electoral mechanics, like the revision of voter rolls. Its exclusion, and the resulting polarisation, will make it almost impossible to manage the conflicts that will inevitably arise during a contentious competition for power in a divided society with a recent violent past. Despite recent efforts by the judiciary to curb impunity, Guinea’s security forces have a long history of heavy-handed repression. A scrappy election could present restless officers, who only recently submitted to civilian rule, with opportunities for troublemaking. The cost of divisive and violent elections for the young democracy could be enormous.
A preferable course – as Crisis Group’s recent report recommended – would be to redouble efforts, while there is still time, to achieve at least a minimum consensus on the basic parameters for the vote. Both sides need to engage in a genuine dialogue and both need to give ground. President Condé, as incumbent, must demonstrate first his commitment to conciliatory politics. He needs to present opposition politicians with an alternative to either a boycott or passive acceptance of his will and offer a credible platform on which to engage them in direct conversations. He could, for example, concede to, and apply himself to raise funding for, the vote of the Guinean diaspora – who in 2010 comprised only just over 120,000 registered voters (of four million). In turn the opposition should take technical challenges seriously, in particular regarding the voter rolls, as it cannot afford to prove right those who accuse it of obstruction.
In working through the technical controversies, the UN Development Programme, the International Organisation of Francophonie and the European Union, who all provide assistance but have come under attack from one or the other side, are natural allies and should work on a joint intervention. Political engagement must accompany technical assistance: the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), given its role during the transition two years ago, could offer its good offices to facilitate dialogue if necessary. Without urgent action, Guinea is headed towards a risky and divisive vote with grave implications for stability and the discredit of the entire political class. | <urn:uuid:4f144eaf-7c54-439e-89e9-60c601b851a4> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://reliefweb.int/report/guinea/salvaging-guinea%E2%80%99s-elections | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882573760.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20220819191655-20220819221655-00670.warc.gz | en | 0.957097 | 1,245 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Re-Orienting Compagnies's Hiring Behaviour : An Innovative 'Back-To-Work' Method in France
Current ‘back-to-work' programmes, particularly in France, tend to be built on a concept of personal responsibility for (long-term) unemployment and follow an ‘adaptive' approach: improving the ‘employability' of the unemployed, which is seen as an individual capacity, independent of the work and evaluation context. Our contribution justifies an alternative approach to back-to-work initiatives, so that society's share of responsibilities for long-term unemployment and social exclusion is taken into account within a collective, emergent and context-related conception of employability. Our study is based on observation of an innovative back-to-work programme in France (IOD) which seeks to change employers' assessment and recruitment practices to help vulnerable candidates who are generally discriminated against when seeking work. This interventionist approach aims to alter the demand side of the labour market and bring about changes in companies' practices to encourage more stable jobs and reduce selectivity in hiring.
|Date of creation:||2007|
|Publication status:||Published in Work Employment & Society, 2007, 21(4), pp.713-730. <10.1177/0950017007082878>|
|Note:||View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00429778|
|Contact details of provider:|| Web page: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/|
References listed on IDEAS
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- Coles, Melvyn & Masters, Adrian, 2000. "Retraining and long-term unemployment in a model of unlearning by not doing," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(9), pages 1801-1822, October.
- Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1987. "The Causes and Consequences of the Dependence of Quality on Price," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 25(1), pages 1-48, March.
- Ben Lockwood, 1991. "Information Externalities in the Labour Market and the Duration of Unemployment," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 58(4), pages 733-753.
- Dale T. Mortensen, 1977. "Unemployment Insurance and Job Search Decisions," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 30(4), pages 505-517, July.
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Saturday evening I joined dozens of photographers in the Ahwahnee Meadow to see the celestial encore of Ansel Adams’ famous Moon and Half Dome image. Don Olson of Texas State University had predicted that the moon would be in almost the same spot as when Ansel made his photograph in 1960. In the meadow Saturday were two of Ansel Adams’ former assistants, Alan Ross and Ted Orland, seen in this photo (Ted is the one pointing). A large group of park rangers took a group portrait, and Delaware North, the park concessioner, even set up a little stand at the edge of the meadow serving free hot chocolate.
There was just one small problem: no moon! The sky was mostly clear, but a persistent band of clouds behind Half Dome hid the moon. Nevertheless, we all had a great time—the lunar no-show didn’t really seem to matter. I’ve posted more photos on The Ansel Adams Gallery’s Flickr group.
Afterward the Gallery hosted a reception for Alan Ross and his beautiful new exhibit, Visions of Yosemite and the West. I talked with Alan about the contact sheet of images Ansel made that evening in 1960; it’s an unusual glimpse into the thought process of a master photographer. Although this JPEG is small, you can see that Ansel actually bracketed exposures! By four stops! Yes, Mr. Zone System hedged his bets. Wouldn’t you in this situation? Also, he apparently didn’t wrap the roll of film tightly (he made this image with a Hasselblad and 120 film), and there was a light leak. Luckily only the edges were damaged, otherwise the world would never have seen this fantastic photograph.
I was also struck by the different compositions he framed. We tend to think that a master like Ansel would have such a clear concept in his mind that he would only need one composition. And in fact the first frame here is, I believe, the one that became famous (I could easily be wrong about that). But he also pointed the camera at Mt. Starr King, then put on a shorter lens and photographed the top of the Royal Arches cliff and the moon above Half Dome again. If you look closely you’ll also notice that Ansel shifted the camera slightly to the left and right for the first four frames, where he bracketed exposures. Was he unsure about the precise framing? This seems odd since he wrote in Examples that he visualized the cropping from the start. The contact sheet shows that after bracketing those first four exposures Ansel composed an image of Mt. Starr King, then came back to the moon rising above Half Dome, but this time with slightly different framing, pointing the camera more to the left than previously, then more to the right. It seems that he was bracketing compositions as well as exposures.
This is something I do frequently. You can’t always tell what really works by looking through the viewfinder or at the camera’s LCD screen. If I’m not sure whether composition A or B is better, I do both. It’s nice to know that Ansel wasn’t immune from this uncertainty!
What all this points out is that even the best photographers sometimes make mistakes, and aren’t always sure about the best composition or exposure. We’re all striving to get better; some are just farther along the path than others. Ansel certainly traveled farther than most of us ever will.
I have a lot to be thankful for. My son started college this year at Humboldt State. He’s adjusted well, is getting good grades, and seems to be having a great time. It’s good to have him home this week. My wife Claudia and I have been happily married for 23 years. We have great friends, live in a wonderful place, and I make my living doing what I love—photography. And I’m very thankful for all of you, my blog readers, workshop students, and fellow photographers. You make my job fun!
Happy Thanksgiving! Our dogs Bear and Rider wish you were here.
The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Warning for Yosemite from 4 p.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Saturday. The snow level is projected to begin at around 5000 feet Friday afternoon, but drop to 4000 feet—the elevation of Yosemite Valley—Friday night. Exact snow levels are difficult to forecast, so a slight fluctuation could mean rain instead of snow, but it seems likely that the Valley will get at least a dusting. Forecasters are predicting two to four inches of snow at 4000 feet, four to eight inches above 5000 feet.
For photographers, the big question is when the storm will clear. It looks like it might clear sometime during Friday night, meaning Saturday morning could be beautiful. Or not. It’s always unpredictable! But whenever it clears there will probably be great conditions for photography.
It rained yesterday, so I drove up to Yosemite Valley early this morning hoping to find some mist. And mist there was—not that much, but enough. I spent a couple of hours in the Ahwahnee Meadow, where I made this photograph. As I mentioned in my last post, I like the edges of seasons, and this image shows the fall-to-winter transition, with just a few leaves hanging on to these backlit cottonwood trees.
While these cottonwoods have dropped most of their leaves, elsewhere in the valley many trees are at peak color. This includes most of the oaks and dogwoods, as well as about half the cottonwoods and a few maples. The oaks in Cook’s Meadow and El Capitan Meadow are beautiful right now.
There’s a chance of rain again late next week, and I suspect there will still be some fall color then too.
I’m often asked about my favorite time of year in Yosemite. I think the answer surprises many people: it’s right now, in early November. People expect me to say spring, when the waterfalls are flowing, or fall for the color, or maybe winter for capturing snow. In one sense they’re right about the fall color, as early November is often the autumn peak in Yosemite Valley. But even if the color is fading, I still love this time of year. My friend Jeff Grandy says he likes the transitions between seasons, and I agree. The edges are often more interesting than the middle. November is a transition from fall to winter. I can photograph yellow leaves next to bare trees. Ice forms on creeks and riverbanks. The light has reached beautiful, low, winter angles. Sometimes the first snowstorm arrives in November, and rain or snow can leave lingering fog or mist. Heavy frost often blankets the meadows – a key ingredient for this deer photograph, made on November 10th, 2006.
Of course every month offers beauty, and there’s always something interesting to photograph in Yosemite. But if I have to choose, this is it.
What’s your favorite time of year in Yosemite – or, if you don’t get to Yosemite often, wherever you live? | <urn:uuid:ffae3d25-db68-4d8c-b273-6ea72e3723f2> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.michaelfrye.com/2009/11/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280065.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00550-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966442 | 1,499 | 2.234375 | 2 |
Unit 5 Topic 1 How much do you know about China? Section A
A: What place is this? B: It’s Fuzhou. A: Where is it? B: It’s in Fujian Province. A: We can also say this is Fuzhou which/that lies in Fujian Province.
Mount Tai/Shandong Province
It’s Mount Tai that/which lies in Shandong Province.
Mount Heng/ Shanxi Province
It’s Mount Heng that/which lies in Shanxi Province.
Mount Hua/ Shaanxi Province
It’s Mount Hua that/which lies in Shaanxi Province.
Mount Heng/Hunan Province
It’s Mount Heng that/which lies in Hunan Province.
Mount Song/Henan Province
It’s Mount Song that/which lies in Henan Province.
Mount Huang/Anhui Province
It’s Mount Huang that/which lies in Anhui Province.
Talk about the following pictures with your partner after the example. Example: A: What a beautiful place! B: Yeah! It’s Mount Tai that/which lies in Shandong Province. A: Have you ever been there before? B: Yes, I have./No, I haven’t.
the Changjiang River/the longest
It’s the Changjiang River that/which is the longest river in China.
the Huanghe River/the second longest
It’s the Huanghe River that/which is the second longest river in China.
Poyang Lake/the largest
It’s Poyang Lake that/which is the largest freshwater lake in China.
Dongting Lake/Hunan Province
It’s Dongting Lake that/which lies in Hunan Province.
Listen to the passage and fill in the blanks. (录音)
The Changjiang River and the Huanghe birthplaces of Chinese River are the __________ culture ___________. runs The Changjiang River _________ through _________ eleven /11 provinces. joins The Huanghe River _________ the Bohai Sea. largest Poyang Lake is the ________freshwater lake. Dongting Lake _____ Hunan lies _____ in Province.
Listen and answer the questions. (影片)
(1) How long have Mr. and Mrs. Green been in China?
(2) How many years of history does China have?
About 5 000 years.
(3) What book can introduce China in detail?
Guide to China.
(4) Can you say some beautiful mountains or rivers in China?
Yes, I can.
Find out attributive clauses within one minute.
1. China is a great country that has about 5 000 years of history. 2. There are many places of interest which attract millions of tourists from all over the world every year. 3. It’s a book which introduces China in detail.
Retell 1a according to the key words.
Two years. About 5 000 years. Mount Tai, Mount Huang, Mount Song, Mount Emei, the Changjiang River and the Huanghe River. Guide to China.
Complete the table according to 1a and your own experiences.
Item In the conversation Others you know
Mount Tai, Mount Mountain Huang, Mount Song Mount Hua … and Mount Emei the Changjiang The Zhujiang River … River River and the Huanghe River
1. Master some new words and phrases. 2. Learn attributive clauses which use “that” and “which”. 3. Learn about the geography of China.
Make a dialog about traveling.
Requirements: ① Tal
k about places of interest: the famous mountains, rivers, cultural relics ... ② Use attributive clauses as many as possible. | <urn:uuid:64b96fa3-fc60-4d5b-82e6-0d2d7d2252e1> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.haihongyuan.com/chuzhongyingyu/1180801.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280364.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00031-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.883486 | 824 | 3.5 | 4 |
Put Chai Ko
Often translated as ‘sticky rice pudding’, put chai ko is typically made of rice flour and red beans. These ingredients are put in a small china bowl. When the pudding sets, it can be removed from the bowl on a small stick and eaten like a popsicle. Modern innovations of this traditional snack have introduced new flavours such as pumpkin and green tea. | <urn:uuid:9f82365a-c5d3-4337-88f0-511c5c08a42b> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.chinatouradvisors.com/Restaurant/Put-Chai-Ko-660 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560285289.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095125-00144-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958884 | 82 | 2.078125 | 2 |
Style and Technique
The core of Lardner’s style and the source of much of his humor lies in his mastery of various American dialects. More specifically, Lardner’s characters, most of whom reside in the lower reaches of the middle class or below, use ordinary language rather than the idealized speech of much literature. This usually means that they slaughter grammar, diction, and all else that is sacred in language. However, Lardner’s characters also speak colorfully, employing delightful slang expressions and revealing the soul of American society. In this, Charles Lewis and Mabelle Gillespie are no exception. What is different about “Some Like Them Cold” is the fact that the entire story is told through letters. This allows Lardner to have a field day with his characters’ spelling, particularly that of Charles, who ends his first letter to Mabelle as follows: “In the mean wile girlie au reservoir and don’t do nothing I would not do.” (Mabelle seems to be slightly more literate.)
In Lardner’s work, the language employed is not primarily an instrument for moving the story along. It is itself the story, providing a window not only into Lardner’s characters but also into American society and into the very depths of human nature. | <urn:uuid:6c577a04-e951-456d-8af6-a6c448d11768> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://www.enotes.com/topics/some-like-them-cold/in-depth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560282926.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095122-00390-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961943 | 282 | 3.484375 | 3 |
Government Bill in the Dail today will reinforce discrimination against atheist teachers
The Government is today bringing to the Dail a Bill to protect Catholic LGBT teachers from discrimination. While that part of the Bill is obviously a good thing, the Bill also reinforces the right of state-funded schools to discriminate against atheist and minority faith teachers.
The Equality (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill has already been passed in the Seanad, and it is now being introduced in the Dail. Today it will be sent to a Dail Committee, where there will be opportunities to make further amendments.
Please contact your local TD today and ask them to welcome the protection being given to Catholic LGBT teachers, but to insist that the same protection be given to teachers who are atheists of members of minority faiths.
Schools Equality PACT
Defending teachers from religious discrimination is one of the four pillars of the Atheist Ireland Schools Equality PACT, which is an acronym for reforming Patronage, Access, Curriculum and Teaching in Irish schools.
Teachers have an equal right to work in state-funded schools. Children should be taught by the best teachers, and teachers should have equal access, based on merit, to jobs in State-funded schools.
Programme for Government Commitment
Fine Gael and the Labour Party seem to have forgotten the pledge in the Programme for Government to protect non-faith and minority faith teachers along with publicly out LGBT teachers
Fine Gael and the Labour Party are now selectively recasting it as a pledge to protect teachers on the basis of their sexual orientation or family status, without any indication that this is a different commitment to the one in the Programme for Government.
Atheist Ireland is asking both Labour and Fine Gael to reconsider this change, and to amend the current Bill to remove all religious discrimination in employment in our schools and hospitals.
The Government claims it is constitutionally obliged to maintain this discrimination, because it has to buttress discrimination arising from the tenets of religions. Atheist Ireland disagrees with this analysis, and we ask the Government to amend the Bill to remove all religious discrimination.
We argue that this case only provided that such discrimination was constitutionally permitted but not that it was constitutionally required, and that we are now in a more pluralist Ireland where we can safely go further in protecting our personal rights.
European Equality Directive
We are also bringing this issue to the attention of the European Union, as the Government is arguing that the EU sanctions this discrimination. We believe this is based on an inaccurate interpretation by the Government of the EU Employment Equality Directive of 2000. This protects employees from discrimination, and it takes precedence over national laws.
The Irish Government negotiated an exemption in this Directive, which allowed States to maintain national laws that were in force at the time, but the interpretation of this exemption has been disputed from the day that it was agreed.
In 2008 the EU took a case against Ireland about this, then dropped it in the political atmosphere in the run-up to the Lisbon Treaty referendum, where some people were hyping up fears about “Europe telling us what to do.” | <urn:uuid:5ea9afe8-9918-4388-996a-a90b7de1fe06> | CC-MAIN-2022-33 | https://www.teachdontpreach.ie/2015/11/discrimination-against-atheist-teachers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882571982.99/warc/CC-MAIN-20220813172349-20220813202349-00074.warc.gz | en | 0.956445 | 635 | 1.75 | 2 |
Some good ideas and great causes come from a loss or tragedy. I learned of a wonderful way to use the gift exchange concept to share with children this season.
Julia Chambers, crochet artisan and the author of several blogs, including “The difference between a duck”, shared a stocking stuffer gift exchange that has its genesis in a personal loss. Some family friends were tragically killed in an accident near Christmas.
She and her daughter decided to gather small gifts for children and wrap them for a gift swap, as a way of healing the wounds of the community. They started a stocking stuffer swap for kids in their area.
“The gifts were meant to carry on the spirit of gratitude to our community, both givers and receivers. To bless friends and neighbors…” Julia Chambers
All ages appreciate a great party, and a White Elephant / Yankee Swap party is a great way to be social in a group. I would caution that small children may have trouble grasping the “stealing” component of the white elephant style of gift exchange, so an alternative might be better.
I would recommend for the child-version, that you stick to just a simple exchange of wrapped gifts. Make sure that you mark boy or girl gifts and share them appropriately. This is the style that Julia and her daughter have chosen and it seems to be working well for them.
Every challenge in life can be turned into an opportunity, with a little creativity and some care. The stocking stuffer exchange sprung from a challenge, but with thought and charity it shows others what it means to truly care.
Have a great holiday season of sharing.
Thanks to Turn Back to God for image
Daughter of the King of Burma
Caretaker of the AlbinoPhant Parties | <urn:uuid:c900602f-1ceb-4044-a7cf-72b03e03ad22> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://albinophantblog.com/white-elephant-gift-exchange/stocking-stuffer-swap-%E2%80%93-in-memory-of-a-lost-child/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280266.9/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00494-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963564 | 363 | 1.6875 | 2 |
The Dark Knight rises: impressive U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber fast flyby photo
Taken on Jul. 21, 2012, by Russell Hill, the following picture shows a variable-sweep wing B-1 strategic bomber serialled 85-0073 “Dark Knight”, belonging to the 7th Bomb Wing, 13th Bomb Squadron, based at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, during a fast flyby at the McChord Air Expo, McChord AFB, Washington.
Due to the high speed, the fast pass generated a huge condensation cloud around the Bone’s upper wing and fuselage surfaces. This type of cloud is the effect of a sudden decrease of pressure in the airflow around the aircraft in moisty weather conditions.
Image credit: Russell Hill
- B-52 bombers deployed to Europe (for an exercise) using a special radio callsign: the name of a Libyan city (theaviationist.com)
- This photo of an F-15E Strike Eagle generating a condensation cloud at low altitude is simply stunning (theaviationist.com)
- [Photo gallery] All the most interesting aircraft of the “Resurgent” Russian Air Force on display (theaviationist.com)
- Too cool to be true: a night sortie on board the B-52 Stratofortress. As seen through the Night Vision Goggles (theaviationist.com)
- Photo: Lightning fills the sky behind a B-1 bomber during a late night thunderstorm at Ellsworth Air Force Base (theaviationist.com)
- Photo: Neither a new black project nor a UFO. This is “just” a huge B-1 bomber being trucked (theaviationist.com)
- U.S. strategic bomber and tanker to be (temporarily) based in Australia. The first of a series of “future rotational deployments” (theaviationist.com)
- [Photo Report] A wide variety of modern combat planes (including strategic bombers) at Red Flag 12-4 at Nellis Air Force Base (theaviationist.com) | <urn:uuid:ccb6cc8a-21ed-4728-a246-11eb42f57da3> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | https://theaviationist.com/2012/10/02/b1-condensation-cloud/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280872.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00315-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.872478 | 457 | 1.695313 | 2 |
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