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Last week, debate erupted over an image Paolo Pellegrin had entered as part of a portfolio that won prizes at both the World Press Photo and Pictures of the Year International competitions. He had apparently cribbed his captions from the New York Times, misidentified the subject of the photo in question, and while he didn’t exactly set up the photo–he arguably created what appears to be a documentary photograph of a tough guy brandishing a gun in a bad neighborhood.
As BagNews Notes first reported, Pellegrin had asked the subject, a college student and the friend of his fixer, to pose for portraits at a local shooting range. The subject, Shane Keller, told PDN Pulse that as he walked to his car with the gun, Pellegrin took advantage of the harsh light in the gritty-looking parking garage to make a picture for a larger story about the underside of Rochester, New York.
Today, World Press photo organizers issued a statement that said, “The jury is of the opinion that although a more complete and accurate introduction and captions should have been made available by the photographer, the jury was not fundamentally mislead by the picture in the story or the caption that was included with it.”
Officially, POYi has so far remained silent about the image, although one juror told PDN last week that he was “satisfied by Paolo Pellegrin’s explanation” about the image.
The big photojournalism competitions are supposed to be about celebrating great work and top talent, but this year’s contests have been overshadowed somewhat by charges of manipulation and the ensuing debate over what crosses ethical lines.
What ends up getting disqualified, and what ends up doing real harm, are arguably not always the same thing.
The White House News Photographer’s Association just rescinded Washington Post photographer Tracy Woodward’s Award of Excellence in the Sports Feature/Reaction category of The Eyes of History competition. WHNPA said it rescinded the award because “digital manipulation that was in violation of the contest rules.” Woodward had cleaned up background distractions in the image, which showed a high school wrestler celebrating after a match victory. NPPA reported the incident in detail on its Web site yesterday.
Meanwhile, debate about the Pellegrin image continues to simmer. Photojournalist Kenneth Jarecke posted a sharp critique of Pellegrin’s actions yesterday. “This controversy is no longer about poor, misleading or ‘lifted’ captions,” Jarecke wrote. “This is now about a self-proclaimed ‘documentary’ photographer who manipulates people and uses them as props to illustrate a story narrative he’s made up in his head. I thought these issues had been worked out by now. You don’t use people for props. You don’t manipulate them into doing things they aren’t doing and you don’t ask them to pose for you and then pretend it’s a situation that you’ve happened upon.”
Anticipating an onslaught by Pellegrin’s many defenders, Jarecke concludes his post: “Sling your rocks and arrows below. Please don’t hesitate to remind me that I’m old and outdated, and thus have no idea what I’m talking about.”
There was also some controversy early last week about the World Press Photo of the Year winner, an image showing a parade of mourners carrying the dead bodies of two children in Gaza. The image was shot by Paul Hansen of the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Some critics took him to task for the dark toning he applied to the image before he entered it in the World Press Photo competition. The version originally published by Dagens Nyheter had lighter tone and slightly different cropping.
WPP photo jury chair Santiago Lyon told Jim Estrin of The New York Times Lens Blog that the jury had examined the image for post processing and decided that Hansen’s photo was “within the acceptable industry parameters.” He added: “Everybody has different standards about these sorts of things, but as a group we felt that it was O.K.”
That didn’t stop the hand wringing, but at the time, it was all that armchair ethicists had to work with. Through the lens of the more recent controversy, what Hansen did now seems quaint and, if not forgiven, at least forgotten.
Justin Maxon and Jared Moossy have won the 2016 Visura Multimedia Grant for their film When the spirit moves, which documents life in Chester, Pennsylvania. Maxon and Moossy, both PDN’s 30 photographers in 2009, were awarded a $5,000 cash prize. The top finalist was Zackary Canepari, who won $1,000 for Flint is the place, a cross-platform, episodic documentary... More ›
Mary F. Calvert, Kirsten Luce, Katie Orlinsky, Sergey Ponomarev and Jonathan Torgovnik have each won a $10,000 grant from Getty Images through its annual Grants for Editorial Photography program. The program aims to “showcase and support powerful and inspiring photojournalism projects,” says Getty Images, which announced the winners today. Ponomarev, based in Moscow, was recognized for his... More ›
Six photographers have been awarded the 2016 Individual Photographer’s Fellowship (IPF) grants from the Aaron Siskind Foundation: Sam Contis of Oakland, CA Holly Lynton of Pioneer Valley, MA Raymond Meeks of Portland, OR RaMell Ross of Providence, RI A 2014 PDN’s 30, Bryan Schutmaat of Hilltop Lakes, TX Danny Wilcox Frazier of Iowa City, IA Offered to U.S. artists working in still photography and photography-based media, the... More › |
The template engine is a compiling engine, all templates are compiled into PHP-files. This will make the delivery of the files faster on the next request, since the template doesn't need to be compiled again. If the template changes it will be recompiled. There is no new template language to learn. Beside the default mode, there is a set of constructs since version 1.6 which allow you to edit your templates with WYSIWYG editors. By default the template engine uses indention for building blocks (you can turn that off). This feature was inspired by Python and by the need I felt to force myself to write proper HTML-code, using proper indentions, to make the code better readable.
Unfortunately, complete documentation is not available at the moment. |
When going to see a Veterinarian for a monthly check up of your dog, you must be prepared what to tell, in this way you will make all the necessary information your vet should know about the condition of your pet. Here are the lists that will help you make things easier.
- Make sure to bring all your records and if necessary, show them to your veterinarian.
- When your first noticed the signs of illness, what you observed and in what order. Did the signs become progressively more severe or diminish in nature? Are they worse at any specific time or day?
- If your pet is drinking more than usual. If so, give an indication of how much water intake per day.
- If you have any other pets, what kind of pet? Are the showing signs of illness too?
- About the appetite of your dog, is it eating or not? Is it having a problem picking up foodstuff or swallowing it? Is it eating less than or more than, usual? Have you made changes to your feeding program or change of dog food brand?
- If your situation have changed. Have you added another animal, moved, had decorators in, changed the carpets or your pet’s bedding, etc?
- If you have been on vacation with your dog. If so, where did you go and what place did you stay.
- If your dog has been in contact with other dogs, in kennels, at dog show, or as a visitor. Were any of those contacts ill?
- About your dog’s feces – have these changed recently in color or consistency? Does the dog strain to pass feces? Does it go more or less frequent than usual?
- About changes in your garden, used pesticides or any other garden sprays or treated the lawn or flowerbeds with chemical preparations?
- About the frequency of your pets urination. Does your pet pass urine more frequently than usual or have any difficulty in that aspect? Does the urine contain any blood?
- If your pet has had an accident or a fight of any sort. What kind of animal did your pet get into fight with, how did it happen and when?
Make a note of all the facts that relate to the questions posted above and take it with you so that you can refer to your findings during the veterinary consultation. It’s only too easy to forget important information during anxiety and hassle of a visit to a veterinary clinic! |
The Porsche 934.5 Wings Into Our Hearts
The Porsche 934.5 is an odd duck. With its strange name and even stranger looks it doesn’t exactly elicit the same kind of emotional lust or name recognition as its late 1970’s contemporaries. But then, it wasn’t built to. The singular purpose for which the 934.5 was crafted was to dominate the race tracks of the day. It was here that this odd duck turned into a track-ruling, competitor-crushing, legend-creating swan.
How exactly did someone come up with this weird and prototypically ’70s Porsche? If you’d like to create one for yourself, simply start with one part Porsche 934 and add in a pinch of Porsche 935. Mix and serve immediately. The 934.5 is the bridge between these two racing models—a portmanteau if you will—of two incredibly successful 1970s race cars.
It all started with the 1976 Porsche 934, which was the racing version of the first 911 Turbo (code-named 930). The “4” in the racing car’s name comes from the fact that the 934 was built to compete in Group 4 of the FIA championship. Obviously, all of the engineering team’s creativity was spent making the car go faster. It worked too—the 934 took both the European GT championship and the Trans-Am championship during its inaugural season. |
Any addicted astrophotographer is always considering new equipment, and also debating the merits of several options. One of the most common questions for beginners is about the difference between digital SLRs and astronomical CCD cameras. I love a good experiment so below is my answer.
Both these images were taken with a Takahashi Epsilon 160 astrograph (530mm f3.3). Total exposure time for both images is 115 minutes (almost two hours). The comparison is between a CentralDS cooling modified and spectrum enhanced Canon 40D and a QHY9 astronomical CCD camera.
The Astro 40D image has been cropped slightly to more closely match the overall QHY9 view but image scale has not been changed in the 100% crops.
Astro 40D image on the left is 23 * 5 mins sub-exposures at ISO 1600. (I know from previous tests that this ISO setting gives the best result and that there is almost no difference between ISO800 or ISO1600 in the end result).
QHY9 image on the right is 11 * 5 mins Luminence and 4 * 5 mins for each RGB filter. (Shooting more Luminence and less RGB may have shifted the result a little more in favour of the QHY but not significantly).
Ambient temperature was around +20 deg Celsius (~70F). Astro 40D with cooling on was running at around 0C (32F) while QHY9 was running at -20C (-4F).
All images calibrated and combined with ImagesPlus and final processing in Photoshop.
My initial reaction - the difference is much less than I expected. The cooled DSLR is putting in a very impressive performance against the KAF-8300 sensor in the QHY9. As you would expect when you look more closely, noise levels are higher in the Astro40D and the QHY9 delivers greater resolution in the nebula and picks up fainter stars. It is also likely that the difference in noise levels would be more pronounced when imaging at slower f-ratios and/or on fainter objects.
A spectrum enhanced 40D without the cooling modification would show much higher noise levels, while a standard off-the-shelf Canon 40D would not be sensitive to the red emission from this Rosette Nebula so the whole image would be very faint indeed.
I think the Astro40D is an excellent camera for widefield astrophotography with Canon lenses. There is no need to worry about custom adaptors, LiveView focus is as easy as it gets, fast lenses are readily available and optically well matched to the sensor and it can easily be controlled with a programmable timer release - no computers required which makes for a very portable and enjoyable setup.
The QHY9 though is a very impressive camera, especially so given its price. My first long exposure image with the QHY9 (of the Horsehead Nebula) convinced me that I had a very capable camera as it blew away my previous attempts with (non-cooled) DSLRs. |
Companion and Companion 4 legs
The stools from the “Companion” collection can be used as an extra chair, as well as a piece of art. The name “Companion” refers to the uplifting function of the stool as it adds an extra dimension to the room.
The collection includes two different stools: “Companion” and “Companion 4 legs”. The stools are available in four different colors: black, white, yellow and blue.
The seats are of solid wood and are available in oak, beech and sipo mahogany.
The base is made of powdercoated steel tubes and the seat is made of clear-coated solid wood. The white part of the seat is painted and the black eye is turned of solid wood and painted. |
Bakhtin's Philosophy and Medical Practice — Toward a Semiotic Theory of Doctor — patient Interaction
David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Jack Alan Reynolds
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Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 2 (3):275-281 (1999)
Doctor-patient interaction has gained increasing attention among sociologists and linguists during the last few decades. The problem with the studies performed so far, however, has been a lack of a theoretical framework which could bring together the various phenomena observed within medical consultations. Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of language offers us tools for studying medical practice as socio-cultural semiotic phenomenon. Applying Bakhtin's ideas of polyphonic, context-dependent and open-ended nature of human communication opens the possibilities to develop prevailing theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of medical consultations
|Keywords||Bakhtin doctor-patient interaction medical consultation medical semiotics|
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Jerome Bickenbach (2012). Argumentation and Informed Consent in the Doctor–Patient Relationship. Journal of Argumentaion in Context 1 (1):5-18.
Kirsti Malterud (1999). The (Gendered) Construction of Diagnosis Interpretation of Medical Signs in Women Patients. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 20 (3):275-286.
Henry Abramovitch & Eliezer Schwartz (1996). Three Stages of Medical Dialogue. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 17 (2).
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (2003). Consultation Instead of Prescription?A Model for the Structure of the Doctor?Patient Relationship. Poiesis and Praxis 2 (1):1-27.
Rita Charon & Martha Montello (eds.) (2002). Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Routledge.
Jan M. Broekman (1987). The Philosophical Basis of Medicine as a Philosophical Question. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 2 (2).
Marian Rabinowitz (1980). Medicine as a Trade. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 1 (3):255-261.
Roosmaryn Pilgram (2012). Reasonableness of a Doctor’s Argument by Authority: A Pragma-Dialectical Analysis of the Specific Soundness Conditions. Journal of Argumentation in Context 1 (1):33-50.
Jay Katz (1984). The Silent World of Doctor and Patient. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Patricia Illingworth (2002). Trust: The Scarcest of Medical Resources. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (1):31 – 46.
Paul Ten Have (1995). Medical Ethnomethodology: An Overview. [REVIEW] Human Studies 18 (2-3):245 - 261.
Halvor Nordby (2003). Doctor–Patient-Interaction is Non-Holistic. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 6 (2):145-152.
Joe Feinglass (1987). Variations in Physician Practice and Covert Rationing. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 8 (1).
M. M. Bakhtin (1994). The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov. E. Arnold.
K. W. M. Fulford (1989). Moral Theory and Medical Practice. Cambridge University Press.
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David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Jack Alan Reynolds
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If one wishes to advocate a free society—that is, capitalism one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so called “conservatives.”.
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James Morauta (2002). Rights and Participatory Goods. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 22 (1):91-113.
L. W. Sumner (1987). The Moral Foundation of Rights. Oxford University Press.
Anthony J. Povilitis (1980). On Assigning Rights to Animals and Nature. Environmental Ethics 2 (1):67-71.
Siegfried Van Duffel (2012). The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93 (1):104-123.
Nedim Nomer (2010). Fichte and the Relationship Between Self-Positing and Rights. Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (4):469-490.
Tara Smith (1992). On Deriving Rights to Goods From Rights to Freedom. Law and Philosophy 11 (3):217 - 234.
P. J. Lomelino (2007). Individuals and Relational Beings. Social Philosophy Today 23:87-101.
Erol Kuyurtar (2007). Are Cultural Group Rights Against Individual Rights? The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 3:51-59.
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Philosophical Quarterly 59 (234):138-149 (2009)
Fictional realism, i.e., the view that because fictions exist, fictional characters exist as well, has recently been accused of leading to inconsistency generated by phenomena of indeterminacy and inconsistency in fiction. We examine in detail four arguments against fictional realism, and present a version of fictional realism which can withstand those arguments.
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Richard Woodward (2015). Identity in Fiction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3).
Michael Jacovides (2010). Experiences as Complex Events. Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (2):141-159.
David Sanson (2016). Frivolous Fictions. Res Philosophica 93 (2):1-20.
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Astrid Vicas (1993). The Nature of Fictional Discourse. Dissertation, Mcgill University (Canada)
Jeffrey Goodman (2004). A Defense of Creationism in Fiction. Grazer Philosophische Studien 67 (1):131-155.
Amie L. Thomasson (2003). Fictional Characters and Literary Practices. British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2):138-157.
Ross P. Cameron (2013). How to Be a Nominalist and a Fictional Realist. In Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects. Oxford University Press 179.
Anthony Everett (2007). Pretense, Existence, and Fictional Objects. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1):56–80.
Amie L. Thomasson (2003). Speaking of Fictional Characters. Dialectica 57 (2):205–223.
Richard Hanley (2003). Much Ado About Nothing: Critical Realism Examined. Philosophical Studies 115 (2):123 - 147.
Stuart Brock (2010). The Creationist Fiction: The Case Against Creationism About Fictional Characters. Philosophical Review 119 (3):337-364.
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Fractals, shapes that look similar to their parts no matter how much you zoom in, are everywhere from broccoli to seashells. Now, a new study of an old physics problem has found more: Electrons inside some conductive materials may be hopping around atoms in fractal patterns.
"What we finally found is a sort of a proof that this energy landscape looks funny," said co-author Brian Skinner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who studies the movement of electrons.
|Physicists found that, in some materials, electrons follow paths shaped similarly to a Lichtenberg figure, seen above.Image Credit: Bert Hickman, Stoneridge Engineering|
Mott’s theory suggests that a traveling electron is like a hiker conquering a mountain range. The extra electrons repel and slow down the hiker: they’re like mountains it has to cross. So it needs extra energy, usually heat, to hop up and past the peaks.
In 2012, Skinner noticed miniature semiconductors called quantum dots conducted electricity a tiny bit better than Mott’s research predicted.
"We didn’t make a big deal about it at the time," he said. Other experiments over the last few years saw the same effect. So, in 2015, he and his colleague set out to discover why.
"Resolving that was kind of tricky," he said. "I just spent a lot of time pacing up and down the hallway, trying to come up with the right argument that would explain what was happening."
They programmed computer simulations of electrons moving at different temperatures through a special type of semiconductor. The simulations confirmed a strange, slightly high conductivity, and Skinner realized the electrons had to be finding shortcuts around the mountains.
He came up with equations for those shortcuts. They resembled a new type of fractal, much like a pattern of lightning called the Lichtenberg figure that resembles a branching, tree-like shape. The team went back to the simulations and the math checked out.
The fractal structure is "kind of surprising," said Alexei Efros, a retired physicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and teacher at the Academic University of St. Petersburg in Russia. He was not involved in the research, but after Mott, he was one of the first to study the mechanism, known as hopping conduction, between 1960 and 1980.
Yuri Galperin, a physicist at the University of Oslo in Norway who studies hopping conduction and was not involved in the research, feared computing power limited the simulations. "It’s probably true," he said, "but in my view it’s not complete."
The paper appeared on ArXiv.org in June and has been accepted for publication by the American Physical Society's journal Physical Review B.
For now, it's unclear what applications the new insight may yield. That's because an electronic device that relied on hopping conductivity would be a poor conductor. Most modern electronic devices try to take advantage of metallic -- not hopping -- conduction, where there are no similar barriers impeding electrons.
But Skinner still believes understanding the mechanism is important, in part because it is occasionally used in next-generation electronics experiments or even laptops and cell phones.
"I kind of find myself fighting this bias where people feel like, oh, that field is dead, and it's not so interesting," Skinner said. "I have to be like, no, no, no, it's not the same. There's something really interesting here."
—Andrew Silver, Inside Science News |
Newton's Laws of Motion are also very present in the game of soccer.
Newton's First Law of Motion states that an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force; an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. This is very evident when the ball is in the air. The ball would stay in the air forever if it weren't for gravity and drag. Gravity pulls the ball down toward the Earth and drag, the friction of air acting in the opposite direction of the ball, slows the ball down. Another example of this is evident when a ball is sliding across a field and then slows down and stops. Now at first the ball was at rest on the ground, not moving. Once the force acted on it, (a big burly soccer dude), the ball is set into motion where Newton's Laws take over. The friction of the ground causes the ball to slow to a stop and also air resistance opposes the ball and brings it to a stop. Newton's Second Law states that the
acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass. This can be very easily be stated using the equation: F=ma. In this case F is the net force, m is the mass of the object, and a is the
acceleration of the object. This can be seen when you kick the ball, the more force you use to move the ball the greater the acceleration of the ball.
Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is a an equal and opposite reaction. Just like if you start hollering at the referee during a game, he's going to yell back and make you go sit your butt down. Every time you go to kick the ball this law comes into effect. You may not realize this because we are so massive compared to the ball that we do not realize that the ball actually pushes back on our foot as we push against it. |
Until now, the story of Susan Boyle—the Scottish singer who rose into the spotlight after her performance on Britain’s Got Talent—hasn’t been fair. Part of the problem is that people haven’t had all the information, and today’s news should help clear things up. Susan Boyle has revealed that she has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism on the high-functioning end of the spectrum.
In the past, she’s been described as “slow,” and former BBC host Paul Henry even called her “retarded,” saying, “Here’s the really interesting revelation: she is in fact retarded… And if you look at her carefully, you can make it out.” As a child, she was bullied and given the name “Susie Simple.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Susan Boyle reacted to being judged and explained:
Some articles have said I have brain damage. It’s been something else. I have always known that I have had an unfair label put upon me. I have Asperger’s. It is a relief.
Asperger’s doesn’t define me. It’s a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself. People will have a greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do.
Diagnosis of Asperger’s has increased in recent years. You can read more about it here.
Susan Boyle’s 2009 debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, is the UK’s best-selling debut album of all time. Her latest album, Home For Christmas, is out now. |
In 1994, Carnegie Mellon University professor Richard Florida was paging through a newspaper when a headline triggered what he calls a "holy moly" moment. Lycos, a search-engine company spun out of CMU, announced it was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston. When Florida asked why, colleagues told him that "Boston offered the lifestyle options that made it easier for Lycos to attract top creative and entrepreneurial talent," he recalls.
Holy moly indeed, Batman! More than a decade later, Professor Florida is still enjoying the sunshine. But shouldn't the anecdote get some critical examination? I've heard this from lots of people in Pittsburgh with connections to CMU and the tech sector: Lycos didn't leave Pittsburgh because it lacked access to talent (in fact, initially, Lycos even left a presence here). Lycos went where the money was -- and is. (Trivia question: Where is Lycos today?) Lycos's leaving wasn't a bad thing for Pittsburgh. In fact, the Lycos deal was a big success for CMU and for Pittsburgh, as well as for its founders. That case has been made publicly before, but it doesn't stick, and when I hear it in conversations, most people are reluctant to talk about it publicly. Why is that?
It seems to me that the research that the observation generated is interesting -- but hardly conclusive. What Rich Florida found was a correlation between his defintion of the "creative class" and certain indicators of economic success. What's hard to pin down is the direction of the causal arrow -- if there's any causal arrow at work at all.
Here's an example of what I mean: The best-known concentration of technology companies in the United States is in the Silicon Valley, which stretches (roughly) from Menlo Park to Morgan Hill. How does that region do, anecdotally, on measures of "creativity"? For technological creativity, it may have no peer. For other "cultural" creativity, until very recently, and until long after the Valley became "the Valley," it was a wasteland. (I'd be happy to swap stories of downtown San Jose in the mid-1980s.) The Valley took off, IMHO, because Stanford aggressively pushed its research into the private sector; because the Santa Clara Valley (as Silicon Valley was once known) had a decades-long tradition of Defense Department-sponsored industrial R&D that spun engineers outward as the DoD gravy train dried up; and because the longtime San Francisco banking community realized that the mid-Peninsula is a pleasant place to work as well as to live. The tech community flourished because the money was there, in Menlo Park, to finance the revolution. It didn't hurt that Menlo Park was the original home of the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey's experiments with LSD, but the "creative class" element was always highly marginalized. There was one head shop in Menlo Park in the late 1960s and into the 1970s; in all other respects, the Valley of that era would make modern Mt. Lebanon look like a den of iniquity. The other relevant anecdote, it seems to me, is that Boston -- which allegedly stole Lycos from Pittsburgh based on superior access to "creativity" -- was seen in the 1990s as hopelessly out of it in battles for technology-based economic development. Silicon Valley was the model, not Boston.
That's an anecdote, not research. I hypothesize that the Silicon Valley lacked a deep "creative class," yet that region did okay for itself. If that area is better known today on "creativity" metrics, as I suspect it is, then that "creativity" may have followed economic growth.
There are lots of people with opinions about the Valley. Have a conversation -- at my expense, if you like -- about whether my hypothesis is right. Can Pittsburgh have a similarly honest discussion about whether Lycos matters, and if so, how? |
Request/reply: Get the list of available devices. More...
Request/reply: Get the list of available devices.
It's useful for applications such as viewer programs and test suites that tailor behave differently depending on which devices are available. To request the list, send a null PLAYER_PLAYER_REQ_DEVLIST.
|The number of devices. |
|The list of available devices. |
Member Data Documentation
The documentation for this struct was generated from the following file: |
DECLARE my_variable_declared NUMBER; my_variable_defined my_variable_declared; BEGIN NULL; END;
My response: I don't believe there is any "standard" - one thing I have come to learn and accept about Oracle documentation is that it is not terribly precise and it does not take the trouble to define all of its terms. I don't think that is going to change any time soon.
And I must admit that I follow in those big footsteps: I am not always terribly precise about the usage of certain terms. Regarding DECLARE and DEFINE, I would say that the term "declare" is fairly unambiguous. You declare things in the declaration section of a block (which also includes the entire package specification).
"Define" is a bit more....flexible, to my mind. I believe that I generally use that term to describe the creation ("defining") of a database object or program unit. But I probably also use it to describe the process of declaring a procedure in a package and other such steps.
In terms of the way you draw the distinction above, between a REF CURSOR type and a cursor variable, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Both are declarations, one of a type and the of a variable based on that type. But if someone showed me that package specification and told me, "Look, Steven! I defined a new REF CURSOR type!" I would immediately understand what is meant. Wouldn't you? |
Cold Images - Poem by Gerry Legister
The coin in the mind is very hard to define
The scale of pain passing through the family line
Take the sword and face the challenges of disease
Demons in the soul make our dreams freeze
Make a splash in the fountain of mysteries
The sword I hold unlock the cold images within
The dreams with hope brings greater gains,
More stars I see through the wet stain rain.
Here I see cold images through foggy windows
Wrapped up in time with my bleak surrounding,
That draws the cold breeze and icy winds
So thin the wire cuts through my thinking.
On troubled moors cold images bleached the air
Refresh my wills and drifts away into the atmosphere.
Comments about Cold Images by Gerry Legister
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Spectacle: Killer Music
Killer Music: A Heavier Censorship Law is Needed
Almost everyone has listened to a song where they didn’t know what the lyrics were saying. Or, many people are guilty of singing along too. Hip-hop music has been the center of controversy ever since its birth. Some of the lyrics can have a negative on impact the minds of our young generation. It has ultimately even led to higher crime rates and deaths in many cities across America.
Music is soul. It has become a part of our daily lives. Music is everywhere. Hip-Hop music has been around for over 40 years and it is embraced as a culture or lifestyle. However, the birth of “Gangsta” rap as a genre stemming from Hip-Hop came during the 1980s. This type of Hip-Hop music reflects the poor lifestyles of young African-American kids growing up in areas known as the “ghettos” all across America. Therefore, there are a few that have taken this lifestyle and voiced it for the world to be heard through music.
These “Gangsta” rap artists talk about how they grew up and what they did in their music. They talk about stealing cars as bonus points to becoming accepted, using guns to kill or for protection from other gang members, and selling drugs on their streets to make money. What these artists don’t realize is the fact that their lyrics actually influence young kids growing up in these neighborhoods where they are exposed to this lifestyle.
Therefore, crime rates are slowly on the rise again. According to ABC News, the crime rate across America went up %15 last year. However, for awhile the crime rate was slowly falling. The LAPD, Los Angeles Police Department, considered Los Angeles the gang capital of the world since there are over 450 active gangs in the city. However, even cities like this have seen a decline in crime rates lately.
Plus, not all of these so called rappers have the intention of influencing kids to commit crimes. Some of this music actually reflects the lifestyle and talks about success in order to make it out of their poverty stricken lives. It is hard for some people to see the metaphor behind some of these rappers and what they represent. There a few that can actually be seen as heroes to people growing up in these neighborhoods. Some rappers go out to their communities and give back by giving money to those in need or buying essential necessities for those they grew up together with.
But music like “Gangster” rap is still playing on radios, YouTube, and iTunes today that not every city is seeing a decline in crime rates. Chicago has now become the murder capital of the world. According to statistics gathered by the FBI, Chicago has the highest homicide rate at 500 reports surpassing big cities like New York and Detroit. Both of these cities have been at the top of the list for highest murder rates before.
Chicago now holds the record of 500 homicide reports in one year. The FBI claims that %69 of the reports came at the hands of guns. Many of these rap songs talk about using guns to kill so is it hard to see the analogy?
The music industry needs to keep a closer watch on putting out this type of music for the people. Especially with youths, they must have better censorship laws so young kids will not be able to listen to songs that are vulgar and talk about killing people or selling drugs instead of going to school. Music like this should only be available to adults or teens 18 and older. |
Almost two years ago, a friend awoke on her living room sofa to find her male roommate tugging off her shorts and kissing her.
He had a girlfriend. He was a longtime acquaintance in a larger group of friends. When he made advances after moving in, she made it clear the relationship was purely platonic.
But that night, she'd drunk some wine with a friend, fell asleep and awoke to an assault. She pushed him off, staggered up to her room half asleep, locked the door and went back to sleep.
Emails and texts between the two made it clear that she'd rebuffed his advances — and that he'd indeed been on top of her removing her shorts when she awoke.
He contended that she'd responded to his advances that evening — after she'd fallen asleep.
But a jury examined the evidence in a trial last summer and found him guilty of attempt to commit sexual assault. He was sentenced to 10 years of intensive sex-offender probation, including 30 days on a work crew, substance abuse evaluation and sex offender treatment.
Unfortunately, almost every day we hear about cases even more serious than my friend's. Last September, the Boulder County DA's office successfully prosecuted a homeless man who repeatedly raped a woman after she offered to let him use her trailer to clean up.
In Stuebenville, Ohio, four adults were indicted by a grand jury in the aftermath of a 2012 rape of a 16-year-old girl by two high school football players. Local prosecutors originally failed to pursue charges in that case despite a preponderance of social media evidence, including photos. The two football players were convicted after the state attorney general took over the case.
And the University of Colorado recently paid $32,500 in a settlement with a female student who said the university didn't take her sexual assault allegations seriously. CU is among 55 universities being investigated by the federal government for Title IX violations related to sexual assault.
My friend — and many others subjected to sexual assault in Boulder County — benefitted from the thorough investigation of the Boulder Police Department, the prosecutorial skills of the Boulder County District Attorney's Office, the ruling from a jury of her peers to convict, and the support of Moving to End Sexual Assault throughout.
But support from the criminal justice system after the fact isn't enough.
We, as a society — as parents, siblings, friends, classmates — have a responsibility to make it clear that sexual assault is never acceptable.
Too often, there's an emphasis on responsibility of potential targets of sexual assault: Don't drink, don't dress like that, don't walk alone. Certainly, some of that advice is valid. But occasionally walking alone, dressing provocatively or drinking more than one should does not excuse sexual assault.
It's wrong to blame the target of sexual assault. My friend's life was upended by awaking to an assault. Friends and acquaintances made it worse by questioning why she'd filed charges in what they saw as a minor incident, as if having a roommate climb on top of you and trying to rape you was a trivial inconvenience. Among the things she heard: "these things happen to women, get used to it" and that it was more her fault than his.
Instead of laying blame, it's time to channel resources to prevention as well as prosecution.
MESA offers several prevention education programs, including Men Standing Up and Peer Building Justice.
But the rest of us must also take a role in preventing sexual assault.
It's wrong to watch friends or acquaintances take advantage of someone — male or female — who is unconscious or barely so. That's the time to sober up and use your phone to call 911, not to tweet videos or photos.
Missoula's Make Your Move campaign is a great example, with posters featuring messages such as "She was on her own, so I made my move... and told the guys hassling her to back off. They were really crossing the line."
It's time to teach would-be assailants where the line is drawn: that no means no, that someone totally inebriated isn't capable of consent.
If you're a guy wondering how to respond to your peers, Zaron Burnett III offers great advice in his Medium article, "A Gentleman's Guide to Rape Culture."
It's time for individuals and institutions, from high schools to universities to workplaces, to take the lead on sexual assault prevention education.
Sandra Fish is a journalist who lives in Boulder. |
In yet another blow for Internet activists in Russia, the Pirate Party of Russia (PPRU)'s request to be recognized as a legitimate political party has been denied.
Among other reasons, the Russian Ministry of Justice cited the fact that they aren't really pirates, which would be illegal.
"The main reason for refusing registration to the Pirate Party is its name," the PPRU said in a press release. "Russian pirates see no reason for dropping their historical name, which has become the symbol of people's struggle for independence and freedom on the Internet."
Last year, the Ministry of Justice denied the party for the same reason, stating that “piracy is an attack on sea of river craft, which is a criminal offense.” Pirates have been denied in other countries for similar reasons, too: Taiwan said no to a potential Pirate Party in June, saying that citizens might confuse them for "real pirates."
The Pirate Party, which takes different forms in different countries but consistently believes in Web-friendly ideals like Internet freedom, net neutrality, and copyright reform, has frequently taken heat for its name, derived from the party's early days defending the torrent site The Pirate Bay. Party founder Rick Falkvinge has long defended the Pirate name. The PPRU quoted Falkvinge denouncing the Ministry decision:
Aims and objectives of the Pirate Party have long understood and known to the general public. [...] The very thought that the movement for freedom and civil rights is compared with the sea robbery is either absurd or malicious inappropriate interpretation of events.
Described by Reporters Without Borders' Internet Enemies Report as "a country under surveillance," Russia has dealt major blows to Internet activists in the past year. Most notably, the country's so-called "blacklist bill," which gives the government the ability to keep citizens from viewing any website it dislikes, passed in July.
Photo via PPRU/Facebook |
The more I learn about Warren Buffett and other successful entrepreneurs and investors, the more convinced I am that their success can be replicated -- perhaps not to the same magnitude, but to a considerable extent nonetheless.
The key is to train your brain how to think. Buffett doesn't have a patent on value investing. It isn't proprietary. He's open and honest about the theoretical framework underlying his approach -- namely, that of Benjamin Graham and Philip Fisher -- and he discusses it at length in Berkshire Hathaway's annual report.
What distinguishes people like Buffett is how they make decisions. He, in particular, is a consummate rationalist. He approaches issues in a deliberate, calm, and dispassionate manner. And by doing so, his decisions aren't adulterated by the logical errors that obscure a less rational person's thought process.
How Buffett manages fear
Nothing illustrates this better than Buffett's philosophy toward fear. Everyone knows his saying to be "fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." But what's less appreciated is how incredibly radical this advice is from a biological perspective.
In the whole scheme of things, modern humans are little more than well-accessorized cavemen -- think Fred Flintstone as opposed to George Jetson. Yes, we have houses and cars. Yes, we listen to music on our iPods and watch movies on our iPads. And, yes, medicine and other sciences have come a long way since our club-carrying days.
But the commonalities that we share with our ancient ancestors greatly outnumber the differences. And this is particularly true when it comes to the brain. "Our brains were simply not shaped by life in the world as we know it now, or even the agrarian world that preceded it," wrote Daniel Gardner in The Science of Fear.
They are the creation of the Old Stone Age. And since our brains really make us what we are, the conclusion to be drawn from this is unavoidable and a little unsettling. We are cavemen. Or cavepersons, if you prefer. Whatever the nomenclature, we sophisticated moderns living in a world of glass, steel, and fiber optics are no different, in a fundamental sense, than the prehistoric humans for whom campfires were the latest in high tech and bison hides were haute couture.
The most important consequence of this for our purposes is the way humans are programmed to respond to fear. That is, in direct contradiction to Buffett's advice, we seek to avoid it at all costs regardless of whether the presumed threat is in the form of a saber tooth tiger or a figurative bear market. Psychologists refer to this as loss aversion -- a slight variation of which is known as risk aversion.
The takeaway for investors is simple. Rationality wins. When Buffett says things like the "most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect," we should take him at face value and respond in kind, as the rewards from following his advice will greatly outweigh the time and effort spent doing so.
The article Warren Buffett, Freak of Nature originally appeared on Fool.com.John Maxfield has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends and owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Copyright © 1995 - 2014 The Motley Fool, LLC. All rights reserved. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. |
Is this a scene from Lord of the Rings? No, these incredible pictures are from a disused quarry in WALES
- Steep inclines, towering mountains and deep valleys trick your eyes into thinking you are peering into Middle Earth
- But the landscape captured by photographer Matthew Growcoot is in fact a redundant slate mine in North Wales
- Dinorwic Quarry lies in the heart of Snowdonia and was once the second largest mine of its kind in the world
A first glance and your eyes might be tricked into thinking you are peering deep into Middle Earth or Mordor.
But the steep inclines and towering mountains are in fact nestled in the heart of Snowdonia, North Wales at the site of a redundant slate quarry.
Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien is known to have drawn inspiration from the Welsh language when he created the Elivsh dialect his mythical characters speak.
And so it is possible the Dinorwic Quarry, which lies between Llanberis and Dinorwig, near Bangor, could have shaped the landscape Tolkien made home to characters including Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo Baggins.
Scroll down for video
Steep inclines frame an expanse of water in a scene, which you could be forgiven for thinking was straight from the set of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy
But the towering mountains pictured here are not those of the Elven outpost of Rivendell, created by JRR Tolkien. Rather they are the boundary of Dinorwic Quarry, once the second largest slate mining quarry in the world
The dramatic landscape of Snowdonia bears a striking resemblance with the backdrop used for the Lord of the Rings films starring Sir Ian McKellen, pictured playing Gandalf in the Fellowship of the Ring
Parts of the quarry could have been used to depict the mythical lands of Middle Earth, Mordor and Hobbiton, as seen in The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers, pictured above
Once the second largest slate mine of its kind, the vast quarry spans more than 700 acres. The dark grey slate chipped from the walls of the quarry was used for decades to make roof tiles for homes across Europe.
As photographer Matthew Growcoot walked through the dramatic scenery, capturing these images, he said he felt as though Tolkien's Gandalf, played by McKellen, was lurking nearby.
He said: 'The dramatic surroundings added to the epic feel of the quarry.
'Walking around the place you really felt like you were on some kind of heroic quest, all you needed was Gandalf to top it all off.'
'Part of the beauty is how untouched the
surrounding landscape is. All you could see for miles were mountains,
fields and a handful of villages,' said the 24-year-old from Birmingham.
The redundant quarry was closed in July 1969 after hundreds of years producing slate, which was used to make roof tiles for homes across Europe
Different parts of the quarry resemble scenes from Rivendell, Hobbiton and Mordor, scenes made famous in the Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson
These slate towers, once a vital part of a piece of equipment which helped move the mined slate to the quarry floor, resembles the geography of Mordor
It is not just the landscape that could have inspired JRR Tolkien, the author is known to have drawn on the Welsh language in creating the Elvish dialect of his characters
Photographer Matthew Growcoot captured the images. He said: 'Walking around the place you really felt like you were on some kind of heroic quest, all you needed was Gandalf to top it all off'
At the height of production in the 19th Century the quarry produced 100,000 tonnes of slate each year
The first attempts at slate mining took place at Dinorwic in 1787 when a private partnership secured a lease from the landowner Assheton Smith.
The attempts were beginning to look fruitful but were dashed by the outbreak of war with France and rising tax and transportation costs.
In 1809 Assheton Smith himself formed a new partnership.
The construction of a horse-drawn
tram line to Port Dinorwic in 1824 gave the quarry a boost, and the
business began to flourish.
At its peak in the 19th Century the quarry produced around 100,000 tonnes of slate each year and employed around 3,000 men.
By 1930, that number had dropped to 2,000, but the quarry continued a steady production of slate until its closure in 1969.
The quarry was closed in July 1969, leaving the 300 people still working there out of a job. In its heyday the quarry employed 3,000 local men
The eerie lighting adds to the feeling that the landscape could be that which is inhabited by Tolkien's mythical characters
Dinorwic Quarry was carved out of Elidir mountain and made up of two main quarry sections and workers used an elaborate network of trams to navigate their way around the vast industrial hub.
By the 1960s extracting the slate had become difficult.
After 170 years of chipping away at the landscape, parts of the quarry were beginning to slide into some of the major pit workings. A major slide in 1966 nearly ground production to a halt permanently.
Work continued for another two and a half years before the quarry was closed in July 1969, leaving the 300 remaining members of staff to find work.
The quarry is now home to the Welsh National Slate Museum and is a popular spot with rock climbers.
A section of the quarry is used as part of the Dinorwig power station, a hydroelectric scheme.
In the past the disused mine has been used as the setting for films, including scenes from the 1987 film Willow and Clash of the Titans.
The quarry lies in the heart of Snowdonia, between the villages of Llanberis and Dinorwig in North Wales
An elaborate tram network linked the two main sections of the quarry, which spans more than 700 acres
It is not just the landscape of North Wales, which could have provided inspiration for Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings author was known to be heavily influenced by the Welsh language.
Dr Carl Phelpstead of Cardiff University told the BBC in an interview in 2011 that the Elvish language bears a very close resemblance to Welsh.
He said the author knew both the modern and medieval language very well, adding: 'It's not so much that he borrowed Welsh words, more the sounds.
'This particular Elvish language is very like the sounds of Welsh and deliberately so.
'I have a friend of mine who is a native Welsh speaker who went to see the Lord of the Rings films and when they started speaking Elvish in the film she turned to her daughter and said 'they are speaking Welsh' so people do see this relationship.' |
-- Male bluebirds have bright blue heads, tails, backs and wings; the sides, flanks and throats are chestnut red, according to Cornell University. The undersides are also chestnut red from the chin down to the belly, but the belly is white. Females are generally less colorful than males.
-- In addition to berries and garden insects, bluebirds like mealworms, which are available at wildlife specialty stores.
-- Place a bluebird house 4 to 5 feet from the ground, facing south or southeast, if possible. Allow at least 20 feet of open space in front of the house. The opening should be a 1½-inch round hole. Avoid painting the inside of the box; paint the outside a light color to reflect heat. Use natural wood to build the box.
-- Don't be discouraged if your nesting boxes are not used the first year. If bluebirds are not common in your area, it may take them a few seasons to find your new box. Bluebirds generally return to the same area each year.
-- "Enjoying Bluebirds More" ($4), pictured, is a good 30-page booklet that tells you how to build, site, install and monitor your own nesting box. It also provides a troubleshooting chart and information on how to prevent predators, parasites and insect pests from bothering your box. You'll also find a list of plants that attract bluebirds, including red cedar, inkberry, Virginia creeper, dogwood and American holly. Dick Lohr and wife, Jackie, a York County master gardener, find the birds like viburnum berries.
The booklet is available at wildlife specialty stores, including Wild Wings Nature Store in Hidenwood Shopping Center in Newport News and Wild Birds Unlimited stores in Monticello Marketplace in Williamsburg, and Village Shops at Kiln Creek in York County.
-- Handmade bluebird boxes can be purchased from Williamsburg/James City County master gardeners for $20 each. Call Bill Baetz at 258-4936. Ready-made boxes are also available at wildlife and home-improvement stores and garden centers.
-- For more information, visit the Virginia Bluebird Society at www.virginia bluebirds.org or the North American Bluebird Society at www.nabluebirds ociety.org.
Compiled by Kathy Van Mullekom/Daily PressCopyright © 2014, Daily Press |
Thursday, February 7th, 2013
Photo by Mark Pummell
A water level sensor has been installed in Beaver Creek at the U.S. 127 bridge. Other sensors are located in Grand Lake near the Celina Water Treatment Plant intake building and in the Wabash River at state Route 49.
Online story associated with this photograph
GRAND LAKE - The state eventually wants to install an automated system to open and shut two tubes on the West Bank spillway to regulate Grand Lake's water level. The second test to gain data to implement the system and establis . . .
Additional pictures for this date |
Well seen as though we were talking about breaking passwords, here’s a tool for Firefox to help you manage your more secure passwords. Better security without bursting your brain Password Hasher is a Firefox security extension for generating site-specific strong passwords from one (or a few) master key(s). What good security practice demands: Strong passwords […]
Tag Archive | "strong-passwords"
It’s common sense for most people on the hacking side of computer security as we know how easy it is to break a password when it’s only a few characters long or it uses a dictionary word (even if it is postfixed with a couple of digits, a hybrid dictionary attack breaks it pretty fast). […] |
The translation of Humboldt's Kosmos [Cosmos (1846–58)] is delayed.
Gives instances of peculiar genera with several good species in very small islands. Scarcity of insects on islands.
JDH cannot prove that there is much hybridising, but does not see why there should not be. "Bother variation, development & all such subjects, it is reasoning in a circle I believe after all."
–offshoot from it such as I have attempted to
portray— I suppose there can be no doubt that the population of some of the
Islands lately discovered was fast disappearing from sensuality &c: it is
equally evident that under such circumstances it did not attain its maximum: If the
accession of civilization is a miracle so must the decline of it be also, for the
protracted miracle would become a 2d
I have heard nothing about Kosmos, Bailliers I suppose to be a species of Piracy. Humboldt had agreed, that Murray should have the publishing of the translation & passed me the compliment of asking who would be the best translator (for I cannot suppose he intended me the high honor of asking for information) I said Mrs Sabine as translator of Wrangel, & he commissioned me to tell her how much he wished she would take a part in it—, consequently, with Murray's sanction, (who wished Mrs Austin to have it, which H. did not like at all) I told Mrs S. & Col. S. wrote to Baron H. about it: this is all I know, I hope Murray's is Mrs Sabine's translation, I will ask when I come up to London. I feared for Strzlecki's book, I am very glad he did not send me the Bot. mss as he promised:, he is a nice fellow— Bronn's Gesichte I know nothing of. Bother variation, developement & all such subjects,! it is reasoning in a circle I believe after all. As a Botanist I must be content to take species as they appear to be not as they are, & still less as they were or ought to be. You see I am amazed at my own incapacity to fathom or follow the subject to any good purpose (open confession is good for the soul).
I think I can give you plenty of instances of peculiar genera with several good species
in very small Island. E.G.
Lachanodes (arb. Compos.) 2 good species.— Juan Fernandez.
Dendroseris (arb. Compos.) 7 species I do not know all, but suppose them all good.—
Robinsonia (arb. Compos.) 4 species, I do not know them well. Madeira
Sinapodendron, 3 species—a peculiar genus of Cruciferæ. Sandwich Islands.
Schiedia (Caryophylleæ) 3 species
Peteria 3 species
Kadua 9 species I think both these genera are quite peculiar very nearly so at any rate Rubiaceae
Dubautia (Compos) 2 species
Microchæta (Do) 4 species
Clermontea 5 species
Delissea— 7 species Lobeliaceæ I am not sure that the genera are all peculiar, but nearly so.
Rollandia 2 species
Phyllostegia 5 spec in Owhyhee, 2 in Oahu Labiatæ. I think both are peculiar
Stenogyne— 4 sp in Owhyhee
These Sandwich Islander's are not positive evidence, as I do not know how far some of the genera may not have solitary representative species in seperate Islets.
Of confined genera there are many examples of solitary Islands having more than one well marked species & still more of Islets having well marked species which together form a group of a mundane genus,
I have always felt opposed to Bory's (who is a great Gascon! but not altogether to be despised) views of the variableness of Insular species
I certainly have no good evidence in favor of the loose statement I made &
which corresponded with a vague idea I held, of Insects being scarce on Islands: yet
13 species is surely very few for Keeling if size is to be regarded, how
often may you not find 13 on your own window?— Kerguelens Land has
only 3.. New Zealand & V. D. L. are certainly poor—in
Trinidad (of Brazils) I saw only 3, I think, a Hemerobius & the
House-flie & cockroach, introduced from a wreck: Canaries & Madeira are
poor, I think: Cape de Verds are too dependent on the W. coast of Africa to
judge from— nothing struck me as so marvellous as the appearance of
4 Insecta & many Arachnida you mention as on
I cannot prove that there is much hybridizing in nature, but do not see why there should not be, as we do not doubt that species require the pollen of other individuals exactly as in the higher animals you must not breed in (I think the term is.—
I cannot hook my Kerguelens tree or climate on to the vacillating temperature of S. America, many thanks for the information though.
Do you connect the union of Conchogeographic districts at the Galapagos with the currents?—
Every young Irish yew bears berries, there is a sort of Irish yew in Ayrshire
which I believe like the goddess Diana of the Ephesians dropped down from heaven
& picked itself up in a garden, when I hear whether it bears berries I will tell
you if she be equally chaste If the yew had been Italian & bows made it
After class I go to old Chas. Lyells at Kinnordy, & shall not be home till middle of August, I hope we may meet in October, I often think of our two meetings, & long for another.
And now to bother you for the last time, The reappearance of
plants in certain situations is a curious phenomena of which instances are multiplying
daily in this neighbourhood: there are doubtless series of seeds in some grounds lying
dormant but not dead: what a curious principle life must be & what an
uncomfortable abode it must often have. Cutting open rail-ways causes a change of
vegetation in two ways, by turning up buried live seeds, & by affording space
& protection for the growth of transported seeds: so that it is often very
difficult to determine to which cause the appearance or superabundance of a plant is
attributable The Dutch Clover case is constantly quoted but the Stirling castle one is
more curious. The Kings Park was dug up in about 1650? during the 1st
rebellion, wherever the cuts were made for encampments, the broom appeared, but in a
year or two disappeared.. In rebellion of 1745, it was again encamped upon &
again Broom came up & & disappeared: it was afterwards ploughed
& immediately became covered with Broom, which has all for the
I am still talking over the Students. Every Saturday I take them on excursion & walk them 20 miles gathering plants, about 20 or 30 generally go of the class. I have thoughts of taking them into the Grampians of Forfarshire for a week or 10 days, if enough would or will come forward. I wish you could be induced to come down & join us.
To conclude, (I have been reading Scotch Sermons) how curious that water plants should be so widely diffused, water must have been a mighty agent in dissemination not only though are these diffused, but diffuseable. Aponogeton, a Cape plant, not native of cold regions bears a freezing every winter in our ponds: no one would have dreamt of it
Ever your's | Jos D Hooker.
- f1 884.f1Dated on the assumption that this letter falls between letter from J. D. Hooker, [after 12 July 1845], and letter to J. D. Hooker, [22 July – 19 August 1845].
- f2 884.f2Humboldt 1845–8 was an unauthorised translation by Augustin Prichard, published by Hippolyte Baillière.
- f3 884.f3Wrangel 1840, translated by Elizabeth Juliana Sabine, wife of Colonel Edward Sabine.
- f4 884.f4Sarah Austin.
- f5 884.f5Murray's translation (Humboldt 1846–8) is by E. J. Sabine. Sarah Austin had declined John Murray's proposal that she take on the work (correspondence in John Murray Archive).
- f6 884.f6Strzelecki 1845.
- f7 884.f7Bronn 1841–9.
- f8 884.f8Hawaii.
- f9 884.f9Artemis of Ephesus, subsequently identified with the Hellenic goddess of the same name and the Roman Diana, was associated with trees, agriculture, the hunt, and chastity. Diana was armed with a bow and arrow; yew is the wood from which the English long-bow was made.
- f10 884.f10Charles Lyell Sr of Kinnordy, a friend of the Hooker family since their residence in Glasgow. |
Art lives in your memory, helps make new ones
By Jane A. Black
There’s this wall in my neighborhood that some people would consider urban blight, but I beg to disagree. It’s a peeling, flakey, worn-out pastiche of paint with some graffiti thrown in for good measure. It faces a prominent corner, across from a beautifully renovated historic school building. I’m sure that a lot of people wish they would either scrape it or paint it – and I think the urban pioneers who bought the building will do so. They’ve been working on the place, and I know I will enjoy how it adds to the neighborhood once it’s spiffed up. But I’ll miss that wall, because every time I see it, I think about Mark Bradford.
A while back, a massive unframed canvas appeared in the rotunda of the Dayton Art Institute. Helter Skelter I, measuring 12 feet in height and nearly 35 feet in length, was rich in texture, with papers adhered, ropes that had been glued and sanded away, layers applied and removed. Silver popped up through tans, beiges and whites – red bled through. It was one of Mark Bradford’s conglomerations of repurposed advertisements.
The artist, who grew up in South Los Angeles, undoubtedly saw his share of decrepit billboards in the “Golden State of Highway Signs.” Bradford translated them into compositions that are visually captivating and fraught with meaning. Last summer, there was a large retrospective of Bradford’s work at the Wexner Center in Columbus that I thoroughly enjoyed. His work has entered my permanent repertoire of thought, and so I convert similar source material in my head, especially now that I live in an area that is fighting hard against poverty and disinvestment.
Most things I look at actually remind me of art. Raking light on buildings? Hopper, of course. Fruit in a bowl? Ah, Cezanne. Those are the easy ones … more or less universal for everyone who took Art History 101, I imagine. But the ones that really mean something are the ones that are more personal, I think.
There was another installation in the Dayton Art Institute rotunda, even longer ago: a sculpture of oversized bowls of polyurethane filled with polyurethane foam. They reminded me of the red Melamine dishes Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Chuck gave us as a wedding present, and every time I saw those dishes stacked in the sink, they became that towering sculpture by Robert Therrien.
Seeing Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art from the Dicke Collection, the current special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute, reminded me of how much I appreciated these earlier loans from the Dicke family, how they had become part of my life.
That’s the way art works in my life. Its formal and associative qualities blend together. When I look at art, it helps me see the world in a more conscious way, to connect where I am and what I think to the people and places around me. It ties things together, though not always in a neat little package. Art isn’t always pretty, and neither is life. But it’s all worth a look.
Jane A. Black is a fiber artist and the executive director of the Dayton Visual Arts Center. Visit the gallery at 118 N. Jefferson St. or visit their website at www.daytonvisualarts.org. Follow her on Twitter @lookingabout. She can be reached at email@example.com. |
You are not chicken. It is much better to go in understanding risks, thinking about them and what you would do should you come across a dangerous situation.
First I would say you should know the area you are hunting and be familiar with the terrain, especially because you (we) walk in the dark. Falling off a hill or cliff can be just as dangerous as a couple coyotes. Where I hunt (and I usually hunt alone), there are of course skunks and raccoons, but also some wild pack dogs and coyotes, so I do carry a handgun (I have a conceal carry permit) and everytime I get out of my truck, get my gear ready and start my walk to my stand, I try to make sure my right hand is free (to reach for the gun) just in case I do run into something. It is usually dark, but I have the lights in my cap and I will turn them on and off as I approach certain points in my walk. Being prepared is important and if you are thinking about it, then your senses are more in tune to what is happening around you. I make sure my ears are not covered when I am walking to my stand. I want to hear every sound. I love to hunt and understand the risks. Now it's not to say if I were in an area known to have wolves or bears, that I might not be a little chicken to go out on my own to hunt. I might actually think twice about it.
Enjoy your hunting but be aware of your surroundings. I am not sure what else you can do or have with you to protect yourself, but I am sure there are others on this forum that may have an idea that would be deemed legal. |
Thank you very much, Dean Einhorn. I see here Ruth Wedgwood in the front row, a member of the Defense Policy Board, and a couple of friends here from 30 or 40 or even more years back. Bill Coleman and Hal [inaudible], it's good to see you. Colonel Hickey, thank you for all you do, as well as you gentlemen.
This is an impressive institution, with a well-deserved reputation as one of the important centers of strategic thought in America. And I'm certainly pleased to be with you. And I thank you for your invitation.
This School, of course, is named for one of the giants of the Cold War, Paul Nitze, who I knew and worked with over the years.
Paul was a driving force here, as has been my friend, Paul Wolfowitz, who led this School before returning to government in the Pentagon first and now at the World Bank.
And I am pleased to be here to discuss America's ongoing mission in Iraq -- and the importance of it succeeding.
The other day, I came across an interesting set of statistics that I'd like to mention. It seems that the Pew Research Center asked leaders in the United States their views of the prospects for a stable democracy in Iraq.
Here were some of the results:
- 63% of the people in the news media thought the enterprise would fail;
- So did 71% of the people in the foreign affairs establishment; and
- 71% in the academic settings or think tanks.
Interestingly, opinion leaders from the U.S. military are more optimistic about Iraq by a margin of about 64 percent to 32 percent favorable. And so is the American public, by a margin of 56 percent to 37 percent.
And the Iraqi people are optimistic. I've seen this demonstrated repeatedly -- in public opinion polls, in the turnout at the elections, the referendum on the constitution, in the number of tips that the Iraqi people are providing to the Iraqi Security Forces and to the Coalition forces. They've grown from 483 a month to 4,700 tips per month.
This prompts the question: which view of Iraq is more accurate? The pessimistic view of the so-called elites in our country -- or the more optimistic view expressed by millions of Iraqis and by the some 155,000 U.S. troops on the ground?
But, most important is the question: why should Iraq's success or failure matter to the American people?
I'd like to address these questions today, before responding to your questions which I look forward to.
First, should we be optimistic or pessimistic about Iraq's future?
The answer may depend on one's perspective to a certain extent. Indeed, one of the reasons that views of Iraq are so divergent is that we may be looking at Iraq through different prisms of experience or expectation.
For starters, it must be jarring for reporters to leave the United States, arrive in a country that is so different, where they have to worry about their personal safety, and then being rushed to a scene of a bomb -- car bomb -- or a shooting, and have little opportunity to see the rest of the country.
By contrast, the Iraqi people see things probably somewhat differently: they can compare Iraq as it is today, to what it was three years ago -- a brutal dictatorship where the Secret Police would murder or mutilate a family member sometimes in front of their children, and where hundreds of thousands of Iraqis disappeared into mass graves. From that perspective, Iraq today is on a vastly different, and a greatly improved path.
A distinguished academician, I don't have the exact quote so I won't name him, said something to the effect that the situation in Iraq is terrible, and it's never been better.
If one is viewing events through a soda straw, they should know that they are by definition selectively focusing on some facts that may highlight their view and not seeing some other perspectives. A full picture of Iraq comes best from an understanding of both the good and the bad, and the context for each.
Among the continuing difficulties to be sure are:
- Bursts of violence, including continued assassination attempts, attempts to intimidate Iraqi leaders and those who support the legitimate Iraqi government;
- Hostage taking;
- Continued U.S., Coalition, and Iraqi casualties;
- Iran and Syria continue to be unhelpful. We know that;
- Calls for Coalition withdrawal from some quarters that encourage those who are opposing the legitimate Iraqi government and aid their fundraising and their recruiting.
However, there are also some positive developments to be seen, if we look for them:
- The political process is on schedule. Iraqis now have a constitution that they wrote, that they voted for, and that they now are proceeding towards elections under that constitution in less than two weeks -- a week and a half -- December 15.
- There are hundreds of candidates who are politicking in those elections;
- There seem to be growing divisions among the enemies of the Iraqi people, particularly after the bombing of a wedding reception in Amman, Jordan, where now even Zarqawi's family is demonstrating against him;
- Iraq's neighbors now seem to believe that this new democracy might in fact succeed, which they doubted I think for some period, and they seem to be moving to get right with the Iraqi people and the prospective Iraqi government. And they're more active in their support, which is a good thing;
- A vital and engaged media is emerging, with some 100 newspapers in Iraq now, 72 radio stations, 44 television stations, incredible number of cell phones, which is an entirely new thing in that country; and
- The Sunnis are increasingly taking part in the political process, and further isolating those who still oppose the government of Iraq;
- The stock market is alive and well in Iraq.
To be responsible, it seems to me, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks. As Senator Joe Lieberman recently suggested, a better measure of success might be that a vast majority of Iraqis -- tens of millions -- are on the side of the democratic government, while a comparatively small number are opposed to that government. I would suggest that this gives the Iraqi people an enormous advantage over time.
The other question I posed is of critical importance, and that was: why does Iraq's success or failure matter to the American people?
Consider this quote:
"What you have seen, Americans, in New York and Washington D.C. and the losses you are having in Afghanistan and Iraq, in spite of all the media blackout, are only the losses of the initial clashes."
The speaker was Zawahiri, a senior member of al-Qaeda, and a top leader in the effort to defeat U.S. and Coalition forces and I should add moderate Muslim regimes around the world. The terrorists' methods of attack, simply put, are slaughter. They behead. They bomb children. They attack funerals and wedding receptions.
This is the kind of brutality and mayhem that the terrorists are working to bring to our shores. And if we do not succeed in our efforts to arm and train Iraqis to help defeat the terrorists in Iraq, this is the kind of mayhem that these terrorists, emboldened by a victory, will bring to our shores -- let there be no doubt.
Indeed, the most important reason for our involvement in Iraq -- despite the costs -- and they're considerable -- is often overlooked. It is not only about building democracy, although democracies tend to be peaceful and prosperous and are in and of themselves good things to be sure. And it's not only about reopening Iraqi schools, hospitals or rebuilding infrastructure, though they are proceeding apace and these things are desirable and ultimately essential to stability in that country.
But, simply put, defeating extremist aspirations in Iraq is essential to protecting the lives of the American people.
Imagine the world our children would face if we allowed Zawahiri, and Zarqawi, and bin Laden, and others of their ilk to seize power and operate with impunity out of Iraq. It would turn Iraq into what Afghanistan was before September 11th -- a haven for terrorist recruitment, training and a launching pad for attacks against U.S. interests and our fellow citizens. Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East and which would threaten the legitimate governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is their plan. They have said so. We make a terrible mistake if we fail to listen and learn.
In my view, quitting is not a strategy. Quitting is an invitation to more attacks and more terrorist violence here at home. This is not just a hypothesis. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia emboldened Osama bin Laden in the 1990's. We know this. He said so.
The message that retreat in Iraq would send to the free people of Iraq and to moderate Muslim reformers throughout the region and the world would be that they cannot count on America. The message it would send to our enemies would be: that America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq and it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere.
What is needed in my view is resolve, not retreat; courage, not concession. Rather than thinking in terms of an exit strategy, we should be focused on a strategy for success.
The President's strategy focuses on progress on the political, and economic, and security fronts. You can read that strategy paper on the White House web site.
On the security side, today some 214,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained and equipped. They are of varying degrees of experience. Each day and each week and each month that goes by, they gain more experience and more capability. Working with Coalition forces, they are steadily improving in experience:
- Coalition forces have handed over military bases to Iraqi control and also a complex of palaces in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit;
- The Shiite areas of Najaf and Karbala and Sadr City, the scenes of battles last year, are more peaceful today; and
- In Tal Afar, 5,000 Iraqi troops took a key role in liberating and securing what had been a base of operations for extremists' networks and foreign networks.
I began these remarks by mentioning the contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people. I don't think we can close a discussion on Iraq without mentioning the media coverage and the current political debate that's taking place.
Recently, a member of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association reported on the intense discussions within the A.P. over whether or not their coverage of Iraq has been slanted or fair. For my part, almost every time I meet with troops, I am asked the same question: they ask why aren't the American people being given an accurate picture of what's happening in Iraq?
But let me say something in defense of the media. They have a tough job. It's not easy. And a number of them have put their lives at risk, and some have been killed.
The media serves a valuable -- and indeed an indispensable -- role in informing our society and holding government to account. But it's important also for the media to hold itself to account. Government has to reassess continuously, and we do. So to, it's useful I believe for the media to reassess.
We have arrived at a strange time in this country where the worst about America and our military seems to so quickly be taken as truth by the press and reported and spread around the world -- often with little context and little scrutiny -- let alone correction or accountability after the fact. Speed it appears is the critical determinant. Less so, context.
Recently there were claims by two Iraqis on a speaking tour that U.S. soldiers attacked them with lions. It was widely reported around the United States. It is still without substantiation. And yet that story was spread across the globe. Not too long ago, there was a false and terribly damaging story about a Koran that was supposedly flushed down a toilet in Guantanamo, and in the riots that followed in several countries, some people were killed. And a recent New York Times editorial implied that America's armed forces -- your armed forces -- our armed forces -- use tactics reminiscent of Saddam Hussein.
I understand that there may be great pressure on many of them to tell a dramatic story. And while it is easy to use a bombing or a terrorist attack to support that interest, it is not always the most accurate story or at least not the full story.
Consider this: You couldn't tell the full story of Iwo Jima simply by listing the nearly 26,000 Americans that were casualties in a brief 40 days at Iwo Jima; or you couldn't explain the importance of Grant's push into Virginia just by noting the savagery of the battles. And they were savage. So too, in Iraq, it is appropriate to note not only how many Americans have been killed -- and may God bless them and their families -- but what they died for -- or more accurately, what they lived for.
So I suggest -- and I take for granted the good intentions of the people in the media -- I suggest that we ask: how will history judge -- if it does -- the reporting some decades from now when Iraq's path is settled?
I would urge us all to make every effort to ensure -- government and the media -- to make every effort to ensure that we're trying to tell the whole story.
Further I think it's worth noting that there are 155,000 or 156,000 today Americans in uniform who are sending back e-mails to their friends and families, telling them what they're seeing. And it's a slice of what is actually happening. It's not the total picture. But it's a slice. And it's an accurate slice. It's the truth as they see it. And much of it is different than what those in the United States are seeing and reading.
Our country is waging a battle unlike any other in history. We are waging it in a media age that's unlike any war that war fighters have ever known. Think of it. This is the first war of the 21st Century. It's the first war to be conducted with talk radio, and 24-hour news, and bloggers, and emails, and digital cameras, and Sony video cams, and all of these things that bring so much information near instantaneously to people. And in this new century, we all need to make adjustments -- government and the media alike. And change is hard -- let there be no doubt.
We are all Americans. We are all in this together. And what we do today will not only impact us, but it will surely impact our children and our grandchildren, and the kind of world they will live in.
Thank you. I'd be happy to respond to some questions. |
This page provides all possible meanings and translations of the word fassaite
a variety of pyroxene, from the valley of Fassa, in the Tyrol
Fassaite is a variety of augite with a very low iron content, Ca(Si,Al)2O6. It is named after the Fassa Valley, Italy.
It is thought to be a contact mineral formed at high temperature on the interface between volcanic rocks and limestone. It is also reported in meteorites.
Find a translation for the fassaite definition in other languages: |
[Recently], I attended a presentation by Gary Levitt, the developer of the MERGE project planned for the corner of Carmel Mountain Road and Carmel Country Road.
It seems to me that neither the original plan for 28,000 square feet of retail/commercial space nor Mr. Levitt’s plan are currently relevant or in keeping with the character of the community. The original plan was conceived when this entire area was dirt, of course, and the idea that a plan conceived a decade ago might still be “approved” is ludicrous. Communities grow and change in an organic manner and the city and local planning board should immediately revoke the approval and the use of the land should be re-examined. And Mr. Levitt’s plan presents raises plenty of issues that can be taken into consideration:
- Character of the community. No one wants another strip mall or large shopping center in the middle of this fully residential area. Small, service-based businesses and eateries designed to meet the needs of the immediately surrounding community are what’s needed. Certainly no one living in this area is seeking a “destination” shopping center that will bring traffic and visitors from other areas of San Diego to our community.
2. Safety. Traffic and congestion are already an issue in the condo development abutting the area. Any development in this area must have traffic entrances and exits that don’t create further congestion. Further, the walkways into and out of the development should be designed to promote safety by using walls and other landscape structures to impede bike-riding, skateboarding, etc., through the area and also to ensure no routes exist for children to exit directly onto the busy streets surrounding. The current plan celebrates open access from the sidewalks bordering the structures but, as a parent, I see only a wide-open “runway” for children to end up on a street where speeds regularly exceed 50 mph.
- Security and privacy. The proposed design includes patios and roof decks that would create sightlines directly into the neighboring homes. The proposed underground parking garage (a true anomaly in this area) could easily present issues with security and create opportunities for crime.
- Longevity. Various retailers have struggled and failed in larger shopping areas in our community. To me, this indicates the developers are out of touch with the needs of the community and bringing in the wrong sort of retailers. Do we want a new development that will merely be empty storefronts a few years down the road? Of course not. So we need a development plan that truly asks what the community needs and recruit and provide that.
Unfortunately, I did not have the impression from the presentation that any thought has been put into the question of what the community wants and needs. Instead, I got the impression that the developer is interested in squeezing as much into this acreage as the planning board and city will allow, disregarding the concerns of the immediate neighbors and the community as a whole. And if the community doesn’t get on board, then Mr. Levitt will apparently just go through with his oft-repeated threat of building the “already approved” shopping center, thereby ensuring that no one is happy.
That is not community building. That is community destruction. I hope that the city and planning board will step in and provide much needed support of the community’s needs and wants in this matter. |
The threat of war between nuclear-armed Pakistan and India is increasing. Pakistan withdrew troops from the Afghan border today, possibly to move them to the Kashmir frontier for a face-off with India. Militants attacked more police posts in Kashmir, and heavy cross-border shelling, mortar and gunfire continued. Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee has told Indian troops in Kashmir to prepare for sacrifices and "decisive victory."
It seems plausible India is preparing for a "limited war" to flush out Islamic militant camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. But Pakistan has vowed to retaliate if attacked, possibly with nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, President Bush announced Thursday he’s sending War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to the region next week.
Pakistani physicist and writer Pervez Hoodbhoy argues that the conflict will extend far beyond Kashmir. He writes: "Even more important than the fate of a few million Kashmiris is that of India’s huge Muslim minority, which equals or exceeds the population of Pakistan. Without Pakistan’s decisive action on cross-border insurgency, the Muslims of India will become the target of state-sponsored pogroms and ethnic cleansing. The massacres of Gujarat provide a chilling preview of what may lie ahead at the hands of a fundamentalist Hindu government."
Today we are joined in our studios by nonviolence advocate, teacher and writer, Arun Gandhi. His is the grandson of the great independence leader and nonviolence activist Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat. After the religious killings there, Arun Gandhi wrote: "Never have I been so ashamed to be recognized as a Hindu as I am today after the horrendous killings and savagery of Hindus in Gujarat State."
Arun Gandhi has devoted his life to building on the legacy of nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi. He is the co-founder and director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1960, he founded the Center for Social Unity, an economic self-help program for the untouchable caste.
- Arun Gandhi, nonviolence advocate, teacher and writer, and grandson of India’s great political leader Mahatma Gandhi. He is the co-founder and director of the M.K.Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was recently featured in a visual collection on biographies called "Hope and Heroes: Portraits of Integrity."
- Azan Nan Kpe–Angelique Kidjo, Aye (Mango Records CD).
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democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, |
Once Upon a Time, every plant had an air system, fed by central compressors that hissed cheerfully whether working or idling. Hey, air was free, right? Maybe then, but not today.
Energy consumption is one of the key factors determining how a machine or system is received these days. Different regions of the world have experienced differing energy costs over time. But today, users in every region want to squeeze the most bang from the fewest pneumatic bucks.
Fortunately, most major vendors of pneumatics are prepared to help you work toward this goal. Trade organizations like the USA’s National Fluid Power Assoc. (NFPA) have useful guidelines to assist in designing efficient pneumatics. International standards help ensure that compliant components, wherever built, will deliver good performance and value. And Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) guidelines, to be covered in a future Design World article, will help you choose the right type of system for your job.
Nonetheless, recent advances by several international firms have reinforced specific steps you can take to cut energy consumption in pneumatic applications. Here, from Bosch Rexroth and Festo, are steps you can take to reduce energy costs from pneumatic systems.
1: Beware of oversizing components
For decades, old-timers like this editor recall oversizing actuators. If we really needed, say, a 2-in. cylinder, then we’d specify the next size larger. At the same pressure, the larger actuator would bring more force to the task, and could better cope with heavier or misaligned loads, we surmised.
But oversizing equals waste. And the first way to increase energy efficiency is optimal dimensioning of the components used, thereby avoiding unnecessary air consumption due to oversizing. Over the life cycle of a machine, this adds up to a significant amount of money. Pneumatic components are available in a wide array of sizes, which provide the optimal conditions for precise application dimensioning. A cylinder with an application-optimized diameter can reduce air consumption by at least 15%, when compared to one with a commonly oversized diameter.
Many vendors simplify the dimensioning with online calculation and optimization programs. Through a few clicks and some basic inputs, the practical result is clearly presented including technical data and recommended components. For example, a new online air-consumption calculator from Rexroth lets you calculate and compare the resulting energy costs from the basis of compressor capacity, operating hours and the technical parameters of the actual application.
In typical installations, at least 15% of the air volume can be saved by using compact and economical designs with correctly sized cylinders and valves, and optimized nominal flows. That equates to an energy dollar savings of 15%, according to Kjell Lyngstad, Global Account manager of Bosch Rexroth.
2: Reduce volume by cutting distance between valves and actuators
You can substantially increase machine efficiency by reducing lengths of tubing runs between components. Thus dead volumes are reduced and pressure losses are avoided through shorter tube lengths.
Look closely at the advantages of decentralized air supply. Centralized valve manifolds are typically cumbersome, require long air lines, and consume a lot of energy. Vendors now offer small, decentralized valves and manifolds that concentrate pneumatic functions at the point of use. Valves can mount directly to cylinders without hose connections. This direct connection eliminates pressure losses through long lines from the control cabinet to the pneumatic drive. Valve/actuator units can reduce tubing connections by 50% and cut energy use by 35%. Decentralized systems can also yield faster response times and higher cycle frequencies.
If harsh operating conditions or sanitary washdowns for, say, food processing equipment are issues, look into decentralized valve units made of engineered polymers that are small, light, chemically resistant, and able to withstand harsh operating conditions. Some valves and manifolds have sanitary designs and materials suitable for food processing, eliminating need to house pneumatic valves in remote stainless-steel enclosures with long tubes running to the actuators. Rexroth makes a valve system that fulfills IP69K requirements. This system enables a significant reduction in tube lengths by allowing it to be placed directly around the actuators in the food and beverage industry, something that is not normally possible due to high-pressure cleaning requirements.
Innovative pneumatics modules with high energy density offer the cycle time advantages of decentralized automation structures and also lower air consumption up to 35%. These very compact components are so small and lightweight that they can be integrated directly on the actuators.
3: Avoid using excess pressure
Pneumatic systems frequently waste energy by supplying higher pressure than an actuator needs. For instance, in many applications cylinders either push or pull a load, but not both. Yet most often machines use the same pressure for both extend and retract strokes, which is extremely inefficient.
Using pressure regulators to supply the right pressure for each task can lower energy consumption by more than 25%. For instance, “smart” regulators combine digital control electronics with proportional valves. They constantly compare preset pressure limits with actual values to ensure exact metering.
Rexroth’s term for this is energy on demand, based on decentralized intelligence to adapt the pressure individually to needs and thus raising energy efficiency. The pressure profile of an actuator’s movement is divided into different phases: Start, movement, end and return stroke. Start and end phases usually require high energy, while movement and return stroke phases can be performed with a significantly lower pressure. Even if the reduced pressure usage distance appears short, it is sufficient enough to optimize the motion and to minimize hard end position stops. When many thousand repetitions of the movement are performed, the incremental savings accumulate to a noticeable efficiency increase of the entire process.
One concern to guard against: operators commonly increase supply pressure on regulators in hopes of improving performance, but this wastes significant amounts of money in air and operating costs for no actual benefit – if components are sized correctly. It is important to monitor and ensure machine pressure remains within designated limits to avoid wasting energy.
4: Minimize leakage
Every pneumatic system can save energy by avoiding leaks. Statistics from the Dept. of Energy suggest the problem is widespread: the average facility, estimates show, has 30 to 35% leakage if it hasn’t taken recent action. Valves and deteriorated seals are two common sources. Some valve designs, such as lapped-spool valves with metal seals, have inherent internal leakage that is constant as long as air is supplied to the valve. Switching to comparable valves with soft seals can significantly reduce leakage.
Another source of leaks is deterioration of seals. If standard seals are observed to degrade, consider extreme-service seals like Viton, Teflon, or polyurethane.
Modern air-preparation units are available with an integrated air-volume sensor. The sensor emits an electrical pulse each time a specific volume of compressed air has passed through the air-preparation package. The electrical pulse signals can be totaled by the controller and therefore actual air consumption (and energy costs) can be calculated for the machine over a period of time. This also lets users detect increases in machine air consumption that indicate developing leaks or nonscheduled changes to the operating pressures for the motions of the machine. The real life cost of leakage and overpressurization can be counted as well as the cost savings from correcting these problems.
According to National Resources Canada, small leakages in compressed air systems can add up to significant costs. For example, a single leak as small as 1/16 in. on a compressed air system running 24/7 at 125 PSI can cost over $1000/yr. That’s for a single leak.
Multiply those numbers by several leaks and you’re talking serious money, notes a Festo quality engineer. “When you go into a plant and hear the leaks,” he says. “That’s just money being burned up.”
Festo offers customer services including leak detection, air quality and similar air auditing services. The company also offers a new system for monitoring and diagnosing sources of air consumption in pneumatic systems. It includes pressure and flow sensors, a diagnostic controller and visualization tools so that users can to detect and fix air problems early. The company estimates optimizing application of pneumatic components coupled with proper system maintenance can lower air consumption up to 60%. At that rate, return on investment averages around six months.
Energy-efficient design of pneumatic systems
Incorrect dimensioning leads to higher costs, a reduction in quality and other problems. Learn basic solutions for correct dimensioning using real examples in this two-day course that teaches planning and designing safe optimized pneumatic systems. Working with Festo ProPneu software you will understand relationships between pressure, load and speed.
Festo AG & Co. KG |
Five Ways to Reduce the Size of Classes
Andrew Binstock writes that the best developers keep their classes to 50-60 lines of code. How can you do that? Here are five techniques:
- Diminish the workload -- Each class should just one thing.
- Avoid primitive obsession -- Don't use collections in their raw form.
- Reduce the number of class and instance variables -- If you have a lot of variables, you can probably move a group of them to a separate class.
- Subclass special-case logic -- If you have logic that isn't used very often, move it to a sub-class or a separate class.
- Don't repeat yourself (DRY) -- Discipline yourself to avoid duplicate code in both the writing and the maintenance phases.
Originally published on http://www.developer.com. |
If using outlines, don’t make them too heavy. This will prevent your artwork from sitting comfortably on the wall. Instead, use a more natural paintbrush stroke.
For a simple inkpen-style stroke, create a long thin circle (fill only), then drag it into your Brushes palette. Click New Art Brush, then click on the Stroke Options icon at the bottom of the palette and choose Hue Shift from the Colorization Method menu – this allows you to choose colours for this brush later. Select the Pen or Pencil tool and use your new brush for outlines.
To add depth and interest to your wall art, add textures to larger areas of flat colour. For the grass- style texture here, create the shape first, then draw pen lines where you want your texture to flow. Create the top and bottom lines, then use the Blend tool (Object > Blend) to create the in-between lines.
Create a solid circle and drag it into your Brushes palette again. Click New Pattern Brush, then Hue Shift in the Colorization Method menu. Apply this brush to your lines – you may need to make the lines into overlapping solid objects to fill spaces. You can adjust the brush size in the Brush Options menu. For easier colouring, select your new shapes and click Object > Expand Appearance, to make everything into grouped, solid shapes. |
DubaiSat-2, an advanced imaging satellite, is undergoing final testing and is expected to be launched in the last quarter of 2012 from the Yasny Cosmodrome in north Russia.
A group of 22 Emirati engineers from the Emirates Institute for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST), based in South Korea, worked on the satellite for five years.
"Basically it's completed, we are just putting the final tests on it and it should be ready very soon," said Salem Al Marri, project manager of the space programme at EIAST, adding that it should be finished in "less than a month".
It will become the second EIAST satellite to be launched in three years. DubaiSat-1, which cost US$50 million (Dh183.7m) to develop, was launched in 2009 from a former Soviet base in Kazakhstan.
The new satellite will have a much higher resolution camera, offering images of one metre per pixel, comparable with that offered by Google Earth. The improvement in resolution was partly at the request of UAE authorities who wish to use the images in town planning.
The two satellites will work together and will be joined in 2015 by a third EIAST satellite, DubaiSat-3. The third satellite, now being designed, will be built entirely by Emirati engineers in the UAE. |
“ A palace named after the Knights of St Stephen in Pisa, Italy. „
Palazzio dei Cavalieri translated into English as Knight's Sqare is a beautiful square in Pisa, one which had great importance during the medieval times and even today is the 2nd square in the city. When I visited it, I thought it was quite quiet, neither too far from Borgo Stretto or The Leaning Tower of Pisa, it is not located in a straight line from it but it is more or less in between the two.
Several majestic looking buildings, all with rather different shapes and designs look at you from different angles of this wonderful cobbled square. The buildings have been built in a renaissance style and I think that my favourite is the Palazzo dell'Orollogio because I'm quite partial to an arch and it has a particularly small one, just large enough to fit a small car through!
Today the buildings are mostly used as university buildings, so unless you are a student there is very little to go and see inside but this square is rather an impressing sight. The name derives from the headquarters of the knights of St.Stephen being based in the Palazzo della Carovana, the building that stands out the most with its intricate grey and white design with a knight on a horse statue in front of it.
Definitely worth popping along to!
A palace named after the Knights of St Stephen in Pisa, Italy. |
A few years ago, David Mamet wrote this memo to the writers of the crime drama, The Unit. Mamet gives good advice to these writers. It’s good to see that all of us struggle from time to time with our writing, even professional writers. I don’t write fiction, but the general premise is the same. Here’s the core of Mamet’s teaching:
WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.
1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?
START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.
ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED
THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.
DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.
I get really bored with exposition instead of drama. I don’t now if I realized that before, but as Mamet explains, scenes have to be dramatic and exposition isn’t dramatic. |
1) Every cell in the body has
a SODIUM-POTASSIUM PUMP in it that generates
electricity which is POWER!
2) Everywhere we have a BLOOD
VESSEL going through our body, we have a
LYMPHATIC VESSEL going side by side with cells
3) The purpose of the
LYMPHATIC VESSELS is to pull out all the dead
cells and poisons and excess water from the
spaces around the cells which keeps the cells
in the "DRY STATE" with no excess
water around the cells.
4) The cells have to be kept
in the "DRY STATE" in order to get
OXYGEN from the blood vessels.
5) BLOOD PROTEIN and WATER
leave the BLOOD STREAM to ALTER the "DRY
STATE" which is the CAUSE OF LACK OF
OXYGEN AT the cell level.
6) Breaking the MENTAL (anger, loss of
temper, holding grudges etc.), NUTRITIONAL
(Man-made Tea, coffee, liquor
"beer", tobacco, drugs, too much
salt, sugar, candy, cakes, ice cream, pop,
and too much meat.), and PHYSICAL (being
lazy and being a shallow breather), LAWS OF
HEALTH is what brings the blood proteins and
water out of the blood stream and produces
lack of oxygen. Anything that will damage
cells will cause the blood protein and water
to leave the blood stream and alter the
"Dry State" which is the actual
cause of pain, loss of energy, and every
disease on the face of this earth!
7) When we learn to obey the
laws of health and ACTIVATE our LYMPHATIC
VESSELS to CONTROL the BLOOD PROTEIN and
WATER, there will be NO PAIN, NO LOSS OF
ENERGY and NO DEATH by DISEASE.
It is interesting that
99.9% of the people throughout the entire
world do not even know that every
cell has a "Sodium-Potassium Pump"
in it or that we have lymphatic
vessels that parallel the blood vessels. All
they know is that they have lymph nodes under
the arm, in the neck, and in the groin. No
college, university, or medical school in the
United States is teaching what the
"Sodium-Potassium Pumps" do or the
importance of the lymphatic vessels. About 98%
of the people in the United States are
breaking one or more of the mental,
nutritional or physical laws of health. As a
result, by the year 2000, 9.8
out of ten will have heart disease
or cancer before they die.
The LYMPHATIC VESSELS pulls the "Blood
Proteins and Water" out from around the
cells so they can get OXYGEN
and the Sodium-Potassium PUMPS can generate the ELECTRICITY
that gives the eyes the POWER
to see, the brain the POWER
to think, the heart the POWER
to beat, and the white blood cells the POWER
to kill the cancer cells and
the viruses etc. etc. |
One of the most frequent types of recurrent nightmare or anxiety dream, being chased sometimes can be traced back to waking situations in which you felt caught or vulnerable, acted passively, or in which you gave in.
Some researches connect it to a stressful situation dating from childhood or adolescence, the memory of which is often repressed. Being chased by animals or demons can represent your own unexpressed or unacknowledged anger or aggression, which is being projected onto the chaser.
Being chased and caught, especially by a man, may be birth process memories. Consider it as a possible sexual pun for chaste being chaste, and not caught. If you are the chaser, what you are chasing may represent a goal, or a solution to a waking issue. With what ease or difficulty are you pursuing it?
See escape and fear.Related dream symbols
No related posts |
WASHINGTON The Food and Drug Administration is conducting a safety review of the drug Maxipime, an injectable antibiotic made by Bristol-Myers Squibb used to treat serious infections like pneumonia, according to money.cnn.com
The FDA decided to initiate the review after a study from the medical journal The Lancet suggested that patients on the drug had a higher rate of death compared with patients treated with other drugs in the same class of medications, known as B-lactams. The study also shows that patients with febrile neutropenia – a condition marked by fever and a significant drop in white blood cells – had a higher risk of death.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the FDA said it was working with Bristol-Myers “to further evaluate the finding of increased mortality in patients who received cefepime.” The agency also said it wants health-care professionals and patients to report side effects from the use of cefepime to the FDA’s MedWatch adverse event reporting system.
Tony Plohoros, a Bristol-Myers spokesman said, “We have reviewed safety data from our database as well as government databases to determine if there’s a change in the safety profile of cefepime and have concluded that the safety profile has not changed.”
U.S. sales of Maxipime totaled $107 million during the first nine months of 2007, according to Dow Jones. |
FACED AS PARENTS,
you reach a point where you must scratch “the way you’ve always done it” and open your minds and hearts to doing whatever it takes to get the job done. Like any father, when David Brown’s daughter Emily was diagnosed with Rapid Cycle Bipolar Disorder at age thirteen, he immediately thought he could “fi x it.” But it wasn’t until her attempted suicide turned life upside down for their entire family that he realized he would need a set of tools he had never used before.
Fear and doubt, combined with worry as a father, prompted David’s quest to learn as much as he could about Bipolar Disorder. His journey helped him to realize that some of his own behaviors were triggers to Emily’s episodes and taught him that he would have to rediscover ways to communicate with his daughter if he had any hope of restoring the trust they once had.
Duct Tape and WD-40 is an inspirational look at the journey of one father into the world of mental illness. It offers tools often unknown to parents and the children they love and the hope they need to see their implantation through.
“David’s workshop with his daughter Emily is valuable because it is not only informative and interesting but it gives hope…hope that a person can recover from bipolar disorder and- most importantly- hope that the relationship between a parent and a child can be reclaimed and, perhaps, enhanced.
David and Emily do this all with a great sense if humor and perspective. ”
“David and EMILY!!! I have not mentioned how much I understand Emily’s contribution to this book. Without her consent this gift would not be offered to the world. THANK YOU, EMILY!
Your gift of story telling is a wonderful way to present this devastating story that portrays a hopeful and enduring theme. The theme of HOPE and RECOVERY! Thank God for your telling of your story. What an impact this will have on so many people. People you will not even know you have touched.”
I extend my highest compliments on your book, Duct Tape & WD-40; A parents guide to the mysteries of a bipolar child.
The lessons learned from your well told story will benefit those who read this book. I can see your book rivaling I’m Not Sick. I Don’t Need Help as a lifeline for families confounded and in crisis as a result of a loved one’s mental illness. Your shared experiences will spare many families of avoidable tension and conflict.
Taylor P. Andrews
Long time NAMI activist
Your book has changed my whole view on bi-polar. I am thankful that you took the time to write “Duct Tape and WD 40″. If I wouldn’t have read your book I would still be in denial, so I thank you. |
The design patent is perceived by many designers and patent attorneys as being a relatively weak and impotent patent protection mechanism as compared with the better-respected utility patent. It is typically thought that design patents are only useful in protecting against exact copies. The reasoning behind this attitude is one or more of the following very commonly held misconceptions:
1. Design patents are generally perceived as easy to get around. Why bother if small changes are all that is required to avoid my patent.
2. You generally get what you pay for, and design patents are cheap, so I’m probably not getting a lot.
3. In the end, design patents are just a fast (and don’t forget “cheap” and “probably ineffective unless the accused product is an exact copy”) way to gain the rights to mark a product with a patent number.
As a result of these misconceptions, the design patent is generally an under-appreciated, misunderstood and under-utilized tool in both protection and enforcement of patent rights. Until this summer, with the Apple-Samsung case that thrust it into the spotlight, the design patent has been generally quiet, humble, and meek. However, the design patent has always had some very potent elements built into its protection and enforcement mechanisms and more recently, some additional power has been gained through court decisions (See e.g., Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. SWISA, Inc., 543 F.3d 665 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (doing away with the point of novelty test and not adopting the non-trivial advance test)) loosening the test for finding infringement of the design patent. Apple’s heavy reliance on its design patents serves as one example of this power and the magnitude of the damages award in the Apple-Samsung case moves the design patent into its rightful place in the spotlight.
For now, it is enough to refer design patent skeptics to the verdict and damages award in the Apple-Samsung case to understand, accept and implement the power of design patents. While the case itself has not rewritten any design patent laws, it is significant due to Apple’s heavy reliance on design patents to show Samsung’s infringement.
The relevant numbers at a glance:
• Apple’s damages claims were a total of approximately $2.5 billion, with about 80% or $2 billion owing to its design patents.
• The products at issue were also covered by more than 200 utility patents.
• The verdict resulted in $1.05 billion owed to Apple by Samsung, primarily due to design patent infringement. This is one of the largest damages awards ever issued in a patent infringement case.
Apple’s success with its design patent protection as both a stand-alone protective mechanism as well as a very effective supplemental protection to that provided by its utility patents should convince the skeptics that the design patent is, indeed, a highly powerful and effective protective and enforcement mechanism.
The Apple-Samsung case did not occur by chance. In fact, it appears that both parties had begun to recognize the value of design patents. In the years leading up to the case, the number of design patents issued to both parties from 2001 to 2011. Samsung’s numbers are greater than Apple’s numbers in this context largely because it has significantly more products to protect than Apple:
Perhaps significantly, Apple received design patent D650,133 on November 13, 2012, for the now-familiar page turning design implemented on various devices. This patent does not include the underlying technology required to implement the page turning device, but does cover the non-function aspects that are indicated in part below:
And, Apple and Samsung are not the only ones that have begun to appreciate the power of the design patent. The above data is an extreme example, but since 2001, applications for design patents have increased by 40%. The chart below illustrates the strong upslope in both filings and issuances design patents within the USPTO.
Data Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Technology Monitoring Team (PTMT)
This increase signals an enhanced recognition of, and reliance upon, the power of the design patent in IP protection strategies, which has been validated by the Apple-Samsung verdict and its resulting $1.05 billion damages award, based primarily on Apple’s design patent rights. In short, broad and robust design patents are powerful. Prudent companies should recognize the necessity of incorporating design patents into their patent protection and enforcement strategies. |
Telling our stories in ways that make us stronger
by Barb Wingard1
As Indigenous people of this country, we have faced so many losses due to past and present injustice. Grief’s presence has been with us for a long time. Now we are seeking ways of speaking about Grief that are consistent with our cultural ways of doing things. We are remembering those who have died, we are honouring Indigenous spiritual ways, and we are finding ways of grieving that bring us together. We are telling our stories in ways that make us stronger.
Dealing with our grief, with all of the losses we have experienced, is not about moving on and forgetting. It’s about remembering our people and bringing them with us wherever we go.
I’ve lost a brother, my father, my grandmother too, but I believe that they’re still with me. I carry a lot of their ways. I acknowledge them.
We Aboriginal people have had too many losses. Sometimes it seems as if we are moving from one death to another. Our people just get so weary; at times it’s too much to go to one more funeral.
We simply have to find ways of grieving together because it’s far too hard to do it on our own.
I remember talking to a young Aboriginal man in Murray Bridge late last year. There have been so many deaths in his family and recently he’s been diagnosed as having a mental illness. I met up with him because the mental health team had said, ‘Would you like to see Auntie Barb to talk about some of these things?’
We sat out on the lawn and made our first connection. We didn’t call it counselling, we just called it talking together under the trees. He began to share stories with me about so many deaths - all his uncles have died, and his father - there’s been one after the other. He spoke of how he believes his illness has come because of the grief.
The environment and the way that we were sitting made it comfortable for him to talk. As he spoke about all the people who have passed on, we acknowledged them quietly.
He’s a brilliant young lad. He’s finished year 12 and has got big plans about having his own business. He showed me how he’s going to do this in stages. He also showed me a memorial he’s been working on, for all those who have passed away. He’s acknowledged special things about each individual. He’s found meaning for each one and he’s painting them each a different image. It is a beautiful memorial. He’s looking at a lot of the cultural aspects of their lives as well - reflecting on all that has happened in this land, and how a lot of the problems nowadays relate to what happened in the past.
These days, if you talk too much about the past, people look at you as a radical - they think you’re trying to stir up trouble There are those who say, ‘We’ve got to forget about the past and move on’. That’s fine to a point, but I think we have to acknowledge the events that happened in the past that had an impact on our grandparents, our parents, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, on ourselves. When people say, ‘Forget the past’, they’re asking us to leave a lot behind. They’re asking us to desert our old folks. We cannot move on and leave them behind - we must bring them with us wherever we go.
A part of Aboriginal people’s story-telling is that we hold onto our loved ones who aren’t here any longer. Our old people are who we belong to. Through them we identify each other. When an Aboriginal person meets another Aboriginal person, we work out how we know each other through our relatives. I might not know your parents, but who were their parents? We constantly reflect and remember these people.
All my histories are through my grandmother. Everybody knows of her and her children. Hanging on to these old people is very much part of our strength. It is part of our story-telling. They are talked about so much that they are still with us.
When a people has had as many losses as we have had, it is not time to forget and move on. It is time to remember, to stay connected to our people, past and present. We will not forget our people and we will not forget the past. We have to acknowledge and keep on acknowledging all that has happened in this country.
Thirty-five years ago I was fifteen and it was 1964. In those days there was an Aborigines Act where some Aboriginal people were given an Exemption which allowed us to mix with the wider community, but it also indicated that we ceased to be Aboriginal.
This act prevented many of my people from returning to their birth places on the missions. There was also a loitering act which prevented people of different races congregating together. This included mixing with our own people as well as our white friends. In those days, we were not even citizens of this country. That didn’t happen until 1967.
So many of our losses have been unjust, and this is what is so hard to deal with. We are losing a lot of our people well before their time. Many of our deaths are not natural - for example, deaths in custody. It is tragic that we are losing our people so young.
When my father died he was thirty-nine, a week off his fortieth birthday. To us that is a tragic event, but it is a common one. People like me, who are in our fifties, we count our blessings that we are here each day. We say to each other how lucky we are to still be alive. We don’t take life for granted.
It’s important for us as Aboriginal people to make the links between justice and grief. We need the injustices addressed so that we can grieve our losses. We need our stories told and acknowledged. Working on our grief in these ways is working towards justice.
Aboriginal people have many different ways of dealing with grief. Often when people die there can be a good feeling that their spirit will be going to meet with all the other spirits, other lost loved ones. A lot of Aboriginal people also experience signs from loved ones who have passed away. Seeing particular birds, for example, is often experienced as having ongoing contact with people who have died, ongoing contact with their spirits.
We are trying to listen to people’s stories to put them more in touch with their own healing ways.
My father died when I was 14, and I remember seeing him in the coffin. I wanted to cry loud and yet the environment that we were in didn’t allow for me to grieve in my way. I think European society has encouraged particular ways of grieving and they don’t necessarily fit for Aboriginal people. If you go to a funeral service in an Aboriginal community you can wail and cry and grieve the way you want to grieve. But in mainstream funeral services there seems to be a lot of silence to grieving.
I don’t believe that this silence fits with Aboriginal culture. I don’t believe that this silence is a good thing. I especially don’t think it’s good for our young men. Some of the women perhaps have a better mechanism because they have a network in which they’re not afraid to shed tears. But silent cries can go on for years and be heard by no-one. They can eat away at a person’s spirit.
If only all those people who are silently crying could find ways to come together. I think they’d be quite amazed how much they have in common and how much they’d want to share somebody else’s story.
We are trying to find ways to bring together our people who are grieving. Camp Coorong, in 1994, was one attempt in which all Aboriginal families in South Australia who had experienced a death in custody gathered together. The document that came from this gathering was called ‘Reclaiming Our Stories, Reclaiming Our Lives’ (1995).
Here is an extract from it:
Aboriginal people have always had their own special ways of healing. This includes ways of healing the pain from loss and injustice.
These healing ways have been disrespected by non-Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal people have been discouraged from using them. But the healing ways have survived and are playing an important part in Aboriginal life today.
Talking together more about the healing ways is one path to taking them back, to making them stronger. (p.15)
Another aspect of the gathering was to find special ways of remembering - ways of remembering that make it possible for people to see themselves through the eyes of the lost loved one.
Recently, I remember speaking to a man who was very angry with his Dad who had died years ago. Gradually we brought his father to our conversations, let him join us, and over time he remembered his father putting his arms around him. There were so many stories that had been forgotten.
As this man gradually saw himself through the eyes of his father, he reconnected with his father’s love. As he told the stories of this love, I watched a weight lift from him. It was almost like Mr Anger just jumped out of his body and I was looking at a different person. His expression was so soft as he spoke of wanting to share these stories of his father with his brothers and his sisters. I don’t know where Mr Anger went, but it was beautiful to watch him go.
When we reclaim the stories we want to tell about our lives, when we reconnect with those we have lost, and the memories we have forgotten, then we become stronger.
Not only are we telling our stories differently, but we are listening differently too. We are listening for our people’s abilities and knowledges and skills. We’ve been knocked so many times that we often don’t think very well of ourselves. But we’re finding ways to acknowledge one another and to see the abilities that people have but may not know they have. Without putting people on pedestals, we are finding ways of acknowledging each others’ stories of survival.
Talking with Grief
We are also looking for healing ways of talking about our losses. One way is to externalise Grief. At times I play the character of Grief and invite others to ask me questions:
- What is your name?
- Have we met you before?
- Has your presence been with Aboriginal people for a long time?
- How have we dealt with you in the past?
- How can we deal with you now?
In this way we begin to talk about the journey of Aboriginal history. We speak of the loss of land, sickness, deaths, the stolen generation, the loss of language - as well as the ways in which Aboriginal people have responded.
For Aboriginal people, in some ways, inviting people into conversations with Grief is encouraging people to hold on. Grief invites us to cherish our people and our histories. We need to take up its invitations.
We need to talk about our history with our own people. I think the young children that we have now, the youth, really need to know our stories, including our stories of loss and how we have dealt with them. In some ways this is honouring of our grief.
I think that the words ‘death’, ‘they’ve gone’, ‘I’ll never see them’, leave a lot of people feeling bad about death. Death and grief are very scary for some people. But one day we too are going to pass away and join the spirits.
1. Barbara Wingard can be contacted c/- Dulwich Centre Publications
Aboriginal Health Council of South Australia, 1995: ‘Reclaiming Our Stories, Reclaiming Our Lives.’ Dulwich Centre Newsletter, 1.
Copyright © 2001 Dulwich Centre Publications
Buy this book at The Narrative Therapy Library and Bookshop
To list of articles on this web site
To list of books from Dulwich Centre Publications
Dulwich Centre Home Page |
Daphne Laureola is an
excellent example of why "theatrical" and "film"
productions aren't interchangeable; it has been brought to the screen very much
as a "filmed play" rather than a film adaptation of a play, and it
shows. This made-for-TV story of a young man's fascination with a middle-aged
woman, the "Daphne" to his "Apollo," attempts to get us
interested in the emotional lives of the young Ernst (Clive Arrindell) , the
erratic Lady Pitts (Joan Plowright), her resigned husband Sir Joseph (Laurence
Olivier), and a handful of lookers-on, but the story never gets off the ground.
Many elements that would seem
natural in the theater ring false notes here. The dialogue, for instance, has
an exaggeratedly dramatic quality that's certainly not realistic, and the
performances from all the characters, whether in major roles or in small parts,
all seem a little forced, as if they are "projecting" their
characters rather than living them. These are both tendencies that work in
theater: with the more limited, often more abstract world of the theater set,
the dialogue can be less naturalistic; we accept that poetic expression can
take precedence over pure realism.
Similarly, over-dramatizing the
performances themselves is somewhat of a necessity in a theater performance,
simply because a gesture, a tone of voice, or a facial expression has to be
exaggerated at least a little in order to be noticed by the audience. In
contrast with the arms'-length distance of theater, the film camera brings the
audience right into the drama, as if the theater seats were actually on the
stage: here, subtlety of facial expression and tone can be picked up, and
exaggeration suddenly becomes obtrusive rather than effective.
The film also sticks closely to
the limitations of time and space of a theater set, with its four acts each
limited to a single location (the restaurant, the house, the garden, and the
restaurant again) and taking place in "real time" with any jumps in
time occurring between acts. The result is that the emotional buildup that we
need to see just isn't there: Ernst's fascination with Lady Pitts, expressed
largely in monologues to her and later her husband, seems abstract and sterile,
an intellectual exercise rather than a real emotional response. Given the film's
attempt to reach an emotional peak in the final act, I think we're intended to
really appreciate the feelings and personalities of the characters, but instead
of showing us how they develop, they're handed to us on a platter, and it
Daphne Laureola is a
story that tries to address deep human concerns about relationships between men
and women, but it ends up feeling shallow and inconsequential. The awkward
combination of a realistic presentation with highly theatrical dialogue,
pacing, and staging is enough to make the film fall flat; on top of that, the
acting isn't particularly convincing, and the story is uncompelling as well.
Daphne Laureola is
presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.33:1. Some aspects of the transfer
are reasonably satisfactory; the clarity of the image is good, and there is
little noise. However, other problems crop up. Print flaws appear periodically
throughout the film, and especially toward the end we get frequent horizontal
distortions of the image, as if the DVD were being transferred from an ailing
VHS copy. The color quality is uneven; while the darker colors (reds, browns)
are fairly natural-looking, some of the other colors are either drab (as with
the green colors in the garden) or excessively bright with occasional bleeding.
The film's mono soundtrack is
basic but it gets the job done: with its highly theatrical setup, Daphne
Laureola is an entirely dialogue-based film. The dialogue is always clear,
though of course it's fairly flat-sounding, and the sound as a whole is clean
and free of distortion.
Text biographies of the main
members of the cast are provided.
In 1949, the original stage version of Daphne
Laureola was popular and award-winning, but this 1977 film version of it
doesn't capture whatever charm may have graced the original. I recommend that
viewers skip this uninspired DVD release. |
Images: Recycling keeps the machine green [Image 1 of 2]
Photo by Cpl. Kenneth Trotter
Piles of crushed cans sit in the dumping area of the station recycling center here April 8, 2013. Segregation is also an integral part of the process. As residents sort through their garbage, they take an account of what they are and are not recycling. Segregating trash not only makes it easier on the recycle center, but it also helps the Marine Corps in the long run.
Date Posted:04.17.2013 23:52
Location:IWAKUNI, YAMAGUCHI, JP |
Welcome to E-Books Directory
This is a freely downloadable e-book.
Mathematical Geography by Willis E. Johnson
Read this book online or download it here for free
by Willis E. Johnson
Publisher: American Book Company 1907
Number of pages: 346
Contents: The Form of the Earth; The Rotation of the Earth; Longitude and Time; Circumnavigation and Time; The Earth's Revolution; Time and the Calendar; Seasons; Tides; Map Projections; The United States Government Land Survey; Triangulation in Measurement and Survey; The Earth in Space; Historical Sketch. |
Australian Woman Survives Plunge After Bungee Line Snaps
(NEW YORK) -- An Australian student touring Zimbabwe survived a fall into the Zambezi River after her bungee cord broke, dropping her into crocodile-infested waters.
“I think it is definitely a miracle that I survived,” said Erin Langworthy.
Langworthy did the jump on Dec. 31 with Shearwater Victoria Falls, whose website touts the experience as “Pure Adrenaline!!!!!!!!!!!”
The 22-year-old jumped from Victoria Falls Bridge, 365 feet above the river, and after the cord snapped -- with her feet tied together -- she maneuvered her way to the bank, she told ABC's Good Morning America. The whole experience was caught on camera by her friend.
“I actually brought my arms up over my face, to protect myself when I hit the water. I sort of remember it all, it was quite cold so it snapped me out of it,” she told GMA on Monday. “I tried to stay afloat, and your legs are quite heavy cause of the line. I was hearing the rapids. Luckily we had been rafting, so I remembered some of the safety tips.”
Langworthy spent a week in the hospital with a fractured collarbone and bruises. She says that all of her cuts and bruises have now healed.
“The main problem is my lungs. So I’m stuck in South Africa longer then I thought,” she said.
According to Victoria Falls National Park officials and tourist websites, nearly 50,000 people had jumped from that bridge over the past decade, and this was the first time a cord had snapped.
“As a matter of record we wish to highlight her bravery and survival skills, which contributed significantly to her rescue. Her continued positive disposition and strength of character has been an inspiration to us all,” Shearwater Victoria Falls said in a statement. “It goes without saying that we deeply regret the incident, which is the first such incident in 17 years of operations during which time more than 150,000 people have safely jumped from the bridge.”
Langworthy told GMA that she would consider bungee jumping again -- just not anytime soon.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio |
Sustainable land, aquatic and resource planning and management support the conservation, protection and restoration of the environment, enhance human well-being and contribute to a strengthened economy
Coastal Zone Management Plans
- Provide information about migratory bird habitat to province, First Nation, and local governments as part of planning processes in order to promote ecologically sound decisions.
Cost Benefit Air Quality Objectives
- Benefit analysis of air quality and visibility improvements in both the Lower Fraser Valley and Okanagan.
- Scientific analysis, assessment and advice on the causes of air pollutants, their movement, and the potential efficacy and effectiveness of air pollutant management strategies.
Fraser Valley Farm Soil Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium Survey 2005
- Multi-stakeholder soil survey for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the Fraser Valley.
Sustainable Agriculture Strategy: Advanced Corn Silage Management
- Development, communication, and transfer of information on environmentally sustainable agricultural practices related to agro-chemicals and other operational practices.
Union of British Columbia Municipalities 2007 Environment Forum
- The Union of British Columbia Municipalities 2007 Environment Forum brought together elected officials and city staff from all municipalities in British Columbia between June 27 - 28, 2007.
Water Balance Model for British Columbia
- Outreach and enhancement of the Water Balance Model for British Columbia.
Sumas River Watershed Land Use Trends
- Evaluation of trends in water and sediment quality in the Sumas River watershed.
Stewardship Centre/products and guides
- Facilitated the integration of regionally developed spatial and planning data including community mapping data and information.
Alternative Development Education Program
- Alternative Development Education Program for the Millard-Piercy Watershed Stewards to highlight the principles of low impact development.
Saving Small Towns: Low impact Development Solutions Conference
- Two day conference in Cumberland, British Columbia.
Health & air quality (Phase 2) - health effects of ambient air quality in the Lower Fraser Valley
- Quantification of impacts and associated economic costs of current and predicted air quality in the Lower Fraser Valley of British Columbia.
Compilation of Environmental Quality Data for Agricultural Areas of the Fraser Valley Including the Greater Vancouver Regional District
- Report Summarizing Environmental Quality Data Sources.
Habitat Acquisition Trust: Urban Forest Stewardship Initiative
- Secure the retention of treed ecosystems within the Greater Victoria area.
For further information contact: email@example.com
- Date Modified: |
Eole Water, a French company specialising in the design of water production systems, is presenting its new product called the WMS1000 Wind Turbine at the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) in Abu Dhabi this week.
Eole Water technology is capable of producing potable water from humidity contained in the air, with a wind turbine or photovoltaic panels. This equipment can produce up to 1,500 litres per day of pure drinking water in normal conditions and 250 litres per day in remote desert conditions such as those found in the Sahara or the UAE. Eole Water says that it is the only technology able to produce 1000 litres of drinking water per day and up to 30 Kw of electricity.
The company claims that the equipment can produce its own electricity, which is used to transform the humidity into liquid and give fresh drinking water in remote or isolated areas onshore or offshore, for workers and staff, or even clients for instance in eco hotels or green buildings. Eole said that the equipment can be removed easily.
“The WMS1000, an innovative technology for the future, offers great opportunities for economic and sustainable developments of dry or isolated areas, with no water or electricity,” according to a company statement.
Eole Water is said to be a complementary solution to existing sources of drinking water supplies in Gulf Countries.
SPIE Oil & Gas Services, a company established in 22 countries, is committed to a partnership with Eole Water in order to promote and implement the WMS1000.
Access to drinking water has become a major challenge for economic development policies worldwide, especially in Gulf countries. It is estimated that by 2050, three quarters of water resources of the region will be depleted. |
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"I chose Criminology at ECU because of the flexible study options. They made it easy to tailor a course to my needs.
Having the chance to attend a conference at the Australian Institute of Criminology in Canberra has been my greatest opportunity so far. This allowed me to meet and learn from the leading researchers in the field.
The staff make a big difference too. Lecturers go that extra mile. The time and effort they put into every student helps you get the most from your course. Thanks to them I have had a number of great employment opportunities before even completing my course."
Criminology and Justice student
The School of Law and Justice is a diverse and dedicated School, offering a creative and energetic learning environment.
Intrigued by law, justice and criminological issues and want to make a difference?
A career in law, legal research and policy, law enforcement, corrections as well as the growing area of juvenile justice will interest you.
An ECU Law and Justice education will prepare you for success, plus you’ll gain invaluable practical experience with opportunities to participate in:
The Law and Justice community has a strong research culture, with particular expertise in criminology, policing and judicial administration.
With a focus on challenging and innovative research, the School is rapidly establishing themselves as an industry leader in issues of law and justice. |
Last month, state and local leaders from the 11 states and the District of Columbia receiving funds from Phases 1 and 2 of the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top program met in Washington, D.C. Participants explored teacher and leader effectiveness initiatives in the context of college- and career-ready standards. They focused on how to:
- better support teachers and principals as they work with their students to meet new, higher standards;
- create reforms that are sustainable and improve over time; and
- collaborate across agencies to meet Race to the Top goals.
Reflecting on more than a year’s experience with implementing the program, the officials agreed that their Race to the Top efforts sometimes have been challenging but are clearly worth it. They see their reforms as a significant opportunity to better prepare students to succeed in college and careers.
“It’s the right work to do,” said Mitchell Chester, commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “It’s clearly an ambitious agenda, and one that requires substantial effort and a willingness to rethink how we do school … but it is the right work to do.”
Watch “Race to the Top: Voices from the States:”
Click here for an alternate version of the video with an accessible player.
Learn more about Race to the Top. |
Schools in Jessup, MD
About Jessup Schools
- There are 3 K-12 schools in Jessup, MD, including 3 public schools. Jessup public schools belong to two districts, Anne Arundel County Public Schools School District and Howard County Public Schools School District.
- There are 2 Jessup elementary schools, 1 Jessup middle school, 1 Jessup high school and 2 Jessup preschool schools.
Contact Education.com with questions or feedback about SchoolFinder.
Please note, if you wish to speak to someone at the school, you must contact the school directly. |
356. Carex acutiformis Ehrhart, Bietr. Naturk. 4: 43. 1789.
Plants colonial; rhizomes long-creeping. Culms central, coarse, trigonous, 55–130 cm, scabrous-angled. Leaves: basal sheaths pale green to brownish or red tinged; ligules 5–14 mm; blades glaucous, M-shaped, (4.5–)5.5–12(–20) mm wide, glabrous. Inflorescences 15–35 cm; proximal 2–5 spikes pistillate, ascending; distal spikes erect; terminal 1–2(–3) spikes staminate. Pistillate scales lanceolate, acute to acuminate, glabrous, at least the proximal with scabrous awn to 3.5 mm. Perigynia ascending, ± glaucous, often strongly red dotted, ± strongly 12–18-veined, thin-walled, narrowly ovoid, flattened-trigonous, 3–4.5 × 1.4–2.1 mm, glabrous; beak 0.3–0.6 mm, emarginate to weakly bidentulate, teeth to 0.2 mm. 2n = 78.
Fruiting Jun–Aug. Open swamps, wet, open thickets, marsh edges, sedge meadows, lakeshores; 0–300 m; introduced; Ont.; Conn., Ind., Mass., Md., Mich., N.Y.; Eurasia; Africa.
An uncommon and local introduction, Carex acutiformis forms large, glaucous clones where it is established but is, as yet, not spreading aggressivly into adjacent habitats. It superficially resembles C. aquatilis, but is larger, has 3 stigmas, and has strongly veined perigynia 3–4.5 mm. |
Today’s guest blogger is Susan Meissner, author of the brand new novel (out today!), A Sound Among The Trees. In the book, Marielle Bishop, who has watched all her friends marry and begin families, has at last found love online. She leaves the Arizona desert to marry a Virginia widower, joining him and his two children —and his first wife’s grandmother— in an ancestral family home where it seems like ghosts are everywhere, real and imagined. Here Susan shares insights on how to give the past a proper place in a new relationship.
Everyone brings to new relationships echoes of their past relationships, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our life experiences, both the good and the bad, shape how we think, what we value, and who we are. Falling in love with someone is learning to love the person they’ve become because of their life experiences.
It’s tempting to write off every bad or tragic experience that’s happened to us or a prospective life partner as “baggage” and therefore not to be touched, considered, or embraced. Treating the past like it has no part in the here and now is like tossing every diploma and award and blue ribbon you’ve ever earned into the trash because, hey, the past has no part in the present. The fact is, everything we’ve learned in the university of
life has molded us into the person we will be in all our future relationships.
Your past, or someone else’s, can seem like baggage if it prevents you or them from moving forward and taking new risks, but it is not baggage if it helps you and those you care about discover what is real and what is not, what matters and what doesn’t. The past teaches us why we are who we are, but it doesn’t define who we are. We are who we are because of the choices we made, not just the circumstances that were imposed upon us. The past doesn’t have to be feared or adored or ignored. The best thing you can do with your past is learn from it and then walk forward. The best thing you can do with someone’s else’s past is learn from it and then walk
A great way to gauge how much each others’ past will play into a dating relationship is to have the conversation early, perhaps when you both sense the relationship is “going somewhere.” Agree to be transparent about it. Past experiences either strengthen or weaken our ability to trust. When you agree from the get-go to be honest with each other, you begin to tutor your heart to again risk trusting someone. Honesty is made possible with trust. Trust is made possible with truth. Truth makes us feel secure.
Your past is not just what happened TO you, it is also what you responded to. You made choices, you made adjustments, you survived.
If it holds you down and paralyzes your ability to love fully, it’s baggage. If it reminds you of what you risked for love, it’s more like a medal.
Don’t be afraid to wear yours.
And don’t be afraid to see someone else wear theirs. |
500,000 spine operations are performed every year in this country to address back pain. Common causes of back pain include degenerative disc disease (herniated discs, slipped discs, spinal stenosis), spinal deformity, spinal trauma and tumors.
These surgeries can range from simple back surgery for a lumbar disc to more complex surgery, such as lumbar spine fusion surgery. While lumbar spine surgery makes up a minority of all operations, it helps to know the benefits that newer, minimally invasive techniques can deliver.
Dr. James Doty, director of the El Camino Hospital Neuroscience Institute, covers the following informative topics in this video about minimally invasive lumbar spine fusion surgery for serious back pain:
- Conditions treated by lumbar spinal surgery
- New, minimally invasive approaches to lumbar spine fusion
- Typical recovery from minimally invasive lumbar fusion
- Success rates for lumbar fusion
- Finding the right surgeon for you
- Patient success stories |
updated 10:45 am EST, Tue November 30, 2010
Palit spoils GeForce GTX 570 specs before debut
Video card maker Palit late today spoiled NVIDIA's plans for its next 500-series graphics chipset with details given out days ahead of launch. Sales sheets sent out early have shown the GeForce GTX 570, a more mainstream alternative to the GTX 580, that would potentially outperform the older GTX 480 flagship while still costing less. The design would have a lower 1.28GB of RAM and a narrower 320-bit bus, according to Kitguru's copy, but would boost the main clock speed from 700MHz to 732MHz while also using faster individual shaders and video memory.
All the hardware features of the GTX 580 should be present, including OpenGL 4.1 support and lower power use, although the lower core count, reduced memory and reduced bandwidth will make two billion polygons per second an unlikely figure.
The board is expected to launch on December 7 and is thought to be getting a 'hard' launch where cards are available on or shortly after the release day. Palit didn't give out its pricing with the leak, but the GTX 580's $499 pricing suggests NVIDIA will aim for $399 on the slightly slower but less costly to make add-on. Both upgrade cards and pre-assembled PCs are likely to use the 570 from the start. |
News & Press Releases
Al Moumin Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding Launched at American University
April 11, 2013
On March 19, UCLA Political Science Prof. Michael L. Ross delivered the inaugural Al Moumin Distinguished Lecture on Environmental Peacebuilding, which was hosted by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), American University’s School of International Service, and the United Nations Environment Programme. More than 80 people attended the event held at American University. The annual lecture series is named for Mishkat Al Moumin, Iraq’s first Minister of Environment, a human rights and environment lawyer, and a Visiting Scholar at ELI. Click here to view the press release. |
European Medicines Agency invites comments on new overarching guidance for the development of influenza vaccines
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has released the second module of a new overarching guideline on influenza vaccines for a six-month public consultation.
The guidance published today covers the non-clinical and clinical requirements for the development of new influenza vaccines and aims to facilitate the prompt assessment of new vaccines. It follows the publication in April of a module on the quality requirements.
The new modular guideline is intended to cover and update in one single, consolidated document the existing guidance on regulatory, quality, non-clinical and clinical aspects of the development of all types of influenza vaccines, in all epidemiological situations, i.e. seasonal, pandemic and pre-pandemic.
It has been developed based on the experience gained from many years of seasonal vaccination campaigns, the 2009/2010 influenza A(H1N1) pandemic, requests for scientific advice received from vaccine developers and applications for marketing authorisation.
The guidance provided applies to vaccines for which ample regulatory experience has been gained, as well as to some novel types of vaccines based on established surface antigens.
The most notable changes introduced by the non-clinical and clinical module of the guideline include:
- new terminology for pandemic vaccines to replace the term pandemic mock up vaccine with ‘pandemic preparedness vaccines’ and the term pre-pandemic vaccines with ‘zoonotic influenza vaccines’;
- revision of criteria for the assessment of immunogenicity in favour of a broader evaluation of immune responses rather than the use of seroprotection rate and haemagglutination inhibition as the main tests for evaluation;
- introduction of effectiveness studies for seasonal influenza vaccines as requirements in the post-authorisation phase.
The guidance on enhanced safety surveillance for seasonal influenza vaccines, which was adopted as a stand-alone document in April 2014, will be annexed to this module following its finalisation.
Comments on the draft non-clinical and clinical module of the influenza vaccines guideline are invited until 31 January 2015 and should be sent to firstname.lastname@example.org using the form provided. |
Stigma is a part of everyday life for most people, but for those women who are part of stigmatized groups, it can be devastating to their emotional health if they don't know how to cope properly.
One example of a stigmatized population is women with physical disabilities.
Rhoda Olkin, a distinguished professor at the California School of Professional Psychology, had polio when she was only 1 and grew up with her disability. According to Medline Plus, polio is “a viral disease that can affect nerves and can lead to partial or full paralysis.”
Since Olkin had an early-onset disability, she has had to cope with stigma throughout her life. In the process of developing her career as a psychologist, she has experienced more stigma with supervisors than with clients.
“As a therapist with a disability, clients assume things about me that are actually very helpful for therapy,” Olkin said. “They assume I know what suffering is, they assume I know what it means to be downtrodden or stigmatized, and assuming that I’m empathic. Those are positive things to attribute to a therapist, whether they’re true or not. So it’s often been a helpful thing as a therapist.”
Olkin can attest to the stigmatization of the physically disabled population.
“Stigma in general means that a person is thought of as being ‘other,’” Olkin said. “It’s like a big separation between us and them … people with disabilities have always been thought of as the other.”
She said people without disabilities have kept this stigma going.
“People without disabilities have lots of ways that they perpetuate that, because the idea that disability can happen to anyone is very very threatening and scary,” Olkin said. “The more you divorce yourself or distance yourself from disability, the more you protect yourself from the idea that it could happen to you.”
Stigma can have a lot of negative effects for those who are being stigmatized, including discrimination, prejudice and stereotypes. For example, children with disabilities were not allowed in school for many years. In other cases, people with non-disabilities treat people with disabilities as if they are inferior.
Olkin also brought up the use of microaggressions, which is commonly associated with ethnic or racial minorities and sexual orientation, but also for people with disabilities.
“Microaggressions are acts or behaviors by other people that make you aware of your minority status and have a comment about your inferiority,” she said.
She gave the example of an African American person going into a store, and the manager monitors that person just because of race and stereotypes.
“For people with disabilities, microaggressions occur multiple times in the day, both through the environment and through interactions with other people,” Olkin said.
She gave an example of people without disabilities taking up handicapped parking spots
“You haven’t had an interaction with a person directly, but nonetheless it suddenly made you aware of the fact that you are a person with a disability, that you have ‘special needs,’ and those needs are not being met,” Olkin said. “Those needs can be trampled upon by other people.”
She said these microaggressions can have negative effects on mental health, productivity and social interaction.
Because these microaggressions and stigma in general are everywhere in daily life for people with disabilities, Olkin gave a few suggestions for ways people with disabilities can handle these situations.
“You have to learn to ignore a part of your environment, which seems odd because in some ways you’re hypervigilant,” Olkin said, including thinking about accessible aisles in stores. “At the same time, if a mother yanks her kid out of my way, and I’m thinking, ‘…What is she teaching her kid about disability,’ … a part of me is saying this is not worth getting upset over, this is not something I want to hold on to.”
She added that there are certain situations where ignoring is not the best solution.
“Sometimes picking a battle that you do want to fight can be enormously empowering,” Olkin said.
Finding support with other people who have disabilities can be helpful. This can be an informal or formal support group. Basically, it can just be a social network that includes people with disabilities.
“Being in a community of people … where your disability becomes irrelevant, and yet also a group of people where your disability is something that can be talked about in a way that it can’t be with non-disabled people,” Olkin said.
For people who don’t have disabilities, knowledge is key to removing the stigma and microaggressions, as well as ignorance regarding stereotypes.
“Some of the more common assumptions about people with disabilities is that they have lower intelligence, that they are asexual, that they are dependent and more helpless than other people, or conversely that they’re kind of super-people,” Olkin said.
She added that religion can play a part – some believe that God chose only certain people to have disabilities because they are special or because someone else in the family committed a sin.
Olkin described a cartoon where one person in a wheelchair is in an elevator with non-disabled people, and all the non-disabled people are looking at the ceiling so they don’t appear rude by staring at the wheelchair.
“That’s the kind of behavior that makes it so awkward, when somebody meets me and they don’t want to look down at my wheelchair and I can feel them not looking down,” Olkin said. “It permeates the social interaction, and I think it’s because people without disabilities are not used to interacting with people with disabilities.”
She added that people with disabilities complain that those without disabilities won’t touch them.
“In these daily interactions, you’re made aware that you’re a stigmatized status,” Olkin said. “The thing that non-disabled people can do is just relax and don’t be afraid to make mistakes and try to act naturally … always ask before you help. Never just help.”
Parenting with a disability can also be a challenge, especially because of the stigma involved.
“You don’t have to do it like everybody else is doing it, you have to find your own way, and whatever way you do it is fine,” Olkin said. “Kids love you for who you are, and it doesn’t really affect the relationship … your kids, who don’t know any different, will absolutely accept it. It’s other parents who won’t accept it.”
One website, www.disabled-world.com, has multiple steps people with sudden disabilities can use to cope, including removing stress and focusing on the present. Another website, called LifeTips, has advice for non-disabled people and disabled people for coping with disabilities. Look at the links below for more information.
What tips do you have for dealing with stigma, discrimination, stereotypes and prejudice regarding disability? Share your experiences. |
The Gold in the Oceans
There was an announcement this past week that Solix Biofuels has started oil production at a facility in Colorado:
Solix Biofuels begins production of oil made from algae
Solix Biofuels Inc. said Thursday it has started the production of oil made from algae at its Coyote Gulch Demonstration Facility, with full-scale commercial operation set for late summer.
“We are ready to prove to the world the viability of algae as an alternative to petroleum-based fuels,” Solix COO Rich Schoonover said in a statement.
Coyote Gulch is located on a two-acre site in the Durango area on land provided by the Southern Ute tribe.
Algal oil production began July 16, Solix said. It said Coyote Gulch is expected to produce the equivalent of 3,000 gallons per acre per year of algal oil by late 2009.
Yes, this is the same Solix whose co-founder admitted earlier this year that the costs of producing fuel from algae were $33/gal. And there’s the rub.
Never mind that “full-scale commercial” output refers to less than 0.4 barrels per day. (Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these stories ever bother to pick up a calculator). Never mind that they are going to require 20 full-time employees at the site to (hopefully) produce 6,000 gallons on the 2 acre site. OK, let’s do the math on that one just for fun. That works out to 300 gallons per year per employee. Let’s be conservative and say that the average salary is $30,000/yr. That is then $100 of salary for each gallon of algal oil that is expected to be produced (it’s actually more, because the site is supported by more employees off-site). And that’s just salaries. You quickly to start to see why John Benemann claims that you can’t even buy algal fuel for $100/gal.
People struggle with these sorts of concepts. They read a story like the one above, and they incorrectly assume that some alternative fuel technologies are at a stage of development that they most certainly are not. This sort of thinking – especially when it infects our political leaders – is dangerous because it creates unrealistic expectations and distorts energy policy.
Sometimes when I am trying to illustrate this point, I use the following example. There are an estimated 25 billion ounces of gold dissolved in the ocean, which is about 10 times the total amount of gold that has been mined throughout history. At current prices, that gold is worth many trillions of dollars. The fact that the oceans are full of gold has been known for over 100 years. That gold is there for the taking. And while people have been running scams related to the ocean’s dissolved gold for over 100 years, nobody has invented a commercial process for extracting it.
I could certainly start a company based on the idea of extracting gold from the oceans. I might even convince some people to invest in the company, if I am very aggressive with my cost projections, can convincingly exaggerate the status of the technology (actually I have the worst ever poker face, so that is unlikely), and I assure investors that technical breakthroughs are inevitable. After all, there is a multi-trillion dollar payoff. What’s a few million from each investor when we are all going to make trillions? (The funny thing is that I used this example with a businessman once, and he was ready to start a company – missing the entire point of the story).
The gold in the oceans and the gold in algal biofuel have much in common. You can develop a production process in each case, but the capital and operating costs for producing each are far too high for them to be commercially viable.
I don’t begrudge anyone trying in either case to improve upon the processes. But can we please do it with a minimum of fanfare and press releases? At some point the public and the politicians are going to become completely jaded at the repeated examples of over-promising and under-delivering (the ‘hype’), and the evaporation of taxpayer money that went into these schemes (the ‘fleecing’). When that happens the money is going to dry up for the hypesters and the promising technologies alike.
- For those who want an inside edge in the energy sector.
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2014 EIA Energy Conference
July 14-15, 2014 - Washington, D.C.
Platts 4th Annual NGLs Conference
Sep. 29 - Oct. 1, 2014 - Houston, TX |
NSF "Discoveries" Site Features Action Science Explorer
The National Science Foundation is featuring new visualization research by ISR-affiliated Professor Ben Shneiderman (CS/UMIACS) and his colleagues on the “Discoveries” section of its website. The Shneiderman group's Action Science Explorer helps reveal emerging trends and controversies and encourages collaborations within the research community.
The ideas used in this prototype software some day could be widely implemented in existing and new systems. Recently, a medical imaging database developer called ASE “a visually compelling yet easy to navigate system for viewing large sets of linked data.” He is considering adapting ASE to improve his product.
About Action Science Explorer
Action Science Explorer is partially an integration of two powerful existing tools: the SocialAction network analysis tool developed by Adam Perer and Ben Shneiderman in the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and JabRef, an open source bibliography reference manager.
SocialAction provides powerful network analysis capabilities including force-directed citation network visualization, ranking and filtering papers by statistical measures, scatterplots of paper attributes and statistics, categorical and numerical range coloring, and automatic cluster detection. JabRef supplies all the features one would expect from a reference manager, including searching using simple regular expressions, automatic and manual grouping of papers, DOI and URL links, PDF full text with annotations, abstracts, user generated reviews and text annotations, and many ways of exporting.
These tools are linked together to form multiple coordinated views of the data. Clicking on a node in the citation network selects it and its corresponding paper in the reference manager, displaying its abstract, review, and other data associated with it. Moreover, when clusters of nodes are selected their papers are floated to the top of the reference manager for easy perusal. The inverse is true as well, with any paper, group, or search term selected in the reference manager highlighting the corresponding nodes in the network.
Action Science Explorer supports rapid understanding of scientific literature. Users can analyze the network of citations between papers, identify key papers and research clusters, automatically summarize them, dig into the full text of articles to extract context, make annotations, write reviews, and finally export findings in many document authoring formats. The infrastructure enables users to generate readily-consumable surveys of scientific fields.
Action Science Explorer was developed by Cody Dunne, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science; Robert Gove, MS, Computer Science; Ben Shneiderman; Professor Bonnie Dorr (CS); and Judith Klavans, a senior research scientist in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).
| Read the NSF story |
Antonsen, Shneiderman Elected IEEE Fellows
December 13, 2011 |
Steel Guitar: Underground or Under The Ground
A recent debate with a friend has me wondering: Has the steel guitar gone underground, or is the steel guitar dead and gone from country music altogether, buried “under the ground?”
Since Webb Pierce came out with “Slowly” in 1954, the pedal steel guitar has been the signature instrument of country music. Virtually non-existent in all other musical genres, its prominence in country music until the last decade (and arguably, the last two decades) has made it an audible watermark of country music. Lloyd Green, aka “Mr. Nashville” (and the steel guitar player for hundreds of country recordings), has been quoted as saying that “the steel guitar is the other voice in country music.”
But where is that “other voice” today? I don’t hear it in mainstream country music. Recently, I forced myself to sit down and listen to the top 10 singles on the Billboard chart; from Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” to Blake Shelton’s “I’ll Just Hold On,” what struck me was that while a hint of steel is audible on most of the recordings, none of them featured the melodic intros, solos and fills that have long been a staple of the genre.
Subtle steel tones are there (as is the banjo) seemingly to “countrify” the songs.
Maybe the contemporary song format is just a rhythmic accompaniment to a vocalist. Maybe the steel guitar doesn’t “fit in” anymore. But the instrument has historically been prominent in providing signature intros and solos (and for those of us steel guitar enthusiasts, classic fills that define a song–sometimes more than anything else in the recording).
Today, that kind of instrumentation exists only in the country music produced by artists such as Dale Watson, Junior Brown, Wayne “The Train” Hancock, Asleep at the Wheel, James Hand, Jesse Dayton, Justin Trevino, Amber Digby, Brennen Leigh, Jason Allen, Jake Hooker and a handful of other roots country music artists, primarily based in Texas.
But while we in Texas tend to think that we’ve got it all goin’ on down here, the roots country music artists do not dominate Texas music festivals (although I do have to mention that the one reason I dig Kevin Fowler is that he tours with both a steel guitar and a fiddle). And the majority of us typically have less than 200 audience members at most of our shows. Quite a few of us travel without a steel guitar in our road bands.
Combine this with the fact that mainstream radio and even many Americana stations will not play music that is “too country,” and you have a musical sound that is struggling to be heard. A major label executive once told me, “Honky tonk doesn’t sell.” How would it? The potential roots country music audience is largely unaware that roots country music exists!
To me, underground implies that there is a sort of revival underway that is growing and ready to bubble up to the surface, while under the ground means that a revival is yet to occur. New life must be breathed into bones in order for the underground to stir and then break through to the air above. With little radio airplay and small audiences, it is difficult to feel like a revival is going on.
Sometime, when you have a few minutes, I want you to listen to 2 songs: “I’ve Just Destroyed the World I’m Living In” and “Look At Us.” Two songs from two very different eras of country music. Two songs that feature the same steel player. A voice that is no longer with us (John Hughey passed away this last year), but one of the great steel guitar voices that embodied the definition of the soul and spirit of country music.
I am not ready to bury the steel guitar. But top 40 country music has done just that. Buried it in a wash of sound–a sound without voices, without dynamics and without distinction.
The good news is that there are artists who are still making this music. We’ve yet to create a movement, but as long as the music is being made, there is always hope. We have some great steel guitar players in the world who continue to support and promote the instrument. Let’s not say that the spirit of the steel guitar is resting in peace. It’s roaming the earth, still haunting many of us. I believe that one day we can bring it back to life.
- Dave W.: Just read the news here. Will miss E145 very much - love this site. All the best to you Juli …
- Leeann Ward: Oh, dang! This is real. Farewell to the most generous, informative, quality, intelligent, consistent, ethical country music blog! You …
- bll: Thanks Juli for all the great articles and information; you'll be missed by me and I suss several others. Best …
- Both Kinds of Music: I hope people appreciate the irony that one of the best "Americana" albums is titled Metamodern Sounds in COUNTRY Music.
- Barry Mazor: I would not rule out that possibility..There's a different set of voters involved..
- Dana M: Does anyone else think that Brandy Clark actually has a good chance of winning since this isn't a country awards …
- Juli Thanki: UPDATE: Brandy Clark got a Best New Artist nom. BEST AMERICANA ALBUM: Rosanne Cash -- The River & The Thread John Hiatt -- Terms …
- luckyoldsun: Glenn Campbell is great and I'd love to see him get an award, but the words of that song may …
- Casey Penn: Juli, it was an honor to write for you here on Engine145.com. You're good at what you do, and The …
- bob: Go Brandy FGL - Just go away. |
Can anyone explain Sir Philip Sidney's "sonnet 37?"
I found lots of information on sonnet 31 but I can't find much of on 37. I really don't have much of a clue what is going on in this sonnet!
2 Answers | Add Yours
I think I'll have a go at it...it looks like an interesting poem. You're right, though, it isn't an easy one to find analysis of:
My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell,
My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labour be;
Listen then, lordings, with good ear to me,
For of my life I must a riddle tell.
Mouth watering is usually a sign of desire, and when one's "breast doth swell" it is commonly a sign of being prideful. The itchy tongue thing could be a sign of being thirsty, but in context with the earlier line that his mouth is watering I would believe this means he is "itching to say something."
"My thoughts in labor be" could mean that his thoughts are coming difficultly (laboriously) but I think it means that he is about to "give birth" to some of his thoughts; i.e. he is about to start speaking his mind.
The speaker asks some gentlemen to listen to what his about to say and to listen well...he intends to tell a riddle about his life.
Towards Aurora's court a nymph doth dwell,
Rich in all beauties which man's eye can see;
Beauties so far from reach of words, that we
Abase her praise, saying she doth excel;
Aurora, mythologically, is the Roman goddess of dawn. She is the one that makes the sun come up and the sun go down. A nymph is a female spirit that is usually attached to a certain location. In this context, a female spirit "lives" near where Aurora holds court. She is "superhot." Words can describe how beautiful she is. "Abase" means to "bring down or reduce," so the poet is saying that she is so gorgeous that men can't find the words to describe her and are stuck saying that she "excels."
Rich in the treasure of deserved renown;
Rich in the riches of a royal heart;
Rich in those gifts which give the eternal crown;
She is very well known and well thought of, "deserved renown." She is also very majestic in a "royal" way, holding herself regally. In short, she has many "treasures" beyond cash...she is a "larger than life" person with the attitudes of a great woman.
Who though most rich in these, and every part
Which make the patents of true worldly bliss,
Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is.
All of these wonderful personality gifts make her world a "worldly bliss." She has a good existence. She has no real bad luck, other than the fact that "Rich she is." I find it interesting that the word "rich" is capitalized in mid-sentence. That implies that it is a proper noun, but I can't find any meaning of the word other than to have lots of money.
It seems to imply that being "Rich" in all these gifts is both a blessing and a curse for the nymph. It almost feels like there should be something more to this sonnet...some explanation of why she is both rich and poor for having these gifts, but that doesn't seem to be evident here.
It is also possible I am missing some huge piece of this puzzle...some implication that I don't understand or some piece of the much longer book that explains more about this sonnet. I wasn't able to find #38 in order to compare it with this one and see if the theme continues.
I hope this gives you a little direction to head. Good luck to you!
To the person who commented before me:
The last line that you mentioned that "Rich" was capatilized and it was a proper noun was because it was. The woman that he is writing of, Penelope Devereux, was a love of his. He was engaged to her for some time and she ended the engagement and shortly went to marry a man named Lord Rich. The mentions of Rich is said to be a pun to her name.
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Where in Canada was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples established?
1 Answer | Add Yours
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was established in Ottawa, Ontario, the capital city of Canada. This Royal Commission formed on August 26, 1991. The final, five-volume, 4,000-page report was issued in November of 1996. The Government of Canada presented a 16-point mandate to the Royal Commission and the report is the Commission's response to this government mandate.
Upon completion of their work, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples set forth 440 recommendations. These recommendations called for significant changes in the relationship between Canada's Aboriginal Peoples and non-Aboriginal peoples and various governments in Canada (national, provincial, regional, city, town).
The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Co-Chairs were Rene Dussault, j.c.a and Georges Erasmus. The Commissioners were Paul L.A.H. Chartrand; J. Peter Meekison; Viola Robinson; Mary Sillett, and Bertha Wilson.
Although there were disagreements with the final report, in general Canada's Aboriginal Peoples welcomed the report. One of the report's major recommendations was the formation of an Aboriginal parliament.
In January of 1998, the Government pf Canada issued a response to the report. The government's response was entitled "Gathering Strength: Canada's Aboriginal Action Plan. The response outlined four main objectives: Renewing the Partnership with Canada's Aboriginal Peoples; Strengthening Aboriginal Governance; Developing a New Fiscal Relationship, and Supporting Strong Communities, Peoples, and Economics.
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We often hear that our high unemployment is the result of the housing boom and the need to shift unemployed construction workers into new fields, which takes time and training. Construction employment has fallen dramatically since the housing bubble burst, but construction worker unemployment is neither what raised the unemployment rate nor what prevents it from falling as rapidly as we would want. The graph makes this clear by showing the overall unemployment rate and the unemployment rate excluding construction.
In the early aftermath of the housing collapse in 2007, the unemployment rate was 4.6 percent, just one-tenth of a percentage point higher than if there were no construction sector. By 2011, the unemployment rate had risen to 8.9 percent and would have been 8.6 percent without construction. The rise in unemployment from 2007 to 2011 was 4.3 percentage points (going from 4.6 percent to 8.9 percent) and would have risen 4.1 percentage points without any construction sector (from 4.5 percent to 8.6 percent). Thus, just 0.2 percentage points of the overall 4.3 percentage-point rise in unemployment can be attributed to higher construction worker unemployment; that is, construction-sector unemployment is responsible for less than 5 percent of the overall rise in unemployment between 2007 and 2011. |
Foundation Training ©
During the third century B.C., Alexander the Great, who as a young man commanded vast armies and conquered the Persian Empire, became one of those individuals first recognized as a very special horseman. As a young boy, he trained the great stallion, Buchephalus, when his father's trainers had given up on the horse, and, did so with a gentle hand. Alexander, a pupil of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, had been educated on the basis of human ideals and logic. The story of the fiery Bucephalus, tamed by Alexander when all others had failed, is important in that he incorporated vision and tact in lieu of force. The horse was afraid of his own shadow, yet out of all the horsemen in the entire kingdom of Macedonia, only this small boy was able to understand him. Alexander was perhaps one of the most notable examples of striving to understand and work completely within horse's nature. He didn't use a lariat, a round pen, a whip or a lunge line to create an unbelievable level of trust, communication and partnership with Buchephalus.
After all is said and done, there are two, and only two distinctly opposite paths of interaction between horse and man. One uses restraint, absolute control, negative force and comfort/discomfort. Our Western heritage, unique to the entire world, has possibly contributed more than its' share to this widely accepted practice. When horses were cheap and plentiful, it was expedient to "break" them. Bronc busters were generally regarded as a notch above the rest of the ranch hands but often ended up as a "Remudero" long before their expected retirement age. But respecting and holding dear the traditions of a very special era of the history of the horse does not mean that we must blindly accept the training methodology that era used.
William Cavendish perhaps exemplified this mind-set when he stated: "A boy is a long time before he knows his alphabet, longer still before he has learned to spell, and perhaps several years before he can read distinctly; and yet there are some people who, as soon as they get on a horse, entirely undressed and untaught, fancy that by beating and spurring they will make him a riding horse in one morning or a dressed horse in a week. I would fain ask such people whether by beating a boy they could teach him to read without first showing him the alphabet. Surely, they would beat him to death, before they would make him read."
While the philosophical beliefs and insight of Foundation Training go back thousands of years, only recently has this simple method of combining one of the horse's strongest instincts with true freedom of choice into a "hands on" format been available. It does not require a round pen, halter, lunge line or any type of restriction. In fact, optimum results can only be obtained in a large open area when the horse is completely free to choose whether to accept the lessons presented to him or not. In twenty-five years, I have never had one refuse a lesson. Unlike "clicker" training that uses treats, FT utilizes not only positive imprint (approval) on an instinctual level but also negative imprint (disapproval) through the use of verbal/hand cues and body language. This gives the teacher an extensive vocabulary to communicate and greatly enhances the ability to shape the relationship between them. FTX focalizes all the horse's attention on the "teacher" while enhancing the horse's awareness to verbal communication instead of his natural use of and receptivity to body cues. At no time is any type of physical punishment or intimidation used with the exception of self-defense. The following comparison may shed some light into the philosophical differences between our present day, traditionally accepted methods of "training" and what is called Foundation Training.
In the first scenario, a masked stranger jerks you out of bed from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, ties your hands behind your back and drags you to a cage you have never seen before in your life. You have no idea where your family is or the motivation of the stranger's actions nor his intentions. Judging from his demeanor and actions to this point, you have a very dismal, uncertain view of your immediate welfare. He turns you loose (still with your hands tied behind you) and returns shortly with a whip forcing you to run around the cage. He speaks a foreign language so you do not always understand or do exactly what he wants you to do. Occasionally, the bite of the whip when you make an honest mistake turns your fear and apprehension into utter frustration and terror. After doing this several times, he then puts a piece of metal in your mouth with short ropes attached and has a midget climb up and sit on your shoulders. You are unaccustomed to the additional weight and feel very clumsy and vulnerable. The midget speaks the same foreign language your kidnapper did that you STILL do not understand but through the jerking bite of the sharp metal in your mouth and slapping you with the whip, he "teaches you" to do very illogical, strange and sometimes frightening little dances.
In the second scenario, a stranger knocks on your door during "normal" hours, hesitantly explains (he does not speak English very well) that he is new in the neighborhood and invites you over for supper. He IS a stranger, and, as such, your mistrust of ALL strangers makes you feel a little apprehensive. But you ARE hungry and the sample he has brought with him convinces you to accept his invitation. When you arrive where the meal is being served, you are very politely (almost apologetically) asked to wash your hands and face before sitting down at the table to eat. As the meal progresses, you are almost casually informed that it is considered proper at the stranger's house, to sit up straight when eating and never talk with your mouth full of food. The requests, though very sincere and firm, are made in such an extremely gracious manner that it seems a very small price to pay for such an enjoyable "feast." As the weeks and months go by, the visits and the "feasts" become an everyday part of your life and the "stranger" becomes a true friend to be valued and trusted. You actually look forward to his visits. You also find that you and he have developed a third "go-between" or "bridge" language that enables both of you to converse with each other quite easily and comfortably. One day, at supper, he mentions that he has to carry a midget to a friend's house and asks if you would help him. You have never done anything like this before but because of the trust you have in your friend, and his assurance that you can do it easily, you willingly agree to help. At first, the unaccustomed weight makes you feel uncertain as to whether you can carry the midget or not, but with the reassurance from your friend, your apprehensions soon disappear. In time, your balance and confidence carrying the midget on your back grows and it becomes a normal, accepted part of your life. While carrying him, the midget asks you to do some of the little "dances" that that you have learned before at mealtime and even some new ones. You also find that the "bridge" language you developed with your friend is quite an advantage when learning to do the little "dances" and makes it much easier to learn the new ones. In fact, because the stranger becomes so ecstatic and showers you with such praise when you do them correctly, you soon share a sense of accomplishment and thoroughly enjoy becoming extremely proficient at doing them.
It is obvious, even to those who have never touched a horse, which of these two scenarios would be more be likely to produce the highest level of trust and communication and effect a true partnership with the horse. That same scenario would also effect the ultimate level of horsemanship that is not a horse and rider functioning in conjunction, but a separate living entity unto it's own, living, breathing, functioning, working, playing, as one.
The Foundation Training Exercises, (FTXs) were developed by Chuck Mintzlaff of Hutchins, Texas. He operates an Early Intervention (immediate response) Equine Psychotherapy program designed specifically to help severely abused children reorient and regain their lives. The horses used in the program are the only five in Texas certified by Delta Society for Animal Assisted Therapy and they are naturally, Foundation Trained. The program has served several thousand children and maintains an injury free ten-year safety record. The clients learn not only in depth history of equine/human relationships and care of the horse, but complete "hands on" groundwork as well as independent mounted interaction riding the horses For further information, he can be reached at (972) 225-5800 or firstname.lastname@example.org
~ Antoine de Pluvinel ~
Behold the horse, in all his
glory and majesty. |
[e-lang] A promise based JSON command shell
tyler.close at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 14:40:23 EDT 2009
Thanks for the feedback. Responses inline below...
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Mike Samuel <mikesamuel at gmail.com> wrote:
> From http://waterken.sourceforge.net/web_send/
> fragment arguments
> Sometimes, it is useful to include information in a URL that won't
> show up in the HTTP protocol's Referer header, but can be made
> available to the server that issued the URL. To support this, the
> web_send library can move information in the URL fragment to
> the query component of the Request-URI. For example, for the call:
> lib.Q.get(drum, 'hits');
> target URLref Request-URI
> /myApp#s=obj456 /myApp?q=hits&s=obj456
> This scheme seems to take fragment parts and merge them into the
> namespace of form parameters. So if someone can control a link on the
> page and get the user to click it, then they can potentially add query
> parameters, allowing them to spoof an enabled checkbox, or radio
If the attacker can control the link, can't they also put these
parameters directly into the URL's query string?
> Could query parameters derived from the fragment portion be moved into
> a namespace less likely to conflict with form data?
The issuer of the URLref can use whatever query parameter naming
convention they like. The web_send library will just copy the data
> Shameless plug follows.
> The key components are:
> JSON encoding and decoding
> If you want to avoid using json2's JSON.parse which delegates to eval,
> is a fast JSON parser that doesn't use eval under the hood.
That sounds good, but I'd like something that is API compatible with
the JSON object. Crock's json2.js first checks to see if there's
already a JSON object defined and only provides one if it doesn't
already exist. I believe this implementation allows the browser to
substitute it's own native JSON parser, which I believe many browsers
are planning to do. If you changed the boilerplate around your
implementation to follow the same convention, I'd be tempted to
More information about the e-lang |
For the third consecutive year, the U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations Office awarded Battelle the highest possible rating for its operation of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The "Outstanding" rating was based on Battelle's performance in three main areas—scientific and technical excellence, operational excellence, and leadership and management.
"Since 1965, PNNL has used experience, innovation and forward thinking to create one of the premier multi-purpose national laboratories in the nation," said Keith Klein, manager of DOE's Richland Operations Office. "Whether it's leading edge molecular and cellular biology research, earth systems science, or computer science and information technology, PNNL continues to prove itself as a leader in basic science and quality research and development."
The Department of Energy's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. |
According to an article that appeared in the Kathimerini newspaper, another classified document published on WikiLeaks has revealed that in December 2004 Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that he did not control the Turkish army and was therefore unable to intervene to stop violations of Greek airspace by Turkish fighter jets over the Aegean.
However, at the beginning of the last decade, as the information about Operation Sledgehammer has revealed, senior officers of the Turkish armed forces drew up plans, which focused on provoking an armed clash with Greece, aimed at creating internal instability in Turkey and triggering a military coup, leading to the overthrow Erdoğan's government .
In addition, the documents found and seized reveal that, apart from the plan to provoke a land incident in Evros or, alternatively, to have a Turkish military aircraft shot down by the Turkish armed forces themselves, Operation Sledgehammer also had a maritime dimension, initially targeting Leros or, alternatively, Inousses and Fourni.
In view of the above, will the Commission say:
What official information does it have about the above?
Although there have undoubtedly been considerable changes in the balance of power between the military establishment and political power in Greece's neighbour, Turkey, how does it intend to protect Europe's southern borders from any threat of a casus belli? |
Throwing kitchen waste into a compost heap is an excellent way to have a ready supply of compost on hand for vegetable and flower gardens. The only problem is decomposition has a distinctive smell many people do not want in the house.
A simple way to compost kitchen waste is to start a worm bin. Red wiggler earth worms can live quiet comfortable in a plastic or wooden box, eating kitchen waste and turning it into rich fertile vermicompost for use in the garden.
There are many advantages to vermicomposting. It produces fewer odors and attracts fewer pests than putting food wastes in the garbage. It saves the water and electricity that a sink garbage disposal unit would use. It requires little space or labor. It produces high quality fertile compost – worm castings are a natural fertilizer. It keeps food wastes out of the landfill. Food waste in the landfill decomposes without oxygen, creating methane gas, which is a major contributor to global warming.
All you need to vermicompost are a worm bin, bedding, water, worms and food scraps. You can buy a ready-made worm bin, or you can us a simple plastic bin or wooden box. It will need to have a cover for darkness, and holes for air circulation. I use a large Rubbermaid tote box that I have drilled several holes alone the stop for ventilation.
The worms need to burrow in bedding to bury the garbage. Shredded paper, cardboard or leaves will work. This is a great way to recycle your junk mail and catalogs. Run this paper waste through a paper shredder and add to the bottom of your box. This bedding must be kept moist, so regular mistings of water are necessary.
Use only red worms, or “wigglers”, which are the composting worms. Feed your worms non-meat kitchen waste, such as veggie and fruits peelings and scrapes, tea bags, coffee grounds, egg shells and paper products like coffee filters, napkins and paper towels.
Every few months, remove the rapidly multiplying worms from the box and use the rich vermicompost to fertilize houseplants and garden vegetables. After cleaning the box thoroughly, add shredded paper products to the bottom and add the worms back to start the process over.
Be warned, the worms reproduce rapidly because all they do is eat and multiple. You will probably have too many worms to add back to one box, so be prepared to start new worm boxes, or you can add a few worms to several areas of your garden. They will burrow to soft garden soil and begin their cycle of eating and reproducing as if they had never been moved.
Worm farms would be a wonderful idea for school children that are interested in gardening projects. Worm boxes could be set up at school and then the children could feed the worms with all the left over school meals. This would teach a valuable lesson in the art of recycling and improving the Earth.
So the next time you don’t eat all your house salad at lunch, bring it home in a doggy bag. Can’t eat all that bread left in the complimentary breadbasket? Bring it home to the worms. Tired of dumping used coffee filters and coffee grounds in the trash? Feed it to the worms. They are heard working and they work for food, so the more food and kitchen waste you have, the happier your worms will be. You will be rewarded by a decrease in kitchen waste and an increase in produce from the garden. |
Parent Directory | Revision Log
|Links to HEAD:||(view) (download) (annotate)|
Fix not including VT in starting characters for \s.
Reword pcretest messages and clarify "first char" meaning.
Add a simple tripwire to pcretest to lock out certain modifiers.
Add VT to the set of characters recognized as white space.
Refactored auto-possessification code.
tests: Unify unicode noncharacter tests The tests have the same output for the 8, 16 and 32 bit tests, so put them into test 4 instead of duplicating it into separate tests for each library.
Correct Unicode string checking in the light of corrigendum #9.
Support (*UTF) in all libraries.
pcretest was not diagnosing characters > 0x7fffffff in 8-bit mode.
tests: Add tests for short UTF-8 and UTF-16 The only preexisting test was accidentally lost in rev 1174. Add exhaustive tests for short UTF-8 and UTF-16.
tests: Improve test coverage for pcre_valid_utf8.c Make sure to have a test for every PCRE_UTF8_ERRn.
pcre32: utf: Reject all non-characters and not just 0xfffe
pcre32: tests: Use \x?? escapes to create invalid UTF-8 Make test input data lines be UTF-8; so to construct invalid UTF-8 sequences \x?? escapes must be used.
Update character class handling to use new character case information; rework \h, \H, \v, and \V to use the same apparatus with centrally defined lists.
Fix auto-possessifying bugs when PCRE_UCP is not set, but character tables specify characters in the range 127-255 are letters, spaces, etc.
OP_NOT now supports any UTF character
Allow octal escapes up to \777 in 16-bit non-UTF mode.
Merging all the changes from the pcre16 branch into the trunk.
Rolled back trunk to r755 to prepare for merging the 16-bit branch.
Tidies for 8.21-RC1 release.
Update full set of tests with many configurations.
Patch to RunTest for use with simulations; further JIT code/test tidies.
Refactor RunTest and add JIT-specific tests.
This form allows you to request diffs between any two revisions of this file. For each of the two "sides" of the diff, enter a numeric revision.
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Lawrence Blum is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His scholarly interests include race studies, moral philosophy, philosophy of education, social and political philosophy, moral psychology, multiculturalism, and philosophy and the Holocaust.
Author of the recently published High Schools, Race, and America's Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity, and Community, published by Harvard Education Press. The book is based on a course on Race and Racism he taught at his local high school to a racially and ethnically diverse class of seniors.
You can purchase it here.
Blum has written five books: High Schools, Race, and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us About Morality, Diversity, and Community (Harvard Education Press, 2012); “I’m Not a Racist, But”: The Moral Quandary of Race (Cornell UP, 2002) (which was selected best book of the year in social philosophy, by the North American Society for Social Philosophy); Moral Perception and Particularity (Cambridge UP, 1994); A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (co-author: V.J. Seidler) (Routledge, 1989); Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
Professor Blum has also taught at UCLA (in Philosophy), Stanford School of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, and (in spring 2013), Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He has also taught about race and racism in high school (the subject of his most recent book) and works with K-12 teachers on teaching about racial subjects.
Blum is married to the historian and film scholar Judith Smith, who teaches in (and was for many years the director of) the American Studies Program at University of Massachusetts, Boston. |
How to Buy a Primary Sump Pump
Home centers sell a confusing array of sump
pumps that range from $50 to $250. But don't
despair. We've reviewed all the specs, talked
to the engineers and boiled it down to five
simple buying tips:
1. Horsepower means nothing. It's the pumping
volume in gallons per hour (GPH) that
counts. Check the capacity of your current
pump. If your current pump keeps up with the
flow during the heaviest rainstorms, buy that
capacity again. If not, buy a pump with a higher GPH rating. To find your current
pump's rating, locate its make and model number on the label and find the specs
on the manufacturer's Web site.
2. Check the “head” on the manufacturer's GPH rating. Head is the height that
water has to be lifted from the pump to the horizontal discharge pipe. More height
means harder work for the pump. The GPH rating on most good-quality pumps
includes the head (typically 10 ft.). But some manufacturers rate pump capacity
without head (“3200 GPH at 0 head” for example). That gives an unrealistic—and
misleading—estimate of pump capacity.
3. Spend the money to get a quality sump pump. Look for a caged or vertical
float switch, a motor with a UL and a CSA rating, and a pump made with a stainless
steel, cast aluminum or cast iron impeller and pump body. Avoid pumps made
from epoxy-coated parts.
4. Buy an energy-efficient pump. Once you find a pump with the correct GPH
rating, look for a model that consumes the fewest amps. This isn't about saving
electricity; high-amp pumps run hotter and burn out the float switch faster.
5. If your sump accumulates gravel or sand, buy a “top suction” pump that's “solid
passing” to prevent a stall/burnout caused by trapped gravel. Or raise a “bottom
suction”-style pump on a few bricks to keep it off the bottom of the sump.
While you're at the home center, buy a new male fitting to fit the pump outlet; pipe
primer and cement; a new check valve and rubber couplers |
FROM THE MALLEE TO RYE, MORNINGTON PENINSULA, VIC., AUST: THE ROWLEY LINK.
It would be difficult to read any local history of Rye without encountering the surname ROWLEY. Although some local histories mention members of the pioneering families moving elsewhere,this is the exception rather than the rule. Using LIME LAND LEISURE and other peninsula histories, one of my early research projects, an entry in my PENINSULA DICTIONARY HISTORY called FAMILY CONNECTIONS aimed to explain how the bride and groom became acquainted. One connection had me baffled for over a year,that between Robert Rowley senior and Christina (or Christine) Edwards*. The mystery was finally solved because of a man whose father moved from the Mallee to Rye.
Although I did not make a note of the year, I believe that I remember seeing that Robert Rowley married in 1858 or 1859. This may have been on page 144 of LIME LAND LEISURE. Ron Doig,whose mother was a Rowley, told me that Robert,aged 38,married Chistena (my spelling,probably relying on the above book),aged 22,in 1859 in Longford, Tasmania. Either the year given was wrong or the marriage notice below was published well after the ceremony.
ROWLEY-EDWARDS - By the Rev. J Smithies, at the house of Mr Joseph Tongs, Illawarra, Christina Edwards, the only daughter of Mr William Edwards, of Newborough, Fife, Scotland, to Mr Robert Rowley, of Dromana, Victoria.
RYE CEMETERY DATA.
2717 ROWLEY Robert b1822 29/12/1911 89 Christena born London,arrived Sydney 8/7/1826
2717 ROWLEY Christena b1838 3/9/1924 86 Robert born Scotland,Both Pioneers of this District.
If Robert was 38 at the time of his wedding,this would indicate that the wedding took place in 1860 or 1861.
If Christena was 22 at the time of the wedding, this would also indicate that the wedding took place in 1860 or 1861. Thus it is likely that Robert and Chistena were married in late 1860 or very early in 1861.As an earlier notice appeared in the same newspaper on 1-1-1861, the wedding was probably in December 1860.
When I saw the residence of Joseph Tongs was at Illawarra,I immediately thought of New South Wales, but Illawarra was also a station in Gippsland. Joseph Tongs' lease* on the station may have been transferred or cancelled in 1863, accounting for his arrival in Launceston from Melbourne in that year. As roads into Gippsland would have been little more than blazed tracks circa 1860,it is likely that Peter Pidoto,for whom Robert Rowley worked at Dromana, was carrying more than timber on his vessel and was delivering supplies to the Gippsland pioneers through Port Albert and other suitable landing places.
(*Joseph Tongs may have OWNED Illawarra.)
KAYE and BUTCHART will SELL by AUCTION,on an early day, which will be duly announced,The stations known as
SWAN REACH, ILLAWARRA, KILLMORIE,and ALLANDALE,situate on the Tambo River and Lake King,etc.
(P.3,Argus,5-1-1863.) Frank Rowley's move to Stratford (Gippland, as mentioned later in the journal)) may have resulted from Robert's early familiarity with the area. The Tongs family appears to have been associated with Longford, in whose police court John Tongs, known to own 100 acres on the Cressy Estate by 1865, was fined five shillings in 1861 for not registering his dog. S.Tongs did jury service in 1862. (P.5,The Cornwall Chronicle, 3-5-1862, SUPREME COURT.
It is possible that Joseph Tongs was related to Christena or her guardian.)
At the time I was working on another entry in the dictionary history called HISTORIC ORIGINS OF STREET NAMES and I received a phone call from a descendant of James Trueman in response to my letter in DESPERATELY SEEKING. Now living in Rosebud, she had once been a customer of hairdresser, Raymond Guest, of Canterbury Rd in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. His son, Raymond, still lives in that locality and told me the origins of the street names on James Trueman's grants on the western side of Truemans Rd. He also sent me the subdivision plans of the Almaray Estate, named after his mother and father and mentioned his neighbours to the east and fronting Truemans Rd, the Doigs. A bit more phone book speculation and I was talking to Ron Doig, son of poultry farmer, Alfred Doig, who had married a Rowley "chick!", and eventually subdivided the western half of Trueman's grants as the Oceanaires Estate.
In about 1909, James Little Brown (repeatedly called John by rate collectors even though he was a councillor!) mysteriously arrived from the Mallee and transformed the ti-tree and rabbit infested land at the back of Rye into beautiful pasture.
How was it that Alf Doig and James Little Brown just happened to turn up at far-flung Rye? It all revolves around the Rowley family not being quite so tied to the Rye area as generally portrayed. It was not unusual for sons to move away from the family farm; while large families were fine for helping with harvesting, the farm could not support the sons when they were ready to start their own families. This problem was mentioned in requests for the extensions of the railway from Red Hill; lack of transport to Melbourne precluded more extensive agriculture, so sons were leaving the area. One of these was the father of George Townsend (whose letter to Cinderella was the basis of my journal about Dromana etc through the eyes of a twelve year old.) Another was Michael Cain who spent time at Sale and in Adelaide (where his daughter, Mary Agnes,who married Hill Harry Cairns, was born.)
Robert Rowley was quite the nomad. His father died in Tasmania while he was quite young and his mother married Richard Kenyon. His mother and stepfather were among the earliest lime burners at the Heads,perhaps supplying another from the Apple Isle who was a Sorrento resident in 1803, John Pascoe Fawkner. Robert did not come with them! A few years later he started his own lime burning operation in the Sorrento area with Frankston pioneer, Henry Cadby Wells who walked all the way from Melbourne with his pregnant wife, and whose daughter was the first white child born in Sorrento,on the site of the Koonya Hotel (formerly "Lugger Jack" Clark's "Mornington Hotel".)
After the 1840's depression ended the lime burning venture, Wells returned to Richmond but his bootmaking must have been profitable because by 1849 he and Robert were in partnership, crayfishing in Henry's boat, which was lucrative until the boat came down on its anchor in Westernport while they visited their families. It was at this time that Henry built Clark's Cottage (demolished for extension of the Koonya.)
Robert's first house at Rye was on the foreshore opposite the original post office. He was probably fishing at the time. But his first marital abode was probably on the east side of Carrigg St in Dromana. What had he been doing since the early 1850's?
Could he have returned to Tasmania. He married Christena Edwards at Longford, Tasmania when he was about 37 and Christina, 22. Ron Doig said the marriage took place in 1859 and Nell Arnold said that it was in 1860 but Ron had access to extensive genealogy compiled by Heather Spunner. Robert was born in 1822 and died on 29-12-1911 and Christena was born in 1838 and died on 3-9-1924, aged 86, according to Rye Cemetery records.
I have speculated that Robert had been a crewman on vessels sailing between Victoria and Tasmania during the 1850's,perhaps with Henry Cadby Wells, to account for Henry calling Robert his old shipmate,but I now realise that "Shipmate" could be in reference to their crayfishing together. However, in light of his former crayfishing and later employment by Peter Pidito, this employment cannot yet be discarded as a theory. He could also have returned to Tasmania, perhaps to live with relatives or to work as a policeman*.(Cornwall Chronicle.)
As Christina had only just been born when he first came to the heads to visit his mother and stepfather and still a toddler when he started lime burning with Wells,he obviously kept in contact with the Edwards family in some way. I have formed the impression from trove that an Edwards family was involved in export.
*An OLD COLONIST. -An old colonist at present in the Gippsland district, is Mr. R. Rowley of Rye the father of
Mr. Frank Rowley, Stratford, and Mr. R. Rowley of Rye. Mr. Rowley sen. landed in Tasmania in 1824 being then 4 years old. He there resided until 1844 when he came to Rye Victoria: where he has since lived. In Tasmania he held an appointment under the Government and received from the Crown a grant of land. Mr. Rowley is in his 88th. year. ((P.2, Mornington Standard, 18-1-1908.)
Perhaps the policeman was Robert. He would have been 2 when his father, James, was transferred to Hobart from Sydney. As illustrated previously, he had not lived at Rye all the time since his arrival and he would have been in the "Northern Isle" (a bit of Tasmanian humour) by 1841 as the following shows (unless Henry Cadby Wells walked all the way to Sorrento just on the off-chance that Robert would be waiting for them.)
It is believed that after a short stay in Frankston, Henry and Hannah made their way down to Sorrento, then known as Point Nepean. They were blessed with another daughter, Mary Louise Wells, also nick-named 'Polly', born 7-6-1841 at Sorrento and Baptised in the Church of England, Parish of St. James on the 10-10-1841. Polly was the eldest of 13 children, having 12 brothers ! ! Polly is believed to have been the first white baby born to permanent settlers of the Mornington Peninsula. (THE WELLS STORY-ONLINE.)
N.B. Henry and Hannah had to go to the original cathedral in Melbourne, St James Old Cathedral, now located at West Melbourne. St James the Less at Mt Eliza did not exist until much later.
Very soon after their marriage, Robert and Christina were at Dromana. Crown allotment 4, section 1, Kangerong of 36 acres, between the western side of the Dromana Hotel and the eastern end of Sea Quinn Close, extended south to Palmerston Ave. It was subdivided very early, the Dromana Hotel and an associated 17 acres,with John McClear's house on one acre, on the western half; the eastern half consisted of 17 acres owned by mariner, Peter Pidoto, and Holden's store on one acre. The following description of Carrigg Drive refers to the eastern half, east of the covered footpath that runs alongside the hairdresser, Kindilan Society and other shops.
P.39, A DREAMTIME OF DROMANA. Holden's General Store stood near the corner of Carrigg St. Next door to the store was a slab hut where at one time the Rowleys, later of Rye, lived. Mr Rowley worked at loading Peter Pidota's (sic) craft. (The author, Colin McLear, would have been told all this by relatives, fisherman John McLear and Mrs Holden being the pioneering neighbours near Carrigg St referred to in my journal of that name.)
P.132. The petition of 9-3-1861 leaves no doubt that Mr Rowley was Robert Rowley,his signature indicating that he was not a spelling champion,almost forgetting the w in his surname.
This was not the only connection between the Rowleys and Dromana; Robert bought land on the summit of Arthurs Seat (crown allotment 25B, section B, Wannaeue of 93 acres) in 1904, in his mid 80's, to exploit its timber. James Rowley was a member of the committee of the Dromana Sports Club when it ran its last recorded (horse) racing meeting on 11-3-1927. And now the Mallee!
Robert Rowley seems to have settled on his grants (46 and 46A, section A Wannaeue of 117 acres) south of the Trueman/Guest land, in about 1867. He had earlier lived in the house on the foreshore mentioned previously. He built a new house on his farm near the present Carboor St. In 1900 Robert was assessed on the Truemans Rd farm but by 1910 he must have moved to his third house, 17 Lyons St, Rye and James Rowley, fisherman of Rye was assessed, as he was in 1919.
At about that time, Wilfred Rowley moved to the mallee (P.145 LIME LAND LEISURE.) He spent 13 years there contracting and managing an experimental farm at Carwup, south of RedCliffs. While there he met and married Emma Shaw. He also became friendly with the Doigs. Harry Doig came to visit the Rowleys at Rye and met Dorothy Rowley whom he married in 1939.
James Little Brown.
Excerpt from the Cr J.L.Brown entry in my SHIRE OF FLINDERS journal.
Jim stayed for 18 days with Robert Rowley on the west side of Truemans Rd, south of Trueman's grant.Then he went to Melbourne and bought 1500 acres from banks and trust companies. In very short time, land was cleared, burned, fenced and sown with grass. The wire netting fences kept rabbits out and those trapped inside could not escape the inevitable.Overseen by James Cain and Robert Myers, well were dug and windmills installed to pump water into concrete troughs.
As stated earlier, Jim Brown just happened to turn up at Rye in 1909. I believe that Jim had previously lived in Rye* and Wilfred Rowley's move to the Mallee might have been suggested by Jim.
* INTESTATE ESTATES
The curator of the estates of deceased persons has obtained rules to administer the estates of the fol- lowing deceased persons under Act No. 1,060: John Barnard (de bonis non adminis), of Geelong West, who died on 2nd March 1895, £400; David Brown, of Rye, who died 8th July 1900, £3,325/0/4 etc.
(P.3, Argus, 19-7-1900.)
While I was trying to find more about this David Brown, and substituting Tootgarook for Rye, I found this mention of Raymond and Alma Guest's subdivision.
Clues and News
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957) Monday 7 December 1953 p 8 Article Illustrated.
I've always had a yen for a weekend house-to get away from the city and crowds. I haven't got the house yet, but I've invested in a block of land on the Almaray Estates at Tootgarook-for only £25 deposit and£2 monthly! It's a super spot, between Rosebud and Rye, with a perfect bathing beach and a background of lovely country-side. There are several excellent blocks still available, so if you like my idea, contact Almaray Estates, 33 Edgevale Rd,, Kew. UM4212.
By the way,it was Harry Doig from the Mallee who ensured that the area's name became Tootgarook and not Birkdale which Whitaker's Tourist bus advertisements called it because of Birkdale House on the east corner of Carmichael St.
The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957) Monday 12 December 1938 p 15 Advertising
... omce cent_5775 DROMANA Rosebud Birkdale Rye - Whltaker s leave Whlglit ? 110 Flinders st 9 30 a m 5 p m
Raymond Guest was clever, sneaking advertisements into gossip type columns such as clues and news and:
Easter Parade of theShopping Spy.
I love swimming and sunbathing and the man in my life likes fishing and shooting-so we're unanimous in our praise of theAlmaray Estates at Tootgarook, a gorgeous spot on the Mornington Peninsula, between Rosebud and Rye. A new subdivision of land has recently been made and excellent blocks are available at moderate prices (cash or £25 deposit and £2 monthly). During Easter, see Mr. Guest at end of Morris st., otherwise contact
Almaray Estates, 33 Edgevale rd., Kew. (P.8, Argus, 8-4-1954.)
on 2013-08-09 00:41:56
Itellya is researching local history on the Mornington Peninsula and is willing to help family historians with information about the area between Somerville and Blairgowrie. He has extensive information about Henry Gomm of Somerville, Joseph Porta (Victoria's first bellows manufacturer) and Captain Adams of Rosebud. |
Top Document: Military Space A Travel FAQ
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1.1) What is Space A? Space A is short for "space available air transportation on government owned or controlled aircraft." Now you know why people shorten it to Space A :-) Basically Space A is a byproduct of military aircraft and commercial charter flights that are scheduled by the Department of Defense to perform military missions. When mission and cargo loads allow, there are often seats made available to eligible people. With a little bit of patience and flexibility, you can travel all over the world for almost nothing. 1.2) Is Space A travel a reasonable substitute for airline travel? That depends on what your goals are. Success with Space A travel depends on flexibility and good timing. If your schedule is flexible and you have the financial resources to cover the "worst case" scenario (paying for a hotel for several days and then flying home commercial), space available travel can save you money most of the time. In fact, if the place you want to visit is a remote military base that is difficult to reach by commercial flights, Space A might actually be more convenient than trying to arrange commercial flights. 1.3) Will Space A travel cost much? In general, no. There is a head tax on CONUS outbound or federal inspection fee on CONUS inbound international commercial charters. Meals may be purchased at a nominal fee (usually under $3.00) at of most air terminals. Meal service on Air Force commercial charter flights is free. And you might spend a bit on phone calls to find out about flights, a room for the night along the way, or a bus fare to get from one base to another. As a rule of thumb, figure that a domestic Space A trip will average between $25 and $50 each way, depending on how frugal you are (e.g. take a bus vs. rent a car) and how lucky you are (e.g. get a room on base vs. pay for a hotel room). |
CINCINNATI – Napoleon in Egypt, a history exhibit exploring the time the French conqueror spent in one of the world’s greatest civilizations, will open March 3 at the Cincinnati History Museum for a two month stay.
This exhibit brings two cultures together to study Napoleon’s fascination with Egypt, the roots of Egyptology and the amazing impact these countries had on one another.
As an incident in history, Napoleon’s agenda in conquering Egypt remains unclear.
During his expedition, hundreds of administrators, artists, poets, botanists, zoologists, surveyors and economists were intermingled with the French soldiers.
Shortly after a devastating military defeat in Egypt, Napoleon abandoned his army to return to France and appoint himself Emperor. Eventually, the forsaken French soldiers were forced to surrender to the British.
However, the “tag-a-long” savants were triumphant and brought back to France enough information to fill Descriptions de L’Egypte, a 22-volume authoritative tome on Egyptology.
It was during this occupation that the Rosetta Stone was discovered. Inscribed in Greek, hieroglyphics, and demotic, the Stone enabled linguists to translate other Egyptian writings. A reproduction of the Stone is included in the exhibit.
Other artifacts to be on display include a depiction of The Battle of the Pyramids, a medal commemorating the return of Napoleon to France, and a section of the Book of the Dead, along with many etchings, letters, and political cartoons from the time Napoleon’s people were in Egypt. The exhibit will also feature a small theatre where visitors can watch a brief video on Napoleon and his time spent in Egypt.
Steps to mummification.
Visitors will also have an opportunity to take a closer look into the mummification process, including a demonstration of all of the steps the ancient Egyptians used in mummifying their pharaohs and noblemen.
Napoleon in Egypt runs through May 31 at the Cincinnati History Museum at Cincinnati Museum Center, Admission to the Cincinnati History Museum is $6.50 for adults, $5.50 for seniors, $4.50 for children 3 through 12 years-of-age and $3.50 for children 2 and under. For more information, call 513-287-7000 or visit the museum Web site at www.cincymuseum.org. |
Proliferation represents a quantitative as well as a qualitative threat. Contact mines designed in 1908 can still be found in world inventories and will continue to be used simply because they are relatively inexpensive and simple to manufacture, obtain, and maintain. While their lethal range is not as great as newer mines, their mere existence poses a potential threat. Indeed, the psychological nature of the mine threat is one reason why mine warfare is so effective.An imposing array of modern mine-countermeasures (MCM) systems continues to be developed and procured to enhance the capabilities of dedicated forces and vigorously pursue the transition to an organic MCM capability. The Navy’s dedicated MCM forces, composed of active and reserve surface MCM ships, MHC ships, MCM helicopters, and explosive-ordnance-disposal divers are among the best in the world. With the addition of the MCM command-and-support ship Inchon (MCS12), the Navy possesses a true expeditionary mine countermeasures capability. Aggressive development of organic MCM systems for forward-deployed carrier battle groups and amphibious ready groups is under way. Focused science, technology, and developmental efforts are producing solutions to difficult mine-warfare problems. For very shallow water, the shallow-water assault breaching system (SABRE) system and the Distributed Explosive Technology net system are in development for delivery in FY 01. These complementary systems are designed to defeat mines and obstacles in the difficult surf-zone region. Contributions from organizations outside the traditional mine-warfare community are augmenting dedicated and organic MCM capabilities. For example, the Oceanographer of the Navy collects and disseminates environmental data essential to effective mine countermeasures. Mine warfare-relevant emphasis in projects dealing with MCM digital-route surveys; maintenance of a global mine-like contact database; and development of mine warfare-specific environmental databases augment the Navy's ability to rapidly assess, avoid, or neutralize the sea-mine threat. |
When I tell people I'm a black belt in Karate, most look at me as if I'm nuts. They can't believe I spend $85 a month and three nights a week to do battle in one of those sweaty, stuffy, frill-free schools. Others chop the air and emit the high-pitched wail made famous by Bruce Lee. After six years of this I just shake my head and think, "What a bozo!"
Karate is not about feisty little tumbler superheroes who always prevail against the bad guys. Karate is about balance. Part physical, part spiritual, it offers a way for hyperstressed, hyperactive, hyperachievers to find a peaceful, powerful center.
Mike McCue is the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Paper Software, Inc., which creates products for virtual reality on the Internet. A black sash, he's studied Closed Crane Kung-fu since 1985. "Starting up a business is like being in a long sparring match. You get hit, you get surprised. Kung-fu has trained me to keep going. You learn more, practice more, work harder. You keep your eye on the goal."
The martial arts have as many dimensions as they have students. And there are 10 million people practicing the martial arts in this country — last year 1.5 million new participants signed up for classes.
What they'll find depends on what they're looking for. For many, of course, Karate and the other martial arts build self-defense skills. For others, the study of Karate is a way to focus mentally, to clear your mind of the daily round of endless meetings, political skirmishes, and do-or-die deadlines. In any martial art, mental toughness is everything. Because once you're out on that floor, there's no turning back.
Afternoon, Day One: Walnut Creek, California
My kids ask me if I can do a spinning back kick," says Greg Schultz, 45, a financial adviser and a fourth-degree black belt. "I tell them they've been watching too many Steven Seagal pictures — that's just Hollywood Karate."
I've traveled from Boston to see how Karate is taught at JKA Karate of California, a San Francisco dojo (school). Greg is one of the dojo's top students. He's also the head of two money management firms, Retirement Planning, Inc. and Asset Allocation Advisors, Inc. in Walnut Creek. Greg is one of several businesspeople I know who, year in and year out, devote their Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights to training in Karate.
Greg took up Karate in the fall of 1970, when he was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Karate was exotic, and that was good enough reason to try it. But it wasn't until he left school for a year, at age 21, that he got hooked. He was waiting tables in Maui when a friend told him about the Hawaii Karate Association. There he discovered the discipline and structure that was missing from his beach-bum existence. It wasn't a spiritual thing, he insists. "Karate was just fun."
Karate is still fun. But it's different. "It's more of a personal quest," he says. "It has less and less to do with other people and more and more to do with me. I'm ultimately trying to test and push and improve myself. It's no longer a question of: `Can I kick faster than the other guy?' The question now is: `Can I kick faster?' Period."
I ask if he's learned anything from Karate that he's applied to his business life.
Recently, he replies, the top six students took the school's sensei (teacher), Kenichi Haramoto, out for his 53rd birthday. Beer and sake were flowing. So were the stories.
"I don't think Sensei fully appreciates the character building he's done for us. So we tried to convey some examples beyond the superficial elements of technique and conditioning. When it was my turn to speak I told them about my business philosophy, which I call the Haramoto approach to business. It's very simple. When you attack, you resolve never to retreat. Sensei has this focus of purpose where it's clear that if he's coming at you he won't take a step back. It really screws up your opponent's counterattack. It becomes a battle of wills.
"It's all tied together," he continues, "particularly in business, where you face a lot of obstacles and it consumes all your energy and you rarely have a clear path. You need to be really focused and have a resolve that cannot be shaken loose."
He pauses and leans back in his chair. "Maybe I'd have the same discipline even if I hadn't trained in Karate. But I doubt it. I believe it's made a huge difference."
Evening, Day One: JKA Karate Dojo, San Francisco
"Line up!" snaps sensei Kenichi Haramoto. We scramble to the back of the room and stand shoulder to shoulder. Greg Schultz, the highest-ranking student, heads the line.
"Seizaaaaaan!" Greg shouts, leading the bow-in ceremony that begins each class. We kneel on the wooden floor. "Mokusuuu!" he commands. We close our eyes and concentrate on our breathing. I try to adjust to the unfamiliar surroundings: the first floor of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in Japantown, where JKA Karate holds its classes. But the hum of a fan distracts me. "Mokuso Yame!" We open our eyes after 30 seconds. Still kneeling, we bow to Sensei. He bows to us. We're ready to begin.
We spread out across the back of the room and face Sensei Haramoto. A traditional instructor, he speaks few words. Instead he demonstrates each move. Then he counts, as do all Karate instructors, in Japanese.
He throws a double-kick combination. "Ichi!...Ni!...San!" In an explosion of white we follow him, kicking out with one leg, then the other, as we lunge across the floor. We react to the count and kick at an imaginary opponent.
"Shi," he continues. "Goh!...Mawat-te!" We turn, executing a downward block. "Ichi!" he begins again. "Ni...no extra motion, no extra motion," he says, instructing us to keep the moves clean. Everyone stops as Sensei steps into a deep front stance and shows us how our kicks are supposed to look. A 53-year-old knee-surgery survivor, he more closely resembles a 35-year-old dancer as he gracefully extends one leg and then the other.
Sensei is teaching us kihon, combinations of basic punching, blocking, and kicking techniques. Through hundreds of repetitions, we are systematically training our arms and legs to control a surprise attacker.
We practice a half-dozen additional combinations. We drill at sparring. Then come kata, or forms, the most graceful part of Karate. We face a side wall covered with calligraphy scrolls and move through sequences of punches, kicks, strikes, and blocks. Some slow, some explosive, they're choreographed to defend against multiple attackers. Resembling powerful dance routines, they develop strength and improve reflexes. The discipline required might even help perfect character.
After three sets of four katas, we form a circle around the hall's periphery. Everyone squats. Greg counts while we do 30 leg lifts. Each person then takes a turn counting off an exercise: 30 push-ups, 30 counts of hip twisting, 30 counts of leg extensions. The class started 90 minutes ago. I'm ready to collapse. After 15 sets, the count returns to Greg.
I get up, thankful that I've made it through the class. Huh? Everyone else is still squatting. Greg begins the entire series again. After 15 additional sets, I'm totally spent.
We bow, meditate, and recite the five principles of Karate: "Seek perfection of character; be faithful; endeavor; respect others; refrain from violent behavior."
At last, the class is over. Until tomorrow.
Evening, Day Two: JKA Karate Dojo
I walk to the center of the floor and face Greg Schultz. We bow and begin. Elbows in, knees bent, we watch each other warily for a few moments — each waiting for the other to pounce. My pulse is racing. I get up on my toes and bounce nervously. It's my first time sparring with him. I don't know what to expect.
Greg is calm. Focused. His brown eyes observe my every move. Watching. Waiting.
Finally my patience gives out. "Eeeiii!" I shout as I lunge forward, concentrating all my energy into the sound. I explode off my right leg, aiming my left fist at his neck. Aha! I think I've got him. Dead wrong. He steps to the side and taps my fist away. In a flash he nails me in the solar plexus with a front snap-kick. My stomach muscles contract instinctively but there's no pain. He held back. A millimeter farther and the kick would've knocked me into next week.
After 20 years of training, Greg's control is masterful. But now I've learned something: he waits for his opponent to make the first move. As in business and life itself, in Karate you're at your most vulnerable when you attack.
Next time, I'll remember.
Coordinates: Crum (email@example.com) is president of Aiki Works Inc. of Aspen, CO.
Natalie Engler (firstname.lastname@example.org), a freelance writer covering technology and business, has studied Shotokan Karate for the past six years at the Boston Karate Club.
"How to Start in the Martial Arts"
"The Better Dojo Bureau"
"White Collar, Black Belt" |
With the U.S. election over, all eyes are on China and the Communist Party's National Congress. Yes, once again it's that time of the decade when when the country's ruling party welcomes its new leader to take the podium. And, as outgoing Premier Hu Jintao began his speech, warning his comrades against corruption, it has been revealed that some prominent names have had their Twitter accounts tampered with.
Amongst the hacked were Tsinghua University academic Patrick Chovanec, the China Media Project, Adam Minter, and Christina Larson. As always with cases like these, the finger points at nationalist hackers, either sanctioned by or not sanctioned by the government. One firm who fell foul of the dark side of China's Internet was Google, whose corporate site was hacked after it decided to stop censoring content on its Chinese site. When the site was censored, the firm had no option but to pull out of China: as a result, its market share on both search and maps is on the wane. |
Meats and Cheese Drive Slight Increase in Retail Food Prices
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 12, 2012 – Retail food prices at the supermarket increased slightly during the first quarter of 2012 with protein staples – meats and cheese – showing the greatest increase in price, according to the latest American Farm Bureau Federation Marketbasket Survey.
The informal survey shows the total cost of 16 food items that can be used to prepare one or more meals was $52.47, up $3.24 or about 7 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2011. Of the 16 items surveyed, 13 increased and three decreased in average price compared to the prior quarter. The cost for the overall basket of foods increased about 7 percent compared to one year ago.
About two-thirds of the quarter-to-quarter increase in the marketbasket of foods was due to higher retail prices for sliced deli ham, sirloin tip roast, ground chuck, bacon and cheddar cheese.
“Retail prices for meats and cheese were higher in the first quarter of the year due to generally strong demand and tight supplies, a situation that carried over from 2011,” said John Anderson, an AFBF senior economist. “According to Agriculture Department data, retail meat prices probably peaked sometime in the first quarter, and wholesale prices have declined noticeably in recent weeks. This suggests that retail meat prices may decline as 2012 progresses.”
Reversing a decline in the prior quarter, sliced deli ham increased 74 cents to $5.43 per pound; sirloin tip roast increased 60 cents to $4.75 per pound; ground chuck increased 36 cents to $3.53 per pound; shredded cheddar increased 33 cents to $4.65 per pound and bacon increased 16 cents to $4.21 per pound.
Other items that increased in price compared to the fourth quarter of last year were bagged salad, up 37 cents to $2.85 per pound; flour, up 27 cents to $2.65 for a 5-pound bag; Russet potatoes, up 26 cents to $3.01 for a 5-pound bag; orange juice, up 19 cents to $3.36 for a half-gallon; apples, up 19 cents to $1.59 per pound; toasted oat cereal, up 6 cents to $3.13 for a 9-ounce box; large eggs, up 5 cents to $1.77 per dozen; and vegetable oil, up 1 cent to $2.97 for a 32-ounce bottle.
Whole milk decreased 23 cents to $3.53 per gallon; white bread decreased 7 cents to $1.85 for a 20-ounce loaf and boneless chicken breasts decreased 5 cents to $3.19 per pound.
Several items showing an increase in retail price from quarter-to-quarter also showed year-to-year increases. Compared to one year ago sirloin tip roast increased 20 percent, ground chuck increased 14 percent and sliced deli ham increased 11 percent.
The year-to-year direction of the Marketbasket Survey tracks with the federal government’s Consumer Price Index (http://www.bls.gov/cpi/) report for food at home. As retail grocery prices have increased gradually over time, the share of the average food dollar that America’s farm and ranch families receive has dropped.
“Through the mid-1970s, farmers received about one-third of consumer retail food expenditures for food eaten at home and away from home, on average. Since then, that figure has decreased steadily and is now about 16 percent, according to the Agriculture Department’s revised Food Dollar Series,” Anderson said. USDA’s new Food Dollar Series may be found online at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FoodDollar/app/.
Using the “food at home and away from home” percentage across-the-board, the farmer’s share of this quarter’s $52.47 marketbasket would be $8.40.
AFBF, the nation’s largest general farm organization, has been conducting the informal quarterly Marketbasket Survey of retail food price trends since 1989. The mix of foods in the marketbasket was updated during the first quarter of 2008.
According to USDA, Americans spend just under 10 percent of their disposable annual income on food, the lowest average of any country in the world. A total of 64 shoppers in 24 states participated in the latest survey, conducted in March.
Sidebar: Tracking Milk and Egg Trends
For the first quarter of 2012, shoppers reported the average price for a half-gallon of regular whole milk was $2.46, up 9 cents from the prior quarter. The average price for one gallon of regular whole milk was $3.53, down 23 cents. Comparing per-quart prices, the retail price for whole milk sold in gallon containers was about 25 percent lower compared to half-gallon containers, a typical volume discount long employed by retailers.
The average price for a half-gallon of rBST-free milk was $3.42, up 8 cents from the last quarter, about 40 percent higher than the reported retail price for a half-gallon of regular milk ($2.46).
The average price for a half-gallon of organic milk was $4.19, up 28 cents compared to the prior quarter, about 70 percent higher than the reported retail price for a half-gallon of regular milk ($2.46).
Compared to a year ago (first quarter of 2011), the retail price for regular milk in gallon containers was up about 2 percent, while regular milk in half-gallon containers rose 9 percent. The average retail price for rBST-free milk increased 6 percent compared to the prior year, while organic milk was up 13 percent.
For the first quarter of 2012, the average price for one dozen regular eggs was $1.77, up 5 cents compared to the prior quarter. The average price for a dozen “cage-free” eggs was $3.39, up 42 cents compared to the prior quarter but nearly double (90 percent higher) the price of regular eggs. Compared to a year ago (first quarter of 2011), regular eggs increased 8 percent while “cage-free” eggs increased 6 percent.
|Contacts:|| Tracy Taylor Grondine
| Cyndie Sirekis |
Remarks by Joshua M. Sharfstein, M.D, Principal Deputy Commissioner of Food and Drugs, at the Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee Meeting on July 16, 2010
Thank you for a few moments of your time this morning. I asked for this chance to come speak with you to express the appreciation of FDA for the remarkable commitment and expertise you have brought to this scientific advisory committee.
Prior to coming to FDA, I served as the city health commissioner of Baltimore City. Before that I served on the staff of Congressman Henry Waxman. And I am trained and have worked as a pediatrician.
So as you might imagine, I had at least three good reasons to celebrate the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act last year.
This law is intended to improve health in the United States – by protecting children from addiction and disease, helping tobacco users quit, and reducing the enormous toll of suffering and death from tobacco products in this country.
To succeed, FDA needs good advice.
I want to take this opportunity to describe publicly how FDA assembled such a terrific group to help us as we launch tobacco regulation in the United States – and how we address issues related to conflict of interest and bias.
Last fall, FDA received more than 100 nominations for voting members of this committee. We then asked the Assistant Secretary for Health, Dr. Howard Koh, to bring together public health leaders from the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Trade Commission. We gave this group the requirements of the Tobacco Control Act and a big pile of CVs. They then worked to identify top experts to advise our new program.
Experts like Dr. Jonathan Samet, a member of the Institute of Medicine who was twice awarded the Surgeon General’s Medallion for his work as editor for Reports of the Surgeon General on tobacco.
Experts like Dr. Dorothy Hatsukami, a Professor of Cancer Prevention at the University of Minnesota who edited the chapter on nicotine addiction in the Surgeon General’s Report on how tobacco causes disease.
Experts like Dr. Neal Benowitz, the Chief of Clinical Pharmacology at the UCSF School of Medicine, a past president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and one of the scientific editors of the National Cancer Institute monograph on the health risks of low tar cigarettes.
Experts like Dr. Melanie Wakefield, a leader in mass media, advertising, marketing, brand images and warning labels, and behavioral research. She has served as the senior editor to the National Cancer Institute monograph on the role of the media in promoting and reducing tobacco use.
And experts like Dr. Jack Henningfield, a global leader in addiction research who has advised HHS, the World Health Organization, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer. He served as scientific editor of the Report of the Surgeon General on the Health Consequences of Smoking: Nicotine Addiction.
I could go on and mention every one of you. But let me just say that we are honored to have such leading experts serve as advisers, and we deeply appreciate your counsel and perspective.
Dr. Koh and his team did a terrific job identifying top experts. But that was just step one. We next evaluated conflict of interest before making any final selections.
This is an obligation the agency takes very seriously for all of our external advisory committees – both in assembling the committee, and before each and every meeting.
Our approach to the tobacco committee started with the fact that no voting member on this committee is permitted to have a financial interest in the tobacco industry during their service on the committee or for the 18 months prior to their appointment. This not only makes sense … it is specified in the law.
In addition, before each meeting, we determine the agenda and then compile a list of products and firms that could be affected by the discussion and outcomes of the meeting and any FDA decision based on the committee’s recommendations. This list could include tobacco products, laboratory tests, or even drugs and devices if these will be discussed or implicated. We send you this list along with a confidential financial disclosure form and instructions for completing the form. Voting members then complete this form, identifying all financial interests that they have in the products or firms.
These financial interests include all stocks and investments, consulting relationships, research support and grants, employment, patents, work as an expert witness (including the specific topics of testimony), and other activities. We count imputed interests, such as grants to the institution and the interests of a spouse or minor child.
This confidential information is then reviewed by staff from various offices in accordance with FDA’s procedures: the Center for Tobacco Products, FDA’s Advisory Committee Oversight and Management Staff, FDA’s Ethics and Integrity Staff, and, as necessary, the Office of General Counsel/Ethics Division of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Based on these reviews, we consider whether the meeting will have a direct and predictable effect on these financial interests. If there is a disqualifying financial interest, we will generally ask that you recuse yourselves from the meeting. If there is a disqualifying conflict of interest, you do not participate unless granted a waiver. A waiver can only be granted under limited circumstances and would be made public. We have not granted any waivers for TPSAC meetings to date.
According to our law and regulations, when specific products come under discussion, we consider appearances that may arise from personal and business relationships in accord with the standards of ethical conduct for all government employees. With the guidance of ethics staff, we then determine whether an appearance concern outweighs the value of your contribution to a particular meeting. When such issues arise, we may ask additional questions of you or ask you to step back from meetings.
In addition to taking steps to address conflict of interest, FDA regulations permit the agency to remove a member from an advisory committee who demonstrates bias that interferes with the ability to provide us with objective advice.
In applying this rule, we understand that a stated opinion on a scientific matter does not necessarily mean that a member would have a closed mind on a particular issue. After all, by definition, experts have views about issues that fall within their particular areas of expertise.
I know that this whole process can be burdensome on you. But I also know why this process exists. It exists to ensure that the integrity of the expert advice FDA receives on tobacco and all other issues handled by the agency.
It is a process supported by the Department of Health and Human Services and recently affirmed by the Office of Inspector General.
It is also a process that FDA stands behind.
When questions are raised from any quarter, we review them. We take them seriously. We are prepared to take appropriate action when we find the concerns have merit … and we are prepared to hold steady when we find the concerns are not justified.
Identifying top experts … applying our laws and regulations fairly … This is how we benefit from your expertise to develop an effective public health program on tobacco.
Good luck today, and thank you. |
Policy Statement and Student Self-Evaluation
The policy of the Online College is to offer students educational opportunities which may otherwise not be possible in on-campus programs. Online courses are not an easy way to get college credit without working. Online courses are designed to be comparable to on-campus courses in terms of subject-matter covered, course objectives, and competency testing. Although regular, on-campus attendance is not required, the student can expect to spend as much, if not more, time on course work as he/she would in an on-campus course. Success in an online course requires a high degree of self-discipline and communication skills. Online College teachers carefully monitor all students progress. Students who are not keeping up with assignments may be withdrawn from the course.
Other than new or transient students, a student must have a minimum GPA of 2.0 at the time of registration in order to register for Internet classes. Approval of the academic division Associate Vice-president is required for exception to this procedure.
Two facts stand out among online students:
(1) The withdrawal rate is typically higher than that of on-campus courses.
(2) The grades of students who complete the course are typically very good.
Ask yourself the following question: "Am I a self-motivated, serious student who is willing to keep up with my assignments without letting up, and who is willing to communicate frequently with my teacher and ask for help whenever I need it?" If your answer is "Yes," Online College courses are for you, and the chances are very good that you will succeed. |
How late is too late to start saving for retirement?
This question is difficult because the answer depends on your income and assets, your goals for retirement, and many other factors. Ideally, you should begin saving for retirement in your 20s. More time to save enhances your chances of having the kind of retirement lifestyle you want.
If you're in your 40s or older and haven't saved much (or anything) yet, you may face a challenge in building the retirement fund you need. The shorter your time frame, the less room you have for error. But don't panic--it's never too late to start saving. You may still be able to secure a comfortable retirement for yourself, but you may have to make some tough choices to do so. Here are a few tips if you're getting a late start: Save as much as possible: The more you save, the more you'll have when you retire. Try to maximize your contributions to IRAs, 401(k)s, and other tax-advantaged vehicles. Then supplement your retirement fund with mutual funds, savings accounts, and other investments. Cut current expenses: Chances are, not all of your expenses are absolutely essential. If you can wipe out or trim certain expenses, such as expensive coffees and daily lunches out, you'll free up more money to invest for retirement. Invest more aggressively: This can help you build a large retirement fund in a short time. Certain stocks and mutual funds may enable your savings to grow more rapidly. The tradeoff: These investments are subject to market risk which will expose you to greater volatility, including a possible loss of principal. Before investing in a mutual fund, carefully consider its investment objectives, risks, fees, and expenses, which are contained in the prospectus available from the fund. Review the prospectus carefully, including the discussion of fund classes and fees and how they apply to you. Delay retirement: You may have no choice but to delay your retirement until after age 65. This strategy will buy you more time to build your nest egg. Plus, the more years you work, the fewer years of retirement you'll have to fund. Rethink your retirement goals: Set more realistic goals for your retirement (no beach house on the Riviera, for example). That way, you won't need as much money to fund your retirement.
If you fear you're getting too late a start, or you're not sure where to start, consult a financial professional. He or she can help you map out a plan to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you need to be when you retire. |
Called the “Olympics of Art,” the Venice Biennale brings together some of the best contemporary artists from around the world, making it a must-visit art show at least once in a person’s lifetime. (In other words, let’s add it to the bucket list.) This year, it opened to the public on June 4 and it will run until November 27. The Venice Biennale takes place only once every two years (in odd years) and is attended by over 300,000 visitors.
Joe Pagetta, a media relations representative, writer and singer-songwriter in Nashville (and a frequent visitor to My Modern Met), just wrote to us to tell us about one of the most interesting installations he witnessed first-hand at this year’s Biennale.
“One of the most powerful — and fun — exhibits I encountered at the 2011 Venice Biennale was by the alias Norma Jeane. It’s an interactive installation meant to break down and transform over time as visitors engage with it. It started as a tidy block of plasticine in late May (see the picture below of how it started) in the colors of the Egyptian flag: black, white and red, and its title, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) refers to some of the most popular hashtags on Twitter during recent Egyptian and Arab world uprisings. You can still make out some of the block in the pictures, but you can also see how complete and creative chaos have taken over the room.
“Visitors are encouraged to take apart the block and, for the most part, do whatever they please, even take some of it with them, as long as they don’t leave it in another exhibit. The result is overwhelming and moving. And sometimes it’s funny, even though what Norma Jeane is getting at is nothing but. There are love notes, ‘I was here’ type creations, and humor. See how one visitor amended another’s creation in the last photo.” |
Save Money at Home
Energy Conservation Opportunities (ECOs) are abundant on the campus of FHSU. However, you also have opportunities to save money and think green in your own home.
One of the easiest ways to save money on your home heating and cooling bill is to adjust your thermostat at night while you are sleeping and during the day when you are away. Try adjusting your thermostat 10 degrees cooler in the winter and 10 degrees warmer in the summer. Daily adjustments for an eight-hour period can easily lower your utility bill by 10%. Better yet, buy a programmable thermostat to make the changes for you. You can program it so the temperature is comfortable before you get home from work or before you wake up in the morning. A $50 programmable thermostat will pay for itself with energy savings in the first year.
Please continue to look for other opportunities to reduce utility consumption in your work, study, living, recreation or learning space on campus. |
The Prince of Egypt
Using subtlety in preference to bombast, Dreamworks' biblical epic may be destined to become an animated classic. Richard Buskin talks to the audio team behind The Prince of Egypt
A BLOOD-AND-GUTS chariot race, a massive sandstorm, a pillar offire that reaches the sky, an exodus of more than 100,000 people, a burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, and no less than ten plagues were on the menu for the sound team that toiled for up to three years on Dreamworks' recent animated feature, The Prince of Egypt.
The directive from the studio's top brass was for the audio elements to be developed in tandem with the visuals, as the animators would be using the audio to help shape the visuals from the line-drawing phase onwards. Consequently, a far higher proportion of the sound work took place during production (as opposed to postproduction) than is the case on regular live action features.
'We pre-edit this type of film so that there's no unnecessary work done by the animators,' explains Nick Fletcher, supervising editor on The Prince of Egypt. 'The script that we start with isn't usually as tight as one on a live action movie. A lot of the people in the story department often sketch ideas and even whole sequences, pinning their drawings up on the wall and discussing everything. Then, being that we have the Avid here, it's very easy to point a video camera at those drawings and shoot them in, so that is why we now edit stuff at an earlier stage than we used to. Next we record scratch dialogue here, put music on as well as sound effects, and that is how we kind of build the story reel.
'This obviously is when ideas are very loosely developed, and the editing therefore becomes part of the process in developing the story,' he concludes. 'When people are fairly comfortable with a sequence we then bring the actors in, and we record the final production dialogue and cut that against our storyboards.'
'During the production phase my main directive was to create a fluid environment and bits of action for the transition from storyboards to animation,' adds sound designer Lon Bender who, along with Wylie Stateman, founded the Soundelux Entertainment Group back in 1982. 'The fluidness of the movement of the characters through space was totally undeveloped because they were just voices in an ADR studio and storyboards on a one-dimensional piece of paper. The movement and environment for them to act in was often created by the sound, and then the animators were able to do all of the layouts and design the movement of the characters from one location on the screen to another from the visual standpoint.'
For his part, the fact that he was so involved in the overall development of the film made Nick Fletcher feel that his job extended beyond that of picture editor. 'Whereas with live action footage you make your cuts from the daily rushes, as the editor on a film like The Prince of Egypt you can actually design shots too,' he says. 'You can say, "I'd love to get a crowd shot here", and you knock up a rough sketch and put it in, and if it works then we'll carry it through into production. We're involved in the storytelling process from the beginning, and I think that's more interesting in a way.'
Given the high cost and time-consuming nature of animation, there is normally not nearly as much shooting of new scenes on a feature-length cartoon as on a live action picture, yet there were still certain shots in The Prince of Egypt that, once viewed, required re-animating. At the same time, while Lon Bender and Wylie Stateman (his partner at Soundelux Hollywood) were involved from the movie's inception, several audio ideas were also developed in the cutting room, and so there was often a close collaboration between the Dreamworks and Soundelux teams.
A case in point is the creation of the voice of God for the pivotal scene when Moses hears from his maker via the burning bush. 'That was a particularly interesting challenge for me, and something that I was very fond of working on,' comments Nick Fletcher. 'I remember we tried so many different versions of that. Being that it had the theological aspect to it that you don't really get in most movies, some brilliant ideas just didn't work on religious grounds. For instance, in terms of the effects that we tried out to manipulate the voice, if you want to make someone sound like an alien or the Devil it's relatively easy, but of course that was a no-go for us. Idid a version myself using the actors, actresses and children within the film, kind of morphing from one voice to another, which for me was great fun to do and produced a pretty amazing sound. But it crossed the line theologically and so we had to abandon that idea.'
The task of creating God's voice was thus handed to Lon Bender and the team working at the facility of the film's music composer, Hans Zimmer. 'The challenge with that voice was to try to evolve it into something that had not been heard before,' says Bender. 'We did a lot of research into the voices that had been used for past Hollywood movies as well as for radio shows, and we were trying to create something that had never been previously heard not only from a casting standpoint but from a voice manipulation standpoint as well.'
The solution was to use the voice of actor Val Kilmer to suggest the kind of voice we hear inside our own heads in our everyday lives--as opposed to the larger than life tones with which the Creator has been endowed in prior celluloid incarnations.
The chariot race, on the other hand, demanded a sound that realistically conveyed the flimsy, lightweight construction of vehicles of the day. After much experimenting, bamboo and a variety of squeaks were settled upon as the raw elements with which the Foley artists could perform their moves.
'We wanted to get away from the classic Hollywood idea that, in this kind of setting, weight equals excitement,' says Lon Bender. 'We wanted something in the mid to high frequency range, not only allowing the characters to be in an environment that was real from an historic standpoint, but also enabling us to test how we could use mid to high frequency sounds that work with a score that has a lot of low and mid frequency sounds from the percussion section. In fact that was quite successful, because we weren't competing within the aural spectrum with the score, and so the chariot race not only turned out to be historically accurate, but also entirely separate from the music.'
Again frequency considerations came into play during a desert montage that highlights the changes taking place with regard to Moses' perspective on himself and the world around him, by focusing on his own diminishing stature in relation to the increasing size of his environment.
'The low frequencies expand as he gets further and further out into the desert and as the desert grows,' explains Bender. 'As we dissolve from one phase of his life to another, long exhaling breaths emphasise his new take on life, and the sound of the desert gets deeper and deeper and deeper, and finally it goes into the windstorm that completely takes over the screen. That then contrasts with the silence that follows, and the same is true with the Angel of Death sequence, which is one of my favourites.'
In this scene, which has no music, the Angel's sound comprises the breaths of adults and children, while extremely sharp knives are used to convey the Angel's movements and the souls of the deceased are represented by a single exhale.
'We purposely played everything very quiet and very subtly to add to the feeling of danger, instead of going in the traditional Hollywood direction of everything getting louder and more exciting,' says Bender. 'We went for a much more surgical sort of scariness where things are extremely quiet and lurking around in the shadows. I think that scene is very successful.'
Equally successful in its own way is the scene that depicts the parting of the Red Sea, blending the powerful visuals with huge oceanic and gale-force wind sounds that, courtesy once more of keeping a sharp ear on frequency differences, manage to circumvent Hans Zimmer's dramatic score.
'I had the elements of that score in my hands as we were putting the sounds together,' says Bender. 'There was a certain amount of clashing going on. In fact, we had to re-envision some of the big, broad sounds--mostly of the water playing against the rocks and against the sand, and where the water goes right by the camera--in order to make room for everything. These were the things that were less static, whereas the things that were static did not fly because of all of the elements of the music, which included a lot of strong woodwind instruments and also some synthesiser pads that were very heavy. These gave size and scope to it but they also conflicted with the broad organic sounds, so we went for the things that were less static and that seemed to work very well.'
Multiple systems were used on the Prince project; Pro Tools integrated with Nick Fletcher's Avid, while WaveFrame was also used for a lot of the editing.
'We did a lot of our previews and playbacks off of the WaveFrames where we were coming off the hard drive,' recalls Lon Bender. 'We also used the Dolby ISDN line to play back a lot of the material off Pro Tools when I was at a remote location in San Francisco, which is where I was most of the time.'
At Soundelux, with Bender and Stateman in their complementary roles as sound designer and supervisor, the audio postproduction team consisted of two dialogue-ADR supervisors, eight sound editors, assistant sound editor, Foley supervisor, Foley mixer, a pair of Foley walkers, Foley recordist and to people taking care of any additional audio. Andy Nelson was the dialogue mixer, Anna Behlmer the effects mixer and Shawn Murphy mixed the music.
'Because there's no production track and no contamination from natural exterior recordings, you have a lot more versatility in terms of what you play and the control that you have,' says Bender, who supervised and also participated in the mix of The Prince of Egypt on Stage One at Todd-AO West. 'Animated mixes are more complex for that reason. You really have to make choices to play certain things and leave out certain things, whereas with live action you're often stuck with a production track that dictates how you play certain scenes.'
Andy Nelson spent a couple of months mixing 24 channels of dialogue on an Otari Premier console that also assigned 30 channels to the music and 64 channels to the effects. This was the first full mix that he had ever done for an animated feature, and he concurs with Bender about the advantages and drawbacks.
'It's good that you don't have to get rid of any extraneous sounds,' he says. 'The bad thing is that you've got to start creating an environment for these voices to live in, because, obviously, if you just play them the way that they're recorded straight off the microphone it's going to sound like a radio show. The thing that was interesting to me was that, right from the beginning when they discussed the style of the soundtrack and the way that we would go about the mix, it was very clear that they wanted to create a soundtrack that would be more inclined towards a live action film than a traditional animated feature. You see, it was dealing with a serious subject instead of the usual light-hearted ones that cartoons usually revolve around. In terms of the sound and the visuals you're normally creating a big illusion, but the only illusion in this film related to the characters being drawn.
'From my point of view with the dialogue, what I really strove hard to achieve was a way of creating an environment for the voices to live in, to get a sense of realistic ambience rather than just slinging a lot of echo on things and making them big and broad in the way that animated films are generally treated. I wanted to play on the subtlety of those environments, which is why the dialogue was complex. Then there were a couple of instances where it was even more complicated, such as the voice of God, where we wanted this out-of- body experience without it being booming in the traditional sense. I therefore went to great lengths to place it in the different speakers, but not in an overwhelming sense, opting instead for a warm, comfortable feeling which we achieved with the breaths that were added. That whole sequence with the voice of God and the burning bush was one of the most complicated areas, because there was this constant battle to achieve something that felt very special while not showing your hand as to how you were doing it. I think we pulled it off, but I could have spent longer on it, as we could have all spent longer on certain things.'
Needless to say, even with a three-year schedule in which to complete the audio production and post work, things ran down to the wire. 'There's always a rush to make the deadline in the end, but we just do the best that we can in the time that we have,' says Lon Bender. 'We certainly could have taken twice as long as we did to mix the movie, and I've never worked on a movie where that wasn't the case.'
'During the three years that I was involved with The Prince of Egypt there was never a lull when we weren't doing anything,' adds Nick Fletcher, whose own work on the film lasted until just prior to it's release. 'We've got a great postproduction department at Dreamworks and the postproduction supervisor Jan Owen was guiding it through the final stages, but we'd still get into all of the print checking, signing off on the various sound formats and ensuring that everything matched.'
'We went down a lot of different roads,' comments Lon Bender. 'The soundtrack was well thought out and we tried many, many different things, some of which ended up on the screen and some of which did not. The outcome of all that we tried helped us to make decisions, and I really have to applaud Dreamworks for supporting that type of process because that's normally not done.'
Free Learning Space for Film Sound |
If you are in arrears or in danger of going into arrears, you should contact your lender without delay. Your lender will have specially trained personnel available to help you get back on track. Do not worry about losing your tracker rate if you have one- lenders cannot remove your tracker just because you are in arrears.
Please have a look at our new Consumer Guide to help you deal with your lender should you fall into mortgage arrears. This guide is also available in Irish - An Cód Iompair um Riaráistí Morgáiste - Treoir do Thomhaltóirí. The Central Bank has also issued a binding Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears which sets out how lenders must deal with borrowers in arrears.
If you are in mortgage arrears or you are worried about mortgage arrears, you can contact the new Mortgage Arrears Information Helpline on 0761 07 4050, Monday to Friday, 9.30am to 5pm or visit their website www.keepingyourhome.ie. This is a new initiative overseen by the Department of Social Protection.
The Central Bank issued an industry standard format for the Standard Financial Statement (SFS), which is a document used by lenders to gather relevant financial information from borrowers in arrears or pre-arrears. The SFS is vital to the effectiveness of the Mortgage Arrears Resolution Process and the standard format is to ensure assessments of cases are based on a common analysis of their financial circumstances. A guide for consumers on completing the SFS is available here. |
For the first time in Europe a visioguide in three sign languages
Published on 23.05.2013
For the first time in Europe a visioguide in three sign languages is presented in a museum.
For the first time in Europe, a visioguide in three sign languages is presented in a museum always at the forefront of accessibility issues. The guide is made by Educateam (Museum at scale) in collaboration with FFSB (Fédération Francophone des Sourds de Belgique), the non-profit organization Art et Culture and Samsung, with the support of the King Baudouin Foundation (Elia Fund).
The visioguide covers a selection of 21 works from the Musée Magritte Museum, explained in three sign languages: French-speaking Belgian, Dutch and international. The tablets allow deaf people to visit the museum autonomously. The subtitles in French, Dutch and English also make a suitable approach to the general public and can be used by children, adults, families and tourists. |
Lunchtime crowds in downtown Waukesha were greeted bye a flash mob. It was put together by the United Way for it’s 2010 campaign. FOX6 cameras were there to see the five minute demonstration.
The Waukesha County United Way used everything from texting to Facebook to Twitter to gather a crowd of demonstrators. United Way Rep Jayne Thoma says, "Students from Carroll University. We’ve got a number of students from Waukesha School District. We have a number of individuals from companies that are supporting the United Way campaign that are going to be here today well over 200."
After a quick rally they moved to the center of Waukesha all wearing ’Live United" t-shirts, and on cue flashed their shirts to the lunchtime traffic.
They also carried signs highlighting how the United Way touches thousands of lives. Thoma says, "Help the community, be aware of needs in our community. We’ve recently set a goal of $4.3M here in Waukesha County."
They were all speaking to those Waukesha County residents who do not contribute to the campaign. Co-Chair of the 2010 Campaign Dave Vetta says, "I’ll tell you we have about 20% of Waukesha County that’s using the United Way, and about 5% of Waukesha County that’s giving. So we have to make sure that people that have been giving recognize how important it is."
The flash mob was brief just a few minutes, but hopefully the message got through. Thoma says, "Many of the non-profits are struggling and out hope is that they can really count on United Way, and consistent funding for the 2011 calendar year."
The United Way campaign in Waukesha County runs through the end of November.
Reporter: Gus Gnorski
About First Business Financial Services, Inc.
First Business Financial Services, Inc. (Nasdaq:FBIZ) is a Wisconsin-based bank holding company, focused on the unique needs of businesses, business executives, and high net worth individuals. First Business offers commercial banking, specialty finance, and private wealth management solutions, and because of its niche focus, is able to provide its clients with unmatched expertise, accessibility, and responsiveness. For additional information, visit www.firstbusiness.com or call (608) 238-8008.
The First Business Financial Services, Inc. logo is available at http://www.firstbusiness.com/logo
Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
First Business Financial Services, Inc. |
In recent weeks, many Nebraskans have been affected by shortages in the availability and delivery of propane. Unfortunately, propane supply and distribution challenges have come during the season of highest demand, and just as the Midwest and most of the United States have been experiencing record low temperatures.
Though emergency declarations by the U.S. Department of Transportation have helped provide much-needed regulatory relief to support increased delivery of propane to affected areas, it is clear the market remains constrained. I strongly encourage Nebraskans to keep in mind the following safety measures, guidelines, and resources during ongoing shortages:
- Keep in touch with your propane supplier about supply and price to help plan on how to stretch current supply, and closely monitor your propane tank to allow your supplier plenty of time to refill.
- Do not wait until you are nearly out of propane to call for more fuel.
- Check on your neighbors and elderly or sick people, especially individuals who live alone or in isolated areas.
- Conserve propane supplies by reducing the use of furnaces and hot water heaters.
- Turn thermostats down and limit time spent using the oven or stove to conserve propane.
- Close vents and/or doors to rooms or buildings that do not need to be heated.
- Do not use propane alternatives, such as the propane cylinders used for grills, as substitutes for propane supplies, as this is extremely unsafe.
- Open curtains and blinds during the day to let in the sun and close them at night to keep the cold out.
- Run ceiling fans in reverse to push warm air to the floor.
- Utilize alternative heat sources; use caution with space heaters.
For Nebraskans needing financial assistance, the Nebraska Low Income Energy Assistance Program assists those with limited income to offset heating expenses by partially paying for propane or other fuel source costs. For help, contact the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services at 1-800-383-4278, or visit their website at http://dhhs.ne.gov/children_family_services/Pages/fia_energy.aspx.
Emergency charitable assistance programs are also available through certain Nebraska utilities, such as Aquila (Heatshare and Heat Aid Fund), Black Hills Energy (Heatshare), Metropolitan Utilities District (Heat Aid Fund), and Nebraska Public Power District (Pennies for Power). Nebraskans can check with their local utilities for similar programs, which may be available.
If you wish to contact my office regarding this matter, you can do so by filling out the online contact form available HERE, or by calling any one of my offices in Washington, D.C., or Nebraska. |
Thermal imaging warning system helps ensure the safety at Transpole
Natural gas storage for use in autobuses monitored using FLIR thermal imaging cameras.
Dwindling fossil fuel reserves and rising fuel prices give plenty of cause to look for other types of fuel. That is why the Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine and transport company Transpole decided to start using natural gas as a fuel. To that end natural gas is stored at the Transpole bus depot in Wattrelos, near the French Belgian border. But natural gas storage can be dangerous, for if a fire breaks out there is a very small but definite risk it might cause a devastating gas explosion. An early warning system using thermal imaging cameras from FLIR Systems provides the solution. By detecting a fire in an extremely early stage, likely even before the fire actually starts, the system ensures the safety of both the Transpole employees and of the inhabitants of the surrounding area.
In the 1990's the Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine and public transport services operator Transpole made the decision to start using methane gas from the fermentation of sludge processed in sewage treatment plants as a fuel for urban buses. The aim was to reduce fossil energy consumption and CO2, NOx and CO emissions using local energy.
The FLIR A310 thermal imaging camera detects rising heat, warning of impending fire.
The FLIR thermal imaging cameras, mounted in a rugged waterproof housing, continually monitor the entire premises.
From 1994 to 1998 7 of the autobuses ran on natural gas as an experimental test, using natural gas from the sewage treatment plant in the nearby Marquette. These were the first natural gas powered buses in France. This test showed that using natural gas was price effective when compared to diesel and that it is better for the environment as well. It led to a reduction in particle emissions of 95%, in nitrogen oxide by 71% and noise reduction by 50%. It also proved that the buses running on gas are reliable. Currently, about 80% of the Transpole buses are fueled by natural gas. These buses are employed in 93% of the bus rides conducted by Transpole in and around Lille, saving the equivalent of an estimated 4.48 million liters of diesel per year.
But the use of natural gas is not without risk. If a fire breaks out the stored gas can theoretically have disastrous effects, explains Régis Messiaen, technical manager of the Transpole bus depot in Wattrelos. "The natural gas is stored under high pressure and is highly flammable. If this gas would for some reason explode it would not only threaten the Transpole employees, but also the inhabitants of the surrounding area. We've taken all the necessary precautions, so the chance of anything going wrong is very slight indeed, but however slim the chances may be, you have to do everything within your power to prevent that from happening. That is why we decided to opt for an early fire warning system based on thermal imaging cameras."
The live thermal video produced by the FLIR thermal imaging is shown on two touch screens, one at the depot's entrance and another in the main office.
The company that produced the warning system and installed the FLIR thermal imaging cameras is the French FLIR Systems products integrator ALOATEC. Since 1998, ALOATEC specializes in providing turnkey solutions for the management and control of continuous industrial processes and services, including thermal imaging based fire warning systems such as the system that ensures the safety of natural gas storage at the Transpole bus depot.
Thermal imaging buys you valuable time
"Thermal imaging simply detects fires in a much earlier stage than other detection methods", explains Philippe Bourrier, director of ALOATEC. "Smoke detectors only detect a fire when it has already started to produce smoke. Visual light cameras only detect flames or smoke development and for smoke detection they depend on the presence of light to function. Not only do thermal imaging cameras function regardless of the light conditions, they also help to spot a rise in temperature even before fire breaks out, which buys you valuable time, possibly even allowing you to fix the problem before the fire actually starts."
All objects emit thermal radiation in the infrared spectrum that cannot be seen with the human eye. Thermal imaging cameras convert that radiation to a radiometric thermal image, which means that every pixel in the image is actually a noncontact infrared temperature measurement. At the depot in Wattrelos Bourrier installed ten FLIR A310 thermal imaging cameras, which were mounted in rugged waterproof housing, continually monitoring the entire premises.
Philippe Bourrier, director of ALOATEC (left) and Régis Messiaen, technical manager of the Transpole bus depot in Wattrelos (right).
Currently, about 80% of the Transpole buses are fueled by natural gas, saving the equivalent of an estimated 4.48 million liters of diesel per year.
The cameras are continuously sending their temperature measurements through optic fiber cables to a central computer, which compares the thermal data with previously determined parameters. If any part of the monitored area rises beyond a certain temperature an alarm will go off. The live thermal video produced by the FLIR thermal imaging is shown on two touch screens, one at the depot's entrance and another in the main office, provides an intuitive and easy to understand visual image that will allow personnel and firefighters to immediately assess the situation and recognize the problem.
Accurate and reliable
"I've been installing these thermal imaging cameras in all sorts of industrial applications, including petrochemical installations, for eight years now and I've come to know the thermal imaging cameras of FLIR Systems as highly accurate and very reliable", says Bourrier. "Thermal imaging cameras might be slightly more expensive than CCTV cameras and smoke detectors at the initial purchase, but as they require no light whatsoever to function the maintenance costs and energy bills are kept low. This solution is also the only system that can help you to actually prevent the fire, making it the best fire warning system on the market today."
The touch screen interface shows the floor plan of the facility and live thermal video footage of all ten FLIR A310 thermal imaging cameras, including automatic alarms and accurate temperature readings.
According to Messiaen it was initially difficult to find the right setting for the system. "We had to learn the hard way which settings allow the best combination of early warning and few unwanted alarms. In the past the exhausts of the buses that still run on diesel could cause the alarm to go off, because they reached temperatures higher than the previously determined threshold. We therefore adjusted and tweaked the settings together with Aloatec and the technical support team of FLIR Systems to reduce the rate of unwanted alarms and regular tests ensure that the warning system continues to work perfectly. Now that we have enhanced the system with filters and tried and tested temperature alarm settings, we can honestly say that the system is working very well. It is fast, effective and reliable."
Take no risk, detect possible fires sooner
Fire can be dangerous in its own right, but due to the presence of a natural gas at the depot the advantage of having an early warning in case of fire is of utmost importance to Messiaen. "Now I know that the risk is in fact very small, but if it does go wrong the results might be catastrophic. Theoretically the nearby villages Wattrelos and Roubaix are also within the danger zone. When the safety of our employees and of the village inhabitants is at stake you want to take no risks. Thermal imaging cameras detect possible fires much sooner than any other detection tool, even before the fire starts." |
We would be grateful for any additional information available on this family from the Moravian archives or elsewhere.
On January 31 1784 the Salem tavern was destroyed in a fire. The Meyers were not injured, thanks to the assistance of two tavern guests from Wilkes County who rescued them. The tavern was rebuilt, and opened again in December 1784. The Meyers continued to serve there until 1787, when they retired because of feeble health. Jacob Meyer's death in 1800 is not specifically mentioned in the translated diaries, but Maria Dorothea is referred to thereafter as a widow. She died in November 1803 in Bethabara, where she had gone to visit "her children" Isaac and Dorothea Boner.
Previously we stated that Philip Jacob died in 1801 and that his widow Susanna then married Godfrey Miller. These statements have been questioned, and we don't have the documentation to answer them. A Susanna Myers did marry Godfrey Miller in 1803, but was she the widow of Philip Jacob? Was Susanna Helsabeck even Philip Jacob's wife, or was she the wife of a different Jacob Myers? And if the latter, who were the parents of that Jacob?
Dorothea Meyer and Isaac Boner left Salem "secretly and in a most unseemly manner" on the evening of August 7, 1797, with Salome Nissen and Jacob Schaub, and both couples were married the next day. Dorothea was immediately dismissed from her position as a teacher in the Girls' School. Dorothea and Isaac eventually were readmitted to the Salem congregation and became the parents and grandparents of some prominent citizens. The Schaubs settled near Bethania and joined the Moravian congregation there.
In his will, dated 1794 and probated March term 1801, Jacob Meyer Sr. leaves his large German Bible to his grandson Henry Meyer, a silver watch to his son Samuel Meyer, and his harpsichord to his daughter Dorothea. Another grandson, John Krause, is also mentioned.
Philip "Mire" is listed in the 1800 census with two boys under 10. Presumably Henry Meyer, named in his grandfather's will in 1794, is one of these sons. A Jacob Meyer appears in later Moravian records as the husband of Maria Elizabeth Phillips. We suspect that this is the other son of Philip Jacob and Susanna Meyer. Does anyone have further information on either of these possible Meyer children?
Stokes Co. NC marriage, will, and census records
This page was created on May 28, 2001.
©, 2001-2007 Faye Jarvis Moran
Return to the Jarvis Family Homepage |
MicroBooNE begins construction, elects co-spokesperson
Fermilab physicist Jen Raaf manages the assembly process of pieces that will make the MicroBooNE detector. Photo: Reidar Hahn
Fermilab's neutrino experiment, MicroBooNE, is beginning the full construction phase for the detector, after DOE announced the official Critical Decision 3b approval on March 29.
"This is a significant milestone for the MicroBooNE project," said project manager Gina Rameika, noting that the next step in the DOE CD process will be CD 4, which is approval to start operations, planned for mid-2014.
In the last phase of the project, the MicroBooNE collaboration began acquiring precision-made parts for the detector from institutions like Brookhaven National Laboratory, Syracuse University and Yale University. Soon the team will begin assembling those pieces.
The inner time projection chamber, which will provide three-dimensional reconstructions of neutrino events, will soon begin assembly within the DZero building, a former experiment hall for the Tevatron. When this is finished, the 33-foot-long TPC will slide into a cryostat-cooling chamber and move to its new housing at the Liquid Argon Test Facility, currently under construction at Fermilab. Once there, scientists will begin tracking neutrinos with liquid argon, allowing high sensitivity for the experiment.
"We'll push the TPC into the cryostat, load it onto a truck and drive it really, really slowly to LArTF," said Jen Raaf, the physicist managing the assembly process. "It's like driving a school bus onto a wide-load tanker truck."
Also valuable to MicroBooNE's mission is the recent success of the Liquid Argon Purity Demonstrator. Purifying liquid argon is vital to neutrino experiments for maintaining precise measurements of particle interactions. Though the 170-ton tank will be capable of being evacuated – a more expensive way to maintain argon purity – MicroBooNE co-spokesperson Bonnie Fleming expects the new LAPD-based system to make that process unnecessary.
"As part of our development goal, we want to make sure that the next generation detector, beyond MicroBooNE, doesn't even have to have the option of being evacuable," she said.
The team is also developing the tools needed for data analysis, setting up the controls and preparing the particle beamline for operation.
In addition to DOE's announcement, the collaboration also named a new co-spokesperson, Fermilab physicist Sam Zeller. She was a co-coordinator for LArSoft, the group designing generic software capable of reconstructing detailed data from neutrino interactions in any liquid argon TPC. Zeller has also contributed to the ArgoNeuT, MiniBooNE and SciBooNE experiments.
"We have a fantastic team working to build MicroBooNE as quickly and as safely as possible so we can start taking neutrino data with this new device," Zeller said of the detector. |
An initiative of :
Food-Info.net> Topics > Food components > Food colours > Natural food colours > Cochineal
Cochineal, Carmine, Carminic acid (E120)
Carmine is the name of the colour pigment obtained from the insect Dactylopius coccus (old name Coccus cacti), that lives on cacti from the genus Opuntia. The insect is native to tropical South and Central America and produces the pigment as a deterrent against other insects. The pigment can be obtained from the body and eggs of the insect. It is still used as an organic ant-repellent.
Cochineal insects on an Opuntia cactus (Source)
Carmine is the name of the pigment; the actual colour is carminic acid (C22H20O13):
Structure 1 : Carmine
Cochineal is one of the few natural and water-soluble colorants that resist degradation with time. It is the most light- and heat-stable and oxidation-resistant of all the natural colorants and is even more stable than some synthetic food colours.
Cochineal it is neither toxic nor known to be carcinogenic. However, the dye can induce an anaphylactic-shock reaction in a small number of people, due to impurities in the preparation, not due to the carminic acid.
Cochineal was already used as a colour by the Aztec and Maya peoples of Central and North America . Cochineal was a commodity of much value, even comparable to gold. Cities send bags of cochineal to the capital Tenochtitlán as a yearly contribute to the emperor. The Spanish conquerors of Central America saw the value of the dye, which produced a much better colour than the dyes used in Europe at the time. The dye, which at the time was mainly used in cosmetics and textiles and to a lesser extend in foods, became very popular in Europe. Roman Catholic Cardinals robes were coloured with cochineal, as were the jackets of the British military. Cochineal was a highly prized product and was regularly traded on the London and Amsterdam Commodity Exchanges. As its origins were not known to most Europeans, the American colonists bought their cochineal from Europe, instead directly from Mexico ...
In the 19th century the insects were imported and grown on a large scale on the Canary Islands and the Mexican monopoly came to an end. In 1868, the Canary Islands exported six million pounds of cochineal, equivalent to 420.000.000.000 insects....
In addition as a dye for textiles, cochineal became widely used as a food colouring. Cakes, cookies, beverages, jam, jelly, ice cream, sausages, pies, dried fish, yogurt, cider, maraschino cherries and tomato products were brightened with it as were chewing gum, pills and cough drops. Cosmetic rouge was developed with cochineal as the main ingredient. Cochineal is still widely used in cosmetics.
The demand for cochineal fell sharply with the appearance on the market of alizarin crimson and many other artificial (food and textile) dyes discovered in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Trade in cochineal almost totally disappeared in the course of the 20th century, but in recent years it has become commercially valuable again as many producers (and consumers) prefer natural colours over synthetic colours. However, most consumers are unaware that the ‘natural colouring E120' refers to a dye that is derived from an insect. It is thus not suitable for vegetarians and is banned by some religions.
The insects are killed by immersion in hot water (after which they are dried) or by exposure to sunlight, steam, or the heat of an oven. Each method produces a different colour which results in the varied appearance of commercial cochineal. The insects must be dried to about 30 percent of their original body weight before they can be stored without decaying. It takes about 155,000 insects to make one kilogram of cochineal.
There are two principal forms of cochineal dye: cochineal extract (E120(ii) ) is a colouring made from the raw dried and pulverised bodies of insects with around 20% carminic acid; and carmine ( E120(i) ) a more purified colouring made from cochineal.
Polish cochineal is another dye, which was widely used until the mid 19th century as a textile dye. It was not used as a food dye. Polish cochineal is also derived from an insect, the Margarodes polonicus, found in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia.
Food-Info.net is an initiative of Wageningen University, The Netherlands |
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From: The eUpdate, 6.26.2012
China Releases 5-Year Food Safety Plan
Reeling from a range of tainted products, Ministry of Health vows action
In the wake of a series of scandals—most recently, mercury discovered in baby formula—China has released a new five-year plan to upgrade its food safety system. Despite its more than 2,000 national regulations on food safety, a government-issued release concedes that China “is still suffering from the absence of several major food safety regulations." Many of the existing regulations are overlapping, contradictory, or outdated.
The national Ministry of Health is the lead agency for the project, which is supposed to be completed by 2015, with a review and plan due by the end of 2013. Much like the U.S., China has a large number of agencies—14—that bear some responsibility for food safety.
“The government will prioritize safety standards for dairy products, infant food, meat, alcohol, vegetable oil, seasoning, health products and food additives so as to specify limits for dangerous ingredients in these foods,” said a statement on the official Chinese web portal. “Moreover, the government will make special efforts to set standards for testing various contaminants, food additives, microorganisms, pesticide and animal drug residue in food production by 2015, according to the plan.”
“It would appear that the food regulatory agencies are actually going to play a minor role; they’re there to primarily provide inspection data,” said Robert Buchanan, PhD, director of the Center for Food Safety and Security Systems at the University of Maryland in College Park, who reviewed a rough translation of the document posted on the Ministry of Health’s website.
“It’s unclear, based on the document, whether they will devote new money to food safety or change the structure that they’re currently employing,” Dr. Buchanan noted. “The document generates more questions than answers, but it does appear that the real focus is on developing rationalized standards that are more based on public health and risk than they have been in the past, and to get rid of a lot of the redundancy or conflicts. They have a lot of work to do.” |
Yesterday, Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria were in the headlines again after they declared a caliphate under strict Islamic law. I couldn’t help but think of the contrast: on one hand, what looks to be a blanket of oppression settling over parts of both countries. On the other, I was standing next to the entrepreneur Ala’ Alsallal, 28, as he showed me piles of the banned books that his company, Jamalon, ships to readers throughout the Middle East.
Jamalon is a four-year-old online books retailer that carries 10 million titles, 75% of them in Arabic. Among them are the books on Alsallal’s new banned books list, which Alsallal started because he says it helps sales to ID the books being targeted by the government censors in countries where he operates.
“We keep facing trouble because of what we do,” he says. “But I feel happy when I get people to read or get books.”
Alsallal is one of the entrepreneurs I am meeting here this week, in Amman, Jordan, as I work on projects for a handful of business web sites interested in the stories outside of the violence in Iraq and Syria.
There are a lot of people and organizations pinning their hopes on entrepreneurs like Alsallal to create change in the Middle East. Yesterday, the San Francisco-based microfinance platform Kiva launched a $1 million program funded by Grameen-Jameel Microfinance Ltd. to funnel more money to entrepreneurs, especially young people and women. The program is offering up to 13,000 visitors a free trial to www.kiva.org/MiddleEast to lend to the entrepreneur of their choice. (Grameen is also giving matching grants). Why the focus on youth? One in four people under 30 in the Middle East don’t have a job, according to Kiva.
It doesn’t take much money to help a driven person start a company. Alsallal started Jamalon with $14,000 from Fadi Ghandour, the founder of logistics giant Aramex, whom he met through Ruwwad, a community center in Amman. Ruwwad helped fund Alsallal’s undergraduate degree.
Delivering books is Alsallal’s passion, though he also aspires to grow a company the size of Microsoft Microsoft. There is a Jorge Luis Borges quote hanging outside his door: ‘I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,’ in offices that house 20 programmers, customer service representatives. Just around the corner are books which have arrived from dealers elsewhere in the Middle East and in Europe.
The company sells hundreds of thousands of books a year in a region that has long had a reputation as being a place where people don’t read much. Amazon doesn’t operate at all. In Amman, where Alsallal grew up in a Palestinian refugee community (his grandparents fled Palestine in 1948), there are only two libraries and bookstores are few and far between.
Jamalon has clearly found a market. The company’s revenues have been growing by two to three times a year and it is now adding another five to 10 employees, Alsallal says, though he won’t reveal how much the company makes, except to say it’s not yet profitable. After his seed funding from Ghandour, he raised about $1.2 million from Oasis500, a local incubator, and some prominent American investors, including Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups. He hopes to start raising a $5 million A-round later this year.
He started Jamalon with the help of his family (his parents are both teachers). When USAID gave Jamalon the commission to supply books for a library in a village in southern Jordan, Alsallal’s two brothers took the books in person by truck.
“When they arrived they found the whole village, all the people, waiting for them. They had cooked them a whole goat,” Alsallal said. “They were celebrating having a library.”
Alsallal laughs off the government censors. Among the banned books on his 10 million-strong list of available titles: Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (banned in Israel), and Hadith al-Junud (“Soldiers’ sayings”), a historical novel about the 1986 Yarouk University protests in Jordan (banned in Jordan). And, 50 Shades of Grey (banned everywhere from the United Arab Emirates to some places in the United States).
The Jordanian government used to stop his shipments at the airport, until Alsallal had a meeting with the King Abdullah. Invited with a group of tech entrepreneurs to share his concerns, Alsallal told the King the censors had tried to stop the king’s own book, “Our Last Best Chance.”
“He laughed, just like you are laughing,” Alsallal said. The overt problems have largely faded since the conversation with the King, though the publications arm of the government still sends strident letters. In other countries, meanwhile, the books disappear at the borders. Hugging a couple of books to his chest, he says, “You know what the censors told me? ‘We don’t want any books that can change the way people think.’ ”
That doesn’t matter, he says: “
We just keep sending them.”
And, by the way, Jamalon still ships to Syria and Iraq, with the help of Aramex. |
Willy Wonka may have been the first inspiration for 3D printers. He invented all kinds of machines and contraptions to power his wonderful chocolate factory.
If Wonka had opened up his factory to Etsy craftspeople or Indie Business owners, it would look something like the Shapeways “Made in the Future” factory that has over 8,000 shops in its community.
With more than 1,000,000 parts or products printed, the 3D printing service has moved the concept of designing your own bits and bytes into a real-world product. Shapeways shop owners have earned over $500,000 in income for 2012, which might seem a small sum in comparison to other businesses, it signals a growing trend of personalized production.
Read about the Shapeways growth (with cool infographic) for a fast overview of their 3D printed successes: 2012 in Numbers: The Shapeways Community Rise of 3D Printing For All.
The company is on the bleeding edge of a growth trend forecasted by Wohlers Associates that produces the annual research report: Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing State of the Industry and forecasts by 2015 that the sale of 3D printing products and services will reach $3.7 billion worldwide, and by 2019, surpass $6.5 billion.
Shapeways opened a factory in Long Island City (NYC) earlier this year (with Mayor Bloomberg cutting the ribbon) with a goal to serve the US market with local production. They began with production in the Netherlands, but an east coast facility gives local manufacturing a boost in a sluggish economy.
According to the post:
When its fully up and running, our Factory of the Future will become the largest consumer facing 3D Printing manufacturing facility in the world. It will have the capacity to 3D Print 3 to 5 million objects annually.
It will house state of the art 3D Printers just hitting the market. Our focus will be on Selective Laser Sintering (used for Strong & Flexible nylon) and UV Acrylic Resin Printing (for Frosted Ultra Detail). But plans for 2013 include the addition of Full Color Sandstone and who knows what else. –Shapeways (Links go to descriptions of materials that their printers use.
230,000 community members and a subset of those power these 8,000 shops. Shops that take a 3D model into a real product. A product that just about any individual, with free or low cost software, can design and print at a service bureau like Shapeways. |
French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire has contested the hefty 500-million-euro sum the EU wants France to recoup from fruit and vegetable farmers for past subsidies now deemed illegal. France said it would take its time with a prolonged audit.
REUTERS - France has disputed the hefty sum the EU wants it to claw back from fruit and vegetable farmers for past subsidies that are now deemed illegal, and promised on Tuesday to take its time with a prolonged audit.
“The first step of this process is an audit that will be lengthy,” Bruno Le Maire, the country’s farm minister, told reporters after a crisis meeting with sector representatives.
Le Maire said France would negotiate with the European Commission over the total sum owed by growers, which the European Union executive has put at about 500 million euros ($719.5 million), including interest charges.
“I formally contest this figure of 500 million euros,” he said.
The minister had angered farmers, already protesting against falling prices and income, by saying on Monday he had accepted the EU’s demand that France recoup certain subsidies paid between 1992 and 2002. [ID:nL3412537]
The EU ruled in January that the state aid given to support producer prices and incomes had contravened European farm policy. [ID:nLS582715]
Union representatives reiterated their opposition to the idea of reimbursing subsidies paid years ago to farmers.
“We’re not going to start looking for money seven or 10 years after the event,” said Jean-Bernard Bayard, co-general secretary of the FNSEA, France’s largest farm union.
The decision to acknowledge the EU’s ruling was taken before an end-July deadline to avoid incurring a fine, Le Maire said.
The move also represented an effort to strengthen France’s position before negotiations start in 2010 on the future of the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy beyond 2013, he added.
“We’ll have a stronger negotiating position when we have settled certain problems that now date back several years.”
SHORT-TERM AID PACKAGE
To help struggling growers, Le Maire said he would propose a short-term aid package, including tax breaks, that would be detailed at a further meeting with sector representatives on Thursday.
After Europe’s largest farm economy saw heated price negotiations this spring in the dairy sector, fruit and vegetable growers have stepped up protests in recent weeks against a recession-linked drop in demand and growing competition from other European countries.
Producer prices for fruit and vegetables fell 3.1 percent in June, putting them down 17.6 percent year-on-year, according to latest data from French statistics office Insee.
The French fruit and vegetable sector, the third-largest in Europe, also says it faces rising volumes of cheaper produce from fellow EU countries that have lower labour costs.
Le Maire said production costs would be one of the issues on the table at a September meeting on the long-term competitiveness of the sector.
He said he would also discuss the sector this month at a meeting of French and Spanish officials. Spain is the largest exporter of fruit and vegetables to France and its produce has been targeted by protesting French growers.
Date created : 2009-08-04 |
The Lost Princess of Oz
The High Coco-Lorum Of Thi
And now the Patchwork Girl came dancing out of the wall again. "Come on!" she called.
"It isn't there.
There isn't any wall at all."
"What? No wall?" exclaimed the Wizard.
"Nothing like it," said Scraps. "It's a make-believe. You see it, but it isn't. Come on into
the city; we've been wasting our time." With this, she danced into the wall again and once
more disappeared. Button-Bright, who was rather venture-some, dashed away after her
and also became invisible to them. The others followed more cautiously, stretching out
their hands to feel the wall and finding, to their astonishment, that they could feel nothing
because nothing opposed them. They walked on a few steps and found themselves in the
streets of a very beautiful city. Behind them they again saw the wall, grim and forbidding
as ever, but now they knew it was merely an illusion prepared to keep strangers from
entering the city.
But the wall was soon forgotten, for in front of them were a number of quaint people who
stared at them in amazement as if wondering where they had come from. Our friends
forgot their good manners for a time and returned the stares with interest, for so
remarkable a people had never before been discovered in all the remarkable Land of Oz.
Their heads were shaped like diamonds, and their bodies like hearts. All the hair they had
was a little bunch at the tip top of their diamond-shaped heads, and their eyes were very
large and round, and their noses and mouths very small. Their clothing was tight fitting
and of brilliant colors, being handsomely embroidered in quaint designs with gold or
silver threads; but on their feet they wore sandals with no stockings whatever. The
expression of their faces was pleasant enough, although they now showed surprise at the
appearance of strangers so unlike themselves, and our friends thought they seemed quite
"I beg your pardon," said the Wizard, speaking for his party, "for intruding upon you
uninvited, but we are traveling on important business and find it necessary to visit your
city. Will you kindly tell us by what name your city is called?"
They looked at one another uncertainly, each expecting some other to answer. Finally, a
short one whose heart-shaped body was very broad replied, "We have no occasion to call
our city anything. It is where we live, that is all."
"But by what name do others call your city?"asked the Wizard.
"We know of no others except yourselves," said the man. And then he inquired, "Were
you born with those queer forms you have, or has some cruel magician transformed you
to them from your natural shapes?" |
Capitalist view of Open Source
"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned."
Ayn Rand believed that there is no such thing as "public property". What is commonly referred to as such is the private property of a government. She would probably have had no use for "public domain" software. This is uncopyrighted software and has no owner. In contrast, Open Source software, including all of GPL-ed software, is copyrighted by its authors, and hence is not "public domain" but clearly privately owned. Not only that, since the software is owned by none other than its creators, Rand would have had no argument at all with the property ownership aspect of Open Source.
The Rights of the Producer
"The right to dispose of one's income belongs to the producer, and if he wishes to give it to an heir, a charity, or to flush it down the toilet-that is the producer's right. It is not any of your concern, and it certainly is not the concern of the government."
Rand clearly believed that the producer of wealth alone had the right to determine what to do with it, and stated this in no uncertain terms. When we say today that the author of a piece of software gets to choose the license under which to release it, we are echoing Rand.
A programmer may release his or her work under a commercial license or an Open Source one such as the BSD license or the GPL. He may even choose not to copyright it, and put it into the public domain instead. We may all have our individual preferences for one course or another, but as Rand admonishes, the producer alone has the right to decide how to dispose off his creation. Therefore, she would have had nothing to say against programmers choosing to release their software under the GPL, of their own free will.
"Free competition is the freedom to produce, and the freedom to trade what one has produced, for one's own self-interest, i.e, in the pursuit of one's own happiness."
Rand also wrote that under Capitalism, one might obtain property from another in only one way-by their voluntary consent. Rand said that by banning the initiation of physical force, Capitalism leaves only one way for people to deal with each other-through trade, which Rand called "the highest form of voluntary social cooperation."
Rand was implacable in her opposition to the use of force for any purpose but self-defense. She believed that Capitalism is based on individual rights, free will and free choice, not force or fraud. |
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