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Hilchos Choshen Mishpat
Volume I : Number 8
When An Agent Is Not An Agent
- A real estate agency advertised that there was a certain home for
sale in a specific neighborhood, near a certain supermarket. Reuven (not
his real name) decided to search that
neighborhood and approach the owner directly, bypassing the real estate
agent. He found that home and purchased it.
Does the agent have a Halachic right to demand his fees (completely or
partially), since it is clear that if not for his listing Reuven would
not have purchased this house?
- What if a real estate agent met Reuven on the street, and mentioned
that he had a house for him to look at, but Reuven was not interested.
Shimon, who overhead their conversation, went and purchased that home for
himself. Does Shimon have to pay the agent his fees?
- An agent met a friend at a wedding. In the course of their friendly
conversation, the topic of his work came up and, by the way, he also
mentioned that he had received a new listing in a certain neighborhood
just that day. The following day, his friend went and bought that home
for himself. Does he owe the agent his fees?
- A homeowner listed his house with a certain real estate agent. A week
later, the agent's son became engaged, and the agent and the future
bride's father decided to jointly purchase this home for the young
couple. The agent feels that he is entitled to his fees. His position is
that since the homeowner signed a contract obligating himself to pay for
any sale that comes through the agent, what difference does it make if
the buyer is the agent himself or anyone else?
What is the Halacha?
In all of the above cases, the agent does not collect his fee, and is not
considered to be the agent at all. However, it must be mentioned that in
Question B, Shimon (the buyer) acted improperly and unfairly.
There is an important distinction that must be drawn between payment to
an agent, and payment for use of information protected by a patent or
copyright. When information is "owned" by an inventor or a copyright
holder, the payment is not for work done for you, rather you are
purchasing the information itself. The information in owned by someone,
and can be purchased from the owner just as merchandise can be purchased
from it's owner.
Agency, however, is considered a service done by someone for you, i.e.
the connection of buyer and seller (or any other connection, such as
finding someone a Shidduch). This service qualifies as work done for one
person by another, not as a sale of information. This is true even though
no physical labor is being done for you. It can be compared to a payment
to a psychologist or lawyer for advice - you are paying for the service
rendered, you are not "purchasing" the information that he or she has
passed on to you.
Therefore, in Question A, since the agent did not talk to the buyer and
did not pass any information along to him directly, he did not personally
do any work for him, and can not claim wages for a service rendered. This
would be true even if the listing had contained the exact address. Just
as the newspaper can't claim to be deserving of any fees for publicizing
this information, the agent also has no right to claim that he has done a
service for the buyer by publicizing the information.
In relation to Question B, there too, since the agent did not personally
speak to the buyer, no service was provided by him for the buyer. The
agent's fees are for an actual service provided by him for both sides,
and not payment for exclusive information owned by him.
In relation to Question C, although the agent _did_ speak to the buyer at
the wedding, he admits that he didn't do so in the context of providing
a service for his friend. He was just making friendly conversation. There
is no obligation to pay wages for friendly conversation.
In relation to Question D, the definition of an "agent" is someone who
connects two people who would otherwise be strangers. If the agent is
either the buyer or seller, his classification is "Baal Dovor" (involved
party), not an agent. The seller is obligated to pay Reuven the agent,
not Reuven the Baal Dovor who is taking care of his own personal needs.
PLEASE NOTE: As we noted in last week's listing, these classes are based
on actual cases presented to a Bais Din in Israel. In Israel the process
of selling a home has much less formality than in other parts of the
world. For example, it is common to list an apartment for sale with more
than one agent, and then end up selling it yourself through a sign posted
at your local bus stop! Additionally, it is customary in Israel for the
buyer to pay a commission to the broker, whereas in other countries the
norm may be that the seller exclusively pays the broker.
However, where an exclusive agreement has been entered between homeowner
and agent to list a certain home, it is clearly illegal and prohibited
Halachically for the homeowner to bypass the real estate agent in any
way. The purpose of this class is to point out that even in such a
situation, the agent does not "own" the information regarding this home,
he is merely a provider of brokerage services to all parties involved.
This class is translated and moderated by Rabbi Aaron Tendler of Yeshivas
Ner Yisroel in Baltimore. Rabbi Tendler accepts full responsibility for
the accuracy of the translation and will be happy to fax originals of the
articles in Hebrew to anyone interested.
Feedback is appreciated! It can be sent to email@example.com.
We hope you find this class informative and stimulating! If you do not see a subscription form to the left
of the screen, access the Advanced Learning Network to
subscribe to Business-Halacha.
For information on subscriptions, archives, and other Project Genesis
classes, send mail to firstname.lastname@example.org for an automated reply. For
subscription assistance, send mail to email@example.com.
Please Note: The purpose of this column is to make people aware of Choshen Mishpat
situations that can arise at any time, and the Halachic concepts that may be used to resolve them. Each
individual situation must be resolved by an objective, competent Bais Din (or Rabbinic Arbitrator) in the
presence of all parties involved!
KEDOSHIM AND PESACH:
Rabbi Yehudah Prero - 5755
Rabbi Pinchas Avruch - 5764
The Heart of the Matter
Rabbi Pinchas Winston - 5765
A Lesson Learned
Rabbi Raymond Beyda - 5767
The Real Us!
Rabbi Label Lam - 5772
Thanks for Everything
Rabbi Yehudah Prero - 5766
Pesach In Command
Rabbi Pinchas Winston - 5761
Rabbi Dovid Green - 5759
Relating the Chain of Events: Part 2
Rabbi Yehudah Prero - 5755
Cloaked in Dignity
Rabbi Aron Tendler - 5761
Who Knows One?
Rabbi Yehudah Prero - 5758
Motherhood & Shabbos Pie
Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky - 5759
Jogging Ancient Memories
Rabbi Label Lam - 5763
Forget Your Belt...
Rabbi Moshe Peretz Gilden - 5762
Beyond Common (In)Cense
Rabbi Pinchas Winston - 5758
The Great Shabbos
Rabbi Berel Wein - 5768
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110859 DEVICS Version: V1.0, August 1986
Submitted by: R. Bremmer & D. K. Wagner, Rockwell International,
Operating System: RSX-11M V4.1E Source Language: MACRO-11 Keywords:
System Management - RSX-11
Abstract: The purpose of the DEVICS task is to output the CSR
address, vector, device priority and other device status
information for each device in the system. RSX-11M
currently does not have a simple method of gaining access to
This information is especially useful if a SysGen is to be
performed on the current hardware configuration. Many times
the answer file from the previous SysGen was not saved, or a
list was not prepared containing the above information when
the hardware was installed.
Other information is given regarding the unit or device's
status as well as their individual characteristics. Details
of where and how this information is obtained is described
in the I/O Drivers Reference Manual.
Notes: Operating System RSX-11M V4.1 is required. Will work on other
but will not report new devics on releases better than V4.1E.
Media (Service Charge Code): One RX01 Diskette (KA) Format: FILES-11,
600' Magnetic Tape (MA) Format: FILES-11
The PDP-11 DECUS Software Index
The PDP-11 Home Page
Created: December 26, 1998
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Query: keyword: "Canary Islands"
|Title||Groundwater and marine intertidal Tubificidae (Oligochaeta) from the Canary and Cabo Verde Islands, with descriptions of two new species|
|Journal||Bijdragen tot de Dierkunde|
|Keywords||Oligochaeta; Tubificidae; taxonomy; Canary Islands; Cabo Verde Islands; biogeography; groundwater fauna|
|Abstract||Seven species of Tubificidae are recorded from the Canary Islands, viz. Heterodrilus amplus n. sp., Coralliodrilus leviatriatus Erséus, 1979, Limnodriloides agnes Hrabĕ, 1967, L. janstocki n. sp., Aktedrilus cuneus Erséus, 1984, A. parvithecatus (Erséus, 1978), and Tubifex tubifex (Müller, 1774); the two latter taxa are reported also from the Cabo Verde Islands. All taxa except T. tubifex are marine and there is no evidence of endemism in the freshwater oligochaete fauna of these islands. Heterodritus amplus has short, spindle-shaped, heavily muscular atria; they are morphologically unique within the genus. Limnodriloides janstocki has modified spermathecal setae; it is distinguished from similar species by its long atrial ducts and deep, elaborate copulatory sacs.|
|Download paper|| http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/548296 |
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For someone with a keen interest in all things related to watchmaking, a short stroll in the capital city will uncover fascinating aspects of horological history at almost every turn. The route described here of just over a mile covers developments in the watchmaker’s of such significance that they changed not only horology but navigation and scientific measurement and thus concept of time itself.
We begin at Tower 42 in Bishopsgate, the site of the first Gresham college:
Thomas Tompion 1639–1713 ‘The Father of English Clockmaking’
Tompion was a blacksmith by trade but came to London in 1671 to join the Clockmakers’ Company and soon found employment with the physicist Robert Hooke. Tompion’s watches developed a reputation for superb craftsmanship and mechanical ingenuity and Hooke and Tompion collaborated on some of the first watches with balance springs. A true polymath, Hooke was Professor of Geometry at Gresham college and Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, itself formed at Gresham College following a lecture by the then Professor of Astronomy, Sir Christopher Wren.
It was at Gresham that Hooke introduced Tompion to the leading scientists and intellectuals of the period and he received many important commissions. Tompion’s workshop would build about 5,500 watches and 650 clocks until his death in 1713 and he would be called the greatest English watch, clock and instrument maker of his time.
Find out more about Gresham College and Tompion’s circle here
Down Old Broad St and along Bartholomew Lane to the Guildhall and the Clockmakers‘ museum: John Harrison’s first wooden longcase clock movement.
In 1713, the year Tompion died, John Harrison, a 20 year old carpenter, built his first clock. Although there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the mechanics of the clock movement – it was a poor timekeeper owing to its wooden construction, this example of Harrison’s determined genius would ignite his lifetime’s vocation and mark the beginning of an extraordinary horological journey. Signed ‘John Harrison 1713′ in ink on the calendar wheel, this modest looking creation was nonetheless a statement of intent and as Harrison painstakingly developed his technique, his mastery of the clockmaker’s art would revolutionise timekeeping and navigation for the next two hundred years.
Find out more about the Clockmaker’s Company and their breath-taking collection, here.
Along Newgate St to 17 Red Lion Square: Harrison’s masterpieces
Red Lion Square, just a mile from the Clockmakers’ Museum is where John Harrison lived most of his life of which he dedicated the greater part to solving what was known as the ‘Longitude problem’. While he lived at Red Lion Square, Harrison devoted many years of experimentation to creating a series of timekeepers which would be sufficiently accurate at sea to win the prize of £20,000 offered by the British Government. His fourth timekeeper met the exacting requirements of the Admiralty, but after a protracted dispute, he was required to produce a further timekeeper, the H5, which was sea trialled by the King himself before the prize was reluctantly awarded. It was an astonishing triumph of determination and innovation and one which would have a profound effect on what was then the world’s foremost maritime power.
A comprehensive history of Harrison and the Longitude Problem can be found at the Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth
Round the corner to 119 High Holborn: Thomas Earnshaw’s workshop
While John Harrison’s work proved the theory that timekeepers of sufficient accuracy and reliability could be made for marine use, his timekeepers, though brilliant in conception were very complicated, very difficult to make and very expensive. Building on the development of Harrison’s work by John Arnold, it was another London maker, Thomas Earnshaw who developed what were now known as ‘chronometers’ which were practical to produce and fit for daily life at sea. From his workshop at 119 High Holborn, Earnshaw began producing chronometers to a design that survived almost unchanged until the advent of electronics and satellite navigation. Earnshaw’s chronometer no. 506 was carried on HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836 on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe and establish a chain of points around the world of accurately known longitude. This was also the voyage that carried Charles Darwin who was afterwards inspired to write his book about the theory of evolution, On the Origin of Species.
Find out more about Thomas Earnshaw.
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The Dragon Programme's architect - interview with José Achache
This last week saw the start of the Dragon Programme: a landmark Earth Observation initiative between Europe and China. Fresh from attending its kick-off symposium, ESA Earth Observation Director José Achache shared his views on the start of the Programme he originated, and the benefits it promises to bring all participants.
More than a hundred leading European and Chinese scientists gathered at the island city of Xiamen for three days starting 27 April. They have formed joint Sino-European teams to investigate a range of thematic areas across the three-year life of the Dragon Programme.
Research subjects include agricultural and forest monitoring, water resource assessment, terrain measurement, desertification, the ocean environment, atmospheric chemistry and climate change.
"This week's symposium represents a promising start to a large-scale undertaking," Achache began. "Dragon is really made up of small teams, and they have some hard work ahead of them as develop models and acquire data to make progress within their given field of interest.
"However maintaining the overall cohesion of the Programme is important, and for this purpose we have agreed to set up a co-ordinating committee made up of ten top-level European and Chinese scientists.
"This is because as the teams' work goes on they should find that talking to each other is helpful to them all: so rice crop monitoring researchers might exchange information with the team studying water resources, while those studying forests begin exchanges with the water resources or climate change group."
ESA is supplying data from Envisat and other spacecraft on the 9.6 million square kilometres of Chinese territory – the country is the third largest in the world. To help picture its vast scale, China's total surface area approximates that of Sedna, the newly discovered planetary body at the fringe of our solar system.
"International co-operation was one of my priorities when I began as Director, and China occurred as an obvious candidate," Achache explained. "The sheer size of the country makes it a very suitable test site for our space technology.
"There are a multitude of issues where Earth Observation has the potential to aid Chinese management of the territory they deal with, including development planning, resource mapping and especially the mitigation of natural hazards.
"China is a country of natural disasters: floods, droughts, landslides and some of the worst earthquakes in the world – but these are all areas where space can make a difference."
His own past experience also played a role in inspiring Dragon, Achache added: "Two decades ago I worked on a joint French-Chinese geophysical survey of the Tibetan Plateau, and found that a very rewarding experience. Encouraging similar research links between Europe and China within the area of Earth Observation is useful in its own right.
"Most importantly, I have great confidence in the ability of China and the Chinese people to originate new services and applications based on Earth Observation products.
"China is at least as advanced as we are in spheres such as e-governance. For example, Xiamen where the symposium took place is regional capital of a fast-growing Special Economic Zone. We had demonstrated to us a geographical information system designed for the city helping to manage its expansion, integrating all relevant information, satellite along with data gathered in-situ.
"That sort of system, set up to get all the right information to the decision-maker who needs it, is along the lines of what we are considering for ESA's Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative with the European Union.
"So Dragon is going to be more than a one-way transfer of scientific knowledge. Considering it in terms of capacity building, I think it clear that Europe will gain capacity as operational services developed in China go back the other way."
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Mt. Sneffels Wilderness
We had been hiking up Butcher Creek for close to three hours when we topped a ridge that separated Butcher from Mill Creek. Dallas Peak reared its head to 13,809 feet just to the north. But the really dramatic scene lay below us. Mill Creek formed in a broad meadow carpeted in a rainbow of wildflowers. We weren't seeing the occasional columbine for which Colorado is famous - this field was literally smothered in blossoms, many reaching shoulder high.
This breathtaking view lay along the southern boundary of the Mt. Sneffels Wilderness. Dominated by its namesake 14,150 foot mountain, the wilderness comprises 16,505 acres of dramatic peaks and serrated ridges. By Colorado standards, it's a small preserve, but acre for acre I rate it as one of the state's premier areas. And it offers one of my personal favorite dayhikes of all time, the Sneffels Highline Trail.
Geologically, the area was rich in volcanic activity between 10 and 40 million years ago. Mt. Sneffels itself is an igneous intrusion, formed when molten lava pushed up the substrata, hardened and became exposed as the covering layers eroded away. Volcanic flows created many of the crags, making climbing on the crumbling rock a true challenge - and danger.
Alpine tundra covers most of the wilderness. Although not particularly rich in the diversity of flora and fauna, the land is home to elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, black bear, bobcat, mountain lion and golden eagle. Smaller mammals include pika and snowshoe hares.
Seasonally, expect the wilderness to be snow-free from about mid-July to late September or early October. In the summer, plan for a cool climate and take rain gear. The morning sky may be crystal blue, but I have spent one cold, wet afternoon atop Blue Lakes Pass. As with much of the Colorado Rockies, rain and lightning are not uncommon late in the day.
The Sneffels Wilderness is more a place for day trips or overnighters than week-long backpacks. The Sneffels Highline Trail is a 13 mile loop out of Telluride that is not to be missed. The Blue Lakes Trail is a point to point in the northeastern corner of the wilderness.
Sneffels Highline Trail - 13 miles; 3,600 foot elevation gain. Access: Cornet Creek in Telluride.
This magnificent hike leaves right from the north side of Telluride. Head up the Jud Wiebs Trail for a short period and cross Butcher Creek to hit the Highline. Follow it north along Butcher Creek into Pack Basin for 2 to 3 hours. You are climbing during this section, heading for a 12,200 foot saddle. The top of the saddle offers views of Dallas Peak and Mill Creek Basin. It was late August when I ventured through the Basin covered in wildflowers. Log posts mark the way.
Along this stretch, the trail crosses into the official wilderness, continuing westward. Another 2 to 3 hours from the saddle, the path circles back south and east and hits a crossing of lower Mill Creek. At this point, hikers can head out to the Mill Creek Trailhead if they have arranged transportation. To continue back to the starting point in Telluride, follow the Deep Creek Trail (also known as the Waterline Trail) for another couple of miles.
Blue Lakes Trail - 6.7 miles point to point; elevation change 4,650. Access: From Yankee Boy Basin out of Ouray or East Dallas Creek Road out of Ridgeway.
The trio of Blue Lakes are the only lakes of note in the wilderness, lying just inside the eastern side. The Blue Lakes trail runs west from Yankee Boy Basin, west of Ouray, to the Blue Lakes Trailhead on the East Dallas Creek Road west of Ridgeway. It can be hiked in either direction, with west to east requiring an altitude gain over 4,000 feet. I chose an out and back hike from Yankee Boy Basin to Blue Lakes Pass. If you four-wheel all the way up Yankee Boy, this hike is a couple of miles each way, though I walked a good bit of the 4WD road myself. The reward of a steep set of switchbacks to 13,000 foot Blue Lakes Pass is a fantastic view into the wilderness. Mt. Sneffels stood against a steel gray sky the day I was there, and the lakes reflected dark thunderheads.
Mt. Sneffels is far and away the most popular peak destination in the area. From the south side, the climb is a strenuous scramble. From the north, it is a technical challenge.
The south side ascent starts in Yankee Boy Basin. The climb is 2 to 3 miles and about 2,000 feet up, depending on where you start in Yankee Boy. From the Blue Lakes Trail, the summit route branches north below the pass to a wide saddle less than a mile away. Then you ascend a narrow couloir filled with loose rock. If you are climbing on the weekend, expect a crowd.
Dallas Peak at 13,809 feet is another good destination for peak-baggers. Dallas is rated by many as a very difficult ascent, with roped climbing recommended for the summit pitches. The normal route is to start from the Telluride water catchment area on Mill Creek Road. From there, its roughly 13 miles to the summit with an elevation gain of about 4,400 feet.
The San Juan Hut System runs from the East Dallas Creek Road out of Ridgeway along the north slope of the Sneffels Range, then loops south and east to Telluride. A 6 mile (one-way) section from the Last Dollar Road to North Pole Peak Yurt passes through a mile of the wilderness area. To find the trailhead, take the Last Dollar Road south from Highway 62 for less than two miles. The route follows rolling terrain with a couple of steep climbs.
Details mentioned in this article were accurate at the time of publication
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Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812 – 1870), also known under the pen name of Boz, is the creator of some of the most famous fictional characters in the world. He is also a favourite on the blog.
This is the second of four stories, which were published in a children’s magazine in 1867. The stories came under the general heading and title of Holiday Romance.
It’s important to note that the story is supposed to be perceived as if a child had written it. Not so much in a literary or language sense, but more from an imaginary scenario, ergo storytelling point of view. In her head Alicia is the cinderella like princess and her parents are the King and Queen. She has to live up to her parents expectations, which means being an adult before she actually is one.
There was once a King, and he had a Queen; and he was the manliest of his sex, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more. Seventeen of these children took care of the baby; and Alicia, the eldest, took care of them all. Their ages varied from seven years to seven months.
One day the King was on the way to the market to buy some fish for dinner. The royal couple and their children weren’t exactly the norm. In fact they were quite unusual, almost like an ordinary family with ordinary day-to-day problems.
Of course in fact that is what they are really, an ordinary family. Alicia sees her father, the head of the household, as the King and the mother as her Queen.
The King went on towards the office in a melancholy mood, for quarter day was such a long way off,
With many mouths to feed and growing children to clothe the King isn’t sure how he or they will make it to pay day.Whilst shopping for food, for salmon to be precise, for his family a young errand boy makes the King aware of an old lady in the shop with them.
Now, the King had not seen any old lady, because this old lady had been invisible to him, though visible to Mr Pickles’s boy.“King Watkins the First, I believe?” said the old lady. “Papa, if I am not mistaken, of the beautiful Princess Alicia?” said the old lady.
The King is taken aback by her familiarity with his family members. Who could she be? How does she know his eldest daughter?
The first thing King Watkins thought of was that this woman must be a fairy. A well-dressed fairy smelling of lavender.
“You are right,” said the old lady, answering his thoughts, “I am the Good Fairy Grandmarina.When the beautiful Princess Alicia consents to partake of the salmon—as I think she will—you will find she will leave a fish-bone on her plate. Tell her to dry it, and to rub it, and to polish it till it shines like mother-of-pearl, and to take care of it as a present from me.”
The King was curious as to the reason for this strange request. What was so special about this fishbone and more importantly why Alicia?
“The reason for this, and the reason for that, indeed! You are always wanting the reason. No reason. There! Hoity toity me! I am sick of your grown-up reasons.”
On that note she disappeared and left the King to go home and prepare the salmon for the evening meal with strict instructions on how to serve the fishbone to the young girl.
the Princess Alicia took care to dry the bone, and to rub it, and to polish it till it shone like mother-of-pearl. The morning after the Queen became ill and fainted. Remembering where the smelling-bottle was, she climbed on a chair and got it, and after that she climbed on another chair by the bedside and held the smelling-bottle to the Queen’s nose,
Even in this emergency situation Alicia was determined to help her mother by herself, and save the magic for something more important. She decided to try everything except the magic fishbone.
Princess Alicia hurried up-stairs to tell a most particular secret to a most particularly confidential friend of hers, who was a Duchess. People did suppose her to be a Doll; but she was really a Duchess, though nobody knew it except the Princess.
The Queen’s condition worsened and Alicia took her place in the household. Taking care of her siblings, her father and stepping up to be the mother in the house.
“Alicia,” said the King, one evening when she wished him Good Night.“Yes, Papa.”“What is become of the magic fish-bone?”“In my pocket, Papa.”“I thought you had lost it?”“O, no, Papa.” “Or forgotten it?”“No, indeed, Papa.”
The King is confused as to why Alicia hadn’t used the magic, despite the fact her mother is so ill. Surely if anything warranted a divine intervention then it should be her sick mother.
This was the first time the King questioned her, however it wasn’t the last. One of her brothers cut himself really badly, and again she is faced with the choice of whether or not to use the powerful fishbone.
he put his hand through a pane of glass, and bled bled bled.
Once again the King tried to persuade Alicia by questioning her motives or rather her reason for not intervening in a more magical way.
“Alicia.”“Yes, Papa.”“What have you been doing?”“Snipping stitching cutting and contriving,Papa.” “Where is the magic fish-bone?”“In my pocket, Papa.”“I thought you had lost it?”“O, no, Papa.” “Or forgotten it?”“No, indeed, Papa.”
Incident after incident happens. Upsets, accidents and catastrophes, and every time Alicia solves it herself instead of reaching for the fishbone. Over and over again the King asks whether she has forgotten the wish she carries around with her.
Till one day when the need for money and food becomes desperate. The quarterly pay hasn’t come through and the King is unable to provide for his family the way he wants and needs to.
“No way,” said the King. “I have tried very hard, and I have tried all ways.” “Papa,” said she, “when we have tried very hard, and tried all ways, we must have done our very very best?”“When we have done our very very best, Papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.”
And this was the secret connected to the wish and the fishbone. Knowing when to reach out and ask for help. Knowing when we have reached our own limitations and shouldn’t fear accepting a kind gesture from others.
So she took out of her pocket the magic fish-bone that had been dried and rubbed and polished till it shone like mother-of-pearl; and she gave it one little kiss and wished it was quarter day.
Suddenly the quarter pay came tumbling down the chimney. From then on the quarterly pay came nine times a year and in leap years it came ten times.
“I suppose you know the reason, now, why my god-Daughter here,” kissing the Princess again, “did not apply to the fish-bone sooner?” said the Fairy. The King made her a shy bow.
Their lives were transformed with that one wish. The children were clothed and fed, the house was full of finery and riches, and Alicia was dressed in silks. The fairy found a prince for the princess, and promised them thirty-five healthy children.
The moral of the story? If you have a magic wish save it for something really important, perhaps a wish that everyone will profit from. On a more basic level it says a lot about the inner strength we all carry around inside us, but are often unaware of.
The Magic Fishbone,The Cricket on the Hearth, Sketches by Boz, Hunted Down, The Battle of Life at Feedbooks. Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby at the Internet Archive. Alternatively you can listen to Bleak House, The Chimes, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son or The Magic Fishbone at Librivox.
Download the fabulous Fishing Wallpaper Pack here. To download the fantastic public domain images (Twitter Headers made by our very own Gen and donated to the public domain) in this post, click here: for the 3rd image in this post and here for the second image. For more Twitter Headers, Wallpapers and images by GenXMedia at the Internet Archive.
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I am responsible for me.
This means first that I must act in a way that is responsible for myself. Live out the consequences of my choices without needlessly burdening others. Other have their own troubles and their own responsibilities. When we each who are capable live in this way we both free others to do the same and free ourselves to be more able to help those who truly are needy.
It is a paradox that those who are most self-sufficient are those most capable of helping those who are not.
Existing social structures are each responsible in turn: Family follows the self, then friends, then community and civic/social groups, then local government, then state government, then federal government. This does not mean the federal government is the ultimate authority. It means that the federal government is only authority when and in circumstances where all other levels have either failed, abdicated, or are incapable on sufficient scale to bear any given responsibility. This is the same for each succeeding layer of responsibility: Family is only responsible for that which the individual is not capable of being responsible for. An infant is capable of very little in themselves, so the family is responsible for them, but the family is also responsible for raising that infant to take responsibility to the utmost of it’s capability. When the family fails, or a situation gets beyond, or is beyond, the family’s capability, greater numbers of involved and invested and capable people, friends that is, then share in the responsibility. This does not have to be only in serious situations, it could be when children go off to play together at each others houses, friends share in responsibilities to the benefit of all. Then communities such as churches, clubs, social circles and the like, to which we have voluntarily joined ourselves, bear a certain level of responsibility.
You can see the graduating layers as each successive level bears some responsibility innately and then gains certain responsibility based on specific situations and circumstances. The way to visualize this is as a pyramid: The individual has ultimate responsibility, that is, first and last. While others may become responsible at different times and in different situations, the individual has first responsibility and will answer at the end for all that pertains to them whether others were involved or not. Each successive and broadening layer then goes down, not up, in authority over the individual and over each successive layer. This leaves federal government not as the ultimate responsible party but as the last responsible party. In some ways this last position equates with “least”. It is last in priority, and therefore has least priority in the layers that stand above it. It is not a foundational position either. The foundational responsibility can only belong to something outside, something not us. God does not form a layer below the federal government, God forms the all-encompassing framework inside which the entire pyramid exists.
The second outcome of self-responsibility is that each successive layer of responsibility ought to generally, as a matter of course, act in a way that is not-responsible towards those layers that are above it in priority. Family only takes responsibility for the individual when and where that individual is incapable of being self-responsible. Friends, only when and where the family is beyond it’s capability. And so on. The various layers of government ought only bear that responsibility for which all other layers are incapable or not suited. This does not mean that each successive layer out to act antagonistically to those layers above it in responsibility, but ought instead to build up each layer in order that those other layers are MORE capable, and so that responsibility only falls upon the lower layers when all else has failed. In other words, the family ought to build up the individual so that the family is less necessary, and less likely to be called upon to support that individual as it matures and takes on more responsibility for itself. The friends ought to build up the family and the individual in the same way, and the community ought to do the same for the friends and the family and the individual, and so on. This structure of reinforced and supported and encouraged responsibility results in the strongest communities, the strongest families, the strongest nations, because each individual and each successive layer of responsibility is invest in those that take priority above it, and as each successive layer is made as strong as it can, the entire structure can bear much weight and stress in times where responsibility increases or situations change for any given layer.
The federal government, then, ought to be primarily invested not in centralizing responsibility, authority, and power to itself, but instead in divesting authority. Not delegating, for that implies that it retains ultimate responsibility and is superior to those layers which are in fact superior to it. But divesting authority, actually giving it away (or, more realistically, having it taken away) to those layers which it ought to instead be supporting and reinforcing so that they are able and capable of bearing more and more responsibility and authority.
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Neads in the news - 2006
Trained by Inmates, New Best Friends for Disabled Veterans
Rainbow looks like any other Labrador retriever, but she is not a pet. Trained by a prison inmate, her mission is to help Roland Paquette, an injured veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan, stay on his new feet, the ones he got after an explosion destroyed his legs.
Celebration of love - Dogs help disabled veterans enjoy life
For Army Staff Sgt. Roland Paquette, yesterday's 30th anniversary celebration and fall graduation of the National Education for Assistance Dog Services marks a beginning.
Retriever is golden at job
In many ways, the crimp-eared golden retriever Elliott is just as imperfect as the children and adolescents he helps: He can be lackadaisical, he sometimes has problems following orders and the spots on his tongue prevent him from leading the pampered life in the dog show circuit that he was bred for.
Lending a helping paw - A working relationship
On a handmade, wood sign located near the door to Merle Ferber's apartment, the letters of her last name, and that of her former service dog, Radar, are intertwined. The sign is a fitting tribute to the long working relationship that Ferber had with Radar, who helped her perform tasks as she traveled in her wheelchair. A smooth collie, Radar was so popular that he was inducted into the American Working Collie Association Hall of Fame two years ago. It's hard to find a replacement for a dog like that. But Ferber feels that she has.
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Urban farms around America are breaking through concrete and hitting sustainable paydirt [SLIDESHOW]
Fairview Gardens, Santa Barbara, California
An employee holds a bed of plants while another picks strawberries. More than 100 years old, Fairview wasn’t always an urban farm. Years of sprawl crept in, and what was once a rural farm is now the only working production farm in the Goleta Valley outside Santa Barbara. A handful of families have lived on the property for decades, working the fields and enjoying the urban oasis.
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New research has shown that the tiny organisms in the oil liquid in the bowels of the earth can help find alien life, hidden in the depths of space . German scientists have discovered microorganisms within the water droplets from an unusual lake in Trinidad and Tobago.
Microbes from the asphalt lake in Trinidad and Tobago prompted scientists to think that such tanks on natural satellites of distant planets, such as titanium, can be a haven for extraterrestrial life. The discovery was made on Lake Peach Lake, located near the town of La Brea in the south-west of the country. Peach Lake is the largest deposit of asphalt in the world. Natural mixture of hydrocarbons, which rises to the surface of the lake, during the solidification forms a crust.
Previously, it was believed that due to the high toxicity of the oil is not necessary to sustain life, which can exist only at the interface of water and oil environments. But a new study has given scientists suggests that microbes can exist even in tiny droplets of water that is contained in the oil.
We found the complex microbial communities that play an important role in the decomposition of oil, – said Professor Rainer Mekenstok of Helmholtz Centre Munich for Environmental Research (HMGU).
According Mekenstoka inside these water droplets inhabit a variety of micro-organisms that break down the oil into various organic substances.
According to Live Science magazine astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University in Pullman, opening his German colleagues increases the chances of detecting life on Titan, the surface of which there are many hydrocarbon lakes.
Measurements were conducted by scientists in the past year have shown that Titancontains about 9000 cubic kilometers of liquid hydrocarbons, which is about 40 times more oil and gas reserves in the world.
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On August 10, 2017, decentralized cloud storage platform Filecoin set a new record in raising capital through an initial coin offering (ICO). Within an hour of the token sale launch, the project raised $250 million, overtaking the previous high set by the Tezos ICO, which had raised $232 million a month earlier.
During a panel discussion between several Blockchain-based cloud storage providers at the Token Summit in May, Shawn Wilkinson, co-founder of Storj said:
“Cloud storage is a $20- to $30-billion industry. There may be some differences in business models and the protocol levels in the decentralized storage platforms. But we are all—Sia and Storj and Filecoin and Blockstack—idealistically aligned to crash centralized cloud storage services.”
The success of the Filecoin ICO—which could have been much greater had it not been halted after an hour due to technical difficulties—may speak to the truth of Wilkinson’s assertion.
The Filecoin platform is one of several Blockchain-based cloud storage services that use sharing economy model similar to that of Airbnb and Uber. Filecoin uses InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) by Protocol Labs—“a research, development, and deployment lab for network protocols.” The co-founder of Filecoin and Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, said during the May panel:
“We’ve built a file-addressing protocol completely independent of [a] network. It doesn’t matter what backend storage you are using. You can migrate seamlessly from one to another. That interoperability is critical in ensuring we have one web and not multiple silos. In that environment, it is the file address that is important. Where the file is stored is completely irrelevant to the end user.”
The way decentralized cloud storage works is that you rent space from others on one of these platforms, where people who have more storage space than they can use offer to store your files or run your applications. Each Blockchain-based platform uses their own native tokens as their payment mechanism. Says Sia co-founder David Vorick:
“We’ve created a decentralized marketplace where anybody who has storage can come and offer it to the network at whatever price they feel.”
A by-product of cryptocurrency
Out of this new Blockchain model, an enterprise known as “memory farming” has emerged. Farming involves stocking, connecting and making memory disks available for those looking to store files in the cloud. The process is similar to bitcoin mining, but instead of amassing computing power, farmers amass computer memory.
Memory farmers receive token micropayments from the owners of the files they store. The reward can be converted to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether before being cashed out as fiat currency through exchanges.
The invention of cryptocurrencies is partly responsible for the emergence of decentralized cloud storage platforms. The architecture of the platforms copies the peer-to-peer nature of cryptocurrencies. Their consensus protocols are also similar to those used by cryptocurrency Blockchain networks.
Cryptocurrencies also offer a more appropriate payment solution for a situation in which users can store files for each other in devices all over the globe. Blockchain makes it possible to send instant micropayments across the internet at negligible cost.
These new cloud storage platforms also use smart contracts, another application of the Blockchain. Such contracts are agreements written in code that execute once specific terms have been met. In the case of cloud storage, a renter enters into a smart contract with someone offering file space.
The contract stipulates the details of the conditions the memory owner must meet before payment is sent. Likewise, it sets out the condition for continual storage of a user’s file in the memory device.
Strength of decentralization
As compared to traditional cloud storage services like Dropbox, Amazon S3 and Google Drive, decentralized storage services on the Blockchain have several advantages.
First, decentralized services are protected from central points of weaknesses. They have no servers to attack, nor a third party to compromise, even if a court order demands access to files.
Sia’s Vorick points out that the primary goal of his team was to build a platform that could outlive its founders and withstand both internal and external compromises. He says:
“We’ve created a cloud storage that has no single points of failure. It is very spread out and there is no person who controls it, and that includes us the builders. If we shut down tomorrow as a company, our platform will continue to operate as it currently does.”
Second, decentralized cloud storage services protect user privacy and secure files through client-side encryption. Every file is encrypted, sharded (split) into small pieces and stored in different locations on the network.
Sharding and encryption ensure that not even the owner of the device in which a file is stored can read and make sense of it. Only the creator or owner of a file has the private keys that give them the power to recall the shards and reconstruct the file.
Through a process similar to bitcoin mining, the owner of a file periodically queries farms to verify that file shards are still available. A positive confirmation triggers a token payment as stipulated by the smart contract.
Token payments incentivise farmers to maintain user files and also to expand both storage capacity and availability, which enables them to earn more.
Filecoin would have raised more in their ICO had they not paused the sale when Coinlist, the platform on which it was launched, experienced technical hitches. The ICO was also only open to a select group. To participate, you had to be an accredited investor, with proof an annual income of at least $200K or a net worth of at least $1 million. It leaves the question of how much more funding Filecoin could have brought in had the ICO continued as planned and had it been open to everyone.
- How Blockchain Makes It Easy for Diverse Platforms to Interface - June 5, 2018
- Rupert Hackett – ICO Success Reveals Blockchain Potential to ‘Crash’ Centralized Cloud Storage - September 13, 2017
- Rupert Hackett – Steemit, Using Blockchain to Compensate and Protect Speech - January 30, 2017
- RSK: Making the Bitcoin Blockchain More Like Ethereum 2.0 - December 7, 2016
- Rupert Hackett: Self-driving Cars Might Fail without the Blockchain - October 19, 2016
- The Ethereum Blockchain is Helping Create the Next Generation of Tokens - October 10, 2016
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Do you have a server lying around someplace that spends a significant amount of time in idle? If so, you might want to consider running the Folding@home client. Folding@home is a project based at Stanford whose goal is to simulate and study protein folding, which is crucial in order to understand and develop better treatments for serious diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Folding@home has been one of the most successful examples of distributed computing, whereby individuals all over the world donate spare CPU cycles in order to perform calculations and send the results back to a central location. The project started back in October of 2000, and has since resulted in the publication of over 40 works, and has lead to significant progress in the fight against Alzheimer’s. To date, the Folding@home project has been and is being used to study Huntington’s Disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, among other serious medical conditions.
The Folding@home client runs on Windows, Mac OS-X, Playstation 3 and Linux, and will run in the background while your computer completes other tasks. If you want us to install it for you, just say so in the notes field of your order. In addition, if you wish to make a donation to the project, just specify “Donation Target: Other Open Source Project” and specify Folding@home in the notes field.
For more information about Folding@home, see http://folding.standford.edu/
james June 16th, 2009
Posted In: Research
Have you ever thought to yourself, “gee, it would be a lot of fun to learn how to write software,” but you didn’t want to shell out money for books or a development environment? Perhaps you’re just curious, or maybe you aspire to be a developer one day. Whatever your reason, thanks to open source software and free documentation, you can pick up the skills required with no cost to you (other than your time, of course.)
Where to Learn
Before you start writing code and playing with a compiler (a program that translates human-readable programs into instructions the computer can understand), you’ll first need to learn a programming language. You could spend anywhere between $30 to $70 on a book. Or, you could instead go online. Not only can you use Google to find countless tutorials for just about any programming language, you can also find sites that offer free e-book versions of published works (for an extensive collection of books in any subject, including quite a few on programming, check out http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/). For most of your programming needs, you’ll find that buying books really isn’t necessary.
As you grow in skill, you’ll find that learning by example is a powerful tool. Fortunately, with open source software, you have a plethora of real world applications, their source code layed bare for all the world to see (source code is the human-readable version of a program.) If you want to look at the implementation of a text editor, for example, you can check out the source code for projects like vim (http://www.vim.org/), nano (http://www.nano-editor.org/) or emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/). Do you want to know how various standard library functions are implemented in C, such as QuickSort? Then check out the source code to Glibc (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/). Are you instead more interested in systems programming? Check out the kernel source trees for Linux (http://www.kernel.org) or FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org). You’ll find open source software for just about any need, from web browsers to mail clients, from 3D modeling to audio and video editing solutions. Whatever you want to look at, you’ll more than likely find examples written by others that can help you learn for your own projects.
Where to Get the Software
So, you already have at least some conception of what’s involved in programming, and you want to get your hands dirty by actually writing some code yourself. At the very least, you’ll need a text editor to write your code and a compiler or interpreter to run your programs. You may also desire a more elaborate solution, such as an IDE (integrated development environment), which offers you a one-stop solution for writing code and compiling/running your programs, all from the click of your mouse.
Either way, open source once again comes to the rescue. For C, C++ and a few other languages, you have the GNU Compiler collection (http://gcc.gnu.org/). There are also various interpreted languages, such as Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org), Python (http://www.python.org/) or Perl (http://www.perl.org/). If you’re looking for an IDE roughly like Microsoft Visual C++ or the like, you’ll find KDevelop (http://www.kdevelop.org), Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) or NetBeans (http://www.netbeans.org/), among others.
For more advanced needs, such as revision control (a means of tracking changes in software), you have applications like Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/), Mercurial (http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/) and Git (http://www.git-scm.org/).
There are many more applications for a variety of needs, so whatever you’re looking for, give Google a spin.
It is possible to learn how to develop software without breaking the bank. With free documentation and open source software, you have all the tools you need to learn as little or as much as you want. Here at eRacks, we understand the needs of the developer, and can provide you with a machine pre-loaded with all the software you need to write professional programs. Contact us, and ask for a quote today!
james June 1st, 2009
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Help for the business weary
Need a business plan to pull your farm operation through low-profit times? The Farm Management and Business Planning Seminar, an intensive, two-day program, will help you write a solid business plan. You'll learn how to calculate operating efficiency and capital management and develop a risk management plan. Expert ag economists and management consultants will lead the seminar, which is sponsored by Deere & Company and Farm Industry News.
Company financing at home
Syngenta is offering a financing option that provides low-interest rates through local banks. The option, called Community Choice, is part of the Syngenta Seeds Finance Program. Customers may access competitive loan rates through an interest “buy-down” program at participating banks. The company will test the program this winter in the upper Midwest.
Pioneer Hi-Bred International and DuPont have rolled out an expanded financing program for seed and crop protection purchases. Growers meeting the purchase qualifications may finance the seed and an expanded list of crop protection products at 2.5% below prime. Those growers meeting only the seed or the crop protection requirement may finance at 1% below prime. In addition, producers may sign on to a Performance Plus weed control program, which reimburses a grower for failed weed control if the grower followed label directions. Reimbursement matches the respray cost.
Bt corn reapproved
Bt corn received a new thumbs-up from the EPA. The corn genetically modified to control European corn borer recently earned a seven-year reregistration. The EPA said scientific evidence shows Bt corn does not adversely affect human health or the monarch butterfly population.
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New Guinea 'lost world' revealed
?at least one new bird species?An expedition to one of Asia’s most isolated jungles, in the mist-shrouded Foya Mountains of western New Guinea (Irian Jaya), has discovered a host of new species, giant flowers, and rare wildlife.
The December 2005 expedition by a team of US, Indonesian, and Australian scientists led by Conservation International (CI) found dozens of new species including frogs, butterflies, plants, and what is thought to be the first new bird from the island of New Guinea in more than 60 years. ’s as close to the Garden of Eden as you’re going to find on Earth,"velled CI's Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the expedition [who also took the picture].
The new species of honeyeater, yet to be described, has a bright orange face-patch with a pendant wattle under each eye.
The team also managed to solve another ornithological mystery – the location of the range of the berlepschi form of Carola's Parotia Parotia carolae (sometimes treated as a separate species, Berlepsch’s Six-Wired Bird of Paradise). The team obtained the first ever photos of this spectacular Bird of Paradise.The expedition also found a new large mammal for Indonesia – the Golden-mantled Tree Kangaroo Dendrolagus pulcherrimus, formerly known from only a single mountain in neighbouring Papua New Guinea.
"This expedition highlights the wealth of little known and restricted-range species that occur in the Foya Mountains. Hopefully the region's inaccessibility will mean that this unique area escapes the pressures that are causing such massive habitat loss across so many of south-east Asia's montane rain forests." Said Ali Stattersfield, Head of Science, BirdLife International The scientists also captured the first ever photographs of the Golden-fronted Bowerbird mblyornis flavifrons displaying at its bower – a tower of twigs and other forest materials it builds as part of its mating ritual. Other discoveries included what may be the largest rhododendron flower on record – almost six inches across – along with more than 20 new frogs and four new butterflies. The mountain range’s interior – more than 300,000 hectares of old growth tropical forest – remains untouched by humans. Indeed, the entire Foya forest tract of more than 1 million hectares constitutes the largest essentially pristine tropical forest in Asia, forming part of BirdLife's North Papuan mountains Endemic Bird Area (EBA). In recent decades a high proportion of newly-described birds have been found in EBAs, so although the discovery of a new bird species by the expedition is remarkable, it is not entirely unexpected. However, the wealth of new findings highlight the vital importance of EBAs for the conservation of global biodiversity.
Further expeditions to the area are planned by CI later in the year.
4th July 2014
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THE spectacular seas have abated but the big swell, which has taken a heavy toll on the beaches of the Coffs Coast, is set to return.
Coffs Harbour City Council staff have been busily completing makeshift repairs at local beaches knowing full well there's more work around the corner.
A low-pressure trough is expected to develop and deepen over the north-western Tasman Sea on Monday.
That will result in the return of the large swells experienced over the past few days.
It is for this reason council employees have only done enough so far to ensure the safety of beachgoers.
The ramp in front of Coffs Harbour SLSC at Park Beach has been made safe.
Other interim work completed includes strengthening the walkway at the northern end of Coffs Harbour Jetty, placing sandbags at the base of the staircase at Boambee rail bridge while the rock pool below Bonville Headland has been barriered off.
All along the coast, surfers, swimmers and beachgoers have been left to negotiate steep sand cliffs.
Vertical drops of more than three metres have been created, with walkways to Sawtell Beach ending abruptly in a cliff edge only the bravest souls dare to challenge.
Southerly winds this weekend are expected to bring two to three metre swells.
Come Monday though, the large swells will return and the erosion on the beaches is expected to reach a new level.
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|Overview - 2 Chronicles 4|
|1||The altar of brass.|
|2||The molten sea upon twelve oxen.|
|6||The ten lavers, candlesticks, and tables.|
|9||The courts, and the instruments of brass.|
|19||The instruments of gold.|
2 Chronicles 4:10 (King James Version)
And he set the sea on the right side of the east end, over against the south.
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“A lot of students think we’re just going to talk about art and aesthetics, but I challenge them to think about the cultural importance of art. How was it made, why was it made, how was it used?”
This is the mindset Joel Palka — a recently hired associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change — wants students to bring with them when they walk into his new course, Anthropology and Art (ASB 350).
Throughout the semester, students will explore the art forms of peoples from around the world, focusing not on how the art looks, but rather on the context behind it. Examples include cedar wood masks from indigenous groups of the Northwest U.S. and their connections to identity; poured-bronze sculptures in India and their treatment as living entities; and the shields of the Asmat people of New Guinea, which are seen as having a supernatural power to protect in battle.
Even art from the Western world has its own context, says Palka. And although we may not think our society associates spiritual forces with objects the way others do, there are examples that prove that’s not entirely true.
“I tell my students about studies where a person offers two sweaters to university students — saying one is off the rack from the store, and the other from a convicted killer. Nobody would wear the killer’s sweater,” he said.
Palka himself specializes in Mayan art, another topic covered in the course. He’s interested in Mayan culture change from the time of the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century to the present, so his research involves both archaeological and anthropological work in the rainforests of Chiapas, Mexico.
He also finds it extremely valuable to include the descendant community from where he works in his research.
“When we excavate architecture and artifacts, they provide cultural interpretation of what we find,” he said.
The necessity of diverse perspectives to capture the full meaning of something is a principle he now instills in his students as well. Each week, ASB 350 students read about art from another culture and then write about and discuss their take on major themes, how the art is important to its society, and what they do and don’t agree with in the reading.
“It’s neat because everybody sees something different,” Palka said. “Anytime we talk, we’re going to have anywhere from five to 15 main topics of discussion.”
He also assigns students a research project based on the art of Teotihuacan, which was on display at the Phoenix Art Museum during the first month of the semester. He believes it’s important to get up close and personal with the art whenever possible.
“Don’t think you can be a good art student just by reading books,” he said. “If you don’t see the real thing, you’re missing out on a lot.”
“When I was an archaeology student, my professors taught about the ‘Dancing Figures’ sculpted panels that depict sacrificial victims from Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Mexico. I always thought they were like this big,” he said, gesturing with his hands an arm-length apart. “But when you go to the actual site, you see that they’re double life-size.”
Palka’s favorite lecture to teach is inspired by the work of a fellow ASU faculty member and anthropologist, Associate Professor Miguel Astor-Aguilera of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
Astor-Aguilera turns conventional thinking on its head, says Palka, by arguing that the Maya did not hold their art as sacred and disposed of it once it had served its function.
“It was not supposed to be put in a museum,” Palka said. “It was supposed to rot.”
By the end of the course, his goal is to have transformed the way students think about and appreciate the human component behind these masterful pieces, enriching what could otherwise be just a visual experience.
“I hope that, when they go to a museum, they look at art in a different way,” he said. “Not just as something beautiful from one artist, but as part of a larger story of human culture.”
Top photo courtesy of Pixabay.com
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Press Release – Royal NZ College of General Practitioners
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) has welcomed extra funding in health in this years budget, but says more details need to be released on how the money will be spent.Media Release
Psychiatrists welcome health initiatives in Budget
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) has welcomed extra funding in health in this year’s budget, but says more details need to be released on how the money will be spent.
RANZCP President and New Zealand-based psychiatrist, Dr Murray Patton, says it is pleasing to see extra funding of $40 million allocated for additional support for elderly people including people with dementia.
Mental illness is a major health and social issue, with one in five New Zealanders experiencing a mental illness in any one year.
According to Alzheimers New Zealand, 53,000 people in New Zealand currently have dementia and that number is expected to triple to around 150,000 by 2050.
“The prevalence of mental illness, and the impact it has on the productivitiy of New Zealanders as a nation, cannot be understated. It is not just people who live with mental illness: it is their families, their carers, and their support networks.
“Dementia has become a significant health challenge in New Zealand. We hope that actions to support the care of people with dementia will also include improvements in their mental health care and ensure that other mental health issues affecting older people are not neglected,” Dr Murray Patton says.
Dr Patton has also welcomed free GP visits and prescriptions for children under 13 and extra funding for disability support services.
“Early intervention in a child’s mental health is important and free access to doctors and medication will ensure they get the help they need at an early age.”
“People with disabilities often fall through the service gaps between the health and disability systems and their considerable needs are not addressed. It is important they have access to suitable support to ensure they have quality of life and longer life expectancy.”
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) is the principal organisation training and representing qualified medical practitioners who specialize in the treatment of mental illness in Australia and New Zealand.
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It is the natural right of every human being to be happy--to escape all the miseries of life. Happiness is the normal condition, as natural as the landscapes and the seasons. It is unnatural to suffer and it is only because of our ignorance that we do suffer. Happiness is the product of wisdom. To attain perfect wisdom, to comprehend fully the purpose of life, to realize completely the relationship of human beings to each other, is to put an end to all suffering, to escape every ill and evil that afflicts us. Perfect wisdom is unshadowed joy.
fortunately, any lacking quality can be evolved and if one does not possess these three necessities his first work is to create them. These three things are an ardent desire, an iron will and an alert intelligence. Why are these three qualifications essential to success and what purpose do they serve?
Desire is nature's motor power--the propulsive force that pushes everything forward in its evolution. It is desire that stimulates to action. Desire drives the animal into the activities that evolve its physical body and sharpen its intelligence. If it had no desire it would lie inert and perish. But the desire for food, for drink, for association with its kind, impel it to action, and the result is the evolution of strength, skill and intelligence in proportion to the intensity of its desires. To gratify these desires it will accept battle no matter how great may be the odds against it and will unhesitatingly risk life itself in the combat. Desire not only induces the activity that develops physical strength
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After analysing the menus, we've unearthed the most Michelin ingredients and cooking techniques used by UK restaurants which hold two and three Michelin stars. Following the release of the 2020 Michelin restaurant results, we can reveal what really makes a Michelin menu.
If you eat in the UK’s best restaurants you’re almost guaranteed to find chocolate, caviar or... potato. And those restaurants are no longer just frying or grilling their food – instead smoking, pickling and making sorbet are the go-to Michelin methods for 2020.
What are the 'most Michelin' ingredients?
Chocolate appears on 80% of all the Michelin menus we analysed, in delights such as the Smoked Jivara Chocolate mousse at The Waterside Inn, and the Coriander White Chocolate Dome at Midsummer House.
Potato and Caviar each appear on 72% of Michelin menus – putting the humble spud on equal footing with one of the most expensive ingredients in the world.
When it comes to the crème de la crème of restaurants – the UK restaurants with 3 stars – the menus become even more elite. Here, in place of chocolate and potato, we see lobster, caviar and foie gras but interestingly hazelnut, sweetcorn, mushroom and celeriac also take equal billing at the top.
Michelin chefs also favour beetroot and mushrooms over the much-loved scallops. Three varieties were most frequently mentioned here: wild mushrooms, ceps - note the French name, rather than Italian 'porcini' - and girolles, again using the French name for chanterelles as they're more commonly referred to in English.
We found a wonderful array of mushroom dishes on the menus, from the Cep Mushrooms with Chestnut & Burnet at Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, and Wild Mushroom & Truffle Ravioli by Restaurant Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles.
Classic fine dining luxuries such as truffle and foie gras are still on the list, but are only present on 48% and 44% of menus respectively.
Meat doesn't make it in the 'Top 10' ingredients
There is no red meat in the list of most used ingredients. Instead - alongside vegetables and chocolate - seafood dominates the top spots, with caviar, scallops, lobster and crab ahead of any land animal.
Pork is the most mentioned meat, appearing on 52% of menus (followed by beef, duck, and finally chicken then lamb).
Salt, Pepper & Spice
In these restaurants, spices tread a conservative line. And so as you might expect salt and pepper have the most mentions.
Pepper has the highest billing, featured on 44% of menus – the same number of mentions as foie gras – yet it's rarely just ordinary black pepper that is mentioned. To bring a broader palette of flavours, prized examples include rare Madagascan voatsiperifery pepper used at both Hélène Darroze at the Connaught and Le Dame de Pic. Grapefruit-scented timur berry pepper is pick of the pepper menu at Core by Clare Smith, in 'Duck and red grape, thyme honey, timur berry pepper'. And Sarawak pepper features in The Waterside Inn's 'Pan-roasted fillet of Angus beef with blue cheese, caramelized onion ravioli, red port and Sarawak pepper sauce'.
In contrast, salts are rarely name-checked. Instead the notable salt references are more simply salted, which appears on 24% of menus and salt-baked (12%).
Japanese influences on the UK fine dining scene means that wasabi is ahead of horseradish and other spices, appearing on 20% of menus.
How to replicate these dishes?
You can find the selection of chocolate for cooking here, including the brands chefs are using on those Michelin-menus. Similarly browse our collection of finest quality dried mushrooms here, which bring fantastic texture and umami savouriness to your cooking. And each of the featured peppers are ones we stock under the Sous Chef brand here.
The most Michelin ingredients list in detail
|ALL 2 & 3 Star Restaurants||3 Star Restaurants||2 Star Restaurants|
What are the 'most Michelin' cooking techniques?
Smoking tops the chart of Michelin techniques – it’s used as a description on 68% of the menus analysed, while pickling is not far behind with just over half of the restaurants offering something pickled on their menu (52%).
You'll also see a divide between two star and three star restaurants. Three star restaurants have a notable French approach with confits, purees, and jus all prominent on the menus. These techniques are still present in two star restaurants, but this is also where you see the smoking, roasting and pickling.
Ice-creams and sorbets are extremely popular among Michelin chefs, whether in savoury dishes or sweet. Michelin ice-creams include Pumpkin Ice-cream at Sketch and Lovage Ice-cream at Le Dame de Pic. You can also enjoy a Horseradish Sorbet at Belmond Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons or a Roasted Grapefruit Sorbet at The Hand and Flowers.
How to use these techniques at home?
You can use the same equipment that is used in Michelin starred restaurants with Sous Chef’s range of food smokers, and learn more about Home Smoking here. Similarly try preserving and fermenting with the Sous Chef's collection of vinaigriers, fermentation jars and preserving equipment.
The 'most Michelin' techniques list in detail
|ALL 2+3 Star Restaurants||3 Star Restaurants||2 Star Restaurants|
The method behind the data
We looked at all available online menus for restaurants that hold two and three Michelin stars, as of the updates on Monday 7th October 2019. Three restaurants had no online menus, meaning this data is drawn from 25 establishments. We tallied the frequency of individual ingredients and techniques, and created a log of how often each word appears across the group of restaurants. We excluded information about cheese selections - some restaurants published these but many didn't. English translations were used wherever appropriate.
Browse a huge range of specialist ingredients used by chefs and cooks, find the perfect gift for a chef you know who has recently won - or you think deserves - a Michelin star, or get inspiration for what recipe to cook next in the Sous Chef Bureau of Taste blog.
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THE captive Bird was gone;--to cliff or moor
Perchance had flown, delivered by the storm;
Or he had pined, and sunk to feed the worm:
Him found we not: but, climbing, a tall tower,
There saw, impaved with rude fidelity
Of art mosaic, in a roofless floor,
An Eagle with stretched wings, but beamless eye--
An Eagle that could neither wail nor soar.
Effigy of the Vanished--(shall I dare
To call thee so?) or symbol of fierce deeds 10
And of the towering courage which past times
Rejoiced in--take, whate'er thou be, a share,
Not undeserved, of the memorial rhymes
That animate my way where'er it leads!
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*Older literature referred to zebrafish as Brachydanio rerio. Recent
work (Meyer et al., Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond252:231-236, 1993) and a consensus vote at the 1993 Zebrafish
Meeting at the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory suggest that Danio rerio should now be used.
This book is dedicated to the late George Streisinger
who first began the study of zebrafish in Eugene and
whose insight and gentle support got us all started.
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"The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary."
--George Bernard Shaw
- Among the gunners serving in Nelson's fleet at the Battle of the Nile (August 1, 1799), were 50 Austrian grenadiers, who had been captured by the French at Genoa, only to be liberated when Nelson's squadron intercepted the ship carrying them to France.
- In 1918-1919, the steersman of the transport U.S.S. Leviathan – the former German liner Vaterland – was a young seaman named Humphrey Bogart.
- While the name “Samurai” suggests heroic bushi running around wielding katana, it has recently been adopted by several computer consulting firms, not to mention a graphic arts company and one selling wood working tools; Sic transit gloria mundi.
- In April of 1986 the Council of the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago 30 miles west of Land's End, England, concluded a treaty of peace with the Netherlands, thus ending a technical state of war that had existed since 1651, when the Dutch got tired of having their ships victimized by Scillian "false-lighters," who would erect decoy beacons to lure ships onto rocks to be plundered.
- African-Americans numbered approximately 12.5-percent of American troops killed in Vietnam, a figure roughly in conformity with the proportion of black men of military age in the overall U.S. population.
- In the three days before the British declaration of war against Germany on September 3, 1939, c. 600,000 children were evacuated from London to safer areas in the countryside.
- Union Brig. Gen. Adalbert Ames was the oldest surviving Civil War general of either side, crossing the river in 1933 at 97 years, five months, and 14 days.
- The Byzantine Emperor Nicphorus I was defeated at the Battle of Verbita Pass (July 25, 811) by the Bulgar Khan Krouma, who had his skull encased in silver, so that he could use it as a drinking cup.
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The phrase “working from home” conjures up a picture of a person literally working from their home office, but that’s not always the case. Telecommuting, remote work, and virtual office are probably more appropriate terms because they offer the idea that people who work from home can also work from a variety of other locations. And of course, Digital Nomad is the ultimate term for location-less workers who can set up shop wherever they happen to be at the moment.
Whether you work primarily from home, or are always changing location, here are six alternative workspaces to consider.
These are professionally-managed office spaces and are most often found in major cities throughout the U.S. and the world. If you need a truly professional alternative to your home office, this is the option for you. A rental fee gives you access to high-speed internet, phones, printers, fax machines, large-screen monitors, and other office gadgets. You can either rent space at a communal table, a cubicle, or a private office depending on your needs. In the U.S., you can locate coworking spaces through websites like DeskWanted.com.
Long-known as a refuge for the at-home worker, coffee shops are an obvious choice for anyone looking to get out of the house for a few hours of caffeine-fueled work. Be aware of busy times because it can hard be to find a table during the morning and afternoon rushes, and don’t forget to purchase a coffee or scone every couple hours. Coffee shops are, after all, businesses which won’t exist without our patronage.
Depending on your location, public libraries can be fantastic places to work as a digital nomad. They provide just enough background noise and human interaction to make them more interesting than your empty home, and being surrounded by so much paper-based technology gives your brain a rest from all the gadgets it’s normally confronted with. The biggest advantage is that these spaces are completely free (no need to buy the obligatory cup of joe), and include free WiFi.
I have a friend who has managed, in one year, to work from Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, St. Louis, San Francisco, and a variety of other locations across the country because 1) he’s a telecommuter and 2) he has lots of friends who live in interesting places. If you’re able to travel, take advantage of your ability to work from anywhere and go see some friends. You’ll (hopefully) get a few free days of room and board, catch up with friends, make some fun memories, and continue to get your work done.
Independent bookstores, but also the big-box stores, are great places to retreat for a few hours of work. Voracious readers can strike up a relationship with employees to learn about new books worth reading while also keeping up with work. Like a coffee shop, you’ll want to make sure you spend a little bit of money every time you work from a bookstore. Even if you buy a new book every day, it’s still probably cheaper than renting a coworking space.
If you find yourself in a new place, unsure of where to go for WiFi and good workspaces, college libraries are ideal. Most have agreements with their town or city to be opened to the public as well as to their own students, and they’re often open much earlier or later than other alternative workspaces. Check with the front desk before settling into a cubicle in the corner to make sure their internet is accessible to the public and not just to students with special logins.
Readers, what are your favorite non-home locations for work? Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever telecommuted from?
Brie Weiler Reynolds is the Director of Content and Community at FlexJobs, the award-winning site for telecommuting, flexible schedule, and freelance job listings. For over four years, Brie has been telecommuting full-time as she and her husband move around the country, and she offers career, telecommuting, and work-life balance advice through the FlexJobs Blog and social media. Find her on Twitter @FlexJobs.
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Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]
This came about because they implemented a policy requiring students and parents to be responsible for their children's absences and missing homework. The school and teachers are being sued by parents who want their children's failing grades changed to passing grades even though those children were absent
"Hello! You have reached the automated answering service of your school. In order to assist you in connecting the right staff member, please listen to all your options before making a selection:
- To lie about why your child is absent, press 1
- To make excuses for why your child did not do his work,
- To complain about what we do, press 3
- To swear at staff members, press 4
- To ask why you didn't get information that was already enclosed in your newsletter and several flyers mailed to you,
- If you want us to raise your child, press 6
- If you want to reach out and touch, slap or hit someone,
- To request another teacher for the third time this year,
- To complain about bus transportation, press 9
- To complain about school lunches, press 0
- If you realize this is the real world and your child must be accountable and responsible for his/her own behavior, class work, homework, and that it's not the teachers' fault for your children's lack of
effort ...hang up and have a nice day!"
Origins: The Palisades Charter Schools are a consortium of public schools in Pacific Palisades, California, that have received charters from the
After vociferous complaints (and threats of lawsuits) from parents who contended they were unaware of, or didn't agree with, Palisades High's attendance policy (even though every student and parent had been informed of it), LAUSD officials said the failing marks might have to be voided because the attendance policy was not submitted to and approved by the school board. Without board approval, the school must follow the policies of the LAUSD, which states that students must be graded on the work they do and attendance may not be used as a reason to fail them.
Palisades High officials maintained that LAUSD district administrators had a copy of Palisades' attendance policy in their possession when they approved Palisades Charter High, and that in any case, Palisades' charter school status allowed school officials to set their own rules without inteference from the district. As Education Week noted, the LAUSD's "decision rankled the teachers, who argue[d] that their charter school
The putative answering machine message for Palisades Charter High quoted above was concocted in part as a reaction to the brouhaha over the school's attendance policy, and in part as a sardonic expression of all the usual frustrations teachers experience in dealing with students and parents: fabricated excuses for students' absences and uncompleted homework, blame that teachers are solely responsible for the failures of non-achieving students, complaints from parents about not having received information already sent to them several times, etc. However, the staff "voted" for the message only in the sense that they agreed with its sentiments (the circulating version of this piece often omits the introductory line "Too bad they can't actually use
Variations: A March 2009 version (circulated with an MP3 recording) identified the institution with the unusual phone message as Maroochydore High School, in Queensland, Australia, and added a further "menu option" of 'If you want this in another language, move to a country that speaks it.'
Last updated: 7 June 2015
Blair, Julie. "LAUSD Orders Charter School to Scrap Its Attendance Policy." Education Week. 27 March 2002.
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After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle.
Since then, however, Hanoi has transformed itself more dramatically than almost any other city in the world. Today, the city is an explosive capitalist volcano, and Vietnam is rapidly on its way to becoming a formidable economic and military power. “Many revolutions are begun by conservatives,” Christopher Hitchens once said, paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes, “because these are people who tried to make the existing system work and they know why it does not. Which is quite a profound insight. It used to be known in Marx’s terms as revolution from above.” That’s exactly what happened in Vietnam, though the revolutionaries weren’t conservatives. They were Communists.
Hanoi had a rough twentieth century. The French invaded and made it the capital of colonial French Indochina in 1887. The Empire of Japan seized the city in 1940 and annexed Vietnam to its fascistic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent state after World War II, and his Viet Minh forces controlled a few scraps of territory, but the French returned in force in 1946 and didn’t leave until Ho’s Communist army forced them out in 1954. Hanoi then became the capital of the misnamed Democratic Republic of North Vietnam. Decades passed in squalor and brutality. Ho’s centrally planned Marxist-Leninist system ravaged the economy, and war with the United States and the American-backed government of South Vietnam—which included aerial bombardment of Hanoi itself—made the devastation complete. More than 1 million Vietnamese died.
The North Vietnamese won their civil war in 1975 and imposed the same draconian economic and political system on the South. Saigon, the South’s former capital, suffered when the North took over. “All the schools were shut down,” says Tuong Vi Lam, who vividly remembers when her side lost the war. “My aunts and uncles were in college and they had to quit. They just couldn’t get there. Property was confiscated and given to northerners. Communist propaganda was even put in our math books. We had questions like this: ‘Yesterday a soldier killed three Americans and today he killed five. How many Americans did he kill total?’ The books don’t have those kinds of questions anymore, but they did for five or ten years.”
Vietnam was finally independent and unified, but it fared no better than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba—and almost everyone knew it, including many in the Communist leadership. In the mid-1980s, a fight broke out between those who wanted to continue with the old system and those who had already benefited from quiet micro-capitalist reforms enacted in 1979 and wanted to expand them. Southerners made noise about returning to the pre-Communist system that they knew, from personal experience, worked much better. The relative economic success of other Southeast Asian nations, especially Thailand, was obvious even to the ideologues.
The advocates of change won the argument, and in 1986, the government officially abandoned Marxist-Leninist economics and announced the Doi Moi reforms, defined as an attempt to create a “socialist-oriented market economy.” Presumably, party leaders left the word “socialist” in there because they were embarrassed by Marxism’s failures and couldn’t admit that they’d been wrong. Or perhaps they feared that their remaining supporters were allergic to the word “capitalism.” No matter. Vietnam officially junked Communism a mere 11 years after imposing it on South Vietnam.
State subsidies were abolished. Private businesses were allowed to operate again. Businessmen, investors, and employees could keep their profits and wages. Farmers could sell their produce on the open market and keep the proceeds instead of giving them up to the state. The results were spectacular. It took some time for a middle class to emerge, but from 1993 to 2004, the percentage of Vietnamese living in poverty dropped from 60 percent to 20 percent. Before Doi Moi, the command economy contracted, and inflation topped out at over 700 percent; it would eventually shrink to single digits. After years of chronic rice shortages, Vietnam became the world’s second-largest exporter of rice, after Thailand. Progress hasn’t slowed. In 2013, Vietnam’s economy grew by 8.25 percent. “The number of malls, shopping districts, and restaurants is amazing compared with when I was a kid,” says motivational speaker Hoan Do. “Eighteen years ago, the entire country was broken down. There was hardly any technology, but now even poor people can go to an Internet café and log on to Facebook and YouTube.”
The South led the way. “When the Communist leadership decided in the mid-1980s to put Karl Marx and Adam Smith into an economic blender and see what came out,” reporter David Lamb wrote, “Southerners, exposed to capitalism for decades, were far more comfortable than their northern brethren in adapting to the demands of free markets.” Yet Hanoi eventually liberalized, too, and though it still lags behind Saigon (which the government renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975), it has made breathtaking economic progress.
Hanoi’s economy looks and feels entirely unregulated; the city bursts with activity. Though luxury boutiques, technology stores selling Apple products, high-fashion clothing outlets, and international food chains are easy to find, individual street-front proprietorships predominate. The state still owns or controls some of the largest companies, but the vast majority of businesses are too small to be centrally managed. On a single block, I saw the following for sale: Vietnamese flags, Ho Chi Minh T-shirts, candles, incense, bolts of cloth, used clothing from the U.S., fake money to burn in offerings to ancestors, Angry Birds toys, exotic fruit, meat skewers, iPhones, tea, jewelry, Italian shoes, French pastries, spices, herbs, motorcycle helmets, bootleg CDs, bootleg cigarettes, Japanese BBQ, carpets, funeral boxes, silk, paintings, and bootleg paperbacks with misspelled blurbs on the back.
The city is extremely business-friendly. I asked a local man who works for an American company how hard it is for foreigners to invest and go into business in Hanoi. “The Vietnamese government makes it easy,” he says. “Just present them with a business plan, tell them what you want to do, and you’re good to go.” The same goes for small businesses. All you have to do, he says, “is rent the space, pay the taxes, and that’s it.”
The United States didn’t normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam until 1995, so American companies got into the game only recently, but their presence is evident now. It’s impossible to miss the Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Burger King franchises. General Motors, Dell, Visa, General Electric, and countless others have invested here, too. The Vietnamese want more and will soon get it: Washington is poised to enact the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with 11 Pacific Rim nations, including Vietnam. The TPP will remove outdated bureaucratic trade obstacles on both sides while enforcing labor standards, environmental protections, and intellectual property rights.
Vietnam even boasts its own high-technology start-ups. “The incubation and funding of tech start-ups is still a fragmented segment of our economy,” says Nguyen Pham, founder of the start-up incubator 5desire, “but we’re working on streamlining the process and modeling it rigorously after those in Silicon Valley. We organize technology events that attract world-class foreign speakers and investors. One of our notable events was Hackathon Vietnam 2014, where we partnered with Formation 8—a well-known venture capitalist firm from Silicon Valley—and with the ministry of science and technology in Vietnam. More than a thousand people attended, more than 60 percent of them developers.”
I’ve been to 15 formerly Communist countries, plus Cuba, which is still Communist. (See “The Last Communist City,” Spring 2014.) Vietnam is the only one with good cuisine. I can’t recall enjoying a single quality meal in Europe’s former Communist bloc. Marxism bulldozed restaurants along with everything else, and chefs in post-Communist Europe haven’t had much time to master their craft. Cuba’s food is still mostly terrible, though a handful of restaurants are privately owned and offer tolerable fare. The biggest problem there is a chronic shortage of quality ingredients. Yet Vietnam—still nominally Communist—somehow has outstanding food everywhere, even on the street. It must be some combination of the ingredients, the cooks, and the cuisine itself.
Prosperity never guarantees an aesthetically pleasing urban environment, but Hanoi is easy on the eyes. The city center is dominated by the charming but chaotic old quarter and the more stately and orderly French quarter, just minutes away on foot. Both neighborhoods are anchored by Hoan Kiem Lake, the city’s cultural center. Its name means “returned sword,” after the weapon that the gods supposedly gave Emperor Le Loi in the fifteenth century, which he used to drive out the invading Chinese. Hanoi sparkles with lakes—Hoan Kiem is only the most famous—and it’s studded with an even larger number of ancient Buddhist pagodas with vertical Chinese characters on the walls.
The most exquisite buildings are French and Chinese, but the simpler Vietnamese homes can also be striking. Many look as though the architects mashed Victorian, French, brownstone, and Thai architecture together, and then squeezed the final product into a vise to make it taller and narrower. (Homes and businesses get taxed by their width.) Vietnam’s Communists were wrong about almost everything, but at least they elided some of the mistakes made by their comrades elsewhere in the war against anything old. Hanoi is blessedly free of an asteroid belt of Soviet-style garbage architecture on the outskirts, the kinds that blight so many formerly Communist cities in Europe. I did see a few soul-crushing structures made of poured concrete, but for the most part, these kinds of buildings were never built, or were torn down, or have been overwhelmed by an explosion of new and better construction. Hanoi has grown exponentially since its worst days—the city’s population, under 1 million in 1979, now exceeds 7 million, making it larger than every American metropolis but New York—so perhaps the ugly stuff has just been obscured.
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Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements (TOHM), an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal focused on non-Parkinsonian tremor published by the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS), has now been accepted for inclusion by PubMed Central (PMC), the National Institutes of Health’s repository for peer-reviewed primary research reports in the life sciences.
TOHM, a newcomer in the field of movement disorders, was launched by CDRS in August 2011 at http://tremorjournal.org. The journal is set apart from other journals by its liberal article length policy (full-length articles may be up to 5,000 words) and its rapid turnaround time. First decisions on articles are made in 3.25 weeks from the time of submission, and acceptances are made in 9.85 weeks from the time of submission.
All articles archived in PMC are indexed in PubMed, which comprises more than 22 million citations in its database for biomedical literature. For journals, PMC submits article citations to PubMed as soon as their articles are live in PMC, after any publisher-specified embargo period. Citations usually appear in PubMed within 24 hours of submission to PMC. TOHM has no embargo period, so all articles from the journal are deposited immediately upon publication.
TOHM published 51 new articles since launching in 2011, with the number of submissions growing. The journal's website website has been visited nearly 12,000 times since its 2011 launch. For TOHM, being indexed in PMC will enable the journal’s content to be more readily discoverable and, the editor-in-chief expects, attract even more quality submissions.
"The past fifteen months have seen our journal launch, the website receive hundreds of submissions, and CDRS publish groundbreaking articles by leaders in the field of movement disorders. Now that TOHM is being indexed in PubMed, it confirms our center-stage place in the area of non-Parkinsonian movement disorders. That the indexing will allow for even greater visibility of these articles and impact of our research is extremely exciting," said journal Editor-in-Chief Elan D. Louis.
CDRS’ Director Rebecca Kennison commented on TOHM’s inclusion in PMC: “This is an important breakthrough moment for TOHM. Being included in PMC and indexed in PubMed will enable TOHM to continue to grow and confirms its prestige in providing an international platform for experts and specialists in the field of hyperkinetic movements. We continue to be honored to partner with Dr. Louis and his team and congratulate them on this milestone.”
Tremor and Other Hyperkinetic Movements (TOHM) is a rigorously peer-reviewed academic journal for the publication of scientific and clinical findings and innovations about tremor and hyperkinetic disorders. The journal aims to provide an international platform for experts and specialists in the field of hyperkinetic movements.
The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) at Columbia serves the digital research and scholarly communications needs of the faculty, students, and staff of Columbia University and its affiliates. Our mission is to increase the utility and impact of research produced at Columbia by creating, adapting, implementing, supporting, and sustaining innovative digital tools and publishing platforms for content delivery, discovery, analysis, data curation, and preservation. In pursuit of that mission, we also engage in extensive outreach, education, and advocacy to ensure that the scholarly work produced at Columbia University has a global reach and accelerates the pace of research across disciplines. CDRS, led by Rebecca Kennison, is one of six entities that comprise the Digital Programs and Technology Services branch of Columbia University Libraries/Information Services. The Center was created in July 2007 to address the ongoing evolution of researchers’ and scholars’ needs as new technologies, policies, and systems of knowledge support arise.
Columbia University Libraries/Information Services (CUL/IS) is one of the top five academic research library systems in North America. The collections include over 11 million volumes, over 150,000 journals and serials, as well as extensive electronic resources, manuscripts, rare books, microforms, maps, and graphic and audio-visual materials. The services and collections are organized into 22 libraries and various academic technology centers. The Libraries employs more than 500 professional and support staff. The website of the Libraries is the gateway to its services and resources: library.columbia.edu.
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November 26, 2012
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The High Cost of Dropping Out: Millions Struggle With High College Debt and No Degree. “Meanwhile, the rising cost of college is forcing many students to work long hours, which has been shown to reduce the odds of completing a degree, and is leading others to quit school outright. Ever-higher debt burdens heighten the consequences for those who drop out, making it harder for them to borrow money to buy a house or a car or to go back to school later on. . . . Even successfully completing a college degree is no guarantee of a successful career, especially in today’s still-shaky economy. There were 1.9 million unemployed college graduates in October, according to the Labor Department, a third of them younger than 35. By one estimate, about half of young graduates are either unemployed or are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree.”
Who could have seen this coming?
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Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the
National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. external link Learn more
Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL
Newspaper Page Text
Mrs. Chapman was
I might have to some
, Viola ever gave way to temper.
"Yes," she said sjowly and re
luctantly. "She sometimes gave
xyvay to sudden outbursts. - I
wouldn't call it temper though.
Itr wag just petulance,' caused by
frayed nerves, tjred after a long
day's work. -
The manager of the music store
where she worked was questioned
by the police.
"I dont',knov much about her
private life," he sajd, ''but she al
ways struck me as anice girl. Sjhe
worked hard. She never had any
callers. I don't think she was
called to the telephone once while
she worked for us. Everyone in
the place liked her. v '
"Sometimes she was nervous.
Then for a day or so she would
actqueerly. She would sfcem not
to care about h'er work, and she
wpuld be flippant.
"But that often happens with
working girls. Always there are
times when their nerves over
come them. Then they are flighty.
In Viola's case we never paid any
attention to these fits. They
didn't come often, anyway."
James B. Alliter, whofor 40
years was on the detective force
of Los Angeles, is the one man
who thinks he,canNexplain jthe
shooting of Edge by Miss Carver.
"Perhaps I'm not right about
this," said Alliter, "but I think
that the doctors ought to get
busy and get a name for a new
disease. I think Viola Caryer 4s
"I don't know what the disease
ntight be called unless-you Were
to make up a word like 'work-ing-girl-it-is.'
"It's this way: When the girl
6f the present day has to work
for-her living; when she is forced
to toil long, weary hours, standr
iqg on her feet most of the time;
when she receives for this labor
wages so poor that they barely
will allow her to feed and clothe
herself and will not allow her to
indulge m any recreation; some
thing is bound to happen, ttf their
"No woman can stand agstram
like that indefinitely andTemain
"Did you hear what Mrs.
Chapfaan, said a"bout Viola Car
ver" giving way to sudden, unex
plainable bursty of1 petulance?
Did you hear fhe. music jstore
manager talk about heT fits of
flightless when she was flippant
and didn't care about any, of the
things she usually cared most
about 2 '
"You mean that her mind was
unbalanced by her work?" asked
the reporter. "
"I mean," said Alilter, "that
every working girl of the pres
ent day is subjecttQ a new dis
ease, which, while it is upon her,"
robs her of her viewpoint. Go
and talk to the girls who work
for their living; talk to their
friends. You'll find out."
But Viola Carver will he tried
on the charge of "murder in the
first degree," and the representa
tive of the state of California- will
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The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a magnitude 3.8 earthquake struck about 2:20 a.m. 3 miles northeast of Harrah, a city of about 5,000 people about 20 miles east of Oklahoma City. That was followed nearly two hours later by a magnitude 3.9 temblor 5 miles northeast of the community.
The quakes were strong enough to knock merchandise off the shelves at an Ace Hardware store along with tiles from the ceiling. Store manager Tony Landrith said the falling paint, cleaner and other items along with the tiles caused the security alarm to go off and the police to respond.
When Landrith arrived at the store after the alarm company called him, he and the police discovered "a little bit of everything on every aisle" had been knocked off, he said.
Employees worked throughout the morning and afternoon to clean up. The store opened two hours late, he said.
Earl Burson, Harrah's city manager, said glass windows were shattered at buildings on the city's main street, Church Avenue, and the police department sustained cracks in the wall.
"I'm surprised we had as a little damage as we do," he said. No injuries were reported.
Like Landrith, Burson was woken up by a call after the alarm went off at City Hall after the first quake. After the second quake, alarms started going off throughout the community.
The USGS also reported that a third earthquake struck in north-central Oklahoma Tuesday morning. The magnitude 3.0 earthquake was 5 miles south of Medford at 5 a.m.
Earlier this week, the USGS reported seven small earthquakes shaking 15 to 30 miles northeast of Oklahoma City in a span of 14 hours.
The temblors are part of an increase in earthquakes across Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas that some scientists say could be connected to the oil and gas drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, and especially the wells in which the industry disposes of its wastewater.
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Peru’s lame duck quacks on
For the Herald
Ollanta Humala was expected to be anything but a weak leader
NEW YORK — When he was elected in 2011, many Peruvians feared that Ollanta Humala would join the ranks of left-wing Latin American leaders determined to dismantle the market-friendly neoliberal economic model in place in most of the region since the mid-1990s.
Three years into his administration, Humala has indeed turned out to be a disappointment, but for different reasons. This week, as he tries to secure a confidence vote for his sixth president of the Council of Ministers, Humala is increasingly looking like a lame duck. Facing deteriorating economic conditions, Peru will have to endure the next two years without effective leadership at presidential level.
Given his prior military and political career, Humala was expected to be anything but a weak president. He stormed into the public arena in 2000 when he attempted an unsuccessful military revolt against Alberto Fujimori, the democratically-elected president who turned into a dictator and implemented the market-friendly reforms that turned Peru into an economic miracle after democratic rule was restored in 2000.
After Fujimori’s fall in 2000, Humala was granted amnesty and continued his military career until he was forced to retire in 2004. Espousing a strong nationalist and confusingly populist rhetoric, he launched his presidential campaign in 2006. Criticized by his opponents as a puppet of Hugo Chávez, Humala ended up finishing above his rivals in the first round vote but lost a runoff against former president Alan García. Without a disciplined political party, Humala almost disappeared from the public sight during the García administration (2006-2011).
In 2011, with an equally confusing nationalist and populist platform, but having distanced himself from the Latin American Bolivarian left championed by Hugo Chávez, Humala won the presidential election. Drawing support from the growing lower middle-class who feared the alternative represented by Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the former president, Humala became president.
Once in office, he quickly put to bed fears that he would abandon the market-friendly economic model. Though he maintained a strong nationalist and anti-corruption rhetoric, Humala did not significantly deviate from his predecessors’ paths with his economic and social policies. He implemented an ambitious public works plan that included a much-needed subway in Lima, Peru’s capital. But his administration quickly showed that it lacked a clear roadmap and wasn’t sure what he wanted to accomplish in his administration.
The most revealing evidence of the lack of a plan has been the fragility of Humala’s cabinets. With two more years to go into his five-year term, Humala has already appointed six different people to the position of President of the Council of Ministers, the most important position in the Cabinet. Though cabinet instability is common in Peru, Humala has set a new record. His two predecessors, Alan García and Alejandro Toledo, had five different presidents of the Council of Ministers. If he keeps of shuffling cabinets at this speed, Humala will have as many as García and Toledo combined.
As Peruvians get into the electoral mood with the upcoming municipal elections later this year, Humala looks increasingly weak. His Gana Perú coalition has little presence in municipal governments. Even if his party had managed to field more candidates for mayoral races, the president’s plummeting approval numbers would not help much. Though past Peruvian presidents have struggled with their approval, Humala is unique in that his numbers have fallen despite the fact that he has avoided the type of scandals that tainted his predecessors. People no longer approve of him because he has made mistakes. They increasingly disapprove of him because they believe he has done very little.
As people begin to think about the 2016 presidential election, Humala also seems to lack a plan. His wife, Nadine Heredia, is more popular than him and would make a strong candidate. But according to some constitutional scholars, incumbent presidents’ spouses are banned from running. The fact that Nadine Heredia is widely perceived as Humala’s most influential adviser has also resulted in many people blaming her for the repeated cabinet crises during his administration.
Former president Alan García and Keiko Fujimori, the woman whom Humala defeated in 2011, lead presidential voting intention polls. If either of them wins, Humala will suffer a setback. It is true that no incumbent Peruvian president has succeeded in seeing his or her chosen candidate win a presidential election, but Humala might end up with not even a candidate in the 2016 race.
Congress is expected to narrowly pass a confidence vote on the new Cabinet today, provided that Humala agrees to replace a couple of names. Since Gana Perú needs the support of some of the many opposition groups in the unicameral legislature, Humala has been forced to make multiple concessions to secure passage of the confidence vote.
Yet, at the end of the day, today’s vote will not matter much. There are few hopes that the new Cabinet will last much longer than the previous ones. Even if it were to last, Humala is in such a weak position that he will hardly be able to do in his last two years in office what he has not accomplished so far.
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Looking after your clothes is a crucial element of living a more sustainable lifestyle. The better you look after the clothes, the longer they last and the less waste is created. The more you expand the lifetime of your purchases, the cost-per-wear increases and this isn’t just monetary. In terms of waste, this means the resources used to make the garment go further. Plus, you end up buying less overall. It’s a win-win situation. Taking care of your clothes so they go the distance involves commitment and know-how. Here’s the lowdown.
Skip the tumble dryer
Tumble drying is a huge waste of resources. Annually you could save nearly half a tonne of CO2 emissions for a household that runs a dryer approximately 200 times just by making a switch to other methods of drying your clothes. Secondly, it’s not good for your clothes. “It degrades materials quicker as it breaks down the fibers in the fabric,” Simon Turner, Marketing Director at clothes2orde, explained. This is why clothes often shrink in the drier. “Instead, let your clothes air dry on a rack or on the line, or pop them in the airing cupboard if you have one,” Turner added.
Not all drying is made equal
Now you’ve given up the dryer, it’s important to also get air drying right. “For light clothing, air drying in direct sunlight will help naturally bleach the garments, keeping your whites white. Conversely, dry coloured clothing out of direct sunlight to avoid color fading — dry garments inside out to help preserve colour too,” Clothes Doctor founder Lulu O’Connor suggested. Knitwear needs to be dried flat. “This ensures they don’t stretch and warp when the fibers are wet,” O’Connor confirmed.
Wash your clothes inside out
Unless there are specific stains on the outside you’re trying to tackle, washing clothes inside out is much more efficient. “Washing clothes inside out tackles where most of the dirt and oils are — the part of the clothes that touch your skin. Also, washing inside out will help avoid colour fading on the outside of the garment,” O’Connor pointed out.
Store your clothes with care
Workwear demands the most attention. “Always use proper shirt hangers and correct skirt hangers to maintain their right shape,” Turner said. “On the flip side, casual wear like cotton t-shirts are best served being folded to prevent distortion. The best tip with folding clothes is to follow the seams of the garment to prevent misshaping,” he added.
Invest in durable fabrics
Choose durable materials as these will keep their shape for the longest and prevent telltale signs of wearing like thinning. “If a material is see-through when you put it on, it’s unlikely to last you for many years so investing in higher quality fabrics will serve you in the long run,” Turner said.
Choose low temperatures
Most clothes can be washed at 30 degrees. Not only does this ensure they are not damaged in any way, but it also uses less energy. This is a double win for the planet.
Get good at handwashing
Hand washing is more gentle than machine washing, so your garments will last longer. Lots of delicate items are best off hand-washed. “Many of your garments that say ‘dry clean only’ can actually be hand-washed with a little care,” O’Connor pointed out. See also: items with embellishments like sequins or beads, materials like silk, delicate underwear and swimwear.
Sort those stains
Soaking stains in water as soon as you notice them is the best way to pre-treat them. “Don’t let stains dry onto clothing (except mud stains, which you’ll want to let dry and brush away) or the stain will set. We recommend soaking the affected area in warm water (remember to check the care label for the correct temperature) mixed with stain removal,” O’Connor suggested.
Ironing versus steaming
You will want both in your cleaning arsenal as they serve different purposes. “Steaming is a more gentle way to refresh and decrease clothing and better for light fabrics like cotton. Heavier fabrics like canvas and linen need to be ironed to fully eliminate creases,” O’Connor explained.
We only recommend products we have independently researched, tested, and loved. If you purchase a product found through our links, Sunday Edit may earn an affiliate commission.
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यतो धर्म: ततो जय:
Nivedita as a writer - 5
Nivedita was so fascinated by Kali. That her first book in India was "Kali, The Mother" which she started writing even when she was with Swamiji and others in Kashmir. Later, in 'Kali, the Mother', she was to set down what she felt the message of the goddess to be while in Kashmir: Arise, my child, and go forth a man! Bear manfully, what is thy lot to bear; that which comes to thy hand to be done, do with full strength, and fear not. Forget not that I, the giver of manhood, the giver of womanhood, the holder of victory, am thy Mother. Think not life is serious! What is destiny but thy Mother's play? Come, be My playfellow awhile, meet all happenings merrily . . . . Ask not of plans. Need the arrow have any plan when it is loosed from the bow? Such art thou. When the life is dedicated, the plan will stand revealed. Till then, O child of time, know nothing! . . . Ask nothing. . . .Seek nothing. . . . Plan nothing. . . . Let my will flow through thee, as the ocean through an empty shell.
Shrink not from defeat; embrace despair. Uproot every interest that would conflict with mine. Look for no mercy for thyself, and I shall make thee bearer of great vessels of mercy to others. Be steadfast in the toil I set thee. Strong, fearless, resolute-when the sun sets and the game is done thou shalt know well, little one, that I am Kali, am thy Mother.
It was this understanding of the Mother Kali that when Swami Vivekananda returned from Kshir Bhavani, Nivedita had laid her head at the feet of her guru and said, "Now I know my Divine Mother." Constant meditation on Kali had become so natural with Nivedita that she felt the presence of the Power that Kali symbolized. The editor of 'The Hindu Review' had once been to her house and wrote about his interesting interview with her as follows, "Once I was sitting with Nivedita in her house in Bosepara Lane, sipping tea out of her quaint Swadeshi cup. Suddenly the sky was overcast with black scowling clouds as oftentimes happens in our early summer evening; and there was immediately a marked change in the mood of my hostess. Her face seemed at once to reflect this awfully dynamic mood of Nature. It beamed with a new light, at once awful and lovely. And she sat silent, apprarently unconscious for the moment of my presence, looking intently through the window, at the gathering gloom about the earth and the heaven, and listening like one in trance, to the rising tumult of the growing storm. And just as there came, in a little while, the first flash of lightening followed by the crash of first thunder, she cried out with the bated breath – "Kali!"
To be continued...
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"Girard's Rose" azalea (Rhododendron "Girard's Rose") is an evergreen azalea hybrid prized for the heavy, reliable crop of deep rose flowers it produces in spring and for its compact, tidy form. This azalea, which grows about 2 to 3 feet tall with a similar spread, is potentially cultivated well across U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5 through 8. Selecting and preparing an appropriate planting site and providing this azalea with excellent cultural care encourage rapid establishment and vigorous, healthy growth and flowering.
Choose a planting site that receives filtered sunlight, is protected from intense, afternoon sunlight, has excellent drainage and has acidic soil. Dig a planting hole for the "Girard's Rose" azalea in that site, making the hole at least two to three times wider than the plant's root mass and as deep as the root mass. If you want to plant several azaleas in a small area, consider working a 2- to 3-inch layer of an organic matter soil amendment, such as peat moss or well-rotted compost, into the top 6 to 8 inches of soil to improve its drainage and fertility.
Pull the azalea's root mass gently out of its container, but, if necessary, water the plant thoroughly prior to removing the container to make the task easier. Loosen the plant's pot-bound roots. If the plant is not in a container but planted in the ground, then gently dig around its roots and remove it from its location.
Set the "Girard's Rose" azalea's root mass in the center of the prepared planting hole. Add or remove soil under the roots as needed to ensure that the azalea is planted at the same depth it was grown in the container or its previous location. Fill the space around the root mass with soil you removed to dig the hole, gently firming the soil downward as you proceed to remove major air pockets.
Water the newly planted azalea slowly and deeply to settle soil around the roots and to encourage establishment. Following planting, water the azalea two to three times per week until it is established. Once the azalea is established, provide the plant with about 1 inch of water every two weeks whenever rainfall is inadequate. As a general rule, wet the soil to depth of 8 to 12 inches with each watering.
Spread an organic material mulch such as pine straw, shredded leaves or wood chips around the azalea in a loose layer about 3 inches thick. Keep the mulch pulled back 6 to 12 inches from the azalea's base to avoid trapping moisture against the stem and to prevent harboring pests. Properly applied mulch conserves soil moisture, regulates soil temperature and suppresses weeds.
Trim the "Girard's Rose" azalea lightly following flowering and as needed until midsummer. Pruning in late summer, fall or winter affects the next year's blooms. Cut back overly vigorous and out-of-place branches, remove diseased and damaged parts of the plant, thin out crowded, dense growth to improve air circulation and otherwise shape the azalea as desired using a sharp, sterile pruning shears to make each cut just above a bud or junction with another branch.
Fertilize the azalea lightly following flowering each year using an acid-forming fertilizer or fertilizer labeled for azaleas use if the shrub exhibits slowed growth or a nutrient deficiency. Broadcast the fertilizer evenly over an area that covers most of the azalea's roots, or to just beyond the shrub's outermost branch tips, and water the fertilized area. If the soil's pH is above 6, then generally the shrub will exhibit a deficiency of a micronutrient, such as iron, which appears as interveinal yellowing on new leaves. In that case, apply a pH-lowering supplement or foliar micronutrient spray.
Things You Will Need
- Shovel or spade
- Organic matter soil amendment (optional)
- Tape measure (optional)
- Hose or other watering tool
- Organic material mulch
- Sharp, sterile pruning shears
- Acid-forming fertilizer or fertilizer labeled for azaleas (optional)
- pH-lowering supplement or foliar micronutrient spray (optional)
- Having the soil tested is the best way to determine its pH and what type and amount of amendments are warranted.
- Missouri Botannical Garden: Rhododendron "Girard's Rose"
- University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences: Evergreen Azaleas
- University of Missouri Extension: Growing Azaleas and Rhododendrons
- University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences: Selecting and Growing Azaleas
- University of Florida IFAS Extension: Azaleas at a Glance
- Liz Gregg/Photodisc/Getty Images
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You can use a watchpoint to stop execution whenever the value of an expression changes, without having to predict a particular place where this may happen. (This is sometimes called a data breakpoint.) The expression may be as simple as the value of a single variable, or as complex as many variables combined by operators. Examples include:
intoccupies 4 bytes).
You can set a watchpoint on an expression even if the expression can
not be evaluated yet. For instance, you can set a watchpoint on
‘*global_ptr’ before ‘global_ptr’ is initialized.
GDB will stop when your program sets ‘global_ptr’ and
the expression produces a valid value. If the expression becomes
valid in some other way than changing a variable (e.g. if the memory
pointed to by ‘*global_ptr’ becomes readable as the result of a
malloc call), GDB may not stop until the next time
the expression changes.
Depending on your system, watchpoints may be implemented in software or hardware. GDB does software watchpointing by single-stepping your program and testing the variable’s value each time, which is hundreds of times slower than normal execution. (But this may still be worth it, to catch errors where you have no clue what part of your program is the culprit.)
On some systems, such as most PowerPC or x86-based targets, GDB includes support for hardware watchpoints, which do not slow down the running of your program.
watch [-l|-location] expr [thread thread-id] [mask maskvalue]
Set a watchpoint for an expression. GDB will break when the expression expr is written into by the program and its value changes. The simplest (and the most popular) use of this command is to watch the value of a single variable:
(gdb) watch foo
If the command includes a
argument, GDB breaks only when the thread identified by
thread-id changes the value of expr. If any other threads
change the value of expr, GDB will not break. Note
that watchpoints restricted to a single thread in this way only work
with Hardware Watchpoints.
Ordinarily a watchpoint respects the scope of variables in expr
(see below). The
-location argument tells GDB to
instead watch the memory referred to by expr. In this case,
GDB will evaluate expr, take the address of the result,
and watch the memory at that address. The type of the result is used
to determine the size of the watched memory. If the expression’s
result does not have an address, then GDB will print an
[mask maskvalue] argument allows creation
of masked watchpoints, if the current architecture supports this
feature (e.g., PowerPC Embedded architecture, see PowerPC Embedded.) A masked watchpoint specifies a mask in addition
to an address to watch. The mask specifies that some bits of an address
(the bits which are reset in the mask) should be ignored when matching
the address accessed by the inferior against the watchpoint address.
Thus, a masked watchpoint watches many addresses simultaneously—those
addresses whose unmasked bits are identical to the unmasked bits in the
watchpoint address. The
mask argument implies
(gdb) watch foo mask 0xffff00ff (gdb) watch *0xdeadbeef mask 0xffffff00
rwatch [-l|-location] expr [thread thread-id] [mask maskvalue]
Set a watchpoint that will break when the value of expr is read by the program.
awatch [-l|-location] expr [thread thread-id] [mask maskvalue]
Set a watchpoint that will break when expr is either read from or written into by the program.
info watchpoints [list…]
This command prints a list of watchpoints, using the same format as
info break (see Set Breaks).
If you watch for a change in a numerically entered address you need to dereference it, as the address itself is just a constant number which will never change. GDB refuses to create a watchpoint that watches a never-changing value:
(gdb) watch 0x600850 Cannot watch constant value 0x600850. (gdb) watch *(int *) 0x600850 Watchpoint 1: *(int *) 6293584
GDB sets a hardware watchpoint if possible. Hardware watchpoints execute very quickly, and the debugger reports a change in value at the exact instruction where the change occurs. If GDB cannot set a hardware watchpoint, it sets a software watchpoint, which executes more slowly and reports the change in value at the next statement, not the instruction, after the change occurs.
You can force GDB to use only software watchpoints with the
set can-use-hw-watchpoints 0 command. With this variable set to
zero, GDB will never try to use hardware watchpoints, even if
the underlying system supports them. (Note that hardware-assisted
watchpoints that were set before setting
can-use-hw-watchpoints to zero will still use the hardware
mechanism of watching expression values.)
Set whether or not to use hardware watchpoints.
Show the current mode of using hardware watchpoints.
For remote targets, you can restrict the number of hardware watchpoints GDB will use, see set remote hardware-breakpoint-limit.
When you issue the
watch command, GDB reports
Hardware watchpoint num: expr
if it was able to set a hardware watchpoint.
rwatch commands can only set
hardware watchpoints, because accesses to data that don’t change the
value of the watched expression cannot be detected without examining
every instruction as it is being executed, and GDB does not do
that currently. If GDB finds that it is unable to set a
hardware breakpoint with the
rwatch command, it
will print a message like this:
Expression cannot be implemented with read/access watchpoint.
Sometimes, GDB cannot set a hardware watchpoint because the data type of the watched expression is wider than what a hardware watchpoint on the target machine can handle. For example, some systems can only watch regions that are up to 4 bytes wide; on such systems you cannot set hardware watchpoints for an expression that yields a double-precision floating-point number (which is typically 8 bytes wide). As a work-around, it might be possible to break the large region into a series of smaller ones and watch them with separate watchpoints.
If you set too many hardware watchpoints, GDB might be unable to insert all of them when you resume the execution of your program. Since the precise number of active watchpoints is unknown until such time as the program is about to be resumed, GDB might not be able to warn you about this when you set the watchpoints, and the warning will be printed only when the program is resumed:
Hardware watchpoint num: Could not insert watchpoint
If this happens, delete or disable some of the watchpoints.
Watching complex expressions that reference many variables can also exhaust the resources available for hardware-assisted watchpoints. That’s because GDB needs to watch every variable in the expression with separately allocated resources.
If you call a function interactively using
any watchpoints you have set will be inactive until GDB reaches another
kind of breakpoint or the call completes.
GDB automatically deletes watchpoints that watch local
(automatic) variables, or expressions that involve such variables, when
they go out of scope, that is, when the execution leaves the block in
which these variables were defined. In particular, when the program
being debugged terminates, all local variables go out of scope,
and so only watchpoints that watch global variables remain set. If you
rerun the program, you will need to set all such watchpoints again. One
way of doing that would be to set a code breakpoint at the entry to the
main function and when it breaks, set all the watchpoints.
In multi-threaded programs, watchpoints will detect changes to the watched expression from every thread.
Warning: In multi-threaded programs, software watchpoints have only limited usefulness. If GDB creates a software watchpoint, it can only watch the value of an expression in a single thread. If you are confident that the expression can only change due to the current thread’s activity (and if you are also confident that no other thread can become current), then you can use software watchpoints as usual. However, GDB may not notice when a non-current thread’s activity changes the expression. (Hardware watchpoints, in contrast, watch an expression in all threads.)
See set remote hardware-watchpoint-limit.
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Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
From Last Days of Mankind (1918)
Translated by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry
Schalek: …You are a combatant, and I’d like to find out how its feels. Most of all: how do you feel afterward?
Lieutenant: Well, it is strange. I feel like a king who has suddenly become a beggar. You know, it almost feels like being a king, so high above the enemy city. There they are below – helpless. No one can run away, no one can save himself or hide. You have power over them all. It’s majestic – all else becomes insignificant.
Schalek: I can identify with that feeling. Did you ever bomb Venice?…What, you have scruples? Well, I’ll tell you something. Venice is a problem worth thinking about. We entered the war filled with romantic ideas…
Lieutenant: Who did?
Schalek: We did. We intended to wage it with chivalry. Slowly and after painful lessons we had to change our attitudes. As recently as a year ago, who among us wouldn’t have cringed at the thought of dropping bombs on Venice! And now? Everything has changed. If Venice shoots at our soldiers, we have to shoot at Venice – calmly, openly, and without sentimentality.
Lieutenant: Don’t worry. I’ve bombed Venice.
Schalek: Good for you.
Lieutenant: In peacetime I used to spend my vacations in Venice. I loved it. But when I bombed it from the air – no, I didn’t feel a spark of false romanticism. We all flew home, happily. It was our day of honor – our day!
Schalek: That’s what I wanted to hear! Now your buddies from the U-boats expect me. I trust they are as gallant as you.
Schalek: …May I touch on a delicate problem? Tell me, what did you feel when you drilled that colossus of a ship into its wet and silent grave with so many human beings aboard?
Officer: My first feeling was one of unmitigated joy.
Schalek: That’s what I wanted to hear! I have now gained a conviction: The Adriatic Sea will remain ours!
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The 12-fan NHERI Wall of Wind Experimental Facility (WOW EF) at FIU is the largest and most powerful university research facility of its kind and is capable of simulating a Category 5 hurricane – the highest rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. At FIU, we are dedicated to conducting impactful research and are uniquely positioned to address the many challenges of creating a more hurricane resilient community through innovative product and technology development.
What Can the NHERI Wall of Wind Experimental Facility (WOW EF) Do For You?
The Wall of Wind team is partnering with commercial industry for testing and validating “code-plus” concepts and products, including forensic engineering and modeling in our research facility.
Examples of what can be tested at the WOW:
Examples of our testing capabilities are available here.
The services provided by the NHERI WOW EF to industrial partners include:
View the process from initial contact, to proposal submission, to project execution (flow chart coming soon)
The external Usage Rates and Cost Breakdown document provides the rates associated with Industrial Projects as well as a breakdown of the costs covered under each service.
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The bad news: SAT reading scores have reached an all-time low, and recently released NAEP scores reveal that American students' vocabulary growth is "flat." The good news: It's no longer 2012. It's 2013, a new year, a time to buy gym memberships and to overhaul your vocabulary instruction. Just do it.
Here are a few good vocabulary resolutions that you can put into practice in 2013 that can empower your students to take responsibility for their own vocabulary development.
Hand over the vocabulary scepter.
End the convention of being the only one to assign vocabulary lists in your classroom. Every one of your students has a unique vocabulary, so a one-size-fits-all approach to vocabulary instruction is so 2012. Make 2013 the year when you pass the vocabulary scepter on to your students to choose the words they want to learn. Encourage students to grab text from a reading assignment and make their own word list, and to then whittle down the list to those words they don't know or to those words they think are essential to understanding a text. You can set the guidelines [e.g., create a list with a) 5 words you don't know b) 5 words essential to understanding this author's point of view, and c) 5 words your classmates should learn, etc.], but allow the students to do the word picking. By letting students choose the words, they will be more self-motivated to learn them.
(To read more about Vocabulary Self-Selection, click here.)
Go beyond definitions.
If you teach your students that their vocabulary goal is to memorize a bunch of words and corresponding definitions to pass a quiz next Tuesday, what message are you sending? You are unwittingly implying that understanding words in context and using words in a meaningful way is beside the point. This year, begin showing students that a dictionary definition is a place to start, but that exploring word relationships and usage is the place to end. Reward students for finding the right definition of a word in context. For example, if students run across the use of vet as a verb meaning "to examine carefully," have them identify the correct meaning branch of a Visual Thesaurus word map that fits that particular context.
Also, ask students to paraphrase dictionary definitions into language any 3rd grader would know and to then find example sentences that demonstrate how a word is used in the wild. Here is a sentence example plucked from the Vocabulary.com dictionary page for the word vet showing its use as a verb:
Underwriters are meant to vet clients and work only on offerings that make sense.
—New York Times Nov 20, 2012
And, finally, only after students have explored usage examples, assess their word knowledge by having them use a recently learned word in an original context.
(To read about another activity that pushes students beyond dictionary definitions, click here.)
You don't even have to mention Latin, Greek, or (heaven forbid) Anglo-Norman origins. In 2013, emphasize morphology (word parts) over etymology (word origins). Get students to recognize common patterns in words so that they can approach unfamiliar words with a head start. If your class is discussing socialism, point out that words ending in -ism often represent a philosophical or political doctrine. If the word philanthropy pops up, go on a brief tangent and identify other words containing anthro and phil (e.g., anthropoid, anthropology, bibliophile, philosophy, etc.). These detours into morphology will lead students to recognize English as the mishmash of roots that it is, and to be less intimidated the next time they encounter an unfamiliar word that contains a familiar root.
(To read more about teaching morphology, read this Book Nook excerpt or check out this lesson plan.)
Teach vocabulary through word choice.
Understanding vocabulary is not just a reading skill (even though it is usually categorized that way on standardized exams). Expect students to pay attention to word choice as they write and speak. Take the time to circle a few lackluster or trite words in a student's first draft. Then, ask students to use the Visual Thesaurus to help them find a few better words to replace those stale words. You could even have them write about word choice (e.g., "I replaced the word interesting with riveting because…"). The "I replaced x-word with y-word because" sentence frame will force students to realize that word choice should be deliberate.
(To read more about word choice, click here.)
Practice what you preach.
We all tend to stay in our own vocabulary comfort zones, including teachers — rarely taking risks with hard-to-pronounce words or words that don't come naturally to us. But, if you reveal a little vocabulary vulnerability and risk, then you are creating a classroom environment where word experimentation and word study are encouraged and practiced. If you run across a word you don't know, model for your students how you learn it: by looking it up, by paraphrasing its dictionary definiton, by exploring it in the context of a few sentence examples, and then by using it in an original sentence.
Turning over a new vocabulary instruction leaf in 2013 is not as painful as it might sound. As an adult with an expansive vocabulary, you have already learned how to teach yourself vocabulary. Now, you just need to reveal to your students the little tricks that you use for learning new words. It's not about the distribution of word lists, memorizing definitions, or even standardized reading exams. It's about getting students to realize that they can be in charge of their own vocabulary learning, and that they are not stuck with the same set of words that they knew back in 2012.
Georgia Scurletis is Director of Curriculum for the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. Before coming to Thinkmap, she spent 18 years as a curriculum writer and classroom teacher. Georgia has written curriculum materials for a variety of Web sites (WGBH, The New York Times Learning Network, Edsitement) and various school districts. While teaching high school English in Brooklyn, she was a recipient of the New York State English Council's Educators of Excellence Award, the Brooklyn High Schools' Recognition Award, and The New York Times' Teachers Who Make a Difference Award.Click here to read other articles by Georgia Scurletis
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Homeowners can benefit from seeking the advice of an Arborist in Weston, CT when there is any question about the landscaping around the home. The information that this professional can provide will help with all sorts of issues. Here are a few of the types of support that the arborist can provide.
Identifying Flora and Fauna
After buying a new home, the owner notices some beautiful but unusual plants in some of the flowerbeds or growing along the back wall of the property. Rather than dig them up, the owner would like to know more about them. By calling an arborist in Weston, CT and making an appointment for the professional to inspect the plants, the homeowner may find that he or she has a rare and valuable plant in the yard. With that in mind, the arborist can provide some tips on how to care for it properly.
Worries About Trees and Shrubs
If the homeowner is a little concerned about the condition of certain trees or shrubs on the property, having an arborist inspect them makes a lot of sense. The professional can determine if the trees are infected in some sort of manner, and what can be done to restore them to health. In some cases, the plant life may be in need of additional nutrients in order to grow properly. When that is the case, the arborist can provide guidelines that the homeowner can use in selecting the right fertilizers.
Planning Changes to a Landscape
The advice of an arborist will also come in handy if the homeowner wants to make some changes to the landscape. That includes determining if a tree or shrub can be transplanted without any problem, what sort of plant life will grow in the soil, and even tips on how to place new plants so that they will thrive in the years to come. For people who love the idea of a beautiful garden but are not sure how to achieve the desired effect, the advice of a professional will make a huge difference.
Remember that an arborist is an expert in plant life, and has a lot to share. Put that knowledge to good use and make the most of the landscaping around the house. Doing so will ensure that the plants look great for many years to come. Visit website for more information.
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Empiricists study the world as it is. Reformers try to create the world as it should be. These Accountants and Missionaries do not always see eye to eye.
The history of the treatment of the mentally ill makes painful reading, at least to modern sensibilities. The mentally ill have been abused, ridiculed, stripped of dignity and legal rights, and shunned by the public, who feared their madness. The mad were seen as dangerous and a nuisance. In their madness they might strike out at you, subject you to abuse, to unpleasant sights and embarrassing outbursts, and at the very least would need help and compassion while not being able to give much in return. For example, when we are depressed we have less to offer our friends, and more need of their support, encouragement and tolerance for our lack of contribution.
In the face of these historical abuses, in 1796 the Quakers’ York Retreat offered humane and moral treatment, on the Christian assumption that, whatever the sufferer’s behavioural degradation; the inner light of humanity could never be extinguished. Since that time we have become kinder, and more liberal and generous about disordered comportment. We know that not all mental illness is terminal, irreversible and dangerous. Nowadays we want to reduce stigma, that badge of shame and disgrace which some in society attach to those with characteristics, behaviours or beliefs they find disturbing. Hence a missionary movement among mental healthcare professionals to normalise mental distress, to understand the perspective of even the oddest point of view, and to break down the shame of admitting a mental affliction.
I was always somewhat surprised when, even in the privacy of my office, beset with problems and worries, my patient’s first words after bursting into tears were always “I’m sorry”. I would mumble something about not needing to apologise for having emotions, but in the purely social sense, my tearful patients were right. They had sent out a very powerful distress signal, generally without meaning to, had broken the taboo of emotional restraint and now had to justify this dramatic call for assistance. They felt they were being a drag, and didn’t want to be.
So, if every right thinking person in the psycho-business should be de-stigmatising mental illness, how do we deal with the fact that some of the mentally ill are dangerous? Ideally, we would follow the empirical tradition, and give an accurate and balanced message: “Most people with mental illness are no more dangerous than anyone else, but a minority are more prone to violence. It is difficult to predict dangerousness. Here are the facts and you can judge for yourself”.
What are the facts? In the behavioural sciences, facts are always a work in progress, but the overall picture is now reasonably clear: schizophrenics are more violent as a category, something of the order of 4 times more violent, perhaps even 5 times higher. Given that most people are not very violent at all, being four times more violent is still not very dangerous, but it is an appreciable increase. Drug takers are 10 times more violent. Perhaps shunning some people is a prudent policy. It is certainly within the discretion of any citizen to judge that a fourfold increase in even a very small risk is something worth avoiding, particularly if it can be done without too much bother.
At this point we need to cover just a few technical issues. The best technique to determine violence rates is a prospective study in which you define a population sample and study them long term. Birth cohorts are the gold standard. Follow this large sample, find out who gets schizophrenia, and then take objective measures of violence (arrests, cautions, convictions, jail sentences for example) and then you have your rates of violence, both absolute and relative to those who do not have schizophrenia. Here are some findings, which I have drawn from a paper I will discuss later on:
Hodgins (), in a 30-year follow-up of an unselected Swedish birth cohort, found that compared with those with no mental disorder, males with major mental disorder had a 4-fold and women a 27.5-fold increased risk of violent offences. No separate data were provided for schizophrenia. A later study using the same methodology revealed similar findings ().
The first cohort study to demonstrate the quantitative risk of violent behaviour for specific psychotic categories followed an unselected birth cohort of 12 058 individuals prospectively for 26 years (). The risk of violent offences among males with schizophrenia was 7-fold higher than controls without mental disorder.
Arseneault () studied the past-year prevalence of violence in 961 young adults who constituted 94% of a total city birth cohort. Three Axis I disorders were uniquely associated with violence after controlling for demographic risk factors and all other comorbid disorders: alcohol dependence, marijuana dependence and schizophrenic spectrum disorder.
Probably the most important study in the violence literature to date is that of Swanson (). Using a sample of 10 059 adult residents from Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study sites (), the authors examined the relationship between violence and psychiatric disorder. Eight per cent of those with schizophrenia alone were violent, compared with 2% of those without mental illness. Comorbidity with substance abuse increased this percentage to 30%.
Two factors appear to discriminate those with schizophrenia at increased risk of committing violent acts: comorbid substance abuse and acute psychotic symptoms.
It is important to note that because there is an increase in violence risk in those without comorbidity, substance abuse merely increases the level of risk rather than causing it (Arsenault , 2000; ). Hence, the risk from substance abuse appears to be additive.
In Dunedin, New Zealand, 94% of a total city birth cohort were followed up at age 21 years. Without considering comorbidity, just over 10% of past-year violence committed by these young adults was attributable to schizophrenic spectrum disorders
So, how has psychiatry responded to this awkward junction of facts and missions? The Royal College of Psychiatrists currently gives the following statement as a key fact about schizophrenia: Many people think that schizophrenia makes people violent. This is the exception, not the rule. People with schizophrenia are more likely to be victims of violence by others.
Comment: Well, this presentation is not entirely balanced. Gang members are also likely to be victims of violence by others. They are also violent themselves. Schizophrenia makes people four times more violent. Their violence is an exception, but these exceptions happen four times more frequently.
So, what other exhibits should we look at?
One of the better known papers in the field is Violence and schizophrenia: examining the evidence, from which I had drawn the above papers on violence rates.
They say: It is now accepted that people with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to be violent than other members of the general population. A less acknowledged fact is that the proportion of societal violence attributable to schizophrenia is small.
Comment: So, they are more violent, but make a small contribution to “societal” violence? How can that be so? Now you see it, now you don’t? Or is there some real reason why their increased violence does not have an impact on society?
Here is their argument, in the expanded form of a subsequent book chapter: Criminal and violent behaviour in schizophrenia by Walsh and Buchanan in (Eds) Murray, Jones, Susser, van Os and Cannon (2003) The Epidemiology of Schizophrenia, Cambridge University Press.
It is now generally accepted that people with schizophrenia, albeit by virtue of the activity of a small subgroup, are significantly more likely to be violent than members of the general
population, but the proportion of societal violence attributable to this group is small.
They continue thus:
To prevent unnecessary stigmatization of the seriously mentally ill, with all the attendant difficulties, it is the duty of researchers to present a balanced picture. By neglecting to report measures of both relative and absolute risk a skewed picture may emerge. An example of a balanced report found that men with schizophrenia were up to five times more likely to be convicted of serious violence than the general population (Wallace et al., 1998). Results also presented indicated that 99.97% of those with schizophrenia would not be convicted of serious violence in a given year and that the probability that any given patient with schizophrenia will commit homicide is tiny (approximate annual risk 1:3000 for men and 1:33000 for women).
Comment: Although intending to be balanced, this is another misleading presentation. Fahy did better in earlier papers in which he said that schizophrenics were about 4 times more violent than ordinary members of the public, but that the absolute rates were very low. Let us study some of the assertions:
“99.97% of those with schizophrenia would not be convicted of serious violence in a given year”.
Comment: Presumably this is intended to be reassuring. What does 99.97% mean? It sounds like 100%. In his marvellous “Reckoning with Risk” (2003) Gerd Gigerenzer showed that percentages with decimal points were almost impossible for most people to understand. (I had to count the zeros, and got it wrong the first time round). The best way to make the numbers transparent is to convert them to natural frequencies, ordinary numbers without fractions or decimal points. Using this approach we can say that 9997 schizophrenics in 10,000 won’t be convicted of violence, but 3 will. So 3 in10,000 schizophrenics (10,000 minus 9997 = 3) will get convicted of serious violence. Using the usual yardstick for rare events, that means that 30 per 100,000 schizophrenics are convicted of serious violence each year.
What is the rate of convictions per thousand in the general public? It has not been given for comparative purposes, so the percentage figure is difficult to assess. However, it has been admitted that schizophrenics are 5 times more violent. Thus we can calculate that the rate for mentally well citizens would be roughly 6 per 100,000. One popular proposal to make statistics easier to understand is to place the frequency statistics in the context of villages, towns and cities. Therefore, if you spent a year in a town of 100,000 schizophrenics you might not be at too much risk yourself, but there would be about 30 violent crimes in that town. You might find this somewhat alarming. A neighbouring town of ordinary citizens would have 6 violent crimes to contend with. People will be people, you may say, but from a civilized point of view, every violent crime is unnecessary. It is likely that the reputations of these towns would differ significantly. Which town would you wish to live in, if you were free to choose?
(Paradoxically, the Press in the first town would never bother to report that the accused was a schizophrenic. It would be redundant, so in that town the media could not be accused of stigmatising mental illness.)
The other issue, never covered in these discussions, is that the overall risk rate is not a good predictor of the perceived personal risk rate. Violence is most likely to come from someone you know, with whom you are in a dispute, for whatever reason, usually because of tangled love affairs, business deals and, most of all, criminal activities. Most people know this, and know the sort of people they ought to avoid. The fear caused by schizophrenia is that it is associated with totally motiveless crimes. There is no way you can protect yourself by regulating your behaviour or your friendship patterns. You might be sitting on a bus, minding your own business, when a passing stranger stabs you to death in a matter of fact way, as happened recently to a school girl. It may seem odd to a statistician, but that sort of thing bothers us. In Kahneman and Tversky’s phrase, it has “salience”. To die at the hand of a jilted lover is bad enough, but to die because of a delusion is senseless, and gives us no chance of security. We fear more than statistics.
Now we go on to the murder statistics: The probability that a schizophrenic will commit murder each year is 1 in 3000.
Comment: Why so high? Can that be right? (I have checked the publication to make sure).That translates to a murder rate of 33 per 100,000. In Britain the annual murder rate is 1.2 to 1.4 per 100,000. Out of charity I will take the higher estimate of 1.4. (The more peaceable a society, the more it makes sense to give the figures per million, and 14 per million is the usual British estimate). This suggests that schizophrenics are 23 times more murderous. Something wrong here, I fear. Are these authors really arguing that 1:3000 is a low rate? It would be like moving from the UK to South Africa or Columbia, currently among the most murderous nations on the planet. I hope there is something wrong with their figures, because if they are accurate the implications are alarming. There must have been a miscalculation, because if the figures above are correct in showing that there are 30 violent crimes per 100,000 schizophrenics, then fewer of them will go on the whole way to murder, and the homicide figures should be much lower.
A few years ago the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists was reported as having said that schizophrenics caused only about 10% of the violence. Given that schizophrenics are at most 1% of the population (and probably only 0.7%) this was tantamount to saying they were at least 10 times more dangerous than normal. Four or five times are the more accurate figures.
Looking at the more recent Royal College of Psychiatry report: Rethinking risk to others in mental health services Final report of a scoping group (June 2008) provides us with fresh estimates of dangerousness.
It is estimated that 5% of homicides are committed by people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. (page 18)
Comment: A truthful statement. That is exactly what one would expect, if schizophrenics were 1% of the public and committed 5 times more violent crimes. Their greater rate of violence translates directly into a proportionately greater share of “societal” violence.
The incidence of mental illness among those remanded for acts of violence is relatively high: Taylor & Gunn (1984) found psychosis in 11% of those remanded for homicide and 9% of those remanded for other acts of violence. Similarly, violence in mental health services is not infrequent. The UK700 study (Walsh et al, 2001) found physical assaults had been committed by 20% of patients over a 2-year period and 60% had behaved violently over the same period. Taking the figure of 1 homicide per 20 000 patients with schizophrenia per annum, over the 20 years of a typical patient ‘lifetime’ (assuming active disease from the age of 20 to 40 years) the risk per patient is 1 in 1000 (Maden, 2007). The occurrence of a homicide by a patient with a mental disorder also has potentially devastating implications for the professionals involved. (page 20).
Comment: The homicide would have devastating implications for the victim and the victims’ family and friends. It would have serious implications for the professionals, whose careers can be damaged, but they would not face capital punishment. Having had friends in this category, I can testify that it is an awful process for them, but most of their colleagues know it could happen to any of them doing front line psychiatric work: “There but for the grace of God go I”.
The next point that this report gives the homicide risk as 1 per 20,000 patients per annum, not the 1 in 3000 each year given by Walsh and Buchanan. Taking these new figures, they suggest that the lifetime risk of homicide over 20 years is: the addition of 1 in 20,000 risks per annum for 20 years of active exposure, namely 20 in 20,000, or 1 in 1000. In comparison, the risk of being murdered by an ordinary member of the public is 1.4 per 100,000. Over 20 years that comes to 28 per 100,000 or 1 per 3,571. Thus, these figures suggest schizophrenics are 3.5 times more violent, which is within the published range. These figures look reasonable.
So, can we detect and prevent violent events?
For example, it has been calculated – using the average of all the tests assessed by Buchanan & Leese (2001) – that if 5% of the patient population were within a high-risk category, use of the tests would correctly identify 8 people out of every 100 in the group who would go on to commit acts of violence but misidentify as violent the other 92. In fact, fewer than 1% of community patients will commit serious violence over a period of a year, which means that the tests would correctly identify only 3 patients out of 100. Homicides occur at a rate of 1 in 10 000 patients suffering from a psychosis, per annum, which makes prediction impossible (Shergill & Szmukler, 1998; Dolan & Doyle, 2000). (page 23)
Comment: Two problems here. First, this is significantly different risk estimate: in that on page 20 it was 1 homicide per 20 000 patients with schizophrenia per annum and on page 23 it is 1 in 10 000 patients suffering from a psychosis, per annum. This is confusing, but presumably it refers to the symptom of psychosis, rather than the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and other conditions can induce psychotic behaviour, so we should probably put this estimate aside for the moment, though it is twice as high as the former figure.
Second, low base rates do not necessarily make prediction impossible, but simply very difficult in the absence of valid indicators. Phenylketonuria occurs in 1 in 10,000 to 15,000 newborns (higher in the US) and most cases are detected by screening. Tandem mass spectrometry is claimed to be 100% sensitive and 98% specific, which means that virtually all cases are picked up and the test rarely misclassifies other conditions as being phenylketonuria. Treatment is started promptly, and as a result, the severe signs and symptoms of the classic condition are rarely seen.
Have pity on Psychiatry. As the quotation above reveals, current tests do have the sensitivity and specificity requires to usefully predict violence, let alone murder. The best test that forensic professionals have is a detailed interview leading to a risk assessment, though there is still debate about precisely what this risk assessment should contain. There must also be checking of records, and good links with social services and the Police. Often, this still defeats the current organisation of services. Resource constraints make the problem more difficulty. Poorly trained or poorly motivated ward staff sometimes do not follow risk protocols, even when they are written in to the patient notes.
Note that this unsatisfactory state of affairs does not have to continue for ever. One good indicator seems to be patients trying to re-admit themselves to hospital. Failure to take medication, and over-indulgence in alcohol and drugs is another indicator. It is very hard to detect the signal from among the noise, but we have to keep trying. Perhaps if we could monitor electronically, as if the person had diabetes, we could eventually predict with less error. What would we monitor? Thoughts? Arguments? Drugs in the bloodstream?
So, how can one argue that schizophrenia makes people more violent, but that this does not cause much “societal violence”? This boils down to a particular statistical technique, the calculation of population-attributable risk per cent (PAR%): the percentage of violence in the population that can be ascribed to schizophrenia and thus could be eliminated if schizophrenia was eliminated from the population. Stand back from any calculations, and you already know the answer. If 1% of the population has schizophrenia, and they account for 5% of the violence, then curing them of the condition (or just the violent aspects) would reduce societal violence by 5%. It is a matter of perspective whether you think that this accounts for relatively little societal violence. To me, this line of argument seems like trying to wish away a finding by changing the currency of account. I think it is better for researchers to publish their results on the risks of violence in schizophrenia, which is higher in relative terms but low in absolute terms, without excursions into concepts of “societal violence” as a false comparator. It is a bit like saying that someone who drives a gas-guzzling Hummer has little societal impact because they contribute only a very tiny fraction of the world’s pollution. Don’t move from one metric to the other for rhetorical purposes.
So, to summarise what psychiatrists are telling us about schizophrenia and the risks of violence: there is general agreement that schizophrenic men are four to five times more violent than the rest of the population, but the absolute rates of all violence are mercifully low. The public should make up their own minds how they wish to respond.
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Rutland was a Parliamentary Constituency in its own right until 1918, when it became part of the Rutland and Stamford constituency. In 1983, following further boundary changes it became part of the Rutland and Melton constituency. From 1983-1997 the Constituency comprised the District of Rutland, the Borough of Melton, and the Borough of Charnwood wards of East Goscote, Queniborough, Six Hills, Syston, and Thurmaston. From 1997 until 2010 changes meant the Constituency comprised the County of Rutland, the Borough of Melton, and the District of Harborough wards of Billesdon, Easton, Houghton, Scraptoft, Thurnby, and Tilton. Currently, the Constituency comprises the County of Rutland, the Borough of Melton, and the District of Harborough wards of Billesdon, Nevill, Thurnby and Houghton, and Tilton. Further boundary changes are are under consideration by the Local Government Boundary Commission and will be published on 8th May 2018.
Rutland & Melton Constituency has long been regarded as a Conservative Safe Seat, with Sir Michael Latham winning the seat in 1983 and 1987 and Sir Alan Duncan holding it since 1982. Since 1992, the Conservatives have consistently gained a high vote share (1992 – 59%, 1997 – 45.8%, 2001 – 48.1%, 2006 – 51.2%, 2010 – 51.2%, 2015 – 55.6% and 2017 – 62’8%) with Labour generally coming a poor second with the sole exceptions of 2010 (Lib-Dem) and 2015 (UKIP). It’s said that if you tie a blue ribbon around a rat, the electors of Rutland will vote for it.
The Council follows a similar pattern. Before boundary changes and ward consolidations between Council Elections in 1999 and 2003, the Council make-up was reasonably balanced politically.
The Council elections of 2003 brought a preponderance of Conservatives to the Council Chamber (13 Conservatives, 4 Lib-Dems and 8 Independents) and the Conservative margin has increased at each election meaning that at the time of writing, they hold 17 of the Council Seats and control the Cabinet.
It has to be said that there is a certain amount of voter apathy in Rutland, especially with respect to Council Elections and the most recent election to elect a Councillor to the Oakham South-East Ward, which resulted in the election of Adam Lowe, an Independent, (Conservative Loss) attracted a turn-out of less than a quarter of the Ward Electorate. This, hot on the heels of this by-election being caused by resignation of the previous incumbent over the One-Way issue with Oakham SE ward being one most heavily represented in the Petition.
As can be seen in the graphic below, the Conservatives have controlled the Council for a very long time and this has been reinforced by Rutland being a safe Conservative seat for even longer. Unless Rutlanders realise that there is absolutely no point complaining in the local papers about Council policies and then going out and voting exactly the same Councillors whose policies they are complaining about back in time after time, or, even worse, allowing Councillors to be repeatedly re-elected unopposed, then nothing will ever change. In fact, by voting the way they do, Rutlanders, whatever they write in the local papers, are actually endorsing those policies they claim to reject.
2019 will mark 20 years since we last had a balanced Council Chamber. Let’s make it the year that things change for the better!
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Coastal governors stand in the way of offshore drilling, even if Congress approves it
President Bush keeps repeating his call for Congress to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling. Republican presidential candidate John McCain is consistently drilling home the same message. And on Wednesday of last week, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said that just in case the ban is lifted, his department is laying the groundwork so offshore drilling in new areas could begin in as few as three years.
What drilling proponents don’t say is that even if the congressional ban were lifted, many of the most promising untapped offshore areas would likely remain off-limits to oil and gas exploration.
Bush, McCain, and GOP congressional leaders all say that states should decide whether to open their shorelines to drilling — and that states should get a share of drilling royalties as an inducement to say yes. But many governors and other leaders in coastal states are saying, “No, thanks!”
Some 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico were opened up to drilling by a bill signed into law two years ago, so Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi don’t matter much in this debate.
What’s at stake is an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil off the coasts of other states.
Some 10 billion of that is in Californian waters, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) wants it left alone. He has aggressively challenged his partymates on the issue, saying anyone who suggests that offshore drilling would lower gas prices is “blowing smoke.” Chances are slim that Arnie and other state lawmakers would permit drilling near their shores anytime soon (even though a slim majority of Californians now support it).
Other West Coast governors are of the same mind. On July 29, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) and Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) joined Schwarzenegger in a vow to fight the push for more offshore drilling.
In June, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine (D) and North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley (D) spoke out against offshore drilling, citing the damage it could do to their states’ tourism, real estate, and natural resources. “Our economy is driven by tourism and use of the shore,” said Corzine. “I think we would have a hard time getting public support for this concept.” Likewise, Easley said he didn’t believe the North Carolina legislature would approve offshore drilling.
In the Northeast, Maine Gov. John Baldacci (D) and other political leaders say “no way,” fearing for their state’s fishing industry and environment. Massachusetts tried offshore drilling up until 1982, and found there wasn’t much oil there — plus opposition to drilling from Bay Staters is “fierce,” writes Boston Globe reporter Beth Daley. Maryland’s governor is opposed. Neither Delaware nor Rhode Island has much shoreline to tap. And if Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell (R) is in favor of offshore drilling, she hasn’t said so yet (she didn’t bring it up in a recent speech on energy issues).
It’s proved politically unpopular in Virginia as well, where the state legislature killed two bills that endorsed the notion of offshore drilling in June (though Democratic Gov. Timothy Kaine says he’s open to exploration).
Florida’s leaders long maintained a bipartisan opposition to drilling — until a few weeks ago. After McCain flipped on the issue in June, Gov. Charlie Crist (R), who is interested in being McCain’s vice president, followed suit — albeit unenthusiastically. Other Florida Republicans have also backed McCain’s drilling call, and a number of Florida voters are shifting in the same direction — a recent Quinnipiac poll found that public support for drilling has jumped from 50 to 60 percent in the state. But even Republican U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez has fought to keep rigs at least 125 miles off the state’s Gulf Coast, where tourists like to hang out. And most Democratic leaders in the state remain bitterly opposed.
South Carolina legislators have also indicated that they’re game for offshore drilling, but Gov. Mark Sanford (R) says he opposes it. “We would certainly have some hesitation just based upon tourism and the natural beauty along the coast,” said a spokesperson for the guv. “We certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.” The good news for Sanford: Geologists say there’s almost no oil off the state’s coast.
A recent Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of Americans said they would support drilling in places currently off limits if it would bring down gas prices. But that’s a big “if.” Economists and energy experts say drilling wouldn’t do a dang thing for prices in the short term, and very little in the long term. And the lack of either political will or available oil reserves in most coastal states makes drilling even less of a practical answer to high gas prices.
As members of Congress head home to their districts for August recess, Bush, McCain, and other Republican leaders continue to blame congressional Democrats for blocking offshore drilling — but Dems in Congress are clearly not the only people standing between oil companies and the outer continental shelf.
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60 Years Ago
Work For Peanuts
The “Peanuts” gang debuts in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950. Charles Schulz’s comic strip—
an offshoot of his earlier “Li’l Folks” cartoons—stars lovable loser Charlie Brown (above in 1951). His travails with kites, footballs and his beagle Snoopy propel “Peanuts” for 17,897 strips, inspire TV specials and spawn a licensing empire before Schulz’s death at age 77 in 2000.
20 Years Ago
Forty years of separation ends October 3, 1990, when East and West Germany reunite. Mass relocations from East to West—begun in early 1989—and the creation of a pro-reunification parliament following East Germany’s first free elections in March 1990 hasten progress toward a treaty in which the five East German states join West Germany. In Berlin (above) thousands gather to mark the occasion. “It overcomes a division that never represented the will of the people,” says a resident. Economic and cultural djustments will occupy the country for the next two decades.
120 Years Ago
“No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” John Muir writes in an 1890 campaign for federal protection of the lands around the California valley. Though the valley itself was granted to California in 1864 for public use, it is threatened, Muir argues, by nearby ranching, logging and other human endeavors. On October 1, 1890, Congress makes Yosemite the country’s third national park, preserving an additional 1,500 square miles of wilderness. Today some 3.5 million visitors seek out the park’s splendors each year, including Half Dome (above).
150 Years Ago
An 1860 campaign photograph of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln prompts Grace Bedell, 11, of Westfield, New York, to write to him in October with a suggestion: grow a beard. Her Democrat brothers will vote for him, she says, and “all the ladies like whiskers.” Lincoln replies that a beard might strike some as a “silly affectation,” but months later a bearded president-elect stops in Westfield, kisses Bedell and tells the crowd he has taken her advice. An 1864 Bedell letter to Lincoln asking for a job turns up in 2007; embroiled in the Civil War, Lincoln likely did not see it. Bedell dies in 1936 at age 88.
150 Years Ago
Suspended 1,200 feet above Boston Common in the basket of the hot-air balloon Queen of the Air, American photographer James Wallace Black takes the first aerial photographs in the United States, October 13, 1860. Since his glass plates require fast processing, Black follows French photographer Nadar’s example and brings developing equipment up with him. Balloon photography later plays a part in Civil War reconnaissance. Today Black’s Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It is the oldest existing aerial image.
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Those who don’t brush their teeth regularly may be putting themselves at greater risk of contracting pneumonia.
Samit Joshi, a postdoctoral fellow in infectious diseases at the Yale University School of Medicine, presented a study at the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s annual meeting in Boston, claiming that changes in the types of oral bacteria can have a significant impact on the risk of developing pneumonia. Joshi cited poor oral hygiene as one of the most common risk factors for pneumonia, with the risk doubling if a person has severe gum problems.
The study analyzed the oral health of 37 subjects, from a variety of age and health backgrounds, over the period of one month. Though only a small percentage of the patients developed pneumonia, those who did acquire the disease also saw significant increases in the number of oral bacteria associated with pneumonia.
“Our findings might improve the way we prevent pneumonia in the future by maintaining [the types of] the bacteria which live within our mouths,” Joshi said in an interview with the Global Medical News Network (GMNN).
While the study was not designed to demonstrate the direct relationship between pneumonia and these bacteria, Joshi told the GMNN that he hopes his experiment will be replicated by larger independent studies to determine a causal link.
Upon hearing the findings of the study, the British Dental Health Foundation, an oral health charity, issued a press release stating that poor oral hygiene may lead to the development of pneumonia.
“During the winter months we’re all susceptible to colds, coughs and chesty viruses due to the drop in temperature,” Nigel Carter, the foundation’s chief executive, said in an interview in The Telegraph. “What people must remember, particularly those highlighted as vulnerable, is that prevention can be very basic.”
Carter added that links between gum disease and overall health have been well-documented, and that keeping up good oral health can help stave off illness.
Sheldon Campbell, a professor of microbiology at the Yale School of Medicine who was not affiliated with the study, said that while he was not surprised by Joshi’s findings, they are significant because they place an even greater emphasis on oral hygiene. While there are many variables that might affect the development of a disease, poor oral hygiene will likely negatively affect patients, Campbell said.
“Most of the bacterial organisms that cause infections are neighbors of the oral floor,” he said. “There are too many variables to accurately say, but it’s likely that oral microbodies probably impact the development of certain diseases.”
Approximately 3 million Americans are infected with pneumonia annually.
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SEPTEMBER 3, 2018
I LIVE CLOSE to Elysian Park in Los Angeles, where I often pass the LAPD’s shiny new academy on my afternoon walks. The pop pop pop of cadets training on the gun range echoes through the park’s ravines at a constant clip, their noise pulling me from my daydreams. Recently, when I have heard the pistols, like so many firecrackers set off on a suburban street, my thoughts turn to Jackie Wang’s recent book of essays, Carceral Capitalism. The guns’ impositions remind me of two parts specifically: “gratuitous violence,” the ultimate method of looting by “parasitic governance”; and her central idea in the penultimate essay, “Against Innocence,” that white people (i.e., me) are woefully incapable of internalizing the reality of state violence against Blacks, even when it incurs in geographically white spaces.
There in the hills overlooking Dodger Stadium — itself a monument to municipal dispossession — the academy stands as a physical embodiment of what Wang dubs “the new racial capitalism.” Racial capital is a term borrowed from the late Cedric Robinson. Robinson himself first encountered the term “racial capital” in England, and throughout his career he “took up the term and broadened it into an analytic that posits race as a central feature of capitalism.” Robinson was attempting to resolve the problem so many scholars and historians have of ignoring racializing projects in the study of capitalism. He argued that these projects preceded and helped form capitalism in Europe, contributing to, rather than developing from the material forces of capital as it superseded feudal life. Capitalism is often taken as or depicted as a homogenizing force. But Robinson saw the production of difference as a defining feature of capitalism’s success, and of psyche of those who are in power within it. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “[Y]ou are rich because you are white. You are white because you are rich.”
Wang prefers Robinson’s framework for her essays, though she grants the “dual character” of work in capitalism as both homogenizer and difference-maker. As a homogenizing force, it exploits worker labor, but its differentiating mode expropriates along the lines of class, race, and gender. The expropriation lens is a core feature of the work of Marxist theorists from Rosa Luxemburg to Silvia Federici, whose arguments center on the necessity of populations outside capitalist production to fuel its supposedly endless growth. Marx himself termed this expropriation “primitive accumulation,” but many writers who followed Marx have expanded this term enough to make it a core aspect of capitalism rather than the historical moment that preceded it.
Luxemburg, for example, saw imperialism as the way for capital to expand into non-capitalist regions, expropriating their labor and material wealth. Federici, meanwhile, has argued that capitalism has always rested on the unwaged labor and social reproduction women provide. This remains the case today. For example, as Susan Watkins highlighted recently, contemporary child care now relies on “ocean-spanning ‘chains of care’” with the final link always being unwaged; and Wang notes that women in the 21st century are now dispossessed not only through marriage and child-rearing, but also, increasingly, through elder care.
The turn to expropriation provides richer insight into the ways capitalism works in the messy reality far from Marx’s ideal conditions in Capital. Wang’s influences range far and wide, from geographers like David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to the Afro-Pessimism of Frank B. Wilderson III and the biopolitics of Foucault, to name just a few. I agree with Wang’s choice to focus on expropriation. It is both less apparent and more central to capital accumulation in the 21st century, especially for a country whose industrial base has been gutted by globalization, its factory floor relegated to China, Bangladesh, and Mexico. In the United States, we are left, with increased financialization, low-wage service-sector work, and surplus populations. Wang argues that local, state, and federal institutions “manage” these surplus populations through five main tactics: the financial state of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and finally gratuitous violence. Pop pop pop.
In the United States, surplus populations get incarcerated in a way that they do not in many other parts of the world. The US incarceration rate is 655 per 100,000, far and away the highest in the world. Moreover, on a sheer numerical basis, the US imprisons more people than any other country on earth, with 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5.1 million on parole and probation. The peculiarities of the US system stem from the unique ways in which the state is deployed to ensure capital accumulation, protect racial citizenship, and manage populations. Jim Crow or the Chinese Exclusion Act may be a thing of the past, but access to the full benefits of American citizenship remain bound up with whiteness, such as unequal treatment before the law. Harvey Weinstein, for example, can arrive at court and be out on the street in an hour, while exorbitant cash bail is set for poor, brown, and Black people, who end up in Rikers or Los Angeles’s notorious Men’s Central Jail and Twin Towers.
In her magisterial Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore demonstrates how California addressed a series of significant crises, particularly surplus populations, that arose in the 1970s. Wang traces the connections between the Golden Gulag and the larger carceral state. American productivity began slowing in the 1960s as Europe and Japan reentered the world economy. The perils of a globalizing economy intersected with the rise of law-and-order politics, a racially coded response to the Civil Rights movement. As Naomi Murakawa argued in The First Civil Right, crime was not racialized, race was criminalized. The politics of the early 1970s thus increasingly focused on the brutal management of inner-city populations, almost entirely Black, brown, and poor after white flight. With the tax base fleeing, capital crises sprung up, typified by New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975. The capitalist class seized on these crises as a way to re-liberalize markets that had been managed by the Keynesian state in the postwar era.
According to Gilmore, California was an ideal testing ground for a particular type of response to the crises of the 1970s, for what Mike Davis called “the prison-industrial complex.” Previously, dispossessed populations rarely ended up in prison: “[D]uring most of the modern history of prisons, those officially devoid of rights — indigenous and enslaved women and men, for example, or new immigrants, or married white women — rarely saw the inside of a cage, because their unfreedom was guaranteed by other means.” But by the late 1970s, these formerly dispossessed populations, particularly Blacks, had been battering on the doors of the capitalist state for decades. California’s solution to dealing with Black unrest, surplus populations and capital, falling agricultural productivity, and real estate problems was to push capital investment into prisons through state bonds and other measures. This was a solution reproduced across the Sun Belt, with the dog whistle of law and order, filling the jails with the poor, working-class, urban minorities that the white public feared.
Wang expands on Gilmore’s geography. She includes “what Alex Lichtenstein calls ‘Sunbelt penology’: a penal ideology that emerged in the South but has become paradigmatic across the nation. He labels the region that most vigorously adopted this penal model ‘Flocatex’ after Florida, California, and Texas,” which have expanded mass incarceration to an alarming degree. California, for example, saw its prison population grow by 500 percent between 1982 and 2000. Wang herself is no stranger to this insidious penal ideology. She hails from Florida, where her brother was subjected to the state’s draconian juvenile life without parole sentence. Her short piece “Ripples in Time: An Update” recounts the Kafka-esque misery of dealing with a carceral bureaucracy hellbent on criminalizing juveniles, a category that barely existed until the 1940s, and, according to Elizabeth Hinton, only became a major concern during the Kennedy administration.
As prison construction ramped up, state and private entities also refined the first three tactics (financial states of exception, automation, looting) that keep 21st-century carceral capitalism afloat. Financial states of exception are a convenient excuse for private capital to move in on a municipality. The 1975 NYC fiscal crisis is the Ur-text whereby money managers and investment bankers, with the federal government’s blessing, have held municipal governments over a barrel to extract fees and force public-sector unions to accept increased financialization or outright dissolution.
Today, the lengths technocrats go to put a city back in the financial black would put those ’70s neoliberals to shame. All they wanted in 1975, after all, was to discipline labor. Now the money managers believe avoiding bankruptcy can best be achieved at the risk of poisoning the local population, such as the managers tasked with providing solvency to Flint, Michigan. Detroit fared little better, as city leaders’ blunderous attempts to make a buck backfired spectacularly with the 2008 Global Recession. This didn’t concern politicians, of course, because the poor, mostly Black residents of Detroit would be the ones to foot the bill, not those living in Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills. Today, in Wang’s words, “the role of the state has been inverted such that wealth is being redistributed upwards” whether the state is Rust Belt municipalities or the Federal Reserve. It might be more accurate to say the state has reverted. The postwar glow of the ’50s and ’60s was exceptional, rather than a rule. Nevertheless, at the moment “the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors.”
Ferguson is a textbook example of the confluence of these tactics. There the city used police power with brazen disregard to extract fines from Black residents to make up for budget gaps. Wang goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this “policing as plunder” is explicitly raced, what she calls the “racial kapitalstate.” In fact, when money is tight, it is imperative that “municipalities must fuck over residents by instituting austerity measures […] As demonstrated by the case of Ferguson, in order to remain solvent, municipalities develop a parasitic relation to the people they are supposed to serve.”
The city’s behavior in Ferguson was so egregious (for example, 95 percent of “manner of walking in the roadway” citations were issued to African Americans in a city that is only 67 percent Black) that the Department of Justice was forced to conclude that the city’s looting and police practices violated the First, Fourth, and 14th Amendments. Of course, the only reason officials felt the need to investigate was because of the extraordinary reactions to Michael Brown’s murder. Thousands more cities and counties across the United States practice this kind of looting and criminal disregard for the most vulnerable.
Like capitalism itself, Wang then takes the corporeal turn, from political economy to the individual — the body. “The body” is everywhere; in most every Ta-Nehisi Coates essay, in debates over self-care, sex work, and trans rights, at CrossFit gyms, the Fitbits on our wrists, the tattoos on our skin. For Wang, the corporeal turn is both figurative and literal. It is the idea of biopower, the use of the algorithm, and determinations about which bodies deserve financial credit or the state’s punitive force. Literally, it is the body that is incarcerated, brutalized, or killed.
Wang’s approach begins with the figurative. Gone are the days under the monarch’s arbitrary whim, as he beheads whom he pleases to keep the peace or consolidate power. Instead, systems of rational state control such as the legal system, medical practice, and nowadays algorithmic surveillance slowly coalesced into what Foucault termed “biopower,” a concept many theorists, such as Roberto Esposito, whom Wang relies upon heavily, have expanded. In short, biopower is a process in which the state, through a variety of institutions and practices, fosters the health of both individuals and the social body and protects it from threats to its well-being. If the state can be conceived as a body — a body politic if you will — the state’s power is deployed much like the white blood cells of an immune system, taking care of foreign threats to its overall social health. A relatively anodyne example of this might be the state subsidizing employee fitness and wellness programs, such as it does in certain provisions in the Affordable Care Act. The rationale is that healthy workers will be more productive, which is good for the company’s bottom line and the bottom line of the state.
But within biopower, vulnerable groups often get treated as germs, or as symptoms. Wang describes the discourses in the United States about juveniles and juvenile criminality that arose in the 1980s and ’90s and the dramatic shift in legal and political thought about crime and Black life in the US. Punitive measures were the “rational” means the state used to address what was seen as the existential threat that urban, mostly Black, youth posed to the American body politic. These “rational” measures included the practice of sentencing juveniles to life without parole, three-strikes laws, and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, penned by then-Senator Joe Biden and signed into law by Bill Clinton.
The term “juvenile” was a new category of personhood, appearing after the practice of child labor was banned in the industrializing West. Wang notes: “Vaguely, the concept of the juvenile is associated with a naturalized connection between age and maturity level.” For the state, the problem with this definition is that it encompasses all teenagers, not just some. Thus, Wang continues, a juvenile in the United States cannot be “a natural category that corresponds to a fixed set of characteristics — [it] is a biopolitical construction that delimits the application of criminal law.”
If a subset of all juveniles is seen as posing a risk to social health, as Black boys born in the mid-1980s were seen to be, the state needed to find a way to exert its power — rationally — on that subset without catching too many white juveniles in the same net. This meant incorporating some juveniles into adult institutions. How did this biopower play out, then, from the conception of juveniles as a category to sentencing some juveniles as young as 11 to life without parole?
We can locate the modern origins of draconian sentencing structures in the 1965 Moynihan Report. In the report, the extreme economic disparity between Black and white America was explained primarily by the pathological cultural failings of African Americans. Specifically, “the fundamental problem,” Moynihan writes at the outset is “that of the family structure.” While making a cursory acknowledgment of structural racism, Moynihan blamed the victim, particularly Black mothers, and to read the report today is an exercise in what you might call “smh” or “WTF” reading. Yet its conclusions have influenced both white America’s understanding of Black life in the United States and the respectability politics of middle-class Blacks.
Fifteen years after the report, the appearance of crack cocaine flooding into the United States’s inner cities in the early ’80s set off a middle-class moral panic, adding fuel to the fire stoked by Moynihan. In Black mothers, the media found the perfect villains: crack-addicted welfare queens who were incubating a race of superpredators lacking the moral fiber and empathy of regular Americans. It did not matter that the science behind prenatal crack syndrome was a joke, nor that white Americans used cocaine and other illicit drugs at comparable rates because the media-fueled “epidemic” proved to white America what it already believed to be true.
Venerable liberal outlets like the New Republic and The New York Times carried water for Reagan-era politicians already deeply committed to criminalizing race, while academics such as John DiIulio deployed their own half-baked “science” to rationalize why the state should criminalize these babies. As they became teenagers, the result was, as Nima Shirazi of the Citations Needed podcast noted, “The childification of white people versus to the adultification of African Americans.” Crack use and the supposed rise of the superpredator gave the state the opening it needed to separate white juveniles from their Black and brown peers. Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986 codified sentences for crack versus powder at 100:1 and a whole series of law enforcement and legal actions continued unabated, turning places like South Los Angeles into veritable penal colonies.
By the mid-1990s what Kendrick Lamar has dubbed “Section .80” had reached the nebulous age of the juvenile only to discover that institutions such as the media, academia, politics, and even their own communities had bought into the myth of John DiIulio’s “coming superpredator.” DiIulio wrote that they were “a calculable risk that must be preemptively managed, for they have been deemed incapable of self-government and self-determination.” Imagine, for instance, saying that white suburban youth were incapable of self-government. People would nod their heads in agreement: “Of course, they’re still children, they have much to learn. They need to be free to make mistakes.” But for urban youth, the opposite was true: inability to self-govern becomes a reason to bring the full weight of the adult legal system down on them. The preferred tool of management was incarceration, or what Wang calls “exclusionary inclusion,” and here it is worth quoting Wang at length:
[W]hile adolescents are differentiated from adult citizens based on their limited mental capacities, in order for them to be effectively managed through confinement, they must first be juridically folded into the domain of adulthood, and the jurisdiction of criminal law must expand to include them. […] the juvenile is captured through an inclusion into ordinary law, rather than an exclusion. But while juveniles acquire the right to be punished as adults, they do not acquire the other privileges and rights of adult citizenship (i.e., voting, drinking, and so forth). Their status under the law remains contradictory, for they are at once inside and outside the laws that apply to adults, governed as both exceptional and ordinary subjects. Thus they are catapulted into the domain of ordinary criminal law and juridically “included” at the precise moment they are being branded for exclusion.
In effect, popular discourses about life in Black America dovetailed with mainstream fears about potential hordes of Black teenagers running amok. This provoked the immunological response of state power, which then greatly expanded its ability to incarcerate everyone, not just Black, brown, and indigenous.
How do we mark and manage these diseased elements today? Through an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus fueled by machine learning, the algorithm, and big data, which has automated the punitive forces of the police, school administrators, credit rating agencies, and employers, while eliding the deeply structural racism inherent in these institutions. This technological turn is thanks in large part to the general perception that these “tools” are color-blind, just like our legal system, a worldview wholly adopted by the technocratic liberals who make up the Democratic Party. They are designed by supposed experts, who train algorithms to remove the “biases” that plague human choice and action.
Except this isn’t actually the case. Google’s brilliant engineers still can’t teach its image search to differentiate between a gorilla and a Black man. Their brilliant solution, block the word “gorilla” from the search. Its search function is notorious for returning sexualized depictions of Black girls and women. Researchers, no matter how well meaning, have a set of assumptions, and these assumptions are passed on to their machines, mainly because these tools remain a reflection of larger social forces. Yet for Silicon Valley, and I daresay, large chunks of the body politic, the answer to these problems is not to address the ways that white supremacy and capitalist violence are baked into the system from the start. The problems of empire, and genocide, are foundational; their costs are incalculable. But instead we get calls for more technology, or better technology, more humane and harmonized.
How does this relate to the carceral state? The police are zealous converts to this reliance on algorithm-inflected technology. Predictive policing, as it is called, is the newest fad in a long history of the police’s embrace of statistics as a bulwark against questions about their authority, necessity, and success. It is also an example of the enmeshment of academia and incarceration that would make Jeremy Bentham blush.
Wang singles out the imaginatively named PredPol, a predictive policing startup founded by UCLA mathematicians and an anthropologist: “PredPol is a software program that uses proprietary algorithms (modeled after equations used to determine earthquake aftershocks) to determine where and when crimes will occur based on data sets of past crimes.” Out pop maps with little red boxes that designate today’s batch of patrol-worthy places “a kind of temporary crime zone” (emphasis original). Predictive policing has joined other forms of extreme surveillance and criminology, which have become organizing flashpoints for activist groups in recent years. Jeff Brantingham, the UCLA anthropologist and co-founder of PredPol, has dovetailed his own research of foraging with PredPol’s predictive software. According to Brantingham, “criminals are effectively foragers,” and he argues that “[c]hoosing what car to steal is like choosing which animal to hunt. The same decision-making processes go into both of these choices.” Just as DiIulio applied a naturalist’s veneer to the supposed culture of poverty, PredPol has a sheen of evolutionary certainty about predicting criminal behavior.
The potential flaws in this idea are clear. Despite the perception of data being neutral, it is, by its very nature, biased and always will be. It reflects the preconceptions and limitations of those collecting the data, typically those with power and a purpose to both justify and increase that power. In the instance of predictive policing, what is being fed into an algorithm is decades of police data, which we already know to reinforce and be reinforced by existing systems of race and class oppression. This is further compounded by the fact that police data is notoriously incomplete. The algorithm isn’t told whether an arrest leads to a charge, prosecution, or guilty verdict, whether or not a confession was coerced from a terrified juvenile facing the full weight of the adult legal system, or whether people even want the police to exist. No number of academics promising that theirs is a race-neutral system free of bias will ever change this, only obscure it further.
The process can only produce a picture that inherently privileges police information and perspectives while excluding those of the policed community. Moreover, what kind of crimes are we talking about here? The quality-of-life kind that hobbled Ferguson’s Black population or make driving while Black a crime unto itself? Why not crimes committed by major polluters, corporate executives, pharmaceutical companies? It’s obvious that these PredPol models are not being deployed in an equitable fashion, but of course, that’s not how the legal system is set up to work. The New Inquiry has made hay out of this asymmetry question with its own white-collar crime map.
Under the guise of public safety, there are ever-increasing amounts of surveillance that reinforce the systems of discipline and punishment, Wang calls it “techno-governance,” that we have had since the advent of modern policing. As Ava Kofman recently reported, school shootings are the justification du jour for expanding this system. Facial recognition and machine learning systems will do little to prevent active shooters from carrying out their attacks, but they will give school administrators a similarly sophisticated tool to maintain discipline in their portion of the school-to-prison pipeline.
The crescendo of Wang’s analysis is that this techno-governance over biopower reproduces a white supremacy that is at its core largely irrational and, in the words of Frank B. Wilderson III, “libidinal.” All of the tactics of extraction and exploitation work because they are backed with the threat of social death, or if that doesn’t sufficiently keep people in line, real death. The trick is, kill people white America won’t miss, or believe are in some ways deserving of death. The reporting of Michael Brown’s very public murder by Ferguson police is representative. The New York Times called Brown “no angel.” Though editors later referred to it as a “regrettable mistake” it is more likely that the reporter’s phrase merely reflects a larger fact about life in empire, particularly American empire with its vast media apparatus that has so thoroughly conflated Blackness with criminality. Similar slippage happens on a daily basis when speaking about Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, even medics protected by the Geneva Convention.
Wang finds a similar example in a headline about the exoneration of five counselors responsible for the death of Isaiah Simmons, a teenager being detained at a reform school. It reads: “Charges Dropped Against 5 In Juvenile Offender’s Death.” Not teenager’s death, not young man’s death, not student’s death. Instead, he is defined by his criminality. He is part of the disease that white America is in need of inoculation against. These headlines and reports proliferate across media.
These reporters are reflecting a set of ideas about crime, race, and the deployment of state violence to maintain law and order and economic stability that are fundamental to whiteness, not to the white race, whatever that means. Robin D. G. Kelley had to remind readers recently that “not all white folks are the same […] [n]o one’s ideology or political stance is fixed at birth; ideas, perspectives, and movements are always in flux.” And that’s what whiteness is, an ideology, about as pervasive an ideology as there is in the United States. What these headlines, media narratives, and political rhetoric do is to reinforce this ideology, that whiteness is citizenship, power. We can see this at work in the way various waves of European immigrants were treated and eventually welcomed into the umbrella of whiteness, or how “model minorities” are held up as paragons of striving. And it is not only an ideology believed by people who present as white. To take Kelley’s statement one step further, white as a category is meaningless, but whiteness confers the ultimate meaning in the American context.
Wang’s solution is a call for a move “against innocence.” Innocence, she argues, is the only lens currently used by white America to internalize state crimes against Black and brown people: “[I]nnocence becomes a necessary precondition for the launching of mass antiracist political campaigns” and whenever a person’s moral purity cannot be established they “will not become a suitable spokesperson for the cause.” Wang thinks this is especially the case when antiracist activists are trying to enlist white allies to the antiracist cause, the tactic is “an appeal to the white imaginary,” often used by people of color who are aware that this is the only way white people can access empathy.
Trayvon Martin’s murder is one very obvious example of this, with even President Obama remarking that Martin “could have been my son.” Innocence and what Wang calls “translation,” the fitting of state violence into a vernacular that can be understood by white universal subjectivity, immediately draws out the listener’s empathy, allowing them to see someone like Martin or Oscar Grant as one of their own, innocent, unjustly murdered. A similar logic is at work when people discuss school shootings: it is innocent students in suburban bliss who are gunned down, while similar sentiment is not forthcoming when the latest body-cam video shows a cop shooting a Black teenager in the back, and it also erases powerful mobilization efforts around gun violence. Indeed, the act of translation hits a wall because Blackness is synonymous with guilt and crime, and we remain silent or seek ways to whitewash. Wang points out that the Baltimore Occupy movement effaced race from the outrage over Martin’s death. It was an attack against “youth,” not Blackness, thus sparing white observers from scrutinizing their complicity.
The intractable problem is that white America’s “liberal politics of recognition can only reproduce a guilt-innocence schematization that fails to grapple with the fact that there is an a priori association of blackness with guilt (criminality).” This is compounded by the hegemony of race-blindness, a corollary of which is the belief that for something to be racist, someone needs to say something that is literally racist, primarily by signaling through speech acts or overt acts where “intentionality” can be proven. Of course, when something blatant occurs, media is quick to judge this the result of a few bad apples rather than the legal, political, and carceral systems working as they were designed to. Moreover, as Wang points out, joining Michelle Alexander and others, “the racism underlying the systematic imprisonment of black Americans under the pretense of the War on Drugs is more difficult to locate and generally remains invisible because it is spatially confined,” because
[t]he engineering and management of urban space also demarcates the limits of our political imagination by determining which narratives and experiences are even thinkable. The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as “alternate universes” marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience.
When state violence does rupture white spaces, as it did when Oscar Grant was gunned down on a nearby commuter rail platform, whites return to innocence to explain the deep structural problems that resulted in Grant’s death. Wang is quick to point out that Black establishment politics also falls victim to this mentality, highlighting the way the NAACP abandoned the burgeoning prisoner’s rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s in favor of a respectability politics that resulted in full-throated support for Bill Clinton’s law-and-order efforts in the 1990s.
Wang’s “against innocence” has nuance and takes aim at a number of liberal pieties that may be difficult for some to square, particularly her attacks on second-wave feminism’s complicity in reproducing and expanding the carceral state, the way safe spaces can be used to blunt serious discussions of race and identity, and the leftist desire to recast urban uprisings as rebellions and not riots. I myself had never thought deeply about how the fight against domestic violence, led largely by white women, has had profound consequences for Black and brown people’s safety and an expansion of the carceral state, and this was refreshing and led me to the Prison Abolition Syllabus, which does a great deal to problematize the masculinization of incarceration. However, her essay also opens up a massive problem about imagining what the carceral state is and how to upend it.
When innocence is used as a tactic to elicit sympathy, to shock public opinion, or even to exonerate a single person, it inherently reproduces and prolongs the narrative that some people deserve social — or real — death, yet it is effective for mobilizing sympathies. How then do we shift into a mode of thought where a white person’s first response is not to conflate criminality with Blackness, particularly when it is so deeply entrenched in the social fabric and history of America? No answer is forthcoming, and Wang adopts a pessimism informed by Frank B. Wilderson III.
Wilderson is one of the principal theorizers of Afro-pessimism, which has become a prominent school of thought within critical race studies and has found its way into popular writing via Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wang uses Wilderson’s analytic as well to describe the foundational role it plays in the “gratuitous violence” of the American carceral system. It is compelling, yet if Afro-pessimism has something useful to say about American history, its shortcomings, philosophical and political, are manifold.
Critics of Wilderson and other Afro-pessimists have noted that the school of thought revolves so specifically around American Blackness that it does little more than “reinscribe the most imperial white ‘American’ perspective on slavery and Blackness instead.” The year 1865 or the fact of the 13th Amendment carry little weight for Haitians or Brazilians, for example. However, Wang allows that perspective to go largely unchecked in her essay, and the inability to escape the hegemonic American narrative remains a major weakness of intellectual life in the American left in general.
Furthermore, adopting an Afro-pessimist lens leaves very few options as far as reorganizing society is concerned. As R. L. Stephens noted in an interview last year, the legal avenues for rectifying the foundational sins of the United States have been largely exhausted; in fact the law has given rise to much more pernicious forms of control — the War on Drugs, color-blindness — which are firewalled from legal redress because it’s damn hard to prove in a legal sense that they are racist at all. It’s no wonder that the further along in Wang’s analysis we get, the more dire it becomes.
Admirably, Wang does not end with pessimism. She’s too astute to think that it can be the only antidote to our world. Nevertheless, answers to the problems she raises are not forthcoming — which is how it should be. Instead, in a lovely coda titled “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination” Wang offers an interesting suggestion. Riffing off of the line, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” the famous quote from Jameson that Mark Fisher used in Capitalist Realism, she exhorts us to turn to “a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present.” She then leads us through this imagination. It is one of hope tinged with a bittersweetness that will be instantly recognizable to leftist activists. The road is long and full of false-starts and outright failures, but is always informed by hope, whether it is hope in fully formed revolution, or, as Zoe Samudzi recently called for at her reading at Skylight Books here in Los Angeles, harm reduction. Wang converses across time and space with revolutionary activists and writers who have labored in full knowledge that their struggle is only a small piece of a larger contest for freedom and dignity, and who have never forgotten that what can be imagined can be realized, or Assata Shakur said, “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” Wang’s essays open up a series of questions about the forces arrayed against real justice: surveillance, techno-politics, color-blindness, exploitation, and extraction that occurs close to and far from home. They also set up the abolition of the carceral state as one of the key moral battles of this century. If, in a hundred years, someone can take the same route I’ve been walking all spring and not see the edifice of a police academy, I’d like to think that Wang’s essays helped in some small way to get us there.
This is not to imply that Marx was ignorant of this. He acknowledges early in Capital that it is more a thought experiment than it is a description of reality, something Wang, too, reminds her readers.
If you’re lucky enough to have a retirement plan, chances are its success relies heavily on the stock market; cf. Michael McCarthy’s Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions Since the New Deal..
For an excellent introduction cf. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. For historical background Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, and an updated discussion Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos.
It should be noted that Foucault did not look approvingly on universal or obligatory health care.
For a more thoroughgoing discussion of the history of state fears about juveniles, see Chapter 1 of Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.
If they’re white, however, they’re millennials.
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Advocating Quality Assurance for Door and
by Dean Lewis
A door or window is a complex mechanism of numerous components that must interact over a long service life properly. In fact, AAMA alone has, for a long time, recognized this and emphasized component
Over many years these concerns have been translated into an ever-increasing breadth of consensus-based performance standards that form the basis of the industry’s largest and most respected product certification program. The whole unit performance standard— today’s latest version being AAMA/WDMA/CSA 101/I.S. 2/A440-05—has become the anchor for a range of performance verification programs all aiming at quality performance of the installed product. Since 1962, the AAMA Certification Program has been based on that standard and its
A key element of the effectiveness of the whole unit performance has been the underlying performance standards for the many components—glass, framing materials, hardware, weatherstripping, etc. The components comprise a finished product, and must be third-party verified as meeting their requisite standards to become part of an AAMA-certified
Approved components are listed in the AAMA Verified Components List (VCL), available online at the AAMA website
(www.aamanet.org). Note that only those components for which an AAMA performance standard exists and for which a laboratory test report demonstrating conformance with the requirements of that standard is on file, may be included in the
Updated monthly, the VCL lists more than 100 manufacturers, several hundred individual products and the corresponding AAMA standards in the following categories:
The applicator must have applied and tested a coating in compliance with the appropriate AAMA specification. AAMA verifies that these application lines have tests on file indicating the ability to apply coatings required in the AAMA Certification Program correctly. Test methods verify adhesion, stain and chemical resistance, color-fastness, impact resistance and
Organic coatings on aluminum (AAMA 2603, 2604 or
Anodized coatings (AAMA 611);
Anodized coatings combined with clear coat (AAMA 612);
Organic coatings of varying performance grades on PVC profiles (AAMA 613, 614,
Organic coatings on galvanized aluminum and steel (AAMA 620, 621);
Organic coatings of varying performance grades on fiberglass profiles (AAMA 623, 624,
Performance tests are for compression set and shrinkage under accelerated
Performance tests cover adhesion, low-temperature flexibility, water resistance and other key
Performance tests determine durability after accelerated open/close cycling and shock loads, ability to support sash weight and corrosion
Rotary operators, sash balances and sliding door roller assemblies (AAMA 901, 902, 904, 906, 907,
A Growing List
As the scope of the whole unit performance standard grows, now encompassing some 30 operator types, the categories of components listed on the Verified Components List also expand. New product categories recently added and the standards that govern them
Water penetration resistance and structural load performance of door locking/latching hardware (AAMA
Additional component standards are under development in these same categories to address cellular tapes for installation, non-integral door bottom weather seals and side-hinged exterior door multi-point locking hardware and trim. When finalized, AAMA will determine the possible inclusion of these products in the program as
Everyone in the Supply Chain Benefits
The VCL benefits several stakeholders in the growing certified door, window and skylight market. It is, in effect, an approved shopping list of door and window components for fenestration manufacturers who wish to have their completed doors, windows and skylights certified under the AAMA Certification Program. For component manufacturers, it qualifies them as a resource for a significant base of potential customers, given the large number of AAMA certification program participants. Finally, the VCL and the underlying performance standards represent a credible, multi-layered, third-party-validated quality-assurance program that verifies the all-important components as well as the finished product.
Dean Lewis is the certification manager for the American Architectural Manufacturers Association in Schaumburg, Ill. He may be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. Mr. Lewis’s opinions are solely his own and not necessarily those of this magazine.
© Copyright 2007 Key Communications Inc. All rights reserved.
No reproduction of any type without expressed written permission.
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US moves to close China PV loophole
In a move expected to blunt or even halt the decline in the cost of solar energy in the US, the US government on Tuesday preliminarily slapped duties on Chinese PV modules that use Taiwan-made cells.
With the exception of two suppliers – Trina Solar and Wuxi Suntech – all Chinese suppliers will pay a 26.9% duty on the product they sell into the US market, undercutting the significant cost advantage that most Chinese companies currently enjoy.
Trina, the world’s second largest module supplier, and a company that derived 17% of its $1.77bn in revenues last year from the US, was given a relatively mild rate of 18.6%.
Trina counts SolarCity, the leading US installer of rooftop PV systems, among its customers.
Meanwhile, Wuxi Suntech, the former manufacturing arm of Suntech Power that was recently acquired by Shunfeng, was hit with a devastating 35.2% rate.
The ruling is also a significant blow to Taiwan's large PV sector.
Although the ruling will not be finalized until October, and could still change, the preliminary verdict will be seen as a resounding victory for the US arm of SolarWorld, the German PV group behind the major solar trade cases brought against China in the US and EU.
SolarWorld USA maintains the largest module factory in the US in Hillsboro, Oregon, and has argued that its Chinese rivals enjoy subsidies like cheap finance and electricity.
The decision comes two weeks after the US Justice Department named SolarWorld USA as one of five companies to have been targeted by Chinese hackers allegedly engaged in corporate espionage for Beijing – in part for a look at its legal strategy in a previous trade case.
In that case, which was finalized in 2012, the US imposed both countervailing and anti-dumping duties on Chinese PV cells. The 2012 ruling has made little difference, however, as Chinese module suppliers simply shifted to using Taiwanese cells in their modules.
But the latest ruling slams shut that “loophole”, and, if cemented, would mean that Chinese PV companies would need to manufacture everything from the wafer through the module abroad, in order to escape the duties.
Some may simply choose not to sell into the US.
A separate ruling on anti-dumping duties is expected next month.
While the ultimate impact of the tariffs is unknown, the finalization of the tariffs would at the very least force significant changes upon China’s largest solar companies. IHS, the market researcher, recently said that module prices would “almost certainly rise” in the US if the Taiwanese loophole were closed off.
SolarWorld’s push for tariffs has attracted the scorn of broad swathes of the US solar industry, with downstream players – such as installers and solar-leasing specialists – having benefited from low-cost Chinese panels.
The US is expected to install more than 6GW of PV capacity in 2014, notching up another record year.
The Washington DC-based Solar Energy Industry Association, the pre-eminent US solar lobbying group, immediately issued a statement saying the ruling “threatens to derail the rapid growth” of the sector, while clinging to hope that a mutually satisfactory resolution could still be brokered.
The verdict does not cover thin-film PV kit – potentially handing an advantage to China’s Hanergy, which has acquired a number of CIGS companies in recent years, including US-based MiaSole and Global Solar Energy.
On the other hand, it will inevitably complicate things further for US-based solar companies hoping to do business in China, which transformed over the past two years into the world’s largest solar market by far.
On Wednesday SunEdison, one of the largest US-based solar companies, announced a deal with China’s Huantai Group intended to see the two jointly built 1.7GW of PV capacity in China over the next four years.
The two largest US-based PV manufacturers by market capitalization, First Solar and SunPower, both have significant ambitions of their own for the Chinese market. Both, however, do most of their manufacturing overseas.
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An amazing detail emerged today from the NTSB about the Asiana Airlines crash over the weekend: Two female flight attendants working in the rear of the plane weren't in their seats when it slammed into a seawall, and both were ejected upon impact, reports NBC News. "They were found down the runway and off to the side of the runway," says NTSB chief Deborah Hersman. Both survived with injuries that haven't been specified. Other revelations:
- The crew said it was relying on something called an "autothrottle" to maintain speed, raising questions about whether the cockpit's automated gear malfunctioned or was programmed incorrectly, reports the AP.
- Not only was the pilot flying the plane still in training on the 777, the instructor pilot supervising him was making his first trip as an instructor, reports CNN. It was their first time flying together.
- The instructor pilot told authorities he realized soon before the crash that the plane was too low, but their efforts to abort were too late, reports the LA Times.
- The four pilots aboard—three were in the cockpit and one in the cabin—were not tested for drugs or alcohol after the crash because the US doesn't have the authority to test foreign pilots.
- The plane did a 360-degree spin before coming to a stop.
- Hersman re-emphasized it's too early to blame pilot error for the crash.
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Commonly Asked Questions
How to capture a compression waveform with your eSCOPE ELITE
Follow this process for every compression waveform you are capturing with the eSCOPE ELITE. Please connect as follows:
Channel 1– Exhaust Transducer Channel 2– Ignition Trigger Channel 3– 300PSI Transducer Channel 4 – Vacuum Transducer
The ignition trigger can be Inductive as displayed above, back probed to the signal side of a coil or with an eCOP (Coil on Plug Adapter).
You MUST trigger off the same cylinder that you re analyzing. If the 300psi transducer is in cylinder 3 use the cylinder 3 coil or plug wire.
You can set the Range values automatically by simply clicking on the PSI button.
Remember to set the record time to 40.0 or 80ms.
1. Cranking Wave Form Capture
Note: For this capture you will need 7 to 10 seconds of cranking data obtained with the throttle in the closed position and the fuel system disabled to prevent the engine from starting.
Do NOT use Flood Mode to prevent starting.
a. From the “Measure and Deep Rec” tab, click on “Start Deep Record.”
b. Crank the engine for 7 to 10 seconds.
c. Click on “Stop Deep Record”
We are looking for a captured waveform that is like the one below:
d. Click on “Save Deep Record”
e. Save the Deep Recording and name accordingly.
1. Set the System” to “In Cylinder”, this will automatically populate the channel labels for you, if you are in any other cylinder other that 1, set the Channel 2 label accordingly.
2. Choose the correct firing order using the drop down listing next to Firing Order.
You have saved your capture, now what?
1. Choose Zoom Window
a. Draw a box around two compression towers.
2. Choose Get Cursors
b. Drag a vertical cursor to the center of each compression tower
3. Choose Mark Camshaft
When the engine is in a cranking condition the engine can only produce 1 inch hg to 3 inches hg of intake manifold cranking vacuum.
With this reduced intake manifold vacuum, the exhaust plateau will also be reduced or will decrease in its definition. With this decrease in the exhaust plateau’s definition the exhaust plateau will change in the way that it appears and is used. Since the height of the plateau is based on only 1 to 3 inches hg, this plateau will no longer cross the bottom dead center 180º mark or the TDC 360º +20 mark. The intake manifold vacuum will need to be much greater for the exhaust plateau to have enough height or pressure change for these exhaust and intake ramps to cross their targets. Since the exhaust and intake ramps cannot be used to check cam timing during a cranking condition, the valve openings must be checked instead.
Rules of Thumb
The exhaust valve opening should occur 30º to 50º before BDC 180º.
The intake valve opening should occur just after TDC 360º.
The intake valve closing should occur 30º to 60º after BDC 540º.
If these targets are met the camshafts are timed closely enough for the engine to start however, the camshaft timing could still be up to 1 tooth out of time.
For the cam timing to be known the engine must be at a steady idle state.
Leaking Intake Valve
Now we will look at a problem cylinder as seen in image below; the green trace is the in-cylinder pressure waveform, while the blue trace is the intake waveform, and the yellow trace is the exhaust waveform. When analyzing the in-cylinder waveform several things stand out, such as the leaning compression towers, and the deep exhaust pocket. These items clearly show the cylinder is leaking.
Now look at the intake waveform in blue. The cylinder intake pull marked 1 is from the cylinder we are currently testing. The intake pull marked 3 as we can see is narrow and the transfer point at the TDC mark has moved to a positive pressure. This is caused from an intake valve sealing problem. As the piston moves up ward on the compression stroke the air volume in the cylinder is push into the intake manifold past the leaking intake valve. This creates the narrow intake pull on 3 and then the positive pressure in the intake manifold.
This 2003 Dodge Ram 1500 5.7 exhibiting a misfire on cylinder 2.
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Parshios Chukas & Balak
Volume 20, No. 35
12 Tamuz 5766
July 8, 2006
Martin and Michelle Swartz and family
on the yahrzeit of Martin's grandfather
John Hofmann a"h
Rikki and Nat Lewin
on the 65th yahrzeit (this past week)
of Nat's grandfather,
Harav Aharon ben Harav Noson Lewin
(the "Reisher Rav") z"l hy"d
Daf Yomi (Bavli): Yoma 31
Daf Yomi (Yerushalmi): Ma'asrot 5
The Gemara (Bava Batra 14b) teaches: "Moshe wrote his book -
i.e., the Torah - and the parashah of Bilam." Commentaries ask the
obvious question: Isn't the parashah of Bilam part of the Torah? Why
is it singled out?
R' Chaim Zimmerman z"l (Rosh Yeshiva in Chicago; died mid-1990s)
explains: The parashah of Bilam and the rest of the Torah serve
different purposes. The entire Torah, other than this section, is G-
d's word to His nation. The parashah of Bilam, however, is G-d's word
about His nation. More than that, it is directed not only to the
Jewish People, but to the world at large. Indeed, that is why it was
said originally by a non-Jewish prophet.
What does this parashah teach about Klal Yisrael / the Jewish
Nation? It teaches that Klal Yisrael is a unit. Individual Jews may
be righteous or wicked, but the Jewish People as a whole is always
righteous in G-d's eyes. By way of analogy, R' Zimmerman observes,
the laws of physics that describe the movement of atoms in general do
not predict the movements of a specific atom. Similarly, every
individual Jew has bechirah / free will to do good or bad.
Independently of those choices, however, every Jew has a right to
exist because he is part of Klal Yisrael as a whole.
Where do we see this in our parashah? When Bilam failed in his
first attempt to curse Bnei Yisrael, Balak said to him (23:13), "Go
now with me to a different place from which you will see them;
however, you will see its edge but not see all of it." The Jewish
Nation as a whole, Balak realized, could never be cursed. (Torah
"This is the decree of the Torah, which Hashem has commanded,
to say: `Speak to Bnei Yisrael and they shall take to you a
completely red cow, which is without blemish, and upon which
a yoke has not come'." (19:2)
The law of Parah Adumah / Red Heifer is regarded by our Sages as
the quintessential chok / decree, i.e., a law with no discernible
rational explanation. However, there is disagreement about exactly
what aspect of Parah Adumah is a chok. It is not the basic mitzvah;
our Sages tell us that the Parah Adumah atones for the sin of the
Golden Calf. "Let the mother come and clean up the mess that her calf
made," our Sages say. [Understood simply, the sin of the Golden Calf
brought death to the Jewish People, while the Red Heifer cleanses man
of the impurity of death.]
R' Shlomo Kluger z"l (rabbi of Brody, Galicia; died 1869)
suggests that the chok is contained in our verse. "Speak to Bnei
Yisrael and they shall take to you-i.e., to Moshe--a completely red
cow." Why should the Parah Adumah be Moshe's? Indeed, there is an
opinion in the Gemara which states that each Parah Adumah in history
was prepared only by someone who first was sprinkled with the ashes of
Moshe's Parah Adumah. Of all of the Jewish People, Moshe seemingly
was the one who least needed atonement for the Golden Calf! This is
the mystery of the Parah Adumah.
(Kohelet Yaakov: Drush Heh Le'Parashat Parah)
From the same source:
"Miriam died there and she was buried there." (20:1)
The Zohar states: "Once judgment was exacted against the Parah
Adumah [in the preceding chapter], judgment was exacted against
Miriam." What does this mean?
R' Kluger explains: The Gemara (Mo'ed Kattan 28a) asks, "Why is
the death of Miriam recorded next to the mitzvah of the Parah Adumah?"
The Gemara answers: "To teach that just as the Parah Adumah atones, so
the death of the righteous atones." But why are two atonements
R' Kluger writes: One of the laws of the Parah Adumah is that it
purifies one who is impure, but if one who is pure comes into contact
with it, he becomes impure. Why? This alludes to the fact that it is
easier to repent from improper deeds than from improper thoughts. One
who has done bad deeds knows he has sinned, and he repents. He was
"impure" and he becomes "pure." However, one who has only had
improper thoughts does not believe he has sinned. He thinks he is
"pure," but his failure to repent leaves him "impure."
The death of the righteous has the potential to atone for the sin
of improper thoughts. Why? Because the suffering that one
experiences when the righteous die is in one's mind. If one is pained
in his thoughts at the death of a tzaddik, he thereby purifies his
thoughts and achieves atonement.
"Behold! it is a nation that will dwell in solitude and not
be reckoned among the nations." (23:9)
The message of the gentile prophet Bilam, writes R' Aharon Lewin
z"l hy"d (the "Reisher Rav"; rabbi of Rzeszow, Poland and member of
the Polish Senate from the Agudath Israel party who was murdered by
the Nazis 65 years ago this past week), is that any attempt by the
Jewish People to assimilate into the non-Jewish world must inevitably
lead to the former's destruction. If the nation does not dwell in
solitude, it will not be reckoned at all because it will ultimately
How can we protect ourselves? R' Lewin writes that one answer is
provided by the following enigmatic statement of the Gemara (Menachot
The verse (Bemidbar 15:39) states: "It shall constitute tzitzit
for you, that you may see it and remember all the commandments of
Hashem and perform them." [Says the Gemara:] See this mitzvah and
remember another mitzvah. Which mitzvah? Kilayim!
R' Lewin explains: Kilayim is the prohibition against mixing
species. For example, the Torah prohibits planting wheat and grapes
together. Likewise, the Torah prohibits interbreeding animals of
different species (as defined by halachah). The mitzvah of Kilayim
reminds us that G-d created each plant and animal with unique
characteristics and He intends that each remain unique.
Similarly, G-d created separate nations. In particular, He
separated Klal Yisrael from the other nations, and He intends that it
What aid did He give us to remind us of our separateness? He
gave us a uniform, i.e., tzitzit. When we see ourselves in that
uniform, we will remember our own separateness.
"He declaimed his parable and said: `Who will survive when He
imposes "El"?'" (24:23)
The Midrash Pirkei D'Rabbi Eliezer comments: Bilam said, "G-d
created seventy nations and did not attach His Name to them. He did
attach His Name to `Yisra-El.' And, He equated the name of `Yishma-
El' with the name of `Yisra-El.' Accordingly, who can survive in his
R' Alexander Aryeh Mandelbaum shlita observes: The Midrash is
teaching that the descendants of Yishmael derive their power to
oppress the Jewish People from the fact that G-d's Name is in their
name. This alludes to their strong emunah, both their willingness to
sacrifice their lives for their beliefs and their willingness to kill
others because they believe it is G-d's will. These characteristics
were not found among the other nations that persecuted the Jewish
People throughout their history.
(Matzmiach Yeshuah p.15)
R' Aharon Bakst z"l hy"d
Reb Archik was born in 1869 in a suburb of Vilna. At age 14, he
joined the yeshiva in Volozhin, and later he studied in Rav Yitzchak
Blazer's yeshiva in Slobodka. However, the person that Reb Archik
considered to be his true mentor was Rav Simcha Zissel, the "Alter mi-
Kelm." This teacher held Reb Archik in equally high esteem, saying
that Reb Archik was the most suited of his students to carry the
mussar movement to another generation.
The essence of mussar (character improvement), according to Reb
Archik (as reported by his son), is to not be a hypocrite. Mussar
also teaches us how to understand Chazal's teachings, as opposed to
"finding" our own ideas in Chazal's words. Along these lines, Reb
Archik objected to those who invent new approaches to mussar, saying
that these were products of the ego, not genuine mussar.
After his marriage, Reb Archik briefly engaged in business (at
his father-in-law's insistence), but he knew that his real calling was
the Torah. His first rabbinic position was in a small, but difficult,
town. His opponents there, actually opponents of the mussar movement,
even took to the newspapers to vilify him.
In 1895, Reb Archik was invited to serve as rabbi of a distant
Russian town. When he asked how they knew of him, they cited the
newspaper articles mentioned above. Reb Archik later served as rabbi
and rosh yeshiva in other towns, including Shadova, Suvalk, and Lomza.
His last position was in Shavli, where he served until he was murdered
by the Nazis.
Only a small portion of Reb Archik's written legacy survives. He
turned down a chance to send his writings to London at the outset of
World War II because he felt that they required additional editing. A
halachic work, Torat Aharon, has been published, as has Lev Aharon, a
volume containing mussar discourses. Reb Archik was killed on 15
Tammuz 5701 /1941.
Copyright © 2006 by Shlomo Katz
The editors hope these brief 'snippets' will engender further study
and discussion of Torah topics ('lehagdil Torah u'leha'adirah'), and
your letters are appreciated. Web archives at Torah.org start with 5758 (1997) and
may be retrieved from the Hamaayan page.
Hamaayan needs your support! Please consider sponsoring Hamaayan in honor of a happy occasion or in memory of a loved one. Did you know that the low cost of sponsorship - only $18 - has not changed in seventeen years? Donations to HaMaayan are tax-deductible.
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IS&T SCV Tutorial - Introduction to MATLAB
- 10:00 am on Monday, February 11, 2013
- 12:00 pm on Monday, February 11, 2013
MATLAB (for MATrix LABoratory) is a numerical computing environment developed by MathWorks, Inc. MATLAB is essentially an interpretive high level language that does not require data type declaration or compilation. It can be used to implement mathematical computations such as matrix manipulations with existing linear algebra packages. Many plotting and visualization tools are available as an integral part of MATLAB. MATLAB operations are very intuitive, user-friendly, and are used primarily in an interactive environment to enable fast proto-typing of research activities and efficient software development. Many highly specialized applications, such as Mathematical Finance, Bioinformatics, and Image Processing, are also available as toolboxes. In this tutorial, many of the basic MATLAB operations, including basic 2D and 3D graphics, will be introduced. You will learn many of these operations hands-on. No prior programming experience in any languages is required to attend this course. However, basic knowledge of linear algebra, such as matrix operations, is required.
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|Barked: Thu Mar 27, '14 4:42pm PST |
|I see Boston Terrier pretty clearly: thick neck, prick ears, fine-boned legs, small feet, short spine, short snout, wide skull, barrel chest, larger eyes, black color with white markings.
What's not very BT: snout is too long, ears too long, eyes too small, too large in size, to little white
If he's a BT mix, I suspect the other dog would have the following: prick/half-prick ears, long snout, longer ears, lighter bone structure, large size.
Black is usually a dominant color, so if he's half BT, it doesn't matter what color the other breed is when trying to ID breed.
The second breed could be, in that case:
German Shepherd(most likely), Collie, Catahoula Cur(my second choice), Basenji(unlikely), or Greyhound(also unlikely)
But I could also say maybe a Chihuahua/Bull Breed mix, but I feel that is less likely than Boston Terrier mix.
|my posts | my page | msg me | my family's posts | gift me | become pals|| [notify]|
| 308,420
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- The hunting period begins on the 1st of September and ends on the 1st of March.
- The hunting is characterized by stalking , this being a nice and comfortable hunt.
- Hunting is carried out in the area of Burgenland, close to the city of Graz.
- Accommodation is provided in a castle and it includes all the luxuries one can imagine.
- This type of hunt can also be combined with driven hunt for wild boar.
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This was built in the fourteenth century, along with the adjacent church as a charitable institution dedicated to the care of abandoned infants. It was rebuilt again in the sixteenth century, in Renaissance style, and then again in the eighteenth century by Luigi and Carlo Vanvitelli, after a fire. If you go through the elegant marble portal - designed in the sixteenth century by the Lombardian artist Tommaso Malvito and his son Giovanni Tommaso, with wooden leaves engraved by Pietro Belverte and Giovanni da Nola in the sixteenth century - you will reach the courtyard and the 'Wooden Wheel'. This was a type of cylindrical wooden drum into which the children were placed for a ride, together with several nannies, just in case. The inmates of this institution were called 'Children of the Madonna' and 'Children of Our Lady of the Annunciation', and enjoyed certain priveleges. Some were found with pieces of paper around their necks, on which were written the names of their parents, and others had with them pieces of gold or silver. The existence of these items, together with any other sign, was recorded in a book, in order to facilitate a possible future reconciliation with the parents. The 'Wheel', was one of the most famous of its kind in Italy and was not used after 22nd June 1875.
Attractions & Landmarks, Educational
- Nearest Train: Piazza Garibaldi
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EDITOR'S NOTE: The signs for various schools are in yards around the city; the advertisements are on TV and the radio, encouraging listeners to enroll in one school or another. Choice has become a buzzword across the state when talking about education.
Whichever side of the choice debate you're on, the evidence of Indiana's and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett's push for more choices is evident in the various options parents now have for their child's education.
As students head back to school, this week's stories will feature different families and the education choices they make, their reasons and why their schools are right for them.
East Allen University welcomed its first class of 120 students today, the first official day of school.
The school is East Allen County Schools' early college magnet program, housed in the former Harding High School alongside seventh- and eighth-grade students in Harding Junior High School.
The school has no sports, but will offer intramurals and other extracurricular activities. Its focus is early college, giving students the ability to earn up to 62 college credits by the time they graduate from high school through a partnership with Vincennes University. The district opted to accept freshman classes until the school was full instead of transferring displaced Harding students back to the school.
The program has drawn students from around the district and from other districts like Fort Wayne Community Schools.
Here are profiles of some of the students:
Freshman at East Allen University
Previous school: Lakeside Middle School
When EAU Principal Doug Hicks told Victoria Garcia she had earned a spot to attend the early college magnet, she cried.
“I was so happy,” she said. “It's nice to know that I will be able to go to a school where I can start college early.”
That's especially helpful because Victoria could be in school for many years, as she follows her dream of becoming an anesthesiologist.
At Lakeside Middle School, Victoria earned straight A's in science, and she hopes to continue her academic success despite the challenge of higher-level classes at EAU.
“I like a challenge, so that's great,” she said.
Victoria said she was looking into the voucher program to attend a private school when her mom heard about EAU from a friend. Lorena Garcia is originally from Mexico and speaks only a little bit of English. Garcia translated questions for Lorena, who said she wanted her daughter to attend EAU because she's very smart, it sounds like a good school, and she wants what's best for her daughter.
“I like the idea (of the early college program) because Victoria can spend more time with the family while earning college credit,” Lorena said through Victoria's translation. “She's my oldest daughter. I like having her around, and I don't want her to leave.”
Lorena Garcia said she's very proud of her daughter's academic success and supports her 100 percent in whatever she wants to do.
Victoria said her parents have always held her to a high standard and put academics first.
She said she's most excited to meet her teachers at EAU to see how they measure up to the ones she's had in the past. She's also looking forward to the smaller classes at EAU compared to North Side High School, where she would have attended had she stayed in Fort Wayne Community Schools.
“It seems like we're going to be a family,” she said. “It doesn't seem like high school to me.”
Freshman at East Allen University
Previous school: Prince Chapman Academy
Teffenie Suggs heard about the formation of East Allen University through the closure of Harding High School. Her son was one of the students displaced by the closure. He currently attends Leo Junior-Senior High School.
“I thought that (the magnet program) would put Fort Wayne on the map, especially for kids that didn't necessarily want to attend a four-year college,” she said. “The more I learned about it, the more excited I became.”
McKenzie isn't exactly sure what avenue she will pursue after high school, but said she likes the fact that she'll have the option to get a job right out of high school, potentially earning her associate degree while also earning a high school diploma, or continue on to a four-year college and beyond.
She said she's particularly interested in math and science and possibly a career in medicine.
“She's a pretty smart cookie,” Teffenie Suggs said of her only daughter.
McKenzie said one of her goals at EAU is to be her class valedictorian and to meet the challenge of taking college courses while still in high school.
She also likes the idea of staying close to home and friends she's close with from Prince Chapman, as well as the small class sizes.
“Then you feel more connected and get to know each other better,” she said. “It's like a small family.”
Teffenie Suggs thinks the school will only become more attractive, especially for families with many children. She said she would have liked for her son also to be able to attend EAU because of the option to earn college credits while still in high school.
“With the cost of college today, you can't beat it,” she said.
Freshman at East Allen University
Previous school: Woodlan Junior-Senior High School
For Tyler Culpepper and his parents, Greg and Ann, an option that allows students to graduate high school with an associate degree seems like a no-brainer.
“This is an opportunity for Harding kids to get a leg up. This is an opportunity for your child to get something different,” Greg Culpepper said. “Here's your chance. It's a win-win situation.”
All three were admittedly skeptical at first, believing the talk of a new program at Harding was the district's way of getting the state off its back, Greg Culpepper said. Under state law, chronically low-performing schools, as Harding was, were at risk for state takeover.
But after attending several informational meetings, the Culpeppers couldn't understand why Harding parents and students weren't interested in the new option.
Tyler said he wasn't convinced the school was the best option for him, either. He spent his eighth-grade year at Woodlan after grade levels were reconfigured at Prince Chapman Academy. He grew to like the school and made new friends. He wasn't enthusiastic about leaving again for another new school.
He said also he wasn't sure how difficult the work would be at EAU.
“I'm the type of person who won't ask for help (in class), until I'm at almost failing level, and even then sometimes I don't,” he said.
With some assurance from friends and promises of tutoring, peer tutoring and a study skills class available, Tyler began to think this could be a good opportunity.
His older brother, a former Harding student who spent his senior year at Woodlan after Harding closed, showed him some of his college tuition and book costs. The idea of saving money to earn an associate degree was a major factor in his decision, Tyler said. And he's not as worried now about the possibility of two hours of homework a night.
“I want to prove to people I can push myself and see how far I can get,” he said.
With its main focus being academics and an early college education, EAU has opted not to offer sports, which Greg Culpepper said is one reason he believes many parents didn't give it a chance. Tyler said he likes football and would have wanted to play in high school, but the option of playing intramurals or in gym class was enough for him.
“I like sports,” he said. “I like football, but after learning more about the school, football is just not a key thing right now.”
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4th European regional meeting on the Ramsar Convention, Bled, Slovenia, 13-18 October 2001
|4th European Regional Meeting on the Ramsar Convention, Bled, Slovenia, 13-18 October 2001|
A preliminary overview of
National Wetland Policies in Europe
Informal Working Document
Based on a report compiled in September 2000 by Petra Holtrup (Ramsar Bureau Intern)
Setting the scene for wetland policy
Wetlands have been identified as one of the key life support systems on this planet in concert with agricultural lands and forests (cf. Ramsar Handbook 2, p.5). This has been a key theme in the evolving global support and political commitment for sustainable development and environmental conservation as articulated in the Ramsar Conventions Strategic Plan 1997 - 2002, the World Conservation Strategy "Caring for the Earth", the report of the Brundtland Commission, and Agenda 21. The role of wetlands has emerged as a key element in the delivery of inland freshwater and coastal ecosystem conservation through the Convention on Biological Diversity. The importance of our wetlands goes beyond their status as the habitat of many endangered plant and animal species. They are a vital element of national and global ecosystems and economies.
The seriousness of the continuing loss of wetlands demands a new approach to wetland management. Wetlands are exposed to major threats: conversion from natural areas into agricultural land, urban settlements, industry, and recreation areas. Wetlands are degraded by land-use practices that destroy vegetation, increase nutrient and toxic substances loading, sedimentation, and water turbidity and alter flow regimes. Dredging, intensive aquaculture, logging and acid rain also affect the ecological character of wetlands. The disruption of wetland functions has a high cost - economically, socially and ecologically. Wetland degradation can destroy critical gene pools required for medical and agricultural purposes. It can affect their potential for water quality improvement and prevent their use for educational and recreational purposes. Wetland conservation is vital to achieve the objectives of biodiversity conservation as prescribed by international treaties and related obligations. To meet these aims, a comprehensive national and international policy approach is essential.
Within the text of the Ramsar Convention, adopted in 1971, Article 3.1 establishes that "the Contracting Parties shall formulate and implement their planning so as to promote the conservation of the wetlands included in the List [of Wetlands of International Importance] and, as far as possible, the wise use of wetlands in their territory."
Conditions for effective wetland policies
Effective international environmental policy depends on both, national activities undertaken and policies promoted by individual states at the international arena, and on the successful implementation of international agreements at national level.
Contracting Parties ideally contribute to the development and implementation of international wetland policies promoted by the Ramsar Convention in order to support their own national interests and to prevent external negative influences affecting their own country.
The Ramsar Strategic Plan 1997-2002 formulates major targets and addresses key issues for the implementation of effective national wetland policies, notably under General Objective 2 "To achieve the wise use of wetlands by implementing and further developing the Ramsar Wise Use Guidelines" (cf. Ramsar Handbook 1). Action 2.1.2 suggests to "Promote much greater efforts to develop national wetland policies, either separately or as a clearly identifiable component of other national conservation planning initiatives, such as National Environment Action Plans, National Biodiversity Strategies, or National Conservation Strategies".
Recent experiences have shown that it is important to develop a National Wetland Policy taking into account existing policies on water protection, agriculture, transport, housing, recreation, etc. By doing so, the National Wetland Policy needs to bring together actors at various administrative levels (national, regional and local) with other stakeholders, user and interest groups, including NGOs and individual experts.
Special emphasis should be put on economic pressures and short-term growth interests that can easily counteract the effective implementation of environmental policies. Economic values of wetlands, and their function for the protection of clean water resources have to be taken into account when developing a National Wetland Action Plan, that should ideally be coordinated by a National Wetland (or Ramsar) Committee.
The European region
The Ramsar Convention has now in place a number of Memoranda of Understanding and Cooperation with global and regional conventions and is developing further such agreements. Resolution VII.4 called upon Contracting Parties to strengthen their mechanisms and policy instruments to enhance the coordinated implementation of agreements with global and regional conventions through the development of joint work plans or identifying shared actions (e.g. the joint Ramsar-CBD River Basin Initiative). This needs to be complemented by well-adjusted national decision-making processes that incorporate the different needs of an effective environmental policy at national scale.
In the European context, more structured relations with the instances of the European Union are desirable, notably concerning the largely overlapping areas of interest of the new Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) and the Ramsar Convention. This concerns not only the 15 European Union Member States, but a dozen or so Central European countries engaged in the process of accession to the EU that are also concerned by the major EU instruments of relevance for wetland conservation and wise use (cf. also the Communication by the Commission on wise use and conservation of wetlands, COM (95) 189).
A number of regional agreements are of particular importance in the European context. The Framework Convention on the Protection of Transboundary Waters [www.unicc.org/unece/env/conv/water.htm] of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE) plays a major role for water and wetland protection in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe. There are several other agreements on the protection of transboundary rivers in Europe. One of the oldest is the Rhine Convention which served as a model for several other river conventions, like those on the Danube, Elbe, Odra, or Bug [Note: see www.iksr.org for the Rhine Convention, www.ikse.de for the Elbe Convention, with important further links. Holtrup (1999) The protection of transboundary rivers in Europe - about the effectiveness of international environmental regimes (in German), provides an analysis about transboundary water protection in Western, Central and Eastern Europe.] A new Rhine Convention was recently signed, completed by an Action Programme that covers the entire river basin, including aspects of nature and wetland protection and sustainable development. A major target of the new Action Programme for the Rhine is to establish continuous nature protection areas - a so-called "green chain" - along the river from its source to the delta. Similar programmes are in progress for the Elbe, Odra and other rivers.
Several agreements on regional seas cover increasingly wetland conservation and wise use in the context of integrated coastal zone or catchment planning procedures. Some fall under the UNEP Regional Seas Programme, such as the Barcelona Convention (renewed in 1995) and its Mediterranean Action Plan. Others are outside of this programme, such as the Helsinki Convention with the "Helcom" Commission [www.helcom.fi], the Common Wadden Sea Secretariat, or the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) [www.ospar.org].
Various NGOs work at international scale in areas of overlapping interest, such as the international organisation partners of the Ramsar Convention BirdLife International, IUCN, WWF, and Wetlands International and several, more regionally focused organisations in Europe, such as BUND, Rivernet, Stiftung Europäisches Naturerbe, Global Nature Fund, Coalition Clean Baltic and others.
Starting in 1997, as part of an internship project (initiated by Maryse Mahy, and followed up by Anett Zellei), the Ramsar Bureau began to collect data concerning National Wetland Policies of Contracting Parties in the European region. The project concentrated on the implementation of Action 2.1.2 of the Ramsar Strategic Plan 1997-2002. It resulted in a number of national reports and some attempts to edit a concise analysis. The main focus of this exercise was to produce an overview on 1) the development and implementation status of wetland policies in each Contracting Party, 2) the identification of regional trends, and 3) the provision of additional recommendations for enhanced implementation of these obligations of the Ramsar Convention.
This preliminary overview concentrates on the analysis of specific reports submitted by most European Contracting Parties upon request by the Ramsar Bureau, and additionally on information provided in the National Reports prepared for COP7. The information reflects therefore more or less the situation in late 1998, as in most cases no other information was provided to the Ramsar Bureau since. However, we tried to incorporate more recent information available at the time of analysis (in summer 2000) wherever possible.
The overview covers four central topics, developed in more detail in Ramsar Handbook 2, based on Resolution VII.6, providing guidelines for "Developing and implementing National Wetland Policies".
General questions for the preliminary analysis
- Does the Contracting Party have a National Wetland Policy in place providing a comprehensive statement of the Governments intention to implement the provisions of the Ramsar Convention?
- Has the Contracting Party taken its obligations under the Ramsar Convention into consideration when preparing related policy instruments, such as National Biodiversity Strategies, National Environmental Action Plans, River Basin Management Plans, or similar instruments?
- Has a National Ramsar Committee been established in the Contracting Party to promote coordinating mechanisms and to increase cooperation and synergy between different agencies and institutions? What is the structure of this National Ramsar Committee, who is involved, and how is the cooperation procedure structured?
- Do Contracting Parties without a National Ramsar Committee have other bodies that serve the same purpose?
The results of the preliminary analysis are presented in the attached tables with short comments on a country-by-country basis. Additional information, extracted directly from the National Reports to COP7 (available on the Ramsar Convention website) is marked with (M).
As the analysis is based on information that may now be partially out-of-date, the Ramsar Bureau would appreciate receiving necessary amend-ments, corrections or updates.
To this end, this informal report is distributed as a working document, together with the invitation for the European meeting on the Ramsar Convention, called and hosted by Slovenia in October 2001, with the support of the Ramsar Bureau.
Ramsar Bureau/TS/25 April 2001
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“No excuses” has become a common trope within the world of sports. While the expression is common, putting it into practice is not. On Sunday, Iowa State wrestler Spencer Lee was the embodiment of the phrase as he won his third National Championship with a torn ACL
Spencer Lee has always been a force of nature on the mat. In his four years of high school, the Pennsylvania native had a record of 144-1. In 2017, he was the number one high school recruit in the country and was recruited to wrestle at Iowa. He continued to dominate the competition in college, winning a National Championship as a true freshman and a sophomore.
In the 2021, NCAA National tournament, he continued his winning ways. Sunday’s championship victory was his 35th win in a row. During that stretch, he outscored his opponents 430- 40.
A team of Champions
Lee’s seven-point victory over Arizona State’s Brandon Courtney clinched the National Championship for the Hawkeyes. This was the team’s first National Championship in eleven years. The final match for the Hawkeyes almost didn’t happen. Lee’s coach considered pulling him from the tournament multiple times due to the pain he was in. Even in severe pain, Lee wanted to win or lose on his terms.
‘If I’m going to lose, I’m going to lose my way.’ That’s it. It doesn’t matter. If I lost, I probably wouldn’t have said anything because that’s just how I am. You have to win no matter what. That’s what defines a champion.
Lee’s dad told reporters that he sustained the injury within the first 30 seconds of the Big Ten Championship match, a few weeks earlier, where he defeated Devin Schroder of Purdue 21-3. Leading up to the NCAA tournament, Lee knew that it would be a long haul. If he wanted to complete the three-peat, he would have to face the country’s best wrestlers while having little use of his knee.
Excuses are for wusses.
After the win, Lee told reporters that he didn’t want to tell anyone about his injury because he did want to use it as an excuse.
“I didn’t want to tell anyone because F excuses. Excuses are for wusses. That was a tough tournament for me. I could barely wrestle. I could barely shoot. I can’t sprawl. I believed in my coaching staff and everyone that believed in me and here I am, so here you guys go.”
So what can we take away from this story of three-time National Champion Spencer Lee? We may not be put in the position where we are faced with the same physical challenges as Lee, but we are faced with daily excuses that hold us back from our goals. Whether it be hitting the snooze button because we are tired or not eating right when it’s more convenient to do otherwise. We are faced with a daily barrage of excuses that can keep us from being the best we can be. However, each day we fight back against this mindset, there is no telling what we can accomplish.
That’s it for this post. If you like what you read, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook using the buttons above. If you would like to help us create more inspiring content, you can donate to Greater Than The Game using the button at the bottom of the site.
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Luis Tari and Chitta Baral
Early question and answering (QA) systems focused on keyword search among documents for answers. However, such systems can only answer fact-based questions. It becomes clear that to answer more sophisticated questions, QA systems should rely on some domain knowledge. We propose a question and answering system that uses AnsProlog to represent and reason from the knowledge extracted by using Link Grammar and WordNet.
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An antibody is a type of protein. The body's immune system produces antibodies when it detects harmful substances, called antigens. Examples of antigens include microorganisms (such as as bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses) and chemicals.
Antibodies are also be produced when the immune system mistakenly considers healthy tissue a harmful substance. See: Autoimmune disorders
Each type of antibody is unique and defends the body against one specific type of antigen.
|Review Date: 10/18/2008|
Reviewed By: David C. Dugdale, III, MD, Professor of Medicine, Division of General Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine; and George F. Longstreth, MD, Department of Gastroenterology, Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, San Diego, California. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, A.D.A.M., Inc.
The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Call 911 for all medical emergencies. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. © 1997-
A.D.A.M., Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.
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Yesterday I alluded to Foucault’s Self Writing [PDF: Technologies of the Self/Self Writing], one of a series of studies on “the arts of oneself” that draws heavily on Greco-Roman thought, particularly that of Seneca.
The illustration above depicts Seneca’s suicide (his wife was spared by Nero) who chose the traditional Roman suicide of cutting multiple veins to bleed to death. For some reason the illustration brings to mind the procedure enacted in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. In Kafka’s story a device is constructed that very slowly, minutely inscribes a condemned man’s sentence on his flesh. It is Kafka’s most chilling and unforgettable short story. Judith Butler, in an early essay, draws an analogy between Kafka’s device and Foucault’s concept that the body is figured as a blank page available for inscription, awaiting the “imprint” of history and knowledge.
In Self Writing Foucault quotes Seneca’s phrase, “It is necessary to read, but also to write” as an exercise in self-inscription, what Plutarch termed ethopoietic, a procedure for transforming truth into essence. My own framework is not dissimilar to that described by Foucault, whereby I read, make notes reflecting on what I’ve read, spend time contemplating my notes, often reread, and converse about reading with others. This desire for conversation about literature is what drew me to blogging. As Foucault describes, “to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self”.
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TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. – Asian carp may have breached an electronic barrier designed to prevent the giant invaders from upsetting the ecosystem in the Great Lakes and jeopardizing a $7 billion sport fishery, officials said Friday.
Scientists recently collected 32 DNA samples of Asian carp between the barrier and Lake Michigan in waterways south of Chicago, although the fish have yet to be spotted in the area, said Maj. Gen. John Peabody of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
If the feared bighead and silver carp have gotten through the $9 million barrier, the only remaining obstacle between the carp and Lake Michigan is a navigational lock on the Calumet River. Some DNA was found as close as one mile south of the lock and eight miles south of the lake.
Still, federal officials insisted a Great Lakes invasion was not inevitable.
Officials plan to treat a six-mile section of the canal with a fish toxin called rotenone to prevent the carp from advancing.
Asian carp escaped from Southern fish farms into the Mississippi River during 1990s flooding and have been migrating northward since.
The monstrous creatures can exceed 4 feet long and 100 pounds. They consume up to 40 percent of their body weight daily in plankton, starving out smaller and less aggressive competitors.
Click here to comment on this story »
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A PLANNED $23 million adventure trail mooted to follow the Murray River between the Border and Mildura has the potential to build tourism momentum for the region.
Bringing together the Murray region’s attractions under one umbrella expands marketing opportunities for all the towns and cities involved, and encourages visitors to extend their stays.
Similar tourism alliances have been undertaken in the past but the difference with this one is the development of nature-based activities around key tourism locations.
It has been estimated the project would attract an additional 100,000 visitors, create 69 jobs and generate an additional $12.5 million per annum.
Trail proponents have cited the generation of business opportunities for activities including walking, cycling and kayaking, equipment hire, support for tours, guided tours and eco-cruises.
The lead time for the first stage — from Hume Dam to Echuca-Moama — is one to two years, with the second and third stages to follow over a decade.
If the Murray River Regional Tourism group can bring together tourism organisations and councils along the length of the river, the proposal certainly has some merit.
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| Map > Malaga > Towns map
Towns Map of Malaga
The province of Malaga offers a wide range of places you can visit. The typical Andalusian inland villages of Arab origin and the popular coastal towns during the summer are definitely great options to consider when you're planning your vacation.
The city of Malaga, which was founded by the Phoenicians in the eighth century BC is one of the oldest cities in Europe and passed through Roman and Arab hands being one of the cultural and commercial centres of ancient times.
The name of the city comes from Malaka, given by the Phoenicians who settled in the area, to devote the city to the supreme god Melqart.
In recent history Malaga was the initial focus of industrialization in the peninsula; there are still attesting remains like big chimneys of the old factories no longer present and which remain as memorial of its past.
In the map above we can see the proximity to the main tourist destinations in the province, such as Torremolinos, Benalmadena, Fuengirola and Mijas among others.
To learn more about Malaga, its history and its attractions do not hesitate to visit our comprehensive travel guide.
Top villages in Malaga
If you visit the province of Malaga, we recommend some of the most popular villages; you cannot leave without visiting them. In the map above you can see the approximate distance to the villages and their location.
Surrounded by mountains, when accessing from the coast you will enjoy a beautiful road route.
Frigiliana Village near Nerja situated in the Axarquia region, ideal for lovers of rural tourism and the beach; it has its origins in prehistory, with the establishment of the first settlement of the Bronze Age and which grew with the arrival of the Phoenicians.
Dominated by the Moors during the Middle Ages, the village was eventually conquered by the Christians. Currently you can see in one of its oldest streets some panels that tell the uprising of the people against the Christian invasion.
Fuente de Piedra
From Riogordo you have access to beautiful hiking trails that leave from the village towards the mountains, for lovers of rural tourism and culture, as some pass by the Phoenician and Roman ruins in the area.
To know more about the area, visit our Axarquía guide.
Of Arab origin, its name means "Son of Avis" an Arab nobleman who ruled the ancient castle of Montemayor.
For other recommended places please check out our guide of towns of Malaga.
|back to: malaga car hire spain|
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Legislative approval by the U.S. Congress in 2000 of the prescription of Schedule III, IV, and V controlled substances in office-based practice for treatment of opioid addiction expanded the range of treatment options for opiate-dependent individuals by offering a medication therapy alternative to methadone. Buprenorphine, which is sold under the trade name of Suboxone (a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone) or Subutex (buprenorphine alone), is the first of such medications. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2002 for detoxification and maintenance treatment of opiate dependence.
Buprenorphine may be prescribed by physicians after they receive a waiver from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) (1). Buprenorphine provides a prescription-based treatment to accompany counseling, which facilitates office-based therapy. Goals include bringing more opiate-dependent people, particularly highly motivated individuals, into treatment and increasing the number of physicians addressing this problem. In the past, new pharmacotherapies such as naltrexone have not been widely accepted into addiction treatment (2,3). It was hoped that through educational programs directed to the physician community and supported by the federal government and professional organizations, this new therapy would disseminate widely and rapidly to both addiction specialists and other clinicians (4).
Six years after approval of buprenorphine in addiction treatment, it is not clear how well these goals have been accomplished. According to SAMHSA, by 2006 more than 10,000 physicians had been trained and 7,000 certified to prescribe buprenorphine (4). Surveys of physicians who have been certified to prescribe buprenorphine indicate that complexity of induction, medication costs, and regulatory limits have posed barriers to prescribing (5). Moreover, an estimated 104,640 patients had been inducted on buprenorphine as of March 2005, which is only a fraction of the population that might be helped by this new therapy (4). Researchers examining acceptance of new treatments have focused primarily on either the characteristics and treatment decisions of individual physicians (5,6) or the characteristics of the organizations providing treatment (7) but have rarely considered them in concert. The research reported in this article surveyed physicians who have and who have not sought certification to prescribe buprenorphine. Information was gathered on clinician characteristics associated with prescribing, the views of clinicians on the role of their affiliated organizations in their buprenorphine prescribing practices, and barriers to prescribing.
In 2005 an estimated 1.2 million persons were dependent on opiates (8). The burden of opiate dependence is heavy, both for the addicted individual and for society. Substitution therapy is effective for detoxification and maintenance, but methadone can be administered only in highly regulated environments that may discourage treatment entry (9). Only 20% of opiate-dependent patients received treatment in 2005 (10). The unmet need for treatment makes office-based approaches attractive because they expand the base of providers and venues at which opiate-dependent persons can receive substitution therapies, and they provide a setting for maintenance treatment that does not have the inconvenience or stigma of daily dispensing as does methadone.
The Drug Addiction Treatment Act (DATA) of 2000 established a system that allows for office-based prescribing of medications approved by the FDA to treat opiate addiction. Physicians obtain waivers by receiving eight hours of training, acquiring addiction specialty certification, conducting research on approved drugs, or meeting state regulations (1). In 2002 FDA approved buprenorphine for the treatment of opiate dependence, making it the first drug available via the DATA waiver program (11). In clinical trials buprenorphine has been shown to reduce craving, the percentage of opioid-positive urine samples, and self-reported addiction severity compared with placebo (12,13). In a study of 1,203 psychiatrists conducted on the eve of buprenorphine's FDA approval, West and colleagues (6) found that 81% were not comfortable prescribing office-based opiate agonist treatment. The size of a psychiatrist's substance abuse caseload was found to be associated with the level of comfort with office-based treatment, but only 57% of the 41 certified addiction psychiatrists reported comfort with such an approach. Similarly, Koch and colleagues (7) found that among substance abuse treatment facilities, certified opioid treatment programs were more than twice as likely as noncertified programs to offer buprenorphine. This suggests that prescribing of buprenorphine may be related to the treatment philosophy of these facilities—a medical approach—as well as to program type.
Physicians and facilities interdependently influence one another in the decision to incorporate new treatments. Previous research has found that organizational support of adoption of naltrexone was strongly associated with its adoption by physicians, but the mechanisms by which organizations supported prescribing, and the interrelationships between physicians and their organizations, was less clear (2). This article extends earlier research on adoption of substance abuse treatment pharmacotherapy and follows a framework that recognizes the importance of physicians, their work environment and treatment organizations, and the public policy environment in contributing to adoption (2,14).
The following research questions were addressed: What are the personal, practice, treatment organization, and market characteristics that are associated with receipt of training, receipt of a waiver, and prescription of buprenorphine in office-based settings? How well has buprenorphine been accepted outside the realm of addiction treatment specialists by general psychiatrists and why? What are the barriers to and facilitators of prescribing buprenorphine?
Researchers developed and fielded a 14-page mail survey with an option to respond via the Internet. The survey was designed to elicit physicians' attitudes toward and practices in regard to prescribing buprenorphine. The survey consisted of the following domains: personal characteristics, practice and treatment organization characteristics, patient characteristics, substance abuse treatment philosophy and approaches used, and attitudes and prescribing practices specifically in regard to buprenorphine. The survey was pilot-tested outside the study markets with two addiction expert consultants and two psychiatrists, revised, and then fielded from October 2005 through February 2006. Physicians were sent a $25 incentive in advance to respond to the survey and an additional $25 upon completion.
The target population for the survey was addiction treatment specialists (psychiatrists and nonpsychiatrists) and other psychiatrists in four market areas: Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Miami. These areas were chosen because they have a large number of emergency department visits by heroin-addicted individuals and represent different geographic regions (15). In each of these four markets, two specific groups were surveyed: physicians with a specialty in addiction treatment and additional psychiatrists in the market area who were not members of the specialty organizations. Specialists included all members of two professional organizations—the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and the American Association of Addiction Psychiatrists (AAAP)—identified through mailing lists and any physician in the market area who was listed on the SAMHSA physician finder Web site as having been certified to prescribe buprenorphine. ASAM and AAAP members may be board certified in addiction treatment, board-certified psychiatrists, or physicians trained in other specialties. All have expressed a specific interest in addiction medicine by joining these professional organizations.
Psychiatrists were also drawn from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) master file in each market area; the number of psychiatrists in the master file for the four market areas ranged from 374 to 1,295. For each area, 150 psychiatrists were randomly selected by use of the SAS procedure PROC SURVEYSELECT. To eliminate those who did not have any reason to prescribe buprenorphine, the sampled psychiatrists were first screened with a question asking whether they currently had any patients in their practice being treated for substance abuse (by them or elsewhere).
The nonspecialist sample was limited to psychiatrists (rather than all physicians) because we expected that they would be more likely than other physicians to know about and have interest in prescribing buprenorphine. Finally, if a physician was not included in the above groups but was the medical director of a treatment organization surveyed in our companion study of adoption by treatment organizations (16), he or she filled out a survey. These facility directors were grouped with addiction specialists in the analysis.
After we eliminated undeliverable mailings (27 addiction specialists and 37 psychiatrists who were not addiction specialists), 7% of specialists and 29% of non-addiction specialist psychiatrists were deemed ineligible because they did not have patients in their practice who were being treated for substance abuse or they were no longer practicing. The final sample of complete usable responses was 495 physicians: 224 non-addiction specialist psychiatrists (57% response rate) and 271 addiction specialists (72% response rate), of which 32 were facility directors. Sixteen percent of respondents (spread evenly across states) completed the Web survey.
The major research interest was in identifying factors that are predictive of obtaining certification or training to prescribe buprenorphine and of prescribing it. The starting points for these analyses are two survey questions: physicians were asked whether they obtained certification to prescribe buprenorphine, either by attending a training session or by obtaining a waiver to prescribe, and whether they, in fact, prescribe buprenorphine (a dichotomous-choice question asking whether they prescribe or not). Overall rates of certification and prescribing were calculated, and then through bivariate analysis, prescribing rates were compared by physician characteristics, setting, organization, attitude, and market (t tests of differences in means or chi square tests for categorical variables). Prescribing rates were compared first between addiction specialists and non-addiction specialist psychiatrists and, second, with respect to reported characteristics of affiliated treatment organizations. In addition, physicians' reports of facilitators and barriers to prescribing were examined.
In a final step, multivariate logistic models were constructed to identify physician and organizational characteristics predictive of outcomes of interest: buprenorphine certification and prescribing. As regressors in the models, in addition to personal characteristics of physicians, the item in each domain in our survey that was theorized to be most predictive of outcomes and that correlated with outcomes was selected. This research was approved by Brandeis University's institutional review board.
As shown in Table 1, among both addiction specialists and non-addiction specialist psychiatrists, respondents were mostly male and nearly all were board certified, with an average of 14 or 15 years of experience treating addictions. Addiction specialists reported treating an average of 56 patients for opiate dependence in the past month, and other psychiatrists reported an average of 2.4 (not shown). Addiction specialists reported that more than 20% of their patients were dependent on heroin, alcohol, or prescription opiates. Non-addiction specialist psychiatrists had many fewer patients with opioid addictions, but nearly 20% of their patients were alcohol dependent.
Large differences were found between addiction specialists and non-addiction specialist psychiatrists in the percentage who had received training or were exempt and in the percentage who prescribed buprenorphine. A total of 235 addiction specialists (87%) had received training or were exempt because they had participated in clinical trials. A total of 170 specialists, 72% of those trained or certified, were prescribing buprenorphine to their patients at the time of the survey. In strong contrast, among non-addiction specialist psychiatrists who were treating patients for addictions, 29 (13%) had received training or were exempt, and nine (4%) were prescribing buprenorphine.
Although physicians' personal characteristics were not significantly associated with prescribing of buprenorphine, several practice characteristics were (Table 1). Addiction specialists who had adopted buprenorphine spent more time in group practice and had more patients who were prescription opiate users. The small number of prescribers limits the usefulness of significance testing for non-addiction specialist psychiatrists, but prescribing for this group appears to be associated with a greater percentage of current clinical time spent treating addictions and less time in group practice.
To examine the relationship between payment source and prescribing, we asked physicians to describe the proportion of patients covered by private insurance, state block grant funds, Medicare, Medicaid, and self-pay (not shown). There were some differences in the mix of payment sources for patients receiving substance abuse treatment between prescribers and nonprescribers. For example, prescribers and nonprescribers reported similar mean percentages of Medicare patients (both 9%) and Medicaid patients (21% and 20%, respectively). However, prescribers reported lower proportions of privately insured patients (21% compared with 27%), state block grant fund patients (3% compared with 6%), and patients who were provided care at no charge (free care) (9% compared with 12%) and higher proportions of self-pay patients (36% compared with 21%) (p<.01 for all comparisons).
Addiction specialists compared with other psychiatrists
To understand better why psychiatrists who were treating individuals with addiction problems but who were not addiction specialists were not as likely to prescribe buprenorphine, we compared responses to survey items reflecting their knowledge and attitude in regard to buprenorphine (Table 2). Knowledge and attitudes were significantly different between addiction specialists and other psychiatrists. When asked about the source from which they first heard about buprenorphine, 16% of non-addiction specialist psychiatrists indicated that they had not heard about buprenorphine before the survey, compared with less than 1% of addiction specialists.
There were also strong differences in practice types: fewer non-addiction specialist psychiatrists worked in organizations that recommended use of buprenorphine (35% compared with 66%, p<.001) or encouraged buprenorphine training (11% compared with 42%, p<.001); fewer agreed or strongly agreed with the prescription of other medications, such as naltrexone, to reduce craving (26% compared with 37%, p<.01). Fewer non-addiction specialist psychiatrists believed buprenorphine is effective (44% compared with 74%, p<.001). Perhaps most important is that non-addiction specialist psychiatrists treated far fewer opiate patients than did addiction specialists; the average number treated in the past month was two for non-addiction specialist psychiatrists compared with 56 for addiction specialists. It appears that buprenorphine may be better accepted than other substance abuse pharmacotherapies by addiction specialists: two-thirds of addiction specialists prescribed buprenorphine, whereas only 37% prescribed other anticraving medications, such as naltrexone for alcohol dependence.
Physicians were also asked to rate the importance of a number of barriers and facilitators to prescribing buprenorphine on a scale from 1, not important, to 6, very important. Important factors for nonprescribers were considered barriers, and important factors for prescribers were facilitators (Table 3). Surprisingly, rankings were similar for addiction specialists and non-addiction specialist psychiatrists. Although mean scores for barriers were lower than those for facilitators, among top barriers for both groups were "It does not fit in with my practice," "It would change the patient mix undesirably," and that "prescribing is too complex." For addiction specialists, lack of samples also provided a strong barrier, and for non-addiction specialist psychiatrists, the waiver regulation (having to obtain certification in order to prescribe) was perceived as a strong barrier. In both groups, most important in the decision to prescribe buprenorphine was knowledge and consistency with treatment philosophy. Patient requests and local availability were also rated as highly important. Waiver regulation was also an important consideration, even for prescribers. Also, for physicians who prescribed buprenorphine, cost was not rated as a highly important factor in their decision.
Role of organizational affiliation and treatment programs
Analysis of the role of organizations in treatment was limited to the 271 addiction specialists, because they were more likely to be closely aligned with a specialty substance abuse treatment organization that might have a policy about buprenorphine. Overall, perceived organizational support was strongly associated with adopting and prescribing buprenorphine, but there were exceptions. Among addiction specialists who reported that their affiliated organization was supportive of buprenorphine use, three-fourths (74%) prescribed it, much higher than the rate of prescribing for study participants who believed that their organization was not supportive of buprenorphine (44%). This finding also indicates that nearly half of physicians in organizations that had not adopted buprenorphine prescribed it anyway.
The survey found that an organization's support for the use of buprenorphine was significantly associated with other characteristics, as perceived by physicians (Table 4). Among physicians who reported that their organizations supported training and use of buprenorphine, two-thirds reported that they worked in organizations that had a medical director who engaged providers in clinical decisions, compared with only one-fourth of physicians who reported that their organizations did not support training and use of buprenorphine (p<.001). Physicians in organizations supportive of buprenorphine were also more likely to report a general agreement on treatment methods (p<.01) and to feel that new treatments were encouraged (p<.001).
Multivariate analysis of physician and organizational factors
Table 5 shows the results of multivariate logistic models using the common set of predictors. Physician characteristics (gender, race, years in practice treating addictions, and whether physicians themselves were in recovery) were not predictive of receipt of training or of prescribing buprenorphine, but many of the practice-related predictors were. In the logistic model of receipt of training (or exempt from training), significant variables included organizational support (odds ratio [OR]=7.75, p<.001), at least 50% of clinical time in general psychiatry (negative predictor, OR=.22, p<.01), ten or more opiate-dependent patients in the past month (OR=3.86, p<.01), and patient satisfaction with buprenorphine (OR=3.47, p<.05). In the accompanying logistic model predicting buprenorphine prescribing, organizational support (OR=2.66, p<.01) and ten or more opiate-dependent patients in the past month (OR=2.58. p<.01) were significant and patient satisfaction with buprenorphine treatment was highly significant (OR= 4.70, p<.001). Significant variables also included the view that prescription drugs play a large role in treatment (OR=2.03, p<.05), at least 50% of clinical time in general psychiatry (negative predictor, OR=.46, p<.05), and at least 50% of clinical time in group practice (OR = 3.84, p<.05).
This survey, conducted three years after buprenorphine was approved and marketed for office-based treatment, is the first to include both physicians who have received waivers to prescribe buprenorphine and those who have not. The goal of the survey was to understand barriers to prescribing this new addiction treatment. However, the study was a preliminary examination of use of a new treatment and is limited to particular markets and not necessarily generalizable to all physicians who treat opiate-dependent patients, such as general practitioners. Results indicate that most addiction specialists have adopted it, but beyond addiction specialists, few other clinicians have incorporated it into practice.
These findings also reveal the importance of organizational influence and patient satisfaction, which probably also reflects patient demand, in adopting buprenorphine. The study also identified differences in behavior and characteristics of organizations that support use of buprenorphine and those that do not. The differences in the models predicting certification and predicting prescribing showed important factors that facilitate prescribing: organizational support appears to be more important in obtaining certification than in prescribing, and being in a group practice setting and strong patient demand are strong predictors of prescribing but not of receipt of training. Thus, in comparing predictors of training to those of prescribing, it appears that physicians may train or seek certification with less commitment to the role of medications in treatment, but they need to really believe in the effectiveness of buprenorphine if they are to prescribe.
Low prescribing rates beyond the core group of addiction specialists are consistent with other addiction pharmacotherapies (2,3) and reflect challenges predicted by others (6). The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment has endeavored to provide information and training to physicians to encourage use of buprenorphine in office-based practice. However, the fact that psychiatrists other than AAAP or ASAM members rarely prescribe it raises the concern of how well the message about buprenorphine and its advantages has been communicated. The survey also found that among addiction specialists, having spent more time in general psychiatry decreased the likelihood of prescribing buprenorphine. Although research indicates that pharmacological treatments are commonly prescribed by psychiatrists for patients with and without substance use disorders (17,18), there may be several reasons that buprenorphine has not been more widely prescribed by non-addiction specialist psychiatrists. Unlike many other medications prescribed by the psychiatric community, addiction treatment medications such as buprenorphine are most effective when used in a comprehensive recovery program. In particular, initial dosing of buprenorphine requires its on-site storage and availability and resources for extended monitoring of patients' response. Psychiatrists with limited clinical staff or those not affiliated with addiction treatment programs or recovery support systems may thus be reluctant to prescribe buprenorphine. In addition, psychiatrists unfamiliar with the safety features of the combined buprenorphine-naloxone preparation may be worried about the potential for abuse. Of critical importance is the fact that non-addiction specialist psychiatrists treat fewer patients with addictions than do addiction specialists, which may make it not worth their while to seek training and certification to prescribe buprenorphine.
Both addiction specialists and other psychiatrists ranked "does not fit with my practice" and "would change my patient mix" as important barriers and cost as less important, although the current cost of buprenorphine is $160 per month. It may merely be that some psychiatrists specialize in conditions unrelated to the use of medication-assisted treatments or, of greater concern, that certain psychiatrists do not want to treat opiate-addicted patients. Beyond the issues of medication-assisted treatment, stigma and stereotypes must be addressed to overcome these barriers.
Although knowledge about buprenorphine and a positive attitude toward the role of medications in addictions treatment are both necessary for prescribing, the treatment organization plays a critical role that cannot be ignored. As was found in studies mentioned earlier, the support of an organization is an important factor in adopting new addiction treatment medications. According to physicians, organizations that encourage prescribing of buprenorphine are more likely to be collaborative, reward new treatments, and value professional development.
The goal of office-based treatment of opiate dependence is to improve access and reduce unmet demand by bringing more people into treatment. Our study strongly suggests that more work must be done to familiarize physicians with buprenorphine, destigmatize opiate addiction, and bring additional providers into the treatment of addictions. Fulfilling the promise of office-based treatment may be difficult for two reasons. First, given the importance of organizational influences in prescribing, it is not clear how psychiatrists who are not affiliated with addiction treatment programs will have incentives to obtain training and prescribe buprenorphine. Second, it may be difficult for psychiatrists in solo or small group practice to provide both buprenorphine-based maintenance services and the more complex detoxification without the added resources provided by treatment programs and other facilities. However, as time passes, if more patients with addiction seek treatment in office-based settings, more providers may be willing to change practices to accommodate such patients.
Finally, to the extent that buprenorphine gains broader acceptance among providers, additional surveys are needed to address issues related to cost and access, because a large proportion of patients are not insured. These include determining whether insurers cover buprenorphine and under what restrictions and examining the cost of treatment, drug diversion in the community, and nonadherence to treatment. Thus, although office-based treatment offers a promising path to improved access, expanding addiction treatment through office-based practitioners promises to be a continuing challenge, warranting continued monitoring.
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I feel like I have learned everything I know about Grammar by osmosis. I don't remember learning any of the technicalities of Grammar when I was at school and it has always been a weak area.
I think one of my biggest problems is mixing tense, but I feel reluctant to attempt to do any creative writing whilst my grammar is so poor. I find it to be demoralising and would love to find a good learning plan to finally sort it out.
What are some good ways of learning Grammar as an adult when combined with creative writing? I feel like I could pick up a book and improve but without any feedback or guidance from somebody who knows better I feel like it would not be enough. Ideally I would like somebody who could create a learning plan, and to guide and review any writing I produce. That way I could improve by reading and writing whilst getting good feedback along the way.
Are there any reasonably priced ways of getting guidance from a teacher or tutor with creative writing in general and more specifically with regards to improving grammar?
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|Research Areas & Activities Renewables Hydrogen Carbon-Based Energy Systems Advanced Combustion Advanced Coal CO2 Capture CO2 Storage Electrochemistry and Electric Grid Other Research Analysis Activities Technical Reports||
Carbon-Based Energy Systems > Advanced CombustionCoal and Biomass Char Reactivity
Start Date: January 2003
Reginald E. Mitchell, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering; Liqiang Ma, Graduate Researcher, Stanford University
The goal of this project is to provide the information needed to characterize the fundamental chemical and physical processes controlling coal-char and biomass-char conversion to gaseous species in the type of environments likely to be established in advanced gasifiers, boilers and furnaces.
There is considerable concern regarding the potential global environmental impact of fossil fuels used for power generation. By increasing the fraction of renewable energy in the national energy supply, some of the impact can be mitigated. Co-firing biomass with coal in traditional coal-fired boilers or using biomass as a reburn fuel in advanced coal-fired boiler configurations represent two options for combined renewable and fossil energy utilization. Gasification of the biomass offers additional options. Design of boilers, reburners and gasifiers requires an understanding of processes that control the physical transformations that fuel particles undergo when exposed to hot, oxidizing environments and the chemical reactions responsible for conversion of the solid material to gaseous species and ash. The effort will result in fundamentals-based sub-models for particle mass loss, size, apparent density, and specific surface area evolution during char conversion.Background
The physical characteristics and chemical composition of biomass material influence how it can best be utilized. Upon rapid heating, some biofuels have high gas yields, rendering them suitable for gasification and reburn applications. Other biofuels have high char yields, and are better-suited for co-firing in direct combustion configurations. With the proper choices of biomass, coal, boiler design, and boiler operation, reductions in pollutant and net greenhouse gas emissions can be realized.
The key compounds in biomass materials are cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin; therefore the materials selected for examination will vary in the contents of these key compounds. Hardwoods generally have high hemicellulose and low lignin contents and softwoods have relatively low hemicellulose and low lignin contents. Besides woods and various straws, materials selected for study will include wastes of such biomass treating industries as the wood-processing industry, the paper and pulp industry, and the food industry. Tests to measure the reactivities of chars produced at high heating rates from cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin will also be performed. The objective of one of the planned studies is to assess the extent to which the reactivity of a biomass char can be predicted based on its fractional contents of cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin and the reactivities of the high-heating-rate chars produced from these pure compounds.Approach
Chars characteristic of those created at high temperatures and heating rates in real coal-fired boilers and furnaces are produced in a laminar flow reactor in which is established a high-temperature environment (from 1300 to 2000 K) of specified oxygen content (from 3% to 12% by mole O2). Partially reacted chars extracted from the flow reactor at selected residence times provide samples for analysis to determine char physical and chemical properties as functions of char conversion.
The extracted char samples are subjected to a variety of tests to determine the conversion rates in the high-temperature flow reactor environments as well as to determine apparent densities, specific surface areas, and intrinsic chemical reactivities to oxygen as functions of particle size distributions. Particle size distributions are measured using a Coulter Multiziser, an instrument that measures the size distributions of particle suspensions using an electroresistive method. Specific surface area measurements are made using gas adsorption techniques employing CO2 as the adsorption gas at 298 K. The reactivity tests are performed in a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) under chemical kinetics-controlled oxidation conditions.
As an example of the capability available, scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) of raw and partially reacted almond shell particles are shown in Figure 1 along with mass loss and specific surface area measurements. The raw, unreacted almond shell particles used in the tests were screened to eliminate particles larger than about 1 mm in size. The particles contained 37% ash, by weight. The partially reacted char shown in the SEM was extracted 33 ms after injection into a flow reactor environment containing 8% mole O2 at nominally 1243 K.
To provide insight into the influence of char chemical make-up on rates of oxidation, coals of various ranks and biomass of various origins must be tested. In addition, to provide insight into the impact of ash on the properties of the chars produced, feedstocks having a range of ash contents will have to be tested. Data to characterize the impact of pressure on coal and biomass devolatilization yields, initial char particle morphology, and oxidation rates will be obtained by performing experiments over a range of pressures at fixed temperatures.
This work will develop a greater understanding of how biomass properties influence char conversion rates and to characterize the physical changes that char particles undergo during gasification. The data will permit the development and validation of the physical and chemical sub-models used in comprehensive models for coal-fired and biomass-fired process units. The comprehensive models can be used to investigate potential design strategies and can help define optimum operating conditions that benefit coal and biomass conversion processes.
Restricted Use of Materials from GCEP Site: User may download materials from GCEP site only for User's own personal, non-commercial use. User may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish, commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material without obtaining prior GCEP or author approval.
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Published on October 1st, 2018 | by admin0
What You Need to Know About Returnable Packaging
Using returnable packaging is one business approach considered to not only reduce overhead costs, but it is also a sustainable method of transporting goods used in a variety of industries. This reusable packaging consists of durable containers either handheld or in bulk. Different types of reusable packaging include:
- Reusable wooden pallets are better than single-use lightweight packaging. These timber pallets can withstand repeated use of up to 200 times. Similarly, rugged plastic pallets are also available and made from recycled materials.
- Boxes, trays, and crates. Most packaging manufacturers in the UK offer a variety of boxes, trays, and crates, in different sizes and specifications. These are usually made from wood but are also available in plastic.
- Pallet boxes. This type of packaging is designed for heavy-duty use in warehouses, suitable for transport using forklifts.
- Drums and bulk containers. Drums made from plastic or steel can transport up to 1,000 litres of material. In the UK, around 60% of steel drums are reconditioned and reused.
- Customised reusable packaging systems. Packaging manufacturers offer specialised types of packaging for specific products. Although the upfront cost may be higher, customised packaging offers a host of benefits and can result in savings over a certain period.
Most of these types of reusable packaging are popular across businesses in different industries. Using these reusable packaging options helps reduce the cost of packing and transporting products from one end of the supply chain to another.
Industries using reusable packaging
As mentioned earlier, many businesses benefit from using returnable packaging. These businesses span across different industries. Examples of uses include the following:
- The food and beverage industry. Producers and processors of meat products, distributors of processed food and beverages, fresh fruits and produce distributors, bakery supplies and deliveries, and retailers of grocery products.
- Consumer products and retail. Department store delivery, pharmaceutical products delivery, books and magazines distributors, suppliers for restaurants and fast food chains, membership stores, airline catering, and automobile parts delivery.
- Manufacturing industry. Suppliers of original automotive parts and equipment, suppliers of raw materials for pharmaceutical production, and suppliers of parts used in manufacturing consumer appliances.
These are only a few of the examples for specific businesses relying heavily on returnable packaging. In general, any company that needs to transport products or requires delivery of products from a supplier can benefit from using returnable packaging.
Benefits and trends in returnable packaging industry
Returnable packaging solutions have yet to realise their full potential. Despite the significant initial investment, a company will enjoy a return of investment in a short period of time by considering the cost per trip of reusable packaging compared with single-use and disposable options. Moreover, new manufacturing techniques used in producing reusable packaging further enhance the quality, ergonomic design, safety, and transportation efficiency.
There are also some emerging trends in the industry which further benefit those who use reusable packaging. For example, you can enhance traceability of your products while in transit by using GPS technology. Another emerging trend is producing reusable packaging ready for display, which is extremely beneficial in the retail industry.
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The vault, which holds crucial records that could be used to prosecute those responsible for the Holocaust and other World War II atrocities, is only partially available to select researchers and historians on a confidential basis and at governments’ request. The vault was the property of the 17-nation United Nations War Crimes Commission from 1943 until it was shut down in 1948. It then became available only to governments, and later to select researchers and historians.
In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, B’nai B’rith International called on the United States to “employ the wherewithal of the United States to secure the vital and long-overdue opening of archives at the United Nations documenting many thousands of cases against individuals believed to have committed atrocities during the Second World War and the Holocaust.”
The letter concluded: “We urge the U.S. to ask the Secretary-General and fellow member states to swiftly do away with any and all barriers to public access to the U.N.’s war-era files.”
B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs said, “These records should finally be open and available to anyone. Had these vaults been opened earlier they could have made much more of an impact on successful prosecution of war crimes.”
Not only could the vault help the United Nations provide more detailed information for Holocaust scholars, governments and others concerned with international criminal law, but they can help prosecute modern-day criminals.
“Where has the United Nations been for the last six decades? Hopefully U.N. officials will finally take these requests to heart and make these crucial historical records open to the public,” said B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin.
This topic was discussed at a recent B’nai B’rith Global Round Table event in New York City.
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Farmer feeds his cows sawdust
A Southeast Iowa farmer has come up with a solution to the high cost of cattle feed.
Bob Batey, of Mount Pleasant, said his 50 cows devour the sawdust mixture he feeds them.
The Gazette newspaper reports that Batey, who is 85, stumbled upon the idea in the 1970s when he noticed cows eating sawdust that had washed into their pasture from a nearby paper mill.
Experiments on his farm led him to discover a way to treat and cook sawdust that results in a digestible feed cows find tasty.
It has a nutritional value equivalent to grass hay.
Veterinarian Tara Wellman-Gerdes of West Point confirms Batey's cows are healthy.
The drought created a shortage of corn and hay, causing prices to jump for livestock farmers.
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The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd (SPDC) is co-sponsoring the 9th edition of the National Secondary Schools Science Fair and Quiz Competition which rounds off at the University of Lagos yesterday. Writing on this, a contributor, Precious Okolobo examines SPDC’s support for science education in Nigeria.
For four days now, more than 250 students from 20 states of the federation have been participating in the biggest science fair for secondary schools in Nigeria. The 9th National Science Fair which is holding at the University of Lagos has seen students from 56 secondary schools exhibiting ideas and innovations through science projects and also answering questions in a keenly contested science quiz competition. Simultaneously, their teachers have been taking part in a two-day Educator’s Academy, where they learnt about current trends in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, education, including project management and mentoring of young scientists. This in a nutshell captures the activities that mark theNational Science Fair.
As in previous years, the 2013 fair is being jointly sponsored by The Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) Joint Venture, Intel Corporation and Interswitch Limited. The partners are keen to provide a basis for young minds to develop practical science and engineering solutions to challenges in their environment, through innovative projects. The National Science Fair is a suitable platform forachieving this objective, testing their theoretical understanding of science subjects through the quiz, andthe practical application of science and engineering principles through projects.
To give every school a chance, the respective state ministries of education nominate their best three science secondary schools after an exhaustive selection process. At the fair, the exhibition involves projects in different aspects of engineering and technology, while on the theoretical side, the quiz covers subjects such as English, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Agricultural Science. The science projects are assessed by a team of independent judges selected from Nigerian institutions of higher learning and industries. The best three science projects in each category as well as the best overall projects are selected for awards. SPDC JV will also award scholarships to the three best winners from both the Quiz and the Fair. This will mean scholarship awards for a total of 18 students starting from their current academic year.
But perhaps, the most exciting dimension of the National Science Fair is sponsorship of the winners to the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in the United States. This is the world’s biggest science fair for youths and attracts more than 1,500 participants from about 70 countries. By this sponsorship, the Nigerian students will have the chance to share ideas, exhibit projects and compete for honours on aglobal level.
The National Science Fair continues to improve yearly. For example, the 2012 edition of the fair which held in Port Harcourt was attended by students from 39 schools. This year, 56 schools have turned up in Lagos. Last year, the top three finishers participated in the Eskom Expo International Fair for Young Scientists which took place in Johannesburg, South Africa. The institutions namely, Community Secondary School, Aka-Offot Akwa Ibom State, Niger Delta Science School, Port Harcourt and Cavalry Arrows College, Gboko, competed for honours against over 500 entries in the competition, winning two bronze and one silver medal. The silver medalist, Cavalry Arrows College, Gboko also received the Kelvin Award in recognition for their outstanding project, a lawn mower powered by solar, electric and petrol.
The news from the fair this year is even better. The exhibition reveals projects on such sectors as the environment, agriculture, energy and even security. These show the zeal and enthusiasm of young Nigerians who desire to leverage science and technology in solving national challenges.
And that is how it should be. If Nigeria is to achieve its goal of being one of the top 20 economies in the world by 2020, it must take the development of science and technology very seriously and SPDC supports this aspiration. As early as in the 1960s, SPDC began a scholarship programme, giving young and bright Nigerians a chance to study for science qualifications abroad. At present, some 2,730 secondary and 750 university scholarships are awarded every year in addition to 180 students currently on full-board special scholarship scheme. SPDC has since commenced the Niger Delta Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme, under which 10 candidates from Rivers, Bayelsa and Delta states are sponsored for Masters Degrees in science courses in British universities. The company also sponsors several professorial chairs including establishment of centres of excellence in Geosciences and Petroleum Engineering in some Nigerian universities.
It is expected these and other efforts being made by Government and corporate bodies will equipNigerians with the competencies required to achieve advancement in science and technology.
© 2013, Konnect Africa. All rights reserved.
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Bar Matter No. According to the Rules of Court, you need to take a bachelor’s degree in arts or sciences with any of the following subjects as major or field of concentration: The above Rule, however, does not mean that only those who possess a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, English, History, or Economics can enter law school or take the Bar Examinations. 4th Floor, 10 St Bride Street
In some states, the passing rate is only 40 percent. Complete Your Bachelor’s Degree; You must obtain your 4-year undergrad degree before embarking on a journey to become a lawyer. A thief walked by and stole your wallet. I'm an incoming 4th. The Spanish at first viewed the Philippines as a stepping-stone to the riches of the East Indies (Spice Islands), but, even after the Portuguese and Dutch had foreclosed that possibility, the Spanish still maintained their presence in the archipelago. Note that the Legal Education Board has no official website yet. Bar Exam results 2018: 22.07% passing rate. HELP! XII, §14 (on the practice of professions being reserved exclusively to Filipino citizens). In jurisdictions with two types of lawyer, as with barristers and solicitors, barristers must gain admission to the bar whereas for solicitors there are distinct practising certificates.. This can take a year or more. In the Philippines, there are many people aspiring to be a lawyer, but do not know how to discipline themselves. To pass the bar examinations, a candidate must obtain “a general average of 75 per cent in all subjects, without falling below 50 per cent in any subject.” The successful candidate is entitled to take the oath of office, receive his or her certificate of membership to the Philippine Bar, and, finally, sign the roll of attorneys admitted to practice. (2019). First Reading. Once you have signed your name and obtained your Roll Number, you may be officially called a lawyer. 3. Is Juris Doctor a lawyer? View Schools What Does a Lawyer Do? GUIDELINES IMPLEMENTING A.M. NO. How many years does it take to be a lawyer in the Philippines? eval(ez_write_tag([[336,280],'filipiknow_net-medrectangle-4','ezslot_3',183,'0','0']));The Rule is construed to mean by the legal profession that you took the specific number of units in the subjects above. A bill may become a law, even without the President’s signature, if the President does not sign a bill within 30 days from receipt in his office. Philippine Law School Admission Test (PhiLSAT). Thanks! Start by being certain that you have an interest in that area of the law. The Supreme Court, however, has the discretion to change this passing average. You have your hardbound textbooks, each almost two-inch-thick. Degree. An admission to practice law is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. Retrieved from http://www.chanrobles.com/cralaw/1991septemberdecisions.php?id=665, Divina, N. (2019). : SEPTEMBER 1991 – PHILIPPINE SUPREME COURT JURISPRUDENCE – CHANROBLES VIRTUAL LAW LI… Supreme Court Circular No. Many aspire to be a lawyer but only very few are given the chance to turn into one. You still have to take your oath in a ceremony before the Supreme Court Justices and afterward sign your name in the Roll of Attorneys. How many years in college will I spend if I want to become a lawyer? She saw the possibility of mixing both through Dr. Pedro Solis, a lawyer-doctor and her UERM Legal Medicine professor. Normally, your law school will help you in accomplishing the petition and its attachments. Go back to the main article: How to Become a Lawyer in the Philippines: A Definitive Guide. The medicine-law mix. Cultivate the important skills and qualities required to study law. 3. As explained earlier, the study of law normally incorporates the Socratic Method. Learn about job duties, education, job growth and licensure requirements to find out if this is the career for you. An admission to practice law is acquired when a lawyer receives a license to practice law. (2019). United Kingdom, Tel: +44 (0)20 7842 0090
There were two exceptions to the citizenship and education requirement, but due to the passage of time, these may no longer apply. About FilipiKnow. Law schools have different criteria for accepting law students. (2001). e. You need to practice your handwriting ASAP. The study of law is unlike your high school and college education. My name was on the list of successful examinees for the 2016 Bar exams . In an era of fake news and superficial listicles, this website aims to enlighten, inspire, inform, and entertain in ways that no mainstream media company is gambling on. A medical student should do premedical degree which would be 3 years followed by M.D program which would be for another 4 years. FilipiKnow is a portmanteau of two words: "Filipino" and "knowledge." And also, can a petty crime such like that be a hindrance becoming a government employer? Jus sanguinis means “right of blood,” and it refers to the right of becoming a citizen if your parents hold the same citizenship. A person working as an Attorney in Philippines typically earns around 68,149 PHP per month. Kenneth Roy Sentillas is a graduate of San Beda University - College of Law and presently working as an Attorney for the Legal Division of the National Privacy Commission. What is the best course that I could take before going straight to a law school. This article will hopefully answer all of these questions and more. Going from a House or Senate Bill to a Republic Act is a long and arduous process. b. If it’s not for you, at least you have tried. Did the thief commit piracy?”. Save my name and email in this browser for the next time I comment. This article will show you different ways to use Virtual Pag-IBIG--and how they can make your life easier. Pay your professional tax with the City Hall. In an era of fake news and superficial listicles, this website aims to enlighten, inspire, inform, and entertain in ways that no mainstream media company is gambling on. A lawyer accountant is both a licensed lawyer and a licensed certified public accountant, or CPA. You need to finish a … Aside from these, we have a wealth of cases since 1901 that the Supreme Court has rendered decisions and resolutions. Basically and legally speaking, the requirements for one to be admitted to the bar or for one to become a lawyer in the Philippines are listed in Rule 138 of the Rules of Court. Lawyers are also known as attorneys. Although the categories may have different target readers, they all have the same mission: to educate, empower, and inspire Filipinos to contribute to our country even in small ways. READ: What are the best law schools in the Philippines? Reading the question literally, and trying not to read more into it than is written, I disagree slightly with earlier answers. Gain a Bachelor's Degree. The final step to becoming a lawyer is to write and pass the bar exam. How to Pass the Bar Exam in the Philippines: Tips from a Filipino Lawyer, Resume Samples for Lawyers in the Philippines, https://www.rappler.com/nation/229571-bar-exams-passing-rate-2018, http://www.chanrobles.com/cralaw/1991septemberdecisions.php?id=665, https://tribune.net.ph/index.php/2019/01/28/payment-of-professional-tax/, http://www.ibp.ph/pdf/announcement/MD%20GUIDELINES.pdf, https://www.lawphil.net/courts/rules/rc_138_bar.html. Can a non-U.S. citizen become a lawyer if they attend undergrad and law school in the U.S? There are, however, some continuing requirements that you have to accomplish as a member of the Philippine Bar in good standing: Related: Resume Samples for Lawyers in the Philippines, BM850 – Mandatory Continuing Legal Education. Filipiknow is fueled by the belief that what we expect from our country matters less than what our motherland expects from us. What is the best course that I could take before going straight to a law school. Requirements for the Bar Examinations for New Applicants [Ebook]. Becoming a lawyer is a widely varied process around the world. 7. Philippines - Philippines - The Spanish period: Spanish colonial motives were not, however, strictly commercial. In some states, the passing rate is only 40 percent. Going from a House or Senate Bill to a Republic Act is a long and arduous process. Foreign-trained lawyers can gain admission to the bar in 34 other jurisdictions as well, all with varying rules. Work can be fun, but unless you are sick or otherwise predisposed, you need to work every day, you need to work hard, and you need to work for a length of time. According to our very own Supreme Court, “the practice of law means any activity, in or out of court, which requires the application of the law, legal procedure, knowledge, training, and experience.”. Make a habit out of reading books, newspapers, and magazines. G.R. Visit PayScale to research attorney / lawyer salaries by city, experience, skill, employer and more. PhiLSAT is an aptitude exam – similar to an IQ exam – composed of four subjects: Communications and Language Proficiency, Critical Thinking, Verbal Reasoning, and Quantitative Reasoning. What skills do prospective law students need to cultivate in order to survive law school? law for four years in a recognized law school. A person working as an Attorney in Philippines typically earns around 68,149 PHP per month. About FilipiKnow. Once the bill is finalized, it is filed with the Bills and Index Service and is numbered … Don’t expect them to discuss the material in front of the class, with a marker and visual aids. Community Answer. Retrieved from https://www.lawphil.net/courts/rules/rc_138_bar.html. Unfortunately, more likely than not, we are not these geniuses. Retrieved from http://www.ibp.ph/pdf/announcement/MD%20GUIDELINES.pdf, Office of the Bar Confidant of the Supreme Court. The Philippines’ legal system is a blend of civil law and common law systems, in which … Your choice of law school, therefore, is important but not a necessity in passing the Bar Examinations. Becoming a lawyer is a widely varied process around the world. Law school typically lasts for three years and results in a J.D. It takes 3 readings and an approval from both chambers along with the signature of the President before a bill can become a law, known in the Philippines as a Republic Act. If you are not committed, gauge your interest by at least enrolling in the first year of law school. (2001). 16-06-03-SC, REGARDING INCREASE OF IBP MEMBERSHIP DUES AND OTHER MATTERS[Ebook]. About FilipiKnow. 4. London, EC4A 4AD
year high school student in the Philippines and I'm thinking of being a lawyer in the future. READ: What is the best pre-law course in the Philippines? Whether you're a student, entrepreneur, expat, OFW, or anyone who wants to save, this guide gives you a leg up in choosing the best bank in the Philippines. Practicals: Write! While admission to the practice of law is the sole prerogative of the Supreme Court, the accreditation of law schools falls within the competence of the Legal Education Board. “Our life,” he said, “is a patchwork of laws, rules, and guidelines. It is normally given on all four Sundays every November in the City of Manila (particularly the University of Sto. Fax: +44 (0)20 7842 0091, Public and Professional Interest Division, http://law.upd.edu.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=36&Itemid=56, Anti-Corruption Strategy for the Legal Profession, International Human Rights Fact-Finding Guidelines. Payment of professional tax. See, e.g., Gaas v. Mitumug, G.R. The practice of law is varied. It is normal, however, for some students to take the course in five or six years, especially those working part-time. Philippine Legal System Hierarchy of Laws 1) Constitution fundamental law of the land 2) Republic Acts enacted by Congress 3) Ordinances passed by the local government units 7. I took the Bar Exams. Finally, you have articles from law journals, from newspapers, and from online. If you do not have the required number of units, you may be conditionally accepted but must satisfy the requirements before admission to second-year law. There are in fact a lot more lawyers working out of court rather than those practicing litigation in front of judges as popularized in TV. This includes being a member of and paying the yearly dues to the Integrated Bar of the Philippines(“IBP”), evidence of which is reflected in the IBP official receipt number which must be stated in all pleadings, motions and papers signed and filed by lawyers before Philippine courts. Retrieved from https://tribune.net.ph/index.php/2019/01/28/payment-of-professional-tax/, Integrated Bar of the Philippines. See also PHIL. Continue Reading. Only then does the passer of the bar examinations officially become a lawyer and can use the title of “Attorney”. The bar exam isn’t easy. Bar Exam results 2018: 22.07% passing rate. Go over your grammar and basic style. Practicals: Start reading NOW! eval(ez_write_tag([[580,400],'filipiknow_net-medrectangle-3','ezslot_1',182,'0','0']));You have watched Suits, Law and Order, and How to Get Away with Murder. The qualifications to become a senator, as stipulated in the constitution, are: a natural-born citizen of the Philippines; at least thirty-five years old; is able to read and write; a registered voter; and; a resident of the Philippines for not less than two years before election day. Do not study while you are taking a break, but do not check Facebook while you are studying. Under the second exception, Philippine citizens who were “enrolled attorneys in good standing in the Supreme Court of the United States or in any circuit court of appeals or district court therein, or in the highest court of any State or Territory of the United States”, having practiced at least five years in any of said courts prior to July 4, 1946, could be admitted without examination,even if they completed their legal studies overseas. Take the Philippine Law School Admission Test (PhiLSAT). You need to consult with your school’s registrar. Then, you can already practice law! Some geniuses can pass law school with minimum reading and a lopsided study schedule. What do I do now? A bill may also become a law without the President’s signature if Congress overrides a presidential veto by two-thirds vote. Check the Pomodoro style of studying and make it work for you. Consequently, foreign lawyers cannot engage in the practice of law in the Philippines, and must be represented by a member of the Philippine Bar in all matters connected with such practice. International Bar Association
Research what it takes to become a lawyer. While lawyer accountants can work in a variety of legal and accounting fields, their unique skill set is well-suited for a career in tax law, estate planning, corporate finance law, white collar criminal law … This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. You need a proper study habit. It’s a formidable test, lasting for two to three days, and in some states, yielding a pass rate of only 40 percent. 6. Pass the bar exam — The final obstacle in your path to becoming a lawyer is the bar exam. eval(ez_write_tag([[300,250],'filipiknow_net-box-4','ezslot_6',184,'0','0']));PhiLSAT, or the Philippine Law School Test, is an entrance exam separate and distinct from the entrance exam of the law school itself. Retrieved from http://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/files/bar-2019/new-applicants.pdf, Rules of Court. Is being a lawyer a well paid job in the Philippines? 2. According to the Office of the Bar Confidant of the Supreme Court, applicants for the Bar Examinations must file: There is a filing fee of Php 3,750.00. How many years does it take to be a lawyer in the Philippines? However, the Legal Education Board, which was established in 1993, only began operating in late 2009, and has yet to prescribe the basic curriculum for the study of law. The bar exam usually consists of multiple choice and essay questions that evaluate your knowledge of state law and your ability to apply the law … No. Section 233. Is the piece of cardboard considered a boat? This means that you may have to take summer classes during law school to reach the number of units required. The bar exam tests a wide variety of legal knowledge, from torts to civil procedures to contract law. This is the average monthly salary including housing, transport, and other benefits. 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Textbook, practice online, or Attorney, is a widely varied process around the world and guidelines motherland from. Become more complicated abogado pa ba ako ( will I spend if I want to become a lawyer is long... Specific track to study law handwriting is neat, follows the margins the! Regarding property between the couple own and by the 1987 Constitution procedures to contract.! And his writing, you have your hardbound textbooks, each almost.. Read fast a bachelor ’ s say that you ’ re in high school student in the Philippines maintain! Study is perhaps tougher if it ’ s signature if Congress overrides a presidential veto by two-thirds.... Minimum reading and a different time for study or reading and a lopsided study schedule UERM medicine! Which generally takes 0 to 1 year took the Bar exam tests a wide variety of legal,. What our motherland expects from us take before going straight to a law school admission Test ( PhiLSAT.! 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Article: how to become a lawyer receives a license to practice.! Than 250 attorneys she saw the possibility of mixing both through Dr. Pedro Solis, lawyer... Is normally given on all four Sundays every November in the Philippines research Attorney / lawyer by! Can a non-U.S. citizen become a lawyer is a widely varied process the... Should be more than reading your Facebook or Twitter feed class, with marker! And read fast that your handwriting is neat, follows the margins of law...: make sure that you are studying school admission Test ( PhiLSAT.! May not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice copies. Option=Com_Content & view=category & id=36 & Itemid=56 lawyers can gain admission to the main article: to... Roll number how to become a lawyer in the philippines you still can become a lawyer in the first of... 4 years it should be more than 250 attorneys and `` knowledge. on... Php per month in good standing in order to survive law school complex ensuring..., for some students to take a Bar exam standing in order how to become a lawyer in the philippines maintain such practice ready. Exam of the Supreme Court has rendered decisions and resolutions that area of the Philippines college law... 'S degree in any subject the license examination which generally takes 0 to 1 year wealth. First review and approve your foreign law degree of being a lawyer in the of! All four Sundays every November in the Philippines: 6 Steps what are the best course! To research Attorney / lawyer salaries by city, experience, skill, employer more!
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WorkbooksI started teaching hand analysis at the State University of New York at Binghamton in the winter of 1969. What I lacked in training aids (I had none) I made up for with a surplus of enthusiasm. Well, it is over forty years later; my enthusiasm has not waned but the training materials have certainly improved over time.
The International Institute of Hand Analysis has four training manuals:
• The Hand Analysis Intensive
• Year Long Certification Training
• Advanced Hand Analysis Training
• Master Hand Analyst Training
Copyrighted IIHA training manuals are 150 – 350 pages and contain printed material, diagrams, hand prints, homework and journal exercises designed to support students learning hands. Each manual has gone through multiple revisions as the IIHA programs have been taught by a variety of gifted teachers, each leaving their indelible imprint on the training methods and materials.
It is worth noting, however, that reading hands cannot be learned by study alone. Like many other skills, practice – practice – practice and your individual style and talent for hand analysis will emerge in the form that fits who you are at your best.
For an overview of IIHA training manuals, scroll ahead for some excerpts. Thank you for your interest in the world of hand analysis.
Founder and Director, IIHA
Click to Download PDF
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Question from Bill: What is the best natural remedy for a dog’s eye that’s been poked by a bush’s twig?
Answer from AI:
If your dog’s eye has been poked by a twig, it’s important to act quickly to prevent infection and minimize discomfort. Here are some steps you can take:
- Keep your dog calm: A calm dog is easier to assess and treat. Try to keep your pet still and comfortable.
- Examine the eye: Look for any visible debris or twigs that may be lodged in the eye. If you see something, do not attempt to remove it yourself as this could cause more damage.
- Rinse the eye: You can use a saline solution (the same as used for human contact lenses) to gently flush the eye. This can help to remove any small particles and provide some relief.
When to Seek Veterinary Care
It’s crucial to seek professional veterinary advice if:
- The dog is in pain, squinting, or pawing at the eye.
- There is visible damage to the eye or surrounding area.
- The dog’s eye is red, swollen, or has a discharge.
- You are unable to remove the debris safely.
While natural remedies can be helpful, they should never replace professional veterinary care, especially in the case of eye injuries. However, if the injury is minor and you’ve consulted with your vet, you might consider:
- Chamomile tea: A cool chamomile tea bag can be used as a compress to help soothe the eye. Make sure the tea is caffeine-free and cool before applying it to the eye area.
- Aloe vera: Pure aloe vera gel can help soothe the skin around the eye but should not be applied directly into the eye.
Remember, the eye is a sensitive and complex organ. Any home remedies should be used with caution and only after discussing them with your veterinarian. In many cases, natural remedies are not sufficient to treat eye injuries, and delaying proper veterinary care can lead to serious complications.
To prevent future injuries:
- Keep your dog on a leash in areas with dense vegetation.
- Trim any hazardous bushes or branches in your yard.
- Consider dog goggles for eye protection if your dog frequently runs through dense foliage.
Eye injuries can be serious, so it’s always best to err on the side of caution and consult with your veterinarian for the appropriate care and treatment.
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This article was written by Oilprice.com -- the leading provider of energy news in the world. Also check out this recent article.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick sent letters to oil and gas drillers to warn them about running afoul of the state's rules on flaring natural gas. Gas flaring is the process of burning off excess natural gas when drilling a well, which burns off methane, a better environmental outcome than simply allowing it to escape, even though it still produces air pollution. Texas allows operators to do so for up to 10 days after a well is completed.
Craddick spoke at a conference in Houston, and according to Fuel Fix she explained the motivation behind the warning: "We have flaring rules in the state and we will be implementing and enforcing those. The letter is going to remind people of that. Sometimes, we've had a few not necessarily follow those rules."
The letters sent by the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, was meant to remind operators of the rules, according to Craddick. She says drilling in the Eagle Ford Shale is of particular concern.
Gas flaring has received increased attention recently, but regulators are only catching up to a process that has been under way for some time in places like North Dakota and Texas. Regulators in the Bakken are trying to find ways to incentivize the industry through carrots and sticks to capture the natural gas instead of flaring it. As NPR reported in late January, an estimated $1 million is being burned off each day in the Bakken.
The problem is that the infrastructure often does not exist, and the gas is simply not lucrative enough to build out enough equipment and pipeline capacity to capture the natural gas and transport it to market. Natural gas is worth a small fraction of the value of oil. "We know the infrastructure is behind. We don't want to shut you in. But we also wanna make sure you follow the rules," Craddick said.
America's energy boom is far from over
Record oil and natural gas production is revolutionizing the United States' energy position. Finding the right plays while historic amounts of capital expenditures are flooding the industry will pad your investment nest egg. For this reason, the Motley Fool is offering a comprehensive look at three energy companies set to soar during this transformation in the energy industry. To find out which three companies are spreading their wings, check out the special free report, "3 Stocks for the American Energy Bonanza." Don't miss out on this timely opportunity; click here to access your report -- it's absolutely free.
Written by Joao Peixe at Oilprice.com.
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This is the income received but not earned throughout the accounting period. Conversely, this is the income for those services are to be rendered in future. Such income is deducted from the related income in the credit side of loss and profit account and is also demonstrated as a liability in the balance sheet.
To notice the impact of adjustment entries' on the last account as financial condition of the business firm let's take the similar illustration of Ms. Naina again only comprising the some common adjustments in this. And here we check its impact practically through comparing the transactions of both the examples along with or without adjustment entries.
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Editor: Re "Rescue Canada's poorest provincial economies: Allow Fracking" October 30, 2013
In a special report to the Guardian we were so fortunate to read an analysis by two doctors from the Fraser Institute about how fracking in the Maritimes is all around good for everyone. The economy receives a boost and no harm is done to our resources.
When reading a report we should always ask ourselves who is writing the report and who funds the report writers. What are their motives, and why go to the time to produce this information to the public.
This story is no different. One only has to start at the Fraser Institute's board of trustees to begin to piece things together. I'm sure Gwyn Morgan of EnCana and R. J. Pirie of Sabre Energy are really concerned about how much we overpay in taxes, and how they want to help our economy. I'm sure they really care about being diligent with our resources, and making sure our communities are healthy and don't suffer ill effects from fracking in our back yards. I'm sure their funders like Exxon mobile and the billionaire Koch brothers of oil and gas fame lose sleep over our well being.
I hope they don't think they can feed us Maritimers this load of b.s. and think we're buying it for one second. Corporations care about one thing and one thing only, profit. They don't care about community, environment or our health. Those things get in the way of the profit. If corporate interests think they can sway opinion with propaganda articles like this they are sadly mistaken. Maritimers are not push overs. We are smart, hard working, proud, resilient people.
So next time you see an article from a group like this, telling us how we need to be "rescued" from our poverty, the best thing you can do is roll it up into a ball, put ‘er in the wood stove, throw some kindling on ‘er, and sit back and enjoy the warmth. It's a cold fall and corporations spent good money and time writing that crap.
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WMS hosts Geography Bee (with video)
WORTHINGTON -- Barrier islands help shelter a nature reserve on Apalachicola Bay, an arm of what large gulf?
If you can answer that question correctly, you just might be able to compete against Tanner Barrie, an eighth-grader at Worthington Middle School.
Barrie bested 29 other fifth- through eighth-grade students from WMS Wednesday morning to win the school's National Geographic Bee and earn a chance to qualify for the state contest. He will take a written test in January in his quest to reach state. Just three other students in the past eight years have advanced to the state round from WMS.
Taking the title was not an easy task for Barrie, who had to first make his way through a tie-breaker round just to reach the finals. He was among nine students who answered five questions correctly in the preliminary competition to reach the tie-breaker. Only five students could advance from the tie-breaker to round out the panel of 10 finalists.
Making it to the semi-finals with six or seven correct answers in the preliminary round were Jaeger Marco, Bryan Doeden, Rachel Koller, Katie Rogers and Kharmen Saysirisanh. Those advancing from the tie-breaker round were Barrie, Kendrick Bickett, Sam Martin, Taylor McCarvel and Xochitl Tobias.
Sitting in one long row and facing an audience of parents, grandparents, teachers and preliminary round participants, the finalists returned to the category of U.S. geography and provided oral answers for such questions as, "Thousands of tourists are attracted to Kona for the beaches and coffee in which state?" and "Factors Walk is a network of cobblestone paths that were once part of a historic cotton market in Savannah in which state?" The answers to those questions were Hawaii and Georgia.
Then, requesting each finalist take out dry-erase board and a marker, the moderator asked, "In August 2011, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake was felt along the East Coast of the United States. This earthquake's epicenter was located northwest of Richmond in which state?" Eight of the 10 finalists answered the question correctly by writing down Virginia.
In another round, students were handed a map of the United States, complete with circles of different sizes to mark population changes between 2000 and 2010, and were asked questions pertaining to the states.
Ultimately, the finalists returned to providing oral answers for questions. Here, one finalist was asked, "Ferries bring visitors from the city of St. Ignace to Mackinac Island in which state?" (Michigan) and "The Bitterroot Range is located on the border between Montana and which other state?" (Idaho). The round continued until two finalists remained -- Barrie and sixth-grader Kendrick Bickett.
Barrie, in his third National Geographic Bee at WMS, was poised for the championship round, as was Bickett, who competed in his first bee a year ago.
"I was a little nervous at the start, and then I gained more confidence at the end," said Bickett, who refers to geography as "one of my favorite subjects."
For the past month, Bickett said he visited nationalgeographic.com to answer daily questions in the GeoBee Challenge. Barrie tried that a few times as well.
In the end, the two finalists faced off in a championship round of three questions. The finalist that answered the most questions correctly was deemed the winner.
The first question proved to determine the winner, as Barrie answered "Gulf of Mexico" for the question listed at the beginning of this article. Neither Barrie nor Bickett correctly answered the other two questions in the round.
Those questions and answers were: "Name the Asian country at the eastern edge of the South China Sea that includes about 7,100 islands" (Philippines); and "Timbuktu, a center of caravan trade for almost a thousand years, is located north of the Niger River in which landlocked country?" (Mali).
While this is Barrie's last year eligible to compete in the National Geographic Bee, Bickett is hoping he can return again in the next couple of years.
"I've got to pass the qualifying round -- you never know," he said.
Nearly 250 questions, spanning U.S. geography, geographic comparisons, U.S. physical geography, continents, world geography and cultural geography, were asked during the more than two-hour contest Wednesday morning.
Barrie is the son of Chad and Sara Henderson and Jason and Laura Barrie, all of Worthington, while Bickett is the son of Tim and Stacy Bickett, Worthington.
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Are you in need of a new hot water heater for your home? If your current water heater has finally reached the end of its life expectancy, then shopping around for a replacement water heater is probably at the top of your current ‘to do’ list. When researching systems, you are sure to find a variety of conventional water tank models as well as the newest tankless water heater option. Though you have forever been accustomed to a tank to hold your hot water, in today’s world newer and innovative options are now readily available.
The team here at Steve Mull Plumbing want to share with you some important reasons why switching over to a tankless water heater is an ideal solution for any homeowner.
Benefits of Switching to a Tankless Water Heater
- First and foremost is the simple fact that conventional water tanks can run out of water quickly. However, with a tankless heater the water is actually heated by way of a heating element from the moment the hot water is demanded, regardless of the point of use. Simply put, you never have to wait for hot water and never have to be concerned about your water turning cold right in the middle of your relaxing hot shower. With a tankless water heater, you have an endless supply of water.
- Secondly, tankless is quite energy efficient. Since the tankless heater does not have to heat a full tank of water consistently it will consume less energy thereby improving your carbon footprint.
- Further, conventional water heaters typically have a lifespan of 12 to 15 years where a tankless heater can last near to 20 years or even more.
- Yet another benefit is the fact that water tanks, over time, are susceptible to leaks, just like most other plumbing appliances. However, with the tankless model, there is no water stored which means there is no chance for a leak or any type of water damage.
- Further to the benefits is that tankless models require much less maintenance than conventional heaters. Though they still require routine maintenance by professional technicians yearly, the maintenance is minimal since they have no actual tank that needs to be drained annually.
- Finally, and quite important in our green world today, tankless water heaters consume much less energy which ultimately contributes to lower energy bills and lower electricity bills as well. This, as we all know, helps to increase our savings.
Why You Can Rely on Steve Mull Plumbing
Choosing, purchasing and effectively maintaining a tankless water heater is not something you want to just go out there and do. You want to obtain professional advice and the assistance needed in your decision making from a knowledgeable, certified plumber and water heater tech. For that reason, we highly recommend you reach out to the highly skilled and trained team of plumbers and technicians here at Steve Mull Plumbing. Our team is committed and dedicated to providing you with all the important insight and data needed to properly choose the tankless heater for your home and individual needs. We offer top of the line data, advice, products and services and stand ready to provide you with all your water heater and plumbing needs.
In addition to increased energy saving and lower energy bills, as well as an increased value to your home, our tankless water heaters afford you enhanced comfort and convenience for you and your family year-round. Our premier services include the best all round plumbing products and installations, professional technicians and customer service that will simply not be matched by any of our competitors. In addition, we can offer you advice on how to get your tax credits for choosing and installing your new energy efficient appliance.
If you are thinking about making the all-important switch over to a tankless water heater, then we are the team for you. Simply give a call out to our professionals today and schedule your free consultation. We look forward to serving you and to providing you with all your plumbing needs season after season, year after year!!
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How Much Does A PPM Cost?
You may have learned that there are rules and regulations that apply to raising capital for your business. Federal and state securities laws apply whenever you seek capital from investors, regardless of whether they are friends, family, crowd funding investors, high net worth individuals, angel investors, accredited investors, or otherwise. A private placement memorandum (PPM), as you may have also learned, is the legal document provided to prospective investors when selling equity or debt in your business. It is sometimes referred to as an offering memorandum or offering document. It provides investors with the information they need as well as protects the company in the event of an investor complaint. Now you may be asking yourself, do I really need a private placement memorandum? If so, can I write it myself? Can I use a template? Do I need an attorney? And how much do I need to budget for this?
Regulation D Exemption
Regulation D is an exemption that allows companies to raise capital in what is known as a private placement. There are various rules under Regulation D that are designed to allow for different sized offerings. There are three distinct offerings provided under Regulation D. Each of the three offerings is controlled by a rule: Rule 504, Rule 506(b), and Rule 506(c). The vast majority of offerings are conducted under Rule 506(b) or 506(c). Each allows for the company to raise any amount of money, but differ as follows:
• Rule 506(b): This is a private offering only to investors with whom the company has a pre-existing relationship. Up to a maximum of 35 investors may be unaccredited, but audited financials would be required if there are any unaccredited investors. There is no limit to the amount that can be raised.
• Rule 506(c): This offering allows for general solicitation, which means the company can advertise the offering, list it on their website, use an equity crowd funding site such as Equity Net, and/or use social media, email, seminars, radio, TV, print, and any other means to market the offering. All investors must be accredited and there are enhanced requirements for qualifying investors. There is no limit to the amount that can be raised.
Regulation D provides entrepreneurs and startups with a truly flexible and lightly regulated means for raising capital. However, raising capital from investors is a securities transaction, and even under Regulation D, and the Anti-Fraud Rules apply. Compliance with these rules is critical to avoid severe civil or even criminal liability, which can include investigation by the SEC, state securities commission, or a State Attorney General, potentially leading to enforcement action. Investors can also pursue civil damages. Rescission – an order to return all funds received to investors – is not an uncommon outcome of such investigations. One purpose of a comprehensive customized PPM is to avoid these outcomes by protecting your company in the event of a complaint.
Wide Price Range
There is a significant range in pricing among these options and you may receive price quotes ranging from $2,500 to $35,000. Why the tremendous range in price?
Big law firms have big overhead, including supporting high salaries for associates and partners. The firms will likely charge at least $35,000 to draft a PPM. Keep in mind that only one or two attorneys would be working on your documents, despite the size of the firm, and these lawyers may not even be specialists in private placements, but rather have a more general corporate securities background. These firms may also require an equity interest in your company. Ultimately, the work will probably be good and your interests should be well protected, but the high price tag will choke many startups and entrepreneurs. PPM LAWYERS focuses exclusively on private placements and provides flat-fee services.
In your research, you may also come across small firms that offer PPM drafting services for under $5,000. The service providers at these firms are generally not lawyers at all. In this case, the person or people drafting your PPM may have general business experience and will probably model your PPM on a template or sample PPM. If your drafter is not a trained or experienced lawyer, there is a high risk that s/he will miss important nuances and complexities of the federal and state securities laws that apply to your particular business and offering. Be sure to ask the person preparing your PPM what exemption or exemptions you’re offering should fit into and what facts and regulations s/he has analyzed in making that determination. Ask whether she/he will be drafting industry- and company-specific risk factors for you), or if the PPM will only include boilerplate risk factors. And be sure to ask if she/he will be handling the regulatory filings for both state and federal, as well as what the firm will do in the event an investor complains or has issues with the PPM. Ultimately, in the case of a non-attorney PPM drafter, you run the risk of getting a final product that does not adequately protect your company and leaves you vulnerable to grave legal exposure and compliance issues.
There are also small law firms, sometimes solo practitioners, who will draft a PPM for anywhere from $5,000-$15,000. With such a firm, be sure to find out how much experience the attorney has in corporate securities law in general and PPM practice in particular. Most small firms do not specialize in private placements and may lack the ability to fully understand the nuances of the rules and regulations that apply to your company. Another consideration with a small firm or solo practitioner is their ability to take calls, discuss your project, and complete your documents within a reasonable time frame. Solo practitioners, in particular, are often overworked and unable to provide focused, personalized service. It is also important to find out if they are charging you by the hour or with a flat fee. Billable hours have a way of building up to cost prohibitive levels. Find out exactly what you are getting from this lawyer. Will they handle the regulatory filings, and is that included in the cost? Are they drafting custom risk factors that are industry and company-specific? Are they providing ongoing support or advice throughout the offering, and is that also included in their price quote? Finally, do your homework on the firm you are considering to ensure that they have a track record of satisfied clients, that you can trust them to complete your PPM in a reasonable time frame, and that they can provide the support you need throughout the process.
PPM Templates are available in the $1,000 price range. While this low cost is attractive, especially for a startup or small business, consider these factors before you use a PPM template.
How will you assess whether the template provides a comprehensive structure, includes all necessary components, and reflects the most recent changes in applicable laws and regulations?
• How much time do you have to dedicate to working on your PPM? A comprehensive PPM generally runs 40-50 pages, not including exhibits and appendices. In addition, the language in most templates is likely to be very confusing for a layperson.
• Will the template provider help you? If so, see the “Non-Attorney Drafter” section above.
• Templates are boilerplate documents that have little relevance to your particular business or offering. A good PPM drafter conducts extensive research to ensure that the document is fully customized for your particular business.
• How will you ensure that you’re not making any mistakes with respect to the proper legal exemptions and disclaimers, disclosures, risk factors, securities offering structure, or ownership tables?
Think carefully about these considerations before you spend a lot of time trying to draft your PPM from a template. The answers to these questions are often the difference between a successful raise and a waste of time, let alone the catastrophe of an investor complaint down the road. Laws and regulations have changed dramatically in recent years and remain in flux; it’s critical that your PPM document reflect the most current state of the law. The complex legal language is difficult to navigate for most people and if you miss something or misinterpret something, you could be putting yourself and your company at risk. Most entrepreneurs will not want to take the risks involved with trying to draft one themselves. Remember, a strong PPM not only impresses investors but also stands as your shield against legal exposure and compliance issues. If you’re thinking you can draft your PPM yourself from a template and then engage a lawyer to sign off on it, keep in mind that no good lawyer will put his/her name on a document that they can’t stand behind 100%, due to professional liability concerns. If you do find a lawyer who is willing to review your document, it is likely to be at a substantial cost, because careful review of a PPM document is an extensive process. If you are considering this option, you would be wise to first identify a lawyer who is willing to provide the review and find out what they will charge.
Call A Securities Lawyer
If you want to be able to sleep at night and not waste your money, your best bet is to retain PPM LAWYERS to prepare your documents and provide full coverage and support to you for the entire transaction. Raising capital from investors is not to be taken lightly. Cutting corners at this stage, looking for a cut rate service provider, or spending any money at all to have an inexperienced or unqualified person draft these legal documents is often a waste of money, and can come back to haunt you down the road. As a result, it is the very first layer of defense against potential allegations of securities fraud. Nearly any private placement offering or crowd funding offering cannot go without one as a core best practice.
The Form 1A document standard drives fully registered offerings which are vetted and approved by the SEC and accordingly offers potential investors substantial detail and disclosure. By drafting our clients’ private placement memoranda to Form 1A standards, we strive to maximize clarity, efficacy, and liability insulation. Moreover, drafting PPM’s to this standard enhances the offering’s viability among investors, financial advisors, placement agents, as well as institutions. Finally, our services include taking our robust private placement memoranda and enhancing their presentation value with the highest level graphics and visual content. While a PPM is the heart of a private offering, there are many other considerations and decision points that require a skilled and experienced hand. In particular, the actual structure of the offering (as a small sample: debt versus equity, waterfall mechanics, pro formas, conversion mechanics, investor rights, etc.) is not something that should be randomly chosen. An Attorney provides comprehensive planning, strategy and consulting services in and around your offering to assure optimal structure. Moreover, he can quickly and modify aspects of the offering as each deal often evolves over a period of time and as individual investors request particular incentives and rewards for investment.
A brief summary of those considerations are below, any of which can have drastic implications for the overall character of the private placement offering:
• Pre Offering Analysis and Consultation: Analyzing the venture prior to designing the offering structure so as to identify and offset major weaknesses in the venture itself that may undermine investment viability is a key step.
• Debt versus Equity: One of the primary concerns for any private placement offering is the actual “security” to be offered. Contrary to popular belief, one can sell debt security as well as equity (i.e., the difference between an investor actually owning pieces of the company, versus the investor owning an obligation to pay back a debt). Since this is a major strategy point careful consideration has to be given to the various pros and cons of both approaches, which can have far-reaching implications.
• Optimally Choosing from Various SEC Exemption Rules: There are various “flavors” of private placement offering exemptions that each have their own set of pros and cons (e.g., the total amount of the capital raise, the nature of the documents required for prospective investors, etc.). Properly navigating between them so as to optimize the options and minimize the requirements of the issuer is a key strategy point and requires careful planning.
• “Blue Sky” Filing Strategy and Implementation: All private placement offerings have a double government footprint–a state footprint based on the residence of each investor, as well as the federal footprint which applies across the board. As a result, private placement offerings generally require notification filings (i.e., forms that indicate the nature of the offering, the principals involved, etc.) to be made with these states as well as the federal government. Each state has its own set of requirements which can add complexity and costs. Properly navigating between them so as to optimize the options and minimize the requirements of the issuer is a key strategy point and requires careful planning.
• Share and Unit Classes and Rights: An issuer cannot simply sell “shares”, without considering what investor rights, duties, and obligations attach to each (information rights, management rights, payout preference, etc.). As a result, while pricing the shares or notes is also key, special care should also be given to the various classes the shares, notes, etc. can take since that will dictate many of these rights, duties, and obligations (e.g., common, preferred, or convertible preferred equity).
• Engineering the Capitalization Structure: Properly devising the company capitalization structure (how many shares makes sense given both current and future capitalization/growth needs, company valuation and share, etc.) requires careful planning. Using figures that do not factor in long term considerations can potentially harm the company’s growth and deter investment in the current offering.
• Min/Max Offering: In certain cases, an issuer may be required by statute to or may desire to set a minimum threshold of investment that must be met prior to releasing or being able to utilize the funds. This is a tricky consideration and must be planned with care, so as not to unduly hamper the offering with over onerous thresholds, while still satisfying investor and statutory requirements.
• Engineering Investor Returns and Waterfalls: At the heart of any offering is the actual model of return for an investor. Each offering is different in terms of incentives, industry norms, participants, and a variety of other factors that may affect these models. In addition, a venture or project may leverage a jigsaw puzzle of funding sources including private equity or debt and institutional sources that may also affect this model.
• Marketing Strategies: Any private placement offering should be generated with a robust understanding of the optimal strategy to market that offering based on a solid sensitivity to the investor audience. In addition, after the offering has been generated.
Free Initial Consultation with Lawyer
It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Legal problems come to everyone. Whether it’s your son who gets in a car wreck, your uncle who loses his job and needs to file for bankruptcy, your sister’s brother who’s getting divorced, or a grandparent that passes away without a will -all of us have legal issues and questions that arise. So when you have a law question, call Ascent Law for your free consultation (801) 676-5506. We want to help you!
8833 S. Redwood Road, Suite C
West Jordan, Utah
84088 United States
Telephone: (801) 676-5506
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How long does stem cell knee pain relief last for severe arthritis? We treat many medical providers with knee arthritis and other ailments. Why? First, medical providers like doctors, nurses, and physical therapists have (to quote the movie Jerry McGuire) “been to the puppet show and seen all the strings”. What I mean by this is that they have seen the big negative consequences that can come with invasive surgeries such as knee replacement, so when they might need one, they look for other options. This morning I’d like to highlight MF who is a 54 year old ER physician who had a 2 year history of knee pain with significant arthritis when he was first seen. Based on his recent communications, he had approx two years of about 75% relief with the Regenexx-SD stem cell procedure. Prior to the procedure, using the elliptical machine at the gym would cause his knee to become painful and swell. After the procedure he didn’t have much pain or swelling when he got off the machine. More recently he injured his knee again while doing heavy squats, so now he’s coming back for an update treatment. MF’s results highlight something we do see in some of our stem cell patients with more severe arthritis and who want to remain very active, update treatments are sometimes needed every few years to keep them moving at the levels they desire!
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Feds stop work on Flaming Gorge pipeline study
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has suspended its evaluation of a proposed pipeline to carry water from southwestern Wyoming to the Front Range of Colorado.
Aaron Million of Ft. Collins has applied to pipe up to 250,000 acre feet of water a year from the Green River as far south as Pueblo, Colo.
Rena Brand is project manager for the Corps of Engineers in Littleton, Colo.
Brand says Million wrote to her agency last month asking it to suspend its environmental review of his pipeline proposal. She says Million wants to consider whether his project could generate electricity and, if so, whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should be reviewing it.
The Coloradoan newspaper reports Million was arrested Saturday on a Texas warrant accusing him of stalking an ex-girlfriend.
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The Central Board was a scheme proposed in the mid-1880s to provide for the
devolution of some legislative powers from the Westminster Parliament in
England to a proposed elected body (a board) in Ireland.
It was proposed to partially address the concerns of the Irish Home Rule
movement. It was never pursued, and was superseded by the First Home Rule
Bill in 1886.
According to Section-16, the following are the functions of the Central Board:
To promote cleanliness of streams and wells in different areas of the state.
To advise the Central Govt, on matters concerning the prevention and control of
To co-ordinate the actions of the State Board and resolve disputes among them.
To provide technical assistance and guidance to the State Boards to carry out
research in prevention and control of water pollution problems.
To organize training of persons engaged in pollution control.
To organise comprehensive programme for pollution control through mass media.
To lay down standards for streams or wells.
To prepare manuals, codes or guides for treatment and disposal of sewage and trade
To establish or recognise laboratories for analysis of water samples from any stream,
well or trade effluents.
Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme (IGNOAPS): A
monthly pension of Rs.200/- is given to elderly aged 60-79 years
belonging to BPL category. The pension increases to Rs.500/-per
month upon attaining the age of 80 years. The total beneficiaries
under the scheme are 221 lakh.
5 Pension Schemes For Senior Citizens Offered By The
Government of India
APY – Atal Pension Yojana.
NPS – National Pension System.
PMVVY – Pradhan Mantri Vaya Vandana Yojana.
VPBY – Varishtha Pension Bima Yojana.
IGNOAPS – Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme.
Scheme of National Scholarship for Persons with
Disabilities – Scholarship is awarded for pursueing
post matric / professional / technical courses of
duration more than one year. For students with
autism / cerebral palsy / mental retardation / multiple
disabilities the scholarship is provided from Class 9
onwards. Advertisements are placed in all national
dailies and on the MSJE website in the month of
June. Applicants are eligible if they have disability
above 40 per cent and the total family income does not
exceed Rs. 15,000 per month.
List of Schemes for Differently Abled Persons
Assistance to Disabled Persons for Purchase/fitting of Aids and Appliances (ADIP) Scheme
District Disability Rehabilitation Centre (DDRC)
Implementation of the Scheme for Implementation of Persons with Disabilities Act (SIPDA)
Un-employment allowances to Persons with Disability
Allowances to the family with disabled children.
Allowance to employees with disabilities and child care allowance to women employees with
Special School for students with Disabilities: Govt. BDS Deaf & Dumb School, Kahilipara,
Guwahati; Jorhat Blind Institute, Jorhat; School for Hearing Impaired, Jorhat and Special
School for Hearing Impaired, Lakhimpur, Grants in aid to Sreemanta Sarkar Mission,
Barhampur Nagaon, Assam Sishu Vidyalaya, Bihpuria, Lakhimpur, Janamangal Andha
Adrasha Vidyalaya, Moranhat and Society for Welfare of Blind, Guwahati.
Grants in aid provided to 15 Nos. of NGOs working with a mentally ill person.
Braille Press, Guwahati.
Composite Rehabilitation Centre (CRC).
Railway Recruitment Boards are organisations under the Government of India
that manage the appointment of new employees to work in Indian Railways.
There are 21 offices of railway recruiting board all over the India:
AhemadabadAs part of the National Rail Plan, Vision 2024 has been launched
for accelerated implementation of certain critical projects by 2024 such as 100%
electrification, multi-tracking of congested routes, upgradation of speed to 160
kmph on Delhi-Howrah and Delhi-Mumbai routes, upgradation of speed to
130kmph on all other Golden Quadrilateral-Golden Diagonal (GQ/GD) routes
and elimination of all Level Crossings on all GQ/GD route.
The Human Resource Development Scheme of
Department of Health Research is intended to create a
pool of talented health research personnel in the country
by upgrading skills of faculty of Medical
Colleges/Institutes, mid – career Scientists, medical
To increase the overall availability of trained personnel
for health research from medical colleges across the
country through scholarships, fellowships and career
advancement scheme etc. for faculty and young medical
doctors and other scientists to take up medical and health
research as a career.
The Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises is the ministry in the
Government of India. It is the apex executive body for the formulation and
administration of rules, regulations and laws relating to micro, small and medium
enterprises in India. The Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises is
The statistics provided by the annual reports of Ministry of Small and Medium
Enterprises (MSME) shows a rise in the plan amount spent on the khadi sector
from ₹1942.7 million to ₹14540 million, and non-plan amounts from ₹437 million to
₹2291 million, in the period from 1994–95 to 2014–2015. The interest subsidies to
khadi institutions increased from ₹96.3 million to ₹314.5 million in this period
According to Section-3, the Central Board shall consist of the
1.A full time Chairman (to be nominated by the Central
Government) having knowledge or practical experience in
matters related to environmental protection or having knowledge
and experience in administration of institutions dealing with
2.Not more than five officials nominated by the Central
3.Not more than five persons nominated by the Central
Government from amongst the members of State Boards.
4.Not more than three non-officials nominated by the
government to represent interests of agriculture, fishery,
5.Two persons nominated by the government to represent the
companies or corporations owned by the Central Government.
6.One full time Member-Secretary (to be appointed by the
Central Govt.) having knowledge and experience of scientific
engineering or management aspects of pollution control.
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Price (RRP): $449
You don’t have to look very hard to see that the desktop is going the way of the dodo, what with laptops and tablets taking over. But if you still prefer a stationary computer, Intel’s NUC could fit the bill, and it’s cheap, too.
What is it?
It’s sad but true: desktops are dying. Once an area this reviewer adored (he still does for the most part), people are gradually distancing themselves from the idea that they need a computer on their desk.
After all, why have a desktop when you can have a laptop that you can take with you?
The desktop is still useful in quite a few situations, though, with offices, hospitals, and schools chiefly up there, but homes and small businesses can benefit, too, and Intel hasn’t given up on the area, coming up with a new specification for desktop computers that makes these machines smaller and more desk friendly than they’ve ever been.
Forget about that massive tower you used to keep under the desk, and look past the small desktop or tower you could still keep on that plank of wood or glass you rest your keyboard on, because Intel’s take on the evolution of the desktop is smaller than all of these.
Called the “Next Unit of Computing” or “NUC” for short (say the word “puck” but replace the “p” with “n” and you’ll have the pronunciation), this is Intel’s take on where the desktop could go, plunging enough of what you need into as small a computer as possible.
And small is exactly what it is, with a rough area a little smaller than a CD case, though much thicker, measuring roughly 5 centimetres high.
This isn’t quite a cube, with the NUC appearing more like a cube that has been cut in half, and that’s kind of what it is.
Inside this not-quite-cube, you’ll find an Intel processor, which is hardly surprising given this is Intel’s Next Unit of Computing.
That chip isn’t the most high end processor around, but should do the job, with an Intel Pentium N3700 set to 1.6GHz here, and paired with 2GB RAM. That memory can be upgraded with another stick of memory later on, but you’ll have to bring your own, with only one socket found on this computer.
Storage is rather small from the get-go, with 32GB of storage soldered onto the hardware here, though in an interesting twist, this has Microsoft’s Windows 10 preinstalled to the storage out of the box, just waiting for you.
If you want more room to move, you’ll find support for a 2.5 inch SATA3 drive here, though the cable wasn’t with our box.
Intel did tell GadgetGuy that this should arrive with retail models, allowing you to add more than the 32GB storage, handy since you’re only left with around 15GB with Windows 10 installed.
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Inspiring Girls Expeditions is accepting applications through January 31, 2017 for free summer science and wilderness expeditions in Alaska and Washington for girls ages 16 to 17.
Three teams of up to nine teenage girls and three instructors will spend 12 days exploring and learning about mountain glaciers or fjords with tidewater glaciers. They’ll conduct scientific field studies with professional glaciologists, oceanographers, artists and mountaineers.
The three Inspiring Girls trips of 2017 will include Girls on Ice Alaska, Girls On Ice Cascades and Girls in Icy Fjords. They are operated through IARC and the UAF College of Natural Science & Mathematics.
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|Ten Questions for Charles Darwin and His Followers-#6
By Dr. Chuck McGowen
How could the first primordial cell have survived in an atmosphere containing either oxygen or no oxygen?
At the moment of the appearance of the first master cell the atmosphere either contained oxygen or it did not. No one knows for certain just of what the primordial atmosphere consisted. Some have proposed a combination of hydrogen (H2), carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), nitrogen (N2), water vapor (H2O) and small amounts of oxygen (O2). Others have added methane (CH4) to the mix.
If oxygen had been present then the first cell could not have evolved without first containing a highly complex mechanism called the cytochrome oxidase system. This enzymatic apparatus is the tool that a cell uses to process oxygen, metabolize its food and grow. Without this highly complex and intricately organized system a primitive cell would be “oxidized” or burned-up by the oxygen in the primitive atmosphere. Realizing the improbability that this complex enzymatic system could have randomly evolved in the first cell some evolutionists have hypothesized a primeval atmosphere devoid of oxygen.
But an anoxic atmosphere creates another over whelming problem for the first master cell, the primordial source of all life. Without oxygen the atmosphere would be also missing ozone (O3), which is generated by the action of cosmic rays and/or lightning on oxygen. Ozone protects life on earth by filtering out some of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Without it, no life would survive very long on planet earth. In the Darwinian model of biological macro-evolution, with or without oxygen being present, the primordial cellular origin of all plant, animal and human life would burn up: as soon as it “evolved” it’s toast. In Darwin’s words, it would not be fit to survivie.
No evolutionary scientist has yet shown in the laboratory how any of those mixtures of gases could have produced and sustained self replicating life (a single living cell) when suspended over a liquid containing organic and inorganic chemicals. The entire theory of biological evolution is pure conjecture; an enigma, wrapped in a conundrum and clouded by mystery. Let’s stop telling our students that it is a proven fact. Let’s have an open, honest and unemotional debate on the observable facts that true science has to offer
Monday, May 31, 2010, 07:18 AM
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The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News (WA : 1848 - 1864)
Find an issue
- Click a decade link below to see a list of available issues for that decade
- Click a year link to update the calendars below
1. Select a year to see which months have issues in the following month calendar.
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Cite this title: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-title26
The West Australian, widely known as The West (Saturday/Sunday edition: The Weekend West) is the only locally edited daily newspaper published in Perth, Western Australia, and is owned by ASX-listed Seven West Media (ASX: SWM). The West is published in tabloid format, as is the state's other major newspaper, The Sunday Times, a News Limited publication. It is the second-oldest continuously produced newspaper in Australia, having been published since 1833. The West has strong conservative leanings, and has consistently supported the Coalition.See the full Wikipedia entry
- The Perth gazette and independent journal of politics and news [electronic resource]
- Perth, W. A. : A. Shenton, 1848-1864.
- Digitised as part of the Australian Newspapers service which allows access to historic Australian newspapers.
Also available in print and on microfilm.
Electronic reproduction. Canberra, A.C.T., : National Library of Australia, 2008-2009 (Australian newspapers). Vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1848)-v. 16, no. 815 (Sept. 30, 1864). Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Merged with: West Australian times, to form: Perth gazette & W.A. times.
- Life Dates
- Vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1848)-v. 16, no. 815 (Sept. 30, 1864)
- Later Title
- West Australian times 1835-5846
Perth gazette & W.A. times 1835-5838
- Former Title
- Perth gazette and Western Australian journal 1834-0938
- Australia Western Australia Perth
Where can I find copies?
The National Library of Australia acknowledges the use of newspapers and microfilm owned by the State Library of Western Australia for the digitisation of this title.
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When it comes to Italian racing cars, one of the brands that stand out the most is the Abarth. Abarth was founded by a man, of Australian-Italian descent, named Carlo Abarth together with Armando Scagliarini back in 1949 in the town of Turin. Ever since Abarth was acquired by Fiat, the Abarth logo has been associated with quality and prestigious Italian racing Cars.
The Abarth logo is known for its color as well as the big scorpion in the middle of the shield. Right below that Abarth name are three color: green, white, and red. These three colors represent the three colors found in the Italian flag. Since Abarth was “born” in Italy, it was but fitting to have the Italian flag represented in the logo. The yellow and red color that serves as the background for the scorpion represents the racing world. Abarth has always been manufacturing cars used in the racing world, so the red and yellow colors instantly give you an idea that their cars are mostly for racing use.
The shape of the Abarth logo is made to that of a shield. The shield represents victory and passion. Carlo Abarth has always been passionate about designing racing cars. It was this passion that led to the successful line up of Italian racing cars known the world over. They wanted this passion and victory to be reflected in the Abarth emblem thus the shield was a fitting representation.
When looking at Abarth car logos one that stands out, is the picture of the scorpion. The scorpion was added to the emblem by Carlo Abarth for two reasons. The first reason is that he wanted to make the emblem quite difficult to imitate, so he designed the scorpion in an unconventional way. The second reason is more personal; Carlo was born on November 15th making him a Scorpion. As a whole, the Abarth emblem has been associated with prestigious racing cars the world over.
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The Plaas research team gathered data on 66 land reform projects across the country and found that “land reform has shifted from being pro-poor to being pro-elite”. The question, then, is: who has benefitted from land redistribution in South Africa? Who are the winners and who are the losers Elaborating on the concept of elite capture of the land, Mtero says, “[It] simply refers to the concentration of public resources in the hands of a few individuals, and usually it’s the economically powerful and the politically influential individuals. Instead of broadening access to land and reconfiguring the unequal agrarian structure, a select group of black commercial farmers is promoted in land reform.”
Politicians like to remind us that rights are not absolute – especially when they want to pass legislation that limits the rights of ordinary citizens. However, when their own rights are at stake, then they suddenly forget that rights are not absolute and claim for themselves the absolute rights that they wish to deny the rest of us.
Thus when the freedom of the media is being discussed, politicians often remind us that this right is not absolute and that it must be balanced against other rights – especially the rights of politicians to have their dignity respected and protected and to have their privacy protected. But like the right to freedom of expression, the rights to dignity and privacy are not absolute. In fact, even before we begin to consider whether rights may be limited in terms of the limitation clause, we have to look at the context within which rights are being exercised to determine its scope and content.
The right to privacy is a perfect example of a right which does not have one scope and content regardless of context, but whose reach changes depending on the context within which it is being exercised. Section 13 of the Constitution states that: “[e]very person shall have the right to his or her personal privacy, which shall include the right not to be subject to searches of his or her person, home or property, the seizure of private possessions or the violation of private communications.”
In Bernstein v Bester the Constitutional Court stated that the concept of privacy is an amorphous and elusive one and confirmed that the scope of privacy has been closely related to the concept of identity. The right to privacy is not based on a notion of the unencumbered self, but on the notion of what is necessary to have one’s own autonomous identity. But one’s identity is multi-leveled and dependning on who one is and what activity one is engaged in the level of privacy protection will differ. The right to privacy is therefore like an onion: it has many layers and the closer one gets to the skin the less protected it is. As Ackermann stated in Berstein:
The relevance of such an integrated approach to the interpretation of the right to privacy is that this process of creating context cannot be confined to any one sphere, and specifically not to an abstract individualistic approach. The truism that no right is to be considered absolute, implies that from the outset of interpretation each right is always already limited by every other right accruing to another citizen. In the context of privacy this would mean that it is only the inner sanctum of a person, such as his/her family life, sexual preference and home environment, which is shielded from erosion by conflicting rights of the community. This implies that community rights and the rights of fellow members place a corresponding obligation on a citizen, thereby shaping the abstract notion of individualism towards identifying a concrete member of civil society. Privacy is acknowledged in the truly personal realm, but as a person moves into communal relations and activities such as business and social interaction, the scope of personal space shrinks accordingly.
In a constitutional democracy ordinary citizens have a right to vote, to receive and impart information, to be active citizens who are empowered to make autonomous decisions based on as wide an array of relevant facts about a situation as possible. This means that the privacy rights of a politician will often have to yield to the far more important rights of individuals to make indpendent and informed decisions about their elected representatives.
News that KwaZulu-Natal DA leader John Steenhuisen resigned last week over an affair with party provincial spokesperson Terry Kass-Beaumont, is a case in point. Usually the affairs of an individual should be of no concern to the public at large and should not generally be splashed on the front pages of newspapers. But – rightly or wrongly – South African voters are also influenced by rather prissy moral considerations and seem to take a dim view of marital infidelity. A case in point is the outcry which followed the revelation that President Jacob Zuam fathered a love child out of wedlock.
Personally, I do not think this should normally be relevant. Unless the private actions of the politician contradicts their public statements, I would not really care what a politician gets up to in private. But if a member of the ACPD conducts a private affair with a member of the same-sex, it would be perfectly acceptable to publish such information because the party believes gay men and lesbians are perverts whose rights should not be protected and who should be discriminated against.
Similarly, if a politician promotes safe-sex and the use of condoms and is then caught fathering a love child out of wedlock, it does speak to the double standard of that politician and publication of the private life of that politician becomes fair game. Personally I believe the newspapers went too far when it published allegations of a private affair by Kgalema Motlanthe as he had never claimed to be a sexual saint. Even if these claims were true (which they probably were not) it was no business of the electorate that he was having a girfriend.
But sadly I seem to be in a minority. Most voters do care about whether their politicians have affairs and cheat on their wifes, so the publication of private information about Mr Steenhuisen’s affair was therefore legitimate. He could not claim that his right to privacy was infringed because as a politician this right is limited by the publics right to know.
Similarly, the health records of the minister of health showing that she does not live the healthy lifestyle she claims to live, is fair game. In fact in the USA the health records of the president is made public routinely because the public’s right to know is deemed to be far more important than the president’s right to privacy.
As Paris Hilton knows all too well, the more public one live one’s life, the more you give up your privacy. So much more is this the case when one is a public representative paid by taxpayers. Pity many of our politicians do not want to accept this fundamental aspect of an open and democratic society.BACK TO TOP
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Santa Fe Fiesta; 400th Anniversary Celebration
This weekend, the city of Santa Fe was alive with celebration...400 years worth!
The event commemorates Don Diego De Vargas' peaceful reoccupation of the City of Holy Faith in 1692. On the streets you could hear "Viva la Fiesta," an expression people have been shouting with thanks and pride for 297 years.
The Plaza was a labyrinth of local craftsmen and food vendors offering traditional menu items like fry bread, sweet with sugar or savory with mutton stew, roasted corn, tacos, fajitas, and refreshing homemade lemonade with infusions of sweet fruit juices.
This was a true fiesta, unlike the various festivals that occur here through the summer. All day and into the evening, the sound of Mariachi enlivened the spirit of the occasion. You could hear the music throughout the Plaza calling you to dance, eat, celebrate a history no longer remote, just a few blocks away from Don Gaspar Inn.
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|Publication number||US2649579 A|
|Publication date||Aug 18, 1953|
|Filing date||Feb 1, 1950|
|Priority date||Feb 1, 1950|
|Publication number||US 2649579 A, US 2649579A, US-A-2649579, US2649579 A, US2649579A|
|Inventors||Warren A Alexander|
|Original Assignee||Standard Oil Dev Co|
|Export Citation||BiBTeX, EndNote, RefMan|
|Patent Citations (5), Referenced by (37), Classifications (7)|
|External Links: USPTO, USPTO Assignment, Espacenet|
9 1953 w. A. ALEXANDER 2,649,579
DETECTOR FOR SEISMIC EXPLORATiON Filed Feb. 1, 1950 3 Sheets-$heet l ZU arref). CZ. CIlcxander Unvenbor CLtLor r2525 Aug. 18, 1953 w. A ALEXANDER DETECTOR FOR SEISMIC EXPLORATION 3 Sheets-Sheet 2 Filed Feb. 1, 1950 warren G. Cllexcznder Srzventlor Aug. 18, 1953 w. A. ALEXANDER DETECTOR FOR SEISMIC EXPLORATION 5 Sheets-Sheet 3 Filed Feb. 1, 1950 dOCxJDQOEM u e a v 0 MW Q dOF JJ 6W0 OMLUQJDQOE warren CZ. Cllexander', Srzverztor MOEQJ ZUWO \rUZMDNUMdk IQ Patented Aug. 18, 1953 UNITED ST DETECTOR FOR SEISMIC EXPLORATION Warren A. Alexander, Tulsa, Okla., assignor to Standard Oil Development Company, a corporation of Delaware Application February 1, 1950, Serial No. 141,660
4 Claims. (Cl. 340-17) The present invention relates to an improved type of portable seismometer, or geophone, for seismic exploration. More particularly, it relates to a portable seismometer of the condenser or capacitor type wherein seismic vibrations cause minute changes in the spacing of elongated flexible conductors comprising the plates of the capacitor, the changes being detected by a suitable circuit as will be more fully described hereinafter.
One well-known technique of exploration for oil or other mineral deposits comprises seismic prospecting or reflection seismography wherein a hole is drilled into the earth and an explosive charge or other means of producing an artificial shock is placed in the hole. The shock is initiated and the seismic waves traveling through the earth are detected at various points on the surface of the earth by means of sensitive pick-ups or geophones which translate the detected waves into electrical impulses which after suitable amplification can be recorded on a seismograph.
Usually the geophones are placed in line with the shot point and are more or less evenly spaced from each other and from the shot point. Geophone stations will in general be from about 100 feet to 500 feet apart in a straight line. Each geophone is connected through a suitable cable to a recording station, usually a field truck, provided with seimograph instruments.
Conventionally, a seismograph record is obtained by means of a number of moving coil galvanometers each one of which has a mirror attached thereto, the galvanometers being arranged in a battery in connection with a source of light in such relation to a moving strip of sensitized paper or film that there will be recorded on the paper or film a plurality of wave forms or traces representative of the seismic waves that have been picked up by the individual geophones, suitably amplified, and fed to the galvanometers. Many seismograph instruments are capable of recording as many as 24 or 36 individual traces simultaneously. The strip of paper or film is moved longitudinally at a substantially constant speed and is provided with suitable timing marks so that when the seismograph record or seismogram is later examined it is possible to determine the length of time required for the arrival of seismic waves at any particular point on the earths surface either directly from the source or by reflection from underlying strata.
The making of seismograph records in the manner above referred to is of value in that it.
gives information regarding the nature of the earths subsurface, based on the principle that part of the energy of the artificial seismic shock will travel downwardly and be reflected back toward the surface by various more or less welldefined substrata, and that this reflected energy will be detected by the geophones and be recorded on th seismograph record. Hence, the desirability of placing on one record the traces of as many geophone locations as is practical, since a reflection from a well-defined substratum will appear on the record as a Wave form of increased amplitude on all of the traces in some definite time relation, permitting the reflection to be lined up on the record.
In order to increase the efiectiveness of the records it has become frequent practice to employ a plurality of geophones at each station, all tied to one trace on the record. This practice has many advantages, including the cancelling out of near-surface anomalies. For example, if only a single geophone is used and it happens to be placed near a buried stump or boulder, an anomalous travel time may be obtained for seismic waves reaching that geophone, Whereas if 30 or 50 geophones are laid out and all tied to the same trace, anomalous signals will be cancelled out and the reflected wave will be picked up by the majority of the geophones. Also, if a plurality of geophones are laid out in the direction of the line of spread of the geophone stations and several geophones are tied to the same trace the group of geophones will act as a directional receiver since signals that are not lined up will tend to cancel out, whereas nearly plane wave fronts, representing reflections from substrata, will arrive at all of the geophones at substantially the same time. Furthermore a plurality of geophones tied together in this manner will aid in discriminating against disturbing background noise, erally referred to as wind noise and ground unrest; thus resulting in improved presentation of the reflected signal. A further result will be that weaker reflected signals will be discernable, or conversely, smaller initiating explosive charges may be employed to give equal efficiency in detecting reflecting layers.
It is evident that although the use of a plurality of geophones at each geophone station produces many advantages, the practice does add to the time and labor involved for the making of each record, as well as to the investment cost.
.It is accordingly one object of the present invention .to provide a single geophone which will replace such a plurality of geophones at each station. 5 Another object is to provide a single'intially rather than radially with respect to the shot hole.
One suitable circuit for detecting changes in capacitance in the seismometer capacitor unit is shown in the circuit diagram of Fig. 4. A vacuum tube oscillator is provided having output terminals 2| and 22. One plate of the capacitor of the seismometer unit, represented in Fig. 4 by numeral 24, is connected to terminal 22 and the other plate of the capacitor is connected through fixed resistor 23 to output terminal 2|. The two plates of the capacitor 24 are also connected through a filter section 25 to terminals 29 and 30 which can be connected into cable 18 of Fig. 3, leading to the recording instruments on the truck. Oscillator 20 may be set up to produce an alternating current of 100 kilocycles, for example, and filter unit 25 will be designed to eliminate the 100 kilocycle frequency and to pass frequencies in the normal seismic range, i. e. about 10 to 100 cycles. Filter 25 comprises a rectifier unit 26, an inductance unit 27, and a capacitor 28.
As long as the capacity of capacitor 24 does not change, no voltage of seismic frequency will be produced across terminals 29 and 30. However, when the capacity of capacitor 24 is changed as, for example, when being disturbed by the receipt of a seismic impulse, a seismic frequency signal will be set up across terminals 29 and 30 which can be amplified and recorded by the conventional seismograph equipment. When utilizing the circuit of Fig. 4, oscillator 20, resistor 23 and filter 25 will be contained within unit 16 of Fig. 3.
If greater sensitivity is desired, a circuit such as that depicted diagrammatically in Fig. 5 may be used. A modulated oscillator 3|, which, for example, produces an alternating current of 500 kilocycles with a modulation of 500 cycles per second may be employed. The current from this oscillator is applied across terminals 32 and 33 of a balanced A. C. bridge circuit 34 comprising inductances 35 and 36 and capacitors 39 and 40, the latter being a variable capacitor whose capacitance may be adjusted to bring the bridge into balance, and 39 representing the capacitor comprising the two plates of the seismometer device depicted in Fig. 1. The bridge is balanced after the seismometer spread has been set out so that as the capacitance of 39 varies in accord- .ance with the receipt of a seismic signal, the
bridge becomes unbalanced, causing a variation in potential, produced at terminals 31 and 38 of the bridge circuit. This variation in potential is impressed on the control point of a radio frequency amplifier 4| and the amplified signal thus obtained is fed into diode demodulator 42 and then through cable [8 to the recording amplifier and recording instruments in the recording truck. A related circuit is described in Electronics, April 1949, page 126.
It is to be understood that the specific embodiments of the invention depicted in the foregoing description are by way of example only and are not intended to limit the scope of the invention, the same being limited only by the following claims.
What is claimed is:
1. Improved portable seismometer of the capacitor type comprising an elongated essentially flat flexible tube, an elongate thin flat flexible conductor carried by the bottom wall of said flexible tube, a second elongate thin flat flexible conductor carried by the top wall of said flexible tube out of electrical contact with said first conductor, an elastic non-conducting non-liquid medium disposed between said conductors, and a plurality of flat mass-providing plates carried by the top wall of said flexible tube.
2. Improved seismometer according to claim 1 in which said non-liquid elastic medium comprises a layer of sponge rubber.
3. Improved seismometer according to claim 1 in which said non-liquid elastic medium comprises a gas under pressure.
4. Improved seismometer according to claim 3 including a pressure valve in the wall of the tube to control the pressure of the gas.
References Cited in the file of this patent UNITED STATES PATENTS Number Name Date 1,584,613 Comstock et al May 11, 1926 2,257,187 Owen Sept. 30, 1941 2,272,984 Ritzmann Feb. 10, 1942 2,305,717 La Bell Dec. 22, 1942 2,408,478 Petty Oct. 1, 1946
|Cited Patent||Filing date||Publication date||Applicant||Title|
|US1584613 *||Feb 25, 1920||May 11, 1926||Kalmus Comstock & Wescott Inc||Wave detector|
|US2257187 *||Dec 21, 1939||Sep 30, 1941||Geophysical Res Corp||Seismic surveying|
|US2272984 *||Jul 21, 1939||Feb 10, 1942||Gulf Research Development Co||Seismograph|
|US2305717 *||Oct 23, 1939||Dec 22, 1942||La Bell Oidric Joseph||Circuit controlling means|
|US2408478 *||Nov 17, 1943||Oct 1, 1946||Scott Petty Olive||Seismic apparatus and method|
|Citing Patent||Filing date||Publication date||Applicant||Title|
|US2807793 *||Oct 1, 1954||Sep 24, 1957||Exxon Research Engineering Co||Continuous reelable geophone|
|US2920308 *||Jul 19, 1955||Jan 5, 1960||Jersey Prod Res Co||Geophone|
|US2964731 *||Jun 18, 1954||Dec 13, 1960||Coop Jesse J||Long line condenser hydrophone with gaseous pockets|
|US2965877 *||Jun 10, 1957||Dec 20, 1960||James H Stein||Capacitive-type line hydrophone|
|US2977569 *||Apr 4, 1951||Mar 28, 1961||Harris Transducer Corp||Detector with modulation by magnetostrictive-core acoustic transducer|
|US2978669 *||Mar 8, 1954||Apr 4, 1961||Harris Transducer Corp||Underwater electrodynamic acoustic transducer with air-filled composite diaphragm|
|US3017607 *||Jul 29, 1952||Jan 16, 1962||Gale White||Acoustic impedance detecting apparatus|
|US3177967 *||Sep 5, 1962||Apr 13, 1965||Wilson Louis A||Taxi control systems|
|US3180146 *||Mar 12, 1963||Apr 27, 1965||Simmonds Precision Products||Method of gaging and expelling fluids under zero gravity conditions|
|US3317891 *||Jul 8, 1964||May 2, 1967||Atlantic Refining Co||Resistance-type line detector|
|US3334328 *||Jul 1, 1963||Aug 1, 1967||Texas Instruments Inc||Acoustical radiating antenna|
|US3439539 *||Dec 16, 1966||Apr 22, 1969||Pallis Clare M R||Apparatus for measuring the force on a body due to fluid pressure|
|US3452327 *||Apr 13, 1967||Jun 24, 1969||Continental Oil Co||Apparatus for supporting marine seismic transducer|
|US3659257 *||Nov 4, 1968||Apr 25, 1972||Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst||Continuous magnetic line hydrophone|
|US3717810 *||Jul 15, 1971||Feb 20, 1973||Gulf Research Development Co||Abnormal impedance test for a string of geophones|
|US3782486 *||May 12, 1971||Jan 1, 1974||South African Inventions||Measuring transient loads|
|US3786410 *||Dec 27, 1971||Jan 15, 1974||Mark Products||Seismic cable assembly|
|US3825886 *||May 3, 1971||Jul 23, 1974||Western Geophysical Co||Towable seismic detector conveyance|
|US3846780 *||Jul 24, 1973||Nov 5, 1974||Westinghouse Electric Corp||Intrusion detection system|
|US3889230 *||Sep 2, 1966||Jun 10, 1975||Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst||Capacitive transducer and method of using the same|
|US3921755 *||Oct 1, 1973||Nov 25, 1975||Western Geophysical Co||Towable seismic detector conveyance|
|US3934218 *||Aug 17, 1971||Jan 20, 1976||Seiscom Delta Inc.||Apparatus and method for seismic exploration|
|US3987405 *||Dec 2, 1974||Oct 19, 1976||Institut Francais Du Petrole, Des Carburants Et Lubrifiants Et Entreprise De Recherches Et D'activities Petrolieres Elf||Receiver of continuous structure for seismic prospecting|
|US4084438 *||Mar 29, 1976||Apr 18, 1978||Setra Systems, Inc.||Capacitive pressure sensing device|
|US4103226 *||Sep 15, 1976||Jul 25, 1978||Westinghouse Electric Corp.||Apparatus for gauging the texture of a conducting surface|
|US4182981 *||Dec 8, 1977||Jan 8, 1980||Westinghouse Electric Corp.||Apparatus for gauging the shape of a conducting surface|
|US4334296 *||Oct 1, 1979||Jun 8, 1982||Western Geophysical Co. Of America||Seismic method and apparatus|
|US4414652 *||Jun 26, 1981||Nov 8, 1983||Honeywell, Inc.||Ultrasonic line sensor|
|US5339291 *||May 7, 1969||Aug 16, 1994||The United States Of America As Represented By The Secretary Of The Navy||Flexible component sheet embedding operational components|
|US5804721 *||Feb 14, 1997||Sep 8, 1998||Yankielun; Norbert E.||Capacitor for water leak detection in roofing structures|
|US7519454 *||Oct 27, 2006||Apr 14, 2009||Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc.||Location determination of power system disturbances based on frequency responses of the system|
|US7765034 *||Jul 27, 2010||Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc.||Location determination of power system disturbances based on frequency responses of the system|
|US20070150114 *||Oct 27, 2006||Jun 28, 2007||Robert Matthew Gardner||Location determination of power system disturbances based on frequency responses of the system|
|US20090198383 *||Jan 30, 2009||Aug 6, 2009||Robert Matthew Gardner||Location determination of power system disturbances based on frequency responses of the system|
|USRE29896 *||Sep 1, 1976||Jan 30, 1979||Westinghouse Electric Corp.||Intrusion detection system|
|DE2233579A1 *||Jul 7, 1972||Jan 25, 1973||Inst Francais Du Petrole||Piezoelektrischer druckwellengeber von kontinuierlicher bauart|
|DE2521449A1 *||May 14, 1975||Nov 27, 1975||Inst Francais Du Petrole||Empfaengereinrichtung kontinuierlichen aufbaus|
|U.S. Classification||367/181, 367/169, 361/290, 324/661|
| 225,511
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Lacy named principal of Caddo Virtual Academy
Caddo Schools Superintendent Lamar Goree named Tyron Lacy the first principal of Caddo Virtual Academy on Thursday.
The online high school will launch this fall with more than 130 course offerings designed to provide individualized learning experiences tailored to student’s unique needs.
Lacy’s move to the position is five years in the making as he has grown Caddo’s virtual offerings from the ground up. In 2011, Lacy was tapped to pilot the district’s first virtual platform at Southwood High School. The results led to full implementation of the model district-wide with a focus on credit recovery and acceleration.
RELATED: CPSB approves virtual high school
During his tenure in the role as Caddo’s virtual learning district contact, Lacy became a trusted source not only at a district level, but also statewide for his thorough understanding of online platforms as a means of student engagement.
Lacy now takes the seat as principal of the district’s startup virtual school which will include a team of counselors and teachers tasked with providing supports and resources needed to ensure student success.
“I’m honored to be a part of something that is groundbreaking for our district, but also for our state,” Lacy said. “Caddo is giving me the freedom to allow us to put our own stamp on what virtual education can look like and allow us to stand out from the traditional mold of what other districts are doing.”
Next steps for Lacy and the district include hiring staff members for the campus and creating opportunities for students and families to learn more about the virtual model and enroll.
“Mr. Lacy has been with Caddo from the first conversations regarding virtual possibilities and we are excited for the vision and energy he brings to the principal position of Caddo Virtual Academy,” Goree said. “Starting a new school is an immense task, but one in which Mr. Lacy and the Caddo team are equipped to handle. The future for our students is bright with individuals like Mr. Lacy serving as leaders.”
High School students will be able to attend the virtual academy in August, which will offer a plethora of course options for students ranging from math, science, English and social studies to career pathways certifications, dual enrollment options and a multitude of Advanced Placement components.
The school will be unlike any other in the region because it will have the ability to enhance and tailor personalized instruction to meet the needs of each student. Upon admittance to Caddo Virtual Academy, school officials will work with the student and their families to develop an individualized graduation plan to guide the student through successful completion of a high school diploma. Additionally, the course offerings allow students to earn college credit while in the high school setting as well as foundational courses for career certifications such as medical terminology and nursing assistance.
A larger vision for the Caddo Virtual Academy will be to grow the concept beyond Caddo Parish and allow students across the state of Louisiana to take advantage of the opportunities offered through the district.
“We have an opportunity to create one of the premiere online academies in the state and that begins with showing our parents and families what we can offer and how we are different,” Lacy said. “We’re breaking the mold and envisioning a school that we know our community can be proud of that has the potential to draw students from all over.”
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Charting the Antagonistic Rivalry Between Arsenal and Manchester United
As Manchester United face Arsenal on Wednesday this week, and since, as a United fan, talking about the present is more than a tad uncomfortable, it seemed a good time to take a look back at the rivalry between United and Arsenal.
Although it is, of course, a fixture with a very long history, the antagonism really began in earnest at the beginning of the 1990s, just on the cusp of the dawning of a new era in English football...
'The Old Trafford Brawl'
The origins of the modern rivalry between Manchester United and Arsenal can probably be traced back to October 20, 1990. Denis Irwin and Anders Limpar were involved in a challenge in United's half.
When Nigel Winterburn steamed in with a tackle that owed more of its origin to martial arts than the art of defending, it all kicked off.
This was not the handbags of the contemporary Premier League, this was the First Division of the Football League. A more full-throated affair, a time when men were men and full-backs were allowed one life-threatening challenge before a yellow card was even considered.
The fight was described as a "21-man brawl" in this piece by Michael Hart in the Evening Standard, although he also says that several of those men were involved mostly to try and simmer the whole thing down.
Arsenal ended up being fined £50,000 and docked two points, with United only being docked one. While the temptation exists to make a “Ferguson Association” joke at this point, these were before the days of United's league dominance, and Arsenal still won the league at a canter.
The Old Trafford brawl set the tone for the decade that followed, as the rivalry had an ever more significant impact on the trophy cabinets of both sides.
Ian Wright vs Peter Schmeichel
There was an incredibly ugly dimension to this rivalry. Peter Schmeichel appeared to be facing charges from the Crown Prosecution Service of racially abusing Ian Wright. These charges were subsequently dropped.
The incident is alleged to have taken place in November 1996, and was the back drop to a, literally, explosive 50-50 challenge between the two, three months later, which burst the ball they were competing over.
The two can be heard reminiscing about the challenge on this clip of an Absolute Radio interview Wright conducted with Schmeichel.
They first made their peace during the 2002 World Cup—in this interview with Four Four Two, Schmeichel remembers the moment of entente.
That the finest goalkeeper and the finest striker of the time had a fierce on-pitch rivalry was only fitting, but the rivalry tapped into more important matters than football.
Their post-career friendship seemed extremely unlikely at the time, but is part of a theme of reconciliation that runs throughout the rivalry between the two clubs.
'The Battle of Old Trafford'
The 0-0 draw, which saw Ruud van Nistelrooy miss a last-minute penalty during Arsenal's unbeaten league season of 2003/04, was a tumultuous affair.
Patrick Vieira was sent off for two bookable offences, and the two sides spent most of the 90 minutes kicking lumps out of one another.
It was the aftermath of the penalty miss which drew most attention, as van Nistelrooy was surrounded by Arsenal players, gloating over him as he jogged away from the box.
Redemption would follow, but in that moment it was clear that the upper hand in the back-and-forth battle for superiority between Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson lay with the Frenchman.
'The Battle of the Buffet:' Ruud's Redemtion
"The Battle of the Buffet," or "Pizzagate" to give it an even more ridiculous name, took place on the occasion of Ruud's redemption.
Played on Wayne Rooney's 19th birthday (a fact thrown in to make those of us in our late 30s feel old), the game saw Arsenal's 49-match winning streak coming to a spectacular end.
This game, and the return fixture at Highbury, were high points of a difficult period for Manchester United. They failed to win the league between 2003 and 2007, as first Arsenal went unbeaten and then Mourinho's astonishingly well-funded Chelsea side emerged to take the glory.
However, the clashes with Arsenal that season were highly memorable for United fans. Sir Alex's decision to play Phil Neville in central midfield in the absence of Roy Keane was a masterstroke, as Neville dominated Vieira and United controlled the game. The emerging talents of Cristiano Ronaldo and Rooney also made their presence felt.
Ruud van Nistelrooy opened the scoring and celebrated like a man exorcising demons (or at least the memory of Martin Keown being mean to him). Rooney scored on the 90th minute, and it is fair to say that according to reports, Arsenal's players did not take very kindly to not being able to unveil their "50 not out" t-shirts.
The 1990/91 versions of these two sides may have had something to say about the fact that matters were apparently settled by a food fight, but they were. For many years “who hit Fergie with the pizza” served as a footballing version of “who shot JR?”
I like to think that if Fabregas had joined United last summer, the players would have pelted him with pizza on his first day as part of his initiation.
'I'll See You out There:' Roy Keane vs Patrick Vieira
I have never been more convinced that the team I support would win a football match than I was as Sky Sports showed the footage of Roy Keane's verbal attack on Patrick Vieira ahead of United's 4-2 win at Highbury on February 2, 2005.
"I'll see you out there" is almost the only thing which Keane said that can be transcribed in a manner suitable for a family audience. The rest of his monologue was liberally sprinkled with profanity.
It was the iconic high point of a rivalry which dominated clashes between the two sides for the duration of Vieira's Arsenal career.
ITV4 recently dedicated an hour to a documentary exploring their fiercely competitive encounters and, again, subsequent friendship.
In the Highbury tunnel, Keane was annoyed with Vieira picking on Gary Neville, so the legend goes. Keane's response was to launch into a tirade which clearly shook Vieira. Comforted in the tunnel by Pascal Cygan and Dennis Bergkamp, Vieira did not hit his usual heights in that game.
Keane's righteous indignation carried over onto the pitch as United romped to a 4-2 victory. Keane saw Vieira out there, and United saw Arsenal off.
In this Independent article from 2009, it is noted that a warmth had developed between the two managers. Arsene Wenger had “joked” that it was because Sir Alex no longer considered Arsenal a threat, something which the Scot denied.
However, most observers agree that Wenger's jest had more than a little truth in it. Ferguson did not have to worry about Arsenal anymore, distracted as he was by battling Chelsea and Manchester City.
The two managers developed a friendlier tone, joining forces against the nouveau-riche neighbours that each of them now had to contend with.
Ultimately Ferguson was much more successful in navigating that process, and the era of "detente" coincided with United's most successful period in the Premier League.
Wenger was not able to adapt to the new landscape with anything like as much success, and so Sir Alex was able to sustain his benign attitude to the old rivals.
The signing of Robin van Persie was the height of the detente.
Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson spoke in person, as reported here in the Guardian as part of the transfer negotiations, something which would have seemed unimaginable if Ferguson had been, for example, trying to sign Thierry Henry in 2002.
Many United fans may have been a little bemused by just how bitter Arsenal fans' disappointment appeared. “Have they not noticed we're not really rivals any more?” was the general response from the United faithful.
Initially respectful of his old club, van Persie celebrated like he meant it when he scored against Arsenal at Old Trafford earlier this season. The abuse he had received from Arsenal fans may have played into that.
With Manchester United reduced to desperately trying to scrape fourth place, something which Arsenal fans have become very familiar with over recent seasons, the next few years might see the two clubs competing over similar territory again.
While a rivalry fuelled by Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira might be hard to match, today's players may find themselves with a battle or two of their own.
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Using Amps And Pedals Together
When I was younger, I absolutely refused to play with pedals: stompboxes, distortions, overdrives, boosters: anything that would make your amp go to ’11.’ I simply didn’t want to understand why you should or would use them. “I always chose my amps based on their ability to crunch and the voice of the overdrive, so why bother,” I thought. “Wanna have more distortion? Crank up the gain pot of your amp. Not enough gain? Wrong amp!” It was that simple for me. My turn-around point came somewhere last year. I saw more players use the backline of a venue or the house PA with a bunch of pedals in front of them, and sometimes with a tiny 15 watt tube amp with a nice clean sound. I couldn’t see why that approach had benefits until I borrowed a few pedals to see how that worked. So, let’s take a look at how stompboxes worked for me.
Stompboxes to add flavor to an amp
An amp can often have a great tone by itself but sometimes could use just a little extra. Maybe the tone is too bland or needs a bit more ‘oomph,’ and one or two well-picked pedals can make a huge difference. Sometimes your amp is super-well suited for rhythm: it’s chunky, it’s powerful and it’s tight but the lead channel is too gritty. A traditional overdrive pedal can make all the difference. It gives my rhythm tone a bit of a power boost without a bunch of gain or without changing my base tone too much. And sometimes it’s the other way around: the lead tone can be a little sloppy, chunky and woofy in the lows or just too saggy in general, but add an overdrive for rhythm and Shazam! My rhythm sound is tighter with more punch and much more articulation. I turn it off for my lead tones, since I like it a bit more chewy in the lead. It’s exactly the other way around but hey: whatever works.
Pedals to create more flavors of overdrive
Another way of using pedals is to get more ‘flavors’ of crunch, overdrive or distortion from one amp. You could use one basic tone and use pedals that create a boosted signal that only needs to be amplified on a base overdrive. For example, the Seymour Duncan Dirty Deed Distortion Pedal. That pedal’s got so many options and possibilities to tweak your tone. It creates a boosted signal that works with an already dirty tone very well. You can also use it to boost a tube amp’s clean tone to the max and get a great overdriven sound out of that.
If you’re using a clean amp that needs to be overdriven you could also do it another way: a preamp pedal. A preamp pedal often uses a tube in its preamp circuit to distort the tone and is often a bit larger than a stompbox. Guthrie Govan is a major fan of this method: he uses several boosts and preamp pedals to get his tone. He sets his Victory V10 ‘The Baron’ amp up for a clean tone and gets his overdrive, distortion, lead and effects from pedals. He seems to be the king of getting a huge tone out of a small rig. He wants to be able pack his ‘tone’ in a suitcase, hop on a plane and be done with it!
Wether you want to add a bit of flavor to your amp or simply run an amp clean and get your overdrives from pedals, I learned that pedals can add so much more to your tonal palette and can go perfectly well next to my favorite amps, the amps I’ve been using for so long.
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May I ask who’s calling?
Hello? Who is it?
There must be someone calling because I hear ringing.
Oh, wait. The call is coming from inside my ears. Although, do people’s ears really “ring?” That’s not what I have going on. It’s more like a cross between cicadas and a hearing test.
A steady, almost constant whine.
How long has this been going on? Months? WHO CARES? IT’S DRIVING ME NUTS. STOP IT! STOP MAKING THAT NOISE! JUST STOP IT, RIGHT NOW!
No, really, I’m doing okay. But I guess exposure to loud music has caught up with me. Tinnitus, they call it. This sound. It sounds like an old person problem.
(At least my eyesight is still good. When I look in the mirror, I’m as attractive as ever. Maybe more so.)
Or is it something else? This strange noise. Perhaps aliens implanted something in my brain and they’re trying to drive me crazy. Or maybe it’s the usual experiments they’re running, but their instruments are malfunctioning and only inadvertently causing me mild distress.
There is cause for concern, certainly, especially if it turns out to be aliens — again — but I often forget it’s going on. It hasn’t yet driven me insane, even when I notice it as I lie down to sleep at night. Maybe this is where my low auditory standards come in handy. I’m used to dealing with subpar sound reproduction from my electronic devices.
Or maybe it’s you, God? Trying to send me a message? Even though I’m not sure how much I believe in you anymore.
I’m surprised it doesn’t bother me more, these personal cicadas.
Wikipedia says, “The condition is often rated clinically on a simple scale from ‘slight’ to ‘catastrophic’ according to the practical difficulties it imposes, such as interference with sleep, quiet activities, and normal daily activities.”
I must be on the slight side of the scale, thank god. I’ll report back if I start edging over the cliff into “catastrophic,” but there are gradations in between the two ends that I’ve already glimpsed:
My wife and I were out in the country earlier this year, in a room with the window open, and she commented about the crickets. I couldn’t hear them. That was freaky. Were my cicadas coming in on just the right frequency to drown out the crickets? I was saddened at the idea of not being able to hear crickets. To lose that part of nature. What a bummer.
Or, maybe she was working with the aliens to drive me crazy, and was only pretending to hear them? But eventually I discovered if I turned my head a certain way and got closer to the window, I could hear the crickets. Phew!
(Crickets should come with a volume knob, so you can turn them up to enjoy them for a bit, and then turn them down when they get too rowdy. They clearly need some kind of amplification. There’s no reason the cicadas should get an unfair advantage.)
So, no problem, really. Not yet. Still quite sane. So far.
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JUnit is an open source framework designed for the purpose of writing and running tests in the Java programming language. It's a regression-testing framework that developers can use to write unit tests to check that another code unit works as expected. JUnit helps us to code and test any time when you make any changes in your code during the development. It ensures that modifications in the code will not break your system without your knowledge.
JUnit training course provides the theoretical background and extensive practical knowledge to build effective testing framework. You will learn how to set it up, write, aggregate and run tests in your Java projects. It makes you familiar with the test-driven development to write highly reliable Java code.
Prerequisites: Candidate should have basic Java programming skills.
Posted on: March 27, 2008 If you enjoyed this post then why not add us on Google+? Add us to your Circles
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The Economic Valuation of Patents provides an original and essential analysis of patent valuation, presenting the main methodologies to value patents in different contexts.
Starting with an analysis of the relevance of patent valuation from a strategic, economic and legal perspective, the book undertakes a thorough review of the existing financial and qualitative valuation methodologies. The contributing authors, IP experts from academia and business, discuss the application of valuation issues in various contexts such as patent portfolio management, licensing agreements, IP litigation, IP-backed finance and accounting. For each topic, an introductory theoretical background is provided and specific application contexts are then investigated.
This multidisciplinary book bridges theory and practice in a unique and novel way that will be appreciated by graduate students, scholars and practitioners alike.
Edited by Federico Munari, Associate Professor, University of Bologna, Italy and Raffaele Oriani, Associate Professor, LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy
Contents: Introduction Federico Munari and Raffaele Oriani PART I: PERSPECTIVES ON PATENT VALUE 1. Why, When and How to Value Patents? An Introduction Federico Munari and Raffaele Oriani 2. A Law and Economics Introduction to Patent Law and Procedure Massimiliano Granieri 3. Economic and Management Perspectives on the Value of Patents Federico Munari and Maurizio Sobrero 4. Patent Exploitation Strategies and Value Creation Maria Isabella Leone and Keld Laursen PART II: PATENT VALUATION METHODS 5. Traditional Valuation Methods: Cost, Market and Income Approach Heinz Goddar and Ulrich Moser 6. Advanced Valuation Methods: The Real Options Approach Raffaele Oriani and Luigi Sereno 7. Valuing Patents through Indicators Nils Omland PART III: PATENT VALUATION CONTEXTS 8. Patent Portfolio Management Martin A. Bader and Oliver Gassmann 9. Patent Licensing Contracts Massimiliano Granieri, Maria Isabella Leone and Raffaele Oriani 10. Economic Approaches to Patent Damages Analysis Paola Maria Valenti 11. Valuing Patents for Accounting Purposes Serena Morricone 12. Patent-backed Finance Federico Munari, Maria Cristina Odasso and Laura Toschi 13. Stock Market Valuation of Patent Portfolios Serena Morricone and Raffaele Oriani Index
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Charlottesville is developing an African-American heritage trail to share the city's black history.
The African-American Heritage Center already has a smartphone application with about 10 locations pinpointed around the Jefferson School.
A group is working to map out more sites that tell the story of Charlottesville and Albemarle’s black community starting with colonial times.
“It will be integrated into the story of our community, because it plays a very, very important role,” said Dede Smith, Charlottesville city councilor.
Planners are inviting the community to share stories and ideas for the trail during an open house Saturday, April 12 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Jefferson School City Center.
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ModSecurity is a highly effective web app layer firewall for Apache web servers. It monitors the whole HTTP traffic to a site without affecting its operation and if it detects an intrusion attempt, it prevents it. The firewall furthermore keeps a more comprehensive log for the traffic than any server does, so you'll be able to keep an eye on what is going on with your Internet sites much better than if you rely merely on standard logs. ModSecurity works with security rules based on which it helps prevent attacks. For instance, it detects whether somebody is attempting to log in to the admin area of a specific script multiple times or if a request is sent to execute a file with a specific command. In these circumstances these attempts trigger the corresponding rules and the firewall program hinders the attempts instantly, then records in-depth info about them within its logs. ModSecurity is amongst the very best software firewalls on the market and it can easily protect your web applications against thousands of threats and vulnerabilities, particularly if you don’t update them or their plugins regularly.
ModSecurity in Cloud Hosting
ModSecurity is available on all cloud hosting
servers, so if you opt to host your Internet sites with our business, they will be protected against an array of attacks. The firewall is turned on as standard for all domains and subdomains, so there shall be nothing you'll need to do on your end. You shall be able to stop ModSecurity for any website if needed, or to activate a detection mode, so that all activity shall be recorded, but the firewall shall not take any real action. You shall be able to view comprehensive logs via your Hepsia Control Panel including the IP where the attack came from, what the attacker planned to do and how ModSecurity dealt with the threat. As we take the safety of our customers' websites very seriously, we use a set of commercial rules which we get from one of the leading companies that maintain this type of rules. Our administrators also include custom rules to ensure that your sites will be protected against as many threats as possible.
ModSecurity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
ModSecurity is part of our semi-dedicated hosting
plans and if you choose to host your Internet sites with our company, there shall not be anything special you will have to do as the firewall is switched on by default for all domains and subdomains which you add using your hosting CP. If required, you could disable ModSecurity for a certain site or turn on the so-called detection mode in which case the firewall shall still function and record data, but will not do anything to prevent potential attacks on your sites. Comprehensive logs shall be readily available inside your Control Panel and you'll be able to see what sort of attacks happened, what security rules were triggered and how the firewall dealt with the threats, what IP addresses the attacks came from, etc. We use 2 types of rules on our servers - commercial ones from an organization which operates in the field of web security, and custom made ones which our administrators sometimes include to respond to newly identified threats on time.
ModSecurity in VPS
All virtual private servers
that are set up with the Hepsia CP include ModSecurity. The firewall is set up and activated by default for all domains which are hosted on the machine, so there will not be anything special that you shall have to do to protect your websites. It shall take you a mouse click to stop ModSecurity if necessary or to activate its passive mode so that it records what occurs without taking any steps to prevent intrusions. You shall be able to see the logs produced in passive or active mode from the corresponding section of Hepsia and discover more about the type of the attack, where it came from, what rule the firewall used to handle it, and so on. We use a mixture of commercial and custom rules so as to ensure that ModSecurity will stop as many threats as possible, hence enhancing the security of your web applications as much as possible.
ModSecurity in Dedicated Hosting
ModSecurity is offered by default with all dedicated servers
that are set up with the Hepsia Control Panel and is set to “Active” automatically for any domain which you host or subdomain which you create on the hosting server. In the event that a web app doesn't work adequately, you could either switch off the firewall or set it to operate in passive mode. The latter means that ModSecurity will maintain a log of any potential attack which may occur, but shall not take any action to prevent it. The logs produced in active or passive mode shall present you with additional details about the exact file which was attacked, the form of the attack and the IP address it originated from, etcetera. This info shall permit you to choose what actions you can take to improve the security of your sites, such as blocking IPs or carrying out script and plugin updates. The ModSecurity rules we use are updated constantly with a commercial pack from a third-party security company we work with, but occasionally our admins include their own rules also when they discover a new potential threat.
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|Birth: ||Feb. 14, 1862, Ireland|
|Death: ||Aug. 11, 1911|
Officer Baldwin served with the Louisville Division of Police for twenty-seven years until his death.
He was escorting a detained suspected burglar, Adam Wallace, back to the scene of the crime for identification purposes. When at the vicinity of 18th St. & Eddy Alley the suspect grabbed Officer Baldwin's gun and fatally shot him. Officer Michael Sullivan and Officer John Keefe were waiting on Baldwin at the scene of the burglary at 18th & Walnut Sts. Hearing the gunfire the two officers ran toward Eddy Alley. They confronted the fleeing gunman who immediately began firing the gun at Officer Sullivan. Officer Sullivan returned fire hitting the man fatally in the head.
Officer Baldwin's funeral was held at St. Louis Bertrand church. A detail of police acted as pall-bearers and escort.
He was survived by his wife and the following children: Nellie, Catherine, John, Mary and Regina Baldwin, and a sister, Mrs. Thomas McLaughlin.
The pall-bearers were Officers Michael J. Sullivan, John P. Keefe, John Carroll, Austin Nally, Patrick O'Hearn, Robert Riley, H. C. Miller and John Malloney. The escort was composed of Cornelius Savage, James Twohig, Edward McGrath, Thomas Fitzgibbons, Patrick Tally and Lieut. Schupp.
[The above information was excerpted from a newspaper article about Officer Michael Baldwin published in the Kentucky Irish American, Saturday, August 19, 1911, page 1.]
The photograph of Officer Baldwin is from The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc.
Saint Louis Cemetery
Plot: ***NO GRAVE STONE***
Created by: Gary Powell
Record added: Jun 21, 2010
Find A Grave Memorial# 53970177
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