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On the surface, a pigeon and an alligator could hardly seem more different. While the pigeon is a flying, feather-covered creature that pecks its food with a toothless beak, an alligator is an amphibious, armored predator that crushes its prey in jaws studded with conical teeth. Despite the disparate forms, however, they are joined together by a common ancestry. Both the pigeon and the alligator are archosaurs, the group of "ruling reptiles" that also includes pterosaurs, non-avian dinosaurs, and a host of related forms that died out tens of millions of years ago. The archosaurs that exist today are only a fraction of the different forms that once existed, but a new paper in the journal
As I breathe in and out while writing this post air enters my body via my nose, travels down into the "dead end" of my lungs, and then is exhaled after the oxygen has been absorbed. Not so in birds. Birds have a more efficient respiratory system adapted to unidirectional air flow, or, in other words, air moves in one direction through the bird's system in a kind of circuit. And, as it turns out, alligators can breathe the same way.
Scientists have known for some time that birds breathe in a different way than mammals do. What has been more difficult to determine is how alligators breathe. There had been some suggestion that alligators might breathe via unidirectional air flow, too, but no one had conclusively illustrated that this was the case. To test the hypothesis, C. G. Farmer and Kent Sanders placed sensors in two parts of the respiratory passageways of four dead alligators, artificially ventilated the lungs, and watched to see how the air moved.
The results suggested that the airflow inside the alligator's body was capable of moving in a unidirectional manner along a circuit of pathways, but would they actually breathe in such a way while alive? To find out the scientists placed airflow measurement devices in six living alligators. They found that the airflow in the alligator's respiratory system continued through the transition between inspiration (new air coming in) and expiration (old air going out). Air kept on moving through the system during both phases, again suggesting that the alligators were breathing through unidirectional airflow.
Just how the alligators are able to do this is not yet understood, but the discovery that they can breathe like birds might provide clues to some major events in the history of life on earth. If living alligators and the living theropod dinosaurs we call birds both share this physiological mechanism, then it is possible that the last common ancestor of dinosaurs and alligators was a unidirectional breather, too. If this is correct unidirectional breathing evolved in the first archosaurs over 230 million years ago in the wake of the worst mass extinction in the history of this planet.
The close of the Permian period 251 million years ago was marked by the extinction of up to 96 percent of the animals known to have lived in the seas and over 70 percent of those that lived on land. Among the survivors were the earliest archosaurs (or their close ancestors), and if they had unidirectional breathing it might have given them an advantage. Unidirectional breathing is a more efficient way of obtaining oxygen from the air than the way we breathe, and if the Permian mass extinction was triggered by major changes in the atmosphere as scientists suspect, such as the depletion of oxygen, the archosaurs may have been better able to survive than the early relatives of mammals they lived alongside. This hypothesis requires further evidence, but if correct the beginnings of the archosaur rise to dominance could all have come down to a difference in breathing.
Farmer, C., & Sanders, K. (2010). Unidirectional Airflow in the Lungs of Alligators Science, 327 (5963), 338-340 DOI: 10.1126/science.1180219 |
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SASKATOON, March 2010 – SoilVision Systems Ltd. would like to announce the addition of fully coupled heat and water flow introduced in the SVFlux™ and SVHeat™ software packages. This addition allows the fully coupled modeling of both conductive and convective heat flow in groundwater. The coupling has been implemented in 1D, 2D, Axisymmetric, and 3D modeling and is enabled to work with the Professional versions of the software. Applications of this new modeling ability include geothermal heat exchangers, mine stope groundwater interactions, cover modeling through the winter months, thermal flow regimes around buried hot pipes in permafrost areas, thermosyphon performance, and freezing beneath highways.
The benchmarking of coupled processes becomes progressively more difficult as the complexity of the coupling increases. The development process began with a literature review of publications related to this area. Once the relevant literature was assembled a number of appropriate benchmarks were established to prove the formulation, which was then implemented in SVFlux™ and SVHeat™. All software "modules" in SVOffice™ 2009 are part of the same code. Setting up a coupled problem merely requires the user to use the "Add coupling..." option when in either SVFlux™ and SVHeat™ to add the secondary process. The user can then flip back and forth between the two software packages to define material properties and boundary conditions which are unique to each process. The geometry remains consistent between the two coupled processes.
Using this unique design methodology the setting up of coupled models is i) highly simplified and ii) generally no different than setting up individual uncoupled models. All of the existing CAD model design features as well as other aspects such as automatic mesh refinement continue to be available and highly applicable to solving a coupled model. The user interface is state-of-the-art and allows fast and easy model creation.
Processes of conduction and convection are both solved for simultaneously in a coupled model. Modeling the convection process means that the heat or cold carried along with the flow of the water is simulated. The correct solution of these coupled processes was verified through a series of identified benchmarks. These benchmarks are presented in the SVHeat™ Verification Manual. The complete theoretical development of the coupled equations may be found in the SVHeat™ Theory Manual. SoilVision Systems Ltd. also distributes a large database of numerical models. All the verification models as well as a few example models are available in the group of distribution models:
It should be noted that all SVHeat™ distribution models can be filtered by selecting SVHeat™ as the Application under the List Criteria once the SVOffice™ 2009 software is opened.
About SoilVision Systems Ltd.
SoilVision Systems Ltd. was formed in 1997 by Murray Fredlund, Ph.D., P.Eng. to provide high level software tools to meet the needs of geo-professionals attempting to model the behavior of complex saturated and unsaturated soil systems. |
There’s no doubt a group of youth taking part in Pulaski County Library System’s Summer Reading Program have good taste when it comes to art. They proved it during a contest held last week.
One might say Ashland Duncan, 12, “gobbled up” the top prize in the Edible Art contest, winning her a $10 gift card to Sonic. She used a variety of food items to create a beach scene.
Jena Hardy, library youth services coordinator, said Duncan used two different colors of icing to distinguish water from land, and then used graham crackers to texture the sand.
Twizzlers became a beach blanket and umbrella and Duncan filled the ocean with Swedish gummy fish. The beachgoer was created with pretzel sticks, a marshmallow, Nerds and spiral pasta (for her curly hair). The work of tasty art was then topped off with sprinkles.
Participants were given the option of creating a picture or sculpture. Other food items Hardy provided for contestants to use included gumdrops, Tootsie Rolls and cookies.
The four competing artists (plus the assistance of one participant’s younger brother) spent a little more than an hour creating their masterpieces, which included a car, log cabin and candy house.
Other official participants were Isabella Altis, Miranda Altis and Jacob Duncan.
Just how long the pieces of art escaped the mouths of the artists once the competition was over is unknown. |
The stars in the sky may seem ageless and unchanging, but eventually most of them will turn into white dwarfs, the last observable stage of evolution for low- and medium-mass stars. These dim stellar corpses dot the galaxy, leftovers from brightly burning stars.
Main-sequence stars form from clouds of dust and gas drawn together by gravity. How the stars evolve through their lifetime depends on their mass. The most massive stars, with eight times the mass of the sun or more, will never become white dwarfs. Instead, at the end of their lives, they will explode in a violent supernova, leaving behind a neutron star or black hole.
Smaller stars, however, will take a slightly more sedate path. Low- to medium-mass stars, such as the sun, will eventually swell up into red giants, eventually shedding their outer layers into a ring known as a planetary nebula (early observers thought the nebulae resembled planets such as Neptune and Uranus). The core that is left behind will be a white dwarf, a husk of a star in which no hydrogen fusion occurs.
Smaller stars, such as red dwarfs, don't make it to the red giant state. They simply burn through all of the hydrogen within the star, leaving behind the shell that is a white dwarf. However, red dwarfs take trillions of years to consume their fuel, far longer than the 13.8-billion-year-old age of the universe, so no red dwarfs have yet become white dwarfs.
When a star runs out of fuel, it collapses inward on itself. White dwarfs contain approximately the mass of the sun but have roughly the radius of Earth. This makes them incredibly dense, beaten out only by neutron stars and black holes. The gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth.
White dwarfs reach this incredible density because they are so collapsed that their electrons are smashed together, forming what is called "degenerate matter." This means that a more massive white dwarf has a smaller radius than its less massive counterpart. Burning stars balance the inward push of gravity with the outward push from fusion, but in a white dwarf, electrons must squeeze tightly together to create that outward-pressing force. As such, having shed much of its mass during the red giant phase, no white dwarf can exceed 1.4 times the mass of the sun.
One last kick
While many white dwarfs fade away into relative obscurity, eventually radiating away all of their energy and becoming a black dwarf, those that have companions may suffer a different fate.
If the white dwarf is part of a binary system, it may be able to pull material from its companion onto its surface. Increasing the mass can have some interesting results. [VIDEO: Cannibal White Dwarf Feeds on Companion Star]
One possibility is that adding more mass to the white dwarf could cause it to collapse into a much denser neutron star.
A far more explosive result is the Type 1a supernova. As the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star, the temperature increases, eventually triggering a runaway reaction that detonates in a violent supernova that destroys the white dwarf. This process is known as a single-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova.
If the companion is another white dwarf instead of an active star, the two stellar corpses merge together to kick off the fireworks. This process is known as a double-degenerate model of a Type 1a supernova.
At other times, the white dwarf may pull just enough material from its companion to briefly ignite in a nova, a far smaller explosion. Because the white dwarf remains intact, it can repeat the process several times when it reaches the critical point, briefly breathing life back into the dying star over and over again. |
ASK A QUESTION What are some good Spanish TV shows
Whats are some good spanish shows to watch on Univision and Telemundo. It hard for me to understand spoken spanish but I can usually keep up with the story with spanish captions. Also are there any kid shows anyone can suggest I watch to learn spanish.
El Chavo del Ocho! Even if you think it's silly, it'd be good for you as a cultural value
Personally, I live in Texas, right, but there's this show that comes out of Los Angeles (I believe) called "El Show de Lagrimita y Costel" and it has these classroom skits (among other things) which are very silly but you can learn a lot of double entendre or adianoeta from them, and then there's Chabela with her dramatic confessions...just as a caveat, a lot of Mexican TV will be crammed with scantily clad women, no doubt to keep the ratings "up"... Mind you, it is what some would call "drivel" but hey, can't be dead serious all the time!
by the way, does anyone know if there are any web sites to watch those show on-line? |
Haley has returned to the Shelbys’ home to collect Uncle Tom. Aunt Chloe cooks her husband one last meal before he leaves and laments the evils of slavery. He asks her to trust in God to protect them, and tells her that their master is good. Haley takes Tom away, putting his feet in fetters. Mas’r George, who was visiting a friend the previous day, runs up to the wagon in dismay. Haley goes into the blacksmith’s to fix Tom’s handcuffs, and Tom and Mas’r George converse. George tells Tom that, when he grows older, he will come and save him. For now, he gives Tom a dollar to wear around his neck.
In a small country hotel in Kentucky, a sign announces a hunt for a slave named George, who has run away from his master. In the bar room, some men discuss a recently posted sign. The sign reads, “Very light mulatto . . . will probably try to pass for a white man . . . has been branded in his right hand with the letter H . . . I will give four hundred dollars for him alive, and the same sum for satisfactory proof that he has been killed.” Mr. Wilson, the owner of a bagging factory, is in the inn and says that this same George once worked for him. Just then, a tall man with Spanish coloring arrives at the inn. He calls himself Henry Butler and is accompanied by a slave named Jim. He looks at the sign and dismisses it, saying he seems to recall meeting a man of that description near a farm they passed along the way. Mr. Wilson looks at the “Spanish man” and realizes that he is George Harris. George invites Mr. Wilson up to his room and tells him that he is now a free man and is escaping to a place that will recognize his freedom. Mr. Wilson, well-meaning but rather unenlightened, tells George he is sorry to see him “breaking the laws of [his] country.” George protests that the United States is not “his” country, for slaves neither make nor consent to American laws and gain no protection by them. He asks Mr. Wilson to bring a pin to his wife, whom George believes is still a slave; he also asks Wilson to tell her that he is going to Canada and that she should join him if she can.
Meanwhile, Haley and Tom continue toward the slave market. When they stop for the night, Tom must stay in a jail. This insults his dignity as a man who has always been honest and upright. At eleven o’clock the next day, the selling begins, and Haley buys several more slaves. He then boards them all on a ship headed for the Deep South, where they will be sold for plantation work. On the ship, a slave woman jumps overboard after her son is taken from her. Tom hears the splash.
Eliza and Harry arrive at a Quaker settlement, where they stay with a woman named Rachel Halliday. After learning that Eliza’s last name is Harris, the Quakers realize that she is the wife of George Harris, who is on his way to the settlement. That night, amid tears, the couple reunites. The next morning, the Quakers and former slaves eat breakfast together, and George and Eliza learn they will have to wait until evening to escape.
Since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the term “Uncle Tom” has entered into the English language as a generic phrase denoting a black person eager to win the approval of whites. This section of the novel gives us our first insight into the term’s aptness. Especially in contrast to George, Uncle Tom proves a docile and submissive character. He serves his white owners dutifully, never making any attempt to escape, and praises his master’s goodness even as he is forced to part from his wife as a result of Shelby’s actions. In the figure of Tom, we see evidence of Stowe’s “romantic racialism.” Romantic racialism describes an attitude whereby a person regards another race with a paternalistic kindness—a sense of sympathy tainted by condescension. For while Stowe argues for the fair and humane treatment of African Americans, she also frequently idealizes and romanticizes them, portraying them as quaint or charmingly good-hearted rather than as complex, full human beings.
Yet while we may criticize Stowe’s idealized black characters, it is important to note that most of her characters, both white and black, receive rather sentimental treatment. Like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not aim to present a realistic vision of the world, but rather to argue for a different one—to persuade a particular audience to adopt a particular political position. In the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe sets out to convince her Northern audience of the evil of slavery; she uses the figure of Uncle Tom not to explore the psychology of a slave, but to assist her thematic arguments. Although Uncle Tom’s sense of duty and self-sacrifice have, at times, made Stowe’s book an object of ridicule, it was precisely these qualities of magnanimity and gentle patience that made Tom an admirable and moving figure to Stowe’s white Northern audience in 1852.
In the analysis of Chapters XXIV–XXVIII of Uncle Tom's Cabin, would it be ok if the reference to Uncle Tom's death was removed? It was really a spoiler for me, reading each analysis after finishing the set of chapters for that analysis, and I think other readers won't like these kinds of spoilers as well. Thanks and
2 out of 14 people found this helpful
This really helped with my reading of the book. It made it so much easier!! There wasn't any heavy vocab to go through, and it helped me understand the context easily. I will definitely come to this website first from now on!!
Which chapters would you say describes, Simon Legrre, Miss Ophelia and Eva's attitude towards slavery?
1 out of 1 people found this helpful |
Oral Activities in the Classroom
Possibilities and opportunities for oral expression in the classroom include much more than just individual podium speeches and group presentations. Low-stakes assignments (that are informal and assessed a small percentage of the final course grade) and high stakes assignments (that are formal and assessed a large percentage of the final course grade) engage students on a different pedagogical stage than writing and passive learning.
An element of performativity pervades all oral expression in the classroom, and turns learning into an active and full-body experience, rather than merely a cognitive activity. Oral activities like role-playing, panel discussions, debates, deliberations, and more employ drama as pedagogy and performance as a means and motivation to learn.
Here are a few types of oral activities that can be tailored for the purposes of different courses across disciplines. Most of these oral activities can be adapted for individual or group completion.
Chapter/Article reviews and summaries
Discussion questions and subsequent deliberations
Reporting of research findings
Role playing activities
Sharing and pairing exercises |
DEAR DOCTOR K: Are the benefits of juicing as great as I’ve heard?
DEAR READER: Juicing – extracting the juice from fresh fruits and vegetables – appears to be the latest trend for anyone looking to detoxify, lose weight or just get healthy. But does research support the claims that juicing can reverse chronic disease, jump-start weight loss and “detox” the body?
First, let’s discuss “extreme juicing.” To cut to the chase, I don’t know of any evidence that justifies a juice cleanse or a fast in which a person drinks only juice for several days to months. Particularly if you do it for more than a few days, you could be getting insufficient amounts of protein and other nutrients.
Now let’s talk about juice. A juicing machine removes the pulp of fresh fruit and vegetables and extracts the juice. Fresh juice has been shown to have advantages over commercially packaged juice – even those that claim to be “all natural” or have no added sugars. So if you’re going to juice, it’s best to prepare juice at home, from fresh fruits and vegetables.
But juicing removes the skin and insoluble fiber from fruits and vegetables. Consider this:
• The vitamin, mineral and antioxidant content of a whole fruit, like an apple, is decreased significantly when you peel the skin.
• Insoluble fiber can promote bowel regularity, lower cholesterol, stabilize blood sugars and promote a sense of fullness. But insoluble fiber is lost in the juicing process.
• Drinking too much juice may cause weight gain.
• Excessive juice intake can be dangerous for people with diabetes because juice is a concentrated source of calories, primarily sugar.
A few words about detoxifying: What “toxins” are supposedly being removed from your body? How is juicing supposed to remove them? What’s the evidence that it works? None of the websites advocating juicing that I’ve visited answer these questions.
I have nothing against drinking freshly prepared juice from vegetables or fruits as part of a healthy diet. However, I think it would be better for your health to eat lots of fruits and vegetables every day – unjuiced. |
Now that school is (mostly) wrapped up, I anticipate having some more time to do things. Like bike riding. And catching up on all those episodes of “The Wire” and “Top Gear” I haven’t watched yet. And maybe starting back up with the MIT OpenCourseware thing. And writing the third and subsequent installments of “Talking GPS Blues”.
One thing I’ve been wanting to dabble in and learn more about is microcontroller programming. In the past, I’ve given thought to purchasing one of the Basic Stamp or Propeller kits. But these days, it seems like everyone is going the Arduino route. It looks like there’s a vast community behind that particular family of devices, plenty of reference material, and a great deal of hardware that can interface with those devices. So I’m leaning in that direction.
But I’m confused. There’s the Arduino Uno, there’s the ADK Mega, there’s the Mega 2560, the Netduino and Netduino Plus, Fry’s has a bunch of Arduino clone boards, and I can even get Arduino boards at Radio Shack. (“You’ve got questions? We’ve got blank stares.”)
Question: what’s the best board for a beginner? My object is to learn how to program the Arduino, and to have some fun interfacing devices to it. I may eventually want to branch out into robotics (the 4WD platform interests me). I think I want something with headers and that “shields” can be added to, since I’m not planning at the moment to build any embedded projects and would prefer something that requires a minimum of soldering. Is something like the “Getting Started with Arduino” kit worth the bucks?
You would think the Make folks would have a guide to the various Arduinos on their site, but if they do, I have not been able to find it.
By the way, I actually do not have a soldering iron, and my skills in that area are weak. Can someone recommend a good soldering setup for electronic work as well? I’m not going to start out soldering surface mount stuff, but I’m willing to spend a little money to get something that will give me flexibility to do more advanced stuff as my skills grow.
I’d also appreciate any book recommendations folks have. I have Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and Openframeworks which looks like a decent high-level guide to working with Arduino (among other things), and am considering purchasing the Arduino Cookbook since that seems to have a great deal of “how do I do thing X” instruction in it. Are there any other recommended Arduino books? Is Getting Started with Arduino worth purchasing? |
Hospitals and universities face fees of more than £1 million a year under plans to punish organisations that fail to stop repeated false fire alarms.
London Fire Brigade today warned that persistent offenders would pay a £290 levy for each fire engine called out after the first 10 calls in a year.
There were 40,839 false alarms in London last year, with almost 28,000 at commercial or public buildings and 1,189 at hospitals. St George’s in Tooting was the worst, with 169.
The brigade said the calls — one every 12 minutes — affect its ability to attend real problems, and estimates the disruption costs £37 million a year.
The move to force organisations to take responsibility for fire safety comes amid fears that 17 of London’s 113 fire stations and 600 jobs will be cut to save £65 million over two years. |
The Muslim Brotherhood today dismissed a timetable for new elections in Egypt after at least 51 people were killed at a protest outside a barracks in Cairo.
Adly Mansour, who was imposed as interim president by the army last week after the ousting of Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, rushed out the promise of elections early next year in a bid to stop violence escalating across the country.
But Essam al-Erian, a senior official of the Muslim Brotherhood, said the plan for constitutional changes, parliamentary elections and then a presidential vote just “brings the country back to square one”. The Brotherhood, Egypt’s main Islamist movement which has condemned the coup against Mr Morsi, is calling for fresh protests and an uprising against the new administration. It said soldiers opened fire with live ammunition and tear gas on demonstrators praying in the early hours yesterday outside the Republican Guards barracks where Mr Morsi is believed to be detained.
Amid the conflicting accounts, the shocking death toll dealt a huge blow to hopes of stabilising Egypt to avoid a bloody civil war.
Eight women and four children were reported to be among the 51 killed, with more than 400 injured.
Several witnesses said soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on the protesters, though others said they had first come under fire.
Responding to the escalating crisis, Mr Mansour pledged to set up within 15 days a panel to amend the Islamist-drafted constitution, with the changes being put to a referendum within four months, leading to parliamentary election.
Once parliament convened, a presidential election would then be held shortly afterwards.
In what appeared to be an olive branch to Islamists, Mr Mansour’s decree included controversial language put into the constitution last year that defined the principles of Islamic sharia law.
But the Muslim Brotherhood today accused the army of trying to “steal” the governance of Egypt from Mr Morsi, the country’s first freely-elected president.
The carnage at the demonstration at the Cairo barracks has shocked Egyptians.
Many are already tired of the clashes and violence that started more than two years ago after the overthrow of autocratic ruler Hosni Mubarak in a popular uprising.
Amid concerns in America, Britain and other countries over Egypt’s future, the United Nations said it was “gravely concerned” about mounting violence and said the country was on a “precarious path.” |
Education Minnesota scored a rare win in the charter-school sector Tuesday night when 25 teachers at a German immersion school in St. Paul gave 80 percent support to forming a union, making it the sole unionized charter school in the state.
Charter schools have been an elusive target for the statewide teacher organization, despite its almost total success in organizing district teachers across the state.
Only four charter-school teaching staffs have been union-represented since the first such school opened in 1992, but none has been recently until the vote at Twin Cities German Immersion School. The next step will be contract bargaining.
The win may represent something of an anomaly. A substantial portion of the teaching staff is made up of German-born educators who enjoyed better working conditions in their home country, according to teachers who helped the organizing drive.
The K-8 school, which is in its ninth year, enrolls 375 students. Chair Matt Schneider said in a statement that the school's board "supports our teachers' rights, including their right to form a union." He said the school's growth and high scores on both Minnesota and German assessment tests shows that teachers are skilled and dedicated.
A number of factors have weighed against broader organizing of Minnesota charter schools. Many have high staff turnover, which makes sustaining an organizing drive difficult. And until 2009, teachers also were required to make up a majority of a charter's board, making them both management and labor.
"There can be a little bit of a fear factor … the freedom to speak may not be as prevalent," said Denise Specht, Education Minnesota's president. But she praised the immersion school's teachers, saying they are devoted to improving working conditions at a school to which many of them send their own children.
More common in Wisconsin
According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 12.3 percent of the nation's charter schools had collective bargaining agreements in 2009-10. Wisconsin had the highest number at 121, and five states, including Iowa, required charter schools to have union staffs. Minnesota leaves that choice to teachers.
Minnesota's first charter school, City Academy in St. Paul, was union-represented initially, but no longer is due to a reorganization. Charter schools near Hibbing and Forest Lake that unionized later closed. Teachers at Ubah Academy in Hopkins began the organizing process in 2010, but by the time they won a protracted court fight over who was eligible to vote, turnover in staff had made moot the win.
According to a just-released study by a labor economist and an education professor, data suggest that teacher unionization doesn't significantly help or hurt student achievement. They studied student achievement trends at 1,126 California charter schools. some of which were always unionized, some of which chose to unionize, but most of which were nonunion.
The only impact they noticed on achievement came during the year in which workers unionized. According to co-author Aaron J. Sojourner at the University of Minnesota, that dip may have reflected the union issue distracting both teachers and administrators, but he said that student performance rebounded relatively soon.
Two teachers involved in the organizing drive said that due-process issues are part of their quest to form a union at a school at which they have at-will contracts with less job security. "It's just part of the German employment practices to have a contract," said one teacher, Katie Stephens.
"We wanted the same things that other public schoolteachers have around here," said another teacher, Susan Johnson.
According to state Department of Education data, teachers at the school were paid an average salary of $38,822 in 2013, compared with a statewide average of $54,945. That comparison doesn't account for possible experience differences.
Johnson said that a majority of the school's staff is German-born. Some have taken leaves to teach here for three years on a visa, while others are permanent U.S. residents. Specht said the German-born teachers have remarked that they're paid much less here than in Germany. |
I have made some additions to the change history, using source and others.
Update 7 to Geopolitical Entities and Codes, the successor to FIPS standard 10-4, was issued with the date 2012-02-01. It changes the spellings of Ariana, Kebili, and Sidi Bou Zid to L’Ariana, Kébili, and Sidi Bouzid, respectively.
ISO 3166-2 Newsletter II-3 is dated 2011-12-15. For Tunisia, the only change is that the name of one governorate is changed from L'Ariana to Ariana.
The latest version of the FIPS standard is called "Geopolitical Entities and Codes", published in 2010-04. For no apparent reason, it has changed the code for one district of Tunisia.
FIPS Publication Change Notice No. 9, affecting FIPS PUB 10-4, was issued on 2004-10-01. It assigns a code to the new Manouba governorate. It also changes the name of El Kef governorate to Kef (shown as Le Kef in the tables below).
ISO 3166-2 Newsletter Number I-5, dated 2003-09-05, gives a code for the new Manouba governorate. Newsletter Number I-6 was published on 2004-03-08. It changes the name of Manouba to "La Manouba".
Tunisia (more commonly called Tunis, formally the Regency of Tunis, until about 1930) began the 20th century as a French protectorate. It gained full independence on 1956-03-20. Tunisia's desert boundaries were indistinct at first, and there is still a border dispute with Algeria.
from the capital, Tunis + -ia (suffix for country)
Tunisia is divided into 24 wilayat (governorates).
|Ben Arous||505,773||761||294||Bin `Arūs|
|Le Kef||258,790||4,965||1,917||Al Kāf|
|Sidi Bou Zid||395,506||6,994||2,700||Sīdī Bū Zayd|
Tunisia uses four-digit postal codes in which the first two digits indicate the governorate.
See the Delegations of Tunisia page.
The provinces are divided into mutamadiyat (delegations, districts). The census reports show a tertiary division, the imada (sector).
The UN LOCODE page for Tunisia lists locations in the country, some of them with their latitudes and longitudes, some with their ISO 3166-2 codes for their subdivisions. This information can be put together to approximate the territorial extent of subdivisions.
|Le Kef||101,093||112,490||Le Kef|
|Matmata||21,663||25,396||Territoires du Sud|
|Medjiz-el-Bab||63,740||73,473||Medjez el Bab|
|Nefzaoua||40,690||48,013||Territoires du Sud|
|Ouerghemma||99,735||109,588||Territoires du Sud|
|Souk-el-Arba||76,107||94,755||Souk el Arba|
|Souk-el-Khemis||37,997||46,047||Souk el Arba|
|Tataouine||48,607||63,413||Territoires du Sud|
Note: Source shows results of the 1946 census, broken down by "contrôles civils", which can be translated in various ways. The source doesn't give a translation. One possibility that I think fits is "civil rolls". By matching population totals, I was able to identify each caidate with the civil roll that includes it. There is one discrepancy: source takes 13,968 people away from the Zaghouan civil roll and gives them to Sousse.
|Souk el Arba||199,270||3,050|
|Tunis and Suburbs||570,710||5,560|
TS04), Bizerte (
TS05), Nabeul (
TS08), and Tunis and Suburbs (
TS13). Part of Nabeul governorate transferred to Sousse (former
TS12). These actions were taken under Law 72-1.
TS11), under Law 73-75.
TS01), under Law 74-47. The divisions at the time of the 1975 census were as follows:
TN.AN, FIPS code
TS26), under Law 2000-78.
There are numerous methods for transliterating from Arabic to the Roman alphabet. The names here labeled Arabic are not the only possible versions.
|Sidi Bou Zid||213,115||288,528||374,825||395,506|
Sources: 1975 - ; 1984 - ; 1994 - ; 2004 - . However, the total for 1994 is taken from .
Sources and provide populations that differ by as much as 8.1%. Source had a list of governorates that included some that were created after the census date; it also was rounded to the nearest hundred. Therefore, I report the data from source . Population of Tunis South listed under Zaghouan.
Source had 1994 and 2004 census data, rounded to the nearest thousand. Its 1994 figures differ from by no more than 1.85% in each governorate. The 1994 total in and the one in are the same, within rounding error. Unfortunately, the total of the populations given in is 8,735,875, off by almost 50,000. If we could assume that had transposed the second and fourth digits in the population of Gabès, and that it was actually 360,143, that would make the total for Tunisia come out with an error of only 11. However, if that were the case, and would be in excessive disagreement over Gabès.
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St Clare's School was established in 1956 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, whose mission is to assist women and girls in need and to work with them to help them gain an understanding of their innate dignity and worth.
We are a Catholic secondary school for girls from Years Eight to Twelve. As a CARE (Curriculum and Re-engagement) school we provide a caring and safe school environment for girls who may find mainstream school situations difficult.
St Clare’s offers practical, relevant and motivational lessons and activities which promote personal and academic skills.
Individual Education Plans are created for each student to ensure the most appropriate learning strategies and pathways for each girl and where required appropriate educational support with an emphasis on literacy and numeracy is offered to the students.
The staff of St Clare’s seek to continually offer education and personal development skills that are relevant, motivational and recognise and cater for different life experiences and ability levels.
Term 1 ends April 8 2016
April 25 Anzac Day - pupil free day
April 26 Teachers PD Day - pupil free day
Term 2 commences for students on April 27 |
It's true, money is magnetic! You'll need to get your hands on a super strong neodymium magnet to uncover an amazing secret.
- Super Strong Neodymium Magnet
- Dollar bill
Believe it or not, dollar bills are printed with magnetic inks as a way to reduce counterfeiting. Fold the dollar bill in half as shown and hold the neodymium magnet near the bottom of the bill. Notice how the bottom of the bill moves when the iron in the bill is attracted to the magnet. Bob Becker, a teacher in Kirkwood, Missouri, takes the experiment one step further by turning a dollar bill into soup in a blender. That’s right, he blends a dollar bill with about 200 mL (1 cup) of water. The magnet is held on the outside of the blender while the slurry is whirling around. The blender is stopped and the magnet is slowly pulled away from the blender to reveal the spot of iron. Be sure to perform the experiment with a borrowed bill! Just remind the lender that you’re increasing his “liquid assets” or that you’ve found a way to increase her “cash flow” problems. Yes, Bob Becker is a funny guy… or at least that’s what his attorney says.
If you are interested in this activity, see Money in a Blender.
How Does It Work?
Neodymium magnets (Nd-Fe-B) are composed of neodymium, iron, boron, and a few transition metals making them some of the strongest magnets in the world. Magnets of all types create a magnetic field, with both north and south poles. The magnetic field created by the neodymium magnets is so strong, it will line up to match the magnetic north and south of the earth. It makes a great compass!
Stick one in your pocket and accidentally walk by the refrigerator, and your family will find you stuck to the door! Just one of these magnets will hold 25 of our catalogs to a steel filing cabinet (the things we do when we’re bored!).
On a more serious note, the large magnets are so strong that they may even be dangerous if not handled properly. A pair of these magnets will leap into a deadly embrace from over 6 inches apart and may knock chips off themselves from the force of the impact. You'll be amazed at the super strength of the magnets, but we must warn you to be careful. Any type of magnetic media will be history in the presence of one of these large neodymium magnets.
Learn more about the power of attraction with amazing science kits and magnets. |
Project based learning gets kudos.
An article in New York Times suggests that sticking with science isn't easy but independent projects and a strong work ethic help. For example, on average 40 % of students planning on science and technology majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degre. However, after Freshman Projects were introduced at WPI retention is now over 75% for students in engineering. For the full article click here. |
October 4, 2012
Earth Sounds Workshop
As a complement to its Earth Sounds program, the Wang Center offers an interactive lecture demonstration of Australian, Mongolian, and Native American instruments. Members of the Earth Sounds ensemble introduce the audience to the timbres, techniques, and functions of their instruments, and then invite participants to touch and explore them. A terrific preview for the Earth Sounds concert, this workshop gives participants a deeper understanding of the astonishing musicianship of the ensemble.Thursday, October 4, 2012, 2:00 PM, Charles B. Wang Center TheatreAdmission $10, or free with VIP ticket to Earth Sounds performance
Earth Sounds Performance »
Earth Sounds Flier »
October 11, 2012 and October 13, 2012
BSPG Meditation Workshop and Dharma Talk:"Watching the Breath, Investigating the Four Elements" with Ven. Sayalay Susila
The purpose of this event is to calm our mind and understand the non-self nature of the body through exploring the four elements within. We will practice concentration using anapanasati, mindfulness of breath, in order to develop calmness and serenity of the mind so that the dharma can manifest itself. As Buddha said: "develop concentration, one with concentration sees things as they really are."
On Saturday, we will use this more concentrated mind to investigate the body. The body is composed of the four great elements of earth, water, fire, and wind. Sayalay will show you the path to practice the four elements meditation systematically until the non-self nature of body becomes apparent. The four elements meditation practice is also ideal to develop good health since it helps to balance the elements within the body.
Sayalay Susila is a Theravadan nun for the past 21 years and has been the disciple and assistant of world renowned Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw at the Pa Auk Meditation Centre in Myanmar for 16 years. She has shared her profound knowledge of the Abhidhamma, the psychology & philosophy of Buddhism, and meditation with students in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Canada and US and her teaching has been widely praised as lucid and precise.
Please arrive early and be in place by 9:30am. Bring a cushion, towel and lunch, Wear comfortable warm clothing & socks.Thursday, Oct. 11, 2012 from 6:30 - 8:30 pm. Room 301, Wang Center, SBUSaturday, Oct. 13, 2012 from 9:30 am – 2:30 pm. Room 301, Wang Center , SBU FREE FOR STUDENTS, $20 teacher's donation suggested for non-students.
ALL ARE WELCOME. Please email Hai-Dee Lee to register. BSPG Site »
November 3, 2012
One-Day Meditation Retreat & Dharma Sharing with Nancy Bonardi
In this one-day meditation workshop Nancy will share Buddhist wisdom teachings, alternating with periods of sitting meditation. All are welcome.
Nancy Bonardi began practicing meditation with Chan Master Sheng Yen of Dharma Drum Mountain in 1978. She has over 30 years of meditation experience.Saturday, November 3, 2012, 9:30 AM to 2:30 PMCharles B. Wang Center, Room 301 BSPG website »
BSPG program details »
Community Yoga WorkshopPlease join us for multi-level yoga classes (appropriate for beginners to advanced students) designed to bring mind, body, and spirit into alignment. This is a hatha yoga class. Introduced by Yogi Swatmarama, a sage of 15th century India, traditional Hatha Yoga represents opposing energies: hot and cold (fire and water, following similar concept as yin-yang), male and female, positive and negative and attempts to balance mind and body via asana (poses), pranayama (breath control), and the calming of the mind through relaxation and meditation. Please wear comfortable clothing and bring a mat.
Suggested $5 admission fee for instructor. |
We’ve seen children pray to Obama, families burst into tears of thanks for government provisions, and most importantly we have seen society bend to the will of political correctness. Let’s be clear, the government is an artificial God to the brainwashed masses — and it’s not a new phenomenon.
Today, the government stands as a false replacement to God, and political correctness is the intellectual weapon of choice for ‘peacefully’ altering public perception. This is the kind of government that has superseded anything written in Orwell’s 1984, moving past the blatant physical nature of telescreens and thought police and instead altering the very culture of society itself. Because as think tanks have discovered, a ‘peaceful’ form of intellectual takeover is much more effective than a Hitler-style military blitzkrieg.
Because at the end of the day, the people still believe that they are free. But in reality, the Big Daddy government has incrementally placed itself as the central nervous system of a collapsing society that now suckles upon its tit for basic subsistence. After all, you didn’t build that, Big Daddy government did.
Government As An Artificial God Throughout History
You’ve undoubtedly been exposed to the current welfare state of the nation via radio, television, and online reports, but the welfare state is just the beginning of Big Daddy government’s ascension to a counterfeit higher power. While there is most certainly a push by the Obama administration and its handlers to offer out welfare like candy to those who would rather collect government handouts than perform a relevant task to society, there are much deeper tentacles of the federal government that are wrapping themselves around the pulsating heart of the republic. Actions that are obscured from typical nightly news reports.
And we have seen this throughout history with collapsing societies that deny the existence of a living God and fill the biological desire for a higher power with that of a runaway government. The notion of establishing government and its cronies as the replacement to God is actually an ancient one, though it took thousands of years before the prominent Marxists of the Soviet Union turned it into a formula. In fact, they dubbed the idea ‘God-Building’.
A concept that, whether intentionally or not, we see a hyper-modernized version of each and every day.
The premise of ‘God-Building’ was and is simple: humans, by nature, do very much so hold a desire for a higher power. A natural understanding that there is more to life than meets the eye, and that their actions do in fact count. For years, politicians going back to Roman heads of state have struggled with attempts to remove this desire from the common man. Because after all, how can you rule a population through absolute dictatorship and public servitude when the populace has a strong moral system that does not allow for them to throw their fellow man under the bus or visualize the leader as a divine power.
It simply cannot be done effectively, as leaders in the past have discovered through repeated attempts to do so. That’s why one Russian Marxist within Lenin’s close circle of power hungry think tanks knew that the Soviet Union had to be different. Taking this process and forging it into a methodical instrument of psychological warfare, it was the pre-revolution member of Lenin’s party, Anatoly Lunacharsky, that would help shape Communism’s world-view focus around the idea of a ‘new religion’ where government was God.
Under this new hyper-Orwellian ‘religion’, Lunacharsky spun the concept as one that is based in ‘science’ and abandons ‘supernatural beliefs’. This was the beginning of calculated God-building, which is based on the notion that the love of Big Daddy government as a God figure is highly ‘scientific’ and the original realization of a living God outside of government is ‘old tradition’. Now interestingly enough, Lenin was on the official record actually claiming that he was against Lunacharsky’s concept, going even further into the previous ideology that any form of religion should be abolished — no ideology should exist outside of the state.
But even despite his opposition to God-building and his plans to wipe out all forms of ideology outside of the state, Lenin would ultimately join the ranks of Stalin and other sociopathic leaders to place a mega government in the center of the Soviet Union’s doctrine — with himself as the Christ figure for all to adore. And thus, a new era was brought in under Lenin. Stalin was ushered in as supreme dictator, and millions went along with the bogostroitel’stvo (God-Building) of big government as an artificial God.
A government that ultimately gave its people one of the harshest periods of rule ever recorded in history under the ruthless idol Josef Stalin. The man who stood at 5’4 was given absolute power over all of the land, to which he used to savagely murder millions of them. Why was he allowed to do so? Why did the military go along with it? Why did his closest friends and political advisers allow a 5’4 overweight psychopath to have his way with their wives and daughters?
There’s many psychological components to all of those questions, but the central theme must be remembered of government as an artificial God. The concept of corrupt leaders as an artificial God. Something that first requires the abolition of any God that is not the dictator himself. The result of such a system is ultimately the destruction of the entire society, usually lined with at least several millions deaths in the process. In the case of Stalin’s Soveit Union, experts place the death toll at around 40 million — a number that is extremely conservative and factors in around 20 million deaths from non-combat related events like artificial famine and executions.
According to one expert breakdown carried by the International Business Times, the numbers break down as follows:
“1 million imprisoned or exiled between 1927 to 1929; 9 to 11 million peasants forced off their lands and another 2 to 3 million peasants arrested or exiled in the mass collectivization program; 6 to 7 million killed by an artificial famine in 1932-1934; 1 million exiled from Moscow and Leningrad in 1935; 1 million executed during the ”Great Terror’ of 1937-1938; 4 to 6 million dispatched to forced labor camps; 10 to 12 million people forcibly relocated during World War II; and at least 1 million arrested for various ‘political crimes’ from 1946 to 1953.”
Loving, isn’t it. Millions were hit with artificial famines, millions were executed or sent to labor camps, and virtually everyone was treated as complete trash from their God Josef Stalin. But that is the result of not only God-Building, which is sometimes the result of calculated socialist/humanist ideology that actually turns the central government into the highest power among men, but the entire concept of trusting complete power to a small group of elite. Or in the case of Josef Stalin, one very twisted man.
We’ve seen it time and time again, even as far away as the ‘People’s Republic of China’, the name of which alone is highly dystopian. Not to be outdone by Hitler, the people’s God Mao Zedong systematically went around exterminating those who went against him (namely Christians), thought criminals, and random peasants who did nothing wrong. Mao did not even care if he was killing his greatest supporters. Just like Stalin’s death reign, researchers conservatively estimate that 45 million were killed at the very least. From The Independent:
“Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.”
Notice that starvation and famine always plays a role in the mass murder plans of artificial government gods. Can you imagine if our fast food nation was left without food for a matter of months?
The people are even more reliant upon our bloated Big Daddy government than ever before. We have virtual zero self-reliance in the nation as a whole, with I’d estimate 95% of the entire public counting on an operational central government in order to live their lives. When looking back at Russia, which actually had a population that was heavily into farming and self-sufficiency to a certain degree in many cases, we see how even members of that society lost their lives. In the United States today, even a minor disruption in the Big Daddy system could result in mass chaos within our reliant society.
‘God’, ‘Jesus’ Now Politically Incorrect Thought Crime Words
Under the system in which government has propped itself up as an artificial God, merely mentioning the name of Jesus has now become an extremely politically incorrect thought crime of sorts. And whether you believe in the power of Christ or not (the elite certainly don’t want you to), this government control of ideology is on track with the movements we discussed in regards to the Soviet Union system. Only this time they’re about one hundred times more powerful.
The Soviet Union system was much more effective and powerful than Hitler’s Nazi system because it worked intellectually behind the scenes, taking bites into the general population that were so small they barely noticed that society had been eaten up when they opened their eyes. Hitler was much too aggressive and physical, forcing rebellion and open resistance like never before seen on an international level.
You can liken it to a classic setup of young children battling it out in elementary or middle school. The musclebound bully (Hitler) may physically bully the nerdy teen for his lunch money, but by doing so he ultimately draws the attention of other students and teachers. He may get away with it for a while since the teachers (other powerful nations) may not fully intervene, and the children (general public) are afraid of the bully. The nerdy child, on the other hand, chooses to wage his war against the musclebound bully through psychological attacks. He goes and, through a system of other children, spreads rumors that the bully has some embarrassing trait. Word spreads, and the bully’s daily life is now filled with whispers about his embarrassing secret, ultimately being fueled behind the scenes each and every day by the nerdy child.
The key here is that the bully, under the right circumstances, won’t actually know the source of the rumors. And more importantly, the general public of the school won’t know the source. Nor do they even know if it’s true, they just go along with it because other people are saying it. Meanwhile, those who are close enough to know that the nerdy child is spreading the rumors would not dare go after him lest their reputation is ruined by new lies spread around the school.
Under the intellectual warfare doctrine that we saw in the Soviet Union and now being utilized in the United States on a much larger scale, groups that value God, morals, and personal rights are now being targeted in the sniper sights of globalism. But once again, the war is not waged in a ‘hot’ fashion with paratrooper police kicking down the doors of Christians and rounding them up. Instead, the real God is being rooted out by political correctness and government science.
Government Crackdown on Thought
While Obama has children literally pray to him on video, the government says that you cannot even use the name of Jesus now in many circumstances. Some such scenarios that are pretty much ignored because they do not fit into the politically correct paradigm of the new Orwellian society include the following that were also mentioned by journalist Michael Snyder in another report on government crackdown:
- Sonoma State University ordering a student to remove the cross necklace she was wearing because it could ‘offend’ someone. This, of course, stems from the political thought crime doctrine that really doesn’t have anything to do with stopping citizens from being ‘offended’. After all, gay pride protests meanwhile sport drag queens simulating gay sex while wearing thongs in public, but that is not considered offensive by the establishment because it is politically correct to support grown men in thongs. Welcome to politically correct America.
- A professor from Florida Atlantic University pushed it a step further, banning a student from class who refused to literally stomp on a picture of Jesus. Can you imagine if it were a picture of Obama? How about a picture of Trayvon Martin? You can be sure that the college would be under federal investigation within the hour, with CNN and MSNBC immediately declaring the college to be ‘deeply racist’ and responsible for everything bad in the world. Stomping on Jesus, however, is fine. See how the government is now truly held up as an artificial God?
- The usage of the name Jesus was strictly forbidden in all prayers during the opening sessions of the North Carolina State-House. You read that right, banned from prayers. It appears the North Carolina State-House would much rather have you pray to Obama.
- A high school track team dared to make a ‘gesture’ thanking God for their victory and was ultimately disqualified for doing so. How dare they even gesture to thank God for anything they do, let alone actually say anything. Next time they should offer thanks to Obama for his help in their victory.
- A public preacher faced potential arrest for ‘scaring people’ by preaching biblical verses in public.
- Public prayers from police chaplains in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department are no longer allowed to even use the name of Jesus, as is the case nationally on a growing scale.
- Teachers cannot give a Bible to a child on their own time and from their own library, and a teacher in New Jersey was fired for doing so. While you could argue here that the teacher’s role is to give the children an unbiased education, I would argue that the teacher most definitely would not have been fired for providing the child Barack Obama’s latest book.
The war on reality via political correctness is heating up, and there is no question that the very same persecution I’ve highlighted here will spread. And if we don’t take a stand now, it will only continue in a much broader spectrum. I think pastor Martin Niemöller really said it best in the heavily cited quote regarding the development of the Nazi state:
“First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Today, we face this same scenario. The attacks on the name of Jesus and related thought crime may not ‘affect’ you right now, but the attacks will soon spread. The artificial government God, as we’ve seen with Stalin, is a very short term friend. Just as he empowered those who stood for communism and the abandonment of Christianity in the beginning in order to usher in the government as the phony dogma, he soon would destroy them all. The power that is perceived from supporting the political correct agenda is not only fleeting but hollow.
True power comes in resisting this tyranny and spreading the word. The simple reality is that when we take a stand and refuse to crumble to the politically correct doctrine, when we refuse to cower in fear because we are told we are ‘offending’ the enslaved masses, we win the intellectual battle for our freedoms. |
THE suicide rate in Stroud is 40 per cent above the national average, figures released this week have revealed.
Between 2006 and 2008 the number of suicides per 100,000 people in the county stood at less than 10 – below the national average.
But since then the rate has risen to more than 14 people per 100,000, almost 40 per cent above the national average of 10.19.
The latest figures, which take into account deaths between 2010 and 2012, show Gloucester’s suicide rate at 16.43 per 100,000 – the highest in the county – and Stroud’s at 14.42.
The statistics have been compiled in a Gloucestershire County Council report which also reveals that men are three times as likely to take their own lives.
Suicide rates in England fell to their lowest in 2007, however since then there have been rises in most regions including Gloucestershire.
Concerns have been expressed at the possible link with the recession especially as the report shows that men of working age – aged between 40 and 44 – were the group most likely to take their own life.
According to the report 241 suicides were recorded in the county between 2009 and 2012, nine of which were young people between the age of 15 and 19 of which 57 per cent of the deaths were thought to be a result of family discord and bullying.
Only one third of those people contacted mental health services before their death and the report indicated that 72 per cent of the cases were recorded as having nothing to do with mental health issues.
There is no single factor that can prevent suicide as the likelihood of a person taking their own life depends on several factors however suicide prevention in the county is run as a local health priority with councils, police and health organisations working together.
Cllr Dorcas Binns, cabinet member for public health and communities at Gloucestershire County Council, said: “Every suicide case is a tragedy for everyone involved and prevention remains a top priority for the county.
“The reasons why someone might choose to take their life are varied and complex and no one single factor can prevent suicide from occurring.
“Gloucestershire County Council works with partners including schools, district councils, the health sector, the police and voluntary sector organisations to support a number of programmes focused on building resilience and awareness, particularly in young people.” |
The 1920s in Weimar Germany saw a surge in adherence to modernist ideas about art and craft, including typography and type design. Weimar modernists, eager to put the nationalistic past of the Wilhelmine Empire and World War I behind them, promoted art and design that they saw as universal.
Typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-74) proclaimed a movement in printing he dubbed Die Neue Typographie (The New Typography). Tschichold announced that only the sans-serif letter — stripped of the traditional, small finishing strokes at the ends of the main strokes — was appropriate for the modern age.
Many Weimar modernists developed crisp sans-serif designs, but the most successful was 1927's Futura, a geometric sans-serif designed by Paul Renner (1878-1956). The underlying geometry of Futura, with its undecorated circles and lines, was thought to speak in a universal formal language that transcended national identity. |
1). Apple demarketed its products by using pricing as a strategic tool to keep the products safely inside its target consumer segment. Though the prices of iPhone were brought down to $399, Apple could still lower the prices which it chooses not to, only to maintain a customer base that is in the higher income range. 2). An example of demarketing could be some areas in Florida that prefer elderly vacationers and demarket to college students. It could promote in a way that attracts the desired target market and is unattractive to the demarketed segment. Photographs of elderly people in a promotional brochure that describes exciting bingo nights and shuffleboard tournaments should do the trick. 3). Particular demarketing is when you want to demarket to particular groups or at particular times, etc., to protect your franchise with your core customers. A fine restaurant may be losing its ambience due to a large number of casual diners in order for the organization to achieve its strategic goal to provide an ambience that will win the loyalty of those seeking a more formal dining experience. As a result, the manager might require keeping a dress code for the staff to wear a tie and a jacket. 4). The following print ad by Toyota suggests that it wanted to discourage customers from buying its Prius and instead steering them towards its other cars. The print at the bottom says unless you plan to drive your Prius for 20 years you will do better with our Corolla or our Yaris. |
English literature has a long and colorful history. From the masterfully written old English tales of Chaucer to the countless Shakespearian dramas to the poetic verses of Tennyson, England has produced some of the richest treasures of the literary world. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did a type of literature develop that completely broke the traditions of the past and opened the door to a whole new generation of writers. This new genre was appropriately called the English novel, and it helped to change the literary landscape forever. The English novel was not only a genre within itself, but it also formed several sub genres including historical, gothic, sentimental, epistolary and bildungsroman novels. The works within the genre were so diverse that many different types of authors were able to write according to their own styles and preferences. The development of the novel changed literature not only in England, but throughout the world.
The English novel is a type of literature “such as was never heard of in the world before (Longman 3069),” as Daniel Defoe says in his masterpiece novel Robinson Crusoe. While it was not the only new form of literature that was emerging during the eighteenth century, it was the form that best broke from tradition. The novel rejected the norms of the literary past and began to exhibit the originality that was coming to be valued in English culture. The new characteristics of the novel separated it from anything that had ever been done before. During the Renaissance, there had been a growing tendency to place more emphasis on individual experience rather than collective tradition. Writers like Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, and even the legendary Greek and Roman poets had derived most of their plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature. Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson were the first to take the emerging trends of individuality and originality and apply them to literature. Their stories were completely unique and used realism to show how people actually live (Watt 14). As the English novel developed the idea of characterization changed dramatically. A wide variety of characters and settings began to be used like “a man on an island, a servant-girl under siege, or a solitary eccentric oddly recapturing his prenatal past” (Longman 3067)
Another characteristic of the novel is the use of ordinary names for people instead of symbolic names. For years writers gave characters names that made references to mythology or contained some type of description of the person. Keeping with the idea of representing real life, novelists broke from this tradition and gave their characters more common names (Watt 19). Early novelists had a strong affiliation with the philosophers of their time. Writers like Locke and Hume wanted to create a more realistic world and claimed that our personal identity is based on memory. Novelists began to explore this concept in their works and used everyday language to convey their ideas (23). The novelist Clara Reeve makes a clear distinction between the novel and previous forms of literature in her literary history The Progress of Romance:
The novel gives a familiar relation of such things as everyday pass before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it is to represent every scene in so natural a manner… (Longman 3066)
In this passage Reeve states that literature no longer had to fit an ideal form and was no longer limited to telling stories based on fantasy and imagination. The novel allowed writers to show real people in real situations and allowed the readers to connect to the plot and the characters like never before.
The rise of the English novel had a huge impact on literature in Britain, but what spurred the formation of such an untraditional form of literature in the eighteenth century? In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt says that... |
Old habits die, it seems. Particularly when it comes to discrimination against women. Doesn't seem to matter how obvious the bias, how dramatic the inequity, or how counter-productive the results, it's not hard to find chaps who still believe a penis is some sort of membership card. Or to put it another way, that not having a penis counts as a disqualifying defect. A history of subjugating women? Whatever could be wrong with that?
That many business folk are still grappling with the question is fascinating. You might have thought, by now, the last remnants of the old boys networks would have realised the error of their ways. Learnt to hold their tongues. Especially after former employers' boss Alisdair Thompson's take on women in the workplace. Even the most stubborn of chauvinists seemed to acknowledge the game was up then. That the chicks had come home to roost.
Yet still, some of the old schoolers are hanging on, opposing measures to promote gender equality with deliberately phoney arguments and baseless scaremongering. Recent attacks on a New Zealand Stock Exchange initiative, requiring all listed companies to disclose the number of women on their boards and in senior management positions, only offers more evidence of that. Makes you wonder what these blokes are really scared of.
First there was Gryphon Governance Consultants director Denis Mowbray, who wanted us all to know that having more women on boards was no guarantee of success. Then there was governance researcher Richard Baker, who said a gender mix was no guarantee of diversity. Talk about missing the point. As did Omega Talent chief executive Justin Treagus this week with a similarly specious column in the New Zealand Herald.
From what I've read, the NZX initiative isn't about ensuring a quota of women. It's about encouraging equal opportunity, not equal representation. It's about helping to break down age-old prejudices against women, raising awareness of issues such as fairness, and better utilising resources that some women bring to the table. Those who rubbish it on the basis that an equal ratio of women to men guarantees nothing are guilty of raising spurious objections.
What they won't want to acknowledge is that leaving in place customs and traditions that have historically discriminated against women is bad for business, bad for decision-making and bad for everyone. We know this. As Women's Affairs acting chief executive Kim Ngarimu said earlier this month, British and Australian listed companies are already required to report on gender diversity. The NZX move only brings New Zealand up to speed.
Rather than whinging about being dragged into the 21st century, opponents of the enterprise should be thanking their lucky stars a stronger medicine hasn't been prescribed. Several other countries have opted for mimimum quotas in the boardroom as a form of positive affirmation. Their rationale? They reckon without government intervention, progress would take too long. That without being forced to accept equal opportunity, men would never buy into it.
Mr Baker tells us that companies aren't democracies and that they aren't required to be socially responsible. As if we needed reminding of that. What's also true, however, is that companies operating within a democracy are regulated by laws formed by the governments of the people. Whether Mr Baker likes it or not, we all have a say in the gender debate, however indirectly. Anyone who doesn't agree with that should check with Alisdair Thompson.
Michael Barnett, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust, made the point the other day that far from criticising the NZX action, New Zealanders should be celebrating the breakthrough as a significant step towards righting an indefensible wrong. It's hard to disagree. One small step for man, one giant leap for womankind. And the absurd arguments of those who oppose it? That should only leave us more feeling more convinced.
» Read more of Richard Boock in the Sunday Star Times.
» Follow Richard on Twitter: @richardboock.
- Auckland Now
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Union head slams forestry-safety record
The country's top unionist is crying foul over a new forestry safety code of practice that aims to cut death and injury in the industry by 25 per cent by 2020, saying it has failed to take heed of the lessons learnt from the Pike River mine disaster.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment launched the standards last week only to be accused of providing "weak leadership" on health and safety by Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly.
Kelly said the standards were developed without any worker participation by organisations in the forest industry that "already show they have no understanding of the seriousness of the ongoing health and safety issues in the sector".
Between 2002 and 2008, forestry and logging had the highest rate of serious harm notifications at 16.4 per 1000 fulltime equivalent (FTE) staff per year. This was almost six times the rate for all sectors at 2.9 per 1000.
Kelly said the standards have no provisions for employee participation - a key recommendation in the Pike River Report; weak provisions around vehicles (such as no requirement for seatbelts); and they shift risk to employees.
For example, she said, the standards state that workers can refuse unsafe work but require them to work it out with their employer first rather than establishing reciprocal obligations under which employers have an obligation to stop, listen and respond.
"We believe working conditions in the industry are a major contributor to the accident levels, including long hours and fatigue," she said.
"On this matter the standards put the onus on the workers to manage fatigue, requiring employers only to provide ‘regular rest breaks, a meal break, a daily or nightly sleep period and shared driver responsibilities'.
"How this can be seen as best practice is unbelievable."
Ona de Rooy, general manager - central division of the ministry, said the code is the result of three years' work and was completed prior to the release of the royal commission report into Pike River.
Work on the review of the code started in November 2009 and a first draft was produced in November 2010, which was sent out for consultation.
However, the final document was not created in isolation to external events, she said. "During the review and consultation process, issues were raised by the ministry's inspectorate, forest owners and contractors relating to prosecutions and coroners' findings as new information became available.
"The ministry is continuing to work through the recommendations of the Pike River Royal Commission and continuing to work with the Health and Safety Taskforce on their recommendations for change within the health and safety system."
Those considerations are broader and more strategic than the review of individual codes, she said.
"The ministry is confident that the new [code] will contribute to lowering the work toll in forestry, as it is one of the fundamental elements in a range of work across the sector focused on safety."
De Rooy said the development of the code included international discussions, in particular with British Columbia, Canada, which has a significant forestry industry.
The forestry sector has the highest rate of fatal work-related injuries in New Zealand. The rate of ACC claims for the forestry sector is almost six times the average rate for all sectors.
"I'm disappointed to hear Helen Kelly, for reasons of her own, hijacking a positive and useful development," Glen Mackie, senior policy analyst at the New Zealand Forest Owners Association, said.
Mackie said the industry has had a code for 15 years and it has resulted in a significant reduction in injuries and he was hoping the update would further reduce incidents of serious harm.
"It specifically addresses some of the high-risk activities in the industry, such as breaking out," he said.
Breaking out is the extraction of logs from a forest, often on difficult terrain.
Mackie said consultation on the code was undertaken on all levels with the Forest Industry Contractors Association and the companies themselves.
"Extensive efforts were made to get down to individual workers," he said.
"To say it will have no effect is disappointing," he said. "It shows a lack of understanding of the changes."
Mackie said the current level of injury is unacceptable, but international injury statistics which cast New Zealand's injury rate in a highly unfavourable light are flawed because they do not address the real level of logging activity undertaken by workers.
Those statistics show injury per 100,000 workers, but Mackie said a better comparison is injury per cubic metre of timber extracted.
That focuses in on the actual volume of logs being worked and extracted because that is the high-risk activity.
On that basis, New Zealand is actually ahead of Britain on safety because we extract more than three times the amount of timber.
Mackie said in 2006 there were around 380 serious harm injuries in the industry when around 18 million cubic metres of timber was extracted. He is hoping that in 2012, with 26 million cubic metres extracted, that will drop below 300 as measured by ACC.
"We are very proud of the code and are hopeful it will have a significant effect," he said.
Kelly said workers committees and trained health and safety reps were needed in the industry. She added that written employment agreements are rare and there is too much flexibility within the new standards, for example requiring seat belts to be worn only "where fitted".
She also took issue with a lack of maximum hours worked, saying fatigue is a major contributor to serious harm injuries.
"I've heard appalling stories of fatigue," she said.
Contracting out allows the forest owners to remove themselves from responsibility, she said. The status of such contract workers was an issue addressed in the Pike River report.
Kelly said there had been 13 deaths in the industry over three years, not counting logging trucks. Five deaths had occurred since last Christmas, she said.
- Sunday Star Times
What do you think of the new banknotes?Related story: Better, brighter Kiwi banknotes |
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Vipera Berus: during the descent from Monte Lastroni we ran across this specimen, desperately trying to get away from us. The European Viper (or European Adder) usually has a cross type pattern on its back but there are animals which are completely black. In German, these animals are called Höllotter (Hell Adder), though they are the same species. The European Adder is the only poisonous snake in these parts.
Sept 9th 2009 |
Vermont's congressional delegation announced $2 million in "Brownfields" taxpayer-funded grants for the state last week. The Environmental Protection Agency funding of $400,000 is from the economic stimulus plan and will go towards clean up of and reinvestment in properties blighted by hazardous waste.
The City of Burlington will receive a $200,000 grant; the City of St. Albans will receive $400,000 in cleanup funds, and the New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro will receive a $200,000 cleanup grant.
There are also four regional recipients. The Windham Regional Commission will receive $400,000. The Lamoille County Planning Commission will receive $400,000. The Northwest Regional Planning Commission will receive $200,000. The Rutland Regional Planning Commission will receive $200,000.
The EPA defines a brownfield site as a location where the presence of a hazardous substance may complicate the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of the property. Cleaning up polluted site takes development pressures off of undeveloped open land. It also improves and protects the environment. |
The Green Wave is a significant movie because it can be seen from different perspectives. It is a documentary that reflects a very important historical event in Iran. After 1979 revolution, the Green Movement is the biggest socio-political movement in Iran. This movie very closely reflects the events as they happened in Iran. Most of the scenes are collected from social media, from the videos that where captured by ordinary people who were present right at the scene on the streets of Tehran. Another value of the movie is its creative and modern method of storytelling. The film's narrative is effectively told through interviews and video footage in the voices of the people who have witnessed such an historic event.
I am very happy I watched the movie at the presence of Ali Samadi, the directer, and could talk to him about the movie and hear other audiences' questions and comments on it. Ali was very honest and helpful, sharing his thoughts and experience with all of us. As an Iranian living in USA, I think that it is absolutely important to watch these types of artistic works together with others and raise our awareness of what is going on in the world we live in. |
tacky glue,peppermint candies,cardboard,ribbon
Cut out a circle shape from the cardboard. Then cut out the center to make a wreath form. If you don't have cardboard, you can use an empty cereal box. Spread the glue over the wreath form. Then have the children place the candies all around the wreath. You have the option of leaving the wrappers on the candies, or taking them off. Make a bow with the ribbon and glue to the top center. Let dry. Then depending on the size of the wreath, you can place a magnet on the back to hang on the fridge, or you can tie a ribbon hanger around the top to put on the tree or display. |
Housing markets – a shelter from the storm or cause of the storm?
Almost eighty participants from Europe, the United States and Asia took part in this conference which was jointly organized by SUERF and the Bank of Finland. This was the fourth of their joint conferences taking place every second year.In their welcoming words and opening address Catherine Lubochinsky, President of SUERF, and Sinikka Salo, Member of the Board of the Bank of Finland, respectively, both noted that asset prices are back on the agenda of central banks' policy discussions. Dr. Salo also reminded us of the important role played by well functioning structures and institutions of housing markets in providing cost-effective and quality housing to society.Read more
Oil price affects the economies of oil-producing countries in many ways
Editor Jouko Vilmunen Publisher Bank of Finland ISSN 1796-9131 (online) PO Box 160, FI–00101 Helsinki Email: firstname.lastname@example.org www.bof.fi and www.bof.fi/bofit
Research Newsletter 3/2009 (PDF) |
Syracuse, NY -- In front of a sold-out crowd Monday at Syracuse Stage, Harry Belafonte told stories from his life of activism and encouraged people to work together to achieve peace.
“We are the keepers of truth. We are at the gates of knowledge. We are the most powerful force on the face of the earth,” said Belafonte, 83. “I would gladly debate anybody who would like to challenge that.”
Belafonte was in Syracuse to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Syracuse Peace Council. He flew in from Utah where his documentary film “Sing Your Song” was shown during the opening night of the Sundance Film Festival.
The film tells the stories of activists and artists who are unknown or have more to say, Belafonte said. He was inspired to create the film shortly after the death of his friend Marlon Brando in 2004, a man who was more than just an actor, he said.
“When I read the eulogy, I was saddened by the fact that all the things that he did and all the (ways) he made a difference, were not evident to the larger masses,” Belafonte said. “I looked around and saw so many people passing away, most of them in my age group, and I said, ‘Where is their story?’ Their story is missing. I decided that I would grab some cameras and rush around the world, making sure I documented the lives of those who remain.”
One of the people Belafonte interviewed for the film was Nelson Mandela. “Although much is known about him, much is not known about him,” said Belafonte, who was involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Belafonte encouraged the audience to use technology to communicate and learn about what is really going on in the world.
“We hardly hear about Afghanistan. We hardly hear about Iraq. We hardly hear about what’s going on in other places in the world where we are engaged in military ventures,” Belafonte said. “Somehow the enemy has cleverly found a way to navigate around truth and around information.”
Before leaving for Syracuse, Belafonte remembered a person asking him where he was going. When Belafonte told the person that he was speaking at the Peace Council celebration they said, “Well, you shouldn’t have too much difficulty with that audience. That’s like preaching to the choir.” Here is how Belafonte responded:
“I was reminded of something my friend Dr. King (Martin Luther King Jr.) once said when he was accused of doing just that. He said, ‘Well I’ll tell ya, if you don’t preach to the choir, they could stop singing.’ ”
Contact Fernando Alfonso at firstname.lastname@example.org or 470-3039. |
Former Burmese chief of intelligence Khin Nyunt, once feared and loathed for the torture his agents inflicted, now runs an art gallery. Former Burmese dictator Than Shwe is reportedly enjoying a peaceful retirement in a secluded compound, while family members who grew rich during his military rule live luxurious lifestyles that contrast with the crippling poverty that afflicts most of the country. And a former top general in what was one of the world’s most repressive governments, Thein Sein, is president, hailed both inside the country and abroad as a great reformer. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
To the outside world, Myanmar’s transition from military rule to fledgling democracy can appear jarringly forgiving.
Even those who suffered torture and years of solitary confinement as political prisoners say there is no point calling for retribution. They cite the role of Buddhism, a certain pragmatism and, in some cases, political calculations for their restraint.
The old elite — the generals and the businesspeople who were close to them — are reinventing themselves.
The most stark example may be Khin Nyunt, who opened his art gallery and cafe last month in the compound of his yellow-ocher mansion in Yangon that during the junta’s rule was off-limits to all but those with top military clearance.
Khin Nyunt spends his mornings in prayer surrounded by Buddhist statues and his afternoons tending to an orchid garden.
“I don’t want to analyze or look back on the actions of the past,” Khin Nyunt said in an interview. “Look at how peaceful my life is now, very peaceful.”
Unlike in other countries emerging from years of extreme repression, there have been few calls in Myanmar for trials, war crimes tribunals or even something like the truth-and-reconciliation commission that helped South Africa move beyond apartheid.
The tone has been set by the most famous of the thousands of the country’s former political prisoners, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent a total of 15 years under house arrest before her release in 2010.
“I, for one, am entirely against the whole concept of revenge,” she said earlier this month to an audience of Burmese government officials and foreign business executives.
“I would like us to have the courage to be able to face our past squarely, but making it quite clear that I personally am not for trying anybody or punishing them or seeking revenge or taking the kind of action that will destroy people for what they have done in the past,” she said.
For Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, which leads the opposition in the Burmese parliament, there is a critical political element to the pragmatism. The next general elections are in 2015 and for them to proceed smoothly without a threat of a return to military rule, many are urging a go-softly approach.
Myanmar has been nominally under civilian rule for the past two years, but the government officials leading the transition to democracy today are largely the former apparatchiks of the military governments that ruled the country for five decades.
Thiha Saw, a leading journalist, said this is the critical distinction between Myanmar and other societies going through convulsive transformations.
“This is not a bottom-up revolution,” he said. “It’s a top-down transformation.” |
The initial e-mail triggered suspicion.
People and companies who buy these kinds of rad-chips are usually well-established, repeat customers — more multinational corporation than mom and pop.
Aeroflex salesmen had never heard of “Philip Hope” or his company, “Sierra Electronic Instruments.”
Most suspicious of all, just days after placing the order, Hope sent Aeroflex a certified check for the full amount, US$549,654. That was rare. Buyers were expected to make a deposit, but nobody paid up front.
The suspicious Aeroflex employees contacted the US’ Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which keeps a special counter-proliferation office in the space technology hub of Colorado Springs.
Based on quick record checks, the HSI agents drew a portrait of “Philip Hope.” The man was a Chinese immigrant and legal permanent resident, Philip Chaohui He, an engineer for the state of California assigned to a Bay Bridge renovation project. Sierra Electronic Instruments was a start-up run from the one-room office in Chinatown.
The HSI agents concluded that He was buying the rad-chips on behalf of someone else. Someone rich. Someone who could not legally acquire them. Probably someone in China — likely the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, a state-run entity that operates nearly all of China’s military and civilian space projects.
China Aerospace officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The rad-chips He ordered from Aeroflex are not the most powerful on the market, and could not operate a sophisticated military satellite on their own. Yet experts say they have few uses other than as one of the many components of a sophisticated satellite.
“You wouldn’t spend that kind of money on those microchips unless you intended to use them in much bigger satellites,” said Alvar Saenz-Otero, associate director of the Space Systems Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Despite the concerns about where and how the components might be used, He’s order of 312 rad-chips violated no law. These chips may be legally sold domestically, and to foreign buyers who obtain a US State Department license.
They may not be exported outside the US to certain nations, including China. He had the chips sent to his office address in Oakland, making the deal legal. If He tried to take them abroad, he would be breaking the law.
The agents faced the key question that comes in almost every counterproliferation case: Could they lure the suspect into a sting? If so, would it be worth the trouble?
Undercover operations are time-consuming, expensive and risky. If agents dangled rad-chips in front of the suspect and he got away, the components would probably end up on Chinese satellites. If they delivered the chips and watched him closely, he might lead them to a network traceable to Beijing.
The agents in the case faced another complication: At the time, Aeroflex — the very manufacturer enlisted to help with the sting — was itself under civil investigation for sending rad-chips to China.
Although that investigation was still under way, Aeroflex had already admitted that it sent more than 14,500 rad-chips to China between 2003 and 2008. |
Despite the American Institute in Taiwan’s denials of US involvement in the case involving former Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) deputy minister Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀), the nature of the circumstances in which the allegations of leaking confidential information to China have emerged only makes sense if the US had played a crucial role.
Of course, countries involved in espionage do not go around broadcasting their clandestine actions unless they are, for example, trying to secure the release of an agent who has been caught. Given the circumstances, several questions have arisen.
First, MAC Minister Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) initially said that he had been informed of Chang’s alleged transgressions by an “outside source,” and it was this information that instigated the case. Who was this outside source?
We can answer this on two levels. For a start, the outside source must have been either China or the US, but it is unlikely to have been China, for the revelations are unhelpful for Beijing’s aim of eventual unification. Also, these days, nobody would risk spying on China for Taiwan, for to do so would be to risk offending Chinese President Xi Jinping (習進平) and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) at the same time. Therefore, the source must have been the US, and only the US would have the ability to do this.
In addition, the Ma administration receives intelligence about the actions of people in their circles all the time, but do not always act on such reports. It would probably have known about concerns over certain individuals, such as former Taoyuan County deputy commissioner Yeh Shih-wen (葉世文) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Lai Su-ju (賴素如), but did not act until the news broke about their alleged involvement in corruption.
However, in this latest instance the KMT did not dare ignore the intelligence. Only the US would have this kind of influence over the Ma administration.
Second, why was it necessary to remove Chang from his position in the first place? Why the need to discipline him at the same time as offering a reward?
The outside source would not have handed national security intelligence of this importance to Wang, a mere minister-level official, and neither would Wang have dared suggest that Chang, whom the president had specifically chosen for the job, be plucked from his seat.
Therefore, it would have been Ma himself who received the intelligence from the US, and Ma knew that the reported misdemeanor was not instigated by Chang, as it was Ma himself who had wanted the information leaked. All he could do, then, was to feign ignorance and let Chang take the fall. Wanting to avoid getting his hands dirty, the president left Wang to deal with it or else go through National Security Council Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰).
That is why Wang was able to dangle the possibility of chairmanship of a state-run company in front of Chang, which would have sent a message to the US. It is inconceivable that neither Wang nor the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau knew the truth of the matter and were just following orders from their superiors. Ma, having sought to distance himself from the matter and put King into the firing line, could have his spokesperson announce that everything was in hand.
Third, it needs to be determined whether there is any tension between Chang and King. Ma would not have picked Chang without having first cleared it with King, the “underground president,” but Chang had to take the fall for not playing the game. |
Exercising for 15 minutes a day adds three years to a person’s life expectancy, according to the first study to show there’s a health benefit from even low levels of physical activity.
In a study involving more than 400,000 people, those who exercised for 90 minutes a week were also 14 percent less likely to have died after eight years than those who were inactive, researchers at Taiwan’s National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) wrote in The Lancet medical journal last Tuesday. Every extra 15 minutes of exercise reduced the risk by a further 4 percent.
The WHO recommends adults aged 18 to 64 years exercise for at least 150 minutes a week. While one-third of American adults meet that goal, less than one-fifth of the population in East Asian nations such as China, Japan and Taiwan do, the authors wrote. The study shows that even a small amount of exercise can lower an individual’s risk of death and disease, and a nation’s health costs, they said.
“This advice is very simple and probably easily achievable,” Anil Nigam and Martin Juneau, researchers at the Montreal Heart Institute, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study. “Governments and health professionals both have major roles to play to spread this good news story and convince people of the importance of being at least minimally active.”
Researchers led by Wen Chi-pang at Taiwan’s Institute of Population Science studied 416,175 healthy volunteers aged 20 years or older who participated in a medical screening program in Taipei from 1996 to 2008, with an average follow-up of eight years. Participants were classed in one of five categories of exercise, from “inactive” to “very high” activity.
1. vigorously adv.
激烈地 (ji1 lie4 de5)
例: He defended himself so vigorously that I had to believe him.
2. adhere to v.
遵照 (zun1 chao4)
例: The government is fining manufacturers for not adhering to regulations.
3. disparity n.
差距 (cha1 ju4)
例: Tax exemptions for the rich only exacerbate the economic disparity between the rich and the poor.
More than half of all participants were classed as “inactive,” and a further 22 percent as “low volume” active. Compared with the inactive group, those in the “low volume” category had a 14 percent reduction in their risk of death over the course of the study, Wen and colleagues wrote. At age 30, they also had a life expectancy that was 2.6 years longer for men and 3.1 years longer for women.
Every extra 15 minutes of exercise reduced the risk by an additional 4 percent up to 100 minutes a day, after which there was no additional benefit. The reduction was as high as 40 percent for those who exercised most often and most vigorously.
“If the minimum amount of exercise we suggest is adhered to, mortality from heart disease, diabetes, and cancer could be reduced,” Wen and colleagues wrote. “This low volume of physical activity could play a central part in the global war against non-communicable diseases, reducing medical costs and health disparities.”
The study was funded by Taiwan’s Department of Health, the Clinical Trial and Research Center of Excellence and the NHRI. |
Commercial Roof Structure - Roof Inspections
Inspector will check underlayment, flashing and drip edges and battens (when applicable).
Roof Sheathing, Nailing, Blocking, and Ply Clips
Inspector will verify sheathing size and type, according to approved plans. Inspect crickets where applicable and verify sheathing is nailed according to design. Inspector will also verify fire rated sheeting, nail size, installation of ply clips and check unsupported edge blocking.
Once the in progress inspections are performed, then inspector will perform the final roof inspection, which will include:
- Check Slope and Materials Per Code and Specifications.
- Check flashing including, valleys, coping, drip edge, and wall per code and specifications.
- Check Fasteners
- Check Roof Drainage |
Life's Motto No.1651:01 AM
Friend/Family/or/Stranger to me, "You know what? I had tell you something ... (10 second pause) Hmmm ... Oh! Well, never mind ... may be some other time...". My reaction, "O.K." And I am back to doing whatever I was before the 'person' interrupted me and my thoughts! You could never annoy me with such tactics. On some occasions I might even seem unconcerned but I am really just minding-my-own-business. Since I always speak my mind [and when I don't I have a very good reason for it], I assume the same from other people. I am not a mind reader, and I always take people at face value. If you say, you are alright. I would assume you are and not nag you with, "Are you sure?!" If you say you are busy, I would believe you and never taunt you later about it. My Life's Motto [#165] - Live and Let Live!
But do you think such liberties are returned my way? You guessed right! The answer is No! I do not know why people think giving other people a difficult time, or taunting them about some silly incidences from the past is a great ice-breaker or a conversation starter. Or worse, when people ask inappropriate or personal questions [like when are you going to have a baby!] to prove how close they are to you or how concerned they are about you. So I thought, instead of cribbing about it, I might as well help such 'challenged' people and give them some conversation starters' for future at least:-
1. You can talk about the weather but not for more than a minute
2. Talk about travel or about any recent vacation they might have taken [but do not ask which hotel they stayed in or how much was the room for!]
3. Ask about their work and future plans [but not in so much detail that it startes sounding fishy. And never ask anyone's salary!]
4. Discuss Politics, Entertainment, Sports, Fitness [Here you got your trump card - All-you-can-ask/talk-buffet]
5. If you are not from the same country/culture, you are free to exchange facts and features about it, too!
These should help you sustain a conversation for at least one meeting. Rest, I am relying on the other party's social skills [:P]. Though I cannot expect every one I meet in my life to have read my blog [and this post!] but I submit this feature as my contribution in Public Interest.
Find me on Facebook. |
Here are a few highlights of our Preschool Christmas Party along with some games you might like to try too!
We added a little sparkle to the graphing process! Young children exploring the graphing process with the use of gems and rulers.
Exploring the science of Christmas with this fun candy cane science activity!
Playing our own rendition of Who Stole the Candy from the Candy Cane Jar?
Our paper plate pine needle wreaths turned out more beautiful than our wreath on the door!
It just so happens that pinecone painting is a wonderful process with a beautiful finish!
Exploring a few new DIY paintbrushes during the holiday season. This is our DIY holiday bow paintbrush!
Take time for play all throughout the holiday season!
The children created their own easel paper presents through this simple easel starter!
With so many things on your wish list, it can be hard to narrow down and remember everyone in the process. These lists of Top Toys may be just the help you need!
This little elf likes to sit right next to the Christmas tree!
We shared what we were thankful for through this interesting chart making process. |
The Association of Tea Bloggers: An Introduction
By Jason Walker
If you've ever tried to learn about teas by doing research on the Internet, you probably got confused about some information. How much caffeine does white tea actually have? Does oolong tea help you lose weight? What's the difference between an yixing pot and a gaiwan? How do I choose and prepare the right tea for me?
The Association of Tea Bloggers offers a beacon of clarity. The ATB is a group of tea bloggers who have joined together as peers to improve the quality of our blogs while serving the needs of the tea community.
Since accurate tea information is important, the ATB works to share information from tea retailers and tea researchers to promote a greater understanding of tea and tea culture. The organization does this through community forum discussions, sharing of links to reliable information, and group projects. One recent example is the Green Tea Flavor Project, which several members have started working on. ATB members worked backward from tea tasting research. We studied common flavor elements from the research, reproduced them, and then went through our tea collections to discover which teas offered stronger examples of those flavors. Results were educational and fun for us bloggers and our readers. Two recent flavors discussed include seaweed and parsley.
The ATB also reaches out to the larger tea community. An ATB representative attended the World Tea Expo in Boston, and a screening of the new documentary and book "The Meaning of Tea" in New York City. Our presence at events like these keeps us in touch with the direction of the tea industry and enables us to be a united voice for our blog communities.
TeaMuse.com is pleased to feature a blogger and news from the Association of Tea Bloggers in future editions of our online newsletter. Please feel free to let us know what tea topics you'd like them to tackle by emailing us at firstname.lastname@example.org |
What happens when you combine Post-it Notes with USB drives? You get dataStickies of course. This innovative technology can be carried like a stack of sticky notes, and simply peel and then stick anywhere. Data is transmitted via ODTS (Optical Data Transfer Surface), which is a panel that can be attached to the front surface of devices like computer screens, televisions, music systems, etc. The device uses a special conductive adhesive that sticks them to the ODTS and serves as the medium that transfers the data. Continue reading for more pictures and information.
According to Yanko Design, "They can be stacked and used together for increased capacity, which also enables carrying them together. The top surface can be written on. If a file needs to be given to someone, a single sticky can be handed out rather than an entire pen drive. The dataSTICKIES are not easily lost because they can be stuck down on any object." |
The FCC has set the date for the upcoming 700MHz auction, which we have been looking at for a long time. The auction will take place on January 16th 2008, and will revolve around the already-carved-up spectrum in various aspects. There will be different offerings for different companies involved, so there will likely be a lot of private and public interest in acquiring what is available:
There is a nationwide 10 MHz paired block in which the winner will have to provide a public safety network in addition to any private use. There is a 22 MHz paired block divided into 12 regional licenses which has open device and software mandates. There are two economic area block of 176 licenses each, one is 12 MHz paired and the other is 6 MHz unpaired. Finally there is a 12 MHz paired block of 734 metro area licenses.
Just a few weeks ago, the FCC laid down the rules governing the auction, which has given both potential auctioneers and regular people an idea of what sort of products and services we can expect to come out of it.
I would like to know if Google still plans on participating, since some of their requests to the FCC were fulfilled but not all. |
YOU have just five more days to use your £7,000 Isa allowance for this year or lose it forever. If you're one of those investors who reacts to a deadline as a trained rat does to a bell, keep calm. Isas may be tax-free, but that's irrelevant unless you have taxable returns in the first place, so choose carefully.
Even at this late stage, you should first take a long, cool look at what you already have in your investment portfolio before doing anything. When you have everything laid out before you, the chances are you'll be surprised at what you have. According to the latest figures, some six in 10 people never review their holdings.
Anthony Yadgaroff of Allenbridge says: "Most people are performance-chasers. They buy previously successful funds, such as Aberdeen Technology and Invesco European, then fail to monitor performance and suffer losses."
According to Brian Dennehy, the managing director of Dennehy Weller, free Isa guides add to the problem by encouraging people to buy "fad" funds. Roderic Rennison, the financial services director of Charcolonline, adds: "In the majority of cases, there's a mismatch between the investor's attitude to risk and the investments they hold."
Review your portfolio
1. List holdings and calculate how much each is worth.
2. Find out what the experts are saying about your current holdings. A limited amount of research can be done for free. Visit financial advisers' websites, for instance.
3. Bestinvest's six-monthly Spot the Dog guide highlights underperforming funds. "Dog" funds underperform the relevant stockmarket index for three consecutive years or by 10 per cent over three-year period on a cumulative basis.
The guide should be treated as a snapshot, says John Turton of Bestinvest. "You must also look at our latest information on the fund manager and the group.
"For instance, Scottish Widows comes out badly in Spot the Dog, but they've made a lot of changes aimed at improving performance." The latest guide is based on figures compiled on December 31, 2001.
4. A useful tip for those who cannot bear to part with existing holdings comes from Jonathan Fry of Premier Investments. Mentally convert everything into cash and decide whether you would still invest it in the same funds, he says.
5. Some stockbroker and fund supermarket websites provide investment "wizards" to suggest sample portfolios after helping you to identify your requirements and risk profile. Visit several sites to test consistency, and remember: few fund supermarkets (Schwab is a rare exception) offer a comprehensive selection.
6. Look at your underlying holdings. Morningstar offers a "portfolio X-ray" service which helps you identify where your funds are invested. It generates various lists - the 10 biggest holdings across your entire portfolio, for instance, or a geographical breakdown. You have to register with Morningstar, but the service is free. Much of the information will be months old, however, as fund managers are required to list holdings only twice a year.
7. Check the fund factsheets on sites such as Morningstar, Allenbridge, Charcol and Bestinvest. They carry brokers' opinions of how the funds are performing, ratings and other news about the managers and the management groups.
8. If you want to use your Isa allowance, but don't know where to put it, some managers will take the cash and then feed it gradually into the market later on. If you choose a phasing option, you are setting an automatic process in action, so be sure to monitor it carefully. You can cancel during the mandatory 14-day cooling-off period. After that, early leavers have to pay charges.
Dresdner RCM's plan is unusual in that you are fully invested from the start in a gilt fund and are then moved into either the equity fund or equity income fund in three phases over the year - unless you choose to remain in gilts.
- The first 300 Sunday Telegraph readers to call 0845 6021097 will be sent a free copy of Dennehy Weller's Top Funds Guide. The guide, which normally costs non-clients £3, contains no advertising, and includes useful information on investment risk, as well as showing how Dennehy Weller selects funds and makes recommendations for a range of sectors
- www.allenbridge.com or 0800 33 99 99; www.bestinvest.com or 020 7321 0100; www.charcolonline,co.uk or 0800 71 81 91; www.morningstar.co.uk.
- Investment Management Association (IMA - formerly Autif): 020 7831 0898 or www.investmentuk.org. Association of Investment Trust Companies (AITC): 020 7282 5555 or www.aitc.co.uk. Dennehy Weller & Co: 020 8467 1666. |
Tomatoes, peppers, peaches, cucumbers and nectarines can all be affected, as can many ornamentals.
Usually the offenders are not red and not spiders. You may see tiny, light yellowy-green mites on the back of leaves, although a hand lens may be needed.
In severe cases, leaves may drop and you may see very fine webbing on stalks and leaves.
It's best to treat the problem as soon as seen; control is difficult owing to the speed infestations spread.
For small numbers on edible crops try a product such as Growing Success Fruit & Veg Bug Killer. Fatty acids such as Bayer Organic Pest Control, or Doff Greenfly and Blackfly Killer may also help.
A predatory mite (Phytoseiulus persimilis) feeds on the eggs and active stages of glasshouse red spider mite. Available by mail order (01568 611729; www.thenaturalgardener.co.uk).
Were you involved with the RHS 'Dig It Together' Day over the weekend of September 4-5? Lots of gardening clubs and societies held events around the country. An ideal way to get to know other gardeners and to share experiences. |
CrazyRussianHacker has been sharing his unique brand of science experiments, handy hints - or "life hacks" - and party tricks on YouTube since May 2012 and has gathered a following of over one million regular viewers in the process.
His video "You've Been Using Aluminium Foil Wrong" caused something of a stir when posted in the Telegraph's Good to Share section early on Wednesday, with thousands of viewers admitting they had never heard of the simple trick that makes using kitchen foil and clingfilm rather less of a challenge. I for one now cannot wait to go home and wrap leftover miscellany.
Inspired by this, I investigated what other everyday tasks that I, like many others, have been doing wrong all this time according to our Russian friend. Little did I know how spectacularly I had been failing.
Firstly, alcohol. How many hours have you spent removing the foil from the top of a wine bottle with the little knife on the corkscrew? Too many to count? Also, I find it gets slightly harder with every bottle, although that might be just because its takes a little longer to find my glasses each time.
Drinkers, fiddle no more...
Now, I like an orange as much as the next man but like many of those desk-bound I rarely have the patience and necessary cleaning materials on hand to deal with a) peeling one and b) mopping up the sticky aftermath.
Turns out all I need is a knife and to learn this easy technique. And patience.
Chicken wings: such a lot of work and mess for so little reward. The ratio of napkins to mouthfuls is simply ludicrous, but not, apparently, when you eat them like so:
Sticking with the awkward food theme, the rise of the cupcake in recent years has presented many, the bearded man especially, with a quandry. How does one fit that treat, laden with lcing, in one's mouth, without looking like a camp gluttonous caveman? The first tip in this video is how...
And yes, I've even being using cars wrong. |
After years of head-scratching, the International Tennis Federation has come up with some new-look branding in the hope of revitalising the Davis Cup brand.
The venerable team competition is now appearing on posters as “the World Cup of tennis”, while a promotion entitled “Show Your Colours” is using each team’s flags as a rallying point for fans.
A desperate and underpowered attempt to regain a little of the cup’s lost limelight?
Time will tell, but let us not be too negative. This was already promising to be a good weekend for the competition before a ball had been hit.
For one thing, the return of Andy Murray and Great Britain to the world group has added significantly to its historical resonance.
Their first-round tie against the US, which started on Friday night when Murray faced Donald Young at San Diego’s Petco Park, is a rematch of the first Davis Cup tie from Boston in 1900, which the hosts won 3-0.
The British team have underperformed for so long that a victory here would be their first in the world group since 1986.
And yet, only eight years before that, John Lloyd and Buster Mottram faced John McEnroe and his fellow Americans in another epic: the 1978 final at Palm Springs.
Perhaps it is jingoistic to suggest that the resurgence of Great Britain – which has been powered by some inspired selections by team captain Leon Smith and an array of strong doubles players – benefits the whole competition.
But everyone loves to beat the Brits, in any sport. It is just that, in tennis, those victories are slightly less easy to come by than they used to be.
Meanwhile, Switzerland’s attempt to land a first Davis Cup title has been boosted by Roger Federer’s decision to participate in the first match of the year.
Normally, Federer leaves Stan Wawrinka – the Australian Open champion – in charge and rides in at the last gasp to head off relegation in the September play-off.
This year, though, Federer seems to have been inspired by the possibility of actually winning the competition.
And it is hard to see who might stop the Swiss champions if both stay fit and available throughout the season.
Until yesterday, the last nation to combine two individual grand slam winners was Spain, which brought together Rafael Nadal and Juan Carlos Ferrero in 2005.
After Nadal came within a match of adding a 14th grand slam title to his tally in Australia a week ago, it is easy to see why Federer might want to shore up the only gap in his otherwise impeccable CV: the lack of a Davis Cup title (Nadal, by comparison, has four.)
Success in the final in 10 months’ time would certainly add another wrinkle to the ongoing “greatest of all time” debate.
But whatever Federer’s motivations, it was encouraging to see the most lauded figure in the sport return to the fray against Serbia on Friday, easing past Ilija Bozoljac in straight sets in Novi Sad.
The only shame is that he will not be playing Novak Djokovic on Sunday, for the world No2 has opted for a skiing trip to his childhood home of Kopaonik instead.
Here we see the chief difficulty of team competitions in men’s tennis.
For the best part of a decade, the sport’s narrative has revolved around the crunching collisions between the super-elite in the final stages of grand slams.
Yet when was the last time this happened in the Davis Cup?
The same problem applies to the proposed International Tennis Premier League, a plan to create star-studded teams based in four Asian cities, which is being assembled by former doubles champion Mahesh Bhupathi.
You could see Murray or Djokovic agreeing to hang out in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur for a couple of weeks in December; they would be doing warm-weather training somewhere else at that time of the year anyway.
But it is hard to see them clocking up any extra miles by making the journeys to away trips, which would forestall the tastiest match-ups.
The variety and passion of the Davis Cup make it an important cog in the calendar, even now. Y
et until the big names start to “show their colours” more often, the competition will continue to struggle for airtime. |
by Staff Writers
Washington DC (SPX) May 28, 2012
The hordes of bark beetles that have bored their way through more than six billion trees in the western United States and British Columbia since the 1990s do more than kill stately pine, spruce and other trees. Results of a new study show that these pests can make trees release up to 20 times more of the organic substances that foster haze and air pollution in forested areas.
A paper reporting the findings appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, published by the American Chemical Society.
Scientists Kara Huff Hartz of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Gannet Hallar of the Desert Research Institute's Storm Peak Laboratory in Steamboat Springs, Colo., and colleagues say that western North America is experiencing a population explosion of mountain pine beetles, a type of bark beetle that damages and kills pines and other trees.
The beetles bore into the bark of pine trees to lay eggs.
Gases called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are released from the bore holes, which act as defense mechanisms against the beetles.
VOCs, however, also contribute to the smog and haze that obscures views of natural landscapes in U.S. national parks and other natural areas where tourists flock in summer.
"These results highlight one of the many potential feedbacks due to aerosols, which continue to be the greatest challenge to improving predictive models for air quality, visibility and climate," says Alex Pszenny, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
To determine how beetle attacks affect the atmosphere, the researchers measured VOC levels in the air near healthy and infected pine trees.
They found that beetle-infested trees release up to 20 times more VOCs than healthy trees near the ground surface.
The predominant type of VOC released by trees was called B-phellandrene.
The data suggest that the bark beetle epidemic in the western United States could have led to higher concentrations of organic compounds in the air, which may contribute to haze.
The haze, say the scientists, may in turn harm human health, reduce visibility and affect climate.
Other authors of the paper are Hardik Amin and Aaron Brown of Southern Illinois University Carbondale; P. Tyson Atkins of the Desert Research Institute; Rachel Russo of the University of New Hampshire; and Barkley Sive of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Forestry News - Global and Local News, Science and Application
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"Women are less likely than men to receive the appropriate treatment
after a heart attack and are more likely than men to die in the first
year after a heart attack."
Learn more about treating heart disease:
||Women and Heart Disease – a patient resource guide published by WomenHeart. This interactive online workbook provides educational resources and support as you learn about cardiovascular disease and the impact it has on overall health. The workbook includes videos, print tools, and an audio version of the written text. [en español, Las mujeres y la enfermedad cardíaca]
Ask a Texas Heart Institute Doctor . . .
. . . recent questions and responses
focused on women and heart disease.
Submit your own question to Ask the Heart Doctor or search previous postings.
Updated January 2015 |
As I have studied repentance, forgiveness, and consequences, two things have become clear: 1) there are several camps on these issues in the church, 2) a halfway decent treatment of the subject would take several dozen posts. Therefore, this will be my thoughts, with the understanding some will disagree, and I will keep it to a few posts.
In part, this is in response to a 350 post thread on the TMB message boards (login required). The thread was started to kick around my Oct 28th post I sinned, I expect you to pay for that. Some have suggested forgiveness removes consequences, and there has been debate about what repentance means.
“Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.” [Luke 17:3 ESV]
The first thing I see in this scripture is repentance is to precede forgiveness. This fits with how God forgives us – we must admit and turn from our sins to receive forgiveness and eternal life. No repentance, no forgiveness. This means we need to understand repentance – what it is, and what it is not.
Repentance is not just being sorry we got caught, nor is it wanting to forget the whole thing. The Greek word is Metanoeo, and it means:
to change one’s mind, i.e. to repent
to change one’s mind for better, heartily to amend with abhorrence of one’s past sins
This is more than an “I’m sorry”! True repentance means we get it, we see how wrong and hurtful our sin was, and we change our mind about the sin. In Matthew 3:8 John the Baptist said to the Pharisees and Sadducees “Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance” – He expected their actions to reflect a changed heart.
Chew on that, more tomorrow…
Links to blog posts that stood out to me this last week:
Black and Married with Kids
How To Get Rid of the Honey-Do List and Keep It Gone ◄ A very channelling thought here.
Don’t Just Stay in Your Marriage, Stay in LOVE ◄ Amen to this!
Prostate Cancer Can Destroy Your Marriage ◄ Not something we like to think about, but important!
How My Wife Transformed Me ◄ Has your wife transformed you?
The Generous Wife
Start Early ◄ Ideas for doing the twelve days of Christmas.
For Love ◄ I did a good thing – but I was very close to not doing it. So glad I did.
Jumping on the “Blessed” Bandwagon ◄ Yeah, I rock. (She makes it easy!)
Walk the Walk ◄ Talk is nice, but cheap!
Hot, Holy and Humorous
Intimacy in Marriage
Does Your Husband Demand Certain Sex Acts? ◄ If you’re pushing for something, you should read this.
Joe Beam’s Blog
Husband Not Interested In Making Love ◄ A lot of good information in this post!
“What’s the big deal about Underwear?” (A post for the wives) ◄ I know you get this – but if you want a good way to help your wife get it, try this.
One Flesh Marriage
Broken Dreams ◄ Dreams and expectations can be powerful or painful.
Redeeming Marriages with Jack and Janet
Prophetic Eyes for Your Spouse ◄ “Have a vision for who you and your spouse are becoming.”
The Romantic Vineyard
Our 4th Blogiversary! ◄ Congrats to Debi and Tom – they consistently provide a good deal of great content!
Confessions of a Blessed Wife ◄ Read this carefully and see the heart of a loving husband behind the words. We could all learn a great deal from Tom!
Flirting With Your Spouse 101 ◄ Do you flirt with your bride?
Safe at home
Putting Protective Locks on Your Marriage ◄ Some important locks here.
Stupendous Marriage Show 67: Happy Thanksgiving! ◄ Some great thoughts on affairs. |
Many scientists raise a skeptical eyebrow to traditional herbal treatments, but a new phylogenetic study suggests that such remedies may hold promise—for both medicine and drug development.
In the study, researchers from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom found that many medicinal plants used by nearly 100 cultures on different continents are related. Because these distant groups of people likely identified their plant therapies independently, such herbal treatments may be legit, the researchers argue, and the plants likely contain bioactive compounds that scientist could exploit for new drug therapies.
“People think there’s nothing new to be found,” said John Beutler, a leading chemist at the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research, who was not involved in the study. “But, that’s just not true. Wherever we look, we find new stuff.” But critics still doubt whether researchers will be able to sort effective traditional remedies from the bogus ones, and whether pharmaceutical endeavors will follow.
In previous studies that tried to use cultural comparisons to find useful remedies, scientists struggled to make meaningful taxonomic comparisons. “If [local] floras are different, obviously plants that are used in traditional medicine will be different,” said Royal Botanic Gardens Kew postdoc Haris Saslis-Lagoudakis, lead author of the study, which was published today (September 10) in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. But Haris and his colleagues’ phylogenetic comparisons allowed them to link seemingly unrelated plants.
They constructed genus-level phylogenetic trees of plants from 3 disparate locations—New Zealand, Nepal, and the Cape of South Africa. Once they assembled their trees, they overlaid ethnobotanical data regarding the therapeutic uses of various plants by cultures from each of the three locations (one culture from New Zealand, three cultures from The Cape of South Africa, and more than 80 cultures from Nepal).
In the flora phylogenies for each of the three continents, medicinal plants clustered into “hot nodes,” meaning they were more related to each other than the other plants in the analysis. Further, categorizing medicinal plants by what condition they treated, the researchers found that medicinal plants clustered into condition-specific nodes, even when the analyses from all three locations were combined—again suggesting a high degree of relatedness for plants used to treat similar conditions and lending some validity to these herbal treatments.
Biomedical researchers have occasionally drawn from ethnobotany and traditional treatments when looking for new drugs, but the use of this strategy has waned in recent decades. Though more than 80 percent of plant species have not been tested for therapeutic potential, the last major drug discovered from plants was the cancer drug Taxol in 1967.
This lack of interest stems, in part, from skepticism about the legitimacy of traditional plant therapies. Many cultures use medicinal plants for multiple ailments, for example. If a plant is good for your stomach, people may start taking it for problems with their nearby liver, then their lungs, then their heart and head, and so on, said Daniel Moerman, a professor emeritus of the University of Michigan-Dearborn and a leading expert on ethnobotany and cross-cultural studies. This makes it difficult to determine what condition a medicinal plant may effectively treat.
Haris, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Reading, sidestepped the issue by accounting for all the documented conditions each plant treated. “We scored everything—all of the uses that are defined—and let the results speak for themselves.”
Another criticism facing the study is that cultures sometimes use symbolic visual cues to identify potentially disease-treating plants. For example, it may be common for traditional healers to treat menstrual symptoms with plants that have red flowers, explains evolutionary biologist and senior researcher on the study Julie Hawkins. Such appearance-based selection would suggest that relatedness of medicinal plants is due to looks, not bioactivity.
“But, we’re finding a lot of morphological variation amongst [related medicinal plants],” Hawkins said, which suggests that visual cues don't explain their relatedness.
The researchers also looked at plants being developed or already in use as drug therapies around the globe and found a significant number fell in the nodes with the traditional medicinal plants, further supporting the validity of the method in identifying plants useful for drug discovery. The team noted several plant genera related to traditional medicinal plants that have not been tested for bioactivity, which could serve as low-hanging fruit in the search for new therapies.
Both Beutler and Moerman expressed skepticism, however, that pharmaceutical companies would jump at the new approach to guiding their drug discovery, as the industry has largely shifted toward robotic, high-throughput screens of chemical libraries. But new approaches are always welcome, Beutler said. “The perception is that we’re doing the same old grind and find, and it’s just not the case.” |
Another asylum seeker vessel, this one reportedly carrying 200 people, is in distress in waters north of Christmas Island.
The Indonesian search and rescue agency Basarnas has sent boats to the area and authorised the Australian Navy to enter Indonesian waters to help in a rescue effort.
Hadi Lukmono, Basarnas's deputy of operations, has confirmed the boat is sending distress signals. Mr Lukmono said they had sent two fibreglass boats and a helicopter to the area.
He said Australian warships would evacuate any passengers who were sick or injured from the boat.
"We have agreed to meet at one point with the Australians to carry out the evacuation," Mr Lukmono said.
It is unclear which Australian ships have been dispatched. The nationality of those on board the boat is also unknown.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which received the distress signals, did not immediately respond to questions from this website about the situation.
At least 100 people died in a recent sinking off Java after Basarnas failed to find a missing boat and called off the search. The 55 survivors from that boat were later transferred to Indonesian vessels and returned to detention centres. |
MY twenty-three years as the historian at the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston, were punctuated by intensive work on sound recordings. I conducted scores of taped oral-history interviews and verified the accuracy of the transcripts, edited President John F. Kennedy's recorded telephone conversations, and, in 1981-1982, evaluated tapes made during the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962, as the library prepared for their declassification. The work was fascinating and exhilarating, but the poor technical quality of the tapes frequently required that I listen to the same words dozens of times, sometimes to no avail. It was, notwithstanding, a historian's ultimate fantasy—a chance to be a fly on the wall during one of the most dangerous moments in history, and to know, within the technical limits of the recordings, exactly what happened. I spent just over a year on the tapes, and in 1983 I received an award for "careful and perceptive editing and proofreading of the JFK tapes" from the archivist of the United States. From 1983 to 1997 the library declassified twenty-two hours of tapes, and I continued to review them before each declassification.
Imagine my surprise when, in the summer of 1997, I learned that Harvard University Press was about to publish The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, edited by Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow—complete transcripts of all twenty-two hours. Months of lead time are required to prepare a book for the printer, so I was astonished that the editors could have completed this task less than a year after the majority of the tapes were released to the public.
The editors explained that they had commissioned a team of professional court reporters to prepare a set of "draft transcripts" from the Kennedy Library tapes. Audio experts, using NONOISE, a "technically advanced noise-reduction system," had then produced an improved set of tapes, subsequently checked by the court reporters to be sure that nothing had been lost. However, May and Zelikow stressed their own responsibility for the final product.
The two of us then worked with the tapes and the court reporters' drafts to produce the transcripts printed here. The laboriousness of this process would be hard to exaggerate. Each of us listened over and over to every sentence in the recordings. Even after a dozen replays at varying speeds, significant passages remained only partly comprehensible.... Notwithstanding the high professionalism of the court reporters, we had to amend and rewrite almost all their texts. For several especially difficult sessions, we prepared transcriptions ourselves from scratch. In a final stage, we asked some veterans of the Kennedy administration to review the tapes and our transcripts in order to clear up as many as possible of the remaining puzzles. The reader has here the best text we can produce, but it is certainly not perfect. We hope that some, perhaps many, will go to the original tapes. If they find an error or make out something we could not, we will enter the corrections in subsequent editions or printings of this volume.
An unforgettable moment in these unique historical records concerns JFK's apprehension that military action in Cuba might touch off the ultimate nightmare of nuclear war, which he grimly describes at a meeting on October 18 as "the final failure." Brian McGrory, of The Boston Globe, who listened to this tape with me in 1994, after it was declassified, used those words in the lead of his article on the newly released tapes. But when I checked the transcript recently, I was unable to find "the final failure." Certain that the editors must be right, since they had technically cleaner tapes, I listened again; there is no question that Kennedy says "the final failure." The editors, however, have transcribed it as "the prime failure."
I decided to check the entire transcript for October 18 against the tape, and what I discovered left me dismayed. The transcript abounds in errors that significantly undermine its reliability for historians, teachers, and general readers. Spot checks turned up similar errors in all the other transcripts. Despite the often poor sound quality of the Kennedy Library recordings, many of the relevant passages are clear enough to be heard conclusively. Since details are everything in this kind of microhistory, in which an inaccurate word or phrase can distort our perception of the historical record, we should examine some representative examples.
IN the first days of the secret meetings between Kennedy and his advisers, before the American people knew that the Soviets had missiles in Cuba, the President grappled with decisions that could determine the fate of the world. Should the United States bomb the missile sites or invade Cuba? If it became necessary to take decisive action, would the other nations of the Americas condemn the United States as the aggressor? The United States belonged to the Rio Pact, a mutual-defense treaty signed by more than twenty countries in North and South America. A two-thirds vote by the pact's member nations would authorize U.S. action against Cuba, and would preserve a unified front against the Soviets. On the October 18 tape Secretary of State Dean Rusk clearly assures the President, "I would suppose there would be no real difficulty in getting a two-thirds vote in favor of necessary action. But if we made an effort and failed to get the two-thirds vote, which I doubt would be the result, then at least we would have tried as far as the American people are concerned, to have done ... to have done our ... to have done our best on that."
Twice Rusk said that he expected to get the needed two-thirds vote. But here is how The Kennedy Tapes transcript reads (words in brackets were added by the book's editors for clarification): "But I suppose the only way we have of [using that is] getting [a] two-thirds vote to take necessary action. But if we made an effort and failed to get the two-thirds vote [unclear], then at least we will have tried as far as the American people are concerned. We'll have done that." Both of Rusk's assurances are missing. To understand Kennedy's decision-making process, readers must know what advice he was given. But this crucial evaluation of the diplomatic situation by Kennedy's highest foreign-policy official is lost in the gaps of the published transcript. (The United States did receive the two-thirds vote.) JFK's decision to begin with a blockade rather than with air raids is all the more striking given these assurances of hemispheric support for "necessary action."
The discussion soon turned to several proposed plans for bombing Soviet nuclear missiles, nuclear-capable bombers, and anti-aircraft sites in Cuba. If the missiles alone were struck, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara warned, Soviet bombers could attack the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo or even the East Coast of the United States. A key factor in any decision was whether the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) were operational, and if not, how soon they might be. General Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, strongly urges the President to destroy the SAMs. Even if they are not yet functional, Taylor insists, "the SAM sites would soon become operational" and compromise crucial surveillance flights. JFK observes that attacks on the nuclear missiles and bombers might be possible before the SAMs are armed. Taylor counters that "they may be operational at any time." The Kennedy Tapes has Taylor saying the "SAM site facilities have become operational"—the very point about which Taylor was so uncertain—and then meaninglessly telling the President that "they'll be operational at the same time." General Taylor's assessment, crucial to JFK's decision for military action, is thus reduced to a contradiction and a non sequitur.
A short time later Kennedy speculates about whether Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev should be given twenty-four hours' notice before the United States bombs the missile sites. But no hotline between the Kremlin and the White House then existed, and Kennedy was unsure how to reach the Soviet leader. "How quick is our communication with Moscow?" he asks. The Kennedy Tapes substitutes "If we have a communication with Moscow ..." obscuring Kennedy's primary concern. One adviser suggests that the President simply use the telephone. Robert Kennedy then asks, "It wouldn't really have to go in code, would it?" The Kennedy Tapes misidentifies the speaker as JFK and turns the remark into the immaterial "It wouldn't really have to be a call, would it?"
A few minutes later RFK frets about the dangers of the blockade, including the military risks in forcing "the examination of Russian ships." The Kennedy Tapes renders this as "the invasion of Russian ships," inaccurately suggesting the very sort of confrontation the blockade was meant to avoid.
SOME of the most gripping moments on the tapes occur during JFK's tense meeting with the Joint Chiefs on October 19. General Earle Wheeler, the Army chief of staff, argues that only air strikes, an invasion, and a blockade "will give us increasing assurance that we really have got the offensive capability of the Cuban Soviets cornered." As transcribed in The Kennedy Tapes, however, Wheeler's recommendation—these actions "will give us increasing assurance that we really have gone after the offensive capability of the Cuban/Soviets corner"—would hardly have made sense to Kennedy.
General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, also bluntly tells the President that a failure to invade Cuba would be almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich before World War II. LeMay then predicts that the blockade would appear weak to the American people and our allies. "You're in a pretty bad fix," he smugly warns the President. JFK, always skeptical about the military, reminds the general with a mocking laugh "You're in with me." The Kennedy Tapes merely tells the reader that JFK makes "an unclear, joking, reply." In fact Kennedy's biting response is perfectly audible.
By Monday, October 22, the decision to begin with a blockade had been made, and the President was scheduled to give a speech to the nation that evening. As the afternoon meeting begins, JFK reiterates that the United States must respond to the situation in Cuba to preserve the balance of power and blunt the "inevitability" of Soviet advances. But, he cautions, the blockade may not work, and if it comes to bombing and invasion, "Khrushchev will not take this without a response," either in Cuba or against Berlin. The Kennedy Tapes renders this critical line as "Khrushchev will not complete this without a response," which makes no sense and deprives the reader of the tension in JFK's words.
Moments later, acknowledging the dissatisfaction of the Joint Chiefs, JFK concedes that the blockade will complicate any subsequent military steps: "I want to say very clearly to the military that I recognize that we increase your problems in any military action we have to take in Cuba by the warning we're now giving." The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this line as "I want to say very clearly to the military that I recognize the appreciable problems in any military action ..." thus losing Kennedy's key point: a failed blockade would increase the danger and difficulty of any bombing or invasion that followed.
Kennedy goes on to argue that the United States has commitments all over the world, not just in Cuba. He concludes that heavy air strikes without warning could be politically counterproductive: "I think the shock to the alliance might have been nearly fatal." The Kennedy Tapes mangles these words: "I think we get shocked, and the [damage to the] alliance might have been nearly fatal." Kennedy then raises the most chilling question: "What happens when the work on the bases goes on?" The editors miss this vital question entirely by transcribing it as "What happens when work [unclear]."
THE next day, October 23, JFK and his advisers discuss how to implement the blockade and win support in the press and on Capitol Hill. John McCone, the director of the CIA, offers to call the former President Dwight D. Eisenhower for permission to use his name in talking with members of Congress and to get "his view of this thing, as a soldier." The Kennedy Tapes, inexplicably, has McCone saying "his view of this thing, as a facilitator." At a meeting that evening JFK zeroes in on the Soviet ships approaching the quarantine line. "Now, what do we do tomorrow morning when these eight vessels continue to sail on?" he asks. "We're all clear about how we handle it?" McCone interjects, "Shoot the rudders off them, don't you?" The Kennedy Tapes muddles JFK's question—"We're all clear about how we enter?"—and omits McCone's reply entirely.
By October 26 the discussion had turned to how to handle press questions about ships stopped at the quarantine line. McNamara reports that just one cargo ship has been boarded. "In any case," he says, "it's been successful and I think to do any good the story must be put out immediately." The Kennedy Tapes distorts this important conclusion beyond recognition: "In any case, it was successful and I think the destroyers [unclear]." McNamara never mentions destroyers.
The participants then discuss evidence that work on the missile sites is continuing. They debate whether to add petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) to the list of quarantined materials immediately, or to wait twenty-four hours to see if talks proposed by UN Secretary-General U Thant produce a breakthrough. McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser, suggests that they "leave the timing [on adding POL] until we've talked about the U Thant initiative." The inaccuracy in The Kennedy Tapes is especially bizarre in this case, with Bundy saying "leave the timing until we've talked about the attack thing." These last two examples—"the destroyers [unclear]" and "the attack thing"—could easily leave a reader wondering what in the world these men were talking about. (Three days later, on October 29, U Thant was mentioned again. JFK asserts, "We want U Thant to know that Adlai [UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson] is our voice." But The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this line as "We want you [unclear] to know that Adlai is our voice.")
October 27 saw the darkest moment in the crisis. An unconfirmed report was received at midday that a U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Cuba by a Soviet SAM missile, and the pilot killed. On the tape of the late-afternoon meeting Kennedy discusses whether to order an air strike on the SAM sites if the incident is repeated (a delay that produced consternation at the Pentagon). He declares that two options are on the table: begin conversations about Khrushchev's proposal to swap Soviet missiles in Cuba for U.S. missiles in Turkey, or reject discussions until the Cuban crisis is settled. Kennedy chooses the first, with the caveat that the Soviets must provide proof that they have ceased work on the missile sites. He repeatedly refers to "conversations" and "discussions" and concludes, "Obviously, they're not going to settle the Cuban question until they get some conversation on Cuba." Incredibly, The Kennedy Tapes substitutes "compensation" for "conversation." It's easy to imagine how Cold War veterans like Rusk, Bundy, and McCone would have reacted to any suggestion of compensation for the Soviets in Cuba.
On October 29, the day after Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, the President and his advisers, relieved but not euphoric, conclude that surveillance and the quarantine will continue until the missiles have actually been removed. After a lull in the meeting, during which the conversation turns to college football, the President observes, "I imagine the Air Force must be a little mad," referring to the division of responsibility for aerial photography between the Air Force and the Joint Chiefs' photo-reconnaissance office. The Kennedy Tapes transcribes this as "I imagine the airports must be looking bad," which must leave many readers scratching their heads: the removal of the missiles had nothing to do with Cuban airports. Kennedy then ponders why, in the end, the Soviets decided to back down. He notes, "We had decided Saturday night to begin this air strike on Tuesday." No effort was made to conceal the military buildup in southern Florida, and Kennedy wonders if the impending strikes pushed the Russians to withdraw their missiles. The Kennedy Tapes, however, has JFK saying "We got the [unclear] signs of life to begin this air strike on Tuesday," making his shrewd speculation unintelligible.
ONE particular error, among scores not cited above, seems to epitomize the problems with these transcripts. On the October 18 tape Dean Rusk argues that before taking military action in Cuba, the United States should consult Khrushchev, in the unlikely event that he would agree to remove the missiles. "But at least it will take that point out of the way," The Kennedy Tapes has Rusk saying, "and it's on the record." But Rusk actually said that this consultation would remove that point "for the historical record." The historical record is indeed the issue here.
Of course, the editors of The Kennedy Tapes and other historians would never assume that any transcript is absolutely accurate. The tape itself must always remain the primary historical document. Nonetheless, as the editors affirm, "reliable transcripts—ideally, annotated transcripts—are essential to make the tapes intelligible." These published transcripts, however, require substantial work. The revisions suggested above will inevitably contain some errors; the editing process can never be final or perfect. But if the editors disagree with these findings, we can listen to any of these disputed passages, in private or in public, using the Kennedy Library tapes or the NONOISE tapes.
May and Zelikow, both distinguished scholars, have assured readers that if they listen to the tapes and discover errors or make out unclear remarks, corrections will be included in future editions or printings. And as we go to press, a fourth printing of the book has corrected three of the errors cited above ("the invasion of Russian ships"; "What happens when work [unclear]"; and "the [unclear] signs of life"). However, the editors have not acknowledged these corrections in the preface or identified them in the transcripts, and, of course, uncorrected copies continue to circulate. Readers deserve to know that even now The Kennedy Tapes cannot be relied on as an accurate historical document. |
We don't yet know if Jared Lee Loughner was delusional when he went on a shooting rampage in Tucson. He's not talking, and no one has examined him and diagnosed him with anything that's been publicly revealed. But if he turns out to have been delusional -- and, more specifically, schizophrenic -- he would appear to have something in common with a type well known in the Washington area: the White House Case.
"White House Case" is the term of art used by psychiatrists since the at least the 1960s to describe a distinct subset of the mentally ill who become psychotically preoccupied with the inhabitants of the White House or other government offices.
The term originated at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Southeast Washington, where members of the Secret Service would dump floridly delusional individuals from across the country and even the world who washed up at the White House gates, having incorporated the president into their distorted thinking as villain or savior.
The centrality of political figures in the deluded thinking of the psychotic is a problem Washington has been dealing with as long as there have been political figures and mentally ill -- and one it still grapples with today.
"Washington has a magnet effect," observed Robert Kiesling, the medical director of Pathways to Housing and a former medical director at St. Elizabeth's. "We get a lot of folks from all over the country -- all over the world for that matter -- who come here to do business with the government for various delusional reasons. They make up a high percentage of the homeless population in DC."
Most psychotic visitors drawn to the nation's capital by their political obsessions or delusions, according to a 1943 report by Dr. Jay L. Hoffman, who reviewed cases from 1927 to 1937, came seeking relief from a sense of persecution. A 1965 article from the American Journal of Psychiatry on "Psychotic Visitors to the White House" sought to follow up on Hoffman's contention that the personality of the president and current problems of the government influenced the type of person who showed up and the number of hospitalizations.
The study authors founds that this seemed to be the case, with the greater celebrity of President Kennedy leading to far more hospitalizations than were made in the final year of Eisenhower's presidency.
"In 1960, when Mr. Eisenhower was President, only nine patients were admitted, but 32 were hospitalized in 1961, Mr. Kennedy's inaugural year. This would suggest that some personal characteristic of the President was important," the authors concluded.
A fresh groups of researchers returned to the topic in the 1985 journal article, "White House Cases: psychiatric patients and the Secret Service":
Delusional visitors to the White House or other government offices (often seeking a personal audience with the President) are interviewed by the Secret Service and then sent to Saint Elizabeths Hospital if they are considered mentally ill and potentially dangerous to themselves or others. A review of the demographic characteristics and diagnoses of 328 of these 'White House Cases' treated at the hospital between 1970 and mid-1974 showed that these patients were most commonly unmarried, white, and male, and most had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Although 22% of this group have threatened some prominent political figure, to date none of this study's patients has attempted to assassinate any such government official.
But a 1990 survey on "Violent crime arrest rates of White House Case subjects and matched control subjects" came to a different conclusion, finding that in a sample of those "psychotically preoccupied with a prominent political figure" and discharged from psychiatric hospitals in the early 1970s, "White House Case subjects with prior arrests had a significantly higher rate of total posthospitalization violent crime arrests than the matched control sample."
Is the a lesson to be learned from Washington's experience with White House Cases in the wake of the Tucson shooting?
If so, it is a very straightforward one.
"The lessons from the shooting is the lessons from Virginia Tech and various other incidents that have happened like this," says Kiesling. "People need treatment and if they are experiencing symptoms, they need to get into treatment as soon as possible or they have bad outcomes." |
|How do you know if you're conifencted?
Jan 11, 2009
Hello Dr. I know that this particular topic has been covered over and over but I need a bit of clarification. On the topic of HCV delaying the production of HIV antibodies, you said that HIV testing beyond 3-6 months is only warranted IF and ONLY IF the patient "becomes ill" with acute HCV infection. However, experts also acknowledge that most people who develop acute HCV infections show no symptoms. With that said, how would I (or anyone else for that matter) know if my HIV antibody test at 3 months is valid unless I also take an HCV antibody test? Are you saying that the only way to know for sure is to test for both HIV and HCV? Thanks for your response.
Response from Dr. McGovern
Whether someone gets testing for HCV will depend on many issues, such as whether it is known if the source patient is HCV infected or not.
Remember, this issue of late seroconversion for HIV, in the setting of acute (new) HCV infection has only been described in about one or two cases in the entire literature - a rare event to be sure - and only occurs if a person gets two infections at once - this is also uncommon.
I wrote previously that "HIV testing beyond 3-6 months is only warranted IF and ONLY IF the patient "becomes ill" with acute HCV infection...The phrase "becomes ill" can mean symptoms themselves or abnormalities of liver function tests, which may prompt further testing for HCV. It could also mean HCV seroconversion or detection of HCV RNA. It is difficult to cover all the possibilities because what the clinician tests for will depend on the risk behavior, the source patient, the patient who is being tested, etc...
If you have any concerns about your testing, speak to your medical provider about all issues of concern so that your anxiety about this issue can be addressed - either by further testing or counseling about the risks that are pertinent to your particular case.
Chronic vs Acute
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By Lynn Hill
Over the last several years, many forms of yoga and eastern practices have been adopted into our culture. There is much more awareness about the benefits of meditation, maintaining good posture, and conscious breathing in our practice. Breathing is one of the few bodily functions that can be controlled both consciously and unconsciously. Conscious attention to breathing is common in many forms of meditation, specifically, Anapana, which focuses on the "mindfulness of breathing." The purpose of this practice is to concentrate on bodily phenomena as both a mental discipline, and as a prerequisite to developing liberating insight. Practicing this form of meditation is part of the Eight-Fold Path that leads to the removal of all defilements and finally toward the attainment of nirvana or enlightenment. |
“Freedom had hit Russia like a great slap, and people were still reeling from the shock,” Irakli Iosebashevili writes of the mood among Muscovites in 1993 in his short story “The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist.” The authors of the essays and vignettes collected in “The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain” agree on few things, but on this subject they find common ground: the world changed in 1989, and the peoples of the former Soviet Republics were wholly unprepared.
“The Wall in My Head,” whose release marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is an eclectic anthology, composed of excerpts from previously published novels by authors like Milan Kundera and Victor Pelevin, previously unpublished short stories and essays by Peter Esterhazy and Uwe Tellkamp, among others, as well as art and photographs from artists including Walter Gaudnek and Brian Rose.
The written portions investigate the Soviet Union and its collapse from most every geographical, social and ideological perspective. But the collection’s subtitle is misleading. “The Wall in My Head” isn’t a meditation on the end of communism in the Soviet Bloc, but its history entire—its successes, its failures, and its absurdities. Thought-provoking, oddly nostalgic, and ultimately inconclusive, “The Wall in My Head” is a worthy investigation of a way of life which, for all its flaws, found a place in the hearts and minds of millions.
The book begins by openly challenging the model for daily life in the Soviet Union in a series of stories that emphasize the various shortcomings and irrationalities of the Soviet regime. “Paris Lost” by Wladimir Kaminer is the account of a counterfeit Paris, built by the Soviet government as part of a program to supposedly send some of the nation’s most productive workers on a free vacation to the European center of culture. Of course, they couldn’t possibly do this in reality—after all, capitalist temptations were lying in wait to seduce and entrap those good Communist citizens. Instead, the Soviet government chose to “build their own ‘Abroad’ in the Steppes of southern Russia, near Stavropol, with a real city, and many inhabitants,” a charade which lasted until a foreign journalist got hold of the story.
An extract from “Omon Ra” by Victor Pelevin takes an even bleaker outlook. The drunken narrator comes to realize that “the entire immense country in which [he] lived was made up of lots and lots of these lousy little closets where there was a smell of garbage and people had just been drinking cheap port,” an acknowledgment of the tedium and squalidness of quotidian life in the Soviet Union. Other stories critique the endless, labyrinthine bureaucracy and the culture of mistrust, where civilians spy on their fellow citizens.
But “The Wall In My Head” is by no means an indictment of communism. On the contrary, several of the stories and essays seem to almost pine for its simplicity and order. One of the finest essays in the collection, “Farewell to the Queue,” by Vladimir Sorokin, uses queues as a metaphor for the togetherness and order of Soviet society—a “quasi-surrogate for church,” which taught obedience while giving people time to ponder the advantages of socialism. In his view, the market economy replaced order with chaos, collectiveness with competition, simplicity with complexity; it replaced the queue with the crowd. “The ordeal of the free market,” writes Sorokin, “turned out to be more frightening than the Gulag... because it forced people to part with the oneiric space of collective slumber, forced them to leave the ideally balanced Stalinist cosmos behind.”
In “The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist,” a gangster friend of the titular character joins his family for dinner. He too, finds something lacking in the new, disorderly capitalist system. “In all of its history, Georgia never did so well as it did during Communist times,” he declares. “Everyone had their piece of bread... I hated the communists. But look at what people have to go through now. You think what they have in Georgia is freedom? Being able to eat, that’s freedom.”
Finally, the collection confronts the issue suggested by its title—the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall itself is best introduced in an excerpt from “The Wall Jumper” by Peter Schneider, a one-time student activist in 1960s Berlin. Against expectations, the wall is not presented as some overbearing, malignant force. Schneider instead tells the story of two boys who routinely jumped the wall in order to see films only available on the Western side, before returning home to the East (and even refusing, on one occasion, a direct offer to stay). Anyone who has visited the Berlin Wall’s remains will know that this story is rather fanciful, but its inclusion is an interesting insight into the patchwork portrait of life behind the Iron Curtain that “The Wall in My Head” is attempting to build.
Mostly, “The Wall in My Head” is about communism and the people who lived under it—not when it collapsed under its own weight, but when it threatened to become the world’s dominant form of government. The authors of the anthology, as disparate in their ideologies as in their backgrounds, reach no conclusions. They make few grand claims about communism as a system of government. To some extent, the lack of some overarching statement or idea is frustrating, but it simultaneously feels just. Instead of prescribing a specific view, “The Wall in My Head” makes the reader think, reconsider, and question accepted wisdom.
According to journalist Gleb Pavlovsky, the collection provides an answer to the question “Where from?” Without this answer, he believes, the people of Eastern Europe will be unable to answer another question: “Where to?” For citizens of post-Soviet states, “The Wall in My Head” provides a new avenue for understanding their past.
Conant, Fischer, Counts Stress Learning Communist ConceptsPresident emeritus James Bryant Conant '14 opened the Summer School Conference on Teaching the Nature of Communism Monday night by
Harvard in 1940
Don't Blame CommunismIn recent years, Western media and scholarship have been ablaze with criticism of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) oppressive ruling ...
Two Constitutions, Two FuturesRather than looking to repair a system that has only meant misery and more misery for humanity—why not reach forward to a viable and emancipatory alternative?
FM Investigates: The Kremlin on the Charles
Harvard: Complicit in Promoting Communism? |
If you are like most creative people, you scour the flea markets and garage sales during the summer for great items that can be recycled or “Up”cycled. Last year I found an old oil can at a junk/antique store and immediately it spoke to me.
It said “Don’t I look like a penguin to you?”
And I replied, “Yes, yes you do.”
I took him home, along with another oil can friend, begged my husband to clean them up for me and painted one like a bird and the other like a snowman. Needless to say, they were the first things to sell at a local handmade show I do after Thanksgiving. So, during the year I found more and I thought I would share with you this year’s snowmen.
Directions if you want to make your own snowman:
1. Clean the oil can really well and let it dry.
2. Paint the can with a light coat of Gesso.
3. If you want paint another coat of white when the gesso dries.
4. Paint your snowman’s eyes and stick arms.
5. Goop some modge-podge around the bottom and sprinkle some diamond glitter onto it.
6. Add other embellishments as you like! |
The countdown to Obamacare implementation is on. And owners of businesses with 50 or more employees have begun making some tough decisions on ways to minimize their long-term costs.
That’s because under the law, businesses with at least 50 “full-time equivalent” employees have to provide health care to their workers or pay a penalty. Recent surveys indicate that many small-and medium-sized businesses are restricting hiring and cutting hours to get under that threshold. And according to Kenneth Laks, a certified public accountant at AVZ & Company, many businesses simply aren’t prepared.
“I’m seeing a lot of people not paying attention, and even after warning them they’re still not paying attention,” Laks told The Fiscal Times last week. “A lot of people are not aware of the simplest thing.”
The 2010 Affordable Care, designed to extend health care insurance to millions of uninsured Americans, penalizes firms employing 50 or more people that don’t offer health insurance – or that offer coverage below minimum standards. Regardless of whether companies abide by the new rules or seek a way around them, the stakes are high.
According to the Obama administration, 96 percent of all firms in the United States or 5.8 million out of 6 million total firms have fewer than 50 full time employees and therefore are exempt from the Affordable Care Act. These 5.8 million firms employ nearly 34 million workers. Moreover. more than 96 percent of firms with 50 or more employees already offer health insurance to their workers. Less than 0.2 percent of all firms -- or about 10,000 out of 6 million-- may face employer responsibility requirements. The administration contends that many firms that do not currently offer coverage will be more likely to do so because of lower premiums and wider choices in the exchanges.
The new law takes full effect Oct. 1, when the federal government and state officials launch new on-line insurance exchanges in all 50 states and the District of Columbia where uninsured Americans can apply for affordable or government-subsidized policies.
For many companies, the decision to provide new coverage and fully abide by the law could cost them hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Others that choose not to offer insurance could be hit with substantial federal penalties - although in some cases it would be far less expensive for them to pay the penalties than provide the insurance.
Now small and medium-sized businesses are being forced to make a decision that has both moral and fiscal aspects.
From a moral standpoint, companies must decide if it’s right to provide health care to employees. It’s cheaper to pay the penalty, but is it good business? Is it the right thing to do? According to Denis Collins, an American business ethicist and professor of business at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, the answer is no.
“It’s understandable why a company would do that – it’ understandable to want to minimize your costs. So in the short term, it’s understandable. In the long term, that’s bad business,” he said. "In terms of ethics, that’s egoism. You do what’s in your self-interests. And [businesses] have the legal right to do that. But in the long term…it’s not for the greater good of their employees and it’s not for the greater good of the company, because it’s going to damage morale,” Collins continued.
Kenneth Laks sees it differently: “There are a lot of companies who are saying, ‘who cares? If we have 80 people and we don’t offer insurance, it’s heck of a lot cheaper than providing insurance.’”
The advent of the Affordable Care Act has spawned a surge in business for lawyers, CPAs and industry consultants on ways for businesses to navigate the new law and minimize their financial exposure.
A handful of experts interviewed by The Fiscal Times outlined a half-dozen tactics for dodging health care reform, including the pros and cons. They are:
1. PULL UP YOUR SOCKS AND PROVIDE HEALTH CARE INSURANCE
Pros: It will make current employees happy, while attracting new ones. As numerous studies have shown, happy workers are more productive.
Cons: It’s expensive. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average health care cost per employee this year was $10,522, compared to $10,034 the previous year. That number is expected to rise to $11,188 next year.
2. CUT HOURS FOR WORKERS
Pros: Cutting the hours of workers below 30 hours per week to get under the 50 worker threshold would free the employer from having to provide health care, while also avoiding the federal penalty.
Cons: Technically, it’s illegal. Under Obamacare, employers can’t just cut hours or jobs to avoid providing health care or paying the penalty; there has to be a business reason for the staff reductions. “Benefit plan attorneys are waiting for that to occur so they can bring lawsuits,” said Laks.
3. CUT JOBS
Pros: Firing employees to get under the 50-worker threshold would also free the employer from Obamacare obligations.
Cons: As in the case with cutting hours, it’s illegal. But according to Howard Rosen, an accountant at Conner Ash in St. Louis, employers are preparing to do it anyway.
“People are cutting hours and jobs now because of the 50 full-time equivalent count. They’re cutting down to 27 to 29 hours per week so they don’t have to pay,” he said. When asked if any of his clients were concerned about litigation, he replied, “None that we’ve talked with. Maybe it’s because we’re in the Midwest and we’re not as litigious or as aggressive. That has not come up and we had multiple discussions about this.”
4. PAY THE PENALTY
Pros: It’s cheaper than paying for health care. In the worst case, the penalty is just $2,000 per employee, and the first 30 don’t count. This means a company with 50 or more workers would pay an additional $40,000 in taxes each year.
Compare that to what it would cost to provide health care. Using the Society for Human Resource Management’s numbers, insuring all 50 workers would cost the company $526,100. So paying the $40,000 penalty saves the company $486,100.
Cons: Workers aren’t likely to be too happy about this decision, and it would be hard to recruit new ones.
5. OFFER BAD INSURANCE
Pros: Under Obamacare, employers can provide what’s termed “minimal essential coverage,” a fancy name for a health plan that’s so bad it doesn’t meet Obamacare requirements. The employee has the option to turn down this plan and buy insurance from an exchange. If this happens, the employer is penalized $3,000 for each worker that purchased insurance on his or her own.
The upside for employers is that this penalty is still cheaper than paying for health insurance. As mentioned in the previous example, providing insurance for a workforce of 50 would cost $526,100. Paying the penalties for pushing these workers to an exchange would only cost a maximum of $150,000, although it’s highly unlikely that every employee would chose to buy from an exchange. But even paying the maximum penalty would save the company $376,100.
Cons: Workers probably aren’t going to appreciate the offer of a bad health care plan, especially one that puts them through the trouble of purchasing insurance at an exchange.
6. DOWNGRADE "CADILLAC PLANS"
Pros: Those with high-end health care plans – known as Cadillac plans – are going to experience big changes to the way the get medical care. For many, large deductibles and cheap visits to the doctor’s office will become a thing of the past.
That’s because of Obamacare’s tax on expensive plans. Here’s how it works: for plans that cost more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family, the employer will have to pay a 40 percent tax on the cost of the program above those levels.
Take the cost of the average plan: $10,522. Employers will be forced to pay a 40 percent tax on $322, or about $129. That might seem like a small number, but for an employer with 10,000 employees, it adds up quickly. Such a company would be paying an additional $12.9 million each year.
The tax doesn't take effect until 2018, but employers are already rolling back heath care plans to get below the threshold. If they're able to get the cost of their policies below $10,200 each, it will save them a lot of money down the line.
Cons: The obvious losers in this scenario are those workers who are having their health care downgraded.
7. HIRE A PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYER ORGANIZATION
Pros: Many small businesses are outsourcing human resources, employee benefit and payroll work to companies known as professional employer organizations (PEO). These companies exist simply to provide companies with additional employees – but strictly on a contract basis that doesn’t impact the size of their overall full-time workforce.
Workers hired under this system operate much like federal government contract workers: they are recruited by an outside firm and are paid by them, but they report to and work for another company.
Here’s how it works. Let’s create a fictional biotech firm: we’ll call it TFT Biotech, a small Silicon Valley shop with fewer than 50 workers. TFT Biotech identifies a potential employee, a hotshot Stanford grad with a degree in organic chemistry. They bring her in for an interview and decide they want her. They would then go to a PEO – says Ambrose, one of the biggest in the country – and retain them to hire her. She’ll work at TFT Biotech, but technically Ambrose will employ her.
This saves TFT Biotech money in a number of ways. It removes human resource and payroll cost. It also removes health care cost. If TFT Biotech were to hire the young woman directly, it might breach the firm’s 50-full time worker threshold, forcing it to choose between paying the penalty and providing health insurance.
Ambrose removes that burden. It provides health insurance to the young Stanford grad, as well as to thousands of other workers in the biotech, financial services and professional services industry. This large work force also gives them leverage in negotiations with insurance companies, keeping health care costs down.
Cons: There actually is little downside to this strategy for small companies. The most challenging part of working with a PEO would be managing the relationship between the employee and Ambrose. A small business going this route is counting on Ambrose to keep the employee happy with regard to health care, pay and other human resources considerations. |
The Philippine Constabulary (PC) (Filipino: Hukbóng Pamayapâ ng Pilipinas) (HPP) was the oldest of four service commands of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It was a gendarmerie type para-military police force of the Philippines established in 1901 by the United States-appointed administrative authority. It was later integrated and replaced by the current Philippine National Police on the 29th of January, 1991.
The Philippine Constabulary (PC) was established on August 8, 1901, by authority of Act. No. 175 of the Philippine Commission, to assist the United States military in combating the remaining Filipino revolutionaries then led by General Emilio Aguinaldo. The Philippine Revolution's demise came with the capture of Aguinaldo in 1901 and the surrender and execution by one of its last remaining generals, Macario Sakay in 1906.
The insurrection, continued disorder and brigandry alarmed the civil government which prompted Hon. William Howard Taft, President of the second Philippine Commission to maintain and establish an Insular Police Force to complete the pacification of the islands. The PC was entrusted into the hands of Captain Henry T. Allen of the 6th U.S. Cavalry, a Kentucky-born graduate of West Point (Class 1882) who was named as the chief of the force and was later dubbed as the "Father of the Philippine Constabulary". With the help of four other army officers, Captains David Baker, W. Goldsborough, H. Atkinson, and J.S. Garwood, Captain Allen organized the force, trained, equipped and armed the men as best as could be done under the most difficult conditions prevailing at the time. Although bulk of the officers were recruited from among the commissioned and noncommissioned officers of the US Volunteers, two Filipinos qualified for appointment as 3rd Lieutenants during the first month of the PC, - Jose Velasquez of Nueva Ecija and Felix Llorente of Manila. Llorente retired as Colonel in 1921 while Velasquez retired as Major in 1927.
A milestone in training of the Constabulary soldiers was achieved when the PC school was established in February 17, 1905 at the Sta. Lucia barracks at the Walled City (Intramuros). In 1908, the school was transferred to Baguio when in 1916 the school was renamed Academy for Officers of the Philippine Constabulary. In 1926, the school was renamed the Philippine Constabulary Academy. When the Philippine Army came into being in 1936 (per Commonwealth Act No.1, Executive Order No. 11 issued on January 11, 1936), the institution became the present-day Philippine Military Academy. The school is the main source of regular officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), which prior to 1991 included those of the Philippine Constabulary.
Also worth mentioning is the formation of the famed Philippine Constabulary Band on October 15, 1902 by Colonel Walter Loving upon the instructions of Civil Governor Taft, who was known as a music lover. It will be recalled that among the many things for which the Philippines was famous abroad before the last world war was the PC Band.
The motto of the PC Corps was: Always outnumbered but never outfought!
A milestone in PC history came on December 17, 1917. After a succession of Americans as heads of the organization for 16 years, a Filipino from Rizal province, in the person of Brig. Gen. Rafael Cramé, was appointed Chief of the Constabulary. The PC (now PNP) Headquarters in Quezon City has been named after him.
In 1935, a large tract of land was acquired in the New Manila Heights area, now part of Quezon City, for the future use of the Headquarters of the General Service Troops. This area, which soon became Camp Crame, Camp Murphy (now known as Camp Aguinaldo), and Zablan Field, site of the original air arm of the PC, was exchanged by the Manila City government for the old Gagalangin barracks compound in Tondo.
Under the National Defense Act of 1935, promulgated by General Douglas MacArthur (then newly appointed as commander in chief of the Philippine military), the PC became the backbone of the Philippine Regular Army, later re-established after World War II and was known as both the Philippine Constabulary and as the Military Police Command. It consisted of soldiers trained in military police duties who had a nationwide jurisdiction.
The move to abolish the national police force and to make it a nucleus of a Philippine Army got underway when the Army of the Philippines was created in 1936. Thus, the transfer of the PC to the regular force of the new military organization was effected under the provisions of Sec. 18 of the National Defense Act, and pursuant to Executive Order No. 11 of President Manuel L. Quezon dated January 11, 1936. The Constabulary was inactivated on this date and was known as the Constabulary Division, Philippine Army. The PC was not gone but got submerged in a bigger organization. Thereafter, the insular police duties, formally reposed in the PC, was discharged by a "State Police" created by Commonwealth Act No. 88 dated October 26, 1936.
After turning over the former Constabulary duties to a State Police, which proved to be short-lived and unsuccessful, the Constabulary was revived as a military police force in June 23, 1938 by Commonwealth Act No. 343. By operation of the CA 343, the State Police was abolished and its military police duties reverted to the PC. President Quezon himself recommended to the National Assembly that the State Police be abolished and in its place the PC was to be reconstituted into a separate organization, distinct and divorced from the Philippine Army, which was for "national defense".
The PC once again existed as an independent force retaining all duties in maintaining peace and order and protection of life and property. One of the most significant provisions of the law re-creating it was that which provided that officers and enlisted men detached from the army and transferred to the PC shall retain their identity and legal rights and obligations as officers and enlisted men of the army; that the President may, at his discretion, transfer at any time any officer or enlisted man to and from the army to the Constabulary, respectively; and that all services performed in the Constabulary shall count for all legal purposes as military service. Thus, began the linear roster of officers for both the Constabulary and the Armed forces up until the PC was merged with the Integrated National Police in 1991.
In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed a state of emergency in the continental United States and in all her protectorates, including the Philippines. With the organization of the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) in July, the Philippine Army and the Constabulary prepared their combat units. The PC was inducted to the USAFFE and was organized into three infantry regiments for participation in the defense of the country.
On October 15, the 1st PC Regt. was inducted into the USAFFE by Brig, Gen. George M. Parker in Camp Crame, after which it was moved to the Balara cantonment area in Quezon City, where the men were trained as combat team on the regiment level.
The 2nd and the 3rd Regts. were inducted into the USAFFE on November 17 and December 12, respectively. The 1st and the 2nd were assigned to safeguard public utilities vital to the survival of the growing population of Greater Manila Area.
War broke out on December 8, 1941. The two PC regiments less the 2nd Battalion of the 1st which was ordered to proceed to Bataan immediately, were assigned in Manila to arrest all aliens believed to be sympathetic with the enemy. In additions, these units were ordered to safeguard centers of communication and all public utilities in the city and of securing the metropolitan area against subversive elements. Soon, a protective cordon around Manila was formed by units of the two PC regiments.
By January 1942, most of the “constables” were in Bataan peninsula with other Fil-American troops. “On Bataan and Corregidor, in Aparri, Lingayen and Atimonan, everywhere in the islands were the invaders dread to set foot, Constabulary troops distinguished themselves in action against overwhelming odds.”
On December 29, the 4th PC Regiment was activated and constituted by PC units from the provinces of Bataan, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampangga, Pangasinan, Tarlac, and Zambales. Two days later the regiment was ordered to Bataan.
On April 9, the inevitable bitter end came. Maj. General Edward P. King Jr., CO, Southern Luzon Force, to prevent the unnecessary slaughter of his war-torn troops, negotiated the surrender of the Bataan- Fil American troops with the Jap High Command. Thus, Bataan fell on the historic 9th of April, 1942 and the thousands of Fil-American troops who heroically defended this hallowed ground became prisoners of war.
During the Japanese occupation, the enemy, through the use of force and threats, organized their own version of the Philippine Constabulary which they called the Bureau of Constabulary. A handful of former PC officers and men were rounded up and forced to work with this outfit with the threat that their loved ones would be harmed; majority of the men who escaped managed to find their way into the hills where they joined the resistance movement until liberation came in 1944.
It is a fact that much of the stigma that haunted the PC was the result of the establishment by the Japanese of their version of the Constabulary. Many had the wrong impression that the occupation Constabulary was the same force as that of the pre-war organization.
The Philippines was liberated late in 1944 and early in 1945. Thereafter, the problem of restoring peace and order from the general chaos and disorder arising from the war came up. The Constabulary went on active service with the Philippine Army by virtue of President Sergio Osmeña’s Executive Order 21, dated Oct. 28, 1944. In the reorganization, that followed, the Military Police Command, USAFFE, was created pursuant to USAFFE General Orders No. 50 Another Order, General Orders No. 51 dated July 7, 1945 redesignated the organization as MPC, AFWESPAC.
A major revamp in the Armed Forces set-up was effected on March 30, 1950 when President Elpidio Quirino issued E.O. No. 308 which called the merger of the Philippine Constabulary with the Armed Forces, making it one more major command. Due to the unstable peace and order conditions existing in the countrysides brought about by the resurgence of the Hukbalahap (Huk) which require more personnel strength, the Philippine Army was called upon to assist in the pacification drive with the employment of its combat arms - the Battalion Combat Teams or BCTs, with PC men absorbed by the BCTs. It was by virtue of E.O. 308 and pursuant to Administrative Order No. 113, dated April 1, 1950, the PC was formally merged with the Armed Forces of the Philippines; the merger was completed on July 27, the same year. Under the E.O., the power of executive supervision and all authority and duties exercised by the Secretary of Interior in relation to the PC or its individual members were transferred to and exercised by the Secretary of National Defense. With the appointment, on American advice, of former USAFFE guerilla Rep. Ramon Magsaysay as Secretary of National Defense in September 1950 and the subsequent appropriation by Congress of more funds for the drive against the Communist movement in the Philippines, more BCTs were formed.
The delineation of the missions of the then four major services - Philippine Army, Philippine Constabulary, Philippine Navy, and Philippine Air Force - were underlined by EO No. 389 dated December 23, 1950, which abolished the Philippine Service Command and the Philippine Ground Force. Headquarters Armed Forces of the Philippines became known as "General Headquarters, Armed Forces of the Philippines"; while General Headquarters, Philippine Constabulary became known as "Headquarters, Philippine Constabulary", the nomenclature it had in the prewar years. Also, the major commands were abolished and in their places were activated the four major services. As defined in Executive Order (E.O.) No. 389, the main function of the PC was maintaining peace and order within the country.
In the reorganization that followed, the four Military areas created pursuant to EO No. 94, series 1947, were not altered substantially, but were nevertheless placed under the administrative and operational control of GHQ, AFP.
PC's Missions were as follows:
The PC covered a very extensive range of diversified missions that do not fall under its primary responsibilities. By express provision of law, the PC enforced the motor vehicles law, fishing and games law, the alien law for registration and fingerprinting, and anti-dummy law, and the nationalization of retail trade law. By direction of the President, it enforced the tenancy law, the law on scarp metal, iron and gold, ban on slaughter of carabao, etc. By deputation, it enforced immigration law, customs law, forestry law, quarantine law, election law, public service law, and amusement law and weight and standards on rice and palay. As a civic function, it performed in conjunction with the SWA and the Red Cross disaster relief. The security of VIPs was a routine requirement for the constabulary.
The Commandant of the Philippine Constabulary was also the Chief of the Integrated National Police (the municipal police force for the larger towns and cities).
The PC was organized on similar lines to the army, and consisted of a General Staff located at its General Headquarters at Camp Crame, Manila, and 12 Regional Commands (under a Regional Director) consisting of 104 Provincial Commands (under a Provincial Commander); these controlled the 450 PC Companies which performed all the day-to-day military police work.
The PC used to have four Field Units or Command Zones (PCZs), each of which was headed by a Zone Commander:
The Philippine Constabulary Rangers, or PC Rangers, were independent light infantry companies which served as a counter-insurgency force similar to United States Army Rangers and were organized into 12 large regional companies.
Constabulary Headquarters directly controlled many other services needed at a national level such as the Special Action Force, Central Crime Laboratory, White Collar Crime Group, and Office of Special Investigations (which was a counter intellingence group).
The Constabulary also maintained the following units:
In 1991, it was determined that a new Philippine National Police was to be formed by merging the Integrated National Police into the Philippine Constabulary, with the PC forming the basis as it had the most developed infrastructure. The PC was then removed from the Ministry of Defense and eventually civilianized through attrition and recruitment of new personnel. |
Every year it happens, that time soon coming, when I long to revel in the brief glory of tulips.
It is perfect that tulips are among the first flowers of spring, nosing up into the world like eager children, full of purity and joy. And I love that I can depend on them, that they will always come, in the same spot, comforting as a parent who promises to be home and always is. It even gives me some peculiar pleasure – in winter, you have to find it where you can, I suppose – to think of them growing and striving under a cover of dirt. A tulip is a sort of stealth bomber of beauty, silent, determined, cunning.
But once they have arrived, even in a bouquet purchased from a store, it is their grace and simplicity that I enjoy. Not blowsy as a rose or frilly like a daffodil, they have a certain quiet and sleek elegance. Sure, they announce themselves in a room, attracting attention, but they do so in the way a mannered lady might, dressed in fine, well-tailored clothes, the hem of her skirt just right, no cleavage on show. Vulgar the tulip is not.
And then, to make it even more intriguing, consider that this flower has caused episodic periods of wild, cultish enthusiasm. In history as in its own blossoming, the tulips have had brief, heady moments of glory.
The tulip was first used as decoration in 12th-century Anatolia, where it originated. The word “tulip” is, in fact, the Persian word for turban, as it was a Turkish tradition to wear the flower tucked into cloth wound around the head. The popularity of the flower in Europe began in 1554, when a diplomat acquired seeds from a garden near Istanbul and brought them to Vienna.
The tulip, Mike Dash writes in Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, was astonishing to the Europeans, its intense, concentrated colours unlike anything they had seen before. In Holland, the flower found the perfect set of conditions for producing a kind of madness, known as Tulipomania, in the 17th century. Having won independence from Spain, the country was embarking on its golden age. Commerce flourished. Merchants in Amsterdam prospered through lucrative East Indies trading. They also liked to show off how well they did with grand estates set amid beautiful gardens. The tulip, in this context, became the Ferrari of the day. (Hey, the moat in medieval England was a status symbol, too!)
The peak of Tulipomania came in 1636, when some tulip bulbs sold for 10 times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. One specimen, the Semper Augustus, which has midnight-blue petals topped by a band of pure white and accented with crimson flares, was particularly coveted. Artists painted it and other tulips. They were as exotic as a nude.
The collapse, when it came, was a sudden wilting.
But the Dutch weren’t the only ones to have manic episodes over tulips. There was a period when the flower bewitched the rulers of the Ottoman empire as well. Sultan Ibrahim, who ruled in the early part of the 1600s, was mad on some counts – legend has it that he once had all of the 280 women in his harem drowned so he could enjoy the process of replacing them – but rather sane on others, insisting, for example, on the appointment of a Chief Florist. His son, Mehmed IV, who succeeded him in 1647, was the first sultan to plant an imperial garden at the palace devoted solely to tulips. He even established a council of florists whose job it was to judge new cultivars, describing their unique characteristics, then registering and classifying them. They also had the task of giving the varieties poetic names: Pomegranate Lances, Delicate Coquettes, Rose of the Spring, Cup of Gold.
Passionate response to the flower also extends to modern times, Sylvia Plath’s poem Tulips being one example. “It [the poem] was occasioned quite simply by receiving a bouquet of red, spectacular tulips while convalescing in hospital,” Plath said during a reading recorded for a BBC radio series called The Poet’s Voice in the sixties.
“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here./Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in,” the poem begins. Lying in her hospital bed recovering from an appendectomy, Plath finds the flowers annoying, mocking her depressive state. “The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me./Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe/Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.” Their “sudden tongues and their colour” upset her. They “eat my oxygen,” she writes, concluding: “The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals.”
Fittingly, Plath’s recording of Tulips was itself a kind of brief glory. Starting in 1957, she had approached the BBC in the hope of having some of her poems considered for broadcast, but was rejected. In the summer of 1960, she finally broke in; her reading of one of her poems was first broadcast on Nov. 20, 1960. For the next two years, Plath’s voice could be heard regularly on the radio, reading her new works.
Her last broadcast reading was on Jan. 10, 1963. A few weeks later, she took her own life. Plath, too, was beautiful, glorious in her intelligence – and, ultimately, fragile.
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In the south-western province of Nor Lipez in Bolivia lies the world's largest deposit of lithium. The vast and spectacular Uyuni salt flats sit 3,600 metres above sea level. They are shaped like an inverted cone, 400 metres deep, in which layers of salts have sedimented, interwoven between layers of mud and brine, in which the mineral salts have dissolved.
In recent years, lithium's commercial value has risen astronomically. The development of laptops and mobile phones has depended on lithium batteries, and demand has grown to the point where it is now profitable to exploit the mineral even when it is found in a place as remote and inaccessible as this.
Uyuni is in the department of Potosí, the site of the legendary Cerro Rico (rich hill), which supplied the Spanish colonial regime with silver for 200 years. Mining continued there in the 20th century, particularly after the Bolivian revolution of 1952 which nationalised the mines, creating among the Bolivian people the collective belief that they were now the owners of huge potential wealth that would never again be exploited by "foreign interests".
So strong was this belief that the first attempt to exploit lithium commercially, in 1992 – 10 years before the wave of popular uprisings in defence of Bolivia's natural resources which would culminate in the election of Evo Morales – led to a period of protests across the region, and the then government of Jaime Paz Estenssoro was forced to break its contract with the Lithco corporation.
Today, the potential exploitation of Bolivian lithium exposes contradictions within Morales's government, and the possibility of social conflict, as multilayered as the salt lake itself.
On the one hand, Morales decreed in 2008 that the state would take full control of the exploitation of lithium. A new arm of the Bolivian Mining Corporation was set up with the aim of constructing a plant for the mineral's exploitation.
On the other hand, since 2009 the Bolivian government has begun negotiations with foreign companies with a view to signing contracts for its industrial production. Interested parties include the Japanese firms Mitsubishi and Sumitomo. And there are other possibilities, too: Morales has travelled widely looking for possible joint investment in lithium production with Chinese, Russian and Iranian firms.
Through such partnerships Morales hopes to further fund a number of social welfare projects through the so-called conditional transfer of resources – small amounts of money are given to families, so long as certain conditions are met (for instance, that children are sent to school). This is central to the government's social strategy.
However, the indigenous population of Bolivia's western areas, who are among the poorest people in the country and who have strong communal traditions, appear to disagree with the policy. The social movements that brought Morales to power have mobilised over recent months around demands for local development, and in defence of water rights. In the mind of many Bolivians, the most important thing is that local communities decide on the uses of resources in their own territory.
Bolivia today is undergoing a reconstruction of the state, in the course of which progressive nationalist policies find themselves in conflict with a highly politicised population with its own vision of how best to utilise "the gifts of Pachamama (Mother Earth)". Not only do the Uyuni salt flats sit above multiple layers of strategic minerals, they also raise questions of how to use them – to which there are multiple answers. |
In response to graduates looking to diversify and consolidate their workplace skills, London South Bank University (LSBU) is offering a new flexible learning masters course that increases employability – and that could eventually rival the more traditional MBA.
The specially designed MSc in Business Project Management gives students the skills to manage and transform business operations. "Projects are not about 'business as usual' – they're about business change," says course director Gary Bell.
The ability to innovate and manage change in a constantly morphing, high-tech world is essential to maintaining business competitiveness – which, in turn, ensures profitability and the addition of long-term value to the organisation.
He makes the distinction between the skills involved in being able to manage a project and the skills required to identify the right project in the first place.
"Doing the project 'right' – that's associated with traditional project management," he says. "But you need to choose the right project as well. For me, the study and research of project management is a growing area that's only got going in the past couple of years, as people have realised that the ability to choose the right project links in with other fields, such as business strategy, business analysis and business change. That's where this course fits in."
The smartest businesses know they need to enhance their positions to increase their competitiveness and, ultimately, their profit – and this is reflected in the type of employees they are looking to recruit. Bell argues that a graduate from the MSc in Business Project Management will be more employable than someone from a traditional MBA course, because they will already have the skills needed for the workplace.
"Employers are starting to reject graduates with a traditional MBA in favour of graduates who can hit the ground running," says Bell, who believes the majority of today's taught MBA programmes are too focused on teaching graduates about the maintenance of the business process, rather than equipping them to make a real impact on the business's bottom line.
"We try to be focused on practical skills, on methodology and technique – we 'skill people up' in all the areas of project management," he says.
LSBU's course is new this year, and Bell is constantly reviewing its content to ensure it's as relevant to business and as up-to-date with current practice as possible.
"I'm always looking at potential new modules and new ideas," he says. "I can see business strategy and business analysis being brought in to the field, for example."
This willingness to adapt to changing business practices is part of LSBU's drive to ensure graduates are equipped with the right skillset for the modern workplace; and because LSBU offers flexible learning, with once-a-month study sessions on a Friday and Saturday, students already in business can fit their study around their work commitments.
"We have two intakes annually, and this year we have ten full-time and ten part-time students, from a diverse range of backgrounds," he says. "We have people from engineering, IT, healthcare, and even from within the university."
The current cohort – particularly those already in employments – are already using their new skills.
"Part-time students can look at their businesses, and think about if there's a need for change, and look at the costs and the benefits – and often they'll see that the benefits will outweigh those costs," says Bell.
He points to one student currently researching the possibility of introducing solar technology to his company, and travelling abroad to see how other businesses have managed that.
"The environment has changed and big companies are having to adapt," concludes Bell. "MBAs do have their place – they can give you the skills to manage everyday operations – but there is a new world view, and you can see that with this new interest in project management.
"This perspective is emerging and growing," he adds. "In fact, I think project management courses will eventually be as big and as popular as MBAs are now." |
Rare book collections, stately home gardens and 18th century tapestries are among the heritage being affected by a changing climate, the National Trust has warned.
More erratic weather, changes to rainfall and rising temperatures are already having an impact on National Trust properties and land, the organisation said, forcing it to find new ways of managing the heritage in its care in the face of climate change.
It has seen its insurance claim as a result of extreme weather increase in the past decade, with monthly claims values increasing more than fourfold, and the number of claims made each month more than double between 2005 and 2015.
Problems the Trust has faced include the discovery of mould and spider beetle in the rare book collection at Lanhydrock, Cornwall, prompting the installation of damp proofing and environmental controls in response to more changeable weather.
At Nymans, in West Sussex, drought has forced the garden team to use less water and capture more rainfall, but while storage capacity was increased to 80,000 litres in 2007 and later to 150,000 litres, the system ran dry this year for the first time in seven years.
There are now plans in place to increase water storage capacity further so that the gardens can be watered through the summer even if it stops raining in April.
Warmer winters have affected the National Trust’s plant conservation centre in south west England, reducing the cooler period when grafting plants for its important garden collections is possible.
And at the Vyne in Hampshire, wetter weather and intense rainfall led to water coming through the windows on the west facing side of the mansion and damaging six Soho tapestries dating to 1710, which cost £60,000 to repair, the Trust said.
The Grade I listed property now needs major renovation work to protect it and its contents from further damage.
Elsewhere the Trust is managing land to prevent flooding and creating habitats to protect wildlife from a changing climate, a new report called Forecast Changeable has shown.
Helen Ghosh, director general of the National Trust, said: “The impacts of climate change are clear to see at Trust places, whether from increasingly erratic weather events or from long-term changes in temperature and rainfall distribution affecting countryside and buildings, gardens and collections.
“The risk of permanent damage to landscape and heritage as a result of not planning for a future with a radically different climate is ever increasing.” |
On 11 February 2013, David Edwards, then the most senior civil servant in Queensland’s Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning, used $500 of taxpayer money to buy a “framed and personally signed tennis racquet” for a rich Indian industrialist.
The lucky recipient was Gunupati Venkata Krishna Reddy, whose company, GVK Hancock, is one of those looking to tap the huge coal reserves of Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Multi-millionaire GVK is also a bit of a tennis fan.
In the department’s gifts register, Edwards declared the purchase of the tennis racquet was “of benefit to the Queensland community” because it was “developing and maintaining working relationships between GVK and the Queensland government”.
There’s no detail as to who, exactly, provided the signature. While the gift was curious, it is entirely allowable and was properly declared.
But the tennis racquet might be seen as a totem to the kind of relationships and access that the fossil fuel industry has managed to engineer in Queensland.
A new report published by the Australia Institute – Too close for comfort: How the coal and gas industry get their way in Queensland – details the complex interactions between the coal and gas industries in Queensland and the state’s previous governments.
The report, researched and written by me and paid for by the institute, provides some flesh to hang on the bones of perceptions long-held by many in Queensland that the government and the mining industry are often indistinguishable from each other.
When a government awards a licence to exploit fossil fuels under the ground, those decisions represent the transfer of assets from public to private hands worth billions of dollars to the companies who win the day.
With that in mind, I think Queenslanders should expect the highest levels of accountability and transparency. But in the report, I argue that this does not exist. Not by a long chalk.
To compile the report, I went through documents released under Right to Information laws (Queensland’s version of freedom of information), expenses claims, ministerial diary entries, news reports, lobby register entries, documents tabled in parliament and political funding disclosures.
The report explores liaisons at sports events and restaurants, including the five times that Edwards met over food and wine with bosses of another Galilee coal aspirant, Adani.
But the issue isn’t the taxpayers money spent on meals or tennis racquets for mining bosses (even though some in the community may find it outrageous).
The issue is the level of access companies appear to have at the highest levels and the inescapable impression that the relationships are cosy.
In Queensland, like other states in Australia, the process of lobbying and access is opaque.
The official lobby registers are tokenistic because they manage to exclude any lobbying carried out by companies themselves or the major industry groups, such as the Queensland Resources Council.
Detailed in the report are examples of the revolving lobby door, where personnel move from jobs in government or political offices straight into service for the fossil fuel industry.
But why should the public be concerned about this revolving door? A 2010 report from the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption spelled it out.
The corruption risk is that those who are powerful or wealthy enough to understand how government works or to engage the services of someone who can navigate the decision-making maze on their behalf will exploit their position to their advantage and to the detriment of the public interest.
The state’s burgeoning multibillion-dollar coal seam gas industry is also examined in the report – an area where the lobby door seems to spin particularly fast.
Then there are the political parties themselves, who have set up forums that allow executives to pay for access to ministers.
Former Queensland integrity commissioner Gary Crooke QC has described these arrangements as “bipartisan ethical bankruptcy”, noting that:
Not only is this behaviour wrong from the point of view of perceived and actual fairness, it is deeply flawed because it wilfully and arrogantly disregards a fundamental principle of our democracy: that those elected to govern must use the power entrusted to them for the benefit of the community.
Simply put, the attributes of government have been temporarily reposed in those elected. These attributes are not their property and are not for sale to augment the coffers of sectional interest in the form of a political party.
The Australia Institute’s principal advisor Mark Ogge and research director Rod Campbell say in a foreword to the report:
This report is, as far as we know, the first to look deeply at a single jurisdiction, in this case Queensland, and attempt to rigorously compile a profile of the relationship between fossil fuel companies and governments and political parties, their interactions and their influence.
The results are startling. Compiled together in this manner, individual incidents that might otherwise appear minor, become part of a systemic web of access and influence for fossil fuel companies. The larger view revealed is that of special advantages and pervasive pressure which casts long shadows across our democracy.
As I suggest in the report’s conclusion, improvements to accountability and transparency in the state can only take you so far.
Does simply declaring a gift or political donation make it an acceptable transaction?
Can a lobby register really be effective when it excludes most of the lobbying that actually goes on?
Can concerns about a lack of action on climate change and fossil fuel emissions ever be addressed in the public interest when you have an environment where governments, public officials and political staff have such close and secretive relationships with coal and gas industries?
In February, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, wrote to independent MP Peter Wellington, now the speaker, promising an inquiry, to be carried out by the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission (QCCC), to investigate “links, if any, between donations to political parties and the awarding of tenders, contracts and approvals.”
Reacting to the publication of my report, campaign group Lock the Gate’s spokesperson Drew Hutton said:
I think many Queenslanders and the broader Australian community would be shocked at the revelations in the Australia Institute report on the unhealthy closeness of the relationship between the mining industry and the government.
Hutton suggested the terms of reference for a QCCC inquiry should be broadened to investigate “the influence of the mining industry and urgent changes to place better controls on lobbyists and constrain the ‘revolving door’ between mining and government”.
I agree with that. |
Britain has a weight problem that no number of subtly oversized black T-shirts can hide. The scale of the issue is daunting: 67% of men and 57% of women are either overweight or obese, and by 2030, those figures are predicted to rise to 74% and 64% respectively. But while the majority of reports focus on the nation’s gradual slump towards obesity, those same figures reveal another, seldom-told story. Namely, that weight is more of an issue for men, yet very little is being done to help them. A recent freedom of information request by the charity Men’s Health Forum revealed that 110,324 women had received weight-loss help from their local authorities in 2013/4, but just 29,197 men. In other words, you are 277% more likely to get help with weight loss if you are a woman.
“These figures are pretty shocking,” explains Martin Tod, CEO of Men’s Health Forum. “We want to see local councils making much bigger efforts to design their services to work for men. This is particularly important because men comprise three-quarters of premature deaths from coronary heart disease – and middle-aged men are twice as likely as women to get diabetes.”
There are 20.7 million overweight men in the UK, and the local authorities charged with helping them are reaching just 0.1% of that figure; for women, it’s a scarely better 0.6%. The Conservatives have made encouraging noises about enshrining preventative action at the heart of healthcare, but with cuts wiping millions from precisely the budgets where these interventions come from, it becomes hard to see how we are going to tackle the issue.
I confess, I have an extremely vested interest in this topic, both as a formerly fat man and as an entrepreneur who runs a business delivering men-only weight-loss groups. My own history neatly illustrates why more men aren’t engaged with weight loss. In 2012, I weighed nearly 17 stone and was desperate to lose weight. I was amazed at the struggle I had to find anyone who could offer to help (relatively) normal blokes like me. On a visit to my GP, he tutted earnestly at my expansive gut, handed me a pamphlet and wished me luck. There was no weight-management group to support me, or relevant interventions of any kind.
This left me at the mercy of a commercial diet industry that has jettisoned the idea that men might be an area worth focusing on. Typically, groups such as Weight Watchers and Slimming World are more than 90% female and, as profits shrink, there seems to be little appetite to do anything other than focus on what they see as their core audience. At my heaviest, I remember sitting in a Weight Watchers meeting listening to how my period could cause bloating, wondering how many other men were being similarly let down. As Professor Alison Avenell pointed out in her excellent research into men and weight management, the perception of dieting as a “feminised realm” has damaged men’s relationship with weight loss, and left them disenfranchised from this vital area of health. When you see that Diet Coke is marketed at women and Coke Zero is marketed at men, you begin to see the scope of the issue.
Incredibly, a misguided perception that men aren’t actually that interested in dieting persists. Someone should really tell the 44% of men who tried to diet in 2013. Compare that to the 25% who dieted in 2003, and guess which way this trend is going: it doesn’t take a genius to see that weight loss is becoming a major issue for men. Yet despite this, the help offered to men about losing weight is practically nonexistent – we just get fobbed off with the fitness industry’s “get a six pack in six weeks” nonsense.
For me, it took a long time to get to a place where I could apply the “eat less, move more” mantra and lose more than 60lbs. After failing to find any real support, I started a crowdfunding campaign to launch manvfat.com, a project that offers free support to men who want to lose weight. We raised 102% of our £9,000 target and got support from Jamie Oliver and many of the weight-loss organisations. Perhaps more importantly, we discovered thousands of men from every corner of the world who had the same ambition and problems I did – they wanted to lose weight but were struggling to find support. This is the “not optimal” situation that Avenell’s research describes; however, if you look hard enough, and squint slightly, there are signs of optimism.
Perhaps most importantly, Avenell’s research has been distilled into a best-practice guide by Public Health England and Men’s Health Forum. Professor Kevin Fenton, director of health and wellbeing at Public Health England, has spoken with real enthusiasm about how more needs to be done on the issue. For their part, local authorities seem keen to deliver the sort of services that could see more male lives being saved. At Man v Fat, we are already working with North Somerset to deliver free weight-management programmes following the best-practice guidelines, and our plan is to work with more authorities, and do our bit to make the situation better for those 20.7 million men who simply want to lose some weight. Ultimately, if we want to lower the £5.1bn cost of treating obesity-related conditions – and save lives – it will mean accepting that 0.1% is not good enough. |
Here is a very strange statistic: new car registrations in Britain rose by 12.1% for the 19th consecutive month in September. Britain is in the grip of a new car boom. What makes this particularly bizarre is that we are also witnessing a European car crash. EU sales slumped to a 20-year low in the first half of 2013. New car registrations in France are forecast to fall by 8% this year, sales in Italy have been plummeting for two years and sales are even falling in Germany. While 403,136 new cars were registered in Britain last month – the highest total for 66 months – just 45,175 new cars were sold in Spain.
Britain's great new-car buy seems to defy both logic and personal experience. Car use in London has been in decline for years and yet even where I live in Norfolk, where people depend on their cars, I don't know anyone who recently visited a dealership and unpeeled £17,395 in notes for a Ford Focus Edge 1.6. Seventeen grand for a Ford Focus! Who can afford that? And if you can, why would you? Some new cars (not the Focus) lose 50% of their value 24 hours after being driven out of the showroom.
Last month I paid £3,000 to a secondhand car dealer for a 10-year-old VW Touran. It is a frugal diesel, it is recognisably modern, and its doors close with that reassuring Germanic thud. It is the best car I've ever owned.
Unlike the Touran, I'm not recognisably modern, however, because I've never heard of PCP. Car-industry experts offer a range of interesting reasons for Britain bucking the European car crash but the most striking is the rise of the personal contract purchase. In 2006, about 45% of new cars in Britain were bought on "finance" (loans, leases and PCP). In 2013 so far, 74% have been brought on finance, according to the Finance and Leasing Association. (This figure doesn't include personal loans from high-street providers.) The product behind this increase is PCP.
"If you go into a showroom and look at the sticker-price of the car, it will frighten you to death," says John Tordoff, chief executive of JCT600, a Yorkshire-based car retailer that clocked up a 66% increase in year-on-year new-car sales last month. "Then you look down at the bigger sticker on the door and it says: buy this car for £199 a month.' There might not be many people with £20,000 to spend but there are a lot of people with £199 a month to spend."
PCP is a flexible form of hire purchase, a bit like part-buy, part-rent home-buying schemes. Customers pay a deposit for a new car and then a monthly sum over a fixed term, usually three years, which covers interest and the depreciation of the car. Unlike hire purchase, customers are not committed to buy the car at the end of the contract; unlike leasing, which is a rental agreement, they have equity in the car and can buy it outright by paying the "guaranteed future value" of the vehicle agreed at the start of the term. What usually happens is the customer uses the equity in their car for another deposit and starts another three-year deal with the same dealer. Dealers love it because it encourages repeat business and consumers appear unconcerned about fully owning a car.
"Young people are used to mobile phone deals and iPads on a contract. People are used to renting now," says Paul Harrison, head of motor finance at the FLA. "In an era where everyone's used to paying £50 a month for their Sky bill, consistency is the word. Dealers will throw in service and maintenance packages, warranties and insurance so you can get your total cost of motoring down to one payment each month. That consistency is something we all look for now."
I'm old-fashioned and suspicious of this kind of finance but it is hard to see a catch in well-priced PCP when interest rates are low: the monthly cost is effectively the consumer paying for the car's depreciation so there's no shocking loss on leaving the showroom. There is a risk of fairly punitive payments if a driver exceeds their mileage allowance but if the customer gets into financial difficulties there is at least an asset to recover, so they lose their car rather than other more precious possessions.
But surely a secondhand car is cheaper? Motoring journalist Quentin Willson has been extolling the virtues of secondhand cars for 30 years. Willson rhapsodises about his 14-year-old Mercedes convertible, which cost £2,500 secondhand, but has never known new cars to be so cheap. "It's this bizarre situation where it's cheaper to buy yourself a new little city car with a three-year warranty than run an old VW Golf. A Skoda Citigo for £70 a month. What's not to love?" For the modern motorist, a part-bought, part-rented PCP car you change every three-years is "guilt-free motoring" with none of the stress of buying or maintaining a secondhand car. Economical new vehicles are another reason for the new car boom. Drivers are trading in 10-year-old cars that do 40mpg for new diesels that exceed 70mpg (for sceptics of laboratory fuel-economy figures, What Car? found the Kia Rio and Citroen C3 both exceeded 70mpg in real-world tests).
The coalition will love talk of booming car sales showing confident, consumer-led Britain accelerating out of the recession before its neighbours, but Willson makes an interesting point. European makers are still churning out cars that most Europeans are not buying, so these vehicles are shipped to Britain. "It costs billions to close factories so car manufacturers have no choice but to find a market that could be made more active. They put as many incentives as they could behind these cars to stimulate activity in the UK. It is just to keep Stuttgart, Munich and Barcelona and all those massive factories going. It doesn't represent an economic recovery in the UK, it's just a massive marketing stimulus." He predicts the current cheap deals – and high sales – won't last.
Other industry insiders identify other factors driving the British car boom. Britain's buoyant car manufacturers export the vast majority of their cars but successes such as the Range Rover Evoque and the Nissan Qashqai can only help sales here (one in seven new registrations are built in Britain). Chas Hallett, editor in chief of What Car?, says many drivers have bought a new car with PPI compensation payouts (a typical payout of £3,000 covers a deposit for a car). Another factor is the company car market, which is unusually large in Britain and accounts for half of all new car sales.
But what does this boom say about Britain's changing relationship with the car? Are we one of the most car-obsessed nations in the world? Or, paradoxically, do these figures presage a diminishing love for cars? As everyone in the industry acknowledges, the 19-month rise is a correction: even if the predicted 2.2m new cars are registered in 2013, it is still 380,000 less than the peak of 2.58m in 2003. And, oddly, given our moans about congestion, car use was falling – particularly among the young – before the recession struck. Some academics believe that mileage per capita has peaked in Britain: like peak oil, there is "peak car" and the car is trundling down a long hill towards senescence.
This is an attractive theory to environmentalists and haters of traffic jams but it might be wishful thinking. A study commissioned by rail and road groups including the Independent Transport Commission and the RAC Foundation last year found that, while car traffic levels have been falling in London since 1998, there is a continuing growth in non-company car use outside London among the over 30s: so for 70% of the British population, there has been no "peak car" effect.
Luca Lytton, research manager at the RAC Foundation, says young people are using cars less but argues this is because of economic barriers (mainly the astronomical cost of insurance for young people) rather than a cultural turning-away from the car. The RAC believes that demographic changes will ensure the number of motorists will continue to increase in Britain: if the population rises by 10 million by 2035, as the government suggests, the working-age immigrants and fit, retired, relatively affluent baby-boomers behind these figures are likely to drive.
It is counterintuitive to claim that soaring sales show a declining influence of the car on our lives, but the way we buy motor vehicles does reflect a transformation of our relationship with them. "Car culture is changing, particularly among younger people being increasingly presented with alternatives like car [share] clubs," says Paul Nieuwenhuis of Cardiff Business School. He passed his test in the 1970s. "In my generation cars were a very popular pursuit. When we bought a car we could fix it ourselves. Fixing a modern car is quite challenging. That hands-on experience of working with a car has gone. There's less emotional attachment and there's not as deep a relationship as we had with our cars." We are emasculated and estranged from the car by its transformation from oily mechanical object to computer-controlled being.
Willson agrees. While he welcomes the new car boom putting safer and more environmentally-friendly cars on the road, he sees buying a car as if it was a mobile phone as a sign of a growing car illiteracy. "Most people treat their cars like a peasant treats a donkey. There's a vast majority of consumers who are car illiterate and can't maintain them and throw them away like a handkerchief. How often do you see a car in the driveway being washed or with the bonnet up? We treat them like a washing machine or tumble drier. We've got a generation of kids who don't want to learn to drive and people who see the car as a mobility solution."
When I tell Hallett at What Car? about my secondhand VW, he praises its spaciousness. "But your gearbox could drop out tomorrow and it's worthless," he says. "If you bought a new car for £200 a month with a three-year warranty and lock yourself into that three-year cycle, your car will always be covered."
Seeking reassurance, I phone Andy Seddon, owner of Severalls MOT Centre in Colchester and the man who sold me my Touran. A car romantic, Seddon is convinced that Britain is still a nation of car lovers, complete with popular clubs for Subaru Impreza owners, Minis and Fiat 500s, and cult car shows such as Wheeler Dealers.
So, new versus secondhand? "If I had the money or the credit, I would buy a brand new car on lease for three years," he says. "Free insurance, the whole service package and you hand the keys back after three years and get a new one. That would be perfect. That's the way it should really be."
I'm shocked. Come on Andy, sell me the concept of a secondhand car! After a bit of nudging, Seddon agrees that prices are low and business is brisk. Rising new car sales means that the market is awash with secondhand bargains. British Car Auctions recorded 7.1m used car sales in 2012, outpacing new-car sales by rising 6.4% and returning to pre-recession levels. Apart from my Touran, Seddon recently sold a 57-plate Vauxhall Vectra CDTi with "full history and full leather" for £3,250. "That's a lotta, lotta car for little money," he purrs. And, as he points out, post-recession, many people no longer have the credit rating to acquire finance for a new car.
Perhaps Britain's resurgent love for new cars is a passionless affair. Are drivers buying risk-free motors to pootle from A to B in – without using much fuel or requiring much maintenance – with little more enthusiasm than they would have for an everyday kitchen appliance?
"If that was exactly the case, we wouldn't have the massive peaks in September and March when the number plates change," says Keith Lewis of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. "Although the emotional attachment might not be the same as it was, they still want the feelgood factor of a new car."
Hallett insists that Britain still rivals the US and Japan as the most motor-obsessed nation on the planet. "A car is still an emotional purchase, it's still something we attach emotional value to," he argues. "The UK is actually the most brand-sensitive nation on earth, as far as cars are concerned. Pretty much everyone can tell you the make of their car but I don't know the make and model of my refrigerator. I speak at a lot of schools and children love cars, Top Gear has six million viewers every Sunday and most people need cars. There's a conceit among the London-based media that no one needs a car. Try telling that to a single mother in Leicester where there is one bus an hour." |
As delegates to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth sup their beers and wines in the bars of the Highcliff hotel this week, how many are aware that they are drinking in the shadow of one of the great events in British party conference history?
Indeed, they might not be here at all were it not for a decision taken at a party conference in this hotel long ago.
The Highcliff, which commands a wonderful Channel view across to Studland Bay and the Swanage coast, has served as a political conference hotel many times in recent years.
The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all gathered here since the Bournemouth International Centre was opened a quarter of a century ago.
There have been famous Bournemouth conferences in that time, of course – Neil Kinnock's assault on Militant happened in the town, as did the post-Westland Tory renewal conference, masterminded by Norman Tebbit.
But there is no doubt that Bournemouth's – and the Highcliff's – finest hour in the party conference annals came in May 1940, when Labour met at the hotel for its first conference of the second world war.
On 8 May 1940, Neville Chamberlain's national government (in effect a Tory government in all but name) was humiliated in the Norway debate, held to review the failure of the Narvik expedition.
Chamberlain won the vote 281-200, but 33 Conservatives and eight others voted with Labour against the government.
The next day, Chamberlain met his chief political lieutenants, Lord Halifax and Winston Churchill, and proposed that Labour had to come into the government to form a coalition to prosecute the war. If Labour refused to serve under him, he would resign.
Labour's leader, Clement Attlee, and his deputy, Arthur Greenwood, then joined the meeting. Attlee told Chamberlain Labour would not come in as long he remained as prime minister.
He was asked whether the party would serve under another leader and said he thought they would but that, as Labour was in conference at Bournemouth, he would go and consult the party.
On the following day, 10 May, Attlee, Greenwood and Hugh Dalton went down to Bournemouth. German troops were now pouring into Holland and Belgium.
Attlee convened a meeting of Labour's national executive committee in the Highcliff Hotel.
The committee voted unanimously that Labour would not serve under Chamberlain, but would serve under an alternative leader who commanded "the confidence of the nation".
Attlee took a call from 10 Downing Street before returning to Bournemouth station, and gave the verdict of the NEC to an official, who passed it to Chamberlain as a cabinet meeting was in session.
That evening, Chamberlain resigned and recommended that King George VI should send for Churchill. Attlee became the deputy prime minister, and the most important coalition government in British history was formed.
It had all hinged on the decision taken at the Highcliff, looking out across the English Channel.
The view was probably just as splendid then as it is now. But it must have looked infinitely more threatening in 1940 than it does this week. |
In a quiet corner of a family pub behind Blackburn Rovers’ Ewood Park football stadium, Joe Robinson looks down at his pint. For the past two months, he explains, he has felt on edge and unable to sleep for more than two or three hours a night.
The 22-year-old former British soldier returned two months ago from Syria, where he had fought as a civilian alongside Kurdish forces against Islamic State militants during one of the civil war’s bloodiest periods. Since returning to Blackburn – penniless, jobless and homeless – he has found adapting to civilian life a struggle.
“When you go [to a war zone] with the military you’re getting paid, you’re getting lots of support, you have decompression and stuff like that,” he said. “When I came back, I’d spent every penny I had to get over there, I left my job to get over there. I’ve had nowhere to live. I’ve come back with nothing, no support and nobody to talk to.”
Last week Robinson contacted Combat Stress, the veterans’ mental health charity, on the advice of his mother and fiancee. He has now found a sales job to tide him over, and is sleeping at a friend’s house until he finds his own place. Things are starting to look up.
He is, however, not allowed to leave the country. Robinson returned to the UK on 28 November, needing “a break” after five months of fighting with little armour, antique AK47s and sub-standard tactics. On arrival at Manchester airport he was arrested by counter-terrorism police, had his passport seized and was questioned for 10 hours, he said. He remains on police bail until March.
It was the day after the Tunisian beach terrorist attack in June last year that Robinson quit his job to go to fight in Syria, telling his boss only that he was going abroad. Over the previous 12 months, starting with the murder of Salford aid worker Alan Henning, he had grown increasingly incensed by both Islamic State’s gory propaganda videos and what he saw as Britain’s inaction in Syria.
“Our government were doing nothing about it. That’s the reason I went,” he said. “Everyone knows what’s happened – our government were doing nothing about it – I thought, if our government’s not going to do anything about it then I will. I’ve got the training, so why not use it to help people.”
His life in Blackburn had already been turbulent. He got into a fight on a night out and punched a man, breaking his jaw in two places. He was caught after apologising to his victim on Facebook and was sentenced to community service. But before completing his sentence (he has nearly finished it now, he adds) he went off to Syria.
He told his mother he was going to France to try join the French foreign legion – he had tried unsuccessfully after leaving the British army two years ago – and started researching ways to enter Syria.
Robinson used Facebook to contact Jordan Matson, a former US soldier and one of the most prominent westerners fighting against Isis. Matson put him in touch with the Lions of Rojava, a Kurdish unit hosting a number of foreign militants, including Britons.
Days later, he flew from Manchester to Germany, where he booked a separate flight to Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. On arrival, he rang a middleman, then passed his phone to a taxi driver waiting outside the airport terminal, who drove him to a safe house.
“I had to get in the car, didn’t have a clue where I was going – for all I know I’m going to end up in a fucking orange jumpsuit and get my head cut off,” he says.
When he reached the safe house, a motel about 20 minutes’ drive away, he was relieved to see four Americans. At this point, he told his mother where he was and what he planned to do.
“She was heartbroken. You can imagine, can’t you,” he said, looking down again, ashamed.
The next day Robinson and the Americans travelled with the Kurdish militia group YPG, or People’s Protection Units, to the Iraqi mountains bordering Turkey and Syria before sneaking over the border. There, he said, he crossed paths with westerners who had suffered devastating injuries from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), but it was not until his first week on the ground in Syria that he witnessed the full scale of the war.
Robinson was one of the YPG fighters who fought in the battle of Sarrin, capturing the key northern town fromIsis militants who had been using it as a launchpad for attacks on Kobani.
Robinson said his group captured a school in the centre of Sarrin that had been turned by Isis militants into a sharia court and used to hold sex slaves.
“For the first three days we were there, they sent a wave of 23 suicide bombers at us,” he said. “We were trying to fend them off and they were blowing up in pieces. It was pretty ruthless. When they realised they couldn’t attack us with suicide bombers, they started attacking civilians to draw us out – that’s when the civilian casualties came to the gate.”
The image of one particular group of casualties is seared in Robinson’s memory. A father and his young son and daughter had been brought to the gate of the school with horrific injuries. The father, he said, had stood on an IED while they were fleeing the town, losing his right leg. His son was missing both arms and his daughter had lost her right leg and right arm. Robinson treated them all. He doesn’t say whether they survived.
In his first newspaper interview since returning from Syria, it is clear Robinson has been deeply affected by what he witnessed. The former infantryman, who did a tour of Afghanistan in 2012, talks with emotional intensity about the plight of the Kurdish people – particularly those caught up in Turkey’s recent military crackdown in its Kurdish regions – of whom he admits he knew nothing about before going to Syria.
He said he believes Turkey should be kicked out of Nato and claims to have witnessed Turkish soldiers handing weapons and ammunition to Isis fighters in Jarabulus, just over the Turkish border, in August; a claim almost impossible to verify and one that would be denied by Turkey.
Since returning, he has been lauded as a hero in his Lancashire hometown of Accrington. “I don’t want the attention, I don’t like the attention. I want people to be aware of what’s going on,” he said. “A lot of people see you as this brave person, but I don’t see it as that. I don’t think I’m brave. I tell you what, mate, I was fucking terrified the entire way of going through with it.”
Now he wants to return to some kind of normality: “Going from that situation to being back in civilian life … hopefully everything’s starting to line up.”
Would he go back to Syria? “I’m not allowed to answer that,” he said with a smile. |
G20 leaders will today agree plans to reshape the world economy and give more say to developing nations such as China, India and Brazil when they conclude their summit in Pittsburgh.
The reforms will secure a seat at the top table of global economic policy for emerging nations, with world leaders agreeing that the G20 should become a board of directors on global economic co-operation, shifting the decades-old global balance of power away from Europe.
The G20 group, which includes Argentina, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, will replace the G7, which for more than three decades has dominated the world financial stage. The deal was thrashed out by Barack Obama, who is hosting his first major summit as US president.
The agreement, to be officially announced today at the conclusion of the Pittsburgh summit, will see the world's richest nations pledge to retain emergency economic supports until recovery is secured and work together to tackle climate change. They will agree to tighten banking regulation in an effort to avoid a repeat of the last two years' global economic turmoil. Governments across the world have pumped an estimated $5tn into their economies to deal with the greatest shock to the system since the 1930s.
"Today, leaders endorsed the G20 as the premier forum for their international economic co-operation," said a White House statement after a summit dinner last night. "This decision brings to the table the countries needed to build a stronger, more balanced global economy, reform the financial system and lift the lives of the poorest."
Divisions remain over the questions of bankers' pay. France and Germany are holding out for tougher restrictions on the highly paid executives blamed for bringing down the world financial system.
The US treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, said there had been progress on pay and that G20 countries had reached a consensus on the "basic outline" of a proposal to limit bankers' compensation by the end of this year. He said it would involve setting separate standards in each of the countries and would be overseen by the Financial Stability Board, an international group of central bankers and regulators.
His comments came shortly after the European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, again pressed for the limits.
"Europeans are horrified by banks, some reliant on taxpayers' money, once again paying exorbitant bonuses," Barroso said. "It is important we take action."
Geithner offered the prospect of greater voting rights in the International Monetary Fund for Asian countries over the reservations of European nations, who would lose influence. Given the rise of China's economic power "it's the right thing" and Europe recognised this, Geithner said.
Neither the G7, which was created in the 1970s as the oil crisis struck western economies, nor the G8, which includes Russia, will be disbanded. The latter will instead focus on issues such as national security, while diplomats say the G7 will deal with geopolitical issues.
The new role for the G20 as the premier forum for international economic co-operation will begin with two summits next year, in Canada and South Korea, then annual summits. |
Child abuse allegations against a preacher who helped build Australia’s Pentecostal movement will be investigated by the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, it was announced on Thursday.
The commission will examine how the Sydney Christian Life Centre and Hills Christian Life Centre (now Hillsong Church) and Assemblies of God in Australia (now Australian Christian Churches) treated allegations against the Pentecostal Christian pastor William Francis “Frank” Houston and two other men.
Houston, who died in 2004, confessed in 2000 to sexually abusing a boy in New Zealand more than 30 years earlier. He was immediately sacked by his son, Brian Houston, the high-profile founder of Hillsong.
Further allegations have been made in recent years, including that Houston sexually abused a trainee pastor in the 1980s in an attempt to “cure” him of homsexuality.
Houston was born in New Zealand, training to become a Salvation Army officer at the age of 18 before founding an Assemblies of God ministry, Fairfax reported in his obituary. In 1977 he left for Sydney, where he founded the Christian Life Centre and built the city’s Pentecostal movement.
He has been credited with converting high-profile people to the church, including the jockey Darren Beadman.
In a statement provided to Guardian Australia, Hillsong Church said it “ welcomes any inquiry and will co-operate fully with the Royal Commission.”
The royal commission will also look into the treatment of allegations from the 1980s and 90s against a former teacher, Kenneth Sandilands, at the Northside Christian College and the Northside Christian Centre (now Encompass Church) in Bundoora, Victoria, and the response of the Australian Christian Churches to allegations against Jonathan Baldwin. Both men are still alive.
Encompass Church said it “welcomed” the public hearing, and would continue to cooperate fully.
“Child abuse is abhorrent and goes against everything we stand for,” a senior pastor, John Spinella, said in a statement. “These public hearings of the royal commission are an important opportunity for those who have suffered pain and hurt as a result of actions of the past to be heard.
“As a church we have recognised these past failures and take the opportunity to apologise for the suffering and pain endured by those who were abused.”
The public hearing will run from 7 October in Sydney and will be the 18th for the royal commission. Previous public hearings have put the spotlight on numerous churches, schools and government organisations, including the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army, Marist Brothers, Swimming Australia, the Scouts and New South Wales government-run homes and disciplinary institutes.
“Any person or institution who believes that they have a direct and substantial interest in the scope and purpose of the public hearing is invited to lodge a written application for leave to appear at the public hearing by 23 September 2014,” the royal commission said. |
A scathing UN report has sharply rebuked Mexico for its widespread problem with torture, which it said implicates all levels of the security apparatus in the context of the government’s efforts to combat crime.
“Torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity,” the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, wrote in the report he presented on Monday before the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
The report was based on a fact-finding mission Méndez made to Mexico last spring, and says methods used include beatings, electric shocks, suffocation, waterboarding, forced nudity and rape, as well as threats and insults.
Méndez’s report links torture in Mexico to government efforts to combat the country’s drug cartels, saying the majority of cases he studied involved victims detained for alleged links with organized crime. He also implicates local, state and federal police in the practice, as well as the armed forces.
The army and navy’s role in public security operations escalated dramatically when President Felipe Calderón launched a major offensive against organized crime at the end of 2006. His successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, has made few major changes to the strategy since he took office at the end of 2012.
The number of complaints of torture made to the National Human Rights Commission rose from an average of 320 a year before the offensive to 2,100 in 2012. They have fallen by nearly a third during the Peña Nieto administration, though the report notes that contributing factors remain largely unchanged, including the “tolerance, indifference or complicity” of some doctors, public defenders, prosecutors and judges.
Highlighting that there were only five convictions for torture in Mexico between 2005 and 2013, the report concludes: “The safeguards are weak, particularly in the detection and prevention of torture in the initial moments, as well as in ensuring its rapid, impartial, independent and exhaustive investigation.”
As well as recommending the withdrawal of the armed forces from its current domestic security role, Méndez urges the elimination of the law allowing Mexican authorities to hold suspects for a period of 40 days prior to bringing charges as investigators seek to build cases against them, often with the help of forced confessions.
Mexico’s representative in Geneva said the report’s conclusion that torture is generalised “does not correspond to reality, or reflect the huge efforts in my country to consolidate respect for human rights”.
In an interview with the newspaper La Jornada, Jorge Lomónaco said: “Mexico identifies a series of challenges it needs to attend to ensure the complete eradication of this practice.”
The report comes in a context of rising global attention to human rights abuses in Mexico sparked by the disappearance of 43 students in the southern city of Iguala on 26 September, after they were attacked by municipal police allegedly working with a local drug gang.
The federal investigation concluded that the students were killed on the same night, though some reject this version’s reliance on confessions made by detained officers and alleged cartel members.
The student case cast a shadow over President Peña Nieto’s state visit to the UK last week that was greeted by protests, including one organised by Amnesty International.
The group’s Americas director, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said Monday’s UN report “highlights a culture of impunity and brutality that we have been campaigning about for years”. |
The White House said Thursday it was working "aggressively" to assuage concerns over U.S. surveillance programs after German chancellor Angela Merkel said they violated trust between the allies.
The White House spokesman said that President Obama and Merkel had spoken about her concerns "on several occasions" and that the U.S. continued "to work on this through diplomatic channels."
"We have been engaged directly with the Germans on this issue," Carney said.
At a press conference on Thursday, Merkel said revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had hit with "great force." Documents provided by Snowden indicated that the United States had monitored Merkel's personal cellphone.
"Is it right that our closest partners such as the United States and Britain gain access to all imaginable data, saying this is for their own security and the security of their partners?" Merkel said.
"Is it right to act this way because others in the world do the same?" she added before also touching on alleged British spying at international talks.
"Is it right if in the end this is not about averting terrorist threats but, for example, gaining an advantage over allies in negotiations, at G20 summits or UN sessions?
"Our answer can only be: No, this can't be right. Because it touches the very core of what cooperation between friendly and allied countries is about: trust."
The German leader added that "actions in which the ends justify the means, in which everything that is technically possible is done, violate trust, they sow distrust."
"The end result is not more security, but less."
Merkel's comments came ahead of a meeting Friday between Secretary of State John Kerry and top German officials in Berlin and Munich.
At a speech on American surveillance programs earlier this month, Obama announced that the U.S. was placing tighter restrictions on the surveillance of foreign heads of state. He had already personally assured Merkel her communications would no longer be monitored. |
Young heir to the throne Prince George will be privately christened on October 23, when he is just over three months old, according to the royal family.
The venue holds special significance, as the Chapel Royal at St. James' Palace is where Princess Diana's coffin lay before her Westminster Abbey funeral.
Indeed, the BBC reports that the Henry VIII-built chapel is a very small space, which means the baptism will likely only be for close family and friends.
George's dad, Prince William, was christened at Buckingham Palace in 1982.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Revered Justin Welby, will perform the christening of William and Kate Middleton's first-born child next month.
"I am delighted to be invited to conduct the baptism of His Royal Highness Prince George," the Archbishop said in a statement after the event was confirmed.
"It is a great privilege and honor and will without doubt be an occasion of immense joy and celebration. I am looking forward to welcoming him into the family of the church."
Born July 22, the royal baby will wear a copy of the lace and satin gown worn in 1841 by Queen Victoria's oldest daughter, Victoria, to the christening.
Whatever Kate Middleton wears will instantly sell out.
One last British royal family fun fact: The last royal to be christened in the Chapel Royal was William's cousin Princess Beatrice, in December 1988. |
it's a lamp...it's a stove
The lamp-stove was an appliance which had multiple uses: it functioned as a stove, a heater, and a lamp. Lamp-stoves came in a variety of sizes from one to three burners. The single burner models were quite portable and were often fitted with a finger hold for carrying like a hand lamp or lantern. As a stove, these items found a niche as a small and portable method of cooking or heating items such as irons. Advertising claims stated that they could boil water in 8 minutes and heat a flat-iron in 5 minutes. They were economical in that they heated up quickly and were a lower-cost option to stoking up the wood or coal stove. They were sturdier than similar devices that were invented to be used on top of a regular lamp chimney which was prone to breakage and often proved unstable.
For illumination, the lamp-stoves were most often fitted with mica "windows." This allowed the light from the wide wicks to be cast outward like that of a lantern or head lamp. The mica window also allowed the user to view the height of the flame and adjust same as needed. These mica pieces were often held in place by a removable frame so the mica could be removed for cleaning if it became dirty or sooted, or replaced if it became damaged. Companies that were know for making lamps often made and sold a line lamp-stoves and heaters. The Rochester lamp-stove depicted at the top of the left-hand margin was one such device. These were often fitted with the #10 or mammoth founts they used in their store lamps. In some cases, the enclosure was partially cut away to allow the unit to function as a lamp as well. Others which were designed more as heaters, such as the Banner Oil Heater, were often surrounded by pierced tin or steel and provided little useful light. The Perfection heaters that were very common around the turn of the century and well into the 20th century were offered with a full cylinder of glass as shown here.
The IRON CLAD LAMP STOVE depicted above was manufactured by the Monitor Oil Stove Company of Cleveland, Ohio. They also had offices in Boston. This stove uses the burner shown here. This burner is embossed "PAT FEB 8, 87 - No. 347,545." This patent was granted to Lewis J. Atwood and assigned to The Plume & Atwood Manufacturing Company. It is not known if Plume & Atwood provided the burners for them.
The Florence Machine Company of Florence, Massachusetts manufactured sewing machines and a full line of lamp-stoves and larger oil stoves. According to their advertising pamphlet, they started offering them around 1876. These items remained popular well after the turn of the century as they are often mentioned in magazine advertisements in the early 1900's. Dexter W. Goodell and Oscar N. Kyle obtained a patent for a lamp stove on June 8, 1886. Their patent number 343,535 was assigned to The Florence Machine Co. and conforms substantially to the Florence Lamp Stoves seen in their advertisements. A.W. Shumway assigned his invention to the company for a portable tin oven for oil or gas stoves - pat. no. 383,830 in 1888. Other patents assigned to The Florence Machine Co. include number 204,557 on June 4, 1878 and design patent no. 13,071 on July 25, 1882.
On November 15, 1890, the Central Oilgas Stove Company was incorporated and absorbed the Monitor Oil Stove Company, the Florence Machine Company, and several other stove manufactories.
Patent Search Interface
To view any of the patents referenced in this article, enter the patent number in the field below and click Query USPTO Database. This will open in a new window and take you to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Database - directly to the patent in question. Learn more about the USPTO here. |
Sinkhole swallows car amid Sicily downpour
The Local · 22 Oct 2015, 10:27
Published: 22 Oct 2015 10:27 GMT+02:00
The car plunged five metres through the eight-metre wide hole on a road in Valverde, in the province of Catania.
The female driver made a miraculous escape having just parked the vehicle before the hole opened up, Corriere reported.
It was then hauled out by firefighters with a crane. The scene was captured on the video below.
Heavy rain has swept across Sicily over the past couple of days, with the Catania area faring the worst.
The downpours are expected to continue on Thursday, while torrential rain is also forecast in the Puglia and Calabria regions of southern Italy.
The sinkhole is just the latest embarrassment for the island’s public works authorities. In early January a €13 million viaduct, which lies on a stretch of highway between Palermo and Agrigento, collapsed within days of opening.
Sinkholes are also a common problem elsewhere in the country, especially when torrential rain hits. In February over 300 people had to be evacuated from their homes on a street in Naples after heavy rain and a burst water pipe caused the road to cave in. |
August 3, 2010
Just Walk Out
A 40-Mile, 40-Person, Radically Open-Ended Experiment in Public Art
by JEN GRAVES
In 1990, the king of Belgium, a professed Catholic, was faced with a choice. He could oppose an abortion law by refusing to sign it or he could go against his personal beliefs and put his name to it. As a monarch in a democracy, the king, Baudouin, was in a funny position already; his signature was little more than a formality. But what he did next made a radical sort of sense: He resigned his throne for one day so that another man could take the throne, sign the law, and then restore Baudouin to his rightful position the next day. Rather than choose between bad options, the king simply walked out on his life until the moment passed. The Belgian artist Carsten Höller was inspired by the situation and wrote later:
The solution to this dilemma is ingeniously simple. It is a short-term deviation from your usual behaviour, a shift in character for the sake of avoiding producing something you don’t want to produce, a refusal in time to be the professional you usually are. It is as if you would cut off a continuous line of being. Stop, and start again? Not a change in what you do, but to include an alien moment of not doing.
From this inspiration, the artist created The Baudouin Experiment: A Deliberate, Non-Fatalistic Large Scale Group Experiment in Deviation (2000), which gathered 200 people in a contained set of rooms for 24 hours and asked nothing of them but to leave their outside lives for that time, “to experience with others the possibility of getting away from what you usually are.”
A new art project led by Susan Robb and Stokley Towles took the premise of walking out on your life literally, as well as figuratively. It was called The Long Walk. Forty people who didn’t know each other up and marched out of Seattle two hot, dry weekends ago. We started at a Starbucks parking lot on Lake City Way and proceeded 40 miles on foot to the parking lot next to Snoqualmie Falls, the miles spread over three long, exhilarating, dehydrating, skin-cooking, tarsal-abusing days spent on idyllic trails with eagles and vistas of Mount Rainier, or squeezed on the shoulders of murderously busy roads, or following paths for miles just a block off main drags, where we could see car-repair joints and diners and drugstores—the days punctuated by crawling into tents in public parks and sleeping like stones at night.
After all that, we mounted a bus. It took 40 minutes to get home. This stretching and condensing of time and space, the great illogic of this brief move from motor to foot, shocked the brain. (Some walkers complained that the route was not efficient or beautiful enough; this griping seemed understandable, even inevitable, but somehow beside the point.) We’d become suspended in something like self-imposed snow days.
“The Slow-Movement Movement,” artist Jed Dunkerley dubbed it afterward. (He’d taken charge of helping people with their blisters, which was a full-time performance involving various levels of intervention, from the rubbing on of preventive paste to the cutting of elaborate doughnut shapes out of moleskin to cushion blisters-on-blisters; feet became such an obsession by day two that Robb had to request that attention be drawn upward, “at least to the loins.”)
And like the king’s temporary resignation, what we were not doing was as important as what we were doing. We were not producing anything at our jobs, we were not cleaning our houses or feeding pets and children—we were not living the lives we have made for ourselves, and we weren’t even hiking, since hiking implies a sporting focus and a determined traipse. We were just walking, some of us barely faster than an amble, without much if any preparation or training for an endurance event. This is how we pictured ourselves: as a slow line being drawn. (We wondered, meanwhile, how other people pictured us as they drove and biked by, and a few stopped to ask; they responded mostly with bafflement. Given the normal terms for road use, we made no sense. The closest to an understanding that arose was that we were a walk for a cause, and art was the cause, though after this provided a momentary answer to inquisitive audiences, you could see their brows furrow over larger questions about the nature of art. We didn’t stop long enough for big explanations; we had walking to do.)
At all times we kept maps in our pockets and in our heads—a continuous linear awareness of where we were in the order, how many people were ahead and behind, as artist Chris Engman pointed out while we sauntered into Redhook Brewery in Woodinville for lunch on the first day. Obviously, we were not purists. We weren’t attempting a bragging-rights proof of Emersonian self-reliance, and despite our bipedalism, we weren’t pitted against technology—we used GPS, tweeted and texted (both to outsiders and to each other), and collectively relied on a motorized vehicle, a U-Haul with our tents and food that met us every few hours.
The journey was an open-ended, open-source hybrid in every way. The eagle was equal to the truck flying by advertising “Bothell Furniture for Your Northwest Lifestyle” on
a heavily trafficked suburban road called Novelty Hill; the black raspberries on the side of the trail were equal to the Snoqualmie Fallen & I Can’t Get Up pizza on the menu at the Fall City Grill where we stopped for lunch on the last day. When, walking on a quiet residential street, we came across a gorgeous blond teenager standing on a lawn playing a sparkling blue guitar and singing, we said to each other, “Twin Peaks just happened.” The Starbucks lounge in a QFC in some small but affluent Eastside town had leather chairs facing a fireplace, above which hung a photograph of a group of cavorting pioneer women, presented as ancestors. Meanwhile, artist Rebecca Cummins carried a miniature souvenir Space Needle with her and used it for the prehistoric practice of making sundial drawings. Everything on this trip was as mixed-up as everything is in our lives all the time: urban-suburban-rural, natural-artificial, analog-mechanical-digital, past-present-future. And by the time we came back, it felt like maybe it would be like in one of those sci-fi movies, where only a second passes on Earth while whole years have gone by on another planet.
Significantly, this was a work of public art. It was funded by public money—nobody paid to attend the trip, which was supported by 4Culture and King County Parks as part of the summer Trails Project, intended to activate the regional trails system through art—and it took place entirely on public thoroughfares. There was one tiny exception to this rule, when our group walked 20 feet on a stone path across someone’s property to a trail and we were shouted at by a neighbor—passing by in a car—for trespassing. (We ignored the shouting.) That neighborhood, off Lake City Way, was full of big houses overlooking the water, and—no lie—there was a cut-off corner of a dollar bill sitting in a freshly mowed lawn where a Latino man was still pushing the mower. You can’t help but become aware of land use on a trip like this. In another location, a private landowner had erected a 30-foot fence blocking the public trail, and in preparation for this trip, the county’s legal department, um, influenced the landowner to remove the fence so we could pass, according to a 4Culture staffer.
“Isolation is the essence of land art,” said Walter De Maria, one of the grandfathers of the form, who first started working directly on land in the Mojave Desert in 1968 and who later created The Lightning Field, a one-mile-by-one-kilometer grid of lightning rods set into the ground in the middle of nowhere near Quemado, New Mexico. People
make pilgrimages to The Lightning Field, just as they do to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, or Michael Heizer’s Double Negative on the Mormon Mesa in Nevada. Those are the classics of land art, or earth art, and they’re predicated on solitude. Even if you don’t visit them alone, you’re aware that the work will be very much alone when you leave it—these remote locations are otherwise bereft of art and people.
But an alternative version of land art, just as classic (and illuminated in the 2007 book Land Art by Ben Tufnell), stems from British artist Richard Long’s tradition—of walking. While the American De Maria’s first earthwork (in 1968) was a mile-long line etched into the dry lake bed of El Mirage that had to be walked to be experienced, in 1967 Long created the humbler A Line Made by Walking. Long paced a field until his footprints had worn a path, at which point he took a photograph of the line and added the text “A Line Made By Walking.” Since then, art and walking have been explicitly associated: Artists like Hamish Fulton, also a Brit, take walks as political statements. His piece To Build Is to Destroy. No Man-Made Obstacles for the Winter Winds. 14 Seven Day Walks, Cairngorms, Scotland, 1985–1999, with the title printed over a photograph of a snowy mountain plateau, refers to a fight over the construction of ski lifts in one of the few remaining wild areas in Britain.
But the association of art and walking is also related to what you might call the “verb”-ing of sculpture in the 1960s, or the transition from focusing on objects to focusing on processes. An easy demonstration of this abstract concept is Richard Serra’s Wake at the Olympic Sculpture Park, a piece that has to be walked to be experienced. Meanwhile, the last 40 years have also seen the rise of urban “art walks,” which serve to delineate places. Lately it seems every neighborhood in Seattle has to have an art walk, almost as if not having one would mean it didn’t exist. Seattle now has art walks in Pioneer Square (the original), the Central District, White Center, Ballard, Fremont, Capitol Hill, and Belltown—and probably others too little to be noticed or remembered. (It is hard not to see them as increasingly meaningless.)
The Long Walk had the structure and appearance of a walk-for-a-cause or a political rally but the spirit of Canadian artist Kelly Mark’s 2003 piece Demonstration, a rally of about 30 people picketing while carrying blank signs and yelling, “What do we want? Nothing!” It’s not that they didn’t want anything; they were out there asking for nothing—nothing, at least, that was already defined as a possible choice. Kind of like the king of Belgium. Sometimes a walk is just a way of drawing a line between one thing and another, a line in a place it doesn’t normally go, to see what falls on either side now.
Jul 29th, 2010 by Tamar Benzikry-Stern
Last weekend (July23 – 25), Trails Project artists Susan Robb and Stokley Towles led a group of intrepid walkers on The Long Walk. For a glimpse into their shared adventure, Beth Sellars, one of the walkers, describes.
By Beth Sellars
The Long Walk inspired as many personal responses as participants. Forty of us hiked 40+ miles through landscapes that many of us had only driven. We all participated for different reasons, but were united in a collective goal of “reaching the end.” The 40 individual participants ultimately morphed into a most unique art form; one of cohesive, but diverse group interaction with the spatial experience of the environment. Along the way, we met old and new friends, shared in new experiences and dealt with physical suffering, always assisting one another.
Susan Robb and Stokley Towles, with Tamar Benzikry-Stern’s constant assistance, masterfully organized the incredible complexity of the project and were strikingly agile in revising problem areas. Jed Dunkerley, self-titled “blister medic”, earnestly repaired wounded feet and kept everyone on the march. PA Jana Brevick was pivotal in the success of the event, driving a rental truck filled with our gear, food, and water to every stopping point, repeatedly loading and unloading the confusing array of goods we had entrusted to her. She was unflappable, and remarkably upbeat.
Although we walked along highways and byways, and through occasional construction, we primarily walked along the lush undergrowth of rivers and creeks, over bridges, continued along sun drenched or tree lined trails and roads, and along the railroad trail that hugged the hillside in an ever-increasing grade into the Cascades. Mt. Rainier hovered on the horizon above the green expanse of corn fields in the Snoqualmie Valley. Beavers silently swam alongside our stride, disappearing under water only to catch up with us further upstream. Back water of vibrant green and pools of lilies yielded the sounds of competing frogs while eagles soared overhead.
The welcome shade of trees was enhanced by the sounds of songbirds. Golden light of the full moon flooded the camp ground each night. During the second night at the Tolt River campground, I listened to the long trill of coyotes howling.
Numerous bats living in the tall bat houses at Tolt McDonald Park swooped in a flurry through the dense swarms of mosquitoes that virtually disappeared as we enjoyed dinner in “high dress.” The evening ended with the captivating film Der Rechte Weg by Peter Fischli & David Weiss that paralleled our hike in surprising ways.
The combined resources of 4Culture and King County Parks Department made this project possible through a summer-long commission to three artists, including Susan Robb and Stokley Towles.
With the project, forty people gained new perceptions of the environment that surround us daily. Let’s hope this type of collaborative project can be made possible in the future for even greater numbers of participants. It brings significant new meaning to the art experience.
Aligned with the collective culture-building that was part of this experience, participants’ documentation in a variety of media was combined to create documentation of the work. http://blog.4culture.org/2011/01/the-long-walk-in-video-view/
Images © Long Walk, 2010 participants:
Group shot by David White Jed Dunkerley by Sara Edwards Jana Brevick by Rebecca Cummins Mount Rainier above the Snoqualmie Valley by Beth Sellars Beth Sellars and Rebecca Cummins in “formal wear” by Rebecca Cummins End-of-walk group soak by Beth Sellars
Images © The Long Walk, 2010 participants: Jed Dunkerley, Jen Graves, Morgan Nomura, Susan Robb, Eroyn Franklin, Beth Sellars, David White, Jacob Stone |
President Barack Obama unveiled his administration’s plan to fight foreclosures on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the most important element of the program will require Congressional action—and the banking and business lobbies are already on the attack.
The Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan has three chief components:
- Offer financial incentives to persuade loan servicers to modify mortgages
- Allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance more mortgages
- Change bankruptcy laws and give judges the power to reduce the amount borrowers owe on their mortgages.
The financial incentives probably won’t help much, as Kevin Drum writes for Mother Jones. When a bank makes a mortgage, it doesn’t usually hold onto the loan. Instead, the loan is packaged into a security with a other loans and sold to several investors. Another bank collects payments on the mortgage for the security’s investors and acts as a point of contact, or loan servicer, for the borrower. To date, servicers haven’t shown much interest in keeping people in their homes, even though foreclosure is the worst option for all parties involved.
“Loan servicers already have an incentive to rework loans that would otherwise go into default, and for the most part they aren’t doing it,” Drum writes. “Will a couple thousand dollars [of incentives] change their internal calculus?”
The provision aimed at Fannie and Freddie will help some. It’s also a good use of the government’s authority over the companies, which were nationalized last summer. But the key to Obama’s plan is the bankruptcy provision. Until now, every government-enacted plan to reduce foreclosures has relied on incentives to encourage the banking industry to keep people in their homes. As Drum notes, bankruptcy is the stick behind those carrots. Obama is supporting a bill in Congress that would enable bankruptcy judges to reduce the amount a borrower owes to the present value of the home. The beauty here is that investors who own the mortgage securities, not taxpayers, will have to eat the losses. In short, investors will be held responsible for making a poor investment.
“The government is essentially presenting a choice for mortgage lenders: take our deal, which is standardized across the entire industry, or let a bankruptcy judge modify the loan however he or she sees fit,” Tim Fernholz writes for The American Prospect.
The bank lobby has been fighting the bankruptcy law change since the foreclosure crisis began in 2007, and they wasted no time lashing out at Obama’s proposal today. Elana Schor of Talking Points Memo highlights a nasty statement released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of “Washington’s biggest lobbying groups.” The release not only attacks the Homeowner Affordability and Stability plan, but takes a shot at Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as well, saying the policy “should have undergone a stress test to determine if it’s ready to stabilize a major portion of our economy.” Stress tests for the financial viability of banks were a big part of the murky bank bailout plan Geithner rolled out last week.
If Congress fails to pass a bankruptcy law overhaul, the entire plan will fall apart. And the record so far is not very promising—last year’s bill garnered only about half of the votes necessary to override a filibuster in the Senate.
Team Obama deserves credit for taking action on foreclosures, as John Nichols writes for The Nation. The Bush administration spent years vilifying troubled borrowers and then dedicated hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out banks. If Congress can’t pass bankruptcy law reform, the government should simply force banks to modify loans. The strategy would be simple—either keep borrowers in their homes, or return your check from the federal government.
“Ohio Congressman Marcy Kaptur and economist Dean Baker have some smart ideas,” Nichols writes. “They argue that the proper role for the federal government is not to fund mortgage negotiations but to insist that banks—many of which have already collected billions in taxpayer dollars—carry them out.”
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder. |
“Imagine a society in which money has been banished. A society in which you would be arrested if you wear eyeglasses, if you wear ties, or if you speak a foreign language.” The Coffin Factory‘s Randy Rosenthal takes a look at Rithy Panh’s The Elimination, an autobiography focused on his adolescence during the reign of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.
Rithy Panh’s The Elimination
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The gun law debate after massacres
Published: Dec 18, 2012
In Connecticut at the end of last week, 26 people were dead. Of this number 20 were children. A lone gunman ended their lives. He had no reasonable grievance with them. He just decided to extend his derangement to a generation just beginning to enter the world. They are now gone forever.
When these mass killings happen, often in America, we all look at what caused it and what should be done to help prevent further such occurrences. No one wants to read again about school children being massacred.
The focus always drifts, however, to gun control. We all seek simple solutions to the problem.
Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms. Guns are prevalent in America. Yet despite the easy access to guns there versus here, the homicide rate in The Bahamas, where gun laws are significantly stricter, is five to six times higher.
The problem with the Connecticut killings has nothing to do with gun laws or guns. It has to do with mental illness and evil. A deranged young man killed these people. Tightening gun laws would not have prevented this massacre in the American context.
We must all remember that Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 using fertilizer and motor racing fuel. Should we ban fertilizer or fuel?
The best we can do in societies as individuals and as families is to watch over our loved ones who are mentally ill. Sometimes this means pushing to ensure that they seek psychiatric treatment and that they take their medicines. Other times, this may mean ensuring that they are kept in mental health facilities for the rest of their lives.
The state can ensure that laws exist that allow for referral committals to mental health institutions by families and caregivers when doctors make the necessary evaluations. The state can also ensure that permanent holds exist for the deranged once admitted so they never leave secured faculties.
We cannot stop mentally ill people from doing bizarre things. Obsessing over gun control legislation will not prevent them from acting. However, if we as individuals and as families do more to ensure that our loved ones do not linger posing threats to the public, some of these tragedies could be prevented. Similarly, if the state ensures that there is easy access to treatment for the mentally ill and simple incarceration procedures, fewer of them would be roaming the streets wreaking havoc. |
The Washington Post Sunday
We locked arms. Now, we’re at our throats.
The attacks couldn’t stanch a deepening rift. Time has made it worse.
On Monday, the leaders of Congress are to gather with colleagues at noon for a bipartisan ceremony marking the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It will be reminiscent of the gathering on the night of the attacks, when members of Congress, many holding small American flags, stood on the Capitol steps and spontaneously sang “God Bless America.” But so much has changed.
Twenty years ago, members of Congress were joined in a determined and resilient expression of national unity at an unprecedented moment in the nation’s history, a day that brought deaths and heroism but also shock, fear and confusion. Monday’s ceremony will no doubt be somber in its remembrance of what was lost that day, but it will come not as expression of a united America but simply as a momentary cessation in political wars that rage and have deepened in the years since those attacks.
In a video message to Americans released Friday, President Biden spoke of how 9/11 had united the country and said that moment represented “America at its best.” He called such unity “our greatest strength” while noting it is “all too rare.” The unity that followed the attacks didn’t last long. Americans reverted more quickly than some analysts expected to older patterns of partisanship. With time, new divisions over new issues have emerged, and they make the prospect of a united nation ever more distant.
On a day for somber tribute,
the man who was president on 9/11, George W. Bush, spoke most directly of those new divisions — and threats — in a speech in Shanksville, Pa., where Flight 93 went down on the day of the attacks. Bush warned that dangers to the country now come not only across borders “but from violence that gathers from within.” It was an apparent but obvious reference to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” he said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
The question is often asked: As the United States has plunged deeper into division and discord, is there anything that could spark a change, anything big enough to become a catalyst for greater national unity? But if 9/11 doesn’t fit that model, what does? And look what happened in the aftermath of that trauma.
For a time, the shock of the attacks did bring the country together. Bush’s approval ratings spiked to 90 percent in a rallyround-the-flag reaction that was typical when the country is faced with external threats or crises.
One notable expression of the unity at the time came from Al Gore, the former vice president who had lost the bitter 2000 election to Bush after a disputed recount in Florida and a controversial Supreme Court decision.
Speaking at a Democratic Party dinner in Iowa less than a month after the attacks, Gore called Bush “my commander in chief,” adding, “We are united behind our president, George W. Bush, behind the effort to seek justice, not revenge, to make sure this will never, ever happen again. And to make sure we have the strongest unity in America that we have ever had.” The Democratic audience rose, applauding and cheering.
Trust in government rose in those days after the attacks. Shortly after 9/11, trust in government jumped to 64 percent, up from 30 percent before the attacks, according to Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that was closely tracking public attitudes to the attacks. By the summer of 2002, the firm found that trust had fallen back, to 39 percent.
Five years after the attacks, then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), now deceased, was quoted as saying that America was “more divided and more partisan than I’ve ever seen us.” Today, after many contentious elections, political warfare over economic, cultural and social issues and a domestic attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, many Americans would say things have become worse.
As he prepared the U.S. response to the attacks by alQaeda in the fall of 2001, Bush made clear the United States would go it alone if necessary, assembling what was called a “coalition of the willing.” He put other nations on notice, saying the United States would hold them accountable in the campaign against the terrorists. “You’re either with us or against us in the fight,” he said.
Bush described the world in Manichaean terms: good vs. evil.
Today’s politics at home is often practiced that way. That phrase — “with us or against us” — could stand as a black-andwhite expression of the way in which many Americans approach the political battles: all in with the team, red or blue, or not in at all. If you win, I lose. No middle ground.
Lack of imagination on the part of Americans had helped 9/11 to happen. No one in the upper reaches of government seemed to have envisioned foreign terrorists hijacking airplanes, turning them into massive jet-fuel-filled weapons and crashing them into buildings, although there had been warnings.
If the response in the years that followed was often chaotic or ill-advised, if things seemed to get worse rather than better, the public demeanor of leaders remained one of total confidence.
That was true of one president after another about Afghanistan, as a history of the war has since shown. Eventually, as events told a story that contradicted official assurances, the certitude of the leaders gave way to disillusionment and cynicism on the part of citizens. It happened during the country’s Vietnam experience and happened again with Afghanistan and Iraq. So much went wrong. In the days after the attacks, politicians noted the United States’ vulnerability — two oceans were no longer protection against foreign attack — and vowed to make perpetrators pay. It was a time of extravagant predictions. Chuck Hagel, then a Republican senator from Nebraska and later defense secretary in the Obama administration, said, “We are forever changed.”
More Americans say now that the change was for the worse instead of for the better, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. Six months after the attacks, 2 in 3 Americans said the country had changed for the better.
The mission in Afghanistan morphed from hunting terrorists, subduing the Taliban and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice to one of nation building and a 20-year commitment of U.S. forces that ended last month, amid controversy over Biden’s handling of the exit and a public conclusion that the war had not been worth fighting. On the night of 9/11, George Tenet, then the CIA director, told Bush and other senior officials as they contemplated how to respond: It was time to tell the Taliban we’re finished with them. Today, the Taliban once again control Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was never enough. The Bush administration quickly shifted its focus to a wider war on terrorism. Even in the days after Afghanistan, Iraq was always in the conversation.
In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush described Iraq, Iran and North Korea and “an axis of evil.” He suggested that what he had launched in Afghanistan would be expanded in scope and in time.
“Our war on terror has well begun,” he said, “but it is only begun.”
The next year, the United States invaded Iraq. Among those who opposed that invasion was Gore, although he had supported Bush’s father’s war against Iraq in 1991, unlike Biden, whose positions were the opposite. The 2003 invasion was based on what turned out to be a lie, that there was credible intelligence evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had a stock of weapons of mass destruction. After Hussein was ousted, U.S. officials tried to remake Iraq in a misguided and bungled effort to establish Western-style democracy and institutions in that country.
Enemy combatants captured in the war on terrorism were tortured during interrogations in secret black sites, later exposed, elsewhere in the world. Critics such as McCain, who had been tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, called those techniques illegal and a stain on the United States. A Senate committee later concluded that torture had produced no useful intelligence. There was the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where photos of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers drew worldwide condemnation that further soured the public.
Confidence was undermined in other ways. At home, a hasty effort to create the Department of Homeland Security ended up cobbling together a host of organizations that produced a dysfunctional agency whose role and mission remain a point of contention. Only a year ago, Jeh Johnson, who served as DHS secretary in the Obama administration, said the agency’s headquarters bureaucracy “is still a work in progress.”
There were successes. During the Obama administration, U.S. forces killed bin Laden at his hideout in Pakistan. Over these many years, there were no major attacks by foreign terrorists against the homeland, no small achievement. Presidents from Bush to Obama to Donald Trump went after terrorist groups and individuals in one country after another with Special Operations forces and drone attacks.
Meanwhile, on the political front, the war on terrorism, which had first united the country, turned into a political wedge. Bush and the Republicans used the issue in both the 2002 midterm elections and the 2004 presidential election to help his and the GOP’s cause.
In 2002, Republicans labeled then-Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who had lost limbs in the Vietnam War, as weak in his defense of the homeland. Cleland lost his reelection bid. In 2004, even though opposition to the Iraq War was rising, Bush campaigned heavily on the theme that he would keep the country safe. To bring home the point, Republicans staged their national convention in New York, near the anniversary of 9/11.
With Democrats on the defensive in a military-infused political climate, the Democratic Party scrambled to prove that its leaders had military bona fides. David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief political strategist, recalled the 2004 Democratic convention that nominated then-Sen. John F. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, and said, “We essentially transformed our convention into a VFW meeting. That would not have happened if not for 9/11.”
Then the politics of it all shifted. By the time of the 2008 election, Bush was highly unpopular, and the Democratic candidate who had opposed the Iraq War, Barack Obama, prevailed over other candidates — namely Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — who had supported the resolution authorizing Bush to launch the war.
The GOP nominee was the Vietnam prisoner of war and true war hero McCain, who was the strongest advocate for sending more troops into Iraq in 2007. He lost the 2008 presidential election. As vice president, Biden argued against a similar troop surge in Afghanistan.
If 9/11 could not sustain American unity for long, there were other events that tested whether the nation could break out of its divisions. Among them is the 2008-2009 financial crash, an event that crushed many families and cried out for a united response. But Obama, whose election was hailed as a sign of racial progress, was able to inspire not unity but more division: a tea party revolt, GOP obstruction in Congress and, worse, a rise in racial resentment among some White voters and outright racism among others.
As he was responding to the 9/11 attacks, Bush had sought to tamp down anger and rising hate crimes aimed at American Muslims, saying this was not a war against Islam. Trump, as a candidate and as president, did the opposite, calling for barring U.S. entry to all Muslims (an announcement that coincided with the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor).
Trump’s campaign and presidency further exacerbated the existing racial tensions and divisions. Trump spread conspiracy theories about Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and about where Obama was born. He continues to spread other conspiracy theories today; they, too, have infected the nations’ politics.
The coronavirus pandemic, when it hit U.S. shores in early 2020, amounted to the biggest threat to the United States since 9/11 — a deadly virus in a globalized world demanded a unity of purpose in response. Instead, the pandemic, too, has become a political conflict, over the wearing of masks and the administration of lifesaving vaccines.
The 20th anniversary of the events that led to the invasion of Afghanistan finds the United States no longer in that conflict overseas but in a costly debate at home over how to wage a war against a virus.
The ceremonies commemorating 9/11 are wholly appropriate, designed as they are to mark the loss of innocent lives and the selfless heroism of firefighters and police and other first responders who threw themselves into efforts to rescue anyone who could be rescued and to recover the remains of those who could not, and the bravery of those on Flight 93 who gave their lives to save others. They remind all Americans of what is best about the country.
But it also should be noted that as the nation, and elected officials in Washington, hold these events, there is talk about reinstalling fencing around the Capitol in preparation for a rally next weekend in Washington in support of those arrested and jailed after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
This time, as Bush said Saturday, it is not international terrorism that poses the greatest threat to the homeland; it is domestic terrorism from white supremacists and others. Twenty years on from 9/11, that is the state of the country. |
Save a New York Literary Landmark“The Rizzoli Bookstore building is an icon of New York City architecture and one of the most beautiful commercial spaces in America. It’s an impressive example of adaptive reuse of a former piano showroom into a retail space and one of the few remaining examples of architecturally significant bookstores in an era where bookstores are increasingly threatened.”
Vornado and Le Frak Realty have announced plans to demolish the building in order to build a new high-rise. The Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose mission is “to be responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings,” has declined to grant landmark status to the building on the grounds that the property “lacks the architectural significance necessary to meet the criteria for designation,” despite the Community Board voting unanimously in favor of designating 31 W 57TH Street a landmark in 2007.
This is the time to use social media’s power to inform the Landmark Preservation Commission that 31 W 57th Street is architecturally significant and deserves landmark status! Sign the petition.
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Letterpress, GOOD!!!This print by Robynne Raye is the latest edition to The Beauty of Letterpress. This print sells for $5 and Neenah will double the proceeds with all donations going to Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.
I Love You, Man; “Like a lot of my work, this piece started out really organic,” says Raye. “I’m not sure if it’s a cat or a dog but I don’t think that’s important. My friend Dalton Webb was hanging out with me that day in the studio, and he helped pick the color and font. He laughed when I tried Hobo so I decided to keep it and truthfully, I think I’ve always had a deep down desire to take a typeface disliked by so many, and see it letter pressed.”
Order here.Or find your bliss at:Robynne Raye: @BubblesRayeHamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum: @hamiltonwoodtypThe Beauty of Letterpress: @BoLetterPressNeenah Paper: @NeenahPaper
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Identity Crisis, eh?From our brothers in the North, the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada: “As proud Canadians, do you want something truly memorable for Canada’s 150th anniversary logo? Help us send a loud and clear message to Ottawa about the identity development process for Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations. Use the form below to send your message and sign the national petition:”
Canada’s Centennial Logo. Stuart Ash FGDC
Canadians are using this website to petition the Government to develop a Design Advisory Board for the 150th celebrations identity. We are recommending that the board have representation from each of Canada’s three design associations (GDC, SDGQ, RGD). Use the petition form to make your voice heard, show your support for Canada’s professional design community, and send a clear message to Ottawa about the development of the identity for Canada’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
Print’s February IssueDon’t miss the newest issue of Print, the Sex & Design issue, which takes a tasteful look at issues surrounding sex and design. Read even more by Steven Heller, such as his feature article that explores the relationship between sex and advertising through the years, as well as his Dialogue and Evolution columns.
About Steven Heller
Steven Heller is the co-chair of the SVA MFA Designer /Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program, writes frequently for Wired and Design Observer. He is also the author of over 170 books on design and visual culture. He received the 1999 AIGA Medal and is the 2011 recipient of the Smithsonian National Design Award.View all posts by Steven Heller → |
CHICAGO, June 26, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- People with disabilities, their families, caregivers, seniors, wounded vets and healthcare professionals attending Abilities Expo (#AbilitiesExpo) on June 29 – July 1, 2018 at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center will discover the latest products, education and fun for all ages. They are eagerly anticipating the chance to test drive cutting-edge technologies as well scale "Mini El Capitan" with adaptive climbing equipment which make the experience inclusive for all. Attendees will also have a chance to win a free trip to Los Angeles to meet popular wheelchair dance team, The Rollettes.
Admission and parking for Abilities Expo is free and show hours are Friday and Saturday, 11am to 5pm and Sunday, 11am to 4pm. Complimentary loaner scooters, wheelchair repair and sign language interpreters are also available during show hours.
Story Time for Kids
The Push is a beautiful tale of a lifelong friendship based on the real-life experiences of author Patrick Gray and illustrator Justin Skeesuck, who will read their story at the Expo. One friend pushes his friend's wheelchair on their countless adventures, while the other fuels their escapades with jokes. Inseparable from a young age, the boys learn from each other's unique gifts.
Latest Products and Services
Attendees experience cutting-edge products and services for people with a wide range of disabilities. They will find mobility products, devices for people with developmental disabilities, medical equipment, home accessories, essential services, low-cost daily living aids, products for people with sensory impairments and more. The Assistive Technology Showcase will feature breakthrough AT to empower the community to bridge the gap between ability and disability.
A series of compelling workshops on travel, living with chronic pain, therapeutic cannabis, accessible home design, emerging therapies, financial planning, accessible vehicles and more are offered free-of-charge.
Adaptive Sports, Dancing, Assistance Animals, Climbing Wall and More
Attendees can get in the groove with daily dance demos from the Rollettes dance team and more. Service dog and horse therapy sessions will demonstrate their importance to the community. Expo-goers could discover their new favorite pastime with adaptive sports like quad rugby, boccia, tennis and the brand new sport of paracheer. There are other fun activities including an all-accessible adaptive climbing wall, an engaging game of chess and more.
For more, visit http://www.abilities.com/chicago.
SOURCE Abilities Expo |
We designed a literacy timeline for Great Marlow School.
The literacy timeline traverses the length and breadth of the English department corridor. And it showcases key people and events who have influenced literacy through the ages.
Take a look through the case study to get a sense of how Wall Art can transform any space.
We loved designing this literacy timeline for Great Marlow School. As always, we kicked off the process by visiting the school for our no obligation consultation. Once we were clear on what they had in mind, we put together a bespoke quote based on their needs and budget.
From there, we guided the school through our design process. We have over twenty years’ experience in education and design. So we’ve tailored our design process to make sure schools get the exact result they want when they work with us.
Bring those walls to life
It was critical that we got every detail right on this design. As with any timeline, accuracy was key, so we checked (and double checked) all the dates, facts and figures.
Once the school signed off the designs, we arrange an installation date that suited them. Our installation team often works over weekends and during holidays, as this minimises disruption to teaching time!
The end result
We loved creating this beautiful design for the school. And no doubt pupils will be inspired to learn more about the various people and events who stand out in the history of literacy.
As you wander alongside the timeline, you get a sense of how many events have shaped the course of history. And it’s a celebration of classic novels and texts from throughout history.
Wall Art for your school
Get in touch to find out more about bespoke Wall Art for your school.
You can also see more of our work in the Case Studies section of the website. |
NHS England is launching a major new drive on telehealth and telecare with a series of pilots testing out new devices on the elderly and people with long-term conditions.
The first wave of the NHS Innovation ‘Test Beds’ scheme – involving collaborations with technology companies including Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), IBM and Philips – will run at seven pilot programmes in different areas of England.
One of the schemes, in the west of England, will look at equipping patients with diabetes with remote monitoring and coaching technology to try to help them manage their condition better.
Elsewhere, a pilot in Rochdale is looking at use of telecare and remote devices to deliver more proactive care to elderly people at risk from critical complications of conditions like COPD and heart failure.
And in Birmingham a project is using technology and apps to help people at risk of serious mental illness to manage their condition, and get specialist help in a crisis.
The programme is a joint effort by NHS England, the Department of Health’s Office for Life Science and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Announcing the scheme at the World Economic Forum in Davos, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens was expected to say: ‘Over the next decade, major health gains won’t just come from a few “miracle cures”, but also from combining diverse breakthroughs in fields such as biosensors, medtech and drug discovery, mobile communications and AI computing.
‘Our new NHS Test Beds programme aims to cut through the hype and test the practical benefits for patients when we bring together some of these most promising technologies in receptive environments inside the world’s largest public, integrated health service.’
The launch comes after NHS England ditched an earlier Government programme aimed at getting 100,000 patients managed with telehealth by 2013, following a review of the impact of the scheme at seven pathfinder sites. |
As many of my concepts leverage from others, I've directly cited those instances where the original words best communicate the ideas under discussion. Some models in the text are my own development. Others are derivatives of common models transformed into Operational Excellence applications. When leveraging from others, the original thinkers are given full credit. The book contains more than 20 models and figures that help provide context and clarity to the ideas under discussion. Highlighted below are key representatives of those models.
Fig 1.1 - Lewin Change and Force Field Model
This landmark model is included in the discussion of the precursors that must exist in our organizations before we can honestly consider pursuing excellence. Here, one of the most important precursors is for a company to have a viable organizational change management system in place.
Fig 3.2 The Organizational Culture Assessment
Leveraging from the CVF, the OCAI provides a valuable instrument to map a culture so that leaders can assess the relative strength and focus of their organization and strive to close gaps between their current culture and the preferred culture desired in a future state.
Fig 4.2 OODA Loop
One of several heuristics employed to demonstrate applications available to improve our decision-making, the OODA loop discussion includes information on John Boyd, the developer of the OODA loop. Surrounding discussion include's Boyd's fascination with the Toyota Production System and the Eastern ideas of continuous improvement.
Fig 6.4 Risk and Opportunity Thinking
Pulls together previous ideas and shows how the Competing Values Framework can be employed to improve our risk and opportunity thinking. Demonstrates how we can not only effectively mitigate risks, but how we can employ new ways of thinking to capitalize on opportunities that will allow the business to grow and achieve breakthrough levels of performance.
Fig 10.1 Design Thinking
New ways of thinking will be required to succeed in our new world. Design Thinking on its own isn't a new idea. But combining it with other philosophies and approaches employed throughout the book can help ensure our businesses keep their focus where it belongs, on the customer.
Fig 2.2 - The Competing Values Framework
Introduced early in the book, the Competing Values Framework (CVF) is central to the theme that business leaders can unlearn some ideas to realize we don't have to choose between one choice or another when both are required. We can seek to have both as long as we prioritize what is important when.
Fig 4.3 Management Styles
The discussion surrounding this model begins with Katz's Management Skills model. It then transitions to provide context and insight into why the ideas of Lean and Six Sigma have not been successful in driving transformational improvement across our companies.
Fig 5.1 Strategic Goal Deployment
One of several strategic planning models employed in the book, Fig 5.1 walks through the Hoshin Kanri planning process. This powerful tool can help companies turn strategic planning and goals into tactical actions flowed-down throughout the company to align everyone towards the pursuit of a common vision.
Fig 9.2 The Problem-Solving Process
All companies have problems - most now have many more in our post-pandemic world. Our effectiveness in solving problems serves as a competitive advantage that can separate us from the competition. An effective problem-solving process is simple, but has historically proven to be a rarity within most companies. It's time for us to change that.
Fig 12.2 Process View of Cost
The Application chapter analyzes three different approaches we can focus on: cost, price, and value. Discussion highlights flaws in the legacy focus on price. It then introduces new considerations we must account for when focusing on cost. This includes new learning from the coronavirus pandemic to ensure we deliver the best value to our customers. |
Lady in Red is a showy Mexican native with whorls of bright red flowers forming spikes on square stems. It tolerates drought (and clay soil), and will flower more abundantly with watering during dry spells. Reseeds impressively. Even hungry deer leave it alone.
Salvia coccinea 'Lady in Red', Lady in Red Salvia
Height: 2'. Sun. Brilliant scarlet spikes bloom in summer. Deer resistant. Attracts pollinators. |
Two types of Lyman \ensuremathα emitters envisaged from hierarchical galaxy formation
Shimizu, Ikkoh, & Umemura, Masayuki
In the last decade, numerous Lyman \ensuremathα (Ly\ensuremathα) emitters (LAEs) have been discovered with narrow-band filters at various redshifts. Recently, multiwavelength observations of LAEs have been performed and revealed that while many LAEs appear to be young and less massive, a noticeable fraction of LAEs possess much older populations of stars and larger stellar mass. How these two classes of LAEs are concordant with the hierarchical galaxy formation scenario has not been understood clearly so far. In this paper, we model LAEs by three-dimensional cosmological simulations of dark halo merger in a \ensuremathŁambda cold dark matter (\ensuremathŁambdaCDM) universe. As a result, it is shown that the age of simulated LAEs can spread over a wide range from 2 × 10$^6$ to 9 × 10$^8$yr. Furthermore, we find that there are two types of LAEs, in one of which the young half-mass age is comparable to the mean age of stellar component, and in the other of which the young half-mass age is appreciably shorter than the mean age. We define the former as Type 1 LAEs and the latter as Type 2 LAEs. A Type 1 LAE corresponds to early starburst in a young galaxy, whereas a Type 2 LAE does to delayed starburst in an evolved galaxy, as a consequence of delayed accretion of a subhalo on to a larger parent halo. Thus, the same halo can experience a Type 2 LAE phase as well as a Type 1 LAE phase in the merger history. Type 1 LAEs are expected to be younger than 1.5 × 10$^8$yr, less dusty and less massive with stellar mass M$_star$ <åisebox-0.5ex~ 5 × 10$^8$M$_solar$, while Type 2 LAEs are older than 1.5 × 10$^8$yr, even dustier and as massive as M$_star$ \i̊sebox-0.5ex~ 5 × 10$^8$-3 × 10$^10$M$_solar$. The fraction of Type 2s in all LAEs is a function of redshift, which is less than 2 per cent at z >\rs̊ebox-0.5ex~ 4.5, \rae̊box-0.5ex~30 per cent at redshift z = 3.1 and \raib̊ox-0.5ex~70 per cent at z = 2. Type 2 LAEs can be discriminated clearly from Type 1s in two-colour diagrams of z' - H versus J - K. We find that the brightness distribution of Ly\ensuremathα in Type 2 LAEs is more extended than the main stellar component, in contrast to Type 1 LAEs. This is not only because delayed starbursts tend to occur in the outskirts of a parent galaxy, but also because Ly\ensuremathα photons are effectively absorbed by dust in an evolved galaxy. Hence, the extent of Ly\ensuremathα emission may be an additional measure to distinguish Type 2 LAEs from Type 1 LAEs. The sizes of Type 2 LAEs range from a few tens to a few hundreds kpc. At lower redshifts, the number of more extended, older Type 2 LAEs increases. Furthermore, it is anticipated that the amplitude of angular correlation function for Type 2 LAEs is significantly higher than that for Type 1 LAEs, but comparable to that for Lyman break galaxies (LBGs). This implies that LBGs with strong Ly\ensuremathα line may include Type 2 LAEs. |
It has really helped us to have a safer environment for our team and be able to keep our life critical services going.
Rupert Lawrence - Amica 24
Proven to kill Covid-19*
*independently tested by FDA and CDC approved laboratories
The Power of UVC and HEPA Technology to Deliver Clean, Sterilised Air
Our unique Induct system combines powerful pathogen-neutralising UV-C germicidal technology with measurement data and tools that ensures the air you breathe is protected from bacteria and virus risk.
The React-Air Induct system uses Pure Germicidal Light, HEPA 13 Filters and includes four High-Intensity Pure Fused Quartz UVC Germicidal Lamps which allow air to flow through them, destroying biological contaminants, preventing them from growing again and spreading.
Integrated CO2 Monitoring Systems
The Induct monitors and reports on Carbon Dioxide (Co2) levels within your building. With access to our online cloud portal, you can view live and historical air quality data.
By downloading our React-Air mobile app, or using a web-browser, our system alerts the system administrator if levels of either Co2 or VOC’s exceed set limits.
Historical information is also stored on our cloud portal, so you are able to prove compliance and deliver confidence that you are meeting your duty of care.
The 3 Stage Process for Eliminating Covid-19
1. HEPA 13 Filtration
Using the React-Air’s high-pressure fan, air is passed through a HEPA 13 filter to remove 80% of particles 0.3-1 microns. This process removes pollens, bacteria and viruses bonded to larger particles such as water droplets (the primary way Covid-19 spreads through airborne transmission).
2. Powerful UV Array
The filtered air is then passed through a UVC array, which delivers a dose of 250J/M3 – enough to neutralise Covid-19 (67J/M3 for one second of exposure according to studies). The effect of the UVC Array is intensified by its polished aluminium interior. UVC renders virus particles inert (sterile) by changing the molecular structure of the virus DNA.
3. Activated Carbon Filter
Finally, the air is passed through an activated carbon filter to remove any remaining odours. As well as removing any natural odours in the environment, the reaction between UVC and dust particles creates a mild, but for many people, unpleasant smell – all are removed with Activated Carbon.
CALL US TODAY 0203 885 2299
Due to Covid-19 we decided to purchase the React-Air Induct as we wanted the children and staff to be safe.
From the very start of my enquiry this company has been so efficient and professional, they answered all my questions happily. We even had a follow up call to check everything was working and we were happy with everything.
Not only is the unit great for Covid-19 but it is also great for any coughs or colds (which couldn't be better for a nursery) and hay fever to mention just a few. The parents feel confident to send their children back to nursery and the staff are all happy being in a safe environment.
I honestly can't thank you enough for this system.
Bees Knees Day Nursery
What our customers are saying
Real-Time Information... constant contamination neutralisation you can measure
The React-Air Induct is the only UV germicidal in-line unit that simultaneously monitors lamp brightness, air-flow and air quality and then feeds this information directly back to a base station, so the performance of the system can be monitored from either our ‘React-Air’ mobile app or our online web-based platform for both individual and multiple sites.
This functionality ensures optimal performance combined with real-time information to keep your buildings safe.
The React-Air induct system is installed above your ceiling so that it blends in with your workplace aesthetics. Our installation team designs the correct placement of the Induct units.
Our qualified electrical team undertakes installation to British Standards which ensures that the Induct system always functions correctly.
The monitoring technology inside each Induct is linked wirelessly to the cloud allowing for data to be viewed either on our React-Air phone app for Android or iOS, and our online web portal allows facilities managers to view multiple site data in real-time, and receive alerts if any dangers are detected.
Installation into your existing Ceiling Infrastructure
Real-Time data on our mobile app and online, for monitoring across multiple sites
The React-Air monitoring system uses state-of-the-art measurement contained within the Induct device. Measurements are taken every 10 seconds to ascertain:
Lamp Function and Brightness
Over time, all UV Germicidal Lamps will lose brightness and the surfaces become contaminated by impurities in the air. Once this reaches a threshold, the in-built UV monitor alerts the user that a service is required.
The integrated air quality monitor measures air impurities down to 0.1um. Every 10 seconds, this information is recorded and sent back to the building’s base unit to show real-time air quality information.
Air Flow and Air Exchange Rates
By constantly monitoring air-flow volume through each one of the Induct units, the React-Air system calculates the number of hourly, daily, and weekly air exchanges in your building.
CALL US TODAY 0203 885 2299
Our products have been tested and proven effective against Covid-19
Our React-Air Technology has been tested by CDC approved laboratories in the United States for their effectiveness against removing and neutralising airborne (aerosolised) Covid-19 from the air. In multiple trials, our 'Destroyer' technology proved a 89% neutralisation rate of Covid-19 under test conditions, within 15 minutes of operation.
Trials were undertaken by introducing airborne (aerosolised) Covid-19 in to a sealed test-environment. After a number of control tests (without our technology) and full tests (with our technology), airborne Covid-19 was found to be reduced from 27% of average control test degradation to 89% with our React-Air Technology in place, within 15 minutes.
Studies by The University of Boston undertaken in 2020 have shown that Covid-19 is highly susceptible to UVC light. Japanese scientists have been conducting studies on the effects of ozone in neutralising Covid-19 on surfaces and have shown it to be highly effective with a 90% sterilisation rate. This information, published by research.net shows the results and effective dosages of UV-C light required to inactivate various strains of coronavirus.
“Table 1 above summarises the results of studies that have been performed on Coronaviruses under ultraviolet light exposure, with the specific species indicated in each case. The D90 value indicates the ultraviolet dose for 90% inactivation.
Although there is a wide range of variation in the D90 values, this is typical of laboratory studies on ultraviolet susceptibility. The range of D90 values for coronaviruses is 7-241 J/m2 the mean of which is 67 J/m2, should adequately represent the ultraviolet susceptibility of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus.”
By using this exposure data, and comparing the UV light irradiance measurements from our products, we calculate the exposure times required to deactivate coronaviruses. This is however, a calculation and currently is not backed up by laboratory tests. |
NEW YORK, Feb 17 (Reuters) - New York City's average temperature could rise by as much as 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit this century, and once-in-a-century storms may occur as often as every 15 years, a climate change panel said on Tuesday.
The report by the New York City Panel on Climate Change was requested by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to better understand how global temperature levels could strain the city's infrastructure.
The report was based on data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a 2007 report but for the first time compiles figures pertinent to New York.
"The climate change projections developed by our expert panel put numbers to what we already know -- climate change is real and could have serious consequences for New York if we don't take action," Bloomberg said.
"We cannot wait until after our infrastructure has been compromised to begin to plan for the effects of climate change," he said.
The report predicts average annual temperatures will increase by 4 to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit and extreme events such as heat waves, intense rain, droughts and coastal flooding will become more frequent and more intense.
Coastal floods that are now expected occur once every 10 years could occur once every three years and floods that occur once in a century could begin to occur once in every 15 to 35 years, the report said.
According to the U.N. panel, global temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cm and 59 cm (7 inches and 23 inches) this century. (Reporting by Edith Honan and David Wiessler)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. |
Tahoe conference helps TV meteorologists make sense of climate chaos
As an earth system scientist Noah Diffenbaugh sifts through mountains of evidence to unravel complex processes behind disasters like droughts and hurricanes.
But when someone asks Diffenbaugh if he believes in global warming he turns to a simple scientific tool most people use every day.
“If you believe in thermometers you have no choice but to believe in global warming,” Diffenbaugh said during a presentation Tuesday in Stateline. “Global warming is a measurement, it is not a matter of politics, it is not a matter of belief.”
Diffenbaugh’s expertise on complex climate processes combined with his ability to explain them clearly is one reason organizers of Operation Sierra Storm invited him to speak at the conference of meteorologists at Harveys Lake Tahoe Resort and Casino.
The conference is comprised mostly of television meteorologists. It started more than 20 years ago as a way for tourism boosters to get Lake Tahoe on television screens throughout California by luring weather forecasters to the area.
In recent years, however, the event has evolved to include leading climate scientists and attracts meteorologists from local markets around the country and national cable networks.
It’s a chance for the meteorologists, who work eight to 10-hour days preparing forecasts and delivering them on newscasts, to learn the latest climate research and discuss ways to make it meaningful for viewers.
Unlike the researchers who are writing for academic journals and scientific publications, the meteorologists need to communicate complex and important issues such as global warming to a television audience that includes non-experts and even some viewers who are hostile to the very notion that human-induced climate change is a threat to communities.
“We are still a visual medium, it still at some point has to entertain people,” said Brandon Miller, a meteorologist and supervising weather producer for CNN International. “And that can be tough to do when it comes to climate change.”
Angela Fritz, deputy weather editor for the Washington Post and formerly a meteorologist on CNN, said the ability of televised meteorologists to accurately and effectively talk about climate change is critical for citizens to make sound choices about their communities.
“The only scientist most people see on a day to day basis is their local weather person,” Fritz said.
Meteorologists, Fritz said, are working against efforts that leverage widespread lack of scientific literacy within the public to undermine scientists’ efforts to arm people with sound knowledge.
“The worst thing that happened with climate change was that it became political,” Fritz said. “That was a very intentional move by people who knew what they were doing.”
For Diffenbaugh, who teaches at Stanford University and edits the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and other scientists who address the conference it is a chance to present their latest findings to meteorologists who can use it in broadcasts that potentially reach millions of viewers.
Much of Diffenbaugh’s research focuses on the relationship between climate change and specific weather catastrophes.
He talked about recent work to develop consistent, scientifically valid methods scientists to measure the influence of human-caused climate change on major weather events.
While much of Diffendaugh’s scientific writing is likely to go over the heads of people in a general audience, his work has generated new insight into weather phenomena that affect people every day.
For example, Diffendaugh researched the relationship between climate change and droughts in California.
He showed that drought was more common in the past 20 years than it had been in the first 100 years of record keeping. Yet precipitation in California hasn’t changed much.
“There hasn’t been any statistically significant long-term trend in California’s precipitation and yet California is experiencing much more frequent drought events,” Diffenbaugh said.
What has changed, however, is the temperature. Warmer-than-average temperatures have become more common than cooler-than-average temperatures.
And during low precipitation years warmer-than-average temperatures are about twice as likely to result in a drought.
“Because California has been warming the risk of drought is increasing,” Diffenbaugh said.
Increasing likelihood of droughts in California wasn’t the only scientifically established trend Diffenbaugh covered.
He also showed how the reduction in Arctic sea ice in recent years is well beyond what is expected from natural warming cycles.
“The highest Arctic sea ice year is still lower than what used to be the lowest sea ice year,” Diffenbaugh said. “You talk about new normal, this is beyond new normal.”
Access to climate research and the people who produce it helps the meteorologists improve the confidence with which they discuss climate issues with their audience.
They discussed how their presentation of climate issues has changed over the years as scientists have produced increasingly convincing evidence of how human-induced climate change threatens communities.
“Is it a reality? The answer is yes? Is it caused by man? The answer is yes? What’s our future? That is the question we cover,” said Paul Goodloe, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel. “Although it has been politicized we are not political. We cover what it is. And it is reality.” |
Ranger on winter surveillance duty in the High Jura (Photo credits: RNNHCJ).
Often mistaken for each other, these two entities form two distinct, but complementary, institutions for preserving the local environment.
A Natural Reserve protects those communities where fauna, flora, aquatic areas, mineral deposits and fossils have specific importance. It puts in place necessary regulations to conserve such elements in the protected territory.
A Natural Regional Park (Parc naturel régional – PNR) is an area comprising several communities which share the common objectives of territorial development and planning which respect the local environment. A Natural Regional Park has no specific regulations but adheres to those applicable to National parks.
While the National Natural Reserve of the High Jura is located mostly within the bounds of the Natural Regional Park (PNR), their procedures are clearly separate. This being said, the PNR of the High Jura is a preferred partner of the Natural Reserve for numerous projects. A collaborative agreement has been in force since 2003. |
Mysterious skull of primitive child reveals strange modern human-like teeth
Seven teeth were discovered in the child’s fossilized upper jaw – teeth which were in the process of development when the youngster died approximately 104,000 years ago. The remains were unearthed at a northern Chinese site called Xujiayao in the late 1970s.
Now, X-ray examinations of the teeth’s internal structure show the first molar had erupted a few months before death. Researchers found the root of the tooth was growing at similar pace to modern children, and while other tooth roots had grown more rapidly, overall the child’s dental growth fell within the range of kids today.
“Modern humans develop slowly, and at least for the first 6½ years of life, the dentition of the Xujiayao individual suggests that it also developed slowly,” study co-author Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg of Ohio State University explained.
Researchers estimate that the child belonged to an East Asian Homo population because it had a relatively long life span and an extended period of child care – characteristics that are associated with modern man’s long period of tooth growth.Also on rt.com Dozens of decapitated skeletons unearthed in mysterious ancient cemetery (PHOTOS)
Identifying exactly where this child fits in the span of human evolution is difficult given its unusual mix of features, some of which resemble those seen in Neanderthals and Homo erectus, however others suggest it’s more closely related to Homo sapiens.
Researchers say fossil and ancient DNA analyses suggest that all four Homo species lived in the region during the period that this jawbone is dated to.
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18 Aug 2016
Strengthen and Extension of Participatory Conservation of Critically Endangered Slender-Billed Vulture Gyps tenuirostris in Western Mid-Hills of Nepal
The primary goal of this research project is to identify spatial distribution, habitat requirements and conservation threats of Slender-billed vulture and community conservation campaign in Kaski.
Among the nine vultures species of Nepal, Slender-billed Vulture Gyps tenuirostris is a Critically Endangered species suffered an extremely rapid population decline, particularly across the Indian subcontinent due to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) diclofenac, known to kill by renal failure. Between 1995 and 2011, population of Slender-billed Vulture (SBV) monitoring in lowland Nepal revealed declines of 96% (Chaudhary et al. 2012). In Nepal the estimated population of this species is below 50 (BCN and DNPWC 2011). There is lacking of current status of this species. In Pokhara valley there were seven occupied and four productive nests in 2006/07 breeding season, five occupied nests but no productive nests in 2007-08 and total breeding failure in 2008-09 and 2009-10 (Gautam and Baral 2010a). After that no any record of nesting around Pokhara valley even though good number of adult, sub-adult and juvenile encountered regularly during carcass feeding and foraging on dumping site and Vulture Safe Feeding Site, Ghachok.
Thus this project originated to study the spatial distribution of Slender-billed Vulture and effort to explore nesting site for ecological monitoring in Kaski. Still there are anthropogenic activities like habitat destruction, poisoning and illegal use of Diclofenac on cattle treatment. To reconcile this conflict community based conservation campaigns with massive awareness/advocacy is needed. We further unaware about habitat requirement and future threats for this species. Therefore, we desire to develop baseline data on habitat requirements, ecological status and participatory conservation plan on Slender-billed Vulture. This project aims to support the main goal of 'Vulture Conservation Action Plan for Nepal 2015-2019' and Manifesto chalked out by Saving Asia's Vulture from Extinction (SAVE) consortium. |
Does president Trump’s use of Twitter affect financial markets? The president frequently mentions companies in his tweets and, as such, tries to gain leverage over their behavior. In an open access study in PLOS ONE, Heleen Brans and Bert Scholtens (University of Groningen) analyze the effect of president Trump’s Twitter messages that specifically mention a company name on its stock market returns. They investigate a period of two years in which the president tweeted about one hundred times with the explicit mention of a company name.
The authors study how investors in the US stock market respond to such tweets by investigating the abnormal stock market return of the company associated with these tweets, while accounting for risk and the market trend. They also investigate whether the sentiment of the tweets matters. To this extent, they rely on SentiStrength, which extracts sentiment strength from informal text. Accounting for sentiment is a novel feature in this type of financial market analysis.
The authors conclude that on the day of the president’s tweet about a company and on the first day thereafter, there is no statistically significant effect on the stock market value of the mentioned company. As such, it seems the president does not move the stock market with his tweets in a statistically significant way and the tweets are not economically meaningful. These results confirm those from some other studies, which used a much smaller sample. However, they contrast with a study based on a sample of fifteen tweets between the presidential elections and the swearing in of president Trump.
However, when they account for sentiment of the tweet, Brans and Scholtens find that tweets from the president that reveal strong negative sentiment are followed by reduced market value of the company mentioned. The president’s supportive tweets do not render a significant effect. This finding of asymmetry aligns with other studies in finance.
These results show that president Trump’s tweets about companies can have a negative impact on their market value when the tweets reveal strong negative sentiment. The firms themselves usually are not in a position to respond.
The methodology used does not allow the authors to conclude about the exact mechanism behind the findings and can only be used to investigate short-term effects.
Professor of Economics Sjoerd Beugelsdijk regularly asks himself how to deal with increasing polarization in the Netherlands. He is not very optimistic, given the ‘toxic cocktail’ of underlying causes. He wrote about this subject in his book De...
Different from previous years but still surprising, fun, healthy, and for the whole family: join Groningen’s take on this year’s national weekend of science, organized by the University of Groningen (UG) and Hanze University of Applied Sciences...
From Zwarte Piet (‘Black Pete’) to the coronavirus, from immigration to education, and from farmers and nitrogen to the housing market: the Netherlands is increasingly becoming polarized. In every debate, the standpoints seem to be growing further...
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Updated: Aug 1
The Original Concept of Trias Politica
“If the legislative and executive authorities are one institution, there will be no freedom. There won’t be freedom anyway if the judiciary body is not separated from the legislative and executive authorities.”
- Charles de Montesquieu (1)
Trias Politica (Tripartite System; Separation of Powers):
Recent controversy on Trias Politica is just misleading and inaccurate, a bureaucratic disinformation operation that it's politically meant to distract public attention from the imminent necessity of decolonisation of UK-dominated jurisdiction of Hong Kong courts, the last bastion of UK colonialist interests in post 1997 Hong Kong.
Apparently the present social status of Hong Kong is semi-autonomy within China but it still is partially semi-British colony, too. Hong Kong has no adequate conditions for normalised Trias Politica due to the fatal lack of decolonisation within the framework of One Country & Two Systems implemented astonishingly without decolonisation of the ex-British colony in 1997 yet it does not mean that the present SAR Hong Kong does not have certain extent of Trias Politica.
Under the circumstances, the controversy on ''No Existence of Trias Politica in HK'' not only politically serves external forces like USA who recently labelled Hong Kong as ''mainland China'', but also it serves distracting public attention from necessary decolonisation reform on its common law system. The major issue is that incumbent UK judges are in charge of Hong Kong jurisdiction while foreign judges are not allowed in both UK and USA. This judicial contradiction from colonial era must be solved in order to safeguard judicial independence of SAR Hong Kong from foreign forces.
The SAR bureaucrats ''systematically'' initiated the unfruitful controversy from above and its resulted malign cycle which inevitably involved calculated cliched reactions from opposition, mainstream media, pro-establishment camp, law figures and bots. The aim is to manipulate general public opinion by dominating it with false propositions and pseudo-themes. Because it's purely rooted in brains of bureaucrats and their business friends in employers' trade unions, it won't infiltrate grassroots level for a long time. As this time, it started from bureaucrats and ended in bureaucrats yet they actually achieved the aim to close doors for decolonisation. This ''sanitising'' operation on the general public opinion forms a systematic cycle when there is a certain reformist tendency in political sphere then SAR bureaucrats instigate a controversy with a false proposition to push aside the actual reform meanwhile it is also deliberately done as a PR stunt to comfort the central government.
Furthermore, the denial of Trias Politica is harmonious with the long term political agenda of ruling class of Hong Kong to fuel so called ''pro-democracy'' movement against China while posing as pro-Beijing. They can now say that Hong Kong's difficult condition is due to the lack of both universal suffrage and separation of powers. In fact, self-contempt of its own establishment by SAR bureaucrats is an insult to the central government that it implies the totalitarian nature of being part of China in terms of Western democracy.
In fact, lack or denial of Trias Politica in Hong Kong has not been driving force for any public unrest or discontent ever occurred in Hong Kong until present. On the contrary, the majorities of SAR government, opposition and pro-establishment camp had unanimously insisted that the political system of Hong Kong is based on Trias Politica since the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 until the recent controversy. Thus the denial of Trias Politica is not only self-disdain for the central government itself, justification of US interpretation of the present Hong Kong status for sanctions but also it is a totally ''empty'' controversy to distract attention of public from decolonisation reform.
The judicial hegemony or judicial dictatorship of Hong Kong is originated in direct continuation of the British Hong Kong judicial system and systematic recruitment of UK judges. It is an aftermath of the lack of decolonisation in the judicial filed not an essential result of Trias Politica or One Country Two System itself. At least Trias Politica has nothing to do with the political turmoil at all.
The controversy instigated by the secretary for education, Kevin Yeung on August 31, 2020 when he required deletion of Trias Politica phrase from the liberal studies text books during a voluntary screening by the Education Bureau.
Kevin Yeung thinks there was and is no Trias Politica while Hong Kong has maintained executive dominance since the British Hong Kong colonial era. Key figures of opposition and pro-establishment camps responded to his remark immediately.
Chairperson of ''opposition'' Civic Party Alan Leong criticised:
Indeed, Alan Leong told the facts that the basic law did not literally mention both Trias Politica and executive dominance. Regina Ip who is a member of Executive Council of Hong Kong, legislative council of Hong Kong and a chairman of New People's Party agreed with Kevin Yeung:
葉劉：港司法獨立 三權分立另概念 教科書寫得不好 贊同糾正
Moreover Mingpao cited the chief judge of the controversial Court of Final Appeal's claim on this theme which published in January 2014: |
This stunning brass horseshoe wall hanging brings good luck and protection to your space. The horseshoe is probably one of the most well-known good luck symbols of the Western world. And, the horseshoe also has a long history of being a protective symbol, from being quite common in Egyptian iconography to making an appearance in Islamic art. This auspicious symbol has been considered a charm used to protect against any form of evil while also bringing good luck.
The magic of this horseshoe wall hanging
In addition to the good luck of the horseshoe itself, each of these beautiful pieces is adorned with various good luck talismans from across the world, as well as colorful rhinestones to add a layer of color correspondence, and the words “Signo Poderoso” which translates to powerful sign. It is believed that the good luck power of the horseshoe is connected to a man named Dunstan who lived during the 10th Century and became the Archbishop of Canterbury, which is the highest seat of the church in England. St. Dunstan, as he came to be known, ensnared the devil when he nailed a horseshoe to his hoof and only released him after the devil promised never to enter a place that had a horseshoe hung over the door.
The tradition of hanging a horseshoe over a door carried on, and the legend of the horseshoe grew as the years passed. In the Middle Ages, when fear of witches ran rampant it was said that witches were afraid of horses and their iron shoes. People thought that witches would never pass through a doorway with one hung above it, and people even nailed horseshoes to witch’s coffins to keep them from coming out. (Funny, right?)
Today, we still see lucky horseshoes hung over doors, both inside and out. Hanging a horseshoe facing upwards in a “U” shape is said to keep evil out and bring good luck into your home. Conversely, hanging an upside down one will have luck flowing out of your home. If you want to follow tradition, you can hang yours with 7 nails through the 7 holes for added luck.
This listing is for one (1) brass horseshoe wall hanging. These are about 3.5″x4″ with an attached chain for hanging. |
Are you looking for Operational Cost Calculation In Sap….
Throughout the UK Power Efficiency Certificates are created using basic methods and power presumptions which allows structures to be compared to an additional fairly. By doing this it permits proprietors, possible buyers or lessees to watch the predicted energy consumption and carbon scores over an annual basis, so they can take into consideration the overall energy performance and gas prices as part of their financial investment or living costs.
All Energy Performance Certificates are accompanied with a recommendations report which outlines cost-effective measures that can be put in place to improve the overall energy efficiency rating of a given property. A typical recommendation could be to upgrade a building’s heating system, increase insulation levels in a loft space or to upgrade single glazed areas to double glazing.
The Power Performance Certificate is necessary as greater than 50% of the UK’s power intake as well as carbon exhausts are produced incidentally that we light, warmth and also usually utilize buildings. Reasonably little changes such as setting up low energy or LED lighting in all outlets of a structure can have an extensive result on energy intake.
- A (92 PLUS)
- B (81-91)
- C (69-80)
- D (55-68)
- E (39-54)
- F (21-38)
- G (1-20)
When is an Energy performance certificate required?
Your residential or commercial property’s EPC needs to be readily available to potential customers as soon as you begin to market your residential property available or lease. EPC Certificates became a governing need in April 2008. You must obtain an accepted Domestic Energy assessor to generate the EPC
A need on all domestic homes, that are either being offered, constructed, or rented, and should be supplied to a potential purchaser or lessee at no cost.
Are there any cases whereby my building may be exempt?
The answer is of course! The complying with circumstances consider your home excluded.
Some noted buildings.
Structure due for demolition causing website due for redevelopment.
Building to be marketed or rented with vacant possession.
Places of praise.
Industrial sites, workshops and also non-residential farming buildings that have a low power demand.
Stand-alone business structures with a complete valuable flooring area of much less than 50m ².
What are the penalties for not having an EPC?
As from the 1st April 2018, there will be a requirement for any properties rented out in the private rented sector to normally have a minimum energy performance rating of E on an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). The regulations will come into force for new lets and renewals of tenancies with effect from 1st April 2018 and for all existing tenancies on 1st April 2020. It will be unlawful to rent a property which breaches the requirement for a minimum E rating unless there is an applicable exemption. A civil penalty of up to £4,000 will be imposed for breaches.
This guidance summarizes the regulations: Find out more
You do not pay anything until the survey is has been fully carried out and that you are happy with the service. Invoices will be issued at this point.
What is your Energy Performance Certificate process? Operational Cost Calculation In Sap
- Upon arrival to the residential property, the power assessor will introduce themselves, carry and also describe the procedure out a health and wellness & safety and security threat evaluation for safety objectives.
The assessor will require access to all of the areas in the property, consisting of (where relevant) loft hatch, room in the roof, expansions, sunroom, electrical and also gas metres.
The assessor will certainly draw an illustration strategy of the general floor area of the residential property. When this is done they will certainly overcome each area taking accurate measurements as well as catching all appropriate data (Property age, building materials, Wall thicknesses, furnace & controls, hot water cylinder details, water cylinder insulation, Additional heating unit (if applicable), Floor building and construction, polishing kind as well as reduced energy illumination.Please note that we appreciate your home whatsoever times and also will certainly guarantee that it will certainly be left as it was before we performed our study.
Schedule your EPC
One of our certified EPC assessors will see you at your facilities. The survey will certainly take generally in between 1-2 hrs to complete.
We will publish your Commercial EPC to the government register within 24-48 hours of leaving your property and send you a copy directly via email.
What We Offer
Emphasis 360 has ten years’ experience in using SAP evaluations to a selection of clients based in Bristol and all over the UK.
We offer a consultancy strategy to conformity and also constantly have your demands at the leading edge of what we do.
When dealing with tricky growths and also are yet to be defeated by a challenging rating to date, we are well versed.
At Focus 360 Energy we complete both style phase as well as as-built parts of your SAP Estimations in Bristol and we will email your record within your due dates.
SAP Calculations for New Builds in Bristol
A number of the jobs we handle call for an improvement score of 40% or over which we have always handled to achieve regardless of occasionally having tight spending plan restrictions laid out to us.
Therefore alone, we are confident that you won’t be disappointed in what we need to offer.
We comprehend that you have deadlines to meet so constantly supply the very same day response. We offer a 48-hour quick track service as well as same day EPC Certificate as common, so you will not be kept waiting.
SAP Calculations (Common Evaluation Procedures) are a structure policy need and also the UK federal government’s chosen methodology for assessing the power efficiency of all brand-new construct conversions, expansions as well as homes.
Once SAP Calculations in Bristol have been successfully completed on a dwelling an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) is generated. The energy performance certificate is an additional document required for building control sign off and is a legal requirement when selling or renting out a home.
AP score is a way of contrasting the energy effectiveness of different houses and is racked up on a ranking range in between 1 and also 100 (100 standing for a house with a zero-energy expense as well as 0 with a high power expense). From the SAP computations, we are able to function out a power price for a provided residential property.
SBEM Calculations (Simplified Building Energy Model) is a tool that is used to analyse the compliance of your new non-domestic building with Part L of the building regulations (England and Wales) and equivalent regulations in Scotland, Northern Ireland.
The SBEM computations procedure is put together by considering the suggested structures use of materials, heating unit, air conditioning, warm water, air flow as well as illumination solutions. The computation also looks at what renewable power sources have actually been used, such as solar photovoltaic or pv, solar thermal, ground/air-source heating.
Once this information is designed in our government accepted software application, we can give a precise understanding of what the structures energy performance as well as carbon discharges will certainly be. This result is gauged versus a notional building of the very same measurements ideally enabling good and also ingenious design to dominate. By jointly determining the material, services, lighting, sustainable as well as low carbon innovations to a notional structure we can permit some compensation in between the various elements.
Who needs SBEM Calculations?
BEM Calculations are a compulsory need for any kind of heated new build business residential or commercial property which surpasses 50m2 in dimension. In enhancement to new construct business structures some remodelling and also extension jobs will certainly require an SBEM calculation.
Structure control will certainly need a layout stage SBEM computation to be sent at the exact same time as your structure policy application. Structure control will not allow the structure commence without obtaining both files.
Structure control will certainly call for both the layout stage SBEM Calculation and also Commercial EPC once the building has been built. Structure control will unlikely authorize the building off without both records.
Air testing (Also known as Air Permeability, air leakage test and pressure test) is a measure of showing how good your building is at keeping the head in and the cold out.
All brand-new developments in the UK are required to have an air examination brought as part Accepted Document Component L (England and Wales) and also section 6 of the technical manual (Scotland).
Once the building has actually been completed and also before the occupier moves in, the Air test will constantly be lugged out.
Fundamentally, the reduced the air leak, the far better the structure is at keeping out the cool as well as the lower the energy costs will be. Nevertheless, having a 100% air-tight building is not needed an advantage as issues might take place such as mould and condensation. Striking a balance in the result is key.
You can choose not to evaluate all stories on a bigger site, yet it’s worth noting that the SAP rating will certainly be penalised on those not checked. This is frequently referred to as self-confidence variable.
Why choose us?
- Professional and reliable
- Flexible appointments to suit you
- Friendly practical advice
- 10 years experience in the industry
- Same day turnaround
- Affordable pricing
What we offer
Covering Bristol and the surrounding locations, Emphasis 360 Energy has ten years’ experience offering power performance certifications (EPC’s) in Bristol and throughout the south-west. Operational Cost Calculation In Sap
We provide both domestic as well as business EPC certificates to a huge variety of clients consisting of estate agents, lawyers, residential property proprietors, facility managers and the public. |
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently summed up the economic benefits of widespread child care and paid family leave. Since 1979, she explained in a speech at Brown University, women have brought about most gains in real household income. Making life easier for working moms helps women enter and stay in the workforce and in turn boosts economic growth, Yellen reasoned.
As an economics professor who researches issues that working women face, I couldn’t agree more. When more women earn income their own families benefit — along with the whole economy. And I’m heartened to see that after its initial proposal for a child care tax break that would mainly benefit the rich, the Trump administration has switched gears. It now seeks to bring relief to working families farther down the economic ladder.
According to media reports based on skeletal details, officials want to increase the Child and Dependent Care Credit, which lets working parents deduct up to US$2,100 from their taxes. That’s the kind of fix that would make our economy friendlier toward working moms as Yellen prescribed.
More women working outside the home
The nation’s workforce has changed dramatically since the 1950s. Back then, workplaces generally centered around male breadwinners. Stay-at-home wives did most of the caregiving.
In a majority of families with children today, both partners earn money, do housework and take care of their kids. Families with children have become less likely to live with extended family members able to pitch in with caregiving and more likely to be headed by single parents. In 2013, the sole or primary earner was the mother in nearly 40 percent of households with children.
On top of the time burden, child care costs are growing. Full-time care for kids under four years old ran $9,589 on average in 2015 — more than the tab for in-state college tuition, according to a report from Care.com, the largest online care market, and the New America Foundation, a think tank.
Another burden: The U.S. is the only industrialized nation without paid family leave for employees with newborns. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 covers only workplaces with more than 50 employees. It guarantees unpaid time off.
Some companies voluntarily offer new mothers and fathers paid parental leave to care for newborns and newly adopted children. Others provide paid family leave for whatever emergency arises.
Unfortunately, many workers can’t even take unpaid leave without jeopardizing their jobs.
On top of the Child and Dependent Care Credit, the federal government helps working parents save on child care expenses by allowing companies to let employees use dependent-care flexible spending accounts.
These FSAs help middle- and high-income workers more than low-earners with little or no tax liability — whose need for help is greater. For them, there’s the Earned Income Tax Credit. Its distribution as an annual lump sum, averaging in most states between $2,000 and $3,000, is ill-suited for the cash-strapped families scrambling to pay their bills year-round who are eligible for this benefit.
After experiencing widespread push-back, the Trump administration recently said it would revise its initial proposals to do more for low-income parents with limited tax liability or who pay no taxes at all. It also outlined plans for new child care and elder care savings accounts that included few details.
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was “contemplating” changes to its original maternity leave proposal. By giving new mothers six weeks of paid time off, even that plan would set an important precedent. But it would exclude adoptions and many increasingly common new configurations for American families.
The Trump administration should ensure that all workers benefit from family-friendly tax and employment policies, not just high-paid earners and new mothers. Men and women alike should be free to take paid family leave, and all employees needing to care for their close relatives deserve an opportunity to do so without losing their jobs or obliging more women to stay out of the labor force.
Maximizing “women’s presence in the workplace . . . allows us to capitalize on the talents of our entire population,” as Yellen said. “It is also good business.” |
The biggest test of the province's COVID-19 strategy is now on the horizon.
Since the words "pandemic", "lockdown" and "social distancing" entered our collective vocabulary back in March, P.E.I. has been able to prevent community spread of the virus. Every one of the 44 cases has been traced.
Despite some initial fears, no cases have been traced to the arrival of seasonal residents, the travel bubble with the other three Atlantic provinces or the decision by the Canadian Premier Soccer League to conduct its season without fans at UPEI.
School is just around the corner. Students from outside the bubble who are attending UPEI or Holland and College have arrived now and are being self-isolated before other students arrive. As of this writing, that process has not resulted in any additional cases and hopefully that will remain the case.
The ramping up of the public school system presents more challenges. Each school has developed a plan that will see classes formed into cohorts, with the students being limited to interaction within that group. That is fine in theory but it will likely prove to be a challenge for teachers to enforce.
When they appeared before a legislature committee this week, Deputy Education Minister Bethany MacLeod and Norbert Carpenter, the acting superintendent of the Public Schools Branch, indicated the fact a student may have the sniffles doesn't necessary mean they are going to be sent home from school.
Let's face it: some children (and adults for that matter) are prone to getting colds. They were likely prone before COVID-19 came along and that has to be taken into consideration when determining how much of a risk they are to their fellow students and staff members. Given the fact the most common COVID-19 symptoms are similar to a number of other diseases complicates the risk assessment and common sense and medical history has to be a factor.
Teachers and bus drivers will face a daunting challenge when it comes to convincing students to keep their masks in place when they are on the bus and moving between classes. While designer masks are part of the back-to-school shopping list for the first time and many children (particularly at the younger grades) will be keen to wear them the first few days, that is likely to wear off quick.
The big question, of course, on the minds of everybody connected with education, is how many cases will it take to shut down a school or ultimately switch the entire system to online learning. Education officials are promising all classroom lessons will be duplicated online from day one for students who may be forced to self-isolate as they await test results.
This time around, online learning will be mandatory should there be a COVID-19 closure (it was voluntary in the March to June period.) This is vital especially at the high school level where students are competing for scholarships and post secondary admission — voluntary just doesn't cut it.
If we are able to restart school without a major jump in cases, we will go a long away to returning to what passes for normal in the COVID-19 world.
Andy Walker is a former reporter for the Journal-Pioneer and is now a freelance writer who lives in Cornwall, P.E.I. |
Don't be Surprised by Suffering2
The first thing Peter tells us is that we shouldn’t be “surprised” by suffering. Continue reading . . .
The first thing Peter tells us is that we shouldn’t be “surprised” by suffering. Here is how he put it in 1 Peter 4:12-19.
“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And “If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?” Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:12-19).
In other words, if you are going to respond properly to suffering and even learn to grow from it and deepen in your relationship with Christ, you have to develop a solid and Scriptural theology of what suffering is all about. Suffering, says Peter, is normal! It is standard fare for the believer. It is to be expected.
Remember: Peter is writing to a predominantly Gentile audience who would have experienced little if any suffering prior to coming to faith in Christ. Unlike a Jewish believer who knew a lot about suffering and oppression, Gentile Christians would have regarded suffering as a strange and inexplicable misfortune, wholly out of place and inconsistent with the promises and blessings of the gospel.
But if that is true, what is the point of it all? Why does God orchestrate my life in such a way that I have to endure the insults and abuse of unbelievers? It is, says Peter, “to test” us (v. 2b; see 1 Peter 1:6-7. See Psalm 66:10; Mal. 3:1-4).
Here is the NIV rendering of v. 12 – “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.” The purpose clause “to test you” is completely left out and thus fails to communicate why Christians should not be astonished or embittered with suffering.
Suffering is “not a sign of God’s absence, but of his purifying presence” (Tom Schreiner, 219)! Suffering for Christ in some form or degree is essential to the formation of Christian character.
Suffering is not an imperative. It is an indicative. We are not told to seek it or pursue it. We are simply told that it is a given.
It’s critically important that you not react with surprise when either you suffer or you hear of someone else who has. If you do not grasp this truth, your instinctive response will be to shake an angry fist in God’s face and scream out: “Where were you when that missionary in Liberia died of Ebola trying to help those who are afflicted with it? Where were you when that godly Christian man lost his job because he refused his employer’s order to cover up an illegal transaction? Don’t you care? Didn’t you see this coming?”
By all means weep with those who weep. By all means experience righteous anger at those who unjustly oppress Christian men and women. But don’t let the onset of suffering, no matter how intense or prolonged it may be, throw you into confusion or doubt or shock or uncertainty about the goodness of God.
People often ask me what practical benefit there is in affirming and believing in the absolute sovereignty of God over all of life. That’s it!
To be continued . . . |
The archaeological area sprawls across basalt hill overlooking the gulf of Orosei. Its main feature is the single-tower nuraghe, about 12 m tall and made of basalt and volcanic rock. The entrance is surmounted by a lintel and leads into the central chamber, almost completely obstructed by the collapsed structure. In the outer wall open four niches, presumably guard shelters originally accessible from a corridor with stairs later incorporated into the wall. Around the nuraghe sprawls a stone hut village encircled by a defence wall made of large stone blocks and natural boulders.
Leave Dorgali and take SS 125 'Orientale Sarda' heading south. When you reach the tunnel, turn left towards Cala Gonone. After about 4 km after the turnoff, take a dirt road on the right that leads to the archaeological site. |
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SAN JOSE, CA – On Wednesday, October 21, 2020, the Santa Clara County Board of Education unanimously approved and signed a resolution in celebration and observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and the month of November as Native American Heritage Month.
The Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE) recognizes the second Monday of October as the national observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day and November as Native American Heritage Month. The SCCOE acknowledges and celebrates local and national Indigenous People and Native Americans, in particular, the Muwekma Ohlone tribe of Santa Clara County, as well as the Amah Hutson, Esselen, and Taymen tribes, and their efforts to revive and preserve the culture, language, and history of the first people of this region.
“Both the Santa Clara County Office of Education and its Board of Trustees are dedicated to observing and celebrating the diversity of our students, so it is a real honor to be able to acknowledge both Indigenous People’s Day and Native American Heritage Month,” said Santa Clara County Board of Education President, Claudia Rossi. “It is very important that our students know the history of the land of Santa Clara County and are able to learn from and celebrate those that came before us.”
The SCCOE recognizes the remarkable work by local Santa Clara County organizations and individuals such as the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and its commitment to support the advancement of Native Americans in STEM education and careers. Additionally, the Indian Health Center of Santa Clara Valley, under the leadership of Sonya M. Tetnowski, a Makah tribal member, has offered comprehensive health care and wellness services since 1977. The SCCOE also celebrates activists Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayer-Roods and Anne Marie Sayer. Anne Marie is the steward of Indian Canyon, the only federally recognized Indigenous land in the Bay Area, and Kanyon, Ann Marie’s daughter, has released a film featuring their activism titled, “In the Land of My Ancestors.”
“Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Native American Heritage Month are opportunities for us to reflect upon the severe injustice and dispossession suffered by the first people of our region and nation,” said Dr. Mary Ann Dewan, Santa Clara County Superintendent of Schools. “Through their stories, history and heroic efforts, we learn about, respect, and celebrate the legacy, heritage and culture of the Indigenous Peoples and Native Americans and their contributions.”
The SCCOE is committed to enhancing equity, diversity, and inclusion and thereby, honors local and national indigenous populations and Native Americans. With over 180 tribes represented in Santa Clara County, the SCCOE remains dedicated to providing schools and districts with resources and supports that advance ethnic studies courses and curriculum.
About the Santa Clara County Office of Education
Working collaboratively with school and community partners, the Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE) is a regional service agency that provides instructional, business, and technology services to the 31 school districts of Santa Clara County. The County Office of Education directly serves students through special education programs, alternative schools, Head Start and State Preschool programs, migrant education, and Opportunity Youth Academy. The SCCOE also provides academic and fiscal oversight and monitoring to districts in addition to the 22 Santa Clara County Board of Education authorized charter schools. |
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