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1. How many ways can you order a pizza if you pick one from each choice; 4 sizes, 3 different crusts, 5 kinds of cheese, and 12 toppings?
A. 80 B. 1440
C. 60 D. 720
2. Students at Midtown Middle School can choose their schedule from 3 math courses, 3 science courses, 2 social studies courses, and 2 art courses. Determine the number of possible schedules that include one course in each subject area.
A. 36 B. 10
C. 18 D. 20
3. Two number cubes are rolled, then a spinner with 4 different colors on it is spun twice, then two coins are flipped. How many total possible outcomes are there?
A. 2,304 B. 46,656
C. 4096 D. 24
4. In one popular game, five number cubes are rolled at the same time. If the number cubes are kept separate, what is the total possible number of outcomes?
A. 30 B. 360
C. 15,625 D. 7,776
5. You want to buy a car. You have a choice of 5 different dealerships. Each dealership carries 3 different car companies. Each company provides 10 different models. Each model has 7 different colors. If you must choose one dealership, one company, one model, and one optional package, how many different cars do you have the opportunity to buy?
A. 625 B. 320
C. 1,050 D. 4,096
The McGraw-Hill Companies |
Name: _________________________
Date: _________________________
Match the vocabulary words with the definitions on the right.
scooter, lose, loose, sooner
_________ Not binding or restrictive.
_________ To cause (something) to cease to be in one's possession or capability due to unfortunate or unknown circumstances, events or reasons.
_________ Comparative form of soon.
_________ A child's foot operated vehicle consisting of a long platform between two wheels, the front one of which has an upright handle for steering. |
Global Climate Talks In Durban Avert Failure, If Not Global Warming
12/11/2011 01:59 pm ET | Updated Dec 11, 2011
The official theme of the recently concluded United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa -- the 17th such meeting since national governments committed to combating climate change in 1992 -- was "Working Together, Saving Tomorrow Today." But while a rough accord was ironed out at the 11th hour in Durban, there remained some disagreement over what it means, and whether the contentious two-week meeting lived up to its ambitious motto.
Some environmental groups saw the agreement as being far less ambitious than what is needed to curb rising temperatures and prevent the potentially devastating impacts of a substantially warmer planet.
"While governments avoided disaster in Durban, they by no means responded adequately to the mounting threat of climate change," Alden Meyer, the director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement issued from the Durban talks. "The decisions adopted here fall well short of what is needed. It's high time governments stopped catering to the needs of corporate polluters, and started acting to protect people."
"These talks started with low-level ambitions, and they achieved what at best could be described as baby steps in the right direction," said Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International, in a phone call from Durban. "But it is an agreement that is out of touch with the urgency on the ground, and one that fails to reflect the sort of ambition that the situation calls for."
But others saw a victory, however modest, snatched from the jaws of defeat -- particularly given the rancorous tenor of the talks and what at times seemed the almost impossible task of getting 194 nations to agree on anything.
"We really were on the brink of total disaster here," said Andrew Light, a senior fellow and director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress. "We almost saw the complete collapse of everything that's been accomplished in this process since 1992."
After negotiating into the early hours Sunday, delegates ultimately overcame some of the more vexing disagreements that had threatened to derail the talks completely. Chief among these was agreeing to pursue an entirely new climate accord that would bring all nations under greenhouse gas restrictions, with an aim of hammering out such an accord by 2015.
The U.N.'s original climate compact divided the globe into rich nations and poor ones, seeking binding emissions restrictions only for nations of means. But the United States -- the largest emitter among developed nations -- had entered the negotiations in Durban insisting that developing nations with substantial economies like China and India were responsible for huge and growing amounts of global emissions themselves. In that light, American negotiators steadfastly refused to discuss a future compact unless a goal was set for creating a system that would eventually bind all nations to some sort of emissions cuts.
China overtook the United States in overall emissions in 2007. Some analysts suggest that China could be the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases by mid-century.
After hours of niggling over language in Durban -- including parsing the differences between terms like "legally binding" and "legal force" -- India, China and other nations among the developing bloc agreed, along with all other U.N. member nations, to negotiate "a protocol, legal instrument or legal outcome" by which all nations would be bound by some sort of emissions restrictions. The parties agreed to begin pursuing the agreement in earnest in the first half of 2012, with an aim toward having a final document by 2015.
Nations would then begin the long process of signing and ratifying the pact, which would likely not go into effect until a certain percentage of nations representing a certain percentage of global emissions had done so. Delegates agreed to a goal of having the document "come into effect and be implemented from 2020."
That nearly decade-long path forward -- as well as the linguistic jujitsu that led to dropping the term "legally binding" from the Durban agreement -- left some critics decrying the talks as producing too little and increasingly, too late.
"I think the real people who won here, the ones who will be celebrating today, are the major polluting corporations of the world," Naidoo said, "because they will essentially be able to continue with business as usual."
Naidoo described the current climate regime as "nothing more than a voluntary deal that's put off for a decade." That, he said, threatens to take the world well over the 2-degree Celsius uptick in temperatures -- compared to pre-industrial levels -- that scientists generally agree is the threshold for preserving the planet's delicate ecosystems and avoiding some of the worse potential impacts of climate change.
The Climate Action Tracker project, a joint scientific effort of the German non-profit Climate Analytics and the renewable energy consultancy EcoFys, issued a statement on Sunday declaring that despite the Durban agreement, the world remained on track to see well over a 3-degrees Celsius rise in average temperatures by the end of the century. Such an outcome could mean a possible "dieback" of the Amazon rainforest, destruction of coral reefs, loss of Greenland ice sheets and other effects.
"At best this was about saving face," said Naidoo, who was ejected from the conference on Friday after protesting the lack of progress. "It was not about saving the planet and saving and securing our children's and our grandchildren's future."
But Light and other observers said that such grievances fail to appreciate the accomplishments of the Durban talks.
"What would you rather have, no language whatsoever, or this?" Light said, adding that the agreement at Durban continues to recognize and aspire to the 2-degree limit.
The consensus on negotiating a new climate pact also provided a crucial pathway for the European Union to agree to an extension of the Kyoto Protocol, the only current legal mechanism in place that has put limits on carbon dioxide emissions among wealthy nations. The United States never took part in the Kyoto pact, but developing nations were adamant at Durban that it be preserved beyond 2012. The E.U., however -- as the chief participant in Kyoto -- wanted assurance that something broader and more inclusive would be pursued in its place before agreeing to bind itself to a new phase of the 1997 protocol.
"If parties had said no to the E.U., and we did not have this compromise document," Light said, "then the E.U. would have said no to a new phase of the Kyoto protocol, which would have prompted many of the developing countries to simply walk out of the meeting."
The meeting also produced a path toward establishing the so-called Green Climate Fund, which would provide up to $100 billion annually to help poor nations develop and implement clean-energy technologies, reduce their emissions and adapt to changes in the climate that can't be avoided. But while the concept of the fund was preserved, and sources for start-up capital were identified, major questions were punted down the line -- including identifying sources for long-term financing of the fund, as well as its management, oversight and location.
Other steps taken by the delegates include establishing general tenets on transparency for reporting and monitoring individual national emissions, a commitment to creating new market mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gases and new rules for earning emissions credits tied to carbon capture and storage projects. Carbon capture and storage is a controversial technology that critics say has not yet proven able to permanently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But critics worried that all of this amounted to precious little progress on a problem that could quickly spiral out of control.
"The impacts of climate change are ever more evident, and we pump ever more carbon pollution into the atmosphere each year," said Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "We are in grave danger of locking in temperature increases well above two degrees Celsius, which would foreclose our ability to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."
"Powerful speeches and carefully worded decisions can't amend the laws of physics," Meyer added. "The atmosphere responds to one thing, and one thing only -- emissions. The world's collective level of ambition on emissions reductions must be substantially increased, and soon."
But Andrew Light of the Center for American Progress suggested that, if nothing else, Durban's real success was leaving open at least some possibility of raising ambitions on emissions reduction -- an outcome that was far from assured during the two weeks of acrimonious debate in Durban.
Light said, "It almost went down the toilet."
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If you want to learn to code, we explain which languages you should learn - right now in 2016 - and how to start programming and creating your own apps, websites and more. 2014 was the Year of Code in the UK, and the intention was to encourage people across the country to get coding for the first time. In addition, programming was added to the school curriculum (replacing outmoded lessons in learning, for example, how to use a mouse) in September 2015 so children as young as five are now learning to code.
Update September 2016: There are a couple of new tools which are specifically aimed at kids and teens. One is the BBC micro:bit which is being given to students in Year 7 for free, but you can also buy this pocket computer for £15. You can code for it using a variety of tools and languages including MicroPython and JavaScript.
The latest option is Apple's Swift. This was introduced two years ago, but now Apple has just released a new, free iPad app called Swift Playgrounds which aims to teach kids to code in Swift using a fun game-like environment. It works on all iPad Air and Pro models, plus iPad mini 2 and later. They will also need to be running iOS 10.
Learn to code - Swift Playgrounds
Many people see these new programming tools as the most significant shake-up since the BBC Micro was introduced to schools in the 1980s, a move that saw a huge resurgence in the fortunes of the British computer industry. It will be some time before their impact becomes fully apparent of course, but there’s strong evidence that the interest in programming is high at the moment. Whether you're young, old or somewhere in between, programming is not only rewarding - it can earn you good money as a career, too.
Learn to code: where to start
It’s important to recognise that there’s no single best language, though. In preparing this article we spoke with Mark Chambers, CEO of Naace, a community of educators, technologists and policy makers who share a vision for the role of technology in advancing education. Mark was keen to avoid recommending specific languages, indeed the National Curriculum doesn’t require particular languages to be taught.
Learn to code: Programming by blocks
One of the two most commonly used programming languages in schools is Scratch which was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Unlike most languages, Scratch programs are created by linking blocks together on screen. This allows students to learn about the structure of programs and the concept of algorithms but without having to learn syntax, that is the exact textual format of an instruction in a conventional language. In addition, because the blocks resemble jigsaw pieces, their shapes reduce the likelihood of blocks being connected together when the end result would be nonsensical.
The new BBC micro:bit also uses a block-based programming environment called Microsoft Block Editor.
Microsoft Block Editor
Despite this unconventional approach, Scratch genuinely is a procedural language, as are most of the popular computer languages, but with the notable exception of some of those used in Web design that we’ll look at later. In other words, it allows the programmer to define a sequence of operations for the computer to carry out.
Scratch is often used in primary schools but it would be unwise to set an upper age limit, above which a student should learn a conventional language instead. It’s also used in secondary schools, indeed it could be beneficial for anyone who has never coded before, while recognising that it will always be a stepping stone to the types of language that are used in business and industry. Scratch is available free of charge. You can either download a version to use offline or you can create programs directly on the website. Another block-based language that is gaining popularity is Google Blockly – see our guide to getting started with Blockly
Learn to code
Learn to code: The BASIC alternative
When there was last a big push on teaching computing in schools, BASIC was the language of choice since it was available on the BBC Micro as well as on many of the cheaper home computers of the time. Although it was designed as an educational language, though, BASIC’s continued use for learning to programme is the subject of some debate. Some would argue that it’s an old-fashioned language that will get students into habits they’ll find it hard to break when they start to learn newer languages. Others say that, because it’s such a simple language, it better parallels the way processor work than more modern languages and is useful because it provides this insight.
Learn to code
Learn to code: Object Oriented Languages
With the explosive growth in the uptake of Android smartphones and tablets, it would be quite natural to want to learn to create your own Android apps, a large majority of which are written in Java (not the same as JavaScript that we discuss later). In addition, Android’s popularity means that learning this language could be a good move from the viewpoint of career prospects.
This is another object orientated language so would be a logical progression from Python or, if you don’t fancy learning two similar languages, an alternative to Python, albeit one that’s not as commonly used in schools. If you want to learn Java you have several options. The Java Developers’ Kit (JDK) is freely available and runs on your PC. There are also several online resources that allow you both to enter and run your code in a web page – see, for example, www.compilejava.net.
Most of today’s most popular languages are object oriented. Although the syntax varies between the different languages, having learned one such language you’ll be in a good position to migrate to another. If you want to discover which are the most commonly used in industry today, take a look at the Ttiobe index. Here's a section of Python code:
Learn to code
Learn to code: Web programming - HTML and CSS
Coding for the web is very different from everything we’ve seen so far since, at its most basic, it uses a completely different type of language. Even so, it’s a vital skill to learn. To create the simplest of web pages you’d use a language called HTML (and ideally the latest version, HTML5) which stands for HyperText Markup Language. As a markup language, it doesn’t provide a list of instruction that are executed in sequence as procedural languages do but, instead, it describes how text and images are displayed on screen. Quite a lot of an HTML document will be the text you see on screen when it’s displayed on the web but, crucially, that text will be interspersed with so-called tags. For example, if some text is preceded by a '< h1' and has '/ h1 >' (we've added spaces and single quotes to prevent your web browser interpreting these as code!) following it, that portion of the text is displayed as a level 1 heading. This is just a simple example and it gets more involved when you start to add graphics, tables and links, but the concept of tags applies throughout.
Learn to code
Trying your hand at writing HTML requires software that will already be on your PC. You can create an HTML document using an ordinary text editor like Notepad and, so long as you give it a filename that ends with .htm or .html, double clicking on it in Windows Explorer will cause your default Web browser to display it, just as if it was hosted on the web. In addition, most web browsers will allow you to see the HTML source code that generated the page you’re viewing. However, going beyond this, dedicated HTML editors (e.g. CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor from www.coffeecup.com) offer additional features such as colouring tags for easy identification while editing, and perhaps the ability to preview how your page will appear in a browser. In addition to writing HTML code, unless you’re working as part of a multi-disciplinary team, you’ll also need some graphics design skills. While we need to mention this to present the full picture, it would be stretching a point to refer to this aspect of web design as coding.
Learn to code
A webpage created using HTML alone will be static but other languages allow you to create dynamic content. The very first step in this direction is the use of another language called CSS which stands for Cascaded Style Sheets. We’ve seen how text can be turned into a header in HTML and, in the simplest of cases, the browser will use its own default font, size and colour for each level of heading. HTML does allow you to define these characteristics yourself but CSS provides a better way. Now a separate CSS file defines exactly how each of the heading levels appears, making it easy to alter the appearance of an HTML document purely by specifying a different CSS file. Using a CSS file, every page on a company website can be given the same corporate look and feel without having to repeat the formatting information in every single HTML file.
Learn to code: Learning Resources
We enjoy Udemy's range of courses, too.
Learn to code
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Science / Cell and Molecular Bio Test 1 Part 2
Random Science or definition Quiz
Can you name the Cell and Molecular Bio Test 1 Part 2?
Quiz not verified by Sporcle
Forced Order
There is a limit as to how fast an enzyme can go; one substrate move in and products move out before the next substrate moves in
What is IP3?
Control where microtubules form and they bypass the time for nucleation.
Energy bearing compound
The folded bits in the mitochondria
Protein constituents know how to orient themselves to create the cytoskeleton via long filaments
Small molecules that convey the message from the receptor to the cell interior.
A system that’s based in cytoskeleton of neurons that is responsible for transporting materials such as organelles, vesicles… etc.
What is cAMP?
Allows a reaction to go faster
What is DAG?
Form the tonofilaments of epithelia, found in skin and hair
Binds and hydrolyzes GTP
Turn things off
Binds the relative cargo
Portion that is connected to filament
Incorrect tracking of the eye
Made of actin and actin-binding proteins, responsible for cell shape, contraction, motility, and cellular transport
Monomer buffer
Notable example of MTOC
Force x distance
Protein that forms filaments for muscle contraction
Key activator of Arp2/3 that is itself activated by G protein coupled receptors.
Length one step of a motor makes
What enzymes act upon
Using RNA as a template for making protein
Growth by the addition of monomers
Plus-end directed, toward the periphery
Accelerates the movement of a solute down it’s electrochemical gradient
Turn things on
Stabilize nerve axons by maintaining girth
Altered vision and confusion
A motor is called this if it can walk continuously along a filament without falling off
Allow very specific ions to cross membranes by creating a channel/tunnel through the cell membrane
Proteins that exchange solutes
Lend lateral strength to tissues, stable, they are not polar
Cause unknown in terms of ALS
Basic subunit for filaments
Other proteins or molecules that are necessary to keep the enzyme activated
An assay with actin over myosin
Molecular motor that takes cargo to periphery of cell
Same enzyme doing basically the same reaction but in a different way
Shut down mitosis
Protein changes its shape in a way to where it no longer functions
Connecting a hormone to a very specific effector
Makes branch points on actin filaments and nucleates new filament growth.
Due to multiple copies of a gene the effect of a gene can be enhanced
Microtubule based motors that are minus-end directed
Type of drugs that treat cancer
Actin filament stabilizer; leads to liver failure if ingested.
What is Ca2+?
Breaking apart water (hydrolysis) in the process of breaking protein chains
Rate of using ATP
Proteins that transport solutes together
Faces inside world of body
Microtubule based motors that are mostly plus-end directed
Relates time to the mean squared distance traveled
Speed of movement
Dynein that is used for cargo transport
Allow specific solutes to cross membrane
Two different proteins stuck together
Shuttle that promotes nucleotide exchange
Too many copies of genes
A temporary protrusion of the surface of an ameboid cell for movement and feeding
A substance can be called this if you can put one wavelength in and get a different wavelength out
Causes disassembly of microtubules
Stabilizes microtubules, blocking cell division
Where a specific kind of RNA (ribosomal) is being made
Something that binds to a receptor
One event makes tons of second messengers
Any device that changes some measurable quantity into another measurable quantity
Copying DNA into RNA
Top of “hump” in energy diagram of reaction
Exchanges three sodium ions OUT and two potassium ions IN utilizing one ATP (ATP releases a P, becomes ADP, causes pump to open)
The beginning of chemical or physical changes at discrete points in a system. Helps the actin filaments start growing.
Determines G protein specificity
Elimination of toxins
Soda straw tubes, made out of tubulins, used for intracellular transport. Very stiff, grow from the + end
New growth off of the main actin filament
Normal though harmful byproduct of oxidative metabolism
Double membrane around the nucleus
Interacts with hormone; determines ligand specificity
Monomer concentration [m] at which the rate of monomer addition equals the rate of monomer loss.
Molecular sized apparatus that converts energy to work
What does cAMP activate?
Any of various pathologic changes seen in living organisms in response to excessive levels of cytotoxic oxidants and free radicals in the environment.
An assay with kinesin or dynein and microtubules
A large chunk of the microtubule disassembles rapidly
Break protein chains through hydrolysis (breaking apart water)
Faces outside world
Oxidizes proteins in a more harmful and irreversible way
Load bearing filaments
Acts on ATP to strip off two phosphates turning it into cAMP
Away from the middle
Maximum amount of force a motor can generate
Amount of time spent generating force
Handles Oxidative stress in the body.
“Hump” to get over on its way to lower energy
Feeling of motion (spinning)
Molecular motor that takes cargo to center of cell
The filling in the mitochondria
What SOD converts superoxide into
Dynein that is used for cilliary and flagellar motion
Stacking by alternating between alpha and beta tubulins
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Historically, the United States has been considered a refuge for those seeking a better life. Since the first European colonists arrived in the late 16th century, immigrants have sought a fresh start for centuries in America, the “land of opportunity”. So it should stand to reason that Americans would feel empathy for their fellow emigrants, yes? In fact, Americans’ view on immigration policies might be summed up as, like the Facebook status: “It’s complicated.”
Much of this complexity stems from the varying circumstances of foreign-born people. The issue of undocumented immigration is politically charged and widely covered in the media, but they aren’t the only ones affected by U.S. immigration policy. For example, foreign-born prospective students and workers who entered the U.S. legally have also been impacted. Walter A. Ewing, a senior researcher at the Immigration Policy Center, believes current U.S. immigration policies around nonimmigrant foreign students and high-tech workers undermine America’s economy. Many of these students and workers were educated at U.S. universities, but are forced to leave the country when their temporary student or work visas expire. They take their potentially valuable contributions to the U.S. economy with them.
This infographic examines immigration trends in the U.S., the impact of nonimmigrant foreign-born students on the U.S. economy, and what current government initiatives such as the DREAM Act are doing to help foreign-born (especially tech-savvy) students stay in the U.S.
Yahoo Finance, “U.S. Immigration Policies Are Sabotaging the U.S. Economy”, January 2013
For a complete list of sources, please view the infographic.
Alien-nation: Foreign-born Students in a Nation Founded by Immigrants
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Ships have sailed the oceans for hundreds of years carrying goods and passengers to new places, the early ships had rough accommodations unlike the ships of today. Even after ships were not the only mode of travel they were still a popular mode of transportation for the wealthy as well as the poor.
Over the years the accommodations became so much better that companies began to brag about what their ships had to offer passengers in the ways of comfort.
They began to build this ship larger and with more comforts for their passengers, so what began as the only way to move goods and people from one place to another turned into a luxury for the wealthy to travel from places like Europe to America.
These ships were outfitted with items like crystal chandeliers and beautiful wood decks filled with chairs for passengers. The companies became very competitive as to who could build the most luxurious ships, like the Titanic.
Even today you will find ship lines advertising what they offer aboard ship; they have ballrooms, several dinning rooms, shops, games of all sorts, enough entertainment that once aboard ship you would not be bored or have to leave the ship till the end of a cruise.
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Benzoyl chloride
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Not to be confused with benzyl chloride.
Benzoyl chloride
Benzoyl Chloride
Preferred IUPAC name
Benzoyl chloride
98-88-4 YesY
ChemSpider 7134 YesY
Jmol 3D model Interactive image
Interactive image
KEGG C19168 YesY
PubChem 7412
RTECS number DM6600000
Molar mass 140.57 g·mol−1
Appearance colorless liquid
Density 1.21 g/mL, liquid
Safety data sheet Oxford MSDS
Toxic T Corrosive C
R-phrases R34
S-phrases (S1/2) S26 S45
NFPA 704
Related compounds
Related compounds
benzoic acid, benzoic anhydride, benzaldehyde
YesY verify (what is YesYN ?)
Infobox references
Benzoyl chloride, also known as benzenecarbonyl chloride, is an organochlorine compound with the formula C6H5COCl. It is a colourless, fuming liquid with an irritating odour. It is mainly useful for the production of peroxides but is generally useful in other areas such as in the preparation of dyes, perfumes, pharmaceuticals, and resins.
C6H5CCl3 + H2O → C6H5COCl + 2 HCl
C6H5CCl3 + C6H5CO2H → 2 C6H5COCl + HCl
As for other acyl chlorides, it can be generated from the parent acid and other chlorinating agents phosphorus pentachloride or thionyl chloride. It was first prepared by treatment of benzaldehyde with chlorine.[2]
An early method for production of benzoyl chloride involved chlorination of benzyl alcohol.[3]
It reacts with water to produce hydrochloric acid and benzoic acid:
C6H5COCl + H2O → C6H5CO2H + HCl
Benzoyl chloride is a typical acyl chloride. It reacts with alcohols to give the corresponding esters. Similarly, it reacts with amines to give the amide.[4][5]
It undergoes the Friedel-Crafts acylation with aromatic compounds to give the corresponding benzophenones and related derivatives.[6] With carbanions, it serves again as a source of "PhCO+".[7]
Benzoyl peroxide, a common reagent in polymer chemistry, is produced industrially by treating benzoyl chloride with hydrogen peroxide and sodium hydroxide:[8]
2. ^ Friedrich Wöhler, Justus von Liebig (1832). "Untersuchungen über das Radikal der Benzoesäure". Annalen der Pharmacie. 3 (3): 262–266. doi:10.1002/jlac.18320030302.
3. ^ US1851832, 29 March 1932
4. ^ C. S. Marvel And W. A. Lazier "Benzoyl Piperidine" Org. Synth. 1929, volume 9, pp. 16. doi:10.15227/orgsyn.009.0016
5. ^ Prasenjit Saha, Md Ashif Ali, and Tharmalingam Punniyamurthy "Ligand-free Copper(ii) Oxide Nanoparticles Catalyzed Synthesis Of Substituted Benzoxazoles" Org. Synth. 2011, volume 88, pp. 398. doi:10.15227/orgsyn.088.0398. (an illustrative reaction of an amine with benzoyl chloride).
6. ^ Wesley Minnis "Phenyl Thienyl Ketone" Org. Synth. 1932, vol. 12, pp. 62. doi:10.15227/orgsyn.012.0062
7. ^ M. Fujita and T. Hiyama "Directed Reduction of a beta-keto Amide: Erythro-1-(3-hydroxy-2-methyl-3-phenylpropanoyl)piperidine" Org. Synth. 1990, volume 69, pp. 44. doi:10.15227/orgsyn.069.0044
8. ^ El-Samragy, Yehia (2004). "Chemical and Technical Assessment". Benzoyl Peroxide (PDF). 61st JECFA (Technical report). Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives. p. 1. Retrieved 31 October 2013.
External links[edit] |
Category:English proverbs
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to: navigation, search
Recent additions to the category
1. that's the way it goes
2. any port in a storm
3. perfect is the enemy of good
4. the customer is always right
5. it's the hit dog that howls
6. as one door closes, another opens
7. the eyes are the window to the soul
8. when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
9. if you mess with the bull, you get the horns
10. mess with the bull, get the horns
Oldest pages ordered by last edit
1. discretion is the better part of valour
2. treat 'em mean to keep 'em keen
3. there's always a bigger fish
4. truth will out
5. there are plenty more fish in the sea
6. the grass is always greener on the other side
7. you can't get a quart into a pint pot
8. there's more than one way to skin a cat
9. when the cat's away the mice will play
10. power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely
» All languages » English language » Figures of speech » Proverbs
English phrases popularly known as representations of common sense.
Pages in category "English proverbs"
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Why some drug prices should be high
How much should we pay for new drugs?
That is arguably the most important, complex, and controversial question in health care today. New drugs intended for widespread use — like antiviral medications for hepatitis C, cholesterol-lowering PCSK9 inhibitors, and biologic drugs for various cancers — can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. Some experts fear that rising drug costs will bankrupt health care. The cost of drugs is the number one health issue in the 2016 election, and both Democrat and Republican voters favor government intervention to help reduce prices.
The three leading presidential candidates, Republican Donald Trump and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, have all come out in favor of letting Medicare negotiate drug prices to better reflect the value that drugs do — or do not — provide. But in order to do that we must better understand how to measure the value of drugs.
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There is no doubt that new drugs are pricey. But the current way they are valued misses the boat — it ignores vital aspects of why drugs are developed, prescribed, and taken. Most attempts to quantify a drug’s value are based on what individuals are (in theory) willing to pay for the benefits a drug can bring, be it longer or higher-quality life. This fails to factor in beneficial effects that extend beyond the treated individual and that accrue to loved ones and communities.
As physicians caring for patients and health policy researchers studying drug pricing and health care markets, we believe these “spillover effects” have real benefits. Research suggests that improvements in a patient’s quality of life can lead to simultaneous improvements in caregiver and family quality of life. For diseases that diminish a patient’s ability to engage with loved ones or that are associated with high caregiver burden, such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, and childhood cancers, effective treatments may generate particularly large social value.
Spillover effects can extend to communities and even countries. Many diseases, from Zika to Ebola, primarily affect individuals in low-income countries. The conventional economic value of treating these diseases is low simply because individuals usually afflicted by the disease are poor.
A fuller interpretation of the value of treating diseases like Ebola should recognize that the total value of treatment includes both the direct value to the affected individuals plus the indirect value to others around the world who value better health for affected individuals and the continued stability of the region. Our inability to adopt this more comprehensive view of social value is a key reason we routinely underinvest in diseases that mainly affect the developing world.
Current methods for estimating the value of new drugs fail to capture the added value of better and extended life for loved ones who care for, depend on, and interact with the individual using the drug. On a personal level, the current conversation fails to recognize that our lives are valuable — not just to us as individuals but to our loved ones as well. On a global level, it fails to recognize that treating disease goes beyond helping individuals to healing communities and ultimately stabilizing societies.
Economic estimates suggest that individuals are willing to pay on average $100,000 to $150,000 for an additional year of life. These estimates, while imperfect, serve as a starting point for nearly all assessments of drug value. Drugs deemed low-value when the value of a year of healthy life is assumed to be $150,000 may be socially beneficial (or “cost-effective”) if the value of a year of life is instead $300,000. A drug that extends life by two weeks and costs $10,000 would be low-value in the first scenario, but cost-effective in the second.
For example, caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease spend more than $50,000 per year on expenses related to the care they provide. None of that is currently taken into consideration when evaluating a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug. Studies suggest that drugs used to treat illnesses with high caregiver burden are among the most expensive in development.
This is certainly not to say all drugs should be priced higher. Instead, drugs should be priced for the value they provide not only for patients, but also families, communities, and societies. Only a system that more clearly recognizes what constitutes value can stop overpaying for low-value drugs, and start rewarding the use and development of high-value ones.
Quantifying spillover effects in health care is still a nascent endeavor. Yet early results suggest that we should include bonds of love and family to gauge the value of a better, longer life. John Donne’s eternal words, “No man is an island,” are as relevant today in the genomic revolution as they were in the 17th century Scientific Revolution. Men and women are not islands, and as such, are not the exclusive beneficiaries of new treatments. Our intuition seems to recognize this. It’s time our policies do, too.
Dhruv Khullar, MD, is a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Anupam B. Jena, MD, is an economist, physician, and associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School.
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Alexander Hamilton was one of George Washington's trusted advisers during the American Revolution, and the first Secretary of the Treasure of the United States.
Hamilton was born in 1757 in the West Indies, and was orphaned at the age of 11. However, his cleverness showed early, and his employers pooled their money to send him to university. Either that, or they just wanted him out of the building. Hamilton moved to New York in 1773 and began attending King's College (later Columbia University). By 1774, he was writing pro-rebel articles - not really in the spirit of attending somewhere named after the King - and by 1775 he'd joined the volunteer militia. Again... probably not exactly what his sponsors had in mind when they sent him there.
Hamilton fought during the occupation of New York in 1776. He was a natural leader, and George Washington appointed him an aide-de-camp - a job he held for 5 years. However, Hamilton was eager to get back into battle and in 1781 he commanded troops during the decisive victory at Yorktown.
Hamilton became a member of Congress for New York in 1788. He developed a particular fixation on the funding of the Federal Government, which at the time was... well, broke, as it wasn't allowed to demand any taxes from the member states. (While that may sound wonderful when you're looking at your federal tax bill, it meant the government couldn't do thing like pay their army. Soldiers like getting paid.)
In 1787, Hamilton was named the first Secretary of the Treasury, where he fought for a strong federal government (in heated opposition with Thomas Jefferson, who promoted states rights). Hamilton was responsible for creating much of the foundation of the US Fiscal policy, the details of which are probably important, but so indescribably boring I can can barely be bothered even to finish this sentence.
But I did. Because I care.
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Foursquare Gardens - Foursquare garden at Renfrew Museum and Park, Waynesboro<br>
Foursquare garden at Renfrew Museum and Park, Waynesboro
On Sunday, May
22 at 1:30pm the public is invited to Renfrew Institute's celebration of the newly relocated Pennsylvania German Foursquare garden which is located in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania's Renfrew Park. The garden is based on historical eighteenth and nineteenth century foursquare gardens and is used as a "teaching garden" for area school children attending Institute programs. Our readers may ask what is a foursquare garden.
It was a concept in gardening brought over by the colonial Pennsylvania Germans in 1683, but originally was designed by residents of Swiss cloisters and monasteries. The gardens were laid out in multiples of eleven feet with the most common size being fifty-five or sixty-six feet. This was because the length of an eighteenth century fence panel was eleven feet. The surrounding fence in a foursquare garden was composed of two posts, two rails, and pickets which were fifty-two to sixty inches high. The twelve foot rails were made of chestnut which fit into chestnut or locust posts. The flat side of the rail was placed on the outside of the garden. The pickets were of white oak, pine, chestnut, and rarely black walnut split or sawn wood which was nailed at intervals of no more than one and one-half inches.
foursquare garden ephrata cloisters pennsylvania
Foursquare garden at Ephrata Cloisters in Ephrata, Pennsylvania
The foursquare garden contained raised beds of six or seven inches high which were supported by hardwood boards. In the center was a two foot wide path with smaller square raised beds on all four sides. In towns those paths were often paved with large flat stones while in the country the paths were commonly dirt. The raised beds allowed the control of planting the seeds which were essential to the eighteenth century farmer. As our devoted Colonial Sense reader knows, seeds were valuable in colonial America. If a crop failed, it meant going without food for the winter. Seeds were often stored in seed chests. Those seed chests brought unbelievable prices in our feature article of the Pook and Pook Auction in April of this year.
In the plot plans of a country homestead, the four square garden used the benefit of the morning sun by being placed on the southern or eastern slope of the property. Gardens were very close to the house and sometimes placed jut outside the kitchen door for easy access to the garden crops. A lilac bush was commonly placed on the edge of a four square garden.
Foursquare Gardens Picture
In towns and villages, the four square gardens were located at the back door of the house and extended to the barn or alley. There was a center path leading from the back door to the back of the lot. There would be an intersecting path halfway which would divide the garden beds.
The Pennsylvania Germans were meticulous on the planting of crops in the raised beds. There was never any sign of weeds. Annual vegetables grew in straight rows. Flowers could be placed throughout the garden but were commonly at the intersection of where the two paths crossed. There was a small area for herbs which was near the kitchen door. Perennials were relegated to a three-foot-wide perimeter just inside the fence.
In the foursquare garden, the women in the household were the primary gardeners. Whether it was the mother, the daughters, or the hired girl, they were responsible for planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting. The wife determined the time to water and weed, the days for digging and raking, the days of planting, and the days to harvest the crops. She was responsible for two crops a year such as cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet peas, lettuces, spring onions, radishes, carrots, peppers, eggplants, radishes, and melons. Many women painstakingly grew their own seed such as onion sets. The first year's crops was planted to produce seed. The following year the onions were sown in short rows to produce onion sets. After the onions were harvested and dried, they were placed in the ground the final year to grow onion crop. In September a late variety of lettuce was sowed. In winter months for protection the lettuce was covered up by brush and harvested in early spring.
foursquare garden ephrata cloisters pennsylvania
Another scene of the Foursquare garden at the Ephrata Cloisters
Blessed thistle was a herb grown in the foursquare garden which was deemed "holy" and was said to protect the garden. The Indians used thistle as a natural birth control while the European monks used the plant to treat small pox. Sedum which the Pennsylvania Germans called "thunder weed" was planted on the right side of the garden gate and was said to protect the garden and buildings from lightning strikes. In the center of the garden a yucca plant (Our Lord's Sword) or rosemary would be planted. They would not plant artemesia Wormwood and Southernwood (called "Old Man" and "Old Woman") near each other because the two plants would fight each other and not grow.
During the long winter months, the foursquare garden became the storage area for all the vegetables and some fruits that were produced during the summer months. Cabbage was not only used as sauerkraut, but was also kept fresh by pulling the heads from the ground, roots intact, and removing outer and damaged leaves. The cabbage heads and roots were then packed in a half-barrel buried in the garden. The barrel would then be covered with straw and garden soil. The family could served a fresh cabbage dish if the ground would unthaw during a warm spell. Apples, red beets, and turnips were stored in the same manner.
Since food was such an importance in the Pennsylvania German community, exact rules for planting, harvesting, and weeding were followed. The phases of the moon were followed closely. If seeds were planted in the wrong side of the moon less seeds would bloom. It was a good omen to plant flower seeds during the occurrence of a rainbow.
Foursquare Gardens Picture
The seeds used by the Pennsylvania Germans were brought from their homelands. A phrase they liked to use was Gude Sume, Gude Gaarde which translated as good seeds, good garden. colonial settlers also took an interest in new seeds. In a Memorandum Book written by Charles Heinitsch, apothecary of Lancaster, well over a hundred vegetables and herbs were listed. In the spring of 1827, he wrote, "I wanted the flower seeds to accommodate my distant customers, who buy my garden seeds and would then also take with them the flower seeds, as they come but once or twice to town in one season."
Some of the most basic tools that were used in a foursquare garden were a shovel, iron rake, spade, wheelbarrow, dung fork, a broad and tined hoe, and sharp knife or heavy shears. A watering can was essential and hung upside down on every fence.
Annual vegetables were planted in rows running north and south to allow the morning sun to shine on one side and the afternoon sun on the other. Beans and cucumbers were planted in hills, and onions were planted in two-foot-wide rows that were marked with the back of a wooden rake.
Be sure to check out the grand opening celebration of Renfrew Institute's Pennsylvania German foursquare garden. The event will feature garden activities for children, a brief program with ceremonial planting, music, and refreshments. Admission is free.
"As students plant seeds, water, care for and harvest the bounty of the 4-square garden,” said Sherry Hesse, institute director of cultural studies, “they also learn concepts in historic preservation, farmstead culture, folklore, plant biology, natural history, ecology, and environmental awareness."
Foursquare Gardens - Foursquare garden at the Golden Plough Tavern in York, Pennsylvania. Due to all the rain this year, they are slightly behind in planting the garden.
A corps of volunteers is working with institute garden staff members to ready the garden for spring. Leitha Rountree, a retired second grade teacher from South Hamilton Elementary School in Chambersburg, is helping with the work. Rountree accompanied her students to 4-square garden programs over many years.
"I am helping because I believe in their mission here at Renfrew Institute," she said. "Coming to the garden was a wonderful experience for the children."
The garden project was made possible through a grant from the PA Department of Community & Economic Development (DCED) and through the sponsorship of several businesses and individuals: James Rock and GRC Contractors, the late J. Edward Beck, Paul K. and Anna E. Shockey Family Fund, and an anonymous donor. In addition, Rep. Todd Rock and his staff assisted with the DCED grant, and contributions were made by Brian Stum and B & D Lawn and Landscape Inc., John Frantz, Andy Gehr, Matt Gunder, Debbie Pflager, Wayne Martz, David H. Martin, Red Mohn, Chad Otis, and members of the board and staff of Renfrew Institute and Renfrew Museum and Park.
Parking is available in Renfrew’s lower lot off Welty Road. For more information, please call the institute at 717-762-0373 or visit the Renfrew Institute.Source: Text & photos by Bryan Wright
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Open Access
Anticipating the $1,000 genome
Genome Biology20067:112
Published: 27 July 2006
A new generation of DNA-sequencing platforms will become commercially available over the next few years. These instruments will enable re-sequencing of human genomes at a previously unimagined throughput and low cost. Here, I examine why the $1,000 human genome is an important goal for research and clinical diagnostics, and what will be required to achieve it.
In April 2003, 50 years after Watson and Crick first described the chemical structure of DNA [1], the DNA sequence that makes up the human genome was proclaimed "essentially complete" [2]. Following on from this, in October 2005, the project of the HapMap consortium to identify the locations of one million common single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the context of this reference human genome sequence were completed [3]. Accomplishing these two genomic milestones required the development, testing and implementation of technology platforms that could produce data at previously unprecedented throughputs, as well as of the bioinformatics tools and computational capabilities to analyze the resulting data and to interpret it in meaningful ways. It is this critical interplay of technology and bioinformatics that will usher in the next era of genome sequencing technology, commonly referred to as 'the $1,000 genome' on the basis of its targeted price per genome in US dollars; today, we find ourselves poised at the brink of this era. In this paradigm, the cost of determining an individual genome sequence would fall to a price of around $1,000, placing it firmly in the realm of advanced clinical diagnostic tests. As a result, determining a person's genome sequence might ultimately become an important first step upon entering a health insurance network or a health care provider's practice, akin to determining their height, weight and blood type, for example.
Why aim for a $1,000 genome?
Given this paradigm, one might ask why a $1,000 genome is an important or necessary goal to achieve. Fundamentally, even with the significant achievements of the HapMap Project [3], we have little context for comprehending the breadth of human genomic diversity, encompassing all types of variation beyond common single-nucleotide variants. Capturing this range of diversity, at the current cost of around $10-20 million per genome sequence, places it firmly outside the bounds of fiscal reality. Yet without this 'baseline', genome scientists and statisticians lack a contextual framework within which to evaluate the genome-characterization projects that are presently under consideration. Some such projects are described here.
As recently outlined by Hartwell and Lander [4], the comprehensive characterization of all differences in DNA sequence and chromosome organization between cancer genomes and their corresponding normal genomes should have a significant impact on our understanding of the spectrum of genomic alterations that underlie malignancy. Similar projects are currently being championed by the National Human Genome Research Institute [5] to provide sequencing and analysis of focused regions in the genomes of individuals with mapped, uncloned, autosomal Mendelian disorders, X-linked disorders and specific common diseases. These and similar projects require a comprehensive combination of focused genome re-sequencing that targets specific 'suspect' genes, a characterization of chromosomal amplifications and/or deletions, comprehensive gene-expression profiling, and karyotyping, when possible. Taken together, this broad-brush approach will potentially further our understanding of a particular disease, with genome- and transcriptome-level characterizations that identify the shared somatic changes associated with the phenotype.
Projects such as these are 'discovery' efforts: they aim to characterize a relatively small (typically not statistically significant) number of affected individuals or samples, first evaluating genome alterations for each individual and then establishing shared, statistically significant somatic alterations for the group. A subsequent phase would follow these discovery efforts that would aim to evaluate the genome alterations ascertained from the smaller group in thousands of similar samples, using high-throughput, inexpensive assays that can provide the necessary statistical power to establish (or refute) the contribution of each mutation. Ultimately, this approach will yield genome-wide sequence-based biomarkers; the mutations, copy-number changes, rearrangements and other alterations that are diagnostic for the disease in question. With knowledge of these biomarkers in hand, the availability of rapid and inexpensive human genome re-sequencing (so-called as the reference sequence is already known) heralds an era in which re-sequencing becomes a clinical diagnostic or prognostic tool.
The technologies currently available
Placing the task of developing a $1,000 genome technology in context requires a quick overview of the current state of the art in genome re-sequencing technology. There are already several commercial platforms that can evaluate known human SNPs in a rapid and massively parallel manner, including those offered by Illumina [6] and Affymetrix [7]. These technologies predominately use DNA:DNA hybridization and are ideal for genotyping known SNPs and identifying copy-number differences, but are unsuitable for discovery of novel SNPs or other polymorphisms (insertions or deletions - 'indels' - or rearrangements). For novel polymorphisms, DNA sequencing of products obtained by PCR from genomic DNAs, using primers designed to match selected regions of the reference human genome, represents the best technology to date. A PCR-based re-sequencing approach has limitations but has been implemented by brute force for several large-scale projects [813].
In many ways, this situation is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of large-scale genome sequencing, in that many of the components for automation, methodology and bioinformatics are, in my opinion, being developed in a 'just-in-time' fashion. We should hope, however, to be saved from this path because PCR-based re-sequencing of the human genome is ultimately limited by several factors. Selecting unique primers for every region of interest in the human genome is frankly not possible, because of SNPs and/or repetitive content that reduce the stability of primer-annealing sites near exons, and because of gene families and pseudogenic regions. Even when unique primers can be designed, data-quality issues frequently arise in PCR and/or sequencing as a result of structural features (high GC content or homopolymer and dinucleotide runs). Furthermore, the overall cost of PCR-based re-sequencing is about 2.5 times that of clone-based sequencing, primarily because of the expense of PCR compared with high-throughput sub-clone isolation. This cost, coupled with a higher inherent failure rate for PCR from genomic DNA templates, further increases re-sequencing costs and timelines, as either more patients must be sequenced to achieve mutation discovery across samples, or additional attempts at PCR and sequencing of fewer samples must be successfully completed to obtain the necessary data.
The technology needed to reduce the cost of genome sequencing
What, then, are the general features of a technology platform that can overcome the inherent limitations of our PCR-based re-sequencing paradigm and deliver a genome for significantly less cost and within a much faster time frame than at present? We can examine a generic de novo sequencing pipeline for clues (Figure 1a). One of the least automated and most error-prone steps at present is preparation of genomic subclone libraries. An ideal re-sequencing platform would therefore remove the sub-cloning step and sequence directly from a relatively small input quantity (several micrograms, for example) of genomic DNA. A side benefit of skipping conventional sub-cloning is that cloning bias, which can skew representation of a genome, is avoided (which is not to say that other types of bias might not be introduced). Another significant benefit is that subsequent clone-specific steps, such as picking clones from agar plates, isolation of individual subclone DNAs and sequencing reactions in microtiter plates, are eliminated along with much of the automation required to perform them. Contrast the more complex workflow in Figure 1a to a generic massively parallel instrument workflow in Figure 1b, for example.
Figure 1
Comparison of conventional and massively parallel sequence pipelines. Both pipelines begin with a DNA fragmentation step. (a) The steps in a conventional genome-sequencing pipeline, most of which require dedicated automation and processing in a 384-well format. DNA fragments are subcloned into bacterial vectors and introduced into bacterial cells to prepare a library covering the whole genome. The transformed cells containing subclones are plated and grown and then harvested by robotic picking, and the DNA from each one is isolated and sequenced. The sequence is visualized by loading onto a capillary sequencing instrument. (b) The steps in a generic massively parallel genome-sequencing pipeline. Genomic DNA fragments first undergo end repair to provide blunt ends for adaptor ligation and then have specific adaptors ligated to their ends that contain priming sites for PCR and sequencing. The adaptor-ligated fragments are then hybridized to complementary adaptors that are fixed to a surface (a slide or bead), and then in situ PCR amplification is used instead of bacterial amplification in vivo. Sequencing reactions of the surface-amplified fragments take place on the surface. The sequence is visualized using either luciferase (pyrosequencing) or fluorescence reporting that is detected by a CCD camera.
Massively parallel data production in a single duty cycle of an instrument is another critical component for success, and the amount of data required to be produced depends solely on the size of the genome. Currently, a capillary sequencing instrument produces around 1.35 megabases (Mb) of sequence per 24-hour duty cycle (20 × 96 samples daily at an average read length of 700 bases), which means that about 4,500 duty cycles are needed to produce the raw base equivalent of a diploid human genome (I estimate roughly 12 years). By contrast, each '$1,000 genome' instrument should require about a month per diploid genome of raw data, in order to provide a suitable 'discovery' research platform (more realistically 1-5 days per genome would be required, once whole-genome re-sequencing moves into the clinical laboratory).
Specifications for the accuracy of base-calling, the length of sequence reads and the ability to produce sequence from the paired ends of each DNA fragment are equally critical. For re-sequencing, unequivocal placement of a read pair onto the reference genome and determining whether the fragment ends, so aligned, encompass a region of 'difference' (for example a mutation, indel, rearrangement, translocation, or other difference) relative to the reference are pivotal requirements. Alignment and determination of differences in read pair placements are directly affected by the accuracy of base-calling, by read length, and by the capability to obtain sequence from both ends of a genomic fragment. Maximizing read length and obtaining paired end reads could ideally converge to provide long reads across an entire fragment (and, by inference, to provide haplotype information); but even so, the accuracy of base-calling would determine the efficiency of re-sequencing (including the required coverage of the genome needed), which directly determines its cost. Base-calling accuracy is influenced by the reaction chemistry and by the algorithms developed to extract base-calls from raw data, among other factors. In addition to these considerations, it is also necessary to consider the ability of reaction chemistry and reaction conditions to overcome any secondary-structure effects in the templates that might truncate reads and affect coverage.
Current massively parallel sequencing technologies
So, are we anywhere near this lofty goal of the $1,000 genome? At present, the short answer is in fact 'no'. Given the level of interest in the goal, however, a significant amount of activity and several innovative, interdisciplinary technologies are now being pursued. I do not aim to describe these new technologies in detail here; a recent review [14] analyzes many of them comprehensively and comparatively. Of such technologies, only one massively parallel sequencing instrument, the GS-20 from 454 Life Sciences has so far achieved commercial availability [15]. This instrument uses pyrosequencing (the enzymatic sequencing method that reports nucleotide incorporations using the reporter firefly luciferase [1618]), of genomic fragments that have been captured and amplified on agarose beads to produce up to 20 Mb of sequencing data (in 100 base-pair read lengths) per 4 hour instrument run.
At its present base-calling accuracy, read length and cost per run, a human genome cannot be sequenced for even $100,000 using the 454 instrument, but it nevertheless represents an important first step toward the $1,000 genome goal. Realistically, the 454 platform will continue to improve, providing longer read lengths and higher base-calling accuracy, and the commercial pressures of other massively parallel instruments will drive down the costs per run. The imminent entry of another massively parallel platform from Solexa Ltd, due this summer (2006), will help to fuel this trend [14]. Others will follow in the ensuing months and years. It is therefore conceivable that we are quite close (within 1-2 years) to having instruments suitable for the research laboratories that will provide the 'discovery' setting described earlier.
The challenges of having so much data
If, for the sake of argument, we assume that novel, massively parallel platforms will be developed and implemented to rapidly and inexpensively re-sequence human genomes, there are related concerns to point out. Namely, are the challenges posed by the enormous data-generation capabilities and by the analysis of these data also being anticipated? The tracking, storage and submission of the data from such platforms will certainly pose significant challenges, even for large sequencing centers. Similarly, intelligent algorithms that use computing resources efficiently must be developed for aligning and mapping re-sequencing data onto the reference genome, evaluating the aligned sequences for mutations, indels, rearrangements, and so on, and reporting genome-wide alterations in an annotated and organized fashion. Most challenging of all, it will be of critical importance to develop meta-analyses and statistical analysis tools that integrate across disparate data types, such as whole-genome re-sequencing data, gene-expression data, copy-number alterations, biochemical pathway information, clinical parameters (age, sex, diagnosis and treatment), outcomes, and so on, and thereby enable researchers to collectively interpret these data for all samples in a study and to form testable hypotheses from this discovery phase. These bioinformatic challenges may well be as daunting as the development of the instruments themselves, and ultimately they will determine whether, once ready, the instruments can be utilized immediately and effectively.
Incorporating the new and ever-increasing functional knowledge of the non-genic portions of the genome, which often comes from incongruent sources, into meta-data analyses will also determine whether we can make sense of sequence changes that are found outside exons and known regulatory regions. After all, the primary reason that current PCR-based re-sequencing approaches typically focus on exons is that the impact of a sequence change on an encoded protein can be readily deciphered. Follow-on functional studies of the altered protein can characterize the impact of a mutation on function, can suggest other pathway-related effects of the mutation, and ultimately may identify treatments to counteract the mutation. It is at this interface - where genome-scale sequence information and its consequences begin to have an impact on clinical practice, directing treatment, indicating genetic predisposition to disease and predicting outcomes - that applications of the $1,000 genome concept in a clinical context begin to take shape. But first, much of the aforementioned discovery phase has to take place. Without this, the contextual framework for understanding an altered genome is not there.
Finally, once these discovery phases are completed for specific diseases, confirmed in thousands of affected individuals and subjected to the rigor of approved clinical tests, they must enter into the collective practice of medicine. Given that this paradigm shift will require changes both in medical education and in acceptance by health insurance providers and ethicists [19], we have a long way to go. Even if we can never comprehensively interpret the entirety of each re-sequenced genome, the efforts under way to revolutionize DNA sequencing, and to dramatically decrease its cost so that multitudes of human genomes can be sequenced for discovery and ultimately for clinical means, are well worth it. Simply put, having this capability not only facilitates our efforts to understand the genomic basis of disease, but also opens our minds to questions not yet imagined.
Authors’ Affiliations
Genome Sequencing Center, Washington University School of Medicine
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© BioMed Central Ltd 2006 |
President Lyndon Johnson could have been a character in a Greek tragedy. His accomplishments were immense. He twisted enough arms to win the Civil Rights Act, despite recalcitrant fellow Southern Democrats and the knowledge that he was sacrificing the South as a source of Democratic votes for at least a generation. He outlined and won passage of the War on Poverty, perhaps the most significant social justice legislation in our history. He signed into law bills establishing national wilderness areas and parks and other environmental protections.
But Johnson’s hubris, the pride that precedes a fall in Greek morality plays, led him to escalate rather than resolve a war in Vietnam passed on to him by his predecessor John Kennedy. The war served Johnson badly; he used the deception of unproven North Vietnamese attacks on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin to persuade Congress to give him unprecedented war-making powers. In time, his escalated war would cost 57,000 American lives and 2 million Vietnamese.
In time also, war protestors who were willing to go “Part of the way with LBJ,” when he ran against Barry Goldwater, were asking, “How many kids did you kill today?” The war’s unpopularity brought Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy into the 1968 primaries against him. On March 31, looking wan and defeated, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. Five years later, he was dead at 64, either despised or forgotten, a sad and lonely man.
His daughter, Luci Baines Johnson, believes it unfair to judge her father by the war alone; it was never what he wanted, she argues. What he did want, and wanted to be remembered for, was what he called “The Great Society,” a vision of an America not more powerful or richer than others, but transformed to value things other than wealth and power. He laid out his vision in a remarkable speech delivered 50 years ago on May 22, 1964 to graduates at the University of Michigan.
A unique perspective for an American president
Though Johnson was no silver-tongued orator like President Obama, his words, crafted by speechwriter Richard Goodwin, rang with inspiration and wisdom. And though he didn’t write the speech, there can be no doubt that Johnson shared Goodwin’s values; a man like Johnson would never let another person put words that he disagreed with into his mouth.
The speech was arguably the greatest ever delivered by a modern American president. It was a different take on American exceptionalism, exceptionally different from what America has actually become. Its gender-biased language is dated, but its message is far more advanced than our current dialogue.
Indeed, no president would dare speak Johnson’s words today for fear of being labeled unpatriotic or un-American. The speech was a call to redefine the American dream. We should not let its 50th anniversary pass without recalling it and recommitting ourselves to its goals. It contains a perspective on American life never articulated by any American president before or since then.
Reaching back to Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, Johnson reminded his audience that wealth, power, economic growth, or military superiority should not be our goals.
He suggested that we already had enough wealth; greater labors of Sisyphus were no longer necessary. It was time to elevate quality above quantity.
Growth trumps quality
Today, instead of quality of life, politicians speak of “growth” as if it is the answer to all problems, an economic good without negative externalities. In the debates of 1996, vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp declared in a debate with opponent Al Gore that the GOP would “grow the economy” twice as fast as the Democrats could. Gore, the proclaimed environmentalist, never questioned whether such rapid growth would be a good idea given the limits of the biosphere.
President Obama and liberal economists like Paul Krugman pay as much homage to the god of growth as Republicans do. But 50 years ago, when America was far less wealthy, Lyndon Johnson had no problem going where Gore and Obama would not.
Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth … Worst of all expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.
Johnson thought we ought to be indignant about unbridled growth. How far we have come since then in forgetting the wisdom in his words!
Johnson was clear that the War on Poverty, which he had launched that January, and the Civil Rights Act, which he was just then muscling through Congress, were priorities, but, by themselves, they were not his ultimate goal.
Honoring leisure time
Our modern presidents deify endless work. They are obsessed with incentives to labor and compete, but seem totally unconcerned that leisure too can be time well spent. The Jack they idolize is “all work and no play.” He may be dull but he is productive and successful, whatever those words have now come to mean.
Johnson thought differently. The time had already come, he noted, to honor free time. He knew then that you cannot talk about building social connection when people have no time for each other. He knew that the good life is not about being constantly busy in a rat race to nowhere.
Today, the “demands of commerce” reign supreme. You cannot propose anything in our modern legislatures without first asking if it would be good for business above all other priorities.
Johnson was also one of a handful of American presidents who truly made the environment a priority. Modern happiness research has shown clearly how important access to the natural world is for both happiness and health. Hospitals are even being built with every window looking on natural greenery because people heal faster in such rooms. Johnson did not have the benefit of such research but he understood nature’s value.
[The Great Society] is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake … We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful. Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution. Our parks are over-crowded, our seashores overburdened. Green fields and dense forests are disappearing.
A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the “Ugly American.” Today we must act to prevent an ugly America. For once the battle is lost, once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
Who cares about meaning anymore?
Johnson would have abhorred the way we dishonor creation day after day, turning the lush hills of Appalachia into flattened terraces of rubble to strip the coal from their bowels or filling the oceans with plastic detritus that leaves albatrosses choking and dying 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. He continued:
[The Great Society] is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods … It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
In Johnson’s day, the meaning of our lives meant something. The great majority of college students then, when asked by pollsters, did not feel it necessary to become rich. They wanted work where they could make a difference instead of work where they could make a killing. Today, the polls tell a different story. Indeed, we drive our children like cattle to get the highest grades to get into the most prestigious schools to get the best jobs—defined not by meaning but by market value—and “compete in the global economy.”
On that spring day 50 years ago, Johnson asked the students of Michigan to want more from life. He tried to inspire them to demand more than the greed we hold out to them as the meaning of life today.
Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty? Will you join in the battle to make it possible for all nations to live in enduring peace — as neighbors and not as mortal enemies?
A new American Dream
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson chose not to believe that Americans were condemned to “soulless wealth.” He elucidated a new dream valuing quality of life above quantity of stuff. That he was a flawed man does not make his observations any less true. Looking back on his words at the University of Michigan, we see how far we have not come and how far we still must travel.
Luci Baines Johnson is right. For all his faults, and despite the debacle of Vietnam, her father’s legacy deserves reconsideration. But sadly, the good that he did and the dream he shared in his Great Society speech are in danger of being buried with his bones, the latter by the unbridled growth he warned us of.
In our pursuit of growth and greed we have allowed poverty levels in America to creep back toward where they were before his War on Poverty reduced them appreciably. We have allowed inequality to soar to its highest levels ever.
We have allowed the destruction of beauty and nature. We have built an ugly America enslaved to the demands of commerce, where strip malls and billboards line our highways and blight our vistas, and everything we see is flooded with commercial appeals.
We have sacrificed the leisure Aristotle thought essential to the good life to pointless busyness, impatience, time stress, and boredom, perpetually seeking the newest gadget or virtual connection that might drive lack of meaning from our minds.
Moreover, the competition that greed entails has brought back with a vengeance the scourge of racism, hidden by code words until a redneck rancher like Cliven Bundy attempts to rehabilitate slavery, exposing still festering wounds.
The Great Society remains that gleaming city on the hill that cannot be reached without a new American Dream, a different kind of society and a different kind of human being. Yet it is still there, it is still achievable, and it still beckons.
Copyright, Reprinted with permission. |
Deforestation Rates: A Rising Danger
Deforestation Rates: A Rising Danger Satellite studies have revealed that deforestation rates are up by 62%. Even though the Food and Agriculture Organisation stated they were decreasing, it has begun to be evident that deforestation is having mass effects on the environment. This has a big impact on the changing climate, with deforestation ascending this means that carbon dioxide in the air is declining which will cause devastating effects on the earths wellbeing.
Kingston Lacy: Snowdrops, hedges and ironwork
The Gift of Precious Sparkle |
Title: Guidance on Reporting
Publisher: GTOS GOLFC-GOLD Project Office, Natural Resources Canada
Publication Year: 2008
JRC N°: JRC50092
URI: http://www.gofc-gold.uni-jena.de/redd/index.php
Type: Articles in periodicals and books
Abstract: The chapter gives an overview of the current reporting requirements under UNFCCC, including the general underlying principles. The typical structure of a GHG inventory is illustrated, including an example table for reporting C stock changes from deforestation. The chapter outlines the major challenges that developing countries will likely encounter when implementing the reporting principles, elaborates concepts already agreed upon in a UNFCCC context and describes how a conservative approach may help to overcome some of the difficulties described.
JRC Institute:Sustainable Resources
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The cooperative view: New evidence suggests a symbiogenetic origin for the centrosome
MBL, WOODS HOLE, MA There are two ways in which cooperation is the theme of a paper published this week by Mark Alliegro and Mary Anne Alliegro, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratorys (MBL) Josephine Bay Paul Center.
One is revealed in the papers acknowledgements, where the Alliegros thank those who helped them after Hurricane Katrina completely disrupted their laboratory at Louisiana State University (LSU) in New Orleans and their lives in 2005.
The second is the papers scientific theme: the origin of the centrosome, a component of animal cells that functions in cell division. In their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Alliegros give evidence that the centrosome evolved through symbiogenesis in which previously independent organisms fuse, become mutually dependent, and over time, become a single composite organism rather than by the evolutionary process of random, heritable mutations and natural selection.
The Alliegros moved to the MBL permanently in September 2007, after two years of attempting to forge on in a devastated New Orleans. We realized, if we stayed there, our research program would not survive, says Mark Alliegro, who was a professor at LSU Health Sciences Center.
The origin of the centrosome, their paper points out, has been controversial for many years. The theory of symbiogenesis as a mechanism of evolution has also stirred debate since it was introduced in the 1920s and subsequently elaborated in the 1960s by Lynn Margulis of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Today, only two cellular components the mitochondria and the chloroplasts are generally accepted by evolutionary biologists as having a symbiogenetic origin. The Alliegros paper suggests that centrosomes are another likely candidate.
They base their argument on evidence that the centrosomes, which they obtained from the eggs of the surf clam Spisula, contain RNA that is likely a remnant of a once-independent, simpler genome that was incorporated by symbiosis.
Most animal genes have introns, regions that are transcribed into RNA but then spliced out, says Alliegro. But if you look at viral genes or bacterial genes, they have little or no introns. It turns out the genes for Spisula centrosomal RNAs have few or no introns. They are a special set of RNAs that derived from intron-poor or intron-less genes, which may very well support the idea that they come from a simpler organism, like a virus or bacteria.
The Alliegros lost their RNA library due to Katrina, and in their paper they acknowledge Gloria Giarratano of LSU Health Sciences Center, who helped them re-clone the library from DNA they recovered in the hurricanes aftermath. They also thank Bruce and Sharon Waddell of Slidell, Louisiana, in whose home they lived after Katrina, and where our laboratory was resurrected in part from the dining room table; as well as Carol Burdsal and other colleagues at Tulane University, where they temporarily set up a new lab. Robert Palazzo of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a longtime visiting investigator at the MBL, is acknowledged for providing the centrosome preparation for the original RNA extractions as well as advice and encouragement. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health as well as post-Katrina emergency recovery funds from the Society for Developmental Biology.
Contact: Diana Kenney
Marine Biological Laboratory
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Basic Body System Terms Used in Medical Coding/Billing
Each vocation has its own specific terms which are widely used and medical coders and billers are no exception. A body system is a group of organs that perform a specific task. For example, the nervous system includes the brain, the spinal cord, and the nerves.
Information about body systems matters to you because coding books are structured according to the body systems. The books that you’ll use are known as CPT books, which, for the most part, contain all the procedural codes you can bill.
These books contain the procedures as defined by the American Medical Association (AMA), and they’re updated each year; some codes are added, and some are deleted. The new codes usually become effective on January 1. So make sure that you always use the most current edition!
Here is listed the major body systems you’ll likely encounter on the job (and in your CPT books in the section devoted to that system).
System Organs Involved
Cardiovascular Blood vessels, heart, and lymph system
Digestive Structures inside the mouth, stomach, and colon, all the way
down to the rectum
Endocrine Thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands
Eye and ocular adnexa and auditory Eyes and ears
Female genital (see note) Ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and external genitalia
Integument Skin and nails
Male genital (see note) Penis, prostate, testes
Musculoskeletal Connective tissue, muscles, ligaments, and bones
Nervous Brain, spinal cord, and nerves
Respiratory Airway and lungs
Urinary (see note) Kidneys, bladder, ureters, and urethra
In some reference books, the male and female genital systems are combined with the urinary system and referred to as the genito-urinary system.
After you identify the correct system code from the CPT, your next step is to find the supporting diagnosis codes for the procedures. You can find these in the ICD-9 book (International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Edition). Lucky for you, the ICD-9 book also categorizes diagnosis codes by body system (in addition to other sections that contain codes for illness and other non-specific codes).
In October 2014, the United States will start reporting disease and injury using ICD-10 codes.
After you’re familiar with the basic body systems, it’s time to think about what can go wrong with them. When a system is not functioning properly, an illness or disease process is at work. |
The Big Question: Is the breeding of pedigree dogs leading to cruel abnormalities?
Why are we asking this now?
It's long been known that pedigree dogs are more likely to suffer from health problems than their mongrel brethren. But a study by scientists at Imperial College, which featured in a BBC1 documentary last night, has revealed just how severe those problems are.
What does the study say?
In a nutshell, that pedigree dogs are much more heavily inbred than had previously been demonstrated, and that that inbreeding causes serious birth defects and abnormalities that can make the animals' lives a misery.
How seriousis the problem?
That depends on the nature of the abnormality: for some breeds, though, their breeding can have appalling consequences. Perhaps the most startling ailment is that suffered by a third of cavalier King Charles spaniels, syringomyelia, which is the result of their brains being too large for their skulls. "The cavalier's brain is like a size ten foot that has been shoved into a size six shoe," says veterinary neurologist Clare Rusbridge. "It is described in humans as one of the most painful conditions you can have, a piston-type headache... If you took a stick and beat a dog to create that pain, you'd be prosecuted. But there's nothing to stop you breeding a dog with it."
Many other breeds suffer similar problems: golden retrievers are prone to cancer, while boxers often suffer from heart disease and epilepsy. The Kennel Club claims that 90 per cent of the British canine population is healthy, and that these kinds of genetic diseases are actually more common in humans than dogs. But there are concerns that the problem will get worse, as an increasingly concentrated gene pool makes the abnormalities even more likely to be passed on.
Some are concerned that dog breeders show little regard for the health of their charges. "I defy anybody to say that they would approve of brother-sister mating or father-daughter mating [in humans]," says geneticist Steve Jones. "And yet if you speak to dog breeders, father-daughter or father-granddaughter mating is common. They must know that this is going to cause problems."
Why are the dogs inbred?
The whole point of the pedigree designation is that it applies to animals which have not had their breed's natural characteristics diluted by cross-breeding with another. The Kennel Club maintains strict pedigree standards that competition dogs are compared to, and, for obvious reasons, breeding close relatives makes it easier to keep dogs close to that template – and helps encourage features that go down well with judges at shows like Crufts. The role Crufts and other competitions have played in encouraging dog breeders to mate close relatives has led the BBC to consider whether it will continue broadcasting the show. "When I watch Crufts, what I see is a parade of mutants," says Mark Evans, chief vet of the RSPCA. "It's some freakish, garish, beauty pageant that frankly has nothing to do with health and welfare."
What other problems do the pedigree standards cause?
As well as the genetic defects like heart disease and epilepsy, the exaggeration of prize-winning features can cause health problems in themselves. These features are often not natural to the breed, but have been exacerbated by years of selective breeding between two dogs that share the same strong characteristics.
The folds of flesh on a bassett hound's legs cause skin complaints; flat-faced pugs have difficulty breathing; prize bulldogs are so oddly proportioned that they often find it impossible to mate or give birth without help.
How long has this been a problem?
The problems began in the 19th century, when dog fanciers began to set down particular physical features that were deemed to be ideal for the breed in question.
In 1864, for instance, Birmingham breeder Jacob Lamphier created the 'Philo-Kuon' standard for bulldogs, decreeing it essential that a bulldog have a deep furrow between its eyes, a recessed nose, and a short, thick neck. Before then, dogs had simply been bred with their practical uses in mind, meaning that their physical capacities were more important than their aesthetic appeal; now, inbreeding is so ubiquitous that the Imperial College researchers estimate the UK's boxer dog population of 20,000 to have the variety of genetic material you would expect to find naturally in a population of about 70.
The Kennel Club, which now governs the pedigree standards in the UK, has been roundly criticised for failing to do enough to solve the problem.
Why is the Kennel Club under fire?
Critics argue that it has not done enough to change the way pedigree dogs are bred. It is against club rules to cross-breed a pedigree dog with a different variety, which makes it hard to see how the gene pool can diversify.
And while many other national kennel clubs have changed their rules to bar incestuous breeding in the face of mounting concerns over the health ramifications, it is still perfectly legitimate in the UK.
In its defence, the club says that inbreeding is an essential tool for the development of breeds. And it points out that it amended pedigree standards 20 years ago to discourage breeders from placing a dog's aesthetic appeal above its health.
In theory, too, unhealthy dogs should not be able to win prizes at dog shows, although many are sceptical about the practical application of that principle. "We recognise the problem," says Club secretary Caroline Kisko. "But it is far less common than it ever was in the past... We are the ones that are trying to put things right."
So how can the problems be solved?
The Imperial college researchers suggest three crucial changes. Since successful competition dogs are likely to be particularly popular breeding stock and will therefore concentrate the gene pool still further, they argue that there should be a limit on how many times any one dog can father a litter.
To combat the problems that arise from a severely limited pool of available animals, they suggest encouraging owners to mate their dogs with animals from abroad. And they say that the breed rules should be relaxed to allow animals to breed outside of their pedigree.
Failing to take such actions may exacerbate the health problems suffered by purebred dogs. "If dog breeders insist on going further down that road," Steve Jones says, "I can say with confidence that there is a universe of suffering waiting for many of these breeds."
Should we be ashamed to watch Crufts?
* It has been known for years that the in-breeding of dogs causes health problems
* Even without scientific evidence, some of the health problems of are obvious
* The dogs have no say in whether they want to be shown, so it's cruel if they're sick
* The scientific evidence is new, and the Kennel Club has promised to consider it
* Ninety per cent of the dogs are said to be healthy – a higher proportion than in humans
* We allow human beauty pageants even though size zero is proven to be unhealthy |
CARP2106 – Footings & Foundations pdf
Credits: 2 (1/1/0)
Description: This course prepares the student with the knowledge and skills necessary to complete site layout, footings and foundations for residential construction.
Prerequisites: (None)
Corequisites: (None)
1. Identify site layout.
2. Build form footings.
3. Layout wall forms.
4. Discuss different types of wood, metal and insulated concrete forms.
5. Install rebar.
6. Discuss concrete preparation and applicable uses.
7. Demonstrate safe use of hand and power tools.
8. Demonstrate use of lazers, transit and levels.
9. Estimate materials for excavation and concrete.
MnTC goal areas: (N/A)
« back to course outlines |
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Poverty and hunger in the UK
Oxfam's 'Below the Breadline' report, compiled in conjunction with Church Action on Poverty, the Trussell Trust, and including figures from food redistribution charity FareShare, reveals a scandalous situation in Britain in 2014.
Today, Britain is a country where one in five people live below the poverty line and life expectancy in some areas is lower than in some developing countries. Yet the rich keep getting richer opening up a massive inequality gap. In fact, the UK is on course to become one of the most unequal countries in the industrialised world.
Listen: Why Oxfam campaigns on
food poverty in the UK
"When I get paid I can eat for the first two weeks. And then I'm out of money - I go to my neighbour." Patricia, East London.
People can't earn enough to live on
Another fallout from the 'perfect storm' that many people face every day - rising prices, unfair working conditions, benefit cuts, reduced buying power - is that a growing number of families are facing food poverty.
It seems unbelievable in the 21st century that in the UK - the world's seventh wealthiest nation - people are going hungry. Increasing numbers of people are being forced to use food banks in order to feed their families.
Read the 'Below the Breadline' report
"We don't get to eat real food like fruit and vegetables. We only have proper food once a month now." Tracy, mother of one daughter, Essex.
The rise of food banks
The number of food bank parcels given to people grew by 54 per cent in the 12 months to April 2014.
The ongoing cuts have frayed the already tenuous social safety net for many people, and proposed legislation ending support for local assistance schemes to be introduced next year, will push even more people into debt and poverty.
We need politicians from all parties to address the issues and work to end this growing inequality and the resulting hunger and hardship it means for millions of ordinary people.
What we're calling for
We want:
• the government to fulfill its fundamental duty to provide a social security system that acts as a safety net for vulnerable people instead of forcing them into food poverty.
• government to commission independent research into the use of food banks and use the findings to tackle the issues.
• all political parties to address food poverty in the UK and commit to increasing the National Minimum Wage to the Living Wage by 2020.
• the government to FULLY review the use of zero-hours contracts and social security sanctions in view of their impact on hardship and hunger. |
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Narrator: On April 5, 1911, 400,000 people lined the rain-drenched sidewalks of New York as an empty, horse-drawn hearse crept from the dank, narrow streets of the Lower East Side toward the skyscrapers towering over Madison Square. New Yorkers from all walks of life had come to pay tribute to the unidentified victims of the Triangle fire: the deadliest workplace accident in the city's history. A few weeks earlier, the workers had been forgotten cogs in America's immense industrial machine; now, one in 10 New Yorkers were there to claim them as their own.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: Public conscience thought they had failed these young women. They had somehow not protected them.
David Von Drehle, Writer, Writer: There was a recognition: wait these girls can't die in vain. That was said over and over and over again as if the city had somehow turned it's back on them.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: If there weren't massive funerals, it would have been very easy for the city and the city officials to say, "Well, this is just, it's sort of a natural disaster. It's a terrible thing, but there's nothing anyone can do about it. "
Annelise Orleck, Historian: If you ask the average American, "Is it okay for workers to work in a shop where the conditions are so dangerous that it could cost them their lives and not have government intervene," most people would say, "No. There's a line." The Triangle Fire drew that line. It burned that line, really, into the nation's conscience.
Narrator: Every morning -- six days a week -- more than 100,000 people poured out onto the streets of the Lower East Side, headed toward another day's work in the city's garment factories. Many were young women in their teens, some were girls as young as 10. They were immigrants, Italians who had fled natural disaster, Jews who had escaped persecution in Russia, Ukraine, Poland. Their families had chosen America for its promise of a better future. But even the youngest daughters had come to understand that their precarious hold on the American dream depended on their willingness to work.
Woman 1 (Meredith Anne Bull): Father had to take me to the shop and not be late for his own work. I was eager to begin life on my own responsibility but was also afraid. "Don't look so frightened," he said.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: These young girls weren't just earning money for their own clothes or to, you know, go out to a dance hall or to Coney Island. They were earning money to support the family.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: Economic security was the American dream for many of them. Making enough money to be able to put food on the table, not worry about making rent for the week.
Narrator: As the throng disappeared into sweatshops in tenement apartments, several hundred workers veered off toward the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, in the heart of Greenwich Village.
At the base of the Asch Building, men and women stepped into wooden freight elevators, to ascend to the Triangle factory on the eighth and ninth floors. Workers like Michela Marciano, who managed to send a few dollars to her family in Italy every month, or Julia Rosen whose 17-year-old son worked alongside her to help support three younger children, or Catherine Maltese whose 13-year-old daughter wasn't too young to join her on the factory floor.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Getting a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a pretty desired position because they were working in a much more modern factory environment. High ceilings, big windows. Compared to the coal-stove heated, dusty, hugely crowded sweatshop rooms, Triangle was a plum.
Narrator: But even at the Triangle, sewing machine operators faced a 14-hour workday for $2 a day at most. And that was before bosses docked their pay for the needles, the thread, the electricity they used.
Gussie Schneier (Daniella Rabbani): Sometimes you work at a big machine and it's not working right. One of the needles skips and you get blamed for mistakes.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): The same machines, the same surroundings. Shirtwaists, Shirtwaists, and more shirtwaists.
Narrator: On the 10th floor, the Triangle owners could feel their vast machine shuddering below. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had made Triangle a million-dollar-a-year behemoth, mass-producing the garment every modern woman must have: the shirtwaist. Harris and Blanck were known as The Shirtwaist Kings, but their empire, as they saw it, was under constant siege. After 20 years, the shirtwaist was getting stale. Fashion editors began to showcase colorful dresses for the modern woman and turned up their noses at the bourgeois waist. No matter how much silk embroidery Harris added to their designs, the Triangle's sales charts sloped down. Material and shipping costs seemed always to be rising.
Profit margins matched this year's fashion: "teasingly sheer."
David Von Drehle, Writer: For Max and Isaac there was this constant awareness that they were -- as successful and as rich as they were -- they were one bad season away from being broke. The competition was enormously fierce: 500 blouse-makers on the island of Manhattan alone.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: While they're getting the orders from the department stores, there's some small shop a half a mile away that's willing to beat them by half. So it's all about continuous production to get as much cloth turned into a product as possible, at the lowest possible price.
Narrator: That summer there was a growing new threat. All over the city, garment workers were agitating for shorter hours, better pay, safer shops, unions.
Harris and Blanck saw it in the papers every day and on the streets below. Workers were walking off the job by the tens, scores, hundreds. The partners even suspected talk of union on their own shop floor.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: Unionization was the single largest fear for most of these employers. They were terrified that unions would come in because that would diminish their authority over the work place.
Narrator: The right to control their own factory was an article of faith for Harris and Blanck -- as for hundreds of business owners just like them. The Triangle partners were in a bracing, daily battle for economic survival. And they meant to control all they could.
Speed mattered more than ever at the Triangle: volume kept Harris and Blanck ahead of their competition. The men had invested in the most up-to-date technology -- and it had to pay. The old pedal pump sewing machines made 34 stitches a minute. With the new electric machines the girls were expected to make 3,000 stitches a minute -- and no mistakes.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: An individual worker would be assigned a task whether it was, you know, making collars or buttonholes, and that's what they would do.
Steve Fraser, Historian: They're subject to the rhythms of the machine. They are the slave of that machine and the pace at which it works.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): Rubber heels had just come into use and you rarely heard the foreman sneak up behind you, watching.
Sonia Murray (Ami Ankin): He wouldn't let you stop. Not for a drink, the bathroom, nothing.
Woman 2 (Meredith Anne Bull): Sometimes, in my haste, I'd get my finger caught and the needle goes right through it. I bind the finger up with a piece of cotton and go on working.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Operators were charged for any mistakes that they made. For a lot of these young women whose families depended on their earnings it was very, very stressful. If they messed up a garment, and their pay was docked, they would be left, you know, coming home to tell mom, who always got the pay check, "The family's gonna be hungry this week."
Narrator: Even after the machines powered down for the day, the Triangle workers were subject to one final management imperative: No one left the building before opening her bag to the foreman's inspection at the Greene Street exit.
Max Blanck was kept awake nights calculating the dollars he might lose if workers walked out with shirtwaists tucked in their bags, or fabric, or thread. To ensure that nobody slipped out un-inspected, Blanck ordered that the only other exit -- at Washington Place -- be kept locked.
Steve Fraser, Historian: Bosses are under such intense competitive pressure that they're prepared to ignore under most circumstances the grievances of their workers to treat them like, like shtuka, like animals, like pieces. And they don't fear anything. There's no government intervention. There's no labor legislation. There's really very little sanitary legislation protecting the health and safety of workers. There are no minimum wage laws or maximum hour laws. Nobody's watching!
Narrator: There was release at end of a day's monotonous toil as the women stepped out into the long light of summer.
Alfred Allan Lewis, Writer: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was in the middle of New York. If you walked half block you were in Washington Square, lower Fifth Avenue, the great Greek revival homes of the affluent. If you walked to the other side, you were in Broadway, where Wannamaker's store was, where, within a few blocks, what was called "Ladies Mile" was, with all of the wonderful shops.
Steve Fraser, Historian: This is the gilded age. It's an age of extravagant conspicuous consumption.
Thomas Bender, Historian: They can walk up Fifth Avenue and see limestone mansions as far as the eye can see. They can see all around them that there's all kinds of wealth.
Maria Cichetti (Kara Jackson): They were so beautiful, those hats. They were so rich. A woman looked so dressed, you know, in the back, with the bustle. I wanted to grow up to wear earrings and hats and high heels.
Lottie Spitzer (Daniella Rabbani): I liked music. I liked lectures. I wanted to learn things; I wanted to learn everything. The only thing is, the time; I needed time.
Anzia Yezierska (Marta Milans): I used to creep up on the roof of the tenement and talk out my heart to the stars and the sky. Why were we cramped into the crowded darkness? Why are we wasting with want? Where is America?
Narrator: On the morning of October 4, 1909, Harris and Blanck arrived at the Triangle to find their worst fear realized -- their own workers on strike.
They saw this union movement as a personal attack on them; an attack on private property; an attack on the liberty at the heart of America's promise and possibility. Only 20 years earlier, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck had themselves arrived in America -- two young tailors from the shtetls of Eastern Europe -- poor, but ambitious.
As far as they were concerned, they'd built the Triangle Waist Company with their own sweat and ingenuity. They'd risked every hard-won dollar on their dream. And the gamble had earned them each 10-room brownstones uptown with maids, butlers, governesses.
David Von Drehle, Writer: This was the story that was being told all across Europe about what was possible in America. They'd made it. It was the American Dream. The symbol of what it was all about.
Robyn Muncy, Historian: They saw their wealth, their power, as perfectly legitimate reward for their exercise of individual freedom. And that that was the best thing for American society. That was the best thing for the economy.
Narrator: The evidence abounded in New York: Private wealth was building the city's skyscrapers, its parks, museums, libraries and hospitals. And the men who made it happen were celebrated.
Steve Fraser, Historian: These industrial buccaneers are lionized. There is this commitment in American culture to an extreme kind of individualism that individuals, especially the owners of private property, should not be interfered with. That to interfere with them is to place inhibiting obstacles in their path that will restrain prosperity and industrial growth.
Robyn Muncy, Historian: I think a lot of industrialists saw themselves as fairly benevolent, as providing jobs, as providing the means of survival to hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers. And if workers complained about their wages, complained about their hours or the conditions under which they worked, they were biting the hand that fed them.
Narrator: Progressive reformers had been shining a light on the growing inequalities in America for 20 years: The crushing poverty, cramped living spaces and inhumane working conditions. But their calls for government to re-balance the relationship between employers and their employees went largely unheeded. What elected official wanted to put the brakes on the country's remarkable economic engine?
Picketers at the Triangle knew that if they wanted their bosses to treat them fairly, they'd have to force the change themselves.
Steve Fraser, Historian: Winning a union in the shop means establishing a contractual relationship with the boss that covers all the workers in that shop, with respect to not only the wages they work for and the hours that they work, but the conditions under which they work and that their bosses no longer be allowed to get away with what they've been getting away with.
Narrator: Max Blanck and Isaac Harris weren't going to let a bunch of disgruntled factory girls tell them how to run their company. The Triangle owners used "private detective agencies " to provide replacement workers and muscle, bought prostitutes to start fights with the women on the picket lines, and paid off the local police precinct. Their hired thugs beat Triangle strikers; and policemen hauled the picketers into court if they fought back. But every day for six weeks -- in the face of physical abuse and public indifference -- the women took up their places in front of the Asch Building.
The longer the women of the Triangle stood fast, the more workers at other shirtwaist factories paid attention. Week after week the feeling grew: something could be done at their own shops.
Rose Cohen (Kara Jackson): I used to go in the ladies room and a few used to follow me and I was talking to them union.
Eva Goldstein (Ami Ankin): I knew our girls were dissatisfied, I knew other shops were already on strike. I knew it only needed someone to talk to the girls a little and they would join the strikers.
Steve Fraser, Historian: They are in America and they're surrounded by the vocabulary of equality and fairness and that whole language of democracy and they begin to expect something like that for themselves -- real opportunity where they see none; a real voice where they have none.
Narrator: That autumn, on factory floors all over New York, shirtwaist workers were talking about ways to secure equitable pay, reasonable working hours, a bit of control over the safety of their shops, and unions to hold the gains.
At the end of November 1909, when organizers called a meeting at New York's Cooper Union, shirtwaist workers packed the house. The aisles overflowed. The crowd backed up into the street.
And they were all there to consider something unthinkable before the Triangle women had made their stand: a proposal to run an industry-wide strike against each and every one of the city's 500 shirtwaist manufacturers.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: It's a pie-in-the-sky idea. And everyone's trying to talk them out of it. The reformers and the Women's Trade Union League, the senior men and their union, the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers himself, is begging them not to do this crazy thing: "None of your families have enough money to sustain a strike. Your younger siblings could starve. You don't wanna do this."
Narrator: While union leaders cautioned against action, a 22-year-old garment worker stepped uninvited to the podium. Everyone at the meeting knew of Clara Lemlich. Just a few weeks earlier when she'd organized a strike at the factory where she'd worked, Lemlich had been beaten by the owners' hired men. She could still feel the sting of six broken ribs.
Clara Lemlich (Amy Ankin): I want to say a few words. I have listened to all the speakers. I have no more patience for talk. I move that we go on a general strike.
David Von Drehle, Writer: And the room goes crazy. There's almost no point in taking a vote, you know. It's like it's unanimous. She's carried the day.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: They believed they were going to make history.
Narrator: The next morning, workers in shirtwaist factories across the city awaited some kind of signal.
Rose Perr (Kara Jackson): We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines. "Shall we wait like this? Who will get up first?" I started to get up. And at just the same minute all -- we all got up together, in one second. We all stood up, and all walked out together.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: They had calmly put down their scissors and walked away from the only thing standing between them and starvation and between their families and starvation.
Narrator: The women of the Triangle had spurred what was then the largest single work stoppage in the city's history.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): Ten thousand, 20,000, this is more than anyone of us dared to dream of or hope for. This is not a strike. This is an uprising.
Narrator: Within 48 hours 70 of the smallest and most vulnerable shirtwaist factories gave in to their workers' demands. They were union-only shops now.
The Triangle bosses were contemptuous of the owners who gave up without a fight. Harris and Blanck organized a manufacturers' association to stand united against the rabble-rousers. And they issued an edict: "No surrender."
Annelise Orleck, Historian: The prostitutes are out there. They're beating them. The police are watching. They're doing nothing.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: And it wasn't just women, the prostitutes' pimps would jump in. Triangle would hire ex-prize fighters and known toughs. You'd have people being sent off to the hospital.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Ribs were being broken, heads were being cracked, and there wasn't a lot of sympathy. When one girl was dragged into court with her head in bloody bandages and the policemen said she'd attacked him, the magistrate believed it and said, "You are on strike against God and nature."
Narrator: Policemen ran strikers into court every day, where judges fined the women, put them in jail, or shipped them to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island. When 10,000 workers marched on City Hall to protest police brutality, the mayor waved them off.
David Von Drehle, Writer: The establishment was against labor unions; the police were against labor unions; city hall was against labor unions.
Narrator: Still, the women went back to their picket lines day after day after day. A handful of Progressive reformers were inspired to join the pickets, but for nearly a month most of the city -- and much of the press -- paid little attention.
David Von Drehle, Writer: At this low moment in the strike, when they're running out of money, the most amazing thing happens: A woman named Anne Morgan decides to take up their cause. Anne Morgan was the daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful financier probably in the history of the world. Here was the face of American capitalism, Morgan, and the idea that his daughter was taking up the cause -- in a public way -- of these radical, often socialist, trade-unionist strikers, walking picket lines in New York was shocking and exciting. I mean the newspapers ate it up. It was great copy.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: They really did believe that the city needed to be reformed and that it was unacceptable to be beating these young girls. And they also believed that they were allies in this campaign for women's suffrage, which was picking up steam. So the mink brigade, the so-called mink brigade, start walking the picket lines and it works.
Narrator: The society ladies' support kept the strike on the front pages. Millionaire socialite Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Anne Morgan took over a committee to challenge police brutality and to enlist picketers from the uptown crowd.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: If you have someone on the social register walking a picket line, police are going to be a little bit more careful and even private police are gonna be a little more careful about who they club.
Narrator: By the middle of December, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris could feel things turning against them. The mainstream press was now writing sympathetic stories about the striking women -- they had suddenly become "those brave girls." With Christmas approaching and the strikers gaining public support, Harris and Blanck decided it was time to lead their fellow factory owners toward the negotiating table. On the Triangle owners' recommendation, the manufacturers' association agreed to higher wages and shorter hours, if the strikers would drop their demand for union-only shops.
Strike leaders refused.
Their hard-line didn't sit well with Miss Morgan. She was all for individual workers getting better treatment, but she drew the line at fomenting social upheaval.
"I am heartily in favor of these strikers," Anne Morgan told the press, "but these 'fanatical doctrines' are all the more dangerous because they tend to tear down all the good in our present social state." She abruptly resigned from the strike committee.
Alfred Allan Lewis, Writer: She thought they were really trying to turn this into a socialist cause. And she would have none of it. This wasn't about changing the world. Anne Morgan liked most of the world in which she lived.
Narrator: Despite having lost a powerful public advocate, the shirtwaist workers refused to soften their demands. The busy season was right around the corner, and the strikers were betting that owners would want all the experienced hands they could get. One by one, hundreds of shirtwaist manufacturers accepted their workers' demands for a union. And by the middle of February, thousands had returned to union-only shops.
The Triangle strikers weren't so fortunate. When they finally went back on the job, they had won concessions on wages and hours, but Harris and Blanck had forced them to give up the big issue. Triangle workers still lacked real power to improve the worst conditions of the factory floor. There would be no union in the Asch Building.
March 25, 1911 was a Saturday, a short, eight-hour day at the Triangle. As the clock inched toward the end of the shift thoughts drifted toward escape: a long night of freedom beckoned and no work on Sunday.
Woman 2 (Daniella Rabbani): Sometimes we go to Coney Island, where there are good dancing places. I'm very fond of dancing. Many of the young men like to talk to me, but I don't go out with any except Henry. Lately he has been urging me more and more to get married. But I think I'll wait.
Narrator: On the streets below, New Yorkers were already enjoying a leisurely Saturday: bicycling, motoring, strolling the Avenues, window-shopping on Broadway.
David Von Drehle, Writer: Washington Square, you know, is the center of that downtown community so the park was packed with people enjoying the day. And suddenly there's smoke rising over this tower a half a block away.
Narrator: Minutes earlier, a dropped cigarette had started a fire on the eighth floor of the Asch Building. Triangle workers dashed for the stairs, the elevators, and the fire escape. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris on 10 -- warned by phone from below -- made their way to the roof where they scrambled across to the building next door.
In the panic, no one alerted the 200 sewing machine operators on the ninth floor.
Ethel Monick (Kara Jackson): I turned to one of the girls who was putting on her hat and said, "Where does that smoke come from?"
Woman 3 (Daniella Rabbani): Before I could move, everybody in the shop started to scream and holler.
Narrator: Startled machine operators scanned the floor for friends and family, and for the fastest way out. The everyday exit, the Greene Street stairway, was already blocked by smoke and fire. Some women fled out a window and onto the fire escape to the back alley. Others ran toward two tiny passenger elevators that led to Washington Place.
Woman 3 (Daniella Rabbani): The first time the elevator came up the girls rushed in, and it was crowded in a half second. The elevator driver struggled with the door and finally closed it. I was left with those who didn't make the first trip.
Narrator: Sewing machine operators pushed their way down narrow aisles clogged with wicker baskets, loose fabric, their own co-workers.
Mary Bucelli (Marta Milans): I was throwing them out of the way. I was pushing them down. I was only looking out for my own life.
Kate Alterman (Kara Jackson): A young lady began to pull me in the back of my dress. I kicked her with my foot and I don't know what became of her.
Yetta Lubitz (Ami Ankin): I jumped over two lines of machines away from the flames. I looked and I saw an old Italian woman. She couldn't jump over the machines.
Narrator: Panic rose when the women inside heard the overburdened fire escape pull from its masonry, heard the cries of their fellow workers tumbling off the twisting structure. As the smoke grew thicker, some were drawn toward the light of windows overlooking Washington Square.
People were starting to gather at the Asch Building now: passers-by and picnickers, students from nearby New York University, and a young reporter from the United Press.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): There was a living picture in each window -- four girls waving their arms. "Call the firemen," they screamed. "Get a ladder." We heard a fire engine in the distance. "Here they come," we yelled. "Stay there."
Narrator: The fire was spreading faster now -- feeding itself on piles of shirtwaists, wooden tables, even the fabric dust that hung in the air. The only precaution the Triangle owners had taken against this sort of disaster -- a dozen red pails of water -- sat impotent in the corners.
The workers who remained inside pushed toward the Washington Place passenger elevator. They knew time was running out. This was probably the last run.
Anna Gullo (Marta Milans): The elevator came up and I was swept into the car by the crowd behind me. The last thing I remember seeing was my sister Marie -- enveloped in flames.
David Von Drehle, Writer: As the elevators descended, workers started jumping into the elevator shaft, first trying to slide down the cable or ride the top of the car but then the crowd behind these women in the open elevator doorways are pushing, pushing to escape from the flames. And now people are being pushed, falling into that elevator shaft.
Narrator: There was one final hope for the trapped Triangle workers: opening the locked door to the Washington Place stairway. But no one had the key.
Kate Alterman (Kara Jackson): I saw Bernstein trying to open the door. He couldn't open it. And then I saw Margaret bending down on her knees. The trail of her dress and the ends of her hair began to burn. And then came a big smoke and I couldn't see. I just knew it was Margaret.
Lena Yaller (Daniella Rabbani): People were screaming about their children and anything else. I noticed Bernstein going around like a wild cat on the windows. Then I saw the flames covering him. Smoke was coming up all around us. I couldn't see anything else. I felt a draft. I wanted to make my way over to where it came from. I wanted to open the window.
Narrator: It had been less than five minutes since the first alarm, but more than a thousand people had crowded around the Asch building. They watched as the firemen raised their ladders to their full extension. They barely reached the sixth floor -- 30 feet shy of the trapped Triangle workers.
Man 1 (Frank Pando): People began to holler, "Raise the ladders! Raise the ladders!" But we had the ladders up.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space.
Man 2 (Joe Lisi): I saw groups of women embracing each other and leaping to the sidewalk. The firemen were helpless. The nets were ripped from their hands, many stooped and picked up the nets again with their hands bleeding.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): The last workers were trapped against the blackened windows, burning to death before our very eyes. The glass they were pressed against shattered. Down came the bodies in a shower -- burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward.
Man 1 (Frank Pando): The bodies lay there on the sidewalk three or four high, burning, and we had to play the hoses on them.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year.
David Von Drehle, Writer: The crowd knew the Triangle. They knew the cause of these workers And here, now, of all places this same factory had gone up in flames and hundreds of these workers who had said that the conditions were not safe, that the fate of workers was perilous in New York, the justice of the strikers' cause had been underlined in blood on these sidewalks.
Narrator: Thirty minutes after the initial call, the New York City Fire Department had the blaze at the Triangle under control. Three hours later, firemen began lowering bodies by block-and-tackle.
New York City policemen -- some of them the same men who had beaten the picketing workers -- leaned out of windows on each floor to make sure the bodies didn't bang against the side of building as they descended from the Triangle Waist Company for the final time. Others catalogued the personal belongings strewn on the sidewalks: a broken hair comb, a patent leather Oxford with the laces still tied in a knot, a rosary, a fur-trimmed hat with a crushed red rose.
Even the most hardened policemen buckled; the crew had to be changed almost every hour. When the last body was removed just after midnight, the total number of dead stood at 145.
Fifty-three had jumped or fallen from the windows. Nineteen fell in the elevator shaft. More than 20 tumbled off the fire escape. And at least 50 burned to death on the factory floor. All but 23 of the dead were women, nearly half of them teen-agers. One jumper had miraculously survived. She lay near death in St. Vincent's Hospital.
The morning after the fire, friends and relatives of the Triangle workers gathered outside a temporary morgue on the East River, where the bodies were lined up for identification each under white cloth, heads pillowed up for viewing.
David Von Drehle, Writer: People were invited to come in and try to identify children, or wives, or husbands, or boyfriends, or daughters, or girlfriends who had not come home all night.
Man 3 (Frank Pando): I had to get Mary identified; she was burned beyond recognition. The dentist opened her mouth and recognized his work.
Esther Rosen (Daniella Rabbani): It was Mama's hair. I braided it for her. I know... I know.
Salvatore Maltese (Joe Lisi): I've been to the morgue three times and looked over 20 charred bodies. None of them can I recognize as my wife.
Narrator: The fire claimed its final victim on March 30, 1911, when the surviving jumper died. In death, she was no longer anonymous. She was Sarah Kupla, a 16-year-old sewing machine operator mourned by her family in the Bronx.
Newspapers, public officials, the wider world had begun to attach names to these Triangle workers by then: Rosie Bassino and her sister Irene; Max Lehrer and his brother Sam; Mary Goldstein; the Saracino sisters; Michela Marciano, who had survived an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius before emigrating to America; Rose Manofsky, whose little sister had lost her sole source of support; and Salvatore Maltese, who had buried every female in his household: his wife Catherine, his 20-year old daughter Lucia and his daughter Rosaria, who was -- at 14 -- the fire's youngest victim.
Families of the victims took some small measure of comfort from a sympathetic public. New Yorkers raised money to pay for burials, to support dependents left behind, or to replace the weekly cash envelopes Triangle workers had sent to their families in Europe.
Survivors also hoped for some small measure of justice when Isaac Harris and Max Blanck were brought up on charges of manslaughter and were shattered when the two men were acquitted. The state failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men knew the exit door was locked at the time of the fire.
The Shirtwaist Kings would take their insurance settlement and fade into obscurity. The Triangle factory -- and the memory of the women who worked there -- would not.
Thomas Bender, Historian: People were realizing that they had tolerated a kind of set of employment and other industrial practices that they should never have tolerated. What people had been saying, that you can't have unregulated industrialization, that there are things that have to be managed not by the market but by public policy, this now rang true in a way that it didn't the day before.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: It opens wide a system that was for so long seen as a private system between a worker and an owner. It essentially says at that point that it's no longer private. It can never be private again. There are 146 women, men who died because that was a private system. That doesn't work.
Narrator: In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, an enraged public compelled government to act.
The New York State Legislature funded a factory safety commission, which held months of hearings, collected testimony from hundreds of owners and workers, and inspected nearly two thousand factories.
Within two years, the commission's shocking findings spurred the passage of more than 30 new laws. They set standards for minimum wages, maximum hours and workplace conditions, gave teeth to child labor laws, and addressed each and every failure at the Triangle factory.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: And New York does become a model, clearly inspired by these young women. I think Sam Gompers said it best that rarely do you get an opportunity for such legislative reform, but women had to burn first in order for this to happen.
Woman 1 (Kara Jackson): I dreamed about the fire at night, and I would dream that I was falling out of the window, screaming. I remember hollering to my mother in the dark. "Mama, I just jumped out of the window."
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Science / The Reactions of Photosynthesis
Random Science or definition Quiz
Can you name the The Reactions of Photosynthesis?
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ClueTerm or Definition Extension
Light energy splits water into hydrogen ions and oxygen ions while photosystem 2 loses electrons .
Chlorophyll absorbs light .
Six molecules of CO2 combine with six molecules of RuBP forming 12 molecules of PGA.
Electrons and H+ combine with NAPD+ forming NADPH.
Occurs in the thylakoid membrane of the chloroplast. Uses water, and produces O2, ATP, and NADPH.
Electrons passed to Photosystem 1.
Chlorophyll absorbs light.
ClueTerm or Definition Extension
2 PGAL molecules react to form glucose.
Occurs in the stroma of the chloroplast. Uses CO2 from atmosphere, and ATP, and NADPH from the light dependent reaction. (photosystem one) This also produces Glucose.
Electrons are passed to an electron transport chain.
Electron transport chain uses energy to make ATP through CHEMIOSMOSIS.
ATP and NADPH are used to convert the PGA into 12 molecules of PGAL.
10 molecules of PGAL react with ATP forming 6 molecules of RUBP. This allows the cycle to continue.
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World cinema
East Asian cinema
South Asian cinema
Southeast Asian cinema
West Asian cinema
A 16 mm spring-wound Bolex H16 Reflex camera, a popular introductory camera in film schools
The origin of the name “film” comes from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) had historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, photo-play, flick, and most commonly, movie. Additional terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the cinema, and the movies.
Main article: History of film
Preceding film by thousands of years, plays and dances had elements common to film, scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism applied, such as mise en scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Moving visual and aural images were not recorded for replaying as in film.
A frame from Roundhay Garden Scene, the world’s earliest film, by Louis Le Prince, 1888
With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. Early versions of the technology sometimes required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Some of these machines were coin operated. By the 1880s the development of the motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel, and led quickly to the development of a motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these “moving picture shows” onto a screen for an entire audience. These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as “motion pictures”. Early motion pictures were static shots that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques.
Ignoring Dickson’s early sound experiments (1894), commercial motion pictures were purely visual art through the late 19th century, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Around the turn of the twentieth century, films began developing a narrative structure by stringing scenes together to tell narratives. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were realized as effective ways to portray a story on film. Rather than leave the audience in silence, theater owners would hire a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music fitting the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete film scores being composed for major productions.
The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I when the film industry in United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood, typified most prominently by the great innovative work of D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1914) and Intolerance (1916) . However in the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang,in many ways inspired by the meteoric war-time progress of film through Griffith, along with the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, quickly caught up with American film-making and continued to further advance the medium. In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them “talking pictures”, or talkies.
The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of so-called “natural” color. While the addition of sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color was adopted more gradually as methods evolved making it more practical and cost effective to produce “natural color” films. The public was relatively indifferent to color photography as opposed to black-and-white,[citation needed] but as color processes improved and became as affordable as black-and-white film, more and more movies were filmed in color after the end of World War II, as the industry in America came to view color as essential to attracting audiences in its competition with television, which remained a black-and-white medium until the mid-1960s. By the end of the 1960s, color had become the norm for film makers.
Since the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, the succeeding decades saw changes in the production and style of film. New Hollywood, French New Wave and the rise of film school educated independent filmmakers were all part of the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology has been the driving force in change throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century.
Main article: Film theory
Film theory seeks to develop concise and systematic concepts that apply to the study of film as art. It was started by Ricciotto Canudo‘s The Birth of the Sixth Art. Formalist film theory, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasized how film differed from reality, and thus could be considered a valid fine art. André Bazin reacted against this theory by arguing that film’s artistic essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality not in its differences from reality, and this gave rise to realist theory. More recent analysis spurred by Lacan‘s psychoanalysis and Ferdinand de Saussure‘s semiotics among other things has given rise to psychoanalytical film theory, structuralist film theory, feminist film theory and others.
Film is considered to have its own language. James Monaco wrote a classic text on film theory titled “How to Read a Film“. Director Ingmar Bergman famously said, “[Andrei] Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” Examples of the language are a sequence of back and forth images of one actor’s left profile speaking, followed by another actor’s right profile speaking, then a repetition of this, which is a language understood by the audience to indicate a conversation. Another example is zooming in on the forehead of an actor with an expression of silent reflection, then changing to a scene of a younger actor who vaguely resembles the first actor, indicating the first actor is having a memory of their own past.
Main article: Montage
Parallels to musical counterpoint have been developed into a theory of montage, extended from the complex superimposition of images in early silent film[citation needed] to even more complex incorporation of musical counterpoint together with visual counterpoint through mise en scene and editing, as in a ballet or opera; e.g., as illustrated in the gang fight scene of director Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Rumblefish.
Main article: Film criticism
Main article: Film industry
In the United States today, much of the film industry is centered around Hollywood. Other regional centers exist in many parts of the world, such as Mumbai-centered Bollywood, the Indian film industry’s Hindi cinema which produces the largest number of films in the world.[1] Whether the ten thousand-plus feature length films a year produced by the Valley pornographic film industry should qualify for this title is the source of some debate.[citation needed] Though the expense involved in making movies has led cinema production to concentrate under the auspices of movie studios, recent advances in affordable film making equipment have allowed independent film productions to flourish.
Profit is a key force in the industry, due to the costly and risky nature of filmmaking; many films have large cost overruns, a notorious example being Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Yet many filmmakers strive to create works of lasting social significance. The Academy Awards (also known as “the Oscars”) are the most prominent film awards in the United States, providing recognition each year to films, ostensibly based on their artistic merits.
Associated fields
Terminology used regarding film
Most people use “film” and “movie” interchangeably. “Film” is more often used when considering artistic, theoretical, or technical aspects, as studies in a university class. “Movies” more often refers to entertainment or commercial aspects, as where to go for fun on a date. For example, a book titled “How to Read a Film” would be about the aesthetics or theory of film, while “Lets Go to the Movies” would be about the history of entertaining movies. “Motion pictures” or “Moving pictures” are films and movies. A “DVD”, “videotape”, “video”, or “vid” is a digital reproduction of an analogue film, or a product with all of the elements of an analogue film but made in an electromagnetic storage medium. “Film” and “video” may be used interchangeably when the video is of sufficient quality, or is the original medium of recording. “Silent films” need not be silent, but are films and movies without an audible dialogue, though they may have a musical soundtrack. “Talkies” refers to early movies or films having audible dialogue or analogue sound, not just a musical accompaniment. “Cinema” either broadly encompasses both films and movies, or is roughly synonymous with “Film”, both capitalized when referring to a category of art. The “silver screen” refers to classic black and white films before color, not to contemporary films without color.
The expression “Sight and Sound”, as in the film journal of the same name, means “film”. The following icons mean film – a “candle and bell”, as in the films Tarkovsky, of a segment of film stock, or a two faced Janus image, and an image of a movie camera in profile.
Widescreen” and “Cinemascope” refers to a larger width to height in the frame, compared to an earlier historic aspect ratios. A “feature length film”, or “feature film”, is of a conventional full length, usually 60 minutes or more, and can commercially stand by itself without other films in a ticketed screening. A “short” is a film that is not as long as a feature length film, usually screened with other shorts, or preceding a feature length film. An “independent” is a film made outside of the conventional film industry.
A “screening” or “projection” is the projection of a film or video on a screen at a public or private theater, usually but not always of a film, but of a video or DVD when of sufficient projection quality. A “double feature” is a screening of two independent, stand-alone, feature films. A “viewing” is a watching of a film. A “showing” is a screening or viewing on an electronic monitor. “Sales” refers to tickets sold at a theater, or more currently, rights sold for individual showings. A “release” is the distribution and often simultaneous screening of a film A “preview is a screening in advance of the main release.
Hollywood” may be used either as a pejorative adjective, shorthand for asserting an overly commercial rather than artistic intent or outcome, as in “too Hollywood”, or as a descriptive adjective to refer to a film originating with people who ordinarily work near Los Angeles.
Expressions for Genres of film are sometimes used interchangeably for “film” in a specific context, such as a “porn” for a film with explicit sexual content, or “cheese” for films that are light, entertaining, and not highbrow.
Main article: Film trailer
Film, or other art form?
Similarly, the playing of a film can be considered to fall within the realm of political protest art, as in the subtleties within the films of Tarkovsky. A “road movie” can refer to a film put together from footage from a long road trip or vacation.
Education and Propaganda
Main articles: Education and Propaganda
Film is used for education and propaganda. When the purpose is primarily educational, a film is called an “educational film”. Examples are recordings of lectures and experiments, or more marginally, a film based on a classic novel.
The same film may be considered educational by some, and propaganda by others, such as some of the films of Michael Moore.
Main article: Filmmaking
At its core, the means to produce a film depend on the content the filmmaker wishes to show, and the apparatus for displaying it: the zeotrope merely requires a series of images on a strip of paper. Film production can therefore take as little as one person with a camera (or without it, such as Stan Brakhage‘s 1963 film Mothlight), or thousands of actors, extras and crewmembers for a live-action, feature-length epic.
1. Development
2. Pre-production
3. Production
4. Post-production
5. Distribution
Main article: Film crew
Originally moving picture film was shot and projected at various speeds using hand-cranked cameras and projectors; though 1000 frames per minute (16⅔ frame/s) is generally cited as a standard silent speed, research indicates most films were shot between 16 frame/s and 23 frame/s and projected from 18 frame/s on up (often reels included instructions on how fast each scene should be shown)[2]. When sound film was introduced in the late 1920s, a constant speed was required for the sound head. 24 frames per second was chosen because it was the slowest (and thus cheapest) speed which allowed for sufficient sound quality. Improvements since the late 19th century include the mechanization of cameras — allowing them to record at a consistent speed, quiet camera design — allowing sound recorded on-set to be usable without requiring large “blimps” to encase the camera, the invention of more sophisticated filmstocks and lenses, allowing directors to film in increasingly dim conditions, and the development of synchronized sound, allowing sound to be recorded at exactly the same speed as its corresponding action. The soundtrack can be recorded separately from shooting the film, but for live-action pictures many parts of the soundtrack are usually recorded simultaneously.
Main article: Independent film
But the advent of consumer camcorders in 1985, and more importantly, the arrival of high-resolution digital video in the early 1990s, have lowered the technology barrier to movie production significantly. Both production and post-production costs have been significantly lowered; today, the hardware and software for post-production can be installed in a commodity-based personal computer. Technologies such as DVDs, FireWire connections and non-linear editing system pro-level software like Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and consumer level software such as Apple’s Final Cut Express and iMovie make movie-making relatively inexpensive.
Open content film
Main article: Open content film
Fan film
Main article: Fan film
Main article: Animation
File formats like GIF, QuickTime, Shockwave and Flash allow animation to be viewed on a computer or over the Internet.
Limited animation is a way of increasing production and decreasing costs of animation by using “short cuts” in the animation process. This method was pioneered by UPA and popularized by Hanna-Barbera, and adapted by other studios as cartoons moved from movie theaters to television.[4]
When it is initially produced, a feature film is often shown to audiences in a movie theater or cinema. The identity of the first theater designed specifically for cinema is a matter of debate; candidates include Tally’s Electric Theatre, established 1902 in Los Angeles[5], and Pittsburgh’s Nickelodeon, established 1905. [6] Thousands of such theaters were built or converted from existing facilities within a few years.[7] In the United States, these theaters came to be known as nickelodeons, because admission typically cost a nickel (five cents).
Typically, one film is the featured presentation (or feature film). Before the 1970s, there were “double features”; typically, a high quality “A picture” rented by an independent theater for a lump sum, and a “B picture” of lower quality rented for a percentage of the gross receipts. Today, the bulk of the material shown before the feature film consists of previews for upcoming movies and paid advertisements (also known as trailers or “The Twenty“).
The movie theater pays an average of about 50-55% of its ticket sales to the movie studio, as film rental fees.[8] The actual percentage starts with a number higher than that, and decreases as the duration of a film’s showing continues, as an incentive to theaters to keep movies in the theater longer. However, today’s barrage of highly marketed movies ensures that most movies are shown in first-run theaters for less than 8 weeks. There are a few movies every year that defy this rule, often limited-release movies that start in only a few theaters and actually grow their theater count through good word-of-mouth and reviews. According to a 2000 study by ABN AMRO, about 26% of Hollywood movie studios’ worldwide income came from box office ticket sales; 46% came from VHS and DVD sales to consumers; and 28% came from television (broadcast, cable, and pay-per-view).[8]
Future state
While motion picture films have been around for more than a century, film is still a relative newcomer in the pantheon of fine arts. In the 1950s, when television became widely available, industry analysts predicted the demise of local movie theaters. Despite competition from television’s increasing technological sophistication over the 1960s and 1970s, such as the development of color television and large screens, motion picture cinemas continued. In fact with the rise of television’s predominance, film began to become more respected as an artistic medium by contrast due the low general opinion of the quality of average television content. In the 1980s, when the widespread availability of inexpensive videocassette recorders enabled people to select films for home viewing, industry analysts again wrongly predicted the death of the local cinemas.
In the 1990s and 2000s the development of digital DVD players, home theater amplification systems with surround sound and subwoofers, and large LCD or plasma screens enabled people to select and view films at home with greatly improved audio and visual reproduction. These new technologies provided audio and visual that in the past only local cinemas had been able to provide: a large, clear widescreen presentation of a film with a full-range, high-quality multi-speaker sound system. Once again industry analysts predicted the demise of the local cinema. Local cinemas will be changing in the 2000s and moving towards digital screens, a new approach which will allow for easier and quicker distribution of films (via satellite or hard disks), a development which may give local theaters a reprieve from their predicted demise.
The cinema now faces a new challenge from home video by the likes of a new High Definition format, Blu-ray, which can provide full HD 1080p video playback at near cinema quality. Video formats are gradually catching up with the resolutions and quality that film offers, 1080p in Blu-ray offers a pixel resolution of 1920×1080 a leap from the DVD offering of 720×480 and the paltry 330×480 offered by the first home video standard VHS. The maximum resolutions that film currently offers are 2485×2970 or 1420×3390, UHD, a future digital video format, will offer a massive resolution of 7680×4320, surpassing all current film resolutions. The only viable competitor to these new innovations is IMAX which can play film content at an extreme 10000×7000 resolution.
Despite the rise of all new technologies, the development of the home video market and a surge of online copyright infringement, 2007 was a record year in film that showed the highest ever box-office grosses. Many expected film to suffer as a result of the effects listed above but it has flourished, strengthening film studio expectations for the future.
See also
• Basten, Fred E. (1980). Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow. Cranbury, NJ: AS Barnes & Company. ISBN 0498023176.
• Basten, Fred E. (writer); Peter Jones (director and writer); Angela Lansbury (narrator). (1998). Glorious Technicolor [Documentary]. Turner Classic Movies.
• Merritt, Greg (2000). Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. ISBN 1560252324.
• Rocchio, Vincent F. (2000). Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywood’s Construction of Afro-American Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 0813367107.
• Schrader, Paul (Spring 1972). “Notes on Film Noir”. Film Comment Vol. 8 (Issue 1): 8–13. ISSN 0015-119X.
• Schultz, John (writer and director); James Earl Jones (narrator). (1995). The Making of ‘Jurassic Park’ [Documentary]. Amblin Entertainment.
External links
Find more about Film on Wikipedia’s sister projects: Definitions from Wiktionary
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Quotations from Wikiquote
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Public Release:
Water-cleaning chemical made 'on-demand' with new group of catalysts
Quick and efficient way of producing hydrogen peroxide could help provide clean water to the poorest and most remote populations in the world
Cardiff University
A quick, cheap and highly efficient method for producing a water-purifying chemical has been developed by researchers at Cardiff University.
The team, from the Cardiff Catalyst Institute, Lehigh University and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, have developed a new group of catalysts that can produce hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on-demand in a simple one-step process, opening up the possibility of manufacturing the chemical in some of the poorest, remote and disaster-stricken areas of the world.
Their results have been published in the journal Science. A video explaining the work of the Cardiff Catalysis Institute can be viewed here.
"Using our new catalyst, we've created a method of efficiently producing H2O2 on-demand in a quick, one-step process," said co-author of the study Dr Simon Freakley from the Cardiff Catalysis Institute.
"Being able to produce H2O2 directly opens up a whole host of possibilities, most notably in the field of water purification where it would be indispensable to be able to produce the chemical on-site where safe and clean drinking water is at a premium."
Over four million tonnes of H2O2 are produced by industry each year, predominantly through a large, multi-step process, which requires highly concentrated solutions of H2O2 to be transported before dilution at the point of use. Current uses of H2O2 include paper bleaching, disinfecting and water treatment and in the chemical synthesis industry.
Though centralised systems adequately supply clean water to billions of households around the world, many people still do not have access to these large-scale water supplies and must therefore rely on decentralised systems for a safe source of water.
The team, led by Professor Graham Hutchings, has previously developed a state-of-the-art catalyst made from palladium and gold nanoparticles that helped to create H2O2 from hydrogen and oxygen.
Now the team have shown that gold can be replaced with five different readily available metals, including tin, zinc and cobalt, to form a much cheaper and more efficient group of catalysts for this specific reaction.
Co-author of the study Professor Graham Hutchings said: "Our new catalyst shows that it is possible to achieve equally high utilisation of hydrogen to form hydrogen peroxide by replacing the gold in the catalysts with cheap readily available metals, therefore significantly reducing costs.
"Rather than replace the current industrial process, we envisage this catalyst being used where low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide are required. For example, we could see our catalyst being used in decentralised water purification systems in which the speedy, on-demand production of hydrogen peroxide would be essential.
"We are already in discussions with industry to see how this catalyst can be developed further."
Notes to editors
1. For further information contact:
Michael Bishop
Communications & Marketing
Cardiff University
Tel: 02920 874499
|
A Byte Out of History
The Alger Hiss Story
Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was convicted 63 years ago this month.
The jury returned from its deliberations on January 21, 1950—63 years ago this month. The verdict? Guilty on two counts of perjury.
Alger Hiss, a well-educated and well-connected former government lawyer and State Department official who helped create the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II, was headed to prison in Atlanta for lying to a federal grand jury.
Whitaker ChambersThe central issue of the trial was espionage. In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers—a senior editor atTime magazine—was called by the House Committee on Un-American Activities to corroborate the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet spy who had defected in 1945 and accused dozens of members of the U.S. government of espionage. One official she named as possibly connected to the Soviets was Alger Hiss.
The FBI immediately began probing her claims to ensure those who were credibly named—including Hiss—did not continue to have access to government secrets or power. As the investigation into Bentley and related matters deepened in 1946 and 1947, Congress became aware of and concerned about the case. Details leaked to the press, and the investigation became national news and embroiled in partisan politics in the run up to the 1948 presidential election.
Chambers, who had renounced the Communist Party in the late 1930s, testified reluctantly that hot summer day. He ultimately acknowledged he was part of the communist underground in the 1930s and that Hiss and others had been members of the group.
In later testimony, Hiss vehemently denied the accusation. After all, Chambers had offered no proof that Hiss had committed espionage or been previously connected to Bentley or the communist group.
Elizabeth Bentley FBI File
View Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley’s FBI file.
It could have ended there, but members of the committee—especially then-California Congressman Richard Nixon—prodded Chambers into disclosing information suggesting there was more to his story and his relationship with Hiss. In later testimony, Hiss admitted knowing Chambers in the 1930s, but he continued to deny any ties to communism and later filed a libel suit against his accuser.
The committee was torn. Who was telling the truth, Hiss or Chambers? And should either be charged with perjury?
A key turn of events came in November 1948, when Chambers produced documents showing both he and Hiss were committing espionage. Then, in early December, Chambers provided the committee with a package of microfilm and other information he had hidden inside a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The two revelations, which became known as the “Pumpkin Papers,” contained images of State Department materials—including notes in Hiss’ own handwriting.
It was the smoking gun the Justice Department needed. Hiss was charged with perjury; he could not be indicted for espionage because the statute of limitations had run out. An extensive FBI investigation helped develop a great deal of evidence verifying Chambers’ statements and revealing Hiss’ cover-ups.
In 1949, the first trial resulted in a hung jury, but in 1950, Hiss was convicted. Sixty-three years ago today, he was sentenced to five years in prison, ending an important case that helped further confirm the increasing penetration of the U.S. government by the Soviets during the Cold War. |
all 99 comments
[–]allotropist 516 points517 points (81 children)
The Sun has apparent magnitude -26.74, and the dimmest star we can see with the naked eye is magnitude +6. That's a magnitude difference of 32.74, meaning the Sun is about 12 trillion times brighter (as viewed from Earth). Since the Sun is radiating 1361 Watts per square meter on Earth, that dimmest star is shining with a brightness of about 0.11 nanowatts per square meter, or 1.1e-10 W/m2.
Let's say the human pupil has a radius of 4 millimeters, that gives an area of about 50 mm2, or 5e-5 m2. That means the pupil is absorbing about 5.5e-15 Watt from that dim star.
A photon of yellow-green light has an energy of about 2.25 electron-volts, or 3.6e-19 Joule.
Dividing 5.5e-19 Watt by 3.6e-19 Joule gives about 15,000 photons per second.
edit to fix formatting
and one more edit to note that the above assumes all the star's power is in the visible (and it's not), and that Earth's atmosphere absorbs a significant fraction of incoming solar power. Both of these (and no doubt many more) factors will reduce the photon number by at least a factor of three, bringing the number of photons down to around 5000 per second. Thanks aggasalk for the correction!
[–]aggasalkExperimental Psychology | Visual Psychophysics 168 points169 points (15 children)
great answer, but i'm thinking you might have missed something by going from a measure of broadband solar radiation to photons at a particular wavelength. only about 450W/m2 of visible light reach the surface. so, i'd divide your final estimate by 3.
i don't have time to go into it now, but here's an obligatory reference to the classic study of Hecht, Schlaer, and Pirenne. they did a similar series of calculations, to find out how may photons are necessary to trip a single photoreceptor in the retina. the answer comes out to be six or seven, since you're dividing that ~5000/s over the dozens (or fewer) of rod cells that are signaling many times a second that 'there is a star there'..
i.e., it's not fair to the eye to call it a 'poor instrument' (as you do below)!
[–]allotropist 18 points19 points (11 children)
Good point. I didn't consider that, nor that a significant fraction of solar irradiance is lost to reflection and absorption on the way through the atmosphere.
edit poor by comparison to CCDs is what I meant
[–]blasto_blastocyst 9 points10 points (2 children)
I have read that the eye does detect single photons but the brain filters them out to lower visual noise in low-light situations. Discussion here
[–]NorthernerWuwu 0 points1 point (1 child)
Well, I generally wouldn't block quote Wikipedia but they actually have a nice, concise and well-sourced bit on this.
The absolute threshold for vision was assessed in a landmark experiment by Hecht, Shlaer and Pirenne in 1942. The experiment was designed to measure the minimum number of photons detectable by the human eye, therefore various controls were implemented to ensure that this is was the case.
Dark Adaptation – the participants were completely dark adapted (a process lasting forty minutes) in order to optimise their visual sensitivity.
Location – the stimulus was presented 20 degrees to the left of the point of focus, in order for it to fall 20 degrees to the right of the fovea (the most sensitive point of the eye), where there is a high density of rod cells.
Stimulus size – the stimulus, a circle of red light, had a diameter of 10 minutes (1 minute=1/60th of a degree). This ensured that the light stimulus fell only on rod cells connected to the same nerve fibre (this is called the area of spatial summation).
Wavelength – the stimulus wavelength matched the maximum sensitivity of rod cells (510 nm).
It was found that the emission of only 90 photons was required in order to elicit visual experience. However, only 45 of these actually entered the retina, due to absorption by the optic media. Furthermore, 80% of these did not reach the fovea. Therefore, it only takes nine photons to be detected by the human eye. Moreover, as the chance of any one rod receiving more than one photon is very small, we can assume that it only takes one photon to excite a rod receptor.[citation needed]. Threshold cannot be determined on perfect sensation or lack thereof, due to fluctuations in the threshold. Thus, there is no set brightness seen by the viewer, and no intensity just lower than this that no flash is seen. To activate a bipolar, multiple rods must be stimulated, e.g., as 1940’s experiments have determined, that eleven quanta, one for each single rod, is necessary to trigger light perception. Another experiment shows that a 60 percent frequency may represent 2,500 quanta, one per rod, among a patch of 2 million rods. Therefore only one rod out of many is perceived at the threshold, and in a short stimulus, rods cannot absorb more than a single photon of light. (A quantum or photon is stated as Planck's constant and the frequency of light .
[–]Mr_Green26 7 points8 points (2 children)
CCD? Charged-Coupled Device or Coherent Change Detection?
[–]hithisishalMaterials Science | Microwire Photovoltaics 14 points15 points (1 child)
they meant charge coupled device. A good CCD (say, one used in a telescope) should get pretty close to counting single photons. Let's say 10s of photons to be generous. Not the best source (marketing material), but some info is here:
[–]Mr_Green26 2 points3 points (0 children)
Thanks it was a joke, a bad joke only a few people would get. I work with satellites and there is a test we have to take that includes a question about CCDs and it is an acronym that means both in the analyst world.
[–]kgvc7 1 point2 points (0 children)
Also the energy per area is an average. It is more/less depending on the angle of the ray.
[–]CanadianSpy 21 points22 points (38 children)
It is amazing to think that even at these distances we are seeing 15k photons. The photon density at star must be crazy
[–]feelygoose 11 points12 points (24 children)
Something even crazier: "Each second, about 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter on the part of the Earth that faces the Sun"
[–]Festeron 18 points19 points (15 children)
But don't they pass through the Earth as if it wasn't there? The neutrinos get you at night, too.
[–]jswhitten 11 points12 points (0 children)
Yes, the fraction of neutrinos that are stopped by the Earth is negligible. You'll get about the same number at night.
I read, and am struggling to find where, that sometimes, people in true 100% darkness see little flashes of light, and that these could be neutrinos hitting photoreceptors in their eyes at perfect angles. Something like that. Can anybody with knowledge confirm/deny?
Edit - Cosmic rays, not neutrinos.
[–]dancingwithcats 1 point2 points (6 children)
Neutrinos react so weakly with matter that it's more likely that those flashes are other forms of radiation, such as the cosmic rays postulated in the Wiki article you linked.
[–]Festeron 5 points6 points (5 children)
Asimov taught me that 50 light years of lead has a 50% chance of blocking a neutrino. There aren't a lot of those just lying around.
[–]CylonBunny 0 points1 point (4 children)
50 light years of lead would almost certainly collapse into some kind of black hole right?
[–]allotropist 2 points3 points (3 children)
A ball of lead would, yes. But a relatively thin rod could be any length.
[–]moor-GAYZ 0 points1 point (2 children)
Are you sure?
As in, would pressure in the middle of the rod have a limit (supposedly below the structural strength of lead for a sufficiently thin rod)?
[–]scswift 1 point2 points (6 children)
Let's say we were able to construct something like a solar panel for Neutrinos. How much energy might we get from like a square meter of the stuff?
[–]SilpionRadiation Therapy | Medical Imaging | Nuclear Astrophysics 0 points1 point (0 children)
Very roughly: Neutrinos carry away about 2% of the energy from the PPI chain, so it should be something like 2% of 1361 W/m2, or about 27 W/m2.
[–]pauklzorz -3 points-2 points (3 children)
Pretty lose to nothing, cause the neutrinos just pass through it like nothing. They have to physically hit objects to interact with them, and space at that level is very very very empty, so pretty much everything flies right through.
[–]scswift -1 points0 points (2 children)
Step 1: Create black hole.. Step 2: Allow black hole to absorb neutrinos and harness Hawking radiation as it evaporates. Step 3: Profit!
I did say IF we could create such a panel...
[–]pauklzorz 1 point2 points (1 child)
Ah, I misunderstood your question then. You're just asking how many neutrino's pass through a square meter every second or so?
[–]scswift -1 points0 points (0 children)
Well I meant theoretically, if we could make a material that they collide with a lot, how much energy could we extract from those collisions.
[–]jackarcalon -2 points-1 points (0 children)
The average nuclear fission releases about 200 MeV of energy, of which roughly 4.5% is radiated away as neutrinos.
If nuclear fusion works the same way as fission, then a one-meter neutrino solar panel would generate enough energy to power a 45 Watt lightbulb day and night.
[–]shmageggy 4 points5 points (0 children)
The first star that showed up in a search for Vmag 6 in the Hipparchos catalog has a parallax of 10.75 milliarcseconds, giving a distance of 303.4 light years. A circle with that radius has a surface area of a bit over 106 light years2 . Dividing by 50mm2 and multiplying by 15000 yields 3.1x1046 photons emitted per second. This is an unimaginably huge number. I guess I have no way to intuit whether it's even close to reasonable or not.
edit: a number
[–]allotropist 4 points5 points (11 children)
15,000 is about 100x more than I was expecting. Our eyes are poor instruments.
Near the surface of the star, there'd be about 500 million billion times more photon flux.
[–]mckulty 23 points24 points (7 children)
Our eyes are poor instruments
How so? With maximum dark adaptation, 20° temporal to the fovea, at 550 nm, the eye can detect just a few photons. How much more sensitive can it be?
[–]Ixuvia 8 points9 points (2 children)
Don't know if this is what was being referred to, but there are some kinds of frogs that can see individual photons.
[–]brainflakes 2 points3 points (1 child)
Just to add that our eyes have the potential to see individual photons, however we've evolved to filter out anything less than 5-10 photons per 100ms to decrease visual graininess in low light.
The human eye is very sensitive but can we see a single photon? The answer is that the sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. However, neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously see single photons we would experience too much visual "noise" in very low light, so this filter is a necessary adaptation, not a weakness.
[–]Shukrat 1 point2 points (2 children)
Cat eyes? Non-scientist here, just thinking what can see in the dark
[–]mckulty 0 points1 point (1 child)
Cats have a reflective membrane under their retina that reflects missed photons back through the retina for a second chance. It makes them see more efficiently, but not because their photoreceptors are more sensitive.
[–]allotropist 0 points1 point (0 children)
Single photon sensitivity is what I had in mind, though it's explained elsewhere in this thread that noise reduction why that's not achievable.
[–]sintaur 10 points11 points (2 children)
Lay person, but I did some quick googling to see how many of those points of lights were galaxies. Amazed to find there's just a handful of galaxies visible to the unaided eye.
[–]SeverePsychosis 2 points3 points (0 children)
Yep! just head out somewhere very dark and you'd be surprised at how much more spectacular the night sky becomes.
[–]bluepepper 1 point2 points (0 children)
You also know what this implies: aside from these few galaxies, every star in the sky is actually part of the Milky Way. This means that in pictures like this, the Milky Way is not just the white stripe in the middle, it's every star!
[–]Celysticus 4 points5 points (0 children)
If I did my math properly assuming the Earth has a mean radius of 6371 km, and only half of the object is visible to said star you're observing. Then, each start at magnitude +6 is imparting energy on the planet at a rate of about 5.6kW. Just thought that might be an interesting number. /shrug
[–]Oznog99 4 points5 points (0 children)
Hmm, how many photons is that on a particular rod or cone?
I guess you'd have to figure out the projected area on the retina, figure out how many rods/cones there are per sq mm, and how much is a sensitive part vs insensitive interstital space.
[–]Nebraskinator 3 points4 points (7 children)
Biologist here. In extremely dark environments, humans can detect as few as 9,000 photons per second. Your math matches that limit of detection nicely.
[–]jmdugan 6 points7 points (2 children)
[–]Nebraskinator 7 points8 points (0 children)
"9000 per second" comes from this source:
Researchers found that 9 photons/milisecond could be detected with an average success rate of 60%. There are 1000 miliseconds in one second. I just converted that number to the same units as the commenter's to demonstrate that his/her calculations fall within an order of magnitude of the experimentally determined value.
[–]florinandrei 1 point2 points (0 children)
The calculations at the top of the thread are off by at least 2 magnitudes, or a factor of at least 6.3x. Most people can see mag +8 stars in very dark locations; some exceptional individuals can reportedly see down to mag +8.5. I've posted a reply elsewhere in this thread.
That brings down the number of photons into the hundreds (perhaps very few hundreds), instead of the thousands. That's a lot closer to your numbers. You have to allow that seeing a star in the sky is a bit more challenging than a special setup in a lab, so you'd need a bit over 100 photons / sec for the star.
[–]Yamez -1 points0 points (0 children)
It turns out our eyes are actually quite well adapted for low light. We're just not as good as nocturnal specialists. I think this is cool.
[–]real_cool_club -1 points0 points (0 children)
I read something recently (although I forget the source) that said that rods are capable of detecting even a single photon.
[–]mach0 -2 points-1 points (0 children)
Your posts contradicts almost everyone else's (with references) here about how many photons can the eye detect so I don't think you're right.
[–]tcelesBhsup 0 points1 point (2 children)
Isn't there also a "red shift" due to universal expansion perpendicular to the direction of travel that "spreads" the photon away from each other as they go long distances? That would reduce the photon density at the receptor. I'm not sure to what degree... probably negligible.
[–]Gnashtaru 2 points3 points (0 children)
Nope. Light travels at the speed of light.. period. If the doppler effect spread them out that would mean it effected the speed. What actually happens is the wavelength gets larger. But the number of photons would stay constant. I looked this up and read up on it not too long ago because I was thinking that if you could slow them down then there is no reference for the math. Of course it's entirely possible that since time and the speed of light are very related, maybe everything varies but we cannot tell because if say... light slowed down, so would time. So we would perceive no change.
[–]F0sh 0 points1 point (1 child)
At least according to wikipedia and informal observation, the pupil can be more like 9mm when at its widest - so that would up the photon count a bit.
[–]florinandrei 0 points1 point (0 children)
Amateur astronomer here. We use the actual pupil size when calculating certain parameters of the telescope (e.g. "exit pupil"). A mismatch may result in reduced performance of the instrument. One thing is certain: 9 mm pupil is huge and unrealistic.
It's more like 7 mm for younger people, or 5 mm for older folks. An average of 6 mm should be okay for most purposes.
[–]CitizenPremier 0 points1 point (0 children)
5000 per second per pupil?
[–]TheRamenator 0 points1 point (0 children)
I think you should increase the pupil size, as its the lens' area we should be interested in.
[–]florinandrei 0 points1 point (0 children)
Amateur astronomer here. You're talking about limiting magnitude. Your calculations are nicely done, but you're off by 10x, even after the corrections, due to the premise quoted above.
Mag +8 is actually doable, given excellent conditions and people with good (but not exceptional) eyesight. The limit (darkest site ever, people with above-average sight) seems to be at or close to +8.5 mag.
+6 limiting magnitude is given for good but not extraordinary conditions. The vast majority of people can do better.
So you can lower your estimate about 6.31x (2 magnitudes lower). That makes it less than 1000 photons / sec, probably a few hundreds.
(scroll down to "observing sites")
EDIT: 4 mm pupil is not realistic in a dark location (looking at the sky at night). It's more like 5 ... 7 mm, towards the bigger end for young folks, or towards smaller for older. An average of 6 mm in darkness is quite reasonable, and it's what you should use in your calculations.
That would actually raise the number back up by about 2.25x.
[–]aelendelInvertebrate Paleontology | Deep Time Evolutionary Patterns 0 points1 point (0 children)
Seems like a couple of orders of magnitude close! Amazing!
FWIW, the 'angular width' of most visible stars in the night sky is on the order of a single molecule at arms length. What you are 'seeing' when you look at one is the limit of the resolution of your eye...the actual star is much smaller.
[–]evilregis 3 points4 points (1 child)
That would explain why when you view stars through a telescope or binoculars, they still appear as just tiny points of light. They (stars) don't magnify in size. You just see greater numbers of them.
[–]florinandrei 1 point2 points (0 children)
If the instrument is good, and seeing conditions are good too, towards the maximum magnification you start seeing the diffraction figure, a.k.a. the Airy disk and rings. The star is not a mere dot anymore, it's more like a tiny bullseye. But that's due to diffraction effects in the instrument.
[–]TOMMMMMM 2 points3 points (9 children)
If space were a perfect vacuum with no particles to interfere with photons, would it be possible to not see a light source simply because the density of the photons traveling out radially from the source per given area decreases so significantly that not a single photon would hit your eye?
This was basically my question the other day, so its awesome to actually gain some knowledge from this post.
[–]PredictsYourDeath 4 points5 points (0 children)
I asked this question long ago, link to the original thread below with the answer copied here:
Let's imagine this situation. We've got a light source (which I've uncreatively made a star) and three observers, two of them at the same distance from the light source and one further away. The light source emits a single pulse of light at a single frequency and can only choose how much energy is put into the pulse. The light, naturally, travels at 3 x 108 meters per second in all directions.
The question is, does the third observer know the light source is there or not? The answer is buried in another question: How much energy is in the pulse of light? Let's imagine that there are only two photons worth of energy.
The green circle I've drawn around the star is a crude representation of the front of the probability density of the light wave traveling from the source. It propagates at the speed of light and, even more crudely, I could say that as it moves in time, it represents the smallest distance you can be at and be aware that the light exists. Until the that wave front interacts with something, whether it's the observer's eye, or a comet, or a speck of dust, the two photons of energy are completely delocalized on the wavefront. They could be anywhere. By having two pieces of matter (the two observers) intercept the two photons of energy coming from our source, there is no energy left in the wave front for the third observer to detect. The two photons have been localized to the positions of our first two observers.
So the third observer sees nothing.
So the answer to your question about how we're able to see stars despite the fact that there are, quite literally, a metric fuckton of bits of matter for them to interact with that are closer than us? Stars emit an even bigger metric fuckton of energy, so by the time the wave front gets to us, there's still plenty of energy to go around to hit us in the eye.
original thread:
[–]bobthemighty_ 2 points3 points (1 child)
Minute physics did an excellent video on a similar topic: |
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As the world wobbles ....
As the world wobbles...
The earth seems as stable as the weather is changeable, but in fact scientists have long known that movements of air masses can make the planet wobble on its axis for periods of a year or more. Now, researchers using very sensitive satellite and radio astronomy techniques have found "rapid" wobbling of the earth on a time scale of two weeks to several months, and have shown that the wobbling is at least partially caused by atmospheric changes.
When high- and low-pressure air masses move about the earth, the weight distribution of the atmpshere is changed. This can make the rotating earth wobble, just as moving the balancing weights on the wheel of a car can change the way the hub rotates. The effect was anticipated in 1862 by Lord Kelvin, and has since been observed to at least partially cause the earth's annual wobble and the 14-month Chandler wobble.
Improvements in wobble-monitoring systems and in detailed, worldwide collection of weather data allowed the discovery of the shorter-period wobbling and its correlation with changes in weather patterns, reports a team of scientists in the July 14 NATURE. The researchers, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., used two methods involving extraterrestrial bodies to pinpoint to within 5 centimeters the two surface points of the earth's rotational axis.
The group obtained highly accurate measurements of the earth's movement with a technique called satellite laser ranging, which involves bouncing laser beams off the moon and/or an artificial satellite and measuring the time it takes to travel the distance there and back. They confirmed this information with very long baseline interferometry, in which a number of radiotelescopes on different continents observe a quasar at the same time and compare the signals to get information about the relative motion of the observatories.
Using these techniques, the scientists were able to observe the earth's axis of rotation moving 6 to 60 centimeters over these shorter periods.
The researchers are not sure whether all of this short-period wobbling is caused by atmospheric changes or if there are other possible reasons, says Richard Rosen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. This is because air-pressure changes over the ocean cause sea-level changes of about 3 to 4 centimeters, and the team is unsure of what effect that water movement has, he says.
"We get better correlations if we ignore air masses over the ocean," but then the mass changes aren't enough to account for all the wobble, Rosen says. Other factors might be earthquakes and the shifting of tectonic plates, wind patterns around the earth or redistribution of water in rivers and lakes, he says. "There are a lot of things that there just arenht good data for, so you can dream up all sorts of possibilities," he says.
The laser ranging and interferometry measurements used to spot the wobble can also be used to measure the movement of tectonic plates and local changes in the earth's gravitational field, says coauthor Jean Dickey of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For instance, comparison of satellite and radiotelescope measurements will reveal gravitational changes, she says, because the satellite is affected by these changes while the interferometry measurements are not. Tectonic motion can be detected by comparing motion measurements from different points on the earth.
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Title Annotation:new measurements of earth's wobble
Author:Vaughan, Christopher
Publication:Science News
Date:Jul 16, 1988
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Next Article:Earth-sized radiotelescope record.
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How Many Days Of Bleeding Are Typical During Menstruation?
Creative interpretation of menstrual flow
Amy Gulp/Getty images
Question: How Many Days Of Bleeding Are Typical During Menstruation?
Answer: Menstruation lasts from three to five days, on average.
Your period is the shedding of the lining of your uterus. Your menstrual flow is partly made of this shed lining called the endometrium. In order for your normal period to come your body has to ovulate. Usually, your period will come about 12-16 days after you ovulate if you did not get pregnant.
During the first few years after the onset of menstruation, many girls experience unpredictable menstruation. This is because they are not ovulating regularly. Your menstrual cycle includes both ovulation and your period.
Your menstrual cycle happens because of a complex interaction between hormones produced by structures in your brain and your ovaries. It can take some time for this interaction to function properly. The good news is that menstruation usually normalizes after about two years.
Normal menstruation can last from one to eight days. For most women with regular menstrual cycles, their period will last for three to five days. That doesn't mean that anything is wrong if your period is longer or shorter.
Period length can vary, and some lifestyle or medical changes may impact the duration or severity of bleeding and cramping.
Your menstrual flow is made up of the shed endometrium and blood flow from the little vessels that are exposed after the lining sheds.
Factors that change the thickness of the endometrium or the number of blood vessels plays a role in how many days bleeding lasts.
For example, a woman who is getting closer to menopause and has lower levels of estrogen will have less endometrium built up so she will have a lighter and shorter period.
On the other hand, a woman with an endometrial polyp will have more endometrium and more blood vessels so she will most likely bleed heavier and for more days.
Using hormonal birth control can affect the number of days your period lasts.
Women who use oral contraceptives frequently experience shorter periods, as well as lighter flow. This is because the hormones in the birth control pill stop the ovaries from ovulating. The pill contains estrogen so the lining of the uterus builds up but much less than it would naturally. And the progesterone component of the pill counteracts the estrogen build up to make the lining to be shed overall thinner than normal. The hormones in the birth control pill shut down the ovaries and essentially take over control of the endometrium. In fact, today’s continuous oral contraceptives offer women the chance to menstruate four or fewer times per year.
Women who use progesterone only contraception like Mirena or Nexplanon will see noticeable lighter and shorter periods.
Often, using these methods can lead to no period at all. This is because progesterone has an effect that thins the endometrium.
If your periods are heavy or you bleed for too many days, your doctor may suggest using a hormonal contraceptive to help control your bleeding
Of course, anytime your period is excessively heavy, long lasting, or doesn’t seem normal, consult your physician for advice.
Updated by Andrea Chisholm MD
Menstruation and the Menstrual Cycle;;; accessed 07/21/08.
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Installing a wind turbine on or around your home is a great way to diversify your energy supplies, but you don’t need a 100 foot wind tower to get the job done. As such, Electric Pinwheels has produced a small, flexible and easily-attachable wind turbine that can help dramatically reduce a family’s energy consumption. Best of all? It can be installed in 8 seconds, without the need for bolts, screws, alignment or balancing.
electric pinwheels, domestic wind turbine, polymer wind turbies, electric pinwheel turbine blades, wind turbies blades, wind power
The company specializes in polymer turbine blades that are shaped to resembles a bird’s feather. As a result, the overall weight is reduced by 63 percent compared to turbine blades made of wood and fiberglass, and the Electric Pinwheels say that their lighter blades allow for quicker response to the changing wind speed and direction. The rotor on the wind turbine also acts as a large gyroscope, resisting change in direction as it spins. “By reducing the rotating mass by 63% and moving weight toward the center of rotation has the effect of reducing the moment of inertia by 78%, which is the property that governs the degree of gyroscopic effect,” the company said. And if you’re worried about the visual impact of the turbine, the blades have been designed to be of a translucent appearance so as to adapt to ambient conditions.
According to the company’s website, “Electric Pinwheels’ patent-pending blade attaches to the hub by inserting the leading edge spar into a hole and twisting into position. The spar pulls out slightly to lock the blade angle, while the trailing edge spar is pulled into its receiver block. Finally the skin anchor piece is pulled over a post and the entire blade is pulled outward. These three anchor features are designed to be redundant in the unlikely event of failure, adding to the safety of locating the wind turbine close to buildings and people.”
You can watch a video demonstration of the turbine being installed here.
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Q: Are white holes real?
Physicist: The Big Bang is sometimes described as being a white hole. But if you think of a white hole as something that’s the opposite of a black hole, then no: white holes aren’t real.
They show up when you describe a black hole using some weird coordinates, so they’re essentially just a non-real mathematical artifact. However, white holes are a cute idea so they show up a lot in sci-fi. White holes are a mathematical abstraction that necessarily exist in the infinite past. That is to say, if you follow the mathematical model that physicists use, you’ll never have a situation where a white hole exists at the same time as anything else. Its existence happens infinitely long ago.
Near and inside of a black hole spacetime
Spacetime gets seriously messed up near and inside of a black hole. To make the math easier, and to help make the situation easier to picture, the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinate system was created.
In this (very unintuitive) diagram straight lines through the center are lines of constant time, with the future roughly up. The event horizon of the black hole is also the infinite future (from an outside perspective it takes forever to fall all the way into a black hole). That should make very little sense, but keep in mind: black holes and weird spacetime go together like Colonial Williamsburg and a lingering sense of disappointment. The black hole’s interior is the upper triangle, the entire universe is the right triangular region and the white hole is the lower region.
The boundary of this lower region is in the infinite past. That is; in this goofy mathematical idealization of a static and eternal black hole, a white hole shows up automatically in the infinite past. One of the issues here is that black holes need to form at some point (in the finite past).
Taking this model completely seriously and assuming that it implies that white holes are real is a little like saying “imagine an infinite robot-godzilla”, and then worrying about where it came from. It’s an abstraction used to think about other things. Physicists love themselves some math, but the love is tempered by the understanding that writing down an equation doesn’t make things real.
Physicists love themselves some math.
Physicists love themselves some math, but (almost always) recognize the scope and limitations of their own equations.
For example, we can talk about the location “North 97°, East 40°”, but that doesn’t make it exist (North 90° is the north pole, the farthest north you can get by definition).
Sci-fi is about the only place you’ll hear people talking about white holes. Whites holes are the opposite of black holes: they spit out matter and energy, they’re impossible to enter, they’re very bright, that sort of thing. In fiction “the opposite of…” is a great way to get weird new ideas (e.g., Bizarro Superman).
The Einstein picture was created here.
This entry was posted in -- By the Physicist, Astronomy, Math, Physics. Bookmark the permalink.
16 Responses to Q: Are white holes real?
1. Boris Borcic says:
You write from an outside perspective it takes forever to fall all the way into a black hole.
Does this not mean that can be somehow opposed – and all the more relevantly with the current debates of firewalls – to the classical notion of “no drama” at the horizon for the infalling observer, that the geometry of his past light cone undergoes a discontinuity at that event?
(I posted essentially the same question a few weeks back on a years-old post on this blog, that I can’t retrieve at the moment; so I am making sure to check notification of followup comments)
2. rigney says:
Not trying to show off my ignorance, but from Newton on to Einstein etc., other than for some very fancy calculus, I see gravity as nothing more than an act of magnetism in disguise. If black holes exist, I attribute them to this powerful entity. I love science with a passion, but unfortunately not smart enough to grasp it other than elementary. As I understand it, black holes have a vacuuming effect similar to pulsars. So, since all atoms have certain magnetic properties, perhaps black holes are nothing more than giant magnets? A white hole on the other hand, if such a thing exists, may have been the white light seen as our universe began.
3. Flavio says:
Analogously, aren´t the imaginary numbers used in the schrodinger equation and on the equations of m theory just an abstract, not apliccable model?
4. The Physicist The Physicist says:
The complex numbers found in quantum mechanics are extremely important, and QM can’t (cleanly)be done without them. However, they don’t directly show up. They just work in the background. There’s an old post about that here.
5. Phyllis McLemore says:
Lucky I read the Seth books channeled by Jane Roberts. Otherwise I would have no reason to be interested in physics.
Seth is an energy being that vibrates in a “parallel reality”. Seth says that there are as many colors of holes as there are colors. And these holes are the enter and exit points that energy takes when traveling through different wave lengths. People form these tunnels from intent because we choose to be here. Our choosing forms the tunnel to this frequency creating these holes at both ends. Birth is the end of the tunnel literally. Some books say that we are still attached by a cord to the reality we came from. That means that hole is our connection to the “other side” people talk about.
I don’t understand the cord, though, because as beings of energy and light it would seem to me that I could travel in and out of …..why do these bodies we create have to have cords to another world, the light world we come from?
These bodies are so dense that they don’t vibrate fast enough to keep the connection.
6. white Holes are mathematical fantasy and nothing else, nature is more simple the only thing we need a deeper thinking and clearer understanding…. in order to explain one thing we do not need to add or decorate with additional features that it becomes more complex to understand it……….. my first question ? is our universe finite or infinite… if infinite then our universe has not originated from the big-bang …….. because within a limited time (i.e. 13.7 billion years). it cannot shoot out to infinity……. if it is finite then it has a big-bang origin and it expand to infinity unless the time permission is infinite….!!
7. John David Dunson says:
@juges debnath: There can be both an infinite universe and a Big Bang. I think most people assume that the “universe” expands with the matter from the Big Bang, but that has never made sense to me. What does make sense to me is that the universe is already infinite, and the matter from the Big Bang will keep expanding into it forever. Otherwise, we would eventually expand all the way to the edge of the universe. @rigney: You can’t say gravity is like magnetism because magnetism has poles that can push as well as pull. @Boris Borcic: This doesn’t affect Alice’s fall. It’s only talking about what her fall will look like to Bob (an outside observer). Her own frame of reference is where the debate over no drama vs firewall comes into play. @Flavio: Imaginary numbers are very important and very “real”. They also play a huge role in electrocity/electronics engineering calculations.
8. Mehrdad says:
And there are primordial black holes. Low mass, high Hawking radiation, LITERALLY white holes.
9. Bob says:
Well, primordial black holes (or black holes of small mass) do emit a whole lot of radiation. However, you have to make the black hole first, which means putting in matter/energy. So once the black hole evaporates via Hawking radiation, you don’t have a net gain of energy.
To Physicist: If white holes violate conservation of energy, then how could they exist? Is there a “weird” theoretical way that white holes could work around or avoid this law?
10. The Physicist The Physicist says:
In part because there’s no positive evidence, and in part because of problems like you mention, it’s fair to say they don’t exist.
11. Pingback: A simple test for the EU people. - Page 78 - Christian Forums
12. Swapnil says:
Whats with Stephen Hawking’s new statement where he said that black holes do not exist?
13. Xerenarcy says:
some simple arguments why a white hole cannot exist:
1. a white hole is often used to explain where all the stuff in a black hole goes; a black hole in universe A, leads to a white hole in universe B. for all intents and purposes the inside of a black hole is not something you can pass through, it just accumulates stuff and due to gravity that ‘stuff’ is crushed and merged into the black hole. so ruling out that black holes are universal bridges (same reason wormholes could exist but don’t), a white hole no longer has reason to exist.
2. even then, for a white hole to spit out radiation and particles it would need to be constantly spitting out energy in such amounts that particles can spontaneously be created. if we are talking about “opposite of a black hole” then the amount of energy coming out needs to approximate the amount of energy falling into a black hole of similar size. so then white holes ‘grow’ by evaporation and ‘shrink’ by ejecting energy in all directions. no matter how you try to think about it a true opposite of a black hole, in a thermodynamical sense, is ludicrous.
3. ok, so ignoring why a white hole can exist or where it gets its energy from, my favorite argument comes up… what happens to all the energy and matter that the white hole spits out? without a sufficient escape velocity all the energy and matter that a white hole spits out would be gravitationally attracted to itself, and inevitably (so long as the white hole continues to spit out matter/energy) will collapse to form a black hole. providing ‘sufficient’ escape velocity to avoid this scenario would rob the white hole of even more energy still…
given the above you would have to conclude that the only way a white hole can exist is a black hole operating in reverse time. quite possibly an ‘antimatter black hole’ would fit this category (arguably antimatter and time-reversed matter have a lot in common, indeed in QM the distinction is often moot for single particles)
14. Donald Pennino says:
It should be obvious to everyone that white holes exit. The Big bang was nothing more then matter from another universe spewing into our “known” universe. Black holes spew the same crap back into another. Proof there is at least one other universe(probably many more). Our universe is not “infinite” but has finite volume made of some type of fabric with barriers. This answers most of physics question. Just open your mind up and don’t get pulled into a mathematicians or philosophers rule minded game. Heaven, hell, multi-dimensions, ghosts, time portals, etc . It’s all the same thing that we have given different names for our lack of understanding of how it all works.
15. casey says:
is this saying that a white hole existed before our universe and that possibly they exist on the other side of blackholes so therefore they are not in our universe and do not exist or they just don’t exist at all
Leave a Reply
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The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Quiz | Two Week Quiz A
Buy The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Lesson Plans
Name: _________________________ Period: ___________________
This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 9, Now the Books Themselves.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Which one of the following is a topic of discussion in Letter #150 to Christopher?
(a) Maps for the books.
(b) Advertisements for the books.
(c) The number of books printed.
(d) The number of books sold.
(a) April.
(b) November.
(c) July.
(d) February.
3. As stated in "The Professor," when are The Lord of the Rings books officially published?
(a) 1952.
(b) 1953.
(c) 1951.
(d) 1954.
4. How many Rings of Power does the One Ring control?
(a) Eight.
(b) Ten.
(c) Seven.
(d) Nine.
5. Where does the conversation about accents take place that Tolkien discusses in his letter to Christopher?
(a) On a plane.
(b) In a boat.
(c) On a train.
(d) In a car.
Short Answer Questions
2. How does Tolkien describe the change that he has made to his manuscript in Letter #129?
3. Who is the person that Tolkien thanks, and is the recipient of Letter #130?
4. What is the term "galleys" used to refer to in "The Professor"?
5. How does Tolkien feel when he looks at his work in the revision stages?
(see the answer key)
This section contains 223 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)
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Scientists measure red meat cancer risks
In collaboration with the Press Association
Scientists say that they have identified one of the main links between a diet high in red meat and an increased risk of bowel cancer.
Researchers at the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit and the Open University found that people who eat two or more portions of red meat every day have a significantly higher level of cellular DNA damage than people who ate one portion or less a week.
A study by the same team last year showed that the risks of bowel cancer could be increased by as much as a third among people with high-red meat diets.
Nearly 17,000 currently die from the disease every year in the UK.
"These combined discoveries have allowed us to link red meat consumption to an increased risk of bowel cancer and may give us some clues about developing a screening test for very early changes related to the disease," said Professor David Shuker, who headed the Open University team.
The study suggested that the increased cancer risk could be caused by substances called N-nitrosocompounds, which form in the large bowel after eating red meat.
These are thought to combine with DNA and make cells more susceptible to changes or mutations which can increase their likelihood of becoming cancerous.
"This study strengthens the link between red meat and bowel cancer by showing that chemicals in red meat can damage DNA," said Ed Yong, science information officer at Cancer Research UK.
"While it doesn't mean that everyone should go vegetarian, it does emphasise that eating a healthy, balanced diet is very important for reducing your risk of cancer.
"Cancer Research UK's Reduce the Risk campaign advises people to eat lots of fibre, fruit and vegetables, and cut down on red and processed meat." |
Media censorship
From Conservapedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Media censorship (or story burying) is a common problem among modern news organizations, both in print and on television networks. News organizations with a political bias will often censor news stories by:
• failing to report on them
• reporting on them, but making them less prominent (either by placing the story in a less prominent position, or devoting less air-time to it)
• failing to adequately represent one side of a story.
The third is by far the most common media tool. Most media organizations cannot risk not printing major stories (where "major" can apply either to importance in society or value to the audience - these do not always overlap. See infotainment), or burying them to less prominent positions, lest they risk losing their audience or market share. Instead, media outlets will enact their censorship agenda by misrepresenting one side of a story, where the misrepresentation is often proportional to the political importance or partisanship quotient of the story.
Party misrepresentation can take the form of:
• omitting quotes from an organization that would make the story less damaging to that organization
• using incomplete quote froms an organization to mislead
• referring to one organization using volatile and emotive language
Media censorship in various regimes
The index of press freedom ranks 175 of the worlds' nations by their degree of freedom of the press[1] (the higher the rank, the freer the press). Below are listed some nations notable for their press censorship or freedom.
China (#168)
According to the Council on Foreign Relations,
China's constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the document contains broad language that says Chinese citizens must defend "the security, honor, and interests of the motherland." Chinese law includes media regulations with vague language that authorities use to claim stories endanger the country by sharing state secrets.[2]
See also
External links |
Paul Craig Roberts
April 7, 2012
The stagecoach bounced along the uneven trail through Indian lands. A year ago there would have been danger from Indians. But Ulysses Grant had sent General Philip Henry Sheridan, who had brought the horrors of war to Confederate civilians, to annihilate the plains Indians.
In his winter campaign of 1868-69, Sheridan attacked the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, killing women and children and taking the Indians’ supplies and livestock. In Congressional testimony, Sheridan advocated the slaughter of the vast herds of bison in order to deprive Indians of food.
Having turned professional hunters loose on Indian lands, Sheridan wrote: “Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated.” For his proficiency in war crimes, Sheridan was made commanding general of the U.S. Army.
When the first thud of the arrows hit the stage, the passengers screamed, “Indians, we will be scalped.” Among the passengers was a grizzled, hardened man. He retrieved an arrow and noting the metal arrowhead realized that it was not an Indian arrow and that the stage was being attacked by outlaws posing as Indians.
False flag attacks are as old as history.
“Bowie” Johnston had fought Indians all his life. He had more respect for them than he had for most white men. Unlike the other passengers, he understood that Indians would be blamed when whites preyed upon whites.
He also understood that seized with fear, the stage driver would urge the horses onward. The rough trail would mean no accurate shooting from the coach and likely a broken axel or lost wheel. An overturned and wrecked stagecoach would be easy pickings for the outlaws.
Bowie opened the stage door and swung up on top of the coach. With his Colt at the driver’s head, he ordered the driver to stop the coach. He seized the Winchester from the guard. When the coach stopped, he commenced firing.
His two shots took two of the raiders out of their saddles. The rest, realizing they were facing an experienced fighter, rode off.
The stage driver and guard and the other passengers were both angry and relieved.
“We thought you were with the Indians,” they exclaimed, “but you drove them off!”
“They weren’t Indians,” Bowie replied. Those were outlaws after the payroll, knowing that they would be home clear with the robbery blamed on Indians.”
One of the self-important passengers ejaculated, “Why are you shielding those murdering savages. We know it was Indians. Look at all the arrows.”
“Mister,” replied Bowie, “I have been fighting Indians all my life. Look at this arrow. The feathers are not representative of any tribe. The arrowhead is metal. Indians have flint arrowheads. No Indian nation has a foundry or blacksmith. Come with me. Let’s go look at the two I killed.”
Reluctantly, the passengers accompanied Bowie, who wiped the war paint and grease from the dead men’s faces. A uniform gasp was emitted from the driver, guard, and passengers. All could see that a false flag attack had been perpetrated upon the stagecoach.
Bowie told his now attentive audience, ” this attack was intended to bring retribution upon demonized Indians. Innocent Indians would have been massacred while white men rode away with the money. Bowie removed the arrows from the stagecoach and put the metal tips into his pocket. We will take the bodies with us as evidence against further depredations against the Indians.
Bowie contemplated his life. He had been a man ever since a plains grizzly had struck down his horse and ripped him and his saddle off his horse’s back. Faced with a massive killing machine, the 185 pound man armed with a bowie knife felt small indeed. Bowie had been able to inflict enough wounds that the grizzly abandoned the attack.
Bowie’s steadfastness had saved his life, and now it had saved the lives of the stage passengers. Where did this steadfastness originate? Why hadn’t Bowie screamed, “we will be scalped!”
Experience. Bowie had experience. He knew.
Related Articles |
Kashmir Valley is a province of Jammu and Kashmir state, located at the extreme north of India. The entire state has three main provinces – Jammu, Kashmir, and Leh Ladakh. Jammu region resembles more or less to the rest of the north Indian states and cities, in topography and ethnic constitution. However, the other two provinces Kashmir Valley and Ladakh are quite distinct from the rest of Indian states.
Transportation in Kashmir
Kashmir Valley constitutes both the plains as well as terrains surrounding these plains. Srinagar is the capital of Kashmir, and the city-center. National Highway 1A connects Srinagar as well as Kashmir with the rest of India. The roads is Srinagar and other districts are metallic paved roads. At some places, due to heavy snowfall, the roads get damaged in winters. In remote areas, especially far off villages, the roads are not paved.
There are a number of transportation and commutation facilities, operated both by government as well as private institutions. State Road Transport Corporation or (SRTC) is the largest state operated transport company. The agency is primarily responsible for interstate travel, and their presence in cities has been diminishing. Large buses and coaches are owned and operated by SRTC.
In Kashmir, transportation facilities availed by local residents and tourists, often bear small differences. Local residents in cities usually commute by private buses, auto rickshaws or their personal transportation (cars). For longer distances, that is from district to district, MUVs (Multi-purpose Utility Vehicles) and buses are the primary means of transport. In MUVs, Tata Sumo, Tavera, Qualis, Innova (rarely) are some of the means of transportation.
MUVs are the important and primary means of transportation for tourists and travelers. This is due to the hilly tracks and inclines for which MUVs are well suited. Sedans and Saloons are rare and almost non-existent.
Trips and Guided Tours
For picnic trips and other getaways that are not more than 100 kms away, like Gulmarg, Sonamarg, Pahalgam, Aharbal, Dodhpather, Yusmarg, almost all drivers are well acquainted with the routes and provisions needed. For other places and special trips, only experienced drivers who have thorough knowledge about the routes are engaged. Usually for guided tours, taxis or cabs are booked for complete days or from popular destinations- to-destinations.
Commuting in Srinagar
In Srinagar, there are some places where heavy traffic sometimes causes delays. There are few bottlenecks, like Lal Chowk, Dal Gate, Srinagar ByPass Road, Rainawari, Hawal, Rambagh and some other vicinities. Occasionally delays are suffered while traveling from Srinagar to Pahalgam or Aharbal or at times enroute Srinagar Airport. |
Ontario Scenery Photo Tour
Ottawa and Canada's Parliament Buildings
Photo: Parliament of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario
Source: Photo by Kaitlyn Guenther
© Kaitlyn Guenther, used with permission
Ottawa, Ontario is the capital city of Canada. Ottawa is home to the Parliament of Canada, the House of Commons, the Senate, the Privy Council, the Supreme Court, the Federal Court and the Bank of Canada. Ottawa is the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada. It is also the permanent residence of the Governor General of Canada.
The name "Ottawa" is derived from the Algonquin word adawe, meaning "to trade". Ottawa and the Ottawa Valley was home to the Algonquin people prior to the arrival of Europeans during the fur and subsequent lumber trade eras.
Europeans from Ireland and France settled in Ottawa and it has become a multicultural - bilingual city with a diverse population.
Parliament Hill information and coloring page
Photo: Centennial Flame in Ottawa, Ontario
Source: Photo by Leanne Guenther
© Leanne Guenther, used with permission
The Centennial Flame is a symbolic flame that forms the central element of a fountain on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Ontario.
The Centennial Flame was lit by Lester B. Pearson (the Canadian Prime Minister at the time) on New Year's Day, 1967 to officially inaugurate the Canadian Centennial celebrations. The Canadian Centennial was a year long celebration held in 1967 when Canada celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation.
The fountain's water runs from beneath the coats of arms for each of the provinces and territories as they existed in 1966, into a moat below. The wall surrounding the moat lists the year each province and territory joined Confederation.
The Supreme Court of Canada is the highest Canadian court and is the final court of appeals in the Canadian justice system.
The court grants permission to between 40 and 75 litigants each year to appeal decisions rendered by provincial, territorial and federal appellate courts, and its decisions are binding upon all lower courts of Canada.
The Supreme Court of Canada is composed of nine judges: the Chief Justice of Canada and eight others.
Supreme Court |
XXI. talking flags and Torches.
Ho! my comrades, see the signal Waving through the sky; Re-enforcements now appearing, Victory is nigh.
Yes, there were flags in the army which talked for the soldiers, and I cannot furnish a more entertaining chapter than one which will describe how they did it, when they did it, and what they did it for. True, of the flags used in the service told stories of their own. What more eloquent than Old glory, with its thirteen stripes, reminding us of our small beginning as a nation, its blue field, originally occupied by the cross of the English flag when Washington first gave it to the breeze in Cambridge, but replaced later by a cluster of stars, which keep a tally of the number of States in the Union! What wealth of history its subsequent career as the national emblem suggests, making it almost vocal with speech! The corps, division, and brigade flags, too, told a little story of their own, in a manner already described. But there were other flags, whose sole business it was to talk to one another, and the stories they told were immediately written down for the benefit of the soldiers or sailors. These flags were Signal flags, and the men who used them and made them talk were known in the service as the Signal Corps.
What was this corps for? Well, to answer that question at length would make quite a story, but, in brief, I may say that it was for the purpose of rapid and frequent communication between different portions of the land or naval forces. The army might be engaged with the enemy, on the march, or in camp, yet these signal men, with their flags, were serviceable in either situation, and in the former often especially so; but I will begin at the beginning, and present a brief sketch of the origin of the Signal Corps.
The system of signals used in both armies during the Rebellion originated with one man — Albert J. Myer, who was born in Newburg, N. Y. He entered the army as assistant surgeon in 1854, and, while on duty in New Mexico and vicinity, the desirability of some better method of rapid communication than that of a messenger impressed itself upon him. This conviction, strengthened by his previous lines of thought in the same direction, he finally wrought out in a system of motion telegraphy.
These facts are taken from a small pamphlet written by Lieutenant J. Willard Brown of West Medford, Mass., and issued by the Signal Corps Association. Other facts pertaining to signalling have been derived from A manual of signals, written by General Myer (Old Probabilities) himself, since the war.
Recognizing to some extent the value of his system, Congress created the position of Chief Signal Officer of the army, and Surgeon Myer was appointed by President Buchanan to fill it. Up to some time in 1863 Myer was not the Chief Signal Officer alone, but the only signal officer commissioned as such, all others then in the corpsand there were quite a number — being simply acting signal officers on detached service from various regiments.
One of the officers in the regular army, whom Surgeon Myer had instructed in signalling while in New Mexico, went over to the enemy when the war broke out and organized a corps for them.
From this small beginning of one man grew up the Signal Corps. As soon as the value of the idea had fairly penetrated the brains of those whose appreciation was needed to make it of practical value, details of men were made from the various regiments around Washington, and placed in camps of instruction to learn the use of the Signal kit, so called. The chief article in this kit was a series of seven flags, varying from two feet to six feet square. Three of these flags, one six feet, one four feet, and one two feet square, were white, and had each a block of red in the centre one-third the dimensions of the flag; that is, a flag six feet square had a centre two feet square; two flags were black with white centres, and two were red with white centres. When the flags were in use, they were tied to a staff, whose length varied with the size of the flag to be used. If the distance to signal was great, or obstructions intervened, a long staff and a large flag were necessary; but the four-foot flag was the one in most common use.
It will be readily inferred that the language of these flags was to be addressed to the eye and not the ear. To make that language plain, then, they must be distinctly seen by the persons whom they addressed. This will explain why they
Plate 1.
were of different colors. In making signals, the color of flag to be used depended upon the color of background against which it was to appear. For example, a white flag, even with its red centre, could not be easily seen against the sky as a background. In such a situation a black flag was necessary. With green or darkcolored backgrounds the white flag was used, and in fact this was the flag of the signal service, having been used, in all probability, nine times out of every ten that signals were made.
Before the deaf and dumb could be taught to plate 3. made. Let me illustrate these motions ing cuts.
plate 2. talk, certain motions were agreed upon to represent particular ideas, letters, and figures. In like manner, a key, or code, was constructed which interpreted the motions of the signal flag,--for it talked by motions,--and in accord with which the motions were by the accompany-
Plate 1 represents a member of the Signal Corps in position, holding the flag directly above his head, the staff vertical, and grasped by both hands. This is the position from which all the motions were made.
Plate 2 represents the flagman making the numeral 2 or the letter i. This was done by waving the flag to the right and instantly returning it to a vertical position. To make 1 the flag was waved to the left, and instantly returned as before. See plate 3. This the code translated as the letter t and the word the. 5 was made by waving the flag directly to the front, and returning at once to the vertical.
The signal code most commonly used included but two symbols, which made it simple to use. With these, not only could all the letters of the alphabet and the numerals be communicated, but an endless variety of syllables, words, phrases, and statements besides. As a matter of fact, however, it contained several thousand combinations of numerals with the significance of each combination attached to it. Let me illustrate still further by using the symbols 2 and 1.
Let us suppose the flagman to make the signal for 1, and follow it immediately with the motion for 2. This would naturally be read as 12, which the code showed to mean O. Similarly, two consecutive waves to the right, or 22, represented the letter N. Three waves to the right and one to the left, or 2221, stood for the syllable tion. So by repeating the symbols and changing the combinations we might have, for example, 2122, meaning the enemy are advancing; or 1122, the cavalry have halted; or 12211, three guns in position; or 1112, two miles to the left,--all of which would appear in the code.
Let us join a signal party for the sake of observing the method of communicating a message. Such a party, if complete, was composed of three persons, viz., the signal officer (commissioned) in charge, with a telescope and fieldglass; the flagman, with his kit, and an orderly to take charge of the horses, if the station was only temporary. The point selected from which to signal must be a commanding position, whether a mountain, a hill, a tree-top, or a house-top. The station having been attained, the flagman takes position, and the officer sweeps the horizon and intermediate territory with his telescope to discover another signal station, where a second officer and flagman are posted.
Having discovered such a station, the officer directs his man to call that station. This he does by signalling the number of the station (for each station had a number), repeating the same until his signal is seen and answered. It was the custom at stations to keep a man on the lookout, with the telescope, for signals, constantly. Having got the attention of the opposite station, the officer sends his message. The flagman was not supposed to know the import of the message which he waved out with his flag. The officer called the numerals, and the flagman responded with the required motions almost automatically, when well practised.
At the end of each word motion 5 was made once; at the end of a sentence 55 ,; and of a message 555. There were a few words and syllables which were conveyed by a single motion of the flag; but, as a rule, the words had to be spelled out letter by letter, at least by beginners. Skilled signalists, however, used many abbreviations, and rarely found it necessary to spell out a word in full.
So much for the manner of sending a message. Now let us join the party at the station where the message is being received. There we simply find the officer sitting at his telescope reading the message being sent to him. Should he fail to understand any word, his own flagman signals an interruption, and asks a repetition of the message from the last word understood. Such occurrences were not frequent, however.
The services of the Signal Corps were just as needful and valuable by night as in daylight; but, as the flags could not then talk understandingly, Talking Torches were substituted for them. As a point of reference was needful, by which to interpret the torch signals made, the flagman lighted a foot torch, at which he stood firmly while he signalled with the flying torch. This latter was attached to a staff of the same length as the flagstaff, in fact, usually the flagstaff itself. These torches were of copper, and filled with turpentine. At the end of a message the flying torch was extinguished.
The rapidity with which messages were sent by experienced operators was something wonderful to the uneducated looker-on. An ordinary message of a few lines can be sent in ten minutes, and the rate of speed is much increased where officers have worked long together, and understand each other's methods and abbreviations.
Signal messages have been sent twenty-eight miles; but that is exceptional. The conditions of the atmosphere and the location of stations were seldom favorable to such longdistance signalling. Ordinarily, messages were not sent more than six or seven miles, but there were exceptions. Here is a familiar but noted one:--
In the latter part of September, 1864, the Rebel army under Hood set out to destroy the railroad communications of Sherman, who was then at Atlanta. The latter soon learned that Allatoona was the objective point of the enemy. As it was only held by a small brigade, whereas the enemy was seen advancing upon it in much superior numbers, Sherman signalled a despatch from Vining's Station to Kenesaw, and from Kenesaw to Allatoona, whence it was again signalled to Rome. It requested General Corse, who was at the latter place, to hurry back to the assistance of Allatoona. Meanwhile, Sherman was propelling the main body of his army in the same direction. On reaching Kenesaw, the signal officer reported, says Sherman, in his Memoirs, that since daylight he had failed to obtain any answer to his call for Allatoona; but while I was with him he caught a faint glimpse of the tell-tale flag through an embrasure, and after much time he made out these letters CRSEHER
and translated the message Corse is here. It was a source of great relief, for it gave me the first assurance that General Corse had received his orders, and that the place was adequately garrisoned.
General Corse has informed me that the distance between the two signal stations was about sixteen miles in an air line. Several other messages passed later between these stations, among them this one, which has been often referred to:--
Allatoona, Georgia, Oct. 6, 1864- Captain L. M. Dayton, Aide-de-Camp:--
I am short a cheek-bone and an ear, but am able to whip all h — l yet. My losses are heavy. A force moving from Stilesboro to Kingston gives me some anxiety. Tell me where Sherman is.
John M. Corse, Brigadier-General.
The occasions which called the Signal Corps into activity were various, but they were most frequently employed in reporting the movements of troops, sometimes of the Union, sometimes of the enemy. They took post on elevated stations, whether a hill, a tall tree, or the top of a building. Any position from which they could command a broad view of the surrounding country was occupied for their purpose. If nature did not always provide a suitable place for lookout, art came to the rescue, and signal towers of considerable height were built for this class of workers, who, like the cavalry, were the eyes of the army if not the ears. I remember several of these towers which stood before Petersburg in 1864. They were of especial use there in observing the movements of troops within the enemy's lines, as they stood, I should judge, from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet high. Although these towers were erected somewhat to the rear of the Union main lines, and were a very open trestling, they were yet a conspicuous target for the enemy's long-range guns and mortar-shells.
Sometimes the nerve of the flagman was put to a very severe test, as he stood on the summit of one of these frail structures waving his flag, his situation too like that of Mahomet's coffin, while the Whit-
Signal tree-top.
worth bolts whistled sociably by him, saying, Where is he? Where is he? or, by another interpretation, Which one? Which one? Had one of these bolts hit a corner post of the lookout, the chances for the flagman and his lieutenant to reach the earth by a new route would have been favorable, although the engineers who built them claimed that with three posts cut away the tower would still stand. But, as a matter of fact, I believe no shot ever seriously injured one of the towers, though tons weight of iron must have been hurled at them. The roof of the Avery House, before Petersburg, was used for a signal station, and the shells of the enemy's guns often tore through below much to the alarm of the signal men above.
Signalling was carried on during an engagement between different parts of the army. By calling for needed reenforce-ments, or giving news of their approach, or requesting ammunition, or reporting movements of the enemy, or noting the effects of shelling,--in these and a hundred kindred ways the corps made their services invaluable to the troops. Sometimes signal officers on shore communicated with others on shipboard, and, in one instance, Lieutenant Brown told me that through the information he imparted to a gunboat off Suffolk, in 1863, regarding the effects of the shot which were thrown from it, General Longstreet had since written him that the fire was so accurate he was compelled to withdraw his troops. The signals were made from the tower of the Masonic Hall in Suffolk, whence they were taken up by another signal party on the river bluff, and thence communicated to the gunboat.
Not long since, General Sherman, in conversation, alluded to a correspondent of the New York Herald whom he had threatened to hang, declaring that had he done so his death would have saved ten thousand lives. The relation of this anecdote brings out another interesting phase of signalcorps operations. It seems that one of our signal officers had succeeded in reading the signal code of the
A Signal tower before Petersburg, Va.
enemy, and had communicated the same to his fellowoffi-cers. With this code in their possession, the corps was enabled to furnish valuable information directly from Rebel headquarters, by reading the Rebel signals, continuing to do so during the Chattanooga and much of the Atlanta campaign, when the enemy's signal flags were often plainly visible. Suddenly this source of information was completely cut off by the ambition of the correspondent to publish all the news, and the natural result was the enemy changed the code. This took place just before Sherman's attack on Kenesaw Mountain (June, 1864), and it is to the hundreds slaughtered there that he probably refers. General Thomas was ordered to arrest the reporter, and have him hanged as a spy; but old Pap Thomas' kind heart banished him to the north of the Ohio for the remainder of the war, instead.
When Sherman's headquarters were at Big Shanty, there was a signal station located in his rear, on the roof of an old gin-house, and this signal officer, having the key to the enemy's signals, reported to Sherman that he had translated this signal from Pine Mountain to Marietta,--Send an ambulance for General Polk's body, --which was the first tidings received by our army that the fighting bishop had been slain. He was hit by a shell from a volley of artillery fired by order of General Sherman.
To the men in the other arms of the service, who saw this mysterious and almost continuous waving of flags, it seemed as if every motion was fraught with momentous import. What could it all be about? they would ask one another. A signal station was located, in ‘61-2, on the top of what was known as the Town Hall (since burned) in Poolesville, Md., within a few rods of my company's camp, and, to the best of my recollection, not an hour of daylight passed without more or less flag-waving from that point. This particular squad of men did not seem at all fraternal, but kept aloof, as if (so we thought) they feared they might, in an unguarded moment, impart some of the important secret information which had been received by them from the station at Sugar Loaf Mountain or Seneca. Since the war, I have learned that their apparently excited and energetic performances were, for the most part, only practice between stations for the purpose of acquiring familiarity with the code, and facility in using it.
It may be thought that the duties of the Signal Corps were always performed in positions where their personal safety was never imperilled. But such was far from the fact. At the battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864, a signal officer had climbed a tall pine-tree, for the purpose of directing the fire of a section of Union artillery, which was stationed at its foot, the country being so wooded and broken that the artillerists could not certainly see the position of the enemy. The officer had nailed a succession of cleats up the trunk, and was on the platform which he had made in the top of the tree, acting as signal officer, when the Rebels made a charge, capturing the two guns, and shot the officer dead at his post.
From the important nature of the duties which they performed, the enemy could not look upon them with very tender regard, and this fact they made apparent on every opportunity. Here is an incident which, I think, has never been published:--
When General Nelson's division arrived at Shiloh, Lieutenant Joseph Hinson, commanding the Signal Corps attached to it, crossed the Tennessee and reported to General Buell, after which he established a station on that side of the river, from which messages were sent having reference to the disposition of Nelson's troops. The crowd of stragglers (presumably from Grant's army) was so great as to continually obstruct his view, and in consequence he pressed into service a guard from among the stragglers themselves to keep his view clear, and placed his associate, Lieutenant Hart, in charge. Presently General Grant himself came riding up the bank, and, as luck would have it, came into Lieutenant Hinson's line of vision. Catching sight of a cavalry boot, without stopping to see who was in it, in his impatience, Lieutenant Hart sang out: Git out of the way there! Ain't you got no sense? Whereupon Grant very quietly apologized for his carelessness, and rode over to the side of General Buell. When the lieutenant found he had been addressing or dressing a major-general, his confusion can be imagined. (See frontispiece).
After arriving before Fort McAllister, General Sherman sent General Hazen down the right bank of the Ogeechee to take the fort by assault, and himself rode down the left bank to a rice plantation, where General Howard had established a signal station to overlook the river and watch for vessels. The station was built on the top of a rice-mill. From this point the fort was visible, three miles away. In due time a commotion in the fort indicated the approach of Hazen's troops, and the signal officer discovered a signal flag about three miles above the fort, which he found was Hazen's, the latter inquiring if Sherman was there. He was answered affirmatively, and informed that Sherman expected the fort to be carried before night. Finally Hazen signalled that he was ready, and was told to go ahead. Meanwhile, a small United States steamer had been descried coming up the river, and, noticing the party at the rice-mill, the following dialogue between signal flags ensued:--
Who are you?
General Sherman.
Is Fort McAllister taken?
Not yet; but it will-be in a minute.
And in a few minutes it was taken, and the fact signalled to the naval officers on the boat, who were not in sight of the fort.
During the battle of Gettysburg, or, at least, while Sickles was contending at the Peach Orchard against odds, the signal men had their flags flying from Little Round Top; but when the day was lost, and Hood with his Texans pressed towards that important point, the signal officers folded their flags, and prepared to visit other and less dangerous scenes. At that moment, however, General Warren of the Fifth Corps appeared, and ordered them to keep their signals waving as if a host were immediately behind them, which they did.
General E. P. Alexander, the officer referred to as having organized the Rebel Signal Corps, in an article in the Century Magazine for January, 1887, describing Pickett's charge, says that he was particularly cautioned, in moving the artillery, to keep it out of sight of the signal-station upon Round Top. In a foot-note referring to this caution he says:--
This suggests the remark that I have never understood why the enemy abandoned the use of military balloons early in 1863, after having used them extensively up to that time. Even if the observer never saw anything, they would have been worth all they cost, for the annoyance and delays they caused us in trying to keep our movements out of their sight. That wretched little signal-station upon Round Top that day caused one of our divisions to lose over two hours, and probably delayed our assault nearly that long. During that time a Federal corps arrived near Round Top, and became an important factor in the action which followed.
In a note addressed to the historian of the Signal Corps Association, to whom General Alexander has furnished a sketch of the organization of the Rebel Signal Corps, he says:--
You are more than welcome to the compliment I paid the signal-station on Round Top in my article in the January Century. I have forgiven all my enemies now; and though you fellows there were about the last that I did forgive, I took you in several years ago, and concluded to let by-gones be by-gones.
Thy work is done; along Virginia's river No more thy signal flies; From Georgia's hills by night no more the quiver Of thy red torch shall rise. There came a noon when from the bastions frowning Of every fort and bay Flung out a banner; hurrying on and crowning The mountains far away. We left undecked no hamlet's little steeple That loud with joy-bells rung; And from the breasts of a too happy people Its passion-flowers were hung. We knew its language; knew our work was over; And hailed, while ours we furled, The only Flag whose sovereign folds shall cover Henceforth our Western world. |
Untitled Document
Milk Mustache Campaign Letter to the Public School System
Dear Superintendent,
I have recently become aware of the fact that your school district promotes and supports the Milk Mustache Campaign aimed to encourage school children (and their parents) to consume milk and other dairy products for optimal health. I find this alarming and very concerning because in reality, students’ health is being jeopardized by the assumption that cow's milk is a healthy food for humans.
There have been an array of studies conducted on both human and non-human animals revealing the staggering correlations between the consumption of animal based foods, and the likelihood of developing degenerative diseases. The most comprehensive study ever conducted on the relationship between diet and disease (The China Project) found 367 correlations linking the consumption of casein (the primary protein found in milk) and the development of disease. Casein has been scientifically proven to be carcinogenic and one of the leading causes of not only death, but common illnesses such as obesity in North America.
The Milk Mustache Official Website states "Milk is kids' top breakfast beverage" and claims to be "the leading source of 10 nutrients in kids' diets," in a survey sponsored by Kelloggs. The website also states, "Mom's Top 5 School Day Breakfast Foods" as:
1. Cereal
2. Eggs
3. Toast
4. Waffles
5. Pancakes
The problem is that milk and the other foods listed as being favorites or important in a child's diet are not health-promoting foods. By continuing to encourage the consumption of dairy products within an educational setting of young, impressionable students, you run the risk of increasing the likelihood that the students will develop obesity, type 2 Diabetes, and a host of other preventable, debilitating diseases. Because the Milk Mustache Campaign portrays celebrity figures, children helplessly follow the endorsement by famous people they resonate with.
A solution to this very serious health problem is the immediate removal of the Milk Mustache Campaign Ads along with developing a stronger district-wide understanding between the relationship of milk consumption and fat gain, as well as other adverse health implications. Further recommendations are to consider that the primary sources of nutrition, which all children need for a healthy start in life, come from plant-based whole foods. These consist of fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, seeds and legumes. They provide the richest sources of macro and micronutrients (proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals) and even aid in the prevention and reversal of disease.
I would be happy to meet with school district representatives to form a committee to create a truly healthy learning environment for our children that is free from corporate and agribusiness influence. I look forward to working with you to find more sound solutions for a healthier future for our children.
-Robert Cheeke
For more information about the T. Colin Campbell Plant-Based Nutrition Certification Course, please visit www.ecornell.com/robertcheeke |
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Radiation Levels In Japan Causing Concern in Other Countries
Mother and daughter receive radiation exposure scanning in Fukushima, northern Japan Friday, one week after a massive earthquake and tsunami, March 18, 2011
As the nuclear crisis continues in northeastern Japan, the government is telling people near the damaged Fukushima-Daiichi reactors to stay indoors. The US government is warning Americans already in Japan to stay at least 80 kilometers away from the reactor site. Many people in the U.S., China and Russia are reportedly stocking up on potassium iodide pills to protect themselves against any wind-borne radiation. While there are many uncertainties about the public health situation in Japan, much is known about the health effects of radiation.
Tens of thousands of people in Japan have been scanned for radiation exposure by medical teams wearing white suits and carrying Geiger counters. When radioactive iodine enters the body, it settles in the thyroid. Children are especially vulnerable.
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine exploded in 1986, people living nearby were exposed to unusually high levels of radiation. Experts say more than 6,000 children developed thyroid cancer as a result of that exposure.
"Radioactivity is bad for children because it can damage DNA and affect the way cells divide. And children have cells that divide more rapidly than adults because they are growing," said Dr. Edwin Lyman, who is with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Confusing terminology
Health experts now know that some of these cancers could have been prevented if the children had taken potassium iodide before being exposed to the radiation.
Unless a person is scanned, it is impossible to know how much radiation the body has absorbed.
The terminology can also be confusing.
"One way of measuring is through rem,” said Dr. John Soh, chief of radiation oncology at the Cleveland Clinic. “Another way is the sievert. And because the seivert is a very large unit, we typically measure things in milliseverts. And just to give you an idea, a chest x-ray is about 0.2 milliseiverts," Soh stated.
Dr. Soh says the average person should not be exposed to more than one milliseivert per year. If a person were exposed to 17 seiverts or 1,700 rem, it would likely result in a fatal cancer.
Thursday morning, Kazuo Ymanaka, a spokesman for the Japanese power plant, sought to reassure a frightened populace that the radiation levels around the damaged reactors were going down.
"The changes in the level of radiation as of March 17, today at 9:30 was 3,786 microsieverts per hour. An hour later at 10:30, it went down to 3,750 microsieverts, a bit lower than previously," he said.
Hourly exposure crucial
Professor Robert Baker from Texas Tech University has studied the radiation effects around Chernobyl.
"The amount of radioactivity that kills humans is a substantial amount. If you don't get that much radiation, then the effect for the rest of your life is not easily measured," Baker said.
What counts is not only the amount of a one-time, immediate exposure, but how much radiation a person is exposed to per hour, or regularly over weeks and months. An exposure of four or five seiverts per hour could require a bone marrow transplant.
A review by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the highest radiation levels so far at the Fukushima plant have been around 400 millisiverts, rates that are high enough to cause radiation sickness within two or three hours. That level quickly dropped and other readings have been far lower. And the levels also drop quickly the farther away from the damaged plant the measurements are taken. |
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How to Ignore a Bully on the School Bus (Middle School)
Two Methods:Ignore the BullyResponding to the BullyCommunity Q&A
Is there an irritating bully making your life a misery every time you step onto the school bus? While you can't change how that person behaves, you can change the way that you deal with the situation and reduce your exposure to the bullying behavior. Follow these steps to help you to cope with the bus bully.
Method 1
Ignore the Bully
1. 1
Don't make eye contact. From the moment you step onto the bus to the moment you step off to get to school, just completely ignore the bully.
2. 2
Sit in a seat by the window, then have someone you trust sit by you, or squeeze in past someone already sitting on the outer seat, so as to stop the bully sitting next to you. This puts you in a more hard to reach position and stops the bully from sitting by you.
• It's wise to sit as near to the front as possible, so that the driver can witness what the bully is saying/doing so that they can take action. Some buses have video recorders that record what happens on the bus. If your bus has this, use it to your advantage and allow it to capture what the bully is doing to you.
3. 3
Make plans with your friend(s) to save a seat for you. It is wise to stick with your friends as much as possible on the school bus, since they can prove valuable in helping you to cope with the bully. Also, it's nice to have a friend by your side when there's a bully calling you "dumb".
4. 4
If the bully is sitting right behind you and is poking you in the head and/or saying insults, ignore them. It's hard, but if you don't respond the bully will eventually get bored and stop doing it. After all, the reason they are bullying you is to get a reaction from you!
5. 5
If your friend is beside you, use the 'Invisible Bully Conversation' technique. If the bully is saying something nasty to you, turn to your friend and ask them a question naturally, right in the middle of what the bully is saying, acting as if the bully is invisible and cannot be heard. Don't say something like "The weather is nice today, isn't it?" really loudly and obviously, or even worse, "Don't you just hate bullies?" Start a conversation as you would normally, and casually say something like "The homework yesterday was really hard, wasn't it? I think I got question 14b wrong."
6. 6
If this fails, reach into your bag and find something to do while the bully is talking. You can find many goodies in your bag to do, such as homework or a book to read. When the bully is saying or grunting something nasty, bend down and casually pick up a book and start reading, or finish your homework. This is useful because it also makes you absorbed in what you're doing and you can easily ignore the bully.
7. 7
Pretend to be asleep. When the bully is talking, you can pretend to fall asleep and even insert a snore or two. This makes you a pointless target as you're not listening or watching at all.
Method 2
Responding to the Bully
1. 1
If the bully persists throughout the whole journey, turn around and ask them politely but firmly to "Please stop saying nasty things about me, because it's really irritating and annoying." If they still persist, tell them "If you don't stop, I will go to the bus driver/teacher/head of school etc." Don't be like an immature five-year-old saying "You're mean, I'm gonna tell"; rather, say it assertively and firmly. If they say something stupid like "Oh, I'm so scared," say "Well, you won't exactly be happy when you get a (form of punishment at your school)" and proceed to ignore him/her from then on. Remember, bullies are cowards so they probably are actually scared.
2. 2
Catch the pranks and respond with disdain. Does the bully always stick out a leg for you to trip up on? Next time they do it/try to do it say 'Wow. Really? You would sink to that level? What kind of freakish joy do you get from tripping me (name of bully)?' Cross your arms, and look the bully in the eye (step 1 doesn't apply here) and wait patiently for the bully to put his/her leg down. You can even laugh a little and shake your head to show that this pitiful technique of the bully makes you laugh. Use the name of the bully so they realize your talking to them.
3. 3
When the bully taunts you and calls you mean names, fight back with words! Just think about Martin Luther King Jr. and his speeches against racism. If they call you dumb or some other dirty name, reply with something witty like, "It takes a dumb one to know a dumb one" or even funnier, "Stop stalking me! It's creeping me out!" This would be a good technique if they constantly following you. You can use this technique if they are repeatedly bothering you and you are sick of it, or you feel they have crossed the line and you will not let them put you down, but only respond to them once if you must. Ignoring is a far better technique.
4. 4
Don't listen to what they say. They don't know who you really are! Why should you care about what they say? When someone calls you dumb (lacking intelligence or common sense) how would they know that? They don't know your test grades. You are yourself and no one can change who you are. Never let bullies trample all over you.
5. 5
Remember that bullies are just bad, sad people. They are bad to the core because they take pleasure in being nasty to people, and sad because they spend their lives doing it and they're probably only doing it because they're jealous of you or they're taking out their own problems on someone else. If bullying gets out of hand and makes your life a misery, always an adult. It may be hard, but remember this is exactly how you will win against the bully.
Community Q&A
Ask a Question
• Bullying is any act of intentional unkindness, not just repeated unkindness. Repetition of the act is a way of confirming that the bully has no intention of letting up.
• Always act as if you don't care what the bully says. Reacting is exactly what the bully wants.
• Remember that you're a hundred times the person that the bully is, and you should never sink to their level by bullying back, however frustrating it is.
• Stay as far away from the bully as possible. Don't go near them in the jostle to get to the exit. It's unpleasant to be squished against the bully and also it gives them more of an opportunity to hurt you.
• It doesn't pay to live by the saying 'tooth for a tooth'. Be the better person instead.
Article Info
Categories: Dealing with Bullying
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‘The War on Drugs’ Makes Kids Less Safe
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John LashThe hypocrisy of government efforts is a well known phenomena. Whatever scheme they embark on is wrapped in the stars and stripes, somehow connected to good Christian behavior and/or “the troops” and presented as necessary for protecting families, especially children. These common tropes then serve as justification for all sorts of behavior, no matter how reprehensible. The truth of course is often far different, and the true reasons for policies and social control are often hidden. Sometimes an effort may start for political gain but then be co-opted for monetary or other reasons.
Consider the so-called War on Drugs. In the popular imagination it began with then President Nixon, although various interests had been advocating for federal intervention in the use of mind altering substances since the days of alcohol prohibition. This effort, supposedly aimed at making our lives safer, has had terrible consequences, as outlined in blog post by Tony Newman last year in The Huffington Post. Among these: racial injustice; denied education, housing and other benefits; wasted tax dollars; unsafe living conditions (due to prohibition’s connection to crime), weakening constitutional rights as government seeks to circumvent the fourth amendment, violence across the world (including nearly 70,000 deaths in Mexico since 2006), and (ironically) decreased safety for children. It continues in large part because governments, particularly policing agencies, have a vested monetary interest in perpetuating the conflict.
Kids (especially youth of color) are less safe for several reasons. First, communities are destabilized by over-incarceration and its impact on families as well as the localization of violence in lower income neighborhoods. This violence is directly linked to the black market created by illegality.
Next, kids (and again even more kids of color) are policed disproportionately to their drug use. Many white adults enjoy a de facto decriminalization of marijuana because of enforcement patterns. Black youth are disproportionately arrested and prosecuted and receive harsher punishments even though their rates of use are similar to whites. As a consequence they often become ineligible for government assistance in education and housing.
Lastly, the actual impact and dangers of drug use are obscured by moralistic and simplistic educational programs. Despite the best efforts of schools and other institutions over the last four decades kids continue to use drugs, particularly marijuana and alcohol. As Dr. Carl Hart so ably points out, the demonization of illegal drug users and the exaggeration of drug effects is contrary to the evidence before kids eyes. The crack-addled inner city degenerate who will do anything to get his drugs (or his hillbilly meth-using counterpart) is a fiction, not borne out by statistics and research. Like Reefer Madness, these visions of drug users have little to do with reality. Kids know this, and to continue to lie to them or subject them to failed programs likeD.A.R.E. is to lose whatever credibility we as adults have.
There is hope, though. I breathed a sigh of relief when I read a recent articlein The New York Times about Colorado’s projected tax revenue from the sale of marijuana. “Colorado Expects to Reap Tax Bonanza From Legal Marijuana Sales” is the headline. It encapsulates exactly why this particular front in the so-called War on Drugs may soon be ending. Money has perpetuated it, and money (instead of research) will end it. Politicians are smelling money, and the lure of it will prove stronger than their commitment to this false war. Speech writers and policy wonks will be working overtime to provide the rationalizations for this change in policy. It will be cast as increased freedom, fiscal responsibility or even compassion. Honestly I don’t care why they do it, as long as the war stops. All of us, especially kids, will be infinitely safer. |
- dotTech - https://dottech.org -
NASA is preparing to test laser-based communication system
LLCDInstalled-673 [1]
Transferring large data from space to Earth is not as fast as we might think, that is why NASA is working on ways to allow for laser-based communication systems. These systems will link satellites in space with the base station here on Earth. Once the connection is linked, scientists would have the ability to transfer photos and videos at a higher speed compared to what is available now.
According to NASA:
The LLCD mission will use a highly reliable infrared laser, similar to those used to bring high-speed data over fiber optic cables into our workplaces and homes. Data, sent in the form of hundreds of millions of short pulses of light every second, will be sent by the LADEE spacecraft to any one of three ground telescopes in New Mexico, California and Spain.
Sounds great, right? It sure is, however; there’s a 238,900-mile gap separating the satellite and NASA’s posts on the ground, which means problems could arise during data transfer. We expect the smart people at NASA to have a backup plan if something should go sour.
Furthermore, the NASA reports also claims the laser-based communication system would allow for data transfer speeds 6 times faster than what is currently available. That means NASA could have download speeds at around 622Mbps, and upload speeds somewhere around 20Mbps. If everything goes according to plan for the future, we could one day be tuning into a NASA live video broadcast from space in full HD, how well does that tickle your fancy?
No word on how long before the laser-based communication systems come into play, but whenever it does, we’ll be tuning into NASA’s live feed with popcorn and Jager in hand.
[via NASA [2]] |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Castrati)
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Castrati were rarely referred to as such: in the 18th century, the euphemism musico (pl musici) was much more generally used, although it usually carried derogatory implications;[2] another synonym was evirato, literally meaning "emasculated". Eunuch is a more general term, since historically many eunuchs were castrated after puberty and thus the castration had no impact on their voices.
A Byzantine castrato from the 11th century.
Castration as a means of subjugation, enslavement or other punishment has a very long history, dating back to ancient Sumer. In a Western context, eunuch singers are known to have existed from the early Byzantine Empire. In Constantinople around AD 400 the empress Aelia Eudoxia had a eunuch choir-master, Brison, who may have established the use of castrati in Byzantine choirs, though whether Brison himself was a singer and whether he had colleagues who were eunuch singers is not certain. By the 9th century, eunuch singers were well-known (not least in the choir of Hagia Sophia) and remained so until the sack of Constantinople by the Western forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Their fate from then until their reappearance in Italy more than three hundred years later is not clear. It seems likely that the Spanish tradition of soprano falsettists may have hidden castrati. Much of Spain was under Muslim rulers during the Middle Ages, and castration had a history going back to the ancient Near East. Stereotypically, eunuchs served as harem guards, but they were also valued as high-level political appointees since they could not start a dynasty which would threaten the ruler.
European classical tradition[edit]
In the 1720s and 1730s, at the height of the craze for these voices, it has been estimated that upwards of 4,000 boys were castrated annually in the service of art.[11] Many came from poor homes and were castrated by their parents in the hope that their child might be successful and lift them from poverty (this was the case with Senesino). There are, though, records of some young boys asking to be operated on to preserve their voices (e.g. Caffarelli, who was from a wealthy family: his grandmother gave him the income from two vineyards to pay for his studies[12]). Caffarelli was also typical of many castrati in being famous for tantrums on and off-stage, and for amorous adventures with noble ladies.[13] Some, as described by Casanova, preferred gentlemen (noble or otherwise).[14] Modern endocrinology would suggest that the castrati's much-vaunted sexual prowess was more the stuff of legend than reality – in addition to lacking a hormonal (but not a socio-psychological) sex drive, a castrato's remaining genitalia will not develop in size.[15] Only a small percentage of boys castrated to preserve their voices had successful careers on the operatic stage; the better "also-rans" sang in cathedral or church choirs, but because of their marked appearance and the ban on their marrying, there was little room for them in society outside a musical context.[16]
Alessandro Moreschi, the last of the Sistine castrati
The Catholic Church's involvement in the castrato phenomenon has long been controversial, and there have recently been calls for it to issue an official apology for its role. As early as 1748, Pope Benedict XIV tried to ban castrati from churches,[19] but such was their popularity at the time that he realised that doing so might result in a drastic decline in church attendance.[20][21]
The rumours of another castrato sequestered in the Vatican for the personal delectation of the Pontiff until as recently as 1959 have been proven false. The singer in question was a pupil of Moreschi's, Domenico Mancini, such a successful imitator of his teacher's voice that even Lorenzo Perosi, Direttore Perpetuo of the Sistine Choir from 1898 to 1956 and a lifelong opponent of castrati[clarification needed], thought he was a castrato. Mancini was in fact a moderately skilful falsettist and professional double bass player.[22]
Modern castrati and similar voices[edit]
So-called "natural" or "endocrinological castrati" are born with hormonal anomalies, such as Klinefelter's syndrome and Kallmann's syndrome, or have undergone unusual physical or medical events during their early lives that reproduce the vocal effects of castration without being castrated. Jimmy Scott and Radu Marian are examples of this type of high male voice.[23] Michael Maniaci is somewhat different, in that he has no hormonal or other anomalies, but for some unknown reason, his voice did not "break" in the usual manner, leaving him still able to sing in the soprano register.[24] Other uncastrated male adults sing soprano, generally using some form of falsetto but in a much higher range than most countertenors. Examples are Aris Christofellis,[25] Jörg Waschinski,[26] and Ghio Nannini.[27] However, it is believed the castrati possessed more of a tenorial chest register (the aria "Navigante che non spera" in Leonardo Vinci's opera Il Medo, written for Farinelli, requires notes down to C3).[28] Similar low-voiced singing can be heard from the jazz vocalist Jimmy Scott, whose range matches approximately that used by female blues singers,[29] while the Turkish popular singer Cem Adrian has the ability to sing from bass to soprano, his vocal folds having been reported to be three times the average length.[30] Actor Chris Colfer has a similar range. Colfer has stated in interviews that when his voice began to change at puberty he sang in a high voice "constantly" in an effort to retain his range.[31] The late musician Jeff Buckley had a four-octave range, which allowed him to cover women's songs in a natural voice and reach notes from bass to soprano.[32] Voice actor Walter Tetley may or may not have been a castrato; Bill Scott, a co-worker of Tetley's during their later work in television, once half-jokingly quipped that Tetley's mother "had him fixed" to protect the child star's voice-acting career. Tetley never personally divulged the exact reason for his condition, which left him with the voice of a preteen boy for his entire adult life.[33]
Notable castrati[edit]
Francesco Bernardi, known as "Senesino"
See also[edit]
3. ^ a b c Sherr
6. ^ Heriot chs. 1–3 passim
13. ^ see Heriot, p. 141–154
15. ^ but see Barbier, pp. 13–15
20. ^ Frosch, W.A. (2006). "The sopranos: post-op virtuosi". The FASEB Journal. 20 (6): 595–597. doi:10.1096/fj.06-0402ufm. PMID 16581964.
23. ^ "The Male Soprano Page". Retrieved 2015-08-30.
24. ^ "An Interview With Michael Maniaci". Opera Today. Retrieved 2015-08-30.
25. ^ [1] Archived 30 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine.
26. ^ "Jörg Waschinski, Sopranist". Retrieved 2015-08-30.
27. ^ [2] Archived 17 October 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
29. ^ [3] Archived 20 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine.
30. ^ Capa, Ebru (7 May 2005). "Kaleydoskop içine hapsolmuş kanatsız bir melek (Angel without wings, captured in a kaleidoscope)" (in Turkish). Hürriyet. Retrieved 26 March 2009.
31. ^ Milzoff, Rebecca. "Glee's Chris Colfer on Owning 'Defying Gravity' and Resembling a Hummel Figurine – Vulture". Retrieved 7 November 2011.
32. ^ "Kingdom For A Kiss - The JB F.A.Q.: Jeff's vocal style and range". Retrieved 4 May 2015.
33. ^ Keith Scott (2000). The Moose That Roared - The story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a flying squirrel and a talking moose. St. Martins Press. ISBN 0-312-19922-8.
34. ^ Frosch, W.A. (2006). "The sopranos: post-op virtuosi". The FASEB Journal 20 (6): 475-479
• Bontempi, G: Historia Musica (Perugia, 1695)
• Howard, P: "The Modern Castrato: Gaetano Guadagni and the coming of a new operatic age", (New York, 2014)
External links[edit] |
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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For other people named Durrani, see Durrani (disambiguation).
Durrani[pronunciation?] (Pashto: دراني) or Abdali[pronunciation?] (Pashto: ابدالی) is the name of a prominent Sarbani Pashtun tribal confederation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Originally known by their ancient name Abdali, which may derive from the more ancient Ebodalo (Bactrian: ηβοδαλο / "Hephthalites"). The word Abdal is also the plural form of the Arabic word Abdul, which means slave or follower. They have been called Durrani since the beginning of the Durrani Empire in 1747.[1] The number of Durrani is estimated to be roughly 16% of the population of Afghanistan or 5 million individuals.[2] Durrani are found throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan; although large concentrations are found in southern Afghanistan, they are also found to a lesser extent in east, west and central Afghanistan. Many Durranis are found in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces of Pakistan. The Durrani Pashtuns of the Afghan capital Kabul are usually bilingual in Pashto and Dari Persian. The ruling Sadozai and Barakzai dynasties of Afghanistan were originally from the Durrani. Former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzi is one of the most well known Durrani.
Flag of the Durrani (Abdali) Tribe
Ahmad Shah Durrani established the Durrani Empire in 1747, and the name Durrani originates from that period.
They were known in the past as Abdalis, from approximately the 7th century until the mid-18th century when Ahmad Shah Durrani was chosen as the new Emir and the Durrani Empire was established.[3] One of Ahmad Shah's first acts as Emir was to adopt the title padshah durr-i durran ('King, "pearl of the age").[4] He united the Pashtun tribes following a loya jirga in western Kandahar and changed his own name from Ahmad Shah Abdali to Ahmad Shah Durrani. Since that period, the kings of Afghanistan have been of Durrani extraction.
The origin of the Abdali is probably the Hephthalites.[5] The Zirak line begins with Sulaiman Zirak Khan. Zirak was father of Popalzai, Barakzai, and Alakozai.[6]
The Durranis were the most divided Pashtun tribe (مهمبن) during the rule of the Ghilji, with some having openly opposed them[citation needed]. The Durrani are the politically dominant Pashtun group in Afghanistan, as the former President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, is of the Durrani sub-group known as the Popalzai and has close ties to the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, another member of the Durrani tribe Mohammadzai/Barakzai.[citation needed]
According to Hayat Khan's history of Afghanistan from their progenitor Bor Tarin, otherwise known as Abdal, are descended their two main divisions the Zirak and the Panjpai.[citation needed] The term Abdal, however, gradually superseded that of Bor Tareen and came into special prominence when Ahmad Shah Abdali Sadozai/Popalzai commonly known as Durrani, began his career of conquest. The Achakzais are, in strictness, a branch of the Barakzai, but Ahmad Shah, Durrani himself an Abdal/Bor Tarin/Tareen, fearing the growing numbers of the Barakzai, separated them from the parent stock. Since then, their organization has remained distinct. It is still used, though sparingly, for the Achakzai, who have become localised in Toba and are regarded as a separate political unit from the rest of the Tarin/Tareens.
Durrani prince tomb in Kohat
Branches or subtribes[edit]
The Musahiban also branch from Durrani. Sadozai Abdali tribe is the tribe Ahmad Shah Abdali was from. The Durrani Tareen tribe is divided into two branches Panjpai and Zirak. Durrani tribes of the Zirak branch include Popalzai, Alikozai, Barakzai, Badozai, and Achakzai.[citation needed]
The Panjpai branch are mainly found in the western Kandahar, Helmand and Farah area, and they include Alizai, Noorzai, Ishakzai or Sakzai , and Maku.
The literacy rate of the Durrani is the highest among all the Pashtun tribes and they are also considered the most liberal of the Pashtun tribes. The Durranis continue to live close to other people of Afghanistan and culturally overlap in many ways with the Tajiks whom they often share more cultural and socio-economic traits in comparison to the more tribal Pashtuns such as the Ghilji, which is the other major Pashtun tribe.
See also[edit]
External links[edit] |
White matter
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White matter
Grey matter and white matter - very high mag.jpg
Micrograph showing white matter with its characteristic fine meshwork-like appearance (left of image - lighter shade of pink) and grey matter, with the characteristic neuronal cell bodies (right of image - dark shade of pink). HPS stain.
Human brain right dissected lateral view description.JPG
Human brain right dissected lateral view, showing grey matter (the darker outer parts), and white matter (the inner and prominently whiter parts).
Latin substantia alba
TA A14.1.00.009
FMA 83929
Anatomical terminology
White matter structure of human brain (taken by MRI).
White matter, named for its relatively light appearance resulting from the lipid content of myelin, refers to axon tracts and commissures.
White matter tissue of the freshly cut brain appears pinkish white to the naked eye because myelin is composed largely of lipid tissue veined with capillaries. Its white color in prepared specimens is due to its usual preservation in formaldehyde.
White matter, long thought to be passive tissue, actively affects how the brain learns and functions. While grey matter is primarily associated with processing and cognition, white matter modulates the distribution of action potentials, acting as a relay and coordinating communication between different brain regions.[1]
White matter is composed of bundles of myelinated nerve cell projections (or axons), which connect various gray matter areas (the locations of nerve cell bodies) of the brain to each other, and carry nerve impulses between neurons. Myelin acts as an insulator, increasing the speed of transmission of all nerve signals.[2]
The total number of long range fibers within a cerebral hemisphere is 2% of the total number of cortico-cortical fibers (across cortical areas) and is roughly the same number as those that communicate between the two hemispheres in the brain's largest white tissue structure, the Corpus callosum.[3] Schüz and Braitenberg note "As a rough rule, the number of fibres of a certain range of lengths is inversely proportional to their length."[3]
The other main component of the brain is grey matter (actually pinkish tan due to blood capillaries), which is composed of neurons. The substantia nigra is a third colored component found in the brain that appears darker due to higher levels of melanin in dopaminergic neurons than its nearby areas. Note that white matter can sometimes appear darker than grey matter on a microscope slide because of the type of stain used. Cerebral- and spinal white matter do not contain dendrites, neural cell bodies, or shorter axons,[citation needed] which can only be found in grey matter.
White matter in nonelderly adults is 1.7–3.6% blood.[4]
White matter forms the bulk of the deep parts of the brain and the superficial parts of the spinal cord. Aggregates of gray matter such as the basal ganglia (caudate nucleus, putamen, globus pallidus, subthalamic nucleus, nucleus accumbens) and brain stem nuclei (red nucleus, substantia nigra, cranial nerve nuclei) are spread within the cerebral white matter.
The cerebellum is structured in a similar manner as the cerebrum, with a superficial mantle of cerebellar cortex, deep cerebellar white matter (called the "arbor vitae") and aggregates of grey matter surrounded by deep cerebellar white matter (dentate nucleus, globose nucleus, emboliform nucleus, and fastigial nucleus). The fluid-filled cerebral ventricles (lateral ventricles, third ventricle, cerebral aqueduct, fourth ventricle) are also located deep within the cerebral white matter.
Myelinated axon length[edit]
Men have more white matter than females both in volume and in length of myelinated axons. At the age of 20, the total length of myelinated fibers in males is 176,000 km while that of a female is 149,000 km.[5] There is a decline in total length with age of about 10% each decade such that a man at 80 years of age has 97,200 km and a female 82,000 km.[5] Most of this reduction is due to the loss of thinner fibers.[5]
One study found that compared to women, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence; and compared to men, women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to general intelligence. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers. [6]
White matter is the tissue through which messages pass between different areas of gray matter within the central nervous system. The white matter is white because of the fatty substance (myelin) that surrounds the nerve fibers (axons). This myelin is found in almost all long nerve fibers, and acts as an electrical insulation. This is important because it allows the messages to pass quickly from place to place.
There are three different kinds of tracts, or bundles of axons, which connect one part of the brain to another and to the spinal cord, within the white matter:
1. Projection tract extend vertically between higher and lower brain and spinal cord centers, and carry information between the cerebrum and the rest of the body. The cortico spinal tracts, for example, carry motor signals from the cerebrum to the brainstem and spinal cord. Other projection tracts carry signals upward to the cerebral cortex. Superior to the brainstem, such tracts form a broad, dense sheet called the internal capsule between the thalamus and basal nuclei, then radiate in a diverging, fanlike array to specific areas of the cortex.
2. Commissural tracts cross from one cerebral hemisphere to the other through bridges called commissures. The great majority of commissural tracts pass through the large corpus callosum. A few tracts pass through the much smaller anterior and posterior commissures. Commissural tracts enable the left and right sides of the cerebrum to communicate with each other.
3. Association tracts connect different regions within the same hemisphere of the brain. Long association fibers connect different lobes of a hemisphere to each other whereas short association fibers connect different gyri within a single lobe. Among their roles, association tracts link perceptual and memory centers of the brain.[7]
Unlike gray matter, which peaks in development in a person's twenties, the white matter continues to develop, and peaks in middle age.[8] This claim has been disputed[by whom?] in recent years, however.[citation needed]
A 2009 paper by Jan Scholz and colleagues[9] used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to demonstrate changes in white matter volume as a result of learning a new motor task (e.g. juggling). The study is important as the first paper to correlate motor learning with white matter changes. Previously, many researchers had considered this type of learning to be exclusively mediated by dendrites, which are not present in white matter. The authors suggest that electrical activity in axons may regulate myelination in axons. Or, gross changes in the diameter or packing density of the axon might cause the change.[10] A more recent DTI study by Sampaio-Baptista and colleagues reported changes in white matter with motor learning along with increases in myelination.[11]
Clinical significance[edit]
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common diseases which affect white matter. In MS lesions, the myelin shield around the axons has been destroyed by inflammation.
Alcohol use disorders are associated with decrease in white matter volume.[12] Animal studies suggest that alcohol may cause loss of white matter by damaging oligodendrocytes, the glial cell responsible for maintaining myelin.[13]
Changes in white matter known as amyloid plaques are associated with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. White matter injuries ("axonal shearing") may be reversible, while gray matter regeneration is less likely. Other changes that commonly occur with age include the development of leukoaraiosis, which is a rarefaction of the white matter that can be caused by a variety of conditions, including loss of myelin, axonal loss, and a breakdown of the blood–brain barrier.[citation needed]
The study of white matter has been advanced with the neuroimaging technique called diffusion tensor imaging where magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scanners are used. As of 2007, more than 700 publications have been published on the subject.[14]
1. ^ Douglas Fields, R. (2008). "White Matter Matters". Scientific American. 298 (3): 54–61. Bibcode:2008SciAm.298c..54D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0308-54.
2. ^ Klein, S.B., & Thorne, B.M. Biological Psychology. Worth Publishers: New York. 2007.[page needed]
3. ^ a b Schüz, Almut; Braitenberg, Valentino (2002). "The human cortical white matter: Quantitative aspects of cortico-cortical long-range connectivity". In Schüz, Almut; Braitenberg, Valentino. Cortical Areas: Unity and Diversity, Conceptual Advances in Brain Research. Taylor and Francis. pp. 377–86. ISBN 978-0-415-27723-5.
4. ^ Leenders, K. L.; Perani, D.; Lammertsma, A. A.; Heather, J. D.; Buckingham, P.; Jones, T.; Healy, M. J. R.; Gibbs, J. M.; Wise, R. J. S.; Hatazawa, J.; Herold, S.; Beaney, R. P.; Brooks, D. J.; Spinks, T.; Rhodes, C.; Frackowiak, R. S. J. (1990). "Cerebral Blood Flow, Blood Volume and Oxygen Utilization". Brain. 113: 27–47. doi:10.1093/brain/113.1.27. PMID 2302536.
5. ^ a b c Marner, Lisbeth; Nyengaard, Jens R.; Tang, Yong; Pakkenberg, Bente (2003). "Marked loss of myelinated nerve fibers in the human brain with age". The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 462 (2): 144–52. doi:10.1002/cne.10714. PMID 12794739.
6. ^ University Of California, Irvine. "Intelligence In Men And Women Is A Gray And White Matter." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 January 2005. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050121100142.htm>.
7. ^ Saladin, Kenneth (2012). Anatomy & Physiology: The Unity of Form and Function. New York: McGraw Hill. p. 531. ISBN 978-0-07-337825-1.
8. ^ Sowell, Elizabeth R.; Peterson, Bradley S.; Thompson, Paul M.; Welcome, Suzanne E.; Henkenius, Amy L.; Toga, Arthur W. (2003). "Mapping cortical change across the human life span". Nature Neuroscience. 6 (3): 309–15. doi:10.1038/nn1008. PMID 12548289.
9. ^ Scholz, Jan; Klein, Miriam C; Behrens, Timothy E J; Johansen-Berg, Heidi (2009). "Training induces changes in white-matter architecture". Nature Neuroscience. 12 (11): 1370–1. doi:10.1038/nn.2412. PMC 2770457free to read. PMID 19820707.
10. ^ "White Matter Matters". Dolan DNA Learning Center. Archived from the original on 2009-11-12. Retrieved 2009-10-19. [self-published source?]
11. ^ Sampaio-Baptista, C.; Khrapitchev, A. A.; Foxley, S.; Schlagheck, T.; Scholz, J.; Jbabdi, S.; Deluca, G. C.; Miller, K. L.; Taylor, A.; Thomas, N.; Kleim, J.; Sibson, N. R.; Bannerman, D.; Johansen-Berg, H. (2013). "Motor Skill Learning Induces Changes in White Matter Microstructure and Myelination". Journal of Neuroscience. 33 (50): 19499–503. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3048-13.2013. PMC 3858622free to read. PMID 24336716.
12. ^ Monnig, Mollie A.; Tonigan, J. Scott; Yeo, Ronald A.; Thoma, Robert J.; McCrady, Barbara S. (2013). "White matter volume in alcohol use disorders: A meta-analysis". Addiction Biology. 18 (3): 581–92. doi:10.1111/j.1369-1600.2012.00441.x. PMC 3390447free to read. PMID 22458455.
13. ^ Alfonso-Loeches, Silvia; Pascual, Maria; Gómez-Pinedo, Ulises; Pascual-Lucas, Maya; Renau-Piqueras, Jaime; Guerri, Consuelo (2012). "Toll-like receptor 4 participates in the myelin disruptions associated with chronic alcohol abuse". Glia. 60 (6): 948–64. doi:10.1002/glia.22327. PMID 22431236.
14. ^ Assaf, Yaniv; Pasternak, Ofer (2007). "Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)-based White Matter Mapping in Brain Research: A Review". Journal of Molecular Neuroscience. 34 (1): 51–61. doi:10.1007/s12031-007-0029-0. PMID 18157658.
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Iptables is a powerful firewall built into the Linux kernel and is part of the netfilter project. It can be configured directly, or by using one of the many frontends and GUIs. iptables is used for IPv4 and ip6tables is used for IPv6.
The stock Arch Linux kernel is compiled with iptables support. You will only need to install the userland utilities, which are provided by the package iptables in the official repositories.
Basic concepts
iptables contains four tables, which are areas where a chain of rules can apply:
1. raw filters packets before any of the other tables.
2. filter filters packets.
3. nat is for network address translation (e.g. port forwarding). Because of limitations in iptables, filtering should not be done here.
4. mangle mangles packets.
Tables contain chains, which are lists of rules for packets that are followed in order. There are three built-in chains: INPUT, OUTPUT and FORWARD.
1. Inbound traffic addressed to the machine itself hits the INPUT chain.
2. Outbound, locally-generated traffic hits the OUTPUT chain.
3. Routed traffic which should not be delivered locally hits the FORWARD chain.
A rule in one of these chains can be to send a packet down another chain. If the packet passes successfully through this second chain, it will move to the next rule in the original chain. The three built-in chains have default targets which are used if no rules are hit. User-defined chains can be added to make rulesets more efficient.
A "target" is the result that occurs when a packet hits a rule. Targets are specified using "jump" (-j). The most common targets are ACCEPT, DROP, REJECT and LOG.
There are many modules which can be used to extend iptables such as connlimit, conntrack, limit and recent. These modules add extra functionality to allow complex filtering rules.
From the command line
You can check the current ruleset and the number of hits per rule by using the command:
# iptables -nvL
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0K packets, 0 bytes)
pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
If the output looks like the above, then there are no rules. Nothing is blocked.
You can flush and reset iptables to default using these commands:
# iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
# iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
# iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
# iptables -F
# iptables -X
Configuration file
Iptables rules are by default stored in /etc/iptables/iptables.rules, this file is read by iptables.service:
# systemctl enable iptables.service
# systemctl start iptables.service
Iptables rules for ipv6 are by default stored in /etc/iptables/ip6tables.rules, this file is read by ip6tables.service. You can start it the same way as above.
After adding rules via command-line, the configuration file is not changed automatically - you have to save it manually:
# iptables-save > /etc/iptables/iptables.rules
If you edit the configuration file manually, you have to reload it:
# systemctl reload iptables
The LOG target can be used to log packets that hit a rule. Unlike other targets like ACCEPT or DROP, the packet will continue moving through the chain after hitting a LOG target. This means that in order to enable logging for all dropped packets, you would have to add a duplicate LOG rule before each DROP rule. Since this reduces efficiency and makes things less simple, a logdrop chain can be created instead.
Create the chain with:
# iptables -N logdrop
Then define it:
## /etc/iptables/iptables.rules
... other user defined chains ..
## logdrop chain
:logdrop - [0:0]
-A logdrop -m limit --limit 5/m --limit-burst 10 -j LOG
-A logdrop -j DROP
... rules ...
## log AND drop packets that hit this rule:
-A INPUT -m state --state INVALID -j logdrop
... more rules ...
Limiting log rate
The limit module should be used to prevent your iptables log from growing too large or causing needless hard drive writes. Without limiting, an attacker could fill your drive (or at least your /var partition) by causing writes to the iptables log.
-m limit is used to call on the limit module. You can then use --limit to set an average rate and --limit-burst to set an initial burst rate. Example:
This appends a rule to the logdrop chain which will log all packets that pass through it. The first 10 packets will the be logged, and from then on only 5 packets per minute will be logged. The "limit burst" is restored by one every time the "limit rate" is not broken.
Assuming you are using syslog-ng, you can control where iptables' log output goes this way:
filter f_everything { level(debug..emerg) and not facility(auth, authpriv); };
filter f_everything { level(debug..emerg) and not facility(auth, authpriv) and not filter(f_iptables); };
This will stop logging iptables output to /var/log/everything.log.
If you also want iptables to log to a different file than /var/log/iptables.log, you can simply change the file value of destination d_iptables here (still in syslog-ng.conf)
destination d_iptables { file("/var/log/iptables.log"); };
ulogd is a specialized userspace packet logging daemon for netfilter that can replace the default LOG target. The package ulogd is available in the [community] reopository.
See also |
The Mystery of Ireland’s Leprchauns
338px-Leprechaun_ill_artlibre_jnl.png Historically thought of as tiny, shoe-making people of the fairy world, leprechauns have been a mainstay of Irish folklore since medieval times. And like many of the fantastic creatures that dwell beneath the misty veil of Irish legend, leprechauns have their origin in magic. Theories abound as to how leprechauns came to be, but general belief dictates that they’re descended from the Tuatha De Danaan, a race of magical beings who arrived in Ireland 2,500 years before the Celtic invasion.
With the arrival of the Celts, their superior iron weapons no match for those of the Tuatha De Danaan, the descendants of the leprechauns are said to have gone into hiding. To protect themselves they constructed a vast underworld beneath Ireland’s soil– one that many Irish still believe to exist today.
The portals to his shadowy fairy world are many and include places like waterfalls, lakes and standing rock formations. Leprechauns are believed to have the ability to pass between this underworld and world of humans freely, and have historically been known to appear suddenly to many unsuspecting bystanders.
Classically taking on the form of small, well dressed old men that favor heavy overcoats and hats, leprechauns are thought to guard treasure supposedly hidden by the Danes when they invaded Ireland in the 9 th century. Seeing a leprechaun is considered to be good luck because if one is ever captured by a human they are obligated to grant he or she three wishes. But leprechauns will do just about anything to avoid being caught, including vanishing into thin air—or more likely into one of their magic doorways.
According to many locals, there are places in Ireland where you’re more likely to see leprechauns than others. Several people in Ireland have devoted themselves to the art of finding these magical places: writing books, giving tours and building websites. One website,, has an entire section devoted to the quest for Ireland’s leprechauns called The Leprechaun Watch that even includes a live web cam .
Several places where leprechauns have reportedly been seen can be visited on many of Tenon Tour’s optional day tours, including the Rock of Cashel and Giant’s Causeway. Tenon also offers tours to Dublin’s Leprechaun Museum , where you can learn everything there is know not just about leprechauns but the whole of mystical Ireland. These optional tours are available as part of our Signature Tenon Tours to Ireland. So be sure to have your camera ready on your next Ireland vacation!
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A machine that speeds up evolution
March 17, 2009
The ["target"] DNA is mixed into a vial of bacteria, which is then put into a custom-made machine designed in Church's lab. In the machine, the mixture is subjected to a precisely choreographed routine of temperature and chemical cycles that encourage the bacterial cells to take up the foreign DNA, swapping it into their genomes in place of the native piece it resembles. The single-stranded pieces of DNA are thought to "fake out the cell's DNA replication machinery, sneaking in and filling a gap" during the replication process, says Church. Each generation of the rapidly reproducing bacteria takes up more of the foreign DNA, ultimately producing a population that has all the desired genetic changes.
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Lorena A. Barba group
Why I push for Python
My colleagues are puzzled by my relentless push of Python as the language to teach programming to our undergraduates. They look at me funny, each time that the subject comes up and I can't help vehemently insisting "Python!"
It's natural to be skeptical of someone championing a programming language; we've all seen the language wars rage foolishly in other contexts—surely it's just a matter of preference? And many of my colleagues prefer Matlab, although some others insist that our undergraduates need to learn C. Does it matter?
Let me articulate my reasons to continue to advocate for Python. First, let's agree on the context of this discussion: I'm talking about a programming language to teach undergraduate students of engineering the computational skills that will make them more successful, both as students and as future STEM professionals.
Most entering freshmen have no programming experience whatsoever. Unfortunately, computer science is all but absent from the school curriculum: in 2011, only 5% of high-schools in the US were certified to teach the computer science AP course and only 0.6% of all AP tests taken were in CS [1].
I'm talking about teaching complete novices their first baby steps of programming, and rather swiftly bringing them to a level of skill where they can use computing in their other courses: to analyze data for those lab reports, to learn linear algebra, to solve problems in particle mechanics, problems involving differential equations, maybe even to write a program to control a robot. And by the way, these students are busy and have a social life and cannot abide courses that seem like a waste of time. Let's also make it fun, then, can we?
A programming language for beginners
What is a programming language? All computers really understand is machine language: instructions operating on binary bits. Programming languages are made for humans. Their goal is to allow humans to express what they want the computer to execute for them, in a way that other humans can understand.
Compare these two programs … which is more human-readable?
First, in C++:
#include <iostream.h>
void main()
cout << "Hello world" << endl;
Now, in Python (v.2.7):
print "Hello world"
This simplest of code examples is used in the book "How to think like a computer scientist" [2] to explain why Python is good for teaching beginners. In the C++ version, there are too many elements (#include, void, main) that will be confusing for students. Explaining them takes time, can be intimidating for beginners, and serves no purpose in helping students get computing. Jeff Elkner explains in the preface to "How to think…" that the C++ version of the book had 13 paragraphs explaining the "Hello world" program, while the Python version had only two. The 11-paragraph difference dealt not with programming concepts, but with details of C++ syntax. Beginner programmers will just get frustrated by obscure syntax.
Quoting Elkner again…
Using Python has improved the effectiveness of our computer science program for all students … More students leave the course with the ability to create meaningful programs and with the positive attitude toward the experience of programming that this engenders.
From anecdote to data
Analyzing 30 programs written in Java and 30 written in Python by novice programmers (in Finland, aged 16–19), Mannila et al. (2006) studied the errors found in them to identify those that could be attributed to the language. The students in both groups had the same teacher and studied the same contents in the same environment; only the language changed.
The study categorized errors as relating to understanding (logic) or arising from features of the language (syntax). Four criteria were also applied to the programs as a whole: execution, satisfying specs, error handling, and structure.
Of all the syntax errors found, only two appeared in Python programs while 19 were found in the Java programs (missing brackets or semicolons, uninitialized variables, etc.). And the logic errors were also significantly fewer in the Python programs, compared to Java (17 to 40). Also, more Python programs ran correctly and satisfied the specifications, and more included error checking/handling, compared to the Java programs.
A second part of the Mannila et al. study looked at how the students who learned with Python transitioned to a second language in a later course. Critics of Python as a first language often claim that being too simple, it makes students run into problems when having to use a more advanced language later on. But after both analyzing the programs and interviewing the students, Mannilla et al. concluded that students experienced no problems in the transition. (In particular, they had no problem adapting to static typing after having learned to code in Python.)
In conclusion, this study showed that students make fewer syntax and logic errors when learning in Python (compared to Java), and there are no pitfalls when transitioning to a second language. Python makes it easier to focus on giving students a solid ground on computational thinking.
Bonus reasons for Python
Watch the first 5 minutes of this hands-on introduction to Python for beginners, by Jessica McKellar (Director of the Python Software Foundation), to hear several reasons for learning Python:
Quoting Jessica …
1. Python is a versatile language: you can analyze data, build websites (*), maintain servers, make art or music.
2. Employers love Python: people will want to hire you.
3. Python is a great teaching language … a lot of educational institutions are switching to Python, e.g., MIT
4. It reads very much like English (it has low syntactic overhead)
5. It is very easy to get useful work done quickly in Python
6. You can do data analysis and graphing with Matplotlib (even 3D animations)
7. You can write games on Python (using PyGame)
(*) Websites are build on a Python framework called Django. Examples: Instagram, Firefox, Pinterest, even YouTube!
Continue watching the video from about 8:20 to learn a bit of Python right now! You can type along with Jessica and try the code right on your browser by going to PythonAnywhere.com
Why is it so hard to learn to program?
The well-known computer-science educator Mark Guzdial addressed just this question (Guzdial, 2010). There are many reports of high failure rates in introductory programming courses (worldwide). Why do students find it so hard?
Studying how people use a natural language to describe a task to another human gives clues. In such descriptions, people don’t define iterations, they instead put into words set operations; they are not explicit about loops terminating; people use constraints, event-driven tasks and imperative programming, but they never talk about objects. And when these natural-language instructions are given to other participants, they have no problem following them. Processing a set of data until it's finished is natural, but incrementing an index is not.
How is this related to Python? It so happens that the language's core looping idioms can often replace index manipulation, making it more like plain English. The following examples were given by Raymond Hettinger (core Python developer) in a keynote in 2013. To get the square of the numbers from 0 to 5, you might write Python code like this:
for i in [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]:
print i**2
But the convenient function range() makes it easy to iterate over longer lists.
for i in range(6):
print i**2
This has the disadvantage of creating the list in memory (not good if the list is very big). So in Python 2.7, a better way is with the xrange() function (which in Python 3 dropped the x):
for i in xrange(6):
print i**2
Now, suppose you want to print the colors in a list like this:
You might write this to loop over all the colors:
for i in range(len(colors)):
print colors[i]
But Python let's you do this instead, which looks more natural, and like Raymond says, more beautiful:
for color in colors:
print color
In summary, Python is a lot more like English than other programming languages, and reduces the cognitive load in learning to think computationally.
What about Matlab?
I used Matlab for years and I understand why many of my colleagues use it heavily. For many of them, it's awfully hard to imagine their workflow without Matlab. But there are reasons to at least think about switching, and I will let others speak for me here.
Luis Pedro Coelho is a computational biologist at EMBL. In "Why Python is Better than Matlab for Scientific Software," (Oct.'13) he offers these reasons:
In "Why use Python for scientific computing" (July'13), Cyrille Rossant, a neuroscience researcher at University College London, offers similar reasons:
Almar Klein, a developer and scientist in the Netherlands, has more concrete objections to Matlab in the long "Python vs. Matlab" essay:
"… the most fundamental problem with Matlab is its commercial nature
And cites these other issues:
A trio of additional issues brought up by Hoyt Koepke of University of Washington can be extracted from his "10 Reasons Python Rocks for Research," as follows:
And there's more, if you still need more convincing:
1. "A National Talent Strategy. Ideas for securing US competitiveness and economic growth," Microsoft white paper, p. 13 (2012) // PDF // See also: CS Education Statistics,
2. "How to think like a computer scientist. Learning with Python," Allen Downey, Jeff Elkner and Chris Meyers. Green Tea press, 2002 // Free book
3. Mannilla, L. et al., "What about a simple language? Analyzing the difficulties in learning to program," Computer Science Education, vol. 16(3): 211–227 (2006)
4. Guzdial, M. (2010). Why is it so hard to learn to program? In Andy Oram and Greg Wilson, editors, Making Software: What Really Works and Why We Believe It, Chapter 7, pp. 111–124. O’Reilly Media, 2010.
• Eric Wilson
Jessica's second point "Employers love Python: people will want to hire you." seems a stretch to me. I'm sure there are more Python jobs than some languages, but not nearly the market as Java & C#.
This is from a Java developer that would love the opportunity to do Python for money.
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
Thanks for leaving a comment!
In the tutorial, she's talking to complete beginners who are not likely to become full-time developers, so I think the point here applies to professionals of other fields (or artists) having programming skills, in addition to their field-centric skills.
In my world, I extrapolate the statement to engineering students, where Python is probably more marketable with employers than Matlab. Python is used in industry, whereas Matlab is mostly used in universities.
• Eric Wilson
OK, that makes sense. All the best in your fight against C & Matlab
• http://biosport.ucdavis.edu/lab-members/jason-moore Jason K. Moore
Coming from an engineering prof, I would have expected you to say that Matlab is mostly used in industry, yet you said Python is. Do you have something that backs up that claim with respect to engineering industry?
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
I don't have data, sorry. What I said (and it was hearsay) was not specific to _engineering_ industry, but industry in general—and I was thinking of the popularity metrics of programming languages, where Python has been on the rise.
As far as I know, Matlab is used a lot in a subset of industry (e.g., automotive) where the killer app is Simulink.
• dbg
Java and C# are prominently used by large corporate enterprise IT organizations for developing internal business software. There's a pretty steady job market writing that kind of software but its hardly comprehensive. There are a large number of domains where Python is a more common/preferred language. Scientific computing, data analysis and statistics, and server-side web development are the first three that come to mind. That's not to say you can't write good software in those domains with Java or C#. Just that Python is more common.
Even in the context of enterprise business software, Python is still incredibly useful and desirable to employers. Its one of the most common scripting languages used as "glue code" for managing infrastructure. Most of the enterprise software I've worked on is a mixed system actually. The main application (or applications) might be written in Java, and a dev in this domain certainly should be very comfortable working in Java, but its really important to be familiar with a lot of different technologies.
• Eric Wilson
While it is true that Java is the only choice in the large corporate world, I have worked at several small companies that use Java for building web applications. In fact, my experience is that for web development, there are way more Java jobs than Python in web development. (About 10x for an Indeed.com search in my area, and that may be understated because many of the Python listings are jobs where Ruby/Python/Perl are thrown in there for good measure.)
Scientific computing is certainly a strength of Python, but those jobs are extremely rare. Despite having a PhD in math, I can't find any leads on a scientific computing job.
As for glue code, yes, of course. I wasn't suggesting that one can't use Python effectively in many jobs, I was speaking to the idea of people wanting to hire you because you know Python. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong recruiters, but I can't find anyone that cares that I can write Python pretty well.
• Wolf
I suspect there are more Java and C# jobs as well, but I think most of these jobs are of the somewhat boring, enterprise kinds of software development.
I know a friend of mine uses Python in a hospital to automatize many parts of the workflows. Jessica points out some nice examples of Python used in practice as well.
So for job security, sure: learn Java and C#. But for the more interesting jobs, it's advisable to learn other languages which seem to be more appropriate for certain niches.
• Eric Wilson
That's how I used to think. But I have an interesting Java job now, and I can't find _any_ Python jobs, interesting or otherwise.
Of course it's advisable to learn other languages in any case. I am skeptical of any experienced Java dev that doesn't know and use any other language. But in my experience that is unrelated to "Employers love Python: people will want to hire you."
• http://alfredessa.com Alfred Essa
I lead a team of data scientists, researchers, and developers. Our primary languages are Python and R. Python's ecosystem has amazing momentum with innovations such as iPython, iPython notebook, and Pandas. My team is also responsible for product development in learning analytics. For front-end development we gravitate towards frameworks such as Ember.js and D3 (also Java Script) for data visualizations. With the spike in demand for Analytics I believe Python is emerging as the Queen of programming languages in Data Science.
• LibertyToad
Yeah, that's a pretty good stretch based on when I was job hunting a year ago. I am primarily a C# and C++ developer and would much prefer to work in Python.
• indranil sinharoy
Nice post! I wasn't aware of the argument that one of the reasons that make Python easier to learn is because its structure is more like a written/spoken language for communication, specifically English. In my own case, I had stayed away from Python as I felt it to be too verbose and felt that I would have to type a lot to do simple things. However, that has changed now, and I have been using Python for the last 2 years. I have also realized the beauty in the language, which is really very elegant and expressive. Just like English (or any other language for written/spoken communication), code written in Python can evoke emotions and feelings. I had never experienced such a thing in C, C++, Matlab or LabVIEW (of course among them there are some that are easier than other). I have also experienced first hand (what many others have already talked about) that ideas translate into code more easily in Python.
On a different note, it would be very interesting to know about the basic/ general workflow people in science have adopted around the Python ecosystem. I am not talking about the use of specialized packages. Like how people mix both IPython notebook and Sphinx for literate programming. How they use different Python tools from the start of a project or a research idea, to publication and sharing, etc.
• Misguided Hindus
• Titus Brown
Lorena, you might also be interested in this paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1734437. In summary, my colleagues Bill Punch and Rich Enbody showed that there was no difference in later CS learning if Python was taught before C++.
• Spaceship goes fast
Hey! I took CSE 231 at MSU with Punch. Now I code in python all day every day. Imagine that.
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
Thanks Titus! ... both for leaving a comment and for the link. I had not seen this paper. Its starting point is also an important one: "one semester of C++ does not provide students with [a useful] problem-solving tool." (I suppose the same thing can be said of bare C.) Yet most non-majors have only one course in programming. This is precisely what concerns me: how do you develop computing skills in non-CS majors so they can be more successful in their studies and careers?
My personal opinion is that a better way than the one-semester freshman "intro to programming" course is to embed computing throughout the curriculum, across several courses—engineering math, linear algebra, differential equations, mechanics, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, dynamics and vibration ... all these courses could embed computing as part of their problem-solving approaches.
The paper you mentioned could be particularly useful for my ongoing conversation with colleagues of the robotics branch of MechEng. They tell me that "all our students need C" because they will program microprocessors. I say that learning basic computing skills with Python will prepare them well for algorithmic problem-solving skills, and they'll be ready to learn a second language (and it's a subset of students, not the whole cohort, that go into robotics). But so far I'm not winning that argument.
• RestfullBull
There's http://pyrorobotics.com/ which is python for robotics. Might help you in that argument.
And there's micropython , python on a microcontroller. Not a replacement for c , but can work in some robotics projects, according to author.
• Fangohr
Thanks Lorena for a very interesting post, full of insight, pragmatic and effective approaches to teaching programming to students who are not computer scientists.
I'd like to mention (my own) little report on this from 2004 which looks specifically at C, Matlab and Python as (first) programming languages introduced to engineers at university, which is based on my previous efforts to teach those three languages to engineering students. At the time - that's 10 years ago - the Python eco-system was not as well developed, but the key points for Python were the same: we need to pick a language to teach principles of programming, and we might as well choose one that makes this as easy as possible. By teaching the principles, we enable the students to learn additional languages as and when required during their lifelong learning in their various career paths. Python can do the job of introducing these principles. It so happens that Python in practice goes beyond that by often providing already all the computational/processing/analysis/visualisation power and tools that is required for many tasks in a science and engineering career, and this is increasingly more so as scientific libraries improve and tools like the IPython Notebook become available.
For completeness, the journal URL for "A Comparison of C, MATLAB, and Python as Teaching Languages in Engineering", Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 3039, 2004, pp 1210-1217, is http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-25944-2_157 and a free post-print is available from http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/22811/
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
Hans, thanks for your comment and for the link. I just read your paper from 2004. It aligns so well with the other materials that I've been reading! As discussed in the paper by Mannilla et al. (2006), beginner programmers make a lot of (frustrating) mistakes with C, like you also observed —incorrect scope for loops or other blocks, syntax errors including braces and semicolons, type errors—. I would have liked to see some metrics in your paper (how many students, did you count errors in a given assignment, etc.)
You also put your finger on a considerable disadvantage of the Matlab programming style: only one function per file. I remember when I was using Matlab heavily several years ago, and I was doing a *lot* of copy-and-paste. This gets horrendous as your code base grows.
To think that you wrote this 10 years ago ... at a time when the Python ecosystem was wimpy in comparison. Now we have greatly improved Matplotlib and other stuff like pandas and so on.
• Snakus Oilus
Doesn't the fact that indexing starts with 0 instead of 1 in Python negate your core argument that "programming languages are made for humans, not computers"? In the real world, do you seriously count things starting from 0? MATLAB's indexing is far more amenable to the way humans think.
MATLAB 1 - Python 0.
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
Yes, the number system starts at zero. In mathematics, all the equations and formulas that involve indexing start from zero. Polynomials, Taylor series, Fourier series, linear bases, iterative approximation methods, and many other mathematical expressions and methods all have a zeroth-order term.
Mathematics starts at zero, and the real world too. You may think that you count from one, but in fact zero is always in your counting system: it means there's nothing in your counting set.
It doesn't matter which index you start with, it only really matters how you design your language for slicing and such. Ondrej Certik has a nice explanation of that here: http://www.fortran90.org/src/faq.html#what-is-the-most-natural-starting-index-for-numbering
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
The original commenter, Snakus Oilus, was doubtful that numbering from 0 is more natural, and alluded to counting. Because of that allusion, in my reply I referred to how it's natural in mathematics to start with zero.
But you bring us back to the more relevant issue: what matters for computer programming. In this case, E. W. Dijkstra explains why numbering should start at zero in this brief note posted on his website:
I couldn't possibly improve on that.
• Juanlu001
Thanks for the wonderful post, full of references and interesting information! The points you raise are exactly those which we're trying to make in my own University - in fact, we developed our own #aeropython in Spain not many months ago, as you noticed :)
While you are pushing Python "from the top", we're doing the same "from the bottom" - we'll see if we success in showing our classmates the advantages of Python and then make our professors consider alternatives to the well-established, commercial products. Many people were lacking solid programming abilities and they found this language an awesome tool.
Muchas gracias por compartir todo esto, ¡un saludo lleno de admiración desde el otro lado del océano!
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
Gracias a ti por el apoyo!
• Jack Poulson
Hi Lorena,
I was pleasantly surprised to see this pop up on HN!
Perhaps this is in support of your point, but there are three errors in your C++ hello world that will prevent compilation:
1) should be
2) "main" should return an integer status
3) "cout" and "end" are members of the "std" namespace, so they either need to be prefixed with "std::" or pulled in with a "using" statement.
On the other hand, in defense of C++, foreach statements are possible as of C++11 and have fairly nice syntax when combined with 'auto'.
• Rob
According to http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/05/09/why-python-is-slow/ raw Python is probably not an adequate replacement for Matlab, just based on speed alone on account of its dynamic features. I'm not arguing it couldn't be used, as you can easily bolster Python's number crunching with NumPy or the like, but even then I've heard that Matlab is faster for more involved math (probably on account of higher function call overhead and the fact that things have to move back through Python just to go into NumPy).
I have personal experience in Python's speed affecting usability; I wrote a little app to query a Google API in Python and 150 queries took 2:30. All fine when you have time to burn, but I'd rather not sit around and wait. My Python solution wasn't great, as I couldn't use map and asyncio wasn't available then, so I ported it to Node.js. Suddenly, 150 queries finished in 45 seconds. Not only that, but the SQLite bindings were nicer and I could indeed use map to do my dirty work in a nicer looking way. So for my little project, it was easier to use another language.
Also, Python is not fantastic as a teaching language (in my humble opinion, as everyone's computer language "reasons for being better" often are) because although it is interpreted and comes with a comfortable REPL and thus better at teaching the basic concepts of programming, Java is better at teaching Object-Oriented Programming. While I can't say OOP is the end-all and be-all of programming paradigms, it is often instrumental in helping mitigate code copy-and-pasting (and otherwise DRY code), as well as showing programmers how to use statically-typed programming languages. I've found that people who've started with dynamic languages have a harder time adjusting to static languages ("do I really have to type int every time I want to make a number? man, Python was smart enough to do it for me, why can't I just use that?") compared to vice versa ("wait, all I have to do is type `var`? that's cool, but how do I know what's supposed to be in there?"). Again, statically-typed langauges may not be everyone's cup of tea, but they're often useful when working with large code projects and IDEs that understand them.
However, Python is better than Lua (sans LuaJIT) in terms of raw game programming, I'll say that immediately. Love2D is great for all it can do, but Lua is really just often way too slow. Why does my space-age machine struggle to maintain sixty frames per second with only 1000 objects on screen? Cause Lua can't pump out enough data at a high enough rate. Python can do that and much more. But considering a game written in C or C++, Lua is usually the better pick as strictly a scripting language, because of its really puny dependencies and the ease of use in creating bindings to Lua call-out. Plus, no one really wants to bundle an entire 30MB Python installer with their application when they can just statically compile in a tiny Lua interpreter.
PS: "colors = ['red', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow'}" should end with a square end bracket :)
• RestfullBull
If you want to compete with matlab, you compare it to python +numpy which is quite fast for math.
• Rob
Right, exactly; but "flat" Matlab (that is, Matlab with few looping constructs) has been shown to me to be faster than Python+NumPy for intensive calculations. If you want something comfortable and easy to prototype in, Python can be your best friend. But after a little while, you may find yourself outgrowing Python and moving to a domain-specific language. Sometimes you never quite need to make the jump, and that's normal; but I maintain that there's a reason that Matlab exists.
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
This post inspired animated debate over at Hacker News:
The professional bias of HN readers shows, however, as most assumed that the post was about computer science majors—maybe without reading it—rather than engineering majors. (I sensed other bias, too, when the author of the post is referred to as "he," but that's beside the point.) Even in the case of CS majors, though, I know that the success story of Havey Mudd is in part ascribed to switching the intro class to Python …
• manejandodatos
#manejandodatos I should have learnt Python before - http://www.manejandodatos.es/2013/11/learnt-python
• http://williammora.com/ William Mora
Nice post. After reading this article I feel like coding some Python :)
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• Nelso Jost
It is important to realize that Python is NOT a replacement por C/C++, at least not yet (go on, PyPy folks!). Take the example of scientific computing: without NumPy (which is just a bunch of C/Fortran compiled modules) there is no much of a game for pure Python in large data analysis. Take the example of Pygame which is a binding for the great SDL lib (again, compiled in C), or PyQt/PySide, binding for C++ great Qt GUI framework. When programming in Python, 95% of the time you will be relying on some lib coded in C or C++.
That said, I think this is also why everyone should use Python. Say you have a new software project, what do you do? Start with the requirements: find the right tools for the right jobs. Then again, most of the tools are already created (probably compiled in C/C++). Next step you ask yourself: how are you gonna use those tools/libs? Is there really a need for diving into C/C++, memory management, all of it, just to use those libs? I think that most of the times the answer is a simple NO. Here is when Python come in hand: as far as the next layer of abstraction goes, Python and its great extensibilty features, clean syntax, and dynamic typing, make a hell of a language -- and not just a "glue" one. I really believe that Python is mature enough even for large scale projects. As far as optimization goes, on the project level you will be doing function calls and passing data structures around most of the time -- and Python is just perfect for that.
Finally, when some tool/lib still does not exists either in Python or the programming world in general, you can always go and create/optimize them on whatever compiled language you like and bring them into the whole Python project as extended libraries. This also enforces the great skill for programmers: compartimentalization.
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• Kaan Akşit
I am amazed to read similar thoughts. I feel there are endless opportunities using Python in science.
• mahdi ouziala
i am a beginer with python and i had used matlab simulink and i want know how and if there is a library in python that can be used in process control and process modeling
• kumar
Python Certification in chennai
• OldGuy
I am an old high school math teacher and have just taken some online courses in MATLAB. I absolutely love it and can see many places where I can incorporate in my mathematics curriculum. The problem is the IT in the public school system is extremely political. Few teachers/administrators see the value of teaching programming. Even though Mathworks is offering a tremendous pricing opportunity for secondary schools ($500 for an annual license for the entire school), I cannot get it funded. The school instead decided to buy Minitab for statistics. So I am going to abandon MATLAB and go with Python. The learning curve should be manageable and the licensing is MUCH easier....FREE. The only problems I foresee are: 1. Getting administrator rights to install on computers. 2. Finding a good install package that includes all the numPy, sciPlot, etc. etc. so that I have most of the functionality of MATLAB. I also understand that Python doesn't do surface/3D plots very well yet. 3. Would like for vPython to work with Python 3 so I can have students do animations. Your thoughts and corrections are welcomed...
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
OldGuy, you will not regret your choice of using Python for your math teaching!
I'd be happy to help. A few tips …
(1) if you cannot get your admins to install Python on the school computers, you can find a cloud alternative; have a look at SageMathCloud [1] and Wakari [2]
• OldGuy
Thank you. i will start looking at this in a couple weeks. Thank you for the offer of help. I may take you up on it. :)
• Fangohr
Hi OldGuy, I agree with Lorena's reply on all accounts. Some additional info: The anaconda installation works generally great, and our ~500 first year engineering students have installed it on their laptops (with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) without problems, following these instructions [1]. I am sure that for Mac OS X and Linux, you can install this as a user (i.e. no sysadmin privileges required) and I would expect the same is true for Windows.
To further encourage you: our teaching assumes no prior programming language knowledge, and while targeting first year students at university, you may be able to use some ideas from existing teaching materials. Some of ours are visible at [2]
Good luck!
[1] http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~fangohr/blog/installation-of-python-spyder-numpy-sympy-scipy-pytest-matplotlib-via-anaconda.html
[2] http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~feeg1001/support.html
• OldGuy
• OldGuy
Wow! These resources are fantastic! Thanks again!
• Raphael
A lot of this works off of either "Python vs C(++)/Java" or "Python vs Matlab". There are many other language, though. In particular, why Phython and not one of the other scripting languages?
• http://lorenabarba.com/ Lorena A. Barba
The context of my piece is *engineering* education, not computer science. In engineering, Matlab and C are the only other languages used in an intro to programming course.
• Raphael
Are there factors other than custom that exclude other languages per se? Picking the best of three (least evil?) and picking the best are quite a different tasks.
You cite engineering and scientific computing sources; afaik, these are quite distinct disciplines. Isn't Fortran still a thing in scicomp? Your code samples, at least, would work as nicely in a host of other languages. My point is, if there are external parameters that restrict the choice of language as drastically as it seems they do here, it'd be helpful to make them explicit.
• Thomas Jose
Python is a highly sophisticated and famous programming language with understandable and readable syntaxPython course in Thrissur
• Pedro Marcal
+Lorena A. Barba Group, you might be interested to know of my research in automatic programming. That is to say converting text to code based on Python and Natural Language Processing. |
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
"Globalization" refers to the growing interdependence of countries resulting from the increasing integration of trade, finance, people, and ideas in one global marketplace. International trade and cross-border investment flows are the main elements of this integration.Globalization started after World War II but has accelerated considerably since the mid-1980s, driven by two main factors. One involves technological advances that have lowered the costs of transportation, communication, and computation to the extent that it is often economically feasible for a firm to locate different phases of production in different countries. The other factor has to do with the increasing liberalization of trade and capital markets: more and more governments are refusing to protect their economies from foreign competition or influence through import tariffs and nontariff barriers such as import quotas, export restraints, and legal prohibitions. Asian economies such as Hong Kong (China), the Republic of Korea, and Singapore. But not all developing countries are equally engaged in globalization or in a position to benefit from it. In fact, except for most countries in East Asia and some in Latin America, developing countries have been rather slow to integrate with the world economy. The share of Sub-Saharan Africa in world trade has declined continuously since the late 1960s, and the share of major oil exporters fell sharply with the drop in oil prices in the early 1980s. Moreover, for countries that are actively engaged in globalization, the benefits come with new risks and challenges. The balance of globalization's costs and benefits for different groups of countries and the world economy is one of the hottest topics in development debates.
Guest Lecturer in Economics,
PG and Research Department of Economics,
Arulmigu Palaniandavar College of Arts & Culture,
Dindigul District, |
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Definisi 'licence'
English to English
1. excessive freedom; lack of due restraint Terjemahkan
when liberty becomes license dictatorship is near|the intolerable license with which the newspapers break...the rules of decorum
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2. freedom to deviate deliberately from normally applicable rules or practices (especially in behavior or speech) Terjemahkan
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3. a legal document giving official permission to do something Terjemahkan
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4. authorize officially Terjemahkan
I am licensed to practice law in this state
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Immune police recognize good and bad guys in the body
To determine what antigens Tregs can recognize, Drs. Pacholczyk and Ignatowicz did side-by-side studies of antigen receptors expressed on nave T cells and Tregs.
Here, we could quantitatively compare proportions of how many regulatory cells or how many non-regulatory cells see non-self versus self antigens, and we found these proportions to be similar,? says Dr. Ignatowicz. We found regulatory cells respond to cells presenting non-self antigens as frequently as nave T cells.
Researchers report that 70 percent of the most frequent receptors found on na ve T cells also were found on Tregs. Since receptors define what the individual T cell recognizes, it provides additional evidence that nave T cells and Tregs see the same thing, they say.
Drs. Pacholczyk and Ignatowicz reported in the August 2006 issue of Immunity that Tregs, like na ve T cells, learn what to recognize in the thymus. They also reported that most Tregs that mature in the thymus retain their regulatory properties and do not later convert to nave T cells as was previously believed. This finding emphasized the role of the thymus as the primary site where Tregs differentiate and acquire their unique inhibitory functions, they say.
Although, the majority of T cells that may harm healthy body tissue are eliminated in the thymus, some errant autoreactive cells can escape and cause autoimmune disease. Tregs previously believed to primarily recognize self-tissue with the idea of protecting it are considered the antithesis of these autoreactive cells.
It was believed that regulatory cells are baptized autoreactive cells, says Dr. Ignatowicz. They are like bad boys that went good, since they also recognize self tissue but seek to protect it.
Yet scientists kept running into the reality that some regulatory cells also were recognizing and potentially protecting invaders such as bacteria and viruses.
The MCG scientists say because both T cell populations are educated in the thymus, it is not surprising that they recognize the same things.
Contact: Toni Baker
Medical College of Georgia
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Temperatures of springs in the vicinity of Crater Lake, Oregon, in relation to air and ground temperatures by Manuel Nathenson, 1990
Air temperatures for weather stations in an area of 30 longitude by 20 latitude are given in Table 1. Locations of the weather stations are shown on Figure 1, and temperatures are plotted versus elevation in Figure 2. These values are for a 30 year period and should be relatively stable. The area covered by these stations is relatively large, ranging from the Coast Range through the Cascade Range and into the Basin and Range. Stations from a large area are necessary to get an adequate range of elevations. Figure 2 shows that at each elevation there is a significant range of average annual temperatures, but it appears reasonable to fit a best straight line to the data. Using temperature as the dependent coordinate, the line has a slope of -4.6±0.40C/km and an intercept of 13.2±0.50C at sea level elevation (± values are standard error). The value for lapse rate is smaller in absolute value than that found by Bodell and Chapman (1982) for the Colorado Plateau but is similar to the ground temperature lapse rate given by Delisle (1988) for wet climates.
A search was made to find drill hole data for calculating average ground temperatures for the same area. Data from many drill holes indicate either hydrologic disturbances or near-surface disturbances that are not easily understood. Data from seven drill holes were found to be used easily for extrapolation, and the results are given in Table 2 and plotted on Figures 1 and 2. The ground temperature data are more restricted areally and in elevation range because of the significant influence of hydrology on near-surface temperatures in the higher elevations of the Cascades (e.g. Black and others, 1983a). Unlike the results for the Colorado Plateau, the distribution of ground temperatures is generally similar to that for air temperatures (Figure 2). More data might show that this is somehow a biased sample; however, the larger data set of Powell and others (1988) has no ground temperatures cooler than mean annual air temperatures whereas 3 out of 7 in Figure 2 are cooler than the air temperature best fit line. It seems likely that the difference reflects a difference in climate between the Cascade Range and the Colorado Plateau and is not an artifact of the data set.
Table 1. Mean annual temperatures from weather stations in the vicinity of Crater Lake (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1982)
Table 2. Ground temperatures for drill holes in the vicinity of Crater Lake obtained by projecting temperature versus depth to the surface. Data from Black and others (1983a, 1983b), Blackwell and others (1981, 1982, 1986), Hull and others (1977, 1978).
Figure 1. Map of southern Oregon showing locations of weather stations, drill holes used to determine average ground temperatures, and outline of map of Figure 3. Names shown are for places near some of the weather stations.
Figure 2. Mean annual air temperatures and average ground temperatures versus elevation for locations given in Figure 1. Line shown is least-squares fit to air temperature versus elevation data.
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What Is a Hydraulic Differential Valve?
Hydraulic differential valves are used to detect differential pressure situations in compound hydraulic systems. The most common use is detecting malfunction or failure of one of the two or more hydraulic circuits in automotive braking systems. Hydraulic differential valves accomplish this task by sensing the difference in pressure between the two systems and alert the driver or operator of an impending problem in stopping the vehicle. Differential valves are also used to control the differential pressure across a fixed restriction such as an orifice or flow section to control the flow of a fluid.
Monitoring Systems
• Modern automotive brakes use dual master cylinders to actuate independent front and rear braking circuits, or diagonal braking circuits. Additional to this may be anti-lock braking functionality. Most vehicles monitor the status of the two independent primary master cylinder circuits. When brakes are depressed, the two independent pressures are compared in a hydraulic differential valve, which has a small limit switch between them. The two sides are isolated from each other by high pressure seals. A differential pressure between the two circuits would signify a malfunction in one of the redundant circuits, and the switch would be actuated, turning on a brake malfunction light in the driver dashboard. In such an event, the car's brake system should be checked.
Flow Control
• Hydraulic differential valves can also be used to establish a flow though a flow restrictor by maintaining a constant differential pressure across the restrictor. For example, it may be necessary to control the flow of hydraulic fluid through a hydraulic motor powering a conveyor belt in an industrial application. If the plant has many hydraulic users, flowing pressure throughout the plant can vary widely, which would result in fluctuations of the conveyor belt speed. A hydraulic differential valve would closely modulate the flow through the motor by adjusting itself to maintain a constant differential pressure across a fixed restrictor prior to the motor inlet, which would maintain a constant speed in the motor independently of motor load.
Heavy Industry
• Hydraulic differential valves may also be used in conjunction with hydraulic cylinders on jacks, lifts, cranes or hoists to keep the mechanism at a fixed position or to lift a specified amount of weight.
• Hydraulic differential valves are also used to protect mercury-filled and other liquid-filled pressure measuring columns from overflowing one side. A hydraulic differential valve is connected to both pressure taps. If the differential process pressure being measured is less than the setting of the valve, it is allowed to be applied to the differential column for a reading by the technologist. However, if the pressure difference is too great, the hydraulic differential valve seals off both column pressure taps until the situation is alleviated.
• Hydraulic differential valves can be used to prevent suddenly too hot or too cold showers when another person turns on another faucet, alleviating at least some domestic squabbles.
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(This post is by Christine McCann)
State of Nuclear Politics in Japan
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda announced his cabinet this week, including the re-appointment of Goshi Hosono, who served as both Nuclear Crisis Minister and Environment Minister under the previous Prime Minister, Naoto Kan.
Hosono said that his priorities are decontamination, nuclear waste storage and management, and the establishment of a new nuclear regulatory agency. He admitted that highly radioactive waste will probably have to be stored, at least temporarily, in Fukushima Prefecture near the site of the disaster.
A government panel investigating Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO)'s saleable assets has determined that the company's real estate holdings are worth $14 billion in book value (which is based on purchase price.) Resale value is probably considerably higher. The panel is looking at potential sources of compensation for victims of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. TEPCO says it can only part with a small section of the land, worth $1.3 billion.
State of the Reactors/Cooling Efforts
For the first time since the March disaster, the temperature of the bottom of Fukushima Daiichi's Reactor 3 fell below 100ºC, moving the reactor closer to cold-shutdown status.
Typhoon Talas hit parts of Western and Central Japan this week, killing 39 people and leaving 55 missing, while causing massive flooding and mudslides. Experts are concerned that the increased rainfall will tax the already-full reservoirs of contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, causing potential leakage and further contamination of ground water.
Contamination (Including Human Exposure)
Japan released the results of 2,696 radiation readings taken at schools and parks within a 20 kilometer radius of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, as well as adjacent zones. Readings from Okuma Town (approximately 1 kilometer from the plant) measured over 700 millisieverts per year; areas 19 kilometers from the plant measured 100 millisieverts per year. The maximum recommended exposure level is 1 millisievert per year.
Togichi Prefecture plans to temporarily move radioactive ash, measuring approximately 30,000 Bq/kg, to waste treatment facilities within the prefecture. Officials want to eventually move the ash to lined, water-proof pits at least 20 meters from houses, but are encountering resistance from residents, who doubt the safety of the arrangement.
Numerous radioactive hot spots have been designated in Date City, causing confusion among residents, who have been urged to avoid parks and forests and stay inside. In some towns, 50% of the households have been deemed hotspots; evacuation is voluntary but government assistance is provided. Residents complain that measurements are unreliable and inconsistent; one house may be eligible for evacuation compensation, while the house next door may not.
High levels of radioactive cesium-in some cases measuring 2,720 Bq/kg-were found in tea leaves in Chiba and Saitama prefectures. Tea producers are trying to determine where the tea originated.
Rice Crisis
In spite of government assurances of safety, the Fukushima nuclear crisis is having a profound effect on sales of rice from the region. A survey conducted by a professor at University of Tsukuba shows that Japanese consumers are unlikely to buy rice harvested from Fukushima, even if the government says that the rice is free of radiation.
A recent study shows that because of confusion about government guidelines and unclear evacuation zones, 70% of Japanese prefectures have decided not to conduct evacuation drills or are undecided about whether they will do so. In the past, residents within a 10 kilometers radius participated in drills; however, the Fukushima disaster affected a far greater area, leaving officials confused about what drills are most effective. Municipalities say they cannot proceed without clear guidance from the government.
Fukushima Prefecture officials met with TEPCO President Toshio Nishizawa this week, after the company announced plans for compensating victims of the Fukushima disaster. Prefecture officials complained that compensation guidelines should be much broader, including those who evacuated of their own volition. Moreover, they said all 2 million Fukushima residents should be compensated for emotional distress. Nishizawa said that TEPCO will do its best.
Other Nuclear News
Risk of earthquake damage to many US nuclear plants is significantly greater than previously thought. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says that 25% of the nations reactors may need upgrades, admitting that reactors are at risk for larger earthquakes that those they were originally designed to withstand. Nuclear reactors in the US are not subject to reevaluation of earthquake robustness, unlike building codes, which must be updated every 5 to 6 years to reflect changes in seismic science. Similarly, they are not regularly evaluated for their ability to withstand floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, or other natural disasters. The nuclear industry has argued that the recent 5.8 magnitude earthquake in Virginia-which shifted 115-ton waste casks several inches-is proof that the North Anna plant there can withstand a large quake.
The NRC said that May's emergency shutdown at Massachusetts' Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, operated by Entergy Corp, was due to “inadequate enforcement of operating standards, failure to follow procedures, and ineffective operator training.” The plant is now subject to a year-long safety review and additional inspections.
In spite of lessons learned from the Fukushima disaster, and a general European distrust of nuclear power, Finland announced it will build a new reactor in the northern part of the country. Greenpeace Nordic expressed concern about the handling of nuclear waste.
Shikoku Electric halted operation of its Number 1 reactor at Ehime Prefecture's Ikata plant for routine maintenance and inspection, bringing the total number of shut-down reactors in Japan to 43, or 80% of the total. Restart dates have not been set. |
Social return on investment (SROI) is a method for measuring values that are not traditionally reflected in financial statements, including social, economic and environmental factors, which can identify how effectively an organization uses its capital and other resources to create value for the community. While a traditional cost-benefit analysis is used to compare different investments or projects, SROI is used more to evaluate the general progress of certain developments, showing both the financial and social impact of the corporation.
SROI is useful to corporations because it can improve program management through better planning and evaluation; increase the corporation’s understanding of their impacts; and allow better communication regarding the value of the corporation’s work (both internally and to external stakeholders). Philanthropists, venture capitalists, foundations and other non-profits may use SROI to monetize the social impact, in financial terms.
A general formula used to calculate SROI is as follows:
SROI = (social impact value – initial investment amount) / initial investment amount *100%
Assigning a dollar value to the social impact can present problems, and various methodologies have been developed to help quantify impact. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), for example, is one method that converts and organizes qualitative information into quantitative values.
• Inputs – resources investment in your activity (such as the costs of running a job readiness program)
• Outputs – the direct and tangible products from the activity (for example, the number of people trained)
• Outcomes – the changes to people resulting from the activity (i.e., new jobs, better income, improved quality of life for the individuals; increased taxes and reduced support for the government)
• Impact – the outcome less an estimate of what would have happened anyways (for example, if 20 people got new jobs but 5 of them would have anyways, the impact is based on the 15 people who got jobs as a result of the job readiness program)
2. What is the Social Security administration responsible for?
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Use It Or Lose It
Laboratories frequently accumulate bottles of old chemicals, often toxic or hazardous, that are no longer used. Laboratory managers can use several strategies to properly reuse or dispose of these chemicals.
Proper Disposal or Reuse of Old Laboratory Chemicals
Laboratories frequently accumulate bottles of old chemicals, often toxic or hazardous, that are no longer used. Laboratory managers can use several strategies to properly reuse or dispose of these chemicals. These strategies are not mutually exclusive. Laboratory managers can apply more than one to meet the requirements of maintaining laboratory safety and environmental protection. These strategies are discussed in the individual sections below.
Proper disposal can be expensive. So it is essential to minimize the need for proper disposal, by minimizing chemical purchases. Even if yours is a small laboratory, centralizing chemical purchasing is an effective way to do this. Having a single person assigned to purchase all chemicals for the entire laboratory will help ensure that duplicate orders are not made by different members of the laboratory staff. More people may be assigned to do this in larger laboratories, and departments may be set up to manage chemical purchasing, storage and waste disposal.
Maintaining a computer-searchable chemical database
The first step in proper recycling or disposal of chemicals is to know what you have. The best way to do this is by maintaining an inventory of all the chemicals in use or stored in your laboratory. Supply room personnel should record the receipt of all purchased chemicals. Among the data that should be recorded are the supplier, the amount of chemical purchased, its purity, its amount, the person ordering the chemical and the laboratory room number to which it was delivered.
New chemicals should be added to the database as they are purchased and old ones deleted as they are consumed. This last requirement means that laboratory personnel and not just stockroom personnel should be able to access the database to update information. Laboratory personnel should record when samples are completely consumed or transferred from one laboratory to another.
This inventory can be used to tell laboratory managers and staff members when samples become so old that disposal is necessary. This database can also be a moneysaver by enabling lab personnel to learn from whom they can obtain a needed chemical without purchasing a new sample. Should it be necessary to purchase a fresh sample of a particular chemical, the purchaser can review the chemical inventory to identify a supplier and the chemical purity of previously purchased samples of the same chemical.
Several firms offer commercially available chemical inventory database software. Using an Internet search engine and keyword phrases such as “chemical inventory management software” can identify software suppliers and retrieve a description of their products.
These computer programs vary in sophistication and features. Software search features can include one or more of the following search options: searching by chemical name, chemical supplier, the storage location, and the laboratory department and/or individual who purchased the chemical. The chemical name can be the proper IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) systematic name designation or one or more common names of the chemical. Other search options include the CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service) number of the chemical and the date of purchase. Some programs provide storage of MSDS information.
More sophisticated software can print barcode labels for chemicals that can be affixed to the chemical sample container and used to track movement of chemicals within the laboratory and their consumption. Should supply of a chemical be recorded as falling below a specified level, some software can automatically issue an alert informing the user of that particular chemical and that it needs to be reordered. Some chemicals may arrive with an expiration data beyond which the chemical should not be used. Some software offer features that include issuing an alert when a particular chemical sample usage date is due to expire.
Some software suppliers such as Chemoventory offer limited capability versions of their software for free ( to educational and other nonprofit institutions. Other software provides more features but must be paid for. One example is Nexxis Chemical Inventory Manager (
Holding periodic lab cleanup days
Having periodic cleanup days during which old chemical samples and unused/nonfunctional equipment is collected and disposed of can be a useful way of putting labs in clean, tidy and safe operating condition. These cleanup days are most effective in achieving these goals if lab managers insist that all routine work stop for the day to focus on cleanup.
Sometimes only an individual laboratory rather than the entire facility needs to have a laboratory cleanup day. This situation can arise if a laboratory is being relocated from one location to another either within the facility or from one facility to another. Alternatively, the termination of a project or its relocation from one laboratory to another may be facilitated by a lab cleanup day.
If an individual laboratory rather than the entire facility is cleaning up and disposing of old chemicals, have the appropriate lab staff members advertise their lack of availability to coworkers before this process begins. Interruptions can greatly reduce the efficiency of the cleanup process and increase the time required for it.
Once old chemical samples are identified and selected for disposal, proper procedures must be followed. Lab managers can have samples packed properly by lab personnel for pickup and disposal by a qualified chemical disposal firm. Some disposal firms will perform all the work themselves. This approach may be more appropriate for large laboratories.
While any chemical to be discarded is chemical waste, hazardous chemical waste is defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) or a relevant state authority as waste that presents a danger to human health and/or the environment. The EPA defines four key properties that determine whether a chemical is hazardous waste: ignitability, corrosivity, reactivity and toxicity.
Potentially hazardous chemicals must be disposed of in accordance with federal and state regulations and procedures. EPA regulations are summarized at
While state requirements vary somewhat by locality, the basics remain the same. However, it is best to consult with your relevant state agency or the EPA to determine whether particular chemicals are defined as hazardous and what the requirements are for storage and disposal. These requirements should be defined on the chemical’s MSDS. However, if the chemical was purchased some time ago, the available MSDS sheet may be out of date and you should consult the current version of the MSDS.
Many labs use one or more large containers labeled “chemical waste” for solvents and other chemical wastes. Extreme care must be used in combining chemicals in such containers, as some chemicals may be incompatible. For example, addition of a strong oxidizing agent may result in oxidizing another chemical in the container and leading to heat evolution and an explosion or fire.
Because of the dangers of such chemical incompatibilities and the hazards of chemical spills occurring in a busy work area, chemical waste containers should be stored away from normal work areas and away from sinks and floor drains. Every addition of a chemical waste to a storage container should be noted in a permanent record such as an online file or a laboratory notebook.
Do not completely fill waste containers, particularly waste storage bottles. While the amount of empty headspace at the top of the container can vary with the size of the container, it is usually best to allow about 20 percent vacant headspace at the top of the container for possible vapor formation or liquid expansion due to heat evolution.
To remove chemical wastes from your laboratory site, contact professional, licensed hazardous waste haulers and transporters. Trained personnel from these firms will package waste chemicals properly for transport and disposal.
Training lab personnel
Training lab personnel in proper disposal and storage procedures is essential. This is a particular issue in academic laboratories because the students using a laboratory can change from semester to semester. Larger laboratories often have a Health, Safety & Environment Department whose personnel are qualified to conduct such training. If your laboratory does not, there are consultants who offer training programs in proper chemical storage and disposal.
When supervising students working in laboratories, professors and teaching assistants should review the safety concerns and required safety procedures associated with each laboratory exercise or experiment.
Solvents and glassware cleaning
Solvents produced as waste in laboratory equipment such as rotary evaporators and distillation apparatus are often as clean as what initially comes from a fresh solvent bottle. Do not dispose of these solvents; reuse them instead for routine laboratory operations such as glassware cleaning. Often one can filter and reuse solvents for at least initial cleaning of glassware. Laboratory personnel should limit the use of solvents and other chemicals in routine operations such as cleaning laboratory glassware.
Chromium-containing cleaning agents can be highly effective but should be used only as a last resort. Evaluate the use of enzyme-based or detergent-based cleaners before resorting to chromium-based cleaners. Chromium- based cleaners are highly toxic, as the Julia Roberts film Erin Brockovich makes clear in a fairly accurate recital of a major California pollution case in which chromiumcontaining toxic wastes leached into a town’s water supply and apparently led to birth defects in children and severe illnesses in adults.
Volatile solvents such as isopropyl alcohol routinely used for sterilizing equipment should be replaced by quaternary amine-based detergents. Replace highly toxic solvents such as benzene or carbon tetrachloride with less toxic ones whenever possible. For example, cyclohexane is often used as a substitute for carbon tetrachloride.
Mechanical cleaning methods should be used instead of solvents whenever possible. These may be as simple as using cleaning brushes in good condition or ultrasonicators instead of solvents. Large laboratories often use industrial dishwashers instead of solvents for cleaning glassware.
Keeping an adequate supply of clean glassware on hand will reduce the tendency to rinse glassware with volatile solvents such as acetone to quickly dry glassware for reuse. So will the use of a glassware drying oven.
Neutralize aqueous acids and bases. Pour only nontoxic, pH 4 to 9 aqueous fluids down drains. Neutralize and clean up spills so that all or most of the waste can be disposed of properly.
Distill used solvents to purify them. For example, scale-up laboratories and pilot plants can accumulate large volumes of used solvents. If distillation removes all reactive compounds and impurities, distillation can both purify solvents for reuse and reduce volumes released to the environment. After all, production plants frequently distill solvents for these reasons as well as economic ones.
Chemical Disposal and Lab Staff Reductions
By John K. Borchardt
Dr. John K. Borchardt is a consultant and technical writer. He is the author of Career Management for Scientists and Engineers and often writes on career-related subjects. He can be reached at
Categories: Lab Health and Safety
Published In
Laboratory Etiquette Magazine Issue Cover
Laboratory Etiquette
Published: May 9, 2011
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Laboratory Etiquette
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Marler Blog Providing Commentary on Food Poisoning Outbreaks & Litigation
What is Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)?
We have been working over the last several months updating and expanding our about websites. Here is the content for our most recent work
What is Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)?
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is one of a spectrum of common functional gastrointestinal disorders. Symptoms of IBS can include constipation, diarrhea, alternating diarrhea and constipation, abdominal pain, urgency, bloating, straining at stools, and a sense of incomplete evacuation. The Rome III definition for IBS, which is widely accepted in the medical community, is recurrent abdominal pain or discomfort at least three days per month for at least a three month period, with at least two of the following symptoms also present: improvement of the pain or discomfort with defecation, a change in frequency of stools, and/or a change also in the form or appearance of stool.
The symptoms of IBS are usually long term, and, although they can cause daily gastrointestinal symptoms, are frequently episodic, meaning that they do not occur on a daily or regular basis. Symptoms may be triggered by specific foods or by stress but often no specific triggers can be identified
What causes IBS?
IBS is often described as a “functional” disorder. This means that there is no structural abnormality or other objective findings to explain it. The specific cause (or causes) of IBS is not known; but for all IBS patients, there are likely several factors that contribute to both onset and continuation of the problem.
A. Altered gastrointestinal motility
Although researchers and clinicians have not yet identified any actual anatomic changes, it is likely that people suffering from IBS have experience dysregulation in the motor function (also called “motility” or “peristalsis”) of their gastrointestinal tracts. Peristalsis is the process by which the intestinal wall contracts and forces material through the colon. In IBS patients, the colon wall may contract spasmodically, thereby forcing material through too fast for water reabsorption. This abnormality can result in diarrhea, or it may cause colonic contractions that can slow or temporarily stop motility, resulting in constipation.
In addition, the gastrocolic reflex—i.e., the signal sent to the colon to empty when the stomach fills with food—may be heightened in patients with IBS, who may feel the urgent need to relieve themselves after eating, especially in the morning. As a result of this, many feel that food is “going right thru them” but this is not the case.
B. The brain-gut connection
Evidence also suggests that some IBS patients may suffer from faulty communication between the gut and central nervous system—interference that may be brought on by psychological stressors, hormones, the immune system, or neurotransmitters.
In addition to the central nervous system, IBS also implicates a parallel nervous system within the digestive tract itself—i.e., the enteric nervous system—which is so large and complex that it has been dubbed “the second brain.” The enteric nervous system is embedded in the wall of the digestive tract and functions semi-autonomously from the central nervous system. Extending from the esophagus to the anus, it regulates digestive tract motility and gastrointestinal blood flow, and also generally senses the environment within the digestive tract.
The enteric nervous system emits a wide array of neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine, which stimulates smooth muscle contraction, increases intestinal secretions, and prompts the release of enteric hormones and dilation of blood vessels.
Many researchers and clinicians believe that the central nervous system and the enteric nervous system both play a role in causing IBS symptoms. Since the central nervous system is where stress and coping mechanisms are found, it is felt that these and other psychological factors that are frequently associated with the development of IBS symptoms play a major role. Some people with IBS have hypersensitive intestines, giving them increased sensory sensation and input—i.e., an increased perception of feeling in the gastrointestinal tract. For example, persons with IBS will experience pain with distension of a balloon in the rectum when the balloon has a smaller volume than in people without IBS. This is called visceral hypersensitivity.
Stress is also implicated in IBS because it has physiologic consequences, including increased heart rate, delayed stomach emptying, and increased colon contractions. Stress results in the release of various substances, one of which, corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is found in both the gut and the brain. CRF increases water and mucus secretion in the colon and, as a result, may contribute to symptoms such as diarrhea in IBS.
The close, interrelated relationship between the digestive tract and the brain is underscored by the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is found in both organs. Indeed, the vast majority, 95%, of serotonin is contained is contained in the gut. When the gut releases serotonin, it simulates intrinsic nerves that initiate secretion and peristalsis, as well as extrinsic nerves that modulate sensation.
Normally, after serotonin is released into the gut it is removed from the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter (SERT), which is found in the cells that line the gut wall. It is theorized, however, that some people with IBS do not have enough SERT, and thus have too much serotonin in the colon, causing symptoms. The excess serotonin can then overwhelm receptors in the gut, causing them to shut down. This, in turn, causes the slowed motility that results in constipation.
Two recent drugs were developed that affected serotonin in the gut and also improved diarrhea (alosetron) or constipation (tegaserod). Moreover, serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRI—a class of antidepressants) are sometimes prescribed to decrease symptoms in severe cases of IBS, but are used at lower doses than those employed to treat depression. Alosetron and tegaserod are no longer readily available due to the potential for serious side effects, but their efficacy, along with that of SSRIs, in treating IBS supports the role of serotonin in generating IBS symptoms.
Recent, preliminary evidence also suggests that, in some cases, an enteric infection (see discussion on post infectious IBS) may cause chronic, low-grade inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, which can disrupt normal gastrointestinal motility. This may involve mast cells, which are important in fighting pathogens in the gut wall. The mast cells secrete histamine, prostaglandin, and other chemicals to fight infection and produce inflammation, but their effect may persist after the infection has cleared, with chronic low-grade inflammation at levels too low to be seen visually.
C. Effect of the normal gut flora, including bacteria
Increasing evidence suggests that changes in normal gut bacteria may play a role in the development of IBS. “Normal gut bacteria”—i.e., intrinsic fecal (or colonic) flora which is called the fecal microbiome that perform multiple functions important to health such as digesting carbohydrates, and they are distinct from common food borne pathogens like Salmonella, Shigella, and E. coli O157:H7, which can act as the precipitating cause of IBS symptoms in cases of post-infectious IBS (see discussion on post infectious IBS). Recent studies suggest that some individuals suffering from IBS may have experienced changes in their levels of normal gut bacteria. In certain cases, treatment with antibiotics and probiotics (living organisms that, when ingested, have a beneficial effect on the host), have helped reduce IBS symptoms supporting the notion of the importance of the gut flora.
D. Genetic pre-disposition
Finally, studies suggest that a certain percentage of those suffering from IBS are genetically predisposed to the condition, though many individuals included in this group experience an inciting or precipitating event (e.g. gastrointestinal infection, discussed below) which initiates symptoms. In fact, individuals with IBS are 33% more likely to have a family history of IBS.
What is Post Infectious IBS?
The observation that the onset of IBS symptoms can be precipitated by gastrointestinal infection dates to the 1950s. Different studies have shown that 7-31% of individuals, who have experienced an episode of infectious gastroenteritis, whether bacterial or viral, may develop symptoms of IBS.
One recent meta-analysis (a study that combines results from previously published research studies and analyzes the larger number) of 8 studies published between 1950 and 2005 found a positive association between gastrointestinal infection and the onset of IBS in 6 of the studies. In this meta-analysis alone, the average occurrence of post-infectious IBS was 9.8%, compared to 1.2% in the control group. This equates to a sevenfold increase in the odds of developing IBS after gastrointestinal infection.
There appear to be several risk factors associated with the development of post-infectious IBS, including female sex, severity and duration of the acute infectious illness, whether the person suffered from bloody stools, and psychological profile. As with non-post-infectious IBS, the precise mechanism that produces the symptoms is not specifically known. The pathogens known to precipitate post-infectious IBS symptoms include specifically, though not necessarily exclusively, Enterotoxigenic E. coli strains, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli strains (including E. coli O157:H7), Campylobacter, Shigella, and Salmonella.
What is Dyspepsia?
The specific cause of dyspepsia is not known, but individuals who suffer from the condition frequently exhibit any of several abnormalities that may play a role. These include a decreased ability of the stomach to expand with food, delayed gastric emptying, abnormal motility of the small bowel, and infection by Helicobacter pylori (though, in this latter group, dyspeptic symptoms rarely resolve even after eradication of H. pylori infection).
Recent studies have also demonstrated that, like post-infectious IBS, gastrointestinal infection may also act as a trigger for symptoms of functional dyspepsia. In one study of individuals who had been infected by Salmonella, one in seven had symptoms of dyspepsia, and one in ten had symptoms of IBS. In another, more comprehensive study, physicians following thousands of individuals infected by E. coli O157:H7 in a drinking water outbreak found that functional dyspepsia was twice as common in those who had suffered gastrointestinal infection in the outbreak compared to those who did not. Risk factors for functional dyspepsia were female sex, smoking, pre-existing IBS, anxiety, depression, and having an acute gastrointestinal illness longer than 7 days.
What is gastroparesis?
Gastroparesis is a condition in which stomach emptying is delayed, resulting in symptoms of nausea, vomiting, early satiety and weight loss. It is most commonly associated with diabetes, but sporadic cases can occur. There appears to be a relationship with viral gastroenteritis, as studies have shown development after rotavirus infection in children. There are no studies linking gastroparesis to bacterial infection, but a link may exist. Studies of such a possible link are sorely needed.
How is IBS diagnosed?
Clinicians diagnose IBS by identifying typical symptoms, taking a thorough history and doing a complete physical examination, and testing blood samples for other potential causes of symptoms. Stool tests are also be indicated as a means of testing for minute amounts of blood in the stools (occult blood) and sometimes to exclude active infection. In some patients, examining the colon with colonoscopy may be indicated, particularly for anyone over 50. The most important organic diseases that can have similar symptoms are inflammatory bowel disease, colon cancer, celiac disease, and in women, ovarian cancer, which can initially present simply as abdominal bloating.
Treatment of IBS
Treatment of IBS varies from person to person, and case to case. They include, where appropriate, changes in lifestyle, such as eating regular meals; changes in diet, such as increasing fiber in those with constipation; and eliminating trigger foods such as fructose and non-absorbable sugars, which can cause diarrhea and bloating. Over the counter medications can be used to decrease diarrhea (loperamide), or improve constipation (soluble or insoluble fiber, laxatives).
Antispasmodics can help with pain, but narcotics are not a good therapy for IBS symptoms because they can alter gastrointestinal tract motility, affect mental function, and cause dependency. For a small number of patients with severe and refractory symptoms, especially pain, low dose antidepressants can be very effective. Probiotics have been helpful for some, though studies on probiotics in the setting of IBS are limited. In certain trials, benefits have also been seen with hypnotherapy, acupuncture, and psychotherapy.
• Carl Custer
Allergens seem to play a part in some individuals.
My wife is wheat intolerant, not a celiac but has symptoms.
In most states, it is difficult to impossible to determine whether a dish has wheat (or another allergen). The waiter doesn’t know, the cook/chef doesn’t read lables, or they don’t care.
Legal Seafood is a sterling exception as are a few high-end restaurants.
Labeling menus could be a solution and the recent allergen labeling Act would make it easier if States could resist the National Restaurant Association. |
Companies such as ChevronTexaco, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Petro-Canada and Suncor Energy have made multibillion-dollar investments in the oil sands in recent years, raising total production to about 1 million barrels per day. If sufficient natural gas is available to cook the sludge, output from the oil sands is expected to reach 2 million barrels per day by 2010, rising to 3 million by 2020 and as much as 5 million for many decades to come.
The oil sands expansion is expected to increase Canada's emissions of greenhouse gases by as much as 12 percent of the country's total allotment under the Kyoto Protocol, making it almost impossible for the government to meet its commitments for reducing emissions, Hazell said.
Although it supports the Mackenzie pipeline, the Gwichin tribe, whose 7, 000 members live on both sides of the Alaska-Canada border, oppose oil development in Alaska. Its leaders have long been active participants in U.S. environmentalists' lobbying campaigns in Washington against drilling in the wildlife refuge because the area is the main summer calving ground of migrating caribou herds that are a major source of the tribe's food supply.
"By destroying that one area in (the refuge), they will ultimately destroy the caribou," said Joe Linklater, chief of the Gwichin First Nation in Yukon Territory, who traveled to Washington earlier this month to lobby against the Alaska refuge proposal.
Linklater said he and his family, who live in the village of Old Crow, north of the Arctic Circle, hunt and kill several caribou each April and October during the animals' migration through the area. "That's what is in our freezer all year long -- the caribou -- and that's what we eat," he said. But he noted that the Canadian pipeline lies outside caribou migration areas.
Many other twists and turns lie ahead amid the complicated energy politics of the Far North.
The Mackenzie project has caused consternation in Alaska because it could delay construction of the planned $20 billion, 3,500-mile natural-gas pipeline from Alaska's North Slope down into Canada. The existing trans-Alaska pipeline carries oil only, and natural gas extracted in the North Slope as part of the oil drilling process must be re-injected into the ground. Experts say income from a natural-gas pipeline is needed to allow full expansion of oil drilling in the Alaska refuge.
The proposed Alaska pipeline route, which would parallel the Alaska- Canada Highway into the Yukon and British Columbia, is further behind in the Canadian regulatory process than its Mackenzie rival. Canadian officials are believed to be deliberately taking a go-slow stance to ensure that their pipeline gets built first.
Top U.S. sources of crude oil imports
The U.S. imports a total of 10,038,000 barrels of petroleum per day, the
majority of which comes from these five countries:
Imports Total proven reserves
Barrels per day (2004) Billions of barrels
Canada 1,611,000 179
Mexico 1,597,000 13
Saudi Arabia 1,494,000 262
Venezuela 1,294,000 77
Nigeria 1,062,000 35
Proven oil reserves
-- Canada
179 billion barrels total
Alberta oil sands: 174 billion barrels
Other: 5 billion barrels
-- United States
32 billion barrels total
Outside Alaska: 16.9 billion barrels
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: 10.4 billion barrels*
Other Alaska: 4.7 billion barrels
* Estimate of "technically recoverable" reserves, not proven reserves
Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oil and Gas Journal |
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• Forests
1. 1. Forests
2. 2. Some of the largest trees in the world are in California. They are called redwood trees.
3. 3. Redwood National Park is a large forest of redwood trees.
4. 4. Visitors in thePark can walkand drivethrough theforestto look atthe trees.
5. 5. Some redwoods are hundreds of years old. They are very tall andvery wide at the bottom.
6. 6. One tree has alarge hole in thebottom of it.The hole is so bigyou can drive acar through it.
7. 7. What is the topic of this paragraph?Which topic is too general? Which one is too specific? a. Parks in California b. Redwood trees in Calfornia c. The age of redwood trees
8. 8. Answers:a. Parks in California too generalb. Redwood trees in Calforniac. The age of redwood trees to specific
9. 9. In many areas of Scotland, there were once large forests.
10. 10. Scotland
11. 11. These forests had rich dirt thatwas good for plants. The trees inthe forest kept the dirt in place.But over many years, people cutdown the trees. The needed the wood for burning and they needed the land for farming.
12. 12. With no trees, a lot of thegood dirt was washed away by the rain. The landbecame rocky and not good for farming.
13. 13. Now the Scottish governmentwants to make the land betteragain. It is planting new trees. These new forests look nice and green. They also will improve the land for the future.
14. 14. What is the topic of this paragraph?Which topic is too general? Which one is too specific? a. Forests in the future b. Rocky hills in Scotland c. The forests of Scotland
15. 15. Answers:a. Forests in the future too generalb. Rocky hills in Scotland to specificc. The forests of Scotland
16. 16. Large forests are important tous in many ways. They give uswood for building and heating.They are home for many kinds ofplants and animals. For manycity people, forests are a place togo for a vacation. There they canlearn about nature, breathe fresh
17. 17. air, and sleep in a quiet place.There is one more reason whyforests are important foreveryone. The leaves on treeshelp clean the air. Dirty air is aserious problem in many parts ofthe world. Without our forests,this problem might be evenworse.
18. 18. What is the topic of this paragraph?Which topic is too general? Which one is too specific? a. The importance of forests b. Taking vacations in forests c. Large forests around the world
19. 19. Answers:a. The importance of forestsb. Taking vacations in forests too specificc. Large forests around the world too general |
Dinosaurs' Living Descendants
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
(Continued from page 3)
Since the last of the non-avian dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago during the mass extinction that closed the curtain on the Cretaceous period, birds have evolved other characteristics that set them apart from dinosaurs. Modern birds have higher metabolisms than even the most agile Velociraptor ever had. Teeth disappeared at some point in birds' evolutionary history. Birds' tails got shorter, their flying skills got better and their brains got bigger than those of dinosaurs. And modern birds, unlike their Maniraptoran ancestors, have a big toe that juts away from the other toes, which allows birds to perch. "You gradually go from the long arms and huge hands of non-avian Maniraptorans to something that looks like the chicken wing you get at KFC," says Sues. Given the extent of these avian adaptations, it's no wonder the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds as we know them remained hidden until paleontologists started analyzing the rich fossil record from China.
In addition to Sinosauropteryx, several other revelatory specimens came to light through amateurs rather than at scientific excavations. The challenge for Zhou and his colleagues is to find hot specimens before they disappear into private collections. Thus Zhou and his colleague Zhang Jiangyong, a specialist on ancient fish at IVPP, have come to Liaoning province to check out any fossils that dealers friendly to their cause have gotten their hands on of late.
Zhou picks up a slab and peers at it through his wire-rimmed glasses. "Chairman, come here and look," Zhou says to Zhang (who earned his playful nickname as chairman of IVPP's employees union). Zhang examines the specimen and adds it to a pile that will be hauled back to Beijing for study—and, if they are lucky, reveal another hidden branch of the tree of life.
Richard Stone has written about a Stonehenge burial, a rare antelope and mysterious Tibetan towers for Smithsonian.
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How to Write a Book As a Teenager
Community Q&A
Writing a book is not an easy task. Having knowledge of the storyline and locations are important for making the book accurate and sound truthful and, more importantly, realistic. Many books however, are based on just an idea, a thought that the author has reflected on and wants to share with readers.
1. 1
Think about things that you enjoy doing or learning about. Experiences that you might have gone through and places you might have visited. A friend perhaps, or a relative, or even a special pet. Maybe even a place you have wanted to visit, or a place that you have already visited . If you want to write fiction or sci-fi, start off easy; maybe a fantasy set in your state or province? Or maybe the sci-fi takes place on Earth in one hundred years.
2. 2
Visualize and focus on what the subject would be, and how it would plot out. Would it be about one person only? Or a pet? Or would it include others? Where would you want the book to start and end?
3. 3
Remember to beware the middle; this is where your reader will have gotten over your wonderful beginning and are looking forward to your fantastic ending. But along the way they just...get...bored. This is where you add the magic! There's no way your character can go back to her old life now; she HAS to go through to the end!
4. 4
Buy a notebook, or sit at the computer, and type out your ideas and thoughts. Since you are a teenager, you might want to write about your teen experiences, desires or things you always wanted to do or see. You can write about your pet, or your friends, just do not write their real names. Give everyone a made-up name, and don't use them too realistically. Use a single trait or physical appearance, because you never know if you might accidentally use them in an unflattering way.
5. 5
Jot down the beginning, middle and end. The book has to end, and you have to know or think about how it might or could end. Sometimes, just because you plan an ending, does not mean that the storyline will actually lead to that ending. However, it is just someplace that, at this time, you want the story to lead to. Feel free to change the story as much as you want.
6. 6
Put your notes together in the order of start, middle, and end. Start typing more information into each section. Sit quietly and just let your thoughts and memories guide you, and it will. Keep writing until you suddenly stop. Then read back what you wrote. You might be surprised to see a good part of a book coming to life. It's always good to know about 100 times more stuff than you'd actually use; that means that if you ever feel like writing 99 more books after this one, you can do it without doing another speck of research.
7. 7
Keep at it, editing, re-editing until you feel that everything you want to say or feel is in the book. Then have someone else read it and give you input. But remember; there is such a thing as too much editing.
8. 8
Look at your pages. You have just written a book.
Community Q&A
Add New Question
• When we try to publish a book, what would be best? Looking for a publisher or self-publishing?
wikiHow Contributor
Self-publishing is much easier and faster, but you are unlikely to get many readers. If you want a larger audience, find a literary agent to look it over before sending it to a publisher.
• It's hard for me to find names to my characters -- what should I do?
wikiHow Contributor
Go through baby naming websites, as they have many lists of names and meanings that could give you ideas for character names.
• How long should it take to write your book?
wikiHow Contributor
It depends on how quickly you write. Try for around 600-1,000 words per day. The length of a novel is around 70,000-90,000 words. At that rate, it will be finished in 70-100 days. You can go faster or slower, but if you keep to a good schedule, and include editing, you could be finished in 4-5 months.
• Is it expensive to publish a book without a publisher?
wikiHow Contributor
Independently publishing a book is usually free if done online. However, you still need to get advertising to get your book out there. In terms of publishing a hardcover, you can look up the prices for vanity publishing, which vary greatly depending on whom you choose and where the publishing is done. You also need to account for distributing the book yourself.
• I think one of the main things I need help with on this subject is the way of developing an idea in a story without having to plan it out.
wikiHow Contributor
First know your characters. You have your idea, now develop your characters. Then you can find a scene that works and imagine how each character will react. With luck and perseverance, a story will grow!
• How do I keep myself motivated to push through and finish the story?
wikiHow Contributor
Staying motivated is hard, but if you're truly passionate about your story, you'll want to see it through to the end. Keep rereading what you've written to keep your head in the world of your story and stay mentally engaged. Set aside a time each day to work toward completing it, so you don't get distracted and lose interest. You might also consider writing the book with a friend, as this can help both of you stay motivated.
• Can you suggest a good title as I am thinking of writing a book about my bestie.
wikiHow Contributor
Good titles are often hard to figure out. Wait until you are finished writing before you make a title. You can name it after characters, whether it is their names or something about them or who they are. You can name it about the plot or hint at the plot. Or you can name it after the morals in the story (if there are any).
• I often start writing a book but then lose inspiration. What can I do?
wikiHow Contributor
Join a writer's club or group. Having peer support to continue your efforts is often helpful. Have a set time to write each day, so that even if you don't feel like writing or aren't feeling especially inspired about your idea on a given day, you have to discipline yourself to at least put something down.
• How can I tell my teacher my book was written for her?
wikiHow Contributor
You could write a dedication on the first page of the book explaining why the book was written for your teacher.
Ask a Question
• Your book can be about anything you want, remember it's your book!
• Read books. Read and notice how the author writes, and introduces subjects and uses words as if the person was talking.
• Take breaks so you can read it fresh and revise with a new perspective.
• When the book's finished, you may want to share it with your friends/family or people over the internet. If you receive a lot of praise and good reviews, then you may want to think about publishing it.
• Writing a book is a very individual endeavor. That is why we have so many authors and various subject matters.
• Not all books have to be written about family or friends, unless you feel you have things to write in that direction.
• Remember that you don't have to be an adult to write and publish a book. There are many teenage authors and even a few pre-teen and child authors.
• Make sure that your book is something that might interest your reader. You want people to read your book so, write a book based off what people like to read at the time.
• Let others read it and give you suggestions.
• A book is never perfect the first time around, so don't get frustrated if it doesn't come out just how you wanted it on the first try. That's what editing is for!
• Anyone can write a book. Not every one can be successful or sell the book. Make sure you understand that, and do not be unhappy if the book you write goes no further than your own family.
• Sometime people get so warped in their own world, they start to neglect their family, friends, and other people they should be paying attention to. Don't let that be you. Set a clock timer next to you and set it for, let's say an hour. When it rings, finish your sentence, and stop. That way you don't waste your entire day on your book.
Article Info
Categories: Fiction
In other languages:
Español: escribir un libro siendo adolescente, Русский: подростку написать книгу, Italiano: Scrivere un Libro da Adolescente, Português: Escrever um Livro Sendo um Adolescente, Deutsch: Als Jugendlicher ein Buch schreiben
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Guidelines for Preserving Cultural Landscapes
Standards for Preservation
The Approach
Spatial Organization + Land Patterns
Water Features
Structures, Furnishings, + Objects
Special Considerations
Standards for Preservation
1. A property will be used as it was historically, or be given a new use that maximizes the retention of distinctive materials, features, spaces, and spatial relationships. Where a treatment and use have not been identified, a property will be protected and, if necessary, stabilized until additional work may be undertaken.
2. The historic character of a property will be retained and preserved. The replacement of intact or repairable historic materials or alteration of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided.
3. Each property will be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use. Work needed to stabilize, consolidate, and conserve existing historic materials and features will be physically and visually compatible, identifiable upon close inspection, and properly documented for future research.
5. Distinctive materials, features, finishes, and construction techniques or examples of craftsmanship that characterize a property will be preserved.
6. The existing condition of historic features will be evaluated to determine the appropriate level of intervention needed. Where the severity of deterioration necessitates repair or limited replacement of a distinctive feature, the new material will match the old in composition, design, color, and texture.
When the property’s distinctive materials, features, and spaces are essentially intact and thus convey the historic significance without extensive repair or replacement; when depiction at a particular period of time is not appropriate; and when a continuing or new use does not require additions or extensive alterations, preservation may be considered as a treatment. Prior to undertaking work, a documentation plan for preservation should be developed. |
Malaysia Bunga Raya Series 1994 20 Cents With Mechanical Die Doubling (MDD).
Mechanical doubling is probably the most common form of doubling on Malaysia coins and the form of doubling most often confused with doubled dies, especially by those just getting started with collecting die varieties.
This form of doubling has been known by a number of different names over the years. It has been referred to as “ejection doubling”, “machine doubling”, “strike doubling”, “shift doubling”, and “shelf doubling”. If you see references to any of these, it is most likely mechanical doubling that is being referred to.
The primary characteristic of mechanical doubling is that the secondary image (doubling) has a flat, shelf-like appearance. On genuine doubled dies the secondary image is raised and rounded just like the primary image. Also, genuine doubled dies are characterized by a splitting of the serifs on letters with serifs, or a “notching” of the corners of the letters which are doubled. This splitting of the serifs or notching of the letter corners will not be found on coins with mechanical doubling.
Unlike genuine doubled dies for which the doubling is on the die itself (hence the term “doubled die”), mechanical doubling is the result of loose parts in the coining press. These loose parts allow the dies to shift slightly at the moment of impact when the coin is being struck. This slight shifting of the dies is what causes the flat, shelf-like appearance of mechanical doubling
This form of doubling is extremely common with numerous examples being produced on all denominations every year. Most serious doubled die collectors view this type of doubling as a form of damage to the coin rather than a collectible form of doubling.I am not saying that you cannot collect this form of doubling, if you are interested in it. Rather,I am saying that you should know the difference between the two forms of doubling and label them properly. Knowing that mechanical doubling is an extremely common form of doubling you also need to be very realistic about any values that are assigned to coins with this common form of doubling.
Source: Wexler's coins and die varieties.
1. Hello admin.
Saya kira MDD adalah mmg sgt berbeza dgn genuine Doubled Die, saya harap admin tidak mengelirukan pembaca dgn contoh bergambar yg diletakkan di dlm posting ini, kerana tiada dlm istilah Mechanical Doubled Die (MDD). genuine Doubled Die sering dikaitkan dgn variety kerana ia berlaku semasa proses hubbing. sedangkan MDD adalah berlaku semasa manufacturing dlm kategori striking error. sekiranya gambar rujukan diatas ditulis sbgai Mechanical doubling damage adalah lebih bersesuaian.
2. Hi Anonymous,
I am sorry and thank you very much for your kind comments. I amended accordingly.
Hope you all will always drop by to correct me from my wrong interpretation of error coins.
You kind contribution of comments are making my Blog better,I sincerely thank you. |
You have searched the English word "Exercise" meaning in Urdu which is "ورزش" warzish. Exercise meaning in Urdu has been search 20852 (twenty thousand eight hundred and fifty-two) times till 4/29/2017. You can find translation in Urdu and Roman for the word warzish. Find the meaning in Urdu, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, French and other languages.
Roman Urdu
mashq karna
مشق کرنا
ورزش کرنے والا
مشق کرنے والا
کثرت کرنے والا
Definition & Synonyms
• Exercise
1. (v. t.) To set in action; to cause to act, move, or make exertion; to give employment to; to put in action habitually or constantly; to school or train; to exert repeatedly; to busy.
2. (v. i.) To exercise ones self, as under military training; to drill; to take exercise; to use action or exertion; to practice gymnastics; as, to exercise for health or amusement.
3. (n.) Exertion for the sake of training or improvement whether physical, intellectual, or moral; practice to acquire skill, knowledge, virtue, perfectness, grace, etc.
4. (v. t.) To put in practice; to carry out in action; to perform the duties of; to use; to employ; to practice; as, to exercise authority; to exercise an office.
5. (n.) The act of exercising; a setting in action or practicing; employment in the proper mode of activity; exertion; application; use; habitual activity; occupation, in general; practice.
6. (n.) The performance of an office, a ceremony, or a religious duty.
7. (n.) That which is done for the sake of exercising, practicing, training, or promoting skill, health, mental, improvement, moral discipline, etc.; that which is assigned or prescribed for such ends; hence, a disquisition; a lesson; a task; as, military or naval exercises; musical exercises; an exercise in composition.
8. (v. t.) To occupy the attention and effort of; to task; to tax, especially in a painful or vexatious manner; harass; to vex; to worry or make anxious; to affect; to discipline; as, exercised with pain.
9. (v. t.) To exert for the sake of training or improvement; to practice in order to develop; hence, also, to improve by practice; to discipline, and to use or to for the purpose of training; as, to exercise arms; to exercise ones self in music; to exercise troops.
10. (n.) That which gives practice; a trial; a test.
11. (n.) Bodily exertion for the sake of keeping the organs and functions in a healthy state; hygienic activity; as, to take exercise on horseback.
Do, Drill, Employment, Example, Exercising, Exert, Practice, Practise, Recitation, Usage, Use, Utilization, Work,
• Exercised
1. (imp. & p. p.) of Exercise |
Considerations for Implementation
Trauma-Informed Screening & Assessment
Clinicians should consider the following when selecting trauma screening or assessment tools to implement in a given system:
• Considering the number of items/length of administration—The shorter the tool, the more likely you will use it.
• Cost—Systems are more likely to use free or low-cost tools.
• Child age range targeted with the instrument—Many prefer tools that apply to a range of ages or have age-defined versions.
• Method of administration—Tools that you can administer quickly and easily in a paper and pencil or interview format gather more comprehensive and accurate information.
• Respondent—What is the feasibility of having a particular respondent (child, caregiver or caseworker) complete a specific tool (e.g., availability)?
• Translations and available languages—For tools to be relevant and accurate, they should be available in the family’s language.
• Accessibility & Mobility—As tools are developed that include on-line administration, real-time scoring and reporting features, and mobile access, you will need to consider feasibility, organizational readiness, costs, and security of these products.
Empirical support—You should use tools that have empirical support. Here are some key empirical concepts to consider:
1. Reliability: The extent to which a measurement instrument yields consistent, stable, and uniform results over repeated observations or measurements when administered under the same testing conditions.
2. Validity: The degree to which a measure actually measures what is intended, rather than something else. An IQ test has validity if it measures IQ and not IQ plus achievement in reading. A measure of depression has validity if it measures depression and not both depression and anxiety.
3. Standardization of Norms: Standardization is the process of testing a group of people to ascertain their typical scores on a construct. For example, the presence of specific trauma symptoms within a population of children who have experienced physical abuse. With a standardized test, the participant can compare where his or her score falls compared to the standardization group's performance.
4. Specificity and sensitivity: These metrics/statistics are important when trying to determine if a characteristic or diagnosis is truly present or absent. A measure is specific when it accurately identifies a construct that is present. A measure is sensitive when it accurately identifies the construct as absent. For example, many researchers have tried to use existing measures to screen for PTSD symptoms and their efforts illustrate the difficulty in achieving both specificity and sensitivity. Specific items on the Child Behavior Checklist identify children likely to have the diagnosis of PTSD. However, because certain items assessing some aspects of PTSD were not included in the original version of the CBCL, the existing items are not sensitive which may lead to false positives, and thus do not accurately identify those who should not be considered to have PTSD (i.e., those where PTSD is truly absent).
Implementing a Trauma Screening Process or Tool
Prior to implementing a trauma screening or assessment process into a child serving system, take these important steps to facilitate seamless implementation and to support the workforce throughout the process. The Chadwick Trauma-Informed Systems Dissemination and Implementation Project (CTISP-DI; makes the following suggestions:
1. Pull together an “Implementation Team” that includes an expert in research and psychometrics.
2. Become familiar with some of the common concerns that may arise prior to the implementation of a screening process.
a. Professionals or paraprofessionals may express concern that the process of asking questions about a child’s trauma history or symptoms may potentially distress the child. Multiple research studies have explored this topic and none has found any evidence that asking questions regarding trauma exposure and symptoms increases a child’s level of distress (Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, and Hamby, 2013).
b. Professionals often question whether the screening or assessment tool or process will provide additional information not previously collected in the interview process. Numerous research studies have explored this issue over the last half century and have consistently found that the use of measures outperforms clinical judgment, suggesting that both forms of information gathering are essential (Grove & Lloyd, 2006).
c. A further concern of professionals is the time it may take to implement, evaluate, and re-assess the selected processes and protocols over the period working with the child and family. While this concern is valid, the amount of information gathered through the process can help clinicians provide the best care to the child and family.
3. Child-serving systems should provide broad training on child traumatic stress to the entire workforce, including training on different trauma types (e.g., sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, exposure to domestic violence) and various traumatic stress reactions that children may exhibit, including internalizing and externalizing problems. Through training, the workforce should acquire a core knowledge base of how child traumatic stress reactions may manifest, the trauma reminders typical in their populations, and concrete strategies to address child traumatic stress reactions. The NCTSN has developed resources that provide broad training on child traumatic stress, including the Child Welfare Trauma Training Toolkit (for child welfare), Think Trauma (for juvenile justice), and the Core Curriculum on Childhood Trauma (for clinicians and other professionals).
4. Child-serving systems should establish an ongoing relationship with a mental health provider so that if a screening process determines that a child would benefit from a trauma-focused mental health assessment, there is a clear linkage to a provider trained in providing such an assessment.
5. Identify the informants for the screening or assessment tool. Determine during initial contacts if it is more appropriate to administer the assessment tool to the child or to ask the caregiver to answer the questions about the child. Determine this by considering the age of the child, the caregiver’s knowledge of the child’s symptoms, and the willingness of either to give the information. Screening and assessment tools are not interchangeable, meaning that you cannot administer a tool intended for a child to an adult and vice-versa.
6. Pilot test the screening or assessment process within the system prior to implementation. Asking questions about trauma exposure and symptoms may be uncomfortable, and providers who practice with a colleague become more comfortable with the language and managing various responses.
7. Initiate a system for addressing secondary traumatic stress. Service providers should have an organizational policy in place to address secondary/vicarious trauma. Find more information on addressing this here. |
McGovern ButtonMcGovern bumper sticker
Photos courtesy of South Dakota State Historical Society
George McGovern was born in Avon in 1922. He grew up in Mitchell. During the Second World War, he flew a B-24 bomber. He became a war hero. Afterwards, he went back to school. Then he taught history at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell. The people of South Dakota elected him to Congress. He served in the United States House of Representatives. It was 1956. Four years later, President Kennedy gave him a new job. The president put him in charge of the Food for Peace program. McGovern became a United States senator in 1962. He worked for peace and against hunger. Ten years later, he lost the race for president to Richard Nixon. McGovern stayed in government. He served as a delegate to the United Nations. He taught and wrote several books. Today, he is still working against hunger in the world. |
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wordless #9
This Wordless is an explanation of Wordless #8
York Redoubt is a fortress that was built in 1793, situated on a bluff overlooking the Halifax harbour entrance. This fort is located near my home, and hubby and I often go to there for a stroll or sometimes make the hike down to the shore. This photo is of a tower along the shore, overlooking the harbour. This area of the fort is deteriorating and undergoing restoration hence the "Danger" sign in my previous post - Wordless #8.
post signature
LarryG said...
who and why was it built?
i'm off to google to check this out.
Shadow said...
oooh, that fort looks positively spooky!!! thanks for the explanation of the danger sign.
Kori said...
What a great image; I dont think it looks spooky, though, just-stark and noble. |
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Genetics inspire cyber-security research at Wake Forest
The fight against computer viruses and other threats is taking a new direction at Wake Forest University.
Erinn Fulp and Michael Crouse are fighting the continual evolution of viruses, worms and malware with evolution. Together, they are developing the first-ever automated computer configurations that adjust as quickly as the threats.
Fulp is associate professor of computer science and Crouse is a computer science graduate student who was recently named one of the "nation's top new inventors" by Inventor's Digest magazine.
In refining a genetically inspired algorithm that proactively discovers more secure computer configurations, they are leveraging the concept of “survival of the fittest.”
See more.
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Middle East
IS threat to Syria's northern bald ibis near Palmyra
A northern bald ibis Image copyright Thinkstock
Image caption A small breeding colony of the northern bald ibis was found near Palmyra in 2002
A rare bird may become extinct in Syria because of the capture of Palmyra by Islamic State, experts say.
A tiny breeding colony of the northern bald ibis - a critically endangered species - was found near the city in 2002.
Only one female returned from the wintering grounds in spring 2013.
Three further birds held in captivity were abandoned last week after their Bedouin guards fled the fighting. Their fate is unknown.
The Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon has offered a reward of $1,000 (£646) for information on the whereabouts of Zenobia (named after the queen of Palmyra), the only remaining bird who knows the migration routes to wintering grounds in Ethiopia.
Without her, birds bred in captivity cannot learn the migration routes and the species could go extinct in the wild in Syria, say ornithologists.
"Culture and nature, they go hand in hand, and war stops, but nobody can bring back a species from extinction," Asaad Serhal, Head of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon, told the BBC.
Image copyright AP
Image caption Palmyra was built when the area was under Roman rule
The BBC's Jim Muir in Beirut says that for several decades the species was thought to be extinct in the Middle East until seven birds were found nesting near Palmyra more than 10 years ago.
Despite being protected, and breeding, their numbers dwindled to just four wild birds by 2012.
A tagging project in 2006 discovered that the birds from the Syrian colony were wintering in Ethiopia. But it was unclear what was happening to the fledgling or immature birds.
Media playback is unsupported on your device
Media captionDr Steven Portugal used the northern bald ibis to reveal why birds fly in a V formation (footage courtesy of Waldarappteam)
Background: Dr Steve Portugal, Royal Holloway University of London
Bald ibis were originally widespread across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, but due to hunting, habitat loss and pesticide poisoning, they underwent dramatic population declines and are now only found in Morocco and Syria.
These two populations are incredibly small, with the Moroccan population being unusual for the species in that they are not migratory, spending all year at the same site in the Atlas Mountains.
Most historic populations were highly migratory, and the relic Syrian population contains the only remaining individuals who have the knowledge of historic migration routes from Syria to wintering grounds in Ethiopia.
The loss of this remnant population would result in the loss of the last migratory bald ibis, while also losing the genetic diversity that these migratory individuals contain.
The fall of Palmyra came just days after IS captured the major Iraqi city of Ramadi.
The capture of the ancient ruins at the World Heritage site next to the modern city of Palmyra has raised international alarm.
IS militants have destroyed several sites in Iraq - most recently the ancient city of Nimrud, one of Iraq's greatest archaeological treasures.
Related Internet links
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites |
Quotations about
The debate about the relative importance of 'nature' and 'nurture' is the most important, the longest-running, and the most fraught of all those debates in psychology that occasionally appear resoluble. (The important and ongoing debate about how the mind is related to the body is almost as heated, but that debate usually appears entirely non-resoluble {see Quotes IV}.)
Until the proof, in 1945, of the scale of the Nazi Holocaust, belief in the importance of 'nature' had enjoyed a century of acceptance in the West. In the late nineteenth-century, traditional Christian approaches to improving people and society were unable to cope with the new problems of urban life-rising crime, conspicuous squalor, sexual diseases and child prostitution. After the First World War, nation-states were increasingly expected by their enlarged electorates to do battle with their own social problems just as they had battled with each other militarily on an unprecedented scale, and to use science in peace as they had in war. Two particular strategies seemed possible. One was to control alcohol consumption by increased taxation or by outright prohibition. The other was to prevent the recurrence of similar social problems in future generations by introducing society's problem-cases to sterilization, castration, contraception or abortion-if not to the sexual restraint long urged unavailingly by the churches. This second, futuristic route to 'improvement' presumed problems like mental subnormality {the 'learning difficulties' of today}, schizophrenia, criminality and alcoholism to be substantially inherited.
By 1945, it was clear for all to see that both these major efforts toward 'improvement' had been tried and had failed horrifically. In the USA, the 'prohibition era' had yielded more crime, alcoholism and drug-taking than before-together with a corruption of, and public mistrust for the police: laws restricting alcohol consumption had led to illicit brewing and retail, which in turn desensitized many moderate drinkers to engaging in crime. In Nazi Germany, the initial proposals for 'race hygiene' via eugenics had been quickly discarded in favour of euthanasia for the mentally and physically handicapped and state-orchestrated terror for objectors in general and for the Jews in particular. Finally, in 1941, as the armies of the Third Reich poured through Poland into Russia and the 'concentration' and slave-labour camps filled up, the Holocaust was set in motion. Now, quite regardless of health, educational attainment or IQ (the testing of which had been banned by Hitler in 1937, apparently to prevent the above-average IQ's of the Jews from being advertised), five million Jews, gypsies and homosexuals lost their lives to racial fanaticism.
After 1945, it became almost a matter of faith in psychology that important aspects of human personality, intelligence and rationality were mainly matters of 'nurture' rather than 'nature'; that 'improvements' were to be sought in education, training or psychotherapy, or by alterations in social conditions-especially for poorer families; and that psychology would follow the path outlined by Russian and American behaviourism. {See QUOTES XX re 'psycho-social engineering'; and QUOTES X re the eventual Head Start programmes that aimed to raise intelligence itself.} However, by 1970, behaviourism-with its stress on the importance of learning and on the apparent discovery of effective 'conditioning' procedures-had itself taken some hard knocks in academic circles. These came partly from the growing recognition that 'conditioning' could not account for the phenomena of human language and symbol-using intelligence; partly from the increasing success of amelioration of mental illness by drugs; partly from failures of behaviour therapy to bite reliably on many 'unwanted habits' (especially on sexual fixations and on alcohol- and nicotine-consumption); and partly from direct empirical investigation of the role of 'nature' in human intellect, in personality differences, and even in social attitudes.
There are in fact three 'nature vs nurture' issues rather than just one. They concern what is innate, what is inherited, and what is important.
(i) What is innate to the species-in this case, homo sapiens? What features of human behaviour and experience arise from the genes that we all share and without most of which a human child is unlikely to be born? Obvious possibilities are that language (or at least a certain capacity for language) is innate to Man; ditto bipedalism-conferring the major evolutionary advantage that we can carry things easily. But what about the sex-role division of labour -so general a feature of human cultures historically, but now under challenge {see QUOTES XXII}? Proving innateness (versus dependence on learning) of a largely species-specific characteristic-like birdsong-may seem easy enough: we 'simply' rear a bird without exposing it to conspecifics or their song. But we can hardly carry out the same experiment with human children today -though the feat was attempted by one or two rulers of the past (e.g. the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who was curious to see whether children reared in isolation would end up speaking Hebrew, or whether the Almighty might have graced some other language with His approval). Today there is much discussion of 'sociobiological' ideas as to how we evolved (perhaps as 'aquatic apes'?) and as to what is innate (altruism?, love of our own kith and kin?, inter-racial antipathy?); but to prove points decisively in either the 'nature' or 'nurture' direction is hard work; and such matters are so important that many people are properly reluctant to change their minds without decisive proof. {The suggestion of the Nobel-Prize-winning German ethologist, Konrad Lorenz (1962, Aggression: the So-called Evil), that human aggression is not only innate but actually 'desirable' (at least, intrinsic to distinctively human patterns of sociality) still remains the outstandingly controversial claim of ethology and sociobiology-though Freud, too, thought we all had a 'death wish' of some kind that was normally channelled away from the self, towards external targets.} Altogether, precise attributions of important, universal human features to 'either' nature or nurture looks quite unlikely. The incest taboo is an obvious example: it will be maintained 'naturally' in so far as societies are not so riven with internal strife as to put a premium on the special co-operation that will occur between the genetically similar offspring of incestuous unions; and it is also maintained by religious injunction and folk memory. Again, the human sex-role division of labour has been well-nigh universal and thus a clear candidate to be thought 'innate'. Yet some obviously think this may change if females continue to have access to physical force (whether via the gun, labour-saving devices, or the police), can delay or abjure pregnancy and child-rearing, and can rely on their nation states to fund the education, health-care and even child-care of their own children while they themselves go out to work. {For presentation of modern nativist claims see e.g. M.Ridley, 1993, The Red Queen and M.S.Gazzaniga, 1994, Nature's Mind.}
(ii) Which differences between us are inherited genetically from our parents? Which characters 'breed true'-with people being more similar to each other according our estimates of the number of genes they share? With which traits can it be said that a 'eugenics' programme would be likely to have some degree of at least technical success? With this matter there are three obvious main lines of systematic inquiry.
(a) We can look at genetically similar (or even identical people (monozygotic (MZ) twins)) who grow up in different environments, thus allowing us to learn whether environmental differences, between families, contribute to final observable ('phenotypic') differences in behaviour and personality.
(b) We can look at children who are genetically unrelated (by population standards) and who grow up in the same family environment-as when adoptive children grow up alongside genetically unrelated children of similar age.
(c) We can look at pairs of children who share the same environment, but who differ in their degree of genetic similarity-as do MZ and DZ (dizygotic, 'fraternal') twins. We ask whether, with environment similar for the twins making up each pair, the greater within-pair genetic similarity (of the MZ's) makes for greater within-pair phenotypic similarity {as measured by intra-class correlation coefficient}.
Of course there are variants on all these methods. For example, in the 1990's there are many half-siblings who grow up largely apart, for example. More importantly, each method has its own limitations. Adoptive children may have been selected by agencies in the past as especially 'suited' to the families to which they were assigned: thus a brown-eyed child might not be assigned to blue-eyed adoptive parents, and a child of a well educated biological mother might be sent to a relatively bookish home. Investigators have tried variously to allow for, circumvent or neglect such methodological problems. In particular, careful attention is essential to the genotypic, phenotypic and environmental ranges across which any particular study has been conducted: relatively few adoptees are adopted into the extremes of the range of human environments, for example; and twin studies using volunteers will usually under-represent pairs carrying genes for relatively low levels of IQ In recent years there has been an enormous increase in high-quality psychogenetic work in many Western countries. Interpretations remain contested in some quarters (e.g. L.J.Kamin, 1984, Science; C.R.Brand, 1987, Nature); but a certain amount of fresh practical advice on child-rearing and education can be offered on the basis of the emerging research picture (Brand, 1989, in D.Anderson, Full Circle).
(iii) How do people come to differ as much as they do? How does phenotypic population variance arise? Is it largely accounted by 'broadly heritable', or genetic factors? Importantly, this question is different from the last two, for not all genetic variance is inherited. The best known example of this is the case of eye-colour in homo sapiens: two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child if each of them carries the 'recessive' gene for blue eyes as well as the 'dominant' gene for brown eyes. Interaction between genetic factors (epistasis) is another purely genetic phenomenon that will not make for marked parent-child or sibling-sibling similarity: if a certain combination of genes is crucial to a character, within-family resemblances will be modest, since genes segregate in the process of transmission. Tracing such minimally transmissible effects is much harder; and, when they are found, they may somewhat upset the interpretation of other studies: for example, outstanding phenotypic similarity in MZ twin-pairs may reflect epistasis as much as 'narrowly heritable' genetic variance. Lastly, we come to entirely non-transmissible genetic effects -as when genes mutate or when chromosomes are damaged or appear in triplicate. (For example: 'Fragile X' and 'Down's syndrome' are often the causes of mental retardation in children from families having no general propensity to produce lower-IQ children). The way ahead to the identification of further such genetic effects is highly technical and even then serendipitous; but at present it is widely believed by geneticists (and by some people who are anxious about the prospect of a 'new eugenics') that many further gene-phenotype links will be discovered as the human genome is mapped in its entirety (see e.g. D.J.KEVLES and L.HOOD, 1992, The Code of Codes, Harvard University Press). It would be nice to be able to say that whatever features of personality, intellect, psychopathology etc. cannot be attributed to genetic features must clearly be put down to 'the environment', and vice versa. However, psychologists long ago decided that matters were not so simple, and modern work provides ways of firming up this hunch.
Initially, saying that 'nature and nurture interact'-perhaps 'inextricably' -to yield human outcomes did little more than draw a veil over the failure of environmentalist theories to prove their main case. To talk of genetic-environmental interaction was more to obfuscate than to clarify. Strictly speaking, G x E interaction occurs when an environmental difference multiplies with a genetic value in determining phenotypic outcome: for example, a good violin level attained by a child will probably reflect not just 'genes for musical ability' and 'a good violin teacher', but their interaction or multiplication-there will probably be little attainment to show for having one but not the other. Is such G x E interaction a powerful influence in human affairs? Well, if there is a lot of it around, it should mean that MZ twins will be especially similar only when they grow up in similar environments: and this phenomenon is not readily apparent across the range of psychometric test-score 'phenotypes'. However, many other things have been alluded to under the heading of 'interaction effects' by non-specialists; and the most compelling of these is the idea that a child's development occurs as it 'interacts with the environment'. Since virtually all children quite literally 'interact with the environment' (with the important exception of grossly handicapped children), it is not immediately obvious how this observation is supposed to enable us to account for eventual differences between children. But in recent years, several techniques have come on stream for identifying various forms of what is properly called genetic-environmental covariation (G,E COV). Theoretically there are three types of G,E COV that may help produce full population variance:
(1) Genotype and environment may be correlated by certain types of children being born into certain types of environment-as with children having genes for high-IQ [if there are such genes, of course] being born into environments that are themselves [correctly] judged by modern educators and social workers to be more likely to boost development.
(2) Parents, educators, etc., may decide to supply a certain type of environment to a certain type of child-smiles for a pretty girl, punishment for a cheeky boy, violins for children who seem interested and prove themselves capable, etc.
(3) Lastly, the genotype itself may lead its possessor to active selection of particular environment-as the child itself comes of an age to choose its toys, treats, friends, hobbies, school subjects etc.
These last two types of G,E COV can usefully be called 'transaction' with the environment: the point is that G has yielded, passively or actively, a changed environment (whether by selection or creation) that, in its turn, will normally be expected to influence the child further. If such 'transactions' occur, perhaps especially of type (iii), then we could expect that children will diverge as they grow up unless they are genetically identical. And this is just what has seemed to happen in the few studies that have looked for the effect: at around seven years, DZ twins are almost as similar as MZ twins; but by adolescence the DZ's have diverged while the MZ twins have remained as similar as they were. What seems to happen is that the environment is not, as behaviourists could make it for their laboratory animals, a truly independent variable operating from outwith the 'organism'. Quite the contrary: environmental differences between us are largely under our own control after childhood, and psychological divergence seems to follow in line with genetic differences that may not have expressed themselves at all until such environmental opportunities arise. Classical environmentalists would wish us all exposed to a limited diet of systematically improving arrangements. They would perhaps wish all children to be exposed to the standard British primary 'school' with its staff trained in sociology and Piagetianism. By contrast, the 'transactionist' will look especially at whether the environment provides variety and choice for children, and at whether the environment is responsive to the highly individual pressures from growing children for intellectual and emotional development beyond the levels that individual children have already reached. {For further coverage of the need to differentiate treatments according to individuals, see QUOTES XX and XXIX.}
Such are some of the main arguments, methods and types of finding that are brought to bear on 'nature-and-nurture' issues today. In general, enormous progress in the direction of agreement amongst experts has occurred in recent years, with few simple social-environmentalist claims being left on the table-except those concerning extreme environments that are seldom encountered in the West. This would once have seemed a pessimistic thing to say; but it is no longer so. With years of slight achievement for social-environmentalist techniques behind us {see QUOTES X and XX}, and with gene replacement therapy said to be just around the corner, probably the happiest thing that victims of psychological ill health or 'learning difficulties' could be told would be that their grandchildren, at least, would be spared their condition. Whether people will be any more responsible about the 'new eugenics' than the old will remain to be seen. It is always possible that powerful new environmental variables-not seen so far in the twentieth century -will come into play and yield variance between people that would quite dwarf the human differences that result perhaps mainly from genetic differences today. Such overwhelmingly powerful environmental features would presumably resemble those associated historically with religion and associated pressures for strict socialization-an environmental pressure for which the twentieth-century West professed little use. More likely, increasing provision of equal opportunity and choice-now available to children in their own homes thanks to the proliferation of TV channels-will mean that the intellectual and personality differences that remain in future populations will be increasingly of genetic origin. High heritabilities will thus be a major testimony to the achievement of equal opportunities for all.
{Further coverage of nature/nurture issues will be found in QUOTES X (about intelligence), QUOTES XIV-XVIII (about personal propensities), XXI-XXIV (about group differences), XXVII (about 'equality') and XXVIII (about 'freedom').}
The Nature vs Nurture ideological problem
"Doubtless we all feel a repugnance to assigning so little efficacy to environmental forces as the facts of this study seem to demand; but common opinion also feels a repugnance to believing that the mental resemblances of twins, however caused, are as great as the physical resemblances."
E.L.THORNDIKE, 1905, in J.M.Cattell & F.J.E.Woodbridge, Archives of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1. New York : Science Press.
"In 1948, [in Russia] the Communist Party Central Committee officially repudiated the entire science of genetics. Soviet academics were obliged to teach the pre-Darwinian doctrine that acquired characteristics can be transmitted to one's heirs.... It was not until the mid-sixties that Lysenko's scientific nonsense was formally repudiated by Soviet authorities."
Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question of Intelligence: the IQ Debate in America. New York : Carol (Birch Lane).
"Wherever the theory of inheritance of human behaviour exists there is also the possibility of the emergence of fascism." E.BELL & J.SERAMKI, 1964, The Social Foundation for Human Behavior.
"Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation."
Herbert MARCUSE.
"The very suggestion that differences in personality and intellect between individuals might depend substantially on genetic differences nowadays causes outrage in many quarters, especially when it is suggested that statistical differences between ethnic groups or the sexes may be so influenced."
M.LOCKWOOD, 1985, Nature.
"....we must suspect those who continue to espouse theories of individual differences in personality which centre on family environment and cultural influences, of motives other than scientific."
N.MARTIN & Rosemary JARDINE, 1986, in S. & Celia Modgil, Hans Eysenck: Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"....caring left-wing ideologues have it in for Darwin to a man. After all, his theory holds that people differ from one another! Worse, the differences give some people an unfair advantage over others, and these advantages can be inherited by their children - in flat contradiction to the requirements of equality, social justice, and the abolition of hereditary privilege. Such a wicked theory cannot possibly be true, or if it is it shouldn't be."
David JONES, 1986, 'Believe it or not....' The Times, 11 xii.
"Psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists in the early part of this century largely rejected what they took to be a Darwinian construction of man. They insisted that human behaviour could be understood only through culture and the principles of learning theory. They were impatient to utilize new techniques in order to change conditions - and consequently the nature of man."
Robert J. RICHARDS, 1987, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. University of Chicago Press.
"Despite intellectual acknowledgment of the essential duality of the origins of high ability, most individual researchers are emotionally - sometimes passionately - attached to the defence of one extreme."
J.SLOBODA, 1993, 'Weighing of the talents'. Nature 362, 11 iii.
"Even in the age of the human genome project, there are many who react with animosity and even outrage to the proposition that our genes play a major role in the development of specifically human behavioral traits."
P.MARLER, 1995, Contemporary Psychology 40.
"On the one side are the pervasive views of sociologists and political scientists who believe socio-economic factors are the "master variable." They have allies in anthropology, where "culture" is considered the key shaper of behavior, among behavioral psychologists who believe that human nature answers only to environmental conditions, and among social workers and liberal political reformers. On the other side are differential psychologists who believe that tested intelligence is a good candidate for the "master variable." They have allies in the growing number of geneticists, sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists who share the conviction that inherited factors must be brought more into the picture. Children in a family, raised in the same environment by and large, often turn out quite differently. Genes matter."
R.A.GORDON, 1995, Planning for Higher Education 23.
"Scientists are going to discover many subtle genetic factors in the makeup of human beings. Those discoveries will challenge the basic concepts of equality on which our society is based."
David Baltimore (Nobel Prize winner in medicine and microbiology), 1983, to R.Reeves, Kansas City Times, 7 iv.
Nativist proposals about humanity in general
"The moral philosophy of the eighteenth century was richly sociobiological, especially that in Scotland, where Adam Smith, Ferguson, Millar, and Kames, among others, located the source of every significant pattern of behavior in some passion, drive, or instinct. Altruism, Smith thought, was the innate drive in man that made society possible, just as the "instinct" to truck or barter, to buy or sell, was the true source of the economic system."
R.NESBIT, 1982, Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
"William James was one of the first writers, and was the most forceful, in urging that instinct was at the root of a good deal more of man's behaviour than was commonly admitted.... [One] classification which has been popularized by Tansley's The New Psychology, is that into ego-instincts [e], herd-instincts[h], and sex-instincts [s], corresponding to self-preservation (and aggrandisement), tribal preservation, and racial preservation respectively.... [By contrast, Thorndike provides] an enumeration of one specific situation after another, with the specifically instinctive response in each case.... Between these two extremes is a list like that of McDougall....:
Corresponding primary emotion [Tansley]
e Flight, Concealment or Immobility Fear
e Pugnacity Anger
e Repulsion Disgust
e Submission Subjection
e Self-assertion Elation
e Curiosity Wonder
s Parental Instinct Tender Emotion
s Reproductive Instincts )
e Acquisition ) the emotions
e Feeding ) corresponding to which
h Gregariousness ) are not so definitely
e Construction ) named by McDougall.
Godfrey H. THOMSON, 1924, Instinct, Intelligence and Character.
London : George Allen & Unwin.
"My own suggestion is that a central part of what we call 'learning' is actually better understood as the growth of cognitive structures along an internally directed course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of the environment.... Innate factors permit the organism to transcend experience, reaching a higher level of complexity that does not reflect the limited and degenerate environment. We may usefully think of the language faculty, the number faculty, and others, as 'mental organs'."
Noam CHOMSKY, 1980, Rules and Representations. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Intelligence is structured according to innate tendencies or propensities, presumably with a material correlate in the brain.... The basic Aristotelian premises of logic, like the law of the excluded middle, are common to all peoples.... The same is true also of morality, despite cultural differences. The Love Commandment, for instance ["Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"] appears again and again in widely varying cultures. Humans really do think alike.... There is every reason to think that our morality was conferred by biological causes."
M.RUSE, 1986, to NATO Conference on 'The evolutionary biology of intelligence', Poppi, Italy.
"A long-standing dogma in this century's social science has been that the nature of human beings is that they have no nature, except perhaps a few highly domain-general learning mechanisms. Evidence that such a view is empirically untenable has been accumulating over the past decade (D.Brown, 1991, Human Universals). [Intricate, domain-dedicated machinery,] coupled with the social, cultural and ecological inputs that reliably activate them [may be hypothesized for]:
childhood fears of loud noises, darkness, snakes, spiders and strangers;
characteristic emotions such as anger, envy, passion and love;
characteristic facial expressions such as those showing happiness and disgust;
competition for limited resources;
specific mate preferences; classification of kin; love of kin;
play; deceit; concepts of property; enduring reciprocal alliances or friendships;
retaliation and revenge; sanctions for crimes against the group;
rites of passage; concepts of self;
concepts of intentions, beliefs and desires as part of a theory of mind;
status differentiation; status seeking; prestige criteria;
humor; gender terminology; sexual attraction; sexual jealousy;
sexual modesty; toolmaking; tool use; tools for toolmaking;
weapon making; weapon use; coalitions that use weapons for war;
collective identities; cooking; coyness; crying; and probably hundreds more (see Brown, 1991)."
W. T. DEKAY & D.M.BUSS, 1992, Current Directions in Psychological Science 1.
"Although behaviourists eschewed any appeal to the mental as being irremediably unscientific, contemporary psychology....is based firmly on the causal efficacy of beliefs and desires. Moreover, what underpins this mentalism is a version of Cartesian rationalism that ascribes massive innate cognitive structure to the neonate."
Neil SMITH, 1994, 'Chomsky's revolution'. Nature 367, 10 ii 1994.
Frank BOAS (social anthropologist), 1928, introducing Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. New York : William Morrow.
The importance of evolution {For more sociobiological proposals, see QUOTES XVIII.}
"....evolution can properly be defined as a natural process in time, self-varying and self-transforming and generating increasing complexity and variety during its transformations; and this is precisely what has been going on for all time in all the universe. It operates everywhere and in all periods, but is divisible into a series of three sectors or successive phases:
the inorganic or cosmic;
the organic or biological; and
the human or psychosocial.
Each phase operates by a different main mechanism, has a different scale and a different type of change, and produces a different type of result.... The critical threshold between the inorganic and the biological phase was crossed when matter and the organisms built from it became self-reproducing; that between the biological and the psychosocial when the mind and the organisations generated by it became self-reproducing in their turn....
In general, we must bring home to the general public the possibility of real genetic improvement, the burden it could lift off human shoulders, the hope it could kindle in human hearts. We must make people understand that social and cultural amelioration are not enough. If they are not to turn into temporary palliatives or degenerate into mere environmental tinkering, they must be combined with genetic amelioration, or at least with the hope of it in the future."
Sir Julian HUXLEY, 1962, The Eugenics Review 54.
"In a very real sense the organism effectively transcends physical laws - even while obeying them.... The necessary information [for behavioural novelty to occur is] present, but unexpressed in the constituents. The epigenetic building of a structure is not a creation, it is a revelation."
J.MONOD, 1972, Chance and Necessity.
"By the very achievements of his mind, man has eliminated all those selecting factors which have made that mind. It is only to be expected that humaneness will presently begin to decay, culturally and genetically; and it is not surprising at all the symptoms of this decay become progressively more apparent on all sides."
Konrad LORENZ, 1976.
"The notion that we could dispense altogether with the concept of human nature is fashionable but it is not, I think, actually an intelligible one at all.... [Even Marx, arguing against Bentham,] remarks, 'To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nature.... Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations etc. by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature modified in each historical epoch."
Mary MIDGLEY, 1984, Wickedness. London : Ark.
"....very many people still make pre-evolutionary assumptions about human uniqueness, a uniqueness that supposedly separates us in kind as well as in degree from our simian ancestors.... (For the rightist position, see Scruton, 1986; for the leftist position, see Lewontin, Rose and Kamin, 1984; for a good, middle-of-the-road position, taken by a well-known philosopher, see Rorty, 1979.).... it is suggested [by 'pre-evolutionists'] that there is something morally and politically unsavoury about the ideas (if not the very personalities) of those who would claim that our evolutionary past is relevant to an understanding of our cultural present. Terms like "reductionism" and "genetic determinism" are bandied about....
"The outstanding feature of human and primate puberty is the extremely long interval between birth and the onset of sexual maturity. The teleological explanation for such a prolonged reproductive hiatus, in which physical growth is stretched out to a very low rate, is to accommodate the maturation of the large brain and to optimise the opportunities for the transmission of learning and language from one generation to the next. These attributes have enabled man to inherit acquired as well as genetic characteristics. This exogenetic heredity and cultural selection are the key to the success of man in mastering the environment and achieving supremacy over other species (R.V.Short, 1976, Proc.Roy.Soc.London). The critical mechanism on which this strategy of deferred reproduction is based is the brain-mediated inhibition which restrains the hypothalamic drive to the reproductive axis. The limits of variability in the prolonged juvenile period are genetically determined. Within these limits, however, the onset of puberty can be advanced or delayed by factors such as nutrition, energy demands, body size and social interaction."
F.C.W.WU, 1988, in P.Diggory et al., Natural Human Fertility: Social and Biological Determinants. Basingstoke, Hants : Macmillan.
"Social practices are concept-dependent; but, contrary to the hermeneutical tradition in social science, they are not exhausted by their conceptual aspect. They always have a material dimension. This is an important consideration, as reflection on the prevalence and impact of the phenomena of hunger, homelessness and war upon so much of human history shows.... The two crude philosophical distinctions, between mind and body and reasons and causes, have done untold damage here. Thus the social structure is embedded in, conditioned by and in turn efficacious on the rest of nature, the ecosphere. At an epistemological level, this means that reasons, and social forms generally, must be causes (as well as effects)."
Roy BHASKAR, 1989, Reclaiming Reality. London : Verso.
"In an intriguing psychological profile of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, Hildebrand (1991) uses prospect-refuge theory to explain the consistent appeal of Wright's architecture. According to Hildebrand, Wright's houses have a basic motif that mixes the drama of discovery with a strong sense of hominess. Unexpected views and refuge opportunities abound, from the front gate through the backyard of a Wright house. An internal, contained fireplace with a lowered ceiling and glass doors or windows opposite gives a strong sense of refuge, balanced by the opportunity to see out and survey the surrounding environment.... Wright's consistent use of changes in ceiling elevation and the placement of major living spaces directly under the roof both open up the space visually and create the comfortable sensation of living under a tree canopy. The sense of refuge and protection that one feels under a spreading tree canopy is certainly consistent with an evolutionary approach to aesthetics."
G.H.ORIANS & Judith H.HEERWAGEN, 1992, 'Evolved responses to landscapes.' In J.H.Barkow, Leda Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind. New York : Oxford University Press.
"[There are two ways in which male 'monogamous' birds] decrease the odds that their mate will be fertilized by another male. One is mate guarding, in which males follow their mates closely during the fertile period, and another is frequent copulation, in which males displace the sperm of interlopers with their own sperm." M.KIRKPATRICK, 1992, reviewing Sperm Competition in Birds. Nature 357, 7 v.
"....fitness is....thought to be comprised of three major components: fertility, survival, and generation time (Morton, 1982, Outline of Genetic Epidemiology). Thus, in addition to how many offspring a person has, there is the consideration of how many of these offspring reach the age of fertility and yield offspring themselves, as well as how early in life one group of offspring achieve sexual maturity compared to another group. It is important to be explicit about this: fitness is in essence a longitudinal concept."
J.W.GILGER, 1995, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 14.
Reservations about the importance and value of evolution theory.
"[A Victorian lady, on hearing Darwin's theory of evolution, exclaimed] "I pray that it is not true; but, if it is true, I pray that it does not become widely known.""
R.LEAKEY & R.LEWIN, Origins. New York : E.P.Dutton.
"....I cannot accept the wedding-cake view of levels of explanation in psychology with culture balancing on the top. Why should we talk as if 'a dose of social psychology' should be added on to a supposedly more basic set of biological mechanisms? After all, socio-cultural influences begin at birth."
R.S.HALLAM, 1985, Bulletin of the British Psychol. Socy. 38.
"Chimps, endearingly close to us though they clearly are (indeed, they share more than 99% of their DNA with us), can tell us very little about the genesis of Mozart's Requiem, the Sistine Chapel or Paradise Lost."
Pierre L. van den BERGHE, 1987, in D.N.Jackson & J.P.Rushton, Scientific Excellence. London : Sage.
"Darwin pointed to the importance of biological nature as the basis of society, although it is more difficult to work out the precise connection between human nature and the different forms of human culture. A strong hold on Darwinian theory certainly acts as an effective antidote to the relativism which suggests that each society must be understood in its own terms, and that there is nothing in common between societies separated by time and space. [Thus] some modern neo-Darwinians are....inclined to explain morality wholly in evolutionary terms. Such an exercise is misconceived. Human reason, as a capacity, may be the product of evolution; but it is sufficiently flexible and free-ranging to detach itself from the direction of our natural inclinations. It can even sit in judgement on them. Certainly, evolutionary theory is more adept at dealing with the origin of our natural sympathies and aversions, our likes and dislikes, than in explaining the operation of human reason. Since it is itself the product of the latter, it is wise not to over-reach itself."
Roger TRIGG, 1988, Ideas of Human Nature. Oxford : Blackwell.
"In the past, psychologists have tried to "account for" human behavior through reductions to underlying biological mechanisms. This Newtonian ideal has not worked, and modern science is pulling away from the efficient-cause bias on which such reductionism ultimately rests.... The author proposes that we distinguish between two realms of explanation - the BIOS and the LOGOS.... It can be recognised that the BIOS is necessary for behaving organism to exist, and thereby to take part in the LOGOS. The LOGOS relies on formal and final causation via patternings and orderings of meaningful relations." J.F.RYCHLAK, 1988, to 24th International Congress of Psychology in Sydney (S450).
"[Julian Huxley, one of the fathers of genetic and eugenic thought in Britain, and the first Secretary General of UNESCO,] was well aware that man was not 'just another animal' and that human culture added a totally different dimension to the human experience. Some of this is because culture itself provides innumerable new and diverse environments which must act as selective agents. But much more important is the release culture provides from solely biological processes and the speed with which cultural change, as compared with biological evolution can occur. Further, in a sense that has no equivalence in any other organism, human beings can control their own destiny, since they can totally determine natural environments and create cultural environments to their will."
G.A.HARRISON, 1989, in M.Keynes et al., Evolutionary Studies. London : The Eugenics Society.
"It is of little, if any, scientific advance to argue that something is innate or has a 'biological basis', or to imply that this imposes some necessary constraints on our minds. What has been put in us, biologically, through natural selection, may be creative, inventive and liberating, rather than constraining."
Ken RICHARDSON, 1989, Understanding Psychology. Milton Keynes : Open University Press.
"We are beginning to escape from the Cartesian chains in Western thought, by looking at the mind as "what the brain does". (By "Cartesian chains", I mean the implied "mind/body" dualism....) Once this Copernican Revolution is made in Western thought - I shall not say philosophy - many conceptual problems may find their solutions, not least in coming to terms with dyslexia, schizophrenia, and many other human problems."
Robin FRANCIS (Society of Dyslexians, Marlborough), 1989, correspondence in Encounter 73, ix/x.
"As the primitive had spiritualized nature, so the psychiatrist now animalizes man. It seems that when we try to explain the human condition, we - human beings - have a hard time finding a happy medium between making too much or too little of intentionality: when we are culturally underdeveloped, we treat objects as agents; when we are culturally developed, we treat agents as objects. Thus, the primitive tries to understand Nature in terms of human nature, while the psychiatrist tries to understand human nature in terms of Nature. In our roles as modern scientists, we have corrected the savage's mistake. Who will correct the psychiatrist's mistake, and ours for supporting it?"
Thomas SZASZ, 1987, Insanity: the Idea and Its Consequences. New York : Wiley DePublisher.
"We, that is our brains, are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them." R.DAWKINS, 1989, The Selfish Gene (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
"There is a priori reason to expect that embryos will resemble in formal pattern embryos of ancestral forms more closely than the formal patterns of adults will resemble those of ancestral adults. This is far from what Haeckel and Herbert Spencer dreamed of in their notion that embryology would have to follow the pathways of phylogeny. The present phrasing is more negative: Deviation from the beginning of the pathway is more difficult (less probable) than deviation from later stages."
G.BATESON, 1979.
"To say there is a program in DNA that constructs the organism is to use a misleading shorthand or to fail to understand the problem. It is like saying that all you need to know of how to understand high-temperature superconductors is what they are made of and where the atoms are relative to one another. Try that on a physicist.... Organisms are large-scale physical systems that grow and develop, run, fly, produce leaves and flowers and generate patterns of relationships with each other. 'Some of them even love and write poetry. Genes do none of these things, and neither do molecules."
B.GOODWIN, 1995, 'Neo-Darwinism has failed as an evolutionary theory.' Times Higher Educational Supplement, 19 v, p. 18.
Empiricist proposals
"Man is par excellence an animal that learns. It is far more important to be able to learn than to have learned. Progress in evolution is like finding the centre of the maze. It is better for each generation to re-enter the maze with the power of learning than to start at the point, possibly in a blind alley, at which the previous generation finished. Inheriting acquired characters would involve blind alleys."
Godfrey H. THOMSON, 1924, Instinct, Intelligence and Character. London : George Allen & Unwin.
"Visual experience is essential for the establishment of the cerebral cortical circuitry that allows normal binocular vision. For example, the pattern of right-eye, left-eye dominance columns is permanently altered by simply closing an eye of a young primate [D.H.Hubel et al., 1977]."
D.J.SIMONS & P.W.LAND, 1987, Nature, 16 iv.
"The human brain probably contains more than 10-to-the-fourteenth synapses, and there are simply not enough genes to account for this complexity."
J.-P.CHANGEUX. Reported in Science, 11 vii 1986.
"I do not believe that violence is an innate characteristic of humankind, merely an unfortunate adaptation of certain circumstances." R.LEAKEY, 1992, in R.Leakey & R.Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: in Search of What Makes us Human. London : Little, Brown & Co.
The importance of history, society and culture.
"[The] sum of productive forces, capital funds, and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as the 'substance' and 'essence' of man."
Karl MARX, German Ideology.
"History....is driven by necessity, creating from authority that dies a new authority; from routine broken by war, a new routine; a new illusion of finality, of stability, in which minds are caught by their own realised dreams."
Joyce CARY, 1947, The Drunken Sailor.
"Like the cabbage it so much resembles, the homo sapiens brain, having arisen within the framework of human culture, would not be viable outside of it."
Clifford GEERTZ, 1962, in I.M.Scher, Theories of the Mind. New York : Free Press of Glencoe.
"Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature; but, once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world, the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic, man produces reality and thereby produces himself."
P.L.BERGER & T.LUCKMANN, 1966, The Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, New York : Doubleday.
"Men without culture would be monstrosities with some useful instincts, few identifiable feelings, and no intelligence."
Clifford GEERTZ (anthropologist), 1980. Cited in L.A.Machado, The Right to be Intelligent. New York : Pergamon.
"The study of the historical past....is predicated on the assumption that there does not exist a uniform human nature which is the same everywhere and at all times, that human nature is in continuous change, and that the intelligibility and coherence of human activity are to be sought, not behind or above this ceaseless changing, but in the very change itself.... After a century and more of discussion which now seems in large part otiose, it ought to have become clear to us that what scientists - basing themselves on the always provisional assumptions and hypotheses of their various sciences - may say, for example, about the physics and chemistry of the human body will not settle questions worth raising about conduct, or resolve moral dilemmas, or still feelings of spiritual inadequacy or dissatisfaction. If the case had been otherwise, religion would long ago have been banished to the remote and superstitious parts of the globe....
[The] metaphor of structure and superstructure is quite inappropriate for the historian, who will be at a loss how to decide if one particular event belongs to the structure, and another to the superstructure. Is Lenin's leadership of the Bolshevik revolution superstructural? Is Cleopatra's nose structural? If changes in the price of gold are structural in sixteenth-century Europe, are they also structural in the twentieth-century world - and if not, why not?....
the key to history....lies in history itself, and to try and go behind history is impossible, indeed meaningless. History is the record of human actions - those actions which constitute man's nature, and by doing which man makes or constitutes himself, provides himself with an identity and a personality."
E.KEDOURIE, 1985, The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays. London : Mansell.
"....the "reality" of most of us is constituted roughly into two spheres: that of nature and that of human affairs, the former more likely to be structured in the paradigmatic mode of logic and science, the latter in the mode of story and narrative. The latter is centered around the drama of human intentions and their vicissitudes; the first around the equally compelling, equally natural idea of causation.... we manipulate or operate physically upon that which is in the domain of cause and effect; but we interact or try to communicate with those who seem governed by intentions. Or, as the Navy adage had it, "salute it if it moves, otherwise paint it"."
J.BRUNER, 1986, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard U.P.
"Self generally is the product of relations with others, and both master statuses [e.g. age, sex, class and race] and personal traits can be viewed as thoroughly interactional in source and expression."
Sheldon STRYKER, 1987, in K.Yardley & T.Honess, Self and
Identity: Psychosocial Perspectives. Chichester : Wiley DePublisher.
"Mr Jasper Conran [dress designer], dressed like a nineteenth-century courtier, told us [in pursuit of his thesis that 'fashion is everything'] that fashion looked forward, was the outward manifestation of change, a symbol of development and, above all, 'a clue to life'. Without fashion, we learned, 'there can be no survival'." Peter HILLMORE, 1988, The Observer 5 vi. (Reporting a debate at the Oxford Union as to whether 'Fashion is full of sound and fury, signifying everything'. - The motion was lost, 209-to-345.)
"....if we now find ourselves experiencing ourselves as self-contained, self-controlled individuals, owing nothing to others for our nature as such, we need not presume that this is a fixed or 'natural' state of affairs. Rather, it is a form of historically dependent intelligibility requiring for its continued sustenance a set of shared understandings. It is a moment in a still ongoing historical process and may be reconstituted as understandings change." J.SHOTTER & K.GERGEN, 1989, Texts of Identity. London : Sage.
"Western mathematics - the secret weapon of cultural imperialism - is a product of cultural history."
Alan BISHOP (Cambridge University), 1990, Race and Class. (Quoted in Freedom Research, xi 1990.)
Some reservations about the importance of culture etc.
"Most cultural fads and fashions are fairly absurd. More absurd than most are fashions which, like those of today [i.e. Beatlemania] are largely set from 'below'. Professors, writers, intellectuals, bishops, all take care to be discreetly 'with it', fully conversant and in sympathy with all that wells and throbs up from the slums beneath them."
Editorial, Daily Telegraph, 6 x 1963.
"We cannot avoid being struck by the enormous disparity between knowledge and experience - in the case of language, between the generative grammar that expresses the linguistic competence of the native speaker and the meagre and degenerate data [to which he is exposed] on the basis of which he has constructed this grammar for himself."
N.CHOMSKY, 1968, Language and Mind. New York : Harcourt, Brace & World.
"It would be wrong to suppose that civilization developed wherever the environment was genial, and failed to develop where it was not....[Maya] culture reached its climax in that particular part of their extensive territory in which the environment was least favourable.... The Sumerians found no Garden of Eden awaiting them in Mesopotamia and the adjoining territory at the head of the Persian Gulf, but literally made their environment out of unpromising material by constructing an elaborate system of canals for the drainage and watering of their lands. A very large number of Aztecs and members of several other Middle American tribes lived and made their gardens on artificial islands that they themselves constructed with their hands.... It is true that less cultured tribes may be pushed aside into exceptionally unfavourable environments, but the idea that environment determines culture, whether at the pre-civilized or civilized state, is untenable."
J. R. BAKER, 1974, Race. Oxford University Press.
"Although adaptation of an organism to its environment is the chief process directing biological evolution, with the evolution of intelligence organisms became more and more independent of their environments, by modifying the environments according to their needs. This process culminated in the evolution of mankind, which can be understood only as a result of the interaction of two kinds of evolution, the biological and the cultural.... Cultural evolution, however, being the emergent result of the evolution of mind, cannot dispense with biological preconditions; it builds on biological facts and faculties."
"Jerome Bruner {see above} is to psychology what the Bishop of Durham is to the Church of England: genes, IQ tests and conditioned reflexes are relegated to the past by Bruner just as the Right Reverend David Jenkins urges the modern faithful to dispense with unduly literal, 'cultist' and 'idolatrous' beliefs in the Virgin Birth and 'conjuring tricks with bones'. Bruner is a higher type of environmentalist - the type that disdains the messy effort of trying to prove that environmentalism is actually true. To Bruner, the major realities of the human condition are quite obviously products of ourselves, our languages and our 'speech acts': any heritability estimates, even if they came out at zero, could only sully this great a priori truth....
Bruner's perverse detachment of the human superstructure from its infrastructure does human nature a double disservice. It is not just that we are cut off from our biology and from the guidance of our evolutionary history - serving to weed out the more inane 'constructions of reality' as this history surely does. Worse than that, Bruner's ideas about the human superstructure are narrowly cognitive, rejoicing as they do in the transcendent possibilities only of 'mind'....
Bruner may be right in principle - that different 'cultures' might conceivably 'construct their own realities'; but he is largely wrong in practice.... If we are to believe Bruner, our natural, human constructiveness should have generated, world-wide, at least a few languages and social systems that defy inter-translation and mutual comprehension. In fact, there is no such phenomenon."
C.R.BRAND, 1987, Behaviour Research & Therapy 25.
"....the social structure is [arguably] not at all the gossamer affair that it is sometimes portrayed to be. It has strengths which are all the greater because they are unseen. It may seem odd to claim that faith in a religion, or a code of conduct in science, in the English common law, or the United States constitution rests on habits of mind with a genetic base to them. But, however much it may go against the grain of modern thinking to admit that some of the triumphs of human reason are buttressed by semi-automatic forces, at least it has to be accepted that the triumphs are likely to be more stable if they are."
Michael YOUNG, 1988, The Metranomic Society. London : Thames & Hudson. (Extract in New Society 84, 27 v 1988.)
"It is easy to mistake what we are and may be. Culture makes up our evolutionary deficit; it may also intoxicate us, shower us with false promises. The culture of the Enlightenment has done this, not only bemusing us with false, deterministic, theoretical systems; but in its dying convulsions throwing up voluntarist nightmares like those of Jean-Paul Sartre.... For David Levy (Political Order), the trick seems to be to grasp simultaneously that there are parts of our nature which - like our need for friendship, family and law - cannot be transcended, while at the same time the transformative powers of modern technology have reduced nature to the status of a comparable and perishable institution."
Dennis O'KEEFFE, 1989, Encounter 73.
"Shakespeare's Antonio, in The Tempest, says that the idea of "conscience" is meaningless to him, since, unlike a chilblain, he cannot feel it: "I feel not / This deity in my bosom"....
It is often assumed today, especially by post-structuralists, that the mind does not exist as a creative agency; that there is instead a tabula rasa which reflects in miniature the linguistic and social assumptions current in the individual's environment."
Meg Harris WILLIAMS, 1990, Encounter 74, v.
"In an investigation of the representation of colors by normally sighted, color-blind and totally blind individuals (Shepard & Cooper, 1992, Psychological Science 3), Lynn Cooper and I found evidence that....contradicts the central tenet of the British empiricist philosophers - that everything that each individual knows must have first entered through that individual's own sensory experience. We asked the individuals with the different types of normal and anomalous color vision to judge the similarities among saturated hues under two conditions: (a) when pairs of those hues were actually presented (as colored papers), and (b) when the pairs of hues were merely named (e.g. "red" compared with "orange"). We applied multidimensional scaling to the resulting similarity data for each type of individual and for each of the two conditions of presentation. Most striking were the results for the red-green color-blind individuals (protans and deutans). As expected, when the colors were actually presented to these individuals, multidimensional scaling yielded a degenerate version of Newton's color circle with the red and green sides of the circle collapsed together. Significantly, however, when only the names of the colors were presented, multidimensional scaling yielded the standard, nondegenerated color circle obtained from color-normal individuals."
R.N.SHEPARD, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, Leda Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind. New York : Oxford University Press.
"Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is ruin."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"Taking account of all Russell's (1994, Psychol. Bull. 115) qualms, my analysis shows that the evidence from both literate and preliterate cultures is overwhelming in support of a universality in facial expressions.... There were six [samples] of subjects with minimal outside contact [from the Sadong, the Bahinemo, the South Fore and the Dani]....Significant agreement for at least some facial expression of emotion was obtained in five of the six studies.... In criticizing these studies, Russell set a standard by which all research done outside the confines of the laboratory would be discredited."
P.EKMAN, 1994, Psychological Bulletin 115.
A plague on both your houses!
"....Individual Psychology diverges from the theory of determinism: no experience is in itself a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences - the so-called trauma - but instead make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences but are self-determined by the meaning we give to them; and when we take particular experiences as the basis for our future life we are almost certain to be misguided to some degree."
Alfred ADLER, 1931, What Life Could Mean To You. Oxford : Oneworld, 1992.
"Psychology today includes an important school for which man is nothing other than a brute, e.g. B.F.Skinner's behavioralism; another in which the fact that man is an animal practically disappears, e.g. Jacques Lacan's existential analysis; and various incoherent mixtures, e.g. Freud's psychoanalytic theory, which wants to found itself on biology and at the same time to account for spiritual phenomena, to the detriment of both."
Allan BLOOM, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind. New York : Simon & Schuster.
"Man's brain lives in the twentieth century, [but] the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age."
Erich FROMM, 1941, Escape from Freedom.
"Man is a biosocial animal, and much of our trouble in making psychology into a science has been the mutual antagonism of those who would only look at the social, or only at the biological side, sometimes not even paying lip-service to those aspects they disregarded."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1979.
"I suspect....Eysenck believes in the priority of the biological. So strong is that belief that he inadvertently belies his biosocial credo: '...the biological aspects are prior in point of time and inescapable...' But surely the social nature of man has as long a history as the biological and is equally inescapable? Some four million years ago, as now, a human or humanoid baby, we must assume, was also dependent on a mother's care, and had to learn how to find food and relate to other people. A non-social, purely biological human organism is inconceivable. Social learning theory has therefore as much {and} as little claim to priority as a biologically anchored theory." Marie JAHODA, 1984, British Journal of Psychology 75. (Reviewing a chapter by Eysenck in Annals of Theoretical Psychology.)
"A manifest gap in the Eysenckian school of thought, and one which has sometimes made it distasteful to others, is its lack of concern with those aspects of the psychology of Man-feelings, ideas, motives and other experiential data-which many believe to be the essence of 'personality'."
G.CLARIDGE, 1986, in S. & Celia Modgil, Hans Eysenck:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
M.A.HOFMAN, 1986, to NATO Conference on 'The evolutionary
biology of intelligence', Poppi, Italy.
"Sackett (1968) demonstrated that, despite their sexual ineptitude, male rhesus monkeys who had been reared in isolation still showed signs of being sexually aroused by the sight of female peers. This suggested that a heterosexual orientation per se was not disrupted by social isolation, but merely the social skills needed to express it."
Lee ELLIS & M. Ashley AMES, 1987, Psychological Bulletin 101.
"Both G.H.Mead and J.B.Watson accepted Darwin, and so they accepted that there was both continuity and discontinuity [between man and other species]. It makes a dramatic difference to one's model of man, however, depending upon where the stress falls.... Language, after all, is a species-specific form of behaviour. The social psychology of Mead is more firmly grounded in evolutionary biology than is the behaviourism of either Watson or Skinner."
Robin FARR, 1987, Presidential address to the British
Psychological Society, Bulletin of the B.P.S. 40.
"[I advocate] a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner."
Stephen Jay GOULD, 1987, An Urchin in the Storm. New York : Norton.
"[Wilfred Thesiger, My Kenya Days] is critical of the Adamsons (of Born Free fame) for having turned the lions which they reared into potential man-eaters, because 'the lions had inevitably lost their instinctive apprehension of human beings due to their close association with them and since as cubs they had never been taught to hunt.' Thesiger's point was proved when one of George Adamson's lions, having mauled a friend's son, then killed his cook and was shot by Adamson while it was carrying off the corpse." S. COURTAULD, 1994, The Spectator, 23 iv.
"....the Durkheimian view favoured by the social sciences (the individual's behaviour is dictated by society via the processes of enculturation during childhood) and that of evolutionary biology (society is the creation of individuals) [might be] simply opposite sides of the same ontogenetic coin. Of course, the individual's behaviour is dictated by its upbringing, with many of its behavioural rules instilled by society during childhood. But the fact that these rules exist does not mean to say that they have always existed in that form: societies do change and when they change they invariably do so at the behest of individuals. Social rules as we see them now may thus be the outcome of long periods of social negotiation in a past that we cannot see and which have long been forgotten. This does not mean that ideologies may not be important in driving social change or that cultural institutions are not limited in the number of forms they can take by internal structural coherence. Such ideas have received considerable attention from evolutionary biologists [examples include Dawkins' (1977) analysis of memes and Boyd and Richerson's (1985) models of cultural evolution]. But it does mean that there may be grounds for reinterpreting the relationship between Durkheim and Darwin as one of differences in time-frame or perspective rather than one of epistemology."
R.I.M.DUNBAR, 1995, in R.Dunbar, Human Reproductive Decisions: Biological and Social Perspectives. London : St Martin's Press (in association with the Galton Institute).
Psychogenetic methods for tracing human individual differences to 'nature vs nurture'
"[King James IV of Scotland] put a dumb woman in Inchkeith, and gave to her two young children, and furnished them with life's necessities for nourishment-meat, drink, fire, candles and clothes and with all other necessities to man or woman-wishing by this means to know what language the children would speak when they came to lawful age. Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but as to myself I know nothing except what I have been told."
PITSCOTTIE, 16th Century Scottish chronicler. Quoted by R.Grieve, 'Isolation experiments on children's language.' In George W.G.Montgomery, Language for the Eye: an Anthology of Deaf Writing and Publishing. Edinburgh, Donaldson's College : Scottish Workshop Publications.
"Enough has been said [here] to prove that an extremely close personal resemblance frequently exists between twins of the same sex. and that, although the resemblance usually diminishes as they grow into manhood and womanhood, some cases occur in which the resemblance is lessened in a hardly perceptible degree."
Francis GALTON, 1875, 'The history of twins, as a criterion of the relative powers of nature and nurture.' Fraser's Magazine 92.
{It was not realize till the 1920's that there are two types of twin, monozygotic and dizygotic.}
"The interaction of nature and circumstances is very close, and it is impossible to separate them with precision.... We need not, however, be hypercritical about distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces of nature and nurture are totally different, although the frontier between them may be uncertain, and we are perfectly justified in attempting to appraise their relative importance."
Francis GALTON, 1883, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its
Development. London : Dent, 1907.
"It is true that a key assumption of the ordinary twin method is that identical twins and fraternal twins experience approximately comparable trait-relevant environmental influences. Considerable evidence suggests that this assumption is valid (Bouchard, 1984, in S.W.Fox, Individuality and Determinism); but such technical and often indirect evidence will rarely persuade confirmed environmentalists. It is important, however, to point out that if the environmental explanation were true there would have to be sizeable correlations between similarity in the treatment of twins and similarity in their personalities. The evidence available suggests the contrary (R.Nichols, 1978, Homo 29)."
T.J.BOUCHARD, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen:
Consensus and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"Plomin's group [of psychogeneticists, in Pennsylvania] employs a technique called allelic association which uses large samples of unrelated individuals at the two extremes of the IQ range and analyses DNA markers in or close to genes having products of prima facie neurological relevance (such as dopamine receptor protein and neurofilament protein)."
J.SLOBODA, 1993, Nature 362, 11 iii.
"....our main conclusion after some years of work on this problem is that mathematical estimates of heritability tell us almost nothing about anything important."
C.JENCKS, 1972, Inequality. New York : Basic Books.
"....in the absence of experimental controls in which genetically identical individuals are assigned at conception to different random environments, the confounding effects of the environment (intra-uterine and external) with the genotype can never be eliminated." K.RICHARDSON & J.M.BYNNER, 1984, International Journal of Psychology 19.
"Am I precluding the study of human behavior genetics? Not at all....I {merely} believe that the realm of the possible is far more circumscribed than has been recognized in the current largely worthless literature being produced by the careerists (Plomin, 1989, 1990; Bouchard et al., 1990). The task of a scientifically sound human behavior genetics is challenging but not impossible of execution. It will involve studying the behavioral consequences of known genes."
J.HIRSCH, 1990, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 10.
"It amazes me how many graduate students and even colleagues think that giving a psychological test to monozygotic and dizygotic twins makes one a geneticist. The number of naive estimates of from twin correlations published in the literature with no mention whatsoever of profound methodological problems is symptomatic of the malaise."
D.WAHLSTEN, 1990, Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 10.
"[Burn & Goodship found that of one MZ twin, by the process of inactivation of the surplus X chromosome] had an excess of the mother's X, the other was just as likely to have only the father's, or some of the mother's and some of the father's, or all of the mother's-it didn't seem to matter. Yet the MZ girls as a group showed more skewing than DZ girls. "Whatever causes identical twinning, these studies show that even though identical twins share the same genes, a genetic trait does not have to be shared," Burn says. "The English language is misleading in calling these twins identical-perhaps we should use the German term eineiige, 'one-egg'." ....A few identical twins are so different that they don't resemble each other any more closely than ordinary siblings. Some researchers suspect that certain differences, particularly in behavior, result from their separating early in embryogenesis, and therefore coming to term in separate placentas."
Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.
"Donald Hebb doubted the possibility of estimating heritability at all, and compared the effort to sort our the relative contributions of heredity and environment to obviously absurd efforts to sort out which is more important in deciding the size of a field-its length or breadth.... We must re-phrase Hebb: given a large number of rectangular fields, which is more influential in affecting differences in size between them - length or width, and is there any interaction between the two? That is a question which is quite easy to answer, using the statistical techniques known as analysis of variance;.... it is certainly not nonsensical or unanswerable."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1981.
"[Steven Rose, in his letter on 'The Burt business' says] the heritability of human traits cannot be determined because humans cannot be selectively bred. On the contrary, virtually every textbook on human genetics describes procedures for heritability estimation. Half of the articles in the most recent issue of Genetic Epidemiology, the premier international journal devoted exclusively to analytical methods in human genetics, report heritability estimates or describe methods for heritability estimation."
Thomas J. BOUCHARD et al., 1993, Times Literary Supplement, 19 ii.
"[In 160 same-sex Croatian twin pairs, aged 15-19], intraclass correlations for monozygotic and dizygotic twins were, respectively,
.75 and .44 for visualization;
.58 and .33 for spatial orientation;
.67 and .41 for word fluency; and
.74 and .41 for vocabulary."
D.BRATKO (University of Zagreb), 1995, from the abstract of an address to International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.
"From the first few months of life, 40 per cent of babies fail to show much reaction to novel stimuli, such as unfamiliar speech and colourful moving mobiles. At the other extreme, there are 20 per cent of young infants who are highly reactive, showing fretful behaviour and thrashing limb movements to these stimuli. Such early classifications turn out to be powerful predictors of uninhibited/inhibited behaviour in later childhood."
Kerry SIMS, 1995, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22 xii.
(Reviewing J.Kagan, Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature.)
Hereditarian proposals about differences
A little background:
"My dear Adele,
I am four years old and I can read any English book. I can say all the Latin Substantives and Adjectives and active verbs besides 52 lines of Latin poetry. I can cast up any Sum in addition and can multiply by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, , 10 . I can also say the pence table. I read French a little and I know the Clock."
Francis Galton (aged 4, to his sister and tutor, Adele).In
K.PEARSON, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, Vol. I.
"I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace, Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. The years-heired feature that can In curve and voice and eye Despise the human span Of durance - that is I; The eternal thing in man, That heeds no call to die." Thomas HARDY, 'Heredity'.
"I propose to show that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.... ...I have no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike.... It is in the most unqualified way that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary."
Francis GALTON, 1869, Hereditary Genius. London : Macmillan.
GALTON, 1869, Hereditary Genius.
"It has now been demonstrated that.... a single gene is sufficient to account for a wide range of facts about human asymmetries for speech and handedness."
Marian ANNETT, 1978.
"It would seem natural to suppose that, as we grew older, the differences in our vocations [in business and the clergy] would have increased the divergence in our characters. On the contrary, we think that for the last few years we have been growing more alike."
Statement to Galton by his monozygotic twin nephews.
Cited by R.E.Fancher, 1985, History of Psychology Newsletter 17.
"If ever there were an exemplar of inborn mathematical ability it would be Srinirasa Ramanujan, a poor, uneducated Indian, born 100 years ago, who was one of the greatest and most unusual mathematical geniuses who ever lived.... Although his family was of the middle class [in India of the 1890's], he was actually very poor. Ramanujan, his brother and his parents lived in a one-room adobe home. His entire mathematical education seems to have been gleaned from only two [not particularly good] books.... In 1909, when he was 22, he married a nine-year-old, Srimatni Janki, and took a clerical position in the Madras Port Trust Office to support her and his mother, who lived with the young couple. While he worked as a clerk, Ramanujan [poured out] math results, using excess wrapping paper from the office to scribble down his formulas. He was so obsessed with his mathematics, in fact, that he did not want to stop to eat.... [His wife} and Ramanujan's mother used to feed Ramanujan at mealtimes so that he would be free to continue writing while he ate.... Carlos Moreno, of the City University of New York, says that Ramanujan's work in the area of number theory is exactly what physicists need when they work on the 26-dimensional mathematical models of string theory.... It can at least be argued that, for Ramanujan, a formal education was almost beside the point."
Gina KOLATA, 1987, Science 236, 19 vi.
"Gedda (1960) reported that, in 351 sets of twins, 94 per cent of monozygotic (identical) twins agreed in their degree of participation in sport, whereas only 15 per cent of dizygotes did so."
J.RADFORD, 1990, Child Prodigies and Early Achievers.
New York : Free Press.
"On the traditional theory [of 'blended inheritance'], as Galton saw, the real difficulty was, not so much to understand why brilliant fathers beget brilliant children or why feebleminded parents should have feebleminded offspring, but rather to explain how such exceptional individuals could have emerged in the first place. Galton therefore, who by an odd coincidence was born in the same year as Mendel, proposed to substitute a hypothesis of particulate inheritance for blended inheritance.... Both for believers in blended inheritance and for those who reject any notion of innate mental difference, one of the most baffling results of school surveys is the occurrence, not only of extremely dull children in the families of the well-to-do professional classes, but also of extremely bright children in families where the dullness of the parents and their total lack of culture would, one might imagine, have doomed their offspring to hopeless failure. With the Mendelian hypothesis, these anomalies are just what we should anticipate." Sir Cyril BURT, circa 1970, in C.James, Modern Concepts of Intelligence. 94, Chatsworth Road, Croydon : R.S.Reid.
"Human geneticists, psychologists and scientists in other fields have established that all psychological traits, including intelligence, mental illness, homosexuality, musical ability and talent, and criminality, possess a significant genetic component."
Marian VAN COURT & S.B.SAETZ, 1985,
Politics and the Life Sciences 4.
"For monozygotic twins [in a sample of 3,807 twin pairs in Australia], the correlation coefficients for the binary trait of "ever-smoking" (males .50, females .60) were significantly greater than for dizygotic twins (males .37, females .31)." M.C.HANNAH, J.L.HOPPER & J.D.MATHEWS, 1985 American Journal of Human Genetics 37.
"....it is now generally agreed that at least half of the total variance in personality traits is due to genetic causes, and indeed their contribution may be even larger than that."
Personality and Individual Differences. New York : Plenum.
"Leadership, traditionalism and obedience to authority - the sorts of values on which empires are built - are traits largely inherited from our parents, according to a radical new study from the University of Minnesota that has shattered the widespread belief that such values are learned."
Report in The Irish Times, 8 xii 1986.
"Like others who have studied twins reared apart, we have been impressed by the remarkable similarity of most MZ-apart co-twins - not just in those dimensions of aptitude, personality, or interest that we are able to measure (e.g. degree of superstitiousness), but in idiographic traits that cannot be measured in the usual sense of that term. Examples include aspects of personal style, forms of expressive behaviour, pace and tempo of speech and movement, reaction to stress and excitement, postures unconsciously adopted while standing or sitting, specific fears (e.g. heights, confined spaces), focal interests (e.g. working with dogs, making guns), unusual habitual behaviors (e.g. giggling, obsessively counting things, leaving love notes about the house, and pretending to sneeze while on crowded elevators."
T.J.BOUCHARD (Univ. Minnesota) et al., 1986, in A.Demirjian,
Human Growth: a Multidisciplinary Review. London : Taylor & Francis.
"The results from the classical twin study method of comparing MZ and DZ intraclass correlations, and those from the newer, model-fitting approaches, are in good agreement in assigning approximately 50% of the twins' variance in altruism, empathy, nurturance, aggressiveness, and assertiveness to additive genetic influence."
J.P.RUSHTON et al., 1986,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50.
"Identical twin brothers re-wrote the RAF's history books yesterday when they shared a coveted honour awarded to trainee officers. Flying Officers Egryn and Niall Huskisson, aged 21, won the Sword of Merit after superiors at Cranwell College, the RAF's officer training college in Lincolnshire, rated them equally highly. It was the first time in the RAF's 69-year history that the prize had been awarded to two people." The Times, 30 i 1987.
"In this report, we apply a recently developed multiple regression analysis to data collected from a sample of 64 pairs of identical twins and 55 pairs of fraternal twins [mean age of all twins = 12.7 years] in which at least one member of the pair is reading-disabled, and present [perhaps the first definitive] evidence for a significant genetic aetiology."
J.C.DEFRIES, D.W.FULKER & M.C.LaBUDA, 1987, Nature 329, 8 x.
"The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart is an eight-year-old research program which focuses on identical and fraternal twins reared apart from very early in life.... [Our] results, unlike findings from the majority of previous twin studies, are based on samples of mature adults, and very strongly support the hypothesis that both personality development and the development of mental abilities are significantly governed by a chronogenetic system [which] results in convergent development even in the face of environmental forces that would be expected to result in divergent development."
T.J.BOUCHARD, Jr., 1988, to 24th International Congress of
Psychology, in Sydney (Abstract F563).
"The Queen has always maintained that, from the earliest age, all her four children had distinguishably different personalities. Charles was always sweet-natured and thoughtful.... There was always a hint of restraint, even withdrawal, unlike his outgoing sister, who always did the waving when they were in a car together."
'Spectrum' feature, The Times, 5 ix 1988.
"My mother always said to me: 'You know, if you had a decent father you could have been a lawyer'."
Walter MATTHAU, quoted in The Observer, 4 ix 1988.
"Results for [the latent phenotypes of] Extraversion, Neuroticism and Lie Scales [yielded] broad heritability estimates of 51, 47 and 16% (for males) and 53, 51 and 46% (for females).... No evidence was found for heritable influences on the Psychoticism latent phenotype...."
Personality and Individual Differences 10.
"A unique recent study of MZ and DZ twins raised together and apart....has confirmed the typical heritability of .50 across diverse traits, including....aggression, behavioral restraint and traditional morality." J.P.RUSHTON, 1989, Journal of Research in Personality 23.
"Just as I inherited God-given talents in terms of co-ordination, eye for a ball, and sporting flair, they have been accompanied in my genes by traits of character, and these, too, shape my approach to cricket."
David Gower (Captain of the English cricket team), 1989,
interviewed by H.McILVANNEY, The Observer, 21 v.
"....virtually all human traits have a genetic and biological basis, which is partly responsible for individual differences in these traits. This holds for height, lung capacity, shoe size, sperm count, intelligence, compulsivity, criminality, and numerous other characteristics, including substance abuse."
L.MILLER, 1990, Journal of Substance Abuse.
"There is a moderate genetic influence on all aspects of tobacco dependence, and light and heavy smoking may be influenced by different genes. These are the conclusions of a study from the United States based on data from the National Research Council's twin registry [which yielded information on 4,775 pairs of twins].... One of the strongest genetic effects was in light smokers, and this was found to be different from the inherited predisposition to the severe dependence of heavy smokers."
Medical Monitor, 27 xi 1992.
"The intraclass correlation for MZA pairs {i.e. for pairs of monozygotic twins reared apart} is the best single estimate of broad-sense heritability, assuming that selective placement and other types of correlated environments are unimportant [for the trait in question}. [In our sample, using the 46 MZA pairs from Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging (SATSA) (average age at testing 66)], the MZA intraclass correlation (residualized for age and gender) was .78 for the first principal component {of mental abilities, i.e. the g factor}.... Resemblance of SATSA twins reared apart for cognitive abilities is independent of age at separation, degree of separation, and the number of years separated {most commonly eleven years, beginning by the first birthday}. {67 MZT pairs (monozygotic pairs reared together) showed an intraclass correlation of .80.} Heritability is estimated to be about 80% for the first principal component, which can be viewed as a measure of general cognitive ability....
Finding genetic influence for general cognitive ability is greater in mid-life and late life than in earlier years is particularly interesting for two reasons. First, this finding is contrary to assumptions that environmental influences become proportionally more important for individual differences during the life course. Second, it fits with a general prediction made in developmental behavioral genetics: When heritability changes during development, it increases (Plomin, 1986, Development, Genetics and Psychology). In the case of cognitive abilities, this increase appears to reach a plateau in mid-life.
Also of interest is the finding of nonadditive genetic variance. {For the Swedish DZA (fraternal reared-apart) twins were correlated at only .32; and DZT pairs correlated only .22.} Although genetic influence on cognitive abilities has been assumed to be additive, evidence for nonadditive genetic variance on IQ has recently been reported (Chipuer et al., 1990, Intelligence 14).... A preponderance of nonadditive variance suggests that the phenotype may have been subjected to natural selection." N.L.PEDERSEN, R.PLOMIN, J.R.NESSELROADE & G.E.McCLEARN, 1992, 'A quantitative genetic analysis of cognitive abilities during the second half of the life span'. Psychological Science 3.
"....heritabilities of about .40 to .50 are ubiquitous for virtually all traits measured with ordinary psychological tests.... Intelligence is an exception as it yields higher heritabilities."
T.J.BOUCHARD, Jr., 1993, 'Genetic and environmental influences on adult personality: evaluating the evidence.' In J.Hettema & I.J.Deary, Foundations of Personality. Dordrecht : Kluwer.
"Genetic analysis of data from 2,680 adult Australian twin pairs demonstrated significant genetic contributions to variation in scores on the Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, and Reward Dependence scales of Cloninger's Tridimensional Personality Questionnaire, accounting for between 54% and 61% of the stable variation in these traits."
A.C.HEATH, C.R.CLONINGER & N.G.MARTIN, 1994, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 66.
"Heritabilities range from about 40% to 50% for personality, vocational interests, scholastic achievement and general intelligence."
R.PLOMIN et al., 1994, Science 264, 17 vi.
"Multivariate analyses of specific cognitive abilities suggest that genetic influences on all specific cognitive abilities overlap to a surprising degree (Pedersen et al., 1994/5, Intelligence).... Multivariate analyses also indicate that genetic effects on scholastic achievement overlap completely with genetic effects on general cognitive ability (Thompson et al., 1991, Psychol. Science 2).... Research with diverse twin and adoption designs has found genetic influence on parenting, childhood accidents, television viewing, classroom environments, peer groups, social support, work environments, life events, divorce, exposure to drugs, education and socioeconomic status."
"The Germanic peoples (the Germans, Dutch, Flemings, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Scandinavians, Goths, Burgundians and Vandals) who founded so many of the modern states of Europe following the demise of the Roman Empire, carried the concept of heredity to its logical conclusion in their virtually unique system of kinship. Unlike their kinsmen, the Greeks, Italics, Celts, Slavs and East Balts, they did not organize themselves in patrilineal clans and phratries which recognized only their father's kinfolk, but saw kinship in fully genetic terms. The Germanic "kindred" comprised all the individual's relatives on both the paternal and the maternal sides, assessing the degree of closeness according to their actual genetic relationship. This was a quite different system from the concept of patrilineal or matrilineal clans so widespread amongst other peoples of the world."
R.PEARSON 1996, Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science. Washington, DC : Scott-Townsend.
"Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of human conduct and character to inherent original natural differences."
John Stuart MILL, 1848, Principles of Political Economy.
"There is not one jot or tittle of evidence of any genetic basis for any behavioral trait, except schizophrenia-whether it be intelligence or nastiness or aggressiveness. And given the finite resources which support scientists in their playgrounds, it is a waste of taxpayers' money to study IQ heredity or other genetic components of human personality."
R.C.Lewontin, 1976, reported in Times, 26 x. Cited by
R.Travis Osborne, 1980, Twins: Black and White. Foundation
for Human Understanding: Alexandria, VA ; Athens, GA.
"For all we know, the heritability [of IQ] may be zero or fifty per cent.... The great importance attached by [genetic] determinists to the demonstration of heritability is a consequence of their erroneous belief that heritability means unchangeability."
S.ROSE, L.KAMIN & R.LEWONTIN, 1984, Not in Our Genes.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"Until the advent of modern psychology it was almost universally denied that parents could have anything to do with the emotional disturbances seen in their children; "bad" children were just "bad" seeds and had to be beaten brutally to have the "badness" knocked out of them. Such an attitude is characteristic of a hate culture."
Reuben FINE, 1985, The Meaning of Love in Human Experience.
New York : Wiley DePublisher.
"Research into the personalities of monozygotic and dizygotic twins (e.g. H.H.Goldsmith & I.I.Gottesman, 1981, Child Development 52) yields moderate estimates of the heritability of "extroversion", "anxiety", "persistence" and "fearfulness". However, because twin data are used, even these moderate heritabilities are likely to be overestimates. This evidence that personality traits owe little to inheritance probably goes against popular belief."
R.McHENRY, 1986, in R. Harré & R.Lamb, The Dictionary of
Developmental and Educational Psychology. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Evidence that monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins in their views of the death penalty, white superiority, and water fluoridation (N.G.Martin et al., 1986, Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci. USA 83) hardly demonstrates that these traits are genetically determined. That genetically identical individuals should develop similar personae is not surprising. Convergence in the personal views of monozygotic twins might be fostered by the treatment they receive from their parents, teachers and peers; by the manner in which their phenotypic resemblance influences their interactions with one another; and quite possibly by some similarity in temperament that may indeed by genetically influenced. Beyond this, any claim that the development or acquisition of opinions....is genetically specified....or that variation in these traits is overwhelmingly attributable to additive genetic effects is preposterous!" B.WALDMAN, 1989, Behavioral & Brain Sciences 12.
"....modern studies of randomly sampled homosexuals (via AIDS research programmes) show little more concordance for identical (25%) than for fraternal (25%) twins (King & McDonald, 1992, British J. Psychiatry 160)."
C.R.BRAND, 1993, Behaviour Research & Therapy 160.
"Somehow it always seems that the crummier the test, the higher the heritability it produces."
Peter Schönemann (Purdue University), 1994. Reported by C.Mann, 1994, 'Behavioral genetics in transition', Science 264, 17 vi.
"Behavior genetics is another way for a violent, racist society to say people's problems are their own fault, because they carry 'bad' genes."
P.Breggin (Center for the Study of Psychiatry, Bethesda), 1994, to C.Mann, 1994, 'Behavioral genetics in transition', Science 264, 17 vi.
(Social-)Environmentalist proposals about differences
"Helvetius (1758 De L'Esprit) maintained that men were wholly the product of their environment, and infinitely malleable by education."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology.
London : Routledge.
"All the men we meet with, nine parts out of ten, or perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred, are what they are, good or evil, by their education."
Adam SMITH, The Wealth of Nations.
"Many of the causes inducing intellectual derangement....have their origin not in individual passions or feelings, but in the state of society at large; and the more artificial, i.e. civilised, society is, the more do these causes multiply and extensively operate."
George Burrows, 1828. Cited in G.ROSEN, Madness in Society.
New York ; Harper & Row, 1969.
"If education cannot do everything, there is little it cannot do."
John Stuart MILL, 1848, Principles of Political Economy.
"We believe that the 80% of [the population that are normally two-handed persons, i.e. ambidextrous,] are made one-handed SOLELY by the pressure of early influences and training, in which nurses, mothers, teachers and an uncompromising prejudice unite their misdirected forces with a determination and persistency that Mrs Grundy herself has never approached."
J.JACKSON, 1905, Ambidexterity.
"The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education."
Bertrand RUSSELL, 1928.
"There are inheritable differences in structure, but we no longer believe in inherited capacities.... Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to train any one of them to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief, and even beggar-man or thief."
J.B.WATSON, 1931, Behaviourism.
London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
"All personality traits are acquired and maintained through learning."
G.W.KISKER, 1977, The Disorganized Personality, 3rd edn.
New York : McGraw Hill.
"Genes and glands are obviously important, but social learning also has a dramatic role. Imagine the enormous differences that would be found in the personalities of twins with identical genetic endowments if they were raised apart in two different families or, even more striking, in two totally different cultures. Through social learning, vast differences develop among people in their reactions to most of the stimuli they face in daily life."
Walter MISCHEL, 1981, Introduction to Personality.
New York : Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
"Among the 97 neglected or abused children, 44 had become criminal, alcoholic, mentally ill or had died before reaching age 35; and 53 showed none of these signs of being damaged."
J.McCORD, 1983, Child Abuse and Neglect 7.
"Nothing is abnormal or unacceptable and everything can be understood in terms of early experience."
Judy COOPER, 1985, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society.
Stephen Jay GOULD, 1987, An Urchin in the Storm.
New York : Norton.
"America's new Secretary of State, James Baker III, had an upbringing that would be painfully familiar to a survivor of an old-style English public school. His father, James Baker II, used to douse his only son with cold water if he slept past 7a.m..... Baker's work habits today-like Margaret Thatcher, he lives and breathes his job-are a product of his father's hard-driving style; his younger sister is said to have been so unhinged by the prodding that she became "unhinged" and spent three decades in and out of mental homes."
'Profile of James Baker', Sunday Times, 26 ii 1989.
"Nearly 52% of [prominent twentieth-century psychologists] were found to have been either first-borns or only children, a figure significantly higher than one would have expected given the number of siblings [median = 2] present in their families.... Intelligence tests were devised and refined by two only children (Binet and Stern), and then made mathematically sophisticated by two first-borns (Thurstone and Burt)."
W.S.TERRY, 1989, The Psychological Record 39.
"....younger children [especially] and children from lower social classes are more susceptible to the influence of TV commercials than other children."
A. FURNHAM, 1993, Reaching for the Counter. London :
Social Affairs Unit. (Quoting research by E. de Bens & P. Vanderbruaence, 1992, TV Advertising and Children.)
"Galton followed up cases of great mental similarity between twins, and also great dissimilarity, which not infrequently occurs. If home identity were the cause of the similarity, one would expect twins brought up in different homes frequently to show dissimilar mentalities. But in fact, in Galton's data, twins brought up in the one home were often as dissimilar as were those brought up in different homes (having been separated at or near birth). Their similarity appeared to be independent of the environment....
Dr [Kate] Gordon (see Elderton, Biometrika, 1923) tested the intelligence of over 200 pairs of siblings, all 400 of whom had lived for ten years and more, not in their separate homes, but in three orphanages in California. Here there is no home environment tending to make brother and sister both better, or both worse, than the average. The common orphanage environment could not make brother and sister resemble each other any more than it made any boy resemble any girl inmate. But the siblings still showed a strong mental similarity in their departure from the average, with a correlation of .52 practically identical with that found for home-dwelling siblings."
London : George Allen & Unwin.
"....inequality is recreated anew in each generation, even among people who start life in essentially identical circumstances."
C.JENCKS, 1972, Inequality. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"By and large, the more significant the question is, the less capable is sociology of giving an answer. And that inability has a great deal to do with the partially indeterminate, or self-determined character of human behavior."
Pierre Van den BERGHE, 1975, Man in Society.
"Whenever social explanations are offered for mental disorder, the possibility has to be faced that the latter phenomena are so largely determined by genetic, intra-uterine or birth-related factors that little room is left for the influence of interpersonal events.... It has to be admitted that, despite all the clinical and research activity in this area, there is as yet little incontrovertible proof of there being social causes of mental disorder."
J.ORFORD, 1976, The Social Psychology of Mental Disorder.
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"At least half of the children born into a disadvantaged home do not repeat the pattern of disadvantage in the next generation."
Michael RUTTER and Nicola MADGE, 1976, Cycles of Disadvantage.
London : Heinemann.
"It is not so much the genetic psychometrist who oversimplifies the situation as it is the environmentalist, who attempts to explain all phenotypic variations in terms of a single variable of stimulation versus deprived environment." P.E.VERNON, 1979.
"The most challenging fact from twin-family studies of the past quarter of a century is that the results provide no evidence that shared environmental factors influence personality development. This is not a bias of the twin method itself, since the same analyses applied to IQ provide, indeed demand, that a significant proportion of the variance be attributed to common environmental effects."
R.ROSE, 1982, Science.
"Our data suggest....that newspapers have no power to mould the political attitudes of their own readers."
W.L.MILLER et al., 1982, British Journal of Political Science.
"No environmental factor has been shown to produce [schizophrenic] illness with even moderate probability in anyone unrelated to an index case."
H.FREEMAN, 1983, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 8 iv.
"If....high socio-economic status, a stimulating home environment, and bright parents all contribute to genius, then every child in a given family should have the same shot at success. But how many people have heard of the siblings of Bach, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Descartes, Darwin, Gandhi, or Sun Yat-sen?"
D.K.SIMONTON, 1984, Genius, Creativity and Leadership.
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
"....any sort of normal human environment is all you need to do a perfectly good job of rearing an infant.... Any parent of more than one child knows darn well how different those children are. I don't think most parents believe that they really shape a child's future dramatically."
Sandra Scarr (developmental psychologist and psychogeneticist),
interviewed in Psychology Today, v 1984.
"Both {post-Freudian} psychoanalysis and behaviourism suffered from extreme environmentalism - in particular, social environmentalism - and long remained dismissive of evidence that major psychiatric ailments were of partly genetic and individual origin and were remediable primarily by chemical treatments."
C.R.BRAND, 1985, The Listener, 19 ix.
"All personality dimensions, irrespective of the questionnaire from which they are derived, show that about half the variation [amongst testees] is due to additive genetic effects (more if test unreliability is taken into account) and the remainder to specific within-family environmental variance.... In practical terms, we have a situation where parents exert no general effects over personality development in [all] their children."
David A. HAY, 1985, Essentials of Behaviour Genetics. Oxford : Blackwell.
"....shared experiences involved in growing up in the same family do not make family members more similar to one another."
R.PLOMIN, 1986, Journal of Personality 54.
"In a study of 573 pairs of adult twins, 50% of the variance on each scale ['altruism', 'empathy', 'nurturance', 'aggressiveness' and 'assertiveness'] was found to be associated with genetic effects, virtually 0% with the twins' common environment, and the remaining 50% with each twin's specific environment."
J.P.RUSHTON et al., 1986,
Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.
"The harder you look at the facts, the more ephemeral appears the connection between diet and disease." J.ADAMS, 1987, New Scientist 1543, 15 i.
"We don't direct the ordinary man's opinion. We reflect it." Lord NORTHCLIFFE, 1989, The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street. London : Hutchinson.
"Although the environment plays a substantial role in the genesis of individual differences, it seems that the most important environmental effects serve to differentiate members of the same family. That is, the main sources of environmental variation in personality are of an "accidental" rather than "cultural" kind."
Genes, Culture and Personality. London : Academic.
"Genes seem to continue actively contributing to intellectual variation at least into early adulthood, whereas the effect of shared family environment appears to be largely inertial after early childhood."
J.C.LOEHLIN, J.M.HORN & L.WILLERMAN, 1989, Child Development 60.
"Gillian [Blyton], now Mrs Donald Baverstock, has recalled blissful hours with her mother [Enid Blyton, the children's writer] - country walks, picking wild flowers, witty stories. "All those sunsets and birdsongs she wrote about genuinely meant a lot to her, and these she gave to me." {By contrast,} Imogen [Enid Blyton's other daughter] was different: unable to appreciate what she had to give. But where does the fault lie? Some children are easy to like, others less so. The child Imogen was sullen, sour and rebellious, suspicious, defensive and "downright rude", unlike her outgoing sister. "I was horrible," she says. "It's a relief to be able to say it."" Valerie GROVE, 1989, Sunday Times, 26 ii.
"One belief that is distinctive of the twentieth century is that it is your childhood that makes you what you are. I don't really go along with that."
David HARE (British left-wing playwright), 1989, interviewed by
Sue Lawley, 'Desert Island Disks'. BBC Radio IV (UK), 3 iii.
"As Bloch (1977, Man 12) says, it is the "professional malpractice of anthropologists to exaggerate the exotic character of other cultures." Nor is the most damaging aspect of this dynamic the professionally cultivated credulousness about the claim of wonders in remote parts of the world, which has led anthropologists routinely to embrace, perpetuate and defend not only gross errors (see Freeman, 1983, on Mead and Samoa; Suggs, 1971, on Linton and the Marquesa) but also obvious hoaxes (e.g. Castaneda's UCLA dissertation on Don Juan; or the gentle "Tasaday", which were manufactured by officials of the Marcos regime)." The most scientifically damaging aspect of this value system has been that it leads anthropologists to actively reject conceptual frameworks that identify meaningful dimensions of cross-cultural uniformity in favor of alternative vantage points from which cultures appear maximally differentiated.... Other sciences select frameworks by how much regularity these frameworks allow them to uncover. In contrast, most anthropologists are disposed to select their frameworks so as to bring out the maximum in particularity, contingency and variability (e.g. how are the people they study unique?)."
John TOOBY & Leda COSMIDES, 1992, in J.H.Barkow, L.Cosmides & J.Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York : Oxford University Press.
"....the concept of "learning" has, for the social sciences, served the same function that the concept of "protoplasm" did for so long in biology. ....[eventually] "protoplasm" turned out to be a heterogeneous collection of incredibly intricate functionally organized structures and processes-a set of evolved adaptations, in the form of microscopic molecular machinery such as mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Krebs cycle, DNA transcription, RNA translation, and so on."
"I have studied young artists who at age 20 all described their early lives as harmonious and happy. Then at age 40, when we interviewed them again, those who had been fairly successful still said in retrospect that they had had a harmonious home life, but those who had gone through a hard time and had become alcoholics or drug addicts all blamed their parents."
M.CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, 1993, in Ciba Foundation Symposium 178, The Origins and Development of High Ability. Chichester : Wiley-Interscience.
"[Brigitte] Bardot was given some stunning attributes by her Maker, progressed from adolescent model to star very quickly, and was so gorgeous that she attracted the Svengali interest of Roger Vadim.... Jeffrey Robinson [Bardot - Two Lives] gives numerous and grim examples of the price Bardot paid for her fame, including living under almost constant siege from tourists and admirers when in St Tropez. A fragile creature under the provocative exterior, there have been a number of suicide attempts."
Hugo VICKERS, 1994, The Spectator, 27 viii.
"Sandra Scarr concedes that parents can have important effects on children's motivation and self-esteem, but she insists that, beyond a certain minimum level of nurturing, they have little measurable impact on intelligence, interests and personality."
Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.'
New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.
"[George Washington Carver] was born during the American Civil War, the son of Mary, a Negro slave.... ....largely self-educated, he finally achieved his Bachelor of Science degree at the age of 32, specializing in mycology (the study of fungus growths).... He changed the agricultural and eating habits of the South; he created single-handed a pattern of growing food, harvesting and cooing it which was to lift Negroes (and whites too!) out of the abject state of poverty to which they had been condemned by their own ignorance.... ....he was one of the first scientists to work in the field of synthetics, and is credited with creating the science of chemurgy-'agricultural chemistry'. The American peanut industry is based on his work. ....His death [in 1943] was mourned all over the USA ....His father dead before he was born; his mother abducted while he was a baby; born a Negro slave in the deep South, weak and ailing; growing up in a poverty-stricken house with hardly any books, with the white people who brought him up not far from illiterate; denied schooling because of his colour, having to piece together the rudiments of an education while constantly hungry, and having to earn every penny he spent by performing the most menial jobs imaginable, exposed all the time to recurring traumas because of his colour; troubled by a severe stammer assumed to have been brought on by his early abduction....this kind of handicap is practically unknown today."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1995, Genius: the Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge University Press.
"What I have been telling my students about autism being caused by the failure of parents to reinforce their children properly is obviously wrong. Now that I know some parents of autistic children personally, I can see that you are correct. Autism is a biological disorder, and the parents are not the cause of it." Ivar LOVAAS, 1964, in conversation with Bernard Rimland, Director of the American Institute for Child Behavior Research. Autism Research Review International 1.
"The idea that autism - a condition in which children are unresponsive and unable to communicate - is a result of a mother's failure to bond to her infant has fallen out of favour in the United States.... Family studies provide compelling evidence for genetic involvement in the disorder: the [concordance] rate is 50 per cent higher than expected among siblings, and higher still among twins; as many as 25 per cent of parents of autistic children have a language disorder; and 15 per cent of their siblings have some kind of learning disability."
N.HENESON, 1987, New Scientist, 8 i.
Parental deprivation
"The death of either a parent or an older brother was experienced in childhood by 51% of the [U.S.] Presidents and 45% of the [British] Prime Ministers. This occurred to 22% of the Nobel Laureates and 41% of Roe's sample of eminent scientists.... Compared to the average of 8% in the general population experiencing early parental deaths, the percentages for adult criminals [32%], adult psychiatric patients (especially depressives) [27%], and eminent adults [28%] are high and quite close to one another."
R.S.ALBERT, 1980. Reprinted in R.S.Albert, Genius and Eminence.
New York : Pergamon.
"My father and mother were dead [they had died of diphtheria around his third year of life] and I used to wonder what sort of people they had been.... Throughout the greater part of my childhood, the most important hours of my day were those I spent alone in the garden, and the most vivid part of my existence was solitary.... Throughout my childhood I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair of meeting anyone with whom I could talk. Nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency.... There was a footpath leading across the fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more about mathematics."
Bertrand RUSSELL. Cited by B.-A.SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The
Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Churchill, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth I, Edgar Allan Poe, and Martin Luther all suffered from maternal deprivation.... the more you study formulae for maternal success, the more you tend to conclude that human achievement is a lottery."
Mary KENNY, 1983, Sunday Telegraph.
"The evidence suggests that, on the whole, humans are remarkably and gratifyingly resilient."
S.H.WOLKIND, 1982, reviewing Maternal Deprivation Re-assessed.
"One of the most persistent pieces of folk-lore is that children suffer if mother goes out to work. Maladjustment and delinquency are the effects most commonly predicted. Yet research evidence so far has not supported such predictions."
Margaret B. SUTHERLAND, 1989, Biology and Society 6. (Reviewing A.E. & A.V.Gottfried (eds), Maternal Employment and Children's Development.)
"[Virginia, the mother of U.S. President Bill Clinton] was widowed six months before Clinton was born....Her travelling salesman husband, William Blyth, was killed in a car crash.... [Clinton] was left with grandparents while [his mother] went to New Orleans to pursue a degree in nursing so she could raise her family. Then in 1950 she married second husband, Roger Clinton, a car dealer and the man whose name Bill adopted. He turned out to be a drunkard who often used his fists on his wife after a bender. When Bill was 14, and already on the way to his 6ft.2in., he stood up to his bullying stepfather. [His mother says] "It went to forming Bill's character because he had to be the man of the house in many ways." ....In 1968, Virginia was again widowed when Roger died from cancer. She married a hairdresser a year later, but this third husband died in 1974 from diabetes."
Allan HALL, 1992, The Sun, 5 xi.
""[D.C.Rowe, 1994, The Limits of Family Background, Guildford Press] selected two groups of children under 11: the parents of one group had been convicted of child abuse or neglect; in the other the parents had no such convictions. The groups were carefully matched for age, sex, race and social class. Some twenty years later....26% of the abused or neglected group had been arrested for juvenile delinquency; [but so had] 17% of the non-abused group.... Even the claim that for normal development the infant must form a close bond with a mother or mother substitute is now in doubt. The children of the kibbutzim formed no such bonds but grew up to be normal adults."
Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1994, The Observer, 4 ix.
"....Eisenstadt (1978, Amer.Psychologist) studied 699 famous historical figures and found that one in four had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By the age of 15 the loss had exceeded 34%, and 45% before the age of twenty. These losses almost certainly exceed those suffered by the average citizen of those times.... [by the twentieth century] death of mother or both parents by the age of 15 was three times more frequent in the sample of eminent people than in the general population."
Sibling rivalry
"At the age of seven, wee Sam Coleridge head a fist-fight with his big brother Frank. Furious at being punched hard in the face, Sam grabbed a kitchen knife and would have stabbed Frank had his mother not appeared to save the situation. Terrified of his mother, Sam ran to a river about a mile from his native Ottery St Mary and fell asleep by the water's edge. At five in the morning he woke up too weak to move and might have died had he not be discovered by an old fox-hunting squire. This incident haunted Coleridge's imagination so strongly that, as late as 1828 (he died in 1834) he wrote a fragment about "a little child/ In place so silent and so wild.""
Alan BOLD, 1996, Glasgow Herald, 20 i.
'Life stresses' and disasters
"[A seventy-year-old victim of encephalitis lethargica] has survived the pressures of an almost life-long, character-deforming disease; of a strong cerebral stimulant; and of confinement in a chronic hospital from which very few patients emerge alive. Deeply rooted in reality, she has triumphantly survived illness, intoxication, isolation and institutionalization, and has remained what she always was-a totally human, a prime, human being."
O.W.SACKS, 1973, Awakenings. Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"The impact of stress on personality characteristics may, it seems, not normally be very great."
Sheila M. CHOWN, 1983, Psychology Survey 4.
"....of great interest is the account by Elder of the life histories of women, first seen in their early thirties at the time of the great depression, and followed up after forty years. Those badly hit economically in the depression appear to have survived the vicissitudes they have had to face in later life rather better than those less deprived in the depression. Elder concluded that 'the depression years were an apprenticeship in learning to cope with the inevitable losses of old age'."
Sheila M. CHOWN, 1984, British Journal of Psychology 75.
"Both laypersons and social scientists typically assume that psychological well-being or happiness is a response to objective circumstances or events.... Responses from the General Well-being Schedule were examined for 4,942 men and women surveyed in a follow-up [after ten years] of a national sample. Results showed substantial stability for well-being scales [test-retest r's being around .45] for the total group and for demographically defined sub-groups; and stability coefficients were as high for those who had experienced changes in marital or employment status or State of residence as for those who had not."
British Journal of Psychology 78.
"There are methodological difficulties in assessing the psychological impact of civil disorder and terrorism. But, as well as can be judged from community surveys, hospital admissions and referral data, psychotropic drug usage, suicide and attempted suicide rates, and from assessment of the actual victims of violence, [Northern Irish] society has not 'broken down', nor has the [psychiatric] impact been judged considerable." P.S.CURRAN (Mater Infirmorum Hospital, Belfast), 1988, British Journal of Psychiatry 153.
"In a ten-year follow-up of a national probability sample, widowed men and women showed little or no difference from married individuals on measures of self-rated health, activities of daily living, social network size, extraversion, openness to experience, psychological well-being or depression."
P.T.COSTA et al., 1991, in E.M.Cummings et al.,
Life-Span Developmental Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ : Erlbaum.
"Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift. I believe only some master principle of heredity, defying liberal theories of environmentalism, can account for the profusion of human types, often manifested within a single family. The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band."
Camille PAGLIA, 1992, Sex, Art, and American Culture.
New York : Random House (Vintage Books).
"Forty per cent of all patients diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder drink heavily (Wilson, 1988, Behav.Res.&Ther.), and their symptoms subside when they abstain."
S.J.COHEN (Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry), 1994, British Medical Journal 309, p.873.
"When the Beirut hostages emerged, they surprised everyone by their good humour. McCarthy, Waite, Sutherland, Keenan and Anderson seemed not merely sane but practically radiating health and happiness. How did they do it? After four sets of memoirs, it still seems a mystery."
Alasdair PALMER, 1994, The Spectator, 7 v.
"Although there was psychological impairment in some of the Jewish survivors, this book {Dorit Whiteman's The Uprooted: A Hitler Legacy - Voices of Those Who Escaped before the Final Solution, New York, Plenum} gives added testimony to the phenomenal adaptability and restorative power of the human mind and body."
Leslie BERGER, 1995, Contemporary Psychology 40.
"Twenty-three survivors of the Jupiter cruise ship disaster completed the Impact of Events Scale.... [The ship sank off Athens, October 1988, after a collision, and four deaths resulted.] ....greater early intrusion [of ideas, thoughts and images] was associated with later symptom scores ....other work has shown that dysfunctional thinking is activated is activated by stressful life events for those with a prior history of depression (Miranda, 1992, Cognitive Therapy & Research 16). It is suggested, therefore, that prior depressive personality might be important in moderating the relationship between early intrusion and later symptoms in so far as it is a marker of dysfunctional or negativistic thinking. ....other research has shown more guilt-provoking causal attributions to be associated with intrusion."
S.JOSEPH et al., 1995, Behaviour Research & Therapy 33.
"Helmreich spent more than six years travelling the United States listening to the personal stories of hundreds of [Holocaust] survivors.... What emerges is a picture that is sharply different from the stereotypical image of survivors as people who are chronically depressed, anxious or fearful."
Publisher's announcement for W.B.Helmreich, 1995, Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives they made in America.
New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction.
"....by the 1960's, interest on [Greta Garbo's] investments was in the six-figure ballpark; at any time, she could have liquidated or dipped into those holdings, though the thought of doing so threw her into a state. Her anxieties, as always, concerned her finances and her health. Although both were in good condition, her increasing wealth was matched by increasing anomie."
Barry PARIS, 1995, Garbo. London : Sidgwick & Jackson.
Other genetic factors (e.g. epistasis [gene-gene interaction])
Marian ANNETT, 1978.
"Reliable psychiatric diagnoses, new mathematical models, and recombinant DNA technology have followed hard upon one another in the past decade to make psychiatric genetics not only respectable, but suddenly big business. Huntington's disease and narcolepsy have been tracked down on the genome and, even as this review is being written, reports are emerging {though they turned out to be over-optimistic} of the genes for manic-depressive psychosis on Chromosome 11, Tourette syndrome on Chromosome 18 and Alzheimer's disease on Chromosome 21."
S.LEWIS, 1987, British Journal of Psychiatry 151.
New York : Plenum.
"Professor Lubs and his colleagues (Child Development 57) studied sixteen families in which the number of cases of dyslexia strongly suggested inheritance, and analysed the chromosomes of the people involved. They concluded that the pattern of occurrence of one third of cases was so strongly linked to what appeared to be an abnormal gene situated on Chromosome 15 that the odds in favour of the abnormality being the prime cause of the condition were overwhelming.... The fact that a single gene can influence and even partially control the development of a complete function such as reading implies that other brain functions may be similarly controlled."
J.NEWELL, 1987, The Times 21 i.
"'Friendliness' is a vague concept, but recent research at the University of Zurich and at Cambridge suggests that people can agree on which cats are more friendly (Animal Behaviour 34). And, it seems, friendly cats often had the same fathers - even though offspring and sire never met."
Reported in New Society 1543, 15 i 1987.
"[Tourette Syndrome (TS)] is one of the most common single-gene disorders affecting men . In most patients, the disorder starts with attention deficiency and hyperactivity, followed some two or more years later by the development of motor and vocal tics. Many patients require special education because of letter, number, or word reversal, poor reading ability, and poor retention of material read. This applies even to those with a form of the disorder too mild to need treatment. It is estimated that, among children who are not economically disadvantaged, 10 to 30 per cent of conduct disorder may be due to the presence of the TS gene."
John TIMSON, 1988, Biology and Society.
(Summarising a report by D.E.Comings et al., 1987,
Amer.J.Hum.Genetics 41.)
"Eye-movement dysfunctions, detectable during smooth pursuit but not during saccadic movements, occur in a majority of schizophrenics and in about 45% of their first degree relatives.... [My evidence is that] when considered together, schizophrenia and eye-movement dysfunctions can be accounted for by a single autosomal dominant gene."
P.S.HOLZMAN (University of Harvard), 1988, to 24th International
Congress of Psychology, in Sydney (Abstract S 661).
"Scientists are homing in on the faulty genes that predispose millions to mental and emotional misery. Schizophrenia, manic depression, Alzheimer's disease, even alcoholism-all are giving up their genetic secrets."
Robin McKIE, 1989, The Observer (The World), 4 vi.
"We are just beginning to realise the importance of genomic imprinting (e.g. Monk, 1987, Nature 328), a form of very early modulation of gene activity that holds true for the life of that individual, but is erased between generations. The same gene of identical DNA sequence and position can be imprinted differently depending on whether it is transmitted by a male or a female."
Editorial, Biology & Society 6, ix.
"[K.Blum and E.Noble, J.Amer.Medical Ass. 263] have found a gene long believed tied to addiction in the brains of more than three-fourths of a sample of thirty-five deceased alcoholics....The gene may work by interfering with cells' receptivity to dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure. Individuals with the disorder might consume alcohol because they have no normal access to 'feeling good'."
Brain/Mind Bulletin 15, vi 1990.
Los Angeles, Box 42211.
"A pair of British MZA's [monozygotic twins reared apart] who had met for the first time as adults just a month previously, both firmly refused in their separate interviews to express opinions on controversial topics; since long before they discovered each other's existence, each had resolutely avoided controversy. Another pair were both habitual gigglers, although each had been raised by adoptive parents whom they described as undemonstrative and dour, and neither had known anyone who laughed as freely as she did until finally she met her twin. Both members of another pair independently reported that they refrained from voting in political elections on the principle that they did not feel themselves well enough informed to make wise choices. A pair of male MZA's at their first adult reunion, discovered that they both used Vademecum toothpaste, Canoe shaving lotion, Vitalis hair tonic, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. After that meeting, they exchanged birthday presents that crossed in the mail and proved to be identical choices, made independently in separate cities.....
The existence of genetic traits that are not (or are only weakly) shared by first-degree relatives would be evidence for a neglected mechanism of non-additive or configural genetic determination.....
The mammalian eye and the hominid hand with its opposable thumb are multigenic, but they are not constructed additively. If, at conception, one is short-changed on eye genes, one does not develop a smaller but otherwise normal eye.....
Traits that depend on configurations of polymorphic genes that....segregate independently will be shared by MZ twins, who share all their genes, hence all gene configurations, but are much less likely to be shared by DZ twins, siblings or parents and offspring. Such traits, although genetic, would not tend to run in families." D.T.LYKKEN et al., 1992, 'Genetic traits that may not run in families'. American Psychologist, xii.
"Bramwell (1948)....re-examined Galton's (1869) study of hereditary genius and concluded that, of all the professions studied by Galton, only judges seemed to aggregate within families. Bullough et al. (1981) compiled additional data and noted that "....creative achievement was rarely carried on in the same family beyond one generation...."
The Creative Personality Scale is a 30-items measure of trait creativity that was essentially derived through empirical keying using data from more than 1,700 persons, many of whom were architects, mathematicians, research scientists and graduate students. {High scorers say they tend to be relatively resourceful, insightful, individualistic, reflective and intelligent.}.... [Our correlation for monozygotic twins reared apart] is moderately high (.54), whereas the dizygotic-twin-reared apart correlation is low and not significantly different from zero. This finding is consistent with the notion that creativity if an emergenic trait."
N.G.WALLER et al., 1992/3, Psychological Inquiry.
"Studies of twins provide strong evidence for the heritability of manic-depressive illness. If an identical twin has manic-depressive illness, the other twin has a 70 to 100 percent chance of also having the disease; if the other twin is fraternal, the chances are considerably lower (approximately 20 percent)."
Kay R. JAMISON, 1995, 'Manic-depressive illness and creativity.'
Scientific American 272, ii, 47-51.
"Intraclass correlations for peer reports (not corrected for lack of consensus among judges) were between .31 (agreeableness) and .48 (openness) in the MZ group [701 pairs] and between -.02 (neuroticism) and .28 (openness) in the DZ [263 pairs]."
A.ANGLEITNER, R.RIEMANN & J.STRELAU, 1995, to International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, meeting in Warsaw.
"[Separated at birth and reunited thirty-nine years later,] each of the Jim twins, as [these MZ's were called] was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty pounds; they looked as much alike as any other identical pair. At their reunion, they discovered that each had been married twice, first to a woman named Linda and then to a woman named Betty. Jim Lewis had named his firstborn child James Alan, and Jim Springer had named his James Allen. In childhood, each twin had owned a dog named Toy. They had enjoyed family vacations on the same beach in Florida and had worked part time in law enforcement. They shared a taste for Miller Lite beer and Salem cigarettes."
Lawrence WRIGHT, 1995, 'Double mystery.' New Yorker, 7 viii, 44-62.
"[Tom Bouchard's MZ 'Jim twins'] were thirty-nine when reunited. Both had earlier married women named Linda, then got divorced, then married women named Betty. Both had served as sheriff's deputies in their respective Ohio towns. Without ever seeing each other, both had vacationed at the same beach resort on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Both liked working with wood and had similar basement workshops....Each had built a circumarboreal; bench around a tree in his yard....In each case the bench was painted white. Both Jims drank Miller Lite, chain-smoked Salems, liked stock-car racing, and did not like baseball....On many different measures, Bouchard later reported their test scores were about as close as those you would expect from the same individual taking a test twice."
Daniel SELIGMAN, 1992, A Question of Intelligence:
"....when there are epistatic fitness interactions [between genes], sexual reproduction can actually slow down evolutionary progress, by breaking up co-adapted groups of genes as soon as they arise.... Because sexual reproduction is almost universal, I wonder whether epistatic interactions can be as widespread as is sometimes thought."
J.M.SMITH, 1987, Nature 329.
Nature-Nurture Interaction
"....paradoxically enough, the influence of a good environment is most conspicuous where the influence of a good heredity is most conspicuous."
C.BURT, 1943, British Journal of Educational Psychology 13.
"....any characteristic develops as a complex interaction between genes and environment. Many of the ancient nature-nurture debates were thus futile. But there is still the question - separate from that of an individual's determinants - of how the differences between individuals are determined by either set of factors."
Chris BRAND & Halla BELOFF, 1972,
British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 13.
"....genetic and environmental factors interact and cannot be considered to be independent of each other."
M.RUTTER, 1975.
"....the interaction between heredity and environment is so continuous, intricate, variable, cumulative and specific that no general statement can be made about their relative contributions."
S.H.STOTT, 1983.
"The concept of interaction between biological and psychosocial variables seems to be one of the most frequently praised ideas in psychology...."
K.UNGER, 1984, Science.
"[According to L.Sugarman, (Lifespan Development) we clearly cannot ever hope to quantify all the intensively interacting variables that are operative in development. So we are entitled to work in terms of global metaphors: "frameworks of description". This seems an interestingly retrograde move. In the older sciences, relief from the dilemma of infinite chains of causal influence came with common sense. Although the total number of potential sources of variance in any observed phenomenon are enormous, most have inconsequential effects and may even cancel each other out."
P.M.A.RABBITT, 1987, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 13 i.
"....it is a lot easier to talk about G x E interaction than it is to find it."
R.PLOMIN, 1990, Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
"If interactions {between genetic and environmental factors} were rampant, evolution (at least in sexual species) would be impossible."
T.J.CROW, 1990, Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
"Currently researchers in biogenetics find no compelling reasons to include interactions in their models."
D.K.DETTERMAN, 1990, Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
Nature-Nurture Covariation and Transaction
"Circumstances certainly make men, but Marx also believed that 'men make circumstances'."
Roger TRIGG, 1988, Ideas of Human Nature.
Oxford : Blackwell.
"A person is the product of his environment. His behaviour, in turn, shapes the environment and, thus, the individual is able to modify the conditions under which he lives."
F.KANFER, c. 1965, Behavioural Self-Management.
"Bell (1968) was among the first to indicate that the basic model of socialization - the actions of parents on the child - might be found wanting. Empirical studies suggested that congenital contributors to child behaviour activate parental repertoires of response.... the correlations between parent and child behaviour could thus be plausibly interpreted as indicating the effects of children on their parents. Such views were important in urging that the infant or young child was not merely a recipient of stimuli, but played a part in its own development."
Ann M. and A.D.B.CLARKE, 1986,
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
"....infants [themselves] control the social stimulation on which their own development depends."
"Milieu is that part of the larger environment which is being shaped by the individual and which is also being participated in and swept into the individual's consciousness, so that external environment and individual consciousness are fused into one, into what Whitehead called "mutual immanence", a phrase he owed to William James. James' view of the interaction of mind and environment breaks for once and all the hateful dualism that Descartes gave to the world. For the empiricist James, mind is no mirror, no circuited receiver, but a function, and in this respect it is like breathing, eating, walking - all functions in which the actor and the environment are in mutual immanence. The special character of milieu is that the only real environment exists in the consciousness of the actors - philosophers, artists, scholars, scientists, all - and thereby serves a catalytic function, while the consciousness of the actors is an inalienable part of the surrounding environment."
Robert NISBET, 1982, Prejudices; a Philosophical Dictionary.
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
"Developmental studies in general have failed to yield much evidence of strong relationships between early environmental influences [from parents] and later personality development. These negative results are probably more comprehensible to parents than to psychoanalysts, who have been too busy in their own prolonged training to try to influence their own children. Siblings are different from the beginning [of life] and develop into what they will in spite of our best efforts to shape their behaviour. From their peers, and from the world at large, they select what they want."
"At each developmental step, our personalities and intelligence lead us into contact with experiences that match what we want, what we like, and what we are interested in. We ignore things that we think are boring or too difficult or too easy."
Sandra Scarr, interviewed in Psychology Today, v 1984.
"The Colorado Adoption Project was designed to give a straightforward and definite answer to developmental psychology's most famous question: the relative influence of nature and nurture.... The basic question is whether the functioning of an adoptive child is influenced most powerfully by genetic inheritance or the environment of the adoptive home. The straightforward and somewhat surprising answer is that, in general, neither has any major identifiable effect [in early infancy].... There are many intriguing negative findings, and it may be that these are explicable in terms of limitations on genetic expression during the first years of life."
P.STRATTON, 1986, British Journal of Psychology 77.
"....the difference between an environment-personality correlation in non-adoptive and adoptive homes estimates the extent to which genetic factors mediate correlations between environmental measures and measures of personality.... The only relevant adoption study is the Colorado Adoption Project whose data for infancy suggest substantial genetic mediation of environment-personality relationships."
R.PLOMIN, 1986, Journal of Personality 54.
"Which had the most influence on me, my mother or my father? Heaven only knows, I don't think either of them had! I think I had more influence on them. Were they Conservatives? - I don't think I ever asked."
Norman Tebitt [Conservative Party Chairman], 1986.
Interviewed by John MORTIMER, The Spectator, 24 v.
"....data from three relevant adoption studies suggest that about half the relationship between environmental indices and IQ in non- adoptive homes is due to genetic similarity between parents and their children."
R.PLOMIN, 1987, in S. & Celia Modgil, Arthur Jensen: Consensus
and Controversy. Brighton : Falmer.
"What studies have revealed in recent years poses a fundamental challenge to conventional wisdom about the importance of childhood environment. It is that the environment shared by members of the same family has little or no role in producing whatever personality similarities they exhibit.... Behavioural geneticists are finding that genes account for about 50% of the variance (that is, 50% of the range found in a given study population) in most normally distributed traits. Most of the remaining differences are attributed to environmental influences unique to individuals - ranging from individual parent-child interactions to peer influences to random events. So, although the family environment may influence personality, it does so in a non-uniform and therefore unpredictable way in different individuals."
Constance HOLDEN, 1987, 'The genetics of personality'. Science 237, 7 viii.
"Several studies have shown that not only do parents influence the behavior of their offspring, but, from birth onward, offspring influence the behavior of their parents (e.g. R.Q.Bell, 1968, Psychol.Review; R.Q.Bell & L.V.Harper, 1977, Child Effects on Adults....). If so, and if the morphological appearance, mannerisms, and interests of homosexuals tend to be inverted before puberty, parents are likely to respond somewhat differently to homosexual offspring than to heterosexual offspring, even before their orientation per se is manifested.... several studies have found greater parental hostility toward homosexual boys than toward heterosexual boys, even during childhood, especially by fathers."
L.ELLIS & M.A.AMES, 1987, Psychological Bulletin 101.
"With their concept of transaction, R.S.Lazarus and S.Folkman [1984, Stress: Appraisal and Coping] emphasise a dynamic relationship between person and environment, which means that both, person and environment, are involved in a reciprocal exchange that proceeds in time. The concept of transaction seems to demand a microanalytic assessment technique that follows the unfolding person-environment step by step, i.e. as continuously as possible."
L.LAUX & Hannelore WEBER, 1987, European J. Personality 1.
"Some creatures-sea anemones-just grow in their environments; others- cockroaches-select their environments; higher animals-especially human beings-create their environments."
Norman DIXON, 1987,
Edinburgh University Psychology Department Seminar.
"....purely cultural and purely genetic theories of transmission [of human differences in reproductive characteristics, such as frequency of sexual intercourse, twinning rate, and age at first pregnancy] may be giving way to those based one gene-culture co-evolution in which epigenetic rules are hypothesized to guide individuals to learn those patterns of behavior maximally compatible with their genotypes [e.g. Rushton, Littlefield & Lumsden, 1986, Proc.Nat.Acad.Sci. USA 83]. J.P.RUSHTON & A.F BOGAERT, 1988,
Journal of Research in Personality 22.
"Our finest investigators [amongst sociologically trained social psychologists], such as Alex Inkeles, Melvin Kohn, Morris Rosenberg, Melvin Seeman and Glen Elder, have convincingly traced the influence of structural variables on personality. Yet we apologize constantly for our one-sided neglect of individual's effects on society."
R.H.TURNER, 1988, Social Psychology Quarterly 51.
"....as twins grow up, they grow apart. [Our meta-analysis of 130 twin studies] demonstrates what some developmentalists have begun to deduce: the non-shared environment {differing between different children growing up in the same family} of siblings has been a neglected source of experience in considering developmental process."
K.McCARTNEY et al., 1988, to 24th International Congress
of Psychology, Sydney (Y 46).
"Rowe and Herstand (1986 Aggressive Behavior 12) found that although same-sex siblings resemble one another in their exposure to violent programmes [on TV], it is the more aggressive sibling who (a) identifies more with aggressive characters, and (b) views the consequences of the aggression as positive." J.P.RUSHTON, 1990, Canadian Journal of Criminology 32.
"....the most important aspect of the environment of any of an organism's traits are its other traits."
Darryl T. GWYNNE, 1992, Nature 359, 3 ix. (Reviewing S.C.Stearns, The Evolution of Life Histories. Oxford University Press.)
"At last I have laid the ghost that had haunted me for 45 years. My return visit to Pangbourne College to speak to the sixth-formers went very well.... The atmosphere of the place has changed beyond all recognition since my days there, and my hosts were charming....
It is all something of a puzzle. Could it all have been as terrible as I have always remembered it or did I bring my own unhappiness to school with me at the start of every term?.... I felt comfortable and at ease and all the way home to Soho I kept wondering whether it could all have been so awful all those years ago. If it was, perhaps it was just as well if it toughened up that miserable boy who was so reluctant to stray far from his mother's apron strings"
Jeffrey BERNARD, 1993, The Spectator, 6 iii.
"....about two thirds of the reliable variance in measured personality traits is due to genetic influence.... Current thinking holds that each individual picks and chooses from a range of stimuli and events largely on the basis of his or her genotype and creates a unique set of experiences - that is, people help to create their own environments."
T.J.BOUCHARD Jr., 1994, 'Genes, environment and personality.' Science 264, 17 vi.
"The concept of genotype-environment correlation, originally proposed by Plomin et al. (1977, Psychol. Bull.) has been developed by Sandra Scarr (e.g. 1992, Child Development 63). When there is a correlation between genetic and environmental effects, it means that people are exposed to environments on the basis of their genetic propensities. For example, if intelligence is heritable, then gifted children will have, on average, intellectually gifted parents who provide them with an intellectual environment as well as genes for intelligence. Alternatively, the individual might be picked out as gifted and given special opportunities. Even if no one does anything about the individual's talent, the individual might gravitate toward intellectual environments. These three scenarios represent three types of gene-environment correlation: passive, reactive, and active, respectively..... genes influence not only the amount of television watched [Waller et al., 1990, Psychol.Science 1: rBIOL.SIBLINGS = .48; rADOPTEES = .26] but also the nurturance of parents, the nature of the peer group, the sense of well-being experienced and a host of life history events."
J. Philippe RUSHTON, 1995, Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ : Transaction Publishers.
"Identical twins tend to have their first dates at about the same time and to date with equal frequency. Their sexual dysfunctions also tend to be very similar. They marry and begin having children at roughly the same points in their lives. The only real difference between identical twins lies in whom they choose to marry ....[although twins competing for the same mate is a staple of television talk shows]. ....[In the Minnesota study, separated MZ twins' spouses showed] a strong correlation between twins and their spouses in regard to height, physical attractiveness, education and traditionalism, but over all the twins and their spouses had too little in common to explain their selection of each other. ....twins' spouses were hardly more alike than people who were married to unrelated individuals."
The genome
J.SLOBODA, Nature 362, 11 iii.
"In the December 1 issue of Nature, Freedman and his colleagues report that they have identified and cloned the gene that, when matched, causes a severe hereditary obesity in mice. What's more, the Rockefeller group has found that humans have a very similar gene."
Aye FLAM, 1995, Science 266, 2 xii.
Some adjudications
"....human nature, which is certainly biological in its foundations [cannot] be treated as though it were wholly biological, and thus equivalent to the nature of other species. The difficulty is that the environment for human beings is not merely physical, but cultural, not merely the here and now, but historical, and culture and history become internalised in a way that renders them no longer merely environmental. They become constituent parts of the human organism, and the process of socialisation, taking place in the formative stages of childhood, moulds the developmental process in many of its psychologically most important aspects.... The significance of the influence of culture on intelligence has received a good deal of empirical support in recent years from the work of Hunt, Bruner, Cole et al., Lab, Lure and others...."
L.S.HEARNSHAW, 1979, Cyril Burt: Psychologist.
London : Hodder & Stoughton.
"....the primary source of variation in personality is chance, be it in the hazards of development and the accidental experiences of the pre- and post-natal environment, or in the random assortment and recombination of genetic loci."
L.EAVES & P.A.YOUNG, 1981.
"....in the 1980's there is a move towards a more biological perspective: the pendulum is swinging back in Hans Eysenck's favour."
A.Gale, 1982, Nature, 27 v.
"Our brains, hands and tongues have made us independent of any single features of the external world.... Thus it is our biology that makes us free."
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"We start in search of the individual, but instead of him, we will find fathers and sons, husbands and wives, members of religious congregations, employers and employees, artists and patrons, authors and readers.... The individual can only know and define himself when acting and reacting within such networks which are made, kept in repair, and modified by him and his fellow-individuals."
The Crossman Confessions and Other Essays. London : Mansell.
"What has happened here [in the work and review by L.J.Eaves, H.J.Eysenck & N.G.Martin, 1989, Genes, Culture and Personality] is that proponents of nomothetic, scientific approaches to human psychological differences are losing, at half time, by their own scrupulosity, to their classic opponents, the champions of idiographic, individuality-acknowledging approaches to personality. For the present, only IQ is left as a variable that behaves like a paradigmatic nomothetic personality trait - yielding generally greater phenotypic similarity in closer relatives. In contrast, much of the rest of adult personality now appears to emerge by magic."
C.R.BRAND, 1989, Nature 341, 7 ix.
"S.Oyama's under-recognised The Ontogeny of Information (1985, Cambridge University Press) carries out a deconstructive analysis of the gene-environment dichotomy, without feeling it necessary to appeal to exotic intellectual traditions."
John R. MORSS, 1992, Theory and Psychology 2.
"The fashion is beginning to change. The failure of liberal reforms to deliver the Great Society has cast doubts on the proposition that better nurture can deliver better nature. The failure of sociologists to find even a few of the purported (Freudian or social) causes of schizophrenia, homosexuality, sex differences in criminal tendencies and the like has undermined their credibility. And a better understanding of how genes work has made it possible for liberals who still believe in the perfectibility of man to accept genetic explanations. In at least one case-homosexuality-it is now the liberals who espouse nature and their opponents who point to nurture."
'Nature or nurture?- Old chestnut, new thoughts.'
The Economist, 26 xii 1992 / 8 i 1993.
"We know nothing about the heritability of human temperamental and intellectual traits."
Richard LEWONTIN, 1993, Biology as Ideology.
New York : HarperPerennial.
"[A curious statement, often repeated in R.Plomin & G.E.McClearn, 1993, Nature, Nurture and Psychology, American Psychological Association, is that] the battle between nature and nurture was nonsensical, and that it has been resolved by searching for a numerical solution on the lines of how much, in what circumstances, for what trait. The assumption that there were 100% hereditarians among the behavioural geneticists will not stand up. Having been in the middle of that battle, and having known many of the leading participants, I cannot think of one who would have assumed anything so obviously silly as a 100% genetic determination of any behavioural variable. The imputation that there were any 100% hereditarians is simply untrue; there were, and are, 100% environmentalists, and they carried the day for many years, largely ignoring the available evidence, or misrepresenting it. There never was a scientific argument of either-or; it was always one of how much."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1994, Personality & Individual Differences 17.
Epilogue: Emollient proposals
"I fully acknowledge the great power of education and social influences in developing the capacities of the mind, just as I acknowledge the effects of use in developing a blacksmith's muscles."
Francis GALTON, 1869, Hereditary Genius. London : Macmillan.
"[Emile Zola's] commitment to hereditary determination of "feelings, desires, passions, all human manifestations" was an integral part of a world view that was characteristic of an anti-aristocratic, anti-clerical, radical bourgeois of the Third Republic. It was....an attempt to reconcile the facts of an unequal and hierarchical society with the ideology of freedom and equality."
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"Both the Watsonians and the Freudians....attribute to the action of the environment a great deal of the formation of personality. In the Freudian theory, it is repression, mainly of the sex instinct, which is responsible. In Watson's it is association of fear (or rage, or love) with situations other than the natural stimuli which plays the major part. In both, the home life of the first two years is all important. But both admit the influence of heredity. [Watson said "Albert was extremely phlegmatic", otherwise his conditioned fear of a white rat would have been more marked.]. It is the form which hereditary forces take which is determined by the home, not the strength."
London : George Allen and Unwin.
"...Gone are the days, I hope, when students would rebel when I talked in one lecture about innate capacities and individual differences and in the next about the different way in which character is formed in different cultures systematically and how different the results were. Someone was sure to go away muttering: 'She can't have it both ways.' But, of course, we can...."
Margaret MEAD, 1972, in T.R.Williams, Introduction to Socialization.
St Louis : Mosby.
"R.G.Collingwood [the philosopher and historian of ideas]....attributes his passion for learning to his father and to himself. It was his father's doing, he writes, that he began Latin at the age of four and Greek at six, but his own that he began,
"....about the same time, to read everything that I could find about the natural sciences, especially geology, astronomy, and physics; to recognise rocks, to know the stars, and to understand the working of pumps and locks and other mechanical appliances up and down the house. It was my father who gave me lessons in ancient and modern history.... But my first lessons in what I now regard as my own subject, the history of thought, was the discovery, in a friend's house a few miles away, of a battered seventeenth-century book, wanting cover and title-page.... I was about nine when I found it....""
B.-A.SCHARFSTEIN, 1980, The Philosophers. Oxford : Blackwell.
"Self-control and even conscience seem to be much more modifiable by the influence of education than is intelligence.... [So] it seems to be the function of the teacher to form character and to find out about intelligence. In so far as he can influence the latter, he will do it through the former."
Sir Godfrey THOMSON, 1929.
"Most recent psychological evidence indicates the necessity of remembering the importance of both inherited characteristics and environmental conditions for normal development."
Fred J. SCHONELL, 1948, Backwardness in Basic Subjects.
"I accept the widely held diathesis-stress theory of mental disorder."
H.J.EYSENCK, 1977.
"Ultimately, we believe that human beings are bio-social organisms, and that work on individual differences can be most fruitfully pursued by paying attention to both these aspects of our nature." Editorial statement of the journal Personality and Individual Differences [Editor-in-Chief H.J.EYSENCK], 1980.
"....there is no contradiction between the assertion that a trait is perfectly heritable and the assertion that it can be changed radically by the environment."
Harmondsworth : Penguin.
"Love-shyness is believed to be the result of a genetic-biologically rooted temperament, and of learning experiences with peers and family."
B.G.GILMARTIN, 1987, Journal of Personality 55.
"Michael Bailey of Northwestern University used advertisements in magazines to find sets of male twins [of whom at least one was gay]. Looking at 110 pairs of twins he found that if a homosexual man had an identical twin, in 52% of cases he was also gay; if he had a non-identical twin, in only 22% of cases was the twin also gay....[Whitam & Diamond found MZ's 66% concordant and DZ's 30% concordant.] {In Britain, King & McDonald, working from an AIDS clinic, with subjects who had not been collected as volunteers for twin research,} found 45 homosexuals who had twins; only eight reported that their twin was also homosexual or bisexual. However, since some of the fraternal pairs were of mixed sex, a lower concordance rate was to be expected. And the difference between the identical twins and fraternal twins still pointed in the same direction: 25% of identical twins shared their co-twin's homosexuality, compared with only 14% of fraternal ones....
Homosexual men are more likely to have elder brothers than [are] heterosexual men. As women get older, it appears that their immune systems become more likely to reject male [high-testosterone] foetuses. If gay genes are a defence, that would explain the observation. Of course, the fact that gays are more likely to have elder brothers might also be used as evidence for family structure as a cause."
The Economist, 5 xii 1992.
The Economist, 26 xii 1992 / 8 i 1993.
"Genetic data provide some of the best evidence we have for the importance of non-genetic influence. In addition, genetics provides the designs that allow us to look for environmental influences in a way that takes genetics into account rather than trying to ignore it, as happens in studies of regular families, whose members are of course genetically related. When we find that parents who read to their children more often have children who read better, we just can't assume that's a causal environmental association."
"Professor Lykken {1993, J. Person. & Soc. Psychol.} questioned more than 900 pairs of twins and their spouses about their love life, with surprising results. It turns out that the partners of pairs of twins are, on average, barely more alike than any other two adults passing in the street.... Again....in most cases one twin did not particularly like (or dislike) their twin's mate; and the partners of twins did not like or dislike the [other] twin any more than someone might like the partner of a friend. "As far as we can see," says Professor Lykken, "whom people fancy and then marry is not governed by any logical rules.... At best, similarity in things like age, education, attractiveness and political leanings narrows the field of suitable candidates by about 50 per cent.""
Jerome BURNE, 1993, The Independent, 9 ii.
"....two identical twins separated at birth [both kept themselves] exceptionally clean and tidy. When asked why they did so, one replied that his adoptive mother was a model of cleanliness and tidiness, the other that he was reacting against his adoptive mother who was an absolute slob."
Stuart SUTHERLAND, 1994, The Observer, 4 ix.
"[In the film, The African Queen,] Katharine Hepburn, playing a missionary, pours Humphrey Bogart's gin into the river, and a discussion about Bogart's vulnerability to temptation ensues. 'But Missy,' he protests, 'it's just human nature.' 'Nature,' replies Hepburn, 'is what we are put into this world to rise above.'"
Marek KOHN, 1995, The Race Gallery: the Return of Racial Science. London : Jonathan Cape.
(Compiled by Chris Brand, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh)
Cycad Web Works Sat Apr 29 07:18:26 EDT 2017 : # 2 : last modified 29/3/117
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Factors that calculate price elasticity of demand, Microeconomics
Factors that calculate price elasticity of demand:
The proportion of Income spent on the Commodity
If the price of a good is relatively low such the expenditure on it is an insignigicant fraction of most individual or family incomes, then consumers of such a commodity are insensitive to a price change of the good. It tends to have inelastic demand. On the other hand, if the price is high the proportion of income)s) spent on it is large than it tends to have elastic demand. For example, salt has relatively low price in Ghana and families spen insignificant percentage of their incomes on salt. Therefore, even if the price of salt doubles, people find little difficulty in buying the same quantity they used to buy.
The demand for a product tends to be more elastic in the longer period of time ad less elastic in the shorter period of time. This is because consumers need a longer time to adjust to changes in price. In the case of substitutes like elasticity and gas cooker, if the price of electricity goes up it will take time for consumers to switch over from electricity cooker to gas cooker for consumers need time to acquir the gadgets.
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Hanukkah is a Jewish Festival of Lights. It is a celebration of the re dedication of the Jews to the God of Israel after coming out of captivity. Historically it was begun after the Maccabees initiated a rebellion against Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Afterward the Temple was cleansed and the re-lit menorah miraculously burned for eight days even though it only had wick enough for one. |
Frequently Asked Questions about Microtia and Aural Atresia
What is microtia?
Microtia means small ear and is a congenital birth deformity of the pinna (external ear). Microtic ears can vary from just small ears to a total absence of the external ear (anotia). Eighty percent of the time it is unilateral (one sided), 20% of cases are bilateral (affecting both sides).
How does microtia affect hearing?
In most cases there is about a 40% reduction in hearing in the microtic ear (similar to sticking your fingers in both your ears). They will also have problems locating where a sound is coming from.
Do children with bilateral microtia experience more problems?
Yes, they will have more of a hearing problem and should be fitted with special hearing aids before they are 6 months old. The sounds that babies hear in the first 12 months are very important for speech development and future success in school.
How often does microtia occur?
Microtia occurs in one of about 5,000 to 7,000 birth.
Did the parents have any effect on the problem?
The exact cause (etiology) of microtia is somewhat obscure, however, there is no evidence that the parents’ activities during pregnancy contribute in any way to this condition. And there is nothing that could have been done during a pregnancy to prevent microtia from occurring.
What are the chances of having a second child with microtia?
About one in 20, or 5%.
When will my child become aware of microtia?
Most children begin to notice their “little ear” when they look in a mirror at around age 3 ½ or 4. Or other children may mention it to them.
What should parents tell their child?
They can tell their child that they have a small ear the same way that some children are tall or short, or fat or thin, etc. They can also say that when they are older the doctor can make it bigger. The important thing is not to make much of a fuss about it. If the family is anxious or ashamed he child will be also.
Will my child need speech therapy?
Children should be assessed between 12 and 18 months, usually by a local early intervention program, to determine if speech therapy would be helpful.
Is microtia associated with any other problems?
The majority of children with microtia have no other medical problems. About 30% have underdeveloped bony and soft tissues on the affected side (hemifacial microsomia), and a small percentage of others experience other syndromes.
What is atresia?
Atresia, also known as aural atresia, is the absence or underdevelopment of the ear canal and middle ear structures. Patients who have atresia have no hearing on the affected side. Microtia is almost always accompanied by atresia because the external and middle ear develop at the same time in the womb.
How can the healthy ear be protected?
It is very important to aggressively treat any ear infections in the normal ear to protect its hearing. This is particularly important during the cold and flu season. It is also important to wear sports helmets and watch the volume on earphones.
What surgical treatments are available for microtia?
There are three treatment options for microtia. In the first an artificial, prosthetic ear is attached to the head. The second option is to insert an artificial ear framework under the skin. The third, and most popular option is to use one’s own rib cartilage to create a new ear.
Can one use rib cartilage from a family member or friend?
This is not recommended because tissue other than one’s own is “foreign tissue”. Transplanted foreign tissue would require the patient to take special drugs for the rest of his/her life to prevent rejection.
What is the best age to begin reconstruction?
Most parents and surgeons wait until the child is 9 years old. By then, the rib cartilage will be will be large enough to form a framework for the new ear.
Which surgery comes first, hearing or microtia?
It is best to perform the external ear reconstruction before the middle ear surgery that improves hearing.
How painful is the surgery?
The child will be asleep during major surgery with the anesthesia administered by a pediatric anesthesiologist. After surgery, patients go home with pain medication. Other surgeries are done on an outpatient basis, and recovery is relatively minimal.
Are there limitations on sports and other activities after surgery?
Most patients can return to swimming and other sports activities in 4 to 6 weeks after surgery. Thereafter their “new” ear can be treated much like their “old” ear. |
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Part 1: Genetics: From Genes to Proteins
Convert the following DNA sequence into its RNA equivalent and then using the genetic code, convert that RNA sequence into the amino acid sequence.
For this above DNA sequence, what information is contained in the genetic code for the first and last codon? Be specific.
Part 2: Genetics Problem - Human Blood Types
Mendel is the father of modern genetics, but there are some genetic characteristics that cannot be describeed by simple Mendelian genetics. Such is the case with the human blood types in which there are 3 alleles for the same gene, A B, and o. A parent can pass allele A, B, or o to the offspring based on the parent's genotype.
From these 3 alleles, there are 4 blood types (phenotypes): A, B, AB, and O, and there are six genotypes: AA, Ao, BB, Bo, AB, or oo. This is an ex of codominance in which both A and B alleles are codominant to each other.
Blood types can be used in forensics to determine if blood is from the victim or criminal. Blood types can be used to determine parental source in situation where the father is unknown; however, blood types can only eliminate certain blood types. DNA fingerprinting is a better method that is used often in criminal and parental determination cases.
Punnett squares such as the one shown above are used to determine the probabilities (percentages) for genotypes of offspring given specific genotypes for the parents.
In the ex above, the Punnett Square represents a cross (mating) between a male (on the left side) with blood type AB, and a female, (top of square), with blood type B, genotype BB.
Fill out and turn in the Punnett square for AB x BB above. And, answer the following problems for the cross represented above. Make sure you understand the difference between phenotype (blood type) and genotype. The Punnett Square shows the possible genotypes. When answering the problems, percent (probability) calculations and your answers should be in terms of the phenotypes (the blood types) and NOT the genotypes.
1. What are the possible blood types for the offspring?
2. What are the ratios or percentages for each possible blood type from this cross?
3. What blood types that are not possible from this cross?
You will be turning in 1 completed Punnett square and answers to the problems for Parts 1A above.
Part 3: Cell division, mutations, and genetic variability.
Eukaryotic cells can divide by mitosis or meiosis. In humans, mitosis produces new cells for growth and repair. And, meiosis produces sex cells (gametes), called sperm and eggs. Changes or mutations in genes in sex cells can be inherited by human offspring. Genetic variation in a population of organisms is good; however, sometimes mutations can be harmful or cause genetic disorders.
Briefly, answer the following two problems. List and cite your references for this:
How do meiosis and sexual reproduction (fertilization) produce offspring that differ genetically from the parents? Be sure to talk about both meiosis and fertilization.
Name and describe one ex of a human disorder that is inherited and also describe the specific inheritance pattern. For this problem, pick disorders that result from mutations in DNA or chromosome number rather than exs such as a genetic tendency for a disorder such as cancer.
You will be turning in answers to the two problems above for Part 2.
Instructor Comments: Set up and work out the part 1 problem. Next set up the part 2 blood typing problem using the punnet square method. Be sure to answer each problem concerning the problems using full sentences in good short answer format. Be sure to find out the probabilities of the offspring inheriting a certain blood type correctly. Paste part 2 following part 1 of the assignment.
Please paste your part 3 ESSAY answers following parts 1& 2 in the same document. Submit one document as the completed IP3.
For part 3, Make sure to use good college level composition with detail, elaboration, and explanation. Make sure to take a good look at the process of meiosis when answering the first problem. In the second problem, when discussing your genetic disorder, be sure to include what mutation is known, the inheritance pattern, the symptoms, diagnosis, treatments and outcomes. Use your sim score to improve your writing skills. No previous submissions allowed!
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• Reference No.:- M927255
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Skin Conditions: Pigmented Birthmarks
What Causes Pigmented Birthmarks?
The cause of pigmented birthmarks is not known. However, the amount and location of melanin (a substance that determines skin color) determines the color of pigmented birthmarks.
What Are the Symptoms of Pigmented Birthmarks?
Symptoms of pigmented birthmarks include skin that is abnormally dark or light, or bluish, brown, black or blue-gray in color. Discolorations of the skin may vary in size and can be smooth, flat, raised or wrinkled. Pigmented birthmarks may increase in size, change colors, become itchy, and may occasionally bleed. If they do, they should be seen by a dermatologist as they may require a biopsy
How Are Pigmented Birthmarks Diagnosed?
How Are Pigmented Birthmarks Treated?
In most cases, no treatment is needed for the birthmarks themselves. When birthmarks do require treatment, however, that treatment varies based on the kind of birthmark and its related conditions.
Large or prominent moles that affect appearance and self-esteem may be covered with special cosmetics. Moles can also be removed surgically.
Warning Signs
Since there is an increased risk of skin cancer in congenital nevi, see a doctor if you notice a change in color, size, or texture of a mole or other skin lesion. Also, see a doctor right away if there is any pain, bleeding, itching, inflammation, or ulceration of a congenital mole or other skin lesion.
Can Pigmented Birthmarks Be Prevented?
There is no known way to prevent birthmarks. People with birthmarks should use a good quality sunscreen with an SPF of 30 or higher when outdoors in order to prevent complications.
WebMD Medical Reference
Reviewed by Debra Jaliman, MD on January 11, 2017
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wikiHow to Plant Asparagus
Five Methods:Getting Ready to Plant AsparagusGrowing Asparagus from SeedsPlanting One-Year CrownsCaring for the Plants While They MatureHarvesting AsparagusCommunity Q&A
Asparagus is one of the first green vegetables to come into season at the end of winter, and its presence in markets heralds the start of spring. How do you grow these tender, nutritious stalks in your garden? Start them from seeds, or for faster results, plant their crowns. Once established, asparagus plants produce spears every spring for 12 to 25 years.
Getting Ready to Plant Asparagus
1. 1
Find out if asparagus grows well in your region. Asparagus does best in areas that have either cold winters, during which the ground freezes, or very dry summers. It's a hardy and adaptable plant, but it's much harder to grow in areas with mild winters and wet summers, such as the Gulf Coast of the United States.
2. 2
Decide whether to start your plants from seeds or crowns. Asparagus seeds require three years to grow before they are ready to be harvested. During their first season the seeds germinate and sprout, and after that they need two years to establish their long, spongy roots deep into the soil. When you plant crowns, you skip the first season and go straight to the rooting stage. This means you can lightly harvest your asparagus in the second year, in addition to a full harvest in year three.
3. 3
Asparagus seeds have a low germination rate, so it's more difficult to know exactly how many plants you'll end up with. However, the seeds that do get established tend to turn into hardy plants that last longer and produce more spears than plants that came from crowns.
• Asparagus crowns that are marked "2-year crowns" supposedly allow you to harvest spears just one year after planting. However, the process of transplanting asparagus plants after they've already established their roots can damage them, and they typically still need two full years in the same soil before they reach full production.
4. 4
Choose a planting spot for your asparagus. Since asparagus can keep producing spears for up to 25 years, choose a spot you're ready to devote to asparagus for a very long time. The area should have the following characteristics:
• Full sun. Asparagus does best in sunny conditions. Since it comes up early in the spring, it's ok to choose a place near trees that don't yet have leaves. Just make sure the asparagus bed isn't shadowed by a group of trees or a building.
• Well-drained soil. The soil should be loose and have excellent drainage. Asparagus planted in waterlogged soil will rot.
• Space for a raised bed. This is optional, since asparagus do fine in the ground, but it's easier to keep their bed free of weeds and completely drained when it's raised.
5. 5
Buy asparagus seeds or crowns. Asparagus seeds and crowns can be purchased at home and garden stores, nurseries or online. Seeds are available all year round, but crowns are usually for sale very early in the spring, right before they should be planted.
• Asparagus plants are monoecious, meaning that each plant is either male or female. The female plants put energy into producing seeds, so they don't produce as many spears as the males. Some varieties of asparagus have been engineered to produce only male plants. You only need to plant half as many crowns of a male-only variety to get the same yield, since you won't need to weed out the female plants.
• Asparagus seeds aren't usually separated by sex, so the female plants are weeded out once they sprout.
• Choose a rust-resistant variety, such as one of the many "Jersey" varieties or a "Mary Washington."
• If you're buying crowns, pick healthy-looking crowns that are a grayish-brown color, large and plump. Buy them just a day or so before planting them.
• Purple asparagus and other heirloom varieties are available at nurseries. You can create white asparagus by shielding the spears from the sun with soil.
Growing Asparagus from Seeds
1. 1
Start the seeds indoors. Early in the spring, sow single seeds in small pots meant for starting seedlings. Place the pots in full sunlight, moisten the soil daily, and keep them at a temperature of 77 °F (25 °C).
2. 2
Lower the temperature when the seeds sprout. Once they have sprouted, they do not need to be kept as warm. Lower the temperature to 70 °F (21 °C).
3. 3
Plant the seedlings outside. When the seedlings are about a foot tall, and the weather outside has warmed to spring, it's time to plant them outside in a nursery bed. Dig a hole about 3 inches deep to allow them to continue growing.
4. 4
Weed out the female plants. When the plants begin producing flowers, you'll be able to tell which are male and which are female. The male plants have large, long flowers, and the females have smaller flowers. Pull up the female plants and compost them.
5. 5
Transplant the male plants to the permanent bed. Let the male plants complete their growing cycle and overwinter in the nursery bed. The following spring, one year from germination, they have reached the same maturity as one-year crowns, and are ready to be transplanted to the permanent bed. Follow the steps below to continue growing the plants.
• Be sure to dig the plants up while they are still dormant. Don't wait until they start their second growing season, or they will suffer from transplant shock.
Planting One-Year Crowns
1. 1
Prepare the bed. Prepare a bed 4 feet (1.2 m) wide. Remove all traces of weeds and grass from the bed, making sure there are no roots left behind in the soil. Till the soil and rake in manure, compost, blood or bone meal at a depth of 10 to 15 inches (25 to 38 cm).
2. 2
Soak the crowns. Place the crowns in a bucket of either warm water or a compost tea (fortified with plant nutrients) for about 15 minutes before planting.
3. 3
Plant the crowns. Place the crowns in the trenches, spacing them 18 inches (30 to 45 cm) apart. Drape the roots over the sides of the ridges.
• Cover the roots and crowns with soil. Place soil over the roots and over the crowns by 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7 cm).
• Water the area thoroughly after you are done planting.
4. 4
Back fill the soil. As the asparagus plants begin to grow and the soil settles, add more soil over the crowns. Place 1 to 3 inches (2 to 7 cm) of soil over the crowns every 2 to 3 weeks until the trenches are filled to ground level.
5. 5
Mulch the plants. Spread 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 cm) of mulch around the plants after the trench has been filled. Mulching the plants helps to keep weeds down and helps retain soil moisture.
Caring for the Plants While They Mature
1. 1
Water the plants regularly. Asparagus plants will reach maturity after two full growing seasons. In the meantime, keep the soil moist at all times.
2. 2
Weed the soil. Asparagus plants will die if they have to compete for nutrients with weeds, grasses, and any other plants. Take good care of the soil while the plants reach maturity. When they're older, their deep roots will naturally crowd out weeds.
3. 3
Fertilize and mulch the plants. In spring, fertilize the asparagus plants with a liquid fertilizer meant to stimulate growth. During the winter, protect the plants from the cold by covering them with straw or another mulch.
4. 4
Watch out for pests and diseases. Asparagus plants are susceptible to asparagus beetles, which feed on the fern-like asparagus foliage during summer and spring. They lay eggs on the asparagus leaves. If you see the beetles or their eggs, pick them off.
Harvesting Asparagus
1. 1
Pick the spears. After three years, or two if you started the asparagus from crowns, it's time to enjoy your harvest. Cut the spears every few days using a sharp knife or scissors. As your plants produce more spears, you may have to harvest them more often.
• Spears are ready to be harvested when they are about 6 inches (15 cm) high, and the tips begin to loosen.
• Limit the first harvest to two or three weeks, picking spears every few days, and taking care not to pick too many from the same plant. Spears will come up thinner the longer you harvest. A good rule of thumb is to stop harvesting once the spears are about the size of a pencil, allowing the plant to devote energy to its root systems from then on.
• The following year, extend your harvest time to four or five weeks. In the succeeding years, you can extend it to six.
2. 2
Prepare the plants for next year. At the end of the growing season, stop picking the spears and allow them to grow to their natural height. Keep the asparagus bed weeded, watered, and free of pests throughout the summer. In the fall, cut the fronds down and remove them from the area so no pests will overwinter in the asparagus bed.
Community Q&A
Add New Question
• Can you harvest and start new plants with the seeds or berries that the females produce. Should you take them off the plant or collect them after they drop?
Andrew Carberry
Professional Gardener
Andrew Carberry
Yes, you can harvest the seeds once the berries ripen. Remove the seeds from the berries, wash them well, dry them out and store them until it's time to plant next spring.
• How low do you cut asparagus plants in the winter?
Andrew Carberry
Professional Gardener
Andrew Carberry
Cut the plants down to just above ground level and cover with a few inches of mulch for the winter.
• Do I cut my first year plant at all or should I leave it alone until the next spring?
wikiHow Contributor
When the foliage dies in autumn, you can trim it off. Otherwise, don't touch it.
• What is the spacing for asparagus seedlings when planting in a temporary nursery bed?
wikiHow Contributor
I planted mine about six inches apart and they are doing really well. I have attempted to plant from crowns twice without much luck. I decided to try seeds and I will never go back!
• My asparagus plants reached 2 to 4 inches under grow lights and now are almost all falling over. What am I doing wrong?
wikiHow Contributor
It sounds like your stems may be weak. I always run a fan on my plants under my grow lights. It will build up strength in the stems such as the wind provides outdoors.
Unanswered Questions
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• Consider waiting an extra year before harvesting the asparagus, or only harvesting a portion (2 to 3 spears per plant) of the vegetable during your first year of harvest. The more time you give asparagus plants to get established, the longer they will live and the heavier subsequent harvests will be.
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Back You are here: Home Islamic Articles Beliefs Philosophy of Muharram
Philosophy of Muharram
Phylosophy of Muharram
In the hot and crowded hall, muffled laments are released like sullen doves and tears roll amidst sobs like dew on the petals of trembling roses. All are focused on Hossein. All are thinking about the Master of the Martyrs. There is no past, there is no present, there is only now; there is no you, no I, only Hossein; there is no fear of death, there is no desire for this world, their is only liberation, freedom and love of truth, for this is the majlis of Imam Hossein (as). From the youngest of ages, we learn about the tragedy of Karbala, and wherever there are Shia, one can find people lamenting and participating in dirges for him. Some people have questioned the "true" Islamic nature of these acts. Some claim that it is an innovationa grave sin in Islam. Others, consider this noble event to be "backwards", and others, still, believe that its purpose is just to make simple, emotional people cry.
In this article, ensha Allah, we will examine the historical roots of these observances, as well as the philosophy behind it.
The main element of the commemoration of Karbala is the remembrance (thikr) of the suffering of the holy personages of that tragedy. From at least the time of Imam Jafar al-Sadeq (as), this was done through a poetic account of the events. The first majils, however, was held by Imam Hosseinss sister, Seyyeda Zainab (as) and his son, the fourth Imam, Zainul Abideen (as). It took place on the fourtieth day after the massacre at the very sight that it occurred. During their time and for many years thereafter, the political and social conditions did not allow for public recitation. Hence, the devout Shia held private ceremonies.
Public majlis has its origins in the year 963 AD/352 AH, nearly three hundred years after the tragedy of Karbala. It was instigated by Sultan Muizz al-Dowla, a Shia ruler who wanted to publicly protest his objections to the corrupt leadership of the Abbassid dynasty. He used the incident at Karbala as a metaphor for the corruption and deviation present in the umma in his day. The majlis of Imam Hossien (as) became a rallying point for the Shia in addressing the injustices of the past as well as for demanding greater self-determination. In the sixteen century AD (ninth Islamic century), the Shiite Saffavid dynasty was established in Iran and Shiism was declared the state religion. This created a more conducive political and social condition for elaborate commemorations. In the city of Isfehan, which became the capitol of this dynasty, various groups competed with each other for the most elaborate and emotional presentations. (Perhaps it is in this situation that such acts as chest-beating, forehead-cutting (ghameh) and self-flagellation came about, despite the reservation of the scholars regarding these activities.)
But what is the philosophy behind majlis? Is it really just a folk tradition carried too far? Should we, living in the West, abandon it all together? If one examines the basis of majlis, one learns that it is actually at the heart of Islam and is one of its greatest and most sincere manifestations of love and pietyfor Allah, the Prophet (saw) and his pure progeny. The philosophy of the majlis of Imam Hossein (as) is based on the concept of free will, one of the issues which distinguishes the noble Shiite school of thought from the other schools of thought in Islam.
This issue of pre-destination versus free will was itself magnified due to the tragedy of Karbala because of the questions which it raised in the minds of the umma. Do not forget that the people who committed the atrocities against Imam Hossein (as) were themselves Muslims who believed in towhid and maaad and said their prayers and made their fasts. How could they behead the person whom their own Prophet would place on his lap and kiss as a child, and not feel guilt? How could they justify having stripped naked and trampled with horses the body of the man called the "Chief of the Youths of Heaven"? After realising what they had done, how could they have not revolted against Yazid?
The answer which appealed to the ruling elite was the idea that all things are predestined by Allah. This served to maintain the status quo. Because all is pre-destined, if the outcome of it is good, the action was good and if it were bad, then the action was bad. If Allah does not want something to happen, it wont, and if it did, that means that He approves of it. People cannot rebel against the authorities because Allah has predestined for them to be in authority and to rebel against them would be to rebel against the will of Allah.
A little thought will quickly reveal the false nature of this argument. Allah has stated "And if We had pleased, We would have given to every soul its guidance, but the word from Me was just. I will certainly fill hell with the jinn and men together." (45:13). Allah decreed neither guidance nor misguidance to people. Rather, He has given us faculties of thought and sensation, prophets, Imams and divine books to all to guide us. This is how He distinguishes between the faithful and the unfaithful. If all actions were predestined, then no one could be held accountable for their deeds, because they did not choose to do them. Yet, Allah has stated that some will go to hell because of their misguidance. If He made some people misguided by design and destined them to go to hell out of no choice of their own, then He would be punishing them not only for something they did not chose to do, but for something that He made them do. This would imply that Allah would be an unjust God (Allah forbid), but that is an impossibility, for it is against the refined and glorious nature of Allah. As He has stated, "Surely Allah does not do injustice to the weight of an atom ..." (4:40), and, "Surely Allah does not do any injustice to men, surely man does injustice to himself" (10:44)
The justice of Allah has always been one of the pillars of belief in Shiite Islam. Allah is just and no injustice can be attributed to him. From the time of Seyyeda Zainab and Imam Zainul Abideen (as), the whole purpose of thikr was to recall the injustice done to not only to Imam Hossein (as), but the suffering endured by all the holy personages of the Ahl al-Bayt (as). Majlis became a vehicle for expressing this vital and important concept of free will. As we had mentioned earlier, public majlis originated in the efforts of Shiites to assert their political rights and draw a connection between the tyranny and oppression suffered by Imam Hossein (as) and that suffered by themselves. Having a similar situation requires acting in a similar manner. So, out of the majlis movement arouse a theatrical representation of the events at Karbala, called taziyeh. This has been one of the greatest weapons of the Shia throughout the years for inspiring resistance against the oppressors and renewing our bonds of faith and faithfulness to Islam. The opinion of many of our great Islamic scholars has likewise supported the taziyeh performances. Fazel Qommi, the great 19th century theologian stated about it, "... there is a time when it is among the greatest of religious works. And this which is merely to please Allah is a great jihad and Allah is such that if a person humbles himself in His cause, He does not exclude him from His blessing."
The principles of taziyeh are imitation (tamaththul) and resemblance (tashabboh). This is based on a well known hadith by the Prophet Mohammad (saw) which states, "Whoever makes himself resemble a group is in the category of that group." By imitating Imam Hossein in the performance and by crying for him through sympathy and comprehension of his situation, one takes on the character of that pure and radiant personality. So much so, that to remember him and his companions is like having stood in their ranks and having sacrificed for Islam as they did.
Many people have asked what the purpose of crying for people who lived and died 1200 years ago is, suggesting we forget all about it and move on. To do this would be to forget about Islam. In fact, crying for Imam Hossein (as) is so desirable, that it equated with the rewards of worship of Allah. Imam al-Sadeq (as) states, "The sigh of the sorrowful for the wrong done us is an act of worship", and, "Anyone who remembers us, or, if we are mentioned in his presence, and a tear as small as the wing of a gnat falls from his eye, God would forgive all his sins ..." Imam Hossein (as), has himself said, "I am the martyr of tears, no man of faith remembers me but that he weeps."
Why do the Imams (as) assign such great merits to these acts that they become a mark of faith and an act of worship? You cannot truly weep for them unless you understand their generosity, courage, piety and sacrifice for Truth. To do this, you must study their words and actions, which by its very truth will instil a desire to put them into practice. Then, when you sigh for them, you will be remembering Allah and His promise of the just Kingdom to be established by Imam al-Mahdi (as), thus increasing your faith and sabr during hardship. When you recall that Allah in His mercy sent those guides and proofs of His religion to save us from deviation and the hell fire, then you shall shed tears for their monumental task and scacrifice for the guidance of all mankind. Recall how the Prophet (saw) has said that one hour or contemplation is better than seventy years of worshipand Allah (swt) has stated, "Therefore remember the benefits of Allah that you may be successful" (7:69) Thus, it is not difficult to see how a sigh for those purified and wise personalities is like an act of worship, for it is actually an act of contemplation of and remembrance of Allah, "and certainly the remembrance of Allah is the greatest." (29:45)
What about the promise of sins being forgiven? How is it possible that crying for the Ahlul Bayt would be rewarded with the forgiveness of sins and a palace in paradise when the same is not promissed for other lesser acts (fariya)? My dear friends, know that you do not have to die on the battlefield to be a shahid. You do not need to hold a sword in your hand to be a mujahid in the path of Allah. A shahid is literally someone who witnesses something, in this case, truth and towhid. A person who witnesses to truth and calls people to it and struggles to understand the truth, apply the truth, live the truth and spread the truth, is a mujahid and shahid while he is alive and will die the death of a martyr, even if he passes away in his sleep in his bed. As we have mentioned above, to cry for the infallible leaders of the ark of salvation requires a total change in paradigm and a dedication to living and dieing for truth and love. Perhaps that is why all the sins are forgiven when one cries for Imam Hossein (as), because one has become of shahid of his struggle and sacrifice for Mohammadan (saw) Islam over Yazidi Islam. And perhaps that is why the eighth Imam, al-Rida (as), has stated, "If it would please you to have the reward of those who were martyred with Hossein, say whenever you remember him, Oh how I wish I were with them that I may have achieved great victory."
Another benefit of the the majlis of Imam Hossein (as) also creates a continuity of experience between the Muslims and their leaders, making each generation feel as if they were with the Imams (AS) and the Prophet Mohammad (saw). Consider how when you remember a deceased loved one it is as if they are alive and in your presence. By remembering the lives of those infallible ones, repeating their hadith and living their sunna, we enliven the spirit of connection between us and them. It gives us hope, it counsels us in times of difficulty, and provides a path of bravery, wisdom, generosity and patience on which to base our lives.
Imam Hossein (as) made a decision to confront injustice and tyranny rather than be complacent to it. The victory of Karbala was not decided in the battlefield but in the hearts of the truth-seekers and lovers of Allah. The real battle was not over power but over justice and obedience to Allah and His Prophet. That is also why those who have properly understood the message of Karbala and emulated Imam Hossein (as) have succeeded against the greatest odds. Look at how in the last twenty years, under the guidance of Imam Khomeini (ra) the people of Iran were able to topple the CIA-backed Shah, armed only with the love of Hossein (as) and a desire for truth or martrydom! It was this same message of Karbala which inspired the Islamic resistance in occupied south Lebanon. One teenager sent the mighty US Marines running out of Beirut and a few thousand men have been an inexhaustible thorn in the eye of the Israeli military machine.
In closing, I quote the faqih, Seyyed Ali Yazdi who once wrote about Imam Hossein (as), "Is it not sufficient to cause tears [to flow] that the Imams of the Shia faith are related to him, and he recongnizes them as his own? Is not the saying of the great one [Imam Hossein], I am killed so that they will weep enough to provoke the Shia? Are not the words of Imam Jafar sufficient who said, Brother, dont you want to accompany Fatimeh in weeping for Hossein? Are you content that you not show your agreement and sympathy with the Prophet of Allah and Ali and Fatimeh and Hassan and the other guiding leaders who are beloved of Allah, and show that you resemble and follow the Umayyads [by not crying for them]?" |
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The meaning of «ox»
An ox (plural oxen), also known as a bullock in Australia and India, is a bovine trained as a draft animal.
Oxygen is a chemical element with symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group on the periodic table and is a highly reactive nonmetal and oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as well as other compounds.
Oxford (/ˈɒksfərd/) is a city in the South East region of England and the county town of Oxfordshire. With an estimated 2015 population of 168,270, it is the 52nd largest city in the United Kingdom, and one of the fastest growing and most ethnically diverse.
Oxytocin (Oxt; /ˌɒksᵻˈtoʊsɪn/, /ˌɒksi-/) is a peptide hormone and neuropeptide. Oxytocin is also used as a medication to facilitate childbirth.
Oxy-fuel welding (commonly called oxyacetylene welding, oxy welding, or gas welding in the U.S.) and oxy-fuel cutting are processes that use fuel gases and oxygen to weld and cut metals, respectively.
Oxidative phosphorylation (or OXPHOS in short) is the metabolic pathway in which cells use enzymes to oxidize nutrients, thereby releasing energy which is used to reform ATP.
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What does british west africa mean?
british west africa meaning in General Dictionary
the previous British territories of western Africa, including Nigeria, Cameroon, Gambia, Togo, Sierra Leone, in addition to Gold Coast
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Freetown was the first place in British West Africa granted local self-government.
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The Physics Behind No\(\nu\)a
The \({\rm NO}\nu{\rm A}\) experiment is a long-term experiment looking to study neutrino oscillations using the newly upgraded NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam at Fermilab, allowing for more sensitive measurements than possible before. Following the non-zero measurement of the mixing angle (\(\theta_{13}\)), there is hope that the collider can now be used to study the neutrino mass hierarchy with more certainity, as well as put a limit on the CP violating phase (\(\delta_{cp}\)). In this paper, I will briefly introduce neutrino oscillations and the planned measurement of the mixing angle and mass hierarchy at \({\rm NO}\nu{\rm A}\) as well as its implications on neutrino physics.
In 1934, when the parts of the standard model were first being pieced together, Enrico Fermi introduced a massless particle called a neutrino that is fermionic in nature and does not ineract with baryonic matter, in order to explain how beta decay could convserve fundamental quantities (energy, spin, etc.) (Wilson 1968). For a while, only electron neutrinos were thought to exist. However, fifty years later in 1988, Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger earned the Nobel Prize in physics for work they did in 1962 at the Alternating Gradient Synchotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In their paper, the group from Columbia reported that they had found a second kind of neutrino that did not couple to the electron like the one proposed by Fermi, but instead to muons produced by their beam in upstate New York(Danby 1962). Another forty years passed before the third generation of neutrino was dicovered in 2000 by the DONUT collaboration at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois(Kodama 2001). For a long while, these various “flavors” of neutrinos were thought to not couple with anything apart from their respective fermion. However, people reasoned that it wasn’t impossible that these neutrinos could interact with other forms of matter. |
PS3+Solutions - 593 Choice and Markets in the Presence of...
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Unformatted text preview: 593 Choice and Markets in the Presence of Risk 17.3 We have illustrated in several settings the role of actuarily fair insurance contracts (b, p) ( where b is the insurance benefit in the “bad state" and p is the insurance premium that has to be paid in either state). In this problem we will discuss it in a slightly different way that we will later use in Chapter 22. A: Consider again the example, covered extensively in the chapter; of my wife and life insurance on me. The probability of me not making it is 6, and my wife’s consumption if I don’t make it will be 10 and her consumption if I do make it will be 250 in the absence of any life insurance. (a) Now suppose that my wife is offered a full set of actuarily fair insurance contracts. What does this imply for how p is related to 6 and b? Answer: Actuarial fairness implies that what my wife pays is equal to what she receives in expectation. She will receive (b — p) with probability 6, and she will pay p with probability (1 — 6). Thus, actuarial fairness implies that 6 (b — p) = (1 — 6) p or simply p = 6b. (b) On a graph with b on the horizontal axis and p on the vertical, illustrate the set ofall actuarily fair insurance contracts. Answer: This is illustrated in panel (a) of Graph 17.3. (a) Graph 17.3: Tastes over premiums p and benefits b (c) Now think of what indifference curves in this picture must look like. First, which way must they slope (given that my wife does not like to pay premiumsbutshe does like benefits)? Answer: Indifference curves must slope up. Consider any initial bundle (b, p). We know that an increase in b to b' will make my wife unambiguously better off — which means that the bundle containing b’ that is indifferent to (b, p) must have an offsetting increase in p which, by itself, would make my wife unambiguously worse off. You can thus think of this as indifference curves over two goods where one of the goods, namely the premium p, is really a “bad”. (d) In which direction within the graph does my wife have to move in order to become unam- biguously better off? Answer: She becomes unambiguously better off as p falls and b increases — thus, she be- comes better off moving to the southeast in the graph. (e) We know my wife will fully insure if she is risk averse (and her tastes are state- independent). What policy does that implyshe will buy if 6 = 0.25 .9 Answer: As was shown in the text, this would imply buying a policy (b, p) = (240, 60) which satisfies the actuarily fair relationship derived in (a). Under this policy, she would have con- sumption of only 190 in the “good” state (where she has income of 250 but needs to pay the premium of 60) but she also has consumption of 190 in the “bad” state (where she has income of 10, has to pay the premium of 60 but also gets a benefit of 240). Choice and Markets in the Presence of Risk 594 (f) Putting indifference curves into your graph from (b), what must they look like in order for my wife to choose the policy that you derived in (e). Answer: This is illustrated in panel (b) of Graph 17.3. (g) What would her indifference map look like if she were risk neutral? What if she were risk- loving? Answer: If her tastes were risk neutral, she should be indifferent between all the actuarily fair insurance policies along the budget line p = 6b. Thus, her indifference curves must be straight lines with slope 6. If she were risk loving, then she would still become better off moving to the southeast in the graph, but her indifference curves would bow in the opposite direction from those involving risk aversion. This is pictured in panel (c) of Graph 17.3. B: Suppose u(x) = 1n(x) allows us to write my wife’s tastes over gambles using the expected utility function. Suppose again that my wife’s income is 10 if I am not around and 250 if I am — and that the probability of me not being around is 6. (a) Given her incomes in the good and bad state in the absence of insurance, can you use the expected utility function to arrive at her utility function over insurance policies (b, p)? Answer: Her expected utility is U(xB,xG) — 6u(xB) + (1 — 6)u(xG) = 61an + (1 — 6)1nxG (17.21) where x3 is her consumption in the event that I am not around and xG is her consumption in the event that I am around. For any insurance policy (b, p), x3 = (10+ b — p) and x5 = (250— p). We can therefore write her expected utility of the policy (b, p) as U(b, p) = 6ln(10+ b— p) + (1 — 6)1n(250— p). (17.22) (b) Derive the expression for the slope of an indifference curve in a graph with b on the horizontal and p on the vertical axis. Answer: This is just the MRS which is MRS__6U(b,p)/6b __ 6/(10+b—p) ‘ aU(b,p)/ap ' (—6/(10+b—p)) — ((1—6)/(250—p)) 6(250— p) = 6(250— p) + (1 —6)(1o+ b— p) ' (1723) (c) Suppose 6 = 0.25 and my wife has fully insqu under policy (b, p) = (240,60). What is her MRS now? Answer: Plugging 6 = 0.25, b = 240 and p = 60 into equation (17.23) gives us 025(190) _ 025(190) +0.75(190) _ (d) How does your answer to (c) compare to the the slope of the budget formed by mapping out all actuarily fair insurance policies (as in A(b))? Explain in terms of a graph. Answer: We concluded in A(b) that the slope of the budget line is 6 which is equal to 0.25 in our case. Now we concluded that, at the actuarily fair full insurance policy, the MRS of our indifference curve is also 0.25. Thus, the indifference curve is tangent to the budget line at the full insurance policy — implying that my wife is optimizing by fully insuring in the acuarily fair insurance market. We depicted this already in panel (b) of Graph 17.3 where tastes were assumed to be risk averse (as they are when we can use the concave function u(x) = lnx to represent tastes over gambles using the expected utility function.) MRS = 0.25. (17.24) 347 One Input and One Output: A Short-Run Producer Model 1 1.4 In this exercise, we will explore how changes in output and input prices affect output supply and input demand curves. A: Suppose your firm has a production technology with diminishing marginal product throughout. (a) With labor on the horizontal axis and output on the vertical, illustrate what your production Output ou+fv+ frontier looks like. Answer: This is illustrated in panel (a) of Graph 11.5 — an initially steep slope to the pro- duction frontier (representing initially high marginal product of lab or) which becomes shal- lower as labor input increases. (a) #91:?! A late, (Q) Ma RLD/ Graph 1 1.5: Output Supply and Labor Demand (b) On your graph, illustrate your optimal production plan fi2r a given p and w. True or False: As longas there is a production plan at which an isoprofitcurve is tangent it is profit maxi— mizing to produce this plan rather than shut down Answer: This is also illustrated in panel (a) where the isoprofit is tangent at the profit maxi- mizing production plan A. As long as such a tangency exists, the isoprofit will have positive intercept — which implies that profit will be positive. Therefore it is better to produce at the tangency than not at all. It is also the case that only one such tangency can exist under this shape of the production frontier — so no other potentially profit maximizing production plan can exist. (Note: It is technically possible for price to be so low or wage to be so high One Input and One Output: A Short-Run Producer Model 348 that the optimal production plan is at the origin — but in this case, there is no tangency at a production plan with positive output.) (c) Illustrate what your output supply curve looks like in this case. Answer: The output supply curve illustrates the relationship between output price on the vertical axis and output quantity on the horizontal. This is illustrated in panel (b) of Graph 11.5. This curve mustbe upward sloping — because an increase in p causes the isoprofits to become shallower which in turn causes the tangency with the production frontier to move to the right on the production frontier. (d) What happens to your supply curve if w increases? What happens if w falls? Answer: When w increases, the isoprofits become steeper —which means that the tangency with the production frontier moves to the left even as p remains the same. Thus, each point on the output supply curve shifts to the left. The reverse happens when w decreases. (e) Illustrate what your marginal product of labor curve looks like and derive the labor demand curve. Answer: The marginal product of labor curve is simply the slope of the production frontier. Since the production frontier starts steep, the marginal product of labor is high for initial labor units, and since the production frontier becomes shallower as labor increases, the marginal product of labor falls. This downward sloping MP! curve is illustrated in panel (c) of Graph 11.5. The labor demand curve is then simply derived from the marginal revenue product curve — which in turn is simply the marginal product curve multiplied by output price p. This is illustrated in panel (d) of the graph. (f) What happens to your labor demand curve when p increases? What happens when p de- creases? Answer: When p increases, the isoprofit curve becomes shallower — which implies the tan- gency of the isoprofit with the production frontier moves to the right, resulting in more labor input. Thus, when p increases and w stays the same, more labor is hired — which means the labor supply curve shifts to the right. This can also be seen by simply recognizing that pMPg increases as p increases. The reverse happens when p decreases. B: Suppose that your production process is characterized by the production function x = f (l) = 1001n(€ + 1). For purposes of this problem, assume w > 1 and p > 0.01. (a) Set up your profit maximization problem. Answer: The profit maximization problem is max px— w! subject to x = 1001n(€+ 1) (11.26) x which can also be written as the unconstrained maximimtion problem mtax 100pln(€ + 1) — wl. (11.27) (b) Derive the labor demand function. Answer: The first order condition for the unconstrained maximization problem above is — —w=0. (11.28) Solving for l, we get the labor demand function 100p— w [(p, w) = (11.29) (c) The labor demand curve is the inverse of the labor demand function with p held fixed. Can you demonstrate what happens to this labor demand curve when p changes? Answer: The labor supply curve we graph (with l on the horizontal and w on the vertical axis) is then _ 100p w(l) — [+1. (11.30) 349 One Input and One Output: A Short-Run Producer Model When p increases, the right hand side of this equation increases — which implies that the labor supply curve shifts to the right. When p falls, the right hand side decreases — which implies that the labor supply curve shifts to the left. ((1) Derive the output supply function. Answer: To get the output supply function, we simply plug the labor demand into the pro- duction function; i.e. 100p— w w +1) =1001n(fl). (11.31) x(p. w) = f (€(p, w)) = 1001n( w (e) The supply curve is the inverse of the supply function with w held fixed. What happens to this supply curve as w changes? (Hint: Recall that lnx = y implies ey = x, where e is the base of the natural log.) Answer: To take the inverse, we first divide both sides of the supply equation by 100 and recognize that this implies 1 e(x/100) = E. (11.32) w Solving for p, we get (16/ 100) we , = —. 11.33 p(x w) 100 ( ) To see what happens as w changes, we simply take the derivative of this supply curve with respect to w — i.e. apuc’w) _ we(xl100) — — > 0. 11.34 6w 10000 ( ) Thus, as w increases, the supply curve shifts up (and as it decreases, the supply curve shifts down). We could also see this directly by simply looking at the supply function x( p, w). Just take the partial derivative of x(p, w) with respect to w to find that , —1 ‘mp w) = i <0. (11.35) 6w w Thus, as w increases, output decreases — which is equivalent to an upward shift in the supply curve. (f) Suppose p = 2 and w = 10. What is your profit maximizing production plan, and how much profit will you make? Answer: Plugging these prices into the labor demand [(p, w) and output supply x(p, w) equations, we get the production plan (I, x) = (19,299.57); i.e. you will hire 19 workers and produce approximately 300 units of output. Profit is then approximately Profit: px — w! = 2(300) — 10(19) = 410. (11.36) 411 Production with Multiple Inputs 12.9 Business and PolicyApplication: Investing in Smokestack Filters under Cap-and-Trade: On their own, West in pollution abating technologies such as smokestack filters. As a result, governments have increasingly turned to “cap-and-trade” programs. Under these programs, dis- cussed in more detail in Chapter 21, the government puts an overall “cap” on the amount of permissible pollution and firms are permitted to pollute only to the extent to which they own sufficient numbers of pollution permits or “vouchers’I I f a firm does not need all of its vouchers, it can sell them at a market price py to firms that require more. A: Suppose a firm produces x using a technology that emits pollution through smokestacks. The firm mustensure that it has sufficient pollution vouchers v to emit the level ofpollution that escapes the smokestacks, but it can reduce the pollution by installing increasingly sophisticated smokestack filters s. (a) Suppose that the technology fi2r producingx requires capital and labor and, without consid- ering pollution, has constant returns to scale. For a given set of input prices (w, r), what does the marginal cost curve look like? Answer: The MC curve is flat when the production technology has constant returns to scale. This is depicted in panel (a) of Graph 12.16. (A) M V MC will! pa llolion Poached Graph 12.16: Cap-and-Trade and Smokestack Filters (b) Now suppose that relatively little pollution is emitted initially in the production process, but as the factory is used more intensively, pollution per unit of outputincreases— and thus more pollution vouchers have to be purchased per unit absent any pollution abating smokestack filters. What does this do to the marginal cost curve assuming some price pg per pollution voucher and assuming the firm does not install smokestack filters? Answer: It causes the MC curve to be upward sloping as depicted in panel (a) of Graph 12.16. (c) Considering carefully the meaning of “economic cost”, does your answer to (b) depend on whether the govemmentgives the firm a certain amount of vouchers or whether the firm starts out with no vouchers and has to purchase whatever quantity is necessary fi2r its production plan? Answer: It does not depend on whether the vouchers are owned by the firm or the firm has to purchase them. In both cases, the opportunity cost of using a pollution voucher to emit pollution in production is py. If the firm owns the voucher, it foregoes the opportunity to sell it at py to another firm that wishes to buy more vouchers. If the firm does not own vouchers, it must directly pay pg per voucher. Production with Multiple Inputs 412 (d) Suppose that smokestack filters are such that initial investments in filters yield high reduc— tions in pollution, but as additional filters are added, the marginal reduction in pollution declines. You can now think of the firm as using two additional inputs — pollution vouchers and smokestackfilters 7 to produce outputx legally. Does the overall production technology now have increasing, constant or decreasing returns to scale? Answer: The overall technology nowhas decreasing returns to scale. This is because, whether the firm uses pollution vouchers or smokestack filters or some combination of the two, ithas to expend increasing resources to deal with its pollution output for any marginal increase in production. (e) Next, considera graph with “smokestackfilters”s on the hor’wontal and “pollution vouchers" v on the vertical axis. Illustrate an isoquant that shows different ways of reaching a particular output level? legally — ie. without polluting illegally. Then illustrate the least cost way of reaching this output level (not counting the cost of labor and capital) given py and p3. Answer: This is illustrated in panel (b) of Graph 12.16 where A is the cost minimizing bundle of smokestack filters and pollution vouchers to produce 7 when the prices of filters and vouchers are p, and py. (f) If the government imposes additional limits on pollution by removing some of the pollu- tion vouchers from the market, py will increase. How much will this affect the number of smokestack filters used in any given firm assuming output does not change? What does your answer depend on? Answer: The increase in py will cause isocosts to become shallower. If output does not change from E, this will lead to a change in the cost minimizing bundle to B — causing the firm to use fewer vouchers and more smokestack filters. The size of the adjustment depends on the degree of substitutabilitybetween vouchers and smokestack filters in production. In other words, if it is relatively easy for the firm to install additional smokestack filters, the effect will be bigger than if it is not. (g) What happens to the overall marginal cost curve for the firm (including all costs ofproduc- tion) as py increases? Will output increase or decrease? Answer: This is illustrated in panel (c) of Graph 12.16. The marginal cost of production increases as py increases, rotating the MC curve from MC to M C' . For a given output price p, this implies that the profit maximizing output falls from 36" to x3 . (h) Can you tell whether the firm will buy more or fewer smokestack filters as py increases? Do you think it will produce more or less pollution? Answer: It is not clear whether the firm will buy more or fewer smokestack filters — because it is not clear by how much the firm will reduce its output. We know from panel (c) that the firm will produce less, and we know from panel (b) that, for the same level of output, it will buy more filters. But if the firm decreases production sufficiently much, it may end up buying fewer filters. No matter what, however, it will produce less pollution — because it produces less output with more filters for that level of output than it would have used before. (i) True or False: The Cap-and-Trade system reduces overall pollution by getting firms to use smokestack filters more intensively and by causing firms to reduce how much output they produce. Answer: This is true. As we have shown, the firm uses more smokestack filters for any given output level (panel (b) of the graph) but also produces less output (panel (c)). B: Suppose the cost function (not considering pollution) is given by C(w, r, x) = 0.5w0'5 r0'5x, and suppose that the tradeofi" between using smokestack filters s and pollution vouchers v to achieve legal production is given by the Cobb-Douglas production technologyx = f (s, v) = 50st"25 v0'25. (a) In the absence of cap-and-trade policies, does the production process have increasing, de- creasing or constant returns to scale? Answer: The marginal cost function derived from C(w, r, x) is MC(w,r,x) = = 0.5w0-5r0-5. (12.108) 413 Production with Multiple Inputs This function is independent of x — i.e. the marginal cost is constant, which implies con- stant returns to scale. (b) Ignoring for now the cost of capital and labor, derive the cost function for producing different output levels as afitnction of p3 and [2,, 7 the price of a smokestack filter and a pollution voucher: ( You can derive this directly or use the fact that we know the general form of cost functions for Cobb-Douglas production functions from what isgiven in problem 12.4). Answer: Plugging in A = 50 and a = fl = 0.25 into the cost function given in problem 12.4, we get 0.25 0.25 2 xps pv — =0.0008 05 0'5x2. 12.109 50(0.250-25)(0.250-25) ’73 p” ( ) C(ps. Pva) = 0.5 (c) What is the full cost function C(w, r, p3, py) .9 What is the marginal cost function? Answer: The cost of producing output level x is then simply the cost of labor and capital plus the cost of complying with the requirement that pollution is produced legally; i.e. C(w, r, p3, py) = 0.5w°'5 r°-5x+ 0.0008p2-5p3-5x2. (12.110) The marginal cost function is then MC(w, r, p3, py) = 0.5w0'5 r"'5 + 0.0016pg'5 pg'sx. (12.111) ((1) For a given output price p, derive the supply function. Answer: We set p equal to MC and solve for x to get x(w r p p p) _ p_0'5w0.5r0.5 J J SJ UJ (12.112) (e) Using Shephard’s lemma, can you derive the conditional smokestack filter demand function? Answer: Shephard’s lemma tells us that the partial derivative of the cost function with re- spect to an input price is equal to the conditional input demand function for that input; i.e. 6C J J J 0'5x2 8(w,r,p3,py,x) = M = 0.0004 p” ops p25 ' (f) Using your answers, can you derive the (unconditional) smokestack filter demand function? Answer: If we plug the supply function x(w, r, p3, py, p) into the conditional smokestack filter demand function s(w, r, p3, pmx), we will get the unconditional smokestack filter de- mand function. We then get (12.113) 4122-5145 (g) Use your answers to illustrate the effect of an increase in py on the demand for smokesth filters holding output fixed as well as the effect of an increase in py on the profit maximizing demand for smokestackfilters. Answer: The derivative of the conditional demand function s(w, r, p3, py,x) with respect to py is positive — indicating that we will buy more smokestack filters conditional on produc- ing the same quantity of output as before. The derivative of the unconditional filter demand s(w, r, py , p3, p) with respect to py, however, is negative — indicating that we will buy fewer pollution filters when we arrive at our new profit maximizing production plan. This is not because we pollute more — but rather because our supply function x(w, r, p; , py , p) tells us that we will produce sufficiently less such that we will need fewer overall filters even through we use more filters for the quantity that we do produce than we would have before. s( = (12.114) ...
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This note was uploaded on 11/17/2010 for the course ECON 100A taught by Professor Woroch during the Fall '08 term at Berkeley.
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sequence -base +package
package data-list-sequences
Find sequences within lists. Version 0.1
package live-sequencer
An editor shows a textual description of music (like Haskore), an interpreter computes and emits a stream of MIDI events, and (that's the main point) the user can change the program on the fly. Additionally the state of the interpreter is shown in the form of the current reduced term for educational and debugging purposes. * example usage ***** The live-sequencer does not make music itself, its entire task is to control other software or hardware synthesizers. That is, in order to hear something you need a working MIDI synthesizer such as the sampling based software synthesizer TiMidity. You may run TiMidity and the live-sequencer this way: > timidity -iA & > live-sequencer-gui --connect-to TiMidity Simplesong & This should give you an ongoing stream of notes. Then change one of the numbers that appear in the lines like qn = 300 and press CTRL-R for "reloading" that module into the interpreter. This should immediately have an effect, namely increasing the tempo of the melody. You may also alter a note name like c 4 to cis 4, then reload, then undo the modification and reload, again, after a while. This is the main idea of changing the song while it is playing. The way the changes are applied warrants that the change takes effect when the time comes. Music is not interrupted and does not need to be restarted for reacting to changes. The overall task performed by the sequencer is to lazily evaluate a term called main that is a list of events. The value of main is a stream of midi events (On/Off pitch velocity, PgmChange, Controller) or (Wait milliseconds). You may wrap a MIDI event in a Channel constructor in order to assign the event to the particular MIDI channel. If you omit this constructor then the event is put to channel 0. In each step, the head of the main stream gets reduced to head normal form (with : at the top), and the first arg of the : gets fully expanded and it must be a MIDI event. * input language ***** The used language is syntactically almost a subset of Haskell with only strict pattern matching and pattern matching only at the definition level (no case), no local bindings (no lambda, let, where), no types (no type inference, type signatures and type declarations are skipped), and with diet syntax (i.e. drastically reduced syntactic sugar, like no layout rule, no do syntax, no list comprehension, no operator sections). Semantics is similar to lazy evaluation, but we have no sharing. The design goal is that code can be changed while the program is running. This implies that evaluation of one expression may give different results at different times (e.g., during a live performance, one changes some chords of a musical theme). In turn, this implies that we do not store and share results of evaluations, hence, we don't have local bindings. You may import and use the special functions Controls.checkBox, Controls.slider from the Controls module. For every call to these functions a widget is added to the control window and the state of the widget is the result of the function call. Technically every change of these widgets internally adds or updates a rule in the Controls module. The effect is very similar to updating a value definition in a module and then reloading that module to the interpreter, but using the widgets is more intuitive. * Offline rendering ***** In the library interface of this package we provide the basic Live-Sequencer modules in order to allow offline rendering of music that you programmed within the Live-Sequencer. You may generate a standard MIDI file using functions from the Render module. To this end load your song module into GHCi and call > YourModule> Render.writeStream "yoursong.mid" yourSong * HTTP access ***** You may open a browser and view all modules under http://localhost:8080/. If the user of the GUI inserts comments like this one: > ---------------- , then it is possible to modify the content below this mark via HTTP. This way multiple people can participate in the composition process. The recommended situation is a room with a data projector and a loudspeaker, where the conductor explains the functions to the auditory and the participants can watch the screen and listen to the music. You may choose any other port using the command line option --http-port. If you want to use a system port like the standard HTTP port 80, we recommend to configure a firewall to redirect the external port 80 to the internal user port. We discourage from starting the live-sequencer as root user. You may disable the HTTP server altogether by compiling with cabal install -f-httpServer. * Execution modes ***** There are three modes of execution that you can choose from the Execution menu: * Real-time: This is the mode for musical live performances. The interpreter waits according to the Wait elements in the main list. * Slow motion: This mode is for demonstration and debugging. You can alter the speed using CTRL-< and CTRL->. * Single step: This mode is for demonstration, debugging and as a pause mode, when the interpreter reaches the end of the main list. You can trigger evaluation of the next element using CTRL-N. You can perform a single reduction with CTRL-U, which also highlights the rule that will be applied next. Changes to the program are only respected when an element is completely reduced and sent via MIDI. Unfortunately it is currently not possible to undo a step. * Editing ***** You can change a module name by altering the module identifier between the module and where keywords and then triggering module reload. The same way you can load new modules by adding import lines and reloading the module. Alternatively, you may create new modules or close old ones using functions from the File menu. For composition it is useful to play parts of the music. You can do this by simply placing the cursor within an identifier or by marking an expression and then call Play term from the Execution menu. This will make the marked expression the current term and start playing. Once the music is playing you can change it by altering the module and reload it. However you may find out that you cannot do a certain modification this way. In this case you can mark an expression that denotes a stream transformation function and call the Apply term menu item. This will apply the marked function to the current term. Useful functions are: * merge newTrack for adding a new track simultaneously. However, mind the latency! * flip append newTrack for appending some events to the current music. * dropTime time for skipping a part of the music. However this may skip some Off events and this yields hanging tones. Additionally you may exceed the number of maximally allowed reductions. * skipTime time for skipping a part of the music. This one only removes or shortens Wait constructors. Thus all events are played but you risk exceeding the limit for playing many events at once. * compressTime acceleration time for accelerating the music for a certain time. This should circumvent the problems of dropTime and skipTime. * Limits ***** Without some safety belts it would be very easy to consume all memory or all processing power by accident or by people who contribute malicious code via HTTP. Thus we have added some limits. These have reasonable default values but you can adjust them to your needs via command line options at startup. These are the limits you can set: * maximum number of reduction steps per list element: With this limit you can prevent infinite loops. * term size: With this limit you can prevent memory leaks. * term depth: With this limit you can prevent unbalanced expression trees. Unbalanced trees do not consume more memory than balanced ones, but they consume considerably more graphical space on pretty-printing. * maximum number of events per time period: If your song is too fast or does not contain any Wait elements at all, your machine will run out of processing power. Thus you can restrict the number of events generated in a certain period of time. It is controlled by two options: --event-period sets the time period in milliseconds whereas --max-events-per-period sets the maximum number of events within this time period. In principle you can consider this a ratio but you cannot simply cancel it. E.g. both --event-period=100 --max-events-per-period=15 and --event-period=1000 --max-events-per-period=150 describe the same ratio, the difference is how liberal is the sequencer with respect to exceeding the ratio for a short time. Read the first setting as: "For 15 adjacent events, the duration between the first and the last one must be at least 100ms." That is, if you emit 20 events simultaneously every second, then the first setting will forbid this, and the second setting will allow it. Thus we recommend to first set --max-events-per-period to the number of events that you want to emit simultaneously and then set --event-period large enough to match the power of your machine. * ALSA ***** Using the --new-out-port option you may add more ALSA MIDI ports. Every port extends the range of MIDI channels by 16 new logical channels. That is Channel 40 ev sends an event to MIDI channel 8 at the second newly added ALSA port (because 40 = 2*16+8). Every --connect-to option refers to the latest added port. Example: > live-sequencer --connect-to Synth0 --new-out-port out1 --connect-to > Synth1 --new-out-port out2 --connect-to Synth2 You do not need to connect to any synthesizer at startup. You may connect or disconnect the live-sequencer to any synthesizer once it is running using aconnect (command line) or kaconnect, alsa-patch-bay, patchage (graphical interfaces). The live-sequencer itself can be controlled to some extent. You may start the live-sequencer this way > live-sequencer --connect-from YourMidiController or connect to it once it is running. This enables the following functions: * If you press a key on your MIDI keyboard named YourMidiController, then the according note name is inserted in the current module. However, note durations cannot be preserved and velocities are ignored, as well. Thus don't expect that the live-sequencer captures complex songs, this function is just intended as assistance for note input. * You can control execution of the live-sequencer using MIDI Machine Control SysEx messages. Some MIDI controller keyboards have transportation buttons that support those messages. The supported MMC commands are: * RECORD STROBE: Toggle between receiving and ignoring note input from MIDI keyboard * PLAY: Restart the interpreter * STOP: Halt the interpreter and turn sound off * PAUSE: Toggle between real time and single step mode * FAST FORWARD: Next element in single step mode Version 0.0.4 |
Friday, March 11, 2016
How to Exercise Dynamic Control
Exercise #1: The fade-out
Can you are doing this?
Exercise #2: Three different volumes
Thursday, March 3, 2016
How To Make Guitar Scales Sound Good
When it comes to improvising using scales many guitarists get into the habit of playing in a linear and predictable fashion. This is mainly because of how we initially learn scales, using sequential patterns on the neck.
A question I often get asked is how to make scale movements sound more musical. In the first lesson on major pentatonic, we learned the importance of using target notes to give our scale movements more purpose and keep them connected to the backing music. But how we approach these target notes is also a key factor in melodic soloing. If you listen closely to some of the best loved solos out there you'll notice that they often mimic vocal dynamics in terms of moving from one note to the next.
The most memorable melodies, whether vocal or instrumental tend to avoid prelonged linear movements through a scale. So how do we escape the trap of simply running through a scale in straight, predictable runs? Once you've learned a pattern, you'll know how to get from one note to the next in the scale's natural sequence. But you'll also know how to skip notes in the sequence.
For example, in this major pentatonic pattern we could start on the 5 on the second string, and instead of moving down to the 3, we could skip the 3 and move to the 2 before targeting the 1. We could of course reverse this movement and skip a note moving UP the scale. Or we could play from 5 to 3, but skip the 2 before landing on 1.
These are two simple examples of how skipping notes in the scale sequence can create more melodically interesting phrases. Now, when fingering these note skips, especially with pentatonic scales we'll often have to use a technique called "rolling". This is where we consecutively play two adjacent strings on the same fret, using the same finger for both. Using just one finger keeps our fingering economical especially when playing at speed.
In the previous example, we'd fret the second string with the flat part or pad of our finger, just below the tip and then "roll" it to a more vertical position so the tip frets the third string below. This technique is quite subtle and takes some practice. But being able to roll will allow you to skip certain notes in a scale seamlessly. The rolling technique is also essential for many arpeggio patterns, especially for sweep picking.
We can create exercises covering the entire pattern that use this roll technique. Such as this one... Once you can play through the entire pattern like this break it down, isolating parts of the sequence as a lead up to your target note. Try also skipping two notes in the scale sequence.
For example... We can then experiment with combining the different sequences with linear movements. You can find more skipped note sequence ideas, with tabs, on the lesson page. We can make linear runs sound more interesting by staggering them.
For example, here I play three notes down from the top... Now I take one step back in the sequence and play another three notes down... Repeat this sequence and you get the following... Simply reverse the sequence to move up the scale. Just like the skipped note sequences, we can break down this full exercise into small phrases that resolve to a target note.
Pedal sequences involve playing one static note and alternating between that static note and a sequence of other notes. It's quite difficult to explain in words, but here I identify the pedal note, or pedal point, marked in red. I then alternate this note between other notes in the scale. Again, the idea is not to play through an entire pattern using these sequences rather isolate small phrases that lead to your target note.
Already we have countless combinations of skipped, staggered and pedal sequences to create melodic phrases. Once you've practiced each type of sequence individually, it's time to practice combining them seamlessly.
Of course, you don't want to completely crowd your solo with drawn out sequences so be sure to also include simpler phrases, that give your solo some breathing space. If you like, you can try out what you've learned in this lesson over my guided jam tracks. Try applying different sequence techniques over other patterns across the neck. There are other ways to bring your scale phrases to life, including techniques such as bending, slides and legato but we'll look at adding those to our repertoire at a later time. For more help with the techniques covered here, including tabs, visit the lesson page. Cheers! |
What is a shekel?
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Shekel refers to one of many ancient units of weight and currency. The first known usage is from Mesopotamia around 3000 BC.
The Israeli New Sheqel is the currency of Israel.
Includes CC-BY-SA content from Wikipedia's Shekel article (authors)
Includes CC-BY-SA content from Wikipedia's Israeli new sheqel article (authors)
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Getting Started with MySQL
This page provides a terse guide to basic MySQL functions an features. The need for the guide arose because of some database driven projects. Although the MySQL documentation is very good and throrough, my needs require something simpler and shorter. Just the most common commands are required along with an example or two. As Joe Friday used to say, "just the facts ma'am". So hopefully this guide will be useful not just to myself but other developers getting started with MySQL.
Table of Contents
MySQL Administration
Running the MySQL Client
There are several differnt ways to run the MySQL client. Each method has its advantages.
MySQL Command Line Client
The default method is to simply type:
Note: This runs the mysql command line client. This of course assumes the mysql server is running an you can connect to the server.
The mysql command line client starts and looks something like this:
$ mysql
Your MySQL connection id is 2554
Server version: 5.1.37 MySQL Community Server (GPL)
To exit out of the shell type:
Log In
Most of the time you want to log into the MySQL server you are working with. To do this, you generally need to include a few more options on the command line.
User name and password prompt
To just log into to the local MySQL server, specify a user name and the -p option. This prompts you for the password to log in.
mysql -udbuser -p
Specify Everything on Command Line
To log in a host by name and database to use, creat a comman line like this. Notice that instead of prompting for a password this time, it is included on the command line.
mysql -udbuser -pdbpass -h127.0.0.1 dbname
The specifies the localhost. It should be the same as "localhost" but my Mac makes me use the number.
Running from the Command Prompt or Shell
You can also run SQL commands from the command line for shell prompt. For example:
ysql -u blueskydbuser -pdbpass -e "use login; select * from users"
Issuing SQL Commands with Text Files
Often, you will want to issue a number of queries or or a more complext SQL statement. In situations like this, storing the SQL commands in a text file can be helpful. To run the commands, simple pipe them into the MySQL client.
mysql -uUserName -pPassWord dbname < file.sql
If you include use dbname; command as the first line, you can shorten the command to this:
mysql -uUserName -pPassWord < file.sql
Back Up and Restore
Backing up and Restoring a DB is pretty straight forward.
Backing Up a DB
To backup a database, use the following command:
mysqldump -uUser -pPassword dbname > dbname.sql
This creates a dumpfile that looks something like this:
1:DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `users`;
3:CREATE TABLE `users` (
4: `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
5: `email` varchar(40) NOT NULL,
6: `user_password` varchar(30) NOT NULL,
7: `first_name` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
8: `last_name` varchar(20) NOT NULL,
9: `nick_name` varchar(20) DEFAULT NULL,
10: `registration_date` datetime NOT NULL,
11: `last_online` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
12: `jdata` text,
13: PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
16:LOCK TABLES `users` WRITE;
This creates a text file full of the SQL commands you need to restore the database. Note that mysqldump adds a number of comments to this output file. Some of the comments are not compatible with the MySQL client, so in this example I removed them.
Restoring the DB
To restore the database, first start the MySQL client and create the database. For example:
create database dbname;
To restore the tables and data, pipe the SQL commands from the dumpfile back into the MySQL client:
mysql -uUsername -pPassword dbname < dbname.sql
Starting and Stopping the Server
These examples are for Mac OS X. They also assume that the server commands are in the path.
Starting the Server on OS X
To start the MySQL Server on OS X, sudo to a bash shell. Type:
mysqld_safe --user=mysql &
Shutting Down the Server
To shutdown the server, type:
mysqladmin shutdown
Set the root password
To set the MySQL Root password, use the mysqladmin client, not the mysql client. Type the following:
mysqladmin -u root password secret
where secret is the password for root you want to use. Since you will be typing this password into a configuration file in plain text in the next step, don't use one of your real password. Use something specific for this task.
Reset the Root Password
Steps described here:
Add a User
To add a user with all privileges, do the following:
CREATE USER 'user1'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YourPasswordHere'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'localhost' with grant option';
In more normal circumstances, you would want to limit the user to a single database and limited set of privileges. Reference:
Checking the results
Assuming you have root access to the MySQL server, you can check if the user has been added.
use mysql; select * from user;
ERROR 1396 (HY000): Operation CREATE USER failed for 'user'@'localhost'
This error is caused by deleting a user from the user table, then trying to add the user back. The deleted row may still be cached. Restart the mysql server or flush the table caches using: flush tables;
MySQL Queries
This section provides an overview of commonly used queries.
Create a Table
A table is created with the create table command. This requires some knowledge of the MySQL data types and a little SQL.
For example to create a table to manage users on a web site, my create table statement would look something like this.
1:CREATE TABLE users (
2:id int not null auto_increment primary key,
3:email varchar(40) not null,
4:first_name varchar(20) not null,
5:last_name varchar(40) not null,
6:user_password char(30) not null,
7:registration_date datetime not null,
8:last_online datetime,
9:jdata text
Insert a Row
To insert a row into a table, the syntax would look like this:
1:insert into users values(null, "", "test", "George",
2:"Washington", "georgew", utc_timestamp(), null, null);
4:insert into users values(null, "", "test", "John", "Adams",
5:"johna", utc_timestamp(), null, null);
Select Data
Selecting data for MySQL is the same as for any other SQL database. For example, to retrieve all thr rows in a table, the command would be:
select * from dbname;
To return only specific columns from the rows specify them instead of "*".
select first_name, last_name from dbname;
To specific specific rows, use a where clause.
select first_name, last_name where last_name="Doe";
Update a Row
You update fields in a row using the update command.
For example, if I wanted to udpate the access_level field for a one user I could write something like this:
update users set access_level=99 where nick_name="johna";
Say for example I added the access_level column and needed to load it with default data. That can be done with a query like this:
update users set access_level=1;
Without the where clause, all the rows in the table will be affected.
Add a Column to a Table
Opps you just forgot to add a column to you table. How do you fix it. With the alter table command.
alter table TableName add new_column type;
For example:
alter table TestTable add middle_name varchar(40); |
verb (used with object)
to act (a part) sketchily.
to act subtly and restrainedly.
to understate or de-emphasize; downplay:
The ambassador underplayed his role in the peace negotiations.
verb (used without object)
to leave out of one’s acting all subtlety and enriching detail.
to achieve an effect in acting with a minimum of emphasis.
to play (a role) with restraint or subtlety
to achieve (an effect) by deliberate lack of emphasis
(intransitive) (cards) to lead or follow suit with a lower card when holding a higher one
Read Also:
• Underplot
noun 1. a plot subordinate to another plot, as in a novel. noun 1. a subsidiary plot in a literary or dramatic work 2. an undercover plot
• Populate
verb (used with object), populated, populating. 1. to inhabit; live in; be the inhabitants of. 2. to furnish with inhabitants, as by colonization; people. verb (transitive) 1. (often passive) to live in; inhabit 2. to provide a population for; colonize or people
• Underpopulated
[uhn-der-pop-yuh-ley-tid] /ˌʌn dərˈpɒp yəˌleɪ tɪd/ adjective 1. having a population lower than is normal or desirable. underpopulated /ˌʌndəˈpɒpjʊˌleɪtɪd/ adjective 1. having a low population rate
• Porch
noun 1. an exterior appendage to a building, forming a covered approach or vestibule to a doorway. 2. a veranda. 3. the Porch, the portico or stoa in the agora of ancient Athens, where the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium and his followers met. 4. Obsolete. a portico. noun 1. a low structure projecting from […]
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Poster about endemic flora and fauna of Western Ghats
Kerala - God's own country
Blessed with natural habitats and ecosystems like the serene beaches, enchanting backwaters, mist clad hills stations, lush forests, diverse wildlife, scintillating waterfalls, extensive plantations, tropical islands, invigorating monsoons, ayurvedic health centres, historic monuments, sacred pilgrim centres, magical festivals, spectacular art forms, splendid cultural heritage, spectacular boat races, spicy cuisine... and lots and lots more.
Western Ghats - Hotspot of Biodiversity
The Western Ghats, known locally as the Sahyadri Hills, are formed by the Malabar Plains and the chain of mountains running parallel to India's western coast, about 30 to 50 kilometers inland. They cover an area of about 160,000 km2 and stretch for 1,600 kilometers from the country's southern tip to Gujarat in the north, interrupted only by the 30 kilometers Palghat Gap.
poster about endemic flora and fauna of Western Ghats
Endemic flora and fauna of Western Ghats
(Numbers in the bracket shows total number of species in India)
Reasons for the high biodiversity |
Level up: How the gamification revolution affects healthcare
Usually, patients don't want to fool around when it comes to their health, but what if games were just what the doctor ordered?
Gamification, turning everyday operations into incentive-based activities, has become a worldwide phenomenon, permeating businesses across all industries. Now, it's healthcare's turn to get a piece of the action. But with patients' well-being on the line, can healthcare gamification really deliver the kinds of results traditional medicine has provided for centuries? Here are just a few examples of what injecting a little fun into medicine can do.
"Gamification can actually help patients handle more of their own treatment themselves."
Stimulate brain function in dementia patients
Ultimately, there is precious little available to patients who suffer from Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia besides heavy medication and a slow, inevitable digression of mental faculties. Thankfully, healthcare professionals and scientists have yet to exhaust every channel to combat this tragic ailment. Many have researched theories behind games as a form of strengthening exercises for the mind with surprisingly positive results.
However, one study published in the International Journal of Serious Games found gamification also had the potential to improve another aspect of this disease rarely considered: its impact on the family of the afflicted. According to the organization's research, gamification can actually help patients handle more of their own treatment themselves by incorporating games into their daily medical regimen, thus relieving family members charged with at-home care. Games as a method for organizing appointments and the intake of medicine remove some of the stressors from the children or grandchildren who would otherwise manage these things.
Video games can boost a doctor's surgical prowess in the real world.Video games can boost a doctor's surgical prowess in the real world.
Train doctors and improve surgical motor skills
Have no fear: Doctors will still need much more than a high score to practice medicine. But textbooks and even on-site training can't completely prepare doctors to perform admirably under pressure and in any scenario. One facet of healthcare gamification looks to provide doctors and surgeons with a virtual environment to test their wits without compromising a patient's health. However, games can work wonders for these professionals outside the hospital or clinic. Traditional, recreational video games proved to have an uncanny effect on certain doctors' abilities to perform their duties at work.
Another study conducted by Beth Israel Medical Center's Department of Surgery found laparoscopic surgeons received a power-up from playing more than three hours of video games a week. Past gamers had 37 percent fewer surgical errors and spent 27 percent less time with patients under the knife. In gaming, mental acuity and sharpening motor skills come with the territory, but while gamers might not utilize these advantages beyond the sofa, healthcare professionals can use them to keep patients safe, decrease hospital or clinic expenses, save resources and grow as caregivers.
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New England > Vermont > Lamoille River
Lamoille River, Vermont
This river is formed in Greensborough. Its general course is N.W. It passes through Hardwick, Wolcott, Morristown, Johnson, Cambridge, Fairfax, and Georgia, and falls into Lake Champlain at Milton, 12 miles N. from Burlington. This river has numerous tributaries: it has several falls, which produce a valuable water power. Its banks in many parts are very fertile. It was discovered by Champlain in 1609.
© 2004–2016 |
Utilizing Census Returns
Census returns can be very valuable tools in tracking down our ancestors. For instance, the first census in the United Kingdom took place in 1801, with a census retaken every 10 years since then. There was one lapse in this cycle, 1941 was missed due to World War II. The very first censuses were nothing more than a count of total people, with personal details not being recorded until 1841. Since then, census has been fine tuned to ensure a comprehensive count and informative detail.
What is a Census?
The UK census is actually a survey of people residing in individual households or institutions (hospitals, prisons, elderly homes etc.) throughout the United Kingdom on a specific night. A standard form of information is issued to the head of each household or institution who records accurate details of each resident before returning the forms to the Census Bureau. The information the census requires is:
• Each residents full name
• Precise age of each person residing there
• Their marital status
• The relationship to the head of the household
• Sex
• Occupation
• Place of Birth
• Medical disabilities
• Language spoken
People are encouraged to divulge true and accurate information by keeping the census records sealed for 100 years. When they are opened however, they can reveal a wealth of valuable genealogy information.
What Information Can I find in a Census Return?
A census return is pretty much a snapshot of your family a hundred years ago. You can find new members of your family, verify their ages and other dates, and you can gain insight into their occupations and general health. You can also visualize what happened in the intervening years, though it is wise not to interpret too much. Beware of things like babies with the same name etc., they could be duplicates.
How Do I know Which Census to Use?
Census returns are organized according to the districts or areas in which the collection of information was done. Fortunately the original records are available on microfilm to ensure length of life, to find your ancestor though could be tricky. First you must find the exact reference for the microfilm where your ancestor's return is located. There are four recommended ways of doing so:
1. Searching a name index. The most recent census available would be 1901, which would have a comprehensive name index. Census records before 1851 would not have many details. You can search the National Archives online here http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/
2. If your surname is not on the name index, but you know the village name where your ancestor lived, you can quickly find the surname within the town records.
3. If you have a precise address, you can quickly find the census records within the town.
4. If you don’t have a village name or precise address, you can search by county. Each county will have a name index compiled for each census taken within it.
Basically the more information you have on your ancestors, the more quickly you can locate them. However, sometimes the tedious and meticulous search of these records will reveal only a glimmer of insight into your family history. Don't be discouraged. One small bit of information can start your family tree sprouting like you wouldn't believe!
If you initially don't find the information you're looking for, go back to basics and review what resources you already have. Precise addresses can be a huge advantage when searching through census records. Double check your family bibles and civil registration records for that one lead that can reveal the next generation of your family history.
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Steve Jobs’ life in a timeline
Some of us woke up to the news of Steve Jobs’ death, the visionary that inspired a generation with his phenomenal inventions, such as the Macintosh and the famous iPod. Steve pushed the human race to develop and evolve and is now gone. He will be severely missed, in memory. I want to take a look at his life and his achievements so we can remember Steve as a revolutionary individual.
To know more about Steve Jobs, take a look at this book
steve jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was born on the 24th of February
Steve enrolled at the Reed College, in Oregon, Portland. He dropped out after two semesters.
Steven worked for Atari, the creators of the famous games Space Invaders & Roller Coaster Tycoon. He also went to meetings for the Homebrew Computer Club with an older high school friend, Steve Wozniak.
rollercoaster tycoon
Both Steve Jobs and Wozniak continued the Homebrew Computer Club meetings.
The Apple computer was founded on April Fool’s Day, just after Jobs and Wozniak created a new circuit board in their garage in Silicon Valley. Ron Wayne, a third co-founder, left Apple after just 2 weeks, the Apple computer then went on sale for $666.66 in the summer.
young steve jobs
The second Apple computer was released, it was the first ever PC to have color graphics, revenue reached $1 billion.
Steve Jobs married his girlfriend Chrissan Brennan & they had a daughter named Lisa.
Steve visited PARC (Xerox Pala Alto Research Centre) and is inspired by a PC with a user interface which is graphical.
Apple releases itself to the public, they raised $110 million in possibly one of the biggest public offerings to this day.
Annual revenue reaches $1 billion.
The Lisa computer was available in stores. Steve hired John Sculley as the CEO of Apple.
The Macintosh advert was played during the Super Bowl, which then went on to be sold.
steve jobs introduced Macintosh 1984
Steve and John Sculley clash, which lead Jobs to hand in his own resignation. Wozniak resigned Apple later that year.
Steve Jobs started Next Inc., which was a new computer creation company, making computers for universities. He also bought Pixar from George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars.
star wars
The first computer from Next Inc. was put on sale for $6, 500
Apple and IBM announce a new partnership to create new PC software and microprocessors; Apple releases portable Macs called PowerBooks.
Apple releases the Newton, which was a hand-held computer that used a pen to control it. Apple loses $188 million in the quarter of July. John Sculley is replaced with Michael Spindler who became the CEO of Apple. Sculley resigned as chairman. Steve Jobs then decides he wants the point of focus to be on developing software, instead of computers.
Apple releases the Power Macintosh, which was based on the PowerPC chip that was developed with Motorola and IBM, Jobs then licensed his operating system.
The first ever Mac clones are sold. Pixars’ Toy Story hits the cinemas and Pixar goes to Wall Street with a 140 Million IPO.
Toy story steve jobs
Apple reported they plan to buy Next Inc. for $430 million, to gain ownership of the operating system that Jobs and his team created. Steve was then given the position of advisor for Apple. Spindler was replaced with Gil Amelio as CEO of Apple.
Steve became the temporary CEO of Apple after Amelio was fired; he creates the marketing opportunity by referring to himself as the iCEO of Apple. Steve then stops the Mac clones.
Apple begins making a profit again. Apple also released the candy coloured, iMac which shook up the PC industry. The Newton was withdrawn from the shelves.
Steve Jobs becomes the permanent CEO of Apple
The first iPod was sold. Macs with OS X where also released along with the iTunes software.
Apple iPod
Apple launches the iTunes music shop, with roughly 200,000 songs sold at $0.99 each. 1 million songs were sold in the first week.
Steve went into surgery for pancreatic cancer; Apple reveals this after the surgery.
Apple creates more versions of the iPod, including the Nano and an iPod which can play video files. Future Macs were also announced that will use Intel chips.
Disney buys Pixar from Steve for $7.4 billion, which made him become Disney’s largest shareholder.
Apple releases the iPhone; customers camped overnight to be the first to have one.
Apple iPhone 4S
Jobs appears to be ill due to his significant weight loss. In September’s Apple event, he states that the reports of his death are exaggerated.
Steve explains that his weight loss is due to a hormone imbalance and he will carry on running Apple. A few days later he announces he will be on sick leave, he had a liver transplant and returned to Apple in June.
Apple sells a total of 15 million in only 9 months of the latest gadget being released, the iPad.
apple ipad by steve jobs
January 17th 2011
Jobs announces another sick leave to his employees via a memo. Tim Cook takes Steves’ place and runs Apples’ projects but Jobs keeps his title of CEO and stayed involved in major decisions.
August 24th 2011
Jobs resigns as the CEO of Apple, Cook took the title of CEO and Jobs is named the chairman of Apple.
October 5th 2011
Steven Jobs dies at the age of 56 in California.
Steve Jobs Grave
Steve Jobs had accomplished amazing success in his lifetime, he pushed our race to evolve past a point that we thought impossible before him. Think what could have been accomplished if Jobs lived longer, considering what he was capable of creating. He has inspired a generation and will not be forgotten.
About The Author:
Lewis Austin is a Social Media marketer for SEO Positive, if you want to learn more, visit his blog.
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Monday, January 19, 2009
Happy Poe-day!
While the most anticipated 200th anniversary this year is the combined Darwin/Lincoln bicentennial on Feb 12th, they weren't the only famous people that were born in 1809. Today marks the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth -- which occurred in Boston -- not a town that one usually associates with the man who became an editor of the Richmond, VA based Southern Literary Messenger and who died in 1849 in Baltimore.
I'm sure that other blogs and newspapers will bring up "The Raven", but Poe was more than a macabre poet and was more sane and rational than the narrators of his fiction and poetry, which many people confuse with Poe himself. So, I present you with other sides of the man that may be new to you.
1) Poe the book reviewer. Here Poe reviews Francis Glass' bizarre "WASHINGTONII VITA" -- a biography of George Washington written in pseudo-classical Latin!
2) Poe the literary theorist. In the "Philosophy of Composition" Poe describes how he wrote -- or at least how he *thought* he wrote -- which may not be the same thing at all -- shades of the debate over whether the cliched "scientific method" actually describes what scientists do in practice.
3) Poe the biologist! Or at least Poe the biology textbook author --The Conchologist's First Book: or, A System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools. There's actually a lot of questions about Poe's contributions to this -- apparently he based it on an existing text and was accused of plagiarism. |
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60 Cards in this Set
• Front
• Back
The immune responses principle objective is the _________ of infectious threats.
Most of the time, containment requires elimination of the microbe, known as __________, but sometimes just requires ___________.
The immune response is inherantly __________.
Disease and death caused by the immune response is termed __________.
_________ __________ ________ (PRR) are proteins that bind to a broad-spectrum of microbial products.
Pattern recognition receptors
Two examples of things that PRR's recognize:
1. Lipopolysaccharides
2. dsRNA
The two phases of the immune response are:
1. The innate phase
2. The adaptive phase
The innate immune response is considered "________". Because...
nonspecific (because it recognizes common molecules of microbes)
Molecules of the innate phase are ever-present, thus act immediatly upon a _______ _________.
Danger signal
The ________ immune response becomes apparent a few days after _________ and is principally mediated by ___ cells and ____ cells.
T cells and B cells
T cells secrete _________, which are proteins, that mediate local immune responses.
B cells secrete high ________ ___________ that noncovalently bind to microbes and their products.
Affinity antibodies
B cells and T cells control the great majority of infections, provide long-term ________ to infectious agents and are responsible for ______________.
__________ of _______ are those where microbes have an opportunity to access the body. An example would be the _________ membranes.
Portals of entry
List the six types of first-line defenses:
1. Skin
2. Mucosa
3. PRR, including toll-like receptors
4. Complement proteins
5. Inflammation
6. Fever
Complement proteins
-Synthesized in liver
-When temp goes up, these bind to microbes so phagocytic cells can see the pathogens.
Caused by cytokines and tissue damage. Body's attempt to seal off the potential infection site
List the 3 types of toxic substances in mucosa:
1. Defensins, antimicrobial peptides ~30 aa long
2. Peroxidase, an enzyme that causes oxidatino of microbial products
3. Lysozyme degrades peptidoglycan
_________ ______ are the bacteria that inhabit the body and protect against other infectious agents.
Normal flora
The skin posseses the water-tight protein polymer _______ that is resistant to penetration.
All cells in the immune system arise in the _______ ________.
Bone marrow
_______ cells of various developmental maturity exist in the bone marrow and are _________ cells for immune and blood cells.
__________ is the process of generating and maintaining immune and blood cells.
The process of ________ and _______ ______ formation is mostly unknown and considered the Holy Grail of immunology.
Blood cell
Special cytokines, termed ________ _______ ________ (CFS) play a prominant role in hematopoiesis, but bone marrow _________ cells are also required.
Colony stimulation factors
Stromal cells
Granulocytes contain toxic substances, like _________. The 3 types of Granulocytes are:
1. Neutrophils
2. Basophils
3. Eosinophils
Highly phagocytic and produce oxidative substances
Basophils and ______ cells contribute to inflammation.
Thought to play a role in containing parasitic infections.
Mononuclear phagocytes
Monocytes exit blood vessels and differentiate into macrophages that play a prominant role in constraining microbes to the infected tissue
Dendritic cells
-In all tissues
-Provide a link btwn innate and adaptive immune response by stimulating naive T cells
________ _______ (NK) cells kill infected cells and cause _________ damage by also killing adjacent uninfected cells. These are a type of _________ cell.
Natural killer
Lymphocytes are part of the ________ response and include 2 main types of cells:
1. T cells
2. B cells
What are the 2 types of T cells?
1. Helper T cells that secrete cytokines
2. Cytotoxic T cells kill other cells that harbor pathogens, "assasins"
What do the B cells of the adaptive immune response do?
Secrete antibodies
-secreted by all body cells
-More then 60 known in vertebrates
-they have a dramatic impact on immune responses
Cytokines bind to specific ________ __________, which results in a physiologic change in the _________ cell.
Cytokine receptors
What are the four types of cytokines?
1. Chemokines
2. Interferons
3. Interleukins
4. Tumor necrosis factors
Recruit immune cells into infected tissue ("help!")
Parcipitate in inflammation
Confer anticiral status upon cells
Largest group of cytokines
Mediate immune response
Tumor necrosis factors
-Initiate inflammation
-Induce programmed cell death of infected cells
Evolution has provided a number of ________ _______ capable of recognizing microbial threats.
Sensing systems
Some _________ proteins recognize bacterial cell walls and perforate them, others bind to bacteria and facilitate their __________.
Interferons induce teh expression of ______ __, which digests dsRNA.
RNase L
________ cells ahve receptors on their surfaces that bind to bacterial products and _________ proteins.
Phagocytic cells are recruited to sites of infection by __________.
After engulfment of microbes into a __________, the cells are killed by fusion of the phagosome with a __________, which contains toxic compounds.
Inflammation is a mechanism for __________ of microbes in the infected site.
Inflammation is a ________-______ sword. Too little and the microbes can go ________, too much and it can lead to ____________ _______.
Double-edged sword
Too little --> virus goes systemic
Too much --> cardiovascular shock
What is the first step in the inflammation process?
Infected or traumatized tissue secretes chemokines
What is the 2nd step in the inflammation process?
Circulating leukocytes exit the blood vessel (diapedesis) by squeezing btwn capillar endothelial cells
What is the 3rd step in the inflammation process?
Once in the tissue, the cells secrete inflammatory proteins that augment capillar leakage.
Capillary leakage involves the loosening of _______ _______ btwn capillary cells. ________ then leaks out. If the holes are big enough, ______ can also leak out, this is called a _________.
Tight junctions
Bacterial ________ are potent inducers of inflammation. They bind to macrophages and elicit ______ ________ ________ production.
Tumor necrosis factor
If enough macrophages are stimulated by bacterial __________, as in septicemia, then ________ _________ can occur.
Septic shock
In septic shock, so much ______ leaks out of the capillaries that the circulatory system ________.
_________ __________ ________ ensues in septic shcok, causing systematic blood clots and death.
Disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC)
Fever is caused by the production of _________-1 which is a ________ and travels to the hypothalamus in the brain and increases body temp.
The four classes of cytokines are:
1. Chemokines
2. Interferons (Confer antivirus status upon cells)
3. Interleukins (Mediate immune responses)
4. Tumor necrosis factors (Initiate inflammation) |
Plant Sex, Does it Really Exist?
Yes there is plant sex, at least in accordance with the same manner that we perceive sexuality in humans.
There are inflorescences and flowers of the same plant species, as in corn or maize, which are considered purely male, and there are those which are purely female. In dioecious plants where these male and female flowers are separated in different individuals, like date palm, there are male and there are female plants in the same way that there are human males and females. By sex it is meant that there are kinds, or genders, of organisms performing distinct reproductive functions.
It is now of common recognition that just like humans and other animals, plants have male and female sexual organs (flower parts) which produce male and female sexual gametes, respectively. Likewise, X and Y chromosomes are involved in sex determination.
Insert: The continued reference to male and female flowers and plants is likely for convenenience in which the distinctions between the sporophytic and the gametophytic generations are taken aside. Botanically, according to Randy Moore and co-authors of Botany, International ed., published 2003 by McGraw-Hill, 919 p., such a reference is incorrect because no sporophyte or any part of the sporophyte can have a gender. Accordingly, only the gametophytes can be male or female because they are the direct producers of the male and female gametes.
The credit for discovering the existence of sex in plants is generally attributed to Camerarius. He demonstrated that there are two sexual variants among date palm individuals: the males and the females. The word "generally" is used here because there is no unanimity as yet.
According to Roberts (1929) and other supporters, Rudolph Jacob Camerarius established the certainty of sex in plants by experimental evidence in 1694. However, he was not the first to know of it. These two sentences may appear to be contradictory, but no. For clarity, let us find enlightenment from the words of this prominent author close to a century ago.
This matter of how sex in plants was established was discussed by Herbert Fuller Roberts of the University of Manitoba (Canada) in his book entitled “Plant Hybridization Before Mendel” published in 1929.
Notes from Roberts (1929)
Accordingly, it was recognized from the very early times of its cultivation, probably in ancient Babylonia and Assyria, that there existed two types of date palm: the sterile and the fruit-bearing.
Likewise it was known that the product of a “sterile” male tree was needed in order for a fertile “female” tree to bear fruits. Further, it was found that the pollen from a few trees could fertilize many female trees by hand-pollination. The word “sterile” here should mean being unable to produce an offspring while “fertile” is the reverse, with the same application as in infertile or fertile period for women.
The Arabs continued the practice of manual pollination and seem to have noticed that date palm is divided into two sexes with similar functions to that in humans, particularly in the creation of a new individual. Many more could have known the existence of plant sex.
Kazwini (circa A.D. 1283), an Arabic writer on natural history, wrote of the date palm:
“It is created out of the same substance as Adam, and is the only
tree that is artificially fertilized.”
and also:
“The date has a striking resemblance to man, through the beauty of
its erect and slender figure, its division into two distinct sexes,
and the property, which is peculiar to it, of being fecundated by a
sort of union.”
The early Greeks and the Romans must have also known about plant sex. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), Herodotus, Pliny, and Theophrastus (370-287 B.C.) were among those who mentioned it.
However, there was neither suggestion nor investigation to establish the certainty of plant sex and its application to the formation of seeds and to crop improvement. The artificial pollination of date was only for the purpose of ensuring that individual dates bear more fruits.
Roberts suggested that apart from date, there was then no other dioecious plant of economic value. Had there been other more, particularly the annual grain-producing plants, plant breeding could have advanced at a very early age.
Camerarius did it. He provided the experimental evidence for the existence of plant sex.
Camerarius (1665-1721) is the Latinized name of Rudolph Jacob Camerer, then professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Tübingen in Germany. On August 25, 1694 (he was 29 years old), he published his memoirs in the form of a letter entitled “ De Sexu Plantarum Epistola.”
It was the first documentation of a scientific investigation on the existence of sex in plants. For his test plants he used the Mercurialis, spinach, and hemp which are all dioecious, and corn or maize which is a monoecious plant.
He proved that pollen is essential to fertilization, that the pollen-producing flowers or plants are male, and that the seed-bearing plants are female. He also discovered that the removal of the pollen-bearing flowers from the staminate inflorescence (tassel) of a corn plant grown in isolation prevented seed formation.
In addition, he contemplated the possibility of outcrossing plants which are now known to belong to different taxonomic classifications. He particularly mentioned hemp x hops, and castor bean x Turkish wheat. He would not be surprised that the advances in plant breeding have now led to the development of transgenic varieties.
Personal note: The above narration seems to me that plant sex, at least in date palm, had become common knowledge to many, a long time ago before Camerarius. The second quotation from Kazwini in fact clearly stated its existence. Still, in the world of science, it is not sufficient that the existence of a fact be made known. The rule now requires that such a fact must be supported with properly obtained experimental evidence and duly published. The ancients were not privy to these rules.
Anyway, the issue of whether or not Camerarius is the "first" is a trivial matter. What really matters is that he proved the existence of plant sex in a manner that is acceptable to the end users. And being so, his investigation could have provided the catapult in plant breeding.
A new thought: Was he credited as well for discovering artificial pollination by means of experimentation?
ROBERTS HF. 1929. Plant hybridization before Mendel. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Retrieved June 2, 2015 from https://archive.org/details/planthybridizati00robe.
(Ben G. Bareja, June 3, 2015)
>>> Click to go to Basic Genetics and Plant Breeding pages >>>
<<< Click to return to cropsreview.com Crop Farming Homepage from plant sex |
Posts Tagged ‘Natural Source’
Solar Energy Impact on Environment
Monday, June 14th, 2010
Solar energy is the type of energy that is derived from sun light. It is one of the most environment friendly power sources available in the world. There are several environmental benefits of using solar power and the biggest advantage is that there are no carbon emissions from using solar energy. There is no air pollution and it is a renewable source of energy. More than being renewable it is abundantly available across the world. Also, it is more reliable natural source than wind.
While using wind energy is also a genuine cause to protect the environment, the installation and huge sized equipment tend to create a different type of pollution — noise pollution. If just one wind mill is located at a distance, one may not hear and feel the noise. However, if there are too many wind mills in one area, the noise levels will be much higher and can become a source of noise pollution. That is why people often prefer solar energy systems to wind energy systems.
Installation of solar power system is very simple and it does not take much space. It is not noisy and it is used just to absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity. It does not give out any toxic waste or poisonous gases. If a lot of people use solar energy, then the burning of coal, which is a fossil fuel, to generate electricity may come down rather significantly. This will help us to preserve the fossil fuels, reduce the carbon emissions and also downsize the progress of global warming.
Taking into consideration the numerous benefits, one can say without a doubt that the impact of solar power on the environment is actually a positive one. Today, the efficiency and dependability of solar energy is questioned. However, technology dealing with solar power is constantly improving and soon we may have a solution to both these questions. |
Why Prioritization is not Prioritized when Managing Time?
Time Management and Prioritization are often topics of discussion in Performance Management and initiatives that are focused on enhancing productivity. But often productivity is unaffected.
Let us start with examining our process of doing To-Do Lists, Activity Logs and other time management tools. We start the day with listing out all the tasks that need to be handled during the day and keep some room to add new tasks that evolve as the day goes on. The focus is on completing as many tasks as possible.
Some people then have a process of prioritization that helps them to determine the order of the tasks. The parameters used vary for each person. However, the prioritized list of tasks does not seem to increase efficiency in people.
David Rock, in his book ‘Your Brain at Work’, has mentioned latest research on brain science that has finally revealed the answer to this conundrum.
David Rock states that in effective time management, there are 3 steps:
1. Creating the list of tasks
2. Putting them into buckets of Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 based on the complexity of the task
3. Understanding ones energy levels during the day and performing the level of task based on the complexity
The last step is often overlooked. The Level 3 tasks often require the highest concentration and should be conducted when energy levels are high. This is because the Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC) of our brain handles the complex tasks and requires a lot of physical energy to do the processing. Level 1 are routine tasks, which have been done before and are stored in our brain and just needs to be recalled. This requires the lowest energy. Hence, Level 1 should be done at times when our energy is at a low.
When we do not plan our tasks based on these principles, we tend to do the Level 1 tasks as we are able to complete it without too much effort and we are rewarded as we experience instant gratification. Planning our day using all 3 steps of time management gives you the highest likelihood of increased efficiency.
Make the decision to prioritize your tasks based on both the complexity of your task as well as the energy levels needed to handle the task. More importantly, make the decision to follow what you have decided. This will take you a significantly higher level of functioning.
The Time Management Training conducted by MMM Training Solutions has been repetitively described as ‘life changing’ because it is based on the principles of brain science.
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See also: {{Overview}}, {{Perspective}}, GoodUnderstanding
In order to KnowEverything, especially in the sense of knowing the most with the least, it is important to take up a subordinate perspective.
GoodUnderstanding is what yields a subordinate perspective.
See also: {{View}}, AlgebraOfViews, CompositionOfViews, GoodUnderstanding
===What is a subordinate view?===
A subordinate view is one that understands itself as being extended by a greater view.
It seems that the crucial point in bringing together our views is that we be able to distinguish our roles. We are both superordinate and subordinate and we simply need to take up our role, but especially as subordinate to God. Here the {{Divisions}} of everything are key, as they make clear whether we are identifying with the whole (taking up any perspective) or with the part (taking up a perspective). The choice of the whole is to take up all or any perspective, and the choice of the part is to take up a or no perspective. And such reinterpretations are what drive the operation [AddOne +1] and perhaps the other operations as well.
[{{Rapport}} How are God and human able to understand each other?] It is easier for me to state this question in Lithuanian: Kaip Dievas ir zmogus susikalba? The word susikalba means literally with-selves-speak and means understand each other sufficiently for purposes of communication. It can happen that quite literate people may not be able to make sense of each other, which is to say, they may not "connect". It can also happen that people with limited language skills may yet understand each other quite well. This is not necessarily complete understanding or even shared understanding. Instead, it is simply a sufficient understanding that each has of the other for practical purposes. We say that they have rapport or good understanding.
An important part of a UniversalLanguage or the system that I am working on is the role of communicative assumptions. We can start communication by assuming (ConstructiveHypothesis) that either side wants to communicate. So this assumption suggests that we can use the concepts and structures required by communication itself as the structures that we use for the form of our language and the first subject of our language that we talk about.
Long time ago I mentioned "four positions of dialogue" with respect to GOS and never got to elaborate this. Now, much later, in a different context I was asked again and wrote MeatBall:DiscussionRoles. I hope it is sufficient to fill your need too. -- HelmutLeitner August 1, 2006 14:48 CET
Helmut, Thank you, yes this is relevant and also related to AlvydasCepulis' work on polylogue. I will set up a page on Dialogue. Yes I have read large parts of WilliamIsaacs book Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, it is valuable.
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When Animals Die In Masses, It's Freaky — But Not Unnatural
The really creepy part of these die-offs is often the very reason they happen in the first place.
When Animals Die In Masses, It's Freaky — But Not Unnatural
The next time the news reports that birds are falling from the sky or schools of fish are floating belly-up, don't panic.
Mass die-offs of animals are becoming more common. But the really creepy part of these die-offs (you know, the mass part) is often the very reason why the deaths happen in the first place.
Earlier this month, thousands of fish were found dead in waterways near Long Island, New York. But far from it being a sign of the apocalypse, officials think a lack of oxygen was to blame.
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The fish were believed to have been chased into a canal by predators, and because it was such a big group, there might not have been enough dissolved oxygen to go around.
An even larger die-off happened in New Jersey earlier this year for likely the same reason: too many fish for all of them breathe.
Birds are also common victims of mass die-offs. Depending on the time of the year, thousands of birds will roost together as a group. If something causes mass panic, like fireworks, the birds all fly in different directions at once. Simply crashing into each other at high speeds is enough to kill hundreds at a time.
Yes, humans are sometimes responsible for the die-offs, like when habitats become over-polluted.
But in some cases, the reason is simply too many animals in the same place at the wrong time.
Even if the reason for the deaths isn't a cause for concern, the die-offs can be. They can put a sudden strain on the local ecosystems the animals were a part of.
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