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Lunch GIFs Cliparts
The lungs are the primary organs of the respiratory system in humans and most other animals including a few fish, and some snails. In mammals and most other vertebrates, two lungs are located near the backbone on either side of the heart. Their function in the respiratory system is to extract oxygen from the air and transfer it into the bloodstream, and to release carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the atmosphere, in a process of gas exchange. Respiration is driven by different muscular systems in different species. Mammals, reptiles and birds use their different muscles to support and foster breathing. In earlier tetrapods, air was driven into the lungs by the pharyngeal muscles via buccal pumping, a mechanism still seen in amphibians. In humans, the main muscle of respiration that drives breathing is the diaphragm. The lungs also provide airflow that makes vocal sounds including human speech possible. Humans have two lungs, a right lung, and a left lung. They are situated within the thoracic cavity of the chest.
Download Lunch Animated GIF Images. Lunch belongs in Food Folder. There are a total of 30 Images. Click on any of Lunch Image to open and download it. |
The Goliath groupers are on their honeymoon. As a diver, you can use your dive time to do science and actively contribute to the conservation of these gentle giants. All you need to do is count fish. Here’s how.
Goliath groupers are critically endangered throughout their tropical and subtropical Atlantic ocean distribution. In the United States, a federal and state moratorium on harvest implemented in 1990 has allowed a slow path towards recovery from near extinction. Diving in Florida will allow you to see Goliath groupers during the most spectacular time of the year: spawning season.
Every year, from mid August to early October, Goliath groupers travel from around the state of Florida to congregate at a few sites along the Florida coastline (from north of Miami to the Jupiter area) for the purpose of breeding. These congregations are spawning aggregations. The peak spawning season is September. Goliaths remain for several weeks at the spawning aggregation sites checking each other out, and seeking potential mates with an elaborate courtship. Spawning occurs either at the full moon or the new moon (scientist are still looking into this).
You can dive for science if you know how to count fish and you can tell apart a light color fish from a dark color fish.
How to count fish like a scientist.
As you start your dive, count Goliath groupers every 10 minutes. You will count all the Goliaths around you, in a 360 degree field of view. To do so, you turn slowly around on yourself, like a little planet Earth rotating on its axis, counting as you turn, until you reach your starting point. You already learned to count numbers in kindergarden, so I will not elaborate any further. Why is this important? Because knowing how many fish you see at each dive site helps scientists like me to evaluate the health of the population
How to count colorful fish like a scientist.
As males and females seek each other out and engage in courtship they change their “color”, or in this species, their color “tone” from light to dark. There are 4 color phases (check out the photo below)
Normal (N) – typical brown blotches you see year round
Light (L) – The fish body is all white or very light
Dark (D) – the fish body is all black or very dark
Bicolor (B) – The fish has a white head and a dark body
Goliath groupers and their color phases. Photo Credit: Mike Phelan, Alang Chung
Each color phase has an “assigned sex”, this means, scientists suspect what sex belongs to each color phase, but the groupers are not willing to provide a sample of their eggs or sperm as they pass by the unsuspecting scientific diver. For now, we think the Normals are males or females not engaged in courtship. Once the Goliaths engage in courtship, the Lights are females, the Darks are males, and the Bicolors are dominant males.
To count the number of Goliath grouper in each color phase, after your first count, you will do another 360 rotation around yourself, this time you are counting how many groupers in each color phase you see. It’s easier to look for the Lights, Darks and Bicolors as they stand out. Everything else will be Normals. Why is this important? Because knowing how many Goliath groupers are in each color phase helps scientists like me to quantify how active is the spawning aggregation.
How to enter data like a scientist
1 – Bring a dive slate with you, with a pencil. The slate can be any size comfortable to you
2- On the top of the dive slate write DATE, TIME IN , DIVE SITE. You fill in that information after you complete the dive
3- As a reminder to yourself, under the date, time in and dive site lines, write down the color phases and their abbreviations,
N = Normal, L = Light, D = Dark, B = Bicolor
4 – Dive, dive, dive. Every 10 minutes count the number of Goliaths (your first 360 rotation) then count the number in each color phase (your second 360 rotation). Depending on whether you are diving air or nitrox, you will do 2 counts or 3 counts per dive.
Let’s say in your first rotation you count 10 Goliath groupers. You write down the number 10. On your second rotation you count 2 Lights, and 2 Darks (easier to see among the Normals). So right next to the 10 (your first count) you write 2 L, 2D, 6N.
Please email me the data sfriastorres@gmail.com
If you have photos or video of Goliath groupers, and you know WHEN and WHERE you took them consider sharing them with me for the purpose of science.
You are welcome to post comments here or email me your questions/comments
Safe diving ! Please, read the diving etiquette below.
Goliath grouper etiquette.003.003 |
They looked high and low for their family records but couldn’t find them. And so they were barred from priestly work as ritually unclean. The governor ruled that they could not eat from the holy food until a priest could determine their status…(Neh. 7:64-65 MSG).
A friend has been researching her genealogy and connecting branches of her family tree.
She’s found some bare limbs and is determined to dig through her ancestral roots to uncover her family history.
In Nehemiah’s book, he assigned God-fearing men to research genealogical records of people who first returned from King Nebuchadnezzar’s exile. Nehemiah 7 includes a list of family names and numbers, ranking from servants to support staff to royalty. Every person counted in Nehemiah’s chronicle.
Similarly, in my friend’s ancestral quest, Nehemiah’s researchers discovered some family branches that hadn’t budded leaves. These unaccounted names needed someone to uncover their roots before the people could be acknowledged as part of Nehemiah’s family tree.
Their governor labeled these unclaimed people unclean. They weren’t allowed to eat holy food or work in pastoral jobs until a priest determined their status. Every family has a story in their plot of land. As we walk toward eternal life, we seek unity within our root system.
According to God, He is the vine, and His people are the branches. We all matter to our Creator.
Jesus, thank You for planting Your seed in the tree of life. Help me uncover any dead branches that cuts off growth from Your bountiful harvest.
Planting wisdom seeds in fertile soil around lily pad land, |
Java developer interview questions: The hard part
14 Jul
Episode 27
General object oriented programming / design core
• Explain polymorphism, encapsulation, cohesion, coupling.
• Difference between inheritance and aggregation.
• Describe some refactoring techniques.
• Explain SOLID principles.
• What design patterns do you know, explain some.
• What design anti-patterns do you know?
• Write a code that:
• calculates a factorial of given number
• does a Fizz Buzz
• inverts order of letters in words of given sentence.
• checks if given string is a palindrome.
• enumerates all permutations / variations of given set of characters
Java core
• What is the contract between equals and hashCode and how it’s used in Java collections?
• Describe Java collections, interfaces, implementations. What’s the difference between LinkedList and ArrayList?
• What’s the difference between primitives and wrappers, where do they live, what’s autoboxing?
• Where can you put keywords final and static and what do they do?
• Access modifiers in Java.
• Difference between String and StringBuilder / StringBuffer.
• Difference between interface and abstract class.
• Difference between overriding and overloading.
• Types of exceptions and “handle or declare” rule.
• How does garbage collector work?
• How would you deal with memory leak / stack overflow problem?
• How to make a class immutable and what’s the point?
• What’s JIT compilation?
• What’s new in Java 8 / Java 7? What’s coming in Java 9?
Hibernate / databases
• What’s ORM?
• Describe benefits and drawbacks of Hibernate.
• Difference between Hibernate and JPA
• What’s new in latest versions of Hibernate?
• What’s lazy loading?
• What’s N+1 problem?
• Explain some Hibernate annotations.
• What’s Hibernate Session and SessionFactory?
• States of entity beans.
• Cashing levels in Hibernate.
• Transactions support in Hibernate.
• What’s optimistic locking?
• Describe ACID principles.
• Describe database normalizations.
• How would you approach to optimization of a slow query?
• What’s new in latest versions of Spring?
• Describe benefits and drawbacks of Spring.
• What’s inversion of control and dependency injection?
• What Spring modules have you used?
• What types of dependency injection can be used in Spring?
• What modes of auto wiring are available in Spring?
• Describe Spring MVC.
• Scopes in Spring.
• Bean life cycle.
• What’s the difference between Spring Bean and EJB Bean?
Miscellaneous topics
• Explain Aspect Oriented Programming.
• What’s the difference between GET and POST?
• What’s the difference between web server, web container and application server?
• Describe what’s happening in Java web application between entering an url in browser and getting the requested web page.
• What’s a n-layer architecture?
• What are the differences between microservices and monolithic applications?
• What enterprise design patterns do you know?
• How would you test an application? Different layers of tests. What testing frameworks do you know?
• How would you test a single method?
• What was the hardest technical challenge you’ve faced in your career?
• What’s Domain Driven Development?
• Name some important plug-ins for your favourite IDE.
• Apart from IDE, what tools do you find essential for your daily work?
• What version control tools have you used?
• What’s the difference between branch and tag?
• What tools for continuous integration / build / static code analysis have you used?
There is more
As usual. I’ve tried to cover most typical for the interview. There are plenty stuff aside from core language and everything depends on particular job and your resume. Personally I’m not a big fan of strict specialisation and like to do full stack development from database to frontend, with maybe more bias towards backend. Most popular technologies around Java backend are now probably Spring and Hibernate, that’s why I gave them separate sections here. Most popular stuff for front end would now be Angular.JS and Bootstrap. But more on that later on.
There is plenty information on the internet about “[technology name] interview questions”, go ahead and google what you need. If you like to hold a book in your hand, there are several on the topic of programming interviews, I’ve read three of them some time ago, you may find some useful stuff there as well:
Good luck on your technical interviews! In the next episode we are going to talk about soft parts of software developer recruitment process :)
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4 responses to “Java developer interview questions: The hard part
1. Anurag Singh
September 22, 2017 at 11:35 am
thanks for sharing with us.
keep posting.
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What Happens If You Breathe In Toxic Fumes
What Happens If You Breathe In Toxic Fumes
What Happens If You Breathe In Toxic Fumes
Have you ever wondered what happens if you breathe in toxic fumes if exposed to them? In fact, what are toxic fumes in the first place? What can toxic fumes do to you? What are sources of toxic fumes? Can toxic fumes make you sick or kill you? And what are toxic fumes exposure symptoms?
If you’ve ever asked yourself any or all of these questions, then this post is definitely for you. You see, toxic fumes can originate from anywhere, and if you’re especially a worker in an industrial area, getting to know all about toxic fumes could save your life. Toxic fumes are generally harmful gases, dust, or smoke that’s produced as a result of a chemical transformation activity such as heating, reaction, or even explosion. So, what are the side effects of inhaling toxic fumes?
Side effects of inhaling toxic fumes
The side effects may include short-term problems such as throat and lung problems, headaches, fainting, eyesight problems, nausea and even coughing blood. Long term side effects may include chronic coughs, damage of nerve, certain illnesses e.g COPD, low concentration, memory problems etc. The harshness of these problems is based on how long you’re exposed to the toxic fume in question.
Effects of inhaling VOCs
VOCs, also known as Volatile Organic Compounds are a group of chemicals mainly found in substances used mostly in building and maintaining our homes. These chemicals can be released inside our homes and you may not know if they’re present by just smelling around since they are odorless. Examples of VOCs may include: Methylene chloride, benzene, and toluene. While exposing yourself to low levels of VOCs can take longer to be a serious health problem, studies show that for people with underlying conditions such as asthma, VOCs can make their symptoms worse.
The short term effects of inhaling VOCs may include: Dizziness, vomiting, headaches, irritation of nose, eye or throat and worsening of underlying asthma condition.
The long-term effects of inhaling VOCs may include: Damage of the central nervous system, damage of liver and kidney – and even cancer.
Coming up with a fume and VOC extraction strategy can greatly help you evade the problems caused by toxic fumes and VOCs.
Benefits of fume & VOC extraction
Fume and VOC extraction refers to the process of eliminating toxic fumes and VOCs in our home and work environment using effective VOC fume extractors. The benefits of fume and VOC extraction include:
• Removal of potentially toxic fumes and particulates formed in welding and those in VOCs.
• Protection of valuable equipment.
• Cleaner and healthier air to breathe and operate from when indoors or at work.
Our Mission
“IP Systems constantly strives to be your trusted technical resource for your fume filtration needs. Whether it be the Laser, Electronics, Welding, Lab or Medical industry our goal is to offer you an unmatched customer experience.”
For Contact : IP Systems, LLC , 50-A Satellite Blvd. NW , Suwanee, GA 30024 ,
770-614-7701 , info@ipsystemsusa.com
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One of the big thrills in my life was studying jazz piano with the great Billy Taylor. I first met him in 1982 at the Jazz In July summer program he developed at The University of Massachusetts, and he taught me a great deal over the course of 4-5 years.
Billy often told me "Improvisation is learned the same way we learn language."
He didn't elaborate on this much, but I knew that his remark came from his deep thinking about the subject. I've often pondered his statement and it's gradually shaped my whole approach to teaching jazz, rock, pop, and even classical improvisation.
Here's one example, which draws from the way Billy Taylor himself learned to play jazz:
We begin learning language by listening to people speak, long before we ourselves begin speaking.
Taylor was born in 1021, at a time when jazz could be heard everywhere in his local Washington D.C. environment. In fact, he would have heard jazz and jazz-related pop music on an almost daily basis, at the same time he was hearing language. So by the time he actually began learning to play jazz piano, he had already internalized the sounds of jazz, just as a toddler has already internalized the sounds of their language by the time they begin to speak fluently.
This is fascinating, because it points out one of the biggest obstacles many aspiring jazz musicians face today: they haven't heard much jazz by the time they start learning to play it themselves. Jazz isn't in our popular culture anymore. Back in the 20's, when Taylor was young child, pop music used the swing feeling of jazz and even many of the same harmonies, which is why so many popular songs like "Bye Bye Blackbird" became jazz standards. But as good as some of today's popular music is, it isn't jazz-related, and this holds back aspiring jazz musicians in ways they don't often realize.
So Taylor's insight that "Improvisation is learned the same way we learn language" provides us with the answer: To learn jazz, immerse yourself in the sounds of jazz continuously, and for a long period of time.
Whenever I want to understand one of the specifics about learning jazz piano, whether it's for myself or for one of my students, I ask myself, "How does this relate to learning language?" And the answer always come to me.
You can ask yourself this question too, and we can both thank Billy Taylor for showing us the way!
You'll also get my weekly jazz newsletter with practice tips and inspiration |
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What is anthropology?
Anthropology is the study of humankind; it seeks answers to the question: What makes us human? Anthropology is concerned with exploring the evolutionary origins of our species, investigating the emergence of cultures and cultural traditions, over space and time, and understanding the ways in which contemporary humans and human societies experience and make sense of the world around them. Given the vast nature of the subject area, anthropology is divided into four fields: archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Our department encourages students to take courses across the fields, to gain an appreciation for all aspects of the discipline. We offer an undergraduate major leading to either the B.A. or B.S. degree in anthropology. We also offer a minor in anthropology.
Why major or minor in anthropology?
Anthropology provides students with knowledge of and appreciation for the biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity of humanity, past and present. We are committed to supplying students with a broad, well-rounded education, and a wide range of skills and abilities, such as writing, research, communication, and critical analysis. As such, anthropology is a good major for students interested in law, medicine, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and business and entrepreneurship. Anthropologists are also employed in education, publishing, politics, health care, government (local, state, and national), and in diplomacy related to international relations and international aid. Click here to view a list of specific jobs and careers for anthropology graduates.
Learn More
For more information, please contact:
Dr. Nicole Katin, Undergraduate Program Coordinator |
Is Cyprus divided politically?
Cyprus has been divided, de facto, into the Greek Cypriot controlled southern two-thirds of the island and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus a third. The Republic of Cyprus is the internationally recognised government of the Republic of Cyprus, that controls the southern two-thirds of the island.
Is Cyprus ethnically divided?
The people of Cyprus are broadly divided into two main ethnic communities, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, who share many cultural traits but maintain distinct identities based on ethnicity, religion, language, and close ties with their respective motherlands.
Why did Cyprus split two?
In response to the growing demand for enosis, a number of Turkish Cypriots became convinced that the only way to protect their interests and identity of the Turkish Cypriot population in the event of enosis would be to divide the island – a policy known as taksim (“partition” in Turkish borrowed from (تقسیم)”Taqsīm” in …
Is Cyprus two separate countries?
Are Cypriots ethnically Greek?
IT IS INTERESTING: Frequent question: Does Cyprus need a visa from Egypt?
What religion is Cyprus?
Why did the Turkish invade Cyprus?
Who is the current leader of Cyprus?
The president of Cyprus is the head of state and the head of government of the Republic of Cyprus. The office was created in 1960, after Cyprus gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Currently, the president of Cyprus is Nicos Anastasiades, since 28 February 2013.
Does Turkey recognize Cyprus?
Why is Famagusta still forbidden?
Is Cyprus part of European Union?
IT IS INTERESTING: Can I visit Cyprus without quarantine?
Is Cyprus a third world country?
To be classified as a First World country, several factors are considered. The gross domestic product and the gross national product of the economy are evaluated.
First World Countries 2021.
Country Human Development Index 2021 Population
Cyprus 0.869 1,215,584
Poland 0.865 37,797,005
United Arab Emirates 0.863 9,991,089
Andorra 0.858 77,355
Sunny Cyprus |
Marli’s Tangled Tale by Ellie Jackson
Saturday, November 13th from 11 am to 12:30 pm
Saturday, November 20th from 11 am to 12:30 pm
The Story: Marli’s Tangled Tale by Ellie Jackson is a story adventure with a puffin called Marli who gets tangled up in helium balloon strings while she is out at sea. With the help of the local wildlife center, Marli is cut free and rehabilitated just in time to get back to her family.
The story focuses on the impact on animals when we release helium balloons into the environment. It encourages understanding of litter dropping and the importance of beach clean-up.
Proposed Plan: 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Activity 1: Story: Read Marli’s Tangled Tale to students. Children follow on the SmartBoard and answer questions related to what we are reading and viewing.
Activity 2: A short very short talk about puffins including where they lay their eggs here in North Wales and what we can do to help Puffins like Marley
Activity 3: Make a paper plate puffin with a pledge not to drop litter so we can keep animals like Marli safe.
Book your event here: Marli’s Tangled Tale |
Readers ask: What Id Ezra And Nehemiah Fail To Do?
What happened between Ezra and Nehemiah?
In Ezra-Nehemiah we see the people return to their homeland after exile and attempt to rebuild the temple and set right their covenant with God. In Ezra-Nehemiah we see the people return to their homeland after exile and attempt to rebuild the temple and set right their covenant with God.
What happens at the end of Nehemiah?
After 12 years in Jerusalem, he returns to Susa but subsequently revisits Jerusalem. He finds that the Israelites have been backsliding and taking non-Jewish wives, and he stays in Jerusalem to enforce the Law. Nehemiah returns to Jerusalem, carrying letters of authorisation from the king; he inspects the walls.
Why was Ezra exiled?
Ezra was living in Babylon when in the seventh year of Artaxerxes I, king of Persia (c. 457 BCE), the king sent him to Jerusalem to teach the laws of God to any who did not know them. Ezra led a large body of exiles back to Jerusalem, where he discovered that Jewish men had been marrying non-Jewish women.
You might be interested: FAQ: How Did Nehemiah Inspire Others To Build With Him?
What did the prophet Ezra do?
What can we learn from the book of Ezra?
Ezra shows us that being a good steward is how we serve God and serve others. He reminds us that God promised to not turn His back on us, even if our lives are scarred by sin and rebellion. No matter how long we have been away, Ezra encourages us to rebuild and rededicate our lives to Him.
What is the message of the book of Ezra?
What is the main message of the book of Nehemiah?
What is the point of Nehemiah?
The book of Nehemiah was written to remind the people of God of how God had worked to bring them back to their land and rebuild the city of Jerusalem. Throughout both Ezra and Nehemiah, readers are reminded that it was God who or- chestrated the historical events to bring the people of Israel back to their home.
You might be interested: What Category Is The Book Of Nehemiah?
Why are Ezra and Nehemiah important?
The biblical figures of Ezra and Nehemiah are not the most popular or well-known. Ezra is a Bible nerd who gets other people to take the Bible seriously. Nehemiah is essentially a project manager for the rebuilding of the ancient walls of Jerusalem.
How did Ezra die?
While Ahsoka was away, Ezra Bridger also went missing. He sacrificed himself and disappeared into an unknown section of the galaxy with the villainous blue-skinned Grand Admiral Thrawn. Like Ahsoka, Ezra was conveniently absent for all of the original film trilogy.
What does Ezra stand for?
Ezra is a biblical name meaning “help” or “helper” in Hebrew. The Ezra of the Bible was a Jewish priest who helped reintroduce the Torah to the Jewish people who escaped captivity in Babylon.
Did Ezra rebuild the walls of Jerusalem?
Why do you think Ezra 7/10 is such an important statement about Ezra?
Why is Ezra 7:10 such an important statement about Ezra? It shows that Ezra was devoted to the Word and taught the word. Why were mixed marriages such a threat to the settlers that returned to Jerusalem? Their wives could have false gods and take the settlers and turn them away from God.
Can Ezra be a girl name?
The name Ezra is a girl’s name meaning “help”. Ezra, the Biblical name that has recently risen into the boys’ Top 100, makes it onto the girls’ side with more than 200 baby girls given the name in the US in 2015.
You might be interested: Question: How Long From Abraham To Nehemiah In The Bible?
Which tribe of Israel were the priests?
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One Piece Flow Definition
One Piece Flow Definition. In one-piece flow a product is completed before the next one is started. Producing and moving one item at a time or a small and consistent batch of items through a series of processing steps as continuously as possible with each step making just what is requested by the next step.
Continuous Flow
Continuous Flow from
In simple terms it means one-by-one processing of a product. In simple language it means that the parts are moved through operations from station to station with no. Single Piece Flow Continuous Flow Standardized Work.
Make One Move One.
The strict definition is that one piece flow is that each person or process only works on one piece at a time before it is pulled downstream one piece at a time to the next process. One Piece Flow method sometimes called continuous flow is a production method used instead of traditional mass production. Single Piece Flow Continuous Flow Standardized Work. In opposite conditions we might process an entire batch or lot at each station before moving it to the next station. |
Why Do Dogs Eat Poop
Why Do Dogs Eat Poop: The Bottom Line. Look, we understand that realizing that your sweet, precious, face-licking dog is also eating their poop is… not ideal. However, at the end of the day, while a bit unsettling, poop eating should not be ignored. If your dog is eating their own feces (or any feces for that matter), the dog owner needs to. Why Do Pugs Eat Their Own Poop? Dogs eat poop for several reasons, and that can be due to wanting attention, boredom, dominance behavior, neglect, avoiding punishment or health issues. The scientific name for your Pug eating poop is known as coprophagia, which generally refers to the ingestion of canine’s own poop or another animal.
Probiotics For Cats & Dogs Colorado Journeys Mobile
When we focus on those dogs who are clearly coprophagic, we find that the dogs who eat poop tend to do it often. The survey showed that 62 percent ate stools daily and 38 percent did so weekly.
Why do dogs eat poop. Why Do Dogs Eat Their Poop? There are many theories as to why dogs consume their feces or the feces of other animals, and there are several factors to consider. Researchers claim that some of the elements that affect whether a dog eats feces include: Overall Health Of The Dog; Shame; Why Do Dogs Eat Poop? "There are many reasons why a dog may eat their own feces (coprophagia) or the feces of another animal," says Dr. Jacob Vencil, a veterinarian in St. Augustine, Florida. "The most common would be behavioral. Meaning, as strange as this may sound, the dog simply enjoys eating feces. Think of it like a person eating a booger." While it may sound disgusting, dogs eat cat poop as a result of natural dog behavior.When it comes down to it, dogs like to eat something with a strong smell, like that of cat poop, or even better.
So, why do dogs really eat poop? If your adult pup suddenly starts eating feces, then you should first rule out an underlying health problem. Eating excrements could be due to a parasitic infection, deficiency in the dog’s diet, malabsorption issues, diabetes, thyroid disease, Cushing’s or other conditions which cause an increase of the. Why Do Dogs Eat Cat Poop? When any living species eats poop, whether dogs or humans, it is known as Coprophagia. This leads to unhealthy amounts of bacteria and parasites. These germs could cause issues with the digestive tract and eventually even diarrhea and vomiting. Besides, dogs’ mouths would give out a repelling smell. Why Dogs Eat Horse Poo! The question of why dogs eat horse poo aka manure aka horse apples aka cow/horse patties has been pondered by many great minds, as evidenced by some of the deep philosophical discussions I stumbled upon when researching this article. I felt obligated to add my equally profound thoughts on this important matter.
Now that your dog did eat bird poop one way or another, you might be wondering if it is poisonous. There is no simple way to answer this question. In some cases, dogs can get affected by bird poo whereas other times, it is completely harmless. In a few cases, just inhaling the bird poo can also trigger harmful effects. It’s a stomach churning sight for us humans, but many dogs like to eat poo, otherwise known as coprophagia; the eating of faeces or dung. Horse manure, cow pats, cat poo, fox poop and even other dogs’ faeces are common favourites. Why do some dogs eat poop? Stool-eating is one of the most disgusting habits of dogs. Coprophagia is the act of eating feces, and it's relatively common in dogs.
Dogs do not have any idea about the nutritional content of the food that they eat so do not be surprised if you caught them eating poop. Their ancestors learned to live by scavenging ‘š so, whatever they can eat, they eat as long as they can get their stomachs full until the next meal that they can find. 7 Shocking Reasons Why Dogs Eat Poop – The Complete Guide to Treating Coprophagia As a dog owner, you must have thought that you’ve seen it all . You’ve witnessed all the terrible and mildly disgusting habits such as butt-licking, slurping water from your toilet or even sniffing other dog’s butts. Frozen poop, in particular, is gulped down with relish! (There is a reason why dog owners have coined the term “poopsicle.”) In his study, Hart made some other observations about why dogs eat.
Video: Why Do Dogs Eat Poop & How to Stop Poop Eating in Dogs. Last update on 2020-10-21. Recent Posts. Why Is My Dog Panting and Restless? 13 Reasons for these Scary Symptoms. Barking at Heaven’s Door: Do Dogs Know When They Are Dying? Random Dog Quote: About The Author. Charles Joseph. Most new owners are delighted by puppy antics, but a puppy that eats poop prompts anything but smiles. It could be any animal's feces, too. From its stool to your cat's litter box deposits to a neighboring horse's or cow's manure, some puppies don't discriminate when it comes to poo they're willing to eat. The most common reason for why dogs eat poop is most likely to be they are a greedy eater, a hound, a terrier, a dirt eater or a multi-pet home occupant! There is little evidence suggesting a nutritional basis for this behavior, but it can be a symptom of a health issue, especially if paired with other signs of malnutrition.
Keep in mind that most dogs will eat cat stool or horse poop when given half a chance. Owners simply have to prevent dogs from having access to “treats” like these. Adult dogs might eat their own poop or other dogs' poop for a variety of other reasons like boredom, illness, anxiety, fear of being punished for accidents, getting attention as. Get a Reaction: Dogs like to eat poop to see how you will react. It could be its way of teasing you and getting you excited. Protect the Pack: Studies have shown that younger dogs will often eat the poop of an elderly or sick dog. Scientists think this is because the dogs learned to eat the poop to eliminate the scent predators can follow. Why Do Dogs Eat Poop? This is the first question that many dog parents ask as soon as they see the undesired behavior, which is actually relatively normal in dogs. Understanding the reasons for coprophagia is vital to correct the behavior. When looking at why dogs eat fecal material, we can find some underlying medical causes and some.
Why Do Dogs Eat Rabbit Poop: Key Takeaways Dogs may consume rabbit poop for a variety of reasons, including nutritional deficiencies, curiosity, and regular ‘ol derpy dog behavior. While rabbit poop may cause illness in dogs, it usually doesn’t sicken them or create any serious health problems. In certain situations, it’s not uncommon for dogs. Dogs eat poop for a variety of reasons. Some are normal and some are signs of an underlying issue. It’s uncommon for adult dogs to eat their own poop or another dog’s poop. 2 Common Reasons Why Dogs Eat Poop. Poop-eating is normal in the following scenarios: Nursing female dogs: They eat. Why Do Dogs Eat Poop? Medical Reasons. First, let’s begin with possible medical reasons that may cause your dog to eat poop. 1. Enzyme deficiency. Before domestication, a wild dog’s diet would be dependant on whole prey and local vegetation.
Why do dogs eat poop? It is an eternal question, one that we ask as frequently, and with as much continuing bewilderment, as any of the great conundrums.
This is my dog, Chester… and he eats horse poop
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Why Does My Dog Eat His Food Away From His Bowl? Dog
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Generate a random date between two other dates
How would I generate a random date that has to be between two other given dates?
The function"s signature should be something like this:
random_date("1/1/2008 1:30 PM", "1/1/2009 4:50 AM", 0.34)
^ ^ ^
date generated has date generated has a random number
to be after this to be before this
and would return a date such as: 2/4/2008 7:20 PM
Answer rating: 166
Convert both strings to timestamps (in your chosen resolution, e.g. milliseconds, seconds, hours, days, whatever), subtract the earlier from the later, multiply your random number (assuming it is distributed in the range [0, 1]) with that difference, and add again to the earlier one. Convert the timestamp back to date string and you have a random time in that range.
Python example (output is almost in the format you specified, other than 0 padding - blame the American time format conventions):
import random
import time
def str_time_prop(start, end, time_format, prop):
"""Get a time at a proportion of a range of two formatted times.
start and end should be strings specifying times formatted in the
given format (strftime-style), giving an interval [start, end].
prop specifies how a proportion of the interval to be taken after
start. The returned time will be in the specified format.
stime = time.mktime(time.strptime(start, time_format))
etime = time.mktime(time.strptime(end, time_format))
ptime = stime + prop * (etime - stime)
return time.strftime(time_format, time.localtime(ptime))
def random_date(start, end, prop):
return str_time_prop(start, end, "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M %p", prop)
print(random_date("1/1/2008 1:30 PM", "1/1/2009 4:50 AM", random.random()))
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Jul 20, 2020
4 min read
Vitamin D: what levels are recommended for me?
Vitamin D, also known as the sunshine vitamin, has a role in several important bodily processes. We can get vitamin D from food, supplements, or when it’s also produced when skin is exposed to sunlight.
Few nutrients have generated as much interest recently as vitamin D, which is said to have numerous benefits like keeping bones strong and preventing cancer. Are you getting enough? If you’re like many Americans, it’s entirely possible that you’re not.
What is vitamin D?
Vitamin D, also known as “the sunshine vitamin,” has a role in several important bodily processes. We can get Vitamin D from food or supplements. It’s also produced when skin is exposed to sunlight, creating a substance processed by the liver and kidneys that plays a number of important roles in our bodies.
Although vitamin D is present in some foods, most of the vitamin D in our bodies comes from the conversion of the substance our body makes naturally to vitamin D by UVA rays (Nair, 2012). At certain times of the year, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to get enough sunlight to produce adequate vitamin D. Experts estimate that 40% of Americans and as many as 1 billion people worldwide may be deficient in vitamin D (Parva, 2018).
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Vitamin D’s role in the body
Vitamin D plays many important roles in the body. One of its most central roles is the regulation of calcium levels, thereby strengthening bones while preventing fractures and osteoporosis (Bischof-Ferrari, 2005). Vitamin D is also involved in supporting the immune system and plays a role in protecting against several cancers, including breast and colon cancer (Aranow, 2011; Song, 2019; Meeker, 2016).
Studies have shown that vitamin D also helps the body regulate blood sugar, both reducing the risk of diabetes and improving blood sugar levels in people who have already been diagnosed with diabetes (Schwalfenberg, 2008) and lowering the risk of cardiovascular diseases like heart disease and stroke (Vacek, 2012).
What are normal vitamin D levels?
A vitamin D level of 20–50 ng/mL is considered to be the normal range. Having a serum vitamin D level below 20 ng/mL is considered to be harmful to your skeletal health (Giustina, 2019). Your healthcare provider can do a simple blood test to determine if you have sufficient vitamin D levels.
How to get more vitamin D if you’re deficient
To maintain a normal level of vitamin D in the body, the National Institutes of Health recommends a total daily vitamin D intake of 600 IU (15 mcg) for adults up to age 69 and 800 IU (20 mcg) for adults 70 and older, whether through food or through supplements. If your healthcare provider determines that you have a vitamin D deficiency, they may recommend that you add more vitamin D to your diet.
Good sources of vitamin D include fatty fish (such as salmon and tuna), fish oil, fortified milk, eggs, and fortified breakfast cereals. Dietary supplements can also be a good way to increase vitamin D levels in your body. It’s important to remember that supplements are not tightly regulated by the FDA, so it’s important to shop carefully and choose a reputable brand.
Is there such a thing as too much vitamin D?
Absolutely. Because vitamin D regulates the amount of calcium your body absorbs from your diet, high levels of vitamin D can cause excessive uptake of calcium, which itself can cause serious problems. If your healthcare provider recommends adding vitamin D to your diet using a supplement, make sure to choose one that provides the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) of vitamin D.
2. Bischoff-Ferrari, H.A., Willett, W.C., Wong, J.B., Giovannucci, E., Dietrich, T., Dawson-Hughes, B. (2005). Fracture Prevention With Vitamin D Supplementation: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. JAMA. 293(18):2257–2264. doi:10.1001/jama.293.18.2257. Retrieved from
3. Giustina, A., Adler, R. A., Binkley, N., Bouillon, R., Ebeling, P. R., Lazaretti-Castro, M., Marcocci, C., Rizzoli, R., Sempos, C. T., & Bilezikian, J. P. (2019). Controversies in Vitamin D: Summary Statement From an International Conference. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 104(2), 234–240. Retrieved from
National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements – Vitamin D. (n.d.). Retrieved July 17, 2020 from
Schwalfenberg G. (2008). Vitamin D and diabetes: improvement of glycemic control with vitamin D3 repletion. Canadian Family Physician Medecin de Famille Canadien, 54(6), 864–866. Retrieved from
Song, D., Deng, Y., Liu, K., Zhou, L., Li, N., Zheng, Y., Hao, Q., Yang, S., Wu, Y., Zhai, Z., Li, H., & Dai, Z. (2019). Vitamin D intake, blood vitamin D levels, and the risk of breast cancer: a dose-response meta-analysis of observational studies. Aging, 11(24), 12708–12732. Retrieved from
Vacek, J.L., Vanga, S.R., Good, M., Lai, S.M., Lakkireddy, D., Howard, P.A.. Vitamin D Deficiency and Supplementation and Relation to Cardiovascular Health. The American Journal of Cardiology, 109(3):359-363. Retrieved from https://doi:10.1016/j.amjcard.2011.09.020 |
The Table
The Table
The table with the bread and wine was the first objects you would encounter when you entered through the door and into the tabernacle.
“Outside the Most Holy Place put the table against the north side of the Tent and the lampstand against the south side.” (Exo 26:35)
Like most of the other pieces of furniture inside the tabernacle of Moses, the table was also made of acacia wood and covered with gold.
“Make a table out of acacia wood, 36 inches long, 18 inches wide, and 27 inches high. Cover it with pure gold and put a gold border around it.” (Exo 25:23-24)
The table inside the tabernacle was to hold bread and wine. This constituted the food of the priests.
“They shall spread a blue cloth over the table for the bread offered to the LORD and put on it the dishes, the incense bowls, the offering bowls, and the jars for the wine offering. There shall always be bread on the table.” (Num 4:7)
Frankincense is known for its sweet smell, but bitter taste.
This speaks of the word of God … sweet on the ear, but difficult to implement.
“I took the little scroll from his hand and ate it, and it tasted sweet as honey in my mouth. But after I swallowed it, it turned sour in my stomach.” (Rev 10:10)
As there were no chairs for the table in the tabernacle, the priests had to eat the bread standing up!
This reminds us of the armour of God.
The Passover bread also had to be eaten standing up, ready to go.
“You are to eat it quickly, for you are to be dressed for travel, with your sandals on your feet and your walking stick in your hand. It is the Passover Festival to honor me, the LORD. (Exo 12:11)
The table in the tabernacle depicts the table of the Lord. It is therefore not only a place for fellowship, but also a place of readiness for service.
“Be ready with the good news of peace as shoes on your feet.” (Eph 6:15 BBE)
If you are found ready, then the Master will wait on you (serve you)!
“Be ready for whatever comes, dressed for action and with your lamps lit, like servants who are waiting for their master to come back from a wedding feast. When he comes and knocks, they will open the door for him at once. How happy are those servants whose master finds them awake and ready when he returns! I tell you, he will take off his coat, have them sit down, and will wait on them. How happy they are if he finds them ready, even if he should come at midnight or even later! (Luk 12:35-38)
The table of the Lord, as depicted by the table with bread and wine in the tabernacle, is the table of fellowship.
“Taste and see that the LORD is good. Blessed is the person who takes refuge in him.” (Psa 34:8)
The priests were not allowed to enter the tabernacle and eat the bread from the table unless they were first purified at the altar and the wash-basin.
Similarly, no one can share in the Holy Communion unless their hearts be cleansed first
“It follows that if one of you eats the Lord’s bread or drinks from his cup in a way that dishonours him, you are guilty of sin against the Lord’s body and blood. So then, you should each examine yourself first, and then eat the bread and drink from the cup. For if you do not recognize the meaning of the Lord’s body when you eat the bread and drink from the cup, you bring judgment on yourself as you eat and drink. That is why many of you are sick and weak, and several have died.” (1Co 11:27-30)
Judas Iscariot shared of the bread with an unclean heart.
Then he (Jesus) took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.” In the same way, he gave them the cup after the supper, saying, “This cup is God’s new covenant sealed with my blood, which is poured out for you. “But, look! The one who betrays me is here at the table with me!” (Luk 22:19-21)
He consequently ended up meeting up with an untimely death.
“Judas threw the coins down in the Temple and left; then he went off and hanged himself.” (Mat 27:5)
We need to feast on who God is.
Jesus is both the bread and the wine.
“While they were eating, Jesus took a piece of bread, gave a prayer of thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. “Take and eat it,” he said; “this is my body.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks to God, and gave it to them. “Drink it, all of you,” he said; “this is my blood, which seals God’s covenant, my blood poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” (Mat 26:26-28)
He was prepared for us in the same way that bread is prepared for consumption.
Jesus is our bread of life.
“I am the bread of life.” (Joh 6:48)
To make unleavened bread, the grain must first be ground in a mill, then sieved and tested.
Jesus, the innocent, passed through the mill of suffering.
“For Christ himself suffered for you and left you an example, so that you would follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no one ever heard a lie come from his lips. When he was insulted, he did not answer back with an insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but placed his hopes in God, the righteous Judge.” (1Pe 2:21-23)
Next, He was sieved, tested and pronounced without fault.
“Now, I have examined him here in your presence, and I have not found him guilty of any of the crimes you accuse him of.” (Luk 23:14)
After this, to make bread, the dough had to pass through the fierce heat of an open fire.
Jesus was pierced with holes all over his whole body and passed through the fire of Calvary.
He was then raised up as the Bread of Life.
The bread at the table in the tabernacle is all for free!
The LORD says, “Come, everyone who is thirsty— here is water! Come, you that have no money— buy grain and eat! Come! Buy wine and milk— it will cost you nothing! Why spend money on what does not satisfy? Why spend your wages and still be hungry? Listen to me and do what I say, and you will enjoy the best food of all. (Isa 55:1-2)
You can enter the tabernacle of heaven right now, sit down at the table of fellowship with the Lord and partake of the bread of life.
Why not do it right now? |
Why do they sew lips shut when you die?
Koutandos said a body’s nose and throat are packed with cotton wool to stop fluids from seeping out. Cotton may be used to make the mouth look more natural, if the deceased doesn’t have teeth. Mouths are sewn shut from the inside. … Makeup—but not too much—is applied to lessen the ‘waxy look’ a dead body might have.
How do they keep a dead person’s mouth shut?
A: The mouth can be closed by suture or by using a device that involves placing two small tacks (one anchored in the mandible and the other in the maxilla) in the jaw. The tacks have wires that are then twisted together to hold the mouth closed. This is almost always done because, when relaxed, the mouth stays open.
Why do they Wire dead peoples jaws shut?
The process of sewing eyes shut is a myth, but depending on the nature of the body, the eyelids may be glued down. The mouth and jaw may then be wired shut. This is done by inserting a wire into the mouth with a needle injector, and tying it tightly to ensure the mouth doesn’t drift open.
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Do morticians glue mouth shut?
Setting The Facial Features. The eyes are closed, often using skin glue and/or plastic flesh-colored oval-shaped “eye caps” that sit on the eye and secure the eyelid in place. The mouth is closed and the lower jaw is secured, either by sewing or wires.
What do they remove when you die?
Organs are removed and taken to a different part of the room for the pathologist to collect samples. This is also when urine, blood and eye fluid samples are taken. All the organs are put back inside the person afterwards, who is then sewn up, before going back in the fridge.
Do they break your jaw when you die?
At the moment of death, all of the muscles in the body relax, a state called primary flaccidity. … With the loss of tension in the muscles, the skin will sag, which can cause prominent joints and bones in the body, such as the jaw or hips, to become pronounced.
Do morticians remove eyes?
We don’t remove them. You can use what is called an eye cap to put over the flattened eyeball to recreate the natural curvature of the eye. … And sometimes, the embalming fluid will fill the eye to normal size. Yes, the eyes and lips are glued together.
Do bodies explode in coffins?
You’ve never heard of exploding casket syndrome (ask your mortician if it’s right for you), but funeral directors and cemetery operators have. … When the weather turns warm, in some cases, that sealed casket becomes a pressure cooker and bursts from accumulated gases and fluids of the decomposing body.
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Does dying hurt?
Do undertakers sew mouths shut?
Do morticians remove organs?
The pathologist removes the internal organs in order to inspect them. They may then be incinerated, or they may be preserved with chemicals similar to embalming fluid. … Another option after autopsy is that the organs are placed in a plastic bag that’s kept with the body, though not in the body cavity.
Do they remove your tongue when you die?
The Tongue Does Pop Out After Death
So, while it sounds like something someone would make up, it is true. … When you die, these bacteria do not die along with you. Instead, they continue doing what they do best. In fact, the bacteria begin to digest the intestines they have happily lived in for ages.
Why do they put gloves on the Dead?
It was widely believed that touching a casket would allow the spirit of the deceased to enter your body. As a precaution, pallbearers were required to wear gloves. People believed a similar funeral superstition that opening your mouth to yawn could allow a spirit to enter and inhabit your body.
Are organs removed for embalming?
The misconception might come from confusion between embalming and autopsy, in which organs are removed, weighed, studied, and sometimes sampled for testing. This is done by a pathologist, not an embalmer. After an autopsy, organs are placed back into the body prior to receipt at the funeral home for embalming.
Do they remove your brain when you die?
If you’re being cremated, your brain, like the rest of your body, will burn and become ash (usually the entire body is gone within 90 minutes).
Do they stuff you when you die?
You Release Urine And Feces
All of your muscles relax after you die because they are no longer receiving instructions from your brain. As soon as your body expires, it releases urine and feces because the muscles holding those fluids back are no longer tense. You probably stink a little, and it’s a mess to clean up.
My handmade joys |
What is commonly used to anchor work to a board while doing macrame?
Explanation: If you’re working with center cords you can secure them to the clip board using tape. A split ring is another way that you can anchor your work and keep it secure.
How do you anchor in macrame?
One way that you can anchor your work is by using a macrame board. Use pins to secure the ends of the cording to the board. Make sure that the ends of the cording are aligned so that your work at the start of the project is as neat and uniform as the end.
What do you use a macrame board for?
One of the basic pieces of macrame equipment is the macrame board. This board holds the work while the crafter knots it, and there are different types of boards available. Most macrame boards are flat pieces of foam, particleboard, or pressed cardboard.
What is the process in making macrame?
Start with 3 or more Lark’s head knots. … 2. Take the outer left cord and place it diagonally across all the other 5 cords. … … Working left to right, make a double half hitch knot with the second cord.
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How do you stop macrame from curling?
When the fringe on your projects doesn’t hang quite right or it curls up when you don’t want it to, there is a way to keep it nice and straight.
How to Use Spray Starch to Keep Your Fringe in Shape
1. Comb feathers. …
2. Spray on starch. …
3. Use a comb to shape fringe. …
4. Comb again until smooth. …
5. Trim any out of place strands.
What is the best macrame cord?
7 Best Cords For Macrame
Rank Product Details
1. SMIJ Cotton Macramé Cord Cotton, 220yd
2. XDOUS Macrame Cord Cotton, 220yd
3. Bonnie Craft Cord Polyolefin, 200yd
4. Tenn Well Braided Macrame Cord Cotton blend, 165ft
Where do I start with macrame?
To learn macrame, you need to master some key knots.
Larks head knot
• Fold the string half down the middle.
• Slip the folded string on top of the object (wooden stick/ring). …
• Pull the cord up behind the object, without twisting the strings, then pull the two strands through the loop.
Can you use yarn for macrame?
What is macrame string?
Macrame cord is a group of fibers/strands twisted or braided together, and is then used to be tied or knotted together to form a textile art known as macrame. Many of you who are just beginning will often read or hear macrame cord being referred to as either macrame rope, yarn, or strings.
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What is a knotting board?
Knot boards are a very effective way to display knots. If constructed carefully, a knot board is a permanent display that informs others or simply showcases a knot tyer’s careful and beautiful work. … Generally speaking, knot boards are made for one of three purposes: to teach, to inform, or to showcase knots as art.
What are the 3 basic macrame knots?
Stop getting tangled and get the basics right with these 3 easy macramé knots for beginners! We’ll show you how to do a basic Cow Hitch, Square Knot and Wrap Knot to help you get started on some beautiful macramé work!
What are the three basic macrame knots?
Today I will show you the three most common macrame knots, the square knot, the spiral knot and the half-hitch knot. By knowing just these three basic knots you will be able to create your own unique piece of macrame that will fit your taste and style. Here is a video that will show you all three knots.
What are the types of macrame?
The 5 types of macrame knots that you should know are the Double Half Hitch Knot, Lark’s Head Knot, Square Knot, Gathering Knot, and Berry Knot. These 5 different knots you should know before starting your first macrame project are the fundamental building blocks when creating a macrame piece.
My handmade joys |
You asked: How do dividends affect owner’s equity are they treated as a business expense explain?
How do dividends affect owner’s equity?
Stockholders’ equity, also called owners’ equity, is the surplus of a company’s assets over its liabilities. Cash dividends reduce stockholders’ equity by distributing excess cash to shareholders. Stock dividends distribute additional shares to shareholders and do not affect the balance of stockholders’ equity.
Are dividends treated as a business expense?
Does dividend decrease owner’s equity?
Cash dividends reduce stockholder equity, while stock dividends do not reduce stockholder equity.
How do dividends affect balance sheet?
When dividends are paid, the impact on the balance sheet is a decrease in the company’s dividends payable and cash balance. As a result, the balance sheet size is reduced. If the company has paid the dividend by year-end then there will be no dividend payable liability listed on the balance sheet.
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What are examples of dividends?
An example of a dividend is cash paid out to shareholders out of profits. They are usually paid quarterly. For example, AT&T has been making such distributions for several years, with its 2021 third-quarter issue set at $2.08 per share.
Why do dividends reduce equity?
Can you pay yourself dividends monthly?
Yes, as a sole proprietor, you can pay yourself a wage or salary, which is considered your personal income in the Canadian government’s eyes. A sole proprietor’s business income and personal income are considered one by the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA for tax purposes.
Where do you record dividend income?
Dividends on common stock are not reported on the income statement since they are not expenses. However, dividends on preferred stock will appear on the income statement as a subtraction from net income in order to report the earnings available for common stock.
Why is a dividend not an expense?
The cost of dividends is not included in the company’s income statement because they’re not an operating expense, which are the costs to run the day-to-day business. A company’s dividend policy can be reversed at any time and that, too, will not show up on its financial statements.
Can you pay dividends from retained earnings?
Dividends can only be paid out of retained profits. Retained profits are the funds remaining after all liabilities and expenses have been taken into account. If you have undistributed profits remaining on the balance sheet from previous financial years, this sum can be added to the current level of retained profit.
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What is the difference between dividend and equity?
Over longer time periods, equity funds have historically delivered higher returns as compared to other assets like fixed deposits, public provident fund, debt mutual funds, etc. … In a dividend option, gains made on the principal amount are distributed to the investor.
Why dividend is paid on face value?
The Dividend is always declared on the face value (FV) of the share, regardless of its market value. The dividend rate is calculated as a percentage of the nominal value of the annual share.
Do dividends count as income?
You can earn some dividend income each year without paying tax. You do not pay tax on any dividend income that falls within your Personal Allowance (the amount of income you can earn each year without paying tax).
Working out tax on dividends.
Tax band Tax rate on dividends over the allowance
Additional rate 38.1%
How do dividends affect cash flow statement?
How do dividends impact cash flow? Because dividends are considered a liability, rather than an asset, they won’t influence your business’s cash flow until the dividends are issued.
Are dividends a liability or asset?
For shareholders, dividends are an asset because they increase the shareholders’ net worth by the amount of the dividend. For companies, dividends are a liability because they reduce the company’s assets by the total amount of dividend payments. |
Expert system can resolve a few of the world’s biggest difficulties, if we manage the risks appropriately
This blog post comes from Dr Catriona Wallace the Founder & Executive Director of Artificial Intelligence company Flamingo Ai, service provider of Device Learning based technologies.
Prepare for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to expand thanks to recent world changes. It will be especially essential for ladies to understand AI as it will uniquely affect them both in service and personally.
Artificial intelligence (AI) may be explained as the theory and development of computer system systems able to carry out tasks usually requiring human intelligence, such as visual understanding, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation in between languages.
AI is the fastest growing tech sector worldwide. US$38 B was invested in the last 12 months and this is due to grow 12- fold in the next 5 years.
The significant difficulties with AI come from the absence of regulation, legislation or standards to monitor its advancement and use. There are little to no laws governing this sector at the moment. There are threats of AI being biased in its decision making and possibly triggering harm. Examples of this include the Apple Card occurrence and the Amazon recruitment program
Predisposition in AI comes from two primary sources. One, less than 10 percent of coders in the AI sector are women, which means that there is the potential for mindful or unconscious bias to be constructed into the algorithms. The outcome is that the AI discovers that guys in tweed coats are teachers and that this is the predominant response.
In November 2019, Minister for Market, Science and Innovation, Karen Andrews, launched Australia’s very first AI & Ethics structure. In the framework are eight essential concepts. These include:
1. Human, social and environmental wellness
2. Human-centred values
3. Fairness
4. Personal privacy defense and security
5. Dependability and safety
6. Openness and explainability
7. Contestability
8. Responsibility
AI technology has to do with 5 years ahead of the legal system, for this reason in the interim we require to depend on structures and guidelines in addition to Ethical Leadership such as the structure developed under Minister Andrews.
AI has the potential to greatly improve the human condition. In particular, AI-will drive advancement in biotech, medical, environment and agriculture technologies among others– these modifications will be hugely useful to human beings. There is likewise great scope for AI to support people with disabilities.
At the same time there is a huge capacity for AI to be utilized to damage human beings, be it through mass manipulation of people throughout elections, powering damaging social networks, or the coming of self-governing weapons. This is why Elon Musk noted, “Inviting AI into the world is like summonsing the devil.” We, however, are very confident that AI will release people from the mundane to focus on activities or efforts that make us more human including imagination, a go back to fundamental science, enhanced relationships and health, a focus on art and the much better care of the environment. And on the back of the Summer 2019 bushfires that swept Australia,– we want to develop fire-fighting robotics as there ought to be no reason that a human must stand between their house and a 30 foot inferno. A robotic would enjoy to do this.
During April, I will launch a brand-new organisation, called Ethical AI Advisory, which is a consultancy established to help organisations develop ethical approaches to artificial intelligence. This will be my contribution to ensuring AI is done for great which women and minorities are not discriminated against, so that it is fair for all.
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Pomegranate | Crop regulation in pomegranate | crop regulation methods
Pomegranate is one of the most promising fruit crops of India. It has exquisite nutritionally valuable and remunerative crops.
In recent years pomegranate is getting popularity in the international trade due to its processed products and nutritional value. The major advantage of crop Canon is to strengthen the tree to rest and produce prolific flowers and fruit during any one of 2 or 3 flushes.
The aim of regulation is to produce uniform and good quality yield.
A good crop is possible only when the crop is regulated in a single season, otherwise the flowers continue to bloom uninterrupted. The selection of bahar in one place is mainly determined by availability of water, occurrence of pests, diseases and marketing position.
Crop regulation in Pomegranate is achieved by the several techniques like, flower bud thinning, shoot pruning, withholding irrigation and use of different chemicals.
Introduction :-
Pomegranate (Punica granatum L.) is one of the most predominant fruit crops of India which is grown in the tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world.
It belongs to the Punicaceae family and native of Iran but extensively grow in Mediterranean and central Asia.
It is highly suitable for arid and semi-arid region. India is the largest producer of pomegranate in the world.
The production of pomegranate is around 2.79 MT from the area of 0.25 million hectare.
It is rich sources of nutrients and phytochemical compounds. Phytochemical compounds found in many parts of the pomegranate tree like peel, juice and seeds parts of pomegranate fruits.
For multipurpose medicinal uses, so it is also known as “Dadima” in Ayurveda.
Pomegranates are mainly consumed as fresh and processed products like beverages, juice, jelly, jam etc. and as “Super fruit” in the global functional food industry.
This fruit peel is an uneatable scrap obtained during processing of juice. This fruit peel has multiple source of flavonoids, tannins and other phenolic compounds
Pomegranate has three main flowering and fruiting seasons or bahars, ambe bahar (spring season flowering), mrig bahar (June-July flowering) and hasta bahar (October- November flowering).
Pomegranate flowers continuously throughout the year under tropical climate, subtropical central and western India, there are three distinct flowering seasons viz. rainy (Mrig Bahar), spring (Ambe Bahar) and autumn (Hasta Bahar) with the corresponding harvesting periods during the rainy, winter and spring seasons in pomegranate.
Objectives of crop regulation in pomegranate
The main purpose of crop regulation in pomegranate is to relax the tree during any one of the two or three flushes and to produce prolific blossom and fruits. Besides, some main objectives are as under:
1. To regulate the uniform and good quality of fruits
2. To obtain suitable crop at a desired season
3. To increase number of hermaphrodite flowers
4. To maximize the production as well as profit to the producer.
5. To reduces the fruit dropping and increases the yield
6. To reduce cost of cultivation
They always avoid taking ambe bahar crop and regulate this crop into mrig bahar and crop is harvested during winter season but some people choose hasta bahar with less availability of water.
Principles of flower regulation :-
The basic principle of crop regulation is to manipulate the natural flowering that increase fruit yield, quality and profitability in pomegranate during the desired season.
Flower regulation is useful for best and long-term use of resources with high yield. Beginning of flowering and canon of flowering are pretendedby the different factors viz.
environmental and genetic factors.
Pomegranate flowers produce irregularly from Feb to October in the dry and semi-dry regions.
In India, all commercially grown varieties are very sensitive to insect-pests and diseases, especially Scorching, Bacterial Leaf Blight, Nematode, Termite and Mite etc.
Therefore, availability of irrigation water, pest and disease infestation and market demand are the major issues for flower regulation.
Indian pomegranate varieties are mostly produce flowers throughout the year.
Methods of crop regulation in pomegranate
Flowering is mostly affected by many factors viz. defoliants, withholding of irrigation, plant growth hormones, nutrients status and canopy management (training and pruning) etc.
Light pruning and ethrels foliar spraying are defoliant practiced to shedoff leaves. Withholding of irrigation (lack of moisture) is done 1 to 2 month before taking desired bahar in pomegranate.
The top soil around the tree should be dug to a depth of 30 cm, equal to the leaf canopy. The mixture of manure and fertilizers are applied into the soil which is then leveled and light irrigation is done after application.
The better floral sex ratio, higher fruit setting and ultimately higher quality and yield of fruits may be taken in year at a desired season by these treatments.
Bahar treatment must be started from third year onwards for taking better quality. Bahar treatment is done in
the following ways:
1. Flower regulation by cultural practices
Canopy management by training and pruning (carbon nitrogen ratio) is the best method to achieve higher flowering percent and quality fruit production in pomegranate. Pomegranate may be trained as single stemmed tree or multi-stemmed tree.
For the last few years, pomegranate plants have been trained by open centre system. Light pruning should be done after withholding of irrigation and 15 to 20 days before starting of new bahar.
To avoid fungal attack on pruned parts of plants should use 10 per cent Bordeaux mixture paste.
Withholding of irrigation is done in April-May for regulating of crop in dry areas. These cultural practices give good quality fruits and yield 60 to 80 fruits should be retained on single plant.
2. Induce more flowering due to the stress of water scarcity
The main principle of withholding of irrigation is to provide rest for the plant. Withholding of irrigation is done for one and half month in loamy soils and one month in light sandy soils.
It practices to accumulate large amounts of food to enhance growth in the coming season and increasing of number of flowers. In this stage the leaves of pomegranate plant fall (50 to 70 %). Under water stress conditions, plants produce osmatin, arginine protein, proline and proteogenic amino acids like prolines etc.
These amino acids help to stimulate flowering in the plants under water stress condition, so the plant produce more flowering and good sex ratio.
3. Use of chemicals for flowering
In pomegranate crop, spraying of ethrel (1-2 ml per litre) is sprayed extensively for crop regulation.
Ehtrel hormone stimulates the enzymes i.e. polygalacteronase and cellulase for cell smelting. These chemicals are considered best for good flowering.
4. Physiological disorder
Major physiological disorders like fruit cracking, sun scorching, browning of arils etc. are in pomegranate in dry areas. The foliar spray of gibberellic acid (20ppm) and boron (0.2%) are control of fruit cracking in suitable bahar.
Sun scorching in this fruits must be evade with use of thirty (30%)-thirty five (35%) butter paper and shade net, respectively. Harvesting of pomegranate fruits should be done at appropriate time to avoid the browning of arils.
5. Insect-pests and diseases management
Crop regulation is good system for managing the insect pests. Use of defoliant contains leaf falls from fifty to hundred(50-100%) it helps to escape the crop from outbreak of insect-pests and diseases and also reduce usage of insecticides.
Crop canon is an productive and modern executive application for obtaining maximum yield with better
quality. Availability of irrigation, insect-pests infestation, market demand, climatic conditions and use of
germ plasm are play major role in crop regulation. It requires an intensive care and work for its operation.
Crop regulation is more effective to control of physiological disorders i.e. sun scorching, fruit cracking etc. |
The Importance of Biodiversity and The Association for Geographical Studies // Dangers to Biodiversity
Earthy people may characterize biodiversity as the complete of all plant and creature life of the planet, and the actual planet – the air, water and land that upholds creature and vegetation. This variety of living animals shapes an emotionally supportive network which has been utilized by every civilization for its development and advancement. The rich biodiversity has been instrumental in giving humankind with food security, medical services and mechanical products that has prompted elevated requirement of living in the present day world. Incidentally it has additionally delivered the cutting edge consumerist society which is antagonistically influencing the variety of organic assets whereupon it is based. The variety of life on earth is excessively rich to the point that on the off chance that we use it economically we can continue growing new items for ages. Consequently, we should understand the significance of biodiversity as a significant asset.
Organic assortment can be seen at three levels –
• The hereditary inconstancy inside an animal groups
• The species inconstancy inside a local area
• The association of species in a space into particular plant and creature networks.
The hereditary variety: Every person in an animal groups contrasts broadly from others in its hereditary cosmetics because of enormous number of blends conceivable in the qualities. This hereditary fluctuation is fundamental for solid rearing populace of an animal groups. The decrease of hereditary variety will result in-reproducing in species. This prompts hereditary oddities and in the long run annihilation of that specific species. The assortment of nature's abundance can be taken advantage of on the off chance that we breed homegrown plant and creature assortments with their wild assortments to make them more useful and infection – safe. Current biotechnology likewise controls qualities to foster better kinds of seeds, medications and other mechanical crude materials.
The species variety: Every normal and man-made biological system is comprised of an assortment of creature furthermore, plant species. A few biological systems, for example, tropical rainforests are exceptionally wealthy in the quantity of species when contrasted with different environments like the desert biological system. At present the researchers have had the option to distinguish 1.8 million species on the Earth. Notwithstanding, this may just be a small portion of what truly exists.
The biological system variety: There are an enormous wide range of environments on the Earth. Unmistakable biological systems incorporate normal scenes like woods, prairies, deserts, mountains and so on just as oceanic environments like streams, lakes and oceans. Each of these likewise has man-adjusted regions like farmlands, touching terrains, metropolitan grounds and so forth Any environment that is abused or abused loses its usefulness and gets debased.
The Association for Geographical Studies
Many individuals need to know "For what reason is biodiversity significant?" Firstly, it is significant since it addresses the practically endless assortment of plant and creature life, and the assortment of the kinds of Earth's biological systems that help life as far as we might be concerned. It empowers people to get by in what would somehow bring about antagonistic conditions. Biodiversity is the very stuff that upholds the development and separation among the changing species. It's the reason felines are felines and ponies are ponies and people are people. What's more, further, it is liable for the distinctions among gatherings inside the bigger species. Take a gander at the number of apparently various kinds of people there are or wilderness felines or birds.
Water, wind, and daylight produce a significant part of the energy we use, and the activity of the planet on different substances throughout hundreds of years make and give things like coal, which is used to produce heat and more energy. Energy from wind, water, daylight, and coal warms our homes and force every one of our apparatuses Decaying creature matter has, throughout the hundreds of years made the petroleum derivatives we use consistently to control the vehicles that make transportation somewhat simple also, helpful. Without biodiversity we would be (in the event that we existed by any means) a homogeneous populace, with every one of us having similar weaknesses. This would imply that in the event of a pestilence, we would all be killed since there would be no biologic contrasts that would empower a few of us to endure and adjust. A lot of our cutting edge medication depends on blends of organically different substances separated from different plants (which we, consequently, mark therapeutic). Indeed prior to the ascent of current medication, ayurveda and unani frameworks of medication utilized different plants to accomplish different outcomes. Without those plants, and the incredible assortment of creepy crawlies that fertilize and cross-fertilize them, people would be considerably more defenseless against sickness.
The biodiversity contained in the environment furnishes timberland tenants with all their every day needs-food, building material, grain, medications and an assortment of different items. Biodiversity additionally gives us timber, stone, and marble – to give some examples of the structure materials much human residence relies on – we would to a great extent be without cover.
While people are omnivorous, without biodiversity there would be for all intents and purposes no assortment in our weight control plans. One motivation to inquire "for what reason is biodiversity significant?" is on the grounds that biodiversity gives a strict secret stash of food varieties, from things as normal as wheat or corn to things as fascinating as a portion of the fish utilized in sushi. Further, not every one of the supplements we need are in a specific food, so without an assorted base of food sources to make mixes from our overall wellbeing would endure. Biodiversity supports the bodies we live in, and influences the lives we lead, and the social orders we structure.
Numerous customary social orders have assumed a significant part in saving their biodiversity. They esteem biodiversity as a piece of their job just as through social and strict opinions. Customary agrarian social orders have been growing an incredible assortment of harvests which goes about as a protection against the disappointment of one yield. Present day agrarian practices on the other hand rely to a great extent upon monoculture with parcel of significance given to cash crops for public and global business sectors. This has brought about nearby food deficiencies, joblessness, landlessness and expanded weakness to dry spell. Reliance on water system offices, manures and pesticides has likewise expanded.
Other than all types of life reserve an option to exist on the Earth. Aside from the financial significance of preserving biodiversity, there are a few social, moral and moral qualities which are related with the sacredness of all types of life. Biodiversity likewise makes indispensable commitment to our style, creative mind and inventiveness. It frames an essential piece of the travel industry in the world. Individuals all around the world visit public parks, asylums and resorts to reproduce themselves. It helps them to de-stress as well as assists them to feel one with nature.
Dangers to Biodiversity
Biodiversity is something delicate, powerless to a wide range of dangers. Indeed, even as it upholds all life on earth it is continually confronting dangers and harm that is beyond difficult for our different biological systems to recuperate from. Dangers to biodiversity come from many sources, generally human however some normal. Biggest among the dangers to biodiversity looms human covetousness. By and large, people have consistently taken what they required from the actual earth and from its plant and creature species, with no see regarding if the assets being devoured were limited. It has as it were been since the center of the 1980s, as species began becoming wiped out at a record rate, that dangers to biodiversity became perceived as a significant concern.
Deforestation has left sections of land of previous backwoods uncovered and ungracious to the creatures and plants that relied upon them for food and food. A few waterways, like the Aral Ocean, have had their saline levels change so profoundly that they are appalling by the marine life that used to be abundant. These and different dangers to biodiversity, again for the most part brought about by people, have caused circumstances where support for the human existence of certain areas is risked by the changes to the space. For instance, when a waterway is at this point not livable, the fish become wiped out or move somewhere else, adding to appetite of the nearby land species that used to benefit from them.
Designing activities –, for example, dams and water system channels which change the progression of water to a locale, and can make either flood bowls or deserts, contingent upon which undertaking is set in a district – are among the greatest man-conveyed intimidations to biodiversity. They render tremendous measures of land unusable for developing food, despite the fact that – to be reasonable – a water system project is typically carried out to carry water to land that is more either dry or undeniably more crowded than the land utilized for the undertaking.
Preservation of Biodiversity
The genuine issue we face, in any case, is the preservation of biodiversity. While everybody concurs that preserving regular assets is a smart thought, there is no agreement on the best way to go about it. Each gathering, from legislative organizations to agro organizations to concerned people has their actually what for own preservation of biodiversity implies, and what measures ought to be taken to accomplish it. Further, each gathering has its own plan to seek after, and may respect a few components of preservation of biodiversity as dangers to those plans.
A contributor to the issue is that preservation of biodiversity is very exorbitant. We are simply starting to foster the innovations important to protect biodiversity areas of interest, however attempting to reestablish a region to its unique state isn't just exorbitant, it is generally expected unimaginable. Further, nobody arrangement fits all areas of interest. What is required in, for instance, the Aral Sea area isn't really what will work in the Everglades. In the main region, what is required is modifying the water system frameworks to reestablish legitimate saltiness of the
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What is mindfulness & why Mindfulness Skills?
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness Meditation is about being present moment by moment. It is a state of attention that is both relaxed and focused. The traditional name of Mindfulness is Vipassana, and it is one style of meditation amongst many. The type of Mindfulness I teach comes from the works of Shinzen Young and it is the one I find most useful and beneficial in terms of precision of the technique and clarity of the explanations.
Why Mindfulness Skills?
If you are wondering why develop Mindfulness skills. The benefits of Mindfulness training are –
• It can help increase mental, emotional and physical well-being.
• It can help to reduce stress and improve the way we interact with others.
• It can also help nurture our appreciation of our self and the world around us.
The system I teach is non-religious, so whatever your beliefs you can benefit.
Developing these skills helps you to experience your thoughts, emotions, physical sensations – and the ways that these interact – more clearly.
By doing this, you become much more self-aware.
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Far Out Space Station Concepts by NASA (Gallery)
Artist's Conception of Space Station Freedom
2001:A Space Odyssey Space Station
This the classic space station image from the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968. Praised for its special effects, the movie based its space station concept on Wernher Von Braun's model. Kubrick's station in the movie was 900 feet in diameter, orbited 200 miles above Earth, and was home to an international contingent of scientists, passengers, and bureaucrats.
Proposed USAF Manned Orbiting Laboratory
A 1960 concept image of the United States Air Force's proposed Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) that was intended to test the military usefulness of having humans in orbit. The station's baseline configuration was that of a two-person Gemini B spacecraft that could be attached to a laboratory vehicle. The structure was planned to launch onboard a Titan IIIC rocket. The station would be used for a month and then the astronauts could return to the Gemini capsule for transport back to Earth. The first launch of the MOL was scheduled for December 15, 1969, but was then pushed back to the fall of 1971. The program was cancelled by Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird in 1969 after the estimated cost of the program had risen in excess of $3 billion, and had already spent $1.3 billion. Some of the military astronauts selected for the program then transferred to NASA and became some of the first people to fly the Space Shuttle, including Richard Truly, who later became the NASA Administrator.
Spider Space Station Concept
A 1977 concept drawing for a space station. Known as the "spider" concept, this station was designed to use Space Shuttle hardware. A solar array was to be unwound from the exhausted main fuel tank. The structure could then be formed and assembled in one operation. The main engine tank would then be used as a space operations control center, a Shuttle astronaut crew habitat, and a space operations focal point for missions to the Moon and Mars.
Roof Space Station Concept
This is the Johnson Space Center's 1984 "roof" concept for a space station. The "roof" was covered with solar array cells, that were to generate about 120 kilowatts of electricity. Within the V-shaped beams there would be five modules for living, laboratory space, and external areas for instruments and other facilities.
Skylab Concept by George Mueller
Brick Moon Space Station Concept
This is an artist's impression of the "Brick Moon." "The Brick Moon" was the title of an article published in the Atlantic Monthly by Edward Everett Hale in 1869. This piece was the first known proposal for an Earth-orbiting satellite. Hale envisioned that the satellite could be used by mariners as a navigational aid. He believed it would be the longitudinal companion to the latitudinal North Star. In 1869, this story was considered fantasy but in retrospect "The Brick Moon" foreshadowed the need for a space station and some of its technologies.
Noordung's Three-Unit Space Station Concept
This 1929 Hermann Noordung image depicts a three-unit space station as seen from a space ship. Hermann Potocnik (1892-1929), also known as Herman Noordung, created the first detailed technical drawings of a space station. The three units were the habitat, the machine room, and the observatory, each connected by an umbilical. The Earth is in the background, approximately 26,000 miles away. The station in this image is roughly above Cameroon's southern tip, in a geosynchronous orbit on the median of Berlin.
Noordung's Space Station Habitat Wheel
Three-Radial-Module Space Station Concept
This three-radial-module space station concept was intended to utilize Apollo hardware to deploy the station and to transfer crews to and from orbit.
Artificial Gravity Space Station
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Statue of Liberty in New York
Statue of Liberty
Visiting the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island and the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island is a wonderful experience and to get the most out of it, realize that visiting can take most of a day.
Why is the Statue green? The Statue's copper has naturally oxidized to form its familiar "patina" green coating. This patina is as thick, in many places, as the copper behind it and is protecting the copper from naturally wearing away.
How tall is the Statue of Liberty? The Statue is 305ft. 1in. from the ground to the tip of the flame. It is the equivalent height of a 22-story building. In 1886, it was the tallest structure in New York.
Classical images of Liberty have usually been represented by a woman. The Statue of Liberty's face is said to be modeled after the sculptor's mother.
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Tuesday, 4 March 2014
A2 Film Studies Exam Practice: Spectatorship and Emotional Response
Would you agree that strong emotional effects are achieved in some films by the careful construction techniques and in others by the subject matter itself?
Films are carefully designed and produced to ensure that they cause the audience to feel something. Emotions towards a film can range from joy to anger and despair. The three films studied for this topic revolve around controversial subject matter such as racism and hatred and therefore cause most viewers to feel angry, sad, shocked and often a great deal of anticipation as to how they will end. These emotions are encouraged by the filmmakers through both their choice of subject matter and also the carefully constructed micro techniques used.
Nothing a director does is by accident and many techniques such as the use of a soundtrack and editing are there to encourage emotional responses in the audience. American History X, This is England and United 93 all feature non-diegetic soundtracks that increase the sadness of events depicted on screen. Typical instrumental music is added to the film in post-production and violins and pianos are commonly used for sad scenes. For example when Danny dies in AHX and Derek is running in slow motion, there are violins playing and when Shaun is all alone on the beach in TIE, there is acoustic guitar on the soundtrack. Shane Meadows even drowns out the sound of one character’s speech with piano music to emphasise how sad the scene is with Combo being racist in front of Milky. The editing also builds anticipation in these films with crosscutting between Derek and Danny as they part at the school gates, cutting between the passengers and the people on the ground in United 93 and cutting to close ups of character’s reactions as Combo tells his story. AHX also uses voiceover to make Danny more identifiable.
All three films are constructed to make the audience identify more with some characters than others. They have clear preferred readings created through their construction techniques in order to make the audience care for and side sympathise with certain characters. For example in AHX and TIE, there are young characters called Danny and Shaun. Danny’s voiceover tells the story of the film and as it is supposed to be him reading his essay, it even continues after his death. In essence, the audience hears his thoughts and perspective on events and therefore is more likely to identify with him. The cinematography aids this process with close ups and point of view shots and also the fact Danny is played by Edward Furlong who was a minor star after appearing in Terminator 2. Similarly TIE follows Shaun through his daily life. There is no voiceover but the camera sticks close to him, even when he is alone and we learn that both he and Danny have fathers who have died, instantly making them more sympathetic. When Danny dies and when Shaun starts to become a racist thug, there is music on the soundtrack to ensure that the audience feels sad. On the other hand United 93 uses no stars and reveals very little about the passengers’ back stories but through the cinematography and subject matter, still makes the victims easy to identify with.
Cinematography can be vital to creating an emotional response, as can be the mise-en-scene that is captured by the camerawork. In United 93, the camerawork is very often handheld and the view is often obstructed by framing that is not clear and feels improvised. This gives the film a great sense of realism, as if the viewer is watching a documentary caught be a camera operator on the plane with the passengers. This makes it more horrifying and saddening. The cinematography in AHX and TIE is much more composed and formal. Thought it may not have the same level of realism as U93, it still can create an emotional response. In both films, the spectator is put in the point of view of victims; Milky when he is physically attacked and Murray when he is verbally attacked. The camera is positioned in a high angle to look down on Derek after he has been raped and also on Shaun when he is all alone in TIE. Similarly, a low angle is used to make the house look imposing when Doris falls to her knees outside it after her fight in with Derek in AHX. The mise-en scene of AHX is particularly shocking with its use of swastika tattoos and Nazi memorabilia but it is also shocking and sad to see the appearance of the World Trade Centre still standing in U93.
On the other hand, it is certainly not only the construction techniques in any of these films that make them so sad. It is also the subject matter in all three films that is essential to creating the emotional response and one of the main reasons for this is their reference to real life events. U93 is a film based on the real life events of September 11th 2001 when a plane was hijacked and the passengers all died trying to take back control of the plane from terrorists. The real events are still very raw in the memories of many people who watch the film and the real life tragedy clearly makes the film far sadder than if the film was nothing but fiction. The phone calls that the characters make are based on actual transcripts which make the scenes where the passengers say goodbye to the loved ones extremely sad and difficult to watch. AHX and TIE may not be based on true stories but they frequently refer to real life events, to make the films more poignant and sad. AHX has Derek ranting about Rodney King and the LA race riots but Derek also pushes hot button emotive issues such as immigration and unemployment to make his racist rants appeal to his audience of followers. Similarly Combo in TIE uses immigration and unemployment but also refers to the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher to try and convince people of his cause. These real life references will undoubtedly mean more to those who remember them in real life but the use of real footage in TIE means the viewer will get the message that director Shane Meadows is trying to share.
All three films are about racism, hatred and violence. These are potent issues for creating emotional responses as many spectators will feel strongly about them. AHX deals with the issue of racism through the redemption of one Neo-Nazi skinhead who goes from brutally murdering an African American to being raped in prison by other Neo-Nazis to agreeing to help solve the problem or racism. TIE tells a coming of age story of a young boy who gets in with an older crowd before being influenced by a racist thug and finally turning against racism. U93 is about four men who want to kill a plane full of people because of their religious beliefs and their hatred of America. These are clearly emotive subjects where characters feel extremely strong hatred, say shocking, vile things and commit horrendous acts against each other.
In conclusion, it is not simply the subject matter or the construction techniques that create the strong emotional responses to these films. It is a marriage of both where the content is disturbing, challenging and often brutal while the music, editing and cinematography encourage the viewer to react with sadness, shock or horror. The script and the performances ensure that the audience care for the characters, even characters who they may have at first hated. The most emotional scenes of the films all occur towards the end where the subject of racial conflict comes to a head but also the music, performances, editing and cinematography add inexorably to the emotional impact.
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JFreeChart Architecture
JFreeChart Architecture with Tutorial, Basic Terminology, What is Jfree Chart, Jfreechart Installation, Jfreechart class, Jfreechart's key classes, ChartUtilities class, ChartFrame class, PiePlot3D class, NumberAxis Class, XYSeriesCollection Class, TimeSeries Class, TimeSeriesCollection, PiePlot class etc
JFreeChart Architecture
JFreeChart Architecture
JFreeChart's library contains two levels of architecture to define the interaction between its various classes.
1) Class Level Architecture:
The basic Class Level Architecture represents how various classes present in JFreeChart library interact with each other to yield various types of charts.
• The File represents the user input used for creating a dataset in the file.
• The Database represents the source having user input used for creating a dataset in the database.
• The Create Dataset represents the dataset which is being created and stored into the object.
• The General Dataset is a type of dataset which is used to create pie charts.
• The Category Dataset is a type of dataset which is widely used for bar chart, line chart etc.
• The Series Dataset is a type of dataset which is used for storing series of data and construct line charts.
• The Series Collection Dataset represents the various categories of series datasets that are added to Series Collection Dataset. This type of dataset is used for XYLine Charts.
• The Create Chart is the method which is executed to create final chart.
• The Frame/Image represents that the chart is displayed on a Swing Frame or an image is created.
2) Application Level Architecture:
The Application Level Architecture shows the location of JFreeChart library in a java application.
• User data is received by the client program.
• Standard Java and JFreeChart APIs are used to generate the output in the form of either a frame, which can be displayed directly inside the application or independently in the image formats such as JPEG or PNG. |
Using Barnacle Infrastructures to Advantage Your Customer Blog
The symbiotic relationship between whales and barnacle clams is a fact. The barnacle clams live on the open sea where whales make their homes. The whales want barnacle clams to eat, along with shelter from the elements and coming from predators. The clams supply whales with food, as well as a way of moving to fresh water where they canine and backside young. Inturn, the whales take care of the clams by filtering all their poop in order that the clams possess a nourishing home to live in.
One example of a barnacle and whale romantic relationship can be seen in the lives of sea frogs. Sea frogs primarily prey on crabs. These turtles also prey on fish, small crustaceans, fish ova, snails, insects, and even various other sea pets or animals. The green turtle also feeds on seafood and snail, as well as smaller crustaceans like the common bullnose snail. Quite a few creatures are crucial to the ocean ecosystem since they equally provide a way to food and home for not just sea turtles, nonetheless green turtles as well.
However , both of these wildlife are endangered by liveliness, which is intimidating their very existence. A variety of human natural environment is being destroyed or perhaps diminishing anticipated towards the building, and in particular by unlawful fishing actions. There has been a significant increase in the number of incidents of green turtle commensalism as well, due to the desire for more seafoods, more so since China plus the United States are depleting their particular seafood provides.
To date, the barnacle is the simply creature in the ocean that acts as a website link between all Earth’s environments. The barnacle is a crucial player inside the food cycle, because it is found in very few foodstuff chains, and only in a few meals chains. Due to this, it is a link between all environments. The barnacle is a very important part within the ecosystem, https://theorderbride.com/latin-region/ and is in close romantic relationship with the whale relationship as well.
It is generally accepted that with no barnacle, the ecosystems would be greatly dissolvable, as many critters rely on them with regards to food. Several sea turtle species be based upon barnacles for his or her protection from predators. In the outrageous, barnacles are located on a few islands in the Pacific, but today they can be present in almost every sea basin. These marine invertebrates have helped to form a sophisticated and intricate web of life which have been incredibly diverse, and works in an intricate manner to support a range of different features.
For this reason, the use of barnacle infrastructures could benefit businesses in numerous different ways. To begin with, by posting information applying open source articles platforms, you may benefit from the comprehensive research performed by industry professionals. This groundwork may profit your company in many different ways: first of all, by helping to define your customer and product niche, and second, by assisting you understand the elaborate web of interactions between organisms. Finally, it may profit your business by giving valuable back-end services on your customers, just like sales and marketing analytics. Finally, it may well benefit your guest weblog, as you can make use of this additional data to develop and market different aspects of the guest blog in a brand new way, and thus gain even more visibility in the blogosphere.
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The Use of Ketamine as a Treatment for Depression and Alcohol Use Disorders
By Brendan Kelleher
2020, Vol. 12 No. 10 | pg. 1/1
Ketamine, described by the chemical formula C13H16ClNO, is most commonly associated with adolescent and adult recreational drug users and ravers who abuse this drug to experience a euphoric and dissociative state. Although this drug is a federal schedule III controlled substance as a result of this abuse potential, ketamine has experienced a renaissance in clinical interest in recent years.1 Although clinical use of ketamine is controversial, it has become a focal point of pharmacological research due to its considerably diverse molecular targets and neurophysiological properties.2 In fact, recent studies have cited ketamine as a potential therapy for depression, including treatment resistant varieties, as well as alcohol use disorders.
Historical Perspective
Ketamine was first discovered by Parke-Davis laboratories in 1962 as part of an effort to create a powerful, novel anesthetic agent with analgesic properties.3 The group initially produced phencyclidine, more commonly referred to as PCP, and while this substance did induce the desired effects, it produced dangerously severe excitation and delirium in a significant percentage of the trial population. After the failure of phencyclidine, the group continued to engineer derivatives and eventually created CI-581, a fused ketone and amine, later combined as the drug name ketamine, that produced cataleptic, analgesic and anaesthetic action with a much shorter duration than PCP, without the detrimental excitations.3 Ketamine proved to be a very powerful substitute as it produced “potent anesthesia, sedation and analgesia while maintaining cardiopulmonary stability and airway patency.”2
In the early years after ketamine was developed, significant research and clinical trials were performed. In 1963, ketamine was patented as a veterinary anesthetic. Following this application, ketamine was later introduced as an FDA-approved prescription medication under the brand name Ketalar in 1970 and was widely used as an anesthetic throughout the Vietnam war.2,3 By the end of the war, ketamine was regularly abused and associated with the psychedelic experiences sought by most recreational users. However, beginning in the 1990s, researchers began to rediscover ketamine as a potential source of psychopharmacological treatments.
Pharmacological Profile of Ketamine
Ketamine is a general anesthetic used for short term diagnostic procedures and surgery.4 However, expanded use in medical settings has been limited due to its negative psychological effects, including vivid hallucinations, agitation, and confusion.4 Ketamine’s mechanism of action is different from most hypnotic, antidepressant and mood disorder treating pharmaceuticals such as benzodiazepines, as ketamine does not interact with GABA receptors. Its specific and detailed physiological impacts have not been entirely explored, but at a basic level, ketamine is a noncompetitive (allosteric) antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.2 There are several theories as to its true mechanism of effect after binding, but none have been supported by significant empirical data. One theory on the effects of ketamine explores its relationship to glutamate, a major amino acid neurotransmitter that is often linked with many mood and anxiety disorders.5 Glutamate is thought to cause changes in mood and psychological state through a network of signaling involving the binding of glutamate to NMDA receptors. As ketamine is able to allosterically inhibit the NMDA receptors, it has been proposed that ketamine prevents the binding of glutamate, often producing antidepressant and other neuromodulation effects. Another more recent theory proposed that ketamine is involved in rewiring brain circuitry and changing synaptic growth to influence mood and recovery from depression.6
There are two main types of ketamine that have been used to produce various clinical effects. Racemic ketamine, often infused directly into the bloodstream, is a blend of “S” and “R” mirror ketamine molecules.7 Esketamine, often given as a nasal spray, only contains the “S” ketamine molecule and was approved by the FDA this past March under the name “Spravato.”7 S-ketamine appears to be a better long term choice for treating clinical disorders as it appears to be less prone to causing psychomimetic side effects, such as derealization and hallucinations.8 However, significantly more research must be done to confirm this finding.
Ketamine’s systematic effects are quite interesting. At low and anesthetic doses, ketamine produces increased blood pressure and heart rate and does not cause any significant respiratory depression, preserving the upper airway reflexes.3 However, ketamine can induce several negative side effects in certain populations. These overall effects have been recorded by various researchers and can be organized into four main categories: (1) intoxication, similar to other sedatives and anesthesia agents; (2) perceptual changes and disturbances in auditory, visual, and somatosensory domains as well as feelings of dissociation, depersonalization and derealization; (3) delusions, including misinterpretation and thought disorders; and (4) other general negative symptoms such as an inability to speak.3
Another key characteristic of ketamine is its fast absorption time. Ketamine has a maximum plasma absorption range from three to thirty minutes, depending on the mode of delivery.3 In addition to fast uptake time, ketamine binds strongly to receptors, meaning that ketamine exerts its influence very quickly upon administration.
Solution to Treatment Resistant Depression?
Depression is a sometimes episodic and often chronic mental illness that can feature discrete symptomatic periods separated by periods of apparent wellness.8 It is the third leading cause of disability worldwide affecting close to 350 million individuals.9,10 Depression in individuals can have varied causation and may be treated differently for different people. Because of this non-uniformity of causation and manifestation of depression, it is imperative that these underlying factors be examined to ensure that all relevant issues are taken into account before treatment.
Major depressive disorder (MDD), a significant diagnostic category of depression, is often associated with frequent relapses and incomplete recovery and remission.11 Quite frequently, individuals suffering from MDD are treated with psychopharmacological agents widely available such selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs), and other antipsychotic medicals.12 Unfortunately, the majority of these agents take weeks to take effect and in 10-20% of patients, these antidepressant medications do not result in an improvement in symptoms. This untreatable population falls under the umbrella of treatment resistance. While traditional treatment has not proven to be effective in these cases, research on less traditional treatments may provide alternative treatment options in these cases.
In recent years, multiple studies have linked ketamine to antidepressant effects, particularly in cases of treatment resistant depression. In a study by Murrough et al in 2013, researchers observed an 89% improvement in depression questionnaires 24 hours post ketamine administration in a population of adults with treatment resistant depression.5 Furthermore, in a study conducted by Segmiller et al, three of six participants suffering from treatment resistant depression that were treated using ketamine showed both short term and long term improvements in his/her outlook and symptoms.13 In addition to its prospective ability to alleviate some symptoms of treatment resistant depression, ketamine’s rapid absorption and effect can induce a response in several hours, providing a rapid, novel treatment compared with most antidepressant regimens, which take weeks for noticeable effect. While several of these studies examine a very small sample size, early results suggest promise for future treatment and research.
While the majority of depression-related ketamine research has examined its effects, there has been very little work done to examine the underlying mechanism behind the effects. In an effort to better understand this relationship, in April 2019, Conor Liston at Weill Cornell Medicine examined synaptic changes in depressed mice that resulted from ketamine administration. Liston stressed mice in two distinctly different ways, observed the results of the stress, and then administered ketamine. He found that the ketamine seemed to partially reverse the effects of stress, regrowing synapses where stress had destroyed them. Improved behavior and circuit function were observed in the mice within a three hour span post administration, and synapses began to regrow between twelve and twenty four hours.14 While synapses regrow rapidly, they often deteriorate if not maintained properly. Liston himself admits that while the findings are very promising, there is still a great deal of additional study needed. Liston states, “Our findings open up new avenues for research…that could include drugs that stabilize the synapses or behavioral therapies that engage the healed synapses and circuits, thereby strengthening them.”14 While Liston’s study is certainly not the first study to link ketamine to antidepressant actions, it is one of the first to provide solid evidence for the mechanism that causes the effect. One slight drawback of the study is that Liston’s team only examined the effects of a single dose of ketamine and did not address how multiple doses would affect an individual. It is unclear whether multiple doses would result in an increased rejuvenation of synapses or cause some sort of regression. Even considering its limitations, the study provides empirical supporting evidence and a solid jumping off point for future clinically directed research.
Treatment of Alcoholism
Substance overuse and abuse disorders such as alcohol use disorder and other substance use disorders are among the leading causes of avoidable mortality and morbidity worldwide, affecting 19.7 million individuals in the United states over the age of 12.15,16 Additionally, 74% of those who suffer from a substance abuse disorder are simultaneously suffering from an alcohol use disorder.16 As a result, when treating for alcoholism, researchers must ensure that they examine the whole clinical formulation, treating all aspects and angles to ensure nothing is missed. A treatment serving as a suppressor of desire to consume alcohol in an individual may prove to be an ineffective therapy for the comorbid condition.
A study published in November 2019 suggests that ketamine could serve as a disruptor of negative alcohol consumption patterns in adults. The study focused on addiction as a memory disorder that relies on maladaptive reward memories (MRMs) to develop and maintain these addictions.17 MRMs are learned associations that are created between drug predictive environmental stimuli such as the look, taste and smell of a substance, and the specific drug reward that the nervous system experiences.18 These memories were long thought to be unalterable and current treatments for substance abuse usually focus solely on learning adaptive behavior to suppress the desires and cravings. However, recent research has examined memory reconsolidation, a process involving the reactivation and destabilization of old, long-term memories to update themselves through the incorporation of new information19. Their findings suggest that through memory consolidation it is possible to selectively target and weaken the memory cues, damaging the network of MRMs and weakening the response to the behavior.20 The research team hypothesized that triggering MRMs in individuals that drank dangerous amounts of alcohol and immediately administering ketamine would disrupt the retrieval of associated memories and result in a reduced desire to drink.
To test this hypothesis, the group gathered 90 individuals who admitted that they drank too much alcohol, but were not formally diagnosed with an alcohol use disorder (Anderson), and split them into three groups: (1) induced retrieval and administered ketamine (RET+KET group); (2) no retrieval and administered ketamine; and (3) retrieval and administered placebo (saline). The results were quite intriguing. In the RET+KET, there was a significant reduction in desire to drink beer placed in front of them post ketamine administration vs. pre ketamine administration. There was no significant change noted in the control group.19 The RET+KET group also showed a significant drop in the number of binges post manipulation while the control group showed no difference.
Additionally, to ensure that the outcomes examined were not simply short term, the research team continued to follow subjects up to nine months after the manipulation. Researchers observed reductions in weekly alcohol drinking in all groups, with no evidence of rebound.20 This cross-group trend was likely due to some sort of self-awareness and initiative following their admittance to dangerous alcohol use. Most significantly, the RET+KET group had cut their average alcohol consumption in half by the nine month check in. This data suggests a notable, potential relationship between ketamine administration and reduction of alcohol consumption and the results aligned with a therapeutic mechanism grounded in reconsolidation interference.20
Future Directions
Ketamine holds a great deal of promise as a potential source of psychological treatments due to its rapid absorption and effect timing, as well as potential long term results. Unlike other antidepressants or MRM reducing treatments that can take weeks to yield results, individuals who received ketamine therapy began to show results hours after administration for both antidepressant action and reduction in alcohol consumption. These findings suggest many possible avenues of exploration for future effective and efficient treatments to psychological disorders. As substance and alcohol use disorders are very often comorbid with depression and other mood disorders, treatment of both conditions simultaneously could be quite advantageous, and alleviation of one condition with ketamine treatment may lead to improvements in the other.
While the future does seem bright for clinical use of ketamine, there continue to be impediments to widespread acceptance due to ketamine’s stigma, as it is an addictive narcotic that continues to be abused as a recreational drug. Clinical trials and significant research on substances such as ketamine can be expensive, often requiring the support of grant money. It is often much more difficult to get this limited funding for a controversial pharmaceutical like ketamine compared to treatments without negative associations. In addition, there are several aspects of ketamine treatment that require a great deal more research before any real conclusion can be made about its true efficacy. It is clear that there is still significant work to be done before ketamine could be a widely accepted psychological treatment.
Based on the evidence provided by recent studies, the use of ketamine as a potential therapy for depression, including treatment resistant varieties, as well as alcohol use disorders, has the potential to significantly benefit individuals affected by these conditions as an alternative to traditional treatments. Future clinically directed research is warranted to determine whether ketamine treatment is the psychological breakthrough that will best address these conditions.
1.) U. (n.d.). Drug scheduling. Retrieved February 24, 2020, from
2.) Li, L., & Vlisides, P. E. (2016). Ketamine: 50 Years of Modulating the Mind. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 10, 612.
3.) Mion, G. (2017). History of anaesthesia: The ketamine story – past, present and future. European Journal of Anesthesiology, 34(9), 571-575. doi:10.1097/EJA.0000000000000638
4.) N. (n.d.). Ketamine. Retrieved February 24, 2020, from
5.) Murrough, J. W., Perez, A. M., Pillemer, S., Stern, J., Parides, M. K., aan het Rot, M., Collins, K. A., Mathew, S. J., Charney, D. S., & Iosifescu, D. V. (2013). Rapid and longer-term antidepressant effects of repeated ketamine infusions in treatment-resistant major depression. Biological psychiatry, 74(4), 250–256.
6.) Moda-Sava, R. N. (2019). Sustained rescue of prefrontal circuit dysfunction by antidepressant-induced spine formation. Science, 364(6436). doi:10.1126/science.aat8078
7.) Meisner, R. C. (2019, May 22). Ketamine for major depression: New tool, new questions [Web log post]. Retrieved February 24, 2020, from
8.) Paul, R., Schaaff, N., F. P., Moller, H., & T. F. (2009). Comparison of racemic ketamine and S-ketamine in treatment-resistant major depression: Report of two cases. The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, 10(3), 241-244. doi:
9.) Corriger, A., & Pickering, G. (2019). Ketamine and depression: a narrative review. Drug design, development and therapy, 13, 3051–3067.
10.) Ishak, W. W., Greenberg, J. M., & Cohen, R. M. (2013). Predicting relapse in major depressive disorder using patient-reported outcomes of depressive symptom severity, functioning, and quality of life in the Individual Burden of Illness Index for Depression (IBI-D). Journal of affective disorders, 151(1), 59–65.
11.) Serafini, G., Howland, R. H., Rovedi, F., Girardi, P., & Amore, M. (2014). The role of ketamine in treatment-resistant depression: a systematic review. Current neuropharmacology, 12(5), 444–461.
12.) M. (2018, February 03). Depression (major depressive disorder). Retrieved February 24, 2020, from
13.) Segmiller, F., Rüther, T., Linhardt, A., Padberg, F., Berger, M., Pogarell, O., Möller, H.‐J., Kohler, C. and Schüle, C. (2013), Repeated S‐ketamine Infusions in Therapy Resistant Depression: A Case Series. The Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 53: 996-998. doi:10.1002/jcph.122
14.) Makin, S. (2019, April 12). Behind the Buzz: How Ketamine Changes the Depressed Patient’s Brain. Scientific American.
15.) Torregrossa, M. M., Corlett, P. R., & Taylor, J. R. (2011). Aberrant learning and memory in addiction. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 96(4), 609–623.
16.) Thomas, S. (2020, February 3). Addiction statistics: Drug & substance abuse statistics. Retrieved February 24, 2020, from
17.) Sanders, L. (2019). Ketamine cultivates new nerve cell connections in mice. Science News.
18.) Hyman, S. E. (2005). Addiction: A Disease of Learning and Memory. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 162(8), 1414-1422. doi:
19.) Lee J. L. (2009). Reconsolidation: maintaining memory relevance. Trends in neurosciences, 32(8), 413–420.
20.) Das, R.K., Gale, G., Walsh, K. et al. Ketamine can reduce harmful drinking by pharmacologically rewriting drinking memories. Nat Commun 10, 5187 (2019).
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What makes our homes such inviting places for cockroaches? How do they survive? What makes them so adaptable? How can we prevent a cockroach invasion, and if we have been invaded, how can we get rid of them?
How do they get into our houses and how can we get them out?
David goes to new depths to explore the life of a cockroach.
Segment length: 7:36
Cockroaches. We humans consider them the "rats of the insect world," yet cockroaches could be considered one of the most successful creatures on earth. Entomologists have found fossilized cockroaches that are more than 300 million years old. Amazingly enough, these fossilized cockroaches look very similar to the ones scurrying around in our yards and homes today.
There are over 4,000 species of cockroaches. As one of nature's recyclers, they are often found eating natural forest debris. A few find their way into our kitchens, basements, and bathrooms, coming up through the drains, sneaking in through cracks, or carried in on grocery bags. These cockroaches are usually looking for warm, moist, dark places to call home.
Cockroaches, by design, are survivors. They are nocturnal, making them hard to spot. If they are discovered, their flat bodies make it easy for them to escape into small crevices. Their antennae and cerci help them detect changes in vibrations and air pressure, making it difficult to even step on them. Cockroaches are omnivorous. They eat anything from dog food to plaster. Internal bacteria help cockroaches digest these unusual meals. If necessary, cockroaches can live for three months without food and one month without water.
Although cockroaches preen regularly, they are still suspected of transmitting diseases such as salmonella, dysentery, and typhus. They are also suspected of causing allergic reactions in half of the 17 million people afflicted with asthma.
Have cockroaches appeared in your home? Implement an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program. First, start by making the site less attractive to cockroaches by storing food in tight containers and maintaining high sanitary standards. Then, if you must use pesticides, read the warning labels carefully. Traps and boric acid can be used instead of highly-toxic sprays. Although an IPM is a safer approach for the environment, following it probably won't enable you to get rid of cockroaches completely. Remember, cockroaches have been around for 300 million years. They are sure to be around for a long time to come.
1. Most cockroaches originated in Africa. Now they are found in all parts of the world. How might this spread of cockroaches have occurred?
2. You have just found cockroaches in your home. What will you do?
antennae a pair of sensory feelers on the head of an insect
bacteria microscopic organisms that, in this case, aid in a cockroach's digestion
boric acid a medical antiseptic; a powder that acts as an insecticide for cockroaches
cerci small nerve endings on the back of a cockroach that can detect changes in air pressure and movement
entomologists scientists who study insects
nocturnal active at night
omnivorous eating both animals and plants; in the case of cockroaches, eating almost anything
palpi sensitive appendages attached to the oral part of a cockroach enabling it to pre-taste food
Insects. (1986) Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. Videotape.
Souza, D.M. (1991) Insects around the house. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Books.
Wenner, A.M., and H.D. Klein. (1991) Tiny-game hunting: Environmentally healthy ways to trap and kill the pests in your house and garden. New York: Bantam.
Additional sources of information:
Carolina Biological Supply Co.
2700 York Road
Burlington, NC 27215
(800) 334-5551
Connecticut Valley Biological
82 Valley Road
P.O. Box 326
South Hampton, MA 01073
(800) 628-7748
Community resources:
Pest exterminators
University entomology extension services
Main Activity
Caught One!
Design a cockroach trap. See if you can catch one.
Are cockroaches your invisible neighbors? Make a guess as to where you might find them. Design your own cockroach trap, or team up with your classmates. Then set out on an expedition to trap a cockroach.
1. Coat the outside of your container with masking tape, black paint, or construction paper to make the inside of your container dark and inviting to a cockroach.
2. Smear a wide band of petroleum jelly around the inside of the container just below the neck.
3. Add bits of food to the container for cockroach bait.
4. Where in your school, home, or community might cockroaches be hiding? Select a site, get permission, then go and set up your trap. Place the trap on its side. Create a miniature ramp using the cardboard strip or tongue depressor, extending the ramp from the floor to the container.
5. If you catch a few cockroaches, quickly screw the lid on tightly. You don't want any cockroaches to escape. Notify the building authorities of your discovery.
1. What plan would you suggest to help get rid of the cockroaches at your specific site? What experiments can you devise to see how well your plan works?
2. Compare your cockroaches with those caught by your classmates. Are they the same types of cockroaches or are they different? Try to identify them.
What repels a cockroach? Experiment by putting a piece of bread in one end of a box and adding a cockroach. How long does it take for the cockroach to start eating the bread? Then, place a piece of peeled garlic into the box. Observe. Is the cockroach attracted to the garlic or repelled by it? Try bay leaves or cucumbers. Does your cockroach say "No thanks!" to these? Experiment with other foods.
Get out the calculators. A female German cockroach reproduces four to eight times in its life cycle, laying seven to eight egg cases, each case containing 35 to 40 eggs. About how many offspring might one female German cockroach have? Divide students into groups to solve the problem. Give each group a package of kidney beans to predict how many cockroaches their female would produce. Put all the beans together to see the effects of cockroach reproduction.
Find out how smart a cockroach can be. Design a cockroach maze. Start with a baking pan half-filled with water. Build a maze using several 6-oz. cans and strips of cardboard. Arrange the cans in the pan and place the cardboard strips on top of the cans to create two pathways. One pathway leads to the cockroach's home, the other leads to a dead-end. Put your cockroach at the start of the maze and observe.
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These cities' digital twins can give us double the insights
IoT, big data and 5G have made it possible to create “digital twins," detailed virtual replicas of objects, processes and even cities in the real world.
What if every city had an identical twin? Well, not absolutely identical but more a virtual model of all of its streets, buildings, road furniture, terrain, and public spaces.
Digital twins, created through geodata modeling, can be connected to data-collecting IoT sensors to help urban designers, governments and citizens visualize plans and processes before they occur. For example, a “twin" can help plan the details of construction before breaking ground or installing a new façade, prepare for potential emergency situations like natural disasters, respond to urban environmental changes and more.
Let's review some of the use cases being employed today, the future of digital twinning and how it can make cities safer and more efficient overall.
You've heard of twin cities...?
Here are just a few recent examples of how digital twin technology is being used
in cities around the world.
• In Los Angeles researchers are creating a way, via digital twins, to view car crashes seconds after they happen, locate and recommend an optimal route for ambulances, alert all connected self-driving cars to clear a path and, as a result, prevent further accident-related pile-ups and traffic jams.
As these cities are proving, digital twins are capable of increasing the collection of big data and transforming that into improved traffic and transportation, smart city planning and increased safety and preparedness. But did you know that Geodata Models can be beneficial in other ways?
Simulations in real-time
When digital twins, like HERE Geodata Models, are connected to IoT sensors that collect data, they can create a simulation of a person, place or thing. For cities, digital twin models can visualize variety of scenarios to help planners, workers and citizens prepare for the future:
• “Road Furniture": map geo-locations and 3D geometries of objects on or near roads and streets. 3D geometry is the mathematical location of shapes in three-dimensional space and consists of an x-coordinate, y-coordinate and z-coordinate. Objects can include trees, fire hydrants, signage, traffic lights, and street lamps.
• “First Response": assist in locating and learning about building assets for emergency response teams including placement of windows, balconies and fire escapes, architectural materials, location of parapet walls, chimneys, HVAC units, head houses, and solar panels on rooftops.
• “3D Canvas": visualize a city's changing demographics and the policies that affect them, or zoning such as crime statistics and public health issues.
The examples above illustrate how individual cities can use Geodata Models to improve urban infrastructure and public policy creation. But what would happen if digital models of cities were networked together to create a digital country, continent or even an entire planet?
"While most of these digital twins are designed to serve the local population, some are already thinking about how to create a network of these cities. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has established a pilot project to build a network of digitally twinned smart cities, which, in addition to Singapore, will include Jakarta, Indonesia, and Cauayan City, Philippines. The goal is for participating cities to use their shared resources and capabilities to collaborate on solutions to key urban challenges."—Daniel Castro for GovTech.com, October/November 2019.
Digital twins are enabling us and our partners to mature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technologies by enhancing operations through an understanding of the locations these vehicles operate in - allowing players in this ecosystem to develop safer solutions in a cost-efficient manner. - Antina Lee, HERE Product Innovation Manager
A powerful couple: 5G and digital twins
The deployment of new 5G networks could play a major role in justifying the creation of large scale digital twins throughout the world. These digitized smart city environments could then be used to help cities work together through virtually-connected alliances. Digital twins can also help cities share best practices to collaborate on developing solutions to key urban challenges.
As it is right now, 5G companies select a candidate cell site location in a labor-intensive and typically manual process involving a dispatch of technicians for physical on-site surveys. These candidate locations can be on cell towers, high-rise building rooftops and increasingly in locations containing utility poles and street lamps. Without accurate information - site dimensions, site details and environmental context - the process of fully vetting individual candidate cell locations could result in potential delays and increased costs.
What if every city had an identical twin?
A digital twin can help solve these challenges by allowing operators to perform this real estate vetting from a remote, centralized location. An additional benefit of performing these site surveys virtually is the ability to conduct this work for many different candidate locations at the same time, resulting in large cost savings and faster service.
Once the tower, rooftop and pole locations have been selected, the digital twin can be further used together with network design and GIS application software programs to determine the best location within the site to deploy the 5G network equipment for maximum performance and coverage.
Creating a digital representation, a geodata model, of the site means that engineers, planners and technicians can access the replica using an app and guarantee that their plans match the details of the site in real life. This digital survey will cut down on the number of site visits needed, keeping the installation moving quickly. Guidance from data-rich digital twins has the potential to reduce deployment lead time, cost of labor, and the overall 5G project budget.
"Although we anticipate 5G network planning and network design use cases will drive initial widespread adoption of HERE Geodata Models, there are a wide array of additional applications for this dataset including SimViz (virtual simulations in cyberspace), AR/VR/spatial computing and ground obstruction maps for ground-based robots and aerial drones." – Mark Yao, HERE, Director of Product Management
See the future with HERE Geodata Models.
Urban Mobility
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New Feature 5 of 10: New and Improved Adaptive Learning
This blog is the 5th of the 10-part blog series introducing you to the 10 new features currently available for your use as you kickoff the new school year.
Below we’ve clarified and explained how the new and improved Adaptive Learning works and what you and your students can expect:
1. What is an Adaptive Learning Path?
An Adaptive Learning Path is simply a set of standards/concepts that are grouped and sequenced for your students to work through at their own pace. It can be any number of concepts. Since the path is adaptive, students can work through the concepts at their own pace as they meet the minimum rigor and proficiency requirements for each concept.
Key takeaways:
1. Curriculum settings ensure that students receive ample practice within a concept without the need for teachers to schedule recurring practices. (i.e. In a path with 8 concepts using the ScootPad default rigor and proficiency settings, the student has to work through a minimum of 160 questions (8 concepts*20 questions) and maintain an 80% proficiency.)
2. Learning paths are adaptive and each student will work through at their own pace. Students receive time-out lessons and scaffolding in real-time which is necessary for them to continue independently.
learning path.PNG
Learning Path with only 8 concepts
2. Can I build my own Adaptive Learning Path?
Yes! ScootPad offers out-of-the-box adaptive learning paths which cover a full year/grade level. However, you are encouraged to customize learning paths which align with your pacing guides and your curriculum. Learn how to build your own learning paths by clicking here!
Key takeaways:
1. You must choose a learning path for your students when Math or ELA is set to comprehensive. This can be the ScootPad pre-built path, your own or shared by someone else.
2. The initial Personalized Diagnostic is based on the learning path you choose so make sure you are setting your students on the right paths.
3. After setting up my classroom what happens next?
The Personalized Diagnostic, if auto-assigned, is the first task your students will encounter as part of their adaptive learning experience. Learn more about the “Enhanced Personalized Diagnostic Assessment” by watching an on-demand video.
Key takeaways:
1. The length of the diagnostic will vary for each student based on their prior knowledge of the concepts (hence adaptive).
2. ScootPad updates the students’ learning path in real-time with concepts that passed the diagnostic and those needing practice.
3. Students can save and resume the diagnostic as often as necessary until its complete.
In a LP with only 10 concepts, on the Personalized Diagnostic, example student passed 5 and needs practice in 2. 3 concepts were not attempted due to their dependency on others.
4. How do the results of the diagnostic factor into my students’ practices?
Once students complete the diagnostic, they are automatically launched into adaptive practices. Visit your adaptive practice dashboard to see diagnostic results and mastery progress thus far. Click on the learning path button to see which concepts were passed, not passed, not attempted, and lastly, the concepts the students will start practice in.
Key takeaways:
1. Each student’s path has been carved out by the diagnostic.
2. ScootPad will automatically start students where they need the most help
3. Concepts the students passed on the diagnostic are not subject to the rigor mentioned above. Instead these concepts will be queued up for the Mastery Check. Keep reading to find out more!
LP blog
Teacher’s view of unit 1 view of a LP. Showing concepts in various stages of mastery.
5. What does a student see in an adaptive practice?
Key takeaways:
1. Adaptive Practices offer a truly personalized experience for each student based on the concepts being spiraled for that student in real-time.
2. ScootPad automatically pushes out lessons when students need help.
3. ScootPad will automatically scaffold as many grade levels as necessary (going down as far as Kindergarten if necessary) in order to fill skill gaps.
4. The RTI-Aligned Intervention Monitor helps the teacher predict and take action quickly and timely.
gif student
6. What is a Mastery Check?
Remember those concepts the students passed on their diagnostic? Also think about the concepts that meet the rigor and proficiency criteria (marked as practice done). These concepts are colored turquoise in the learning path and will be revisited with strategically spaced quick assessments, called Mastery Checks. Concepts successfully passed during the Mastery Check are marked “Mastered” in the learning path. Learn more about “Automatic Mastery Checks” by clicking here!
Key Takeaways:
1. Mastery Checks are automatic and strategically spaced.
2. Concepts that are Mastery Check ready are shown in turquoise color.
3. Concepts successfully passed during a Mastery Check are marked “Mastered”
diagnostic passed
The ScootPad Team
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Nano revolution in data storage
Sarah: Looks like my recent wishes for nanoscale components to make my laptop lighter might not be that far-fetched. Experts strongly believe that nanotechnology will revolutionise data storage within about 10 years, giving us lighter, more robust and faster computer devices. Computer World and both addressed this issue in recent discussions. For example, developments such as Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM) could allow components such as the disc drive and memory chip to be merged into one item, making MRAM a likely candidate for becoming the universal memory item in nanoelectronic equipment. The new development relies on spintronics, whereby the quantum spin of electrons is harnessed to facilitate extremely rapid data stroage and retrieval. Traditional computer storage components rely not on the quantum spin of electrons, but only on their charge. New material usage will also contribute to novel technologies, such as the changover from silicon to nanoscale metal and carbon components in transistors and electric circuits. I hate to get all Australian Idol on you…..but that’s what I’m talking ’bout! Love ya Marcia.
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Abbreviated form of “Driving” and “texting”. Drexting is a slang term that means to drive while texting.
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A graphics program that enables you to draw pictures, then store the images in files, merge them into documents, and print them. Unlike paint programs, which represent images as bit maps, draw programs use vector graphics, which makes it easy to scale images to different sizes. In addition, graphics produced with a draw program have […]
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(v) In information technology, to move from summary information to detailed data by focusing in on something. To drill down through a series of folders, for example, on a desktop means to go through the hierarchy of folders to find a specific file or to click through drop-down menus in a GUI. To drill down […]
• drill through
(v.) Drill through is a term used to describe the act of exploring or browsing items like folders, files or related components. Generally associated with drill down and drill up, which indicate vertical movements between components, drill through is an action in which you move horizontally between two items via a related link. An example […]
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An area of reserved space in a personal computer where hard or floppy disk drives (or tape drives) can be installed. The number of drive bays in a computer determines the total number of internal mass storage devices it can handle.
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The Science Behind Anti-Aging Therapies
The Science Behind Anti-Aging Therapies
The process of therapeutically engaging in an anti-aging program involves understanding the aging process and how it can be affected, discipline in adhering to a regimen of daily activities, dedication to the process which can take time, and utilizing the help from experts of various biological fields and, of course, the scientists and their specially developed active ingredient products
Life extension science, also known as anti-aging medicine, is the study of slowing down or reversing the process of aging to extend both the maximum and average lifespan. Some researchers in this area believe that future breakthroughs in tissue rejuvenation, stem cells, regenerative medicine, molecular repair, gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and organ replacement (such as with artificial organs or xenotransplantations) will eventually enable humans to have indefinite lifespans (agerasia) through complete rejuvenation to a healthy youthful condition.
Currently, for the average person, there are a variety of anti-aging products and disciplines such as nutrition, physical fitness, skin care, hormone replacements, vitamins, dietary supplements and all natural products available which can be used to address specific age-related issues.
Current strategies and issues
Diets and supplements
Much life extension research focuses on nutrition— diets or supplements—as a means to extend lifespan. There are some dietary patterns with some support from scientific research such as caloric restriction and selective natural foods.
A number of natural foods have been identified as being both helpful and harmful in combating the aging process. Diets using the helpful food items have proven to be effective in assisting the body in replenishing declining cells. While the avoidance of those foods that have a toxic effect upon the body’s regeneration process combine to promote youthful results.
The free-radical theory of aging suggests that antioxidant supplements, such as vitamin C, vitamin E, Q, lipoic acid, carnosine, and N-acetylcysteine, might extend human life. Resveratrol is a sirtuin stimulant that has been shown to extend life in animal models, but the extent of the effect of resveratrol on lifespan in humans is still under clinical trial.
There are many traditional herbs used to extend the health-span, including a Chinese tea called Jiaoqulan (Gynostemma pentaphyllum), dubbed "China's Immortality Herb. Ayurveda , the traditional Indian system of medicine, describes a class of longevity herbs called rarayanas, including Bacopa monnieri, Ocimum sanctum, Cuecuma longa, Centella asiatica, Phyllanthus emblica, Withania somnifera as well as many others from Sub-Sahara Africa which many local linguistical names most of which have not been given Western scientific descriptions as of yet.
Hormone treatments
The anti-aging industry offers several hormone therapies.
Proposed strategies
Caloric restriction
The best-characterized anti-aging therapy was, and still is, CR. In some studies calorie restriction has been shown to extend the life of mice, yeast, and rhesus monkeys significantly. Long-term human trials of CR are now being done. It is the hope of the anti-aging researchers that resveratrol, found in grapes, or pterostilbene, a more bio-available substance, found in blueberries, as well as rapamycin, a biotic substance discovered on Easter Island, may act as CR mimetics to increase the life span of humans.
More recent work reveals that the effects long attributed to caloric restriction may be obtained by restriction of protein alone, and specifically of just the sulfur-containing amino acids cysteine and methionine. Current research is into the metabolic pathways affected by variation in availability of products of these amino acids.
Anti-aging drugs
There are a number of chemicals intended to slow the aging process currently being studied in animal models and a few human clinical trials One type of research is related to the observed effects a caloric restriction (CR) diet, which has been shown to extend lifespan in some animals Based on that research, there have been attempts to develop drugs that will have the same effect on the aging process as a caloric restriction diet, which are known as Caloric restriction mimetic drugs. Some drugs that are already approved for other uses have been studied for possible longevity effects on laboratory animals because of a possible CR-mimic effect; they include rapamycin, metformin and other geroprotectors, MitoQ, Resveratrol and pterostilbene are dietary supplements that have also been studied in this context.
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS)
Another proposed life extension technology would combine existing and predicted future biochemical and genetic techniques. SENS proposes that rejuvenation may be obtained by removing aging damage via the use of stem cells and tissue engineering, telomeret-lengthening machinery, allotropic expression of mitochondril proteins, targeted ablation of cells, immunotherapeutic clearance, and novel lysosomal hydrolases.
Many biogerontologists find these ideas "worthy of discussion" and SENS conferences feature important research in the field.
Genetic modification
Fooling genes
Reversal of informational entropy
According to some lines of thinking, the aging process is routed into a basic reduction of biological complexity, and thus loss of information. In order to reverse this loss, gerontologist Marios Kyriazis suggested that it is necessary to increase the input of actionable and meaningful information both individually (into individual brains), and collectively (into societal systems). This technique enhances overall biological function through up-regulation of immune, hormonal, antioxidant and other parameters, resulting in improved age-repair mechanisms. Working in parallel with natural evolutionary mechanisms that can facilitate survival through increased fitness, Kryiazis claims that the technique may lead to a reduction of the rate of death as a function of age, i.e. indefinite lifespan.
Aging as a disease
Most mainstream medical organizations and practitioners do not consider aging to be a disease. David Sinclair says: "I don't see aging as a disease, but as a collection of quite predictable diseases caused by the deterioration of the body" The two main arguments used are that aging is both inevitable and universal while diseases are not. However, not everyone agrees. Harry R. Moody, Director of Academic Affairs for AARP, notes that what is normal and what is disease strongly depends on a historical context. David Gems, Assistant Director of the Institute of Healthy Ageing, strongly argues that aging should be viewed as a disease. Because of the universality of aging he calls it a 'special sort of disease'. Robert M. Perlman, coined the terms ‘aging syndrome’ and ‘disease complex’ in 1954 to describe aging.
Scientific research
In 2003, Aubrey de Grey and David Gobel formed the Methuselah Foundation, which gives financial grants to anti-aging research projects. In 2009, de Grey and several others founded the SENS Research Foundation, a California-based scientific research organization which conducts research into aging and funds other anti-aging research projects at various universities. In 2013, Google announced Calico, a new company based in San Francisco that will harness new technologies to increase scientific understanding of the biology of aging.] It is led by Arthur D. Levinson and its research team includes scientists such as Hal V. Barron, David Botstein, and Cynthia Kenyon. In 2014, biologist Craig Venter founded Human Longevity Inc., a company dedicated to scientific research to end aging through genomics and cell therapy. They received funding with the goal of compiling a comprehensive human genotype, microbiome, and phenotype database.
Aside from private initiatives, aging research is being conducted in university laboratories and includes universities such as Harvard and UCLA University researchers have made a number of breakthroughs in extending the lives of mice and insects by reversing certain aspects of aging. |
What is quality?
Efficient and cost-effective operations are some of the the underlying objectives of manufacturers to remain competitive in the marketplace. Manufacturers today are faced with competitive pressures leading them to consistently innovate new product and process. They aim to reinvent their manufacturing processes so they can respond better to changing customer preferences and market disruptions.
Quality is defined by APICS as conformance to requirements or fitness for use. It simply means that any process, activity, product, or service must comply with specifications. In rare cases where perfect quality is impossible to achieve, a less variation from the standard or specification can be acceptable. For some industries (e.g. pharmaceutical, chemical) that require a high degree of precision and regulatory compliance, quality control is a major part of the business.
Delivering a high-quality product is the primary goal of any improvement effort. To achieve product quality, manufacturers should understand customer needs well to obtain insights and information to meet product requirements. The collected information enables manufacturers to design production process, establish appropriate quality systems, determine packaging and handling requirements, and develop performance measures
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Are you not sure how to tell if you need new tires? Do you know how long they tend to last on average? If not, there are a few things that you need to know that will keep you safe and sound when driving your vehicle.
So when are you supposed to change your tires? Keep reading to learn more!
Depth of the Tread
Tire tread is measured per 1/32ths of an inch. When your tires are new, the tread should be between 9/32 to 11/32 of an inch. As you drive your car, the tread begins to wear down and the depth will begin to lower closer to the main rubber of the tire.
You should check your tread depth regularly to catch it before it drops below 4/32. When your tread drops to about 2/32, your tires are now unsafe. To check the tread depth, you should use a tire gauge for an accurate measurement.
Testing at Home
If you don’t have a tire gauge handy to check your tread, you can use the penny test to get an idea of where your tread is. Holding the penny with Abraham Lincoln’s head pointing to the tire, slide the penny in between the tread to measure it. The tread is the widest groove, in the middle of your tire, that wraps around it.
Once you have the penny inserted into the tread, you should look to see how high the rubber is on his portrait. Check several different locations of tread on your tires, for consistency, and if at any point you can see the top of Abraham Lincoln’s head, then your tires need to be replaced.
Tire Lifespan
Most tires can last between 5 to 10 years, depending on how much you drive your vehicle and how heavy the load is that the tires bear on average. When you start nearing the 5-year mark on your tires, you should have them inspected by a qualified service professional to help you judge their health.
If you have a spare tire for your vehicle, it should also be inspected at the same time. Spare tires can also deteriorate, even if they aren’t used often, and will not be very effective when you need them if they also need replacing.
If you aren’t sure how old your tire is, the week and year it was manufactured are stamped on the sidewall. It is the four-digit number following the model information.
There are other factors besides the time that will lead to your wheels aging. The components of your tires, such as the rubber, age over time due to different environmental conditions. These can be either extreme heat and humidity or from the cold and snow.
Sidewall cuts or cracking is a sign that the rubber is degrading. The cracking is generally caused by harsh sunlight and heat. Cuts are usually caused by damage on the road by being hit by a rock or something else that is sharp.
Your tires might become damaged at some point and this will result in needing a replacement. If there are bulges or bubbles, then this is an indication that the internal frame was damaged and air pressure has seeped out into the outer layers.
If you have driven over a nail or sharp rock, you might have punctured a hole or had the nail become embedded into the wheel. If the nail had become embedded, then you may not notice that there is an air leak right away. The hole might allow moisture to seep into the tire which might create rust on the steel parts.
The area of the tire surrounding the embedded nail will eventually weaken and can cause your tire to blowout while driving. This can be a dangerous situation for you and your passengers if it happens while moving at a fast speed. This is why, it is important to inspect your tires every so often to avoid issues like these.
Vibrating Steering Wheel
If you can feel your steering wheel vibrating while you are driving, this is a sign that your tires have been wearing unevenly. They might have been worn unevenly if they are unbalanced. They might become unbalanced over time if they haven’t been rotated regularly.
If you notice vibrating in your steering wheel, take your car in to have the tires rotated. If the vibrating doesn’t stop, this means your tires have permanent damage and it is time to replace them. If you need standard tires, you can find those or the best fuel wheels for larger vehicles online.
Tread Wear Bars
As your tires begin to wear out, you will start to see the tread wear bars. These bars are easy to see on your tire and are located on an even level with the tread.
The bars can be seen either running across the entire wheel or they will form between the treads. If you see these bars becoming exposed, you should schedule a tire replacement soon.
Most tires have a lifespan of 25,000 to 50,000 miles before they will need to be replaced. Each vehicle is different though, so you will want to refer to the owner’s manual to see what their recommendations are for your car.
To get the most mileage you can out of your set of wheels, you should make sure to perform routine tire maintenance. Check the tire pressure often, adjust the alignment when needed, and rotate the tires to keep them from wearing unevenly.
When Are You Supposed to Change Your Tires? Now You Know
Are you still asking yourself, “When are you supposed to change your tires?” There are several ways to tell if they need to be replaced. The main points are the age of the tires, the depth of the tread, if there is any visible damage, how many miles have been driven on them, and if the steering wheel is vibrating.
If have any of these issues, then it is time to replace your wheels before they get worse.
If you’d like more vehicular tips or information, be sure to visit our website daily!
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What is financial volatility and how to avoid it?
What is financial volatility and how to avoid it?
Volatility is the main measure of risk and there are several ways to minimize its impact on portfolios
What is financial volatility and how to avoid it?
Risk in finance can be very intuitively defined as the probability that investors are wrong. When they buy shares, what they are looking for is an expected return assuming a certain risk in return.
Thus, the risk of an investment is nothing more than the volatility of returns or the dispersion of past returns with respect to its average. In other words, the risk depends on how strong the ups and downs of profitability are. And that is volatility.
Statistically, it is calculated with the variance, but since this is a measure without a metric, analysts often use the standard deviation of daily returns. That is, the risk of stocks, volatility, is measured as the deviation from past returns.
The concept of volatility is often used to refer to the abrupt movements of a certain index, for example, the IBEX 35. The best-known indicator on a global scale is the VIX, which measures the volatility of the S & P500 and which shot up as soon as the coronavirus pandemic explodes. But the concept of volatility is much broader.
Volatility as a measure of dispersion of returns
The teachers Francisco Lubián and Pablo Estévez offer an example to understand the concept in their book “Stock market, markets and investment techniques”.
Let’s suppose an investor who wants to decide between Telefónica and BBVA, and has the daily prices for one year. With these prices you can calculate the daily returns, and with these, the expected return, which is nothing more than the average of the returns or your mathematical expectation (the mean).
If in the case of Telefónica, for example, the expected return were 0.11% and in BBVA 0.06%, the calculation of the standard deviation of the securities (which can be done with Excel) would give Telefónica 1 62% and 1.94% in BBVA.
As investors prefer to have a higher return and lower risk, it is clear that in this example Telefónica would be more attractive than BBVA, since the bank promises a lower return (0.06%) with higher risk (1.94%).
Volatility measures the probability that an investment will lose value
This is academic definition of financial volatility and how to calculate it. In practice, investors do not usually pay much attention to the concept of standard deviation as a measure of volatility, although it is usually expressed in the commercial file of practically all investment funds.
How do you explain Angel Faustino, financial analyst and book author “Invest your savings and multiply your money”The important thing is to be clear about the concept, to understand that risk, measured by volatility, is “the probability that an investment will lose value.”
By its very definition, and because it is associated with risk, many investors will want to avoid volatility, or at least minimize it. It is reasonable to want to do so, but volatility itself, as a concept, is neither good nor bad.
Investors’ risk tolerance defines assumed volatility levels
There will be investors with more tolerance for risk who are willing to assume greater volatility in their portfolios, in exchange for obtaining better returns.
“A portfolio manager, a retail investor, will adjust this parameter based on their investor profile or the investment mandate that a fund or diversified portfolio has,” comment analysts from XTB.
What’s more, the most active investors, such as traders, usually look for operations with volatility to take advantage of specific market movements.
On the contrary, “long-term passive investors will prefer less volatility since in this way it is easier to calculate what the expected profitability is”, explain the analysts of IG.
Systematic risk cannot be avoided
Once investors are clear about what volatility implies, they will have to define their profile to determine the level of risk they want to take, in order to try to minimize it.
There will always be a market or systematic risk that can be eliminated and that is given by the simple fact of investing.
It is usually quantified through the risk-free asset of the market in which it is invested, the German 10-year bond in Europe or its counterpart the USA, for example.
How to reduce volatility
On the contrary, the risk of the asset in which it is invested can be minimized or even reduced to zero “if the investor or the manager diversifies the portfolio until they achieve it,” they recall in XTB.
Specifically, it is about taking advantage of diversification through a varied portfolio of assets, such as fixed income, equities, liquidity, different geographical areas or different maturities.
For example, they explain in IG, the famous investor Ray Dalio It makes a portfolio that it calls permanent made up of 40% long-term bonds, 30% stocks, 15% medium-term bonds, 7.5% gold and 7.5% other raw materials.
In this way, your portfolio is hedged when the equity market falls and you take advantage of rises in the stock market when there is optimism. |
** war and social upheaval: mass killings
War and Social Upheaval: Mass Killings in History
Figure 1.--When the subject of mass killing and genocide comes up, one usually thinks about the NAZI war on the Jews--the Holocaust. And almost incomprehensively, it was only the first step in mass murder that the NAZIs were planning. Mass killing is not, however, unique in human history. There are tragically many instance of wide-scale killing. It is perhaps the industrial efficency which the NAZIs developed for death that makes the Holocaust unique. This is a scene from the NAZI Lodz Ghetto.
The history of the 20th century is in many ways obsessed with Hitler and the NAZIs and the Holocaust. But of course the NAZIs were not the only mass murders in history nor the most deadly in terms of body count. It is instructive to look at other historical instances of mass murder. While the 20th century has been the most deadly, other mass killings have occurred in many other centuries as well. In all of these historical events, there are no precise records of slaughter and estimates vary widely as to the number of people, almost always primarily innocent civilians, actually killed. In each of these instances there were also profound social consequences. In many instances, especially with the eralier events, the full extent of those consequences is not yet fully researched.
Chinese Emperors
Chinese history is not well studied in the West which focuses primarily on European history. China is one of the oldest civilizations on earth. Civilization appeared in China about 3,000 BC in the Yellow River valley. Chinese emperors are among the rulers that have pursued killing on a massive scale. Mao is only the latest in a long history. The early emperors are legendary figures. But a great deal is known about many early emperors. Some Chinese emperors conducted extremely large mass killings. The total numbers of deaths is unknown. Some estimates exceed 35 million. But here we need to list specific emperors. The great emperor who first unified China and even bequeath its name -- Qin (pronounced Chin) Shihuang is noted for burning alive 346 scholars in order to put an end to opposition. This practice of burying people alive was a commonly employed tactic of Chinese emperors. When the ruler of the Wei kingdom (Zaozao) conquered Xuzhou, he reportedly buried alive thousands of civilians. Transitions from one dynasty to another commonly involved massive loss of life. This involved war, mass murder, famine, disease, and other factors. Details are often sketchy and population estimates inconsistent. Despite the statistical problem, there were clearly very substantial population declines. The transition from the Han Dynasty to the Qin Dynasty took 8 years (221-207 BC). Some reports suggest that the population declined from 20 million to 10 million people. The transition from the Dong (Eastern) to the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) appears to have resulted in a massive decline in population. One source suggests 50 million. The rise of the Three Kingdom period (222-589 AD) left China with a population of 7 million. The transition from the Sui Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty (618), the population declined from 50 million to about 35 million. The population during the Song Dynasty peaked at about 100 million (960-1279). When the Qing Dynasty began, the population had declined to only 14 million (1655). Much of this decline occurred just before the Qing seized power (1626-55). The population is believed to have plummeted from 52 million to 14 million.
Assyrian Empire
The Assyrian Empire�s root-and branch depredations were early instances of mass killing.
The Romans were masters of war in the ancient world and as a result amassed one of the greatest empires of all time. Europe was to a large degree shaped by Roman wars. We have no estimates of the number of people killed by the Romans. Populations, especially in Europe were smaller at the time than was the case in our modern world. And the Romans while undeniably brutal were not mindless killers. One of the benefits of war was to turn defeated soldiers as well as conquered peoples into slaves, a valuale commodity at the time. For Rome, slavery was essentil to the economy. Even so, killing was an aspect of Roman subjecation of the areas added to the Empire. Rome began its outreach from the Italian peninsula with the Punic Wars. One historian had described the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War (149�146 BC) as "The First Genocide". [Kiernan] It almost certainly was not the first, but it was an early one. The great campaigns of Rome in North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Dacia, England, and others involved mass killing. The Great Revolt of the Jews against Rome (66 AD) let to virtual destruction of the Jewish people. The subsequent Roman reconquest of Judea and the destruction of the second Temple effectively snuffed out Jewish opposition. An estimated 1.5 million Jews were killed and the survivors were dispersed as slaves. The sum total of Riman killing has to be very substantial, but we do not yet have an estimate.
For nearly 50 years they both served the Romans as allies as well as wared with them. The Huns were the most dangerous barbarian people that the Romans came into contact with. Unlike the Germans, the Huns steadfastly refused to Romanize. They refused to learn Latin and settle down and farm the land. Hunic attacks were especially desvesting. Whole regioimns were devestated. We do not yet have an estimate of the number of people that they may have killed. We believe it was in the millions, but the limited period of time in which the Huns were dominant limited the total.
Anglo-Saxon Invasion of Britain
Many historic accounts focus on the Goths abnd other Germanic tribes over running the Western Empire. A more limited, but historically important Germanic invasion took place in the north, the invasion of Roman Britain. The invasions took place after the last Roman garison withdrew from Britain (407 AD) abd was largely accomplished by the time St Augustine arrived (end of the 6th century). The Germanic invasions significantly changed the democraphic and ethnic pattern of Britain, especially what we now call England. The make up of the population, language, political structure, and other institutions were fundamentally changed. The Germanic invaders replaced the Romanized Celts who might be called the British. Historians have differed over the interactions between Germanic invaders and British. The disappearance of Latin and Celtic suggested that the Germanic invaders did not absorbe the Celts, but rather conducted a war of extinction. Modern DNA studies tends to confirm this. Not only did Germanic dialects (which evolved into Old English) replace Latin and Celtic, but loose knit and often feuding hereditary kingships replaced the more centrally governed system of provinces left by the Romans. [Myres] Urban life desintegrated and the Roman cities were largely abandoned. The problem for historians is that the victors were the Germanic tribes or Anglo-Saxons who were not literate at the time and thus there are no surviving contemprary written accounts. The earliest accounts of the conquest come several centuries later. Available sources suggest that the British (Roman-Celtic) authorities after the departure of the Legions had increasing duifficulty resisting the depredations of the northern tribes. They apparently hired a Germanic warlord and his men as mercenaries (mid-15th century). Relations soon desintegrated andthe Germans not only revolted, but invited kinsmen to join them. The Germanic tribes soon controlled much of low-land Britain. The stuggle of the Romanized Celts and Germanic tribes appears to to be the genesis of the Arthurian legend. While the Britons apprarentlt held out for some time, they were eventually driven into the mountaneous western areas and survived as the Welsh people. At the time Saint Augustine arrived, the Anglo Saxons controlled most of southern Engkland and were expanding north and west (late 6th century). It is not all together clear who the Germanic invaders were. The Britons tended to call them Saxons. The name England of course comes from the Anglii, another Germanic tribe. And to further confuse the issue, the Germanic dialect most cloesly related to Old English appears to be Frissian.
The Crusades
Pope Urban II in an effort to direct intercine European warfare abroad helped launch the Crusades to free the Holy Land (1095). While the number of people killed by the Crusaders is small in comparison to the other mass killings listed here, the ferocity of the killing merits mentions. The Crusaders, the Knights of God, routinely put the civilians in captured cities, including women and children, to the sword in the process of sacking and looting the town. The crusaders may have butchered over 1 million people.
The Mongols
The Mongols burst out of the Asian steppe in the 13th century when Temujin united the various klans and was proclaimed Genghis Khan or Very Mighty King 1206). Genghis and his descendents conquered China, India, the Middle East, and Russia. Genghis himself after defeating the Poles was about to move further into Western Europe when he died (1227). The Mongols than retreated back to Asia, conquering Bulgaria, Moldavia, and Wallachia on the way. Mongol military campaigns were nothing short of horific. Tthe Mongol horsemen were ruthless killers who destroyed whole nations leaving nothing but charred ruins. They may have killed over 30 million people.
African Slavery
Slavery is not a uniquely African experience. Slavery is as old as civilization and almost certainly predates it. Slavery was practiced throughout the ancient world. And this includes early African civilizations. While slavery is not uniquely African or associated with Africans, it is the region that has suffered the greatest from the practice. The ancient and medieval routes of the practice means that the full cost to Africa will never be knon. We know that African slaves captives appeared in Roman slave markets. The numbers appear to have been limited, primaril because the major source of Roman slves were war captives and seizures of people in conquered countries. The Islamic outburst from the Arabian peninsula greatly expanded the African slave trade. The Arabs for nearly a millenium dominated the Indian Ocean and controlled the commerce in slaves in the Indian Ocean, up the Nile, and over Saharan caravan routes. The total numbers are unknown, but are knoiwn to be very substantial. Slavery did not begin in Africa with the coming of the Europeans, but the demand for slaves in first Caribbean sugar islands and later Brazilian and North American plantations fueled an almost industrial plundering of the African people. Despite the potential value of the economic slaves, the sklave trade was a tremendously bloody undertaking. Unlike the arab slave trade, the conduct of the african slave trde by more developed economie means that some actual data is availble. Many historians believe that over 15 million Africans were killed in the process. Unlike the situation in Muslim countrie, powerful abolitionist movements developed to extinguish the evil of slavery in Christian countries.
Native Americans
The Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadores encountered many vibrant Native American civilizations. Their conquest of the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, and other civilizations using modern weapoinry was brutal. The virtual enslavement of the population resulting in even more deaths through over work and lack of care. But the most deadly killer was European diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity. More killings occurred by the British and Americams in North America. In all perhaps 15 million Native Americans may have perished.
The Thirty Years War (1618-48)
The Thirty Years War was the most bloody and destructive war ever fought in Europe until the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. It was actually a series of wars involving most European countries, but fought primarily in Germany. The war was exceedingly brutal, in part because of the religious passions of the Reformation. The struggle was between Catholic and Protestant princes aided by non-German coregilionalists. While initially a religious war, the fighting was complicated by dynastic rivalries and the desire of the Sweeds and French to curb the power of the German Holy Roman Empire dominated by the Hapsburgs. It is believed that about 6 million civilians, mostly Germans, perished in the conflict.
Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
Historians often comment on a shift in war from the restrained 18th century battles to the more bloody battles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. This is probably an exageration, but the conscription introduced by the French Revolution made for much larger armies which escalated casualties. Napoleon himself was an undisputed military genius. He was unable, however, to find a diplomatic sollution with the powers that opposed him. His only policy was constant warfare. The result of this and the clash of massive armies resulted in enormous casusalties. The Napoleonic Wars as distinguished from the battles of the French Revolution are usually dated 1799-1815. There are no precise statistics on casualties. Historians have tried to estimate then approximate numbers killed. As a general rule about half were killed in battle and half died due to disease and other factors such as starvation abnd the cold during the Rusian campaign (1812-13). French and French allies experienced conservatively an estimated at 1.0-1.5 million men killed. The great proportion were French. French allies were mostly Germans who after the defeat of Austria, Prussia, and the otther German states were forced to fight with the French Army. Allied armies fighting the French probably experienced about 1.5-2.0 million men killed, again conservatively estimated. Civilian casualties are even more diffiult to estimate. Some historians suggest that civilian casualties would have about approximately equaled the number killed. Here we are not talking about mass murder, but civilians were caught in the crossfire of military actions, duied during siges, had their crops destoyed or livestock taken resulting in famine, died from diseases, and perished in other ways connected with the wars. Deaths may have occurred months after the warring armies had passed throughh an area. Thus actual estimtes vary widely from about 0.7-3.5 million civilians. In fact, no one really knows. The civilian casualties would have been mostly non-French (primarily German, Russian, and Spanish) because most of the batles were fought beyond French borders. The overall death totals thus range from about 3-7 million people during the Napoleonic Wars. That estimate should be put in the context of smaller European populations than is mow the case.
Tsarist Pogroms (1881-1917)
Russia until modern times was a country virtually without Jews. Russian expansion into the Ukraine (17th century) and Poland (18th century) changed it from a country without Jews to a country's with the bulk of the world's Jewish population. It was a population that neither the Tsars or the Orthodix Church wanted or appreciated. Jews who had rights in both the Ukraine and Poland, were largely deprived of their rights in the Tsarist state. Nor were they wanted in Central and Western Europe from which they were driven during the medieval period. Thus they had limited opportunity to emmigrate west. The Tsarist state restricted them to the Pale of Settlement (1791-1917) meaning they could not emigrate east. Most Jews were thus trapped in the Pale. There they were deprived of basic rights and subjected to enumerable depredations. There was always the fear of a new Tsarist decree. The greatest fear was military conscription which meant service for 30 years and thus essentially a loss to the community. Because of the many Tsarist restructions, Jews fared poorly in Russian controlled Ukraine and Poland, most surviving on a meager living at the subsistence level. A few Jews achieved some success in the Tsarist state, but they were the excetions to the generaln condition of Jews who had few opportunities to achieve any degree of success. Rejected even reviled bt Tsarist society and the Orthodox Church, Jews withdrew into their often isolated communities organized around . naturally insulated themselves within their communities and around synagogues and other religious institutions. Pogroms began as soon as Jewish communities were brought into the Tsarist Empire. The Russian term 'pogrom' meant 'to wreak havoc'. It developed a new terrifying meaning, an organized attack, commonly a massacre, of a minority group, especially Jews. Not infrequently local officials were involved in the pogroms. Cossacks in the Ukraine were especially feared for launching pogroms. While Tsarist pogroms occured earlier, they increased in number and intensity during the late-19th and early-20th century (1880s-1910s). They were one of the reasons that Jews emmigrated in such large numbers to the United States and Western Euroope as those countries moved toward emancipation. It also was a factor in the growth of Zionism. America thus became one of the countries with the largest Jewish population. The pogroms launched against Jews tendedv to be brief outbursts (1-4 days) launched with little or no warning. They were outbreaks of exteme brutality in a susposedly civilized state withnlaws With astonishing brutality. Both peasants and urban residents would riot, attacking, robbing, and killing their Jewish neighbors. They had little concern that Tsarist authorities would intervene or punish them for these assaults. Homes, synagogues, and shops were looted and burned. People were beaten and killed. If the rioting did not stop, the police would finally intervene, but rarely was there any effort to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators. Several events excplain the sudden increase in pogroms. First was Alexander I's emancipation of the Serfs. This mean that large numbers of poor, largely poor Russians who had been taught tonhat Jews by the Orthodox Church flooded into the cities and towns where they encountered Jews. Second was Alexander II's assasination and the reaction of his reactionay and crabidly anti-Semetic son Alexander III. Rather than largely local events, attacks on Jews became a policy promoted at the highest level of the Russian state. [Aronson]
Turkish Genocide of the Armenians (1915-16)
More than a million mostly Christian Armenians were murdered by Ottoman authorities during World War I. Clara Barton led the first Red Cross relief effort conducted outside the United States. While most of the killings occurred during the War, Ottoman actions against the Armenians began in the 1890s. Western newspapers carried articles about "barbaric Mohammedans" murdering Christian martyrs during 1894-96. The killings provoked wide-spread international contamination, but no country intervened to stop the killings. Another series of pogroms occurred in 1909. The Ottomans entered World war I on the side of the Central Power (Germany and Austria-Hungary) in late 1914. The wide-spread, organized genocide against the Armenians began in 1915. Accounts on the numbers of Armenians vary. The estimate of 1.0 million is often used,but some accounts are as high as 1.5 million. [Balakian] The Ottomans used World war I as the NAZIs used World War II as a cover for the killings. The Turkish Government denied at the time and Turkish Governments even today continue to deny that the killings took place and were coordinated by Turkish authorities.
Soviet Communism
The NKVD like its German counterpart the SS was involved in mass murder. These ctions are not as well studied as the German killing actions. Because they began before World war II, and went on for a longer period, they may well exceed the German actions in number of victims, although this is difficult to determine with any precission. There were differences in that whole families were usually not targeted, although families did perish s partr of the populations transported to the interior during the War. We are just beginning to piece together the totality of the NKVD killing operations. Large numbers of people were killed by the Cheka, but we are not sure any fall into the mass murder category. The post World War I Civil War Famine may be an example. Here it is difficult to assess blame between the Cheka and Bolshevik authorities. Readers may have information to add to our assessment or suggest mass killing operations we have not yet identified. The same is probably true OGPU/GPU with the exception of the Ukranian Famine. Most of the mass murders were conducted by the NKVD before, during, and immediately after World War II. These include the Great Terror, Gulag deaths, Barbarossa prisoner executions, ethnic cleansings, ethnic punishments, and German collaborator executions. Stalin was preparing a massice action gainst Soviet Jews at the time of his death. KGB killings after Stalin's death were much more focused on individuals actually guilty of legal violations however specious and not just mass arrests for purposes of terror. Beczuse the Soviet Union was not defeated and completely occupied during World War II, details on many of the Soviet mass killing operations are not as detailed as the German operation
Nationalist China
Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang fought the War Lords for control of China. Subsequently he fought the Communists before and after the Japanese invasion. His efforts to suppress the Communists involved massuive killings of civilians. Much larger numbers of civiklans persushed surung the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). Most were killed by the Nationalists. Large numbers of peasants in rural China also died as a result of Natinalist actions. The primary cause was Natiinalist armies and war lords assiciated with the Natiinalist seizing food. The Nationalists as the War progressed had more ampre trouble feeding their armies, especially as the Japanese occupied sone of the best agricultural land in China. Mationalists trrops in some area were starving. The Nationalists who carried out the bulk of tghe resistance to the Japanese became more amore desperate and demands on the peasantry increased. The result was in many areas was both taxes and depratory raids in rural areas leaving the peasantry without food. The Communists did the same, but were more restrained. Some estimate as many as 10 million people perished, but there is no accurate accounting. The subsequent Nationalist defeat in the Civil War can be attributed more than anything else to the treatment of the peasantry during the Civil War. [Collingham, pp. 248-272.] It should be noted that the famines caused by the Natiinalist were smaller than those associated with Mao's Great Leap Forward.
NAZI Germany (1939-45)
The NAZI engineered Holocaust of the Jews is the best documented example of mass murder in history. This is because the NAZIs lost the World War II and the copious records they took along with the testimony of individuals conducting the Holocust and their surviving victims have left us with a chilling historical record. The NAZI Holocaust succeeded in killing about 6 million Jews. This was not the largest instance of mass murder in history, but is perhaps the most horific because of the way the SS industrialized the killing process. Less well understood is the fsct tht if the NAZIs had succedded in would have been only the first chapter in a terrifying rengineering of the Human race. High on the NAZI list of untermench were the Slavs of Eastern Rurope. The NAZIs killed many more people than Jews in their preliminary efforts to build a new German empire in the Occupied East. There was also the Lebensborn program aimed at children. In all the NAZIs probably killed more than 20 million people. The NAZI penchant for killing was such that they killed millions of people who could have assisted in their war effort. And as a result, before the Allies destroyed German industry in the strategic bombing campaign, there was a severe labor shortage in the Reich.
Imperial Japan
Japan began empire building by seizing Taiwan (Formosa) from China (1895). Korea was made a colony and Korean nationalism and language brutally suppressed (1905). Large-scale killings began when Japan seized Manchuria (1931) and even mokre so when they invaded China (1937). It is in China where most of the Japanese killings took place. The most noted example was the Rape of Nanking (1937) and the reprisals after the Dolittle Raid (1942). In addition to shootings and other executions, the Japanese used germ warfare on the Chinese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) the Japanese seized most of Southeast Asia and their brutal rule was accompanied with many attrocities and civilian deaths. The most glaring example was the use of civilan and POW slave labor which because of mistreatment and starvation diets resulted in great loss of life. There wee also many attrocities perpetrated in civilians by the Japanese during the War outside of china. The most galring exampl here was tge Rape of Manila (1945). Estimates vary as to number of people killed by the Japanese, but the total may exceed 10 million.
Communist China
Most lists of 20th century villans almost always place Hitler and Stalin at the top. Sometimes Mao Tse Tung is not even included, very rarely is he at the top. But if one uses bidy count as the metric for evil, Mao should surely be at the top of the list. And it is no accident that Communists occupy two of the three top places. The Communists in China were responsible for killings of massive numbers of people. Here Mao was primarily responsibe. Many of those killed were individuals from targeted economic and social classes such as land owners, army officers, police, government officials, and others. The first large-scale killings took place shortly after Mao seized powe with the Communist victory in the Civil War (1949). The killings were acrried out as part of the land reform and campaign against counter revolutionaries. Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (about 50 million people) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform. [Goldhagen, p. 344.] In paractice far few people were killed when Mao seized power, but the numbers of peasants, mostly land owners including some of Chin's best farmers, are widely estimated to have exceeded 1 million people. [Rummel, p. 223.] The counter-revolutionaries Mao went after were mostly officials of the Kuomintang who did not flee to Taiwan. Also targeted were intellectuals suspected for some reason or other of disloyalty. [Mosher, PP. 72-73.] Here precise numbers do not exist, but estimates suggest about 0.7 million people were executed, 1.3 million were interned in labor camps, and 1.3 million were subject to some kind of control. [Kuisong] Much larger numbers died horrible deaths because of economic mismanagement and resulting famine especially resulting from Mao's Great Leap Forward. Unlike the famine introduced in the Ukraine, these were unintended deaths, at least the initial plans for Mao's Great Leap. Mao believed his own propanganda. He was going to thrust China into a new era by his visionary policies. With they failed abjectly, famine resulted which then provided the opportunity to destroy class enenies. Here individuals believed to be the least loyal (priests, land owners, middle class families, ect.) were given lower rations than others. [Valentino, p. 128.] The death toll may have reached 45 million people, but estimates vary and there is no precise count available. The Great People's Prolatarian Cultural Revolution was the final episode in Mao's sad chapter. Summary executions and death due to torture and mistreamentment totaled about 2.5 million people. [Dik�tter] Estimates of the total number people who died as a result of Mao's rule to over 50 million people.
Indonesia (1965-66)
Many of the largest mass killings of the 20th century were conducted by Communists. There is one mass killing in which the Communists were the primary targets. The killing occurred during the rise to power of General Suharto. Suharto seized control of the military (1965). He ruled Indonesia for the next 32 years. The Indonesian Army went on a killing spree targetting the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). The chain of events surrounding the killings are highly controversial. The Army claims that the PKI was preparing a nation-wide uprising in which President Sukarmo was participsting. The uprising was called the September 30th Movement. The 30th of September Movement was real, but it was no a massive attempt by the PKI's 3 million members to seize power. The attempted coup was actually launched October 1. The Army quickly suppressed the coup. They then proceeded on a killing spree designed to destroy the PKI. The killing eventully extended far beyond members of the PKI and its supporters The killing continued over several months and on a lesser scale for a few months longer. The killing took on an ethnic chsracter as the Army was particular suspicious of ethnic Chinese which was largely non-Muslim. There are reports the American CIA assisted Suharto and the Indinesia military. There are no precise statistics on the number of people killed. The Government reported less than 0.1 million. There are, however, creditable estimates pf over 1 million deaths. It was the most horrific mass slaughter in Southeast Asiary after the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia (1970s) and comparable to what the Communists did in Vietnam after their victory (1975). Curiously this is one of the least well studied mass killings of the 20th century.
Bangladesh (1971)
The Awami League which swept elections in East Pakistan and demanded autonomy. This was unacceptable to the Pakestani Army. The Army launched a massive attack (March 25, 1971). The Bengali supporters of the Awami League were largely unarmed and unprepared for an attack by what was essentially their own Army. The Pakistani Army launched a massive campaign including massacres and other acts of terror designed to coerce the civilian population. The indescriminate killing that followed including large numbers of women and children. Part of the campaign was aimed at killing Hindus and driving the surviors out of the country. Priprity targets were Awami League activists, university students, professionals, businessmen, and other individuals seen to represent the leadership of Bengali nationalism. The Army campaign including the destruction of villages, looting, rape, and other attricities on an unbelievable level. The Army set up torture and extermination centers. When Bengali resistance developed, the Army carried out with collective retailiation, including the destruction of whole villages and the people living in those villages, There were also attacks by the majority Bengalis ob Hindus and Biharis. The terrible slaughter did not end until the Indian Army intervened (December 16). By that time mass graves existedthroughoy the country. There is no precise accounting of the killing. We note estimates of 0.5-3.0 million people.
Kymer Rouge (1970s)
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, after years of struggle, defeated the Cambodian military and seized the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. What followed was one of the most sinister and senseless acts of genocide ever committed by a government on its own people. The Khmer Rouge's first step was to force all the inhabitants of Phnom Penh no matter what their age or health into the country to work in labour camps. Their goal was to create a Cambodian state of pure communism. One step to achieve that goal was to eliminate all class enemies, meaning virtually every Cambodian with any kind of education. Not only were the adults killed, but also their children. Some were killed outright in infamous prisons and the work camps. Others died of starvation and overwork. The Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million Cambodians, 30 percent of the country's population. The Khmer Rouge closed all the normal institutions of a modern country, including banks, hospitals, schools, and stores. Temples and any exercise of religion was banned. Everyone had to work in the fields for 12-14 hours daily. Children were separated from their parents so that they could be better indoctrinated. The children were recruited as soldiers or worked in mobile work gangs.
Vietnam (1975)
The anti-War movement in the United States made the killing during the Vietnam War a major issue. They focused on the civilians they claimed were being killed by American and South Vietnamese forces (ARVN). Much less emphasis was given to the killing by the Viet Cong and North Vienamese. The United States signed a treaty with North Vietnam--the Paris Accord (1973) and then withdrew its forces. After Congress ended assistance to South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Army conquered South Viernam (1975). The groups which expressed concern about the killing during the War were virtually silent as to what the North Vietnamese did before the War and then after their victory. Ho Chi Minh�s Vietnam Labor Party, later the Communist Party, after defeating the French, carried out what they called a land reform program. It involved wholesale slaughter. There is no precise body count, but the estimates range from 0.2-0.9 million people. The North Vietnamese after their victory in South Vietnam arested hundreds of thousands of individuals, including businessmen, landowners, priesrs, government officials, and particularly ARVN officers. They were held under very harsh conditions in "reeducation" camps. Tens of thousands were killed outright or persished because of iltreatment. Large numbers of people fled the country, perhaps as many as 2 million people. The only realistic way out was by boat. Many attempted to escape on any craft they could find, including primitive rafts that were not seaworthy. Large numbers of the boat people perished at sea.
Ethiopian Red Terror (1977-78)
Another evil perpetrator of genocide was Mengistu Haile Mariam, currently being sheltered Zimbabwe. Mengistu led the Derg, a Communist junta that controlled Ethiopia (1974-87). He organized the Red Terror (1977-78). He is believed to be reonsible killing as many as 2 million people during his blody reign. An Ethiopian court found him guilty of genocide but he is being sheltered by the Zimbabwe regime.
Iraqi Genocide: Saddam (1987-88)
The most serious charges leveled against Saddam are those of genocide. Saddam's brutality has not been limited to individuals, but to whole peoples--especially the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ite Arabs in the south of Iraq. These are not small parts of the population. The Shi'ite Arabs are about 60 percent of the Iraqi population and the Sunni Kurds are about 17 percent. These two groups are in fact the great majority of the Iraqi people.
Rawanda Genocide (1994)
Rwanda's Hutu majority in 1994 organized and carried out the mass murder of the Tutsi minority. The Hutis in only 100 days, slaughtered 0.8 million Tutsis and moderate Hutu political opponents. Incredibly the Hutus slaughtered the Tutsis at a faster pace than the NAZIs murdered the Jews in World War II. The Hutu massacres seem even more unfathomanable than the NAZI genocide. One journalist reports, "... how do you account for the evil we saw in the green hills of that nation in 1994, when one day we saw a mother with a baby tied to her back gleefully using a machete to hack up another woman also carrying an infant?" [Hartley] A U.N. peace keeping force in the country was unable to protect Tutsis seeking sanctuary. Finally as the Hutu massacres intensified, the U.N. withdrew its force, completely abandoning Tutsi refugees to their grisly fate. Only a Tutsi rebel force defeating the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army finally ended the killing. France had strong contacts woth the Hutu Government and had good inteligence on what was transpiring. A small French force toa ssist the U.N. Peace Keepers might have prevented the killing. France did send troops, but only to evacuate its own nationals. America also failed to act, paralized by the 1993 debacle of the humanitarian relief effort in Somalia.
The Sudanese Government is engaged in a genocide against the Darfur people, Black Muslims of the western Sudan. There appear to be two elements involved. One is the racial element. The Khartoum Government lookss down on the Black Darfurs. Two the Darfurs do not accept the strict shihira code promoted Law promoted by the Khartoum Government. The numbers of people being killed in military actions by the Khartoum Government is substantial. Even more significant is the efforts by the Khartoum Government to deny relief shipments. Some reports suggest that as of mid-2004 about 30,000 people have been killed. Human rights groups estimate that 0.3-0.5 million may die if Sudan succeeds in preventing relief supplies reaching these beleagered peoples. There is virtually no coverage of this in the Arab press or satellite news like Al Jazeera. Here is not just the Arabs that covering up the genocide. Nor has the United Nations been willing to address this outrage. Darfur Province
The Killers
The four most deadly regimes in world history were the 20th century totalitatrians (Soviets, NAZIs, Japanese militarists, and Chinese Communists). The Soviets and NAZIs industrialized the killing process. The killing was carried out by a suprising small numbers of individuals giving the body count. While we often do not know a great deal about the killers in genocidal programs before the 20th century, we do know a great deal about the killers during the 20th century. A Russian reader offers an insightful description. "I think both Stalin and Hitler looked for absolutely controllable, obedient professional staffers for their ideas. If Beria hadn't been a good performer, then Stalin would have removed him, as he did many before him. If Eichmann hadc demured in carrying out his assignment, than Hitler and Himmler would have found another Eichmann. These people didn't ask questions, they clicked their heels and said, "Yes, sir." They used all their talents and energy to perform ANY tasks the Leader assigned with maximum quality and effectiveness. They were not monsters, but ideal clerks. They equally good could have organized planting trees and flowers in some park or killing millions of people in some pit." We think our reader has succintly described many if not most of the killers. We do think, however, that not all of the killers were clerks and in this semce see some differences between the NAZIs and Soviets.
Aronson, I. Michael. Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris (Harper Collins: 2003), 475p.
Collingham, Lizzie. The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (Penguin Books: New York, 1962), 634p.
Dik�tter, Frank.
Goldhagen. Daniel. "Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity," Public Affairs (2009).
Kiernan, Ben. Yale University.
Kuisong, Yang. "Reconsidering the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries, " The China Quarterly Vol. 193 (March 2008), pp.102�121.
Mosher, Steven W. China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality (Basic Books: 1992).
Rummel, Rudolph J. China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. (Transaction Publishers, 2007).
Valentino, Benjamin. Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press: 2005).
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Created: August 21, 2003
Last updated: 6:54 PM 12/14/2018 |
IASbaba’s TLP OPTIONAL – 2017 : Geography [17th July, 2017] – Day 6
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1. Manas National Park
2. Gandak river
3. Jamshedpur
4. Chilika lake
5. Zanskar range
1. GNI as a measure of development
2. IHDI
3. Federalism
4. Indian versus American federalism
5. Happy Planet Index
3. Write an essay on ‘geographical basis of Indian federalism’. (20 marks)
4. Discuss the geographical factors behind the creation of Telangana. What are the challenges being faced by the bifurcation of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh? Examine. (15 marks)
5. Examine various measures of economic development. Discuss their merits and limitations by using suitable examples. (15 marks)
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Home Cellular science Between astrophysicists clashing on a galaxy “deficient in dark matter” • The...
Between astrophysicists clashing on a galaxy “deficient in dark matter” • The Register
Never mind the memory errors due to radiation. Another deteriorating part of the decades-old Hubble Space Telescope has found itself in a tight spot. This time, his camera unit is again in the middle of a clash between scientists over whether the galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 contains dark matter or not.
When DF2 was written in a Nature article in 2018, the study immediately raised eyebrows. The article concluded that the galaxy was devoid of dark matter. How could this be possible?
The mysterious substance is believed to be present in all galaxies, holding together twinkling stars, swirls of dust and gas, and more, giving galaxies structure and shape. Dark matter is a crucial element in our theories of galactic formation, and finding a galaxy without this hidden substance, or a very small amount of it, breaks all the rules. DF2 was presented as a major eccentric.
About a year after the Nature article appeared, researchers led by the Spanish Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias (IAC) rejected the findings, arguing in the Royal Astronomical Society’s monthly notices that the previous study was was mistaken on the distance with DF2. The galaxy is actually 42 million light years away, not 65 million as stated in the Nature article, the IAC boffins said. And when you plug that closer distance into the formulas for calculating its mass, it turns out that a lot of DF2 is made up of dark matter, and there certainly isn’t a shortage of it. In fact, DF2 would look like any normal galaxy harboring dark matter.
Unresponsive to this conclusion, the authors of the Nature article – led by astrophysicists at Yale University – now believe that DF2 is even further away than previously thought. In a new article, published this month in The Astrophysical Journal, the team placed their dark matter-deficient DF2 72 million light-years away.
“There is a saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the new distance measure strongly supports our previous conclusion that DF2 lacks dark matter,” said Zili Shen, a graduate student at Yale and first author of the latter. article.
This can be wishful thinking. Ignacio Trujillo, IAC researcher based in Tenerife, is not backing down. “I think their analysis is far from convincing,” he said. The register. “I think it’s really poor.”
By the way, just to give you an idea of ​​how intense this debate is from a distance, days after the IAC said in 2019 that DF2 was 42 million light years away, team members from Yale published another article finding a nearby galaxy, NGC 1052-DF4, was also short of dark matter and at about the same distance as DF2.
Telescope damage
Where does Hubble fit into all of this? Well, the Yale team used the Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to calculate the distance from our corner of the Milky Way to DF2. This is done using the red giant branch tip technique, which involves using the brightness of the stars to determine how far away they are.
The ACS was installed in 2002, and repaired in 2006 following an electronic failure. At the time, the ACS was equipped with an instrument called Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). It was the instrument that was briefly out of service in January 2019 after voltage levels were erroneously measured, requiring a reset of the telemetry circuit.
The WFC3’s UVIS detector has suffered radiation damage due to its orbit, reducing its charge transfer efficiency, which scientists must take into account and correct, especially when studying distant and weak galaxies. Trujillo suspects that this degradation of the image sensor coupled with the weakness of DF2 played a role in the Yale team’s erroneous calculation of the distance of tens of millions of light years.
“They overlooked many important issues related to weak source analysis,” he said. “This is the key to a camera that is already as damaged as the Advanced Camera for Investigations (ACS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. In a reanalysis of the galaxy that we are currently conducting, we find that the galaxy is close. contrary to what they claim. â€
For what it’s worth, in their 2019 article, the IAC team said they calculated the distance of 42 million light years (13 million parsecs) after weighing six sets of data from various telescopes. and sky surveys, although it relied mainly on images. from Hubble. He claimed that “up to five independent redshift distance measurements converge at a distance of 13 Mpc for the galaxy,” and believes his approach is more accurate than the Yale team’s estimate.
This dispute over the dark matter content of DF2, based on the Hubble imagery, comes at a turning point for the Space Telescope, which has been in operation for just over 30 years: it continues to suffer from memory errors, the preventing scientific work from being carried out, despite NASA’s continued efforts to repair the instrument. Earlier this year, a questionable software update temporarily put it in safe mode.
Everything in the details
Shen not only defended the telescope, she said the Yale team used longer exposure times for their last article to measure the brightness of red giant stars and therefore the distance from DF2. “Hubble is used for incredibly precise measurements, including the rate of expansion of the universe, and its instruments are perfectly calibrated,†she told us. “Also, with these long exposures, the red giant stars are easily detected. The red giant stars are what matters to our distance measurement. This is a measurement at which Hubble is very good.”
“What is happening is that the other team used our previous data from the same ACS camera to draw conclusions which have now been found to be incorrect with our new 20 times longer exposures,” she added. .
Regarding the corrections needed for the deteriorated charge transfer efficiency, “this shouldn’t be a problem,” Shen said. “Radiation causes slow and well understood degradation of detectors over the years. It is well characterized, and it is corrected in the analysis. We have a step called charge transfer efficiency (CTE) correction, and when performing photometry there is a time dependent zero point. These are standard data analysis steps that we have followed.
Yale astronomy professor Pieter van Dokkum, who co-authored the university papers on DF2, also told us that the degradation of CTE is explained, adding that the long-exposure images cement the conclusion of a distant galaxy with low dark matter content. “This is a case where the team from Tenerife had an interesting hypothesis, that the galaxy was much closer to us than we thought, but the new data definitely rules out it,” said he declared. The register.
Mireia Montes, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, who works with Trujillo to refute the suggestion of a galaxy without dark matter, agreed that longer exposures should, in theory, work better. However, she said the latest Yale article is confusing and appears to ignore the brightness of some of the red giants, an omission that may have skewed the final numbers.
“The analysis they did is not very clear to me,” Montes told us. “They remove a lot of stars, which is essential for the method they use, without clearly explaining why they are doing it. Another factor is the aging of the telescope. Hubble has been in orbit for 31 years and this camera has been in there. space since 2002.
“Since the stars in this galaxy are so faint in the images, we would expect some effect on the measurements.”
Shen, meanwhile, doesn’t think there has been a significant change in the state of Hubble’s camera. “We haven’t seen any official announcements regarding the damage to the camera from the Hubble team. I would be happy to see any documentation on this damage,†she said. El Reg.
Montes and his team, which includes IAC’s Trujillo, said their follow-up article on DF2 had been accepted for publication; a pre-printed version is here. She thinks the galaxy is more normal than people think, because not only is it tied to dark matter, but it also has a disk and structure, as one would expect.
Let science continue. ®
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How to Write a Summary on a Science Project
••• SDI Productions/E+/GettyImages
After completing a science project, it is important to write a report summarizing the project's goals and results. It describes the procedure followed and also tabulates the data and diagrams. A science project is meant to show whether the project was successful or not and also recommends further work that can be done related to the project. A science project summary should help others understand the project.
Write the title and contents of the summary. Normally the contents lists the abstract, introduction, experiments, data, diagrams, graphs, results and conclusion.
Write the abstract and introduction of the project. The abstract should be short and should not be more than one or two paragraphs. It should explain the aim of the project and the results expected. The introduction should give background information on the project. It should explain the different phenomenon observed and the technology used.
Summarize the experiment procedure followed. It should be detailed and include diagrams to support the procedure whenever possible.
List the data used in the project. For example, in a project involving the spectrometer, tabulate the angles used in the spectrometer and also angles that were obtained from the experiment.
Explain the results that were obtained from the project. Describe if they matched your expectations or not. If the desired results were not obtained, explain how and why the results are different.
Write a conclusion listing the results and how this project could be extended for further research.
Conclude the summary by listing your references and acknowledgments.
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Grade: Pre-School
Subject: Art
#3298. moods and edvard munch's scream
Art, level: Pre-School
Posted Thu Dec 22 07:23:23 PST 2005 by karen sapp (picklesapp@hotmail.com).
st. john's early education, worthington
Materials Required: sculpey; construction paper; and oil pastels
Activity Time: 30 min
Concepts Taught: moods, feelings, emotions
what you will need:
small amount of skin-colored sculpey
black construction paper
orange construction paper
red construction paper
oil pastels
something to "carve with"
give a brief description of the artist, edvard munch. talk about his need to communicate emotion in his art. ask the children to tell you what they think the person in the picture who is holding his head in his hands is thinking. (some will say he saw a spider, or he's angry because someone took his toys. their responses are very sweet. next, give the children some sculpey. ask them to roll it around, squish it, etc. until it is warm and plyable. next, invite them to "make a face" using their fingers and the back of a brush or clay tools to illustrate a mood. can be happy, screaming, sad, maybe whatever they are feeling at that moment. we set the sculpey aside (put on a piece of wax paper with their name so it can go straight in the oven after class). the children work with the construction paper, tearing or cutting paper for a background. then, with oil pastels they draw a "body" for their subject. when the sculpey has cooled from the oven, glue it in place! |
Animal Testing: Is the End in Sight? | Animal Testing Facts & Information
Is the End of Animal Testing in Sight?
Does animal testing work? What are the alternatives? In this blog, we answer common questions about this topic.
Rabbit in animal testing lab
Image Credit: AdobeStock
Please note: there are no graphic images in this blog but inevitably some of the details are distressing.
On Thursday 16th September 2021, the European Parliament passed a resolution to accelerate the transition away from using live animals for research, regulatory testing and education. It is a positive step along the painfully slow path towards ending cruel animal testing practices in laboratories.
Back in 2007, the European Parliament, which is made up of elected politicians from each EU country, adopted a declaration to end the use of Great Apes and wild-caught monkeys, and to set a timetable to end all experiments on primates. It was a wonderful victory but there came an intense backlash, with the industry lobbying hard to halt this progress.
And in 2010, when the law governing the use of animals in laboratories was updated, this declaration was not upheld. Instead, the new regulation set out its goal of “full replacement of procedures on live animals … as soon as it is scientifically possible to do so”. Without binding goals, it was feared that this fine-sounding aim would prove to be meaningless, and the last decade has shown that those fears turned out to be true.
Since then, with no incentive to change, there has been no real difference in the number of animals used. The industry simply went back to “business as usual”. Now the European Parliament is reminding the pharmaceutical and research industries once again of this commitment, and putting pressure on the European Commission to make some long overdue progress. While this is incredibly positive, history tells us that we should not expect the end of animal experiments any day soon.
What is Animal Testing?
Cruelty-Free International defines an animal test as “any scientific experiment or test in which a live animal is forced to undergo something that is likely to cause them pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm”.
Experiments include:
• Injecting or force-feeding an animal with a substance that could harm them
• Surgically removing organs or tissues to deliberately cause damage
• Forcing animals to inhale toxic gases
• Deliberately frightening or stressing animals to create anxiety and depression
At the end of the experiments, almost every animal is killed.
How Many Animals are Used in Research?
In the UK alone, almost three million experiments on animals took place in 2020. That doesn’t mean three million animals were used. Some animals endure more than one “procedure” but there are many, many more animals who were bred but not used. These individuals are simply killed without their lives ever being counted.
In some countries, not every animal is even classed as an animal. In the United States, rats, mice, fish, amphibians and birds do not qualify for the basic legal protections given to other animals in laboratories. This means there doesn’t need to be any justification to experiment on them and their lives and deaths are not counted in any statistic.
So, no one really knows the global figure because not every country collects data and for those that do, the data is not accurate. The Lush Prize, which incentivises innovative and effective animal-free research, suggests that the global figure is likely to be in excess of 115 million animals every year.
Mouse in animal testing lab
Image Credit: AdobeStock
Which Species of Animals are Used in Laboratories?
The list is long, and includes dogs, cats, monkeys, birds, ferrets, rats, mice, guinea pigs, hamsters, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, cows, birds and fish.
Many animals including dogs and cats are bred inside laboratory facilities and will never experience life as they should. Horses, cows, sheep and pigs are often supplied by dealers and may originate from racing stables or farms. And, almost unbelievably, monkeys are still taken from the wild and forced to breed inside farms in countries including Mauritius and Vietnam. Their offspring are then sold off and shipped to laboratories around the world, including the UK. Wild-caught monkeys themselves are still used in experiments outside of Europe.
Watch this fascinating discussion between Ricky Gervais and Dr Ray Greek about animal testing, why it continues and whether it works.
What Sorts of Experiments are Done?
Experiments tend to fall into three categories:
• Basic Research
This is the most common use of animals around the world, and there is often no specific endpoint in mind. It’s curiosity-driven, speculative, a what-happens-if? approach to research. It does not test medicines, but could include testing recreational drugs, psychology experiments or creating animals who suffer the same symptoms as human Parkinson’s sufferers. While many of these experiments hit the headlines as “medical breakthroughs”, research has shown that very few actually lead to effective treatments in people.
• Genetically Modifying Animals
Mice and other animals are increasingly being bred with certain genes inserted or deleted into the cells of their bodies. This involves suffering at every stage of the process. Many animals die within the first few days because of severe physical defects, and vast numbers are bred in order to try and produce just one animal with the desired characteristic. The others are just discarded. Despite this, the diseases or conditions they are being bred to imitate often don’t affect that species, and so the artificially induced condition studied in animals is not the same as the spontaneously arising condition experienced by humans.
• Regulatory Testing
This is standardised, legally required testing designed to see if medicines, chemicals (including paints, dyes, inks, petrol products, solvents, tars and waste materials), pesticides, biocides, food additives, cosmetics and other products are 1) safe for use, and 2) effective. Animals are forced to eat or inhale substances or have them rubbed onto their skin or injected into their bodies. The animals are then subjected to monitoring and testing before almost always being killed. Researchers will then look at the effects on their tissues and organs. Across the EU, testing cosmetics on animals is banned, but the testing of household products continues.
Does Animal experimentation Work?
It depends what you mean by “work”. As we have seen, most basic research does not lead to any medical advancement, and the outcomes of testing products including medicines on animals very much depends on the species. After all, if a product is safe and / or effective in guinea pigs but not in rabbits, what does that mean for people?
Animal experimentation began in ancient Greece but really became commonplace in the seventeenth century at the dawn of the European enlightenment. It can be a pretty crude way to try and find an answer, that ultimately has to be tested in another species: humans. With modern technology, however, we are increasingly finding better, quicker, cheaper, and more reliable ways to get more effective solutions.
Are there any animal testing alternatives?
Campaigners state that ending the use of animals in laboratories is not a choice between protecting animals and people, and it does not mean ending medical progress. Far from it. The development of non-animal testing methods is growing fast and includes using human cell cultures, “organs-on-chips”, donated tissues, computer modelling, volunteer studies and epidemiological studies. You can find out more about these advances here and here.
Stop animal testing bandage on kitten's leg.
Image Credit: AdobeStock
Does the Law Protect Animals in Laboratories?
In some countries there is no legal protection at all, while others offer some legal protections to some animals, but all over the world severe suffering is legally permitted on sentient animals. And there is nowhere on Earth where a dog in a laboratory is afforded the same protection as a dog in a home. In the UK, the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) specifically excludes animals in laboratories as if they are somehow different to the very same species living elsewhere.
Laboratory Exposés
Even when there are laws in place, some brave investigators and whistle-blowers have managed to obtain information about shocking abuses and neglect within laboratories, including:
• At a contract testing facility in Spain, a whistle-blower revealed animals being smacked and shaken, dying animals being taunted and mocked, poor handling leading to spinal injuries and legal breaches (April 2021). See more here.
• At a German laboratory, undercover footage revealed dogs lying in blood and excrement, distressed primates spinning in circles in tiny cages, dead beagles hung up on meat hooks, and macaque monkeys violently handled, restrained and force fed (Oct 2019.) See more here.
• In a laboratory in the USA, an investigator reported poor living conditions, sick and dying animals going untreated, cats handled in such a way as to cause them stress and cats deprived of water (June 2017). See more here.
• In Canada, an investigation found animals were thrown, slammed, suspended by their ears or limbs and struck in the face. Wounds went untreated and a faulty system left monkeys without water to drink (2016). See more here.
Who Pays for This?
In the UK, we all do. A large proportion of animal experimentation happens inside universities, often paid for by taxpayers. And health charities also often fund or conduct animal experimentation, which is paid for by our donations. Other research happens in corporate laboratories and the costs are factored into the business model of bringing new products to market, ultimately paid for via the NHS in our taxes.
How Can We Help?
1. Sign Veganuary Ambassador Peter Egan’s petition to get better laws for animals in UK laboratories.
2. Join Cruelty Free International to support their campaigns and Animal Free Research UK to support the development of innovative non-animal tests.
3. Buy products that are not tested on animals wherever possible.
4. Find out which charities do and do not fund animal tests via Animal Aid’s Victims of Charity and donate to those who do not harm animals.
5. Write to your political representative about binding targets for ending the use of animals in laboratories.
Thinking of trying vegan?
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Frequent question: What does investment value mean?
How do you calculate investment value?
The future value formula
1. future value = present value x (1+ interest rate)n Condensed into math lingo, the formula looks like this:
2. FV=PV(1+i)n In this formula, the superscript n refers to the number of interest-compounding periods that will occur during the time period you’re calculating for. …
3. FV = $1,000 x (1 + 0.1)5
What is current investment value?
Current value is the current value of the mutual fund investment units you currently hold. Current Value = Units x Current NAV. Net Investment is the net amount inflow of your investment activity. For example: You purchased 10 mutual fund units at a NAV of Rs.
What is the difference between market value and investment value?
What does market value of investments mean?
Market value (also known as OMV, or “open market valuation”) is the price an asset would fetch in the marketplace, or the value that the investment community gives to a particular equity or business.
IT IS INTERESTING: How are non registered investments taxed at death?
What is ROI example?
How do you calculate value?
What is the ideal investment?
The answer is often something like this: An ideal investment would have to have the following characteristics. First, it would have to have a high return. It should have a yield high enough to outperform inflation and taxes, plus a little more. Fifteen percent per year would be about right.
What is a good market value?
What is an increase in the value of an investment?
What is the difference between market value and capital value?
Market capitalization is basically the number of a company’s shares outstanding multiplied by the current price of a single share. Market value is more amorphous and more complicated, assessed using numerous metrics and multiples, such as price-to-earnings, price-to-sales, and return-on-equity.
IT IS INTERESTING: Best answer: What is a working capital investment?
Is current value the same as market value?
Market value is the company’s value calculated from its current stock price and rarely reflects the actual current value of a company. … The market value is usually higher than the intrinsic value if there is strong investment demand, leading to possible overvaluation.
What does total investment value mean?
Total Investment Value means, for any given period, the total of the aggregate book value of all of the Company’s assets, including assets invested, directly or indirectly, in Properties, before reserves for depreciation, bad debts or similar non-cash items. |
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Teaching your Teenager How to Budget and Save
Teenagers need to learn how to manage their money when they grow up.
But the sad reality is, many parents find this a challenging hurdle to overcome. Discussing family budgets, getting teens to care, or knowing how to handle money can be difficult for parents.
In this article, I’ll share practical tips on how to make this daunting task easy.
Model Good Money Management
Watching how you handle money teaches your child valuable lessons. That’s what it meant by this Jamaican saying: “What monkeys see, monkeys do.”
So, parents should be modelling responsible attitudes toward money. Show them how to manage money in simple ways. By doing this, you can help your child develop practical skills in money management.
Also, another way to teach them is by getting them involved in household finances. Here are some tasks that you can do with your teenager.
• Establishing family budget
• Making savings goals for the family
• Making an emergency fund
• Defining what the family needs vs the wants
• Saving for something important
• Organising the bills to be paid
• Keeping impulse purchases to a minimum
Make Your Budget With Your Kids
Allow them to be part of family budget discussions. It’s okay if they don’t understand it right away. Start simple.
Let them be a part of your budgeting meetings with your spouse. Take the time to go over your budget with them line-by-line.
The goal is to engage your kids in understanding how much money comes in. Help your kids understand how to divide the money equally for family expenses. And also teach them the importance of saving money.
The kids will see how much money should be spent on essentials. It can also illustrate how much money can be spent on other costs.
Make sure your teen knows that not all expenses are the same. Some costs are necessary, such as food. At the same time, others are an investment in the future, such as education.
Teenagers need to see a real-life example of how budgeting works to learn and put it into action.
Educate Them on How to Manage Their Finances Responsibly
A teenager’s first step to responsible money management is having a set amount of their cash that they can spend at will. The earlier you start this process, the better.
Providing your teenager with a fixed but regular cash flow will teach them budgeting skills. Whenever they make mistakes or make impulse purchases, they will be the only ones to pay for those mistakes. As a result, your teens will be more careful when making purchases.
By doing this, your teens will always know that there will be no more pocket money to be given until the following schedule.
A teenager who gets money whenever they need it won’t be responsible for their finances.
Encourage Them to Handle Their Own Money
Your child should be given more control and responsibility for spending their money as they get older. It helps your child learn financial management skills that will last a lifetime.
It might be helpful if you and your child determine how much money can be saved or spent. It’s important to encourage your child to save money rather than spend it all.
Money management mistakes are inevitable. That is whether your child spends a week’s allowance in a day or two or impulse buying stuff that they don’t need at all. But your child may learn from the experience and do it differently the next time.
Help Them Set Up Their Bank Accounts
Help your kids open a savings account for savings and a checking account for daily spending. Setting up a joint teen checking account achieves the perfect balance. It means the balance between independence and supervision.
You will keep complete control over the account. And at the same time, it allows your teenager to track it online by setting this up. After that, you can provide them with a debit card associated with the checking account.
Having a debit card means they don’t need to bring cash, and you can keep track of where the money is spent. The cards offer the same convenience as credit cards. By doing so, parents can check their teenage children’s spending.
Teach Them Not Only to Save but to Invest
In addition to managing their money, they should also save up and invest their money. Your teens should learn to save 10% of their money in both short-term and long-term accounts.
Consider teaching them about 401k as well. Then, as soon as they are ready to live independently, they can truly set themselves apart from the crowd.
Teach Your Kids to Invest in the Stock Market
Though most people, including teenagers, should avoid picking stocks, it can be a great lesson for someone just starting. In addition, watching individual stocks over several months can be an excellent way for teens to learn about how the stock market works.
A lesson like this may be more valuable than the results that an automated investing service would have obtained.
Allow your teen to purchase some shares in any company they want. Then, regularly have them check the performance of the stock. Explain to them why the shares increased or decreased in value.
Teens won’t need to risk that much money if they buy partial shares in companies through brokerages. Instead, your teen can put money in through small amounts, and they can observe what happens in their investments.
Establish a Budget With Your Teenager
Managing money is one of the most critical life skills we parents try to teach our children. But, unfortunately, teenagers are more likely to spend money than learn how to budget it.
Educating your teen on the basics of budgeting can set them up for financial success. And also can maintain their financial independence in the future.
Your teen can set a budget whether they work part-time or receive an allowance from you.
Your teen will learn a lot about budgeting if you teach by example. Consider creating your budget now if you don’t already have one.
If you have a system to manage your money, you should share it as much as you’re comfortable with your teen. You can give your teenager real-world examples of managing money and budgeting by letting them sit with you when you pay bills from time to time.
As a parent, make it a goal to teach your teenagers how to manage their budget in preparation for life outside the home. Show them how to manage money and expenses like adults. It’s a lesson they will never forget.
Teach Responsible Borrowing to Build a Positive Credit History
Credit plays a crucial role in adult life. When your teen becomes an adult and wants to take out a loan, buy a car or rent an apartment, they’ll need a credit history. They can qualify for better rates and terms by having a good credit history, resulting in thousands of dollars saved over their lifetime.
There are several ways that you, as a parent, can assist your teenager in building a credit history that will propel them forward.
A credit line is something you may want to consider. It usually happens in the late teens, so don’t rush it. Once your child is ready, you can help her build a positive credit history.
Parents often wonder whether their child should have used a credit card. The decision to let your child use credit is entirely up to you. Making your child an authorized user of your credit card account can have many benefits.
It can be helpful for your teenager to start a student card or to make emergency purchases. Yet, it’s not just about establishing a good credit score; it’s also about using credit cards responsibly. The only way to learn that is by doing.
Other than that, your teenager can also start building credit by getting a loan from Lucky Plaza money lender like Cash Mart. Unlike credit cards, they can get a lump sum of money and use it for personal needs like financial emergencies.
But you should teach and assist your teen when they apply for loans. Make them understand its pros and cons and how it works. Of course, it would be a challenge for them. Yet, with such a challenge, your teenager will grow and become a sensible spender. Thus, they will appreciate the value of money.
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As part of British Science Week, Year 4 have been learning about cargo ships and transporting goods around the world. We found out about the Cutty Sark which was built in 1869 and the children discussed how the ship managed to transport tea from China to England all those years ago.
The children were split into small teams and challenged to investigate the best shape, size and materials to use to keep a boat afloat. All teams made a rectangle shaped boat from paper as an initial test and investigated how many pennies the boat could hold before the boat sunk.
The groups had a fantastic afternoon and made wonderful boats in numerous shapes, sizes and used materials such as cardboard, plastic, paper, foam, foil and material. The children recorded their findings and found that larger boats could distribute the weight better and therefore took longer to sink and waterproof materials helped to stop the boats letting in water. |
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Legal Report September 2011
SOCIAL MEDIA. In two similar cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, the appellate court ruled that students who created fake MySpace pages to spoof pages that their principals might have created were protected under the First Amendment. The courts ruled that the schools could not discipline the students for activities conducted off school grounds.
In one case (Layshock v. Hermitage School District), Justin Layshock used his grandmother’s computer to create a MySpace profile spoofing his high school principal, Eric Trosch. On December 10, 2005, the 17-year-old Layshock used a photo from the school district’s Web site to create the profile and gave unflattering and vulgar answers to the questions used to create the profile. Layshock then gave numerous other students access to the profile by listing them as “friends.” After Layshock posted the profile, three other students posted profiles of Trosch. Each was more offensive than Layshock’s.
Trosch learned of the profiles about a week after they were posted. Concerned about his reputation, Trosch contacted the police and attempted to press charges, asking whether the profile constituted harassment, defamation, or slander. No criminal charges were brought against Layshock or the other students who posted profiles.
The school was not able to block student access to MySpace from school computers because the district’s technology coordinator was on vacation. So the school cancelled computer programming classes and limited the students’ access to computer labs and the library. This policy continued until school was out for holiday break on December 21, 2005.
On that day, officials learned that Layshock might be the author of one of the profiles. Layshock and his mother were called into the superintendent’s office. Layshock admitted writing the profile. No disciplinary action was taken, and Layshock gave an unprompted, personal apology to Trosch.
The school district held a disciplinary hearing in early 2006 and found Layshock guilty of several infractions, including disrespect, harassment of a school administrator via the Internet, and gross misbehavior. The school found Layshock guilty of all charges. Punishment included a 10-day suspension and exclusion from all extracurricular activities. Layshock was not allowed to participate in graduation and he was prohibited from continuing his advanced placement classes and was instead put in a program for disruptive or learning delayed children for the rest of his high school career. The school district informed Layshock that he might still face expulsion for his actions.
Layshock’s parents sued the school district claiming that it violated their son’s First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. Both sides requested summary judgment—a hearing based on the facts of a case without a trial. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania found in favor of the Layshocks. The school district appealed the decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit found that, absent conduct that causes significant disruption, a school may not discipline students for First Amendment speech that occurs outside school grounds. In the written opinion of the case, the court wrote that “we do not think that the First Amendment can tolerate the school district stretching its authority into Justin’s grandmother’s home and reaching Justin while he is sitting at her computer after school in order to punish him for expressive conduct that he engaged in there.”
In another case (J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District), a female middle-school student, referred to as J.S. in court documents, created a MySpace profile of her principal, James McGonigle. The profile, which was created on the weekend at the home of J.S., did not name McGonigle but did include a photo of him from the school district’s Web site. The profile was vulgar and contained sexually explicit terms. Initially, the profile was public and could be found by anyone but the next day J.S. made the profile private. By the time the profile was taken down, 22 students had been given access.
McGonigle learned of the profile two days after it was posted when a student mentioned it to him. The student told McGonigle that J.S. had posted the profile and provided a print-out of the post. The only print-out of the profile that ever entered the school was this one requested by McGonigle.
J.S. was given a 10-day suspension and was prohibited from attending school dances. McGonigle also threatened J.S. and her mother with legal action. Both apologized personally to McGonigle and J.S. wrote him a letter of apology.
On the same day that he met with J.S. and her mother, McGonigle contacted local police to press charges. Local law enforcement referred McGonigle to the state police but warned him that any charges would likely be dropped. McGonigle ultimately decided not to press charges but requested that police discuss the matter with J.S. to stress the seriousness of the issue. J.S. and her mother were summoned to the state police station for this purpose.
J.S. and her parents filed a lawsuit against the school district, claiming a violation of First Amendment rights. Both parties requested summary judgment. The U. S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania granted the school’s request. The court made a distinction between protected speech and “vulgar and offensive” speech, which is not protected in a school setting. The court noted that while the incident did not cause a serious disruption, it did have an effect on the functioning of the school, and the district, therefore, acted appropriately. The plaintiffs appealed.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overturned the lower court’s decision. The court ruled that the profile was created outside of school on the student’s own time and was, therefore, protected by the First Amendment. The court also noted that the profile did not cause a significant disruption at the school and that J.S. took pains to ensure that the profile would remain private. In the written opinion of the case, the court noted that “if anything, McGonigle’s response to the profile exacerbated rather than contained the disruption at the school.” (Layshock v. Hermitage School District, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, No. 07-4465, 2011. J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, No. 08-4138, 2011)
DRUG TESTING. A federal appeals court has ruled that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) does not stipulate how long a drug user must undergo rehabilitation before being protected by the act, but an employee is not protected by the ADA if the drug use is sufficiently recent that the employer believes drug abuse is still an issue. Protections are triggered when there is a reasonable belief that drug use is no longer a problem.
Peter Mauerhan was hired by Wagner Corporation as a sales representative in 1994. In 2004, Mauerhan entered an outpatient drug rehabilitation program. Wagner was aware of Mauerhan’s participation in the program but was not affected because the program took place outside of work hours.
In June 2005, Mauerhan was required to take a drug test. The test was positive, and Mauerhan was fired for violating the company’s drug policy. Mauerhan’s supervisor told him that if he could stop using drugs, he could return to the company.
Mauerhan entered an inpatient drug program in July 2005. He completed the program a month later, but his counselor’s prognosis as to a potential recovery was “guarded.”
The day after completing the program, Mauerhan contacted Wagner and asked for his job back. Mauerhan was told that he could return but at a lower compensation level and with different accounts. Mauerhan declined the offer and filed a lawsuit claiming that Wagner violated the ADA and discriminated against him as a drug addict when it refused to hire him back.
Wagner requested summary judgment, arguing that Mauerhan was a current drug user when he asked to be rehired and, thus, was not a qualified individual with a disability under the ADA. (The ADA provides a “safe harbor” for those who have successfully completed a drug rehabilitation program and are no longer using drugs.) The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah granted Wagner’s request, ruling that a 30-day rehabilitation program was too short to ensure that Mauerhan had successfully completed a program and was drug free. Mauerhan appealed the decision, arguing that there was no rule or standard establishing that a 30-day program was insufficient proof of rehabilitation.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld the lower court’s decision. The court ruled that the 30-day program was not the determining factor, however. An employer must be convinced that a person’s drug use is no longer an issue for that person to be protected by the ADA. An employee is not protected by the ADA if the drug use is sufficiently recent that the employer believes drug abuse is ongoing. In the written opinion of the case, the court noted that “an individual’s eligibility for the safe harbor must be determined on a case-by-case basis, examining whether the circumstances of the plaintiff’s drug use and recovery justify a reasonable belief that the drug use is no longer a problem.” (Mauerhan v. Wagner Corporation, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, No. 09-4179, 2011)
DATA SECURITY. A bill (S. 799) introduced by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) would apply data protection and notification requirements to companies not yet covered by other federal laws. The law expressly exempts financial institutions and healthcare organizations, both of which already are covered under other federal statutes. Industries that would be affected include telecommunications and cable television industries, which have not previously been included in privacy laws.
Under the proposal, protections are only given to sensitive data, which is defined as personally identifiable information, information that includes a unique identifier, and any information that is collected, used, or stored in connection with other information that, when combined, may be used to identify a specific individual. The bill excludes information obtained from public records or data shared voluntarily in a forum, reported in the media, or designated as workplace contact information. Privacy advocates have voiced objections to these exclusions.
S. 799 would require the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to issue rules on how companies must notify individuals of information use, storage, transfer, and collection practices. Rules would also be issued on the acceptable methods for opt-out or opt-in consent and the means by which consumers could correct inaccuracies.
Individuals could not sue under the provision and the bill would preempt state data protection laws, many of which are more stringent than the proposed legislation.
S. 799 has two cosponsors and has been referred to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.
Testifying at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on similar legislation, Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy & Technology said “What is needed more than security and notification requirements is a data privacy law that incentivizes and requires companies to collect only as much personal information as necessary, be clear about with whom they’re sharing information, and expunge information after it is no longer needed.”
S. 968 would permit the attorney general to pursue certain actions against what the bill defines as Internet sites dedicated to infringing activities. Such sites are those that have no significant use other than engaging in copyright infringement and by selling or promoting copyrighted works without permission. The government would be allowed to take legal action against the registrant of the domain name or the owner or operator as indicated through the domain name registration. Courts could issue temporary restraining orders or injunctions against such sites.
BORDER SECURITY. A bill (H.R. 915) introduced by Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), designed to improve security along the U.S. border with Mexico, has been approved by the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. The bill must now be considered by the full committee.
The bill would require that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) establish a border enforcement security task force that would facilitate collaboration among federal, state, local, tribal, and foreign law enforcement agencies. These groups would share information and launch coordinated crime reduction activities.
ICE would be required to report to Congress on the effectiveness of the program in enhancing border security and reducing drug trafficking, arms smuggling, illegal alien trafficking, violence, and kidnapping along the border.
WEAPONS. A new law (formerly S.B. 321) in Texas allows employees to keep firearms and ammunition locked in their cars on company property. The law does provide exceptions for schools and for properties, such as oil and gas refineries, where combustible or explosive materials are prohibited by law.
The law makes it clear that the presence of firearms or ammunition on the employer’s property does not constitute an unsafe workplace. Except in cases of gross negligence, the law gives employers immunity from civil liability arising from the practice of keeping firearms on company property.
New York
SEXUAL ABUSE. A bill (S.B. 5606) has been introduced that would require hotel and motel owners to provide sexual harassment training to employees and to develop programs to facilitate reporting of harassment. Hotel owners would be required to provide a “know your rights” brochure to all employees detailing state and federal laws on sexual harassment. The bill would make it illegal to retaliate against employees who report sexual harassment.
The bill was introduced in response to the alleged sexual assault of a housekeeper by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
This column should not be construed as legal or legislative advice. |
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In the second decade of design and construction of water-cooled and watermoderated power reactors in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the neutron irradiation effect on reactor pressure vessels (RPV) was reduced in a twofold manner: 1. Steel optimization for high toughness at the end of design life. 2. Fluence reduction by adaptation of core geometry and RPV diameter.
The methods of fluence evaluation and results for different core configurations are described. They provide a satisfactory fluence surveillance of the RPV. If necessary, operational measures are possible to reduce the end of life (EoL) fluence of the RPV. The provident fluence reduction measures taken in two older commercial power plants are described. These measures reduced the EoL fluence by more than a factor of two without loss of power.
The new generation RPV provides a larger water gap between core edge and RPV wall and therefore much lower EoL fluences. The design EoL fluence of all 1300-MWe and the modern 1000-MWe PWR is 5 × 10 18 cm -2 and 3.3 × 10 18 cm -2, respectively.
Fine-grain forged steels 22 NiMoCr 3 7 and 20 MnMoNi 5 5 and corresponding weldments are used for the RPV in KWU-built nuclear power plants. Extensive experience has been gained on the irradiation behavior of these steels. By specifying high purity, especially for the elements copper (Cu) and phosphorus (P), and by keeping Nickel (Ni) at medium levels, which improves preirradiation toughness but supports irradiation effect, high postirradiation toughness is maintained.
Therefore, in combination with the low EoL neutron fluences, the nil ductility transition temperature shift Δ T 41 was reduced by nearly 90% by comparison with the first generation plants (high fluence, high copper).
reactor pressure vessel (RPV), light-water reactors, heavy-water reactors, pressurized-water reactors, boiling-water reactors, neutron irradiation, neutron fluence, RPV materials, RPV steel, low-alloy steel, forged steel, irradiation effect, neutron fluence reduction, irradiation effect minimization
Author Information:
Leitz, C
Department head, Irradiation Behavior, and section manager, Radiation Shielding, SIEMENS A. G., KWU Group, Erlangen,
Koban, J
Committee/Subcommittee: E10.08
DOI: 10.1520/STP10391S |
1921: The Moon and the Great Wall
Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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The Moon and the Great Wall
And arguably sunspots, on rare occasions. But even if they count, it takes ideal conditions and you might hurt your eyes.
This is a reference to the myth that the Great Wall of China is the only manmade object[citation needed] that can be seen from the Moon (or from space) with the naked eye. Sadly, it cannot. In fact, it's barely visible from the low orbit of satellites.
This comic mocks the myth by conflating it with another saying about the Moon, and how the Moon's craters and valleys are visible to the naked human eye. Indeed, the Moon is the only celestial body for which this is true, as all other bodies (with the potential exception of the Sun, see the title text) can only be seen as tiny points of light by the unaided human eye. There is nothing special about the Great Wall of China in this factoid, though; the Moon’s features can be seen equally well from practically any place on Earth with a view of the Moon[citation needed].
The title text states that one is sometimes able to see large sunspots if any are present and conditions are ideal. However, looking directly at the sun with the naked eye risks extensive damage to the eye and should NEVER be done. It could, however, be possible to see them when the Sun is seen through a thin cloud cover or maybe at sunset/sunrise. (It's possible to see very large sunspots with solar eclipse glasses or other adequate protection, but that's not unaided human eye.)
[Megan is holding her arm up towards Ponytail as they stand atop a large brick wall with merlons along the top. They are standing to the left of a tower with three small windows as well as merlons on the top.]
Megan: Did you know that the moon's craters and plains are the only structures on the surface of a celestial body that can be seen with the naked eye from the Great Wall of China?
gives something like an authoritative explanation togeter with photos taken from the ISS.
Summary: the great wall can't really be seen from space. But you may be able to spot its shape if the conditions are right. Such as light from the right direction (see the shadow), or snow accumulating on one side of the wall but not the other.
Jyrki Lahtonen
"The statement in the comic, however, is actually true." - It might be, but the part about the Great Wall in it is somewhat irrelevant - it is equally true also from anywhere else in the world. 09:49, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Yeah it's simply a reversal of the myth. "The Great Wall of China" could be replaced with "anywhere on Earth". But that would be less funny. Jdluk (talk) 10:27, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
The Great Wall is 13,000+ miles long, but only 35 feet wide. It's the narrowness that make it impossible to see from space. If we use thread (approx 1/100th of an inch wide) as an analogue, the GWC can be represent by a piece of thread 732 ft long (1.5 inches equals one mile), viewed from 5.5 feet away (equivalent to the 100 miles "edge of space"), or 1222 ft (22,000 miles geosynchronious orbit) or 2.5 miles (238,855 miles orbit of the moon) JamesCurran (talk) 15:07, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
732 feet long viewed from 5.5 feet away doesn't sound credible. And the "edge of space" is 100 kilometres up, not 100 miles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line 03:50, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
What part of that don't you find credible? Are you questioning my math? And I guess, the definition of "Edge of Space" has been revised since I first did the calculations when I was in college. JamesCurran (talk) 17:26, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
"The wall is a maximum 9.1 m (29 ft 10 in) wide ... The apparent width of the Great Wall from the Moon is the same as that of a human hair viewed from 3 km (2 mi) away." - Wikipedia. 03:59, 29 November 2017 (UTC)
That's simply false. The Great Wall of China is another structure on the surface of a celestial body that can be seen with the naked eye from the Great Wall of China. -- 19:05, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
definition of celestial body: "A natural object which is located OUTSIDE OF EARTH'S ATMOSPHERE, such as the Moon, the Sun, an asteroid, planet, or star."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/celestial_body http://www.dictionary.com/browse/celestial?s=t 21:04, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
As opposed to terrestrial body, which is, well, the earth XD
Actually, there are four terrestrial bodies in our solar system alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_planet https://www.space.com/17028-terrestrial-planets.html 15:27, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Could be possibly correct if they were referring to the Celestial Empire (China). Can't tell with mixed case. Probably unlikely. 03:30, 30 November 2017 (UTC)
Those merlons are way too small. They are not going to protect Megan & Ponytail from incoming arrows. -- 19:08, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
Depends how high the wall is... Perhaps in order to reach the top of the wall archers might need to be so close that the merlons are actually sufficient. NiceGuy1 (talk) 05:19, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Looking at the pictures on the wiki-page, the merlons are indeed taller than what one would infer from the comic. Obviously the characters are standing on loose stones or crates or something. 18:23, 13 December 2017 (UTC) |
Anemia in Dogs: Signs, Treatment, Prevention & More
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Dog anemia occurs when there aren't enough red blood cells circulating in the blood to support normal bodily functions. Signs of anemia in dogs are related to a lack of oxygen and low blood pressure, both of which can make a dog feel tired. If you're concerned that your dog may be anemic, keep reading to discover more about what anemia in dogs is, the clinical signs and how it can be treated and prevented.
How Does a Dog Develop Anemia?
Normally, red blood cells are created in the bone marrow and circulate in the bloodstream for three to four months. The cells are removed from the bloodstream when they become damaged or old. Dog anemia occurs when either the bone marrow doesn't make enough red blood cells, the red blood cells are destroyed by immune-mediated or infectious causes or the body loses red blood cells faster than it can make new ones — as in conditions that cause severe bleeding.
Anemia may be either regenerative or nonregenerative:
Dog Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever walking, playing, running, jumping in the park in spring
• Regenerative: In regenerative anemia, a dog loses enough blood to trigger the bone marrow to make new red blood cells, but the red blood cell count is still too low. Regenerative anemia is caused by rapid blood loss, immune-mediated destruction of red blood cells or severe parasite infestations, all of which trigger the bone marrow to make more red blood cells.
• Nonregenerative: Nonregenerative anemia happens when a dog has a low red blood cell count but isn't making new red blood cells because their bone marrow is either damaged or has lost normal function of the hormones that stimulate red blood cell production. Nonregenerative anemia occurs in chronic diseases such as chronic kidney or liver disease. It can also be caused by infections parvovirus or ehrlichiosis that damage the bone marrow, nutritional or mineral deficiencies such as iron or vitamin B12 deficiency, drug reactions, or cancer.
What Are the Signs of Dog Anemia?
Clinical signs of anemia in dogs can include:
• Increased heart rate
• Pale pink or white gums
• Exhaustion, general weakness or lethargy
• Loss of appetite
• Panting
• Heart murmur
In addition to the signs of anemia in dogs, your dog may also present signs associated with the underlying condition that's causing anemia. For instance, they might experience weight loss or oral ulcers if the cause is kidney disease, yellowing of the skin with liver disease, a swollen abdomen with cancer of the spleen or evidence of external parasites like fleas in parasite infestations.
Human and a dog. Girl and her friend dog on the straw field background. Beautiful young woman relaxed and carefree enjoying a summer sunset with her lovely dog
How Is Dog Anemia Diagnosed?
Your veterinarian will conduct a physical exam and laboratory testing to determine if your dog is anemic and what might be causing it. Anemia is diagnosed when the packed cell volume or hematocrit (both measures of red blood cells) are low. A vet or lab pathologist can tell a lot from a sample of blood examined under a microscope, including accurate numbers of all types of blood cells, if the dog was exposed to toxins or heavy metals, if there are blood parasites, etc. If your vet determines that your dog is anemic but the cause isn't readily apparent, then they'll conduct further testing to determine the cause, which could include (but is not limited to) lab tests on body fluids, evaluating a sample of bone marrow, X-rays and/or abdominal ultrasound.
How Is Dog Anemia Treated?
Treatment of dog anemia involves replacing blood cells and treating the underlying cause. Traumatic blood loss can lead to shock, and in severe cases, dogs may require blood transfusions to treat a life-threatening loss of blood.
Otherwise, treatment of anemia will depend on the underlying cause. For example, parasitic worms are treated with a dewormer, iron deficiency is treated with iron supplementation, immune-mediated anemia is treated with immunosuppressive drugs and bacterial infections are treated with antibiotics.
Can Dog Anemia Be Prevented?
While you can't predict or protect your dog from every cause of anemia, you can take steps to lower your dog's risk of developing anemia. Tips to protect your dog against conditions that can cause anemia include:
• Having your dog examined by a vet at least once a year.
• Having your dog's stool tested at least once a year to check for parasites and using a monthly broad-spectrum dewormer to protect your dog against worms.
• Using effective flea and tick control during the flea/tick season (ask your vet for recommendations).
• Feeding your dog a high-quality, complete and balanced food that's certified by the Association of American Feed Control Officials (AAFCO).
Fortunately, in many cases, if the underlying cause of the dog's anemia can be treated, the dog is in otherwise good health and they receive prompt treatment, the prognosis can be favorable. If the dog is already unhealthy, the anemia is severe, or the anemia is due to cancer, toxins or immune-mediated causes, the prognosis is less favorable.
Contributor Bio
Dr. Sarah Wooten
Dr. Sarah Wooten
A 2002 graduate of UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Sarah Wooten is a well-known international speaker in the veterinary and animal health care spaces. She has 10 years experience in public speaking and media work, and writes for a large number of online and print animal health publications. Dr. Wooten has spoken in the veterinary education space for 5 years, and speaks on leadership, client communication, and personal development. Dr. Wooten is also a certified veterinary journalist, a member of the AVMA, and has 16 years experience in small animal veterinary practice. She serves on the Weld County Humane Society Executive Board and the Fearfree Advisory Board. In addition, she is a co-creator of the wildly popular card game 'Vets Against Insanity'. When it is time to play, she can be found skiing in Colorado or diving with sharks in the Caribbean.
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Recent footage of a military exercise by a pro-Turkish militia (National Liberation Front) who established a shooting range against the archaeological hill of Ain Dara in the occupied Afrin province invaded and controlled by Turkish forces and their proxy militias last year, revealed the tragic disappearance of the famous historical masterpiece known as The Lion of Afrin. Although it was not immediately clear what exactly had happened to the monumental statue, it is widely believed that the artefact had been stolen by pro-Turkish looters and almost definitely smuggled across the border into Turkish mainland.
Ain Dara itself was targeted by Turkish jets in 2018 as Turkish units and their proxy forces advanced on the area known for its archaeological wealth that featured one of the world’s oldest temples often compared in significance to the Temple of Solomon. Christian Maronite came from this region and the shrine of their most sacred saint Mar Maroon is located in the area. The historical site including the temple itself was destroyed in the Turkish airstrike. Very few important artefacts escaped destruction including the invaluable and unique Lion of Afrin which has now been stolen and reportedly smuggled into Turkey, in a blatant violation of international law and UN relevant resolutions prohibiting the vandalism, theft or trading in archaeological artefacts.
Mount Ain Dara: Bleeding Stones that Breathe History
Since it took control of Afrin in 2018 having defeated and expelled Kurdish YPG and other militias in the region, Turkish forces and their affiliated militias have conducted systematic excavations in the province which included Prophet Hori (Cyrus) classified by UNESCO among Syria’s most important archaeological sites. A Russian TV channel screened a report headlined “A Call to Save Them” explaining the enigma and secrets surrounding “portraits of Prophet Hori” and questioning the possibility of the masterpieces being sold outside Syria.
One of the most important hills located some 8 km (5 miles) from Afrin city centre, Ain Dara excavations previously conducted by Syrian, local Kurdish authorities, as well as some foreign archaeological missions including an American team, supervised by Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zemanski which the Acropolis since 1956 have yielded astonishing findings and revealed forms of some of the world’s oldest settlements. The Ain Dara site derived most of its archaeological fame from its unique Temple which dates back to the end of the Bronze Age around 1250 BC. The edifice is considered a rare Hittite relic of international proportions, often compared in its plans, beautiful ornaments and grandeur to the Temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem.
More than a Lion in Captivity: Archaeological Vandals
The basalt Lion sculpture which was discovered in 1956 is 3.30 meters, and the material used is identical to that used in ancient similar artefacts. The top part of the Lion indicates that it might have been integrated into the entrance of one of the architectural monuments or edifices since the role of this type of sculptures was guarding the gateways of places of special significance. Decorative works ornate only one side of the statue; the other side where it was connected to a wall, base or column was left plain. On December 20th, the Turkish army and its mercenaries attacked Afrin with tanks, artillery and jets causing massive destruction of the city.
During the ISIS and al Nusra radical Islamist contamination and ruthless reign in many Iraqi and Syrian provinces, irreparable damage was done to several museums, historical sites, artefacts and monuments. As if that wasn’t enough, occupation forces completed the unfinished shameful job which is a blot on the face of humanity, a disgrace to the international community and UN-affiliated organizations and bodies in charge of preserving world heritage. Culprits should be prosecuted and brought to justice with harsh deterrent sentences, for the damage of their crimes exceeds by far the massively lucrative thefts they carry out as individuals or states.
One such heinous crime took place in February 2018, when Turkish bomber jets attacked the archaeological Ain Dara hill destroying its Temple along with unique archaeological traces such as the massive footprints on the site. The disappearance of the Lion of Afrin marks another war crime against Syrian history and humanity at large, whether it was committed by Turkish occupiers, their proxy gangsters, a local, regional or international archaeological mafia which have ravaged and plundered much of Syrian and Iraqi museums, historical artefacts and unparalleled human heritage. The exact whereabouts of the Lion of Afrin are not known, but the scars its theft are bound to leave might be as long and deep as the history of the masterpiece itself. |
Readers ask: How To Teach Classical Music?
How do you introduce someone to classical music?
The best thing you can do is ask him to come to your performances. This will expose him to some classical music, and he’ll be supporting you at the same time. You can also make a date night out of going to a concert together. It’s always much more interesting to see a live performance than it is to just listen to one.
What are the 5 basic characteristics of classical music?
The Classical period
• an emphasis on elegance and balance.
• mainly simple diatonic harmony.
• use of contrasting moods.
How would you explain classical music?
How do you make classical music fun for kids?
Add even more fun by giving them instruments of their own to play (shakers or rhythm sticks are easy to DIY) or props (ribbon wands, etc.). Encourage them to move their bodies in a way that matches the music: fast when the music is fast and slow when it is slow. Yep, we’re basically doing interpretive dance over here.
You might be interested: How To Get Your Classical Music Performed?
Who is the father of classical music?
What is unique about classical music?
What are the 10 classical period?
10 Classical Music Composers to Know
• Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
• Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91)
• Johannes Brahms (1833–97)
• Richard Wagner (1813–83)
• Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93)
• Frédéric Chopin (1810–49)
What is an example of classical music?
10 Iconic Pieces of Classical Music
• Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op.
• Symphony No.
• “Ave Maria” by Charles Gounod.
• “Messiah” by George Frideric Handel.
• Serenade No.
Was classical music for the rich?
What do you call classical music?
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Saut de ligne
Saut de ligne
Rash or Rational?
North Korea and the threat it poses
International relationships
Saut de ligne
Saut de ligne
During 2016 and 2017 North Korea conducted an unprecedented series of missile launches and nuclear tests to advance its ambition to become one of the world's nuclear powers. This testing escalated tensions in the region and increased the risk of renewed conflict.
With its current rate of development, it is possible that North Korea can already strike the United Kingdom with an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), potentially able to carry and deliver a nuclear warhead. Within the next six to 18 months, it is almost certain to be able to achieve this capability. However, North Korea has not yet publicly demonstrated that it has mastered either nuclear warhead miniaturisation or re-entry.
A North Korean nuclear strike against the UK seems highly unlikely. We do not believe that North Korea regards the UK as a primary target-its goal being to threaten the United States mainland (although also bringing the UK within range of its missiles) in the event of hostilities on the Peninsula.
It will be obvious to Kim Jong-un that initiating a nuclear exchange is bound to lead to North Korea's annihilation: the polar opposite of his objective of regime survival. We consider that Kim Jong-un, though undoubtedly ruthless, is nevertheless rational. As such, he could be dissuaded and deterred from launching a nuclear weapon.
It is far more likely that the UK will continue to suffer from reckless North Korean cyber-attacks, such as Wannacry. North Korea has shown an utter lack of concern about who gets hurt by such attacks. Similarly, there is a definite danger that North Korea would have few, if any, qualms about promoting nuclear proliferation to other states or even non-state actors.
Recent engagement between North and South Korea, and potentially between North Korea and the US, has begun to reduce regional tensions surrounding the North's nuclear weapons programme. However, Kim Jong-un seems to see such weapons as insurance against any threat to his regime's survival. He is therefore unlikely to give them up now.
If there were a conflict in the region, the UK would have no legal obligation to provide military assistance. Yet in the event of North Korean aggression against South Korea and/or against the United States, it is unlikely that we would stand aside.
1 - Introduction
1. During 2016 and 2017, the self-styled Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) demonstrated its determination to become a nuclear-armed state by conducting an unprecedented series of missile launches and nuclear tests. These tests showed how quickly the North Korean programme was advancing, revealing increasingly powerful nuclear devices and missiles capable of reaching the United States and the United Kingdom.
2. The potential threat posed by North Korea's ability to mount nuclear attacks against the US, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and other countries has led to a crisis in the region. In particular, the rhetoric of the exchanges between the US and North Korea on the missile launches and nuclear testing has escalated tensions in the region and increased the risk of renewed conflict. However, recent developments in 2018, including proposed talks between the leaders of North Korea and the US, may have begun to de-escalate the crisis.
3. At the same time, North Korea has continued to demonstrate its willingness and ability to conduct cyber-attacks around the world, with the UK among those countries seriously affected. For example, the global Wannacry ransomware attack in May 2017 infected many NHS organisations, causing widespread disruption across the healthcare sector. The UK Government later revealed that North Korea was most probably the source of Wannacry.
Terms of reference
1. On 13 September 2017, we held a one-off evidence session in which we examined the recent nuclear and missile testing by North Korea and the situation in the region. As a result of the evidence received, the continued missile testing by North Korea and the UK Government's announcement that North Korea was probably behind Wannacry, we decided to conduct a substantive inquiry into the threats to UK security posed by North Korea.
2. On 14 December 2017, we launched the inquiry with a call for evidence seeking submissions to address the following questions:
• What is the security threat currently posed by North Korean capabilities in nuclear, cyber and other, conventional weapons to the UK and its allies?
• Is the UK adequately prepared to defend itself against cyber and other emerging threats from North Korea?
• How is the Ministry of Defence supporting other government departments and the private sector to defend themselves against cyber threats, such as those posed by North Korea?
• What might be the potential capability of North Korea in nuclear, cyber and other, conventional weapons in the coming future?
• How might the UK Government respond to any further escalation of the crisis, such as further development of North Korean military capabilities or conflict on or near the Korean peninsula?
The inquiry
6. We held three oral evidence sessions in total (including the initial one in September) with contributions from academic specialists; a former Assistant Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Nigel Inkster; a former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Capability), Vice Admiral (Rtd) Sir Jeremy Blackham KCB; the Minister of State for Defence, Rt. Hon. Earl Howe; the Minister of State for Asia and the Pacific, Rt. Hon. Mark Field MP; and the Asia-Pacific Director at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Kate White. We are grateful to all of our witnesses who gave oral and written evidence...
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Title : Rash or Rational?
Author (s) : House of Commons Defence Committee |
Monday, September 17, 2018
Influence of Genetic Background on Severity of Neurodevelopmental Disorders
(Explanation of picture. As shown, individuals with the same primary variant associated with a certain disease show completely different symptoms. This is due to differences in their genetic background (More information in blog))
In this article by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, writers highlight a study done by researchers from Penn State which link variations in a person's genetic background to the severity of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism.
Many genetic variants have been known to increase a person's vulnerability to various neurodevelopmental disorders, however, a problem lies when two people with the same variant show different symptoms. Researchers from Penn State shed light to this problem by revealing the key role of a person's genetic background. To study this, the team took 757 individuals who had a deletion along a gene band, which has been linked to several neurodevelopment disorders, and 233 of their parents and/or siblings.
After analyzing sequences and other data, the research team found that the accumulation of mutated genes elsewhere lead to the severity of a disorder made vulnerable by the main genetic variant. This explains the discrepancy of why a parent and child who share the same primary variant show different symptoms (e.g. the parent may be normal, while the child displays the disorder). Higher mutations are partly dictated by family history. A child who has a history of family members with neurodevelopmental disorders are at an increased risk of being born with a higher number of mutations in the genetic background, making their disorder more severe.
At the conclusion of the research team's study, they emphasize the need for genetic background testing of individuals who show neurodevelopment disorders, as well as their parents, to draw a more conclusive pathway of treatment and disease management.
I believe research in this area of genetics should be continued and expanded upon. By doing so, it dispels the misconception that a single gene variant dictates the manifestation of symptoms. To add, screening for mutations in one's genetic background should be one of the main course of action in determining treatment, since they influence the severity of the disorder to such a high degree.
Link to actual published article
Additional article exploring topic
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• There will be tenderness over the undersurface of the joint.
• There is likely to be swelling and inflammation.
What is Sesamoiditis?
What causes Sesamoiditis?
Sesamoiditis refers to an overuse injury which develops over time due to repetitive impact. An increase in forefoot weight-bearing activities such as dancing is often a contributing factor.
Stress fractures
Sesamoiditis Treatment
Sesamoiditis surgery
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A fingernail-size gadget could help prevent babies from being stillborn
an image of a pregnant woman's bellyan image of a pregnant woman's belly
Researchers have published a pilot study that introduces a new at-home, wearable device that could cut down on some of the 2.6 million stillbirths that occur every year around the world.
How does it work? The sensor is the same kind that reorients your smartphone’s screen when it detects motion. Chenxi Yang and Negar Tavassolian at Stevens Institute of Technology adapted that technology and embedded it in a small wearable patch. The result is kind of like a tiny seismograph: the fetal heartbeat causes the maternal abdomen to vibrate, which the sensor picks up on.
How accurate is it? Not perfect, but not too bad. Tavassolian said the accuracy rate on 10 pregnant women who wore the patch at NYU’s Langone Medical Center hovered around 80%—the team wants that rate to be closer to 99%. But it’s comparable to the accuracy of the electrode-based fetal cardiotocograms used in hospitals, the standard procedure for detecting fetal heart rate in expecting women.
Stillbirths often occur without warning. About one-third of all stillbirths happen without any previous complicating factors. Wearing a device like this could send women to the doctor at the earliest sign of trouble, which could in many cases save the fetus.
It’s part of a race to stop stillbirths. There are other products vying to get FDA approval to spot stillbirths before they happen. One is the Owlet, which uses an electrode band to track and record fetal heartbeat. Another is Rubi, which uses nanotechnology to track voltage changes in the fetus and then sends them to a smartphone.
How is this different? Yang and Tavassolian said their product is cheaper (less than $100), rechargeable (battery life is about 24 hours), and easier to use, without the bulky electrodes that hospitals use.
This might go beyond tracking fetal heart rate and preventing stillbirths. Any expecting mom could, in theory, wear the device, and Tavassolian said the goal is for it to be used as early as possible. That means that it might also help track proper growth and movement of the fetus to help prevent other complications, making it potentially useful in tracking the health of both the unborn baby and the pregnant woman. |
What is the Cure for Financial Misbehaving?
I first heard the noted American economist and author Dr. Richard Thaler give a speech about something called “behavioral finance” over twenty years ago. It was my introduction to a new field of research in economics. I was so impressed with the concept that I prevailed on him to allow me to audit his graduate course “Managerial Decision Making” at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
Well, behavioral finance has come a long way since then. It is now mainstream and is recognized as an important area to explain human behavior in the real world of decision-making. Prior to groundbreaking research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970’s, the world of economic decision-making was based upon a theoretical “rational” man. This rational man made decisions based on all known information, without bias and without emotion. Interestingly, Tversky and Kahneman were from the field of psychology, not economics. Imagine my excitement when Dr. Thaler described “bias” and heuristics (rules of thumb). More often than not, that explained how my clients were making decisions.
It finally made perfect sense to me that even though it was logical to get a mortgage to finance the purchase of a new home, one of my clients demanded that he and his wife save enough cash to make the purchase—though it took them many, many years to reach that goal. As a child during the depression, he had seen his parents lose their home during the depression. His fear of losing his own home, while not rational, was understandable.
With each of Dr. Thaler’s classes my understanding of the often hidden and underlying bias that influences decisions was broadened. One example of a heuristic is mental accounting. We humans have a tendency to categorize, segregate, or name money in different ways. Money inherited from grandma is “Grandma’s Money” and therefore, not used for ordinary spending.
On the other hand, windfall money like tax refunds are often treated like found money and we spend it on trivial things without thinking. Mental accounting can be used in good ways as well—naming a college fund “Sara’s College” will almost always lead to meeting the goal for Sara. Mental accounting, however, can lead to problems if we discount the cost of our purchase when using credit cards. If we were required to count out dollars for each purchase, I’d bet that we would all be spending less.
It turns out that generally, we do not like loss and that is understandable. But loss aversion can be a very strong influence on future decision-making. Extreme loss aversion can keep us from investing in appropriate ways. There may be a tendency not to sell a stock or mutual fund that has lost money because we do not want to acknowledge the loss.
Loss aversion may increase our temptation to sell when there is a stock market downturn. These are only a few of the heuristics uncovered by behavioral finance. One of Dr. Thaler’s contributions to this body of knowledge is turning seemingly negative tendencies into “nudging” people to make decisions that are good for them.
The most notable example of nudging people to make better decisions is in the adjustment to how companies present options for joining their 401k plans. Traditionally, a new employee is offered the option of joining a 401k plan. They then are given the application to fill out with the list of investment options to choose. The rate of response was low.
In an effort to increase participation in 401k retirement savings plans, Thaler and Sunstein were instrumental in getting companies to rearrange the offering. The new employee was enrolled automatically in the plan unless they did not want to participate, in which case they were required to fill out the paperwork to “opted out.” Enrollment in 401k plans increased substantially. Employees were “nudged” to make a decision that was in their best interest.
In his book Misbehaving2, Thaler is calling for an “enriched approach to doing economic research, one that acknowledges the existence and relevance of humans. Dr. Thaler asserts that we humans, consumers and investors alike, do not act rationally, but economists have pretended that we do.
Back to Dr. Thaler’s class twenty years ago: Dr. Thaler presented the tension between traditional market theories this way (please give me license; my notes are from twenty years ago):
* Market Efficient Zealot
-Security prices are always equal to intrinsic value
-It is impossible to predict security price movements accurately
* Behavior Finance Zealot
-Stock prices only depend on market psychology
-It is easy to predict price stock movements
* Sensible Middle Ground
-Security prices are highly correlated with intrinsic value, but sometimes diverge
-It is sometimes possible to predict movement a little.
My conclusion: develop a long-term, evidence-based investment philosophy, document it, and follow it when making decisions. Then, revisit that philosophy with some regularity to check for human error.
Books by Richard H. Thaler: ”Nudge” with Cass R. Sunstein; ”Misbehaving”; “Quasi-Rational Economics”; “The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life”
This article was reprinted at forbes.com on 4/6/17. Click here to read
Cicly Maton
Cicily Maton, is a Sr. Planning Analyst in the Chicago office of The Planning Center, a fee-only financial planning and wealth management firm.
Email her at: cicily@theplanningcenter.com.
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Winslow Homer: Life and Death Upon the Waters - The Gulf Stream
Updated: May 7
This painting is an enigma even though certain things seem evident. The boat is in rough waters; the mast is broken; it is rudderless; and the sharks have gathered like vultures waiting for the inevitable. Some have noted that the red streaks in the water prefigure the blood that is to come. Others see the open areas in the small craft as entrances to the tomb, with the crumpled sails being a shroud. Some feel that Homer, having suffered the death of his father the year before he painted this, may have, at age 63, been thinking of his own inevitable demise. The feeling of the plight of this young man was so overwhelmingly hopeless, that the artist later added the ship in the distance, as possible salvation. My question always has been why does the young man seem so calm? There was a story (legend?) in the Bahamas of a British sailor named McCabe who survived being robbed at sea, and set adrift in a hurricane. This is perhaps a version of that tale, but why is the young black man featured here in this drama instead of the Englishman? Why is he represented in such a casual pose? Is he just resigned to his fate? Does he not care? What is Homer, who came to know the Bahamas quite well, saying here about this young man and perhaps the people he comes from?
Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was a New Englander, whose career as an illustrator allowed him to capture scenes from the Civil War for Harper's Magazine. His fluid ease with sketches and watercolors allowed him to capture the moment, whether it be soldiers in action or in repose. Being from Maine, Homer was quite comfortable with the sea, and the role it played in the lives of those who earned their livings from its bounty, enjoyed its pleasures, and feared its stormy moods. In fact the last 25 years of his life were spent in a seaside cottage owned by his family, where he painted his famous seascapes, a subject he took up after a stay in England in 1881-82. It is not a wonder that he received a commission from Century Magazine in 1884 to illustrate an article, "A Midwinter Resort," about Nassau in the Bahamas. The idea was to encourage the tourist trade, which at that point was about 150 people a season.
His work in the Bahamas showed me something about Homer that helped me resolve my feelings about that young black man he portrayed lying so unalarmed in that broken boat with the sharks circling all around. Homer approached the lives of the people of the Bahamas, a country made up of people some of whom had once been enslaved, by showing them in relationship to their environment just as he showed the New Englanders in relationship to theirs. There was no disparagement, no caricatures, just people living their independent lives as they chose to live them, in touch with their environment and unafraid of it.
Here we see a young man who has found a beautiful piece of white coral and is showing it off to the woman in the sailboat, as any proud fisherman might. The commentary provided on the museum's web page concerning this painting is written by David E. White, Jr., who describes Homer's attitude as, "[an] admirable effort to exhibit blacks as possessing citizenship in a global community, and such an effort, in the face of abject dehumanization, constitutes an act of restorative justice." Restorative justice in beautiful watercolor. Thinking back to his Civil War illustrations, it was one of those, The Bright Side
(1865) in which he showed a group of black U.S. Army teamsters taking a break from their heavy lifting to sit for a moment against a tent in the sunshine. Homer documented what he saw without casting anyone aside. That painting, in fact, marks the transition in his career from illustrator to painter.
The two pieces below show off Homer's technique, certainly from his days as an illustrator, in which he uses graphite to draw detail and watercolor to create the needed fluidity. The characters in the paintings are solidly represented, as are their vessels. Yet the pieces have all the freshness of a watercolor sketch, without overworking the distant clouds or shorelines. The focus is on the young men, their hunt, and the beautiful waters. The young men are also shown to be successful in gleaning what they want from the sea. They are at home in these waters in ways that the tourists to come would never be.
So I come back to the young man in the broken boat, in the stormy, shark-infested waters. I look at him now, and I do not see resignation or defeat at that moment. I see that he is alertly looking to his left, surveying possibilities and not concentrating on the sharks, whose behavior he probably knows all too well. While Homer did insert that distant ship to the right, others have observed that the water spout, the left over sign of the storm, is in the distance and probably not heading his way. Why? Sharks go to the ocean floor when storms come to avoid the turbulent surface of the sea. Does the man survive? Does he succumb? After surveying how Homer represents the people of these islands, I don't think that this fellow has given up just yet.
Homer may have given us another possible outcome in a piece called After the Hurricane
(1899). It is also ambiguous, but I'd like to think that our fellow has washed ashore, broken boat and all, and will wake up to go back to sea another day.
What do you think of Homer's story telling? Does this fellow survive or not? Why? Log in and tell us.
Homer's work is in Public Domain. Museum references and links are given. |
Why is Canada fighting over a gas pipeline to nowhere?
The world is awash in LNG that's a lot closer to the ocean and a lot cheaper to move.
Many of Canada's rail lines are shut down by protests in support of the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in what is now British Columbia, who are objecting to a big four-foot diameter gas pipeline. The Coastal GasLink pipeline is going to feed gas to a new Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plant at Kitimat, which will then be shipped to China.
The Premier of Alberta says that “anyone demonstrating because of the pipeline’s climate impact is hypocritical, because the line would enable countries such as China to burn liquefied natural gas from Canada instead of dirtier coal.”
But is LNG, which is basically methane, really any better for the environment than burning coal? While it is true that burning methane produces 24 percent less CO2 than burning coal for a given amount of energy, getting it out of the ground (and getting it from Dawson Creek to China) has its own footprint. And Premier Kenney is ignoring the methane that leaks out before it is burned, which is 80 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
A new study published in Nature has found that a lot more methane is leaking from fossil fuel operations into the atmosphere than previously thought. The study was the first that could differentiate methane emitted from fossil fuels from the background levels emitted by natural sources, using carbon-14 measurements of methane in ice cores. According to the study, “This result indicates that anthropogenic fossil CH4 emissions are underestimated by about 38 to 58 teragrams CH4 per year, or about 25 to 40 per cent of recent estimates.”
Then there is the issue of losses at the LNG plant, liquifying the methane. According to a Bloomberg article provocatively titled Gas Exports Have a Dirty Secret: A Carbon Footprint Rivaling Coal’s, a lot of it is lost in the process.
As long as natural gas stays in the pipeline, emissions remain relatively low. But the sprawling terminals that export the fuel use ozone-depleting refrigerants to supercool it into liquid form, called LNG. They also belch toxic gases such as sulfur dioxide and release excess methane, a greenhouse gas more immediately destructive to the atmosphere than CO₂.
We have noted previously that just making the LNG eats up 10 percent of it.
Enbridge Gas© Enbridge gas
Then there are the compressor stations which keep the gas moving through the pipeline. The Coastal GasLink pipeline will ultimately have eight of them. These all burn gas; one study indicated that, on average, a reciprocating compressor burned “45 000 GJ of natural gas during the reporting year and the flare burned 2400 m3 of processed natural gas.” That's 42 million cubic feet of gas per year, a fraction of the 2.1 billion cubic feet per day that the pipeline carries per day, but equivalent to the consumption of 684 average American houses. A small matter, but just pointing out that every step of the way, from start to finish, there are leaks, flares, boil-offs, pumps and compressors eating up the gas. What percentage of it actually gets to China? I can't figure it out.
gas prices keep dropping© S&P via Bloomberg
And who is going to pay for it? Gas prices have never been so low, it's a Gasmaggedon. Pushing gas through a $6.6 billion pipeline isn't free, nor is shipping it across the Pacific. Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg,
New export projects from Australia to the U.S. have flooded the market with new supplies at the moment that warmer weather and the coronavirus in China curbed demand. The result is brimming storage tanks in Europe and prices for the commodity testing record lows.
The Coronavirus may go away, but warmer weather and cheaper supplies closer to China probably won't. Meanwhile, Canada is being torn apart over a pipeline nobody needs, moving gas that should be left in the ground. How stupid is this.
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Identify Safety and Environmental Issue
Understanding safety and environmental issues
What P can retain a lethal electrical charge even after the device is unplugged. What M contains information about a chemical solvents emergency cleanup procedures . What P is a common type of screwdriver. What A is common measure implented to reduce the risk of ESD. What R is a recommended way to dispose AA batteries. What P is a trait affecting IT support that is governed by law. What M is used to measure the voltage across a battery. What C is a component found in CRT monitors that holds a lethal charge . What K is often dirtier than the average toilet. What C can be to clean fan blades. What L is a part of a printer that is hazardous to the eyes. What H is the enemy of electronic components. What S is used to clean the PC case. What S is built into a plug adaptor to smooth out voltage spikes. What M is useful if you can read information on the motherboard. What A is would you find a brand new motherboard in. What L is something you should do when the customer is talking. What P refers to arriving on time at the customer site. What A means you are taking responsibility for problems that have occured. What F allows you to find a suitable time for both you and the customer to meet.
Click here for more free teaching resources |
So, What is Closure in Golang?
By Tour of Go definition, closure can be described as
Go functions may be closures. A closure is a function value that references variables from outside its body. The function may access and assign to the referenced variables; in this sense the function is “bound” to the variables.
I modified the code a bit from the Tour of Go example:
As we can see, the adder function return an anonymous function with an int parameter and return an int. Beware that the sum variable is initiated in the adder function but outside of the anonymous function. In the main function, we store the anonymous function returned by adder, then after calling the stored function (adderFunc), every time we’re inputting an int in the parameter, the sum variable is added. It’s pretty unique though because it looks like the anonymous function should not “recognized” the sum variable right? But since it’s wrapped in the adder function, it forms a closure. This sum however only “saved” in the adderFunc. If we let say create a new one by calling adder(), the new created function will have its own sum.
Ok Now You Might Understand a Thing About Closure, But When Will We Use It?
Have you ever used a go routine just for make a simple function concurrent? in a nutshell you have a function process() and then you want to wrap things up like go func() { process() } (), more or less like this.
Ignore the last forever loop, it’s intended to keep the main function running
Let’s assume the process function takes some time (DB, API call, or anything in real application) and we simulate it to takes 50 milliseconds. We’re having an array of int for simplicity, in the real case it can be an array of struct / object from API call / DB / anything. Then let say we’re going to process it one by one concurrently so it won’t be blocking the whole process (faster). But if we run the program, rather than printing 0–9, this is what we get.
Unfortunately since the variable i is shared by go routine, the counter got to 10 first before the go routine process function use the variable. We can solve this by saving the i variable to temporary var, then use the temporary var for the goroutine function to closure the temp variable.
After changing the code, we’re having the expected result (all unique id from 0–9 is processed / printed).
There is also another alternative, we can declare the go routine to accept one parameter so the i at that time is copied to the anonymous go routine function parameter like this.
Testing it again, and it prints the correct result.
Be careful while using go routine and shared variable accross multiple go routine. Hope you find this article helpful, cheers :)
Fellow Software Engineer |
The war on Rome | Aeon
Pope John Paul II in Battery Park, New York, 1979. Photo by Gilles Peress/Magnum
The war on Rome
For centuries, Americans saw the Catholic Church as a dangerous foreign enemy. Not any more. What changed?
by Maura Jane Farrelly + BIO
For nearly 350 years, anti-Catholic bias was a reliable and powerful presence in the political and religious culture of the United States. Today, when the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, for example, insists that Muslim immigrants ‘want to use our freedoms to undermine… freedom’, it can be easy to forget that for most of US history, Catholicism, not Islam, was the bogeyman against which Americans defined themselves as a free, noble and (some have said) ‘chosen’ people.
It was a desire to get away from what the English Puritan Samuel Mather in 1672 called ‘the manifold Apostasies, Heresies, and Schisms of the Church of Rome’ that drove the Puritans to Massachusetts in the 1620s and ’30s. They believed that the Church of England was tainted by the remnants of Catholic theology, and they thought these ‘popish relics’ destroyed the freedom people needed in order to accept salvation from God. Because Americans held onto this Puritan understanding of Catholicism for centuries, the idea that the founding of Massachusetts had been a bold bid for ‘freedom’ became an almost religious truth. Even though people were actually executed and banished in colonial Massachusetts because they held ideas about religion that were considered ‘newe & dangerous’, schoolchildren still learn this myth in US classrooms.
In 1774, John Adams felt sorry for the Catholics he observed at a mass in Philadelphia. The ‘poor wretches,’ the future US president told his wife, were ‘fingering their beads [and] chanting in Latin, not a word of which they understood’. A century later, the cartoonist Thomas Nast was less sympathetic on the pages of Harper’s Weekly. Nast’s Catholics in the 1860s and ’70s were violent and drunk ‘Paddys’ and ‘Bridgets’ too ignorant to think for themselves and dominated by priests who worked to obliterate the separation between church and state.
In 1960, the self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale worried that Catholic voters were theocracy-loving minions who’d put a man, the Catholic John F Kennedy, in the White House who couldn’t ‘withstand the determined efforts of the hierarchy of his church’ to meddle in US politics. So Peale (the original ‘positive thinker’) formed the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom and campaigned for Richard Nixon.
For most of US history, voters, ministers and lawmakers believed that there was something fundamentally un-American about Roman Catholics. They weren’t ‘free’ – and they couldn’t be free so long as they worshipped within the Church of Rome. Catholics were an element in US culture that had to be kept as far away as possible from the centres of political, military, economic and educational power. Letting such an intrinsically enslaved element ‘have its say’, so to speak, would constitute an existential challenge to the US, since at its core, the country was just an idea – the idea of freedom.
Given how long Americans feared Catholicism, the years that have passed since Kennedy’s election in 1960 have been remarkable. Today, six of the nine justices on the US Supreme Court are Catholic. The US hasn’t had another Catholic president since Kennedy, but that’s not because Protestants still fear the corrupting potential of Catholicism. Jeb Bush, a Catholic convert, is already being held up as the frontrunner for the Grand Old Party for 2016. Paul Ryan and Joe Biden both spoke proudly of their Catholic upbringing when competing to be vice-president in 2012. Ryan talked about the Catholic concept of ‘subsidiarity’ when recommending that Medicare be turned into a voucher programme, and Biden pointed to the ‘dignity in every man and woman’ that he’d learned about from priests and nuns when supporting President Barack Obama’s overhaul of the healthcare system.
The former altar-boy John Kerry failed to win the White House in 2004, but it wasn’t because Protestant voters had concerns about his Catholic faith. If anyone had concerns about Kerry’s faith, it was his co-religionists. More than half of the Catholics who voted in 2004 cast their ballots for George W Bush, the evangelical incumbent from Texas, rather than the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, in part because Kerry’s record on abortion didn’t reflect the teachings of his church. In this sense, the senator’s Catholicism might have been a political burden for him – but not in the way it was a burden for Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic nominee for president, who swept the Catholic vote, but lost the election in a landslide because many Americans saw him as being on the side of ‘rum, Romanism, and ruin’.
The story of anti-Catholicism’s dramatic disappearance from the cultural landscape in the US (Dan Brown’s novels notwithstanding) is a complicated one. It would be a mistake, however, to see the story as proof that the destiny of the US is to become a place of complete religious tolerance. Americans no longer consider Catholicism to be a threat because the very idea of ‘freedom’ in the US has changed into something more compatible with the corporate approach to freedom that the Catholic Church has always insisted upon. The Catholic understanding of religious liberty and church-state relations has also changed, becoming more compatible with the US vision and the reality of religious pluralism.
But what hasn’t changed – at least not fundamentally – is a need in the US to oppose religious groups that don’t define freedom in modern liberalism’s terms. Indeed, this need has only expanded in recent years into parts of western Europe where concepts of freedom also contribute to national identity, but immigration has forced native-born people to confront the reality that some don’t understand freedom to be a matter of liberté and egalité.
15 people were killed in bible riots in Philadelphia, and more than 50 injured. Two Catholic churches and a seminary were destroyed
For example, the status or condition of women in many cultures that define freedom as ‘submission’ to the will of God is repugnant to people who understand freedom to be the exercise of certain individual rights, such as the right to personal expression or a jury of one’s peers. But repugnant, too, has been the condition of some women in Western countries such as the US and Austria, where an overweening respect for the rights to privacy and personal property enabled Ariel Castro and Josef Fritzl to keep women imprisoned in their basements for decades, even though both men had been visited by police officers and had next-door neighbours.
Americans are actually less violent today than they used to be when encountering a religious ‘other’. The protests over building of an Islamic cultural centre near the World Trade Center site in 2010 did not deteriorate into deadly riots, the way rumours of Catholic efforts to remove Protestant bibles from public schools sparked protests in 1844. At least 15 people were killed that year in the Kensington and Southwark Bible Riots in Philadelphia, and more than 50 were injured. Two Catholic churches and a seminary were destroyed, and when the fighting was finally over, the collective property damage exceeded $150,000, at a time when yearly household incomes averaged less than $900.
Signs and bullhorns were the only weapons anyone brought to the protests in New York in 2010. But make no mistake: the impulse that drove those people to gather in downtown Manhattan, predicting and decrying the implementation of Sharia in New York City, is the same impulse that brought Protestants in Philadelphia to the streets in 1844 – the urge to protect the US from the perceived threat of a religious population that understands freedom in terms that are very different from those of most Americans.
One of the ironies of the American Revolution is that the colonists’ opposition to British rule began as what they thought of as a defense of their rights as Englishmen. England had once been a ‘land of freedom and delight’, according to the Calvinist minister Abraham Keteltas, whose sermons helped to bring skeptical residents on Long Island over to the Patriots’ side. The country had grown corrupt, however, its governmental ministers in London made greedy by the spoils of colonialism. Colonists thought that ministerial corruption threatened the freedom that people on both sides of the Atlantic believed was their ‘birthright’ as Englishmen. Only the colonists, though, were strong and virtuous enough to see this truth and do something about it. It was for the sake of liberty, Keteltas insisted in 1777, that ‘the present civil war is carried on by the American colonies’.
When he justified the revolutionary conflict in this way, Keteltas was essentially saying that there was a new sheriff in town. England’s government was no longer the world’s best protector of the ‘absolute rights of individuals’, which included the rights to property, political representation, personal security and the rule of law. Individual rights had a new set of protectors who lived in North America; their names were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
Rights that were ‘absolute’ were inalienable ‘gifts of God to man at his creation’, according to Anglo-American jurists such as William Blackstone. They were not, in other words, something governments gave to people; absolute rights were something governments protected for people. History had shown, however, that kings and politicians were more than capable of insulting God’s wishes and becoming tyrants. It had happened in England in the late 1680s, as all colonists knew. And now, nearly a century later, it seemed to be happening again.
The events of 1689 loomed large in the minds of the men and women who pushed for independence in the 1770s. England’s king that year had been James II and, in his short time on the throne, he’d managed to dismiss Parliament, expand the size of the army, and suspend the charters of seven colonies in North America.
The reason he’d done all of this was clear – at least to many members of Parliament. James was a Catholic. He’d converted after fleeing to France at the age of 15, following the execution of his Anglican father, King Charles I, during the English Civil War, the Calvinist-tinged uprising of the 1640s. While his conversion might have been understandable, given the way Protestants in his home country had treated his father, many still felt it was ‘inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a popish prince’. Catholicism, after all, was a faith that demanded blind obedience, crushed independent thought, and inculcated the habits of ‘tyranny and arbitrary power’ into its adherents. It was no surprise, really, that James had chosen to disregard the God-given rights of his subjects; he was just treating the English people the way the Pope treated Catholics. And in 1689, the Anglicans and Calvinists in Parliament realised he would have to be stopped.
To that end, they ‘invited the prince of Orange to vindicate their liberties’, according to the well-known history that Keteltas recited to his congregants in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War. William of Orange was the Calvinist stadtholder of several provinces in the Netherlands. He was also James II’s son-in-law, married to the king’s oldest child, Mary, who’d been raised as an Anglican by her mother. Forty years earlier, Anglicans and Calvinists had hated each other enough to fight a civil war that led to the execution of the king. But in a classic diplomatic move, whereby the ‘enemy of my enemy’ becomes ‘my friend’, England’s Protestants united in 1689 to launch a coup that forever linked ‘English’ and ‘Protestant’ identity. To this very day, Roman Catholics are barred from sitting on the English throne – though since 2013, heirs to the throne have been permitted to marry Catholics, provided they don’t convert.
However, what became known as ‘the Glorious Revolution’ did more than just link ‘English’ and ‘Protestant’ identity. It also settled the question of what ‘freedom’ was, and defined the concept for English-speaking people in thoroughly Protestant terms. Freedom became the absence of outside restraint – or ‘the power of acting as one sees fit,’ in the words of Blackstone. Rights were something held wholly and intrinsically by the individual, because without them, individuals could not fulfill the responsibilities given to each person by God. The Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura obliged people to read their Bibles and use their reason to construct a personal piety that began with the Word and the undeniable reality of their sinfulness. Freedom, in this Protestant way of thinking, was something given to human beings by the Creator so that they might choose to receive God’s grace. Governments that respected an understanding of freedom that began with the rights of the individual, then, were thought to be ‘godly’ governments.
What they called ‘popery’ (to emphasise Catholics’ servile obedience to the Pope) was synonymous with ‘slavery’
Freedom was not something to be realised by human beings only with the help of others. This way of thinking reflected the Vatican’s belief that truth was something too complex for any one person to access on his own. It’s not that there was no freedom within early modern Catholicism; however, freedom was the fulfillment of God’s wishes for humanity, and Scripture and human reason, on their own, were not enough to understand what those wishes were. For this reason, God had created a ‘Brain Trust’ of really smart men to advise Him on the ‘New Deal’. These men studied Scripture and the teachings of earlier theologians to uncover the fullness of God’s grace. Governments that allowed themselves to be guided by the Church, therefore, were the only godly governments for a Catholic before the modernising influence of the Second Vatican Council of 1962.
In the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the vast majority of English-speaking people believed that freedom did not exist within the confines of the Catholic Church. What they called ‘popery’ (to emphasise Catholics’ servile obedience to the Pope) was synonymous with ‘slavery’. In the decades that followed 1689, the colonists in North America considered the king and parliament to be the best checks against popery the world had ever seen. That’s why they spoke of the rights that God had given to them as ‘the rights of Englishmen’. But following the Seven Years’ War (1754-63), England’s colonists became convinced that parliament was no longer respecting their rights. And even though not a single MP was Catholic, they expressed their fears in the familiar language of anti-Catholicism.
Political leaders predicted that the US would soon be ‘fed with blood by the Roman Catholic doctrines’ and subjected to the kind of ‘tyranny under which Europe groaned for many ages’. Newspapers fretted that ‘the medium of French law and popery’ would soon be ‘established’ in the colonies, ‘the one enslaving the body, the other the mind’. In 1827, one veteran recalled that ‘the real fears of popery… stimulated many timorous people to send their sons to join the military ranks’. The common cry of the Patriots, he recounted, was ‘NO KING, NO POPERY!’
These concerns about ‘Jesuitical designs’ didn’t go away after the war was over, but public expressions of anti-Catholicism did decrease considerably in the years following independence, partly because US Catholics had sided with the Patriots, and partly because there weren’t many Catholics in the US to stimulate the fear. The first US bishop, John Carroll, estimated the country was home to 30,000 Catholics in 1790, the year the nation’s first census put the overall population at nearly 4 million. Catholics were ‘as rare as a comet or an earthquake’ in the US, according to John Adams. But that situation was soon to change.
The first Catholic immigrants to come to the US in large numbers were not the starving and destitute, famine-fleeing Irish who dominate the narrative in survey courses on US history. They were Germans who started coming over in the 1820s to get away from religious violence in their home provinces. Some of these Germans stayed in the coastal cities where they first landed, but many more headed inland to places such as Cincinnati and Chicago, both in sparsely populated territories that had only recently become states.
This mass migration convinced many leaders that a papal conspiracy to undermine US freedom was afoot. In words that could easily be mistaken for those of modern-day, anti-Islamic politicians such as France’s Marine Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, the prominent Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher warned in 1835 that Catholics ‘do design the subversion of our institutions’. Theirs was a religion ‘enslaving and terrible in its recorded deeds’, and their numbers in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were becoming ‘too great and influential for the safety of republican institutions’. Priests, Beecher claimed, were ‘wield[ing] in mass the suffrage of their confiding people’, telling Catholics to vote for laws and leaders who would ultimately destroy democracy.
Beecher’s fears eventually led to the formation of the American Party, which was nativist and anti-immigrant. Popularly known as the ‘Know-Nothing’ Party, its stance on immigration was similar to the Tea Party’s today – though Know-Nothings didn’t have any existing immigration restrictions to appeal to. The American Party never captured the White House, but their candidate in 1856, Millard Fillmore, had spent two and a half years there, since he’d been vice president at the time of Zachary Taylor’s death in 1850. The mayors of Chicago, Boston and Washington, DC were members of the American Party in the 1850s. The party won control of the state legislatures in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in 1854, and several congressmen and at least one governor, J Neely Johnson of California, also belonged to the American Party.
There is no historical evidence that anything resembling a Catholic conspiracy against US democracy ever existed. At the same time, the fact is that Catholics in the 19th and early 20th centuries did conceive of freedom differently from most Protestant Americans. While Catholics weren’t the patsies that Beecher made them out to be, they were not obsessed with their individual rights the way many Protestants were. They listened to their bishops when those bishops warned them that public schools were a place where ‘all classes, Protestants, Jews, and Infidels meet promiscuously’, and they used their hard-earned money to send their sons and daughters to Catholic schools because – in the words of Rochester’s Bishop Bernard McQuaid – ‘watchful Christian parents would never allow their children to associate with such [people], justly fearing contamination’.
The ‘contamination’ that McQuaid and others feared was the ‘false theory of authority’ underpinning Protestants’ understanding of freedom. That theory, Father James Keogh of Pittsburgh explained in 1862, elevated ‘the principle of private judgment’ above ‘the one power on earth that has the right to decide whether the civil law be in accordance with, or in opposition to, the law of God. That power is the Church of Christ.’
So damaging was this false theory of authority that Pope Leo XIII felt the need to speak out against it in 1899. The word he used to identify the false theory was ‘Americanism’. Manifested in everyday life, Americanism consisted of ‘the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, [and] the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world’. Such freedoms, Pope Leo insisted, ‘wrapped minds in darkness’ and fostered a climate of individualism that was dangerous because it caused people to ‘become unmindful of both conscience and of duty’.
Leo XIII’s words captured the attention of the US press. The Boston Daily Advertiser called the Pope’s position ‘a solemn manifestation of the intransigent spirit of Catholicism’. The New York Times Magazine and the Milwaukee Sentinel each printed a syndicated editorial suggesting that Catholicism wasn’t ‘compatible with the virility and independence of the American people’. The Times added a hopeful observation, however: Catholics in the US, it noted, couldn’t ‘escape the atmosphere of liberty in which they live’.
Americans learned that individual rights alone could not produce a society that was both free and industrialised
Leo’s disdain for the idea that a person might actually have a right to his opinions is as odious to Americans today as it was in 1899. But his concern that a preoccupation with individual rights could cause people to forget their duty to ‘be solicitous for the salvation of one’s neighbour’ does sound a bit different to a 21st-century audience that has accepted (to varying degrees) the premise behind Theodore Roosevelt’s trust-busting, his cousin Franklin’s ‘New Deal’ reforms, and the programmes that came out of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’.
In a broad sense, the history of the 20th century was the history of how Americans came to terms with the reality that individual rights alone could not produce a society that was both free and industrialised. In an age of modern corporations – lawmakers gradually learned – freedom needed some extra help.
In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Johnson declared a ‘war on poverty’ that gave good government the obligation of protecting not just an individual’s rights, but also her potential. The housing, food and educational assistance programs he put forward were designed to ‘give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capabilities’. Drawing upon FDR’s ‘four freedoms’ address of 1941, Johnson called for the US to be ‘a nation free from want’, expanding the conditions of freedom well beyond the rights to property and political representation outlined by Anglo-American jurists in the 18th century.
Just as the Catholic Church has always taught that reason alone cannot help an individual access truth, US policies and institutions (even many of the conservative ones) now teach that rights alone cannot help individuals access the freedom that is available to them as human beings. This shift in Americans’ understanding of what makes freedom possible is one of the reasons they no longer view Catholicism as an existential threat.
The Catholic Church has also changed its understanding of freedom – specifically religious freedom. Until 1965, the church/state separation enshrined in the US Bill of Rights was anathema to the Catholic Church. ‘Error has no rights’ was the phrase that animated the Vatican’s relations with secular authorities, and as the only earthly institution that contained the fullness of divine truth, the Catholic Church was believed to be a proper partner for any and all states.
But in the early years of the Cold War, Pope John XXIII worried that the world was being threatened by ‘a temporal order which some have wished to reorganise excluding God’. Under such circumstances, any belief in God became preferable to Communism. Therefore, in 1962 the Pope convened the Second Vatican Council to consider several modern questions, including the questions of religious liberty and ecumenism. The result was Dignitatis Humanae (1965), which recognises religious freedom as a social and civil right, grounded in ‘the dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself’.
The Catholic Church embraced a Protestant understanding of religious freedom in 1965 in response to a perceived threat – the threat of godless Communism. Today, some Protestants in the US are embracing an older, pre-Vatican II understanding of Catholic religious freedom in response to another perceived threat – in this case, the growing number of lawmakers and courts that have insisted gays and lesbians have a fundamental right to marry.
This trend is the reason evangelical voters turned out in droves in 2012 to support the candidacy of Rick Santorum, a traditionalist Catholic who attends a Latin Mass and has insisted he doesn’t ‘believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute’. Support for Santorum was strong among evangelical Protestants even before he announced his candidacy – so strong, in fact, that in 2005, Time magazine named him one of the ‘25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America’, in spite of his Catholicism.
The idea that the Church should have ‘no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country’, according to Santorum. On this point the Republican from Pennsylvania has something in common with many of the world’s Muslims – though naturally, he’d disagree with them about which religion ought to have an influence. A survey conducted in 2012 by the Pew Research Center found that 98 per cent of the Muslims in Jordan, 97 per cent of them in Pakistan, and 92 per cent of them in Egypt believe that the teachings of Islam should ‘hold sway’ over the laws in their country.
Interestingly, in the US, Muslim immigrants feel differently. Only 28 per cent of US‑born Muslims think that mosque leaders should refrain from politics, but 60 per cent of Muslim immigrants recently told researchers at Pew that mosque leaders should ‘keep out of political matters’. It’s a directive that suggests Muslim immigrants in the US might be more ‘American’ than some of the Catholics and Protestants voting and campaigning in the US today.
HistoryHistory of ideasPolitics and governmentValues and beliefs
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Environmental disasters linked to man are becoming more and more frequent. What happened last July 25 in the Indian Ocean, southeast of the tropical island of Mauritius, invites us to reflect and draw important conclusions. Man is the main cause of the deterioration of our ecosystem. We ourselves are endangering the survival of the world in which we live, without realizing that we are reaching a point of no return. A point that should be frightening but that, instead, seems to be ignored by most people. It is therefore useless to complain and stand by and watch, when the only right thing to do would be taking the reins of the situation.
The Mauritius disaster
Let’s take the example of the Mauritius where the merchant ship Wakashio, after having run aground and broken in two, has lost more than 1000 tonnes of fuel into the sea. The fuel quickly leaked into the turquoise waters of the lagoon, and two weeks later the local government declared a health emergency.
This accident demonstrates once again how man is not only unable to take responsibility for his actions, but also how he cannot learn from his mistakes. Similar events have already occurred in the past, such as the collision of the tanker Exxon Valdez with a barrier in Alaska, which in 1989 caused the spillage of 11 million gallons of oil into the sea. According to a recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmosferic Administration, some 98,000 liters of oil still contaminate the area’s coasts and the local population still shows signs of hydrocarbon poisoning.
What makes us angrier, however, is to know that most of the times these are accidents that could have been avoided or restrained thanks to more immediate interventions, such as the one of Wakashio. As testified by some sources, it seems that on board the ship there were celebrations, and that the approach to the coast was put in place to achieve a better telephone coverage. This information would lead anyone to point the finger at the commander but, as it is well known, the fault is never attributable to a single party.
In Mauritius also the authorities of the island have taken a false step. The first rescue operations started in fact almost a week after the stranding of the ship, thus making vain the race against the time of citizens who made themselves available, even with rudimentary tools such as tissues, sugarcane leaves and plastic bottles, to try to reduce the damage. The authorities are therefore on trial, accused of having been delayed in the rescue, and of having declared the emergency almost two weeks after the accident.
Mauritius disaster
Photo by imo.un, via wikipedia
The consequences
The effects of these events are devastating, and they affect our ecosystem irreversibly. The fuel poured into the sea by the ship Wakashio has caused great damage to the marine flora and fauna, changing their conditions of growth forever. Unfortunately, it is not only the fuel in the sea that worries, in fact there are many other toxic substances that every day man spills into the environment.
First of all, we find plastic: an increasingly widespread material, and for which an effective method of disposal has not been discovered yet. According to some sources, today in the oceans there are more
than 150 tons of plastic, intended to increase if production does not stop. What we are provided with is a really worrying data, if you consider that a small container of this material takes between 100 and 1000 years to be disposed of.
Plastic is the main enemy of marine fauna, and thisis why many species are becoming extinct, and some are in serious danger. Sources say that high percentages of plastic were found inside the bowels of many seabirds, and many died, such as sea turtles, mistaking it for jellyfish and swallowing it. However, man is not immune and also our health is affected by all this.
plastic in the sea
Plastic in the sea: fish caught in a plastic bag. Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash
The percentage of plastic we ingest is every year higher: today it is more or less the size of a credit card per week.
This is the most evident effect of pollution, but in the process of evaluating the damage we must not forget the economy, especially as regards the tourism sector. Let’s return to the example of the disaster that occurred last July on the islands of the Indian Ocean: the fuel in the sea also had negative consequences for tourism, which is already in crisis because of the pandemic that is affecting the whole world right now.
Infact, many have given up spending their holidays in what it is considered as one of the most heavenly places on earth, compromising local businesses which only live thanks to the presence of tourists.
In conclusion, we can sadly say that man is slowly contributing to its extinction; an event that is now destined to come, but that we could slow down thanks to a strong awareness-raising activity. One does not expect a sudden change but many small gestures that, in the long run, could lead to a small improvement. If we all try, we may be able to ease the burden of our mistakes on future generations.
Cover image: Photo by imo.un, via wikipedia
Francesca DugoAuthor: Francesca Dugo. I’m Francesca, I’m 21 years old and I was born and raised in Trento. I’m currently studying modern languages at university, and my biggest dream is to be able to visit every corner of the world. |
II. Background
1. Neurotoxic, non-Anticoagulant rodenticide in diphenylamine category of agents
2. Pale, odorless, crystalline solid
3. Greater use as Anticoagulant rodentacides are phased out due to resistance
4. Available in multiple low concentration forms (blocks, pellets at 0.01%) as well as high concentration forms (7.5%)
III. Pathophysiology
1. Exposures
1. Ingestions and toxicity in pets (dogs, cats) has been more common than toxicity in humans
1. https://www.addl.purdue.edu/newsletters/1997/spring/bromoethalin.shtml
2. Accidental, unintentional pediatric ingestion
1. Typically low dose ingestion without toxicity
3. Intentional ingestion for Suicide attempt in adults
1. Potentially lethal
2. Mechanism (effects may be delayed up to 24 hours)
1. Cerebral Edema
2. Oxidative phosphorylation is uncoupled (in CNS mitochondria), resulting in decreased ATP
3. Nerve Impulse conduction is interrupted
3. Pharmacokinetics
1. Asymptomatic at doses <0.1 mg/kg
IV. Findings
1. Cardiovascular
1. Tachycardia
2. Gastrointestinal
1. Vomiting
2. Abdominal Pain
3. Hematologic
1. Mild bleeding (mild Anticoagulation effects)
4. Neurologic
1. Agitation
2. Tremors
3. Lethargy
4. Myoclonic Jerks
5. Seizures
V. Differential Diagnosis
VI. Labs
1. See Altered Level of Consciousness
2. See Unknown Ingestion
3. Standard toxicology labs (e.g. Bedside Glucose, Acetaminophen level, Salicylate level)
4. Consider INR (if Anticoagulant rodenticide ingestion suspected)
VII. Management
1. See Unknown Ingestion
2. ABC Management
3. Activated Charcoal if recent ingestion
4. Seizures
1. Benzodiazepines
5. Cerebral Edema
1. Hypertonic Saline
2. Mannitol
6. Severe ingestions
1. Consider Intralipid emulsion infusion
7. Disposition
1. Low dose ingestions may be discharge home if asymptomatic
2. Medically observe intentional ingestions up to 24 hours
3. Admit all symptomatic ingestions
VIII. References
1. Tomaszewski (2021) Crit Dec Emerg Med 35(6): 28
Images: Related links to external sites (from Bing)
Related Studies
Ontology: bromethalin (C0054093)
Concepts Pharmacologic Substance (T121) , Organic Chemical (T109)
MSH C040307
English bromethalin |
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WYSIWYG is short for What you see is What you get means you will see whatever you writing exactly as it will appear to everyone. This refers to the editor for writing posts on the blog.
If we talk about WordPress, it has two editor options, one is a normal editor, and the other HTML editor.
The normal editor is default and is a WYSIWYG editor as you can see the text exactly with all formatting as it will appear after publishing whereas if you change to HTML editor you will see only code. It also contains formatting tools like Bold, Italic, font size and style.
3 months ago 1
If you do not have much knowledge of HTML, then you can design web pages using "WYSIWYG editor". The full name of WYSIWYG is "what you see is what you get".
Meaning in this you can edit the code as soon as the HTML editor and make the layout of the website.
If you have ever blog post on CMS like WordPress, Blogger or Joomla, etc. So you must know that HTML and CSS are not used while writing the post.
All you have to do is write the content in the plan text editor and publish it.
All these CMS blog system uses WYSIWYG editor. In this editor, the text, images, videos etc. to be written are directly converted into HTML and CSS.
2 months ago 1
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Juneteenth is a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It is celebrated each year on June 19 (its name being a shortened form of the words June and nineteenth). People typically celebrate the holiday with prayer and religious services, speeches, educational events, family gatherings and picnics, and festivals with music, food, and dancing. Juneteenth became a national holiday in the United States in 2021.
© North Wind Picture Archives
During the American Civil War the Emancipation Proclamation freed the more than three million enslaved Black people in the Confederate states, which had rebelled and were fighting against the Union. President Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation in 1863. However, slavery continued in Texas for more than two years until the news reached the state. Finally, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, and informed the state’s residents that slavery had been abolished there. Many slave owners tried to keep this news a secret, but the news spread. The people who were freed from slavery celebrated with prayer, feasting, song, and dance. Later that year the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially ended slavery throughout the United States (not just the former Confederate states). The amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.
From the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers site (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83025779/1920-06-12/ed-1/seq-14/)
The following year, on June 19, the first official Juneteenth celebrations took place in Texas. The original observances included prayer meetings and the singing of spirituals. African Americans wore new clothes on that day as a way of representing their newfound freedom. Within a few years African Americans in other states were celebrating the day as well, making it an annual tradition. Celebrations have continued across the United States into the 21st century.
Juneteenth became a state holiday in Texas in 1980, and nearly all the other states later followed suit. In 2021 the U.S. Congress passed legislation making it a federal holiday. Juneteenth was the first U.S. national holiday to be established after Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was created in 1983.
Juneteenth is also celebrated outside the United States. Organizations in a number of countries use the day to recognize the end of slavery and to celebrate the culture and achievements of African Americans. |
Orca Survival
Welcome to our online Nature Connections Series. Our first four presentations feature marine educator Mikaela Montanari who explains orca ecotypes, their differences in territory, appearance, diet, foraging habits, and even their social behaviours. Learn about their importance as a species and and their prospects for survival.
You are probably already aware that orcas are endagered. In this presentation, Mikaela delves into some of the reasons, the realistic prospects for their recovery, and what you can do to help.
Our passion is connecting youth with outdoor adventures, contributing to self-confidence, healthy lifestyles, and environmental awareness. Please join our worthwhile cause. |
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a young boy, Huck, in search of freedom and adventure. He meets a run away slave named Jim and the two undertake a series of adventures based on the Picaresque novel by Mark Twain. As the story progresses the duo exploit an array of episodic enterprises, while Huckleberry slowly changes his views of bigotry. Along the way, Huck and Jim meet the King and Duke, who ultimately send the protagonists towards a different route on their journey. As Huck begins to have a change of heart, he gradually begins to distinguish between right and wrong, and conclusively, Huck is faced with the moral dilemma between the world's prejudice, of which he's grown up with, and the lessons Jim has taught him throughout the story about the evils of racism. The complexity of his character is enhanced by his ability to relate so easily with nature and the river.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
Operation Barbarossa
1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War
Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa, named after Frederick I) was the code name for the European Axis invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. It began on 22 June 1941. More than 3 million men attacked along the 2,900 km front, which made it the largest military invasion in human history.[8] It also involved 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses.[9]
Operation Barabarossa
Part of the Eastern Front of World War II
Operation Barbarossa corrected border.png
DateJune 22, 1941 – December 5, 1941
Soviet Union
Result The Axis conquers huge areas of the Soviet Union and causes heavy losses on the Red Army but fails in its overall strategic goal of defeating the Soviets in a Blitzkrieg campaign.
Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler
Nazi Germany Franz Halder
Nazi Germany Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb
Nazi Germany Fedor von Bock
Nazi Germany Gerd von Rundstedt
Kingdom of Romania Ion Antonescu
Finland Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946) Giovanni Messe
Soviet Union Joseph Stalin
Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov
Soviet Union Aleksandr Vasilyevskiy
Soviet Union Semyon Budyonny
Soviet Union Kliment Voroshilov
Soviet Union Semyon Timoshenko
Soviet Union Markian Popov
Soviet Union Fedor Kuznetsov
Soviet Union Dmitry Pavlov
Soviet Union Ivan Tyulenev
~3 million
3,600 tanks,
4,389 aircraft[1]
46,000 artillery pieces
~5.7 million
12,000-15,000 tanks,
35,000-40,000 aircraft (11,357 combat ready on 22 June 1941)[2]
Casualties and losses
186,452 killed
40,157 missing
655,179 hurt
2,827 aircraft destroyed
2,735 tanks destroyed
802,191 killed
1,336,147 hurt
2,835,000 captured.[3][4]
21,200 aircraft destroyed[5][6][7]
20,500 tanks lost
Planning for the operation started in December 1940. The attack was to start on May 15, and its main objective was to destroy the Soviet military power. Some Nazi ideological goals were included, as were Soviet deposits of natural resources which would be helpful to keep fighting the war against the Allies.
Even though the Soviets were in a terrible condition, the Axis did not complete its objectives. Tactically, the Germans held some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union, mainly in Ukraine.[10] However, the Germans were pushed back from Moscow and could not do another attack as large and long as Operation Barbarossa on the Eastern Front.[11]
War continuesEdit
The winter of 1941-1942 began unusually early. It was not noted as being particularly bad by the Soviets, but the Germans were accustomed to warmer temperatures and were ill-prepared. The Germans' equipment broke down in the cold, and some men were still wearing summer uniforms, which they stuffed with newspapers in an attempt to stay warm. Many German soldiers froze to death in the extreme cold.
Operation Barbarossa was followed in 1942 by the failed "Fall Blau" (Case Blue), which was intended to take the Caucasus region and its oilfields.
The German attack opened the Eastern Front, which is in Russia called the "Great Patriotic War". A few years later, the Soviets pushed the German soldiers and invaded the German-occupied territories in Eastern Europe.
The Soviets then invaded Germany itself and fought the Battle of Berlin, the final battle before Germany's surrender. Although the Soviets eventually repelled the Germans, the tremendous cost was five times as many Soviet deaths as Germans.
Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history by the number of men involved and by the number of people who died.[12] The operation opened a theatre in which more men were involved than any other in history.
1. Bergström, p130
3. About the German Invasion of the Soviet Union
5. Bergström, p117
6. Krivosheyev, G. 1993
7. Note: Soviet aircraft losses include all causes
9. Yad vashem - Chronology of the Holocaust
10. A.J.P Taylor & Colonel D. M Proektor, p. 106
11. A.J.P. Taylor & Colonel D. M Proektor 1974, p. 107
12. Peter Antill, Peter Dennis. Stalingrad 1942. Osprey Publishing, 2007,ISBN 1-84603-028-5, 9781846030284. p. 7. |
Understand(ing) #AtoZChallenge
This year for the Blogging from A to Z in April Challenge I have chosen a single word for each letter of the alphabet. Each of these words is important in the Bible. I am including a story in each post. Links from biblical references go to Bible Gateway.
#AtoZChallenge 2021 April Blogging from A to Z Challenge letter U
Understand mostly appears in the Bible as part of the word, understanding. There are over 230 references, depending on the translation searched. Is a definition of the meaning necessary here? There is no special meaning attached to understanding in the Bible, but there is a desire that the readers should understand its message.
Wisdom and understanding are often linked Deuteronomy 1:13, Deuteronomy 4:6
King Solomon asked the Lord for an understanding mind (sometimes translated as wisdom). 1 Kings 3:9
God understands everything about us 1 Chronicles 28:9
To jump to the story Planting seed click here.
King Solomon had a wise man to oversee the building of the temple 1 Kings 7:13-14
The book of Nehemiah (who restored the walls of Jerusalem) has references to people who could understand, especially being able to understand the Law.
The Book of Job is all about attempts to understand suffering and man’s inability to understand everything a God does.
The Psalms speak of understanding: those who seek after God Psalm 14:2
There are comparisons between foolishness and wisdom.
In Psalm 119 the psalmist (writer) asks four times for understanding (verses 1, 27, 34, 73) then explains how he has understanding (verses 99, 100, 104), asks again for understanding in verses 125, 144 , 169, while explaining how understanding is gained in verse 130
As Job discovered the psalmist explains that God created the heavens by understanding in Psalm 136:5
The Book of Proverbs is full of sayings about understanding.
Genesis 11:7 The tower of Babel was where God confused people’s languages so that they did not understand one another and could not work together.
The prophet Isaiah speaks about understanding. In particular he describes the Spirit of God as being a Spirit of wisdom and understanding. Isaiah 11:2
The understanding of the creator is unsearchable Isaiah 40:28
The people being slow to understand is also a theme in many prophets’ words.
Daniel had understanding in dreams and visions Daniel 1:17
The disciples did not always understand Jesus’ teaching Mark 9:32
After Jesus’ death and resurrection He opened the minds of two disciples so they would understand Luke 24:45
The Holy Spirit gives understanding 1 Corinthians 2:12
Planting seed
In the time when Jesus lived on earth there were no tractors or combine harvesters. Farming was done by people using animals to help them.
Nowadays seed is often planted exactly where the farmer intends using machinery.
In Jesus day the person planting seed (the sower) would have a basket or bag full of seed and walk to and fro in the field, throwing the seed. It would have been a familiar sight to the people who listened to Jesus. The method was known as broadcasting long before radio and television were invented!
One day when there were so many people trying to hear him he spoke from a boat, while they listened on dry land. He told a story about the seed, sown by a sower.
Some of the seed fell on the path. Birds flew down and gobbled it up.
Some of the seed fell on rocky ground. There was not enough soil for healthy growth. The seed germinated but withered, scorched by the sun.
Some of the seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the young plants.
The rest of the seed fell on good ground, where it grew and produced a yield of crop many times the amount sown. Perhaps one hundred times, or sixty times or thirty times.
Jesus did not tell the crowds the meaning of this story, but his disciples asked him about it later. He told them that they were being given the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.
The crowd would not understand in fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy.
He explained to his disciples that the message was the seed. When people did not understand the message it was like the seed on the path.
The seed on the rocky ground represented people receiving the message gladly, but not continuing as disciples when persecution came.
The seed among thorns was like people, who allowed the cares of this world and the false hope of riches to crowd out the message.
The seed falling on good ground was like someone hearing and understanding the message and continuing, bearing differing amounts of fruit.
This story is a retelling of the Parable of the sower Matthew 13:1-23
U is for Upper Room
My posts for the A to Z Challenge this year are all about the Easter Story, recorded in 4 books of the New Testament: the Gospels. Image in sidebar links to Theme Reveal post.
Image in sidebar or below post links to Theme reveal
In the Easter story the Upper Room was where Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover. (Letter L and Letter I) Most houses had living space upstairs. The arrangements for finding and preparing the upper room are interesting. Jesus told his disciples to look out for a man carrying water on his head, who would lead them to the place where they were to prepare the Passover meal.
It was usually the women, who fetched water; a man carrying water would stand out from the crowd. All the details are in the Gospels (Letter G). Matthew 26:17-19, Mark 14:12-16 and Luke 22:7-13
U is for uneven #AtoZChallenge
U is for uneven or odd numbers
One, two, three, five, seven are prime
Or indivisible except by one and their own numbers.
Please excuse the repeated word for a rhyme!
Uneven rocks and pebbles on a sandy beach
Two is the only even number in the rhyme; all the others are odd. Numbers are used to count or measure things, which occupy physical space. Some of those things are regular geometrical shapes.
My word for the letter U is uneven – irregular, rough, not even. Left to itself the ground where we walk is uneven. Roads and tracks develop ruts or pot-holes. Grass grows in clumps; animals dig holes.
The prophet Isaiah foretold a time when rough places would be made smooth. Was he talking about John the Baptist, who would prepare the ground of people’s hearts for the Messiah, Jesus Christ? The Gospel of Matthew says so.
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The calculator performs an easy and advanced operations through fractions, expressions through fractions linked with integers, decimals, and mixed numbers. It additionally shows detailed step-by-step information about the portion calculation procedure. Solve difficulties with two, three, or more fractions and numbers in one expression.
You are watching: 7/8 - 1/2
Rules because that expressions with fractions: Fractions - usage the cut “/” in between the numerator and also denominator, i.e., because that five-hundredths, enter 5/100. If you are using blended numbers, be sure to leave a solitary space between the whole and portion part.The cut separates the numerator (number above a portion line) and also denominator (number below).Mixed numerals (mixed fractions or mixed numbers) compose as non-zero creature separated by one space and portion i.e., 12/3 (having the very same sign). An instance of a an unfavorable mixed fraction: -5 1/2.Because cut is both indicators for portion line and also division, us recommended usage colon (:) as the operator of division fractions i.e., 1/2 : 3.Decimals (decimal numbers) enter with a decimal point . and also they are automatically converted to fractions - i.e. 1.45.The colon : and slash / is the symbol of division. Have the right to be offered to divide combined numbers 12/3 : 43/8 or have the right to be offered for write complicated fractions i.e. 1/2 : 1/3.An asterisk * or × is the symbol for multiplication.Plus + is addition, minus sign - is subtraction and ()<> is mathematical parentheses.The exponentiation/power prize is ^ - for example: (7/8-4/5)^2 = (7/8-4/5)2
Examples: • adding fractions: 2/4 + 3/4• individually fractions: 2/3 - 1/2• multiplying fractions: 7/8 * 3/9• splitting Fractions: 1/2 : 3/4• exponentiation of fraction: 3/5^3• fractional exponents: 16 ^ 1/2• adding fractions and also mixed numbers: 8/5 + 6 2/7• dividing integer and also fraction: 5 ÷ 1/2• complicated fractions: 5/8 : 2 2/3• decimal come fraction: 0.625• fraction to Decimal: 1/4• fraction to Percent: 1/8 %• to compare fractions: 1/4 2/3• multiplying a portion by a totality number: 6 * 3/4• square source of a fraction: sqrt(1/16)• to reduce or simplifying the portion (simplification) - splitting the numerator and also denominator that a portion by the very same non-zero number - tantamount fraction: 4/22• expression through brackets: 1/3 * (1/2 - 3 3/8)• compound fraction: 3/4 the 5/7• fountain multiple: 2/3 that 3/5• divide to uncover the quotient: 3/5 ÷ 2/3The calculator follows well-known rules because that order the operations. The most usual mnemonics for remembering this order of work are: PEMDAS - Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. BEDMAS - Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction BODMAS - Brackets, that or Order, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction.
See more: Iyanla: Fix My Life Fix My Secret Life As A Gay Pastor : Part 3
GEMDAS - Grouping signs - base (), Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. it is in careful, constantly do multiplication and also division prior to addition and subtraction. Part operators (+ and -) and also (* and also /) has the exact same priority and then should evaluate native left come right.
Fractions in native problems:
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Lay the Proper Foundation for a Strong Singing Voice
Those who attend vocal classes in London do so to lay the proper foundation for a strong singing voice. Once you have understood that it is not going to happen overnight and you will need to put in a stupendous amount of hard work to get that stupendous voice; you know you are on the right track. Singing is a skill and once you've learned that skill, you can do it without too much thought. With some solid training and understanding you too can develop a voice which people will compliment you on all the time. When you join such classes under a great singing teacher like Ken Tamplin, he can show you exactly how to sing better.
Such a teacher would transform the most ordinary people with mediocre singing skills into great singers on the basis of his sound methods of instruction and nurturing style. Why just in London , you can get world class voice training in UK if you sign up for singing lessons at the Ken Tamplin Voice Academy . What does it mean to sing a loud powerful note as opposed to a note of medium volume? Well, it is really a matter of intensity. If your vocal chords can hold a stronger push of air pressure back for longer, it produces a sound wave of higher intensity, which means a note at higher volume.
You need to train and strengthen the tiny muscles that coordinate your vocal chords rather than your diaphragm to be able to hold down more air, for longer. That is how vocal power is produced. Just a few months of regular practice with the right exercises and you will have re-programmed your voice so it can sing with great power, range, and excellent tone. Poor teaching methods might lead to a singer working for years on his/her singing range, yet only being able to add a few notes. You can avoid this if you understand that once your sound has been created at the vocal cords, it will move up in the spaces in your throat, mouth, and head. As the sound resonates through these spaces, it changes tone quality depending on the proportion of each cavity.
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Each species has a dedicated page on which you can find all sorts of information, in particular:
- a short presentation text to find out more about this species;
- this species' characteristics on Birdrama;
- the standard capacity that birds of this species have;
- plumage available for this species;
- the best breeders of this species;
- the best breedings for this species;
- statistics about birds of this species;
- some birds of this species: the best birds in terms of capacity, level, those that have received a progress star, those that are for sale...
A species' page also contains different community elements, in particular:
- players who like this species;
- groups that are talking about this species;
- photos;
- discussions about this species on the forums.
The comparison between the capacity of the best birds of a certain species and the species' standard capacity allows you to measure its progress: the wider the gap, the more advanced this species is in the game.
Some very wide progress gaps can exist between species, especially depending on the number of breeders who have birds and breedings of this species.
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House Sparrow
House Sparrow ##STADE## - plumages 26
The House Sparrow has lived all over the world for a very long time. Scientists think that this species has existed since prehistoric times. Found all over the world, house sparrows are the most widely distributed wild bird in the world.
Sparrows likes living in man-made areas, like farms or cities. In fact, the sparrow hates living in completely natural areas such as prairies or forests.
These little birds are never far from humans, found in untidy nests in holes or crevices, sometimes even ousting other birds from their nests. House sparrows are very sociable and breed very quickly.
These chirpy birds feed mostly on seeds and insects, but will eat just about anything! Unfortunately, due to their living environments being so close to humans, and a recent rise in pesticide use, house sparrows are being unintentionally poisoned. As a result, their population is decreasing.
pagination_id 19
House Sparrow ##STADE## - plumages 26
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Expressionism and City Life
Expressionist Portraits
Expressionist portraits reveal more than just what people look like.
Expressionism and Nature
Expressionist Depictions of War
Extreme angles, flattened forms, garish colors, and distorted views distinguish Expressionism, an international movement in art, architecture, literature, and performance that flourished between 1905 and 1920, especially in Germany and Austria. Starting in 1905, as industry grew in Europe, the Expressionists migrated to cities. There they formed groups such as Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), shared studios, exhibited together, and published their work and writing.
The Expressionists sought to depict the world as it felt rather than how it looked, and, by doing so, to reinvigorate art with authenticity and expressive force. They rejected the dominant stylistic conventions and subject matter of German visual culture at the turn of the 20th century, instead looking to the boldly colorful, introspective paintings of the Post-Impressionists and to fellow German and Austrian artists who explored the darker side of life and the artistic imagination in their work. Many Expressionists also found early inspiration in the flat patterning and bold forms of The New Art movement.
In their quest for authenticity, the Expressionists also looked for inspiration beyond European art and culture to native folk traditions and tribal art. They frequented ethnographic museums and world’s fairs, where they encountered collections of African and Oceanic art. Reflecting a common attitude of the time, the Expressionists perceived non-Western art as “primitive,” unevolved, and therefore closer to the origins of humanity. They borrowed stylistically from what they saw—including geometric ornamentation, decorative patterning, and flattened planes. As Germany neared the onset of World War I, more elements of the grotesque appeared in Expressionist work. Expressionists embraced printmaking as a way to quickly distribute work to a larger audience and as a means of promoting or criticizing social or political causes.
General agreement on or acceptance of certain practices or attitudes; a widely used and accepted device or technique, as in drama, literature, or visual art.
A flat or level surface.
The visual or narrative focus of a work of art.
A distinctive or characteristic manner of expression.
A work of art on paper that usually exists in multiple copies. It is created not by drawing directly on paper, but through a transfer process. The artist begins by creating a composition on another surface, such as metal or wood, and the transfer occurs when that surface is inked and a sheet of paper, placed in contact with it, is run through a printing press. Four common printmaking techniques are woodcut, etching, lithography, and screenprint.
The shape or structure of an object.
Encompasses varying stylistic approaches that emphasize intense personal expression. Renouncing the stiff bourgeois social values that prevailed at the turn of the 20th century, and rejecting the traditions of the state-sponsored art academies, Expressionist artists turned to boldly simplified or distorted forms and exaggerated, sometimes clashing colors. As Expressionism evolved from the beginning of the 20th century through the early 1920s, its crucial themes and genres reflected deeply humanistic concerns and an ambivalent attitude toward modernity, eventually confronting the devastating experience of World War I and its aftermath.
Formed in 1911 in Munich as an association of painters and an exhibiting society led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Using a visual vocabulary of abstract forms and prismatic colors, Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual values of art as a counter to [what they saw as] the corruption and materialism of their age. The name, meaning “blue rider,” refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider. The group, which published an influential almanac by the same name, dissolved with the onset of World War I.
Related Artists: Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Käthe Kollwitz, Franz Marc, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
AUDIO: An introduction to the exhibition German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse |
Activities director – Staff member who oversees events and activities in various assisted living and skilled nursing care settings.
Acute – Sudden and severe condition.
Advance directive – Written statement of an individual’s preferences and directions regarding health care. Advance Directives protect a person’s rights even if he or she becomes mentally or physically unable to choose or communicate preferences regarding medical treatments.
Alzheimer’s Disease – The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s affects memory, thinking and other mental abilities. Alzheimer’s develops slowly and gradually worsens over time. While there is no cure for the condition, there are treatments to help manage the symptoms.
Assessment – Determination of a resident’s care needs, based on a formal, structured evaluation of the resident’s physical and psychological condition and ability to perform activities of daily living.
Assisted living – Long term care option that offers varying degrees of personal and medical care within a homelike setting. Assisted living facilities range from a private room or an apartment to a multi-unit facility specializing in Alzheimer’s care. The goal of assisted living care is to maintain maximum independence. Also called “residential care.”
Caregiver – An individual who cares for another person in need.
Certified nursing assistant (CNA) – Trained, licensed nursing professional who assists with personal care needs, such as bathing, dressing or eating.
Cognition – The process of knowing, being aware of thoughts; the ability to reason and understand.
Continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) – Housing communities that provide different levels of care based on resident needs, from independent living apartments to skilled nursing care. Residents move from one setting to another as needed, but continue to remain a part of their CCRC.
Dementia – General term used to describe a set of symptoms that affects intellectual and social abilities such as memory, problem solving and communication.
Do not resuscitate order (DNR) – Request that instructs medical professionals not to attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Dual eligibles – Persons who qualify for both Medicaid and Medicare.
Hospice care – Care philosophy focused on reducing suffering rather than curing a condition. Hospice addresses physical, spiritual, social and emotional needs of dying individuals and loved ones. Hospice care can include pain medication, therapy or counseling.
In-home care – Care that takes place at home. It may be unpaid or paid care provided by loved ones, friends or professional caregivers. In-home care typically includes assistance with day-to-day tasks, such as bathing, walking, or cooking.
Letter of instruction – Written document that offers care guidance. A letter of instruction might name persons to look after children or pets, direct persons to important documents or accounts, or include a list of important contacts such as an employer, attorney or financial advisor.
Licensed practical nurse (LPN) – Certified professional who provides basic bedside care under the direction of a registered nurse (RN) or physician.
Living will – Legal document that specifies medical or life-sustaining treatments in the event the patient is unable to make decisions or communicate.
Long term care – Broad spectrum of medical and support services provided to persons who have lost some or all capacity to function on their own, and who are expected to need such services over a prolonged period of time.
Long-term insurance – Private insurance to cover long term care needs.
Medicaid – Joint federal and state health insurance program available to those with limited income and resources. Eligible individuals include pregnant women, children age 19 or younger, persons age 65 or older, and those who are blind, disabled or in need of nursing home care. Medicaid will pay for nursing facility care, provided the nursing facility is certified.
Medical director – Physician who oversees medications, examinations and treatments.
Medicare – Health insurance program administered by the federal government. Medicare is available to people who are age 65 or older, permanently disabled, or affected by kidney failure or long-term kidney disease. Medicare does not provide a comprehensive long term care component.
Medicare part B – Medical insurance that helps pay for doctors’ services, outpatient hospital care, and some other medical services that Part A does not cover (like some in-home health care). Part B helps pay for these covered services and supplies when they are medically necessary. A monthly premium must be paid to receive Part B.
Medicare supplemental insurance – Private insurance that pays Medicare deductibles and co-insurances, and may cover services not covered by Medicare. Most plans will help pay for skilled nursing care, but only when that care is covered by Medicare. Also called “Medigap.”
Ombudsman – Advocate for patient/resident rights and improvements in the long term care system.
Personal care – Assistance with “activities of daily living,” such as getting out of bed, bathing, using the toilet, dressing, walking or eating.
Personal resources – Private payment sources such as savings, investments and assets.
Physical therapy (PT) – Therapy to help those recovering from illness or injury. Physical therapy works to relieve pain, restore maximum function and prevent future injury or disability.
Registered nurse (RN) – Nurse who has graduated from a formal nursing education program and passed a state-administered exam. RNs have completed more formal training than licensed practical nurses (LPNs) and have a wide scope of responsibility including all aspects of nursing care.
Rehabilitative care – Care services that assist those recovering from illness, injury or disease. Rehabilitative care treatments help patients regain abilities lost as a result of life-changing events.
Resident care – Care services that include maintenance of a safe environment, religious programming, housekeeping and social activities.
Residents’ rights – Rights of those living in an assisted living care facility or skilled nursing care facility.
Respite care – Short term relief program offered in a variety of care facilities. Respite care gives both caregivers and loved ones a break. In respite care, a skilled care professional assumes caregiver responsibilities for a predetermined amount of time.
Skilled Nursing Care – 24/7 comprehensive care provided in a homelike setting. Skilled Nursing Care centers promote autonomy and choice. They offer a variety of services, social activities and recreational opportunities. Also called “nursing homes.”
Social worker – Care professional committed to advancing social rights.
Therapy – Treatment of various health conditions, with the goal of restoring or improving abilities and reducing further deterioration or injury. |
Multiple processes
Traditionally, the way Python programmers have worked around the GIL and its effect on CPU-bound threads has been to use multiple processes instead of multiple threads. This approach (multiprocessing) has some disadvantages, which mostly boil down to having to launch multiple instances of the Python interpreter with all the startup time and memory usage penalties that this implies.
At the same time, however, using multiple processes to execute tasks in parallel has some nice properties. Multiple processes have their own memory space and implement a share-nothing architecture, making it easy to reason about data-access patterns. They also allow us to (more) easily transition from a single-machine architecture to a distributed ...
Get Distributed Computing with Python now with O’Reilly online learning.
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Frequently Asked Questions:
Bioidentical Hormones
What are bioidentical hormones?
Bioidentical hormones are molecules that have the same structure as the hormones your body makes. You recognize them as your own and process them the same way. This is not true of non-bioidentical hormones. Non-bioidentical hormones somewhat resemble our own hormones and may accomplish some of the same tasks but may also cause toxic byproducts as your body breaks them down for use. This may cause a wide array for side effects like bloating, mood swings, water retention, and more seriously, cancer and heart disease. Not only do bioidentical hormones not cause these side effects but they can prevent them.
What happens to my hormones as I age?
As men and women age, they experience a drop off in hormones. In men this happens gradually starting in the late 30s or 40s. In women, some hormones decrease gradually and some drop suddenly at menopause.
Which hormones are we talking about?
For optimal functioning pre-menopausal women often need thyroid, progesterone and/or testosterone repletion. Post-menopausal women often need thyroid, progesterone, testosterone and estradiol. Men require testosterone repletion. Some may need thyroid care to feel their best.
Isn’t losing my hormones just a normal part of aging?
Yes and no. One hundred years ago the average lifespan was 53.6 for men and 54.6 for women. Hormone levels dropped and the we died. This is not so today. Many people are living into their 70s and 80s and beyond with very low or no hormones and very high rates of chronic disease. Adequate levels of hormones are needed to regulate body metabolism, immunity, heart and brain function to name a few.
Do I have a hormone deficiency?
Symptoms of hormone deficiency include weight gain, loss of muscle and bone mass, degenerative disease like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease, autoimmune disease, wrinkling and thinning of the skin, depression and stress, cognitive decline, loss of sex drive, fatigue and sleep disorders. Do you have any of these symptoms?
As levels of hormones decline, so do our physical and mental capabilities. We lose our energy, vitality, strength, physique, and health. Diagnoses like osteoporosis, coronary artery disease, muscle atrophy, sleep apnea, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction are common with age.
What will happen when I replace my low hormones?
By restoring hormones to a more youthful level, it is possible to improve our energy and strength. It is also possible to improve or reverse many of the symptoms and signs that we have come to associate with aging.
How do I get started with hormone care?
Schedule an initial consultation with Annie Macleod, Nurse Practitioner. She will order hormone laboratory testing. Based on the lab results and your symptoms and goals, she will formulate a replacement regimen that is specifically tailored to your needs. She will continue to adjust your regimen based on follow up lab tests and consultations until you are feeling optimally. This typically takes an average of 4 months.
Do I need to take hormones forever?
Once you are feeling optimally, Annie recommends follow up lab tests every six months to ensure your regimen continues to meet your needs. You may safely discontinue your hormones anytime, however, your body will never again make optimal level of hormones it did before levels began to decline in mid-life. No patient has chosen to discontinue their hormones after Annie has brought them to an optimal level. They simply feel too good.
Can’t my primary care provider just do this for me?
Yes and no. There is no good reason your primary care provider can’t provide hormone care for you. However, replacement of hormones is not emphasized during medical training. Your primary care provider would need to pursue additional training to safely and effectively replace hormones. Those that do, often use non-bioidentical hormones.
Adjusting hormones isn’t hard but when done well it is personalized, artful and takes practice. Most medical providers don’t feel equipped or confident enough to provide this service. Nor does insurance cover the labs and visits necessary to get started with hormone care. Annie sees you every 4-6 weeks for the first few months to adjust your dose and to monitor your response the regimen. Following patients closely does not fit into the conventional medical model of 15-minute annual visits. |
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Ways to Spin the Ball
Spins are significant to this game because they create these spins that make the game and the returning of certain moves harder. Spins are created when the ball grazes the racket.
It can be done the best when it is grazed as much as possible and at the tip of the racket with an inverted or smooth rubber. Without a spin in the ball, the ball is easily attacked by the opponent unless they make a mistake and send it back low, hitting the net.
spin the ball
spin the ball
Hit the ball with an upward movement, with the racket tilted so that the side you see does not hit the ball. The top part of the ball should continuously spin away from you.
When the ball is hit this way, it will move in a downward arc, making it easy for the opponent to attack, especially if it lands at the end of the table near them.
However, the ball does spin toward the player, which will make them miss if they do not adjust their timing correctly. When you have to return this type of shot, keep the racket closed or tilted towards the table.
Hit the ball with a downward movement so that it is almost like scooping the ball but not all the way because you should be stopping when the paddle is parallel with the table.
The racket should be tilted so that you can see the side that hits the ball, which should make the bottom half of the ball spin in the direction that is away from you.
The ball should slow down after it makes contact with the table, hit correctly, and cause the player to miss if they are not expecting this. Since it is spinning toward the table, the player has to move closer to the table to hit it back.
It is a difficult spin for the opponent because it is difficult to attack, and if they hit it back with their racket closed, they will hit the ball into the net. When you have to return this type of shot, keep your racket opened or tilted towards the sky away from you.
Hit the ball with a sideways stroke and pull back or push forwards from yourself, depending on which way you want the ball to spin. The racket should be perpendicular to the table, and the ball should be spinning sideways.
The ball should be spinning sideways after it hits the table, forcing the receiver to correct their timing if they hope to reach it in time. The ball will be either have a left or right spin and move towards that side of the table.
The sidespin is good for serves because it could cause the receiver to make a mistake, such as causing the ball to “fly” over the table without touching it.
To return this type of shot, you must figure out if it is a left or right spin coming at you immediately and then with your bat ready at the opposite side. It means that if a ball comes from your opponent with a left spin, it will land on your left side of the table.
You Should Spin The Ball Instead of Hitting It
Several reasons make spinny shots more effective than speedy ones. When you get too excited during a game, every player tends to go for an all-out shot or exert brute force to his stroke. Table tennis has small margins for error. So you should learn to control your strokes at all times if you want to win.
Boll topspin schillings
Boll topspin schillings
Today I will explain the reasons why spin is more effective than speed.
Spin Reduces Air Drag
Air drag (air resistance to objects flying through its molecules) is highly reduced because of the turbulence created. The upper side of the ball travels forward, and the downside travels backward. It reduces the air resistance imparted on the ball compared to a flat hit. So spinny shots are faster than flat shots!
Margin For Error Increases with Topspin
Let’s compare two different strokes. A topspin stroke with a 45-degree angle of the paddle and a flat hit. Both of the strokes exert the same amount of force/energy to the ball. Hitting the ball flat demands extreme accuracy, and the ball fails to land on the table (the ball is traveling straight).
Using topspin, on the other hand, allows you to have a more significant margin for error. The ball follows a curvy path, and it tends to “dip down” onto the table, making the shot more likely to succeed. To understand better the spin phenomenon, watch this video below.
Better Control & Accuracy
When using a spinny shot, you hold the ball for a split of a second to your paddle. This split of a second is enough to provide your brain information about what you are doing with your shot (increased dwell time). So the longer the ball stays on your paddle, the more information your brain receives, the more knowledge about the stroke you acquire.
On the contrary, when hitting the ball flat, the only information you acquire is about how “hard” the incoming ball is (a fastball compresses the rubber & sponge and gets into the blade, a slow ball compresses the rubber). Ultimately, by spinning the ball, you can learn to control and dictate its trajectory and develop accurate shots!
Spinny balls “kick” after a bounce
No need to analyze that. A flat hit causes the ball to travel in a predictable path. It is the reason that hard smashes sometimes are returned with “reflective” blocks.
When imparting spin to the ball, its path will be unpredictable after the bounce. Plus, you can add variations in the amounts of spin imparted (heavy topspin, light topspin) or add sidespin to make it even more challenging to receive.
Ending, I will like to add a historical fact that changed the game’s evolution entirely till the 80’s Chinese hard hitters were dominating the game. Then the Swedes appeared and started looping every ball. They were the first team ever to cause serious Chinese headaches.
They attacked with constant looping from forehand and backhand(back then, pro players played forehand loops and backhand as a consistent shot with punch blocks or counter hit). Looping from both sides was a revolution!
The Level of Spin in Table Tennis
In most racket sport, the use of spin is essential. The level of spin in table tennis is much higher than in other racket sport.
At the beginner level of the sport, spin is not so important when compared with the advanced level. Two types of spin are introduced at the beginner level of table tennis: topspin and backspin.
spin level
Without spin knowledge, it will be difficult for beginners to understand and develop their basic table tennis skills. In the advanced level of the sport, the use of spin is very vital and inevitable.
Topspin and backspin
Though there are other spin types, the topspin and backspin are more critical at the beginner level. Explained, topspin is when the top of the ball rotates away from the player, and the bottom rotates towards the player. The racket grazes the ball from the top with a forward and upward motion. The table tennis topspin is mainly applied as an attacking shot.
The backspin, on the other hand, is the opposite of topspin. Backspin is when the top of the ball rotates towards the player, and the bottom of the ball is rotating away from the player. The racket grazes the bottom of the ball with a forward and downward motion. The backspin is mainly used as a defensive shot.
Topspin and backspin are also used for table tennis serves. It will be easier for you to learn the topspin and backspin serves if you are a beginner.
The use of a combination of various racket components enhances the production of spin. For instance, the inverted sponge racket is used to create heavy spin.
The sidespin is another type of spin in table tennis. The sidespin serve is mainly used in the advanced level of table tennis.
Click here to learn how to apply and return spin.
Most types of modern rubbers have a high level of spin and require more experience to make use of these rubbers. If you are a beginner, you will not be able to use high spin rubbers because they are challenging to control.
My advice is that you start with an all-round rubber racket with medium spin and speed. This type of racket has more control, create less spin and pace to the ball.
table tennis DVDs
Check out for more related post on spins: |
Last updated February 1, 2019 by Lisa Richards, CNC
How Does Chlorine Affect Your Immune System?
Drinking water is a source of chlorine that may weaken your immune system
Is there chlorine in your water supply? The answer is almost certainly yes if you live in the US or many other parts of the world. This means that if you are drinking unfiltered tap water and taking unfiltered showers then you are exposing yourself to a major potential cause of Candida overgrowth. Chlorine can kill your gut flora just like antibiotics.
So why is this harmful chemical added to our drinking water? Chlorine is a highly efficient disinfectant that kills harmful organisms and prevents the spread of waterborne diseases like dysentery, but it does come with a cost.
Although killing pathogenic organisms is clearly a good thing, chlorine can weaken your immune system and weaken its ability to fight off a pathogen like Candida albicans.
There are several ways that you can reduce your chlorine exposure. In today’s post we’re going to look at exactly how chlorine can affect your immune system, and just what you can do to prevent this from happening.
How Chlorine Can Lead to Candida Overgrowth
The idea that chlorine is harmful to us is not controversial at all. In fact both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Center for Disease Control list it as a harmful substance. However, they focus mostly on the effects that large amounts of chlorine can have on the upper respiratory tract. (1, 2)
Free Guide To Beating Candida
A less obvious, but equally troubling, side effect of chlorine happens in your intestines. When this powerful disinfectant passes through your stomach and reaches your gut, it can kill off or suppress many of the beneficial bacteria that live there.
The lymph tissue that lines your digestive system creates over sixty percent of your immune cells. It decides what bacteria and elements get through and which ones should be eliminated. It acts as a barrier for bad bacteria and a transport for good elements. Another role that your beneficial bacteria play is by communicating with this part of your immune system to focus it on ‘foreign’ microbes.
These bacteria also help with digestion, regulate the acidity in your gut, and form an important part of your immune system themselves. Among other things, destroying that delicate balance of flora can weaken your resistance to disease.
When chlorine gets in your system, it can destroy or weaken much of your beneficial intestinal flora. (3)
This not only disrupts your digestion and causes issues such as bloating and indigestion, but also also allows the Candida yeast to run rampant and weaken your immune system. An imbalance in your gut flora is an opportunity for a fast-growing pathogenic yeast like Candida albicans.
If your colonies of ‘good bacteria’ are destroyed by an external factor like antibiotics or chlorine, there is suddenly less competition in your gut. This provides the Candida colonies with the space and nutrients they need to create biofilms, expand throughout your gut, and produce their toxic byproducts in larger amounts.
This intestinal Candida overgrowth can affect your digestion, damage your intestinal walls, and further weaken your immune system.
Why Is Chlorine In Your Water Supply?
More than 98% of US public water supplies are chlorinated, so first let me explain why all that chlorine is in your drinking water. It’s there because chlorine is a powerful disinfectant that kills more than 99% of the harmful organisms and bacteria in your water supply. It kills disease-causing pathogens like cholera, typhoid, and dysentery by dissolving their cell walls.
Would it be better for all of us if chlorine weren’t used, especially since regular chlorine exposure is a possible contributory factor to Candida? Not necessarily.
Public officials have to tread a fine line between preventing disease in our water and using as few harmful chemicals as possible. If the chlorine was removed, it would certainly eliminate some of the negative effects of chlorine on our immune systems. But it would also expose us to harmful pathogens that could result in other health problems.
Of course, although chlorination of our water is generally a positive thing, that doesn’t mean that we actually need to drink the chlorine. By using simple water filters in your home, you can enjoy all the benefits of disease-free chlorinated water, while still eliminating your exposure to chlorine.
How Can You Reduce Your Chlorine Exposure?
Here are a few steps that you might want to consider as you try to limit your chlorine exposure:
• Drink filtered water (either from a whole-house filtration system or by using Brita-style filters in your kitchen).
• Don’t use chlorinated bleach in your laundry.
• Be aware that pools and hot tubs contain chlorine too. Avoid them or shower well after using.
• Take bottled water with you when you go out.
• If you do find yourself regularly exposed to chlorine, take a good probiotic to maintain your gut flora.
Let’s take a look at those in more detail.
The first step to reducing your chlorine intake is by starting with the water you drink. Most cities add chlorine to their water, so the best solution is a whole house filtration system that removes it before it even enters your house. You can buy different kinds of systems, but be sure to buy one that filters your entire water supply. That way, not only will you have pure drinking water, but the water you cook with, bathe with, and wash your clothes with will be free of chlorine.
Not all filtration systems remove the same chemicals. Talk to a good salesperson and do your research to find out which systems most effectively remove the chlorine from your water. You may end up paying more for a whole house system but it will be worth it for your health.
If you cannot afford a whole house water filtration system, get individual filters for your kitchen sink to keep your drinking and cooking water safe. You can also buy a shower filter or one for your bathtub. Don’t forget your bathroom sinks too.
Your water supply is not the only source of chlorine in your daily life. Do not buy chlorinated bleach for your laundry, and check the list of ingredients in your laundry supplies. Remember to also check your cleaning products for chlorinated bleach as an additive. Whenever possible, it is best to use natural products that are gentler on you and what you are cleaning.
Another area that is important to consider are pools and hot tubs. Public pools and hot tubs contain high levels of chlorine to kill bacteria from multiple users. You should really try to avoid these as much as possible. A refreshing swim in the sea or fresh water is a much healthier option.
When you go somewhere like work or shopping, take your own bottled water or buy it rather than drinking from public places. You will never be able to avoid all sources of chlorine, but the more you can, the stronger your immune system will be and the better chance you have of beating your Candida overgrowth.
Just because something has been made available for public use does not mean it is safe for everyone. This is the case with chlorine and new studies are starting to show its harmful effects. (4)
What happens if you are regularly exposed to chlorine and unable to do anything about it? Take a good probiotic. This will help to balance out the effects of the chlorine and maintain the health and diversity of your gut flora. We recommend the Balance ONE probiotic.
Candida overgrowth is just one of many health problems that excessive exposure to chlorine can cause. So if you are following a strict Candida diet, taking your antifungals and probiotics and you still can’t get rid of Candida, consider taking steps to reduce your chlorine intake as much as possible.
You will never be able to completely avoid chlorine, but reducing your exposure can boost your immune system and help you to beat your Candida. If you want to learn more about boosting your immune system, our Ultimate Candida Diet treatment plan recommends a list of immune boosting supplements.
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1. Very good information for a Canada sufferer
2. Magda says:
Hi Lisa,
I’m going through the candida detox & diet at the moment, following your programme (my 3rd week now). The progress so far is fantastic, feeling much better already (although beating those sugar cravings is still hard…). One of my key activities to keep fit is regular swimming, so I’d go to a public swimming pool 3-5 days a week for a 30mins swim. I do shower afterwards within the facility. I’ve stopped it for 3 weeks now, but would be keen to start going back say 2-3 days a week. Do you recommend it? Or do you think it could affect the treatment? Many thanks for all the useful information you provide!
1. Lisa Richards says:
Hi Magda, I’m glad that its helping! You should be aiming to reduce your overall exposure to toxins. So if you are taking positive steps in other parts of your life (like drinking filtered water, for example), then you might be OK to use a chlorinated pool. As you suggest, showering after your swim is a great idea. Your body is designed to cope with a certain amount of exposure to toxins like chlorine, but you just have to be careful not to overload it!
1. brian says:
hi Lisa
was wondering if exposure to chlorine over time can bring on such auto immune decease such as hidredinitis supperativa?
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Civil Rights MASH efromm and awilliams
• Emancipation Proclamation
Emancipation Proclamation
Abolitionists during the civil war pressured President Lincoln to emancipate enslved African amricans. However, on September 22, 1862 with extreme pressure from the Republican senators to declare President Lincoln's position on slavery, he signed the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation. This then officall declared freedom for slaves only in parts of the Confederacy not under the control of the Union Army.
• 13th Amendment
13th Amendment
The Amendment started with Radical Republicans. These Republicans wanted antislavery and were not willing to forgive the Confederates for allowing slavery. They wanted to take action and to do so they elected to Congress a Radical Republican. He then came out with the 13th Amendment. This Amendment states that there will be no slavery in the United States.
• 14th Amendment
14th Amendment
This amendment was written up rignt after the Civil Rights Act in 1868. This act was set to give rights to everyone to create equality. It stated that states can not deny rights and privileges to any U.S. citizen. This event was soon followed by 15th amendment which was similar to this one.
• 15th Amendment
15th Amendment
The 14th Amendment as well as the 15th Amendment were both forced with the Enforcement Act in 1870. The fight for this Amendment started when the Supreme Court in North Carolina upheld the right for free men in color to vote. This made many people upset and they wanted change. Thats where the 15th Amendment comes into play. This gave citizens the right to vote regardless of their color, race, or condition of former servitude.
• Plessy vs. Ferguson
Plessy vs. Ferguson
A man named Homer Plessy, buys a first class train ticket but because he's one-eighth black, and "one drop of minority blood," he gets kicked off the train. Later, his case makes an impact that the saying "separate but equal" wasn't really equal at all.
• 19th Amendment
19th Amendment
The true reason for the 19th Amendment was due to the fact that women down in the south wanted the right to vote. Women previously had the right to vote but this Amendment was focused more on womens sufferage and how it can be changed for the better. This was origionally called the "Anthony Amendment" after the women that came up with the bill, Susan B. Anthony. This bill was passed in 1920 which then allowed women the right to vote.
• Smith vs. Allwright
Smith vs. Allwright
This case confronted the issue of all white primaries in the state of Texas. Smith, an educated black man,and the NAACP brought the issue to the Supreme Court "holding that the Texas Democratic Party's racial restriction on voting in its primaries was in violation of the 15th Amendment.
• Executive Order 9981
Executive Order 9981
President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 with intent of "establishing the Presidents committee on equality of treatment and opprotunity in the armed forces." There were two purposes to this. One: to declare that it would be the policy of the US to provide equality of opprotunity for members of the armed forces without regard to skin color.. The other purpose was to establish a seven-member advisory committee to study and recommend ways A.F. could implement the segregation policy.
• Brown vs. Board
Brown vs. Board
Brown vs. Board of education started with a 7 year old girl named Linda Brown in Topeka, Kansas. She lived miles away from her all black school but just right up the road from the white school. Her father insisted that couldn't she just attend the white school close to her house? From there the arguments started to try to over turn school segration. The final ruling was that the supreme court was against segregation in schools.
• Emmett Till Murder.
Emmett Till Murder.
Emmett Till was murderer for "wolf-whistling" at a woman. Relatives and/or close ones of the woman were very much racist, and because of this apparent action that Till made, it caused him his life.
• Montgomery Bus Boycott
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a thirteen month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses were unconstitutional.
• Greensboro & Nashville Sit Ins. Feb 13-May 10 1960
Greensboro & Nashville Sit Ins. Feb 13-May 10 1960
A series of non-violent protests which led to the woolworth's department store chain reversing it's policy of racial segregation. Greensboro sit ins were an instrumental action, leading to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in our countries history. Movement then spread to other southern cities including Nashville, Tennessee where the students of the movement had been trained for a sit in by civil rights activist James Lawson.
• Freedom Rides
Freedom Rides
Civil rights demonstrators demanded "Freedom Now!" and white segregationists wanted segregation forever. Then, Pres. Kennedy would have to decide to intervene or to not intervene. Busloads rolled out of Washington, DC on their way to New Orleans. They acted the opposite of how they were suppose to. Whites deliberately sat in the back, while blacks sat in the front. At each stop, African Americans entered "whites only" waiting rooms to test whether the facilities were integrated.
• March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
More than 200,000 demonstrators took part in the March on Washington for jobs and freedom in the nations capital. The March was successful in pressuring the administration of John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress.
• "Sunday School Bombing"
"Sunday School Bombing"
The bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most horrific crimes during the civil rights movement. Four young girls were attending Sunday school, were killed when a bomb exploded at the church. The church was a center for civil rights meetings. Just a few days before, courts had ordered the desegregation of all Birmingham schools.
• Civil Rights Act: 1964
Civil Rights Act: 1964
The Civil Rights was broken down into two parts. The first movement had protested the forced exclusion of blacks and whites in public places. The second part of the act forbid segregation in hotels, resturants, theaters, and sporting arenas that did business with interstate commerce. This meant that they were now allowed to not segregate in certian public events.
• Voting Acts 1965
Voting Acts 1965
This law was signed into law on August 6, 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted by many southern states after the civil war.
• Civil Rights Act of 1957
This act ended discrimination in the work force against blacks. It was passed in the year of 1957. In 1960, it gave the attorney general power to sue in federal courts on African Americans. |
Margot Armstrong June 26, 2021
Social media are online interactive technologies that allow the generation or sharing / exchange of various forms of human expression, ideas, career orientations, and various other types of non-verbal communication through virtual communities and networks. This technology has changed the way business and marketing are carried out and it has also changed the way in which organizations carry out their own communication. Today, a marketing strategy is usually formed by incorporating social media into the overall marketing mix, in order to make the message more personal to the target audience. It also enables the organization to get feedback from the target market quickly, efficiently, and at a low cost.
The benefits of social media marketing over traditional marketing models is that it allows a company to create, monitor and disseminate content across multiple platforms and to keep track of the results of this activity. There are many advantages to social networking, the most important of which are the ability to interact with people across the world and the ability to generate increased website traffic and sales. Additionally, social media allows the organization to develop a stronger customer relationship management system by allowing customers to easily contact the organization via social media channels. It also allows for a company to measure the impact of any advertisements and offers on consumer behaviors.
Organizations that have not yet started to take advantage of social media may see the benefit of doing so sooner rather than later. In fact, as more organizations, consultancies, startups, and multinational companies become aware of the benefits of this technology, more will be attracted to using it. Social network sites offer users an exceptional opportunity to create a social network community that is dynamic, fun, creative, and supportive. The key to the success of this strategy is to understand the real world factors that may affect the interest, participation, and purchase decisions of a given user group. Organizations may see increased sales, increased website traffic and user community engagement, and improved management of customer service issues, all of which will help increase the bottom line.
When planning to use social media platforms, it is important for organizations to carefully consider how each platform will work best for their organization. Each social media platform has different ways in which users can share information and engage with others. For example, Twitter uses 140 character messages and allows users to tweet, whereas Facebook uses long posts and allows users to comment on the post. LinkedIn also allows its users to send one another direct messages, whereas Pinterest allows users to post on pins and allows them to be shared. YouTube also allows users to post video clips and allows users to comment on the clips. To maximize the benefits of these platforms, it is important to determine which type of content will resonate with the target audience and which types of content may not be effective.
One of the other key components to this strategy is whether or not an organization will be able to identify which social networking sites they should use and how they will use social media’s addiction to promote their business. For example, Twitter can be used to communicate with customers and potential customers. However, if an organization’s focus is more on engaging with their employees and potential clients, they may find that using this platform incorrectly can have a negative impact on their business. This is because using Twitter for business promotion can backfire if they are not careful.
However, there are many businesses who have found that social networks work well for promoting and marketing their business. This is due to the fact that social media is relatively inexpensive compared to traditional forms of advertising, such as newspapers or television. Therefore, if you choose to use social media to share information and engage with others, you need to be sure that you have carefully considered how you will do so. While some social networks may not be as beneficial to your company as others, it is important to remember that each network will have its own unique purpose and may not be effective for every organization.
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What is quantitative easing?
30 Sep 2021 | by: Patricia Miller
What is quantitative easing?
Quantitative easing is a monetary policy that enables central banks to purchase predetermined amounts of government bonds and other financial assets to help them inject money into the economy with the objective of expanding economic activity such as lending and investment.
Other objectives of quantitative easing are to lower interest rates by bidding up fixed-income securities and to expand the central bank’s balance sheet. By purchasing assets with newly-created bank reserves, quantitative easing can serve to provide banks with more liquidity.
A recent example of quantitative easing was in March 2020 when the US Federal Reserve announced its plan to make up to $700 billion in asset purchases. This emergency measure was in response to the economic and market turmoil brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and served to provide liquidity to the US financial system.
How quantitative easing works
Quantitative easing works by implementing large-scale asset purchases in the open market and using newly-created bank reserves. As a result, new money enters the economy and financial institutions have more cash in their accounts which can be held, used for lending to customers or companies or used to buy other assets.
The release of new money into the economy stimulates economic activity and aims to prevent issues arising in the financial system. Quantitative easing can help avoid a credit crunch and ensure that financial markets operate as normal.
As the prices of bonds increases due to the demand from the Federal Reserve and yields decrease, investors are more likely to invest in higher returning assets such as stocks which can help the stock market achieve stronger gains.
Lower interest rates also make it cheaper to borrow money which can encourage people and companies to take out loans for big-ticket purchases.
One of the main objectives of quantitative easing is to grow confidence in the economy so people continue to spend, invest, borrow money and companies continue to hire employees.
Once the economy is deemed strong enough, the quantitative easing will be reversed by the central bank. The bonds they bought will be sold, causing an increase in interest rates and a decrease in the money supply.
Advantages of quantitative easing
The advantages of quantitative easing include:
Prevents unemployment
When economic uncertainty arises, it usually has a direct impact on employment levels. Businesses restrict the hiring of new employees and tighten their belts by looking for ways they can make their business leaner.
But with quantitative easing, the stimulation of economic activity keeps employment levels stable and prevents long term unemployment.
Provides immediate results
Quantitative easing can be implemented immediately and delivers immediate results before financial systems are impacted significantly. As soon as a crisis hits, central banks can begin the process of quantitative easing to keep the economy moving.
Disadvantages of quantitative easing
The disadvantages of quantitative easing include:
Can create asset bubbles
By lowering interest rates, quantitative easing can create speculative activity in the stock market that can lead to asset bubbles. The rapid rise in price due to the increase in demand followed by a sudden crash when assets are sold can bring about huge transfers of wealth.
May cause inflation
One of the biggest risks of quantitative easing is that it could cause inflation. As the policy creates money and uses it to stimulate lending, it is inherently inflationary. While there is little evidence to support this, it has been suggested that the spike in inflation may occur several years after the quantitative easing., Digitonic Ltd (and our owners, directors, officers, managers, employees, affiliates, agents and assigns) are not responsible for the content or accuracy of this article. The information included in this article is based solely on information provided by the company or companies mentioned above.
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Last updated: 05.09.18
First aid basics for Sole Traders
It is well known that larger organisations must have properly trained designated first aiders. They are an invaluable asset that can mean the difference between life and death when it comes to an incident in the workplace. When considering sole traders, however, the chances are less likely that first aid will be needed and so the requirement for formal training may not be needed either. However, it’s still important for sole traders to have a basic understanding of first aid for those unlikely incidents, whether they involve customers, partners or members of the general public.
Becoming a qualified first aider requires considerable practical learning, which may not be feasible for everyone, but fortunately there is a first aid procedure that anyone can learn, even online, which will help. This is known as the first aid primary survey. It is a method of assessing the first aid situation and getting ready for the arrival of trained medical professionals. Here at Virtual College we offer courses in the primary survey which can be taken online by anyone. Click here to be taken to the course page to find out more, or continue reading for a summary of what the primary survey involves.
The letters DRABC are the easiest way to remember what the primary survey involves. Each letter represents one step, and you work through each one as part of the process. In the event of an accident that isn’t severe, you may move through the first few steps in seconds, but in a serious incident, each one must be carefully checked.
D for Danger is the first step. This means checking to make sure that the scene is safe for you and the patient. If you come across someone in the road for instance, is it safe for you to give them attention? Or if the patient has cut themselves on something, is the hazard still present?
R for Response comes next. This means checking to see if the person is responsive. This can be done by speaking loudly to them, gently shaking their shoulder, or by pinching their earlobe. They may make eye contact, speak to you, or communicate in some way.
A is for Airway. You need to determine whether or not it is open and clear. If the person is responsive you can seek to clear any blockages if they are present. If they are unresponsive, then you should gently lift their head and tilt their chin forward to clear the airway.
B is for Breathing. You need to check to see if the person is breathing properly. If they are responsive, it’s likely they are but the breathing may not be normal. If possible, seek to resolve whatever is causing the issue, which may be an obstructed airway. If they are not responsive, look, listen and feel for breathing. If this isn’t happening, then you must call 999 immediately and begin chest compressions. Click here to find out how these are performed.
C is for Circulation. This is the last step of the primary survey, but one of the first that you may act on in many normal first aid situations. You should check to see if the person has any severe bleeding. If there is, then call 999 and attempt to stop the flow of blood using pressure and clothing. If there is no severe bleeding, then you may have minor injuries to deal with.
These leads us on to the final point - the first aid kit. Even as a sole trader it is wise to have one wherever you work - perhaps in your office or car. Even a relatively small one will be useful in a wide range of situations, and most come with instructions. |
sabato 21 aprile 2012
"You're the tenth"
Indian river (Tamil Nadu)
Ten men were walking when they faced a rushing river. Nobody could swim well and the river’s current was very strong, but they had to cross it to continue their journey.
One by one the ten men then jumped into the river. After much difficulty they reached the other bank and one of them counted to see if all ten had saved. But he counted only nine persons because he didn’t count himself. To check again an other of them counted the fellows and he arrived at nine too, because he forgot to count himself.
Convinced they had lost a companion, the men despaired until a stranger passed by that place who asked them why they despaired.
They told him they had lost a companion crossing the river and to prove him that one of them counted again the fellows and said, "See, we were ten and now we are nine, we lost one of our mates!"
The stranger immediately realized the mistake and touched the breast of the man who had counted the other mates, saying, "you're the tenth."
And so he did to the other fellow, touched their chest and repeated to each, "you're the tenth."
Similarly, the disciple goes to his own guru saying, "I cannot find the truth, I have looked for it in the the world, in study, in science, in religion, I looked for it in the sky, but I haven’t found it."
The guru then approaches the student, touching his chest and says "tat tvam asi," that "you're the one, you're the truth you're looking for."
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In the pest management business, we apply pesticides in numerous ways for our clients. Spraying is extremely popular, although there are also granular applications, dusts, injections, fumigants, and other styles of applying pesticides in order to achieve control of the target pest. Most of the time, this works fine. However, there are occasions where pesticide applications can cause plant injury, which can be used as a general definition for the term phytotoxicity. I will discuss here only plant related injury, without referring to potential injury to people, pets or structures.
Fundamental Phytotoxicity
This is simply a situation where a pesticide and a plant variety do not get along. Most pesticides are generally considered safe to use on a wide variety of plants. However, experience shows that sometimes the pesticide may be simply be fundamentally injurious to a particular type of plant, even when applied correctly and at label rates. In the old days, such examples might include Malathion on hibicsus, Agrimycin on ivy, Chipco 26019 on peace lily, and copper on bromeliads. I once saw an entire greenhouse full of gardenias defoliated by a proper application of a mancozeb formulation whose label strictly prohibited use on gardenia.
Modern pesticides are usually tested more thoroughly than products from decades ago. Often, during such product testing, investigators will discover that certain plant varieties simply don’t like certain chemicals. For example, Heritage is a terrific strobin fungicide which I and others recommend frequently. However, experience has shown that Heritage is not safe on some apple and cherry varieties, nor on leatherleaf fern. The label therefore strictly prohibits use of this product on these varieties. It is fairly common today for pesticide labels to permit use of a product on a wide variety of turf and ornamentals, yet specifically prohibit use on others. Such counter recommendations are often listed toward the bottom of the pesticide label, after the permitted varieties, so check your pesticide labels carefully.
Dosage Phytotoxicity
We all know that some people think if a little is good, more is better. That generally does not apply in the realm of pesticide applications, and it may be downright illegal. You all know that applying the correct dose to dosage of a pesticide is critical. Apply too much, and you can risk plant injury, as well as waste money and product. Apply too little, and you may invite pest resistance. Pay attention not only to dilution rates, but to formulation rates per unit area, such as ounces per thousand square feet. Applicators can not only sometimes mix a chemical too strongly, but they can also apply too much of a properly – mixed formulation per unit area. The pesticide label can be your best friend in such situations. Also, don’t ignore sprayer calibrations, and remember that nozzles do wear over time.
Cumulative Phytotoxicity
Most of the time, pesticide applications can be properly made according to the label, without incident. Occasionally, if multiple applications are made to the same plants or turf with the same product, phytotoxicity can develop over time. One application may be fine, but multiple applications of the same product can lead to larger accumulations in the plant, resulting in injury. In my experience, this is especially possible with systemic products, both fungicides and insecticides. Watch your rates and rotate your chemistries to help avoid this. Many pesticides today also limit how much product can be applied to a specific area per year.
Environmental Phytotoxicity
I am referring here not to potential injury caused to the environment from pesticide applications, but to plant injury that can happen when pesticides are applied during unfavorable environmental conditions. Applying atrazine during summer is a classic example. We Floridians know that chemical injury risk to plants increases during hot weather, or when plants are drought stressed. Any kind of plant stress can potentially increase the risk of spray injury, so keep those factors in mind. When I was a spray man for large ornamental nurseries in the 70s, we tried to never spray when the temperature was above 85°. Landscape plants and turf can generally be sprayed when temperatures are somewhat higher than that, but drought stress greatly increases susceptibility to injury.
Placement Phytotoxicity
Pesticides may often be applied safely when applied to certain parts of a plant, but not to others. For example, granular herbicides such as pre- emergents may be fine when applied to soil at the base of plants. However, if the granules land in a whorl or cup, or on open flowers, injury can occur when it normally wouldn’t. Placement phytotoxicity is more common with granular products, though formulations diluted with water can also cause potential injury when applied to certain plant parts, such as open flowers. Applying a copper fungicide to a fruit tree may be a perfectly appropriate application, but flower injury when applied at the wrong time can substantially reduce fruit yield.
Combination Phytotoxicity
Sometimes chemical X may be safe to apply in a certain situation, as can chemical Y. However, if the two are mixed together, potential injury can result. This can happen with herbicides as well as fungicides and insecticides. Nutritionals can enter the picture as well. I have lectured extensively on tank mixing in the past. Tank mixing is generally safe, but it is a fine and delicate art. It is very dependent on experience and on application details such as weather, dosages, and plant or turf varieties. There are literally quadrillions of potential tank mix combinations, so pesticide labels are often of limited help in this area. Use your experience and be cautious.
Another type of combination phytotoxicity can occur when a singular product is applied which reacts with residue from a previously applied product. Again, either by itself may be fine, but the two together can cause potential problems. A good example of this is injury from applying acidic products too soon before or after metallic products. I know of one fungicide whose label restricts its use within two weeks before or after applications of copper fungicides.
Pressure Phytotoxicity
Many times, I have seen pesticides applied properly in terms of application rate and all of the normal label precautions. However, injury can still occur if the pesticide is applied with too much spray pressure, or if the nozzles are utilized to close to tender foliage. Sometimes just the spray pressure alone can cause injury to sensitive plant varieties. Other times, it seems to be that the combination of pesticide and pressure causes injury.
Episodic Phytotoxicity
Many of us have experienced situations where we might have applied a pesticide in a normal situation 99 times without incident. Then, on a proverbial 100th application just like all the others, something goes wrong, and injury occurs. It is often quite difficult to figure out just what happened in the case of episodic phytotoxicity. Sometimes it can be environmental conditions, tank or hose residue from previous applications, mixing order, agitation problems, or numerous other possibilities. Such spray injuries are not that uncommon. Both managers and applicators should be honest and straightforward when discussing these things when they occasionally happen. Phytotoxicity is a risk many of us take every day, but better understanding can help us minimize potential problems. |
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iTriplet, a rule-based nucleic acid sequence motif finder
With the advent of high throughput sequencing techniques, large amounts of sequencing data are readily available for analysis. Natural biological signals are intrinsically highly variable making their complete identification a computationally challenging problem. Many attempts in using statistical or combinatorial approaches have been made with great success in the past. However, identifying highly degenerate and long (>20 nucleotides) motifs still remains an unmet challenge as high degeneracy will diminish statistical significance of biological signals and increasing motif size will cause combinatorial explosion. In this report, we present a novel rule-based method that is focused on finding degenerate and long motifs. Our proposed method, named iTriplet, avoids costly enumeration present in existing combinatorial methods and is amenable to parallel processing.
We have conducted a comprehensive assessment on the performance and sensitivity-specificity of iTriplet in analyzing artificial and real biological sequences in various genomic regions. The results show that iTriplet is able to solve challenging cases. Furthermore we have confirmed the utility of iTriplet by showing it accurately predicts polyA-site-related motifs using a dual Luciferase reporter assay.
iTriplet is a novel rule-based combinatorial or enumerative motif finding method that is able to process highly degenerate and long motifs that have resisted analysis by other methods. In addition, iTriplet is distinguished from other methods of the same family by its parallelizability, which allows it to leverage the power of today's readily available high-performance computing systems.
Here we present a rule-based method to identify degenerate and long motifs in nucleic acid sequences. The widely accepted sequence motif finding problem formulation proposed by Pevzner and Sze in [1] is adopted in this article. We call an oligomer of length l, an l mer. A motif model is denoted by <l, d>, where l is the length of the motif, and d is the maximum number of mutations allowed with respect to the motif. An instance of a motif is termed d-mutant. Two d-mutants of the same motif must not differ by more than 2d differences. We call two l mers neighbors if their difference is ≤ 2d. Given n sequences, each of length L (could be of variable length), the goal is to locate the set of d-mutants in each sequence from the sample where the largest difference between any pair of d-mutants in the set is ≤ 2d. In the following we will briefly summarize two major motif finding approaches, viz. statistical and combinatorial. Readers who are interested in a more comprehensive survey about motif finding can refer to [2, 3].
Position weight matrix is often used as a statistical scoring system to identify biological signals from background. This technique implies that biological signals consist in part of conserved nucleotides that are critically important for their potency. As a result, motifs discovered by this approach tend to contain relatively invariant nucleotides at a few positions. Many transcription factor binding site prediction methods are developed based on this approach. Gibbs sampling and expectation maximization are typical techniques employed by MEME [4, 5], AlignACE [6], BioProspector [7], MDScan [8] and MotifSampler [9]. The primary advantage of this approach is its speedy runtime and minimal memory consumption. However, statistical overrepresentation will vanish when the size of the motif to the number of mutations ratio decreases. One improvement of this approach is to incorporate phylogenetic information in background estimation. Well-known examples of this approach include FootPrinter [10] and PhyloGibbs [11]. However, such an approach is challenged by multiple substitutions occurring in distant species or motif searching in a single species. Some other methods train a Markov model to capture nucleotide dependency information of known binding sites in order to make prediction for unseen cases. One extension of the Markov model was reported in [12]. The authors incorporated several features, such as gaps and polyadic sequence elements, to handle diversified transcription factor binding sites.
An alternative to a statistical approach is the combinatorial or enumerative approach [1] where the observable biological signals are believed to be the variation of a hidden motif, and they do not exhibit conspicuous conservation at any particular position, and yet they are similar to each other. This approach is suitable for families of biological signals where the targeting proteins do not rely on a few conserved nucleotides at fixed positions. Instead the overall binding affinity is determined cooperatively by nucleotides in a region. Many such examples are found in precursor RNA processing signals including the pyrimidine-rich region near 3' splice sites and the U/GU-rich region downstream of polyadenylation sites. One fundamental problem faced by the enumerative approach is the exponential growth of computing resources when the size of the motif increases. To circumvent this, existing methods such as WINNOWER [1], MotifEnumerator [13], MITRA [14], TIERESIAS [15], Gemoda [16] and PMSprune [17], employ various elegant pruning strategies to abandon unpromising pursuits as early as possible.
Both enumerative and statistical approaches have proven to be valuable in analyzing real biological examples and both approaches are complementary to each other. In most situations when little prior knowledge is known about the motif, we believe both approaches should be considered. Since our focus is on solving degenerate and long motifs, we adopt the enumerative approach that is guaranteed to find the optimal motif by applying a novel rule-based algorithm to identify all optimal motif candidates without the expense of exploring the entire 4l space exhaustively. In addition, our algorithm is designed to be highly parallelizable so as to exploit today's parallel computing technology in handling massive biological data. As a proof of concept, we will evaluate our algorithm using the simulated data described in [1]. Also we will show our method is able to identify motifs in real promoter sequences, and 5' and 3' untranslated regions (UTR) from different species. Results show that our method can solve highly degenerate and/or longer motifs that overwhelm the capabilities of other methods. Furthermore, we have compared the prediction accuracy of our method with the statistical motif finding methods mentioned above and find that our method is equal to and sometimes better than these methods. Besides in-silico simulations, we have also verified our prediction of downstream polyadenylation motifs for three human genes using a dual Luciferase assay. Our software is developed in C++ and standard template library (STL). It has been tested on Linux platform. Interested readers can download the software freely from this website
iTriplet Algorithm
Our rule-based enumerative algorithm is named iTriplet. It stands for inter-sequence triplets. A triplet consists of three neighboring l mers (less than 2d differences from each other) sampled from three different sequences. The 'inter-sequence' part of the iTriplet algorithm systematically explores tripartite combinations of l mers from different sequences in order to identify motif(s) that span all sequences in the sample. The span of a motif refers to the number of sequences containing its d-mutant. For clarity, we will explain our method by limiting to only one motif in the sample, and every sequence contains at least one occurrence d-mutant of the motif even though our method can deal with multiple motifs and 10-20% of contamination. We will describe our iTriplet algorithm in two parts: the 'inter-sequence' part will be discussed first, followed by the Triplet algorithm.
The inter-sequence part of iTriplet
If sufficient number of sequences are given and the motif model is not highly degenerate, i.e. small d with respect to l, the likelihood that an l-sized motif can span through all sequences by chance is rare. Based on this insight, we utilize the span of a motif as the indicator to identify unusual motifs in a sample.
The inter-sequence part of iTriplet consists of two stages: initialization stage and expansion-pruning stage. Below is the description of the procedure.
Given a set of n sequences and a motif model <l, d>, randomly designate two sequences from the sample as reference sequences, namely R1 and R2, and the rest as non reference sequences S1, S2, ..., Sn-2.
Initialization stage: Randomly select an l mer (r1) from R1 and a non reference sequence, say Si. Identify all possible triplets based on r1, l mers from sequences R2 and Si as illustrated in Figure 1A. For each triplet, identify the set of motif(s), if any, common to the triplet using the Triplet algorithm (will be discussed later). Store the returned common motif(s) and its associated sequence IDs in a hash table as shown in Figure 1B.
Figure 1
Inter-sequence algorithm. (A) For each l mer r 1 in R 1, identify 2d-mutants in sequences R2, S1, S2, ... The rectangular box represents the 2d-mutant of r 1. The dotted line triangle represents a triplet. (B) Hash table to keep track of the span of the putative motif. Hash table consists of two parts viz. key and value. In this case, the key is the putative motif; value is a list of unique sequence IDs. Putative motifs are produced by the Triplet algorithm. They are common motifs to triplets.
Expansion-pruning stage: Randomly select an unprocessed non-reference sequence, say Sj. Similar to the initialization stage, identify all triplets based on r1, l mers from sequences R2 and Sj. Identify the set of common motifs of all triplets using Triplet algorithm and store them in the hash table. Prune the hash table by removing motifs with span not covering all processed sequences so far. If the hash table is not empty after pruning, repeat the expansion-pruning stage with the next unprocessed non-reference sequence. If the hash table is empty after pruning, return to the initialization stage, randomly pick a different l mer (r1) from R1, and repeat the same two-stage inter-sequence process again until all l mers in R1 have been processed. If all non-reference sequences have been processed and the hash table is not empty, then return motif(s) in the hash table to the calling program.
As described above, the processing of different l mer r1 in R1 are completely independent of each other. It means that they can be executed simultaneously wherein not even a single synchronization point is required. Therefore, given M processors, the algorithm can trigger up to (M-1) concurrent processes simultaneously. Theoretically, the performance gain by parallelizing this step is (M-1) times for a M-processor system where one processor is designated for overall coordination purposes. Our current parallel version of iTriplet is implemented based on this idea.
The Triplet part of iTriplet
The purpose of this part of the algorithm is to uncover the complete set of motifs common to all members of the triplet in a deterministic and efficient way. The clues solely come from the similarities and differences among the three l mers rather than the enumeration of all possible l mers. It is efficient because the number of motifs shared among all three l mers should be small. By example, the estimated probability of any three l mers to share at least one common motif for models <12,3> and <30,9>, is 5.47 × 10-4 and 2.97 × 10-4, respectively.
Before we describe the algorithm, we need to define two main data structures used by this algorithm viz. move vector and score vector. The three l mers passed into this process are stacked up conceptually to form l numbers of three-nucleotide tall columns as shown in Figure 2B. These columns must fall into one of the three patterns: (I) with identical nucleotides denoted by Pi; or (II) with all different nucleotides, denoted by Pnc; or (III) with two out of three nucleotides being the same, denoted by Pmn where m and n denote the indices of the two l mers with dominant nucleotide. We will show later that common motifs can be discovered by various ways of selecting nucleotide from these three types of columns. Such selection is captured in a move vector which is illustrated in Figure 2C. In addition, each move vector is associated with a score vector which is defined as [i1, i2, i3], where i1, i2 and i3 denote the numbers of identical positions between the motif represented by the move vector and the three given l mers l1, l2 and l3, respectively.
Figure 2
Intuition of Triplet algorithm. (A) Intuition of Triplet algorithm. A triplet consists of 12 mers l 1, l 2 and l 3. l 1 and l 2, l 1 and l 3, and l 2 and l 3 contain 4, 6 and 5 differences respectively as labeled in the lines connecting them. Use the 12 mer as the center to draw an imaginary circle. Each circle denotes the set of neighboring 12 mers that are no more than 3 differences from the center 12 mer. In other words, each circle represents the set of putative motifs that generate the center 12 mer. Note that we do not actually generate the set of putative motifs. Centroid l mer is denoted by a diamond shape dot. The goal of the algorithm is to uncover all members of the set in the intersection (dark gray) of the three sets. (B) Centroid l mer construction. Shown are three patterns of columns viz. same nucleotide in three 12 mers Pi (solid line vertical boxes in positions 1, 5, 6, 8 and 10), all different nucleotides across three 12 mers Pnc (vertical box with dashed boundary in position 11), and two out of three 12 mers having the same nucleotides Pmn (dotted line vertical boxes in positions 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, and 12). The centroid l mer is constructed in stage 1 of Triplet algorithm described in the text. The number of identical positions between the centroid l mer and l 1, l 2 and l 3, is represented by the score vector and the selection of nucleotides encoded in move vector (C) Structure of move vector. (D) Exploratory scheme discovery from stage 2 of Triplet algorithm. Centroid l mer constructed in Figure 2B is modified by the composite operation of sac(P12) and nc(3,1) to create three extra motifs near its neighborhood. (E) Example of applying rule 13 to create a new move vector in (D).
Triplet algorithm consists of three stages: 1) centroid l mer construction, 2) exploratory scheme discovery, and 3) motif generation. Below is the description:
Stage 1: centroid l mer construction. Given a triplet of three l mers from the calling program, identify the three column types Pi, Pmn and Pnc as discussed above. Check if the triplet satisfies this inequality: l-d ≤ |P i | + |P mn |*2/3+|P nc |*1/3 (for derivation, see Additional file 1) where |Pi,|, |Pmn| and |Pnc| denote the number of Pi, Pmn and Pnc patterns respectively. If the given triplet fails to satisfy this inequality, return no common motif and exit. Otherwise take these three steps to construct the initial move and score vectors: i) take the common nucleotides from columns Pi, ii) take the dominant nucleotides from Pmn, and iii) for columns Pnc, take the nucleotides from the l mer which is currently farthest from the work-in-progress centroid l mer produced by the previous two steps. Pass the newly created move and score vectors to stage 2 for further processing.
Stage 2: exploratory scheme discovery. Based on the excess score(s) (> l-d) in one or more of the three values in the initial score vector, formulate alternative ways to select nucleotides from Pi, Pmn and Pnc patterns through the 61 rules (will be discussed later). An execution of a rule produces a new set of move vector(s) and its associated score vector. Repeat stage 2 processing of the new move vector(s) until all newly generated score vector(s) becomes [l-d, l-d, l-d] i.e. no excess score. Pass all move and score vectors generated in this stage to stage 3.
Stage 3: motif generation. Generate motif by going through each value in the move vector, and select the specified number of column patterns and associated nucleotides accordingly. When all move vectors are processed, return all motifs to the calling program.
Regarding the rules mentioned in stage 2 of Triplet algorithm, they are actually made of five basic operations listed in Table 1. These five basic operations are the only possible alternatives to the selections which produce the centroid l mer. The basic operation can be applied individually or be combined with one other basic operation to act like a single operation, namely a composite operation. Basic or composite operations act on the current move vector in the light of its score vector. To facilitate searching, we pack the basic/composite operation and its impact or changes on the current score vector, namely impact vector, into a new construct called rule as shown in Figure 2E. These 61 rules are further organized into three non-mutually exclusive groups, each group has 42 rules, according to which l mer in the triplet possesses excess score (full list can be found in the Additional file 1). The decision to select a rule is determined by the three conditions. First, it has not been chosen already. Second, the three values of the new score vector, obtained by the addition of the impact vector and the current score vector, must be ≥ l-d. Third, the triplet contains the column pattern(s) required by the basic and/or composite operation. Notice that every rule will reduce the total score value of the new score vector. It means that successive applications of these rules will eventually create a score vector of its minimum score values [l-d, l-d, l-d] and that marks the terminal state.
Table 1 Five basic operations for triplet processing of iTriplet algorithm
Regarding stage 3, one move vector may generate more than one motif. For the example in Figure 2D, the new move vector due to rule 13 is [5,2,1,2,1,0,0,1,0,0,0]. The first value specifies to select the nucleotides from the five P i column patterns which are found in positions 1, 5, 6, 8 and 10 (see Figure 2B). Since there are exactly five P i column patterns, only one way is possible. The second value of the move vector specifies to choose dominant nucleotides from two P12 column patterns out of three and to choose the odd nucleotide from the remaining one. It will generate three possibilities. The rest of the values in the move vector will be processed similarly.
We have given the full description of iTriplet algorithm. Regarding the correctness of the algorithm, at this stage, we have not come up with a theoretical proof yet, however we have conducted extensive testing of more than 14,000 cases including models <11,2>, <12,3>, <13,3>, <15,4>, <28,8> and <40,12>; over 2,000 cases per model. In each case, we had generated 20 sequences each of length 600 with all nucleotides occurring equally likely. In each sequence, a single l-size d-mutant was planted at a random location. After each run, we checked whether the returned motif from iTriplet was the same as planted or not. iTriplet performed correctly for all cases.
Time and Space Complexities of iTriplet
The inter-sequence part of iTriplet mainly iterates all combinations of triplets among sequences. Therefore, for model <l, d>, we estimate the time complexity of the inter-sequence part of iTriplet to be O(nL3pl) where n, L and p are the number of sequences, length of sequence and probability to form a triplet that shares at least one motif. As discussed before, we estimate p should be in the range of 10-4, and L should normally be 102. Therefore, the effective time complexity of the inter-sequence part ranges from O(nLl) to O(nL2l). Stage 2 of Triplet part should generate all possible score vectors as long as the score value between each l mer and the centroid l mer is at least l-d. In the worst case scenario, there are d3 score vectors. The generation of actual motifs based on the move vector in step 3 should depend on the size of the motif l. Therefore the time complexity of Triplet is O(d3l). Hence the overall time complexity of iTriplet is O(nL3pl2d3). For PMSprune, the time complexity is O(nL2N(l, d)), where N(l, d) is . After eliminating the common terms, the main difference lies in the growth of Lpl2d3 and N(l, d) in iTriplet and PMSprune, respectively. When the motif model is small, N(l, d) is smaller than Lpl2d3. However, when l increases, the combinations of N(l, d) grows exponentially. iTriplet's space complexity depends on the degeneracy of the model, therefore it is O(N(l, d)) before pruning. After pruning, the space requirement will shrink.
Results and Discussion
Simulated data
In order to examine how iTriplet method can solve more degenerate and longer motifs, we compared it with some well known enumerative methods using simulated data. The simulated sequences were generated as described in the Additional Materials section. Simulated datasets were constructed using a wide range of l and d parameters in order to compare the performance of different methods in dealing with various sizes of the motif and/or noisy situations. The sequential version of our method was compared with three other well-known methods that have the same focus to guarantee finding the optimal motif viz. MotifEnumerator [13], PMSprune [17], and RISOTTO [18]. Sequential tests were conducted on a Linux machine equipped with an Intel P4 3 GHz processor and 2 Gbytes of memory. All methods can successfully identify the planted motifs in the simulated dataset unless the runtime was longer than 6 hours. We also repeated the same set of tests for the parallel version of iTriplet on a three-node Linux cluster equipped with the same processor as a sequential test. Results are tabulated in Table 2. The second column of Table 2 is the neighborhood probability of each model, which is the probability that any two l mers differ by no more than 2d by chance, a good indicator to reflect the degree of degeneracy of the model.
Table 2 Methods comparison on simulated datasets.
For short motifs (<16 nucleotides) iTriplet is comparable to the fastest (PMSprune) and is significantly faster than MotifEnumerator and RISOTTO. When motif length is longer than 16, all other methods take longer than 6 hours to process. Note that iTriplet is able to process highly degenerate <18,6> and <24,8> models which cannot be handled by these other three methods as well as other statistical based methods such as MEME, MotifSampler and BioProspector. Based on these results, we learned that the performance of all methods depends on l and d, but to a different extent. Intriguingly, the runtime of PMSprune quadrupled, though still very fast, when l increased from 12 to 15 even though the neighborhood probability remained relatively at the same level. A similar trend is also observed in RISOTTO but with even higher fold increment in runtime. Such a phenomenon is not observed in our method. When neighborhood probability is doubled in models <12,3> versus <14,4>, and <14,4> versus <16,5>, the runtime of PMSprune increased 15 and 13.5 times respectively and RISOTTO increased 12 and 10 times respectively whereas iTriplet only increased 6 and 9 times, respectively. Based on these observations, we can understand that the algorithms employed by RISOTTO and PMSprune are quite sensitive to both l and d even when the neighboring probability remains at the same level. Thus RISOTTO and PMSprune take a longer time to search for the optimal motif; whereas the combined effect of l and d on performance was less severe for iTriplet. This explains why RISOTTO and PMSprune encountered difficulty in handling longer motif models. This does not exclude that iTriplet is unaffected by large d (high degeneracy). But one distinctive feature of our algorithm is that it can split the task into smaller subtasks which can be run independently in parallel. When comparing sequential and parallel versions of iTriplet, the parallel version averaged 1.77 times performance gain in a three-node cluster that is quite close to the theoretical gain 2.0. Testing based on the simulated data revealed that different methods have different tradeoffs in tackling the general <l, d> motif problem therefore further investigation is still needed to cope with various challenges of this problem.
Real biological sequences
Besides simulated datasets, we tested our method using multiple sets of real biological sequences. One issue with real biological sequences is the lack of prior knowledge about the size and maximum numbers of mutations permitted by the motif. The optimal motif(s) comes from the model having the smallest neighborhood probability and produces the least number of motifs. In order to pin down the optimal motif, the algorithm must be run for a range of l and d. But we have found that the search of the optimal l and d can be done methodically by making use of the neighborhood probability of each model. In the situation when iTriplet has found too many motifs for the specified model then we can conclude that the model is too lax and so a more stringent model should be used, by increasing l or reducing d or both at the same time. Alternatively, once a satisfactory model is found, one can look for shorter models with similar neighborhood probability if the shorter alternative gives a similar result. In order to ease the effort for searching for the optimal model, iTriplet provides an autonomous mode option. Under autonomous mode, the program will explore various models using the strategy just described, and return the best models with motif length from 6 to 40 bases and maximum number of differences from 1 to 12. But the user also has the option to limit the size of motif to a specific range. Although many models are examined, only a very limited numbers of models, usually none or one, can provide the optimal motif unless the given sequences contain multiple motifs. Several reasons are that a slight change in the size and/or the maximum number of mutations will result in a substantial change in neighborhood probability which can be seen in Table 2. As mentioned in the Background section, we have included promoter and 5' UTR regions from four genes commonly chosen as test cases for motif finding algorithms [10, 14, 17]. In addition, we have also added a set of 3' UTR sequences in our test in order to understand how our method performs in other regions of a gene. Table 3 summarizes the prediction by iTriplet for various genes and genomic regions.
Table 3 iTriplet prediction using real biological sequences.
Multiple motifs are often identified by iTriplet for real biological sequences. Four reasons account for this: 1) the number of sequences considered is small, mostly 4 in our test therefore resulting in a higher chance to encounter random span, 2) a naturally occurring recognition site is not necessarily represented by one consensus, 3) it is possible for the biological sequence to carry more than one signal especially in the 3' UTR, and 4) the presence of low complexity repeats.
Therefore we need a scoring system to filter out random from genuine motifs. Since only a small number of sequences are given, the set of true motif instances must resemble each other more than a set of random l mers; otherwise no conclusion can be made. As we have discussed in the inter-sequence algorithm section, if members of the triplet are very similar to each other, the intersection will become big, i.e. high numbers of common motifs. Based on this property, we derived a straightforward scoring system based on the numbers of common motifs uncovered to support whether the finding is statistically significant. Due to this, the 5' and 3' overlapping neighbors of the true motif are often included as part of the prediction as well. Therefore in some cases of the genes listed in Table 3, the predicted motif is longer than the model specified. Each prediction is a consensus of a number of common motifs. The method of constructing the consensus is similar to the frequency plot of Weblogo [19]. Nucleotides with frequency at a position greater than 30% will be included in the consensus sequence. As can be seen from Table 3, our predictions for promoter and 5' UTR sequences, and 3' UTR regulatory elements are largely consistent with published experimental data.
Sensitivity and specificity test
We also measured the prediction accuracy of iTriplet in predicting transcription factor binding sites in E. Coli. These binding sites are experimentally validated and documented in the RegulonDB database [20]. The test was conducted using the three-level testing framework described in [21]. Under this testing framework, the prediction made by a method is measured at the nucleotide, binding site and motif levels. In the first and second levels, i.e. nucleotide and binding site levels, sensitivity, specificity, performance coefficient and F-measure are computed based on the true positive (TP), false positive (FP) and false negative (FN) information gathered by comparing the predicted and actual binding sites. Performance coefficient and F-measure were originally proposed by [1, 22] and [21] respectively. Both of them have the advantage to combine sensitivity as well as specificity perspectives into a single number so as to ease interpretation. The formula for these four measurements can be found in the Additional Materials section. Note that at the binding site level, a prediction is considered correct when the predicted binding site overlaps with the actual binding site by at least one nucleotide. These four measurements were calculated for each transcription factor individually. Averaged measurements of all transcription factors are used for method comparison. The Kihara group [21] also suggested a third level assessment that is motif level. The rationale of this extra level test is to assess the adaptability of the method to make correct predictions for a wide range of transcription factors. The motif level measures the fraction of correct predictions out of all binding sequences and transcription factors. iTriplet was compared with the top three performers, i.e. MEME, BioProspector and MotifSampler, listed in Table 1 of [21], and WEEDER [23]. For each method, the parameter setup was adopted from [21] except that no background sequence information was used for BioProspector. Motif length was set to 15, the same length used in [21] except WEEDER where the maximum supported length is 12. We chose the maximum differences in the range from 3 to 5. For accuracy measurements, the top five predictions were used for the three selected methods. But in our case, we selected only the highest score consensus motif(s) instead of the top five used in [21]. Although only BioProspector and MotifSampler exhibit variation in prediction even for the same input sequences, in order to maintain fair treatment, we still repeat the test ten times for all methods. Table 4 shows the averaged measurements of iTriplet together with four other motif finding methods. iTriplet has demonstrated better prediction accuracy than the other four methods at both nucleotide as well as binding site levels except the F-measure is second at the nucleotide level. However, our mSr and sSr scores are ranked third mainly because these two measurements tend to favor methods with high sensitivity regardless of specificity. In the extreme situation, if a method predicts all nucleotides are part of a motif, it will score 1 for mSr and sSr. This point is further evidenced by the disproportionality of sensitivity and specificity of the other three methods except WEEDER at both nucleotide and motif levels. Therefore we think PC and F-measure are fairer measurements of prediction accuracy than mSr and sSr.
Table 4 Prediction accuracy of iTriplet versus four others motif finding methods.
In vitro verification of predicted polyA downstream elements
To examine whether motifs predicted by iTriplet had biological activity, we chose to examine sequences important in the 3' end processing of mammalian pre-mRNA, in particular sequences found just downstream of the cleavage and polyadenylation site. Almost all eukaryotic mRNAs contain a post-transcriptionally-added polyA tail that is important for many aspects of mRNA function. According to one bioinformatic study, 54% and 32% of genes in human and mouse, respectively, contain more than one polyadenylation site [24]. The polyA tail is added at the polyA site (PAS) in the nucleus in a 2 two-step reaction consisting of a large cleavage complex that cleaves the pre-mRNA into two fragments followed by polyA tail addition to the upstream fragment [25]. Two main sequence motifs are important for cleavage/polyadenylation of mammalian mRNAs. The highly conserved and well-understood AAUAAA motif (called the polyA signal) is found 10-25 nt upstream of the PAS. The second motif is found 10-30 nts downstream of the PAS but is poorly understood due to its low conservation both in sequence and position. Although current bioinformatic approaches support the view that this motif is U/GU-rich [26], they provide only a limited understanding of what motif(s) lies in this downstream region. First, the exact identity of this putative downstream motif for a given mammalian gene is often ambiguous and indeed it is a distinct possibility that there will be multiple motifs including auxiliary motifs. Second, in some cases where the predicted motif was examined by an extensive mutational analysis, the data supported the existence of additional motifs important for polyA site function [27]. Thus the prediction of this downstream motif represents a type of problem suitable for analysis by iTriplet. To this end the downstream sequences of a set of genes was analyzed by iTriplet with the predicted motifs being indicated in Figure 3. According to a NMR structural study of the U/GU-rich binding protein CstF-64 [28], we believe the binding site should not be longer than eight nucleotides. Hence we applied a series of models ranging from 6 to 8 nucleotides long to nine genes of interest to us viz. U1A, SPR40, CDC7, DATF, LBP1, GAPDH, RAF, Mark1 and SmE. Results showed that model <8,2> yielded the best fit with the consensus TCTGATTT and this motif agrees with previous analysis performed by the Graber lab [26] that the downstream region consists of a transition from UG-rich to U-rich in the 5' to 3' direction. MEME [4, 5] was used to process the same set of sequences with the resulting motif being BTRDGSCWSA that lacks such a transition.
Figure 3
Confirmation of predicted polyA downstream elements by dual Luciferase reporter system. (A) pRL-GAPDHwt was made from a standard pRL-SV40 Renilla expression plasmid by replacing the SV40-derived 3'UTR and polyA signal sequences with the human GAPDH 3'UTR (NM_002046) and 116 nt past the PAS. pRL-GAPDHmt matches pRL-GAPDHwt but having Motif A mutated as shown. Plasmids were transfected into HeLa cells and Luciferase activity measured 24 hours later. Values for Renilla Luciferase were normalized to those obtained from a co-transfected Firefly Luciferase plasmid. The pRL-GAPDHwt plasmid expresses 2.2 fold more Renilla than pRL-GAPDHmt plasmid thus Motif A is enhancing expression by 2.2 fold. (B) pRL-RAFwt (NM_002880) was made like pRL-GAPDHwt but from the human RAF gene sequences as indicated. pRL-RAFmt matches pRL-RAFwt but having Motif A mutated as shown. These plasmids were transfected and analyzed as in panel A. (C) pRL-U1Awt (NM_004596) was made like pRL-GAPDHwt but from the human U1A gene sequences as indicated. pRL-U1Amt matches pRL-U1Awt but having Motif A mutated as shown. These plasmids were transfected and analyzed as in panel A.
To test whether the TCTGATTT motifs identified by iTriplet were functional, the dual Luciferase reporter system was used where Renilla Luciferase mRNA contained the entire 3'UTR plus sequences past the PAS of the gene of interest. A co-transfected Firefly Luciferase reporter was included that serves as an internal normalization control. As diagrammed in Figure 3, the plasmid pRL-GAPDHwt was made from a standard pRL-SV40 Renilla expression plasmid by replacing the SV40-derived 3'UTR and downstream polyA signal sequences with the human GAPDH 3'UTR and polyA signal region (NM_002046) including 116 nt past the polyA site. iTriplet predicted that GAPDH has a motif we call GAPDH Motif A that would potentially be important for polyA site activity. To determine if GAPDH Motif A is functional, we mutated it as shown to make plasmid pRL-GAPDHmt. Plasmids were transfected into HeLa cells and Luciferase activity was measured; values for Renilla Luciferase were normalized to those obtained from the co-transfected Firefly Luciferase control plasmid. The pRL-GAPDHmt plasmid expresses 43% less Renilla Luciferase than pRL-GAPDHwt, indicating Motif A enhances Renilla Luciferase expression by about 2.2-fold.
The same analysis was done in panels B and C but for the human RAF and human U1A genes, respectively. As can be seen the RAF Motif A enhances expression 3.2 fold and the U1A Motif A enhances expression by 5.1 fold. Here we have demonstrated the predictive power of iTriplet for these three genes however we do not exclude the existence of other binding sites that can also affect polyA activity of these genes.
We have presented a novel rule-based algorithm called iTriplet to solve the challenging degenerate and long motif finding problem that was unsolved before. In addition, we have confirmed our prediction for real biological signals experimentally. The runtime of iTriplet is comparable to other well-known methods of the same design philosophy and is significantly better at analyzing longer motifs (>16 nucleotides). To our knowledge, iTriplet is the most parallelizable motif finding method in the family of guaranteed optimal motif finding algorithms developed so far. Furthermore we have shown that our method is very competitive in prediction accuracy when compared with other popular motif finding methods. Overall, our method has the superiority like other exact optimal motif finding methods to find the optimal motif in the absence of statistical overrepresentation and yet without sacrificing prediction accuracy. That said, no single method or approach is able to solve the general <l, d> motif problem completely in terms of guaranteed solution, speed, memory consumption and prediction accuracy. Thus, further research effort is needed to overcome various hurdles of this problem.
Additional Materials
Simulation data
We generated multiple sets of simulated sequences according to the <l, d> motif model formulated by Pevzner and Sze [1]. Each dataset consists of 20 sequences, each 600 nucleotides long. All nucleotides occur equally likely. In each sequence, a single l-size d-mutant is planted at a random location. We have prepared datasets for a wide range of <l, d> motif models, i.e. <11,2>, <12,3>, <13,3>, <14,4>, <15,4>, <16,5>, <18,6>, <19,6>, <24,8>, <28,8>, <30,9>, <38,12>and <40,12>.
Untranslated region sequence data
In addition to simulated data, we also prepared and tested several sets of real biological data that can be split into two groups, one 5' upstream of the start codon, i.e. 5' UTR and promoter; and the other from the 3' UTR. For the 5' UTR-promoter group, we chose four genes that are commonly tested in other motif finding algorithms [10, 14, 17], namely, preproinsulin, DHFR, metallothionine, and c-fos. Homologous regions from four species were included for analysis using the Homologene database from NCBI. To obtain the upstream promoter region, BLAT [29] was used to map the cDNA to the species genome provided by Genome browser [30]. Based on the 5' starting point of the cDNA, we then extracted promoter sequence from the genome. Further details of this sequence set are found in the Additional file 1.
Another set of real biological sequences is taken from the 3' UTR where AU-rich elements (AREs), cytoplasmic polyadenylation elements (CPEs), and Pumillio binding elements (PBEs) [31] were chosen. The AREs were derived from 30 experimentally validated human and mouse 3' UTRs [32]. These genes were also confirmed by the ARE database ARED 2.0[33]. Based on the accession numbers provided by ARED, we retrieved the cDNA sequences from NCBI's RefSeq database [34]. The 5' end of the 3'UTR begins right after the stop codon, However, the 3' end of the 3' UTR is not obvious because we have found that most of the cDNA sequences deposited in RefSeq database lack a poly(A) tail. In order to accurately determine the 3' end of the 3' UTR, we utilized expressed sequence tag (EST) data from the UCSC Genome Browser [35]. We first mapped each cDNA to the genome using BLAT. The true end of the 3' UTR should coincide with the endpoint of the EST. The more ESTs that end at the same spot as the cDNA, the higher confidence we have about the true end of the 3' UTR. The set of sequences we obtained are variable in length ranging from 92 to 1608 bases bringing the total sequence space to 23,022 bases. For CPEs and PBEs, we have used the five cyclin genes, B1, B2, B3, B4, and B5 from Xenopus laevis [31]. Complete annotation of the sequences can be found in the Additional file 1.
Run-time performance
We compared the performance of our method with three other methods with the same enumerative design philosophy, viz. MotifEumerator, RISOTTO and PMSprune. Source codes were downloaded from these sites, MotifEnumerator from, RISOTTO from, and PMSprune from They were compiled in the Linux ×86 platform according to the instructions documented in the respective websites.
Transfection and Luciferase assays
Cell culture and transfections were done as previously described in [36]. For Luciferase assays, the cells were harvested after 24 hours and Luciferase measured using the Promega dual Luciferase kit (Promega, Madison, WI) measured on a Turner BioSystems Luminometer (Turner BioSystems, Sunnyvale, CA).
Sensitivity and specificity test
For the sensitivity and specificity test, we adopted the three-level (nucleotide, binding site, and motif) testing framework proposed by the Kihara group [21]. Two sets of data, ECRDB70 and ECRDB62A, were downloaded from their website These data were originally derived from the RegulonDB database [20]. The ECRDB62A dataset comprises 713 intergenic sequences containing binding sites for 62 transcription factors in E. Coli K-12. We filtered out duplicated sequences, transformed reverse strands into forward direction, and dropped transcription factors with less than three binding sequences. The final reconstructed dataset contains 379 distinct sequences from 36 transcription factors. At the nucleotide and binding site level, four different assessments were performed. Sensitivity (Sn) is defined as , where TP, FN stands for true positive and false negative respectively. Specificity (Sp) is defined as , where FP is false positive. We followed two other assessments that were described in [21] to combine Sn and Sp. Performance coefficient (PC) is defined as , which was originally proposed in [1, 22]. The last assessment is called F-measure (F), which tends to penalize the imbalance of Sn and Sp. F is defined as . Both PC and F fall into the range of [0,1], with value 1 indicating perfect prediction. In addition to the nucleotide and binding site levels, the Kihara group proposed two other accuracy measurements viz. sequence accuracy (sSr) and motif accuracy (mSr). sSr is defined as where Ns is the number of sequences having their motifs correctly predicted, and N is the total number of binding sequences of a transcription factor. The overall sSr is the average sSr of all transcription factors. mSr is defined as , where Np is the number of transcription factors with at least one correctly predicted binding site in the binding sequence set and M is the total number of transcription factors in the dataset. We compared our method with WEEDER [23] and the top three best-performing methods previously evaluated in [21]: MEME, BioProspector and MotifSampler. MEME, BioProspector, MotifSampler and WEEDER were download from,, and respectively. For WEEDER, we specified the organism to be E. Coli K12 "BEC" and the type of analysis "large".
Availability and Requirements
Source code of iTriplet is freely available and requires no license requirement. The current version of iTriplet is only available on RedHat linux platform. It requires GNU g++ compiler version 3.4.4 or above and Python version 2.5.1 or above. Interested readers can download the software from our website via the following link Detailed information about how to build and run the software, description of parameters and output can be found in the captioned website.
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This work is supported by NIH grant GM57286 to SIG and a fellowship from Rutgers IGERT program on Biointerfaces to ESH from NSF DGE 0333196 (PI: P. Moghe).
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Correspondence to Samuel I Gunderson.
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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors' contributions
ESH and SIG conceived and wrote the manuscript. CDJ conducted the Luciferase assays. ESH designed and developed the algorithm.
Electronic supplementary material
Additional file 1: iTriplet: a rule-based nucleic acid sequence motif finder. Materials about promoter and 5' UTR sequences, 3' UTR sequences, probability of motifs, 61 rules to discover neighboring motifs, parallelization configuration, and help text of iTriplet. (DOC 156 KB)
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Ho, E.S., Jakubowski, C.D. & Gunderson, S.I. iTriplet, a rule-based nucleic acid sequence motif finder. Algorithms Mol Biol 4, 14 (2009).
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Asked by: Siro Exposta
asked in category: General Last Updated: 17th June, 2020
What was one major effect of the Grand Canal in China?
The canal was built in order to easily ship grain from the rich farmland in southern China to the capital city in Beijing. This also helped the emperors to feed the soldiers guarding the northern borders. The Ancient Chinese built early canals to help with transportation and commerce.
Click to see full answer.
In respect to this, what impact did the Grand Canal have on China?
China has two main river systems the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. The Grand Canal connects the two Rivers systems. This makes it possible to ship grain from the agricultural south to the more industrial north. It also helped bring supplies to the Chinese armies defending the northern borders.
Subsequently, question is, when was the Grand Canal built in China? 468 BC
Additionally, what is the grand canal used for today?
A major change in the course of the Yellow River in 1855 cut the Grand Canal in two sections. By the first half of the 20th century, the canal was no longer functioning in a coherent manner. Today, the canal is about 1,700 kilometers in length and is still heavily used in the Yangtze delta.
What was traded on the Grand Canal?
From the Tang to Qing dynasties, the Grand Canal served as the main artery between northern and southern China and was essential for the transport of grain to Beijing. Marco Polo recounted the Grand Canal's arched bridges as well as the warehouses and prosperous trade of its cities in the 13th century.
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Where does the Grand Canal start and finish? |
Have you ever wondered what is the difference between Gelato and Ice Cream?
Ice cream and ice cream have completely different meanings even if in the eyes of the average consumer, it would seem the same thing.
Both have similar basic ingredients: milk, cream and sugar, which are mixed together and shaken vigorously.
Gelato has more milk than cream than ice cream and, in turn, has less fat. Making ice cream involves churning out the mix at a much slower rate than preparing ice cream. Shake the mix and quickly introduce air into the mix, making the dough softer. As a result, ice cream is much more milky and dense with less air, while ice cream is creamier and can contain between 25% and 90% air. The higher density gives the ice cream a more intense flavor. The higher density and lower fat composition mean that ice cream is generally served at a higher temperature than ice cream. Otherwise, the ice cream would be very hard. Since gelato is denser, a portion of gelato can be smaller than a portion of ice cream. In other words, you might be satisfied with a smaller volume of gelato because the ice cream has more air, which does little to satiate your hunger (but it can make you fart more). In addition to the ingredients described above, the vinje ice cream often prepared with the addition of artificial flavorings, unhealthy vegetable fats thus obtaining a poor quality product which is the opposite of the Italian Gelato to be savored, where the taste buds thank us
In the world of dessert, there is nothing in the world that is more creamy, sweeter and full of ingredients of absolute quality than an Italian Gelato.
In order to differentiate their offer, restaurants are increasingly opting for top-quality artisan gelato for their dessert menus. Some chefs realize how difficult it is to get a great product by preparing it in a restaurant, because of the time needed to produce a quality Gelato, but also for the necessary investments that are very high for a product that is of service and not at the center of the business. Our secret is the meticulous research of the ingredients that we customize for each restaurateur in order to guarantee a dessert that is always different thanks to the many possible combinations. Finally, for most restaurants, prices are still essential to evaluate a new partner. Suppose you are buying Gelato for $ 12 / kilo. This will allow you to have 10 balls / balls of ice cream that can be used for 5 desserts, which you will sell for $ 7/8. Make the calculations: you will discover that it is an option not to be missed for your restaurant! What are you waiting for, call us now!
The ice cream festival is one of the most epic ways to make a meeting memorable. Whether you’re celebrating a birthday, a recent victory at work with an office celebration, or organizing a graduation party rather than a wedding. Nothing so practical and cheerful about BarbaGelato’s restaurant service.
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How to Teach Vocabulary: Selecting Targets
One of the most common challenges with vocabulary intervention is selecting targets.
After all, there are hundreds of thousands of words to choose from! How do we narrow it down?
Last week, I shared four criteria for selecting vocabulary targets, but I thought it would be helpful to back up a bit.
How do we know which types of words to choose? Are we focusing on basic concepts, synonyms/antonyms, categories, Tier 2 words, context clues, affixes…? The list goes on and on!
Once we have a focus, what materials do we use? Do we work off of a word list? Do we use materials from the classroom?
The Answer to All of Your Questions
It depends.
And we don’t really have all of the answers yet.
Ack! I know! So frustrating!
What We Do Know
I’ve been sharing information in my vocabulary blog post series, and those are a great place to start for a general overview.
There are some suggestions in the literature (like Lowman, Stone, & Guo’s article), but there isn’t a road map. There is a good dose of clinical judgment involved when answering these types of questions for our students–even though it would be lovely to have a proven step-by-step guide, wouldn’t it?
Let’s look towards them for some inspiration…
They used interactive book reading to teach instructional verbs to preschoolers. Students in the intervention group were taught 12 words over the course of three weeks. Students in the control group were only exposed to the words during teacher talk.
The results? “Children in the book-reading group knew significantly more words on a receptive picture identification task than children in the control group both at posttesting and at follow-up testing in the fall. No significant group differences were noted at spring testing.”
(I found out about this study–and many others–from Meredith at the Informed SLP.)
Although the intervention didn’t have lasting effects, the students in the intervention group did gain an entire year of incidental learning in just three weeks! I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the intervention continued… And how can we use this with other ages?
My Approach
Caveat: These are very general statements! My approach varies depending on the context, unique characteristics of the student, and countless other variables. The research isn’t there to tell me exactly what to do with all of my students, so I’ve integrated as much as I can and use clinical judgment to figure out the rest!
Across the board, I love using contextualized interventions. I’ve tried a more traditional drill approach, but I feel like I get a better result when I focus on the student’s context. This article by Gilliam, Gillam, and Reece (2012) gives a helpful overview with a sample lesson. They focused on narrative language skills in this particular study, but many of the principles can still apply. The Contextualized Language Intervention textbook (affiliate link) goes into a lot more detail! This approach makes a lot of sense to me, and that’s why I write so much about literacy- and curriculum-based therapy!
Early Communicators
PracticalAAC is a fabulous resource when it comes to figuring out where to start with emerging communicators! Core vocabulary can be a great approach, but it’s not the answer for all of our students.
Foundational Vocabulary
When I work with younger students, basic concepts are one of the first things I look at. They are one of the first things that I target because they’re key to developing more complex vocabulary and are a key part of the preschool/kindergarten curriculum. Students also need them to follow directions! I use an approach similar to the one that Lowman, Stone, & Guo described in their article when teaching concepts. I also wrote about some additional strategies here!
If we want students to learn more complex vocabulary, then they need a way to describe those words and make associations between them. I find the Expanding Expression Tool to be very helpful for these types of goals. I collect baseline data and identify specific areas to focus on (e.g., Does the student struggle with one area more than others? Are they using a variety of words or do they stick to a select few?). Once students have a solid base of describing vocabulary, we’ll move towards comparing/contrasting items. Comparatives and superlatives end up being a big focus, and it’s also a great way to target more complex syntax.
Notice a trend? It’s all about the building blocks and building a solid foundation!
More Advanced Vocabulary
As students gain these foundational skills, my focus shifts towards vocabulary for comprehension. I will pull texts from the curriculum and identify words ahead of time. I choose words based on the criteria we discussed in last week’s post. If you want to learn more, Bringing Words to Life (affiliate link) is a great resource! We may focus on different types of vocabulary here. Do they struggle with multiple meaning words? Do they struggle to break down words?
There is some mixed research when it comes to teaching context clues, but I’ve had success using that approach with some of my students. I think a “strategy” approach makes a lot of sense for the “right” student. I’m all about teaching students to fish! More on that later. 🙂
P.S. Please do grill me on my “framework”! I’m constantly learning and adjusting my approach. I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions–especially if you have some research to support a certain approach!
Individualizing the Process
This general framework helps me make decisions, but it is not a cookie-cutter approach! I know there’s a problem if all of my early elementary students have the same vocabulary goal. I use assessment data (including formal assessment results, teacher report, language samples, classroom observations, probe data, ongoing data collection, etc.) to drive decision-making.
Because we want to provide educationally relevant services, teachers are a huge asset in this process! I always want to know: What is the student struggling with in the classroom? What can we do to scaffold their success?
Diving into Treatment
I use the strategies discussed in previous posts when targeting vocabulary at all of these levels. That said, there are always exceptions!
For example, Beck et al. (2012) recommend teaching new vocabulary after reading a book with younger students and pre-teaching vocabulary for older students.
I implement these strategies and keep a close eye on the data to help me adjust. If I learn about a new strategy, I’ll implement it with a few groups and compare progress. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m making do with the resources that I have! Until someone builds that perfect roadmap, it’ll have to do. 🙂
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1. Andrea says
B) I would love some examples of vocabulary goals you use! I’ve been starting to develop goals focused more on strategies and I feel I’m getting the grasp of that, but I’d be interested to know how you word your vocab goals that are not strategy-based.
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Available both as an herb and as a spice, coriander is widely used in all types of cuisines across the globe. It belongs to the parsley family and its leaves also closely resemble that of parsley leaves. Even though it is mostly considered to be native to southern Europe and the Middle East, it has been used in Asian countries for thousands of years. today, it can be found growing in many countries in Europe, Africa, Asia as well as in the Americas. The fresh leaves of the coriander plant are known as cilantro, and are commonly used as an herb in cooking.
As an herb, coriander has a refreshing aroma. The seeds have a mildly sweet and spicy taste with a citrus undertone, and when they are ripe, have a pleasant fragrance. However, when unripe, they often have a pungent smell. Mostly, coriander is used heavily in curry powders. In its spice form, it is often sprinkled over soups and stews. It is also used to add flavour to smoked and grilled meat, and is known to go extremely well with pork and ham. Moreover, this versatile herb and spice is used in traditional English black pudding recipes as well as Italian sausages. |
Quick Answer: How Does Formalin Inactivate Virus?
Does formaldehyde kill virus?
Formaldehyde is a cold sterilant that effectively kills all microorganisms, including spores and resistant viruses, when used in proper concentrations and given adequate contact time.
Formalin is the saturated solution of formaldehyde in water.
A 100% formalin solution is equivalent to 37%–40% formaldehyde..
How do you inactivate influenza virus?
Preparation of inactivated influenza vaccines is conventionally achieved by exposure of cell- or egg-derived live virus to beta-propiolactone (BPL) or formaldehyde (FA). BPL reacts readily with nucleophiles, resulting in alkylated and acylated products.
What does it mean to inactivate a bacteria or virus?
Pathogen inactivation: A process designed to eliminate pathogens from water, air or donated blood. Pathogens include viruses, bacteria, and fungi. … One form of pathogen inactivation for blood uses a chemical that, when exposed to ultraviolet light, binds to the genetic material.
Is formaldehyde and formalin the same?
How do you make homemade disinfectant spray?
How do you inactivate a vaccine for viruses?
Inactivate the virus By killing the virus, it cannot possibly reproduce itself or cause disease. The inactivated polio, hepatitis A, influenza (shot), and rabies vaccines are made this way. Because the virus is still “seen” by the body, cells of the immune system that protect against disease are generated.
Is formaldehyde a disinfectant?
Why is 70 Alcohol a better disinfectant than 95 alcohol?
Who inactivated virus?
Viral inactivation A process of enhancing viral safety in which virus is intentionally “killed”. Viral removal A process of enhancing viral safety by removing or separating the virus from the protein(s) of interest.
How do you weaken a virus?
There are four ways that viruses and bacteria are weakened to make vaccines:Change the virus blueprint (or genes) so that the virus replicates poorly. … Destroy the virus blueprint (or genes) so that the virus can’t replicate at all. … Use only a part of the virus or bacteria.More items…
How does a virus become inactivated?
Many viruses contain lipid or protein coats that can be inactivated by chemical alteration. Viral inactivation is different from viral removal because, in the former process, the surface chemistry of the virus is altered and in many cases the (now non-infective) viral particles remain in the final product.
Is formalin toxic to humans?
Is formalin a hazardous material?
USED FORMALIN DISPOSAL. … This means that the used formalin working solution is not a hazardous waste because it is not listed and it is not a characteristic hazardous waste. It does not have the RCRA characteristic of ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity, or toxicity (40 CFR 261.21 – 261.24).
Is a vaccine a dead virus?
What does formaldehyde do to the body?
Is bleach the same as disinfectant?
A disinfectant is a substance that kills germs on non-living things. The most well-known disinfectant is bleach, which is sodium hypochlorite diluted in water, sometimes with a scent added. … These, while still needing care in their handling, are less toxic than bleach but can be highly effective disinfectants.
What inactivates a virus?
High Quality Chemicals for Virus Inactivation For virus inactivation in proteins, such as Factor VIII or van Willebrand factor, a solvent/detergent treatment is the method of choice to inactivate lipid-coat enveloped viruses. With other proteins, such as albumine, pasteurization is the preferred option.
What does it mean when a virus is in an inactive state?
In inactive viral infections the virus will not replicate itself except through replication of its host cell. This state can last over many host cell generations. … This is known as lysogenic viral reproduction. Integration can result in a latent infection or a productive infection. |
This is Your Child’s Brain on Bach… in 3-D
Music not only touches the soul it also appears to build the brain.
USC researchers — in a partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the nonprofit Heart of Los Angeles and Youth Orchestra LA — have found that auditory pathways in the brains of young children receiving classical music training are maturing more quickly than those of other children in the study. Additionally, the young musicians are more accurate at detecting pitch changes in the melodies.
“The auditory system is stimulated by music,” said Assal Habibi, lead author of the recent results published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and a senior research associate at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “This system is also engaged in general sound processing that is fundamental to language development, reading skills and successful communication.”
Explained Justin Haldar, USC Viterbi assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering: “In some ways the brain is like a muscle. If you exercise it, then the regions that you’re exercising will get stronger. And the process of getting stronger can be associated with detectable changes to the brain tissue at the microscopic level.”
Anecdotal evidence has long suggested a correlation between musicianship and creativity, as well as musicianship and scientific ability. Past research on the impact of music on the brain has largely focused on adults. However, the USC–LA Philharmonic–HOLA developmental study follows 65 children ages 6 or 7 for five years, comparing brain changes among three groups: 21 children who receive ongoing classical music instruction through HOLA’s youth orchestra; 24 in a community soccer program; and 20 not involved in any specific after-school activities.
The initial reported findings were based on a technique called EEG that measures the electrical activity of the brain. Now, specialized software created by a USC Viterbi professor and his former Ph.D. student, both from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, is allowing the researchers to analyze MRI data to see differences in children’s brain structure as they emerge.
BrainSuite, software co-created by Richard Leahy, a USC Viterbi professor of electrical engineering, and David Shattuck, now a professor at UCLA, has many advantages over competing products, said Hanna Damasio, director of the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center and a project researcher.
Justin Haldar and (left) Richard Leahy, both of USC Viterbi, are leveraging new tools to characterize the effects of music on the human brain.
BrainSuite has been our choice of tool to investigate structural changes because it is an automated engine,” Damasio said. “It allows us to study the development of cortical thickness in specific brain regions, as well as the anatomical connectivity between key cortical areas. Additionally, BrainSuite’s results can be inspected at every step, allowing us to [modify], whenever necessary, to optimize the analysis.”
Haldar added that analyzing the MRI data with BrainSuite “will provide a more complete picture of the trajectory of brain development.”
BrainSuite’s capabilities are not limited to music research. The software helps researchers in a number of disciplines, from neuroscience to radiology, by providing them with a tool through which they can explore the brain and its role in human development, cognition, behavior and disease.
Its 3-D images depict a colorful, exquisite landscape that an ordinary onlooker might mistake for art. But to a scientist, the images map the condition and composition of the human brain.
BrainSuite takes 3-D images of the brain and can morph each of these images onto a common representation of the brain, or an atlas.
BrainSuite enables researchers to track changes in brain size, shape or function. The open-source software also allows researchers to compare the brain images of different study subjects, and to compare specific areas in one subject’s brain to another’s.
“We can analyze, for example, whether there are regional differences in the size or shape of the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and those with mild cognitive impairment,” Leahy said. “More generally, we can detect differences between a control group and different disease populations. In a similar manner, BrainSuite can also be used to investigate differences between groups addressing, for example, questions of nature versus nurture, and the impact of genetics and the environment on the brain.
“BrainSuite is able to visualize and analyze the brain’s white matter,” Leahy added, “which contains the axonal fibers or ‘wiring’ between different brain areas, to better understand how the brain functions as a complex set of interacting networks.”
In addition to analyzing conventional MRI scans, BrainSuite can perform automated diffusion MRI analysis, which maps the movement of water molecules in the brain. Diffusion MRI allows scientists to study the microscopic features of brain tissue that are too small to see with conventional MRI. Such microscopic changes may be associated with aging and disease, or the subtle changes that manifest after learning something new. BrainSuite is a key tool for current scientific studies at USC.
“We are using BrainSuite for an NIH-funded study on chronic stroke survivors,” said Carolee Winstein, a professor at USC’s Division of Biokinesiology and Physical Therapy. “The software helps us to measure the integrity of the corticospinal tract, which controls the movement of skeletal muscles. We hope to determine if changes in the corticospinal tract beyond six months of a stroke are associated with improvements in movement for patients who have suffered mild to moderate impairment.”
In another study, researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC are working with Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center and the Cleveland Clinic to study a type of epilepsy caused by a birth defect, focal cortical dysplasia, where neurons in an area of the brain have failed to migrate to the proper formation of the brain. FCD disrupts brain circuitry and causes seizures.
Many cases of FCD are difficult to detect through imaging. Saman Hazany, an assistant professor of neuroradiology at the Keck School of Medicine, said scientists are working with Leahy to test BrainSuite and see if it improves FCD detection so that doctors can treat those patients appropriately.
And then there’s the music study.
“Intensive music training during childhood may have a broader and lasting impact, particularly in those from disadvantaged backgrounds,” Leahy said. “This study will help us to better understand the effects of early-music training, possibly leading to new insights into the impact and importance of music on brain development.”
Managing editor Marc Ballon contributed to this story. |
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A mythical race of cannibalistic creatures.
"Anthropophagi are not native to the Americas. They are to Northern and Western Africa and the Caroli Islands, but not here... They are not natural scavengers... Anthropophagi prefer fresh flesh, but there are things that drive them even more powerful than hunger... The female can breed, but she cannot bear. She lacks a womb, you see, for that location of her anatomy is given to another, more vital organ; her brain." The female places the child, wrapped in a protective sac, inside the male's mouth. The male has 2 weeks to find a host for it, or else it bursts the sac, and the father either chokes on it or the cub suffocates. Once placed inside a human victim, the cub develops and consume the host.
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User Story
What is a User Story?
In software development and product management, a user story is an informal, natural language description of features of a software system. They are written from an end-user or user of a system and may be recorded in project management software. Depending on the project, different stakeholders may write user stories like customers, users, managers, or development teams.
A user story is used in Agile captures a description of a feature from an end-user' perspective. It describes the type of user, what they want and why. A user story helps to create a simplified description of a requirement.
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In daily life, most of us will find ourselves in situations that cause anxiety.
Being anxious - that feeling of being unsettled, uneasy or scared, is a natural human response to stress and is designed to protect us from a perceived danger. This is often known as the fight, flight or freeze response.
Usually, we can manage these feelings and they pass over time, but sometimes they can become overwhelming, affecting our ability to get on with our lives.
Anxiety can take many forms and, If you are worried about it, we can talk to you and help you to access support.
Why do we get anxious?
There are lots of things in daily life that can cause anxiety.
This could be linked to something specific like:
• studying for a big exam
• preparing for a job interview
• meeting someone new for the first time – either as a friend or on a date
• big life changes like moving house or having children
• dealing with a traumatic incident such as a car accident or being a victim of crime
• experiencing violence, abuse or discrimination
However, in many cases, you might not be able to identify what’s making you anxious.
Many of the services that are there to support people with mental health will be able to work with you to identify the factors that contribute to your anxiety and help you work through them.
How do I recognise anxiety?
People who are experiencing anxiety will often experience symptoms that affect them emotionally and physically.
Many of these symptoms are normal responses to stressful situations but could indicate a mental health issue if they are experienced either over a prolonged period of time (weeks and months) or are particularly intensely.
You may find that:
• you worry all the time, sometimes with no good reason, or out of proportion
• you notice physical symptoms like feeling sick, losing your appetite, struggling to sleep (or oversleeping), losing interest in sex, feeling your heart racing in your chest, changing toilet habits, pins and needles
• you may feel your mind is racing with many thoughts – some of which may be unpleasant
• you have panic attacks – intense and sudden feelings of fear or discomfort, often accompanied with shortness of breath, nausea and a feeling of ‘losing control’
• you have a tendency to always see the negative things in any situation
• you avoid everyday situations that’s you may find difficult
Anxiety takes many forms, and services that are there to support people with mental health will be able to work with you to identify the factors that contribute to your anxiety and help you work through them.
Anxiety – looking after yourself
When feeling anxious it can be hard to think about what next steps to take. Here are a few ways to help manage anxiety.
• It may be useful to shift your focus from your feelings of anxiety to another something that interests or comforts you. This may be an image or an object in the room, spend time really focussing on the details.
• Try and steady your breathing. By inhaling slowly through your nose and exhaling through your mouth, you can establish a slow and calming pace. Relax your muscles and focus on your breath.
• Speaking about what’s making you anxious to someone you trust, can be really helpful in managing your anxiety. They might have experienced a similar problem and can talk you through it. You can always talk to a member of our health improvement team.
Anxiety and Gay and Bisexual Men.
As with other mental health conditions, gay, bisexual and all me who have sex with men are disproportionately affected by issues around anxiety.
Our experiences of mental health are closely linked to the challenges we face as a community, from experience of homophobia and discrimination to accepting our own identity and the pressure to conform to a heteronormative society, sometimes known as minority stress.
Our mental health is also shaped by other health inequalities. From higher rates of poor sexual health and alcohol/substance use to pressures within our own communities, such as body image and age.
Anxiety and Trans men
Anxiety often impacts trans men’s ability to live their lives as they wish.
There are a number of different reasons trans men may experience anxiety from issues accessing healthcare, discrimination in the workplace, and coming out.
Anxiety can often be linked to the process of transitioning and experiences of interactions with health professionals. These professionals can play a pivotal role in whether someone is able to transition or not.
During points of anxiety, community support, including friends and social groups both in person and online) can make a very real difference for your wellbeing. |
Home » History of Vaccines » Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Anti-VaccineLand
Lewis Carroll’s Adventures in Anti-VaccineLand
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is best known for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
What do those books have to do with vaccines?
Lewis Carroll did get into a debate with someone that was pushing anti-vaccine misinformation about the smallpox vaccine.
Lewis Carroll liked to believe impossible things, but that the smallpox vaccine could cause other people to get smallpox wasn’t one of them.
In 1877, the Eastbourne Chronicle published a letter by Mr W Hume-Rothery, who claimed that the smallpox vaccine “was causing smallpox in large numbers of people” and discredited the value of vaccination in preventing smallpox.
According to Julie Leask, in her article “Should we do battle with antivaccination activists:”
Using his real name of Charles L Dodgson, Carroll refuted the claims with his characteristic eloquence. This correspondence escalated into an increasingly defensive exchange between Carroll and Hume-Rothery, in which Carroll, “a trifle ruffled but keeping to the point, retired after the third round”. His opponent continued vigorously until the editor ended the correspondence.
Of course, the smallpox vaccine, can’t cause smallpox. It is made using the vaccinia virus.
Vaccinia is a pox-type virus that is related to smallpox. That’s why vaccination with the smallpox vaccine creates immunity against smallpox. You can’t get smallpox or cause someone else to have smallpox after getting vaccinated though.
You could get smallpox from the previous method that was used to induce immunity – variolation, but Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was much safer and had long replaced variolation when Carroll and Hume-Rothery were having their ‘debate.’
And like those who make anti-vaccine arguments today, Hume-Rothery either made a mistake or was intentionally trying to deceive people. In one of his letters, Dodgson “claimed that just using the percentage of deaths among vaccinated patients , without comparing it with the percentage of deaths among the nonvaccinated, proves nothing.”
Who knew that Dodgson also studied epidemiology…
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FAQ: Which Of The Following Has More Inertia Bowling Ball Or Tennis Ball?
Is bowling ball a inertia?
An object’s inertia resists changes its motion. The inertia of the bowling ball, when rolled down the lane, will resist the change in its motion. The ball will continue to roll until acted upon by a greater force.
Which of the following has more inertia feather or hammer?
Inertia depends on the mass of an object. So the hammer will have the greater inertia than that of a feather.
Does a tennis ball have inertia?
The moment of inertia determines how much spin the ball acquires for a given angular impulse applied by the racket’s strings and also how the ball behaves when it bounces. When a ball bounces, the friction between the ball and the court surface produces a substantial torque.
Which ball has the most inertia?
The smaller the inertia (mass) of an object, the less force is needed to accelerate it at a given rate. Since inertia is simply just a measurement of mass, the bowling ball has a higher mass, thus inertia, than the tennis ball.
Which is more inertia?
You might be interested: Often asked: What Is The Best Bowling Ball For Heavy Oil?
What objects would have the most inertia?
The tendency of an object to resist a change in velocity is known as the object’s inertia. For example, a train has significantly more inertia than a skateboard. It is much harder to change the train’s velocity than it is the skateboard’s.
Which of the following has most inertia?
Inertia is the measure of the mass of the body. The greater is the mass of the body; the greater is its inertia and vice-versa. (a) The mass of a stone is more than the mass of a rubber ball for the same size. Hence, the inertia of the stone is greater than that of a rubber ball.
What object has the largest inertia?
Hence amongst the following options, the human body has the highest mass thus it has the highest inertia. Inertia is a property of an object to resist changes in its current state of motion and is directly proportional to the mass of the object. Mass is solely dependent upon the inertia of the object.
What law of motion is tennis?
Newton’s third law of motion describes action and reaction forces. The more force you use to a hit a tennis ball, the more reaction force your arm receives from the racket. Every time your feet hit the ground when you are running, the ground hits your feet with an equal and opposite force.
What’s the relationship between mass and inertia?
You might be interested: FAQ: How To Teach Bowling Steps?
Which has more inertia so need more force to move?
A more massive object has more inertia than a less massive object. Fast-moving objects have more inertia than slow-moving objects. An object would not have any inertia in a gravity-free environment (if there is such a place). Inertia is the tendency of all objects to resist motion and ultimately stop.
What law is best described by inertia?
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Irish low-cost giant Ryanair today pledged to support the development of sustainable aviation fuels to promote a carbon-neutral future. The airline joined the Fueling Flight Initiative as part of its pledge to turn the blue airline green.
Understandably right now, sustainability is the airlines’ number two priority, with public health having been unexpectedly made the top priority. However, while airlines have had to shift their focus slightly to ensure the health of those flying, that doesn’t mean sustainability has been placed on the backburner. Indeed, last month we saw British Airways invest in bringing forward its use of Sustainable Aviation Fuels.
Ryanair takes notice of SAFs
Ryanair today pledged to become part of the movement for sustainable aviation fuels. The airline joined the Fueling Flight Initiative in an attempt to help pave the road to carbon neutrality. The airline’s Director of Sustainability, Tom Fowler, said,
“A transparent and future-proof regulatory framework for SAFs can support and equip airlines in their fight against climate change, and we are proud to be part of this initiative… With this new initiative, we take a further step to the achievement of our decarbonisation targets and the broader UN Sustainable Development Goals.”
What are Sustainable Aviation Fuels?
Sustainable Aviation Fuels are like fossil fuels but are considered to be a greener alternative. The fuels can be made from a range of sources. British Airways, for instance, is targeting SAFs made from household waste in addition to ethanol made from the leftovers of processing wheat straw.
The problem with Sustainable Aviation Fuels is that they are currently costly. They are being produced in low quantities meaning that they cost a lot to create, and thus cheaper conventional fuel is preferred from a cost standpoint. For a low-cost carrier such as Ryanair, this could be a turn-off. However, the industry hopes that more widespread production would ultimately bring the cost of such fuels down.
What else is Ryanair doing?
While it may not be apparent to the everyday flyer, Ryanair has been pushing for airlines across the industry to do their bit to bring down CO2 emissions. In June 2019, the airline began to publish its monthly CO2 statistics, encouraging other airlines to follow suit.
With the current situation excluded, the airline argued that by operating with a higher load factor, its CO2 emissions per passenger were lower. With the introduction of the 737 MAX, its CO2 emissions should drop further. Firstly the brand new aircraft are more efficient than their older counterparts. However, they will also carry more passengers, further lowering the proportion of CO2 emitted per passenger.
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