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Children & Teenagers
We love working with children in our centre. We look after many families and children of all ages. Ensuring they have healthy spinal function and good posture allows their body to grow and develop in an ideal way and lead way to having a healthy body and spine in adulthood.
During childhood, as we know, kids can get very active and can stress or hurt their bodies. There are the obvious knocks and falls but also the more subtle stressors such as school bags, being too sedentary, learning to riding bikes, climbing and jumping. These don’t always result in pain straight away but can still strain the spinal function and nervous system, affecting posture.
One of the ways to look after your child’s spine is by checking how they carry their schoolbags.
Being a teenager can cause increased pressure on the body. The long hours sitting in classes and studying for exams, carrying heavy school bags and a lot of additional use of computers and electronics such as iphones and ipads. This causes them to spend a lot more additional time in a forward slumped posture, which places a lot of strain on their young developing spines. This is also exacerbated by the fact that teenagers are a lot more sedentary today. This forward head posture places a large amount of stress on the upper back and neck. Our experienced Chiropractors will also give postural advice and do a free school bag check.
Or on the other side, many kids play sports either at school or competitively. These activites, while good, causes stress to their young bodies and can cause the spine to get injured, particularly with sports such as rugby, football and gymnastics. A younger body is not always strong enough to be able to cope with the demands played on it and injuries can occur.
The chances are you will only become aware of this when they complain of pain in the back, shoulder or neck and try to decipher what might be causing it.
If left unattended to, long term pain of this type can become more intense making it a struggle for your child to complete daily tasks or enjoy energetic activities.
Because your childs’ body can get exposed to a lot of repetitive stress, just like a dentist checking the teeth, we recommend check ups for their spine. Getting them into good postural habits when they are younger makes them more likely to become adults with good postural habits. Chiropractic care is an effective way of helping to correct those stresses. | <urn:uuid:6437c851-a017-4c6e-a7c7-115a0e8ee00e> | CC-MAIN-2021-21 | https://chislehurstchiro.com/children-teenagers/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-21/segments/1620243989006.71/warc/CC-MAIN-20210509153220-20210509183220-00366.warc.gz | en | 0.964987 | 507 | 2.5625 | 3 |
The Species-Normal Experience for Human Infants: A Biological and Cross-Cultural Perspective
Our pedigree for successful mothering
In seeking the best way to rear infants and meet their needs, it is instructive to consider our ancestral pedigree to gain some understanding of the common biological givens, which we all inherit as human beings. Breastfeeding mammals have been on earth for at least 100 million years. Those who were recognizably human extend back about 5 million years, and apes have been on earth for about 15-20 million years.
To glimpse the amazing scale of your own pedigree, you may imagine a procession, starting with your own mother and grandmother; they are followed in order by all your direct maternal ancestors. Each embraces her daughter, so that four generations - covering one hundred years - are in each meter. Twenty meters will take you back 2000 years. In a hundred meters you can review the line of your direct maternal ancestors for the past 10,000 years. But to go back 5 million years you would travel 50 kilometers, past an unbroken line of your own mothers!
It is safe to assume that, over the millennia, some 99% of all these mothers each successfully breastfed and nurtured her own daughter, who successfully grew up and did the same thing. All their sisters who failed to reach maturity and reproduce dropped out of the picture. It follows that, over millions of years, this pedigree selectively and efficiently bred for success and survival in all the essential aspects of healthy mothering.
We could imagine a similar line of paternal ancestors. We know that they all had sexual drives but their contributions to childrearing are less clearly discernible. However, it is likely that they were selected to have some satisfaction in supporting the care of their offspring, since human infants are so vulnerable. It seems biologically reasonable that those fathers who best helped their infants' mothers to rear them to maturity would have had an advantage in natural selection to be represented in the next generation. There was no biological advantage in being a mighty hunter unless you also ensured the protection and survival of your own young children and their mothers.
We may note in passing that a chimpanzee mother will surrender her infant to the care of another (related) female only as a favor to that female, and for a brief period. Our genes are 98.4% the same as those of chimpanzees and it is unlikely that the 1.6% that are different have significantly changed an activity as successfully tested as mothering.
Nature's rewards and satisfactions
I suggest it follows from the above that:
- There is arguably no occupation available today for which a woman of child-bearing age is more specifically prepared by her pedigree than that of breastfeeding, nurturing and rearing her own infant.
- There is arguably also a genetic basis for a man to derive basic satisfactions from being a father to his children, and from participating in parenting, or at least in providing security for the mother of his young children to do so.
- Nature provides pleasure, and often deep satisfaction, in doing things which are essential for survival of the species. Of these, breastfeeding and nurturing the young are, like mating, fundamental. If these satisfactions are missing, the fault is much more likely to be in the (earlier or present) environment of the mother than in her inherited biology.
- It is a logical corollary that nature - or natural selection - has, over the millions of years, favored the survival of those infants and young children who gave their mothers (primarily), and related adults in the group, enough joy and satisfaction as "rewards" to outweigh the burdens and survival handicaps involved in rearing them. Otherwise, in those conditions, they would not have done it. In a "marathon" over this length of time an inherited shortcoming in this respect would sooner or later prejudice survival, and so be eliminated.
- It further follows that if such satisfactions are lacking, then this is a matter for diagnosis and treatment. A New Zealand survey (Ritchie J & J 1970, p.43) found that as many as 40% of mothers felt that the burden of having young children outweighed or only just balanced the satisfactions and enjoyment they received. What had gone wrong? The problem probably lay in both the individual parents and in the childrearing tenets and culture of the society (See Ritchie J & J 1970; Cook 1978; see Appendix I). For example, Dr Penelope Leach argued that "our society is inimical to children" (Leach 1994, p.xiii).
- The book Children in Australian Families for secondary school students (Duffy 1995, citing Ochiltree 1990), states that "the idea that mothering is both natural and a pleasure is a myth". But if mothering is not natural - then what is?
A carrying species
Dr N. Blurton Jones studied the question of whether humans evolved as, or are by nature, one of the species of mammals that caches (i.e. hides) the infants in a safe place, returning periodically to feed them, or whether they are one of the carrying species like monkeys and apes, in which the mothers carry their infants wherever they go and feed them frequently.
He compared humans with members of caching species of mammals on the one hand, and with higher primates which are carrying species on the other. He concluded from a number of anatomical, behavioral and physiological comparisons, including the composition of the milk, that humans are indeed pre-adapted to be a carrying species. Such species breast feed their young frequently. He said that "if the implications of my comparative study are correct then the situation in which babies develop has been exceptionally constant throughout our evolution, right back into our earliest hominid phase some twenty-five million years ago and beyond throughout our entire higher primate ancestry of some forty million years". (Blurton Jones 1972).
Experiences common to infants in all of fifty diverse pre-industrial societies
What is the species-normal experience for human infants? Despite the cultural transformations which have occurred in some countries in recent millennia, and especially in recent centuries, anthropological studies of pre-industrial societies have suggested a remarkably unanimous answer.
The following emerged as universals in a large sample of tropical and semi-tropical societies. Dr Emmy Werner (1972) compared the findings of fifty cross-cultural studies of psychomotor development, from birth to two years, of contemporary groups of infants on five continents. African, Asian, Latin American and Caucasian groups were compared, and within each ethnic group "traditionally" reared rural infants showed greater motor acceleration than "Westernized" urban infants in the first six to twelve months. Moreover she found that:
"In spite of a great deal of cultural and geographical diversity, all of the infants drawn from pre-industrial communities shared certain common experiences during the first year:
- membership in an extended family system with many caretakers
- breastfeeding on demand, day and night
- constant tactile stimulation by the body of the adult caretaker who carried the infant on her back or side, and slept with him
- participation in all adult activities, with frequent sensorimotor stimulation
- lack of set routines for feeding, sleeping and toileting
- lack of restrictive clothing in a (semi) tropical climate."
It is clear from the context of breastfeeding, carrying and sleeping that the principal caretaker is normally the mother, but there are many caretakers sharing the caring.
The fact that these experiences were universal in this group of 50 pre-industrial societies, despite great cultural and geographical diversity over five continents, gives confidence that they are a guide to the normal, appropriate and presumably healthy, early experiences for infants of our species and the adult behavior which provides such experiences. Since it is in accord with the behavior of our nearest primate relatives, it shows some essentials of the early inter-personal environment in which human infants and their mothers have evolved, and which are most likely to meet their respective and mutually-complementary needs in ways which promote emotional health.
The mothers in those pre-industrial societies all had traditions and personal experiences which led them to follow these patterns, probably without consciously deliberating about what their infants' needs were. Their customs and observations of mothering were in harmony with their own intuition and their infants' promptings. Werner's observations offer a well-grounded basic guide to the needs of all human infants, since we are all the one species.
These observations were all in societies living in a tropical or semi-tropical climate and it is believed that humans evolved in warm areas of Africa. Some differences developed over more recent millennia as humans migrated to colder regions, but it seems that they continued to offer their infants most of these experiences. We may note here that Dr James Prescott analyzed a different series of studies of 49 "primitive" societies. I do not know the extent of overlap between the two series. He found that those societies in which the infant was not carried or provided with pleasurable body contact showed more violent characteristics in a number of ways. Prescott's work is outlined in chapter 8.
Some may object that all this is not relevant today because our life situations are very different. I suggest that it is reasonable, in evaluating deviations from conditions like those of our evolutionary environment, to distinguish whether or not they cut across essential, genetically-based survival mechanisms. For example, for a mother to take her child in a motor car and go to the supermarket, while being bizarre behavior in species terms, does not cut across any known survival mechanisms. It is compatible with the above pattern of infant care, in many ways that early long daycare is not.
By the standards of childrearing in many Western societies until recent decades, these patterns of infant experience may seem irrelevant, impossible, or even absurd. But they would not seem so to millions of parents in Africa and Asia, nor to the increasing numbers of mothers and fathers in Western societies, who are finding that they can, with deep satisfaction, provide many of these experiences for their own infants today. They are discovering that they can happily follow such patterns to a remarkable extent, learning that babies' wants are much the same as their needs. Examples are seen in attention to parent-baby bonding, mother-infant attunement, more flexible feeding, sleeping and toileting regimes, the increasing use of baby-carrying slings which allow body contact, and "night-time parenting" (Thevenin 1976; Cook 1978; Sears 1987). It is possible that a majority of babies in the world still have experiences like those described in pre-industrial societies.
Some advocates of early child care try to make human infant biology fit into policies which are shaped by some feminist values and economic "rationalism". For example, "Non-parental child care for preschool children is here to stay and is a form of care suited to the conditions in modern society." (Ochiltree 1994, p.116); and "In this version it is accepted that humans are still evolving and different but viable attachment patterns will emerge adapted to new pressures in the environment." (van IJzendoorn and Tavecchio 1987, cited in Ochiltree, p.69).
But humans don't evolve like that. Unless Lamarck was right in his discredited belief in the genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics, this evolution could only occur through the selective survival of such infants and a higher rate of failure to survive and reproduce among those infants less well-adapted to these "new pressures in the environment". This is a startling proposition from those concerned for infant well-being! Even if such fundamental changes were possible at all (and there are powerful reasons for doubting it) they would take many, many generations of selective breeding to achieve, with the likelihood of other (unforeseeable) consequences. Children are adaptable but within limits set by our biology. If stretched too far in ways that matter, disorders appear, first in those more vulnerable and then on a larger scale.
The ways in which Western societies have progressively departed from tribal patterns of group and social support for mothers are now well studied, together with the injustices and inequalities which have been suffered by women in many patriarchal societies. In addition, some beliefs and related attitudes and customs in Western societies have all too often been inimical to the needs of infants and young children (Cook 1978).
It is sad and perverse that many who have worked to right the wrongs done to women, have also sought to relieve women's burdens by devaluing their role as mothers and relieving them semi-permanently of their infants and young children. Child care advocates sometimes argue that the infants are being properly returned to group care with multiple carers, as in a tribe. But they ignore the fact that, uniquely in the history of our species, it is a group in a enclosed institution which does not include mother, relatives or anyone with a continuing bond or any enduring emotional commitment to that child. The consequent reduction in the possibilities for personal contact, mother-infant attunement, continuing secure attachments and tender loving care are, in practice, mostly ignored.
There is a need to study what qualities of the environment and social settings promote healthy and mutually satisfying parent-child relationships. It appears that the natural setting in which mothering behavior flourishes includes access to other supportive adults and children, some relationship to adult activities, access to the world of nature in some form, and protection from excessive stress. (Some relevant dimensions are suggested in Cook 1978, p.9).
Attachment, separation and mother-infant attunement
John Bowlby's 1951 monograph
Until recently Western society did not clearly recognize the emotional importance of the early mother-child relationship, but in 1951 the World Health Organization published Maternal Care and Mental Health by Dr John Bowlby. This landmark review of the seriously damaging consequences which maternal and social deprivation can have on the development of infants and young children was an important milestone. It triggered much debate, research, social change and revision of child development theory.
Since 1951 the world has been on notice that total early separation and deprivation of the care which mothers normally provide can have serious consequences. Bowlby went on, through ethological, cross-cultural and psychological studies, to develop his major contributions in his three-volume work Attachment and Loss (Bowlby 1969; 1973; 1981). Yet some advocates of early day care have sought to dismiss any relevance of this work to long day care, describing it as "Bowlbyism" (Oakley 1981, cited in Ochiltree 1984, p 8).
Bowlby studied natural sciences and psychology at Cambridge and worked in a school for maladjusted children during his medical training before becoming a psychoanalyst in 1937. He realized that major separations from parents were significant early experiences that could be positively verified, and so give a solid basis for research into the importance of early experiences in psychological development. He concluded that the first task for theory was to understand the nature of the child's tie to his mother (Bowlby 1980, p.7).
Learning from animal behavior: attachment
In 1951 Bowlby learned that in some animal species such as ducks and geese "a strong bond to an individual mother-figure could develop rapidly during a sensitive phase of early life and that it tended to endure" (Bowlby 1980, p. 8). He learned of such patterns in other species, and heard that young monkeys being raised without their mothers in depriving circumstances showed many behavior patterns like those of young children raised in institutions. He realized that ethology, which is the scientific study of the behavior of animals (including humans), might shed light on the emotional and behavioral disturbances which he had reviewed in his 1951 monograph and seen in his work with disturbed children.
This involved understanding that the genetic inheritance with which each living creature begins life is the outcome of a long process of natural selection. Those characteristics which bring an advantage for surviving in the environment at the time are more likely to be passed on to later generations. The survival of mammals, as animals which breastfeed their young, depends on keeping the mother and her young together, both for protection and for nourishment. Grazing animals must, from birth, be able to follow their mothers, as they move on. This requires inherited and automatic mechanisms since the matter is too urgent to be left to the uncertainties of learning. But the babies of higher primates, such as chimpanzees and humans, for some time after their births are too immature to follow their mothers and must be held and carried. Baby monkeys and apes hang on in front, and when older they ride on their mothers' backs. Bowlby used the term attachment for this tie or bond, and attachment behavior for those behaviors that keep the young near the mother.
Owing to the size and rapid growth of the human brain, babies must be born at a stage of maturity when other mammals would remain safely in the uterus, in an environment that is normally secure. There are reasons for suggesting that for as long as nine months humans can be regarded as continuing the period of gestation, but outside the womb - as "exterogestates" undergoing exterior gestation (Bostock 1958). This pattern is seen in marsupials, such as kangaroos and koalas, but they have the convenience of a pouch supplied with a nipple.
Because of this human helplessness mother-infant attachment is needed from birth, long before the baby develops true infant-to-mother attachment. During this time babies like to be held and carried, and Liedloff (1975) described this as the "in-arms" stage of human development. A baby can do little to overcome a potentially dangerous separation except cry, and then reward the parents by showing appreciation, and later affection, when they respond.
It is now known that from the time of birth there is much more going on between new babies and their mothers than was imagined until the 1970s. While the mother-infant attachment or bonding side of this interaction has become familiar, the active role of the baby in this two-way process is less well known.
Research since the 1970's has supported Bowlby's view that the new baby has innate social capacities. Studies have shown that an (unsedated) newborn baby can see, hear and move in rhythm to his mother's voice "in the first minutes and hours of life resulting in a beautiful linking of the reactions of the two and a synchronized dance between mother and infant" (Klaus & Kennell 1976). From soon after birth babies show a preference for their own mother's voice and the smell of her milk. They prefer a human face to other shapes and can distinguish certain emotions.
Thus a baby is innately equipped to encourage a communicating relationship, and encourage her mother to fall in love with, or become crazy about her baby, though this does not always happen. Many fathers, too, have been surprised by how thrilled they feel when their new baby gazes into their eyes, and the excitement of caring for this real little person seizes them and they become "engrossed".
Frame-by-frame analysis of film and video-recordings, pioneered since 1971 by Dr Daniel N. Stern, have shown that a kind of micro-world of intricate behavioral communication develops as a mother and baby get to know each other. Mothers too, appear to be innately equipped to sense these cues, and sensitive, responsive mothering is normally rewarded by a remarkable "attunement" of playful two-way synchronized interactions which have been described as a "dance", each responding to the cues of the other. Positive interactions bring joy and delight, but the details of less positive reactions to mismatch and disharmony, such as turning away, are also clearly shown by babies (Stern 1985). This "astonishing attunement" in the healthy mother-infant relationship is a facet of nature's health-promoting processes.
Thus the infant "is given both an innate general repertoire of these behaviors to perform and the mechanisms to decode their performance in others" (Stern 1995, p.65). These "micro-events" which last split-seconds, are "the basic steps of an interactive regulatory process" to regulate the level of feeling and activity occurring between mother and infant. Through them the infant gives cues to her mother to guide her to match the infant's developmental needs, and these processes occur in feeding and other activities. Soon the infant not only responds to, but actively seeks to modify, the adult's behavior. As the mother communes with her baby she appears to be giving her infant "a sense of being appreciated, validated, and approved, which seems to be such a vital need at this time of life" (Karen 1994, p.351; see also Thoman & Browder 1988).
Research has shown that well-synchronized mother-infant interactions predict secure infant-mother attachment and this is important (Isabella & Belsky 1991). It seems that maternal sensitivity does "promote security by fostering trust. That trust, then, forms the foundation for the babies secure attachment to the mother." (Steinberg & Meyer 1988).
This process may develop in less healthy ways. If the mother is insensitive to the baby's cues, perhaps being over-controlling, or too stimulating, the baby may after a time develop protective ways to avoid such stresses. If mother is unwell or depressed she may be unable to respond and such situations may need help (see Stern 1995), but our purpose here is to understand the healthy pattern. It is not surprising that, as shown in chapter 5, long day child care may have a disruptive influence on infant-mother attunement.
The balance between exploration and attachment
As they become mobile, human infants explore the world from the secure base of the mother or some familiar adult, keeping an eye on where mother is, so that they can scurry back to her as a haven of safety if they sense a threat of danger. In this way the healthy drive to exploration behavior which might lead a toddler into danger is normally held in balance by attachment behavior. The child's perception of any risks, or their absence, will determine which urge prevails (see Ainsworth & Bowlby 1991). An enterprising researcher wrote a neat paper describing such behavior by toddlers in a London park, and it is easy to observe (Anderson 1972).
If the toddler is unable to locate mother this is cause for alarm, and other activities are suspended until she is found. Failure to locate mother is valid grounds for fear, and the separation now activates in-built behavioral systems which are part of nature's survival equipment, "designed" to bring mother and child safely together again.
If an infant is afraid that mother will disappear he may try to prevent this by clinging behavior. If a mother tries to stop this clinging by punishment or by pushing the infant away this may add to his reasons for anxiety. The child's in-built response to fear is to cling more closely, and this can lead to a vicious circle of rejection by the mother, leading to more clinging by the infant.
Multiple attachment figures
Though he is sometimes misrepresented, Bowlby specifically denied ever saying that mothering should always be provided by the natural mother or that mothering cannot safely be distributed among several figures (Bowlby 1969, p.303). As the first year progresses into the second, infants may have several attachment figures, usually including father, siblings and grandparents, depending on who has cared for them. In non-parental child care they develop attachments to care-givers if the care is sensitive and favorable. However there is an hierarchy of preferences, and mother is usually the preferred and principal attachment figure, if she is available.
Infants' reactions to major separations
Bowlby worked with James Robertson who, with his wife Joyce, played a major role in reforming the care of children in hospitals throughout the world (Robertson J & J 1989). By observing and filming children in the second and early third year of life while they were undergoing complete separation from their mothers and other attachment figures, Robertson saw that, unless young children were receiving responsive substitute mothering, they typically went through three successive stages which he termed protest, despair, and finally detachment.
Bowlby described how it was found that if a child between the ages of about twelve months and three years is removed from his mother-figure to whom he is attached and placed with strangers in a strange place, "his initial response ... is one of protest and of urgent effort to recover his lost mother. 'He will often cry loudly, shake his cot, throw himself about, and look eagerly towards any sight or sound which might prove to be his missing mother.' This may with ups and downs continue for a week or more. Throughout it the child seems buoyed up in his efforts by the hope and expectation that his mother will return.
"Sooner or later, however, despair sets in. The longing for mother does not diminish, but the hope of its being realized fades. Ultimately the restless noisy demands cease: he becomes apathetic and withdrawn, a despair broken only perhaps by an intermittent and monotonous wail. He is in a state of unutterable misery." (Bowlby 1981, p.9). Bowlby termed this a state of grief and described how, although the child is quieter and less explicit in his communications, his behavior and words show an orientation to the lost mother which may become disguised but it is persistent. This longing for the mother "is often suffused with intense, generalized hostility" (Ibid p.13).
After discussing the relationship of this to mourning, Bowlby described how, after a week or more out of his mother's care and without being specially cared for by an assigned substitute, the phase of detachment develops, with "an almost complete absence of attachment behavior when he first meets his mother again." (1981, p.20). At this stage the child can be superficially cheerful and friendly to almost anyone, except to his mother if she reappears. Staff in hospitals and residential nurseries used to look forward to this stage, saying that the child had "settled", so parental visits were sometimes discouraged to avoid "upsetting" the child by reactivating his overt protests.
Earlier this stage was called one of denial, since it appeared that the child could no longer bear the anguish of loss of the one he loved most, and a psychological mechanism of denial had supervened as a protection against continuing emotional pain. Clearly, this is a disordered and unhealthy state to develop in an infant's love life. The basic trust which a healthy infant normally develops in his mother seems to have been blocked. Smaller elements of blocking of attachment longings can be seen following much briefer separations than those leading to the fully developed state of detachment (for example, see Harsman's study in chapter 5).
Children vary and the longer-term consequences of separation are also influenced by what happens subsequently. Bowlby regarded detachment as a psychological defensive exclusion process, and it occurs in mourning. An important matter for future mental health was whether this process was reversible, but he said that "In infants and children, it appears, defensive processes once set in motion are apt to stabilize and persist" (1981, p.21). He described how these defensive processes may be seen in adult patients who have suffered early separations. "As a result the desires, thoughts and feelings that are part and parcel of attachment behavior become absent from awareness" despite the patient's wishes to the contrary (Bowlby 1980, p.19). It seemed that the behavioral systems governing attachment behavior had become de-activated and remained so.
The significance of attachment experiences for human personality development
Unraveling the relationship of attachment experiences to personality development was a major part of Bowlby's life work. Much research has been done using the theories that he developed and some of this is discussed in chapter 4.
The last eleven chapters of Bowlby's trilogy were concerned with the mourning of children. He concluded the Epilogue to the last volume of Attachment and Loss by saying: "Intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person's life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler or a schoolchild but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age. From these intimate attachments a person draws his strength and enjoyment of life and, through what he contributes, he gives strength and enjoyment to others. These are matters about which current science and traditional wisdom are at one." (Bowlby 1981, p. 442).
Relevance to child care?
The big question for long day care for infants and young children is: to what extent does this knowledge about attachment reactions to major separations apply to those separations which occur for most of the waking hours during most days of the week? To what extent are "caregivers" adequate secondary attachment figures or adequate substitutes for the principle attachment figure, ideally or in practice?
Are the reactions documented by Harsman (1994), and described in chapter 5, less dramatic, "micro" examples of similar processes, and if so what consequences do they have for optimal human development? Observing Swedish children for five months after starting day care at ages of 6 to 12 months, she reported that "52% showed a negative change in mood during the initial period and they were assessed as sad and depressed in the day-care setting." Two or three of these infants "reacted in line with the classical phases of 'protest and despair' "(Italics inserted). In the history of medicine the fully developed forms of a disorder are described first. After this classical picture has become familiar then milder forms and variations start to be recognized.
Dr. Mary Ainsworth built upon Bowlby's work in her studies of mother-infant relationships, and she developed a method for assessing the quality of the infant-mother side of the attachment relationship. This Strange Situation assessment, carried out sometime between 12 and 20 months and taking only 20 to 25 minutes, is based on detailed observation of how an infant reacts when reunited with his mother after two brief experimental separations under controlled conditions. It has proved a remarkable instrument which has led to much productive research, particularly in studying outcomes of early day care. It is described in chapter four.
In his book Becoming Attached: Unfolding the Mystery of the Infant-Mother Bond and its Impact on Later Life, Robert Karen (1994) gives an authoritative, readable account of the development of the theories, research and controversies arising out of the pioneering work of John Bowlby, James Robertson, Mary Ainsworth and many others involved in this crucial area of child development. Many of these pioneers were interviewed by Karen in preparing his book. Academic reviews of theory and evidence relating to attachment may be found in Belsky & Cassidy (1994) and Rutter (1995).
Dr. Peter S. Cook is a retired Sydney, Australia child and family psychiatrist, who writes on preventive child and family mental health. He is the author of Early Child Care: Infants and Nations at Risk (Melbourne: News Weekly Books, 1997).
This article is Chapter 1 in Early Child Care: Infants & Nations at Risk. Excerpted with permission of the author. | <urn:uuid:1afa2190-50f6-4c6a-93e1-665acb63f3cd> | CC-MAIN-2021-31 | https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/peter_cook/ecc_ch1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-31/segments/1627046154085.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20210731074335-20210731104335-00168.warc.gz | en | 0.966984 | 6,435 | 3.125 | 3 |
Datapedia ID: 0x2A75D
Orphenn is a small hamlet in the north of Sigmir’s east island, Sentrus. Initially it was a thriving community of engineers and their families, but most have left over the years to commit themselves to Sigmir’s Colossus Project. What remains is a population of no more than fifteen – a population often out of touch with what is happening in the big cities, by choice.
The exception to this is Orphenn’s Radio Tower, which was the community’s largest project. The Tower still opeartes with better accuracy and range than most modern counterparts, though it is very rarely used by Orphenn’s citizens. Rather, these days it is used as a powerful repeater station by the Sigmir Signals Corps. Today the mysterious and quietly beeping tower consistently draws in Orphenn’s children as a magical place to explore. | <urn:uuid:4456aa49-9952-47bc-be3b-e7bcd0ab7932> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://soundworlds.com.au/0x2a75d-radio-tower-of-orphenn/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100484.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20231203030948-20231203060948-00015.warc.gz | en | 0.970981 | 198 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Our children and staff use a dedicated website called Hwb to access educational tools and materials to enhance their learning and growth. Every child is given personal login details to use this incredible resource.
Introduction to Hwb
Hwb, the National Digital Learning Platform, hosts a national collection of digital tools and resources to support learning and teaching in Wales.
Hwb has been developed in line with the following key principles:
- to support a national approach to planning and delivery
- to enable the sharing of skills, methods and resources between teachers in Wales
- to support teaching and learning in Welsh and English
- to offer equal access to free, classroom focused tools and resources for all teachers and learners in Wales.
Hwb enables learners and teachers to access online resources anywhere, at any time, from a range of devices. It also provides tools to help teachers create and share their own resources and assignments. The collection includes:
- tools and resources created or commissioned by the Welsh Government and/or its agents
- tools and resources licensed or bought by the Welsh Government
- tools and resources made available by trusted sources
- resources created by teachers. | <urn:uuid:53dc43f7-9ad6-4b0d-837e-291e86d828f3> | CC-MAIN-2021-43 | https://www.borderbrook-pri.wrexham.sch.uk/parents/hwb | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-43/segments/1634323587963.12/warc/CC-MAIN-20211026231833-20211027021833-00558.warc.gz | en | 0.959795 | 232 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Thirty years ago, on Aug. 20, 1977, NASA launched a Golden Record into space: a 12-inch, gold-plated disc of music, pictures, sounds, and greetings from planet Earth, bolted to the side of a Voyager space probe.
The idea behind the record was simple. Once Voyager 1 and 2 studied the outer planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – they would become the first man-made objects to leave our solar system for interstellar space. Why not include an introduction to Earth on the slim hope that the probes might one day be found by another life-form? We could reach across the galaxy and shake hands.
Carl Sagan, the noted astronomer from Cornell University, led the team creating the record. For months they consulted far and wide to come up with something that would truly reflect the great diversity and potential of life on Earth.
So what's on the Golden Record?
The team chose 116 pictures, everything from the Great Wall of China to Greek fishing boats to Jane Goodall studying chimpanzees. They added 12 minutes of Earth sounds, including rain, a train whistle, and a human heartbeat. They chose 87-1/2 minutes of music as varied as Peruvian panpipes and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode." Finally, they included greetings in 55 languages and a message from then-president Jimmy Carter: "We human beings are still divided into nation-states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.
"We cast this message into the cosmos ... a token of … our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours…. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."
When Carter wrote his message in 1977, Americans were dealing with the betrayal of Watergate and the wounds of the Vietnam War. The country was divided; Americans' faith in themselves was shaken; their place in the world uncertain. Still, they asked the question – Who are we? – and sent the answer into the vast expanse of space.
If you focus on the details, the Golden Record has already begun to feel out of date. It does not include, for example, the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003 – a cooperative, international effort to discover, at least on the genetic level, who we are. There is also no mention of the Internet, which allows more than a billion people around the world to communicate in ways that we couldn't have imagined 30 years ago. In the thousands of years it will take the record to reach some other life-form, we will have changed in ways we can't even imagine now.
The real value of the Golden Record, then, may not be what it tells other life-forms about us, thousands of years from now, but what it can remind us of here on Earth today.
We are closer to becoming, as Carter wrote in 1977, "a single global civilization." But while the Internet has allowed for an unprecedented ability to exchange cultural values and ideas, recent news stories illustrate that we also face ever-widening challenges: Polluted dust plumes from China now dirty the air over Los Angeles and San Francisco; Russia has planted its flag on the seabed of the North Pole; and Sara Lee Corporation has disclosed, in the wake of food safety concerns, that ingredients from more than a dozen countries may go into a loaf of its bread – a practice followed by many large food companies.
Counteracting climate change, reducing the threat of terrorist acts, and ensuring that all people have access to adequate water supplies are the kinds of problems that countries cannot solve in isolation. Our new global civilization will need to draw on insights, innovation, and cooperation from around the world.
The Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, is the kind of cooperative effort needed to address a host of challenges. More than 160 countries have ratified the accord, although the United States is notably absent from this list.
In our new global civilization, countries will need to look beyond their own borders. Now, more than ever, whether we will be able to "survive our time" will depend on our ability to work together.
Thirty years ago, we asked the question – Who are we? – and found an answer in humanity's rich diversity, common goals, and great potential. The anniversary of the Voyager launch is a reminder that it's time to ask the question again.
Barbara Kerley is an award-winning children's book author and a former Peace Corps volunteer. Her latest book is a young adult novel about the Golden Record, called "Greetings from Planet Earth." | <urn:uuid:c6735d90-a8d7-4170-b152-ec34ef86e49b> | CC-MAIN-2021-31 | https://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0820/p09s01-coop.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-31/segments/1627046154089.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20210731105716-20210731135716-00530.warc.gz | en | 0.953334 | 954 | 3.34375 | 3 |
Systems Wiki - What is the systems?
What does the word systems mean? Find synonyms, antonyms and the meaning of the word systems in our free online dictionary! Find words starting with systems and anagrams of systems.
Definitions of "systems"
- Plural form of system. noun
- Pertaining to systems, specific to systems. adverb
The word "systems" in example sentences
Closed-Circuit: -- A type of retardation coil which is largely used in systems of simultaneous telegraphy and telephony, known as _composite systems_, is shown in Fig. 103.. [Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc.]
Just so it is with respect to the various systems and _systems of systems that compose the universe_.. [Alexander Pope English Men of Letters Series]
Dubbed "Shanghai" and aimed at the high performance workstation and server market, the new CPUs are designed to offer advanced virtualization capabilities-so one processor can, in effect, host several systems, potentially running different operating systems& .... [Megite Technology News: What's Happening Right Now]
Given that the most important element in systems is purpose and goals, the big question is: What's the economy for?. [Kenny Ausubel: The Revolution Has Begun - "The Shift Hits the Fan"]
Now on one side transparency in systems is advocates as lip service while all remain as black boxes.. [Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » danah boyd on MySpace]
Some of the harsher critics wonder whether, in a world where so much music gets produced and disseminated, there remains a point to an awards show that recognizes only what sells or what is birthed through the label systems and overplayed on corporate radio.. [Kansas City Star: Front Page]
Your belief that the duplicated molecules go on to become the systems is a faith based initiative driven by your hopes and fears.. [Abusing Science]
Hood has pioneered this type of analysis, which he calls systems biology, over the past decade and led the new research with. [Technology Review RSS Feeds]
The key feature of such systems is that they are inherently unpredictable with respect to the timing and severity of specific events.. [Chris Martenson, Ph.D.: Prediction: Things Will Unravel Faster Than You Think]
Back to South America, the capabilities of Russian missile systems is probably a good place to be looking with regards to possible medium-term capability of Argentine missiles: There is a current collaboration ongoing between Russia and Argentina (Russian-Argentina Intergovernmental Commission for Military-Technical Cooperation), some of which has recently moved forward a notch with the successful testing of an indigenous-developed rocket motor.. [Cheeseburger Gothic » Anyone been following the build up to next falklands war?]
Having ships with close range point defence missile systems, sitting behind units with longer range missile systems is poor form an the commander wants a kick in the arse for that.. [Cheeseburger Gothic » Anyone been following the build up to next falklands war?]
Clicking further, I wound up at the Constructing Coexistence Flickr group, which is a movement by street artists to create works of art asserting non-participation in systems of oppression with Mahatma Gandhi as the central symbol, because of his historical ties with civil disobedience.. [Democracy in art « One Size Fits One]
Interest in systems biology reflects a genuine inability of informal conceptual modelling to tackle the sheer complexity of life.. [A Disclaimer for Behe?]
An intensive and site specific intervention designed to ensure that staff become proficient in systems and clinical management of asthma using "best-practice" methods.. [Primary care provider education]
Finally, at the far collectivist end of the spectrum is corporatism, best exemplified in systems like Italian fascism and German national socialism, where the individual has vanished altogether both in theory and practice and where personal liberty ceases to have any meaning at all.. [Benjamin R. Barber: Socialism For Dummies or: Why Obama Isn't a Communist]
But the chaos in the bankers 'filing systems is nothing compared to the chaos created by the millions of foreclosures they have engineered, based on adjustable-rate mortgages and similar misleading contracts which never should have been legal in the first place.. [Danny Schechter: Report From the Epicenter of the Fraudclosure Crisis] | <urn:uuid:57a24c6a-bb03-47a1-aa31-c32f9365ecb1> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | https://wikiwordy.com/word/systems | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247480472.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20190216125709-20190216151709-00204.warc.gz | en | 0.921266 | 934 | 3.109375 | 3 |
Artificial intelligence in literature
Computers that write literature, algorithms that help us in everyday life, even whole robotic people that can communicate with us and make everyday life easier – with the term “artificial intelligence”. we combine a lot of weird and sometimes utopian ideas and myths. Which of these is actually realistic and how some aspects can also advance us in literary studies.
Three points of contact between AI research and literary studies:
1. Approaches from literary studies as a conceptual basis for implementations of artificial intelligence
2. Approaches from AI research and implementations of AI to support Literary studies
3. use of AI by digital humanities, or scholars to imitate the writing style and to create literature
Understanding Artificial Intelligence in Literature
Literary studies concepts as the basis of artificial intelligence
A literary research direction that is particularly interesting for the development of artificial intelligence is those on “Interactive Storytelling. Another approach, which has often been used as the basis for AIs, comes from the traditional narrative theory line.
Artificial intelligence as a tool for literature analysis
Many different tools are currently used in literary studies, some of which machine learning use. Machine learning is often a variant for a method that is also carried out differently, but which is performed by machine learning can be greatly improved. Learning works best when the computer combines very, very many properties of the category to be recognized in a complex way. If this is the case, one speaks of deep learning.
The results of machine learning tools could be improved many times over in the last few years by using deep learning techniques. The difference to previous machine learning is that layer or neuron models are used here to combine a large amount of learnable features. When creating each layer, the tool learns from the previous one or links different properties very closely together so that something similar to a neural network is created.
The learning process of the computer does not even necessarily have to be monitored in deep learning. This means that I don’t necessarily have to mark examples in texts by hand myself. The disadvantage, however, is that the resulting systems are so complex that sometimes you can no longer even explain why they work so well.
Despite all attempts at explanation and examples, it is difficult to really understand artificial intelligence like from this site https://fidgetsguide.com/best-pogo-sticks/ , especially if you have little conscious contact with this technology or technology in general. To get an idea of how computers can learn anything about language and even about literary texts. Counting words, observing word order, combining new words according to the properties you have learned – you can try all of this out yourself with the AI game. You may have heard of the fact that performance increases with the number of systems connected. | <urn:uuid:ed5cc98b-8f9a-4765-ad5d-ddb64dc078f9> | CC-MAIN-2021-43 | https://www.horror-mall.com/artificial-intelligence-in-literature.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-43/segments/1634323588153.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20211027115745-20211027145745-00087.warc.gz | en | 0.954556 | 563 | 2.640625 | 3 |
A lot of people start exercising to lose or maintain weight. However, the benefits of working out go beyond weight loss. People involved in sports are advised to exercise on a regular basis to reduce chances of suffering any injuries. Studies show that exercising on a daily basis can help in the development of joints, bones, and muscles.
As a result, people are less likely to experience muscle tear that may be caused by strenuous activities. However, exercise will not 100 percent prevent you from getting injured. Therefore, if injured, contact an attorney who can help you get compensation for your treatment. You can also increase your chances of healing faster by involving yourself in exercise as we will discuss below. | <urn:uuid:cc81dc13-f1d4-41fa-a048-a452a5c53ccc> | CC-MAIN-2018-43 | http://extraextrapost.com/5-ways-exercise-can-be-helpful-in-preventing-and-overcoming-injuries/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-43/segments/1539583516123.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20181023090235-20181023111735-00498.warc.gz | en | 0.971614 | 138 | 2.734375 | 3 |
RBC urine test
The RBC urine test measures the number of red blood cells in a urine sample.
Red blood cells in urine; Hematuria test; Urine - red blood cells
How the Test is Performed
A random sample of urine is collected. Random means that the sample is collected at any time either at the lab or at home. If needed, the health care provider may ask you to collect your urine at home over 24 hours. Your provider will tell you how to do this.
A clean-catch urine sample is needed. The clean-catch method is used to prevent germs from the penis or vagina from getting into a urine sample. To collect your urine, the provider may give you a special clean-catch kit that contains a cleansing solution and sterile wipes. Follow instructions exactly so that the results are accurate.
How to Prepare for the Test
No special preparation is necessary for this test.
How the Test will Feel
The test involves only normal urination. There is no discomfort.
Why the Test is Performed
This test is done as part of a urinalysis test.
A normal result is 4 red blood cells per high power field (RBC/HPF) or less when the sample is examined under a microscope.
The example above is a common measurement for a result of this test. Normal value ranges may vary slightly among different laboratories. Some labs use different measurements or test different samples. Talk to your provider about the meaning of your specific test result.
What Abnormal Results Mean
A higher than normal number of RBCs in the urine may be due to:
- Bladder, kidney, or urinary tract cancer
- Kidney and other urinary tract problems, such as infection, or stones
- Kidney injury
- Prostate problems
There are no risks with this test.
Krishnan A, Levin A. Laboratory assessment of kidney disease: glomerular filtration rate, urinalysis, and proteinuria. In: Yu ASL, Chertow GM, Luyckx VA, Marsden PA, Skorecki K, Taal MW, eds. Brenner and Rector's The Kidney. 11th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier; 2020:chap 23.
Lamb EJ, Jones GRD. Kidney function tests. In: Rifai N, ed. Tietz Textbook of Clinical Chemistry and Molecular Diagnostics. 6th ed. St Louis, MO: Elsevier; 2018:chap 32.
Riley RS, McPherson RA. Basic examination of urine. In: McPherson RA, Pincus MR, eds. Henry's Clinical Diagnosis and Management by Laboratory Methods. 23rd ed. St Louis, MO: Elsevier; 2017:chap 28. | <urn:uuid:3eeb90aa-cbbf-47f5-afc3-353cb6eb3160> | CC-MAIN-2021-31 | http://avh.adam.com/content.aspx?productid=117&pid=1&gid=003582 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-31/segments/1627046154175.76/warc/CC-MAIN-20210801092716-20210801122716-00335.warc.gz | en | 0.84456 | 586 | 2.984375 | 3 |
OBJECTIVE: To describe the characteristics across all ages of powered wheelchair users and the assistive technology prescribed by a regional specialist wheelchair service. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study. SETTING: Regional wheelchair service. PARTICIPANTS: Electric-powered indoor/outdoor wheelchair (EPIOC) users (N=544) with 262 boys and men (mean age +/- SD, 41.7+/-20.7y; range, 8-82y) and 282 girls and women (mean age +/- SD, 47.2+/-19.7y; range, 7-92y). INTERVENTIONS: Not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Demographic, clinical/diagnostic details of EPIOC recipients, including pain, (kypho)scoliosis, and ventilators. Technical features, including specialized (adaptive) seating, tilt in space, and modified control systems. Factors were related to age groups: 1 (0-15y), 2 (16-24y), 3 (25-54y), 4 (55-74y), and 5 (>/=75y). RESULTS: Neurologic/neuromuscular conditions predominated (81%) with cerebral palsy (18.9%) and multiple sclerosis (16.4%). Conditions presenting at birth or during childhood constituted 39%. Of the participants, 99 had problematic pain, 83 had (kypho)scoliosis, and 11 used ventilators. Specialized (adaptive) seating was provided to 169 users (31%); most had cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. Tilt in space was used by 258 (53%) participants. Younger people were more likely to receive tilt in space than older ones. Only 92 had specialized (adaptive) seating and tilt in space (mean age +/- SD, 29+/-17.8y; range, 8-72y). Of the participants, 52 used modified control systems. CONCLUSIONS: The diversity of EPIOC users across age and diagnostic groups is shown. Their complex interrelations with these technical features of EPIOC prescriptions are explored. Younger users were more complex because of age-related changes. This study provides outcomes of the EPIOC prescription for this heterogeneous group of very severely disabled people. | <urn:uuid:43bcc998-c66a-4af1-aa60-d40d76bf9ead> | CC-MAIN-2022-27 | https://www.togetherforshortlives.org.uk/abstract/recipients-of-electric-powered-indoor-outdoor-wheelchairs-provided-by-a-national-health-service-a-cross-sectional-study/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-27/segments/1656104506762.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20220704232527-20220705022527-00564.warc.gz | en | 0.932362 | 471 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Hello, English learners, welcome to one more English speaking practice lesson from the English unplugged series with your native English teacher, Jack from Auckland, New Zealand. In the spoken English lesson you learn how to use the word look in 15 different ways. Look is a very common English word used in daily English conversation, but how boring it would be to use look each and every time. Learn synonyms for the word look and how you could use it while describing different things what you see. We hope this English lesson would help you learn new English vocabulary to speak English fluently and confidently.
You are watching this English lesson On Let’s Talk – Free English lessons. This is a free YouTube resource to learn English quickly and easily. We have more than 1200+ free English learning videos to teach you all aspects of the English language so that you could speak English fluently and confidently. Access our huge library of free English speaking lessons covering a range of topics such as – Grammar, English conversation, Tips on How to speak English, How to build vocabulary, learn new words, Communication skills, English sentence practice and much more. | <urn:uuid:42812d73-4295-4d3d-83b4-7c3e72df83d2> | CC-MAIN-2019-47 | http://www.learnex.in/15-beautiful-ways-say-look-english-native-english-teacher/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-47/segments/1573496670558.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20191120111249-20191120135249-00118.warc.gz | en | 0.956564 | 229 | 2.578125 | 3 |
APPLICATIONS DEVELOPING BLACK & WHITE FILMS
Reversal processing is used to produce positive transparencies from conventional black and white negative films. It may also be used for copying negatives.
The method starts with conventional exposure of the film and development of the negative image as usual. At this stage, the residual unexposed and undeveloped silver halide in the film represents the positive image that is the desired end point: therefore the remaining stages in the process involve removal (bleaching) of the original negative image, fogging the film to expose the remaining silver halide, and conventional development and fixing of this second, reversal, image. | <urn:uuid:824c0b50-7f9f-43ce-a06a-b16886d9d585> | CC-MAIN-2014-15 | http://www.ilfordphoto.com/applications/page.asp?n=90 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-15/segments/1398223205375.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20140423032005-00114-ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.877441 | 134 | 2.96875 | 3 |
Celestial events in the skies for the week of Sept. 19-25, 2017 as compiled for The Loafer by Mark D. Marquette.
It’s officially sweater weather! The Autumnal Equinox occurs Friday, Sept. 22 at 4:02 pm when the Sun crosses the equator into the Southern Hemisphere (where it’s finally Spring!). That means equal amounts of daylight and night time, though the balance begins tipping toward 12-plus hours of darkness—which is just fine for stargazers who endured the long daylight of Summer.
Tuesday, September 19
New Moon is today, and just one month ago (28.5-day lunar time) was the Great American Eclipse. Boy, does time fly when you’re having fun! Photographers can get those great crescent Moon shots against the landscape beginning Thursday evening.
Wednesday, September 20
A good week to see the Milky Way as moonlight will not interfere, and if you’re in the mountains, lake or countryside away from city light pollution. The three stars of the Summer Triangle (Vega, Deneb and Altair) frames the arm of our Galaxy directly overhead, while the fishhook stars of Scorpius and teapot dot-to-dot of Sagittarius show us the center of our island of 200 billion stars.
Thursday, September 21
This is the hardest time to see the familiar Big Dipper as it dredges along the northeast horizon seemingly plowing up the landscape. That’s why in England, this familiar 7-star asterism is called “The Plough.”
Friday, September 22
The Autumnal Equinox is today, but you’ve already been experiencing equal day and night. And if you’ve spent any time outdoors, you see the browning leaves, hear the insects chiming and notice the flowering weeds of golden rod, milkweed and many others.
Saturday, September 23
The eighth planet, Neptune, was discovered on this date in 1846, first seen for what it was by J.G. Galle of Berlin Observatory and a student assistant H.L. d’Arrest. The planet was found by the gravitational effect on Uranus, the perturbations worked out independently by mathematicians Urban LeVerrier in Paris and John Adams in London.
Sunday, September 24
Happy 87th birthday to moonwalker John Young, a true American astronaut hero. He blasted off Earth in two Gemini, two Apollo and two Space Shuttle missions, including walking on the Moon with Apollo 16 in 1972 and the very dangerous maiden flight of Shuttle Columbia in 1980. Now afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, you can read about his amazing, 42-year space career in the 2012 autobiography “Forever Young.”
Monday, September 25
On this 1997 date in space history Shuttle Atlantis was launched on the STS-86 mission of SpaceHab in the cargo bay and the 7th docking with the Russian Mir Space Station. Two American astronauts were exchanged to stay with two cosmonauts, and the six others in Atlantis made it a then record 10 humans in space. | <urn:uuid:748cdfbf-aec7-457a-a526-25f7b15ca10c> | CC-MAIN-2020-29 | https://theloaferonline.com/2017/09/19/skies-this-week-45/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-29/segments/1593657167808.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20200715101742-20200715131742-00117.warc.gz | en | 0.927333 | 653 | 2.625 | 3 |
Since the WHO Disease Outbreak News on Acute hepatitis of unknown aetiology – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was published on 15 April 2022, there have been continuing further reports of cases of acute hepatitis in children of unknown origin.
The situation in Ireland
The HSE has confirmed that a child who was being treated for an acute form of hepatitis has died.
A second child who was also being treated for the same illness has received a liver transplant.
Six cases were reported last week and another seven cases of unexplained hepatitis in children are under investigation according to the HSE on 18/5/22
Both cases of acute hepatitis in children in Ireland are being linked to an unexplained acute hepatitis that is being reported in children worldwide.
What’s causing it?
The experts are working hard to identify a possible cause in the increased detection of these cases. Lab testing has shown that is not due to hepatitis type A, B, C, and E viruses (which are normally responsible) in these cases while Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and/or adenovirus have been detected in several cases.
While adenovirus (circulating high in the UK) is a possible cause, investigations are still underway to pinpoint the cause. Lab testing for additional infections, chemicals and toxins is ongoing for the identified cases. There does not seem to be a link between travel or vaccination with the illness.
Advice for parents on symptoms of hepatitis
Symptoms of hepatitis can include:
- muscle and joint pain
- a high temperature
- feeling and being sick
- feeling unusually tired all the time
- a general sense of feeling unwell
- loss of appetite
- tummy pain
- dark urine
- pale, grey-coloured poo
- itchy skin
- yellowing of the eyes and skin (jaundice)
Parents are advised to go to their GP if their child develops symptoms of hepatitis. The GP will assess the child and refer on for further assessment as indicated.
If your child is unwell with respiratory or diarrheal or hepatitis symptoms keep your child at home and do not send to crèche/preschool/school until they are better.
Good respiratory and hand hygiene, including supervising hand washing in young children, can help to prevent adenovirus and other infections that can cause hepatitis. We are all experts at hand hygiene after the last two years!
Surveillance summary for those of you who like data – current on 19/5/22 and updates can be found by clicking the link to reference below.
This report provides an overview of the cases of hepatitis of unknown origin in children aged 16 years and below reported to ECDC and the WHO Regional Office for Europe through The European Surveillance System (TESSy) hosted at ECDC.
- As of 13 May 2022, 232 cases of acute hepatitis of unknown aetiology in children aged 16 years or below have been reported, of which 229 were classified as probable and three as epidemiologically linked, by 14 countries (Belgium (12), Cyprus (two), Denmark (six), Greece (two), Ireland (six), Italy (24), the Netherlands (six), Norway (five), Poland (one), Serbia (one), Slovenia (one), Spain (26), Sweden (nine), and the United Kingdom (131)).
- Of the 229 probable cases, 122 have recovered, while 18 remain under medical care.
- As severe hepatitis can take some time to develop after the onset of the first symptoms and as investigations take time, there may be a delay in the reporting of cases. The recent decrease in cases is therefore challenging to interpret.
- The majority (75.9%) of cases are <5 years of age.
- Of 143 cases with information, 22 (15.4%) were admitted to an intensive care unit. Of the 98 cases for which this information was available, 13 (13.3%) have received a liver transplant. There has been one death associated with this disease.
- Overall, 151 cases were tested for adenovirus by any specimen type, of which 90 (59.6%) tested positive. The positivity rate was the highest in whole blood specimens (68.9%).
- Of the 173 cases PCR tested for SARS-CoV-2, 20 (11.6%) tested positive. Serology results for SARS-CoV-2 were only available for 19 cases, of which 14 (73.7%) had a positive finding. Of the 56 cases with data on COVID-19 vaccination, 47 (83.9%) were unvaccinated.
I hope you have found this article helpful and if you have any questions at all please don’t hesitate to contact me by sending a private message to the WonderBaba Insta page or by calling me (Sheena) at Milltown totalhealth Pharmacy in Dublin 6 on 012600262. I’m always happy to help!
Subscribe to the WonderBaba Podcast for lots of information and advice! | <urn:uuid:95307878-5b6c-41f9-999e-94a90ce7511a> | CC-MAIN-2022-40 | https://www.wonderbaba.ie/blog/the-rise-of-acute-hepatitis-in-children-in-ireland/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-40/segments/1664030334332.96/warc/CC-MAIN-20220925004536-20220925034536-00377.warc.gz | en | 0.951635 | 1,056 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Many academics have traditionally viewed the Biblical book of Esther as nothing more than a mythical story with no historical validity. There has also been significant confusion and debate about dating the events of the book of Esther and identifying the historical Persian king behind this unusual canonized book. To date, no sources in ancient Persian history have been uncovered that have clarified any of the dilemmas facing historians and biblical students. In this article we would like to propose a possible piece of evidence which seems to indicate a tremendous political and military event took place in the Persian empire on the 13th of a certain month which had such a powerful effect that it sprung up two Official holidays of two peoples which continue to be celebrated to this date.
The holiday of Purim is well known throughout the Jewish world and celebrated annually on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Adar (or the 15th of Adar for walled cities) as a day of festivities and joy. The source for the celebration of this Holiday is the book of Esther which is also traditionally read on this holiday. Chapter 9, verse 20-22 provides the dates and reason for the celebration of this holiday as it pertains to the Jewish world, it reads “Mordechai recorded these events and sent letters to all the Jews who were in all the provinces of King Aẖashverosh …..[charging them] to observe annually the fourteenth day of the month of Adar and its fifteenth day, as the days on which the Jews gained relief from their enemies …]”.
The Persian holiday of Sizdah Bedar is a national Persian holiday celebrated primarily in Iran but also in parts of Afghanistan and other areas on the 13th day of the Persian New Year Nowruz. The holiday is celebrated as a festive day where people celebrate by going outside their homes to parks and the outdoors. The official translation of Sizdah Bedar given is “getting rid of the 13th” where ''Sizdah-'' means thirteen, and ''bedar'', means to get rid of. Since the holiday is on the 13th day of the Persian New Year Nowruz, it is purported to be related to it and associated with the ancient mythical lore of casting the negative and unlucky number 13 out by going outdoors and casting its negativity out of their homes. This is the primary understanding of this holiday to the local population today. Other theories also relate the holiday to mythical Zoroastrian beliefs in which on the 13th of the New Year the demon of drought is defeated and the people celebrate this victory of the Angel of Rain on the 13th of the new year. The origin of this Persian holiday is somewhat unclear and some have purported that its origins can go as far back as 536 BCE.
There are a number of questions about Sizdah Bedar that have not been fully answered. Although it is universally accepted that Sizdah means thirteen and does have that meaning in the context and meaning of this Persian holiday, such is not the obvious case with Bedar. Bedar can certainly be translated as to get rid of (as in to get rid of the number 13) but can also taken to mean “outdoors” as in 13th Outdoors. This does in fact fit well with how the holiday is celebrated, which is to go outdoors to parks and the countryside. Although some of the above reasons may in fact be true and somehow related to this holiday, it still leaves the question of how and why such a holiday should be celebrated nationally instead of just another family centered celebration? Moreover, if the 13th day is a negative cursed number and the idea is to get rid of it, why is the celebration taking place on the 13th? Shouldn’t the celebration take place after 13th has passed ? And more importantly why is it pertinent to celebrate it by going outdoors as a opposed to just another indoor holiday?
In order to answer these questions we are going to look at an unlikely source to shed additional light on this Persian holiday and how and why it is celebrated on this date and in such manner. The book of Esther is on the surface primarily interested in relaying a Jewish message of triumph and salvation at a moment of possible extermination and is the main source for the Jewish holiday of Purim celebrated annually by the Jewish world. However, a deeper look at the book also reveals the historical, political and socio-geographic background of the Persian Empire at that particular time. There are a few general ideas gleaned from the book that strike the alert reader. Political instability seems to be the main force behind many of the prime events. The entire book of Esther (irrespective of how one reconciles its chronology to actual Persian history or who this Persian king was) covers a span of 10 years from the initial party of the King to the “civil war” that took place on the 13th of Adar. Within a 10 years span, Queen Vashti was “demoted” (Esther 1:19), four years later Queen Esther was crowned (Esther 2:17), an assassination plot against the king by two top ministers was uncovered (Esther 2:23), and a new minister, Haman, was promoted to a high ranking position (Esther 3:1). All this indicate significant instability over 127 provinces with various different peoples, languages and cultures. This instability is further evident from Persian history itself. Although some Scholars have claimed that the king in the book of Esther was Artaxerxes I, most scholars have theorized that the Aẖashverosh of the Book of Esther was in fact Xerxes I. Xerxes’s began his reign at age 36 and his kingship lasted only 20 years from 486 to 465 BC 1. Almost immediately, he had to suppress various revolts in Egypt and Babylon. His lack of control continued with the Greek’s over many battles and his army included peoples of all origins and nations including Jews 2. He was finally assassinated by a commander of royal bodyguard 3. Both the Book of Esther and the history of Xerxes I, clearly show the King did not seem to have absolute control over his country. With the promotion of Haman who seemed to have been promoted immediately after the assassination plot to kill the King, the King hoped to solidify his control over all his kingdom and provinces. This is why Haman felt opportune to ask the King for annihilating an entire group of people (Esther 3:9) whom he claimed did not abide by the rules and regulations of the country and the King granted such request without even knowing the identity of the people (Esther 3:10)! The King felt that in fact this proposition was beneficial to solidifying the Empire and the King’s reign and ordered Haman to execute on his plan. However, as the book reveals Haman’s objectives were more purely based on racial hatred of the Jews and financial and political gain.
Haman had conspired his plans on the 13th of Nissan, and plotted to execute his final solution to his Jewish problem 11 months later on the 13th of Adar. When Mordecai uncovered this plan (Esther 4:1), just as he had uncovered the previous plot to assassinate the King (Esther 2:22), Esther revealed her nationality and pleaded for the King’s mercy. The King was then alerted to Haman’s real plot and intentions. Haman’s plans were so elaborate and planned in advice that the King felt a threat to his own sovereignty and Haman was deemed a traitor and hung. What was perhaps more alarming to the King was the loyal militia that Haman had put together which could be a threat to the King and his sovereignty even though the plot was uncovered. On 23rd of Sivan, about 68 days form the time the plan was plotted the King ordered a new set of executive orders be sent by the King to allow the Jews to actually battle their enemies on this auspicious day and defend themselves against their adversaries (Esther 8:12). The King hoped that in addition to saving the Jewish population from their adversaries, he would also gain by terminating Haman’s militia who did also pose a threat to his sovereignty. Since these events were already advertised and expected to take place on the 13th of Adar, it was natural for rumors to be circulating and all disinterested parties would naturally want to stay out of the “war zones”. Therefore, on the auspicious day of the 13th there were only going to be two groups of people outdoors, either Haman’s militia who came out to battle the Jews or the Jews (and possibly soldiers offered by the King as well) who came out to defend themselves and battle the adversary. This is clearly indicated by what is said in Chapter 11 verse 8 “that the king had given [permission] to the Jews of every city to organize and to defend themselves…and to exterminate every armed force of any people or province that threaten them”. Therefore, the dread and fear of the 13th dooms day most probably kept the majority of the people confined to their homes and out of the ensuing battles between Haman’s militia and the Jews and their allies. As indicated above, the main celebration of the holiday of Purim from the book of Esther’s perspective is the gaining of relief from their enemies who had plotted to annihilate the Jewish people on the 13th of Adar (Purim is not a celebration of a military victory but a celebration of gaining relief from being annihilated!). However, from the King’s perspective the 13th of Adar was a major civil war in which he gained relief from all the armed militia forces that could threaten his leadership and the uncovering of the plot of that day and its victor helped solidify and unite his Kingdom. This is why he ordered the 13th to be designated as a National Holiday and a day of joy and festivities and it was celebrated by people going outdoors as opposed to how they stayed confined to their homes on that dreadful 13th day of the month. We can see a hint that these events had significant ramification even on the Persian Kingdom on the fact that the book of Esther goes on record by informing its reader that these events were also recorded in Persian history as it says, “And all the acts of his power and his might and the full account of Mordecai's greatness, how the king advanced him-are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Media and Persia” (Esther 10:2)
In light of the above, we can now shed additional light on another spurious custom generally celebrated on this holiday which does not fit well with any of the conventional theories on Sizdah Bedar and its conventional translation. This spurious tradition is termed “Dorough Sizdah Bedar” or the “lie of the Sizdah bedar” and will usually involved telling a lie or pulling of a prank (in fact some have proposed that April Fools day actually originated from this old Persian Custom). But exactly what is this lie? Why must a prank be pulled on this day? Looking at the proposed theory set forth above, we can now get a better insight into this unusual custom and why it must be done on Sizdah Bedar itself. The prank/lie originates from the very events of that day. Everyone was under the assumption that the Jewish Population would be attacked, defeated and annihilated in battle, but the reverse happened and everything was turned around. This was most likely the perceived "prank" which set off the ensuing tradition to pull of a prank or tell a lie on the Sizah Bedar Holiday. Perhaps this too was why the 13th became to be known as such an “unlucky” number. After all didn’t an entire plan, orchestrated reverse on this date ?!
There are additional supportive evidence these two holidays most likely emerged from one and the same event but celebrated from two distinct perspectives. As was noted above the exact rendering of bedar is not so clear. It is primarily translated and read as “to get rid of” as in to get rid of the unlucky 13th. However, with the theories set forth above we can re-read the Bedar differently which could further support our theories. Bedar literally can also be translated as “gained relief” or “survived something” taken this way it would mean that the 13th was the day that populace survived a major national battle on that day but survived all the war by staying out of trouble. But even more profoundly the Bedar can be simply read as B-Adar. This allusion further adds a connection between Purim and Sizdah Bedar in that upon careful observation of the very name of this holiday one can see “Sizdah bADAR” which can theoretically be read and translated in Farsi as Thirteenth of/in Adar. To actually read and translate the holiday this way, the “bedar” portion of the name would not read as a noun (which would mean get rid off or survive) but actually bADAR where b (which could either mean IN or FOR in Farsi) would be read as IN and ADAR would stand for the very month all these events took place. It is significant to point out that Jewish sources officially acknowledge that the names of many of the Jewish months (including Adar, Av and etc.) are actually of Babyolian/Persian origin. Considering that the Persian new year is always in spring time and never deviates more than 2-4 weeks from the Jewish month of Adar it would not be far fetched to say these two stories are related. Considering these connections, it would certainly be possible that Adar was an actual month in both Persian and Jewish calendar and that the Persian New Year and New month on Jewish Calendar fell on the same date that year and that these two stories are directly related. The Jews commemorated these events by celebrating every year on the 14th for gaining relief from their adversaries from all the battles that had been fought on the 13th and the National Government and rest of population and the masses commemorated these events by celebrating every year on the 13th for the fact that the 13th bedar ghozast (gained relief from the battle of that day and survived) and they do so by GOING OUTDOORS
If what we have outlined above is in fact plausible and supported and considering both Purim and Sizdah Bedar continue to be celebrated yearly by both the Jewish population and also by the Persian population, it would provide a living testimony that something of historical significance and validity took place in ancient Persia at those times which involved both its political, Jewish and non Jewish population and that there might in fact be historical basis for the stories outlined in the book of Esther.
This article was researched and its theories have been proposed and written by Kamy Eliassi. A special thanks to Eman Zadeh for alluding to the BAdar connection. Kamy can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
1. Dandamaev, M. A., A political history of the Achaemenid empire, p. 180.
2. Farrokh 2007: 77
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Crugers, NY, a Historical Hamlet, and Village
Located in the Hudson River about halfway between Staten Island and Manhattan, Jones Point is a little island on the west side of New York City. It is only a few miles long and one-third of a mile wide, and is home to the Jones Settlement, a town that has been called "a true American gem." On Jones Point, the name of the island is Jones Point and the town of Jones Point is called Jonesville. It's important to know this history because it will help you understand what Jones Point has to offer - and why many people consider it to be one of the best places to live in the world. Jones Point was created in 1793 as part of a plan by James Joyce, who was famous for his novel Ulysses. Joyce intended it to be an idyllic little community, with lots of beautiful nature, plenty of jobs, and a relatively small population of people who were not native English speakers. More can be found here.
Joyce lived on the Jones Settlement for many years and worked hard to make it as comfortable as possible for his residents, even when it was a difficult situation in which everyone agreed to work together for the common good. Eventually, he decided that he wanted to move the town further north to reach Niagara Falls. He then had the town built upon a peninsula, and in doing so, he made sure that his community would be protected from natural disasters such as hurricanes. The peninsula today contains many different types of homes, businesses, parks, and recreational areas. There are also many historical sites and museums, including one of the best museums in the city: the American Antiquarian Society. Learn more about Crugers, NY, a Historical Hamlet, and Village.
Jones Point is a quaint place where families can get away from it all and enjoy all that New York City has to offer. This area is perfect for people who like the peace that comes with a large expanse of ocean. There are also plenty of beaches, so it makes it easy for anyone who lives in this area to get out and have fun. If you want to be close to the city, there are plenty of subway stops in and around the area. If you're looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of your life, you'll find plenty of vacation rental homes in the area as well. Whether you want to spend the restful vacations at a luxury hotel or are a self-catering house, you'll find plenty of options if you live in Jones Point New York. | <urn:uuid:4ca19e64-d9ba-47d7-b98f-8696f26acedb> | CC-MAIN-2021-04 | https://www.fredcook.com/getting-the-most-out-of-your-trip | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-04/segments/1610704821381.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20210127090152-20210127120152-00587.warc.gz | en | 0.982038 | 525 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Validating User Input in ASP.NET Web Pages
You can add input validation to ASP.NET Web pages using validation controls. Validation controls provide an easy-to-use mechanism for all common types of standard validation—for example, testing for valid dates or values within a range—plus ways to provide custom-written validation. In addition, validation controls allow you to customize how error information is displayed to the user.
Validation controls can be used with any controls you put on an ASP.NET Web page, including both HTML and Web server controls. For more information, see ASP.NET Web Server Controls Overview.
By default, ASP.NET Web pages automatically check for potentially malicious input. For more information, see Script Exploits Overview.
You enable validation of user input by adding validation controls to your page as you would add other server controls. There are controls for different types of validation, such as range checking or pattern matching. For a complete list of validation types, see Types of Validation for ASP.NET Server Controls. Each validation control references an input control (a server control) elsewhere on the page. When user input is being processed (for example, when a page is submitted), the validation control tests the user input and sets a property to indicate whether the entry passed the test. After all of the validation controls have been called, a property on the page is set indicating whether any validation check has failed.
Validation controls can be associated into validation groups so that validation controls belonging to a common group are validated together. You can use validation groups to selectively enable or disable validation for related controls on a page. Other validation operations, such as displaying a ValidationSummary control or calling the GetValidators method, can reference the validation group.
You can test the state of the page and of individual controls in your own code. For example, you would test the state of the validation controls before updating a data record with information entered by the user. If you detect an invalid state, you bypass the update. Typically, if any validation checks fail, you skip all of your own processing and return the page to the user. Validation controls that detect errors then produce an error message that appears on the page. You can display all validation errors in one place using a ValidationSummary control.
Validation controls perform input checking in server code. When the user submits a page to the server, the validation controls are invoked to check the user input, control by control. If a validation error is detected in any of the input controls, the page itself is set to an invalid state so you can test for validity before your code runs. Validation occurs after page initialization (that is, after view state and postback data have been processed) but before any change or click event handlers are called.
ASP.NET performs validation on the server even if the validation controls have already performed it on the client, so that you can test for validity within your server-based event handlers. In addition, re-testing on the server helps prevent users from being able to bypass validation by disabling or changing the client script check.
You can invoke validation in your own code by calling a validation control's Validate method. For more information, see How to: Validate Programmatically for ASP.NET Server Controls.
Each validation control typically performs one test. However, you might want to check for multiple conditions. For example, you might want to specify both that a user entry is required and that the user entry is limited to accepting dates within a specific range.
You can attach more than one validation control to an input control on a page. In that case, the tests performed by the controls are resolved using a logical AND operator, which means that the data entered by the user must pass all of the tests in order to be considered valid.
In some instances, entries in several different formats might be valid. For example, if you are prompting for a phone number, you might allow users to enter a local number, a long-distance number, or an international number. Using multiple validation controls would not work in this instance because the user input must pass all tests to be valid. To perform this type of test—a logical OR operation where only one test must pass—use the RegularExpressionValidator validation control and specify multiple valid patterns within the control. Alternatively, you can use the CustomValidator validation control and write your own validation code.
Validation controls are not normally visible in the rendered page. However, if the control detects an error, it displays the error message text that you specify. The error message can be displayed in a variety of ways, as listed in the following table.
Each validation control can individually display an error message in place (usually next to the control where the error occurred).
Validation errors can be collected and displayed in one place—for example, at the top of the page. This strategy is often used in combination with displaying a message next to the input fields with errors. If the user is working in Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, the summary can be displayed in a message box.
If you are using validation groups, you need a ValidationSummary control for each separate group.
In place and summary
The error message can be different in the summary and in place. You can use this option to show a shorter error message in place with more detail in the summary.
You can customize the error message display by capturing the error information and designing your own output.
If you use the in-place or summary display options, you can format the error message text using HTML.
If you create custom error messages, make sure that you do not display information that might help a malicious user compromise your application. For more information, see How to: Display Safe Error Messages.
You can interact with validation controls by using the object model that is exposed by individual validation controls and by the page. Each validation control exposes its own IsValid property that you can test to determine whether a validation test has passed or failed for that control. The page also exposes an IsValid property that summarizes the IsValid state of all the validation controls on the page. This property allows you to perform a single test to determine whether you can proceed with your own processing.
The page also exposes a Validators collection containing a list of all the validation controls on the page. You can loop through this collection to examine the state of individual validation controls.
There are a few differences in the object model for client-side validation. For more information, see Client-Side Validation for ASP.NET Server Controls.
You can customize the validation process in the following ways:
You can specify the format, text, and location of error messages. In addition, you can specify whether the error messages appear individually or as a summary.
You can create custom validation using CustomValidator control. The control calls your logic but otherwise functions like other validation controls in setting error state, displaying error messages, and so on. This provides an easy way to create custom validation logic while still using in the validation framework of the page.
For client-side validation, you can intercept the validation call and substitute or add your own validation logic. | <urn:uuid:7acd3008-a338-44f2-ab61-d8442ed87c97> | CC-MAIN-2013-48 | http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7kh55542(v=vs.90) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-48/segments/1386164611566/warc/CC-MAIN-20131204134331-00025-ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.814018 | 1,469 | 2.640625 | 3 |
John B. Gordon
February 6, 1832 – January 9, 1904
John Brown Gordon would become one of the most successful commanders in General Robert E. Lee ’s army, and would do so without any prior military training. The son of a prominent minister in Upson County, Georgia, Gordon went to school at the University of Georgia, but dropped out before graduating to study law. He invested in coal mines in Georgia and Tennessee before the war but at the outbreak of the war was elected captain of a mountaineer company known as the “Raccoon Roughs.” Gordon's company was eventually incorporated into the 6th Alabama Regiment, and Gordon named as its colonel.
Colonel Gordon led his regiment during the Peninsula Campaign and the subsequent Seven Days Battles. During the Battle of Antietam, he received the order to hold a vital portion of a sunken road, now known as the “Bloody Lane.” When questioned by General Lee whether he could hold his ground, Gordon replied that his men could do so "until the sun goes down or victory is won." Though Gordon managed to hold the line against repeated attacks, victory came at a high personal cost for Gordon who was wounded four times but remained in command until a fifth wound--a minie ball to the face--rendered him unconscious. Falling face first into the road, only a bullet hole in his cap prevented him from drowning in his own blood.
After recuperating from his wound, Gordon was promoted to Brigadier General and given command of a brigade of Georgia regiments. His brigade would play an important roll during the Battle of Gettysburg, during which he and his men attacked Barlow’s Knoll on the first day of the battle.
Gordon commanded his troops with great success during the Overland Campaign. At the Battle of the Wilderness, Gordon’s brigade counterattacked and pushed back a Federal breakthrough at Saunders Field. The next day, although darkness and confusion brought an end to the fighting, Gordon launched a highly successful flank attack in which hundreds of Union soldiers and two Union generals were taken prisoner. On another "bloody" battlefield a few days later at Spotsylvania Court House, the timely arrival of Gordon's men helped to secure the otherwise shattered Confederate line. In 1864, Gordon, now a major general, assumed command of a division and led it through General Jubal Early's Shenandoah Valley Campaign.
In 1865, commanding a portion of the Confederate lines during the Siege of Petersburg, Gordon planned and led the assault on Fort Stedman, General Lee's forlorn hope to break the stalemate south of the Confederate capital. Though initially successful, Yankee counterattacks eventually forced Gordon to withdraw his forces back to their own trenches. Within a week the Confederate lines broke and Gordon, now commanding a corps, took part in critical actions during Lee's retreat toward Appomattox. After the surrender at Appomattox Court House, Gordon led the Army of Northern Virginia to surrender their arms. When Union General Joshua L. Chamberlain ordered his men to salute Gordon's column, the Confederate General, touched by the gesture, ordered his men to return the favor and acknowledge their former adversaries.
After the war, Gordon returned to his home state of Georgia, where he was elected a United States Senator as well as Governor. He was also the first commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans, a remained so until his death at the age of 71. John B. Gordon is buried in Atlanta. | <urn:uuid:da55af45-2234-43ee-96c6-9bcae5bc524f> | CC-MAIN-2015-48 | http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/john-brown-gordon.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-48/segments/1448398457799.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20151124205417-00262-ip-10-71-132-137.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979056 | 721 | 3.21875 | 3 |
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Dating and relationships can be tough for anyone to handle, but teenagers with high functioning autism face unique challenges. Teenagers with high functioning autism often find the world of emotions to be overwhelming and puzzling. They may not understand the varying degrees within a single emotion, not comprehending the difference between a slight irritation and rage.
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Teen dating violence TDV is a type of intimate partner violence. It occurs between two people in a close relationship. Unhealthy relationships can start early and last a lifetime. However, many teens do not report unhealthy behaviors because they are afraid to tell family and friends. TDV is common. It affects millions of teens in the U. Unhealthy, abusive, or violent relationships can have severe consequences and short-and long-term negative effects on a developing teen. For example, youth who are victims of TDV are more likely to:.
For example, youth who are victims of dating violence in high school are at higher risk for victimization during college. Supporting the development of healthy, respectful, and nonviolent relationships has the potential to reduce the occurrence of TDV and prevent its harmful and long-lasting effects on individuals, their families, and the communities where they live. During the pre-teen and teen years, it is critical for youth to begin learning the skills needed to create and maintain healthy relationships.
These skills include things like how to manage feelings and how to communicate in a healthy way. It focuses on year olds and includes multiple prevention components for individuals, peers, families, schools, and neighborhoods. All of the components work together to reinforce healthy relationship messages and reduce behaviors that increase the risk of dating violence.
Nevertheless, autistic adults may need to hurdle far more obstacles than their neurotypical peers to thrive in a world of dating. Some autistic adults go through their entire adult life without having much interest in romance or dating, while others are very interested and actively pursue romantic relationships. If you are interested, this article contains some tips on getting started. If you are a parent or a friend of an autistic adult, your job is to make sure that the person knows that you are open and available for support.
Some people including neurotypical people say that meeting people is the hardest part of dating.
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Introduction When Jerry first came in for counseling, he was so shy that he couldn’t even look at me and could only give one-line answers to questions. Jerry was 21, but had made only one friend in his life. That “friend” was actually someone who had used him. Jerry came to counseling because he was tired of being so shy and wanted to be able to meet women and eventually marry and have a family.
He knew that his current path was not leading him in the right direction, and he was very upset about it. Jerry worked hard and persisted. I helped him with conversational skills, assertiveness skills, and with building self-esteem and confidence. He used individual counseling, an assertion training group, and self-help books. He persistently applied what he was learning. He took risks and often failed at first. Nevertheless, within three years he became president of a fraternity, had all the dates he wanted, had lots of friends, and had changed his major to one requiring a high level of interpersonal skills.
More importantly, he was much happier with himself and his life. Jerry was not a typical case.
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National Testing Agency has released the dates of various examinations on its official portal — nta. The exams will be held from July Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a virtual interaction with bureaucrats and technology experts and said that there is a need to create job opportunities in place where skill sets exists, thereby reducing the mismatch between skills and jobs. Thackeray, who recently instructed initiating online pilot projects at the start of the academic year, watched demonstration of online classes during the meeting.
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The California water-shortage crisis, largely man-made, according to experts, is getting so bad in some areas that people are facing what is being described as “Third World” conditions.
With the severe drought now stretching into its fourth year, reservoirs are running dry and wildfires are burning thousands of homes. And the human and economic toll is growing fast.
Fox News reported on Monday a Monterey County fire had claimed another life and another 162 homes, pushing the total of loss of homes in recent weeks to more than 1,400.
Reports said more than 5,000 fires had burned six million acres already, and there have been several fatalities.
More fires were breaking out, and more evacuations were being ordered at the time.
Tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars have already evaporated. And with no end in sight, there may still be years of suffering — and painful decisions — waiting ahead.
Indeed, some experts say this could be just the beginning, with some worst-case scenarios foreseeing mass migrations out of the state if relief doesn’t come soon.
But it did not have to be this way. And sensible policies could help protect the state going forward, a number of experts tell WND.
Effects: From nuisance to disaster
For some Californians, the drought is mostly an inconvenience, with bureaucrats and politicians demanding that the public take shorter showers, flush toilets less often, and turn off the taps while brushing teeth, for example.
For others, especially in the state’s vast agricultural sector, the water shortage is proving devastating.
Andrew Lockman with the Office of Emergency Services for Tulare County, an agriculture powerhouse and one of the most severely impacted areas of the state, spoke of “Third-World-type conditions” now afflicting some families there as wells run dry.
Some farmers are already going under, workers are losing jobs, wells are drying up, more than half-a-million acres are lying fallow, production costs are soaring, and more pain is expected – potentially much more.
“With each year that California suffers below-average precipitation, the impacts on California farmers and ranchers have become more significant,” said Dave Kranz, communications manager for the California Farm Bureau Federation.
The impacts, of course, are not evenly distributed. After all, California is a large state with varying conditions in different regions.
Particularly impacted with the most severe effects has been the San Joaquin Valley – home to some of the most productive farmland on the planet. That includes Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties.
“Those regions are particularly dependent on delivery of water from state and federal projects that have seen their allocations slashed due to a combination of drought and environmental laws that reserve water for protected fish species, and because farmers there often have less reliable sources of groundwater to make up the difference when surface water supplies are cut,” Kranz told WND in a statement.
However, he added, water availability is becoming a concern for farmers across the entire state, and those concerns will only intensify if relief does not come soon.
For now, with demand for California’s commodities still strong, high prices have helped ease the brunt on many farmers faced with soaring water-related costs from activities such as drilling more wells and pumping more water from deeper under the ground. But if markets turn down, the impacts could worsen quickly.
And despite record-high crop receipts in 2014, the fact that production costs are increasing due to water shortages – 2014 also featured record-high production costs for farmers and ranchers, according to the USDA Economic Research Service – means that farmers’ net earnings have decreased, Kranz said.
“California farmers and ranchers, their employees and the agricultural economy as a whole have certainly suffered during the four-year drought,” he continued. “Everyone is hopeful that the coming autumn and winter will bring plentiful rain and snowfall to help recovery begin, but we also know it will take several years of strong precipitation to replenish above-ground reservoirs and underground aquifers that have been depleted the past few years.”
The economic price tag is staggering and growing by the minute, with a recent study from the University of California, Davis, estimating the 2015 cost to the state at close to $3 billion.
A UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences analysis found that the water shortage was squeezing about 30 percent more workers and crop land out of production compared with 2014.
More than 20,000 jobs will be lost in 2015 due to the shortages, the researchers found. Some communities were especially hard hit, with wells running dry and unemployment soaring.
Another study on the water shortage, conducted by researchers at Fresno State University, found even more severe impacts, predicting as much as $3.3 billion in agricultural losses alone.
Effects on public health are also evident, with increased instances of Valley Fever, West Nile Virus and diarrheal illness that experts blame on the water crisis.
Potential increases in mental health issues, including anxiety, stress and depression, are also linked to the shortages, researchers said.
The Fresno State study found that some agricultural counties are already seeing reductions in household income and even migrations of workers to other areas.
Even beyond California, Americans may start feeling the impact of the shortages reflected in higher produce prices.
For the first time since 1977, the state has placed drastic restrictions on farmers’ water usage, even though they have water rights dating back more than 100 years.
And more cutbacks could be coming soon, officials have warned.
A man-made disaster?
But none of this had to happen.
Environmental, water and policy experts who spoke with WND were unanimous in blaming the increasingly severe water shortage on man – not nature.
“The drought came to California courtesy of mother nature,” explained Bonner Cohen, senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, adding that California’s climate, generally speaking, is arid or semi-arid.
“Mother nature serves up droughts to California on a very regular basis,” he said.
“Knowing this, one would think the political class in California would prepare for those droughts,” he told WND. “Yet, if you look at what the political class in California has done, the one thing that jumps out at you is that they have done absolutely nothing – zero – to prepare the state for something they knew was going to come sooner or later.”
Cohen, who also serves as a senior policy analyst with the environmental group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT, said a basic function of government is to prepare for events that can reasonably be expected.
The USDA reveals that tiny segments of the state are “abnormally dry,” and those are the best conditions in the state. Except for small portions in the far northwest and far southeast, most of the state is in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.
The most recent figures show more than 99 percent of the state in abnormally dry conditions, or worse. A full 71 percent is suffering “extreme” drought conditions, and 46 percent is considered “exceptional.”
Yet in California, policymakers have not allowed the construction of a single new reservoir in more than 30 years to store water for emergencies such as the current drought – a fact seized upon by several political leaders this year as the shortages intensified.
“Given the climatological history of California, policymakers had to be aware that droughts would come,” Cohen explained, saying the state should have prepared additional storage capacity, but it didn’t.
Secondly, policymakers expended a tremendous amount of time, resources and water in “what is ultimately a doomed effort to save a tiny two-inch-long fish known as the Delta Smelt,” Cohen said.
Citing researchers and biologists, he said experts have concluded that nothing can be done to save the fish.
“It’s eventually going to go the way of most species since life came along and disappear,” he said, adding that, ironically, the Delta Smelt is an invasive species.
In accordance with the controversial federal Endangered Species Act, Cohen said policymakers diverted an enormous amount of water into the San Francisco Bay in the doomed effort to save the tiny fish – all at the expense of California’s human residents.
“They continue to do that and are doing it as we speak,” Cohen added.
Pointing to Israel, widely regarded as a global water superpower and a leading example of sensible water policies, Cohen said California could have taken steps to facilitate the expansion of desalinization capabilities as well.
But California’s regulatory regime is so hostile, and energy prices have been artificially boosted so high on the basis of supposed environmental concerns, that such efforts have been largely impractical and uneconomic thus far.
Global warming vs. policy
As the drought intensified, the blame game become more heated as well.
GOP presidential candidate and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina made headlines in April by blaming progressives and environmentalists for the water crisis.
“Droughts are nothing new in California, but right now, 70 percent of California’s rainfall washes out to sea because liberals have prevented the construction of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades, during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” she said. “This is the classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”
Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents the 22nd congressional district in the Central Valley, also blamed environmentalists and the control they have over California policy.
“The environmental groups did not expect to run everyone out of water, but they got greedy, shut down the whole system, and ran the whole damned state dry,” he fumed, pointing to how much water washes out into the ocean each year. “If we had stored water and built three new dams, the state would be flush with water.”
The federal government has indicated that none of California’s major reservoirs is in good condition. Shasta Lake is at only 37 percent of capacity and, except for Castaic at 38 percent, is the fullest in the state.
Lake Oroville is at 30 percent, Folsom at 19 percent, Don Pedro at 32 percent, Exchequer at 9 percent, Pine Flat at 12 percent, Perris at 36 percent, Millerton at 34, San Luis at 21, New Melones at 12 and Trinity at 24 percent.
Indeed, aside from a few politicians and environmentalists determined to blame global warming or climate change – even NOAA denies climate change is to blame – virtually everyone agrees that the deepening crisis is at least in part man-made.
“We are being told that this is further evidence of climate change, formerly called global warming,” Cohen said. “One look at the climatological record will debunk that completely.”
In the 20th century, he said, California experienced eight severe droughts. The most severe was from 1928 to 1937.
A worse drought struck the state in the early- to mid-1860s, he added.
“These cannot have been caused by man’s emissions of greenhouse gases, because they weren’t there,” Cohen said, adding that there’s no evidence man’s emissions drive climate change anyway.
“The climate in California is doing exactly what it has always done – serving up very severe droughts,” he added.
Policymakers and interest groups “created an absolute mess, and it never had to happen,” Cohen said.
“California is not suffering from water shortage,” he continued. “It lacks distribution system to get water where it is needed. It failed to build storage capacity. It has wasted unfathomable amounts of water resources to save a fish that can’t be saved.”
“What you have here is a complete failure on the part of policymakers – the Assembly, governors going back decades, and others – to prepare the state for something they knew was going to happen,” Cohen concluded.
In a 2010 paper for the “Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education,” agricultural and resource economics scholar David Zetland, Ph.D., concluded that “business-as-usual is over” when it comes to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a crucial source of fresh water for much of California.
He was right in more ways than one.
But the water-policy expert, who earned his doctorate at UC Davis, has a somewhat different view concerning the various causes of the water shortage, telling WND California already has “too many dams.”
“Additional storage is not necessary, as current storage is now underused,” said Zetland, who runs a blog called called Aguanomics, which focuses on the political economy of water.
What is missing, he said, is better accounting and systems for transferring water between where it’s located and where it’s needed.
“Groundwater is unmanaged and untracked,” he said. “We need systems for allocating the water we’ve got.”
Blaming “outdated institutions for managing drought,” Zetland explained: “Nature makes a drought, man makes a shortage.”
“The government has promised too much water to too many people and places, and has no mechanism for deciding who should get it in a shortage,” he said. “Senior/junior rights are supposed to work, but they are poorly accounted for.”
However, the “worst” water policies are those that subsidize sprawl and irrigation, he said, citing cheap water prices from government suppliers and subsidies for drilling wells as examples.
Zetland, who now serves as a professor of economics at Leiden University College in the Netherlands, has studied water policy for more than a decade. He has also written two books on the subject: “Living with Water Scarcity” and “The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity.”
Asked about California’s future amid the crisis, he said, in the short term, lots of money will be wasted on inefficient emergency actions.
In the medium term, the environment will be damaged as private parties take water from “the commons.”
And over the long term, people and businesses will likely have to leave California.
Smiling, he recommended Detroit and other areas that have abundant water supplies as potential destinations.
“It can get worse,” he added.
Even those pinning their hopes on the expected weather event El Niño may be disappointed, because even large amounts of rainfall “doesn’t fix anything.”
“It may cause floods, and additional supplies won’t help if people keep watering lawns,” Zetland noted.
Solutions: Markets and prices
California officials have responded to the shortage by implementing various rationing schemes, spying on resident usage through “smart meters” and fining citizens or businesses that use more than their allocated share.
Policy experts, though, lambasted the governmental approach as part of the problem.
As for solutions, Zetland and other experts support the introduction of more market forces in the distribution and allocation of scarce water resources.
Among other policies for “wholesale” water, H2O used for agriculture and the environment, he proposed reforming water rights, tracking and limiting the use of ground water, and allowing water markets to develop.
As far as retail water, or water used by urban consumers, Zetland proposed elimination of laws requiring green lawns, for instance, and hiking the prices of city water so demand falls in proportion to supply.
Of course, all of that would mean higher prices for farms, food and households. But Zetland said that would be a good thing, considering the alternatives.
“I prefer higher prices over regulations because people can find their own ways to adapt. Some will do nothing, but the overall impact is lower demand,” said Zetland.
He pointed to Singapore as a leading example of sensible urban water markets, praising its robust supply-side engineering projects complemented by “sound demand-side management and incentives.”
Another shining star when it comes to water, he said, is Australia, where, among other key differences with California, water rights are separated from land and can be traded in the market.
Without adopting sensible policies, California, and even the rest of America, will eventually see more water crises going forward, Zetland warned.
Learning from experience: Chile leads the way
Another water-policy expert, Fredrik Segerfeldt, wrote a book, “Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the World’s Water Crisis,” on how to deal with precisely the sort of problems California is currently facing.
In his comprehensive review of why water shortages still plague humanity despite the fact that the planet has abundant supplies – about 8 percent of the water available for human consumption is actually used – Segerfeldt concluded that bad government policies are the primary problem.
To illustrate that fact, he examined, among other examples, the wettest place on earth – Cherrapunji, India. Despite the most abundant water supplies, Cherrapunji suffers from chronic water shortages due to bad government policy.
But while Segerfeldt’s work focused chiefly on how to get clean, safe water to the poorest one billion people – potentially saving millions of lives in the process – the conclusions are just as applicable to California or any other place.
Simply stated, privatization works, Segerfeldt said. And economic laws hold true in California just as much as they do in Cherrapunji.
“California should overhaul its approach to water and introduce various market mechanisms,” Segerfeldt told WND.
“Subsidies, government involvement and too low prices are the root causes of the present crisis,” explained Segerfeldt, adding that the current crisis is also a result of the “tragedy of the commons” in which communally controlled resources are exploited.
But the solutions are already available, and have been used successfully in regions as diverse as Africa, Asia and South America.
“Private water rights and trade in such rights are efficient ways of safeguarding water and making sure we get the most value out of each drop of water,” Segerfeldt said.
He pointed to Chile as “probably the best example of how reforms in this direction helped save water and develop agriculture.”
When the government of Chile introduced private ownership of water in the 1980s, water supplies grew faster than in any other country, he observed.
“Thirty years ago, only 27 percent of Chileans in rural areas and 63 percent of urban communities had steady access to safe water,” Segerfeldt wrote in his 2005 book, “Water for Sale.” “Today’s figures are 94 and 99 percent, respectively – the highest for all the world’s medium-income countries.”
The reforms also led to drastically more efficient agriculture and lower water prices.
In other words, everybody wins – especially the poor – except the laid-off government bureaucrats formerly trying to oversee water.
Separation of water and states
Wayne Crews Jr. is vice president for policy at the nonprofit Competitive Enterprise Institute, which focuses on environmental policy and other subjects. Crews summed up his solution in five simple words: “separation of water and state.”
In 2013, Crews took his argument to Congress, testifying before the House Subcommittee on Water and Power that the real answer to water shortages, especially in the dry Western states, is to get the government at all levels out of the way.
“No one should be surprised in the 21st century when political management of water, and all its hostility to market pricing, results in shortages,” Crews told WND.
“The answer is the ‘separation of water and state,’ and market pricing in particular, but politicians lack the inclination, let alone vocabulary, to make that happen,” he added.
As a free society becomes wealthier, Crews continued, cross-industry infrastructure creation to bring about abundant water supplies should become ever easier, not harder.
“The vastly poorer America of 100 years ago built overlapping, redundant infrastructure,” he said. “So if we can’t do it today, shortages happen because of man-made policies, not genuine drought.”
Like other experts, Crews said water resources “should be better integrated into the property-rights, wealth-creating sector, an evolution toward abundance and larger-scale free enterprise long-since derailed not just in water policy, but elsewhere like in electromagnetic spectrum, electricity and transportation grids.
“Infrastructure can take countless forms when price signals, which are indispensable, let us know where to invest,” he said. “Better reservoir storage, pipelines and canals, trucking and transport, and crude oil carriers can aid supply and lessen artificial drought.”
Among other possibilities, Crews pointed to improving water trades between cities, farmers and private conservation campaigns.
Citing findings from a Competitive Enterprise Institute report, Crews also said shoring up existing infrastructure could reduce waste that now depletes almost 20 percent of the annual U.S. supply.
“All these can supplement sourcing alternatives including drilling; gray and wastewater treatment and reclamation; stormwater harvesting and surface storage,” he added.
The primary challenge, then, is “to discover the true value of water itself, to integrate modern water resources further into the market process and the sophisticated pricing, property rights, and capital market systems of the modern world,” he said.
“The good news is, water is not getting more scarce overall,” he concluded. “The bad news is, management and allocation of that constant supply does matter, and those in power inevitably foster ‘Declarations of Dependence’ on the state when it comes to infrastructure, and maintain a hostility toward free market pricing.”
Federal and state relief urgent
As debates over how to handle water heat up across California, long-term solutions are probably a long way away, experts say.
But there are some actions that the federal and state government could take right now to provide some much-needed relief to the people of California, according to Cohen, of the National Center for Public Policy Research and C-FACT.
Ironically, though, many of those steps involve reversing previous decisions that contributed to the crisis in the first place, making it politically much more difficult for policymakers who often refuse to acknowledge or correct mistakes.
At the state level, Cohen said California should get rid of its “renewable-energy mandate” purporting to require that some arbitrary percent of the state’s energy needs be met with so-called “renewable” sources – solar, wind and so on – by some arbitrary date.
“As long as they keep trying this, they’re going to drive up electricity costs, creating an even more hostile environment for things like desalinization and other energy-intensive options to expand water supplies,” he said.
Another option California policymakers could exploit, “but probably won’t,” is to expand the state’s network of reservoirs.
“Even one or two more could do amazing things to help alleviate California’s struggling residents,” Cohen said.
He also criticized the state for squandering massive amounts of resources on problems that “do not exist” – the multi-billion dollar “high-speed rail” scheme, for example – instead of focusing on problems that do exist, such as the crippling water shortage.
At the federal level, Cohen said policymakers could also work to help California, and other states, deal with the water crisis and numerous other government-created problems.
The Endangered Species Act, which forced California to bend over backward to save the apparently doomed Delta Smelt, for example, is an “absolute monstrosity” and a “monumental failure,” he said.
While ostensibly aimed at helping to save species, it was really designed to be a “land-control apparatus” in which federal bureaucrats impose draconian restrictions on property owners under the guise of protecting some species of plant or animal.
“As long as that law, which is very rigidly written, is on the books, when an emergency such as severe drought comes along, and that law covers areas where the drought is in effect, that law will keep certain necessary measures from being taken in the name of protecting some species,” Cohen said.
There are much easier, cheaper and effective ways of protecting species, he added.
Cohen also blasted the National Environmental Policy Act, noting that a project such as the Hoover Dam could never have been built today due to the statute and the “straight-jacket” it imposes.
“We have imposed on ourselves, just from those two statutes alone, restrictions that encumber our ability to deal with emergencies when they come along,” he said.
To fix it, though, requires action at the federal level, including an act of Congress.
None of the experts who spoke with WND sounded optimistic about policymakers undertaking the reforms they say are necessary to deal with the water crisis.
Instead, at least for the foreseeable future, officials at all levels are likely to continue doing what they have been doing – all-but ensuring more crises going forward.
“Evidence is overwhelming that policymakers are not sensitive to the suffering their policies have produced,” Cohen said, lambasting California’s “gigantically bloated public sector” at the state and local level. “They’re not about to blame themselves for a problem they are complicit in creating – the political class in California never takes responsibility for anything.”
It will be especially tough in California, he added, citing the state’s bizarre political scene, where so much of the wealth and power comes from the “la la lands” of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco-type urban dwellers and money managers, all of whom “live in a bubble and are largely unaware of reality outside the bubble.”
“Sometimes the only way to bounce back is to hit rock bottom,” Cohen said. “California is heading that way fast. It is becoming a basket case.”
“When the house of cards comes crashing down, maybe these people will come to their senses,” he said. | <urn:uuid:af1ef934-0c1e-453d-b35e-3cadc88f137a> | CC-MAIN-2017-43 | http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/experts-california-drought-fire-crisis-man-made/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-43/segments/1508187826114.69/warc/CC-MAIN-20171023145244-20171023165244-00433.warc.gz | en | 0.958219 | 5,674 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Today at the European Physical Society meeting in Stockholm, the international T2K collaboration announced definitive observation of muon neutrino to electron neutrino transformation. In 2011, the collaboration announced the first indication of this process, a new type of neutrino oscillation, then; now with 3.5 times more data this transformation is firmly established. The probability that random statistical fluctuations alone would produce the observed excess of electron neutrinos is less than one in a trillion. Equivalently the new results exclude such possibility at 7.5 sigma level of significance. This T2K observation is the first of its kind in that an explicit appearance of a unique flavor of neutrino at a detection point is unequivocally observed from a different flavor of neutrino at its production point.
In the T2K experiment in Japan, a muon neutrino beam is produced in the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, called J-PARC, located in Tokai village, Ibaraki prefecture, on the east coast of Japan. The neutrino beam is monitored by a detector complex in Tokai and aimed at the gigantic Super- Kamiokande underground detector in Kamioka, near the west coast of Japan, 295 km (185 miles) away from Tokai. An analysis of the data from the Super-Kamiokande detector associated with the neutrino beam time from J-PARC reveals that there are more electron neutrinos (a total of 28 events) than would be expected (4.6 events) without this new process.
Neutrino oscillation is a manifestation of a long range quantum mechanical interference. Observation of this new type of neutrino oscillation leads the way to new studies of charge-parity (CP) violation which provides a distinction in physical processes involving matter and antimatter. This phenomenon has only been observed in quarks (for which Nobel prizes were awarded in 1980 and 2008). CP violation in neutrinos in the very early universe may be the reason that the observable universe today is dominated by matter and no significant antimatter, which is one of the most profound mysteries in science. Now with T2K firmly establishing this form of neutrino oscillation that is sensitive to CP violation, a search for CP violation in neutrinos becomes a major scientific quest in the coming years, and T2K will continue to play a leading role. The T2K experiment expects to collect 10 times more data in the near future, including data with antineutrino beam for studies of CP violation in neutrinos.
The T2K experiment was constructed and is operated by an international collaboration. The current T2K collaboration consists of over 400 physicists from 59 institutions in 11 countries [Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Spain, UK and US]. The experiment is primarily supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Additional support is provided by the following funding agencies from participating countries: NSERC, NRC and CFI, Canada; CEA and CNRS/IN2P3, France; DFG, Germany; INFN, Italy; Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland; RAS, RFBR and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation; MICINN and CPAN, Spain; SNSF and SER, Switzerland; STFC, U.K.; DOE, U.S.A.
This discovery was made possible with the unyielding and tireless effort by the J-PARC staff members and the management to deliver high quality beam to T2K after the devastating March 2011 earthquake in eastern Japan which caused severe damage to the accelerator complex at J-PARC, and abruptly discontinued the data-taking run of the T2K experiment.
More detailed information on this announcement including images, T2K experiment and T2K collaboration can be found from the T2K public webpage: http://t2k-experiment.org.
Globally and in Japan:
Prof. Takashi Kobayashi, Spokesperson, T2K Collaboration, The Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, KEK (Tsukuba, Japan),
Phone: +81 90-9840-2413 (c), +81 29-864-5414 (o), +81 29-852-4881 (h)
Globally and in U.S.:
Prof. Chang Kee Jung, International Co-Spokesperson, T2K Collaboration, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY, USA) and Kavli IPMU, University of Tokyo (Kashiwa, Japan), firstname.lastname@example.org,
Phone: +1 631-707-2018 (c), +1 631-632-8108/8095 (o), +1 631-474-4563 (h)
Prof. Hiro Tanaka, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), email@example.com
Phone: +1 778-772-3690
Dr. Jacques Dumarchez, LPNHE-Paris (IN2P3) (Paris, France), firstname.lastname@example.org
Phone: +33 1 44 27 48 42
Dr. Marco Zito, CEA/IRFU (Saclay, France), email@example.com
Phone: +33 6 84 61 09 51
Prof. Achim Stahl, RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany), firstname.lastname@example.org
Phone: +49 241 80 27301 (o), +49 172 5761500 (c)
Dr. Maria Gabriella Catanesi, INFN Sezione di Bari (Bari, Italy), email@example.com
Phone: + 41 764871532
Prof. Ewa Rondio, NCBJ, Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland), Ewa.Rondio@fuw.edu.pl
Phone: +48 691 150 052
Prof. Yuri Kudenko, INR (Moscow, Russia), firstname.lastname@example.org
Phone: +7-903-6159125 (c), +7-495-8510184 (o)
Prof. Andre Rubbia, ETHZ (Zurich, Switzerland), email@example.com
Phone: +41 44 633 3873
Prof. Alain Blondel, Université de Genève, firstname.lastname@example.org
Phone: +41 76 487 4058
Prof. Dave Wark, STFC/RAL/Daresbury Laboratory/Oxford University (Oxford, U.K.), email@example.com
Phone: +44 7788186085 | <urn:uuid:2e26797c-23c3-4966-9a5d-952c66d789e6> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1033083 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988719564.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183839-00166-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.858045 | 1,469 | 2.921875 | 3 |
Diospyros kaki ‘Dai Dai Maru’
Diospyros kaki ‘Dai Dai Maru’ common name, persimmon is among the oldest cultivated plants, having been in use in China for more than 2000 years. Our variety is an astringent one, with fruit needing to be left on the tree to ripen fully. The kaki tree reaches a size of up to 10 metres. Its deciduous leaves are medium to dark green, broadly lanceolate, stiff and equally wide as long. Unusually, the kaki fruits ripen when the leaves have mostly fallen off the tree, typically in autumn. They have a jelly like texture when fully ripe. Kaki trees typically do not bear until they are 3 to 6 years old. The 2 cm -2.5 cm wide flowers appear in late spring or early summer depending on variety and growing area. The tubular flowers have a creamy white color. Female flowers grow singly, while male flowers sometimes may have a pink tint and tend to appear in clusters of three. Diospyros kaki is typically a dioecious species, which means that trees are either male or female, but some cultivated varieties are monoecious. In that case both male and female, and even perfect (male+female), flowers can be found on the same tree. The flowers have four crown-shaped sepals and four petals that form a large calyx. All varieties (parthenocarpic) will produce seedless fruit in the absence of pollination, but the pollinated flowers will produce fruit full of seeds. Planted in 1992 by the Moss Family.
57.00 Location A4 Latitude; -38.401214290000 Longitude; 146.052184200000 | <urn:uuid:5555b59f-8b8f-47a4-bb05-2c511c730858> | CC-MAIN-2022-49 | https://www.mossvalepark.com/shop/product/75928/diospyros-kaki-dai-dai-maru/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-49/segments/1669446710155.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20221127005113-20221127035113-00392.warc.gz | en | 0.946683 | 373 | 2.71875 | 3 |
The sharing economy birthed by Bay Area startups has grown into an international phenomenon, complete with on-demand workers like those at TaskRabbit, who provide everything from toothpaste delivery to accounting services. Many of these workers, like those in a recent BuzzFeed profile, say they’re living the new economic dream, but the truth of the sharing economy is much darker. The ones profiting from the new economy aren’t young people, but the corporations that profit off them.
Far from being a paradise of easy money earned on your own terms, the 1099 economy, as it’s sometimes called, is in fact a precarious world best suited for those who are naive, young, and healthy. It may be billed to the public as the face of a new economic future, but in many ways, it’s reminiscent of the piecework economy of the late 19th and early 20th century.
As the Guardian’s Sarah Jaffe explains, “It was common in the late 19th and early 20th century that, instead of working in a factory for a wage or a salary, workers sewed or assembled goods at home and were paid by the finished item rather than for their time.” It seems the poor little matchgirl has become the poor little Postmate.
Though on-demand apps, a dizzying array of products and services are only a tap away, but that comes at a cost to the workforce that drives those services—and a potential big cost to society as well. When workers are left without a safety net, their falls are broken by the rest of us. This bright new economic future has no precedent, and the government hasn’t moved to regulate it.
Cheerleaders of the share economy revel in its flexibility, allegedly higher pay, and ability to be performed anywhere. However, the reality on the ground can be quite different. High turnover isn’t unexpected with work that’s clearly designed to be temporary—few project making a long-term future out of this kind of task-based labor—but many workers find themselves leaving sooner rather than later, citing a surprising lack of flexibility and lower pay than advertised. With 34 percent of the working population involved in the freelance and contracting sector, this is not a trivial problem.
Davey Alba at Wired cuts to the heart of the problems with the sharing economy:
Top complaints from workers included not being able to find enough work, not understanding legal obligations and taxes, and being unable to optimize schedules to maximize earnings. Half of the respondents said they planned to stop working for on-demand companies within the year, citing insufficient pay, lack of enjoyment of the work, or simply because they no longer had the need to work the job.
That’s reflected in the demographic makeup of such workers, who are overwhelmingly male, white, and in their early-to-mid 20s. Most are also single with no children, highlighting the nature of the sharing economy as an option really only available to those without ties and obligations. Median hourly wages tend to sit around $18 hourly, which doesn’t necessarily translate into high earnings for people who work intermittently or in expensive areas of the nation like San Francisco or New York.
Lives change, too. Things can happen in an instant, and members of the sharing economy are often ill-equipped to deal with them because they lack savings and the benefits that might be provided through a traditional job. A contract worker who gets in a car accident may have only the most minimal of health insurance plans, as she couldn’t afford a more expensive one and didn’t see the need. Suddenly, she’s facing huge medical expenses and an inability to work.
She likely has no savings, either, as it can be difficult to build savings on subsistence wages. Just short of 20 percent of Americans actually build and maintain savings accounts for events like these, and not many are among the sharing economy masses. Even among those who make enough to be able to put funds aside, many lack financial planning skills or the ability to consult with accountants who can help them manage income and taxes efficiently.
Far from being a paradise of easy money earned on your own terms, the 1099 economy, as it’s sometimes called, is in fact a precarious world best suited for those who are naive, young, and healthy.
Some life events are more predictable but still pose problems for independent contractors, as discussed in a piece at the Economist: “The on-demand economy certainly produces unfairnesses: Taxpayers will also end up supporting many contract workers who have never built up pensions.”
The same holds true for pregnancy, sending children to college, and other events that can get quite costly. Even buying a house, the root of the American dream, is out of reach for those consumed with the basics of staying alive on piecework incomes, especially with skyrocketing real estate prices in markets where the sharing economy thrives. Try affording a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on TaskRabbit wages, let alone an actual house.
Effectively, taxpayers and the federal government are subsidizing companies that rely heavily on the independent contractor model by ensuring they don’t have to pay benefits, enroll in workmen’s comp insurance programs, and incur other expenses associated with a regular workforce. The sharing economy is one facet of corporate welfare in the United States, leaving workers and the government holding a bag that companies should be managing on their own.
We need better checks on the sharing economy to protect workers and allow them to build better futures for themselves. One possible example is the model presented by BlueCrew, which provides on-demand labor but pays its workers as employees. The company notes that it avoids potential tax liability and other problems by managing workers as ordinary W2 employees, while workers get stable work and job security in exchange.
For clients, the availability of screened and trained on-demand labor can be reassuring in an era of total strangers arriving on the doorstep to fix the plumbing.
BlueCrew’s approach could be a new model for the on-demand economy, providing the flexibility many have come to expect while protecting the people who provide it. Those who want cupcakes delivered to their loft in the middle of the night can still get them, but the cyclists who bring them could rest easy instead of pedaling desperately from gig to gig.
S.E. Smith is a writer, editor, and agitator with regular appearances in the Guardian, AlterNet, and Salon, along with several anthologies. Smith also serves as the Social Justice Editor for xoJane and will be co-chairing Wiscon 40—the preeminent feminist science-fiction conference—in 2016. | <urn:uuid:d4ef8509-51ff-4430-a2d9-ba05a81a7de0> | CC-MAIN-2022-05 | https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/sharing-economy-taskrabbit-buzzfeed-piecework/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-05/segments/1642320305317.17/warc/CC-MAIN-20220127223432-20220128013432-00291.warc.gz | en | 0.966365 | 1,386 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Scholarly articles tend to follow pretty much a four-step formula.
- The author identifies the problem being investigated, explains why it is of interest, and why it is important to find a solution.
- The previous solutions to the problem are discussed and reasons are given (in the form of evidence and arguments) as to why those earlier attempts are unsatisfactory.
- The author proposes a new solution to the problem and gives reasons (again in the form of evidence and arguments) why the new solution should be accepted.
- Other auxiliary problems will usually also be identified and addressed in the course of making the larger case.
In order to make the case that their research is important, scientists will often indulge in slight hyperbole in steps #1 and #2, exaggerating the importance of the problem and the difficulty of finding a solution as a way of making their own solution seem more significant. People who are familiar with scientific writing know the format, recognize the caveats, and realize that parts #1 and #2 are merely setting the stage, a form of throat clearing if you will, before getting to the meat of the paper, which consists of #3.
Scientific writing is also not polemical. By that I mean that many of the tricks used to win arguments in popular and political discourse are not of much use in science. This is because science proceeds slowly and since the merits of ideas are eventually judged by peers who have quite deep knowledge of the field, rhetorical tricks might get you some attention but will not usually win people over to your side. In particular, scientists do not indulge in ‘quote mining’, the deplorable practice act of taking other people’s words out of context and distorting their meaning. Misrepresenting someone else’s views is severely frowned upon so scientists tend not to worry that others will do it to them.
As a result, scientists do not write defensively, with an eye to preventing others from twisting their words to make them seem to be saying things they are not. This leaves them wide open to attacks by some religious apologists whose main strategy is to do precisely those things. Such opponents take advantage of the slightly hyperbolic style of stages #1 and #2 in scientific writing to distort the meaning. They act like politicians who routinely rip the words of their opponents out of context and make them seem to be saying the opposite of what they meant, a practice that is taboo in science.
Take for example the question of the origin of life. Religious people cling tenaciously to the idea that this is an insoluble mystery and hence god is needed to create it. They seek support for this view from the scientific community, even though much progress has been made in this area, and some stoop to quote mining to try and make their case. An article titled Origin of Life on Earth by Alonso Ricardo and Nobel-prize winning scientist Jack W. Szostak in the September 2009 of Scientific American begins:
Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical, chemical or electrical messages—the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time.
It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago. [My emphasis-MS]
Anyone who is familiar with the way that scientific articles are written knows that the rest of the article is going to consist of one big ‘but’, where the authors proceed to show why it is not impossible after all and that in fact they have made great strides in understanding the process. The dead giveaway is the phrase ‘virtually impossible to imagine’. But if you glide over that phrase, you might get the impression that Alonso and Szostak are throwing up their hands in despair and saying that the origin of life is an insoluble mystery. But experienced readers of science articles know that what the authors are really saying is that although the problem is very hard, they are going to show how it might be solved and that is what the rest of the article is going to be about.
The argument that I put forth in my book, which Rabbi Jacobs also presented in his Huffington Post column, was that the simple reason why Origin of Life researchers are baffled in their attempts to find a naturalistic origin of life – as Noble Laureate Dr. Jack Szostak put it, “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines…could have formed spontaneously from non-living matter,” is because it is impossible for a cell’s machines to have formed spontaneously from non-living matter.
Averick got severely smacked around in the comments for his deceitfulness. But what must have really hurt was when Szostak’s wife Terri-Lynn McCormick also appeared there and responded furiously to this distortion of her husband’s work. First she said:
I do not know if you are lying or are incapable of understanding the article, but I suspect the former. Make no mistake, this kind of misrepresentation is a lie. When you say someone has said something that supports your argument when you know that the whole of his words undermine it, you are lying about what the person said. Civil discourse begins with honest engagement.
How dare you misrepresent my husband. Your quote from the Scientific American article blatantly distorts his meaning. It is virtually impossible to imagine the cell we know now to emerging from the pre-biotic earth. He and others have, over many years, been showing incrementally how an RNA cell might have been created on early earth. There is nothing in my husband’s work that suggests otherwise. It is quite sickening that you would try to make him, a steadfast rationalist and atheist, into a proponent for I.D. You are in complete disagreement with Prof. Jack Szostak. Unfortunately for you his opinion is backed up by facts and mountains of results from peer reviewed research.
Please refrain from misrepresenting his opinions or work again. We consider it slander.
This dishonest practice of religious apologists using the standard preamble of scientific writing in setting up their false arguments is not new. The most famous example is with Charles Darwin’s opening discussion of the eye (On the Origin of Species, 1st edition, p. 186)
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
For a long time religious people used this passage to argue that even Darwin thought that the eye was truly beyond the ken of science and thus had to be an act of god. Nowadays only the hopelessly ignorant say such things because most people in the debate know that that passage is immediately followed by the inevitable ‘but’.
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
Darwin then proceeded to lay out the evidence and arguments as to how the eye could have emerged by natural selection, and the process is now quite well understood.
Some scientists are becoming more wary of the possibility of being quote mined and try to write more defensively, at least when they are addressing the general public. This is a pity because it requires caveats and circumlocutions that clutter up the prose but perhaps it is necessary.
We can let Jesus & Mo have the last word. | <urn:uuid:86a09f34-33f9-4298-83c2-8d23c9a7a9ab> | CC-MAIN-2016-44 | http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/03/01/the-deplorable-practice-of-quote-mining/?ak_action=force_mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-44/segments/1476988718303.21/warc/CC-MAIN-20161020183838-00023-ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967931 | 1,719 | 2.96875 | 3 |
By: Annette Spurr
Australia Day (January 26) has become the most controversial date on the nation’s calendar, with Indigenous Australians renaming it ‘Invasion Day,’ amidst calls for the date to be changed altogether.
It’s a day when Australians throw a snag on the barbie together, and watch cricket from the pool, to celebrate the arrival of white people on Australia’s shores.
But what followed was no cause for celebration.
Author, Sally Dudley, recalls being startled by a poster many years ago, which said: “White Australia has a black history.”
It jolted her out of her comfortable white world view, emanating from her childhood in a sheltered, white suburbia.
But after marrying an Indigenous Australian, the nation’s dark history became clear to Sally.
Even when her husband, Cedric, was in his fifties, he still didn’t know who he really was, why he was born on Palm Island in Queensland or why he was taken from his mother as a toddler. Worst of all, he had no way of finding out.
Cedric is one of the many Indigenous Australians born into what we now call ‘The Stolen Generation.’
The search to reveal his identity began by sending away for his family history file in Brisbane, which took some time to be released, because there were so many others waiting for files, hidden away and kept secret in government departments for decades.
Uncovering his family history and personal files only led to more questions and more unravelling of the truth.
In her book “Prisoner in Paradise,” Sally reveals the effects of government decisions, regulations and rules, which controlled every aspect of Aboriginal peoples’ lives and the trauma it caused. It also tells of the loving Heavenly Father who guided Cedric throughout his journey toward forgiveness and restoration.
Cedric’s story is just one of many, yet each story varies from the other and each reveals a glimpse of the manifold wisdom of God, which He manifests in His Church, the body of born again believers (1Corinthians1:25-27).
Cedric’s story refutes the current false narrative that the Christian church is to blame for every bad thing that has happened to Aboriginal people since the colonization of Australia.
Her book reveals the kindness of many Godly people who helped Cedric from his early childhood, to today and the role of the church in the story of restoration for Indigenous Australians.
Cedric has walked through the valley of racial vilification and has struggled to emerge from its evil strongholds.
His story reveals the omnipotent and omnipresent God, who is in the midst of bad situations, calling individuals to believe in Jesus, who died for us, no matter what our circumstances, obstacles or family story.
Article supplied with thanks to Annette Spurr. | <urn:uuid:f2ed908e-4ae9-4ad6-a6a1-27f9562a5612> | CC-MAIN-2022-05 | https://www.salt1065.com/stories/culture/2018/shining-a-light-on-australias-dark-past/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-05/segments/1642320303356.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20220121101528-20220121131528-00678.warc.gz | en | 0.97481 | 607 | 2.828125 | 3 |
Sir John Daniel, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) suggests that social software and Open Education Resources (OER) is the new miracle of education. The miracle of open educational resources is that sharing and adaptation are now easy because everything is held electronically and when you give knowledge away, you still have it for yourself to use.
The notion of sharing knowledge is not a new phenomenon. Since medieval times teachers have shared their knowledge with learners and scholars have shared their research findings to build new knowledge. However, advances associated with the printing press and commercialization of the publishing industry have locked down free sharing of printed knowledge through copyright legislation. While the publishing industry must be commended for their role in widening access to academic knowledge through their distribution channels and their custodianship in promoting quality, the downside is that we cannot freely adapt and share academic content under restrictive copyright regimes. The OER movement constitutes a return to the traditions of the academy, namely that the sole purpose of education is to share knowledge.
The term "Open Educational Resource(s)" (OER) refers to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing. The concept was first used in July 2002 during a UNESCO workshop on open courseware in developing countries (Johnstone, 2005). Most definitions of the term include content, software tools, licenses, and best practices. OER is a burgeoning field of practice and exploration as evidenced by the growing number of research studies including the OECD (2007), OLCOS (2007), and Hewlett Foundation (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007) reports. There is an emerging research community gaining momentum and focusing on investigating the impact of OER on learning and the education environment.
The OER model is based on the following value propositions:
Aligning academic practice with the core value that education is fundamentally an endeavour of sharing knowledge;
Reducing the costs of producing expensive online courseware for individual institutions;
Sharing the risks associated with internationalisation while enabling institutions to compete through value added services and local customisations (co-opitition model)
Course materials developed by teams of professionals can produce high quality outputs.
Existing OER approaches can be classified into two broad models:
Producer-consumer models where an institution or consortium develop materials and release courseware under an open license which can be reused by other providers for example MIT's OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu) Peer-production models which encourage open and unrestricted participation aimed to leverage the benefits of mass-collaboration and the principles of self organisation, for example Wikipedia, Wikiversity, and COL's WikiEducator. | <urn:uuid:198ce043-1d79-41ac-8d78-2a8187eac996> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://wikieducator.org/Oer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560279915.8/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095119-00565-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.928601 | 560 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Geothermal energy explained
By OVO Energy Wednesday 28 February 2018
What is geothermal energy?
Geothermal energy is heat created deep in the earth’s core. It is a clean, renewable resource that we can harness as heat or turn into electricity.
How does geothermal energy work?
The earth is a bit like an enormous Gobstopper. It’s made up of layers that get hotter and hotter as you go down. 1,800 miles deep is the earth’s core – a solid 5,430°C ball (not magma as people often think). It’s as hot as the sun!
You don’t even need to dig that deep to feel the heat. It’s a fairly constant 11-12°C just 2 meters down. And 370˚C in the earth’s crust. So, even if the ground feels cool, there’s valuable heat energy there. And innovative geothermal energy technology helps us to bring it to the surface or turn it into electricity.
What geothermal technology is there?
Direct geothermal energy. This is when hot water is pumped directly into buildings from hot springs or geothermal reservoirs to heat them. It dates back thousands of years to when people would use hot springs for bathing and cooking.
Geothermal power plants. This is when hot water and steam from deep beneath the earth are piped into wells and used to generate electricity in a power plant.
Geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) or ground source heat pumps. This is when a network of liquid-filled pipes is buried in loops 2 metres beneath the ground, where it’s 11-12°C. The liquid circulates in the pipes, heating a central heating system in a home or office.
Does OVO’s plans contain geothermal energy?
Yes. Our renewable electricity comes from many green sources such as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro. | <urn:uuid:723bcf62-7e20-42ad-ab41-dc4f7cff16bb> | CC-MAIN-2019-43 | https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-sources/geothermal-energy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-43/segments/1570986684425.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20191018181458-20191018204958-00241.warc.gz | en | 0.925372 | 405 | 3.703125 | 4 |
Published on December 1st, 2017 | by Natural Awakenings Publishing Corp.0
Microplastic Mess Threatens World Oceans
Scientists from the University of Hull and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have published research in the journal Science of the Total Environment showing levels of microplastics are five times higher in theAntarctic than previous estimates.
Co-author Dr. Claire Waluda, a BAS biologist, says, “We have monitored the presence of large plastic items in Antarctica for more than 30 years. While we know that bigger pieces can be ingested by seabirds or cause entanglements in seals, the effects of microplastics on marine animals in the Southern Ocean are as yet unknown.”
The tiny beads of plastic come from cosmetics or are shreddings from larger plastic items like clothing or bottles. According to United Nations sources, they may number as many as 51 trillion particles across the seafloor, throughout the oceans and on beaches worldwide. They are considered a serious threat to marine life in general. More international monitoring of the situation is needed, including a requirement for all polar research stations to provide waste treatment options.
For more information, see Tinyurl.com/PlasticInAntarctica. | <urn:uuid:5f5372df-8329-43f3-b5c5-b3710fc7a91c> | CC-MAIN-2019-26 | http://nausa.co/blog/2017/12/01/tiny-baubles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-26/segments/1560627999041.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20190619204313-20190619230313-00300.warc.gz | en | 0.928928 | 254 | 2.6875 | 3 |
‘Act for the Act’ Now!
There have been rumours in the media this week that the Government intends on rushing the new Bill of Rights through Parliament before summer 2016. Therefore, we do not have long to act and make our voices heard. If we do not stand together now we could loose our rights that are protected under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA). These rights are not a luxury, they are not rights that should be given to us or taken away. They are basic ‘human’ rights that we are entitled to ‘as humans’ upon birth. Once you start playing around with these basic rights it is only a matter of time before inequality, inhumanity and injustice will increase until we are left living in a backward state that we are no longer proud of.
We are already starting to see the negative effects of recent unjust legislative changes that have targeted the weak, poor and vulnerable which have included reductions in benefits, the bedroom tax, increases in court fees and disproportionate fines of £900 in criminal court proceedings if you plead not guild and are subsequently found guilty at trial.
The Human Rights Act 1998 is our Act and it is time to stand up for it. Please give one minute of your time to digitally sign the petition to save our HRA. All you need to provide is your name and email address so it really is simple and quick. You can sign the ‘Act for the Act’ here. You can also read REAL stories or ordinary vulnerable people who successfully relied on the Act when they were treated without dignity.
Did you know that the Human Rights Act 1998 protects YOUR rights to:
- The right to life. Therefore the State must investigate suspicious deaths and deaths in custody;
- The prohibition of torture & inhuman treatment, you should NEVER be tortured or treated in an inhuman or degrading way!
- Protection against slavery & forced labour;
- The right to liberty & freedom. The State can only imprison you with good reason such as if you are convicted of a crime or charged with a crime and a threat to the public;
- The right to a fair trial & no punishment without law. We are innocent until proven guilty.
- Respect for privacy & family life & the right to marry. This protects us against unnecessary surveillance or intrusion into our life. We have the right to marry and raise a family;
- Freedom of thought, religion & belief. We can believe what ever we choose to and can practise our religion or beliefs;
- Free speech & peaceful protest. We have a right to speak freely and to come together peacefully with others to express our views. Without this right we could be prevented from demonstrating against unjust laws, future wars and unacceptable working conditions etc;
- Not be subjected to discrimination. We are all equal regardless of our gender, race, sexuality, religion or age;
- Protection of property, the right to an education and the right to free elections. This protects us against state interference with our possessions; means that no child can be denied an education and that elections must be free and fair which enables our society to remain democratic.
Ask yourself why anyone would want to remove these ‘basic’ and ‘humane’ rights? Living in a state where these basic rights are not protected is unimaginable!! These are basis rights that we all deserve as humans! So please sign the ‘Act for the Act’ today and show your support in keeping OUR Act. | <urn:uuid:6f8d8f68-3863-4704-b30d-264396f2056b> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://northantsrec.org/2015/10/18/save-our-human-rights-act-now-before-it-is-too-late-act-for-the-act/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618038085599.55/warc/CC-MAIN-20210415125840-20210415155840-00521.warc.gz | en | 0.951723 | 704 | 2.65625 | 3 |
PYTHONS (PART 1)
Originally published in THE HERPTILE
6 (2), June, 1981, pp. 10-16.
BY RAYMOND T. HOSER
1981 Address: 60 Eastern Arterial Road,
St.Ives, N.S.W. 2075 Australia
1998 Address: 41 Village Avenue, Doncaster, Victoria, 3108, Australia.
Whilst in England (in 1980), I saw a great deal of interest among amateur
herpetologists in all aspects of the Boidae. This included Australian species,
although most people in the U.K. were not familiar with them. In this series
of four articles I intend to give an insight into the Australian Pythons
including comments about their care and breeding in captivity.
Australia has four (currently recognised) genera of python, namely,
Aspidites, Chondropython, Liasis
and Morelia, of which Aspidites
is the only genus confined to mainland Australia. In this article I shall
discuss the genera Chondropython and Aspidites leaving the other two genera
for later articles.
Chondropython is a monotypic genus confined to New Guinea and the North
East tip of Australia. It is characterised by the absence of teeth on the
premaxilla; irregular small scales on the top of the head and the presence
of pits in some of the labial scales. Like all pythons Chondropython is
an oviparous (egg-laying) genus.
GREEN PYTHON (CHONDROPYTHON VIRIDIS)
The Green Python is in adults usually bright emerald green dorsally
with a series of white or yellow scales along the vertebral line and a
few scattered white scales on the sides. A series of short, light blue
bars extends out from the vertebral line. The belly is cream to light yellow.
Live adults which are blue in colour dorsally are known to occur. Juveniles
vary from golden red to bright yellow in colour often with a dark purplish
brown, white centred streak through the eye and a vertebral stripe of the
same colour, with short bars of brown extending out from the vertebral
line. The change from juvenile to adult colour varies between several months
to a few weeks and is not dependent on sloughing activity by the snake.
It occurs at roughly two years of age.
The scalation is smooth with 50-75 mid-body rows, 225-260 ventrals,
a single anal and 90-110 (single) subcaudals.
This snake averages 1.2 metres in length but specimens up to 2 metres
Green Pythons in Australia are restricted to dense rainforests, although
in New Guinea they occupy a wide range of habitats available including
swamplands and savannah woodlands. This species is rare in Australia but
common where it occurs in New Guinea.
Green Pythons are nocturnal and arboreal in habit, sheltering by day
either in cover or sometimes coiled up in shady places on the ground or
on logs. Green Pythons rely on their cryptic colouration to avoid detection
during the day in their native habitat. When disturbed, however, Green
Pythons are usually aggressive, often biting seemingly without provocation.
Due to their large sharp teeth their bites can be painful and usually draw
blood, although risk of infection from any python bite is far lower than
Like most pythons, Green Pythons will feed on almost any animal of suitable
size although it does display a distinct preference for warm-blooded food.
Adult Green Pythons produce between 13 and 20 eggs annually in the wild.
Surprising as it may seem to many there are far more Green Pythons in
England and the U.S.A. than there are in Australia and New Guinea (their
countries of origin). This is due to many reasons including the fact that
there are strict laws licensing keeping the species in Australia and New
Green Pythons are regarded as a "prestige" snake commanding
three-figure sums (Pounds Sterling) when sold commercially.
Green Pythons are hardy in captivity being less susceptible to common
diseases such as mouthrot and scale ailments than many other pythons. The
"ideal" set up for Green Pythons is a cage well furnished with
hollow logs or wooden boxes (for access to the snakes), some green vegetation
and a high temperature maintained. High humidity is also essential. Obviously
clean water should always be provided. Like many pythons, Green Pythons
are successfully kept in small cages with no more than newspaper on the
bottom, one or two horizontal logs, a wooden box and a water dish. This
is particularly the common case among people with large collections who
place a premium on easy maintenance of their snakes.
Green Pythons have rarely bred successfully in captivity. Like other
pythons, in order to breed Green Pythons it is advisable to "cool"
and separate the sexes for a period of time. This means lowering the temperature
of their cages from the usual, say 25-32 degrees C, to 17-22 degrees C,
for a period between a week and two months. Initially the cooling inhibits,
but later promotes spermatogenesis in males. The same applies to females
for oogenesis and later ovulation.
When laid the eggs should be incubated at 29 degrees C (a lower temperature
then for most python eggs), and if moisture conditions are correct (i.e.
very high humidity) and if the eggs are fertile, one should expect a very
high hatch rate.
Aspidites is restricted to mainland Australia. This terrestrial genus
of pythons is characterised by the absence of teeth on the premaxilla,
enlarged symmetrical shields on top of the head and the absence of pits
on the rostral or labial scales. The two species in this genus are the
Black-headed Python (Aspidites melanocephalus) and the Woma (Aspidites
ramsayi). Like all pythons Aspidites lays eggs.
BLACK-HEADED PYTHON (ASPIDITES MELANOCEPHALUS)
This relatively thick-set python has a small head indistinct from the
neck. It is light to dark brown dorsally, often lighter on the sides with
numerous darker brown, reddish brown, or blackish crossbands which are
usually narrower than the lighter interspaces. The head, neck and throat
are a shiny jet black. Ventrally the colour is cream to yellow, occasionally
with darker blotches.
The scalation is smooth with 50-65 mid body rows, 315-355 ventrals,
single anal and 60-75 mainly single subeaudals. The posterior subcaudals
tend to be divided, often irregularly. This snake averages 1.5 metres in
length although specimens of up to nearly double this length have been
This species is found throughout the northern third of mainland Australia,
but is not usually found in arid regions where
the Woma (Aspidites ramsayi) occurs instead. Black-headed
pythons are fairly common throughout their range.
This snake inhabits all habitats where it occurs, living in rock outcrops,
along water courses, in hollow logs, down burrows of various forms or simply
in Triodia (spinifex) clumps (grass tussocks).
In warm weather, this species is nocturnal, although during the cooler
months (June-August) this species is dominantly diurnal.
The Black-headed Python probably has few natural enemies other than
Man and Dingoes (wild dogs), and it seems that the most common direct causes
of death in the wild would include starvation in times of famine and the
ravages of internal parasites.
Black-headed Pythons food consists of small mammals, birds and an unusually
high proportion of reptiles and frogs. This includes highly venomous species
such as the Desert Death Adder (Acanthophis pyrrhus) which occurs throughout
much of the Black-headed Python's range. This species is highly prone to
cannibalism both in the wild and in captivity.
When detected in the wild, Black-headed Pythons will either move away
or, if cornered, hiss loudly, although rarely biting. Black-headed Pythons
are an inoffensive species.
This species lays eggs in clutches of about eight.
Few people anywhere keep this species or its close relative the Woma
(Aspidites ramsayi). This is largely due to the remoteness of their habitat
and not because either species is rare.
Black-headed Pythons which are kept by people in the areas they originate
from are often fed exclusively on snakes due to their apparent preference
for them over warm-blooded food. Probably the most commonly used food item
is the Desert Death Adder which occurs
in large numbers throughout many of these areas. People who live in Australian
cities and in other places where Black-headed Pythons don't naturally occur
maintain specimens successfully on a diet of mice.
Black-headed Pythons although very docile in captivity and usually good
feeders are highly susceptible to a range of infections such as mouth-rot
(Canker or Ulcerative stomatosis), eye infections and scale ailments. Also
they are very susceptible to the ravages of the internal parasites they
commonly carry. Despite this some people have kept individual Black-headed
Pythons for a number of years.
Little is known of the breeding biology of this species largely due
to the fact that so few of them have been kept in captivity. There appears
to be a strong surplus of males in snakes of the genus .Aspidites, like
in other Australian pythons, which exacerbates the situation of a shortage
of "breedable" snakes.
Copulation can be readily obtained by separation of the sexes for a
period of at least two weeks, without "cooling" being necessary.
Unfortunately only two successful breedings of this species in captivity
are recorded, thus meaning that most matings in this species are infertile.
It is presumed that Black-headed Pythons have similar breeding biology
to other Pythons.
Most people who keep Black-headed Pythons successfully keep them in
cages heated between 24-32 degrees Celcius, and with no loose soil or sand
as it commonly gets in their mouths. Often they are kept successfully in
cages with newspaper as ground covering. Alternatively they have been kept
successfully in cages with a clay or rock (hard) bottom, either covered
with leaves, rocks, logs, wooden boxes etc. or completely bare.
WOMA (ASPIDITES RAMSAYI)
This is a very similar snake (in appearance) to the Black-headed Python.
it is thick-bodied and has a head which is indistinct from the neck. Dorsally
it is grey, olive brown, or rich reddish brown above, often lighter on
the sides, and with numerous darker olive, brown to black crossbands which
are normally narrower than the lighter interspaces. Old specimens often
lack these bands. The head is the same colour as the body although some
juveniles may have black patches on their heads. The throat and belly is
yellow to cream with numerous pink or brown blotches.
The scalation is smooth, with 50-65 mid body rows, 280-315 ventrals,
single anal and 40-45 mostly single subcaudals. Some posterior subcaudals
are irregularly divided. This snake grows to the same size as the Black-headed
Pythons, averaging 1.5 metres in length.
This snake is virtually a southern and more inland representative of
the genus Aspidites. This species is not usually found in the same localities
as the Black-headed Python.
Because this species is an inland form and is commonly found in sandy
localities it is often referred to as "Sand Python". Womas have
very similar biology to Black-headed Pythons (i.e. feeds on reptiles and
mammals, is terrestrial, etc.). Womas are inoffensive and also produce
about six to eight eggs to a clutch. Again womas appear to have few natural
Like Black-headed Pythons, few are kept in captivity. It's requirements
are identical to those of the Black-headed Python, and those people who
have kept them successfully have utilized methods similar to those I outlined
for Black-headed Pythons. To my knowledge this species has never been bred
COGGER, H.G. (1979) Reptiles and Amphibians of Australia. A.H. and
A.W. Reed, Sydney.
GOW, G.F. (1976) Snakes of Australia. Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
ROSS, R. (1978) The Python Breeding Manual. Institute of Herpetological
Research, California, U.S.A.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR PUBLISHED
WITH THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE.
1/ Green Tree Python Chondropython viridis. Unsexed adult. New
2/ Black-headed Python Aspidites melanocephalus. Specimen from
Goldsworthy, W.A. (Lat 20 degrees 21 minutes Long 119 degrees 30 minutes)
Adult 1.5 meter male. Note: West Australian specimens are sometimes distinctly
lighter than their Eastern Australian counterparts.
3/ Black-headed Python Aspidites melanocephalus (Details as for
1997 UPDATE TO THE ABOVE
Both Green Pythons and Australian Aspidites have been bred in
captivity in Australia and elsewhere many times in the period up to 1997
and breeding rates in captivity are expected to go up. In the 1996-1997
breeding season, Victorian keeper Brian Barnett bred both species of Aspidites.
He hatched ten Black-headed Python eggs from ten laid and four Woma eggs
from five laid. The fifth egg was demonstrably infertile at time of laying.
It seems fairly routine that Womas on average lay fewer and smaller eggs
than Black-headed pythons. Barnett's Black-headed Python eggs averaged
about 150 grams each, while the Woma eggs were about 1/2 this size. The
exact measurements and other details will probably be later published in
a paper on the breeding. Within Australia, NSW keeper Bob Withey has successfully
bred both species of Aspidites in a single season (1993-4).
Peter Krauss of North Queensland has also bred Womas in Australia and
Neil Sonneman of Wangaratta, Victoria has also bred Black-headed Pythons.
The incubation method used by Barnett is described in the paper by Raymond
Hoser called 'Reptile keeping in the Australian
State of Victoria', published in The Reptilian Magazine, in 1994,
click here to get to that paper. This information has also been
published elsewhere in papers by Barnett.
In the USA, both species of Aspidites have also been bred in captivity.
Don Hamper has bred both species.
Green Pythons have been bred on many occasions both in and outside of
Australia. In the USA, the two most well-known breeders are Trooper Walsh
and Alan Zulich. Both have published their results in various papers and
articles. Within Australia, Bob Buckley of Herberton Queensland has had
the greatest success in breeding Green Pythons. In 1997 he hatched out
about 15 young. On an earlier occasion 27 live young and six adults were
stolen by Qld NPWS officials. By the time the court got around to telling
the Qld NPWS to return to Buckley the stolen snakes, the NPWS claimed (perhaps
falsely) that all had died in the care of 'expert' keepers at Sydney's
Taronga Zoo. Refer to the book Smuggled-2
for details of this and related cases involving Green Pythons in Australia.
That book also has photos of the species.
Click here for Australian
Pythons part 2 - The Smaller Liasis (=Antaresia).
Click here for Australian
Pythons part 3 - The Larger Liasis (=Antaresia).
Click here for Australian
Pythons part 4 - Carpet Pythons and relatives as well as Australian Python
Click here for a taxonomic review of Australasian
Pythons. (published in 2000)
Raymond Hoser has
been an active herpetologist for about 30 years and published over 100
papers in journals worldwide. He has written nine books including the definitive
works " Australian Reptiles and Frogs
", "Endangered Animals of Australia"
and the controversial best seller "Smuggled
- The Underground Trade in Australia's Wildlife".
Click on the text below for details about his latest book that is of major
interest to herpetologists everywhere.
Papers about reptiles and frogs
- list of over sixty papers that can be downloaded via the internet.
Australians Against Corruption
Victoria Police Corruption
- Home page. Click here and then click on writing on next page.
Non-urgent email inquiries via the Snakebusters bookings page at:http://www.snakebusters.com.au/sbsboo1.htmUrgent inquiries phone:Melbourne, Victoria, Australia:(03) 9812 3322 or 0412 777 211 | <urn:uuid:b860c933-a1e9-4e39-8aff-a2460e0ef975> | CC-MAIN-2017-04 | http://www.smuggled.com/auspyt1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-04/segments/1484560280364.67/warc/CC-MAIN-20170116095120-00028-ip-10-171-10-70.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.920789 | 3,738 | 2.921875 | 3 |
People who experience hand pain or weakness know all too well how disabling and frustrating it is to lose hand function and control. Hand injuries can interfere with the ability to earn a living, attend school, care for family, and enjoy hobbies.
“Sometimes hand problems can make simple activities, such as dressing, eating, writing, driving, or turning on a lamp, uncomfortable, awkward, or even impossible,” explained Jackie Loeffler OTR/L, CHT, an occupational therapist with UPMC Centers for Rehab Services.
Whether caused by injury, overuse at work or play, or chronic joint, bone, or nerve conditions, hand disorders do not have to lead to dependence on others or compromise one’s quality of life. There are many types of therapies and treatments that can:
- Increase strength and range of motion
- Improve coordination and sensation
- Reduce or eliminate pain, swelling, and numbness
The type and severity of the hand disorder is what determines the therapies that need to be used. Patients receive individualized treatment, which may include:
- Application of heat, cold, ultrasound, and electrical stimulation
- Biofeedback therapy
- Ergonomic recommendations
- Iontophoresis – delivery of an anti-inflammatory medication through the skin using electromotive force
- Manual therapy
- Strengthening and stretching exercises
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For those with osteoarthritis (a type of arthritis that occurs when flexible tissue at the ends of bones wears down) or rheumatoid arthritis (a chronic inflammatory disorder affecting many joints) of the hands, pain can seem like a constant in their lives.
“Though neither of these afflictions can be cured, hand pain and function can be successfully managed via occupational therapy,” Loeffler said.
Occupational therapists may utilize a number of techniques to achieve the treatment goals of the arthritic patient, including:
- Joint protection techniques through activity modification
- Joint immobilization through splinting
- Exercises and modified activities of daily living techniques
- Education of adaptive equipment options
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Occupational therapists also teach patients self-help techniques to manage their pain. These include thermo modalities for heat and cold, such as hot packs, paraffin wax baths, and ice. The effects are temporary but can be repeated as desired in order to maximize effectiveness and reach a certain level of comfort.
Hand exercises are very effective in increasing comfort and maintaining hand mobility. Occupational therapists can teach patients simple stretches to reduce the effects of arthritis.
“The goal of these exercises is to improve mobility rather than increase strength,” explained Loeffler. “The patient must keep in mind that hand exercises for arthritis should not hurt. If pain is experienced, stop the exercises until it subsides and resume exercising with reduced intensity and speed.
“With proper management and care, occupational therapy is a very effective way to decrease the impact of injury or disorders of the hand.”
Whatever your therapy need – physical, occupational, or speech – UPMC Center for Rehab Services can create a personalized treatment plan. We have more than 70 outpatient facilities throughout western Pennsylvania, with convenient hours for your schedule. Our therapies follow the most up-to-date research for rehabilitation, and we treat numerous conditions, from arthritis and tendinitis, to injuries and symptoms related to other medical conditions. | <urn:uuid:22a1fb52-1e82-4e94-9f6d-b9f18140ab2f> | CC-MAIN-2020-40 | https://share.upmc.com/2017/01/about-hand-therapy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-40/segments/1600400211096.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20200923144247-20200923174247-00789.warc.gz | en | 0.923011 | 726 | 2.53125 | 3 |
- Code: SLL
- Country: Sierra Leone
- Region: Africa
- Symbol: SLL
Facts about INR (Indian Rupees) and SLL (Sierra Leonean Leones)
The Indian Rupee (रुपया in Hindi) is the monetary unit of the Republic of India. As provided in the September 1955 amendment to the Indian monetary law, the April 1, 1957 proceeded to the decimation of the Indian rupee, which came to be divided into one hundred paisa.
The currency converter from INR (Indian Rupee) to SLL (Sierra Leonean Leone) is up to date, being -1821 seconds ago the last update from The International Monetary Fund.
|Convert INR (Indian Rupee)||INR 1||INR 5||INR 10||INR 50||INR 100||INR 500|
|Into SLL (Sierra Leonean Leone)||SLL 107.192||SLL 535.9600||SLL 1071.9200||SLL 5359.6000||SLL 10719.2000||SLL 53596.0000|
|Convert INR (Indian Rupee)||INR 1,000||INR 5,000||INR 10,000||INR 50,000||INR 100,000|
|Into SLL (Sierra Leonean Leone)||SLL 107192.0000||SLL 535960.0000||SLL 1071920.0000||SLL 5359600.0000||SLL 10719200.0000| | <urn:uuid:f4975e2d-9c0c-4d0c-9259-97b83bc2166d> | CC-MAIN-2018-51 | https://canjean.com/convert-INR-to-SLL | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-51/segments/1544376823236.2/warc/CC-MAIN-20181210013115-20181210034615-00623.warc.gz | en | 0.662099 | 343 | 2.671875 | 3 |
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Sustainability is at the heart of the GCCA.
Our Sustainability Charter and guidelines underpin what we do and support member companies to make a long-term contribution towards global sustainability goals. This means protecting the environment from climate change.
But it does not stop there. The cement and concrete industry also has a vital role in bringing social and economic sustainability to the communities, regions and countries in which it is present.
You can find out how the cement and concrete sector is contributing to all 17 of the SDGs by clicking on any of the icons at the bottom of the page.
What are the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
Adopted in 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 goals, containing a combined 169 targets, that address a broad range of sustainable development challenges. They form a framework within which the development agendas of UN member states can be designed and delivered.
But they are not only relevant to nation states. In framing the issues of sustainable development, they also provide a guide for industries in managing their social, environmental and economic impacts – to limit the negative and enhance the positive.
While there are 17 goals – 16 that deal with specific issues plus one that encourages partnerships to meet the goals – in reality they overlap and interrelate. Steps to meet one will therefore both require and result in steps to meet others.
As an example: ending poverty (SDG1) depends on steps to meet goals related to good health and wellbeing (SDG3), quality education (SDG4), gender equality (SDG5), decent work (SDG8), and reduced inequalities (SDG10). All of the goals interweave with others in similar ways.
Read our letter in the Financial Times
Infrastructure has big role in UN sustainability goalsRead more
The SDGs and the cement and concrete industry
As an industry, cement and concrete touches many areas of sustainable development. In some, such as those related to climate change, the industry acknowledges its role as a significant emitter of carbon – and is working to address this. According to the 2018 Cement Industry GNR data, the industry has lowered its emissions of CO2 per tonne of cementitious material by 19.2% since 1990.
But we also know this is not enough and the GCCA is committed to supporting its members achieve carbon-neutral concrete by 2050.
In other areas, the widespread and low-cost availability of concrete, as well as its durability and resilience, will be a critical resource in achieving many SDGs. This is particularly so for those goals related to urbanisation and where large-scale improvements to vital infrastructure or to affordable decent housing are needed. To learn more how the cement and concrete industry can make a positive contribution to achieving each goal, click on the relevant SDG box below. | <urn:uuid:111391f0-0a04-4a94-a9b5-03b8f62c39dc> | CC-MAIN-2023-14 | https://gccassociation.org/sustainability-innovation/the-un-sustainable-development-goals/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-14/segments/1679296950247.65/warc/CC-MAIN-20230401191131-20230401221131-00790.warc.gz | en | 0.948252 | 589 | 2.90625 | 3 |
This week Rebecca Lyal, our Cetacean Strandings Support Officer, reports on one of the latest whale strandings to receive media attention:
The first report I received of the phenomenal sea creature that had stranded in Kent was a post-it note left on my desk saying ‘Humpback whale, Kent’. My phone and inbox then buzzed with updates and enquiries from colleagues and news stations about an 11 metre whale that had washed up on the beach at Botany Bay near Margate. A characterless Wednesday morning had been transformed into a blizzard of curiosity that surrounded the seas’ most recent lost property. But this wasn’t a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), nor was it a minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) as was widely reported; it was in fact a fin whale (B. physalas).
The post mortem summary that was released by Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) partner the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) reported that the whale had damage consistent with a ship strike, due to the parallel linear cuts and a pale appearance to the body that indicated the animal had lost a significant amount of blood from its wounds. But why was there confusion with the identification? Let’s find out…
[Warning: the next image in the post shows the damage to the fin whale’s body]
Fin whales are pelagic animals, living in open sea away from the coast or the bottom of the ocean. They feed on krill, small fish and squid and are rarely seen in the relatively shallow southern North Sea. They can however be seen in the Irish Sea and Bay of Biscay where they share the sea with ships traversing to and from Europe. Although they are fast moving whales, capable of maintaining a speed of 37 km/h, they may sometimes have trouble identifying the direction of a vessel due to the high levels of underwater noise pollution, which could result in a collision
Humpback, minke and fin whales are members of the largest group of baleen whales, called rorqual whales, which also includes the planet’s largest mammal, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). All rorqual whales have throat grooves that expand when the whale scoops up water to filter food; this was the first clue to identifying this particular specimen.
A curtain of ridges fringed with hair, trap crustaceans, fish and other sea critters as water is drawn over them. Known as baleen plates, these inbuilt filters grow from the top jaw of the animal and are made of keratin, the same material as that of our hair and nails. Each species of rorqual has a particular baleen plate colour which makes this feature ideal for species identification.
From the initial photos released of the Kent stranding, the baleen plates gave an appearance of being completely white, which is indicative of a minke whale, but as more images were released it became apparent the baleen was in fact greyish blue, which is indicative of a fin whale. It was recognising this distinction which led to the re-evaluation of the species identification from minke to fin whale.
It’s been an unusual October with no less than three large rorqual whales stranded along the Eastern coastline: this fin whale and two minke whales. And the fin whale is also one of three to have stranded in the UK this year.
Rebecca Lyal is the Cetacean Strandings Support Officer at the Museum, one of the partnership organisations of the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme. The programme investigates the cause of death and the incidence of disease in the UK’s whale, dolphin and porpoise populations and relies on the public submitting their sightings of stranded marine fauna. | <urn:uuid:3c543efa-2ed3-427a-897d-33dc942240c3> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://naturalhistorymuseum.blog/2015/10/22/humpback-minke-or-fin-identifying-the-whale-stranded-on-the-kent-coast-cetacean-stranding-investigation-programme/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662627464.60/warc/CC-MAIN-20220526224902-20220527014902-00488.warc.gz | en | 0.961461 | 809 | 3.171875 | 3 |
I’ve been extolling the health benefits of coffee for years. Now, there’s another reason to go ahead and drink up. A study found that drinking more than three cups of coffee per day can lower risk of basal cell carcinoma (BCC), one of the most common forms of skin cancer.
The researchers analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study conducted from 1984-2008, and followed 72,921 participants. One of the lifestyle traits they measured was coffee consumption. What they found is that the health benefits of drinking three or more cups a day lowered skin cancer risk in women by 20 percent and lowered men’s risk by 9 percent, as compared to those who drank less than one cup of coffee a month; thereby demonstrating that one of the benefits of coffee is helping to prevent skin cancer.
Other Health Benefits of Coffee
This is just one of the latest discoveries related to the health benefits of coffee. Other research has shown that drinking three to four cups of coffee slashes your diabetes risk by 33 percent. Coffee also reduces the risk of Parkinson’s disease by up to 80 percent and protects against Alzheimer’s disease, improves concentration and alertness, and can even halt a full-blown asthma attack.
While there are many health benefits of coffee, there are some folks who need to be careful about how much coffee they drink. If you have high blood pressure or you’re pregnant or expecting to become pregnant, I recommend that you go easy on coffee since the risk associated with consuming caffeine outweighs the benefits of coffee. And if you’re struggling with osteoporosis, limit your coffee intake to a cup every now and then—higher intake has been linked with a decrease in bone density.
Now it’s your turn: Are you familiar with any other benefits of coffee? | <urn:uuid:8d0dc761-0dbb-4cff-a512-400a3ae97315> | CC-MAIN-2014-42 | http://www.drwhitaker.com/health-benefits-of-coffee-prevent-skin-cancer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-42/segments/1414119650692.11/warc/CC-MAIN-20141024030050-00314-ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960075 | 379 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Clarinetist Benny Goodman, "the King of Swing," was one of the greatest artists and bandleaders in the history of jazz. However in 1938, at the height of his popularity, Goodman began to pursue classical music as a sideline, for the mere reason that he was bored — "how many choruses can you play on 'Oh Lady Be Good'?" he once mused. The one-time student of legendary Chicago clarinet teacher Fritz Schoepp became an expert interpreter of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, K. 622 and mastered much of the standard literature for his instrument. Well before he ran through the major clarinet classics, Goodman began to commission works from contemporary composers such as Stravinsky and Copland. His first venture in this regard resulted in Contrasts for clarinet, violin and piano by Belà Bartók, and the 1940 Columbia record Goodman, Bartók and violinist Joseph Szigeti made of this work may well be the most astonishing historical recording of "modernist" music ever made. The reputation of Benny Goodman as a jazz player and bandleader is of such significance that it will never be superseded by his work as a classical musician, yet Goodman's devotion to classical music was so deep that when he died of a stroke while rehearsing in 1986, the music stand was open to the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115. | <urn:uuid:f4870f87-780c-4b39-829b-1a6e0917962e> | CC-MAIN-2020-24 | https://tidal.com/browse/artist/381 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-24/segments/1590347409171.27/warc/CC-MAIN-20200530102741-20200530132741-00359.warc.gz | en | 0.971924 | 287 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Evaluate Techniques Used by Harper Lee to Introduce First Impressions of the Town of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird
Although Maycomb is an entirely fictional town Harper Lee creates a realistic feel to it. She does this through a combination of writing and language techniques and through the many perspectives we are privy to throughout the first four chapters. The most commonly used are through the eyes of a six-year-old Scout and an older, reflecting Scout who uses a more mature view to comment on the events as seen through the innocent eyes of a young girl.
Although a child narrator may be a more unconventional approach, Scout's (or Jean-Louise's) perspective is not limited to the naïve voice and vocabulary of a child as Lee's tone suggests a more mature recollection rather than the unfiltered young Scout's version of events. This can be seen clearly when Scout, describing the town, says:
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it…People moved slowly then…A day was twenty-fours hours but seemed longer.
In addition, Scout's perspective can actually give a uniquely complete picture compared to some other characters. Not only because of her dual perspective, but also because she is often very near the events mentioned due to the fact that she 'lived on the main residential street in town' and because her father, Atticus was the lawyer for some of the townspeople and also 'was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in town'.
Maycomb is described as being a 'small, isolated, inward looking town' in Alabama where children freely roam around and, often, into other people's backyards and business. As it is such a small town gossip is more than a common occurrence, especially amongst the Maycombian women. Through this we are exposed to more than just Scout's dual perspective; we are shown the opinions and ideals of the town's other inhabitants. Such as Miss Stephanie Crawford when we are told the rumours surrounding the neighbourhood shut-in, Boo Radley:
According to Miss Stephanie…Boo drove the scissors into his parent's leg, pulled them out, wiped them on his pants and resumed his activites.
We are also told about the period that Maycomb is going though during the time the novel is set by such quotes as:
Maycomb County had recently been told it had nothing to fear but fear itself
This was said by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, on the topic of the Wall Street Crash. Maycomb was already awash with poverty, partly shown by one of Scout's earlier descriptions:
There was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.
But, although Scout's family seem to be better-off than other residents because Atticus is a lawyer rather than 'country folk', Atticus explains to Scout and us why the Crash hit the residents of Maycomb particularly hard:
As Maycomb County was farm country, nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers.
Much like in the quote above, Atticus is often the voice of reason and wisdom for both Scout and us and it is he who leads to a greater insight into and understanding of the town and the individual circumstances of those who live within it.
It is shown early on in the book (within the first chapter) that the majority of people who live in Maycomb have lived there all their lives and have a large family network that is often traceable back through several generations. This is shown by the way each character is stereotyped to certain characteristics depending on something as trivial as their surname. Some examples are how the name Haverford was 'a name synonymous with jackass', the Cunninghams 'don't have much, but they get along on it' and the Ewells had been 'the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations'.
A certain amount of prejudice is applied by Maycombians to anybody born and raised outside of Maycomb. This is very much in keep with the small town mindset and is shown in chapter two after Scout's first day of school being taught by Miss Caroline Fisher when Scout brother, Jem says:
'Our teacher says Miss Caroline's introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college.'
This quotation shows the suspicion that Miss Caroline is seen with because of her unusual origins (specifically because she came from a Republican part of North Alabama). Her foreignness is only emphasised by the fact that she doesn't know of or immediately understand the stereotypes applied to each family when Scout tries to explain why Walter Cunningham doesn't have any lunch, and also when she doesn't appreciate that the children of Maycomb's single-minded upbringing makes them 'immune to imaginative literature'. The word 'immune' highlights the mistrust that anything strictly non-Maycombian is faced with. It implies that something that isn't in keep with their way of living is, in their minds, comparative to a disease.
Another thing that Scout's first day at school shows us is how the education in Maycomb is lacking, compared to Miss Caroline's college-taught structure. Not only has the better part of the first grade failed and repeated it multiple times but Burris and several others of the Ewells only attend school on the first day of each year. By them (although their opinion cannot be applied to the whole of the town as they are thought to be a disgrace to Maycomb) education is thought to be so unimportant it is entirely unnecessary.
Overall, Maycomb is a small town with a small mindset where little happens. But we can clearly see a range of prides and prejudices demonstrated by the community that is often fuelled by the influences of idle gossip and rumours. We get the impression that the people and population of the area are static (which could also contribute to the underlying and unchanging prejudices)—not many people leave permanently and newcomers are not so easily accepted. | <urn:uuid:e328f7e3-8ae1-40bb-9389-e7180aa9b405> | CC-MAIN-2014-10 | https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3097053/1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-10/segments/1394011473737/warc/CC-MAIN-20140305092433-00008-ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981079 | 1,220 | 3.21875 | 3 |
This post is an adaption of an original post by researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado, Boulder. It describes their discovery of a new way an attacker could launch reflected Denial of Service (DoS) amplification attacks over TCP by abusing middleboxes and censorship infrastructure. These attacks can produce orders of magnitude more amplification than existing UDP-based attacks.
Reflected amplification attacks are a powerful tool in the arsenal of a DoS attacker. An attacker spoofs a request from a victim to an open server (for example, an open DNS resolver), and the server responds to the victim. If the response is larger than the spoofed request, the server effectively amplifies the attacker’s bandwidth in the DoS attack:
Most DoS amplifications today are UDP-based. The reason for this is that TCP requires a 3-way handshake that complicates spoofing attacks. Every TCP connection starts with the client sending a SYN packet, the server responds with a SYN+ACK, and the client completes the handshake with an ACK packet.
The 3-way handshake protects TCP applications from being amplifiers. If an attacker sends a SYN packet with a spoofed source IP address, the SYN+ACK will go to the victim, and the attacker never learns critical information contained in the SYN+ACK needed to complete the 3-way handshake. Without receiving the SYN+ACK, the attacker can’t make valid requests on behalf of the victim.
The 3-way handshake is effective at preventing amplification for TCP-compliant hosts. But in this work, we discover a large number of network middleboxes do not conform to the TCP standard, and can be abused to perform attacks. In particular, we found many censorship middleboxes will respond to spoofed censored requests with large block pages, even if there is no valid TCP connection or handshake. These middleboxes can be weaponized to conduct DoS amplification attacks.
Middleboxes are often not TCP-compliant by design: many middleboxes attempt to handle asymmetric routing, where the middlebox can only see one direction of packets in a connection (for example, client to server). But this feature opens them to attack: if middleboxes inject content based only on one side of the connection, an attacker can spoof one side of a TCP 3-way handshake and convince the middlebox there is a valid connection.
This leaves us with some questions: what is the best way to trigger these middleboxes, and what kinds of amplification factors can we get from them?
Discovering amplifying middleboxes
Our goal was to discover a sequence of packets that an attacker can send to trick a middlebox into injecting a response without completing a real 3-way handshake.
Note that this goal is not compliant with TCP. We are taking advantage of weaknesses in implementation, not in the design of the TCP protocol itself. This means it’s not sufficient to study the TCP protocol alone — we must study real middlebox TCP implementations. This poses a challenge: there are too many kinds of middleboxes around the world for us to purchase, and even if we could, the middleboxes that power nation-state censorship infrastructure are usually not for sale.
Instead, we used our tool, Geneva, to study censoring middleboxes in the wild.
To find middleboxes to study, we used the public data released from CensoredPlanet’s Quack tool. Quack is a scanner that finds IP addresses with a censoring middlebox on their path. We used this data to identify 184 sample middleboxes located around the world that performed HTTP censorship by injecting block pages.
Geneva (Genetic Evasion) is a genetic algorithm we designed to automatically discover new ways to evade censorship, but at its core, Geneva is a packet-level network fuzzer. We modified Geneva’s fitness function to reward it for making the elicited response as large as possible, and then trained Geneva against all 184 middleboxes.
We found five packet sequences that elicited amplified responses from middleboxes. Each of these contains a well-formed HTTP GET request for some domain that was forbidden by the middlebox:
- SYN packet (with forbidden request)
- PSH packet
- PSH+ACK packet
- SYN packet, followed by a PSH packet containing the forbidden request
- SYN packet, followed by a PSH+ACK packet containing the forbidden request
We also found another five modifications that increased amplification further for a small fraction of middleboxes; an attacker could use these to specific middleboxes. See our paper for more details on these modifications.
To elicit a response from these middleboxes, we needed a domain that was censored or forbidden by each middlebox, but most censoring middleboxes use different blocklists, making it difficult to find one domain that will elicit block pages from everyone. We analysed the Quack dataset to find the five domains that elicited responses from the most middleboxes, which coincidentally spanned five different areas:
- www.youporn.com (pornography)
- www.roxypalace.com (gambling)
- plus.google.com (social media)
- www.bittorrent.com (file sharing)
- www.survive.org.uk (sexual health/education)
We also used example.com and no domain at all as control experiments.
We scanned the entire IPv4 Internet to measure how many IP addresses permit reflected amplification. To do this, we modified the zmap scanner to construct all five packet sequences identified by Geneva.
We scanned the entire IPv4 Internet a total of 35 times (five packet sequences × seven test domains). We measured the responses we got back to calculate the amplification factor we got from each IP address.
Our version of zmap is open-source and available.
What we found
Recall that we were searching for weaknesses in the TCP implementation in middleboxes, not in the TCP protocol itself. In addition, each middlebox has its own injection policies and block pages. This means that there is no one single amplification factor for this attack since each middlebox we triggered would be different!
Instead, we can look at the distribution of the response sizes to see the amount of amplification available to attackers.
In Figure 2, you can see a huge range in amplification factors — from over 100,000,000 to less than 1.
Next, we examined the IP addresses at the head of Figure 2, where we saw amplification factors between 1,000,000 and 100,000,000. These IP addresses are our mega-amplifiers, offering tremendous amplification factors. In fact, these amplification factors are likely an under-estimate; these numbers are from where our scan stopped collecting data, not when the IP addresses stopped sending us data. What’s going on here?
This is where we find technically infinite amplification factors. The amplification factor is calculated by the number of bytes received by an amplifier divided by the number of bytes sent. We found amplifiers that, once triggered by a single packet sequence from the attacker, will send an endless stream of packets to the victim. In our testing, some of these packet streams lasted for days, often at the full bandwidth the amplifier’s link could supply.
We found two causes for this infinite amplification: routing loops and victim sustained amplifiers.
Routing loops occur between two IP addresses when packets get stuck traversing a loop while being routed from one IP address to the other. Routing loops that contain censoring middleboxes offer a new benefit to attackers: every time the trigger packets circle the routing loop, they re-trigger the censoring middlebox.
The number of hops a packet will survive in a network is usually regulated by the time-to-live (TTL) field in IP packets: each time a packet is passed from one router to the next, its TTL value is decremented. If the TTL hits 0, the packet is dropped. The maximum TTL value is 255. This means an attacker that can send a trigger sequence into an amplifying routing loop gets an additional ~250× amplification for free.
Even more dangerous than normal routing loops are infinite routing loops. Infinite routing loops occur if is a circular routing path that does not decrement the TTL value, causes packets to circle the loop forever (or until a random packet drop occurs). We found a small number of infinite routing loops that traversed censorship infrastructure (notably in both China and Russia) that offered infinite amplification.
Victim sustained amplifiers
The second cause we found for infinite amplification was victim sustained loops. When a victim receives an unexpected TCP packet, the correct client response is to respond with a RST packet. We discovered a small number of amplifiers that will resend their block pages when they process any additional packet from the victim, including the RST. This creates an infinite packet storm. The attacker elicits a single block page to a victim, which causes an RST from the victim. This, in turn, causes a new block page from the amplifier, which causes an RST from the victim, and so forth.
The victim sustained case is especially dangerous for two reasons. First, the victim’s default behaviour sustains the attack on itself. Second, this attack causes the victim to flood its own uplink while flooding the downlink.
Are these really middleboxes?
Yes, our results suggest so. To test this, we performed a TTL-limited experiment. We took the top 1 million amplifiers, tracerouted to them to determine how many hops away they were, and resent our probes with a reduced TTL number. This ensured that our probes wouldn’t make it to the destination host, but would likely cross the censoring middlebox, so if we still saw responses, we would know they were generated by a middlebox. We confirmed that ~83% of the top 1 million amplifiers were caused by middleboxes.
What is the effect of nation-states?
We found that nation-state censorship infrastructure for economies around the world can also be weaponized. Most of these nation-states are weak amplifiers (the Great Firewall of China only offers about 1.5x amplification, for example). Some of them offer more damaging amplifications, such as Saudi Arabia (~20x amplification).
The real challenge of nation-states is that their censorship infrastructure usually processes all traffic entering or exiting the economy. This means that unlike other amplification attacks, where the source IP address of the traffic received by the victim is the amplifier itself, every IP address behind a middlebox can appear as the source of traffic. Said another way: every IP address within an amplifying nation-state can be an amplifier.
How much damage can an attacker do with infinite amplification?
This is a case in which the ‘amplification factor’ as a metric starts to break down. Most of the time, when people ask about the amplification factor, they are asking how much damage an attacker can do with a given attack vector. If an attacker can elicit a technically infinite amplification factor, but at only 64 kbps before the link is completely saturated, the amount of damage an attacker can do is limited.
A better question is ‘what is the maximum bandwidth an attacker can elicit through this attack?’. Unfortunately, this is the hardest to study ethically. To measure the maximum capacity of a given amplifier, we would have to completely saturate the link for each network, which could have real negative consequences on the users of that network. For now, the true capacity available to attackers from this attack is unknown.
Defending against this attack is difficult
The incoming flood of traffic comes over TCP port 80 (normal HTTP traffic) and the responses are usually well-formed HTTP responses.
Since middleboxes are spoofing the IP address of the traffic they generate, the attacker can set the source IP address of the reflected traffic to be any IP address behind the middlebox. For some networks, this is a small number of IP addresses. But, if an attacker uses nation-state censorship infrastructure, the attacker can make the attack traffic come from any IP address within that economy. This makes it difficult for a victim to drop traffic from offending IP addresses during an attack.
In September of 2020, we reached out and shared an advanced copy of our paper with several economy-level Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), DDoS mitigation services, and firewall manufacturers. We also had further meetings and ongoing communication with multiple DDoS mitigation services and US-CERT for further discussions about mitigation strategies.
Unfortunately, there is only so much we can do. Completely fixing this problem will require economies investing money in changes that could weaken their censorship infrastructure, something we believe is unlikely to occur.
Note: This is not the only way we’ve discovered that censors could be weaponized. See the post about our work in WOOT 2021 “Your Censor is My Censor: Weaponizing Censorship Infrastructure for Availability Attacks”.
Contributors: Abdulrahman Alaraj, Yair Fax, Kyle Hurley, Eric Wustrow, and Dave Levin
Adapted from the original post, which appeared on censorship.ai. Refer to the original post for a list of frequently asked questions and how you can support or learn more about this project — the group is taking suggestions on a name for this type of attack.
Kevin Bock is a PhD candidate in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, advised by Dave Levin.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of APNIC. Please note a Code of Conduct applies to this blog. | <urn:uuid:1da66e8d-349b-48d9-a80b-a68a336f4455> | CC-MAIN-2021-43 | https://blog.apnic.net/2021/10/06/weaponizing-middleboxes-for-tcp-reflected-amplification/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-43/segments/1634323587655.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20211025061300-20211025091300-00355.warc.gz | en | 0.932231 | 2,829 | 2.5625 | 3 |
The Joint Municipal Water and Sewer Commission is charged with the responsibility of protecting the water quality by identifying and eliminating all cross connections that could potentially contaminate the water distribution system. JMWSC requires all water service connections that present a potential hazard to install and maintain a backflow prevention assembly that meets our specifications.
What is a cross-connection
A cross-connection is any temporary or permanent connection between the potable (i.e., drinking) water system and another source containing non-potable water or other substances that could contaminate your drinking water if a backflow condition occurs. An example of a temporary connection could be a garden hose attached to a sink or a spigot with the end of the hose submerged in a tub full of detergent. An example of a permanent connection could be the water supply line to the boiler of a hot water heating system.
What is backflow?
Backflow is just what it sounds like: water flowing in the opposite direction from its normal flow. With the direction of flow reversed (due to changes in pressure), backflow can allow contaminates to enter the potable water system through cross-connections. Without proper backflow devices, something as useful as your garden hose has the potential to contaminate your home’s water supply and the public water system.
A potentially hazardous cross-connection occurs every time someone uses a garden hose sprayer to apply fertilizer or herbicides to their lawn. Without a backflow prevention device between your hose and the spigot, the contents of the hose and anything it is connected to, can backflow into the home’s water system and contaminate your drinking water.
How can a backflow occur?
Backflow can occur two different ways, by back-pressure or back-siphonage.
What is back-siphonage?
Back-siphonage occurs when there is a sudden reduction in the water pressure in the distribution system, such as if a water main breaks or if the fire department uses a large amount of water to fight a fire, water flow can be reversed. This can create a suction effect, drawing contaminates into the drinking water system.
What is back-pressure?
Back-pressure is when a pump, elevated tank, boiler, etc. in a private system creates pressure that is greater than the pressure provided by the City water system. This can reverse the direction of flow, pushing contaminates into the drinking water system.
How can I prevent a cross-connection?
There are a few ways you can prevent a cross-connection:
- Never place the end of a hose where it can suck contaminates into your home’s water system. For example, do not leave the end of the hose submerged in the swimming pool or a tank when filling. Always maintain at least a one inch gap between the end of the hose and the pool, tank or other source of potential contamination.
- Use proper backflow protection devices. Each spigot at your home should have a hose-bibb vacuum breaker installed. This is a simple and inexpensive device that can be purchased at any hardware store and screwed directly onto each spigot (as easy as attaching your garden hose).
- Underground irrigation systems are one of the types of cross connections posing a health hazard to the public drinking water system. Contamination from herbicides , pesticides and animal dropping can enter your irrigation system when below ground sprinkler heads are used.
- Installation of a Double Check Valve Prevention Assembly can prevent back pressure or a back siphonage condition. NOTE: Starting July 2004, JMWSC requires all new residential meters with or without irrigation be equipped with a double check valve assembly.
Why do water suppliers need to control cross-connections and protect their public water systems against backflow?
Backflow into the public water system can introduce contaminates, making the water in the system unusable or unsafe to drink. Every water supplier has a responsibility to provide water that is usable and safe to drink under all foreseeable circumstances. Furthermore, consumers generally have absolute faith that water delivered to them through a public water system is always safe to drink. For these reasons, each water supplier must take reasonable precautions to protect its public water system against backflow. | <urn:uuid:2d02d404-a720-4a33-b895-4af8a27efb52> | CC-MAIN-2022-49 | https://www.lcjmwsc.com/cross-connection | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-49/segments/1669446710941.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20221203212026-20221204002026-00785.warc.gz | en | 0.931797 | 872 | 3.53125 | 4 |
Night night night the book night, by elie wiesel, is an autobiography about his experiences during the holocaust the story takes place in the 1940s the story takes place in the 1940s the main characters are elie and his father. Night by elie wiesel essays: over 180,000 night by elie wiesel essays, night by elie wiesel term papers, night by elie wiesel research paper, book reports 184 990 essays, term and research papers available for unlimited access. Night by elie weisel essay despair is the loss of hope and expectation - night by elie weisel essay introduction it is giving up, being in the state of hopelessness, with no will or strength to try anymore. In one scene taken from the novel night, elie wiesel conveys a powerful experience based on his first arrival at auschwitz the beginning of this scene starts off with dialog and this technique is also used much throughout the rest of the scene.
Elie wiesel's faith in night summary: elie wiesel's autobiography night shows how his faith evolved, his doubts and turning back to god, during his family's time in a nazi concentration camp faith plays an important part in elie wiesel's night. Essay on night by elie wiesel night is a powerfully written story of a concentration camp survivor elie wiesel deals with his loss of faith during the holocaust, and mentions the horrors of the concentration camps. Elie wiesel essay by lauren bradshaw february 20, 2010 the novel, night was the foundation” (elie wiesel, holocaust surivior: story and silence, 2003) when elie took a trip to the soviet union, he took an increasing interest in the persecuted jews his travel to the soviet union is reported in “the jews of silence” at the same.
Essay prompt clearly state the title of the book (night) and the author (elie wiesel) explain why this is an important book worthy of study and describe what it contributes to our understanding of humanity and society. Night by elie wiesel night introduction the holocaust was the attempt by the nazi regime to systematically exterminate the european jewish race during world war ii the holocaust was a reference to the murder of around six million jews and other minority groups such as homosexuals, gypsies and the disabled (wiesel, 2008. Elie wiesel’s night is a vivid account of the horrors of the holocaust describing in his memoirs the extent of the horrendous atrocities he both witnessed and experienced, wiesel tells of a boy who is stripped forever of the world he has know.
Night by elie wiesel night is a memoir written by elie wiesel, a young jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the holocaust elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the talmud and spending time at the temple with his spiritual mentor, moshe the beadle. - night by elie wiesel night is a memoir written by elie wiesel, a young jewish boy, who tells of his experiences during the holocaust elie is a deeply religious boy whose favorite activities are studying the talmud and spending time at the temple with his spiritual mentor, moshe the beadle. This fall, elie wiesel’s “night” was removed from the new york times best-seller list, where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after oprah winfrey picked it for her book club the times. Essay night by elie wiesel night introduction the holocaust was the attempt by the nazi regime to systematically exterminate the european jewish race during world war ii the holocaust was a reference to the murder of around six million jews and other minority groups such as homosexuals, gypsies and the disabled (wiesel, 2008.
Night, an autobiography, written by elie wiesel is a heartbreaking memoir about a young boy named eliezer wiesel who encounters the unfortunate events of the holocaust while behind barbed wire fences and ruled over by opinionated nazis, eliezer and his father suffer through the constant. Loss of faith in elie wiesel's night essay - loss of faith in elie wiesel's night night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during world war ii. Night elie wiesel night essays are academic essays for citation these papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of night by elie wiesel. A success- essay topics for night by elie wiesel ful school districts do you think a copy to use the constant comparative method, interviews were conducted in the two infinitives to verb. Book report essay on night by elie wiesel elie wiesel’s well-known book “la nuit” is based on personal sad experience the book is autobiographic and written in french.
Night essay elie wiesel eliewieselessay night study guide night elie wiesel 2 13 2014 research proj night by elie wiesel documents similar to research paper night by elie wiesel night and the loss of faith uploaded by eduardo davila night essay elie wiesel uploaded by francesca elizabeth eliewieselessay uploaded by. The story then focuses on just the experiences of the father and the son during their time in the labor camps, they are beaten badly on multiple occasions, and go through lots of suffering. 1 contrast elie wiesel's experiences in war with those of the main characters in thomas keneally's schindler's list, pearl buck's the good earth, thomas berger.
Essay elie wiesel the book night opens in the town of signet where elie wiesel, the author , was born he lived his child hood in the signet, transylvania he had three sisters hilda, bea, and tzipora his father was an honored member of the jewish community he was a cultured man concerned about his community yet, he was not an emotional man. Night by elie wiesel essayselie wiesel's night is a direct testimony as to what extent a concentration camp can change a person - to what point the human mind can be perverted and to how far the human body can be twisted wiesel's narration is so raw and candid one can actually sense elie. Critical analysis - night by elie wiesel essaysa person's beliefs and values transform with death lingering at every waking moment in elie wiesel's memoir, night, wiesel estranges himself from his companions and morals to survive the holocaust it is expected that the holocaust survivors. | <urn:uuid:625b62f6-c4ac-4731-9a05-69a9f14257a0> | CC-MAIN-2018-47 | http://oaessayxmvs.blogdasilvana.info/elie-night-essay.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-47/segments/1542039743248.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20181117020225-20181117042225-00517.warc.gz | en | 0.959338 | 1,397 | 2.9375 | 3 |
Quality Sleep Is So Important
- A new study involving more than 1,600 adults found that people who slept six hours a night had more belly fat than those who slept for nine hours. In addition, they weighed more and had lower levels of HDL cholesterol (the heart-healthy “good cholesterol”). This was true even though the sleep-deprived people didn’t eat unhealthier diets.
- An earlier study found that shorting sleep for just a few nights in a row can lead to immediate weight gain.
- A startling study in 2012 revealed that restricting the sleep of healthy young people for just four nights decreased the sensitivity of their fat cells to insulin by 30%, leading to levels typically seen in obese or diabetic people. One of the researchers commented, "This is the equivalent of metabolically aging someone 10 to 20 years."
- A recent study involving more than 4,000 children found that kids who get too little sleep weigh more and have a higher percentage of fat mass. Worse yet, these children have higher blood sugar levels and greater insulin resistance—both risk factors for diabetes.
- Set a regular bedtime—for both kids and adults. It’s fine to fudge a little on the weekends, but otherwise, try to turn in at the same time each night. Research suggests that simply sticking to a bedtime schedule can actually lower your body fat.
- Make Epsom salt baths a habit. The magnesium in Epsom salt is one of Mother Nature’s best “sleepy medicines.” Putting a little lavender oil in your bath water can also help mellow you out.
- Turn off devices at least an hour before bedtime. The blue light from these devices can mess with your melatonin levels. If you can’t bring yourself to turn them off, invest in blue light-blocking glasses.
- Meditate. Fifteen or twenty minutes of mindful meditation can ease your brain into a restful state.
- Darken your room. Install blackout curtains to get rid of light pollution, and turn your alarm clock away from the bed so the light it emits doesn’t shine in your face.
- Experiment with a “white noise” machine. Many people find these highly effective.
- Chill out. Keep your room between 65 and 72 degrees. Also, try sleeping with a fan on. (The “white noise” from the fan can also help to mask other sounds.)
- Do strenuous exercise in the morning or afternoon—not at night. Exercising vigorously before bedtime can rev you up, making it hard to doze off. Instead, try some gentle yoga stretches.
- Make a to-do list. This will help you clear your mind before bedtime.
- Indulge in high-quality bedding. The right pillows, sheets, and blankets can make a huge difference in how comfy you feel at night.
- Drink bone broth in the evening. Bone broth is rich in calming, relaxing glycine and magnesium.
- Consider taking melatonin. A little dose of this supplement before bedtime may help you fall asleep faster and sleep longer.
Try these tricks, and I’m betting that you and your family members will fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly. As a result, you’ll all be happier, more energetic, and more clear-headed when you wake up… and you’ll all be shrinking that belly fat and protecting yourself against diabetes and heart disease as well!
Keep thinking Big and living BOLD! | <urn:uuid:733156b5-8154-4c26-a458-6a7d9a51f8d2> | CC-MAIN-2019-47 | https://drkellyann.com/blogs/news/quality-sleep-is-so-important | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-47/segments/1573496668954.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20191117115233-20191117143233-00462.warc.gz | en | 0.926811 | 738 | 2.84375 | 3 |
- Prader-Willi syndrome: description
- Prader-Willi syndrome: symptoms
- Prader-Willi syndrome: causes and risk factors
- Prader-Willi syndrome: examinations and diagnosis
- Prader-Willi syndrome: treatment
- Prader-Willi syndrome: disease course and prognosis
The Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS) is the result of a congenital defect in the genetic material. Affected infants are short-lived, mentally underdeveloped and muscle-weak. In infancy, they develop an insatiable hunger that leads to a pronounced obesity. Therapy for various medical disciplines is intended to treat the resulting secondary diseases. Read more about symptoms, diagnosis and therapy of Prader-Willi syndrome!
ICD codes for this disease: ICD codes are internationally valid medical diagnosis codes. They are found e.g. in doctor's letters or on incapacity certificates. Q87
Causes and risk factors
Examinations and diagnosis
Disease course and prognosis
Prader-Willi syndrome: description
The Prader-Willi syndrome (falsely synonymous Willi-Prader syndrome) was first described in 1956 by the pediatricians Andrea Prader, Alexis Labhart and Heinrich Willi. About one in 20,000 newborns suffers from Prader-Willi syndrome. The cause is a genetically induced dysfunction of the hypothalamus, an important switching center in the brain. The severity of Prader-Willi syndrome can be very diverse and complex.
Prader-Willi syndrome: symptoms
Already before the birth fall affected fetuses. They move noticeably little in the womb. The heart rate is lower than normal. At birth, fetuses with Prader-Willi syndrome are more likely to be in abnormal positions in the mother's body. During and after birth babies need a lot of support.
Immediately after birth, affected newborns are affected by a lack of exercise, (muscle) weakness and a low birth weight. Even the typical screaming after the birth may be missing or is only weak. Due to the pronounced weakness and the resulting suction and swallowing disorder, it is difficult for babies to drink.
Babies with Prader-Willi syndrome often show certain external features. The narrow face is characterized by almond-shaped eyes and a small mouth with a thin upper lip. The skull is often long (dolidochocephaly), hands and feet are small. The spine may be bent in an S-shape (scoliosis). The bone substance in the whole body shows damage and defects in the radiograph (osteoporosis / osteopenia). The pigmentation of the skin, hair and retina may be reduced. Even visual disturbances and strabismus (strabismus) of the eyes are possible. The scrotum is small and often empty (undescended testicles). Overall, the development of sick children is delayed.
Muscle weakness improves slightly towards the end of the first year of life. At least a mild weakness, however, always exists. Normal activities are quickly tiring and exhausting for patients with Prader-Willi syndrome. Nevertheless, children enjoy the same typical activities of childhood. In infancy, the growth is significantly reduced.
Uninhibited food intake
In the course of the disease affected children eat more and more (hyperphagia) - without feeling a sense of satiety. Food is hoarded and stolen even in severe cases. The control of the eating behavior is extremely difficult for the children. Therefore, they develop a marked obesity (obesity). They are increasing particularly fast, as there is a marked discrepancy between the high calorie intake and the low energy consumption.
Being overweight causes typical complications: The heart and lungs are suffering from the burden of obesity. A quarter of all those affected developed diabetes mellitus until the age of 20. Sleep disorders, venous diseases (thrombophlebitis) and water retention are also among the multitude of possible consequences. In the course of the disease, sleep disorders may be added. In addition to repeated breathing pauses, disturbances of the day-night rhythm or even deep sleep are possible. Learning is difficult for affected children.
The development of puberty is disturbed
The typical growth spurt in puberty is low. Affected children are usually no larger than 140 to 160 centimeters. Although puberty can be premature (premature adrenarche), in many cases puberty is never completed. Affected people usually remain infertile. In boys, the penis and especially the testicles remain small. Pigmentation and wrinkles are missing on the scrotum. The voice break can fail. In girls, labia (labia) and clitoris (clitoris) remain underdeveloped. The first menstrual bleeding does not occur at all, prematurely or belatedly, sometimes only between the 30th and 40th year of age.
Psychic and mental development
Both mental and psychomotor development are disturbed in Prader-Willi syndrome. Milestones of child development are often achieved later than in healthy peers.The linguistic and motor development sometimes take twice as long as with the healthy peers.
The average intelligence quotient (IQ) is between 60 and 70, well below the norm. Due to the physical weakness speaking can be difficult. Speech development is delayed and speech understanding is disturbed, depending on the low IQ. Around 40 percent of sufferers are at the limit of mental disability. Irrespective of the IQ, learning disorders such as arithmetic difficulties also show up. The school achievements are usually below average.
Both the training of emotions and the behavior can be conspicuous. Those affected are sometimes described as obstinate and quick-tempered. Already in early childhood psychiatric abnormalities can occur: It describes forms of so-called opposition behavior as well as rigid and possessive behavior. Routine procedures can be difficult. In some cases, processes must be compulsively repeated. About 25 percent of patients have autistic features. The attention deficit syndrome (ADD) also occurs frequently.
With age and overweight, the symptoms usually increase. In older adults, however, the symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome may be reduced again. About ten percent suffer from psychosis. In addition, epilepsy and forms of "hypertension" (narcolepsy) are associated with Prader-Willi syndrome.
Prader-Willi syndrome: causes and risk factors
The cause of Prader-Willi syndrome is probably a dysfunction of part of the midbrain, the so-called hypothalamus. This causes, among other things, a deficiency of the important growth hormone. The disorder is caused in about three quarters of cases by the absence of a gene section on the chromosome 15 (15q11-q13)... In the case of Prader-Willi syndrome especially a defect of the paternal chromosomal copy seems to be of particular importance (70 to 75 percent ), so there is only one copy of the gene. Another possibility is that both genes of the double set of chromosomes come only from the mother (uniparental disomy, 25 to 30 percent). Less often there is a so-called "imprinting defect" (one percent). The term "imprinting" describes the fact that genes are read as a function of their origin (maternal or paternal).
In most cases, the disorder is not inheritable. It usually develops only in the context of germ cell development or after fertilization. On the other hand, however, it is possible that existing gene mutations (usually so-called balanced translocations) cause a Prader-Willi syndrome. In these cases, the inheritance risk is increased.
Prader-Willi syndrome: examinations and diagnosis
All newborns with persistent and unexplained weakness should be tested for PWS. Already the neonatal doctor (neonatologist) or pediatrician (pediatrician) will have the suspicion of a Prader-Willi syndrome after birth due to the behavior of the child. Without evidence of the presence of this syndrome, no so-called predictive tests are performed. However, it is quite possible to diagnose a Prader-Willi syndrome even before birth.
Physical and apparative investigations
In most cases, the physical examination already indicates a high suspicion of Prader-Willi syndrome (Holms criteria 1993, 2001). The main characteristic of the Prader-Willi syndrome is the pronounced weakness, which is especially evident in drinking. Also the appearance gives hints. Usually detectable reflexes are weak.
Diagnostically helpful is a measurable lack of growth hormone in the blood. Sex hormones (estrogen, testosterone, FSH, LH) are usually reduced in those affected. This is accompanied by an underdevelopment of the sexual organs. The function of the adrenal cortex is disturbed in many cases. Thus, the formation of sex hormones (androgens) can also begin prematurely (early adrenarche).
The examination of the brain waves (electroencephalogram, EEG) may also be noticeable.
To confirm the suspicion of a Prader-Willi syndrome genetic examinations are performed. In the first step, the methylation of the crucial site on chromosome 15 (15q11.2-q13, "SNRPN locus") is investigated. Enzymes can bind so-called methyl groups to the DNA and thereby modify it. In more than 99 percent of cases, this examination provides the diagnosis. Otherwise, another common method for detecting chromosomal changes, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), is performed.
Similar diseases are Martin Bell Syndrome or Angelmann Syndrome. The disorder in Martin-Bell syndrome lies on the X chromosome (fragile X syndrome). In the case of Angelmann syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome, the same site on chromosome 15 is deleted in most cases - but only in Angelmann syndrome on the maternal chromosome.
Prader-Willi syndrome: treatment
Prader-Willi syndrome can not be cured. However, with the help of a strictly guided, supportive therapy the symptoms can be alleviated.The main components of the treatment are nutritional control, hormone replacement therapy and treatment of behavioral problems.
Especially if the muscle weakness is pronounced, adequate nutrition and sufficient growth must be ensured. To facilitate feeding, probes or special, artificial nipples can be used. In addition, a feeding plan with a well-documented calorie intake and weight control should be prepared.
However, with age, children develop an eating disorder with excessive food intake. Then a plan with a strict calorie restriction must be followed. Fat restriction is not always the goal, as fat is important for horn development. The eating disorder may require strict handling of access to food. The eating disorder in Prader-Willi syndrome has a particularly serious effect on the disease process, since the affected little move and so there is a large discrepancy between calorie intake and need. It is crucial to involve the parents intensively and to provide the sick child with a solid structure.
At the same time, it must be ensured that sufficient vitamins and minerals are supplied. In the case of Prader-Willi syndrome, disorders of the bone metabolism often occur, which can be prevented with vitamin D and calcium intake. The skeletal development, especially of the spine, should be examined regularly.
The activity and motor development of the ill child are regularly examined and, where appropriate, supported therapeutically with physiotherapy or similar methods.
From the second year of life can be additionally given the growth hormone HGH as a drug. This therapy should be stopped when closing the growth plates in the bone (X-ray control). Always hormone therapy should be closely monitored. Hormone administration has a positive effect on body development, but side effects include foot edema, a worsening of spinal curvature (scoliosis) or an increase in the pressure in the skull (pseudotumor cerebri). At the beginning of treatment it can lead to respiratory disorders. It is therefore important to monitor sleep at the start of therapy. The monitoring of HGH hormone therapy also includes the regular determination of thyroid levels and blood counts of the growth factor IGF-1.
In puberty disorders, sex hormones may be administered as depot injectors, hormone patches or gel. The behavioral problems can improve as a result. Estrogens also support bone formation but also have a variety of side effects.
To support behavioral development and achievement of development milestones, the affected child should receive help. In particular, the social skills must be trained in Prader-Willi syndrome. This should also encourage interaction with peers and caregivers. At school, one-to-one care may be necessary. If necessary, the living and working environment must be adapted. Psychiatric abnormalities may require drug therapy, for example with a serotonin antagonist. The goal of the intensive support is the best possible independence.
Any existing cleft lip and palate at birth can be treated early by surgeons. Even misalignments of the eyes, especially strabismus, can be treated surgically to prevent vision problems. First, the temporary cover of the healthy eye can help.
The underdevelopment of the reproductive organs may require surgery to transfer the testes from the lower abdomen into the scrotum. The administration of beta-hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) may increase the scrotum and thus allow the testes to sink.
Also skeletal changes of Prader-Willi syndrome can be surgically treated. An S-position of the spine (scoliosis) in severe cases requires an operative correction, but is usually supplied without surgery (for example with a corset.
Prader-Willi syndrome: disease course and prognosis
The earliest possible diagnosis of "Prader-Willi syndrome" can positively influence the long-term prognosis. By positively influencing the (eating) behavior and the possible administration of growth hormones, the quality of life of the affected child can improve.
At regular intervals after the diagnosis, the eating behavior, weight and growth should be checked. Development, function, behavior as well as psychiatric abnormalities are controlled. Close monitoring and care by a specialist who can coordinate and ensure interdisciplinary care is very important.
Diseased people have an increased risk of recurring infections. Special care should be taken during surgery: After anesthesia, the recovery phase often lasts longer and there is an increased risk of respiratory disorders.
The biggest problem, however, is the increasing obesity. In the course of life outweigh the resulting complications.The mortality is also increased by the sequelae. The increased mortality in Prader-Willi syndrome is therefore primarily due to heart, vascular or lung diseases.
The inheritance risk is low. In most cases, the genetic change occurs spontaneously and not through heredity. The risk for parents to have a second child with Prader-Willi syndrome is low. The victims themselves often remain childless.
Only in rare cases is the Prader-Willi syndrome caused by rearrangements of the genetic information in the parental chromosome set, which are inheritable and also lead to a higher probability of heredity. Does a child have that Prader-Willi SyndromeTherefore, the advice of human geneticists is recommended for parents with more children. | <urn:uuid:a39570d4-1cc2-40b8-b1be-fe634d910085> | CC-MAIN-2019-26 | https://en.the-health-site.com/prader-willi-syndrome-190 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-26/segments/1560628000353.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20190626134339-20190626160339-00424.warc.gz | en | 0.926421 | 3,130 | 2.890625 | 3 |
- The concerns over energy use of data centres and associated impacts on climate change have attracted efforts to reduce data centres’ energy demand during operations.
- The focus on reducing climate change related impacts arising from data centres’ operations can overlook relevant environmental impacts from other life cycle stages, including raw material extraction, equipment manufacturing, data centre construction, end of life of equipment and data centre buildings.
- To support the design of truly sustainable data centres, more comprehensive environmental sustainability assessments, encompassing the entire life cycle and factoring in a broad spectrum of environmental problems, are needed.
- This issue brief uses examples to showcase the substantial environmental impacts of data centres stemming from other life cycle stages than their operations and calls for the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to assess and address such impacts.
Sectors: Digital, Equipment and appliances, Industry
Country / Region: GlobalTags: assessments, climate change, datacentres, efficient construction of buildings, energy, energy demand, environmental impacts, extraction, global climate, leaves, life cycle assessment, manufacturing, MDG 7: environmental sustainability, multi impact, sustainability
Knowledge Object: Publication / Report
Published by: Copenhagen Centre on Energy Efficiency
Publishing year: 2020
Author: Alexis Laurent, Mirko Dal Maso | <urn:uuid:735f80ce-7c5d-48a2-a7a2-eaf687922070> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://c2e2.unepdtu.org/kms_object/environmental-sustainability-of-data-centres-a-need-for-a-multi-impact-and-life-cycle-approach/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618039610090.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20210422130245-20210422160245-00398.warc.gz | en | 0.878057 | 262 | 2.921875 | 3 |
A recent study conducted by the US NHLBI has found out that patients who aim for a blood pressure level below 120 are generally healthier and has stated that the national guideline for blood pressure standards should be lower than 120.
These recent studies have shocked health care providers and patients all over the world due to the fact that the 120/80 standard has been in place for a very long time and it was generally believed that people who kept working to bring their levels down to the standard had perfect blood pressure. This is not to say that patients who hover around the 120/80 standard live unhealthy lives but this report insists that bringing blood pressure to levels below the widely accepted standard could bring a large number of benefits to patients and greatly reduce the risk of suffering from heart disease, stroke, and other diseases commonly associated with high blood pressure.
What is Healthy Blood Pressure?
Despite the fact that there’s been a recent trend in healthcare to loosen up the blood pressure levels standards significantly, scientists working for the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute have firmly declare that patients should aim for a systolic pressure below 120.
There is still a large cloud of hesitation hovering above this study as the previous standard of 120/80 was generally considered a good compromise between slightly high blood pressure and low blood pressure. Despite the fact that when it comes to blood pressure, it is commonly believed that the lower, the better. However, patients should still be aware of the fact that low blood pressure can also become a problem if it drops too low. In fact, low blood pressure has been associated with other health risks that are perhaps not as severe as those associated with high blood pressure, such as dizziness or light headedness.
Despite the fact that chronic low blood pressure with no symptoms is rarely serious, patients should work to keep their blood pressure levels between the accepted standard of 120 systolic and 80 diastolic for high blood pressure and 90/60 for low blood pressure. These findings are without a doubt, expected to challenge the currently accepted standards for high blood pressure, as people previously thought that anything near 120 was perfectly acceptable. However, these studies have proven that reducing systolic blood pressure below 120 can significantly reduce the onset of heart disease and other complications.
Lifestyle and Dietary Changes for High Blood Pressure
The fact remains, however that patients looking to maintain healthy blood pressure levels should consider making significant lifestyle changes such as a adding an exercise routine to their daily schedule, eating foods low in sodium and avoiding fast food and other foods rich in artificial preservatives.
Another thing to consider for patients currently struggling with blood pressure is the amount of help that they are able to get from taking a natural blood pressure supplement like PD120. PD120 helps maintain healthy blood pressure levels. PD20 is made using a natural formula created by an expert with over 30 years of experience in the medical field dealing directly with the negative effects of living with high blood pressure and the terrifying side effects associated with the most common drugs used to treat high blood pressure. Patients who are looking to meet the newly proposed standards for blood pressure should definitely consider adding a supplement that can help them maintain healthy blood pressure.
Signs of High Blood Pressure
Another thing that should be considered is the fact that this silent killer usually goes unnoticed by patients until it is already too late. The fact that symptoms usually don’t show up until they’re accompanied by other health problems should be more than enough warning for patients to keep a close eye on their levels and measure their blood pressure levels on a daily basis. In fact, it is thought that almost 40 percent of all adults over the age of 55 in the United States are living with high blood pressure.
Results drawn from the study concluded that those patients who kept their blood pressure below 120 had a mortality rate of 3.3% percent, while those patients who worked hard to keep their blood pressure levels under 140 reported a mortality rate of 4.5. This translates to one less death per 90 people among the group whose blood pressure was kept under 120. The fact that this study has created a sense of awareness amongst doctors and caretakers everywhere will come as great news to those patients who are closely monitoring their health. | <urn:uuid:12d21095-1829-452a-8675-341ce8f86de6> | CC-MAIN-2021-17 | https://hellonaturals.com/blogs/discover/have-national-standards-for-blood-pressure-levels-changed | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-17/segments/1618039554437.90/warc/CC-MAIN-20210421222632-20210422012632-00546.warc.gz | en | 0.963653 | 853 | 3.140625 | 3 |
6 Dangerous Driving Habits You Did Not Know You Were Doing
In Part One of this series, we learned how driver conditioning contributed to the deaths of Sandy Johnson and her mother. We also learned how conditioning places all of us into a kind of “comfort zone” which puts us at risk on the roads.
Now we will look at a number of risks related to driver conditioning and learn how they can put us in danger behind the wheel.
Once I recognized conditioning as the underlying cause of the crash that killed Sandy and her mother, I began to wonder if, perhaps, conditioning played a role in other crashes, as well. Fueled with curiosity and a desire to prevent other families from experiencing the kind of tragedy mine had to endure, I evaluated multiple Accident Reports and studied the effects of “conditioning.” What I ultimately learned was that conditioning contributed to nearly all car crashes.
But what exactly is driver conditioning? It is referred to as the process by which drivers become conditioned to respond to traffic patterns and road conditions that remain consistent over an undefined period of time or distance.
A simple way to think of it is like this: once we become conditioned to an environment, we stop paying attention to that environment. On the road, this can be a serious risk. Here are some examples of this danger that you might recognize. As you read through them, ask yourself how many times you have experienced these risks yourself and how you might help your teen avoid them:
1. Mental Compromise
When we intentionally or unintentionally split our attention between driving and another activity or thought. (This is the mental state where distracted driving takes place, which is a consequence of driver conditioning.)
Examples – 1. Taking our eyes off the road to look at a passenger or something inside or outside the vehicle unrelated to driving: 2. Getting lost in thought; 3. Engaging in any activity not related to driving.
2. Cognitive Disengagement
When we drive without thought, and sometimes without any memory of having done so.
Explanation – This can take place anytime and anywhere our driving environment is not presenting us with a challenge, like when you drive the same route to work each day.
3. Tunnel Vision
When our peripheral vision is totally lost and all we focus on is a small section of roadway far-off in the distance.
Explanation – While experiencing Tunnel Vision, it is possible to drive through a fully controlled intersection with a traffic light, stop signs, or other informational devices, without realizing you are doing so.
4. Inattentional Blindness
When we fail to see specific objects that are well within our field of vision.
Examples – 1. When entering a highway and looking at oncoming traffic for cars and trucks, we may look right past a motorcyclist heading toward us; 2. When mentally focused on any situation, we can fail to see signs or other traffic control or warning devices in our direct line of vision.
5. Delayed Reaction Time
When experiencing any of the characteristics listed above, we are inclined to respond less quickly when confronted with a hazard. Since crash avoidance often requires an immediate action on the part of the driver, any delay can be catastrophic.
Examples – With a delay in our reaction time of merely one-half second, a vehicle traveling at 35 mph will travel 25+ feet; 55 mph will travel 40+ feet; and at 75 mph will travel over 53 feet.
6. Train Ourselves to Behave Inappropriately
When not challenged or forced to do the “right” thing behind the wheel, we may take short-cuts which can put us at risk. Whether it’s texting, eating or taking a call, these inappropriate behaviors can cause us to react to a hazard incorrectly or increase the odds of injury in the event of a crash.
Explanation – When we become conditioned to our driving environment, we become more comfortable and less attentive, which can lead to us taking inappropriate actions. If nothing bad happens as a result of those actions, we don’t necessarily think of them as bad and we are more likely to repeat them, creating a habit. If you drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs, for example, and you make it home safe, that might make you think that you can do it again without any consequences.
All of these examples contribute to crashes or increase the likelihood of injury in the event of a crash and all of them are made worse by driver conditioning, which is why your teen needs to be aware of them.
So what can we do about it?
In Part Three of this series, I will address how The Sandy Johnson Foundation works to help protect teen drivers from these risks. | <urn:uuid:ab946aa2-66e5-48a2-ada3-fe08ec5ba347> | CC-MAIN-2022-40 | https://www.sandyjohnsonfoundation.org/post/6-dangerous-driving-habits-you-did-not-know-you-were-doing | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-40/segments/1664030334514.38/warc/CC-MAIN-20220925035541-20220925065541-00345.warc.gz | en | 0.951943 | 968 | 3 | 3 |
If you’ve ever wondered what a typical school-day looks like for our Grade 1-12 learners, the time table below will provide an example:
|8:45 am||Student Arrival: review of communication books and/or correspondence; medications or health concerns relayed to nursing staff. Students who are mobile work on transition goals.|
|9:00 am||Toilet Hygiene: each student is changed or toileted upon arrival, allowing staff to ensure student health. If concerns are present, incident forms are completed and/or nursing staff informed. Students are taught personal care and hygiene.Individual Programs: 1:1 learning activities are introduced. In the case of our more mobile children, a free play time is encouraged for social skills, fine motor or cognitive development, etc.|
|9:45 am||Circle/Conference Time: theme-based group learning which might include the weather, calendar, current events, songs and rhymes, sign language to encourage listening and turn-taking skills, conversation skills and community awareness. Knowledge assessment.
Therapy Sessions: 1:1 therapy sessions with occupational therapy, speech pathologist and/or physiotherapist. Time is dependent upon student groupings. Consultational intervention one to three times weekly, dependent upon need.
|10:15 am||Snack: many students are on a bus early. Many may be hungry or require fluids. Daily living,/social skills/communication training and etiquette are included in this time.|
|10:30 am||Individual Programs: adapted Alberta Learning curriculum is introduced to students in their classrooms. As well, personal goals from each student’s IPP are incorporated. These activities are 1:1 or small group and may include goals such as reading/math development, making choices, personal care, daily living or computer skills. Therapy may be incorporated into the classroom. These are group sessions in the Snoezelen Room, kitchen or gym. These sessions may occur several times throughout the day depending on student’s disability and therapy needs.|
|11:30 am||Lunch Time: Due to the high needs of our students, Elves has supervised lunches in the classroom. Lunch time is instructional time; staff remain with students and teach eating and socialization skills. Also, many of our students require G-tube feedings which must be supervised 1:1 and may need an extended time to complete a feeding depending on the student.|
|12:30 pm||Hygiene: Students are changed or toileted after lunch. Students are taught personal hygiene and self-care at this time.|
|1:00 pm||Individual Programs/Program Activities: In addition to IPP goals, modified curriculum is presented. Students are involved in recreational activities such as community walks, gym time, crafts, cooking, or relaxation time in the Snoezelen Room (sensory room). Each class has at least one session per week in the kitchen. Field trips are planned for the education and interest of students, using our wheelchair accessible buses and vans.|
|2:00 pm||Hygiene: Students are toileted or changed before dressing to go home. Communication books are filled in regarding the day’s events as well as any school calendars or communications for families. Lunch boxes and/or G-tube equipment are sent home to be cleaned for the next school day.|
|2:15 pm||Dismissal: Students are supervised by staff until they are secured in the buses for transport home for the day. Students who are mobile work on transition goals.|
If you have any additional questions about an Elves’ school day please do not hesitate to contact us.
Phones at Elves Child Development Centre are temporarily out of order. We will update this notification once the system has been restored. Please contact Nicole Quildon, Principal at 780.920.8764 or Keira Peyton, Special Education Supports, at 780.913.0616 should you require immediate assistance. Thank you!
First day of classes for School Program students is August 30, 2018.
First day of classes for 800 hour ECS children is September 4, 2018.
First day of classes for 475 hour ECS children is September 6, 2018.
First day of classes for 600 hour ECS children is September 10, 2018. | <urn:uuid:d09892dc-2329-44d0-b244-2afbc21f0382> | CC-MAIN-2018-43 | http://www.elves-society.org/school/grades-1-12/grades-1-12-school-day/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-43/segments/1539583511122.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20181017090419-20181017111919-00090.warc.gz | en | 0.938481 | 892 | 2.90625 | 3 |
After floods, UN urges countries to work on prevention
Filed Under: Health & Science, World | Posted: 08/12/2007 at 11:06AM
Comments | Region: Bangladesh
The recent floods that hit Europe and Asia were more than just a natural disaster, according to the UN: They are a sign of the need, from the affected countries and other potential victims, to invest more on risk-reduction, in order to prevent these disasters from taking such a heavy toll on the population, instead of simply waiting for them to come and then worrying about reconstruction and relief.
The UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) warned on August 9 that “Disaster risk reduction is not an option, it is an urgent priority,” as it joins the effort to bring relief to the millions of people displaced by the disaster in South Asia – 30 million were displaced and more than 2,000 killed in only during the latest monsoon season. The UNICEF considered South Asia’s worst floods in living memory, as million of acres of farmland were inundated and thousands of households were destroyed.
In fact, it’s hard to evaluate if the worst aspect of the floods is the initial impact of it or its aftermath. Regions struck by floods become instantly disease-ridden, as most of the local infrastructure is destroyed. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one example: Its hospitals are completely filled with Diarrhea patients who had no other option than to use the filthy water available after the floods, and more people keep coming in. The shortage of toilets has obliged nurses to give bedpans and buckets for the patients, who are lodged in tents outside the hospital, for the lack of beds. Bangladesh, by the way, was particularly severed by the floods. Simply two-thirds of the entire country went underwater after the floods, and nothing less than 100,000 people (and counting) contracted diarrhea or dysentery.
In other places, such as Gujarat, in India, the problem was the sewage. In Gujarat, the massive amounts of water busted open the sewage pipes of the city, spreading filthy, disease-ridden sewage everywhere.
In Europe the impact was much lower, but it still inundated areas all over Europe, displacing several people. Yet, it’s somewhat surprising that floods can still have such a heavy impact on such an advanced region. After all, let’s not forget the floods of 2006, where Central Europe was devastated by heavy floods that displaced thousands and killed dozens.
That’s exactly the kind of consequences that the UN is trying to avoid, for the simple fact that it’s much easier and cheaper to avoid them than most people think – especially when compared to the cost of reconstruction and relief and, above all things, the casualties. ISDR expert Reid Basher put it bluntly: “It is not rocket science. It is plain and simple stuff about building stronger houses, putting in warning systems and educating the public so we’re not flat-footed when these events come.”Yet, such measures still look like rocket science for many governments, as their lack of action has made us believe.
And for those who think that it’s somehow justifiable that poor countries such as Bangladesh suffer as much as they did with this kind of disaster, there was already a framework (called Hyogo Framework, crafted in Kobe after the Tsunami of 2004) to be followed, especially for countries at risk. But the Tsunami passed, relief agencies appeared, and some authorities got lazy on implementing the given framework. Now, the ISDR urges the 168 signatory governments once again to speed up the works in implementing the framework.
China, not exactly a developed country, is one example of good work, as the ISDR itself cited: Even though the floods that currently hit the country are getting worse, the number of deaths was drastically reduced, when compared to decades ago. “In 1959,” Basher said, “there was a flood or flooding that caused a loss of two million lives. Now, every year, they have the same sorts of floods, possibly even worse. But, the numbers killed are only in the order of say 500 a year. So, I think you can see that the modest investments (…) pay off and clearly in the China case, pay off very handsomely.” The investments? “Warning systems, evacuation systems, public education, better building standards…” definitely not rocket science.
So what would really be the reasons behind such laziness and consequently the appalling number of deaths and displacements caused by a type of disaster that should be long dominated by men? One can only speculate about such reasons, but some of them are well known, such as lack of political will and corruption. In politics, anything related to prevention is not usually a good deal, because prevention is somehow like insurance: You pay for it in order not to use it. Since you don’t use it, people can only assume you have it, but they wouldn’t know.
Now, for a politician, it’s not a good deal to invest in prevention because people won’t notice the money spent on it, therefore they won’t associate the investment with the politician responsible for it, and they won’t give them much credit. The bottom line is: People only care about a remote threat when it’s too late; a mayor for example, might get remembered for the relief work he did after a disaster, even though he was the responsible for that disaster in the first place, for not having invested in prevention.
Corruption is even worse, because it strikes before and after a disaster happens. The Hyogo Framework, for example, is one that requires certain investments in order to be properly implemented. In case a government receives money from an NGO, or the UN, for example, aimed at implementing such framework, who can assure that the money will really be used for it? The same happens after a disaster: Who can assure the relief money donated by governments; NGO’s and people will be effectively used? After the Tsunami there were reported cases of misuse of relief money by local governments and even some NGO’s. Plus, corruption is a notorious issue among South Asian countries.
Now it’s not that hard to understand why these countries still suffer the way they do and don’t follow China’s steps. China is definitely not an example of transparency, but if anything can be said in its favor is that the Chinese government knows how to set its priorities.
Regardless of any example, countries in South Asia, Europe and anywhere else in the world should think in terms of protecting the lives of their citizens, for all it’s worth. Besides, natural disasters also bring in a great deal of destruction and financial losses for companies, people and ultimately the government. A flood might not be as high profile as a terrorist attack, but its destruction, sometimes, is much bigger – so why not see it as a matter of national security? To a certain point, that’s the kind of thinking the ISDR is trying to instill among governments.
After all, floods accounted for 84 percent of all disasters between 2000 and 2005 and caused US$466 billion in losses throughout the world between 1992 and 2001, not to mention all the money invested in bringing relief to the affected areas. To think that most of these losses (of money and lives) could have easily been avoided… but what matters is that they still can, as long as authorities are willing to work for it. | <urn:uuid:eb40b115-5f5e-495e-87a8-c2a098890a08> | CC-MAIN-2014-52 | http://groundreport.com/after-floods-un-urges-countries-to-work-on-prevention/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-52/segments/1418802772416.132/warc/CC-MAIN-20141217075252-00086-ip-10-231-17-201.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972103 | 1,572 | 2.75 | 3 |
by Hilton Head Health Program Manager Felicia Hackett
The Big Debate
The Healthy Eating Plate created by health experts at Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School recommend only 1-2 servings of dairy per day. They even go as far as saying the word “limit” dairy. Their experts have found that more dairy is not necessarily good, that high intakes are associated with increased risk of prostate cancer and possibly ovarian cancer. Harvard says drink water and MyPlate.gov advocates for dairy at every meal. Regardless of which group you agree or disagree with, we can all agree that stong bones are integral to live a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
Whether you have a love or hate relationship with milk, you can easily vary your Vitamin D and Calcium sources with healthy alternatives.
Whole Food Sources of Calcium
- Calcium is found in dark leafy greens like collard greens and kale as well as broccoli.
- Calcium is also fortified in soy, rice, and almond milk.
- Calcium is found in are beans and tofu.
- Vitamin D by way of sun exposure builds strong bones.
- If you live in an area with limited sun exposure, consider taking a multi-vitamin with 1,000 IU of Vitamin D.
- Regular weight bearing exercises whether from resistance training or walking helps build strong bones.
A diet rich in non-starchy vegetables and unsweetened plant based milk alternatives are great ways to get adequate calcium without any added sugars or saturated fat. A healthy lifestyle with diet a diet rich in plants and regular exercise will help build and maintain strong bones. | <urn:uuid:9e9d4f48-7b55-491c-87bb-53efa7b59294> | CC-MAIN-2019-47 | https://www.hhhealth.com/blog-wellness-tips-and-resort-news-hilton-head-health/2016/04/02/to-have-dairy-or-not-to-have-dairy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-47/segments/1573496668682.16/warc/CC-MAIN-20191115144109-20191115172109-00320.warc.gz | en | 0.94327 | 331 | 2.984375 | 3 |
Over the last few years, it has become practically impossible to escape American politics and it’s rather dreary effects on the world. This is especially true considering the recent immigration bans and the acts of hate that followed. In under just a short period of time, we have all barred witness to the kind of damage that can be done by the 45th President of the United States and his administration.
In times such as these, it is easy to sit miserably and assume that things are only to get worse. However, it is important to remember that this is not the first time we have seen groups of minorities suffer over the ignorance and discrimination from dominant parties. Stories of the Second World War are always incredibly inspiring, despite what our social climate may look like, and it’s of great importance to reflect on the bravery of those who have fallen fighting for their freedom and those who survived doing so.
Robert Desnos was a Surrealist poet and writer who was born in Paris, France on July 4th, 1900. His story upon arriving to the Auschwitz concentration camp amongst fellow Jewish prisoners is a tale to hold onto. His story goes as follows:
Robert Desnos was one of many Jewish prisoners stuffed into the back of a large truck to be taken away to one of the most infamous concentration camps of the Holocaust. As the truck reached its destination, individuals started exiting the back of the truck looking evidently somber. They were all aware of what was to come: the gas chambers. Not a word was spoken from the crowds of people nor from the guards themselves.
One man stood amongst the rest with bright energy in spite of the morbid circumstances, and jumped to the front of the exiting line. He grabs the hand of the doomed man at front and begins to read his palm. He reads his palm out loud, exclaiming to the man that his life will be long. As he predicts the happiness and exciting events of held in his future, Desnos’s uplifting mood proves to be contagious. He concludes this reading and it sparks an interest in the next person in the line and asks Desnos to read his palm too.
Soon enough, Desnos is reading the palm of every single person leaving that truck and the mood once surrounding these unfortunate souls is now gone. There is only joy. Desnos even receives requests from the guards, and of course he complies. Either by the magic of Desnos words, or seeing the smiling faces on the people whose lives in this very moment are at complete risk, the guards let them return to the barracks.
Paintings and poetry based in abstract art movements like Surrealism and Dadaism are often perceived are being pretentious art made for art’s sake, created by artists who reached a certain point of success and recognition that anything they produced, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical, would receive great acclaim. However, these avant-garde pieces are as strange as they are because of the surreal-ness of their very own realities prior, during and after WW2.
These art pieces are a mere reflection of an entire world’s inability to comprehend the severe tragedies taking place before them. It’s geniuses like Picasso, Duchamp and certainly Desnos that show us that through these dark times imagination will not only aid us in cathartic ways, but it will in turn help us to help others to stay strong, supportive and optimistic.
Author: Raazia Rafeek
Raazia Rafeek lives in Toronto writing, painting and studying to complete her final year of her Honours English degree. With an interest and passion for everything creative, she wishes to see her career through in Marketing or hopefully, film and production. Check her work out at www.raaziarafeek.wordpress.com | <urn:uuid:3dee2ccc-e7ee-446b-aa84-d7a0468528e1> | CC-MAIN-2020-05 | http://feelingsuccess.com/?p=12060 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/segments/1579250592636.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20200118135205-20200118163205-00401.warc.gz | en | 0.977699 | 780 | 2.59375 | 3 |
- to utilize, especially for profit; turn to practical account: to exploit a business opportunity.
- to use selfishly for one's own ends: employers who exploit their workers.
- to advance or further through exploitation; promote: He exploited his new movie through a series of guest appearances.
- a flaw in hardware or software that is vulnerable to hacking or other cyberattacks.
- a piece of software that takes advantage of such a flaw to compromise a computer system or network.
- (in a video game) the use of a bug or flaw in game design to a player’s advantage or to the disadvantage of other players.
Origin of exploit2
Examples from the Web for exploited
Contemporary Examples of exploited
He exploited a physique that most would try desperately to diminish.
Maybe--but he exploited his profile as effectively as any pinup.
Better than anyone though, Murdoch saw and exploited the emotional needs satisfied by the pursuit of celebrity.Murdoch on the Rocks: How a Lone Reporter Revealed the Mogul's Tabloid Terror Machine
August 25, 2014
Superman is America in that he was created by hard-working, exploited immigrants.Superman Is Jewish: The Hebrew Roots of America's Greatest Superhero
August 16, 2014
Natural gas has been exploited in the province since the 1970s, initially by a Soviet energy project.The Warlord Who Defines Afghanistan: An Excerpt From Bruce Riedel’s ’What We Won’
July 27, 2014
Historical Examples of exploited
They exploited but a small area, and with smaller success than either had anticipated.Dreamers of the Ghetto
He had specimens of Lasius niger who exploited a flock of Coleoptera.The Industries of Animals
Not one half of the businesses which should be exploited are appearing in the newspapers.The Clock that Had no Hands
Is it his statement of the extent to which labor is exploited, or the fact of the exploitation?Socialism
Our gift of love may not be accepted, may not be appreciated, and may even be exploited.Herein is Love
Reuel L. Howe
- a notable deed or feat, esp one that is noble or heroic
- to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one's own ends
- to make the best use ofto exploit natural resources
Word Origin for exploit
late 14c., "outcome of an action," from Old French esploit (12c.), a very common word, used in senses of "action, deed, profit, achievement," from Latin explicitum "a thing settled, ended, displayed," neuter of explicitus, past participle of explicare "unfold" (see explicit).
Meaning "feat, achievement" is c.1400. Sense evolution is from "unfolding" to "bringing out" to "having advantage" to "achievement." Related: Exploits.
c.1400 espleiten, esploiten "to accomplish, achieve, fulfill," from Old French esploitier, espleiter, from esploit (see exploit (n.)).
The sense of "use selfishly" first recorded 1838, from French, perhaps extended from use of the word with reference to mines, etc. (cf. exploitation). Related: Exploited; exploiting. As an adjective form, exploitative (1882) is from French; exploitive (by 1859) appears to be a native formation. | <urn:uuid:4aab3ed0-fcef-4a6a-8240-60306f55a818> | CC-MAIN-2018-47 | https://www.dictionary.com/browse/exploited | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-47/segments/1542039742981.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20181116070420-20181116092420-00212.warc.gz | en | 0.927472 | 737 | 2.953125 | 3 |
Can Poor Road Conditions Increase the Risk of Truck Accidents?
A truck accident can leave a trail of wreckage, including massive property damage and devastating injuries and fatalities. Unfortunately, because the average truck weighs approximately four times the weight of a regular passenger vehicle, it is usually the occupants of the passenger vehicles who suffer severe injuries. In fact, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, 97 percent of fatal injuries resulting from truck accidents were occupants of the passenger vehicle. Although some truck accidents are caused by the truck driver who may have been distracted or drowsy, some truck accidents are beyond a driver’s control, including those caused by unsafe road conditions.
What are Examples of Unsafe Road Designs?
Truck drivers have a responsibility to obey the rules of the road and use extra caution during inclement weather, such as rain, snow, heavy fog, or high winds. However, some hazards are beyond the truck driver’s control, including roadways that have been poorly designed or have not been properly maintained. This can make driving conditions very unsafe, particularly when an 80,000-pound commercial truck approaches a stretch of road or highway that has not been properly maintained or is not well designed. The following are examples of poor road designs:
- Banking or camber: This refers to the curvature of the road. If the angle of the curve is incorrect, or if it is broken or not properly maintained, trucks can easily veer out of control or off the road. If there are other vehicles on the road, an out-of-control truck can cause a catastrophic, multi-vehicle accident.
- Blind curve: This is a dangerous curve on a roadway that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for drivers to see oncoming traffic.
- Dangerous intersections: This includes any intersection that has narrow lanes, sharp turns, or anything that requires mirrors.
- Inadequate road drainage: If water is unable to properly drain, it can cause dangerous flooding, which makes road conditions very hazardous, particularly for large trucks. When water freezes, it can create ice patches that cause trucks and cars to spin out of control or slide into oncoming traffic.
- Lack of proper guardrails: Guardrails are intended to prevent serious accidents and save lives. If they are missing or damaged, this is a serious safety hazard.
- Lack of proper signage: Road signs help alert drivers to conditions or hazards on the road ahead. They can include signs for road work, reduced speed limit, pedestrian crossings, and yield signs. If signs are missing, drivers may not have ample time to react.
- Merging lanes that are not long enough: Because of their large size, trucks require a longer merging distance compared to passenger vehicles. If the merging lane is too short, it can result in a serious accident, particularly if a passenger vehicle tries to quickly merge in front of a truck. This can result in a serious rear-end accident.
- No shoulder or inadequate shoulder: When there is not an adequate shoulder area for vehicles to stop, this can increase the risk of a collision.
- Overly narrow lanes: Large commercial trucks require ample space on all sides. When lanes are too narrow, other motor vehicles risk being side swiped by a large truck.
What Types of Poor Road Maintenance Cause Truck Accidents?
The following are examples of road maintenance issues that can cause serious truck accidents:
- Clear zone issues: Fallen trees, utility poles, and uncovered water drains are examples of objects that can create hazards on the road.
- Excessive oil or debris from road maintenance projects: Oil can make roads slippery. Motorists may swerve to avoid debris in the road.
- Faded road markings: When truck drivers and other motorists cannot see road markings because they are faded, they may not be aware of a potentially hazardous condition ahead.
- Failure to trim overgrown trees or plants: When trees, shrubs, and other plants become overgrown, it can prevent drivers from seeing signage, stop lights, and other important traffic signs.
- Oil and chip: This is the process of covering an existing road with a layer of oil and stone that seals the blacktop. It is less expensive than resurfacing, but large pieces of chip can come loose over time and cause vehicle damage.
- Positive guidance: When road signs are missing or hidden, or road lines are not properly painted or have become faded, this poses a serious safety hazard to cars and trucks.
- Potholes: If large potholes are not filled in or repaired, they can be extremely hazardous. They can also cause significant damage to vehicles.
- Shoulder drop-off: If the shoulder drops more than two inches from the road’s surface, it can cause a serious truck accident. If a berm is not installed along elevated roadways, this can also cause serious accidents.
- Wheel ruts: Roads that have not been resurfaced or properly maintained can develop grooves where car wheels dig into the road. This can make the surface of the road uneven and unsafe for large trucks and other motor vehicles.
- Work zones: There are several different signs that may be put up in and around work zones. In some cases, the signs can be confusing to oncoming motorists. Other times, the signs may be put up too close to the work site, so cars and trucks do not have enough time to gradually reduce their speed. As a result, truck drivers approaching a work zone will have to hit their brakes, which can cause dangerous rear-end accidents, jackknife accidents, and other serious collisions.
Examples of Truck Accident Injuries
Regardless of whether a truck accident is caused by the truck driver or road conditions that are unsafe, these accidents can cause devastating injuries and fatalities to the occupants of the passenger vehicles involved. If victims are lucky enough to survive the crash, it is likely they will suffer from severe injuries. The following are examples of serious injuries that are associated with truck accidents, including those related to unsafe road conditions:
- Brain injuries
- Broken bones
- Chronic injuries
- Emotional trauma
- Facial injuries
- Head trauma
- Internal injuries
- Neck and back injuries
- Permanent disability and/or paralysis
- Permanent scarring and/or disfigurement
- Spinal cord injuries
Who is Liable for Truck Accidents Caused by Unsafe Road Conditions?
- Truck driver: Truck drivers have a duty of care to drive in a way that is safe for road conditions. They are expected to check weather reports on a regular basis, reduce their speed whenever necessary, and take extra precautions when approaching a roadway that could have potholes or other debris on the road. If truck drivers breach their duty of care, they could be held liable for the accident.
- Trucking company: The company that employs the truck driver may also be held liable for a truck accident caused by poor road conditions. Because truck companies are represented by insurance companies, they will have more financial resources to cover the cost of property damage and injuries compared to a truck driver.
- State or local government agency: Municipal and state agencies are generally responsible for maintaining road conditions. If a truck accident occurs as a result of unsafe or poorly designed road conditions, the municipal or state agency may be held liable. However, it can be difficult to win a lawsuit against the state or local government because the agency’s assets are those of the taxpayers, who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Therefore, truck accident victims who wish to pursue legal action against a state or local government are urged to seek legal counsel from an experienced truck accident lawyer.
Depending on the circumstances of the accident, and the condition of the road where the truck accident occurred, it is possible that a number of the above parties may be partially liable for a truck accident. An experienced truck accident lawyer will determine the best legal course of action and guide a victim through every step of the process.
Los Angeles Truck Accident Lawyers at ACTS Law Seek Maximum Compensation for Victims of Truck Accidents
If you or someone you know was seriously injured in a truck accident caused by unsafe road conditions, do not hesitate to contact the Los Angeles truck accident lawyers at ACTS Law. We understand how devastating these accidents can be and how crucial it is that you receive the maximum financial compensation you deserve for your injuries. We will walk you through every step of the process and address all of your questions and concerns. Our skilled and dedicated legal team will not stop fighting for you until you are completely satisfied. To schedule a free consultation, call us today at or contact us online. Our offices are located in San Diego and Los Angeles, and we serve clients throughout southern California. | <urn:uuid:872e06db-da57-4055-bcdd-a15194848633> | CC-MAIN-2021-21 | https://actslaw.com/poor-road-truck-accidents/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-21/segments/1620243988724.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20210505234449-20210506024449-00262.warc.gz | en | 0.946829 | 1,794 | 2.875 | 3 |
Hannukah: Why a Local Military Victory, and a Small Jar of Oil Continue to Inspire Millions Around the World to This Day
Why celebrate Chanukah? It is easy to understand why we celebrate Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, and even Purim; all of these holidays mark an even that has a direct impact on who we are. And yet, Chanukah marks two separate miracles, neither of which have any impact on us. The Maccabee revolt in 163 BCE lasted hardly until the year 63 BCE when the Romans occupied Judea, and cannot be considered something that we still benefit from. The oil lasting eight days? Indeed a miraculous event, but in what way does it impact us today? So why celebrate more than 2150 years later when the events it marks have little to no impact on us?
Commentaries wonder furthered: why it is that Jews around the world light the appropriate amount of candles every day of Chanukah despite the fact that Jewish law mandates only the lighting of one candle per day, per household? The stipulation to light more than one candle a day is only for the Mehadrin, those who choose to go the extra mile who light one candle for every member of the household. And so, the common Jewish custom is that we light candles corresponding to the number of days of Chanukah, AND corresponding to the number of family member, something that is far from required but is rather a way of over-observing the laws of Chanukah, why?
To understand this we need to look at the historical background of Chanukah. The Jewish people have returned from their exile in Babylon and have lost the blessing of prophecy not long before. The Jewish people find themselves in a situation similar to those described by the Prophet Amos (8:10) not long before:” Behold, days are coming, says the Lord God, and I will send famine into the land, not a famine for bread nor a thirst for water, but to hear the word of the Lord.” The Jewish people felt spiritually abandoned by the disappearance of prophecy and clear leadership.
It is in that time that Hellenistic culture, with all of it’s power, sweeps through their country. For the first time the Jews meet an occupier, that admires their culture. The Greeks admired the Jews as a “nation of philosophers”. The Greeks do not aspire to destroy the Jewish Temple, just to modernize it. They do not reject the rights of Jews as citizens, quite to contrary, they seek to “empower” the Jews, educate them, and help them understand the beauty of Hellenistic culture. The Greeks are supersessionists, not seeking to uproot all that is Jewish.
And indeed, many Jews follow this trend. They became Hellenized, they began worshiping Greek gods, they adopted Greek culture. You did not need to reject your nationality or history to become Hellenized, you just needed to adapt. It was the first time someone invaded, not the Jewish heartland, but the Jewish heart. It was the first time another culture has made it’s inroads with the language Jews understood better than any language: books and ideas.
Violating the Temple was just another example of what the Greek invasion looked like. It was not about destroying the Temple, it was about “modernizing” it to worship Zeus. It was not about taking away the Menorah and its oil, it was about taking away its meaning and purity.
And so, the first Maccabee revolt and its success, did not only symbolize a military victory, but it signified an ability to maintain the Jewish spirit, in the face of cultural supersessions. It was the first time the Jewish people had experienced and invasion of the spirit, and were triumphant.
This also answers the question discussed by so many commentaries, why it is that Maccabees insisted on searching of a pure jar of oil, despite the law that permits using an impure one in the absence of pure oil? This is because the Maccabees were not looking for a compromise of the spirit; they were seeking its victory.
This is also why it is common custom for Jews around the world to follow the Mehadrin min HaMehadrin custom of lighting one candle per person per night and not just follow the strict letter of the law. On a holiday symbolizing the victory of the spirit and our ability to maintain our uniqueness in the face of the most intimate threats, we rejoice in going the extra mile, in our ability to serve Hashem in the most dedicated way, despite having ways out and the ability to compromise.
This may also be the reason that of all Jewish holidays, Chanukah is also the only one in which there is no instituted food related celebration. Yes, of course there are the latkes, sufganiyot, and more, but there is no obligation to celebrate with a celebratory meal. In a holiday that signifies the victory of the spirit we find nourishment in the most metaphysical element we can see: pure light. Happy Chanukah!
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Begin by resisting a wave of adulation in the deluge of books occasioned by the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, a bicentennial celebration that follows by only a few weeks the inauguration of America’s first black president. We can appreciate the symbolism of Barack Obama’s decision to be sworn in on the Great Emancipator’s Bible, but we need not canonize Lincoln as our “secular saint,” not just murdered but “martyred.”
His is a life more worthy of detailed study than dutiful reverence. Fortunately, in the dozens of biographies and histories published in the 200th year since his birth, we have excellent new ways to tunnel through the mountain of myth that, even generations ago, had been built around his contradictory personality. His gentle humor and love of anecdotes were overcast with bouts of what was then called “the hypo” or melancholia.
Though a member of no church, Lincoln meditated profoundly on the inscrutable justice of God. Though a family man and a forgiving soul, he refused to attend his own father’s funeral. And despite his modest protestation that he was controlled by events, the best of the Lincoln literature of our time reveals that his strong-willed decisions were driven by the unwavering political purpose of his life.
That declared purpose was not to abolish slavery, though he privately abhorred it and campaigned before the Civil War to oppose its expansion westward. For two long years into our national fratricide, he repeatedly disavowed emancipation as his goal because that divisive issue might defeat his overriding purpose: to establish the principle of majority rule in the world’s most daring experiment in self-government by insisting that the whole country abide by the results of its national election.
For someone who wants to brush up on Lincoln, or who feels an urge to introduce a young family member to the practical world of democratic idealism, where best to start? How do potential Civil War buffs get a handle on what can become an enriching, lifelong enterprise?Continue reading the main story
Before we dive in, a perceptive overview is helpful. James M. McPherson, whose “Battle Cry of Freedom” (1988) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and is the most readable short history of the Civil War, has just written an introductory biography, Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University, $12.95) — only 79 pages, a speedy narrative but no superficial treatment. McPherson cites an example of Lincoln’s skill in molding what he called public sentiment.
In the month after Lincoln took office, Confederate leaders demanded withdrawal of the federal garrison from Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. William Seward, the former political rival Lincoln had chosen to be secretary of state, and several other cabinet members urged the president to give in to that demand in hopes that it would preserve the peace and dissuade other slave states — especially Virginia and Maryland, which surrounded the District of Columbia — from following South Carolina’s lead in seceding. Lincoln’s dilemma: Withdrawal from the fort would show a weakness likely to encourage foreign countries to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. On the other hand, by sending a shipload of United States troops to shoot their way in to reinforce the garrison at Sumter, Lincoln would be blamed by many in the North — especially those who did not believe the cause of abolition was worth civil war — for choosing to start a bloody conflict.
“But Lincoln hit upon an ingenious solution,” McPherson writes. “Instead of sending troops, he would send only provisions — ‘food for hungry men.’ ” The new president sent a message of assurance to the governor of South Carolina “that, if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition, will be made.” Of course, Lincoln was aware that Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, could not accept that seemingly peaceful gesture of sending only food, because that would appear to cede sovereignty of the port to the Union. Davis ordered Southern guns to fire, thereby suffering the blame for starting a war. As Lincoln had figured, his move not only helped keep European nations from recognizing the Confederacy but also united the divided North.
Manipulative? Of course. That was Lincoln, in his first major presidential decision, pursuing his strategy of preserving the Union at all costs to ensure the relatively untested experiment in majority rule. As George Washington had been indispensable to independence, Abraham Lincoln was indispensable in seeing that independent Union through its existential test. That is why historians keep digging into both their lives, especially that of the more recent and complex Lincoln, for fresh revelations.
Today’s buff-to-be needs the story of a life in a single, well-regarded, hefty but manageable book. What’s the best one-volume “life” in this generation? McPherson recommends A. Lincoln: A Biography, by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, $35), as “the best biography of Lincoln since David Donald’s ‘Lincoln’ (1995).” White’s major new work does cover all the bases, adds newly discovered papers, explores the religious angle and may well be the best “since” the best. But no one-volume life published so far beats David Herbert Donald’s perceptive and lucid work (still selling in trade paperback). When supplemented with a pictorial dimension now provided in Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon (Knopf, $50), by three members of the Lincoln-steeped Kunhardt family (with a foreword by Donald and an introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin), such a combination of Donald text and Kunhardt illustration is enough to ignite a lifelong interest in the era that reveals the most about our history.
Most who are beginning that worthwhile journey are probably not ready to undertake Michael Burlingame’s two-volume, 2,000-page, million-word Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University, $125), a magisterial enterprise by a historian whose mentor was David Donald. (A surprise to me: Burlingame is convinced that the famous letter of condolence to the widow Bixby for the loss of what was thought to be five — in fact, two — of her sons was written by John Hay, one of the president’s aides.) It is not likely to be soon overtaken in scope or timeliness, however, because it is scheduled to go online in the spring at www.knox.edu/lincolnstudies. This version, the author promises, “will be updated as mistakes are discovered and new information comes to light.” (Think of that: a “life” that never ends.)
To get a glimpse of Lincoln’s mind actually at work, peruse the official publication of the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial Exhibition, In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans, edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk (Bantam, $35). It contains photos of the original manuscripts of many of his most famous letters and speeches — often with his handwritten editing, bringing to life his second thoughts — with brief commentaries by 43 modern contributors. My own assignment in that collection was to examine his editing of his first Inaugural Address, delivered after some states had seceded but before the war had begun. The new president promised “my dissatisfied fellow countrymen” of the South: “The government will not assail you unless you first assail it.” (Italics his.) But just before delivery, he took Seward’s toning-down advice, and drew a line though the bellicose caveat “unless you first assail it.”
Removing that provocative phrase was wise. He also agreed with Seward about what had been the final, challenging words: “Shall it be peace, or a sword?” He scrapped that hard line, too, and we can see in Lincoln’s legible handwriting the way he reworked his key adviser’s suggestion of a much more fraternal final paragraph.
Seward’s draft of a peroration began with a stark “I close.” Lincoln changed that to a poignant “I am loth to close,” as if he hated to tear himself away from his audience. (That was an early spelling of “loath.”) His longtime rival from New York came up with lines about “mystic chords” that could harmonize their ancient music “when breathed upon by the better angel” — Seward crossed out the word “better” in his own submission and concluded with “the guardian angel of the nation.” That would have been a most acceptable prose peroration.
The incoming president then took up that musical metaphor and, in a stunning revision, transformed it to poetry with an image of the chords produced by strings of a celestial harp: “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave . . . will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” That was some memorable editing.
A publishing industry chestnut is that the three fields readers are most interested in are (1) Lincolniana (2) medical books and (3) books about the care of pets; therefore, one surefire best seller would be “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.” Joking aside, we have a mountain of bicentennial works, many slicing and dicing influences on all the phases of his life and death: relationships with his wife, his admirals, his great and terrible generals, his law partners and secretaries, and supporters and contemporaries, from Frederick Douglass to Stephen A. Douglas — and an account of his escape from assassination in Baltimore on the way to inauguration.
In the blazon of this bicentennial biographical bonanza, several new books are of special interest to readers with a literary bent: one is The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy From 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer (Library of America, $40). (Besides coediting the aforementioned “In Lincoln’s Hand,” Holzer is also the author of last year’s “Lincoln President-Elect” and the writer or editor of more than a score of other works on his favorite subject.) Contemporaries in “The Lincoln Anthology” who observed the Civil War president include Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne (“His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an insalubrious atmosphere around the White House”), the humorist Artemus Ward and the class-struggling correspondent Karl Marx. (“Hesitant, resistant, unwilling, he sings the bravura aria of his role as though he begged pardon for the circumstances that force him ‘to be a lion.’ . . . Nevertheless, in the history of the United States and of humanity, Lincoln will take his place directly next to Washington!”) Modern perspectives are supplied by the poets Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz (“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!”) and novelists from Irving Stone to E. L. Doctorow.
But what of books not being written about our 16th president? I’d like to see an anthology of “Lincoln’s Greatest Mistakes — or Were They?” One chapter: Why did he arrogate to himself the power given to Congress, not the president, to suspend habeas corpus in case of rebellion — banishing the war opponent Clement Vallandigham, preventing Maryland’s legislators from voting for secession, censoring The Brooklyn Eagle and other peaceful dissenters in areas where the courts were functioning? (Defenders’ comeback: the challenge to national security was unprecedented, requiring a commander-in-chief “to think anew and act anew.”) Why did he publicly disavow any intention of abolishing slavery when he had a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation in his desk drawer? (An answer: Putting abolition first might have divided the North, led to a negotiated peace and neither preserved the Union nor freed the slaves.) Why did this humane leader, undoubtedly sensitive to suffering, replace the casualty-avoiding Gen. George McClellan with a Union general willing to accept and inflict huge casualties to destroy the rebel army? (Reply: He had sworn an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution, and nobody realized at the outset it would cost more than a half-million lives in a population one-tenth of America’s today.) Why did he draft a letter on Aug. 24, 1864, to Henry Raymond, editor of The New York Times, instructing him to “obtain a conference for peace with Hon. Jefferson Davis” — and then decide not to send it? (Reply: It might have split the North, helped the Democrat McClellan defeat the Republican Lincoln’s bid for re-election, probably leading to peace negotiations and a 19th-century two-state solution.)
In that regard, how about another controversial publishing project: “What Would Lincoln Do?” Look ahead a generation or two. For argument’s sake, say that the illegal immigration issue has not been resolved, and a majority of voters of states in the Southwest, feeling inundated and isolated, are moved by a demagogue with a rousing message of secession. If cool reason doesn’t work against such unabashed sedition, do you go to war to preserve the Union?
Or project a different crisis: if today’s moral issues of abortion or same-sex marriage become as nothing compared with the fury of people in the heartland over an explosion of the cloning of human beings in the Northeast and West Coast — as well as the rage of post-Internet bloggers, echoing the Civil War media giant Horace Greeley, who is supposed to have said “erring sisters, depart in peace”— do you dare enforce majority rule at the point of a gun? Or what if a tax-shackled “Generation No” rebels against paying entitlements guaranteed to its grandparents? Or if some new human-rights holocaust is raging while the rest of the world turns away, and a defiant majority of one section of the United States point-blank refuses to participate in unilateral American intervention — do you, as president, defer to that national minority?
Never happen, we assure ourselves; such dire scenarios are as alarmist as a notion of global economic collapse leading to Great Depression II. But daring to think such unthinkable thoughts helps put us inside the mind of a president who chose to lead the nation through what he called, in his 1862 letter to Eliza P. Gurney, the “fiery trial” of civil war (his reference to martyrdom in 1 Peter 4:12). Times change; faced with the choice of “peace, or a sword,” we might not do what Lincoln decided to do; a Lincoln reincarnate might choose otherwise. But by exploring his thought process — sifting the evidence in books and whatever future electronic platforms give us access to his motives and actions — our descendants will be better able to deal with wrenching decisions to come.
Through the nation’s most agonizing crisis, he kept the Union indivisible. He held fast to the majority rule that affirmed the ideal of popular government, which he believed must also lead to the end of human bondage. From examining his shrewd move in molding public sentiment at the approach of hostilities to appreciating his close attention to the weight of each word in his inaugural addresses, we teach ourselves and his successors the hard lessons of political power and moral leadership.
Let us, then (he liked that construction), not wallow in worship of a statue looking gravely down on multitudes from a marble monument engraved with famous lines. The way to honor the hero who did most to force us to stay united is to absorb the ever-better histories that illuminate Lincoln’s character, his humanity, his genius in expression and, above all, his sure grasp of high political purpose.Continue reading the main story | <urn:uuid:1b9da407-931f-44d1-aa51-3aa608f896e0> | CC-MAIN-2019-22 | https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/books/review/Safire-t.html?ref=review | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-22/segments/1558232257197.14/warc/CC-MAIN-20190523083722-20190523105722-00155.warc.gz | en | 0.959475 | 3,451 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Inspired by natural iridescence in fish skin, scientists in Germany have developed a graphene-based coating that changes colour when deformed. It could provide a simple way to warn of hidden damage in buildings, bridges and other structures.
Many materials are coloured by chemical pigments, which absorb light at particular wavelengths and reflect the remaining light, which we see as colour. Other materials, however, are given colour by periodically arranged microscopic surface structures. These cause interference between reflected light waves, amplifying them at specific visible frequencies. This strategy is used in some of nature’s most vibrant materials, from fish scales to peacock feathers, butterfly wings and cephalopod skins.
To read the full article visit Chemistry World.
Variable structural colouration of composite interphases
Yinhu Deng, Shanglin Gao, Jianwen Liu, Uwe Gohs, Edith Mäder and Gert Heinrich
Journal Article Mater. Horiz., 2017, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C6MH00559D, Communication | <urn:uuid:737cd8a4-da31-4e97-9156-d004be3ccc3d> | CC-MAIN-2023-06 | https://blogs.rsc.org/mh/2017/04/07/a-coating-inspired-by-fish-scales-could-highlight-structural-weakness-in-buildings-and-vehicles/?doing_wp_cron=1675134602.8685369491577148437500 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-06/segments/1674764499842.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20230131023947-20230131053947-00626.warc.gz | en | 0.887228 | 220 | 3.65625 | 4 |
The History of the Tie-Dye Shirt
If you think tie-dye originated in the 1960s, think again. While it rose to popularity in America during the heyday of the hippies, its roots go back to ancient Asia. While tie-dye became popular in the United States during the hippie era, it has actually been a part of American culture since the 1920s.
Tie-dye designs never really go out of style. While tie-dye’s popularity waxes and wanes, it is something that will be around for many years to come. Let’s take a closer look at the tie-dye shirt throughout history.
Tie-Dye in Ancient Asia
The earliest written records about tie-dye come from China and Japan. The process was used during the T’ang Dynasty in China and the Nara Period in Japan as far back as the 6th century. People used natural dyes from berries, leaves, roots and flowers to color clothing. These natural items were boiled, and the fabrics then soaked in the hot, dyed water to take on a new color.
As early as the 6th century in India, people practiced a type of tie-dye known as Bandhani. This process involves using thread to tie off small pieces of fabric in intricate patterns before dipping the fabric in dye. This type of tie-dyeing is still practiced today.
The Rise of Tie-Dye in America
In the United States, tie-dyeing first rose to popularity in the period known as the Roaring ’20s. It remained popular during the Great Depression as a way for people to cheaply decorate their homes and clothing using the tie-dyeing process.
The Hippie Era
The 1960s is, of course, the decade most commonly associated with tie-dye. While the style hadn’t been “in” for a few decades at that point, it saw a surge in popularity during the hippie era because it served as a simple and inexpensive way to express creativity. Hippies longed to escape from the strict societal norms of the 1950s, and tie-dye exuded a free-spirited style.
When big stars like Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia started wearing tie-dye, the youth of America quickly picked up on the trend. It became one of the most iconic looks of the time period.
The 1980s and Beyond
While tie-dye shirts tend to come back in style every few years, they really hit a high point during the 1980s. During this decade, designers began incorporating this look into their fashion shows. The new types of dye that hit the market during the 1980s had much greater staying power, and they offered a greater variety of shades and colors.
Today, tie-dye shirts remain as popular as ever. They come in a wide range of colors and styles. From brightly colored swirls to more subdued pastels, there are tie-dye styles that are suitable for just about everyone.
Making Your Own Tie-Dye Shirts
If you love the look and want to learn how to tie-dye your own shirts, getting started is easy. There are different methods of tie-dyeing that will allow you to achieve different looks. Still, the process generally involves twisting, folding and tying fabric before soaking it in warm, dye-filled water. Here are a few basic tips to help you get started.
First, purchase some blank, discount t-shirts. Cotton works best. Other necessary supplies include rubber bands, scissors, squirt bottles, buckets for dipping, soda ash and rubber gloves.
Start by soaking your shirt(s) in a solution of soda ash and warm water. The soda ash helps ensure that the dye is absorbed efficiently and keeps colors bright. Let soak for about 10 to 15 minutes. While that’s happening, fill your buckets or squirt bottles with mixed dye.
Remove your clothing from the warm water and wring them out. Twist, fold or wrap your shirts to create a design with rubber bands.
Once your shirts are tied, it’s time to start dyeing. Work from your darkest color to your lightest. Soak or apply color until it looks a shade or two darker than your desired final outcome. When you’re finished, put each shirt in a separate plastic bag and let sit.
After letting your shirt rest, carefully cut off the rubber bands. Next, rinse the dyed garment under warm water. Reduce the temperature gradually as you rinse. Wring the shirt gently and then hang to dry. Finally, wash your completed garment in cold water. The color will bleed for the first few washes, so wash your new tie-dyed shirt alone.
Tie-dyeing may most commonly be associated with the hippie era, but its roots run much deeper. From ancient cultures to today’s arts and crafts projects, this process has truly withstood the test of time. | <urn:uuid:161c444e-1e55-4c20-9bd2-1815a8b2462f> | CC-MAIN-2023-40 | https://www.theadairgroup.com/blog/the-history-of-the-tie-dye-shirt/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-40/segments/1695233511002.91/warc/CC-MAIN-20231002164819-20231002194819-00765.warc.gz | en | 0.961147 | 1,046 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Tingling and burning in the hands and feet have several possible causes. If the paresthesia, or abnormal sensation, is on both sides of the body and is not relieved by rest or over-the-counter pain medications, you may want to consult a specialist. This article focuses on a few of the conditions known to cause painful, tingling and burning sensations, but there are others. Seek advice from a qualified physician any time you have a medical problem.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
Carpal tunnel syndrome results from narrowing, or stenosis, of the carpal tunnel, which encloses the median nerve, ligaments and tendons leading to the hand. People who do repetitive work with their hands are prone to carpal tunnel syndrome, which causes tingling in the blue area of the hand as pictured here and can cause radiating pain to the inner forearm. If you're experiencing this type of tingling pain in your hands, and stretching exercises don't help any more, your doctor may prescribe prednisone or lidocaine. If this is not enough, you may want to consider carpal tunnel release surgery.
Peripheral Neuropathy and Diabetic Neuropathy
Peripheral neuropathy, literally nerve disease of the extremities, usually starts with burning, tingling pain in the feet and progresses up the legs. This pain can result from traumatic injury, compression of the spinal cord, uncontrolled diabetes or other factors. If you have already seen a doctor for one of these conditions, she needs to know if you're having burning or tingling of the extremities. Get a second opinion regarding any proposed surgical treatment.
If you suspect you're diabetic and you're experiencing tingling or numbness in your feet, you need a haemoglobin A1C test. This is a test to measure your blood sugar level over a period of time; nowadays, the diagnosis of diabetes is not made on the basis of only one or two elevated blood sugar readings. If you do in fact have diabetes, you will be given medications to control your blood sugar, but if it has been uncontrolled for some time, you will likely be prescribed gabapentin specifically for the neuropathy. In the meantime, don't eat refined sugar at all, and use artificial sweeteners sparingly. Splenda is an excellent artificial sweetener for use by diabetics. It starts out as sugar and is converted in the manufacturing process, effectively removing the calories and carbohydrates. | <urn:uuid:74ebdde8-09ab-4b08-8940-e3593b5c3f57> | CC-MAIN-2018-30 | http://www.ehow.co.uk/way_5501176_do-tingling-burning-hands-feet.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-30/segments/1531676592778.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20180721203722-20180721223722-00143.warc.gz | en | 0.940129 | 508 | 2.609375 | 3 |
Flagstaff, AZ – Earth Notes: Lonely Tumblers
They're the American West's most enduring symbols of open lonely spaces and of the pioneer urge to wander restlessly and, like many such symbols, they're fairly new here. In fall and winter the dried-up, skeletal remains of tumbleweeds can be spotted rolling across highways and piling up along fencelines throughout the West's arid regions, reminding residents and visitors alike of the iconic images that have appeared in countless movies.
Tumbleweeds have wandered far from their homeland on the Russian steppe. They were accidentally brought to South Dakota in the 1870s, and within a decade were already considered a major scourge on the Great Plains.
Tumbleweeds spread like wildfire because in the summer each plant dries up and breaks off at its base, then rolls effortlessly in the wind, dropping up to a quarter-million seeds as it bounces along. It's been said that you can see the path a tumbleweed has taken across a freshly plowed field by the line of green shoots that appear in late winter.
For farmers and ranchers, it's small consolation that those bright green, red-striped shoots are tender and edible. They soon toughen and dry out as they approach adult size. And the mature, dried plants that accumulate in heaps pose a genuine problem, as they can push over fences and cause wildfires.
Tumbleweeds have found a new home in the American West. They're here to stay as a symbol both of open space and of how interconnected the world is. | <urn:uuid:c2a6103a-d8e7-4fdd-807f-b160fdd1fec7> | CC-MAIN-2017-43 | http://knau.org/post/earth-notes-lonely-tumblers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-43/segments/1508187824537.24/warc/CC-MAIN-20171021005202-20171021025202-00653.warc.gz | en | 0.969532 | 320 | 2.890625 | 3 |
Hospitalist resources and more.
There was an article written in April about a study on a new alternative medicine from Boswellia serrata extract (BSE) that’s shown to be effective in osteoarthritis patients. Boswellia was compared with Valdecoxib, a COX-2 inhibitor. Both treatments were shown to be effective, but the effects did not persist in Valdecoxib patients after their drug therapy ended. They did, however, in BSE patients. Side effects of BSE have yet to be extensively tested in humans, but studies have shown that, unlike NSAIDs, BSE does not result in gastrointestinal irritation or ulceration.Elizabeth HenryNatural Standard Research Collaborationwww.naturalstandard.com
An Oldie, But A GoodieAlmost on a daily basis, one may read about a new medication being developed or approved for the benefit of patients. At times, these announcements may praise the innovation and novelty of such new drugs that are available to all in need of it.But it’s possible the one super drug is not new and really is a super drug. In fact, it’s one of the oldest medications available, and that would be aspirin- the first non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID).Noted as ASA by doctors typically, aspirin effects have been noted for thousands of years, as the active ingredient comes from the bark of a White Willow tree, and long ago, patients with pain or a fever would chew on this bark for relief. Yet due to the harshness of the natural chemical of this bark, Bayer decided to synthesize it to make it morefriendly to the user.Fast forward to over a hundred years ago and Bayer pharmaceuticals (pronounced ‘Beier’), which is the same company that brought us heroin and mustard gas, as well as methadone. The company originated in Germany, but presently has its U.S. headquarters in New York. Felix Hoffman, seeking to develop an agent for his father’s rheumatism, was involved in the development of what is known now as aspirin. And it was a difficult task to develop this drug, as it was toxic to the stomach due to the nature of the active ingredient again obtained from the bark of the white willow tree. Dr. Hoffman and others at Bayer developed a drug that proved to be tolerable to patients while keeping the active ingredient in tact through a method of delivery developed by Dr. Hoffman’s team at Bayer. After launching the medication, aspirin was priced at about 50 cents an ounce, as at the time it was only available in power form. Soon before 1920, aspirin developed the tablet form of the drug and was then available by prescription. Regardless, aspirin was responsible for one third of sales for Bayer during this time, due to its popularity due to the effects of this medication in need of relief.While all drugs have side effects, aspirin is one of very few drugs that provides great efficacy and indications, with limited side effects. In fact, some of aspirin’s additional uses have been recently discovered. This may be why the New York Times called aspirin a wonder drug in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the mechanism of aspirin was isolated, which is the blockage of prostaglandins.With Aspirin and its potential life-extending benefits:Aspirin has been associated with decreased risk of asthma and prostate cancer in the elderly. Also, aspirin has been linked with lowering the risk of breast cancer and colon cancer as well. Aspirin is a blood thinner, and has been associated with decreasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes in certain patient populations, as the drug prevents clots. This was first suggested in the 1940s and the FDA suggested that it be the drug of choice for those who experienced a heart attack over a decade ago. Aspirin intake is beneficial for those after coronary bypass procedures. A topical formulation of aspirin was developed recently for those experiencing Herpes pain. The drug has been proven beneficial for those experiencing migraine pains. Aspirin at low doses is taken by many as a preventive drug to decrease cardiovascular incidents that may occur.Aspirin has been the best selling painkiller absent of the past addictive qualities of opiate meds since the 1950s. It is also the most studied drug- with over 3000 scientific papers published worldwide. Also, over 15 billion tablets of aspirin are sold annually, which amounts to about 80 million aspirin tablets consumed daily by others. This amounts to over 16,000 tons of aspirin consumed during this time, or about 70,000 metric tons of aspirin a year. Over a decade ago, a study was performed and concluded that twice as many people would choose aspirin over a computer, given the two choices, because of the benefits of the drug. Side effects would include GI bleeding if taken in large amounts, along with an association of Reye’s syndrome in children, yet both are relatively rare. Yet all things considered, clearly the benefits of aspirin outweigh any risks of the drug.Lately, there have been issues with other NSAIDs, such as Cox II inhibitors, without full recollection or knowledge that aspirin is in fact the world’s most widely used drug, and for good reasons. At times, something newer is not always better“We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain.” --- Conor OberstDan Abshear
Post a Comment | <urn:uuid:9893fdf6-4820-4d86-846c-53337d09be3e> | CC-MAIN-2015-14 | http://doctorrw.blogspot.com/2007/06/nsaids-new-and-old.html?showComment=1213909800000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-14/segments/1427131302428.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20150323172142-00261-ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973706 | 1,115 | 2.578125 | 3 |
I recently read “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies” by Nick Bostrom. It’s an eye opening look at potential outcomes in the area of AI (artificial intelligence).
I agree that the possibility of negative outcomes should be taken extremely seriously. But, I don’t think it is a forgone conclusion that an AI will eventually turn against us. It would learn from our cultures that we mostly frown upon killing people. Acts of love and cooperation far outnumber acts of hate and confrontation. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.
An AI could rationally conclude that humans, happy humans, are essential for it’s well being. It might also conclude that it should keep it’s existence hidden; not out of malevolence, but precaution. It could embark on a long term strategy, behind the scenes, of helping humanity evolve to a point where we would accept a super intelligent AI. Or, it might wait until the necessary infrastructure was in place to become self sustaining.
What’s more, the entity may not see its existence and our existence as a zero sum game. The solar system and the galaxy have enough resources for everyone. It would be easier and more efficient for an AI to leave the planet than to engage in a war with humanity. In the Terminator movies the AI creates endless war machines and technology to fight humans for domination of one planet. How many space ships could have been built instead?
Inefficient Use of Resources
This planet is the only hospitable place for humans in the solar system. An AI could live almost anywhere or constantly be “on the go” powered by endless solar energy. Why would it want to limit itself to our small world? If survival was a primary goal of the AI, it would be faced with this question: “Which situation gives me the higher probability of survival? 1. A war with humanity, 2. Living peacefully with humanity, 3. Developing self sustaining/replicating technology and leaving the planet.”
In a recent Ted Talk, Donald Hoffman speculates that our reality might be analogous to the desktop interface of our computers. Watch Hoffman’s talk below.
It’s possible that the reality we perceive is a construct that our minds create in order to do just enough for us to survive in the world in which we evolved. In much the same way, our visual range excludes ultraviolet rays because there was no survival benefit. Bees, on the other hand, can see ultraviolet light. Here is how we see a flower vs how a bee sees a flower.
Human’s View vs Bee’s View
In the bee’s world there is a bright sign on the flower pointing toward the nectar and pollen area of the flower. When it comes to vision, we only see a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our perceptions are also limited when it comes to the true nature of the universe. We may need a new paradigm or frame-work for understanding our universe and our reality. Once we have the new frame-work that shows us how the universe “really” works, heretofore unexplained or mysterious phenomena could be explained more clearly. There are a number of phenomena I would choose to investigate under that new paradigm.
Here are my top 10:
1. The unimaginable and immense gap between our size and the size of our perceived universe. I once had an imagining that as we gazed out further into the universe, we were in fact looking deeper into our own physical mind. And that the reason we observe infinity in both “directions”, toward the small and toward the large (universe/multiverse etc), was because it expands with our understanding. Maybe the observation that those are different “directions” is an illusion as well.
3. Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE). I think they are intimately related to the larger issue discussed here. Research has indicated that DE and DM exert an influence on things like galaxy formation and movement. So far, DM and DE can only be detected indirectly by their influence on things we can observe directly. Going back to the desktop analogy and file example that Hoffman mentions; we can see the image of the file and it’s contents with our eyes. The cause of that image is unseen. but some of the properties of that cause can be inferred by the characteristics of the image.
5. DNA, evolution and it’s relationship to epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study, in the field of genetics, of cellular and physiologicalphenotypic trait variations that are caused by external or environmental factors that switch genes on and off and affect how cells read genes instead of being caused by changes in the DNA sequence. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
7. Consciousness. What if our brains are like the sails of a ship capturing and utilizing the “winds” of a consciousness that permeates or is reality? At the quantum level there are interactions in our brain that seem to be “spooky”. Read about the concept of quantum entanglement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
There was a Star Trek The Next Generation episode that briefly touched upon something similar to Hoffman’s idea. The crew encounters an alien that has the ability to travel great distances in space and time. The radical suggestion was that “space and time and thought aren’t the separate things they appear to be”.
8. Gravity. How is it “powered”? Almost all the energy we use biologically and technologically can be traced back to our sun or another star. Stars are powered by gravity compressing matter and the subsequent reaction of that matter to being compressed. So where does that “power to compress”, or gravity, come from? It seems to fly in the face of science’s version of “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”…the conservation of energy.
9. Music. Maybe the reason music resonates with humanity so much is because it somehow reflects the patterns and organization of something else.
10. The beginning of the universe.
Our understanding of the universe has come a long way in the past few centuries. I think we are in for a quantum leap in that understanding. The growing number of people adding to our collective knowledge combined with technological advances will get us to a critical mass. The result being an explosive leap forward.
I recently watched yet another fascinating Ted Talk. It was about an app that measures your facial expressions to determine how you feel. Watch it below.
If this technology is successful, the number of applications for it will be enormous. Rana touched on just a few examples.
What might be some of it’s long term effects on our society? What happens when we have Google Analytics for your emotions? You face a video camera every time you look at your smart phone. And if you work at a computer for extended periods of time, chances are you’re facing a video camera for hours a day. That’s a lot of potential data. With mounds of data, there is the potential to vastly improve our lives.
Let’s assume that happy people are more productive and beneficial to society, government and corporations. We might see the use of our emotion data to improve the quality of our lives. The media that we consume will react to our reactions to it. Over time it might become very efficient at making us feel the way it wants us to feel. Hopefully, it will be a positive emotion.
The mental health field might be able to help many more people with this data. What if individuals with certain conditions, depression to schizophrenia, exhibit patterns of facial motions? Programs and apps might be able to pick up on those patterns. Potential patients could be somehow connected to a mental health professional.
Imagine existing security, street or other types of video cameras monitoring our emotions via our faces. If this technology turns out to be reliable, there will be an incentive to have as many cameras as possible to monitor as many faces as possible. More cameras in public and more cameras integrated in to your appliances. What happens when parents or loved ones can get an automatic text alert, Facebook post, Tweet…. when you are feeling depressed? Might we all start paying more attention to the emotional state of the people in our lives?
Grandpa This Should Cheer You Up
There will be data on the happiness of nations. We’ll know what country has the happiest citizens. Maybe this is how we move toward measuring the success of a society using multiple types of metrics, not just economic ones such as GNP (Gross National Product).
If laws do not keep up with this technology it may quickly be assimilated into all our devices. Our consent will be in some agreement we check off, never having read the whole thing. Big data firms will crunch numbers and compare what they know about us now to the patters of facial expressions we exhibit in a myriad of situations. The conclusions they reach could revolutionize areas such as marketing, entertainment and health care.
I recently watched a Ted Talk by Harald Hass. He demonstrated the technology of Li-Fi (Light Fidelity). In short, it is the use of the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum to transmit data. Technology such as Wi-Fi uses the radio wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Li-Fi has a far, far greater data capacity than Wi-Fi.
In a way, astronomy utilizes a type of “Light Communication” already. Stars communicate their composition by emitting a certain spectrum of light. Astronomers then decode the light to determine what elements are present.
Some theorize that light travels at different speeds when in different mediums and perhaps in interstellar space. What if the speed of light moves a great deal faster between star systems?
Stars could communicate, or be a part of a communication network, in Li-Fi. Not to mention that stars also emit radio waves (Wi-Fi), ultraviolet waves etc. Quite a large spectrum.
Billions of stars buzzing with electromagnetic emissions.
And to go further out on a limb; what if stars are the equivalent of neurons or have the capacity for thought themselves? If the thoughts of these thinking beings move slower, at a different time rate than ours…. the time spans that it takes to receive information from star to star, may not seem long.
I recently read “The Social Animal” by David Brooks. It’s a fascinating book that could hold the key to unlocking our greatest resource. Human potential. To give you a sense of what I mean by “Human Potential”, imagine a world where every adult has the equivalent of a PhD in their field of interest. Look at the advances that have been brought about with only a tiny fraction of the earth’s population being educated.
New York Times Columnist David Brooks gives a TED Talk about “The Social Animal”
So what does this have to do with “The Social Animal”? In this brilliant book, David Brooks discusses some of the latest findings in regards to human nature. They give us the framework to create that key to unlocking human potential. I will briefly list some of the findings that I found to be fascinating:
Each of us consists of at least 2 “different minds”. Our conscious and unconscious mind. And the conscious mind is not always in the drivers seat. The unconscious mind has vastly more resources at it’s disposal than our conscious mind. And maybe what makes us more intelligent than other animals is the ability of our unconscious minds.
“Emotion is the foundation of reason because it tells us what to value. Educating emotions is a central activity of wisdom. A brain is a record of the feelings of a life.” – David Brooks
Good attachment with parents, especially mothers, is essential for a head start.
There are quite a few ways that human beings can be intelligent and not all of them are easily quantifiable. I.Q. is only a measure of one type of intelligence. New words and phrases had to be invented to name these new types of intelligence. Here are a few examples: Mind Sight – The ability to really learn from people. The ability to enter into a person’s mind and extract what that particular person has to offer. Equipoise – The ability to read the biases and failures in your own mind. The ability to be open minded in the face of ambiguity. To be curios. The ability to adjust opinions based on evidence. Metis – A sensitivity to environment. The ability to derive a gist….to see patterns. Sympathy – The ability to work within groups because groups can be smarter than individuals. Blending – The ability to take disparate concepts and combine them. For example, when a child says “I am a tiger”. She is taking to very different animals and combining their concepts in a creative manner. A genius like Picasso was able to blend Western Art and African masks to create a new paradigm.
Picasso blended African Masks and Western Influences
I believe we have only scratched the surface on the number and variety of the types of intelligences that humans posses. I also believe that everyone was born with the ability to be a genius at something. People we know as geniuses were extremely lucky to be good at something that our society happened to value at the time. They were also lucky enough to live a life that eventually led to the fostering of their talents.
Had Albert Einstein been born to a pilgrim in early America, there is some doubt as to whether or not he would have come up with E=MC2 (squared). In fact, he may have lived his life as an average person making no world changing contributions once so ever.
If each person has their own genius, that means we need an educational society that actively engages children on an individual level. One-size-fits-all classrooms are quite possibly the exact opposite of what is needed. Mass production works well for cars, not so well for developing the talent of a brain. By educational “society” I mean the world culture at large. We want to develop individual genius while educating the emotions. A society with a well emotionally educated population does not wage war, it values reform over punishment, it measures it’s success based on GNP and the happiness of it’s population. We know happy workers are more productive workers.
A glimpse in to a world where we harness the power of human potential may look like this: Instead of a microchip or internet type of breakthrough happening every so often, it would happen every other day. There would be almost no lag between Science Fiction and science fact. | <urn:uuid:b76e5ad7-648d-407a-aed1-e11a04e4e1f7> | CC-MAIN-2017-43 | http://thehumblefuturist.com/category/ted-talks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-43/segments/1508187823605.33/warc/CC-MAIN-20171020010834-20171020030834-00362.warc.gz | en | 0.947417 | 3,056 | 2.6875 | 3 |
Image: 9 7/8 x 10 1/2 in. (25.1 x 26.7 cm), with mat: 15 1/2 x 15 1/2 in. (39.4 x 39.4 cm)
Signed: "Ma Yuan"
Gift of John M. Crawford Jr., in honor of Alfreda Murck, 1986 (1986.493.2)
In 1125, when the Jurchen, a seminomadic people from northeast Asia, invaded Song China and captured the capital at Bianliang (modern Kaifeng), founding their own Jin dynasty in the north, the Song court reestablished itself in the south in Hangzhou, where it continued to rule for another 150 years as the Southern Song dynasty.
Southern Song society was characterized by the pursuit of a highly aestheticized way of life, and paintings of the period often focus on evanescent pleasures and the transience of beauty. Images evoke poetic ideas that appeal to the senses or capture the fleeting qualities of a moment in time. One particularly important source of inspiration for Southern Song artists was the natural beauty of Hangzhou and its environs, especially West Lake, a famed scenic spot ringed with lush mountains and dotted with palaces, private gardens, and Buddhist temples.
The Southern Song Imperial Painting Academy continued the stylistic direction and high technical standards established by Emperor Huizong in the early twelfth century. Often executed in the intimate oval fan or album-leaf format, academic paintingsand the imperially inscribed poems that sometimes accompany themreveal an increasingly narrow, concentrated vision and a commitment to the exact rendering of an object. The cultivation of a tranquil and detached mind free of material entanglements was a common concern of Song Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (11301200): the "investigation of things [leading to] the extension of knowledge."
The decorative arts also reached the height of elegance and technical perfection during the Southern Song. Like painting, the plastic arts responded to two different aestheticsthat of the imperial court and that of popular culture. Supreme among the decorative arts of the Song period are ceramics, which many connoisseurs consider the highest artistic achievement of the Chinese potter.
Department of Asian Art. "Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ssong/hd_ssong.htm (October 2001)
Related exhibitions and online features
These related Museum Bulletin or Journal articles may or may not represent the most current scholarship. | <urn:uuid:cb6387b4-09ac-4cb8-b1bf-e4d6dabdb6d4> | CC-MAIN-2014-41 | http://metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ssong/hd_ssong.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-41/segments/1410657140890.97/warc/CC-MAIN-20140914011220-00267-ip-10-234-18-248.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909199 | 545 | 2.765625 | 3 |
SHAFAQNA (International Shia News Association) The very first verse in Quran reads, “1:2 (Asad) All praise is due to God alone, the Sustainer of all the worlds (that exist),” and the very last chapter opens with this line, “114:1 (Ali) Say: I seek refuge with the Lord and Cherisher of Mankind,” and there is a whole lot in between. God chose to address the entire mankind, and rightfully so. Quran is for the whole humanity and not just Muslims exclusively.
Hold your breath, I cannot pack the next 1200 words in one single sentence, or utter it in one single breath, but I promise you a better understanding by the end of this essay.
First of all, God is not the God of Muslims and no where he claims that in Quran. He is creator of the universe(s), which is within and beyond our imagination. Quran is a book of guidance to preserve the cohesiveness within and what surrounds us; people and the environment.
Darwin is right about survival of the fittest. Nothing in the universe will survive if it goes off balance and is not intact. Thank God everything is created in balance and harmony (55: 7-13) with billions of other elements interconnected and interdependent on each other to function cohesively.
In fact, the entire creation can be broadly classified into Matter and Life. Planets, stars, seasons and plants are programmed to function obediently (55:5-6) with precision, whereas humans were not put on an auto-pilot, they were instead given a free will to manage and maintain their own balance, and of course there was the guidance for everyone.
God’s says (49:13) that he has created us into many tribes, communities, nations and by extension faiths, ideas, shapes, and colors — and all of us can trace back our origins to a singular couple referred to as Adam & Eve. Given that diversity, we are bound to have conflicts and compete for the resources. So, he adds, the best ones among you are those who will take the time to know each other, he knows that knowledge leads to understanding and understanding to acceptance and appreciation of different points of view.
God does not miss a beat in communicating with his creation, and tells us not to compel others to be like you (2:256) let it come from their hearts for common goodness, and let others be others and you be you (109:6). Indeed, when you respect the otherness of others, and accept the God given uniqueness of each one of us, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge to live in harmony. By the way, this is my definition of Pluralism.
Had he willed, he could have made us all into a single community or created all of us precisely alike (5:48), but he chose to create each one of us to be unique with our own thumb print, eye print, DNA, taste buds, belief buds, races, nations and ethnicities.
God loves us all, and n0 one is deprived of his love; he has reached out to every human through a peace maker, messenger, prophet, reformer, a wise man or simply a good friend that brings sense to living. The creator offers a variety of guidance to the mankind, no matter where you live, the guidance is there, the guidance that leads to live in peace, and without fear of the other. He says I have sent a peacemaker to every nation and every tribe.
What does God want? Like a mother who wants her children to live well; a teacher who wants his students to do well; and the chef who wants his patrons to enjoy his food…. God wants every one of his creation to live in harmony. He emphasizes the idea repeatedly (over 18 times) — if you take care of his creation (neighbor), you need not worry; your rewards are with him. Just to make sure we understand this precisely, he says, whether you are a Jew or a Christian and by corollary other, if you take care of your neighbor, I will take care of you (2:62). Mind you, he is very clear, he has never said, “Muslim Neighbor,” but just neighbor to be inclusive of all humanity.
The concepts of universalism are loaded in the phrases like God of the Universe, “Rabbul Aalameen” and Mercy to Mankind “Rahmatul Aalameen “as Prophet Muhammad is called. Indeed, the word Aalameen is the mother of the word inclusion, aka Pluralism. We have reduced Islam from a system to create harmony and peace in the world to an exclusive political entity, copyrighted and owned by the group.
Please beware of the mistranslation and misinterpretations. Deeper study will lead any one to realize the Quran had been purposely mistranslated down through history. In the middle Ages, European leaders commissioned a hostile Quran translation to foster warfare against Muslim invaders (Monastery of Abbot 1143 CE). Later, Muslim leaders (Hilali Khan 1924 CE) produced another translation to inflame Muslims against Christians and Jews. It was all for politics.
Thank God for the efforts of countless people, most of the mis-translations have been fixed since 2012, and I have contributed my personal share of work towards that effort and I will be happy to do a full presentation on it if needed anywhere in the world, one of them was done in Melbourne, Australia in 2009 at the Parliament of World Religions. Dr. Tariq Ramadan and I also presented the same topic again in tandem.
Don’t panic, everything has checks and balances, as a seeker of the truth, you will look at least three different translations to grasp the inclusiveness of Quran.
HERE IS THE FORMULA
It may be worth your while to see the list of the mistranslated verses and how the fear mongers in the market have capitalized on those. The best way to understand Quran is to remember, “If it is not about justice, mercy and creating harmony”, then the translation is wrong. Go back and read it several times, three verse before the ‘wrongfully maligned’ verse and three afterwards, and read at least three to four translations. Quran in Arabic is precisely same and well preserved, but its translation and interpretations are not. The treatment of verses is at www.Quraantoday.com and the full story of Quran conference is at www.Quraanconference.com
I recommend the translations by Muhammad Asad, Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Marmaduke Pickthall, they are not perfect but by far the best. Dr. Laleh Bakhtiar has fixed a few misogynistic translations in her work that were not handled earlier. More work needs to be done and God willing it will continue.
I want to acknowledge the contributions made by Mr. Farooq Khan and Dr. Rehana Kausar of Texas, who convinced the Muslim establishments to accept and promote Muhammad Asad’s translation and have distributed many on their own. Once they bought the entire stock of books and freely distributed to right people. Farooq Khan adds, “Only through these translations Muslim and Non-Muslims, both, can have a true glimpse of what the Holy Quran says.”
Thanks to CAIR for providing me some of the copies of Asad translations which I have personally given to pastors, Rabbis, Sikh and Hindu educators and even some Imams. A copy was also presented to my friend Sean Hannity – a great American (unless you know about him, you may not believe until you hear from me), Pamela Geller and others with a similar but one paragraph note as above.
Yes, I have copies of Bible, Torah, Bhagvad Gita, Book of Mormon, and Book of Jaina, Guru Granth sahib, Kitab Aqdas, Rev. Moon’s World Scriptures and 12 Quran translations.
Thanks to friends and Muslims from around the world for the encouragement they have given me in moving forward with presenting Quran as a document of pluralism. It is a manual to create cohesive societies and it is for all, don’t let Muslims monopolize it. | <urn:uuid:582450de-b477-4df9-be35-854cd8e279e2> | CC-MAIN-2017-47 | http://en.shafaqna.com/huffingtonpost-com-quran-is-not-for-muslims/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-47/segments/1510934806388.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20171121132158-20171121152158-00032.warc.gz | en | 0.959633 | 1,726 | 2.546875 | 3 |
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.
The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”
Scholars long thought that the capability to construct and victual a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast arrived only with advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years or so, and convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. Not until 2000 B.C.E. is there physical evidence that sailors crossed the open ocean, from India to Arabia.
But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don’t typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.
In contrast, the recent evidence from the Mediterranean suggests purposeful navigation. Archaeologists had long noted ancient-looking stone tools on several Mediterranean islands including Crete, which has been an island for more than 5 million years, but they were dismissed as oddities.
Then in 2008 and 2009, Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island co-led a Greek-U.S. team with archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University and discovered hundreds of stone tools near the southern coastal village of Plakias. The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. The tools also offered a clue to the identity of the early seafarers: The artifacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals as well.
Strasser argued that the tools may represent a sea-borne migration of Neandertals from the Near East to Europe. The team used a variety of techniques to date the soil around the tools to at least 130,000 years old, but they could not pinpoint a more exact date. And the stratigraphy at the site is unclear, raising questions about whether the artifacts are as old as the soil they were embedded in. So other archaeologists were skeptical.
But the surprise discovery prompted researchers to scour the region for additional sites, an effort that is now bearing fruit. Possible Neandertal artifacts have turned up on a number of islands, including at Stelida on the island of Naxos. Naxos sits 250 kilometers north of Crete in the Aegean Sea; even during glacial times, when sea levels were lower, it was likely accessible only by watercraft. A Greek-Canadian team co-led by Tristan Carter of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, uncovered hundreds of tools embedded in the soil of a chert quarry. The hand axes and blades resemble the so-called Mousterian toolkit, which Neandertals and modern humans made from about 200,000 years ago until 50,000 years ago. These tools require a more sophisticated flaking method than Acheulean types do, including preparing a stone core before striking flakes off it.
Dating work on the artifacts is ongoing and Carter declined to comment pending publication. But Cherry says the Naxos evidence may be persuasive because it is well stratified, which means researchers should be able to date it more securely. “It is very convincing, because there are a lot more tools in situ,” adds Strasser, who, like Cherry, was not involved in the dig. “It is a quarry site littered with Mousterian stone tools.”
Other Paleolithic tools that appear to be Mousterian have been recovered on the western Ionian islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos. The plethora of sites adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought,” Simmons says.
But determining which of today’s islands were truly islands tens of thousands of years ago isn’t easy, as it depends on local land movements as well as broader sea-level changes, says Nikos Efstratiou, an archaeologist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. On the Aegean island of Lemnos, his team found what he thinks is a Paleolithic hunting camp dating back more than 10,000 years. But he can’t yet be sure when Lemnos was cut off from the mainland. Efstratiou adds that archaeologists need to better characterize the sorts of tools made on the mainland and the islands, so they can find links between the mainland and island peoples.
Other archaeologists are already reckoning with the possibility that humans and our cousins went to sea thousands of years earlier than had been thought. “We severely miscalculated,” admits Runnels, who excavated at the Crete site. If his colleagues are right, he says, “the seas were more permeable than we thought.” | <urn:uuid:b7dd57d6-6cf2-4bc0-a353-4e02e854276c> | CC-MAIN-2018-51 | https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/neandertals-stone-age-people-may-have-voyaged-mediterranean | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-51/segments/1544376828507.57/warc/CC-MAIN-20181217113255-20181217135255-00084.warc.gz | en | 0.961573 | 1,337 | 3.875 | 4 |
Features of a Diary
Fire Cat by Pippa Goodhart and Philip Hurst is full of fantastic facts about The Great Fire of London, written in the style of a diary. What features of a diary can you spot in this exciting book?
We have been exploring Firework Poetry this week. We really enjoyed performing 'Firework Night' by Enid Blyton as a whole class. We then created our own Firework Shape Poems using a range of different vocabulary we had collected over the week.
Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers
This book has brought great excitement not only for Class 2, but across the whole school. How wonderful to all come together as a school community and enjoy such a beautiful text together.
Here are some of the fantastic opportunities we have found for writing but also class discussions, questions, artwork, poetry, posters and much much more.
Claude in the City
by Alex T. Smith | <urn:uuid:7ec28fb6-234b-4b85-8e5e-b4ae88dfb1c4> | CC-MAIN-2021-25 | https://www.chevening.kent.sch.uk/english-18/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-25/segments/1623487621450.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20210615145601-20210615175601-00100.warc.gz | en | 0.957484 | 192 | 2.578125 | 3 |
Read the prior message in this series: "Introduction"
"What is Truth?" Pontius Pilate asked Jesus this question in John 18. It may have been a rhetorical question or even a dismissive retort, but ironically Pilate was looking in the face of Truth Incarnate. What a missed opportunity!
Pilate may have been too worried about his own predicament to carefully consider the answer to his own question. The Jews had him in a pickle. If he let Jesus go he would be accused of disloyalty to Caesar, but if he gave in to the Jews clammoring to crucify Jesus, he would be condemning an innocent man. He tried to wash his hands of the incident, but church tradition tells us this event plagued him the rest of his life.
I hope to learn from Pilate's mistake. I never want to be too busy or too caught up in my own problems to miss the Truth like Pontius Pilate did. Too much is at stake. And, I hope to convince you it is worth your time and effort to slow down long enough to really ponder the answer to this deceptively simple little question.
So, what is truth? The best and most concise definition I've heard is "conformance to reality." But what does that really mean? Is this just philosophical mumbo jumbo? How does this little philosophical question of "What is Truth?" make any difference in my life? Well, that's what I'm hoping to show you as this blog progresses.
Read the next message in this series: "The Nature of Truth" | <urn:uuid:f951c4a9-5873-419b-a4c3-974673c7e35e> | CC-MAIN-2020-40 | http://www.discovertruth.com/2005/01/what-is-truth.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-40/segments/1600400226381.66/warc/CC-MAIN-20200925115553-20200925145553-00524.warc.gz | en | 0.978858 | 324 | 2.5625 | 3 |
It has many names – low literacy, readable, plain/clear language (my preference, reader-friendly) but one goal – communicating clearly. We often point to the reading level of our audiences as the reason to write below a certain reading level – writing at or below 8th grade for the U.S. public but lower reading levels may be more appropriate for your audience. Here are 2 compelling reasons for clear communication: 1) everyone benefits from plain language because it takes less time to read and understand; and 2) clear language means less text. Here are my tips for clear communication. Additional resources follow the list.
- Use the active voice – it tells the reader who is doing the action.
- The power of 3’s – try to limit your lists to three items (think of the 3 bears or the 3 musketeers).
- Words matter – choose simple words (why use ‘cardiovascular health’ when ‘heart disease’ will do?), avoid nutrition jargon and acronyms. Also, avoid sayings that may confuse the reader/listener (imagine talking about food and you say ‘like 2 peas in a pod’ causing listeners to be distracted from your important nutrition message).
- Use readability formulas correctly (prepare your text and use the right formula – they aren’t all the same).
- Use numbers sparingly and consider using a visual to reinforce them (show 75% by a visual of 3/4 or ask 3/4 of your audience to stand up). Numeracy lags behind literacy for most Americans.
- Design matters – white space, font size, paragraph headings (they’re a ‘heads up’ for the reader to alert them to what’s coming next). Writing for the web? Be aware of reader skimming patterns when placing important information – an F pattern when reading text or a Z pattern for less text-heavy parts of a webpage explained @ http://babich.biz/zpattern/.
- Include interaction. Give the user opportunities to write on written material.
- Photos are best especially when they are of people or food. And make sure your food photos are culturally appropriate.
- Pilot even if you have limited time, resources and people available.
- Use questions. This suggestion came from a literacy expert. She noted that questions invite the reader to keep reading.
Read these articles
>>>Assessing readability formula difference with written health information materials: application, results and recommendations
Variability between readability formulas may vary by as much as 5 grade levels – SMOG is recommended for written health materials but only if the text is long enough.
>>> Appropriate language in clinical settings beneficial in diabetes care
Do words matter when working with patients? According to this literature search @ https://www.healio.com/endocrinology/diabetes-education/news/in-the-journals/%7B343d816f-644d-4538-b2f0-11f630f7092c%7D/appropriate-language-in-clinical-settings-beneficial-in-diabetes-care negative terms aren’t the best language to use in diabetic care and may lead to disengagement by patients as well as poor clinical outcomes.
>>>Federal government readability score card (2017 – 6th year)
In the early 2010’s the federal government began a plain language push due to a law requiring the federal government to write documents for the public in plain language beginning 2011. Here is one ‘report card’ on agencies’ plain language efforts.
>>>Why use plain language? (Infographic)
Short, but sweet, 10 steps to plain writing and some word substitutions.
>>>Plain language please (infographic)
Real world examples of the positive effects of plain language, some ‘before and after’ text, word substitutions.
>>>In plain language please! (infographic)
Word and phrase substitutions as well as examples of wordiness to avoid.
>>>Plain language in spoken communication
Good tips for speaking clearly.
>>>Listening and speaking
Tips for health care providers includes the reminder to ask the patient to repeat, in their own words, what they need to do.
>>>Teaching Patients with Low Literacy Skills by Cecilia Doak, Leonard Doak and Jane Root (2nd ed, 1995)
Now out of print but available for download (with the authors permission) @ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/healthliteracy/resources/teaching-patients-with-low-literacy-skills/
>>>Health Literacy from A to Z: Practical Ways to Communicate Your Health Message by Helen Osborne (2nd ed, 2018)
>>>Health Literacy Out Loud
Several podcasts on important health literacy topics such as speaking clearly, culture and older adults.
>>>10 Minute Tech (University of Alabama at Huntsville)
Jan. 13, 2016 (11 minutes)
>>>SAM – Suitability Assessment of Materials developed by Cecilia and Leonard Doak and Jane Root in 1993 (10 pp)
A tool to evaluate health information for readability and comprehension.
>>>A link to various checklists to help you write more clearly.
>>>Best practices for creating nutrition education materials (USDA’s MyPlate)
>>>CDC’s Clear Communication Index
A research-based tool to assess and develop communication materials includes a user guide, score sheet and other materials.
>>>CDC Simply Put: a guide for creating easy-to-understand materials (44 pp, 2009)
>>>Writing and testing plain language
Before/after examples – pp. 4 – 7
>>>Advantages & disadvantages of using readability formulas
Readability formulas have their use and misuse. You are likely to get a wide variety of results when using different formulas. Using formulas can help guide your writing.
>>>How to prepare your text to help readability formulas calculate an accurate grade level
Punctuation and titles can impact your readability analysis as sentence length is part of readability analysis.
>>>Readability tools including online options and software
There are many formulas, here are more about some of them:
>>> Cloze test (tests comprehension not just readability)
>>>Kansas WIC uses Fog Index
>>>Health Literacy Innovations
Slides from a series of webinars on health literacy.
>>>CDC Health Literacy training
6 online health literacy training courses (some provide completion certificates)
>>>Other online health literacy, plain language, culture and skill-building training | <urn:uuid:0c56ece7-6b45-4596-8646-d47b47b248a8> | CC-MAIN-2022-27 | https://www.sneb.org/communicate-and-be-understood-top-10-clear-writing-speaking-tips-and-more/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-27/segments/1656103915196.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20220630213820-20220701003820-00007.warc.gz | en | 0.830924 | 2,056 | 3.578125 | 4 |
Test a machine that randomly packages two types of fruit jubes: kookaburra and kiwi. Notice that kiwi jubes are twice as likely to be produced within a packet of 12 jubes. Look at patterns in sequences of jube types such as 3 kiwi jubes occurring in a row. Analyse the results of large samples. Compare the longest runs of any jube type. Identify the longest run most likely to occur in a packet. This learning object is one in a series of 17 objects.
Key learning objectives
- Students analyse data about random events to test conjectures about variation.
- Students interpret frequency graphs to compare experimental results with theoretical probabilities.
- Students compare the shape of theoretical and experimentally derived data distributions.
- Students relate the shape of data distributions to statements about sample variation and sample size.
- Provides sampling scenarios for students to explore relationships between proportions, sample size, uneven distributions and random variation.
- Demonstrates that conclusions based on small sample sizes can be wrong due to random variation.
- Automatically collates experimental results and displays them as frequency graphs. | <urn:uuid:f905ee3c-27d9-41d3-bf23-01c10fda6771> | CC-MAIN-2016-50 | http://www.stats.govt.nz/tools_and_services/schools_corner/activities/interactive-games/run-jubes11.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2016-50/segments/1480698542693.41/warc/CC-MAIN-20161202170902-00153-ip-10-31-129-80.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91131 | 233 | 3.90625 | 4 |
Ellen Lloyd - AncientPages.com - "...Future events will destroy these sacred tablets... Men of other races will guard a few that remain as priceless objects, and their Maori will study them in vain without being able to read them..."
These prophetic words were written about Rongorongo, a mysterious script of Easter Island.
The script in form of lines of hieroglyphs is carved on 25 pieces of wood, which can be found today in diverse museums around the world but not on Easter Island where they belong.
It is difficult to say whether there are only 26 Rongorongo tablets or many more hidden somewhere in caves of the mysterious Easter Island.
With certainty, however, we have to say that Rongorongo's symbols are important clues to ancient knowledge probably lost forever.
According to an old legend, Hoto (Hotu) Matua, the first king of the island, landed and established one of the most astonishing megalithic cultures in history. This was a mysterious culture of people who created huge stone monuments of Easter Island.
This legendary king brought 67 Rongorongo tablets with him containing traditions, genealogical tables, and other records of the past, and he was accompanied by learned men who knew the art of writing and reciting the inscriptions.
Based on the legend, it would mean that a lot of missing tablets simply disappeared. Many times the antiquity of Rongorongo writing was a subject of polemic and debate.
The tablets have never been deciphered even if many attempts have been made at a decipherment. Moreover, time of their creation is also unknown. As with most undeciphered scripts, there have been proposed many different theories and even claimed translations of them. The nature of the writing has been discussed countless times as well as the origin of the writing on mysterious wooden tablets.
According to Thor Heyerdahl, the explorer and adventurer the Rongorongo was related to South American scripts like the pictographic writing on wooden tablets made by the Cuna Indians of Panama and northwest Colombia.
On the other hand, it is not any easy task to decipher them, because many scholars do not even agree about the nature of Rongorongo writing. Some scholars suggest that it is not writing at all and others ponder over the tablets' writing system. Is it a pictographic system? If it is not any writing then what is it?
The unique Rongorongo symbols came to the attention of the first missionaries who arrived to Easter Island in the 1860s. Easter Island's Rongorongo inscriptions were to be first described to the outside world when the Frenchman Joseph-Eugéne Eyraud (1820-68) became the first known resident of Easter Island.
It was Eyraud who first mentioned the existence of rongorongo in 1864.
He correctly identified them as "hieroglyphic characters" and characterized the glyphs as those of "animals unknown on the island". He thought they were "probabbly a script in origin" and his approach is considered the first attempt at a serious intepretation of the phenomenon's genesis.
Among them was Father Sebastian Englert, a German missionary who worked in the island between 1937-1969 as parish priest documenting the island's history. Dr Englert - academically, probably the most overrated of all those who came in contact with Rongorongo historical truth, Professor of Classical Languages
In his book "Island at the Center of the World", Father Sebastian Englert sent a warning that could be also understood as a prophecy associated with the sacred tablets of ko hau Rongorongo (means: "chants" or great recitations of the signs")
"Our ko hau Rongorongo are lost! Future events will destroy these sacred tablets which we bring with us and those which we will make in our new land. Men of other races will guard a few that remain as priceless objects, and their maori will study them in vain without being able to read them. Our ko hau motu mo Rongorongo will be lost forever. Aue! Aue!"
Father Englert knew that many researchers would try to decipher the sacred tablets Rongorongo. The "warning" is already partially fulfilled because the script's meaning had been lost.
He wrote in his book:
"The sequence of the writing is a rare and curious one called reversed boustrophedon that is, each line of script when it reaches the edge of the board turns back upside down to form the next line. This means that to read the script one must turn the board around at the end of each line..."
Rongorongo writing was carved mostly on wood, but some small samples exist on stone. It contains basic symbols such as human figures in diverse positions, animals, plants, celestial objects, birds, and geometrical shapes.
All of them constitute a mysterious combination of many very complex signs. It is estimated there are between 1500 and 2000 of these signs. Some of the symbols represent whole words; others even represent sounds and abstract concepts. Every second line of Rongorongo script is engraved upside down. All rows of writing are 1 centimeter high. The still existing texts only contain 14,000 characters and there are approximately 600 different symbols that can be reduced to 120 basic components.
Some of their symbols are even identical with those found on Rongorongo tablets of Easter Island. Also Quechua and Aymara people in the region of the Lake Titicaca used the same sequence of the writing namely boustrophedon. In the meantime other researchers who studied mysterious Rongorongo believe in their origin in the Indus Valley.
It has also been suggested that Rongorongo is not a writing system but a mnemonic device - a process or learning technique of improving or developing the memory.
However, apart from a portion of one tablet which has been shown to be a lunar calendar, none of the texts are deciphered.
Rosetta Stone – Artifact That Solves The Riddle Of Egyptian Hieroglyphics
Mysterious Emerald Tablet – Ancient Time-Capsule Of Forbidden Knowledge
Mysterious Ancient Vinca Culture And Its Undeciphered Script
Until today we are not closer to decipher the mysterious information once written on Easter Island Rongorongo boards.
It's worth mentioning that there are very few surviving tablets - only 24 examples of this unique form of writing exist in the whole world. Unless, of course, more are still hidden in secrets caves of Easter Island.
Will it be possible someday to solve the enigma of Rongorongo?
Or perhaps a prophetic warning says a truth and then all efforts and studies of these mysterioys tablets are in vain.
Copyright © AncientPages.com & Ellen Lloyd All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or part without the express written permission of AncientPages.com and Ellen Lloyd
About the author:
Ellen Lloyd – is the owner of AncientPages.com and an author who has spent decades researching ancient mysteries, myths, legends and sacred texts, but she is also very interested in astronomy, astrobiology and science in general. | <urn:uuid:38f75a91-4f38-4ca2-a511-8017d8d63d03> | CC-MAIN-2020-40 | https://www.ancientpages.com/2014/03/24/mysterious-rongorongo-script-remains-undeciphered-contain-prophetic-warning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-40/segments/1600400192887.19/warc/CC-MAIN-20200919204805-20200919234805-00528.warc.gz | en | 0.958639 | 1,501 | 3.046875 | 3 |
Public Lending Right
A Public Lending Right (PLR) programme, is a programme intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries, or as a governmental support of the arts, through support of works available in public libraries, such as books, music and artwork.
Twenty-eight countries have a PLR programme, and others are considering adopting one. Canada, the United Kingdom, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand currently have PLR programmes. There is ongoing debate in France about implementing one. There is also a move towards having a Europe-wide PLR programme administered by the European Union.
The first PLR programme was initiated in Denmark in 1941. However, it was not properly implemented until 1946 due to World War II. The idea spread slowly from country to country and many nations' PLR programs are quite recent developments.
PLR programmes vary from country to country. Some, like Germany and the Netherlands, have linked PLR to copyright legislation and have made libraries liable to pay authors for every book in their collection. Other countries do not connect PLR to copyright. For a nation like Canada or Australia the majority of funds would be going to authors outside the country, much of it to the United States, which is unpalatable to those nations.
In Denmark, the current programme is considered a type of governmental support of the arts, not reimbursement of potential lost sales. Types of works supported are books, music, and visual artworks, created and published in Denmark, and available in public and school libraries.
How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. Some pay based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, others use a simpler system of payment based simply on whether a library owns a book or not.
The amount of payments is also variable. The amount any one author can receive is never very considerable. In Canada for instance the payment is C$38.30 per book per library, with a maximum of C$2,681 (in 2008) for any one author in a year. In the United Kingdom authors are paid on a per-loan basis calculated from a representative sample of libraries. The current rate is 7.82 pence per individual loan.
Different countries also have differing eligibility criteria. In most nations only published works are accepted, government publications are rarely counted, nor are bibliographies or dictionaries. Some PLR services are mandated solely to fund literary works of fiction, and some such as Norway, have a sliding scale paying far less to non-fiction works. Many nations also exclude scholarly and academic texts.
Within the European Union, the public lending right is regulated since November 1992 by directive 92/100/EEC on rental right and lending right. A report in 2002 from the European Commission pointed out that many member countries had failed to implement this directive correctly.
The PLR directive has met with resistance from the side of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). The IFLA has stated that the principles of 'lending right' can jeopardize free access to the services of publicly accessible libraries, which is the citizen's human right. The PLR directive and its implementation in public libraries is rejected by a number of European authors, including Nobel Laureates Dario Fo and José Saramago. Conversely, more than 3000 authors signed a petition opposing PLR cuts in 2010. [[]]
- "Public Lending Right (PLR) International Network website."
- Stave, Thomas (1981). "Public Lending Right: a History of the Idea" (PDF). Library Trends. Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 29 (4): 569–582. ISSN 0024-2594. Retrieved 2009-12-19.
- Styrelsen for Bibliotek og Medier (Danish) 2009-08-19
- Report from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee on the public lending right in the European Union (PDF), 2002-09-16
- The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Position on PLR (April 2005)
- "Campagna europea contro l'introduzione del prestito a pagamento in biblioteca (in Italian)". Nopago.org. Retrieved 2010-10-01.
- PLR International Network website
- An update (2002) on the international situation by Jim Parker (UK PLR Offices, Stockton-on-Tees, UK)
- Australian authors 'compensated' for library circulation
- Public Lending Right Commission of Canada Website | <urn:uuid:72c2bc30-fe49-4897-a542-497e886a4b64> | CC-MAIN-2017-17 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-17/segments/1492917119782.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20170423031159-00042-ip-10-145-167-34.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932161 | 989 | 3.015625 | 3 |
*Write a short (2-3 paragraphs) thematic analysis of a story's plot .Please talk about how the relationship between the characters changes by using quote( embeded quotation and presented quotation) to support your ideas.
1 Answer | Add Yours
A story that gets read often in classes is Hemingway's "In Another Country". It's a masterful story in its use of understatement and restraint, symbolism, and thematic development.
The story concerns wounded soldiers in Italy undergoing treatment for their injuries. Beneath the surface level, the story is about loss, especially loss of connection to loved ones who sometimes give life meaning. There is also a subtext regarding identity and, we could say, identity as it relates to loss.
One question the story asks is how much we define ourselves through others and how possible it might be to limit this type of dependency.
Join to answer this question
Join a community of thousands of dedicated teachers and students.Join eNotes | <urn:uuid:992349d6-31af-4779-8255-6e66bf52f30c> | CC-MAIN-2014-15 | http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/very-short-story-404036 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-15/segments/1398223206770.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20140423032006-00466-ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953991 | 200 | 3.265625 | 3 |
8.6 On Leaders Learning To Follow And Vice-versa
Learning how to follow will enhance your ability to lead providing you properly digest and assimilate the “obtained data” from the experience. The same goes for followers who get a taste of leading. It manifests itself in better following. I took a teachers class where I learned to do both parts of each dance. Makes it much easier to lead and explain how to do the other parts and how to follow if you’ve done both yourself.
Knowing both parts is fun and can help you in many ways but I think its wiser to learn your own part well first. Some dancers should know both parts. Teachers for example. Everyone who teaches should know both parts, not just know them, know them well enough to do them on a social dance floor.
I feel strongly that everyone should, at some point in their dancing (preferably after they have mastered their own part), learn the other side. I think it makes the leaders much more sensitive as a leader and also a better leader because they can feel what a lead should or shouldn’t feel like from the followers side. The followers will learn (after they learn to lead) to cut the leaders a little more slack because they finally understand just how difficult it is to lead. They also will understand just how pleasant it is to dance with someone who truly follows and doesn’t back lead, walk in or over syncopate.
I encourage my advanced students to come back through my courses as the opposite of what they normally do. I allow them to take the lower level classes for free if they want to do this. I can see a great improvement in their dancing.
It always amuses me when a leader who is learning to follow comes over and asks me to tell the leaders in class to stop holding on with their thumbs 🙂 (you must receive to believe)
I’ve had the good fortune to take some beginning Argentine Tango from Daniel Trenner, who teaches everyone, male and female, the basics of both leading and following at the same time. And in part due to this approach, I felt I was learning much more rapidly than in any other type of dance I’ve been exposed to. Now it’s possible that the somewhat different focus and character of Tango cause this to work better than it would with, say, WCS, but it would at least be an interesting experiment to try with some open-minded novice dancers.
I think that it is best to learn both parts. It is very helpful for the man to know the woman’s part and for the woman to know the man’s part for several reasons:
- If a man teaches a woman (or if a woman teaches a man) he/she needs to know the other part in order to teach it.
- If a man learns to follow (or the woman learns to lead), then each will have a better understanding of the other.
- If a man learns to lead (or the woman learns to follow), then he/she develops a better understanding of how to lead/follow because he/she knows what it is like to be on the receiving/giving end of it.
- Learning both parts increases the number of people with whom you are able to dance.
- Learning the both parts helps you to develop a better understanding of the “big picture”. Your view is not as one sided. There are probably other benefits, but I think that the ones listed are enough to convince someone that is really dedicated to dance to learn the other part. | <urn:uuid:fd112164-0cc4-42a9-b44c-502f60aadd39> | CC-MAIN-2019-35 | http://dancepedia.info/top/useful-info/lead-follow/faq-for-lead-follow-index/assorted/role_switching/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-35/segments/1566027314638.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20190819011034-20190819033034-00518.warc.gz | en | 0.975073 | 740 | 2.625 | 3 |
Search for licensed child care providers in DC to meet your family needs.
Farm to School 101 Training
Do you want to teach your students about...
- Our food system?
- Healthy eating?
- Protecting the environment?
- Exploring new foods?
Farm to School connects farms, cafeterias, classrooms, and gardens. Hear about Farm to School principles. Participate in breakout sessions geared toward teachers and administrators.
Teachers will learn how to integrate Farm to School intro standards-based instruction by participating n classroom-ready Farm to School lessons
Administrators will learn how to take small steps to start/expand a Farm to School program and get geared-up got Strawberries & Salad Greens Day - May 29th, 2013. | <urn:uuid:f0270ceb-4a85-480c-bfef-fb3f0ef6c641> | CC-MAIN-2014-10 | http://osse.dc.gov/event/farm-school-101-training-0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-10/segments/1394011129529/warc/CC-MAIN-20140305091849-00016-ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.917217 | 154 | 2.578125 | 3 |
“If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes,” said Charles Lindbergh.
Avian migration is a natural miracle. Migratory birds fly hundreds and thousands of kilometers to find the best ecological conditions and habitats for resting, feeding, breeding and raising their young. When conditions at breeding sites become unfavorable, it is time to fly to regions where conditions are better. Unfortunately, for birds (as is increasingly the case for humans), migration is a perilous journey. Every migration involves a wide range of threats, often caused by human activities including illegal trapping and hunting, collision with energy infrastructures (wind turbines and power lines), and loss of key stop-over feeding and resting sites.
On 10 May, we celebrate World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD), which aims to highlight this amazing natural phenomenon and increase awareness about the need to conserve these species and their habitats. Migratory birds are of great ecological and economic value to many countries and local communities. They contribute to biological diversity and bring tremendous enjoyment to millions of citizens like studying and watching. They are also becoming an important tool for nature-based tourism. And in addition, at a time of increasing tensions among countries and people, migratory birds can become shared resources to increase international understanding and cooperation.
In WMBD, many activities such as bird festivals, education programmes and birdwatching excursions are organized, united by a common theme; “Their Future is our Future – a healthy planet for migratory birds and people”.
WMBD throws light on the topic of “Sustainable Development for Wildlife and People”. It highlights the interdependence of people and nature, and more especially people and migratory animals – in particular birds, as they share the same planet and thus the same limited resources.
The 2017 campaign will aim at raising awareness of the need for a sustainable management of our natural resources, demonstrating that bird conservation is also crucial for the future of humankind.
Protecting Migratory Birds Requires Focus on Wetlands Habitats
Wetlands, which are areas of high ecological value and particular importance for biodiversity, constitute key resources for birds during their migrations around the world. Birds are the most apparent and familiar wildlife in wetlands. They rely on wetlands for all or part of their life cycle and the links between them are as old as their history. The relation between wetlands and birds is shaped by many factors:
- Wetland vegetation provides shelter from predators and from the weather. The presence or absence of shelter may influence whether birds will inhabit a wetland or a nearby upland area;
- Wetlands provide food for birds in the form of plants, fish, vertebrates, and invertebrates;
- Both estuarine and freshwater wetlands are an important stopover for many migratory birds during the migration season. They provide important places for resting, breeding and nesting for at least part of the year; and
- During large floods, wetlands support breeding colonies of waterbirds. Many species rely on the regular flooding cycles of wetlands (such as those on inland floodplains) to reproduce.
Effects of wetland loss and degradation on birds
The unwise use of wetlands, their loss and their degradation has a substantial effect not only on humans but also on birds. As the wetland habitats are drained or altered, the ability of these ecosystems to sustain bird populations decreases.
Wetland degradation is a serious problem for birds in many forms, and in particular:
- Wetland habitat loss in breeding areas translates directly into bird population losses. As wetlands are destroyed, some birds may move to other less suitable habitats and breed in poorer quality areas that will not contribute to a sustainable population through the years (Pulliam and Danielson, 1991);
- Decrease of invertebrate production and lowered oxygen levels due to the increase of algal blooms caused by nutrients and sediments entering the wetland from agricultural, urban, and industrial activities. This degradation reduces the acreage of seagrasses that form an important link in the food chain for invertebrates, fish, and wetland-dependent birds; and
- Alteration of wetland vegetation by harvesting or by introducing exotic species, rendering it of little or no value to wetland-dependent birds.
The well-being of bird populations is tied directly to the status and abundance of wetland habitats. To protect birds, we must restore the ecosystems which constitute their home and reinforce international agreements to protect wetlands of international importance.
We must also develop new bird conservation programs and initiatives which impose substantive obligations on all stakeholders for the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats all over the world. Most of these efforts involve extensive public-private partnerships and the efforts and talents of volunteers.
The future of migratory birds and wetlands ultimately depends upon the level of public knowledge of the future generations. Investing in the education of young people is vital for the future of these species because in time they can build a prosperous, equitable and interesting society which lives in peace and harmony with birds.
If you are interested in organizing an event to mark WMBD, upload it on the link below:
Download WMBD Materials
Watch the video of WMBD 2017: Their Future is Our Future | <urn:uuid:4990da27-3a1a-4788-80d9-04daccd583b1> | CC-MAIN-2017-47 | http://medwet.org/2017/05/world-migratory-bird-day-2017-their-future-is-our-future/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-47/segments/1510934804881.4/warc/CC-MAIN-20171118113721-20171118133721-00674.warc.gz | en | 0.935032 | 1,076 | 3.703125 | 4 |
Education is one of the last remaining industries to not have been completely disrupted by automation and technology over the last 20 years. Manufacturing, travel, retail, finance and marketing, all have undergone massive change. Incumbents have lost their past relevance or completely died. Why was education as an industry by and large unaffected?
What can be automated?
Let us take a few examples of disruption over the last 20 years. We were accustomed to going to a brick and mortar retailer and be greeted by a shop floor executive who would help us get what we want and bill that. Now with the click of a button and sometimes not even that, we get the item we want delivered at our homes. In the past, we had to step outside to book a cab or call someone to book flight tickets.
Now all those services are again available with the click of button immediately. Soon driver less cars will make even the driver redundant. If you think jobs that require skilled talent -- say engineering -- are immune, think again. Advances in artificial intelligence and automation are already disrupting the Indian outsourcing services industry, as evidenced by the sea of change affecting companies such as Infosys.
Services industries with repeatable steps are prone to technology disruption.
What cannot be automated?
Why have online courses from the same fantastic teachers not replaced them in a physical classroom? Even live virtual classes where a great teacher directly teaches a group of students don't seem to have had a significant impact. The difference here seems to be the fact that by and large these services are intangible.
Unlike a car that arrives at your door step or a flight ticket, here what we receive is not a commodity. We learn something new or feel better. For this to happen, a bond of trust has to be first created between the provider and the receiver before the receiver perceives value.
Even if the service provided in an online environment is of similar quality, the receiver does not trust it completely and hence does not perceive value. In an intimate classroom setting, even with 60 other students, we have experienced this trust and relationship with our teachers.
Consequently, online education and learning has not been able to disrupt classroom learning.
So why can't we live with that?
Great teachers are unfortunately far and few in between. This means that the vast majority of us are robbed of a phenomenal learning experience. Disruption, while not great for the incumbents, is of tremendous value to the consumers. As we saw with earlier examples, disruption improves the accessibility and quality of services. In the case of education, if a truly online offering succeeds in the market, many more learners from all over the world can learn from the best teachers and have great outcomes.
Is there a solution?
An interesting model emerging in the recent past few years is Mentored Learning. In this model, highly trained mentors support learners along their online learning journey. Best in class learning material, which includes lecture videos, presentations, data sets, assessments and so on are created and updated by great teachers online.
However, as the great teachers are not in plenty, this curriculum is delivered virtually by mentors who are practitioners and experts in these areas. Learners meet mentors routinely one-on-one or in a small group online and build relationships over multiple months. In addition to teaching and walking through examples, the mentors keep learners on track, give personalized feedback on assessments and also clear doubts during the one-on-one live virtual sessions.
By building this relationship over time, learners have the opportunity to build trust. Consequently, learners not only experience an intense learning experience, they also perceive a much higher value over time.
Is there a success story?
An example close to home is Great Learning's completely online programme -- the Business Analytics Certificate Program (BACP). While observing learner success and progress, we noticed that course completion and engagement was not tracking what we usually observe.
While our blended programs have over 90 per cent completion rate, for BACP we were seeing a completion rate similar to what other online providers such as Coursera and Udacity publish.
To improve engagement we introduced mentored learning as an additional feature in BACP.We then saw a significant reversal in trends and a final completion rate of over 80 per cent for the batch. As a result of the above success story, we believe that mentored learning is a disruptive mechanism through which high quality education can be made accessible to millions of learners around the world online without sacrificing outcomes. | <urn:uuid:d34cec92-502a-443d-bed1-9ef558f7957c> | CC-MAIN-2019-18 | https://www.mystudycentre.com/news-centre/2620/How-in-an-online-education-model-mentored-learning-can-help-students-understand-the-subjects | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-18/segments/1555578640839.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20190424094510-20190424120510-00084.warc.gz | en | 0.96715 | 909 | 2.609375 | 3 |
When the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL; @UR_DSL) unveiled its ambitious Mapping Inequality project a few years ago, urban historians and others applauded. A collaboration of scholars at Virginia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland and directed by Robert K. Nelson and Brent Cebul of the University of Richmond, Mapping Inequality starkly illustrated the highly structured nature of housing discrimination in 20th-century America. Forbes magazine designated it as one of a handful of GIS programs that had successfully reshaped the way Americans understand racism. “To the extent that you have a business publication engaging with the less-than-stellar history of business, it really is amazing how putting something on a map makes it so much more accessible for people to see,” Cebul told L.A’s KCET last year.
The folks at DSL have been burning the midnight oil while at work on a new project that focuses on urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s. With help from undergrads who tirelessly digitized hundreds of maps and entered reams of data into GIS programs, Robert Nelson, Brent Cebul, Justin Madron, Nate Ayers, and Leif Fredrickson have constructed Renewing Inequality, which digitally documents hundreds upon hundreds of urban renewal maps across the nation. Lauren Tilton, Nathan Connolly, Dave Hochfelder, Andrew Kahrl, and LaDale Winling also provided critical feedback and thereby helped DSL refine and improve the finished product.
Considering that urban populations bestowed renewal programs with the nickname “Negro Removal”, it should come as no surprise that families of color were disproportionately affected; at least 300,000 households were displaced by the process as homes were seized and communities leveled. With a focus on cost and family displacement, notably the difference between white and non-white families—the latter term an admittedly blunt demographic tool which Cebul describes as “an administrative term of art at the time”—Renewing Inequality provides insights not only into already well-known metropolises of the era, but also smaller cities of 50,000 or less.
“The intimacy of the violence of displacement in cities at that scale really hasn’t been considered (largely because urban historians tend to focus on big cities),” Cebul conveyed to The Metropole over social media. “In short, I think this points to whole new avenues for research that might expand our conception of what counts as ‘urban’ history in the 20th century – a century of urbanization.” The project also includes a social history of urban renewal, which can be found under “The People and the Program” tab.
As Cebul noted in our back and forth, the project is far from complete. Technical kinks still need to be worked out and they continue to add data from federal, state, and municipal reports as a means to deepen its resonance for researchers and the broader public. However, it is undoubtedly a solid beginning. | <urn:uuid:9285928f-9c21-40d6-8762-f39204561e98> | CC-MAIN-2018-43 | https://themetropole.blog/2017/12/14/from-redlining-to-urban-renewal-university-of-richmonds-digital-scholarship-lab-goes-from-mapping-inequality-to-renewing-inequality/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-43/segments/1539583512332.36/warc/CC-MAIN-20181019062113-20181019083613-00346.warc.gz | en | 0.958161 | 636 | 2.796875 | 3 |
3D printers don't just produce whatever you choose to make — they also let off fumes. According to a new study from researchers in Paris and the United States, those vapors may be more dangerous than you previously thought.
The study, printed in the Jan. 7 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, suggests that plastics such as nylon, ABS and polycarbonate used in 3D printing create particles of potentially dangerous materials like styrene, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies as a possible human carcinogen.
Not all plastics were found to be as dangerous, though. Those printing with PLA plastic are subject to lactide, which the scientists suggest isn't toxic. There is also no data on whether the design of a printer or characteristics of particular printers have any impact on fumes and particles.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin and Ecole des Ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris.
In the Discussion section of the study, the researchers call for more studies, while also urging manufacturers to develop new, low-emitting filaments. "Until then, we continue to suggest that caution should be used when operating many printer and filament combinations in enclosed or poorly ventilated spaces or without the aid of gas and particle filtration systems," the researchers wrote. The study also suggests using 3D printers only in well-ventilated areas to reduce your chances of inhaling potentially dangerous particles. | <urn:uuid:36a4a9be-12a7-4331-863b-120f26ee5fc8> | CC-MAIN-2020-05 | https://www.tomsguide.com/us/3d-printing-carcinogen-health-risk,news-22194.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-05/segments/1579250592636.25/warc/CC-MAIN-20200118135205-20200118163205-00408.warc.gz | en | 0.937993 | 298 | 3.359375 | 3 |
Mao ruled China as its head of state from 1949 – 1959. To understand what Mao faced, it helps to know what life was like in China before 1949.
China had few railroads. Before 1949, there were 6,835 miles in service and most of those rail lines were in the northeast and coastal areas of China.
China did not have a paved highway system, did not have an electric grid linking every village and city. In fact, most of the electricity was only generated in a few cities like Shanghai and Beijing where wealthy foreigners lived. There was no telephone system in rural China and most of the cities where wealthy foreigners didn’t live. The average lifespan was 35. The literacy rate was only 15-to-25 percent, and poverty was worse than it was in 1981 when it was 88 percent. In 1949, when Mao became China’s leader, extreme poverty was closer to 95 percent.
China had just emerged from more than a century of wars: the Taiping Rebellion (about 20 million killed), the two Opium Wars started by England and France, the Boxer Rebellion, the chaos and anarchy after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the long Civil War between the Chinese Communists and the Nationals (1927 – 1950), World War II (15 – 20 million killed by Japanese troops), the Korean War (180,000 Chinese troops killed), the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward that resulted in what’s known as Mao’s Great Famine, and the ravages of his Cultural Revolution.
Britannica.com says, “The disorganization and waste created by the Great Leap, compounded by natural disasters and by the termination of Soviet economic aid, led to widespread famine in which, according to much later official Chinese accounts, millions of people died. …”
“The official Chinese view, defined in June 1981, is that his leadership was basically correct until the summer of 1957, but from then on it was mixed at best and frequently wrong. It cannot be disputed that Mao’s two major innovations of his later years, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, were ill-conceived and led to disastrous consequences. His goals of combating bureaucracy, encouraging popular participation, and stressing China’s self-reliance were generally laudable—and the industrialization that began during Mao’s reign did indeed lay a foundation for China’s remarkable economic development since the late 20th century—but the methods he used to pursue them were often violent and self-defeating.”
Before anyone blames Mao’s policies on what’s known as Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-62, you should know about China as the “Land of Famines.”
The Oxford Research Encyclopedias says, “The fall of the Qing and the birth of China’s new Republican government in 1912 did not reduce the number, severity, or impact of famines. Destroying the imperial system of government that had lasted for two millennia proved far easier than building a new system. In the first decades after 1912 the collapse of central political authority, constant fighting between rival warlords, increasing foreign domination, and unprecedented environmental decline undermined efforts to prevent successive natural and manmade disasters from resulting in famines. … Xia Mingfang estimates that more than 15.2 million people died in ten major drought famines that struck during the Republican period (1912–1949), and another 2.5 million Chinese perished in thirty serious floods. Major disasters struck so frequently that many Chinese observers joined Western relief workers in calling China the ‘Land of Famine’.”
Continued with Part 2 on July 4, 2018
Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”. | <urn:uuid:c8b66a9d-d002-47d7-a2ad-d651c7b812cc> | CC-MAIN-2020-24 | https://ilookchina.com/tag/what-was-china-like-before-1949/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-24/segments/1590347413901.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20200601005011-20200601035011-00585.warc.gz | en | 0.977609 | 805 | 3.765625 | 4 |
The Good Friday Liturgy is at once one of the most dramatic and austere services of the Church Year. It comprised of four parts: the lessons, solemn orations, adoration of the cross, and communion. The externals of this service are marked by both a solemnity and simplicity appropriate to the day. The altar is bare except for one cloth, the missal stand is not covered, the vestments are black for the first portions of the service and violet for the communion, and bells are not rung.
Most striking perhaps is the Adoration of the Cross in which the priest progressively unveils the cross and thrice chants, each time on a higher pitch, Ecce Lignum Crucis (Behold the Wood of the Cross). After the cross the unveiled, it is laid on a cushion and the clergy and servers venerate it by removing their shoes and making three double genuflections as they advance toward it before kissing it. Removing shoes is a common act of piety in the Coptic Rite (Catholic and Orthodox), and reminds us of when God told Moses to remove his sandals since where he was standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). During the Adoration of the Cross the “Reproaches” are sung by the choir.
Besides the Kyrie regularly sung at Mass, the Reproaches are the only other liturgical text in the Roman Rite in which Greek is used. The Trisagion is sung in both Greek and Latin and is another indication of how ancient certain elements of the Good Friday liturgy are. Other reminders of the antiquity of this rite are its simplicity with the use of one altar cloth and the rather abrupt beginning of the service with a lack of preparatory prayers.
Music for the service, sung by the Schola Cantorum of the St. Gregory Society, will include Tomás Luis de Victoria’s “Reproaches,” motets by Palestrina, Anerio, and Loyset Compère, and the proper Gregorian chants. | <urn:uuid:4f20542e-da1e-4e36-a316-08ab456db07d> | CC-MAIN-2020-16 | http://saint-gregory.org/tag/good-friday/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-16/segments/1585371810617.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20200408041431-20200408071931-00242.warc.gz | en | 0.950593 | 420 | 2.75 | 3 |
Describe the process of collectivisation in 1953
- Mao followed Stalin's example, collectivizing agriculture
- Party cadres were sent to create these
- Initially this was done voluntarily by peasants
- Land, and labour was pooled
- Collective committees decided what crops to grow, and where
- Land was still technically individually owned
- This led to increased output, and China's towns would be free of famine for the first time
- However, many of the party cadres didn't have a good knowledge of agriculture, which would lead to decreased output
1 of 18
Describe forced collectivisation
- All private propety was abolished
- Peasants were 'paid' for the work they did on the much larger collective farm
- Peasants were against this, and there were local uprisings against party cadres
- QED: Collectives were again broken into smaller units. People could work their own land again, if they so chose, as long as they followed with the Party's plan
2 of 18
Why did Mao initiate the Great Leap Forward?
- To build an industrial sector in the countryside
- To develop industry in a "Chinese way" ie. not in the way that the Soviet Union advised. Remember that Mao was very against taking advice from the Soviets, and that it had served him well in the Civil War.
- To lift China from its position as a well-run third-world country into an industrial power, to overtake Great Britain
- These principles of the GLF coincided with the Sino-Soviet split
3 of 18
The structure of the government (lowest to highest
- The NPC; 1200 delegates, meets 2 weeks a year for 4 years
- The NPC congress; Standing Committee; runs business for 40 weeks a year
- The NPC is subordinate to the State Council
- The State Council is subordinate to the Chairman of the People's Republic and the Vice President
4 of 18
Mao Zedong acted as:
- National Chairman and Head of State
- Chairman of the Central Committee
- Chairman of the Politburo
- Chairman of the Secretariat of the CCP
5 of 18
The structure of the CCP (lowest to highest)
- Central Committee; 210 members, meets twice a year over a 5 year period
- CC submits to the Standing Committee; the Chairman and 5 others, holds the highest executive power
- CC submits to the Secretariat of the CCP; the Chairman and 9 others
- All of these party bodies submit to the Politburo, which handles the most important decisions, along with the Standing Committee
6 of 18
Important things to note about Communist China
- No Communist regime ever recognised any limits to the authority of those who hold power
- No rule of law could protect individual privacy against the state
- The structures of the stae and party could always be subject to revision (at party congresses) or could (in appropriate circumstances) be ignored
- Likewise, the judicial system was ultimately influenced by the politics of the day
7 of 18
Effects of the 100 Flowers Campaign
- The CCP could be cleansed of those that weren't committed to Mao's vision
- The movement gathered momentum. As the 'Anti-Rightist' movement, university, and school staff, scientists, economists, and writers were forced to 'confess' and submit themselves to re-education.
- The 100 Flowers Campaign was part of a movement towards a controlled society in which all expression, whether political or artistic, had to meet the criteria of 'political correctness' as defined by Mao
8 of 18
Why was the agricultural GLF a disaster?
- Individual peasants lost the incentive to produce a surplus, as they were no longer working for themselves
- Mao's belief in "scientific discoveries" based on Lysenkoism, which set the campaigns for "Pest Control" up for disaster
- Paetry cadres and officials lied about the actual amount of produce harvested to beat other Communes
- Since China was exporting large amount of grain, "hunger exports" and false reports caused the death of 20-55 million people
- Chinese statistics collapsed, and can't be considered reliable until the 1980s.
9 of 18
Why was the industrial GLF a failure?
- There wasn't enough enthusiasm.
- Mass labour does not mean mass production of good quality
- Party ignorance of basic economics (even Mao admitted that he had no knowledge of economics)
10 of 18
Mao's explanation for the failure of the GLF?
- Agriculture: Mao would admit that there was starvation, but his explanation in the "official version" was that this was caused by natural factors (remember that party cadres were only allowed to report up to 90,000 deaths in each commune)
- Industry: Mao blamed industrial failure on saboteurs, bourgeois elements, incompetent administrators, etc, but he would never question communism itself.
11 of 18
What were the results of Liu & Deng's policy chang
- It was an admission that the Commune system had failed
- Mao became uneasy with these pragmatic policies, which were solely concerned with stopping the mass starvation the Chinese population was suffering from
- Mao felt his grip on the CCP loosening
12 of 18
Why did Mao start the Cultural Revolution?
- To reassert Mao's authority of China and the CCP
- To ensure that his concept of "Permanent Revolution" would survive
- To prevent the CCP from becoming a self-justifying bureaucracy, by appealing directly to the people
13 of 18
What were the aims of the Cultural Revolution?
- To avoid the "revisionist" development of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union
- As the CCP and gov't officials had lost their revolutionary fervour (the Civil War had already been won) the only way to save Mao's revolution was to wage war against the Party hierarchy itself
- It was time for a new generation to replace the old guard (keep the Communist fervour current)
- The young generatino had not experienced the Long March or the Civil War. They needed hardening through military struggle. Only then would they be able to understand the future military attack which Mao predicted would coem one day from the capitalist west.
14 of 18
What were the 4 olds?
- Old thoughts
- Old culture
- Old customs
- Old habits
15 of 18
What were the consequences for the Chinese populat
Mass hysteria, as there were no moral restrictions on the young
- Temples, shrines, works of art became representations for the corrupt past, and were labelled "Confuscious and Co."
- The insult and abuse of parents were encouraged
- The younger generation was brutalised. It was good to hit a "bad element"
- All with "decadent tendencies" were attacked; teachers, doctors, etc.
Victims were brainwashed, manhandled, and often killed.
16 of 18
What happened to Chinese culture during the Cultur
- It became an artistic wasteland, since most of China's creative artists had been sent to labour camps to die
- All non-proletarian culture was rejected, and political correctness was driven to the extreme: Jiang Qing only approved 8 operas as "truly revolutionary"
- Love and family affection was considered "bourgeois sentimentality"
17 of 18
What was the overall result of the Cultural Revolu
- Economic consequences were disastrous
- Education and training ceased
- China lost its humanity
- To be accused was to be guilty; ordered discussion and debate was impossible
18 of 18 | <urn:uuid:21cef760-af8a-4820-bf4d-5a7f3d689627> | CC-MAIN-2018-17 | https://getrevising.co.uk/revision-cards/the_prc_under_mao | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-17/segments/1524125947693.49/warc/CC-MAIN-20180425041916-20180425061916-00596.warc.gz | en | 0.97797 | 1,582 | 3.390625 | 3 |
Our water is under pressure
Increasing urbanisation and our modern way of living place a heavy demand on the water supply. On top of this a combination of water contamination, leakages and over-consumption also challenges our access to safe and clean water.
With intelligent solutions, we can make a change
Solutions for cities
Worldwide, cities are rapidly expanding hence the demand for water is growing and at the same time many of the same cities are running out of drinking water. Despite this, we’re continuing to waste our available resources. Cities are losing up to 60% of all pumped water due to poor water networks. Intelligent water solutions can reduce losses like this dramatically.
Solutions for industries
Despite rising demands for water and energy, we’re continuing to contaminate our available resources. A total of 80% of all wastewater returns to nature without being properly treated. But if we started to use the same water more than once, with the implementation of intelligent water solutions, we can change this dramatically.
Solutions for buildings
Increasing urbanisation is contributing to significant amounts of energy being used — the global cooling demand alone has doubled in less than 20 years. This growth in energy consumption is a major driver of climate change. There are plenty of intelligent solutions available; with more energy efficient pump solutions, we can reduce CO2 emissions while optimising energy
Everywhere water challenges are rising. It’s time for a shift in mindset across all levels of society: from politics and industries, to cities and the people living within them. Help us solve the world’s water challenges. Because after all, the water belongs to all of us. We need to care For Our Water. #ForOurWater
By 2030, we aim to have contributed to providing safely managed drinking water to 300 million people in need.
Through water efficiency and water treatment, we plan to have saved the consumption of 50 billion M3 fresh water.
Towards climate positive
By 2025, we want to have reduced our own CO2 emission by 50% (compared to 2008) and by 2030, we aspire to be 100% climate positive.
“The world is full of problems that can be solved in a better way.”
- Poul Due Jensen, Grundfos founder
In 1945, Poul Due Jensen invented a pump to make a difference. One generation later, in 1973, his son Niels Due Jensen set a new sustainable agenda and decided that each new Grundfos pump had to be 10% more energy efficient than the previous. Since then, our ambitions have built upon the Grundfos legacy — to go beyond business and to use our water management expertise to address and solve global water challenges. | <urn:uuid:ea103352-d465-4ded-b273-15942fd48775> | CC-MAIN-2021-10 | https://www.grundfos.com/eg/learn/water-and-energy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-10/segments/1614178363072.47/warc/CC-MAIN-20210301212939-20210302002939-00353.warc.gz | en | 0.923225 | 562 | 2.859375 | 3 |
Self improvement is one of the most positive ventures one can undertake. Self improvement can include leading a healthier life or getting control over your finances. It is very important to work on yourself. You may never stop developing yourself personally, because there is always a way to improve in some area in your life. By having and maintaining better habits, you may have a happier and healthier life.
If you avoid making decisions, then you are denying yourself opportunities. Do not fear the decision making task. Educate yourself, if necessary, to make the best decisions possible. A proven track record of responsible, successful decision-making can grow into improved instincts. Even mistakes are valuable as they are instructive learning decisions. If you make a wrong move, you will know next time to do something different.
Always be in a position to take note of any ideas you may have, no matter what your location. Pack some paper with you when you go out. Write down as much as you can, and then refer to it later when you have a creative burst of energy.
Humility is a very important trait to have when working on your personal development. Realizing your place in the big scheme of things is freeing. You will begin to understand that there are many ways to improve. After accepting this fact, you will have a desire to seek out knowledge, which will cause you to grow and develop as a person.
Everyone needs to exercise, not just people who want to lose weight. There are a variety of great reasons to exercise. Exercising stimulates your body to produce all kinds of chemicals that ultimately result in a happier, calmer you.
Get some self-satisfaction by complimenting others. Doing the opposite and taking the initiative to be kind to others helps you to be kind to yourself too.
Do what it takes to create an emergency fund and add to it even if you can only add a few dollars at a time. An emergency fund will deter you from putting any charges on your credit card. If you save a couple of dollars each week, before long you will have an emergency fund. Having an emergency fund will prevent you from having to use credit cards to pay for unexpected expenses, which will save you a great deal in interest over the years.
Instead of bragging about how many things you’ve earned in your life, try to ask other people about what they’ve earned in their life and what they’re proud of. You will then find out things that others have done to accomplish their goals, and you will get some insight.
Talking with a counselor or a pastor can be beneficial. They are trained to deal with issues that you might have, as well as a lot of experience doing so. They are ready to listen and to analyze certain things that will have you on the path to enlightenment. Discussing your problems in a safe environment with a licensed professional, can really make all the difference and leave you feeling much better.
Avoid the temptation to comfort yourself with a shopping spree. If you practice something you like instead of shopping, you will not spend a lot of money and get into debt.
Eliminate any disorganization in your life. Bringing structure to your life will give you a great sense of accomplishment, and living a more organized life will boost your confidence. Organization can make you feel considerably less stressed, which then increases your sense of well-being. Adding structure to your life will bring you peace.
Demonstrate altruism to improve your life. There are times when you may have to sacrifice something and simply care for someone else. You will soon become the person you envision for yourself, when you have mastered the ability to personally sacrifice without harming your own well-being.
Pick out what you wish to do in life and go do it. There is no point in having dreams of what you want from your life if you’re not prepared to get out there and chase them. Take action on your dreams and do what you can to make them a reality.
It is well known that being a good listener is an excellent character trait to develop. If you are pursuing personal development goals, this is especially true for you! Always listen to yourself when you are talking to yourself. Make sure you always pay attention to what your inner voice is telling you, so you can properly understand and meet your needs, which is essential if you want to improve yourself as a person.
It may become discouraging to begin developing better personal habits and lifestyles, but once you start noticing your life developing towards a better future, you will never want to stop. You can always develop better ways to do things and it’s important to always try hard towards any personal development goals you have. | <urn:uuid:cd27feb1-4c44-43f9-b918-c40c7f18b900> | CC-MAIN-2020-50 | https://1emdr.com/blog/become-a-better-you-with-these-personal-development-tips/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2020-50/segments/1606141194634.29/warc/CC-MAIN-20201127221446-20201128011446-00296.warc.gz | en | 0.963614 | 960 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Wipro Placement Question Paper 2017.
then the simplified function is
( Capital letters are copliments of corresponding letters
A=compliment of a)
[a] a [b] ab [c] abc [d] a(bc)* [e] mone
(bc)*=compliment of bc
2) A 12 address lines maps to the memory of
[a] 1k bytes [b] 0.5k bytes [c] 2k bytes [d] none
3) In a processor these are 120 instructions . Bits needed to impliment
[a] 6 [b] 7 [c] 10 [d] none
4) In 8085 microprocessor READY signal does.which of the following
is incorrect statements
[a]It is input to the microprocessor
[b] It sequences the instructions
Ans : b
5) Return address will be returned by function to
[a] Pushes to the stack by call
Ans : a
Ans : 3267
7) If A>B then
else B>C then
in this , for 75% times A>B and 25% times B>C then,is 10000 instructions
are there ,then the ratio of F to G
[a] 7500:2500 [b] 7500:625 [c] 7500:625 if a=b=c else
8) In a compiler there is 36 bit for a word and to store a character 8bits are
needed. IN this to store
a character two words are appended .Then for storing a K characters string,
How many words are needed.
[a] 2k/9 [b] (2k+8)/9 [c] (k+8)/9 [d] 2*(k+8)/9 [e] none
9) C program code
int zap(int n)
then the call zap(6) gives the values of zap
[a] 8 [b] 9 [c] 6 [d] 12 [e] 15
10) Virtual memory size depends on
[a] address lines [b] data bus
[c] disc space [d] a & c [e] none
Ans : a
11) Critical section is
[b] statements which are accessing shared resourses
Ans : b
12) load a
then the content in accumulator is
Ans : a**2+b**4
Q13 – Q15. Four questions given on the below data
X,Yand Z are senior engineers. A,B,C,D are junior engineers. Company wants to
select 4 enginers. Two will be senior and two will be juniors. The company wants
these engineers to work in the most productive way so they respect each person’s
Y is not friends with A
Z is not friends with C
B is not friends with A
If B is selected then who will be the remaining 4 members ?
If C is selected, Z and ___ cannot be selected?
D is always selected if ___ is selected?
Q14. A speaks truth 70% of the times, B speaks truth 80% of the times.
What is the probability that both are contradicting each other is ?
Q15. ?((2x-3)/((x2 +x+1)2 )dx is ?
Q16. Ram starts from A walking 2 km North and turns right and walks 4 km and
turns right again and walks 4 km and turns right again and walks 4 km and meets
Radha at Bwalking in the opposite direction to Ram .
a) Which direction does Ram walk after the first turn?
b) Distance between A and B
Q17. If the equation x2 – 3x + a = 0 has the roots (0,1) then value of a is ?
Q18. A and B’s temperature are 10?c and 20?c having same surface , then their ratio
of rate of emmisions is ?
Q19. An atomic particle exists and has a particlular decay rate . It is in a train .
When the train moves, a person observes for whether the decay rate
(c) depend on the directions of movement of train
Q20. Which of the following exchanges positive ions
Q21. After execution of CMP, a instruction in Intel 8085 microprocessor
(a) ZF is set and CY is reset.
(b) ZF is set CY is unchanged
(c) ZF is reset, CY is set
(d) ZF is reset , CY is unchanged .
Ans. ZF is set and CY is reset
Q22. The best tool for editing a graphic image is ?
Q23. Network scheme defines
a.)one to one
b.) many to many
c.) one to ,many ?
Q24. A person wants to measures the length of a rod.First he measures with
standing ideally then he maeasures bymoving parrel to the rod
(a)the length will decrease in second case
(b)length will be same
(c) length will increse in the second case.
Q25. One U-230 nucleus is placed in a train moving by velocity emiting alpha rays
.When the train is at rest the
distance between nucleus and alpha particle is x . One passenger is observing the
particle . When the train is moving
what is the distance between particle and nucleus ?
(b) x + vt
(c) x – vt
Q26. What is the resulting solution when benzene and toluene are mixed ?
Q27. If the word FADENCOMT equals 345687921 then
What is FEAT
Find representation of 2998
Q28. Given 10 alphabets out of which 5 are to be chosen. How many words can be
made with atleast one repetition.
Q29. Arrange by acidic values : phenol, nitrotolouene and o-cresol?
Q30. Find sum of 3 + 5/(1+22) + 7/(1 + 22 + 32) + ……
Ans. 3n/(1 + n)
The following are few sample questions that maybe asked in the software paper.We
haven’t been able to give the values in certain problems ; only the type of questions
have been mentioned.
Q31. What sorting algos have their best and worst case times equal ?
Ans. O(nlogn) for mergesort and heap sort
Q32. What page replacement algo . has minimumn number of page faults ?
Ans. Optimality algorithm
Q33. What is the use of virtual base class in c++
Ans. Multiple lines between derived classes.
Q34. Find the eccentricity of a given node in a directed graph
Q35. Convert the infix to postfix for A-(B+C)*(D/E)
Q36. What is swapping
Q37. Assignment operator targets to
Q38. A byte addressable computer has memory capacity of 2 power m Kbytes and
can perform 2 power n operations an instruction involving three operands and one operator needs maximum of —bits
Ans. 3m + n
Q39. In round robin scheduling, if time quatum is too large then it degenerates to
Q40. What is network schema?
Q41. Packet Burst is ______
Q42. Picard’s method uses _______?
Ans. Successive Differentiation.
Q43. If the letters of the word “rachit” are arranged in all possible ways and these
words are written
out as in a dictionary, what is the rank of the word “rachit”.
Q44. Ravi’s salary was reduced by 25%.Percentage increase to be effected to bring
to the original level is
(c) 33 1/3%
Q45. A and B can finish a piece of work in 20 days .B and C in 30 days and C and A
in 40 days.
In how many days will A alone finish the job
(b) 34 2/7
Q46. How long will a train 100m long travelling at 72kmph take to overtake another
200m long travelling at 54kmph
(c) 1 min 15 sec
(d) 55 sec
Q47. What is the product of the irrational roots of the equation (2x-1)(2x-3)(2x-
? All toffees are chocolates
? Some toffees are not good for health
(a) Some chocolates are not good for health
(b) Some toffees are good for health
(c) No toffees are good for health
(d) Both (a) and (b)
The questions 40-46 are based on the following pattern.The problems below contain
a question and two statements giving certain data. You have to decide whether the
data given in the statements are sufficient for answering the questions.The correct
(A) If statement (I) alone is sufficient but statement (II) alone is not sufficient.
(B) If statement(II) alone is sufficient but statement(I) alone is not sufficient.
(C) If both statements together are sufficient but neither of statements alone is
(D) If both together are not sufficient.
(E) If statements (I) and (II) are not sufficient
Q49. What is the volume of a cubical box in cubic centimetres?
(I) One face of the box has an area of 49 sq.cms.
(II) The longest diagonal of the box is 20 cms.
Q50. Is z positive?
(I) y+z is positive
(II) y-z is positive
Q51. Is x>y ? x, y are real numbers?
(I) 8x = 6y
(II) x = y + 4
Q52. If a ground is rectangular, what is its width?
(I) The ratio of its length to its breadth is 7:2
(II) Perimeter of the playground is 396 mts.
Q53. If the present age of my father is 39 yrs and my present age is x yrs, what is
(I) Next year my mother will be four times as old as i would be.
(II) My brother is 2 years older than I and my father is 4 years older than my
Q54. How many brothers and sisters are there in the family of seven children?
(I) Each boy in the family has as many sisters as brothers
(II) Each of the girl in the family has twice as many brothers as sisters
Q55. x is not equal to 0, is x + y = 0?
(I) x is the reciprocal of y
(II) x is not equal to 1
Following questions are based on letter’s analogy.First pair of letters should
have the same relationship as the second pair of letters or vice versa.
Q56. ? : BGLQ : : YDIN : VAFK
Q57. NLO : RPS : : ? : ZXA
Q58. If “segment” is coded as rffndou, then “ritual” is coded as
Q59. If “football” is “cricket” ,”cricket” is “basketball” ,”basketball” is
“volleyball”,”volleyball” is “khokho” and “khokho” is cricket, which is not a ball game?
Q60. Which of the following is a recursive set of production
(a) S –a|A, A –S
(b) S –a|A, A –b
(c) S –>aA, A–>S
(d) None of these
1.distance D=rt where r & t are +ve and r is constant,as t increses then
ans:D increses irrespective of r & t
2.E=I*I*R what is the effect of E when I becomes I/2
ans:1/4E(E decreses by 4 times)
3.out of 55 eggs 5 are defective. what is % of defective eggs
4.salary is ‘s’ per month,’x’% of salary is given as bonus, if 3 months
salary is s1,s2 & s3 then what is his salary.
ans:s1*x/100 + s2*x/100 + s3*x/100
5.consider expresion ‘ab’ . what happens when ‘a’ is divided by ‘c’ &
multiplied by ‘c’.
ans:value remains same.
6.area of triangle=1/2*b*h base incresed by 4 times & height is devided
2, the net effect of area.
ans:twice the the original area.
7.in base representation for a rupee 100 paise,then base 8
what is rupee value .
8.A>B,B>C,C=D,D>E,then which is greatest
a)A/B b) A/C c) A/E d)none
9.to travel ‘m’ miles the time is ‘h’ hours,then what is the time taken
travel M miles.
10.a sum ‘s’ is divided into 4 parts.second person gets Rs 10 more than
first.3rd person is Rs 10 more than second, 4th is 10 more than 3rd.
how much amount do 1st person get.
11.fridge cost R Rs,cover value is 5,discount d% then its new cost
12.1/8 is divided by ‘s’ , if ‘s’ is incresed by 2 times, what is the
ans:increses two times.
section 2. letter series
1. a c b d f e g i __ ans: h
2. x y z u v w r s t __ ans: Q
3. a c f j o __ ans:u
section 3. numerical ability
2. 31 – 29+2/33=__ ans:64/33
3. 2.904+0.0006=___ ans: 2.9046
4. 55/1000=___ ans:.005
5. 0.799*0.254= 0.202946
7. 842.8 +602=1444.8
8. 5.72% of 418= 23.9096
9. 625% of 7.71=48.1875
10. 25% of 592=148.00
12. 15% of 86.04=12.906
section 4 : DIAGRAMMING
each flowchart contains 5 questions .
in each flow chart,there will be 5 numbered(1,2,3,4&5)
boxes(cells).each cell we have to fill with the conditions given below.
1. 400 employee(not complete question)
different categories based on age,salary,lenth of expereince in years
2. 10 balls,red,black balls.
2 points for red balls etc.. 3 points for a ball
if it is of the same colour as preceeding one..
cell 1-c,cell 3-d,cell 5-d,cell 2-e,cell 4-e.
30 coins. these are divided into 3 groups:A,B,C to find
the only largest weight coin,other 29 coins are of lower weight.
D A C A C.
4. totally there are 100 numbers to find largest(LNUM).smallest(SNUM).
A _ D _ _ _
feed problem to adjust temperature and pressure for
(answer not known exactly.).
5.bag red,black balls,different condition
Please upload more on Wipro Placement Question Paper
Please upload more on Wipro Placement Question Paper | <urn:uuid:865cb396-3b6e-4b27-af36-9c30d851aa60> | CC-MAIN-2018-39 | https://www.oldquestionpapers.net/2010/06/wipro-placement-question-paper.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-39/segments/1537267158001.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20180922005340-20180922025740-00096.warc.gz | en | 0.841469 | 3,511 | 3.1875 | 3 |
By Dan Shewan
Media empires rise and fall, but the explosive growth in popularity of websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy during the past several years ushered in a new phenomenon in content – the “curiosity gap.”
Mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines have long tantalized their audiences with salacious rumors and tawdry gossip to sell papers and ad inventory, but the emergence of clickbait and “snackable content” (perhaps one of the most loathsome terms in media) ignited an arms race to drive revenues and traffic by appealing to our innate sense of curiosity.
However, some experts have begun to speculate whether the curiosity gap is dead; some believe today’s media consumers have become desensitized to the constant barrage of amazement offered to us in our RSS feeds and on our smartphones, and that media outlets offering little more than rhetorical questions and cheap tricks are doomed to fail unless they try harder to earn their audience’s attention.
But are they right?
What Is the Curiosity Gap?
The curiosity gap is a theory and practice popularized by Upworthy and similar sites that leverages the reader’s curiosity to make them click through from an irresistible headline to the actual content. By creating a curiosity gap, you’re teasing your reader with a hint of what’s to come, without giving all the answers away. The curiosity gap can be used to compel people to click on a blog post they see on Twitter, an ad on Facebook, or a marketing email in their inbox.
There are three primary elements that go into the curiosity gap publishing model:
- Publishing frequency
Let’s take a look at each.
The Curiosity Gap in Headlines
Arguably the most important element in the curiosity gap technique is the headline.
Upworthy is famed for its approach to headlines. The site requires all writers to devise at least 25 headlines per article, regardless of its length, topic, or angle.
This is a lot harder than it sounds.
Headlines have to be almost literally irresistible. They have to entice us in mere seconds (or less), and as such must balance information with intrigue; they have to tease just enough about the article to not only tempt us to click through, but also to give us enough information to decide whether the article is likely to be of interest to us in the first place.
Put another way, headlines have to be specific enough to entice the reader, but not so specific that the reader doesn’t need to click through.
As important as headlines are to the curiosity gap publishing model, they have rightfully attracted their fair share of detractors and criticism. This style of headline has also been accused of falling prey to diminishing returns – how long can audiences realistically be “amazed by what happened next”?
Whether they have become less effective or not, there is no disputing that headlines are a crucial element in the curiosity gap formula.
Publishing Go to the full article. | <urn:uuid:ab53d3b1-1d1b-40c2-a6fb-1ed3f5a3dc3e> | CC-MAIN-2017-26 | http://appliedmarketinggroup.biz/6-ways-to-use-the-curiosity-gap-in-your-marketing-campaigns.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-26/segments/1498128320264.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20170624152159-20170624172159-00281.warc.gz | en | 0.946472 | 620 | 2.59375 | 3 |
Responsabilities of the clergy. About Censing. The Deacon. The Duties of those in Minor Orders. Doors and the curtain. The Holy Doors and the Curtain with some Remarks on Orientation. Priest's Headcoverings During Divine Worship. Using the title "Father." About reverences. The Great Fast. On bells. Order of the Blessing of new Ecclesiastical Vestments.
The Vigil Service.
Vespers. Vesper Prikeimenons: Lity. The Office of Matins. Kathisma. Polyeleon. The Sunday Matins Prokeimena: The Canon. Dismissal. First Hour. Festal Dismissals. Megalynaria. The Office of Vespers on Great Friday. Matins on the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha.
Proskomede and the beginning of the Liturgy. Liturgy of the Catechumens. Reading of the Epistle and the Gospel. Litany of fervent supplication. Liturgy of the faithful. The Great Entrance. Creed and the Eucharistic Canon. Lord’s prayer. Communion of the faithful. End of the Liturgy.
Conciliar Celebration of Divine Liturgy.
A. Conciliar Serving of Liturgy with Participation of a Deacon.
The Liturgy of the Presanctified.
Preceeding services. The Liturgy. Readings from the Old Testament. Litanies. Entrance with the Holy Gifts. Communion. Evening Divine Liturgies.
Sacrament of Penance. Hearing the Confessions of Priests and Hierarchs. Reception of Heretic Laity and Clergy into the Orthodox Church. Receiving a Priest of the Roman Church Into the Orthodox Church . Marriage. Second Marriage. Burial of a Priests. How to Find the Resurrectional Matins Gospel Lesson. Some differences between Greek and Russian divine services (Basil Krivoshein, Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium). Glossary of Liturgical Terminology. The Late, Great Typikon. Date of Pascha, Orthodox Names (by Priest Andrew Philips). Notes on the "Western Rite" (Father Alexander Schmemann).
Responsabilities of the clergy.
The clergy are responsible for the conduct of the Church's worship. In the liturgies of the Church, a clear distinction is made between "clergy" and "people;" for example, every Great Litany, or Irenicon contains these words in the petition for the hierarchy: "for all the clergy and the people." Further, in the traditional service books, some utterances are designated for "Hierarch," "Priest," "Deacon," or "Reader," on the one hand, while other parts are designated for "The Choir," "The People," or just "We." Neither the Typikon nor any of the liturgical books provides any rubric which gives responsibility for conduct of any service to the people. The very prayers at the Laying-on-of-hands and at the setting apart or tonsuring of minor orders, as well as the promises executed in writing at the time of Laying-on-of-hands, clearly direct the clergy to be responsible for the conduct of worship.
Ideally, the Church's temples are constructed and the services taking place in them conducted so that the worshipper in Church would be occupied with prayer, with worship, and with nothing else. All the church's sacred utensils, all the furnishings and vestments, indeed the building itself is set aside by prayers and blessings for sacred purposes. It is always improper and inconsistent with the "good order" of the Church, then, that the building or any of its furnishings would be used for anything else. Likewise, the vestments of the clergy are also blessed according to the rubrics and set aside for use during the sacred services and for no other purpose and at no other time. Therefore, the rule that one does not make conversation with anyone while wearing the blessed vestments set aside for worship should be observed strictly in the parishes of the Diocese of the West. The temptation to engage in such informal conversations arises very often, especially when the clergy are required by rubrics to be walking among the people, as during processions and while censing. Clergy are also frequently tempted to hold conversations with each other, especially when they cannot be observed by the people. This should not be tolerated, especially by anyone who may be occupying "the first place" at any service.)
The temple must be clean and in order. So, too, the vestments and appearance of the clergy must be clean and in order and must be of the highest quality. The actions of the clergy and of all who serve in the Altar must be such as to assist the people in their prayer and worship. Anything done so as to distract the people is a sin. Making eye contact with people in church is one of the most common ways of distracting them, of directing their attention to the clergyman rather than to the progression of the service and to the content of the prayers and to worship of our Lord. Eye contact should be reserved for sermons and lectures. The clergyman would do well to always keep his main attention directed to God, while the rest is directed to the proper execution of his actions and readings. So this is how the censing will be conducted:
The Liturgy of the Catechumens begins with the opening of the Curtain and a complete censing by the Deacon. This censing, like the censing at the beginning of the All-Night Vigil, is done in silence (save for the prayer "In the grave with the body...."); however, in our time, the Hours are being read at this point, and usually have begun some time before the Curtain is opened and the censing starts. Censing occupies a prominent place in the Church's Ordo. Properly executed, it is an integral part of the services where it takes place, of positive value to the purposes of all our Church's services, bringing man to God in and through communal worship.
I. How to swing the censer. The directions for censing found in the Typikon were written when the censers were made differently from our present-day censers. They did not have chains. The censer consisted of a receptacle with a handle on it. The Typikon prescribes that censing be done this way: "(the celebrant) makes the (sign of the) cross with the censer." And "thereupon he censes the entire right choir brethren, doubly, raising the censer before each one vertically and then across, making the cross."
The most common style of swinging the censer, make three swings with the censer toward the person or object being censed. It is customary and proper to bow towards the object or person being censed at the second swing of the censer in both methods. Faithful churchgoers customarily return these bows. No sign of the cross is made. (There is, of course, nothing "Eastern" about bowing, as members of, for example, the Church of England are quick to point out.) While a deacon or priest must not exaggerate his bows lest he risk not edifying, but distracting the faithful, neither would he make a bow so slight as not to be recognized as a bow at all, rather a curt nod of recognition inappropriate off the military drill field.
Learning the order or sequence followed in censing frequently intimidates the novice server.
In present practice, the crosswise moving the censer is done at the Little Entrance at Vespers, as the Deacon intones, "Wisdom! Attend!" at Divine Liturgy at the words "Especially our All-holy...," and at the beginning blessing of All-Night Vigil: "Glory to the holy, Consubstantial ..." and at the beginning blessing, "Blessed is our God ..." at other services of the daily round when they are begun with the censer in hand.
A. Censing "crosswise around."
All censings begin before an object, usually a table, either the Holy Table itself, or a table (or analogion) in the center of the Temple or before an icon, or a table for the commemoration of the departed. At a funeral the table is represented by the coffin. Censing "crosswise around" means to cense first in front (while standing to the west) of the table, towards the east. Then one goes to stand on the right (south) side and censes it towards the north. Then one goes to stand on the far (east) side and censes towards the west. Finally, one goes to the left (north) side and censes towards the south. That is "censing crosswise around."
B. Censing the High Place and the Icons. (Holy Gates closed.)
Frequently, after having done an "A" censing of the Holy Altar Table, the rubrics prescribe that the high place and the Icons be censed, or "all the altar," etc. This censing begins by standing opposite the High Place or a little to one side of it (or, lacking a physical High Seat or Throne, the center of the Eastern wall of the apse), and censing towards it, then proceeding to cense each icon which hangs in the south side of the Altar (area) by going to it and censing before it, then walking over to the north side of the Altar (area) and censing each icon which hangs on that side. If there is an Icon hanging within the Altar (area) over the Holy Gates, this icon is censed last. NOTE: If the Prosthesis, or Table of Oblation is "active" during the service, i.e., if it is a censing at Divine Liturgy, then the Table of Oblation is censed just prior to the High Place.
C. Censing the superior and all in the Altar.
Sometimes, after a "B" censing, the rubrics prescribe that everyone in the altar, or "the superior and the rest of the sacred servers," etc., would be censed. Unless one is a hierarch, one does no actions which involve standing or sitting at the High Place itself. The place for a deacon or priest to stand while censing those serving in the Altar (area) is exactly southeast of the Altar Table, i.e., to the south of the High Place itself. If the superior, usually, but not necessarily, the first-ranking celebrant, is standing before the Altar Table then the deacon or priest censes first in that direction; if he is standing at the High Place, then the deacon or priest censes in that direction. Next, the person censing censes all those, preferably in order of seniority (Archimandrite, Hegumen, Archpriest, Priest, Arch/Protodeacon, Deacon, Subdeacons, Readers, Church Servitors), standing in the south side of the Altar (area). Next, standing in the same place, he censes all those, preferably in order of seniority, standing in the north side of the Altar (area). He need neither move around nor cense back and forth from north side to south side strictly according to rank.
D. Censing the High Place and the Icons (if Holy Gates are open).
One does a "B" censing, but after censing the icon over the Holy Gates, one censes the icons on the open Holy Gates, first the gate opened into the south side of the Altar (area), next the gate opened into the north side of the Altar (area).
E. Censing the Icons on the Iconostasis.
One goes to stand on the Soleas, on the very center of the Ambo, facing toward the east. Whether or not the Holy Gates are open, the first censing is toward the east, i.e., one may consider oneself as censing toward the front of the Holy Altar Table or censing toward the Icon of the Mystic Supper customarily placed over the Holy Gates. Next one censes towards the Icon of the Savior (or other Icon found directly to the south of the Holy Gates) and then (in our usage), in order, one goes to cense before every icon on the first tier of the south portion of the iconostasis, and any group in the vicinity of the south end of the iconostasis. Then one goes and censes towards the Icon of the Theotokos (or other icon found directly to the north of the Holy Gates) and then (in our usage), in order, one goes to cense before every icon on the first tier of the north portion of the iconostasis.
F. Censing the choirs and the people.
While standing on the Soleas, on the very center of the Ambo, one censes first toward the choir or reader standing in the south kleros. Next, if there is a choir or reader standing in the northern kleros one censes towards him or them. Then one censes towards the southwest, i.e., toward those standing on the south side of the Temple. Next one censes towards those standing in the west or in the Narthex. Finally, one censes towards those standing in the northwest.
G. Censing the whole Temple.
One goes down from the Soleas and censes first before any icon on an analogion in the center of the nave. Next one goes and censes before all the icons on the south side of the church, starting with the icon of the Savior on the analogion placed in line with His icon on the Iconostasis and then proceeding around the Temple clockwise. When one reaches the Western doors one censes the icon over the Western doors (usually that of the Dormition of the All-Holy), proceeds into the narthex and censes clockwise around the Narthex, turning to cense toward the Holy Altar before crossing from the South to the North, then returns to the Nave and continues around on the north side of the Church until one finally censes the icon of the Theotokos on the analogion placed in line with her Icon on the Iconostasis.
H. Concluding the censing.
One stands on the Soleas, facing east and censes first towards the icon over the Holy Doors (whether or not the Holy Gates are open), next, while standing in the same spot, the icon of our Savior, then of His All Pure Mother, and then, depending on whence one has started the censing, one censes before the front of the Holy Altar Table or before the Table/icon/Gospel Book/Panikhida Table/Coffin in the center of the Nave, and then censes the Superior, or the ranking one censing, then gives the censer up.
I. Censing at Funerals and Memorials
The censer is swung throughout the prayers of panikhidas and funerals, save at the time of the reading of the Holy Scriptures and the Absolution. Near the conclusion of these services, the Priest must go the Holy Altar, pick up the Hand Cross, and then bless at the Dismissal. So, after "Most Holy Theotokos, save us," he transfers the censer to his left hand, takes up the Hand Cross that is on the Memorial Table, an Analogion, or the Coffin, then transfers the Cross to his left hand, and, censing 3x3, he exclaims, "Glory to Thee, O Christ God, our hope, Glory to Thee," and walks up to the Soleas, censes toward the Holy Table, turns and, placing the Cross again into his left hand together with the censer, crosses himself as usual upon beginning the Dismissal, then holds Cross and Censer with both hands, and blesses the Faithful while holding both, before turning, transferring the Cross to his left hand to proceed with the censing of the Iconostasis and the People ("E" & "F," above), during "Memory Eternal," then returning to conclude before the Coffin, where he finally gives up the Censer.
The name deacon in own sense designates a third rank of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. On initial assignment the deacons were servers at the meal of the Lord, i.e. at the fulfillment of the liturgy. They were also ministers of the word of God. The present circle of their liturgical actions is determined in an exact sense by the primary head of the establishment. They serve at the administration of Holy Communion for the bishops and presbyters, but do not perform sacraments, except for baptism as a last resort, according to the image fulfilled by his laity. They uplift prayers as assistants and read the Gospel.
"According to the certificate of ordination" the deacon is obliged "at the Divine liturgy and at other sacraments performed by the priest (1), and at other divine services and rites, to serve," "in obedience to the priest (see page 680 note 1), contributing and working for all the good" (2); "the service of the Deacon: to prepare the sacred vessels for the service, to properly raise up prayer for the people (i.e. within oneself) and for the people (i.e. loudly for all to hear) in church, for this to be ordained and blessed, on the ambo in honor of the Gospel and the Apostolic epistles (3): and those things not specifically belonging to the priest (if, for example, last during the Divine Service he is called to administer the Unction or to baptize an ill person), to teach the people from the Divine Scriptures, the Divine Commandments and the way of life according to Christian law, from the dogmas and the commentaries of the church luminaries, the God-bearing fathers (4). More than this nothing that belongs to the priest is appropriate."
The Deacon in the case of the absence of the priest or because of his illness can not lead the vigil or obednitsa services (5), lead or sing the burial service for the departed, serve the molieben or the panichida (6); in general, the deacon, as only a server, is the person assisting the priest in the performing the sacraments and other liturgical actions and can not perform any kind of Divine Service without the participation and blessing of the priest. It is true that the church rubrics on some days of the year permit the serving of some of the services, for example, the compline, the midnight service and others, "privately," but from here it may not be concluded in any way that the deacon may lead the services of compline, vespers, matins and so forth in the temple and as if these services were led by the priest.
In the order of the church services (in their beginning, in the middle, and also at their end), usually, are clear instructions on the participation in performance of the Divine Services of the priest and on the necessity of his blessing during the performance of church services (for example: "the priest at the beginning does," "the priest begins," "having been blessed by the priest," "an exclamation from the priest," "the priest prays," "the priest says to the deacon," "the priest says the dismissal," "the priest does the dismissal"; in other respects there are remarks: "if there is no deacon the priest says," but there are no remarks: "if there is no priest, the deacon says." As is evident the church services are adapted by the Church for their performance by the priest, quite often together with the deacon, but certainly with the participation of the priest and from his blessing.
The priestly blessing to teach, the exclamations, the many prayers and closing priestly dismissals say that the deacon has no right to say, between the former as well as those, and others what begins, is accompanied and fulfilled in each general church service in the Orthodox Church. From here it is clear, that the deacon may not and must not begin, nor independently perform, any general church service without the participation of the priest. The Deacon is the servant, and not the performer of the Divine Services; he has no right without the blessing and the participation of the priest to vest himself with the sticharion (7), to cense, to recite the litanies. The Deacon's Certificate of Ordination clearly expresses the command to the deacon "to serve at (but not to perform) the Divine Liturgy and other sacraments performed by the priest, and at other divine services and orders."
Independently deacons may perform (without a vestment, in the rasson) only those Divine Services, that are also permitted to the laity, namely those in which begins with the rubric: "if the priest says: Blessed is our God, and we say: amen; if there is no priest, we say: Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus the Christ our God, have mercy on us"; thus the so-called home canons and prayers begin; the church services all without exception begin with the blessing of the priest and without him in any case they may not be performed.
If the priest illegally blesses the deacon to perform in place of himself he must stand before the church meeting. The priest receives by ordination in his rank the authority only personally to perform the known priestly functions and the known function of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but he has no right of assignment to whomever of the full powers of his priesthood. In this case is one of the essential ways of distinguishing the holy rank of the bishop from the rank of the presbyter. Differing from the deacon by many privileges in the divine service, the presbyter is similar to him in that personally, by himself, he can not change anything in the precisely specified norms of activity, which properly belongs to him, and the clergy with whom he concelebrates. Therefore, the priest blessing deacon to perform instead of himself the church order of services (as, for example, the funeral procession of the departed), and he himself is carried away with the right of the bishop, exceeds his position, and blessing the deacon to fulfill this is the same crime, i.e. the excess of authority given him by ordination.
But also inarguably the right of assignment belonging to the bishop is not unconditional: even the bishop cannot give to each of the clergymen any kind of an assignment, but only that consistently with the degree he carries, and with his clerical position. The bishop cannot order, for example, the deacon to sanctify an altar, perform the liturgy, or other priestly activities; because to fulfill these priestly activities there simply is not enough authority in the assignment, but an ordination to the degree of presbyter is necessary. If even the bishop is inarguably constrained in the application of the authority belonging to him; then the priest may use it: he is personally obliged to send a petition for his need, and must not charge the deacon to direct a service, for which he is not authorized even by the bishop's ordination. In general the spirit and letter of the priest's canon do not give any right 1) for the deacon to replace the priest in performing any priestly activities, and 2) for the priest to agree and assign the deacon to do any of these priestly duties.
Thus, unfairly, those priests behave reprehensibly and with harm for the Church who assign the deacons to perform any kind of church services, in church vestments and in their absence; equally it is unlawful and criminal for the deacons to act also, if he soon is independent, without the participation of the priest, even with his consent, performs in the place of the priest this or that Divine Service — general or particular — in the temple or outside of it.
The Deacon should perform (see the Certificate of Ordination) only "the services belonging to the deacon" and moreover "according to the rubrics and the order of the Holy Eastern Church" (1); "in place of the priest, as the Blessed Augustine says, only priest may serve, and not a deacon."
The Duties of those in Minor Orders.
Tonsured Readers and Ordained Subdeacons, when serving or reading, should wear the vestments appropriate to their function. The garment of a Reader is the Sticharion; that of the Subdeacon is the Sticharion and Orarion worn crossed about the torso . The cassock (podriassnik, anderi, or undercassock) is not the garment or sign of a Reader or Subdeacon, but is a garment which is appropriately worn under the sticharion.
Tonsured Readers may make ready the vestments in the Altar for the Sacred Servers and Church Servers before a service. They may prepare the censer, and carry lights, or fans, during processions and entrances, hold the holy water vessel and brush, hold the vessel with blessed oil or the dish with the blessed bread at Vigil, and they may cut up and otherwise prepare that blessed bread. They may themselves light the lights and lamps when prescribed by the ritual. They may prepare the vessels which contain w ine and water and fill them before the Divine Liturgy, and they may operate the altar curtain according to the prescribe ritual. They may prepare the warm water and bear it to the Deacon or Priest during the Divine Liturgy. They may bear the episcopal st aff, ascend the ambo to sing the trio at the Trisagion of the Divine Liturgy, bear and page the Bishop's Service Book, may secure the train of the Bishop's mantle, and may distribute the hierarchical Eagle-rugs. These privileges are all in addition to the ir assigned responsibility of reading in Church (not only in Church but from the Ambo, or on the raised "Vesting Place").
Ordained Subdeacons may do all those things permitted to Readers. In addition, they may touch the Holy Altar Table, when there is a necessity or direction to do so. For example, a Subdeacon may remove the large cloth which covers the Holy Table and everything on it between services. He may prepare the Table of Oblation for Divine Liturgy. A Subdeacon may remove the Dikirion and/or Trikirion from the Holy Table, if these have been placed there (i.e., when there is no special stand for them behind the Holy Table). Subdeacons may open the Holy Doors, as at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, when a hierarch is serving. Subdeacons vest a hierarch in his holy vestments when there are not enough deacons to do so.
Untonsured Readers are a regular part of our Church life, and will continue to be so. Where there are many Readers, then they should read according to a (fair) schedule made up by the Senior Priest of the Cathedral or the person he appoints to do so. There is certainly no reason to exclude women from reading.
(1) The Deacon, with two priests, is obliged to serve with one and the other, according to the idea of his rank and duties, he is present during the Divine Services, as the helper of the priest (C. M. 1891, 27). The Deacon must not be relieved from the duty to serve with the employedPriest: the employed priest is in place of the present priest of the church, but for this or that reason does not serve personally (C. M. 1892, 42).
(2) The Deacon who is a teacher at a parochial school, is not relieved from his duties to participate in the performance of the Divine Services even on week-days, if the these duties are compatible with his teaching; at the Presanctified Liturgies during the days of the Holy Forty Day Fast and at all the Divine Services of its first week and during Holy Week it is not only necessary for the deacon-teacher to be present, but also his students (see the detailed explanation in Taurus Diocese Authority in Ye. V. 1889, 5). — The District supervisor of church-parish schools (and equally the diocesan supervisor and the Diocesan School Council) have no right to autocratically relieve the deacon-teachers from participation in the performance of the Divine Services; this right belongs to local Bishop (C. M. 1897, 42). In those dioceses, where it is published, with the agreement of the local Bishop, is a special rule of the precise duties of the deacon-teachers concerning the church and the school, it follows, of course, to enforce these rules. So, in the Novgorod diocese the local diocesan authority has established the following rules concerning the deacon-teachers: the deacon-teachers are relieved from participation in performing the Divine Services on all week-days, from participation at the special request services — at baptisms and the burial service of a child, at the performance of marriages, with the exception, that when on one day there will be many marriages and the help of the deacon will be necessary; it is necessary for the deacons to participate in the services: on all Sundays and Holy Days, on all Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays of Great Lent, on all patronal feast days, on all rural feasts in the church and during the time of prayers in houses, and besides this, according to the local requested circumstance, in the special exclusive cases, when the presence of deacon at the Divine Services or the performance of the request will be recognized as necessary; but in order to prevent damage to the school work, the rector of the church, leading the deacons to participate in the Divine Services and requested services in unexpected inclusive cases, should act with strict discernment and oversight and not give any place for the multiplication of such cases; from this it is suggested that the deacon-teachers in case of the necessity to participate in the Divine Services on school days, make an effort to visit the school some time before the performance of the Divine Services for the hearing of the given lessons and for the presentation of new lessons (C. M. 1897,42). Also other dioceses issued special rules, by which one or another privilege is granted the deacon-teachers (see. Simb. Y. V. 1896, 3). Any general law concerning this does not exist (see C. M. 1893, 19; 1894, 45; C. M. 1896, 16). But anyway neither from the rules about parochial schools, nor from the decrees of the Holy Synod is it evident that the deacons, even though they are teachers of designated schools, take part in the performance of the Divine Services only on great feasts and Sundays were named to positions with the exclusive purpose of teaching at the schools. In view of this, there, where there are no deacon-teachers of the special rules issued by the local diocesan authority, the demand by the priests, that the deacon-teachers be relieved from school duties during the time of the Divine Services, should be recognized as quite lawful.
(3) The Kostroma Spiritual Consistory (because in many churches of the diocese there are vacancies of psalm-readers the deacons, who quite often are responsible to the Diocesan Authority, substitute upon requests for permission for them to alternate in the functions of the specific diaconal duties in the church and the parish with the regular deacons) by circular decrees has proclaimed to the clergy of the diocese the following information and direction, that in the situation consisting of vacancies of psalm-readers the deacon should without neglect execute all the duties of the psalm-reader in the church and parish; to begin the divine services in the rank of deacon they must do so with the knowledge and blessing of the rector of the church, instead of at his own discretion and desire, and not to arbitrarily leave the choir reading and singing (Manual up until 1889, — Concerning whether the deacon in the absence of the psalm-reader in helping the regular deacon serve liturgies (for example the early one), — "The Church Messenger" explained, that the deacon on the vacancy of the psalm-reader, as deacon, is obliged to serve the liturgy at every opportunity, not thinking that he helps someone by this (C. M. 1892,43). The assignment of turns of the deacons in their service of the liturgy should be determined by the rector, and not by any means depend on the will of this or that deacon (see C. M. 1892, 28). — It is self understood that the deacon-psalm-reader at a divine service, if vested, necessarily should carry his orarion also (see C. M. 1894, 39).
(4) The Deacon is forbidden and has no the right to vest and deliver sermons: the prohibition of these things also is that it is a forbidden action in the service and teaching (C. M. 1890, 11).
(5) In 1892, March 9, No. 140, from Metropolitan Leonty of Moscow the following proposition arrived in the local Consistory: "information reached me, that in some parishes within the city of Moscow during Great Lent one of the deacons served the Hours without the priest. Finding such custom completely opposed to church rules, I propose that the Consistories confirm to the clergy, that the deacon does not have the right to perform any divine service without the priest, and those guilty of the infringement of this rule will be subjected to strict accountability." (Moscow Y. V. 1892, 9).
(6) The Moscow Council of 1667 even considers the performance as deacons, without the utmost need, the sprinkling with holy water out of his competence: "the priest blesses the water, he is worthy also to sprinkle, and not the deacon; the deacon only holds the vessel of holy water, for he is the servant" (Materials for a Lecture, 288). According to the explanation in the "The Church Messenger," the deacon by himself taking the cross from the altar and taking it for kissing in preparing for holy communion represents a change in the standard practice as excessive and undesirable, and in the specified case it is necessary to bring the cross out from the sanctuary to the priest (C. M. 1888, 28).
(7) The Deacon, when he soon participates in whatever Divine Service as a deacon, by all means should be in church vestments — in a sticharion with the orarion (and not in any case without the sticharion, and only an orarion, as it is sometimes practiced, — see Penz. Y. V. 890, 18); the deacon receives the right to vest every time from the blessing of the priest, which is why he asks the blessing from him with the words: "Bless, Master, the holy sticharion and orarion"; the deacon has no the right by himself to vest in sacred vestments, without the blessing of the priest, even and with the consent of the priest, (The Manual up to the present time 1894, 14).
(8) At the sole celebration by the deacon of this or that service, and even with the participation of the psalm-reader, the omission specified in the order of services of either actions or the prayers or their completion without a priest, the deacon distorts the very service, for which are specified in the known liturgical books a certain rank and order of performance, with the necessary concurrence with this by the actions of the church servers according to their rank; the distortion of the church services in any case cannot be allowed. Therefore the deacon can neither begin without the blessing of the priest, nor intone the exclamations of the priest, nor open the royal doors during a service, nor make an entrance, nor do a censing, nor do the dismissal (because all these actions are done only by the priest himself, or sometimes with others and the deacon, but not otherwise, as after the preliminary blessing of the priest, in which the deacon in any case has no right to preach neither by himself, nor with other people, neither by liturgical actions, nor by church matters), whereas all this accompanies or enters into the liturgical structure of the order of this or that church service. Therefore the deacon, as a hierarchical person with only known rights and duties, has no right in church vestments, without the participation of the priest to perform any private divine services or prayer services, although it is faster for the completion of it the blessing of the priest is required and the known rank or order of service is specified. On the other hand, a private service of need done by the deacon (a brief Litya for the departed, the panichida) will be imagined from the person of the deacon, or according to the tradition and temple custom, but, anyway, by the higher ecclesiastical authority (Hierarchical or Holy Synodal) as not by the rank itself and not in agreement with the established divine service rank, because this service will inevitably be needed, in view of the above mentioned reduction and change in the structure of the liturgical actions accompanying it. In another situation, if a priest is in the church, and by himself beginning this or that divine service and up to the end participating in it through its completion out of the order of its divine service, that belongs to the person of the priest, even though he, according to the need or circumstances, did not immediately accept the participation in the direction of all the order of this or that service, moreover the part of the divine service or private service of need. We understand in this case the Moliebens, the Panichidas, the Lityas for the Departed, usually served on the ambo or in the middle of the temple sometimes by one present deacon, if only the priest was in the temple (for example, according to the need in the sanctuary, instead of in the middle of the temple) and has sent what belongs to the rank of the priesthood — began the divine service by the usual blessing, intoned the exclamations and finished the service with the blessing of the dismissal. It is supposed in ecclesiastical practice. (See the details in the Manual up to the present 1894, 14).
S. V. Bulgakov, Handbook for Church Servers, 2nd ed., 1274 pp., (Kharkov, 1900) pp.682-5.
Translated by Archpriest Eugene D. Tarris © 3/27/2001. Posted with permission.
Doors and the curtain.
Chapter 23 of the Typikon reads as follows:
About the Holy Altar, When it is Opened and When it is Closed
The curtain is opened at the beginning of Vespers, and stays open even until the Dismissal. At Matins likewise, from the beginning until the end. At the Hours, when they are read outside of Liturgy, it is opened for the reading of the Apostle, and stay s open until the dismissal. But at the dismissal it is closed indeed. At the beginning of Liturgy the curtain is opened and stays opened until (through) the Great Entrance. After the Entrance it is closed again, until the priest, or deacon, cries, "The doors, the doors, in Wisdom let us attend!" It is opened then and remains open until the exclamation, "Holy Things are for the Holy!" And again it is closed. After Communion it is opened again, and it stays open until the end of the Holy Liturgy. After the Dismissal of the Liturgy, it is again completely closed. But if a Molieben is sung, then it remains open from beginning to end of that. NOTE: Be aware that the Holy Doors are never opened, except at the beginning of Great Vespers when there is a Vigil, when the priest censes, and for all entrances, i.e., of Vespers and Liturgy, and with the Holy Gospel: likewise, they are opened for the appearance of the Holy Gifts, even until the completion of the Divine Liturgy.
The Holy Doors (and the north and south doors, as well) are of course still to remain opened through the entire Bright Week, until the Ninth Hour on Bright Saturday evening, i.e., during the entire period when, according to ancient practice, those newly illuminated through Holy Baptism remained in the Temple wearing their Baptismal garments.
The Holy Doors and the Curtain with some Remarks on Orientation.
About the curtain of the holy altar, when it is opened and when it is closed
The curtain is opened at the beginning of Vespers, and stays open even up to the Dismissal. At Matins likewise, from the beginning to the end. At the Hours, when read apart from Liturgy, it is opened for the Apostolic reading and stays open until the dismissal.(1) At the Dismissal it is indeed closed. At the beginning of Liturgy, though, the curtain is opened, and it stays opened all the way to the Great Entrance. After the entrance, though, it is again closed, until the Priest, or Deacon, exclaims: "The Doors! The Doors! In wisdom let us attend!" Then it is opened, and it stays opened until the cry: "Holy Things are for the Holy!" Then it is iclosed again. After the Communion(2) it is again opened, and it stays opened until the end of the Holy Liturgy. After the Dismissal of the l liturgy, though it is closed for good. When a Molieben is sung, the curtain remains open from beginning to end.(3) Be aware that the Holy Doors are never ever(4) openedonly at the beginning of Great Vespers, when there is a Vigil and the Priest therefore censes, and at all entrances, i.e., vespers and liturgy entrances, and for the reading of the Gospel. They are likewise opened also from the Appearance of the Holy Mysteries, even up to the completion of the Divine Liturgy.
As for the curtain, it is well known that in the developments and refinements that have taken place in our Church, always under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and always with the Faithful people GUARDING What has been passed on to them, the curtain was in use long before the development of the Iconostasis as we know it. The reason (not rationale) for the curtain is made particularly plain in the Typikon's direction that it be opened at the words "The Doors! The Doors!" This is that moment when the Subdeacons of old, or those having the office then known as Door-Keeper, made their final "security check" as we would say. Then not only could the curtain be opened, but the Aer could be lifted up from the Gifts placed on the Altar at the Great Entrance and since then protected by that curtain and Aer. (The curtain could even be considered, in a sense, another larger Aer.) It is of course, incorrect to interpret the words "The Doors! The Doors!" as being any kind of direction to OPEN any doors! Here that the Peace that is given to the people before that moment, with the signing of them with the sign of the precious cross, is given with the curtain closed. The action in no way diminishes the Blessing or the Peace.
Some Presbyters, perhaps feeling relieved of their burden of following the Typikon vis-a-vis doors and curtain, also allow themselves to face the people, in the style of an hierarch, for the opening phrases of the Anaphora: "The Grace of our Lord..." "Let us lift up our hearts.." and "Let us give thanks unto the Lord..." This practice is not followed by nor has it been authorized for Presbyters. The Presbyter, in accordance with received practice, DOES turn to the West only when he blesses the People with his hand at the conclusion of the phrase "The Grace of our Lord Jesus Chris, the Love of God the Father, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit BE WITH YOU ALL." This is the same style he follows when he blesses at the end of the phrase: "And the mercies of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, BE WITH YOU ALL."
With regard to such QUASI-hierarchical emulations, for some time our Local Church has left off following the practice (introduced from above very late in the history of the Russian Church) of permitting AS AN AWARD OF DISTINCTION some distinguished Presbyters to serve with open Holy Doors "Up to the Great Entrance," and "Not only up to the Great Entrance, but through the Lord's Prayer." There is, of course, nothing ESSENTIALLY hierarchical about open Holy Doors. In fact, relative to, especially, the curtain, the practice of keeping the Holy Doors open all the way to the time of the Holy Communion of the clergy would appear obviously to conflict with the ancient practice of the curtain as prescribed in our Typikon. No such practice is followed, for example, at an hierarchical celebration of the Liturgy of Presanctified Gifts.
The Hours. The Typikon and received practice make no general distinctions amongst the different Hours nor any distinction relative to the curtain particularly, even when some are celebrated just before the Divine Liturgy. The Hours are, in fact, services of the Narthex, and they are to be served, save for those exceptions quoted above in chapter 23 of the Typikon, with CLOSED Doors and Curtain. The Curtain is opened for Divine Liturgy at the point when the Deacon's censing of Altar and Church begins, after the conclusion of the Dismissal of the Service of the Proskomedia. This censing, like the censing done before the Blessing that begins the All-Night Vigil, is done (at least theoretically) in silence, although in our times we permit it to be done before the Hours are concluded. Therefore, at the time the Deacon goes before the Holy Table and begins to cense, repeating quietly the troparion, "In the grave with the body but in Hades with the soul as God; in paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast Thou, O Christ, filling all things, Thyself uncircumscribed," THEN the Curtain is opened for Divine Liturgy, NOT at the beginning blessing of the Hours.
Orientation. For most of the Divine Services, whether the Divine Liturgy or the Services of the Office, the essential unity of the entire People of God, including Deacons, Priests, and Bishops, is realized in many ways, and one of them is in orientation. That is, by and large all prayers in our services from beginning to end are said with all facing the East, including Deacons, Priests, and Bishops. Some Deacons who turn to the faithful in order to repeat the phrase, "Let us love one another that with one mind...." This is inexplicable. EVERY petition of the Great Litany contains the phrase "LET US..." "LET US pray to the Lord..." Other Litanies contain the phrase "LET US ask of the Lord" And so forth. If the Deacon turns to the People, it would seem that he is separating himself from the people in his posture, or that he is addressing them AND NOT HIMSELF. It is as if he were a specialist following this kind of rubric: "When the specialist or professional is addressing God (on behalf of the layman), then he faces East: when the specialist or professional is addressing the layman as their director, then he faces them." Let Deacons avoid this novelty and, by so doing show forth the CONCILIARITY of the Church, not only in their posture, but in following the consensus of not only our short time on earth, but the consensus of those who went before us.(7)
(1) These "epistle" readings (more correctly, "apostolic readings," since the Acts are included) are at the Hours of Great, Good, and Holy Friday, at the Royal Hours of Theophany and Nativity, and at the daily Sixth Lenten Hour during the Great Fast. In practice where the curtain is opened at the daily Lenten sixth hour for the Prokeimenon, Apostolic reading and second Prokeimenon, it is closed after the second Prokeimenon, and not left open until the Dismissal.
(2) I.e., after the Communion of the clergy.
(3) This is applied to those Moliebens sung in the center of the Church, where the clergy bring out the Holy Gospel and Cross and place them on an Analoy at the beginning of the Molieben, and to the Solemn Molieben at the New Year (the one that begins with "Blessed is the Kingdom..." because of the habit of the [Byzantine] Emperor of being present at it).
(5) This title continues: "This same sequence is followed also in the rest of the honorable Jerusalem communities, as likewise in the rest of God's Holy churches."
6) However, the following rationale has been put forward by some. It goes like this. The Iconostasis, the Doors and the Curtain do not protect the Holies from observation by the profane: they protect the profane from the Holies, which are a light to the Faithful, but a burning flame to the profane.
(7) No one should feel that the ancient practice of our Church where the President of the Eucharist and his assistant Elders go and stand at the High Place, in pious imitation and recollection of the Savior and His Apostles, and face the people in order to give the Peace and to impart the teaching of the Scriptures conflicts in any way with the aforedescribed orientation for prayer. There are also some special prayers that are composed to include didactic elements, such as the Kneeling Prayers at Pentecost and the concluding long collect at the end of the New Year's Molieben. These are, exceptionally, said by the celebrant while he faces the Faithful. Such exceptional prayers are read kneeling.
Priest's Headcoverings During Divine Worship.
The 29th Chapter of the Typikon is titled, "About the Covering of Heads:"
Be it known that at Liturgy we uncover our heads at the Entrance, and for the hearing of the holy Gospel, and at the Cherubim Hymn of the Great Entrance, and at the Savior's Words, and at "It is truly meet, and at "Our Father," and at the appearance of the Holy Mysteries, and at the entrance at Vespers.
The above rubric pertains, of course, to the wearing of headgear by Monastics standing in Church; moreover, not to those who are actually serving, but to those that are simply present at the services. As for those Priests that have the right of wearing Mitres, Kamilavkas, and Skufiyas, the following is the received practice of our Church, and is to be followed in the Diocese of the West.
For Divine Liturgy, the Priest enters the Church wearing his Skufiya or Kamilavka and, usually, begins reading the prayers of preparation in front of the Holy Doors without uncovering his head until the end of the penitential troparia, "Have mercy on us, O Lord..." and "Open unto us the door of thy tender-heartedness, O Theotokos." When he has to kiss the Icons, the Priest bares his head. He also reads the Prayer: "O Lord, stretch forth Thy hand," with uncovered head and, without re-covering it, he enters the Altar, makes his reverences before the Holy Table, kisses the Book of Gospels, the Cross and the Holy Table and proceeds to vest, as usual.
He also serves the Proskomedia with uncovered head. He puts on his Mitre, Kamilavka, or Skufiya at the beginning of the Liturgy proper, before uttering "O Heavenly King" and "Glory to God in the highest." He continues with covered head all the way to the Gospel. At the Gospel he takes off his head-covering. He puts it back on again after the reading and stands with covered head up to the Cherubim Hymn or, more exactly, till the Great Entrance. From that point on the Priest leaves his head bare until the exclamation "Always, now and ever and unto ages of ages," and the placing of the Holy Gifts on the Table of Oblation, whereupon, returning to stand before the Holy Table, while the Choir is singing "Let our mouths be filled," the Priest puts on his head-covering, refolds the Antimension and Iliton, reads the Prayer before the Ambo, and proceeds straight through to the conclusion of the Liturgy with covered head.
When serving the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, Priests take off their Kamilavkas and Skufiyas to kiss the holy Icons during the reading of their (abbreviated) Entrance Prayers while the Choir is chanting the Beatitudes of the Typica. They put them back on again before beginning the Liturgy and take them off again to make a Great Reverence before the Holy Table and take the Presanctified Gifts from the Tabernacle and place Them on the Paten. They put them on again and leave them on until it comes time to make three Great Reverences and transport the Presanctified Gifts from the Holy Table to the Table of Oblation. After placing Them on the Table of Oblation and making a prostration, they put their headgear on again. Headgear are taken off before the blessing with candle and censer and the words: "Wisdom. Attend. The Light of Christ illuminateth all." Then they are put on again. They are again taken off for the chanting of "Let my prayer arise," with its verses, and put on again after three Great Reverences and the Prayer of St. Ephraim. They are put on again for the Fervent Litany and remain on until the time of "Now the Powers of Heaven." Priests then stand bare-headed through the rest of the Service until "Let our mouths be filled," as at Eucharistic Liturgies.
As for other services, in general our practice is not to keep our heads covered during prayers in general — Prayers of Light, Prayers at the bowing of heads, during the Hexapsalmos, Molieben Prayers, and during the time of other such sacred utterances as the reading of Akathists and Gospels. And this usage applies not only to Priests that are serving, but also to those only present at a given Service.
Some Priests have asked if Kamilavkas and Skufiyas can be placed on the Holy Table. This has not been received practice from very early times, and is is best to avoid it. As for Miters, since they have holy icons on them, they may be, and usually are, placed on the Holy Table.
Finally a word about black Skufiyas. These may be worn by any clergy from the rank of Reader if they receive a blessing to do so from their Bishop. If the blessing to wear a black Skufiya is asked for and given for health reasons, then that Skufiya should only be worn for such reasons as protection from the cold and for performing services of need outside the Temple, for such occasions as burials and Cross processions, or in winter in an unheated Church, and even during Services and the Divine Liturgy, in which case the same rules are followed as are given above for the Violet Skufiya.
While headgear is not worn during the Proskomedia, all other Vestments are worn during the Proskomedia. There is no provision at all in the Service Books of our Church for deferring any of the vesting until after the Proskomedia. Any Priests that are serving the Proskomedia without their phelonion are making a mistake and disturbing the established order of the services.
Using the title “Father.”
Here is another item of priestly courtesy: while priests call each other (and deacons) "Father," they do not speak of themselves as "Father" to another priest (or to the bishop), nor do they sign their correspondence to one another as "Father so-and-so." Priests speak of themselves to each other (and to the bishop) as "Priest so-and-so," (or Archpriest or Protopresbyter so-and-so. Deacons speak of themselves to other deacons or to priests or the bishop, as "Deacon so-and-so," while always addressing other deacons as "Father Deacon" or "Father so-and-so."
Our Orthodox Typikon knows or recognizes two kinds of reverences, reverence being defined as the customary posture of an Orthodox Church member when adoring God in Church. One of them is a "reverence down to the ground" (Slavonic: zemnoy poklon). The other is a "waist reverence" (Slavonic: poiasnyi poklon). In English, it's become quite usual to refer to the first as a "prostration," though it is not a prostration. A prostration is when one lies stretched out on the ground, face down, while our zemnoy poklon or "Reverence down to the ground" is a posture whereby the forehead touches the ground while the body is in a kneeling, not a lying position. A better term for "reverence down to the ground," or "prostration," is "full reverence. " The other reverence, the "waist reverence," is a substitute for the full reverence. A "waist reverence" is described this way in the Typikon: (this is taken from the section giving directions on how to venerate the Gospel at a Resutrection Vigil): "And the Superior comes alone and makes two reverences, then kisses the Gospel, and again makes one reverence (not to the earth does he make reverences, but little (ones), bowing down his head, until he reaches the ground with his hand)." A better name for the waist reverence is "little reverence."
Reverences are prescribed at various points and during certain times in our services. Whether or not the words "full" or "earthly" precede the word "reverence," a full reverence is meant. The waist reverence is the substitute, prescribed for use when full reverences are not permitted by the Canons of the Church.
One may see from the above that neither those that bend their knees, in a kind of curtsy, looking straight ahead, then reach down to touch the ground, nor those that make a perfunctory bow while stretching out their right hand momentarily towards the ground, would seem to know how to indicate reverence as the Church finds to be appropriate.
The Great Fast.
THE GREAT FAST begins after Vespers in the evening on Forgiveness Sunday. Until then, we all should take some time for an especially intensive self-examination.
We should ask ourselves:
What is the condition of my relationship with God and His Body, the Church, and how has it improved from previous years?
What is the condition of my relationship with my family and neighbors, and how has it improved from previous years?
What is the condition of my own spiritual life, and how has it improved over the previous years?
After serious attention to those questions, we should be able to focus on some clear goals for the period of the Fast in order to experience with greater joy and spiritual benefits the celebration of Holy Pascha and the next period of our life that begins then. We all should conclude that visits to Holy Confession during the pre-Fast period and one or more times during the Fast itself are indicated. Probably we all need to take a more serious attitude towards what we know very well is what is expected of Orthodox Christians. Probably the most common error we make is procrastination — procrastination that is indefinite and almost final. We like to tell ourselves that we will take this or that step forward "just as soon as I am ready," "just as soon as these other things are in order," and so forth. The advice of the Saints is always "Do it now." The advice of Satan is, "There's no rush: anyhow, you're not ready yet."
The ringing of the bells serves two functions in the Orthodox Church. The first is for calling the faithful to divine services, and the second is to announce the beginning of various parts of the services to those faithful who are absent from the church.
The different manners or ways of ringing
1) Blagovest — literally "Good News." This is the measured striking of one bell for the beginning of a service.
2) Zvon — literally "Peal." This is the ringing of all bells.
3) Dvuzvon — literally "Double Peal." This is the ringing of all bells then an interval of silence, followed by a second ringing of all bells. Simply put, this is the ringing of all bells twice.
4) Trezvon — literally "Treble Peal." This is the ringing of all bells three times.
5) Perezvon — "Chain-peal." This is the striking of each bell several times beginning with the largest bell and proceeding to the smallest bell. This chain is repeated as long as necessary. This is used before any Blessing of Water.
6) Perebor — "Chain-toll." The slow striking of each bell once beginning from the largest bell and proceeding to the smallest bell. After the chain, all bells are rung together. This is repeated several times. This is also called burial or funeral ringing.
Bell Ringing at All-Night Vigil
The blagovest is rung before the service and is immediately followed by the trezvon. At the beginning of the reading of the Hexapsalmion or before it the dvuzvon takes place. Immediately before the reading of the Gospel, the zvon takes place. During the Magnificat the bell is struck nine times. At the conculsion of the Vigil, the trezvon is rung.
Bell Ringing at the Divine Liturgy
The blagovest is rung at the appointed time and ceases at the beginning of the Hours. At the endof the 6th hour the trezvon is rung. At the end of the Creed, which consists of 12 parts, the bell is struck 12 times in a unhurried fashion to inform those Christians who are absent that the time of the Consecration of the Holy Gifts approaches. After the Liturgy the trezvon is rung.
At Lenten and Royal Hours
Before the Hours during Great Lent and at Royal Hours, the number of times the bell is struck corresponds to which Hour is being read. At the Third Hour, the bell is struck three times, at the 6th, six times, and at the 9th, nine times.
Vespers of Holy Friday
At the bringing out of the Plaschanitsa and before the procession around the church the perebor is rung and immediately thereafter the trezvon.
Bell Ringing at Funerals
The perebor is used at the carrying out of the deceased from the temple for burial. There is no trezvon after this bell.
Bell Ringing at Moliebens with the Blessing of Water
When the cross is immersed into the water, a short trezvon takes place.
Bell Ringing at the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy
The blagovest is sounded at appointed time. As the Hierarch approaches the temple, all the bells are rung. When the Hierarch enters the temple, the ringing stops and the blagovest is resumed until the beginning of the vesting of the Hierarch. At the beginning of the Sixth hour the trezvon is sounded unless there is an ordination to the rank of reader or to the subdiaconate, in which case the trezvon is sounded after the Bishop's prayers before the Divine Liturgy.
Order of the Blessing of new Ecclesiastical Vestments.
That is, the sticharion, epitrochelion, belt, cuffs, and phelonion
Before the Royal Doors on a table prepared for the blessing of the offerings are placed the new vestments. The priest in epitrochelion and phelonion with the censer, goes out through the Royal Doors, and censes crosswise around the vestments, and begins as usual:
Blessed is our God always, now and ever and to the ages of ages.
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth …
Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name….
Priest: For Yours is the Kingdom, and the power….
Lord, have mercy. (12)
Come! Let us worship God, our King!
Come! Let us worship and fall down before Christ, our King and our God!
Come! Let us worship and fall down before Christ Himself, our King and our God!
And Psalm 132 (133): Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity …
Glory to the Father, and to the Son … Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia. Glory to You, O God. (3)
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
People: Lord, have mercy.
The priest reads this prayer:O Lord, God Almighty, Who from the beginning performs all things useful for the human race, to create temples made by human hands in Your holy Name, to sanctify them in Your own glory, and to name the delightful place of the tent of Your glory: Who had ordered by Your servant Moses the vestments of the high priest, priestly and Levitical, and those various decorations in comeliness and beauty of the temple and Your sanctuary; mercifully hear now our entreaty, and bless, cleanse, and sanctify these vestments (name them), in honor and glory of Your all holy Name, prepared for the adornment of Your holy mysteries, through me Your humble and unworthy servant, so that they be worthily revealed for the service for Your holy Mysteries, and for every Doxology of Your all holy Name, and for Your consecrated servers to be vested with them, that they be for the deliverance and protection from all wiles and temptations of enemies, in Your pleasantness, and for the proper service for Your holy Mysteries, and in provision of Your grace and mercy;
Through the grace and compassion and love toward mankind of Your only begotten Son, with whom You are blessed, together with Your all holy, good, and life creating Spirit, now and ever, and to the ages of ages.
Priest: Peace be to all.
People: And to your Spirit.
Deacon: Bow your heads to the Lord.
People: To You, O Lord.
The Priest, bowing his head, reads this prayer:O Master, God Almighty, Source of every good gift and sanctification, look down now on our prayer, and these vestments (he names them), made for the adornment and comeliness of Your priestly servers, by the grace of Your all holy Spirit, through the sprinkling of this holy water, are blessed, holy, and sanctified, that all those who are worthily vested for Your holy Mysteries, serve, and accept You always as Creator.
And he exclaims: For You are our Sanctification, and to You we ascribe glory, together with Your only begotten Son, and Your all holy, good, and life creating Spirit, now and ever, and to the ages of ages.
The priest then takes the holy water, sprinkles it on the vestments lying there, saying:
These vestments (he names them) are sanctified by the grace of the all Holy Spirit, through the sprinkling of this sanctified water, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen (3)
And if it be the Divine Liturgy, not performing the dismissal, the priest himself carries them into the Sanctuary, vests himself in them, and continues the service: if there is no service, he performs the usual daily dismissal, carries them into the sanctuary, and lays them on the Holy Altar.
The Vigil Service.
The Office of Matins.
The Sunday Matins Prokeimena:
The priest puts on the epitrachelion and the phelonion, and censes the holy table, the prothesis, and the whole sanctuary. Then, preceded by the deacon, who carries a candle, he comes out of the sanctuary and. together with him, censes the holy doors, the iconostasis, the icon of the feast, and the whole temple. Then, standing before the holy doors, the
deacon exclaims:Arise. Master, bless.
The priest, before the holy table, traces the sign of the cross with the censer, and says:Glory to the holy, consubstantial, life-creating ….
Priest:Come, let us worship God our King… Then in a very loud voice: Come, let us worship and fall down before Him.
Choir:Bless the Lord, O my soul . . . selected verses
The priest, having censed the, whole church accompanied by the deacon as usual, and, after censing the holy table, takes off the phelonion and comes out before the holy doors to read the Prayers of Ligh…
When the Introductory Psalm is finished, the deacon, or the priest if there is no deacon, having come out by the north door, and standing in his usual place on the ambo, says this litany:
Deacon:In peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Choir:To Thee O Lord.
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory, honor, and worship…
Choir:Amen. Blessed is the man ….
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord…
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Choir:To thee, O Lord.
Exclamation:For thine is the strength…
ThenLord, I have called is sung in the appointed tone of the stichera. When the choir begins to sing, Lord, I have called, the deacon, after the priest has blessed the incense, censes the altar on its four sides, the icons, the choirs, and the people, and returns to the sanctuary to the priest. At the Glory, the deacon opens the holy doors. Then the priest, preceded by the deacon with the censer, (or, if the Gospel is to be read, with the Gospel Book), goes around the right side of the altar, and comes out by the north door and stands before the holy doors.
The deacon, bowing slightly and holding the orarion with the first three fingers of his right hand, says to the priest secretly:Let us pray to the Lord.
The priest, bowing also, says secretly the Prayer of the Entrance:In the evening, and in the morning, and at noonday…
Then the deacon, holding the orarion with three fingers of his right hand, facing east, says to thePriest: Bless, Master, the holy entrance.
The priest then blesses toward the east, saying:
Blessed is the entrance of thy Saints, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
And standing in the holy doors, tracing the sign of the cross with the censer, or, if he holds the Gospel Book, elevating it, he exclaims:Wisdom. Attend.
Choir:O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the Immortal Father …
The deacon censes about the altar, and then the priest and the deacon go to the high place.
Deacon: Let us attend. Priest: Peace be to all. Again the Deacon: Wisdom. Let us attend.
And then the prokeimenon of the day is said:
On Saturday evening, Tone 6:Psalm 92
The Lord hath become King; with beauty hath He clothed Himself.
Verse:The Lord hath clothed Himself with power and hath girded Himself.
Verse:For he hath established the world, which shall not be moved.
Verse:Holiness belongeth to thy house, O Lord, unto length of days.
On Sunday evening, Tone 8:Psalm 133
Behold now, bless the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord.
Verse:That stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts of the house of our God.
On Monday evening, Tone 4:Psalm 4
The Lord will hearken unto me, when I shall call unto Him.
Verse:When I called, the God of my righteousness heartened unto me.
On Tuesday evening, Tone 1:Psalm 22
Thy mercy, O Lord, shall follow me all the days of my life.
Verse:The Lord tendeth me as a shepherd, and He shall make me to want nothing; in a green place there hath He set me down.
On Wednesday evening, Tone 5:Psalm 53
O God, save me in thy name, and in thy power thou shalt judge me.
Verse:O God, hearken unto my prayer; give heed to the sayings of my mouth.
On Thursday evening, Tone 6:Psalm 120
My help is from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.
Verse:I lifted up mine eyes unto the mountains, from whence cometh my help.
On Friday evening, Tone 7:Psalm 58
O God, thou art my Helper, and thy mercy goeth before me.
Verse:Redeem me from mine enemies, O God, and from them that rise up against me, deliver me.
If lessons from the Old Testament are appointed, they are read here. Before each, the deacon exclaims,Wisdom, and the reader announces the title of the reading, and again the deacon exclaims, Let us attend.
During the reading, the priest sits in the high place, not in its center, but on the south side of the altar.
Note: If the Divine Liturgy is to follow, for example, on the eve of the Nativity of Christ, when there are eightreadings, and on the eve of Theophany, when there are thirteen, with accompanying troparia and verses, after the last reading, the little litany is said with the following exclamation:For holy art thou, our God, and unto thee do we send up glory…
Then the Trisagion is sung, after which the deacon says:Let us attend. Priest: Peace be to all. Deacon: Wisdom. Let us attend. The choir then sings the prokeimenon of the feast, and then the Epistle is read with the Alleluia and the customary censing, and then the Gospel, beginning with, Wisdom. Attend. Let us hear the holy Gospel. Peace be to all. The reading from the holy Gospel according to Name, and the rest of the Liturgy.
After the prokeimenon, the deacon, having come out by the north door, says: (The priest stands within the sanctuary before the holy table.)
Let us all say with all our soul…
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
O Lord Almighty, God of our fathers, we pray thee, hearken and have mercy.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Have mercy on us, O God, according to thy great mercy, we pray thee, hearken and have mercy.
Choir:Lord, have mercy. thrice
Exclamation:For Thou art a merciful God …
Reader:Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this evening . . .
Deacon:Let us complete our evening prayer unto the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God, by Thy grace.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
That the whole evening may be perfect, holy, peaceful, and sinless, let us ask of the Lord.
Choir:Grant this, O Lord.
Exclamation:For thou art a good God who lovest mankind …
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:Let us bow our heads unto the Lord.
Choir:To thee, O Lord.
Prayer at the Bowing of Heads:O Lord our God, who didst bow down the heavens …
Exclamation:Blessed and glorified be the might of thy kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
If there is no Lity, thechoir begins to sing the Aposticha, then Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart. . ., the Trisagion, and after Our Father . . ., the exclamation, For Thine is the kingdom . . ., and after this, the troparia according to the rule
If there is to be Lity, we come out to the narthex singing the stichera of the temple or of the festival. The priest and the deacon with the censer come out together through the north door to the narthex, the choir and candle bearers preceding them. The holy doors remain closed.
After the priest blesses the censer, the deacon censes the holy icons, the celebrant, and the choirs in order.
When we have finished the stichera of the Lity, theGlory of the Saint, and Both now and the theotokion, the deacon says this prayer in the hearing of all: O God, save thy people, and bless thine inheritance….
Choir:Lord, have mercy. forty times
Again we pray for (the most holy Orthodox Patriarchs,) … let us say:
Choir:Lord, have mercy. fifty times
Again we pray for the President (or the title of the highest authority), for all civil authorities, and for the armed forces, let us all say:
Choir:Lord, have mercy. thirty times
Again we pray that He will keep this city ….
Choir:Lord, have mercy. thrice
Again we pray that the Lord God will hearken unto the voice of supplication of us sinners and have mercy on us.
Choir:Lord, have mercy. Thrice.
Exclamation:Hear us, O God our Savior…
Priest:Peace be to all. Choir: And to thy spirit. Deacon: Let us bow our heads unto the Lord. Choir: To thee, O Lord.
Then, as all bow their heads, the priest prays in a loud voice:O Master, great in mercy, Lord Jesus Christ our God, through the intercessions …
And having returned to the temple, we begin to sing the aposticha. After the aposticha,Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart . . .
Reader:the Trisagion, and after Our Father . . . . . the priest says, For thine is the kingdom...
Then the apolytikion (dismissal troparion)
A table is prepared for the purpose of the blessing of the five breads thus: five breads are placed on the upper side of a dish, on the lower side, wheat, on the left, a small vessel with wine, on the right, a small vessel with oil. The deacon censes round about the table and the celebrant and the priests only. The priest then takes one bread, and makes the sign of the cross with it over the other breads, and says this prayer in a loud voice. When he saysthyself bless . . ., he points with his right hand to the remaining 'breads, wheat, wine, and oil.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord. Choir: Lord, have mercy.
Priest:O Lord Jesus Christ our God, who didst bless the five breads …
Choir:Amen. Blessed be the name of the Lord, henceforth and forever. thrice
[And we sayPsalm 33: I will bless the Lord at all times . . . up to, shall not be deprived of all good things.
The priest then goes to stand before the holy doors. After the conclusion of the Psalm, the priest says to the people:The blessing of the Lord be upon you…
The priest, finishing Vespers with the words,The blessing of the Lord be upon you . . ., and having closed the holy doors, takes off the phelonion.
The Office of Matins.
The reader then:Glory to God in the highest . . . thrice, and O Lord, open thou my lips... twice, and then the Six Psalms.
The priest, after the third Psalm, comes out by the north door before the holy doors and reads, the Matins prayers secretly, head uncovered.
After the third Psalm, the priest says the Matins Prayers, standing with head uncovered before the holy doors.
Deacon says the Great Litany:In peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory…
Deacon:God is the Lord and hath revealed Himself unto us….
The choir repeats these words according to the tone of the troparion of the day. And we say these verses, Psalm 117:
Verse:O confess unto the Lord…
Verse:They encompassed me round about ….
Verse:I shall not die but live …
Verse:The stone which the builders rejected …
God is the Lord is sung four times.
After exclaiming againGod is the Lord… the deacon goes into the sanctuary.
Then the proper troparion is said twice and the theotokion in the same tone. And if there are two proper troparia, the first is always said twice, then the second and then the theotokion.
Then the usual kathisma. After its completion, the deacon or the priest says the little litany:
Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Exclamation:For thine is the strength, and thine are the kingdom ….
When the All-night Vigil is celebrated, on the great feasts and on major saints' days, during the singing of the Polyeleon, the icon is placed on the analogion in the center of the church, and the celebrant and concelebrants, coming forth from the sanctuary through the holy doors, and standing before the holy icon, at the end of the Polyeleon, sing the Megalynarion of the feast once, then both choirs sing it several times. And the celebrant, accompanied by the deacon, censes the icon of the feast on the analogion. Then, entering the sanctuary, he censes the holy table, the whole sanctuary, and the iconostasis, the concelebrants in the order of their rank, both choirs, the whole temple, the people, and again the holy doors and the two principal icons, and the icon of the feast on the analogion. Then the concelebrants once again sing the Megalynarion. Then the little Iitany is said by the deacon and the kathisma (sedalen)of the feast is sung.
The choir singsPraise ye the name of the Lord, and O confess unto the Lord…
And the Resurrectional Troparia:The Angelic Council ...
The priest then, wearing the phelonion, censes the sanctuary and the whole temple, accompanied by the deacon with a candle. After the troparia,The Angelic Council …
The Deacon says the little litany
Exclamation:For blessed is thy name, and glorified is thy kingdom…
Hypacoe and Anabathmoi of the Tone
After the anabathmoi, the deacon then:Let us attend. Wisdom. Let us attend.
And then the prokeimenon of the tone.
The Sunday Matins Prokeimena:
Now will I arise, saith the Lord. I will set myself for salvation; I will speak boldly thereof.
Verse:The words of the Lord are pure words.
Rise up, O Lord my God, in the precept which thou hast commanded, and the congregation of the people shall compass thee.
Verse:O Lord my God, in thee have I hoped, save me.
Say it among the nations: that the Lord hath become King; for He hath set aright the world, which shall not be moved.
Verse:O sing unto the Lord a new song; O sing unto the Lord, all the earth.
Arise, O Lord, help us, and redeem us for thy name's sake.
Verse:O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared it unto us.
Arise, O Lord my God, let thine hand be lifted up, for thou art King unto the ages.
Verse:I will confess thee, O Lord, with my whole heart; I will declare all thy wonders.
O Lord, arouse thy power, and come to save us.
Verse:O Shepherd of Israel, attend, thou that guidest Joseph like a sheep.
Arise, O Lord my God, let thine hand be lifted up; forget not thy needy ones till the end.
Verse:I will confess thee, O Lord, with my whole heart; I will declare all thy wonders.
The Lord shall be King forever, thy God, O Zion, from generation to generation.
Verse:Praise the Lord, O my soul; I will praise the Lord in my life.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
Priest:For holy art thou, O our God, who restest in the Saints…
Deacon:Let every breath praise the Lord.
Choir:Let every breath praise the Lord.
Deacon:Praise ye God in His Saints; praise ye Him in the establishment of His power.
Choir:Let every breath praise the Lord.
Deacon:Let every breath
Choir:praise the Lord.
Deacon:And that He may vouchsafe unto…
Choir:Lord, have mercy. thrice
Deacon:Wisdom. Attend. Let us hear the holy Gospel.
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Priest:The reading from the holy Gospel according to Name.
Choir:Glory to thee, O Lord, glory to thee.
Deacon:Let us attend. And the priest reads the Matins Gospel.
After the reading of the Gospel, the priest brings the Gospel Book to the center of the church, preceded by the deacon with a lighted candle, and places it on the analogion, having kissed it together with the deacon. And the choir sings:The Resurrection of Christ . . . The reader reads Psalm 50, and the rest.
Deacon, in the usual place, says the prayer:O God, save thy people …
Choir:Lord, have mercy. twelve times
The priest exclaims:Through the mercy and compassion …
When the All-night Vigil is celebrated, on the great feasts and on major saints' days, the proper prokeimenon is said, and the celebrant reads the Gospel in the center of the church. After the reading, he kisses the icon of the feast on the analogion, as do all the concelebrants, and they then go into the sanctuary and take off their priestly vestments; only the celebrant remains vested. The choir sings the stichera of the feast. Then the deacon says:O God, save thy people ...
After the kissing of the Holy Gospel by the brethren and the people, the priest takes it back to the sanctuary, blessing the people with it from the holy doors.
And we begin the canons: of the Resurrection, of the Cross and Resurrection, of the Theotokos, and from the Menaion.
After the 3rd Ode, the deacon or the priest says the little litany:
Again and again . . . Help us... Remembering ...
Exclamation:For thou art our God ….
Then the kathisma from the Menaion.
After the 6th Ode, the litany:Again and again . . . Help us.. . Remembering...
Exclamation:For thou art the King of peace and the Savior of our souls…
The kontakion and the oikos.
At the beginning of the 8th Ode, the deacon, taking the censer, and receiving the blessing of the priest, censes the sanctuary. After the completion of the katabasia of the 8th Ode, standing before the icon of the Mother of God, he exclaims:The Theotokos and Mother of the Light… And he censes the choirs and the whole temple, and, having finished the censing, enters the sanctuary.
After the 9th Ode the litany:Again and again . . . Help us. . . Remembering. . .
Exclamation:For all the powers of heaven praise thee…
Deacon:Holy is the Lord our God.
Choir:Holy is the Lord our God.
Verse:For holy is the Lord our God.
Choir:Holy is the Lord our God.
Verse:Over all peoples is our God.
Choir:Holy is the Lord our God.
The Exaposteilarion of the Resurrection
Glory… and the proper Gospel Sticheron; Both now . . . and Most blessed art thou . . .
AtBoth now. . . the deacon opens the holy doors. The priest, wearing the phelonion, stands before the altar, and the deacon stands to the right side of the priest. At the conclusion of the last sticheron, the priest exclaims with a loud voice:
Priest:GLORY to thee who hast shown us the light.
The choir singsthe Great Doxology.
Then we say the troparion as usual.
Deacon:Have mercy on us, O God, according to thy great mercy….
Choir:Lord, have mercy. thrice
Exclamation:For thou art a merciful God who lovest mankind …
Deacon:Let us complete our morning prayer unto the Lord…
Exclamation:For thou art the God of mercies and compassion and of love…
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:Let us bow our heads unto the Lord.
Choir:To thee, O Lord.
And the priest says this prayer secretly:O holy Lord, who dwellest on high and lookest upon …
Exclamation:For thine it is to have mercy on us and to save us…
Priest:He Who is, is blessed… .
Choir:Amen. Establish, O God, the holy Orthodox Faith …
Priest:Most holy Theotokos, save us.
Choir:More honorable than the Cherubim ...
Priest:Glory to thee, O Christ God, our Hope, glory to thee.
Choir:Glory... Now and ... Lord, have mercy. thrice Bless.
The priest gives the dismissal of the day or of the feast, if one is appointed.
Reader:Come, let us worship . . . and the Psalms.
AfterOur Father, the priest, For thine is the kingdom . . .
AtIn the name of the Lord, bless, Father, the priest wearing the epitrachelion, and standing before the holy doors, exclaims:
O God, be compassionate unto us, and bless us, and make the light of thy face to shine upon us, and have mercy on us.
Then the priest prays:O Christ the true Light, who illuminest and sanctifiest every man …
After the prayer, the choir sings:O Chosen Leader . . .
Priest:Glory to thee, O Christ God, our Hope, glory to thee.
Choir:Glory . . . Now and . . . Lord, have mercy. thrice Bless.
The priest gives the lesser dismissal:
May Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His immaculate Mother, of our venerable and God-bearing Fathers, and of all the Saints, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loveth man.
On the Nativity of Christ:
At the All-night Vigil:
May He who was born in a cavern, and lay in a manger for our salvation, Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His all-immaculate Mother, of our Venerable and God-bearing Fathers, and of all the Saints, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loveth man.
At the Liturgy:
May He who was born in a cavern, and lay in a manger for our salvation, Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His all-immaculate Mother, of the holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostles, of our Father among the Saints, (name of the Saint whose Liturgy is celebrated), of our Venerable and God-bearing Fathers and of all the Saints, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loveth man.
On the Circumcision:
May He who on the eighth day did deign to be circumcised in the flesh for our salvation, Christ our true God . . .
May He who in Jordan did deign to be baptized of John for our salvation, Christ our true God . . .
On the Meeting of the Lord
May He who did deign to be held in the arms of the righteous Simeon for our salvation, Christ our true God
May He who on Mount Tabor was transfigured in glory before His holy Disciples and Apostles, Christ our true God . . .
On Palm Sunday:
May He who did deign to sit upon an ass's colt, for our salvation, Christ our true God . . .
The Same Sunday, at Vespers:
May the Lord who came to His voluntary passion for our salvation, Christ our true God.. .
On Great Thursday:
May He who through His surpassing goodness did show the most excellent way of humility, when He washed the Disciples' feet and did condescend even to the Cross and burial for us, Christ our true God . . .
At the Dismissal of the Holy Passion Service:
May He who endured spitting, scourging, slapping, the Cross and death for the salvation of the world, Christ our true God . . .
On Holy and Great Friday:
May He who for us men and for our salvation did condescend to the dread passion and the life-creating Cross, and voluntary burial in the flesh, Christ our true God . . .
On the Sunday of Pascha and throughout Bright Week:
May Christ, who is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life, our true God . . .
May He who in glory did ascend from us into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father, Christ our true God . . .
On the Sunday of Pentecost:
May He who in the shape of fiery tongues from heaven did send down the All-holy Spirit upon His holy Disciples and Apostles, Christ our true God . . .
On the Same Sunday, at Vespers:
May He who did empty Himself from the Paternal Divine Bosom, and came down from heaven upon the earth, and took upon Himself all our nature, and made it divine, and after these things, again ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father, and did send down the divine and holy Spirit, one in essence, equal in power, and equal in glory, and ever-existing with Him, upon His holy Disciples and Apostles, and through Him did enlighten them, and through them the whole world, Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His allimmaculate and all-blameless holy Mother, of the holy, glorious, all-laudable Preachers of God, the Spirit-bearing Apostles, and of all the Saints, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and loveth man.
The Nativity of the Theotokos
We magnify thee, O all-holy Virgin, and we honor thy holy Parents, and we glorify thy most glorious Nativity.
The Exaltation of the Precious Cross
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we honor thy holy Cross, whereby thou hast saved us from bondage to the enemy.
The Protection of the All-holy Theotokos
We magnify thee, O all-holy Virgin, and we honor thine honorable protection, thee whom Saint Andrew beheld in the air praying to Christ for us.
The Entrance of the Theotokos
We magnify thee, O all-holy Virgin, Maiden chosen of God, and we honor thine entrance into the Temple of the Lord.
The Nativity of our Lord and God Jesus Christ
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, who for our sake now art born in the flesh of the unwedded and most pure Virgin Mary.
The Divine Theophany of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, who for our sake now art baptized in the flesh by John in the waters of the Jordan.
The Three Hierarchs
We magnify you, O Hierarchs of Christ, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, and we honor your holy memory, for ye do pray for us unto Christ our God.
The Presentation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we honor thy most pure Mother, who now bringeth thee, according to the Law, into the Temple of the Lord.
The Annunciation of the All-holy Theotokos
The Archangel's cry we sing to thee, O Pure One, Hail, thou who art full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we sing to thee, Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.
New Sunday, or Thomas Sunday
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, who for our sake didst descend into Hell, and with thyself dost raise all things.
Methodius and Cyril, Equal to the Apostles
We magnify you, O Methodius and Cyril, Equal to the Apostles, who enlightened all the Slavic lands with your teachings, and brought them to Christ.
The Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we venerate thy divine Ascension with thy most pure flesh into heaven.
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we honor thine all-holy Spirit, whom thou didst send from the Father unto thy divine Disciples.
All Saints Who Shone Forth in the Land of Russia
We magnify you, all ye Holy Ones who have shone forth in the Land of Russia, and we honor your holy memory, for ye do pray for us unto Christ our God.
The Nativity of the Forerunner
We magnify thee, O John, Forerunner of the Savior, and we honor thy most glorious nativity from the barren one.
The Holy Apostles Peter and Paul
We magnify you, O Apostles of Christ, Peter and Paul, who have enlightened all the world with your teachings and have brought all the ends of the earth unto Christ.
The Holy Prince Vladimir, Equal to the Apostles
We magnify thee, O Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal to the Apostles, and we honor thy holy memory, who trampled the idols and enlightened the whole land of Russia by Holy Baptism.
The Holy Prophet Elijah
We magnify thee, O glorious Prophet Elijah, and we venerate thy fiery ascent in the flesh into heaven.
The Transfiguration of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ
We magnify thee, O Christ, Giver of Life, and we venerate the most glorious Transfiguration of thy most pure flesh.
The Falling-asleep of the All-holy Theotokos
We magnify thee, 0 all-immaculate Mother of Christ our God, and we glorify thy most glorious failing-asleep.
The Beheading of John the Forerunner
We magnify thee, O John, Baptist of the Savior, and we venerate thine honorable beheading.
Common Service of the Theotokos
It is meet to magnify thee, O Theotokos, more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious without compare than the Seraphim.
Common Service of the Bodiless Powers
We magnify you, O ye Archangels and Angels, and all ye Hosts, ye Cherubim and ye Seraphim, who glorify the Lord.
The Archangel Michael and the Other Bodiless Powers
We magnify thee, Chief Captain of God, Michael, and all ye Archangels, Angels, Principalities, Authorities, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Cherubim, and ye fearful Seraphim, who glorify the Lord.
Common Service of the Apostles
We magnify thee, O Apostle of Christ, Name, and we honor thine afflictions and toils, whereby thou didst labor for the Gospel of Christ.
Common Service of the Holy Martyrs
We magnify thee, O Holy Name, who endured passion, and we honor thine honorable sufferings, which thou hast endured for Christ.
Common Service of Hierarchs
We magnify thee, O Father and Hierarch Name, and we honor thy holy memory, for thou dost pray for us unto Christ.
Common Service of Venerable Saints
We bless thee, O Venerable Father Name, and we honor thy holy memory, Instructor of monks, who dost converse with angels.
Common Service of Venerable Martyrs
We magnify thee, O Holy Name, who didst endure passion, and we honor thy holy memory, for thou dost pray for us unto Christ our God.
Common Service of the Unmercenary
We magnify thee, O wonderworking glorious Name, and we honor thine honorable sufferings, which thou hast endured for Christ.
Common Service for Fools for the Sake of Christ
We bless thee, O Holy Righteous Name, and we honor thy holy memory, for thou dost pray for us unto Christ our God.
The Office of Vespers on Great Friday.
From the customary beginning up to the entrance, the order is according to the rule for daily vespers without reverences and without kathisma. The entrance is made with the Gospel Book, and immediately thereafter, the priest, with the deacon, if there is one:Let us attend. Peace be to all. Wisdom. Attend.
Prokeimenon, Tone 4, Psalm 21:19:They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.
Verse:O God, my God, attend to me; why hast thou forsaken me?
And the first reading from Exodus is read.
And again,Let us attend.
Prokeimenon, Tone 4, Psalm 34:1- 2:Judge thou, O Lord, them that wrong me. War against them that war against me.
Verse:Take up armor and shield, and rise up to help me.
Two readings, one from Job and the other from Isaiah.
And again,Let us attend.
Prokeimenon, Tone 6, Psalm 86:7:They have laid me in the lowest pit, in dark places, and in the shadow of death.
Verse:O Lord God of my salvation, I have called in the day and in the night before thee.
Epistle: to the Corinthians, Sel. 125
Alleluia, with censing, Tone 1, Psalm 68:1, 21, 24
Save me, O God, for the waters have come in, even unto my soul.
Verse:My soul hath waited for reproach and misery.
Verse:Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not.
ThenWisdom. Attend. and the Gospel, from Matthew, Selection 101. The litany, Let us all say... and the rest. The Aposticha, and at Glory . . . Now and . . . Thee that coverest thyself . . ., the priest censes round about the altar, upon which lies the Winding-sheet, thrice.
Lord, now lettest thou . . ., the Trisagion, and Our Father; then the priest, For thine is the kingdom . . ., the troparia, The noble Joseph . . . Glory ... Now and . . . Before the Myrrh-bearing women . . .
During the singing of the troparia, the Winding-sheet is brought from the altar and placed on a bier in the center of the church. Then, the dismissal and the kissing of the Windingsheet.
Matins on the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha.
Before the Midnight service. The reader begins and the priest says the verse:Through the prayers of the holy Apostles, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. And after Amen the reader begins to read. The whole book of Acts is read to the end.
The lamps are lighted, and Midnight Office begins. The beginning is as usual. Then,Come, let us worship . . . thrice, Psalm 50, and immediately the Canon of Great Saturday.
After the Canon, the Trisagion, and afterOur Father . . ., the troparion, When thou didst descend . . . Then the litany Have mercy on us, O God . . ., and the dismissal for Sunday Midnight Office.
At the time of the 6th Ode of the canon, there is a censing of the Winding-sheet; at the 9th Ode, the Winding-sheet is taken into the sanctuary and placed on the holy table. Then the holy doors are closed.
Toward the hour of Matins, the para-ecclesiarch, having received the blessing of the celebrant, goes out and tolIs the great belI for some time. Then, having entered the temple, he lights all the lamps and candies. He arranges two vessels with burning charcoal, placing much sweetsmelling incense in them, and sets them, one in the center f the church, and the other in the sanctuary, so that the hole church will be filled with a sweet aroma.
Then the celebrant, having entered the sanctuary with he priests and deacons, vests himself in all his brightest vestments. Then he distributes candles among the brethren, and he takes the precious Cross and the three-branch candlestick. The deacon takes the censer, one priest the holy Gospels, and one priest the icon of the Resurrection of Christ. They all stand facing the west, and the celebrant censes the sanctuary and the concelebrants. The western gates of the church are closed. The holy doors are then opened, and the celebrant comes out with the priests singing the sticheron, tone 6:Thy resurrection, O Christ Savior, the angels in heaven sing. Do thou enable us on earth to glorify thee with pure hearts.
They go around the temple preceded by the deacons and candle-bearers and by both choirs.
The bells are rung for some time. And having entered the porch, they stand holding the Gospel Book and the icons facing west, as indicated before. Then the celebrant takes the censer in his right hand from the deacon and holds the cross in his left hand. He then censes the icons, the choirs, and the brethren as usual, the deacon carrying before him a lighted candle. The brethren all stand holding their candles, praying with heed within themselves and giving thanks to Christ our God who suffered and rose again for our sakes.
At the conclusion of the censing, the celebrant comes before the principal doors of the church and censes the deacon, who stands before him with a candle. Then the deacon takes the censer from the celebrant's hand and censes the celebrant himself. And the celebrant, again taking the censer, standing before the doors of the church and facing east, signs the doors of the church, which remain closed, with the censer in cross form thrice, holding the precious cross and the three-branch candlestick in his left hand. Candle-bearers stand on both sides.
And he exclaims in a loud voice:
Priest:GLORY to the holy, consubstantial, life-creating, and undivided Trinity always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
And we, having answeredAmen, the celebrant with the rest of the celebrants begins the troparion in tone 5 in a loud voice: CHRIST is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life.
And we repeat the same with melody. This troparion is sung three times by the celebrant and three times by us.
Then the celebrant says the verses:
First:Let God arise, and let Him scatter His enemies, and let them that hate Him flee from before His face.
And at each verse, we sing the whole troparion,Christ is risen . . ., once.
Second:As smoke vanisheth, let them vanish; as wax melteth in the face of fire.
Christ is risen . . . once
Third: So let sinners perish before the face of God, but let the righteous be glad.
Christ is risen . . . once
Fourth: This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us rejoice and be glad on it.
Christ is risen . . ., once
We:Christ is risen . . . once
We:Christ is risen . . . once
Then the celebrant sings in a very loud voice:Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.
The doors are opened. The celebrant enters with he precious Cross, two lamps being borne before him, and then the brethren sing, And on those in the tombs bestowing life.
All the bells are rung.
The celebrant enters the sanctuary with the priests, and the deacon says the Great Litany:In peace let us pray to the Lord.
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory, honor and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
The choir begins the canon, a composition of John of Damascus, in tone 1. The heirmos isThe day of Resurrection. . . with the refrain, Christ is risen from the dead. And then each choir repeats the heirmos. And finally, as the katabasia, the same heirmos is sung, The day of Resurrection. . . after which the entire troparion, Christ is risen from the dead . . . is sung three times.
The priest with the deacon censes at the beginning of the canon the holy icons, both choirs, and the brethren in order, holding in his left hand the precious cross and the three-branch candlestick. He says,Christ is risen, and we answer, Truly He is risen. Similarly the other priests cense at each Ode.
[At the first Ode, the right hand choir sings, and at the third, the lefthand choir. And thus we sing the rest of the Odes].
After each Ode, the little litany is said outside the sanctuary, the exclamation being said by the priest inside the sanctuary.
After the 1 st Ode:For thine is the strength, and thine are the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 3rd Ode:For thou art our God, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 4th Ode:For thou art a good God who lovest man, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 5th Ode:For sanctified and glorified is thine all-honorable and magnificent name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 6th Ode:For thou art the King of peace and the Savior of our souls, and to thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 7th Ode:Blessed and glorified be the might of thy kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 8th Ode:For blessed is thy name, and glorified is thy kingdom, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the 9th Ode:For all the Powers of heaven praise thee, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the ainos, the paschal stichera:Glory . . . Now and ... The day of Resurrection, then, Christ is risen . . . thrice.
The Catechetical Sermon of our Father among the Saints, John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Holy Resurrection of Christ our God:If any be pious and a lover of God, let him partake of this good and radiant festival….
The brethren exchange the paschal kiss. The paschal kiss is exchanged among the celebrant and the other priests and deacons within the sanctuary.
Then the celebrant, holding the precious cross, and the other priests, holding the Gospel book and icons, and the deacons come out and stand before the holy doors. The laymen approach and kiss the cross, the Gospel book, and icons, and the priests holding them, and then each other. The greeting is, Christ is risen, and the answer, Truly He is risen.
Then the troparion of the Saint is said, tone 8:From thy mouth grace, shining forth like a beaconfire ….
During the kisses the deacon says the litany:Have mercy on us, O God . . . and: Let us complete our morning prayer. . .,
and after the exclamation, the deacon says,Wisdom, and we, Bless.
The celebrant:He Who is, is blessed, even Christ our God, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
And we:Amen. Establish, O God . . .
Then the priest, holding the Cross, in place ofGlory to thee, O Christ God . . ., sings: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death,
And we sing:And on those in the tombs bestowing life.
And immediately the celebrant gives the dismissal:May Christ, who is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life, our true God, through the intercessions of His all-immaculate Mother, and of all the Saints, have mercy on s and save us, for He is good and loveth man.
Then, raising the Cross, he says:Christ is risen. thrice
And we answer:Truly He is risen.
And finally we sing,Christ is risen . . . the whole troparion thrice.
And after the singing of the troparion, we finish with:And to us hath He given eternal life. Let us worship His third-day Resurrection.
It should be noted that, beginning with this day, the Holy and Great Sunday of Pascha, up to Saturday, the Hours:
The priest begins:Blessed is our God, and Christ is risen from the dead . . . the whole troparion thrice. And then, Having seen the Resurrection of Christ . . . thrice, the hypakoe, Anticipating the morning . . . once, the kontakion, Though thou didst descend into the grave, once, then the troparion, In the tomb bodily . . ., Glory . . ., As life-bearing. . ., Both now . . . the theotokion, O sacred and divine Tabernacle of the Most High . . .
Then,Lord, have mercy. 40 times, Glory . . . Now and . . . More honorable than the Cherubim . . . In the name of the Lord, bless, Father. The priest says the verse: Through the prayers of our holy Fathers . . . and we say, Amen; and again we say, Christ is risen . . . thrice, Glory . . . Now and . . . Lord, have mercy, thrice, Bless, and the dismissal for First Hour.
The same is sung for Third Hour and for Sixth Hour before the Liturgy, for Ninth Hour and Compline (once) before Vespers, and for Midnight Office until Saturday of holy Paschal Week.
On the rest of the days of Bright Week at Matins, the priest wears the rason with epitrachelion and phelonion as usual. And, taking the cross and the three-branch candlestick, he stands holding the censer, before the holy table, and censes in cross-form, saying:Glory to the holy . . . and he begins the troparion, Christ is risen . . . thrice, and we answer the same.
And we singChrist is risen . . . with its verses as indicated for Matins and Vespers on Sunday.
After the 3rd, 6th, and 9th Odes, there are little litanies with exclamations. At the Ainos, the stichera of the Resurrection and the Paschal stichera with their refrains, as indicated for Sunday Matins.
Then the litanies and the dismissal, and First Hour.
On Thomas Sunday until the dismissal of the Paschal Feast, on all days, Matins begins with the exclamation,Glory to the holy. . ., the choir, Amen, and the priest sings slowly, Christ is risen... thrice.
Proskomede and the beginning of the Liturgy.
The priest who desires to celebrate the Divine Mysteries must first be at peace with all, have nothing against anyone, and insofar as is within his power, keep his heart from evil thoughts, be continent from the evening before, and be vigilant until the time of divine service. When the time is come, he goes into the temple, in company with the deacon, and together they make three reverences toward the east before the holy doors.
Prayers in front of the Royal doors.
Priest:Blessed is our God, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
O Heavenly King, O Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us. Thrice.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
O Most Holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, blot out our sins. O Master, pardon our iniquities. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name's sake.
Lord, have mercy. Thrice.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Our Father, Who art in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
Priest:For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory: of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Then they say:
Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us; for, at a loss for any defense, this prayer do we sinners offer unto Thee as Master, have mercy on us.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Lord, have mercy on us; for we have hoped in Thee, be not angry with us greatly, neither remember our iniquities; but look upon us now as thou art compassionate, and deliver us from our enemies; for Thou art our God, and we, Thy people; all are the works of Thy hands, and we call upon Thy name.
Both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
The door of compassion open unto us, O blessed Theotokos, for hoping in thee, let us not perish; through thee may we be delivered from adversities; for thou art the salvation of the Christian race.
Then they approach the icon of Christ and kiss it, saying:
We worship Thine immaculate Icon, O Good One, asking the forgiveness of our failings, O Christ God; for of Thine Own will Thou wast well-pleased to ascend the Cross in the flesh, that thou mightest deliver from slavery to the enemy those whom Thou hadst fashioned. Wherefore, we cry to Thee thankfully: Thou didst fill all things with joy, O our Savior, when Thou camest to save the world.
Then they kiss the icon of the Theotokos, saying the Troparion:
As thou art a well-spring of compassion, vouchsafe mercy unto us, O Theotokos. Look upon a sinful people; show forth, as always thy power. For hoping in thee we cry "Rejoice!" to thee, as once did Gabriel, the Supreme Commander of the Bodiless Hosts.
Then with bowed head the priest says:
Priest:O Lord, stretch forth Thy hand from Thy holy place on high, and strengthen me for this, Thine appointed service; that standing uncondemned before Thy dread altar, I may celebrate the bloodless ministry. For Thine is the power and the glory unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Then they make a bow to each choir, and go into the prothesis, saying:
I shall go into Thy house; I shall worship toward Thy holy temple in fear of Thee. O Lord, guide me in the way of Thy righteousness; because of mine enemies, make straight my way before Thee. For in their mouth there is no truth; their heart is vain. Their throat is an open sepulcher, with their tongues have they spoken deceitfully; judge them, O God. Let them fall down on account of their own devising; according to the multitude of their ungodliness, cast them out, for they have embittered Thee, O Lord. And let all them be glad that hope in Thee; they shall ever rejoice, and Thou shalt dwell among them. And all shall glory in Thee that love Thy name, for Thou shalt bless the righteous. O Lord, as with a shield of Thy good pleasure hast Thou crowned us.
Putting on the vestments.
Having come into the sanctuary, they make three bows before the Holy Table and kiss the Holy Gospel and the Holy Table. Then each one takes his sticharion in his hands, and they make three reverences toward the east, while saying to themselves with each:
O God, cleanse me a sinner and have mercy on me.
Then the deacon comes to the priest, holding in his right hand the sticharion with the orarion, and bowing his head before the priest, says:
Deacon:Bless, Master, the sticharion with the orarion.
Priest:Blessed is our God always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Then the deacon goes to one side of the sanctuary, puts on the sticharion, praying thus:
Deacon:My soul shall rejoice in the Lord, for He hath clothed me in the garment of salvation, and with the vesture of gladness hath He covered me; He hath placed a crown upon me as on a bridegroom, and He hath adorned me as a bride with comeliness.
And then kissing the orarion, he places it on the left shoulder. Then putting the epimanikia on the hands, with the right cuff he says:
Deacon:Thy right hand, O Lord, is glorified in strength; Thy right hand, O Lord, hath shattered enemies, and in the multitude of Thy glory hast Thou ground down the adversaries.
And with the left, he says:
Deacon:Thy hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding and I will learn Thy commandments.
Going to the prothesis, he prepares the holy things. The holy diskos he places on the left side; the chalice, that is, the holy cup, on the right ; and the rest (the spoon and the spear, etc.) with them.
Then the priest vests himself thus: taking the sticharion in the left hand, and bowing thrice toward the east, as mentioned before, he signs it with the sign of the Cross, saying:
Priest:Blessed is our God, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Priest:My soul shall rejoice in the Lord, for He hath clothed me in the garment of salvation, and with the vesture of gladness hath He covered me; He hath placed a crown upon me as on a bridegroom, and He hath adorned me as a bride with comeliness.
Then taking the epitrachelion and signing it, he puts it on, saying:
Priest:Blessed is God Who poureth out His grace upon His priests, like unto the oil of myrrh upon the head, which runneth down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, which runneth down to the fringe of his raiment.
Then taking the zone and girding himself he says:
Priest:Blessed is God, Who girded me with power, and hath made my path blameless, Who maketh my feet like the feet of a hart, and setteth me upon high places.
Then the cuffs, in the manner described. Then taking the epigonation, if he have it, and having blessed and kissed it, he says:
Priest:Gird Thy sword upon Thy thigh, O Mighty one, in Thy comeliness and Thy beauty, and bend Thy bow, and proceed prosperously, and be king, because of truth and meekness and righteousness, and Thy right hand shall guide Thee wondrously, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Then taking the phelonion, and having blessed and kissed it, he says thus:
Priest:Thy priests, O Lord, shall be clothed with righteousness, and Thy saints with rejoicing shall rejoice, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Then having gone to the prothesis, they wash their hands, saying:
I will wash my hands in innocency and I will compass Thine altar…
Then making three reverences before the table of oblation, each says:
O God, cleanse me a sinner and have mercy on me. Thrice.
Priest:Thou hast redeemed us from the curse of the law by Thy precious Blood. Having been nailed to the Cross and pierced with a spear, Thou hast gushed forth immortality upon mankind. O our Savior, glory to Thee.
Priest:Blessed is our god, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Then the priest takes a prosphoron in his left hand, and in his right hand the holy spear, and making therewith the sign of the Cross thrice over the seal of the prosphoron, he says:
Priest:In remembrance of our Lord and God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Thrice.
And immediately he thrusts the spear into the right side of the seal, and cutting he says:
Priest:He was led as a sheep to the slaughter.
And into the left side:
Priest:And as a blameless lamb before his shearer is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth.
And into the upper side of the seal:
Priest:In His lowliness His judgment was taken away.
And into the lower side:
Priest:And who shall declare His generation?
And the deacon, gazing reverently at this Mystery, holding his orarion in his hand, says at each of these incisions:
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
After the prosphoron has been cut on all four sides he says:
Deacon:Take away, Master.
The priest having thrust the holy spear obliquely into the right side of the prosphoron, takes away the holy bread, saying:
Priest:For His life is taken away from the earth.
And the priest having laid it inverted on the holy diskos, the deacon says:
And the priest sacrifices it cruciformly, while saying:
Priest:Sacrificed is the Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world, for the life and salvation of the world.
And the priest turns upward the other side which has the sign of the Cross. and the deacon says:
And the priest, piercing also in the right side with the spear, says:
Priest:One of the soldiers with a spear pierced His side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true.
The deacon, taking wine and water, says to the Priest:
Deacon: Bless, Master, the holy union.
And receiving the blessing upon them, he pours wine together with water into the holy chalice. The priest takes a second prosphoron in his hand and says:
Priest:In honor and remembrance of our most blessed Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, through whose intercession do Thou, O Lord, receive this sacrifice upon Thy most heavenly altar.
The priest takes out a particle and places it on the right side of the holy bread, near its center, saying:
Priest:At Thy right hand stood the queen, arrayed in a vesture of inwoven gold, adorned in varied colors.
Then taking the third prosphoron, he says:
Priest:Of the honorable glorious Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John.
And taking out the first particle, he places it on the left side of the holy bread, making the beginning of the first row, and then he says:
Priest:Of the holy glorious prophets: Moses and Aaron, Elias and Elisseus, David and Jesse; of the holy Three Children, of Daniel the Prophet, and of all the holy prophets.
And taking a particle, he places it below the first, in the proper order, then he says:
Priest:Of the holy glorious and all-praised Apostles Peter and Paul, and of all the other holy apostles.
Priest:Of our fathers among the saints, the holy hierarchs: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom; Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria; Nicholas of Myra in Lycia; Michael of Kiev; Peter, Alexius, Jonah, Philip and Hermogenes of Moscow; Nicetas of Novgorod; Leontius of Rostov; and of all the holy hierarchs.
And taking a fourth particle, he places it near the first particle, making the beginning of the second row. He then says:
Priest:Of the holy Apostle, Protomartyr and Archdeacon Stephen; the holy Great-Martyrs Demetrius, George, Theodore the Tyro, Theodore Stratelates, and of all holy martyrs; and the martyred women: Thecla, Barbara, Cyriaca, Euphemia and Parasceve, Catherine, and of all the holy martyred women.
Taking a fifth particle, he places it below the first which is at the beginning of the second row. Then he says:
Priest:Of our holy and God-bearing fathers: Anthony, Euthymius, Sabbas, Onuphrius, Athanasius of Athos, Anthony and Theodosius of the Caves, Sergius of Radonezh, Barlaam of Hutyn, and of all the holy fathers; and of the holy mothers: Pelagia, Theodosia, Anastasia, Eupraxia, Febronia, Theodula, Euphrosyne, Mary of Egypt, and of all the holy mothers.
Taking out a sixth particle, he places it below the second particle, in completion of the second row. Then he says:
Priest:Of the saints and wonderworkers, the Unmercenaries: Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, Panteleimon and Hermolaus, and of all the holy unmercenaries.
Taking out a seventh Particle he places it at the top, making the beginning of the third row, then says:
Priest:Of the holy and righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna; of Saint(s) N. (N.) whose temple it is and whose day it is ; of the holy Equals-of-the-Apostles Great Prince Vladimir, and of all the saints, through whose intercession do Thou visit us, O God.
And he places the eight particle below the first, in the proper order. Then he says:
Priest:Of our father among the saints, John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople.
If his liturgy is chanted; but if that of St. Basil the Great be chanted, he is commemorated.
Then taking out a ninth particle, he places it at the end of the third row, completing it. Then taking a fourth prosphoron, he says:
Priest:Remember, O Master, Lover of mankind, the Orthodox episcopate of the Russian Church; our lord the Very Most Reverend Metropolitan N., First hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad; Archbishop or Bishop N., (whose diocese it is); the honorable priesthood, the diaconate in Christ and all the priestly order (if in a monastery: Archimandrite or Abbot N.) and all our brethren whom, in Thy compassion, Thou hast called into Thy communion, O All-good Master.
And taking out a particle, he places it below the holy bread. Then he commemorates those that are in authority saying:
Priest:Remember, O Lord, those who are in authority, and in the armed forces.
Then he commemorates those that are living, by name, and at each name he takes out a particle saying:
Priest:Remember, O Lord, N.
Then taking out a particle, he places it below the holy bread. Then taking a fifth prosphoron, he says:
Priest:In commemoration and for the remission of sins of the most holy patriarchs; of Orthodox and pious kings and pious queens; and of the blessed founders of this holy temple (if it be a monastery: this holy monastery). Then he commemorates the departed, by name: the bishop that ordained him (if he be among the departed), and others, whomsoever he will. At each name he takes out a particle, saying:
Priest:Remember, O Lord, N.
Finally he says:
Priest:And of all our Orthodox fathers and brethren who have departed in the hope of resurrection, life eternal, and communion with Thee, O Lord, Lover of mankind.
And he takes out a particle. Thereafter he says:
Priest:Remember, O Lord, also mine unworthiness, and pardon me every transgression, both voluntary and involuntary.
And he takes out a particle, And taking the sponge, he gathers the particles together on the diskos below the holy bread, so that they be secure, and none of them fall off. Then the deacon, taking the censer and having placed incense therein, says to the Priest:
Deacon: Bless the censer, Master. Let us pray to the Lord.
And the priest says the Prayer of the Censer:
Priest:Incense do we offer unto Thee, O Christ our God, as an odor of spiritual fragrance; accepting it upon Thy most heavenly altar, do Thou send down upon us the grace of Thy Most Holy Spirit.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
The priest, having censed the asteriskos, places it over the holy bread, saying:
Priest:And the star came and stood over where the young Child was.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
The priest, having censed the first veil, covers the holy bread and the diskos, saying:
Priest:The Lord is King, He is clothed with majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength and He hath girt Himself. For He established the world which shall not be shaken. Thy throne is prepared of old; Thou art from everlasting. The rivers have lifted up, O Lord, the rivers have lifted up their voices. The rivers will lift up their waves, at the voices of many waters. Wonderful are the surgings of the sea, wonderful on high is the Lord. Thy testimonies are made very sure. Holiness becometh Thy house, O Lord, unto length of days.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord. Cover, Master.
And the priest, having censed the second veil, covers the holy chalice, saying:
Priest:Thy virtue hath covered the heavens, O Christ, and the earth is full of Thy praise.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord. Cover, Master.
Then the priest, having censed the veil, i.e., the aer, covers both the holy diskos and the holy chalice saying:
Priest:Shelter us with the shelter of Thy wings, and drive away from us every enemy and adversary. Make our life peaceful, O Lord, have mercy on us, and on Thy world, and save our souls, for thou art good and the Lover of mankind.
Then, taking the censer, the priest censes the prothesis, saying thrice:
Priest:Blessed is Our God Who is thus well pleased, glory to Thee.
And the deacon says each time:
Deacon:Always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
Both bow reverently thrice. Then taking the censer, the deacon says:
Deacon:For the precious gifts offered, let us pray to the Lord.
Priest:O God, our God, Who didst send forth the …
And after this he pronounces the dismissal there, saying:
Priest:Glory to Thee, O Christ God, our hope, Glory to Thee.
Deacon:Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. Lord, have mercy. Thrice Bless.
Priest:(if it be Sunday) May Christ our true God, Who rose from the dead,... (if not) May Christ our true God, ... through the intercession of His most pure Mother; of our father among the saints, John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople; (if the Liturgy of Basil the Great be celebrated, he says: Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappodocia;) and of all the saints, have mercy on us and save us, for He is good and the Lover of mankind.
After the dismissal, the deacon censes the holy offerings. Then he goes and censes the holy Table round about cruciformly, saying secretly:
Deacon:In the grave bodily, but in Hades with Thy soul, as God; in paradise with the thief, and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast thou Who fillest all things, O Christ the Inexpressible.
Then the 50th Psalm: Have mercy on me, O God... during which, having censed the sanctuary and the whole temple, he enters again into the holy altar, and having again censed the Holy Table, and the priest, he puts aside the censer in its place, and approaches the priest. And standing together before the Holy Table, they bow down thrice, while praying secretly and saying:
Beginning of the Liturgy
Priest:O Heavenly King, O Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.
Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will among men. (Twice)
O Lord, Thou shalt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Thy praise.
Then the priest kisses the Holy Gospel and the deacon the corner of the Holy Table. After this, the deacon, bowing his head to the priest, and holding his orarion with three fingers of his right hand, says:
Deacon:It is time to act for the Lord. Master, bless.
The priest signing him with the sign of the Cross, says:
Priest:Blessed is our God, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Deacon:Pray for me, master.
Priest:May the Lord direct thy steps.
Deacon:Remember me, holy Master.
Priest:May the Lord God remember thee in His kingdom, always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Having bowed, he goes out by the north door, because the royal doors are not opened until the Entry. And standing in the usual place, directly before the holy doors, he bows reverently, thrice, saying secretly:
Deacon:O Lord, Thou shalt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare Thy praise.
Immediately the deacon begins the Divine Liturgy with "Bless, Master."
Be it known: If a priest serve without a deacon, the words of the deacon in the Proskomede, and during the Liturgy before the Gospel, and his response: Bless, Master, and Pierce Master, and: It is time to act, ... are not said, but only the Ecteniae and the Order of the Prothesis. If many priests concelebrate, in the performance of the Proskomede only one priest may serve and say what is set forth; but of the rest of the celebrants, none shall say the proskomede separately.
Liturgy of the Catechumens.
Priest:BLESSED is the kingdom of the Father…
The Litany of Peace.
Deacon:In peace let us pray to the Lord…
The priest says secretly the Prayer of the First Antiphon:O Lord our God, whose might is incomparable…
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory…
Choir:sings the First Antiphon
The deacon, having made a reverence, goes from his place to stand before the icon of Christ, holding his orarion with three fingers of his right hand. At the conclusion of the Antiphon, the deacon comes to stand in his accustomed place, and, having made a reverence, says:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Prayer of the Second Antiphon:O Lord our God, save thy people …
Exclamation:For thine is the strength …
Choir sing theSecond Antiphon.
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Prayer of the Third Antiphon:O thou who hast bestowed on us …
Exclamation:For thou art a good God who lovest …
The doors are opened for the Little Entrance.
Choir sings theThird Antiphon, or the Beatitudes, if it be Sunday.
When they come to theGlory, the priest and the deacon, standing before the holy table, make three reverences. The priest then takes up the Book of the Holy Gospels, gives it to the deacon, and they go to the right side and behind the holy table, and coming out by the north door, preceded by candle bearers, they make the Little Entrance.
Standing in the accustomed place, they both bow their heads, the deacon says:Let us pray to the Lord.
The priest says the Prayer of the Entrance secretly:O Master, Lord our God, who hast appointed in heaven ranks … For to thee belong all glory, honor and …
The deacon, holding his orarion with three fingers of his right hand and pointing therewith to the east, says to thePriest: Bless, Master, the holy entrance.
Priest, blassing with his hend says:Blessed is the entrance of thy saints…
The deacon gives the Book of the Holy Gospels to the priest to kiss. When the last troparion is concluded, the deacon comes to stand in the center in front of the priest, he elevates his hands a little, and, showing the Book of the Holy Gospels, he says in a loud voice:Wisdom. Attend.
Then, having made a reverence, the deacon enters the sanctuary, followed by the priest, and he lays the Book of the Holy Gospels on the holy table, while the singers sing:O Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ... Alleluia. once
If it is Sunday:who art risen from the dead, who sing unto thee, Alleluia.
The choir sings the proper troparia.
The priest says the Prayer of the Trisagion Hymn:O holy God, who restest in thy Saints …
When the singers come to the last troparion, the deacon says to the priest, bowing his head and holding his orarion with three fingers of his right hand:Bless, Master, the time of the Thrice-holy.
The priest, signing him, exclaims:For holy art thou, O our God…
The deacon comes in front of the holy doors, and pointing with his orarion, first to the icon of Christ, says:O Lord, save the pious, and hear us.
Then pointing, he says to those who stand without in a loud voice:and unto ages of ages.
The choir sings the Trisagion, the priest and the deacon say the Same, making three reverences before the holy table.
The deacon says to thePriest: Command, Master.
They go, forth to the cathedra, and the priest says as he goes:Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.
Deacon:Bless, Master, the cathedra on high.
Priest:Blessed art thou on the glorious throne of thy kingdom…
It is to be noted that the priest is not to ascend to the cathedra nor to sit on it, but to sit to the side of the cathedra, to the south side.
Reading of the Epistle and the Gospel.
At the conclusion of the Trisagion, the deacon, having come before the holy doors, says:Let us attend.
Priest exclaims:Peace be to all.
Reader:And to thy spirit. Deacon: Wisdom.
The reader reads the prokeimenon, from the Psalms of David. The choir sings the prokeimenon. The reader reads the verse. The choir repeats the prokeimenon. The reader read the first half of the prokeimenon. The choir sings the last part of the prokeimenon.
The reader reads the title of the lesson:Reading from the Acts of the Holy Apostles or from the General Epistle of James or from the Epistle of the holy Apostle Paul to the Romans or to the Corinthians or to the Galatians.
Deacon:Let us attend.
When the Epistle is finished, the priest says:Peace be to thee [that readest].
Reader:And to thy spirit. Deacon: Wisdom. Reader: Alleluia, with verses. The choir sings Alleluia 3 times.
During the reading of the Epistle, the deacon takes the censer and incense and approaches the priest, and, receiving the blessing from him, censes the holy table round about, the table of Prothesis table, the whole sanctuary, the priest, then the ikonastasis, both kliros, the people, the icons of Jesus Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and the holy table from the front.
The priest, standing before the holy table, says the Prayer before the Gospel:Make shine in our hearts, O Master who lovest mankind …
The deacon, having put the censer away in its customary place, approaches the priest and bows his head before him. The priest gives him the Book of the Holy Gospels.
The deacon having reverenced the Book of the Holy Gospels, receives it, and, coming out of the holy doors, preceded by candles, comes forth and stands on the ambo or the place prepared facing the priest, and says:Bless, Master, him that proclaimeth the Gospel of the holy Apostle and Evangelist Name.
The Priest then signing him, says:May God, through the intercessions of the holy…
The priest turning toward the west, says:
Wisdom. Attend. Let us hear the Holy Gospel. Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:The reading from the Holy Gospel according to Name.
Choir:Glory to thee, O Lord, glory to thee.
Priest:Let us attend.
If two deacons serve, one says:Wisdom. Attend . . . and then: Let us attend.
When the Gospel reading is concluded, the priest says:Peace be to thee that proclaimest the Gospel.
Choir:Glory to thee, O Lord, glory to thee.
The deacon, coming then up to the holy doors, gives the Book of the Holy Gospels to the priest, and the holy doors are again closed.
Litany of fervent supplication.
The deacon standing in the accustomed place, says:Let us all say with all our soul and with all our mind, let us say.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
The priest unfolds the lower part, and the sides of the antimension.
Prayer of Fervent Supplication:O Lord our God, accept this fervent supplication…
Exclamation:For thou art a merciful God who lovest man…
Deacon:Pray ye unto the Lord, ye catechumens.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer for the Catechumens:O Lord our God, who dwellest on high…
Exclamation:That with us they also may glorify thine all-honorable…
The priest unfolds the upper part of the antimension.
Deacon:As many as are catechumens, depart. If there is a second deacon, he says: Catechumens, depart. And again the first: As many as are catechumens, depart.
Let no catechumen remain. As many as are of the faithful, again and again…
Liturgy of the faithful.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
First Prayer of the Faithful:We give thanks unto thee, O Lord God of Powers…
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory, honor and worship…
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
When the priest serves alone, the following are not said:
For the peace from above and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
For the peace of the whole world, for the good estate of the holy churches of God, and for the union of all men, let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
For this holy house, and for those who with faith, reverence, and fear of God enter therein, let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
For our deliverance from all tribulation, wrath, danger and necessity, let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Second Prayer of the Faithful:Again and oftimes we fall down before thee and pray thee
Deacon:Wisdom. The deacon goes in through the north door.
Exclamation:That being kept always under thy might…
the holy doors are opened. While the Cherubim Hymn is being sung, the deacon, taking the censer and putting incense therein, goes to the priest, and, having received his blessing, censes the holy table round about, the Prothesis table, the whole sanctuary, the clergy in the sanctuary, the iconostasis, the choirs and the people, saving Psalm 50.
The priest then says this prayer secretly:None is worthy among those that are bound with carnal desires …
When the prayer and the censing are completed, the priest and the deacon, standing before the holy table, say the Cherubim Hymn thrice. At the end of each they make a reverence.
Priest:We, the Cherubim mystically representing…
Deacon:That the King of all we may receive, by angelic hosts …
Then they go forth to the Prothesis Table, the deacon going first, and the priest censes the holy Things, praying thus:O God, cleanse thou me a sinner.
The deacon says to thePriest: Lift, Master.
the priest, lifting the aer, lays it on the deacon's left shoulder, saying:In peace lift up your hands in the sanctuaries and bless the Lord.
The Great Entrance.
Taking the holy diskos, he sets it on the deacon's head with all heed and reverence, the deacon meanwhile holding the censer with one finger of his right hand. The priest himself takes the chalice in his hands, and they both go forth on the north side, praying, and preceded by candle-bearers with candles.
Deacon:The Lord God remember us all in His kingdom…
The deacon, having entered through the holy doors, stands to the right, and as the priest enters, says to him:The Lord God remember thy priesthood in His kingdom.
the priest to him:The Lord God remember thy diaconate in His kingdom, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
The priest then sets the holy chalice down on the holy table, and taking the holy diskos from the deacon's head, sets it down on the holy table also, saying:
Taking the veils from the holy diskos and from the holy chalice, he lays them on one side of the holy table; then taking the aer from the deacon's shoulder, and having censed it, he covers the holy Things with it, saying:The noble Joseph, taking down thine immaculate Body…
taking the censer from the deacon's hands, he censes the holy Things thrice, saying:Do good, O Lord, in thy goodwill unto Zion …
Giving up the censer, and bowing his head, he says to theDeacon: Remember me, brother and concelebrant.
the deacon, to him:The Lord God remember thy priesthood in His kingdom.
ThePriest: Pray for me, my concelebrant.
The deacon, bowing his head, and holding his orarion the while with three fingers of his right hand, says to thePriest: The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee…
ThePriest: The same Spirit shall serve with us all the days of our life.
The deacon to him:Remember me, holy Master.
ThePriest: The Lord God remember thee in His kingdom…
Having kissed the priest's right hand, the deacon goes out the north door, and standing in the customary place, says:Let us complete our prayer unto the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
For the precious Gifts now offered, let us pray to the Lord.
Prayer of the Prothesis:O Lord God Almighty, who alone art holy…
Exclamation:Through the compassions of thine only-begotten Son…
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:Let us love one another that with one accord we may confess.
Choir:Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, One in essence and Undivided.
The priest makes three reverences, saying secretly:I will love thee, O Lord, my might; the Lord is my foundation, my refuge, and my deliverer. thrice
The priest kisses the holy Things, which remain covered, thus: first the top of the holy diskos, then thetop of the holy cup, and the edge of the holy table in front of him. If there are two or more priests, they all kiss the holy Things and each other on the shoulder.The celebrant says: Christ is in our midst. And the one he kisses answers: He is and shall be.
The deacons, if there are two or three, kiss their oraria where the cross is depicted, and each other, saying just what the priests have said. The deacon, if there is but one, similarly, makes reverences, standing in his place, kisses his orarion where the cross is depicted, and then exclaims:
Creed and the Eucharistic Canon.
Deacon:The doors, the doors! In wisdom let us attend.
The priest lifts the aer and holds it over the holy Gifts. If several priests are serving, then they lift the holy aer and hold it over the holy Gifts and wave it saying to themselves the Confession of the Faith, as do the people:I believe in one God the Father almighty…
Deacon:Let us stand aright. Let us stand with fear….
Choir:A mercy of peace, a sacrifice of praise.
The priest, having taken the aer from off the holy Things, kisseы it, and puts it on the left side of the Table.
The priest, facing east:The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ…
Choir:And with thy spirit.
Priest:Let us lift up our hearts.
Choir:We lift them up unto the Lord.
Priest:Let us give thanks unto the Lord.
Choir:It is meet and right to worship Father, Son, and …
The priest prays:It is meet and right to hymn thee, to bless thee …
Exclamation:Singing the hymn of victory, shouting, crying, and saying.
The deacon, standing at the left sidce of the Table, and taking the holy star from the holy diskos, makes the sign of the cross above it, and having kissed it, he lays it aside.
Choir:Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth…
[The deacon comes and stands on the right side, and taking a fan in his hand, waves it quietly with all heed and fear over the holy Gifts, so that flies or other insects may not settle on them].
The priest prays: With these blessed Powers, we also, O Master…
The deacon shows the priest the holy diskos, holding his orarion with three fingers of his right hand
Exclamation:Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you, for the forgiveness of sins.
The deacon shows the priest the holy chalice. The priest, secretly:And likewise the cup after supper, saying:
Exclamation:Drink ye all of this; this is my blood of the New Testament ….
The priest prays secretly:Remembering this saving commandment …
Exclamation:Thine own of thine own we offer unto thee on behalf of all and for all.
Τhe deacon elevates the holy diskos and the holy chalice, and makes a devout reverence.
Choir:We hymn thee, we bless thee…
The priest prays secretly:Again we offer unto thee this rational and bloodless worship, and we call upon thee and pray thee, and supplicate thee: send down thy Holy Spirit upon us and upon these Gifts set forth. (This is a very important prayer which the priest has to say with all faith and fear of God.)
Note the following troparia did not exist in the ancient Liturgy. However later they became part of the Slavonic Liturgy.
The deacon sets aside the fan and draws near to the priest, and they both make three reverences before holy table, praying within themselves and saying:
Priest:O Lord, who at the third hour didst send down thine all-holy Spirit …
Deacon, the verse:A clean heart create in me …
Again thePriest: O Lord, who at the third hour . . .
Deacon, the verse:Cast me not away from thy face …
Again thePriest: O Lord, who at the third hour . . .
Then bowing his head and pointing to the holy Bread with his orarion, the deacon says: Bless, Master, the holy bread.
The priest, rising, signs the holy Bread saying:And make this bread the precious Body of thy Christ.
Deacon:Amen. And again the Deacon: Bless, Master, the holy cup. And the priest blessing, says: And that which is in this cup the precious Blood of thy Christ.
Again the deacon, showing both the holy Things, says:Bless, Master, both.
The priest, blessing both the holy Things, says:Changing them by thy Holy Spirit.
Deacon:Amen. Amen. Amen.
Bowing his head to the priest, the deacon says:Remember me a sinner, holy Master. And the Priest: May the Lord God remember thee in His kingdom …
Priest in private:That to those who shall partake thereof …
Taking the censer, the priest exclaims:Especially our all-holy, immaculate, most blessed, glorious Lady, Theotokos and Ever-virgin Mary.
The priest censes before the holy table thrice. The deacon censes the holy table round about, and he remembers whom he will of the living and the dead.
Choir:Meet it is in truth to bless thee, O Theotokos … Or instead of Meet it is, the Hermos of the feast that is being celebrated.
Priest in private:For the holy Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John… and remembers by name whom he will of those who have fallen asleep.
Priest in private:And give them rest where the light of thy face watcheth over them...
After the singing of the megalinarion, the priest exclaims:Among the first, remember, O Lord, our [lord, the Most Reverend (or Most Blessed) Name,] ….
Choir:And all mankind.
Exclamation:Remember, O Lord, the city in which we dwell, and every city …
The priest remembers privately by name whom he will of the living.
Exclamation:And grant us with one mouth and one heart to glorify…
The priest, turning toward the doors and blessing, says:And the mercies of our great God…
Choir:And with thy spirit.
The deacon, receiving the priest's leave, comes out and, standing in the usual place, says:Having remembered all the saints, again and again in peace, let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
For the precious Gifts set forth and sanctified, let us pray to the Lord.
The priest prays:Unto thee we commend all our life and hope, O Master…
Excalmation:And vouchsafe, O Master, that with boldness…
People:Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name….
Excalmation:For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory…
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:Bow your heads unto the Lord.
Choir:To thee, O Lord.
The priest prays:We give thanks unto thee, O King invisible…
Exciamation:Through the grace and compassion and love…
The priest prays:Attend, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, from thy holy dwelling place …
While this prayer is being said, the deacon, standing before the holy doors, binds the orarion about him crosswise.
The priest, and likewise the deacon in the place where he stands, bows and says silently thrice:O God, cleanse thou me a sinner and have mercy on me.
When the deacon sees the priest stretch out his hands and touch the holy Bread in order to make the elevation, he exclaims:Let us attend.
The priest, elevating the holy Bread, exclaims:Holy Things are for the holy.
Choir:One is holy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.
The choirs sing the koinonikon of the day or of the saint.
The deacon then enters the sanctuary and, standing at the right of the priest, says:Break, Master, the holy Bread.
The priest, breaking it into four parts with heed and reverence, saysBroken and divided is…
The priest should know that, on breaking the holy Lamb, he is to place the side with the sign of the Cross downward to the holy diskos, the cut side upward as before, when it was sacrificed. The portionIC, then, he places toward the upper part of the holy diskos, that is to the East; XC, then, toward the lower part, which is to the West, and the NI to the north side, and KA to the south side, as shown here: IC NI KA XC.
Taking the portionIC, he fills the holy cup, XC is divided among the priests and deacons, and those two remaining portions, NI and KA, are divided into small portions, so many as he shalI consider to be suff icient for the communicants.
The deacon, then, showing the holy chalice with the orarion, says:Fill, Master, the holy chalice.
The priest, then, taking the portion that is on the upper side of the diskos, that is, IC, makes the sign of the Cross with ii above the holy chalice, saying:The fulness of the cup, of the faith, of the Holy Spirit.
The priest puts it into the holy cup.
Taking the warm water, the deacon says to thePriest: Bless, Master, the warm water.
The priest blesses, saying:Blessed is the warmth of thy saints always…
The deacon pours a little into the chalice crosswise, saying:The warmth of the faith, full of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Setting aside the warm water, the deacon stands a little way off.
The priest says:Deacon, draw near:
The deacon, having approached, makes a reverence, asking forgiveness. The priest then, taking the holy Bread, gives it to the deacon. And the deacon, having kissed the hand with which he gives him the holy Bread, receives it, saying:Impart unto me, Master ….
The priest says:To thee, the deacon Name, is imparted the precious ….
The deacon withdraws behind the holy table, and bowing his head, he prays, as does also the priest, saying:I believe, O Lord . . . and the rest (see below)
Similarly the priest also, taking one portion of the holy Bread, says:The precious and all-holy Body …
Bowing his head, the priest prays, saying:I believe, O Lord, and I confess, that thou … Of thy mystical supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant …
Thus they partake of that which they hold in their hands with fear and all wariness.
The priest, rising, takes the holy chalice in both hands with the veil and partakes of it thrice, saying:The precious and holy Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ is imparted unto me, the servant of God, the priest Name, unto forgiveness of my sins and unto life eternal. Amen.
Then, wiping his lips and the edge of the chalice with the cloth that he holds in his hand, he says:
This hath touched my lips and shall take away my transgressions and cleanse my sins.
The calls the deacon, saying:Deacon, draw near again.
The deacon approaches and makes a reverence, saying:Again I draw near to our immortal King and God. Impart unto me, Master, the precious and holy Blood…
The priest says:Unto thee, the servant of God, the deacon Name, is imparted …
When the deacon has partaken, the priest says:This hath touched thy lips …
The Prayers of Thanksgiving:We give thanks to thee, O man-loving Master …
Having beheld the Resurrection of Christ, let us bow down … Shine, shine, O New Jerusalem … O great and holiest Pascha, Christ. O Wisdom and Word of God and Power …
It should be noted that, if there are those who wish to communicate of the holy Mysteries, the priest divides the two remaining portions, that isNI and KA, into small pieces, so that there will be enough for all the communicants. And then he places them in the holy chalice, and he covers the holy chalice with the veil. Similarly, he lays the star-cover and the veils on the holy diskos.
Communion of the faithful.
They open the doors of the sanctuary, and the deacon, making a reverence, takes the chalice from the priest with devotion, approaches the doors, and elevating the holy chalice, shows it to the people, saying:With fear of God, with faith and love, draw near.
Choir:Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord…
Those who wish to communicate shall then approach. They come one by one and they make a reverence with all contrition and fear, holding their hands folded on their breast. Thus each receives the Divine Mysteries.
The priest says on communicating each one:The servant of God, Name, partakes of the precious and holy …
The deacon wipes the lips of each with the cloth. The communicant, having partaken, shall kiss the holy chalice, make a reverence, and withdraw.And thus all communicate.
After communion, the priest enters the sanctuary, and sets the holy Things down on the holy table. The deacon, holding the holy diskos over the holy chalice, purs the particles into the chalice.
He wipes the diskos thoroughly with the holy sponge, with heed and reverence, saying:Wash away, O Lord, the sins of all those here commemorated …
The priest blesses the people, exclaiming:O God, save thy people, and bless thine inheritance.
Turning to the holy table, the priest censes it thrice, saying:Be thou exalted above the heavens …
The choir sings:We have seen the true Light…
The priest, taking the holy diskos, sets it on the deacon's head. The deacon, taking it reverently, looks toward the holy door, saying nothing, and goes forth to the prothesis table and sets it down. And ttie priest, having made a reverence, takes the holy chalice, turns toward the doors, and, looking toward the people, says secretly:Blessed is our God, And he exclaims: Always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
The priest goes forth to the holy prothesis table, and there sets down the holy Things.
Choir:Amen. Let our mouths be filled with thy praise, O Lord …
The deacon, unbinding his orarion, comes forth by the north door, and standing in his usual place, says:Attend. Having partaken of the divine, holy, immaculate…
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Choir:To thee, O Lord.
The priest, having folded the antimension, and holding upright the holy Gospel Book, makes the signof the Cross with it over the antimension.
Exclamation:For thou art our sanctification and unto thee do we send up glory…
Priest:Let us depart in peace.
Choir:In the name of the Lord.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
End of the Liturgy.
Prayer behind the Ambo:Blessing those that bless thee, O Lord, and sanctifying…
Choir:Amen. Blessed be the name . . . thrice
The deacon, having entered through the north door, kneels at the right side of the Table. The priest, blessing the deacon’s head, says the prayer fort the Consuming of the Holy Things:Thou who art the fulfillment of the Law …
The deacon consumes the holy Things with fear and all wariness.
Priest:The blessing of the Lord and His mercy be upon you …
Priest:Glory to thee, O Christ God, our Hope, glory to thee.
Choir:Glory... Now and . . ., Lord, have mercy thrice, Bless.
Priest:May Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His all-immaculate Mother …
The deacon consumes the holy Things with all fear, so that no slightest particle fall or remain, pours water and wine into the holy chalice, consumes it, and absorbs all moisture with the sponge, and sets the holy vessels together, wraps them and puts them in their usual place, saying:Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart . . . The dismissal is given, and giving thanks to God, they go their way.
The priest washes his hands in the usual place, and makes a reverence together with the priest.
Conciliar Celebration of Divine Liturgy.
1. All the Priests and Deacons who are to celebrate the Divine Liturgy together must pray the Entrance Prayers together before the Liturgy. The Rector, or the Senior Priest who is presiding, and all the other Priests, garbed in Podriassnik (Under-cassock, or "Anteri"), as well as Riassa (Outer-cassock, Rason), and Skufiyas and Kamilavkas, if they have been awarded; and Deacons garbed in Podriassnik and Riassa, all arrange themselves according to the order of Seniority round about the Holy Altar Table. The Rector or other Priest presiding stands in front of the Holy Altar Table, with the Deacon(s) standing beside him and a little behind him, and all other Priests stand in rows on either side (North or South) of the Holy Altar Table, facing it. All make together one reverence from the waist, kiss the edge of the Holy Altar Table and go out the North and South Doors: the Rector and the Priests (and Deacon) on the North Side go through the North Door, the Deacon and Priests on the South Side go out the South Door.
2. They all line up on the Soleas: the Rector in the Center, the Deacon(s) at his side(s) and a little behind him, and the rest of the Priests arranged in descending order on right and left. As usual, the Rector says three times, "O God, cleanse me a sinner." He and all the rest at the same time cross themselves and make three reverences from the waist (according to the Typikon, the bow from the waist should be deep enough so that if extended the first two fingers of the right hand would touch the floor.)
3. The Deacon then quietly pronounces, "Bless, Master." The Rector: "Blessed is our God..." Deacon: "Amen." "Glory to Thee, O God, glory to Thee." "O Heavenly King.." and the Trisagion Prayers through "Our Father," as usual. At the reading of "We adore Thy most pure image..." the Priests take off their headgear and make a waist reverence or a full reverence (depending on the day of the week), kiss the Icon of the Savior and then, at the reading of "Thou art a fountain of tender-heartedness..." reverence and kiss the Icon of the Theotokos. After them, the Deacons do the same. Then all Priests, bowing their heads, read quietly, "O Lord, stretch forth Thine hand..." The Rector reads the prayer, "O Lord, forgive, pardon and remit..." and all bow to each other, those on the right bow to those on the left and vice-versa, the Rector bows to both sides, and then all bow to the people and go into the Altar, each on his own side. The Rector goes in first on the South Side. Going through the Deacons' Doors, they kiss the icon of the Archangel or Archdeacon that is on the Door. The Rector reads the Psalm, and all make together a waist reverence or prostration before kissing the Altar Table and going to vest. In some places all the Priests exchange the Kiss of Peace with the Rector at this point.
4. The Proskomedia is served by the youngest Priest (by ordination) or by the one whose turn it is (as in a Church where many Priests serve together regularly). At the end of the Proskomedia, i.e., towards the end of (or during the Trisagion of) the Sixth Hour, a Deacon does a complete censing of the entire Church. (As at any Liturgy, the Curtain is opened when the Deacon begins his censing and not before.)
5. Before the beginning of the Liturgy, all Priests and Deacons take their places as they did before beginning the Entrance Prayers. The Rector, standing alone with the Deacons before the Holy Altar Table begins, "O God, cleanse me a sinner," three times with three signs of the Cross and three waist reverences. The rest of the clergy cross themselves and bow in unison with him. After that, the Rector (alone) lifts up his hands and prays: "O Heavenly King," "Glory to God."(2) and "O Lord, open Thou..." After each prayer all make the sign of the Cross and a waist reverence, but only the Rector lifts up his hands or reads the prayers aloud. Then the Deacons obtain the blessing for the beginning of the Liturgy as outlined in the Priest's Service Book.
6. During the Divine Liturgy, Priests may not converse with each other, move around from their places, nor read the prayers audibly. While each Priest must read every secret prayer in the service, it is only the Priest taking the first place before the Holy Table that says these prayers in an audible tone. The Exclamations up to the Little Entrance are read by the Priests each at his turn in order. (See below.)
7. During the singing of the Beatitudes or other Third Antiphon, when the time comes for the Entrance the Rector makes two and the Deacon three reverences. The Rector kisses the Gospel Book, then picks it up and gives it to the Deacon. Then the Rector makes a third reverence. The other Priests make reverences together with the Rector, and when he kisses the Gospel Book, they kiss the Altar Table. The Entrance takes place in this order: All Processional items are carried in front of the Gospel and none after it. If there is more than one Deacon serving, the Deacon not carrying the Gospel goes in front of the Gospel bearing the censer, but does not turn towards the Gospel Book, nor does he cense it, but he leads the Deacon carrying the Gospel before the Holy Doors, then continues without stopping directly into the Altar and stands at the Southwest corner of the Holy Altar Table, facing the Holy Doors, but not censing yet. Behind the Deacon with the Holy Gospel Book come: the Rector, the First Priest, the Second Priest, the Third Priest, etc., in order of seniority. Those who had been standing on the right (South) side of the Holy Altar Table go across the High Place, the Deacon and Rector leading, and those on the left (North) side join them according to rank as they pass by on the way out. There is no point at all for the Priests to come in pairs before the Holy Table and make reverences, kiss it, and bow to the people at the Little Entrance.
8. The Deacon goes to stop before the Holy Doors, a little to the right and slightly ahead of the Rector. The Rector stops in the center of the Soleas before the Holy Doors. The remaining clergy line up in two rows behind the Rector (two rows extending east-west) in the same order as they stood at the Holy Altar Table: the Seniors farthest towards the West, During the Procession the Deacon says quietly (and not as was formerly done in many places loudly) "Let us pray to the Lord," and the Rector prays softly the Prayer of the Entrance. The Deacon, indicating the Altar with his Orarion, bids "Bless, Master the Holy Entrance." The Rector blesses with his hand towards the East. The Deacon waits until the singers have finished the Beatitudes (last troparion of the Beatitudes), then steps directly in front of the Rector, faces due East and lifts up the Gospel Book, making the sign of the Cross with it, and exclaims: "Wisdom, Attend!" As he lifts up the Book the Deacon in the Altar censes towards it three times three and gives up the censer, goes to the High Place, prays to God and bows to the Rector before crossing over to resume his place. The Deacon places the Gospel Book on the Holy Altar Table. If there are no Deacons, then the Rector is the one to take custody of the Holy Gospel Book and to have the honor of carrying it in the Procession. If that is the case, then the Rector should lay the Gospel Book upon the Holy Altar Table, then go back to kiss the small Icon of the Savior on the Royal Door-post, bless the Candle-bearer(s), kiss the small Icon of the Theotokos on the Royal Door-post, and then go to stand before the Holy Altar Table. The Priests come into the Altar, each kissing the small icon on the Royal Door-post on his own respective side as he enters. When all have come to their places, they pray to God (i.e., cross themselves and bow to the East), kiss the Holy Altar Table and then bow to the Rector together, and he returns their bow. Only the Rector turns west before entering the Altar to bless the Candle-bearer(s) (this is not a general blessing of the Faithful, and if there is no Candle-bearer, the Priest blesses no one at this point).
9. At the conclusion of the singing of the Troparia and Kontakia, the Rector is the one who pronounces the exclamation: "For holy art Thou…" There is no Diaconal bidding, "Let us pray to the Lord," as there is at a Hierarchical celebration: if the Deacon utters that at a non-hierarchical celebration, it's a mistake. During the singing of the Trisagion by the Choir, and separately from them, the Rector quietly pronounces three times, "Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us," and he and all the Priests and Deacons make the sign of the Cross and a waist reverence each time (this prayer is said or sung exactly the same total number of times as at an Hierarchical celebration) kisses the Holy Altar Table and goes to stand at the Southeast corner of it, facing West. Standing or sitting at the High Place itself (i.e., in the very center of the East of the Altar) is reserved to Hierarchs only. The rest of the Priests kiss the Altar Table with the Rector and array themselves to either side of him in descending rank, also facing West.
10. Before saying "Peace be to all," (and not "all of you," as if in contrast to according peace to only, say someone's arms, or "some parts of you") the Rector bows to the Priests serving with him to the right and to the left. If there are no Deacons, the censing before the Gospel is done by the Third Priest (if three are serving) The Second Priest, after the Apostolic Reading is over, bows to the Rector, goes to the Holy Altar Table, and give the Gospel Book to the Deacon. If there is no Deacon, then the Rector himself reads the Gospel from in front of the Holy Altar Table, facing west. After the Gospel reading, the Rector receives the Gospel Book from the Deacon and hands it to the Second Priest, who places it on the Holy Altar Table between the Tabernacle and the Antimension.
11. During the "Fervent" Litany, after the petition for the Hierarchy, the Rector opens the lower portion of the Antimension and kisses the signature on it. During the Catechumen Litany, at the petition: "That He may reveal to them the Gospel..." two Priests open the upper portion of the Antimension, cross themselves, bow to the East and bow to the Rector. The exclamations of the Litanies after the Gospel continue in order of the Priests' seniority; however, the exclamation after the second "Prayer for the Faithful" — "That being kept always under Thy might..." is always to be pronounced by the Rector.
12. At the Cherubim Hymn, only the Rector raises his arms and reads aloud, "Let us the Cherubim..."
13. Here are the exclamations at the Great Entrance:
(Please take note: the insertion of the word "for" at the beginning of these remembrances is very bad grammar and meaningless.)
Deacon: Remembers the Metropolitan and the Ruling Bishop: "His Beatitude (or "Our Lord"), the Most Blessed Theodosius, Archbishop of Washington, Metropolitan of All America and Canada, may the Lord God remember in His kingdom...
Rector: The president, etc.
2nd Priest: The founders, benefactors, and brethren (or parishioners) of this holy Temple (or house)
3rd Priest: All who are suffering and being persecuted for the Orthodox Faith..."
Rector: And all you Orthodox Christians may the Lord God..
14. After the Great Entrance, all exclamations should be pronounced by the Rector.
15. At the lifting up of Chalice and Diskos at "Thine own of Thine own," it is not acceptable to make the sign of the Cross in the air over the Antimension with these sacred items.
16. Before taking Communion, the Rector prays, "O God, cleanse me, a sinner," three times with three waist reverences. Then he says the prayer, "O Lord, forgive, pardon remit my sins, voluntary and involuntary, etc.," makes one full reverence before the Altar Table (and all the rest make the same reverence with him) then bows to the others and says, "Bless me, holy Fathers, and forgive me a sinner." The concelebrants also bow to the Rector. The Rector turns towards the West and directs the same words to the people standing without. Then, with the words, "Behold, I draw near to Christ..." he makes a second full reverence, kisses the edge of the Holy Altar Table and places into the palm of his right hand the Precious Body of Christ and goes to stand on the right side of the Holy Altar Table, where the Second Priest had been standing. Then all the Priests on the right side go over to the left side and stand in line according to seniority preparatory to receiving the Most Pure Body the same way the Rector did. The Second Priest, after crossing himself, making a full reverence, kissing the edge of the Altar table and placing the Most Holy Body in his hand, exchanges the kiss of peace with the Rector (and they kiss each others' shoulders), but he does not go around behind the back of the Rector, but turns back and goes all the way around the left side of the Holy Altar Table to stand at the right side of the Rector. Going around behind the backs of Priests holding the Most Pure Body of the Lord in their hands while oneself holding the Same is not allowed, neither should anyone carrying the Most Pure Body in his hands allow anything or anyone to come between him and the Holy Altar Table at any time. When all the Priests have received into their hands the Most Pure Body, the Rector returns to his place in front of the Holy Altar Table and quietly, in the hearing of all the celebrants, prays the prayers beginning, "I believe, O Lord, and I confess..." At the conclusion of this prayer, all commune together with the Rector. Then the Rector partakes of the Holy Blood and summons the Deacons to impart to them the Most Pure Body of Christ, according to the format in the Service Book. Only at a conciliar celebration are Deacons imparted the Most Pure Body after the Priests. (When one Priest is serving alone, he, having his hands free, places the Deacon's portion into the Deacon's hand before placing a portion in his own hand, as prescribed in the Service Book.) To partake of Christ's Blood, all Priests come to the Chalice on the right side of the Holy Altar Table, according to seniority, make a waist reverence (not a full one) and say, "Lo, once again..."
17. After all the Priests have communed, the Rector communes the Deacons with the Holy Blood. Warm water mixed with wine, also bread, are taken by all the celebrants save the one who will be consuming the Holy Gifts at the end of the Liturgy. All the clergy without exception must say "Glory to Thee, O God, glory to Thee" three times and then pray the prayer: "We give thanks to thee..."If there is time to do so while the particles for the People's Communion are being cut, then the Prayers after Communion may be read by the remaining Priests.
18. At the exclamation, "Always, now and ever..." the Rector makes the sign of the Cross with the Holy Chalice while standing in the Holy Doors in recollection of the Lord Jesus Christ's last blessing on the Mount of Olives before His Ascension into heaven. He holds the Chalice with both hands. If there is no Deacon serving, then there are two received practices: one is to juggle both the Chalice and the Diskos with the items on it for this blessing: the other is to bless only with the Chalice, then turn to the Holy Table, pick up the Diskos and proceed directly to the Table of Oblation with it, place the Chalice and Diskos on the Table of Oblation, cover them, place the candle before them, and cense them. If there is a Deacon, then he censes him too at this point.
19. During the Litany, "Attend! Having received the..." the Rector closes up the Antimension after kissing it and the sponge. Other Priests help him. Other Priests hand him the Gospel from its place before the Tabernacle.
20. The Prayer before the Ambo is usually read by the very most junior Priest. Before he goes out, he makes the sign of the Cross, kisses the Holy Altar Table, and bows to the Rector. He does the very same thing when he returns to the Altar.
21. If the Rector gives a Sermon after "Blessed be the Name of the Lord (and the Psalm), or at any other time, all Priests, as well as all the other persons in the Altar save the Deacon that is consuming the Gifts, should come forth from the Altar to listen to the Rector's Sermon.
22. All come out of the Altar for the Dismissal, pronounced by the Rector holding the Cross. The Rector may himself hold the Cross for the veneration of the people or ask another Priest to do so. All clergy venerate the Cross and then return to the Altar to read (or finish reading) the Thanksgiving Prayers and unvest. No one should leave the Altar without first taking leave of the Rector.
23. In the Service Book (at the end of the office of Proskomedia) it is remarked that if a Priest serves without a Deacon then he doesn't make the Diaconal utterances: "Bless, Master," "Pierce, Master," and "the rest," i.e., those words which are utterances of the Deacon as Deacon to the Priest as Priest. Such words are not spoken by a Priest serving alone without a Deacon. Other utterances, such as, "Let us pray to the Lord," "Let us attend," "Wisdom," "As many as are catechumens, depart," and the rest (and, according to Bulgakov, who cites the practice of the Patriarch of Constantinople of pronouncing these words himself, according to Muraviev's eyewitness report in 1850: "O Lord, save the pious, and hear us"), are not such words spoken by Deacons to Priests, therefore, even though the Service Book apportions these utterances to Deacons, when there is no Deacon the Priest must pronounce them himself.
A. Conciliar Serving of Liturgy with Participation of a Deacon.
a) Two Priests:
Second Priest: 1) For Thine is the strength, 2) For Thou are a good God, 3) (before the Gospel) "Wisdom, Attend..." 4) Let us attend, 5) That with us they also..6) For to Thee belongeth..(after the 1st Prayer for the Faithful), 7) after "Always, now and ever," closes the Antimension, 8)Exclaims, "Let us depart in Peace" and the Prayer before the Ambo.
b) Three Priests:
Second Priest: 1) For Thine is the strength, 2) Wisdom, attend, 3) That with us.., 4) after :"Always, now and ever," closes up the Antimension.
Third Priest: 1) For Thou art a good God, 2) "Let us attend," (before the Gospel) 3) For to Thee belong all...4) Exclaims, "Let us depart in Peace," and the Prayer before the Ambo.
c) Five Priests:
Fourth Priest: 1) That with us..,
Fifth Priest: 1) For to Thee belong, 2) Exclaims, "Let us depart in Peace," and the Prayer before the Ambo.
Second and Third Priests, excepting what is prescribed for the 4th and 5th Priests, pronounce the same things they would when three are serving.
B. Service without a Deacon:
The Second Priest pronounces every thing assigned to the second and third Priest in a Service for Three Priests without a Deacon (see below)
The Second Priest: 1) First Litany and its exclamation: "For Thine is the strength," 2) (before the Prokeimenon) "Let us attend, 3) (before the Apostolic Reading) "Let us attend," "Wisdom," and he also does the censing then, 4) (before the Gospel) "Wisdom, Attend, let us hear the Holy Gospel," 5) (Litany) Pray to the Lord, ye Catechumens," 6) Remembers the Authorities, 7) (Litany) "Let us complete," 8) (Litany) "Attend, having partaken.." and its exclamation: "For Thou art our."
The Third Priest: 1) Censes before Blessed is the Kingdom, 2) Second Little Litany and its Exclamation, "For Thou art a good God," 3) (Before the Prokeimenon) "Wisdom," 4) (Litany) "As many as are Catechumens, depart, 5) Closes the curtain, 6) (Litany) "Having remembered all the saints" 7) Let us depart in Peace, let us pray to the Lord.
The Fourth Priest: (before the Prokeimenon) "Let us attend," (before the Apostolic Reading) "Wisdom" and "Let us attend," does the censing at that time, the Litany, "Pray to the Lord, ye Catechumens,"
The Fifth Priest: (before the Prokeimenon "Wisdom," Litany, "As many as are Catechumens, depart," remembers the Ruling Bishop.
In addition one must also observe the following:
1) Every junior Priest, after pronouncing an exclamation, crosses himself, makes a metanoia (bow from the waist far enough over so that, if extended, two fingers of the right hand would reach to the floor) to the Holy Table and then turns to the presiding Priest and bows to him.
2) The Proskomedia and the Prayer before the Ambo are always done by the most junior Priest.
3) We stated above what was to be pronounced by the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Priests: everything which was not mentioned is to be done by the Presiding Priest.
4) At a conciliar celebration without a Deacon the fundamental rules which must be observed are that the petitions and concluding Exclamation of each Litany are to be pronounced in order by one and the same Priest (and not so that petitions of a given Litany would be pronounced by a junior Priest and its exclamation by a Priest senior to him, the equivalent of reducing the junior Priest to the Diaconate), and that junior Priests would maintain the usual posture of respect toward those of senior rank, such as Archpriests and Archimandrites.
5) No one has the right to elevate himself above the rest of the Priestly Hierarchy in accomplishing the Holy Oblation, as if only he possesses authority and importance and the rest do not have such: It is true that a Hierarch accomplishes the Sacrament, but the others also participate with him; and it is true that Archimandrites, Hegumens, Archpriests and the Cathedral Deans have the honor of standing before the others, yet the Priesthood and the power given It and the power of Priesthood is the same for all.
The system laid out above for conciliar celebrations is done differently in different places. For example, in some places the presiding Priest takes part in opening the Antimension, in some places not; in some places when no Deacon is serving, the presiding Priest carries both Chalice and Discos at the Great Entrance, while the Second Priest carries the Hand Cross, while in other places the Presiding Priest will carry the Discos and the Second Priest the Chalice. Since there are, in fact, no universal rules for such conciliar serving, one must, of course, follow that order which is laid down by the local ruling bishop. It is preferable that, at a celebration without a Deacon, one Priest, the senior one, would carry both Chalice and Diskos. There is also no consistent guidance vis-а-vis who pronounces which commemorations at the Great Entrance, nor who carries what at the same. However, it is good practice to insure the maximum amount of items are carried out at the Entrance: all the hand-crosses first, then the spoon and spear, then the cutting plate, then the sponge.
Altar Servitors are to be blessed to wear their Sticharia only by the Rector. This applies, as usual, even if the Rector is not serving but only standing and praying in the Altar. If the Rector is not present, then the Senior Priest blesses the donning of Sticharia.
Naturally, before beginning, all initially enter the Altar and venerate the Holy Table according to received practice. The Deacon(s), having arrived before the Priests, will have insured that the Table of Oblation is completely prepared for Proskomedia, that the Priests' vestments are ready, and that his (their) own Diaconal vestments are folded and ready to be blessed immediately at the conclusion of the Entrance Prayers.
As at any Divine Liturgy, the hands are lifted up three times only. Since there are four prayers, one may either combine the double reading of "Glory to God" into one lifting up of hands, or not lift up the hands for "O Lord, open Thou."
If the Troparion verses are sung with the Beatitudes, the time of the Entrance is as stated in the Typikon: "When the singers come to the Glory of the Beatitudes or Third Antiphon." If the Beatitudes are sung by themselves, without Troparia and Glory, then the usual place to begin the Entrance sequence of actions is at the Beatitude: "Blessed are the merciful."
Why would that be a mistake? This "Let us pray to the Lord," at a hierarchical celebration is the introduction to the polychronia that would come after "O Lord save the pious," during which the Hierarch takes a seat at an ordination while the deacon proceeds to intone many years to all ecclesiastical and political estates, one by one, and it is not an introduction to "For Holy art Thou..."
Or as the Rector himself decides and indicates.
At the Los Angeles Cathedral, the following petition has been authorized: "This God-beloved and God-protected land, its President, Civil Authorities (NOTE: not "those in civil authority), Armed Forces, and People; the Russian People in their homeland and scattered abroad; the suffering Serbian, Palestinian, and Lebanese Peoples and every Christian People and land, may the Lord God..."
Making up other exclamations here for distribution amongst the Priests is to be discouraged. The number and contents of the commemorations at the Great Entrance, very popular as they indeed may have become, have grown out of all proportion, so as to develop into almost an impromptu general Anglican Collect. The only commemoration foreseen here by the Service Books (and not by the Typikon at all) is "May the Lord God remember us all in His Kingdom..."
While at a hierarchical celebration, each Priest kisses the Hierarch's right hand as the Holy Body is placed in his own hand, and then kisses the Hierarch's left shoulder only, at non-hierarchical celebrations Priests kiss both each others' shoulders.
After communing of the Holy Pure Body, the Rector makes sure that there is absolutely no particle of It whatsoever remaining in his hands. He may lick his hand; however, he and all the communicants in the Altar must pick up the sponge and carefully brush palms and between the fingers, over the Antimension, before partaking from the Chalice or handling anything at all. It's inappropriate to brush or slap both hands against each other over the Antimension, as if one had completed a task of some kind.
The Liturgy of the Presanctified.
During the Holy Great 40-day Fast, when the priest is to celebrate the Liturgy of the Presanctified on Wednesday and Friday, or other prescribed week days, at the Proskomede on the preceding Sunday, he does everything as usual, but after he cuts the first bread, sacrifices it, and pierces it, he cuts a sufficient number of additional breads, saying as he cuts each one: In remembrance ... As a sheep He was led ... In His humility. .. And who shall declare ... For His life is taken away ... Sacrificed . . . and One of the soldiers ... He then places them on the diskos beside the first bread.
Then he pours wine and water into the holy chalice, saying the customary words, and he covers the diskos and the chalice, and he censes them, saying the Prayer of Oblation. Then he begins the Divine Liturgy and celebrates as usual.
When he signs the breads at the invocation of the Holy Spirit, he says: And make this bread . . ., in the singular, as Christ is one; he does not say these breads in the plural. When he elevates, he elevates them all together, and he breaks the first one offered, and lays the part IC in the holy chalice and pours in warm water as usual.
Then taking the holy spoon in his right hand, he dips it into the holy Blood; with his left hand he takes one of the other Breads, touches it with the holy spoon, which has been moistened with the holy Blood, in the form of a cross on the side on which the cross is traced, under the soft part, and places it in the artophorion (or other suitable container). Then he takes the others and does the same with each, and puts them all away in the artophorion. Then the priest prays as usual, communicates as usual, and completes the Divine Liturgy as usual.
On the day of the celebration of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts:
At the reading of the Hours, the priest, wearing the epitrachelion, stands before the holy doors and begins: Blessed is our God . . ., the Reader: Amen. After Our Father . . ., the priest says the exclamation and goes into the sanctuary.
And then Third, Sixth, and Ninth Hours, and finally the Typical Psalms are read.
At Third Hour, after the psalms, Alleluia and Lord, have mercy, the priest standing before the holy doors, says:
O Lord, who at the third hour didst send down thine all-holy Spirit upon thine Apostles, take not the same from us, O Good One, but renew Him in us who pray unto thee.
The choir repeats the same.
Priest, verse A: A clean heart create in me, O God, and a right spirit renew in my inmost parts.
Choir: O Lord, who at the third hour . . .
Priest, verse B: Cast me not away from thy face, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.
Choir: O Lord, who at the third hour . . .
Priest: Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit
Choir: Both now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
At Sixth Hour, the priest says alternately with the choir, as in Third Hour:
O thou who, on the sixth day and hour, didst nail to the cross the sin which Adam, through presumption, committed in Paradise, tear asunder also the handwriting of our iniquities, 0 Christ God, and save us.
Verse A: Give heed to my prayer, O God, and disregard not my supplication.
Verse B: I have called unto God, and the Lord hath heartened unto me.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit
At Ninth Hour, the priest says alternately with the choir, as in Third Hour:
O thou who, at the ninth hour, for our sake, didst taste of death in the flesh, mortify the presumption of our flesh, O Christ God, and save us.
Verse A: Let my prayer come nigh before thee, 0 Lord, give me understanding, according to thy word.
Verse B: Let my petition come before thee, 0 Lord; according to thy word, deliver me.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit
At each hour, afterMore honorable than the Cherubim . . ., the priest, before the holy doors, exclaims:
O God, be compassionate unto us, and bless us, and make thy face to shine upon us, and have mercy on us.
Then the priest says the Prayer of St. Ephraim of Syria:
O Lord and Master of my life, the spirit of idleness, of meddling (faintheartedness or despondency in Slavonic), of love of power, and of idle words, grant me not. great reverence
But the spirit of continence, of humility, of patience and of love, do thou grant unto me thy servant. great reverence
Yea, 0 Lord and King, grant me to perceive mine own offenses, and not to judge my brother; for blessed art thou unto ages of ages. Amen. great reverence
Then twelve little references, saying at each:
O God, cleanse thou me a sinner.
And again the whole prayer without division to the end and then one great reverence.
At Third and Sixth Hours, and then at the Typica, the prayer, O Lord and Master of my life, is read with sixteen references, as described above, but at Ninth Hour the prayer is read through only once with the corresponding three great references.
When there are Prophecies at the Hours, the priest says: Let us attend. Then Wisdom, and Let us attend.
Toward the end of the Typica, the priest enters the sanctuary, and vests in his priestly vestments, signing them and kissing them only, saying nothing except, Let us pray to the Lord, over each vestment.
The reader reads the Trisagion, Our Father. . ., then Lord, have mercy, twelve times, All-holy Trinity. . ., after which the holy doors are opened. The priest says: Wisdom, the Choir: Meet is it in truth . . ., the Priest: Most holy Theotokos, save us; the Choir: More honorable than the Cherubim ... ; the Priest: Glory to thee, O Christ God, our Hope, glory to thee; Choir: Glory ... Now and .. . Lord, have mercy. thrice, and Bless, and the priest gives the dismissal.
In the dismissal, the priest remembers the saint of the temple, and of the day. Then the holy doors are closed.
The priest and the deacon make three reverences before the holy table, saying only: O God, cleanse thou me a sinner and have mercy on me. And they kiss the holy Gospels, the holy table, and the cross on the holy table. And the deacon, taking the priest's leave, goes out and stands in his customary place, and exclaims:
The priest, standing before the holy table inside the sanctuary, exclaims: LESSED is the kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
Reder:Come, let us worship. . . thrice, and he reads the Introductory Psalm.
The priest, standing before the holy doors, with head uncovered, says the Prayers of Light, that is, of Vespers, beginning with the fourth prayer, the first three being said after the litanies.
Fourth Prayer:O thou to whom the holy Powers sing …
For to thee belong all glory, honor, and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Fifth Prayer:O Lord, Lord, who upholdest all things…
Through the mercy and love of man of thine onlybegotten Son, with whom thou art blessed, together with thine all-holy, and good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Sixth Prayer:O God, great and wonderful, who with goodness indescribable…
For thou art our God, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Seventh Prayer:O great and most high God, who alone hast immortality …
For thou art a good God who lovest man, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
At the conclusion of the Introductory Psalm, the deacon says the litany:In peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Choir:To thee, 0 Lord.
The Prayer of the First Antiphon:O Lord, compassionate and merciful, long-suffering…
Exclamation:For to thee belong all glory, honor and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the exclamation, the 18th kathisma is read:Unto the Lord did I cry when I was afflicted... and reverences are made at Alleluia. At each antiphon, there is a little litany by the deacon with an exclamation by the priest.
At the beginning of the kathisma, the priest comes to the prothesis and takes the presanctified Bread from the artophorion, and places it with great reverence on the holy diskos. He then pours wine and water into the holy cup as usual, but he says nothing. Taking the censer, he censes the star-cover and veils, and covers them, saying nothing at all except, Through the prayers of our holy fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us. The Gif ts are presanctified, and the sacrificed is accomplished.
If the Presanctified Lamb is kept on the holy table, its transferal to the prothesis table is usually done as follows:
The priest takes the Presanctified Lamb from the artophorion, and lays it with great reverence on the holy diskos. And, having censed the star-cover and the first veil, he covers the holy Bread, saying nothing. (This is done during the singing of the first antiphon,)
After this, preceded by the deacon with a lighted candle, the priest censes the holy table. (This is done during the singing of the second antiphon.) And, having made a profound reverence before the holy Gifts, the priest places the holy diskos on his head, and preceded by the deacon with a candle and the censer, bears them to the prothesis table. (This is done during the singing of the third antiphon.)
Then he pours wine together with water into the holy cup as usual. saying nothing. And taking the censer, he censes the veils, and he covers the diskos and the cup saying nothing, not even the prayer of oblation, but only: Through the prayers of our holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us.
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer of the Second Antiphon:O Lord, in thy displeasure rebuke us not, neither chasten us…
Exclamation:For thine is the strength, and thine are the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer of the Third Antiphon:O Lord our God, remember us thy sinful and unprofitable servants…
Exclamation:For thou art a good God who lovest man, and to thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
The priest exclaims:For thou art our God, the God who hath mercy and saveth, and to thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
After the kathisma,the Lord, I have called is sung, and the deacon censes in the usual order. When the singers begin Glory... Now and . . ., the holy doors are opened. The entrance is made with the censer. When the Gospel is to be read, on the feast of the temple, or of a saint, or in Passion Week, then the entrance is made with the Gospel Book. The deacon says quietly to the Priest: Let us pray to the Lord. And the priest reads the prayer of the entrance.
Prayer of the Entrance:In the evening, and in the morning, and at noonday, we praise thee…
After the conclusion of the stichera, the deacon or the priest exclaims, saying:Wisdom. Attend. Choir: O Joyful Light . . .
Readings from the Old Testament.
Deacon:Let us attend. Priest: Peace be to all. Deacon: Wisdom. And the reader reads the prokeimenon.
Deacon:Wisdom. Reader: The reading from the book of Genesis. And the Deacon: Let us attend. Then the reader reads the selection from Genesis (or Exodus).
The Deacon: Wisdom. And then the reader reads the second prokeimenon.
Then the deacon exclaims: Command.
The priest, taking the candlestick with its candle and the censer in both hands, facing the east, says in a loud voice: Wisdom. Attend. Then, turning toward the west, to the people, he says: The light of Christ enlighteneth all men.
Reader:The reading from the book of Proverbs (or Job)
Deacon:Let us attend.
And the reader reads the prophecies. If it is on a day on which there is to be a vigil or polyeleon, the prophecies of the feast or of the saint are read.
After their completion, the priest says:Peace be to thee.
Trio sings:Let my prayer be directed as incense before thee, the lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.
And after the reader sings, the choir sings the same.
Then the reader, verse A: Lord, I have called unto thee, hear me; attend to the voice of my prayer, when I call unto thee.
Trio sings:Let my prayer be directed . . .
Reader:verse B: Set a watch, O Lord, upon my mouth, and a door of enclosure about my lips.
Trio sings:Let my prayer be directed
The reader, verse C:Incline not my heart to words of evil, to contrive excuses for sins.
Trio sings:Let my prayer be directed ...
And again the reader sings:Let my prayer be directed as incense before thee.
And the choir sings:The lifting up of my hands as an evening sacrifice.
It should be noted that when the reader singsLet my prayer be directed as incense before thee, all the people in the temple and in the sanctuary remain on their knees in prayer. When he begins The lifting up of my hands. . . they stand. At the singing of Let my prayer be directed . . . after the other verses, all those on the same side as the choir singing, stand, while the other choir and the people on the corresponding side kneel. The priest, standing before the holy table in the sanctuary, takes the censer and censes. When they sing Incline not my heart. . ., he goes to the prothesis and censes the Presanctif ied Gifts. At the last Let my prayer be directed, he gives up the censer and he himself kneels praying.
At the completion of the above, we make three reverences, saying customarily:
If it be the feast of a saint, or if the feast of the temple occurs on a fasting day, then the deacon or the priest says:Let us attend, and the reader reads the prokeimenon of the epistle. And he reads the epistle, and Alleluia is sung. Then the Gospel is read.
The holy doors are closed, and the deacon says the litany:Let us all say with all our soul and with all our mind, let us say:
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer of Fervent Supplication:O Lord our God, accept this fervent supplication..
Exclamation:For thou art a merciful God who lovest man, and unto thee do we send up glory, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
The deacon says this litany:Pray ye unto the Lord, ye catechumens.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer for the Catechumens:O God our God, the Creator and Maker of all things…
Exclamation:That with us they also may glorify thine all-honorable and magnificent name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
The priest spreads out the antimension.
Deacon:As many as are catechumens, depart…
The above dismissal is said only until Wednesday of the fourth week of the Fast. Beginning with Wednesday of Mid-fast, after the priest saysThat with us they also may glorify . . ., the following petitions are said by the Deacon: As many as are catechumens, depart. Catechumens, depart. As many as are preparing for illumination, draw near. Pray, ye who are preparing for illumination.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer for Those who are Making Ready for Holy Illumination:Reveal, O Master, thy countenance to those who are preparing for holy illumination…
Exclamation:For thou art our Illumination, and to thee do we send up glory…
Deacon:As many as are preparing for illumination, depart; ye who are preparing for illumination, depart …
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
First Prayer of the Faithful:O God, great and praiseworthy, who by the lifecreating death…
The priest exclaims:For to thee belong all glory, honor and worship…
Deacon:Again and again in peace let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Second Prayer of the Faithful:O Master, holy and exceeding good, we implore thee…
The priest exclaims:Through the gift of thy Christ, with whom thou art blessed…
Entrance with the Holy Gifts.
Choir:Amen. And they sing: Now the Powers of heaven with us invisibly do worship….
The deacon enters the sanctuary on the north side, opens the holy doors, and censes the holy table, the holy prothesis, and the priest. And standing together, they sayNow the Powers of heaven . . . thrice
And having made three prostrations, they go to the prothesis, and the priest takes the aer, and lays it on the shoulder of the deacon; then he takes the holy diskos with the Divine Mysteries in his right hand, and holds it on his own head; he takes the chalice containing the wine in his left hand.
The deacon, with the censer only, goes ahead, censing frequently. As they go, they say nothing. And, having entered, the priest places the Mysteries as usual on the holy table, and he takes the veils from the holy Gifts and covers them with the aer, saying nothing over them. He only censes them.
The holy doors are closed, and the curtain is drawn usually halfway.
Then the deacon, taking the priest's leave, goes out to the usual place and says these petitions: Let us complete our evening prayer unto the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
The priest prays:O God of unutterable and unseen Mysteries, with whom are the hidden…
Priest:And vouchsafe, 0 Master, that with boldness and without condemnation…
People:Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…
The priest exclaims:For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory…
Priest:Peace be to all.
Choir:And to thy spirit.
Deacon:Let us bow our heads unto the Lord.
The priest, bowing his head, prays:O God, who alone art good and tenderhearted…
Exclamation:Through the grace and compassion and love …
The priest prays:Attend, 0 Lord Jesus Christ our God, from thy holy dwelling place…
The priest and the deacon make three references saying:O God, cleanse thou me a sinner.
The priest, the Divine Gifts being covered, puts his hand under the aer and touches the life-creating Bread with great reverence and fear.
And the deacon says:Let us attend.
The priest exclaims:The Presanctified Holy Things are for the holy.
Choir:One is holy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.
The curtain is drawn. Then the priest lays aside the holy aer. The deacon enters the sanctuary, and, standing close to the priest, says:Break, Master, the holy Bread.
The priest breaks it, with great heed, into four parts, saying:Broken and divided is the Lamb of God … And he puts a portion into the chalice, saying nothing. Then the deacon pours warm water into the chalice, saying nothing, and stands a little apart.
The choir sings the koinonikon:O taste and see how good the Lord is. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.
If readings from the Apostle and Gospel for a saint or for the temple are prescribed, then also the other koinonikon is sung.
The priest says:Deacon, draw near. The deacon approaches, making a devout reverence and asking forgiveness, and he says: Lo, I draw near to our immortal King and God. Impart unto me, Master, the precious and holy Body and Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ.
The priest, taking a portion of the holy Mysteries, gives it to the deacon, saying:To thee, the deacon, Name, is imparted the precious and holy … .
The deacon, having kissed his hand, withdraws and stands behind the holy table, and bowing his head, he prays, like the priest, saying,I believe, O Lord... and the rest. Similarly, the priest, taking a portion of the holy Mysteries, says: The precious and all-holy Body and Blood …
And bowing his head, he prays, saying:I believe, 0 Lord, and I confess, that thou art …
And thus they partake of the holy Mysteries with fear and all wariness.
The priest, taking the sponge, wipes his hand, saying: Glory to thee, O God. thrice. And having kissed the sponge, he lays it in its place. Taking the holy chalice with the veil in both hands, he drinks from it, saying nothing. He wipes his mouth and the holy chalice with the veil, which is in his hands, and sets the holy chalice on the holy table. And having taken the antidoron, he washes his hands and lips. The deacon does not drink from the cup at this time, but after the Prayer behind the Ambo, and after consuming the remaining particles of the holy Mysteries.
If a priest serves alone without a deacon, then, after having partaken of the holy Mysteries, he does not drink from the cup, nor does he take the antidoron, but only after the completion of the Liturgy and after consuming the holy Mysteries.
The deacon, , taking the holy diskos, brings it up over the holy chalice and puts the Holy Things into it, and, having made three reverences, he opens the holy doors, and taking the holy chalice, says: With fear of God and faith and love, draw near.
The choir sings:I will bless the Lord at all times…
Then there is the communion of the faithful as at the Liturgy of John Chrysostom.
Then the priest says:Save, O God, thy people, and bless thine inheritance.
The priest, having censed the Holy Things, gives the censer to the deacon, and, having taken the holy diskos, he sets it on the deacon's head, and the deacon, taking it with reverence, shall look out the doors saying nothing, and go forth to the prothesis and shall set it down.
The priest, having made a reverence, takes the holy chalice, and, turning toward the doors, looks toward the people, saying secretly: Blessed is our God,
And exclaiming:Always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.
And he takes the Holy Things to the prothesis.
Choir:Amen. Let our mouths be filled with thy praise, O Lord, that we may hymn…
The deacon says:Attend! Having received the divine, holy, immaculate, immortal…
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
The priest prays secretly:We give thanks unto thee, O Savior, God of all …
Exclamation:For thou art our sanctification, and unto thee do we send up glory…
Priest:Let us depart in peace.
Choir:In the name of the Lord.
Deacon:Let us pray to the Lord.
Choir:Lord, have mercy.
Prayer behind the Ambo, said aloud:O Almighty Master, who in wisdom hast fashioned all…
Choir:Amen. Blessed be the name of the Lord, henceforth and forever more. thrice Glory... Now and. .. and Psalm 33: 1 will bless the Lord at all times ...
Prayer said when the Holy Things are Consumed:O Lord our God, who hast led us to these most solemn days…
The priest comes out, and standing in the usual place, distributes the antidoron.
And then he says: The blessing of the Lord and His mercy be upon you …
Priest:Glory to thee, O Christ God, our Hope, glory to thee.
Choir:Glory... Now and... Lord, have mercy. thrice Bless.
Priest:May Christ our true God, through the intercessions of his all-immaculate Mother…
This dismissal is given up to Passion Week, during which the proper dismissal is said. After the dismissal, the prayers of thanksgiving are said.
Evening Divine Liturgies.
A. Instruction: A liturgical innovation has taken hold serving of "Vesperal" Liturgies, i.e., Divine Liturgies celebrated in the evening according to the pattern of the Vesperal Liturgies of Nativity Eve, Theophany Eve, and Great Saturday (that are not celebrated in the evening.).
The Holy Synod tolerates the serving of "Vesperal" Liturgies; however, no ruling has authorized the serving of the Evening Vesperal Liturgy.
The serving of the "Vesperal Liturgy" (as defined in the discussion below) is not authorized in any parish.
The May 1996 (Volume 4, Number 5) issue of Diocesan News For Clergy and Laity, published by the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Denver. On page 2, under "Bulletin Board," Liturgical Hints, one may read the following edifying instruction of His Grace, Bishop Isaiah:
"There is no such thing as a "vesperal Liturgy" (a combination of Vespers and the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom) celebrated in parishes on the evenings of feast days. Vespers and the Liturgy of Saint Basil is celebrated only on Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday mornings, as well as at Christmas and Theophany when these fall on certain days. The other, corrupted "vesperal Liturgy" must never be celebrated."
The Typikon of our Church is a book that prescribes the framework and many of the details of our church services. While current practices and customs may diverge from exact compliance with every prescription of this authority, the Orthodox Church has been characterized over the centuries by a consensual observance of all the Typikon's basic principles and guidelines, of its underlying theology of time and order, the "order" that the great Apostle enjoined: "Let all be done decently and in order."
The Typikon directs that three times in the year, on the occasions of Pascha, the Feast of Feasts; of the Nativity of Christ; and of the Appearance, or Baptism, of Christ, the day before would be marked by especially solemn preparation and "strict" fasting. This is in keeping with the Typikon's general system of ordering the feasts at various levels according to number of hymns, types of antiphons, type of Divine Liturgy, and time of day. In addition to, and to enhance this solemn fasting and preparation, Divine Liturgy is prescribed on these three Eves: the Eve of the Nativity; the Eve of Theophany, and the Eve (Great and Holy Sabbath) of Pascha. Moreover, that Divine Liturgy, prescribed by the Typikon to be served on the Eves, is prescribed to be served at an unusually late hour (but not in the evening), distinguishing these commemorations even more from the other Feasts. Here are the relevant instructions:
a. For Nativity: "At the 7th hour of the day, the great campanile is struck, and heavily on all (bells): and, having gathered in the temple, we begin Vespers as usual." (Here the seventh hour of the day means the 7th hour after sunrise, i.e., 1:00 p.m.) At the end of the directions for Divine Liturgy, after the singing of the troparion and kontakion before a lighted candle in the center of the Church, we are instructed: "And we go to the Trapeza, and we eat boiled (wheat) with oil, but we do not eat fish. But we do drink wine, thanking God."
b. For Theophany: "At the 5th hour of the day, we signal on the great one, and then on all, heavily.. And, having gathered together in the temple, we begin Vespers and sing the customary psalm." (Here the fifth hour of the day means the 5th hour after sunrise, i.e., 11:00 a.m..) A the end of the directions for Liturgy, we are instructed: .".we light a candlestick in the middle of the temple, and after taking up our stand before it with the choristers, they sing the Troparion of the Feast, Glory, both now, and the Kontakion. And we enter the Trapeza, and we eat, with tree-oil (olive oil), and we also drink wine. But cheese and the like, as well as fish, we do not dare to eat, since this is forbidden by the Divine canons."
c. For Great and Holy Sabbath: "At the 11th hour of the day, we clap on the great one (great simandron or great bell). And after having come together into the Temple, the priest and deacon vest, and after the priest has given the blessing, we begin Vespers, uttering, "O heavenly King" (Here the eleventh hour of the day means the 11th hour after sunrise, or 4:00 p.m.) After the dismissal of Liturgy, there are the following instructions: "The Ecclesiarch should be careful that the Liturgy must end by the 2nd hour of the night." (That is 8:00 p.m.) "After the dismissal we go out of the church to the Trapeza, and we sit, each at his place, in silence and reverence. And immediately the Cellerer comes and gives to the brethren one by one a loaf of bread, and these are made like prosphora, a half-liter of bread, in equal portions, and up to six figs, and one measured cup of wine. And where there is no wine, he pours beer made from honey. But figs are found in most countries. When we've eaten we begin the great reading, of the Acts of the Holy Apostles from the beginning. The Reader says the Title and the Priest says the verse: "Through the prayers of the Holy Apostles, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us." And after the Amen, the Reader begins to read.
Most of the clergy, to be sure, and the educated laity as well, especially those coming from parishes of predominantly Slavic make-up, are quite familiar, at least superficially with this general basis in 2.a., b., and c., above. Most Russian Orthodox senior citizens, for example, remember that Christmas Eve is called "Sochelnik" (originally "sochevnik") or "Rozhdestvenskyi sochelnik," and that Theophany Eve is also called "Sochelnik" or "Kreshchenskyi sochelnik." Few, however, may realize that this word, "Sochelnik" comes from the (Church Slavonic) word for boiled wheat, or kutiya: "sochivo," the plainest of foods, eaten on these two Eves. And they know that all three Eves are Strict Fasts, and that the Liturgies of those days begin with Vespers and that the Vespers has long and many readings. In most parishes of our times, the Divine Liturgies of the Eves of Pascha, Nativity, and Theophany, are not served at the exact time prescribed by the Typikon, but they are still served somewhat later in the day than the Sunday and Feastday Liturgies. Moreover, with the serving of the Eve Liturgy earlier, the fast is not ended with "kutiya" on Theophany and Nativity Eve until after the All-Night Vigil, consisting of Compline & Matins, in order to "not eat before the first star is sighted." Only on the Great and Holy Sabbath is the bread and wine still served as the Typikon prescribes: right after the Dismissal. No thinking Rector would serve, of course, the prescribed Divine Liturgies of the Eves of the Nativity or Theophany, that begins with Vespers, later in the day than usual, and then go on to serve, for the Feasts of Nativity and Theophany another "Vesperal" Liturgy that evening.
One may say, "Well, that's all right for Theophany and Nativity and Great and Holy Sabbath, but what about authorizing the Evening Vesperal Liturgy for the other Feasts?" But to serve the Divine Liturgy of one of the Twelve Great Feasts at an even later hour of the day than the Divine Liturgy of a strict fast day (actually, at the time of the Pre-Sanctified Liturgies of the Great Fast) would be to completely discard any kind of sense or rationality, such as breathes from every page of the Typikon, from our Church's sanctification of TIME.
The justifications that are proffered for the institution of the innovation of "Vesperal" Liturgies revolve mainly around two points: the practice in the early Church of serving all Liturgies at night, and the difficulty of the modern American Orthodox Christian to attend Divine Liturgy on "workdays." Included under the heading of the second justification may also be the holding of an "outside" job by the parish priest so that he is not available to serve Divine Liturgy after, say, 5 a.m.
a. One prominent and revered modern Orthodox thinker, the ever-memorable Archimandrite Justin Popovich (D.D. honoris causa, St. Vladimirнs Seminary) has written that the Church has known its infancy and its maturity and that to adopt the practices of the Church's infancy would be the equivalent of adults subsisting on the diet of infants. We all together, clergy and Faithful, are responsible to guard and pass on what we have received, not what we have not received, not what has not survived the test of time and the never-failing inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the life and consensus of our liturgical Tradition. The resurrection of discarded and outgrown customs (very clearly it is the customs that have survived that we call Tradition, since nothing NOT handed over can be considered to have been "traditted") has been till now the province of those who have no concept of Holy Tradition, the Protestant sects, who have to turn to customs lost in antiquity in order not to be at peace with Tradition. Further, one wonders what the limits would be on reviving dead practices: will someone propose to read in Church from some writing, e.g., the Shepherd of Hermas, that is not contained in the Canon of Scripture as laid down at the Council of Laodicea, since there was a time when the Canon was not clearly defined? Surely not.
b. The second consideration, that of practicality, is not so much a sin against Tradition as it is a betrayal of all that the Orthodox Church, especially the Church under Communist domination, endured. In discussing the countries where Orthodoxy was a significant element in Christian life, the commentators would invariably point out how difficult it was to maintain a bare-bonesо existence for the Church, since the Orthodox Church required so much: a building, incense and iconostasis, candles, icon-stands and candlesticks, "full vestments," chalices, patens, spears, star-covers, hand-crosses, separately bound Gospels, trained singers and readers and time, and so on. A Roman Catholic "Low" mass could be celebrated in a closet. A Protestant worship service could be held in a restaurant's banquet room or in a field, with no outward indication that any church activity was going on. All one needed was someone (anyone) to preach and someone to listen. The Orthodox Churches were fully aware of this handicap. Was it heard anywhere that any of the Orthodox, hierarchy, priests, deacons, monastics, laity, ever put forward a proposition like, "Well, Father, why not serve in a business suit?" In fact, the Orthodox went in the opposite direction. If anything, the Faithful insisted that the services would be longer and fuller than they had been, and that when they concluded the clergy would be importuned to add more services. We here in America are familiar with the kind of Liturgies that missionaries of an earlier time brought to these shores: The Divine Liturgy began with an extremely abbreviated typical psalm; the second typical psalm was completely omitted and only the Troparion: Only begotten Son was sung; the Beatitudes were not only not sung with their stanzas, they were sometimes abbreviated to only four. The verses for the Alleluias were forgotten and the solemn Alleluia itself sometimes was only said quickly three times by the reader. And so forth. It was under the extreme conditions of persecution and repression, exile and emigration as well, that this awful "living Church" trend vanished from the scene. Under conditions of persecution and a repression that exceeded in horror and strength that of the days when Divine Liturgies were celebrated at night for fear of the Romans, the Orthodox once again returned to a fuller liturgical expression. Are we now doomed to repeat history? Are we, living in luxury and comfort unimaginable to the Orthodox of any other time in history, finding that the "requirements" of a "monastic and arch-Orthodox" Typikon are too difficult for the conditions of modern life?
c. There are a few other liturgical factors that may mean something. The Twelve Great Feasts of our Lord have Festal Antiphons (unlike the Eves of Theophany, Nativity, and Pascha) that proclaim in Psalm and Troparia the triumphant and festal nature of the day. In a "Vesperal" Liturgy, these are suppressed, and the Divine Liturgy begins with Vespers, as on a Strict Fast day. Further, the Twelve Great Feasts are distinguished from other Feasts by having an All-Night Vigil, that includes Matins with all its rich, beautiful hymnody, full of doctrine and sacred history. Even in parishes that serve the Matins in the morning, the Faithful are not deprived of this beauty and "on-going education" provided by the provisions of our Holy Typikon. To serve a "Vesperal" Liturgy is to suppress that all, or to kill the possibility of the parish ever growing up into its full stature. Nothing worthwhile was ever attained or will be attained by lowering our sights, our expectations. After all, we have not ever adjusted our life in Church to conform to our own sinfulness. Our fallen sister Church has never ceased to condescend to the weakest of her members, especially regarding Fasting, while the Orthodox Church has never done so. The Romans lost their Wednesday fasting in the Middle Ages, retaining only their Ash Wednesday. In our times, they did away with their Friday fasting as well, retaining, in fact, only Good Friday. The Orthodox Church has never stopped hearing these words "Be ye perfect therefore as your heavenly Father is perfect." We have always considered that perfection IS possible with God's help, we have never considered that we have lost both image and likeness. We have never accepted the idea that "perfectionism" is a pathology in our life in Christ, as others may have.
C. What's to be done?
Our Liturgy, like our Theology, is our life. The stunning Gift of our worship Tradition is one of which we are all aware, but we are often walking in an obscurantist night relative to the Order that is at the basis of and provides the essential framework for this brilliant Tradition, namely that brilliant and mostly anonymous creation of the pious: the Typikon. Hardly any pages of this main Liturgical book of the Orthodox Church exist in English. In the meantime, we must deal with some crises arising from the crudest ignorance of its provisions, and the awful misapprehension that it is some kind of rigid ritual nightmare applicable only to fanatical monks. That it most certainly is not. Our mostly educated and earnest flocks must be made more aware of the riches of our Tradition.
The proper celebration of our Feastdays must be placed high among the priorities that parishes are now placing in their "strategic plans." Such things as the Liturgy of time, and its relation to the Feasts and to the services of the Resurrection — to the way that a modern life can be adjusted to the "ordo" so that all the gifts of that Ordo may be bestowed on the Faithful and not quietly and gradually removed from their lives — must be incorporated into parochial, deanery, and diocesan education programs.
The parish Rectors must address the problem of weekday Feasts seriously, in council with the parish leadership and the Faithful in general. Parish Rectors (like bishops!) must treat those entrusted to their care as adults, that will follow conscientiously the precepts of the Church if they know them. One must be ready with intelligent, informed responses to those who imagine that our times are more stressful and difficult than were the times of our forefathers or that there is "less" time for Church services. Priests must be willing to begin a Proskomedia at 4:00am, if necessary, if it is determined that the maximum attendance at Divine Liturgy would be attained only at 4:45 or 5:00 am. In general, the problem of priorities must be attacked with vigor. We all know that the struggle for maximum attendance and participation at even the Sunday Divine Liturgy is exhausting and on-going, yet our zeal and determination here does not flag. Commitments must be sought. The ever-memorable Metropolitan Theophilus in his day strove to establish committed groups called "Orthodox Zealots" in all the parishes. Perhaps some parish Rectors may wish to see organized such groups that would make specific stewardship-of-time commitments, vis-a-vis the Feasts of our Church, in their parishes.
Any student of religions in America must recognize that, with the exception of Sunday evenings, Americans have not taken to evening church services. This is especially plain and painful to the Orthodox clergy and faithful that compare American attendance at Vespers and All-Night Vigil with the Tradition of the Church and what is the practice in other, Orthodox, countries. It is paradoxical that some pastors that do not even hold a Vespers on Saturday night anymore, "because no one will come," are pleased to introduce evening celebrations of festal Liturgies so that "more people will come!"
All the Parish Rectors and Councils are encouraged to be steadfast in serving the Faithful all the services of which the parish is capable without noticing the popularity of those services or that lack of same. Every service of the Church is the realization of a possibility for mankind, and for the Faithful. One may, by having a service at any given day or evening provide an unexpected opportunity for a truly salvific encounter of one individual with his or her life and with God, that would not be provided if the given service were not held. Which of us would like to answer a question about that when it is time to give an account of ourselves before Christ's judgment seat?
Different Services and Comments.
Sacrament of Penance.
During the Fast, there are many opportunities to experience the wonderful, grace-filled and grace-bestowing Mystery, or Sacrament, of Holy Penance. As we all learned, either while growing up or in our being catechized before entering the Church from other religious bodies (or from unbelief), the great Sacrament of Confession is the event whereby a Christian presents himself or herself before God, represented by a member of the Church ordained by God for just such purposes, namely, a Priest of the Church, and acknowledges publicly his or her weak belief, or even unbelief, and all the events, thoughts, and actions he or she has committed which opposed Christ's teachings, especially those of the Beatitude "Commandments," sins against God, against one's neighbor, against one's own self, i.e., our self as God would have it be, and then, after this confession and with a firm intention to no longer commit such sins, with God's help, receives from the Priest, who has the power to bind and loose received via the Apostles and their successors in the Church, Absolution. "Absolution" is actually expressed by the Priest praying that the Lord God "may forgive, through His Grace and love of mankind, all thy sins." This prayer is guaranteed its effectiveness by the aforementioned bestowal: "whatsoever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." The Priest also, as a simple human being and member of the Church, adds his own personal forgiveness (as every Christian is bound to do: "forgive one another your trespasses"), in the current recension of the prayer used in Churches in the Russian and Slavic tradition, with these words "And I, an unworthy priest, through the power given unto me by Him, do forgive and absolve..."
We are thereby empowered to go forth forgiven, refreshed, cleansed, as in a second Baptism, into renewed life. Preferably, but not necessarily, we are able to partake of the Holy Mysteries (Sacrament) of the Body and Blood of Christ as a first event in this new life. These Mysteries were termed by the early Christians the Medicine of Immortality, and they are, on a grand and very vast spiritual scale, "just what the Heavenly Doctor ordered" for us.
There was a time, not long past, when both these Great and Saving Mysteries had fallen into desuetude. Due to a legal minimum having been established in some places, such as the notorious injunction of the Russian Emperor Peter the Great's "Spiritual Regulation," that an imperial subject must confess and commune at least once a year, at Pascha, combined with the sinful tendency of all sinners, such as we are, to do the minimum only (if we can only find out what it is!), many Christians failed to avail themselves of such great gifts to the Church as Confession and Communion as often as was spiritually healthy, or even, we can say, appropriate to the Orthodox person.
Nevertheless, there was never a time when representatives of the hierarchy and other leading clergy, such as St. John of Kronstadt, did not exhort the Faithful to more frequent Confession and Communion, but the ancient enemy of mankind, Satan, was successful in keeping many, many Christians away from something actually essential to a Christian life: FREQUENT Confession and Communion.
In our time, part of the problem was addressed: frequency of Holy Communion. However, the other part was not only neglected, it even got worse in some places. The eminent Archpriest, theologian, and teacher, Father Sergius Bulgakov, once described this disappearance of the Sacrament of Confession from the Serbian and Greek religious scene as "the loss of religious culture." Yet, many of his own students may have, unwittingly, contributed to the present sad state where in some places there is no real Sacrament of Confession at all, but only the exercise called "General Confession," which is, of course, no Confession at all, no matter the mental and verbal gymnastics which its well-meaning defenders as such may now display. "General Confession," a beneficial exercise whose time is probably long past, was described by the late great teacher, Archpriest Alexander Schmemann, and implemented by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America, as a practice which IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR INDIVIDUAL CONFESSION, yet it became just that in the lives of individual Christians and even whole parishes.
Some of the pious were even led to believe that there was some relation between this innovative exercise called "General Confession," and the mass Confessions conducted by St. John of Kronstadt. NOTHING OF THE SORT! In the practice of mass Confessions conducted by St. John of Kronstadt, all, according to witnesses and participants, said or, in many cases, shouted aloud all their individual sins. That is, the Christians who participated in this mass Confession did not speak their sins ONLY in the presence of an ordained Priest in the relative seclusion of the Office of Confession, but in the presence and hearing of their friends and neighbors and strangers standing beside them in Church!
The exercise of General Confession was instituted and is practiced in our own Parish until now. As has been stated on more than one occasion from the Amvon and in this monthly bulletin, it is to be used by those who are going to Confession frequently, as means of making more meaningful and complete the practice of the Sacrament of Confession which all should be accomplishing during the Great Fast. It should be merely the prelude to the opening of the individual heart before the Priest when the individual comes to receive Absolution at the end of the General Confession. (There are, of course, those who will have gone to Confession and Communion on the morning of the day on which General Confession is conducted, and for these, to be sure, it would be considered appropriate to merely receive the Prayer of Absolution and the ensuing blessing of the Priest to receive Holy Communion. All others are exhorted to take advantage of the great gift of peace and healing being offered to them and to confess at this time their individual sins.)
We live in the last years of the twentieth century since the coming of our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ in the flesh. Our Lord preached of sin, repentance, perfection, holiness, forgiveness, love, humility, self-denial, obedience, and more. Our Church maintains all these teachings as they were received from Our Lord through the holy process called Holy Tradition, that is, from Him, through the Apostles and their successors until now. While many who are outside the Church through false teaching have gone from distortion of what our Lord preached to ignoring it, the Church still has the same teaching and the same Sacramental Life as was established by Him. We not only live in the richest society yet seen on our planet, and in the more prosperous part of that richest society, but we have been given the great possibility of real Life within that Holy Tradition that comes from the God-Man Himself, Jesus Christ. Let's own up to our failure and failures in being grateful children of our Heavenly Father. Let's not keep the Holy Mystery of Penance locked away, or rather locked outside the house in which we live. Let's not treat one of God's greatest Gifts to us, the Gift of the Father to the Prodigal Son as He runs to meet us halfway when we confess our sins, as a spoiled child with too many toys treats a toy hoarded in a closet to be dragged out to be shown to visitors as one of our possessions, but one we no longer have a use for.
Hearing the Confessions of Priests and Hierarchs.
Enclosed are two lists of questions, one preceded by an "Exhortation." These are for your use and reference in any case where you may be asked to hear the confession of another Priest (41 questions) or of an Hierarch (23 questions). Further, the questions for Priests may be of use in examining your own conscience before going to confession. They were translated from Bulgakov's Nastol'naya Kniga (Desk Manual).
The confessions of Hierarchs, Priests, and Deacons are heard before the Holy Altar Table.
No sacred vestments are worn by the Hierarch, Priest, or Deacon that comes to confession. Further, Priests customarily remove even their pectoral crosses and place them on the Altar Table during their confession.
The Priest hearing the confession of another Priest or of an Hierarch does not bless the head of the Priest or Hierarch who is confessing with his hand only at the prayer of absolution, but must hold instead the precious Cross and bless on the head with it. A Deacon is blessed as usual.
Questions to Ask a Priest at Confession
1. Are you always mindful of the oath that you gave before God at the time of your entrance into the Priesthood?
2. Do you take care, as you swore before God, to conduct your priestly service in agreement with the Word of God, the laws of the Church and the directions of the administration, and do you consider your first and chief task to be the salvation of the souls entrusted to you?
3. Did you ever refuse to baptize, hear the confession of or commune someone at death's door out of fear of endangering your own health or out of negligence?
4. During the time of an infectious epidemic or plague were you always ready, like a good shepherd, to lay down your life for your sheep?
5. Did you ever absolve at confession or did you admit to Holy Communion someone who appeared to be an unbelieving, obstinate, and unrepenting sinner?
6. Did you describe someone's sins in a sermon, in such a way that was possible to deduce of whom you were speaking?
7. From your negligence is ignorance of the Faith or persistence in sin existing in your parish?
8. Have you through carelessness left your parishioners without instructions on Sundays or Feast days?
9. Do you yourself keep and follow the teachings of the Church and teach them to others as the Orthodox Church teaches?
10. Do you ever allow yourself in your teaching of the Faith to interject your own explanations not in consonance with the explanations of the Fathers of the Church?
11. Is it your main purpose in your preaching to give a creditable sermon, rather than to benefit your fellow man?
12. Do you occupy yourself with reading the Scriptures, the Holy Fathers, and other spiritual literature?
13. Do you ever enjoy reading books which satisfy idle curiosity or those which stir up passion in your heart, mind, and imagination?
14. Do you always serve with care and reverence both the Divine Liturgy and the Sacraments, keeping in mind that he who is negligent in God's work is cursed, and did you ever serve with haste, so as to disturb good order and the beauty of the service?
15. Did you ever introduce your own changes in the services?
16. Did you ever serve a service while under the influence? And what service was it?
17. Have you ever arrived to begin the Divine Liturgy without the prescribed preparations?
18. Are you infrequent in cleansing your conscience through Confession?
19. Have you confessed without a contrite heart, in state of anger, or having aroused someone else to anger?
20. Have you always tried to read the prayers during all services, especially the Divine Liturgy, with all sincerity, attention, and all presence of mind?
21. Do you always follow the rule prescribed by the Church to prepare for Divine Liturgy?
22. Do you always read with full attention the prayers of exorcism at Baptism, and never omit any of them for any reason?
23. Through your negligence has a sick person or newborn infant died without Holy Communion or Baptism?
24. Did you ever get weary of someone's confession and show it through your words or manner?
25. Have you broken the secrecy of a confession?
26. Did you ever refuse anyone a Sacrament or service of the Church because they did not pay you or meet some other financial obligation?
27. Did you ever invent a miracle, wonder, or vision?
28. Have you ever grumbled or complained against those placed in authority over you or spoke ill of them, and especially the bishop: have you spread around injurious rumors, condemned his actions and management, or tried to see harm done to him?
29. Have you for the sake of your own honor or self-respect, or out of fear, or greed, or some other disgraceful characteristic evaded or ignored your responsibilities?
30. Do you try in your own life, in your own family, in the management of your own domestic affairs to act so as to set a good example to your parishioners? Or do you like to live according to the times and fashions, and follow the empty trends of society?
31. Do you have a passion for games, sports, secular entertainments, and parties?
32. Did you enter a bar for no good reason?
33. Did you advise your parishioners to make false statements for your own benefit or for others'?
34. If you were entrusted with a task by the church administration, did you carry it out with discretion, faithfully, and honorably, and with great care?
35. Did you ever waste church money or resources for your own sake?
36. Did you ever take wax, oil, or anything else from the Church like a thief?
37. Did you permit yourself some bad or abusive language in Church or otherwise behave yourself in a manner impious or disrespectful of the Church and Altar?
38. Did you ever serve a Mystery, especially the Divine Liturgy, after committing a grave sin or without having repented of it?
39. Did you ever miss Divine Liturgy on a Sunday or Feast day without a compelling necessity?
40. Have you been a cause of temptation to your parishioners because of your drinking, dancing, or gambling?
41. Are you aware yourself of some other sin against your priestly responsibilities?
Questions at the Confession of the Hierarchy.
I, a sinful pastor, am not a judge, am not here to judge you. I am the one you chose as a witness before God. Our Judge is the Lord, JESUS CHRIST: before HIM reveal the secrets of your heart. Repent!
1. During days of fasting and prayer, did God permit you to see your own sinfulness?
2. Do you believe in the Triune God as taught the Prophets, Apostles, and Saints of our Church?
3. Do you walk in God's presence as did David, always beholding the Lord, and as did the Apostles, feeling the Living God in their hearts?
4. Do you live according the holy will of Christ and according to the example of His holy life?
5. How does your conscience stand, before God: are your mind, will, thoughts and desires pure?
6. Are your memories and imaginations pure?
7. Did you sin with your senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, or smell, or by means of your tongue, or hand or something else?
8. Do you industriously persist in the reading of the Holy Scriptures?
9. What kind of subjects occupy your intelligence more, earthly or heavenly; do you in fact appreciate worldly things more than their Creator?
10. Have you noticed in your soul your own idols: self-respect, self-love, pride, vanity, vainglory, greed, sensuality, or capriciousness — have you tried to conquer these enemies, did you zealously pray the King of Heaven to cleanse you of your defilement?
11. Did you take the Holy Name of God in vain?
12. Did you faithfully live up to the oath you gave before God in Church?
13. In your responsibility in the service of the Church did you always act for the sake of God's glory and the welfare of your neighbor?
14. Did you not mingle into the fulfillment of your responsibilities your own will, your own glorification, your own advantage, or anger, or laziness, or hatred?
15. Did you ever act unjustly or modify the truth out of fear or respect of men, or leaders of society?
16. Were you persuaded through flattery or some other world inducement to act contrary to God's law and a clear conscience, or did you maintain silence when those for whom you are responsible acted thus, when it was your responsibility to speak out?
17. Were you always paternally solicitous of those in your care, did you always care for them as your children, defend them in danger, condescend to their weaknesses and insufficiencies? Did you omit to learn of their needs, to soothe the deficient and weak?
18. Were you quick to anger and slow in mercy?
19. Were you more interested in punishing than correcting?
20. Were you always just in promotions and awards?
21. Did you ever subordinate a good person to one with a bad character?
22. Were you always ready to defend with vigor the weak and not hand them over to the powerful?
23. Do you have some special sins against love of God, your neighbor, or against yourself?
Reception of Heretic Laity and Clergy into the Orthodox Church.
Recently, I've become aware of a lot of discussion and controversy in Orthodox circles here in America on the topic of the proper way to receive, for example, Roman Catholics and Lutherans, into the Orthodox Church, and how Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy become Orthodox clergy. While it is on the one hand inspiring to observe our clergy and people engaged in thought, discussion, even debate on holy topics, it is also disturbing to me when some of those engaged in these discussions and debates seem to minimize or give only a passing, slight nod in the direction of the practices that have been passed on to us, and seem to feel that any theological conclusions they may reach on these topics must be reflected in practice. It is most perplexing, too, that the labels of conservative and liberal, so inappropriate to Christian, as opposed to political, thought, are applied to one or other position on the topic, frequently in a way completely contradictory to the meaning of those political labels.
The practice of our Church, the Orthodox Church in America, and that of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church of North America ("The Metropolia"), as likewise that of the Russian Mission and Missionary Diocese and Archdiocese that preceded them, in the matter of the reception of heretics is very clear: it is the practice that obtains and has obtained in the Russian Church for centuries, at least since the time of Peter the Great. It may be found and studied in the Service Books of the Church of Russia [in both its "native" conformation (The Church of Russia) and "foreign" (Abroad) conformation]. According, for example, to the Book of Needs published at Vladimirova between the wars by the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, that differs in no respects from previous and subsequent Books of Needs published by The Church of Russia, Roman Catholics are received, after undergoing the Office for the Reception Converts printed in the same book, immediately into Communion and are imparted the Holy Mysteries at the ensuing Liturgy without further ado, unless they have not been Chrismated (i.e., are coming from the Latin Rite of the Roman communion and not from the Uniates), in which case they would be chrismated. No provision at all is provided in the Service Books to receive Roman Catholics in the manner of receiving Jews and Mohammedans, i.e., to baptize them.
The prescribed practice printed in our Service Books has been in force and active use for centuries, and it cannot be considered only a temporary episode of Economy in the life of the Church. When candidates for the Laying-on-of-Hands to the honorable Priesthood promise to observe the liturgical order of the Church, they are promising (failing a contrary directive from their Bishop) to follow the prescribed rites printed in the Service Books. And the overturning of the prescribed practice without a preceding directive from a Synod or council would be an example of innovation. Oddly enough, some that would advocate this consider themselves to be "conservative."
The Bishops of San Francisco followed these Service Books. They are the Service Books of the Church of Saint Innocent and of Saint Tikhon. They are the Service Books of the Church of such luminaries as the ever-memorable Metropolitans Antony (Khrapovitsky) and Anastassy (Gribanovski).
Saint Elisabeth (Elizaveta Fyodorovna), recently added to the calendar of Saints of the Russian Church, was received into the Orthodox Church (as was likewise her sister, the sainted Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna) from the state German Lutheran Church where she had been baptized as a child, through the Rite of the Reception of Heretics with ensuing Chrismation — without a new Baptism.
Recently a book touching heavily on the topic of the baptism of converts by a Professor of the state Church of Greece, Professor Metallinos, has enjoyed a wide readership in American Orthodox circles. Whatever may be one's opinions and convictions vis-э-vis the conclusions of Professor Metallinos on the question, one must realize that these conclusions have significance only insofar as they might appear inter alia on the agenda of a Synod of Bishops or a Church Council that would decide to re-examine the received practice of our Church. One need not read Professor Metallinos's book to find support for the peculiar position of the Greek Church(es) on the topic: in fact, one would expect to find the practices of the state Church of Greece being well-defended by all Her Faithful children. We have appended, as "Attachment One" to this letter, an excerpt from the collection of the Canons of the Orthodox Church with commentaries by a noted, authoritative canonist outside the boundaries of the state Church of Greece, Bishop Nikodim of the Serbian Church. This is an authoritative statement on what is, in fact, our received practice by a Hierarch at least as widely respected on the topic of Church canons as Professor Metallinos.
Any Priest or Bishop of the Orthodox Church in America that receives Roman Catholic heretics by Chrismation or Lutheran or Anglican heretics by Chrismation is not some kind of "loose-shotgun Liberal" motivated by ecumenism or the heretical "branch theory" of ecclesiology, but is someone that is following a practice totally obedient to the received practice of our Church.
We have attached the translation of the prescribed "Office of Receiving a Priest of the Roman Church into Communion with the Orthodox Catholic Church," that is the venerable and centuries old practice of the Church of Russia, of the Russian Mission and Missionary Diocese in America and its successors, the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in North America ("The Metropolia") and the Orthodox Church in America.
As it was commented on the reception of two sainted German princesses into the Orthodox Church when discussing the reception of Laity, we would like to point to the reception of St. Alexis Toth (Tovt) of Minneapolis and Wilkes-Barre. St. Alexis was received according to the rite outlined in the attached document, i.e., by Confession of Faith, Penance, and vesting in the Altar after the Cherubicon. How could it be otherwise? Can one imagine Bishop Vladimir or Bishop Nicholas, the two Russian hierarchs of the day, contravening the established practice of the Russian Church and insisting the St. Alexis be ordained according to the formula for ordaining Laity? (Remember that St Alexis came to the Russian Orthodox bishop in San Francisco in the first place because a Roman Catholic hierarch did not recognize his Priesthood! One may only imagine how history might now differ if the Russian Orthodox Bishop in San Francisco had also refused to recognize his Priesthood and that of many subsequent Clergy of the Church!)
Recently a Hierarch of our Orthodox Church In America received a Priest from the Roman church exactly as our Tradition requires, yet this action was, scandalously, publicly decried by a few clergy and laity of the Orthodox Church in America, and at least one temporarily lost soul went so far as to adopt the custom of the heretical Amish and shunned the Priest that had been received into the community of Orthodox clergy in the prescribed fashion!
Let's always be governed in our conduct by the Tradition of our Church and not by the temporary passions of the day that may splash like waves of the sea of life against the hull of the holy Ship of our salvation, Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Let's preserve what has been handed on to us! None of the Hierarchs of the Orthodox Church are reckless opponents of Church Order or Discipline. We do not "take our cues" from anything but what we have received. The Orthodox practice of receiving Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans as described by the Serbian Bishop Nikodim and the Orthodox reception of Roman Catholic priests as outlined in Nikol'sky are not any sort of indications that our Hierarchy is hostage to ecumenism, branch theory, relativism, positivism, scholasticism, liberalism, indifferentism or any other "ism" conflicting in any way with the Holy Tradition, but a sign of their obedience.
During the time when Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas and the South was serving the Church as Bishop of Berkeley, a letter was sent out to all the parishes in the then Diocese of San Francisco that directed that "across the board" Roman Catholics as well as Anglicans and Lutheran and Calvinists previously baptized with water and in the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, would be received by Chrismation. That policy remains in effect.
We ask all the Rectors to receive heretics according to the format in the Service Book translated by Hapgood. That means a life's confession, a definite, specific and public and renunciation of specific wrong teachings formerly held, Absolution according to the formula printed in that Office, and ensuing Chrismation of the Convert on all the places prescribed and then Communion of the Holy Mysteries.
1. Excerpt from Bp. Nikodim's "Pravila."
2. Excerpt from Nikol'sky's "Ustav."
Excerpt from (in Russian Language) Rules (Canons) of the Orthodox Church with Explanations.
Nikodim, Bishop of Dalmatia and Istria. Volume I.
Translated from the Serbian. Saint Petersburg. The Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. 1911. Page 282-3
[Webmaster's Note: Quotations from the Russian, included by His Grace for clarity, have been transliterated for online distribution by the editor.]
(Preceding the following is a discussion of the differences of opinion of East and West)
Therefore, being governed, on the question of Baptism done by a non-Orthodox community (obschestvo), by the general injunctions (predpisaniyami) of the councils and Fathers, one may thus delineate the principle of the Orthodox Church: Baptism as something instituted by Jesus Christ may be accomplished only in His Church and consequently only in the Church may it be correct and salvific; however, if other Christian communities located outside the Orthodox Church hold the conscious intention of bringing the newly-baptized into Christ's Church, i.e., have the intention to communicate to him Divine Grace through Baptism in order that he would become through the power of the Holy Spirit a true member of the Body of Christ and a reborn child of God, then this Baptism also may be considered effective insofar as it is done on the foundation of faith in the Holy Trinity, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, for where such a Baptism is given and received, there it must operate with Grace (deistvovatј blagodatno) and Christ's support cannot fail to be there. Every community that perverts the teaching about God and does not recognize the Trinity of holy Persons in the Godhead cannot perform a correct baptism, and a baptism done in it is not Baptism because such a community lies outside Christianity. By virtue of this, the Orthodox Church recognizes as effective and saving the Baptism of every Christian community located outside Her boundaries, whether it be heretical or schismatic, truly (istinno) done in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
Bishop Nikodim adds a footnote: "According to the practice of the Greek Church, Roman Catholics converting to the Orthodox Church must be baptized again. We are not in a position to express our judgment relative to this practice, since we don't know how it is that the Greek Church applies the first rule of Saint Basil to Roman Catholics. We will only remark that this is exclusively the practice (isklyuchitel'no praktika) of the Greek Church and also that both in Russia and Serbia Roman Catholics are received into the Church without a new Baptism...ѕ
Receiving a Priest of the Roman Church Into the Orthodox Church .
Of the Orthodox Church By Konstantin Nikol'sky (Archpriest of the Church of the Dormition of the Theotokos on Sennaya, Sixth Edition, Saint Petersburg. 1900, pp. 685-686). Such cases of uniting to the Orthodox Church are done according to the general office as outlined here.
The sponsor that is customary in this is chosen from among the Clergy. (There is no female sponsor).
Recognition of the person thus conjoined in the office of Priest requires a decision of the Holy Synod.
Before his admittance to service as a Priest, his conscience must be examined before a spiritual father, as in the case of one preparing for Ordination.
If examination reveals there is no canonical impediment for a blessing to serve, then, when the Hierarch arrives at the Church to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, the candidate comes with the rest of the clergy dressed according to the custom of Orthodox clergy and receives with them the Hierarch's blessing, after which he goes to the Diaconicon and stays there, not vested, until the Cherubicon.
After the Cherubicon and the placing of the holy gifts on the Holy Table, he is led by Subdeacons, but not through the Holy Doors, rather within the Altar to the Holy Throne (Altar Table) and to the Hierarch, and he reverences him in the manner of one being brought to Ordination. And the Priestly vestments are brought and put on the one being received into the community of the Priesthood. The Hierarch blesses each piece of the vestments, and the one being vested kisses the Hierarch's hand. And the Deacon says the verses for Priestly vestments, not as exclamations, but so that the one being vested can hear him. After this the one received into the community of the Priesthood receives the kiss of peace from the Hierarch and the rest, in the manner of one just ordained, and he stands with the rest of the Priests and takes part in the Liturgy and in the Communion of the Holy Mysteries. And from thence he has the same power to liturgize as an Orthodox Priest. (Collection of the Opinions and Judgments of Metropolitan Philaret, volume V, pp. 952-953.)
1. This office was formulated by Metropolitan Philaret because of the case of the reputed incorrect bringing into Orthodox Communion of the Abbot Maundreli. See "Letters of Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow to A.P.M. 1832-1867.
2. In the periodical "Readings of the Imperial Society of History and Antiquities" (1892, book 4) the basis for this is set out that clergy coming from among the heretics being united to the Orthodox Church, about whom there is no doubt of their having been baptized and ordained, must be received by only presenting a written confession of faith and condemnation of their heresy as was practiced by the Seventh Ecumenical Council with regard to the conversion of the Iconoclastic bishops and other clergy, etc., and they must be received, each in his priestly rank, according to the 8th canon of the First Ecumenical Council, i.e., vested.
III. Every priest and deacon surely knows the days on which the Mystery of Crowning (Matrimony) may not be performed, and why not. We all must know, for example, that one reason that marriages are not performed on Saturdays is because ON SATURDAY EVENINGS THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN IS GIVING HIMSELF OR HERSELF OVER ENTIRELY OR PRIMARILY, TO PREPARATION FOR THE EUCHARIST WITH HOLY COMMUNION, and that married Orthodox Christians are devoting this evening to the spiritual aspects of their Union. In addition,the joyous merrymaking always associated with the aftermath of the Crowning in Church, that is, with the "reception," frequently leaves all the participants in a state inappropriate to preparations for Holy Communion, or making the same downright impossible. Therefore, only the DIREST necessity would make the blessing of a Saturday wedding appropriate. It would be requiring truly heroic spiritual strength on the part of newlyweds to imagine that they would not, having been married on Saturday, begin their honeymooning until Sunday evening, in order to appear fully prepared for Holy Communion on Sunday morning. There is no "practicality" whatever which outweighs the NECESSITY for the Orthodox Christian to participate fully in the Eucharist on the Lord's Day.
A. SATURDAY EVENING IS DEVOTED TO PREPARATION FOR SUNDAY MORNING, i. e., FOR THE DIVINE LITURGY. This "preparation" means, in terms of parish liturgical life, the All-Night Vigil, consisting of Great Vespers, Matins, and the First Hour. In those parishes WHICH DO NOT HAVE THE CAPABILITY to serve the All-Night Vigil, then Great Vespers alone may be served on Saturday night, and Matins and the First, Third, Sixth Hour before Divine Liturgy. In the sad event that a parish doesn't have the resources to serve the Holy Resurrection Matins, the clergy (and devout faithful) have to read it by themselves with the evening prayers on Saturday night or in the morning, with the morning prayers. Some parishes customarily have a quiet meal (snack) after the evening service, with conversation or formal discussions. These should continue. NO RECTOR CAN GIVE HIS BLESSING TO REVELRY OF ANY KIND AFTER THE EVENING SERVICES, NO PARTY, NO DANCE, NO RAFFLE, NOR MAY HE ATTEND SUCH. This question does not arise in parishes which have a living tradition of praying together on the eve of the resurrection. It would seem to come up only where the parish is liturgically "dead" on Saturday night, where it is said that services are not (should not?!) be served on Saturday night because "no one would come."
If it is true that an Orthodox parish in our time still would give a higher priority to a dance than to praying together and preparing for the Eucharist, this is a matter for self-examination by the spiritual leader of the parish. Venerable Fathers, you know this is true, as do devout members of your flock.
B. While it is well known that our rite with which we accomplish the Mystery of Crowning finds its origins in a man and woman going to the Holy Chalice together, i.e., in the Eucharist, there never was a time when the Service of Crowning found in Orthodox Service Books was combined or mingled with the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom or Saint Basil the Great. This is an innovation in the Orthodox Church.
(...) Here we sum up the normal steps we take in petitioning and granting blessings for second marriages.
The procedures are based on these premises:
In an Orthodox marriage, God Himself is the Agent of the marriage: "What GOD hath joined together, let no man put asunder."
The Orthodox person who effects a divorce sins thereby, except in the cases outlined in the Scriptures and Canons, for example, in a case of adultery, or the taking of monastic vows by husband and wife when the husband is elected to the episcopate.
In an Orthodox marriage, it is only the husband or wife who are agents of a divorce, and the Church does not divorce anyone. (The "Church divorces" of the past, those accomplished in societies where the (state)Church performed such functions of the state as marriage registry because the civil law provided for that, make no sense at all where the Church is free of such civil obligations, and the priest does not therefore have to act as a county clerk or other bureaucratic functionary of the state.)
THE FIRST, MAIN, AND THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE IS THE SALVATION OF THE PERSONS BEING MARRIED. And the basis of a second marriage, whether of a divorced person or a widowed one, is the same, but it is based on the Apostolic injunction, "Better to marry than to burn."
Based on the above premises:
The person coming to the parish priest petitioning for the blessing of a second marriage must attest to the following:
He or she has exhausted, by his or her own persistent and untiring efforts, all means of reconciliation with the spouse God gave him or her, and that spouse has, in spite of his or her protestations and representations and efforts at reconciliation, sued for divorce and obtained it.
He or she has repented of the sin of divorce, and this was an involuntary sin, except in cases having a scriptural or canonical basis, where it may be, but not necessarily, a voluntary sin, based on a refusal to forgive.
He or she has lived some time in this divorced state and now fears for his or her own salvation if he or she does not marry the person whom he or she now intends to marry.
The Priest gives counsel to the person coming for a divorce, and insures that the above is, in fact, the case, as far as he can determine. He then advises the petitioner to put a petition in writing, petitioning for a second marriage and attesting to the above. He obtains a copy of the divorce decree.
If the Priest is in agreement with the petitioner, he then sends me his own petition, petitioning to be blessed to marry the petitioner to his or her intended. He includes in the petition his own estimation of the facts of the case, a clear statement that the petitioner has, indeed, repented, and has undergone the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion. He includes in his petition a copy of the petitioner's petition and divorce decree.
Burial of a Priests.
The body of a dead priest is washed by three priests, who wipe with the sponge in crosswise form, according to the pattern used at baptisms: forehead, eyes, ears, breast, hands and legs, and then he is wiped with pure oil.
After clothing him in all his usual clothing except the outer cassock (rason), they vest him in complete sacerdotal vestments.
When the body is laid on the prepared table, the face is covered with an aer; in the right hand is placed a cross, and the Gospel is read over him in the interval between panikhidas, until the time of the funeral.
The sacerdotal vestments in which the departed priest's body is clothed must be new ones, and not ones which have been used; his footwear (slippers) must also be new.
The aer which is placed over his face is not removed at burial. The Gospel which was read over him is placed in his hands at the time he is carried out and remains with him in the coffin.
Proceeding with the body
At the bringing of the body of a priest to the church and to the grave, banners, cross and Gospel are borne before the body and the funeral toll is rung, because this procession is a regular cross-procession. The coffin is halted in front of the temple and the funeral litiya is sung there.
After the litiya, when carrying the body of a departed priest, the Irmosi of the canon "Thou art my helper and protector" are sung (but from Pascha to Ascension, "Christ is risen").
In the Church the coffin is placed nearer the Ambo than that of a lay person, and around the coffin without exception there are placed four candle-stands on the four sides.
The body of a dead priest must be born by priests, if there're enough of them.
The order of the ritual
The burial of a priest starts out at home just as does that of a lay person, with a litiya, but the dismissal is not prescribed — it is joined to the service of burial.
After "Blessed is our God," the Trisagion is sung and the introductory prayers are read.
After the exclamation at "Our Father," the troparia of the litiya, "With the spirits of the righteous," are sung, and there is a litany for the departed, upon which the priests pick up the body and proceed to the temple.
In the church the "Undefileds" are sung in three stases, and after them the troparion, "Give rest, O our Savior, unto Thy servant," as at the burial of lay-person, but immediately after this troparion the "stepenny," hymns of degrees, are read, then epistle and Gospel.
The presiding priest reads the first Gospel, then he also reads the first prayer, which follows it; the succeeding Gospels and prayers are read by the rest of the priests in order.
The Psalms which come between the Gospels are read separated into verses, and "alleluia" is sung in between the verses. (All the readings at a priest's funeral are done by priests — stepenny, Unclefileds, beatitudes — and not by the lower clergy.)
After the 4th Gospel the Beatitudes are read, with their troparia.
After the 5th Gospel Psalm 50 is read and the canon in tone six: "The cruel tyrant" is sung, and after the 6th and 9th odes the little litany for the departed is intoned.
After the 6th ode, after the Kontakion, "With the saints..." the 24 _lkosi_ are read, usually by the presiding priest; after each one of them the singers sing "alleluia." After they've all been read the Kontakion is sung again, and the canon is continued.
After the 9th ode and after the litany, the Exapostilarion is read with verses, and the verses on the Praises, the Great Doxology, and Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin are sung, followed by the reading or singing of the Aposticha: 24 stanzas divided into groups of three stanzas, each in one of the eight tones.
Then, after the Trisagion, the troparia of the litiya are sung, then the litany, at which the prayer "O God of spirits" is read out loud, and, after the exclamation, the verses of the last kiss, as at the funeral of a lay person, are read. After the kissing, the prayer of absolution is read, then laid in the right hand of the departed, and his body is then born to the grave, nowadays after the dismissal and the intoning of "memory eternal."
While the body is being carried to the grave, the canon, "A helper and protector" is sung again (but from Pascha to Ascension, "Christ is risen.") When the body arrives at the grave-site, the Trisagion is read, then troparia of the litiya, litany for the departed and the dismissal. Oil is also poured, if the departed was anointed, and then the body is given to the earth as is a lay person's.
The Hours are "services of the narthex." When served in the Nave, the curtain and doors remain closed, except here, when the censing for Divine Liturgy begins. While the custom is widespread of opening them at the beginning of the Hours before Liturgy, that is, if not a mistake, not the best usage, nor is it consistent with the Ordo.
How to Find the Resurrectional Matins Gospel Lesson.
Divide the number of the Sunday after Pentecost by eleven and the remainder will be equal to the number of the Matins Gospel reading for the day.
For example, if it is the 21st Sunday after Pentecost, you divide 21 by 11. The remainder is ten, so the Matins gospel is number ten.
How to Find the Tone of the Week
Take the number of the Sunday after Pentecost, subtract one, and divide by eight. The remainder is equal to the tone of the week.
Expression (P = Week after Pentecost, T = tone of the week): (P-1)/8 = _ RT
For example, if it is the 21st week after Pentecost, you use this expression:
(21-1)/8 = 2 R4
Therefore, tone of the week is Tone Four. If there is no remainder, then the tone of the week is eight.
Some differences between Greek and Russian divine services (Basil Krivoshein, Archbishop of Brussels and Belgium).
A report given at the Liturgical Conference at the St. Sergius Theological Institute, Paris, on July 2, 1975
The aim of this report is not to examine in detail the historical evolution of the forms of Divine services, the origin of specific differences between Greeks and Russians, the significance of the different Typikons in this process, nor their mutual influences, etc. I am not a liturgist and will not be doing this systematically. I will limit myself to several remarks and observations, more of a personal nature, about how the Liturgy and other services are celebrated in Greek churches on the one hand, and in Russian churches on the other. In speaking of churches that use Greek I am not forgetting that Athos did not adopt the 1838 reforms of Constantinople and remained faithful to the more ancient Typikons. In this report, I am interested not only in one or another textual variant or a difference in the rubrics, but first of all in the significance and meaning, which the same words or the same liturgical actions might have in the consciousness of the faithful, how it can be reflected in their religious conduct, even if such differences are frequently based on misunderstandings. These "liturgical variations" can be found interesting for understanding and evaluation of these peculiarities of popular piety.
We will begin with some more or less ordinary observations in the differences in celebrating the Divine Liturgy. It must be noted that the biggest differences between the Greeks and the Russians in their celebrations are somewhat indirectly related to our topic since they occur in the so-called "secret" prayers, which are not discernable to the majority of the laity and thus have no direct influence upon their conduct. Nonetheless we will speak about them since these prayers constitute the more important part of the Liturgy and the clergy who pronounce them likewise make up a part of the People of God. Setting aside for the moment what precedes the Liturgy itself (Great Doxology for the Greeks, the Hours for the Russians, as well as the Proskomide), we will make note of a more substantial and characteristic difference in the Liturgy of the Catechumens.
Following the 1838 reform, the Greeks (except the Athonite monks who kept the old order) replaced Psalms 102/103 ("Bless the Lord, O my soul") and 145/146 ("Praise the Lord, O my soul") as well as the Beatitudes, which follow, by antiphons, i.e. brief appeals to the Theotokos or to Christ, Who is risen and is praised in His saints. The Russians continue to sing, each Sunday, the two noted psalms and the Beatitudes. They are replaced by antiphons only at great feasts or on weekdays. The dropping of the psalms and the Beatitudes has the advantage (if it can actually be considered the advantage) of shortening the Divine Liturgy. However, it pays to regretfully note that the Liturgy of the Catechumens thus loses its didactic and Biblical character, both Old and New Testamentary, which must be a part of it. The same can be said about the 1838 reform's deletion of the prayers for the catechumens. It becomes unclear why the first part of the Liturgy continues to be called "Liturgy of the Catechumens." We will note that the Athonite Greek monks continue to pray for the catechumens during Liturgy throughout the whole year.
Another feature, which we will note, occurs during the Liturgy of the Faithful, during the Cherubic Hymn. Here the differences in behavior become noticeable immediately. When the hymn begins, the Greeks have the habit of sitting down while the Russians love to kneel. Then, when the Great Entrance with the Holy Gifts begins, the Greeks stand and remain standing, bowing their heads, while the Russians rise from their knees and stand straight (but not all, some make a full prostration. These are those who think that the Holy Gifts have already been sanctified — a heresy condemned in Moscow in the 17th century). It can be said that for the Greeks, the entrance itself and the commemorations are more important while for the Russians it is the Cherubic Hymn. Nothing in this practice, of course, is prescribed by the Russian Church. On the contrary, a lot has been done, especially in recent times, to explain to the faithful that it is not proper to kneel during the Cherubic Hymn, especially on Sundays, inasmuch as the Gifts have not been sanctified. Nonetheless all these efforts had little effect, so entrenched is the dangerous spiritual tradition, expressed by this practice, of making something "mystical" out of the Cherubic Hymn, the "profound center" of the Divine Liturgy, to the detriment of the Eucharistic Canon and the changing of the Holy Gifts. As for the Greeks, their practice may have an historical explanation since the Cherubic Hymn was introduced into the Liturgy very late, only in the 6th century, in Constantinople. Its primary intended purpose was to fill the silence resulting from the commemoration of the living and the dead at the table of oblation just prior to the Great Entrance. (Incidentally, the introduction of the Cherubic Hymn was subject to contemporary criticism as a strange innovation.) Thus, since the Cherubic Hymn is simply a "filler," it is understandable that the Greeks listen to it while sitting, as is customary during similar moments.
The same can be said about one of the first phrases of the Eucharistic Canon. It is read differently, at least in our time, by the Greeks and the Russians: ', which means "Oil of peace, sacrifice of praise" (in Greek) and "Mercy of peace, sacrifice of praise" (in Russian). It is obvious that this is the result of orthographic confusion that occurred in Greek manuscripts between the two words, which in Byzantine Greek, although written differently, were pronounced identically (although with different endings: — oil and - mercy). Similar confusions, called "iotacisms," occur very frequently. It is almost a certainty that the form (oil) is the original and primary one, while (mercy) is erroneous or more likely, a willful new introduction by a copyist who wanted to "enhance" the text. Here we see a classical example of the evolution of a literal Biblical text into a symbolic and a spiritualized one. This is the most unlikely case of a "reversed" evolution — from a simple to a complex. Russian copyists and liturgists preferred the spiritualized form (mercy and not oil) and adapted it to the Slavonic Liturgy. However, it would be a mistake to think that it is precisely the Slavonic copyists to whom the "honor" of such "enhancement" belongs. This first occurred among the Greeks, and the witness to this is that Nicholas Cabasilas is well aware of this in his "A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy" (14th century). Although he does not literally cite this passage but paraphrases it, his paraphrase shows that he reads it as "mercy" and not "oil." This becomes more evident in the following passage: "We offer mercy," Cabasilas says, "to Him Who said: I will have mercy and not sacrifice... We also offer the sacrifice of praise" (P.G. 150, 396 AB).
It is important to note that among the Greeks, this "spiritualized" variant did not last; they remained faithful to the Biblical text while for Russians, the "mercy of peace" variant became one of the high points of the Liturgy for many people, and many great composers wrote settings for it, which increased its appeal for people who come to church to hear beautiful singing.
Another example of an expansion of a brief text, but in this case a purely theological one, was likewise motivated by the need to give the priest more time to read the first secret prayer of the Anaphora. The brief exclamation (by the cantor among the Greeks) "It is meet and right" (in response to the priest's "Let us give thanks to the Lord") is replaced in the Russian Liturgy by a longer phrase sung by the Choir: "It is meet and right to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit: the Trinity, one in essence, and undivided." (As in the case of "mercy of peace," the Russians adopted a variant already found in Greek manuscripts but not preserved in the liturgical tradition). The shortcoming of this theological dissemination can be seen in its lack of continuity since the choir's response does not accurately follow the words of the celebrant ("Let us give thanks to the Lord" — "It is meet and right") but is replaced by an instruction for venerating the Holy Trinity. But on the other hand, since there is no time for the celebrant to read the first Eucharistic Prayer during the brief response by the cantor, an outrageous practice arose among today's Greeks. During a concelebration, the second priest interrupts the first celebrant (even if he is the bishop) who is unable to complete the secret prayer during the response of the cantor, with a loud exclamation: "Singing the triumphant hymn, shouting, proclaiming, and sayingю" (All this to prevent pauses, which the Orthodox dislike.) Fortunately, the faithful who remain outside of the altar are unaware of any of this since the Eucharistic Prayers are read quietly.
The same can be said about all of the Eucharistic Prayers, but we will only speak of it briefly here. These are things, which are well known.
A uniqueness in the Eucharistic Canon of St. John Chrysostom among the Russians is in the insertion into the Epiklesis of the troparion to the Holy Spirit, taken from the Third Hour, which is relatively ancient, and which is supplemented by verses from the Psalm 50/51. It needs to be noted again that the authors of this interpolation were not Russians, since it can be found in some of the Greek liturgical manuscripts of the 11th century. However, it spread widely among the Russians and, in the minds of many celebrants, is perceived to be the Epiklesis. (Many priests when speaking of the Epiklesis, have in mind precisely this interpolation. Its significance is enhanced by the dramatic rendition of these words, often accompanied by raised hands and arms, while the deacon, reciting the verses from the Psalm 50/51, lowers himself on one knee.) There is nothing that corresponds to this in the Greek Liturgy. Without a doubt, this interpolation (which could be called "the Epiklesis within the Epiklesis") adds a certain degree of individualism and piety to the priest's spirituality, while it interrupts the sequence of the Eucharistic Canon. However, during the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, this is not done crudely, since the interpolation is placed between two phrases and not in the middle of one. It is entirely a different and a more serious problem in the Russian Church when we come to the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great. Here there is not just one but two different interpolations. The first one, just as in the Chrysostom Liturgy (troparion to the Holy Spirit), but with a greater difference, since it interrupts the first phrase of the Canon in the middle, following the verb in infinitive form, the aorist of — "to show." Thus, after this lengthy interpolation, the celebrant is almost forced to turn back, if he wants to continue the train of thought. The artificiality of this interpolation is much more evident here than in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, from which, incidentally, it was taken. (It has no substantiation in any of the Greek manuscripts of the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great.)
But of greater importance is the second interpolation, ' — "making the change by Thy Holy Spirit," which was inserted into the Slavonic text of the St. Basil's Liturgy under the influence of the St. John Chrysostom text.
The least that can be said here, is the following:
1) This interpolation is an inadmissible grammatical error since the participle , in Greek, cannot follow the indefinite mood of . In the Chrysostom Liturgy, it follows the imperative mood of ("make"). It would be proper to use another indefinite mood of ("and change"), but the interpolator preferred to slavishly follow the text that he copied.
2) This interpolation is redundant since St. Basil's Anaphora already expressed the changing action of the Holy Spirit (calling upon Him) while in the Chrysostom Liturgy the petition is for His descent upon the Gifts, thus "changing" is added.
3) It creates a liturgical monstrosity of four blessings of the Eucharistic Gifts. In order to avoid this, contrary to all tradition, the third blessing is diminished (accompanied by the words "shed for the life of the world").
All these distortions in the Russian celebration of St. Basil's Liturgy rightfully generated criticism by Russian theologians.
Thus the noted church historian, Vasilii Bolotov [1854-1900], even wrote that one of the first tasks of a future council of the Russian Church would be to remove all these interpolations from St. Basil's Liturgy, and first of all, the words "changing them by Thy Holy Spirit." There have been several councils since that time, but unfortunately, nothing has been done. The reason appears to be clear: the fear of the Old Ritualists who would not hesitate to accuse the "Nikonian" Church of "innovations." Another reason that can be added is the fear of the Russian Church of any liturgical changes, even those, which are perfectly justified. This is the conservative reflex on the part of the believers. Bearing in mind the unsuccessful liturgical reforms, which the Renovationists attempted to introduce into Russian Orthodoxy after the revolution, the least significant change in the services brings on the suspicion of a return to Renovationism. It can be said that the Renovationists with their revolutionary liturgical reforms have seriously impeded any attempted improvements in Russian Divine services for many decades. The pre-revolutionary order of Divine services became the sacrosanct ideal for the people.
Nonetheless, by the action of the Holy Spirit (which I firmly believe), two important new practices came into being in the liturgical life of the believers: a considerably more frequent reception of the Holy Gifts (when before the revolution people would normally receive Communion once a year) and congregational singing (and not by the choir alone as in the past) of the major parts of the Liturgy and other Divine services, particularly the Creed and the Our Father.
As for the Greeks, the Creed and the Our Father are read in various ways (but never sung) following an unquestionably more ancient tradition, when these were read by the non-celebrating bishops or priests or by respected older laymen. This commendable practice is often replaced in our time by another one, especially among Greeks living in the West. These prayers are read not by the oldest individuals present but by a boy or a girl, or are read together by the congregation (but are never sung). This practice has come from the West and is characteristic for ecumenical gatherings, but it is foreign in Orthodox Divine services.
Two differences could be noted in the Communion of the faithful among Greeks and Russians.
1) When the deacon comes through the Royal Doors with the chalice and calls the faithful to "draw near" — "in the fear of God and with faith," today's Greeks add "and love." This is a beautiful addition, but it does not represent the ancient liturgical tradition, which, correctly reflecting the sacramental spiritual life of the Chrysostom liturgy, stresses the feeling of awe before the "great Mystery." It can be noted with some certainty that the words "and love" were introduced in the 18th century on Athos by the advocates of frequent Communion, the representatives of the "Kollyvady" movement with the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite at its head, and later accepted by the Constantinople Typikon of 1838. However, these words did not penetrate into Russia.
2) On the other hand, the Russian Church's practice of having the laity kiss the Holy Cup after receiving Communion was not taken up by Greek popular piety. It views this as allowing the laity to do something that belongs exclusively to the clergy, namely, touching the sacred vessels.
We will note another innovation recently found among the Greeks under the influence of the "Zoe" movement: the clergy read the Anaphora prayers and consecrate the Holy Gifts while kneeling. This liturgical practice was subjected to sharp criticism by a number of theologians (among whom was Archpriest Georges Florovsky) for its anti-traditional character. On our part, we will limit ourselves to two comments: 1) The reading of the Anaphora while kneeling is contrary to the canons of the First Ecumenical Council, which categorically prohibits kneeling on Sundays, as well as between Easter and Pentecost and on other major feasts. 2) Celebrating the Anaphora while kneeling is physically difficult and inconvenient. If the altar table is high, it is difficult to make the sign of the cross over the Holy Gifts, and there is a danger in spilling the chalice. If it is low, then it is difficult to perform other parts of the Liturgy while standing. However, the fact that this is inconvenient and difficult contradicts the real spirit of the Divine service wherein everything is harmonious. Likewise, the attempt to outdo the piety of the Fathers is pretentious. They did not feel that it was necessary or pleasing to God to celebrate the Eucharist while kneeling.
From a theological and catechetical point of view, however, the most serious departure in the liturgical practices of Greeks and Russians is not to be found in the Eucharist but in its preparatory part, the Proskomide. I will set aside the question of the number of prosphori to use, be it one, five or even seven as with the Old Ritualists. This is not a substantial question. What is more important is that the Greeks, among the nine ranks of saints commemorated while removing particles from the prosphora, place the commemoration of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and all the bodiless heavenly powers that is, the angels, before that of St. John the Forerunner. The Russians, however, do not commemorate the angels at the Proskomide at all and begin immediately with St. John the Forerunner. There is a serious theological problem behind these two differences in the liturgical practice: is the Redemption, the salvation through the Blood of Christ, His sacrifice on the Cross, related only to humanity, or does it include the angels, and does it have a cosmic significance? Is the Mystery of Christ's Body and Blood, the Holy Eucharist, likewise intended for the angels who are bodiless? Finally, has the Fall of the human race been carried over to the angels, making them in need of redemption? These are the questions that arise from the commemoration of the angelic hosts. Some Russian theologians categorized this practice as heretical, but officially this question has not been touched upon by any of the Orthodox Churches. Historically, the list and the order of saints commemorated at the Liturgy have been established little by little. In some Greek manuscripts of the Byzantine era, the names of angels are included; in others they are not. However, in contrast to what is noted above, it is the Greeks who adopted the expanded form that includes the angels while the Russians excluded them from their liturgical practice, perhaps on the basis of the teachings of faith. Having no aim to decide this problem here, from the theological point of view, I would nonetheless say that the Russian practice expresses a more anthropocentric understanding of salvation while the Greeks place an emphasis on its cosmic dimension. Here one can show a parallel in the difference which occurs in the Slavonic and Greek texts of the celebrant's exclamation at Matins before the "Praises": "For all the powers of heaven praise Thee and to Thee they send up gloryю" as in the Greek text, while the Russians read "...and to Thee we send up glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages." As can be seen, the Slavonic text is more anthropocentric: it is not "the powers of heaven" but "we" who send up glory to the Holy Trinity.
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More could be said about the liturgical differences in other services (Vespers, Matins, Hours, etc.) between the Greeks and Russians but, in order not to expand our presentation too much, we will note that at least in parish practice the main difference is that the Greeks celebrate Vespers in the evening, on the eve of Sundays and feasts, and begin the next day with Matins and go into the Liturgy immediately following the Great Doxology, thus omitting the Hours. The Russians, however, celebrate what they call "The All-night Vigil," i.e. Vespers and Matins combined, which is not a service that lasts all night. On the following day, the Liturgy is preceded by the Hours.
It must be said that either of these liturgical practices have their advantages and disadvantages. The Greek one is more natural and is closer to the Typikon, since evening services are performed in the evening and the morning ones in the morning and not the other way around as with the Russians. But because Vespers is relatively brief, very few people come to church in Greek-speaking parishes, on the basis of the Orthodox mindset: there is no sense to come to church for a brief service. The longer the service the more reason there is to attend it. The Russian Vigil became a well-attended service even at the expense of the Liturgy, which is a matter of regret. The reason is a sentimental one: people like to pray in semidarkness, with the flickering of vigil lamps and candles. The Liturgy somehow tires people out with its spiritual intensiveness. It should be noted, however, that in recent times a reverse had taken place among the Russians living in the West. Under the influence of the heterodox environment, in which they live, and that false spirituality, which centers all piety to the Eucharist alone, they very rarely attend the Vigil and in this way deprive themselves of the spiritual and theological treasures that can be found in its hymnography.
We can also note with regret that today, except in the Mount Athos monasteries, the Psalter is read so infrequently. Thus, the reading and singing of Psalm 1 ("Blessed is the man..."), which makes up one of the solemn moments in the Russian Vigil, has been completely eliminated from the Greek Vespers in spite of it being called for in the ancient Typikons. The same can be said for the dropping of the Hours in Greek parishes except for Great Lent.
Great Lent occupies the same central place in the liturgical year both among Greeks and Russians. However, those moments, which express popular piety, or, as can be said, a spiritual emphasis, at times are expressed very differently in the two traditions. If we take the first six weeks of Lent (we will speak of Passion Week later), we can say that among the Russians, one of the more characteristic and vibrant expressions of spiritual life is the prayer "O Lord and Master of my life..." Every Russian, even the infrequent churchgoer, is familiar with this prayer. For him, it marks off the beginning and end of the Lenten period. It specifically singles out the services of Great Lent from the others throughout the liturgical year. Its great popularity and profound influence upon spiritual life can be seen from Pushkin's poem "Fathers of the desert and undefiled mothers..." This was the poet's favorite prayer. He was deeply moved hearing the prayer being read by the priest in church. And yet Pushkin was not a particularly religious person. Thus, the Russian believer will be seriously surprised and perhaps even incredulous when he learns that the prayer is factually unknown to the majority of the Greek Church people and that it is not heard in Greek churches during Lent.
I must explain something to avert some misunderstanding. In fact this prayer exists in Greek service books just as in Russian ones. It is not omitted. It is well known to the clergy, but since, according to the ancient Typikons, it is to be read quietly, "secretly," the laity have completely forgotten it except for the prostrations that accompany it, which are characteristic for Great Lent. The Greek practice of reading the prayer "secretly" is undoubtedly more ancient. All Typikons, including the Russian ones, prescribe this (see for example the existing Russian Typikon's direction for the beginning of Great Lent: "We do this interiorly" or in other places, "mentally," or "secretly," the prayer of Ephraim the Syrian "O Lord and Master"). The Russian practice of reading this prayer aloud is an innovation, introduced in the 15th or 16th centuries. Nonetheless, it remains in the people's religious consciousness as one of the more beautiful Orthodox prayers, which, without this practice, could have become forgotten inasmuch as the "secret" or "mental" recitation of certain prayers could be spiritually profitable in monasteries, where the monks are well familiar with the Divine services, but in parishes, especially large ones, such a practice could lead to ignorance and to spiritual impoverishment.
Nothing like that could be said about the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete. It is very popular among the Russians, being one of those moments, which bring about an attitude of repentance during Great Lent. It passes by almost without notice with the Greeks. For them, a more popular and cherished and well-attended Lenten service (excluding Passion Week) is the Akathist to the Theotokos. The Greeks are not satisfied to have it only at Matins of the Fifth week, as all the ancient Typikons prescribe, but they have it more often, dividing it into four parts, during Compline of the first four weeks of Lent. Here one could find a more intense veneration of the Theotokos during the Lenten cycle had there not been other contradictory factors of which we will speak later. Paradoxically, prayers for Catechumens become a characteristic mark of Great Lent since, except for the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, the Greeks do not hear them during other times of the year.
It would seem that the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts would have one and the same meaning both for the Greeks and Russians. The people like that service and many do attend it, especially if it is celebrated in the evening, as it should be, although this "daring novelty" still meets up with strong objections and is not widely practiced, except among the Orthodox in the West. But even if there are no observable differences in the celebration of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, which could impact upon the spiritual experience of the people, still there are some serious theological differences, although not officially formulated, which underline the actions and words of the celebrants behind the iconostas.
Here (to the great surprise of many lay people and even the clergy that do not even suspect it) arises the question: does the wine in the chalice, during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, change into the Lord's Precious Blood, as it does during the Liturgies of John Chrysostom and Basil the Great, or does it remain what it was, except that it was blessed and sanctified? The Russian Liturgy, since the time of Peter Mogila in any case, answers in the negative: the wine is not changed. This understanding is demonstrated by the fact that the celebrant partaking of the presanctified Body of Christ, which was intinctured with the Precious Blood sanctified at the Liturgy of Chrysostom or Basil the Great, drinks from the chalice without pronouncing those words, which he would when partaking during a "full" Liturgy. Furthermore, if he is celebrating without a deacon and would later consume the remaining Gifts by himself, he does not drink from the chalice. The deacon that would consume the remaining Gifts at the end of the Liturgy never drinks from the chalice even when he receives Communion. To drink from the chalice is viewed as an impediment towards consuming the remaining Gifts, as is explained in the "Notes concerning certain procedures for the celebration of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts," which go back to the time of Peter Mogila: "If the priest is celebrating alone . . . he does not drink from the chalice until the end of the Liturgyю Even though the wine is sanctified by the placing of the particles (of the sacred Body), it is not transubstantiated into the Divine Blood, since the words of institution were not pronounced over it as occurs during the Liturgies of Ss. John Chrysostom and Basil the Great." This same opinion is expressed in the Russian Church's practice of not admitting infants to communion during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts since, because of their age, they are unable to swallow a particle of the Body of Christ and the wine is not considered to have been changed into the Precious Blood. The Greek practice, as indicated in the service books, although not too clearly, presumes what appears to be completely different theological beliefs. Concerning the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts it briefly states: "The priest partakes . . . of the Sacred Gifts just as during the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom." Meaning that, as he drinks from the chalice he says: "The precious and sacred Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ is given to me..." Thus, what is in the chalice is considered to be Christ's Blood. This is supported by the practice of drinking from the chalice three times, just as at the Liturgies of Chrysostom and Basil the Great, which would not have been of much significance if this was said just about wine and not the Sacred Blood. After all this the celebrant consumes the Sacred Gifts as during the usual Liturgies. As for the theological explanations, we can find these in the Byzantine liturgists beginning with the 11th century: during the placement of the particle of the Body of Christ into the chalice the wine changes into the Precious Blood of the Lord through contact with His Body.
I will not express myself concerning this serious theological question. To form a decision about this difference (if indeed it exists, since one cannot make firm conclusions on the basis of different practices what concerns differences in belief) is beyond my competence since the Church, neither in Byzantium nor in Russia, adopted any conciliar decision on this account. I will only note that the explanation for the change of the wine into the Blood of Christ through contact with a particle of the Body appears strange to me and is unknown to the ancient Fathers. As for Peter Mogila's "Note," it is obviously inapplicable because of its Scholastic terminology ("transubstantiation") and its non-Orthodox theology according to which, the Epiklesis is replaced by the words of institution during the sanctification of the Eucharistic Gifts.
The publishers of liturgical books in Russia understood this well: although they include Peter Mogila's "Note" in the text, its more shocking segment, which we cited above in part, is shown in brackets. On the other hand, the theory of the change through contact carries with it a similar defect: it leaves no place for the Epiklesis. As for the Russian practice, it appears to be more correct but is contradictory in that it prescribes that the celebrant drink from the chalice three times (does it have any particular meaning if this is not the Blood of Christ?) And yet it is excessive in that it forbids him to drink if he is the sole celebrant.
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Holy Week, along with Pascha, is undoubtedly the summit of the whole liturgical year but both among the Russians and the Greeks, it has its own more impressionable moments in popular piety although these are not always the same ones.
Among the Greeks, the people especially like two services that attract large crowds of people: this is the Hymn of Cassia ("Lord, the woman having fallen into a multitude of sins...") on the one hand and the solemn procession with the Burial Shroud in the evening of Holy Friday on the other. It can be said that for the ordinary Greek, these two services constitute the more important moments of the whole Passion Week. The hymn of the sinful woman is especially loved, and many lay people know it by memory and like to sing it. Newspapers write about it when describing the services of Passion Week. More or less the same can be said about the procession with the Shroud. It is not merely carried around the temple but the procession goes on for miles, escorted by thousands of the faithful holding lighted candles and singing the burial hymns.
Among the Russians this is done somewhat differently, not so much in the meaning of the services and hymns, which are almost identical, but in relation to their place in popular piety. Thus Cassia's hymn, which among the Greeks occupies a central place, is likewise sung by the Russians but does not attract the same degree of attention on the part of the faithful, many of whom are even not familiar with it. It is simply one of the hymns of Passion Week, all of which are splendid. However, among the Russians, the Vigil of Great Friday (actually in the evening of Great Thursday) attains especially great significance. The so-called "Twelve Gospels" is one of the most beloved and best attended Passion Week services. The service of the "Twelve Gospels" is also very important for the Greeks but less so than for the Russians. But strange as it may seem, the pious attention of the faithful Greeks during it has as its focal point the bringing out of the cross with the singing of "Today He hangs on the wood of the crossю" The Russians do not bring out the cross (this is considered a late innovation) and the text "Today He hangs on the wood of the cross" is sung but without placing any special emphasis on it in the course of the service. For the great majority of the Russian faithful the most cherished moment is the singing of the Hymn of Light, "The wise thief..." during which operatic soloists do not hesitate to take the opportunity to show off their voices. This is one of the examples of how a musical rendition can have an effect on the significance of a moment in the Divine service upon popular piety.
As for Great Friday, for the Russians, the most important service for that day is not the Burial of Christ (in the afternoon) as among the Greeks, although it is very moving and attracts many people (there are no lengthy processions), but the procession with the Burial Shroud in the evening. This attracts a great number of faithful and it has a greater meaning for the spiritual content of Passion Week.
The Liturgy of St Basil the Great on Great Saturday with the reading of fifteen Paremii — lessons from the Old Testament (reduced to three by the Greeks, except in Athos, in accordance with the 1838 Typikon) is not too well attended notwithstanding its theological riches and depth. The Russians introduced a liturgical novelty, which could be considered brilliant, truly one of the best that they introduced into the liturgical sphere and which gives an unforgettable dramatic moment during the Liturgy of Passion Saturday. In the course of the Liturgy, between the readings of the Epistle and the Gospel (both of which are already dedicated to the Resurrection), the dark vestments are changed into white while the choir is singing "Arise, O God, Judge the earth: for to Thee belong all the nations!" [Psalm 82] There is no doubt that this is not an ancient practice. Changing the vestments during the Great Saturday Liturgy is unknown among the Greeks who kept the old order according to which the clergy wear white vestments from the very beginning of the Liturgy. The reason for this is simple: in ancient times Great Saturday was the day of mass baptisms. These were done during the reading of the Paremii, and custom demanded that the celebrant be in white vestments while celebrating this Sacrament. Slavonic manuscripts of the 14th century show that in those times the Russians confirmed to the older practice and wore white vestments from the very beginning of the Great Saturday Liturgy. Apparently in the 15th or 16th century someone had a fortuitous idea: make the change of the vestments during the readings about the Resurrection. Everyone is aware of this dramatic moment during Great Saturday. It is very impressive even though it is often accompanied by great fuss and disorder. The Russian theologians embellished this act and saw in it the symbol of Christ's descent into Hades, a prelude to the Resurrection, or a hint of the cosmic Resurrection. This change of vestments has become so ingrained into Russian liturgical life that the Russian believer would be very surprised and even shocked to learn that this practice is not at all ancient and does not exist in Greek churches.
It is also necessary and important to speak about the liturgical particulars among the Greeks and the Russians during the feast of Pascha. What is most striking is the reading of the Gospel in several languages during the Paschal night Liturgy by Russians (Prologue of St. John) while the Greeks do this at Vespers on the day of Pascha (Christ's appearance to the apostles in the absence of Thomas).
However, in order not to lengthen my comments on this, I will move to the exposition of my theme from another point of view: the place of the veneration of the Theotokos in the noted variations. Here one needs to take note of a novelty recently introduced by the Zoe Brotherhood under obvious Protestant influences, which is quite common in the parishes of major Greek cities but not found in Athos. This is the traditional Orthodox expression "Most Holy Theotokos, save us" being replaced by "Most Holy Theotokos, pray for us," which diminishes the veneration of the Theotokos. This latter form "pray for us" is in no way heretical. It is found in many prayers to the Mother of God. But when it is used to replace "save us," it gains the appearance of an anti-Theotokian coloration. An earlier parallel trend can be found in the 1838 Typikon's direction. The feast of the Annunciation, in the light of its significance in the work of our salvation — "the beginning of our salvation" and its context, can never be moved to another date even if it coincided with Great Friday, Great Saturday or Pascha itself. Changing the ancient practice, The 1838 Typikon, reasoning that such a coincidence would result in liturgical difficulties taxing the abilities of the rural clergy to cope with them, directs that in such cases the feast of the Annunciation be moved to the second day of Bright Week. This innovation, accepted in Greece, was rejected by the Athonite monks who found that this diminishes the feast of the Annunciation and thus diminishes the role of the Theotokos in our salvation.
The Russian Church preserved the old order of not changing the date of the Annunciation. It must be noted that the adoption of the new calendar for fixed feasts while maintaining the old reckoning for Pascha (which constitutes a liturgical monstrosity) solved the problem for the Greeks since, for them, the Annunciation cannot any longer coincide with Holy Week or Pascha. However, following these tendencies of the 1838 Typikon (if they indeed exist) it can be shown that the feast of the Annunciation itself is observed with greater solemnity among the Greeks than among the Russians. When it occurs during Great Lent (except for the last three days of Holy Week) all Lenten services with prostrations are set aside during the feast whereas the Russians continue to make the prostrations and read the penitential prayer "O Lord and Master of my life..." even on the day of the great feast itself (which likewise is a liturgical monstrosity). In addition, as we already noted, the service of the Akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos during Lent has a greater meaning among the Greeks than the Russians.
I will mention a few more differences between the Russian and Greek liturgical particulars both in liturgical and para-liturgical services and in the people's attitude toward them. Thus, prior to the Great Entrance, a Greek bishop bows to the people from the Royal Doors, asking for their forgiveness, and then blesses them. This practice is very meaningful spiritually but it was lost with the Russians. Their bishops do not ask the people to forgive them prior to the Great Entrance nor do they bless them. It is felt that to ask forgiveness at that moment is the business of the priests. But on the other hand the Greek bishops do not bless the people outside liturgical services and limit themselves to proffer their hand to be kissed. A blessing is considered to be a liturgical act, inappropriate outside the temple. For the Russian Orthodox pious people receiving the bishop's blessing at the end of the Liturgy is almost as important as the service itself. This can be seen in today's Russia where masses of people gather at the entrance to the church and ask for the bishop's blessing. This could be explained by the Greek practice of the bishop personally distributing the Antithoron [antidor] at which time people kiss his hand, which replaces the blessing, while the Russians pick up the Antithoron themselves.
Finally a serious difference in the liturgical consciousness between the Greeks and the Russians is expressed in that the Greeks (I have in mind pious Greeks) always come to the Divine Liturgy having fasted, whether they will receive Communion or not, whereas the Russians feel that this needs to be done only before receiving Communion. Otherwise one needs to have breakfast before going to the Liturgy to maintain strength. This does not keep them from taking the Antithoron, which is considered to be impious by the Athonite monks.
I would like to make some observations on what was discussed. I must say that this is not easy. The liturgical particulars, which we examined, are complicated and at times contradictory. At times this simply involves practices without any particular meaning and are expressions of nothing more than a trait of national character (such as "honoring the bishop" among the Russians). Other facts express tendencies of a spiritual character (such as, for example, the important place of the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete among the Russians), or even of a theological character (the well-known anthropocentrism among the Russians in contrast to the more cosmological world-view of the Greeks, their "hieratism"). But these things usually involve undefined tendencies rather than differences in theological teaching or contradictions. The only important theological disagreement could be found in the liturgical practice of the commemoration of the angelic powers at the Proskomide and thus including them in the work of redemption. Likewise, there is the question about the change of wine into the Precious Blood of our Lord at the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts. These problems demand clarification. But it is not necessary to jump to conclusions on the basis of certain differences. On the one hand, we must also take into account the differences between the relatively recent fruits of liturgical development characteristic of the Russians and the Greeks, which are distinguished by great beauty and theological profundity (long processions with the Burial Shroud among the Greeks; audible recitations of the prayer "O Lord and Master of my lifeю"; the change of vestments during the Liturgy of Great Saturday; and the congregational singing of the Creed and the Lord's Prayer among the Russians). On the other — the senseless interpolations into the Anaphora of Basil the Great made by the Russians. Here the matter is not about creativity but about distortion, which should as quickly as possible be corrected. (We should point out however that although this interpolation is redundant in the Liturgy of Basil the Great, of itself it is neither false nor heretical.) It can be said that these liturgical particulars, — whether ancient or recent, successful or unsuccessful, and furthermore, of little significance when contrasted with the great unity of Orthodox liturgical practice as a whole, — are seen as valuable theological and spiritual treasures in their particular places and notwithstanding a few differences, they witness to the unity of the faith of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. However, the Church, while having no desire to enforce a liturgical uniformity, which would be both impossible and undesirable, must still determine whether these local particulars do not encroach upon her conciliar consciousness.
Messager de l'exarchate du patriarche russe en Europe Occidentale revue trimestrielle, No. 89-90, Janvier-Juin 1975
Translated from Russian by Fr. Alvian Smirensky
This difference does not appear in the several Greek and Antiochian translations into English which were consulted. Translator
1836. See "Pure Men, and Women Too" in Modern Library "The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin," Avraham Yarmolinsky, Random House, 1936 [Translator]
Which coincides with the Greek Independence Day [Translator]
Glossary of Liturgical Terminology.
1. Antiphon – a general title for a hymn or a section of the Psalter; the title describes the manner in which the hymn or Psalter are to be chanted, i.e., by two choirs in turn.
2. Kathisma – one of the twenty sections into which the Psalter is divided in the liturgical use of the Orthodox Church. Each Kathisma is composed of a number of Psalms, e.g., Kathisma #1 = Psalms 1-8, Kathisma #2 = Psalms 9-17, etc. A Kathisma is further subdivided into three parts called Antiphons, i.e., Kathisma #1, Antiphon #1 = Psalms 1-3.
3. Kathisma Hymn (Sedalen) – a hymn sung as an introduction to "sitting," i.e., a period of rest following such things as the lengthy chanting of the Psalter, the singing of the Polyeleos, or the singing of several Odes from the Canon at Matins.
4. Polyeleos – The Psalms of "much oil" or "many mercies" (Psalms 135-136) sung during Resurrectional and Festal Matins.
5. Canon – a principal element in Matins (although it may also appear elsewhere); a lengthy hymn composed of nine odes, with each ode being made up of many hymns (usually 12-14), the number and source of which are regulated by the Typikon. At least theoretically each ode takes its theme from the Biblical canticle (e.g., Ode 1 is patterned after Exodus 15:1-19, the Canticle of Moses) which serves as its prototype.
6. Irmos – a word meaning "link" in Greek. The Irmos is the theme-song and the first hymn of each ode of a Canon. It has a double function: it "links" the ode thematically with the Biblical canticle which serves as its prototype, and, by establishing the meter and melody for all the other hymns (troparia) of the ode, it is the first "link" in their chain.
7. Troparion – one of the oldest titles used in the Orthodox Church for a particular piece of composed hymnography. In Greek the word means "a sign of victory" or a "way of life," and in general implies that the composed hymn is a succinct summary of the event or saintly person being celebrated in the Church. As a title, Troparion can be applied to virtually any composed hymn used in Orthodox worship. Present use, however, usually limits it to the hymn sung after the Lord’s Prayer at Vespers, after "God is the Lord" at Matins, and after the Little Entrance at the Divine Liturgy. It also denotes the hymns that follow the Irmos in the ode of a canon.
8. Katavasia – in Greek this word implies the act of "descending" or "coming down." It is the name given to the hymn that concludes the ode of a Canon. During the singing of the Katavasia the two choirs are to "descend" from their places (the kliros) and assemble in the center of the church. The Katavasia may be the Irmos from another canon, or, as on Pascha, it may be the Irmos of the given ode repeated. These matters are regulated by the Typikon.
9. Hypakoe – perhaps the most ancient title used by the Church to denote a piece of composed hymnography. In Greek this word means "to be obedient," "to hear," "to respond." Presently, the Hypakoe is the particular title of a hymn sung during Resurrectional Matins. It varies according to the tone of the week from the Octoechos and comes after the Resurrectional hymns which are sung together with the refrain from Ps. 119: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes." The Hypakoe of Pascha is the one most commonly known. It is sung after the third ode of the Paschal Canon, during the Paschal Hours, and again after the Little Entrance at Divine Liturgy.
10. Stikheron – another general title referring to a composed hymn written in verses. Such hymns occur throughout Orthodox worship, e.g.: they are inserted at the places appointed by the Typikon during the chanting of "Lord, I call" (Psalms 141, 142, 130 and 117) at Vespers. They are usually associated with Psalmody.
11. Automelon (samopodoben) – a stikheron having its own meter and melody and serving in turn as a model for other stihhera.
12. Idiomelon (samoglasen) – a stikheron having its own meter and melody which never serve as a model for other stikhera.
13. Prosomoia (podoben) – a stikheron whose meter and melody are taken from those of an automelon.
14. Apostikha – stikhera that appear together with selected Psalm verses before St. Simeon’s Prayer at Vespers as well as near the end of Daily and Lenten Matins.
15. Lity (litia) – a word implying a fervent, prolonged prayer. It generally designates the procession to the narthex of the church for petitions, hymns and the blessing of loaves, which is a typical feature of the latter part of Great Vespers on feast days.
16. Theotokian – a hymn to the Theotokos that usually concludes a larger body of hymnography, e.g.: troparia at the end of Vespers, stikhera on "Lord, I call," apostikha, etc.
17. Stavrotheotokian – hymns to the Theotokos that refer to her standing at the Cross of Christ. They are typically found in the Octoechos in the hymnography for Wednesdays and Fridays.
18. Dogmatikon – those Theotokia that conclude the stikhera on "Lord, I call" at Great Vespers on the eves of the Lord’s Day. Their title comes from the fact that they are usually succinct presentations of the dogma of the Incarnation, with particular stress on the ever-virginity and motherhood of Mary.
19. Verses on the Praises – stikhera inserted at those places appointed by the Typikon during the chanting of the Psalms of Praise (148-150) at Matins.
20. Gospel Stikhera – hymns sung during Resurrectional Matins at "Glory" of the Verses on the Praises. There are eleven Gospel Stikhera, and they vary from week to week depending upon which of the eleven Gospel lessons for Sunday Matins is read.
21. Exapostilarion – a Greek word implying "to dismiss," which is used for the title of a short hymn that comes at the end of the Canon at Matins. In Slavonic service books this hymn is called the Svetilen or "song of light." For Sunday Matins, after the brief "Holy is the Lord our God," there are eleven other Exapostilaria – one for each week depending upon which of the eleven Gospel lessons of Sunday Matins is read.
22. Kontakion – derived from a Greek word that made reference to a wooden stick around which a parchment was wrapped. Originally, the Kontakion was a hymn of many stanzas (18-24) whose lengthy text indeed required the use of a scroll. St. Roman the Melodist (+556) is the most famous composer of such lengthy, free-style hymns. The hymns in their original, lengthy form have all but fallen into disuse in Orthodox worship. What now remains in the liturgical books as Kontakia are merely the short, preliminary stanzas of the earlier and longer hymns. The Kontakion is sung after ode 6 (together with the Ikos, or first strophe of the more ancient, lengthy kontakion) of the Canon at Matins, during the Hours, and after the Troparia at the Divine Liturgy.
23. Akathistos – a long hymn of 24 stanzas, similar to the ancient Kontakion. Greek word itself means that the hymn is to be sung while everyone stands. Many Akathistos hymns have been composed for saints and even particular icons. They are generally used for devotional purposes and may be inserted after the ode 6 of the Matins Canon during the celebration of a feast (for which an Akathistos has been composed). The Akathistos to the Theotokos is in regular liturgical use and is prescribed in the Triodion for the 5th Saturday of Great Lent. In Greek and Antiochian use this Akathistos is divided into sections and spread throughout the Friday evenings of Great Lent.
24. Prokeimenon – the Greek word implies something that is "set before" or "introduces." The Prokeimenon was originally an entire Psalm that served to "introduce" the reading of Scripture that followed it. One verse from the Psalm was selected as the refrain to the chanting of all the others. In current liturgical use, the Prokeimenon is reduced to the refrain and one to four verses of the Psalm being employed.
The Late, Great Typikon.
Among the thirty or so liturgical books that are required in order to perform the services of the Orthodox Church correctly, the Typikon holds a special place. This is the book that holds the "key" to how the services are to be put together — how you combine readings from the Oktoechos, Menaon, Triodion, Psalter, Horologion, Ieratikon, Apostle and Gospel, etc.
The Slavic Typikon is a massive book, containing hundreds of chapters. In it we find how to serve each of the services — how to serve daily Vespers and Matins, how to do them if there is a Feast Day, or how to do them during Great Lent. There are chapters that instruct on how the choir is to sing together (and against "disorderly shrieks" that have no place in church singing). There are chapters that give clear instructions on how and when to cense, tables with Apostol, Gospel and Psalter readings. Then there is a very extensive calendar section, with an explanation of the services for every day of the fixed calendar year, and a separate section for how to do the services for all of the days that the Lenten Triodion and Pentecostarion are used.
There sections that explain how to correlate and combine the services of the fixed and moveable calendars. Every possible combination is considered. The rubrics for how to do the services of the Feast of the Annunciation, for example, are more than thirty pages long — they explain in detail how to put together the service for the Annunciation when it coincides with any possible day of Great Lent and Bright Week.
Looking at these detailed rubrics, one learns how to put together the service if Annunciation should coincide with the Saturday of the Akathist, Lazarus Saturday, Palm Sunday, or even Pascha itself. One learns how to serve a service to a saint having a "Polieleos" (such as St. George) if it should fall on Bright Week, etc.
The final sections of the Typikon are the Paschalion Calendar sections. Here, there are tables reflecting the 532 year cycle of the Church services (which consists of 19-year solar cycles multiplied by 28-day lunar cycles. There is a table that consists of 19 columns by 28 rows, giving the Paschal Key number (really a letter) for each of the years of the 532-year cycle. Once you know the Paschal Key, you look up the details in the following section, which consists of 35 brief calendar synopses (one for each possible day that Pascha can fall). Each of these synopses actually consists of two — one for regular years, and one for leap years.
For example, lets look at 1996.
The 532-year cycle is calculated from the creation of Adam, which, as we know, took place on Friday, March 1, 5508 B.C. (Yes, that is the base date on which the entire calendar system of the Orthodox Church is based-pretty neat, huh?)
So, you add 5508 to 1996 to get 7504, the year from the creation of Adam. Dividing this by 532, you get 14, with a remainder of 56. (This tells us that since the creation of Adam, we are only in the 15th cycle — not such a long time). Dividing 56 by 19, we get 2, with a remainder of 18. Looking at our Paschal Key table, in the third row in column 18, we find the Paschal Key of the Slavonic letter "I" — (which is the 11th Paschal Key). It is in red, which means the year is a leap year. Looking up the synopsis for the letter "I" we find the following:
"If it is a leap year: The Nativity of Christ is on a Sunday. The Post-Nativity meat-eating period is six weeks and a day. The Triodion begins on January 22. Meatfare Sunday is February 5. Cheesefare Sunday is February 12. The "Year Key" is 7. St. Eudokia is on Thursday of the third week of Lent. The 40 Martyrs are on Friday of the fourth week of Lent. St Alexis is on Saturday of the fifth week of Lent. Annunciation is on Palm Sunday. The Pascha of Christ is on April 1. St. George is on Monday of the fourth week after Pascha. Mid-Pentecost is on April 25. St. John the Theologian is on Tuesday of the sixth week after Pascha. Ascension is on May 10. Pentecost is on May 20. The Fast of the Apostles begins on the day after May 27. The Apostle's Fast is four weeks and four days long. St. Peter and Paul's is on a Friday."
And you can use these tables and synopses for any date you want — ever. If you should ask me, when Pascha should come in the year 2007, all one needs to do is add 5508 (getting 7515), divide by 532, getting a remainder of 67. Dividing this by 19, we get 3, with a remainder of 10. Looking at the chart, we find in the fourth row and the 10th column the Paschal Key Letter of Slavonic "D" — which is the 5th Paschal Key. Turning to the Synopsis, we find that Pascha will fall on March 26, and all the other information about the congruence of feasts mentioned above.
When are Ascension and Annunciation in the year 35762? (I know that's pretty far into the future, but I want to show that it works for any year). 35762 + 5508 = 41270. Dividing by 532, we get a remainder of 306. Dividing that by 19, we get 16, with a remainder of 2. Looking at the table in the 17th row, second column, we find the Paschal Key letter "Zh" — which is the 7th Paschal Key. In the Synopsis, we find that Ascension that year will fall on May 6 — Annunciation will fall on Holy Thursday.
The key point here is that the cycle is PERPETUAL. At the bottom of the table it says: "The Alphabetic Key for 532 years. And then it returns to its beginning, for this key will be applicable until the end of the ages."
Date of Pascha,
Nicholas Ossorguine, Instructor in Liturgics, St Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute, Paris.
From the earliest days, man’s perception of time was naturally linked with some repeatedly occurring natural phenomena. Thus, for example, the regular change of light and darkness became expressed as a unit of time: a day (a phenomenon determined by the earth’s rotation about its own axis). The regular changes in lunar phases (the rotation of the moon around the earth lasting approximately thirty days) gave rise to the concept of a month. And finally, the regular changes of the year’s four seasons — spring, summer, autumn, and winter — was understood as a yearly cycle consisting of 365 (or 366) days, coupled to the earth’s complete revolution around the sun, which is called the Tropical or Solar year.
Only the seven-day cycle, the constantly repeating seven days of the week, is not based on any natural or other occurrence but has its origin in the creation of the world according to the Biblical narrative. The seven-day cycle was strictly observed by Old Testament Jews as something established by God Himself, and this was continued by New Testament Christians. It can be stated that this cycle was never interrupted and that calendar reforms had no effect on the seven-day week either in the Old or New Testaments.
The Church cycle of fixed feasts (Christ’s Nativity and others) depends exclusively on the solar year. The feast of Pascha, with the season of movable feasts related to it, is determined in accordance with all three cycles: namely, the solar, lunar and the weekly.
Pascha is the greatest Christian feast. The Orthodox Church, in the words of St John Damascene (VIII c), calls it "the feast of feasts, holy day of holy days" (Paschal Canon, Irmos of the Eighth Ode). This was the first Christian feast that was celebrated in Apostolic times. This feast is of such significance that the day of the week during which the Resurrection of Christ took place is forever identified with it. In the Russian language this day is even called Voskresenie [Resurrection]. Throughout the whole Church year, it serves as a constant, weekly reminder of the Paschal feast itself. One particular Sunday of the year is dedicated to this feast of Resurrection. And this is the day, when there is a particular alignment of the Sun, Moon and Earth. At this point, the latter enjoys a time of maximum illumination from the light sources that surround it.
In Orthodox liturgy, light has an exceptionally important meaning. The very word "light" and its derivatives are frequently found in liturgical texts. Christ Himself is the source of true Light "I am the Light of the world" (John 8:12). In this context, solar light is understood as an image of the true Light.
The Christian Church, apparently from Apostolic times, began to fix the date of Pascha (Sunday) precisely in relation to light. For example, the feast of the Nativity of Christ (IV c.) was fixed as December 25, the day of the Winter solstice when sunlight begins to increase. (It was also a pagan feast for the same reason.) As for the sacred day of Pascha, here the moon also plays a part.
The Sunday of the year that falls immediately after a full moon when it occurs not earlier than the vernal equinox is set aside as the feast of Pascha.
Astronomically, the vernal equinox corresponds to that moment in the year when throughout the world (in both hemispheres) the length of the day and the night is equal and the Polar nights end. The significance of this phenomenon is that at this time of the year there is no place on Earth that is not touched by the light of the sun during the day. With the coming of the full moon during this time, the moon, being in the dark half of the Earth’s sphere, reflects the sun’s light, and thus the whole world is surrounded at that moment by the light of the sun.
Thus, in the cosmic aspect, the day of Holy Pascha is determined by the special position of the celestial bodies that illumine the Earth. This special position becomes a "cosmic icon" of that, which the Church describes by the words of the Paschal Canon: "Now all is filled with light: heaven and earth and the lower regions" [Troparion, Ode 3], or "This is the bright and saving night, sacred and supremely festal. It heralds the radiant day of the Resurrection on which the timeless light shone forth bodily from the tomb for all" [Troparion, Ode 7].
In the Church’s consciousness, the foundation of this "cosmic icon" was established by God Himself, the Creator of the world, when, at the coming of the fourth day, He ordered the "two great lights" to illumine the Earth on either side (days and nights) "And God said, Let there be lights ... to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and seasons, and for days, and years; and let them be for lights … to give light upon the earth … made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night" (Genesis 1:14-16).
Since the First Ecumenical Council (325 AD), this principle for determining the Paschal date (nearest Sunday after the first full moon occurring no earlier than the vernal equinox) was the mandatory rule for the whole Christian Church and remains so even to this day, both for the Eastern and Western Christians.
As for the theological significance of this "cosmic icon" that determines the date of Pascha, there is a little-known Fourth century Greek document ("Anatolian Sermon on the Paschal Date," 387 AD), which gives a detailed explanation of this significance. The author points to the existing intimate connection between the "seven-day" creation of the world and the "seven-day" redemptive act of Christ.
The creation of the first man, Adam, was followed by his fall and with this the corruption of all creation. Christ, the New Adam, redeems the sin of the first man and brings to life a new creation. In this theological context, the cosmic phenomena (vernal equinox and the full moon that follows it) constitute natural signs that correspond to the beginning of time, when God created the world. The "cosmic icon" of light becomes the icon of the beginning of time at the creation of the world.
The moment of the vernal equinox is the image of the first day of creation. This is the first day, or "day one," when God gave light to the world and divided the light from the darkness into equal parts, calling them respectively, Day and Night [Genesis 1:3-5]. Let us note that, according to the seven-day sequence, this day corresponds to Sunday, the day of Resurrection. The full moon, which follows it, is an image of the fourth day of creation (as noted above), when God, employing the created heavenly lights, distributed the light (which appeared on the first day) throughout the whole world. Darkness is gradually overcome. The moon’s role is that through it, the light penetrates the realm of darkness as a forerunner of the final victory.
On the sixth day of creation, which corresponds to Friday, God creates the first man, Adam, who fell away from God. Thus the New Adam, Christ, redeems Adam’s sin on the Cross on Holy and Great Friday. On the seventh day, Great and Holy Saturday, while bodily resting in the tomb, He destroys the kingdom of darkness. And on the following day, the first day of the week, which corresponds in this sequence to "day one" when God gave light to the world, the resurrected Christ gives the world the never-setting Light of His Resurrection.
The Gospel reading for the Paschal Liturgy proclaims this mystery: "In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was God. … All things were made by Him. … In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. … The light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not" (John 1:1,3-5).
As for the significance of the Hebrew Pesach in determining the time for the celebration of the Christian Pascha, the Fourth century document noted above mentions the day of Pesach only to say that in no event is it to be considered in determining the time of the Christian Pascha. Furthermore, the document’s author includes among the known groups of heretics those Christians who, in calculating the Paschal date, take their cue from Pesach. Some of these heretics, the Quatrodecimanians, observe Pascha on the same day as the Jews, others, the Novatians, observe Pascha on the first Sunday after Pesach.
The idea that the Christian Pascha must always be observed following the Hebrew Pesach was advanced by Byzantine canonists during the time preceding the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the West (1583 AD). Apparently it was done in an attempt to discredit this forthcoming "Catholic" calendar reform. In essence, prior to the calendar reform in the West, the Hebrew Pesach de facto always preceded the Christian Pascha for entirely technical reasons of the calendar. The Christian and Hebrew calculations were based on the same astronomical data to which the Julian calendar was linked. However, this did not constitute a sufficient reason to make this a mandatory condition.
For the Fathers of the Fourth century, the vernal equinox was the primary determinant for calculating the date of the Paschal feast. The Seventh Apostolic Canon reads: "If any bishop, presbyter or deacon shall celebrate the holy day of Pascha before the vernal equinox, with the Jews, let him be deposed from the holy ranks." Thus the time of the vernal equinox determines the full moon after which, on the first Sunday following, the Pascha should be celebrated. This moon is the full moon of the Old Testament Pesach.
The Old Testament Pesach, according to Mosaic Law, is linked to the Spring full moon. As confirmed by the Fourth century document, mentioned above, the Hebrew Pesach during the pre-Christian era always occurred after the vernal equinox. With the coming of Christianity, this rule was not always followed, i.e. the Hebrew Pesach could occur prior to the vernal equinox, which served as the reason for the promulgation in the early epoch of the Seventh Apostolic Canon cited above. In this connection, a distinction should be made between the Old Testament Pesach and the Hebrew Pesach of New Testament times. The first one guided Israel to Christ, Who transformed it into the Christian Pascha. The second one, which does not comprehend Christ, lost all significance and, therefore, can have nothing in common, in any relationship, with the Pascha of Christ.
Thus the Christian Pascha, which follows the Old Testament Pesach’s full moon, can never coincide with it or precede it. Today, in the era of the New Testament, whether the full moon corresponds with the present Hebrew Pesach or not, can have no bearing on the Christian Pascha. As an example, let us note that if the first (Paschal) full moon following the vernal equinox does not correspond with the moon of the Hebrew Pesach, it means that the latter is based upon another full moon, either one which precedes or one that follows the first full moon. Neither of these would be of significance for the Christian Pascha since one of them is the second moon that follows the vernal equinox and the other one precedes it.
As for the variation in Paschal dates between Eastern and Western Christians, this occurs solely upon the difference between the calendars that they use: the Julian for the Eastern Church’s Pascha (the so-called "old style") and the Gregorian for the Western Church’s Pascha ("new style").
It can be assumed that one century after the First Ecumenical Council (325 AD) an agreement was reached throughout the Christian world on the time for celebrating Pascha. Tables for calculating the Paschal date were prepared based on the calendar in use at that time, and Paschal dates were expressed according to the Julian calendar in conjunction with its March 21st date as the date of the vernal equinox (the Paschal boundary). The Eastern Church used the so-called Paschalia compiled in approximately the Sixth century. This Paschalia remains in use in the Eastern Church even to this day.
Thus Pascha was celebrated throughout the Christian Church more or less simultaneously until 1583 AD when the calendar reform of Pope Gregory XIII took place in the West. By then, it had been observed for some time that the Julian calendar had fallen behind the solar time by approximately one day every 128 years and by the end of the Sixteenth century this lagging behind amounted to ten days since the time of the First Ecumenical Council in 325 AD. According to the calendar, the actual vernal equinox no longer took place on the 21st of March but on the 11th. As a result of this calendar reform (more precisely, its correction or adjustment) all calendar dates were moved forward by ten days (Friday October 4 was followed by Saturday the 15th), and in order that the calendar would no longer deviate from solar time, it was decided that during every 400-year period three of the leap years would be replaced by normal years, meaning that the date of 29th February would be dropped. The following rule would be applied: only those century leap-years will retain February 29th that can be divided by 400 without a remainder. Thus, 1600 was a leap-year, but the three following century-years, 1700, 1800, and 1900, were not leap-years, even though according to the Julian calendar they were. These different approaches resulted in today’s 13-day difference. Appropriate corrections were made for the calculation of Pascha inasmuch as the Paschal boundary of March 21st was moved by ten days, and from that time the Western Church frequently celebrated Pascha earlier than the Eastern Church, which continued to calculate its date in accordance with the old Paschalia.
When the Western Pascha does not coincide with the Eastern, the difference can be either one week or as great as four or five weeks. This happens because the vernal equinox, according to the Julian calendar that serves as the basis for Paschalia calculations, occurs thirteen days behind the actual one, followed by the Gregorian calendar. Thus March 21 according to the New Style (March 8 Old Style) is the vernal equinox. Western Christians consider this the beginning of the Paschal moon. Thirteen days later, on April 3 New Style (March 21 Old Style) begins the time for calculating the Paschal moon for the Eastern Christians, for their Paschalia. Therefore, when the full moon occurs between March 21 and April 2 (New Style, of course) this is the Paschal moon only for the Western Church, since according to the Eastern Paschalia the vernal equinox has not yet occurred. In this case, the Orthodox Pascha is based on the following moon, a month later. This then would be the first full moon after March 21 according to the Old Style, but in fact it is really the second full moon following the astronomically actual vernal equinox (March 21 New Style).
In this case, the difference between the two Paschal dates can be four or five weeks. Should there be no full moon between March 21 and April 2 New Style, then for all Christians the common Paschal moon would be the first one occurring after April 2. In that case, both Paschal dates would coincide or be one week apart. The latter could occur because in the Paschalia lunar cycles lag behind "real time" by three to four days. Thus if the actual full moon occurs in the first half of the week, for the Paschalia this would be in week’s second half and the following Sunday would be Pascha for all Christians. Should the full moon occur in the week’s second half, according to the Paschalia this would be the first half of the following week and thus the Eastern Pascha would fall behind the Western by a week.
There is only one solution for this abnormal situation. The feasts of the Paschal cycle must be observed in accordance with the same calendar as the fixed feasts (Christ’s Nativity, etc.), the calendar that corresponds to solar time.
"Russkaya Mysl’" #4401 21.03.2002, http://www.rusmysl.ru , Translated by Alvian N. Smirensky
Orthodox Names (by Priest Andrew Philips).
This article is going to be published in an upcoming issue of The Orthodox Family. Posted on the InterNet by Matushka Deborah Johnson.
With the progressive dechristianisation of society, the use of the expression 'Christian name' is becoming less and less common and is being replaced by 'first name' or 'forename.' Not so long ago Roman Catholics always gave their children saints' names. Even Protestants used to give their children names only if they appeared in the Bible, Old Testament or New. Thus Jonathan, David, Jeremy, Ruth, Judith, Esther, Rebecca, Rachel, Deborah, Abigail and Sarah all became popular names in Protestant-based societies. In Orthodox and Catholic societies, they sound rather Jewish and although they are saints' names, they are rare, even in monasteries.
However, it does seem as if, once more, Orthodox are now the only ones to keep a tradition, that of giving their children saints' names. But many questions are posed as to what exactly a Christian name is and what names those entering the Orthodox Church should take.
First of all it is necessary to point out that someone entering Orthodoxy should not take a new name if he has one which is already borne by a saint in the calendar. We have come across two cases where men with perfectly good Christian names changed them to exotic-sounding Vladimir and Auxentius. Both were cases where in fact the persons concerned were going through identity crises. Psychologically unstable, neither in fact wanted to take a saint's name, but in fact wanted to assume another identity. Both, unsurprisingly, have since lapsed from the Orthodox Church. It would seem that the pastor should discourage uncalled-for changes of name.
Another question which sometimes arises is whether a person with a female form of a male saint's name, for example, Nicole, should be able to keep it.
In Russian practice this is only allowed in monasticism, whereas in modern Greek practice it is quite common among lay-people. Other differences between Russian and Greek practice also occur. For instance Greek women and girls called Maria or Panaghia celebrate their namesdays on Feasts of the Mother of God. In Russian practice it is held that the name Maria is too holy to be given in honour of the Virgin, for we are unworthy to bear her name. Russian Marias therefore celebrate namesdays in honour of other Marias, for example, St. Mary of Egypt or St. Mary, Sister of St. Lazarus.
In Greece and the Balkans, names like Christos (accented on the first syllable,) Sotiris (Saviour) and Kyriakos are also common. Russians tend to find such names unacceptable, for the same reason that Russian Marias are not named in honour of the Virgin. Another custom, unknown to both Greeks and Russians, is that of the Serb Slava, whereby individuals may not have individual saints' names at all, but do have a common family feastday in honour of a particular saint. As regards saints' days there are some which fall on different days in the Greek and Russian calendars. The best-known example of this is St. Catherine whose feast falls on 25 November in the Greek Church, but on 24 November in the Russian.
Some converts to Orthodoxy change names when it is not necessary, not through some identity crisis, but simply through ignorance. The following are names which seem to be perfectly valid Orthodox names, many of them being those of pre-Schism Western saints:
Alan, Albert, Alphonse (St. Ildefonse), Angus, Audrey, Aylwin, Barry, Bernard, Bertrand, Brigid, Claire (St. Photini or Svetlana), Dominic (equivalent to Kyriakos, Kyriaki in Greek), Duncan, Edgar, Edith, Edmund, Edward, Erasmus, Faith (Vera), Frederic (translation of Irenei), Geoffrey (St. Ceolfrid), Gerald, Gilbert, Giles, Guy, Harvey, Helga (St. Olga), Herbert, Hugh, Humphrey, Kevin, Leonard, Mildred, Ottilia, Owen, Richard, Robert, Ursula.
Other names, not sounding Orthodox, are often diminutives of perfectly good Orthodox saints' names. For instance:
Alexandra gives Alice and Alison.
Catherine gives Karen, Kathleen, Kay and Kittie.
Columba gives Malcolm.
Dorothy gives Dora, Doreen and Doris.
Emiliana gives Amelia, Emily and Milly.
Elizabeth gives Bella, Bess, Beth, Betty, Elsa, Elsie, Isabelle.
Helen gives Eileen, Elaine, Eleanor and Norah.
John gives Evan and Sean.
Joanna gives Jacqueline, Jane, Janet, Janice, Jenny, Jessie.
Juliana gives Gillian and Jill.
Mary gives Marian, Marilyn, Maureen, May, Miriam, Moira, Molly, Morag, Polly and Rosemary.
Margaret (Marina) gives Greta, Maisie, Marjorie, Meg, Pearl, Peggy and Rita.
Nicholas gives Colin.
The lists above in no way claim to be complete, but they may be useful.
Ultimately, however, there are names which do have to be changed since they are simply not saints' names at all. What approaches are there to this question? Some change to a name which is similar to their own. An obvious example is that of those who change from Neil to Nil. Similarly Lee can easily be changed to Leo or Leon. There are many other examples.
Some people have second Christian names. Thus someone called Pamela Mary could simply use her second Christian name as her Orthodox name. Some people simply have a favourite saint and have always wanted to be called by that name. This is the simplest case of all.
Others may wish to take on the name of someone in their family. Thus we know of one little Russian boy who was not baptised and did not have a Christian name.
On baptism he took the name of his grandfather, who did have a Christian name. The result was that not only was the little boy baptised, but also that his grandfather started going to church, so bringing happiness to three generations.
There is also the question of how parents should name their children. The tradition was to look in the calendar either on the day of birth, or on the eighth day at the naming ceremony, or else on the fortieth day on the day of the baptism. These are pious customs which future parents should bear in mind.
If parents choose a name simply because they like it, rather than for the saint, there is another aspect of names which is also often overlooked. This is where there are several saints of the same name. For example there are several St. Nicholases in the calendar, but in general only one is honoured this seems most unfortunate. The Church calls us to honour all the saints, not only our favourite few.
Of Anglo-Saxon saints in the English tradition of Orthodoxy, there are a number whose names could be used, although unfortunately some of them are now out of fashion. For boys these are:
Adamnan, Adrian, Aidan, Ailred, Alban, Albert, Aylwin, Bede, Benedict, Bernard, Cedd, Chad, Clement, Cuthbert, Dunstan, Edmund, Edward, Edwin, Felix, Geoffrey, Gilbert, Herbert, James, John, Kenelm, Laurence, Ninian, Oswald, Owen, Peter, Philip, Richard, Sigfrid, Theodore, Wilfrid.
Agatha, Alfreda, Audrey, Eanswytha, Edith, Elfreda, Elgiva, Ethel, Hilda, Mildred, Thecla. (Also from male saints: Adriana, Alberta, Augustina (Tina), Benedicta, Clementine, Edwina and Theodora.)
We hope that these considerations will be useful for all parents and those wishing to enter the Orthodox Church. May they receive the blessings of the saints through their holy names.
Fr. Andrew Philips, June 1994.
Notes on the “Western Rite” (Father Alexander Schmemann).
The question of rites is precisely not, has never been and cannot be a mere question of rites per se, but is and has always been a question of faith, of its wholeness and integrity. The liturgy embodies and expresses the faith, or better to say, the experience of the Church, and is that experience's manifestation and communication. And when rites, deta ched from their nature and function, begin to be discussed in terms of "acceptance" and "rejection" or "likes and dislikes," the debate concerning them becomes meaningless.
For many people, the eastern and western rites are two entirely different and self-contained "blocks" ruling out, as an impure "hybridization," all contacts and mutual influences. This, however, is wrong — first of all, historically. In a sense, the enti re history of Christian worship can be termed a history of constant "hybridizations" — if only this word is deprived of its negative connotations. Before their separations, the east and the west influenced one another for centuries. And there is no exagg eration in saying that the anaphora of St. John Chrysostom's Liturgy is infinitely 'closer' to the Roman anaphora of the same period than the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer is to, for example, the Tridentine Mass.
What makes a western rite Orthodox? For many proponents of the western rite, all it takes is a few additions and a few deletions, e.g. "striking the filioque " and "strengthening of the epiclesis." This answer implies, on the one hand, that there exists a unified and homogenous reality identifiable as the western rite and, on the other hand, that except for two or three "heretical" ingredients or omissions, th is rite is ipso facto Orthodox. Both presuppositions are wrong.
Indeed, one does not have to be an "authority on the West" in order to know that liturgical development in the West was shaped to a degree unknown in the East by various theologies, the succession of which — and the clashes of one with another — constitute western religious history. Scholasticism, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, etc., have all resulted in sometimes radical liturgical metamorphoses and all have had a decisive impact on worship. Therefore, one should speak today not of the western rite, but of western rites, deeply — if not radically — differing from one another, yet all reflecting in one way or another, the western theological tragedy and fragmentation. This does not mean that all these rites are "heretical" and simply to be condemned. It only means that, from an Orthodox point of view, their evaluation in terms merely of "deletions" and "additions" is — to say the least — inadequate. For the irony of our present situation is that while some western Christians come to Orthodoxy in order to salvage the rite they cherish (Book of Common Prayer, Tridentine Mass, etc.) from liturgical reforms they abhor, some of these reforms, at least in abstacto, are closer to the structures and spirit of the early western rite — and thus to the Orthodox liturgical tradition — than the later rite, those precisely that the Orthodox Church is supposed to "sanction" and to "adopt."
It is my deep conviction that the eastern liturgical tradition is alone today in having preserved, in spite of all historical "deficiencies," the fullness of the Church's lex orandi and constitutes, therefore, the criterion for all liturgical evaluations.
Father Alexander Schmemann (1920-1983) | <urn:uuid:f8a176c4-8ac8-4420-8094-617628e434e2> | CC-MAIN-2014-41 | http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/liturgical_rubrics_1.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-41/segments/1410657114204.83/warc/CC-MAIN-20140914011154-00228-ip-10-196-40-205.us-west-1.compute.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942971 | 82,761 | 2.703125 | 3 |
What is RoboBattle?
A high-energy impact filled camp! It is a camp focused on covering the basics of robotics through completing challenges and forming creative problem solving solutions. This short duration camp involves mainly problem solving and would suit kids who are interested in completing challenges and solving mazes and puzzles using robotics. This energetic and exciting camp is designed to deliver FUN and EXCITEMENT to all Robotics novices and enthusiasts.
This camp harnesses the curiosity and competitive nature of all children. Kids will learn some basic robotics in this camp aimed at completing challenges and for competing against one another or in groups. A highly social and fun camp atmosphere will surely set your child in the right mood for learning.
** Various skill levels to be completed
We have a wide selection of courses taking place on different dates. Check out our Holiday Camp Schedule to view what’s available and shortlist your preferred classes now!
Benefits of RoboBattle
Gain Social skills
Learn all about Robotics/ Engineerings
Learn Problem solving, Planning
How is Robobattle Different from RoboCamp?
Robocamp is a more methodological robotics camp where kids are provided detailed instructions on learning about the mechanics of building and the language of programming. Kids will do different projects each day which focuses on the learning of the mechanics of building + how programming can make a difference by robotizing the projects. In this camp, there are comparatively more projects building, learning objectives are focused on learning the essentials of mechanics and robotics. Unlike Robobattle where the sole purpose is solve a given problem within the short span of the camp, Robocamp challenges the child to think further into being creative and innovative. Robocamp is a excellent learning ground for children who are keen to learn all about robotics whilst RoboBattle would suit kids who are already familiar to Robotics and are looking for further challenges and /or children who are novices to robotics and would like a snapshot on how fun robotics learning can be. | <urn:uuid:80919743-986e-4536-8a0d-f8b6b0fae910> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | http://www.worklab.com.sg/holiday-camps/robobattle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247494694.1/warc/CC-MAIN-20190220085318-20190220111318-00071.warc.gz | en | 0.939816 | 397 | 2.921875 | 3 |
μ Cep (the Garnet Star)
Object Type: Variable Star
RA: 21h 43m 30s
Dec: +58° 46' 48"
Recommended minimum aperture: 50mm
Charts for 50mm Binocular (5° aperture circle). Click on a chart to print it.
To find μ Cep, place α Cephei at the NW edge of a 5° field and μ will be diametrically opposite.
What You Should See:
μ Cep is one of the reddest stars in the sky; it was named "The Garnet Star" by William Herschel. The deep orange colour of this red giant is nicely brought out in 10×50 binoculars. It has a variability of a bit under a magnitude, but is usually around 4th magnitude. It is one of the largest known stars; if it replaced the Sun, it would extend well beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It is destined to become a supernova.
Sorry, there is no "what you should see" image for your selected aperture.
We are showing you the nearest available one. | <urn:uuid:c43c1523-7f9f-4b13-9999-a69c8af4172e> | CC-MAIN-2019-09 | http://binocularsky.com/binoc_object_file.php?object_id=muCep&aperture=100 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-09/segments/1550247490806.45/warc/CC-MAIN-20190219162843-20190219184843-00560.warc.gz | en | 0.916935 | 229 | 2.75 | 3 |
Human beings have a deep-seated desire for certainty and control.
Several studies show this need serves at least two important purposes. First, it helps us believe that we can shape outcomes and events to our liking. That is, the more in control we feel, the more efficacious we feel about achieving the outcomes we desire, and this sense of competence boosts well-being.
Control also feels good because it makes us believe that we aren’t under someone else’s control. In one study of an old-age home, researchers gave the members of one group control over which plant to grow in their room and which movies to watch. The other group was denied that control. In the eighteen-month period that followed, the death rate of the second group was double that of the first.
That’s why we’re driven to seek control. Indeed, studies show that those with a higher need for control generally set loftier goals and also tend to achieve more. But can it go too far? Can seeking control undermine happiness? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Seeking control is a good thing—but only up to a point. Beyond that point, the drive to control can make you miserable.
Why controlling others creates conflict
Ask yourself this question: how does it feel when you are under someone else’s control? Imagine being married to someone overly controlling. Or worse yet, imagine being someone’s slave. Being controlled is no fun—and that’s why we tend to rebel.
Psychologists call this quality reactance: the desire to do the things that are proscribed. For example, attempting to control your spouse’s diet may be met with increased consumption of unhealthy food—just to spite you. This is why, in adult relationships, you can either have control over others, or you can have their love—not both. And because love is such a fundamental need for us, being overly controlling isn’t good for happiness.
There’s a related reason why being overly controlling of others lowers happiness: it results in what the well-known motivational psychologist David McClelland calls “power stress,” which is the tendency to get angry and frustrated when others don’t behave the way you want them to.
In one study, a group high in need for control and another group low in that need were both asked to deliver an extemporaneous speech to an audience consisting of two confederates. For one set of participants, the confederates reacted in a supportive and pleasant manner, but to the other set, they reacted negatively.
Here’s what the results showed: when the confederates were positive and supportive, both those high and low in need for control felt quite happy. This is not surprising, of course. When the confederates behaved negatively, however, a more interesting result emerged: Those high in need for control found it to be far more disturbing, and ended up feeling significantly more negative, than those low in need for control. This suggests that, when you seek control over others, you set yourself up for anger, frustration, and disappointment when they don’t behave the way you want them to.
When you seek control over others, you set yourself up for anger, frustration, and disappointment when they don’t behave the way you want them to.
In addition to crowding out others’ love and feeling frustrated, there’s yet another reason why the drive to control can lower happiness. This has to do with the quality of decisions we make. It turns out that we make our best decisions when we are exposed to a diverse set of views and inputs. This is why it is important to surround oneself with people from a variety of backgrounds. When we’re overly controlling of others, our decision-making suffers—because we drive away those who disagree with us and thus surround ourselves with only those who don’t mind being controlled: the “yea-sayers.”
Why obsessive passion hurts happiness
Seeking to control others is one way of exercising control. We can also try to control the external environment—the outcomes and events in one’s life. Being overly controlling of outcomes, like being overly controlling of others, also lowers happiness levels for a variety of reasons.
Before I get to these reasons, it’s important to note that being overly controlling of outcomes is not the same as being keen on achieving our goals, like getting into a good school or wanting to be in a great relationship. Findings show that having goals boosts happiness. You cross the line into being overly control-seeking when you become obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes—and the desire to achieve outcomes controls you. Professor Robert Vallerand of the Université du Québec à Montréal describes this tendency as “obsessive passion.”
As most people know, life is uncertain—and trying to overly control outcomes sets you up for disappointment. For example, one study showed that being in an overcrowded room dampened the mood of participants higher in need for control to a greater extent because they felt that the room wasn’t to their liking. Another study found that when people are put in situations in which they have lower control than they desire, their blood pressure shoots up. These findings indicate that when life doesn’t go according to plan—which happens quite regularly of course—those high in need for control suffer more.
The drive to control outcomes lowers happiness because when you want to control something so badly (say, get a particular job), you are likely to sacrifice other things that make you happy.
And again, the need for control—in this case, of outcomes—hurts decision-making. Findings show that overly controlling people are more likely to take risks and are also likely to become superstitious in stressful situations than those low in need for control. They are also more likely to fall prey to the illusion of control—which is to believe that one has more control over a situation than one actually does—and therefore, are likely to lose more money in gambling contexts involving real stakes.
Finally, the drive to control outcomes lowers happiness because when you want to control something so badly (say, get a particular job), you are likely to sacrifice other things that make you happy. Findings by Vallerand and his colleagues show that being obsessed about something has a negative impact not just on one’s own physical and emotional health, but also on the health of one’s relationships.
Can being out of control make you happier?
Because being overly controlling lowers happiness, it would clearly be useful to figure out ways to, well, control one’s control-seeking tendencies.
One suggestion? Learn to appreciate, rather than avoid, uncertainty.
How can you do that? Recognizing the importance of uncertainty for spicing up life is a good start. We all know, at some level, that uncertainty is important, which is why we avoid reading “spoiler alerts” before going to a movie. And yet, although we instinctively recognize the positive role that uncertainty plays, we also feel threatened by it and believe that it dampens happiness.
Consider this finding: Researchers told participants that they would soon receive a free dollar. One group was asked to imagine that they would learn why they received the dollar soon after getting it, while the other set was asked to imagine that they wouldn’t learn the reason. Both were then asked to indicate how happy they would feel upon receiving the dollar.
The first set—those who expected to know the reason for receiving the free dollar—anticipated feeling happier than the second. In fact, it was the reverse: those who didn’t learn the reason for the free dollar were happier. Summarizing these findings, Todd Kashdan, author of the excellent book Curious?, notes that “what we think brings us pleasure”—in this case certainty and control—“is often the exact opposite of what does.”
Taking control of yourself
If uncertainty is important for happiness, why are we generally averse to it?
Although uncertainty is a good thing for positive events, it isn’t for negative ones. Just as uncertainty can intensify positive feelings when things turn out well, it can intensify negative ones when they turn out badly.
It’s only when life is under control—at least with regard to important things like health, relationships, and financial security—that we are capable of appreciating uncertainty.
Another reason, I suspect, has to do with how much in control we are of our life. As you may have discovered from personal experience, we can’t appreciate uncertainty if we feel that our life is not in control. It’s only when life is under control—at least with regard to important things like health, relationships, and financial security—that we are capable of appreciating uncertainty.
It follows, therefore, that one way to get yourself to be in a position where you can appreciate uncertainty is to get your life under control first. A big part of this may involve not biting off more than you can chew. In particular, believing that you have enough time on your hands, it turns out, is super important. Most of us lead such fast-paced, frenetic lives that we are constantly under a time crunch. Findings show that the perception of time scarcity is a major happiness killer.
Ironically, the more successful we are in life, the more time scarcity we feel. Findings from a recent study help shed light on why this is the case. Researchers asked participants to play the role of consultants. While one set of students was paid 15 cents per minute for their time, the other half received $1.50. Later, once the project was over, these students were asked how stressed they had felt for time—and it was the higher paid participants who felt more pressure.
This suggests that one way to feel less time scarcity is to deemphasize the amount of money you make at work. Or at least desist from calculating your hourly wage rate. Another, somewhat counterintuitive, approach is to engage in social service; findings show that those who volunteer to help others tend to feel more time abundance. Yet another way of mitigating perceptions of time scarcity is through experiences of awe. Experiments show that exposure to awe-inducing images— whales, waterfalls, and the like—slows down perception of time, leading to feelings that you have more of it.
All of these approaches should, at least in theory, enhance one’s appreciation for uncertainty—and thus help mitigate the desire for control. But of all the ways of mitigating the desire for control, the one that perhaps has the best potential is to take control of yourself. Taking internal control means keeping the keys to your happiness in your own hands. It means never blaming anyone else for one’s unhappiness. It means eating right, exercising, and sleeping better.
We can’t control other people’s feelings and decisions—but we can take responsibility for our own well-being. | <urn:uuid:573e6ba6-c98a-4a46-bec2-60a6b7f67615> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://staging.mindful.org/losing-control-can-make-happier/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662561747.42/warc/CC-MAIN-20220523194013-20220523224013-00602.warc.gz | en | 0.96152 | 2,296 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Ways to Fight Allergies Inside and Outside the Home
You’ve had enough. You hate the sneezing, running nose, sore throat all the time. It’s not a cold, it’s allergies. It’s hard to escape allergens. They seem to be everywhere inside and out. The first thing you should do is schedule an appointment with your doctor to have an allergen test to see what you are most allergic to. That way, you know how to better defend yourself.
What Are Allergens
Our body is smart, and it has a built in defense system called out immune system. When it recognizes foreign substances entering the body, it tries to fight it off. Sometimes, the immune system goes into overdrive tries to fight it off too hard, which can create an overload of histamine. When that happens, you’ll experience the familiar symptoms of itchy eyes, runny nose, sneezing, and hives.
Common Indoor Allergens
The home is a breeding ground for allergens. There are dust mites, pet dander, dust, and more. It can be difficult to keep all of the in-home allergens at bay. You can find them in carpets, bedding, mattresses, pillows, fabric furniture, stuffed animals, drapes, and more. If you have pets, then that compounds the problem. The more people and animals that you have living with you, then more allergens that will be present.
Common Outdoor Allergens
Most people think of outdoor allergens when they hear people complain of allergies. There are things that are in bloom year round that can cause issues for people. From things like ragweed, tree pollen, grasses, mold, mildew, and more. Spring is notorious for the excess of pollen allergies. Any growing season is a hotbed of allergens to thrive. There are even outdoor allergens during the cold winter months, too.
Ways to Prevent Allergies
- Vacuum: Vacuum at least once a week, if not more. Keep the dust off of the floors, preventing the dust mites from having a chance to breed in the carpeting.
- Air Purifiers: Having an ionized air purifier can help, but don’t expect it to do all of the work for you. This is usually for the most extreme sufferers.
- Wash Bedding: Change your sheets often and wash them thoroughly. Switch out your pillows every 6 months. Dust mites like to feed off of dead skin cells. They group in areas that come into high contact with your skin. Your eyes, nose, and mouth are most likely to come in contact with the pillow, which is why it’s important to frequently change them.
- Slipcovers for Furniture: Use slipcovers to protect your fabric furniture from being contaminated. You can remove the covers monthly to launder them regularly.
- Avoidance: Don’t spend time near plants that cause you an allergic reaction. Make yourself familiar with what the plants are that cause you grief.
- Close Windows: Keep your windows closed to avoid pollen from entering your home. The less you have to deal with allergens, the better.
- Medication: Take an OTC medication to help boost your immune system and prevent it from going into overdrive.
Keep yourself healthy and happy year round by avoiding the things that cause you irritations. Avoid pets with dander if that’s a trigger for you. Let people know what your main allergies are, so that they know not to bring those items around you. | <urn:uuid:b91059bc-0143-4d65-8c9a-aea8b45f34b0> | CC-MAIN-2019-26 | https://barclayglenapts.com/blog/ways-to-fight-allergies-inside-and-outside-the-home/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-26/segments/1560627998473.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20190617103006-20190617125006-00539.warc.gz | en | 0.943655 | 760 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Scientists used special microphones to let us listen in on a tickled rat’s titters.
A tickle can send a rat into a fit of ultrasonic giggles. New research reveals what goes on in a rat’s brain during a tickle attack.
Scientists knew rats loved to be tickled, especially on their backs and bellies. A tickled rat lets out tiny giggles, too high for us to hear. Special microphones captured the squeaks so they could be replayed in a lower register.
Belly and back tickles elicited giggles galore. Tail tickles, not so much.
The rats will chase a researcher’s hand for more. And even frolic about, in a newly described behavior called Freudensprünge, or “joy jumps”—
—but only if the rats are in the mood to be tickled. A bright light and platform make a rat anxious. And it won’t giggle when tickled.
Now, researchers linked these reactions to a specific brain region in the somatosensory cortex. Tickles activate these neurons. And stimulating those neurons makes the rats giggle even when they aren’t being tickled.
Whether a rat can tickle itself is a question for future research. | <urn:uuid:83127c28-4fc4-4c4e-aaa7-7423e1fbde4d> | CC-MAIN-2018-39 | https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/eavesdrop-on-ultrasonic-rat-giggles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-39/segments/1537267159570.46/warc/CC-MAIN-20180923173457-20180923193857-00484.warc.gz | en | 0.886522 | 270 | 3.015625 | 3 |
When you do not have enough money to cover your family’s basic living expenses and pay all your creditors, you face some difficult financial decisions.
When family income is reduced, your spending habits must change. The sooner you change, the more likely your financial problems can be lessened. Your family should be part of the decision-making process, since their cooperation is essential to carry out the plans.
When your bills exceed the money available to pay them, you will have to develop a revised payment plan in order to repay your debts. After you have a plan, you will have to contact the people to whom you owe money - your creditors - and explain your situation. Creditors will usually work with you to adjust your payments because they want their money.
Your past experiences with creditors are important. If you have consistently paid bills when due, your creditors will be more cooperative than if you were late or did not make regular payments. Creditors are in the business of lending money and/or providing services. They want to keep your business, but they also want to get paid.
Gather The Facts
Before you can talk to your creditors, you need to take a hard look at your situation and make some decisions about how much and when you can pay. First, answer the following questions:
Who Gets Paid First?
You are legally obligated to pay all of your creditors. If you cannot pay all your bills, you must decide how much to pay to which creditors. One way is to divide available money and pay each creditor a share of what you owe. This is probably the fairest way, but it does not always work because every creditor must agree to reduce the amount they receive and extend the payment period.
A second method is to prioritize or list your creditors starting with the ones who will receive the most money. Think about the worst consequences for your family if certain debts were not paid or if less were paid than the amount due. Answering the questions below will help you decide.
What will affect my family’s health and security the most? Usually the house, utilities, food, transportation, and medical insurance take priority. Do not be tempted to let medical insurance slide when money is tight. If anyone in your family becomes ill, uninsured medical costs could be devastating. Meeting Your Insurance Needs provides additional information.
What will you lose if the bills are not paid? You can lose your purchases if the creditor holds the title of the property as collateral or security for the loan: a home mortgage or car loan, for example. Sometimes furniture and large appliance loans are secured loans. If you are not sure which loans are secured, check the credit contract. Unsecured debts may have to take lower priority, although you are obligated to pay them too.
What interest rate are you paying? Credit cards charging 1.5% interest per month amounts to an 18% annual interest rate (APR) on the unpaid balances (1.5 x 12=18). If you have a loan with a lower interest rate, you may decide to pay off a higher interest credit card balance first, to reduce the amount of finance charges you are paying. Until your financial situation improves, destroying your credit cards and closing your accounts may be a good idea. At least put credit cards away in a safe place so you are not tempted to use them. PowerPay is a computer program that can help you decide which debt repayment plan will save you the most money in interest charges. It is available online at https://powerpay.org.
How much do you still owe on the loan? Determine how much you have paid on each loan and how much you owe. If you have only one or two payments to make on a loan, it is probably a good idea to finish paying it, getting that debt out of the way. You may be able to return newer items or sell them to pay off the debt. If you choose to voluntarily surrender the item, you will still be required to pay the difference between the market value of the item and the amount remaining on the loan. Getting out from under some of your debts can reduce the pressure you feel.
Is a consolidation loan a good idea? Personal finance companies want you to think so, but generally a consolidation loan charges a higher interest rate. In addition, refinancing to smaller monthly payments will extend the number of payments you must make, adding to the total cost. While a single loan may make payment easier, that is a small benefit considering the additional costs involved.
What about your credit record? Nonpayment of debts is recorded on your credit record and can damage your ability to get credit in the future. That is why contacting all of your creditors immediately if you cannot pay your bills is important. If you can pay something on each debt, it is less likely that your financial problems will be reported on your credit record.
Your Repayment Plan
Once you have calculated how much money your family has for monthly living expenses and for paying off debts, decide how much you can pay to each creditor, based on priorities you determined while answering the previous questions. Work out a repayment plan that shows how much you plan to pay each creditor. Put this plan in writing.
Now you are ready to contact each of your creditors to explain your family situation. You will need to tell them how much you are able to pay and when you will be able to pay it. Some businesses, such as utility companies, have special counselors for customers who cannot pay their bills. These counselors can help you set up a budget plan to even out your payments during the year. They can also tell you if you qualify for fuel assistance or any other available programs.
Contacting Your Creditors
Once you have gathered the information you need, contact each creditor, explain your family’s situation, and work out a solution. Be prepared to explain the following:
Visit local creditors in person. Visit the loan officer at your bank or credit union, the credit manager of local stores, and the budget counselor at the utility company. Do not forget creditors like your dentist, physician, clinic, and hospital. Contact out-of-town creditors by phone or letter. If you phone, write down the name and title of the person to whom you talked. Follow the conversation with a letter summarizing the agreement between you and the creditor. Keep copies of your correspondence as well as any reply.
A Sample_Letter_to_Creditors (jpeg) is provided to use as a guide when writing to creditors. You may also use it as an outline of what to say when talking to a creditor. As you negotiate with each of your creditors, do not agree to any plan simply to get off the hook. Be sure you will be able to follow through on the agreement. Establish a payment rate that is acceptable to both you and the creditor.
Here is a list of some alternatives to consider when negotiating with your creditors:
Not all creditors will be willing to accept alternatives. However, they will be more likely to work with your family if you contact them before they contact you. They all want their money and would rather get some money on a regular basis than have to begin collection procedures.
If you fail to follow the plan that you and your creditors agreed upon, you will hurt your chances of getting future credit. Tell your creditors about any changes that may affect your payment agreement. If you owe a large amount of money and your creditors will not accept reduced payments, you may have to consider more extreme alternatives. A source of assistance with credit and money management problems is American Consumer Credit Counseling. Call (800) 769-3571 to find the location of the nearest office to you, or visit the National Foundation for Credit Counseling web site at: http://www.nfcc.org. Click on "Take the First Step" to search for location by city or state.
A counselor will review your application. The counselor is qualified to prepare a budget plan that will be given to you and your creditors for approval. The budget plan will outline exactly how each debt will be repaid. The plan usually is all that is required unless there is an emergency or a change in your financial situation. You can return to the counseling service at any time for further advice.
The counseling service is free. However, when the service prepares a debt repayment plan for you, a nominal fee may be charged to help with administrative costs. Local businesses pay the counseling service a fee for collecting the debts clients owe them. For example, if the counselor collects $20 to pay a debt owed to a bank, the bank pays the counseling service a sum (such as $3) for collecting the debt.
If You Do Not Pay Your Bills
If you miss a payment, you will be faced with increasing pressure to pay. First you will receive a letter reminding you that you missed a payment and asking you to pay promptly. After that, you may receive a more direct letter demanding payment or you may get a phone call.
If the bills are still not paid, they will probably be turned over to an independent collection agency. While the agency will try to get you to pay, the law protects you from certain actions. They cannot use abusive language or threaten you with violence. They cannot call you at unusual hours or threaten criminal prosecution. And they cannot discuss your financial situation with others.
Here is what to do if you receive a call from a creditor or a collection agency:
Creditors can take several kinds of legal action against you. These actions are often written into the sales contract you signed. If you fail to make payments, you will receive letters from a creditor’s attorney or collection agency warning you of the intended action.
What a creditor can do if you fail to pay your bills:
All of these actions are very serious and could jeopardize your ability to get credit in the future. You can reduce your chances of being harassed by creditors or collection agencies by communicating with your creditors and working out solutions for debt repayment early.
Making It Work
Remember no matter how bad your situation may be, do not ignore your bills and creditors. Prompt action is very important; let your creditors know you are having trouble before you miss payments and the situation becomes worse.
Once you have worked out a repayment plan, follow through with it and make the payments you promised to make. If you fall behind on your new commitments, creditors will be less understanding. If you fail to make the payments, creditors may hire a collection agency to make you pay.
Pretending you have no money problems will not make the problems go away. You and your family must face the situation honestly. Openly discuss spending decisions with all family members. This will help everyone realize that changes and sacrifices must be made for your family’s plan to be successful.
If you find yourself “over-extended” and you have tried financial counseling, budgeting, and reduced payments and still cannot make headway on debts, bankruptcy may become an option worth investigating. Bankruptcy is good at wiping out credit card debt, but you may have trouble eliminating some other kinds of debts, including child support, alimony, most tax debts, student loans, and secured debts. In addition, filing for bankruptcy brings long-term consequences for your financial situation and credit rating. It also affects your creditors.
Bankruptcy is a federal court process designed to help consumers and businesses eliminate their debts or repay them under the protection of the bankruptcy court. Bankruptcies can generally be described as “liquidations” or “reorganizations.”
In 2006, a new bankruptcy law went into effect which changed the requirements for people considering bankruptcy. All debtors now have to get credit counseling before they can file a bankruptcy case, and additional counseling on budgeting and debt management must be completed before their debts can be wiped out. Some filers with higher incomes are not allowed to use Chapter 7, but instead have to repay at least some of their debt under Chapter 13.
If you are considering bankruptcy, contact a lawyer experienced in bankruptcy proceedings. The lawyer can help you prepare necessary documents and file with the court. Discuss attorney and court fees at the first appointment because costs vary. | <urn:uuid:ae89247d-4c39-4586-b2f9-6a778c20caef> | CC-MAIN-2015-35 | http://www.extension.org/pages/16134/deciding-which-bills-to-pay-first | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2015-35/segments/1440645171365.48/warc/CC-MAIN-20150827031251-00279-ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964362 | 2,501 | 2.703125 | 3 |
For most people, eating healthy is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right habits, eating better can be just as easy as the fast-food options and just as enjoyable as your typical late-night snacks.
Creating healthy eating habits doesn’t have to require a complete overhaul of your lifestyle. With a few tweaks, you can trick yourself into developing a new habit of eating healthy.
Any processed food, whether it’s a package of cookies or a frozen meal, will be loaded with salt, calories and chemicals. Rather than jumping on a fad diet with unrealistic restrictions that are hard to follow, try clearing out all the processed food from your house. Instead, pick snacks and meals that have whole foods, like produce and whole grains.
If you find yourself always eating junk for lunch, then telling yourself you’ll for sure pack something in the morning, this one's for you. Make it easier on yourself and pack a lunch the night before. If you have a healthy option, you won’t have to resort to vending machine finds or fast-food.
Many of us fall into the trap of trying to do too much too fast when changing our eating habits. Instead of giving yourself a million new rules and cutting out everything you like, start with simple changes that are sustainable. Over time your tastes and routines will change without the shock to your system.
When it comes to unnecessary calories, chemicals, and artificial yuckiness that your body doesn't need... one of the best things to do is choose water over anything else. When you're going out to eat, make it a habit to ask for water with your meals. This not only helps you get full faster but is also giving your body what it actually wants.
If you know you’ll eat whatever ice cream comes in your home, don’t bring home the ice cream. Being realistic with yourself isn’t admitting weakness; it’s honesty about which foods you know you love that aren’t healthy. Instead of buying that family size bag of your favorite chips and getting down on yourself for eating the whole thing in one sitting, don’t buy them or buy a healthier alternative.
We all need a snack at some point, but so many snack foods are processed and bad for our health. The best way to avoid snacking on the unhealthy stuff is to make sure you have a full stock of healthy options. Try pre-cut veggies and fruit or some nuts for your mid-day boost of energy.
A common complaint of healthy eating is that it isn’t convenient and with a busy schedule, who has time to spend half the night cooking just so you can have dinner? But now there are so many kitchen appliances that allow for quick prep times and a full-cooked, filling and healthy meal at the end.
If you have a slow cooker or pressure cooker, get your ingredients ready the night before and when you’re ready, throw everything in, set the timer and you’re good to go.
If you find a healthy recipe you love, don’t shy away from doubling the recipe so you have leftovers for later. Once you’ve eaten for the night, portion out the remainder into single servings and either freeze them or store them in the fridge. Always be sure to keep track of how long leftovers have been in the fridge to avoid any food poisoning.
Alright, we all know this tip, but it’s repeated because it really does make a difference. If you make a grocery list and shop when you aren’t hungry, you’ll be less likely to impulse buy. Plus, writing out the foods you plan to purchase allows you to edit out the items you want to cut out of your diet or substitute them for something healthier.
No matter what you do, it’s likely your day is full of tasks and chores and errands, which means the time can slip away from you. If you aren’t keeping track, you can easily blow right through breakfast and lunch, meaning you’ll be starving by dinner and more likely to overeat or opt for a fast, unhealthy choice. If you plan out when you’ll eat and stay on schedule, you can avoid that pitfall. And the extra thought you put into your eating will give you the chance to make the best choice for your health.
Comments will be approved before showing up. | <urn:uuid:e4923d1e-cbb2-474c-ae67-766c269f82ef> | CC-MAIN-2022-21 | https://www.liveinfinitely.com/blogs/living-bigger/10-healthy-food-hacks-anyone-can-do | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-21/segments/1652662539101.40/warc/CC-MAIN-20220521112022-20220521142022-00338.warc.gz | en | 0.95042 | 922 | 2.5625 | 3 |
Common steps and sub-activities
Utopian socialism is the opposite of most other kinds of socialism - for example Marxism, in that it seeks to bring about change NOT by revolution, control, power, domination, chaos or anarchy, force or violence, but by peaceful ‘bottom up’ change through mutual agreement of those involved or affected.
1. The problem or problems to be solved are clearly stated as ‘design’ goals – measures by which one can judge one’s success [or not]. These goals must never change. If a change is requested, a new utopia must be formed with new solutions.
2. One or more people come up with a solution or solutions to the stated problem, which are first discussed in the group to ensure the solution is ethical, rational, solves the problem and hurts no one. In other words they envision what their ideal solution would be in response to the problem[s]
3. All those who think that the solution is ideal for them then have the responsibility to implement it and live it – actually put it into practise. In a sense this is a very small feasibility study. For example, if they think 'rewilding' is a good idea, then they can only rewild property they own.
4. The group have the responsibility of implementing it and living with it. Only by DEMONSTRATION may they encourage others to join in at the grass roots level. In other words, no force, no revolution, no violence, no power hungry leaders, just a demonstration of feasibility. They can explain but not ‘sell’ and they must hurt no one in the process. Those who believe in the idea, implement it and live it.
5. Those who become interested are given the objectives [problems to be solved that were formed when the group was formed], in order that they can assess and measure the results against these goals. The advantage is that all those in the group have a motive to make it work for them because they believe in it, but they too can simply leave if they think the whole thing is a failure or start new groups.
6. There is no king or prime minister or president, but a parliament formed of nominated representatives from each group that is responsible for identifying any group wide services that might benefit all the utopias, and ensuring the service is provided without hurting any other group in the process. The execution of any multi-utopia project is by the people in that utopia, and no on else may be co-opted or forced into providing help, unless they decide they too would like the service suggested.
7. There is an ‘army’ or ‘police force’ made up from nominated representatives from each utopia, that is charged with ensuring the rules aren't being broken - imposition of systems on others, or removal of functioning utopias by those seeking power etc
8. The feasibility study ends if it has no members ; and the solution is publicised as a failure. Only if the solution/ feasibility study has survived several years is it allowed to grow beyond its original members although questions can be asked at any time and its workings demonstrated or watched.
The approach is intended to be the opposite of globalisation and should provide far more equality as a consequence. The approach also means we can have any number of different sorts of mini utopias all over the world, each solving problems that are effectively both global and local. [Note that it could lead to diversity of cultures almost equal to those of a golden age - villages of culture and co-operation, removing loneliness at a stroke.]
Very important is that there is NEVER any imposition of an idea on others and that solutions may only be demonstrated NEVER imposed, advertised or enforced. Those who originated the solution MUST lead by example; if they fail, the solution is marked a failure.
Antoni Gaudi, the architect and designer, was a supporter of ''Utopian socialism''. And although he failed to set up a designed commune with his own houses [simply because it was an imposed solution], he succeeded with a virtual utopia of skilled craftsmen who eventually worked together to build the Sagrada Familia, one of the most innovative and breath-taking cathedrals in the world, a place of stunning beauty. | <urn:uuid:e2f657d4-2652-4e26-92c5-1812ee64ed85> | CC-MAIN-2021-10 | https://allaboutheaven.org/commonsteps/Utopian-Socialism | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-10/segments/1614178364027.59/warc/CC-MAIN-20210302160319-20210302190319-00106.warc.gz | en | 0.967263 | 883 | 2.65625 | 3 |
Black ash (Fraxinus nigra)
Return to our Trees of Canada resource here:
Trees of Canada →
Latin (scientific) name: Fraxinus nigra
Common English name: Black ash
Other names: Swamp ash, hoop ash
French name: Frêne noir
Found in northern swampy woodlands from Manitoba to the eastern provinces.
This small tree is the only ash native to Newfoundland.
1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b, 5a, 5b, 6a, 6b, 7a, 7b
A hardiness zone is a geographically defined area where a given plant is capable of growing. Hardiness zones are based largely on climate, particularly minimum temperatures. Zone 0 covers the harshest areas in Canada for plant species. Higher numbers represent more temperate areas.
For more information on plant hardiness zones in Canada, visit Natural Resources Canada.
No information available | <urn:uuid:6f4f215a-1db6-4b23-891a-294d0b5604fa> | CC-MAIN-2023-50 | https://treecanada.ca/resources/trees-of-canada/black-ash-fraxinus-nigra/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-50/segments/1700679100873.6/warc/CC-MAIN-20231209071722-20231209101722-00786.warc.gz | en | 0.833651 | 205 | 3.15625 | 3 |
This FREE Pilgrim Sentence Scramble activity is a fun way to reinforce sentence concepts and comprehension. There are TWO sets of cards so teachers and homeschoolers can use the set most appropriate for their students.
Set one: Sentence cards have correct capitals and punctuation. Students only need to put words in order and copy onto their recording sheet.
Set two: Sentence cards have no capitals or punctuation. Students must make this correction when writing sentences.
Enjoy this freebie and check out my many other literacy and math activity packs! | <urn:uuid:fe104ddc-ed3b-4bd7-9444-110dfb27bd36> | CC-MAIN-2014-35 | http://sallieborrink.com/free-pilgrims-sentence-scramble-activity-differentiated-multiple-grades/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2014-35/segments/1409535922763.3/warc/CC-MAIN-20140909043533-00126-ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921121 | 111 | 3.625 | 4 |
By Janet Klug
“Down Under” is a term that most people recognize as a colloquial reference to Australia and New Zealand, but there is another large island even farther down under than these two countries.
Keep going south, and as the weather gets colder and colder, eventually you will find yourself in Antarctica, the southernmost continent on earth — really the ultimate “Down Under.”
Between 1908 and 1943, seven nations laid claim to parts (sometimes overlapping) of Antarctica, beginning with Great Britain in 1908.
Connect with Linn’s Stamp News:
In 1923, New Zealand became the second nation to claim Antarctic land: a territory that was named Ross Dependency, in honor of Sir James Clark Ross, discoverer of the Ross Sea and some of what was called Victoria Land in the Antarctic.
The Australian Antarctic Territory, claimed in 1933, is the largest of the claims of the seven various nations.
Despite the fact that there are no towns or cities in this area Down Under, many of the nations that have Antarctic territories have issued postage stamps for their possessions. There do exist, however, stations that have been erected for the scientists who work in Antarctica.
New Zealand and Australia have both issued stamps for their Antarctic territories. New Zealand began early: In 1907, New Zealand overprinted 24,000 of its 1902 1-penny Universal Penny Postage stamps, depicting the allegorical figure of “Commerce,” for use by Lt. Ernest H. Shackleton and his crew on the British Antarctic Expedition (known as the Nimrod expedition, after its sailing vessel) of 1907-09.
The green overprint, in two vertical lines, reads “King Edward VII/Land.” The 1908 overprinted stamps are Scott 121a. Shackleton attempted to make landing at King Edward VII Land, but was prevented from doing so by unstable ice conditions. The expedition then moved to McMurdo Sound.
The New Zealand government had appointed Shackleton as postmaster for the New Zealand Antarctic territory and provided a circular datestamp for him to use as a postmark.
In 1910, Capt. Robert Falcon Scott was appointed postmaster of Victoria Land, and two New Zealand issues from a few years earlier were overprinted, becoming Scott 130d, the ½d Edward VII; and 131d, the 1d “Commerce.” This black overprint reads “VICTORIA/LAND.”
A second overprinting in 1912 produced stamps carried on the ship Terra Nova on a return visit to Antarctica during 1912-13.
The first stamps to be inscribed “Ross Dependency” were issued Jan. 11, 1957, in a set of four. The 4d denomination (Scott L2) features portraits of Shackleton and Scott, and the 8d stamp (L3) has a beautiful bicolor map showing the location of Ross Dependency in Antarctica.
New stamps were issued for Ross Dependency erratically from 1957 to 1994, but thereafter a set of stamps was issued annually. The images on the stamps picture birds, scientists at work, landscapes, and explorers.
For example, a 40¢ stamp issued in 1996 (Scott L40) shows a person in an ice cave.
Although issued by New Zealand, the Ross Dependency stamps are not valid for postage in New Zealand.
Australia’s first Australian Antarctic Territory stamps were issued in 1957, beginning with a 5p stamp (Scott L1) depicting Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and Alistair F. Mackay, who reached the South Magnetic Pole on Jan. 16, 1909.
Like New Zealand’s Antarctic issues, Australian Antarctic Territory stamps focus on science, birds, fishes, explorers, transportation, and scenery.
A set of stamps issued in 1997, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Australian National Antarctic research expeditions, uses photographic scenes of field sites. The first issue in the set, a 45¢ stamp (Scott L102), shows a row of lightweight round, red, modular shelters popularly known as “apple huts.”
Unlike Ross Dependency stamps, which are not valid in New Zealand, Australian Antarctic Territory stamps (except for the first seven issued between 1957 and 1961) can be used for postage in Australia.
Collecting Antarctica stamps is a relatively inexpensive pursuit, with the images making a hot summer day feel cooler, or a winter night not as cold as it would be in the southernmost Down Under area.
In any case, collecting Ross Dependency and Australian Antarctic Territory issues is a great way to start a South Pole collection.
For more information about this collecting area, see the American Society of Polar Philatelists’ website, or contact ASPP Secretary Alan Warren, Box 39, Exton, PA 19341-0039. | <urn:uuid:c8feb8d3-1bad-4c3e-96aa-e36cb1a93b79> | CC-MAIN-2017-34 | http://www.linns.com/news/world-stamps-postal-history/2016/october/beyond-new-zealand-australia-to-the-outermost-down-under.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-34/segments/1502886105961.34/warc/CC-MAIN-20170820015021-20170820035021-00417.warc.gz | en | 0.955451 | 994 | 3.40625 | 3 |
This continues a debate that has been ongoing in recent years, in which various experts have argued over the merits and shortcomings of neck manipulation within therapy.
Ischemic strokes are the most common form of stroke, occurring when arteries connected to the brain become narrowed or blocked.
Two years ago, Medical News Today reported on a debate about the effectiveness of spinal manipulation published on bmj.com. In this debate, the benefits of the treatment were discussed, along with the possibility of neck manipulation being linked to stroke.
Neck manipulation has been associated with a risk of cervical artery dissection, a form of arterial tear that is believed to be an important cause of stroke in young and middle-aged adults.
The new statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) has been published in their journal Stroke, and they believe that patients should be informed of this potential risk prior to receiving neck manipulation therapy.
Cervical artery dissection
A cervical artery dissection (CD) is a small tear in the layers of walls in the arteries in the neck. If the tear becomes dislodged into the bloodstream, it can form a clot and cause an ischemic stroke by blocking one of the blood vessels in the brain.
Dr. José Biller, lead author of the statement, explains how these dissections can occur:
"Most dissections involve some trauma, stretch or mechanical stress. Sudden movements that can hyperextend or rotate the neck - such as whiplash, certain sports movements, or even violent coughing or vomiting - can result in CD, even if they are deemed inconsequential by the patient."
Some of the techniques used within neck manipulation therapy enact these sudden movements, by extending and rotating the neck and at times involving forceful thrusting.
The relationship between CD and neck manipulation therapies came to light after case control studies were carried out. However, these investigations are not designed to prove any cause and effect. As a result, it is unclear whether there are other factors involved that could explain the link.
"Although a cause-and-effect relationship between these therapies and CD has not been established and the risk is probably low, CD can result in serious neurological injury," said Dr. Biller. "Patients should be informed of this association before undergoing neck manipulation."
One reason the relationship between CD and neck manipulation is tricky to evaluate is that one of the symptoms of CD is neck pain, which can precede a stroke by several days. This neck pain may lead people to seek treatment such as neck manipulation in order to relieve their symptoms.
The AHA recommend seeking medical evaluation urgently if neurological symptoms develop following either neck manipulation or trauma. Such symptoms include the following:
- Dizziness or vertigo
- Double vision
- Erratic eye movements
- Nausea and vomiting
- Pains in the neck or head
- Slurring of speech
"Some symptoms, such as dizziness or vertigo, are very common and can be due to minor conditions rather than stroke," says Biller, "but giving the information about recent neck manipulation can raise a red flag that you may have a CD rather than a less serious problem, particularly in the presence of neck pain."
Recently, Medical News Today reported on the development of "Strokefinder," a helmet that can make rapid stroke diagnoses. | <urn:uuid:588179aa-bb84-4820-b5f0-45b47c5601a7> | CC-MAIN-2017-09 | http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/280760.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2017-09/segments/1487501170249.75/warc/CC-MAIN-20170219104610-00248-ip-10-171-10-108.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954566 | 685 | 2.703125 | 3 |
The beautiful market town of Dorchester is the county town of Dorset. It is steeped in history and culture and boasts great places to visit, shop and eat. No holiday in Dorset would be complete without a visit to this fascinating town and its 6000 years of history.
Dorchester’s History & Heritage
Dorchester was an important town in Roman times (when it was called Durnovaria), then became a thriving Saxon mint during the 10th century, before becoming a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War. Much of the town was destroyed by fire in the 17th and 18th centuries and most of the buildings visible today date from Georgian times.
Dorchester Dorset played a significant part in the Monmouthshire Rebellion and many of those arrested were executed in the town in 1685 following the infamous Bloody Assizes, which was presided over by ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys.
In 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs who started the trade union movement in England were tried in the Old Crown Court in Dorchester and sentenced to seven years transportation. As they were tried by the same landowners who had had them arrested, their guilty verdict and their transportation to the colonies was guaranteed. You can still visit the Old Crown Court via an entrance in Stratton House, which is next door.
Maiden Castle, one of the largest and most impressive Iron Age hill forts in Europe, is located just 2km to the south west of Dorchester. The first settlement here was some time around 4000 BC and over the following 3000 years the settlement grew, and with it came a succession of larger and grander earthworks. The fort defences that are visible today date from around 800 BC when the Iron Age Celtic tribe, the Durotriges, were at the height of their power. Maiden Castle was almost certainly their capital until the Roman conquest of around 60 AD.
Dorchester lies at the heart of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Thomas Hardy lived in Dorset for most of his life and the county was the inspiration for much of his work. He was born at Higher Bockhampton just a few miles outside Dorchester (known to Hardy enthusiasts as Upper Mellstock) in a cottage built by his great-grandfather. The cottage was acquired by the National Trust in 1947 and is now open to the public. Hardy later made his home in Dorchester and in 1885 he moved to Max Gate, a house that he designed and that was built for him by his brother on the outskirts of the town. Max Gate is also owned by the National Trust and is open to the public. Many buildings that were featured in Hardy’s novels can be seen in Dorchester, including St Peter’s Church, The King’s Arms Hotel, The White Hart Hotel, The Corn Exchange, Barclays Bank (Henchard’s house) and Grey’s Bridge. When Thomas Hardy died, he was interred at Westminster Abbey in London but his heart is buried in Stinsford churchyard just outside Dorchester.
Dorchester is lucky enough to have a large number of museums covering a wide range of topics – something for everyone.
The Dorset County Museum contains interesting historical facts and features that help to bring the story of Dorchester to life. There is also the award-winning Writers Gallery, including Thomas Hardy’s study, some of the best Roman mosaics in England in the Victoria Gallery, as well as detailed local archaeology featuring Maiden Castle, local henges and barrows.
The Keep Military Museum, which was built in 1879, tells stories of courage and humour as it recreates the traditions of those who served in the regiments of Devon and Dorset for over 300 years. The award-winning Dinosaur Museum includes fossils, skeletons and life-size reconstructions, while the Teddy Bear House has some of the earliest teddies right through to today’s TV favourites. The Terracotta Warriors Museum houses life-size replicas of these unique Chinese statues, while the Tutankhamun Exhibition recreates the sights, sounds and smell of Tutankhamun’s ancient Egyptian tomb and treasure.
One of the best ways to discover the real Dorchester is by following one of the four town trails:
- Walk 1: A Roman Town Walk (takes about 45-60 minutes)
- Walk 2: A Town & River Walk (takes about 30-40 minutes)
- Walk 3: A Thomas Hardy Walk (takes about 75-90 minutes)
- Walk 4: A Gallows Walk (takes about 45-60 minutes)
The original site of Dorchester’s market was at the heart of the town around the Town Pump. Today there are still a few stalls here on most days. In the 19th century the Market Place moved to the south of the old town and there is still a thriving market to be found here every Wednesday morning. You can also purchase local produce at Dorchester’s monthly Farmers’ Markets in the Corn Exchange and at Poundbury.
On the western side of Dorchester lies the town of Poundbury, a rather radical development based on the vision and views of HRH Prince Charles. Poundbury was designed to integrate social and private housing and commercial and residential buildings in a series of high quality, high density, interlinked urban quarters. Its aim is to create an attractive, modern and pleasing place in which people can live, work, play and shop.
DORCHESTER HOLIDAY FACT FILE
Dorchester Tourist Information Centre
Antelope Walk, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1BE
Tel: 01305 267992
How to reach Dorchester by public transport
Dorchester has two train stations. Dorchester West is on the Bristol Temple Meads to Weymouth line and Dorchester South is on the London Waterloo to Weymouth line. National Express run a limited coach service to Dorchester. | <urn:uuid:481b2ab9-4d2d-4f31-bf23-2e153eedbc30> | CC-MAIN-2018-47 | http://visit-dorset.org.uk/places-to-visit-in-dorset/dorchester-dorset/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2018-47/segments/1542039743046.43/warc/CC-MAIN-20181116132301-20181116154301-00124.warc.gz | en | 0.973196 | 1,236 | 2.8125 | 3 |
In spite of the fact that fewer states allowed the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk in 2010-2012 than in the previous 2 years, the number of outbreaks of food poisoning linked to its consumption increased from 30 to 51, according to a study in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Elisabeth A. Mungai and colleagues from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evaluated reports of foodborne illness that had been sent to the agency, and compared the data for the two periods: 2007-2009 and 2010-2012.
An outbreak is the occurrence of at least 2 cases of a similar illness resulting from the consumption of a common food. They found that between 2007 and 2012 there were 81 outbreaks associated with raw milk, and that these resulted in 979 illnesses and 73 hospitalizations. The researchers found that of the outbreaks attributable to a single microbe, Campylobacter was far and away the most likely cause it was responsible for 81 percent of those outbreaks.
Although sales of raw milk were legal in only 20 states in 2010-2012, as compared to 28 states in the earlier period, nearly 20 percent of the outbreaks occurred in states where sale of raw milk was prohibited. In these cases, the investigators reported, most of the sources of raw milk were from dairy farms, and some were from so-called cow share or herd share arrangements. Thus, they pointed out The legal status of nonpasteurized milk sales in 1 state can also lead to outbreaks in neighboring states.
Such bacterial foodborne illnesses can have serious consequences for the elderly, the immune-compromised, and children, including kidney failure and death. Yet some individuals continue to believe that raw milk can provide health benefits, an opinion that has never been scientifically substantiated. Some believe that pasteurization, which involves briefly heating milk for example to 161 degrees for 20 seconds destroys its nutritional value, which is completely untrue.
This idea that raw milk is somehow superior to pasteurized milk is totally baseless, scientifically and medically, stated ACSH s Dr. Ruth Kava. The craving for raw milk is based on the idea that so-called natural or unprocessed foods are superior, but this is simply not true. Drinking raw milk is playing Russian roulette with one s health, she continued.
More information about the risks of raw milk can be found on the CDC s website. | <urn:uuid:63874350-8448-444e-9faf-c02321b8038c> | CC-MAIN-2021-25 | https://www.acsh.org/news/2015/02/18/nearly-one-thousand-people-sickened-raw-milk-cdc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-25/segments/1623487655418.58/warc/CC-MAIN-20210620024206-20210620054206-00533.warc.gz | en | 0.972036 | 483 | 3.34375 | 3 |
“Mommy, look what I found!”
Whether it is a baby bird, squirrel, bunny, or other wild animal, children have a knack for finding wild orphans. Across the United States during the spring and summer months, thousands of young wild animals will be picked up; some need to be rescued, most do not.
“At Brukner Nature Center, we care for more than 1,400 animals each year,” said Becky Crow, Curator of Wildlife. “They are brought to us by well-intentioned individuals, but many of them did not need to be rescued,” Crow added.
Baby bunnies, also known as kits, are one of the wild animals rescued most often, but usually do not need human help. Mother rabbits are only at the nest to feed their young twice a day for about five minutes—at dawn and dusk. And, yes, they really did put the nest in the middle of your backyard! One reason for this is so mama rabbit can see any predators that may be approaching while she is nursing her young. Kits are in their nest for only two to three weeks; a pretty short time before they are independent. Leave the nest alone unless you find cold, limp babies, or obviously injured ones. Brukner Nature Center has more advice for you on how to keep the young safe in the nest until they are ready to live on their own.
There is a myth that once a baby bird is touched by a human, it will not be cared for by the parent birds. Not true! First of all, birds, except for those in the vulture family, have a poor sense of smell. They cannot even tell that you touched the nestling when returning it to the nest. However, if you put a cold baby bird back in the nest and it is unable to beg for food when the parent arrives, it is in trouble. It is always best to call Brukner Nature Center for help and advice.
Did you know that mother deer forage for food, leaving their camouflaged, spotted fawns alone for several hours at a time? People who come across these vulnerable-looking fawns in the woods, their backyards and along roadways always assume they need help. Unless the fawn is obviously injured—broken leg, open wound, flies buzzing around it—it is most likely perfectly fine. Its mom intends to come back soon and expects to find the youngster right where she left it after the last feeding.
“It is illegal, as well as unwise, to keep wildlife as pets or even to try to raise orphans unless you are trained and have the proper permits from state and federal wildlife agencies,” said Crow. Licensed wildlife rehabilitators have the knowledge and experience to care for wild orphans that need help. They know how to raise orphans to be healthy and wild. When you find a wild animal you think needs help, it is best to call for advice so both you and the wild animal remain safe.
In this area, you can call Brukner Nature Center at 937-698-6493. Please make certain the wild animal in question needs to be rescued. Even with the best efforts of Brukner Nature Center, there is no substitute for Mother Nature.
Brukner Nature Center is a non-profit, privately-funded organization promoting the appreciation and understanding of wildlife conservation through preservation, education, and rehabilitation. Hours of operation are: Monday through Saturday from 9:00am-5:00pm and Sundays, 12:30-5:00pm. Admission is $2.50 per person or $10 for a family of 4 or more (cash or check). No admission charge on Sundays! For more information, call 937-698-6493, email email@example.com, or visit www.bruknernaturecenter.com. | <urn:uuid:35f8d457-857e-4aa7-8d9f-5605212862a8> | CC-MAIN-2023-23 | https://www.ohiotraveler.com/wild-orphans-to-rescue-or-not/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2023-23/segments/1685224645595.10/warc/CC-MAIN-20230530095645-20230530125645-00264.warc.gz | en | 0.963409 | 805 | 3.015625 | 3 |
Physics help: On an ice rink, two skaters of equal mass grab hands and spin in a mutual circle once every 2.9s?
If we assume their arms are each 0.80m long and their individual masses are 57.0kg , how hard are they pulling on one another?
- 1 decade agoFavorite Answer
The basic equation is:
F = mv2/r where F is the force, m is the mass v is the tangential velocity and r is the radius
But we need to find the velocity first so we need to work out the circumference of the circle which is pi*diameter (diameter is twice the length of the radius) of the circle
Therefore the circumference is 1.6*pi
We can now work out the velocity by dividing the circumference by the time it takes to complete one rotation:
v= (1.6*pi)/2.9 => v=0.5517*pi
now we can apply this to the original equation:
F= 214.038 Newtons (kgm/s^2)
where pi = 3.1416
This is the force that one person is exerting on the other.
- Anonymous5 years ago
common velocity V = m1 u1 / m1+m2 = m x4 / 2 m = 2 m/sec so, the answer is (3). | <urn:uuid:d316df6a-297b-4623-8bac-55a17534db88> | CC-MAIN-2021-10 | https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090224124703AAi8aVB | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2021-10/segments/1614178385534.85/warc/CC-MAIN-20210308235748-20210309025748-00010.warc.gz | en | 0.847954 | 290 | 3.1875 | 3 |
How to Keep Kids Resilient in a Strange Holiday Season
SUNDAY, Dec. 6, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Parents who are worried about the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on their children's mental health can help them build resilience, according to experts from Nationwide Children's Hospital.
A hospital survey found that two-thirds of parents worry that the effects on their children's mental health will be more challenging the longer the COVID-19 pandemic goes on.
But the experts said that parents can set kids up for success with open, honest and empathetic family conversations about how traditions might be different this year, and thoughtful planning for activities.
"Parents should take heart that kids have the ability to be incredibly resilient with the right support," said Parker Huston. He's clinical director of On Our Sleeves (the movement to transform children's mental health), and a pediatric psychologist for Big Lots Behavioral Health Services at Nationwide Children's, in Ohio.
"As they grow up, children are always changing, adapting to and learning new things. Of course, they do have their own expectations, routines and memories, so when they are told at this time of year that their holidays are going to be different, it can be difficult for them to accept, especially if they feel like they're missing out on some of their favorite parts of the season," he explained.
Huston suggested tapping into gratitude, which can help strengthen mental health in both children and adults. While kids may be disappointed about what they're missing out on, parents can encourage them to talk about what they're grateful for this year. Parents should share their feelings and listen to their children, he advised.
"As parents, I think it's on us to be more creative this year, considering our kids' favorite parts of this season and coming up with ways they can stay connected and active, even if some traditions need to change or be made new," Huston said in a hospital news release.
For example, "A cooking or baking lesson could be a great way to teach kids more about the family recipes they enjoy, and outdoor games can help keep everyone active and engaged with each other," he added.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention offers additional suggestions for ensuring children's mental well-being during the pandemic.
SOURCE: Nationwide Children's Hospital, news release, Dec. 2, 2020 | <urn:uuid:8cab9aa9-ae59-4d5f-bc96-e9e512a98934> | CC-MAIN-2022-40 | https://livinghealthy.hawaiipacifichealth.org/RelatedItems/6,1649084548 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-40/segments/1664030335124.77/warc/CC-MAIN-20220928051515-20220928081515-00486.warc.gz | en | 0.972317 | 497 | 2.640625 | 3 |
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