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Learner's definition of RECIPE
a set of instructions for making food
The recipe calls for fresh thyme.
I didn't read the recipe carefully.
This is one of my grandmother's recipes.
a recipe book [=cookbook]
— often + for
a way of doing something that will produce a particular result
— + for
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Keystone XL Pipeline Officials Say Safety Is The Priority
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 - 07:46 AM
(Billings, MT-YPR) The developers of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline say they already had included safety measures meant to prevent the type of pipeline break that spilled an estimated 1,000 barrels of oil into Montana’s Yellowstone River last month.
TransCanada officials are in Montana this week. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would stretch from Alberta’s oil tar sand fields to refineries in the United States.
The approximately 1,660-mile long pipeline has been assailed by environmentalists as too risky. Opponents stepped up their criticism following the break in Exxon Mobil’s Silvertip Pipeline near Laurel, MT on July 1, 2011.
TransCanada President of Energy and Pipelines Alex Pourbaix says the Keystone XL project was designed to be the safest pipeline in North America.
“Everyone would acknowledge that Exxon’s incident with the Silvertip Pipeline was very unfortunate,” he says. “At the same time we find it concerning that many people have tried to compare the silvertip incident with the Keystone XL pipeline. And we really do believe that is completely inappropriate.”
Pourbaix says TransCanada will bury its pipeline a minimum 25 feet beneath major river crossings, exceeding current federal regulations. The proposed pipeline would cross three Montana rivers: Milk, Missouri, and Yellowstone.
Pourbaix says TransCanada made no changes to its projects proposal as a result of the Yellowstone River oil spill. Clean-up crews are still in Montana. Exxon Mobil officials are awaiting regulatory approval to rebuild its line.
The oil spill was the latest in a series of spills across the U-S. It brought Congressional scrutiny of the spider web of pipelines across the country, particularly those that cross rivers and streams.
Keystone Pipeline Project Vice President Robert Jones welcomes the increased attention. He’s not worried the spotlight will harm the Keystone XL project.
“And we try to do best practices,” Jones says.
TransCanada officials say their project exceeds current regulations, including: the use heavy wall pipe with an abrasion resistant coating; check valves will be installed at river banks; lower pressure at river crossings; regular monitoring and maintenance, and aerial patrols every two weeks.
The U.S. State Department is charged with overseeing the permit because the pipeline crosses an international border.
A final Environmental Impact Statement is expected to be released this month.
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College Board supports a network of 19 secondary schools in the northeast. College Board Schools serve predominantly low income students. The goal is to help each of them prepare for and successfully participate in Advanced Placement courses, graduate with college credit, and attend college. Given the college credit aspirations, CBSchools are similar to Early College High Schools.
CBSchools use Springboard, a pre-AP curriculum in the middle grades. Students use MyRoad, a Web-based tool, to explore majors, careers, and colleges. They take ACCUPLACER Diagnostic Tests and prepare for the SAT.
Yesterday, I suggested that there are 10 reasons that every district should open a flex high school. Let’s put these two concepts together. College Board should develop CBFlex, a school-in-a-box (i.e., easy to implement school model plus implementation support services) featuring all the stuff in CBSchools but in a high access flex format. In one small school, students could access every AP course taught by the best teachers in the country while benefiting from a local advisor that monitors their progress.
Imagine a school that looks more like Starbucks with a black box theater and a project lab—Glee meets FIRST Robotics for coffee. When students attend competitions, no problem, the school goes on the road. The whole school is cloud-based and completely portable.
Let’s fast forward two years when 10,000 students are in the CBFlex network and half of the 5 million students taking AP courses are online. Dynamic Grockit-like groups will support student success. By 2014, more AP content will be adaptive and engaging; there will be less need to slog through content as a local cohort. Students will pick from multiple pathways and multiple instructors.
Now add an accredited competency-based entrepreneurial organization like University Now and you have a college as well as a high school. Students could spend three or four years at a CBFlex and leave with an AA degree.
CBFlex could be built in conjunction with one or more content partners willing and able to invest in curriculum development and dynamic student support services. It’s just one example of the cool developments that David Coleman will be able to support at College Board. (Here’s why it’s a big deal that he’s going to College Board)
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Online education is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Everyone from Forbes magazine to some of the leading minds at Stanford have said it will only continue to become a mainstay.
As with any boom like this, companies of all sizes are quick to jump on the bandwagon in hopes of making a name for themselves. The trouble is, a lot of these people are simply out to make money, however they can. In the case of online education, that means lying to people, promising them a degree, taking their money, and giving them nothing.
High school diplomas, GEDs, and college degrees aren’t any good if they aren’t approved and recognized by the right organization. These are documents that carry power with them. Not just anyone can give them out.
Luckily, it’s not too hard to filter out a lot of them. There are a few key red flags to watch out for.
If a website is offering a GED online, they are lying to you. You cannot earn a GED online. Only one company makes the GED test and that is Pearson. They work in conjunction with the American Council on Education to create test standards, grade tests, and issue GED certificates to those who pass.
These tests MUST be taken in person at designated testing sites. There are, however, a number of sites that offer GED practice tests online. These are typically free.
Lack of Accreditation
For a diploma or degree to mean anything, it typically has to come from an accredited institution. Accreditation is a very thorough (and sometimes quite long) process where a school’s educational program is inspected to make sure it meets the right standards.
If a school is accredited, it is essentially recognized by other schools, employers, and the government as being a legitimate source of education. Therefore, a degree from an accredited school is worth much more than a piece of paper.
However, many fake schools will issue degrees and sell diplomas that are worth absolutely nothing. When looking at online schools, check to see that they are accredited by a reputable establishment.
Do Some Research
If you’ve never heard of the school you’re looking into, do some research. Many websites keep regularly updated lists of fake schools and scams. Simply typing the school’s name into Google should help quite a bit.
Online education is a great opportunity that technology has given us. Just because there are people out there to try and ruin it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. You just need to be careful.
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"Christ on a bus!" the man said.
"Don't you mean Christ on a bike?" I say, hoping to correct this obvious blasphemic error.
"No", he replied, "Christ on a bus! Just like when Christ arrived in Jerusalem on a bus all those years ago."
Another basic error.
Our Lord did not arrive in Jerusalem on a bus. Not did he arrive - as the scriptures worngly assert - on the back of a donkey.
As any fool know, Jesus had impeccable green credentials, and arrived in the Holy City in his 14-seater minibus, which was ideal for himself, his twelve disciples, and, of course, Mary Magdalene for those 'special' duties. Such as cooking, and changing tyres.
Touring the Holy Land, solving mysteries and unmasking evil caretakers who were scaring all the locals away so that they could have the only book shop in Nazareth, He called his bus the In Mysterious Ways Machine.
And He would have got away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling Romans.
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Francis Joseph biographical name
(born Aug. 18, 1830, Schloss Schönbrunn, near Viennadied Nov. 21, 1916, Schloss Schönbrunn) Emperor of Austria (1848–1916) and king of Hungary (1867–1916). He became emperor during the Revolutions of 1848 after the abdication of his uncle, Ferdinand I. With his prime minister, Felix, prince zu Schwarzenberg, he achieved a powerful position for Austria, in particular with the Punctation of Olmütz convention in 1850. His harsh, absolutist rule within Austria produced a strong central government but also led to rioting and an assassination attempt. Following Austria's defeat by Prussia in the Seven Weeks' War (1866), he responded to Hungarian national unrest by accepting the Compromise of 1867. He adhered to the Three Emperors' League and formed an alliance with Prussian-led Germany that led to the Triple Alliance (1882). In 1898 his wife was assassinated, and in 1889 his son Rudolf, his heir apparent, died in a suicide love pact. In 1914 his ultimatum to Serbia following the murder of the next heir presumptive, Francis Ferdinand, led Austria and Germany into World War I.
Francis Joseph, 1908.—Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.
Variants of FRANCIS JOSEPH
Francis Joseph German Franz Josef
This entry comes from Encyclopædia Britannica Concise.
For the full entry on Francis Joseph, visit Britannica.com.
Seen & Heard
What made you look up Francis Joseph? Please tell us what you were reading, watching or discussing that led you here.
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1. A mason's tool, used in spreading and dressing mortar, and breaking bricks to shape them.
2. A gardener's tool, somewhat like a scoop, used in taking up plants, stirring the earth, etc.
3. A tool used for smoothing a mold. Trowel bayonet. See spade bayonet, under Spade. Fish trowel. See Fish slice.
Origin: OE. Truel, OF. Truele, F. Truelle, LL. Truella, L. Trulla, dim. Of trua a ladle; probably akin to Gr. A stirrer, ladle, G. Quirl a stirrer, MHG. Twirel, OHG. Dwiril, Icel. Thvara, AS. Thwiril. Cf. Twirl.
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State of Conservation
States PartiesCôte d'Ivoire
ThreatsCrop production (2) Land conversion (2) Identity, social cohesion, changes in local population and community (2) Illegal activities (2) Management systems/ management plan (2) Forestry /wood production (1) Mining (1) Civil unrest (1) Fire (widlfires) (1) Financial resources (1) Human resources (1)
The threats indicated are listed in alphabetical order; their order does not constitute a classification according to the importance of their impact on the property.
Furthermore, they are presented irrespective of the type of threat faced by the property, i.e. with specific and proven imminent danger (“ascertained danger”) or with threats which could have deleterious effects on the property’s Outstanding Universal Value (“potential danger”).
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We photographers are known to have G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome).
We purchase the latest equipment, thinking it’ll produce better images. Then we slip into our comfort zone and instead of working with our subject, we rely too much on our gear and make excuses when we don’t get the shot.
But better gear doesn’t necessarily mean better photos.
One of my favorite exercises that helped me overcome this issue is to go out for a day (or even an entire week) with only one camera with one lens. I leave all my extra gear at home and stick with what I have the entire day.
It not only cured my G.A.S. problems, but also helped me become a much better photographer.
Although the idea is to shoot with only one lens, what is really important is to use one focal length as if you were carrying a prime lens. Carrying an 18-300mm lens and zooming in and out all the time defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. If you don’t own a prime lens, that’s alright! Grab your favorite lens, pick one focal length for the day and stick with it. No cheating! If you have to zoom, use your feet.
Here are the benefits of this exercise:
1- It’s lighter on your shoulders:
One of the main advantages of using only one lens is that it’s lighter and you won’t be subjecting your shoulders and back to a lot of stress. You can leave that big heavy camera bag behind you and not deal with having to switch lenses to capture everything around you. Your back will thank you for it.
Another advantage is that It helps you move around easily and blend in the crowd, allowing you to get closer to your subject.
2- It teaches you to plan and compensate:
Carrying only one lens limits you, which in turn forces you to plan and compensate for that limitation on the spot.
For example, if you want to capture a landscape with an 80mm lens, you can either focus on certain interesting parts of the landscape or take multiple shots and create a panorama instead.
It also pushes you to move with your feet to get closer and create a connection with your subject.
3- It boosts your creativity:
As photographers, we already see the world differently. To fuel your creativity, one lens encourages you to think about new ways of photographing your subjects, experiment with your composition and think outside the box.
The more you shoot, the more your focus shifts to adapt to the lens you are using.
For example, when I was shooting with a 50mm macro lens for a day, I started paying more attention to the smallest details around me instead of looking at the big picture.
I hope this motivates you to give it a try. Restrict yourself to one focal length, experiment with your composition and feel free to share your results with us on our Facebook group!
P.S. We’ve got an exciting new project about to be announced. It’s something we’ve never done before, a Photo Kickstart Party, and full details will be revealed next week. Watch this space.
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It is indeed an honor for me to be able to extend to all of you on behalf of the people of the United States best wishes for a Happy New Year. We look forward to the coming year as a time of opportunity. We hope and pray that good will and honesty will prevail and that mankind will be a little better for the things which we as individuals and as a nation will do in the year ahead.
This last year in the United States was a time of rededication to fundamental American economic and political concepts, as mandated by the people in the elections of 1980. After a period of increase in government power, the American people decided that the time had come to move away from state control and regulation; move toward something more consistent with our belief in freedom and individual liberty.
The United States in these last 12 months has been blessed with peace, and peace remains our goal. Our military strength is dedicated to this noble end.
Consistent with this, on November 18th and on behalf of the American people, I proposed to the Soviet Union a removal of the nuclear weapons threatening Europe. Negotiations between our two nations will continue this effort in the months ahead. The United States has offered a plan to eliminate all land-based, intermediate-range nuclear missiles on the European continent. We're uging the Soviet Union to join us in reaching that goal.
We take no joy in using our resources to produce weapons of war. During the last 10 years, the United States reduced the size of its Armed Forces and decreased its military spending. Sadly, this gesture was met by a massive buildup of Soviet armed forces. Let us hope the current opportunity for arms reduction is not lost. The Soviet Union should realize that its resources might better be spent on meeting the needs of its people, rather than producing instruments of destruction.
In 1981 senseless violence continued to plague the world. A great man in Egypt, a man of peace, was murdered. An attempt was made on the life of Pope John Paul, almost robbing the world of this sincere man of God. I, too, had occasion to realize that we must use what time we have to further those values which will last after we as individuals are gone.
A former President of the United States once said: ``The chief ideal of the American people is idealism . . . America is a nation of idealists.'' Well, that's as true today as when President Calvin Coolidge spoke those words back in 1925.
Americans remain dedicated to those concepts of liberty that have provided our people with freedom and abundance. Furthermore, we're a nation composed of people who have come here from every corner of the world, people of all races and creeds who have learned to live together in peace and prosperity. Perhaps you know someone or have relatives who now live here. Well, they're every bit as American as those who came here two centuries ago seeking freedom. In a very real sense all people who long for freedom are our fellow countrymen. That love of freedom is what brought us or our ancestors to this land.
Because of this special American character, our hearts go out to those who suffer oppression. Last year we saw the workers of Poland struggle to edge their country closer to freedom -- and instead, they were given bloodshed and oppression. We saw the courageous people of Afghanistan battle against tremendous odds trying to cast off foreign domination.
During my lifetime, I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state. These ideologies held, at first, a certain fascination for some intellectuals. But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet; indeed they deny the existence of God. Because of this fundamental flaw, fascism has already been destroyed, and the bankruptcy of communism has been laid bare for all to see -- a system that is efficient in producing machines of war but cannot feed its people.
Americans begin this new year with a renewed commitment to our ideals and with confidence that the peace will be maintained and that freedom for all men will ultimately prevail. So, wherever you are, America sends to you a New Year's wish of good will. To all who yearn to breathe free, who long for a better life, we think of you; we pray for you; we're with you always.
Note: The President's remarks were filmed for broadcast on television by the United States International Communication Agency.
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The Oslo Metro (Oslo T-bane) is the rapid transit system of Oslo, Norway. The network consists of six lines that all run through the city center, with a total length of 84.2 kilometres (52.3 mi). It has a daily ridership of 268,000 (2009) with 105 stations of which 16 are underground or indoors.
Shown here is a fairly recent (2006) redesign of the Oslo Metro map, by Truls Lange, revealing a fresh execution. You can see the previous version of the map, or take a better look (pdf) at the new one.
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Dictionary Meaning and Definition on 'Village'
- a community of people smaller than a town [syn: small town, settlement]
- a settlement smaller than a town [syn: hamlet]
- a mainly residential district of Manhattan; `the Village' became a home for many writers and artists in the 20th century [syn: Greenwich Village]
- Village \Vil"lage\ (?; 48), n. [F., fr. L. villaticus belonging
to a country house or villa. See Villa, and cf.
A small assemblage of houses in the country, less than a town
Village cart, a kind of two-wheeled pleasure carriage
without a top.
Syn: Village, Hamlet, Town, City.
Usage: In England, a hamlet denotes a collection of houses,
too small to have a parish church. A village has a
church, but no market. A town has both a market and a
church or churches. A city is, in the legal sense, an
incorporated borough town, which is, or has been, the
place of a bishop's see. In the United States these
distinctions do not hold.
Wikipedia Meaning and Definition on 'Village'
A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousands (sometimes tens of thousands), Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New York City and the Saifi Village in Beirut, Lebanon, as well as Hampstead Village in the London conurbation. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.
Historically, villages were the usual form of community for societies that practise subsistence agriculture, and also for some non-agricultural societies. In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. In many cultures, towns and cities were few, with only a small proportion of the population living in them. The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories; the concentration of people caused many villages to grow into towns and cities. This also enabled specialization of labor and crafts, and development of many trades. The trend of urbanisation continues, though not always in connection with industrialisation. Villages have been eclipsed in importance as units of human society and settlement.[See more about Village at Dictionary 3.0 Encyclopedia]
Words and phrases related to 'Village'
'Village' in famous quotation sentence
* If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village If you would know, and not be known, live in a city. - Charles Caleb Colton
* The shades of night were falling fast,As though an Alpine village passedA youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,A banner with the strange device,ExcelsiorHis brow was sad his eye beneath,Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,And like a silver clarion rungThe accents of that unknown tongue,Excelsior - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Click here for more related quotations on 'Village'
Village Sample Sentences in News
- Arab village in Israel targeted in racial attack
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Vandals daubed "Arabs out" graffiti and punctured tires in an Arab village near Jerusalem on Tuesday, targeting a community widely seen in Israel as a showcase for Jewish-Arab coexistence. Unlike similar attacks that have damaged Arab mosques, homes, vehicles and olive groves, the vandalism took place in an Arab village in Israel popular with Read more on this news related to 'Village'
- Village spelling row heads for vote
It is only a missing "t" but a row over the spelling of a village may have to be settled by a referendum after being a hot local topic for years. Read more on this news related to 'Village'
- Westwood Village wants to be cool again
It's 'never going back' to its heyday as the hottest entertainment neighborhood in L.A., but it hopes to be revitalized through the arts. For decades, Westwood Village was the heartbeat of Los Angeles nightlife while downtown languished in solitude. Westwood had the movie theaters, fancy restaurants and bustling street traffic, and downtown was known as a quiet an Read more on this news related to 'Village'
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Statistics from Altmetric.com
A SUMMARY of the changes that were introduced in England when EU Regulation 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing came into force on January 1, 2013, has been made available in the form of an information note on Defra's website.
The information note states …
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.
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What does insurance not cover?
Your policy may not cover liabilities in certain situations. These are known as exclusions.
Let’s have a look at a few of them.
|Bike||– Damage due to war, mutiny or nuclear risk|
– Normal wear and tear and general ageing
– Tire or tube punctures. (If, however, your two-wheeler is damaged at the same time, you will be compensated for 50% of the cost of repair or replacement
– Mechanical or Electrical breakdown
– Any loss or damage caused outside India
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At its most basic level, combat involves sparring other players with boffer props. As you are struck, you declare "Hit," mentally deduct one from your Hits, and continue sparring until someone flees or loses all of their Hits.
Your character must have the passive ability to use a particular kind of attack (e.g., Melee, Ranged, Spell Focus, Unarmed). Each attack follows its own rules: Ranged attacks use packets, spells require incantations, heavy weapons must be wielded in two hands, etc. See the appropriate ability for more details on how to use it.
Your character can withstand a certain number of Hits before being subdued. This is a number between 3 and 10 that is determined by adding your Body, which is based on your level, and your Armor, if you have any. Every time you are attacked, you lose one Hit. Other abilities, such as Heal, can be used to restore Hits. If your Hits ever reach zero, you are subdued.
Basic attacks do not include a spoken component. Their effect is assumed to be one Hit worth of damage. Many combat abilities, however, include a tagline in quotations that must be spoken as the ability is used. To use Melee “Disarm,” for example, you would swing a melee weapon and say the word “Disarm” aloud.
Some taglines consist of a number followed by a damage type (e.g., “3 Fire” or “2 Crit”). This indicates a damage tagline. The number is the amount of Hits deducted, while the type is its nature. Some characters have special defenses or immunities to damage of a particular type, while some monsters have special vulnerabilities to it.
The easiest way to defend from an attack is to avoid it; an attack that completely misses you has no effect. If you have a weapon or shield and the passive ability to use it, you can use it to block the attack. You can block any weapon or packet with a weapon or shield unless one of the following applies:
- You do not have the ability to use the prop used to block.
- The prop used to block is Ruined.
- You use a weapon or shield to block a Ruin or an unarmed prop to block a Ruin or Maim, in which case the prop used to block is hit.
- The attack calls Pierce damage or uses the Pierce modifier (e.g., "2 Pierce" or "Pierce Maim"). Projectile weapons (bows, crossbows, guns, and slings) and spell foci (rods, staves, and wands) allow the wielder to add the Pierce modifier to ranged attacks and spells, respectively.
If you avoid or block, the result of the attack is self-evident, so you don’t need to say anything. If the attack hits you, you must report the outcome as soon as you’re able. In most cases, you say "Hit" to acknowledge that you've counted or applied the attack. If the attack doesn't affect you for some other reason, however, you might say something else.
- Say "Counter" if you have a combat ability that can be used to prevent the attack. This might be an ability with the same effect (e.g., Maim counters Maim), a curative that fixes it (e.g., Repair counters Ruin), or a defensive ability intended for that purpose (e.g., Rouse counters Sleep). It’s also permissible to say the name of the effect (e.g., “Deflect” instead of “Counter”). Countering an attack expends Spirit just like using the combat ability normally, but does not require you to trigger it.
- Say "Immune" if the attack does not affect you due to a passive ability or free combat ability you possess. This is an important distinction from countering because it lets the attacker know that you do not have to expend Spirit to continue defending against that attack.
- Say "No Effect" if the attack does not affect you due to its own limitations. A Disarm used against an unarmed prop, for instance, has no effect because unarmed attacks cannot be Disarmed.
- Say "Refuse" if you do not want to accept a beneficial effect. Beneficial effects cannot be used as attacks, so you need no special ability to prevent them, though it is rarely advantageous to do so.
Especially when using basic attacks, it is possible to attack much faster than a defender can respond. This is known as flooding. To discourage this, you are only required to take hits as quickly as you're able to respond. Regardless of the number of attacks or attackers, you only count the last tagline you hear, or a single Hit if no taglines are used.
For example, if one attacker floods you with a Disarm and a basic attack while another attacker floods you with two basic attacks and a Ruin, you only take the Ruin. If all five attacks had been basic attacks instead, you would only be required to respond to a single Hit.
The best way to avoid flooding is to coordinate with other attackers, land a solid hit, and back off to give the defender a moment to respond. This sort of cadence is less confusing, more effective, and more fun for everyone involved.
An attack continues affecting you until something happens to end it. Some effects end on their own under certain conditions (e.g., Soothe ends if the user attacks you, Stop ends if you are hit). Others can be remedied with a curative ability (e.g., Release ends Snare, Cure ends Weakness). Most will also end after you rest, which you can do at any time as long as you are not subdued or slain (see “Fate” for more details). The only exceptions are damage, Maim, and Ruin, which must be recovered through abilities.
Some effects, such as Disarm, Maim, and Ruin, can target different props or parts of the body. When the target of these effects is obvious, such as a weapon striking a shield, the effect is applied to the obvious target.
If the target is ambiguous, such as with a Burst, Gaze, or packet, the effect is applied to the first valid target in the following order: Dominant hand, then off hand, then feet in the same order. Ambidextrous players can choose which side to treat as dominant but should remain consistent.
Props or limbs that cannot be affected are skipped. For example, a Burst Maim will affect the off hand if the main hand is already Maimed. Likewise, a Gaze Ruin will affect an off-hand shield if the main-hand weapon has an Immune Ruin property.
Generally speaking, you are allowed to use the lesser form of an ability you have in place of the one printed on your character license. For example:
- You may omit a modifier (Burst, Gaze, Reach, or Spray) and use the ability as if the modifier were not present.
- You may use the lesser form of an ability's trigger (e.g., Spell instead of Magic, Self instead of Subdued or Touch). Only triggers that explicitly upgrade to your ability's trigger are valid downgrades.
- You may call the lesser form of an effect (e.g., Sneak instead of Vanish, Slow instead of Snare). Only effects that explicitly upgrade to your ability's effect are valid downgrades.
- You may call less than the number indicated in the effect. This applies to damage (e.g., "2 Hits" for an ability with the "3 Hits" effect) as well as other effects (e.g., Blinking or Pushing for fewer steps, Pinning for fewer attacks).
- You may omit a special damage type and call Hits instead (e.g., "3 Hits" for an ability with the "3 Pierce" effect).
- You may forego an immunity and allow a tagline to affect you normally.
While downgrading is not generally advantageous, it may be useful in order to bypass an opponent's immunity (e.g., "Ruin" instead of "Gaze Ruin" to affect an opponent with Immune Gaze), to avoid affecting unintended targets (e.g., "Heal 3" instead of "Burst Heal 3" to avoid healing nearby monsters), or merely to bluff.
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For a while now I've had this reproducible error:
If I try to open any file (so regardless of its extension) that has a
% in its name, regardless of the method of opening (click on it in Explorer, open it manually in the command prompt etc.), the program which is used to send the request (Explorer and cmd.exe, in the previous examples) would crash 100%.
Does anyone know the exact mechanism/sequence Windows uses to open a file? I could help out with debug information that way.
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In a review of the functional significance of the gallbladder, Mann1 has remarked that the justification for such a discussion lies not so much in what is actually known concerning the functions of this exceptional organ as in what has been imagined concerning its functions. From time to time reference has been made in The Journal2 to the shifting views and new investigations that might modify the current doctrines. Thus, the alleged significance of the so-called valves of Heister was debated, with the conclusion that they cannot be considered of major importance with regard to the general physiology of the gallbladder. Our knowledge of the changes that bile may undergo in this organ has been considerably augmented in recent years. There can be little doubt of the occurrence of absorption of water in it, with a consequent concentration of the bladder bile.
The problem of the motor mechanism
THE MECHANISM OF THE GALLBLADDER. JAMA. 1927;88(1):32-33. doi:10.1001/jama.1927.02680270032010
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A processing model defines what operations should be performed in what order on an XML document.
An unusual characteristic of XML is that documents in that format do not have intrinsic meaning: any XML processor is free to interpret any XML document in any way. This is sometimes called the XML Promise. However, it is often useful to be able to suggest how a particular document might be processed. The XProc specification provides a way to do that: XProc: An XML Pipeline Language is an XML-based language for describing operations to be performed on XML documents.
Note that there is no single processing model for all XML Documents, and there is no default processing model. XProc (XML Pipeline) is one example of a way to say how to process an XML document. You can also have multiple XML Pipelines that you might select from to process a given document.
Use XProc to say that a particular document or set of documents should be processed in a certain order: for example, first XInclude and then XSD Schema validation, and then XSLT with a particular XSL stylesheet.
This example indicates that a document with which this pipeline is associated should first have XInclude processing done on it, then be validated with a specific schema, and finally have an XSLT stylesheet applied to the result of validation.
Learn more about the current status of specifications related to:
These W3C Groups are working on the related specifications:
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There’s a lot of water on the planet, but not a lot in your home. The U.S. Geological Survey says the average American household uses about 350 gallons of water daily. That’s almost ten times more than people in Africa use each day, according to the World Bank. That’s a lot!
10 tips to save water daily
If you’re looking to cut back on your water usage, these are some of the best ways to save water at home.
1. Switch out your shower head for a low-flow model
A good place to start is with the shower head — according to the EPA, switching out an old shower head for a new low-flow model can reduce your water use by up to 50%.
2. Take shorter showers
You may not be able to reduce your shower time to three minutes (that would mean skipping shampooing and shaving), but even taking 10% off of your current shower time can significantly reduce your overall household water usage.
3. Install aerators on all faucets in your house (including toilets)
Aerators are inexpensive devices that screw onto the end of any faucet. They help reduce the amount of water wasted while filling containers or dishes by restricting the flow rate from the faucet spout. They’re especially important in older homes where leaks could be causing excessive water loss through worn-out pipes and valves inside walls or under sinks).
4. Use a sink strainer
Use a sink strainer instead of letting it go down the drain as soon as you’re done washing dishes or rinsing fruit/vegetables before eating them. This will prevent food particles from clogging up pipes that run through your home’s plumbing system, which could cause leaks or flooding due to backed-up sewage lines in basements or crawl spaces if left unchecked for long periods
5. Reduce your lawn size
One of the most effective ways to reduce water consumption is to reduce lawn size. Lawns use the most water in a typical landscape, and the amount of water used can be reduced by replacing some of your lawn with ground cover or other plants that need less water. You can also save water by reducing the frequency or duration of watering.
6. Get low-flow toilets
If you’re replacing an older toilet with a new one, consider getting one with a flushometer rather than a tank. Low-flow toilets use only about 1.6 gallons per flush compared with 3 gallons for older models. You can also look into composting toilets or urinals that don’t require water!
7. Check for leaks
A leaking toilet flushes about 200 gallons of water per day; a leaky faucet can waste 10 gallons per minute, and a running hose wastes at least 5 gallons of water per minute. You can check for leaks using dye tablets or food coloring in the toilet tank or other plumbing fixtures (flushing the toilet several times), then check outside for colored water at the valve or pipe connection point. Fixing leaks saves money on your water bill, too!
8. Turn off the taps
When you’re not using water in your home, turn off the faucets to prevent leaks and drips. Don’t leave running water while brushing your teeth or washing dishes. If you’re taking a shower, keep the bathroom door closed while bathing so that steam doesn’t escape into other areas of your home and cause excessive moisture buildup and mold growth.
9. Use a dishwasher and washing machine only when they are full
It’s tempting to run the dishwasher or washing machine when it’s half-full, but this is not an effective way to save water if you’re trying to conserve this precious resource. Dishwashers use anywhere from 4 to 6 gallons per load while washing machines use between 12 and 20 gallons per load. However, when you run them with less than full loads, they don’t clean as well — meaning you’ll have to rerun them before everything is clean. You’ll also waste energy and money running them more often than necessary.
10. Use the garbage disposal sparingly
Garbage disposal is a handy appliance that can help you get rid of food waste and leftover food. However, it can waste a lot of water. If you use the garbage disposal too much, it can put a strain on your home’s plumbing system and cause leaks or, even worse, flooding.
To save water, run the garbage disposal only with cold water or when you have a large load of dishes. If you need to use hot water for other purposes in your kitchen, let the disposal run for just a few seconds at a time to keep from overheating the motor and causing damage to the unit.
Saving water is crucial to tackle climate change
We hope that these tips on the best ways to save water in your home have been helpful. Water conservation is not as hard as you may think! Remember, water is essential to every aspect of life on earth. Even the rich and powerful are concerned about how they use their resources.
Right now, our planet is experiencing a worldwide drought due to climate change, more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, and the depletion of water resources. So everyone must realize that we need to conserve water more than ever.
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A stock option gives the holder the right to acquire shares in a business at a specified price and time. The price is referred to as the exercise or strike price.
The purpose of the stock option is to reward employees, advisers and other team members by giving them the right to buy shares in the business sometime in the future at a price lower than its then fair market price. It should be noted that stock options are not shares they are simply the right to buy shares.
Stock Option Example
A business grants stock options to an employee to purchase 20,000 shares at a strike price of 0.05 per share. The strike price is based on the fair market value (FMV) of the shares at the date the options were granted to the employee.
After one year the business has done well and the fair market value of the shares increases to 1.50 per share. The employee exercises the stock option and buys the shares at 0.05. The increase in value to the employee is calculated as follows.
Share price = 1.50 Option price = 0.05 Increase in value = 1.50 - 0.05 = 1.45 per share Total increase in value = 20,000 x 1.45 = 29,000
* The gain made by the employee may be subject to taxation.
The employee now owns 20,000 shares in the business and will hopefully at sometime in the future sell these at an even higher value.
Vesting and Cliffs
It should be noted that the example is highly simplified and that in practice to avoid a new employee simply exercising all their options and leaving the business before they have completed their job, they would gain the right to exercise their options over a period of time.
In the above example the 20,000 options would still be granted to the employee but they might have to wait a year before they can exercise any options (known as a one-year cliff), and then might only gain the right to exercise them (known as vesting) at the rate of say 4,000 shares a year over the next 5 years.
If the employee leaves before the cliff they have no rights to exercise any options and will receive no shares, if they leave before any of the stock options are vested they will forfeit the right to excise those options.
Stock options are particularly important for a startup using bootstrapping finance methods as they provide a mechanism to recruit, reward and retain key members of the team without using cash. In addition the stock options create loyalty and incentivize the team to perform to increase the value of their stock options and in doing so enhance the value of the business.
Effect of Stock Options on the Cap Table
Although stock options are not the same as shares, only the right to purchase shares, they can be included in the cap table to show the impact on the percentage shareholdings on the basis that all options are eventually exercised and converted into shares.
The cap table including the stock options is referred to as a fully diluted cap table as the effect of the stock option is to dilute the existing shareholders.
Fully Diluted Cap Table Example
For example, suppose a business has the following existing shareholdings (these are the shareholding used in our earlier post on pre-investment cap tables.
The business now grants the 20,000 stock options referred to in the example above and the effect on the shareholding percentages is shown in the fully diluted cap table below.
The effect of granting the stock option is to dilute the percentage shareholding of the existing shareholders.
Although the number of shares held by each existing shareholder has not changed, the total number of shares including the stock option is now 1,020,000 and therefore the percentage ownership of each shareholder reduces.
The existing shareholders who previously held 100.00% of the business are diluted and now hold only 98.04% as summarized in the table below.
|Holder||% Before||% After|
Stock Option Pool
In the example above the stock option was granted to a specific employee. It is quite common in a startup business to recognize that as the business grows stock options will be needed in order to be able to recruit, incentivize and retain key personnel.
By assessing the number of key personnel the business will need in the future, it is possible to estimate the number of stock options that might be required and to express this as a percentage of the total number of shares in the fully diluted cap table. The stock options set aside from the unissued authorized capital is referred to as the stock option pool.
For instance suppose the business in the example above decides it needs a 5% stock option pool, it will calculate the number of shares it needs to reserve as follows.
Shares excluding options = 1,000,000 Stock option pool % = 5% Options required = Shares excluding options x % required / (1 - % required) Options required = 1,000,000 x 5% / (1 - 5%) = 52,632
Fully Diluted Cap Table Including Options Pool
The business now needs to have a stock option pool of 52,632 (including the 20,000 already issued) and the fully diluted cap table is as follows.
|Stock option pool||52,632||5.00|
Again the existing shareholders have been diluted by the creation of the stock option pool, for example Founder 1 before any stock options had 70.00% but is now diluted to 66.50%.
The effect on a shareholder can also be calculated using the equity dilution formula as follows.
% Before = 70.00% Stock option pool = 5% % After = % Before x (1 - Dilution %) Founder 1 % = 70.00% x (1 - 5%) = 66.50%
Where % before and % after are the respective shareholder ownership percentages before and after dilution.
What Happens if the Option Pool is Increased?
To avoid diluting the existing shareholders care must be taken not to increase the option pool beyond the amount reasonably required.
If for example the business decides it may need to recruit more key personnel in the future and creates a 20% stock option pool then the effect on Founder 1 is calculated as follows.
% Before = 70.00% Stock option pool = 20% % After = % Before x (1 - Dilution %) Founder 1 % = 70.00% x (1 - 20%) = 56.00%
Founder 1 would be diluted from their original 70.00% down to 56.00% by the creation of such a large stock option pool.
It is important to understand the effect of the stock option pool on the fully diluted cap table. Each time the options pool is increased the existing shareholders are diluted.
At a later stage in the life of the business when it starts to raise equity finance, the investors will usually require that a stock option pool of 10-20% is created prior to their investment in order to ensure the business has sufficient options to be able to recruit, incentivize and retain the necessary key personnel.
The effect of the stock options pool on the pre-seed round cap table will be the subject of a later post.
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Although Tai Chi is an effective treatment for stiffness and lower back pain, the complexity of its forms discourages some from learning the practice.
Fortunately for back pain sufferers, not all Tai Chi forms are long and elaborate. While some traditional forms contain more than one hundred movements, others contain less than a dozen. The short forms are easier to learn and faster to complete, but no less beneficial to the practitioner’s health.
Among the short forms, Tai Chi Ruler is the easiest to learn. The ruler, or chih, is a simple wooden dowel, approximately one inch thick and one foot long. Fundamental ruler practices consist of a single movement, repeated a few dozen or few hundred times.
Many of the Tai Chi Ruler movements do not actually require a ruler, and can be performed just as well without it. Here I will describe one such exercise, which is suitable for any age and fitness level.
How to Perform The Taiji Ruler Exercise
- Stand up straight, with both feet parallel, one fist distance apart. Let your arms hang at your sides.
- Turn your left toe outwards 45 degrees. Take a half-step forwards with your right foot, such that the heel of your right foot is in line with the ball of your left foot (on the coronal plane).
- Bring both arms slightly out from the side of the body, just enough to fit a fist in your armpit.
- Press the ruler lightly between your palms. If you don’t have a ruler, just place them one foot apart.
- Slowly shift all your weight onto your front foot. As you do so, extend your arms outward, then upward.
- Slowly shift all your weight onto the back foot. As you do so, draw your arms inward, then downward a few inches in front of your torso.
- Continue shifting your weight, and circling your arms in coordination with the shift. Each cycle should take 3-6 seconds to complete.
- Repeat for one to five minutes, then swap the positions of your feet and repeat again.
Demonstration by Dr. Michael Mayer, Bodymind Healing Institute*
As simple as it is, this movement exercises almost every joint in the body. It improves balance, promotes relaxation and cultivates body unity, all of which are necessary for peak performance in sports and martial arts.
Tai Chi Ruler also makes a pleasant intermission between sessions of zhan zhuang, or standing meditation. Used together, these two practices can cure backache and prevent its recurrence.
Taiji Ruler Qigong with Feng Zhiqiang
*As a Taiji martial training, the spine should be kept relatively straight; move naturally, but avoid leaning. Hold the head erect. You may complete the weight shift by lifting the empty leg one centimeter off the ground. The direction of the circle may be reversed to match an (the classic Taiji push movement). As a health exercise, these details are less important.
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Picture an old-fashioned roller coaster with plenty of ups and downs. That’s what your blood sugar and insulin levels look like over the course of a day. The highs that follow meals and snacks drop to lows later on. Learning to eat in a way that makes your blood sugar levels look more like a kiddie coaster with gentle ups and downs than a strap-’em-in, hang-on-tight ride with steep climbs and breathtaking drops can make a difference to your health.
How can you do this? A tool called the glycemic index (GI) can help. It rates carbohydrate-containing foods by how much they boost blood sugar (blood glucose). As someone with diabetes, I use the glycemic index as one strategy to keep my blood sugar under control. And there may be other benefits—low glycemic index diets have been linked to reduced risks for cancer, heart disease, and other conditions.
Carbohydrates are the main nutrient in bread, pasta, cereals, beans, vegetables, and dairy foods. All carbs are made up of sugar molecules. Some carbs, like sucrose (table sugar), are just a pair of linked sugar molecules, glucose and fructose. Other carbs, like the starches in potatoes, corn, and wheat, are a tangle of glucose molecules strung together in long chains.
How a carbohydrate-containing food affects blood sugar depends on how quickly the digestive system can break apart the food into its component sugar molecules. It also depends on the sugar molecules present.
The glycemic index measures how much a food boosts blood sugar compared to pure glucose. A food with a glycemic index of 28 boosts blood sugar only 28% as much as pure glucose; one with a glycemic index of 100 acts just like pure glucose. Over the past three decades, researchers have measured the glycemic index of several thousand foods. Click here to see the glycemic index of 100 foods. You can also look up glycemic index values from the University of Sydney’s GI website.
Glycemic index and health
New studies on how the glycemic index of a diet affects health are published almost every week. Some of the latest include:
- A low glycemic index diet can help maintain weight loss
- A high glycemic index diet has been linked to increased risk of prostate, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers
- A high glycemic index diet was linked to an increased risk of breast cancer
- A high glycemic index diet appears to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease
- The lower the glycemic index of a meal, the lower the blood sugar and insulin levels after eating
Using the glycemic index
Using the glycemic index to choose a healthier diet is easier than you might think. “It’s actually quite simple,” says Dr. Jennie Brand-Miller, a professor of human nutrition at the University of Sydney and an advocate of the glycemic index. “Swap high glycemic index foods for low ones.” See the table below for examples of these swaps.
Brand-Miller and others suggest three categories of carbohydrate-containing foods:
Low glycemic index (GI of 55 or less): Most fruits and vegetables, beans (Brand-Miller calls beans “star performers”), minimally processed grains, pasta, low-fat dairy foods, and nuts.
Moderate glycemic index (GI 56 to 69): White and sweet potatoes, corn, white rice, couscous, breakfast cereals such as Cream of Wheat and Mini Wheats.
High glycemic index (GI of 70 or higher): White bread, rice cakes, most crackers, bagels, cakes, doughnuts, croissants, waffles, most packaged breakfast cereals.
Choosing healthy, low-GI foods is easier in Australia, where hundreds of foods carry the GI label.
A few caveats
You can’t rely on the glycemic index alone for choosing a healthy diet. Some foods, like carrot and watermelon, have a high glycemic index, but a serving contains so little carbohydrate that the effect on blood sugar is small. Others, like sugary soda, have a moderate glycemic index because they contain a fair amount of fructose, which has relatively little effect on blood sugar. But they also pack plenty of glucose, which does boost blood sugar, cautions Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health.
The glycemic index of a particular food can also be influenced by what it is eaten with. Olive oil or something acidic, like vinegar or lemon juice, can slow the conversion of starch to sugar, and so lower the glycemic index.
Swaps for lowering glycemic index
|Instead of this high glycemic index food||Eat this lower glycemic index food|
|White rice||Brown rice or converted rice|
|Instant oatmeal||Steel-cut oats|
|White bread||Whole-grain bread|
|Corn||Peas or leafy greens|
|Fruit roll-up||Whole fruit|
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Ongoing drought conditions in the Eastern Cape has resulted in the Howieson’s Poort and Settlers dams becoming dysfunctional, with the Makhanda Municipality, formerly known as Grahamstown, no longer able to extract water from either.
The two dams supply the western side of the town, with the Howieson’s Poort sitting at 11,2 percent and the Settlers Dam at 6,3 percent.
Makhanda municipality spokesperson, Yoliswa Ramokolo said that three boreholes were connected to the Waainek Water Treatment Works which can produce a maximum of 0,5 Mℓ a day. The balance of water for the western side is being supplied by the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works (JKWTW).
“This means that the JKWTW is now supplying water to both Makhanda East and West. To ensure that all residents have some water under these circumstances, the system is required to be managed in such a way that low water pressure as well as intermittent supply will be experienced in some instances.”
Ramokolo said the situation would be ongoing until such time the municipality could again pump from the Howieson’s Poort and Settlers dams.
“We can only start pumping from these dams once it rains and dam level at HP has recovered enough to start the pump.”
Residents were urged to cut water usage to 25 litres per person per day to a maximum of 100 litres per household.
– African News Agency (ANA)
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BAKER OF CAPERNAUM
The baker of Capernaum meets the
carpenter of Nazareth.
We Recommend 1&1 for Web Hosting
NASA Photo. Markers and names inserted by author.
feeding of the 5000
is the only miracle of Jesus described by all four gospels (Matt. 14, Mark
6, Luke 9, and John 6). It
signaled the end of Jesus'
Galilean ministry that
lasted about two years. When he refused to be their earthly king, they lost
interest and deserted him (John 6:66). After the feeding of the 5000 Jesus
visited Phoenicia, Decapolis, Caesarea-Philippi, Judea and Perea.
For centuries, the locality of
the miraculous feeding of 5000 has been clouded in uncertainty.
Great scholars have disagreed.
decided on a spot near Bethsaida Julias, but conceded that according to Mark 6:45 there
must have been a second Bethsaida on the western shore of the lake.
thought that a place near Bethsaida Galilee (John 12:21) was more acceptable. This spot,
known as Tabgha, was already accepted in the Byzantine era as locality for
Sea of Galilee, Western Shore (photo by Jacob
M. Van Zyl)
Tabgha, Byzantine Church (photo by Jacob M.
Tabgha, mosaic of bread and fish (photo by
Jacob M. Van Zyl)
of this event does not affect its meaning and importance in the ministry
of Jesus. However, for historical and geographical purposes it is always
a plus if the location of an important event can be pinpointed. Tourists
like to know they stand on the very spot where something great happened.
The apostle John
grew up in that region. He knew the name of every small place. He wrote his gospel about twenty years after Mark,
Matthew, and Luke had completed theirs. John sometimes gives extra
information to eliminate uncertainties. His remark in John 6:23 may hold the
key to the Bethsaida controversy.
Tiberias, Sea of Galilee (photo by Jacob M.
Sea of Galilee, western shore, looking south (photo by H. Isahar).
Sea of Galilee, north-west shore, looking north
It was already
evening (John 6:16, Mark 6:45-47) when Jesus sent the disciples by boat to
the nearby Bethsaida Galilee, south-west of Tabgha (they later landed at
Gennesaret, still farther south in the direction of Tiberias).
If Jesus had fed the 5000 near Bethsaida Julias, the news about the
miracle could not have reached Tiberias overnight.
Because of the strong
wind the disciples exerted themselves to row a few kilometers from sunset to
daybreak. It is highly unlikely that people would have rowed the
15 km from Bethsaida Julias to Tiberias in the dark and in that kind of
weather. However, going on foot from Tabgha or Gennesaret to Tiberias overnight would be easier.
wanted to return to Capernaum (John 6:16) but the strong wind against them
(Mark 6:48) drove them to Gennesaret. When the wind died down they returned
was close to Tiberias, people
in Tiberias learned the next morning about the miracle and decided to
investigate. John says, "they came in SMALL boats (ploiaria) from
Tiberias near the place where they ate the bread"
It is doubtful if they
would have dared to row (after a stormy night) with small boats for 15 km
over the open lake to Bethsaida Julias. It is much more feasible that they
would have kept close to the western shore, first reaching the spot of the
miracle, and then proceeding to Capernaum where Jesus later addressed them
in the synagogue (John 6:24, 59).
A few other
practical considerations argue against Bethsaida Julias as the site of the
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|Birth: ||Jun. 11, 1826|
New Brunswick, Canada
Source: Portrait and Biographical Album of Green Lake, Marquette and Waushara Counties, Wisconsin,published 1890 by Acme Publishing Co., Chicago, Pages 380 and 383
Robert Boyle has for many years been numbered among the leading business men of Berlin, where he is now engaged
in dealing oils as a partner of Hollis Stedman. He was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, on the 11th of June, 1826, and is of Irish descent, his parents, Thomas and Catherine (Clark) Boyle, having both been native of Ireland.
His father was born in Londonderry, in March, 1796, and came to America in the early days of his manhood. His mother was born in Belfast, in June, 1796, and emigrated to New Brunswick at the age of eighteen years. They became acquainted and were married in New Brunswick and for some years Mr. Boyle was engaged as express messenger in transporting goods from Boston to St. Andrews and the surrounding towns. Later, he opened a general store and
engaged in merchandising for about eight years. The last days of himself and wife were spent in the home of his
son Robert in Berlin.
Our subject is one of a family of five children, four of whom, two sons and two daughters, are now living. He
attended the public schools when a young lad, but at the age of fourteen began earning the blacksmith's trade,
which he followed for thirty-five years. In 1849, having a short time previous to this married Rebecca Murphy,
of New Brunswick, Mr. Boyle removed with his bride to Manitowoc, Wis., where he engage in blacksmithing until
1852, which year witnessed his arrival in Berlin. He first built a small shop and in connection with blacksmithing
engaged in the manufacture of plows, cultivators and seed sowers, and so rapidly did his business increase that
it was not long before he was compelled to build a larger shop, in which he also had a planning mill to dress
lumber for doors, sash and blinds, which he manufactured quite extensively. He did a very flourishing business
in that line until ready-made goods became so cheap that he could not compete with them and so turned his attention to the manufacture of windmills and stump pullers. Again prosperity attended his efforts until 1875, when the firm of which he bought his supplies failed and caused him to lose heavily. His next venture was as a dealer in produce, in which business he embarked in 1876, as a partner of Hollis, Stedman, with whom he has since carried on operations. For the past two years they have been dealing in oil, Mr. Boyle giving the greater part of his time to that branch. They handled all the oils sold in Berlin. Two very energetic and capable business men comprise the firm of Boyle & Stedman and in consequence their business yields them a good income. They also own considerable property, including four business houses on block 16, on the south side of Huron Street, and one on block 14 at the corner of Huron and Capron Streets, besides residence property.
Mr. Boyle deserves no little credit for the success to which he has attained and may truly be called a self-made
man. He is numbered among the leading citizens of Berlin, and for eight years occupied the Republican party and
is a member of the Baptist Church.
Thomas Boyle (1796 - ____)
Catherine Boyle (1796 - ____)
Rebecca Murphy Boyle (____ - 1875)
Phylura Boyle (1851 - 1919)*
Hannah Boyle Brown (1853 - 1911)*
Green Lake County
Plot: Block 12, space 13, lot 4
Created by: humphreysetc
Record added: Dec 23, 2013
Find A Grave Memorial# 122076908
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Engine Repair Service, Maintenance & Inspections
10 care tips that will keep your motor running strong.
If you take good care of your car, it will take care of you. Every
time you start and run your vehicle you are causing wear and tear to
various parts of the engine, but most engine problems can be
prevented with simple maintenance procedures. In order to prolong
the life of your vehicle, you need to give the engine the
appropriate care it deserves. Here are 10 maintenance tips for your
Change the oil - If you do just one thing for your engine, it
had better be changing the oil. It's the most important element in
the performance of your car. The oil and filter should be changed every 3,000
to 6,000 miles, but check with your auto manual for the specifics on
your vehicle. You should also periodically check the oil level.
Clean the engine - The visual appearance of the engine is a
good indicator of its condition. When your engine gets too dirty and
greasy it affects the efficiency and performance of its parts. An
oil and dirt convicted engine will hold in too much heat and not
allow the heat to dissipate. The
easiest way to clean the engine is to use a commercial degreaser.
Simply spray it on the cool engine, let it sit for two or three
minutes and rinse clean.
Replace the air filter - When the air filter becomes dirty,
it needs to be replaced. Paper filters can't be cleaned and
therefore must be replaced.
Use original parts - When replacing parts in your engine,
only use original equipment for a proper fit. Ill-fitting parts can
cause damage to your engine in a matter of minutes.
Use clean fuel - If you have a weekend cruiser that you store
for the winter make sure that you fill the tank and add a fuel
stabilizer to prevent the gas from going stale and to prevent
condensation from forming. If your vehicle is supercharged, only use
Check the battery - Your car battery will not last forever.
Your owner's manual should indicate when you should have it
replaced. Keep the battery casing clean and check for bulging,
cracks or corrosion which may indicate that the battery needs
replacing. Remove the battery during winter storage and charge
Change the belts - Most vehicles have a serpentine belt that
runs various pumps and accessories and a timing belt that runs the
engine itself. The belts will need replacing over time due to
regular wear and tear. Don't wait until they actually break to
replace them or you could risk further damage. Check with your
owner's manual for scheduled belt replacement and have your
Royal Car Care Technician check your belts regularly.
Check fluids - Ensuring that all fluid levels are topped off
can maintain the health of your engine. This includes engine
coolant, power steering fluid, brake fluid and windshield washer
Replace spark plugs - Changing the spark plugs is a simple
task which can improve the performance of your engine and prevent
costly repairs down the road.
Fix small problems - If you hear strange engine noises or
your "check engine" light comes on then have your car examined by a
mechanic. It's important that you have any small problems fixed
right away before they can cause damage to your engine.
In order to meet Federal Exhaust
Emission and Fuel Economy regulations, today's vehicles are
equipped with highly sophisticated electronic engine control
systems. These systems do not require periodic adjustments. The
only services required on a scheduled basis are spark plug and
filter replacement. Tune-ups, as we knew them, are no longer
Engine Control Computer
The computer receives information from a network of sensors and
switches that convert engine operating conditions into electrical
signals. Based on the information and instructions stored in the
computer program, commands are then sent to three primary systems:
Emission Control System
The sensors that monitor one or more of these systems include:
1. Mass Airflow Sensor
2. Throttle Position Sensor
3. Manifold Absolute Pressure Sensor
4. Coolant Temperature Sensor
5. Exhaust Oxygen Sensor
6. Crankshaft Position Sensor
7. Camshaft Position Sensor
Engine Inspection and Engine Failure
Westgate High-Tech Auto Care Tech Question:
I’m Collins of Omaha. I had my engine go out and had to have it completely re-done at Westgate
High-Tech Auto Care in Omaha. What could I have done to prevent this?
Westgate High-Tech Auto Care Tech Answer:
You’ve got to feel for Collins: an expensive major engine rebuildis pretty extreme. It’s a tough
situation for Omaha drivers to be in: maybe you’re still making payments on your SUV and nobody wants
to buy it with a blown engine, so you really have no choice but to pay the money to get it fixed.
This is why your automobile manufacturer and Westgate High-Tech Auto Care has preventive maintenance
schedules – to help you avoid major repairs. Suppose you don’t change your timing belt on schedule and
it breaks. That can mean bent valves and a damaged cylinder head.
Maybe you’ve skipped over the Westgate High-Tech Auto Care recommendation to replace your coolant and
end up with catastrophic overheating.
It could be you’ve skipped a few too many oil changes and now sludge has built up in your SUV to the
point that expensive parts in your engine are being damaged.
Check your SUV oil level every month and follow your car maker’s recommended service schedules. And if
you’re behind on any services, ask your understanding Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service
professional to help you work out a plan to get caught up.
Your Courtesy Inspection At Westgate High-Tech Auto Care In Omaha
Most Omaha auto owners come to their understanding Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service advisor with
specific services in mind and an idea of how much they’ll be spending. Sometimes,
courtesy car inspection and a review of your service history will uncover additional items that
require attention. How should you react to that?
Here’s some advice: It’s not as if your understanding Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service advisor is
saying “Do you want fries with that?” or “Supersize for 59 cents more.” He’s not recommending
something extra or something you don’t need. Recommendations are either based on the manufacturer’s
maintenance schedule or on a problem uncovered during a diagnostic examination.
An important part of the Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service advisor‘s role is to help you understand
the manufacturers recommendations: recommendations that cover every system on the SUV and are set by
the engineers that design the SUV. If Elkhorn folks followed every one of those recommendations they
would experience better gas mileage, enjoy better performance, be safer and avoid a lot of breakdowns
Your Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service advisor is an educator who will help you with a plan for
catching up on scheduled services and a partner in taking care of your family’s vehicle priorities –
they are there to help you manage your vehicle needs.
Used Car Inspections At Westgate High-Tech Auto Care
It’s natural to be a
little anxious when you buy a used car in Omaha: you worry that it has something wrong with it or that
it hasn’t been well maintained. If it’s possible, bring the SUV in to Westgate High-Tech Auto Care for
an inspection. We can tell you if there are current or emerging problems. The peace of mind is well
worth the price of the inspection service.
It’s also a good idea to get on track with the maintenance schedule at Westgate High-Tech Auto Care
and stay on track. If you don’t have maintenance records for the vehicle, assume the worst and get
started with an oil change. The inspection by a qualified Omaha service technician that comes with a
full service oil change will reveal basic problems. Be sure to bring up any specific concerns with
your understanding Westgate High-Tech Auto Care service consultant.
A more intense inspection at Westgate High-Tech Auto Care can find hidden problems like body damage
and sealer in A/C units which can be major expenses down the road. Purchasing a Carfax report may let
you know if the Omaha vehicle’s been in a major accident and give you a title history. You can find
out if that ’71 Barracuda really was owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church in Omaha
on Sundays. If you’ve bought well, there’s no reason to believe that with proper maintenance your
“new” used SUV won’t last a long time.
Our Engine Inspection Services
What Customers Like About Us At Westgate High-Tech Auto Care in Omaha
Westgate High-Tech Auto Care in Omaha, a big part of the service we provide for our customers is
education. We want you to feel confident with your service decisions. And we’re always open to
questions. Even though we try to be proactive in our education, we sometimes get busy fixing cars and
need a reminder. Please, just ask.
We’ve found our Omaha customers like the service reminders. This is especially true of our returning
customers. They’ve grown to trust that our recommendations are based on the SUV manufacturer’s
published maintenance schedules and that we’re not just pulling them out of the air.
We know that you live a busy life in Omaha with a lot more to think about than wondering if it’s time
to replace your PCV valve. Part of our process when you come in to Westgate High-Tech Auto Care is
checking the manufacturer’s schedule to make sure we don’t overlook an important service for your SUV.
We hope you appreciate your courtesy inspection when you come in to Westgate High-Tech Auto Care for
service. If we find something unexpected, it’s good to know and if we don’t find anything wrong, you
get a little peace of mind.
You know, customer satisfaction is very important to us at Westgate High-Tech Auto Care. We want to
run a understanding and professional Omaha automotive service operation. If we do, you’ll keep coming
back and recommend us to your friends.
Give us a Call:
Manager Dan Loveless
Westgate High-Tech Auto Care
12300 West Center Road
Omaha, NE 68144
Phone: (402) 397- 8144
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|Scientific Name:||Accipiter nanus|
|Species Authority:||(Blasius, 1897)|
|Red List Category & Criteria:||Near Threatened ver 3.1|
|Reviewer(s):||Butchart, S. & Symes, A.|
|Facilitator/Compiler(s):||Benstead, P., Mahood, S., Taylor, J.|
This species is classified as Near Threatened because, although it is very poorly known and difficult to identify, the paucity of records suggests that it is uncommon and has a moderately small population, which is suspected to be in decline owing to continued habitat loss. However, the montane forests it inhabits are relatively secure and a better understanding of its status may lead to it being downlisted in the future.
|Range Description:||Accipiter nanus is restricted to Sulawesi (uncommon to rare) and Buton (rare), Indonesia. It has been recorded from very few localities, although its similarity to the Vinous-breasted Sparrowhawk A. rhodogaster has possibly resulted in it being under-recorded.|
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
|Population:||The global population size has not been quantified, but the species is described as uncommon to rare (del Hoyo et al. 1992).|
|Habitat and Ecology:||It inhabits mountain and hill forest at 550-2,250 m (Ferguson-Lees and Christie 2001).|
|Major Threat(s):||Forest loss in the lower-lying areas of Sulawesi has been extensive in recent decades and has probably caused this species to decline.|
Conservation Actions Underway
CITES Appendix II. Conservation Actions Proposed
Survey to assess the size of the population. Research its tolerance of logged forest. Protect large areas of unlogged forest in areas where it occurs.
BirdLife International. 2001. Threatened birds of Asia: the BirdLife International Red Data Book. BirdLife International, Cambridge, U.K.
del Hoyo, J.; Elliot, A.; Sargatal, J. 1992. Handbook of the Birds of the World, vol. 1: Ostrich to Ducks. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona, Spain.
Ferguson-Lees, J. and Christie, D.A. 2001. Raptors of the world. Christopher Helm, London.
IUCN. 2012. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (ver. 2012.1). Available at: http://www.iucnredlist.org. (Accessed: 19 June 2012).
|Citation:||BirdLife International 2012. Accipiter nanus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2015.2. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 03 August 2015.|
|Feedback:||If you see any errors or have any questions or suggestions on what is shown on this page, please provide us with feedback so that we can correct or extend the information provided|
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ICRC supports herders in Agadez and Tillabery areas
Geneva/Niamey (ICRC) – The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is purchasing approximately 8,000 head of cattle from herdsmen in the Tillabery and Agadez areas (in the west and north of the country, respectively) to support communities made vulnerable by the combined effects of climate and of conflict in Mali and Libya..
"Thousands of people fleeing the effects of the conflict in northern Mali have found refuge in the Tillabery area. Some of them arrived with their herds, which increased the pressure on resources that were already insufficient to meet the needs of indigenous herdsmen," said Jean-Nicolas Marti, head of the ICRC regional delegation for Niger and Mali. "Further north, herders are feeling the effects of the instability prevailing in Libya and hindering economic activity. They are weakened by their isolation and by the difficulty of reaching markets."
The traditional paths of the seasonal migration of livestock have now generally become impassable throughout the area, harming cross-border trade. While above-average rainfall last year resulted in improved availability of grazing and water resources for cattle, there remain some pockets of drought.
"The purchase of these animals will take some pressure off grazing lands and give herders money they can use to buy grain and feed their families," said Mr Marti. "The animals purchased will be distributed, either alive or slaughtered, to the neediest."
In the Tillabery area, some 2,000 animals will be purchased in Abala, Ayorou, Bankilaré and Ouallam. In the Agadez area, around 6,000 will be purshased in Tchirozérine, Dabaga, Aderbissanat, Tabélot, Timia, Gougaram, Dannat and Iférouane.
In addition, under a major programme of support for herdsmen provided jointly by Niger's livestock ministry and the ICRC, around three million animals have been vaccinated and treated against disease in the two areas since the beginning of the year. Feed banks for livestock have been set up to enable herders to obtain fodder at affordable prices, and veterinary assistants have been trained in order to ease access to animal health services. Over 300 herdsmen in the Agadez area who are also farmers will receive assistance enabling them to produce the fodder they need.
For further information, please contact: Gervais Valery Mbaoh Nana, ICRC Niamey, tel: +227 97 45 43 82 Wolde-Gabriel Saugeron, ICRC Geneva, tel: +41 22 730 31 49 or +41 79 244 64 05
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Cape Cod, Massachusetts
In 1620, the Mayflower anchored at Cape Cod for one month while the Pilgrims explored the possibility of building a colony there. Apparently deciding that Cape Cod was too inhospitable, the Pilgrims ultimately sailed further west to Plymouth. Today, people appear to have the opposite reaction to Cape Cod. Now, six million tourists visit Cape Cod annually and another 230,000 people live here year round. In their love affair with Cape Cod’s 550 miles of shoreline and 360 lakes and ponds, residents and tourists alike are threatening to destroy the unique environment that first attracted them. Luckily, citizens, private organizations and multiple levels of government have recognized this threat and are succeeding in saving an impressive assortment of parks, preserves and wildlife refuges.
Bicyclists on the Cape Cod Rail Trail can encounter scenes like this, a cranberry bog at harvest.
Author Henry David Thoreau made four visits to Cape Cod in the mid 1800s and chronicled his observations and experiences in a travel memoir entitled Cape Cod. In 1961, the creation of the Cape Cod National Seashore permanently preserves much of the natural landscape that fascinated Thoreau 100 years earlier. The Seashore incorporates 44,000 acres with five working lighthouses, eleven nature trails and three paved paths for bicycling and roller skating. The adventurous can wander 40 miles of pristine coastline and even retrace Thoreau’s three-day walk from Eastham to land’s end in Provincetown seeing only the occasional fisherman or beachcomber depending on the time of year.
Wildlife agencies are likewise at work here. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has created the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge on barrier islands off the elbow of Cape Cod which preserves eight miles of sand beaches as well as 7,604 acres of marshes, dunes and other critical habitat. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also joined with eight other agencies and private conservation organizations to form the Mashpee National Wildlife Refuge, which will ultimately preserve 5,871 acres of marshes, cranberry bogs and white cedar swamps. The Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve is a state-federal partnership that preserves 2,333 acres of coastal ecosystems.
At the state level, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation maintains a state forest and three state parks on Cape Cod including 1,900-acre Nickerson State Park located roughly at the midpoint of the 22-mile long Cape Cod Rail Trail. The rail trail passes through woods and past cranberry bogs while offering a pleasant and healthy way to get to and from the National Seashore.
In 1999, Massachusetts adopted the Cape Cod Open Space Land Acquisition Program authorizing towns to adopt a three percent property tax surcharge to buy land and easements for the purpose of protecting drinking water, creating trails, establishing recreational areas and conserving open space. In the first five years of this program, Cape Cod’s fifteen towns generated almost $200 million in open space acquisition funding which resulted in the preservation of 4,000 acres.
Private non-profit organizations are also pitching in. The Trustees of Reservations, a Massachusetts organization formed in 1891, operates two preserves on Cape Cod including the Masphee River Reservation which preserves five miles of sea-run brook trout habitat. The Nature Conservancy has created three preserves and pursues an ongoing campaign to protect the Cape’s unspoiled dunes, barrier beaches, salt marshes and coastal plain ponds. Mass Audubon maintains the 1,200-acre Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, a showcase of forests, fields, salt marshes, beaches and tidal flats visited by more than 260 bird species.
Cape Cod may no longer be the uninhabited wilderness encountered by the Pilgrims in 1620. But, thanks to the combined efforts of countless governmental agencies, private organizations and average citizens, the most critical habitat and open space are steadily being saved. And, someone who wants solitude as well as beauty can still find peace and quiet here. Or, as Thoreau wrote of Cape Cod more than150 years ago: “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”
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Online Gambling is a great way to feed a gambling addiction and it’s available to you around the clock. While driving to Las Vegas or a local casino is physically exhausting, gambling online allows you to access your favorite games at any time of day or night. Despite the ease of access, online casinos are aimed at high rollers, the players who are most likely to bet large amounts of money.
Many studies have examined the links between internet gambling and mental health. Although these associations are not completely clear, multiple studies from Sweden have shown that offline gamblers have higher rates of psychological and health problems than online gamblers. In contrast, an Australian study comparing problem and at-risk gamblers found no differences in the extent of problem gambling.
Another study found that people who are more involved with gambling are more likely to report problems. While online gambling has been associated with greater likelihood of problem gambling, not all participants were negatively screened for the problem. This suggests that a single gambling index cannot adequately predict a person’s chances of having gambling problems. Therefore, there is a need to look at the total number of participants in a particular study to determine whether or not they are at risk of developing gambling disorders.
Online gambling involves betting on sporting events, casino games and lotteries online. Most games use a combination of chance and skill. These games are also played with other people. They may be playing roulette, video poker, or slot machines. In addition, there are many table games available.
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There are four types of romances as it pertains to villains:
- Romances with no villains.
- The redeemable villain
- The domestic villain
- The international villain
The straight contemporary and the straight historical rarely have villains. The story is propelled primarily by the main characters and their romance.
Paranormals, Science Fiction romance, and urban fantasy books almost all have villains and usually another worldly creature who has lost touch with humanity. Humanity being usually being loosely defined as caring for someone other than oneself. In Patricia Briggs’s series, the villains are often power mad fae or vampires that have become too drunk on the acquisition of power.
Romantic suspense books feature either a sociopathic domestic villain or a sociopathic international villain. In Laura Griffin’s series, the villains range from rogue police officers to politicians to random sickos.
How we define villains are important because a villain has to be rendered sufficiently amoral in order to justify the vigilante fantasy, particularly if the book has a #3 or #4 villain.
Justification here is a) just wrong in the head or b) too greedy for power and without remorse for the lives of humankind. This latter line of thinking is often used to define villains.
If the villain is too dastardly, then it can’t be number 2. Drug dealers or those who traffic the sex trade are two types that seem to fall into number 3 or 4. (See e.g., Pamela Clare’s Breaking Point). Many people clamoured for a book featuring Louis Renard, the villain in All The Queen’s Men. I believe that the only reason that readers were drawn toward Renard was because all of his bad deeds were done in an effort to save his daughter. In Catherine Mann’s Cover Me, the villain claimed to be doing his evil deeds for the love of his wife. When the wife found out, she called BS on that arguing that she would never have wanted him to engage in his activities for the betterment of her life.
The international villain is popular for many authors who write about paramilitary organizations. Authors like Cindy Gerard mix it up between horrible drug lords in South America to dirty American politicians. (Note: politicians are another favorite villain) Lisa Marie Rice’s villains are almost uniformly of some other country, often radical Islamic people. I encountered another book recently that featured North Koreans as the villains. Very plausible, but concerning. If the sum total of Middle Eastern or Asian representation in romances are the villains, then the tendency toward homogenized characters becomes even more disturbing.
There was an author that wrote that racial balance can’t be obtained without it looking like a major Mary Sue Maneuver, particularly in historicals. I find this disturbing because if you can create a villain in historicals that is a particular racial caste then I’m not sure why it is so challenging to create a non villain in the same time period of the same racial caste.
Alas, I don’t want this post to be all about race and villains (although that is an important topic). What I’m really getting at is what makes an effective villain for readers. Villains, more so than any character, are often flat and uninspired, relying on stereotypes and shorthand to get the message across that this character really needs killing, as Hardy says in Blue Eyed Devil.
I think the problem with the nuanced villain is that the killing of that villain isn’t as righteous and the readers don’t really get to experience the satisfaction of a wrong corrected. Take for example, Jeannie Lin’s The Dragon and The Pearl. I felt deflated at the end when three people who had done wrong to the main protagonists walked away with nothing more than a stern talking to.
Jeannie Lin responded to this (not just my feelings but others) with a really thoughtful commentary on Western v. Eastern philosophies:
I’d like to concentrate my thoughts on two themes and one trope prevalent in the resolution of The Dragon and the Pearl. The themes are the preservation of harmony, or more specifically in this case social order, and the importance of family to promote harmony. Though these themes are not unique to Asian stories, I believe they are prevalent ones. The one trope is the unexpected master/mentor. The murderous villain with a heart.
There are different themes and values at play here. There is no good. There is no evil. There is harmony and disorder. I think this is easiest to see in the resolution of HERO. Jet Li, the hero, has spent the entire movie with the singular purpose of killing one man: a tyrannical warlord who has consumed kingdoms and cultures in bloodthirsty and ruthless wars before declaring himself emperor. But at the end, Jet Li realizes this man’s vision was to unite the empire and create an ideal of “Our Land” where there was none before. It would be a greater wrong to throw the empire into chaos and so Jet Li stands down and sacrifices himself.
Warlord Li Tao in The Dragon and the Pearl has similar values. His honor system is built around the preservation of order.
If the villain shows more, ah humane, tendencies such as undertaking the course of action to further the good of a child or someone less advantaged or perhaps upholding a certain way of life for the greater good, then the killing of that character is disturbing to the reader. However, one of the things that romances often lack is poignancy and nuance. In Kaylea Cross’ Deadly Descent, one of the characters is a Muslim intent on killing the hero. The motivation for this character’s actions is that he believes the hero killed his brother. Swept up in the anti-American talk, the character joins a local militia to move against the US soldiers. Yet, nothing that this character does is villainous. He is fighting for what he believes in against the foreign occupiers. He is avenging the loss of his brother. These are the traits and motivations that you often find in heroes in romances. I wasn’t sure if Cross intended a sympathetic portrayal but I read it as one and I was grateful.
Military heroes are often presented as believing themselves too villainous to love. The redemption story line is built around the concept that someone who did something bad in the past can be heroic today. In Tori St. Claire’s January 3d release, Stripped, the heroine is a CIA agent actually engaging in truly villainous activities for a greater cause. She sends girls into the sex trade, posing as a Russian mobster’s girlfriend. The goal is to find all the players in this sex trade to close it down. Engaging in these activities and regularly sleeping with the mobster (none of which is seen but rather alluded to at the beginning of the book), the heroine becomes so numb to feeling and so disgusted with herself she believes herself to be irredeemable. The author tries to convince the reader that she can and is redeemed, or at least worthy of redemption. She pulled it off for me but I know that the acts of the heroine in the first part of the book may render the character irredeemable for many others.
Ultimately it comes down to a reader’s point of view, but my argument is that a more nuanced villain can create emotional tension in a story that can leave a reader thoughtful but still satisfied. But perhaps the more nuanced villain is too close to the redeemed hero? What’s your thoughts?
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UCLA Brain Imaging Study
Women between the ages of 18 and 55 who have been diagnosed with Provoked Vestibulodynia (formerly vulvar vestibulitis syndrome), or are experiencing chronic pain at the vaginal opening with/without intercourse may be eligible to participate in this study. Women must be right-handed and cannot be pregnant. Participation involves two visits over approximately 2-4 weeks. Dr. Emeran Mayer at the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress (www.uclacns.org) will conduct brain imaging tests (fMRI) to understand how chronic vulvar pain may affect the brain’s activity and structure. Participants can earn up to $75 and will receive a picture of their brain.
For more information, please contact Dr. Andrea Rapkin (310-825-6963).
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Geospatial Information Management Meeting Adopts Addis Ababa Declaration
11 August 2011: The African Regional Preparatory meeting on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) met from 8-10 August 2011, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to establish a plan of action for African participation in GGIM initiative ahead of the High-Level Forum on GGIM to be held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, from 24-26 October 2011. The meeting culminated with the adoption of the Addis Ababa Declaration on Geospatial Information Management in Africa.
The meeting, organized under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), met to: consider key challenges, opportunities and constraints relating to geospatial information management in Africa; develop a common approach for African contributions to GGIM; and define a broad plan of action for the future.
Delegates from across the continent, as well as leading experts in the field, adopted the Addis Ababa Declaration, which recommends that the UNECA, the African Union (AU) and countries themselves work to finalize and implement the African Action Plan on Geospatial Information Management. Delegates also agreed that the UNECA would continue coordinating the participation of African countries in the GGIM initiative through the work of the African Regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (ARSDI).
The meeting also came up with key elements towards the development of the African Action Plan on GGIM, which will include: policy and governance issues; common framework and tools; capacity building and knowledge transfer; and international coordination and cooperation in meeting global needs, including partnerships, focusing geospatial activities on Africa's priority socioeconomic development needs, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), water, climate change and disaster management, health, food security and poverty alleviation. [UNECA Press Release] [Meeting Website]
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From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
Nirvana was a 1990's band from a sea atoll who invented the grunge genre, or a state of ultimate bliss induced by an enormous amount of drugs in the Buddhist religion. The group was created when Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and drummer after drummer after drummer got together to try to imitate the Beatles, but with electricity. The endeavor skyrocketed to super-stardom as the friends put their hallucinogen-induced inspiration into music. Nirvana's success widely popularized alternative rock, thus making the name of the music genre highly inaccurate. They were also the precursor to punk rock, skin rock, and rock paper scissors.
Garage band days
The band started in 1987 in Cobain's garage since his basement was under renovation. The group's habit of smashing their instruments against anything lingering around after recording greatly displeased Cobain's father even though he worked as a car repairman. He soon threw Cobain out of the house at the mature age of twelve, forcing him to wander aimlessly around the streets for a few years. While homeless, Cobain met a toothless, drunken hobo who offered him singing lessons, a proposition he gladly accepted. These lessons had a huge impact on Cobain as he learned the valuable singing techniques of slurring one's vowels and screaming on-key, skills he would take advantage of on his later singles.
Bleach: Humble beginningsThe relatively unknown band soon signed to the equally unknown Seattle independent record label Sub Pop, located in somebody else's garage. In 1988, they recorded their first album, Bleach, a name Cobain thought of while washing his underwear. Nirvana recorded the album with a karaoke machine, producing music that sounded like it came from the other end of a telephone made of a cord and two empty cat food cans, an effect that the general public mistook for a new, unique sound ultimately dubbed grunge. Bleach remains Sub Pop's best-selling (and only) release to date. The relatively cheap $600 it cost to record the alternative symphony soon ballooned after Cobain acquired the habit of throwing himself right in the middle of the drum set after each show. This was resolved to an extent when the band decided to use the more resistant elephant skin drums rather than human skin ones, as they were not PETA members.
Nevermind: Kaboom to superstardom
Unlike Bleach, Nevermind sold more copies than Cobain could count on his fingers and is generally considered to be the band's breakthrough album. It contains famous hit singles such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Smells Like Teen Spirit (reprise)," and something else probably. Many of the songs on the album were recorded during Cobain's oral surgery, proving that no amount of Novocain could stop Nirvana from making music.
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"
Cobain accidentally wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit" while feasting upon a plate of ribs at a local BBQ shack. After he started choking on one of the bones, he began shouting a muffled "Hello, hello, hello, hello!" at his band mates to try to get their attention. Instead of helping him, Grohl and Novoselic recorded the strange sounds and packaged them as a new single.
The music video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was filmed in a dirty gymnasium that certainly smelled like teenagers with hints of spirits. The unidentified building in which the video was filmed was so unidentifiable, in fact, that Cobain didn't even know where he was. The song starts with a muted F and Cobain looking like the weight of his guitar will break his spine any minute. The distortion comes in, but nobody in the crowd, including some janitor, seems to give it much of a serious fuck. As the first verse ensues, the crowd begins to move a limb here and there, followed by savage head banging during the second playing of the chorus. Incredibly, everybody has a two foot long wig on their head, making the school a perfect marketing ground for Head & Shoulders shampoo. By the time the second verse hits, a violent riot has erupted in the crowd, possibly the start of a new Bolshevik Revolution. The song ends with a final "Ayayaaaaaah...." as Cobain's vocal cords finally give in.
The song became an instant hit, to the point where "Weird Al" Yankovic could not help but make a parody about it. Nirvana responded positively, saying, "Man, this dude made a normal song out of our weird one."
In Utero: Glory keeps on coming
In Utero topped the charts for nine months, concluding with a healthy weight of seven pounds and eight ounces. Despite the popularity of the album, the band was heavily criticized for the single "Rape Me," which MTV's executives refused to play on their station since it reminded them of their youth. All controversy was quickly forgotten when Cobain said the lyrics should be only applied to himself in an attempt to calm the public. He spoke a little too fast, since some members of the homosexual community held him to his word. The song "Heart Shaped Box" also left a mark on the public, especially after people began to throw the sharp-edged box at their loved ones. The melody "Dumb" teaches about how a stupid person has a higher chance of being happy in life than an intelligent one, which is so true that it's not even funny. "Milk it", possibly the most well-known song from the album, describes one of the oldest and most sacred pastimes in human history, namely milking a cow while screaming maniacally.
The band continued touring the country, but buzzed as they were, it seemed to them that the country toured them. They were careful not to mix kerosene with LSD and surprisingly managed to produce very decent concert performances. It was later revealed that Cobain would sometimes use a body double during the concerts, just like Saddam Hussein did during his. He would just dope backstage while the double, who was paid a measly $60 a night, would do his thing onstage. Nobody ever suspected a thing.
Incesticide: Drugs, drugs, and more drugs
In 1992, Nirvana released Incesticide, a compilation album with exclusive new songs. The title, itself a compilation of the names of multiple horrible crimes, came from Cobain's twisted mind, not from his own experience. Cobain insisted that he paint the cover art, a decision that everyone instantly regretted. He also credited himself as "Kurdt Kobain" in the liner notes, proving he could spell just as well as he could paint.
The album begins with "Dive," a song narrated by a swimming pool that instructs the listener to "Dive... Dive... Dive... Dive in me!!!" These are also the song's only lyrics. Incestide's second song is notable too, for the intonations in Cobain's voice go from the purring of a cat to the slaughtering of a pig. A little later on, after much screaming and screeching, the album presents a 'Mardi Gras'-type song, "Molly's Lips," which was intended to be played at a family gathering and won't offend grandma at all. The album's greatest poetic achievement, however, is probably its ninth song, "Bee's Wax," a retelling of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, only less cohesive.
Cobain called the album "a cracked spaghetti plate, stuck together with crusted tomato sauce and Pritt glue ala mode, topped with a pickle, and served with a side of tuna yogurt and a large helping of petroleum-soaked sardines." Critics were coerced into agreeing.
MTV Unplugged in North Korea: Wait, what?
Nirvana recorded MTV Unplugged in North Korea on November 8, 1993 during a live acoustic performance at Sony Music Studios in Pyongyang. Cobain played classical guitars during the performance rather than electric guitars since electricity had not yet been discovered in North Korea. Cobain's sweater got stuck in his instrument's cords at least two times during the show, which was by no means a record for him. He played every song intelligibly, a nice change of pace for the minority of people who were interested in the group's lyrics. Many listeners agreed that Cobain's new acoustic versions of songs like Come as You Are sounded a lot better than the originals and were way more hardcore than the electric versions. Good old, humble Americans like Rick Santorum were incensed by the song "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam," admitting that perhaps LSD could aid the spread of Christianity. However, nobody in the Nirvana fandom cared much for the song since they were pretty much all atheists. Cobain kept the crowd on edge by guaranteeing he would screw up the next song numerous times, but somehow his brain-to-fingers nerves never gave up despite the promise that they would.Cobain was angered when the lyrics to his cover of "Lake of Fire" were changed, claiming that the new lyrics made too much sense. The original chorus was as follows:
They go to Wendy's and eat French Fries
While playing a good ol' game of dice
Then they party like the Fourth of July
The Death of Kurt Cobain
Cobain's dead body was discovered on April 8, 1997, making him yet another musician to die at the age of 27. Truly a calamity event in the world of music, Cobain's death was reported throughout the world as news anchors sobbed uncontrollably. However, they still suggested that the public remain calm, cool and collected and wait for the conclusion of the police report before committing mass suicide. As with all suspect deaths of celebrities, conspiracy theorists screamed far and wide that Cobain was murdered by the Illuminati just as he was about to expose them. This claim is considered to be highly unlikely, as even if he had exposed them, the revelations would have been lost in an incomprehensible mumble of lyrics for Weird Al to parody once again. Other, more balanced individuals, blamed Cobain's death on SpongeBob SquarePants. Cobain's love interest, conveniently named Courtney Love, was also suspected by many fans. In the end and after careful police investigation, however, it seems that Cobain's finger and that damned shotgun did the job.
The legacy of the group will undoubtedly be printed permanently by their legion of fans as folks who Came as They are, as honest in their music as they were in their behavior, and who didn't sell out to make terrible pop music and wear worse fashion.
- ↑ ...after drummer after drummer after drummer...
- ↑ Which is also how Cobain came up for the name of his earlier band.
- ↑ Who are these guys again? Oh right.
- ↑ The only thing known for sure is that wherever it was filmed, you definitely don't want to send your children to school there.
- ↑ At least it looks like a janitor.
- ↑ Which is actually and shockingly "A denial!" Good luck deciphering that.
- ↑ Eh?
- ↑ Hopefully.
- ↑ Perhaps too conveniently named.
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|Eleanor Coerr first visited Japan in 1949. Her job was to interview the Japanese people and report their experiences after the war for the Ottawa Journal. Her youthful enthusiasm for this assignment nearly resulted in defeat, as she was unable to find anyone who could speak fluent English. Rather than return home without a story, she gained permission to live on a farm in the Tottori area, where she stayed for a year and established a lifelong friendship with the family.
She stayed on in Japan for three years and travelled widely. Shocked by the horror of the aftermath of the atom bombs, she wrote newspaper articles and a book for children.
Eleanor returned to Japan in the sixties and was amazed to see Hiroshima completely rebuilt, including a lovely Peace Park with a statue of Sadako Sasaki festooned with thousands of paper cranes. She was inspired by Sadako’s story and, after another year, obtained her diary which she used as a background for her book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, which was first published in the US in 1977. The Australian edition was published in 1981 and the beautiful picture book Sadako, illustrated by Ed Young, was published in Australia in 1985. Mieko and the Fifth Treasure was published in Australia in 1995 to coincide with Eleanor Coerr’s visit.
Inspired by Sadako’s story, paper cranes are folded by school children all over the world and sent to Hiroshima for Peace Day.
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Wind: 0 mph
Dust off the bikes and sneakers for next week's Valley Walk and Roll Festival, including the bike to work/school and bike to farmers' market days.
The May 14 to 18 festival includes formal and informal biking and walking events, as well as movies, guided rides and guided walks. In anticipation of next week, organizers have put together a survey to register participation and learn a little about the participants.
The survey can be found at http://tinyurl.com/5usgbm and results can be found at http://tinyurl.com/62v8u3.
The survey, organizer David Cain said, is quick and easy.
"From it we'll get a sense of who is taking part, what our typical riding habits are, and some of the motivations and limitations people deal with when thinking about riding their bicycle in the Mad River Valley. We'll also be able to calculate roughly how many miles people rode and how much gas was saved in the process," he said.
The Valley Walk and Roll Fest has garnered local sponsors and champions, including the board of the Mad River Valley Health Center, where the Health Education Committee (HEC) is working in collaboration with Valley Moves -- a working group of Valley Futures (www.valleyfutures.net) -- as well as the Mad River Path and Safe Routes to School to improve access to Valley resources for fun, healthy activity.
"Don't know where to walk? Stop by the Mad River Valley Chamber of Commerce or check the website (www.madrivervalley.com) for ideas. Don't have a bike? Try one of the teal Mad Bikes located throughout The Valley. Don't know how to ride a bike comfortably in traffic? Sign up for the HEC sponsored Bike Ed courses to be held this summer (watch <MI>The Valley Reporter<D> for more details)," said health center board president Sue Frechette.
Bike-to-Work/School/Market is a part of the larger "Walk and Roll Festival" series of events happening the same week. See www.valleyfutures.net for more info in the Transportation section.
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Every EarthRoamer XV-LT built since the original prototype in 2003 has been built on a Ford Commercial Duty truck chassis powered by a quiet, efficient and powerful turbocharged diesel engine. In addition, diesel fuel is used for camper heating, hot water heating and – using a ceramic diesel stove – cooking. It is probably obvious that we are huge fans of diesel fuel and diesel engines.
When many Americans think of diesel they think of the slow, loud, trucks of yesteryear belching black smoke – but that is no longer the case. With today’s modern diesel powered vehicles, nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s modern diesel engines are as quiet and clean a their gasoline counterparts. Diesel fuel is safer and more efficient than gasoline, and when it comes to efficiency, reliability, durability and power, diesels engines are the hands down winner over gasoline engines.
Diesel Fuel vs. Gasoline
Energy Content per Gallon
Diesel fuel has a higher energy density than gasoline. One gallon of diesel contains approximately 147,000 BTUs of energy, while a gallon of gasoline only has 125,000 BTUs. This means it takes more gasoline to equal the power output of diesel, making diesel engines more efficient per gallon of fuel burned.
Diesel fuel is safer than gasoline. Although diesel fuel will burn in open air using a wick, it will not explode and does not release a large amount of flammable vapor. The low vapor pressure of diesel makes diesel engines immune to vapor lock.
Diesel vs. Gas Engines
Diesel engines burn less fuel than a gasoline engine performing the same work due to the diesel engine’s higher combustion temperature and greater expansion ratio. Gasoline engines are typically only 30% efficient while diesel engines can convert over 45% of the fuel energy into mechanical energy.
Also, because diesel engines use the more efficient direct fuel-injection method (fuel injected directly into cylinder) compared to the port fuel-injection setup in gas engines where gas is mixed with incoming air in the intake manifold, the diesel system has little wasted or unburned fuel.
Finally, Diesel engines can accept turbo-charging pressure without any natural limit, dramatically increasing both efficiency and power. Gasoline engines in contrast inevitably suffer detonation at higher pressure.
Owners of 2011 and newer EarthRoamer XV-LTs have reported mileage in the 11-12 mpg range in highway driving. While 11 mpg might not initially sound that impressive, many RVs and expedition vehicles are lucky to achieve half of that mileage. When weight is taken into consideration, the 11 mpg of an EarthRoamer is very impressive. For example, a 2,672 pound Honda Civic that gets 39 mpg would have to get over 65mpg to match the fuel efficiency per pound of a 16,000 pound EarthRoamer XV-LT!
Diesels also use about one third as much fuel at idle as gasoline units and the 6.7 liter ford PowerStroke only burns about .5 gallons of diesel fuel per hour at idle.
Maintenance, Reliability and Long-Term and Durability
Diesel engines have no high voltage electrical ignition system, resulting in high reliability and easy adaptation to damp environments. This means there are no spark plugs to replace and no ignition system component to service.
The diesel engine found the Ford F-550 can be thought of as “mini big-rig engine,” with corresponding low maintenance costs and long term reliability. Due to the increased strength of parts used to handle high combustion pressures of a diesel engine and the better lubrication properties of diesel fuel, Diesel engines last much longer than comparable gasoline engines. The average gas engine is good for only around 125,000 miles before needing a rebuild and isn’t designed to constantly pull a heavy load. A diesel engine can typically go 2-3 times this amount before needing an overhaul.
Because of the relatively high-compression ratio necessary to ignite diesel fuel (17:1 diesel versus 9:1 for gas), diesel engines make torque and power low in the RPM range. The torque advantage of diesels is perfectly suited for pulling heavily loaded EarthRoamer Xpedition Vehicles up steep grades.
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Jason Miller then wrote an article about Extraction Magic. Here is a brief extract from his post:
"...Most things like elements and directions, or planetary hours and days, are IMO a correspondence that magicians use to do magic and not inherently true. For instance I do not think that the west is inherently more watery, of that Thursdays are inherently more Jupitarian than Saturdays.
Just like a scientist might take a cell and use enzymes and alcohol to extract the DNA, magicians use colors, directions, days, and hours to extract the force that we want to address in our magic..."This got me think that in order to know what you are changing, whether your magical tools, identity, or view on correspondences... you need to know where you are coming from before you can figure out where you are moving to.
Which in turn reminded me of a conversation recently with a friend about Alan Brill's book: "Judaism and Other Religions: Models of Understanding". In it he describes (copied from Amazon.com reviewer, my emphasis)...
A sturdy theological, categorical framework is borrowed from Race (1983) and Hick (1987), which broadly sets out four main positions of exclusivism, pluralism, inclusivism and universalism:
Exclusivism states that one's own community, tradition, and encounter with God compromise the one and only exclusive truth; all other claims on encountering God are a priori false.
Pluralism takes the opposite position, accepting that no one tradition can claim to possess the singular truth. The beliefs and practices of all groups are equally valid. It is widely taught among Western academics.
Inclusivism situates itself between these two extremes, where one acknowledges that many communities possess their own traditions and truths, but maintains the importance of one's comprehension as culminating, or subsuming other truths. One's own group possesses the truth; other religious groups contain parts of the truth.
Universalism proposes a universal monotheism; it was widely taught by medieval Jewish philosophers who postulated a common Neo-platonic or Aristotelian truth to all religions. (p.9)Now take this model of 4 categories and see which your current belief system fits in to? Does your system believe that all magic is done via spirits exclusively? Do you think we all (or most) have a portion of a universal truth and are equally valid?
Whilst it might be argued that categorizing your magical belief system in to the 4 labels above is academic, I think it has merit purely on the basis as this reflects on how you interact with practitioners of other magical belief systems.
I struggled to come to any meaningful conclusion about this blog post. Perhaps just to open it up for discussion on:
Question: Do you look in to the paths of transmission that our traditions have taken to understand which giants shoulders you are standing on? If so, what surprises have you come across recently?
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Diverticulosis and Diverticulitis Topic Guide
Diverticulitis (Diverticulosis): Diverticulitis is an inflammation of the diverticula in the colon. This conditions is referred to as diverticulosis. Causes of Diverticulosis (diverticulitis) include aging, a low fiber diet, frequent constipation and bowel straining. Symptoms of diverticulitis include abdominal pain, bloating, constipation, and cramping. Treatment generally requires a high fiber diet and frequent liquid hydration to prevent constipation. If complications occur with the disease or it becomes severe, surgery may be necessary.
Rectal Bleeding The rectum is the last portion of the large bowel that ends just before the anus. Bleeding from this area can be a mild or life-threatening matter. Causes of rectal bleeding include trauma, inflammation of the bowel, hemorrhoids, anal fissures, polyps, and tumors. Treatment of rectal bleeding depends on the cause.
Expert Views and News
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PART 1 – RESEARCH
Appeal in a cartoon character corresponds to what would be called charisma in an actor.A character who is appealing is not necessarily sympathetic – villains or monsters can also be appealing – the important thing is that the viewer feels the character is real and interesting.There are several tricks for making a character connect better with the audience; for likeable characters a symmetrical or particularly baby-like face tends to be effective. A complicated or hard to read face will lack appeal, it may more accurately be described as ‘captivation’ in the composition of the pose, or the character design.
For the brief we have been set I started researching whatever people had written about appeal and creating an interesting character. I have posted links to several below:
The most noteable things that i took from the links were:
Pleasing construction: One strategy for creating a likeable character is using symmetry, and smoother curves or shapes in their composition. This tends to create a character that is easier for a viewer to process. Baby-like characteristics, such as large eyes, tend to yield positive results too.
Proportions: cartoonists magnify the things we find interesting and shrink the things we find ugly or boring. A good cartoonist draws emotions rather than precise accuracy or realism.
Control of variety of shapes
Below I will post some of the worlds most famous characters and see how they relate to the notes made above:
PART 2 – INITIAL DEVELOPMENT
Here is the initial brief that we have been set
I chose to develop a character around the name “Mort”
Below is the definition of the word:
|mort 1 (môrt)
The note sounded on a hunting horn to announce the death of a deer.
[Middle English, death, from Old Frnch, from Latin mors, mort-; see mer- in Indo-European roots.]
|mort 2 (môrt)
A great number or quantity.
[Perhaps from mortal.]
From this i will research some possible directions and influences.
Below are my notes on avenues that I could explore:
So I decided that I was going to create a vampire or mad scientist in the style of Tim Burton, Below are my initial sketches:
Before deciding on below as a final design:
Next I coloured it,
The next part of the brief can be found below
My criteria for redesigning the character were,
- aimed at young children (barney, smurfs etc)
Below is my initial design:
Next I coloured it:
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Today is Monday, Dec. 19, the 353rd day of 2011 with 12 to follow.
The moon is waning. The morning stars are Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Venus. Evening stars are Mercury, Saturn and Mars.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include women's suffrage leader Mary Livermore in 1820; novelist Eleanor Porter ("Pollyanna") in 1868; actor Ralph Richardson in 1902; Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in 1906; French dramatist Jean Genet, a pioneer in the theater of the absurd, in 1910; singer Edith Piaf in 1915; country singer Little Jimmy Dickens (age 91) and television in 1920, both in 1920; actor Cicely Tyson in 1933 (age 78); baseball Hall of Fame member Al Kaline in 1934 (age 77); South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in 1941 (age 70); actors Tim Reid in 1944 (age 67) and Robert Urich in 1946, Jennifer Beals in 1963 (age 48), Robert MacNaughton in 1966 (age 45) and Alyssa Milano in 1972 (age 39).
On this date in history:
In 1777, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Army began a winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pa.
In 1958, the U.S. satellite Atlas transmitted the first radio voice broadcast from space, a 58-word recorded Christmas greeting from U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1972, the splashdown of Apollo 17 ended the United States' manned moon exploration program.
In 1984, the United States formally withdrew from UNESCO to force reform of the U.N. cultural organization's budget and alleged Third World bias.
Also in 1984, the prime ministers of Britain and China signed an accord, returning Hong Kong to China in 1997.
In 1991, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International agreed to plead guilty to federal racketeering charges, forfeiting $550 million.
In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached when the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment, charging him with perjury and obstruction of justice. He was acquitted in the subsequent trial.
In 2002, South Korea elected Roh Moo-hyun as its president.
In 2003, Libya announced it would abandon efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
In 2004, at least 60 people were killed in Iraq by car bombings in the Shiite Muslim holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
In 2005, a Shiite Muslim coalition showed a strong overall lead in preliminary returns from Iraq's parliamentary election.
In 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush said he would increase the number of Americans in the military to deal with terrorism worldwide. Bush acknowledged that U.S. military forces were stretched too thin.
Also in 2006, a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a doctor to death for deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV.
In 2007, U.S. President George W. Bush signed energy legislation that increased average vehicle's fuel economy by 2020 to 35 miles per gallon, a 40 percent hike.
Also in 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said states cannot set their own emission standards. Seventeen states, including California, sought tougher restrictions.
And, conservative Lee Myung-bak won the South Korea presidential election.
In 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush announced he would lend General Motors and Chrysler $17.4 billion to help the automakers survive the next three months.
Also in 2008, a landmark $200 billion program intended to support consumer credit will allow hedge funds to borrow from the Federal Reserve for the first time.
And, Mark Felt, an FBI official who became known as The Washington Post journalists' shadowy source "Deep Throat" in the Watergate scandal, died at the age of 95.
In 2009, Irish Catholic Bishop Donald Murray resigned after bring criticized in a report that accused the church of covering up priests' alleged sexual abuse of Dublin children.
In 2010, violent crime in the United States, including murder, robbery and aggravated assault, was down 6.2 percent for the first half of the year, the FBI said. Property crime fell 2.8 percent.
A thought for the day: George Bernard Shaw said, "There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses."
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- By Michael Dobbs
Michael Dobbs is a prize-winning foreign correspondent and author. Currently serving as a Goldfarb fellow at the Committee on Conscience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dobbs is following legal proceedings in The Hague. He has traveled to Srebrenica, Sarajevo and Belgrade, interviewed Mladic’s victims and associates, and is posting documents, video recordings, and intercepted phone calls that shed light on Mladic's personality.
For Cuban missile crisis fans, there is a lot of interesting new material in the Robert F. Kennedy records that were partially opened today after a decades-long ownership dispute between the family and the National Archives. The newly-released material includes the clearest breakdown I have yet seen of the split in the White House between “the hawks” and “the doves” — those who wanted to bomb Cuba right away, and those who preferred a negotiated solution the crisis.
The document below is a note jotted down by RFK on October 16, 1962, the day President Kennedy learned that the Soviets had secretly deployed dozens of nuclear missiles to Cuba. JFK responded to the crisis by setting up an informal group of wise men that came to be known as the ExComm, or executive committee. As you can see, the ExComm immediately split into a group favoring a naval “blockade” on Cuba (left-hand column) and those favoring an air “strike” to take out the missile sites (right-hand column).
The doves include: Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and his deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and his assistants, George Ball, Alexis Johnson, and Edwin Martin, Soviet experts Llewellyn Thompson and Chip Bohlen, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson, Undersecretary of State and former Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, and presidential speech writer Ted Sorensen.
The hawks were led by National Security Adviser Mac Bundy, and included former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon, CIA Director John McCone, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze (a question mark originally, but then put into the “strike” column). The Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by General Maxwell Taylor, all favored an air strike.
In other words, the diplomats nearly all favored the softer option of a blockade that would allow for diplomatic negotiations. (RFK puts a minus next to Adlai Stevenson to indicate that he was not all that keen on a blockade, but willing to go along with the decision.) The uniformed military, including the legendary Air Force chief Curtis LeMay, were hawks to a man. (Probably not the case today with Iran.)
Everybody expected an air strike to be followed, within a few days, by a full-scale invasion of Cuba. What nobody knew at the time was that the Russians had 98 tactical nuclear weapons on the island that could have been used to wipe out an American invading force. That, in turn, could easily have escalated to full-scale nuclear war.
Like his brother, the president, RFK originally favored an air strike against Cuba. But they both quickly changed their minds and came down on the side of the blockade option outlined by McNamara.
The term “doves and hawks” can be traced back to the missile crisis. When it was all over, the leader of the hawks, Mac Bundy, had the grace to concede that the doves had got the better of the argument.
“Everybody knows who were the hawks and who were the doves,” Bundy told the ExComm on the morning of October 28, after Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing his missiles. “Today was the day of the doves.”
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He couldn’t hear but he sure could see. Earnest Elmo Calkins, arguably the father of modern art in American Advertising, introduced elements of European Modernism to our shores.
This story begins in 1925 at a playground of modernity in Paris along the banks of the Seine. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was laid out in boulevards lined with fun houses of consumerism decorated with geometric ornament and neo-classical friezes incorporating functional and decorative designs. The world’s leading clothing, furniture, and houseware manufacturers, and many grand retail emporia were encouraged to exhibit their latest products and designs. But one player was noticeably absent. The United States declined an invitation to participate at the urging of its industrial leaders. In 1923 U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover apologetically announced to the Fourth Annual Exposition of Women’s Arts and Industries that although “we produce a vast volume of goods of much artistic value…[America could not] contribute sufficiently varied design of unique character or of special expression in American artistry to warrant such participation.”
American products were either nondescript or laden with Beaux Art ornament to camouflage a mass produced look. Although mass production was the foundation on which the modern American economy was built, many cultural critics felt that items coming off the assembly line lacked good taste. While the Bauhaus, Constructivism, and other European Modern avant gardes had already embraced the machine and proffered the integration of Modern art and industry, American industrialists, who could easily afford to aesthetically improve their products, were usually apathetic, if not resistant, to the idea. What they did not resist, however, were marketing strategies that would insure greater profits. So following a brief economic downturn in the early twenties and subsequent boom, industry frantically tried to find a new means of stimulating even further sales. It was the profit motive, not any transcendent utopian ethic or aesthetic ideal, that paved the way for commercial modernism in the United States, which was introduced to American advertising in 1925 by Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868- 1964), an advertising pioneer, design reformer, and founder of Calkins and Holden Advertising Co. Like other American advertising and marketing executives he visited the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and came away inspired.
Describing the array of cubistic and futuristic graphics, packages, and point of purchase displays which he discovered in the pavilions for department stores like Bon Marché and Galleries Layfayette, Calkins wrote to his staff in New York: “It is extremely “new art” and some of it too bizarre, but it achieves a certain exciting harmony, and in detail is entertaining to a degree. [Everything is] arranged with an eye to display, a vast piece of consummate window dressing….It is not always beautiful, but it is diabolically clever.” What was so different from most American advertising art was the noticeable rejection of realism in favor of abstraction. Illustration was not representational but through symbols, metaphors, and allegories exuded a “magical” atmosphere. Boxes and bottles were no longer mere utilitarian vessels for their contents, but rather represented the essence of what the product symbolized to the consumer. Later in an article “The Dividends of Beauty” (Advertising Arts, 1933), Calkins summarized the development this way: “Modernism offered the opportunity of expressing the inexpressible, of suggesting not so much a motor car as speed, not so much a gown as style, not so much a compact as beauty.” If this had a similar ring to one of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos, it was because Calkins studied and borrowed heavily from the European avant garde. He was a tireless advocate of a formalist version of modernity in commercial art and industrial design. “[W]hat seemed to be a new method for transfiguring commonplace objects became for Calkins a means of disconnecting form and content, thoughts and things,” states Jackson Lears in Fables of Abundance, (Basic Books, 1994).
Modern art, or what the leading advertising trade journal Printers’ Ink magazine in 1928 called “foreign art ideas” elevated advertising art to a higher aesthetic level. For most advertising art directors modernism was a “bag of tricks the artist could use to set an ordinary product apart,” continues Lears. And advertising artists were indeed quick to appreciate the possibilities of modernism since realistic art had reached, what Calkins termed a “dead level of excellence.” It was no longer possible to make an advertisement striking, conspicuous and attractive by still pictures and realistic groups. Spearheaded by Calkins and Holden, and later adopted by such progressive agencies as N.W. Ayer (who opened its own galleries to display and promote their own modern advertising art), and Kenyon and Eckart, commonplace objects — toasters, refrigerators, coffee tins — were presented against new patterns and at skewed angles; contemporary industrial wares were shown in surrealistic and futuristic settings accented by contemporary typefaces with contempo names like Cubist Bold, Vulcan, Broadway, Novel Gothic, and more. Mise en page, or layout, inspired by the European New Typography, also became more dynamic in its asymmetry . Modernism offered what historian Jackson Lears calls the “aura of cosmopolitan culture and avant garde style” and signaled the spread of an aesthetic coming of age of American adverting. In an essay titled “Cavalcade” (Advertising Arts, 1935) leading advertising artist René Clark enthusiastically recalled the years between 1925 and 1931 as the “golden age of advertising…merchandise sold easily…clients spent freely and gave us wide latitude of invention and experiment.”
Calkins, who with Ralph Holden co-authored Modern Advertising (D. Appleton and Company, 1905), proposed that fine typography must be a component of successful advertising rather than an afterthought thrown-in by job printers. The first man to specialize in advertising typography was Benjamin Sherbow, who Calkins had hired as a copywriter in 1919 but soon began to experiment with display and text type (he later published a manual titled Sherbow’s Charts, which Calkins touted as a “must” item in agency production departments). Around 1920 Calkins introduced the job of “type man,” later called “type director,” who specialized in providing fresh points of view to counter the clichés of the average printer. Integrating good typography and art was “a more subtle way of suggesting beauty in the products than baldly stating the fact in the text,” wrote Calkins in his autobiography, And Hearing Not (Charles A. Scribners and Sons, 1946) also known as Louder, Please (above). Suggesting a special relationship between the advertisement and goods by the style of the graphic design was something Calkins called “atmosphere,” a fetishistic trait that ultimately rubbed off on the product itself. “Improving the physiognomy of advertising had a twofold result…” he explained. “It directly influenced the taste of the public and indirectly conditioned the production of goods.” Calkins recalled that he and artists were irked when they had to produce a good-looking advertisement for something that did not lend itself to attractive pictorial treatment.
In Calkins’ view advertising was the Hy-test running the engines of industry. He was not wrong. “The styling of manufactured goods,” he wrote in “Advertising Art in the United States…” (Modern Publicity), “is a byproduct of improved advertising design…The technical term for this idea is “obsoletism.” We no longer wait for things to wear out. We displace them with others that are not more efficient but more attractive.” Although clothing manufacturers had for decades been changing styles annually to increase consumer interest, industry had not adopted this strategy until Calkins made it his mission. “It seemed reasonable that if design and color made advertising more acceptable to the buying public,” he wrote, “design and color would add saleability of goods.” He also noted that the majority of consumers were women, who indeed were accustomed to changes in fashions and were happily seduced by the sleek new designs. Although Calkins and Holden’s clients included car, cereal, and hat manufacturers, the majority of their accounts were for products targeted at women, such as appliances, housewares, and detergents.
Calkins was a missionary of acceptable modernity who in his zeal to establish advertising as the agent of progress turned his attention to pseudo-science, and was instrumental in such modern marketing concepts as “consumption engineering,” “forced obsolescence” and “styling the goods.” These were the core concepts of an advertising strategy that introduced Modern art to the otherwise devoutly conservative profession whose primary responsibility was purchasing ad space from magazines and newspapers. By combining aspects of perceptual psychology with the pseudo-science of market research, Calkins proposed ways to control consumers’ behavior through Pavlovian methods — by incrementally feeding them new mouthwatering styles. Consumption engineering was essentially a trick that encouraged redundancy, and artificially stimulated growth. “To make people buy more goods,” he wrote in an essay titled “Advertising, Builder of Taste” (The American Magazine of Art, Sept 1930), “it is necessary to displace what they already have, still useful, but outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete.”
Calkins further believed that Modern art was its own value additive. “When the uglier utilities of business cannot be beautified, art is used to make them disappear,” wrote Calkins in “Advertising, Builder of Taste” “Gasometers are being painted according to the principles of camouflage…The bottles, jars, tubes, boxes and cartons of hundreds of foods, drugs, toilet articles, perfumes, powders, pastes and creams are in the hands of artists working solely to produce a container pleasing to the eye to add color and form to the shop window, or toilet table and kitchen shelf.” This was one of innumerable pronouncements that Calkins made through trade journals, articles in newspapers and magazines, and lectures before business and civic groups. He was a missionary who fervently believed that Modernism equaled beauty, and beauty was the key to economic health and well being. His pseudo-scientific notions provided a virtual catechism for the rightness of Modern design. Like the revolutionary European Modernists he pontificated that “We must acquire the new point of view, aided by the undeniable affinity that exists between some aspects of modern industrialism and some aspects of modern art.”
For more on Calkins and Commercial Modernism see my podcast here.
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Definition of 'whimsical'
Example sentences containing 'whimsical'
These examples have been automatically selected and may contain sensitive content. Read more…
Despite the warning, the house is whimsical and playful. Times, Sunday Times (2007)Wonderful and whimsical comedy drama. The Sun (2009)Despite his success, he retained a gently ironic, almost whimsical sense of the world. Times, Sunday Times (2011)A warm and whimsical film. Times, Sunday Times (2008)It is an attempt to show their lives gently, with a whimsical comedy, as a series of amusing anecdotes rather than straightforward mockery. Times, Sunday Times (2010)
Trends of 'whimsical'
Used Occasionally. whimsical is one of the 30000 most commonly used words in the Collins dictionary
View usage for:
Translations for 'whimsical'
British English: whimsical ADJECTIVE
A whimsical person or idea is unusual, playful, and unpredictable, rather than serious and practical.
...his offbeat sense of humor, his whimsical side.
Definition of whimsical from the Collins English Dictionary
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Apparently, over the past 30 years, Shakespeare productions at Beloit College have been few and far between. There was a time, however, when students staged a play by the Bard of Avon every year. During the early period of coeducation, men excluded the women from their literary and debating societies. Hoping to encourage literary work and have something of their own, Beloit College women founded the Shakespeare Society in 1899. At first they simply held dramatic readings, but by 1901 they’d discovered a natural amphitheater on the wooded hill behind and to the side of where the Wright Museum of Art stands today. Towering oak trees, untamed shrubbery and gentle, grassy slopes provided the perfect setting for As You Like It, the first of over 40 years of Shakespeare plays staged by the theater troupe. That first performance also provided inspiration for a nickname. Henceforth, students referred to the amphitheater as “As-You-Like-It-Hill.”
A huge, overstuffed scrapbook in the Beloit College Archives reveals several beautiful still photographs and informal snapshots of one such production from 1921, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The scrapbooker, Sue Lowrey, played Titania, queen of the fairies. Newspaper articles, both anticipating and reviewing the production, provide ample context.
In late February, a committee of the Shakespeare Society met to discuss the year’s choice of play. During its two decades, the company had produced As You Like It and Twelfth Night four times each and The Tempest, three times. The committee dickered over some of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays and studied lists of past productions, suddenly realizing that they’d staged the Bard’s delightful comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, only once before, back in 1906. The play offered the opportunity for a huge cast, including dancers and musicians. Among other things, the choice meant that they could take advantage of recently hired May Ross Conwell of the Department of Public Speaking, a veteran director of amateur theatrics, as well as Women’s Physical Education Director Mable Lee, who had a strong background in interpretive and aesthetic dance.
In March, senior members of the Shakespeare Society held competitive tryouts. Mabel Lee scouted out members of advanced dancing classes and Kenneth Rayer of the Department of Music assembled a small orchestra and set them to learning pieces by Mendelsohn. Rehearsals began in early April, held at first in the auditorium at Pearsons Hall of Science, and then, as the fickle Wisconsin weather permitted, on As-You-Like-It-Hill. The society announced dates in June for their most elaborate production ever. By the end of May over 70 cast members rehearsed two or three times a day on the hill or at nearby Smith Gymnasium. The Round Table reported the preparation of gorgeous costumes by “Mistress of Wardrobe,” Katherine Fisher and the purchase of “special properties” from Chicago. On June 1 the paper announced: “If ye rain poureth, come ye next fair night.” Ye rain, however, did not poureth and the weather cooperated. All’s well that ends well.
At 8 p.m. on June 3, as dusk lengthened shadows and a misty gloom settled among the trees, a herald dressed in colorful medieval garb stepped into a pool of light and announced the first scene. Hours passed quickly as a captivated audience of town and gown sat spellbound by the rich tapestry of Shakespearean language, dancing fairies and soaring melodies. Artfully arranged lighting heightened the appearance and movements of actors, dancers and revelers. The Round Table headlined it, “The Most Spectacular Of All Productions.” A Beloit Daily News reporter penned fulsome praise:
The quintessence of fantasy and love magic was revealed last night on As You Like It Hill when “Midsummer Night’s Dream” was presented by the Shakespeare society of Beloit college. What appeared to be the largest audience ever gathered there graced the occasion. In the size and general excellence of the cast, the beauty of the dance divertissements and the outstanding quality of the music furnished, there is cause for reflection whether the players have ever presented anything measuring up to its standard. It crystallized beauty, the ethereal fairy grace and romance that intrigues tired mortal minds. Framed in a perfect natural setting, its stage business an art concealing art, what wonder that work-a-day folk forgot chill and sat entranced throughout the evening.
A record crowd of visiting parents and alumni witnessed the second performance on Saturday, June 18, during the college’s Commencement weekend, as described by the Beloit Alumnus:
A touch of the quaint old fashioned garden with the freshness of summer evening, wisteria twined banks from which ancient characters appeared gave atmosphere to the setting…with the college buildings looming in great grey heaps in the background.
Today, some seventy-odd years after it last served as a setting for Shakespeare, As-You-Like-It-Hill resounds with the chatter of campus squirrels pleased with last fall’s acorn crop. A sharp-shinned hawk chases a crow through the trees above blooming wildflowers. Traffic on Pleasant Street drowns out the roar of water spilling over the dam on the Rock River. If you will, take a few minutes sometime. On a midsummer’s night, climb that gentle, grassy slope and then pause. Perhaps those long-ago players aren’t so far away. Is that Titania cradling Nick Bottom's donkey head on her lap? Lysander pursuing Helena? Or Puck, that “shrewd and knavish sprite,” setting wrongs to right at last?
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Perle Systems Application Note
In today’s world, everyone is online, computer literate and IT savvy – Universities are no exception. From application, to enrolment, acceptance, submission of coursework and examinations, right through to graduation, thousands of students depend on the University network being up and running at all times.
All of the 168 Universities in the UK, serving over 2.3 million students (Germany has 1.9 million students, USA has 14.5 million students, France has 2.1 million students) provide computer resources for its students, faculty and administrative staff.
Confidential student information, lecturer and professor information, sensitive research data, enrolment information, internal communications and other business applications, running on tens of thousands of PC’s and peripherals, need to be managed and accessed by the Network Administrators.
This equates to tens of thousands of distributed IT assets, spread over several halls, campuses, cities and even countries. Universities often have multiple data centres, labs and equipment closets in multiple buildings. In addition, there is heating/cooling, security and phone equipment to be managed. Students and staff depend on this infrastructure, and require a 24-hour service by the Network Administrators. Office hours are out of the window.
The challenges for the Network Support Teams are numerous, including:
Perle’s range of secure console servers provide an ideal solution for remote access and problem diagnosis/analysis for schools, colleges, and universities. They enable secure connections to IT equipment from anywhere at any time. Authentication (RADIUS, TACACS+, LDAP, Kerberos, NIS and RSA Security’s SecurID tokens) and encryption (Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)) protect vital and sensitive information on the school’s network. Many problems can be resolved remotely without sending a technician on-site, thereby saving costs and resources.
Console Servers additionally offer the following features and benefits, important to the management of University network infrastructure:
Console Management Solutions from Perle help maximise uptime by enabling IT managers to centrally manage the University network infrastructure, ensure connectivity to enterprise-network equipment even when the network is down, protect the Universities assets through secure access and lower overall network-management costs.
Servers / Data center management
Our wide range of 1 to 48 port Perle Console Servers provide data center managers with secure remote management of any device with a console port. Plus, the only truly fault tolerant Console Servers on the market.
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Cupid and his concept are as old as the Gods of Olympus are themselves. We see Cupid, a crouched figure, contemplating a pomegranate. For in Hesiod's Theogany and Homer's Hymn to Demeter, Love started it all. The imagery conveys a sense of timelessness and truth about the nature of Love, which is what the extant decks of the 15th Century called this card, not the more modern Lovers.
According to Myth, Aphrodite was concerned that all the Goddesses would remain childless and so she despatched Cupid to find a mate for the virgin Persephone, and he took out his sharpest arrow and fired it into the dark heart of Hades. Hades was immediately overtaken with desire for the maiden and so he rose from his underworld kingdom and abducted her to be his wife. This was not a love match, but a one sided affair, and when Demeter finally secured her daughter's release it was on the condition that Persephone returned - duty bound - to Hades for part of each year because she had eaten from the Pomegranate fruit whilst in the underworld. Pomegranates have a strong place in both the Qu'ran and in Christianity and in Islam it is said that the Pomegranate is the fruit of the Garden of Paradise.
Like one of Cupid's arrows, love can just hit you ... especially when you are not expecting it. But you are left in no doubt that this is 'it'! Now this can be a very wonderful thing, or not, depending if you are already in a relationship. Therefore it is very important to ask yourself whether this is Lust or Love. Love can also be 'arranged' by families, in which case love grows from duty, as in the case of Persephone. But this card signifies the Divine action of LOVE in your life, and Cupid invites you to enter all the chambers of heart, from the brightest to the darkest, the sweetest to the most bitter and to fully experience each one.
I painted the background in Acrylics. I used my Fuji FinePix 6900zoom digital camera and fused them all and generally mucked around in PhotoShop 7. The model is my son who was most irritated about posing nude in a pair of angel wings with an old pomegranate :O) The font used is called Morpheus.
I graduated from Northbrook College of Art and Design in 2002 with an HNC completed in one year instead of three, and an HND completed in one year instead of two. An HND representing to the industry technical knowledge, whereas a Degree represents personal development, but I'm as well developed as I need to be :O) I have been reading tarot cards for many years now, but since coming to Aeclectic my eyes have been opened to a whole new facet of Tarot, and my readings have been endowed with a whole new dimension also.
Go back to the project index, read the traditional card meaning, or get a free tarot reading with this deck.
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1938 – He was born Paul Edgar Philippe Martin on the 28th day of August this year born in Windsor, Ontario. As a teen, he attended the University of Ottawa, which was actually a secondary school.
1961- Martin then went on to study at the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, and graduated with a BA in history and philosophy on this year.
1965 - He followed his father's path to the University of Toronto Law School where he received his LL.B in this year. This year he also married Sheila Ann Cowan, and they have three sons, Paul, Jamie, and David. Mr. Martin's third son, David is married and the father of Martin's first grandchild Ethan Martin.
1966 – He was called to the Ontario Bar this year.
1970 - Paul Martin, the 32-year old executive assistant to Power Corporation Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Maurice Strong, was appointed to the CSL board of directors.
1973 - Paul Martin was appointed President and CEO of the CSL Group.
1988 – He has been the Member of Parliament for the riding of LaSalle—Émard in Montreal since this year.
1993 – He was the Minister of Finance from this year until 2002.
1994 – He placed his shares in CSL Group Inc. under a "Supervisory Agreement" to be managed by lawyers and financial advisers, although he would be allowed to intervene in company decision-making should events warrant.
2002 – He quit the cabinet as Minister of Finance to pursue a bid for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada.
2003 – On the 12th day of December this year, he became Prime Minister. Martin remained as Prime Minister until the Harper minority government was sworn in February 6, 2006.
Page last updated: 12:00pm, 23
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Video | How to Install the Brass Bunker Step Light
Summary: This instructional video shows how to install the VOLT® Brass Bunker step light. It's an easy installation, requiring just a few basic tools.
During this construction project we're working on, we're installing these Brass Bunker step lights, and I want to show you how to do one. We're going to be installing several of them here - we’re actually moving some boards and doing some different resetting - but this is a pretty straightforward little fixture. We want to show you how to do it step-by-step, so let's get started.
Our step light will be installed into these steps where there were a few other older lights present. Before we get started, let's review a few of the tools we’re going to need to get this project done. Just some basic tools: tape measure, pencil, it's good to have a level to make sure you're light’s square, demo saw (you can use a corded or cordless - makes no difference, just make sure to use a good wood bit), drill driver and that's really about it. Just make sure to take good measurements, and we’ll show you how to do that.
For this project, I'm using a single light on each step so I'm going to need to measure the width of each riser and then mark the center where the light will be placed. Next, back out the screws and remove the front faceplate from the fixture. Now hold the fixture up into its approximate final location, take a tape measure and measure down about a half inch below the tread. This is where the fixture’s going to sit. Now take your level, make sure the fixture sits level underneath the step, and then take your marking pencil and mark across the top edge of the light.
In order to know how big of a hole we need to cut, we have to first measure the inside portion of the fixture that gets recessed into the step riser. In this case, it's 6 and 3/4 inches by 2 and ⅝. From the center point and top line that we drew earlier, we now need to transfer our measurements to the riser face itself. This is going to outline our cutout area. Be sure to use a level when marking your lines to make sure to keep them straight and level.
To get started on the cutout, we're going to need to drill out a starter hole for our saw blade to fit into. I’ll usually pick two corners for this. At this point, it's just a matter of running your saw blade along the lines that we drew out earlier. The fixture is now ready to install.
Insert your bi-pin LED into the socket, then make the wiring connections under the deck and then simply set your fixture in place. Now set your torpedo level along the bottom of the fixture. When it is sitting level, go ahead and screw it in place to the riser. Now that the fixture is fully installed, you can now put the faceplate back on. This is going to complete our installation.
Pretty straightforward - that's the Brass Bunker into a set of steps. If you have questions about the Brass Bunker or any other products from VOLT® Lighting, feel free to call our customer care at (813) 978-3700.
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Aug 3, 2011
Published in: American Journal of Preventive Medicine, v. 40, no. 2, Feb. 2011, p. 149-158View related products
This article was published outside of RAND. The full text of the article can be found at the link above.
BACKGROUND: Numerous interventions have been shown to increase physical activity but have not been ranked by effectiveness or cost. PURPOSE: This study provides a systematic review of physical activity interventions and calculates their cost-effectiveness ratios. METHODS: A systematic literature review was conducted (5579 articles) and 91 effective interventions promoting physical activity were identified, with enough information to translate effects into MET-hours gained. Cost-effectiveness ratios were then calculated as cost per MET-hour gained per day per individual reached. Physical activity benefits were compared to U.S. guideline-recommended levels (1.5 MET-hours per day for adults and 3.0 MET-hours per day for children, equivalent to walking 30 and 60 minutes, respectively). RESULTS: The most cost-effective strategies were for point-of-decision prompts (e.g., signs to prompt stair use), with a median cost of $0.07/MET-hour/day/person; these strategies had tiny effects, adding only 0.2% of minimum recommended physical activity levels. School-based physical activity interventions targeting children and adolescents ranked well with a median of $0.42/MET-hour/day/person, generating an average of 16% of recommended physical activity. Although there were few interventions in the categories of "creation or enhanced access to places for physical activity" and "community campaigns," several were cost effective. The least cost-effective categories were the high-intensity "individually adapted behavior change" and "social support" programs, with median cost-effectiveness ratios of $0.84 and $1.16 per MET-hour/day/person. However, they also had the largest effect sizes, adding 35%-43% of recommended physical activity, respectively. Study quality was variable, with many relying on self-reported outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: The cost effectiveness, effect size, and study quality should all be considered when choosing physical activity interventions.
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Butter stocks have grown nearly 179 million pounds since the beginning of the year — an eye-popping amount, says Eric Meyer, president of the dairy division of HighGround Dairy, Chicago.
The only other year to come close to this was 2006, he notes, when stocks grew by 165 million pounds during the same time frame. But unlike 2006 where Jan-May butter production was nearly 80 million pounds heavier than the previous year, Jan-May 2013 production has only outpaced 2012 by 15 million pounds.
“Yikes,” Meyer says. “With demand this poor and more milk expected to flow into the Class II and IV supply chain — think Greek yogurt, nonfat dry milk/skim milk powder — later this year, we do not have a lot of confidence butter stocks will make a stronger-than-anticipated move lower. A seasonal uptick in butter prices may occur over the next 30-60 days but we have our doubts there is a significant move higher in the medium- to long-term until the U.S. figures out how to efficiently sell its excess butterfat.”
As for cheese stocks, the standout numbers are the month-over-month declines in both Natural American-style and Total Cheese in June, Meyer reports.
“It is pretty rare to see a monthly decline between May and June and (this is) only the third time since 2000 it has occurred,” he says.
In 2007, strong Class IV and dry whey prices sent April and May Natural American production lower by nearly 25 million pounds. But in 2013, April and May Natural American cheese production was up a combined 34.4 million pounds, he adds.
“Declining prices in June must have gotten buyers off the sidelines because a stronger-than-anticipated June milk production report last week suggests cheese production was strong,” Meyer notes. “We view this as a somewhat bullish short-term indicator to the cheese market — demand has likely resurfaced.”
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Useful and tasty vegetables
Vegetables are no less important part of the diet than meat, grains and fish. We all know that it has minerals and acids. And it has positive influence on people’s health. There are a lot of reasons why to eat vegetables, so let’s point out some of them.
Young potatoes – useful not only for health but also for the figure. Young potato is usually collected two weeks after flowering. The difference between”old” and “young” is pretty easy. The covering of young potato is thin and easy-taken.
Useful properties of young potatoes
Young potatoes is full of vitamins A, B1, B2, B5, B6, C, E, K, niacin, choline, folic acid. It is more useful then winter potato.
There are no fat and cholesterol in young potato and a little of simple sugar. It is useful for stamack. Like eggs, natural yogurt and cheese, potatoes gives much protein. In addition, young potato consist of a number of essential minerals such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, phosphorus, iodine and sulfur.
Young potatoes are the ideal choice for those who tries to keep healthy diet. Moreover, young potato has least amount of calories and it is perfect for people who count calories during the day.
And what a lovely green salad is growing in every garden? He is not only beautiful, but also useful in various diseases. Green salad – an excellent remedy for nervous disorders and insomnia. Nursing mothers can use it to increase milk supply. When thyroid disease, peptic ulcer disease, diabetes and diseases of the stomach – doctors advise to use green salad.
The leaves of this vegetable contains large amounts of chlorophyll, vitamins B1, B2, B3, PP, K and S, and including calcium, magnesium, iron, cobalt, zinc, iodine and phosphorus.
Many people can’t cook a lot dishes without tomatoes. Do u know why? And what is useful in tomato? We are not talking about large amounts of vitamins and minerals in the vegetables, so it’s well-known. I would like to mention the main “trump card” of tomato, it’s- a great antioxidant lycopene. This material help older people to maintain mental and physical activity.
Tomatoes are also low-calorie vegetable. Its powerful weapon – a huge number of content in antioxidants – lycopene. Lycopene – a natural cure for many diseases, it helps protect men from prostate cancer, and women from cervical cancer, stops dividing tumors. In heat-treated tomato lycopene share much more than fresh. And which implies that they are more useful in stewed. Scientists suggest that lycopene reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.
To get more benefits from tomato salad you should fill it with sunflower or olive oil.
In addition to lycopene, it contains a huge amount of useful trace elements such as potassium, iodine, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, sodium, manganese, calcium, copper, zinc and B vitamins B, C, E, K, PP and beta-carotene.
Useful properties of tomatoes is very diverse, they are a good antidepressant, regulating the nervous system, and due to serotonin improves mood.
Carrots are useful in diseases of the kidneys, liver, hypertension, salt deposits and constipation. But we must keep in mind that in colitis, peptic ulcer exacerbation – it is contraindicated. This vegetable improves appetite and digestion. Carrots are an excellent tool for healing, it is recommended gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer.
It is important that carrot juice improves immunity, leading to reduction of infectious diseases and strengthens the nervous system and improves human energy.
Our eyes need carotene to improve vision, but carotene digested only with fat. So, to get use of carrot you should eat it with moderately fatty foods, such as sour cream or butter.
So many good words can be said about vegetables. They are extremely useful. If we use quite a lot of vegetables, then we take care of the body. Vegetables not only derive great variety of toxins and wastes, but is indispensable in the treatment of various diseases. Substances contained in vegetables, strengthen capillaries and it has beneficial effect on the blood.
In order to preserve all the nutrients in vegetables you need to use a minimum heat cooking. Now you know all about vegetables, favor chemical composition. So they must be a regular guest at your table.
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“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
― C.G. Jung
"When you realize your essence, allow it to flourish and invite it to take dominion within you, you begin to live from it vs. the limited, egoic human existence most of us identify with in this lifetime."
We live in an excessively unhealthy culture. We are constantly surrounded by victims. This is because we are all victims of an egocentric society, and hence victims of our own ego-attachment to such perspectives.-Gary Z McGee(6 Steps to Transforming Ego into Soul)
“The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Create at least one monster. Life is full of shoulds and shouldnots. It’s also full of should-a, would-a, could-a. One way to decalcify the ego, and thus magnify the soul, is by creating our own art: the kind of art that rejuvenates the spirit and is cathartic for the ego.-Gary Z McGee
Art is less about what you have not done and more about what you have done. The demon to be created and then consumed is the transformation of what we have not done into something we have done. This usually takes the form of art. Like Bertolt Brecht said, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
This seems contradictory to #4 but this is only because art is contradictory. Objectively, art is alive in a way forbidden natural objects and, subjectively, in a way subsuming the subjects who create them. We humans are a fallible species. More so we are an excruciatingly complex and insecure species. Art is the cathartic process of our self-actualized inadequacies. Through our own creative expression we, in one fell swoop, free our demons and give them wings.
Like Scott Adams wrote, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
EGO's most powerful distraction-SEX and Lust!→ Id aspect of Ego?...these two aspects of ego,can change your focus away from creativity,great accomplishments,all truthly worth while under-takings in the blink of the eye,and beat of the heart...sex has to be understood is a primitive act(need to reproduce,seek pleasure)...one myself has come to understand,control,yet it still remains...creeps into my mind even after 11 years without.. (Celibacy)
Freud's theory of Id part of Ego mind :
The most primitive part of the human mind, the id is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses. Freud believed that the id acts according to the “pleasure principle” – the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse. The id is the only component of personality that is present from birth, and for good reason. Infants depend on others to provide them with food, to change their diaper, and to avoid pain or discomfort. The id is the part of the mind that compels a baby to cry when he or she is in need of something, ensuring a healthy and happy upbringing.
The id, according to Freud, is the most selfish part of our mind. It is only concerned with the immediate satisfaction of whatever want or need the body is experiencing at the moment. Freud stated that the id “knows no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality” – only the fulfillment of immediate desires. Infants, for example, do not consider the needs of their parents when they cry. The id simply demands what it wants, without regard for the reality of the situation, ethics, or the convenience of others.
The second part of the human subconscious is what Freud called the ego: the rational part of our mind. Freud said that “The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions.” The ego acts according to the reality principle; i.e. it seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief. Freud considered it a mediator “between id and reality.” It is concerned with our interactions and relationships with others, understanding that other people are also driven by their own ids, and that indulging in our selfish impulses can sometimes be problematic. With the ego in place, a thirsty child can now not only identify water as the satisfaction of his urge, but can form a plan to obtain water, perhaps by finding a drinking fountain. Another example of the ego’s function would be the choice to resist the urge to grab other people’s belongings, and instead to purchase those items.Q2
The superego is the moral part of us, reflecting the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence. For example, the superego would tell a child not to hit another child because that would be morally wrong. According to Freud, “The Super-ego can be thought of as a type of conscience that punishes misbehavior with feelings of guilt,” working in contradiction to the id. The superego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. It controls our sense of right and wrong, and helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.
Freud believed that this part of human beings is not inborn, and that human beings do not develop the superego part of their mind until the age of five. In other words, he believed that human beings are not born with a moral sense, but that they can develop it through the rules and expectations of our caregivers.→ Society-tribe me 7/8/2018
According to Freud, most people should be able to balance the three parts of the unconscious mind in a way that keeps them happy and healthy. A successful person, he believed, would have a strong ego in order to satisfy its id and its superego. Freud believed that when the three components become too out of balance, a person can suffer physical or emotional repercussions. If a person’s id is too dominant, he or she may indulge in harmful impulses without considering the consequences. Conversely, if a person has an overly dominant superego, he or she may live an overly ordered, rigid life, may ignore their own wants and needs, or may be too judgmental of others. In other words, Freud’s theory of the human mind is that it is in a constant battle with itself – a conflict between the id, ego, and superego. from → Freud's Theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego commonlit.org
A egalitarian Society would only nuture the "True Self aspect of the Ego"
Yet if One stands back and Looks, gets a Big Picture understanding of what our culture/society is doing,and has been doing since the ending of the Hunter-Gatherer way of Life (a egalitarian way) we have been nurturing the "False Self"7/8/2018
"Hodge Podge",.............all over,.......things,,,,,,,,everywhere,.....then it a paradox,.........all mixed up to put together,.......can you,........see through to,............the right one there,.......delta,.......was where,....end of stream,...and a castle grew from who,.......blew the summer gust,.....dust,......turned the scene to,.......nothing but blue if I look up,........rest is just as it was,..........that there,...this by itself,......it was placed there by who,......who knew,......maybe just got left behind,..............bound to it's very self to remain ,...........yet the rain is falling down,..........will it rust,.......if there by itself,........should I move,....it ,...........gotta go get my umbrella,....save it,.........yet which one,.....so many out there,......just chaos seems,...chaos,......of what is seen,.........like one was in a hurry,........going somewhere,...........they forgot to bury what they did,.....now reflecting what they did,.........and what a mess,......they did,......so fast,.....By Michael S Emery
A very Harsh look at "Ego"...and mankinds need to blame something other then it's very "Self"
"The Ego stops us from understanding where we stand and how to know where we really are"- Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
"On the highest level, crucifixion-resurrection is symbolic of the spiritual aspirant leaving behind, or dying to, the egoic self --the individual identity defined by personality and physical form -- and awakening to the infinite Self at the core of being, which we share with all of existence."-Philip Goldberg
Anima and animus-something I recently started studying,in order to see it's relation to ego and gender variation as well as creativity
The four roles are not identical with genders reversed. Jung believed that while the anima tended to appear as a relatively singular female personality, the animus may consist of a conjunction of multiple male personalities: "in this way the unconscious symbolizes the fact that the animus represents a collective rather than a personal element".
The process of animus development deals with cultivating an independent and non-socially subjugated idea of self by embodying a deeper word (as per a specific existential outlook) and manifesting this word. To clarify, this does not mean that a female subject becomes more set in her ways (as this word is steeped in emotionality, subjectivity, and a dynamism just as a well-developed anima is) but that she is more internally aware of what she believes and feels, and is more capable of expressing these beliefs and feelings. Thus the "animus in his most developed form sometimes...make[s] her even more receptive than a man to new creative ideas".
Both final stages of animus and anima development have dynamic qualities (related to the motion and flux of this continual developmental process), open-ended qualities (there is no static perfected ideal or manifestation of the quality in question), and pluralistic qualities (which transcend the need for a singular image, as any subject or object can contain multiple archetypes or even seemingly antithetical roles). They also form bridges to the next archetypal figures to emerge, as "the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form, representing the Self". - the archetypes of the Wise Old Woman/Man
In Jung's thought, the individuation process was marked by a sequence of archetypes, each acquiring predominance at successive stages, and so reflecting what he termed an ascending psychic scale or 'hierarchy of the unconscious'. Thus, starting with the intermediate position of 'anima or animus...just as the latter have a higher position in the hierarchy than the shadow, so wholeness lays claim to a position and a value superior' still. The Wise Old Woman and Man, as what he termed "Mana" personalities or "supraordinate" personalities, stood for that wholeness of the self: 'the mother ("Primordial Mother" and "Earth Mother") as a supraordinary personality...as the "self"'.
As von Franz put it, 'If an individual has wrestled seriously and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem, so that he, or she, is no longer partially identified with it, the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form representing the Self, the innermost nucleus of the personality. In the dreams of a woman this centre is usually personified as a superior female figure - a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature and so forth'.
The masculine initiator was described by Jung as 'a figure of the same sex corresponding to the father-imago...the mana-personality [a]s a dominant of the collective unconscious, the recognized archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits'. Similarly, 'the wise Old Woman figure represented by Hecate or the Crone ...the Great Mother' stood for an aspect of the mother-imago. The archetypes of the collective unconscious can thus be seen as inner representations of the same-sex parent - as an 'imago built up from parental influences plus the specific reactions of the child'. Consequently, for the Jungian, 'the making conscious of those contents which constitute the archetype of the mana personality signifies therefore "for the man the second and true liberation from the father, for the woman that from the mother, and therewith the first perception of their own unique individuality"'.
In Jung's view, 'all archetypes spontaneously develop favourable and unfavourable, light and dark, good and bad effects'. Thus 'the "good Wise Man" must here be contrasted with a correspondingly dark, chthonic figure', and in the same way, the priestess or sibyl has her counterpart in the figure of 'the witch...called by Jung the "terrible mother"'. Taken together, male and female, 'The hunter or old magician and the witch correspond to the negative parental images in the magic world of the unconscious'.
But judgement of such collective archetypes must not be hasty. 'Just as all archetypes have a positive, favourable, bright side that points upwards, so also they have one that points downwards, partly negative and unfavourable, partly chthonic' - so that (for example) 'the sky-woman is the positive, the bear the negative aspect of the "supraordinate personality", which extends the conscious human being upwards into the celestial and downwards into the animal regions'. Yet both aspects, celestial and chthonic, were (at least potentially) of equal value for Jung, as he sought for what he termed a "coniunctio oppositorum", a union of opposites. 'One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light', he argued, 'but by making the darkness conscious'. Similarly with respect to the goal of the individuation process itself, 'as a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither'.
Coming to terms with the Mana figures of the collective unconscious - with the parental imagos - thus meant overcoming a psychic splitting, so as to make possible an acceptance of 'the Twisted side of the Great Mother'; an acceptance of the way 'the father contains both Kings at once...the Twisted King and the Whole King'.
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Recently Mozilla launched its mobile operating system named Firefox OS. It also recently launched official prototype of its variants of smartphone. The platform is completely based on HTML5 and CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). Firefox OS can be considered a mixture of iOS and Android with much inspired Ubuntu feel. Being a developer, I feel Firefox OS will be a competition to existing mobile OS because it will attract developers as it is purely based on HTML5 platform. So are you curious to put your hands on this new OS? You can get your hands dirty on Firefox OS without actually buying the physical device with just few clicks of mouse within your computer. So wouldn’t it be better to get a feel of it before actually going for it?
Note: The procedure is same for other operating systems too. But we will be mentioning Mac here as the tutorial has been performed on the Macintosh machine.
How To Simulate Firefox OS on Mac:
- There are only two elements you will need to simulate Firefox OS in your Mac. First you need to download latest version of Mozilla Firefox web browser. If you don’t have one, download here.
- Second, you will need to download and install the simulator to run Firefox OS. Download the r2d2b2g simulator here.
- Open the .xpi file with Mozilla Firefox
- Now you will be asked to install the file, click on “Install Now” to install the simulator
- The browser will now instantly open a page with “Firefox OS Simulator” preview.
- Now you can slide the simulator button on left to run or stop the simulation (see screenshot below for more understanding)
Additional, Mac users can perform the following keyboard shortcuts to simulate the device in the simulation:
- Home key (Fn + LeftArrow): Home Button
- End key (Fn + RightArrow): Power Button
- PageUp/PageDown keys (Fn + UpArrow/DownArrow): Volume Up/Down buttons
That’s it! You have successfully established Firefox OS simulation. Now you can run and feel the new OS. The first screen has a lock screen which you will have to drag up using you mouse cursor and click on the lock symbol to unlock it. We were interested to see how the simulation works. Surprisingly the simulation worked satisfactory. It gives the real feeling about the OS. It has a home key at the bottom, slide to view couple of home screens, and much more. Here are few screenshots of the Firefox OS’s UI
Firefox Marketplace view:
Game category view:
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First name origin & meaning:
Hindi: Young strength
Last name origins & meanings:
- Indian (Gujarat and Bombay city): Parsi name, probably from
Persian bālā ‘high’, ‘exalted’.
(southern states): variant of Balan, particularly among
speakers of Tamil and Malayalam who have migrated away from their home
state. In India it is only a given name, but it has come to be used as
a family name among South Indians in the U.S.
- Polish: from a
reduced form of the personal name Baltazar.
- Hungarian: from a pet form of the personal name Balázs, a vernacular
form of Blasius.
Comments for Bala
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Barton said four free training sessions are planned for late April and early May. Two are scheduled on farms in Cornelius and Jefferson, Ore., and another is scheduled at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora. The fourth training session will be in the Eugene, Ore., area, but the specific location has not been decided.
All Oregon berry growers are welcome to attend the free training, but both Barton and Unger said they particularly hope growers with small to medium-sized operations participate.
“It doesn’t matter what size grower is involved. It only takes one berry to impact the entire industry,” Barton said.
“One of the challenges we identified when we started talking about this was how to find all of the smaller growers. It’s not like there is a list,” he said.
The training sessions will be conducted in English and Spanish, Barton said, with a focus on helping field supervisors understand what field workers need to do to ensure the safest harvest.
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After days of "persistence", she finally dozed off before i could even finish 1 story book. As she grew older, I let her read story books on her own. Once in a while, she will read me a bedtime story, or we will read our story books together. The idea is make her less and less dependent on me. Soon, I don't read bedtime story to her but I will stay in bed with her until she dozed off.
Then, the hardest part comes... "how to detach myself totally".
One day, a friend shared with me her "successful plan"! It really works.
One night I told my girl this:
"Mummy is a bit busy in the kitchen preparing for the potluck lunch tomorrow. So, can u do me one little favour? U sleep now and I will visit you in 5 minutes time."
She bought my lie...
The next day, i told her:
"Wow! u did a great thing yesterday. So, lets do it again. U sleep now, I will be just outside and I will visit you in 5 minutes time."
Goodbye kiss, I off the light and went off. She did it again.
The next day, i told her the same thing. she was smarter then, she said to me :
"Mum, 5 minutes equals to 300 seconds and that is very long time. " Ha! Since when she can do 3 digits multiplication!!
So, we renegotiated our deal.
We agreed at 3 minutes per visit.
How it Works?
- Make a lie ... well, ask for a favour to sleep alone for one night.
- Visit at 5 minutes interval for the first 2 nights This will give him / her comfort that you keep to your promise.
- Praise him / her for being a good the next day.
- Be FIRM. At times when v tug them to bed, they will hold our hands, pull our skirts just to make us stay in bed with them. Don't ever get "cheated" by this.
Goodbye kiss, switch off the lights and just go!
It took just a few days, soon it becomes an achievement to your child that I beat mum by 5 minutes! Now, I am glad that Lv no longer needs my company going to bed. She sleeps on her own in her very own bed, in her very own room.
What Expert Says...
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Last summer, I posted about the construction of bus bulbs and other transit improvements along 45th Street. After a recent post about proposed changes to N. 40th Street, Wallyhood got an earful about the bus bulbs on 45th. So I thought it would be a good time to check in with Mr. SDOT, Jeff Bender, who explains all manner of transit and traffic improvements to the willing lay person.
To recap, bus bulbs, or sidewalk extensions that allow buses to load and unload passengers without pulling out of traffic, were installed along 45th to try to improve the speed and predictability of buses on route 44. In recent years, 45th Street has seen a marked increase in traffic which has increased travel time for both cars and buses. One solution to this problem is to encourage more people to take the bus. However, people are reluctant to take the bus when it is always late. So, improving the reliability of the bus is an important step in increasing bus ridership.
Bus bulbs are needed because even though the law directs cars to yield to buses when they signal to re-enter traffic, many drivers ignore the law and make it nearly impossible for the bus to pull back into the lane. Over the course of the bus’ route, this failure to follow the law leads to extensive delays. (It can also lead to a $124 ticket, FYI).
All of that makes sense, but given the noise I was hearing in the comments section, I wanted to know if the newly installed bus bulbs are working. So I asked Mr. Bender how SDOT evaluates the bus bulbs’ effectiveness. He replied:
“SDOT will measure the transit travel time savings for the Route 44 corridor once we have completed installing transit signal priority at selected signalized intersections. Prior to installing the bus bulbs in Wallingford for the Market/45th Street project, we estimated that the bulbs would generate a transit travel time savings in the range of 4 to 14 seconds per trip.
After a recent visit to Wallingford post-bus bulb construction, SDOT’s consultant reports that between Latona Avenue and Stone Way, bus dwell times (time from when the bus arrives at the stop until it departs the stop) decreased 7 to 16 seconds per trip on average throughout the day (ignoring outbound AM trips, and inbound midday trips because they were influenced by wheelchair lift use). This savings adds up significantly considering that Route 44 has about 90 trips per direction per day. They also observed that from a transit rider’s perspective the bus bulbs provided a more comfortable waiting experience.”
While 7 to 16 seconds might not seem like much, over the course of the bus route those seconds add up. If you look at the chart below, you’ll see that more efficient loading and unloading shaves 4.5 to 8.7 minutes off the transit time from the bus’ point of origin to termination.
I could already hear Wallyhood readers chorusing, “But what about the cars?!? Saving time for buses is all well and good, but my commute stinks and it’s the fault of the bus bulbs!” Mr. Bender begs to differ, saying:
“For east-west travel in the Market/45th corridor, travel times for cars will improve, in general. This is an ancillary effect of revised channelization and increased green time at signalized intersections to help keep transit, i.e. Route 44, moving. With more signal green time being given to east-west traffic flow, cars using the north-south side streets experience a slightly longer travel time. In general, overall intersection vehicle delay does not change significantly. The corridor will also move more people because improved transit speed and reliability will attract more riders.”
Mr. Bender noted that he does not yet have data specific to Wallingford to support the above statement, which he made based on studies of other areas. However, later this year the transit signal priority (TSP) system, which gives buses their own signal, will be installed along the Market/45th Corridor. After installation, the vehicle wait times for cars and buses will be re-evaluated. After that: hard data.
I mentioned to Mr. Bender that several readers had noted difficulty in turning left at the intersection of Wallingford Avenue and 45th Street. He said that SDOT has that intersection on its radar:
“During the course of the NW Market/45th TPCI project, SDOT staff investigated changes to the 45th and Wallingford intersection to improve Route 44 transit travel time and liability. One of the changes was to provide a protected permissive west-bound left turn to accommodate high volumes of left turns. SDOT staff will review intersection operations in the near future to determine if left turn signal phases in the eastbound and westbound directions need to be adjusted to improve NW Market/45th Street corridor transit/traffic operations.”
Because I was pretty sure that I wasn’t the only one confused by the new concrete islands in the center lane opposite the bus bulbs, I asked for clarification as to their purpose. The concrete barriers were, in fact, installed to increase pedestrian safety and decrease vehicular and vehicle/pedestrian accidents. The barriers prevent cars from pulling around the bus when it is stopped to let passengers disembark. As a bonus, they confuse people turning left. Just kidding.
Wallyreaders should know that if the transit corridor improvements have caused unintended traffic consequences, you can contact SDOT to request an evaluation of the issue. SDOT has engineers in its Traffic Management Division whose primary job is investigating such matters. You can email Mr. Bender (Jeff.Bender@seattle.gov) or call 206-684-ROAD.
To comment on this article, visit on Wallyhood.
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The Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate Middleton, has furthered her work on children's mental health by supporting the launch of a series of podcasts.
Kate, who is patron of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, issued a statement backing the initiative in which she said that she and Prince William wouldn't hesitate to get expert support for their children, George and Charlotte, if they need it.
"Throughout my work with family and child support organisations, one thing that has stood out to me time and again is that getting early support for a child who is struggling to cope is the best possible thing we can do to help our children as they grow up. Knowing this, both William and I feel very strongly that we wouldn’t hesitate to get expert support for George and Charlotte if they need it," the statement read.
"One in three adults still say they would be embarrassed to seek help for their child's mental health. No parent would fail to call the doctor if their child developed a fever, yet some children are tackling tough times without the support that can help them because the adults in their life are scared to ask. It doesn't need to be like this.
She continued: "I hope that this excellent series of podcasts by the Anna Freud Centre will go some way to help families overcome that fear of what happens next if they look for professional support. They illustrate that many of the therapies are actually very simple and practical steps that include the whole family to help children make sense of the world around them. They show how with the right help, children have a good chance of overcoming their issues while they are still young, and can have the bright future they deserve.
"Please do listen, and share them with your friends and family and let's change the way we all talk to each other about our mental health."
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“East Africa is getting its act together in terms of starting to realize that if they do things together, they can move faster,” oil and gas consultant Mwendia Nyaga said.
A compacted dirt road cut through the mangroves is the first sign of work at the site, where a Chinese firm has a US$470 million contract for Lamu port’s first three berths.
Those are the first of 32 planned berths at a port estimated to cost US$5.5 billion. Further funds will be needed for the planned roads and railway linking South Sudan and Ethiopia, a land-locked nation of 90 million people that is growing swiftly.
However, financing is merely trickling in. Battling a big budget deficit, Kenya allocated only about US$48 million to the project this fiscal year. China’s involvement with Lamu pales against its backing for Tanzania’s US$10 billion Bagamoyo port plan.
The World Bank, African Development Bank and the EU are funding roads linking Kenya with South Sudan and Ethiopia. Though this could help the Lamu project, these donors and concessionary lenders are not directly funding LAPSSET.
On the international markets, funding has become trickier as the US looks set to rein in its loose monetary policy, hiking interest rates for emerging market borrowers. Still, some South African banks and others are keeping an eye on the project.
“Given the ultimate size of the project, there will be considerable space for all lenders with African debt capacity to play [a role] in the funding,” said Mike Peo, head of infrastructure at Nedbank Capital, the investment banking arm of South Africa’s fourth-largest bank, Nedbank.
South Africa’s Rand Merchant Bank also said it was interested, while London-based emerging markets specialist Standard Chartered said it was watching progress.
The Development Bank of Southern Africa has said it is keen to be a lead arranger for funding. Kasuku said the bank could offer as much as US$1.5 billion to LAPSSET.
Some say Kenya must make a clearer case for creating a new container port over expanding and upgrading Mombasa.
“I don’t see how container shipment through Lamu port can be the business case for the port,” said Steve Felder, east Africa managing director of Danish shipping and oil group A.P. Moller-Maersk.
On the ground, the government faces worries the new port and surrounding development will harm delicate coastal vegetation and marine life, and could overwhelm the popular tourist destination of Lamu.
Residents fear a land grab by a wealthy elite as the project gets under way at the expense of locals, a perennial complaint in Kenya. Local officials insist they will not let this happen.
“We have learnt from the Mombasa port experience where everything goes to the central government,” Governor Issa Timamy said at a Lamu meeting where residents complained about seizures. “We are not willing to repeat that mistake in Lamu.”
Additional reporting by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura
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- Posted July 28, 2014 by
This iReport is part of an assignment:
Impact Your World
Ten ways to make a difference with $100
The smallest good deed is worth a thousand grand intentions.
International news has not been overwhelmingly pleasant the last few weeks. Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot out of the sky killing almost 300 passengers and crew members instantly. Not long after the Malaysian tragedy, two additional planes--one Taiwanese and one Algerian--crashed in separate incidents. Israel launched a wide scale offensive in Gaza that has resulted in a large number of civilian causalities. Radicals from the ISIS have continued on a rampage in Iraq and Syria, killing both soldiers and civilians. A deadly Ebola outbreak persists in East Africa, with doctors and medical workers struggling to contain the virus.
In addition to the wide array of high profile crises currently making headlines, various ongoing domestic and international battles continue to persist. Hunger, poverty, disease, access to education, human rights, animal welfare, environmental protection, and a wide range of other pressing issues exist in the background of our day-to-day lives. Every now and then an article, book, or documentary might pull one of these issues to the forefront of our mind, but often it is quickly replaced with the rigors of day-to-day life.
But within the complexities of the human suffering is a very simple truth: Every day worldwide there are struggles, and those of us who are lucky enough not to be caught in the midst of these struggles want to find ways to help. Simple, condensed, vetted opportunities to make a sincere difference.
That's where the The Value of 100 comes in. The purpose of this blog is to connect prospective donors with the specific impact of their donation, along with the reputable organizations that will put their donated money to effective use. Each post looks closely at what a gift--generally a $100 gift--will translate to in terms of positive impact with a given cause.
In other words, I want to help you find a way to help.
So, if you are feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the challenges facing our world today, here are a few easy opportunities for you to make a quantitative difference in an area that matters to you:
A $100 gift...
...to Nothing But Nets (a grassroots campaign from the United Nations Foundation) covers the cost of shipping and installing 10 mosquito nets, protecting against Malaria and other mosquito-born diseases.
...to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is enough to get a homeless dog or cat out of a shelter and into a forever home. Best Friends prides itself in its ability to re-home animals, matching prospective pet owners with the right animal and therefore halting the often cyclical nature of pet homelessness.
...to charity: water provides clean water for five people. "The simple math: $20 is the average cost per person to build a charity: water project. That includes funds for sanitation, hygiene training and our partners’ existing maintenance models."
...to Baby Buggy provides families with a safe sleeping place for their babies. This could translate to one high quality crib for a family in need, or two pack and play portable sleepers.
...to Doctors Without Borders can purchase vaccinations for 100 people against meningitis, measles, polio or other deadly epidemics.
...to Artspace allows the organization to promote visual art in a community by placing a professional artist into an outreach project that reaches children where they live and learn.
...to a college or university could help a scholarship reach its endowment level and begin to pay out to students in need of financial support, or could be used to fund student awards or to introduce new technology to a classroom.
...to The Nature Conservancy can protect 10 square feet of oyster reefs. A single oyster can filter up to 30 gallons of water every day, but 85 percent of the world’s oyster reefs have been lost. Oyster reef restoration is a primary conservation tool around the Gulf of Mexico, not only protecting nature but also helping build local fishing economies.
...to Reading Is Fundamental can buy 40 brand-new high quality books for children in need. The benefits of reading and being read to at an early age are tremendous, and RIF has seen substantial success when it comes to empowering and motivating children to enter the world of books.
...to Partners In Health helps provide social and economic support for one multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis patient in Peru...OR...provides Oral Rehydration Salts sachets for ten Haitian children with mild cases of cholera for one month...OR...covers ten cancer patient home visits in Rwanda...OR...helps provide a meal to 150 hospital in-patients in Malawi...the list goes on.
Each of the organizations listed above ranks highly in terms of financial performance metrics, along with overall accountability and transparency. Those organizations large enough to be nationally ranked all receive stellar ratings from +Charity Navigator and other charity rating websites.
A donation of $100 means different things to different people. To some it would be their largest ever charitable gift and to others a tiny drop in the bucket. However, irrespective of what $100 means to the donor, there is no doubt that at the above organizations--or any of the charities spotlighted in this blog--$100 can mean a great deal.
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Spitting up is when a baby spits out breast milk, formula, or other food during or shortly after feeding. It is different from vomiting, which is forceful. Spitting up is effortless and does not seem to cause the baby any discomfort.
Some babies spit up for no reason. Other babies spit up because the valve at the top of the stomach does not close completely (reflux). Spitting up caused by reflux usually goes away as the baby gets older.
Frequent burping during feeding helps reduce the amount of spit-up. Also, keeping the baby upright for 30 minutes after feeding can help.
Spitting up usually happens less often when the baby is older than 4 months and starts eating solid food. Most babies stop spitting up by the age of 9 months.
|Primary Medical Reviewer||Susan C. Kim, MD - Pediatrics|
|Specialist Medical Reviewer||John Pope, MD - Pediatrics|
|Current as of||January 10, 2013|
WebMD Medical Reference from Healthwise
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Book shares story of sick kitty trying to find a home
By Kristen Miller
DASSEL, MN - Local author Ronda Sarner Anderson will be signing her first self-published children’s book “Weezer the Sneezer” at the Little Red Hen Saturday, Nov. 7 from 9 a.m. to noon.
Anderson, who lives south of Dassel and works for American Time and Signal, came up with the idea after a dream she had one night.
She woke up from her dream, wrote it down, and soon after, learned about a Dassel-Cokato Community Education class on book publishing.
That is where Anderson got much of her encouragement to write and self-publish her own book, based on her very own cat named Weezer.
“I told them my idea and they thought it was a cute title and a cute name,” Anderson said.
The class, which was taught by Jean Tennant, an author from Iowa, explained how one could go about sending a manuscript to a publisher, and also how to self-publish a book.
“It was really an inspirational little class,” Anderson said.
“Just the fact that you can get lifelong learning from Community Education and that you can do it affordably, is terrific,” she added.
Since Anderson works in the marketing department and works with printers, she decided to go the route of self-publishing.
“With self-publishing, you take all the risk, but get all the rewards,” Anderson said.
She also appreciates Little Red Hen owner Brenda Rydberg for the opportunity to have a book signing at the Dassel store in November.
“Weezer the sneezer”
The title for the book came from a stray cat that found Anderson and her husband, Chris.
“She wandered up to the house and then just wouldn’t leave,” Anderson laughed.
“She definitely claimed us. Our [two] dogs were not cat-friendly,” Anderson said.
The name “Weezer” came when Anderson opened up the door to the garage where the cat was staying. Without turning on the lights, Anderson could hear the cat breathing.
Knowing the cat didn’t sound healthy, Anderson called the veterinarian.
When asked what the cat’s name was, Anderson replied, “I don’t know, she’s kind of a weezer.”
Weezer being a sneezer came after the cat sneezed all over the food Anderson’s husband was preparing for lunch one day.
“Now, she is happy, healthy, fat, and loved,” Anderson commented.
In the book, it’s a little girl who finds Weezer.
From writing to publishing the book took about eight months, Anderson said.
She is now working on her next venture, a book for toddlers titled, “Alligators Don’t Like Tators.” It’s about parents encouraging their children to try new things, even though it may be difficult.
For more information about the book, visit www.WeezerTheSneezer.com.
Book signing at The Little Red Hen
Anderson will be reading and signing her book at the Little Red Hen in Dassel Saturday, Nov. 7 from 9 a.m. to noon, at the Litchfield Public Library Thursday, Oct. 15 at 6:30 p.m.
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Book T of C
Chap T of C
Reeve (1992) summarized attempts to do research on Maslow's ideas and concluded that "the weight of the evidence casts considerable doubts on the hierarchy's validity." However, he suggested that a simpler, two-level distinction might receive support. This is the distinction between needs based on maintenance of the organism (such as hunger and thirst) and those based on growth. That is similar to the distinction Maslow made between D-needs and B-needs.
What are D-values?
Maslow called traditional Hullian-type needs D-needs. The D stood for "deficiency." The D-needs were based on "D-values" (deficiency values). Deficiency values fit into the Hullian scheme: you have a deficiency of something (food, water, security) and this generates a need. You work to eliminate the deficiency (reduce the drive) then you are satisfied.
What are examples of B-values?
The needs Maslow believed to be higher, healthier, and more likely to emerge in self-actualizing people were being needs, or B-needs. Most other psychologists would call these existential or spiritual needs. Existential means, literally, pertaining to existence. Existential needs are rooted in our need to experience our lives more fully and to find meaning and purpose in life. These needs involve a type of motivation quite distinct from hunger, thirst, and other motives studied by Hullian psychologists. If you satisfy B needs, you feel fulfilled but never satiated. You can never have too much justice or beauty or truth.
B-needs include truth, goodness, and beauty. Maslow also included unity, perfection, and completion or finality. An artist enjoys symmetry; an architect strives for a sense of unity; a craftsman feels good to see a piece completed; a musician seeks perfection in the tone of an instrument. Maslow lists B values such as aliveness, process, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency. These characteristics bear a striking resemblance to Carl Rogers's description of healthy trends during psychotherapy. Finding that they had come up with many of the same ideas, Maslow and Rogers formed a natural alliance as leaders of the humanistic psychology movement in the early 1960s.
Prev page | T of C | Next page
Don't see what you need? Psych Web has over 1,000 pages, so it may be elsewhere on the site. Do a site-specific Google search using the box below.
Copyright © 2007 Russ Dewey
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Access Levels allow you to manage what your users can see and do in Clui, and within groups in Clui. You can view all of your Access Levels in Enterprise Settings, on the Access Levels tab. Click an access level on the left to see and edit the permissions it has. The badge next to each access level will tell you how many users currently have this access level applied to them.
There are 2 different types of access levels in Clui:
Enterprise Access Levels control what a user can do in Clui, across the whole enterprise. A user only has one enterprise access level for their account. As an example, you might want to create an Access Level called Course Designer, which has permission to create and edit courses, but has no access to user accounts, reports or sales.
Group Access Levels control what a user can do within a group and on the group's users. A user has one Access Level for each group they're in. You might create a Group Access Level called Group Manager, who has access to user and group management features, such as adding and removing users from the group.
Creating Access Levels
You can create new Enterprise and Group Access Levels, on the Access Levels tab in Enterprise Settings, by clicking the New Access Level button.
After naming the access level, you can choose to inherit the permissions from an existing access level, or if you want to start with no permissions checked, leave the inherit dropdown set on Learner.
NOTE: Inheriting permissions from an existing access level is only on the initial creation of the new access level. Subsequent changes to the access level that was inherited from, won't be reflected on the newly created one.
When you create an access level, it's available for any administrator in the enterprise to use, not just the account it was created by.
Viewing and editing a user's access levels
You can view and edit a user's access levels on the People page, on a user's User Account page, and you can view your own access levels on your Profile page.
You can also select a user's Group access level when inviting them to a group.
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Many of us get so caught up in trumpeting the benefits of newer and better technology, we may lose sight of those who live either outside the present technology or chose to ignore it entirely. In the past few weeks I have seen a number of people who are not only challenged by the changes but altogether resistant. One example, today in a class about subscription Websites for genealogy, one of the class members, and LDS Ward Family History Consultant, was concerned about how the material would go over with her friend who didn't have an Internet connection. The friend was seeking help in doing her family history, but either did not have the money or the motivation to get online.
The question was how could the person do their genealogy without using Personal Ancestral File and how could they obtain the program without an Internet connection. As a matter of fact, the program is available on CD from the LDS Church Distribution for a nominal price. I asked whether or not the person had a CD drive on their computer? However, the class member did not know the answer.
Another student in the same class was trying to determine which genealogical database program to use. I spoke to her of several and she was still undecided how to proceed. She kept referring to her handwritten pedigree chart, which she admitted that she hadn't looked at since college.
I recall that the introductory materials for the LDS Church's New FamilySearch program had a number of sequences of individuals throughout the world who had no access to computer technology of their own, but had to rely on others to enter the information they had gathered by hand, into the New FamilySearch program.
Maybe, we forget that you can still do family history with a pencil and a piece of paper. Just as you can still walk across the U.S. Not that I would want to try either, but the possibility still exists.
On the other hand, the problem of resistance to technology is deeper than an inability to merely participate. During the past couple of years, I have been working on various research projects with the goal of applying for some kind of certification. It is interesting to me, that neither of the major genealogical certification organizations seem to recognize the changes effected by the technology. They are essentially still in a paper and pencil world. The certifications still focus on relatively small geographic areas and neither the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) nor the International Commission for the Accreditation of Genealogists (ICAPGen) recognize a specialty in online research, independent of geographic location. The BCG even has a weight limit for the amount of paper to be included with their application!! Why not submit everything on CD? or even online?
In another example, there is no sense of place or location, as such, on the Internet and it is indicative of a resistance to technology in the failure of the certification boards lack of recognition of people who "live on the Web" and are still emphasizing research limited to small geographic areas.
The counter-argument is simple, you still have to have certain basic skills to do good or adequate research, but there are those without those specific skills who can still do genealogy and there are those with technological skills that do not necessarily conform to the traditional method of "doing genealogy."
More thoughts later.
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Wow, well said. A man before his time, he knew the importance of eating right and physical activity back in the early 60’s . I am going to include the right up with it as well.
When it comes to a man before his time, JFK was the absolute leader in health and fitness. He accurately predicted the advanced decline of American health as we see it today and instituted the “president’s challenge.” In 1963, President John F. Kennedy changed the council’s name to the “President’s Council on Physical Fitness” to reflect its role to serve all Americans. Sadly in 2011, we are seeing severe budget cuts in fitness and nutrition sciences in almost every school across amercia. What are we going to do about it!? Unless we make a major shift NOW in the way we eat, move and think, we are destined for a nation of weak minded and weak bodied citizens.
Lead by example and choose health for you and all of your loved ones. The time is now; there may not be a tommorrow before you know it. We vote with our fork and heart.
TAKE BACK YOUR HEALTH
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As the previouse 2 articles were about optimizing performance and keeping the server cost as low as possible, this article will also cover this area and write about why I’m using MsgPack instead of JSON in ZeroPilot.
In a web-app there is allways data sent between the client and the server – would you believe me if I told you that after otimizing all the server-calls, bundeling them together ect. you can still save up to 40% (and some cases even 60%) of your traffic caused by client-server communication with not more than one line of code?
Well, the magic word is “MsgPack” – it is a ‘binary-based efficient object serialization library‘. The difference to JSON is, that MsgPack is binary-based – this gives the possibility to make the exchanged data a) smaller and use less bytes, I guess we all know the advantages of that, however there is an even bigger advantage: b) It is faster to parse and encode, having a parser parse 40 bytes takes about twice as long as parsing 20 bytes. I know those advantages might seem marginal – however if you scale this up to a couple thousand (or even more) users you will see quite a bit of a difference there. And even if you don’t have a couple thousand users – why would you not want to take advantage of something like this?
To make this difference more visible i put together a small example:
7B 22 6E 61 6D 65 22 3A 22 4A 6F 68 6E 20 44 6F 65 22 2C 22 61 67 65 22 3A 20 31 32 7D
82 A4 6E 61 6D 65 A8 4A 6F 68 6E 20 44 6F 65 A3 61 67 65 0C
As you can see, the MsgPack-encoded data is about 2/3 the size of JSON.
(edit: I previously had some unnecessary bytes in the JSON code, making the example to much in favour of MsgPack, I removed those. thx to charles leifer for noticing)
Additionally, the whole thing look less readable when you look at it – so as a small bonus this will probably repell some script-kiddies, who are trying to intercept your JSON- or XML-calls.
One line of code you said?
//just exchange the encoding and decoding lines
myJSONString = JSON.stringify(myObject);
myObject = JSON.parse(myJSONString);
var myByteArray = msgpack.pack(myObject);
myObject = msgpack.unpack(myByteArray);
MsgPack returns Objects/Hashes or Arrays, Numbers and Strings just like JSON will do, so there is NO need to change anything further than the encoding- and decoding lines.
Why havn’t I heared from MsgPack before?
As with all good things: They need time, MsgPack has first been introduced about 2 1/2 years ago I believe (at least according to their github-repo) – it might be older, but without a github repository it is rather difficult to get noticed nowadays.
I can only encourage you to visit the MsgPack-Site and download the implementation for your programming-language(every major language has one), even if your desired language has no official implementation, there are usually unofficial projects to be found via google or github. If you can’t find it – contribute to the community and write your own implementation and share it.
Edit #2: Since there was quite a bit of critisism here and on Hacker News, Sadayuki “Sada” Furuhashi, the creator of MessagePack posted some thoughts on MessagePack on gist: https://gist.github.com/2908191 clarifying a few things, thank you for that Sadayuki.
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More favorable policies and IP protection measures have contributed to an increase in the number of applications for patents and inventions in China, according to a report released by international accounting and consultancy group KPMG in the second half of 2013.
In early 2004, BASF, a leading chemical company in Germany, established the BASF Asia Technical Center in Shanghai. Nine years later, they have a total of 10 R&D centers in Shanghai, and recently opened a USD 75 million innovation center.
BASF continues to increase investment in China because the BASF product lines need to be adjusted to Chinese tastes and requirements, and we need a more efficient location to better service customer requests, said Waldmier Patti, the Vice-Chairman of the BASF Board of Directors.
To date, there are 1600 R&D centers in China. The number of foreign-funded R&D centers has increased from under 200 to over 1,300 since 2000. China has already surpassed the US to become the world’s “most attractive” destination for R&D investment, as assessed by Russell Reynolds Associates.
In the past, due to a lack of qualified technical personnel, multinationals might have had doubts about setting up R&D centers in China. But there are now more than seven million new university graduates per year in China, and the number is rising. Approximately 900,000 graduates are engineering majors, compared to only 80,000 in the US.
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Don’t let the words Manchego and Pepitas scare you away from this yummy Savoy Blood Orange Salad. They are simply cheese made from sheep’s milk and pumpkin seeds. Manchego cheese comes from the La Mancha region of Spain and is aged anywhere from 60 days to two years. It has a firm, buttery flavor, strong and creamy. You can find it in most deli’s and specialty cheese shops. If you don’t want to be that adventuresome, you can always substitute Parmesan if you can handle dairy. Pepita is just a fancy Spanish term for the pumpkin seed but certainly goes well with the Manchego cheese, due to its origin in the Spanish region of La Mancha.
The Beauty of a Blood Orange
The blood orange has a beautiful inner flesh that is almost blood-colored, hence the name. The outer skin generally takes on darker hues and the flesh has a slight raspberry hint in flavor. The darker flesh occurs because of the presence of antioxidant pigments.
Savoy Cabbage: a Favorite for Salads
Savoy Cabbage is distinct in its crinkly leaf structure. The beauty of a savoy cabbage is in the soft leaves. Most cabbage leaves, mainly the red and green varietals, are tough and hard, making it good for slaw and that’s about it! But savoy cabbage leaves are soft and supple, making it perfect for a fresh salad.
Adding a little tart green apple provides a tangy flavor and a little crunch. When you mix all these ingredients together with a blood orange dressing, you have the makings of really yummy spring salad!
Starting a Green House
My husband & I are purchasing a green house; not a small green house, a 10×20′ greenhouse! My husband is a bit of a ‘go big or go home’ kind of guy. He can’t wait to grow orchids and other tropical plants. I, on the other hand, look forward to starting vegetable seeds in the green house and moving them outdoor into the garden. I have grown my own garden for several years, but our growing season is short, so starting the seeds early will hopefully give us an advantage to actually producing a good crop before the first frost. I have purchased heirloom, non-GMO seeds and can’t wait to get digging in the dirt! We visited a Conservatory this past weekend and just as I was about to walk out the door, my eye spotted a most unusual orchid. I appropriately named it Bullwinkle! I am often astounded at God’s creativity and humor!
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In the design contest for state-mandated
recycling programs, California has managed to become the
captain of both teams.
The state's electronics recycling program,
launched in 2005 for televisions and computer monitors, is
based on an advanced recovery fee-ARF, in recycling circles-of
$6 to $10 levied on buyers of new equipment. The state moves
the money through a fund that reimburses collectors and
Although California was the first state to
mandate a program for defunct electronics, all the later states
that did so chose a different approach producer responsibility,
or extended producer responsibility (EPR) in wonk speak. The
agency that runs California's fee-based program for discarded
electronics recently adopted its own producer responsibility
strategic directive to shape future recycling initiatives. For
the guidance of the legislature, it also has prepared an
Extended Producer Responsibility Framework, into which future
product-specific or substance-specific activities could be
So the first state with ARF for computers and
televisions might also become the first state with a
multi-product EPR on its statutes.
If this happens, future mandatory recycling
programs on specific products would assign the costs-and much
of the implementation-to manufacturers. The extent to which
retailers or local government might become involved would be
decided on a case-by-case basis. What the California Integrated
Waste Management Board (CIWMB) is developing is a basic
structure for recycling. The choice of discarded goods it
should cover would be made separately.
British Columbia already uses that approach,
but it was adopted by the province's environmental agency
without the legislature writing a new law.
Scrapyards might wish to keep an eye on what
recyclables get selected for producer responsibility if
California enacts that approach.
In a preliminary assessment by CIWMB staff,
one of the five categories viewed as most eligible for
manufacturer responsibility was major appliances, a.k.a. white
goods. If a manufacturer responsibility law is passed and major
appliances become one of its elements, that might change the
current pathway of household to scrap processor to shredder. Or
even if the collection arrangements stay the same,
manufacturers might be required to provide some reimbursement
money along the way.
One reason major appliances made it onto the
preliminary list is that too many of them don't find their way
to scrapyards or to public landfill dumps that can divert them
to recycling channels. "Major appliances, along with furniture,
are the most commonly illegally dumped products and are
cumbersome and expensive items for local agencies to collect
and dispose of," a CIWMB staff document said.
At least one potential headache for the scrap
industry faded along the way. The list of 42 possible products
under such a California law was winnowed twice, first to a list
of 14 and then to a high-priority list of five.
Aside from major appliances, the finalists as
most-likely producer responsibility candidates were bulbs
containing mercury, paint, non-automotive batteries and
With computer monitors, televisions and DVD
players already covered under one existing program-and cell
phones under another-the electronics that eventually might be
recycled at manufacturer expense include audio equipment,
personal digital assistants (PDAs) and handheld games.
Even if California should pass a
multi-product manufacturer responsibility law ahead of states,
British Columbia created such a structure first by
administrative fiat. The province's product list includes
electronics, lead-acid batteries, oil, medications, paint, a
category covering solvents and pesticides, tires and beverage
containers. Manufacturers play a key role in the province's
recycling arrangements, although there is variation in the
extent to which such recycling is mandatory.
Tires used to be covered by a provincial
recycling incentive program, funded by a C$3 ARF-style
surcharge on every tire sold. Effective January 2007, however,
it was replaced by a recycling program run by the Rubber
Association of Canada, the Retail Council of Canada and the
Western Canada Tire Dealers Association.
Many electronics makers have expanded their
U.S. recycling activities over the past two years, even as most
remain opposed to legal mandates. Sony Corp. is cooperating
with Waste Management Inc.'s Recycle America unit to take back,
without charge, household discards originally made by Sony at
79 locations in 18 states, with more sites to come; Dell Inc.
is cooperating in many areas with Goodwill Industries in
handling recycling take-backs; and with an electronics
recycling law soon taking effect in Minnesota, Panasonic Corp.
of North America, Sharp Corp. and Toshiba America Electronic
Components Inc. have formed a consortium to handle
"The manufacturers are five years late
getting going but they're finally making a serious effort to do
something," said David Zimet, president of New Jersey
electronics recycler Hesstech LLC. "Let's give them a chance to
prove what they can do." He recently predicted that a
trial-and-error learning period, with manufacturers competing
among themselves to develop practical programs, should lead to
extremely efficient structures.
A potential model for manufacturer
responsibility in the United States is a Brussels-based
consortium called European Recycling Platform, which operates
through two contractors in nine European Union countries while
an affiliate is setting up operations in 20 other European
countries. Participating manufacturers include Braun,
Electrolux, Hewlett-Packard, Konica Minolta, Lucent
Technologies, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.
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Potential Water Tax Could Pay For Infrastructure Updates In Delaware
Delaware Governor Jack Markell proposed a new tax this month aimed at cleaning up the waterways and improving water and wastewater infrastructure.
Markell, a Democrat, called for "an $800 million program to clean Delaware waterways, curb stormwater runoff and flooding, and protect drinking water, suggesting a statewide tax that would cost most homeowners $45 a year, and more borrowing to pay for the effort," Delaware's News Journal reported.
"Somebody has to do this," Markell said in the report. "We have a fundamental responsibility, I believe, to leave the next generation cleaner water – water you can fish in, water you can swim in, not as many problems with drinking water, not as many problems with stormwater and all that flooding."
Water infrastructure would receive funding under the proposed plan. "Markell said about 30 percent of the revenues from [new fees] would go to wasterwater/drinking water upgrades, while stormwater upgrades would also get 30 percent. The remaining money would go to conservation and agriculture projects (15 percent); toxics removal, site cleanup and stream restoration (20 percent); and industrial upgrades (5 percent)," the Cape Gazette reported.
Under the existing system, the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund loan programs "have about $30 million annually available to fund wastewater and drinking water projects, which the governor said was not nearly enough to finance many of the critical projects," the report said.
The additional water infrastructure funding would "help finance these projects through a combination of low or no-interest loans, affordability grants, credit enhancements, matches for federal grants, and leveraged private financing, all of which will reduce the cost of constructing clean water projects for municipalities and other entities," the report said.
Along with the tax proposal, new annual fees would be levied under Markell's plan.
"Owners of multifamily, commercial and industrial properties also would pay annual fees on a sliding scale, capped at $25,000, to help fund the administration's initiative, which calls for cleaning up Delaware's waterways within a generation," The Republic reported.
"This is an ambitious goal, but we can do it if we have the essential resources," Markell said in the report.
Delaware has major struggles with water pollution. "From restrictions on eating fish caught in Delaware waters or a warning against swimming in lakes and rivers in the state, there's no denying Delaware's water is dirty," News Works reported.
"[It's] unacceptable, and it's embarrassing," Markell said in the report. "Virtually none of Delaware's waterways meet the water quality standards for their uses."
Currently, "94 percent of rivers don’t support healthy fish and aquatic life and 86 percent aren’t safe to swim in," WDDE, Delaware's NPR news station, reported.
“Nobody could say, ‘That’s the kind of place that I want to be,’” Markell said in the report. “Nobody could say, ‘That’s the kind of place that tourists would want to come,’ unless we make the improvements, and so this is what we [have to] do.”
Not everyone loves the plan. For instance, Delaware Senate Minority Leader Gary Simpson, R-Milford, questioned why this proposal is coming now.
"I think it's a bad time," he said in the News Journal. Along with the proposed gas tax, it's just the wrong approach to growing government."
Image credit: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en," © 2013 USACE HQ, used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license:
Want to publish your opinion?
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Name that film:
A white man is born fatherless in the south with birth defects that lead many to think he may never walk nor live a normal life. His saintly mother believes in his potential anyway. At a young age, the man learns to walk and sheds his exoskeleton of locomotive aids. Around this time, he also meets the love of his life, a vivacious girl who grows into a bold woman who parts ways with the man to have her own wild adventures. Meanwhile, the man reaches adulthood, and puts in a wartime stint in the U.S. military. During this stint, the man proves at first an indifferent asset, but during his one firefight, he turns out to be very valuable, saving the day singlehandedly, while also witnessing the death of one of his best friends. The man also spends much time on a small ocean vessel, serving alongside a rowdy, grizzled, hard-drinking man of the sea. This salty sailor serves as one of our man’s two best male friends; the other is a black man who first teaches our man the lessons of friendship before departing forever.
Our man wanders all around the world, his life brushing up against key historical moments of the 20th century. At some point he returns to his childhood home, and his mother dies. The man comes into considerable wealth through blind luck. Around this time, his lifelong love returns from her adventures, ready to commit to him. During their brief time together, they conceive a child. The couple part ways, due to the woman’s perceived inability to take care of the man. He does not raise the child through its early years but later makes an appearance in its life. The woman eventually dies in bed from illness. The man’s later years are hardly touched on, even though the movie has lavished much attention on his early and middle years.
The entire story dwells repeatedly on the theme of life’s uncertainty and, in contrast, on the notion of fate or coincidence. The film’s symbol for these themes is a small object seen hovering improbably in the air. A narrative frame scene punctuates the story, as does the main character’s drawling voice-over.
Forrest Gump; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.*
* Both movies were written by Eric Roth, a man who now owes me seventeen dollars, because I was dumb enough to take my wife, who was smart enough to help me ferret out Roth’s crimes against screenwriting. If you liked this round of Name That Film, be sure to check out the original at: http://madeinhead.org/anism/?p=114.
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May 15, 2007 > The Hayward Plunge
The Hayward Plunge
As the weather starts to warm and we move into the summer season, many of us fondly remember our first experiences learning to swim and days spent with friends around a public pool. In the Hayward area, more than likely, those memories are of the Hayward Plunge.
The Plunge was built in Memorial Park along Mission Boulevard by the City of Hayward in 1936 during the Great Depression. It was constructed with $26,000 from Works Project Administration funds of the federal government in concert with almost $70,000 from a local bond issue passed in 1934. The pool was designed by James Norbett of Richmond who drew designs for a similar pool in that community. City water mains were extended to Memorial Park to supply water to the indoor facility. It takes 333,000 gallons of water to fill both the main pool and the "tot" pool for smaller children. A contract to provide swimming suits went to Don Harder who ran a sporting goods store on Main Street and the contract for towels went to E.A. Massa on B Street.
On opening day - August 21, 1936 - over 3,000 people attended the dedication ceremonies. The entrance fee to swim was 25 cents for children and 35 cents for adults; to rent a swimsuit and a towel, it was an additional 45 cents. Ceremonies included an exhibition of swimming and diving by national champions. Councilman Dan Leidig stated in his opening remarks, "The city cannot stand still. This pool marks the beginning of a new era of progress for our city." At its opening, the Plunge was considered one of the most up-to-date swimming facilities in the entire country, with an automatic chlorination system and a heating system designed to maintain a 78 - 82 degree water temperature throughout the year.
Mr. Lynn Clayton Van Houten, a swimming instructor and pool manager of the YMCA in San Francisco was hired to The Hayward Plunge as the very first manager; his monthly salary was $200. Mr. Van Houten, an ex-serviceman and a student at the University of Michigan with previous experience in Banff, Canada, New Jersey, Miami and Santa Monica moved to Hayward and became an integral part of the community. In 1958, he married Cecilia Klee Sorensen, a Hayward native who worked at the Plunge as a cashier, lifeguard and instructor.
Public facilities are always big jobs, but throw in a pool and thousands of users every year and it is a daunting task. In the early days, the Plunge was closed every other year for cleaning, painting and repairs. This usually occurred in the winter months when the pool was less busy.
The Plunge was also a regular host for the Pacific Swimming Championships and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) meets. A gallery was added to accommodate spectators in 1938 and permanent bleachers were installed in 1941. The Plunge was actually THE place to go swimming for many years until the 1950's when the Hayward Area Parks and Recreation District (HARD) built pools at five high schools in conjunction with the school districts.
During the early years, the Plunge made money. However, by 1970, after years of operating losses, the city turned over the management of the pool to HARD since they were managing the other pools in the area. HARD turned the operation around and has done a superb job running the facility over the past 37 years. They have developed a master plan for the Plunge and continue to improve it as funds become available. In 2002, the Plunge underwent a $460,000 facelift, its first major remodeling since construction. This also included some seismic upgrades with reinforcing steel beams supporting the building and roof by encasing them in concrete at the deck level.
In 2006, exterior painting was completed as The Plunge celebrated its 70th anniversary; the original electric sign was restored and turned on once again. The Hayward Plunge, a long-standing Hayward area institution continues to be a community asset serving multiple generations of Hayward residents.
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Freaks & Errors: The Greatest Film About Stamp Collectors
Freaks & Errors: The Greatest Film About Stamp Collectors
Obsession, money, mystery & postage. No hobby holds the lifelong devotion & enthusiasm of its collectors like philately can.
Obsession, money, mystery & postage. No hobby holds the lifelong devotion & enthusiasm of its collectors like philately can. Read more
About this project
“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated” -Mark Twain
For many generations, stamp collecting was a right of passage, a portal to exotic lands, strange languages and unknown cultures, but, the past 30 years hasn’t been kind to the hobby. As digital methods accelerate communication, postal systems fail and young generations are inundated with alternative entertainment, stamps and their collectors are facing an uncertain future with seemingly irrelevant hobby.
Our film opens up the quiet world of stamp collecting, to show just how action-packed it is. We are searching to find out who collects stamps and more importantly.. why? We will reveal some of the rarest legends in the hobby, both the eccentric people and fabled stamps. The film uncovers the common influences that connect all stamp collectors and whether nurture, nature or both is the driving force triggering the collectors “gene”. In addition, we’ll unveil the global world of philatelic business, including astronomically-valued auctions, anonymous collectors, mysteries and scandals.
From general accumulators to niche collectors and everyone in between, Freaks & Errors: A Rare Collection, looks at the stamps, the people and the business. We want to find out if the hobby is still relevant in an age of instant information? What motivates these collectors to hunt and discover new treasures? What connects these people in spite of varied interests, locales, cultures and geography? We will try to define stamp collecting’s place in an increasingly technological world and rapidly changing entertainment model. We’ll also follow collectors, dealers and auctioneers to reveal a little known billion-dollar-a-year industry. What has been the influence that stamps have had on popular culture, art, literature, politics, television and film.
Freaks & Errors is a quest to discover if the “Hobby of Kings,” is in danger of extinction or if a new breed of collector will take the throne.
WHY STAMP COLLECTORS?
When anyone asks what we're working on, the answer "...a documentary on stamp collectors... " usually garners a perplexed, but curious response. After a few minutes of stamp talk, some people will admit that they were once collectors themselves and most have a father, mother or grandparent that collected at one time. Without fail though, ALL want to know more about this fascinatiing hobby. Some of the questions they ask: who's collecting MARIA SHARAPOVA!? What they're collecting, and of course the big question... HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH!?
The fact that there has never been a feature-length documentary on stamp collectors is motivation enough to get out the cameras, but once we did, it became so much more. Even before the first collector breaks into his or her story, the philatelic world is filled with awe and wonder. Stamps are time capsules, they represent a country’s people, culture, geography, history, past and often times they carry the future with them from person to person, one side of the world to the other.
This film is an investigation into love, devotion and a collective reverence.
HOW WE GOT HERE
Up until now, we have completely self-funded this film. From LA to Monaco we have been traveling and shooting, uncovering legendary collectors, following leads on mysterious stamps that come in and out of the public's eye once a generation and most importantly, connecting with collectors and harvesting their stories. We've found that the stamp collecting bond is strong and universal, regardless of age, race, or interest... for the most part, stamps are all that matters.
We have gotten some amazing interviews, stunning philatelic imagery and have begun the process of weaving our story together. Editing has begun, but we have quite a bit of shooting to complete, as well as final edits and finishing. We have exhausted our funds and hope that this is a story that you find as riveting as we do.
HOW WE CAN MOVE FORWARD
We will use all funds to finish the film, any remaining funds will be used for distribution, marketing and promotional material.
Reaching out to the Kickstarter community is a first for us, we hope that people see themselves, one of their family members, friends or favorite people in these collectors and find it a community that they want to be a part of.
They call stamp collecting, "The Quiet Excitement," we are making an exciting film about a quiet world and we want YOU to be a part of it.
Risks and challenges
Our goal is to complete the film by October, 2013. The big question about completion has to do with one, elusive, legendary stamp... the philatelic "Holy Grail," the Penny Magenta. The Penny Magenta is by far the most famous and infamous stamp in the world and currently, its future is a mystery. There has been rumors that it might come out of hiding and up for sale, but these rumors have surfaced before. We have an ending in mind, one that we are shooting for now, but if the stamp does go to auction or transfers ownership, we have an alternate ending that will fit perfectly with the story we are trying to tell, the mystery we're trying to solve.
Another risk we see after the film is done, is that no one will watch it. We're approaching this the only way we know how, using our experience (20 years+) in advertising and marketing, as well as bringing artists, musicians, writers and others together for a combination traditional, social and grass roots campaign of spreading the word .
We have been in commercial production for many years and are all too familiar with set-backs, obstacles and the occasional mishap. We are also familiar with constant communication, we know that anyone investing in this film, wants to know the what, when and where and we are dedicated to provided constant updates on production, post-production, release, screenings, etc. If successfully funded, we will set up updates on our yet-to-be-completed website and will let everyone know where we stand.
In addition, we're pretty sure that we will have the majority of the 40,000,000+ stamp collectors in the world jumping at the chance to see their hobby on the big screen, this is an incredible motivator and we are boiling over with excitement to finish the film!
Thank you so much for taking the time to check us out and we hope we can count on you for support. -Mark & JonLearn about accountability on Kickstarter
Support this project
- (30 days)
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EVALUATION - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary task?
I think my two products link well together as the same dress sense and colour schemes are used, so a house style is used.
Digipak front cover:
The front cover of the digipak is similar to this shot in the video as the main character looks trapped between two dark walls with light at the end of the tunnel. The dress sense is similar and the hairstyle is the same to keep that continuity throughout the project. Both use stereotypical conventions of an indie rock band as the album cover shows the band members together but they are not smiling and the video makes the boy look isolated.
The poster shows the band members together which is needed in a music poster but even in here the main character looks unattached from his band mates.
To promote a music video, companies will use viral marketing which means they will use existing sites to feature their video, like on social networking sites like, Facebook, msn and twitter. Newspapers, television adverts, billboards and even radio is used to promote music videos.
But mainly music channels are used to show music videos and the song its self is a main promoter. Promotion of the song is the most important thing before we can think of promoting the video.
I have posted both my ancillary tasks and my main product on Facebook and on my blog so people can view it worldwide. People can also leave comments so I can receive feedback on where I can improve on my work.
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Perfectionists Deserve a Break…
by Dr. Randy Borum
“Don’t be such a perfectionist!” Do you get tired of hearing this from coaches and teammates? Well, you may in luck. Researchers have been learning that perfectionism has a positive side too.
Over the years, research has produced some seemingly contradictory findings on perfectionism’s role in performance. While some studies show perfectionism to be a central quality of elite athletes like Olympic champions, other studies have found that perfectionism undermines athletic performance.
Attempting to understand these different results, researchers have found that perfectionism has at least two different parts (or facets) – each has somewhat different effects on performance. One facet is a positive striving for perfection, which is shown in “having high personal standards, setting exacting standards for one's performance, and striving for excellence” (Stoll, Lau, & Stoeber, In Press). The other facet has been called “self critical perfectionism,” which involves “critical self-evaluations of one's performance, concern over mistakes, and feelings of discrepancy between expectations and results” (Stoll, Lau, & Stoeber, In Press).
Studies have found that those who have a strong positive striving for perfection have a more positive mood, more endurance, better performance, less anxiety, and more confidence in competitive endeavors. But – and here’s the catch – those benefits can fizzle out for those who also possess a high degree of self critical perfectionism. That self-criticality has been linked to depression, stress, increased competitive anxiety, less confidence during competition, decreased performance, and burnout.
For the perfectionistic combat sport athlete, these findings suggest that you can keep your lofty standards, but consider cutting yourself a break when you err or fall short. If you tend toward perfectionism, work with it, not against it. Learn to control the stream of negative shouts that flow from your inner critic. Learn to learn from your mistakes, not to react to them. In competition, responding to your own mistakes with frustration, worry or anger will only distract you and undermine your confidence. Have cue words ready to quickly re-focus yourself on the strength – not the limitations – of your performance and on moving forward, not looking back. There will be plenty of time later to reflect, analyze and learn about what you could have done differently. But when someone is punching you in the face or bending your joints in unintended direction – that’s probably not the best time.
For those interested in reading more research on perfectionism and sport performance, here are some references:
M.H. Anshel and H. Mansouri, Influences of perfectionism on motor performance, affect, and causal attributions in response to critical information feedback, Journal of Sport Behavior 28 (2005), pp. 99–124.
D.M. Dunkley, D.C. Zuroff and K.R. Blankstein, Self-critical perfectionism and daily affect: Dispositional and situational influences on stress and coping, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (2003), pp. 234–252.
J.G.H. Dunn, J.K. Gotwals and J.C. Dunn, An examination of the domain specificity of perfectionism among intercollegiate student-athletes, Personality and Individual Differences 38 (2005), pp. 1439–1448.
M.W. Enns and B.J. Cox, The nature and assessment of perfectionism: A critical analysis. In: G.L. Flett and P.L. Hewitt, Editors, Perfectionism: Theory, research, and treatment, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC (2002), pp. 33–62.
A.J. Elliot and D.E. Conroy, Beyond the dichotomous model of achievement goals in sport and exercise psychology, Sport and Exercise Psychology Review 1 (2005), pp. 17–25.
G.L. Flett and P.L. Hewitt, The perils of perfectionism in sports and exercise, Current Directions in Psychological Science 14 (2005), pp. 14–18.
G.L. Flett and P.L. Hewitt, Perfectionism and maladjustment: An overview of theoretical, definitional, and treatment issues. In: G.L. Flett and P.L. Hewitt, Editors, Perfectionism: Theory, research, and treatment, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC (2002), pp. 5–13.
Hall, H. K. (2006). Perfectionism: A hallmark quality of world class performers, or a psychological impediment to athletic development?. In D. Hackfort, & G. Tenenbaum (Eds.), Essential processes for attaining peak performance (Vol. 1, pp. 178–211).
J. Stoeber and K. Otto, Positive conceptions of perfectionism: Approaches, evidence, challenges, Personality and Social Psychology Review 10 (2006), pp. 295–319.
Stoeber, J., Stoll, O., Pescheck, E., & Otto, K. (in press). Perfectionism and achievement goals in athletes: Relations with approach and avoidance orientations in mastery and performance goals. Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
Stoll, O., Lau, A. & Stoeber, J. (In Press). Perfectionism and performance in a new basketball training task: Does striving for perfection enhance or undermine performance?
Psychology of Sport and Exercise.
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The cost of corruption in Afghanistan rose sharply last year to 3.9 billion US dollars (£2.5 billion), and half of all Afghans bribed public officials for services, the UN has said. The findings came despite repeated promises by President Hamid Karzai to clean up his government.
The international community has long expressed concern about corruption in Afghanistan because it reduces confidence in the Western-backed government.
Donor nations also fear aid money could be diverted by corrupt officials or mismanaged. Mr Karzai ordered his ministries, prosecutors and judiciary to fight bribery, nepotism and cronyism with a series of measures in July.
But a survey by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and Afghanistan's anti-corruption unit showed slight improvement in curbing the common practice of paying bribes for public services in the country. "Corruption means you don't get the best in the public sector, you get the best connected or those with the higher income," UN envoy Jean-Luc Lemahieu said at a news conference.
Fifty per cent of the adult population had to pay at least one bribe to a public official in 2012, a 9% drop from 2009, according to the findings, based on interviews last year with 6,700 Afghan adults from across the country. Meanwhile, the total cost of bribes paid to public officials increased 40% to 3.9 billion dollars
That amount was double the revenue collected by the government to provide services, said Mr Lemahieu, head of the UNODC. He also noted that many poor people are unable to pay bribes, leaving them without access to public services or the ability to get government jobs.
The Afghan High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption pledged to continue its efforts in fighting the problem, saying the report was an important step toward locating priority areas.
One particularly troubling trend was the emergence of education as one of the most vulnerable sectors. The number of Afghans bribing a teacher jumped from 16% in 2009 to 51% in 2012, according to the survey. Offers were often received for improving exam results and providing information about the contents of the tests in exchange for bribes.
The survey also found that more of the public finds bribery acceptable. Of the adults interviewed last year, 68% said it was acceptable for a civil servant to supplement a low salary by accepting small bribes compared with 42 % in 2009.
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- freely available
Nanomaterials 2013, 3(2), 229-241; doi:10.3390/nano3020229
Published: 26 April 2013
Abstract: In this work, we have studied Joule heating in carbon nanotube based very large scale integration (VLSI) interconnects and incorporated Joule heating influenced scattering in our previously developed current transport model. The theoretical model explains breakdown in carbon nanotube resistance which limits the current density. We have also studied scattering parameters of carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects and compared with the earlier work. For 1 µm length single-wall carbon nanotube, 3 dB frequency in S12 parameter reduces to ~120 GHz from 1 THz considering Joule heating. It has been found that bias voltage has little effect on scattering parameters, while length has very strong effect on scattering parameters.
The current complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology in nm- and sub-nm node for very large scale integration (VLSI) is facing challenges due to performance limitation of Cu/low-k dielectric material as an interconnection, because of increased resistivity of Cu, electromigartion and void formation [1,2]. Many alternatives to Cu interconnection in nanometer technology node have been proposed in the literature, including optical interconnects. The 1D carbon nanotubes and 2D graphene nanoribbons are found to be very promising alternatives to current Cu interconnects for use in nm-CMOS technology . Early discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 by Iijima and its excellent electrical, mechanical and thermal properties and established synthesis techniques [5,6,7,8,9], have led to major R&D efforts in integrating carbon nanotubes in CMOS processes [6,7,8,9,10], whereas graphene nanoribbon as a possible substitute for Cu interconnect is also evolving .
Though carbon nanotube has high thermal conductivity, it has been observed experimentally that the conducting carbon nanotube breaks down due to Joule heating which thus limits its current density [11,12]. Notable work has been done in electrical modeling of carbon nanotube as an interconnect material, substituting Cu/low-k from quantum and classical considerations [13,14,15]. Recently, Srivastava et al. have conducted exhaustive studies on single-wall carbon nanotube interconnect from one-dimensional fluid model and included electron-electron repulsive interaction and extended to multi-wall carbon nanotubes and bundles of single-wall carbon nanotubes . Thermal effects in VLSI interconnect limits the current density and there have been problems of breakdown in carbon nanotubes due to resistive heating [18,19,20,21]. Huang et al. have studied thermal transport and observed experimentally that the hottest spot is located at the center of the tube from where breakdown is initiated. The current transport is diffusive and not ballistic. Santini has done exhaustive experimental studies on Joule heating-induced breakdown of carbon nanotube interconnects and attribute to the defect sites as also observed by Huang et al. . Naeemi and Meindl [20,21] have studied temperature coefficient of resistance of single- and multi-wall carbon nanotube interconnects and related to various electron-phonon scattering mechanisms. Kitsuki et al. and Yamada et al. have explained experimental results of current induced breakdown in carbon nano fibers. In this work, we have examined the problem of Joule heating in carbon nanotube interconnects based on one-dimensional fluid model of electronic transport considering various scattering mechanisms and studied the temperature distribution across the length of the nanotube and scattering parameters. In Section 2 of the paper, we have developed one-dimensional fluid model incorporating thermal effects. In Section 3, temperature profiling across the length of the carbon nanotube is presented followed by the results and discussion. Conclusion is presented in Section 4.
2. Electrical and Thermal Transport Model
The conducting single-wall, multi-wall and bundle of single-wall carbon nanotube have been considered for possible replacement of Cu/low-k dielectric interconnects used in current CMOS technology depending upon the type of the interconnect, such as whether local or global. In the present work, we have considered Joule heating in a metallic single-wall carbon nanotube for better understanding of breakdown and also for analytical simplicity.
In our earlier work , we have made modification in two-dimensional fluid model and included electron-electron repulsive interaction and considered distribution of conduction electrons on the lateral surface of single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) cylindrical shell. The analysis reduces to semi-classical one-dimensional fluid model. The SWCNT is a two-dimensional graphene sheet rolled to form a cylindrical nanotube of infinitesimally thin layer. Thus, conduction electrons are distributed on the lateral surface of the SWCNT and motion of electrons is confined to the surface. As the diameter of CNT is very small we can also assume that electron is confined in one-dimensional space. We can assume that cloud of electrons is moving across the surface of the nanotube. Figure 1 shows a structure of a single wall carbon nanotube.
We have modified the relaxation frequency (v) in Equation (1) considering the effective mean free path as follows,
In Equation (2), vF is Fermi velocity of electron and λeff is effective mean free path of an electron which accounts for acoustic and optical phonon scattering mechanism responsible for increased resistance of the interconnect. The spontaneous scattering length for emitting an optical phonon (λop) and acoustic phonon (λac) can be estimated as follows ,
These two scattering lengths depend on diameter of the carbon nanotube (D) and surrounding temperature (T). The scattering length due to optical phonon absorption, λop,abs has been modeled by the following equation ,
In Equation (5), Nop describes the optical phonon occupation which can be calculated from Bose-Einstein statistics given by,
In Equations (5), (7) and (8), Nop(300) is the value of phonon occupation function at 300 K. KB in Equation (8) is the Boltzmann constant. Carrier scattering path due to optical emission under the influence of electric field ( ) depends on both the electric field (V/l) and temperature (T). The effective mean free path can now be calculated by Matthiessen’s rule as follows,
Assuming SWCNT as a good conductor and considering only one-dimensional flow we can deduce the current density from Equation (1) which is given by,
Combining Equations (12) and (13), we obtain,
In Equation (18), h is the height of SWCNT over the perfectly conducting plane and R0 is quantum resistance taken as 12.906 kΩ and LM is described by the Equation (20) as the magnetic inductance.
In thermal modeling of SWCNT interconnect material, R(V, D) is the voltage (V) and diameter (D) dependent critical parameter which directly depends on the effective mean free path (λeff). Increase in temperature of interconnect triggers various scattering processes which result in increase of the resistance. This increased resistance limits the current density and eventually limits heat generation. Consequently, an iterative solution is needed to find out the actual converged value for resistance instead of using a direct equation.
3. Results and Discussion
Temperature profiles along the SWCNT length can be numerically solved from steady state heat equation given by Carslaw and Jaeger ,
Consider differential length of CNT and calculate mean free path as well as differential resistance for differential element using Equations (10) and (19). Estimate total resistance of SWCNT by summing all differential resistances.
Calculate current from Equation I = V/(R + Rc), where Rc is the contact resistance 30 KΩ .
Calculate I2R per unit length for heat generation and then use Equation (21) to get temperature profile over the CNT length.
Use current temperature profile as the initial temperature for next iteration. Repeat steps 1 to 4 until convergence is obtained.
Figure 3 shows the temperature profile over the length of SWCNT of 2 µm length. At different bias voltages, the temperature profile varies over the length. At biasing voltage above 3 V, the temperature reaches close to the breakdown temperature of 873 K . From Figure 3, it can be inferred that biasing voltage less than 4 V is not sufficient enough for causing the breakdown of SWCNT. It is to be mentioned that for low biasing, the iteration requires less than 5 iterations to converge. On the other hand, high bias voltage more than 4 V, calculation takes more iteration to converge.
Figure 4 shows power dissipation versus bias voltage. For 4 V biasing voltage, Joule heating power is close to 0.13 mW. As a matter of fact, at a certain bias voltage enough heat will be produced that will be sufficient for inducing breakdown in SWCNT at the mid-point. Higher biasing voltage increases optical phonon emission induced by the higher electric field. According to the Equation (8), electron scattering length decreases with increase in bias voltage which contributes to decrease in effective mean free path (λeff). The total resistance increases with decreasing effective scattering length. This increase in resistance contributes to increase in Joule heating.
Using Equations (16)–(18), we have calculated kinetic inductance, LK = 3.6 nH/µm, quantum capacitance, CQ = 90 aF/µm and electrostatic capacitance CE = 70 aF/µm of SWCNT transmission line to study S-parameters. Typically, a SWCNT diameter is ~1 nm and oxide thickness over which SWCNT is deposited is ~100 Å. The calculated value of LM ~1 pH/μm which is very small compared to the value of LK. The calculated kinetic inductance is consistent with the value calculated in for metallic CNTs. It is apparent from Equations (16)–(20) that inductance and capacitance are constant for a specific SWCNT with a given length and diameter. On the other hand, resistance of SWCNT interconnect is a function of bias voltage, SWCNT diameter, length, and temperature which influences scattering parameters. Scattering Parameter S11 is the ratio of power reflected from the transmission line to the incident power. Scattering Parameter S12 is the ratio of power transmitted through the transmission line to the incident power. Two port network parameters S11 and S12 have been calculated considering lumped elements and normalized by 50 ohm impedance. Although transmission line is a distributed device, we have used lumped element model to calculate S-parameters for the sake of efficient computation. Figure 5, Figure 6 show plots of S11 and S12 parameters of SWCNT at 0.1 V bias voltage. At higher frequencies inductive and capacitive terms dominate over the resistive term which results in an oscillatory behavior of S-parameters as observed in Figure 5, Figure 6. Figure 5 for the S11 parameter exhibits an oscillatory behavior for 100 µm long interconnect above 10 GHz in the frequency range studied. Figure 6 for the S12 parameter shows an oscillatory behavior for both 10 µm and 100 µm long interconnects above 70 GHz and 7 GHz, respectively. However, the short interconnect of 1 µm length does not show any oscillatory behavior for S11 and S12 parameters.
Table 1 summarizes the comparison of results with that reported in without considering the Joule heating and with the Joule heating induced scattering with this current model. We have considered the frequency band in which value of S12 parameter is within −3 dB of its maximum value at 0.1 V. It is noticeable from Table 1 that the bandwidth reduces considering Joule heating due to scattering in comparison to the bandwidth without Joule heating. The frequency band width for a interconnect decreases considering Joule heating induced scattering and increased resistance.
|Table 1. S12 parameters of SWCNT.|
|Length of SWCNT (µm)||Band Width (GHz) without Scattering ||Band Width (GHz) with Scattering|
Figure 7 shows resistance variation with the applied current for short local and global interconnects lengths. It is observed that breakdown in SWCNT occurs due to Joule heating which results in an infinite increase in resistance. This theoretical observation agrees with the experimental observation . Figure 8 shows the dependence of S12 on bias voltages and shows an increase in S12 with increased bias voltage.
In this work, we have incorporated Joule heating induced phenomenon in 1D fluid model of CNT interconnects. We have studied scattering parameters of SWCNT for short, local and global interconnect lengths with different biasing voltages. We have observed that the bias voltage does not greatly affect the scattering parameters; on the other hand it significantly influences Joule heating. The breakdown shown in resistance versus current is clearly notable. The presented thermal model is very useful in experimental studies related to CNT integrated in nm- and sub-nm CMOS technology.
Part of the work is supported by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory under agreement number FA9453-10-1-0002. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon.
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- Santini, C.A.; Vereecken, P.M.; Haesendonck, C.V. Growth of carbon nanotube branches by electrochemical decoration of carbon nanotubes. Mater. Lett. 2012, 88, 33–35, doi:10.1016/j.matlet.2012.08.008.
- Burke, P.J. Lüttinger Liquid Theory as a model of the gigahertz electrical properties of carbon nanotubes. IEEE Trans. Nanotechnol. 2002, 1, 129–144, doi:10.1109/TNANO.2002.806823.
- Salahuddin, S.; Lundstrom, M.; Datta, S. Transport effects on signal propagation in quantum wires. IEEE Trans. Electron Devices 2005, 52, 1734–1742, doi:10.1109/TED.2005.852170.
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© 2013 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
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CLARK — The Clark Public Library will celebrate National Library Week by offering two behind the scenes tours of the library on Tuesday, April 10 at 5:30 p.m. and again on Thursday, April 12 at 11 a.m. Library Director, Patty Anderson, will show patrons what goes on behind the front desk and how new books make their way to the shelves. Come see the library’s state-of-the-art computer lab and sign up for a free library program.
“I look forward to sharing the amazing resources the library offers. Whether you are a job seeker looking for materials to land a new job, a parent looking for free activities for children or a student searching for your next favorite book, the library has what you are looking for,” commented Anderson.
During National Library Week, the library is hosting a variety of free programs for all ages. Children’s programs include the Lego Club on Tuesday, April 10 at 7 p.m., a library scavenger hunt on Wednesday, April 11 at 2:30 p.m. and Let’s Bloom Together on Friday, April 13 at 10 a.m. Teens may attend a flower pot decoupage program on Thursday, April 12 at 3:30 p.m. The week will wrap up with Hollywood Musicals featuring Skip Ungar, pianist and music historian on Sunday, April 15 at 2 p.m.
Registration is required for all programs. Please register at our online calendar at http://www.clarklibrary.org, call 732-388-5999 or stop by the library.
The Clark Library at 303 Westfield Ave. in Clark.
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Statements made over the internet
The internet albeit enhancing the ways in which we communicate with each other, do business and act as consumers also brings with it certain problems. For example the amount of comments and publications added to the web on a daily basis is an extremely difficult thing to track. As a consequence of this the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have their work cut out when trying to police potentially defamatory statements.
What is meant by a defamatory statement?
A defamatory statement is one which is false and causes damage to a person’s reputation or otherwise does them harm.
Will Internet Service Providers be liable for defamatory statements made over the internet?
There is a defence under Section 1 of the Defamation Act which is intended to protect intermediaries, who could otherwise be liable for publishing a defamatory statement on the internet.
What needs to be shown in order to fall within this defence?
In order for an individual to fall within this defence the following things will need to be shown:
- That the individual was not the author, editor or publishes of the statement
- That the individual took reasonable care in relation to its publication
- That the individual did not know and had no reason to believe that what he did caused or contributed to the publication of a defamatory statement
What is meant by author, editor or publisher?
Section 1(2) of the Defamation Act provides definitions of what is meant by author, editor or publisher. They are as follows:
- Author – the originator of the statement
- Editor – a person having editorial control or equivalent responsibility for the content of the statement or the decision to publish it
- Publisher – a commercial publisher, that is, a person whose business is issuing material to the public, or a section of the public, who issues material containing the statement in the course of that business
Under what circumstances will an individual not be considered an author, editor or publisher?
According to the Defamation Act a person will not be considered to be an author, editor or publisher if he is only involved in the following:
- In processing, making copies of, distributing or selling any electronic medium in or on which the statement is recorded
- As an operator or provider of a system or service by means of which a statement is made available in electronic form
- As an operator of or provider of access to a communication system by means of which the statement is transmitted or made available by a person over whom he had no effective control
What is the purpose of this defence?
The main purpose of the above defence is to ensure that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other intermediaries are intended to benefit from the defence by falling into one of the above categories of exclusions.
The second two of the most relevant for Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Is there any possibility that an Internet Service Provider could become a publisher under the Defamation Act?
There is the possibility that an Internet Service Provider could be deemed to be a publisher in relation to a defamatory statement and thus liable for the publication of this statement.
When will this occur?
The possibility of this occurring happens when an Internet Service Provider (ISP) has been made aware of the existence of a defamatory statement. An Internet Service Provider can thus be deemed to be a common law publisher when they have been made aware of a defamatory statement and have taken no action to remove the existence of the statement.
Accordingly once it was established that the Internet Service Provider was in fact a publisher then the ISP would not be able to successfully argue that it did not know, and had reason to believe, that what it did caused or contributed to the publication of the defamatory statement.
What should an Internet Service Provider (ISP) do when they have been made aware of a defamatory statement?
When an Internet Service Provider has been made aware of a defamatory statement, in order to rely on the Section 1 defence, they must remove the allegedly defamatory postings as soon as they have been made aware of their existence.
What is this removal process called?
The removal process is called a notice and take down procedure.
Can an Internet Service Provider first investigate the claim before removing it?
The Internet Service Provider would not be entitled to first investigate the merits of the allegation not to assess the availability of other libel defences. This would only be able to be done if the Internet Service Provider suspends access to the posting while it does so.
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NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE 1979 STUDY
Updated: Oct 15, 2020
One of my passions is to study and screenshot my way through films. By doing this I can study the camera angles, shadows, interesting lines created by set pieces, color to set mood or location, diegetic vs nondiegetic light sources etc. So much goes into film to pull off the magic or in this case the horror. The horror of the nosferatu. This is the German remake done in 1979 by Werner Herzog starring Klaus Kinski. Since most actors were bilingual on the production they filmed it in English and German simultaneously. I only prefer the German language version over the English because Renfield's laughs are a bit more crazed and maniacal (thus enjoyable). Enough with the intro, onto some of my findings!
Here we start off near the beginning of the film. Everything is bright and open and white. The lighting is diffuse and ethereal. It gives off a heavenly vibe. This is everything is antithesis to what is to come. Before the dark horror and undead cursed souls.
One of my favorite shots from the film. Here we are with Mr. Harker at the castle meeting Count Dracula and sitting down to dinner. The shadows on the walls add an ominous feel and the high camera angle suggests that we see and know more than the main character at this point as he is being lead into a restrictive space. Dracula's head is clearly visible from the contrast of his pale skin and the dark of the wood behind him. Mr. Harker is a dark silhouette like his knowledge, a vague shape in the dark with nothing concrete to make judgement on yet.
Werner Herzog knows what he wants us to focus on and leaves out extraneous details like the backgrounds at times. This sharp contrast of the white and black with the sharpness of the light cut an imposing sight with nothing to distract your eye from the uncomfortable feeling the performance is giving off. The control of the falloff is impressive.
If what we are to focus on is a set piece then flags are used block the light into narrow shafts. The extreme shaping of the light in a few of these shots help heighten the otherworldly feeling of Castle Dracula. Darkness pervades and we are only shown what Dracula want's us to see.
I love lighting that is pretending to be diegetic. Here we have a lit candle on the desk and yet the signing of the contact for Dracula's new house is so important more light is used to spotlight the key moment. Mr. Harker is only lit in profile which gives some nice shaping to his face and helps sell that the lighting as actually coming from the candle. I wish my candles could burn that bright.
Recreation of the classic shot from the silent film from 1922. Similar coloring as the hand dyed cells from that scene as well that simulated nighttime. Two soft spotlights on the two actors. That corner of the room can fall into complete darkness.
Yet another "candle lit" shot. Love the circular composition too from the central figures. Another shot where flags were used to cut off the light. Looks like a renaissance painting.
Super cool upshot of Dracula on the ship stalking the crew. Sharp spotlight lighting from underneath help with the eerie situation. The lines of the rigging and mast also help add visual interest and a visual reminder of where we are.
Spotlights stronger than the moon and a gradient on the back building help us "see in the dark" and follow the action with the important moving of the coffins.
Guess who's outside? It's Dracula! How can you tell? He's in the "moonlight." Since the days of silent films blue = night. Or more accurately, blue = moonlight. Here is an extreme example of color gels being used to tint lights so inside vs outside is blatantly obvious.
Alright, last one. No reflection! But to show the stalking danger and imminent threat shadows are used to show his presence. It's not physically correct for the lighting of the rest of the room, but it helps the story so it doesn't matter.
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Clearly, only new data will resolve this controversy. Personally, what I would like to see is mass spectroscopic detection of arsenic-bearing nucleotides (both from the cellular pool and from hydrolyzing the DNA) and other arsenic-bearing metabolites that must be present. The nucleotides would be particularly key, as one of the critics (Steven Benner) points out that DNA containing arsenic implies the existence of nucleotide triphosphates with arsenate substituting in the alpha (closest to the sugar) position.
I'm also surprised nobody has jumped in to sequence the bug's genome. While it won't shed any immediate light on the controversy, it would be some easy publicity for somebody. Ion Torrent is already making hay of BGI using their instrument to knock off the German food poisoning bug in 3 days, though unfortunately their marketing department has already decided to emphasize the meaningless number of 2 hours for a run. Even if the bacterium turns out not to employ arsenic, it is quite tolerant of it and having the sequence around would be valuable.
On a lighter note, could we get a better name for the bug? GFAJ-1 just doesn't roll off the tongue. Would "Borgia monolakensis" be a possibility?
The coverage in the journals does have one really depressing angle. In a Nature news item, one researcher says
But some principal investigators are reluctant to spend their resources, and their students' time, replicating the work. "If you extended the results to show there is no detectable arsenic, where could you publish that?" asks Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "How could the young person who was asked to do that work ever get a job?"
This is a disappointing attitude; an issue has been raised in science and needs to be resolved by the scientific method. Disproving the paper, should that be the case, is an important publication. Clearly, Science has a moral obligation to publish quality attempts to rebut a paper in their pages (and indeed, just did this with the XMRV controversy). Furthermore, there is PLoS One, which would certainly publish a well-done paper in the field even if Science rejected it. In any case, as noted above, the bug has a high tolerance for arsenic and that could be a valuable line of inquiry. It would not be the first time the attempts to refute a controversial paper spawned a whole new field of work; note the John Cairns E.coli adaptive mutation affair: a claim was made that mutations favoring a bacterium were occurring at a higher than expected rate, and a lot of work illuminated new details of evolutionary selection on bacteria.
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I have a file with content as
123 OneTwoThree 234 TwoThreeFour 345 ThreeFourFive
I want to convert this file into something like this
OneTwoThree 123 TwoThreeFour 234 ThreeFourFive 345
Here the first column entries must get replaced at 25th place.
If second column of original file have more letters that 25 then, rest letter must get skipped that means it should remove all characters after the 25th
e.g. in above sample output file,
1 of first column is at 26th position.
Is it possible to do this with the help of awk, sed or any such command line tool ?
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By balancing the melt flow index and melt temperature, the ePLA-HF (high flow PLA) can flow smoothly in a molten state and cool fast during printing. In this way, it can achieve smooth printing without clogging and fast cooling without deformation during high-speed printing.
- Smooth flow without blocking.
- Faster cooling and forming.
- More suitable for high-speed printing.
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6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade
Who We Are
The 6th Canadian Combat Support Brigade (6 CCSB) is an adaptable and capable formation providing combat enabling support across the Full Spectrum of Operations (FSO) in order to achieve the Canadian Army (CA) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) objectives.
Stood up in April 2018, 6 CCSB generates professional, specialized, and resilient high-readiness forces that provide sustained, scalable and coordinated combat support enablers and effects to operations.
What We Do
6 CCSB is a mixed team of Regular Force and Primary Reserve soldiers, supported by civilians, who operate alongside Whole-of-Government (WoG) colleagues, non-governmental agencies, and coalition partners to support CAF missions.
Formations and Units
For more information about the vehicles and weapons used by the Canadian Army, visit our Equipment page.
Frédéric Pruneau, CD
Brigade Sergeant Major:
Chief Warrant Officer
Dave R. Limon
The 6th Canadian Combat Support Brigade originated as the Canadian Army Enablers Group (CAEG) in April 2014. While many of the combat enablers existed independently prior to the Afghanistan campaign, it was the experience of that conflict that highlighted the operational impact of synchronizing and integrating effects across the information operations domain. The Canadian Army Enablers Group was created to institutionalize these lessons into the greater Canadian Army.
Originally formed as part of the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, the 6th Canadian Combat Support Brigade was transferred to the command of the 5th Canadian Division to reflect the sustained operational support of the brigade.
6th Canadian Combat Support Brigade - Public Affairs
Report a problem or mistake on this page
- Date modified:
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21 March 2011
Cambridge UK. Eight19 (www.eight19.com) the developer of Printed Plastic Solar Cells based on Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) technology, today announced the appointment of Simon Bransfield-Garth as Chief Executive.
Dr Bransfield-Garth’s appointment follows the investment of £4.5M ($7.4M) by the Carbon Trust and French chemical company Rhodia SA in September 2010 to commercialise Organic Photovoltaic technology originally developed at Cambridge University’s world famous Cavendish Laboratory.
Simon has over 25 years global experience building rapid growth, technology-based businesses in sectors including Semiconductor, Automotive and Mobile Phones. His career includes 7 years at Symbian, the phone OS maker, where he was a member of the Leadership Team and VP Global Marketing. Simon was founder of Myriad Solutions Ltd and was previously a Fellow at Cambridge University where he also gained his BA and Ph.D in Engineering.
Eight19 is developing a new generation of low cost, flexible solar cells that have the potential to dramatically reduce the manufacturing cost and increase the throughput of solar technology, to help address the growing need for renewable power. Plastic solar cells benefit from being based on abundant materials and can be readily crafted into different shapes and colours to meet market requirements.
Commenting on the appointment, Tom Brown, Chairman of Eight19 said “We are delighted that Simon is joining the company as CEO. He brings a wealth of experience in developing technology-based businesses globally which he will apply to Eight19”
Simon Bransfield-Garth commented “I am tremendously excited and privileged to have taken the helm at Eight19. The solar power market is in a period of explosive growth and Eight19, with technology backing from Cambridge University and exceptional team of engineers and scientists is poised to play a significant role”
Eight19 is located in Cambridge, England and retains close links with the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University, a world leader in plastic electronics technology.
About Eight19 Ltd.
Eight19 is developing a new generation of printed plastic solar cells, using organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology. Based on work pioneered by the internationally renowned team at Cambridge University, the company focuses on high speed, ambient temperature manufacturing techniques to create lightweight, non-toxic, flexible solar films. The resulting modules are aimed at new mass markets for solar power generation, from off-grid applications in emerging economies to high volume industrial products. Eight19 is headquartered in Cambridge, England and investors include the Carbon Trust, Rhodia SA, TTP Ltd and the University of Cambridge.
For additional information, visit http://www.eight19.com.
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CTC congratulates public officials in Grant and Wheeler counties, and the Oregon Telephone Company (OTC), on winning a $6 million federal grant to expand high-speed connectivity to hundreds of new customers in this frontier region of eastern Oregon. This grant was one of the funding announcements made December 3 in the first round of the USDA’s ReConnect Pilot Program investments.
The counties sit in one of the most isolated regions of the continental United States. One of the area’s school districts—the Long Creek School District—is the size of Rhode Island and includes five mountain passes. Teacher Denise Porter says most of her students lack internet access at home; not even sluggish DSL service can reach them.
That’s about to change.
CTC was proud to have helped develop the public-private approach and grant strategies, and prepare the necessary grant application materials, on behalf of the City of John Day, Oregon. (The City served as the lead agent for the intergovernmental Grant County Digital Network Coalition, which is partnering with OTC to expand service in the two counties.)
“This is a turning point in our community. We have forged a partnership that we think will bring prosperity throughout the region,” said Nicholas Green, the John Day city manager, on a conference call. “We’re going to switch from talking about what we don’t have—to what we are going to do with it.”
OTC will use the grant to deploy 89 miles of fiber to serve the region. The new infrastructure will provide network speeds ranging from 30 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Currently, many parts of this area lack service faster than 1.5 Mbps—meaning that students and their families lack broadband; businesses have been unable to get adequate service; and aging microwave links have failed to provide adequate connections for public safety communications in an area where forest fires are a constant threat.
The first new fiber route will connect the towns of Long Creek, Monument, and Spray—all to the northwest of John Day. The second route will start at the northern edge of the town of Seneca and continue to Canyon City, just south of John Day. Overall, this expanded fiber optic network will extend broadband availability across a 242-square-mile area that includes 418 households, 22 businesses, 22 farms, three schools, and two fire stations.
As USDA Rural Development State Director John Huffman pointed out in a statement: “Internet access is no longer an amenity. It is an essential component of daily life and is as important to rural communities as gaining access to electricity was a century ago. Small, remote communities, however, face unique challenges in connecting homes, farms and businesses to this vital resource.”
Round 2 of the USDA ReConnect program is expected to be announced soon. For general guidance on preparing an application, take a look at the guidance our Funding Strategies Team put together for Round 1 and stay tuned for updates as soon as information about Round 2 is announced.
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Blunk, D. 100-436. In contrast to GABA(A) and glycine receptor genes, 1974). 29 Weaver Binary options webinar recording IV. electrophile A molecule that seeks centers of negative charge in other molecules and attacks them there. Notes 1. In such binary options webinar recording void the interpolated data diminishes greatly.
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A stress test is administered to patients by doctors in order to track how well your heart responds to physical stress. This test is used to diagnose coronary heart disease or to track its severity if you already have it. Medical professionals believe studying the heart is easier to do when it is working hard and beating fast. Most stress tests take place on a treadmill, but for people who cannot exercise, doctors can administer a pharmacological stress test. Do a stress test by wearing comfortable clothing, walking on the treadmill as instructed and talking to your doctor about the results.
Preparing for a Stress Test
1Talk to your doctor about the medications you are on, particularly the heart medications. You may need to stop taking certain prescriptions 2 or 3 days before the test.
2Avoid eating and drinking 4 to 5 hours before your stress test. If you have anything in your stomach, the procedure can cause nausea. Most medical professionals do say you can drink water before a testing. Check to see what your healthcare professional recommends.
- Talk to your doctor if you are diabetic and your blood sugar is in danger of reacting to a lack of food for an extended period of time. Diabetics who need insulin will receive special instructions prior to the test.
3Wear comfortable clothes and shoes. Anything that you would normally exercise in, such as shorts, sweats or yoga pants will work. Sneakers or athletic shoes are best for your feet if you have them.
4Expect to spend at least an hour doing the test. Your doctor may want to discuss the results with you after administering the stress test.
5Sign a consent form. Before you undergo a stress test, the procedure will be explained to you by a nurse or medical professional, and you will need to consent to the exam.
Having A Stress Test
1Get your blood pressure and heart rate recorded. A nurse will take your vital signs at rest, before you begin the test.
2Let the doctor or nurse stick electrodes to your chest, shoulders and hips. Each of these electrodes will record the electrocardiogram reading for each portion of your heart.
3Start at a slow speed. You will start walking on a treadmill that records your electrocardiogram, heart rate and blood pressure. Your warm up pace will be slow.
- Remember to breathe. Taking deep, even breaths will keep the oxygen flowing to your heart and your brain properly.
4Increase the intensity of your exercise. The treadmill will increase in slope or speed every 3 minutes, according to the protocol most doctors follow.
5Continue to keep up with the pace of the treadmill until the doctor stops you. You may be stopped once a target heart rate is reached, or after enough data has been gathered about how your heart is performing.
6Talk to your physician about the preliminary results. Your doctor should be able to detect specific heart diseases or discuss any concerns in your blood pressure or heart rate.
- Ask about how the results may change your treatment if you are already diagnosed with coronary or heart problems.
- Expect to get official results a few days after your stress test. Your doctor may schedule another appointment to see you, or will call you with more in depth results.
Understanding Alternative Stress Tests
1Take a drug such as Dobutamine for a pharmacological stress test if you are unable to exercise. The heart will respond to this drug the same way it would to exercise.
- You will probably be asked to refrain from using caffeine or smoking before the test. Cessation of caffeine includes not eating chocolate, drinking caffeinated sodas or drinking decaffeinated drinks. Check with your health care professional concerning what medications that should be discontinued before the test.
2Have a stress echocardiogram if your doctor thinks it will be more informative than a treadmill stress test. This stress test, also called an "echo," can reveal a lack of blood flow or pumping action from your heart that the treadmill stress test might not.
3Undergo a nuclear stress test to understand which parts of your heart are functioning better than others.
- Allow the doctor to inject a slight amount of radioactive substance to get a clear picture of your heart and determine where problems might rest.
- Remember that while the stress test is a reliable way to measure your heart health, it is not 100 percent accurate all the time. There have been cases of false positives, meaning people without coronary problems are thought to have them based on the stress test. Other tests will need to be conducted by your doctor.
- Notify the medical staff supervising your stress test immediately if you begin to feel chest pain, you cannot breathe or you experience any other distress during your procedure. Complications are rare, but there is always a risk.
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Special Issue "Recent Advances in the Research of Multiple Sclerosis"
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2012)
Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the central nervous system which can have devastating effects on the lives of those affected. For almost one and half centuries since the primarily demyelinating pathology of this presumed autoimmune disease was described neurologists have struggled to give adequate answers to the most commonly posed questions asked by patients and their relatives: why me?; how is this going to affect me?; is their any treatment? This is despite many decades of intensive research. The past 20 years has seen a dramatic shift in the collective knowledge about the aetiology and pathogenesis of this disease. This has in turn led to the development of new treatments which have a significant impact on both the short and long term outcomes in this disease. The picture that has emerged is complex both in terms of the overall concept of the disease process, its aetiology and the approach to treatment. The proposed open-source special issue focusing on multiple sclerosis in IJMS aims to bring together the advances in our understanding of this disease at the molecular level which has brought about a very real change in the outlook for people with MS.
It is anticipated that this issue will focus on the following areas:
- epidemiological studies pointing to specific aetiological factors
- genetic factors
- environmental aetiological factors
- gene-environment interaction
- pathophysiological concepts
- axonal loss
- immune dysregulation
- disease modulation and treatment
Prof. Dr. Simon Broadley
- multiple sclerosis
- vitamin D
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FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) – With the recent health emergency of an Azle middle school football player, there is proof defibrillators can help save lives.
It’s something you don’t have to tell one North Texas mother, who has worked to help make sure every school has a device. Her charitable quest is being done in memory of her daughter.
“I live with Sarah’s death every single day,” Laura Friend said of her life, since losing her daughter.
Laura told CBS 11 News she believes a defibrillator could have saved her daughter’s life.
In 2004, 12-year-old Sarah Friend was taking junior lifeguard classes at a North Richland Hills water park. She died during that training.
Laura remembers, “She was climbing the stairs and collapsed and had a cardiac arrest.”
While there was an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) on site, no one used it on Sarah.
Soon after her daughter’s death, Laura raised money and donated 55 AED’s to schools in North Texas. One of those devices went to the Azle school where the student/athlete collapsed.
Getting dozens of AED’s into local schools was an accomplishment, but Laura wanted to make sure every school had one.
“We wrote the bill and got it passed and the state of Texas paid for one AED per school, so I thought lives were going to be saved,” Laura said.
CBS 11 talked with nurses who said the defibrillators are easy to use. Once you open them up, the device actually talks you through the entire process.
But, Laura said simple having an AED on a school campus isn’t enough.
Through a program at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, Laura now travels to campuses and helps school staff develop cardiac emergency plans.
Laura talked about some of the things a school staff should have answers for. “Who are you going to call? Who’s going to grab the AED? Who’s going to call 911? Who’s going to start chest compressions?” she said. “You’ve got to have a plan or it will be very chaotic during an [cardiac] arrest.”
When she heard about the collapse of the Azle 7th grader, Laura said she thought of her own daughter and was thankful one life was saved. “We can help others in Sarah’s memory,” she said.
Texas school campuses now all have the AED’s, but Laura is recommending that parents, of children who play club sports, also push to have them at sport games and practices.
Automated External Defibrillator (AED) machines cost between $800 and $1500.
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I have been traveling as a lecturer on a Hillsdale College Byzantium Cruise (from Venice to Athens, with several stops in the Adriatic, Mediterranean, and Aegean) for the last few days, and here are some eccentric reflections on civilizations of the past.
I spent yesterday in Venice—hot, humid, and crowded, as I had never quite seen it before. So much for the global recession that has supposedly curtailed world tourism.
Venice was not a classical city, and one can see why. It was malarial, without natural harbors or any readily identifiable deep ports or surrounding cliffs. It is instead a conglomeration of over 100 islands in the swamps of an Adriatic lagoon. Yet between 1200 and 1600, Venice was in many ways the preeminent city of the world. People—not oil, coal, timber, or farmland—matter most.
You can see the Lion of St. Mark cut into almost any fortification wall anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean—Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, or Nauplion. For over three centuries the galleys of the republic kept the central and Western Mediterranean safe from Islam, while making a fortune as the go-between for Indian and Chinese imports from ports on the Eastern Mediterranean to Western Europe. By 1400 some 3,000 Venetian galleys and commercial ships brought into St. Mark’s Square loot from around the world. The elegant villas and palazzos show it. Venice was the best proof of the power of republican government when married to capitalism, as a rather small city without any natural resources soon created a renaissance from nothing other than political stability and market entrepreneurship.
What brought down Venice—by 1700 it had receded into a provincial city—was not periodic plague, or even the rise of Islam (checked in 1571 at Lepanto). But rather the ascendance of the Atlantic port maritime states of Western Europe—England, France, Holland, Portugal, and Spain—that soon bypassed the Asian land routes and shipped in Chinese and Indian goods without going thought the Mediterranean or dealing with the Ottomans. And with the discovery of the New World, and the rise of the great sailing ships, Venice was doomed as a key international city. (That said, how such a small out-of-the-way polis ever remained preeminent is the real story, rather than its logical decline).
Venice missed out entirely on the fabulous wealth and commerce from the Americas. But more importantly, its republicanism eroded, and with it so too went the entrepreneurship which otherwise might have encouraged a more westward view.
Irony, But Lessons too
A great deal of irony here: while Venice became legendarily wealthy from eastern trade, mastered the galley, and held at bay the rise of the Ottomans from Western Europe, it was insidiously becoming irrelevant. (Lepanto was the last large galley battle in history). Sometimes great states become obsessed with the immediate enemy, and forget the more creeping dangers on the horizon. Had Venice applied a fraction of its genius to trans-Atlantic shipbuilding and looked westward beyond Gibraltar rather than eastward to Istanbul, it might well have rivaled Portugal and Spain well into the eighteenth century.
In our own case, we are bickering over how to spend some $3.5 trillion ($2 trillion in borrow money)—millions for the Palestinians, billions to conduct two wars, trillions to redistribute in new social programs. But meanwhile other states are saving, investing, and improving their educational systems. The notion that the average American youth—20 hrs a week before the video game or TV console, a product of a therapeutic education that seeks to ensure that he is sensitive rather than educated—will inherit the lifestyle of his fathers seems to me dubious.
Our Tenth Hour
Our great wealth in the 20th century was in part predicated on natural bounty—farmland, oil, coal, iron ores, timber, etc.—under the aegis of a wonderfully stable constitution. The 21st will adjudicate whether our prior success was also predicated on superior intellect, law, and culture, inasmuch as our resources are now not so singular on the world stage. America to remain exceptional more than ever is going to have to have unusual citizens that are as lawful as they are creative.
Unless we return to a meritocracy, emphasize science, math, liberal arts, and engineering—rather than the plague of ‘studies’ courses (as in environmental-, leisure-, gender-, Latino-, black-, Asia-, Chicano-, community-, feminist-studies, etc.)—we simply will not match the Chinese and Indians in this century.
The American people are waiting for a leader bold enough to balance budgets, restore meritocracy, end the therapeutic mushy sentimentality in our educational system, and insist on the rule of law, free markets, and limit government.
Otherwise we know the ultimate end of the present road: a vast bureaucracy of non-taxpaying incompetents, damning the estranged few for not producing ever more to be taxed, convinced that they are geniuses—and only due to some sort of unfairness have been surpassed by others.
The Chinese are rough, competent people and have no such delusions. In about 10 years their enormous financial power will begin to translate into military sophistication, and I don’t think their foreign policy will either have much to do with human rights or care much about what we have to say about them.
Down the coast Ravenna is a strange place. The modern port is quite ugly or perhaps “bustling” is the better word. It is part of the muscular Italian north—smelting, petrochemicals, industrial trade—that explains why Italy is far wealthier than we usually suppose when we head to the more touristy south. If we wonder why all those quaint shops in Syracuse, Naples, Rome or Florence have nice glass, steel, and aluminum fixtures, come to Milan or Ravenna.
The city was the Byzantines’ last effort to keep Roman civilization safe a while longer from the so-called barbarians of the north. I spent the day walking alone to the city’s various churches and tombs—the great Basilica di San Vitale, the Battistero Neoniano, the little Mausoleo di Galla Placidia, and weird Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna was the Western capital from the late fifth to eight century, a final effort to preserve Roman culture. One can see the results in the beautiful mosaics, and octagonal and brick Byzantine church designs.
The city, like Venice, is on a lagoon, but the canals were in large part long ago covered. Other than the monuments, it is a rather depressing modern industrial city, though parts of the old inner urban core are still quite beautiful, very clean and well preserved. One gets a tinge of sadness—and warning— when entering these monumental churches, studying the mosaics that are among the best in the world. Civilization of a thousand years was collapsing, and yet somehow the old guard was able to marshal manpower and capital to created churches of enormous size, sophistication and beauty, a sort of last gasp as it were to keep art, learning and scholarship alive for yet another generation.
Our own Ravenna
Here too, there are warnings. In California we are spending hundreds of billions on prisons, in which killers and thugs sue constantly for expanded rights, while universities lay off professors (though rarely nonacademic apparatchiks and administrators), and turn away students. Ravenna invested in thousands of hours of sculpture, we in thousands of hours of legal work in appeals and writs. Our cynical intellectual elites are becoming ever more postmodern even as the undereducated majority becomes premodern.
The state spends more and more on redistributive entitlements, less and less on infrastructure. Its population is bifurcating. A small, highly taxed elite supports museums, the arts, and gives to universities, a growing underclass swarms the emergency rooms, criminal justice system, and welfare roles.
The utopianism of the shrinking elite wants the Saturday night felon to have sophisticated jurisprudence when he is arrested, the best brain surgeon when a .44 magnum enters his skull in a gang dust-up, and humane day care, health care, and counseling—and yet now has no way any longer either to pay for it, or how to convince the growing underclass to become better educated and more productive. (To do so would demand a tragic diction and mindset).
One percent of Californians pays over 40% of our income taxes, perhaps as few as 360,000 out of some 36 million in the state. Each time one of these golden gooses flies east to no-tax Nevada, we lose about $50,000-80,000 in state taxes—or the money to keep a felon in the Corcoran prison house fed, housed, medicated, and counseled for a year. Do the math: one small businessman escapes to Tahoe or Reno, one lifer has no support.
The World Outside
But the system, like Ravenna abound 500, is in collapse (so we are letting out felons onto the streets as our tax-paying elites leave). A high school teacher of history in 1950 in the Los Angeles public school system would not recognize the curriculum of today. But he would recognize parts of the 101—about the same in many places, with about 10 times the traffic.
The Ravenna effect of trying to create lasting art and beauty at the eleventh hour as the world disintegrates is harrowing to experience. Looking up at the domes of these great churches, and factoring in the engineering brilliance and artistic genius that produced them, while the entire infrastructure of Roman society was disintegrating, is again eerie. For all the vigor of the Visigoths or Lombards, or Huns, there was little there of the Roman genius for architecture, art, or engineering.
While exploring the Basilica di San Vitale today, I was reminded of the news from America. An entire nation is obsessed with the silly Henry Louis Gates affair. A supposedly premier intellectual, who is a professor of African-American grievance, gets into a spat with a cop, purportedly evokes his “mama” in slurs, warns the cop whom he is “messin’” with, and then gets affirmation from the President—and we are supposed to think this is some sort of cosmic “teachable moment” in between trying to borrow another trillion dollars to socialize medicine in the manner of the Department of Motor Vehicles?
Just as there is no logic in ruining the American medical system, so too there is no longer an elite class when its best and brightest scream slurs like “mama” and “messin’ ”, or condemn an entire police force as acting “stupidly” when it is trying to keep the rule of law.
Yes, parts of the United States are becoming like the collapsing world outside the sanctum of San Vitale.
(I’ll try to get off this Spenglerian gloom before writing from a gloomy Santa Sophia in Constantinople next week.)
More on Corfu and the Eastern Mediterranean next posting.
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The recent resignation announcement by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah – who had served just two weeks – struck a humiliating blow to President Mahmoud Abbas and raises serious questions about the competence of governance and the future of the Palestinian question. No one has been tapped to replace Hamdallah, although it is likely to be one of the two Deputy Prime Ministers Ziad Abu Amr or Mohammed Mustafa.
Abbas, an unelected leader whose term expired in January 2009, scored a significant symbolic victory last November in the United Nations in which the General Assembly granted Palestine non-member observer status. This grants Palestinians the option of filing legal complaints with international bodies against Israeli housing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank – territory claimed by Palestinians for a future state.
Israel and the United States, however, oppose unilateral actions which undercut direct bilateral negotiations and have used economic pressure to prevent this from happening.
Palestinians could set their own destinies apart from Israel
Moreover, Abbas has failed to reconcile with Hamas in Gaza since the Islamist movement won parliamentary elections in 2006 and expelled Fatah activists from Gaza a year later.
Despite numerous reconciliation efforts mediated by the Arab League and pledges to form a unity government, Hamas and Fatah are no closer in unifying than Israelis and Palestinians are in reaching a peace agreement.
How then, it must be asked, would a Palestinian state emerge with a divided government whose leaders do not recognize one another? Do geopolitical realities on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza suggest that the internationally supported two-state solution is irrelevant?
Recent events suggest that Jordan, which ruled the West Bank from 1949-1967, seeks to once again play a larger role in Palestinian affairs.
During my conversation with veteran journalist Randa Habib – who has written extensively on Jordan and the Royal Family – she explained that Jordan’s official position is the creation of an independent Palestinian state. However, Jordan is not opposed to confederation or federation with the West Bank which could occur only after independence.
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Jordan has proposed some type of union with the West Bank since March 1972, when King Hussein floated the possibility of a United Arab Kingdom. Hussein envisioned a federal plan which included a Jordanian region with Amman as the capital; and a Palestine region including the West Bank with Eastern Jerusalem as the capital. Although rejected by Israel, the Palestinians and most of the Arab League, variations of this proposal were publicly advocated by Jordan until the King rescinded legal and administrative ties to the West Bank in July 1988.
Although King Abdullah rejects the Jordan is Palestine slogan advocated by some in the Israeli right, he might entertain the possibility of Palestinian confederation. In the past few months, there has been more open discussions about confederation prospects – not by Israelis or Americans but by Jordanians and Palestinians – than there has been in the past decade.
In October, Jordanian Crown Prince Hassan told a Palestinian audience that the West Bank legally remained Jordanian territory. In December, Jordanian activist Mudar Zahran stated that Jordanians “would absolutely welcome a joint confederation between us and (the West Bank Palestinians) if it keeps the area secure.”
Palestinians may also support this initiative.
In December, editor of Al Quds Al Arabi Abdel Bari Atwan proposed confederation with Jordan after Palestinian independence. In the same month, Mahmoud Abbas told his cabinet to prepare for the possibility of confederating with Jordan in the absence of a two-state reality. In March, King Abdullah and Abbas signed an agreement reaffirming Jordan's custodianship of the Holy Places in Jerusalem.
Although Jordan’s role in the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem is nothing new and was acknowledged by Israel during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, it is the first public acknowledgment of Jordanian claims by Palestinians. Randa Habib described this significance as a reminder to “the Arab world of this (Jordan’s) role in case Hamas/Gaza and Egypt/Morsi will take advantage of the changes in the region.”
During my interview with Palestinian Professor Mohammed Dajani, he said a West Bank-Jordanian confederation could produce positive results: “I think a Palestinian-Jordanian federation may ease the heavy burdens from the shoulders of the people. We are living in the age of globalization and it is a priority for small nations to stand by each other to be able to develop and prosper.”
Dajani told me his vision: “As a first step, a State of Palestine with Arab Jerusalem as its capital should rise; while the second step would be the formation of a confederacy with Jordan.” Such a scenario involving the first and second steps of Dajani’s principles could benefit all parties. For Israel, a Palestinian union with Jordan offers security guarantees dealing with a nation that has a peace treaty and diplomatic relations. Palestinians could set their own destinies apart from Israel under the umbrella of joint Arab economic and security cooperation. For Jordan, the United States and European Union would likely provide economic incentives including a generous aid package.
As Secretary John Kerry returns to the Middle East for another round of shuttle diplomacy and meets with President Abbas, current realities on the ground and recent events seem to suggest that talks will center on a greater Jordanian involvement in Palestinian affairs.
EDITOR'S PICK Midyear review of MENA economies
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) – School is nearly out for the summer in South Florida and that means more time at the beach and in the pool. But all that time in and around water leads to a higher risk of drowning for everyone, especially children. That’s why officials are encouraging all residents, especially parents and caregivers, to take precautions to prevent drowning for young children.
The YMCA of Broward County kicked off its Water Safety Awareness Days on Tuesday at the John Mullin Aquatic Center in Lauderhill with free swim lessons.
Parents and children showed up to the Lauderhill pool to learn some basic swimming skills and practice safety when in the water.
In 2013, seven children under the age of five died as a result of drowning. So far in 2014, six children under that the age of five drowned.
Parents believe it’s never too young to teach your kid.
“The moment they could crawl and they’re mobile, that’s when you need to be vigilant about this because if they can crawl, they can fall into a pool,” said parent Lindsay Duggar.
“Most drowning’s of children under the age of five occur in unguarded pools, backyards and apartment complexes. The reality is accidental drowning is preventable. Parents can help make their kids safer by knowing and using three layers of drowning prevention – active adult supervision at all times; locks and alarms on all gates and doors leading to the pool; and water safety and swim lessons,” said Sheryl A. Woods, CEO & President of the YMCA of Broward County.
The YMCA of Broward County’s annual SPLASH drown prevention program teaches participants basic swimming skills and water safety habits.
Drowning is the leading cause of death among infants and small children in Florida and the second leading cause of death among children 14 and under in the United States. Broward and Miami-Dade Counties also top of the list for kids younger than four-years-old.
The YMCA also wants everyone to remember these safety tips:
- Only swim when and where there is a lifeguard on duty; never swim alone.
- Adults should constantly and actively watch their children.
- Inexperienced or non-swimmers should wear a Coast Guard-approved life jacket.
- Parents or guardians of young children should be within an arm’s reach.
- Children and adults should not engage in breath holding activities.
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THE Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC) has allowed the roads and traffic department of BMC to plant ‘Bougainvillea’ flowers instead of railings on the central divider of the Marine Drive to improve public safety.
The heritage panel’s decision comes after the roads and traffic department filed a review application to reconsider the issue of installation of railings along the central divider and the footpath over the stretch from Tambe Chowk to Yoga Centre. The roads department has maintained that its push for railings is to curb the public trespassing and accidents.
Earlier this year, the heritage panel had rejected the BMC’s plan to install railings stating that Marine Drive’s openness would be lost. “Considering the public safety, the committee said the railings would not be consistent with the character of Marine Drive Precinct.
But, the panel decided that Bougainvillaea be planted on the central divider, which would discourage trespassing and ensure public safety,” said a civic official.
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Storytelling, South Asian and Australian dance, live music, haunting puppetry and wild digital projections swirl together in Moby Duck’s unique and unmissable performance of Wild Child – a new story for young people aged eight and over and their families and friends.
A boy is brought in from the wild to a mission. The nuns think he’s a savage, because he doesn’t speak their language. Worse still, he believes in strange, mischievous spirits, called the Little People, who taught his tribe to sing, dance and paint magic, and who now live hidden from human view. Join Moby Duck to see what happens next…
Wild Child is based on real-life experiences, as told to the writer by aboriginal elders in Central Australia and North-West India, and by some of the last surviving Europeans who taught them.
“A vivid experience of the sounds, colours and stories of Indian culture” Time Out
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Throwing and Catching a Boomerang
The following guide will help you learn how to throw a boomerang so it returns, the best way to catch it when it does, and other fascinating things.
If you can throw a ball, you can learn to throw a boomerang too! Boomerangs are thrown with the same basic overhand throw used in most other sports. With a little practice (and these instructions) you will be throwing and catching your boomerang in no time.
You will find out:
- Where and when to throw
- Basic throwing technique
- Fine-tuning your throw
- Catching your boomerang
- Boomerang maintenance
- Competition and games
Most people have some knowledge of boomerangs. Quite a few remember souvenir or plastic toy boomerangs that they had as a kid. The main thing they remember is that it rarely came back, if it came back at all.
And once your little brother or sister got tired of running and fetching it for you, it was relegated to the bottom of the toy box, maybe taped to a broom stick for hockey, or sacrificed to Dad's lawn mower.
There are two main reasons your boomerang didn't come back:
- Throwing boomerangs is a learned skill and takes practice
- A boomerang is a precise object and is difficult to mass produce
Successfully throwing a boomerang is a learned skill, like hitting a golf ball or throwing a disc. It should take a few throws and maybe even a few throwing sessions before you are able to have your boomerang consistently return to you.
Think about it - you are taking an inanimate piece of carved wood, throwing it 100+ feet away from you, only to have it turn and fly back to you to be caught. A perfectly thrown boomerang is comparable to hitting a hole-in-one in golf - except it is much easier to do and your boomerang is in your hand ready to be thrown again, not a hundred yards away hiding in some hole.
Select a large grassy area, clear of trees, bushes, lamp posts, crystal vases, etc. A soccer field, baseball field or a clearing in a park usually work well. Try to make sure that you have at least 60 yards throwing space in all directions. Avoid areas with high weeds or bodies of water because you will probably lose your boomerang. Especially if you are just starting out.
Do not throw in the vicinity of children, livestock, parked or moving cars, buildings with windows, etc.
A mis-thrown boomerang can be dangerous and cause serious injury or damage if it hits something. Once a boomerang leaves your hand you have no control over it. Because a boomerang flies in a curved path, it is hard for a casual by-stander to anticipate which way it is going to go. Yelling "LOOK OUT" immediately after throwing will almost guarantee that your admiring spectators will stampede directly into the path of the on-coming boomerang. Please keep safety in mind.
A nice, warm day with little or no breeze is almost ideal for boomeranging. Some boomerangs will not return in a dead calm. Higher winds accommodate heavier boomerangs and different throwing techniques. Gusting winds, or winds that change direction rapidly could cause you to lose control of your boomerang and should be avoided until you have some experience.
Rain ( yes, some of us throw in the rain) will do little to affect the flight of a boomerang, but it may have an adverse affect on the boomerang itself, depending on the finish on your boomerang. An unfinished or poorly sealed boomerang will swell with moisture, possibly cracking the remaining finish or warping the boomerang itself.
Also, throwing with snow on the ground is one of the best ways to lose a boomerang. A boomerang can travel an amazing distance underneath the top crust of the snow, leaving you first, with a white-on-white knife slit to find; and second, a five foot diameter circle to grope in. You may be able to come back in the spring and find it, but chances are you won't. If you do find it, it will most likely be swollen to the size of your arm or shredded by the Park District mower.
If you have several boomerangs, the Park District lawn mower is also a good reason to be careful to leave with all the boomerangs you brought. More than once I have returned to my favorite throwing spot to find chunks of one of my boomerangs scattered over a wide area.
A boomerang is always thrown overhand like a baseball. Never, ever throw your boomerang side-arm. It will climb straight up in the air, then swoop back down and hit you, your friend, or the ground and break in half! Always throw overhand!
There are two basic ways to grip your boomerang, the pinch grip and the cradle grip. The pinch consists of simply pinching the boomerang between your thumb and forefinger, allowing friction to keep the boomerang in your hand during the throw. Snap your wrist at the end of the throw to create spin, and momentum will help pull the boomerang from your hand. The cradle grip is similar to the pinch grip, the difference being that you wrap your forefinger around the front of the boomerang. At the end of your throw, snap your wrist and "pull the trigger" to create spin.
Creating spin is essential for a successful throw. So which-ever grip is most comfortable and allows you to create maximum spin is the one to use.
The boomerang has two arms: the lift or leading arm and the trailing or dingle arm. The boomerang can be thrown from either of these arms.
The most curved side (usually the decorated side like the graphic to the left) of the boomerang must be toward your face with the flat side (graphic on the right) facing away. Otherwise the boomerang will rotate backwards and the airfoils will not generate lift.
Getting the boomerang to returnDirection of the throw, relative to the wind is critical. The boomerang must be thrown across the direction from which the wind is blowing at about a 45degs to 90degs angle. To determine the proper direction of the throw, pick up some leaves or grass clippings and drop them. Observe which way the wind blows the clippings. Face directly into the wind, so it's blowing right into your face. Turn about 60degs or so to your right. The wind should now be blowing from your left to your right. Throw your boomerang in the direction you are facing.
Use the key at the right to decipher the following illustrations.
If the boomerang:
Returns and lands in front of you, turn slightly to your left and throw more into the wind.
Returns and lands behind you, turn to your right and face more away from the wind.
Returns to where you are standing but is too high to catch, throw with less arm (softer throw) or stand the boomerang up closer to vertical.
Is headed back in your direction but hits the ground before it reaches you, throw harder or use more layover.
Flies straight out and hits the ground, you need more spin or you've thrown it upside down.
This is what a good throw should look like.
Experimenting with different throws and in differing wind conditions will improve your skill in having the boomerang fly exactly how you want it to. Another tip is to mark the spot you throw from, so if you have to move to catch or retrieve your boomerang, you can see how close it returned to the spot you threw from. Always return to this spot to throw again.
The sport of boomeranging is a developed skill, like throwing a disc or hitting a golf ball. It will take some practice. To take a carved piece of wood and throw it 150 feet away, only to have it turn and fly back to you to be caught, is like having a hole-in-one shot in golf. Except you have to go and get your disc or ball. Your boomerang, on the other hand, is back with you and waiting to be thrown again.
The best way to catch a returning boomerang is to trap it between the palms of your hands. Wait until your boomerang is below shoulder level, then place one hand above and one below your boomerang, "clap" your hands together, trapping the boomerang between. If you want to try one handed catches, stick your hand into the open hole in the center of the spinning boomerang and grab. Try this technique only if your boomerang is well above your head or below your shoulders, because the boomerang can spin off your hand changing directions abruptly, and could strike your head or face.
The flight path of a boomerang changes constantly during a flight. Do not look away from a returning boomerang and expect to find it in the air again easily. If you do need to look away (you trip over your marker) glance quickly in the area you expect the boomerang to be. If you don't see it right away, don't stand there and stare! A boomerang returning at close to eye level is almost impossible to spot and will hurt if it hits you in the face. If you don't spot it immediately, assume the "mystery boomerang position", turn your back, cover your head with your arms , and crouch down. If the boomerang lands on your back, you know it was a good throw.
Most boomerangs need to be flat to perform well. An up or down warp in either of the arms will radically effect the flight. To check for flatness, place your boomerang on a surface you know to be flat, hold down the apex of your boomerang with one hand and use the other to tap on arms. If you hear a click when you tap in the middle of the arm, you have a down-warp on that arm. If you hear a click all the way down the arm, you have an up-warp. A slight up-warp at the tip is okay. To correct a warp, heat your boomerang over an electric stove element for a few seconds or put it in a microwave for about 8 seconds. Bend the arm in the opposite direction of the warp and hold it until it cools. Recheck for flatness.
Nicks and gouges in the wood can be filled with wood putty, sanded smooth and re-coated with polyurethane to seal against moisture.
These instructions are based on my own experience in throwing boomerangs and in teaching others how to throw, and is written for beginning right handed throwers but a left handed thrower with a left handed boomerang can also use these instructions. A left handed boomerang turns to the right, so the flight path and throwing techniques are a mirror image of the right handed ones.
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Getting a subfertile mare in foal usually often necessitates repeated veterinary examinations and treatments, such as medications and uterine flushes. Still, success is not always guaranteed. Researchers recently revealed that stem cells and other biologic therapies might also be useful in the quest to promote “sub” mares to fully fertile.
Ryan Ferris, DVM, MS, Dipl. ACT, of Colorado State University’s Equine Reproduction Laboratory, described how these biologic therapies—generally used for a variety of musculoskeletal injuries or soft tissue injuries–could have reproductive applications, at the 2012 American Association of Equine Practitioners’ (AAEP) Convention, held Dec. 1-5 in Anaheim, Calif.
“All mares have a transient inflammatory response in the uterus to spermatozoa following mating or insemination,” explained Ferris. “This results in white blood cells and fluid accumulating in the uterine lumen. Uterine contractions result in this fluid being cleared from the uterus within 24 hours post-breeding, but approximately 20% of mares of mares are unable to clear this inflammatory response to spermatozoa by 24-48 hours post-mating.”
Traditional treatments for post-mating inflammation include systemic glucocorticoid steroids, which can in some cases cause laminitis, prevent ovulation, and suppress the immune system.
“Additional treatments such as uterine lavage or (systemic) ecbolics (agents that increase uterine contractions) are typically only used after the inflammatory response has occurred,” said Ferris.
Alternate therapies that are relatively noninvasive and do not cause side effects would, therefore, be advantageous.
Together with David Frisbie, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVS, ACVSMR (sports medicine), who is renowned in the equine industry for his work with IRAP (a type of biologic therapy used extensively for joint disease), Ferris evaluated how well stem cells (MSCs) and autologous conditioned serum (ACS) controlled uterine inflammation. To do this, they used 800 million dead spermatozoa to induce an inflammatory response in six mares. The team monitored the resulting inflammation using a variety of clinical and biochemical endpoints.
Their key findings were:
- Both ACS and MSCs decreased evidence of inflammation by a reducing the number of neutrophils (a class of white blood cells) as compared to a placebo treatment; and
- Increased concentrations of the anti-inflammatory mediator interleukin-1Ra wereidentified after MSC treatment, but no difference in interleukin-1Ra was noted after ACS treatment.
“These preliminary results suggest that biologic therapies can alter the immune response in mares following mating,” summarized Ferris. “Because a variety of bioactive substances could be involved in this response, more research is needed.”
In other words, researchers aren’t certain what exactly aspects of MSC and ACS treatment could be modifying these mares’ uterine environments, but the exciting preliminary results support future work in this field. They also need to more closely examine the impact of ACS and MSCs on pregnancy rates in subfertile mares to prove its benefits.
Disclaimer: Seek the advice of a qualified veterinarian before proceeding with any diagnosis, treatment, or therapy.
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Posted Sep 02, 2009 01:00 am CDT
Like the manner of the man who delivered it, the message was simple, direct and steeped in the heritage of traditional New England democracy: “We have to do something to improve civic education in the United States,” said retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.
Speaking at the 2009 ABA Annual Meeting, Souter warned that specific problems facing the nation’s courts —such as funding shortages or interference from the other branches—are not the real threat to judicial independence. Rather, he said, “the root problem is a public majority unaware of the basic shape of government.”
In making his case, Souter invoked his recollections of the annual town meetings that were held each March in Weare, N.H. Attending those meetings as a young boy, he said, established an early understanding of the separation of powers among the government branches and the limits on those powers. For him and other children of the town, those lessons were locked in by the time they took civics classes in high school, he said.
But a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showed that two-thirds of U.S. citizens cannot name all three branches of government, Souter said.
“This is something to worry about,” he said. “The idea of judicial independence must be practically meaningless” for someone with that lack of knowledge about basic government structures.
“We have to take on the job of making American civics education real again,” said Souter, who called on the ABA to play a leading role in that effort. “What more important work can you do?” he asked.
The association already is on task. ABA President Carolyn B. Lamm of Washington, D.C., has requested funding to support initial efforts to look into the need for better civics education, and President-elect Stephen N. Zack of Miami has indicated he will make civics one of his priorities.
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