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AT&T Video is a Finalist in BCCCC Film Festival The Connected Child concept uses everyday consumer technology to help children rise above disabilities. This video features London Mabie, a nine year old who is developmentally similar to a three year old due to a rare genetic condition. Her dad uses technology to teach her basic academic and independent living skills. The powerful story is a a finalist in the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2013 Film Festival. We invite you to watch the video and vote for it to move to the next round of the film festival. Voting runs through March 1 on the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship website. Read more about London Mabie's experience below. The Connected Child: Using Technology to Rise Above Disabilities The caregivers of a child with a rare genetic disorder use a range of technologies like tablets and smart phones to help her learn, track her care and provide consistent learning experiences. KEYWORDS: People, Social Action & Community Engagement, Technology. Innovation & Solutions, Corporate Social Responsibility, Education, Technology, csr, disability, family, learning, parenting, sustainability, video competition, film competition, AT&T
OneGeology is the world's biggest geological mapping project. This organization has made geological maps from around the globe accessible on the internet through the OneGeology Portal. 110 nations are currently participating, represented by their Geological Surveys. The OneGeology Portal delivers digital geological map data from its source in participating nations using Web Map Service technology - using a distributed, dynamic, and sustainable model. The portal includes over 170 years of continuous scientific survey and research data. Thousands of rock units are mapped dating from more than 3000 million years ago.\| The objectives of the initiative include: 1) make existing geological map data accessible in whatever digital format is available in each country. 2) transfer know-how to those who need it, adopting an approach that recognises that different nations have differing abilities to participate. 3) stimulate a rapid increase in interoperability, achieved through the development and use of the web mark-up language, GeoSciML.
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have a big problem: their limited battery power. But researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are developing a way to extend the range by having drones act like birds. If a drone can land on a power line, the thinking goes, then it can exploit the electricity running through power lines to recharge. The key is getting the UAV to land right on a skinny line, which, given the slim margin of error involved, is no easy task. But both indoor and outdoor tests have gone well, and this week the MIT lab released a video showing a foam glider homing in on a power line and snagging itself on a string drawn in front of it. "Our work demonstrates that we can execute accurate, high-speed flight maneuvers with a fixed-wing UAV using low-cost onboard sensors," says Joseph Moore, one of the research assistants on the project. A drone, Moore says, cannot rely on its camera to guide it to a power line. The typical urban setting is simply too cluttered to estimate the range to a target (assuming it can be seen at all). In addition, the frame rate of most cameras is too slow for a landing that must be executed in less than a second. So the MIT glider employs instead a magnetoresistive magnetometer. This sensor helps the UAV zero in on an electrical power line by locating the magnetic field it produces. It is very precise—and it has to be. "You need to be within 6 cm of the power line," Moore says. "If you miss that, you fall off the power line." In these tests, the small drone was only 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) from the power lines when launched. However, the magnetometer has a range of only four meters total, so a real UAV operating in the field would need to depend on GPS points gleaned from satellite imagery reach the general vicinity of a power line. Moore won't go into great detail about the recharging process because the MIT team has yet to patent its solution. He does, however, outline three basic options. First, there is inductive coupling, whereby the drone's claws form a transformer around the electrical line. Alternately, a UAV could pierce the line and draw current directly from it. Finally, the drone could harvest energy from the electrical coronas formed by very-high-voltage lines. The MIT project, which is funded by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, and DARPA, is set to wrap up this summer. In the meantime, there are a few outstanding issues to address. For example, the lab will need to partner with mechanical design experts to develop a complex grasping mechanism. For the tests, a simple hook was used. The team is also looking at biomimetic features, such as hair-like sensors running along the wings of the UAV to measure airflow. "If we can measure the wind, we can use the wind to improve the mission duration of our vehicle," he says. "We experimented a little with flapping robots," Moore notes, but adds that researchers decided to keep things simple. More complicated designs, he says, "are on the horizon."
Council on Environmental Quality The Council on Environmental Quality coordinates federal environmental efforts and works closely with agencies and other White House offices in the development of environmental policies and initiatives. The Council's Chair, James L. Connaughton who was appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, serves as the principal environmental policy adviser to the President. In addition, CEQ reports annually to the President on the state of the environment; oversees federal agency implementation of the environmental impact assessment process; and acts as a referee when agencies disagree over the adequacy of such assessments. Congress established CEQ within the Executive Office of the President as part of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Additional responsibilities were provided by the Environmental Quality Improvement Act of 1970. In enacting NEPA, Congress recognized that nearly all federal activities affect the environment in some way and mandated that before federal agencies make decisions, they must consider the effects of their actions on the quality of the human environment. NEPA assigns CEQ the task of ensuring that federal agencies meet their obligations under the Act. The challenge of harmonizing our economic, environmental and social aspirations has put NEPA at the forefront of our nation's efforts to protect the environment.
An unmanned aerial vehicle named DEMON made history last month when it demonstrated “flapless flight” at an airfield in Cumbria, England. The demonstrator aircraft’s ailerons/elevators were locked off, allowing it to maneuver using nothing but a series of forced-air jets along the trailing edges of its wings. In the future, such technology could be applied to military or commercial aircraft. DEMON was developed by aerospace company BAE Systems, Cranfield University, and nine other UK universities. It is part of BAE’s £6.2 million (US$9.85 million) FLAVIIR (Flapless Air Vehicle Integrated Industrial Research) program, and took five years to complete. UPGRADE TO NEW ATLAS PLUS More than 1,500 New Atlas Plus subscribers directly support our journalism, and get access to our premium ad-free site and email newsletter. Join them for just US$19 a year.UPGRADE Its “fluidic flight control” system consists of an auxiliary power unit that supplies compressed air to a series of circulation control devices, located in the wings. These release the compressed air from slots along the top and bottom trailing edges of both wings, creating a “blade of air” immediately behind them. Using flight control algorithms to vary which slots the air comes out of (top or bottom, left or right), the roll direction of the plane can be determined. “What the FLAVIIR Team have achieved in such a short time is nothing short of remarkable,” said BAE’s Richard Williams. “I was in Cumbria to watch DEMON fly and I feel sure I have witnessed a significant moment in aviation history.” Flapless aircraft would have several advantages over traditional planes, in that they would have fewer moving parts, require less maintenance and present a stealthier profile.View gallery - 9 images
By Almut-Barbara Renger While Oedipus met the Sphinx at the highway to Thebes, he did greater than resolution a riddle—he spawned a fable that, informed and retold, might turn into one in all Western culture’s important narratives approximately self-understanding. deciding upon the tale as a threshold myth—in which the hero crosses over into an unknown and hazardous realm the place principles and bounds are usually not known—Oedipus and the Sphinx offers a clean account of this mythic come upon and the way it bargains with the ideas of liminality and otherness. Almut-Barbara Renger assesses the story’s meanings and features in classical antiquity—from its presence in old vase portray to its absence in Sophocles’s tragedy—before arriving at of its significant reworkings in ecu modernity: the psychoanalytic concept of Sigmund Freud and the poetics of Jean Cocteau. via her readings, she highlights the ambiguous prestige of the Sphinx and divulges Oedipus himself to be a liminal creature, delivering key insights into Sophocles’s portrayal and developing a theoretical framework that organizes reviews of the myth’s reception within the 20th century. Revealing the narrative of Oedipus and the Sphinx to be the very paradigm of a key transition skilled by means of all of humankind, Renger situates fantasy among the competing claims of technology and paintings in an engagement that has vital implications for present debates in literary reports, psychoanalytic idea, cultural heritage, and aesthetics. Read or Download Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau PDF Similar Ancient Classical books Talking of Siva is a variety of vacanas or free-verse sayings from the Virasaiva spiritual circulation, devoted to Siva because the preferrred god. Written by means of 4 significant saints, the best exponents of this poetic shape, among the 10th and 12th centuries, they're passionate lyrical expressions of the hunt for an unpredictable and spontaneous religious imaginative and prescient of 'now'. The examine of feelings and emotional screens has accomplished a deserved prominence in fresh classical scholarship. the feelings of the classical international could be plumbed to supply a worthwhile heuristic device. feelings can assist us comprehend key problems with historic ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, yet, extra often than no longer, classical students have became their cognizance to "social feelings" requiring functional judgements and moral judgments in private and non-private gatherings. This highbrow background examines the reception of Carl von Clausewitz's army theories in Britain and the USA. within the first finished examine of the literature, Christopher Bassford argues that the influence of Clausewitzian conception has been underestimated and he follows the path of Clausewitzian impact from pre-1873 Britain to 1945. This e-book comprises new serious versions of 2 early and significant examples of the most well-liked overdue Roman ancient genres. the 2 texts, Chronicle of Hydatius and Consularia Constantinopolitana, supply an integral modern account of the fourth century A. D. those variations, in keeping with the 1st ever exam of all surviving manuscripts, are supplied with specified introductions and appendices, and comprise the 1st English translation of Hydatius. Extra info for Oedipus and the Sphinx: The Threshold Myth from Sophocles through Freud to Cocteau Forty. Sen. Oed. 92–102: “nec Sphinga caecis verba nectentem modis / fugi: cruentos vatis infandae tuli / rictus et albens ossibus sparsis solum; / cumque e superna rupe iam praedae imminens / aptaret unfortunately verbera et caudae movens / saevi leonis extra conciperet minas, / carmen poposci: sonuit horrendum insuper, / crepuere malae, saxaque impatiens morae / revulsit unguis viscera expectans mea; / nodosa sortis verba et implexos dolos / ac triste carmen alitis solvi ferae. ” “Even while dealing with the Sphinx, who strings her phrases jointly within the darkest of how, i didn't ﬂee. i've got deﬁed the bloody vengeance of that ghastly seer, and stood upright upon the floor, shimmering white with strewn bones; and as she shouted out threats like a ﬁerce lion, her wings outstretched on the prepared, the whip of her tail in movement, mendacity in wait to ambush her prey from atop the excessive cli∏, there after which did I call for to listen to her riddle: nightmarishly did she allow it resound above me, her jaws gnashing, and, su∏ering no hesitation, tore her claws from the cli∏, slavering for my innards. I unraveled the serpentine phrases and all the interwoven guile of the doom pronouncement of the winged beast, to ﬁnd the hidden answer. ” forty-one. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature within the moment measure, trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky (Lincoln, 1997). forty two. a variety of of reports have seemed in this subject. specially beneficial between them are W. Brach, Der Œdipe von Corneille und der des Voltaire, verglichen mit dem Oedipus Rex des Sophokles (Diss. , Marburg an der Lahn, 1914); W. Jördens, Die französischen Ödipusdramen: Ein Beitrag zum Fortleben der Antike und zur Geschichte der französischen Tragödie (Bochum, 1933); M. Mueller, young ones of Oedipus and different Essays at the Imitation of Greek Tragedy, 1550–1800 (Toronto, 1980), 105–152. a quick, n o tes to pag e s 21– 22 ninety seven summary rendering (of Sophocles, Seneca, medieval assets, Corneille, Voltaire, Platen, Hofmannsthal, and Cocteau) are available in W. Koﬂer and M. Korenjak, “Der literarische Ödipus: Ein Streifzug von der Antike bis Cocteau,” 70–73. On Corneille’s remedy of this fabric, the next are steered: W. H. Friedrich, “Ein Ödipus mit gutem Gewissen: Über Corneilles Œdipe,” in Friedrich, Vorbild und Neugestaltung: Sechs Kapitel zur Geschichte der Tragödie (Göttingen, 1967), 112–139; P. A. Ogundele, “The Oedipus tale within the arms of Sophocles, Seneca and Corneille,” Nigeria and the Classics 12 (1970), 31–51; on Voltaire’s remedy: P. VidalNaquet, “Œdipe à Vicence et à Paris: Deux moments d’une histoire,” Quaderni di storia 14 (1981), 3–21 (ANOVA evaluate with different variants of the eighteenth century). forty three. Œdipe 247f. ; quoted from Corneille, Œuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de l. a. Pléiade): Textes établis, présentés et annotés, ed. G. Couton (Paris, 1987), vol. three, 13–93 (Œdipe), right here 31. forty four. The scholarship has comprehensively investigated the comparisons to be drawn among Oedipus the King and los angeles computer infernale by way of repeated constructions and content material.
Nijera Kori’s overarching goal, as noted above, is a society free from oppression and deprivation through the establishment of the fundamental rights of people. It believes that the struggle to transform the underlying structures of inequality, injustice and exclusion must be conducted on a number of different levels, starting with the individual and extending to the village, regional and national levels. In addition, it must encompass the various spheres, economic, social and political, in which the poor are denied their rights. In realising this goal, Nijera Kori follows a number of principles that Nijera Kori adheres to, and they are: Nijera Kori believes that there is poverty, unemployment, concentration of wealth and power and various other injustices in the society. The majority of the poor are exploited by a handful, as the means of production as well as political power are owned and controlled by the latter. In this back- drop, Nijera Kori defined its role to act as a facilitator of a dialogical process, through which people would be equipped with the ability to analyse and assess their situation and to take action to redress the prevailing system. In this effort, Nijera Kori provides technical services to promote self-confidence and enhance people’s organisational capacity so that they are able to claim and/or establish their rights through building their own organisations rather than depending on the agency such as Nijera Kori to act on their behalf. Though Bangladesh has become famous for its innovation in the arena of micro-credit, Nijera Kori continues with its principle of ‘non delivery of credit’. Nijera Kori believes that micro-credit cannot and does not reach all sections of society – especially the neglected communities and people, who needs it the most. At the same time, Nijera Kori also believes that micro-credit programmes of NGOs, as an alternative financial institution, instead of making people self reliant self-reliant, succeeded in creating dependencies and vulnerabilities among the communities those have enlisted under the micro-credit program. For Nijera Kori, gender equality is one of the pillars of the organisation and remains central to Nijera Kori’s understanding of poverty and social injustice. Nijera Kori recognises that patriarchy perpetuates the disadvantages of inequality, injustice and exclusion, which are intensified in relation to women and girls. In addition, they also suffer from gender-specific forms of discrimination and domestic violence within their household as well as face restrictions on their physical movements and discrimination within the labour market in the larger society. Nijera Kori also believes that male-female relations need not be inherently antagonistic and that men can become women’s allies in the struggle against patriarchal oppression. Indeed, without active support and participation of the men from their families and from their class, poor women will find their own struggle for respect and recognition far more difficult. Nijera Kori’s capacity-building strategy emanates from a fundamental belief that “power” should and must remain with the people. Hence, Nijera Kori’s programs and activities are structured to ensure that financial and organisational autonomy remains with the people. Nijera Kori emphasises on promoting autonomous nature and structure of the working people’s organisations so that the resource–poor members gradually decrease their dependency on Nijera Kori and finally rely on their own strength. Nijera Kori believes in the enormous power of collective action, and consciously deploys its resources to strengthen bonds among the members of the poor people’s organisation. This process is supported by high frequency of meetings, for both staff and landless groups. This frequency of face-to-face meetings is important for promoting closer relationships, establishing trust and ensuring participatory decision-making and accountability. Participatory democracy is the core value that shapes Nijera Kori’s management structure and decision-making process. Nijera Kori also aims to infuse the democratic principles in the management of the people’s organisation that they facilitate to develop. Nijera Kori strongly believes that democratic management is the key to successfully establish the rights of the poor Nijera Kori team based on a thorough analysis of the causes of poverty, inequality and social injustice, concluded to work with a broad spectrum of poor people who primarily depend on selling of labour as their main source of livelihood. They include wage labourers, sharecroppers, small and marginal farmers and people involved in various traditional trades and occupations. Furthermore, Nijera Kori makes it a priority to involve the ethnic communities of Bangladesh within its program. In sum, Nijera Kori aims to work with the poor who lives under extreme poverty and whose basic human rights and needs are largely ignored by the society. The defined target population, according to Nijera Kori’s analyses, is faced with multiple constraints such as economic, social and political. In terms of economic constraint, the poor i.e., the landless and asset-less rely on direct or indirect sale of their labour power to meet their basic needs. However, due to existing structure and organisation of the labour market the poor as a labour-seller have very little or no bargaining power. They must therefore accept wages for their labour, which are often arbitrarily determined by the buyers and may not be sufficient to meet even their daily subsistence needs. In political terms the poor rarely have any voice in local or national structures of decision-making. At the informal village level and/or local government institutions the powerful landed sections of village society dominate the shalish (informal village court) which addresses disputes within village society and in the delivery of the government’s programs. In social terms, the poor are kept in their place by powerful norms and beliefs which legitimatise their oppression and disenfranchisement, and also prevent them from questioning the status quo. Due to their lack of exposure to any alternative set of values, and often reinforced by their lack of basic education, has left the poor unaware of their legally recognised rights, while absence of their own organisation prevents them from claiming and establishing these rights. An additional set of cultural norms and practice further undermines the position of women.
Popcorn is a special type of corn that puffs up when heated. It is one of the most popular snack foods in the United States. According to the Popcorn Board, Americans consume 52 quarts of popcorn per person each year. Seventy percent of purchased popcorn is eaten at home and the rest is enjoyed at sporting events, movies and other events. Popcorn Is Gut-Friendly Corn is a whole-grain food, and all types of corn are gluten-free. Gluten is a protein found in whole-grain foods such as wheat, rye, barley and triticale. Gluten makes dough elastic and baked goods chewy. However, it can cause severe intestinal problems for individuals with celiac diseases or other intestinal problems. Since popcorn does not contain gluten or wheat, it is a good snack option for individuals on a gluten-free diet. Popcorn Fits into Any Food Plan The nutritional content of popcorn depends on how it is prepared. One cup of air-popped popcorn has only 31 calories and 1cup of oil-popped corn has only 55 calories. According to ChooseMyPlate.gov, 3 cups of popcorn is considered a 1-ounce grain equivalent of whole grain. This is good news if you are trying to control your appetite with a filling snack. Instead of 1 slice of bread or 1cup of ready-to-eat cereal, you can have 3 cups of air-popped popcorn. It’s All in the Hull Researchers have found that the crunchy hull or center of the popcorn is packed with ferulic acid, a type of antioxidant. Ferulic acid is found in a variety of foods such as rice, corn, barley, beans and other whole grains, but is more concentrated in popcorn due to its low water content. Antioxidants like ferulic acid protect your cells from free radicals, harmful substances produced by some digested foods and by exposure to tobacco smoke, pollution and other toxins. As part of a healthy diet, antioxidants can help prevent heart disease, diabetes and some types of cancer. Although popcorn is a naturally healthful snack, it can easily become unhealthful when prepared with large amounts of oil, salt or sugar. This is especially true of movie popcorn. A medium bag of movie popcorn has approximately 720 calories, 1,860 mg of sodium and 48 grams of fat. Adults following a 2,000-calorie diet should not consume more than 67 grams of fat per day. The recommended intake of sodium for adults is 2,300 mg or less per day. Articles For Your Diet - popcorn image by Marek Kosmal from Fotolia.com
Are all breast lumps cancer? No. Lumps in your breast are very common and very few of them are caused by breast cancer. Tumour -A tumour is a lump of cells, it can be benign or malignant Benign – A lump of cells that can NOT grow or spread (most benign tumour are not life-threatening, the exception being some types of brain tumour). Malignant – Cells (or a tumour) that can grow and spread. Malignant cells can be life threatening. The vast majority of breast lumps are benign, that means they are non-cancerous. Most people who have a breast lump do not have cancer, in fact if you took one hundred women who all had a lump in their breast, 90 of them (90 %) would not have breast cancer (even though they had a breast lump). The same information can be shown using a picture, the yellow people have a breast lump but don’t have cancer, the green people have a breast lump that is cancer. So what causes breast lumps apart from cancer? In part it depends on your age, some types of breast lump e.g. fibroadenomas are more common in women under 40 while others, such as breast cysts are more common in women over 40 years. These are benign (non-cancerous) lumps and having a fibroadneoma doesn’t increase your risk of getting breast cancer. Fibroadenomas don’t usually hurt and you can have more than one. They are usually 1-3 cm. The charity Breast Cancer Care have more information on fibroadenomas. - Breast Cysts Breast cysts are fluid filled sacs in the breast they can feel soft or hard and can be painful. Many cysts go away by themselves, if they are large and sore they can be drained using a needle. The charity Breast Cancer Care have more information on breast cysts. - Benign phyllodes tumor These are relatively rare and are usually found in older women, they can be found anywhere in the breast and can grow quite large, quite quickly. These tumours are usually removed by a small operation (surgery). A phyllodes tumour can be benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). A pathologist will look at a sample of the tumour and they will be able to tell if it is benign or malignant. Breast Cancer Care have more information on phyllodes tumours. Breast Cancer Care can also send you leaflets in the post about benign breast lumps. If so many lumps are benign, why should you bother your doctor? Because you can’t tell which lumps need treating (because they are malignant) and which lumps can be left alone. Your GP will have a better idea simply because they have felt hundreds of lumps and bumps and if they are in doubt they will send you to your local breast clinic to have it checked out. If the breast clinic are in any doubt they will remove the lump. It is far better to get this done sooner rather than later because even in the unlikely event that it is cancer the sooner it is discovered the more successful treatment is. More Information on breast lumps: If you are reading this because you’ve found a lump in your breast, what should you do? Make an appointment with your GP, you can ask to see a female GP if you prefer and tell them about it, don’t chicken out, make sure it is the first think you ask them about when you get in the door (don’t leave it until the end of your appointment when you are just away to walk out the door). Say “this is embarrassing, but I’ve found a lump in my breast and I’m worried it could be cancer”. Your GP may want to feel the lump and may refer you to a breast clinic, remember this is not a “bad” sign, it can be hard to tell if a lump is cancer or not without doing more tests and that is exactly what breast clinics are there for.
An in press article identifies Mesoplodon hotaula as a new species of beaked whale. Again. Whales don't have beaks Beaked whales are a misnomer: they have a snout that's labeled a beak, but that's not really a beak in any sense. Beaked whales, or ziphiids, deserve a better, or at least a more accurate, name. Beaked whales are ~21 species of odontocetes (toothed whales) and share a relatively recent (less than 30 million years is recent-ish) common ancestor with dolphins. Beaked whales are neat for being sexually dimorphic (having distinct female and male morphologies) in their dentition; whereas females are completely toothless, males in all but one species have only one or two pairs of teeth. Beaked whales are moderate in size for whales, being larger than most dolphins and smaller than the largest toothed whales (sperm whales) and the largest baleen whales (such as the sperm whale). They are also the whales that no one goes on whale-watching trips for. They are deep-diving animals, seeking prey items hundreds of meters of depth underwater. They don't appear to be abundant in population, although some species have never been seen in the wild. Those species have only been identified off dead, or dying, individuals washed up on the shore. That last part makes them fairly difficult to study and can create some taxonomic problems. Mesoplodon hotaula is not a "new" species A researcher named Deraniyagala first named Mesoplodon hotaula in 1963. A specimen washed ashore in Sri Lanka, Deraniyagala described it as a distinct species, but didn't do much to provide evidence for why it was distinct. Two years later, two other researchers considered M. hotaula as a junior synonym (an unnecessary redundant name) for an already named species, and sank the name. Since then, researchers have been making some noise about resurrecting the species name, but this new study is the most concrete work to do so. The in press article by Dalebout et al. looked at seven specimens of M. hotaula found in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, the Republic of Kiribati, the Line Islands, the Republic of Maldives, and the Republic of Seychelles. Most of these specimens had skeletal tissue still preserved, while one was only dried soft tissue. From this tissue they were able to compare the morphology and genetic information of these specimens with already published and new information from other, already-recognized, species of Mesoplodon. The evidence supports fifteen distinct genetic lineages within Mesoplodon, all of which are currently identified as species. What is the importance of this study This study increases our understanding of species diversity within the oceans and, hopefully, provides some further motivation to study oceanic diversity. To quote from Dalebout et al.'s (in press) abstract, This discovery brings the total number of Mesoplodon species to 15, making it, by far, the most speciose yet least known genus of cetaceans. The amount of genetic diversity found within Mesoplodon is kind of ridiculous, particularly since we have no idea on how abundant, or non-abundant, all of these species are. Someone who really likes trying to find needles in haystacks (...in the ocean. ...this may be a bad metaphor) should invest in tracking down these populations and trying to ascertain their abundance. Top image from here. This write-up inspired by write-ups by thedodo.com and phys.org. No beaked whales were probably hurt in this write-up, but I'm not sure because they're so difficult to find unless they're rotting on the beach.
This weekend the League of Women Voters of Arlington is hosting a workshop to educate residents about the history of racism behind American — and Arlington’s — housing policies. Former Wakefield teacher and co-founder of Challenging Racism, Marty Swaim, told ARLnow that the Federal Housing Administration started subsidized mortgages during the Great Depression — but only to whites. In segregated Arlington, this led to developers building suburbs for white buyers who could access the federal program helping them afford the properties. “It depressed the value of black properties because it made those areas even less desirable,” Swaim said. “It’s a cascade of effects.” One 1971 HUD guide for homebuyers in Arlington, retrieved from the Center of Local History’s archives, mapped housing by price. Black neighborhoods like Hall’s Hill and Green Valley were color-coded in red to signify the lowest home values (under $20,000.) Whiter neighborhoods in North Arlington were shaded blue and purple to indicate more attractive homes valued between $40,000 and $50,000. “A lot of Federal Housing Administration loans went to people who settled in these areas, and they were all white,” said Swaim. Redlining was in addition to another form of discrimination prevalent in Virginia: restrictive covenants on deeds that prevented homeowners from selling to minority homebuyers. Some such covenants remain on deeds in Arlington, unenforceable but a reminder of the state’s segregated past. Redlining and restrictive covenants were outlawed in 1968 with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, a bill which took years to gain traction. In 1965, activists in Northern Virginia led a petition drive to support it, garnering signatures from 9,926 Arlingtonians, some of whom reporters from the Arlington Sun described as signing the petition in secret from their husbands or neighbors. “It is abundantly clear that the Negroes will be welcomed in hundreds of neighborhoods in Northern Virginia,” activist Arthur Hughes told the Sun at the time. But even after the Fair Housing Act passed, decades of discrimination would affect black neighborhoods in Arlington, and nationwide, for years to come. “Arlington is not immune,” agreed Carol Brooke, who heads the League’s Affordable Housing Committee. Brooke said Saturday’s event is an opportunity to highlight how racist policies shaped neighborhoods and determined who has been allowed to call Arlington home. One example she cited is the the county’s use of zoning to create and preserve single-family homes — a policy researcher Richard Rothstein has linked to communities trying to price out black neighbors. This year, it’s also a policy lawmakers from Charlotte to Minneapolis to Oregon are abolishing or weakening. In 1975, County Board Chair John Purdy wrote a letter warning officials to keep watch on banks and real estate agents not following the fair housing laws. Not long after, a county task force found that when black homebuyers had enough money to purchase more expensive homes, real estate agents “steered” them to only South Arlington properties, according to a copy of the report ARLnow found in the history center’s archives. The same investigation found black homebuyers needed higher levels of income to qualify for the same properties as the undercover white homebuyers. In 1990, the Washington Post reported a study finding that black homebuyers in Arlington were treated “significantly different” than their white counterparts 10 percent of the time, with real estate agents “steering” clients in the same way the 1970s report had found. “We are interested in having people being to think about how institutional racism developed in Arlington,” said Swaim, who said she co-founded Challenging Racism after learning about the persistent racial achievement gaps in Arlington Public Schools. When researching the issue, she learned unequal school performance was of a wider legacy of racist policies. “Those conversations are intended to move you past the ‘getting started phase’ so you have some skills and a lot of content knowledge, and can take some leadership to end racism,” she said of Saturday’s event. Brooke said the League is also hoping the workshop can help lead to better conversations, and possibility solutions, to the county’s affordable housing shortage that some forecast could displace 20,000 residents. “The goal is enlightenment and advocacy to help change the housing patterns that still exist that are still the legacy of those racist practice,” she said. Although the workshop’s online signup is sold out, she expects some last-minute cancellations and encourages people interested in attending to still stop by.
DSSC photoelectrochemical solar cells that mimic the action of chlorophyll in nature are already being commercialized. They are ten times as efficient as the version met in nature and they are more tolerant of reflected (polarized) light, light at narrow angles of incidence and low levels of light than most alternatives. An example in production is the ink jet printed flexible film from the G24 Innovations factory in the UK where they utilize the latest breakthrough in material science and nanotechnology creating a new class of advanced solar cells which are the closest mankind has come to replicating nature's photosynthesis. This technology platform will enable a wide range of new products - from those used by consumers every day, such as mobile telephones and laptops, to more cutting-edge products ranging from sensors, water purification and LED lighting systems, portable tent structures and building products. Despite this advance, the academics across the world feel that DSSC, invented in Switzerland and widely developed and commercialised across Europe, may be far from optimal in design. For example, questions of interest to the Department of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology in the USA currently include: - What controls the rate of charge injection from the dye into the semiconductor? - What controls the rate of back reaction of injected electrons with oxidized species in the solution? - Why is the iodide iodine redox couple the only redox shuttle that works well in these cells? - Can the iodide iodine system be replaced by other redox species that would allow more efficient use of the available energy in the photosensitized electrode systems? - What controls the rate of electron percolation through the TiO2 film and how do charge carriers "know" to move towards the back electrode as opposed to recombining with the species in the electrolyte? To address some of these questions, Dr. Nathan Lewis, George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology says his team is studying a series of Os- and Ru-based metal complexes. This allows them to vary the ground state redox potential, the excited state redox potential, and the electronic coupling to the electrode surface in a systematic fashion. He is investigating the effects that these variations have on the performance of the photoelectrochemical cell. He says, "We have performed an investigation of how these changes affect the steady-state current vs voltage properties of the cells, and also have performed nanosecond and femtosecond studies of the dynamics of charge injection and recombination at these interfaces. In addition, we are attempting to understand and block the back reaction of electrons in the TiO2 with oxidized species in the electrolyte and to block this reaction through controlled surface functionalization processes. Finally, we are synthesizing a novel series of linked donor-acceptor complexes in an attempt to suppress recombination and to open up the use of other redox couples than iodide iodine and thereby obtain significant improvements in energy conversion efficiency from these types of systems." A typical DSSC construction Source: Fraunhofer ISE For more information read the report Printed Photovoltaics and Batteries. Also attend Printed Electronics Asia 2007 or Printed Electronics USA 2007 Source of top image: sciencedaily.com
Synopses & Reviews Sculpture is becoming known as one of Chinaand#8217;s great arts. Neolithic figurines, rows upon rows of underground terra-cotta statues, exquisite bronzes, Buddhas carved in cave wallsand#151;all these are part of a vast sculptural heritage. This gorgeous book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to offer a comprehensive history of Chinese sculpture. Spanning some seven thousand years, Chinese Sculpture explores a beautiful and diverse world of objects, many of which have come to light in recent decades. The authors analyze and present, mostly in color, more than five hundred examples of Chinese sculpture, dividing Chinaand#8217;s rich and complex sculptural legacy into two partsand#151;secular (tomb and mortuary art) and religious (Buddhist, Confucianist, and Daoist art). Throughout, the authors highlight the inventiveness, purposes, and brilliant execution of Chinese sculpture and comment on how the countryand#8217;s culture nurtured the practical and intellectual choices that shaped its sculptural traditions over the millennia. - For more information, visit the Web site at www.yalebooks.com/china About the Author Angela Falco Howard is professor of Asian art at Rutgers University and formerand#160;special consultant in Chinese Buddhist art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Li Song is the former editor of Fine Art Studies (Beijing) and was editor in chief of the volume on sculpture in the Encyclopedia of China. Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Chinese Art History and director of the Center for the Art of Asia at the University of Chicago. Yang Hong is professor and research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and senior editor of Cultural Relics.
Gas chromatography Post _3 ( Flow control) This is my 3rd post in GC. In fact, this topic which I am going to demonstrate in brief seems minor or not so important. However, I believe that is an important angle which a lot my ignore. Flow control& The relation between pressure and flow rate are essential if you are looking for a perfect components separation, retention times, and identification. Now let us move to the topic: 1- The gas flow in the capillary column is small depending on the type of gas and diameter of The column .it varies from 0.1 ml up to 10 ml per minute. 2- A well regulated and constant flow is important for the reliability, the accuracy and the Reproducibility of retention values. for a column diameter of 0.25mm : N2 flow is 0.40 ml/min, He is 0.7ml/min, and H2 1.1ml/min. while for a packed column of 0.53mm diameter: N2 flow is 5.0 ml/min, He is 9.0ml/min, and H2 12.0 ml/min. It is obvious that the flow is significantly varies based on column diameter and type as well. This means different separation quality, retention values, and ….. 3- The relation between pressure and flow rate: 1-The flow rate is the amount of gas flowing through a column per unit time. The amount depends on the gas velocity and the column diameter. 2- The pressure causes the gas to flow. Pressure and flow are related to each other By the following equation: P= F*R P= pressure R= resistance F= flow Resistance is related to Column length, diameter, a viscosity of Carrier gas, temperature, and external tubing A pressure regulator is installed now to supply a constant gas pressure.
Organic Fertilizers for Crop Production Tuesday, November 9, 2021 \| Troy Buechel As greenhouse organic methods of plant production have increased in interest, the need for viable organic fertilizers has also increased. Organic fertilizer options in the past consisted of single sources of animal and plant by-products that varied in nutrient analysis, release and quality from source to source and batch to batch. Manufacturers today are providing an increasing variety of organic fertilizer products that are more uniform. This consistency is being accomplished through improved manufacturing processes and formula specifications. Organic products are available now as composites of several different organic materials, which help provide more balanced nutrient analyses. Below, you will find out the impacts of bringing organic fertilizer in your production. Thoroughly Controlled Organic Fertilization Although the process is more complicated, it is possible to obtain adequate nutrients from organic sources, but it takes more careful and creative management. In the past, no single organic fertilizer would provide all the required essential elements; therefore, a combination of organic materials had to be devised. Even with these advancements, fertility management is more challenging with organic fertilizers compared to conventional fertilizers. There are several reasons for this, starting with the challenge of knowing both the amount of nitrogen (N) applied and the rate of nitrogen released from the organic material and how it matches to nutrient requirement of the plants. Nitrogen is the most likely major element to become deficient in both traditional and organic productions. In most inorganic chemical fertilizers, nitrogen is immediately available. But, it is more slowly available in most organic fertilizer sources. Nitrogen in organic matter is released from complex molecules but must be converted to ammonium and nitrate ions before plants can take it up. This process is natural and occurs because of the activity of several bacterial/microbial species found in most growing media. This process can be unpredictable and is affected by the factors that impact the activity of bacterial/microbial populations. Uneven nutrient levels Another reason organic fertilizers are more challenging to use is that their ratio of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium are not in the same proportion to each other as with traditional fertilizers. Nitrogen and potassium are traditionally both provided in the same amount in conventional N-P-K fertilizers while phosphate should be no more than half the amount of nitrogen. Organic fertilizers have a different N-P-K analysis, but these formulations will result in comparable plant growth with conventional fertilizers. If organic fertilizers are used at the same rate of nitrogen (ppm) as with conventional fertilizers, there could be a risk of high salt levels and organic acids build-up, which can be damaging for plant growth. Organic Materials for More Nutrients Many organic bulk materials can be incorporated in the growing medium prior to planting in order to provide nutrients. The effective level of these materials depends on the nutrient analysis, the amount added and the needs of the plant. Some pre-plant organic fertilizer materials include, but are not limited to: blood meal, bone meal, fish meal, alfalfa meal, cottonseed meal, crab meal, feather meal, bat guano, greensand meal, kelp meal, dried manure, seabird guano, rock phosphate, soybean meal, wood ash and worm castings. The Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) maintains an extensive list of these materials on their website. In most cases, it may be necessary to apply a ‘soluble’ organic fertilizer solution after planting to boost the level of available nutrients. This is where liquid organic fertilizers, like fish emulsion, become important. Organic Fertilizer for Vegetables Production Using organic fertilizers in your production may be challenging as the balancing of nutrients levels is harder to achieve, especially with nitrogen. When it comes to choosing the right material, the same care applies for vegetable production as for any other crop. Important Element to Keep in Mind When it Comes to Organic Crop Fertilizer When switching to organic crop production and an organic fertilization program, be prepared to more intensively manage the fertilization program over the course of the production cycle. A few things to keep in mind when doing so are: - Consider the length of your crop’s growing cycle; - If using a pre-plant organic fertilizer, know the EC of the amended mix; - Mix and match fertilizers, formulations and nutrient applications to meet the plants needs. Are PRO-MIX Growing Media Organic? Before fertilizing with an organic fertilizer, you need to start your production with organic growing medium. PRO-MIX offers a full line of products for organic growing. These products can be used for edible crops such as vegetables, herbs, small fruits and organic flowers, in anything from basically plugs for seed germination applications or for potted plants, cell packs, and even larger containers. See our organic growing media and how they can help you in your production here. Remember that regardless of the organic fertilizer you choose, your production program should always include a comprehensive monitoring plan for pH, EC and nutrient levels throughout the plant growth cycle. For more information, contact your Premier Tech Grower Services Representative: Jose Chen Lopez PRO-MIX® is a registered trademark of PREMIER HORTICULTURE Ltd. Plants require essential elements to maximize their genetic potential. These elements are supplied by air, water, substrates and fertilizers; for water soluble fertilizers, it is important to make sure your fertilizer injector is working properly and that it is calibrated for accuracy. The focus for this article is to discuss the pros and cons of using a controlled-release fertilizer compared to traditional water soluble fertilizers. Vegetables and herbs fertilization requirements are similar to bedding plants early in their crop cycle. However, as vegetable and herb plants progress from vegetative growth into flowering and fruit production, fertility rates and ratios change for each crop. Purchasing water soluble fertilizer for your crops is not simply based on what is on sale or selecting a “geranium fertilizer” for your geraniums; it is based mostly on the quality of your water source.
NASA's Langley Research Center. The Langley 16-Foot Transonic Tunnel (16-Ft TT) is an atmospheric, closed circuit tunnel with a Mach number range of 0.2 to 1.25. The test section of the tunnel is octagonal with a distance of 15.5 ft across the flats. The twin 34-ft diameter drive fans form a two-stage axial flow compressor with counterrotating blades and no stator. Boundary layer control during transonic operation is achieved with a 35,000-hp axial flow compressor that is able to remove up to 4.5 percent of the tunnel flow from the plenum that surrounds the test section.
PITTSBURGH, April 19, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- This upcoming Monday, April 22nd marks the 43rd anniversary of Earth Day. It's the perfect time to begin taking steps to help make the environment a better one. According to Earth Day Network, last year's Earth Day generated an astonishing one billion "Acts of Green" worldwide. These acts are considered anything from planting trees to cleaning parks and other green spaces to riding a bicycle instead of driving a car or using public transportation. "Today, with gas and oil prices skyrocketing, families everywhere are being forced to tighten their budgets. Therefore, it is important for everyone to learn how energy conservation can save you money," said Rob Comstock, senior vice president for Direct Energy. "Participating in Earth Day and practicing 'green' initiatives everyday will not only benefit planet Earth, but it can also benefit our wallets." Direct Energy recommends its own "Acts of Green" for you and your family to do on Earth Day, as well as every day: - Plant a tree. Trees improve air quality by filtering harmful dust and pollutants such as carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide from the air we breathe. - Bike, walk, jog or carpool whenever possible. When greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles are released into the air, they cause air pollution and harm to the ozone layer. - Make your home an Energy Star. Performing an energy audit on your home regularly can help lower energy bills. For a complete checklist of how to perform an energy audit, please visit http://bit.ly/HomeEnergyAudits. - Run your dishwater and washing machine only when full to avoid wasting water. Water conservation helps prevent water pollution in nearby lakes, rivers and streams. Additionally, water pollution not only damages the environment but also harms pipes and septic systems. - Make a compost. Composts make nutrient-rich soil that holds more water so your plants will grow better. Paper, egg shells, grass clippings, fruits, vegetables and coffee grounds can be added to a compost to make a cheap and easy fertilizer. - Utilize reusable bags when shopping. Keep them in your car and near doors so that they can be easily reached when you are on the go. Plastic bags are not biodegradable and can take anywhere from 15 to 1,000 years to decompose. If you only have a few items, skip the bag altogether and carry them instead. - Swap out incandescent light bulbs in your home for compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) bulbs. CFLs use less electric power and can last up to 10 times longer than regular incandescent bulbs. Furthermore, Direct Energy is utilizing its energy expertise to make a difference in people's lives by donating up to $100,000 to nonprofits through its Reduce Your Use For Good program. Nonprofits are encouraged to create a short video about the good work they do in the community and submit it to www.reduceyouruseforgood.com for a chance to win a $2,500 grant. "Starting with the 43rd annual Earth Day, be conscious of how you can be more eco-friendly and encourage your friends and family to do the same," Comstock said. "Earth Day is just one day a year but you can choose to 'go green' each and every day. Together we can make the Earth a cleaner and healthier place to live." About Direct Energy Direct Energy is one of North America's largest energy and energy-related services providers with more than 6 million residential and commercial customer relationships. Direct Energy provides customers with choice and support in managing their energy costs through a portfolio of innovative products and services. A subsidiary of Centrica plc (LSE: CNA), one of the world's leading integrated energy companies, Direct Energy operates in 46 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia and 10 provinces in Canada. For more information, visit www.directenergy.com SOURCE Direct Energy
There are 32 writing prompts at three different levels. They have a brightly colored picture and prompt to help students begin writing. They are perfect for a writing center or to help generate ideas to write about summer topics. One set of cards have a word bank and sentence starters, one a word bank, the third only has the prompt. There cards can be used to help English Language Learners or struggling writers.
Recovery continues even days or months after a disaster as you and your family face the emotional and psychological effects of the event. Reactions vary from person to person, but may include: Anger, fear, or wanting revenge Lack of emotion Loss of appetite Needing to keep active Restless sleep or nightmares Weight loss or gain All of these are normal reactions to stressful events. It is important to let yourself and others react in their own way. It may be helpful to: Talk with your family and friends about what happened and how you feel about it. Volunteer at a local shelter, blood bank, or food pantry to help with emergency efforts. Talk to your minister, spiritual advisor, or other counselor. Encourage your children to share their feelings, even if you must listen to their stories many times; this is a normal way for children to make sense of traumatic experiences. You may also want to share your feelings about the event with your children. If these strategies are not helping to lower your stress, or you find that you or your family members are using drugs/alcohol or resorting to other unhealthy behaviors in order to cope, you may wish to seek outside or professional help. Ways You Can Help Others To help you, your family, or emergency workers get through a disaster more quickly and safely call 911 or the operator only for a possible life-threatening emergency. Telephone lines are very busy in disaster situations, and they need to be kept clear for emergency calls to get through.
This is the message from the Deputy Minister for Skills, Jeff Cuthbert, as he today outlined the Welsh Government’s response to the Review of Qualifications for 14 to19-year-olds. The recommendations to create new GCSEs in English Language and Welsh First Language, as well as two new GCSEs covering numeracy and mathematical techniques, have also been accepted. These will be introduced in September 2015 and will reflect and support the improvements expected from the new Literacy and Numeracy Framework. The Deputy Minister for Skills, Jeff Cuthbert said: “We are broadly accepting all of the Review’s recommendations and are setting a clear strategic direction and vision for qualifications in Wales. “We will retain GCSEs and A levels. Where necessary we will strengthen and amend these, but ultimately we have confidence in these well established qualifications, which are recognised around the world,. “People expect GCSEs to assess literacy and numeracy, this is why we are developing new GCSEs to do just this. Having two mathematics GCSEs will reflect the importance of the subject for progression and employment. We will expect most learners to take both these GCSEs. “At the heart of this system will be a revised, more rigorous, Welsh Baccalaureate. The Review identified clear support for this qualification. But we will not rest on our laurels, the Review also noted some concerns over the rigour of the current model and we will act to address these, introducing grading and more stretching requirements. “We will further develop the detailed model put forward by the Review and consider whether there is a case for incorporating specific subjects, such as science. “We will continue to engage with stakeholders to ensure that the Welsh Baccalaureate provides both breadth and rigour, together with an engaging learning experience.” The aim is to introduce the revised Welsh Baccalaureate for teaching from September 2015. Other key recommendations being accepted are: - The introduction of a new, stronger gatekeeping process for vocational qualifications to ensure that public funding is only approved for qualifications that have quality, rigour, relevance and value. This will reduce the number of qualifications available and simplify the picture for learners, parents and employers. - A maximum equivalence of two GCSEs for vocational qualifications, where justified, for reporting from 2016 - Removing the Essential Skills Wales qualifications for 14-16 from 2015 with revised Essential Skills and Wider Key Skills qualifications, to be introduced in 2015 for post 16 learners. The Education Minister, Leighton Andrews, has already accepted and outlined the establishment of Qualifications Wales, a new body to regulate and assure the quality of all qualifications, other than degree level, in Wales. The Deputy Minister added: “We are setting out a clear strategic direction and vision for qualifications in Wales. These must be understood and respected worldwide. “Our guiding principle is doing what is best for learners in Wales and for the Welsh economy. This will sometimes mean diverging from England and the rest of the UK. “Implementing the Review represents a significant programme of work. We must be prepared to make an investment in terms of resource, commitment and belief in getting qualifications right.”
Most of us are pretty familiar with data types in our daily lives — we can easily tell that things like 1, 2, 3, and 4 are numbers (in this case, integers). 15.7 is still a number, but has a decimal. We know that every single word I’m typing in this sentence is composed of characters, and we know that in math, “true” and “false” are the answers to logical statements. Just as we do in our heads, R also categorizes our data into different classes. These categories are similar to the real-life ones I described above, but can be a little different in terms of syntax and things to watch out for in your code. To work in R and perform data analyses, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of data types. In this tutorial, I’m going to introduce several different types of data, explain how to use and manipulate each of them, and show you how to check what type of data you have. Let’s dive in. Types of data There are five main types of data in R that you’d come across as an ecologist. I’ll discuss all of them below except complex numbers, which are rarely used for data analysis in R. 1.2, 5, 7, 3.14159) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) i + 4) TRUE / FALSE) I’m also going to discuss a sixth, related category that helps you work with categorical variables: Numeric data types are pretty straightforward. These are just numbers, written as either integers or decimals. We can check if our vector is numeric by using the function # Create a numeric vector x <- c(3, 5, 6, 10.7) # Is our vector numeric? Yes! is.numeric(x) ## TRUE We can check our data type by using the functions class() tells us that we’re working with numeric values, while typeof() is more specific and tells us we’re working with doubles (i.e., numbers with decimals). # Check the type of data class we have class(x) ## "numeric" # Check the specific type of data that you have typeof(x) ## "double" You can, of course, perform mathematical operations with numeric values. # Add 4 to all the values in the vector x + 4 ## 7.0 9.0 10.0 14.7 You can also do math with integers, which represent numbers without decimal places. These are usually used if you’re counting something — for example, you can observe 7 butterflies in a plot, but you can’t observe 7.2 butterflies (or at least I hope not!). If you create a vector manually and don’t have any decimal values, R will still identify your vector as the class “numeric”. # Create a vector with only integers x <- c(1, 4, 2, 7, 8) # Look at the class class(x) ## "numeric" You can change this vector to be an integer by using the function # Change the vector class x <- as.integer(x) # Look at the class class(x) ## "integer" Alternatively, you can generate an integer vector like this. The “L” after each number tells R that you want it to be an integer. # Create an integer vector x <- c(1L, 2L, 5L, 3L, 10L) # View vector x ## 1 2 5 3 10 # View class class(x) ## "integer" You could also create an integer vector like this. The colon ( :) tells R to generate a sequence of vectors from 1 to 10, going up by 1 each time. # Create a sequence of integers x <- c(1:10) # View vector x ## 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 # View data class class(x) ## "integer" Some functions will also automatically generate integer vectors, like the function sample(). This function randomly samples a certain number of integer values within a specified range. I asked sample() to choose ten values between 1 and 10. # Create a random sequence of integers from 1 to 10: set.seed(123) # use set.seed to get the same random values as me x <- sample(1:10, 10) # View vector x ## 3 10 2 8 6 9 1 7 5 4 # View data class class(x) ## "integer" I’m not going to discuss this one because complex numbers aren’t used much in R for data analysis, though they exist. These are just numbers with real and imaginary components (containing the number i, or the square root of -1). Characters are another common data type. These are used to store text in R (also called “strings”). To indicate something is a character, we put quotation marks around it # Create a vector of characters x <- c("These", "are", "characters") # View class class(x) ## "character" Putting quotation marks around numbers will also turn them into characters, which can get confusing. # Create a vector of characters x <- c("1", "4", "5", "7", "8") # View vector x ## "1" "4" "5" "7" "8" You can’t do math with a vector of numbers that are classed as characters. # Try to do math mean(x) ## Warning in mean.default(x): argument is not numeric or logical: returning NA ## NA Why? Because R views them as text! # View class class(x) ## "character" You can turn this character vector of numbers into a numeric vector using the as.numeric()is one way to resolve that issue. Any values that were character will be converted to NAs. In that scenario you’ll probably want to go back and fix your raw CSV file, but at least now the NAs will help you find where the problem was. # Turn it into a numeric vector x <- as.numeric(x) # View vector x ## 1 4 5 7 8 # View class class(x) ## "numeric" And then you can turn it back into a character using # Turn it back into a character x <- as.character(x) # View vector x ## "1" "4" "5" "7" "8" # View class class(x) ## "character" The logical class is represented by only two possible values: FALSE (also can be written F, but never These values result from any logical statements that are made. For example, in the code below I asked R if the elements of my vector were greater than 5. This returns a logical vector where each element is either # Create a vector x <- c(1, 5, 6, 7, 2, 8) # Are the elements of vector x greater than 5? Store results in vector y y <- x > 5 # View y y ## FALSE FALSE TRUE TRUE FALSE TRUE # View class class(y) ## "logical" You can also create a vector of logical statements. # Create logical vector x <- c(T, F, T, F, F, T) # View vector x ## TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE And you can convert logical values to numeric values, and back. FALSE is the same as TRUE is the same as # Convert to numeric vector x <- as.numeric(x) # View vector x ## 1 0 1 0 0 1 # Convert back to logical vector x <- as.logical(x) # View vector again x ## TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE This also means that you can do math with logical values. This is useful if, for example, you’re trying to see how many TRUE values you have in your vector. In fact, applying any math operations to a logical vector will automatically convert the values to 1s and 0s. # View vector x ## TRUE FALSE TRUE FALSE FALSE TRUE # Count how many "TRUE" values there are. There are 3! sum(x) ## 3 Factors are a special data type that is primarily used to represent repeating categories (i.e., categorical variables). When you specify an object as a factor, you’re telling R to think of it as a categorical variable, with different levels. This can be helpful when analyzing your data, as categorical variables and continuous variables are often handled differently in statistical analyses. In the code below, I created a data frame showing the height and sex of five individuals. # Create an example data frame example <- data.frame(indiv = c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E"), height = c(15, 10, 12, 9, 17), sex = c("female", "female", "female", "male", "female")) # View structure of data frame str(example) ## 'data.frame': 5 obs. of 3 variables: ## $ indiv : chr "A" "B" "C" "D" ... ## $ height: num 15 10 12 9 17 ## $ sex : chr "female" "female" "female" "male" ... Right now, the sex column is a character vector because I entered the data in quotation marks. But really what I want to do is tell R that sex is a categorical variable, with “female” and “male” as levels. To do that, all I have to do is use the # Change the sex column to be a factor example$sex <- as.factor(example$sex) # View the factor example$sex ## female female female male female ## Levels: female male You can see that R listed the vector and then beneath that, has figured out on its own that the levels are “female” and “male”. When writing the levels, R will sort them in alphabetical order. That’s why the levels are female male instead of You may want to change the order of your factor levels (this can be useful when plotting your data and determining the order in which they appear). For example, you might have a vector like this: # Create vector places <- factor(c("first", "first", "second", "third", "fifth", "fourth", "second")) # View factor places ## first first second third fifth fourth second ## Levels: fifth first fourth second third The order of the levels doesn’t make sense. We want it to go from first through fifth in the implied numeric order — not alphabetically. So let’s change the order using factor(vector, levels = c("first", "second", "third", etc.)). # Change level order places <- factor(places, levels = c("first", "second", "third", "fourth", "fifth")) # View factor places ## first first second third fifth fourth second ## Levels: first second third fourth fifth Factors don’t just have to be text. They can also be integers. For example, in the code below I created a data frame describing the stream width and order of several stream sites. Stream order is not a continuous variable, even though it’s represented by numbers. It would be best to convert stream order to a factor. # Create data frame example2 <- data.frame(stream = c("Patuxent", "Patapsco", "Deer Creek", "Town Creek", "Browns Branch"), width = c(37, 42, 25, 32, 22), order = c(6, 6, 4, 5, 3)) # View data frame structure str(example2) ## 'data.frame': 5 obs. of 3 variables: ## $ stream: chr "Patuxent" "Patapsco" "Deer Creek" "Town Creek" ... ## $ width : num 37 42 25 32 22 ## $ order : num 6 6 4 5 3 R sees stream order as being numeric, which makes sense. But let’s tell R that stream order is a factor. # Change stream order to a factor example2$order <- as.factor(example2$order) # View stream order example2$order ## 6 6 4 5 3 ## Levels: 3 4 5 6 Looks good. Since these are numbers, R just orders the levels in ascending order. How to check and manipulate data types As demonstrated throughout this tutorial, it can be useful to check the type of data you’re working with and be able to change it to another type if you need. You might need this especially in situations where you’re reading in data from a .csv, and need to check that all your numbers are numeric instead of characters. The main way to check your data type is to use the function class(). If you have a data frame, another easy way to check data types is to use the str() function. This displays the structure of your data frame and tells you what data type each of your columns is. The example below lists heights over time for five individuals. # Create an example data frame example <- data.frame(indiv = c("A", "B", "C", "D", "E"), height_0 = c(15, 10, 12, 9, 17), height_10 = c(20, 18, 14, 15, 19), height_20 = c(23, 24, 18, 17, 26)) str(example) ## 'data.frame': 5 obs. of 4 variables: ## $ indiv : chr "A" "B" "C" "D" ... ## $ height_0 : num 15 10 12 9 17 ## $ height_10: num 20 18 14 15 19 ## $ height_20: num 23 24 18 17 26 You can see that the column indiv is a character vector (abbreviated “chr”), while each successive column is numeric (abbreviated “num”). You also noticed me using functions like as.character(). All of the data types have as. functions, where the first one is a logical statement to check the specific data type, asking “is this object of the class XXX?” and returns as. functions are actions that convert objects into a new data type. You may find yourself using these often when you’re first formatting your data and preparing it for analysis. That’s it for data types in R! Keep an eye out for our next tutorial, which will go over different data structures in R like vectors, lists, data frames, and tibbles. I hope this tutorial was helpful! Happy coding! Also be sure to check out R-bloggers for other great tutorials on learning R
My article for Telegraph: In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the size of a lemon pip at the rate of 10 quadrillion watts (joules per second), albeit for only 100 trillionths of a second. That’s roughly 500 times faster than the entire human population consumes energy. The experiment is a reminder that the energy density achieved when atoms merge is vastly greater than anything in a lump of coal, let alone a puff of wind. It is also far bigger than can be achieved by nuclear fission and much safer too: no risk of meltdown and with much less high-level radioactive waste. The problem, of course, is that reliable fusion power stations were 50 years away in 1950, and were still 50 years away in 2000, so milestones on the road to fusion are greeted with sceptical yawns. But almost everybody in the industry now thinks that jibe is out of date: the stopwatch has started, as one insider put it to me. We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid. Two bits of evidence support that conclusion. First, the British Government will soon announce that it has chosen a site for a prototype government-developed power station, known as Step, the spherical tokamak for energy production, which will be operating around 2040. Secondly, there has been a gold rush of nearly $2 billion of private money into commercial fusion companies: several in the United States, one in Canada and two in Britain. In terms of expertise and infrastructure, the UK is near the front of the peloton in this technology. The recent progress is mainly because of technical breakthroughs. In one design, called magnetic confinement, better superconductors have led to stronger magnets needing less cooling which allows more compact, spherical designs that can stabilise the “plasma” for longer spells of time. In another, inertial confinement, lasers developed for the star-wars missile defence programme have brought ignition temperatures within reach. Before you get cynical, indulge in a bit of hope. If this were to work, then a device the size of a shipping container could power a small city, running on tiny quantities of fuel: some deuterium extracted from seawater and some tritium continuously “bred” inside the thing itself from a little lithium. The output is helium-4, an inert, non-radioactive gas. The environmental footprint would be negligible: no carbon dioxide emissions, no waste, no pollution, very few materials and a pocket-handkerchief of land. We could retire the rest of the energy industry altogether – oil rigs, coal mines, wind turbines, solar farms, hydro dams and all – and set about raising everybody’s standard of living indefinitely, while telling Greta Thunberg to cheer up. Yet even if all goes to plan it will not be till after 2050 that fusion starts to make a big difference. So those countries that rushed to net zero by 2050, like us, using immensely expensive, resource-hungry, land-hungry renewable energy, will look foolish if fusion comes along just after. A bit like – only on a far grander scale – the way we made a huge mistake by mandating the switch to ineffective, unreliable, unsafe compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of waiting for more efficient and better LEDs. The point is not that fusion will certainly come to our rescue, but that there’s probably a 50-50 chance that it will, and governments need to clear the runway to make sure it at least gets a chance to take off. That means learning the lessons from how we killed nuclear fission by driving up its cost. Far from getting cheaper like computers did, fission reactors grew steadily more expensive. This was because we never gave them the chance to profit from experience, to learn by doing. Designs were approved ever more slowly and expensively, gold-plated in a doomed attempt to reassure the public, never improved by tinkering during construction, rarely mass produced to bring down the unit cost, and then built by cost-plus contractors ripping off naive governments. We have made a start in this country. The Regulatory Horizons Council, on which I sit, has recently produced a report arguing that it makes much more sense to regulate a fusion plant as if it were a chemical plant – through the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency – than through the Office for Nuclear Regulation. That is because the risks do not include meltdowns, or high-level (or long-lasting) radioactivity, but are much more like those of a conventional industrial facility. Investing in a technical fix like fusion looks more likely to deliver net zero – albeit not before 2050 – than frantically trying to soup up a 13th-century technology to extract energy from an ultra-low-density source: the wind. Share your comments on Matt's Facebook (/authormattridley) and Twitter (@mattwridley) profiles. Stay updated on new content by following him there, and then subscribing to his new newsletter. How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley is now available in paperback, in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. The first chapter is available to download for free. Matt's upcoming book with Alina Chan Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid is now available to pre-order. Receive all my latest posts straight to your inbox. simply subscribe below: [*] denotes a required field
Take CPR and save a life! Levels of CPRs There are several levels of CPR classes, take the correct level for you. First Aid, CPR, and AED – 4 hours Everyone should know basic first aid and CPR. This level is made for the general public. This course is designed to meet OSHA requirements and teaches basic first aid, CPR, and AED skills such as giving CPR to an infant, child, or adult. First Aid CPR AED is a classroom, video-based, instructor-led course that teaches students critical skills needed to respond to and manage a first aid, choking or sudden cardiac arrest emergency in the first few minutes until emergency medical services (EMS) arrives. Students learn skills such as how to treat bleeding, sprains, broken bones, shock and other first aid emergencies. This course also teaches adult CPR and AED use. Basic Life Support (American Heart Association) 4 hours Joining our EMT Course? This is the CPR Class you need. BLS Healthcare Providers CPR. Certification lasts two years. Covers the necessary skills of one & two-rescuer CPR for all ages. Includes ventilation with a pocket mask, a bag-mask and oxygen, use of defibrillator (AED) and relief of airway obstruction. Intended for the healthcare professional. Here are CPR classes you can find around Kitsap County: - Compressions for life: www.cprkitsap.org
The U.S. Department of Interior’s latest round of its land buyback program ended in September for all Navajo Nation applicants, and DOI’s early data show a sharp decline in participation. As of Sept. 27, only 23% of Navajo landowners who had offers participated in the program, compared to 43% in the program’s last round in 2016. Of the $157 million the Interior Department set aside for Navajo Nation landowners, only $39 million was accepted. By comparison, in 2016 the government set aside $259 million, of which $108 million was accepted. To date, the U.S. has bought back nearly 200,000 acres from landowners on the Navajo reservation. A spokesperson for the DOI said that participation in subsequent rounds of the buy-back program is usually lower than the first round. The spokesperson also said the latest data only account for buy-backs through Sept. 27 and that the DOI offers some options for late applicants. Still, the latest data indicate that participation by Navajo Nation landowners was by far the lowest of any tribe that has been offered at least $100 million in the buy-back program. The information office for the Navajo Nation could not be reached for comment on this story. What’s the purpose of the buy-back? The federal buy-back program is one part of the Department of Interior’s obligations resulting from the settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed in 1996 against the DOI and the Department of Treasury. The complaint was one of the largest class-action lawsuits against the U.S. government, with more than 500,000 plaintiffs. The plaintiffs in Cobell v. Salazar claimed that the federal government had mismanaged lands that were held in trust for the benefit of American Indians. The core of the complaint related to the system of ownership and accounting of American Indian-held lands, a problem called “fractionation” that stems from the original parceling-up of reservation lands. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up land into individual holdings that were then mandated to be inherited in equal fractional ownership by each successive generation. After more than a century of this ownership system, many land holdings have hundreds or even thousands of fractional owners. Because the Dawes Act required that 51% of fractional owners of a particular plot must agree on its use in order to develop it, most of these lands are economically useless. In many cases, full accounting of ownership is impossible. After 15 years of litigation, the U.S. government and American Indian representatives agreed that proper accounting of land beneficiaries is impossible due to the complexity of ownership. In 2010, the parties reached a settlement wherein $3.4 billion would be set aside for the Department of Interior to address these problems. Roughly $1.9 billion of that settlement is the Trust Land Consolidation Fund, which is the fund used to finance the DOI’s buy-back program. DOI purchases fractionated lands from individual landowners, then returns those lands to the tribal trusts, thereby making lands community assets as they once were. Fractionation on the Navajo Nation When the Dawes Act was passed in 1887, there were only a few thousand Navajo. Today, more than 300,000 Navajo are enrolled as tribal members. This population growth has brought with it a proportional degree of fractional ownership of land. There were 25,509 offers made to individual Navajo landowners in 2016. According to the DOI’s sales data, that is the most offers made for an individual tribe in any single round of the program’s implementation to date. Yet, participation rates by Navajo Nation landowners in the latest round were lowest of any tribe that has been offered $100 million or more in the buy-back program. Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez has expressed enthusiasm for the program. “The Nez-Lizer Administration is very pleased and optimistic to see another phase of the federal Land Buy-Back Program implemented on the Navajo Nation to further consolidate fractionated lands,” Nez said in a public statement leading up to the latest implementation of the program.
HOW CAN I HELP MY CHILD? - Use the word wall chart to encourage correct spelling of words. - Review your word wall words in different ways: play word wall Bingo, rainbow words- write your word wall words in different color crayons, play I Spy or make a word find to share with the class. - Use the alphabet chart for proper letter formation. - After writing a sentence, encourage your child to check for the three rules for writing a sentence. Start with a capital letter, spaces between each word and end with a punctuation mark. After reading a fiction book... - Retell the story including a clear beginning, middle and end - Identify the story elements- characters, setting, problem and solution - Make connections- Think of how the book reminds you of something in your life or another book. - Compare two characters- They can be from the same or different books. You can even compare a character to yourself. After reading a Nonfiction book: - Write down key words to help you remember the main ideas. - See if you can recall information by looking at the key words. - Try to write a summary of the book. - Make a list of two new facts you learned.
Long Live Gaming Prep@Collegiate Summer Academy was the perfect opportunity for me to get a better grasp of gamifying lessons and content in the math classrooms by using two distinct strategies and methods and marrying them as one: Class Craft and Judo Math. Because Middle school lends itself to this model, we have successfully done this in two ways: character training and personalized learning goals. In the beginning, students were given avatars through Class Craft and online gamification program that allows teachers to award experience points and powers for great behavior and action while taking away health points and assigning consequences for inappropriate behaviors. Their life has become the video game and everything they do impacts their virtual character as well as their real-life character. FortNite the game has made this the perfect time to implement because kids live, sleep, and breathe virtual reality. It is such an awesome opportunity to use that world to help keep track of the real long-lasting behaviors that determine future success. In addition, the Judo Math system has been incorporated in the Class Craft world through the Quest option. Judo Math separates the curriculum into a set of achievable learning targets and objectives grouped by color or belts. Each belt may have 2-6 objectives so that when the student masters them all, they move on to the successive belt until they reach black belt or green belt. Each belt group comes with a bracelet; the goal is to get all 5 by the end of the unit. I have found that it is better for students to see their progression sooner than later, therefore stretching all 5 belts over the school year is not advisable. It is best to reset belts at the end of a quarter or semester. Within Classcraft, the teacher has the option to set a Quest in a make-believe world where the first task is a video with an embedded quiz or assessment – Edpuzzle or LearnZillion is best for this. If students show that they understand they can go to the next town or mission; if not, they can go in a different direction to help reinforcement the correct learning and then catch up with those who got it the first time in the next mission. The same goes for practice or independent work when assigned. Teachers can grade work or assign it so it is graded digitally. Then send students with mastery in one direction to complete a project or final culminating event while students without mastery travel in another direction to practice more. Finally, they then connect with the final event (assessment). The good thing is students only see their path and what they have unlocked, they do not know about the other worlds until they unlock it with mastery, so everyone’s path is different. I like to use the 5E approach to learning which exposes students to the new material by making connections to what they already know. Then students learn by engaging in an interactive task or video. Afterwards they explain their understanding by submitting notes or reflection. Next, they practice until they are ready to assess. Each Learning target is given to students in advance and they take the time they need to master and move on. Each quest is different and unique to the student himself. For every progression they gain points and powers they can use in the classroom. Who said learning couldn’t be fun!? Ms. Forsythe flying high with the boys at Outward Bound!
Unfortunately, every time the authorities plug one hole, crafty criminals figure out new ways to trick unsuspecting victims. Here are some identity theft scams to watch out for: Phishing: This is where you receive an email, purportedly from a trusted source like a government agency, bank or retailer that asks you to supply or confirm account information, log-in IDs or passwords. These imposters are "fishing" for your personal information. Legitimate organizations never ask you to verify sensitive information through a non-secure means like email. Smishing (for "Short Message Service"): Like phishing, only it uses text messages sent to your cellphone. Even if you don't share any information, just by responding you're verifying that your phone number is valid, which means it probably will be sold to others who will try to trick you into their own scams. Vishing (voice phishing): Where live or automated callers direct you to call your bank under the pretext of clearing up a problem (like theft or overdraft accounts). You'll be asked to share personal or account information. Keep a list of toll-free service numbers for all companies you use so you can call them directly without fearing you've been given bogus information. I also program these numbers – but not account numbers – into my cell phone in case I'm traveling. A few tips for spotting risky emails and texts: - Never give sensitive information by responding to an email/SMS. Remember, legitimate organizations never ask you to verify those through a non-secure means like email. - Although the "From" line may appear to be from a valid company email address, that's easy for fraudsters to mimic (called "spoofing"). - Beware of subject lines and body copy that use ominous or threatening language (e.g., "Your credit card has been suspended"). - Lack of a personalized salutation or closing details (e.g., "Dear Valued Customer"). - Watch for typos, poor grammar, punctuation, capitalization consistency and other warning signs it's not legitimate. - Scroll your mouse over any embedded links before clicking to check for suspicious domain endings - Verify that an alert or request for information is legitimate by looking up the company's phone number and calling it yourself. - Make sure your anti-virus and anti-spyware software is current. Pharming: Where hackers redirect you from a legitimate website to an impostor site where your personal information is harvested ("farmed"). Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter increasingly are being targeted, so always be wary of opening any links – even from trusted friends – because their account may have been hacked. A few tips to identify an unsafe website: Never click on a link embedded in an email. Even if sent from someone you trust, always type the link into your browser. Look for signs of legitimacy. Does the website list contact information or some signs of a real-world presence. If doubtful, contact them by phone or email to establish their legitimacy. Read the URL carefully. If this is a website you frequent, is the URL spelled correctly? Often times, fraudsters will set up websites almost identical to the spelling of the site you are trying to visit. An accidental mistype may lead you to a fraudulent version of the site. Check the properties of any links. Right-clicking a hyperlink and selecting “Properties” will reveal the true destination of the link. Does it look different from what it claimed to lead you to? When visiting a website that asks for sensitive information such as credit card numbers or your social security number, make sure that the website is encrypted over a secure connection. Overall, utilize your internet browser’s security tools. Make sure to install the most current version of your web browser. Most browsers have sophisticated filters that can identify and warn you of potential security threats. For more tips protecting personal and account information and preventing online fraud, visit: - The National Cyber Security Alliance's www.staysafeonline.org. - Visa offers VisaSecuritySense.com, which features tips on preventing fraud online, when traveling, at retail establishments and ATMs, deceptive marketing practices, and more. - And finally, don't forget good-old-fashioned pickpocketing, mail theft, shoulder surfing and dumpster diving as ways people may try to steal your personal information. Article By Kemi Okusanya, Vice President, General Manager Visa, West Africa.
This region includes the countries of North and South America and island nations in their adjacent waters. This region includes three of the largest countries in the world, as well as some of the smallest. While this region is virtually free of some infectious diseases, including poliomyelitis and measles, many other infectious diseases remain endemic and epidemic. In January 2010, Haiti experienced a devastating earthquake that damaged and destroyed several buildings, including hospitals. The country continues to face many health challenges, particularly the spread of cholera in the aftermath of the earthquake. The region is currently under threat from dengue and chikungunya. NIAID priorities in the Americas include research on HIV/AIDS, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and neglected tropical diseases, particularly Chagas disease which is endemic only in Central and South America. All NIAID activities in this region aim to improve understanding of these diseases and to translate new discoveries into methods of preventing, diagnosing, and treating them. View Larger Map The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) have a long-standing cooperation in the areas of tropical diseases including arboviruses of the amazon. The goals for this workshop included exchanging ideas and presenting research findings by U.S. and Brazilian researchers, encouraging partnerships and development of joint projects, and learning about and understanding research capabilities. The goals of this workshop included sharing knowledge about chikungunya disease, epidemiology, and pathogenesis; assessing the chikungunya epidemic risk throughout the Americas; identifying critical gaps in knowledge, technologies, and research infrastructure needed to interrupt the epidemic; and discussing potential collaborative research opportunities to address the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and control of chikungunya disease. back to top Last Updated March 17, 2016
The Story of Jesus Jesus' Biography in the Gospel of John (Lesson 25) 1. In 2 Peter 3:18 we are instructed to grow in the knowledge of Christ. 2. According to John 5:39, this growth is accomplished through careful Bible study. 3. Four books [the Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John] record the Lord’s biography. 4. A general knowledge of these books is helpful as we study them. 5. This lesson is a study of the Gospel of John. I. GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT JESUS' BIOGRAPHY BY JOHN A. The writer of this book is identified as "the disciple whom Jesus loved" (21:20-24). 1. This disciple is mentioned several times (13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7). 2. A number of ancient sources identify this disciple as John. B. Concerning the writer's identity, John: 1. was a fisherman, a son of Zebedee and brother of James (Matthew 4:21-22) 2. was chosen to be an apostle (Matthew 10:1-4) 3. was given the responsibility of caring for Mary (John 19:25-27) 4. wrote 1, 2, 3 John and Revelation. C. The Gospel of John does not seem to have been written for any particular group of people. 1. Its theme is revealed in 20:30-31. 2. Recording all of the Lord's works was not possible (21:25). 3. However, John did record 7 of the Lord's miracles to prove that He is God's Son, including turning water into wine (2:1-11), healing the nobleman's son (4:46-54), healing the man at Bethesda (5:1-9), feeding the 5,000 (6:5-14), walking on the water (6:15-21), healing the blind man (9:1-7), and raising Lazarus from the grave (11:1-45). II. OUTLINE (Whitmire) A. (1:1-18) Prologue [Introduction] B. (1:19-ch.12) The Lord's Public Ministry C. (ch.13-17) The Lord's Private Ministry D. (ch.18-20) The Lord's Passion Ministry E. (ch.21) Postscript [Conclusion] III. IMPORTANT POINTS OF INFORMATION REVEALED IN JOHN A. Christ is a member of the eternal Godhead (1:1-3). B. Christ did, however, become flesh (1:14; 3:16-17; 1 John 4:1-3). C. In addition to recording 7 of the Lord's miracles which prove that He is God's Son, John also recorded the testimony of witnesses who revealed the Lord's identity, including: 1. John the Baptist (1:34) 2. Nathanael (1:49) 3. Peter (6:69) 4. Martha (11:27) 5. Thomas (20:28). D. John contains the 7 "I am" statements of Christ (6:35; 8:12; 8:58; 10:11; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1). E. Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the new birth consists of being "born of water and of the Spirit" (3:1-7). F. In His conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus revealed some important information about worship (4:23-24). 1. Worship is to be directed to God. 2. God desires to be worshipped. 3. Acceptable worship must be offered: a. "in spirit" [with the right disposition and attitude] b. "in truth" [according to God's Word].
a better crowd comment a key to being an effective study here is to study actively not passively my colleague Becky Thompson is gonna introduce concept mapping which is a great way to be enacted steadier take away the key thanks Craig do you ever feel really overwhelmed with the amount of information that you have well a concept map is a great way to organize the information in a really visual way see you're taking all important people terms events place this and you're forming these distinct connections between I'm so that you have a really cohesive understanding up the contact 7 to give in order to be able to build a concept map the first step is you need to choose your main idea so this is probably the unit title or the section title or if it's a smaller quiz maybe it's just one single topic in this case we use parts of a style so now you take this main idea and you're gonna put in the center of your in a box see you know you can always reference back to that main idea you know what your concept map is covering the second step is you need to list your key terms so these are all the important things that you know you're going to be tested on so for example with the park service thou you might have the nucleus DNA chromosomes my to contre a cell membrane ribosomes back you all things like that would be really really important terms that you would see on a test covering parts of a cell the third step is your gonna actually start creating your map so you already have your key in a box and you're going to make connections from there so you're going to use your key term list and you're gonna go one by one 30 each key term connecting at in some way to the main idea senator so far for example will start with the nucleus so this is the control center have the cell so if we connected it to you this talent concept map we might say that the spell is controlled by the nucleus and the nucleus would go in a circle because thing going further from there we know that chromosomes are inside of the so we might extend a line from nuclear test and say that the nucleus contains and even further from there we know that DNA is what makes up chromosomes so we might extend a line from chromosome saying chromosomes I made up a DNA then you go back to your list have key terms adding them one by one to the concept map until you get to the and so once you're finished you have a whole visual understanding a all the key terms that you need it now and what's really cool is you can either hand right a concept map or you can use digital tools such as a website called bubble and you can go to Bible that you ask and create concept map I might so the next time you have to study for something with a lot of key terms key people key places key events a concept map is a great visual tool First of all, we are going to do a brief debate. I am going to ask you some questions and I encourage you to put up your hand and express yourself to the rest of the class. Question 1: What is a lightning? Question 2: What does a bulb work? Question 3: Do you know what is the material our houses' switches are made of? I want you to read text 1. Pay attention to the words in red. Text 1 : We are surrounded by objects. These objects have a size, they can be touched, can be perceived and they can be measured. These objects are a substance in theirselves. A substance is formed of atoms. Atoms are the basic and smallest elements in a substance. Each atom is formed of particles that have electric charge. There are three types of particles: the electron, the proton and the neutron. The electron has got a negative charge and the proton a positive charge. A neutron has got no charge at all. Electrons are the cause of electrical phenomena. Now, I want you to work on your own and create a concept map for text 1. You can watch again the video in this lesson to help you create the concept map in case you need it. If you don't understand any word in the video, just click it. Read text 2 and then do exercise 1. Text 2: The electric current is electrons in motion through a material. When materials allow a electric current pass throughout them, they are called conducting materials. Metals are conducting materials. And when electric current cannot flow through a material, this is called a non-conducting material. Plastic materials and wood materials are non-conducting. The electric current flow is produced because electrons move to an area where the quantity of protons there is higher than the quantity of electrons. For example, in a battery, the area where protons are located is called the positive terminal and electrons move towards there. Electrons start the movement in what is called the negative terminal. Now, I want you to do exercise 1 in pairs and then participate in a debate comparing your answers with the rest of your classmates. The teacher is going to choose six out of all of you. Each of the chosen students has to decide to be an electron, a proton or a neutron. The classroom in divided in three areas. One area is full of electrons, the another area is full of protons and in the other one the quantity of electrons is the same of protons. You have to move into one of these three areas and the rest of the class have to make an statement about your movement.
Distance measurement through angle calculation A laser beam is projected onto a measuring object and reflected from there. Depending on the distance, the reflected laser beam hits a CCD receiver at a certain angle. The distance to the measuring object is calculated by the position of the light dot on the receiver as well as the distance of the laser to the receiver. The material thickness can be determined this way. With the single-sided measuring process, measuring is done against a roller or product guide. Error in the runout of the roller can be compensated by eddy current sensors. The single-sided variant is very suitable for flexible products and for products structured on one side. The unstructured side is measured then. With the double-sided measuring process the top and back side of the product is scanned and the thickness is thus determined. This method achieves good results with rigid, inflexible products and nonwovens. Measurement of thickness (contactless) The Calipro DML optical system uses laser triangulation online to measure the thickness or coating thickness of various materials with the highest accuracy.
The 1994 comedy-drama, Forrest Gump captures historical events in the United States as experienced and influenced by a naïve, and unassuming Forrest Gump, the male protagonist. Schindler’s List, a 1993 historical epic drama tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved over a thousand Polish Jews from the Holocaust during the Second World War. Both Forrest Gump and Schindler’s List are artifacts that consistently recall important moments in history. This essay compares, and contrasts how both films recall important moments in history. Background/Main Argument In recent times, the social sciences have disputed the connection between historical truth and visual representation. In the article “Hollywood’s Holocaust:…show more content… Forrest is sitting on public bench in Savannah, Georgia sharing his life story with people as they take a seat next to him. He starts his biography with his first day in school during the 1950s where he is outfitted with leg braces to compensate for a spinal deformity. The audience learns that the naïve and kind-hearted Forrest, with an obvious low IQ, has played a significant role in history. He met Elvis Presley and by sheer coincidence influenced his well-known stage and concert dancing. Forrest ended up with a football scholarship and excelled on the college team at the University of Alabama. He not only met John F. Kennedy, but he also met Richard Nixon. We also learned that the naïve Gump also exposed the Watergate scandal forcing Nixon to resign his post as US President. Gump joins the US Army and ends up fighting in Vietnam where he saves several of his platoon and receives the Medal of Honor. Forrest somehow manages to achieve many lofty goals. He becomes an international Ping Pong sensation, turns a shrimp boat into a fleet and gains national attention when he decides to travel across the country by foot. Schindler’s List Schindler starts out as a shady business man who moves his business to Krakow hoping to make a fortune. The Polish Jews have been forced to the ghettos of Krakow, and
Water: Total Maximum Daily Loads (303d) You are here: WaterLaws & RegulationsLaws & Executive OrdersClean Water ActTotal Maximum Daily Loads (303d)Glossary Overview \| Glossary \| Example TMDLs \| Litigation - Adaptive implementation - A process that allows for the evaluation of the adequacy of the TMDL in achieving the water quality standard. As stream monitoring continues to occur, staged or phased implementation enables water quality improvements to be recorded as they are being achieved, providing a measure of quality control and ensuring that the most cost-effective practices are implemented first. - Antidegradation policy - A required process for protecting all existing uses, keeping healthy waters healthy and giving strict protection to outstanding waters. - Clean Water Act (CWA) - The series of legislative acts that form the foundation for protection of U.S. water resources, including the Water Quality Act of 1965, Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, Clean Water Act of 1977, and Water Quality Act of 1987. CWA Secs. 305(b) and 303(d) deal specifically with water quality assessment and TMDL development. - Consent decree - Also referred to as a Consent Order, is a judicial decree expressing voluntary agreement between parties to a suit. - Designated use - Those uses specified in water quality standards for each waterbody or segment. Recreational uses; the propagation and growth of a balanced, indigenous population of aquatic life; wildlife; and the production of edible and marketable natural resources are generally stated as "fishable and swimmable" uses. Other uses may be industrial water supply, irrigation, and navigation. - Impaired waterbody - A waterbody (i.e., stream reaches, lakes, waterbody segments) with chronic or recurring monitored violations of the applicable numeric and/or narrative water quality criteria. - Implementation plan - The document or section of a document detailing the suite of corrective actions needed to reduce pollution and remediate an impaired waterbody. Once fully implemented, the plan should result in the waterbody achieving a "fully supporting" status. Current 303(d) regulations do not require implementation plans, though some state regulations do require an implementation plan for a TMDL. - Loading capacity - The greatest amount of a pollutant that a water can assimilate and still meet water quality standards. - Load or loading - The total amount of pollutants entering a waterbody from one or multiple sources, measured as a rate, as in weight per unit time or per unit area. - Load allocation (LA) - The portion of the loading capacity attributed to (1) the existing or future nonpoint sources of pollution and (2) natural background sources. Wherever possible, nonpoint source loads and natural loads should be distinguished. - Margin of safety (MOS) - A required component of the TMDL that accounts for the uncertainty in the response of the waterbody to loading reductions. - Periodic or continuous sampling and measurement to determine the physical, chemical, and biological status of a particular medium, such as air, soil or water. - Narrative criteria - Non-numeric, qualitative guidelines that describe a desired water quality goal. - National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) - The national program for issuing, modifying, revoking and reissuing, terminating, monitoring, and enforcing permits, and imposing and enforcing pretreatment requirements, under Section 307, 402, 318, and 405 of the Clean Water Act. Facilities subjected to NPDES permitting regulations include operations such as municipal wastewater treatment plants and industrial waste treatment facilities. - Natural background levels - Chemical, physical, and biological levels representing conditions that would result from natural processes, such as weathering and dissolution. - Nonpoint source pollution - Pollution that is not released through pipes but rather originates from multiple sources over a relatively large area. Nonpoint sources can be divided into source activities related either to land or water use including failing septic tanks, improper animal-keeping practices, forestry practices, and urban and rural runoff. - Numeric criterion - A measurable value determined for the pollutant of concern that, if achieved, is expected to result in the attainment of water quality standards in the listed waterbody. - Point source pollution - Pollutant loads discharged at a specific location from pipes, outfalls, and conveyance channels from either municipal wastewater treatment plants or industrial waste treatment facilities. Point sources can also include pollutant loads contributed by tributaries to the main receiving water stream or river. - As defined in Clean Water Act Sec. 502(6), a pollutant means dredged spoil, solid waste, incinerator residue, sewage, garbage, sewage sludge, munitions, chemical wastes, biological materials, radioactive materials, heat, wrecked or discarded equipment, rock, sand, cellar dirt, and industrial, municipal, and agricultural waste discharged into water. - The man-made or man-induced alteration of the chemical, physical, biological, and radiological integrity of water. - Receiving water - Creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, estuaries, groundwater formations, or other bodies of water into which surface water, treated waste, or untreated waste are discharged. - Section 305(b) CWA - Section of the Clean Water Act that requires states to submit a biennial report in even-numbered years to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describing the quality of the state's waters. The Sec. 305(b) report describes the overall water quality conditions and trends in the state. - Section 303(d) CWA - Section of the Clean Water Act that requires states periodically to identify waters that do not or are not expected to meet applicable water quality standards. These waters are identified on the Sec. 303(d) Impaired Waters List. A TMDL must be developed for each waterbody on the Sec. 303(d) list. If a listed waterbody has multiple impairments, a TMDL must be developed for each impairment. - Any person or organization with vested interest in TMDL development and implementation in a specific watershed. - Any substance or condition that adversely impacts the aquatic ecosystem. - Third-party TMDL - A TMDL in which an organization or group other than the lead water quality agency or organization takes responsibility for developing the TMDL document and supporting analysis. Upon completion of the TMDL, the state is then responsible for submitting the TMDL document to EPA for approval. - Threatened waterbody - Any waterbody of the United States that currently attains water quality standards, but for which existing and readily available data and information on adverse declining trends indicate that water quality standards will likely be exceeded by the time the next list of impaired or threatened waterbodies is required to be submitted to EPA. - 303(d) Threatened and Impaired Waters List - Under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act (CWA) or Act, states, territories, and authorized tribes are required to develop lists of impaired waters every two years (i.e., Section 303(d) list). The states identify all waters where required pollution controls are not sufficient to attain or maintain applicable water quality standards. States are required to establish priorities for development of TMDLs for waters on the 303(d) List (40C.F.R. §130.7(b)(4)). - 303(d) and 305(b) Integrated Report - EPA recommended approach to integrating water quality conditions data submitted by states under Clean Water Act sections 303(d) and 305(b). EPA guidance provides recommended organization for states' Integrated Report submittals. - Total maximum daily load (TMDL) - The sum of the individual wasteload allocations (WLAs) for point sources, load allocations (LAs) for nonpoint sources and natural background, and a margin of safety (MOS). TMDLs can be expressed in terms of mass per time, toxicity, or other appropriate measures that relate to a state's water quality standard. - Wasteload allocation (WLA) - The portion of a receiving water's loading capacity that is allocated to one of its existing or future point sources of pollution (e.g., permitted waste treatment facilities). - A geographically defined portion of navigable waters, waters of the contiguous zone, and ocean waters under the jurisdiction of the United States, including segments of rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, coastal waters and ocean waters. - Water quality - The biological, chemical, and physical conditions of a waterbody. It is a measure of a waterbody's ability to support beneficial uses. - Water quality criteria - Elements of state water quality standards expressed as constituent concentrations, levels, or narrative statement, representing a quality of water that supports a particular use. When criteria are met, water quality will generally protect the designated use. - Water quality modeling - A system of mathematical expressions that describe both hydrologic and water quality processes. When used for the development of TMDLs, models can estimate the load of a specific pollutant to a waterbody and make predictions about how the load would change as corrective actions are implemented. - Water quality standards - State or federal law or regulation consisting of a designated use or uses for the waters of the United States, water quality criteria for such waters based upon such uses, and an antidegradation policy and implementation procedures. Water quality standards protect the public health or welfare, enhance the quality of water and serve the purposes of the Clean Water Act. - Area that drains or contributes water to a particular point, stream, river, lake, or ocean. Larger watersheds are also referred to as basins. Watersheds range in size from a few acres for a small stream to large areas of the country.
What Is Renal Artery Disease? Renal (or kidney) artery disease is a condition that develops when the arteries in the abdomen that supply the kidneys become narrowed, or blocked, by an accumulation of a fatty substance called plaque. As plaque builds up inside the artery walls, the arteries can become hardened and narrowed (a process called atherosclerosis). Atherosclerosis affects up to 35 percent of Americans, and can cause narrowing (also called stenosis) of any of the arteries throughout the body. As atherosclerosis affects the whole body, people with renal artery narrowing often have other cardiovascular conditions such as carotid artery disease and heart disease. In renal artery disease, the narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the kidneys, causing progressive kidney failure or difficult-to-control high blood pressure in a significant number of patients. What Are the Risk Factors and Symptoms of Renal Artery Disease? Risk factors for renal artery disease include: - Smoking - the number one risk factor for all cardiovascular diseases - Family history of atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, advanced age, or obesity - Sedentary lifestyle Renal artery disease can also develop as a result of fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD). FMD is a condition in which abnormal cells cause narrowing throughout certain arteries, particularly those that supply the kidneys with blood. FMD can also affect the carotid arteries and arteries in the pelvis. This condition can affect anyone but is often seen in women between the ages of 20 and 40. Less commonly, injuries to the kidney can result in scarring, which can block the arteries to the kidney. With renal artery disease, patients can develop high blood pressure that is very difficult to control, and in extreme cases kidney failure. What Are the Diagnostic Tests for Renal Artery Disease? Your doctors can use one or more of the following imaging tests to determine the location and the extent of the arterial stenosis: - Duplex ultrasound - Magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) - CT scan What Are the Treatments for Renal Artery Disease? Patients whose symptoms are mild to moderate can often manage their disease by making lifestyle changes such as quitting smoking, getting regular exercise, and working with their doctors to take care of related conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. Doctors often use minimally invasive procedures such as balloon angioplasty and stenting to relieve the narrowing and improve blood supply to the kidneys. In severe cases, an abdominal bypass operation may be necessary to improve the blood flow to the kidneys. These treatment options are listed as follows: Balloon angioplasty. During this procedure, your doctor places a tiny, soft plastic tube called a catheter into the artery, usually in the groin, and inject a dye that makes the blood vessels clearly visible on an x-ray image. Your doctor can also use a special catheter that has a small balloon at the end, which can be inflated and deflated. The deflated balloon catheter is inserted through an artery in the groin and guided to the narrowed segment of the artery. When the catheter reaches the blockage, the balloon is inflated to widen the narrowed artery. Stenting. In some cases, it may be necessary to place a stent. A stent is a small tube that holds open the artery at the site of the blockage. The stent is collapsed around a balloon when it is placed on the tip of the catheter and inserted into the body. Once the catheter reaches the blockage, the doctor expands the stent by inflating the balloon. The stent is left permanently in the artery to provide a reinforced channel through which blood can flow. Some stents (drug-eluting stents) are coated with medication that helps prevent the formation of scar tissue. Arterial bypass surgery. If renal artery disease is severe, or if blockages develop in an artery that is difficult to reach with a catheter, kidney artery bypass surgery may be necessary to restore blood flow. In this treatment approach, doctors place a bypass graft made of synthetic material or a natural vein taken from another part of the body. During the procedure, the surgeon will make an incision to expose the diseased segment of the artery, and then attach one end of a bypass graft to a point above the blockage and the other end to a point below it. The blood supply is then diverted through the graft, around the blockage, to bypass the diseased section of the artery. The diseased artery is left in place.
- Entry level - No Education - Salary to negotiate We are looking for an analytical, knowledgeable Aerospace Engineer to assist our team as we develop designs, test and modify air and spacecraft, and review and repair existing aircraft. The Aerospace Engineer will assist in drafting proposals for innovative new air and spacecraft designs, help test materials and prototypes, investigate part or product failures and damage, and develop innovative new products, parts, and materials. You may also take part in research and help create specialized production processes or facilities. To be a successful Aerospace Engineer, you should have an aptitude for mechanics, science, math, and computers. You should be thorough, creative, communicative, and technical. Aerospace Engineer Responsibilities: Using mathematics, scientific, and engineering principles to design, repair, and improve air and spacecraft, component parts, facilities, materials, safety regulations, and manufacturing processes. Researching and analyzing information to develop designs and solve problems. Testing aircraft, rockets, and spacecraft to find and correct potential problems and to ensure compliance with quality, safety, and functionality requirements. Designing and assembling control panels, propulsion systems, guiding systems, computer systems, and other necessary parts and systems. Reviewing, developing, and improving production methods, facilities, and safety regulations. Coordinating activities with production, research, testing, and other departments to optimize safety and efficiency. Developing safety and quality standards, budgets, and timelines and ensuring projects comply with these regulations. Writing design proposals, reports, manuals, and other technical documents. Assisting with special projects or providing technical advice. Staying current on industry developments, technology, materials, trends, and regulations. Aerospace Engineer Requirements: Bachelor?s degree in engineering for entry level positions, Master?s degree preferred for advancement or work in research or education. Professional Engineer license may be desired. Some positions may require security clearance. Experience is a major plus. Strong understanding of materials, mathematics, science, thermodynamics, mechanics, robotics, aerodynamics, production methods, and potential safety and functionality problems and solutions. Excellent research, problem solving, and critical thinking skills. Exceptional verbal and written communication, project management and planning skills. Proficiency with computers. Ability to develop and adhere to budgets and timelines. - ms project - safety and security About the company We know finding the right job or candidates for the job can be difficult and time consuming. As a leading employment and staffing agency, JobPilot has the connections to find you the perfect career or the ideal candidate.
Relying on fossil fuels - such as coal, oil, and natural gas - leaves our communities at risk from the processes of resource extraction, storage, and burning. Coal leaves a legacy of harming our water supply and precious land, and can severly impact our communities. Fossil fuels are a finite resource that we should transition away from and to more sustainable sources. The Ohio Environmental Council takes a practical approach to fossil fuel use and the transition to cleaner sources of energy. Ohio’s Energy Mix Ohio generates 84% of its electricity from coal. However, the vast majority of the coal burned in Ohio is imported from other states. According to the National Mining Association, Ohio ranks 4th in the nation in coal use, but 11th in the nation in coal production. In 2009, Ohio utilities spent $1.49 billion to import low-sulfur coal from other states to fill this gap. At the same time, Ohio benefits from great natural resources within the state that can be harnessed for energy. Though renewables like wind, solar and biomass only met a small percentage of Ohio’s energy mix today, they are the fastest growing resource and have the potential to thrive. Thus, Ohio’s reduction in coal use means Ohio dollars staying in the local economy and less Ohio dollars going out of state for energy. For nearly five years, OEC and its colleagues from Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, and Ohio Citizen Action fought to stop the economically dicey and environmentally risky proposed AMPGS coal-fired power plant in Meigs County. In November 2009, the developer of the plant, AMP-Ohio, revealed it will abandon its plans to build the massive 960 MW coal plant near Letart Falls. According to the company’s statement, the change in course was the result of an unexpected 37% increase in the cost to build the 1,000-megawatt plant, which was last estimated at $3.25 billion. However, the demise of the plant is not complete. AMP-Ohio has plans to continue the construction it began on the coal plant, but build a Natural Gas Combined Cycle plant in its place, proposed to go on line in 2014. OEC will be closely monitoring the developments of this plant, and will continue to push AMP-Ohio to reconsider its fossil fuel focus, and deliver more clean energy to Ohio. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is the use of sand, water, and chemicals injected at high pressures to blast open shale rock and release the trapped gas inside. Horizontal hydraulic fracking is just like it sounds: after the well drill reaches a certain vertical depth in the ground, the well is then drilled horizontally. As with any industrial activity, the development of oil and gas involves risks to air, land, water, wildlife and communities. The oil and gas drilling industry argues that horizontal fracking is safe because it has been has been around for 40 years, but that is not correct. While the use of hydraulic fracturing to drill vertical wells has been around that long, horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing is very new and only began in Ohio in 2011.
Country of Origin The Komondor (also known as the ‘Hungarian Komondor’ or ‘Hungarian Sheepdog’, ‘Komondorok’ is sometimes used for the plural noun) is a Hungarian breed. The name ‘Komondor’ means ‘of the Cuman’ indicating the Komondor’s origin with the nomadic Cuman tribe which settled in Hungary in the 1100’s. Another theory is that the Komondor, like the Puli, which shares its remarkable curls, came to Hungary with the Magyar tribe. The Komondor may be related to the large white South Russian Ovtcharka. It served to protect sheep herds from predators, particularly wolves. By some tales, the Komondor was such a skilled fighter that the Hungarian wolf went nearly extinct once it came to prominence. The Komondor was imported to America in 1933 and recognized by the American Kennel Club in 1937. Many European Komondors were killed during World War II, probably because they courageously defended their homesteads. Due to the Komondor’s high grooming requirements, it is still fairly rare outside its native Hungary, though in recent years quite a few have been employed as flock guardians in the Western United States, a trend spurred by the rise in coyote population. The Komondor has a shoulder height of at least 65 cm (25.5 in) and weighs 32-36 kg (70-80 lbs); some weigh as much as 57 kg (125 lbs). The Komondor has a wide skull and muzzle, almond-shaped eyes, and triangular ears. Komondors have a tail carried low and large feet. The Komondor’s long, white, thick, naturally corded coat is its defining feature. The coat begins cording at one to two years of age. The coat protects the Komondor from cold weather, but it is not well suited to wet weather. The thick coat provides protection from attacking predators and allows the Komondor to blend in naturally to a sheep herd when necessary. The Komondor sheds little to no fur. The Komondor is confident, protective and loyal. It is calm and friendly until its family or home is threatened, then it will fight to the death to protect them without hesitation. Komondors can be somewhat stubborn and independent, but make a great family companion if properly socialized and trained. The Komondor is somewhat territorial and can be reserved with strangers, but it will accept them once it understands they present no danger. The Komondor should be socialized when young so it does not grow averse to new people and pets. If socialized, it will actually enjoy the company of another dog. The Komondor is good with older children but should be supervised around young children as it may bite if it is harassed. The Komondor‘s coat must have its cords regularly separated by hand to remove dirt. It must be bathed occasionally to prevent fleas or ticks from collecting in the large coat. When wet, the Komondor takes hours or even days to dry off. The Komondor can be clipped but this removes a lot of the breed’s distinct appeal. The Komondor has a lifespan of 10-12 years. Common health problems include hip dysplasia (malformed hip joint which can cause lameness or arthritis), eye problems such as cataracts or entropion (curled eyelid which can scratch the cornea), and bloat, a potentially serious health problem which can be prevented by feeding from a raised dish, spreading meals throughout the day, and avoiding exercising your Komondor immediately after meals. The Komondor requires firm, consistent training at an early age because it will be very large, strong, and fast when fully grown. Obedience training is strongly recommended. A praise-based approach with plenty of variety will likely yield the best results. The Komondor requires daily exercise such as a walk or playtime in the yard. Swimming may not be a great idea as this dog takes a long time to dry off.
NORWICH was formed from Union (Broome Co.) and Jericho, (now Bainbridge,) January 19, 1793, and named from Norwich, Conn. Pharsalia, Plymouth and Preston were taken off in 1806; New Berlin and a part of Columbus in 1807, and North Norwich in 1849. A part of Preston was annexed in 1808, and a part of the same town was taken off in 1820. It is the central town upon the east border of the County. The surface consists of two high rolling ridges, separated by the valley of the Chenango River. The highest summits are about 500 feet above the valleys. The Ohenango River flows south through the western part, and receives the Canasawacta Creek and Mineral Spring Brook from the west, and Thompson, Ransford and Johnson Creeks from the east. Unadilia River forms the eastern boundary. The soil upon the up lands is a shaly and gravelly loam and in the valleys a gravelly loam and alluvium. Norwich (p. v.) is delightfully situated upon the Chenango River, in the north-west part of the town, and was incorporated April 16, 1816. Canasawacta Creek flows along its western bord.er and unites with the Chenango at the south bounds of the viilage. The streets are regularly laid out and most of them bordered by fine rows of shade trees. The village contains the County buildings, six churches, viz., Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, F. W. Baptist and Roman Catholic, two banks, an academy, two newspaper offices, four hotels, a piano forte manufactory, several carriage factories and tanneries, a blast furnace, a hammer factory, a planing mill, a sash, door and blind factory, a foundry and machine shop, and several other manufactories of various kinds. The village is lighted with gas, contains between 4,000 and 5,000 inhabitants and is rapidly increasing. The Utica, Chenango and Susquehanna Valley Railroad, now open to Sherburne, will soon be open to Norwich, and the Midland Railroad is now in process of construction and will, when completed, give direct communication with New York City. The Piano Forte Manufactory of E. T. Hayes was established in 1838, with a capital of $150. Six or eight iustruments were made the first year and the business gradually increased until about three hundred were made in one year. At present about thirty hands are employed and four instruments are made per week. The Gas Works were started about 1862, by Hayes & Rider, and now the public buildings, many private residences and the streets are lighted with gas. The Hammer Factory of David May-dole is a monument to the enterprise, energy and business talent of its founder and proprietor. The business of making hammers was commenced. in the spring of 1847, and four or five men were employed. In the fall of 1848 the establishment was burned, but rebuilt immediately and put in operation in January, 1849, since which its progress has been onward and upward until the present. About one hundred hands are employed and the sales amount to about $150,000 per year. Sixty-four different kinds and sizes of hammers are made and are generally acknowledged to be the best in the market. Mr. Maydole gives his personal attention to the manufacture of these hammers and allows no defective work to leave the shop. To this in a great degree may- be attributed the fact that he meets with no com petition in the market. The number of hammers made averages. from forty to fifty dozen per day. The Norwich Charcoal Blast Furnace was erected in 1856, by Andrews, Rider & Co., and cost about $25,000. The ore used is from Salisbury, in Dutchess County, and the iron manufactured amounts to about 1500 tons annually. The present proprietors areĽ Russell & Angel, ear wheel manufacturers, of Chicago, Ill., and Adrian, Mich.; J. & N. C. Scoville, of Buffalo and Toronto, and B. B. Andrews, of Norwich. The iron manufactured is used by the proprietors at their foundries in the places above named. About 25 hands are employed. On the 21st of April, 1869, the establishment was burned, but is now being rebuilt. White Store, (p. v.) in the south-east part of the town, contains a church, a hotel, a grist mill, a saw mill, a blacksmith shop and about a dozen houses. Polkville is a hamlet near the center of the town. The first settlement within the present limits of Norwich was made in 1788, by Avery Power. He came here previous to the treaty by which the Twenty Towns were ceded to the State, and located on what was known as the Indian Fields, on lot 39, in the south-east part of the village of Norwich. When the surveyors came here to run out the land it is said that Power paid for his farm by boarding the surveyors and assisting them in their labors. His farm was purchased of the State at the minimum price, three shillings per acre. In 1800 he sold out to John Randall for four thousand and one hundred dollars. The farm contained 286 acres, including the whole of lot 39 and 36 acres over. In the fall of 1790 and spring of 1791, several other settlers came from Massachusetts and Connecticut and settled in various parts of the town. These settlers came via Albany to the Unadilla River and followed marked trees to the Power farm. Where the streams were too deep to ford with safety they crossed in canoes. Some came by the way of Whitestown and down the valley. David Fairchild was one of the first settlers and located near the south line of the town and subsequently removed to Preston. Silas Cole is another of. the early settlers. His farm, according to Clark's History, must have embraced nearly the same as that of Avery Power. He says: "The Cole farm iiicluded all of the corporate limits of Norwich village lying. north of where the Canasawacha Creek crosses South Main Street, and east of South Main Street to where East Street intersects Main Street." He built a house for a tavern, and when the first militia muster was advertised for Norwich, made great preparations to entertain the assembled multitude. Though the crowd that assembled was even greater than was expected, the inn keepers failed to gain the largest share of their patronage, as the village swarmed with hucksters who ministered to the wants of the multitude, leaving the landlords to dispose of Their supplies at the best market offered. Mr. C. became involved by his outlay on this occasion and was compelled to sell his farm. He removed to the State of Ohio, where he died. William Smiley came into the town about the same time and settled south of the village. Flis farm included the once famous Sulphur Spring which was destroyed by an attempt to improve it. Nicholas Pickett was another who came about the same time. Major Thomas Brooks, from Massachusetts, who was engaged in "Shay's rebellion," came here and settled on the west Green in N orwich. He built a log cabin without using either hammer or nails. He subsequently removed to Plymouth, where he died. He was a soldier of the Revolution and was at the battle of Bunker Hill. Israel, CharJes and Matthew Graves were among the early settlers and purchased all that part of the village lying west of South Main Street, and extending to the Creek and as far north, as the Green. Other early settlers were Josiah Brown, John Wait, Martin Taylor,Joseph Skinner, Captain John Harris, Samuel Hammond, William and Hascall Ransford, Chauncey and. William Gibson, Simeon and Job Spencer, John Welch, Lemuel Southwick, Col. William Monroe, Lobden Jaynes, Richard Miller, Manasseh French, Joab Enos, Elisha Smith, Mark, William and Stephen Steer, stephen Collins, James Gilmore, Moses Snow, John Randall and his son the last named still living, John McNitt, David and John Shattuck. The first child born in the town was Lucy Power, and the first male child Marcus Cole. The first marriage was that of Hascall Ransford and Miss Harriet Graves, July 12, 1792. There was no clergyman or other person authorized to marry, nearer than Tioga Point, and Mr. Ransford at first proposed to go there to have the ceremony performed, but finally it was decided to make a Justice of the Peace for the occasion, and the oath was accordingly administered to Joab Enos, who performed his part in the drama to the satisfaction of the parties most intimately- concerned. Doctor Jonathan Johnson was the first physician of the town, he came from Connecticut and settled here about 1794. His widow who was a younger sister of Mrs. Haseall Ransford, the first bride of the town, is still living. Dr. Johnson enjoyed a lucrative practice for many years. In the early years of his practice the forests were infested by wild beasts, whose howls and screams made night hideous as he pursued his lonely way over the hills and through the valleys. Truman Enos, now living in the village of Norwich, came here in 1806 and, established a tannery which he carried on about forty years. He says Joshua Whipple kept a store near the site of the drug store, on Main Street, a hogshead of whisky being the chief article of trade. The first mills were built by Deacon Elisha Smith, on the west side of the Creek, opposite the present stone mill, in 1798. Near the site of the Hughson House was a large trough to hold the lye from several leaches, and near by was a row of kettles to convert the same into black salts. Dr. Harvey Harris, son of Capt. John Harris, was born in 1795, and is the oldest resident of the town, who was born here. Tie informed the writer that five hundred Indians once stopped at his father's, on their way to attend a council at Tioga Point. They proceeded down the river in canoes. Captain Harris's farm was upon the' hill on the east side of North Main Street. The first town meeting was held at the house of Captain Harris in 1793. Subsequently the town meeting was held at the house of Hascall Rausford, who is said to have kept the first inn, though Mr. Power provided entertainment for travelers at an earlier day, and the State Gazetteer says Benjamin Edmunds kept the first inn. It appears from the best information at hand that Mr. Ranford's inn was much larger and' much more worthy of the name than any that preceded it. Mr. Ransford was also the first post master, the mail being received once a week. Deacon Charles Randall, now living in Norwich, informed the writer that when eighteen years of age he moved with his father from Stonington, Connecticut, to Pharsalia, driving an ox team through the whole distance. He started with two yoke,and at Hartford added another. He crossed the Hudson at Catskill and after a journey of twenty-one days arrived at his place of destination. This was in May, 1798. A few years afterwards, his father, Mr. John Randall, purchased a farm in the present limits of Norwich and removed hither. Mr. Leonard M. Cutting was the original purchaser of this town, and on the arrival of settlers refused to sell his land, but wished to lease it after the manner of the Van Rensseiaers and some other early land holders. The settlers declined to enter upon the land upon such terms and proposed to remove to Whitestown, but finally Melanethon Smith and John Stiles purchased Cutting's land and sold to the settlers at $2.50 per acre. Peter B. Garnsey was an extensive land owner and was during his life identified with the prosperity of Norwich, and his heirs are still land owners in the town. The writer was unable to find the early records of the town and consequently is unable to give the early .town officers and many other facts usually obtained from such records. The first religious services were held by Rev. Manasseh French, in. 1793 or 1794. Rev. John Camp preached for several years, alternating between this town and Oxford. In 1814 Rev. Joel Benedict and other missionaries visited the town and their labors were attended with such success that a church of the Congregational br Presbyterian order was organized. We quote the following from Hotehkin's History: "Mr. Benedict, in his report to the Trustees of the Missionary Society, says, 'In the shire-town of the County of Chenango, called Norwich, for years past the greatest stupidity, and an almost total indifference to divine things prevailed, and the Sabbath was wholly neglected. During the last winter and spring the Lord remarkably owned the labors of missionaries in that place. I organized a church there in June, consisting of twenty members, and on the Sabbath the - audience was large, nearly four hundred persons attended. It is impossible to describe the alteration that has taken place there within a short time, for the better.'" For several years succeeding this we have no report of the Church. The Baptist Church of Norwich was organized August 18, 1814, with fifteen members; Rev. Jedediah Randall, pastor. The following are the names of the other members at its organization, viz., John Hascall, John Randall, Beriah Lewis, Elias Breed, Thomas Prentice, Reuben Nichols, Lois Lewis, Lois W. Lewis, Mary Norton, 'Anna Nichols, Huldah Welch, Anna York, Elizabeth Breed arid Pruda Bushnell. On the first of March following, a council of members from North Norwich, Preston, Pharsalia, German and Brookfield, agreed unanimously to give them fellowship as a church. Of this council Jonathan Ferris was moderator and Nathan Noyes, clerk. The first person baptized was Miss Martha G. Randall, in May, 1815. The last of the band who organized this Church, Mrs. Elizabeth Breed, died in thefall of 1868. She was a sister of Miss Randall, the first one. baptized. The Baptist Church and Society was organized August 12, 1816. Their first meetings were held in the Court House. Their first house of worship was erected on the east side of the square, opposite. It was burned in 1845. . A new house was nearly completed when the fire occurred, and was dedicated in December, 1845. It is of stone, situated on the north side of the square, and cost originally $9,000. It has recently been repaired and presents a beautiful appearance in the interior and exterior. The Church has had twelve pastors since its organization. The oldest surviving member, Mrs. Elizbeth Lewis, was baptized December 9, 1816. Soon after the great revival of 1816, one hundred and three persons were baptized. The present membership is five hundred and six; the whole number of males added to the Church by baptism is 410; number of females, 648; the whole number of additions, 1,578, and the number who have died, 214. Rev. J. D. Pope is the present pastor. We were unable to learn at what time the Methodist Church was organized, but their house of worship was dedicated in 1836. Rev. Lyman Beach was the pastor at that time. The present membership is about 400. Rev.. W. A. Wadsworth The population of Norwich in 1865 was 4,331, and its area 26,892 acres. The number of school districts is twenty; number of children of school age, 1,441; number attending school, 938; average attend-' dance, 430; amount expended for school purposes during the last year, $5,830.68.
Just what are they, exactly? The caption at Reuters referred to “the remains of a train wreckage,” and it is that. The train of tank cars carrying crude oil had exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec, creating an inferno that killed at least 15 people, with others yet to be accounted for. This human toll should not be minimized, and I will be among the last to grieve over the loss of company property. Nonetheless, the photo above deserves attention even as it takes us in away from those whose lives were torched by the blast. The scorched tank cars look like carcasses more than anything else. Like the bloated bodies of pigs after a flood, or dead fish after an oil spill in a river. Or, if you like sci fi noir, like pods leaking alien spoor in some industrial wasteland of a long dead planet. The sense of scale is all off–certainly not to human scale, as the tanker truck and other vehicles on the road are dwarfed by the giant metal rames piled up like so much slag at a gargantuan mill. But I keep coming back to a sense of organic life now dead. As if some life form has been decimated arbitrarily, accidentally, without dignity or purpose. Again, I know that human beings really did suffer that death, but nonetheless I think this photograph captures something important about the larger economy of life and death in a machine age. The word “petroleum” comes from the Greek petra/rock and Latin oleum/oil, and that etymology captures the sense of being both inorganic and organic. Technically, oil is not a mineral, yet oil rights are covered under mineral rights, it is pumped out of the dark depths of the earth, and then it is turned into tens of thousands of materials and other products. Likewise, the black (and blackened) steel tanker cars represent the black oil they carried, as if two parts of the same whole. Thus, oil can be thought of as a mineral that once was a mixture of plants and other decomposing matter, and perhaps the photo taps into that deep organic history. Plants and animals were transformed over vast expanses of geological time into the crude oil that then was used in just over a century of industrialized production to support an incredible expansion of human development, but one not without its costs. And that process of oil extraction, distribution, refining, and conversion into machine power increasingly seems to have developed a life of its own, or at least a great many defenders of its right to exist and expand without limit. But as the photograph above suggests, even that process can come full circle, destroying its own and leaving nothing but waste that will be much less likely in the long run to change into anything else. I’ve always enjoyed the family road trip game of Twenty Questions, where you start by asking if the object is Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. For the time spent trapped in the car, we could at least share the illusion that all the world could be placed neatly into one of three categories, and with everything either bigger, smaller, or (less often) the same size as a breadbox. Without cheap gasoline, I doubt we would have played the game. At the same time, we were being driven toward a world where those simple categories were going to become increasingly intertwined. Look again: the tanker cars are at once bigger and smaller than a breadbox. More important, or less a trick of the eye, they also are at once vegetable, mineral, and animal. And so, as this photograph senses, there may be something to mourn there after all. But just what that is, exactly, I’m not sure. Photograph by Mathieu Belanger/Reuters.
Why use respiratory physiotherapy? Respiratory involvement is currently considered the leading cause of hospitalization. The objectives of respiratory physiotherapy are mainly to… - Clear the bronchial tree of secretions. - Decrease resistance of the rib cage - Increase pulmonary ventilation - Adequate ventilatory mechanics - Assist drainage and reabsorption of air and pleural fluid. - Preventing circulatory complications and post-operative scarring - Recovery of effort tolerance (appropriate to each moment). - Maintain adequate respiratory muscles, diaphragm, intercostals, scalenes, ecom, etc. … - Increasing functional capacity - Assist in the prevention and/or treatment of respiratory diseases related to different factors, such as: Airborne suspensions such as covid, rhinovirus, interstitial viruses, etc….. Who does respiratory physiotherapy help? Respiratory physiotherapy helps all those people (infants, children, adolescents and adults) What respiratory diseases or problems do we solve with physiotherapy? - Rib cage problems - Neuromuscular diseases - Obstructive diseases (bronchitis, emphysema, COPD, covid, pneumonia, …). - Restrictive diseases (rib cage deformities, cystic fibrosis, etc…) - It can be directed to children with (bronchitis, asthma, bronchial hyperreactivity, bronchiolitis, diaphragmatic paralysis, bronchial dyskinesia, …). - Neurological diseases (ulrich, smart, ame, cerebral palsy etc., cancer or tumors, lobectomies, cardiac or thoracic surgeries, sleep disease)
Interactive and printable math sequencing worksheets for preschool. Children ages 3-5. Sequencing is all about getting things into the "right order". Before starting these exercises, talk to your child about sequencing. An example is the sequence in which events occur during their daily routine. We explain what is meant by "before" and "after". What comes before or after a certain action. What then comes "next". In this first exercise discuss each picture with your child and ask them to work out the correct sequence of their activities. What happened before and then what happened after. Talk about the pictures and type 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the right boxes. The next three questions have missing numbers. A clock, some socks and some peaches. Enter all of the missing numbers in the correct sequence. Lastly, we have four sequence worksheets for you to print out. In the first worksheet, look carefully at the objects on each line and complete the sequence. For the next two worksheets, simply complete the missing numbers. Lastly, your child should have fun completing the dot to dot number sequence to reveal the animal. Well done! You finished the matching and sorting chapter. Keep up with the good work and learn more with matching and sorting revision practice. Like This Page? Share This Page:
Hurricane Gustav Storm Summary On September 12, 2002 Hurricane Gustav passed over Atlantic Canada. With wind speeds of over 120 km/h, Gustav dumped more than 100 millimetres of rain in portions of Nova Scotia while part of Newfoundland received more than 70 millimetres. To learn more about Hurricane Gustav, read the storm highlights and view the pictures below. - Tropical storm Gustav was upgraded to a hurricane at 11:50 a.m. ADT on September 11, only hours before moving into southwestern Maritime waters. - September 12, Hurricane Gustav made landfall along the southern coast of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia at 1:30 a.m. ADT. - Gustav was upgraded from a tropical storm to a hurricane at 11:50 a.m. ADT on Sept 11, only hours before moving into southwestern Maritime waters. - Normally (50 year average) the North Atlantic would have had three hurricanes by September 11, however, Gustav was the first of this year, making it the latest date for the Atlantic's first hurricane in 60 years. - Reports of heavy rain, high winds, and minor flooding from storm surge were received from around Atlantic Canada...events which were all warned of well in advance by the Atlantic region weather centres. - The highest rainfall amounts officially reported were in Nova Scotia where 102 mm fell in Ashdale (a climate station in West Hants County) and 92 mm at Halifax International Airport. All of Nova Scotia received over 50 mm while the New Brunswick rain amounts ranged from 8 mm (Miscou) to 63 mm (Moncton) and the Newfoundland rainfalls ranged from 40 to 70 mm in the north. - Highest wind speed reports varied across the region... ranging from 89 km/h at Miscou, NB, to 109 km/h at East Point, PEI, to 122 km/h at both St. Paul Island and Sable Island, NS. High wind gusts in parts of Newfoundland of over 100 km/h were still being reported days afterward. - Storm surge conditions throughout the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence coincided (within a few hours) of a run of high astronomical tides, resulting in localized coastal flooding. A noteworthy point for water levels in Charlottetown is that had the highest surge arrived only four to five hours earlier to coincide exactly with the high tide, an additional 70 cm of elevation would have pushed water levels to near record values resulting in definite flooding of portions of downtown Charlottetown. - Gustav was downgraded to a post-tropical storm as it exited Nova Scotia and entered Newfoundland on September 12 shortly before 6:30 a.m. NDT.
Ecocycle Technology allows this plastic erosion control blanket netting to degrade without the need for sunlight after it's no longer needed. It degrades in a two-step process. First, heat and oxygen from the atmosphere causes rapid molecular weight reduction. Microbes in the soil then convert the resulting fragments of net into biomass, carbon dioxide, and water. Conwed Global Netting Solutions
After reporting Naegleria fowleri deaths in the double digits in 2015 and 2014 (HERE and HERE) in Pakistan, and five deaths reported last year, health officials in Karachi have reported the first such case of 2017. According to a Geo.tv report, a 23-year-old man from Tando Allah Yar succumbed to the lethal amoeba while admitted at a private hospital in the city. The report does not indicate how he contracted the lethal amoeba. Naegleria fowleri (commonly referred to as the “brain-eating amoeba”), is a microscopic amoeba which is a single-celled living organism. It can cause a rare and devastating infection of the brain called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). The amoeba is commonly found in warm freshwater such as lakes, rivers, ponds and canals. Infections can happen when contaminated water enters the body through the nose. Once the amoeba enters the nose, it travels to the brain where it causes PAM (which destroys brain tissue) and is usually fatal. Infections usually occur when it is hot for prolonged periods of time, which results in higher water temperatures and lower water levels. Naegleria fowleri infections are rare. Most infections occur from exposure to contaminated recreational water. Cases due to the use of neti pots and the practice of ablution have been documented. The practice of ablution is included in Yogic, Ayurvedic, and Islamic traditions. Within the Islamic faith, ritual nasal rinsing is included in a cleansing process called “wudu” or “ablution.” It is usually performed several times a day in preparation for prayer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You cannot be infected with Naegleria fowleri by drinking contaminated water and the amoeba is not found in salt water. Initial symptoms of PAM usually start within 1 to 7 days after infection. The initial symptoms may include headache, fever, nausea, or vomiting. Other symptoms can include stiff neck, confusion, loss ofbalance, seizures, and hallucinations. After the start of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly. For more infectious disease news and information, visit and “like” the Infectious Disease News Facebook page - Neti pots, Naegleria and you - Miltefosine and the 4th Naegleria fowleri survivor: Talking with Profounda CEO, Todd MacLaughlan - Naegleria fowleri drug research: An interview with Dennis Kyle, PhD
Love the sun? You're not alone. In a recent survey, 75 percent of Americans said they thought sun exposure was healthy. It's true that sun exposure boosts vitamin D production, enhances immunity, improves mood, and increases nighttime production of melatonin, a natural hormone that enhances sleep and slows down the aging process. But too much sun damages skin and eyes, and increases cancer risk. The trick is to enjoy the outdoors while minimizing the damage. 12 Ways to Avoid Sun Burn 1. Cover up. A white T-shirt has an SPF of about 7; dark blue or bright orange clothing has more. Tightly woven fabric offers the best protection-if you can see light through the fabric, it won't protect you. Or look for UPF (UV protection factor) rated clothing. 2. Check the time. The sun's rays are most intense between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., so plan ahead, and wear protective clothing during peak times. 3. Use safe sunscreen. Some conventional sunblocks contain ingredients that can increase the rate of tumor formation, disrupt the endocrine system, or lead to DNA damage. Choose natural and/or organic formulas based on zinc oxide and titanium dioxide that are free of paragons and nanoparticles. 4. Slather it on. Use enough sunscreen to generously coat all exposed skin-about one ounce of sunscreen for the average person. Apply it 15 minutes before going outside, and re-apply every two hours, especially after swimming. 5. Wear a hat. Choose a wide-brimmed one that shades your face, ears, and the back of your neck. If you wear a baseball cap, protect your ears and neck with a good quality sunscreen. Canvas or other tightly woven fabric, rather than straw, filters out the sun's rays best. 6. Seek shade. Hang out under an umbrella, tree, or covered area, especially during peak sun hours. But be aware that UV rays can be reflected off of water, sand, and concrete-so you can burn in the shade. 7. Drink green tea. It contains polyphenols that have been shown to inhibit cancer, including skin cancer, probably by enhancing DNA repair. Topical application of green tea also has protective effects. 8. Stay dry. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the word "waterproof" from sunscreen labels last year because it's completely misleading. Don't count on sunscreen to protect you in the water-protective clothing is a better option. Try http://www.sunprecautions.com. 9. Take your vitamins. Vitamin A or mixed carotenoid supplements may prevent melanoma, the potentially fatal form of skin cancer. In one large study, people who took vitamin A or mixed carotenoids were 40 percent less likely to develop melanoma than those who didn't. And the effects were more pronounced in women than men. Use caution, however, as high doses of vitamin A can cause liver toxicity. 10. Treat burns. Try lavender oil, diluted with 10 parts water, applied directly to skin. Aloe vera gel offers immediate cooling and soothing-keep some in the refrigerator for increased relief. And calendula salve helps heal sun-damaged skin fast. 11. Wear shades. UV rays can burn the surface of the eye and increase the risk of cataracts. Always wear sunglasses that offer 100 percent UV ray protection. Wraparound styles are best. 12. Don't be fooled by clouds. About 60-80 percent of UV rays pass through thin clouds. UVA rays also penetrate glass, so you should use sunscreen even when you're indoors near windows or in the car for a long time (such as during a road trip).
Conscious breathing is so very important because it is such a vital aspect of your life. It is vital in much more than just the physical sense. You can actually control your life's outcomes by learning to attend to your breath and control it. Slowly, deeply and evenly breathe in conscious awareness of the present moment. Slowly, deeply and evenly, breathe out all that no longer serves you. It is an automatic function of our bodies to breathe. When we are not consciously aware of the breath, our bodies just breathe automatically for us. Just like our hearts that beat without our control and our digestion that hums along without a thought, so also goes our breathing. When we become stressed, our entire bodies respond to the perceived threat to our organism. Whether the threat is emotional or physical, our bodies respond the same. All of our muscles tense, getting ready for action. Our hearts beat faster. Our breath becomes more rapid and shallow. This is an unconscious process that happens totally without a thought. When we become stressed, we tighten our bellies, and may even hold our breath unknowingly. When we do breathe, it is shallow and ineffective. The cascade of events that occur in the body as a result of a stressful stimulus is most often from an emotional trigger and not an actual external threat. However, our bodies are unable to distinguish between a "real" or a perceived threat, whether internal or external. The physiologic response it the same. This physiologic response is unconscious and we are not able to control it. This is a fact of the human condition. If the stress response is prolonged and continues to remain in your unconscious, it will create even more stress and dis-ease in your life. When we remember to breathe evenly and deeply, through a conscious breathing process, it becomes physiologically impossible to hold muscular tension. As you know, when your body relaxes, so does your entire demeanor. It only takes 90 seconds for the rush of stress hormones to settle down after a stressful event triggers them. If you hold onto stress and strong emotions for longer than 90 seconds, it is now a choice!! Knowing this brings great power and control to you! So then, why is it so important to focus on the breath through conscious breathing? Beyond the obvious reason of "controlling stress," there are four more very important reasons. The four reasons why we must attend to our breath: Let's explore the first reason that conscious breathing is so important. The breath has no emotion whatsoever attached to it. It is a necessity of life. You breathe whether you are stressed, angry, happy or sad. There is no judgement attached to breathing. It just is. Breathing, in fact, when you attend to it, brings you immediately into the present. It is impossible to hold unto muscle tension and strong emotions, or to have your mind somewhere else, when you are focused 100 percent on your breath! This is a very, very significant thing and the key to your wholeness and Secondly, it is only the breath that connects us to all living things. All humans breathe. It is the thing that connects us to one another. We have many, many differences, but when we contemplate the breath, and our physical processes, we are all the same. Period. All mammals breathe. Reptiles breathe, albeit in a different way, but oxygen is required for them to exist too. Even plants contribute to our process of breathing. Through their transpiration processes, they take our carbon dioxide and convert it to oxygen for us. So we are connected to plants as well. In fact all living organisms require oxygen for their existence. Oxygen is what built the Earth. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you focus on your breath because, even though it is usually automatic, it is the only part of your autonomic nervous system that you can truly control. When you get this concept down in its entirety, you will have great Health and Peace in your life. While I, myself still have a ways to go, I can vouch for the differences that I have brought into my own life with conscious breathing. When I begin to feel that strong emotion rising, it takes less and less time now for me to return my conscious awareness to my breath. This really does work! The 90 seconds that it takes for the adrenaline and cortisone from my excitable sympathetic nervous system to dissipate and pass by, happens more quickly when I am focusing on my breath. Through this deep breathing, I am able to return to evenness. It is the sympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system that is stimulated when you are stressed, through what is called the "fight or flight" syndrome. When you breathe deeply and evenly, this calms the sympathetic nervous system and your automatic fight or flight response to the stressful stimulus. Deeply breathing also stimulates the relaxation response through the parasympathetic nervous system! The parasympathetic nervous system works in exact opposite fashion as the sympathetic nervous system. Learning to breath deeply and wait for 90 seconds to pass is what I call the 90-Second Cure. Because your emotions affect you so deeply, AND affect your body, if you learn conscious breathing, you will prevent a lot of heartache and ill health in your life. This I promise. The way to cure the effects of emotions on the body, is through the body's own process of breathing. When you go to apply your 90-second cure, through awareness of your breath, consciously try to keep your inhale and your exhale balanced. It will re-direct your body's response to one of balance, through the stimulation of your parasympathetic nervous system. The most effective way to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system is to breathe evenly and deeply! You will feel an immediate release of muscle tension when you begin your conscious breathing. You can even manage powerful emotions like anger, when you master this concept. Fourth: When you focus on your breath, you are bringing yourself into the present moment; each and every time! I know that you know that living in the present is desirable. The future never comes, the past is just a thought and so forth. While you know this simple truth, it is very, very difficult to follow it, isn't it! Using conscious breathing to bring you into the present moment is indeed a spiritual practice, because it is only when you are in the moment that you are able to let go of your attachments to the future or your constant ruminations about the past! It is only when you are in the present moment that you are able to truly be present to yourself through introspection, that you can truly heal your body, mind and soul! This is, in theory, such an easy practice!! It is a wonder, we are not taught this as we grow up, and even more amazing that all adults are not taught this in every school, church, temple, mosque, stupa and synagogue! To begin a conscious breathing practice, several times throughout your day, just notice your breath. Notice the depth, length and quality of your breathing. Just be present to this, in the moment. Turn to focus on your breath, whenever you think about it. When you do not remember to think about it, set your cell phone timer, every hour or so, to remind you. After you become more skilled at just noticing your breath, then move on to the actual breathing practice. First, take a deep breath and focus on the inhale. Consciously allow the inhale to open and relax as you draw in deep into your belly. Prolong the inhale for a count of one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand, four-one thousand. Four seconds. Next, turn to the exhale and make it as long, open and relaxed as your inhale - Four full seconds worth. This 4 second inhale and exhale is harder than you think, if you have never practiced breathing techniques (called pranayama in yoga) before! Do this for a round of at least 10 breaths. If you find yourself getting light-headed because your body is not accustomed to breathing deeply, just discontinue the practice. Breathe "normally" for awhile and attempt the 10 breaths again. If you can remember to breathe in this fashion several times throughout your day, each and every day, you will be amazed at the balancing of your body, mind and soul that results! It is especially therapeutic if you learn the practice of belly breathing as part of your conscious breathing exercises. May your journey to wholeness and health be complete when you balance your breath! May you always remain in the moment through your conscious breathing!
The ancient synagogue at Huqoq, an ancient Jewish village in Israel’s Lower Galilee, has been the focal point of yearly excavations since 2011, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the space of nine years, archaeologists were able to unravel a series of stunning mosaics from the confines of the structure that harks back to the late Roman period (circa 5th century AD). And the interesting part relates to how the spectrum of the subject matter covered by these artworks is extensive, ranging from Biblical scenes (including stories of Noah and Samson), Greco-Roman divine entities to even historical scenarios like (possibly) Alexander the Great meeting a Jewish high priest. The Newest Discoveries – To that end, this year’s (2019) newest discoveries have brought forth quite a few fortuitous finds relating to Biblical subject matter. For example, Chapter 7 in the Book of Daniel mentions four beasts that represent four kingdoms leading up to the end of days. And intriguingly, the archaeologists have found mosaics that depict these four beasts. Additionally, they could also identify the first and the only known visual depiction of the episode of Elim (Exodus 15:27) in Jewish art. According to Dr. Jodi Magness, professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, who has been heading the archaeological project at the almost 1,600-year old Huqoq site – Chapter 7 in the book of Daniel describes four beasts which represent the four kingdoms leading up to the end of days. This year our team discovered mosaics in the synagogue’s north aisle depicting these four beasts, as indicated by a fragmentary Aramaic inscription referring to the first beast: a lion with eagle’s wings. The lion itself is not preserved, nor is the third beast. However, the second beast from Daniel 7:4 – a bear with three ribs protruding from its mouth – is preserved. So is most of the fourth beast, which is described in Daniel 7:7 as having iron teeth. We’ve [also] uncovered the first depiction of the episode of Elim ever found in ancient Jewish art. This story is from Exodus 15:27. Elim is where the Israelites camped after leaving Egypt and wandering in the wilderness without water. The mosaic is divided into three horizontal strips, or registers. We see clusters of dates being harvested by male agricultural workers wearing loincloths, who are sliding the dates down ropes held by other men. The middle register shows a row of wells alternating with date palms. On the left side of the panel, a man in a short tunic is carrying a water jar and entering the arched gate of a city flanked by crenellated towers. An inscription above the gate reads, “And they came to Elim.” History of Huqoq – Now in the Biblical scope, Huqoq is mentioned as a border town for the tribe of Naphtali in the Book of Joshua. As for the historical side of affairs, in the later era of the Romans and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire), the settlement functioned as an agricultural village that produced its fair share of mustard, stone vessels, and rabbis (thus attesting to its ancient Jewish population). Suffice it to say, the archaeologists were pleasantly surprised by the flurry of mosaics, a feature that was never found before in canonical Galilean synagogues. Essentially, the researchers have hypothesized that these vibrant artworks rather mirrored the thriving nature of the Jewish people in the 5th century Levant, which rather contradicts the popular notion relating to their decline under Christian rule. As for the compelling link between archaeology and history in the context of Huqoq, Dr. Magness said – Our work sheds light on a period when our only written sources about Judaism are rabbinic literature from the Jewish sages of this period and references in early Christian literature. The full scope of rabbinic literature is huge and diverse, but it represents the viewpoint of the group of men who wrote it. That group was fairly elite, and we don’t have the writings of other groups of Jews from this period. Early Christian literature is generally hostile to Jews and Judaism. So, archaeology fills this gap by shedding light on aspects of Judaism between the fourth to sixth centuries CE – about which we would know nothing otherwise. Our discoveries indicate Judaism continued to be diverse and dynamic long after the destruction of the second Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Chronology of Mosaic Discoveries at Huqoq – Going down the chronological line, the first of these mosaics were discovered in 2012 after a year of excavation at the ancient site. The find pertained to the depiction of Samson and his rage-fueled action of setting the Philistines’ fields ablaze by tying burning torches to each unfortunate pair of foxes’ tails (Judges 15:4). In 2013, the researchers found yet another mosaic representation of Samson, this time carrying the gates of Gaza on his shoulders (Judges 16:3) – pictured above. In the following years, archaeologists were able to uncover even more incredible mosaic scenes, including the ‘non-Biblical’ one that portrays a Greek military commander with golden locks (possibly Alexander the Great), wearing a regal purple attire and a diadem, who is meeting with a white-bearded man clad in white robes (possibly a high priest). Quite intriguingly, the Greek commander is showcased in an authoritative light, as he leads a bull by its horns and is followed by soldiers and even an elephant (pictured in the featured image) – an animal that was never mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Now while the main hypothesis regarding this panel still leans towards the representation of Alexander the Great, the other possibility relates to the depiction of Maccabees facing off against the Seleucid Greeks. In 2015, the researchers were once again enticed by the pictorial scope of the corresponding panel which depicts a rather vivid scene involving humans, animals and mythological creatures like putti (cupids). And in 2016, archaeologists were able to discern mosaic images pertaining to Noah’s Ark and his adventure, along with the (separate Biblical episode of) parting of the Red Sea. The story of Noah’s Ark is represented with the illustration of an ark and pairs of animals, including an assortment of camels, lions, sheep, donkeys, bears and even snakes. As for the momentous scene of the parting of the Red Sea, the very-next mosaic depicts the Egyptian soldiers being swallowed by a monster fish, while their chariots are overturned and destroyed. And in 2017, researchers salvaged yet another series of mosaic panels from the ancient Huqoq synagogue. This time around the depictions included – Greco-Roman sun god Helios in a quadriga (four-horse chariot) surrounded by symbolic zodiac signs, the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale (where the marine animal is shown to be swallowed by a larger fish, and the larger fish is being swallowed by an even larger fish), and the Tower of Babel being constructed by laborers. Back then, Dr. Magness said – One of the distinguishing features of the Huqoq mosaics is the incorporation of numerous classical (Greco-Roman) elements such as putti, winged personifications of the seasons, and — in the Jonah scene — harpies (large birds with female heads and torsos representing storm winds). The mosaics also provide a great deal of information about ancient daily life, such as the construction techniques are shown in the Tower of Babel scene uncovered this summer . And finally, in 2018, the archaeologists came across an arrangement of panels with pictorial depictions and Hebrew inscriptions. One panel with the label ‘a pole between two’ represents a Biblical scene from Numbers 13:23, with the accompanying images depicting two spies sent by Moses to explore Canaan carrying a pole with a cluster of grapes (pictured above). Another panel, referring to Isaiah 11:6, had the inscription ‘a small child shall lead them’. The concurrent pictorial panel depicted a youth leading an animal on a rope. On one end of the eastern aisle, the researchers were further able to unveil a fragmentary Hebrew inscription with the phrase ‘Amen selah,’ meaning ‘Amen forever’. These incredible discoveries were complemented by the rare 1,600-year-old finds of intact columns bedecked in colorful, painted plaster. Source: UNC-Chapel Hill All Images – Copyright: Jim Haberman, Courtesy: UNC-Chapel Hill.
Introduction to Rules of Evidence The rules of evidence determine which information comes in a trial. They also determine how that information comes in. Rules of evidence are the trial system’s equivalent of the rules of grammar. Just as grammar rules govern how we speak and write, evidence rules control courtroom procedures. Evidence rules limit not only what witnesses and lawyers can say during trials, but also how they can say it. The Purpose of Evidence Rules Evidence rules guide the process by which information (evidence) flows from witnesses to a judge or jury. The rules control both the content of evidence and the manner in which it’s presented. To take a familiar rule, witnesses may testify only in response to questions, rather than by telling a long, uninterrupted narrative. Another widely known rule deals with hearsay—it bars witnesses from testifying about certain statements made outside the courtroom. The Origins of Rules of Evidence Most evidence rules developed through “common law” judicial decisions. Today, most evidence rules are found in statutes. California was one of the first states to enact a comprehensive set of evidence laws, known as the California Evidence Code. The California code was a primary model for the Federal Rules of Evidence (“FRE”), a set of laws that governs trials in federal courts. About 40 states have enacted evidence rules based on the FRE. Because every jurisdiction’s evidence rules are based on the common law and on each other, evidence rules are largely similar throughout the country. Judges and the Rules For the most part, judges no longer make evidence rules. With some exceptions, legislatures have taken over the development of evidence law. Lawmakers know that evidence rules are vital in determining the outcomes of cases, and they want to have primary influence in shaping those rules. Of course, it’s up to judges to interpret the evidence rules that legislators produce, and, in doing so, they can substantially alter the scope and meaning of those rules. Many evidence rules consist of general guidelines, leaving judges to interpret them according to the circumstances of each case. For example, assume that an evidence rule provides that certain kinds of documents have to be shown to have been prepared in a trustworthy manner before a judge can admit them into evidence. What’s trustworthy to one judge might not be to another, and will depend on the circumstances of preparation. For example, a judge is likely to hold a sophisticated police laboratory to a different standard than a mom-and-pop grocery store when it comes to documenting transactions. Similarity to Civil Cases In most jurisdictions, the evidence rules in criminal cases are largely the same as those in civil cases. The FRE, for example, apply to both civil and criminal trials. However, certain evidence rules apply differently depending on the kind of case involved. An example is FRE 404(a), which allows criminal defendants to introduce evidence about their or their alleged victims’ character in many cases. (Character evidence is otherwise generally inadmissible.) Use a Lawyer If you’re facing criminal charges, you’re almost always best off letting a lawyer represent you. The rules of evidence are tremendously complex and nuanced; only an experienced attorney will be familiar enough with them to provide a competent defense to criminal charges.
Jack the Ripper may be revealed through DNA testsBreaking News Professor Ian Findlay, a Scottish-born scientist, is attempting to build up a genetic "fingerprint" of the serial killer by taking samples of saliva on the back of envelopes sent to police at the time of the killings. Once his DNA is known, it can be cross-referenced with the DNA of descendants from the prime suspects in the case. Five brutal prostitute murders in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888 were originally linked to Jack the Ripper, although theories have emerged recently claiming that he went on to kill elsewhere. Many of the letters police received signed "Jack the Ripper" are believed to be hoaxes but some, including several which had mutilated body parts enclosed, are thought to be genuine. Professor Findlay, chief scientist at the Gribbles molecular science forensic laboratory in Brisbane, Australia, said being involved in the Ripper case was "daunting". The Glasgow University graduate said: "As a youngster growing up in Blantyre, I always wanted to be a police scientist and now I am working onone of the world's biggest murder mysteries. "The Ripper case is absolutely huge and one mention of it in Australia landed me on the front pages of the newspapers here. "If we found DNA on the stamps, we can compare that with DNA from the descendants of the suspects. There were supposedly hundreds of letters. Most were probably hoaxes, but at least a dozen are thought to be genuine, including one which came with a piece of kidney he took from one of his victims. "Generally, there were thought to be 10 main suspects, from royalty to doctors and painters." The attempt to establish the London murderer's true identity is the latest in a series of recent high-profile investigations which have fanned interest in the notorious killings. Patricia Cornwell, the crime writer, spent GBP2m of her own money researching a book in which she claimed that the artist Walter Sickert was the killer. However, her theory has been heavily criticised by detectives and historians. Professor Findlay began working on the case after developing a DNA identification technology called CellTrack ID which he claims can extract and compile a DNA fingerprint from a single cell or strand of hair up to 160 years old. comments powered by Disqus - Rubio Surges Into Second In New Hampshire - Branstad Says Cruz Ran ‘Unethical’ Campaign - Christie Highlights Santorum’s Endorsement of Rubio - Portman Comes Out Against Trade Deal - Megyn Kelly Gets a Book Deal - A Big List of the Bad Things Clinton Has Done - An Unambiguous Sign Sanders Won Last Night’s Debate - Still Friends at the End - Quote of the Day - Trump Still Leads as Clinton Slips - Clinton Can’t Shake Image as Wall Street’s Friend - Maddow Doesn’t See Sanders Winning - Why Does the Media Still Shield Chelsea Clinton? - Bush Jokes His Mother May Have Abused Him - Rubio Closes the Gap in New Hampshire - Tourism spot for Colonial Williamsburg shocks some New Yorkers during Super Bowl 50 for use of 9/11 attack footage - We asked 6 political scientists if Bernie Sanders would have a shot in a general election - The price of oil has plummeted and with it Russia’s finances - Legal scholars at Harvard debate Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president - Has one of Sally Hemings’s siblings been neglected by history unfairly? - Retired historian George Dennison remains on the payroll at the U. of Montana while faculty are cut - The Atlantic profiles exciting ways to teach history - LDS Church has gone from 0 to 4 historians specializing in women’s history - American Historical Association protests Turkey’s crackdown on historians and other academics who signed a a petition critical of the Turkish government - Israeli historian Yair Auron lays out details of a massacre in 1948
Listen to this BosNewsLife News report via Vatican Radio: By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondet BosNewsLife YEREVAN, ARMENIA (BosNewsLife)– Ceremonies have begun in Armenia to mark the centenary of the start of mass killings of as many as 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks. Several leaders remembered what Pope Francis and other officials view as the first genocide of the 20st century. There was a moment of reflection when a giant church bell reverberated over the square. Many gathered here in the capital Yerevan to remember on a windy, sun filled Friday, one of the world’s darkest chapters. Exactly 100 years ago the mass killings began of predominantly Christian Armenians by Ottoman Turks. The annual April 24th commemorations mark the day when some 250 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up in what is regarded as the first step of the massacres. Eventually as many as 1.5 million Armenians men, women and children died in what the Pope Francis and several other leaders view as “the first genocide of the 20th century”. Most of them either immediately killed or died during deportations and forced marches in 1915, as Ottoman officials worried that the Christian Armenians would side with the enemy Russia. Armenia’s President Serge Sarkisian has expressed hope that the recognition of the killings as genocide would “dispel the darkness of 100 years of denial.” Modern Turkey, the successor of the Ottoman Empire, strongly objects to using the term genocide. It claims the death toll has been inflated and that those killed died of civil war and unrest. Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has expressed condolences to the descendants of the victims without calling the mass killings genocide. Yet French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dignitaries united in mourning the many men, women and children who died as they gathered at Yerevan’s Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex. Each leader walked along the memorial with a single yellow rose. They put it into the center of a wreath resembling a forget-me-not, a flower chosen to symbolize the many victims. “We will never forget the tragedy that your people went through,” Hollande said. France is home to a sizable Armenian community. Among the French Armenians at Yerevan was 90-year old singer Charles Aznavour, who was born in Paris to a family of massacre survivors. However even on this day, politics were never far away: Russian President Vladimir Putin used his speech to warn against what he called Russophobia in a clear message to the Ukrainian government and the West, which has imposed sanctions over Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine.
If you ask people whether they think Jesus was tall or short, they say tall. If you ask people whether he was handsome or ugly, they say handsome. What about slim or overweight? Most people would say slim. The thing is we find it hard – perhaps even sacrilegious - to imagine Jesus as short, ugly and/or overweight. We imagine that, as a human being, Jesus must have been a perfect specimen. But was he? That is a question to which we will never have an answer for sure – as no one ever did even the roughest sketch of Jesus. Or, at least, no such drawing has ever been found. In some ways, this may be a good thing – as it enables us each to imagine Jesus as being something like ourselves. In the 5th century we have the earliest depictions of Christ – by Greek artists who showed him as young, fair-haired and beardless – looking something like the Roman god, Apollo, the god of truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light. Western artists in recent centuries have given Jesus a beard but kept to the fair-haired handsome image. Only more recently do we see artists depicting Jesus in more diverse ways - from a short haired Palestinian, to African, to Korean and even to being female. It’s exciting to see these images and they are welcome. As Jesus lived and died for all humanity and calls each one of us – in all our diversity – to be one in him. But, nonetheless, none of these images depict Jesus as being ugly or imperfect. Apparently in the Middle Ages, there was a tradition that believed Jesus may have been a hunchback or may have had leprosy. And it’s possible that he did. But this tradition seems to have completely disappeared. Great humanitarian workers, like Mother Teresa and Jean Vanier, have said how they saw Jesus in the most ugly and deformed human beings. So maybe this is how we should see Jesus too? Jesus was 'as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised' After all, the closest thing we have to a biblical portrait of Jesus is the description in Isaiah, which points forward to Christ, the suffering servant. And here is the portrait Isaiah paints: ‘Just as there were many who were astonished at him —so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals… He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.’
Epoxy resin is a commonly used material for binding and coating engineered wood in structural applications due to its strength, durability, and adhesive properties. Finding a direct alternative made from scrap or commonly found materials that matches epoxy resin's performance can be challenging, like Polyurethane Adhesive: Polyurethane adhesives are known for their strong bonding capabilities and are sometimes used as alternatives to epoxy. They can be found in various formulations, including some that are environmentally friendly. Natural Resins: Some natural resins like pine resin or rosin can be used as adhesives or coatings for wood. While they may not match epoxy in terms of strength and durability, they are more environmentally friendly. Plant-Based Glues: There are plant-based glues available that can be used for wood bonding. These glues are often derived from renewable resources and are considered eco-friendly. Recycled Plastic-Based Resins: In some cases, recycled plastic-based resins can be used as binders and coatings for engineered wood. These materials can be sourced from recycled plastics, contributing to sustainability. Bio-Based Resins: Bio-based resins made from renewable resources like corn or soybeans can be considered as eco-friendly alternatives to epoxy. They may have varying levels of strength and durability. Bamboo Composite Materials: In certain applications, bamboo-based composite materials can serve as an alternative to traditional wood composites coated with epoxy. Additionally, these alternatives may not provide the same level of performance as epoxy resin in terms of strength and durability, so structural engineering and testing may be necessary to ensure safety and compliance with building codes when using alternative materials in critical structural applications.
Looking for birth parents? At a brick wall in your family history research? Genetic genealogy (DNA testing for family history purposes), a relatively new phenomenon, may be able to assist you! Please keep the following in mind when reading through these pages on genetic genealogy (DNA as it applies to family history): The fact that the Y chromosome and the mtDNA are passed down to the next generation intact, except for some minor mutations which occur from time to time, opens up a whole realm of possibilities with respect to genetic genealogy. For one thing, it means that it is possible to determine which males are descended from a common male ancestor. Similarly, by testing a person’s mtDNA, both males and females can determine descent from a common female ancestor. At the 'macro' level, genetic genealogy also has implications which go much farther back in time, inferring migration patterns of ancient peoples, using the different haplogroups (groups of males carrying the same Y-chromosome mutations, or groups of females carrying the same mtDNA mutations). If a group of males from, say, Spain and a group of males from Polynesia were found through DNA testing to belong to the same haplogroup, then, according to genetic genealogy theory, they had a common ancestor, and it is very likely that migration from Spain to Polynesia, or vice versa, occurred at some point. As already noted, this theory has implications for determining population migrations over time, as well as for identifying particular ethnic groups or groups in a particular geographical area who share the same mutation. As yet, there is no agreement in the industry with respect to the definitions of ethnicity or of geographical populations, and therefore, testing of the same sample by two different laboratories, each using their own arbitrary criteria for defining these two concepts, can lead to some variation in test results regarding one's ethnic or geographic origins. The most common uses of genetic genealogy (i.e., DNA testing applied to family history) at the present time are There also has been a surge of interest in genetic genealogy among African Americans, who want to discover what part of Africa their enslaved ancestors were from, and to find other relatives who were separated as a result of slave auctions. Until this technology was developed, this simply was not possible! See the following video for an example. Other uses for genetic genealogy include adopted persons attempting to discover their ethnic background, and to find relatives. Naturally, this is dependant on those relatives having been tested, and their data being in the same genetic database. Genetic genealogy is a relative newcomer on the scientific scene. While a number of important steps led up to it, such as the mapping of the chromosomes, the actual use of DNA as a tool in scientific analysis began in the 1980s, with the development of a paternity test, called “restriction fragment length polymorphism” (RFLP). In this test, a child’s DNA is compared to that of his or her parents. Since half of the child’s chromosomes come from each parent, half of his genetic code should match his mother’s genetic code, and half should match his father’s genetic code. If it matches half of one alleged parent's genetic code but not half of the other's, the child is not related to the second parent. This test is considered 99.99% accurate. DNA “fingerprinting” began to be used in courtrooms as scientific evidence in the mid-80s. This test uses a person’s unique genetic make-up, compared to genetic evidence left at the scene of a crime or on a victim, to assist in proving or disproving a person’s presence at the scene of a crime, and ultimately his or her guilt or innocence. This sort of DNA testing focuses on the 22 chromosomes (i.e., those other than the Y-chromosome and the mtDNA in the X chromosome), which are a "recombination" (mixing) of the chromosomal contributions from your parents, your grandparents, and their ancestors, and is unique to the individual. In the 1990s, the “polymerase chain reaction” (PCR) technique replaced RFLP as the standard in paternity testing. The RFLP method required extraction of DNA from a blood sample, and processing could take several weeks. The PCR technique, on the other hand, can be done with samples from inside the cheek (buccal swabs), has a faster turn-around time, is less expensive, and is considered even more accurate for paternity testing than the RFLP test. This same method is used in genetic genealogy testing, although the manner of "harvesting" the cheek cells varies from company to company (i.e., rinse with a mouthwash versus saliva in a tube versus scraping the inside of the cheeks with a little stick or tiny brush). The first genetic genealogy hypothesis which led to DNA testing and an academic study occurred in the mid-1990s. At that time, nephrologist Dr. Carl Skoreki, who was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, noted than another congregant of Sephardic Jewish background had a completely different physical appearance as compared to him. Both claimed to be of the Kohen priestly line, and therefore direct descendants of the Biblical priest Aaron. Dr. Skoreki reasoned that, if the Jewish tradition of direct descendancy from Aaron was true, then descendants should have similar Y-chromosomal material, and presumably should retain some sort of physical resemblance to each other. The resulting 1997 study was led by Professor Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona, a molecular geneticist who pioneered Y-chromosome research. Dr. Hammer concluded that there was one marker that was more prevalent in the Kohen Jewish population than in the general Jewish population, and that it therefore appeared to be true that a common line of descent from one man had been preserved through thousands of years. This result, while not without its dissenters and critics (the most prevalent being that it used only 4 markers, and that some of the markers found were common in non-Jewish populations as well as those in the Kohen study), fuelled an interest in DNA testing to assist in genealogy research. The "Kohen" test apparently has been re-run using a higher number of markers. The results indicated that the y-DNA of the Kohen men was the common among men of middle-eastern descent. For my readers familiar with the book of Genesis in the Bible, you will recall that Abram (later known as Abraham) was of Ur of the Chaldees, a middle-eastern town whose exact location is debated. Abram was the father of both Isaac, from whom the Jewish nation are descended, and of Ishmael, from whom all the Arab nations are descended. It therefore is not at all surprising to discover that Jewish Kohens share y-DNA with men of middle-eastern descent. DNA testing was first offered to the public for genealogy purposes in the United States in April of 2000. Academic research has continued alongside the commercial offerings to the general public. Rapid advancements have been made in this field, not the least of which are the following: Scientists assumed that these mutations in the Y chromosome or in the mtDNA occurred randomly, but at an identifiable rate. By looking at the number of mutations which had occurred since the last known common ancestor, they felt that they could predict, within a reasonable margin of error, the time period during which a common ancestor of two individuals had lived, and/or the number of generations back s/he had been in their genetic line. However, newer research has shown that some areas of mtDNA mutate much faster than others, so that the range of error for the time period of the most recent ancestor using mtDNA is broader than previously thought. Currently, the recommendation is to test at least 37 markers for a Y-chromosome test, as the more markers are tested, the more conclusive the results will be, and the more closely the time period during which the most recent common ancestor lived can be predicted. Some laboratories offer the option of testing 67 markers, and some more than 100. The price of the test, naturally, varies according to the number of markers tested. The following video shows this type of testing in action, in the testing of the hypothesis, by a Chinese researcher, that the Chinese were somehow different from other "races" of humans. Clearly, genetic genealogy is still very new, and this area of science continues to develop and be refined. A number of different international genetic projects are underway, or have been concluded, using this genetic theory. The data being released point to a number of conclusions, including the following: I don't know about you, but I find genetic genealogy a fascinating area, even if it is so complex that it is difficult for scientists to explain it in laymen's terms! Click here for upcoming webinars, courtesy of Geneawebinars. Heard the buzz about the new Flip-Pal scanner? See my review, here, or click on the ad, below, to go directly to their website. Looking into DNA testing for genealogy purposes? Try 23andMe, or FTDNA (click the links below).
THE SECRET ROUTE FROM GUINEA . . . and he [Columbus] wanted to find out what the Indians of Hispaniola had told him, that there had come to it from the south and southeast Negro people, who brought those spear points made of a metal which they call guanin, of which he had sent to the king and queen for assaying, and which was found to have thirty-two parts, eighteen of gold, six of silver, and eight of copper. -Raccolta, parte i, vol. i African guanines were alloys of gold containing copper for the sake of its odor, for it seems that the Negroes like to smell their wealth. The guanines brought home by Columbus were assayed in Spain and were found to contain the same ratio of alloy as those in African Guinea. -frederick pohl, Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major On Saturday evening, March 9, 1493, a week after Columbus had been driven by a storm into Lisbon, following his first voyage to the Indies, he sat down to dinner with the Portuguese king at his court in the valley of Paraiso. Don Juan seemed to be in an extremely good mood. He talked to Columbus as to a close friend, with great candor and sweetness, insisting that his guest not stand, bow or accord him any special deference, but sit beside him at table as an equal. The admiral was surprised, deeply warmed by this hospitality, but marveling, nonetheless, at the apparent absence of resentment or envy in the king. All through dinner he looked at Don Juan closely, wondering whether the mask would suddenly slip to reveal the malice Columbus believed was beneath. Had not Don Juan sent three armed caravels to track him down last September as he was setting out on his Atlantic journey? Had not the king given orders that on the islands of Madeira, Puerto Sancto and the Azores, and in the regions and harbors where there were Portuguese, Columbus should be taken? Only last Tuesday Bartholomew Diaz, patron to the king's ship, armed to the teeth, had confronted him, as he lay helpless in the port of Lisbon, his sails split in half by the storm. Diaz had ordered him to leave his ship and render an account to the factors of the king and had pulled back only because Columbus had responded with fighting words, saying he was the Most High Admiral to the Sovereigns of Castile and had to give an account to no one. Perhaps, thought Columbus, he had overreacted to the event because of the fatigue and terror he had suffered in the storm. After he had formally presented his letters to Diaz, had not Alvaro Dama, the Portuguese captain, come to his caravel in great state, with kettledrums and trumpets and pipes? The king too had received him with the highest honors, as befitted a foreign prince. There was nothing, therefore, to be alarmed about. Diaz had issued a routine challenge to a foreign fleet lying at anchor in his country's port. And the talk of the three caravels last September (for he had never seen them) may have been just alarmist talk. Yet as he sat there, balancing these interpretations in his mind, Columbus felt uneasy and afraid. He had brought with him some of the Indian hostages he had seized on the island of Guanahani (Watling Island). These strange guests fascinated the Portuguese court. Not since 62 b.c., when the king of the Suevians presented Quintus Metellus Celer, the Roman proconsul in Gaul, with a gift of "Indians" cast up on the shores of Germany by a storm, had men with skin the tint of red sand been seen in Europe. If the faintest shadow of his true feelings passed across Don Juan's face during his talk at dinner, it was when he looked at these men. Captives though they were, they became inverted in the king's agitated mind into a triumphant troop, their vigorous young bodies branded already with the rival insignia of the Spanish crown. He saw them as King Ferdinand's little puppets, signaling with their hands and limbs for the lack and loss of words. Some of them had paint on their faces, as puppets do, and their hair was unreal, as is the hair of puppets, as coarse and black as a horse's tail drooping over the eyebrows. Some appeared to the king like dolls, oriental dolls with eyes of hard, black glass, void of all expression. Within the glass of those eyes he saw the lands he too had dreamed about, and about which mariners and traders in his African service had spoken. Had he taken the rumors from Guinea more seriously he would have been sitting there that evening, emperor of two continents. The thought of it tormented him. The deep resentments he felt against Columbus, which for diplomatic reasons he had suppressed, crystallized into a beam of mischievous energy directed at the men of the Indies. After dinner that evening, while he was talking with Columbus, "he ordered a dish of beans brought and placed on a table near them, and by signs ordered an Indian from among those who were there, to designate the many islands of his country that Columbus said he had discovered. The Indian at once showed Española and Cuba and the Lucayos and others. The king noted it with morose consideration and in a moment, as though inadvertently, he undid with his hand what the Indian had constructed. In a few moments he ordered another Indian to do the same with the beans, and this Indian quickly and diligently showed with the beans what the other Indian had shown, adding more islands and lands, giving the reason in his language for all he had shown, though no one understood it. And then the king, recognizing clearly the greatness of the lands discovered and their riches, was unable to conceal his grief at the loss of such things and cried out loudly and impetuously, giving himself a blow with his fist in the breast: 'O you wretched fool! Why did you let an undertaking of such importance slip through your fingers?' " The mask had fallen with spectacular suddenness. Columbus's fears were realized. Several members of the court surrounded the king. Some of them attributed his grief to the boldness of the admiral and begged leave to kill Columbus on the spot, destroy all the ships awaiting him in Lisbon, nine leagues from the court, so that news of the discovery would not go back to Castile. But Don Juan said that God would damn his soul to hell for it, and that they should not touch the man. After this frenzied, whispered session with his advisers, Don Juan resumed his conversations with Columbus as if nothing had happened. His face was flushed, but his manner showed none of the agitation which had driven him to that extraordinary outburst. He made it clear, and with a certain grave candor and graciousness, that regardless of his grief and disappointment at not having been Columbus's patron, "he felt great pleasure, nevertheless, that the voyage had been made and had terminated favorably." The whole Christian world should rejoice at this, Don Juan said. His queen was staying in the monastery of San Antonio near the village of Villafranca on the right bank of the Tagus, less than a day's journey from the court. She too would like to see Columbus and accord him every honor before he left for Spain. The truth was, having failed to intercept Columbus both on his outward journey and his return, and having no heart now to order his assassination, as some of his advisers had urged, Don Juan quickly reconciled himself to the implications of this breakthrough to the islands and lands west of the ocean-sea. These implications, he knew, could be serious for Portugal. They would call for a repartitioning of the Christian world, a redefinition of the spheres of power and influence assumed by the two great maritime powers. Before there could be any more Spanish claims to islands and lands within the ocean-sea, he must negotiate the most advantageous terms for the partitioning. He must strive somehow to make Columbus his ally in this, for he would soon be as much a power to be reckoned with as the Sovereigns of Spain. When he returned in triumph, offering up a kingdom beyond the sea to Isabella and Ferdinand, they would be eating out of his hands, hanging on his every word. The admiral would be virtually a prince of the ocean-sea. But Don Juan knew that the rights and privileges of a private citizen in and over vast and vague dominions, unless he had the physical force of an army behind him or the spiritual seal of a pope, could vanish in an instant if he lost the favor of the king and queen. He saw clearly the nature of this newfound power and vulnerability, both of which he intended to exploit. His first ploy, therefore, was to suggest that he could use his influence on behalf of Columbus, if the need were to arise, to see that his agreements with regard to the "discoveries" were honored. Columbus had drafted agreements with the Spanish sovereigns before setting out, making him a partner with the Crown in his prospective discoveries. These agreements (referred to in his diaries as "the Capitulation") had been finalized in his absence and copies of the documents submitted to the Portuguese king. Don Juan said he had looked at these very closely. He understood from his reading of them that the real credit for the "conquest" belonged to Columbus. He was keen to emphasize that this was Columbus' personal conquest, implying that it was well within the power of the admiral even now to bargain over those lands with any foreign prince with whom he might come to an agreement. Columbus was cautious. He had not yet seen the Capitulation, he said. He knew nothing more than that the king and queen of Spain had advised him not to encroach on Portuguese territory during his journeys, not to go to San Jorge de Mina nor to any other part of Guinea, and this had been announced in all the ports of Andalusia before he set sail. This was his way of saying that Spain and her agents fully respected the Portuguese sphere of power and influence, and that the Portuguese were expected to show equal respect for theirs. Columbus also seemed to imply that he needed no one to act as protector or go-between in the matter of any agreements he might enter with the Sovereigns of Castile. To this Don Juan graciously responded that he was certain mediators would not be necessary in this matter. On the following Sunday and Monday the discussions between the king and the admiral continued. It became clear that Don Juan's real concern was not with the chain of islands Columbus claimed to have discovered in the Gulf of the Ganges. Beyond them, beyond the mainland of Asia (if indeed it were true that Columbus had chanced, as he claimed, upon Asia by way of the west), to the south and southeast, lay another world. The king was certain of this. Africans, he said, had traveled to that world. It could be found just below the equinoctial line, roughly on the same parallel as the latitudes of his domain in Guinea. In fact, "boats had been found which started out from Guinea and navigated to the west with merchandise." He was a fool not to have sent an expeditionary fleet into these waters in spite of persistent rumors and reports. But Portugal already had its hands full in Africa, and it was concentrating its exploratory energies on the eastern route to India. Columbus listened intently. The information about the Guinea boats was new to him. He had been to Guinea ten years before and had seen the fortress at San Jorge de Mina which Don Juan was then constructing. Little was known of Guinea trade and navigation at that time, for the African world was vast and strange, and the Portuguese had but one consuming interest-gold-in the pursuit of which they had scratched a mere fraction of the Guinea coast. But why was Don Juan telling him all this, and in such a conspiratorial tone? What did he want? "I want a line," the king said, "drawn across the map of the world from north to south, from pole to pole. This line should be drawn 370 leagues* west of the westernmost islands of the Cape Verde. Let it be the divider between the two Catholic kingdoms. Anything found west of the line goes to you and Spain. Anything found east of the line falls to me and Portugal." As he sat there, brooding on this proposition, Columbus could hear the rain, driven by fierce winds, wasting its fury along the plains of Paraiso. The clamor of the rain and the wind stirred in him strong memories of Africa. He remembered how, at San Jorge de Mina on the Guinea coast, the rain would sometimes come rushing through the trees, sweeping forward like a violent river that had burst its banks, but beaten from passion into impotence by the high brick walls of the Portuguese fort. He used to feel so lost in those days, dismissed as a dreamer, sustained only by a conviction, passionate as the wind, as persistent as rain, storming insistently the minds of those who thought his schemes "chimerical and foolish." He remembered his last audience with Don Juan before he had decided to try his luck in the Spanish court. The king had stared at him with a bored, tired face, his skin strangely puffed by some unknown sickness, his eyes mocking Columbus with disbelief. Now they sat man to man (or was it prince to prince?). Don Juan was actually seeking his help to bring about a new division and reapportionment of power and possessions in the Christian world. Yes, he would go along with the drawing of the line. Yes, he would present the case with all his newfound power and influence at the Spanish court. But surely not out of gratitude for Don Juan's earlier indifference to his exploratory schemes nor his later attempts (if the rumors were correct) to seize him and his ships as they set out across the western ocean. Columbus now saw his advantage. He could name his price. What that price was no one can tell, but before he left the court on Tuesday morning some bargain over the line must have been struck. This line, as proposed by Don Juan on the strength of his intelligence from Guinea, was finally settled by the two great powers at the Treaty of Tordesillas more than a year later-on June 7, 1494. This was years before incursions into South America by either Spain or Portugal. The later "discovery" of the continent placed Brazil east of the line, and so within Portugal's domain of influence (see Plate 1). This region of South America is washed by the North Equatorial current which joins the Canaries current off the Senegambia coast of Africa. This current pulls boats caught in its drift toward the shores of the New World with the irresistible magnetism of a gravitational field. It was along this current that the Portuguese captain Alvares Cabral, driven by a storm off the coast of West Africa in 1500, was blown helplessly but swiftly to Brazil. Excerpted from They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Van Sertima Copyright © 2003 by Ivan Van Sertima. Excerpted by permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The voyage of Ingvar was a big Viking voyage eastwards. It ended in catastrophe and was much talked about. It happened during the middle-end of the 1030-ties and was the last big Viking voyage. The leader, Ingvar, died during the voyage. Ingvar was probably a relative of the king at that time. The fleet he commanded was about 30 ships big and they were going to “Gardarike” (Russia) and the city of “Konugard” (Kiev). There they helped the ruler of Kiev in some fights and then continued southwards. They went by the big river Dnepr to the Black sea and from there to the Caspian Sea by the smaller rivers Rioni and Kura. It is thought that it is somewhere here that the catastrophe occurs. The scientists believe that the cause was that they picked up some disease of some kind. Many rune stones in Sweden mention Ingvar and the men that died with him. There is also an Icelandic story that tells a lot of their travels. And there is historic chronicles from Kiev and Georgia that mention what way they travelled.
\|Common name\|\|papyrus sedge, paper reed, Indian matting plant\| \|Germination\|\|Plant papyrus seeds indoors. Use a pot with drainage holes and rich, moist soil. Lightly cover the seeds with soil. Do not immerse in water while germinating but keep moist. Papyrus is slow to germinate--seedlings should start to produce in a month. Transfer seedlings to shallow water in direct sun. Submerge entire pot slowly and at a slight angle to minimize soil loss. If the weather is not past frost season, create an indoor water spot using a plastic tub. Feed cyperus plants regularly with a fertilizer designed for water plants. Stop fertilizing when moved inside for winter. Prune spent growth regularly to keep dying plant matter out of your water feature. Decaying matter can cause many problems to your mini-ecosystem. Move plants indoors for winter months or cold spells. Plants left in water and full sun will continue to grow year-round. Leaving your plant in low light and kept moist will keep it dormant until next growing season. \|Scarification / Stratification\|\|No\| Use spaces to separate tags. Use single quotes (') for phrases.
Monday, February 28, 2011 The word smilodon comes from two Greek words that mean "chisel" and "tooth." And the word fatalis comes from the same place as the word fatal, so we can tell just by the name of this cat that it can kill with its big chisel-teeth. Luckily, the sabertooth cat has been extinct for about 10,000 years, so we don't have to worry about being attacked by one while we are out walking around the neighborhood. A lot of people call these animals sabertooth tigers, but this is the wrong name for them because they are not really related to tigers. All the different kinds of animals that are called "sabertooth" lived between 33.7 million and 9,000 years ago. The Smilodon group are the ones we hear about most often because they lived in most of the U.S. The canine teeth on these cats could be as long as 7 inches. They were so long that they did not even fit inside the cat's mouth when it was closed. Sabertooth cats liked to eat big animals such as sloths, bison, deer, American camels, horses, and mammoths. They may have got some of their food by scavenging, which would explain why they went to the La Brea Tar Pits and got stuck there while they were trying to eat mammoths and sloths that were stuck in the tar. When they were hunting live prey, they probably brought the animal down with their weight, and then they used their long teeth to slash into the soft parts of the body so that the animal would bleed to death. We don't know why the sabertooth went extinct, but it might have been because when the ice age ended, the environment changed, and a lot of big animals such as mammoths also went extinct. The sabertooth was good at hunting big animals, but would not have been so good at hunting small animals because it couldn't run very fast. I like to think this means that if a sabertooth cat saw a basenji and wanted to eat it, the basenji could outrun the cat. But like I already said, we don't have to worry about that because the sabertooth cats are all extinct now.
April 24, 2009 College barriers may lead to giving up If a student feels the path to college is closed, he or she may conclude that studying and homework are a waste of time, U.S. researchers suggest. Mesmin Destin and Daphna Oyserman of the University of Michigan found that this mentality and lack of motivation toward school occurs in children as young as age 11.Seventh-grade students from low-income families were either provided with information about need-based financial-aid opportunities available to them -- i.e., open-path mind-set that college was a possibility for them -- or information about the enormous costs associated with a college education -- i.e., closed-path mind-set that college was not a viable option. The students then completed questionnaires about their academic goals, expected grades and how many hours they planned on studying and doing homework later that evening. The study, published in Psychological Science, reveals that students as young as age 11, who felt that college was an option for them, expected to do better in school and planned to put more effort into studying and homework, compared to students who did not view college as a realistic possibility. The authors said based on the study results, parents and children from low-income families should learn about the financial accessibility of college early, before gaps in student achievement levels emerge and some fall behind.
July 17, 2009 WHO: Swine Flu Spreading Too Quickly To Track Officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that the H1N1 flu pandemic was the fastest-moving pandemic ever and that counting every case would now be pointless, Reuters reported. The United Nations agency declared swine flu a pandemic on June 11.However, national health authorities will now only be required to report clusters of severe cases or deaths caused by the new virus, or unusual clinical patterns. The WHO said in a statement: "The 2009 influenza pandemic has spread internationally with unprecedented speed. In past pandemics, influenza viruses have needed more than six months to spread as widely as the new H1N1 virus has spread in less than six weeks." The 193 member-state agency said that as swine flu spreads, it has become nearly impossible for health authorities and laboratories to keep count of individual cases, which have mostly been mild. Antivirals such as Roche Holding's Tamiflu or GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza can effectively treat the new flu strain, but many patients even recover without medical treatment. At least a million people in the United States alone are infected with H1N1, and the WHO says the pandemic is unstoppable. WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said that it was very much agreed that trying to register and report every single case of swine flu was a huge waste of resources. The WHO said such tracking has limited authorities' capacity to investigate serious cases and is no longer essential to monitor the level or nature of the risk posed by the virus. But the agency urged all countries to continue closely monitoring unusual clusters of severe or fatal infections from the pandemic virus, clusters of respiratory illness requiring hospitalization or unexplained or unusual clinical patterns. "Signals to be vigilant for include spikes in rates of absenteeism from schools or workplaces, or a more severe disease pattern, as suggested by, for example, a surge in emergency department visits," it said. British Health Minister Andy Burnham said this month the government was projecting more than 100,000 new cases a day of the flu in the country by the end of August, as some 29 people had died to date after contracting the virus. The WHO's numbers of confirmed cases for all countries, which stood at 94,512 cases with 429 deaths as of its last update on July 6, will no longer be updated with global incidences. It will now issue regular updates on the situation in newly affected countries, which should report the first confirmed cases, weekly figures and epidemiological details. But WHO officials said countries should still test a limited number of virus samples weekly to confirm that disease is actually due to the pandemic virus and to monitor any virological changes that may be important for the development of vaccines. WHO vaccine chief Marie-Paule Kieny told Reuters that at least 50 governments have placed orders for vaccines against the new H1N1 strain or are negotiating with drug makers. The agency said cases of seasonal influenza is linked to 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally, but it does not report official figures. On the Net:
It is known fact that most people try to maintain good health to the maximum extent possible including the reduction of consumption of sugar. However they may have to visit the dentist to get broken tooth or teeth restored. Ways to prevent tooth decay It is not difficult to prevent tooth decay. People need to floss at least a day and brush twice a day. The intake of sugar should not be more than thrice a day. Sugar is found everywhere such as fruits, soft drinks and sweets. Hence the intake of all these should be minimized to the least. People who have problem of tooth decay are advised to make use of fluoride mouthwashes or high fluoride dental flosses to avoid the tooth decay to worsen. In the modern day there are number of dental filling materials such as amalgams, gold cast, tooth colored composite fillings to mention a few. Silver fillings or (Amalgam) Dentists make use of Amalgam which is liquid mercury mixture and metal alloy which is used to fill the cavities caused by tooth decay. However family dentistry los angeles prevents its usage as the mercury can have an adverse affect on human health. Tooth colored composite fillings This is useful in filling the anterior and posterior teeth. This is in a form paste which the dentists apply on the damaged part of the tooth. In addition the dentists adjust the bite and polish it as well. This is mostly used for fixing the front teeth or tooth which may have been damaged by decay or cracked or worn. Risks involved in tooth filling There are chances of the arising of tooth sensitivity immediately after the completion of deep filling. However normalcy is restored within a few days or about a couple of weeks from the day of filling. There may be a need of root can treatment if the problem persists. As the time goes by there are chances the fillings might freeze, chip or break in such cases. Hence it is recommended the get the dental crown replaced instead of filling it as it may lead to fracture or fractures. There is no reason why fillings will not last for a long all that is required is good monitoring and maintenance. Studies have proved time and again that composite fillings easily last for a decade. The longevity of the fillings can increased for more time if people brush and floss the teeth, reducing the intake of sugar and something what very important is the people must be touch with their dentist at least twice a year if not more so that it would be helpful to check the fillings on a regular basis.
(Photo: Citizen-Times photo) Now that New Orleans has toppled its statue of Robert E. Lee, Asheville should take a hard look at the man we honor in our city’s most prominent public space. I speak of Zebulon Vance. You know, Zeb Vance, North Carolina’s Civil War governor, whose name is carved into the granite obelisk rising above Pack Square. Vance has largely disappeared from public memory, and his obscurity has allowed his monument to rest undisturbed. It’s time to rattle the foundations. The Vance Monument is a tribute to a white supremacist, the leader of a political party that destroyed the promise of Reconstruction and imposed segregation upon North Carolina. The monument is a towering insult to African-Americans, an affront to American ideals and an embarrassment to the city of Asheville. Some background: Born in 1830 near Weaverville, Zebulon Baird Vance studied at the University of North Carolina, briefly practiced law in Asheville, and then served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1858–61. He fought in the Civil War and served two stints as North Carolina’s governor, the first starting in 1862 and the second in 1876. He was a U.S. Senator from 1879 until his death in 1894. At Vance’s funeral in Asheville, thousands lined up to pay their respects, and they soon raised money to set their feelings in stone. On Dec. 22, 1897, as a band played “Dixie,” the cornerstone of the Vance Monument was laid. In his time, Vance was North Carolina’s greatest statesman, beloved for his masterful speeches, quick wit, and deft political skills that held the state together during times of crisis. Therein lies the problem. Vance united North Carolina by destroying the hopes of its black citizens. Though a reluctant secessionist, once the Civil War started Vance fought doggedly to defeat the Union and preserve slavery. Despite Confederate defeat, he never abandoned the lost cause. There was a brief, shining moment when Reconstruction promised profound change. Thanks to the federal Reconstruction Acts and the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Republican Party — a coalition of blacks, anti-secession whites native to North Carolina and newly arrived Northern whites — gained control of North Carolina government, ratifying a state constitution that guaranteed universal male suffrage, democratic elections for state and local officials, and public schools for all races. African Americans voted freely and served in political office. Vance led the Democrats, the opposition party devoted to restoring white rule. Once they regained power, Democrats amended the constitution to outlaw interracial marriage and integrated schools, and gave the state legislature power over local elections — thus preventing majority-black counties from electing their own leaders. Campaigning for governor in 1876, Vance accused Republicans of plotting to “degrade the good old Anglo-Saxon race beneath the African race.” Though he distanced himself from the Klan, Vance benefited from violent suppression of the black vote, and he drew a bizarre, victim-blaming lesson from that suppression. If blacks are “intimidated from voting or are defrauded in the counting of their votes,” Vance asked, “is not that a strong argument against their supposed capacity for self-government?” Vance’s contempt for African-Americans undermines nearly all his accomplishments. At a time when anti-Semitism was common, he bravely urged Americans “to judge the Jew as we judge other men — by his merits.” Yet he praised the Jewish people through an invidious comparison to “the African negro, the descendants of barbarian tribes who for 4,000 years have contributed nothing to … civilization.” Examples of such appalling rhetoric could be multiplied endlessly. “All of his life, he assumed that African-Americans were intellectually and morally inferior to whites,” the historian Gordon McKinney writes in his biography of Vance. “He was an avowed racist who used the racism of other whites for personal advantage and political purposes.” In a brilliant speech, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked his audience to imagine an African-American girl talking to her parents about Civil War monuments: “Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?” We should be asking the same questions about the Vance Monument in Asheville, a city where the African-American community continues to suffer the effects of the decades of discrimination that Vance and his party codified in law. What should be done? Bringing down the monument has symbolic appeal, but it would be politically difficult and may not be necessary. After all, it is not a statue of a man but a simple spire that could be rededicated to a new cause. For a start, the city could place, near the monument, a historical marker that gives an unflinching account of Zeb Vance’s life and legacy. Another plaque detailing the city’s African-American heritage — as has been suggested before — could be added as well. And then I’d propose that the city rename the obelisk. With the simple addition of two letters, the Vance Monument could become the Advance Monument. The name would give a nod to The Advance, an African-American newspaper published in the 1890s by Edward Stephens, a founder of YMI and administrator of Asheville’s black public schools. Like that newspaper, the Advance Monument would be dedicated to the cause of unfinished progress. A century ago Asheville honored a white supremacist, but we reject those values now. And before we can call our society truly equal, we must advance much further. Mark Essig is a historian and writer living in Asheville.
March 5, 2012 Working Models For Phobos Gravitational Fields Updated Phobos is the larger and closer of the two natural satellites of Mars. Despite decades of Martian exploration, we still know very little about Phobos. Many fundamental properties of this small potato-shaped body stay vague, for example, its gravitational field. SHI Xian and coauthors from Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and Technical University Berlin recently updated working models for the gravitational field of Phobos. Their work, entitled "Working models for the gravitational field of Phobos", was published in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, 2012, Vol 55(2). Mars has two natural satellites, Phobos and Deimos. Unlike the Earth's Moon, the Martian moons are relatively small in size and irregularly shaped. Different scenarios have been suggested for the origin of these two bodies, such as captured asteroids or reaccreted ejectas from an impact event on Mars. However, none of the origin theories has yet been confirmed. To unveil the mysteries of the Martian moons, scientists need more detailed understandings of their physical properties, among which the gravitational field is of great importance. Existing gravitational field models of Phobos are all based on early shape models with relatively low resolution and precision. Since 2003, ESA's Mars Express (MEX) probe has been orbiting Mars in an elliptical polar orbit. This special orbit allows it to perform regular flybys of Phobos, during which plenty of high-quality imaging data are accumulated. These data have helped establish a new, high-resolution shape model of Phobos. This provides a good opportunity to improve the gravitational field model.The authors introduced three different methods to develop shaped-based gravitational field models, namely, the harmonic expansion approach (HEA), mass elements approach (MEA), and polyhedron approximation approach (PAA). These methods are commonly used in gravitational field modeling for small solar system bodies. The HEA analytically transforms the spherical harmonic expansion coefficients of the shape model to the coefficients of the gravitational field model. While treating the body as an accretion of cubes or a polyhedron, the MEA and PAA numerically calculate values of gravitational potential or force on a certain spatial grid. All three methods have their own advantages, especially when considering different purposes. Therefore, the authors adopted them all in the modeling. Comparisons of the results show good consistency, which further confirms the reliability of the acquired model as well as the feasibility of the methods. A set of spherical harmonic coefficients for Phobos' gravitational field was obtained by applying the HEA. These coefficients complete a model up to degree and order 17, which is the most detailed one so far. Analyses of the lower-degree coefficients reflect characters of Phobos as an irregularly-shaped small body. The modeled value of is 20% less than the estimate reported by the MEX Radio Science team. However, since the estimate has an uncertainty of around 50%, this deviation indicates little about the internal structure of Phobos. These model coefficients are ready to be used as coarse or initial values in orbital analysis for spacecrafts. The HEA also yields a precise estimate of Phobos' volume as . As deep space exploration goes on, more and more missions aim to land on small bodies like Phobos. Therefore, it has become necessary to model the surface gravity of these bodies. Due to the weak gravitation and relatively fast rotation, materials on the surface of these small bodies usually experiences a strange dynamical environment that is not always correlated to the topography. Using the MEA, the authors have produced a surface gravity map for Phobos. The gravity anomaly shows a large dynamic range of approximately . Prominent surface features such as crater Stickney can be identified easily. The working models introduced in this article serve as a benchmark for further studies of Phobos' internal structure as well as surface environment. The authors are working on an in-depth comparative analysis between the dynamical environment and surface features, in search of hints about the surface evolutionary history of Phobos. Also, scientists can gain better insight into the internal mass distribution of Phobos when a more precise measurement is done for the gravitational field. Reference: Shi X, Willner K, Oberst J, et al. Working models for the gravitational field of Phobos. Sci China-Phys Mech Astron, 2012, 55: 358-364, doi:10.1007/s11433-011-4606-4 Image Caption: Enhanced-color view of Stickney crater by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA On the Net: - Science in China Press - Shanghai Astronomical Observatory - Technical University Berlin - SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy
\|Standard theory of particle physics\| We have now two great physical theories: · On one side, quantum mechanics, which applies primarily to very small objects (those scarcely affected by gravity), and is the basic tool for the standard theory of particle physics. · On the other, general relativity, which applies to very large objects (from the planets to the whole universe, those for which almost nothing matters except gravity), and is the main tool for the standard cosmological (Big Bang) theory. Unfortunately, the two theories are not mutually compatible, so that physics is far from having resolved its outstanding issues. Moreover, these two theories depend on about forty independent variables. Many physicists think that they are too many. If it were true, it would mean that the configuration space of nature has about forty dimensions. If it is difficult to imagine a four-dimensional space, what about forty!
Treaty of Versailles: 90 years old this weekendBreaking News Without the events of 11/9 (the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989) and 9/11 (the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001), it might have been easier to suggest that the results of the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent gatherings that formally concluded the First World War had indeed faded into the background. Even then, however, the widely held view that Versailles, and the other treaties signed in palaces in the Parisian suburbs in 1919 and 1920, held a key responsibility for the outbreak of a new major war in 1939 and hence for its consequences, might still have offered important reasons for reconsidering their negotiation and results. But there are more compelling contemporary reasons. When Woodrow Wilson came to Paris, the first American president in office to travel to Europe, liberal intellectuals like John Maynard Keynes or Harold Nicolson expected him to use America's overwhelming economic, financial and industrial muscle, backed by a growing military presence, to enforce the ideals he had articulated in his 1918 speeches, most famously the Fourteen Points. He disappointed them, but Richard Nixon still chose his portrait to hang in the White House Cabinet Room, and George Bush Senior and Junior, as well as Bill Clinton, invoked Wilsonian ideals about the role of democracy in creating peace to justify the use of military force. As Henry Kissinger acknowledged"Whenever America has faced the task of constructing a new world order, it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson's precepts". comments powered by Disqus - Rubio Surges Into Second In New Hampshire - Branstad Says Cruz Ran ‘Unethical’ Campaign - Christie Highlights Santorum’s Endorsement of Rubio - Portman Comes Out Against Trade Deal - Megyn Kelly Gets a Book Deal - A Big List of the Bad Things Clinton Has Done - An Unambiguous Sign Sanders Won Last Night’s Debate - Still Friends at the End - Quote of the Day - Trump Still Leads as Clinton Slips - Clinton Can’t Shake Image as Wall Street’s Friend - Maddow Doesn’t See Sanders Winning - Why Does the Media Still Shield Chelsea Clinton? - Bush Jokes His Mother May Have Abused Him - Rubio Closes the Gap in New Hampshire - We asked 6 political scientists if Bernie Sanders would have a shot in a general election - The price of oil has plummeted and with it Russia’s finances - Legal scholars at Harvard debate Cruz’s eligibility to serve as president - Has one of Sally Hemings’s siblings been neglected by history unfairly? - Retired historian George Dennison remains on the payroll at the U. of Montana while faculty are cut - The Atlantic profiles exciting ways to teach history - LDS Church has gone from 0 to 4 historians specializing in women’s history - Israeli historian Yair Auron lays out details of a massacre in 1948
You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course. About this Course About the Course In this course Professor Llewelyn Morgan (University of Oxford) explores Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid. In the first lecture, we think about the Aeneid as an epic poem. In the second, we explore some of the connections between Troy and Rome, before turning in the following lecture to the relationship between Virgil and Homer. In the fourth lecture, we consider Aeneas’ activities in Troy, focusing in particular on his lack of knowledge of what is required of him, while in the fifth lecture we provide a close reading (in Latin) of three moments in Book 2. About the Lecturer Llewelyn Morgan is a Classicist, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The focus of most of his research is Roman literature and culture, and he is the author of the well-received study of Roman poetic form, Musa Pedestris: Metre and Meaning in Roman Verse (Oxford, 2010). But he also has a longstanding fascination for Afghanistan, contemporary and historical, which he traces to his discovery, at an impressionable age, of a Russian samovar inscribed “Candahar 1881”. He has made several visits to Afghanistan in recent years, and his most recent book, The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the history of these remarkable monuments from their Buddhist origins 1,400 years ago, through their celebrity in Islamic wonder literature and European travel writing, up until their destruction in 2001. Morgan is a regular public speaker, on many aspects of Classics and Afghanistan, appears occasionally on BBC Radio 4, and writes slightly less occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1- 13, which are based on Passage below. The construction of roads and bridges Although there were highway links in Mesopotamia from as early as 3500 bc, the Romans were probably the first road-builders with fixed engineering standards. At the peak of the Roman Empire in the first century ad, Rome had road connections totalling about 85,000 kilometres. Roman roads were constructed with a deep stone surface for stability and load-bearing. They had straight alignments and therefore were often hilly. The Roman roads remained the main arteries of European transport for many centuries, and even today many roads follow the Roman routes. New roads were generally of inferior quality, and the achievements of Roman builders were largely unsurpassed until the resurgence of road-building in the eighteenth century. With horse-drawn coaches in mind, eighteenth-century engineers preferred to curve their roads to avoid hills. The road surface was regarded as merely a face to absorb wear, the load-bearing strength being obtained from a properly prepared and well-drained foundation. Immediately above this, the Scottish engineer John McAdam (1756-1836) typically laid crushed stone, to which stone dust mixed with water was added, and which was compacted to a thickness of just five centimetres, and then rolled. McAdam’s surface layer – hot tar onto which a layer of stone chips was laid – became known as ‘tarmacadam’, or tarmac. Roads of this kind were known as flexible pavements. By the early nineteenth century – the start of the railway age – men such as John McAdam and Thomas Telford had created a British road network totalling some 200,000 km, of which about one sixth was privately owned toll roads called turnpikes. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many roads in the US were built to the new standards, of which the National Pike from West Virginia to Illinois was perhaps the most notable. In the twentieth century, the ever-increasing use of motor vehicles threatened to break up roads built to nineteenth-century standards, so new techniques had to be developed. On routes with heavy traffic, flexible pavements were replaced by rigid pavements, in which the top layer was concrete, 15 to 30 centimetres thick, laid on a prepared bed. Nowadays steel bars are laid within the concrete. This not only restrains shrinkage during setting, but also reduces expansion in warm weather. As a result, it is, possible to lay long slabs without danger of cracking. The demands of heavy traffic led to the concept of high-speed, long-‘distance roads, with access – or slip-lanes – spaced widely apart. The US Bronx River Parkway of 1925 was followed by several variants – Germany’s autobahns and the Pan American Highway. Such roads – especially the intercity autobahns with their separate multi-lane carriageways for each direction – were the predecessors of today’s motorways. The development by the Romans of the arched bridge marked the beginning of scientific bridge-building; hitherto, bridges had generally been crossings in the form of felled trees or flat stone blocks. Absorbing the load by compression, arched bridges are very strong. Most were built of stone, but brick and timber were also used. A fine early example is at Alcantara in Spain, built of granite by the Romans in AD 105 to span the River Tagus. In modern times, metal and concrete arched bridges have been constructed. The first significant metal bridge, built of cast iron in 1779, still stands at Ironbridge in England. Steel, with its superior strength-to-weight ratio, soon replaced iron in metal bridge-work. In the railway age, the truss (or girder) bridge became popular. Built of wood or metal, the truss beam consists of upper and lower horizontal booms joined by vertical or inclined members. The suspension bridge has a deck supported by suspenders that drop from one or more overhead cables. It requires strong anchorage at each end to resist the inward tension of the cables, and the deck is strengthened to control distortion by moving loads or high winds. Such bridges are nevertheless light, and therefore the most suitable for very long spans. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in the UK, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunei (1806—59) to span the Avon Gorge in England, is famous both for its beautiful setting and for its elegant design. The 1998 Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan has a span of 1,991 metres, which is the longest to date. Cantilever bridges, such as the 1889 Forth Rail Bridge in Scotland, exploit the potential of steel construction to produce a wide clearwater space. The spans have a central supporting pier and meet midstream. The downward thrust, where the spans meet, is countered by firm anchorage of the spans at their other ends. Although the suspension bridge can span a wider gap, the cantilever is relatively stable, and this was important for nineteenth-century railway builders. The world’s longest cantilever span – 549 metres – is that of the Quebec rail bridge in Canada, constructed in 1918. Label the diagram below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 315? In boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet, write – TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this 4. Road construction improved continuously between the first and eighteenth centuries. 5. In Britain, during the nineteenth century, only the very rich could afford to use toll roads. 6. Nineteenth-century road surfaces were inadequate for heavy motor traffic. 7. Traffic speeds on long-distance highways were unregulated in the early part of the twentieth century. Complete the table below. Use ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. \|Type of bridge\|\|Features\|\|Example(s)\| \|Arched bridge\|\|• Introduced by the 8 ………. • Very strong. • Usually made of 9 ……….\|\|Alcantara, Spain Ironbridge, UK\| \|Truss bridge\|\|• Made of wood or metal. • Popular for railways.\| \|Suspension bridge\|\|• Has a suspended deck. • Strong but 10 ……….\|\|Clifton, UK Akashi Kaikyo, Japan (currently the 11 ……….span)\| \|Cantilever bridge\|\|• Made of 12 ………. • More 13 ………. than the suspension bridge.\|\|Quebec, Canada\| 1. hot tar 2. 5 cm 5. NOT GIVEN 7. NOT GIVEN
by Rebecca Pascoe Moral choices are not just the big decisions which are made on a large scale. We make moral choices everyday. The decision whether to keep or return the money found in a lost wallet or to tell a lie to protect someone’s feelings, or even something as simple as to give up your seat on the bus so somebody else can sit down. They are something unavoidable, so why is it that deciding on right and wrong in a real life situation seems to be more trivial than moral issues which seem to dominate many our conversations and debates, such as the legalization of abortion and changing the minimum wage. Surely the ethics that is happening right before us on a daily basis should be more important to us? Everyday ethics doesn’t take the centre stage simply because the issues we face daily have become habit. Some people don’t even need to think twice before giving up their seat on the bus, whereas others just don’t want to. Perhaps one could say that the outcomes of the moral choices made on a daily basis are already decided by the personality of the person themselves, as surely a kinder more selfless person would be more willing to give up their seat. However, as well as this, it could be said that there are many other factors that influence the moral choices that people make. The first is where we stand in society. Teenagers, for example, could be said to struggle with moral decisions more in everyday life. This is maybe because they have less experience in the world or perhaps because of the pressures and problems that all teenagers are sure to face at some point in their lives. During our teen years, it is a time when many are struggling with their sense of personal identity and fitting in with their peers, which is why their moral compasses may be slightly warped at this time. Take the example or peer pressure. A teenager who would usually have no interest in drugs, or bullying, may go against their own personal values in order to be accepted by their peers. This doesn’t mean that they are intrinsically an unethical person, but they may act in an unethical way because of the conflict between the need for acceptance and obeying their own values. Because of this, moral choices for teenagers and adolescents could be seen as more difficult than it is for adults who don’t face these kinds of pressures in their everyday lives. For some, religion is the main factor that influences how we behave morally. The code of conduct for the specific religion then becomes the code of conduct for its followers, meaning that when faced with everyday moral choices, the religious believer would do what their religion teaches. So for Christianity, which says ‘love thy neighbour’, a Christian should be expected to give up their seat to someone more in need than them. However, a problem arises here when the beliefs of a religion don’t benefit others, as we have seen recently in the case of extremist groups who believe they are following the morality of their religion by hurting others. Although they believe they are doing what is right, the majority of people, including those from their religions who are not extremists, would disagree, and their actions would go against the morality of most people. It could also be argued that the way we are brought up affects how we behave in everyday moral situations, for example if you mother was a thief, and you regularly saw her stealing in front of you while growing up, you may be more accustomed to take the money from a lost wallet. Despite this, it could go the other way, and you could be determined to be the opposite of your mother in adulthood, and thus decide not to steal the money and to return it. In most cases, how we act will depend on the person themselves, and there is no one influence that will make us act in a certain way. When faced with everyday ethics, it is a choice which is usually made quickly or on the spot. It is not something which is debated or discussed, but made by the personal alone in that moment. Because of this, the outcome of moral choices can change day to day, depending on for example, the mood of the person. It has been proven that someone in a bad mood will be more likely to take the money from a lost wallet than someone in a good mood. We can take from this that everyday ethics is just as important as large scale ethics, and although it is much more subjective and fast-paced, we should always try and make the decision that is the most beneficial to all, despite our own circumstances.
I am completely blown away by the digital divide between K12 students who are light years ahead of their teachers, many of whom seem paralyzed by the shock of being forced to go digital in less than 30 days. And this digital divide doesn’t even scratch the surface of the pre-existing digital divide of kids who do have access to internet and technology because they can afford it, and those who do not because they can’t. I spoke to my nephew today who said that he hadn’t seen most of his teachers faces in over three weeks because they weren’t using Zoom or Google Hangouts yet. The challenge facing teachers to go online is nobody’s fault – we weren’t expecting it – but it isn’t fair to our students who have stopped learning because of it. We must get creative quickly to help our students keep learning in order to explore, stay curious, gain skills, and to discovery what excites them about the world. I’ve been a high school teacher. I get it. It’s hard to come up with new lessons every day – let alone, record yourself doing them, and or figure out how to get your curriculum online fast. But it is critical that teachers make this leap. And not give up just because summer is close. I’m not placing judgement – the opposite. I support you. I write as a call to action to all teachers to continue with their mission of teaching. We collaborated with YouTube last year to help produce some lessons that help educators create educational content on YouTube. So this article isn’t just about what learning videos you can find on YouTube, it’s also about what videos you can make to help your own classroom and fellow teachers by open sourcing your curriculum. The good news is – my nephew’s teachers are using Google Classroom, so there is some structure to the materials. But for high school students, middle school students, or elementary school students – they really need to see a human to learn. More importantly – a teacher who can guide them, coach them, support them, mentor them, and encourage them. I’m sorry – power points and text docs just aren’t going to get the job done. Students need digital resources. The incredibly valuable learning resource that every school, teacher, and parent loves to hate is Google’s little sister YouTube. Because of the ads – YouTube is not allowed in schools. But yet – students love learning from YouTube, so much so that learning content is among the most searched on the platform. And while the learning videos on YouTube may not always be created by college professors, that’s OK. It’s often taught by experts in their field who excel at the subject matter – but whom also excel at teaching on this platform. Remember: Khan Academy, now famous, and invested in by Bill Gates, has had tremendous global educational impact and reach, and Khan Academy started on YouTube when he was making math tutorials for his niece. So let’s put aside our qualms about the platform in the spirit of learning and innovation. What’s challenging about YouTube is that is incredibly difficult to find what you are looking for beyond the “search bar” and to know if it’s good or not. How could anyone begin to know which channels are legit, and which ones are baloney. And what teacher or parent has time to do all the research and watch every single video to see if it’s something they want their kids watching? Not to mention the fact that if you open up YouTube, there’s the rabbit hole effect. Below I have curated a list of my favorite learning YouTube channels to help. YouTube is not a replacement of learning resources, but it is a wonderful curiosity tool. A great hook. And more than anything – that’s what students need right now. A way to become engaged again in the material, to be inspired, captivated, and motivated to learn. When teachers curate the video lessons that they have vetted and approved, that could be an excellent winning combination. If the price students need to pay to learn is to watch a free ad every now and then, so be it. YouTube has learned some hard lessons in the last few years and won’t serve ads that aren’t brand safe over these types of learning videos. My nephew’s favorite teacher was the “tech savvy” teacher who had been able to “flip his classroom” and was recording 15 minute video lectures every day to teach, and then giving my nephew an assignment once he explained the key concepts. It happened to be the science teacher and the social studies teacher who were leaps and bounds ahead of his teacher colleagues. When I asked him what his favorite subjects were, he said: science and social studies. Is this a surprise to the rest of us? My nephew was under the impression that not a lot of learning was going to be happening between now and the summer. I don’t think this is because he doesn’t want to be learning – but rather, because teachers have given him that idea. There are no tests scheduled for the rest of the year. I’m sharing below a list of my favorite learning YouTube channels as resources for teachers and parents to keep students engaged, excited, curious, and motivated – not to replace the curriculum, the projects, the assignments, the test, and most certainly not to replace the teacher. I’m also sharing some other learning platform resources to help spark imagination about the possibilities of online learning. I would also be more than happy to connect any K12 teacher with some of my favorite colleagues at StemScopes or SchoolTube who can really help support your transition from classroom to digital platforms with materials. And if you need tech coaching or guidance on how to flip your classroom by making your own videos or going live online with Google Hangouts or Zoom, please – reach out to me directly by sending me a DM on LinkedIn. Just raise a hand, and I’ll reach out to call on you to help. The list below is the exact “emergency learning kit” of resources that I sent my siblings to share with their kids. I added some links to other online learning platforms as well just to show them that the world is moving online quickly – and that’s an exciting place to be with a world of resources opportunity at their fingertips. Now is not the time to be bored – but to be curious, creative, and explore! Are you a teacher, parent, administrator, or student and you agree or disagree with me? Please share your opinion in the comments, I would love to engage in a productive dialogue about your point of view! But before you reach out – I encourage you to check out a few of the learning YouTube videos below. You might be surprised by what you learn 🙂 Pique your curiosity! Crash Course (All Subjects) Nickopedia (Science Experiments) Physics Girl (Physics) ASAP Science (Science) In a Nutshell (Science) Mary Doodles (Drawing / Art) Bill of Rights Homework Help (AP History) CreatorUp (Media Skills) Advance your skills! Khan Academy (Math and all subjects) Go Deeper with Experts! Space Exploration: (Chris Hadfield via Masterclass) Basketball Ball Handling (Steph Curry – via Masterclass) Get College Level Learning- Examples Social Sciences (via EdX) Health & Society (via EdEx) Life Sciences (Coursera) And have fun! Feng Shui (Udemy)
Opioids can include prescription medications like oxycodone and OxyContin, as well as illicit opioids like heroin. They can be both physically and psychologically addicting. Opioids are highly addictive and can cause serious opioid withdrawal symptoms if you stop using. For help, most will turn to an opioid addiction treatment center in Denver. In 2017, President Trump declared a public health emergency in response to the opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic played a significant part in drug overdoses becoming the leading cause of accidental death in the country. In response, health insurance companies are mandated to cover substance abuse and mental health treatment in the same manner as medical conditions. What are Opioids? Opioids are prescription or illicit drugs that are derived from opium and poppy plants. When you take opiates, your brain releases dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter that causes positive emotions like happiness and relaxation. Opioids can also numb pain, as prescription opioids are used to treat severe, traumatic and chronic pain. Oxycodone is one of the ten most prescribed medications in the United States, making it one of the most widely available opioids in the United States. Opioids create a warm sensation and deep feelings of relaxation, making them highly addictive. Since opioid addiction can cause changes to your reward pathways, your brain can become dependent on opioids in order to release neurotransmitters. This creates a significant neurotransmitter imbalance that can take time to correct without the help of addiction therapy programs. Opioid addiction provides additional risks. Since your liver filters toxins and impurities, like opioids, addiction can cause liver damage. Other risks associated with opioid abuse and addiction include: - Worsening symptoms of co-occurring disorders - Medical problems, such as infections - Financial problems - Isolation from friends and family - Significant interpersonal conflict - Personality and behavioral changes Opioid Withdrawal Symptoms Opioids are both physically and psychologically addicting. When you immediately stop using, you can experience intense opioid withdrawal symptoms. Opioid withdrawal signs typically include intense cravings, anxiety, and restlessness. Opioid withdrawal symptoms can begin within hours of your last use and intensify the longer you don’t use. Withdrawal symptoms can last for several days. Other common signs of opioid withdrawal include: - Restless legs - Aches and pain - Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea - Insomnia, exhaustion, and disorientation While opioid withdrawal symptoms are uncomfortable and painful, they rarely cause complications or death. Treatment programs can help you successfully detox and alleviate most opioid withdrawal symptoms. Following detox, opioid addiction treatment can greatly improve your ability to recover. Evidence-based and holistic treatments can help you identify triggers and learn how to cope with cravings in a healthy way. Individual counseling provides you the ability to share complex or overwhelming emotions and thoughts in a supportive, confidential environment. Addiction treatment centers can also offer family and marriage counseling. Finding Help Today Struggling with opioid addiction can make you feel trapped, frustrated and hopeless. Opioid withdrawal symptoms can make it hard to quit. But help is only a phone call away. Red Rock Recovery Center, the best opioid addiction treatment center Denver offers, has the experience, dedication and compassion to help you find recovery. To learn more about our programs, call us today at 855.218.7588.
Posted on January 26, 2011 Historians are taking seriously the old adage about those who ignore the past being doomed to repeat it. Inside Higher Ed reports today that history scholars around the country are forming a new organization, Historians Against Slavery, which will raise awareness of human trafficking today by changing the way slavery is taught on college campuses. Wheaton College History Professor Kathryn Tomasek is among those contemplating how to incorporate this into her teaching. She told Inside Higher Ed about her idea to have students study the advocacy methods of 19th century abolitionists and propose plans for applying those strategies to contemporary efforts combating slavery. "Students need not carry out such a plan, but they should take into account arguments they might encounter for and against contemporary abolition and how those would compare to such arguments in the nineteenth century."
The Hubble Space Telescope's dramatic glimpse of the Carina Nebula, a gigantic cloud of dust and gas bustling with star-making activity, is a glorious feast for the eyes. Energetic young stars are sculpting a fantasy landscape of bubbles, valleys, mountains, and pillars. Now this celestial fantasyland has been brought into view for people who cannot explore the image by sight. Max Mutchler, a research and instrument scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and Noreen Grice, president of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and author of several tactile astronomy books, have created a touchable image of the Carina Nebula that is engaging for everyone, regardless of their visual ability. The 17-by-11-inch color image is embossed with lines, slashes, and other markings that correspond to objects in the giant cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds. The image's design is also useful and intriguing for sighted people who have different learning styles. "The Hubble image of the Carina Nebula is so beautiful, and it illustrates the entire life cycle of stars," says Mutchler, who, along with Grice, unveiled the tactile Carina image in January 2010, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. "I thought that people who are visually impaired should be able to explore it and learn from it, too." Located 7,500 light-years from Earth, the nebula is a 3-million-year-old gigantic cloud where thousands of stars are cycling through the stages of stellar life and death. The nebula is 300 light-years wide, but Hubble captured a 50-light-year-wide view of its central region. A Hubble education and public outreach grant allowed Mutchler to produce the special image. The grant is part of his Hubble archival research project to create complete mosaics of a huge collection of individual Carina Nebula images taken by Hubble (http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/carina/). Mutchler made 300 copies of the tactile image and will distribute them to organizations that serve the visually impaired, including state schools and libraries for the blind and the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Md. When Mutchler decided to make a tactile Carina Nebula image last year, he immediately called his friend Grice, who is a pioneer in designing tactile astronomy images for the blind. But Grice says the nebula image is so visually rich, it posed a challenge to design a textured image that conveys its beauty and complexity. "When I first looked at the image, I didn't know what to focus on," she recalls. "In order to translate the image into a tactile image, I had to make certain that I understood the individual features that make up the image. There was so much to see." She spent a couple of hours on the telephone with Mutchler, who gave her a guided tour of the nebula. Then she parsed astronomy books, looking for other views of the nebula. One feature, in particular, gave her some trouble. It was the Keyhole Nebula. Grice couldn't see how the shape in the image resembled a keyhole. Finally, she came across a 1950s image of Carina, and suddenly, she got it. The name referred to the shape of an old-fashioned "skeleton" key. Some visually impaired children who have touched the image say the feature actually resembles a foot, Grice says. Choosing which features to show on the textured image also posed a challenge. Grice says she relied on a lesson she learned from her first NASA tactile astronomy book of Hubble images called "Touch the Universe": less is more. "Convey just enough to get the idea," she says. "Then provide some Braille text that explains the science and describes the scene. A picture that is jammed with too many tactile details is very overwhelming for the mind's eye." Grice used the Keyhole Nebula as the focal point and added other important features suggested by Mutchler to tell the story of stellar life and death, such as pillars of gas and dust that harbor infant stars, a cluster of young stars called Trumpler 14, and a massive, unstable star, Eta Carinae, that is near the end of its life. The pair then developed a tactile code identifying the raised features and wrote a short guided tour that provides more information on the highlighted on the features. The guide and an audio tour of the nebula are on a special Web page called "The Tactile Carina Nebula" (http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/tactile-carina/), on Amazing Space, the Space Telescope Science Institute's education Web site. A stable of seasoned tactile astronomy evaluators, including Vivian Hoette, the education outreach coordinator of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., and Ben Wentworth, a retired teacher from the Colorado School for the Blind in Colorado Springs, Colo., helped test several prototypes of the image. One such evaluation place was the Youth Slam, held in the summer of 2009 in College Park, Md. The National Federation of the Blind coordinated the event to promote careers in math, engineering, and science. One of the biggest surprises from their testing was the image size. Grice and Mutchler originally thought that a large (almost 6-foot-wide) or medium-sized (3-foot-wide) tactile image would be appropriate for students. The children who sampled the image, however, preferred the much smaller 11-by-17-inch image. "Many students felt lost with the larger prototype versions because certain objects were separated by empty spaces," Grice says. "However, the smaller version allowed hands to easily track from one object to another." Adds Hoette, one of the evaluators: "The smaller size gives them enough details so they can get the big picture, and then they can read the science behind it in Braille text, or they can listen to the audio tour on 'The Tactile Carina' Web page while they are touching the image." The Grice-Mutchler partnership has worked so well that the duo hopes to produce more tactile Hubble images. "It would be great to build up a catalogue of these images for the visually impaired," Mutchler says. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Start building a love for math early with ThinkFun’s My First Math Dice. It includes a pair of dice and two chip counters with 30 counter chips in total. This small game packs a big educational punch with three different games to play. The first game is all about counting. Roll your die and then stack that number of chips on your chip tower. The first to fill their chip tower wins. Game number two is all about number comparisons. Whoever rolls the biggest number, stacks that number on their chip tower. Kids learn more than, less than, and equal to concepts. The last game is simple addition to 10. Players roll both dice and add them up. First to fill their tower wins! Early math lovers are practicing fine motor skills as they pinch and grab each chip. They’re working hand-eye coordination when they’re stacking. Math concepts like counting and understanding zero are reinforced. One-to-one number correspondence is practiced within each game, this means that children match a number word to the object. Lastly, kids are practicing number recognition through repetition as they play. All these early math skills will help set a foundational learning for numbers and their values. In addition to early math concepts, math vocabulary is learned throughout gameplay. Kids learn synonyms, understanding that plus, add, and, and all together, all mean the same thing. Word problems incorporate language and math together. Learning this early math vocabulary will help set the groundwork for success later on. My First Math Dice is an excellent game that promotes learning math concepts at an early age. Grab the game-go bag and everything fits inside. Perfect for travel and quick play anytime and anywhere. Available on Amazon
The best way to treat facial sports injuries is to prevent them. To insure a safe athletic environment, the following guidelines are suggested: - Be sure the playing areas are large enough that players will not run into walls or other obstructions. - Cover unremoveable goal posts and other structures with thick, protective padding. - Carefully check equipment to be sure it is functioning properly. - Require protective equipment – such as helmets and padding for football, bicycling and rollerblading; face masks, head and mouth guards for baseball; ear protectors for wrestlers; and eyeglass guards or goggles for racquetball and snowmobiling are just a few. - Prepare athletes with warm-up exercises before engaging in intense team activity. - In the case of sports involving fast-moving vehicles, for example, snowmobiles or dirt bikes – check the path of travel, making sure there are no obstructing fences, wires or other obstacles. - Enlist adequate adult supervision for all children’s competitive sports.
Safety measures in the drilling industry are usually set up to help workers to avoid getting caught up in drill-related hazards and accidents. Although there isn’t much risk associated with the installation of underground pipes and cables using the HDD technology, measures still have to be put in place since the workers are still at risk of explosions, electrocutions, leaks, etc. Safety is one of the key points of hdd machine drilling construction and needs to be given much attention. Safety Measures For Horizontal Directional Drilling Machine Workers Every day in their line of work, workers in the drilling industry are exposed to numerous dangers of horizontal drilling. This is due to the fact that it’s so easy to come in contact and cause the rupturing of already existing underground electricity, steam, chemical, gas, water, and sewage pipes. Here are some tips that are a part of a safety management plan to ensure that workers stay safe all the time: - Whenever possible, work far away from already existing lines. However, if that is unavoidable always go very slowly around these areas. - Always perform a visual inspection of the planned path before you can start drilling. To be even surer, dig small holes along the path to see if there’s anything underneath. This technique is referred to as potholing. - Find the time to contact utility companies that offer their services within the area and ask for maps to see the routes that their lines follow. Make sure to review these drawings to know of their product lines; exact locations. - Never make adjustments while the horizontal directional drilling machine is in operation. Make sure that everything, especially the cutting tools, is running well before you start drilling. This way you won’t need to make any adjustments. - Do not wear any loose clothing such as scarves or leave your long hair to be free. These may get caught inside the turning tools and you could end up getting hurt. - Always wear eye protection while operating the horizontal directional drilling machines. Sharp debris may fly around and accidentally get into your eyes. - Walk around the drilling path with a tracker or a handheld natural gas detector and look for signal strength variations or other unusual readings and mark these specific locations. This will help you any potential risks, problems, or obstacles on the path. - Finally, ensure that you have specific training for the job before you can start working. The information you get will be very helpful in identifying utility lines in the event that you missed anything from your previous research. For example, if you hear a hissing sound from the ground or smell a distinctive odor, that means that there is a gas leak. This calls for you to take necessary safety measures and preventive precautions as dictated in the good drilling practices guideline. Evacuate the area before debris starts blowing into the air or worse, an explosive fire starts. Conclusion Using drilling machines dictates that you follow the set safety standards as these machines are quite dangerous if you are not careful. Being keen about following the safety procedures while handling this hand-operated equipment will help you minimize the risk of accidents as well as time wastage and loss of materials. Although there is really no guarantee that you will always be safe if you are careful, following the above-listed tips will give you some sort of assurance.
Erich von Falkenhayn, in full Erich Georg Anton Sebastian von Falkenhayn, (born November 11, 1861, near Graudenz, West Prussia—died April 8, 1922, near Potsdam, Germany), Prussian minister of war and chief of the imperial German General Staff early in World War I. Falkenhayn gained military experience as an instructor to the Chinese army and as a member of the Prussian General Staff in the international expedition of 1900 against the Boxers in China. From July 1913 to January 1915 he was Prussian minister of war, in which office he was responsible for the armament and equipment of the German army. Within Germany he greatly improved the system of munitions supply and transportation of troops by rail. He ignored some recommendations of Gen. Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the General Staff, who for that reason considered him responsible for the army’s failure in France in 1914. On September 14, 1914, after the German retreat from the Marne, William II chose Falkenhayn as Moltke’s successor. Falkenhayn was convinced that the war had to be won in France, chiefly by Germany’s standing on the defensive and exhausting her enemies. He did not believe Russia could be defeated militarily. Thus, he opposed the plan of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Gen. Erich Ludendorff for an eastern offensive and was reluctant to provide troops for a theatre he believed “gave nothing back.” Instead, he began concentrating resources for an attack on Verdun that he believed would wear out the French army. On August 29, 1916, following a long and unsuccessful German assault on that French fortress-city, Falkenhayn was dismissed as chief of the General Staff by the emperor in favour of the more aggressive Hindenburg. After leading a German army against Romania for 10 months, Falkenhayn took command of the Central Powers forces (mainly Turkish) in Palestine (July 9, 1917). There he was unable to stop the advance of the British under Gen. Edmund Allenby. Having been succeeded in Palestine by Gen. Otto Liman von Sanders, Falkenhayn commanded an army in Lithuania from March 4, 1918, until the end of the war.
While only one of many historical museums in Indianapolis, the Indiana Medical History Museum showcases its own unique theme and heritage. Located on the west side of downtown Indianapolis, it resides in the space the former Central State Hospital occupied. During its conception in 1895, the building was referred to as the Pathological Department Building. One of its first uses was to begin the process of research for physical causes of mental illness. The structure houses a wide range of artifacts dating back to the 18th century, and the building itself is the oldest facility devoted to the study of pathology in the United States. The valuable collection inside the museum spans a wide range of years and topics, containing historical pieces from the very first studies of psychiatry and medicine up through present day practices. All of these tools and procedures were not only used in the hopes of creating a healthier Indianapolis but would be able to help people worldwide. The Indiana Medical History Museum, while presenting its scientific paraphernalia in an authentic setting, has received updates throughout the years and now contains three sophisticated clinical labs and a photography lab, a well-equipped library, and a large teaching auditorium. In addition to the indoor artifacts the museum houses, outside resides an impressive garden featuring over 90 medicinal plants, cared for by the Purdue Master Gardeners of Marion County. Each plant is accompanied by a detailed plaque describing its use in modern and historical medicine. The Indiana Medical History Museum is a unique way to look back through some Indianapolis history and see how Hoosiers have help further the field of medicine. If you’re interested in touring the museum, one of the must see attractions in Indianapolis, hours are 10:00am to 4:00pm Thursday through Saturday. Tours are conducted on Wednesdays only for groups of 10 or more who call ahead to reserve a time. Volunteers to give the tours are always needed as well, in addition to helping arrange the many artifacts on display. Don’t miss your opportunity to become involved in your community history and learn about the origins of the study of psychiatry at this historic building in Indianapolis. Indiana Medical History Museum 3045 Vermont Street Indianapolis, IN 46222 To learn more about this museum visit the Indiana Medical History Museum website today.
As Global Population Grows, Water Matters More NEAL CONAN, HOST: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. We're broadcasting today from the Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic in Washington, D.C. Clean, fresh water is essential to life. People, animals depend on it. So do businesses and industry and agriculture. Some parts of the world already suffer from scarcity, and as we continue to drink and wash and utilize it and eat - especially eat - reserves are dwindling. Do we have enough to feed seven billion and counting? We want to hear today from farmers. Tell us about your water. Where do you get it? How do you use it? Do you waste it? Give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email: firstname.lastname@example.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, AP photographer David Guttenfelder on his journey into the exclusion zone around Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. But first, feeding the planet. With me here onstage at the Grosvenor Auditorium is Sandra Postel. She's a freshwater fellow at National Geographic Society, director of the Global Water Policy Project. Thanks very much for coming in. SANDRA POSTEL: My pleasure, Neal. CONAN: And Sandra, immigration - irrigation has helped greatly with food production. Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago, is where we began urban society, thanks to diversion of water from rivers. It's not a fully sustainable project, though. POSTEL: Exactly. The - irrigation's been a cornerstone of human civilization, as you say, from the very beginning. You know, if you look at the earliest civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile Valley, the Yellow River Valley in China, you know, these were the beginnings of human civilization exactly because irrigation freed up a number of people in that society to do other things than grow food, to develop mathematics and science and art and all kinds of things. And we've learned from history that it's important not to be complacent about the sustainability of irrigation, because some of these early civilizations - the one in ancient Mesopotamia, in particular - were brought down in large part because their irrigation practices weren't sustainable. So if we look out at the world today, we're getting about 40 percent of our food from the 18 percent of cropland that gets irrigation. So it's very, very important to our food security even today. But if you look at what's happening on the ground, where we have irrigated agriculture going on, you see a couple things happening. We're experiencing the depletion of groundwater. Rivers are running dry. And as happened in ancient Mesopotamia, salt is building up in the soil. So there are threats there that we need to pay attention to. CONAN: Salt building up into the soil. Even fresh water has some salt in it, and as it evaporates year after year after year after year, that salt builds up, and it's not just salt. There's other crud in there, too. POSTEL: Exactly right. Yeah, you have this buildup of salt in the soil unless you flush the salts out on an annual basis, and that's very hard to do in a very dry climate. CONAN: Jason Clay is also with us here at the Grosvenor Auditorium, and he's the senior vice president of market transformation at the World Wildlife Foundation. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The correct name of the organization is World Wildlife Fund.] Thanks very much for joining us today. JASON CLAY: Thank you. CONAN: And you've written about - well, specifically Africa, but the lessons there apply to this country, too. Irrigation is necessary, yet irrigation is tremendously wasteful, as well as not being necessarily sustainable. CLAY: Today, we use about a liter of water to make each calorie of food on the planet. And we're going to have two billion more people coming along by 2050. They're going to have 2.9 times as much income per capita. They're going to consume, per capita, about twice as much food as we do today because they're going to eat more animal protein. And the question is how we're going to do all of this. You know, it's a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. In 1900, we used 90 percent of all the water we used as people to grow food. By the year 2000, we used 70 percent. But the bad news is that we used five times as much water in total, and we simply don't have five times more water to use to grow food. So we're going to have to double-down. We've got to figure out how to get twice as much food, twice as many calories, from each drop of water. CONAN: And the problem being, unfortunately, we can't get more water. There's only a finite amount. POSTEL: Exactly. There's a finite amount of water on the planet, and, you know, nature's dealt a pretty difficult hand when it comes to water, because exactly where we need to grow food is where it's sunny, but also you don't have water in those sunny places. So we don't always have the water where we need it when we need it. So it's very, very tricky business to, you know, apply that water and deliver that water at the right times and in the right amounts. And so what you see now is in a lot of the really important food-producing regions of the world like north China, like northwest India, the breadbasket of India, the Western United States, it's in these places where we're having water shortages, and we're having difficulty sustaining the agriculture use of that water because of water shortages. CONAN: Droughts we call them, right? POSTEL: Well, there's two things. There's water shortages where you have this chronic overuse of water. So you have rivers running dry. You're depleting groundwater on an annual basis. And then it gets worse in times of drought, as we just saw the 10-year big dry in Australia and the droughts in China and that sort of thing. So that's on top of this longer-term trend of water shortage. CLAY: And it's not just people that need water. Every living thing on the planet needs water. We have twelve major rivers globally that don't reach the sea anymore. It's very hard to have freshwater biodiversity when there's no water part of the earth. CONAN: Those rivers don't reach the sea because every single drop of water in them has been taken out to use for one purpose or another. Let's see if we can get some callers in on the conversation. We want to hear from farmers today: Where do you get your water? How do you use it? Do you waste it? 800-989-8255. Email: email@example.com. And we'll start with James, James on the line with us from Charlotte. JAMES: Yes, hi. CONAN: Hi, James. JAMES: Yes, on our family farm, we raise cattle. Well, where they get their water from the creek that runs through the pasture. Well, the city right down the road from us is trying to get us to quit using that water. They don't - they're trying to - they're not - it's not a very - it's turned into, like, a farm-versus-the-city thing. They want that water to not be touched because they're claiming that is part of the watershed, but at the same time, this farm has been there well over 200 years. CONAN: Part of the watershed, it flows into a reservoir and is used for drinking water? JAMES: It goes into a river, and I think they use that for part of their watershed. CONAN: And they'd rather - I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but they'd rather the cattle not mess around in it upstream? JAMES: Correct, correct. CONAN: Yet you've been doing this for 200 years. JAMES: The family's - that's a family farm, been there since before we were even a country. CONAN: And how is this going to work out, do you think? JAMES: Well, we'll just let them drink. You know, I mean, they've got to have their water, so they've got to get it from somewhere. And (unintelligible), so it's, like, a catch-22 or rock-and-a-hard-place thing. CONAN: I understand what you're saying. Eventually, they may be able to force you to stop that. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) CONAN: Okay, good luck with that. JAMES: All right, thank you. CONAN: And we wish you the best. Thanks very much for the phone call. But Jason Clay, that's a tension that goes on around the world as cities continue to develop and as farmers continue to practice their - in their old ways. CLAY: Well, I think as resources become more scarce, there's going to be more competition for them, and money and who can afford to pay is actually going to be part of the issue. It will probably be the case that people in cities will be able to afford to pay more for water than farmers do, and we're already seeing now some of the water rights that exist in places like California for growing agricultural crops being sold to cities, because farmers make more money selling water than they do growing crops and selling it. CONAN: More money selling water? That's... CLAY: And that's probably the shape of things to come in many parts of the world, where it's drier. CONAN: And it's interest, Sandra Postel, reading some of your work, I came across a concept - it may not be original to you - but that trade in crops, sending wheat or corn to a dry place like Saudi Arabia, is essentially trade in water. POSTEL: That's right. Grain is the currency by which we trade water around the world. It takes about 1,000 tons of water to make one ton of grain. So the reason a country like Egypt imports more than half of its grain is not because it's short of land. It's because it's short of water. So as it imports so much grain, it's actually importing 1,000 times that tonnage in water. So we call it virtual water. So you're trading - one of the ways we balance water budgets around the world is by trading grain. So - and that's not been such a big issue so far. We've been able to do that with the extra grain. The problem that we're beginning to see and get worried about is that you have very large countries that used to be self-sufficient in grain, notably China, with 1.3 billion people, India with 1.2 billion people, Pakistan with nearly 200 million people, now beginning to become so water-short that they can't be food self-sufficient anymore. And as they begin to look to the international grain market to buy more food, it's going to force prices up. And they'll be able to afford it, but what worries a lot of us is what that means for the people in South Asia and particularly sub-Saharan Africa that are hungry even today. And so that tension is going to worsen. You've got over a billion people today who are malnourished, even at food prices and availability today. CONAN: Yet, Jason Clay, the situation 50 years ago, we were on the edge of that situation, yet technology in form of the green revolution, solved that problem - or so we thought. CLAY: So we put together a package that included seeds and genetics, water, fertilizers and pesticides and really allowed us to grow agriculture faster in some places, so that we were able to take land out of production, to grow agriculture production faster than the population grew. But right now, we don't have any technologies available that actually are growing faster than the population is growing. And so - and it's not just population. It's consumption, too, how much we're consuming, how much animal protein we're consuming. If you take our technologies and add them all up, we could actually do this, but we're going to have to be very smart about it and we're going to have to start working on it very quickly. Forty years down the road, just for what some people think of as the peak of population, isn't that long. The peak of consumption, we don't even know when that's going to be. That could be 100 years or 200 years. CONAN: Are we talking about genetic engineering, here? CLAY: Well, we certainly can't take genetics off the table. But genetic engineering isn't GMOs, and we have to be very clear about that. We can do a lot by selecting traits. We can select traits and markers for productivity, for drought tolerance, disease resistance - actually, for nutrients, too. That would be a novel concept. We haven't done that too much yet, but I think we can begin to use 21st-century technology to do that. CONAN: That takes time, though. GMOs can happen... CLAY: Forty years is not long when it comes to genetics. But if we map the genomes of some of the basic crops around the planet, we can actually double or triple production within that genome. We don't have to be doing GMOs. CONAN: We're talking with Jason Clay, senior vice president of market transformation at the World Wildlife Foundation. He's with us here in the Grosvenor Auditorium at National Geographic, along with Sandra Postel, freshwater fellow at the National Geographic Society. We're talking, well, about water. Do we have enough to feed seven billion mouths and counting? Farmers, tell us about your water: where you get it, how you use it, do you waste it - 800-989-8255. Email us: firstname.lastname@example.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. We're broadcasting today from the National Geographic headquarters in Washington. In Texas, the drought ravishing that state was recently declared the worst in a century. Recent lawsuits stoked debate over the use of fresh water across the Southwest United States, debates that play out all over the world as farmers use more and more water to feed a global population growing rapidly toward eight billion. We want to hear today from farmers. Tell us about your water, where you get it, how you use it, do you waste it. 800-989-8255. Email email@example.com. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. We're going to get questions from the audience here at the Grosvenor Auditorium as well, and thanks, everybody, for coming in. We appreciate it. Let's see if we can get a caller in on the conversation. Let's go next to - this is Gloria(ph), Gloria with us from the Hood River in Oregon. GLORIA: Yes, thank you for taking my call. GLORIA: Well, I have a small farm in the foothills of Mount Hood, and my water comes from the west fork of the Hood River. And you know, that's where I get my water. How do I use it? I grow blueberries and I grow pears. Now, one of the issues that you haven't talked about is pollution. You know, there is effort here to be more careful about what gets into the water, and there are agencies which test it so that we can see if there are chemicals that are getting into it. But one of the other issues that you didn't speak to, and you have talked about how in dry areas even rain builds up salts in soils, but how about fertilization? I've found that fertilization also builds up salt in the soil, and that's one of the big problems in the - you know, the salad basket of California. So, you know, we can do a lot better. And do I waste water? Of course I waste water. But, you know, there are ways that you - you know, there's new technology. You can put in a new irrigation system and all of that stuff. But if you're growing trees that have been there for, you know, 30 to 60 years, you know, and you want to change the irrigation system to drip, well, that might not be such a great idea. You know, yes, we can use 21st century technology to identify better ways to do stuff, but we need to support people like Wes Jackson(ph), who's a geneticist who's trying to develop, you know, a grain which is perennial. We need to support people like Charles Fishman, who wrote "The Big Thirst," and, you know, that's an eye-opener. And he posits that the reason we waste so much water in this United States is because we don't pay attention to it. It comes - you know, you turn on the tap, and it comes out. We flush more water down our toilet than, you know, Great Britain and Canada use, total, you know. CONAN: Well, Sandra Postel, you've described the United States as being fairly rich in water resources. But she was describing irrigation systems. A lot of farmers simply flood their fields or run water down the funnels between the furrows, the areas between the furrows. She was talking about drip irrigation. That's a relatively newer system and one that is much more - well, it saves a lot of water. POSTEL: It does. We're water-rich as a nation, but we're very water-stressed in the western part of the country, and that's where we have most of our irrigation happening. And you know, the silver lining in all this is that there's so much we can do. As the caller pointed out, there's a waste of water going on, but that's because we haven't really given farmers the incentives they need to really use the most modern and up-to-date technology. And we haven't provided that opportunity the way we can. So drip irrigation is just one example of - it's the most efficient way we know of to deliver water directly to plants. You're delivering the water directly to the roots of the plant in the amounts of water that the plant needs and not, you know, just spreading the water on the field where it's subject to evaporation and running off and adding to the pollution that Gloria talked about. And so I think that's one technology that's underused. In this country we've got about seven, eight percent of - or about seven or eight percent of our irrigated land under drip irrigation. Countries like Israel, Jordan that are growing more fruits and vegetables, up over half. So there's a lot that we can do to improve that efficiency. But again, farmers are good businesspeople. You know, they're making decisions as to how to use their water, what crops to grow, based on the incentives and the prices that - just like any good business person would - the incentives that confront them. So there really are challenges to how do we change the incentives to promote, you know, the better use of efficiency technology where and how we grow crops. CONAN: And Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund, what about that idea, the image - we turn on a tap, it's there. Of course we use it, and of course we waste it because we don't really think about it. CLAY: Well, I think if we - when resources become more scarce, we're going to start paying more for them. It's going to be either - water's going to be charged, or the taxes to use it or the competition between users are going to change. So we're going to have to figure out how to use water more efficiently. But it's not just water, it's soil. It's other inputs. It's land itself. I think there are lots of ways that we can increase efficiency but only if we start to manage and measure it. We've got hundreds of certification programs in the U.S. that look at sustainability of food production. None of them measure productivity, and very few of them actually even measure water at all. So as water becomes more scarce, we're going to have to start doing that. CONAN: Let's go to a question here in the auditorium. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: What role can native planting, especially native edible planting, play in bolstering the food supply while maintaining or managing our water? CONAN: Native plants - in other words the local plants that have always been here? UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Or anywhere. CONAN: Or anywhere, okay. Can you help us out with that, Jason? CLAY: Well, one of the projects that we've been involved with is in Africa, where we're trying to identify what the orphan crops are, the kind of neglected crops, the crops that haven't benefitted from modern plant breeding, and what we could do if we map those genomes and begin to select for traits in years rather than decades or centuries so that we could take tree crops and then double or triple or quadruple production. We're talking about things like cassava, cocoa yams, peanuts, palm oil, et cetera, all native to Africa and used by those people. And the question is then how do we double-up or triple-up production. We think there's a lot of room to be made for genetics. But it's not just about genetics. It's also about how to grow those crops better. We find that anywhere in the world, the best farmers are 100 percent - or excuse me, 100 times more productive than the worst farmers. So how do they do it? What are the practices they use? We need to begin to identify that, document it and spread that around. We have 500 million, 800 million cell phones in Africa? Why aren't we using that to spread information like this, SMS texting and messaging, and replace the old extension agent that's 10, 20, 30 years out of date by the time they're 40 or 50 or 60 years old and use cell phones to get immediate information to people. CONAN: Yet - I assume the extension service in a lot of places you're talking about in Africa is your father and his brother and maybe your grandfather. CLAY: In the sense that most governments can't afford to pay for extension agents anymore, yes, that's true. But learning about modern techniques from your grandparents isn't exactly the most straightforward way to go forward. CONAN: Let's see if we can get another caller in on the conversation. Let's go to Jim, Jim with us from Kansas City. CONAN: Go ahead, please. JIM: I talked to an ag agent about - in 2000, (unintelligible) Texas before I moved up here. And he said by 2020 we would lose the grain belt because the dust bowl is going to come back and that they had already made contracts with Canada to (unintelligible) the grain they were going to have to buy because their genetic expert said they could not possibly breed a viable crop in just 20 years. CONAN: Couldn't - your phone is betraying you, but I think you were talking about the dust bowl returning, and it's been looking like that in parts of Kansas and much of Texas. And Sandra... CONAN: I'm sorry, really having a hard time hearing you, but we're going to let you go, but we'll pick up your question with Sandra Postel of the National Geographic Society; he's a freshwater fellow here, and that is this idea that, well, obviously climate change is having a tremendous impact in places like Texas, in places like Australia, in places like China and Russia. POSTEL: Exactly. It's very troubling from a water perspective because what the scientists are saying now is that we're sort of outside. We've moved outside the normal boundaries of variability. So the droughts are likely to get worse, and the floods are likely to get worse, and we've been seeing this. Right, we've seen, you know, these biblical scale floods in Pakistan, last year 20 percent of the country. We saw a heat wave in Russia that, you know, produced temperatures in Moscow that they hadn't seen in generations, and it cut their wheat crop by 40 percent. So we're seeing these extremes, and that's going to spike food prices. We saw in 2008, and again earlier this year, in February 2011, a spiking of food prices like we hadn't seen. And what that does is it creates more hunger. We saw at least another 150 million poor people go hungry, from about 850 million to up over a billion, because of that spiking of food prices. And also, it also changes the dynamics of the whole food system. And so, you know, this is the kind of thing on top of the demand - the increase in demand for food, again, as more and more countries and people want to consume meat the way we do. You know, we've had a tripling of world population, but a six-fold increase in our meat consumption since 1950. And that trend in demand is happening even as climate change is making the water system much more difficult. CONAN: Jason Clay? CLAY: The variability isn't just about the productivity either. If you have one year where you have too much water and your crop fails and the next year, you have too little water and your crop fails, what bank is going to lend you money to plant the third crop? I mean, we haven't even begun to come to terms with what some of the climate change issues mean for finance and other sectors. CONAN: Here's an email from Jerry(ph): We have a small farm 25 miles north of Denver. One of the cities is offering us to buy our water for 10 times what it was previously worth. In the process, they also force farms into drying up, removing productive farmland from use. So it's six to one and half a dozen in the other, taking away from one hand and giving to the other. Let's get a question from the audience here in Washington. JOEL BREZOIR: Yes, I'm Joel Brezoir(ph). I was wondering, where does desalination fit into the equation of water usage and water need, et cetera, for the future? CONAN: Sandra Postel, desalination, pumping water out of the ocean, taking the salt out and the other stuff. But it's energy intensive, no? POSTEL: It is very energy intensive. It's, you know, we have this image of the vast oceans. If we could just take the salt out, we would have no water problems. And it's a temptation to think that way. The tricky thing is it takes a lot of energy to remove salt from water. Whether you distill it and leave the freshwater behind or you push it through a membrane, which is the more modern way of doing it, it takes a lot of energy. And so desalination is very much a growth industry right now. It's in island countries and desert countries and cities. They're relying a lot on desal(ph) for their drinking water. But it's way too expensive to desalt ocean water to grow food. Food prices would just go through the roof. And the other thing about desalination is because it's energy intensive and it's using usually fossil fuels to run the plant, you're contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to create water. And so you're making those water shortage problems all that much worse. And I think this is part of the issue. Now we're dealing now with this nexus of water, food, energy and climate problems, and we have to think about solutions that tackle all those at the same time, you know, and not try to solve one problem while making another one worse. That's going to just create a vicious cycle. CONAN: Jason Clay, is this an area where technology can help us out? CLAY: Well, I think so. I mean, if you imagine, could we actually harness the way wave actions move so that the waves themselves desalinate water, so that we're not using fossil fuels, we're using other sources. I mean, we - I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball any more than any of the rest of you about where we're going to get our water. But rather than hold out for some technology, I would say let's start being more efficient. We waste a lot of water. More importantly, a hidden thing is that we waste a lot of food. A third of all the calories we produce on this planet are never eaten by people. They're actually wasted. In developing countries, it's post-harvest losses. We don't have elevators. We don't have granaries. We don't have transportation systems. We don't have refrigeration. In our developed countries, it's more - we have portions that are out of control. We have restaurants that throw away food. We look in our refrigerators and throw away food every week. If we could eliminate food waste, we'd have to produce have as much food as we do by 2050. Now, why is that important? Because between now and 2050, we have to produce as much food as we have in the last 8,000 years. That's the challenge before us today. We can't afford to take waste off the table, genetics off the table, technology off the table. None of them are going to get us there by itself. All of them combined, if we will away at them, we can get there. CONAN: Jason Clay, senior vice president of market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund. Sandra Postel is also with us, freshwater fellow at the National Geographic Society, director of the Global Water Policy Project. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And there's another question here in the Grosvenor Auditorium. KENNETH ANUM: MY name is Kenneth Anum(ph). I'm sitting here, listening to this, and I'm wondering about Africa. What are we going to do about Africa? Today, there are places in Africa whereby it's dry, and there's water scarcity. And as water scarcity increases, what's going to happen to these places that are already dry? CONAN: Well, Jason Clay, you brought a monograph. You've suggested eight ideas. We're not going to have time to go into them all, but he's correctly identified the problem, no? CLAY: Absolutely. I was just in Durban last week at the climate talks, and somebody pointed out that the last eight years in Africa had been hardest or, excuse me, the hottest in record. So we've had records for 150 years. The last eight years have been the top eight in terms of heat. That's going to make it very hard to produce food. We're going to have to look for varieties that require less water, that produce more calories per water that we use. We need to begin to start looking at different kinds of metrics. If you talk to farmers, they all talk about how many hectares or how many acres that they're farming, not how many calories they're producing per liter of water, how many calories they're producing per hour of labor. Those are kinds of things that we need to begin to look at. On a finite planet, we've got to manage our resources better, and that means we've got to start counting and measuring and managing. CONAN: One of the interesting pieces in your story was an idea called treadle pumps. The mechanical pumps cost $350, the most inexpensive ones. That's huge amount of money for farmers in that part of the world. Instead, treadle pumps were - works pretty much like a StairMaster, and you can pump water up from an aquifer. CLAY: So the question then becomes how many calories does it take to pump the water to produce how many calories? You need to do the math. We live on a finite planet. We got to always do the math. POSTEL: And one of the - Kenneth makes a really good point that one of the things Africa doesn't have that much of the rest of the world does have is irrigation. So if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, only 4 percent of the crop land is irrigated. And so when those dry times come, there's no ability to use river water or groundwater to irrigate a crop. And so one of the ideas is to try to invest more in that affordable small-scale irrigation like the treadle pumps, which cost a bit more in Africa, and the idea would not be to treadle forever, but it's an entry point, you know? It gets you out of poverty because you can suddenly be more food self-sufficient, not have those terrible years when the drought hits, and begin to take some crops to market. In Bangladesh, where this idea first kicked off, the treadle pump, 1.2 million of those were sold, and a lot of farm families found that to be their ticket out of poverty and toward that next level of income where they could then buy a different kind of pump, where they don't have to work quite so hard. But it's an excellent point. CONAN: We're talking about the shortage of water in many parts of the world and how we're going to use it to feed seven billion and counting. A couple of more questions when we come back. We're also going to be visiting scenes from Japan's nuclear disaster. The area around the Fukushima plant is off-limits to the news media. We'll talk with a photographer about how he got in, who and what he saw there. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) CONAN: We'll get to the exclusion zone outside of Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in just a moment, but we wanted to continue our conversation with Sandra Postel, a freshwater fellow at the National Geographic Society, and Jason Clay, senior vice president of market transformation at the World Wildlife Found. Let's get a caller on the line. This is Cyprus,(ph) Cyprus with us from Fredericksburg in Texas. CYPRUS: Hi. Good afternoon. CYPRUS: I'm a - hi. I'm a farmer in Central Texas, one of the drought-stricken and fire-stricken areas, and we grow peaches and a variety of just different vegetables and crops. We actually grow sustainably, so we use drip irrigation. We utilize cover cropping, soil conservation, plant selection and a variety of other sustainable practices to try to conserve our water and build our soil. Our water source that we use is we have our own private wells that we use and we monitor. I suppose our most troubling issue at this point and question for your experts and audience is on the concern of water privatization versus not. In our case as farmers, we have our own private water, but we are under extreme pressure from our water districts to start putting meters on our own private wells to start charging us and regulating what we use out of our own private water. In some water districts around Texas, they've already started to do this, where they've started metering private wells. I think some other states in the United States have done the same. Some years ago, there was a city or a town somewhere in South America that privatized their public - or their water, and I think successfully the public opened it back up because it made water too expensive and inaccessible to a lot of the poor people there. So I guess that's my big concern, is for even those of us that are trying to do our best to use all the technology and best practices, we're still facing possible issues with our private water being restricted. CONAN: Jason Clay, this is going to be an issue in places other than Texas. Obviously Fredericksburg is, well, the center of the storm, as she mentioned. It's been drought-stricken and fire-hit as well, but this kind of issue, is it public water? Is it private water? Who owns it? Who has access to it? That's the history of the Southwest United States. CLAY: Well, it's a good question. I mean, water moves, and the wells may be on a property, but the aquifers underneath are flowing along states, not just even counties or farms. And so who owns that water? Just because you have a well, do you have unlimited access, et cetera? Are these public goods or are they private goods? This is what, I think, water scarcity is going to trigger as a whole debate around this. How do we manage this - the scarce resource when we have multiple entrance through various wells to tap it? And how would we use it? Would we use it for growing peaches? Would we use it for growing calories? Would we use it for growing other things? I mean, those are decisions that we - we're going to have to start managing them a little better and not just have ad hoc decisions, I think. CONAN: But you can understand, Sandra Postel, the concerns of a farmer. Wait a minute, we're here. The water is here. They never charged us for it before. It's our water. POSTEL: Yeah. Hats off to the caller for being so sustainable in the way, you know, she and her farmers are - her farm is producing, you know, peaches and the other crops because, in Texas, you have a strong sort of disincentive to be that efficient and that sustainable because they have in Texas what's called the rule of capture, which means that if you own land and you drill a well, like they have done, you can pump as much water from beneath your land as you want to. And so there's not a strong - there's a long history there of if you own the land, you own the water and you can pump as much as you want. And as Jason just said, exactly right, it's a common pool under there. So if - as more and more people pump, as you add more straws to that single source of water, it's going to get sucked out faster and faster. And what's the concern now is if you look around the world that all the places where that's happening, so many wells, so many straws in that common pool of groundwater beneath the earth, we're producing something like 10 percent of our food today by over-pumping ground water. So that's kind of a bubble in the food economy from that over-pumping. We're propping it up with the unsustainable use of water. And like we've learned from the housing bubble, the dot-com bubble, they pop. And we're beginning to see in parts of India, for example, where a lot of these over-pumping has happened, that wells are beginning to run dry or farmers can't afford to keep pumping. And so, that land comes out of production or it goes back to dryland farming, which is less productive. So this is a concern globally. We're seeing it locally in the United States here and there, the central valley of California, our fruit and vegetable basket, tremendous over-pumping. But this is a problem globally for the global food economy. It manifests locally, but it's going to translate into more pressure on the food system. CONAN: Well, thank you, both, very much for your time today. We appreciate your dropping by and speaking with us. You just heard Sandra Postel, a freshwater fellow at the National Geographic Society. Our thanks as well to Jason Clay, senior vice president of market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund. Appreciate your time. CLAY: Thank you. POSTEL: Thanks, Neal. CONAN: In just a moment, we'll be talking to David Guttenfelder of the Associated Press about the exclusions zone around Japan's stricken nuclear power plant. Stay with us. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. Correction Dec. 14, 2011 We previously misidentified the World Wildlife Fund as the World Wildlife Foundation.
About the profile areas The 2013 population for Wairoa District is 7,890, with a population density of 0.02 persons per hectare. Location and boundaries The Wairoa District Council area is located in the Hawkes Bay Region of the eastern coast of New Zealand's North Island, about 340 kilometres north-east of Wellington and about 340 kilometres south-east of Auckland. The Wairoa District Council area is bounded by the Whakatane District Council area in the north-west, the Gisborne District Council area in the north-east, the Pacific Ocean in the east, Hawke's Bay in the south, and the Hastings District Council area in the south-west. Wairoa is named after the Wairoa River, which is named from a Māori word meaning 'long water'. 2013 Usual residents hectares (4,120 Km2) persons per hectare European settlement dates from the late 1820s, with a whaling and trading station operating from the 1830s. Population was minimal until the 1850s when Wairoa developed a sea trade with nearby Napier in flax, fruit and timber, and land was leased for sheep and cattle grazing. During the 1860s the town rose to prominence, when it was a garrison town/military base. Growth took place during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The river port declined in the late 1930s when the railway was opened. Gradual growth from took place from the post-war years into the late 1960s. Gradual population decline occurred from the 1970s, with the population of the Council area falling from about 10,000 in 1996 to under 8,000 in 2013. The Wairoa District Council area is predominantly rural, with a township at Wairoa and several smaller settlements. About half of the population live in the township of Wairoa, with the other half living in the rural areas and smaller settlements. Rural land is used largely for farming, particularly sheep grazing, with some cattle and dairy farming, fruit growing and forestry. The Council area encompasses a total land area of about 4,100 square kilometres, including over 100 kilometres of coastline. The Council area is served by State Highway 2 and State Highway 38. Major features of the Council area include Te Urewera National Park, the Wairoa, Mohaka and Nuhaka Rivers, the township of Wairoa, Lake Waikaremoana, Whakaki Lagoon, the Mahia Peninsula, Mangaone Caves, Morere Hot Springs, Morere Springs Scenic Reserve, Wairoa Museum, Blacks Beach, Mahanga Beach, Mahia Beach, Mokotahi Beach, Whakamahi Beach, Mahia Golf Club, Wairoa Golf Club and Wairoa Hospital and Health Centre. The original inhabitants of the Wairoa area were the Ngati Kahungunu Māori people. The Wairoa District Council area includes the townships and localities of Frasertown, Mahia, Maungataniwha, Nuhaka, Ruakituri-Morere, Raupunga, Tuai, Wairoa and Whakaki.
The “Mightier Yet – Everyday more planes, everyday more pilots” propaganda poster was used during World War 2 to recruit young men to join the British airforce. The poster boldly proclaims that everyday there is more planes being produced and thus more planes are needed. The main image of the poster is that of the RAF(British airforce) Hawker Huricanes flying in formation across the sky. Underneath them we can see the sea and clouds. This seems to be taken from a photograph, most likely from the wing of another plane. The “Mightier Yet – Everyday more planes, everyday more pilots” is proclaimed boldly at the top and bottom of the image.
Chronic nasal obstruction is a frequent symptom of seasonal allergic rhinitis and perennial (year-round) allergic rhinitis. This allergic condition may have a debilitating effect on the nasal turbinates, the small, shelf-like, bony structures covered by mucous membranes (mucosa). The turbinates protrude into the nasal airway and help to warm, humidify, and cleanse air before it reaches the lungs. When exposed to allergens, the mucosa can become inflamed. The blood vessels inside the membrane swell and expand, causing the turbinates to become enlarged and obstruct the flow of air through the nose. This inflammation, or rhinitis, can cause chronic nasal obstruction that affects individuals during the day and night. Enlarged turbinates and nasal congestion can also contribute to headaches and sleep disorders such as snoring and obstructive sleep apnea, because the nasal airway is the normal breathing route during sleep. Once turbinate enlargement becomes chronic, it is irreversible except with surgical intervention.
Eye exam near you, Mississippi Eyecare Associates, Optometrist in Hazlehurst The first settlement here by European Americans became known as the town of Gallatin; two lawyers and brothers-in-law named Walters and Saunders came from Gallatin, Tennessee, in 1819 and named the village after their hometown. They built their homes on the banks of the Bayou Pierre, in the western part of Copiah County. Other settlers came with them, and in 1829 the state legislature incorporated the town. The first decades of agriculture were based on the use of slave labor of African Americans. The incorporation charter was repealed on January 18, 1862. The construction of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad began on November 3, 1865, stimulating development of Hazlehurst at the railway stop. It was named for Col. George H. Hazlehurst, an engineer for the new railroad. A city in Georgia is also named for him. As Hazlehurst grew, Gallatin declined into a settlement at a crossroads. In April 1872, the legislature ordered the county board of supervisors to hold an election to decide whether the county seat should be moved from Gallatin to Hazlehurst. After a majority voted for the change, Gallatin’s old brick courthouse was torn down and reassembled in Hazlehurst. Several years later, the old courthouse suffered a fire and was replaced by a new building. The courthouse has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 15 times during the town’s history. This city had civil rights activity during the mid-1960s. Because of violence against blacks in this area, Mississippi, the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice established centers here and in nearby Crystal Springs in 1966 and 1967. They provided physical protection for protesters working with the NAACP on a commercial boycott of white merchants to force integration of facilities and employment, and to gain jobs for African Americans following passage of civil rights legislation in 1964.
Here’s an astonishing fact: every day, about 10,000 pounds of dollar bills are shredded. This is because they are old, damaged or out-of-circulation (don’t worry, the reason for this has nothing to do with the state of the national economy). Luckily, rather than simply waste this ‘old money’, Ford is looking to put it to use, recycle it, and make it into cushions, insulation and other car components! Ford already has a recycling program which sees the carmaker use the likes of soybeans, denim and plastic bottles in its vehicles. The soybeans, for example, have saved approximately $7 million a year for Ford by being used in seat cushions and head rests instead of petroleum. In case you’re wondering, about two pairs of jeans worth of denim is used for sound-dampening in one car. Ford hopes to do the same with the ‘old money’ in order to reduce the amount of plastic it uses. The company pledged in January to use recycled plastic bottles from the North American Auto Show in Detroit and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to create part of the polyester fiber used in the new Ford Focus Electric‘s seats. “Ford has a long history of developing green technologies because it’s the right thing to do from an environmental perspective,” said John Viera, Ford’s global director of Sustainability and Vehicle Environmental matters. “Now, finding alternative sources for materials is becoming imperative as petroleum prices continue to rise and traditional, less sustainable materials become more expensive.” “The potential to reuse some of the country’s paper currency once it has been taken out of circulation is a great example of the kind of research we are doing,” Viera added “Building vehicles with great fuel economy is our highest priority in reducing our environmental impact,” said Carrie Majeske, Ford’s Product Sustainability manager. “We recognize the use of sustainable materials inside our cars, utilities and trucks can also help reduce our environmental impact. These are steps that are not only better for our planet in the long run but are cost-effective as well.” via Auto Blog Lead image: 401K
Architecture in Times of Climate Change reSITE founder Martin Barry gives some insight on making greener cities in times of climate change in this interview with Kateřina Menzelová for Česká Pozice. Photo \| studio schicketanz As temperatures increase, some developers react by installing air condition or air recuperation to their projects. How will climate change influence the way we construct housing? What can be done to make the climate more pleasant in cities? The principles of so-called "green architecture" will continue to impact our cities' residential buildings. We will see more green roofs, green facades such as Forest Towers by Stefano Boeri in Milan or Oasia Hotel in Singapore by WOHA, and tree-lined streets in order to protect homes and streets from the urban heat island effect, which can see temperatures in the heart of cities rise about 15F (9C +/-) higher than those in the countryside. Green roofs are very effective at reducing the heat load of a building, and insulating the cooler air from escaping. The City of Copenhagen now requires that all flat roofs (or those under 30 degrees) are vegetated. Why? It helps cool the city and saves the building owners on OPEX. Traditional practices relative to orienting the building windows against direct afternoon sun, and for maximum cross ventilation are more important now than ever. Artificially intelligent shading devices will also help, as recently built in the Al Bahar towers in Abu Dhabi. Related Talk: Watch Michael Kimmelman Any strategies cities should think about? Cities can take very specific actions to curb the use of fossil fuel by changing transportation and mobility patterns, which of course contributes to climate change and the high temperatures we experience in cities. Stockholm is determined to be a fossil fuel free city by 2040, which has spurred huge investments in electro mobility, car sharing and bike sharing. Copenhagen has created Europe's first carbon neutral zone in order to put a cap on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Adequate green space and the right ratio of trees also help reduce urban temperatures by nearly 3.6 C, with more dramatic temperature decreases in parks and heavily planted streets. This can also save millions of lives in cities by reducing the fine particles in the air, allowing us to breathe easier. Finally, it has financial benefits to owners. Real estate in the heart of cities that is adjacent to green space, or on green streets, are valued at 20% or more than those not abutting or adjacent to parks. Erion Veliaj: Inspiration from Tirana What technologies will become a usual part of our homes? Artificial intelligence. It will be built-into our homes to help us control the temperature, cook our food, clean the house and shade the windows. We have two robots in our home now, and I expect we would have a lot more if we lived in Asia or America. A few weeks ago, while on a flight back to Prague we turned on our robotic vacuum cleaner so we'd have clean floors when we got home. We also use our Google Home device for answering some questions and playing music. In other countries, where the device is better connected to local services - one could order their groceries, or anything they want, simply by asking their device for it. My family regulates the temperate and monitors security remotely in real time at our family house in New York. In Japan, the toilet and bath/shower room has been "smart" and fully automated since the 1990s, allowing homeowners to turn the bath on remotely at their desired temperature, and have the entire toilet room self-clean and dry itself with powerful hot dryers. It's one of my favorite features in Japan. Piaggo Group Italy is now developing a robot "caddy" that will follow-us around the city to carry the stuff we don't have enough hands for. These kinds of devices will continue to be more "fringe," but the built-in intelligence that we don't really see will ease our quality of life in ways we might like. Our vacuum has been a game changer in keeping a clean floor with minimal effort, for example. reSITE Small Talk with James Corner Will climate change increase the building costs? Yes, it already is. The costs are increasing all the way down the supply chain because of scarcity of resources and impacts of climate change on fossil fuel policies. All of the things I've mentioned will increase the cost of building, but on the other hand some costs will be reduced as we innovate the way we construct buildings with 3D printed materials and structural systems. The construction industry is perhaps the slowest to innovate amongst all industries so I expect big changes in the coming 20 years to deal with disruptors. Watch more talks from reSITE Enric Battle, architect and partner at Battle i Roig discusses the integration of biodiversity and infrastructure in urban spaces by looking to biodiversity, connectivity, and productivity to shape urban green spaces. Kathryn Gustafson is a landscape architect and co-founded the landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman, based in London. Gustafson’s projects include Gardens of the Imagination in Terrasson, France, Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London. Deputy Mayor of Paris, Jean-Louis Missika, explains the project of Réinventer Paris and its focus on updating and developing the city’s future in a more innovative and inclusive manner, putting a precedent on sustainability over profit. With 23 sites open for redevelopment proposals, the city has welcomed winning projects selected based on the innovativeness and adaptability.
Allen MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). ix + 305 pp. Hb £60.00, PDF $76.00 ISBN: 9781107064379 The problems relating to energy production and ecological sustainability which we face as a global community are, according to Allen MacDuffie, both material and representational. Nature itself imposes material limits on our capacity for the generation of energy, as our vital resources not only exist in finite quantities, but their intensive use causes severe and potentially irreparable environmental damage. Social and cultural representations of energy production, use, waste, and exhaustion, however, variously problematize and obscure their ecological impact to such an extent that the very word ‘energy’ is ambiguously deployed in the cultural imaginary as both a limited material resource and an unlimited, metaphorical, generally human, power. It is the failure to differentiate between these two uses of the word that, MacDuffie argues, has been “an ongoing source of misprision and fuzzy thinking about resource consumption” (2) since the first nineteenth-century attempts to articulate and to understand the implications of energy generation and pollution in the context of a rapidly industrialising, modernising society. In an expansive and wide-ranging analysis of Victorian thermodynamic discourse alongside fictional explorations of urban-industrial development and the workings of energy, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination deftly exposes a complex and often contradictory history of fictional, biological, and theological narratives about energy, and insists that we must confront the mythologies generated by such stories in order to demystify and to fully understand the historical and contemporary conditions of our ongoing energy crisis. Of interest to environmental historians and philosophers, it makes a compelling case for the importance of literature to exploring and defining our past and present ecological imaginary. MacDuffie begins by tracing Victorian constructions of energy and urban consumption across science writing, natural theology, and industrial practices in the wake of the publication of W.S. Jevons’s influential treatise on The Coal Question (1865) and the establishment of the second law of thermodynamics. There is, he shows, a strange ‘blending of industrialisation and theology’ (30) apparent in the works of thinkers as diverse as T.H. Huxley and Charles Babbage, which founders on a frequent slippage between energy as an indestructible force of both external nature and the human spirit, and energy as a limited material resource. This forms part of a broader tendency throughout the century, evidenced in Carlyle, Spencer, William Thompson, and Marx, to transform resource expenditure into ‘a necessary component of some sort of overarching teleological narrative’ (32) in which technology and human ingenuity supplant divine providence as agents of rejuvenation. The need for a master narrative that makes sense of the modern city’s ever increasing energy expenditure gives rise to a host of unstable signifiers that become ecologically problematic. Narratives about the heat death of the sun, for example, entailed the selective application of deeply anthropomorphic metaphors to the realm of the non-human, and came to function as terrifying symbols of the natural and inevitable fate of a cosmos in thrall to the laws of thermodynamics, as well as hyperbolic representations of the environmental degradation caused by the industrial world and its unsustainable development. As cosmic theological narratives staked a claim for techno-scientific development as a force for good within a universe of inevitable waste, and writers such as Huxley expounded a materialist position with regard to human life while nonetheless reserving a special, cosmically significant place for human intelligence, human industry emerges as at once the cause of and the solution to the depletion of energy resources in the larger narrative of human progress. Having established the significance of the metaphors employed in this emergent discourse of waste and sustainability, MacDuffie turns to ‘Unsustainable Fictions’, and offers very compelling close readings of the ways in which energy was fictionalised in the works of Dickens, Ruskin, Stevenson, Conrad, and Wells. The Court of Chancery sits at the heart of a vast network of resource extraction and dispersal in Bleak House, and the individual stories of energy expenditure that unfold around it demonstrate the inevitable personal and environmental costs of utilising energy. At the outset of the novel, the undifferentiated multitude of humanity is held to be inextricably bound up with waste and universally responsible for environmental degradation; however, a gradual shift in Dickens’s representation of energy throughout leads to the more reassuring conclusion that the energy expended by the characters can be separated into wasteful and non-wasteful varieties. Our Mutual Friend, appearing ten years later, explores the possible reclamation of the waste products found in the dust heaps and the River Thames, while revealing the ways in which these wasted energy forms drain even more energy from the bodies struggling to salvage them. For Dickens, collective fantasies of urban recycling and energy transformation ultimately obscure the ‘stubborn, unregenerate materiality of pollution’ (130). While Dickens is intent on connecting London to the ‘entropic underside’ (144) it would otherwise conceal or deny, Ruskin’s works are more radically thermodynamic in drawing on a complex network of relationships that extends beyond any local centre of order to include the ‘entire economic organisation of the nation’ (145). Robert Louis Stevenson offers an individual case study of thermodynamic transformation in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which the two alter egos are differentiated as distinct forms of energy, and transformation between the two exacts a mounting psychic, social, and physical toll upon both. Joseph Conrad employs the language of resource depletion in an imperialist context in which the concepts of energy and capital are conflated so that the energetic modern city exploits the wealth and resources of apparently wasteful and indolent Third World economies in a ‘relationship of dependency characterized by rapacity and exhaustion’ (222). The dynamics of exploitation and energy loss are expounded by H.G. Wells in the context of the evolutionary future in story of the Morlocks and Eloi in The Time Machine, before the decline of the species is once again aligned with the death of the sun and the end of the cosmos at the end of the novel. Such thermodynamic narratives, MacDuffie makes clear, are a timely testament not to a linear narrative of demystification and the perfect apprehension of resource waste and energy loss throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather to the continual prism of perspectives through which the realities of energy consumption and exploitation were, as they are now, both revealed and obscured. Melissa Dickson, St Anne’s College, Oxford
Kilbourne Hole, in New Mexico's Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. Credit: Visit El Paso, flickr. In 1969, landing on the moon was a truly paradigm-shifting achievement--a real “first” both for the American public and NASA. But we were not unprepared: astronauts went through years of training to get a sense for what space would be like, and this included some time exploring the landscapes of the American west to simulate other planets’ surfaces. Without permanent protection, American wildlands like those used by the space program might deteriorate, damaging unique pieces of American history in the process. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong examine a geological sample in Texas’ Sierra Blanca in February, 1969. Credit: NASA The Apollo 11 astronauts trained in part near rocky Sierra Blanca, in Texas, but some future crews used much wilder areas. Even as the Apollo 11 crew was making its final preparations to visit the moon for the first time, the astronauts of Apollo 12 were training for the next such mission in an area that was later protected as a national monument by President Barack Obama in May 2014: Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. The site of the Apollo 12 training was the Kilbourne Hole, in the eastern end of the Potrillo Mountains complex, which makes up the southern chunk of Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument. The crater, which formed due to an underground volcanic eruption, measures 1.7 miles long and over 300 feet deep, making it a must-see for photo-opportunity seekers and natural candidate to act as a stand-in for the moon’s surface. In fact, the Apollo 12 astronauts were only one of several Apollo crews that used the Kilbourne Hole for this purpose. Kilbourne Hole, New Mexico. Credit: flickr, Visit El Paso. Over the course of the 1960s, astronauts preparing for the moon trained at the Grand Canyon, Texas’ Big Bend National Park, Arizona’s Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument and perhaps most appropriately, Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument. Less than six weeks after Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, Craters of the Moon National Monument, which gets its name from the hardened lava, scattered with cinder cones and sagebrush, that blankets its landscape and gives it a quasi-lunar appearance, hosted Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, Joe Engle, and Eugene Cernan, who hoped to bone up on geology in advance of their 1971 trip.
Yellow Rattle is a well-known wildflower commonly found in meadows, grassy places, heaths and machair. It produces loose, leafy spikes of flowers, usually yellow but occasionally brownish, from May to September. The flowers (13-15mm long) are 2-lipped corollas which have blue or violet teeth and are open-mouthed. The leaves are oblong with rounded teeth, are unstalked and opposite. The seeds are formed inside inflated, dry capsules which, when ripe, rattle and eventually release the seeds to the wind. This is a native plant belonging to the family Orobanchaceae. I first recorded this plant in 1976 at Rossadillisk, Co Galway. The plants were growing in a beautiful old meadow by the sea, among a great number of wildflowers, all crowded together and swaying their heads in the breeze. The hidden Corncrakes were calling 'Crex Crex' and it seemed as if time had passed it by altogether. It was both a sight and a feeling I shall never forget. I photographed it in Ballytore, Co Kildare in 2004. If you are satisfied you have correctly identified this plant, please submit your sighting to the National Biodiversity Data Centre
As we already know, the Philippines are very prone to events such as typhoons, but also earthquakes hit the archipelago over the time: both the happenings can destroy houses and other buildings, among their terrible effects. Everybody can at least image the seriousness and hardship of loosing a home, but what if would it happen several times? This is the risk Filipinos take by rebuilding their homes without observing standard for disaster resistant houses, and this is what Kito Onlus is trying to avoid. First of all, we are going to observe strict rules in the building of the new Health Center in San Francisco Camotes Islands in order to make it typhoons and earthquakes resistant. Secondly, we take the advantage of this opportunity to offering Preparedness Earthquake and Typhoons Trainings also to men involved in the construction: they will learn how to build earthquake and typhoon resistant adobes. Building houses safer and sounder is an essential aspect of the disaster prevention, and Kito Onlus project will not only positively affect the response of the Barangays to disasters, but it will also give to these men an important skill they will be able to spend in several ways. This project is part of the usual Kito Onlus’ Disaster Prevention Trainings. One of them was taken on December in an elementary school and included several demonstrations on how to behave in case of natural disasters.
In This Section: Preparing for Law School Admissions committees look at a variety of factors and trends in your academic record in an attempt to predict how you will perform in law school. There is no "prelaw major," and unlike medical school, there are no specific educational requirements for entrance into law school. Your curriculum should provide a diverse background; choose classes that challenge your ability to think and reason logically, that require you to research subjects thoroughly and write extensively, and that sharpen your ability to analyze material. Developing your research and organizational skills as an undergraduate will benefit you in law school. The following disciplines can help develop skills that are necessary in law school and will serve a future lawyer well: - Social sciences offer insight into human behavior, social processes, and institutions. - Courses that give you a better understanding of diverse cultures will help prepare you for a legal career. - English and communication courses are forums for improving written and oral expression. - Mathematics and philosophy classes provide background in logic and reasoning, as well as problem-solving skills. - Physical sciences require systematic analysis of evidence and inductive reasoning. Law-related classes may allow you to get a feel for law as a general subject, but they neither cover the material in the same depth nor embody the intensity and rigor of law school. Therefore, they are not especially accurate indicators of your ability to succeed in the study of law or whether you will enjoy law school. Selecting a Major Choose a major that interests you and double major if you like, but be aware that this is not necessarily a positive factor in the admissions process. Though most law students do not "major" in specific areas–typically specialization occurs in law firms or other legal environments following law school–there are areas of law you may want to prepare for as an undergraduate. For example, if you are considering a career in patent or intellectual property law, you may want to major in engineering or science. Natural resources can provide a good background for environmental law. Learning one or more languages and taking courses in international studies will help lay the groundwork for a career in international law. Courses in economics, business, and accounting are useful in the areas of corporate and tax law. Compiling an Impressive Record A solid GPA, particularly within your major, is expected, but a willingness to go beyond requirements demonstrates an intellectual curiosity that would be advantageous in the study of law. Academic excellence reflects discipline and abilities, though admissions committees will also consider seriously the variety and depth of your coursework as evidence of your interests and motivation. The key to compiling an impressive transcript is to challenge yourself by taking classes at increasingly difficult levels and studying diverse subject areas. Taking courses on a pass/fail basis might encourage you to explore subjects or levels of instruction you might otherwise avoid for fear of a low grade; keep in mind, however, that taking a number of courses pass/fail may be perceived negatively. While grades earned during study abroad may not be calculated into your GPA for law school, admissions committees will see your study abroad transcript. In general, lecture courses provide a good foundation for further instruction, while seminars allow you to present, discuss, critique, and defend more specific ideas. Seminars also give you the opportunity to interact with faculty. It can be difficult at a large university such as Cornell to identify faculty members who can write detailed and substantive letters of recommendation in support of your application to graduate or professional school. Get to know faculty whom you might later ask for recommendations or evaluations; make yourself stand out as an individual by attending office hours, asking questions in class, and conducting research with faculty. Law schools will be interested in your extracurricular activities, leadership experience, summer jobs, internships, and public service since they seek well-rounded candidates for admission. Select activities that interest you, not those you think will impress admissions committees. However, do not devote so much time to your activities that you sacrifice your GPA, which is far more important in the admissions process than activities.
Haymaking time has arrived. The wild flowers have mainly set seed by now and the process of haymaking ensures that the seeds are spread out in the field and reach the soil. The farmer will cut the grass which he then turns to dry. Finally the hay is baled and taken away. May we say a big thank you to dog owners who have helped to keep the grass clean of poo – this is greatly appreciated. As the fields are then bare, the unmown field edges or margins become important for wildlife to take refuge in. The ragwort here is a great place to look for cinnabar moth caterpillars and the creeping thistle is a favourite with pollinating insects. There are many demoiselles both beautiful and banded enjoying the long vegetation. On Saturday 7th July it is National Meadow Day so do come and join our walk to look for flowers and insects. Meet at the Willow Cathedral at 2pm.
\| Author\|\|J.C. Zwaan\| \|Title\|\|Gemmology, geology and origin of the Sandawana emerald deposits, Zimbabwe\| \|Keywords\|\|Emerald; Sandawana; Zimbabwe; gemmology; petrology; geothermometry; geochronology\| \|Abstract\|\|As one of the most valuable gemstones, emeralds are known to occur in several countries of the world, such as Colombia, Zambia, Brazil, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Madagascar and Zimbabwe. The emerald deposits at Sandawana, Zimbabwe, are described, the emeralds from this deposit characterised and a model of emerald formation presented; this is compared with existing models. \| The emeralds from Sandawana, Zimbabwe, show relatively constant physical properties, with high refractive indices and specific gravities. They are characterized by laths and fibres of amphibole, both actinolite and cummingtonite. Other common inclusions are albite and apatite. Rare, opaque and chromium-rich inclusions constitute a new variety of ilmenorutile. Compared to emeralds from most other localities, fl uid inclusions are rare and small. Sandawana emeralds have very high contents of chromium, sodium, magnesium, lithium and caesium. They can be readily separated from emeralds from most other localities by using traditional gem testing techniques, on the basis of a combination of physical properties, inclusions and chemistry. In cases of possible doubt, such as in comparison with emeralds from Rajasthan (India), the use of oxygen isotopes is helpful. Sandawana emeralds occur at the contact between greenstones of the Mweza Greenstone Belt (MGB) and pegmatite intrusions. Rare-element granitic pegmatites intruded the MGB just prior to and/or during a main deformation event at 2.6 Ga, at the southern border of the Zimbabwe craton. Subsequently, a late-stage Na-rich ‘solution-melt’ containing F, P, Li, Be and Cr was injected along shear zones, causing albitisation of the pegmatite and phlogopitization in the greenstone wall-rock. Coeval ductile deformation is indicated by boudinage, pinch-and-swell and folding of pegmatites, by differentiated layering in associated amphibole-phlogopite schist and by the presence of (micro)shear zones. The synkinematic growth of not only phlogopite, but also emerald, fl uorapatite, holmquistite and chromian ilmenorutile, indicates enrichment of Na, K, Li, Be, F, P, Rb, Cs, Ta and Nb in the emerald-bearing shear zone. This suggests that emerald formation is closely related to syntectonic K-Na metasomatism. In this process, microcline, oligoclase, quartz (from the pegmatite) and chlorite (from the greenstones) were consumed, in favour of albite (in the pegmatite), phlogopite, some new actinolite and cummingtonite, holmquistite, fl uorapatite and emerald (at the contact and in the greenstone). Mass balance calculations indicate that a Na- and F-rich hydrous fl uid must have been involved in the alterations that ultimately caused emerald formation. The presence of small, isolated, highly saline brine inclusions in emerald supports this result. Formation of gem-quality emerald occurred in relatively low-pressure domains, such as ‘traps’ under folded pegmatite or pinch areas near pegmatites with pinch-and-swell or boudin structures. Apatite-phlogopite thermometry gives T = 560-650°C, interpreted as the temperature range at which emerald was formed. These temperatures imply contact metamorphic rather than regional metamorphic conditions. From the general conditions of primary consolidation of rare element pegmatites, and from the inferred crystallisation path of the similar Bikita pegmatite, a corresponding pressure of around 2.5-3 kbar appears plausible at Sandawana. Because of the intimate spatial and temporal relationship with magmatic activity, the pegmatitic/hydrothermal nature of the involved fl uid, and the near magmatic temperatures of phlogopite and apatite formation, a magmatic source for the Na-rich fl uids is very likely. It means that intrusion of the pegmatites, and subsequent albitisation and metasomatism during deformation, have been part of a continuous process in a restricted period of time. The Sandawana data lead to a new model of emerald formation, as a product of contact metasomatism at the border of ultramafic rocks and rare-element pegmatites during a deformation event, involving late stage magmatic/hydrothermal activity channelled by shearing. Hence, Sandawana emeralds were formed in the Late Archaean, around 2.6 Ga, at the border of a major Late Archaean suture zone. As a consequence, they are by far the oldest, compared to other commercially available emeralds. 40Ar/39Ar dates, varying from 1900 to 2400 Ma, are interpreted as Archaean ages that became partially to completely reset during a Proterozoic thermal overprint. The Sandawana model for emerald genesis does not fit into any of the genetic classification schemes proposed in the literature, and shows that no single theory can be applied to all schist-type deposits. Emeralds of gem quality can be formed in very different geological settings, as long as basic conditions are fulfilled. In this respect, the following factors are essential: availability of beryllium and chromium (± vanadium); means of transport to bring the elements together, that is, fl uids of magmatic, hydrothermal, metamorphic or a combined origin; conditions in which emerald may form as a stable mineral, with temperatures generally from 600° down to 300°C; and sufficient space to grow transparent and well-formed crystals. \|Note\|\|Proefschrift Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam\| \|Download paper\|\| http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/41216 \| Use this url to link to this page: http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/record/209632 Notify a colleague add to bookbag
Courtesy of Christie's The legend behind the writing of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is well known, if not entirely accurate. Fueled by inspiration, coffee and Benzedrine, Kerouac sat down at his typewriter and — in one burst of creative energy — wrote the novel that would make him the voice of his generation in just 20 days, typing it out on a single, 120-foot-long scroll. Present at the Creation: Learn the true story behind the origins of On the Road, and hear and see Kerouac read portions of his manuscript. Kerouac actually spent much more time laying the groundwork for his novel than that creation myth suggests, but the part about the giant scroll manuscript is true. Now for the first time, the unfurled scroll has gone on display at the University of Iowa Museum of Art in Iowa City. It will travel next to the Las Vegas Public Library. The giant scroll, which can be seen from end to end, is being housed under glass in a gallery long enough to contain its full length when unrolled. However, its ending is missing — it was reportedly chewed by a dog. NPR's Melissa Block discusses the display with Howard Collinson, the museum's director.
Drainage On Demand Paige E. Buck, State Public Affairs Specialist Date: March 10, 2014 If farmers could actually control how much water their soil holds in the top three to five feet, do you think they’d do it? “You bet they would,” says District Conservationist Tony Hammond. “And if they could turn tile drainage on and off to lower the water table for getting into the field or raise it when crops need the water, they’d love it.” It’s not just a dream. By using a new conservation practice called Drainage Water Management, farmers can do exactly that. Drainage Water Management, or ‘DWM,’ is a new option from USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). “That’s the beauty of this new practice,” Hammond says. “Farmers can customize when their tiles hold on to water and when they release tile water. It’s the ultimate tool.” State Conservationist Ivan Dozier agrees, “There are so many aspects of farming that we cannot control, but this low-cost water control system really gives you more options to manage and control your water. It puts that power into your hands.” Benefits of this NRCS conservation practice can address drought conditions and provide water quality improvements, production increases, and better nutrient management. According to NRCS, the practice only works on flat farmland—fields with a slope of less than 1%. In Illinois, that means it could be used on nearly 10 million acres. Illinois will target 14 counties for a Special DWM Project and a demonstration watershed site. Counties included are LaSalle, Grundy, Kankakee, Livingston, Ford, Iroquois, McLean, Logan DeWitt, Piatt, Champaign, Vermilion, Edgar, Douglas, Macon and Christian. “The Town of Tovey Watershed, located in northwest Christian County will be our demonstration headquarters,” says Hammond. NRCS offers both technical and financial assistance to develop DWM plans for farmers and get structures installed quickly. The practice works on both new and existing tile systems. DWM offers farmers an easy way to control water—whether there’s too much in the spring or you need to hang on to what water you have at the end of the summer. It also helps farmers manage nutrients in their fields. “Keep those nitrates where you need them. That saves money AND improves the environment,” Dozier adds. To watch the new 4-minute video that shows how water control structures work, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4mYch4RFsY. Add DWM to your NRCS conservation plan using either EQIP or CSP Farm Bill options. Make a call to your local NRCS office and start the conservation conversation today. Helping People Help the Land. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer
by William White \| July 18, 2013 3:41 pm A new experimental surgical knife has the ability to detect cancer. The knife was developed by Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London, and can detect cancer in the smoke produced while using the heated knife to remove skin. Currently surgeons have to send skin samples that have been cut from patients to a lab, which then identifies if they are cancerous. In best case scenarios this takes at least 30 minutes. The new “smart” knife can detect if the cut skin contains cancer cells within seconds. The smart knife, and the machines that make it work, currently cost $380,000 to create, but doctors believe that these prices will lower if the knife becomes commercialized. The smart knife has been used to analyze tumors in 91 patients, and it correctly identified cancer every time, reports The Boston Globe. “If its usefulness is supported in further clinical trials, it could potentially reduce the time spent in theatre for many patients.” Dr Emma King, of Cancer Research UK, told the British Broadcasting Corporation. Source URL: http://investorplace.com/2013/07/groundbreaking-new-smart-knife-detects-cancer-as-it-cuts/ Short URL: http://invstplc.com/1nyMdfu Copyright ©2016 InvestorPlace Media, LLC. All rights reserved. 700 Indian Springs Drive, Lancaster, PA 17601.
May 25, 2016 – Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country’s armed forces. The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans founded in Decatur, Illinois, established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end. Annual Decoration Days for particular cemeteries are held on a Sunday in late spring or early summer in some rural areas of the American South, notably in the mountain areas. In cases involving a family graveyard where remote ancestors as well as those who were deceased more recently are buried, this may take on the character of an extended family reunion to which some people travel hundreds of miles. People gather on the designated day and put flowers on graves and renew contacts with relatives and others. There often is a religious service and a picnic-like “dinner on the ground,” the traditional term for a potluck meal in which people used to spread the dishes out on sheets or tablecloths on the grass. It is believed that this practice began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the “memorial day” idea. The crowd attending the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery was approximately the same size as those that attend today’s observance, about 5,000 people. Then, as now, small American flags were placed on each grave – a tradition followed at many national cemeteries today. In recent years, the custom has grown in many families to decorate the graves of all departed loved ones. Memorial Day is not to be confused with Veterans Day; Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving, while Veterans Day celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans. Memorial Day History Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans -the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) – established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country. The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Various Washington officials, including Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over the ceremonies. After speeches, children from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns. Today, cities in the North and the South claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1866. Both Macon and Columbus, Ga., claim the title, as well as Richmond, Va. The village of Boalsburg, Pa., claims it began there two years earlier. A stone in a Carbondale, Ill., cemetery carries the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there on April 29, 1866. Carbondale was the wartime home of Gen. Logan. Approximately 25 places have been named in connection with the origin of Memorial Day, many of them in the South where most of the war dead were buried. The official birthplace was declared in 1966 when Congress and President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, N.Y., the “birthplace” of Memorial Day. There, a ceremony on May 5, 1866, honored local veterans who had fought in the Civil War. Businesses closed and residents flew flags at half-staff. Supporters of Waterloo’s claim say earlier observances in other places were either informal, not community-wide or one-time events. By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed proclamations designating the day, and the Army and Navy adopted regulations for proper observance at their facilities. It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still often called Decoration Day. It was then also placed on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays. To ensure the sacrifices of America’s fallen heroes are never forgotten, in December 2000, the U.S. Congress passed and the president signed into law “The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” P.L. 106-579, creating the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance. The commission’s charter is to “encourage the people of the United States to give something back to their country, which provides them so much freedom and opportunity” by encouraging and coordinating commemorations in the United States of Memorial Day and the National Moment of Remembrance. The National Moment of Remembrance encourages all Americans to pause wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of silence to remember and honor those who have died in service to the nation. As Moment of Remembrance founder Carmella LaSpada states: “It’s a way we can all help put the memorial back in Memorial Day.” Memorial Day Resources - Find the nearest VA national or state Veterans cemetery - Arlington National Cemetery - Displaying the Flag at Half-staff - General Flag Display Guidelines - Folding the Flag - Poppy Flower
Definition of "Under" : adjective: lower in rank, power, or authority "An under secretary." adjective: located below or beneath something else "The under parts of a machine." adverb: further down "See under for further discussion." adverb: down below "Get under quickly!." adverb: below the horizon "The sun went under." adverb: below some quantity or limit "Fifty dollars or under." adverb: in or into a state of subordination or subjugation "We must keep our disappointment under." adverb: down to defeat, death, or ruin "Their competitors went under." adverb: into unconsciousness "This will put the patient under." adverb: through a range downward "Children six and under will be admitted free."
What you need to know Chemical engineers apply the principles of chemistry, biology, physics, and math to solve problems that involve the production or use of chemicals, fuel, drugs, food, and many other products. They design processes and equipment for large-scale manufacturing, plan and test production methods and byproducts treatment, and direct facility operations. Chemical engineers work mostly in offices or laboratories. They may spend time at industrial plants, refineries, and other locations, where they monitor or direct operations or solve onsite problems. Chemical engineers must be able to work with those who design other systems and with the technicians and mechanics who put the designs into practice. Some of the things a chemical engineer might do: - Conduct research to develop new and improved manufacturing processes - Establish safety procedures for those working with dangerous chemicals - Develop processes for separating components of liquids and gases, or for generating electrical currents, by using controlled chemical processes - Design and plan the layout of equipment - Conduct tests and monitor the performance of processes throughout production - Troubleshoot problems with manufacturing processes - Evaluate equipment and processes to ensure compliance with safety and environmental regulations - Estimate production costs for management - Analytical skills: Chemical engineers must troubleshoot designs that do not work as planned. They must ask the right questions and then find answers that work. - Creativity: Chemical engineers must explore new ways of applying engineering principles. They work to invent new materials, advanced manufacturing techniques, and new applications in chemical and biomedical engineering. - Ingenuity: Chemical engineers learn the broad concepts of chemical engineering, but their work requires them to apply those concepts to specific production problems. - Interpersonal skills: Because their role is to put scientific principles into practice in manufacturing industries, chemical engineers must develop good working relationships with other workers involved in production processes. - Math skills: Chemical engineers use the principles of advanced math topics such as calculus for analysis, design, and troubleshooting in their work. - Problem-solving skills: In designing equipment and processes for manufacturing, these engineers must be able to anticipate and identify problems, including such issues as workers’ safety and problems related to manufacturing and environmental protection. The average pay for chemical engineers in the United States ranges from $64,890 to $169,770 as of May 2018. The specific pay depends on factors such as level of experience, education and training, geographic location, and specific industry. Employment of chemical engineers is projected to grow 8 percent from 2016 to 2026, about as fast as the average for all occupations. Demand for chemical engineers’ services depends largely on demand for the products of various manufacturing industries. The ability of these engineers to stay on the forefront of new emerging technologies will sustain employment growth. Chemical engineers must have a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering or a related field. Programs in chemical engineering usually take 4 years to complete and include classroom, laboratory, and field studies. High school students interested in studying chemical engineering will benefit from taking science courses, such as chemistry, physics, and biology. They also should take math courses, including algebra, trigonometry, and calculus. Discover some of the courses you will take pursuing a degree in Chemical Engineering.
The Scholastic“ Ornithology Club” Network The Environmental & Conservation Education activities are related to the concepts of renewable way which must be practiced with a joyful factor and the spirit of recreations that refresh the memory and the spirit from the stress and feeding of memorizing and remembering during the learning with enjoyment and teaching students. Although the method of awareness about clubs needs much effort and longer time, the clubs are considered to be the best ways of preparing the aware generations, which protect the Wildlife and Nature instead of destroying the Nature, Wildlife and Humans. is the main slogan to establish the Scholastic“ Ornithology Club” in the schools. The establishing of SOCN becomes very important through the environmental & Education concepts which costs only the caring about what we have around us through a new Environmental & Conservation Education concepts during the activities, that are practicing by the members of the clubs in the school in a creative way which understands the components of the wildlife and the importance to keep it and applying the Educational concept to be a daily Social (SOCN) aims at encouraging the students to understand the human being site in its environmental framework and to absorb this relation between both sides. The students have an active and vital role in this topic, because they are the heirs of the future. But we can’t ignore teachers who are considered to be the bridge over which one can jump in order to reach the students. Teacher must be well acquainted of the: & Nature Conservation) So that our students can receive such information correctly & daily through the formal and informal members of the SOCN: student is usually a member of this club who works with his colleagues as partners and with his teachers as supervisors. To increase the awareness of the economic, scientific and cultural values for the natural resources, which is their common objective. Why was the SOCN To achieve their objectives as mentioned before. These clubs succeeded in performing their jobs. It was really a perfect success. They have made some progress in changing partially of as a whole the individual behavior. This was achieved by following the learning and teaching process. can never pass the necessary environmental information to the coming generation unless we increase the environmental awareness by using various means of education. Why do we need these clubs? our country there are thousands of schools; Public schools, Private schools & UNRWA schools in Palestine is a great need to activate the concepts, the principles and the aims of modern Wildlife & Nature Conservation which have been implemented in millions of schools in the world. Wildlife & Nature Conservation in Palestine is still in the beginning. Some NGO’s adopted the idea and have been working on it for several years. Some tangible consequences among hundreds of our students can been seen now regarding the Wildlife & Nature Conservation It is agreed that some Environmental Education (E.E) and Nature Conservation curricula are to be prepared and many activities are to be carried in order to apply the new curricula in our schools in cooperation with Education Ministry (Education Development Center /Ramallah and other NGO’s in these firms work hard to sustain the Wildlife & Nature Conservation concepts in our schools since the PWLS was established on 1999. Send mail to Laith Hazim Qumsiyeh ) with questions or comments about this web site.
- Vitamin Guide - Health Conditions - Health Centers - Diet & Weight Loss - Herbal Remedies - Current News - Food Guide This product is milk to which acidophilus culture (beneficial bacteria) has been added. However, the milk is not actually cultured as yogurt. In the process of making yogurt, milk and an added starter (beneficial bacteria) are placed in a warm environment (such as a temperature-controlled yogurt maker) so the flora can ferment the milk, thickening the milk. Acidophilus milk has the same culture, but has not gone through the full thickening process. Originally a by-product of butter making, buttermilk is now a milk product cultured with lactic acid. It is available in both skim and low-fat varieties. Some buttermilk has reduced lactose content, which can make it an option for people who have difficulty digesting the lactose in regular milk. To make this concentrated product, half of the milk’s moisture is removed by evaporation before it is canned. Evaporated milk is sometimes used in cooking, both because it is easy to store and because it curdles less easily when heated than other milk. Unopened, it can be kept at room temperature for up to six months. Once opened, it should be transferred to a clean container and used within three to five days. This type of canned milk, also made by removing half of the water from whole milk, is highly sweetened, and also very high in calories. Goats’ milk is very similar to cows’ milk; it is higher in calcium by a very small margin but also notably higher in fat. Some people with allergies find they have fewer problems with goats’ milk. In the homogenization process, milk fat is broken into particles so small that it is emulsified and held within the milk, instead of floating at the surface. In the United States today, almost all milk is sold homogenized. Jersey and guernsey cows produce exceptionally rich milk that has a higher percentage of cream and butterfat. With its reduced lactose (milk sugar) levels, created by adding the enzyme lactase, this milk is available for people who, because they lack the enzyme lactase, have difficulty digesting milk. Pasteurization is the heat process used to destroy potentially harmful bacteria in milk. Two basic processes are currently in use: in the first, milk is heated to at least 161°F (71.6°C) for 15 seconds; in the second, the milk is heated to 280°F (137.7°C) for two seconds. This product is popular with cooks and budget-minded milk drinkers. To create it, some of the water is evaporated from the milk, and then the milk is sprayed into a drying chamber to further reduce its moisture content, resulting in milk powder or flakes. The powder, available in several forms, including instant nonfat dry milk and dehydrated buttermilk, is easily reconstituted for use by adding water. Raw milk is unpasteurized milk, meaning it has not undergone the heat process used to destroy potentially harmful bacteria. The risk of bacteria (such as listeria and salmonella) in raw milk has prompted states to impose restrictions on its sale. However, raw milk has many proponents who claim that health benefits are lost in the pasteurization process. If choosing raw milk, make sure that it is produced hygienically and stored properly. Several types of milk products have been developed over the years that have a long shelf life, such as canned milk, powdered milk, and ultrapasteurized milk. All these products can be stored without refrigeration in unopened packages or tightly sealed containers for up to six months. Ultra-high-temperature (or UHT) milk is processed at temperatures that produce a product with extended shelf life. Packed in presterilized, aseptically sealed, brick-style cartons (like juice boxes), UHT milk can be stored without refrigeration for about six months. Like canned milk, this milk requires refrigeration once the container is has been opened. Copyright © 2015 Aisle7. All rights reserved. Aisle7.com The information presented in the Food Guide is for informational purposes only and was created by a team of US–registered dietitians and food experts. Consult your doctor, practitioner, and/or pharmacist for any health problem and before using any supplements, making dietary changes, or before making any changes in prescribed medications. Information expires June 2016.
Can cats eat cheese ? According to experts, yes-but in moderation. If you give your cats cheese, occasionally give them a small piece, about the size of a dice. For example, you can choose to limit your kitten’s cheese intake to the time you need to hide the pill for them. However, although many cats can tolerate a small amount of cheese, if your kitten is lactose intolerant or allergic to milk, even a small amount of cheese can cause severe damage to their digestive system. Table of Contents Can cats eat cheese – Is cheese harmful to cats? Cheese is’nt a natural part of the cat’s diet. Cats are obligate carnivores, which means they can only get the necessary nutrients from meat. But even if cheese is high in protein, it can disrupt the cat’s fragile digestive system. The reason is that cats cannot tolerate dairy products well. Human and other omnivores naturally produce lactase to break down lactose in dairy products, but cats do not produce this enzyme. This makes it more difficult for them to digest dairy products. In fact, most cats are lactose intolerant, and if they consume dairy products, they may even experience severe vomiting and diarrhea. If your cat stares at you while you are making grilled cheese, or jumps up and tries to take a bite of the cheese in the salad, you may succumb. But digestive problems are not the only reason to keep your food off the kitten. Cheese is high in fat, and cats who eat cheese can easily gain weight. Obesity in pets is a common disease that greatly shortens their life expectancy and can also lead to many other preventable diseases. Non-dairy cheese and cat You might ask this question-if cats are lactose intolerant, is it okay to feed them dairy-free cheese? While many people think this is a delicious alternative, in reality, non-dairy cheese for cats is no better than regular dairy cheese. Non-dairy cheeses are still high in fat and salt, neither of which is very nutritious for your cat. Treat them right As a natural carnivore, cats get most of their nutrients from meat. But this does not mean that they cannot eat other things. Instead of giving your cat cheese, try these feline-friendly snacks: - fruits and vegetables - A small amount of cooked fish - Boiled eggs Please note that some other human foods may be toxic to pets. Whether you have a picky cat or an all-you-can-eat kitten, make sure to meet their nutritional needs. If you need help developing a nutrition plan for your cat, please call us. Conclusion of Can cats Eat Cheese It should be no problem to feed your cat a little cheese here, but talk to your cat’s veterinarian about whether this is a healthy choice for your kitten. If you do feed cat cheese, please feed them small amounts only occasionally. This will give them something to smile! For More Articles Visit: Digital Combination
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men (after skin cancer). The prostate is below the bladder and in front of the rectum. Prostate cancer begins when cells in the prostate gland start to grow uncontrollably. Prostate cancer is typically diagnosed by a digital rectal examination and/or by early testing of the amount of Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) in the blood. If your PSA or digital rectal exam is abnormal, your physician may recommend additional tests to find or diagnose prostate cancer, including trans-rectal ultrasound and a biopsy. Our prostate cancer specialists will work with you to determine the course of treatment, which could include surgery, radiation therapy, hormonal therapy or a combination of these treatments. Treatment depends on your age, the stage of your cancer, your physical condition and the aggressiveness of the disease. In older men with slow-growing prostate cancer, one option is “watchful waiting.” This involves closely monitoring your prostate cancer by performing PSA and Digital Rectal Exam (DRE) tests regularly and treating the prostate cancer only if and when it causes symptoms or shows signs of growing. Learn more about our programs and the social workers, nutritionists and others who are available during and after your treatment to support you and your family. Age, race and family history play a role as risk factors for developing prostate cancer. - The risk of prostate cancer increases with age, especially after age 50. More than 80% of prostate cancers are diagnosed in men who are 65 or older. - Black men have a higher risk of prostate cancer than white men. They are also more likely to develop prostate cancer at an earlier age and to have aggressive tumors that grow quickly. - Family history also plays a role. If a man has a father, brother, or son with prostate cancer, his risk of developing prostate cancer is 2 to 3 times higher than the average risk. This risk increases with the number of relatives diagnosed with prostate cancer. You may be able to lower your risk by eating healthier. It is suggested that you: - Limit high-fat foods - Cut back on red meats, especially processed meats such as hot dogs, bologna, and certain lunch meats - Eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day