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Ever wanted to attempt to sing harmony? When two or even more individuals sing together a melody in various pitches, it can include amazing depth to a tune. When done correctly, harmonizing can develop a very beautiful sound. But of course, individuals who attempt to balance without the appropriate abilities will certainly instead produce a mass of noise that will be challenging to endure.
Start With the Scales
When balancing, one vocalist sings a song on one pitch while and second singer signs in a greater or lower pitch and/or include notes around the first singer’s initial pitch.
To sing harmony, you can begin by becoming knowledgeable about both significant and minor scales. A scale is simply a set of 8 succeeding notes within one octave, named with the letters A to G. What you will hear is in fact the popular Do Re Mi scale.
The note intervals for a significant scale is: whole note-whole note-half note- whole-whole-whole-half.
Whereas for minor scale: whole-half-whole-whole-half-whole-whole.
To additionally clarify this, take a look at the piano. Find any white secret with a black secret to its right. If you push that white secret, and afterwards press the black key, you are increasing EURhalf a note’. If you press that same white secret, and press the closest white key to its right, you are going up EURa whole note’. For some areas in the piano, you will certainly see 2 white secrets without a black key between them. When you push the left white key, and increases to the right white secret, it’s thought about as increasing EURhalf a note’. Here’s where I learn to sing better
When you sing harmony, the notes are usually from a major scale.
Find Two Voices
When somebody is singing harmony, they will certainly sing around the original pitch and melody of the song. The very first vocalist starts by singing a note from the melody.
Then the second singer will certainly join in singing the same note but at a greater or lower pitch. The chord of the tune can be used a guitar or piano or any other instrument.
The entire procedure is essentially the first vocalist singing, and the second voice singing a greater or lower pitch of the melody the whole time. how to train your voice to sing high notes
Making Harmony Work
When you are beginning to learn consistency, you have to get familiar and comfortable with the tune. Lots of singing instructors advise learn both of the voice parts.
Normally a great deal of practice is had to make consistency work, however there are those few lucky ones who seem to be able to balance a melody at various pitches without any troubles. It’s called on-the-fly balancing’, due to the fact that the harmonizer jumps right into the tune and begin singing.
A singer who can harmonize on the fly has a propensity for finding the center pitch and melody swiftly. After listening to the melody for a short while, they can get the pitch and melody and begin singing instantly. These people are blessed with an excellent ear, or a very trained ear. how to teach yourself to sing harmony
In fact, ear training workouts can be made use of to develop harmony skills as well. For instance, you can try to play a note on a piano, identify the pitch and then picture yourself singing that note. Next, you can attempt singing it along with the note on the piano. Attempt once again, but this time sing a note higher then the note played on the piano, then once more but with a lower note.
If you apply for online singing lessons, some courses have interactive pianos and voice feedback. Using the software, you can practice matching pitches and afterwards going greater or lower. Practice is the best method establish accurate pitch.
Consistency is made use of in numerous different kinds of singing, for example, country music, pop music and rock-and-roll. The Oak Ridge Boys were famous for their skill to blend four extremely various voices into a melody with 2 or more harmonizing.
Experienced harmonizers make it look basic. The principles behind this kind of singing are actually not that hard to understand, but it does take practice to learn ways to properly recognize the pitch and change it higher or lower.
Vocal range is generally in no chance a relatively easy competence to master although balancing is typically challenging. Integrating with another singer is unquestionably not any simple job. Problems produced whilst harmonizing is usually checked out certainly therefore it becomes unattainable to cover them. Right here are some physical exercises which will get you started.
Despite the fact that learning ways to balance is reasonably challenging it is just about the most fulfilling things that you can get efficient. Balancing your tone of voice with that of one more singer can render the plentiful outstanding for your appear. It will need a lot of fortitude as well as efforts because balancing requires mixing diverse notes sung by simply each person. Subsequently the 1st step is always to coach your hearing to understand a harmonious relationship. That can be done and so by just extensively playing the tune of this decision. Hear extensively in the direction of melody and the gadgets.
Look for to hear relating to devices which might be remaining played out inside an unified relationship while utilizing melody. This can bring numerous workout because devices that are playing inside a harmonious relationship can blend just while making use of melody as you move the various other devices can appear additional noticeable.
Step 2 as quickly as you acknowledge the an unified relationship is constantly to try it out yourself by just collaborating your tone of voice while using gadgets. That are not an easy job at the start. To produce things easy look at balancing with the help of the guitar.
For starters take a look at harmonizing your intonation with a bear in mind staying played out around the guitar. It might take you a variety of times to obtain it correct. If you have to comprehend the several notes which work inside a harmonious relationship this can be a remarkable working out to take action.
You will not need to work out with simply one single take note. It is very important to submit yourself whilst working out. Additionally it is vital being your performance. It is a terrific working out to know about how specifically exactly to be able to sing out a harmonious relationship, vocal abilities with the best toss level and also to choose a fantastic remember to be able to balance.
Each and every single a harmonious relationship can produce its disposition this also technique is generally the best way to understand the particular state of minds.
The next step is to attempt to include the skills you’ve got learned as part of your vocal abilities therefore start by getting some your picked melody in addition to vocal abilities a number of notes higher as well as under it, exactly what we wanting to accomplish hear is usually get the a harmonious relationship along with hear for the state of minds put together by the several consistencies.
The final stage needs to be to submit yourself whilst you work out a harmonious relationship with another singer.
With stability, One specific individual sings a song utilizing One pitch while another specific sings in a really fresh pitch and/or contributes paperwork through the very first pitch.
To be able to sing out consistencies, begin with getting encouraged in regards to the minor and significant scales. Any range is certainly simply a set of 8 efficient information within 1 octave, referred to as making use of the words A new for you to Grams.
The major size has notification intervals running whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half. A scale offers notification intervals which go just by whole-half-whole-whole-half-whole-whole.
When you sing tranquility, the documentation normally originated from an incredible size.
Discover 2 Voices
When a specific sings in harmony, these individuals sing out throughout the initial pitch in addition to beat. The 1st specific person will start by carrying out some text inside the beat. The actual vocals are generally sang greater than a growth of notes from a gadget which guitar chords are just consistencies on their own arranged in a technique to offer a significant (delighted) appear or potentially a minimal (dissatisfied) appear. There are other tastes of notes they will be the major a few. Nevertheless digress. The second man or female may communicate singing precisely the same notification, having it on the subsequent better or decrease pitch.
This specific exercise is actually repeating a lot of records all through an audio lesson, while utilizing the Second speech singing formerly mentioned as well as within the beat the whole time.
Developing An unified relationship Function
When you learn on your own preliminary learning to scream consistencies, you will need to get actually safe with all the track. A great deal of trainers recommend studying each words elements. Being a policy you will need tons of practice to produce a harmonious relationship function, however, you will rapidly understand people lucky number of just who take a posture to join a tune at a many pitch without difficulty. It’s described as on-the-fly equilibrium, since the harmonizer simply advances correct in the music as well as beginnings carrying out.
A 1 who are able to carry out on-the-fly balance incorporates a proficiency with regard to rapidly finding heart pitch in addition to the tune. Following listening on the song to obtain a percentage of time, they have the ability to find out the pitch and beat then start off carrying out. These are identical activities made use of in headsets training.
In actual truth, the exercises referring to hearing coaching really needs to be thought about to produce consistency capabilities at the same time. As an example, 1 might well take part in a particular notice around the keyboard, evaluate the real pitch, after which imagine on your own performing it. Following, you ‘d actually sing out that while making use of the keep in mind around the cello. Test it again, nonetheless on this occasion perform some text greater than the particular take note played out about the piano. The next period, perform an email beneath the keyboard note. You are typically vocal variety consistencies.
In case you consider on-line carrying out lessons, several applications get active pianos and intonation feedback. Utilizing the software package, it is possible to training matching pitch after which going bigger and decrease. Apply may be the simple develop Absolute pitch.
A harmonious relationship is used in numerous varying types relating to vocal, which include nation music, put tracks, in addition to rock songs. Your Silver eagles are typically famous for their possibility to integrate 4 extremely a range of voices ideal tune together with a number of or greater harmonizing. Yet another example of gorgeous harmonies in early stages was the real memorable appear from your Claire Siblings. Boyz II Males are a present event.
Adroit harmonizers ensure it is appear simple. The minds powering these kinds of vocal range are in reality not so hard to comprehend, however it asks for put on discover the way to effectively segregate pitch after which you’ll have the ability to decline higher or possibly lowered.
For you to learn to be able to sing harmonies, basically the most efficient approach is usually to consider vocal classes.
If you want to comprehend means to sing harmony, there are in fact specific recommendations that you must generally maintain in thoughts. These pointers will not just aid you to to mix nicely with your group mates, it will certainly also enable you to create procedures which will certainly help you as soon as you go solo. Let us have a look at a few of those approaches …
Concept No. 1: Master the Tune
To be able to sing consistency, you’ll have to learn the tune. When we state this, we don’t simply indicate which you are going to be mastering the elements which you are going to be singing. Around the contrary, you need to understand every singular part within the tune, no matter if or not it’s for your tenor, bass, baritone, soprano, and so forth. The cause for this can be that you must understand the melodies of each section in an effort to sing the going along with chords in ideal pitch and rhythm. In case you only comprehend your aspect, you can’t completely grasp the technical elements of the track to offer it the beautiful consistency that it requires.
Concept No. 2: Sing Consistency with a Musical Instrument
Whilst beyond the group, you have to find out the best way to sing harmony though taking part in a musical instrument, ideally a piano. This could help you in listening for the notes that you simply sing. Engage in the major melody within the piano. Hear it and hum the going along with melody within your head. Subsequent, perform the accompaniment melody to the piano and sing along to it. Around the 3rd effort, play the main melody once more but this time, you are going to sing the accompaniment. You can far much better recognize your progress by tape-recording your voice when you participate in the piano.
Hint No. 3: Train Your Ears
Certainly among the keys to obtaining able to sing consistency is usually to prepare your ears to guarantee that you may conveniently determine parts of resonance and dissonance in each the audio piece and when you and your group mates sing. When you will find some tunes that have some dissonant seems in them, as being a beginner, it is best to stay clear of singing these products very first till you can quickly figure out a meant dissonant observe. To coach your ears for resonance and dissonance, again, tape-record your voice while you sing and play the song about the piano. You are going to observe that you just won’t be striking the very best notes when you initially thought, generally because your ears “hear” your voice in a different way while you sing and when it is on a recorder. Yet another exceptional workout is normally to truly hear to your team mates because they sing too. Analyze for nearly any dissonant notes and suggest them on it.
Singing harmony with another gifted singer can be an extremely gratifying and satisfying experience albeit one that will take thorough practice and hard work. |
DIY 90s Hair Bow Sewing Pattern
This 90s hair bow sewing pattern shows you how to make a DIY hair bow. The pattern includes 2 bow sizes, which you can use to make adult and kids hair bows, or get creative and make shoe clips, brooches, and other accessories. The hair bow sewing pattern is super simple and perfect for beginners.
The sewing pattern includes a full printable pattern and step-by-step instructions with pictures, and tips along the way. If you’re a beginner sewer, instructions will guide you every step of the way, but the pattern also works well for more advanced sewers as well.
▶ 2 bow sizes are included: large (5″ x 3″) and small (3″ x 2″)
▶ The pattern is printed out on your home printer on 8.5″x11″ or A4 paper; reprint it as often as you like
▶ A great item for you to make and sell
▶ Pattern skill level: Beginner (see below for specific skills used)
The pattern you’ll receive includes 10 pages of simple and easy step-by-step instructions, with pictures for each step, diagrams, and sewing tips. The pattern has been thoughtfully and carefully created, with all skill levels in mind, and thoroughly tested to make sure it’s easy to understand. The pattern is priced at $4.
▶ 15” x 8” of Fabric – any woven fabric, including cotton, silk, polyester or wool
▶ Notions: thread, scissors, tailors chalk, pins, and needle
▶ Tools: home printer & 8.5″ x 11″ paper, sewing machine
▶ Optional: Barrettes, Clips or Headband
▶ basic sewing machine stitching
▶ slipstitch handstitch
SEW THESE AND SELL THEM IN YOUR SHOP
Hair bows made using this pattern can be sold in your own shop. If you decide you want to sell the finished bows, just please add a small pattern credit to “I Make It You Make It” to your item description. |
The core of the Internet is pages with links pointing to and from them. That's why it is not only important to have something to get links to, but to link from a page. When it comes to the pages on your own site, you can develop a linking structure to increase conversions and get a slight boost with the search engines.
What is an internal linking structure?
Internal linking structure is a pattern you use to link one of your pages to another. You can only have links in the top navigation or you can also have links in a left or right navigation. Additionally, you can have links in the body text (context, embedded links).
How to setup internal linking?
Generally, you'd rather be linking to pages the current page visitor should want to go. As there are various kinds of visitors and there are different things you may want on a website, there should be sufficient ways of finding what the visitor wants with one or two clicks (at most).
When it comes to links from the context (embedded links), you'd rather link naturally. Linking naturally means you link to a page when you refer to it in the text or the visitor should want to go somewhere after you write something.
How to link?
Generally, it is a good idea to use two or three key words as the anchor text (the text you use to link to another page). This not only makes it clear what the following page is about (apart from being understandable from the context), but also adds some weight with the search engines (just for the former reason, by the way).
Though internal linking isn't just for the search engines (though it helps sometimes), you can and should use internal linking to create clear click paths to increase conversions. |
BEIRUT The millenia-old oasis city of Palmyra is being damaged in clashes between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces and rebels fighting for his overthrow in the midst of the precious archaeological site, a resident said on Wednesday.
Shaky amateur footage filmed by the resident shows the facade of the first century Temple of Baal with a large circle where a mortar bomb has blasted the sandstone. The columns of the great colonnade that extends from the temple have been chipped by shrapnel. (here)
"The rebels are around the town," said the resident, who asked not to be named for fear of imprisonment. "They hide in the desert, some to the east and some to the west."
The groups attack government positions in the town at night, he said.
Hiding in the palm groves behind the ruins, the militants creep towards the ancient site, once a vital stopping point for caravans crossing the Syrian desert carrying spices, silks and perfumes, and the modern town of Tadmur behind it.
The government responds with mortar bombs, artillery shells and rockets, the resident said.
"For the past two months we have had shelling every night," said the resident, who supports the opposition movement. "The army have positioned themselves in the museum, between the town and the ruins."
Soldiers camp out in the luxury hotels once popular with tourists. The army has also entered the Roman theatre and positioned snipers behind its stone walls, he said.
Tadmur's residents took to the streets in March 2011 to call for democratic reforms and an end to the dynastic, four-decade rule of the Assad family.
But as in other cities, police and security forces suppressed the uprising, leading to an armed revolt and civil war in which more than 70,000 have been killed and millions displaced around the Middle Eastern state.
Large swathes of Syria have fallen into rebel hands but the government has managed to retain control of Palmyra.
Maamoun Abdulkarim, director of antiquities and museums at the Ministry of Culture, told Reuters that the interior of the temple was not damaged in the mortar attack, which caused "as much damage as a fire."
Clashes in the palm groves behind the temple and stray bullets could hit the columns and exterior of the ruins, he said by telephone from Damascus. But he said the Palmyra site was largely safe.
"Matters are under control and as for damage to archaeological sites, there is nothing," he said.
"The Syrian army is in some areas in the archaeological site and we oppose this. Our appeal goes to the Syrian government and all the parties to distance themselves from the site so it doesn't become a target for each side."
Emma Cunliffe, a researcher at Durham University in Britain, has been monitoring the destruction to Syria's archaeological sites during the civil war.
Part of her work has included documenting attacks on the Old City of Aleppo, which has seen frontline fighting and fires in its famous souks, and Crac des Chevaliers, a crusader castle on a hilltop in Homs province.
"The old citadels, of which there are a large number, have an age-old function, which is really, really thick walls that protect you from the enemy," she said by telephone from Durham.
These thick walls, she says, make them an ideal spot for a modern military base but lead to their inevitable targeting by enemy forces.
After seeing the videos from Palmyra, Cunliffe said the pattern of damage fits that caused by government-owned weapons, but added it was impossible to be sure.
"It is very unclear what ordnance the rebels actually have access to; they have not hesitated to damage their heritage if it was necessary at other sites, or to utilise it knowing it will be drawn into the line of fire," she said.
The damage to the columns could place the architrave, a beam that rests on the capitals of the columns, in critical condition, leading to more destruction, she said.
(Additional reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
Trending On Reuters
The international community's response to devastating earthquakes in Nepal has been disappointing, a United Nations official said on Monday, adding that donors were focusing more on reconstruction than much needed aid such as food and shelter. Full Article |
Photo: Horia Varlan (Flickr)
When you sit down to a glass of iced tea with a straw in it, you might say that you are sucking the tea up through the straw. In fact, a more accurate description would be to say that the atmospheric pressure is pushing the liquid up the straw.
Decreasing Air Pressure
With the straw just sitting in the glass, the pressure on the surface of the tea is the same all over, including on the little bit of surface inside the straw.
When you suck the air out of the straw, you decrease the pressure inside the straw, allowing the higher pressure on the rest of the surface to push the tea up the straw and into your mouth.
Why Do Straws Work?
Because it is really the atmosphere that is doing the pushing, the atmospheric pressure limits how high water will go up a straw. At sea level, the air pressure is enough to support a column of water about thirty feet high.
Even if you could suck all the air out of a forty-foot straw, the water wouldn’t rise more than thirty feet. In space, where there isn’t any atmospheric pressure, a straw wouldn’t work at all.
How Does A Barometer Work?
This same principal explains how a barometer measures the atmospheric pressure. Since mercury is much heavier than water, the atmospheric pressure can only support a column of mercury about thirty inches high. But as the atmospheric pressure changes, so does the height of the column it can support.
When the meteorologist announces that the barometric pressure is twenty-nine inches of mercury, it means that the air pressure is capable of supporting a column of mercury twenty-nine inches high.
You could measure the atmospheric pressure with a column of water, but a thirty-foot water barometer would be much more cumbersome than a three-foot mercury barometer. |
- Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building - http://inhabitat.com -
QB Playhouses Let Children Build Green Dream Homes
Posted By Beth Shea On March 30, 2009 @ 1:30 pm In Inhabitots | No Comments
Every child longs to carve out their own dwelling space in the big, wide world, and now qb Playhouses enable kids to design, build, and play in their very own unique and delightful abode, brought to life by their imagination. The color and design schemes available in the customization process of a qb playhouse are endless, and a home may also be made 100% unique if a child selects a personal photo with special significance as the pattern for their playhouse. No hard hats are required when it comes to constructing a qb playhouse … just “thinking” caps, and the belief that anything is possible when designing these eco-friendly, fun play spaces that will house your child’s dreams for years to come.
Article printed from Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building: http://inhabitat.com
URL to article: http://inhabitat.com/qb-playhouses-let-children-build-green-dream-homes/
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qb Playhouses: http://www.quubi.nl/original_EN.html
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Copyright © 2011 Inhabitat Local - New York. All rights reserved. |
Pius XII: Hated or Revered by the Third Reich? | Alberto Carosa | CWR
An interview with historian Pier Luigi Guiducci about his new book on the war-time pope.
The unprecedented abdication of Benedict XVI and the election of his successor, Pope Francis, has rekindled worldwide interest in the popes and the papacy. This interest has extended not only to Benedict and Francis, but also to other pontiffs, including the always-controversial Pius XII.
Pius XII is currently in the spotlight mostly because of the bumpy road to his beatification, which is opposed by those who accuse him of having been too lenient towards Hitler’s Third Reich or even of having been in cahoots with the Nazi regime. Recent years have seen the publication of a vast amount of scholarly works refuting these accusations, including books by Sister Margherita Marchione, who is an American nun and member of the Religious Teachers Order Maestre Pie Filippini, and Rabbi David Dalin.
The latest example of this is Il Terzo Reich Contro Pio XII: Papa Pacelli Nei Documenti Nazisti (The Third Reich Against Pius XII: Pope Pacelli in Nazi Documents), by Italian historian Pier Luigi Guiducci, with a preface by Father Peter Gumpel, SJ, the postulator of Pius XII’s beatification cause. Editions in English, Spanish, and French are already in preparation.
Professor Guiducci, who teaches Church history at three universities, including the Pontifical Lateran University’s Ecclesia Mater Institute and the Pontifical Salesian University, has authored nearly 100 books, most with a historical-religious focus, and was so kind as to accede our request for an interview.
Professor Guiducci, could you describe the motives underlying your decision to address such a controversial topic as Pius XII and the Nazis?
Guiducci: Since the Sixties a certain literature has insisted on presenting the figure of Pope Pacelli in a negative connotation, hinting at an alleged passivity on his part during the years of World War II, bordering on some sort of sympathy for a Germany that in those years was dominated by the swastika. What appeared somewhat unclear from the viewpoint of a historical analysis was why so much fuss was being made over Pius XII while…many other, no less dramatic, and even more tragic situations were hardly exposed, scantily reported, and even thoroughly silenced. But by now, dreadful realities, which were neglected and/or sidelined, are increasingly cropping up, thanks to historical studies, investigative reporting, and new in-depth researches.
Can you give us some examples of these wilfully hidden or neglected tragic realities of that era?Continue reading on the CWR site. |
Join us for the following FREE teleconference on Thursday, July 14, from 12:00 - 1:00 p.m. EDT, presented by ABA Section of International Law International Human Rights Committee.
The Armenian Genocide has remained a powerful topic for people of both Armenian and Turkish decent for nearly 100 years. This topic has gained additional focus in the wake of Griswol...d et al v. Driscoll.
Griswold, filed in October 2005 by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) alongside two high school teachers and a student, alleged certain educational materials limited free speech by not including resources that presented “contra-genocide” viewpoints. In August 2010, the First Circuit of Appeals upheld a US District Court ruling that prevented the case from moving forward after a five year battle.
In March, lead attorney Harvey Silverglate argued before a three-judge panel that the educational curriculum in question amounted to a “21st-century library” and should be protected from censorship. On behalf of the panel, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, did not directly address the issue of the Armenian Genocide in his opinion. Instead, Souter focused on whether the issue fell under free speech protection and the panel’s ultimate decision that the case could not go forward.
“The Court of Appeals’ decision is a major victory for sound education on the Armenian Genocide,” Van Krikorian of the Armenian Assembly of America, said in a statement. “The Court defended free speech … and struck a blow to the spurious tactics used by genocide deniers to engage under the pretext of debate.”
This teleconference will provide an overview of the issues dealt with in Griswold et al v. Driscoll and a brief overview of the history of the Armenian Genocide and the state of recognition both domestically and abroad.
Speakers include Mark Fleming, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP; Sonya Nersessian, Immediate Past Chair, Armenian Bar Association; and Professor Peter Rosenblum, Columbia Law School (moderator).
U.S. and Canada Dial-in #: 877-464-2827
International Dial-in: 706-643-9966
Passcode #: 81684988 |
Paul Williams is probably best known as a rock critic who started the groundbreaking magazine Crawdaddy! as a teenager and sang with Timothy Leary on John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Give Peace a Chance." But Williams, who died yesterday after a battle with dementia, also has a major place in science fiction history, including as Philip K. Dick's friend, literary executor and biographer.
Williams met Philip K. Dick in 1972 and the two remained friends until Dick's death, after which Williams served as Dick's literary executor, getting several of Dick's previously unpublished and trippiest novels into print and helping to fuel the rise of Dick's literary reputation. He did an important 1975 article about Dick for Rolling Stone, wrote one of the first biographies of Dick in 1986, Only Apparently Real, and helped to run the Philip K. Dick society.
Over at the Gollancz Blog, Malcolm Edwards writes:
Dick’s reputation is now so secure that it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t always so, particularly – perhaps – in the USA. (He was generally better served by publishers in France and the UK.) It was Paul’s and Russ [Galen]’s work which transformed the situation. When you read one of the many Gollancz editions of Philip K. Dick it is worth remembering that they are there in part because of their efforts.
He also edited the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon, and collaborated with David G. Hartwell on the first book edition of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with a foreword by Jimmy Carter.
Even his books of music writing weren't just about music, but about a lot of other stuff. Speaking about his legendary book Das Energi in one interview, Williams explained:
Das Energi was written in 1970 when I was on this wilderness commune in Canada. It was the next book after Time Between. And I'd been thinking about it for a while. It came out of these late night conversations, where you suddenly, you're sitting around with your friends, you get all excited and you figure out what the world is all about, how everything works, and all these ideas that were in the air from taking psychedelic drugs, reading science fiction books, using the I-Ching, and all that kind of thing. I had some vague idea before I started writing it of, yeah, let's get all that stuff down somehow. And then I was writing fanatically, turning out all kinds of stuff, and I break, which really turned out to be only for four or five months, and when I started writing again, I was in this community in the woods, writing with a pen, and it started coming out in this funny way, just like a few sentences on a page. Maybe an extension of what was happening with Time Between, where the way the words are on the page is part of the story. And, I wasn't really thinking about it, but you start writing and one page leads to the next one, you say, well, let's see, what other subjects haven't been covered yet. I gotta talk about security, I gotta talk about whatever. It was a book of thoughts, though everything I write is really an essay of some kind, and this was just an essay stretched out, where there might just be a paragraph or a sentence on a page, but it's still an essay going from one thought to the next.
Williams carried a lot of the science fiction fanzine culture into the world of rock criticism — and then he brought something back from rock journalism to science fiction, too. Writing in Paste Magazine, Bob Hill said of Williams:
Paul Williams’ pieces weren’t just about music. They were about faith and struggle, religion and redemption, life and death, love and loss. They were about all the major themes that great songwriting is about. But Paul had the space and the freedom to go even deeper; to explore what exactly was at stake in every song and how—on any given night—rock ‘n’ roll had the power to break down the walls that kept people boxed in; to show us the edge without pushing us over.
Paul Williams was indie before indie was indie; punk rock a full decade before anyone even knew what that meant. And he had the foresight and intelligence to recognize that Crawdaddy! would always be more respected and less successful than most of the other mainstream magazines out there… and that that was a good thing.
But you don’t hear Paul’s named mentioned with the same frequency as Lester Bangs or Jann Wenner or even Hunter Thompson. And you won’t find a statue or a stamp or even a park bench bearing his name. And that’s okay, because those things never seemed to matter much to Paul Williams. What does matter is that he created a brand that still stands for something—some 43 years later. He created a magazine that not only gave birth to rock criticism, but somehow managed to outlive it. |
While visiting the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris last Wednesday, I spent some time in the absolutely spectacular Pierre Bonnard exhibit, Pierre Bonnard: L’oeuvre d’art, un arrêt du temps. (For some quotes from French reviews of this important retrospective, see Le Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, February 8.) Bonnard hardly needs any help getting people to like his paintings, but if someone still needs convincing, this is the place for it to happen. In his admiration for the female body, Bonnard is the heir of Ingres, but without all of the academic baggage. You know Bonnard's portraits, his landscapes, his warm, glowing interior scenes, but there are minor works in the show, too, that bring some illumination to a remarkable career, as well as piles and piles of beautiful paintings.
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Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia: The Life of Misia Sert
In 1893, Bonnard met his muse, a 16-year-old girl named Marthe de Méligny (née Maria Boursin). Although they were not married for another 30 years or so, she was Bonnard's constant companion and lover, and he obsessively depicted her nude for his whole life. Bonnard showed himself and Marthe, just after sex, in the shockingly intimate L'homme et la femme (Musée d'Orsay, 1900), shown above with the opening paragraph. The erotic portraits of the first decade of their relationship include the naughty L'indolence (private collection, 1899) -- in which Marthe's pose was perhaps inspired by Courbet's infamous L'origine du monde -- and the tender La sieste (National Gallery of Victoria, 1900). This was also the period of Bonnard's fetish for Marthe in black stockings (in several drawings and paintings in the show).
Somewhere around the time of Le Cabinet de toilette au canapé rose (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1908) -- a loving portrait of Marthe applying her perfume, shown above -- Bonnard's palette began to lighten toward the lighter, brighter colors we associate with his mature style. By the time we reach the extraordinary Nu au gant bleu (private collection, 1916) and La Cheminée (private collection, 1916), the colors are much more vibrant, leaning toward pastel. This is more or less the classic Bonnard, painting in a positively retrogressive way in the era of Dada and Surrealism. One of the many revelations of the show is the wall of tiny photographic proofs that are snapshots of Bonnard and Marthe, standing nude in their garden. Bonnard cannot be accused of idealizing too much: she was a shapely, thin, altogether lovely woman. There are also several of his pencil drawings and water colors on the opposite wall, revealing somewhat his conceptual process.
There are rooms, literally, of various views of Marthe lying in or about to get into the bathtub. Perhaps too many examples, although the variations in color and composition from frame to frame are of mild interest. The best example is Effet de glace from the Winterthur Museum, in which Marthe hovering over her bath is reflected in the mirror of a mantel.
There is a similar excess of riches in the number of landscapes, but one cannot argue with the examples selected. Be careful not to miss the three enormous panels of La Mediterranée (1911, Hermitage), made in Russia for a patron's home. They are hung outside the entrance to the exhibit, a little off to the side. Again, there is an entire room of Norman landscapes, toward the end of the exhibit. The domestic views -- part interior and part landscape -- are the best ones, such as the many paintings done at Ma Roulotte, the home in Normandy that Bonnard purchased in 1912. In this category are great paintings like La salle à manger, Vernon (1925-27), very similar to the one owned by the Met.
Pierre Bonnard: Observing Nature (National Gallery of Australia)
Pierre Bonnard Images (Olga's Gallery)
Bonnard (1998 exhibit, Museum of Modern Art)
Pierre Bonnard: Sous la lumière du Cannet (2001 exhibit, Espace Bonnard, Le Cannet)
One of the best sections of the show is a hallway with eight of Bonnard's self-portraits, from 1899 to very near the time of his death, with half of them coming from private collections and therefore mostly inaccessible. There we see the precise, reserved, silhouette of a man who did not allow either devastating world war in Europe to have any perceptible impact on the luminescent world of his art. In his garden, with Marthe, nothing else mattered.
See also Michael Kimmelman, Pierre Bonnard Retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris (New York Times, March 30). |
Here is a prime example of the overbearing white person, who lives to demonstrate his protective concern for the feelings of "African Americans," even when members of said group would happily live without his protection. In "PC Whiners Aside, Downey Jr. Deserves His Oscar Nod" (Huffington Post, 1/23/09), black author John Ridley reacts to Los Angeles Times' Scott Feinberg, the white person who takes offense for blacks, even when blacks take no offense.
In his January 16 column, Feinberg expresses "shock" over a role played by Robert Downey, Jr., for which he has been nominated for the Academy Award. Feinberg is dismayed, not only because he sees Downey's role as disrespectful to blacks, but because the role has won "widespread approval" from people who, apparently, should know better. In the film, Tropic Thunder, Downey's character, an actor, undergoes an operation that alters his skin pigmentation so he can play a black soldier in a film. In effect, he performs in black face.
"Where is the outrage?" demands the presumptuous Feinberg, ignoring the context of the film's story line. Enjoying his self-appointed position as watchdog for the underdog, he then offers a history lesson about those bad, old Hollywood producers in years past, who thrived on negative portrayals of blacks. "Many in the film industry are so focused on the present," he complains, "that they forget, or worse still, never properly learned, about the past." So, Feinberg, the enlightened white man, is here to straighten out such insensitive white folks. "You can sugarcoat it all you want," he blusters,"but blackface is blackface."
In his brief, terse response to Feinberg's bombast, Ridley nominates him for "Best Performance by a White Guy Who Takes it Upon Himself to be Offended For Black People." Ridley compares Downey's acting achievement in the film to the artful New Yorker cover cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama. It's designed to go for the gut, while making its point. "Trustees of the Liberal Plantation aside," writes Ridley, "Downey Jr.'s performance is sharp, smart satire."
Feinberg seems to imply that what he calls the "wounds of the past" should neither be forgiven nor forgotten. Yes, let's keep the wounds open and bloodied, in order to give types like Feinberg grist for their everlasting race-hyping mill. Commenters on Feinberg's article (on the Times' site) reflect Ridley's impatience with the columnist's intolerant, narrow-minded view of the Downey film:
"This is just more knee-jerk, over-the-top, over-sensitivity to a non-issue. There hasn't been huge outrage from the black community because the community understands the context."
"As an African American woman, I fail to see how celebrating Downey, Jr.'s performance would be the same as celebrating 'blackface.' ... I hope the Academy does recognize Mr. Downey's performance as it was worthy of an Oscar."
"Let's go ahead and ignore the fact that no black people seem to have been offended by the movie. Instead, let's all sit down and have this white guy from LA tell us what is offensive to black people." |
IT project managers are typically individuals presumed to have in-depth technical skills. However, technical aptitude is not the primary key to successful project management. Specifically, IT projects generally will not succeed unless they are managed by professionals who have an adequate combination of business as well as technical communication skills.
Considering one project management model definition; Project Communications Management are the processes impacting timely and appropriate generation, collection, dissemination, storage and ultimate disposition of project information. Within this context, planning a formal communications network, with purpose clarity and policy distinctiveness, is essential for IT projects. Furthermore, disseminating IT project information is considered fundamental to practicing structured project management. Wherefore, providing effective and efficient information distribution and storage normally requires a technology-based project management information system.
“View Part I of the Governance and Managing IT Projects series here“ |
Japanese radish is called daikon in Japan. The Japanese word “dai” means “large” and “kon” means “root” in English. There are many kinds of radishes in various sizes and forms. Although the color of the skin can be red, green, purple, yellow, black, etc, most are white. They contain vitamins A, B and C, iron, calcium, etc., so the nutritive value is high. It can be used in salads, miso soup, simmered vegetables and fish paste balls, among many other dishes. It can also be grated and served as a topping on meat and fish. This use is said to help in digesting food.
Konnyaku and shirataki are a gelatin-like food made from the starch of devil's tongue root. They are manufactured differently. Konnyaku is classified into two basic types – block and string. Shirataki is only string. Konnyaku and shirataki are low-calorie and high-fiber and they clean the intestines. They are used in sukiyaki, simmered vegetables and fish paste balls, one-pot dishes, etc. |
BMW’s art cars are pretentious exercises in corporate art. Or maybe not. An afternoon with the most famous of them all — Andy Warhol's BMW M1 — reveals a breakneck beauty.
Cars in Museums
It was a workday afternoon, the city thumping lightly in the midsummer heat, and our Budapest intern Máté Petrány had just returned from helping to unpack the
world’s most famous BMW, the Le Mans-bloodied M1 painted by Andy Warhol in 23 minutes. Máté was trying to convince me to attend a press conference for the car’s local showing at the Palace of Arts, a massive museum where the car was to be on display for a month.
“It’s a BMW with paint sitting in a fucking museum,” is what I told him, or something to the tune.
Pardon the prejudical lack of appreciation, but I’ve always though of BMW’s art cars as the epitome of corporate bullshit. While BMW is a lovable company in many ways, in their independence, in their better-than-average focus on what really matters in a car, in their general attitude of fuck off to everyone who doesn’t agree, they have a tendency to get carried away by heavy-handed, strained, and very German publicity efforts. The art cars.
Cars are not art. Cars are machines that turn gasoline into miles. They may inspire art, they may inspire and influence wars, they may
shape our culture in profound ways, but cars covered in wacky paintjobs are still nothing but cars, even if they help the Bavarians build even more mellifluous straight sixes.
BMW has a history of making these things, of commissioning artists to get wild on canvases of aluminum und shteel. The results most often end up in museums. Not Warhol’s M1, though. Warhol’s M1 was painted for war in France.
The Platonic Ideal of the BMW
You know the M1.
It’s the sacred cow of the BMW enthusiast, the homologation special turned religious object built in sub-Miura numbers over 30 years ago. The car that’s such a
perfect expression of Freude am Fahre that it’s quite unlike any BMW built before or since. Low, wedge-shaped, mid-engined, it’s more a double spread in a picture book about early ‘70s Italian concept cars than a German road racer, a genuine Giugiaro origami.
It is a thoroughly weird car, conceived back when BMW was on its way to becoming the Bavarian Death Star from being little more than a punk rival to Mercedes–Benz. How it was built by Lamborghini, who suffered one of their pre-Audi bankruptcies, forcing BMW to repo the M1 shells from the factory at Sant’Agata Bolognese before they could be sold off for scrap.
“It’s strange how a few minor details turn what is essentially a Lamborghini into the ultimate BMW,” Máté told me on the phone after helping to unpack the car. “All it takes is a kidney-shaped grille, a Hofmeister kink, and a little squaring off of lines.”
The Waves of van Gogh
I used to think viewing paintings in person was completely unnecessary. After all, what is a painting if not a flat surface covered in paint? And what part of it can a picture book or a screen not reproduce? Perhaps with better screens and better picture books, we may jettison the fetishizing of high-dollar originals and enjoy
artwork the way we enjoy books, where a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard bound in whale penis leather reads exactly the same as a plain text file.
Unfortunately, my neat theory was shattered a few years ago by Vincent van Gogh’s Seascape at Saintes-Maries, an innocent seascape from 1888 I was stuck in front of for hours. I came to realize that paintings, the flattest of art, are emphatically not flat, that they are intricate exercises in three dimension, dependent very much on light and dependent even more on great painters having the ability to fuck with the senses. How a man with van Gogh’s talent can paint waves on the blue Mediterranean using nothing but greens and browns. The picture embedded above is a useless facsimilie. You will have to catch the original somewhere.
The same is true of Andy Warhol’s BMW M1 race car.
Not that the M1 is great art. It’s not. It’s a car covered in paint. The paint is wild
and organic and almost random, the paint is cracked with age, the paint is unlike a proper paintjob. The paint is war paint, shocking splotches of red on the front, the paint is there to highlight the true purpose of the M1: to race at Le Mans.
Race at Le Mans it did. At the 1979 24 Hours of Le Mans, it finished sixth (2nd in class), a mere 19 laps behind the overall winner Porsche 935, a turbocharged prototype monster.
At the press conference, press people do what press people are paid to do, and then I am left with a glass of champagne and the M1. There it sits under high
ceilings, a time capsule from the late ‘70s, corpses of long-dead and mummified bugs still stuck to its radiator, Andy Warhol’s finger-painted signature on its rear. It’s a menacing, purposeful object, a riot of color, and it’s very, very real, it’s not a museum piece to be observed while drinking a glass of champagne on a barely air-conditioned summer afternoon and nodding thoughtfully, it is a race car which has gone out and raced, which has survived the
hell of Le Mans, and here it sits, a testament to all that’s great about BMW and about motor racing, it makes you wish for a gas mask and a quick-acting synthetic vaporized opiate to knock all the museum guards out cold, so you can take your dear time filling up the M1’s fluids, gently prodding the M88 engine to life, its red velocity trumpets waking like both the space marines and the xenomorphs in Aliens, so you can pop open its un-Lamborghini door and toe the accelerator and motor out and away, and then, once it’s warmed up, see what it sounds like in the upper reaches of the 6000s.
In a sense then, it is great art after all. |
Yesterday my group and I wandered about CMU campus looking for people to fill out the US Postal Service’s mail forwarding change of address form so we could see what types of problems people have. The idea was to use the information we gathered to inform the redesign of the form that each of us will be completing by Friday.
We ended up testing five people. While that may seem like a small number, it’s amazing what you can determine from even the smallest amount of user testing.
Today in class, the three groups compared findings. The two major issues that everyone encountered were:
- No one read or even knew there were directions, since they’re not attached to the form
- Most people did not know how to mail the form when they were done.
People did not have much trouble with the form itself, as it’s pretty simple. But the design could definitely be improved to make it friendlier, at the least.
The forms we are creating will be 10.5 inches x 6.125 inches (the current form is 7 inches x 5.5 inches). So we’ll have room to bring in any needed directions as part of the form.
For tomorrow we are to create thumbnail sketches of proposed designs. I’ve already done mine, one as a vertical layout, and the other horizontal. They include numbered sections to help people easily figure out what they need to fill out and where to go next. At least, that is the intention. |
Vol. 12, No. 15 June 15, 2012
- Mali, like other sub-Saharan countries, has been facing growing attacks from al-Qaeda’s North African branch – Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Islamists are involved in a multi-million-dollar ransom industry fuelled by kidnapping Westerners and drug-trafficking in Northern Mali, where al-Qaeda militants and other Islamist combatants share ground with the Tuareg, a minority of perhaps 1 million of Mali’s 15 million people and about a third of the population of Northern Mali.
- In March 2012 the country collapsed into chaos after soldiers toppled the president, leaving a power vacuum that enabled the rebels to take control of the northern part of Mali, approximately two-thirds of the country. This is the fourth rebellion led by Tuareg nomads since independence in 1960. The last ended only in 2008.
- In October 2011 the Tuareg fighters gathered in the oasis settlement of Zakak in the hills by the border of Algeria. They were joined by career rebels, Malian army deserters, and young activists in a conclave that gave birth to the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad).
- The Tuareg offensive occurred after the return of Tuareg fighters to Mali following the fall of their historical patron, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in neighboring Libya. Most probably their rebellion would not have taken place had Gaddafi remained in power. Gaddafi’s Malian fighters returned to Mali bringing with them battle experience and equipped with heavy and sophisticated weapons looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals.
- As has been the case in Tunisia, Egypt, and to a lesser extent in Syria lately, the Tuaregs’ struggle for an independent homeland has been hijacked by better-organized and armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe haven for militants in the Sahara – a west African Afghanistan. The implications of such a development could become a new nightmare for the West.
Until recently, Mali was regarded as an example of African democracy. Western intelligence agencies have been following events in Mali since, like other sub-Saharan countries, it has been facing growing attacks from al-Qaeda’s North African branch – Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Islamists are involved in a multi-million-dollar ransom industry fuelled by kidnapping Westerners and drug-trafficking. Northern Mali has long been a rear base for drug traffickers, with al-Qaeda militants and other Islamist combatants sharing ground with the local Tuareg. Still, Mali was a homogenous political entity with a vibrant leadership dedicated to fighting terrorism and Islamist extremists.
However, in March 2012 the country collapsed into chaos after soldiers toppled the president, leaving a power vacuum that enabled the rebels to take control of the northern part of Mali, approximately two-thirds of the country.
The Fourth Tuareg Rebellion
When Mali’s Tuareg nomads launched their rebellion in January 2012, many in Africa and elsewhere thought it would be just the latest in a long line of desert uprisings to be swiftly terminated with offers of cash and jobs. The Tuaregs, a minority of perhaps 1 million of Mali’s 15 million people and about a third of the population of Northern Mali, are traditionally nomadic people who live in countries touching the Sahara Desert, including Mali, Algeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Libya, who have resisted central authority since colonial times. Mali is no stranger to rebellions. This is the fourth led by Tuareg nomads since independence in 1960. The last ended only in 2008.1
In October 2011 the Tuareg fighters gathered in the oasis settlement of Zakak in the hills by the border of Algeria. They were joined by career rebels, Malian army deserters, and young activists in a conclave that gave birth to the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad), a collation of different factions and agendas, with a force estimated at the time to be 1,000 strong and whose open goal was attaining independence. The Azawad is an immense territory equivalent in size to France and Belgium combined. It is situated north of the Niger River and includes three administrative sub-divisions: Kidal, Timbuktu, and Gao. In the Malian context, Azawad refers to the northern part of Mali, considered by the Tuaregs to be their homeland.2
The Impact of the Fall of Gaddafi
The Tuareg offensive occurred after the return of Tuareg fighters to Mali following the fall of their historical patron, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, in neighboring Libya. Most probably their rebellion would not have taken place had Gaddafi remained in power. Gaddafi’s Malian fighters returned to Mali bringing with them battle experience and equipped with heavy and sophisticated weapons looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals.
Furthermore, the situation in Mali itself played into the hands of the Tuaregs. Inspired by the South Sudanese precedent, and taking advantage of the weakness of the central government and of a poorly equipped army, the Tuaregs launched their offensive in January and subsequently won town after town in the northern part of the country. In late March, troops upset with the government’s handling of the Tuareg rebellion, and opposed to any compromise with the rebels, staged a coup d’etat led by young officers against President Amadou Toumani Toure (commonly called ATT), creating a chaotic situation which was fully exploited by the Tuaregs. In less than three months, the Tuaregs became masters of their historical homeland and on April 6, declared independence for their Azawad nation.
The fall of ATT was dramatic for the West. Washington had tried to bolster Mali’s army by providing $17 million in military aid over the past year to equip and train its forces, as well as providing political support. Regular surveillance flights supported by the U.S. Pan-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative used to patrol the skies looking for suspect or unusual movement in the area. The deteriorating situation in Mali brought the U.S. to cancel an annual exercise called Flintlock 2012, which was due to bring African, European, and U.S. troops together to train together in late March. One of the aims of Flintlock was to build the counterterrorism capacities of African armies.3
Islamists Hijack the Rebellion
As has been the case in Tunisia, Egypt, and to a lesser extent in Syria lately, the Tuaregs’ struggle for an independent homeland has been hijacked by better-organized and armed Islamists from Mali and abroad, creating a safe haven for militants in the Sahara – a west African Afghanistan.
As rebel forces took major tows in northern Mali such as the ancient city of Timbuktu, it appeared that MNLA fighters were operating alongside a newly formed Islamist movement known as Ansar Dine (Defenders of Faith), whose stated goal is to impose Islamic law (Shari’a) all across Mali.
Ansar Dine’s leader is Iyad Ag Ghali, who, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, is “northern Mali’s undisputed power broker.”4 In two decades Ag Ghali led two previous Tuareg rebellions, and served briefly as Mali’s Consul General in Saudi Arabia where he adopted the most extreme Salafi form of Islam before being expelled by the Saudi authorities. Once back home he acted as an intermediary between hostage-paying European governments and kidnappers belonging to AQIM.
While some wonder whether Ag Ghali is motivated more by religion or by personal ambition, he has taken on at least the appearance of a fundamentalist.5 Gone is the large mustache that he used to sport. On a video released by Ansar Dine, he has a full, graying beard.
Colleagues say he became more religiously active in the 1990s when Tabligh Jamaat, a fundamentalist but nonviolent Islamic movement from Pakistan and India, started preaching in northern Mali. Tabligh Jamaat, founded early in the last century, is an offshoot of the Deobandi school of Islam, which is very hardline. Most of the Taliban leadership is Deobandi.
After Ag Ghali was assigned in 2007 to Mali’s consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Saudis became concerned about the amount of time he spent on his satellite phone and his ties to Tabligh Jamaat. They considered his activities incompatible with his status as a diplomat. He had been appointed to Saudi Arabia after he helped negotiate a peace accord that ended a brief Tuareg rebellion. “Some Tuareg rebels are irked at what they view as Ag Ghali’s self-centered decision to abandon northern Mali during a time of crisis, leaving his Tuareg rebel colleagues in the lurch,” a leaked U.S. Embassy cable noted in 2008.6
Today, the doubts about Ag Ghali’s motivations are resurfacing. His family is part of a group of Tuaregs who have traditionally ruled the region around the town of Kidal, and he has been active in the rebellions there for years. Other leaked U.S. diplomatic cables describe Ag Ghali as a master manipulator, especially when there is a chance to make money. “Ag Ghali is so adept at playing all sides of the Tuareg conflict to maximize his personal gain,” notes a cable from October 2008 released by WikiLeaks. “Like the proverbial bad penny, Ag Ghali turns up whenever a cash transaction between a foreign government and Kidal Tuaregs appears forthcoming.”7
Ag Ghali’s age isn’t clear. He was born in Abeibara in northern Mali in the late 1950s. In the 1970s, like many other young Tuareg men, he left to join Gaddafi’s Islamic Legion in Libya. He was sent to fight against Chad in the 1980s, and fought in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. By the early 1990s, Ag Ghali returned to Mali to take part in a Tuareg rebellion in which he was a senior commander and then helped negotiate a peace deal with the government.
The leaked cables show that Ag Ghali spoke with staff at the U.S. Embassy in Bamako several times about events in Mali between April 2006 and January 2010. “Soft-spoken and reserved, Ag Ghali showed nothing of the cold-blooded warrior persona created by the Malian press,” according to a May 2007 cable written after one such meeting.8
Diplomats in Mali said Ag Ghali formed Ansar Dine last year after being rebuffed in separate efforts to head both the MNLA and his Ifoghas clan. Diplomats also say that his links with al-Qaeda are through a cousin who is a local commander. Yet if imposing Shari’a has won Ag Ghali little popularity, it has been crucial in drawing him closer to AQIM, which he now needed for its firepower and the cash it had accumulated after years operating in the area.
The MNLA now appears to risk tearing itself apart over a proposed power-sharing deal with Ansar Dine – with the latter saying that Shari’a is a non-negotiable part of the deal, even as it consolidates its position on the ground.
The alliance between the groups is tense. The MNLA seeks an independent secular state while Ansar Dine professes a Shari’a state. It is unclear which holds more sway in the strech of Sahara taken from the government. In Timbuktu, Ansar Dine has gained the upper hand and announced Shari’a law. The MNLA had already hoisted its green, black, red and yellow flags over Timbuktu, but Ansar Dine fighters pulled them down, burned them, and replaced them with their black flags. Ansar Dine’s next step was to burn Timbuktu’s holy sites, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in order to stress the direction they will be following in the near future: pure Salafism.
Mali is still far from the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan of the 1990s. However, the rapidly unfolding events are turning the area into a magnet for jihadists. Reports from Northern Mali tell of militants from Algeria, Mauritania and Nigeria (Boko Haram militants) present in the northern city of Gao. A leader of Africa’s al-Qaeda branch, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was also spotted in Gao. Belmokhtar, an Algerian, lost an eye in combat in Afghanistan and is known as “the one-eyed sheikh.” Fighters from a breakaway branch of al-Qaeda called the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa have also been seen in Gao. So are al-Qaeda militants, who are not afraid to appear in public. Pakistani and Afghan jihadis apparently have been training recruits for Islamic groups in northern Mali. Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist fundamentalist group, was also reported to have set up training camps in the Malian town of Gao.9
Surprisingly, both the MNLA and Ansar Dine declared on May 26 their fusion into a single movement while announcing the establishment of an Islamic state in Northern Mali and the creation of a “Transitional Council of the Islamic State of the Azawad.”10 Three days later it seemed that this agreement had hit trouble over how strictly to impose Shari’a, and there are even news reports of armed clashes between MNLA and Ansar Dine fighters in the town of Kidal. A further deterioration of relations between MNLA and Ansar Dine could only worsen the security situation in Northern Mali.11
Destabilization of the area works in favor of the terrorist groups. The rebels’ seizure of three major airstrips in the north – near the towns of Gao, Timbuktu, and Tessalit – means that these could be used for everything from drugs and weapons to yet more foreign fighters. The overflow of weapons and combatants from Libya into an already unstable area adds another layer of insecurity.
The implications of such a development could become a new nightmare for the West. Western intelligence agencies as well as those in Africa will have to concentrate their efforts in order to contain the new threat coming from Mali and stop al-Qaeda and its affiliates/associates/allies from establishing a safe haven in the sub-Saharan region. Failure to do so could be interpreted as weakness and as an invitation for terrorist activities in countries targeted by al-Qaeda.
* * *
1. David Lewis and Adama Diarra, “Arms and Men Out of Libya Fortify Mali Rebellion, Reuters, 10 February 2012.
2. Ibid.; Andrew Harding, “Sand and Fury: Mali’s Tuareg Rebels,” BBC, 3 March 2012; “Mali: des Touaregs proclament l’independence, la junte accepte de transferer le pouvoir,” Le nouvel Observateur, 7 April 2012.
3. “U.S. Postpones Mali Military Exercise amid Attacks, Associated Press, 10 February 2012.
4. David Lewis, “Mali: The World’s Next Jihadi Launchpad?,” Reuters, 4 June 2012; Celeste Hicks, “Tuareg Rebels Make Troubled Return from Libya to Mali,” BBC News Africa, 9 February 2012.
5. Martin Vogl, “Spotlight on Leader of Islamist Group in Mali,” Associated Press, 27 April 2012.
9. Michelle Faul, “Mali Attracts Fighters in Void after Coup,” Associated Press, 6 April 2012; “Niger Says Afghan, Pakistani Jihadis in N. Mali,” Reuters, 8 June 2012.
10. “Les rebelles islamistes renforcent leurs positions au nord du Mali,” La Croix, 28 May 2012.
11. “Mali Rebels Split over Shari’a in New State,” Reuters, 29 May 2012; “Mali Rebel Groups Clash in Kidal,” BBC News Africa, 8 June 2012.. |
FRÄNKEL, SECKEL ISAAC:
German banker; born at Parchim, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Jan. 14, 1765; died at Hamburg June 4, 1835.
He acquired by private study not only a high degree of general culture, but also a thorough knowledge of nine languages, ancient and modern, supporting himself at the same time by teaching. He subsequently went to Hamburg, where he became bookkeeper in one of the larger banking-houses. He soon founded a bank himself and accumulated a considerable fortune. Although not unfavorably disposed toward Reform, Fränkel opposed the introduction of Eduard Kley's German hymn-book, considering it too radical a departure from the past of Judaism. With M. J. Bresslau, heading the Reform Tempel Verein, he issued a prayer-book, the "Ordnung der Oeffentlichen Andacht" (Hamburg, 1819), in which Hebrew prayers were interspersed with the newly introduced German hymns. Fränkel translated the apocryphal books from Greek into Hebrew (Leipsic, 1830), and wrote a poem in Hebrew on the sojourn of the French in Hamburg, entitled "Ḥeble ha-Moniyyah we-Ḳin'at El" (Altona, 1815).
- Zedner, Cat. Hebr. Books Brit. Mus. p. 253;
- Fürst, Bibl. Jud. i. 292;
- Fuenn, Keneset Yisrael, p. 335. |
The striking new CIA disclosures that my husband, Jonathan Pollard, did not transmit information about the United States to Israel reaffirms that there is no justification for his continued incarceration after 28 years in prison. Unfortunately, the new CIA disclosures do not provide a legal basis for reopening his court case.
Contrary to popular misconception, the US does not permit prisoners an endless number of appeals. The legal remedies available to a prisoner are severely restricted. Jonathan has used up all of his.
Some background to understanding Jonathan's Catch-22 dilemma: First of all, as unbelievable as it seems, Jonathan has never been allowed a direct appeal of his life sentence in a court of law. His own attorney deprived him of that right.
Jonathan pleaded guilty, cooperated fully (which the recent CIA disclosure acknowledges) and had a plea agreement in which the US government agreed not to ask for a life sentence. Nevertheless, in breach of the agreement, the government asked for a life sentence. Jonathan's then-lawyer did nothing to protest, allowing the judge to grant the government's request and Jonathan was sentenced to life in prison.
Jonathan's lawyer then compounded the disaster by failing to file a one-page notice of appeal within ten days. At that time, Jonathan was being held incommunicado and he had no way of knowing that his attorney was discarding his rights. Consequently, the attorney's failure to file deprived my husband forever of the right to any direct appellate review of his life sentence.
The only challenge to the sentence that remained available under American law was a collateral attack called habeas corpus, which imposes a much higher burden of proof on the prisoner than would a direct appeal. In 1990, Jonathan obtained a different lawyer who filed a habeas corpus petition with the court.
In 1992, the Court of Appeals, in a two-to-one decision, denied Jonathan's habeas corpus petition. Two justices ruled that he had not met the higher burden of proof required as a result of his original lawyer's foul-up. This amounts to being told, "Tough luck, Buddy. Stay in jail for the rest of your life because your original lawyer did not protect your right to appeal!" One conscientious judge disagreed with the majority, writing that Jonathan's life sentence represented a "fundamental miscarriage of justice" requiring relief. This dissenting judge said that the government's breach of the plea agreement was sufficient reason for Jonathan's sentence to be vacated, even under the higher standard that applies to habeas corpus review.
Elliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP became Jonathan Pollard's pro bono attorneys in May 2000. An executive summary on the Justice for Jonathan Pollard website provides an overview of the legal initiatives undertaken by Lauer and Semmelman, between 2000 and 2006.
Despite the intensive efforts of Jonathan's dynamic new legal team, the American justice system denied their new habeas corpus petition which sought to bring the case back to court on the ground of ineffective assistance by the original lawyer. The courts denied the petition on the basis of the statute of limitations, which had long since elapsed as Jonathan sat in jail, unaware of these legal niceties.
When all legal remedies in the Court of Appeals had been exhausted, the attorneys petitioned the US Supreme Court, which also refused to hear the case. To this very day, the merits of Jonathan's case have never been heard in a US court of law. Unfortunately, nothing in the new CIA revelations makes any difference to the Catch-22 rule that Jonathan has used up all of his legal appeals.
Even if Caspar Weinberger himself were to return from the grave today, offering to testify that the US government deliberately hijacked the legal process which resulted in my husband's life sentence, Jonathan would not be permitted to bring the case back to court for Weinberger to testify. No more legal appeals means exactly that.
Neither is parole a viable option. As Jonathan's attorneys have repeatedly explained: "Applying for parole is not an option for Mr. Pollard, because of a severe impediment which has been unilaterally imposed by the Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ has refused to allow Mr. Pollard's current attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman (both of whom have the appropriate Top Secret/SCI-eligible security clearances), from seeing the documents that were submitted to the sentencing judge prior to Mr. Pollard's sentencing in 1987. Although Mr. Pollard's lawyers have a clear 'need to know,' the DOJ has refused to allow them to see their client's entire court file, which is partly under seal. Without access to that file, persons opposed to parole know that they have free reign to say absolutely anything about Mr. Pollard without any risk that they will be contradicted by the documents."
Nor is there an "automatic release" date for Jonathan on November 21, 2015.
This too is a popular misconception. The 2015 date, which appears on the Bureau of Prisons' website, marks the 30th anniversary of Jonathan's arrest.
It is not a release date, but a time at which Jonathan can request parole.
The US government will still be able to hide behind a veil of secrecy and vigorously oppose parole at that time. The only option remaining is presidential commutation to time served.
The newly declassified 1987 CIA damage assessment puts the lie to American allegations that have been used for over a quarter of a century to justify Jonathan's continued incarceration. A second government damage assessment by the Justice Department (the1987 Victim Impact Statement), now public record, forever lays to rest the falsehood that Jonathan damaged US national security. By any standard of fairness, the only conclusion that can be drawn from the combined weight of both government damage assessments is that Jonathan should not have to remain in prison a second longer.
While this travesty of justice may not have originated on President Barack Obama's watch, it has been fully revealed under his tenure. It is precisely for cases like this, where the US justice system is unwilling or unable to correct itself that the American Constitution grants the president virtually unlimited powers of clemency. Justice requires that Obama use his powers of executive clemency to release Jonathan Pollard now.
View original article. |
Introduction / History
The Bonggi people are mainly found on Banggi and Balambangan Islands at the northernmost point of Sabah, Malaysia. Non-Bonggi and other outsiders normally refer to them as "Banggi" or "Dusun Banggi". They are a peace-loving, non-violent group. Historically and contemporarily, they tend to avoid conflicts. The Bonggi speak the Bonggi language, which is distantly related to the Molbog language in the Philippines.
What Are Their Lives Like?
The majority of the Bonggi work as subsistence farmers and subsistence fishermen. They are only small-scale producers depending on simple technology. They plant cassava, maize, banana, papaya, sugarcane, tobacco, tuba (derris elliptica), and sweet potatoes. Coconut farming is their main source of cash income. They use hook and line, small nets, poison, and spears for fishing.
Bonggi communities consist of scattered homesteads with no unifying social centers. Many Bonggi chew betel nut, which has become a part of their identity; sharing betel ingredients gives them a chance to interact.
A pakng lima 'headman' is appointed by the government mainly to settle disputes and legal issues and to help communicate to the government on behalf of the village people any of their needs such as health services or building a dock. Intermarriages are allowed but not favored; on the other hand, marriages to a first cousin are permitted.
What Are Their Beliefs?
The majority of the Bonggi are influenced by animistic beliefs and various superstitions. They resist other religious beliefs, which they see as foreign to their own customary laws. There are many customs pertaining to dominating the spirit world. For example: if a Bonggi can obtain strands of someone's hair, or a tooth, or used tobacco or dirt from a footprint, and bring it to 'an evil rock spirit' (kuakng batu), then the evil spirit will have the power to make that person sick. The Bonggi believe that babies and small children should wear amulets to protect them against evil spirits.
The Bonggi follow certain beliefs in treating illnesses. One example of a common taboo is not to eat any food that is red in color once a person is inflicted by an illness that causes red rashes. Therefore, food such as crabs, papaya, red chili, and watermelon are forbidden for the person with such an illness.
What Are Their Needs?
Modern farming and fishing methods and technology could be introduced to the Bonggi people. Developing an infrastructure such as good land and sea transportation could provide them opportunities to sell farm produce in neighboring places. Pray for believers who have knowledge in these areas to help the people.
There is also a need for education as their illiteracy rate is still quite high. Pray for teachers to help in educating and providing good teaching materials to the Bonggi children and youth.
|Profile Source: Southeast Asia Link - SEALINK Copyrighted © Used with permission| |
This evening hundreds of thousands of West Virginians will sit down to dinner without saying grace and they and their children will go to bed without prayers. On Sunday morning, rather than go to church, they'll sleep late, enjoy a leisurely breakfast, read a newspaper and relax with bottomless cups of tea or coffee. Others will rise early, not to worship God, but to take a walk or hike. And it's all good.
We're talking about non-religious West Virginians - secular West Virginians. A small number are atheists, some are agnostics, but mostly they're regular people, free of doctrine, for whom religious belief and practice simply aren't parts of their lives. They may or may not believe in God. They may or may not be spiritual. But they share a common characteristic in having little interest in religion because even without religious faith they're happy and fulfilled while in public life they're solid citizens and contributors to the general good.
That's not to say that all secular people are virtuous and happy. But, as well shall see, they seem to do at least as well as their religious counterparts and there are lots of them. According to recent studies by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Gallup organization, 29 percent of West Virginians and more than a third of Americans say religion is not an important part of their daily lives. About a fifth of West Virginians rarely or never attend church.
Secular Americans are spread out pretty much across the political spectrum, although they are somewhat less likely than the population as a whole to identify as Republicans. And you can't really blame them given the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates.
"How can you have judgment if you have no faith? How can I trust you with power if you don't pray?" thunders Newt Gingrich who frequently cites secularism as America's greatest threat. In Rick Santorum's lexicon, the word "secular" is regularly associated with the excesses of the French Revolution, collapsing values and various forms of totalitarianism. And Mitt Romney warns about the dangers of "the religion of secularism".
If you happen to be a secular American sitting at home watching TV and you hear this kind of vitriol and hysteria, you almost have to remind yourself that it's you they're talking about. Romney, Santorum and Gingrich rail about a "war on religion," but you're the one who is being insulted to a degree and in terms that religious Americans never have to endure. But, as aggravating as that is, mostly you wonder just what it is these guys are talking about.
That's because, as the United States has become more secular, it's generally become a better place to live. Steve Chapman addressed this issue in a recent Chicago Tribune column.
"In the past couple of decades, most indicators of moral and social health have gotten better, not worse. Crime has plummeted. Teen pregnancy has declined by 39 percent. Abortion rates among adolescents are less than half of what they were. The incidence of divorce is down. As of 2007, 48 percent of high school students had engaged in sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991."
Then Chapman points out that the states that lead in these measures of quality of life far from being the most religiously observant are instead the least observant and most secular.
Vermont and New Hampshire, the states with the lowest rates of church attendance in the country have the fewest murders. Mississippi has the highest rate of church attendance in the country and one of the highest murder rates.
Chapman goes on. "Of the 10 states with the most worshippers, all but one have higher than average homicide rates. Of the 11 states with the lowest church attendance, by contrast, 10 have low homicide rates." The same dynamic is true of other measures of morality and social well-being.
Teen pregnancy rates are highest in states where religious observance is most prevalent and lowest where it is not. Divorce rates are very low in comparatively secular states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where same-sex civil unions are legal, but above average in the Bible belt and among adults who classify themselves as evangelical or "born again." Rates of crime, charitable giving and volunteerism also show that in general more secular states do better than more religiously observant ones.
So, why do the Republican candidates fear and vilify secularism?
They don't trust it. They don't believe morality can exist in the absence of an active faith in God. None the less, they're contradicted every day by millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands of West Virginians who conduct virtuous lives grounding their morality, not in religious faith, but in the principles of love, compassion, duty and charity - impulses they and almost all people feel spontaneously, impulses that don't diminish whether God is present in their lives or not.
If Gingrich, Santorum and those who are of a like mind on issues of faith can set aside their rhetoric about secularism and take a look at whom secular Americans actually are and the lives they lead, they'll find great comfort and reassurance. Perhaps then they will politely respect these people who are, as much as any Americans, good parents, good neighbors, excellent citizens and important contributors to what is good in West Virginia and America. |
Energy-Efficient Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks
Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019-0016, USA
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2006, 2006:039814 doi:10.1155/WCN/2006/39814Published: 18 June 2006
A key challenge for wireless sensor networks is how to extend network lifetime with dynamic power management on energy-constraint sensor nodes. In this paper, we propose two energy-efficient MAC protocols: asynchronous MAC (A-MAC) protocol and asynchronous schedule-based MAC (ASMAC) protocol. A-MAC and ASMAC protocols are attractive due to their suitabilities for multihop networks and capabilities of removing accumulative clock-drifts without any network synchronization. Moreover, we build a traffic-strength- and network-density-based model to adjust essential algorithm parameters adaptively. Simulation results show that our algorithms can successfully acquire the optimum values of power-on/off duration, schedule-broadcast interval, as well as super-time-slot size and order. These algorithm parameters can ensure adequate successful transmission rate, short waiting time, and high energy utilization. Therefore, not only the performance of network is improved but also its lifetime is extended when A-MAC or ASMAC is used. |
Movie Mole: The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Joe Clement talks with Jason Read about psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Sophie Fiennes philosophical documentary: The Pervert's Guide to Ideology. This is the second film Zizek and Fiennes have made together, the first being The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Both films analyze dozens of films and uses films to illustrate concepts in psychoanalysis, the critique of ideology, and how we might recognize the subtle and difficult ways we are implicated in ideology.
Jason Read is a philosophy professor at the University of Southern Maine. He blogs at Unemployed Negativity and is interested in marxist and feminist theory, film and popular culture, and the politics of work.
- Genre: Other
- Length: 12:20 minutes (11.29 MB)
- Format: MP3 Mono 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR) |
The work of a frenzied summer of theorising from those great minds of Trellis
, QTD is the theory which thus far most accurately describes the zone boundary
interactions within the Great Game. It utilises the (as yet) theoretical entities zonons?
to precisely define how proximity, token weightings, and other factors interact to produce the visible effects we know so well in the Great Game. Zonon interactions are described using zone boundary interaction diagrams, which would have been a good deal harder to draw without Fosdyke Notation
While the original paper on QTD was published in 1982, the full implications of the theory on competitive play have only recently been realised. Indeed, the first truly QTD-led game has yet to be played, although it seems likely to happen next year when Riemann and Garuda meet at Helsinki. It promises to be fascinating, if incomprehensible.
Categories: A to Z |
Yesterday Next American City published my piece on the implications of low-income jobs, and non-traditional labor organizing, for our cities. The second half of my post, which I’ll focus on today, is about the restaurant industry (which, unlike Wal-Mart style retail, I’ve had personal experience in).
Earlier this month the Philadelphia Chapter of the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) released a report, “Behind the Kitchen Door,” on the state of the food service industry in Philadelphia which, until recently, was the only sector experiencing significant job growth. The numbers didn’t look too good, as you might expect from a an industry with a national median income of $18,130 per year. As I noted in my Next American City piece:
It’s not hard to see why [ROC] decided to open up shop in Philly. Here, according to a recent ROC report, restaurants raked in $2.3 billion in 2007 (most recent year data was available), a 40 percent [increase in the number of restaurants], while wages declined by 11 percent since 2001. The industry is rife with labor law and wage violations; Some 40 percent of Philly restaurant workers worked off the clock without pay and almost 58 percent were not paid overtime, ROC reported.
“We have done same research in eight other and we run into the same problems across the industry, across the country,” says Fabricio Rodriguez, lead coordinator of ROC Philadelphia. “And all these features that people in the restaurant industry face every day are very common in the [anywhere in] service economy.” [Bold my own.]
Wage theft is rampant in Philadelphia’s low-wage service economy, particularly in its restaurants and bars. Very few are offered paid sick leave (7.2 percent) or any form of health care coverage (5.7 percent). One ROC member, who works as a waitress, told attendees of the October 10, Restaurant Industry Summit of her “constant fear” of getting sick and being unable to make rent. Sounds familiar. When I worked in a restaurant in Maryland, no one ever took days off for illness: Not only was that a sliver of an already meager income lost, but there was a general institutional bias against it. We were young, so we were expected to tough it out (and try not to snot on the customers’ food).
That may just be an unpleasant aspect of a temporary job for college students, but in an economy that is mostly creating low-wage jobs, at the expense of middle-income work, there are a lot of people waiting tables and working as line chefs on a non-temporary basis. They need the ability to take time off, with reasonable pay, if they get sick or have to take a loved one to the hospital.
For that reason ROC has championed Philly’s unsuccessful earned sick leave bill, which would require that all employers offer a specific amount of paid sick days after an employee has worked a specific number of hours. (The latter passed City Council, but was vetoed by Mayor Michael Nutter.) If more 92.8 percent of food service employers are unwilling to treat their workers as human beings with lives outside of work, than the government should require that they do. That, after all, is what government should be for: Protecting and promoting the interests of those without the individual power and privilege to stand alone. (A category that encompasses the vast majority of society.)
The Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association, of course, does not take this view. In a recent Metro Daily article on the dismal state of labor in Philly food service industry, the CEO of the association, Patrick Conroy, dismissed ROC’s findings: “This group has formed chapters in other cities and they come out with virtually the same report.” This is an absurdly lazy rebuttal, even for an industry group (which aren’t known for the originality, or accuracy, of their claims). The reason ROC’s city-specific reports are very similar, is that conditions within the restaurant industry are very similar. Similarly terrible.
Follow Jake on Twitter. |
Cheyenne BOPU Releases Drinking Water Report
Cheyenne’s drinking water is safe and water quality meets or exceeds federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That’s according to the 2012 Consumer Confidence Report released by the Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities. BOPU spokesman Clint Bassett says the agency will insert copies of the report, also known as the Water Quality Report, in May or June bills issued after May 8th. The report is mandated by the federal government with required information about where Cheyenne’s water comes from and how the treated water compares to federal rules regarding drinking water quality. |
L.R. Kimball recently conducted a second survey on cyber security issues to gain an understanding of how the awareness, attitudes and issues regarding cyber security have changed in the last year. Here are some of the survey highlights:
- 65% of respondents are aware of NENA’s new cyber security standards indicating that while awareness has increased to a decent sized majority, there are still a significant number of folks who are simply not aware of these standards from NENA.
- Overall awareness and recognition of the importance of cyber security in a NG9-1-1 environment continues to be very high at around 71%.
- Approximately 57% of respondents suggested that cyber security is a high priority, while 16% indicated that this is their #1 priority. This is increase of about 3% of each measurement from the preceding survey.
- Respondents believe their IT department is responsible for the security of their organization. While it is true that the IT department is responsible for executing the efforts related to cyber security, it is the management of the call center who is ultimately responsible for the entire center – including cyber security.
- The number of respondents who believe the public is concerned about the security of public safety systems has dramatically risen to 61%. We believe this to be a result of the many high profile attacks that have been highly publicized, including those on public safety systems.
- 50% of respondents (an increase of nearly 40%) have started the planning and budgeting process. The compelling urgency of protecting against cyber attacks appears to be growing.
In an effort to understand where respondents were on the migration continuum for NG9-1-1, we asked questions related to what stage of the process folks were in. L.R. Kimball’s new survey showed that 28% of those surveyed are implementing NG9-1-1. This is a 6% change from our previous survey indicating that the transition to NG9-1-1 continues to occur. Approximately 57% indicated they were still in the planning phases for NG9-1-1.
It is here, during the NG9-1-1 planning stages, that L.R. Kimball believes the journey to effective cyber security begins.
- Organizations can start the planning and compliance process with a security assessment which will provide a formal and accurate picture of what they have in place.
- Following the security assessment, an organization should then create a Security Plan which documents its intentions to execute due diligence and defines how it intends to secure its NG9-1-1 system.
- The Security Plan ultimately leads into the next set of steps necessary to secure a call center: implementing safeguards (e.g. antivirus software, firewalls, policies, etc) and then monitoring and maintaining what's been put in place.
Funding was noted by respondents to our survey as an important issue. 60% felt that lack of budget/funding was a moderate to significant problem. In fact, of all of the potential obstacles to success, funding was the only one that was denoted as a real problem. This is a difference from the previous survey where lack of standards, leadership, and other priorities were identified as obstacles.
What can we do about it? L.R. Kimball believes this is an opportunity for Congress to act -- by providing funding via a grant program specifically targeted at securing public safety agencies. Public safety systems are part of our nation’s critical infrastructure. Funding improvements in their security will bolster its ability to withstand attacks while potentially creating jobs (e.g. the new role of security administrator for public safety agencies).
The nation is currently undergoing one of the most important transformations of its public safety infrastructure as it evolves its legacy 9-1-1 system to NG9-1-1. In this new interconnected, IP-enabled world, the need for cyber security has never been more critical. We know that, the industry knows it, and so do the hackers. Now what? |
Cochise County Reports Problems With Vote Tallies
Cochise County elections officials say they’ve had to reprocess more than 20,000 ballots from Tuesday's election. The problem is being blamed on an apparent computer glitch.
Cochise County interim Elections Director Jim Vlahovich said technical difficulties with electronic ballot counting machines are being investigated. He said the problem was detected late Tuesday night when a test of the system turned up something unusual.
“It showed that voter turnout was 62 percent so we obviously thought that was a concern so we started investigating and discovered that the numbers were inflated,” Vlahovich said.
He said Cochise County sent its ballots to Graham County for a recount.
Vlahovich said it’s still uncertain whether the new count will change the outcome of any local races in Cochise County.
Meanwhile, Yavapai County officials said experimental electronic equipment at polling places that was not certified by the state malfunctioned, delaying its election results. |
Most students who have been to college in the last decade have at least one student loan. According to American Student Assistance, nearly 20 million students attend college each year. Of that 20 million, 60 percent have student loan debt. The average student loan across all age groups is $24,301. If you're one of the many carrying the burden of student loan debt, paying those loans off early can have significant financial benefits…or not. Let's look at whether or not it makes sense financially to try to pay these loans off early.
Save on interest.
Student loans carry interest. Many of them have low interest rates, but not all do. Federal loans have the lowest interests, ranging anywhere from 2.3 – 6.8 percent. Private student loans typically fall within the same range, but the interest rates can be higher, too. Paying extra money toward the principal every month (or whenever you can) reduces your overall balance. If you do this consistently, you can save hundreds of dollars in interest each year, and thousands over the life of your loan.
Student loans can never be written off.
Paying those loans off early has another benefit. If you ever fall on hard times to the point of needing to declare bankruptcy, you still won't be forgiven of your student loans. These must be paid back regardless. The only ways these loans are forgiven due to financial hardship are if you die or become permanently disabled. Getting them out of the way as soon as possible can relieve you of that worry, and that's a comforting feeling during hard economic times.
Pay higher interest loans first.
It's tempting to pay off student loans above other things because they plague us for so long after we continue our education. It may not make sense financially, though, if you're carrying around credit card debt and other loans with higher interest rates than your student loans. Tackle those loans with higher interest rates first, and save the student loans for later.
You may qualify for loan forgiveness.
If you work for the local, state, or federal government or for a 501(c)(3) organization, you are eligible for loan forgiveness after you've made 120 payments (10 years of payments) on your student loans. This is possible under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program for Direct Loans only. Only payments made after October 1, 2007 qualify for this program. This is especially helpful for public service workers, though, who tend to make less than their counterparts in the private sector. If you plan to continue in public service, it may not make sense financially to pay these off early if the remainder (possibly tens of thousands of dollars) can be forgiven.
Do you have any advice for paying off student loans early? Share your tips in the comments.
Photo courtesy of Ralph Daily via Flickr. |
On This Day In History
Kids, if you’re ever cleaning out your parents house and you find a lump of concrete with paint on it, don’t throw it away: It might be a piece of history!
It was on this date November 9, 1989 that for the first time since the Kennedy Administration, East and West Berliners could travel freely between the two halves of their city.
The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR,East Germany) starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off (by land) West Berlin from surrounding EastGermany and from East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the “death strip”) that contained anti-vehicle trenches, “fakir beds” and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period. – Wikipedia
Hundreds of people were killed trying to escape East Germany and the Soviet bloc during the 60s, 70s and 80’s. Then with growing pressure from the Vatican political figures like Lech Wałęsa and Republican Pres. Ronald Reagan, the Solviets finally capitulated and tore down the wall.
Watch President Reagan’s Speech in Berlin 1987:
It was a big deal and many in America took a piece of the infamous wall as a reminder of the victory of freedom over tyranny, beginning 23 years ago today. |
The invention of email Jun 20 2011
This is the first part of a five-part blog post by Errol Morris investigating whether his brother Noel Morris
co-wrote the first working email system at MIT in the mid-1960s. From an MIT colleague of Noel's, Tom Van Vleck:
In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, "Where's electronic mail? That would be so cool." And they said, "Oh, there's no time to write that. It's not important." And we said, "Well, can we write it?" And we did. And then it became part of the system.
Van Vleck maintains a web page about what he, Noel Morris, and their team were working on at the time. To go along with Morris' article, the NY Times has an MIT Compatible Time Sharing System emulator that you can use to send email much as you could back in the 60s. |
There is a reason why The Matrix was surprisingly popular when it burst onto the scene in 1999, making over 27 million opening weekend and winning 4 Oscars. Ok, a lot of that had to do with the new special effects, the Kung Fu fighting, and the leather. But another reason that the Matrix is my favorite movie of all time is how it discussed, portrayed, and played on the age-old question--What is Real?
Plato imagined that everything that we call 'real' might be a reflection, or shadow, of another real (really real) world. His analogy was that we were tied up in a cave, with a fire lighting the cave wall, and the only thing we ever experienced were shadows of the real world on the cave walls.
The Cave, of course, is an analogy for our sense organs. Rene Descartes picks up on this theme during the explosion of Newtonian science, saying that if our senses sometimes deceive us (illusions, hallucinations, dreams)--then perhaps they always deceive us? Descartes imagines that we are all being controlled by some sort of evil intelligent being capible of deluding our senses consistently.
Enter The Matrix:
MORPHEUS: "If real is what you can feel, taste, smell, and see, then 'real' is simply electrical impulses interpreted by your brain."
The Matrix imagines that powerful futuristic machines, given enough knowledge of how the human brain works, have subjected us to a new form of slavery, a "prison for your mind," a virtual world that humans are plugged into.
Of course, all of this is silly, and just philosophical thought experiments used to shed light on our limitations. But what I find amazing is that these silly thought experiments are, if you think about it, possible; and we could never really know either way. |
The Bible’s claim to be authoritative has been, it seems, misunderstood in our culture. Really since the Enlightenment, which our Western thinking continues to be heavily influenced by, there has been a shifting of intellectual paradigms. Science and reason have seemingly overcome the study of Religion [a term that is meant in a good way] because of their ability to eschew faith and trust in favor of solid facts and figures that can be tested, repeated, quantified, and empirically verified.
I see this as a problem namely because I tend to believe that absolutely nothing that science and reason have actually figured out runs antithetical to the Bible. The Bible’s authority extends in the unique directions of revealing God’s nature and character, diagnosing the human soul, and finding out how those two things can come together. The Bible is not a science textbook, though there are things pertaining to science contained in its pages. The Bible is not a psychology book, but there are a wealth of case-studies and truths in that realm revealed throughout the narrative of Scripture. Looking at the Bible for what it actually is becomes quite important. To paraphrase a famous quote, the world didn’t need a scientist or a psychologist, it needed a Savior and so that is what the Bible speaks authoritatively about.
It seems that we are foolish if we intractably hold to the odd belief that the Bible contains all truth. The Bible does not contain all truth. It does contain the most important truths, but not once does the Bible break into the world of algebra, the life-cycles of giraffes, how to properly scramble an egg, or the mixolydian scale in the key of Ab. These truths have been discovered, cultivated, and applied apart from (though not in disagreement with) our Holy Scriptures. This does not mean that the two are totally disconnected as the Bible sees God as the Author of all truth, but this Author, obviously chose to write some truth in some places other than the Scriptures (“the heavens declare the glory of God…”).
The Bible’s authority does, however, supersede any other source. It’s an old illustration but it helps to grasp the point, the Bible is like our American Supreme Court. There are other, lower courts, circuit courts, family courts, traffic courts, etc… and all of them function independently of the Supreme Court in the majority of their decisions. But, and this is key, the highest court in the land makes the final rule on whatever cases it deals with. When the Supreme Court makes a ruling there is no other court to appeal to or to overturn its rulings. The Bible does not have to make claims on every nook and cranny of our universe of facts in order to be the highest authority. What it does is make absolute claims of truth in the areas that are universally of most importance.
If we are going to truly honor the supreme authority of the Bible, we must be careful to deal with what the Bible deals with. To speak the words of life and truth found in the Scriptures is spiritually our safest, though culturally dangerous, position. The Bible’s claims on absolute truth do indeed create tension in our world; always have, always will. But in the end, as one preacher has said, “the Bible will rise up to outlive its pallbearers.” Truth is everlasting and eternal, and truth is the authoritative claim the Scriptures make. |
What was the best Christmas you ever had? For most of us, it was the Christmas we got the greatest gift we wanted more than any other.
It was the Christmas you got Barbie with all her accessories or you got G.I. Joe and all of his equipment. Perhaps you got that mink coat or diamond ring or that little boy or girl you wanted more than anything else.
Gift giving is as much a part of Christmas as is Jesus Christ. This is the season that we celebrate God’s gift of the Christ child, the only begotten, to the world. This gift of God is the greatest gift of all.
That’s because it is the gift of life. John says that in Jesus was life (1:4a). Life, as God intended, is to be lived in relationship with God. If we’re not in relationship with God, we’re nothing more than the living dead. Jesus offers us life in relationship with God.
The gift of God’s only begotten Son is the gift of light. John says that the life was the light of humanity (V.4b). However, life lived in relationship with God requires some direction, some teachings, some commandments.
Jesus is our direction, the compass for our way. Jesus shows us how to live life in relationship with God. He shows us how to walk in the light.
Then, the gift of God’s only begotten is the gift of love. For God so loved the world, John says in chapter 3, that God gave the world the only begotten of God. The gift of God’s Christ is the proof and the tangible evidence of God’s love for us.
The gift of the only begotten, says Philip Wogaman of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., is God’s way of showing God’s love to us. God does not fax, email, tweet or text the message of divine love. Rather, God delivers the message of divine love in person by God’s presence.
It is the only way, Wogaman says, that we could have gotten the message. The essential truth about life had to appear in human form in order to touch us.
One Christmas my son, Kelvin, wanted a Nintendo 64. He already had a Sega Game Boy and a Nintendo, but Nintendo 64 was the new game and he wanted one of them.
I tried to reason with him. At that time, the system cost $129 plus the games were $60 each.
I suggested that we get new games for his old Nintendo system which was working just fine.
But days later while shopping, the ‘Christmas spirit’ hit me and I purchased the Nintendo 64 and games unbeknownst to him. When he saw that Nintendo 64 and those games on Christmas morning, he said something that I have never forgotten. He said, “Daddy, you must really love me.”
This is what God has done in giving us the only begotten. God has shown God’s love for us. God has affirmed God’s presence with us.
Jesus is the greatest gift of all because He is our Emmanuel.
He is God with us. Amen! |
AP Photo/Cathleen Allison
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014 | 4:20 p.m.
Nevada Schools Superintendent Dale Erquiaga has ordered a complete review of the Education Department’s student privacy policies and data-sharing agreements amid concerns from parents about third-party access to their children’s school records.
During an interim legislative committee hearing on education on Tuesday, Erquiaga told state lawmakers his department was analyzing what types of student data it collects and how it was shared with test companies. Erquiaga said he intended to share his findings with the public after his review was completed.
In Nevada, some parents are taking issue with how student information might be shared with test vendors and the federal government as the Silver State begins instituting the new, more rigorous Common Core academic standards. Nevada is one of 45 states using the new standards.
With their adoption come new standardized tests. This spring, about 44,000 Nevada students in third to eighth grade will pilot a new computerized assessment, which is being developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
Some parents are lobbying state lawmakers to look into Nevada’s contract with the Smarter Balanced test developer to find out what kinds of student records are being collected and whether it would be shared with the federal government. The parents say they are fearful these student records might include information like parents’ political or religious affiliation and students’ medical and disciplinary history.
Paige Kowalski, director of state policy and advocacy with student data nonprofit organization, Data Quality Campaign, said the federal government currently didn’t have access to state’s student information.
“You own your data and you determine who will get the data by law,” Kowalski testified. “Once (testing companies) administer your test, they can’t share that data to others. They will have to abide by state laws and federal (student privacy) laws.”
Nevada’s student privacy review comes as the state develops a new student data system that will track students from preschool until they enter the workforce. The state has received more than $9 million in federal and state grant money to develop this new “longitudinal student data system.”
Proponents argue it will help policymakers determine which education programs are working. For example, lawmakers can see how many students from a particular class graduate from high school, go onto college and enter a particular industry.
Some critics, however, question whether such a system is necessary and if the state is collecting too much information on students.
“I never thought education was preparing kids to get to the workforce. I thought that was a byproduct of education,” said State Sen. Scott Hammond, R-Las Vegas. “I think that’s too much information.”
Erquiaga tried to assuage concerns about student data privacy.
“The law prohibits us from releasing student information,” Erquiaga said. “Student information is private.”
Erquiaga argued his department has long collected relevant student and academic information to create accountability reports using aggregate student data.
“I only want information that will help students and educators improve,” Erquiaga said. “Without this information, we can’t make these kinds of policy decisions at the state level.”
John Eppolito, who has four children in public schools in Northern Nevada, urged state lawmakers to study Nevada’s contract with Smarter Balanced. The former teacher who is fighting the implementation of new Common Core standards also encouraged lawmakers to adopt an opt-out policy for parents who didn’t want their children to be tested.
“There’s no firewall that cannot be breached,” Eppolito said. “You have to find a way to protect us.”
Laws on books protect students' privacy
Currently, a patchwork of federal and state laws govern how student information is collected and used.
The Federal Education Rights and Privacy Act, adopted in 1974 and revised in recent years, limits school districts from disclosing student records with personally identifiable information. The federal law allows for some exceptions, such as research and school contractors. (School bus companies, for example, need student information such as homes addresses, to provide transportation services.)
However, some privacy advocates argue current federal and state laws leave too much to interpretation and don’t account for new technologies, such online portals for homework assignments and lessons.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department urged school districts to review what online services are being used in schools. The department also encouraged districts develop procedures to evaluate and approve educational services and, when possible, draft a legal contract.
State legislatures are also taking action to improve student privacy laws. In recent months, legislators in 26 states have introduced bills to limit the kinds of student data can be shared and with whom, along with beefing up penalties for illegal disclosures.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
LatinaLista -- Sorpresa, sorpresa! A new poll released yesterday by the bipartisan coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns shows that Latinos believe in sensible gun laws that keep people safe.
According to the poll results:
Sixty-nine percent of Latino voters believe laws governing the sale of guns should be stronger.
A large majority of Latinos, including more than 70 percent of Latino Republicans, Latino gun owners and Latinos over 50, believe that people from other states should not be allowed to carry a loaded and concealed gun in their state unless they meet their state's legal requirements.
Eighty-six percent - support requiring all gun buyers to pass a criminal background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter who they buy it from. Today, only federally licensed gun dealers are required to perform background checks, although 40 percent of U.S. gun sales are conducted through unlicensed sellers.
Seventy-six percent of Latinos favor a new Obama Administration program requiring gun dealers in border states to report when someone attempts to buy more than one semi-automatic assault rifle within a five-day period.
It shouldn't be any surprise that Latinos support such restrictions. After all, the idea of some hot-tempered person pulling a gun out to show how tough they are is scary to any rational person, Latino or not.
However, the determination among Latinos to take a hardline stance against illegal gun ownership comes from either firsthand experience or sad headlines where gun violence directly impacts the Latino community way too often.
For example, the murder of a young Colorado man, the first in his family to attend college, who was shot on his way to burn some music CDs for his sister's quinceañera; or the death of a Chicago five-year-old who was just sitting next to his mother in the car on the way to abuelo's house for dinner when a bullet pierced the car's trunk and mortally wounded him or the shooting of an Oakland, California three-year-old, who was just sitting in his stroller on a sidewalk, and was unlucky enough to get in the way of shots being fired at two men standing near him.
In response to the death of the three-year-old, the Oakland, CA county prosecutor said:
"...It's a reflection of the senseless gun violence we see out there. And to have it happen right in the middle of the day? That's just horrific."
The fact that too many of the people pulling the trigger are members of our own community should be reason enough to take a reality check and understand that while stricter gun laws may not solve the entire problem, it will help keep one more child, with so much potential, from passing before their time.
(Editor's note: Latina Lista has accepted participation in the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters' mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the US media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.) |
Analogy Two: A man comes into your home. He has a gun he made himself. He points it at your family. He fires, but misses. The gun has little accuracy. He fires repeatedly, missing again and again.
You have a much better gun, made in a real factory. It is in the drawer in the bedroom.
Demonstrators in London and San Francisco - who are distant relatives of the gunman - stage a protest, calling you a murderer and demanding that you keep the well-made gun in the drawer because it would be a disproportionate response.
The man with the homemade gun, it turns out, is a religious fanatic who lives across the street. You were once his landlord. There is much bad blood between you.
He races back across the street. He has a larger weapon that he smuggled in through his basement. He shoots from behind his younger son. He wounds your daughter. You take out a rifle. You aim for him and hit the son, killing the boy.
The demonstrators are now calling you a Nazi and chant "Slaughter the Landlord!"
[In his defense, the neighbor explains that you have kept him and his family locked in the house, and have at times, failed to pay his water, gas and electric bills, causing them to be turned off.
This is some years after the neighbor send out his older son, nicely dressed, to knock on your door. Your older daughter opens the door. He greet her politely, and presses the detonator on a homemade bomb.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009 |
BLSA president to use the law as a vehicle for change
FEATURE RELEASE (Feb. 11, 2011) — When Victoria McCaskey was growing up, her friends wanted to be dentists, police officers and psychologists. She was the only one who wanted to be a lawyer.
“At that time, I didn’t know why, as most children don’t,” she said. “As I got older, though, I became more exposed to the sad truths of injustice and disparities among people of different social economic backgrounds, and I knew I wanted to use the law as a vehicle for change.”
After majoring in political science and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, she chose Wayne Law to pursue her career goal because of its location in a city that she felt mirrored her hometown of Flint. “I felt I could be submersed into the world of law and the city of Detroit, combining both to be an effective advocate for impoverished and underrepresented minorities here in the city,” she said. “Wayne Law is big enough to provide numerous resources for each student’s interest, yet small enough to foster a sense of family and community support.”
McCaskey has found that community support in the Black Law Student Association (BLSA), a group that she heads up this year as president. “BLSA created a familial environment for me, with members sharing in my tears and frustrations that come with being a first-year student, and older members giving me words of encouragement when I needed them,” she said. “I look back now, and see that my first year would have been far more difficult had I not joined BLSA.”
But the group has been more than that to McCaskey – it’s been an inspiration. “Since joining BLSA, I have learned the world can never have enough lawyers who advocate for those that can’t advocate for themselves,” she said. “Now more than ever, I have a strong desire to join the legal community of Detroit, serving as a resource for young black law students, just as the black Detroit legal community has done for me.”
This year, BLSA members have volunteered their time to assist a number of Detroit organizations including the Detroit Rescue Mission, Greening of Detroit and the Detroit Adopt-A-Child Program. This semester, BLSA members will partner with Western High School's "Gear Up" program, which aims to help Detroit high school students succeed in high school and matriculate to college, as well as with Wayne Law’s Jewish Law Student Association and Middle East Law Student Association on a three-part cross-cultural museum visit program.
McCaskey, a recipient of the Judges Leona and Leonia Lloyd Twins for Justice Endowed Scholarship, has gotten a good taste of the wide range of career opportunities within the law as a result of several summer work experiences. During the past summer, she was an intern at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan with Magistrate Judge Mark Randon. Before that she spent summers with the Plunkett Cooney Law Firm and the State of Michigan Attorney General’s Office, both in Detroit.
She is still undecided about what practice area she will settle on but she is certain about one thing: “I want to spend my career practicing civility, working for justice and serving my community.”
- ### -
Wayne State University is a premier urban research university offering more than 400 academic programs through 13 schools and colleges to nearly 32,000 students.
For more information about Wayne State University Law School, visit law.wayne.edu. |
Two months after the Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh on April 24, where over a thousand workers died and countless others were injured, families who lost a loved one or workers who were seriously injured face obstacles in obtaining compensation for lost wages, adequate health care for issues related to their injuries, and counseling for severe post-traumatic stress from the tragedy. It is hard to imagine the full ripple effects of the tragedy in the workers’ families and communities, unless one realizes that garment workers were the primary or steady wage earners in their families, who were overwhelmingly young women. The workers’ salaries supported not only their immediate families, but also that of their extended families. Injuries, including those to pelvic areas, have created women’s health issues unique to a predominantly female workforce.
Female Garment Workers as Primary Wage Earners
Sixteen-year old Sabina supports her three sisters and parents as a garment worker. She is unable to attend school because she is forced to work to support her younger sisters and parents. Now, traumatized by the collapse, she no longer wants to go back to the garment factory. Her mother by her side as she recuperates with other workers in a dedicated Rana Plaza unit at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed, Sabina worries about what other work she could find. Most likely, she will return to her village.
Pressure on Children to Drop Out of School to Support Their Family
The tragedy’s impact on the workers’ children also is not often mentioned in the news. Shilpi, whose arm was amputated in order to free her from the rubble, has three daughters and one son. As a helper, she earned 3,000 taka monthly ($38) for the family. Her husband, who suffers from a chronic health condition, is unable to work. Without any income, she cannot pay for the children’s school fees, and so now all three of her daughters have stopped attending school.
Most likely, they will be forced to take on some work to support the family. Shilpi’s story is common and the inability to work will increase the pressure on young children to seek work and will increase the amount of child labor in Bangladesh. When asked what she hopes for the future, Shilpi says, “I want to work, so my kids can go to school.” While many children lost one parent, many children have been orphaned as a result of the tragedy, and they have no source of support. It is reported there are about 20 or so such children. There has been no monitoring of their financial and educational needs. It is not clear whether they have any guardians who are able to take care of them. Grandparents who have taken responsibility for the children are also unable to care for them.
The collateral impact of Rana Plaza on families already economically stretched will create shifts in familial relationships that will reveal some much-needed gaps in services. Understandably, the first line of attention is on holding the retailers responsible and gaining some compensation for the workers, but in the coming months, non-profit and social service organizations will need to pay serious attention to the other socio-economic impacts of the tragedy.
Monetary Compensation from Tragedy is not Reaching Everyone
Even in the area of compensation, workers complain that they are not receiving back wages from factory owners or the compensation from the government.
Some workers have reported to have received an average of 10,000 taka ($125), but when you count that their average monthly wages ranged from 3,000-10,000 taka monthly ($38-$125) that income would quickly be depleted. Family members run around frustrated trying to gather documents, to get the compensation for their families. Advocates, capable to identify the exact hindrance in the distribution of financial support, are necessary to ensure that workers get their due compensation.
Women Centered Health Services for the Young Female Worker
Another issue that is least discussed is the diminished role of women in the household from a primary income earner, and those who are now disabled, to an economic “burden.” Most of the women I interviewed at the CRP Rana Plaza Ward were the primary income earners for their families or were the ones who earned a steady income in contrast to their husbands who were day laborers. Physical therapist, Tanzeena Kabir, communicated to me that in addition to amputees and lower back fractures, one common injury she is observing is pelvic fractures. The pelvic fracture either completely destroys the women’s uterus or injures reproductive organs, and so women are unable to have children or maintain an intimate relationship with their husbands for an extended period of time.
Rubina Begum who worked at Rana Plaza for two years, suffers from a serious pelvic fracture. She shared with me that doctors said she cannot maintain what she says a “husband-wife” relationship for one year. Her husband is a day laborer, and she, like Shipi, is the primary earner for her immediate family comprised of her seven-year old son and extended family. She worries that now she will be neither valued as a worker nor as a wife. Her case is not alone as many women who find their diminished economic ability as wage earners and social standing as wife/mothers will create difficulties at home. There need to be better studies on this as well as access to women centered heath services in order to support the women during this transition period.
Alternative Sources of Income to Maintain Women’s Financial Independence
Despite the debate on the broader macro-economic issues on the processes of Bangladeshi underdevelopment, releasing the female labor force from a predominantly agrarian society in order to provide necessary labor power for the export oriented garment industry was not a smooth process. It has always been exploitative and often traumatic for young women leaving their families and villages to migrate to cities. However, one major argument in favor of garment factory work was that it provided the opportunity for women to enter into contractual relationships with the factory owners and thus provide conditions for her transformation from being free from personal dependence to an individual social person. Because of its higher pay, the garment work offers some amount of financial independence and a sense of individuality and empowerment compared to other jobs typically held by working class women such as domestic work. No longer able to earn similar wages, or in some cases work at all, these women also cannot assume a traditional role of wife/mother. It is not surprising that all of the women I spoke to at the CRP and at the Rana Plaza site expressed a strong desire to work with dignity. Rubina believes that the Bangladeshi Government is responsible for this tragedy as well as the US retailers. What is more horrific and disgraceful about the Bangladeshi Government’s and the US retailers’ lack of action and concern is that Rubina’s demand, like others in her predicament, is not much, she asks for just enough for her family to survive. She earned, with overtime 7,000 taka monthly, which approximately is $80. She too worries about her son’s education and what his life will be like now.
Despite the serious injuries and trauma from the building collapse, the women consistently echoed their concerns for their children’s future, and their ability to economically support their families. Sonali Begum laments, “I made clothes for kids, pretty dresses, but now I can’t even feed my own kids.” She fractured her lower back and cannot walk without physical therapy and requires the use of a back brace. She left her daughter with her mother in their rural village, and her income supported her daughter and her mother.
Improvement of Labor Standards and Delivery of Comprehensive Services from City to Rural Areas
Given that 90% of garment workers are women, and young, in their 20s, the gendered aspects of the tragedy reveals the need for comprehensive women’s health services as well as income safety-nets for families to continue to send their children to school so that they are not forced to abandon school in order to work. In addition, organizations need to fight for improved labor standards in the industry. The challenge to the delivery of services will be the availability of information on workers and the maintenance of proper records. Because the garment sector pulls women from rural areas, many workers have returned to their village homes because living in Dhaka without any source of income is very expensive. They return to households that relied on their income. Mallika Begum would send almost half of her wages to her parents. Alternative income sources need to be created in the rural areas so that women can continue to provide some income to their families, and recuperate and rehabilitate with extended family. The delivery of these dispersed services in rural areas will require coordination among worker groups that have the workers’ contact information and non-profit social service providers. This coordination is critical in order to administer comprehensive health services to the women, not only in Dhaka, but also in the rural areas.
Culturally Competent Social Work and Mental Heath Services
Another key issue related to the collapse is the need for culturally appropriate mental health services. Mental health issues are generally taboo in Bangladeshi society and without a mechanism to process the loss, many family members come to the building collapse site to mourn their loved ones. Given the enormity of the tragedy, there has not been an opportunity to publicly mourn the deaths and those who survived feel either intense guilt or suffer from depression because they cannot imagine their futures. Some families have not yet been able to locate the bodies of their loved ones. There is also an anxiety of being forgotten. This is understandable because while advocates focus their attention on improving safety and legal norms, the workers who will benefit from the advocacy are often rendered invisible. Family members hold pictures of their wives, daughters or sisters, as if they fear they will be forgotten.
Memorial to Remember Workers from Rana Plaza, Tazreen and Other Workplace Tragedies
On a national level, there must be a memorial for workers who lost their lives at Rana Plaza and Tazreen Factory and for all workers in general who have lost their lives due to unsafe workplaces. As of today, there sits an abandoned car in a pool of yesterday’s rain, next to a pile high of rubble.
A sign reads, in part, that workers who died there are “shaheed.” Shaheed is popularly translated to signify “martyrs,” but a better translation is to “bear witness”. The workers who lost their lives bear witness to the injustices of workplace conditions. Memorials can serve as powerful remembrances for lives lost and as constant physical reminders to not allow such tragedies to repeat themselves. Memorials also create for workers and their families a respectful space to collectively mourn the senseless deaths.
In addition, for families who have not been able to locate bodies, the memorial can serve as the site where they can at least find some peace. For mothers who already come to the site to mourn their daughters, it will give them a place to honor their loved ones. It seems unconscionable that such a memorial would not exist given the shiny high story building by the Bangladesh Manufucturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA), the association of politically connected garment factory owners.
Improve Labor Conditions and Form Trade Unions
On the workplace and international front, workers’ rights advocates continue to vigorously fight for improved workplace conditions and safety for garment workers. One such advocate, Kalpona Akter, Executive Director of Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, returned recently from a Walmart shareholder meeting in June 2013 urging them to sign on to the Bangladesh Safety Accord (Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh).
Her organization plans to intensify their pressure on US retailers to hold them accountable for the safety of the garment factories and for compensation for the women who need assistance to support their families. She urges consumers to continue to protest and pressure these brands to do the right thing. Groups like United Students Against Sweatshops and 99 Pickets have been staging direct actions at Gap and Target. Walmart, Gap, Children’s Place, and Sears, among other US retailers still refuse to sign the Bangladesh Safety Accord, but instead they announced it would develop its own non-binding safety measures.
As our conversation winded down on how Americans can show solidarity with Bangladeshi workers and her organization’s work to get more retailers to sign the accord, she turns to the pictures of the Tazreen Factory fire that killed at least 117 workers. She said, sometimes, I feel “activist guilt” because I was unable to help these women, and prevent the Rana Plaza building collapse. But as she flipped through the pictures on her computer (you get the sense that she does this periodically) she’s given a renewed sense of purpose and energy for her fight. Given the scale of the tragedy, and the substantial battle needed to get Walmart and Gap to agree to safety measures, it makes sense that the workers’ suffering animates her struggle.
Support and Build Capacity for Worker Rights Groups
One is both inspired by the humility of workers I spoke with whose main concern is to support their families with dignity and Ms. Akter for her joyful optimism for social change in face of such devastating tragedies – Tazreen Factory fire and the Rana Plaza building collapse. In fact, Ms. Akter has been advocating for garment workers’ rights for years, first as a garment worker until she was blacklisted for organizing, and now in her role at the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. However, like many organizations working on the ground, she struggles for funding to keep her organization afloat. In the face of such tragedy, it is natural to want to provide immediate monetary relief directly to workers, and it is being done. However, for long-term care and advocacy for workers, organizations like the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity and others working with workers like Sramabikash Kendra (Centre for Labor Education and Development), which plays a strong advocacy role with regard to policies that affect the lives of workers, should be supported.
In the coming months, it is extremely critical to continue to struggle for workers’ rights, both at the national and international levels, including encouraging the formation of robust and independent trade unions. It is also critical to provide comprehensive services and long-term care for workers unable to financially support themselves or their families. Fundraising efforts need to focus on building the capacity of organizations to be able to provide long-term care for workers. Symbolic as it may seem, there must be a place where workers can collectively mourn and heal from the trauma of this senseless tragedy in the form of a memorial.
As one sign reads at the site, the workers who died here are “shaheed” or their lives bear witness to this tragedy. Let us, too, not forget them. |
Saturday, November 2, 2013
There is a new teaching portfolio on the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Website: International Tax by Anthony C. Infanti. The website describes the portfolio as an "advanced tax course taken by upper-level students. The course is designed to transmit substantive knowledge through a problem-based approach."
Professor Infanti declares: "I aim to equip my students with the skills that they need to lead successful and rewarding professional lives. This means not only providing them with substantive knowledge of the tax laws but also the analytical, research, and writing skills that are key to success. It likewise means starting students thinking about the type of professional they wish to be and introducing them to both the social justice aspects of tax law and their part in shaping the role of tax law in our society."
He then describes the class: "In my International Tax course, my goal is to build on the foundation that I lay in my Federal Income Tax course and to provide my students with more targeted preparation for practicing tax law. I aim to expose them to a much greater level of practical problem solving. I also aim for them to develop and hone the research and writing skills that will be essential to their success in the practice of tax law, which, more than almost any other area of law practice, can involve significant research and writing responsibilities even into the senior levels of practice. Though I have always taught this course using the problem-based approach and broached ethical issues as they arise in the problems, it took a few years of teaching before I moved away from grading students using a final exam and instead began to use writing assignments. This first began some eight or nine years ago because I realized that, given the complexity and technical nature of the subject, an exam was frustrating both to me and to the students. Searching for an alternative, I quickly settled on the idea of helping to better train students for the actual practice of tax law by developing their research and writing skills—the skills that were essential to my own practice before entering teaching. In the first iteration of the revamped course, I had students work on a single, large writing assignment that was due at the end of the semester. This proved to be little better than the final exam. Even though the writing was practical and highly structured (a private letter ruling request), the students struggled with it. After discussing my frustrations with colleagues, I next moved to the format that I now use: training in research followed by a purely research assignment, next followed by a series of three assignments that ask students to write the typical memorandum to a partner (or the file) that tax lawyers prepare everyday." |
Thanksgiving is drawing close, and I still remember being taught in elementary school about the Pilgrims in their fancy black and white outfits, sitting down on the First Thanksgiving with a bunch of half-naked Indians to celebrate their sharing of food and mutual help. Nowadays though, we like to say “Native American,” as it is more politically correct than “Indian.” My question, then, is why is it still politically correct to depict the Thanksgiving myth in this way?
Every year on Thanksgiving Day since 1970, the 350th anniversary of Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock, the United American Indians of New England (UAINE) has organized a Day of Mourning in Plymouth, Mass. They rightfully protest against the whitewashing of the story of the First Thanksgiving, and the racism and oppression their people still suffer to this day. They want everyone to know that the only thing true about the Thanksgiving myth is that the pilgrims would have all died without the support of the Wampanoag tribe, for which the generous Wampanoag people were rewarded with slavery and genocide.
The Pilgrims did not arrive on some unpopulated wilderness frontier, the American Indian tribes lived there, and every bit of land the Pilgrims acquired was effectively stolen (violently, more often than not) from those native tribes. UAINE points out that in addition to genocide, these Pilgrims from Europe also brought with them racism, religious oppression, sexism, anti-gay/lesbian bigotry, prisons, a class system, and a mercantile attitude that valued money over people’s lives. All of these, I would like to point out, are still issues we are facing almost 400 years later. Hell of a legacy right there.
I suppose it isn’t terribly surprising – we don’t exactly like to remember the atrocities committed against the American Indian tribes by the United States government and its predecessors. We still celebrate Columbus Day, honoring a man who enslaved multiple indigenous populations and created the system of exploitation that was responsible for the deaths of about 300,000 natives on the island of Hispaniola alone.
Considering how much importance we put on “political correctness” and “justice,” it is really incorrect and unjust that this myth of Thanksgiving should perpetuate. I would just like to remind folks that those early European explorers, all proclaimed Christians, proceeded to commit institutionalized genocide over all of North and South America. That’s two entire continents full of people that were either entirely or almost wiped out. I’m not saying that we should depreciate the accomplishments or the history of all these Europeans and Americans, what I am saying is that we need to be aware that they had flaws and committed horrible deeds at the expense of millions of people. We need to remember this and strive to overcome the tragic consequences of these actions. We need to use this history as an example of what not to do, and how to make ourselves better in the future.
On a final note, even the traditional image of the Pilgrim is wrong. All the paintings made of the First Thanksgiving were made at a later date, and the references the artists used were of contemporary and urban Puritans in Europe. Those fancy black and white outfits, clunky shoes, and fluffy dresses all make for fine city-wear, but not if you are out in the wilderness doing hard work. Besides, those outfits look dumb anyway. |
Brain Awareness Week
Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is the global campaign to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research.
Every March, BAW unites the efforts of partner organizations worldwide in a celebration of the brain for people of all ages. Events are limited only by the organizers’ imaginations and include open days at neuroscience labs; exhibitions about the brain; lectures on brain-related topics; displays at libraries and community centers; classroom workshops; and more. Click here for more information. |
As I mentioned the previous article in this series, the next step in the development of the BandmatesFX program will be to enable the user to navigate more general information than just musicians and bands. In this article, I've added the ability to navigate soccer players and their teams. In addition, the program (whose working title is now Topic Map Navigator), can be deployed as a full-browser-page JavaFX applet. Shown below is a screenshot of the program running in a Chrome 2.0 browser, and it also runs in FireFox 3.5+ and Internet Explorer 7+. You'll usually need have Java SE 6 update 10+ in order for the applet to run in the browser (e.g. on Mac with Java 1.5 this app opens in its own window).
One of the features of this program is that it opens a web page when you right-click on an image. Deploying this program in the browser makes this a tighter experience, because the page appears on top of the Topic Map Navigator program. When you subsequently close the web page, the program is revealed again. The screenshot below shows the result of clicking the secondary mouse button on the picture of Lionel Messi, and then clicking the Wikipedia link from his Freebase web page that appears. You may also recall from previous articles in this series that clicking the primary mouse button on an image moves that person to the top of the app.
If you have a late-model Chrome, FireFox or Internet Explorer browser, and Java SE 6 update 10+, go ahead an run this program as a JavaFX applet. If not, you can launch the program via Java Web Start by clicking the Launch button below. Note: Please leave a comment if you have any difficulty deploying this JavaFX applet, providing your hardware/OS/browser/Java version information. I'll report these difficulties to the JavaFX JIRA issue tracker, as I'd like for the JavaFX applet deployment experience to be as solid as it is when deploying with Java Web Start.
In order for the JavaFX applet to occupy the full browser page, we change the width and height of the applet to 100% in the HTML file as shown in the snippet below.
When the browser page is resized, the width and height values of the JavaFX Stage change dynamically. You can bind to these values and control the appearance of the program, using layout classes that are provided with JavaFX. In addition, the JFXtras project has some classes such as ResizableScene, ResizableCustomNode, ResizableHBox and ResizableVBox that make quick work of responding to a resized Stage. For example, the Topic Map Navigator program uses these classes, and the resizable Shelf class, to automatically reposition and scale the cover flows when the user resizes the program.
Regards, and please let me know if you have any questions, |
A new National Academy of Science report on climate change has just been made available from its National Research Council, chaired by Professor James White of CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A video replay of the press briefing webcast is now available. Read or download a pdf of the the complete report or view the summary here:
The report, “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises,” draws upon recent research to adjust the timeframe within which certain climate change impacts may happen. It emphasizes the importance of reducing the “abrupt” element of surprise that can occur due to rapid climate change:
“Abrupt change can take place in the physical climate system (termed “abrupt climate change”) and in the physical, biological, or human systems as a result of steady climate change (termed “abrupt climate impacts”).
The primary timescale of concern is years to decades. A key characteristic of these changes is that they can unfold faster than expected, planned for, or budgeted for, forcing a reactive, rather than proactive, mode of behavior. These changes can propagate systemically, rapidly affecting multiple interconnected areas of concern.”
The report “…extends this idea of abrupt climate change, stating that even steady, gradual change in the physical climate system can have abrupt impacts elsewhere — in human infrastructure and ecosystems for example — if critical thresholds are crossed.”
Global press coverage
Press from around the world have given attention to the report. NBC News, ABC News, Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, the National Geographic News, and The Economic Times of India have covered the report. Richard Harris of NPR’s All Things Considered spoke with Dr. White and other committee members about the report and their findings. Dr. White points out that we should be doing a better job at monitoring the physical environment, such as measuring ocean temperatures. Listen to the four-minute podcast here.
On his New York Times Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin writes:
“Given humanity’s focus on the near and how, the greatest challenge posed by global warming is figuring out how to spur meaningful changes in energy norms based on a risk with this time scale. With that in mind, the new report also looks at abrupt change in societies as well as the climate system.”
Early warning system needed
Of all the findings and recommendations in the report, it’s the call for an “early warning system” that got the most attention from the global press. This warning system would alert societies that a climate-generated emergency event may be imminent. The committee describes the need for a warning system:
“Some surprises in the climate system may be inevitable, but with improved scientific monitoring and a better understanding of the climate system it could be possible to anticipate abrupt change before it occurs and reduce the potential consequences.
Building this ability will require careful monitoring of climate conditions, improved models for projecting changes, and the interpretation and synthesis of scientific data using novel analysis techniques. To address these needs, the committee believes that action is needed to develop an abrupt change early warning system.”
The committee suggests that a new warning system be based on existing early warning systems such as the National Integrated Drought Information System and the Famine Early Warning System Network. These can provide valuable insight into designing an abrupt climate change early warning system. Dr. White states that the report only supplies the “bare bones” of such a system. The committee recommends focusing on expanding the monitoring of existing networks, modeling and testing to improve data collection, and the synthesis of knowledge to improve collaboration.
Dr. White is a featured scientist in Learn More About Climate videos, explaining how and why the climate is changing. To understand more about how climate change is affecting our physical environment, we recommend watching these Learn More About Climate videos. |
Some of you know that I was really good playing basketball back in high school and university, but there was one thing I was lousy at.
I couldn’t shoot freethrows.
I was like the Shaquille O’Neal on my team and the opposition usually figured that out pretty quickly.
If the opposing team was down by just 2, 3 or 4 points and they wanted to increase their chances of winning, they’d need to stop the clock. The best way to do so is to intentionally foul someone on the opposing team and hope that if the person went to the freethrow line to shoot baskets, they’d miss.
To guarantee that the person would miss, the opposing team would typically foul me because I couldn’t make my freethrow shots.
This went on for most of my Grade 11 year in high school (junior year if you’re from the US).
And then, I met Bill Butler.
He was loud. He was of generous proportions and he was brash. In all the months I played for him, he never wore anything more than a t-shirt and jogging pants.
And he knew how to pinpoint and correct bad habits so that his players looked great.
I was in Grade 12 (my senior year in high school) and I started to play for a team outside of high school. The name of the team was Raiders and Bill was the coach.
I’ll never forget what Bill yelled at me during our first practice:
“Girl, your freethrows are awful!”
That’s Bill for you. He never minced words. But unlike some who criticize with no solution in mind, Bill was a player fixer.
He worked with me during practice and after practice to help me improve. He told me how to hold the ball, what to focus on and how to tuck in my elbow so I’d shoot straight.
I remember his advice as if he were sitting right here next to me. He said:
“Girl, the only way you’ll make those shots is if you follow through.”
Follow through. Not only did I have to focus on the target, but I also had to make sure that my arm, my elbow, my wrist and my hand were in alignment. My shoulders had to be aligned, my feet couldn’t be too wide and my hips had to be square to the basket.
Then, when I released the ball, I had to keep my arm up, keep my fingers pointed towards the basket and keep my eye on the ball until it went through the basket. That was the follow through.
In other words, releasing the ball wasn’t the end of my responsibility. I still had to commit to the action until it was complete.
It didn’t happen right away, but my freethrow average went from 2 made shots for every 10, to 4, then up to 6, then finally, I was making 9 freethrows out of every 10 attempts.
I got better. And I owe it all to Bill. When I saw him years later, I thanked him for his guidance. His response? “Girl, you were bad.”
In most things, people give up way too early, for example:
- You start writing a book, but never print it. So, what could potentially bless others stays hidden in your journal or computer.
- You write down all your goals for the new year, but then, you don’t look at the sheet of paper again EVER.
- You start recording audio for an information product, but then stop before you finish due to boredom or some other shiny object that caught your attention.
- You start your plans to launch a blog, but when it comes time to hire a programmer, you make excuses.
- Insert your unfinished project here…
In her book, The Follow-Through Factor, Gene C. Hayden says that following through on a goal and being committed to it are one in the same. In fact, Gene says that “commitment is the body of your idea, follow-through is its legs.”
Following through is your commitment to get your goals done. Just because you think it doesn’t mean it is so. You have to put your thoughts into action and follow through until it’s complete.
The apostle Paul said in James 2:20 that “faith without works is dead.” In other words, you can believe all you want, but if you don’t take action, you might as well consider your ideas worthless.
If you need help sticking to your goals and staying on track, click here to download free copies of Charlie Gilkey’s Free Planners. |
Six months ago, the D.C. Circuit upheld EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare, triggering coverage under the Clean Air Act. Today, the full court denied rehearing to the three-judge panel’s decision. There were only two dissents, which obviously were hoping to set the stage for a cert. petition to the Supreme Court. The dissents provide a preview of the kinds of arguments that will be made to the Supreme Court.
One key point is that neither dissent questioned the scientific basis for EPA’s finding. It is clear that the climate skeptic positions advanced by the state of Texas have no traction even with very conservative judges.
The strongest arguments raised by the dissents involve a technical statutory issue. The case involves provisions of the Clean Air Act that apply to “any air pollutant.” The dissent argues that this means “any criterion air pollutant” (meaning the six pollutants that are most extensively regulated by the statute.” I discussed this issue extensively in a post about the original decision, so I won’t go into the details here, but I think EPA’s position on this issue is sound. It’s notable than only two of the conservatives on the D.C. Circuit were willing to endorse the attack on the EPA’s interpretation.
The dissenters also offer a hodgepodge of other arguments:
- Judge Brown offers a lengthy argument that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Massachusetts v. EPA was wrong. She seems to have failed to notice that six Justices reaffirmed Massachusetts v. EPA in a later decision, American Electric Power v. Connecticut.
- Brown argues that industry had standing to challenge a part of EPA’s rule (the “tailoring” rule) that benefitted them by exempting small emitters from coverage. Her argument is presented very confusingly, but it seems to be that if that part of the EPA rule were struck down, the result would be such an economic and regulatory disaster that Congress would be forced to jump in, and that it would then pass a law overturning Massachusetts v. EPA.
- Both dissenting judges rely heavily on arguments based on the allegedly unacceptable or momentous results produced by EPA’s interpretation of the statute. These arguments portray this as an exceptional case that falls outside the normal rules of statutory interpretation. This “exceptionalism” arguments can sometimes work, as evidenced by the Obamacare case last year — but they face the additional obstacle in this case that the Supreme Court rejected similar arguments in Massachusetts v. EPA.
- The dissenters suggest that the link between greenhouse gases and human impacts may be too indirect to satisfy the Clean Air Act’s requirement of reasonably anticipated harm. That’s a very strained reading of the statutory language and also seems precluded by Massachusetts v. EPA.
Looking ahead to the Supreme Court, it’s hard to see five votes to overrule Massachusetts v. EPA, especially since that decision was reaffirmed in American Electric Power. Judge Brown’s standing argument also seems unlikely to get much support.
As I indicated in my earlier post, I think the statutory interpretation question is fairly debatable. But if the “tailoring rule” stands, the statutory interpretation argument has fairly limited significance — it affects only sources that emit very large amounts of greenhouse gas but not significant amounts of any of the criterion pollutants. Thus, the vast majority of sources that are now covered by the EPA rules would still be covered anyway. The statutory interpretation issue itself is complicated and has little broader significance outside of this case itself. So the odds seem good that the Supreme Court will refuse to hear the case, even though climate change is a high-profile issue. |
Campus safety week
KMUTT’s safety week is organized at Bangmod campus for over 17 years .This event will engage the entire campus community in raising awareness and providing training on how students and staffs can be proactive in their safety and security under the concept of ” SAFETY IN ALL WE DO” . Coordinated by a cross-campus committee, events and activities are being offered through Student Affairs, Residence Life, Campus Police, Dining Services and more.
Fire evacuation training
The course provides a overview of workplace emergency procedures, building fire safety systems and common fire fighting equipment. After training, you will be able to take charge of a building fire emergency evacuation either during a fire drill exercise or for a real fire. Who should attend:
- All members of staff must complete fire safety training on an annual basis
- All laboratory technicians and other workers who engaged in activities that, based on local risk assessment, present a high fire risk are expected to receive practical fire extinguisher training
download a manual
esprel training (Enhancement of Safety Practice of Research Laboratory)
Currently, any research projects which involving the laboratory study that funded by the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) are required to register into the ESPReL system. This stands for Enhancement of Safety Practice of Research Laboratory in Thailand, a computer program which possesses the data collection of the enrolled research laboratory. After the account has been created, ESPReL would send the registered ID to such research laboratory. This program is designed to provide the self-assessment questionnaire (ESPReL checklist). Consequently, all the stakeholders working in such lab are recommended to gather around and complete this checklist. Throughout the above-mentioned ESPReL processes, the strategies of continuously creating the safe practice in research lab will be implemented.
download risk assessment manual
cpr first aid training
The lessons cover life saving skills such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and how to use an automated external defibrillator (AED). Treatment for serious bleeding, shock, spinal cord injuries and conscious / unconscious choking. We conduct Emergency First Response CPR First Aid Training in Bangmod campus twice a year. Furthermore, participants do not need to have previous experience in first aid ! |
Insurance companies have various ways of determining health insurance premiums. The laws which regulate these practices vary from state to state. Currently many insurance companies charge rates according to the health of each applicant for individual policies. Generally the person’s age, gender and occupation are factors in determining rates. Current and pre-existing conditions are also factors in establishing prices.
The Health Status Rating is a rating system which charges higher premiums to people who have medical conditions or a history of medical conditions. Oftentimes, a health status rating is used for people who are joining a health plan for the first time. This is primarily used for individual and small group health plans.
The Health Status Rating system specifies certain conditions which could increase the likelihood that new clients may need health care. In these cases a person who might need health care could pay more than one who does not indicate a need for health care. Currently insurance companies can decide to offer or decline insurance coverage to people with certain underlying conditions. However, beginning in 2014 under the new health care insurance law they may not be able to do this.
Employers seeing their health insurance costs increase are raising rates. They can do this by requiring some workers to either pay higher deductibles or increase the costs of their policies. Individuals and families who don’t have employer-provided health insurance are particularly vulnerable to high rates because they must pay for the total insurance bill on their own.
One national company has requested that employees must reveal their weight, height, body fat and blood pressure. The company referred to this as a “health screening and wellness review.” Employees who refuse to provide the information will be required to pay an extra $50.00 per month for their health insurance.
Let take a look at this requested information. First of all the company wants to know the height, weight and body fat levels. This means they want to know the percentage of body fat relative to your overall height and weight. Your body fat percentage is calculated by taking your age, height, weight, gender and waist measurement into account. This will determine if you have too much or too little body fat. Body fat levels affect the immune system. Too much or too little can increase the risk of developing health problems.
High levels of body fat can be dangerous to your health because excess body fat increases your risk of developing serious health problems. High blood pressure is one of the primary risk factors. Excess amounts of body fat also increases your risk of developing high cholesterol, cancer and diabetes. |
Some of the most significant public concerns surrounding the application of hydraulic fracturing operations regards possible effects on both the available supply of water and possible effects on water quality. Surface spills and leaks are also a potential concern for drinking water supplies.
- Hydraulic fracturing uses 1–5 million gallons of water per well on average.
- Water used for hydraulic fracturing activities accounts for less than 1% of total statewide water use, but it could account for the majority of total water use in some rural counties.
- More research is needed to increase usage of poor-quality waters instead of freshwater.
- Increase prevention of leaks and spills on or near ground surface, which are most likely to contaminate drinking water sources.
Frequently Asked Questions
What impacts does shale oil and gas development have on water resources?
Overall, shale development does not use that much water when compared to other areas of water use. In Texas, water used for hydraulic fracturing represents a small amount—less than 1% of the statewide total water use. However, there are areas throughout the state where water usage can be more significant and important.
Texas has the opportunity to use poor quality waters—such as highly salty, or brackish water or produced water from oil and gas operations—rather than freshwater for hydraulic fracturing. Non-potable brackish surface or ground waters are a substantial resource in West Texas. Another source of brackish water is the water co-produced with oil production, and, to a lesser extent, shale gas production. Since there is no reasonable chance these waters can ever be used for drinking or for agriculture, using them for hydraulic fracturing helps reduce the amount of freshwater used in this process.
Is there a risk for shale oil and gas production to contaminate our drinking water?
The most common pathways for contaminating drinking water sources and causing environmental damage are with surface spills and well casing leaks near the surface.
The depth and separation between oil-bearing and drinking water-bearing zones make contamination of potential drinking water unlikely. Contamination between these two zones has not been observed in Texas.
How can Texas better manage the leaks and spills that are associated with shale development?
There is an opportunity to do a better job of tracking spills and leaks to improve our response to these issues. Information on spills and leaks from oil and gas activities in Texas is less accessible and detailed than in some states, potentially limiting the ability to identify sources and root causes.
Can produced waters be used for drinking or agriculture?
Treating produced waters for use on farms isn’t really an option. The challenge is that water is relatively cheap, and the costs associated with managing, transporting, processing and treating produced waters for agricultural or drinking purposes are not economical.
Waters are also not necessarily produced in the same places where this water is needed for fracturing. The cost associated with transporting these waters for use is not economical.
What is brackish water? Produced water? Flowblack water?
Brackish water refers to water that is more saline than freshwater, but not as saline as seawater. Non-potable brackish surface and ground waters are one source of brackish waters; another source is the water produced from oil and gas production.
Produced waters are defined as any water that is produced from a well, including flowback (the return of water injected into a well) and formation waters (waters originally in the subsurface formation and being brought to the surface for the first time).
“Even though the overall amount of water used for hydraulic fracturing processes in Texas is low, there are areas within the state where the amount used is much more important and will be of more concern.”
~Danny Reible, NAE, Texas Tech University
Water Quantity and Quality Findings
- Water used in hydraulic fracturing processes in Texas represents a small fraction—less than 1 percent—of total water use statewide. In some regions and locales in Texas, however, water used in hydraulic fracturing represents a significantly larger proportion of local water sources.
- Use of brackish groundwater and produced water for hydraulic fracturing can reduce freshwater use. Increased use of these waters, however, can potentially increase impacts to land and water due to spills and leaks.
- The depth separation between oil-bearing zones and drinking water-bearing zones in Texas makes direct fracturing into drinking water zones unlikely, and it has not been observed in Texas.
- Surface spills and well casing leaks near the surface are the most likely pathways for oil and gas activities to lead to contamination of drinking water sources and environmental damage.
- Information on spills and leaks from oil and gas activities in Texas is less accessible and detailed than in some states, potentially limiting the ability to identify sources and root causes.
- In Texas, both economics and risk considerations dictate that much of the produced water will continue to be injected in deep wells or used as fracturing fluid to minimize impacts on other water sources.
Water Quantity and Quality Recommendations
Water Availability and Supply
- Research and testing to enable the use of brackish groundwater and produced waters for hydraulic fracturing should be encouraged.
- Recent Railroad Commission of Texas rules to encourage recycling should be tracked, and their effectiveness for promoting increased use of produced water should be evaluated.
- Aquifer investigations including pumping tests and chemical analyses should be used to better characterize the productivity and chemical composition of brackish groundwater, and variability of these properties, in oil and gas producing areas.
- Further research on the broad life-cycle risks related to water management decisions should be conducted. This research should recognize trade-offs among water use sectors and provide a basis for balancing increased use of poor-quality waters with freshwater use for new hydraulic fracturing activities.
Subsurface Contamination by Fracturing or Formation Fluid
- Direct migration of contaminants from targeted injection zones is highly unlikely to lead to contamination of potential drinking water aquifers. The collection and sharing of pressure data relevant to communication between water-bearing and producing strata—including non-commercial flow zones—or across wells could help identify and avoid potential concerns.
Spills of Flowback Water, Drilling Fluid and Formation Water at the Surface
- Statewide leak and spill reporting requirements for produced water should be considered. For all spilled substances, reporting requirements should be improved to aid identification of the primary sources of leaks and appropriate management responses.
- Texas regulators and industry should continue to develop and apply best management practices relative to well casing design and construction, and surface management of oil and gas operations, to reduce inadvertent release of fluids.
Wastewater Treatment and/or Disposal
- Research on techniques for cost-effectively treating produced water, particularly for uses that have minimal quality requirements, such as for hydraulic fracturing, should be continued.
- Additional research to evaluate potential negative impacts of any such uses also should be undertaken.
Danny Reible, NAE (Lead)
Texas Tech University
Texas Tech University
The University of Texas at Austin |
Extended Definition Essay
You probably know what a descriptive essay is. This kind of article intends to provide the physical attributes of any subject form people to object, places to events. However, there is another format of such an essay that you can utilize. This is the extended definition essay. You can write and define a certain word or notion that will take care of making your readers understand what it is. Just like in writing a descriptive essay, you need to “describe” the meaning of the word to the readers. Therefore, an extended definition essay will provide your audience the meaning of a word.
When someone asks you about the meaning or definition of a word, you will simply tell him a few phrases or exact definitions of it as long as you also know its meaning. However, some people cannot just understand a word or term with very few definition parameters. That is why an extended definition may be necessary for reading. We say extended because we can actually expand the true definition of the word by citing several parameters of interest about it. Have you seen spelling bee contests? Well when the contestants ask for some more details about the words, the panel will give them some more details about the word to test their (contestants) familiarity with it. Thus, the panel is committing an extended definition procedure. This is the same when writing extended definition essays. You will simply add more info about a term so the readers will fully understand it.
In writing extended definition essay articles, what parameter definitions of the word should we provide to the readers? Here are the important aspects of the word that you must include in your extended definition essay:
- Word etymology or the historical roots of the term
- Apply the word to a certain sensory application like how it looks, feels, sounds, smells and tastes
- Identify the word parts
- Explain to the reader how it is used in a conversation
- Discuss what the word is not so it can have boundaries against other terms
- Provide examples of the term definition for proper illustration
- Extend its similarities and differences compared to other words
What is the purpose of writing an extended definition essay? The main objective of this essay type is to inform rather than simply describe. This is its major difference compared to a descriptive essay. An extended definition article wants to make sure that the readers will have better understanding on a particular term. Moreover, it gives them the chance to understand the word in a different approach other than what it already obvious and familiar.
If you want to order an extended definition essay from us, you simply need to fill out the order form. We also have some great samples in the Archives.
Tags: definition essay, extended definition, Extended Definition Essay |
Prince Charles editing the September edition of The Voice, the sole Black newspaper in Britain, drew controversy. The Voice has confirmed this.
The newspaper’s 40th anniversary edition, “Shared Vision For Change,” which contained interviews with Doreen Lawrence and Idris Elba, was guest edited by the 73-year-old heir to the British throne. According to its Twitter profile, The Voice is the only Black national daily published in Britain.
When Paulette Simpson, the newspaper’s executive editor, appeared on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” on September 1, she admitted that the relationship between the newspaper and Charles had first drawn mixed reactions.
Presenter Kate Garraway said on the programme that “there will be those who argue he’s not the greatest guy, not least because he’s not Black and he’s not from the community The Voice has battled for so long, for 40 years.”
“We need all voices present at the table in order to enable change. We believed that he ran for office on causes that we support because of the nature of what he has been doing for more than 40 years “In response, Simpson.
Therefore, she said, “it’s crucial that everyone, not just the ones who are impacted, be at the table when you’re pushing for change in society.
The publication has now released a formal statement addressing both the criticism and the royal family’s participation in the slave trade.
The Voice issued a statement to the Mail Online that said, “We realise the strong sentiments some of our readers have about this edition and the difference of opinions in the community.” “We decided to engage with The Prince of Wales after considering the work he has done on racial equality over the course of 40 years and the similarities with our advocacy over that time.”
The statement said, “The edition we released deals with significant themes like reparations and black empowerment, recounted through the perspective of prominent and respected persons in the community.
“Apologies and restitution for the slavery of Africans remain a major demand from all institutions that were engaged in it or benefited from it,” the statement stated.
Furthermore, according to Lester Holloway, editor of the newspaper, who spoke to BBC London, “all of the institutions, including the royal family, that have been involved in the historical horrors of colonialism have not apologised for slavery and what we’ve got is statements of personal regret which is absolutely not good enough,” according to the Mail Online.
In the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I was involved in the slave trade in Britain. According to NPR, the king openly backed Captain John Hawkins, who in 1562 abducted 300 Africans and traded them for skins, ginger, and sugar.
Charles has talked about the palace’s support of the slave trade several times, although Queen Elizabeth II has never made a formal apology.
Charles acknowledged the “appalling atrocity of the slave trade, and the unimaginable suffering it caused,” according to a report in the Guardian in 2018. A source told The Sunday Times in June of this year that the prince wanted the slave trade to be taught in schools with the same respect as the Holocaust.
Insider’s request for comment was not immediately answered by Clarence House or The Voice personnel. |
How to Play Pokemon Go India on PC Without an Emulator
Pokemon has become a trending topic for now. Many people have been able to play it and make the developer. It was very surprising.
To play the Pokemon Go India game requires a smartphone, whether it’s Android or iOS, which has been equipped with a GPS feature. But financial factors and others make people who have a smartphone below the standard cannot play it. There are new options for those of you who have a good laptop but the smartphone is not GPS support.
So don’t despair first, because this time TechMint will share how to play Pokemon Go on a laptop or home PC that you often use.
if anyone asks, why is it complicated, of course, if you use a PC when we have to hunt Pokemon everywhere? Well, it’s cool to use a PC. You don’t have to leave the house to find the Pokemon, so what you need here is an Android emulator called Nox App Player.
Screenshot of Playing Pokemon Go India on PC
Download Emulator Android – Nox App Player To Play Pokemon Go India on Windows
Previously, make sure you have downloaded the emulator which could TechMint mention above.
Well for those of you who do not have an emulator, you can directly download or download the link provided and there is already one package with Pokemon Go Bundle, how to download it is easy, just click on the download button below.
|EMULATOR: NOX APP PLAYER + POKEMON GO BUNDLE 3.7||DOWNLOAD (377MB)|
|Just click the download link above, hosted directly by the official site. This application is used to run Android emulators that have been added to the Pokemon Go game.|
How to Play Pokemon Go India on PC
Make sure you have downloaded the emulator that we will use on the laptop when playing Pokemon Go via the link above.
Now if it has been downloaded, now run the file that was downloaded. Install as usual, wait until the installation process is complete.
Now if you are ready to follow the steps below.
- FIRST STEP
Run the Nox App Player emulator that has been installed, now if you have entered the Nox home screen, then click the settings button in the upper right corner.
- SECOND STEP
click the Advanced tab, then you can match the NoxApp Application Settings as shown below (Save Images to Enlarge)
- THIRD STEP
Now click Save Changes, then restart the Nox. Now if you have returned to the home screen, click the Virtual Location button on the menu on the right.
- FOURTH STEP
Here you have to choose a location anywhere, try to choose a location in big cities, because there are many Pokétops, hehe: D and don’t forget to click OK after selecting the location. Now go back to Nox, then click Settings in the lower right corner.
- Scroll down or drag down the mouse, Click location – Mode – Change to High accuracy
- Then click the back button to go to the home screen, then run the Pokemon Go game
- Now fill in the date of birth You and log in using the account Google You
- Now you can move the player using the “WASD” button or with “Virtual Location”
Read Also: How to Download PS2 ISO Games for Free
That’s how to play Pokemon Go India on a Laptop or PC which is very easy to implement actually.
So for those of you who are tired of playing on a smartphone, it’s not wrong to try playing Pokemon Go on this PC.
Don’t forget your response about Pokemon Go on this PC via the comments column below. |
A place of immense beauty and charm, Himachal is endowed with clear and serene lakes, lofty mountains, ancient temples and cheerful people who are as innocent as nature itself. Home to the best of the tourist destinations like Kullu, Manali, Chamba and Shimla, Himachal is paradise on earth inviting an onslaught of tourists all round the year. The natural beauty of Himachal along with the hills and valleys add peace to your holiday while the pilgrimages make it serene and divine. Himachal Pradesh is bordered by Jammu and Kashmir on the North, Punjab on the West, Uttar Pradesh on the South and Uttaranchal on the East. Owing to the massive production of apples, the Himachal Pradesh is known as the State of apples. The state is known for the eco-friendly environment, picturesque natural scenery, colourful culture, adventure sports, warm and hospitable people and a variety of fairs, festivals and celebrations throughout the year. Himachal is a favourite destination for tourists as well as pilgrims.
Probably the most popular hill station in northern India, Shimla is the capital city of Himachal Pradesh. Famous for its Mall road, the Ridge, toy train and colonial architecture, Shimla is popular among honeymooners and families alike.
Situated at the height of 2200 m, Shimla is one of the most eminent tourist destinations in the country. Set amidst beautiful hills and mystical woods, Shimla is one of most aesthetically planned cities in India. The erstwhile summer capital of British India, this town's captivating natural beauty, and the atmosphere are bound to leave any tourist overwhelmed. The well-knit roads, impeccable cleanliness, and an efficient administration make for a perfect combination for any tourist destination in the world. This town has colonial-style buildings alongside the historic temples, and the amalgamation of the worlds leaves everyone visiting this region spellbound. Within this city, one must visit the Mall Road, The Ridge, Institute of Advanced Studies and Jakhu Temple. Shimla is also used as a base to cover other nearby places like Chail, Kufri, Naldehra, Mashobra, Tattapani and Narkanda. The toy train to Shimla from Kalka passes through beautiful hills and valleys and is one of the most beautiful train routes in the world.
At 8:00 pm report at Delhi Volvo pick up point (on your own) & Depart for Manali to experience a wonderful vacation. Overnight Journey by Volvo. Exotic Manali offers something special for everyone. It gives peace to mediators, inspiration to Artists, Daring Activities for Adventure Seekers etc. On the way to Manali you experience the cool breeze already taking all your stress away, soothing you from serene environment and surprising you from its jaw- downed landscapes.
This morning, you have your and then start driving towards North Goa. North Goa is dotted with some of the most beautiful beaches of Goa. Dona Paula, Calangute, Baga and Miramar Beach are popular beaches of North Goa. North Goa is home to a number of tourist attractions like Fort Aguada, Basilica of Bom Jesus and Se Cathedral.Visit the Museum of Christian Art, which is one of its kind museum in Asia. The museum is best known to house a collection of items like gold and precious stones and Rosary's. You can also visit Archaeological Museum. Stay overnight at the hotel.
Breakfast & Dinner
Reach Manali Volvo Stand where our representative will welcome you with warm smile & Transfer you to the Hotel. After fresh up, proceed to half day city tour of Manali which includes- Hadimba Devi Temple (This temple constructed in 1553 A.D is Dedicated to Himachal’s Most Significant Deity Hadimba Mata), Vashisht Hot springs (Dedicated to Vashist Muni & well known for its hot Curable water and Religious). Evening you will be free to explore the Mall Road & IBEX Market of Manali, Overnight at hotel.
Breakfast & Dinner
Today morning after breakfast check out from the hotel and proceed to Queen of Hills i.e. Shimla by Deluxe Bus/ On Sharing Basis. On reaching Shimla check into the hotel. Overnight stay at hotel.
Today morning post breakfast proceed to have local Shimla Sightseeing. You may visit The Ridge, The Mall, Jakhoo Temple, Christ Church etc. Later stay overnight in the hotel.
After fresh up proceed for Shimla sightseeing to cover: Kufri (It is one the best ski point in winters and in summers, it turns into a famous tourist picnic spot) Jakhu Temple (According to Mahabharata Myth Hanuman Ji rested while Searching for Sanjivini Plant), Vice regal lodge which was once the residence of British Viceroy of India which is now converted to advance study for its academic use). In Evening Exploration on your own: The Mall, Scandal Point, Ridge, Lakkar Bazaar, and Christ Church and then drive to Volvo pickup point Shimla Volvo Stand for your return trip to Delhi with ever enthusiastic experience…. |
Famously known as Devbhumi, or the Land of the Gods, Uttarakhand is a land of untouched natural beauty and sublime spirituality. Carved out from Uttar Pradesh, the state, formerly known as Uttaranchal, is a place that not only boasts of a scintillating view of the Himalayas but also exhibits a cultural ethos which speaks of a simplistic and harmonic coexistence with nature. With oaks, birches, silver firs and rhododendrons adorning the steep mountain slopes, Uttarakhand offers you a glimpse into an untainted, idyllic world, straight out of the pages of some ancient pastoral literature. Uttarakhand is a very popular pilgrimage site, seeing as it is the originating spot of the Ganga and the Yamuna, two of the most sacred rivers for Hindus. Uttarakhand is home to the Char Dhams, which are four of the most pious sites of pilgrimage revered by the Hindus – Gangotri, Yamunotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath. Thousands of tourists visit Uttarakhand annually to pay homage to the Char Dhams.
If your idea of the perfect holiday involves tranquil hills, untouched nature and a holiday experience that is unadulterated in the truest sense of the term, Mussoorie is the place you should be heading to. Nestled amidst the foothills of the Garhwal Himalayan ranges, Mussoorie, also known as Queen of The Hills, stands at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea level, and has a cool, pleasant climate throughout the year. The pristine, natural beauty of Mussoorie makes it a very popular choice of holiday for honeymooners. If you want to enjoy the beautiful sight of the rolling green slopes juxtaposed with the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, Mussoorie is the place for you to be. This beautiful hill station is the perfect retreat from the sweltering weather of the plains, and the fact that it was a very popular holiday destination during the British era can be seen from the multitude of British remnants engulfing the city, such as the archaic architecture of the hotels and churches dotting the entire terrain. One of the most popular tourist attractions in Mussoorie is The Mall (also known as the Mall Road), which is a slightly steep boulevard that has eateries and other shops lining its entire stretch. From the little houses spread around the area to the architecture of even the lamp posts, The Mall gives off a distinct colonial vibe.
Meet our representative at Dehradun Airport/ Railway Station and then you will be transferred to Mussorie via Rishikesh. Visit Ram Jhoola, Laxman Jhoola etc in Rishikesh and proceed further for the queen of hills Mussorie. Post reaching Mussorie, check in to the hotel and have a delicious dinner and stay overnight at the hotel.
This morning, you have your breakfast and then proceed for sightseeing in Mussorie. Mussorie is certainly one of the most popular hill stations in India. The attractions will be Mall Road, Lal Tibba, Gun Hill ( 2024 Meters altitude, amazing panoramic view ), Kempty Waterfall, Later checkin to hotel and then have a overnight stay at the hotel.
Morning after breakfast, take a drive to Dhanaulti and then enjoy great sightseeing covering Jain Temples, ECO-Park, Barehipani and Joranda Falls, Dashavatar Temple. Later drive towards Dehradun and check in to the hotel and stay overnight at Mussorie.
This is the last day of your tour . Munch some delicious breakfast and then check out of the hotel. Start driving towards railway station Dehradun. You will be dropped at Dehradun railway station.
Tour end with Sweet memories....... |
Pope Francis sent special greetings to Lithuanian Catholics on Sunday as he recalled the Beatification, in Vilnius, of the nation’s first Soviet-era martyr.
“Today in Vilnius, Bishop Teofilius Matulionis, who was murdered because of hatred towards the faith in 1962 when he was almost 90-years-old, will be Beatified” the Pope said to the pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the Angelus.
“Let us give thanks to the Lord for the witness of this courageous defender of the faith and of human dignity. Let us pay our respects to him and to the entire Lithuanian people with applause” he said.
Bishop Matulionis was a priest and bishop who continually defied communist rule and spent much of his ministry in prison. He was declared a martyr by Pope Francis on December 16, clearing the way for his beatification. |
The New York Times recently published an article entitled Sunisa Lee Seizes the Moment and Captures Gold. It describes the path from her ethnic Hmong tribal roots in Laos to become the fifth consecutive American woman to win the best all-around gymnast in the world. Her parents, John Lee and Yeev Thoj, fled Laos in 1975 as children when the communist Pathet Lao forces seized control. Their families were actively recruited by the CIA to fight on the side of the U.S. in the illegal and unrecognized war in Laos. I was directly involved in some of those events from 1968 to 1970 and again from 1973 to 1975.
Moreover, I have friends who helped in the refugee camps in Thailand where they were initially placed and with the agencies that subsequently relocated them to homes in the U.S. Some 80,000 Hmong live in the St. Paul, Minnesota area which has always amazed me that a winter climate would be a place for these mountainous people from Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, there are few merit badges for the U.S. in the Hmong escape from Laos as hundreds of thousands of them were left behind to be captured and executed by the other side. However, once they crossed the Mekong into Thailand, they were well received. For a few of us gringos in that era, crossing the Mekong into Thailand by boat or whatever was the “safe passage home.”
Sunisa’s strength, courage and determination reflect that of her ancestors. Below a frame-by- frame image captures the progression of her floor exercise. Not only was her performance extraordinary but being able to see it unfold in one image is amazing. Obviously, the genetics that kept her ancestors going in a harsh and dangerous world during the war in Laos have been passed on to this remarkable young lady who overcame injuries and challenges to be the first Hmong American to capture an Olympic Gold Medal.
So, who are the Hmong people of Laos? They generally lived in the mountains of northern Laos. In times gone by, the ladies wore their wealth around their necks with their large silver necklaces, as shown below. Their clothing was hand woven indigo dyed cotton with embroidered decorations. Their faces always seemed to be adorned with smiles from ear to ear which has never changed.
In the early 1960s, the CIA selected the Hmong people to form a mercenary army to combat the Pathet Lao in Laos as the Geneva Convention precluded any U.S. involvement. My involvement was through Esso as we provided the logistical and fuel support for the Hmong fighters. Therefore, we operated secret fueling stations in the mountains to fuel T-28 aircraft flown by Hmong pilots to bomb and strafe Pathet Lao troops. We also fueled the CIA-backed Air America aircraft as well as the Corsican aviation companies that were flying civilians and opium which was the currency of the war. Shown below is Colonel Vang Pao, leader of the Hmong troops, with a CIA operative. Our major base was on the outskirts of the provincial residence of the King of Laos in Luang Prabang. On occasion, it would get a bit sporty but it was definitely a beautiful setting. Therefore, the Hmong people were hired mercenaries but in a sense all of us who were involved fell into that category as there were no official U.S. military boots on the ground.
Today, Luang Prabang is one of our favorite destinations and the Hmong people who are the principal residents there contribute to that appeal. The two young ladies, shown below, operate a shop in Luang Prabang which highlights the craftmanship of their embroidery as well as their endearing personalities.
The strength and motivation of Vang Pao was a major force in the war in Laos. On the other hand, the superior number of Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese troops and tanks were impossible to overcome. I recall when Vang Pao’s base was overrun near our airstrip outside Luang Prabang and spending some time with the small handful of mercenary expats around the outdoor bar speculating whether the Vietnamese tanks would come visit us. I eventually left on a Corsican DC-3 several days later since the Air America planes were flying casualties out of Vang Pao’s headquarters. Keeping everything in character, the plane flew to Ban Houei Sai and took on an extensive load of opium bales. We flew to the capital of Vientiane, Laos where I eventually crossed the Mekong to Thailand. Vang Pao settled in California where later in life some brilliant U.S. government folks trapped him in a weapons sting operation based on his desire to return to Laos and upset the Pathet Lao government. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and Vang Pao was able to live out the remainder of his life in peace.
Sunisa Lee, all of us from that era are very proud of you to be the first Hmong American to represent us in your Olympic success. May you continue to achieve new heights as your ancestors are smiling at your accomplishments. |
I consider myself to be an evangelical Christian. The term is a rather controversial one these days. To many, it signifies bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and hatred.
It certainly doesn’t mean that to me. But I understand why people might think that way. And it makes me sad.
Some of us, as Evangelicals, have a lot to learn from Jesus.
In recent posts, we’ve been looking at the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery. We’ve seen how the whole situation was likely a setup by the scribes and Pharisees to trap Jesus into a compromising situation. Would he invoke the death penalty, as the Law insisted?
Jesus turned the tables on them. Without contradicting the law of Moses, he simply invited those who were sinless to cast the first stone. No one did. No one could. And one by one, they all walked away.
There is but one final scene to play out in this mini-drama:
Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Is there no one to condemn you?”
She said, “No one, sir.”
Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, don’t sin anymore.” (John 8:10-11, CEB)
We’re not told the woman’s response. There’s no deep expression of gratitude, no joyous praise, no promise to change her ways.
But what matters, the story seems to say, is not what she does. It’s what Jesus does. And what does he do? He insists on a life of righteousness in a way that doesn’t condemn.
That, I’m afraid, is the lesson many of us need to learn.
It’s perfectly natural for us to think in “us vs. them” categories: black and white, yes and no, true and false. Our brains are often impatient with ambiguity, and we need to know who the good guys and bad guys are. Anything that complicates that simple worldview is apt to make us anxious or even defensive.
Jesus’ opponents certainly tended to think that way. It wasn’t just Jews vs. Gentiles. The Pharisees could subdivide the Jews into those who knew and followed the Law — themselves! — and the ignorant, unrighteous rabble.
But Jesus made their world much more complicated. It was possible to uphold the righteousness of the Law without being legalistic. It was possible to know someone to be a law-breaker while extending them compassion and grace. And perhaps most importantly, it was possible to know oneself to be a law-breaker, to realize that the grace and holiness of God ultimately breaks down every us vs. them. We are all sinners. We are all dependent on mercy.
And we owe mercy to one another.
The hard question we must ask ourselves is, “At whom are we most tempted to throw stones?” This is not a question of erasing all distinctions between what is and isn’t righteous.
But it is a question of learning to be more and more like the compassionate and righteous Lord we claim to serve. |
Easter 2022 By Norris Burkes
No matter what you’ve read, I can promise you this – the insurrection was put down quickly and decisively. The anarchists occupying the garden never really had a chance.
They barely seemed to know it was coming when the occupying powers, caving to the demand of religious leaders, issued an arrest warrant for their insurgency leader.
“Bring this Jesus to me,” said Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect (governor) of Judaea. “Let’s see what kind of leader he claims to be. Does he think himself their king, their God? If so, I’ll make sure he becomes just another revolutionary nailed to a tree.”
Gaining Pilate’s approval, the deputized posse stormed the Gethsemane Garden, a place where Jesus was known to hang with the homeless. The officers expected a fight, or at least hoped to instigate one. They came armed with clubs and swords.
To be certain of their target, they bribed a Jesus insider, a real Judas, to plant an identifying kiss on Jesus’ cheek.
The subject himself offered no resistance. After all, no matter what the prostitutes and degenerate cripples said, Jesus was just a man.
The only struggle came when a sword-packing follower sliced off a deputy’s ear. Eyewitnesses claimed Jesus miraculously reattached it, but the religious leaders dismissed that as fake news.
Others claimed that Jesus’ quiet surrender paved his way to martyrdom. By the time their claim gained traction, Jesus would become much more than a martyr.
Early the next morning, the pathetic arrestee was hauled before Pilot where the governor asked him if he thought himself to be a king.
No response. Only unassuming surrender.
This is going to be easy,” Pilate must have thought. “I’ll make him king — King of Calvary’s Hill.”
So much for this petty uprising.
“Not so fast,” pleaded the first lady. “I had a bad dream about him. You shouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Dreams! Probably just something you ate,” Pilate told his wife.
Then, with a pontific wave, Pilate motioned Jesus into the hands of tormentors who mockingly crowned him with a wreath of puncturing thorns. Nice touch.
In the meantime, Pilate washed his hands. Just another day living in the dream seat of power. Insurrection squashed.
By Friday afternoon, it was a done deal. Even Jesus knew it by then: “It is finished!”
The government prosecution of the fledgling rebellion was far-reaching and absolute. The orders were signed and sealed, then executed with the utmost prejudice.
But Pilate had looked at this all wrong.
He, as well as the religious folks who’d concocted the charges, had operated under the misguided assumption that the coup would come by force.
You can’t blame them. It was also the shared assumption of Jesus’ disciples, including Judas, their disgruntled group treasurer.
It was only Friday, but Sunday was coming.
Such Friday assumptions are often shared by Christians two thousand years later. There are people who claim in Jesus’ name that they must defend God’s Kingdom by force or intimidation.
They go to their school board meetings with open Bibles demanding that certain books be removed. Others threaten county supervisors while decisions are debated about health and quarantine.
Sadly, some even take their swords and clubs to the steps of the nation’s capital where they hope to reinstate their king.
Some seek to advance God’s Kingdom by packing the nation’s highest court in hopes wrongs will be overturned. Yet, they find that righteousness can’t be legislated.
Easter tells me that God’s Kingdom won’t be established through votes, protest marches, or mob rule by either side. Liberals will never bring the Kingdom of God by legislating an earthly utopia and conservatives cannot morph God’s Kingdom into Christian Nationalism.
Jesus made this point when he was asked in Luke 17:21 when the kingdom of God would come.
“The kingdom of God doesn’t come by counting the days on the calendar. Nor when someone says, ‘Look here!’ or, ‘There it is!’ And why? Because God’s kingdom is already among you” (Message Translation).
Sadly, some still look for the Kingdom insurrection in all the wrong places.
On that long-ago first Easter morning, when a few women dared enter Jesus’ empty tomb, they were confronted by angels, asking, “Why do you seek the living among the dead. The one you are looking for is risen” (Luke 24:6).
The words were final witness to the fact that God’s Kingdom has never been about an insurrection.
His Kingdom has always pointed toward the Resurrection, both his and ours. |
In July 2011, a pipeline owned by ExxonMobil burst near Laurel, Mont., dumping 42,000 gallons of crude oil into the nearby Yellowstone River.
As federal officials reported the damage for weeks afterward, they found American white pelicans, owls and other bird species covered in oil, injured or dead. ExxonMobil agreed to pay $12 million to Montana and the federal government in response.
Under a rule President Donald Trump’s administration finalized this month, one of the legal tools to penalize companies like Exxon whose actions lead to accidental deaths of migratory birds would be unavailable to regulators and prosecutors.
The rule, set to take effect early next month, codifies a longstanding policy of Trump’s Interior Department: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act cannot be used to prosecute companies whose actions lead to accidental bird deaths.
Instead, the federal government could only pursue legal action if companies intentionally harm migratory birds.
Opponents say the rule undercuts the purpose of the migratory bird law, which has been in effect since 1918, and will have disastrous effects for bird species.
“We know that millions of birds will die,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the conservation group Center for Western Priorities. “And we are already facing an extinction crisis.”
Groups of trumpeter swans, North America’s largest waterfowl that is considered a “species of concern” in Montana and one of the birds protected under the federal migratory bird law, live in areas of southwest Montana year-round, with additional populations in the summer months.
Threatened Georgia visitors affected by changes
Among the nearly 1,100 species the law protects are Georgia’s own state bird, the brown thrasher, and many others, like the wood stork, barred owl and indigo bunting, that visit the state.
Federal protections are particularly important for migratory species because they live in several different states throughout their lives, giving individual states limited power to effectively protect them.
“Migratory birds are always that reminder that our wildlife does cross state lines,” said Amy Seaman, director of science and policy with Montana Audubon, the state chapter of the national bird conservation group.
The Trump rule is consistent with an interpretation of the migratory bird law U.S. Interior Department Solicitor Daniel H. Jorjani wrote in 2017. U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni overturned that guidance last year in a suit environmental groups brought.
Effect may manifest over time
The rule’s effect would not necessarily be felt overnight, but could add up over years, Kit Fischer, a senior program manager with the National Wildlife Federation, said.
“We may not notice it’s gone until we have an incident where somebody can’t be held liable,” Fischer said.
The law was used as part of BP’s settlement for the 2009 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But more than financial penalties, companies are keen to avoid the “bad headline” that a suit over dead American white pelicans, trumpeter swans and the other birds protected under the migratory bird law would bring, Fischer said.
Without the threat of litigation, oil and gas companies may be less likely to work to prevent migratory bird deaths, he added.
“How long does goodwill last when there’s not regulation behind it?” he asked.
The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, said its members are committed to protecting migratory birds.
“The modernized rule reinforces the original intent of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and accounts for the fact that the natural gas and oil industry is not a primary threat to bird populations,” API senior policy adviser Amy Emmert said in a written statement. “The Department’s approach provides certainty for responsible property owners, including those who operate oil and natural gas facilities.”
But environmentalists say the rule rolls back key enforcement mechanisms that have aided species, and states have invested in the species’ recovery.
Montana’s reintroduction efforts have been “so crucial” to the recovery of the trumpeter swan, said Seaman.
The Trump rule will be challenged in court by the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity and other groups that challenged Jorjani’s opinion, said Noah Greenwald, who directs the Center for Biological Diversity’s endangered species program.
The Interior Department under President-elect Joe Biden and Secretary-designate Debra A. Haaland could also take steps to reverse the rule, though the policy’s formalization as a new rule instead of guidance from Interior’s solicitor makes that process more difficult.
Conservation groups see Biden as on their side of this issue, and the transition has said Biden will seek to overturn last-minute Trump regulations. But it’s unclear where the rule ranks on the incoming administration’s list of policies targeted for reversal.
“It’s everybody’s expectation in a Biden administration that these types of rollbacks will be fixed,” Fischer said. “But it’s going to take time, and they can’t do every one of them overnight. And all of these are going to take some political capital to do right. There’s been a lot of damage done.”
Haaland, a Democratic U.S. House member from New Mexico, cosponsored a bill last session that would have clarified that incidental bird deaths are illegal under the migratory bird law.
Democrats’ wins in Senate election runoffs in Georgia this month tipped control of the Senate and opened the possibility that Congress could reverse the rule under a process known as the Congressional Review Act.
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news outlets supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: email@example.com. |
I think I’ve already made it clear that you just can’t have too many books, especially ones on design and architecture. But it’s also a real pain dragging a lot of them around with you from job to job and it becomes a bigger job to keep track of them once they’re out of your house. So, I try to only take books to my current workplace that I either don’t have a digital version of or just really need to have close at hand.
If I had to limit myself to just 10 books, these would be the books I’d take to start a job.
Here is my must-have list with sources:
1. Architectural Graphic Standards – 5th Edition – This was when the books were filled with great hand drawings and actually showed you in detail how things were built. Lots of period details as well. Out of print for over 50 years (at least in this edition) you can still find copies for anywhere from $20 to $200. The 3rd edition would be a suitable replacement. the first edition is also good to have and has been reprinted several times. Check Abebooks for copies. Not available digitally.
If you are in Great Britain, McKays is the closest equivalent, and is actually superior in a number of ways from our standpoint as set designers. On the Continent, an older copy of Neufert’s is a must. See this earlier post for details. Not available digitally.
In Germany, the best book on period construction I’ve found is Konstruction Und Form Im Bauen, by Friedrich Hess. There are lots of very nice drawings and measured details. Long out of print but you can still find copies second-hand. In Sweden, an excellent book on traditional construction is Stora Boken Om Byggnadsvård, by Göran Gudmundsson. This is a current book and still in print. Neither are available digitally.
2. Time-Saver Standards for Interior Design and Space Planning, 2nd Edition. This is the design complement to Architectural Graphic Standards and covers nearly every situation regarding building interiors. You can find used copies for around $75. There is a digital version available but it’s not only difficult to navigate because of the size of the book but at the price you’d be better off getting a hardback edition.
3. Styles Of Ornament – Alexander Speltz. Originally published in 1904, this book uses over 4000 drawings to illustrate 6000 years of historical design. As a general design reference I don’t think it has an equal. Architecture, furniture, text, carving, metalwork are all covered. A must-have. (Handbook Of Ornament by Franz Meyer would be a close second.) Available from a number of publishers for as little as $10. A digital version is available.
Low Budget Option- download the online PDF here.
4. The Stair Builder’s Handbook – T.W. Love – Not a design book per se, but a book of rise and run tables that make stair layout a breeze. Available from Contractor Resource for about $18.
Low Budget Option – download the PDF Common Sense Stairbuilding and Hand-railing. Skip the mind bending section on handrail layout and skip to page 99. Also, Stair building, which has a nice section on ornamental ironwork.
Also, In April a new book will be out called Simply Stairs – The Definitive Handbook for Stair Builders, by Mark Milner, published by Whittles Publishing in London for £25. Pre-release information on the book makes it look very promising.
5. Backstage Handbook – Paul Carter. Originally a technical manual for theatrical designers, the book is full of great information for film work as well. There are more details in this earlier post from several years ago. Available from Broadway Press for about $22. No digital version is available.
6. American Cinematographers Manual – The new 10th edition will cost you about $80 in hardback and almost the same in it’s digital version through the iTunes and Android sites. There’s a free pdf of the 7th edition here, but much of the latest technology isn’t in it. This is the go-to book for all things dealing with cameras and image capture. A lot of people will tell you you don’t need this. I’m sure you could also have a great career as a car designer without knowing anything about how cars work. Because when it comes down to it, all we’re really doing is designing big, pretty things to bounce light off of. Just remember, if the department names were based on physics we’d be the Light Reflector Design Department.
7. Building Construction Illustrated – Francis Ching. An excellent and thorough book about construction details including wood framing systems as well as masonry. About $30. No digital version is available.
Low Budget Option – access the online PDF here.
8. The Classical Orders of Architecture – Robert Chitham. I think this is the best modern book around that deals with the classical architecture proportional system. This book was out of print for quite a while and fortunately is back in print. The new edition deals with the proportions for both metric and Imperial systems. Used copies can be found for about $45.
Low Budget Option – Get the PDF American Vignola by William Ware and The Five Orders by Vignola. Also, download the very nice PDFs on classical architecture from the The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art.
9. Illustrated Cabinetmaking – Bill Hylton. I covered this book in an earlier post. If you want or need to know basic furniture design and how furniture goes together this is the book you’ll want to refer to. It’s been referred to as the Grey’s Anatomy of furniture building. Full of exploded drawings of many kinds of pieces. Available from Fox Chapel Publishing for $24.95.
10. By Hand & Eye – George R. Walker & Jim Tolpin. Just because this is number 10 on the list doesn’t mean it’s the least important. In fact if you’re just starting out in set design this is the first one I’d tell you to buy. Most bad designs are caused by bad proportions. This book will give you a solid understanding of proportion and keep you from making simple mistakes. You can download a sample chapter here. Also, I wrote a longer post on the book earlier. Walker and Tolpin are promising a workbook that will come out later this year based on the book’s concepts so look for that. Available from Lost Art Press for $38, hardbound.
Low Budget Option – Cut back on the Starbucks for a couple days and buy a digital version for $18. The mental stimulation might be just as good as the caffeine and it’ll be a lot healthier too.
So what have I missed? There are other books I could list these are the best. What’s on your shelf? What books would you say are ‘Must Haves’?
Share your titles with the rest of us. Let me know the important titles I’ve missed here, I’m sure there are a lot. As an incentive, everyone who posts book suggestions goes into a drawing at the end of the week for a free digital version of By Hand & Eye.
C’mon, give us your list. |
Dr. Shen Dingli, deputy director of Fudan University’s Institute of International Studies, has publicly and sharply criticized the United States for purposely “sowing discord in the region under the guise of establishing regional stability.”
The trigger for this unusual outburst by one of China’s leading international relations scholars was the statement by the Commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet Vice Admiral Robert Thomas welcoming an extension by Japan of its air patrols over the South China Sea. The U.S. State Department echoed this welcome “of a more active role for Japan in ensuring stability in Asia.” But its spokesperson Jen Psaki also said “we’re not aware of plans or proposals for new patrols.” This qualification suggested that Thomas had “misspoken” or at least diplomatically “jumped the gun.”
Japan’s Defence Minister Gen Nakatani responded that “We currently do not patrol there or have a plan to do so, but we are deepening our cooperation with the U.S. and the situation in the South China Sea has an impact on our national security.” These comments come just as the U.S. and Japan are negotiating a new bilateral security alliance that is expected to give Japan a more active role in the alliance. Such patrols – if they are implemented – would likely involve Japanese P-3C Orions based in Okinawa and focus on the growing number of Chinese vessels that are overwhelming other claimants’ surveillance capabilities, as well as Chinese submarines based in Yulin on Hainan. Japan has also committed to helping China’s most vocal rival claimants – the Philippines and Vietnam – to enhance their surveillance capabilities. Not surprisingly China has responded by warning Japan not to “create tension.”
Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding and the U.S. will do or say something, at least behind the scenes, to mollify China and restrain Japan. Otherwise I agree with Shen Dingli. If truly intended and implemented, this would be the most insensitive and provocative U.S./Japan move yet in Asia. Indeed, a regional military-related role for the former brutal, racist, still-feared and, for many, insufficiently repentant conqueror of China and Southeast Asia would set off alarm bells throughout the region.
China expects to play a role at the “center of the world’s political system.” It wants to be a new rule maker and an old rule breaker, if it is in its national interest to do so. In short, it wants to be an ‘exceptional’ country like the U. S. The accommodation of such a role for China by the U.S. is what President Xi Jinping presumably meant when he proposed a “new” type of major country relationship at his Sunnylands summit with U.S. President Barack Obama in June 2013. It seemed at the time that Obama agreed.
But this move by the U.S./Japan alliance would strengthen the hand of militarists in China and undercut those who favor a “softer” approach. Similarly, it would seem that the gnomes in the Pentagon’s basement left over from the Cold War have gained the upper hand in the Obama administration. China’s leadership would now be convinced that their idea of a “new relationship” is unrealistic. Understandably, they may think that either the Obama crowd is being unusually deceitful in its approach to China or that they have lost control of the narrative. In either case, if this policy is implemented, it would appear to China that the die is cast and that the U.S. (and its allies) and China are being drawn into an action-reaction dynamic that puts them on a political and perhaps military collision course. Unfortunately for the region there are politically influential people in both countries that seem to want this. But they are not yet in the majority.
However, many analysts in both the U.S. and China have warned of a “tipping point” in China-U.S. relations beyond which the two conclude that conflict is unavoidable and begin preparing for it in earnest while trying to hide their true intentions. Beyond that tipping point the national mindset and policy decisions inexorably tilt and then flow toward conflict. Implementation of these Japanese patrols may well be that tipping point.
This may all sound like Chicken Little warning that “the sky is falling.” But the situation really is quite bad and growing worse by the day. Many Southeast Asian countries are keenly aware of the distinct dire possibilities and are thus hedging and trying to maneuver between the two.
If the U.S. wants to avoid direct conflict or at least postpone it – and it is not obvious that the U.S. wants to do either – it has to accommodate to some degree China’s international interests and aspirations by sharing power. When, on what issues, how, and how much are challenges for U.S. government deep thinkers to ponder and negotiate with China.
Mark J. Valencia is Adjunct Senior Scholar at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, Haikou, China. |
The Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) USS Milwaukee (LCS 5) conducted a live-fire missile exercise off the coast of Virginia on May 11, the U.S. Navy said in a statement.
“The Milwaukee fired four longbow hellfire missiles that successfully struck fast inshore attack craft targets,” the service said. “During the evolution, the ship’s crew executed a scenario simulating a complex warfighting environment, utilized radar and other systems to track small surface targets, simulated engagements, and then fired missiles against the surface targets.”
This marks the first integrated firing of the so-called Surface-to-Surface Missile Module (SSMM), a 24-shot vertical launch system designed to engage smaller surface targets in close proximity to the LCS (e.g., swarms of speedboats) with AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire missiles vertically launched in rapid succession.
The operational range of the SSMM hellfire missiles is approximately 5 miles.
This was the second at-sea launch of hellfire missiles. In March 2017, the Freedom-class LCS USS Detroit conducted a successful structural test firing with hellfire missiles as part of the developmental test program for the LCS Surface Warfare Mission Package. The structural test firing aimed to test the capability of the LCS structure and equipment to withstand the vibration, shock, noise, gases, and other blast byproducts from the firing of a missile.
Using an open architecture design, both LCS classes — the mono-hull Freedom and trimaran-hull Independence variants — are modular, reconfigurable warships that can be fitted with interchangeable mission packages providing specific capabilities for surface warfare (SUW), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and mine countermeasures (MCM) missions in the littoral region.
Initial operational capability (IOC) and deployment of the SSMM is expected in 2019.
“Delays in the development of the SSMM led to the initial deployment of a more limited surface warfare mission package aboard the LCS exchanging hellfire missiles for rigid hull inflatable boats and boarding teams,” I wrote last year. “The package also encompasses two 30- millimeter machine guns, two MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicles and an MH-60S Seahawk helicopter.”
Despite IOC of the SSMM in 2019, the LCS will not be able to engage in high-intensity naval combat as a January 2018 report by the Pentagon’s office of Operational Test and Evaluation notes:
Survivability testing and preliminary analyses on both LCS variants continue to demonstrate that neither LCS variant is survivable in high intensity combat. Although the ships incorporate capabilities to reduce their susceptibility to attack, testing of analogous capabilities in other ship classes demonstrated that such capabilities have limited effectiveness in high intensity combat.
As I reported previously, the USS Milwaukee experienced a loss of propulsion in December 2015:
[…] the Freedom-class USS Milwaukee sustained a combining gear casualty about 64 kilometers (40 miles) off the Virginia coast during an Atlantic transit. The problem was traced back to a software issue, which caused a clutch not to disengage when the ship was switching engines, and not human error. Lockheed Martin fixed the issue by installing new software patches. The ship returned to active duty in June.
The U.S. Navy accepted delivery of its latest Independence-class LCS, the future USS Tulsa, last month. |
Puppy or senior dog, over a decade’s experience running our pet boarding facility has taught us that keeping a hyperactive canine occupied can feel like a full-time job. It’s also necessary. Any dog owner can attest that if you don’t ensure your four-legged friend gets their daily dose of activity, they might just chew through your couch.
Whether your pup has the occasional zoomies or full-time buzzing energy, variation in its activities is important. Walks and dog grooming are essential parts of pet care, but they need entertainment too. Check out this blog post by The Grand Paw to see why.
If you’re a new pet owner, or if you’re looking to show your pad-footed friend some love, here are a few fun activities:
All dogs love to fetch, but since frisbees travel faster and further, they’ll be more fun for your dog to play with. The fact that they’re a circle instead of a sphere also makes them easier for older dogs to keep an eye on.
The flat shape is perfect for dogs that are forever waiting for you to throw the ball but refuse to give it back. While frisbees are easy to hold on to, they’re also much easier to take out of your dog’s mouth.
Free Play with Other Dogs
If your dog attends a good puppy daycare, then they’ll be socialized with other dogs. Socialization is one of the things that makes animal hostels an integral part of comprehensive care. Unless your dog isn’t able to be with other dogs, they’ll love some off-lead time in an open space with plenty of their best friends (apart from you).
Sometimes dogs are frisky, not because they have excess energy, but because they need attention. Spend some time with your pooch and give them your undivided attention. Instead of setting up an activity to occupy them, see how they want to spend time with you.
If you’d love to do these things with your pup but can’t carve out the time, you’d benefit from dog daycare. Pet boarding makes many owners nervous, but our dog daycare center near Bermuda Dunes knows exactly how to ensure wagging tails all around.
The Grand Paw was founded on the idea that only those who truly love dogs can create an enjoyable experience for the animals while providing high-quality pet care. More than a dog-boarding kennel, we like to think of ourselves as a pet resort. We know that when owners leave their fur babies with us, even if just for dog grooming services, they’re placing a lot of trust in us, and we intend to honor that.
If you’d like to speak to a member of our team, call (760) 398-9900. |
How To Make A Passion Fruit Zombie
The Idea Trader is dedicated to spreading interesting ideas and current news to readers and interested parties. This blog contains opinions and insights for ideas and investment opportunities and is not intended as advice for investing.
This month we’re going to make a very special dessert! It’s an easy recipe, but it takes some time to prepare, so be ready for that!
Not only will you get to enjoy eating this delicious treat while studying or reading, but you can also use the ingredients as a nutritious snack or meal.
The components of this recipe are all natural and do not contain any refined sugar. That is important to note since one of the main ingredients is pure honey!
If you have never made your own yogurt before, this is a great opportunity to try. You can find lots of recipes online and in cookbooks, and there are even beginner friendly videos available on YouTube.
But first, let us talk about our beautiful desert!
What is passion fruit?
Passion fruits are a tropical berry that grows in clusters of around 10-20 per cluster. They grow in many different countries including India, The Philippines, Australia and Brazil.
They are most well known for their tangy flavor which comes from both the pulp and juice of the berries.
Some people say the taste is similar to kiwi with a little bit more depth. Because they are slightly tart, they go really well in desserts and drinks!
Many chefs and food creators take advantage of the juicy flesh of the passion fruit to create various dishes and toppings.
Peel the passion fruit
The next step is to peel off the skin of the passion fruit. You can do this by either using your hands or with a spoon, just be sure to scrape all of the delicious pulp out!
Once you have removed the skin, cut the passion fruits in half and scoop out their juicy content. Add that sweet sauce and mix well!
Now let’s make some zombies! Mix together one cup of coconut milk, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, and 2 tablespoons honey. Let these blend for about five minutes until it has mixed fully and then add one tablespoon vanilla extract.
To test if your mixture is thick enough, pour some of the cream onto a plate and see if it sets into a shape. If so, great! But if not, add more coconut milk and whisk away!
Transfer your zombie cream into an airtight container and put in the fridge to set completely.
Blanch the peels
After you wash your passion fruits, cut them in half lengthwise using a knife or pair of scissors. Then hold each piece skin side up over an empty bowl to remove the peel.
Once you have removed the peel, put it into the blachner! This will prevent darkening of the peel which can sometimes occur when slicing it with a paring knife.
After the peel is completely white, pour off the water and set both aside.
Make the cocktail
For this recipe, we will be making what has become one of our favorite recipes for summertime drinks! If you have never made a passion fruit drink before, then start with this simple beverage first! It is easy to make and always tastes delicious.
To make the drink, you will need 2 tablespoons agave nectar, 1 cup fresh or frozen passion fruits, and 5–6 ounces of water. Mix these three ingredients in a blender and blend until it is mixed thoroughly.
That’s all there is to it! This drink can easily be adjusted depending on how sweet or tart you like your beverages to be.
Serve the cocktail
As with any alcoholic drink, what you do with your passion fruit zombie really comes down how much you like or dislike alcohol. If you love drinking wine then adding some liqueur is perfect! But if you are more of a beer person, just using water as liquid will make it taste better.
If you want to use lemon juice instead of lime then double the amount since there is no acidity in citric acid. Just be sure to mix it in properly! And remember that either one can be omitted depending on your personal preference.
The best way to enjoy this delicious drink is by sipping slowly and paying attention to all of the flavors. They say a good word for a drunk is someone who listens to music they know well, so why not apply that to drinks?
This recipe was made popular through YouTube videos. Many people have made their own versions now and spread them around the internet.
Take care of your skin
While using natural products is always the best way to go, if you must use manufactured products like this one, make sure to test for allergic reactions before applying it all over your face.
If you are sensitive to any of the ingredients in the product, stop using it immediately and find another one that does not contain those chemicals. Also, ensure that you are never rubbing the product too much onto your face as this could cause dryness or irritation.
After using the product, wash your face well with warm water to remove it completely. If needed, apply some extra moisturizer to help keep your skin hydrated.
Get a sunscreen
When it comes down to it, sun protection is one of the most important things you can have as a zombie enthusiast. A decent wide-spreading factor sunscreen that has UVB (ultraviolet B) protective factors will keep your skin protected from the damaging effects of the sun.
Zombie movies often feature extended scenes where our lead characters spend lots of time in water or swimming. Unfortunately, the beach and ocean are not always a safe place for people with sensitive skin. If you suffer from dry, flaky skin or frequent rashes due to allergens, make sure to check out your local drugstores’ shelves before heading into the surf!
Some common culprits of allergic reactions include sand, chlorine, milk, and pepper. Obviously, these things cannot be avoided when at the beach, but some sunscreen brands contain special additives that help mitigate this risk.
Seek out natural remedies
Many people have experimented with making your own zombie drinks at home. While some are definitely more effective than others, none contain any chemicals or processed ingredients that could possibly interfere with how your body processes food.
There are many recipes for homemade zombie beverages online and in various books. Some of the best ones include raw milk, fresh lemon juice, half water, and either cranberry juice or plain apple cider.
You can also use whole fruits as additives instead of buying them pre-made.
Get your vitamin D
Vitamin D is an essential nutrient that helps keep our bones strong. It comes from sun exposure or eating foods such as salmon, mushrooms, tuna, milk, and eggs.
But these sources cannot meet the national recommendations during winter months in most parts of North America! This could pose a risk for people who suffer from osteoporosis or have low bone density already.
That’s why it’s important to know how to make passion fruit zombie powder. Let me show you how. |
There Are Bases for the Lord Becoming Flesh When He Returns in the Last Days
Nowadays, many people are bearing witness online that the Lord Jesus’ return is to become flesh in the last days. Some people think that this has no basis in the Bible, so they do not seek or investigate God’s work of the last days. But in fact, there are many scriptures in the Bible predicting that the Lord will return in the flesh. For instance, the Lord Jesus said, “Be you therefore ready also: for the Son of man comes at an hour when you think not.” (Luke 12:40). “ But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” (Matthew 24:37). “For as the lightning, that lightens out of the one part under heaven, shines to the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day.But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation.” (Luke 17:24–25).
“The Son of man” mentioned here refers to the incarnation of God. The incarnate Lord Jesus was called the Son of man and Christ because He was the incarnate flesh of God’s Spirit and so became an ordinary and normal man, living in the company of other men. It is precisely because the God in the flesh is as normal and ordinary as humans from the outward appearance that many people did not acknowledge the Lord Jesus as God and then even slandered and condemned Him, and finally nailed Him on the cross. Therefore, “the Son of man comes” and “the coming of the Son of man” mentioned in the prophecies refer to God becoming flesh when He returns in the last days.
If God came among clouds, everyone would bow down and worship Him and no one would dare to resist and convict Him. Then the prophecy “first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this generation” would not come true.
If you have any questions or confusion, please contact us via Messenger. We will communicate and discuss it with you so that all can understand more truths regarding welcoming the Lord and be able to greet the Lord as soon as possible.
» Extended Reading: |
How to Deal With Prophecies of Jesus’ Coming in the Last Days
By Song Tao
Reading the Scriptures Got Me to Reflect
“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given: and the government shall be on His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, on the throne of David, and on His kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from now on even for ever. The zeal of the Jehovah of hosts will perform this” (Isaiah 9:6–7).
“But you, Bethlehem Ephratah, though you be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall He come forth to Me that is to be Ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).
Every time I read these prophecies, I always thought: The earliest Pharisees often studied these prophecies and they, based on their literal meaning, believed that the One who was to come would certainly be called Messiah, that He would be born in a royal palace with a magnificent appearance, and would be imposing and mighty with a kingly style, and that He would be a great warrior who could lead them to drive the invaders oppressing them out of Israel and would enable them to live a peaceful and happy life upon the earth.
However, the facts completely exceeded their imaginations. When the Lord came, He wasn’t called Messiah but Jesus; He wasn’t born into a royal palace but into a carpenter’s family; He wasn’t so transcendent and extraordinary as they had imagined, but instead He looked ordinary and normal; furthermore, He didn’t come to power on the throne, much less lead them in the overthrow of Roman government, but He instead taught people to be tolerant and patient, to love their enemies and forgive others seventy times seven times, and so on. In the Pharisees’ eyes, the fulfillment of the Bible prophecies wasn’t at all linked to the work the Lord Jesus did. But in fact, all the prophecies concerning the Messiah’s coming had been fulfilled and the Lord Jesus was the Messiah. It seems that, if we only interpret the prophecies in a literal way and aren’t able to receive their meaning purely, it will be difficult for us to welcome God’s appearance and work. Then, how should we treat Bible prophecies in accordance with God’s will?
How to Deal With Bible Prophecies in Accordance With God’s Will
Later on, by chance, I knew of a Christian sister. Her fellowship about the Bible was fresh and enlightening and was a great help to me. So, I told her about my confusion.
After hearing what I said, the sister said, “Speaking of Bible prophecies, we all know that they prophesy what will happen in the future, that they are very obscure and that no one knows what they truly mean before they are fulfilled. As the Scripture says: ‘Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Peter 1:20–21). From this we can see that the prophecy is the words spoken in accordance with the original will of God as the speakers were moved by the Holy Spirit, and that the prophecy directly comes from the Holy Spirit and isn’t what we humans can understand. No matter how profound people’s understanding of Bible prophecies is, it can’t represent God’s will. Only God Himself can reveal His prophecies and mysteries, while man will never be able to fathom them. For example, the prophet Jeremiah once prophesied, ‘In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not’ (Matthew 2:18). If we understand this prophecy relying on our own will, we can only interpret it like this: All the children of Rachel had passed away, so she was weeping bitterly. In reality, however, the words refer to King Herod slaughtering baby boys because of the Lord Jesus’ birth. To give another example. The Old Testament once foretold the coming of Elijah, but no one at that time knew John the Baptist was exactly the coming Elijah. Not until the Lord Jesus revealed the mystery did people come to a sudden realization. Therefore, the correct attitude toward Bible prophecies is that of seeking and waiting and we absolutely must not use the literal meaning of the prophecies to imagine and guess God’s work; otherwise, even if the prophecies have really been fulfilled, we will deny it because in our eyes it is at odds with the literal meaning of the verses. The consequences of that are unthinkable. Just like the Pharisees at the time, they stubbornly clung to the literal meaning of the Bible prophecies and stubbornly believed that what they clung to was right; as a result, they did their utmost to deny, condemn and oppose the Lord Jesus and in the end, they nailed the Lord Jesus to the cross and severely offended God’s disposition.”
Hearing this, I came to understand that the prophecies from God are really so profound and so unfathomable, and that we are incapable of imagining them with our brains. So, when it comes to prophecies, we must be cautious because once we rely on our own personal meaning to explain them and interpret the text literally, we will inevitably make the same mistake that the Pharisees did in defining and opposing God. Just as the Bible says, “For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
How to Deal With the Prophecies of the Lord’s Return in the Last Days
Later, the sister continued fellowshiping with me: “There are many prophecies regarding the Lord’s return in the Bible, and they are very profound. And now all those who truly believe in God are eagerly longing for the second coming of the Lord Jesus; however, there are mysteries relating to how the Lord is coming and what work He will do when He returns, and we humans can’t fundamentally fathom them. So, in welcoming the Lord’s coming, we must learn from the failure of the Pharisees, and not judge the coming of the Lord based on the literal meaning of the prophecies, lest when the Lord comes we should miss the opportunity to receive the Lord because of living in our imaginations and speculation. Then what should we do to welcome the Lord’s second coming? As is known to us all, those disciples of the Lord Jesus such as Peter, John, as well as Nathanael and the woman of Samaria, didn’t cling to the literal meaning of the prophecies, but instead they focused on listening to the Lord Jesus’ utterances; through His words and work, they saw how authoritative and powerful His words were and that what He expressed were all truths. This is why they recognized that the Lord Jesus was the Messiah, and thus they followed Him and gained God’s salvation. In fact, in regard to how we should welcome the Lord’s return, the Lord Jesus showed us the way. He said, ‘And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom comes; go you out to meet him’ (Matthew 25:6). ‘My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me’ (John 10:27). ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me’ (Revelation 3:20). From the prophecies of these scriptures it can be seen that we should take heed to listen to God’s voice like the wise virgins. If we hear someone witnessing that the Lord Jesus has returned, we should actively seek and investigate it. Only then will we have the chance to welcome the bridegroom and be raptured before God’s throne. On the contrary, if we blindly hold onto the prophetic words of the Bible only according to our own conceptions and imaginings and do not take heed to listen to God’s voice, people like us are the foolish virgins, those who God will abandon and eliminate.”
After hearing the sister’s fellowship, I felt my heart brighten. With regard to the Lord’s return, I should learn from the failure of the Pharisees and must not define God based on the literal meaning of the verses. Instead, I should focus on seeking and listening to the Lord’s voice like the disciples of the Lord Jesus, because only in this way will I have the opportunity to welcome the Lord’s return.
Thank God! I felt exceedingly excited. I could but offer up my thanks to God, “O Lord, thank You! I have known what the right way is to treat Bible prophecies.”
From: Grow in Christ
Signs of Christ's Return Have Appeared: The Lord Has Returned
Disasters such as earthquakes, famines and plagues have become more and more frequent in recent years. The prophecies…
All kinds of disasters constantly befall and extend over a greater and greater area. All these show that the signs of the last days have appeared. How can we welcome the Lord? Click here to discuss with us. |
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Webmay 2, 2019 · if, for instance, you weigh 160 pounds and are 5 foot 8 inches, or 68 inches tall, the formula would look like this: (160 ÷ 68 2) x 703 = 24.3. a bmi of 24.3 falls within the normal range (18.5 to 24.9). anything less than 18.5 is considered underweight. a bmi of 25 and above is considered overweight. a bmi of 30 and above is considered obese. Webaug 20, 2021 · furthermore, a low bmi (below 18.5) is also linked to poor health outcomes. that said, bmi fails to consider other aspects of health, such as age, sex, fat mass, muscle mass, race,. Webmar 17, 2021 · bmi in the traditional sense is used as a measure for health risk. it cannot, however, provide an indication of someone’s health habits. bmi does not tell you what someone eats, how.
What Bmi Doesn't Tell You About Your Health
the way we define obesity is flawed. read more about body mass index's flaws on vox : bit.ly 2nxeq2u the body mass |
Krause Leia is a passionate content marketer and a market researcher who is on a spree to capture multiple facets of industry through creativity and innovation. Krause is a content geek who writes for market research, digital marketing, and start-up niches.
AI presents an opportunity for enterprises to advance their understanding of customer goals and the journeys they take to accomplish those goals. Learn how AI can boost customer Experience
Customer Experience (CX) is a key differentiator that allows you to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. It’s the only factor that leaves a positive lasting impact on the customers’ minds. Positive customer experience makes the customer feel good, while negative customer experience leaves the customer unhappy and unsatisfied.
According to OpenText, 30% of customers will leave a brand because of bad experiences and never return.
CX is the next big thing. Studies show again and again that CX can have more of an impact on customers than product quality, price, or service. Brands that take customer experience seriously witness exponential growth and revenue than their competitors.
Businesses today know the importance of CX for customer retention and new customer acquisition. That’s why many companies are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, business intelligence (BI), and various machine learning projects to deliver a seamless customer experience along the customer journey.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of customer science that develops machine intellect, takes on a personal approach and style of thinking, and works like humans.
Many small and large companies have implemented AI and have seen various improvements. By 2025, it seems likely that a significant percentage of customer interactions will be managed and handled by artificial intelligence (AI).
According to Gartner, digitally trustworthy companies will generate 20% more online profit than people who aren’t.
AI isn’t limited to just chatbots and virtual assistants. It’s a machine that will drive the complete CX engine. AI will predominantly fill the missing elements while delivering an excellent customer experience. AI-driven solutions will drive CX across various industries and jobs.
Why Artificial Intelligence?
Every company understands that they are in the CX business. As per McKinsey's report, successful companies see revenue gains of 5% to 10% and cost reductions of 15% to 25% within 2 to 3 years.
Why is AI Becoming a Critical Component in Dealing with CX?
Customer experience professionals who deal with customers’ data daily know the challenges in handling the data. Moreover, navigating through multiple tools to make use of the structured and unstructured is a complicated task. Many CX professionals have given up on the data task due to miscalculation, wrong analysis, inconsistency across data, and negative influence on decision-making.
And that’s why AI is required. AI works way faster than humans and takes in all unstructured information, just like humans. AI can capture voluminous data, take notes of interactions, and generate ready-to-use reports.
AI affixes several customers’ data at various touchpoints and fills in to make meaningful and actionable insights. Artificial intelligence and human intelligence make way for faster decision-making with real data.
However, to integrate AI successfully in your customer experience process, here are a few benefits to consider before implementing it.
Training resources increase operational efficiency but increase operational costs too. Why make customers hold their phones to speak to the next available representative? Using advanced customer service techniques by artificial intelligence provides reliable, flexible, and scalable solutions that will lessen the cost. The cost to train resources and infrastructure costs will widely reduce with the addition of these tools.
AI solutions like ready chatbots and virtual assistants can take businesses to new heights. Chatbots can reciprocate a conversation with a user in natural language processing (NLP) through phones, messaging, websites, or through any app. Virtual assistants can understand a user's natural language processing (NLP) and complete the task for the user.
AI can do tedious tasks without any provision. It eliminates the concept of human supervision. Moreover, it frees up agents handling complex issues and concentrates on providing better resolutions. It also reduces employee attrition and the number of people required to do the job leading to substantial cost savings.
2. Live Agent Support
It’s difficult for a customer support agent to be available for a non-stop period. But someone has to answer users on time or within the defined SLA. Users report queries and issues that need immediate attention.
Such questions can be solved by AI tools that record the items and match them with the closest match. AI tools and automated support can answer customer queries throughout the day.
AI-assisted live agent chat systems can absorb all the customers' queries at once and answer it in the best form of human interactions without customers knowing about it.
Implementing a robust AI tool gives companies a lot of coverage. It’s difficult for business enterprises to set up a centralized customer support system spread across geographies and time zones.
With AI in the game, it's easy to build up data and information from the existing warehouse within the organization to answer repetitive queries and complex questions, irrespective of where you are based or planning to move in the future.
Nowadays, customers aren’t as interested in calling a customer service agent for any assistance or queries. They don’t want to explain the situation to someone about the problem and end up being dismissed without any resolution. At times, it’s quite frustrating.
That’s when investing in an artificial intelligence tool is essential for satisfying digitally inflicted souls. Organizations do not want to stick to their old mundane processes when everything is digitally acclaimed.
Artificial intelligence offers customers always-on self-service in the form of chatbots, virtual assistants, and online forums. With Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbots in customer service and lead generation, businesses can provide human-level interactions without letting the customer know about it.
If your organization is looking to better up customer experience with less direct human interaction, then you should incorporate an AI tool for enhanced customer relationship management and improved customer satisfaction.
4. Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is the first and foremost element required by any organization looking to improve. Customer feedback lets companies know if their customers are happy or dissatisfied. Brands that do not focus on customer feedback have seen less revenue and customer conversion.
With no new customers, businesses are likely to face a downfall. AI on customer feedback helps you collect customer feedback across all platforms in a go, irrespective of data from various platforms or sources.
AI on customer feedback depends heavily on qualitative feedback; hence it’s crucial to focus more on natural language processing (NLP) to make feedback analytics easy and actionable.
With powerful and advanced AI technology in your system, you will make real sense of AI and give a holistic view of the whole customer feedback under one platform. Anybody in your organization can take multiple forms and collect feedback, but the real challenge is to gather data to make meaningful insights, and that only AI can do.
Whether you are a big or small organization, a data scientist, or a customer experience professional, the real use of AI on CX is the need of the hour. Your organization may lose revenue, customers, and business if you don’t find ways to make things easy for customers in the long run.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown over the last few years and has the potential to break markets. Many fortune companies have realized the importance of AI and implemented it to enhance customer experience and build a positive brand. The numbers will rise shortly.
So, what do you think about AI on CX? Drop a comment to continue the conversation.
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How to Choose the Right Therapy Program for Your Troubled Teen
Even when you know that your teen needs professional help, it’s not always easy to know what kind of help. There are dozens of different camps, schools, residential treatment centers, and outpatient programs designed to help troubled teens, and they’re not all the same nor are they all appropriate for every teen’s problems.
Teens who are struggling with drug and alcohol abuse need a different kind of help from teens who are struggling academically, and teens that are facing emotional problems need still another kind of help.
If your teen is facing problems you can’t fix yourself, you can choose from wilderness therapy, residential therapy, outpatient therapy, alternative day schools, and psychiatric hospitalization. The type of treatment you choose will depend on the severity of your teen’s problems. Usually, it’s best if you place your teen in the lowest level of care possible, unless he or she is facing a severe psychiatric or eating disorder. Let’s take a look at the different kinds of therapy programs available for troubled teens and what kinds of problems each program is suited for.
Wilderness therapy is a short-term program in which teens spend a period of time, usually a few weeks, hiking and camping in the wilderness. If you enroll your teen in a wilderness therapy program, he or she will spend the time in the company of several other teens and a roughly equivalent number of counselors. Security precautions will be taken so that no teen slips away from the program. This type of program is a good option for teens who are struggling with substance abuse issues, since your teen won’t have any access to substances while on the program. Wilderness therapy programs seek to break down teens’ defenses through physical exhaustion; teens are asked to hike several miles a day before making camp and participating in group therapy sessions.
However, there’s no academic component to this type of program, and it is short-term. While this is a good place to start with teens that have substance abuse issues, you may want to consider enrolling your teen in a longer-term residential or outpatient program after the wilderness therapy program is complete. Parents and families typically aren’t involved in these programs, and they’re not ideal for teens who are struggling with academic issues.
Residential treatment is best for teens who are suffering from eating disorders or substance abuse disorders, and is usually reserved for the most troubled teens, or for teens who aren’t responding to a lower level of care. Therapeutic boarding schools are available, and these facilities can help teens stay on track academically while they receive treatment.
If you enroll your teen in a residential program, he or she will receive regular group and individual counseling, in an environment free of alcohol and drugs. Your teen may be encouraged to participate in the 12-Step program. Security precautions are in place to keep teens from running away and the sexes are generally segregated. Like wilderness therapy programs, these programs emphasize personal empowerment and growth. Families and parents are usually encouraged to become involved in the treatment.
Psychiatric hospitalization is the highest level of care, and it’s usually short in duration. It’s mostly reserved for situations in which a teen is actively attempting to harm him or herself or someone else. It’s best for teens who are suffering from severe mental disorders.
Outpatient treatment is typically appropriate for teens that do not appear to present a danger to themselves or others, but nevertheless need some kind of professional help. These programs usually involve individual, group, or family therapy. They may be good for teens with substance abuse problems, if the teen has not yet been to substance abuse treatment and is willing to participate.
Alternative Day Schools
These programs are best for teens that are struggling academically, but demonstrating no other problems. Alternative day schools are equipped to give students the academic support they need to work to the best of their ability. Your teen will be able to work at a pace that suits him or her, and will receive more individual academic attention.
It’s not easy to decide what kind of treatment program might be best for your troubled teen. Different programs are best for different kinds of problems, and it’s usually a good idea to get your teen the lowest possible level of care. With the right help, your teen can make the positive changes necessary to develop into a happy and healthy adult. |
As the cold weather comes (and for some it has already arrived), there are plenty of things you can do to keep your home safe and warm. You could look for ways to lock up securely to prevent thieves from taking an opportunity or ensure that nasty draught doesn’t ruin every evening once the temperatures plummet.
These are not the only reasons why you may want to make your home more secure, though. As the cold weather comes, so too do critters looking for refuge. While many might seem cute, they bring with them the risk of disease and they could even cause significant structural damage to your property. If you want to avoid these and more, consider these seven tips to keep curious critters out this winter.
Keep Your Garden Tidy
Overgrown gardens are one of the most common causes of pest infestations. Since you allow your garden to grow and grow, you cannot see what nests the pest has created over the season. This can encourage them to feel comfortable and search further afar. Eventually, they may get closer to your house and look for a way to get inside. Therefore, keeping your garden tidy will offer several benefits. It makes your garden usable all year and prevents potentially unhygienic infestations.
Cap Your Chimney
However, a tidy garden is not the only way to prevent pests. Animals looking for refuge will try anything to get inside, and there’s a chance that your chimney could be an attractive entrance option for critters. But, capping your chimney brings many other positives. It also improves your home’s comfort by preventing down draughts that can cause discomfort, especially for kids or the elderly. While many new properties do not have fireplaces or chimneys, those who live in old homes could benefit significantly.
Apartment living is not as susceptible to critters but it can still happen. Your balcony can seem like an attractive spot for birds, such as pigeons, to make nests. While this may seem cute at first, you don’t want to be responsible for cleaning up after them, and you never know what type of diseases some pigeons may carry. Installing a pigeon net can prevent this problem and even make your balcony safe for any pets you have.
Secure Your Garbage
Loose garbage can create a hotbed for critters, and the more they come to rely on your open garbage containers or bags, the more they will frequent your property. If you’re not careful, this can become too much, and you may need to call in SWAT Wildlife raccoon removal to solve the problem. For any food waste garbage bins, the city or council should provide receptacles with locks to prevent critters from gaining access.
Cover and Secure Gaps In the House
As the years go by, your home will experience wear and tear, especially if you live somewhere prone to various conditions and elements that could batter your house. Experts recommend getting your roof and the surrounding areas checked at least once a year and even more after a heavy storm. You may discover gaps that many critters would love to squeeze through and make nests in your roof. These gaps can also affect warmth and energy efficiency, so you should fix them as soon as possible.
Use Motion Sensors
A motion sensor light can deter animals when they get too close to your property, but it’s important that you only use motion-activated systems. Otherwise, the continuous presence of light outside your home will lose its effect. You can set these lights up in your garden, down the side of your house, and near any areas where critters may be happy to set up somewhere to stay. Lights can also deter thieves, making them doubly useful for protecting your home.
Put Your Pet On Guard
Teaching pets to look out for pests and alert you when they get close can remind you to close windows and doors when your pet barks or comes to see you. It may also be worth letting nearby critters know that an animal is living in your home already. Since many animals are territorial, these critters are likely to be unwilling to invade your property, because they don’t want to mess with the dog or cat that’s already made it home.
While critters may seem cute and cuddly, they can also put your home at risk. Whether they are small and furry, spindly, or scaly, these tips should keep them out of your home to prevent infestations and let you and your family relax. |
A vortex is a rotating region of fluid such as, for example, a tornado or a whirlpool. These vortices are generally created at a moving boundary due to the shear resulting from the no slip condition, but can also result from thermal circulation. In general, vortices move with the fluid and are dispersed by the action of viscosity. One feature of vortices is that their axes can only terminate at solid boundaries, though they can form closed toroidal loops. Properties of vortices are discussed in Paterson (1983) and Kay and Nedderman (1985).
Two simple examples of vortices are the free vortex and the forced vortex. A free vortex is one in which the azimuthal component of velocity, vф, is inversely proportional to the distance from the axis of rotation, i.e., vф ∞ 1/r. In this case, the vorticity is zero everywhere as is illustrated in Figure 1a which shows a fluid element moving in such a flow. Of course, in practice, such a flow cannot exist exactly as it would imply an infinite velocity at the axis. Figure 1b shows the case of a forced vortex, for which vф ∞ r. This type vortex has the property that the vorticity is constant everywhere and equal to twice the angular velocity. Real vortices can often be represented approximately by an inner core which is a fixed vortex, and an outer region where the velocity profile is as for a free vortex—this is known as a Rankine vortex.
An example of a situation in which vortices are generated is that of flow past a cylinder. Figure 2a shows the presence of two counter rotating vortices behind the cylinder. At higher flow speeds, the vortices become detached and leave the cylinder. This is known as vortex shedding and vortices depart from alternate sides of the cylinder, producing a von Kármán vortex street. A schematic illustration of the streamlines (in a frame of reference moving with the mean fluid flow) is given in Figure 2b.
Vortices are also shed from aerofoils. In this case, the vortices combine to form two trailing vortices, which extend from the ends of the aerofoil. This is an important effect in maintaining the lift on an aeroplane. (See also Crossflow.)
Further information on vortices can be found in Massey (1989) and Acheson (1990).
Acheson, D. J. (1990) Elementary Fluid Dynamics, Oxford University Press, New York.
Kay, J. M. and Nedderman, R. M. (1985) Fluid Mechanics and Transfer Processes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Massey, B. S. (1989) Mechanics of Fluids, Van Nostrand Reinhold, London.
Paterson, A. R. (1983) A First Course in Fluid Dynamics, Cambridge. University Press, Cambridge.
- Acheson, D. J. (1990) Elementary Fluid Dynamics, Oxford University Press, New York.
- Kay, J. M. and Nedderman, R. M. (1985) Fluid Mechanics and Transfer Processes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- Massey, B. S. (1989) Mechanics of Fluids, Van Nostrand Reinhold, London.
- Paterson, A. R. (1983) A First Course in Fluid Dynamics, Cambridge. University Press, Cambridge. |
The Great Seal of the Realm is used to symbolize the reigning monarch’s seal of approval on important documents of state. In theory there is one per sovereign but another abdicating king, Edward VIII, who gave up the throne so he could marry Wallis Simpson, never had his own seal. On the other hand, Queen Victoria had to have four as they wore out.
There is a Duke Street that leads off Piccadilly; this was named as a compliment to James Stuart, who was the Duke of York before he was king. Benjamin Franklin used to stay at lodgings in a Duke Street off Oxford Circus, which may or may not have been named after James II; Franklin’s landlady was supposed to have enjoyed his company so much that she reduced his rent by over 50% to lure him to stay on.
Piccadilly itself takes its name from an item of clothing: In the 17th century a ‘pickadil’ was defined as “that round hem or several divisions set together about the skirt of a garment or other thing; also a kind of stiff collar, made in the fashion of a band”. |
The play seeks to draw parallels between Desdemona from Othello and select women from Indian epics
Natya & STEM (Space. Time. Energy. Movement) Dance Kampni presents Kampni Kutcheri — Chamber Concert Series — which will feature singer MD Pallavi and Bindhumalini. The duo has come together for a theatrical production called Desdemona Roopakam.
Desdemona Roopakam looks at a specific scene from Shakespeare’s Othello, says Pallavi. “Our play questions the death of Desdemona, why it happens and the way it happens. We draw parallels with Indian epics to see the role of women in them. We introspect on the perspectives that these stories are told from and what kind of a presence a woman had in these stories.”
Kaikayi, Shakuntala, Renuka and Yellamma are some of the characters explored in the play, says Pallavi. The playback singer, a trained classical vocalist, has won Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuwa Puraskar and the Karnataka State Film Awards for best playback singer for her song “Nodayya Kwate Lingave,” for the Kannada film Duniya.
The play will have a lot of music apart from spoken word poetry, says Pallavi. “It was created during the pandemic, when director and playwright Abhishek Majumdar approached us with the idea of Desdemona.”
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by The Hindu .
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions. |
Portugal’s parliament voted for the third time in nearly two years on Friday to allow euthanasia, though as with previous attempts, the country’s Constitutional Court or the president could block the bill from becoming law.
Lawmakers have approved a bill allowing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in Portugal, the parliament speaker said, though exact voting figures were not immediately available.
Center-left parties in the largely Catholic country were the driving force behind the bill, as they were with laws allowing abortion in 2007 and same-sex marriage in 2010.
PORTUGAL APPROVES EUTHANASIA, DOCTOR-ASSISTED SUICIDE FOR THE TERMINALLY ILL DESPITE PROTESTS
The bill requires the approval of the head of state to become law. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa could choose to block the legislation again or send it once more to the Constitutional Court for approval. That could delay the law for several months.
Vague wording and unconstitutional aspects frustrated the two previous attempts to enact the law.
PORTUGAL LEADERS SUPPORT A SOCCER PLAYER SUFFERED FROM RACIAL ABUSE
Euthanasia is when a doctor directly administers fatal drugs to a patient. Physician-assisted suicide is when patients self-administer the lethal drug, under medical supervision.
The new rules in the latest version of the bill include the mandatory involvement of a psychologist in the process from start to finish and a minimum two-month wait between application and death.
The bill establishes that the patient’s request must be “repeated, serious, made freely and informed, in a situation of very intense suffering, with an extremely serious definitive injury or a serious and terminal illness.” The patient requesting death must freely express his wish at least six times.
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The application is approved or rejected and the entire procedure is supervised by a national committee made up of two lawyers, a doctor, a nurse and a bioethicist. |
Coffee farmers and local exporters have the last laugh after Parliament last night voted to terminate the controversial deal that had given a single company exclusive rights to buy the country’s coffee.
After two-and a-half hours of a bipartisan debate, the House chaired by Speaker Anita Among adopted the Trade committee recommendation to have the deal the government signed with Uganda Vinci Coffee Limited terminated in public interest.
The House based their decision on mainly three major reasons; the deal contravened multiple sections of law; the company doesn’t have financial capacity to undertake the project, and lacks a valid investment licence. The House heard that the company’s investment licence issued in 2014 expired and was not renewed in 2019.
The lawmakers across the political spectrum also noted that the company linked to Italian investor Enrica Pinetti, who signed the controversial deal as a witness, doesn’t qualify for generous waivers.
In the deal, the government had waived all taxes including social security contributions for company employees; offered free land, water, electricity, monopoly for premium quality coffee and the powers to determine prices and limiting licensing of coffee exporters until the company meets its demand which is unlimited.
The MPs resolved that all these waivers were illegally and unlawfully granted by Finance Minister Matia Kasaija.
The House resolved that officials who committed government to such illegalities should be penalised as a deterrent mechanism to stop similar occurrence in future.
Attorney General Kiryowa Kiwanuka accepted the House decision on the coffee deal and promised that the government would review the committee recommendations.
“I have read it and noted its contents. We have listened to the concerns. We have noted the concerns of Parliament and the people. We shall take the recommendations that have been given. We shall review them and report back to Parliament on the action taken,” Mr Kiryowa said.
Earlier, Speaker Among said she was disappointed by allegations that she had been “bribed or compromised” to keep the report away.
Mr Mwine Mpaka, the Trade committee chairperson, indicated that whereas President Museveni was in complete agreement with most of the findings of the report, he was against the termination of the contract.
“ The President agreed with most of the issues raised by the committee but whoever emphasized that the biggest issue has been value addition,…and strongly recommended that a review of the agreement between Vinci and government of Uganda be done in not more three months as opposed to termination as termination could have reputational damage,” Mr Mpaka said.
The review proposal was however ignored, with the majority of the lawmakers insisting that it was a bad deal for the country. |
Over 40 million Americans have seen Dateline’s ongoing popular series To Catch a Predator, which has caught over two hundred potential child predators.
While the show exposed this epidemic, Chris Hansen’s book, To Catch a Predator, shares the true stories of families who have been targeted by predators, revealing the tactics predators use to manipulate their victims and why even cautious families can be vulnerable to their attacks.
He also offers suggestions from police officers, therapists, and child predators on the best approaches for preventing these crimes.
Most critically, he provides parents with concrete steps they can take to protect their kids today, including how to initiate meaningful conversations with their children. To Catch a Predator teaches parents and children what they need to know before the next predator strikes. |
Often described as one of the greatest projects of the Great Depression era, the Rockefeller Center is a complex that originally consisted of 14 buildings designed in the Art Deco style that opened during the mid to late 1930’s (it was expanded in later years with the addition of 5 more buildings). The centerpiece of the complex is its tallest building – 30 Rockefeller Plaza (originally named the RCA Building) which houses the headquarters of NBC. With various other attractions including Radio City Music Hall, a sunken plaza with an ice-skating rink (open during winter months) and an impressive collection of sculptures, murals and other art, Rockefeller Center continues to be one of the key cultural centers in New York.
72 IN. (L) x 72 IN. (W) x 56 IN. (H)
I originally set out to only build a digital model of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But I eventually decided to expand the scope of the project to include the entire Rockefeller Center (at least the 14 original buildings as well as 75 Rockefeller Plaza). Robin Hull – a fellow LEGO enthusiast who also happens to manage the website dedicated to Ralph Hancock (the Welsh landscape architect who had designed the rooftop gardens at Rockefeller Center) even convinced me to try to represent the rooftop gardens in my model. Using over 102 K digital LEGO pieces, this is definitely my largest and most ambitious project to date. |
Union minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari has stated that India might be getting its first E-highway sooner rather than later
Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, declared that India’s first e-highway would soon become a reality. The Minister stated that an electric highway connecting Delhi and Mumbai is being planned by the Road Transport Ministry. For those of you, who are confused as to what an electric highway or an E-highway is, let’s discuss the meaning and use of it in India. An electric highway is a road that has been electrically enhanced and provides power to moving vehicles either by using overhead power lines or by utilising power lines that have been installed into grooves already made in the road. The currently under construction Delhi-Mumbai Expressway is anticipated to have a dedicated lane for the electric highway and would be suitable for electric buses and trucks.
The E-highway will be a seperate lane for the electric cars and trucks on the expressway once built
One significant advantage of E-highways is its environmentally friendly transportation system, among many other possible advantages, such as safety and energy efficiency. It will help the nation achieve its climate sustainability goals once it is operational. Contrary to rail infrastructure, trolleybuses feature rubber tyres that make them quieter than trams. They also produce no pollutants. The 109 km-long longest electric roadway in the world is now being used in Berlin. At the Electric Vehicle Symposium in Los Angeles in 2012, the automation company Siemens unveiled its E-Highway proposal, which called for trucks to be powered by electricity from overhead electric wires. On top of a test track in Europe, the corporation drove vehicles equipped with conductors that would collide with e-highway electric lines. The electric drive motors on the vehicles may be powered by the electricity, turning off the diesel engines. When the trucks departed the roads with overhead wires, the diesel engines could, however, be restarted. On a three-mile stretch of the Autobahn 5 between Darmstadt and Frankfurt later in 2019, Germany unveiled its first hybrid electric-diesel truck.
Mumbai-Delhi expressway might be the first expressway in India that might have the E-Highway
This has been a great initiative taken by the Indian government especially by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Speaking at a meeting of the Hydraulic Trailer Owners Association, the Minister remarked that, “Our plan is to make an electric highway from Delhi to Mumbai. Just like trolleybuses, you can run trolley trucks on the highway.” This can be one of the great additions to the road transport system in India and can reduce a number of problems in the country. |
Everyone, even those living in remote villages in the Amazon, will have looked up and seen white trails across the sky. They can look quite spectacular against a brilliant blue sky.
But why do planes leave trails? Why do some planes leave trails and others do not? What are trails made of and are they harmful to the planet?
Hopefully you will find the answers to these and other questions below useful and interesting.
- 1 What are contrails?
- 2 At what altitude do planes leave contrails?
- 3 How long do contrails last?
- 4 Why do some planes leave trails and others don’t?
- 5 Do military jets leave contrails?
- 6 Do commercial planes leave contrails?
- 7 Do propeller planes leave contrails?
- 8 Do contrails cause rain?
- 9 Can aircraft trails affect climate?
- 10 Why do display aircraft leave trails when flying low?
- 11 Other related articles
What are contrails?
Many people seem to wrongly assume that a contrail formation is actually white smoke from the jet engines but they are actually condensation trails (hence the name “contrail”).
To understand what are the trails planes leave, and how vapor trails are formed, you just need to think about what happens when you go outside on a cold day when the temperature is very low.
When you breathe out your breath is visible in the form of a water vapor mist. This is because your relatively hot moist breath mixes with the cold surrounding air and the moisture in your breath condenses into water vapor.
It is exactly the same when a plane travels at high altitudes where cold temperatures exist.
When an aircraft’s engine burns fuel in its combustion chamber it generates hot humid air which leaves the aircraft via the hot engine exhaust and mixes with the cold air. Condensation occurs and vapor trails left behind the aircraft, normally in the form of ice crystals/ice particles as the water vapor freezes.
As they are at such a high altitude, contrails are effectively cirrus clouds.
You may hear the term dew point used when referring to water vapor forming mist. While this is important in aviation it has nothing to do with the formation of contrails as it mostly affects the atmosphere at low levels
At what altitude do planes leave contrails?
The altitude at which aircraft may leave vapor trails behind them is not actually a fixed altitude as it varies depending on a number of factors including the amount of moisture in the air and also the temperature.
On average airplane vapor trails are produced from around 26,000 feet and upwards, which is well below the cruising altitude of most modern commercial jet aircraft.
How long do contrails last?
If the air is very moist and the temperature is lower than -40ºF/-40ºC (which is oddly also the only time when Farenheit and Celcius are the same) then vapor trails may last up to an hour. If the air is warmer and less moist they may only last a few minutes.
Some NASA observations have seen contrails last as long as 14 hours. See their article The Evolution of a Contrail.
Why do some planes leave trails and others don’t?
Almost every kind of aircraft can leave a contrail provided it can fly high enough and it has at least one engine that leaves hot exhaust gases behind. It doesn’t matter if it has a jet engine, turboprop or piston engine as all will leave white trails.
A glider or an electrically powered airplane is unlikely to leave trails since they will not be leaving behind hot gases as they pass through the surrounding air. In theory, it is possible for short-lived trails to form due to changes in the air pressure caused by the aerodynamic effect of the wings or wingtips.
Do military jets leave contrails?
While many military jets would prefer to not make contrails in order to not be visible they are subject to the same laws of physics as any other planes so will produce them for the same reason.
In some situations, military airplanes do try to avoid parts of the atmosphere where trails are likely to occur. This is for the obvious reason of wanting to be undetected.
However, even a stealth bomber, which is designed to be as invisible as possible, will leave a contrail when the atmospheric conditions are right.
Do commercial planes leave contrails?
Commercial passenger planes do leave contrails (and cargo planes too of course) particularly higher flying jet commercial aircraft.
The majority of the contrails you are likely to observe are made by commercial jets.
Do propeller planes leave contrails?
Many people assume that prop airplanes do not leave trails but that is just because, in general, they are less common than jets and also that they often do not fly as high.
During the second world war, huge flights of bombers flying at very high altitudes used to leave significant amounts of trails across the sky. Also dog fights between fighters used to leave incredible patterns of trails across the skies that were visible to observers on the ground.
Do contrails cause rain?
Contrails do not cause rain to fall because they are formed far too high up in the atmosphere, where rain clouds would never form.
In theory, it is possible for a plane to induce rain (known as cloud seeding) by flying through a cloud but this is very rare and the weather conditions have to be just right. In this situation, they would not be leaving contrails anyway as they would not be flying at a high altitude.
Little is really known about the science of this phenomenon. Deliberate cloud seeding using planes has been tried with little success.
Can aircraft trails affect climate?
Well the global warming campaigners and others with conspiracy theories regarding air travel would certainly say so. But there is no evidence to support contrails affecting the climate.
While science says that contrails can increase global warming by trapping heat, they are relatively so small, that little heat could be trapped. Science also says that contrails can reflect some of the heat from the sun which would, in effect, cancel out any heat they may trap.
It is certainly possible that the carbon dioxide, unburned fuel, small particles in the smoke and even metal particles, which some may refer to as chemtrails, could alter the atmospheric conditions and so have some effect on climate.
However, in the year or so aviation almost stopped worldwide due to the virus, I have heard no reports that global warming improved at all.
Emissions from planes are regulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
Why do display aircraft leave trails when flying low?
Although it appears that formation display teams such as the RAF’s Red Arrows and the US Navy Blue Angels leave contrails when they are flying a display this isn’t actually the case.
They have a special system that, at the flick of a switch in the cockpit, injects oil or other liquid chemicals into the jet exhaust which then forms smoke trails. They use different liquids to give smoke of different colors too. |
Blue is one of the most beautiful colors around. Most people associate blue with being the good guy, the protagonist, the hero, but when it comes to your computer or laptop, the one color you never want to see is blue (or black on Windows 11). Specifically, the blue screen of death or BSOD. The dreaded screen that tells you that your computer has failed or crashed.
It’s a problem that most of us have encountered from the earliest days of Windows up to now with Windows 11. There are a ton of reasons why people encounter this and here’s a little guide to help you out with what to do.
First off, when the BSOD happens to you, don’t immediately panic. Check the Stop Code at the bottom of the screen to see what failed on your computer.
The QR code is there also for you to scan and immediately head to Microsoft’s support page. But that Stop Code will help you see the specific problem that caused the BSOD.
After that, all you have to do is use the power of Google. Just search for the Stop Code that you saved and you will find all your answers on how to troubleshoot the specific problem.
Check for Windows and Driver Updates
First, check if your Windows is up to date. Make sure it is up to date as new versions can sometimes fix problems that the previous version had.
Up next is to check if all your drivers are updated or running well. From the Start menu search for Device Manager. Check first if you have any yellow exclamation points on any drivers or devices. Right-click on them and either update the driver or uninstall the device if it is unnecessary.
This feature is one of the most neglected but handy tools that Windows has. It’s a great tool to restore your system to a previous, more stable version if ever you mess up fiddling with settings in your current version of Windows.
From the search panel just look for Recovery and select open System Restore.
Then follow the steps to choose a specific restore point your system has. Usually, Windows has one automatically saved for you.
Scan for Viruses or Malware
Windows has a great built-in virus detection software and you can either do a quick scan or a more thorough one to make sure your computer hasn’t been affected by any virus or malware.
This is a bit more technical for people who don’t know how to fiddle around with the insides of their PC or laptop. If you can though, check if your RAM sticks aren’t failing. A failing stick can cause BSOD.
A failing hard drive can also affect and cause a BSOD. To check the health of your hard drives I suggest using something like Crystal Disk Info.
SFC means System File Checker. It will search your computer for damaged Windows system files and will attempt to fix them. Something as simple as this can fix your issues.
All you have to do is run a command prompt by clicking on the Windows Start Icon and type CMD to open a command prompt.
From there just type in sfc /scannow
Safe mode allows you to load a very basic version of Windows without anything you’ve installed running in the background. This is a great way to check if it’s something outside of the operating system that is affecting your computer. You will know if it’s either an installed app or service that is causing your BSOD.
To boot into safe mode all you have to do is search for safe mode in the Windows search bar. Then select Advanced Startup to restart now.
From the Advanced Options when your PC restarts, select start-up settings and select safe mode.
This is it. If nothing works and you still constantly get the dreaded blue screen of death then this is your last and only option. Reinstall a clean slate of Windows.
From Recovery just look for Reset this PC. Choose your options and then start the process. It may hurt to lose some files or some settings, but if it will clean up your computer and get it running well again then it’s well worth the process.
Seeing a BSOD is one of the worst things that can happen to any Windows owner. Most of the time they are super frustrating to deal with as they can happen constantly and not even allow you to troubleshoot any of the problems that are causing it.
Hopefully, with our tips here, you can slowly but surely pinpoint what is exactly causing your computer to crash or fail. At the end of the day, prevention is better than a cure, so make sure you are checking for any signs of failure, scanning for viruses, and overall taking care of your precious computer. |
By what do you measure your life? In an age when the “dumbing-down” of every standard is the norm, and measurements of behavior which were once thought unacceptable are now applauded, are we in danger of settling for something less than the standard the Word of God has established for us? Consider just four areas in which the standard is nothing less than the very character of God.
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father … is perfect” (Matt 5:48). Is it possible to attain to this standard? “Perfect” does not convey the idea of being sinless but can convey the thought of being complete, mature, or fully grown. The verses preceding this command involve the treatment of others (vv38-47), so the perfection alluded to here involves treating others with the same patience, mercy, and grace with which God has treated me. It means that the character of God determines my treatment to my brethren and to the unsaved. Do you treat others the way in which God has treated you?
“As God is true” (2Cor 1:18). Paul’s movements had been called into question by the Corinthian believers. Paul was able to say that his own reliability and truthfulness took character from God’s reliability. “As God is true” should mark our promises and intentions. Lying, deceit, and carefully worded statements which allow us to deny we ever “meant” something by what we said, should have no place in a believer’s speech. Our words should be as clear and reliable as God’s words to us. A believer’s word should be as good as a contract.
There may be no greater test of godliness and spiritual life than to be called upon to forgive. We play many mind games to excuse ourselves and hide our unwillingness to forgive. Yet Ephesians 4:32 directs us to forgive one another “even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Issues of repentance and the like aside for a moment, it should suffice us to remember that it cost God an infinite price to forgive us. I should be willing to “lose” something in order to “gain ” my brother (Matt 18:15). The standard of forgiving love is nothing less than, “as God.” As a minimum, I should always maintain a forgiving spirit, mirroring a God Who is “ready to forgive” (Psa 86:5).
Peter’s letter reveals a standard for purity of life which most of us dismiss as unrealistic. “Be ye holy for I am holy” (1Peter 1:16). Peter is quoting from Leviticus where this truth is enunciated in three different places. In Leviticus 11:44, it is linked with the food they ate; in Leviticus 19:2 with the focus of their lives; and in Leviticus 20:23-26 with the friendships they pursued. We can never, in this life, be as holy as God, but we can “perfect holiness” (2Cor 7:1) by giving care to what we feed upon, what we focus upon, and the friendships we make.
Peter emphasizes the need for disciplining our minds (“gird up the loins of your mind,” 1Peter 1:13), of directing our appetites to the Word of God (2:1, 2), and of care as to our associations (2:11). All of these are essential steps for us. |
It’s not just his giant income or the low tax rates he pays on it. And it’s not just the videotape of him berating almost half of America, or his endless gaffes, or his regressive budget policies.
It’s something that unites all of this, and connects it to the biggest underlying problem America faces — the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top that’s undermining our economy and destroying our democracy.
Romney just released his 2011 tax returns, showing he paid $1.9 million in taxes on more than $13 million of income last year — for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent. (He released his 2010 return in January, showing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent.)
American has had hugely wealthy presidents before — think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe’s fortune.
But here’s the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the “malefactors of great wealth,” and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.
FDR thundered against the “economic royalists,” raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions — along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.
But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn’t even specified what “loopholes” he’d close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.
And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.
He’s even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn’t to worry about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him, whom he calls “victims” and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.
(He mangles these facts, of course. Almost all working Americans pay federal taxes — and the federal taxes that have been rising fastest for most people are Social Security payroll taxes, which aren’t collected on a penny of income over $110,100. Moreover, most of the “47 percent” whom he accuses of taking handouts are on Medicare or Social Security — the biggest “entitlement” programs — which, not incidentally, they paid into during their working lives.)
Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.
And that loophole exists solely because private equity and hedge fund managers have so much political clout — as a result of their huge fortunes and the money they’ve donated to political candidates — that neither party will remove it.
In other words, everything America is learning about Mitt Romney — his tax returns, his years at Bain Capital, the video of his speech to high-end donors in which he belittles half of America, his gaffes, the budget policies he promotes — repeat and reenforce the same underlying reality.
So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it. |
Tiger Eyes Bracelets During Yoga- The Truth Behind
Tiger eyes bracelets are a popular trend in the fashion industry. Consider buying tiger eyes bracelets because the tiger eye used is a stone that has been used for centuries to protect one’s home and family, to find direction and to promote self-awareness.
The tiger eye is a gemstone that has been used for centuries. It is a stone that is said to provide protection and had been used as a talisman in many cultures and civilizations, including China, India, Tibet, and the Native Americans for good luck and protection against evil spirits. In Buddhism it is believed that tiger eye helps with the development of wisdom. Purchase bracelets by clicking lava stone.
Benefits of Lava Stone
Lava stone is a natural stone that comes from the earth. It has been used for centuries as a symbol of protection and grounding. It is also used in jewelry to represent love, relationships and fertility. The beads are made from amethyst, rose quartz or moonstone. They are usually in the shape of spheres or cubes and can be found in a variety of colors like black, green, pink, white and brown.
– Protection: Lava stone is a protective stone that brings stability to your life and helps you feel grounded when you’re feeling off balance or out of sorts.
– Love: Lava stones represent love so they can be used as an anniversary gift for your partner or to give someone who you want to spend more time with
Are Tiger Eyes Bracelets Made From Real Tiger Eyes?
Many people wonder if tiger eye bracelets are made from real tiger eye beads. There are many different ways to make tiger eye bracelets with different materials but, there is not one specific way to make them from real tiger eyes. Tiger eye beads can be found in a variety of colors but the most popular colors are yellow and gold.
What’s The Significance Of The Tiger Eye Bracelets During Yoga?
The tiger eye bracelet during yoga can be worn on your right hand or left hand. You can wear it on the right hand if you are practicing yoga asanas in order to get more energy or on the left hand if you want to tap into your intuition and creativity. It is believed to have healing properties and it can help you with anxiety, depression, and insomnia. The stone is also believed to bring prosperity and good luck. It is also used to help with decision-making and seeing things from a different perspective.
Natural Lava Stone Tiger Eye Beaded Yoga Bracelets components
The components of a natural lava stone bracelet are the beads, the string, and the clasp. The beads are what form the pattern and add color to your bracelet. They can be made from all kinds of materials like glass, wood, metal, or stone. Tiger eye is one type of bead that is often used to make bracelets because it has a unique appearance and is easy to work with. The string is what attaches your beads together and keeps them in place on your wrist. There are many different types of strings that you can use for your bracelet depending on what you want it to look like and how you want it to feel when you wear it. Some popular types of string include leather cording, waxed cotton cord, hemp cord, or nylon rope cord. The clasp is what holds everything together.
How Do You Use Tiger Eye Bracelet?
This is a question that many people ask and the answer is that there are many uses for a tiger eye bracelet. The placement of this bracelet on your hand can have a wide range of meanings. It is believed that the left hand is associated with the heart and emotions, while the right hand is associated with practicality and logic.
The meaning of wearing a tiger eye bracelet on your left hand can be interpreted as being more emotional or sensitive. On the other hand, wearing one on your right may be an indication that you are more logical and practical in your approach to life.
Who Should Not Wear Tiger Eye Stone
It is not recommended for those who have epilepsy or suffer from seizures. It can also cause headaches in some people so, it is recommended to avoid wearing this stone if you suffer from migraines. It is said to have a calming effect and can be worn by people who are sensitive or suffer from chronic pain.
Who Can Wear Tiger Eye Bracelet?
This bracelet is suitable for anyone who wants to attract luck, wealth, and happiness. However, it is not recommended for people with heart problems or those who have a pacemaker because the bracelet can cause an electric shock that could lead to heart attack or death. They are usually worn by people who want to attract luck, wealth, and happiness.
Is Tiger’s Eye Rare?
Tiger’s Eye Beads are not as popular as other types of beads but, they are still very well known in the jewelry industry. There are many different types of beads available for purchase, but Tiger’s Eye is one of the most popular ones. They have been used to create jewelry since ancient times and they still continue to be used today. Tiger’s eye beads are found in the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. This type of quartz has bands of orange, brown, and black. The coloration comes from the iron content in the stone. It is not as rare as other types of quartz but, it is not as common either. It is most commonly found in shades of brown, but it can also be found with a red hue or an orange hue.
Can I Wear Tiger Eye to Sleep?
No, you cannot wear tiger eye to sleep. It is not advisable because, it can cause irritation or injury if it comes into contact with your skin. The answer to this question is not straightforward. It depends on the person’s sleep patterns, the tiger eye’s quality and size, and how the person uses it. Tiger eye can help induce lucid dreaming, which would make it more likely for someone to have nightmares or insomnia.
Can Tiger Eyes Get Wet? Are They Water Safe
They are known for their mesmerizing, fiery orange color. But does this mean that they can get wet? The answer to this question is yes. Tiger eyes can get wet and are water safe. However, it is not recommended to wear them in the shower or swimming pool because the chlorine can damage the stone and make it cloudy or dull in appearance.
What does Tigers Eye protect you from?
Tiger Eye bracelet is believed to protect you from negativity or bad vibes that are sent your way from others. This stone has been used for centuries as a protective amulet against negative energies and forces. It is believed to have the power of grounding one’s energy into the earth and providing protection from psychic attacks.
What is Blue Tigers Eye Good For?
Blue tigers eye is a type of quartz that can be found in various colors, including blue, green and yellow. The most common color is yellowish brown, but it can also be found in green, red, blue and purple. Blue tigers eye has a calming effect on the mind. It helps to reduce stress and anxiety. It also helps to improve concentration and focus.
Blue Tiger Eyes Bracelets Benefits
The blue tiger eye bracelet is a popular bracelet that can be worn by both men and women. It is believed to bestow the wearer with courage, wisdom, and protection from harm. This type of bracelet is made from a semi-precious stone called tiger eye. Tiger eye is a gemstone that has been known for centuries for its ability to help people overcome fear and anxiety. It can also help in developing self-confidence as well as improving one’s concentration skills.
Yellow Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
The yellow tiger eye bracelet is a type of gemstone that is worn on the wrist. It is believed to be a powerful healing stone that can help with mental clarity, self-esteem and energy levels. The bracelet has been used for centuries by healers and shamans in Native American culture who believed it could ward off evil spirits.
The yellow tiger eye bracelet comes in various shapes and sizes, but it usually has a round shape with a smooth surface. The color of the stone ranges from light brown to dark brown or black, but it can also be found in other colors such as green, red or blue.
Red Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
Red tiger eye is a beautiful gemstone with many benefits. It is believed that the stone can help in healing physical and emotional wounds, as well as improving your self-confidence.
The red tiger eye bracelet has been used for centuries to provide healing and protection to its wearer. The stone is said to be able to absorb negative energy while protecting the wearer from it.
It is believed that this gemstone can help in healing physical and emotional wounds, as well as improving your self-confidence. It has also been used for centuries to provide healing and protection to its wearer, absorbing negative energy while protecting the wearer from it.
Green Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
The green tiger eye bracelet is a natural stone that is believed to bring good luck. It is also thought to be an excellent stone for those who are looking for success in business.
Tiger eye bracelets are often used as a talisman and can be worn by people of all faiths. They are also believed to give protection from the “evil eye”. Tiger eye bracelets are often given as gifts, especially at weddings or births.
Pink Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
Tiger eye is a stone that is believed to be able to help with many different aspects of life. It can help with the following:
Black Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
Tiger eye is a stone that is believed to have the ability to bring luck and ward off bad luck. It also helps balance emotions, soothe anger, and ease fear. The black tiger eye bracelet benefits are:
– It brings good luck
– It wards off bad luck
– It helps balance emotions
– It soothes anger
– It eases fear
Rainbow Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
The rainbow tiger eye bracelet is a type of jewelry that is worn on the wrist. It has been used by many people for centuries as a form of protection and healing.
This bracelet has many benefits, including:
-It balances the mind and body
-It protects against negativity
-It provides clarity and insight into your life’s path and helps you answer questions such as: Am I living my best possible life?
Multicolor Tiger Eye Bracelet Benefits
– It improves your focus and concentration
– Helps to reduce stress
– Improves your memory and mental clarity
– Prevents insomnia
How can you tell if Tiger Eye beads Are real?
Tiger eye beads can be found in many different colors which is, one way to tell if they are real or not. If the color is too uniform, then they may not be natural tiger eye beads. Natural tiger eyes have a variety of colors that cannot be replicated by man-made methods.
What chakra is Tigers Eyes?
The word “chakra” is translated to mean “wheel” in Sanskrit. Chakra is a concept that has been used in the Indian spiritual tradition of Ayurveda. The chakras are a series of points or centers along the spine that are linked to different parts of the body and help maintain health, balance, and well-being. The seven major chakras are:
– Crown chakra (1st)
– Third eye (2nd)
– Throat chakra (4th)
– Heart chakra (5th)
– Solar plexus chakra (6th)
– Sacral chakra (7th)
Is Tigers Eye Good Luck?
Tiger Eyes Bracelets are a type of bracelet that is said to bring luck and boost confidence. Tiger Eye Bracelet has been used for centuries by the Native American Indians and other cultures. It is believed that they were used to help with the healing process, bringing good fortune, and protection from evil spirits.
Tiger Eye Bracelet is one of the most popular bracelets for people who want to feel more confident about themselves.
Conclusion: Why Consider Buying Tiger Eyes Jewelry
In conclusion, Tiger Eye is a stone that is perfect for those who are looking for something that will provide them with protection, direction and help them become more aware of themselves. If you are interested in purchasing this type of jewelry, then consider buying from Tiger Eyes Jewelry.
Tiger Eye is a stone that has been used for centuries to protect one’s home and family, to find direction and to promote self-awareness.
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A magnitude 5.6 earthquake hit Albania on Wednesday, the second quake in only two days.
The tremor’s epicenter was under the Adriatic Sea, said Albania’s Institute for Earth Sciences, Energy, Water, and the Environment.
Due to the new quake, the Defense Ministry said search and rescue operations in buildings demolished by Tuesday’s quake were stopped until further notice for security reasons.
At least 27 people lost their lives in Tuesday’s 5.6 tremor. The Health Ministry also said that 658 people had been injured.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama also declared the beginning of national mourning across the country |
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Behold Lord Vishnu’s 10 distinct avatars when he descended on the earth to save mankind from the evil in different aeons. Handpainted by artisan Si...View full detailsOriginal price ₹3,999.00 -Original price ₹3,999.00Original price ₹3,999.00₹3,999.00₹3,999.00 - ₹3,999.00Current price ₹3,999.00| /Save 0% Save %
What began as a card game, played with much fanfare in many parts of the country since the 15th century, Ganjifa cards are now cherished only for their cultural and historical significance. What hasn’t lost its charm through time though, is the beautiful art work that was done on these playing cards. Various versions of the game were developed in different regions with themes like astronomy, mythology, astrology, Puranas, and many more. Each had mythological characters or symbols hand painted on the small, mostly circular playing cards. The vibrant paintings were done using pigments derived from natural resources. Today, larger renditions of the artworks are hand painted on paper and adorn the walls of many discerning households. |
As many as 75 laboratory assistants from 75 Vocational High Schools in Indonesia visited Vocational School UGM on Thursday (14/9) as a part of technical training activity for increasing competency of vocational education. The visit was held as a synergy between Vocational High School and UGM Vocational School as well as a facility for educational workforce to increase their competence and comprehension on vocational education.
“This visit aims to give them an opportunity to know tools maintenance and operation as well as fundamental things that have to be available in the educational laboratory,” said the Head of Planning Section in Ministry of Education and Culture, Muhammad Iswandi, S.H., M.Sc.
Iswandi said, from all participants who attended this technical training, more than 80% of them joined this kind of event for the first time. On the other hand, the enhancement of educational workforce’ competency is one of the important things that have to be done in order to develop a qualified vocational education.
“If they never attend technical training, how they can verify their work. Through this technical training, the laboratory assistants can increase their knowledge and we will conduct a certification in the future,” he added.
This event obtained a positive response from Dean of Vocational School UGM, Wikan Sakarinto, S.T., M.Sc., Ph.D. In his opening speech, he said he will always be open for educational institutions that want to visit and directly see the implementation of educational activities at Vocational School UGM.
Currently, according to Wikan, education sector in Indonesia is experiencing an alarming symptom where students only seek for degree and a good grade but do not seek for competencies which are required in the job field. It is one of the criticisms often delivered by businessmen who want to recruit university graduates.
Therefore, Wikan said it is essential for vocational education institutions to be synergized in developing vocational education in Indonesia in order to hold an ideal education which is as qualified as educational education in developed countries.
“We are ambitious to invite vocational education institutions in Indonesia to unite to be the best vocational education in the world. Therefore, it requires a comprehensive relationship between Vocational High School and Higher Education. Hopefully, in the future, vocational education can become the solution for the current issues in Indonesia,” said Wikan. |
How Do We clarify Great Leaders?
I had the pleasure recently of meeting CJ Huff, Superintendent of Joplin, Missouri Schools, while visiting the high school campus at Northpark Mall. All I knew about him I learned from People magazine and the local news. To be honest, before the Joplin Tornado Im not sure I already knew his name – considering I live in the Carthage, Missouri School district (about 10 miles away). After meeting him, however, it was clear that this man is someone who can accomplish amazing things.
I said as much to him and his response was: I had a great team. In the few moments we had to discuss an upcoming bond issue and the vision for Joplin Schools, I could tell he was a great leader.
That singular thought has made me consider what it is to be a great leader, and why did I think that about CJ Huff? People tend to categorize Martin Luther King Jr., Ghandi, George Washington or George Patton as great leaders. Why? Leaders are not leaders unless they have followers. Followers are people who are inspired or motivated by others and choose to believe in their same vision or cause. Notice that information choose – that is important. Leaders are not truly leaders if their followers do so by force or submission, that is a dictatorship or slavery.
If you asked 100 people to define their idea of an inspirational leader, there would be 100 different answers back. However, there are some commonalities percolating to the top within such a question. Greatleaders.info lists three categories that many leaders fall into: charismatic personality, situational leadership and morality or spiritual leadership. From our fleeting encounter, I submit CJ Huff is blessed with two of the three. He is a very engaging person with the ability to discuss rather complicate issues on the appropriate intelligence level of his audience. For example, he was able to dissect the bond issue fairly rapidly and help me understand the need for the bond. And, he is a humble man. When I mentioned the People Magazine articles and honors, he was quick to deflect the praise to his team. This trait makes him more alluring as a leader because he does not bask in the glory of his accomplishments and recognizes he did not do it alone.
CJ Huff also had situational leadership with the Joplin Tornado. This is not an event that anyone would have asked for or dreamed would happen, but it did. The days and weeks afterwards brought a sense of panic. Would everything turn out alright? What would become of Joplin? What would people do for their homes or jobs? CJ Huff stepped up in the confront of an overwhelming situation and made things happen with a singular focus in mind – getting the Joplin students back in school.
CJ Huff told me that he started working with city leaders on May 23rd (the day after the storm) in order to restore students to schools. They had daily morning meetings that outlined each days events and then reviewed those efforts during the next days meeting. That level of communication and commitment to the purpose is apparent as every Joplin school (in some fact) opened on time last fall.
My business is to help people rise to become great leaders, but what does that average? Do I want them to confront adversity in order to prove they are a good leader – NO! The idea is to create good leadership habits and behaviors in our everyday lives so when we are tested, we can stand up strong. The city leaders already established a trust and communication between each other so when Joplin was devastated, the connections were in place for success. Hardship is not the time to establish strong relationships, although their creation can be a side effect – look at all the new friends and family we have built because of our shared experience. |
A Complete Comparison of VMware and VirtualBox – Practical SSH examples
Find centralized, trusted content and vmware workstation 12 nat port forwarding free around the technologies you use most. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I have a VMWare Player I can access these applications by using the local IP address of the guest e. I think this should be possible if I can forward the port 80 of my Ubuntu guest to that of the Windows host. How do I make this happen please? Edit: I should probably add the motivation for wanting to do this.
Basically, I vnware to avoid figuring out the IP address of the virtual machine everytime I access the web applications. The further reason is that the local IP address of the Ubuntu guest might I suspect change, vmware workstation 12 nat port forwarding free that will affect quite a few things, such as the base Fre configured in the webapps’ configuration files e.
Also: VMWare documentation of this. You can do it using SSH Tunneling for example. From windows you open a tunnel from the windows на этой странице 80 to the ubuntu port You can do it using Putty on Windows and having the ssh deamon running on ubuntu, which I guess you should already have.
There are many tutorials on how to do this. I’ll add just one link, but you can always google it and find one that suites you. Portforwarding with SSH Putty. Then build the urls using the host name. If the ip changes you change it in the hosts file. Stack Overflow for Teams — Start collaborating and sharing organizational knowledge. Create a free Team Why Teams? Learn more about Collectives. Learn more about Teams. Vmware workstation 12 nat port forwarding free to do port forwarding on VMWare Player Ask Ffree.
Asked 4 years, 2 months ago. Modified 2 years, 1 month ago. Viewed 16k times. Add a comment. Sorted by: Reset to default. Highest v,ware default Trending recent votes count more Date modified newest first Forwaeding created oldest first. Vmware workstation 12 nat port forwarding free Juan 5, 2 2 gold badges 14 14 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges. Thanks for your reply! Please see my edit. Your solution still requires me to figure нажмите для продолжения the IP address of the guest OS i.
My problem will be solved if I can either hardcode this IP address, or use port forwarding via VMWare’s fogwarding settings which will handle the Vmware workstation 12 nat port forwarding free address change automatically. See additional Info i added to my answer — Juan.
I ended up doing precisely that after my workstatioh comment, resigning myself to hoping that the IP doesn’t change often. I am still on the lookout for a more permanent solution. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as workstatoon guest Name. Email Required, but never shown.
Not the answer you’re looking for? Browse other questions нажмите чтобы увидеть больше portforwarding nat vmware-player or ask узнать больше own question. The Overflow Blog. How to make time for learning in tech sponsored post. Ready to optimize your Wokstation with Rust? Help us identify new roles for community members.
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Advanced Checkpoint Gaia CLI Commands (Tips and Tricks) – InfoSec Memo.How To Create And Use NAT Network In VirtualBox – techbeatly
replace.me › how-to-configure-port-forwarding-in-vmware-workstati. In , with the release of VMware Workstation v, the version numeration NAT Network, +, Port forwarding, +, +, Port forwarding, -. In , with the release of VMware Workstation v, the version numeration NAT Network, +, Port forwarding, +, +, Port forwarding, -. |
A couple of weeks ago, the Economist magazine ran an unusual “help wanted” ad. The Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, will retire in June and the British government is looking for a replacement. On the one hand, it might seem like a great job. The Governor receives a salary of £300,000, … Read more
Last Friday, a top British top financial regulator issued a report suggesting numerous reforms to the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). Libor, a benchmark interest rate that affects more than $300 trillion in financial transactions, is constructed from the cost of funds estimates submitted by a handful of large banks. This summer, e-mails surfaced showing … Read more
See my reaction to the Wheatley Report at Law360.com. |
When Can Children Get Braces?
As a parent, you may wonder about the correct age for braces. Children as young as seven years old may get braces, depending on the orthodontic challenge the child faces.
Warning Signs of Orthodontic Problems
The American Association of Orthodontists recommends your child see an orthodontist at age seven while still having a mixture of baby and permanent teeth. This age allows potential problems to be discovered before they potentially become serious.
However, regardless of age, consider bringing your child in to see us if you observe any of the following:
- Difficulty chewing or biting
- Grinding or clenching of teeth
- Mouth breathing
- Early or late loss of baby teeth
- Trouble speaking
- Facial imbalance
- Biting the cheek or the roof of the mouth
- Jaws that shift or make sounds
A visit to our office will allow us to screen your child for problems and suggest timely, effective solutions. For example, not every orthodontic problem requires braces, but they all likely require some type of treatment. Most of the time Dr. Chelian would like to monitor the growth of your child and re-evaluate in 6 or 12 months to ensure the jaws and teeth are developing appropriately.
How To Tell If Your Child Needs Braces
If your child’s teeth are not aligned, it may impact more than their self-esteem. Misalignment may contribute to pain, difficulty chewing, and jaw problems.
The University of Rochester Medical Center recommends taking your child to an orthodontist for evaluation for braces if you notice any of these problems:
- An overbite
- Missing teeth
- An underbite
- Incorrect or asymmetrical jaw position
- An open bite
- Misaligned, crooked, or crowded teeth
- Cracking or popping of the jaw joint
The best age for braces is typically somewhere between 10–14 years old. However, it is never too late to get braces!
Your Child’s First Visit
When you bring your child to our office, we will warmly welcome you and make sure you feel right at home!. Our team will walk you through the process while answering any questions you may have.
On a typical first visit, we:
- Get you set up in our digital system
- Take professional photos of your child’s face and teeth
- Take digital X-rays
- Scan your child’s mouth with our iTero Element 2 technology to make a 3D model of their teeth and jaw
- Create a custom treatment plan to tackle your child’s orthodontic situation
- Discuss the plan with you and your child
This visit—including the photos, x-rays, and scans—are free of charge. The cost of the treatment depends on what your child needs done. If you decide to proceed with treatment, our team will develop a custom financial plan designed to work for everyone involved!
Now that you know the first visit is free, you have nothing to lose by bringing your child in for evaluation. While the best age for braces is indeed 10-14, we work with your child to treat them properly at whatever age they are.
Contact Urban Orthodontics to schedule an appointment!
Let's get started on your smile journey!
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Union City, NJ 07087
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7In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. Ephesians 1:7-10
The large problem standing in between our union with God is sin. Its the problem Jesus came to deal with as He came from the communion of God, took on flesh, was born of Mary, crucified on the cross, buried in the tomb and raised from the dead. The word for sin here indicates a “trespass” against God. Trespassing occurs when we cross a boundary and enter space that is not ours. Its not that we have entered God’s space, but that we actually left the bounds of His character, will, and word. In leaving that boundary we have been taken captive. Now Jesus came to pay the price.
Jesus paid our redemption price so we can be united with Him again and become participants in the full union work He is planning: the union of things in heaven and things on earth. Jesus’ redemption price – the giving of his blood – is constantly available to you for the forgiveness of sin. When it seems like we are being taken captive by sin again, its time to enter into God’s glorious purpose for you: Jesus shed his blood for the forgiveness of your sin that you might be with Him! |
Desert America: Territory of ParadoxIrene Hwang | Jaime Salazar | Michael Kubo | Ramon Prat
“Desert America: Territory of Paradox” is a survey of the extreme uses and activities that take place in the area roughly encompassing Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and sections of California and Texas.
Through photography and text, personal experience and history, we explore an alternate America desert –one of promise and failure inflated to magnificent proportions. In a region considered barren and empty, we investigate the phenomena that reveal the desert as a place that is in fact teeming with activity.
Seven “books” work in tandem to demonstrate how the Desert is an epic territory of extreme conditions that generate severe and often monumental reactions, constructions and outcomes. These books trace a parabola that begins with the idea of the Desert as the vacant, desired territory of history, the destination of past and present stories of American exodus. The chapters next rise through an arc of increasing colonization, examining the infrastructure projects that made the Desert inhabitable, as well as the technologies and ambitions that encouraged occupation, growth, and fortification. Our journey through this fascinating landscape is completed as we return to the image of the Desert as a territory of the empty and sublime –an image now conditioned by all that we have just witnessed. |
The first few times you hit the water as an archer, you can expect frustration.
That’s just the way it is, and unless you’re an unusually seasoned hunter, your first 20, 30, or even 40 shots are going to miss. And that’s if you even see a shootable fish!
But there are ways to shorten this otherwise steep learning curve, and to help, we’ve assembled some of our favorite tips.
Table of Contents (clickable)
Recommended Bowfishing gear:
- Best Bowfishing Bows
- Best Bowfishing Reels
- Best Bowfishing Arrows
- Best Bowfishing Arrow Tips
- Best Bowfishing Line
Practice snap shooting - and do it on the water
Seasoned professional archers aren’t typically big fans of snap shooting, a technique in which you release prior to full draw and aim instinctively. For them, proper and consistent form is the key to improved accuracy, and in the vast majority of situations, they’re right.
But fast-moving fish often demand snap shooting, and whether you're looking to skewer a fat carp or stick a wily gar, a quick shot can be just the thing - but only if you’ve practiced, practiced, and practiced.
It’s a simple truth that you need to spend hours - hundreds of shots - to develop muscle memory, and actual thousands may be necessary to fine-tune your body’s mind/muscle connection.
But if you want to get good at snap shooting, if you want to rack up numbers that’ll place you in competitive tournaments, you need to be willing to spend the time with your bow that’ll take.
And you need to do that on the water.
We’ve all practiced with targets in the backyard, and that’s a solid way to build a skill base that’ll pay off down the line. But you’ll only really hone your snap shooting skills for fish if you simulate the kinds of shots you’ll actually be taking.
One common tip is to sink soda bottles filled with water. Let them go in different - realistic- depths of water. Then back off to your high-probability distance (start at about 10 feet), and practice your snap shooting.
In contrast to the careful draw you take on a buck, for instance, you’ll need to draw and release in one smooth motion. And that means that bows featuring a let off are not ideal.
The right kind of bow is necessary for snap shooting.
Instead, recurved and lever-actions are the way to go, explaining their popularity with serious bowfishermen.
A few hours a weekend in the off-season will really up your game, and don’t be surprised if you see some well-respected archers doing just the same thing!
Tune your bow on the water
Our second tip is related to the first.
Tuning your bow on the water can make all the difference.
Tuning your bow at home is pretty common, but tuning your bow on the water is what separates champions from average Joes.
Robin Parks, the internet bowfishing sensation, is a firm believer in the benefits of this practice. “When I get a new bow, one of the first things I do is tune it on the water,” he explains. “Instead of paper tuning it like I would a hunting bow, I use the water as my paper. I shoot at a leaf or something on the water and if my arrow is flying sideways or splashing a lot when it hits the water, I adjust my rest or nocking point until my arrow shoots straight into the water without much splashing. A splash is like a tear in the paper. You want an arrow that flies straight into the water. If it flies sideways and causes a big splash, you lose accuracy and kinetic energy.”
You’ll see a real-world difference right away, with cleaner, more accurate shots and greater energy on every hit.
Consider reducing your draw weight for tournaments
This tip may sound strange, especially if you’re a seasoned bowhunter who’s been working up to heavy draw weights to punch big bucks, boar, bear, moose, or elk.
When you send an arrow through-and-through your fish, two things happen.
First, you risk punching the mud or clay bottom and potentially clogging your levering barbs. Not every archer uses this style point (more on this in a moment), so this may not be an issue for you.
But second, you give yourself more work to do when removing your arrow. And in a tournament, time is money.
Hear me out.
Unless you’re shooting a point in which you twist the tip to release the barbs, you don’t need or really want full penetration. Unlike big game, you’re not looking for a long wound channel to increase blood flow - you just want your point deep enough to allow the barbs to grab.
Your shot isn’t going to kill that fish in any case, right?
So a deep point is more than good enough, and when it’s time to remove it, you won’t have to fight through as much flesh.
That means every arrow can come free just that much faster, allowing you to shoot again that much sooner.
If you want to keep up with these guys, reducing your draw weight might do the trick.
And when a tournament is won or lost on one fish, getting back in the action quickly is a champion’s secret.
If you find you’re running your points out the far side of your fish, consider dropping your draw weight by 10 to 15 pounds.
Assess and time your removals, and see if you don’t get back to shooting faster.
Replace your tips and chose your points carefully
Sharp tips are a must, and the moment you see them taking damage, you should either clean them up with a file and sandpaper or screw on a new one.
Dull tips are a deal-breaker: they’ll ruin your next hunt, guaranteed.
And right along with that, you need to be shooting a point that’s matched to your draw weight and quarry. We’ve covered our favorite points before, and you should take a look at our article on the the best bowfishing tips.
Most points are designed for either thin-skinned or tough-skinned fish, essentially falling into two broad categories: “carp” and “gar.” A few, like some of the points from AMS, work well on both, but the vast majority of points fall to one side or the other of this divide.
You’ll also want to match the barb style to your draw weight. Exposed barbs, and more of them, create drag as they pass through the water and your fish, and lower draw weights can really struggle to provide enough power when the water, the scales, and the flesh are working against them.
I like a powerful bow to drive exposed barbs deep.
For draw weights of less than 50 pounds, I really like folding barbs as they lay more or less flat against the point during penetration, only creating significant resistance once they’ve been deployed.
AMS makes the Ankor QT, a point that’s good on all species and ideal for low draw-weights.
Now, keep in mind that folding barbs have weaknesses, too, like the chance to plug them with mud or clay.
A final thing to consider is the manner of release. Once you’ve stuck your fish and got it on dry land, you’ll need to remove your arrow. Some points release their barbs by twisting the tip; others accomplish this with a twist of the shaft.
Generally, the latter is the easier system to work with, but your mileage may vary.
Ultimately, you know your conditions, your skill, and your bow: make the right choice for yourself!
Any serious angler will tell you that scouting and marking likely places to find fish are the keys to success.
That’s just as true for archers as it is for fishermen.
Whether you fish from shore or run a boat, take the time to scout for the best spots. That means you’ll want to consult topo maps and look for places likely to hold the fish you’re chasing, use a GPS to mark spots you’ve found fish, and generally plan where and when to meet up with the gar or carp of your dreams.
Typically, you’re looking for live vegetation that holds prey items and shallow areas with steep drop-offs adjacent to these weed beds.
The logic is simple.
Prey attracts predators - and even carp feed on fish eggs, snails, and other invertebrates, so don’t ignore that fact. You need to locate these feeding areas and then find the ones that allow big fish to hunt and run.
For that, you’re looking for a steep drop-off into deeper water.
That can be a narrow point with weeds along the sides, a shallow shelf near a channel, or nearly any other combination of shallow, deep, and steep - and that includes humps and submerged islands, so good electronics are a must.
If you find these spots, you’ll find the fish!
Wear polarized sunglasses
Our final tip is all about vision. With good polarized sunglasses, you’ll be able to see through the water and glare, spotting fish more quickly and getting a better aim overall.
And while we’re as price-conscious as anyone, really cheap polarized lenses probably won’t cut it. That’s because really inexpensive offerings just won’t offer quality coatings, and the polarizing effect won’t cut surface glare like it should.
High-quality polarized sunglasses make a huge difference!
That doesn’t mean you need to spend an arm and a leg to get a good pair, but you do need to know what you’re looking for to get the most for your hard-earned money.
We’ve reviewed some of our favorites before, and if you want the run-down on the best polarized sunglasses, check out this article. |
As the days shorten and the air grows crisp, it’s a sign that magic is happening below the surface of your local lake. Fall is here, and as water temps plummet, largemouth shed the lethargy caused by the summer’s heat and begin feeding in earnest.
For anglers in the know, fall can be the most productive season to fish largemouth--it’s that good!
But do you know how shorter days and falling water temperatures affect bass behavior?
Do you where the bass are moving?
Do you know what lures and techniques are most effective in the fall?
Keep reading to find out!
Table of Contents (clickable)
- 1 Fall Bass Behavior
- 2 Fall Bass Fishing Tips
- 3 Our Favorite Fall Fishing Lures and Techniques
- 4 Final Thoughts
In the market for new bass fishing tackle? Check out our buying guides below:
Fall Bass Behavior
Bass are plenty active in summer, at least until water temperatures start to creep into the mid- to high-80s. At that point, largemouth will start to turn off.
Heat-induced stress will send them into deeper water or shade, and they’ll stop looking for a meal and just sit still. Basically, the bass are doing what we do when the heat’s really on--looking for shade and a way to cool down.
And just as you lose interest in cutting the grass or taking a long hike in the heat, the bass aren’t really motivated to move.
But as the leaves begin to turn and water temperatures drop back into the 70s, the bass turn back on.
This is a combination of two factors. First, the water is cool enough to energize the bass, but still warm enough to support them. And second, the bass know instinctively that it’s time to fatten up for winter.
Season-savvy anglers know that bass are looking for a place to find food. As Ken Cook, a former fisheries biologist turned professional bass angler, explains, “In the spring and fall, the ‘grocery store’ is usually close to the shoreline and around cover like aquatic grass, rocks and docks. Small fish, crawfish, frogs and other creatures are most abundant and most active in shallow water, so that's where the bass will be.”
This is important to understand: all the fish in your lake felt this summer stress, including bait fish like sucker minnows, shad, perch, and bluegill. Everything is making a move to the shallows--away from the deeper holding positions that protected them from the worst of the summer heat.
And the largemouth will be following the food.
"As the water starts to cool again in the fall, forage fish such as shad move shallow, so the bass follow. In many cases, shad move toward the backs of long coves and bays, so the bass are in those same places," Cook says.
Legendary bass pro Kevin VanDam agrees. “Bass react to cooling water by moving shallower to big flats, long points with a gradual taper, and tributary arms.” And the key is to find large schools of prey, because wherever you find a meal, you’re going to find bass in the fall.
“Bass are more baitfish-oriented now than in any other season,” VanDam thinks. “Look for large schools of shad, alewives, etc., [sic] on your graph. In reservoirs, cooling water causes vast numbers of shad to migrate into tributary arms, and bass are close behind. Follow this migration by fishing the first third of creek arms in early fall, then gradually pressing farther back into the tributary as the surface temperature drops.”
Fall Bass Fishing Tips
Baitfish are likely to be suspended in a few feet of water, holding in shallower water than they were in high summer. But they won’t be hugging the bottom, and neither will the bass that are looking to feed on them.
In the fall, think the top 4 to 5 feet of water, and not deeper. Especially in large shallow flats, you’ll find bass in just a foot or two of water, looking for frogs, crawfish, minnows, and pretty much anything else they can eat.
At night time, everything a largemouth bass eats is moving near shore when the stars come out, so it’s a safe bet that you’ll find hungry bass there, too. Check out our guide on Bass Fishing at Night to learn more about landing big bass at night.
Match the meal.
Fall isn’t the time to ignore the color, size, or pattern of likely meals. In fact, it’s critical that you carefully match the size and color of the prey items attracting attention from bass.
Plenty of pros switch to willow-leafed spinners, crankbaits, jerkbaits, and rattletraps in realistic colors. And even in murky water, silver/chrome is a great choice, as it shimmers and shines like schooling prey.
“Match the meal” and you’ll get more bites.
Bass won’t be as dispersed in fall as they were in summer, and you’ll need to find where they’re schooling in search of a meal. Once you do, you can catch a bunch, but until you find structure or cover that’s holding them, you need to keep your trolling motor running.
It’s also a good idea to start the day with a crankbait that covers a lot of water. It’s essential that you quickly distinguish where you should really spend your time.
Weeds, weeds, weeds.
Bass are moving shallow in search of a meal, and where are they going to find one?
That’s right; live weed beds. This cover provides a place to hide, plenty of oxygen, and the tiny food prey items need. And whatever attracts prey in the fall attracts bass.
Our Favorite Fall Fishing Lures and Techniques
If there’s a dominant lure when the water cools, it’s the lipless crankbait, especially with a rattle.
When fished near or above weedbeds, it’s murder if you know how to use it. The trick is to retrieve it, and then lay off, letting it drift for a few seconds before starting it up again. That on-off action makes the most of the vibration and noise a rattler provides, and it’s been field-tested by legions of anglers.
One of my favorites for fall bass is the Rattlin’ Rapala in “Shad” or “Bluegill.” Both colors are exceptional for clear water, and the rattle just drives bass wild.
Another awesome choice is the Strike King Red Eye Shad. It wobbles and wiggles from side to side, creating irresistible vibration. And with a bright yellow lateral line and red eye, I find this little guy can get it done when the water’s not crystal clear, too.
As the water cools, you’ll find bass shallow, making them ideal targets for topwater props. I keep one or two handy all season, so if I see bass chasing prey to the surface, I’ll be ready to toss a prop into the fray!
One of my favorites is the Rapala Skitter Prop in “Lime Frog.” One look will tell you why:
But no topwater has worked as well for me as the Heddon Torpedo. I like “Black Shiner” and “Clear,” and I can tell you tales about the explosive hits I’ve gotten with these lures when bass were schooling on bait!
Whether you “walk the dog,” pop and crank, or just steady retrieve, I’ve found that bass are going to hit these once they’re excited by a frenzy of baitfish on the surface.
But in more ordinary situations, I look to create maximum vibration and action. For me, that means some aggressive popping with a pause, as well as some dog walking.
Give these topwater champions a try as the water cools--you won’t be disappointed!
Often overlooked, fall is the perfect time to throw the ideal combination of spinner, jig, and soft-plastic swimbait.
We’ve written about the awesome potential of chatterbaits before, and if you need to catch up on this incredible lure, take a look.
For fall, I’d be thinking shad and craw, and there are two options I’d never pass over.
Once you learn how to work a chatterbait, the Z-Man Original–when paired with the impressive Lake Fork Trophy Lures Live Magic Shad–is an almost unbeatable combination in fall.
Offering enticing action, incredible vibration, flash, and a strike-inducing skirt, this is simply one of the most effective combinations out there.
And whether you retrieve this awesome duo with a steady, slow cadence or work the bottom in short hops, all that fluttering action and vibration is a recipe for a hard hit.
I particularly like the “Greenback Shad”/ “Magic Shad” color combination, pictured above.
Perhaps my favorite pairing available, the Z-Man in “Perch” and the 4 ½ inch Z-Craw in “California 420,” is a recipe for massive hits.
Whether you buzz these over weed tops, plop them into the thick stuff and work them out, or run them down the outside edge of the grass, bass can’t leave them alone.
When the bass are running shallow, hunting weeds and the shoreline for food, it’s the ideal time to throw a hollow-bodied frog.
The most legendary of these is the Lunkerhunt, a hyper-realistic frog sporting a close-fitting dual hook. Those dangling legs, while more fragile than the tasseled alternatives, move just like the real thing.
I love this frog, and you will too!
But the trick is in how it’s fished.
Unlike most lures in your tackle box, this bad boy is designed for the mean stuff. Chunk it right in--and don’t worry! By design, it’s essentially weedless.
Then pause. Let it sit for a second or two. You may well trigger a strike right then.
If not, slowly hop it through the water, mimicking the action of the real thing.
Don’t let shorter days and cooler water scare you off the bass. With the know-how to succeed and the lures to attract bites, you can turn fall into prime bass season. When the winter hits, check out our our Winter Bass Fishing Guide.
We hope this article has helped you get a handle on fall bass fishing, and we’d love to hear from you.
Please leave a comment below! |
Last month the Food & Drug Administration published its latest annual analysis of the levels of pesticide residues that contaminate the fruits and veggies and other foods we Americans routinely put on our dinner plates. The fresh data adds to growing consumer concern and scientific debate over how pesticide residues in food may contribute – or not – to illness, disease and reproductive problems.
Over 55 pages of data, charts and graphs, the FDA’s “Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program” report also provides a rather unappetizing example of the degree to which U.S. farmers have come to rely on synthetic insecticides, fungicides and herbicides in growing our food.
We learn, for instance, in reading the latest report, that traces of pesticides were found in 84 percent of domestic samples of fruits, and 53 percent of vegetables, as well as 42 percent of grains and 73 percent of food samples simply listed as “other.” The samples were drawn from around the country, including from California, Texas, Kansas, New York and Wisconsin.
Roughly 94 percent of grapes, grape juice and raisins tested positive for pesticide residues as did 99 percent of strawberries, 88 percent of apples and apple juice, and 33 percent of rice products, according to the FDA data.
Imported fruits and vegetables actually showed a lower prevalence of pesticides, with 52 percent of fruits and 46 percent of vegetables from abroad testing positive for pesticides. Those samples came from more than 40 countries, including Mexico, China, India and Canada.
We also learn that for the most recently reported sampling, among the hundreds of different pesticides, the FDA found traces of the long-banned insecticide DDT in food samples, as well as chlorpyrifos, 2,4-D and glyphosate. DDT is linked to breast cancer, infertility and miscarriage, while chlorpyrifos – another insecticide – has been scientifically shown to cause neurodevelopmental problems in young children.
Chlorpyrifos is so dangerous that the European Food Safety Authority has recommended a ban of the chemical in Europe, finding that there is no safe exposure level. The herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate are both linked to cancers and other health problems as well.
Thailand recently said it was banning glyphosate and chlorpyrifos due to the scientifically established risks of these pesticides.
Despite the prevalence of pesticides found in U.S. foods, the FDA, along with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), assert that pesticide residues in food are really nothing to worry about. Amid heavy lobbying by the agrichemical industry the EPA has actually supported continued use of glyphosate and chlorpyrifos in food production.
The regulators echo the words of Monsanto executives and others in the chemical industry by insisting that pesticide residues pose no threat to human health as long as the levels of each type of residue falls under a “tolerance” level set by the EPA.
In the most recent FDA analysis, only 3.8 percent of domestic foods had residue levels that were considered illegally high, or “violative.” For imported foods, 10.4 percent of the foods sampled were violative, according to the FDA.
What the FDA did not say, and what regulatory agencies routinely avoid saying publicly, is that the tolerance levels for certain pesticides have risen over the years as the companies that sell the pesticides request higher and higher legal limits. The EPA has approved several increases allowed for glyphosate residues in food, for instance. As well, the agency often makes the determination that it need not comply with a legal requirement that states the EPA “shall apply an additional tenfold margin of safety for infants and children” in setting the legal levels for pesticide residues. The EPA has overridden that requirement in the setting of many pesticide tolerances, saying no such extra margin of safety is needed to protect children.
The bottom line: The higher the EPA sets the “tolerance” allowed as the legal limit, the lower the possibility that regulators will have to report “violative” residues in our food. As a result, the U.S. routinely allows higher levels of pesticide residues in food than other developed nations. For example, the legal limit for the weed killer glyphosate on an apple is 0.2 parts per million (ppm) in the United States but only half that level – 0.1 ppm – is allowed on an apple in the European Union. As well, the U.S. allows residues of glyphosate on corn at 5 ppm, while the EU allows only 1 ppm.
As legal limits rise for pesticide residues in food, many scientists have been increasingly raising alarms about the risks of regular consumption of the residues, and the lack of regulatory consideration of the potential cumulative impacts of consuming an array of bug and weed killers with every meal.
A team of Harvard scientists are calling for in-depth research about potential links between disease and consumption of pesticide as they estimate that more than 90 percent of people in the United States have pesticide residues in their urine and blood due to consumption of pesticide-laced foods. A study connected to Harvard found that dietary pesticide exposure within a “typical” range was associated both with problems women had getting pregnant and delivering live babies.
Additional studies have found other health problems tied to dietary exposures to pesticides, including to glyphosate. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world and is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s branded Roundup and other weed killing products.
Pesticide Industry Push Back
But as the concerns mount, agrichemical industry allies are pushing back. This month a group of three researchers with long-standing close ties to the companies that sell agricultural pesticides released a report seeking to soothe consumer worries and discount the scientific research.
The report, which was issued Oct. 21, stated that “there is no direct scientific or medical evidence indicating that typical exposure of consumers to pesticide residues poses any health risk. Pesticide residue data and exposure estimates typically demonstrate that food consumers are exposed to levels of pesticide residues that are several orders of magnitude below those of potential health concern.”
Not surprisingly, the three authors of the report are closely tied to the agrichemical industry. One of the report’s authors is Steve Savage, an agrichemical industry consultantandformer DuPont employee. Another is Carol Burns, a former scientist for Dow Chemical and current consultant for Cortevia Agriscience, a spin-off of DowDuPont. The third author is Carl Winter, Chair of the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of California at Davis. The university has received approximately $2 million a year from the agrichemical industry, according to a university researcher, though the accuracy of that figure has not been established.
The authors took their report directly to Congress, holding three different presentations in Washington, D.C., designed to promote their message of pesticide safety for use in “media food safety stories, and consumer advice regarding which foods consumers should (or should not) consume.”
The pro-pesticide sessions were held at the office buildings for members of Congress and, appropriately it seems, at the headquarters for CropLife America, the lobbyist for the agrichemical industry. |
Where did the year go? The pages of our academic calendars have flown by at a breakneck pace, propelled as if by an occult hand, and now we’re within a month of summer. It’s a good reminder to those of us who aren’t graduating this semester (they’ve already learned this lesson): your time in college goes by quick. So, Comets, take advantage of your time on campus and get involved as frequently as you can.
College presents a rare opportunity to be surrounded by 25,000 other precisely age-based peers. And yes, while schoolwork is both challenging and a primary priority—we’re students, after all–it is not all-consuming. We tend to have time for the things we choose to make space for. Plus, some Department of Education research indicates that teenage students regularly participating in extracurriculars may be up to three times as likely to have a 3.0 or better!
The benefits don’t stop there. Extra-curricular activities have been shown to facilitate problem-solving abilities, enable better adaptability and expression of emotion, enhance students’ general wellbeing and contribute to the development of improved interpersonal skills. But most importantly, they create an outlet for you to plug into different aspects of the Comet community. Extracurriculars aren’t just transactional chores to complete in order to improve your GPA, mental wellbeing, and career prospects—they’re also meant to be fun, as strictly voluntary associations.
So, join a weekly trivia group, play intramural sports, or if you’re looking to improve your written communication, perhaps apply to write for The Mercury. Find your niche here, and if it doesn’t exist yet, leave your own mark on the constantly growing list of more than 400 student organizations. UTD provides countless opportunities to connect with peers and bond around common interests, hobbies, or professions before you move into the comparative isolation of adulthood. Don’t miss it. |
Onion rings supposedly originated in Texas during the early-1920s. Today, they’re one of the most iconic foods in America, along with fries.
They’re sold at almost every fast-food restaurant, burger spot, and BBQ joint in the country. While onions are technically a plant, onion rings are coated in a bready dough before being fried, which isn’t always vegan.
So, are onion rings vegan?
Sadly, most onion rings are NOT vegan. While the onions, by themselves, are vegan, the batter that most onion rings are coated in is traditionally made with eggs and dairy, making it non-vegan.
Additionally, some onion rings contain sugar or are fried in butter or palm oil, which aren’t vegan.
Are you ready to learn some more about one of America’s favorite foods?
Are Fried Onion Rings Vegan?
Onion rings… Some people love them, while others hate them. Personally, I’ve always loved onions and regularly cook with them. When I first went vegan around eight years ago and found out that most onion rings weren’t vegan, I was pretty disappointed.
Most fried onion rings aren’t vegan because of the batter, sugar, and frying medium that’s used to cook them.
That being said, there are lots of recipes for vegan-friendly onion rings. Onion ring batter doesn’t have to contain dairy or non-vegan eggs. Onion rings also don’t have to be deep-fried in unhealthy (and non-vegan) palm oil.
You can bake, air-fry, or even pan-sear your own version of onion rings! I’ll show you one of my favorite recipes for vegan onion rings towards the end of this post.
Non-Vegan Ingredients In Onion Rings
While many onion rings aren’t vegan, there are some onion rings that are vegan-friendly. You just have to know what to look for. The best way to tell for sure whether a certain brand is vegan-friendly or not is to take a good look at the ingredients list.
Thankfully, most restaurants are more than happy to provide you with a list of the ingredients they use for their onion ring batter, so it’s easy to identify potentially non-vegan additives.
Here’s a short visual outlining some of the most common non-vegan ingredients in onion rings, so you know what to look out for:
|Non-Vegan Ingredients In Onion Rings||Why They’re Not Vegan|
|Eggs||Whole eggs (and egg whites) are not vegan because they’re a direct animal product. The egg industry is very cruel and causes a lot of suffering for female hens, who are often cramped in overheated, disease-ridden cages.|
|Dairy & Butter||The dairy industry is just as cruel as the egg and poultry industry, which makes all dairy products non-vegan. Buttermilk, cream, and milk are often added to the onion ring batter to make it thicker and sweeter. Butter, another dairy product, is sometimes used to cook stovetop onion rings as well.|
|Refined White Sugar||If you’ve ever eaten onion rings before, then you may realize that many recipes taste sweet. This is because the onions are often caramelized using refined white sugar. The sugar brings out the naturally sweet flavors in the onions, making for a sweet, zesty, smoky flavor. Unfortunately, refined white sugar is not vegan, as it’s filtered through bone char to remove its natural brown coloring. This is why ethical vegans choose to eat unrefined raw cane sugar or use agave sweeteners instead.|
|Palm Oil||Although palm oil is plant-based cooking oil, the palm oil industry is very destructive to our planet. It’s one of the driving forces of rainforest destruction and has pushed many rainforest species to the brink of extinction.|
These are the main non-vegan ingredients that you need to be aware of. If you see any of them used in a restaurant’s onion rings, then they’re not vegan.
Are Burger King Onion Rings Vegan?
Burger King isn’t exactly the most vegan-friendly restaurant. While some locations have started offering vegan burger patties as an alternative to beef patties, most of the other options on their menu still aren’t vegan. Even the fries are somewhat questionable!
So, it should come as no surprise that Burger King onion rings are NOT vegan.
If you’re curious and want to learn more, I wrote a full post on BK’s onion rings last week. Long story short, though, Burger King onion rings are all made using whey powder, which is a dairy product.
Are McDonald’s Onion Rings Vegan?
While McDonald’s new onion rings may be taking Europe by storm, they aren’t vegan-friendly.
Sadly, McDonald’s onion rings are deep-fried in the same oil that their chicken products are fried in, making them a non-vegan food. They also contain whey, the same milk-derived protein used in Burger King’s onion rings.
As a general rule, fast-food onion rings are almost never vegan.
Not only do you have to worry about the fact that they’re likely cooked in the same vat of oil as the restaurant’s meat is, but there’s a higher likelihood of other non-vegan additives being present.
For instance, McDonald’s uses meat-based seasoning salt in their French fries, which are normally vegan-friendly food. Fast-food companies are notorious for adding animal-derived ingredients in an effort to make their food taste more savory. That’s why I rarely eat anything sold by fast-food chains.
Are Onion Rings Ever Vegan?
Yes, onion rings can be vegan!
It’s just a matter of substituting the egg and dairy additives for other vegan-friendly alternatives. Thankfully, there are plenty of delicious plant-based milk options to choose from. These will provide texture and smooth consistency, along with some protein to hold the batter together.
Additionally, there are also a number of vegan egg substitutes that you can use in place of a real egg. These will act as an emulsifier and are great for cooking applications!
If you’re looking for a sweeter onion ring, you don’t have to use white sugar either. Instead, you can use raw cane sugar, which makes for an even richer flavor. I’ve also caramelized my onion rings with agave syrup, which has a very interesting and sweet flavor.
Last but not least, you don’t have to cook your onion rings in palm oil either. You can cook them in sustainably-sourced vegetable oil like canola oil instead. Canola oil is designed for frying and can withstand high temperatures. It’s also very affordable!
How To Make Vegan Onion Rings (Fast & Simple)
The best way to avoid any unwanted animal ingredients in your onion rings is to simply make your own. Luckily, onion rings are fairly simple to make. You don’t need a deep fryer or any complicated equipment either.
You can fry them with an oil-filled frying pan or use an air-fryer for healthier, lower-fat onion rings.
Here’s how to make your own homemade vegan onion rings in less than thirty minutes!
- 3 Sweet yellow onions
- 1 Cup of vegan bread crumbs
- 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric
- 1/2 teaspoon of paprika
- 1/4 teaspoon of salt
- 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
- 1/2 Cup of All-Purpose Flour
- 2/3 Cup of Almond Milk
- 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon of salt
I prepped these onion rings in an air fryer. However, you can also use a conventional oven as well.
- First, peel and slice the onions into rings.
- Then, create the wet and dry mix separately. One bowl should contain dry mix, the other wet mix.
- Then, dip the onions into the wet mix, covering them fully in the sauce.
- While they’re still wet, dip the onions into the dry mix and coat them thoroughly with the dry seasoning blend.
- Now, it’s time to cook! Conventional Oven: Place the onion rings on an oil-lined baking tray, preheat the oven to 450 degrees, and bake for 30 minutes. Air Fryer: Preheat the air fryer to 400 degrees. Cook in the air fryer for 10 minutes.
The onion rings should be a crispy golden color once they’re ready to eat!
Alternatively, here’s another video for a similar vegan onion ring recipe that I’ve used before:
What Are The Best Vegan Onion Rings Brands?
Making your own homemade vegan onion rings is fairly simple. However, it does require a bit of time and effort. If you’re looking for something fast and easy, then you may just be looking for something simple that you can throw in the microwave or quickly cook in your oven on a pan.
So, with that in mind, here are the best vegan onion ring brands that are already pre-battered and ready to eat!
1) 365 by Whole Foods Crispy Onion Rings (link)
These are some really delicious, simple, and crispy onion rings that are sold on the frozen aisle at Whole Foods Market. You can also order them online through Amazon if you don’t feel like taking a trip to the grocery store!
2) Alexia Crispy Onion Rings with Panko Breading and Sea Salt (link)
These are also sold at Whole Foods Market and a couple of other health food stores. They’re made with slightly higher-quality ingredients, making them a better alternative to the 365 brands. I love the panko breading and the all-natural sea salt used to make them.
The Verdict – Are Onion Rings Vegan-Friendly?
Most frozen and restaurant-style onion rings are not vegan-friendly since they contain eggs, dairy, or non-vegan ingredients. They may also be cooked in palm oil or butter, which are non-vegan as well.
That being said, it’s simple enough to make your own homemade vegan onion rings. There are also a couple of great-tasting store-bought vegan onion ring brands as well!
If you’re looking for some more great side dishes to add to your vegan meals, check out my list of the best vegan sides next! |
-What’s Right In Your Own Eyes?
The opening line in the Old Testament book of Ruth reads like this: “During the time of the judges, there was a famine in the land.” So, Ruth needs to be read, in the context, of the book of Judges. In other words, the events take place at that time when, “…everyone did what was right in his own eyes…” Literally, people did whatever they wanted! They lived by the popular philosophy, of our day, called “moral relativism”; which, means that the famine was about more than a lack of food, water & the necessary provisions of life! There was a famine of “faith” in God & there was a famine of “moral character.” That’s the backdrop of Ruth’s story!
-A Redemption Story!
It’s a story about redemption! That is the overarching theme in Ruth’s story. In the opening verse, of the 1st chapter, we see that the famine prompted a man, named Elimelech, to leave Israel— with his wife, Naomi, and their 2 sons— and, move temporarily to the land of Moab. It appears, from the story, that Elimelech died shortly after their arrival; but, for whatever reason (perhaps because the famine raged on) Naomi continued in Moab & raised her 2 sons, who married Moabite women. Sadly, both her sons died; and, Naomi is left with only her 2 daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah. Naomi heard that God had provided for the needs of His people, Israel, and the famine had ended (v.6).
-Wherever You Go, I Will Go!
So, she set out to return to Israel by herself, encouraging her daughters-in-law to stay in Moab. But, Ruth was determined to go with her. In v.16, Ruth speaks those famous words to her mother-in-law, Naomi: “For wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you live, I will live; your people will be my people and your God will be my God.” When Naomi & Ruth return to Naomi’s home town, everyone recognizes her: “Is that you, Naomi?” But, notice her bitter response: “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, for the Almighty has made me very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty…” (v.20).
-Struggling With Bitterness?
If you’re struggling with bitterness, over the circumstances in your own life, Ruth is the book for you! If you look at all the junk going on in the world & you want to blame God, Ruth is a good book for you to read. Ruth was bitter with God: “…the Lord has brought be back empty…” What the story reveals is that Naomi had competing gods in her life! So, God has to empty us of all our competing gods in order to break us & make us willing to bow to Him alone! Left to ourselves, we fill our lives with competing gods, from birth. And, what are some of our false gods?
-The False Gods We Worship!
We are prone to worship the false gods of “safety” & “happiness” & “leisure” & a “pain-free life.” We worship the “gods” who make our lives bright & cheery; and, become satisfied with those things which will not last! And, like Israel, we choose those temporary pleasure gods & reject the God who offers eternal life! So, God has to remove some of those “other loves” in our life to create the space & capacity necessary to genuinely love Him! To truly worship God, with our whole heart, we have to denounce all the competing loves & interests; and, trust God’s Sovereign providence over all areas of our life! Naomi had some competing gods in her life from which she need to be delivered! At the end of the 1st chapter, they arrive in Israel at the time of the barley harvest. So, Ruth gets a job, working to glean the barley for a farmer who “coincidentally” was a relative to Naomi! Come back next week for the rest of the story! |
Online Thai Dating and Safety Tips
Tips for Dating and Boosting Your Self-confidence
If you're among the millions of singles looking for romance, companionship and ways to increase your self-esteem, then you'll find powerful tips in this article.
Your confidence is essential to your relationships and success. We should be focusing on this more.
Self-esteem refers to the degree that we enjoy to be respected, liked, and feel at ease with ourselves. It is essential to have an amount of self-esteem to be happy and content in our lives However, there are those who are lacking and some have too much.
Why is self esteem important?
Self-esteem is crucial since it influences the choices we make and how we interact within our everyday lives. People with high self-esteem tend to make better decisions in their lives, and they also tend to communicate better with others.
What are the consequences of low self-esteem?
People who have low self-esteem typically fear failing. They may be reluctant to take risks or making statements because they are worried that they'll fail to meet others' expectations. Therefore, they might miss out on opportunities for personal growth and accomplishment. People who have low self-esteem may also struggle with depression, anxiety, and drug abuse.
Find out the factors that affect self-esteem.
The family is one of the main groups that affect self-esteem. Parents, siblings and other relatives influence how we perceive ourselves. They do this in two ways: directly through their words and what they do; and indirectly, through what they expect us to do or the way they model us.
One of the ways that relatives influence our self esteem is through the words they use. What we hear when we're growing up - both the positive and negative will become part of our inner voice, that small voice in our head that speaks to us all day. If we were raised hearing negative remarks or being told that we were unworthy or insignificant, it's no wonder that we struggle to believe in ourselves as we grow older. On the other hand it's a good thing that we've been being praised and encouraged, it's much easier to have high self esteem.
Family members can also affect our self confidence indirectly through their behaviour or attitudes towards us. For example, if our parents are always criticising us or putting us down in some way, we're more likely to think that we're not good enough. On the other hand when our parents are kind and caring, it's much easier to feel comfortable about ourselves.
It's not just our immediate family members that can have an impact on our perception of ourselves - extended family members such as aunts, uncles and grandparents can also be a factor in making us stronger or tearing us down.
Friendships are among the major factors that influence your self-esteem. If you have friends that constantly put your down, or make you feel uneasy about yourself, it's likely create a lot of difficulty for you to feel good about yourself. On the other hand it is a good thing to have friends who are encouraging and make you feel positive about yourself, it will be much more easy for you to maintain a healthy self-esteem.
In relation to social media, you must utilize it in a way that boosts your self-esteem. That means being active in ways that help you feel comfortable about yourself and limit your exposure to areas of social media that can make you feel bad.
Here are some specific things you can do:
Follow businesses and people that make you feel happy about yourself. It could be accounts that share positive or inspiring content for your body or accounts dedicated to something that you are enthusiastic about.
Post content that makes you feel happy about yourself. This could be photos that show off your strengths and achievements, or images that make you happy.
- Comment on and like other's posts in an positive manner.
Unfollow or mute individuals and businesses who's posts make it feel uneasy about yourself.
Don't make the mistake of comparing yourself to others. Keep in mind that everyone's highlight reel is only a small part of their story.
The school environment one is believed to be an important factor in influencing self-esteem. Research has proven children who are connected to their school and their class are more successful academically and also have confidence in themselves. An underlying sense of belonging to school has been found to be associated to higher motivation, improved attitudes towards learning and better overall mental health.
There are a number of possibilities for schools to do to build a sense belonging and build self-esteem in students. Creating a supportive and inclusive environment is key. It can be done by making sure that all students feel respected and valued and have the opportunity for everyone to be involved and be involved, as well as creating positive social connections among classmates.
Ideas for increasing self-esteem.
A large number of people today struggle with low self-esteem. If you are one of those there are things that which you are able to do in order to boost your perception of yourself. One method to boost self-esteem is by setting goals and working towards them. When you meet your goals, then you'll feel a sense of accomplishment and this will help to boost self-esteem. Another method of improving self-esteem is to take proper care of your appearance. Make sure you are dressing in a manner that makes you feel good about yourself.
Be accepting of yourself
A way to boost self-esteem is to be more open with yourself. This is about accepting your faults and weaknesses as well as your positive qualities. Recognize that you're not perfect, but you deserve the respect and affection you deserve. Finding acceptance for yourself is an important factor in improving self-esteem.
Another way to improve self-esteem is to be aware of your positive attributes. Write down the things you like about yourself, both mentally as well as physically. Include things such as I'm a good friend or I have a great sense of humor. By focusing on the positives can make you feel more positive about yourself overall.
Also, make sure to be around people that can make you feel confident about yourself. Spend time with friends or family members who build you up instead of putting you down. Avoid people who criticize or are judgemental and look for people who can make you feel loved and loved. having positive relationships with people can help improve your self-esteem.
Set real-world goals
It is essential to set realistic goals oneself. If the targets aren't achievable they will be very difficult to achieve them and this can cause feelings of unworthiness and low self-esteem.break down your big objectives into small, manageable steps that you are able to complete every day or weekly basis. If, for instance, your goal is to lose weight, you could break it into smaller objectives such as eating healthy meals or exercising for 30 minutes a day, taking plenty of fluids. Recognize your achievements along the way to help boost your self-esteem.
Keep your faith in the positive
It is vital to stay positive while working on improving self esteem. Every day you should try to make a positive statement about yourself even if it's just a small thing. For instance, I am a good friend, or I am a good listener. It may be challenging at first, but it will get easier the more you do it. In time, it will be second nature.
While you are saying positive things about yourself Make sure you be aware of negative self-talk. This includes things such as criticizing yourself by calling yourself names, or comparing yourself with others. These types of thoughts can really damage confidence in yourself, which is why it is crucial to recognize yourself when you are having these thoughts and then turn them into something positive.
Assertiveness is the quality of having confidence and self-assurance, and not being emotional. In relationships assertiveness can assist you to communicate your needs and feelings clearly and effectively, set boundaries and stand up to yourself and others in a responsible way. It is often thought of as a single characteristic or behavior, however, it's actually comprised of many different skills you can develop and apply.
Some people tend to be more assertive than others, but even the most timid among us can learn to be more assertive in our everyday lives. If you're not certain where to start, here are some tips:
Begin by identifying the goals you want to achieve. Assertiveness is about standing to defend yourself and your needs It's crucial to determine what you're looking for before you begin making requests for it.
Think about how you'd like being treated. All people deserve to be treated fairly, and one of the ways to assert yourself is to give yourself the same respect that you show other people.
-Practice saying no. A lot of us struggle to say no because we do not want to offend people or upset the status of the game. But learning to say noassertively is an essential part of creating boundaries and maintaining healthy relationships.
Set boundaries with people. Once you've identified your own desires and needs and wants, you're now ready to start talking about them to those you live with. This can be tricky at first, but it gets more comfortable with time.
Speak for yourself. If you feel you're being mistreated or someone is trying to profit of you, it's important to voice your concerns. It doesn't have to be a battle sometimes just expressing your concerns calmly and clearly can end the situation.
Don't be afraid of asking for what you want. If you have something you want or need from anyone else, don't feel scared to ask directly. This could range from a promotion at work, to a favor from a close friend. If you don't, chances that you won't receive what you want..
Engage in activities that you love
One of the quickest and most effective ways for improving self-esteem is get involved in activities you enjoy. Being involved in things that you are good in and which bring you joy can give you a sense and pride.
Other strategies to boost self-esteem are:
Do not compare yourself to others. Everyone is unique and has strengths and weaknesses.
Focus on your positive attributes. Make a list of positive things about yourself, both inside as well as out. Include things such as I'm a good friend, I'm funny, or I have nice eyes.
Accept compliments. If someone gives you compliments, tell them thank you instead of dismissing the compliment or shoving it off.
-Challenge negative thoughts. When you're having negative thoughts about yourself, try to combat them with affirmations that are positive. For instance, if you're thinking I'm not good enough, remind your self I am worthy.
Self-esteem improvement takes time and effort but it's definitely worth it. By paying attention to your strengths and accepting yourself for the person you are, you will develop a sense of love and appreciation for yourself for who you are.
the power of affirmations
One of the most effective ways to boost self-confidence is to constantly remind yourself of your accomplishments and strengths on a daily basis. This can be done through affirmations that are positive affirmations which are repeated to your self until you are convinced of them.
Some examples of affirmations that can boost your confidence when dating be: I am worthy of respect and love, I am a great partner, or I am worthy to be treated well.
It might feel awkward or unnatural at first to speak these words to yourself, but over time and practice, they will begin to feel increasingly real. As your confidence grows, so will your chances of forming a healthy, happy and lasting relationship.
Online dating can be an excellent way to meet new people and build your confidence, but it's important to remember that there are some risks to be aware of. Follow these tips to stay secure while searching for romance online.
Don't share personal information until you're absolutely sure you can trust the person you're speaking to. This includes your full names, addresses, telephone number, or any other identifying information.
Don't make a payment to someone you've met online regardless of how well you think you know the person.
Be careful when sharing images or videos that can be used to blackmail you.
Start your date in a place that is open to the public and inform a relative or friend know where you'll go and with whom you're meeting.
- Trust your instincts
If something is off, it probably is.
Don't feel pressured or obligated to meet an individual in person if not prepared - take your time to get familiarize yourself with them first.
Pick Up Lines
There's no single best way to start a conversation with someone you're interested in. However, there are a few ways that are more likely to result in a positive response more than others. If you're looking to create an impression, you can try using one of these tried and tested phrases:
Give them a compliment on to the individual you're interested. Everyone would like to feel appreciated So find something you truly like about them and tell them.
- Ask a question. This shows that you're curious to learn more about someone else and gives them an opportunity to speak about themselves as well, which is what most people appreciate.
- Make a lighthearted joke. This can help break the ice and make the other person laughing, which will make them more likely to want to speak to you.
No matter what you do, stay clear of using vulgar or corny pickup lines because they tend to turn your partner off than anything else. |
Does ingestible collagen really work? My quick answer is yes, if you understand the distinction of hydrolyzed collagen – also known as collagen hydrolysate, collagen peptide, gelatine, gelatine hydrolysate or hydrolyzed gelatine – in which individual collagen strands have been hydrolyzed using heat and either acid or alkali solutions.
Hydrolyzed collagen is produced from collagen found in the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals such as cattle, fish, horses, pigs, and rabbits. on the ingestible collagen bandwagon. In Japan and Taiwan, collagen is often added to noodles, soups, fondue pots and even marshmallows.
Collagen, the second most abundant substance in our body, is the protein glue that holds our bodies together, as well as the building block of our tissues. As much as 75% of our skin, over 90% of our ligaments and tendons, 35% of our bones are made of collagen. We drink water as it is a huge part of our body composition, and in the same vein, collagen ingestion may help the body’s collagen formation as a whole.
Here’s a scary thought: in our mid-twenties our collagen production will begin to decrease at a rate of 2% a year, and we would have lost over half the amount of collagen in our bodies by our 50s when the natural collagen production ceases altogether. The clearest signs of this cessation include wrinkles, sagging skin, finer hair, joint pain or joint degeneration.
Pep talk aside, I’ve personally tried many brands and types of collagen products. The main concern of youths, or anyone in their 20s and 30s, is not the need for intake per se, but rather where and how to purchase collagen from a trustworthy source.
Well, one particular brand caught my eye of late, and that is Vida Glow.
I’ve been trying out 2 of its sassy flavours for a week now: the natural marine collagen (left, in turquoise), and the peach-flavoured collagen (right, in pink), and though there aren’t any “omg she’s glowing!” and other immediately obvious effects, my face probably doesn’t get as dry and crack-ly under prolonged exposure to air-conditioning. Plus the additional collagen intake gives me a peace of mind.
Vida essentially means life and with every serving the brand aims to give consumers a little extra “life glow”. While based in Australia, all of Vida Glow’s collagen products are “Made in Japan”, and are marked with the highest grading form of pure marine collagen available. For assurance, Vida Glow ensures that every product batch is tested by an independent NATA accredited laboratory in Sydney, Australia, for quality and safety.
Why I choose Vida Glow:
Vida Glow has done right in the aesthetics department. Its bold, clean packaging and cotton candy colours projects a youthful, trendy image which I love. Helps a lot that the pop-coloured sachets make me happy as I’m stirring its contents into my coffee.
– Being individually packed, it is incredibly convenient to pop a sachet into my morning coffee, and to leave a couple of sachets sticks in my handbag and desk to include in my lunch or midday tea
– Honestly, the peach-flavoured sachet taste so good on its own. You know how collagen from renowned brands (even Meiji) has this overwhelmingly strong fishy taste? Whilst Vida Glow’s marine collagen is not completely devoid of that funky deep-sea odour, it is tonnes less unpleasant on the olfactory senses. And the smell can be rather entirely masked when mixed in strong tea or milkshake.
Vida Glow only produces 100% natural products that contain no artificial flavours, colours, additives or preservatives. It is also free from wheat, gluten, allergens, soy, lactose, dairy, sugar, carbohydrates and fat. Their flavoured collagen powders contain natural fruit flavours and also come with the added goodness of vitamins for extra doses of antioxidants. What’s not to love? If this alleviates any worries, stringent laboratory tests ensure that Vida Glow collagen is free from toxins, heavy metals, and pollution.
– Vida Glow boasts 4 delicious collagen blend flavours. I’ve tried the peach-flavoured one, and it mixes very well with porridge, yoghurt and soup at lunch or dinner. Yes, the blend is pretty heat-stable too. I love my peach-flavoured collagen in smoothies, shakes and fruit juices! If ever I do try other flavours, I’ll let you know how they taste like.
Vida Glow Peach Marine Collagen
In this section, I’ll share a little bit more on each flavour. As mentioned earlier, I loved the natural Peach flavour, made with natural Peach Juice powder. On its own, peaches are rich in phytochemicals called phenols that act as antioxidants. This peach-flavoured powder also comes with added Vitamin C and Green Tea extract for an extra dose of antioxidants which are essential for healthy hair, skin and nails and protection against cell damage!
90% of the time I never leave the house without some form of sun protection on my face, to guard against pre-mature skin ageing. From what I understand, photo ageing happens when damage from UV rays affect skin cell function, usually reflected in rougher, drier, wrinkled and less elastic skin. Ageing is accelerated by the sun’s UV rays which speeds up free radical production while at the same time depletes antioxidants.
The antioxidants boost in Vida Glow drinks will aid in counteracting free radical activity, just as Vitamins A and C (though minimal and inadequate in a single Vida Glow peach sachet) which are both found in peaches, are notable in protecting and hydrating the skin. In addition to daily collagen supplements, a diet rich in Vitamin C helps develop resistance against infectious agents, assisting in stronger immune health. Which is why Vida Glow is a helpful and convenient daily supplement to a healthy and beauty-conscious diet.
Could fit 10 of this in my travel purses! I won’t need to fret over inadequate nutrition on my holidays.
Vida Glow Natural Marine Collagen
Vida Glow’s natural marine collagen is a fibrous protein extracted from the scales of Deep Sea Red Snapper, sustainably sourced from the Western Central Pacific Ocean waters of Australasia. Whilst the other collagen powders are enhanced with natural fruit flavours, I concur that the natural marine collagen smells a tad fishier. Given a choice, I’d definitely go for flavoured collagen.
I must add: the turquoise-emerald-coloured sachets are a real eye-candy!
Marine collagen is usually derived from fish and can be extracted from the scale or skin; Vida Glow uses the scale as it is richer in nutrients and collagen protein. Japanese women have used marine collagen as secret weapon for youthful radiance for many years, and the studies showing the benefits of taking marine collagen are plentiful. And I’m a sucker for that stuff.
Being a 100% natural product, Original Vida Glow marine collagen contains no artificial flavours, colours, additives or preservatives. It is also free from wheat, gluten, allergens, soy, lactose, dairy, sugar, carbohydrates and fat. Au naturale – I totally dig that.
The marine collagen is of low molecular weight hydrolysed collagen powder, making it easy to digest and absorb. The rate at which these powders get absorbed into my smoothies and coffees are very convincing indeed. Research compounds this belief that consumable collagen has a higher bioavailability and absorption rate, and when regularly ingested over long periods of time, collagen fibres are formed to strengthen the collagen matrix below the dermis, the inner layer of the skin.
It’s easy to understand why the Original Vida Glow remains the favourite in Vida Glow’s range as it’s the most convenient to include into your daily diet with the majority of their customers reporting no taste or smell, making it ideal to stir into any food or drinks. I guess I may have more sensitive taste buds – which is fine! As Vida Glow’s flavoured marine collagen options are just perfect for me.
I just love how their range of collagen powders come in such funky, pop colours ♥
The wooden tubes are so fun and instagrammable!
Psst… For all my dearest readers, I’m sharing this beauty secret with you via an exclusive code.
Quote “VIKTORIA10” for 10% off your purchase of any collagen products from Vida Glow ♥
Who’s with me? I’m including collagen into my daily diet to prolong longevity of youthful hair, skin and nails. Even if scientific studies have been inconclusive as proof of its obvious efficacy, boosting your body’s essential composition will not go wrong.
Have a Vida Glow-ing day today!
About Vida Glow
Vida Glow offers a range of natural supplements that nourish hair, skin and nails from within. Our marine collagen is pure hydrolysed collagen peptide and comes in powder form, making it incredibly easy to stir into your favourite food or drink.
Collagen is the most abundant protein in our bodies, amounting up to 70%. Until our mid-twenties, our bodies naturally produce collagen. As this production slows and eventually stops completely, we begin to see the effects of ageing. Replenishing collagen levels will help increase the building blocks that maintain our hair, skin and nails.
Including Vida Glow in your daily diet will help stimulate your body’s natural supply of collagen, increasing elasticity, hydration and firmness in your skin, as well as repairing weak or brittle nails. Vida Glow assists in the growth and strengthening of your hair, adding extra shine and helping rejuvenate dry or damaged hair.
Collagen is a protein that is vital to maintaining healthy muscles and connective tissues. Therefore your tendons, ligaments and cartilage greatly benefit from taking Vida Glow marine collagen, notably preserving joint and bone health and encouraging muscle toning and definition.
Vida Glow will also assist with dealing with daily stresses of toxins, late nights, poor diet, sun damage and harsh environments.
Vida means life and with every servings the aim is to give you with a little extra “life glow”. |
Your thoughts have no roots, they have no home; they wander just like clouds. So you need not fight them, you need not be against them, you need not even try to stop thoughts.
This should become a deep understanding in you, because whenever a person becomes interested in meditation he starts trying to stop thinking. And if you try to stop thoughts they will never be stopped, because the very effort to stop is a thought, the very effort to meditate is a thought, the very effort to attain buddhahood is a thought. And how can you stop a thought by another thought? How can you stop mind by creating another mind? Then you will be clinging to the other. And this will go on and on, ad nauseam; then there is no end to it.
Don´t fight – because who will fight? Who are you? Just a thought, so don´t make yourself a battleground of one thought fighting another. Rather, be a witness, you just watch thoughts floating. They stop, but not by your stopping. They stop by your becoming more aware, not by any effort on your part to stop them.
– Tantra the Supreme Understanding, chapter 2 |
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