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Boys are beginning puberty earlier, as young as 9 years old
Boys are beginning puberty earlier, as young as 9 years old
Image courtsey of
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in the November edition of its journal, Pediatrics, reports that early puberty is not jut happening to girls. Boys are also entering puberty earlier than they used to do so.
How early are boys beginning puberty?
Historically, boys were expected to begin puberty at 11 ½. The large study showed signs of puberty in boys between 6 months to 2 years earlier than that. That means that boys could start puberty as young as 9.
How did researchers determine the onset of puberty in boys?
The study evaluated the onset of puberty based on the presence of enlarged testes and the presence of pubic hair. The study's Marcia E. Herman-Giddens, said she wanted to include production of sperm and ejaculation, which is a measure considered in Europe. If the thought of studying that makes you squirm a bit, you are not alone. Researchers said, "Yikes, we don't want to ask about that!" So they didn't. Further proof that Europe is a little more okay with these things than Americans.
Why are boys arriving at puberty earlier than they used to?
The researchers did not try to answer that question, but possible reasons they suggest include changes in diet, less physical activity and other environmental factors. Experts said that without further research, implications for boys are unclear. More research is needed.
Does race play a factor?
What does this mean for me as a parent?
Parents need to give "the birds and the bees" talk earlier than our parents did, and you should also be prepared to explain your child's body changes. This doesn't mean that you'll have to do so while they're watching Word World, but it's coming, and sooner, not later. Doctors say it is good news that puberty seems to be ending at the same time it used to end, and that boys are still seemingly reaching sexual maturity at the same age as they have in the past. While I'm happy that we don't have grown men in 8th grade, the idea of puberty lasting longer than it used to doesn't seem like great news, either.
I am certainly glad that this study was released this morning, the day after my daughter attended her first tween night. Parents need to know that hormones are coursing through those tween bodies, to be prepared for the resulting drama and to discuss what is appropriate and acceptable behavior.
How big was the study?
The study was fairly large, encompassing 4,100 boys aged 6 to 16 in 41 states.
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By Jacob Cohen-Donnelly on Sep 8, 2009 with no responses
Energy Bill for Global Warming Causes War Between Coal and Natural Gas
In recent years, natural gas has seen a considerable amount of growth due to large reserves being found throughout the United States, utilities realizing that it is the cheaper option, and cities converting their buses to be fueled by natural gas. Because of this, some people were suggesting that the natural gas industry had a winning streak that wasn’t going to end. Although they have made the case that natural gas is better for the environment than large, coal burning plants, lawmakers seem headstrong to keep coal as the nation’s primary energy provider.
A natural gas plant.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle say that the new technology being developed to capture the carbon emissions and bury them is a better tactic to employ than the use of natural gas. There is a lot of money that is riding on the coal industry, money that aids many politicians to get elected. It’s because of this that there is a large mixture of science, business, politics, and environment that is making the energy bills going through the House and Senate worth debating.
People are dismayed that an issue that should be so simple is causing such apathy in Congress. The current House bill that was passed in June provided some support to natural gas, but majority power landed in coal once again. They were provided tens of billions of dollars in pollution credits. Because of this, the savings will be passed on to the consumer. Environmentalists are frustrated about this because all of these billions of dollars in pollution credits are not doing a single thing to ensure that the environment is being protected from this overload in greenhouse gases.
A lot of people in the coal industry are arguing that the technology of capturing and burying the emissions in the ground is a great way to ensure that the emissions aren’t getting into the air. The natural gas people are arguing that natural gas is a sure way to reduce greenhouse gases unlike an “untested technology.” Because of this, the battle is continuing over which is the better method of providing both the necessary energy in the United States, but also ensuring that the environment doesn’t get destroyed more because of all these greenhouse gases.
In the end, officials are saying that, although it may be nice to have benefits to coal and natural gas, but also a decrease in greenhouse gases, there is little way to benefit both parties. There will have to be a choice. |
International Housing Affordability
Brief Analyses | Energy and Natural Resources
No. 756
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
by Wendell Cox
Housing affordability has steadily decreased in the United States and abroad over the past decade. This decrease is due in large part to strict land use regulations— known by a variety of names, such as compact city policy, growth management, smart growth and prescriptive land use.
Metropolitan areas such as Sydney, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, once defined by modestly priced, quality middle class housing, are now among the most unaffordable housing markets in the English-speaking world.
Median House Prices as a Multiple of Median Household INcome in Major MarketsMeasuring Affordability. A standard measure of housing affordability is the median multiple — the median house price divided by gross annual local median household income. The Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey uses the median multiple to rate hundreds of markets in seven nations for which sufficient current house prices and household income data were available. The Index includes 82 metropolitan areas with a population of more than 1 million. Among these major markets [see Figure I], 20 were considered affordable, with a median multiple of 3.0 or lower; 25 were moderately unaffordable, with a median multiple of 3.1 to 4.0; and 13 were seriously unaffordable, with a median multiple of 4.1 to 5.0.
The affordable markets are characterized by less restrictive land use regulation that allows development to occur based upon market preferences consistent with fundamental environmental regulation. Each of the least affordable markets is characterized by restrictive land use regulation, such as smart growth or “livability” policies.
What Is Smart Growth? House prices in metropolitan areas with smart growth policies tend to be inordinately high because of higher land prices. Principal smart growth policies include urban containment (such as growth boundaries and restrictions on developable land), large-lot zoning in urban fringe and rural areas, house building moratoria or limits, high development fees and exactions, and mandatory regional or county planning. Severely limiting or prohibiting development on the urban fringe can make it difficult to meet the demand for new housing by building outside restricted areas. This decreases housing affordability.
Premium for Median Priced HomeNumerous studies have found an association between land use policies and house prices. Scarcity tends to raise prices (other things being equal). However, natural limits on the availability of land, such as the presence of a seacoast or mountains, is secondary to the scarcity caused by regulatory barriers. This artificial scarcity can increase house prices. Indeed, as building costs are about the same nationwide, land prices, not construction costs, account for the largest differences in median house prices among metropolitan areas within a country. In Australia, for example, 95 percent of the increase in inflation-adjusted new house costs from 1993 to 2006 is attributable to land prices, rather than construction costs.
Smart Growth Makes Housing Less Affordable. The higher costs caused by prescriptive land use makes housing less affordable. Consider [see Figure II]:
• In Montreal, Canada, a median priced house, including additional mortgage interest, now costs a household at least $200,000 more than an affordable home in the past.
• In San Diego, California, the premium for a median priced home is $400,000.
• In London, England, the premium can be more than $480,000.
• In Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, the premium is more than $750,000.
Housing Bubble. Since 2008, housing affordability has improved in some markets, and remained constant or declined in others. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the “bubble” markets that “burst” generally reached a trough and began rising again. In the “boom” markets that did not experience a bubble, house prices generally declined in response to the intense economic disruption that occurred due to the collapse of the international market for securities collateralized by home mortgages.
Virtually all markets in Australia and New Zealand, and some markets in Canada, experienced house price increases of bubble proportions. However, Australia, New Zealand and Canada did not experience steep house price declines. These nations were more cautious in their mortgage loan policies and, as a result, had more credit-worthy mortgage loan portfolios.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the bubble was fueled by a relaxation of loan policies, which compromised the integrity of mortgage portfolios and increased the demand for home ownership.
The demand for home mortgages affected markets very differently, depending upon their land use regulations. Generally, land prices in the non-bubble U.S. markets (such as Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth) remained low and, as a result, there was little or no upward movement of house prices relative to incomes. These markets generally have more responsive land use regulation. The higher demand that resulted from the easier money produced a boom in these markets, but not a bubble.
Conclusion. In a number of metropolitan areas around the world, house prices skyrocketed — principally because of more restrictive land use regulations that virtually prohibited new house construction on or beyond the urban fringe.
Wendell Cox, principal of the Wendell Cox Consultancy in metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, is an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Read Article as PDF |
Xylitol the Natural Alternative
So what should I brush my teeth with if fluoride is poison? The answer is a natural compound that has been proven to prevent cavities and is used in toothpaste in the U.S., Europe and around the globe by health conscious individuals. This natural substance I'm referring to is Xylitol.
What is Xylitol?
Xylitol is a sweetener that occurs naturally. It can be found, for instance, in berries, fruit, vegetables and mushrooms. The Finnish name for it, "koivusokeri", or "birch sugar", derives from the fact that the original way to make xylitol industrially is from birch, by chopping up and rendering down the structural fibre of the wood, xylan.
Xylitol was first discovered almost simultaneously by German and French chemists in the late 19th century. It was used in the Soviet Union for decades as a sweetener for diabetics, and in Germany in solutions for intravenous feeding. In China, xylitol has been used for numerous medical purposes.
After over 25 years of testing in varying conditions, it is confirmed that xylitol is the best sweetener for teeth. Xylitol use reduces tooth decay rates all groups, high-risk groups (high cavity prevalence, poor nutrition, and poor oral hygiene) and in low risk groups (low cavity incidence using all current prevention recommendations). Sugarless chewing gums and candies made with xylitol as the principal sweetener have already received official endorsements from at least six national dental associations.
The dental significance of xylitol was discovered in Finland in the early 1970's, when scientists at Turku University showed it could prevent tooth decay.
Xylitol-Jenkki, the first xylitol chewing gum in the world, was launched by the Finnish company Leaf in 1975.
Here's what The California Dental Association has to say about Xylitol:
The Decay-Preventive Sweetener
"Xylitol is a natural sugar alcohol that helps prevents cavities. You may recognize other sugar alcohols used in sugarless products, such as mannitol and sorbitol. Xylitol is the sugar alcohol that shows the greatest promise for cavity prevention. It is equal in sweetness and volume to sugar and the granular form can be used in many of the ways that sugar is used, including to sweeten cereals and hot beverages and for baking (except when sugar is needed for yeast to rise).
How does xylitol prevent cavities?
Xylitol inhibits the growth of the bacteria that cause cavities. It does this because these bacteria (Streptococcus mutans) cannot utilize xylitol to grow. Over time with xylitol use, the quality of the bacteria in the mouth changes and fewer and fewer decay-causing bacteria survive on tooth surfaces. Less plaque forms and the level of acids attacking the tooth surface is lowered.
Studies show that Streptococcus mutans is passed from parents to their newborn children, thus beginning the growth of these decay-producing bacteria in the child. Regular use of xylitol by mothers has been demonstrated to significantly reduce this bacterial transmission, resulting in fewer cavities for the child."
See the whole page about Xylitol here at: http://www.cda.org/popup/xylitol
Here is another study on how mothers chewing gum with Xylitol reduce their child's risk of Streptococcus mutans being passed to them.
Finnish scientists discovered the uses of xylitol on dentistry in the early 1970's. Further research on xylitol chewing gum and xylitol pastilles has set the trend making xylitol an integral part of dental health promotion.The benefits of xylitol are gaining increasing recognition on a worldwide scale.
The Editors of Poisonpaste.com endorse and use all natural toothpaste brands that use Xylitol as its anti-cavity agent. Toothpaste brands that use Xylitol can be purchased at even Walmart, like "Tom's of Maine" with Xylitol. (Be careful to get the right Tom's of Maine with Xylitol, one has Fluoride.) My favorite is "Spry" Non-Flouride Toothpaste and my youngest son's favorite is "XyliWhite". I think its not as minty as Spry, but I think Spry has the best flavor of all of the ones I have tried.
Other popular brands include: Squigle Toothpaste, Tom's of Maine, XyliWhite, Epic Dental Xylitol Toothpaste, and Xlear Spry Cool Mint Xylitol Toothpaste.
Xylitol is also great in chewing gum.
© 2017 PoisonPaste.com |
Check that power has been connected using a voltmeter on the CPU board to make sure that the correct voltage is present. If the voltage reads very low, the problem may be that a fail safe lock being controlled by the DK-26 is drawing too much current for the power supply. Remove the lock from the circuit. If this restores proper voltage and operation of the DK-26, you'll have to determine if the power supply is undersized or if there is a short circuit in the lock wiring which is pulling down the power supply. If the DK-26 is receiving specified voltage, briefly short terminal SRC to terminal REX. You should hear the relay click. This confirms that the CPU board is working but for some reason, it's not reading the keys. Make sure that the keypad cable is connected exactly as shown in instructions. Pay particular attention to the keypad white wire going into terminal WHT. If this wire is not connected, the keypad will appear to be dead. If the relay doesn't operate when SRC and REX are connected, the CPU board has either tripped one of its automatic fuses or has some major problem requiring replacement. The DK-26 employs three special type fuses called PolySwitches.
PolySwitches look like capacitors. When a PolySwitch goes into overload, it automatically adds a high resistance to the circuit which limits current flow to about 100mA, protecting the circuit. Each PolySwitch protects against a particular problem and you need to know how to determine if the PolySwitch has tripped and how to correct the problem and reset the PolySwitch.
PolySwitch #1 comes into play when you are powering the unit from an AC source connected to the AC input terminals. It protects against an internal short on the board. If you are powering the board with DC voltage into the DC input terminals, ignore PolySwitch #1.
PolySwitch #2 protects against an internal DC short circuit on the CPU board.
PolySwitch #3 protects against a short circuit in the keypad which can be caused by skinned keypad wires or mis-wiring the keypad cable into the CPU board terminals. PolySwitch #3 will also trip if there are short circuit problems with the SRC, REX, UCD and HCD terminals.
To check the PolySwitches, apply the probes of a voltmeter to both PolySwitch leads with the board powered. If you are checking PolySwitch #1, set your voltmeter to AC. Set it to DC for PolySwitches #2 and #3. In the normal condition, the PolySwitch will be conducting current so you will read less than one volt. A tripped PolySwitch acts as a high impedance resistor so you will read several volts across the PolySwitch leads. If none of the three PolySwitches have tripped but the properly powered board will not operate its relay when SRC and REX are briefly shorted together, call the factory.
If you find a tripped PolySwitch, you have reset it. Overload current through the PolySwitch trips it so that it clamps the current down to roughly 100mA. The PolySwitch will continue to clamp until all power is removed for about 5 seconds. It is not enough to correct the overload condition; you have to depower the board for 5 seconds and the PolySwitch will reset itself.
If PolySwitch #1 has tripped, visually inspect the four large diodes on the board to see if a loose wire has fallen on them to create a short circuit. If you do not find such a physical problem that can be easily corrected, the board should be replaced although you should be aware that it can be operated with no problems from a DC power supply connected into the DC input terminals.
If PolySwitch #2 has tripped, and you are using DC power, make sure your input polarity is correct. Reversing your input polarity will trip PolySwitch #2. Otherwise, look for any loose wires that could be creating a short circuit anywhere on the board. If you can't correct the fault that is tripping PolySwitch #2, the board must be replaced.
If PolySwitch #3 has tripped, the overload condition is in the keypad wiring or in terminals SRC, REX, UCD and HCD. Carefully make sure that all keypad wires are connected to the correct terminals. If they are, temporarily disconnect the keypad and attempt to reset PolySwitch #3 by de-powering the board for 5 seconds. Once the board has been re-powered, momentarily connect SRC to REX to see if the board will function (the lock control relay will operate). If the CPU board resumes function, reconnect the keypad. If PolySwitch #3 trips again, the keypad will need to be replaced. If the CPU board did not resume function, disconnect any wires on the SRC, REX, UCD and HCD terminals and attempt reset. If this does not restore function to the board, the board will need to be replaced. |
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How to Detect Potentially Violent People in the Workplace
Earlier this month, a gunman walked into a Wisconsin church and shot and killed seven people before turning the gun on himself. Then a teenager walked into his Red Lake, Minnesota school and killed nine people, then himself.
Often, these tragic massacres occur in places where the perpetrator is familiar; church, school or work. And in the case of the workplace, there are some very discernable patterns to watch for, and steps to take to eliminate potential violence before it becomes real violence.
You can spot the warning signs of workplace violence if you know where to look (and some of the signs, like personal hardships, anxiety or depression, are surprising).
But while the patterns and warning signs are there, a study by the American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Inc. (AAOHN), found that most people aren't aware of what to watch for. Said AAOHN President Susan A. Randolph:
"AAOHN's study found that nearly 20 percent of the entire workforce claimed they have experienced an episode of workplace violence first-hand, yet the majority still do not know what to look for when it comes to determining potential offender characteristics. These findings alone define a significant need for companies to commit to and implement workplace violence education and prevention programs. Without employee education, a company will be far less able to diffuse a potential violent situation before it arises."
So don't be left in the dark. Here are the most common warning signs that future offenders tend to exhibit:
• Changes in mood
• Personal hardships
• Mental health issues (depression, extreme anxiety)
• Negative behavior (untrustworthy, lying, bad attitude)
• Verbal threats
• A past history of violence
• Attempts to intimidate others
• Paranoid or anti-social behavior
• A history of drug or substance abuse
What's more is that while most employees aren't able to predict workplace violence before it occurs, they are able to identify changes they saw in their violent co-worker after a crime occurred.
AngerEveryone gets angry sometimes, but a coworker who continually acts out on their anger by yelling, slamming doors and so on, may be starting on the path to violence.
1. Actor behaviors: Acting out on anger; actions as yelling, shouting, slamming doors, etc.
2. Fragmentor behaviors: Not taking responsibility for their actions, blaming others for their mistakes, unable to see consequences for their actions.
4. Mixed-Messenger behaviors: Saying they are part of the company team, but not acting like it.
6. Escape-Artist behaviors: Lying to relieve stress, practicing addictive behaviors like taking drugs and gambling.
8. Stranger behaviors: Fixating on an idea or person, becoming isolated, social skills become poor.
People who exhibit these behaviors may be on the verge of committing a violent act. Says Larry Porte, a former Secret Service agent, such attacks "are the products of understandable and often discernible processes of thinking and behavior." So it's up to you and your co-workers to keep an eye out for these warning signs.
A potentially violent person could exhibit many warnings or be much more subtle.
"There is not one absolute factor that predisposes an individual to workplace violence. Managers and employees should be familiar with each potential warning sign, but look at a totality of factors including the work environment, the employee's home-life and his or her behavior as a whole," said Eugene A. Rugala, supervisory special agent for the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.
What to Do if You Think a Co-Worker is a Threat
If you are confronted by a violent coworker, staying calm and speaking in a relaxed, non-confrontational way is of utmost importance.
Let's say you notice that your co-worker in the next cubicle is exhibiting some or all of the warning signs. What do you do?
Says Dr. McClure, "When the manager, supervisor or HR person sees these behavior patterns, she must document, talk to the employee, discuss the behaviors in terms of their negative effect on work, and require training, counseling, or both. The manager, supervisor or HR person must then continue to monitor the employee's behavior. The goal is to either get the employee to change his behavior, via skills acquisition and/or dealing with problems, or leave the workplace by choice or company decision."
In the event that you're confronted with an angry or violent coworker, you should:
• Call 911 or a supervisor (use your judgment depending on the situation). If your company has a set response plan, follow it (if they don't, contact human resources and suggest they get one).
• Respond calmly. If you get angry, chances are that your co-worker will get angrier too. This means speaking in a soothing, relaxed voice and not using confrontational body language.
• Be respectful to the employee.
• Alert other co-workers of the potential danger using an agreed-upon danger signal.
• Report the incident to management, no matter how small it may seem.
Though workplace violence is a chilling topic, keep in mind what Haig Neville wrote in Dealing With Workplace Violence, "A New York Times study of 100 rampage murders ... found that most of the killers 'spiraled down a long, slow slide, mentally and emotionally.'"
In other words, there were multiple warning signs that the offender was in trouble and on the brink of committing a violent act long before it occurred. Keep your eyes open for the signs, and don't be afraid to report incidents or suspicious behaviors-even if seemingly small-to management or human resources. And, educate those around you of the warning signs too.
If every employee is aware and on the lookout for workplace violence warning signs, there's a much greater chance that it will never come to fruition.
Recommended Reading
The Emotionally Hazardous Work Environment: Is it Worth the Price You Pay?
Online, Phone, U.S. Mail or In-Person: Where is Your Credit Card and Personal Identify Safest?
20% of High School and College Students Victims of Being Stalked
Workplace Violence Can Happen Here
American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Inc. (AAOHN)
Prevent Workplace Violence
Fortune Magazine February 21, 2005
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Skip to definition.
Noun: pubic bone
1. One of the three sections of the hipbone; together these two bones form the front of the pelvis
- pubis, os pubis
Derived forms: pubic bones
Type of: bone, os[2]
Part of: hip, pelvic arch, pelvic girdle, pelvis
Encyclopedia: Pubic bone |
The following animation is the very simplest and basic animation using pure css. It should be understandable and easy to understand the concept of animation.
@keyframe is used to create a animation, the syntax is shown below
Example Program:- (Editor)
Editor is Loading...
We can create the good view using divider and section class, divider class is used to separate the content through horizontal line and section class is used to identify the contents are same section.
The divider class is used to divide the space between two div or two content, it will create a horizontal line in the two content for separate.
flow-text class is like font it will apply text style for the specified text.
If we are separate the column using s1 to s12 then it will start from left side(first), but in some situation if we want to align the div in right side end we can use offset class.
In the following example contain header and followed by the header the next row is separated into three parts, most of the websites are using this type of layout.
The following example is explain about the layout, it contain two rows and first row contain 12 columns(single column) and next row contain two columns (6 + 6 columns).
Microsoft ASP.NET Mvc is a web application development framework built on mature .net framework.
Asp is a scripting language in which code and markup are authored together in a single file. Web Forms
It is a page based approach where each page on the website’s is represented in the form of a physical file called a webform.
WEB FORMS page provides separation of code and markup by splitting the web content into two different files
One for the markup
One for the code
WEB FORM APPROACH is an abstraction from the underlying HTML,JAVASCRIPT and CSS
ASP.Net MVC Architecture
MVC means Model ViewController. MVC pattern spilits into three layers that is model,view,controller.
MVC Architucture
It means the properties and behavior of a domain entity. Database is a collection of data that data retrieved from back end to front end through the models
View means transforming a model or models into a visual representation. ASP.NET webforms are here ( in MVC)called Views. Say in simple ,the VIEWS means DESIGN.
Step 1
Microsoft visual studio is an IDE(Integrated Development Environment)
(a) Open a Microsoft visual studio2013
(b) Select New Project from the Start page.Otherwise you can use menu(Select file ->new project).
MVC Startup Page
Step 2
You can create applications using either Visual Basic or Visual C# as the programming language. Select Visual C# on the left and then select ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application. Name your project "MvcApplication1" and then click OK.
Selection for MVC Program
In the New ASP.NET MVC 4 Project dialog box, select Internet Application. Leave Razor as the default view engine.
The New ASP.NET MVC4 Project dialog box have project templates. The project templates are Empty, Basic, Internet Application, Intranet Application,Mobileapplication,Web API.
New MVC 4 Project
For good understanding I preferred to start with Empty project template.
That means user only add models and create views and generating code.
The Internet Application project template extends the Basic template by adding a few basic controllers and views. Also it generates code and configuration that gives you full membership and authentication functionality.
Intranet application is practically empty web application with home controller and support for Windows authentication. As Windows authentication is optional choice when configuring web application you should do some manual configuring to get intranet application run.
As intranet application uses Windows authentication it doesn’t need sign-in, registering and password reminder forms. Also it does not need model classes for authentication. By all other parts the intranet application is the same as internet application.
Select Internet application from above dialog box .Then below page will be displayed.
MVC Sample Application
1). Click controllers folder in SOLUTION EXPLORER.
2).They have AccountController.cs and we click on Accountcontroller or HomeController ,we will see below page
MVC Application
From below fig we will see how we run this page.
MVC Controller
Running output of MVC Application
The homecontroller have three default VIEWS they are home,about,contact. Lets see the output while we select the internet application .The above fig is Home page of internet application template.It have register,login ,home,about,contact.The register and login page code manage by Accountcontroller.Home,About,Contact page codes are manage by HomeController.Now we see the code of the Home Page in InternetApplication.
The following page is displayed when We will click on About .simirarly we click contact the contact page will be displayed.
MVC Output
View Engine:
ASP.NET MVC support web form (aspx) and razor view engine. View engine is responsible for rendering the view into html form to the browser.
The name space for razor engine is System.Web.Razor
The name space for webform engine is System.Web.Mvc.WebForm and it is depend on System.Web.UI.PageClass .
Package manager NuGet:
NuGet is a package manager tool that allows open-source libraries to quickly
and easily be added to any .NET project.AlthoughNuGet is not tied to ASP.NET
MVC projects, it does ship as part of the ASP.NET MVC installer so you can start
using it right away without having to perform a separate install. This functionality is found in a package called EntityFramework. SqlServerCompact, which can be
installed by right-clicking on the References node within the project.
MVC NuGet Packages
Search bootstrap and jquery packages and install it.
How it works
Adding a model:
1).Install sqlserver2008.
2)open sqlserver2008 ,then view the following page and click connect.
Connect SQL server 2014
Create database:
1. Right click on database and click new database
Expand Database
Create New Database
Created Database
After creating database(guestbookdatabase),we need create table.
1.First expand guestbookdatase.That shown following
Table in sql
Create columns in table and set primary key to id column because we need unique identification for all data.
Create Columns in table
Create Identity with primary Key
Then click(ctrl+s) for save a table.
Save table
Right click on Tables and Choose edit with top20 rows.
Through the following fig,we will see data’s in a table. And also
Add column in table
Now we go to front end(visual studio2013).
How to add model
Create class file in MVC
Give class name
Created Class file
The entities are retrieve from database through model then click rebuild.
Creating controller
Create controller
The Add Controller dialog box provides the ability to customize the controller—
the Template dropdown allows you to select whether you want the controller to be generated as an empty class (the default option), or whether you want some common
scenarios to be automatically generated for you. Two of the several options are
Controller with Read/Write Actions and Views—This option will generate controller
action methods and views that provide simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete)
screens using Entity Framework (which we’ll discuss in more detail in a moment).
Controller with Empty Read/Write Actions—This option will generate controller
actions for CRUD scenarios, but without generating any views or using any particular
data access technology.
We’ll use the default Empty Controller template for now.
After you click the Add button, the new controller will be opened in the Visual Studio Editor.
Now we want to adding (eg).create action to this controller.
public class GuestbookController : Controller
publicActionResult Create()
return View();
Then move cursor to create word in above controller code and rightclick on that word.then open dialog box and click addview.
Add View
Enter View Name in MVC
Selecting a view to render
A view is rendered by calling the View method from within a controller action. The Create action in our GuestbookControllershows this
publicActionResult Create()
return View();
In this case, the Views/Guestbook/Create.cshtml view file is rendered. But how does the MVC Framework know to render this particular view rather than one of the other views in the application (such as Index.cshtml)?Calling the View method returns a ViewResultobject that knows how to render a particular view. When
this method is called with no arguments, the framework infers that the name of the view to render should be the same as the name of the action (Create). Later in the MVC pipeline, the framework’s ControllerActionInvokerclass executes the ViewResultand tells it to render the view. At this point, the framework asks the ViewEngineCollectionto locate the appropriate view for rendering. (As you’ve already seen back in chapter 2, by default the view engine will look for views
within the Views/<Controller Name> directory and the Views/Shared directory).
Complete above process then automatically addcreate View(create.cshtml) to VIEWS IN SOLUTION EXPOLORER
All views are controlled by controller.And also we can create more controllers.
Example for view
ViewBag.Title = "Add new entry";
<h2>Add new entry</h2>
<form method="post" action="">
Please enter your name: <br />
<input type="text" name="Name" maxlength="200" />
<br /><br />
Please enter your message: <br />
<textarea name="Message" rows="10" cols="40">
<br /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Submit Entry" />
The App_Data directory can be used to store databases, XML files, or any other datathat your application needs. The ASP.NET runtime understands this special directory
and will prevent users from accessing files in it directly. Only your application can
read and write to this directory.
The purpose of the Content directory is to contain any noncode assets that need to be
deployed with your application. These typically include images and CSS files(stylesheets). By default, the Content directory contains the defaultstylesheetused by the project(Site.css) as well as a themes subdirectory that contains images and CSS for use with jQuery UI.
Solution explorer
Remembering back to chapter 1, the controller is the coordinator that is responsible for processing input and then deciding which actions
should be performed (such as rendering a view).In ASP.NET MVC, controllers are represented as classes within the Controllers directory. By
default, this directory contains two controllers the HomeController(which handles requests for your home page) and the AccountController
(which handles authentication). We’ll look again at controllers in section 2.2.3.
The Models directory is typically used to contain any classes that represent the core concepts of your application, or classes that hold data in a
format that is specific to a particular view (a view model). As your applications get larger, you maydecide that you wish to move these classes into a
separate project, but keeping them in the Models directory is a good starting point for small projects. The default project contains a single
file in this directory—AccountModels.cs. It contains several classes related to authentication that are used by the default project template.
The Scripts directory is where you can place any JavaScript files used by your application.
The default project template contains quite a lot of files in this directory, including
the popular open-source jQuery library (which we’ll explore in chapter 7) and
scripts used for performing client-side validation.
The Views directory contains the templates used to render your user interface. Each of these templates is represented as a Razor view (a .cshtml or .vbhtml file) within a subdirectory named after the controller responsible for rendering that view.
The Global.asax file lives in the root of the project structure and contains initialization
code that runs when the application is first started up, such as code that registers
routes .
The Web.configfile also lives in the root of the application and contains configuration details necessary for ASP.NET MVC to run correctly.
Now that you’ve seen a high-level overview of the different files in the default projecttemplate, we’ll explore in more detail how the core concepts of controllers, actions, and views interact with one another.
The materializecss maximum allow 12 column, we can separate the screen size into 12 parts. The below example will explain about the how can we use the columns
If you write the paragraph or any thing it will not set the margin manually by writing any styles, but if you want to write the content by set the correct margin, you can simply use the container class it will automatically set the margin and width size depending on your screen size.
text-darken is the class and we can set the value 1 to 5 like text-darken-1 to text-darken-5, also we can set the color of the text by calling text-colorname. So no need to write any extra class for this.
Syntax for text color
Syntax for text-darken class
<div class="text-red text-darken-4">Red Color</div>
Example Program:- (Editor)
Editor is Loading...
In Materializecss we can easy to manage the color, if we apply the red color only then it may we don't like, so we can reduce the color rating by using this lighten-x class
In materializecss we can easy to change the background color by just calling the color name as class name. The following example we are just calling the background color to change the background color.
Example Program:- (Editor)
Editor is Loading...
The card-panel class is used to separate the div to block view.
Meterialize CSS is a CSS Frameworkd and developed by google and it is released under MIT license. First release is v0.95.3 on Feb-25-2015. Mainly used for responsive design and more effect is included.
We need to include the following two css and js files
<link rel="stylesheet" href="">
<script src=""></script>
Example Program:- (Editor)
Editor is Loading...
In many places we need to write the notes for highlighting peoples or some definition needs some attention, in this situation we can use the following example.
1. Marking important notes.
2. If you run blogger you can write some introduction in the last part of the blogger post, so have many chance to read the details some one.
3. This will not have attractive multi color, so your content will not getting nonstandard look.
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Intersex Matters: It’s More Than Sex vs. Gender
Yesterday Cindy Stone presented a keynote speech at the National LGBTI Health Summit. A full-time faculty member of Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, Stone is an intersex activist and educator who speaks to college students and health professionals around the Midwest about intersex conditions. She is part of a national support group working to identify avenues of help for parents and affected children and teens, volunteers with various LGBT groups, and has worked in Indiana University’s Gender Studies Department.
Approximately 1 in 2,000 of the babies born every day are intersex – the baby’s sex falls somewhere in between the typical male/female definition. Intersex conditions run in her own family, and Cindy shared with us her personal journey as well as answering some common questions about being intersex and talking about best medical practices for intersex individuals. Her goal is to remind us that counseling and support is critical for helping anyone dealing with intersex. She works hard to reduce cosmetic surgeries performed on children that can harm their genitals and are not reversible.
What is intersex? Intersex is a general term for many conditions in which a person is born with something other than the standard male or standard female anatomy. One misconception is that intersex individuals have two sets of genitalia, both male and female – they do not. If an intersex condition is externally visible at birth, the genitalia is often referred to as “ambiguous,” looking like a small penis or an enlarged clitoris. Intersex is now commonly referred to in the medical field as a disorder of sexual development (DSD), though Stone does not like to frame intersex as a disorder.
What are some of the ethical controversies that surround intersex conditions? Ethical controversies include when doctors should disclose patients’ medical history, whether attempts to “normalize” genitals that are non-standard via surgery is appropriate, and whether doctors should prescribe intersex patients hormones to “normalize” anatomy and behavior.
What is the best medical practice for intersex individuals? Stone advocates for a patient-centered model that goes beyond medical care and includes trained psychologists and social workers for counseling and support, especially when teens or young adults are newly diagnosed. Connecting young people and adults with others who are intersexed or who are the parents of intersexed children is important so they can give each other peer support outside of the clinical setting to help validate their feelings and experiences.
She maintains that all medical decisions should be made by a group of providers with the child’s best interest in mind. Stone advocates against performing cosmetic genital surgery on intersex infants. Cosmetic surgeries done on babies can rob individuals of a healthy satisfying sex life for the rest of their life.
When is surgery appropriate? Surgery is appropriate for an intersex child when a real medical problem exists, like the inability to urinate. Cosmetic surgery to “fix” the ambiguous genitalia, however, is not necessary for gender assignment.
Are most intersex individuals raised as female or male? Stone reports that most people with an intersex condition are women, for two reasons. First, cosmetic genital surgeries were historically performed (and in some medical institutions, still are performed) on infants with ambiguous genitalia soon after birth, and creating female genitalia is an easier surgery. Second, one of the most common intersex conditions is androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS). Individuals with AIS have XY (male) chromosomes and testes. However, their body is insensitive to the androgens (which includes testosterone) produced by the testes, so their bodies develop as females.
Are there intersex conditions that result in male alignment? Yes. A few intersex conditions that result in male alignment of the genitalia include 5 alpha reductase, partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (as opposed to complete AIS), mixed gonadal dysgenesis, Kallman Syndrome, and Klinefelter’s Syndrome.
Are most intersex folks gay? There is no “real” representative data on the sexual orientation of the intersex population in the United States. However, the percentage of individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in the National Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome support group mirrors the percentage of individuals that identify as LGB in the U.S. population at large.
Can intersex adults have good sex lives? Assuming no cosmetic genital surgery in their childhood – usually yes.
Can intersex adults reproduce? Stone’s good-humored answer: “No, but we sure can practice!” Most intersex individuals are born sterile.
Why not create a “third” sex? Stone reports that nearly all intersex adults say they never wanted to be raised a “third sex”. Her priority is children’s safety, and she believes that school-aged children should generally represent themselves as one gender or the other. Also, Stone noted, who would be the one to decide whether a person was M, F, or I?
The take home message: Stone wants us to recognize that sex and gender are not binary systems, and like there is fluidity in gender there is also fluidity in sex. Cindy’s fundamental belief is that, “I was born to be a woman, I just took more a circuitous path to getting there than the average woman.”
Resources for more information:
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In situ and on-board pulse-chase experiments were carried out on a sublittoral fine sand in the German Bight (southern North Sea) to investigate the hypothesis that sandy sediments are highly active and have fast turnover rates. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of experiments where we investigated the pathway of settling particulate organic carbon through the benthic food web. The diatom Ditylum brightwellii was labelled with the stable carbon isotope 13C and injected into incubation chambers. On-board incubations lasted 12, 30 and 132 h, while the in situ experiment was incubated for 32 h. The study revealed a stepwise short-term processing of a phytoplankton bloom settling on a sandy sediment. After the 12 h incubation, the largest fraction of recovered carbon was in the bacteria (62%), but after longer incubation times (30 and 32 h in situ) the macrofauna gained more importance (15 and 48%, respectively), until after 132 h the greatest fraction was mineralized to CO2 (44%). Our findings show the rapid impact of the benthic sand community on a settling phytoplankton bloom and the great importance of bacteria in the first steps of algal carbon processing. [KEYWORDS: 13C labelling experiment ; bacteria ; macrofauna ; mineralization ; sandy sediment]
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)120-129
JournalMarine Biology Research
Issue number2
StatePublished - 2006
ID: 268389 |
Day 17 NaPoWriMo Almost to the prompt Dancing in Yucatan
The prompt was to write an epistolary poem to an inanimate object and inserting the following into the poem:
1) a song lyric
2) a historical fact
4) a fruit
5) the name of a street in your neighborhood
6) a measure of distance.
I got those, but then forgot it was to be a letter…but since this one took me quite a while to do, I think it will have to not quite match the prompt.
Tyrannosaurus rex, Palais de la Découverte, Paris
T rex, Wikipedia
Dancing in Yucatan
Dinosaurs were of the kingdom Animalia,
phylum Reptilia, node Dinosauria,
even their scientific taxonomy different
from classes of extant species Archosaurs
vanished when the Cretaceous–Paleogene
extinction event sent a bollide colliding
with the earth somewhere
in Yucatan the old dinosaurs
rolling in the deep waves
of shock and tremble the newborn crater
teaching them to dance over impact-
melt rocks and breathing impoverished air
In Yucatan, campesinos planted henequen twisted
Henequen farm in Yucatán Peninsula.
Henequen farm Yucatán Peninsula Wikipedia
its fibre into twine into carpets fermented
juice of the agave’s ripe core for licor
Twenty miles away in Merida
on Camino de Miguel they dance, drink
tequila with lime wedges They wait
for tourists
for December
and the new mythology.
This shaded relief image of Mexico's Yucatan P...
This shaded relief image of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula show a subtle, but unmistakable, indication of the Chicxulub impact crater. Most scientists now agree that this impact was the cause of the Cretatious-Tertiary Extinction, the event 65 million years ago that marked the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs as well as the majority of life then on Earth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Carol A. Stephen
April 17, 2012
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hand cream
Definition of hand cream
1. : a liquid that is rubbed onto hands
Word by Word Definitions
: the forelimb segment (such as the terminal section of a bird's wing) of a vertebrate higher than the fishes that corresponds to the hand irrespective of its form or functional specialization
: a part serving the function of or resembling a hand: such as
1. : with the hands rather than by machine
1. : to touch or manage with the hands
: to deal with
: furl
1. : the yellowish part of milk containing from 18 to about 40 percent butterfat
: a food prepared with cream
: something having the consistency of cream
1. : to form cream or a surface layer like the cream on standing milk
: to break into or cause something to break into a creamy froth
: to move like froth
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up hand cream? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
feeling or affected by lethargy
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Medical Dictionary
Lesch–Nyhan syndrome
noun Lesch–Ny·han syndrome \ˈlesh-ˈnī-ən-\
Medical Definition of Lesch–Nyhan syndrome
1. : a rare and usually fatal genetic disorder of male children that is inherited as an X-linked recessive trait and is characterized by hyperuricemia, mental retardation, spasticity, compulsive biting of the lips and fingers, and a deficiency of hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase—called also Lesch-Nyhan disease
Biographical Note for lesch–nyhan syndrome
(1939–2008), and
William Leo
(born 1926), American pediatricians. Nyhan held the position of professor of pediatrics at several medical schools, including Johns Hopkins. He had a major interest in the disorders of amino acid metabolism and routinely analyzed blood and urine for amino acids. The urine of a pair of patients, two brothers, was found to contain urate crystals. In addition, the brothers were suffering from an obvious but unknown neurological disorder. Nyhan, aided by Lesch, a student research assistant, began investigating urate metabolism and the characteristics of the previously unrecognized genetic disorder exhibited by their two cases. Lesch published a description of the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome in 1964. This report laid the groundwork for the discovery in 1967 of the absence of hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase in children affected with the syndrome.
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up Lesch–Nyhan syndrome? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
feeling or affected by lethargy
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Pain, disorientation, nausea to make for an educational shuttle mission
January 22, 1992|By Douglas Birch | Douglas Birch,Washington Bureau of The Sun
For the six astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery, scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral today, space travel could be more than an electrifying adventure. It might be a real pain.
While in orbit, some may feel nauseous, vomit and see optical illusions -- the floor of the shuttle's cabin, for example, may seem to bounce up and down when the craft is orbiting smoothly. Some may have the eerie experience of forgetting where their feet or hands are in relation to their bodies.
Two out of three astronauts have backaches -- possibly because their spines extend by as much as 2 3/4 inches during spaceflight, NASA says. Some lose a small measure of mental sharpness the first day or so. All space travelers get stuffy sinuses.
"There's potentially a lot of discomfort in that particular job," said Dr. Peter C. Wing of University Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, an orthopedic surgeon who will study back pain among Discovery's crew.
Today's flight is the second shuttle mission in a row to carry an array of life science experiments focusing on the effects of space travel on humans and other organisms, with an eye toward preparing to send astronauts on interplanetary flights -- specifically, NASA's proposed manned mission to Mars.
Experiments tucked in a container in Discovery's cargo bay will measure the effects of zero gravity on the biological clock of slime mold, study fertilization of eggs from the African clawed frog and track cartilage formation by embryonic mouse bones.
The shuttle will also carry thousands of nematodes -- microscopic worms that live in the soil, to study the effect on living tissue of bombardment by high-energy cosmic rays.
"We can find out where a cosmic ray particle has gone into their bodies, and what it has struck," said Dr. Ronald J. White, chief scientist of the Life Sciences Division at NASA headquarters in Washington.
In a study of motion sickness in space, four astronauts will sit in a special computer-controlled chair and go through a series of pitch, yaw and roll maneuvers -- while a special helmet and infrared camera record their eye positions.
In Dr. Wing's experiment, each member of the shuttle crew will keep a daily diary of the location and intensity of back pain. Astronauts will take stereo photographs of each others' backs to record changes in shape.
Most aches, pains and disorientation in orbit, NASA's medical specialists say, are triggered by weightlessness or "microgravity" -- the same bizarre and wonderful condition that permits space travelers to spin and tumble around their craft like otters in the ocean.
Many of these symptoms, collectively known as Space Adaptation Syndrome, vanish after a few days.
But future interplanetary flights could last for years, and the medical perils of long-term flights could be life-threatening.
Bacteria may be more resistant to antibiotics in zero gravity, because organisms grow thicker cell walls, exposing astronauts to dangerous infections.
Damage to cells caused by radiation isn't repaired as quickly in space, and without heavy shielding, astronauts would be vulnerable to intense bursts of radiation from solar flares.
Astronauts in orbit use less energy than any couch potato, and their muscles grow slack without concentrated exercise. The body loses fluid and blood volume. Bones lose as much as 15 percent of their calcium after six to seven months in space -- and broken bones may not heal properly without gravity. Some drugs are less effective in space, though no one is sure why.
Astronauts, who work, train and to some extent compete for a shot at flying aboard a spacecraft, are not complainers. Samuel T. Durrance, an astrophysicist with Johns Hopkins University, is no exception.
"I had no discomfort, sickness, back pain or anything like that," he said, recalling his nine-days aboard the shuttle Columbia in December 1990.
But during Dr. Durrance's flight, his spine grew about 2 1/2 inches. His face puffed up the first day as fluid in his lower body drifted into his head, giving him a stuffed-up nose. He saw flashes of light with his eyes closed, due to the intense radiation. Two other crew members suffered motion sickness, he said, which went away when they took an anti-nausea drug.
But overall, Dr. Durrance dismissed concerns about space flight, saying it is "quite relaxing," and too fascinating to worry about growing a couple of inches or having clogged sinuses.
Other Supreme Court actions
Racketeering. The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to consider PTC a Justice Department plea to reinstate the convictions of eight Mafia figures for their roles in a massive racket in the New York City construction industry in the early 1980s. A federal appeals -- court nullified the conviction of Genoevese family boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and seven others because the trial judge barred defense lawyers from using grand jury evidence that might have helped their defense. U.S. vs. Salerno (No. 91-872).
Disabled children. The court, without comment, left intact a ruling that school officials may not use an education plan for a disabled child, who is protected by federal law, if the parents are so hostile to the plan that it has no chance of succeeding. That case involved a 15-year-old Chicago-area youth whose parents vetoed a plan to put him into a school for students with behavior problems. District 21 Board of Education vs. Illinois State Board (No. 91-849).
Baltimore Sun Articles |
Ways to ‘Dis-empower’ a Bully
How do we Dis-empower Bullies??
If people are Cyber Bullies or bullies in person, there are ways to help. You can help yourself and you can have others who see it happening help you.
Remember that bullies have often been bullied themselves, could be lonely with few friends, and often have a very low self-esteem- THEY need your help as well as the Victim!
Here are some of the ways the Gr 3-6 students thought of to
TALK- say Stop I don’t like it ; WALK- walk away from the situation; TELL- Tell an adult and ask for help
SAVE- Print, screen shot, take a pic of the Cyber message for Evidence; BLOCK- Block, delete and Report the contact; TELL- tell an adult, show them your evidence, ask for help.
Stand up for the Victim
Step back
Ignore them
DON’T Cyber bully or bully back
Show the evidence
Write the bully a kind letter, (telling them things that you like about them)
Change their mind
Don’t be a bystander
Get them to join in with you
Build victims confidence- talk to them, get them to play with you
Build the bullies self esteem – tell them about good things they can do, invite them to play with you, be kind to them- you might find they become kinder as well!
Use humour
Listen to both sides- ask Why they are bullying? How can we fix this?
Help to stop the fight
Be nice to them
Be friends with the person being bullied, stand up for them, play with them
Tell them something good about themselves
Don’t be a bystander, get others to help
Ignore and be friends again
Tell your teacher and mum and dad
Invite them to your place to play
Invite them to your birthday party
How will you Dis-empower and help both the Victims and Bullies????
7 thoughts on “Ways to ‘Dis-empower’ a Bully
1. What fabulous ideas you have shared on how to be strong and confident against bullies. It is up to all of us to work together and stamp out these bullying behaviours!
Verona Gridley 🙂
2. So many smart ideas. You are really thinking “outside the box” and shifting the goal posts around bullying, particularly the hardest-to-do suggestions, such as being kind to the bully.
Sometimes when we understand why another person behaves the way they do it can make it easier for us to respond in a way that benefits us AND them.
3. Thank you for your comments Senior teachers. I’m sure everyone will be working hard on being even more aware of how their actions, or lack of action, impact others – sometimes in a very dramatic way. If we all work together, then we will achieve some great results.
Mrs Bellesini 🙂
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What is a Doll?
How long have we had this love affair with Dolls?
Pearls of Wisdom:
Friday, January 29, 2010
Santos and Creche Figures
Santos: Often found in Portuguese or Spanish communities, these dolls were used in Catholic religious processions and were often elaborately dressed in beautiful gowns and topped with golden crowns. These dolls would occupy a place of prominence in the home of a wealthy person or chapel. The cage could also be used as a sort of prayer shrine with objects placed inside the cage.
Creche figure: Technically not a doll, but rather a figure originally displayed in nativity scene as in the fascinating world of art of the 18th century in Italy, with its Neapolitan cribs, crib-figures and various embodiments of the Infant Jesus. The "presepe napoletano" The magic of the elaborate embodiments of the Infant Jesus (the so called "Bambino Gesu") is incomparable.
Bavarian Creche figures are particularly splendid, and as large as 24 inches. These are often recognized by collectors as fine statues rather than just lay figures for church use.
Background on Nativity Sets
Also know as a Crib, Presepio or Crèche, devotion to Nativity scenes has ancient origins. The popularity is due however, thanks to St. Francis who reenacted what was the first living Nativity scene. When St. Francis visited Rome in 1223, he asked for permission from Pope Honorius III to hold a special celebration during Christmas. He constructed a Nativity and around it stood figures of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, the donkey, the ox, and the shepherds who came to adore the new-born Savior. On Christmas night a child was placed in a crib as an ox and donkey stood nearby.
Dolls of religious significance
The earliest dolls made out of wood were not playthings--they were symbolic and ceremonial figures, often of a religious nature. Their beauty and craftsmanship makes them a desired collectable, but by no means should they be considered as a secular doll.
They were purely made by artisans for use as religious statues. The hands are in uncomfortable or impossible looking poses, the faces are extremely expressive and the overall posture, exaggerates these emotions. Because creating these figures was usually a community group effort, and the carvings of heads, legs and hands was done by different people. As a result, it is quite common to find hands that are not in proportion for the size of a particular doll.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Coming of Age in the Ancient World
The ancient Greeks considered their children to be 'youths' until they reached the age of 30! When a child was born to ancient Greek family, a naked father carried his child, in a ritual dance, around the household. The family decorated the doorway of their home with a wreath of olives (for a boy) or a wreath of wool (for a girl).
In the early days of Rome, the father, not the mother, would decide whether a child would live or die. If the father chose, the child could be abandoned to die. When a child was eight or nine days old, the father chose a name for the child. The marriages in Rome were arranged by the parents of the couple. The girl was often around thirteen years old at marriage, while the boy was a couple of years older on average. The wedding day would end with the groom pretending to take the bride away from her mother as a remembrance of the legendary story of the Sabian women in early Rome.
Children from Egypt were a very important component of life, and were considered to be a great blessing from the gods. Also in the noble and royal families, children were highly regarded. Paintings of King Akhenaten and his wife, Queen Nefertiti, indicate they had a very close and loving bond with their six daughters. Akhenaten was depicted as being at equal level with his surroundings, and was often shown in scenes kissing his daughters and sitting with his wife in a family oriented manner.
The Dolls of Egypt, Greece and Rome
Egyptian dolls constructed of flat pieces of wood and painted with various designs, have often been found in Egyptian graves dating back to 2000 BC. The wood was cut into a simple paddle shape decorated with hair made from clay beads strung into ropes.
Greek dolls surviving examples, show they were made out of clay, ivory or bone. There is a story that Plutarch mentions the fact his two year old daughter, that was not to survive childhood, loved her doll so much that she begged her nurse for milk for the doll, as well as herself. In the custom of dedicating toys at a temple when the child reached puberty, ensured the survival of dolls on such shrines. A child's doll might be dedicated to Hera, or Aphrodite...
"O Aphrodite, despise not my doll's little purple neckerchief. I Sappho, dedicate this precious gift to you"
Roman dolls were made of terracota or bone. Some of these were found in tombs, which raises the question as to whether the figure is really a doll or some sort of grave companion. A doll might have accompanied Roman girls in the grave much as effigies were placed above the grave at a later period...At Herculaneum, a little girl's figure with a doll tightly clasped in her hands was discovered under the ashes and lava that destroyed her city.
Dolls have not only been found on the graves of young pagans, but also in the catacombs accompanying young Christians.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Doll House of Petronella Dunois based on paintings from The Dutch Masters
Children's doll showing a naked child, from the Dunois dolls house. 17th century.
The little figures of people in the doll house are dressed in fabrics and authentic costumes of the day. Doll houses at this time were for the wife of the house to play with and display to her lady visitor, rather than for children to play with.
The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam estimates that Petronella Oortman spent twenty to thirty thousand guilders on her model house, the price of a real house along one of Amsterdam's canals at that time. It took nearly 20 years to build.
Interiors by Vermeer and Pieter De Hooch
Dutch homes were generally cluttered, and not as well-lit as the pristine environments of The Dutch Masters compositions. The Dutch house had specialized functions. Beds, for example, were placed in halls, kitchens, or wherever they fit. But when rooms did assume a particular use, it was often reflected in the paintings chosen to decorate them—domestic scenes or religious images were selected more often for private areas of the house while landscapes or city views were shown in public areas.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Early Wooden Dolls to the 1850s… Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder…
The Old Pretenders
These delightful handcarved 'Queen Anne' style wooden dolls are made by David Chapman & Paul Robins.
English wood dolls of the time are commonly referred to as “Queen Ann” dolls. This may be too general a term as the dolls predate Queen Ann. Eighteen century dolls have different characteristics that can be sorted into three periods:
William and Mary, Queen Ann, and Georgian.
1700 William and Mary Period English Wooden
1740 Queen Ann Period English Wooden
The Queen Ann period doll extends from the 1700s to 1750. They are similar to above except they frequently have glass eyes. Their eye lashes and eyebrows are composed of small dots.
Her clothes, wig and shoes are original to her. The dress has been repaired with antique fabrics but is mostly original. Her corset has whalebone inserts.
1800 Georgian Period English Wooden
These English wooden dolls differ from the preceding periods in that their wood heads are covered in gesso and then painted. The head inset glass eyes that may be occasionally blue. They had flax of hair wigs. The wooden bodies are as previously made except that the end of the torso was pointed.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The Reinassance
In portraiture of the sixteenth century, noble girls are often pictured holding exquisitely dressed dolls, possibly bought new for the sitting.. These dolls are likely to be accurately painted rather than idealised, as the sitters themselves often were, so it must be assumed that such dolls were indeed artistically finished. |
Orchid Name
An orchid name can be a mysterious thing if you don’t know how to read it. But fear not. It is actually quite straightforward. Let’s use the following orchid name as an example and break it into understandable pieces:
Phalaenopsis schilleriana ‘Pink Butterfly’, AM/AOS
Doesn’t it look like a foreign language? Well, it actually is. All scientific names are Latin. But don’t panic, you don’t need to learn Latin to understand orchid names.
Genus – The First Part of the Orchid Name
Orchid Name
Orchid Name
In this example, Phalaenopsis is the genus name. There are about 600 genera (plural of genus) in the orchid family. You may already be familiar with other genera – Cymbidium, Cattleya, Paphiopedilum, Vanda, Vanilla and Dendrobium are all different genera.
Many genera of orchids can be interbred to create new genera. For example, when Brassovola and Cattleya are interbred, the new genus name is Brassocattleya. Another example is Brassolaeliacattleya, which are made from interbreeding three genera – Brassovola, Laelia and Cattleya. Not too difficult, is it? You can easily tell which genera are used to make the new genus because usually their names are just chained together.
However, if there are more than three genera, the name would get ridiculously long, so the names are not just chained together when there are four or more genera. For example, Burrageara is an intergeneric hybrid made from Cochlioda, Miltonia, Odontoglossum and Oncidium. Usually when the genus name ends with “ara”, that means the genus is made up of four or more natural genera. But sometimes you will find that some names that end with ‘ara’ are only made up of three genera. Also, instead of being written as “Burrageara“, sometimes the genus name is written as “x Burrageara“. Having an x in the front of the genus name is actually the proper way to signify that it is an intergeneric genus.
Genus names are usually abbreviated. For example, the abbreviation of Phalaenopsis is Phal. and Cattleya is just C. You can find a list of genus name abbreviations from the Royal Horticulture Society.
Also, the genus name is supposed to be capitalized and italicized, but most of the times people don’t do it properly.
Species or “Grex” – The Second Part of Orchid Name
In this example, the second part of the orchid name – schilleriana – is the species name. There are about 30,000 natural species in the orchid family. Species names are sometimes used in more than one genera. For example, you can find species called floribunda in the genera Masdevallia, Eria and Habenaria but they don’t necessarily have anything in common at all. I guess some taxonomists are not the most creative people in the world, or they just have a special fondness towards recycling.
Here are the largest genera in terms of number of species they have:
Bulbophyllum – 2,000 species
Epidendrum – 1,500 species
Dendrobium – 1,400 species
Pleurothallis – 1,000 species
Species, by definition, are produced in nature. When an orchid is a man-made hybrid, the second part of the name is referred to as the “grex” name. Hybrid orchids comprised of the same combination of species (or hybrids) always have the same grex name. For example, the parents of Brassocattleya Maikai are always Brassovola nodosa and Cattleya bowringiana regardless of which one is the pod parent and which one is the seed parent. As a result, some of the orchids with the same grex name don’t look exactly alike.
By looking at the name, how can you tell whether the orchid is a species name or a grex name (natural vs. man-made)? A species name is always in Latin and in lower-case, whereas a grex name is capitalized and is never in Latin. In reality, hybrid names are mostly very obvious. For example, when an orchid is named Blc. Hillary Clinton, you know automatically that it’s a hybrid.
Cultivar or Clonal – The Third Part of Orchid Name
Cultivar (or clonal) name only exist for orchids that are somehow superior. Therefore not all orchid names have cultivar name. Usually breeders register cultivar names if they think the specific orchid has award potential. Cultivar names can be ‘inherited’; if an orchid was propagated by division, mericloning or selfing, then it gets the same cultivar name because it shares the exact same DNA with the original orchid plant.
The cultivar name is always in single quotes and is always capitalized.
Award Designation – The Fourth Part of Orchid Name
In the example above, the last part of the orchid name “AM/AOS” signifies that this cultivar is superior and earned an award. In this particular case, AM/AOS stands for Award of Merit from American Orchid Society. American Orchid Society has 10 types of awards that can be attached to an orchid name, but it also has other special awards an orchid can earn. The American Orchid Society has trained judges who will score the orchid plant based on various criteria. Orchids are then awarded if they reach certain points (out of 100-point scale). Check out their website to see the details of awards. The most common ones are FCC (First Class Certificate), AM (Award of Merit) and HCC (Highly Commanded Certificate).
While not knowing your orchid’s name wouldn’t stop you from enjoying it, the orchid name can tell you a tremendous amount about the plant. It allows you to speak the same language when you talk to your fellow orchid growers. Most important of all, it gives you information on how to treat it. So next time when you purchase an orchid, pay attention to the tag and don’t throw it away!
Happy growing. |
Soccer Skills Video: Header Back to Basic Soccer Skills
A "Header" is a basic soccer skill, designed to receive, pass, shoot or redirect the ball.
There are two types of headers, or "heading":
1) To clear the soccer ball on defense, in which the forehead to the top of the head is used
to knock a ball away from opponents. Sometimes a defender may leap up to get more
power on the header.
2) To direct the soccer ball on offense, by using the forehead or side of the head to knock it
down, pass or shoot a goal typically off of a corner kick or cross.
Benefits of the Header:
Simply used to get to soccer balls that are in the air, and thus beat an opponent to the ball.
Header Notes:
Young children should not practice this skill, until pre-teen. Work on maintaining eye
contact with the ball, thus allowing for the ball to bounce off of the forehead near the
hairline, for more control.
soccer header heading |
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Can't live with'em, can't live without'em
What are some of the advantages of living with the opposite sex? What are some of the disadvantages? Why? Use some of this week's vocabulary, as well as the phrasal verbs and expressions from Module 7 in the Phrase Builder.
ps We're are meeting in the computer lab at 8:45 on Wednesday, Dec. 17
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
It takes courage to...
Describe a situation that required courage. It can be a personal situation (something that has happened to you or someone you know), or a general situation (something you've imagined or read in the news. Use some of the vocabulary from this week (check your phrase builder).
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Rock On!
Write a review of a concert or a CD from an English-sing artist. Use p.24-25 from your textbook as a model. Use some vocabulary from p.24 and your phrase book (module 2).
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
How does Vancouver compare to your home city?
What are the similarities between your home city and Vancouver? The differences? Do you think that globalization is making every city the "same"? Why/why not? Use some of the vocabulary you have learnt this week and some of the phrasal verbs from p.4 in your phrase builder.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Tough Times In Vancouver
Write about a challenge you've faced here in Vancouver. How did you handle it? Did you learn anything from it? Make sure to check your verb tenses!
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Find a comfortable spot in a public place (cafe, restaurant, bus, skytrain), hide behind a newspaper and listen to the conversations around you :) Take notes! Report what you heard using reported speech. You don't have to tell us word-for-word, just summarize.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
It's a question of taste.
Look in your textbook at p.77, Question 4. Look at the Would you...? list. Find at least one thing that you would never do, and one thing you would (secretly) like to do and why. Now explain at least one thing you've already done and give us all the juicy details. |
Sunday, October 26, 2014
What's a Neurotransmitter Anyway?
by Glen Depke, Traditional Naturopath
I am sure that you've heard of neurotransmitters but this is a likelihood that this are some missing pieces to understanding these in a simple yet productive manner.
To understand neurotransmitters let's first understand neurons. Neurons are actually the most significant players in the brain and they are cells that utilize electrical charges to transmit information and they are the worker bees of the nervous system. Neurons are composed of the soma, dendrites and an axon. To understand this simply:
• The soma is the hub of the neuron and this contains the nucleus which is the control center
• Dendrites are extensions of the neuron that are similar to branches of a tree that receives input from other neurons
• The axon is the projection that sends signals to other neurons or cells
So in essence every neuron is a one way street with information entering in through the dendrites and exiting through the axons. When you have healthy and active neurons these electrical charges are occurring on a regular basis throughout your life.
Your neurons communicate by discharging a small messenger called a neurotransmitter which in turn is received by another target neuron. A neurotransmitter is a chemical messenger that carries, boosts and modulates signals between neurons and other cells in the body. In most cases, a neurotransmitter is released from the axon terminal after an action potential has reached the synapse. The neurotransmitter then crosses the synaptic gap to reach the receptor site of the other cell or neuron. Then, in a process known as reuptake, the neurotransmitter attaches to the receptor site and is reabsorbed by the neuron.
Neurotransmitters play a major role in everyday life and functioning. Scientists do not yet know exactly how many neurotransmitters exist, but more than 100 chemical messengers have been identified.
While there are so many neurotransmitters to concern, here at Depke Wellness be are mainly looking at four neurotransmitters and for a very important reason. These four neurotransmitters are serotonin, dopamine, acetylcholine and GABA. The reason we focus on these particular neurotransmitters is due to the fact that when these are balanced it is typically recognized that the other neurotransmitters will balance also. Even a step further, one of my mentors for years, Dr Danial Kalish, shared that if you can balance serotonin and dopamine the rest will fall into line. Dr Kalish is a wealth of knowledge in the area of neurotransmitters and more with his book "The Kalish Method: Healing the Body, Mapping the Mind." Another significant mentor of mine in functional health and specifically brain health is Dr Datis Kharrazian and I will share that his book, "Why Isn't my Brain Working" is my personal encyclopedia for brain health. For anyone that is interested in understanding this area with a very deep level of comprehension, these books will definitely provide this for you.
In studying Dr Kharrazian's work, I recognized the need to look at the four neurotransmitters listed in the paragraph above. Taking this a bit further, let's place these neurotransmitters into some necessary categories as either excitatory or inhibitory type neurotransmitters. Of the four mentioned already dopamine, serotinin and acetylcholine are excitatory and GABA is inhibitory. Let's look at them individually.
• Serotonin is your happy neurotransmitter that is commonly associated with feeling calm or relaxed even though it is an excitatory neurotransmitter.
• Dopamine is the pleasure and reward neurotransmitter which is produced on large amounts when you fall in love or first engage in some type of addictive behavior such as smoking, amphetamine use or gambling. This is also an excitatory neurotransmitter.
• Another excitatory neurotransmitter is acetylcholine, which is your learning and memory neurotransmitter.
• The inhibibtory neurotransmitter is GABA or gamma-amminobutyric acid, which is known as the anti-anxiety neurotransmitter.
There is also a key note to make and that is that even though an excitatory neurotransmitter such as dopamine is always excitatory and GABA is always inhibitory, they can still have an opposite effect depending on the neuron pathways of which they synapse. In a very basic definition, the synapse is the complete process of communication between neurons.
Let's also look into the comment above a bit deeper. So an excitatory neurotransmitter does not always excite and an inhibitory neurotransmitter does not always does not always inhibit or relax? I know it sounds confusing but this is why neurology and neurotransmitters are not as easy as many would have you believe.
Another key factor in neurotransmitters is tied into what is referred to as the neurons resting potential. When a neuron is at rest, which is not often, it has a resting potential that will basically tell you how much stimulation is needed to make that neuron fire. If a neuron's resting potential is close, very little input is needed to fire but if the potential is far, then a higher input is needed to fire. And in the neuron world, it is all or nothing. If a neuron if far from its threshold it may never get enough stimulation to fire or if your potential is close the neurons fire to easily and are touchy. An example of a far potential is someone that has to turn up the volume on their TV because the neurons responsible for sound are far from the threshold, thus lessening the ability to hear properly . An example of a close potential is tinnitus, you know, that annoying ringing in your ears for many. This is due to a potential that is too close and easily overstimulated. Another example of could be someone that overreacts to certain aromas such as perfume, paint, new carpet, ect.. This close potential can lead to migraines, fatigue and many other symptoms in the body.
The main point to make her is that both the close and far potentials are challenges because they are both symptoms of a degenerating brain.
So what is a person to do if their neurotransmitter function is off? First off we'll look at the common challenges as listed below:
• Poor blood flow to the brain
• Poor blood flow leading to poor oxygen and nutrition levels to the brain
• Poor blood sugar stability
• Too close or far of potentials
• Poor adrenal function
• Chronic high levels of stress
• Chronic inflammation
• Food sensitivity
• Lack of brain stimulation
Taking care of these areas first is always a key when addressing neurotransmitter imbalances. For those that have followed Depke Wellness for some time, you will recognize that these are all consistent focuses of ours on a regular basis.
I have a special gift for you today also. Below I have a link for the new client forms for the Depke Wellness new clients and one of these forms is a complimentary neurotransmitter assessment. Click on this assessment and complete at your convenience. Pay special attention to sections where you have more than half of your responses as 2's or 3's. If you want our opinion on these assessments feel free to email them to and we will provide our input for you. This is our gift to you!
Hopefully today you have learned a bit about neurotransmitters, neurons and resting potential. Remember to email your neurotransmitter assessment to the Depke Wellness team if you have any questions. I have also attached an invite below to a complimentary workshop for the Orange County Alzheimer's Association. If you are in the SoCal area and are looking for information on Alzheimer's, dementia or brain disorders, this is a must attend event.
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave these below and we will respond personally. Thank you!
1. Does this have anything to do with the vagus nerve? I had my gallbladder out over a year ago, and have had major issues since then. I was told my vagus nerve was damaged during surgery. I have yet to find any resources or help from western docs on this, and am basically on my own trying to heal myself. thanks
1. Yes it does Donna. The Vagus nerve will attach at the base of the brain stem and is basically and extension of your brain. If there is brain degeneration, neurotransmitter dysfunction or damage to the Vagus nerve, this can lead to challlenges in any area of the gastro intestinal tract. I include liver, gall bladder and pancreas in this grouping. I would suggest taking the neurotransmitter assessment on my website and forwarding this to me at
2. The link at the bottom is to the assessment. |
Alaska Quiz | Four Week Quiz B
Buy the Alaska Lesson Plans
Name: _________________________ Period: ___________________
This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 11, pgs. 683-737.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. How did the little ones learn about their family's move?
(a) From books.
(b) They remembered.
(c) From Ancient One.
(d) Their dad.
2. Where did the family go?
(a) Over to the beach area.
(b) Out to sea.
(c) Across the bridge to Alaska.
(d) Up into the mountains.
3. What did Venn experience as he managed the Chinese and Filipino workers?
(a) Aside from a few glitches, everyone respected each other, and there was no trouble.
(b) They had language barrier problems.
(c) Everything was very smooth.
(d) He experienced management problems.
4. How was Elmer injured?
(a) By a Bullet.
(b) By a falling crate.
(c) By an attack dog.
(d) In a construction accident.
5. Russian prisoners on the ship were taken to _________.
(a) Japan.
(b) Okhotsk.
(c) Lapak.
(d) Seal Islands.
Short Answer Questions
1. Why were more airstrips appearing in Alaska?
2. Where did they decide to build ships?
3. What did Baranov think about supplying rum and guns to the natives?
4. Why did Cidaq become a Christian?
5. What did LeRoy do after the war?
(see the answer key)
This section contains 248 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page)
Buy the Alaska Lesson Plans
Alaska from BookRags. (c)2017 BookRags, Inc. All rights reserved.
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History >
Pennsylvania Militia
posted Apr 24, 2010, 1:16 PM by James Wise [ updated Aug 29, 2010, 11:58 PM by Travis Wise ]
The earliest settlers were, soon after landing here, compelled to re- sort to some mode of military organization, by the action of the Indians. Then there were the conflicting claims to the country by the Spaniards, French and English. The different settlements, as they happened to be from different nations of Europe, were often given to raids upon neighboring colonies, and sometimes drove them off and destroyed their property; at other times they were content to take the colony under their authority, and incorporate the conquered colonists with their own society. Except the Quakers, all the people were more or less militant. As early as 1750, nearly every able-bodied man was in some way or other connected with the militia of his county. The Indians had become so troublesome that parties, when they went out to open new roads, had to go as armed squads of militia. In 1755, COLONEL JAMES SMITH, who after- ward became eminent in the wars of the country, was captured by the Indians while in the act of opening a road from Loudon to Bedford. After the Revolution the Assembly enacted laws for the regular or- ganization of the militia, and appointed officers to take charge there- of, and to hold regular encampments and muster days. All the people of the county enrolled in the militia were required to meet upon the mus- ter days, and to bring their guns and learn the drill of arms. Those who had no guns, the State being too poor to supply any, were requested to use a stick or, as some did, a corn stalk; and, hence, the name of "Cornstalk militia" was at one time a term quite common. These muster days were eventually great annual events in the county. Here the peo- ple met, discussed political and current events, arbitrated disputes, fought out old quarrels, and some drank whisky and rather indiscrimi- nately frolicked and fought, as opportunity offered. In the early part of the century the authorities ordered a change in the uniform from a black to a white cockade in the hats of the militia. In counties where the Federal party was the stronger, this order created in some places almost riots, and in many there were acts of insubordination and open denunciation of the order. Companies would put on the required cockade while in the ranks drilling, but, the moment the commanding officer would say "dismiss," they would tear off the regular cockades and trample them under foot, and from their pockets produce and place in their hats the other color cockade, and thus boisterously parade the town. Many court-martials of militia officers occurred for insubordi- nations, and the two political parties for a while were the "white cockades" and the "black cockades." |
Before inventing Auto-Tune, the software that would change the music industry forever, Andy Hildebrand was a research scientist in the oil industry.
Working for Exxon Production Research and then Landmark Graphics, a company he co-founded, Hildebrand developed software for processing data from reflection seismology, a method of estimating properties of Earth's subsurface using reflected seismic waves. His innovations were great for finding oil, and they reportedly made him a lot of money.
Here's a screenshot of Landmark's geophysical analysis software today:
landmark software autotune
But reflection seismology was not his first love. A professionally trained flutist since a young age, Hildebrand really wanted to be involved in music, and he found a way to transfer his skills to that field in 1990 when he launched Antares Audio Technologies, a company originally focused on digital music processing and sampling software.
His breakthrough with Auto-Tune was inspired by a fluke comment in 1996 or 1997, when a distributor's wife mentioned how great it would be to have a device that kept her singing in tune, according to Greg Milner's "Perfecting Sound Forever."
Hildebrand thought this over and realized that the type of processing he used in the oil industry could also correct pitch. As he explained on PBS's NOVA years later:
"Seismic data processing involves the manipulation of acoustic data in relation to a linear time varying, unknown system (the Earth model) for the purpose of determining and clarifying the influences involved to enhance geologic interpretation. Coincident (similar) technologies include correlation (statics determination), linear predictive coding (deconvolution), synthesis (forward modeling), formant analysis (spectral enhancement), and processing integrity to minimize artifacts. All of these technologies are shared amongst music and geophysical applications."
And here's a screenshot of Auto Tune's music software — note the similarities:
auto tune
Although there were ways to correct pitch before Auto-Tune, it wasn't easy. Auto-Tune was incredibly good and incredibly easy, among other things allowing users to set a key and then have the software automatically correct notes to hit the right pitch.
"People couldn't believe what they were hearing," Hildebrand told Milner about debuting the software in the late 90s. "I had trouble convincing several of them that I wasn't pulling wool over their eyes."
For Hildebrand creating the software was his way of allowing artist to worry about the emotion of the recording rather than the technical aspects of it.
"The singer's first take is often their best, it's full of vitality and emotion," Hildebrand told NPR in 2004. "After the take, their producer will announce 'great but the second phrase was pitchy so let's do it again.' Well, now the singer's worried about pitch and has to focus on the intonation and the vitality and emotion are gone from their performance. What Auto-Tune lets the producer do is fix the first take."
Auto-Tune caught on quickly but was treated as an industry secret until Cher brought it to the forefront with her 1998 smash "Believe," which used the software at its most aggressive setting for a strange, robotic effect.
"Most major studios were using this software for pitch correction. The studios didn't like to talk about what they were doing," Hildebrand told the Seattle Times . "They didn't advertise the fact they were fixing the singer's pitch, but they did... [Cher] was just the first to make it public." |
FORMULA milk is deficient in a type of fatty acid, thought to contribute to brain development, that is present in breast milk, researchers from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow, report. Changing the composition of infant formula could improve subsequent brain function in children, they suggest in The Lancet.
Research indicates that infants fed breast milk have significantly higher IQs at seven or eight years than those who receive no maternal milk. The Glasgow researchers say their study shows breast-fed babies to have significantly more docasahexaenoic acid (DHA) in their brains than formula-fed infants. Supplementing formula milk with DHA could 'prove beneficial to subsequent neurodevelopment', they suggest. |
The cost of ocean water desalination can vary from one part of the world to another part of the world and even within the same state and only a few miles away from each other. The potential cost variances from one desal plant to another depend on a series of factors, some of which are listed below.
• Project procurement method (design/bid/build, design/build/operate, etc)
• Who owns the project (public agency, private company, public private partnership, etc)
• A water purchase agreement (take or pay agreement, etc)
• Financing of the project (low rate bonds, private investors, etc)
• Water quality objectives set forth by the drinking water regulators
• Quality of ocean water coming into the plant
• Choice of intake systems (subsurface, screened intake, etc)
• Choice of on-site treatment and technology
• Length of time the project is financed
• Percent of desal water to be supplied to the service are (100% desal, 50% desal-50% imported water, etc)
• Cost of power to the desal plant
• Location of the plant (ability to utilize existing infrastructure, etc)
• Numerous others…
With the almost unlimited factors that can affect the cost of ocean water desalination West Basin has completed several cost estimates and impacts to rate payers. The West Basin board first evaluated ocean water desalination and compared the cost to imported water sources through Metropolitan Water District and discovered ocean water desalination was 30x more expensive that imported water. Over the years advancements in technology, energy recovery, optimization and increasing imported water rates have helped ocean water desalination become a more feasible water supply option.
In addition to comparing the cost of ocean water desalination over the years, comparing the cost of ocean water desalination to other water supply options has been performed. West Basin has operated a recycled treatment plant and program since 1990 and has compared the costs of ocean water desalination to the different grades of recycled water produced. On average, a 20MGD ocean water desalination facility would cost approximately $1,800/Acre-foot in comparison to an average of the five types of recycled water qualities West Basin produces at approximately $1,500/Acre-foot. If a larger plant is built, economies of scale provides a benefit and the total project cost drop so about $1,600/Acre-foot. West Basin has estimated the average increase on a monthly water bill to introduce a 20MGD desalination facility would be approximately $3.00/month, or the price of a Starbucks coffee.
• > |
Article of the Day:Spider Webs
Article of the Day:
Spider Webs
Many spiders use webs of proteinaceous fibers extruded from silk-spinning organs, called spinnerets, to catch prey without having to expend energy pursuing it. However, constructing a web is an energetically costly process, and it is not uncommon for a spider to eat its own web each day to recoup some of the energy expended in its spinning. A remarkable material, spider silk possesses a tensile strength comparable to that of high-grade steel and has been used in medical settings to do what? More…:
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Submission + - Ultra-Dense Deuterium - Fusion Fuel Found? 1
Omomyid writes: Scientists at the University of Gothenberg have successfully produced very small amounts of Ultra-dense Deuterium. It's so dense that a 10 cm3 cube would weigh 130 tons. UDD is 1 million times more dense than deuterium ice, a common fuel in laser-ignited fusion projects and would vastly improve the chances of starting a fusion reaction as the atoms are much closer together.
Ultra-Dense Deuterium - Fusion Fuel Found?
Comments Filter:
• "Hydrogen... Fuel... Fusion... Sustainable... Non-Hazardous..." "BINGO!" Never mind the near-complete absence of content; this will run everywhere.
Here's a link to one of the papers (may require subscription outside a research institution; I can't check from here): []
It looks like this phase exists in a few atoms for a few femtoseconds. They're saying it's a sort of "inverted metal", with deuterons moving in the electric field of the electrons. (In normal meta
Another megabytes the dust. |
Writing messages to other members
Writing Messages - General Advice
The most important thing you can do before you send a message is to check it thoroughly. Look for possible grammar or spelling mistakes. You want to come across as being well educated and composed. If it helps, you could write your messages in Word where you can do a spell check just to make sure it is correct. It is also advised not to use internet slang and phrases such as “lol” and not to shorten words to numbers. Some people find it difficult reading messages made up of internet slang. Try to be yourself when writing a message and stay true to your character. If the person you are writing to says something that you don't agree with, don't pretend that you agree with them otherwise you will not be staying true to your character. Don't message someone more than once a day without a response as you may come across as being desperate. There is no harm in a little flirting when writing a message, but don't overdo it, so dirty talk and pictures are best avoided.
Help! What do I write?
Responding to a message
It is entirely up to you whether or not you choose to reply to a message. There is no rule that says you must reply to all messages so don't feel forced to do so. If you don't feel comfortable replying to a message, then don't. Replying should be fun and not make you feel uncomfortable.
It is sometimes easier when responding to a message rather than starting a conversation, as the person you are answering will have set the ball rolling and will probably have given you some starting points in the way of questions. Once you have answered the questions it is a good idea to ask similar questions back, or ask some of your own but remembering not to be intrusive. It is up to you how quickly you respond to a message. There is no reason to delay responding, unless you don't have the time or opportunity, but on the other hand there is no rush. Send a reply in your own time making sure you are happy with what you have written.
Getting a response
Don't expect to get an immediate response from a message. Try to be patient and check your inbox on a daily basis. It may take a day, a week or even longer for someone to reply to you. Remember that not everyone uses a computer everyday; some people may use a friend or relatives computer therefore relying on other people before they can check their inbox. Some people like to take their time writing messages to make sure they are entirely happy with what they have written, so their response may be a little delayed. Try to remember that everyone has something going on in their lives, so don't be disappointed if you don't get a rapid response.
Why didn't they reply?
That is one question you will rarely find the answer to. If you haven't had a response from a message or even if you have been sending messages to someone and they suddenly stop replying, it doesn't mean it is due to anything you have done. How can you have done something wrong by just sending a message show your interest? The best way to deal with not having a response is simply to just move on. You may be disappointed if you have been chatting to someone regularly who you feel you have a connection with and they just stop, but you mustn't let that one person stop you from having fun chatting to others. There could be a perfectly valid reason for someone not replying to you such as; they may have met someone else, they are on holiday, their computer may be broken, they may be unwell, or have work commitments. It could just simply be that they aren't interested in you and they don't know how to tell you, so ignoring messages seems like the easiest option for them, although it may come across as being quite harsh. Remember that some people are quite shy and it has taken a lot of courage for them to join a dating website, so it may just take time for them to pluck up the courage to reply to messages. It may seem like another excuse, but it could also be the truth. You must remember that just because you send someone a message it doesn't mean that they are obliged to reply. Instead of being disappointed about the members who don't reply to you, concentrate your enthusiasm on the members who do reply to you. |
the sign of the cross
Definition of the sign of the cross
1. : a movement of the hand that forms a cross shape and that is done as an expression of the Christian faith She knelt and made the sign of the cross.
Word by Word Definitions
: signal
1. : cross
: to place a sign on or mark by signs
: to represent or indicate by a sign
: the cross on which Jesus was crucified
: crucifixion
1. : to lie or be situated across
: intersect
: to make the sign of the cross upon or over
1. : lying across or athwart
: moving across
: running counter : opposite
1. : across
1. : not parallel : crisscross, crosswise
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up the sign of the cross? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
feeling or affected by lethargy
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Pet Consider
Can Rabbits Eat Dandelions?
Can Rabbits Have Dandelions?
Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with a real live rabbit has had their childhood preconceptions shattered. Rabbits, it turns out, do not subsist solely on whole carrots. Actually, they can only eat very small quantities of carrots. We like to refer to anything that comes out of the ground as ‘rabbit food’, but those of us who actually have to feed bunnies on a regular basis have learned that it can take some research and practice to get their nutrition dialed in. Open up a book on rabbit nutrition and you will discover that rabbits are supposed to eat hay, vegetables of all sorts, tiny amounts of fruit, and weeds. Yes, as in the weeds growing in your front yard.
So, which weeds are safe for your bunnies? Is the most easily recognizable weed, the humble dandelion, safe for rabbit consumption? Can you go outside and pluck up a few to feed your furry friend? Can you give your rabbit dandelions?
The answer is yes, rabbits can (and should!) eat dandelions in moderation. While these pretty yellow flowers don’t seem particularly appetizing to us, they make an excellent supplement for our bunnies. They are cheap, easy to get, nontoxic, and generally well tolerated by most rabbits. Dandelions also happen to be both delicious and nutritious—most rabbits love eating this common weed.
Health Benefits of Feeding Your Rabbit Dandelions
dandelionsWe tend not to think of dandelions as superfoods, but for rabbits, they definitely are. Dandelions are loaded with the nutrients that our rabbits need to maintain optimal health and wellbeing. They are chock full of Vitamin D, several B vitamins, Vitamin E, Vitamin C, zinc, and magnesium. Dandelions also boast more iron content than many iron-rich leafy greens and more potassium than a sugary, starchy banana.
Even more surprising: dandelions have almost as much beta-carotene as carrots! Carrots are most renowned for this important vitamin, but dandelions supply nearly the same amount of beta-carotene for less sugar and fewer calories—and in a more easily digestible leafy green package.
Unlike dogs and cats, rabbits need massive quantities of plant fiber to maintain optimal health. They actually have an organ, called the cecum, that exists solely for the purpose of processing plant fiber. The cellulose present in the food that they eat, which is indigestible to humans, gets pushed into the cecum to sit and ferment. Once fermented, it passes through the body in the form of a cecotrope—which the rabbit then eats to properly absorb its nutrients. This process is more than a little gross from our perspective, but it is a crucial part of rabbit nutrition.
Feeding bunnies too many snacks that are high in sugar or fat and low in fiber can cause serious health problems, both in the short and long term. Your rabbit’s gastrointestinal tract is powered by fiber. Inadequate fiber intake often results in sluggish digestion; food fails to move through the gastrointestinal tract in a timely manner, and it begins to dry out or grow dangerous bacteria.
Partially digested plant matter may become impacted, which can ‘plug up’ your bun’s digestion and result in constipation or gastrointestinal stasis. If your rabbit is passing small, hard fecal pellets, straining to defecate, or hasn’t had a bowel movement in 12 hours, take them to the vet immediately. This type of constipation requires professional care.
Even foods like carrots, bananas, and mangos, which are very healthy for us, can be harmful to rabbits if they are consumed regularly! Because they are high in fiber and low in sugar, dandelions offer your bun many of the same benefits of these sweet treats with a much lower risk of causing health problems.
Things to Consider
Though they are safe and healthy, dandelions should only be given to your rabbit in moderation—most rabbits need to eat only about 2 to 3 cups of fresh vegetables every day to be healthy and happy. These vegetables can provide a lot of nutrition, but they cannot meet all of your rabbit’s dietary requirements. Most of your bun’s diet should consist of fresh, high quality hay. Even if they are not as high in sugar or starch as fruits and other treats, they can still cause digestive problems if your rabbit isn’t getting enough hay.
A word of caution: while dandelions are perfectly safe for your rabbit, it is crucial to avoid picking dandelions that may have been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides. Unless you are sure that the dandelions in question are free of these toxic substances, do not feed them to your rabbit. This is why it’s probably not a good idea to grab dandelions from the park on your way home—they may be sprayed with weed killer.
Final Thoughts
Overall, dandelions make an excellent addition to your rabbit’s diet. They are nontoxic, loaded with nutrients, cheap, and easy to digest. Though they should be part of a mixture of vegetables to keep your bun’s diet interesting, they are a great staple that your rabbit can eat on a regular basis.
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Home | HOMEWORK | Language | Internet work | Project
12th Grade (4 points)
On this page you can find all the information you need for your assignments, such as due dates and guidelines.
Express your opinion:
List of composition topics:
1. Many Israelis believe that Israel should have a presidential election system, like USA, with only 2-3 political parties. What's your opinion?
2. Israel's defense budget is enormous, while its education budget is reduced repeatedly. What's your opinion?
3. Does society treat men and women the same?
4. Many people think that honesty is the best policy, whereas others believe that little white lies and/or flattery can be very helpful. What's your opinion?
5. The world belongs to the young. What's your opinion?
6. In different places around the world, certain breeds of dogs, such as the pit bull terrier, have been banned because it is felt that these dogs have the potential to be killers.
7. Young Israelis go on long trips abroad after high school or the army service. Are you for or against?
8. The use of cell phones in public places should be banned. What's your opinion?
9. Many people feel that the technological advances have not necessarily made us happier people. What's your opinion?
10. Many people become slaves to fashion and its dictates. What's your opinion?
11. Today youngsters around the world have much more in common than they had in the past.
12. Some people believe we should not have Bagrut exams at the end of high school, and rely only on the university psychometric exams. What's your opinion?
13. Television: should children watch so much of it?
14. Chatting on the net: should it be limited for children?
This Week's Assignment
Structure of a composition expressing an opinion:
A. Opening: Present the topic and express your opinion about it.
B. Body: give reasons, examples and explanations for your opinion.
C. Closing: Sum up and repeat your opinion in different words.
Structure for a For or Against composition:
A. Opening: Present both sides (for and against), without expressing your opinion.
B. Body: One paragraph for the reasons FOR.
One paragraph for the reasons AGAINST.
C. Closing: Express your own opinion.
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Tips on Butterfly Watching
1. Butterfly Field Guide–The guide will also provide information on flight times, range, the foodplant (caterpillar food) and nectar sources (adult butterfly food).
2. A Checklist of butterflies possible in your region of the state or country.
3. Close-focusing binoculars will help you see details of pattern and color that are often necessary to identify the butterfly.
Use of these resources will make your search easier and your identification more certain.
Finding Butterflies:
1. Seek out open areas with a variety of natural vegetation, especially flowering plants. Butterflies sometimes rest in the sun to warm their flight muscles (basking), and are most active during midday on a sunny, warm (~60 degrees F), and windless day.
2. Walk slowly and watch carefully for flying butterflies and those perched on flower heads, blades of grass, leaves of shrubs and trees, and those resting on moist ground or along the edges of puddles. Some perched butterflies rest with wings open while others have their wings closed. They are often hard to notice unless you patiently and carefully observe your surroundings.
3. Pick a promising area that is relatively close to home and begin to explore at frequent intervals during the Spring/Summer season and at different times during the day from 9 am to 3 pm. Record your observations and make notes of date, species seen, weather conditions, temperature and hours spent exploring.
4. Adult butterflies can be found taking nutrients (nectaring) on flowers, from sap on tree trunks, rotten fruit, and dung. Often male butterflies are found on a favorite perch (perching) waiting for a passing female or are flying back and forth in a territory (patrolling) on the hunt for a mate. Males also gather on moist ground to take mineral salts used in reproduction (puddling), or are found flying at the peak of hills (hilltopping). Caterpillars are sometimes located feeding if you find the right larval foodplant (host plant). Butterflies found feeding or mating are sometimes easier to approach for close and prolonged observation.
Identifying Butterflies:
1. When a butterfly is first observed in the field or garden, carefully notice as many features as possible BEFORE turning to the field guide.
• Relative size (large (>2-1/2”) – like swallowtails; medium (1-1/2 to 2-1/2”) – like most brushfoots; or small (<1-1/2”) – like grass skippers or blues)
• Shape of wings (rounded, pointed, or with forewings truncated)
• Posture (open or closed wings) when perched
• Color and pattern on the wings
• Flight pattern (close to ground or higher) and flight behavior (wings flat or at an angle)
• Behavior (basking, nectaring, perching/patrolling, puddling, hilltopping, courtship/mating, oviposting (laying eggs))
2. All of these observations will provide helpful clues. Your observation and identification skills will improve with continued practice and time spent in the field.
3. Try to place the butterfly in the right family
4. Butterflies are seasonal and each species flies at certain times during the year (flight) and only in certain parts of the country (range) and in certain types of plant associations (habitat). A good field guide will help greatly with these aspects of butterfly watching.
5. Explore areas like fields of wildflowers, hilltops, canyons, stream sides, marshes, trails and roadsides in open space areas. All of these areas provide different habitats and should yield a variety of butterflies.
6. Most of all enjoy the time you spend outdoors and approach your quest with enthusiasm to learn about these beautiful creatures. |
Washington State University Extension
Garden Tips
Wasps RSS feed
written by
Marianne C. Ophardt
WSU Extension Faculty
for the Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, WA
The Difference Between Yellowjackets and Paper Wasps
Are yellowjacket and wasps the same pest? No, they’re different and we have both in our area. Paper wasps are a real nuisance in my yard. They’re social wasps (living in groups) and build relatively small open-celled nests (not enclosed with a papery covering.) Our native paper wasps are distinctly different from yellowjackets. They have reddish brown slender bodies with yellowish markings and long dangling legs.
However, our area of Washington has been invaded by the European paper wasp. It has a larger shiny black and yellow body that looks much like the common yellowjackets of the region. Unlike yellowjackets, these invasive paper wasps don’t scavenge for food and are considered beneficial because they eat live insects. They’re often a problem because they build their nests almost anywhere in the yard and will sting if their home is threatened.
The common area yellowjackets build large enclosed papery nests in the ground. The entrance to their nests is small and often unnoticed. During the summer the yellowjackets are helpful by eating live insects. They also forage for other sources of protein, such as dead animals, garbage, and ripe fruit.
Once they secure their dinner, they chew it up and return to their nest to feed it to developing larvae. The larvae in turn produce a nutritious liquid for the adult workers to eat. Yummy! In the fall, the yellowjackets’ insect prey start to disappear plus fewer yellowjacket larvae are available to produce their dinner. Without enough food they turn aggressive when seeking out both protein and sugar based foods. That’s when they become a hazard at outdoor feasts.
How to Trap Yellowjackets
I’ve tried using a bright yellow manufactured trap, as well as a homemade trap baited with sweet syrup and fruit juice, but both didn’t trap any yellowjackets. I have lots of yellowjackets around my yard and I want to get them under control before my big barbecue next week. What am I doing wrong?
The problem may be that you have a problem with paper wasps, not yellowjackets. The good news is that paper wasps don’t forage for protein and sweets at picnics. If they’re causing you a problem near a picnic table, they’re probably defending a nearby nest. Try to locate their open-celled nests and treat with an appropriate aerosol insecticide product labeled for wasp control. To avoid getting stung, follow label directions and apply the spray during the evening when it’s almost dark.
If yellowjackets are a problem, lure traps will work for some types of yellowjackets, but their trapping potential can be enhanced by using meat, such as chicken, as an attractant. The meat should be replaced frequently, along with removing the dead yellowjackets. Place baited traps around the periphery of your yard. If you’re trying to protect a picnic spot in a larger area, place the traps about 200 feet away, spacing them every 150 feet apart.
I have tried the WHY traps you recommended for yellowjacket and paper wasp trapping but they don’t seem to work. How come?
The WHY traps work well for the common yellowjackets and native paper wasps in our region, but their attractant doesn’t appear to be effective for the European paper wasp which now outnumbers the native one. Dr. Peter Landolt, the USDA scientist who developed the attractant for the WHY trap, is trying to develop an attractant that will work for the European paper wasp.
Published: 8/24/2012 2:05 PM
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Core elements of an evacuation plan
By: John W. Porco, PE, and Kenneth A. Zaklukiewicz – Michael Baker Jr., Inc.
This paper is intended to provide guidance to local jurisdictions on “core elements” that are essential to be included in an effective local Evacuation Plan. Evacuation is a process by which people move or are moved from a place where there is immediate or anticipated danger to a place of relative safety, offered appropriate temporary shelter, and when the threat to safety is gone, enabled to return to their normal activities or to make suitable alternative arrangements. Local jurisdictions should adapt the elements to any format and content that best suits local conditions. In developing the core elements, the authors reviewed a wide variety of plans and guidance documents from jurisdictions around the United States to identify “best practices” from these documents. In addition, the authors drew on their experience in developing evacuation plans for four large urban areas. An evacuation plan should include:
1. AUTHORITIES: Planning considerations associated with evacuation procedures are complex and must account for existing local, State/Provincial, and Federal legislation and plans.
2. THREAT ASSESSMENT: The Plan should include a comprehensive discussion of the types of incidents that might prompt an evacuation and the potential level of evacuation that each might require, specific to the individual jurisdiction. Examples might be flooding, earthquakes, and terrorism.
3. PLANNING ASSUMPTIONS: Every Plan is founded on a series of Planning Assumptions, which “bound” the evacuation scenario. For example, based on observations, with advance warning, approximately 50% of jurisdiction population will voluntarily evacuate the area even before being ordered to leave based on their perception of danger. Once an order is issued, up to 90% of the affected population can be expected to evacuate.
4. PHASES OF EVACUATION: The actions necessary to conduct an evacuation could be presented by phases, stages, or timing of evacuation activities. This encourages a more organized approach to both planning and implementation. For example, an evacuation might be conducted in four stages, Pre-evacuation contacts, evacuation alert or warning, evacuation order (precautionary or mandatory), and return.
5. LEVELS OF EVACUATION: The Annex should define levels of evacuation, because these will characterize the scope of the event and the actions which must be taken. There are a variety of ways to define evacuation levels, such as minor/routine, major, and catastrophic, based on the impact of the event. “Shelter in Place,” the act of sealing off a room or building in order to isolate the occupants from an external threat and staying inside until the threat has abated, is another option.
6. ORGANIZATION/ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: The Plan must include the organization structure of the evacuation implementation team, clearly indicating what agency is in charge of the evacuation operations. In addition, the Plan should set forth the roles and responsibilities of each agency and organization, local, State/Provincial, and private, that will be involved in the evacuation.
7. TRANSPORTATION: The primary mode of transportation in an evacuation will be privately owned vehicles. Therefore, the Plan must identify and include information on evacuation routes, particularly capacities. Evacuation routes used will be determined based on the location and extent of the incident. However, many individuals within a jurisdiction may not own a car or, for whatever reason, cannot drive or in an emergency may not choose to drive. To this number must be added those who find themselves temporarily without a vehicle, such as commuters, college and university students, many tourists and others. So, supplemental transportation resources must be provided for these “carless” populations. Many urban areas have a significant supply of public transportation assets, most often busses, supplemented by rail transit, commuter rail, private operators, and taxicabs, as appropriate. The Plan should include listings of vehicles available, capacities, points of contact, and dispatch protocols. Another critical element of supplemental transportation services is the designation of pickup points to which evacuees would walk, which must be listed in the Plan.
8. SPECIAL NEEDS: The disastrous evacuation problems experienced in Hurricane Katrina emphasize the need for identification of transportation resources that can help evacuate people with disabilities during an emergency. The National Council on Disabilities defines such persons as those “whose needs for basic necessities are compounded by chronic health conditions and functional impairments, such as people who are blind; people who are deaf; people who use wheelchairs, canes, walkers, and crutches; people with service animals; and people with mental health needs.” The provision of vehicles equipped with lifts capable of accepting passenger wheelchairs and similar mobility aids requires careful coordination. The Plan should include some estimation of special needs populations who will require specialized transportation services.
9. SHELTERING: About 10-20 % of evacuees can be expected to seek public shelter. The remainder will leave the area, stay with relatives or friends, or seek commercial lodging. So, the Plan should include comprehensive strategies for sheltering. Note that shelter-in-place should be considered as the initial response to a hazardous event.
10. ANIMAL CONSIDERATIONS: Ensuring for the transportation, care, and sheltering of animals must be considered in evacuation plans. Many people will refuse to evacuate their homes if they cannot take their pets with them. It is estimated that up to 25 percent of pet owners will not evacuate because of their animals.
11. PUBLIC NOTIFICATION: Effective and informative notification to the public will be vital to convincing them that they should evacuate. The public must understand why they need to evacuate or shelter-in-place, how long they will need to plan to do so, routes to use, the location of transportation pickup points, the time required for evacuations, the availability of shelters, what they should take with them, how their pets will be accommodated, how they should secure their homes, and the security that will be provided when they are away from their homes.
A jurisdiction that includes all of these elements will have a framework for an successful evacuation plan for protection of their citizens.
More information is available from John W. Porco, PE, and Kenneth A. Zaklukiewicz |
Welcome to Sprouts!
The Sprouts Project is an intiative created by Wandsworth Borough Council, FACE (Farming and Countryside Education) and New Covent Garden Market.
The aim of the project is to give inner city school children the opportunity to learn first hand about fruit and vegetables, how they are grown and how it gets to their plates at school and at home.
The project comprises of three elements:
1. A visit to New Covent Garden Market
2. A visit to a working farm
3. The growing of a sustainable garden
The Competition
Over the course of the project year the participating schools are competing with each other to win top prize in one of the three categories. These are:
1. Most Improved Garden - prize for the school garden which has improved the most throughout the project year.
2. Best Display - the school that puts on the best display at the Celebration Event in July.
3. Best Taste - the class that prepares the 'best' dish as judged by our panel at the July Celebration Event.
> Visit the Sprouts website to learn more. |
Child Trafficking Series Continues: Is inter country adoption another form of child trafficking?
According to the US State Department's Bureau of Consulate Affairs, Americans have adopted approximately 250,000 children from other countries from 1999 to 2013. The growing number of adoptions is seen as a good thing for both the children and their new parents. But in light of the growing numbers of children who are being taken from their parents, picked out of the streets, or coerced into the slavery of child trafficking, it makes one wonder whether inter-country child adoptions are just another form of child trafficking.
While it appears there is no official documentation or report on how many of these children were actually stolen from their parents, a quick internet search is enough to convince even the most skeptical parent that this is truly a possibility.
This summer, news of a Chilean Priest who told mothers that their newborn babies died only to illegally adopt them out to other families sparked a huge investigations. The argument given for this cruel act was that single mothers are not accepted by society, so it was determined it was better all the way around. But was it? These children had a right to know who their birth mothers were. These mothers had a right to determine whether or not they could provide for their infants, or to choose to legally give them up for adoption.
In February of this year, Chinese officials announced the conclusion to a 6-month sting involving a child trafficking ring that was buying and selling babies. It was discovered that hundreds of infants were being advertised as available for adoption on various websites. 382 babies were rescued as a result. However, many feel that this was just the tip of the iceberg. The demand to adopt healthy infants is on the rise inside and outside of China. In China, families with no sons are often willing to pay thousands of dollars to acquire an heir. Outside China, families eager to share their lives with a child--any child, are also willing to pay for the privilege.
In poverty stricken or war torn countries, parents have been known to sell their infants for what constitutes a little more than a day or weeks meager supply of food. Others, sign away their rights to conniving child brokers unknowingly on the belief that their child has been selected to attend school in a far away province. However, once the paper is signed the child is not taken to school, but rather becomes the adopted son or daughter of a family who believes they are adopting legitimately.
There are numerous first-person stories from both the child who has become an adult and is now looking for his/her mother, or from the new adoptive parent who discovers that the child they love was really stolen from his/her mother.
While I believe most adoptions through reputable agencies are legitimate, it is the ones that slip through the cracks that bother me. No child should ever be a commodity that can be bought and sold at the whim of an unscrupulous parent or child broker. Every child deserves a loving home with parents and family who care, nurture, and guide.
Child trafficking needs to be stopped! And, if it raises its ugly head in the thousands of inter-country adoptions that take place throughout the world, the people involved need to found, tried, and sent to jail.
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Friday, October 18, 2013
Blog 6-Britain Looks to Fracking as North Sea Oil Dwindles
Nations, like the United States, have become self-sufficient in extracting natural gas through a process called fracking. Across the Atlantic Ocean in the European nations however, environmental concerns have been stirred by the hydraulic technique. Recently France upheld its government’s right to ban fracking and in Germany fracking has been suspended until further notice. Britain on the other hand is facing struggles with its energy future because the North Sea oil reserves have become depleted. Before the end of the year a small shale-gas company, IGas, has plans to drill an exploratory well on the edge of a peat bog that geologists say looks promising. British environmental groups widely oppose shale gas fracking despite the benefits compared to coal gas. The groups are concerned not only for unpredicted seismic eruptions but also possible water pollution. Other worries that don’t directly effect the physical environment is that if shale-gas fracking proves to be a success, it will reduce the incentive to invest in renewable energies. Leila Deen, the head of energy policy for Greenpeace in Britain, said, “If you care about climate change, you shouldn’t be looking for new fossil fuels.” (2013) Not only are oil and gas companies finding new fossil fuels but also the government is preparing a favorable tax system for locals that use and support natural gas use, to reward and help overcome opposition from the community. Ian Stewart, mayor of Salford (a city where exploration drilling will be taking place), said that any company that wishes to begin fracking would have to seek separate planning permission.
Despite opposition from the community, elected officials and environmental groups in Britain, the government is supporting the exploratory drilling by IGas. If the drilling proves to be successful the government has prepared tax incentives for those who oppose the use of natural gas through fracking. Although IGas is not a big business gas company, if this process is successful they will be. This may change some aspects of globalization in the oil business. Poland has been open to shale gas exploration and has relied on Russia for most of its resources. If Britain becomes a contender for natural gas, what does that mean for the international trade of natural gas? I also have to think about what Leila Deen brought up, that although natural gas may be cleaner than burning coal, it does not help the fight to reduce greenhouse gases that effect climate change. Why are so many funds allocated towards other fossil fuels instead of the renewable energy sources the planet truly could benefit from?
Breanna Steinke
4:00 PM Oct. 18 2013
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description icon green arrowIt is important to understand how users and stakeholders will interact with the IS&S Environment and by what means. The vision of how the IS&S Environment will operate must be tied to direct improvements in mission effectiveness. Think of the IS&S Environment as an information highway – the user organizations need a roadmap to identify on ramps, define the rules of the road for managing traffic interactions, and show the off ramps for delivering information.
Desired Outcome: Governance body adopts a written concept of operations on behalf of all stakeholder organizations.
checkmark logoPlay Checklist
1. Understand the different points at which users will interact with the IS&S Environment.
2. Put the identified cultural impediments on the table, discuss them, and determine ways to minimize the obstacles to building the IS&S Environment.
3. Identify difficulties and obstacles in the current way users interact with the existing IS&S Environment or data sources, and prioritize these according to user needs.
4. Identify the business requirements for the IS&S Environment.
5. Define the highest priority information exchanges as a starting point for the IS&S Environment – the priorities should be based on meeting the greatest needs as expressed by the users.
6. Document the as-is model of how these exchanges now get handled versus the to-be model of how the IS&S Environment will handle a more productive exchange of information.
7. Identify the privacy and safeguarding constraints that must be met by any ultimate implementation of information sharing.
8. Identify the roles of all the participants in the information exchanges to be clear about who initiates the exchange, who receives the information, and under what conditions the exchange takes place.
9. Develop metrics that will measure how well the IS&S Environment is meeting business and user needs at each step of the service.
10. Develop a change management process.
key questions icon purple question markPlay Key Questions
1. What are the different ways (both online and offline) that people currently accomplish the task the IS&S Environment will be designed to help do more effectively?
2. Where are user difficulties and obstacles in the current way people accomplish the tasks?
3. What are the business requirements for the IS&S Environment?
4. What kind of exchanges will be supported by the IS&S Environment?
5. How is the exchange of information initiated and received?
6. How do individuals request information?
7. How will the request for information be fulfilled by the IS&S Environment?
8. What services will be involved in producing the information requested?
9. What are the technology considerations?
10. What are the funding constraints?
11. How we are going to manage and address risk?
12. How will privacy be protected and security assured through the information exchange processes?
13. What metrics will best indicate how well the service is working for its users?
resources icon yellow star Play Resources
The following resources can help you with this play:
N-DEx: Understanding the National Data Exchange (N-DEx) System, Chief Mark A. Marshall, Smithfield (VA) PD, Vice President, International Association of Chiefs of Police, (
Comprehensive Regional Information System Project Volume 2: Concept of Operations (2007), Noblis (for the National Institute of Justice),
Information Sharing Environment Common Profile Framework Description
NIEM Cost Model User Guide (2012),
Return to the IS&S Environment Playbook |
Two-hundred years ago, wheat beer could only be brewed by the Bavarian royal family in their reweries. In 1872, King Ludwig II discontinued brewing wheat beer due to a steady decline in sales. That same year, he sold Georg I Schneider the exclusive right to brew wheat beer. Thus, the Schneider Family saved wheat beer from extinction.
Check back for our products list. |
Study Guide: Listening Is an Act of Love
B. Reading the Stories
2. BLANCA ALVAREZ interviewed by her daughter CONNIE ALVAREZ
Pre-reading statement of opinion: Illegal immigrants to the United States risk many physical dangers in their journey to cross the border. What do you think of these people who risk bodily harm as they seek a better life for themselves and their loved ones? Are they heroic . . . irresponsible . . . foolish . . . crazy?
Post-reading guided summary: Write how a “coyote” figured in Connie Alvarez’s childhood imagination by describing how Blanca Alvarez entered the United States. Explain what the mother used to do to ensure her children’s survival. Consider how the mother also inspired the daughter to complete her college education.
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10 Countries with the Highest Deforestation Rates in the World
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The threat of losing trees is evident in these 10 countries with the highest deforestation rates in the world. Deforestation is a considerable threat in today’s world. With nonstop development, production and population growth, the demand for natural resources from trees continue to grow. Despite efforts to re-plant trees and create tree farms, some countries are now experiencing the effects of high deforestation. Many of us are not aware of how trees are helpful to our environment and our safety. The roots of trees help hold soil and prevent erosion and landslides, trees also help absorb water and lessen floods.
Another thing that trees also provide us is clean air and oxygen. Trees help filter the air for us and provide us with oxygen so we can breathe. You’ll notice that countries with fewer trees have more air pollution. Some of the most beautiful sights in the world are the ones created by nature. Trees help create the beauty that we enjoy today and have made the earth greener. There are some countries in the world that support and promote this preservation. As such, they’ve become The 10 Greenest Countries in the World.
The countries listed here are ranked based on how much deforestation has been done in the last 5 years. While other countries have taken steps to preserve and maintain their forests, other countries seem to continue and even increase the deforestation rate with each year. Let’s learn more as we explore these 10 countries with the highest deforestation rates in the world.
10. Laos
Deforestation Rate: 5.3%
Laos has very rich and diverse forest areas. A lot of wood there is harvested for their variety and the country contains some of the best materials that have been constantly logged. Other than wood the forests are heavily sought after for medicine and other products. Logging has been consistently high in the country since the 1980s.
Countries with the Highest Deforestation Rates in the World
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"You and I aren't the same people who sat down together before dinner" Sheila [to Gerald], An Inspector Calls, Act II
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M. Bovey 11B 16th-28th November 1998 "You and I aren't the same people who sat down together before dinner" Sheila [to Gerald], An Inspector Calls, Act II To what extent do you feel that the Characters are changed by the Inspector's visit? How do various attitudes, in your opinion, reflect Social, Cultural and Historical values, both of the time in which the play is set and in the time in which it was written? An Inspector Calls, by J.B. Priestly, is the story of the visit by an Inspector to an apparently normal family, the Birlings. They are celebrating Sheila Birling's engagement to Gerald Croft, who is also present, when the Inspector arrives telling them of the suicide of a young girl called Eva Smith. At first they deny any knowledge of the girl, but as the play goes on the Inspector manages to show that they all helped kill her. Mr Birling had her dismissed from his factory for demanding a small increase in wages; Sheila ordered her to be dismissed from her job in a shop simply because of her pride; Gerald Croft kept her as his mistress before leaving her suddenly; Eric Birling (Mr & Mrs Birling's son) also had an affair with the girl and stole money to keep her living; and Mrs Birling used her influence to deny help to Eva Smith when she needed it most, driving her to suicide. After the Inspector's visit we can see which of the characters have learned their lesson from what the Inspector has said and which are steadfastly clinging to their old beliefs. The differing attitudes between the older and younger characters are shown by their conversations following the Inspector's departure. It is Birling's speech in Act 1 that sets the scene for the action in the play. Birling is confidently talking to Eric and Gerald about what he thinks about the future. ...read more.
When Eric hears the tale of events that began with his father's dismissal of her he is disgusted by what he did and begins to distance himself from his opinions. Interjections such as: Birling ...I said they[the striking workers] could go and work somewhere else. It's a free country, I told them. Eric It isn't if you can't go and work somewhere else. show Eric's opinion of his father's conduct. This means that Eric soon finds himself having a similar opinion as Sheila about their parents' ideas - although for different reasons. Sheila is distressed that her parents do not seem to have heeded the Inspector's warning, whilst Eric is angry that the actions of his parents have led to the death of the woman who was to have his child and is understandably upset at their "don't-care� attitude. This drawing together of ideas is ironic as in the first scene Eric and Sheila spend most of their time annoying each other. Eric's return at the beginning of Act 3 is greeted with fury by Birling, who bitterly tells him that "you're the one I blame for this� and is joined by Mrs Birling, who is "also ashamed� of him. This throws Eric into a wild rage in which he shouts at his mother for turning help away from Eva Smith when she needed it most. Birling dismisses Eric as a "hysterical young fool.� After the Inspector's final message Eric seems to gain clear understanding of the principle of the community (note that the Inspector commented that "we often seem to make the greatest impression on the young ones) and reminds his parents that "I'm ashamed of you as well - both of you�. He tries to assist Sheila in making the elder family members see the lesson that they have been taught, but to no avail. Eric finally severs his links with his father's ideas on community when he savagely criticises Birling's description of people like the Inspector as "cranks�, stating "I didn't ...read more.
Birling was not to know of the rise of the Labour Party in Britain or the Russian Revolution of 1917. In his closing speech the Inspector warns about what will happen if his message about men living together in a community is not heeded: Inspector ...We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are members of one body. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night. In hindsight we can see that the "fire, blood and anguish� that the Inspector was warning about happened in the case of the First World War. This had started because the countries of Europe, instead of existing together, had formed themselves into two camps, with the countries within them allied together. Serbia was Russia's ally, who was also on the side of Britain and France, who had both promised to protect Belgium. Austria and Germany (and later Italy) were also allies. When Austria attacked Serbia, the Russians declared war on Austria and the Germans invaded Belgium, sending Britain and France into battle. The result was a hellish war in which millions died. Had the countries been able to live together then there would not have been a war. The fact that the play was written in the midst of the Second World War suggests that Priestly was saying that the lessons of what happened in the First World War had not been learned. In summary, An Inspector Calls details the differing attitudes of the Birling family to the events leading to Eva Smith's death and how they accept the responsibility for their actions. The older characters are too rigid to change but the younger ones are able to see their faults and accept what they have done is wrong. The play also reflects various cultural, social and historical, which reflect on the time both in which the play is set in and when it was written. ...read more.
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Related GCSE J.B. Priestley essays
1. Marked by a teacher
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of the play, so she can make decisions for herself, and decides not to take the ring back straight away. Gerald then says to her 'Everything's all right now Sheila. What about this ring?' But Sheila refuses to take the ring, and says she needs more time to think about it.
2. Marked by a teacher
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She felt guilty because she was the one to blame about Eva Smith's being sacked from her job at Mildwards. 26. What is Sheila thinking while she is 'staring' at Gerald (page 25)? Sheila stares at Gerald after the Inspector had announced the name Eva Smith assumed after being sacked.
of her actions, and that the influence of class and wealth in 1912 was a very strong influence on the daily lives of working-class people. The reactions of Gerald and Eric also play a decisive role in the changing of the mood from relaxed to tense for instance when Eric
She realises that this could have been a possible outcome of the situation, and that they were very fortunate that it was not. Birling puts forward his view that, "The whole thing's different now..." and continues acting irresponsibly to mockingly imitate the Inspector.
1. How does the character of Sheila Birling, develop throughout this play?
So, it does not even cross her mind that it may have been intentional. Sheila: I can't stop thinking about this girl - destroying herself so horribly - and I've been so happy tonight. (Act 1, page 17) Suddenly, we see a totally different side to Sheila.
From this I have concluded that Sheila represents the younger generation and her purpose in the play is to show people the change between 1912 and the 1940's. Mr Birling represents the older generation and the purpose of his character is to show us what the pre-1912 upper-class man was like.
don't fire Eva then Sheila will never go near the place and she will try and persuade her mother to close the account they have there. Initially, Sheila says she felt - "Rotten about it at the time..." but she doesn't take any action about it.
Sheila soon returns and speaks with the inspector. She obviously feels guilty as she asks him miserably "So I'm entirely responsible?" The Inspector says no but tells her that she is "Partly to blame." Although it was here bad temper and jealously that caused Eva Smith to lose her job at Milwards, Sheila seems genuinely sorry for her actions.
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Why People Think Software Are A Good Idea
Information On Software Defined Wan
Something that is always true about technology is the fact that it is always in motion, so think about this whenever you are looking for something true about technology. The necessity of technology is becoming more obvious day by day as the world is becoming more and more connected globally. The way that networking is taking place is a way in which technology is affecting both individuals and businesses. In one time, it was really possible to take care most of the networking necessities through the software defined networking, also called as SDN.
For those who are using SDN, even if it does provide several benefits for them the network that is now being used is the one which is global and not anymore localized. This is the reason why it is beneficiary for software defined networking to have the extension to the wide area network or WAN. This could have the ability to tie more than one local area network together since this is allowing it to span through a bigger geographical area. The wide-area networks are mostly tied together through the public network which includes the telephone system or the cable system. A WAN might also have the possibility to be tied together through leased lines or satellites. A WAN that is considered as the largest is the internet.
The fact that software defined network is not allowing much growth in the network is an issue. Those that are local networks are rather rigid in their performance and they do not have the capability of adapting well to change. There is a possibility for you to control the elements of the network and it will be allowing smart decisions to be made in the network if ever you are going to remove existing protocols in this kind of networking and set up a standard of APIs. In opening up the network to more of a global level, this is very helpful.
Doing Resources The Right Way
An implementation of software defined networking will also have an issue that could happen and that is in the network management. You can start by moving away from controlling each of the WAN hardware device and program all of them with the central software that would be used as a controller.
The 9 Most Unanswered Questions about Technology
It is essential that you take in consideration of the effect that would have on your business prior to implementing any form of networking, despite of whether it is WAN, SDN or a combination of both. Before you could see it, it may take time and you must think about the investment. Just give all the possibilities a thought before you implement on networking. |
The Constitution
The Irish Law distinction between a “gay” and a “homosexual”
Ever wondered what the difference between a “gay” and a “homosexual” is? Thankfully, in Ireland, we have Supreme Court authority on this important distinction.
In his dissenting judgement in Norris v. A.G. [1983] IESC 3; [1984] IR 36, Henchy J. discussed the campaigns of David (now Senator) Norris and the personality trait that distinguishes the plaintiff from a “mere homosexual”:
His subsequent public espousal of the cause of male homosexuals in this State may be thought to be tinged with a degree of that affected braggadocio which is said by some to distinguish a “gay” from a mere homosexual.
For those readers born after 1878, OED defines braggadocio as:
1. An empty, idle boaster; a swaggerer.
2. The talk of such a person, empty vaunting.
So there you have it!
Broadcasting Should Be The Nationalists’ Holy Grail
BBC Scotland
A recent Scottish social attitudes survey found that 65% of Scots would back independence if they were £500 better off. The slogan “It’s Scotland’s Oil” has been the cornerstone of the nationalists’ case for independence for the past four decades, while the unionist case invariably relies upon Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) reports which show Scotland receives more public expenditure than it raises. I would contend that all of these are entirely erroneous.
No nation’s people have ever voted for independence because they would be a few quid better off.
Scotland has a unique cultural identity. This unique cultural identity is essential to a nation’s independent character, particularly where small countries are concerned. Language, literature, music and theatre played a crucial role in Irish nationalism. However while I would always contest that the very best bits of Scotland’s cultural identity are those parts which are uniquely Scottish it’s hard to argue that Scotland is culturally independent from the rest of the UK. Why else would John Swinney have felt it necessary to reassure Scots that they’d still be able to watch EastEnders in an independent Scotland?
It would seem odd therefore that, despite the fairly broad competence of the Scottish Parliament and Government there has been virtually no shift in Culture policy under the SNP. The work to establish Creative Scotland was begun while Frank McAveety was Culture Minister, with concrete proposals emerging by 2006. The Gaelic Language Act was introduced to Parliament by Peter Peacock in 2004. The only major celebration of Scottish Culture in recent years has been the disastrous “Homecoming Scotland”, which was initially the brainchild of Jack McConnnell. Even then, “Homecoming” appealed more to wealthy American tourists’ sense of Scottishness than our own.
Of course, the zenith of Culture policy is broadcasting – which is presently reserved to Westminster. It is through broadcast media that the vast majority creative output is consumed. In their first term in power the SNP recognised the importance of broadcasting to the nationalist cause. They established the Scottish Broadcasting Commission, who recommended the creation of a dedicated Scottish television network.
Similarly the Scottish Government’s National Conversation considered the question of Broadcasting. Their consultation document proposed as an interim measure that:
• Responsibility for MG Alba should be devolved to the Scottish Government.
• The Scottish Government should be granted the competence to establish a “Scottish Digital Network”.
• The creation of a Scottish division within Ofcom.
• The creation of a Scotland-wide Channel 3 licence, to be regulated by Ofcom Scotland.
• Assigning Scotland a share of broadcasting revenues (i.e. from spectrum sales and licence fee), with the ability to vary the licence fee for Scotland.
The SNP dominated Scotland Bill Committee has made similar recommendations relating to the devolution of broadcasting, though such a move has not attracted the political onus that devolution of Corporation Tax has received. However even if the SNP were successful in having broadcasting devolved to Scotland it would take years to implement any substantial shifts in policy.
If the nationalists’ want to be certain of victory in an independence referendum then they need to foster a greater sense of independence within Scotland’s culture. And to do that they need to do more than hold the occasional festival of Scottishness or commemorate 700-year-old battles. Promotion of the gaelic language will play an important role in the development of Scots culture. So too will the promotion of literature, music and the arts. However in order to engage with every section of Scots society broadcast media are required.
The development of Scots broadcasting will be crucial to making Scotland culturally independent. John Swinney sought to reassure Scots they could still watch EastEnders. However in a culturally independent Scotland, nobody would want to.
Sovereignty and Independence Lite
Despite the fact that my PhD is a contemporary study of the impact technology has had on international taxation law, I’ve found myself delving into the concept of “sovereignty”. The link between international taxation and sovereignty is, in fact, far more significant than it first appears however I’ll bore you with that in a future post.
When considering Sovereignty in Scotland there are two issues: the internal constitutional question as to in whom it vests, and the question of what, externally, it will mean in the future.
The first is fairly straightforward, or at least one would think so. Our Austinian conception of sovereignty was best summarised by Harrison, thus:
The source of all positive law is that definite sovereign authority which exists in every independent political community, and therein exercise de facto the supreme power, being itself unlimited, as a matter of fact, by any limits of positive law.
From a jurists perspective sovereignty is the ultimate source of law within any legal order. It founds executive power, legislative competence, and jurisdiction. Hart would describe it as the “ultimate rule of recognition”.
Even a first year student of Constitutional Law would be able to tell you that sovereignty in the United Kingdom vests in Parliament, and would quote Dicey and Jennings at you until you until they were blue in the face to prove it. Yet this seems to have escaped the SNP’s notice completely.
In November 2007 Alex Salmond wrote:
We in the Scottish Government believe that sovereignty in Scotland lies with its people.
This, the First Minister has re-stated a number of times. But unlike Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz closing your eyes and repeating “there’s no place like home” won’t make it come true. The people of Scotland are not sovereign. Parliament may remain sovereign by common consent but that does not make the people the supreme source of law. Perhaps what Alex Salmond meant to say is that he believes the people of Scotland should be sovereign, which I don’t doubt for a minute.
However sovereignty isn’t merely an element of constitutional law but also an important concept in in international law. Mutual recognition of the sovereignty of other states is one of the fundamental elements of international law. Independence is an essential aspect of that sovereignty, as was discussed by Oppenheim:
Inasmuch as it excludes dependence upon any other authority, and in particular from the authority of another state, sovereignty is independence. It is external independence with regard to the liberty of action outside is borders in the intercourse with the intercourse with other States which a State enjoys. It is internal independence with regard to the liberty of action of a State inside its borders.
If there’s one point of fact on which I’m certain Alex Salmond would agree it is that Scotland is not independent.
This brings me onto the second of the two issues which is what sovereignty will mean in the future. Certainly if Alex Salmond wishes the people of Scotland to be sovereign then Scotland needs to be independent. But how much independence does Scotland need before you can describe it, or its people, as sovereign?
Adapting the old adage, independence is like an elephant – difficult to describe but instantly recognisable. Certainly it is not a binary concept. Even when Oppenheim considered sovereignty and independence in the 1950s sovereign nations were heavily dependent on each other. Nonetheless you’d be hard pressed to claim that a nation lacked independence because of its membership of the EU, or the WTO, or even if it were dependent on foreign aid. Independence does not mean self-sufficiency.
“Independence lite” – which would involve sharing (or, more likely, contracting out) defence, foreign affairs, and even social security – appears to be preferred option of the Scottish Government. What this would involve remains quite unclear. For example, would Scotland and the remainder of the United Kingdom (rUK) have joint, or shared embassies? Would such embassies have a joint ambassador? Or two ambassadors sharing an office? Or one ambassador with two hats? Certainly it seems quite absurd for one person to be accredited as ambassador for two sovereign nations.
Presumably Independence lite means sharing a place on the world stage. We would remain a single Member State of the European Union, our membership of the United Nations would still be through the United Kingdom, and we would still sign treaties as a single entity. In that circumstance it’s hard to see how Scotland would be externally independent as Oppenheim describes, and would therefore lack one of the essential components of sovereignty in international law. From an external perspective Independence-lite would not appear to be any different from Devolution-max.
The difference, therefore, between Indy-lite and Devo-max appears to be one of internal sovereignty. Devolution max would preserve the unitary state, with sovereignty continuing to vest in the UK Parliament. Independence lite would effectively create a confederated state – two internally sovereign nations within one externally sovereign state. Within those nations internal sovereignty could vest differentially. One would expect that within rUK Sovereignty would continue to vest in Parliament, while in Scotland it would vest in the people.
Independence-lite may well create the internal appearance of sovereignty – certainly Alex Salmond’s belief that the people of Scotland should be sovereign could be realised. But it’s difficult to see how such a settlement could be objectively described as “independence”. |
Ethical Issues
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Ethical issues:
1)Ethical issues and society:
The selling of addictive product such as tobacco, cigarettes.
Most people think that the selling of such harmful products is unethical. However, there are also some people think otherwise.
The pros defend their point of view based on the fact that such products enhance their pleasure and reduce their stress. (Ex: cigarettes help reducing stress at work for people who have to work long hours) On the other hands, the cons are against it because of the fact that these products are harmful to health. (Ex: cigarettes cause cancer not only for smokers but also for second hand smokers).
-Government should prohibit smoking at public areas such as restaurants, offices, bars... and strictly punish violators. Explain: By making “the prohibition of smoking in public places a law”, the government can protect the health of community and the environment as well since it greatly reduces the risks of being affected for people who don’t smoke. Therefore, this practice is ethical. -Raise the taxes for cigarettes
Explain: This practice is ethical because it discourages the buying of cigarettes. People who realize that they shouldn’t waste a lot of money in buying cigarettes can eventually quit smoking. By doing so they can protect themselves and their family.
2)Ethical issue in business practice:
In legal perspective using bribery to secure a contract (especially a contract with public sector body) is against the law and penalties will result.
However, people who support this practice argue that it is a victimless crime and rationalize in the term “if we don’t do it, others will”
Strictly enforce severe punishments for the practice of bribery applying to everyone in any cases.
In my point of view, bribery is illegal no matter in whatever situation. Those people who don’t have money will never have a fair chance for themselves no matter how capable they are...
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Speech Writing With Judy Steiner-Williams
Speech Writing With Judy Steiner-Williams
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Need to give a speech and don't know where to begin? A well-written and organized speech greatly reduces the anxiety around delivery, and can help win over audiences in a way the written word just can't match. In this course, Kelley School of Business instructor Judy Steiner-Williams outlines the basics of speech writing, including incorporating support for your thesis and adapting your delivery to your audience. She also provides guidance on writing speeches with different purposes, such as speeches that are primarily informative or persuasive, speeches designed for entertainment purposes, or those designed for a special occasion, such as award acceptance or toastmaster.
Topics include:
* Choosing a topic
* Composing a thesis
* Organizing the speech
* Outlining the body
* Finishing with a strong ending
* Incorporating research
* Adapting to different audience sizes, attitudes, and expectations
* Writing for different occasions
* Preparing notes and visuals
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1. __________ was the first product from Vermont forests and was made by pouring __________ through the ashes from burned trees.
2. As water-powered __________ were built to cut trees for lumber, canals and __________ made it easier to get the lumber out of Vermont.
3. Today __________ % of Vermont's land is forested. This is true in part because many abandoned __________ have returned to forest.
4. One of the problems with lumbering in the 1800's was __________ __________ of large areas of trees. This often caused __________ __________.
5. Today __________ are planted to help renew trees that are cut.
6. Trees cut in Vermont are used for __________, __________, __________, __________, __________, and __________.
7. __________ is used for making paper and cardboard.
8. Woodchips and firewood are two examples of trees being used to general power and __________ __________ in Vermont. |
Thursday, October 20, 2011
icebreaker questions for the art classroom
1. If you could be any artist in the world, who would you choose to be?
2. If you spent all day working with your hands, what would you do?
3. If you could have a super hero power, what would it be?
4. If you could visit any place in the world, where would that be and why?
What is the one kind of art you would collect from that place and why?
5. What is the one substance you would like to build a home out of?
6. If you lived the life of a cartoon character, which one would you select and why?
7. What kinds of hobbies do you have and how could these relate to the subject of art?
8. What is the most artistic hair style you have ever seen?
9. If you could redecorate your room, in any way you wish, what would it look like?
10. What is the one thing that surprised you about visiting someone else at their home?
11. Who is the most artistic person in your family and why?
12. What is the strangest piece of artwork you have ever seen?
13. If you had to write a magazine article about an artist, how would you begin to do it and why?
14. If you had to build a tree house to live in, what would it look like?
15. Let's pretend that your parents or guardian is going to give a big party. He or she is expecting you to decorate some cupcakes and to set up a decorated area. What are some of the ideas you would use?
16. What is the one activity that you hope to do before you turn fifty five years old?
17. If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
18. If you woke up tomorrow morning and found that your hair had changed color, what color would embarrass you so much that you would wear a hat on your head during the entire school day?
19. If you have a pet or if you were to have a pet and you had to dress him in human clothing, what would he or she wear?
20. If your parent had to make artwork to sell from your home, what do you think they could create in order to survive as an artist?
1 comment:
1. Excellent prompts for sketchbook journaling, too! Bravo! |
A joint project
by author/activist Starhawk
and filmmaker Donna Read
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The Scholars and the Goddess
Historically speaking, the "ancient" rituals of the Goddess movement
are almost certainly bunk.
by Charlotte Allen, January 2001
WICCA, sometimes known as the Goddess movement, Goddess spirituality, or the Craft, appears to be the fastest-growing religion in America. Thirty years ago only a handful of Wiccans existed. One scholar has estimated that there are now more than 200,000 adherents of Wicca and related "neopagan" faiths in the United States, the country where neopaganism, like many formal religions, is most flourishing. Wiccans -- who may also call themselves Witches (the capital W is meant to distance them from the word's negative connotations, because Wiccans neither worship Satan nor practice the sort of malicious magic traditionally associated with witches) or just plain pagans (often with a capital P) -- tend to be white, middle-class, highly educated, and politically involved in liberal and environmental causes. About a third of them are men. Wiccan services have been held on at least fifteen U.S. military bases and ships.
Many come to Wicca after reading The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a best-selling introduction to Wiccan teachings and rituals written by Starhawk (née Miriam Simos), a Witch (the term she prefers) from California. Starhawk offers a vivid summary of the history of the faith, explaining that witchcraft is "perhaps the oldest religion extant in the West" and that it began "more than thirty-five thousand years ago," during the last Ice Age. The religion's earliest adherents worshipped two deities, one of each sex: "the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, who brings into existence all life," and the "Horned God," a male hunter who died and was resurrected each year. Male shamans "dressed in skins and horns in identification with the God and the herds," but priestesses "presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess." All over prehistoric Europe people made images of the Goddess, sometimes showing her giving birth to the "Divine Child -- her consort, son, and seed." They knew her as a "triple Goddess" -- practitioners today usually refer to her as maiden, mother, crone -- but fundamentally they saw her as one deity. Each year these prehistoric worshippers celebrated the seasonal cycles, which led to the "eight feasts of the Wheel": the solstices, the equinoxes, and four festivals -- Imbolc (February 2, now coinciding with the Christian feast of Candlemas), Beltane (May Day), Lammas or Lughnasad (in early August), and Samhain (our Halloween).
This nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and egalitarian culture prevailed in what is now Western Europe for thousands of years, Starhawk wrote, until Indo-European invaders swept across the region, introducing warrior gods, weapons designed for killing human beings, and patriarchal civilization. Then came Christianity, which eventually insinuated itself among Europe's ruling elite. Still, the "Old Religion" lived, often in the guise of Christian practices.
Starting in the fourteenth century, Starhawk argued, religious and secular authorities began a 400-year campaign to eradicate the Old Religion by exterminating suspected adherents, whom they accused of being in league with the devil. Most of the persecuted were women, generally those outside the social norm -- not only the elderly and mentally ill but also midwives, herbal healers, and natural leaders, those women whose independent ways were seen as a threat. During "the Burning Times," Starhawk wrote, some nine million were executed. The Old Religion went more deeply underground, its traditions passed down secretly in families and among trusted friends, until it resurfaced in the twentieth century. Like their ancient forebears, Wiccans revere the Goddess, practice shamanistic magic of a harmless variety, and celebrate the eight feasts, or sabbats, sometimes in the nude.
Subject to slight variations, this story is the basis of many hugely popular Goddess handbooks. It also informs the writings of numerous secular feminists -- Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French, Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English -- to whom the ascendancy of "the patriarchy" or the systematic terrorization of strong, independent women by means of witchcraft trials are historical givens. Moreover, elements of the story suffuse a broad swath of the intellectual and literary fabric of the past hundred years, from James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the novels of D. H. Lawrence, from the writings of William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot to Jungian psychology and the widely viewed 1988 public-television series The Power of Myth.
In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess -- a conclusion that strikes at the heart of Wiccan belief.
Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The figure Starhawk cited -- nine million executed over four centuries -- derives from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage and quickly became Wiccan gospel (Gardner himself coined the phrase "the Burning Times"). Most scholars today believe that the actual number of executions is in the neighborhood of 40,000. The most thorough recent study of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors (1996), by Robin Briggs, a historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively short period, 1550 to 1630, and were largely confined to parts of present-day France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious and political turmoil of the Reformation. The accused witches, far from including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens (often other women), not clerical or secular authorities. In fact, the authorities generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with practicing a pagan religion.
If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims on a large scale. Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the 1990s, with the appearance of Davis's book and then of Hutton's, many Wiccans had begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of survival. "We don't do what Witches did a hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago, or five thousand years ago," Starhawk told me. "We're not an unbroken tradition like the Native Americans." In fact, many Wiccans now describe those who take certain elements of the movement's narrative literally as "Wiccan fundamentalists."
An even more controversial strand of the challenge to the Wiccan narrative concerns the very existence of ancient Goddess worship. One problem with the theory of Goddess worship, scholars say, is that the ancients were genuine polytheists. They did not believe that the many gods and goddesses they worshipped merely represented different aspects of single deities. In that respect they were like animistic peoples of today, whose cosmologies are crowded with discrete spirits. "Polytheism was an accepted reality," says Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College. "Everywhere you went, there were shrines to different gods." The gods and goddesses had specific domains of power over human activity: Aphrodite/Venus presided over love, Artemis/Diana over hunting and childbirth, Ares/Mars over war, and so forth. Not until the second century, with the work of the Roman writer Apuleius, was one goddess, Isis, identified with all the various goddesses and forces of nature.
As Christianity spread, the classical deities ceased to be the objects of religious cults, but they continued their reign in Western literature and art. Starting about 1800 they began to be associated with semi-mystical natural forces, rather than with specific human activities. In the writings of the Romantics, for example (John Keats's "Endymion" comes to mind), Diana presided generally over the woodlands and the moon. "Mother Earth" became a popular literary deity. In 1849 the German classicist Eduard Gerhard made the assertion, for the first time in modern Western history, that all the ancient goddesses derived from a single prehistoric mother goddess. In 1861 the Swiss jurist and writer Johann Jakob Bachofen postulated that the earliest human civilizations were matriarchies. Bachofen's theory influenced a wide range of thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, a generation of British intellectuals, and probably Carl Jung.
By the early 1900s scholars generally agreed that the great goddess and earth mother had reigned supreme in ancient Mediterranean religions, and was toppled only when ethnic groups devoted to father gods conquered her devotees. In 1901 the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans excavated the Minoan palace at Knossos, on Crete, uncovering colorful frescoes of bull dancers and figurines of bare-breasted women carrying snakes. From this scant evidence Evans concluded that the Minoans, who preceded the Zeus-venerating Greeks by several centuries, had worshipped the great goddess in her virgin and mother aspects, along with a subordinate male god who was her son and consort. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s archaeologists excavating Paleolithic and Neolithic sites in Europe and even Pueblo Indian settlements in Arizona almost reflexively proclaimed the female figurines they found to be images of the great goddess.
The archaeologists drew on the work of late-nineteenth-century anthropologists. A belief that Stone Age peoples (and their "primitive" modern counterparts) did not realize that men played a role in human procreation was popular among many early British and American anthropologists. Female fertility was an awesome mystery, and women, as the sole sources of procreation, were highly honored. This notion -- that hunter-gatherer societies couldn't figure out the birds and the bees -- has since been discredited, but "it was very intriguing to people mired in Victorianism," according to Cynthia Eller, a professor of religious studies at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, who is writing a book on the subject. "They wanted to find a blissful sexual communism, a society in which chastity and monogamy were not important," Eller says. It was the same general impulse that led Margaret Mead to conclude in the 1920s that Samoan adolescents indulged in guilt-free promiscuity before marriage.
Archaeological expeditions even in the latter half of the century bolstered the notion of a single goddess figure from antiquity. In 1958 a British archaeologist named James Mellaart made a major find: a 9,000-year-old agricultural settlement that once housed up to 10,000 people at Çatalhöyük, one of the largest of several mounds near the modern-day town of Konya, in southern Turkey. Mellaart unearthed a number of female figurines that he deemed to be representations of the mother goddess. One was a headless female nude sitting on what appears to be a throne and flanked by leopards, with a protuberant belly that could be interpreted as a sign of pregnancy. The Çatalhöyük settlement contained no fortifications, and its houses were nearly all the same size, seemingly implying just the sort of nonviolent, egalitarian social system that Goddess-worshippers believe prevailed. Çatalhöyük became the Santiago de Compostela of the Goddess movement, with hundreds of pilgrims visiting the settlement annually. The enthroned nude is a revered Goddess-movement object.
Mellaart's conclusions were bolstered by the work of the late Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-born archaeologist who taught at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1989. Gimbutas specialized in the Neolithic Balkans. Like Mellaart, she tended to attach religious meaning to the objects she uncovered; the results of her Balkan digs were published in 1974 under the title The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. In 1982 Gimbutas reissued her book as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, and she began seeing representations of the Goddess, and of female reproductive apparatus (wombs, Fallopian tubes, amniotic fluid), in a huge array of Stone Age artifacts, even in abstractions such as spirals and dots.
In 1993 Ian Hodder, a Stanford University archaeologist, began re-excavating Çatalhöyük, using up-to-date techniques including isotopic analysis of the skeletons found in the graves. "Your bones reflect what you eat, even if you died nine thousand years ago," Hodder says. "And we found that men and women had different diets. The men ate more meat, and the women ate more plant food. You can interpret that in many ways. A rich protein diet is helpful for physical activity, so you could say that the men ate better -- but you could also argue that the women preferred plant food. What it does suggest is that there was a division of labor and activity" -- not necessarily the egalitarian utopia that Goddess worshippers have assumed.
Hodder's team also discovered numerous human figurines of the male or an indeterminate sex, and found that the favorite Çatalhöyük representation was not women but animals. None of the art the team uncovered conclusively depicts copulation or childbirth. Hodder, along with most archaeologists of his generation, endeavors to assess objects in the context of where they were unearthed -- a dramatic change from the school of archaeology that was in vogue at the time of Mellaart's and Gimbutas's excavations. He points out that almost all the female figurines at Çatalhöyük came from rubbish heaps; the enthroned nude woman was found in a grain bin. "Very little in the context of the find suggests that they were religious objects," Hodder says. "They were maybe more like talismans, something to do with daily life." Furthermore, excavations of sites in Turkey, Greece, and Southeastern Europe that were roughly contemporaneous with the Çatalhöyük settlement have yielded evidence -- fortifications, maces, bones bearing dagger marks -- that Stone Age Europe, contrary to the Goddess narrative, probably saw plenty of violence.
Lynn Meskell, an archaeologist at Columbia University who has published detailed critiques of Gimbutas's work, complains that Gimbutas and her devotees have promoted a romanticized "essentialist" view of women, defining them primarily in terms of fecundity and maternal gentleness. "You have people saying that Çatalhöyük was this peaceful, vegetarian society," says Meskell. "It's ludicrous. Neolithic settlements were not utopias in any sense at all."
The research of archaeologists like Hodder and Meskell has sparked heated rebuttals from Goddess theorists. "We know that even in the West most of art is religious art," says Riane Eisler, the author of the best seller The Chalice and the Blade (1987). "Don't tell me that suddenly these are dolls. Give me a break! You have a woman at Çatalhöyük sitting on a throne giving birth, and you want to call it a doll?" In her introduction to a new edition of The Spiral Dance, Starhawk -- who is working on a film about Gimbutas -- complains about "biased and inaccurate" academic scholarship aimed at discrediting her movement. Perhaps the most painful attack, as far as many Wiccans are concerned, came last June, with the publication of Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. In 1993 Eller had published a sympathetic sociological study of feminist spirituality, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, which many in the movement put on their required-reading lists. Her recent work thus carries a tinge of betrayal, inasmuch as it puts her firmly in Hodder and Meskell's camp. Eller points out that almost no serious archaeologist working today believes that these ancient cultures were necessarily matriarchal or even woman-focused, and most do not interpret any of the things unearthed by Mellaart and Gimbutas as necessarily depicting goddesses or genitalia.
Despite their ire, both Starhawk and Eisler, along with many of their adherents, seem to be moving toward a position that accommodates, without exactly accepting, the new Goddess scholarship, much as they have done with respect to the new research about their movement's beginnings. If the ancients did not literally worship a mother goddess, perhaps they worshipped her in a metaphoric way, by recognizing the special female capacity for bearing and nourishing new life -- a capacity to which we might attach the word "goddess" even if prehistoric peoples did not. "Most of us look at the archaeological artifacts and images as a source of art, or beauty, or something to speculate about, because the images fit with our theory that the earth is sacred, and that there is a cycle of birth and growth and regeneration," Starhawk told me. "I believe that there was an Old Religion that focused on the female, and that the culture was roughly egalitarian."
SUCH faith may explain why Wicca is thriving despite all the things about it that look like hokum: it gives its practitioners a sense of connection to the natural world and of access to the sacred and beautiful within their own bodies. I am hardly the first to notice that Wicca bears a striking resemblance to another religion -- one that also tells of a dying and rising god, that venerates a figure who is both virgin and mother, that keeps, in its own way, the seasonal "feasts of the Wheel," that uses chalices and candles and sacred poetry in its rituals. Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity. "It has the advantages of both Catholicism and Unitarianism," observes Allen Stairs, a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in religion and magic. "Wicca allows one to wear one's beliefs lightly but also to have a rich and imaginative religious life."
"Diotima Mantineia," age forty-eight, is the associate editor of the Web site The Witches' Voice, found at witchvox.com (she would not divulge her real name, partly because she lives in a southern town that she believes is unfriendly to neopagans). She summed up her feelings on the debunking of the official Wiccan narrative this way: "It doesn't matter to me how old Wicca is, because when I connect with Deity as Lady and Lord, I know that I am connecting with something much larger and vaster than I can fully comprehend. The Creator of this universe has been manifesting to us for all time, in the forms of gods and goddesses that we can relate to. This personal connection with Deity is what is meaningful. For me, Wicca works to facilitate that connection, and that is what really matters." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Charlotte Allen is the senior editor of Crisis magazine and is a contributing writer for Lingua Franca. She is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (1998). ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Hannah Olbash. Dark Walk. Grade 12, Age 18. 2013 Silver Medal, Photography.
This Halloween inspired Writing of the Month comes from Lia Schaffner, Age 14, from New York, NY. It won a Gold Key in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category of the 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. We hope it gives you the creeps!
You arrive somewhere. You smell rotten flesh and blood. You see tombstones surrounded by a wild fog that spreads into the darkness. You hear the whine of some ghost. You hear the crackle of bones clacking together. You touch one of the stones. Mossy. You touch some slimy stuff that has a texture like a brain. You are hungry and take out your tongue to feel the rain. It tastes of skin and hair.
Where are you? Everywhere feels haunted. Everywhere feels dead. Are you in hell? There are ghosts haunting this place. You remember as a little kid on Halloween your friends used to put a flashlight below their mouth. Haunting you with blood and bone stories.
Are you in a ghost story? Are you somewhere in a book?
You are in a story. With no way to get out. It’s not safe since you are alive.
Follow these instructions and you will survive and get out of the story. There are places to find safety. You can die. You can live. This is one way I know…
Slapping your head doesn’t work.
Jumping in water doesn’t work.
Maybe poking your eyeballs out and putting a sheet over you will help.
But here’s what I did:
Find a place to sleep. The safe place is near where you are. Where you begin. Where you can come back.
Where the supplies are. Just turn left or right, straight or backwards but you’ll find it. Everyone does.
This is the easy part.
Go to sleep.
If you sleep and 8 hours later it’s still night, drink some Day Potion, (it’s in your supplies) and the sun will come.
Day only lasts about 10 minutes in a ghost story. So you don’t have much time.
Avoid all of the ghosts and spookiness.
Go to Normal Town. Normal Town will not be what you think normal is…
To go to Normal Town you take the red path that looks like blood. It’s sticky. You have to walk really quickly so you don’t get stuck. Then take the first right and you will see a huge paper stretched across the path. Add your name to it. Dip your finger into the path to write with the ink blood ink.
Three paths will appear.
The signs will read: Normal Path, which is the path on the right.
Ax Murder Guy Path, is the path in the middle. If you take it, sometime out of curiosity, you need to wear a sight-seeing Skeleton suit for protection, which you can buy for 123,456 death coins at Ernie’s Dead Gift Shop (in Ghost Town). Don’t use a flash when taking pictures.
And the third path, on the left, takes you to Ghost Town.
Take the Normal Path. It’s still not what you think normal is.
Avoid all Pencil Guys. Pencil Guys sell you pencils. Even though you have invisible death money, in your supplies that you don’t really notice because it’s weightless, Don’t buy anything!
It’s a trick. The pencil transports you at night and you end up in one of the Pencil Guys’ houses, where he has the sharpest pencil in pencil history.
The Pencil Guy will try his best to persuade you.
Just only think of a pink polar bear.
And you won’t buy a pencil.
Keep going down the path, keep doing what I say and you’ll be fine.
At the end of that path you’ll find Normal Town.
Go to a Ghostel. See? It’s not normal to you.
If anyone asks you what you are, say you’re getting ready for Halloween and you’re from Ghost Town.
They’ll think you are a ghost dressed as a human and will be a human for Halloween.
Tell them that you’re visiting Normal Town. It’s your first time here. You’re 1 year old in Ghost age. You’re visiting the Normal Museum of Humans for a Ghost School homework.
Nobody will be suspicious.
The Ghostel room number you need to stay in is 12.9A. Tell that to the lady at the Black Rose desk. When she asks you for your luggage, do a dark trick, which nobody knows but me.
The dark trick is to snap your figures and think of the baggage claim in any airport.
A random luggage will then appear beside you. It has someone else’s stuff. Desk people always look inside your luggage to make sure you’re not a vampire. She will see the other person’s stuff. She will ask questions about that stuff. You should just snap you fingers and information will spill into you. You will then think the stuff is yours.
The desk lady will ask you why you keep snapping your fingers.
You say because it’s a habit. Keep snapping your fingers.
She will give you a bone card for 12.9A. Go to your room. Swipe the card, go in and unpack your stuff.
You will be in this world for a week. Which is 8 hours in human time.
What do you do? You do what all people do: live, survive and die.
There is entertainment everywhere. Movies, sports. Your choice. This is where people die and come here and then wait to really die. It’s a paradise like heaven. But if you try and stay longer than 8 hours, you’ll be stuck. Instead it will become like hell because you will instantly fall asleep forever. And you won’t dream.
So, when the week is about to end: Go to the Normal Museum of Humans and walk through the mirror that lets you see what human life is like.
Snap your fingers as soon as you go through or you’ll die.
Then you will wake up in your bed, thinking it was just a dream.
There are others ways to survive. This was just an example that works.
There are more to find. You can try finding your own.
Good luck…
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Fanon Wiki
Youngian Republic
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The Youngian Republic, also known as the Galactic Republic, Young Republic, or as the Old Republic, was the ruling central government of a large portion (44%) of the Youngian Galaxy from 25,053-22 BMY, and of 20% until 19 BMY, when it was replaced by the Youngian Empire following the end of the Galactic Wars.
The Republic was a inefficent bureaucracy, mired with corruption and the severe disadvantage of a virtually non-existent military. The Confederacy of Independent States was formed as a break-away entity, comprising more then half of Republic territory, leading to Supreme Chancellor Young of the Republic gaining emergency powers and establishing a Republic army/navy. In 19 BMY, the almost non-existent parcels of the Republic and Confederacy were reorganized by Young into the Youngian Empire.
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Friday, September 21, 2012
Unicode Quirks in Django
Python 2.x's Unicode implementation really leaves something to be desired. The major issue often arises when you need to go between str() and unicode() types, the former is a 8-bit character while the latter is a 16-bit character. The problem is that doing .encode('utf-8') on a unicode object is idempotent (i.e. u'\u2013t'.encode('utf-8') but doing it on a str() twice will cause Python to trigger ascii codec errors.
Here's a great introduction of troubleshooting Unicode issues:
There's a great PowerPoint slide about demystifying Unicode in Python, which should be required reviewing. It's more detailed about the complexities of UTF-encoding, but it's worthwhile to review.
One of the general rule of thumbs that you'll get from this talk is 1) decode early 2) unicode everywhere and 3) encode late.
In Django, this approach is closely followed when writing data to the database. You usually don't need to convert your unicode objects because it's being handled at the database layer. Assuming your SQL database is configured properly and your Django settings are set correctly, Django's database layer handles the unicode to UTF-8 conversion seamlessly. For example, just look inside the MySQLdb Python wrapper and right before a query is executed, the entire string is encoded into the specified character set:
if isinstance(query, unicode):
query = query.encode(charset)
if args is not None:
What if you attempt to use on Django objects? (i.e."%s" % User.objects.all()[0]) If you searched on Stack Overflow, you'd see a recommendation to create a __str__(self) in your Python classes that call unicode() and convert to UTF-8:
def __str__(self):
Django's base model definitions (django.db.models.base) also follow this convention:
def __str__(self):
if hasattr(self, '__unicode__'):
return force_unicode(self).encode('utf-8')
return '%s object' % self.__class__.__name__
Normally, Python handles string interpolations automatically by determining whether the string is unicode or str() type. Consider these cases:
>>> print type("%s" % a)
<type 'str'>
print type("%s" % 'hey')
<type 'str'>
print type("%s" % u'hey')
<type 'unicode'>
Assuming your character set on your database is set to UTF-8, consider this example and how Python deals with string interpolations for class. Normally Python does unicode conversions automatically, but for Python classes, "%s" always means to invoke the str() function.
class A(object):
def __init__(self):
self.tst = u'hello'
def __str__(self):
if hasattr(self, '__unicode__'):
return self.__unicode__().encode('utf-8')
return 'hey'
def __unicode__(self):
return u'hey\u2013t'
>>> a = A()
>>> print "%s" % a
>>> print "%s %s" % (a, a.tst)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
In this failing case, the problem is that printing the A class results in printing a str() type intermixed with a.tst, which is a unicode type. When this issue happens, you're likely to see the UnicodeDecodeError
The same problem happens when trying to attempt to declare the __unicode__() method in your Django models and attempt to print out Django objects and attributes that have Unicode characters, similar to the issues reported in this Stack Overflow article. Because Python string interpolation will invoke the __str__() method, you have to be careful about intermingling Django objects and Django attributes when printing or logging them.
What's the solution? In your Django models, it actually may be useful to force returning the Unicode type in the __str__() method, assuming you also have a __unicode__() method defined. One of the quirks of Python is that if a Unicode type is returned, the __unicode__() method will be attempted to execute. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but by adding this section of code, you can avoid the hazards of intermingling Django objects and attributes:
def __str__(self):
return u'%s object' % self.__class__.__name__
The recommendation is also consistent with this python-dev discussion about how to implement __str__() and __unicode__() methods:
This was added to make the transition to all Unicode in 3k easier:
. __str__() may return a string or Unicode object.
. __unicode__() must return a Unicode object.
There is no restriction on the content of the Unicode string
for __str__().
Another alternative is to prefix your logging statements with u', which will force the Python string interpolation to run __unicode__() instead of str(). But it's easy to forget this prefix, so overriding the Django base model with this __str__() has helped to avoid triggering these UnicodeDecodeException errors for me.
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Tooth wear and culture in the Middle Paleolithic humans from Near East
Archaeology & Palaeoanthropology, University of New England
Friday 22, Park Concourse Add to calendar
New Electron Spin Resonance age estimates indicate that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (AMH) from Near Eastern sites were largely contemporaneous. Different interpretations have been proposed as to whether these two species interact or compete between each other in the Levantine region. In this study tooth wear patterns of Neanderthals and AMH from Middle Paleolithic sites of Israel and Northern Iraq are analyzed, based on the observation of specific occlusal contact areas (para-facets) that have been previously described in the dentition of historic and modern hunter-gatherers. The Occlusal Fingerprint Analysis (OFA) method is applied here to virtually reconstruct the jaw movements responsible for the creation of the occlusal wear areas. The results exclude the possibility that para-facets were created by a normal chewing cycle, suggesting, as seen in a previous study, that the formation of these areas is related to para-masticatory activities. Additionally, the results also indicate strong similarity in tooth wear patterns between Near Eastern Neanderthals and AMH. Because these two groups are geographically close and broadly contemporaneous, and because tooth wear is related to cultural factors, this result is interpreted as evidence of cultural interactions between them. Such a scenario is compatible with the analysis of the Neanderthal genome, where it has been suggested that gene flow occurred between Neanderthals and AMH, probably in the Middle East, before 100,000 years ago.
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How to Copy a List of Files in a Windows Folder Into an Excel List
by C. Taylor
Windows Command Prompt automatically creates file lists that can be imported into Excel.
Hemera Technologies/ Images
Maintaining an Excel spreadsheet of computer files can help you keep track of important business documents or images. Unfortunately, Microsoft Excel doesn't include a one-step method for importing a file list from Windows Explorer, but Windows 7 offers an easy workaround. Using the Command Prompt, you can tell Windows to output a text document containing a directory list. This text document can then be imported into Excel and modified just like any other spreadsheet.
1. Press "Win-E" to open Windows Explorer and locate the folder for which you need a file list.
2. Hold the "Shift" key, right-click the folder and select "Open Command Window Here." This only works with folders, not libraries. Libraries point to a specific folder, so select the folder located under the library icon. If the library points to a drive, right-click the drive letter from the folder tree.
3. Type "dir /b > dirlist.txt" without quotes and press "Enter." This creates a list containing file names only. To include file sizes and dates, type "dir > dirlist.txt" instead. To also include files in sub-directories, type "dir /b /s > dirlist.txt" to create a list of files with the full directory structure name, such as "C:\folder\subdirectory\file.txt."
4. Open Microsoft Excel and press "Ctrl-O" to bring up the Open dialog window.
5. Navigate into the folder containing the files. Click the file type drop-down menu and select "Text Files (*.prn,*.txt,*.cvs)." Double-click "dirlist.txt" to open it.
6. Click "Finish" in the Text Import Wizard window to use the default options and import the directory list into Excel.
• To save the list in Excel format, click "File," then "Save As." Choose "Excel Workbook (*.xlsx)" from the file type list and click "Save."
• To copy the list to another spreadsheet, highlight the list, press "Ctrl-C," click the other spreadsheet location, and press "Ctrl-V."
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• Hemera Technologies/ Images
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Articles on Genocide
Displaying 1 - 20 of 39 articles
Bosnia’s 25-year struggle with transitional justice
Life in limbo: the Rohingya refugees trapped between Myanmar and Bangladesh
The remainsof victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda displayed at Kigali Memorial Center. EPA/Dai Kurokawa
Auschwitz to Rwanda: the link between science, colonialism and genocide
Significant links connect racial science in colonial southern Africa with the holocaust of the European Jews. Colonial racial science also contributed to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the 2016 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. He has drawn flack for seeking a third term. Reuters/Ruben Sprich
Why Kagame’s bid to serve a third term makes sense for Rwanda
Unlike the third-term fever afflicting the Great Lakes region, Rwanda is not mired in corruption and stagnation. Rwandans were fearful and anxious about what might happen after 2017 without Kagame.
Tony Abbott has twice compared Islamic State to the Nazis, but does that aid our understanding of terrorism and what needs to be done to defeat it? AAP/Richard Wainwright
When words fail: comparing Islamic State to the Nazis misses the mark
We need to find ways of speaking about the horrific actions of Islamic State that help, not hinder, understanding of the magnitude of those crimes and what needs to be done to combat them.
There are lessons to be learnt about the ICC from the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed in 1928. It failed to prevent the outbreak of war but brought war criminals to justice later. Reuters
ICC: sad lesson of lofty ideals trumped by reality repeats itself
The ICC has not lived up to its noble intentions of making the world more just. Its failure echoes that of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which set out to banish wars and to settle disputes peacefully.
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Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Crenellated Battlement
The term originated in about the 14th century from the Old French word batailler, "to fortify with batailles" (fixed or movable turrets of defence). The word crenel derives from the ancient French cren (modern French cran), meaning a notch, mortice or other gap cut out often to receive another element or fixing. The modern French word for crenel is creneau, also used to describe a gap of any kind, for example a parking space at the side of the road between two cars, interval between groups of marching troops or a timeslot in a broadcast.
source: wikipedia
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Famous Anarchists and Radicals
Here is a part of the site dedicated to those writers, fighter, martyrs, and countless other individuals who know or knew the cause and supported until their death. Part requiem, part informative, here are short descriptions of fellow anarchists and others a part of revolutionary ideas:
Pierre Joseph Proudhon- the man referred to as the father of modern Anarchism. He believed that through the evolution of people's ethical nature and responsibility that government would become antiquated. "Order of Anarchy"
Mikhail Bakunin- Oh hell yea, now for the great Russian revolutionaire. A repudiator of Marxist theory(which he debates in the book Marxism, Freedom and the State), a conspirator against the Tzar, activist, and sweet ass writer.
Emma Goldman- Wow another Russian anarchist. A true ardent anarchist, feminist, riot inciter(which she was once imprisoned for), and a stong proponent for love without marriage and birth control. Along wiht Alexander Berkman, this dynamic duo sure did do some serious political ass whooping.
Peter Kropotkin- Once an aristocratic prince, Kropotkin soon became one of anarchism's biggest writers and theorists in social change and the better living for all of humanity. He has touched on topics such as morality and ethics, mutual aid (the challenge to social Darwinism), and other social injustices present in an oppressive society.
Errico Malatesta- Another wealty anarchist, he used his wealth in support of his political proclivities and railing against the system. As a writer and a propogandist, he is heavily influenced by Bakunin in the fact that he believes in direct action, land seizure, and general strike. Ass kicking indeed.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Venzetti- The most famous of the Italian Galleani Anarchists. These two immigrants where tried and executed in the infamous South Braintree Mass., case where a paymaster and a guard of a shoe factory were murdered and $15,000 was stolen. The trial was a biased travesty of what justice in America is and now Sacco and Venzetti are martyrs in the name of anarchism.
William Godwin- A clergyman who was the first to use anarchist theories in his writings. An opponent of violence and marriage.
Andrew Berkman: failed at assasinating Andrew Carnegie's second hand man Henry Frick.
Leo Czolgosz: assasinated President William Mckinley. This action epitomized anarchy's misrepresention and the discrepancies in some of Emma Goldman's works.
Gaetano Bresci: assasinated Italy's King Umberto to avenge the deaths of Milan massacre in 1898.
Remember this is anarchy's past, so who will be a part of it's future? Support all of those detained in political oppression. Join up with the new movements such as the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, Black Bloq, etc. Revolt! |
Nicholas II
Pope(c. 990–1061)
Nicholas II was pope of the Holy Roman Empire from 1059 to 1061. His reforms included the official ban on clerical marriage.
Gerard of Burgundy was born in France c. 990–995 and became bishop of Florence in 1045. His election to pope was complicated by a power struggle with Benedict X. As Pope Nicholas II (1059–1061), Gerard reformed the papal election process, banned the sale of religious artifacts, and ended clerical marriage. His alliance with Normans in the south of Italy caused a rift between Rome and Germany.
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CHDs/Genetic Conditions/Related Syndromes
Heart Defects possible in Simpson-Golabi-Behmel Syndrome
What is Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome? Simpson-Golabi-Behmel syndrome is a condition that affects many parts of the body and occurs primarily in males. This condition is classified as an overgrowth syndrome, which means that affected infants are considerably larger than normal at birth (macrosomia) and continue to grow and gain weight at an unusual rate. The otherContinue Reading
Heart Defects Present in Ellis-van Crevald Syndrome
What is Ellis-van Creveld syndrome? Ellis-van Creveld syndrome is an inherited disorder of bone growth that results in very short stature (dwarfism). People with this condition have particularly short forearms and lower legs and a narrow chest with short ribs. Ellis-van Creveld syndrome is also characterized by the presence of extra fingers and toes (polydactyly),Continue Reading
Atrial Septal Defect Present in TARP Syndrome
TARP syndrome is a rare condition affecting males that causes several birth defects. TARP stands for Talipes equinovarus, Atrial septal defect, Robin sequence, and Persistent left superior vena cava. Those with TARP syndrome have clubfoot deformity (talipes equinovarus) and congenital heart defects involving failure of the upper heart chambers to close (atrial septal defect). TheContinue Reading
Heart Defects possible with Peter Plus Syndrome
What is Peters plus syndrome? Peters plus syndrome is an inherited condition that is characterized by eye abnormalities, short stature, developmental delay, an opening in the lip (cleft lip) with or without an opening in the roof of the mouth (cleft palate), and distinctive facial features. The eye problems seen in Peters plus syndrome occurContinue Reading
Heart Defects Present in Kleefstra Syndrome (9q34 deletion)
9q34 deletion syndrome, also known as Kleefstra syndrome, is a rare genetic disorder. Terminal deletions of chromosome 9q34 have been associated with childhood hypotonia, a distinctive facial appearance and developmental disability. The facial features typically described include arched eyebrows, small head circumference, midface hypoplasia, prominent jaw and a pouting lower lip. Individuals with this diseaseContinue Reading
What is ALCAPA and ARCAPA?
To read about Anomalous Coronary Artery (ACA), click here. ALCAPA Anomalous origin of the left coronary artery arising from the pulmonary artery (ALCAPA) is a rare but serious congenital anomaly. It was first described in 1866. The first clinical description in conjunction with autopsy findings was described by Bland and colleagues in 1933, soContinue Reading
Endocardial Cushion Defects
Endocardial cushion defects, more commonly known as atrioventricular (AV) canal or septal defects, include a range of defects characterized by involvement of the atrial septum, the ventricular septum, and one or both of the AV valves. Endocardial cushion defect is a congenital defect present at birth. The severity of the symptom complex and presentation isContinue Reading
What is a Vascular Ring?
A vascular ring is a type of congenital lesion where abnormally located normal vessels may cause compression or obstruction of the esophagus or airway. These arteries may be those carrying blood to the body, to the lungs, or both. They are most easily segregated into three main groups: vascular rings, the innominate compression syndrome, andContinue Reading
Heart Defects Present in Acro-Cardio-Facial Syndrome (ACFS)
Acro-cardio-facial syndrome (ACFS) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by: split-hand/split-foot malformation (SHFM) facial anomalies cleft lip/palate congenital heart defect (CHD) genital anomalies mental retardation Up to now, 9 patients have been described, and most of the reported cases were not surviving the first days or months of age. The spectrum of defects occurring inContinue Reading
Andersen-Tawil Syndrome (form of Long QT Syndrome)
What is Andersen-Tawil syndrome? Anderson-Tawil syndrome is a disorder that causes episodes of muscle weakness (periodic paralysis), changes in heart rhythm (arrhythmia), and developmental abnormalities. The most common changes affecting the heart are ventricular arrhythmia, which is a disruption in the rhythm of the heart’s lower chambers, and long QT syndrome. Long QT syndrome isContinue Reading |
Fowl spirochaetosis, Biology
Fowl spirochaetosis
The causal agent Borrelia anserina is a spiral-shaped organism about 8-30 um in length but commonly 14-15 um long and 0-3 um wide. The organisms are actively motile with serpentile movements. The organisms can be seen by staining with Leishman’s or Giemsa methods or a droplet of blood in dark ground illumination of the microscope. The organism can be grown in developing chicken embryo or a susceptible fowl. There is evidence of existence of different antigenic groups. The organism infects chicks, geese, turkeys, ducks, sparrows and other species of birds.
The organism is transmitted from one bird to another by fowl tick, Argas persicus, pigeon tick and occasionally by red raise and rarely by mosquitoes. The disease in a flock, is introduced by infected poultry brought on the farm or possibly from wild birds. During initial stages of infection a septicaemia develops when large number of spirochaetes are present in peripheral blood and ingested by the vectors.
The incubation period following the tick bite varies from 4 to 10 days.The body temperature rises to 430 - 440 C, and is accompanied by depression, cyanosis of comb and wattles followed by jaundice. The faeces are watery, inconsistent and greenish. The mortality rate may be 100 %. The spleen is enlarged with mottled appearance and areas of necrosis.
Diagnosis and control: The disease can be diagnosed by observing the organisms in blood smears or sections of the spleen, liver and kidneys. Live organisms in blood from diseased birds can be seen under dark ground or phase contrast microscopy.
Treatment: Arsenical preparations have been effective when given promptly. Penicillin is very effective at a dose of 15,000 units for an average sized bird. Eradication of ectoparasites, particularly ticks from poultry houses, and hygienic conditions are essential for the control of the disease.
Vaccines derived from haemolysed blood or tissue from infected birds and killed with formal saline or phenol, or from formalinized chicken embryos are effective for at least 6 months.
Posted Date: 9/17/2012 6:36:45 AM | Location : United States
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Operation Desert Strike
Despite warnings from the United States, Iraq moved 40,000 troops into northern Iraq, which threatened the Kurdish population. In response, the president ordered a strike on military targets posing a threat to coalition aircraft in the no-fly-zone.
On August 31, 1996, elements of the Iraqi Army attacked and captured the PUK-held town of Irbil in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq. This renewed Iraqi aggression, led by a Republican Guard mechanized division with the support of regular army troops, alarmed the United States and coalition forces in the region. Rhetoric from Baghdad threatened GCC partners if they assisted the United States in retaliation, while Iraqi air defense forces launched surface to air missiles against USAF fighter aircraft patrolling the northern and southern "no-fly" zones. In response to the seizure of Irbil, USCENTCOM assessed an increased threat to America's interests and moved quickly to bolster its ability to protect those vital national interests on the Arabian peninsula. In close consultation with the National Command Authority, the Command began to develop appropriate military responses to deter further aggression.
The August attack was a significant escalation of an ongoing struggle between PUK and KDP Kurdish factions for control of the autonomous region. Long oppressed by the Iraqi Ba'ath regime, a million Kurds fled to safe havens in Turkey following Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War. The Kurds' plight led to United Nations resolutions and intensive international calls for humanitarian assistance. The United Nations established distribution centers to provide food, medicine, and humanitarian supplies, even as the Iraqi regime continued to oppress and disenfranchise its northern citizens. American efforts to mediate a political settlement between the Kurdish factions reflect a commitment to Iraqi territorial integrity and continuance as a viable state. Iraq's military intervention violated United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, which prohibits Iraqi repression of disenfranchised Kurds in the north and Marsh Arabs in the south. By mobilizing and deploying heavy forces, the Iraqi government demonstrated both the capability and the intent to use force to advance its own agenda. Choosing to do so just as the UN was prepared to implement UNSCR 986 confirmed Hussein's priorities: control, repression, and readiness to use force.
Saddam's actions confirmed a consistent pattern of callous disregard for suffering of the Iraqi people, and a new willingness to use overwhelming conventional forces to continue their oppression. This willingness increased the threat of aggression against allied forces enforcing United Nations resolutions and international relief workers delivering humanitarian supplies.
To prevent enhancement of offensive capabilities in the south and prepare for potential follow-on operations, the NCA directed an immediate military response. In consultation with its coalition partners, the Command evaluated alternative responses from among those available in the region. Against a requirement to send a clear signal of international condemnation for the latest violation of UN resolutions, the Command planned and executed Operation DESERT STRIKE.
On 03 September 1996, a coordinated cruise missile attack was launched against the Iraqi air defense infrastructure, including surface-to-air missile sites and command and control nodes in southern Iraq. Laboon (DDG 58) and Shiloh (CG 67), on station in the Gulf as part of NAVCENT's Task Force 50, fired 14 of the 27 cruise missiles while Air Force B-52s, escorted by F-14s from Carl Vinson (CVN 70), from Barksdale AFB [Air Force Base] LA staged out of Guam on a 34-hour mission and fired 13 conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs) in the early morning hours of September 4th.
During this mission, the B-52 and CALCM weapon systems demonstrated their capability for rapid en-route retargeting, providing the joint force with additional target coverage and strike flexibility that would have otherwise been unavailable. Two Air Combat Command B-52s flew 14,000 miles -- 34 hours non-stop -- to launch 13 conventional air-launched cruise missiles against targets in Iraq. This longest bombing mission in history demonstrated national resolve and cemented US air superiority in the no-fly zones, by putting weapons on targets. The tanker portion of the operation was absolutely critical. Fourteen tankers -- KC-10s and KC-135s -- supplied 760,000 pounds of fuel for the deploying bombers, and 15 tankers offloaded 1,360,000 pounds of gas for the airstrike. Two bombers and 29 tankers' air refueling made Global Engagement possible. A KC-10 out of Guam lost an engine prior to completing the pre-strike refueling, so another KC-10 offloaded extra fuel and then diverted into U-Taphao. Another KC-10 at Diego Garcia performed a pre-strike refueling on extremely short notice, offloading the extra gas the bombers needed and recovering with minimum fuel into Diego. As soon as they landed, the crew was tapped to do the post-strike refueling. In just one hour, the crew took off again and performed the post-strike refueling.
The following day, a second strike of 17 Tomahawks from destroyers Russell (DDG 59), Hewitt (DD 966), Laboon and nuclear-powered attack submarine Jefferson City (SSN 759) was conducted. Enterprise (CVN 65) departed the Adriatic Sea on order of the National Command Authorities and conducted a high-speed transit through the Suez Canal, arriving in the theater two days later.
These precision weapons minimized the risk of collateral damage and aircrew exposure to the threat posed by Iraqi air defenses. The missiles hit their designated targets, sending a clear signal of American resolve and deterring further Iraqi adventurism. That signal and follow-on deployments of F-117 and F-16C/J aircraft, a heavy brigade task force, and a second aircraft carrier to the region backed up diplomatic efforts to deter further aggression.
Two United States and United Kingdom demarches expanded the southern no-fly zone from the 32nd parallel north to the 33rd parallel, and promised a disproportionate response if Iraqi air defense sites were repaired. The expanded no-fly zone reaches the outskirts of southern Baghdad and forced relocation of all tactical aircraft to more northern basing, thus reducing the air threat to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and to Operation SOUTHERN WATCH aircraft. In the following weeks, the bulk of Iraq's forces stood down and withdrew to garrison.
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Giles Waterfield: The ramshackle origin of museums
From a speech given by the author and curator at a conference to mark the 250th anniversary of the British Museum
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Whether or not the early British Museum was a giant, it was certainly surrounded by pygmies. Since the early 17th century, museums had existed, if not flourished, in London and large provincial cities as well as in private hands. I want to touch on the nature of some of these early museums, and to try to give an impression of the intellectual background that inspired them and that produced an attempt, however limited, to communicate with some sort of a public.
In one important respect these early museums did not at all resemble such institutions as we know them. Fine art, as we would call it, did not enjoy the privileged position it achieved in the 19th century. The assumption prevailed that works of art deserved a place in a museum collection primarily as examples of skilful craftsmanship, rather than objects in their own right. Thus, even in the Tradescant or Ashmolean collection, fine art was in effect restricted to the portraits of the founders; English and foreign men of learning; and recent Kings of England. The primarily historical and loyalist significance of this choice is obvious.
The taxonomical system adopted in the early Tradescant catalogue did not allow a special place for works of art. The handful of paintings, such as a landscape by Nathaniel Bacon, were listed in the 1656 catalogue in the somewhat inglorious category of "Mechanick artificiall Works in Carvings, Turnings, Sowings and Paintings".
The early museums in Britain shared a number of characteristics. They were set up by private individuals or by learned societies. While sometimes open to the general public, such accessibility (as we would now call it) was not a significant feature, unless enforced by financial pressures. It would be inappropriate to categorise these institutions in modern terms: they were not museums with a specific focus such as, say, archaeology or natural history; rather, they aspired to a comprehensive coverage of the productions of art and nature. In many cases it is apparent from contemporary descriptions that the collections were assembled with a moral purpose, to show forth the glory of God. Nothing, in other words, was to be excluded from them, and they merged seamlessly with the libraries that almost invariably formed a part of the holdings.
So what were these museums? The Royal Society, which had existed in unofficial form for some years, was formally set up at Gresham College in the early 1660s. It boasted a "Repository" intended to house instruments used for regular scientific experiments, and to bring together objects intended to create a microcosm of the universe.
Of these early societies, the ancestors of the literary and philosophical institutes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, one remarkable example survives. The Gentlemen's Society of Spalding, in Lincolnshire, began to form around 1710 under the influence of the antiquary Maurice Johnson. One of the prevailing interests of the Society was the study of antiquities and natural history, with a strong local bias.
In so far as their collections were intended to assist in the deciphering of the universe through scientific research rather than ecclesiastical dogma, they were symbols of Enlightenment thinking. Not only were the collections used as tools of research supporting the lectures and experiments conducted on the premises, but their codification in manuscript and, if possible, printed catalogues was regarded as a crucial element of the institution's work. The taxonomical principles on which these catalogues were based were diverse and necessarily experimental, but in their various forms they did give the collections some intellectual coherence.
In the long term, all the more intellectually-based of these museums were in effect failures. With the decline of the intellectual life that engendered them, they ceased to have any validity. They were, however, the forefathers in more than chronology of the British Museum. |
John von Radowitz, Press Association Science CorrespondentAAP
CHEMICALS in green tea and red wine may block the brain damage caused by Alzheimer's disease, an early study suggests.
Scientists targeted a process that allows harmful clumps of protein in the brain to kill neurons.
Using purified extracts of the chemicals EGCG in green tea and resveratrol in red wine, they were able to stop nerve cells from being harmed.
The findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, could pave the way for new drugs to treat Alzheimer's.
Lead scientist Professor Nigel Hooper, from the University of Leeds, says it's an important step in increasing understanding of the cause and progression of the disease.
"It's a misconception that Alzheimer's is a natural part of ageing; it's a disease that we believe can ultimately be cured through finding new opportunities for drug targets like this," he said.
Alzheimer's is characterised by a build-up of amyloid-beta protein in the brain which clumps together to form toxic, sticky balls.
The amyloid balls latch on to molecules called prions on the surface of nerve cells. As a result, the nerve cells start to malfunction and eventually die.
"We wanted to investigate whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors, like the way a baseball fits snugly into its glove," said Dr Jo Rushworth, another member of the Leeds team.
Previous research had shown that red wine and green tea compounds are able to reshape amyloid proteins.
When they were added to amyloid balls in a test tube, the toxic clumps of protein no longer harmed human and animal brain cells.
"We saw that this was because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function," said Prof Hooper.
The next step for the team is to uncover exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction destroys neurons.
Dr Simon Ridley, from the charity Alzheimer's Research UK which helped fund the study, said: "Understanding the causes of Alzheimer's is vital if we are to find a way of stopping the disease in its tracks.
Originally published as Red wine, green tea may fight dementia |
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Redesigning Batteries for Longer Lifespans
Category: Science & Technology
Posted: 04:23PM
As advanced as batteries have become, they are still comprised of three primary components; the anode, cathode, and electrolyte. By changing the composition and designs of these components over the years, batteries have been better at storing and delivering energy. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have recently decided to investigate changing the formula for batteries and what happens if these components interact in new ways.
In a typical battery, the anode and cathode are responsible for specific electrochemical reactions that create an electrical potential, while the electrolyte allows for ions to flow between them, and actually create an electrical current. Normally these roles are restricted to those specific components, but the ORNL researchers have developed a battery in which the electrolyte has two functions. Instead of just transporting ions, it will also behave as a cathode supplement. As the reactions occur and the battery discharges, a lithium fluoride salt is produced that catalyzes the activity of the electrolyte, making it active in the process, instead of just a passive material.
When the researchers tested their concept with a modified lithium carbon fluoride battery, it had 26% greater capacity than its more traditional counterpart can theoretically achieve. Such an increase in capacity could extend the life of batteries by years or decades. For long-life disposable batteries, like those in pacemakers, RFID devices, sensors, and other systems where batteries cannot be easily replaced or recharged, that extra life could be invaluable.
Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Do Not Leave A Traceable Pattern When You Are On The Web
Are you someone who goes on the web a lot? Then there is a good chance that you have left some kind of pattern of some kind. It happens to all of us. Even in your offline life you will leave some kind of pattern for people to follow. For example, the way that you go to work every morning is a pattern that you leave. You most likely wake up at the same time everyday and then leave out the door at the same time as well. Or if you do not go to work and instead you go to school, you will still leave a pattern. Yes, even then you are leaving some kind of pattern for people to follow. And patterns like that both in real life and in the online world can be something that really come back to haunt you.
If you are someone who uses the web but do not understand how the web works exactly, you might be wondering how you can leave a pattern for someone else to follow you. But in reality, it is probably easier to track and follow someone on the web than it is in real life. First of all you have to deal with something that is called an IP address. An IP address is a group of numbers that is the address of your computer when it is on the internet. The IP address is issued to you by your internet provider. There are two types of IP addresses out there. One is called a dynamic IP address. That means that you get a new IP address almost every time you log in to your modem. The other IP address is called a static IP address. This means that your internet provider issues you the same IP address over and over again. It may change every few months. Whenever you go to a website, you are leaving your IP address at the site. So if you go to the wrong website then someone would be able to track you down. That is how people who download illegal files get caught. You can use a service like a proxy but even then you are still leaving an IP address, it is just at the proxy now.
While your IP address is the easier way to track you it is by far not the only way to track you. There are a lot of subtle clues that you leave about yourself on the internet all of the time. For example, your username that you use on the websites that you visit. Do you use the same username all of the time or change it up only slightly? Then that is another way that you can be tracked while on the web. Or the email address that you use while you are on the web. You do not even have to use the email address to sign up for a service. Even if you just use the email address while in conversation on the web it can be used to track you. Even the type of conversation that you have can be used to track you. While this method is a lot harder, if you are constantly talking about places that you live or anything unique about your location, then it does not matter what username you use, this can all be traced.
So the key is that you have to be careful when you are on the web. Even if you cannot see it yourself, the slightest thing that you do can be traced.
photo: *~Dawn~*
About Lee Munson
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September 2014 - Galaxy of the Month
NGC 7339 in Pegasus
NGC7339 - Image Courtesy the Sloan Sky Survey
This image was provided by the Sloan Sky Survey and this finder chart was produced using Megastar 5.
NGC 7332 and NGC 7339 are an isolated bound pair of galaxies about 67 million light years away. NGC 7332 is lenticular galaxy with a boxy nucleus. Lenticular galaxies have a light profile that makes them look like spiral galaxies but they have no gas and new stars. They are usually found in large galaxy clusters where it is believed that the gas is stripped out by ram pressure as the galaxy moves through the intra-cluster medium. It is relatively unusual to see them in isolated situations like this.
NGC 7339 is an edge on spiral that is unusually blue. The pair form number 57 0 in the catalogue of double galaxies by Karachentsev. Although NGC 7332 and 7339 appear to be a dynamically interacting pair there are no signs of tidal distortions in the system so the orbit is currently fairly wide. Deep radio observations of the system also show no evidence of tidal interactions although they have turned up some new dwarf galaxies associated with the pair. They do however show a stream of gas in NGC 73339 which could be the remains of a merger event which could account for the current star formation episode in it. Recent surveys looking for globular clusters suggest that both galaxies have a small number ~175 for NGC 7332 and perhaps 75 for NGC 7339. NGC 7339 was also home to supernova 1989L. Both the galaxies were discovered by William Herschel in 1784. NGC 7332 is catalogued as S0(pec) because of the box like shape of its nucleus. The box could be evidence for a bar in the galaxy. Unusually for an S0 type galaxy NGC 7332 does show evidence for a large amount of ionized gas so it maybe a young version of this type. NGC 7339 is probably an Sbc type spiral but is features are fairly low contrast.
Both these galaxies are relatively bright and should be visible in telescopes of 20cm or above aperture from typical UK skies. The galaxies are an interesting pair because they are at right angles to each other. It should be noted that NGC 7339 is the fainter of the pair whne seen visually. It may be possible with larger telescopes to make out the box like shape. Of the nucleus of NGC 7332. They make a nice pair to warm up with before going are more challenging targets.
Owen Brazell - Galaxy Section Director |
People have a fear of climbing ladders. According to an omnibus Internet study of 1000 adults, climbing 25 feet high on an extension ladder causes more anxiety than cutting with a sharp knife, using a chainsaw, working with electricity, public speaking, asking for a raise, talking to children about human sexuality, or getting pulled over by the police.
So, why does climbing a ladder cause so much anxiety? The truth is that every single time someone climbs a ladder, there is a risk involved. What can be done to help eliminate the risk and help people overcome fear of ladders?
Overcomeovercome fear Fear with Training
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Training is crucial in helping people not only feel comfortable when climbing ladders, but also knowing how to climb them safety. The basics remain the same – maintain three points of contact, stay off the top cap on stepladders, follow the three foot rule with extension ladders, and always make sure your ladder is leaning at the proper angle. By being properly trained on correct ladder use, your employees can be fully prepared for what to keep in mind when climbing ladders. They will also most likely feel more comfortable on the ladders, overcoming their fear.
While you are training employees on ladder use, make sure you let them know they will be held accountable if they do not follow the safety guidelines. Then, keep your word. Make sure you talk to an employee when he or she violated safety guidelines and then take the appropriate disciplinary action.
Practice Makes Perfect
Like most things, the more people climb ladders, the more they will be comfortable on the ladder. This comfort can be good, but it can also be risky because there is a chance they will get sloppier as they get more comfortable. Make sure you continue training as they become more used to using the ladder to make sure they don’t develop bad habits.
Remember, almost all ladder accidents can be prevented. By proper training, enforcement and practice, you can help others be safe on ladders and overcome fear of ladders. |
How can we help?
You can also find more resources in our Help Center.
51 terms
Skeletal System
Skeletal System
bodys framework of bones and their associated cartilage and ligaments
Functions of the Skeletal System
1. Support
2. Protection-surround vital organs (eg. brain, heart and lungs)
3. Levers for movement-muscles attached
4. Mineral Homeostasis-stores and releases minerals as needed (eg. calcium and phosphorus)
5. Blood Cell production-in red marrow
Bone Histology
1. Matrix
2. Fixed Cells
What is bone?
A solid connective tissue
1. 1/3 fibers (organic matrix)-collagen
2. 2/3 ground substance (inorganic matrix)-mineral salts (hydroxyapatite) mainly calaium salts
-hardness depends on amount of mineral salts
-resistance to deformation depends on collagen fibers
deposition of mineral salt crystals in bone
Fixed Cells
1. osteoblasts
2. osteocytes
3. osteoclasts
-for new bone by secreting matrix around themselves
-mature bone cells trapped within lacunae
-maintain daily metabolic processes of bone cells
-produce osteobalsts
-huge cells form fusion of many phagocytic cells
-contain enzymes and acids to digest bone matrix (resorption)
-involved in bone repair and remodelling
-remove Ca+2 from bone when it is needed in blood
-produce acids
What are the two types of bone?
1. Compact
2. Spongy
Compact bone
-bone arranged in cylindrical structures called osteons or
Haversian systems
--very dense and strong, no spaces in between
Structure of an osteon
1. Central (Haversian) canal
2. Lamellae
3. Lacunae
4. Canaliculi
-bone arranged in cylindrical structures
-a.k.a Haversian systems
-the cylinder of bone
-"little splints"
-align along lines of stress to resist bending of bone
-compact bone forms from the shafts of long bones and the
outer shell of all bones
layers of calcified matrix, around central canal
Central (Haversian) Canals
-runs longitudionally thorough the center
-contains blood vessels and nerves supplyinbg the bone
holes between lamellae which contain osteocytes
-tiny tunnels connecting lacunae
-pathways for exchange of nutrients and wastes with blood
-vessels in central canal
Spongy (cancellous) bone
-arrangement in an irregular network of small spicules with
spaces between
-arrangement gives strength but lightness
-red marrow
-found in the ends of long bone and center of other bones
What are spicules?
-composed of layers of matrix with lacunae containing
osteocytes, connected by canaliculi
-nutrients and wastes are exchanged with the red marrow
Red Marrow
-fills spaces between spicules
-site of red blood cell formation (hematopoiesis)
What are the two parts of spongy bone?
1. Periosteum
2. Endosteum
-membrane covering outer surface of bone (except at joints)
-some collagen fibers (Sharpey's fibers) penetrate bone to anchor the periosteum
-rich in sensory nerves which detect pain
1. outer fibrous layer
2. inner cellular layer
Outer fibrous layer
-dense irregular connective tissue
-site of tendon, ligament and joint capsule attachment
Inner Cellular layer
-contains osteoblast cells for growth, remodeling and fracture repair
-thin cellular layer lingin inner surfaces of bone
-contains osteoblasts for remodeling and repair of bone
Blood and Nerve supply of Bone
-has a rich blood supply
-bones are very metabolically active and usually heal rapidly
-veins and nerves accompany arteries
1. Periosteal arteries
2. Nutrient arteries
Periosteal arteries
-many small vessels that penetrate the periosteum and bone matrix through Volkman's canals(perforating canal)
-supply vessels in central canals of compact bone
-there is a rich blood supply
Nutrient arteries
-large vessels that enter bones through large holes (nutrient formina) and supply mainly the marrow of spongy bone
Bone Shapes
1. Long Bones
2. Short Bones
3. Flat Bones
4. Irregular Bones
5. Sesamoid Bones
Long Bones
-greater in length than width
-levers for body motion
-(most bones of limbs and paws)
Structure of Long Bones
1. diaphysis
2. epiphyses
3. metaphyses
-atricular cartilage
-medullary cartilage
-shaft, mainly compact bone
-proximal to distal ends
-mainly spongy bone with an outer shell of compact bone
-spaces filled with red marrow
-narrrow zone between diaphysis and epiphysis
1. epiphyseal plate(growth plate)-in immature bones
-plate of hyaline cartilage at metaphysis
-site where bones grow in length
2. epiphyseal line-in mature bones
-line of bone whre epiphyseal plate has ossified (closed)
Articular cartilage
-hyaline cartilage covering joint surfaces of epiphyses
-reduces friction and absorbs shock at joints
-on the end of bones
Medullary cavity
-(marrow cavity)
-space in central diaphysis which contains yellow (fatty) marrow
Short bones
-nearly equal length and width
-spongy bone except a surface
-(carpals and tarsals of paws)
Flat bones
-2 thin, flat layers of compact bone enclosing spongy bone
-surround and protect organs
-provide large surface area for muscle attachment
-(most skull bones, rib cage, shoulder blades)
Irregular bones
-don't fit into other categories
-complex shapes and variable composition
-(vertebrae, come facial bones)
Sesamoid bones
-shaped like a sesame seed
-develop in tendons
-provide strength to areas of unusual mechanical stress
-(patella is the largest)-in horse hooves
Bone Formation (Ossification)
-process of bone formation
-embryonic "skeleton" is composed of loose fibrous connective tissue membranes and hyaline cartilage whcih serve as a template (model for the skeleton)
-ossification is replacement of these tissues with bone tissue
-(remeber all connective tissues come from embryonic mesoderm)
-don't initally have boneis fetus'
2 Methods of Ossification
1. Intramembranous ossification
2. Endochondrial ossification
Intramembranous ossification
-bone forms within loose fibrous connective tissue membranes
-forms flat bones of skull
-ossification center develops in fibrous membrane
-embryonic mesenchyme cells differentiate into osteoblasts
secrete bone matrix around themselves
-osteocytes become trapped in lacunae
-matrix around adjacent osteocytes fuses to form spicules of spongy bone connective tissue between spicules differentiates into red marrow
-osteoblast cells and connective tissue around spongy bone condense to form periosteum and endosteum
-osteoblasts of periosteum form a thin layer of compact bone on surface of bone
Endochondrial ossification
-bone forms within a hyaline cartilage model
-most bones form this way
1. cartilage model develops
2. cartilage model grows
3. primary ossification center
4. osteoclasts hollow out medullary cavity
5. secondary ossification center
Cartilage Model develops
-embryonic mesenchyme cells cluster in shape of future bone
-differentiate into chondroblasts, which secrete hyaline cartilage matrix
-outer layer of chondroblasts and connective tissue condense to form perichondrium
Cartilage model grows
1. interstitial growth-chondrocytes of model divide and secrete matrix between themselves -model grows in length
2. appositional growth-chondroblasts in perchondrium divide and secrete matrix beneath perichondrium
-model grows in thickness
Primary Ossification center develop
-chondrocytes in center of diaphysis die and are replaced by osteoblasts
-osteoblasts secrete bone matrix, forming spongy bone
-ossification center grows outward towards metaphyses of bone
Osteoclasts hollow out medullary cavity
-remodeling repairs spongy bone of diaphysis with compact bone
Secondary Ossification centers develop
-begin in center of each epiphysis and spread outwards, filling epiphyses with spongy bone
-articular cartilage-hyaline cartilage remains on joint surface
-epiphyseal plate-(growth plate) remaining hyaline cartilage between epiphysis and diaphysis
-weak spot in bone
Bone Growth
-regulated by hormones
1. Growth Hormone (GH)
-from pituitary gland
-promotes both of bone
2. sex steroids (estrogens and androgrens)-promote growth
-anabolic steriods-stimulate tissue growth, including bone
-high levels at maturity eventually close growth plates
-makes bones larger and heavier
-Growth in Length-interstitial growth only at epiphyseal plates
-injury to the plate can cause early closure
-Growth in thickness-appositional growth
-osteoblasts in periosteum divide and secrete matrix beneath periosteum |
Coping After a Traumatic Event
Reviewed Nov 17, 2015
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If you have experienced a traumtic event, it is important to know and believe that recovery is possible. Inititial reactions can range from shock, sadness, anger, or relief to be alive. During this brief video, we will review strategies that will help with recovery.
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Have you, or has someone you care about, survived a traumatic event? If so, you can expect to notice a variety of reactions that should improve with time. In this brief 10 minute video, we review some common reactions, offer strategies to help with recovery, and also describe red flags that might indicate the need for professional help.
Common reactions
Everyone has stress, occasional conflicts and even less frequent major crises. But then some people may experience an extreme event such as a hurricane, flooding, a tornado, a serious automobile accident, or an act of violence or abuse. If you have been touched personally by trauma, you are likely to experience a normal progression of stress reactions and can expect to feel exhausted mentally and physically. After surviving a disaster or traumatic event, people may feel dazed or numb. They may also feel sad, helpless or anxious. In spite of the tragedy, some people just feel happy to be alive.
Most people will also find that they can't stop thinking about what happened. These feelings and memories aren't a sign of personal weakness. Most trauma survivors have stress reactions for days or weeks. But some people have long-term problems, including
• posttraumatic stress disorder
• depression
• self-blame
• suicidal thoughts
• alcohol or drug abuse
Although recognizing stress symptoms and putting into practice a few stress-reduction strategies may help lift the exhaustion you feel, you need to accept that what you are feeling is not only normal, but also protective. Your body puts itself into the flight or fight response when it encounters a dangerous situation. Chemicals then surge through your body so you can be prepared to protect yourself. A side effect of keeping you safe is that you will also feel very tired afterwards. This is normal.
Remember that most trauma survivors (including veterans, children and disaster rescue or relief workers) experience common stress reactions. Understanding what is happening when you or someone you know reacts to a traumatic event will help you be less fearful and better able to handle yourself.
You may have strong feelings right away, or you may not notice a change until after the crisis is over. Feelings such as stress and anxiety can affect your daily routines and relationships. It may take significant time to recover. Give yourself time to allow healing.
Recovery is an ongoing gradual process. It doesn't happen through suddenly being "cured," and it doesn't mean that you will forget what happened. But, most people will recover from trauma naturally over time, while others may need professional help.
Recovering from a disaster occurs in phases over days, weeks, and months. Soon after being uprooted by a disaster, you can start the recovery process. There are steps you can take soon after the tragedy to improve the mental and emotional strength of your family. The following steps will help you to begin to retake control over your life:
1. Rebuild physical strength and health. Once you and your loved ones are in a safe and secure place, whether a shelter, a new house or apartment, or a place with relatives or friends, make sure to tend to their immediate medical needs, if any. Be sure everyone has enough to eat and drink to regain their physical strength. Make sure everyone gets restful sleep in as private a space as possible. Rebuilding physical strength is a good first step to calm shattered emotions.
2. Restore daily activities. Restoring daily routines helps build a sense of being home mentally and emotionally, even in the absence of a physical home. Simple routines that your family normally does together, such as family walks, watching television, and bedtime stories, help pull the pieces of daily life back together even in a new place. Restoring daily activities rebuilds the normal sense of morning, afternoon, evening and night.
3. Provide comfort. Family members are better able to deal with the stress of relocation when they are comfortable and informed. Comfort can be increased by:
• providing your family with information about other family, friends, and news of home
• expressing affection for family members, in the ways your family normally shows affection
• discussing, when ready, the emotions associated with the disaster and relocation, such as feelings of loss, missing home, and worry about family members, friends, and pets.
Rebuilding family life
After the initial emergency has passed and the shock and confusion from disaster relocation have subsided, the physical rebuilding and long-term emotional recovery phase begins. This longer recovery phase has two steps:
• Assess all physical and emotional losses the family has experienced. This inventory can help you identify practical actions to take in rebuilding the physical losses the family has experienced.
• Develop an emotional understanding of the disaster experience and your relocation situation to help rebuild family life. Working through emotions takes time. There is no set timeframe or stages for it.
Resolving emotions is a natural healing process that relies on talking to friends about your feelings, mental sorting of emotions, and receiving practical and emotional help from family, friends, your place of worship, or other organized support groups in the community.
Emotional healing
Your personal support groups can help you process your emotions and understand your experiences. Emotional processing involves experiencing the emotions associated with the disaster and figuring out what the disaster meant to your life. One way that many people work through their emotions is by “telling the story” of what happened.
Many people who have lived through a disaster have an overwhelming urge to tell the story over and over again. By sharing stories, you and those around you can sort out the sequence of events associated with the disaster, which at first may be a confused jumble. By telling the story, you can get input from others about what they saw and begin to put meaning into the experience.
Generally, over time, as you heal emotionally, the disaster story will pull together into an organized story that will have vivid details, emotions, and reflections about lessons learned during the experience. With emotional healing, thoughts and dreams about the disaster will be less painful. You will have gained some emotional distance from the events of the disaster. You will also notice a significant change when you start using past tense language when talking about the event. You start to describe the experience as something that happened in the past and that you have worked through the challenges surrounding the event. This honors the significant work and progress you have made and is an important indicator of progress in the healing process. How long this process takes depends on what happened during the disaster and your own unique mental and emotional makeup. You will always associate some pain with the event, but it will not be so overwhelming after the passage of time allows for emotional healing.
Helping children handle disaster-related anxiety
Pay special attention to children who have experienced a disaster or accident. Children sense the anxiety and tension in adults around them. And, like adults, children experience the same feelings of helplessness and lack of control that disaster-related stress can bring about.
Unlike adults, however, children have little experience to help them place their current situation into perspective. Each child responds differently to disasters, depending on his understanding and maturity. A traumatic event can create anxiety in children of all ages because they may interpret the disaster as a personal danger to themselves and those they care about. It is important to provide the child with hope that things will improve. This is important, because again they likely have never been through a trauma such as this and probably have no knowledge of people’s ability to persevere and overcome significant challenges related to a traumatic event.
Whatever the child’s age or relationship to the damage caused by disaster, it’s important that you be open about the consequences for your family, and that you encourage him to talk about it. Some general tips for helping a child include:
• Offer comfort and frequent reassurance that he is safe; make sure he understands it.
• Be honest and open about the disaster while still protecting the child from graphic images or information that may be too overwhelming for him to understand.
• Encourage children to express their feelings through talking, drawing or playing.
• Try to maintain your daily routines as much as possible.
When professional help is needed
If you've survived a disaster, talk to your family and friends when you are ready. Most people recover from trauma naturally over time. If your emotional reactions are getting in the way of your relationships, work, or other important activities, talk to a counselor or your doctor. Treatments are available.
Many people do recover without professional help. They rely on their personal support systems. But others may be overwhelmed by emotions and may need help. Here are some signs that professional help may be necessary:
• the story is too painful to tell
• the person creates a wall of silence around the event for a long time
• the person cannot express or experience his feelings
• dreams and thoughts of the experience continue to evoke very painful emotions that do not go away
• the person’s behavior dramatically changes
• the person has thoughts of hurting himself or others
If these signs are present, an appointment with a mental health professional should be arranged. A mental health professional can help with the healing process.
Anniversary of the event
As the anniversary of a disaster or traumatic event approaches, many survivors (although not all) report a return of restlessness and fear. Psychological literature calls it the anniversary reaction and defines it as an individual's response to unresolved grief resulting from significant losses. The anniversary reaction can involve several days or even weeks of anxiety, anger, grief and sadness, nightmares, flashbacks, depression or fear.
It is normal to have strong reactions to a disaster or traumatic event and its devastation many months later. Recovery from a disaster or traumatic event takes time, and it requires rebuilding on many levels—physically, emotionally and spiritually.
On a more positive note, the anniversary of a disaster or traumatic event also can provide an opportunity for emotional healing. Individuals can make significant progress in working through the natural grieving process by recognizing, acknowledging and paying attention to the feelings and issues that surface during their anniversary reaction. These feelings and issues can help individuals develop perspective on the event and figure out where it fits in their hearts, minds and lives.
Please remember, you and your family have access to trained counselors and professionals who will provide confidential assistance. Help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Please contact a representative at the toll-free number on this Web site for additional assistance.
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Contract & Tort Def Chapter #10
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The flashcards below were created by user CaptainSeb on FreezingBlue Flashcards.
1. absolute privilege
2. abuse of process
• malicious use of the court process for an improper purpose
• assault : the intentional creation of the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact
3. bailee
the party who holds or stores goods for another
4. bailment
5. bailor
the party who has handed over goods for storage to another
6. battery
any non-consensual physical contact or touching by the defendant to the plaintiff’s physical person
7. chattels
possessions other than land
8. conspiracy
an agreement between or among parties to deceive, mislead, or defraud others of their legal rights, or to gain an unfair advantage
9. conversion
10. defamation
intentional harm to a person’s reputation in the community
11. detinue
wrongful possession of a chattel that belongs to another
12. fair comment
a defence against defamation used by individuals and organizations whose mandate is the dissemination of information to the public
13. false imprisonment
confinement within a fixed boundary of a person against that person’s will
14. fraud
1. intentional misrepresentation that causes another to suffer damages; also called deceit 2. false or misleading allegations for the purpose of inducing another to part with something valuable or to give up some legal right 3. a tort and/or crime based on deception for the purpose of profit
15. fraudulent concealment
16. fraudulent misrepresentation
1. a false statement that the maker knows is false, made to induce a party to enter into a contract 2. intentional fraud that causes another to enter into a contract
17. inducing breach of contract
ntentional incitement to terminate a contract prematurely
18. intellectual property
19. intentional infliction of mental suffering
an act or (false or misleading) statement that is calculated to cause mental anguish, results in a disturbance in the plaintiff’s health, and is capable of being diagnosed or confirmed by a physician
20. intentional tort
21. libel
making a defamatory statement by publishing or broadcasting it.
22. malicious prosecution
23. nominal damages
ow amount of token damages awarded to acknowledge the wrong done to the plaintiff
24. psychological confinement
barrier-free confinement of a person against his or her will
25. qualified privilege
a defence against defamation for statements made while fulfilling a duty
26. slander
making an oral defamatory statement
27. slander of goods
false or misleading statements intended to decrease a competitor’s market share
28. slander of title
false or misleading statements intended to deter another from entering into a transaction.
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Contract & Tort Def Chapter #10
2014-03-18 13:08:34
Def Chapter 10
Def Chapter #10
Contract & Tort Def Chapter #10
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uphill battle
Definition of uphill battle
1. : a very difficult struggle Starting her own business has proven to be an uphill battle.
Word by Word Definitions
1. : upward on a hill or incline
: against difficulties
1. : rising ground : ascent
1. : situated on elevated ground
: going up : ascending
: being the higher one or part especially of a set
1. : battalion
: a combat between two persons
: a general encounter between armies, ships of war, or aircraft
1. : to engage in combat between individuals or armed forces : to engage in battle : fight
: to contend with full strength, vigor, skill, or resources : struggle
: to fight or struggle against
1. : to fortify with battlements
Seen and Heard
What made you want to look up uphill battle? Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible).
feeling or affected by lethargy
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Understanding mechanisms that prevent cancer will create novel therapies against cancer
Tumor suppressor genes: Novel targets to suppress cancer
Our research is centered on exploring the function of tumor suppressor genes utilising single cell genomics and genetic animal models. We have developed unique models to study the function of the Retinoblastoma/E2F signaling pathway, which is altered in almost every type of cancer in animals and humans. A major obstacle in creating novel anticancer drugs is that many tumor suppressor genes are mutated and therefore cannot be reactivated to block cancer. However we discovered novel tumor suppressor genes, the atypical E2Fs, that are very rarely mutated in cancer and therefore represent a novel and promising therapeutic target that can be activated in cancer cells to inhibit cell divisions. To develop novel strategies it is essential to understand how these tumor suppressor genes function and how they are regulated. This knowledge will allow us to develop novel therapy strategies by hyper-activating these tumor suppressor genes in cancer cells.
Polyploid cells in liver tissue
Liver cell polyploidy illustrated by bi-nucleation or increased nuclear size.
Tumor suppression through whole genome duplication
The addition of one or more complete sets of chromosomes, also called polyploidy, is one of the most dramatic changes known to occur in the genome. Polyploidy is a prominent feature of cancer, but it is unknown whether this phenomenon contributes to cancer formation. Since polyploid cells have multiple copies of genes, we hypothesise that polyploid cells are better protected against cancer inducing mutations. We are developing novel approaches to determine whether polyploidy in the liver has a tumor suppressor function. Functional insights concerning the impact of polyploidy on cancer formation will lead to development of novel therapeutic strategies. |
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The beginning of the new millennium was marked by the announcement that the vast majority of the human genome had been sequenced. This milestone in the exploration of the human genome was preceded by numerous conceptual and technologic advances. They include, among others, the elucidation of the DNA double-helix structure, the discovery of restriction enzymes and the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the development and automatization of DNA sequencing, and the generation of genetic and physical maps by the Human Genome Project (HGP). The consequences of this wealth of knowledge for the practice of medicine are profound. First, the most significant impact of genetics has been to enhance our understanding of disease etiology and pathogenesis. However, genetics is playing an increasingly prominent role in the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of disease (Chap. 63). Genetic approaches have proven invaluable for the detection of infectious pathogens and are used clinically to identify agents that are difficult to culture such as mycobacteria, viruses, and parasites. In many cases, molecular genetics has improved the feasibility and accuracy of diagnostic testing and is beginning to open new avenues for therapy, including gene and cellular therapy (Chaps. 68 and 67). Molecular genetics has significantly changed the treatment of human disease. Peptide hormones, growth factors, cytokines, and vaccines can now be produced in large amounts using recombinant DNA technology. Targeted modifications of these peptides provide the practitioner with improved therapeutic tools, as illustrated by genetically modified insulin analogues with more favorable kinetics. There is hope that a better understanding of the genetic basis of human disease will also have an increasing impact on disease prevention.
Genetics has traditionally been viewed through the window of relatively rare single-gene diseases. Taken together, these disorders account for ∼10% of pediatric admissions and childhood mortality. It is, however, increasingly apparent that virtually every medical condition has a genetic component. As is often evident from a patient's family history, many common disorders such as hypertension, heart disease, asthma, diabetes mellitus, and mental illnesses are significantly influenced by the genetic background. These polygenic or multifactorial (complex) disorders involve the contributions of many different genes, as well as environmental factors that can modify disease risk (Chap. 63). Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have elucidated numerous disease-associated loci and are providing novel insights into the allelic architecture of complex traits. These studies have been facilitated by the availability of comprehensive catalogues of human single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) haplotypes generated through the HapMap Project.
Cancer has a genetic basis since it results from acquired somatic mutations in genes controlling growth, apoptosis, and cellular differentiation (Chap. 83). In addition, the development of many cancers is associated with a hereditary predisposition. The prevalence of genetic diseases, combined with their severity and chronic nature, imposes great financial, social, and emotional burdens on society.
Genetics has historically focused predominantly on chromosomal and metabolic disorders, reflecting the long-standing availability of techniques to diagnose ...
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Is Too Much B-12 Bad?
Vitamin B-12 is a water-soluble vitamin that has a couple of interesting characteristics that separate it from other vitamins of this type. First, unlike most water-soluble vitamins, the liver actually stores vitamin B-12. Second, a protein called intrinsic factor is necessary for the absorption of vitamin B-12. Most people can stomach quite a lot of this vitamin without problems.
What Vitamin B-12 Is For
Your body uses vitamin B-12 for synthesizing DNA, maintaining the nervous system and forming red blood cells. It is also important for metabolism and neurological function.
How Much You Need
Most adults need 2.4 micrograms per day. Women who are pregnant and nursing need 2.6 micrograms per day and 2.8 micrograms per day, respectively.
Foods With Vitamin B-12
Vitamin B-12 mainly comes from animal sources: chicken, fish, dairy products, eggs, meat and seafood. Many breakfast cereals are also fortified with it. You can take supplements of vitamin B-12, B-complex vitamins or multivitamins if you don't eat enough of these foods to meet your needs. Vegans in particular need to be careful about getting enough B-12.
Who Shouldn't Take B-12 Supplements
There's no official maximum dosage of vitamin B-12 because there's no evidence of problems with high intakes of this vitamin for healthy people. If you have Leber's disease, vitamin B-12 can cause your optic nerve to atrophy quickly. It may also increase the rate at which your arteries become blocked again after angioplasty. Some people experience diarrhea, itching or rashes when they take vitamin B-12 supplements. Pregnant women should stick to the recommended dietary allowances.
Absorbing B-12
If you're over 50, you may need to get your daily dosage through supplements or fortified foods because the vitamin can become more difficult to absorb as you age. Taking B-12 in large amounts doesn't always help you absorb more -- intrinsic factor, the stomach protein that binds with vitamin B-12 so you can absorb it, gets overloaded after a certain point. This may explain the lack of adverse effects at higher doses.
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I am a bit confused regarding convex and affine set. When they mention set, does it mean the set consisting of all the points belonging to the line or shape respectively?
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Yes. A line or a shape is typically defined as a set of points, namely the set of points that you think of as "belonging to" or "lying on" the shape.
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Let $G$ is a simple undirected graph. Suppose $G$ has two subgraphs $G_1$ and $G_2$, such that $E(G_1)\cap E(G_2) =\emptyset$ ($E(G_i)$, stand for the set of edges of $G_i$). Then is it true that genus of $G$ is greater than or equal to the sum of genera of $G_1$ and $G_2$?
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No. The two subgraphs can share the surface more efficiently than that. Take a graph $G$ with genus $g\ge 1$ and duplicate each edge. If you don't like double edges, subdivide them with new vertices. Then you can divide the new graph into two edge-disjoint subgraphs homeomorphic to $G$, therefore each having genus $g$, yet you can still draw the whole graph on the same surface.
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Thank you so much – bor Feb 5 '14 at 5:28
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MUSSOLINI WAS A SOCIALIST Swastika Benito Mussolini & socialist symbolism
Benito Mussolini, fascists, Edward Bellamy, Francis Bellamy, Swastika, Pledge of Allegiance
For a long list of articles exposing the pledge see
Hear expose the pledge on the radio program called "The Grassy Knoll" with Vyzygoth
Play debunking the pledge on the radio with Tom Smith of "The Edge"
Enjoy trouncing a talk host on nationwide radio (with no commercials) with shockwave flash
Support the "MUSSOLINI EDUCATION PROJECT" & fund education about the socialist and his ilk.
Mussolini was a socialist. Benito Mussolini was the leader of the Socialist Party of Italy. Like many modern media Mussolinis, he was a socialist and a journalist.
Mussolini borrowed from American Socialists Edward Bellamy and Francis Bellamy (author of the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892) as shown in this photograph of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mussolini borrowed much of his symbolism from American Socialists.
Also see
In 1908 worked in the city of Trento, which was ethnically Italian but then under the control of Austria-Hungary. He did office work for the local socialist party and edited its newspaper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore ("The Future of the Worker"). He made contact with the socialist journalist Cesare Battisti, and agreed to write for and edit Battisti's newspaper Il Popolo ("The People") in addition to the work Mussolini did for the Socialist Party.
Between 1912 and 1914, Mussolini was the editor of the Socialist Party newspaper, "L'Avanti" (Avanti means "in front", "advance" or "forward" or even "come in"). In 1914 he started his own socialist newspaper "Il Popolo d'Italia" ("The people of Italy").
He was considered by socialists to be a great writer about socialism. He was a staunch proponent of revolutionary rather than reformist socialism, and actually received Lenin's endorsement and support for expelling reformists from the Socialist Party. He was in fact first dubbed "Il Duce" (the Leader) when he was a member of Italy's (Marxist) Socialist Party.
When Mussolini differed with some Socialists it was over participation in World War I, not over abstract theory, or economic doctrine. Many socialists were neutralists in the First World War, whereas Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war.
During World War I, Mussolini publicized what he admitted was his new brand of socialism.
The f-word and the n-word are used to cover-up the history of the deadly dogma of socialism. The USA's Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was written by a self-proclaimed "National Socialist" and "Christian Socialist" in the USA and the early pledge used a straight-arm salute for the U.S. flag, and it was the origin of the salute used by the National Socialist German Workers' Party for its swastika flag, as discovered by the etymologist Dr. Rex Curry (author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets").
The swastika itself, although an ancient symbol, was sometimes used to represent overlapping S-letters for "socialism" under the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
American socialists bear some blame for altering the notorious symbol used as overlapping S-letters for "socialism" under the National Socialist German Workers Party. The swastika symbol was used by the Theosophical Society (from 1875) during the time when the Bellamys, Freemasons and the Theosophical Society worked together to promote socialism.
On October 28, 1922, Mussolini led his "March on Rome", which brought him to power for 23 years.
In late 1937, Mussolini continued to work with other socialists, including a notorious member of the Wholecost (of which the Holocaust was a part): the National Socialist German Workers Party (20 million killed); the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (60 million killed); the Peoples' Republic of China (50 million killed). Mussolini visited Germany in 1937 and pledged himself to support the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In 1939, the National Socialist German Workers' Party joined as allies with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to invade Poland in a pact to divide up Europe, spreading WWII.
In 1938, Mussolini introduced his ‘reform of customs.’” Hand-shaking was suddenly banned as unhygienic: a salute was to be used instead - the right forearm raised vertically. He imposed a new march on the Italian Army which was simply the goose-step of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. According to the book “A Concise History of Italy” by Christopher Duggan, these reforms were introduced mainly to underline ideological kinship with the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and to impress it’s leader.
The so-called “Roman salute” (saluto romano) is as much of a fiction as is the so-called “Roman step” (passo romano) as is the idea that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party emulated Mussolini and not vice versa.
All of the above contributed to the Roman salute myth (the myth that the stiff-arm salute was an ancient Roman salute), debunked by the Dr. Curry.
The most notorious instance of Italy imitating the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was in the racist laws imposed in November 1938.
Before and during it all (from 1892), children in the U.S. attended government-schools where racism and segregation were mandated by law, and where they performed a straight-armed salute to the U.S. flag, and were forced to robotically chant a pledge written by a national socialist who wanted to produce an “industrial army” for totalitarian socialism as popularized worldwide in a best-selling novel.
Rome, Italy, February 23, 1941
Follow me now please:
First, in war potentiality Germany not only did not decrease after seventeen months of war, but increased in gigantic proportions. From the standpoint of human losses, they have been at a minimum if compared with the masses in action. Losses of materials were more than compensated for by immense booty and were absolutely insignificant.
The unity of political and military command in the hands of the Fuehrer-he who once was simple soldier and volunteer Adolf Hitler-gives to the operations an enthusiastic, irresistible, revolutionary and therefore National Socialist rhythm that begins with the highest generals and goes to the humblest soldiers. Britain will realize that once again.
The Mystery of Fascism by David Ramsay Steele
Soon after he arrived in Switzerland in 1902, 18 years old and looking for work, Benito Mussolini was starving and penniless. All he had in his pockets was a cheap nickel medallion of Karl Marx.
Following a spell of vagrancy, Mussolini found a job as a bricklayer and union organizer in the city of Lausanne. Quickly achieving fame as an agitator among the Italian migratory laborers, he was referred to by a local Italian-language newspaper as "the great duce [leader] of the Italian socialists." He read voraciously, learned several foreign languages, (2) and sat in on Pareto's lectures at the university.
The great duce's fame was so far purely parochial. Upon his return to Italy, young Benito was an undistinguished member of the Socialist Party. He began to edit his own little paper, La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle), ferociously anti-capitalist, anti-militarist, and anti-Catholic. He took seriously Marx's dictum that the working class has no country, and vigorously opposed the Italian military intervention in Libya. Jailed several times for involvement in strikes and anti-war protests, he became something of a leftist hero. Before turning 30, Mussolini was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party, and made editor of its daily paper, Avanti! The paper's circulation and Mussolini's personal popularity grew by leaps and bounds.
Mussolini's election to the Executive was part of the capture of control of the Socialist Party by the hard-line Marxist left, with the expulsion from the Party of those deputies (members of parliament) considered too conciliatory to the bourgeoisie. The shift in Socialist Party control was greeted with delight by Lenin and other revolutionaries throughout the world.
From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.
In 1913, while still editor of Avanti!, he began to publish and edit his own journal, Utopia, a forum for controversial discussion among leftwing socialists. Like many such socialist journals founded in hope, it aimed to create a highly-educated cadre of revolutionaries, purged of dogmatic illusions, ready to seize the moment. Two of those who collaborated with Mussolini on Utopia would go on to help found the Italian Communist Party and one to help found the German Communist Party. (3) Others, with Mussolini, would found the Fascist movement.
The First World War began in August 1914 without Italian involvement. Should Italy join Britain and France against Germany and Austria, or stay out of the war? (4) All the top leaders and intellectuals of the Socialist Party, Mussolini among them, were opposed to Italian participation.
In October and November 1914, Mussolini switched to a pro-war position. He resigned as editor of Avanti!, joined with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist Party, and launched a new pro-war socialist paper, Il Popolo d'Italia (People of Italy). (5) To the Socialist Party leadership, this was a great betrayal, a sell-out to the whoremasters of the bourgeoisie, and Mussolini was expelled from the Party. It was as scandalous as though, 50 years later, Guevara had announced that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against North Vietnamese aggression.
Italy entered the war in May 1915, and Mussolini enlisted. In 1917 he was seriously wounded and hospitalized, emerging from the war the most popular of the pro-war socialists, a leader without a movement. Post-war Italy was hag-ridden by civil strife and political violence. Sensing a revolutionary situation in the wake of Russia's Bolshevik coup, the left organized strikes, factory occupations, riots, and political killings. Socialists often beat up and sometimes killed soldiers returning home, just because they had fought in the war. Assaulting political opponents and wrecking their property became an everyday occurrence.
Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement (6) in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists. (7) They took with them some non-socialist nationalists and futurists, and recruited heavily among soldiers returning from the war, so that the bulk of rank-and-file Fascists had no leftwing background. The Fascists adopted the black shirts (8) of the anarchists and Giovinezza (Youth), the song of the front-line soldiers.
Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures, and for more than a year the new movement was not notably more violent than other socialist groupings. (9) However, Fascists came into conflict with Socialist Party members and in 1920 formed a militia, the squadre (squads). Including many patriotic veterans, the squads were more efficient at arson and terror tactics than the violently disposed but bumbling Marxists, and often had the tacit support of the police and army. By 1921 Fascists had the upper hand in physical combat with their rivals of the left.
The democratic and liberal elements in Fascist preaching rapidly diminished and in 1922 Mussolini declared that "The world is turning to the right." The Socialists, who controlled the unions, called a general strike. Marching into some of the major cities, blackshirt squads quickly and forcibly suppressed the strike, and most Italians heaved a sigh of relief. This gave the blackshirts the idea of marching on Rome to seize power. As they publicly gathered for the great march, the government decided to avert possible civil war by bringing Mussolini into office; the King "begged" Mussolini to become Prime Minister, with emergency powers. Instead of a desperate uprising, the March on Rome was the triumphant celebration of a legal transfer of authority.
The youngest prime minister in Italian history, Mussolini was an adroit and indefatigable fixer, a formidable wheeler and dealer in a constitutional monarchy which did not become an outright and permanent dictatorship until December 1925, and even then retained elements of unstable pluralism requiring fancy footwork. He became world-renowned as a political miracle worker. Mussolini made the trains run on time, closed down the Mafia, drained the Pontine marshes, and solved the tricky Roman Question, finally settling the political status of the Pope.
Cole Porter -- sang Mussolini's praises
Mussolini was showered with accolades from sundry quarters. Winston Churchill called him "the greatest living legislator." Cole Porter gave him a terrific plug in a hit song. Sigmund Freud sent him an autographed copy of one of his books, inscribed to "the Hero of Culture." The more taciturn Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his pageants.
The rest of il Duce's career is now more familiar. He conquered Ethiopia, made a Pact of Steel with Germany, introduced anti-Jewish measures in 1938, (11) came into the war as Hitler's very junior partner, tried to strike out on his own by invading the Balkans, had to be bailed out by Hitler, was driven back by the Allies, and then deposed by the Great Council, rescued from imprisonment by SS troops in one of the most brilliant commando operations of the war, installed as head of a new "Italian Social Republic," and killed by Communist partisans in April 1945.
Given what most people today think they know about Mussolini, this bare recital of facts above is a mystery story.
© Libertarian Alliance 2003
to learn more visit
BENITO MUSSOLINI The Pledge of Allegiance & socialism, segregation and racism
The government in the United States was using the fasces symbol before it was adopted by Mussolini when he was a well-known socialist writer and leader. In 1915, fasces appeared on an Indian head gold coin in the talons of an eagle. In 1916, fasces appeared on the Mercury dime. It was propaganda to con Americans into another one of the many stupid wars that the USA's government either started or joined: WWI (the war to make the world safe for democracy, har har). That propaganda supplemented flag waving, the Pledge of Allegiance (with its stiff-armed salute) and similar silliness.
During WWI, Mussolini was a well-known socialist leader and writer. Mussolini also wanted Italians to join the USA and the allies in World war I against the Austro/German forces.
Mussolini mimicked military socialism in the USA as touted by Francis Bellamy (author of the "Pledge of Allegiance") and Edward Bellamy (author of "Looking Backward").
Edward Bellamy's book was an international bestseller translated into every major language, including Italian.
The fasces symbol appears in Congress
It is used in other government seals and symbols
The fasces is on the seal of the Rome Academy where Francis Bellamy (1855-1932) attended school.
BENITO MUSSOLINI FASCISM Swastika, Francis Bellamy, Pledge of Allegiance, Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, Holocaust, Inquisition
Swastika Swastika
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The court case of Frank Herbert Wonschik v. U.S., argued that the jury selection process was impermissibly tainted by the trial judge's request that all potential jurors stand and recite the pledge of allegiance prior to jury selection. Furthermore, that bias also transgressed the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
All in favor of a pledge raise your right hand...
You can own the historic collectible out-of-print book "Twenty-Three Words" by Margarette S. Miller for only $100. It is an eye-popping biography of Francis Bellamy, author of the pledge of allegiance. The book is in mint condition, never used. This may be the only opportunity to obtain this mind-boggling book Just use the donation button below at left to purchase the book and communicate with this website at lawyer AT |
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In Java when casting from an Object to other types, why does the second line produce a warning related to the cast, but the first one doesn't?
void a(Object o) {
Integer i = (Integer) o;
List<Integer> list = (List<Integer>) o;
/*Type safety: Unchecked cast from Object to List<Integer>*/
share|improve this question
The second line produces a warning because only generics generate such a warning. The first contains no generic, hence no warning. – Hot Licks Jul 15 '14 at 12:17
up vote 21 down vote accepted
It's because the object won't really be checked for being a List<Integer> at execution time due to type erasure. It'll really just be casting it to List. For example:
Object o = strings;
// Warning, but will succeeed at execution time
List<Integer> integers = (List<Integer>) o;
Integer i = integers.get(0); // Bang!
See Angelika Langer's Java Generics FAQ for more info, particularly the type erasure section.
share|improve this answer
For clarity, let me slightly rewrite the examples...
I would say, the cruxial difference between:
void a(Object o) {
Integer i = (Integer) o;
void a(Object o) {
is that, given that there is a type-error, the first cast will always immediately throw a RuntimeException (specifically, a ClassCastException) when executed.
While the second one might not -- as long as the input parameter o is any kind of List<?>, execution will just proceed, in spite of an incorrect cast.
Whether the code will somewhere later throw an exception or not, depends upon what you do with the list.
But regardless, an Exception might not be thrown at the line where the cast was made, but somewhere else (which might be a difficult bug to trace down) or not at all.
That's what I understand, is the reason the compiler-designers considered a warning appropriate in the second case only.
share|improve this answer
Excellent explanation. – Trilarion Jun 4 '13 at 20:51
The first will not always throw a CastClassException. The incoming object could very well be an Integer. The first line MIGHT throw an exception, just as the second might if o is not a List. – Hot Licks Jul 15 '14 at 12:16
@Hot Licks : yeah, that's why I wrote "given that there is a type-error" above -- I even put in bold ;) – Rop Jul 23 '14 at 8:42
Jon's answer is the right one, but occasionally you can't get around that warning (like when you're working with a legacy API). In those cases you can suppress the warning like so:
List<Integer> list = (List<Integer>) someApiThatReturnsNonGenericList();
share|improve this answer
Your Answer
|
An author of "Thought," Harold Cruse
Harold Cruse
Wed, 1916-03-08
*Harold Cruse was born on this date in 1916. He was an African American author and intellectual.
Harold Wright Cruse was from Petersburg, Va., and was taken to New York by his father, who had divorced his mother. He was determined to be a writer, but he also developed a lifelong appreciation for the arts through an aunt who took him to Black vaudeville shows on the weekends. As a teenager, he did technical work at the YMCA Theater in Harlem. After service in the Army during World War II, he attended the George Washington Carver School. It was at this Harlem institution run by the poet Gwendolyn Bennett that he heard civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois lecture. He regarded the school as "the Communist Party's cultural base in Harlem."
He wrote briefly for the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker and failed as a playwright. He visited Cuba in 1960 as part of a delegation of Black intellectuals; wrote for newspapers and magazines; and taught Black history for Harlem’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Cruse saw himself as a dissident who offered political critiques along artistic lines. He used writing to explore issues of social justice and equality; relationships between Blacks and Jews (he resented the idea that a great bond existed between the groups); and Black literature that appealed to mass, white audiences. He considered it farcical that Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun" would be considered a realistic portrait of working-class Chicago life.
He criticized notable figures of all races, from the Gershwins for "stealing" Harlem jazz to Black scholar Cornel West, whose fondness for quoting European philosophers annoyed him. A New Yorker reviewer wrote that Cruses book "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual," published in 1967, "will infuriate almost everyone." Viewed by some as a brilliant rant and others as engaging but flawed, the book established the author as a leading personality among Black thinkers of the day. William Jelani Cobb, an assistant history professor at Spelman College who edited "The Essential Harold Cruse," wrote that next to "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth," Mr. Cruse's book was "required reading among Black Powerites."
Cruse held an uncertain view of capitalism and its economic influence over the working class and the media. But he also believed that pragmatism was more influential in contemporary life than the social and racial utopias promoted by American Marxists and Communists. Fascinated by the intersection of the arts and social change, he slammed white pop and jazz musicians and composers who "achieved status and recognition in the 1920s for music that they literally stole outright from Harlem nightclubs." He called for Black performers and technicians to boycott any future production of the Gershwin folk opera "Porgy and Bess," which he considered "a symbol of that deeply ingrained American cultural paternalism practiced on Negroes ever since the first Southern white man blacked his face."
Neither did he feel the Harlem Renaissance was a success. It was integrationist in nature, he said, and did not meet his standards for addressing Black identity. Because of the book's notoriety, Cruse was invited to lecture at the University of Michigan in 1968. Within a decade, he had risen to full professor of history reportedly one of the first Blacks without a college degree to receive tenure at a major university. In 1970, he helped found the university's Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. He retired in the mid-1980s as professor emeritus of history and African American studies.
After retiring from Michigan, he wrote "Plural but Equal" (1987), a book that was damning of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. "As it was implemented in the South," he wrote, "the Brown decision eliminated black teachers, black principals, black administrators, a whole generation of experienced administrative public school personnel made superfluous by integration." He concluded that "the progress of racial integration as public policy can be seen as a process that has left the majority of the black population stranded and stalled at the edges of power while the inner sanctums were protected from change."
Harold Cruse, 89 died on March 25, 2005 at an assisted living facility in Ann Arbor, Mich. He had congestive heart failure. Survivors include his companion of 36 years, Mara Julius of Ann Arbor, and two half-sisters.
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Print 46 comment(s) - last by Chocobollz.. on Dec 2 at 1:43 AM
Researchers hope to improve the therapy so it can be safe for human use
Harvard Medical School researchers have found a way to reverse the aging process in mice, and are now looking to do the same for humans.
Ronald DePinho, leader of the study and a scientist at Harvard Medical School, along with a group of Harvard researchers, have regenerated the bodies of elderly mice turning them into healthy, rejuvenated animals again.
The aging process is not completely understood at this point, but what researchers do know is that free radicals, which are highly reactive particles created naturally within the body, damage cells which helps cause the aging process. Other known causes are ultraviolet light, smoking and other environmental factors.
But now, DePinho and his fellow researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered that an anti-aging therapy called telomere shortening has the potential to eliminate age-related issues like dementia and heart disease by rejuvenating old, worn out organs.
The body typically contains cells that have 23 pairs of chromosomes, and at the end of each chromosome is a "protective cap" called a telomere. Telomeres are cut shorter every time a cell divides, causing the telomere to eventually stop working, fall into a suspended state called "senescence" or die. This process wears out cells and contributes to the aging process.
To counter this process, DePinho and his team of researchers genetically manipulated mice, eliminating the enzyme telomerase within them. Telomerase is an enzyme that prevents telomeres from getting shorter. In lab tests, these mice aged prematurely and experienced tell-tale signs of growing older, such as loss of smell, infertility, smaller brain size, and damaged organs such as the intestines. But when given injections to reactivate telomerase, the signs of aging were reversed and tissues that were previously destroyed had been repaired.
"What we saw in these animals was not a slowing down or stabilization of the aging process. We saw a dramatic reversal - and that was unexpected," said DePinho. "This could lead to strategies that enhance the regenerative potential of organs as individuals age and so increase their quality of life. Whether it serves to increase longevity is a question we are not yet in a position to answer."
DePinho noted that these severely aged mice showed signs of considerable restoration after only one month of treatment. Among the several restored organs in the body was the brain, which showed growth of new neurons.
While this therapy is ideal for mice, it will be challenging to translate this type of treatment to humans because slowing the aging process this way could increase the risk of cancer in humans. Mice have the ability to create telomerase throughout the span of their lives, but telomerase eventually discontinues in humans in order to stop cells from overpopulating and possibly turning into cancerous cells. The constant production of telomerase in mice kept all of the Harvard mice from developing cancer after completing treatment.
DePinho said that increasing the levels of telomerase in humans could possibly slow the aging process the same way it did in mice, but the heightened risk of cancer makes this therapy much too chancy for people yet. But he also pointed out that the treatment could be safe if it was administered periodically to young people who do not have living cancer cells
"The goal for human tissue 'rejuvenation' would be to remove senescent cells, or else compensate for the deleterious effects they have on tissues and organs," said David Kipling, a researcher at Cardiff University who studies aging. "Although this is a fascinating study, it must be remembered that mice are not little men, particularly with regard to their telomeres, and it remains unclear whether a similar telomerase reactivation in adult humans would lead to the removal of senescent cells."
DePinho and his fellow researchers a Harvard hope to continue working on this therapy in order to make it accessible to humans without causing severe side effects, such as cancer. If an appropriate therapy was created for humans, it could prolong the quality of life for elderly people and eliminate health problems that come with age such as stroke and dementia.
"They key question is what might this mean for human therapies against age-related diseases?" said Tom Kirkwood, director of the Institute for Aging and Health at Newcastle University. "While there is some evidence that telomere erosion contributes to age-associated human pathology, it is surely not the only, or even dominant cause as it appears to be in mice engineered to lack telomerase. Furthermore, there is the ever-present anxiety that telomerase reactivation is a hallmark of most human cancers."
This study was published in Nature on November 28.
Comments Threshold
By wordsworm on 11/29/2010 10:50:41 AM , Rating: 4
I have often thought it futile to even dare to believe that one day science might find its way of reversing the effects of ageing.
I cannot imagine how my perspective on life would change.
The ancient wise have often said that immortality was a kind of curse. Mortality forces us to make hasty decisions. If we are immortal, what is a hundred or so years? No longer would we so much as have to choose one or two paths in life: but rather choose the order in which to execute them.
On the other hand, it would make 'until death do us part' a lot more sinister. "Will you love me forever?" "Let me sleep on it!" "Praying for the end of time so I can end my time with you!" Geeze... no, no thanks.
RE: Immortality
By Gzus666 on 11/29/2010 11:05:21 AM , Rating: 4
It doesn't make you immortal, don't be foolish. All it does is stop the decay of DNA on a split. You can still die from the millions of natural causes out there.
If anything, it will likely be a Logan's Run scenario, you just live better while you are alive.
RE: Immortality
By wordsworm on 11/29/2010 7:56:55 PM , Rating: 3
If by natural causes you mean a car hitting you, then yes I understand it won't save you from that. However, it does say that it would help save you from age related illness. That is a huge effect. Essentially, it means immortality for as long as you're not murdered, bombed, or otherwise made dead.
RE: Immortality
By delphinus100 on 11/29/2010 8:17:16 PM , Rating: 4
I'm all for this, but agree that it's merely one less thing that can kill you...
I don't think an auto accident counts as a 'natural' death, but people die through accidents and mayhem (I've known several) already. That won't change very much. (Well...except accidents involving slow reaction times, or other age-related causes.) Death still remains statistically inevitable,* but not biologically, and so, the timing becomes less certain.
I'll take it.
(* I've often phrased it to friends; "If I have to go, I want it to be something like being on an exploding starship, 400 years from now, and not withering away in a nursing home, 40 years from now...")
RE: Immortality
By wordsworm on 11/30/2010 8:33:16 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah, but that 'one thing' is the 'one thing' that gets everyone if nothing else does. Get rid of that 'one thing' and... wow, it's one hell of the right step towards immortality. imo, It's good enough to call it that.
RE: Immortality
By Da W on 12/1/2010 9:01:37 AM , Rating: 2
Eventually the whole galaxy is gonna be swallowed by the massive black hole at its center, it would think this will be the ultimate form of death.
RE: Immortality
By wordsworm on 12/2/2010 12:12:31 AM , Rating: 2
If I live to see it, that would be awesome. Hell, I'd be plenty happy just to watch our star go supernova in five or so billion years.
RE: Immortality
By aegisofrime on 11/29/2010 11:05:59 AM , Rating: 5
On the other hand, science fiction often portrays Humans as being very ambitious and aggressive due to our short lifespans, compared to whatever long-lived aliens there are in that universe. I do think that immortality will probably be a boon. When we die, a world of experience and knowledge dies along with us. With immortality perhaps we will have more time to put all those to good use.
RE: Immortality
By Kurz on 11/29/2010 11:59:47 AM , Rating: 2
Honestly Agressiveness and abitiousness has little to do with the fear of death and more our genetic wiring in the first place.
If someone is Abitious/Agressive It doesn't matter what age or point in their life they are in they'll be those things.
(Mass effect series brought that same view point)
RE: Immortality
By Iketh on 12/1/2010 4:22:52 PM , Rating: 2
I always think of space travel with immortality. All the arguments say light-speed or greater is impossible and this is what limits us from exploring the universe.
With immortality, we'll have all the time in the world...
RE: Immortality
By corduroygt on 11/29/2010 11:21:55 AM , Rating: 5
The problem with immortality is that there can only be one.
RE: Immortality
By thrust2night on 11/29/2010 10:03:01 PM , Rating: 2
The sensation you feel is the Quickening.
RE: Immortality
By killerclick on 11/29/2010 11:27:31 AM , Rating: 2
Life won't change too much. People will just get used to longer (indefinite) lifespans as most people don't spend their time dwelling on aging and dying anyway.
Many people are worried about overpopulation but I'm not and for two reasons:
1. population growth is slowly stabilizing all around the world;
2. human history up to this point has shown that people create resources more than they consume resources. The standard of living was steadily improving with population growth for the last several centuries. There is five times more people on Earth now than two hundred years ago and the average person today has much more resources at their disposal. We are ingenious critters and we can easily grow to 20 billion even with current technology, never mind seaborne solar powered vertical farms with desalination facilities.
RE: Immortality
By gamerk2 on 11/29/2010 12:53:10 PM , Rating: 3
You, my friend,don't quite understand cause and effect. We're already stretching resources to the breaking point as it is, and you think we can grow to 4x our number?
RE: Immortality
By killerclick on 11/29/2010 1:12:03 PM , Rating: 1
That's a fallacy. We're nowhere near breaking point when resources are concerned. There's never been more humans on the planet and the standard of living has never been higher. Sure there are oscillations in energy and food prices but those are economic and political issues that do not affect the overall trend.
RE: Immortality
By Dr of crap on 11/29/10, Rating: 0
RE: Immortality
By killerclick on 11/29/2010 3:17:50 PM , Rating: 1
RE: Immortality
By Flail on 11/29/2010 5:39:19 PM , Rating: 2
I loooooooooooove me some genocide.
herp derp.
RE: Immortality
By Chocobollz on 12/2/2010 1:28:02 AM , Rating: 2
Nope, that's not a fallacy, that's what I called it "thinking". Obviously, you forgot about the diminishing return effect, eg. adding more cores to a CPU will indeed push the performance up, but there'll be a limit, so too human population. You accelerate the growth and you'll hit the limit faster. The amount of works done are also not going up in proportional with the amount of people, eg. 1 people can finish the work in 1 hour, 2 people in 45 minutes, and so on. But the amount of resources needed always going in proportional, if not higher. So in effect, more people means less effective population.
You're also forgetting about all of the negative side-effects, eg. more poverty, etc. Just because you live in a peaceful neighborhood and have a high standard of living, doesn't mean it is on another side of the world. It's already very hard to live for example, in Africa, and what do you expect if you increase their population by 4 times? Yep, they'll start to migrate to another place. Let's hope your place isn't the one they're thinking of.
Oh, and the best thing is, 4x more peoples means 4x times more criminals too. And I haven't even mention about terrorists. Do you really want that many nuts? LOL
RE: Immortality
By MCKENZIE1130 on 11/29/2010 8:03:50 PM , Rating: 1
RE: Immortality
By goku on 11/29/2010 8:44:17 PM , Rating: 2
I thought the reason people split up is because of aging.. That there is a disconnect and one gets "tired" or "isn't in the mood" any more while the other is. Or even worse, one is aging badly and the spouse cant stand to look at them or deal with them because one of the major reasons they're with that other spouse is because of the looks looks they had and little else.
RE: Immortality
By JediJeb on 12/1/2010 11:40:05 AM , Rating: 2
That definitely wouldn't explain why many couples split after two years of marriage while in their twenties. Most couples that split up are because they jumped in to quickly without getting to know each other well enough first.
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Jesus, King of Edessa
(Jesus was a king of Edessa, in northern Syria)
by Ralph Ellis
This will be a challenging book for many readers, not simply because of the sometimes complex evidence that will be explored, but also because this book really does overturn all our preconceived ideas about the New Testament and the history it was trying to tell.
Readers of Ralph's previous works will understand that Saul (St Paul) was actually Josephus Flavius, the 1st century Jewish historian. This was proposed some 15 years ago in Jesus, Last of the Pharaohs, but since there was so much opposition to this amalgamation of characters this claim was eventually re-explored and proven many years later in the book King Jesus. But this radical conflation of characters is not merely an interesting aside, it is central to understanding who Jesus really was; for perhaps the most important result of this new identification was the troubling fact that all of the gospel accounts actually occurred in the AD 50s and 60s - some 20 or 30 years later than the orthodox chronology would suggest. This dramatic reevaluation of biblical chronology has been vigorously challenged, by a diverse array of both orthodox and freethinking critics, but time after time the ancient texts have backed up this claim - including the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian legend. When writing the history of Joseph of Arimathaea, the author(s) of this vast Arthurian tome came across an insurmountable chronological problem, for Joseph also needed to be active during the siege of Jerusalem, and so the laughable literary solution to this conundrum was to make Joseph go to sleep for three days and yet wake up forty years later. Such are the many problems that the orthodox biblical chronology imposes on the true history of this region.
Then we had the illumination provided by the books Cleopatra to Christ and King Jesus, which proposed that Jesus was a descendent of Cleopatra of Egypt. More radically, it would appear that he was a direct descendent of Queen Thea Muse Ourania, who had been given to King Phraates IV of Parthia (Persia) as a diplomatic bride by Emperor Octavian. But Queen Ourania was exiled from Parthia in AD 4 and made her way with 200 courtiers and 600 cavalry to Syria. And they did so just as the Star Prophesy gained popularity in Rome - the prophesy that claimed a new king would be born under an eastern star, an eastern monarch who would rule the whole Empire. So in AD 4 we do indeed have a royal family who were on a journey and living in a state of poverty, perhaps in a stable, whose new infant son was born under the Eastern Star and would have been visited by the Magi. Remember that the Magi were the Parthian priesthood and king-makers, and so they would only be interested in an infant who had an element of Parthian royal blood. And when tracking the history of that same infant within the many chronicles of Saul-Josephus, it was apparent that he grew up to become Jesus of Gamala, who is also called King Izas of the Adiabene. And so we at last knew who Jesus was - he was Jesus-Izas, a minor prince of a land called Adiabene.
Cleopatra Thea Muse
Fig 1.
Busts of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt and Queen Ourania of Parthia.
Note the similarity between these queens, which is not so surprising if they were mother and daughter.
However, although these identifications were hugely radical and thought-provoking, eliciting a great deal of debate in conferences and within the blogsphere, there was nothing tangible to really challenge the traditionalist believer here, because you could not put a historical finger on any of these characters. Jesus of Gamala and King Izas had no city, no palace, no mosaic images, no records, and not even a contemporary coin to their name. And where was this mythical land called Adiabene? It certainly did not sound like the location in Iraq, to which it was ascribed. Thus Jesus of Gamala and King Izas were merely phantoms of literature from the not entirely reliable quicksilver-quill of Saul-Josephus, and as such they could be dismissed by the Christian faithful as literary apparitions created by Saul-Josephus for his own nefarious purposes.
However, Jesus, King of Edessa, Ralph's new book, is a radically different prospect for both the theist and the secular rationalist alike, and so readers will have to brace themselves for the secrets that lie within the many pages of this new book. Just imagine being able to visit the city that Jesus governed; to stand on his citadel; to look at contemporary images of Jesus himself and of his direct descendants. Impossible? Not at all. One just needs to have the key to unlock this historical vista, and that key was provided for us many centuries ago by an unknown author who wrote the haunting hymn 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel'. This hymn calls Jesus 'Emmanuel', a little-used name for Jesus that is only mentioned once within the gospel accounts, in Matthew 1:23.
The Emmanuel key
But why did Jesus have a name that he never used? A name that was shoehorned into the gospel accounts in a most unsatisfactory manner? Was this simply a scribal error or oversight, or was this a deliberate ploy - a secret code or key that would conceal the true identity of Jesus from all but the truly enlightened and initiated? That, is the central mystery that we need to explore and explain. But that key would not have been of any great use without the lubricant provided by the mournful melodies of Enya, who brought this key to life. Thus in the introduction to this book, it is Enya who provides us with the beauty and wonder that this enigmatic key deserves.
Vid 1.
Enya Video - 'O Come, O come, Emmanuel'. The key to the historical Jesus.
But if the hymn 'Emmanuel' was the key to unlock the secrets of the gospels, then the new chronology that the previous books in this series provided was the locking mechanism itself - for there is absolutely no point in having a key if one is trying to unbolt the wrong lock. Readers could use the 'Emmanuel key' for an entire lifetime on the classical AD 30s date for the gospels, and find absolutely nothing. It is only when we try to rotate this key in the AD 60s lock that the mechanism will slide open, and the new golden-rayed vista of the historical Jesus-Emmanuel will become apparent. And so the identification of Jesus in the historical record that will take place in this new book is utterly dependent on this late AD 60s date for the gospel events, that has been painstakingly explored and explained in the previous books in this great series.
King Abgar of Edessa
So who was Jesus? Well, without giving too much away, and so detracting from the exciting historical treasure-hunt in the new book, perhaps we can explore and explain who this Jesus character really was. In short, the previous books in this series were perfectly correct, and so this new book represents a rather satisfying confirmation that all of the previous research was based upon solid foundations. So yes, Jesus was indeed descended from Queen Thea Muse Ourania; and this Egypto-Parthian queen did indeed get exiled from Parthia in AD 4; and her husband-son was indeed the semi-mythical monarch called King Monobazus-Izas of Adiabene.
The crucial difference, however, is the new evidence that the lands of Adiabene were not in Iraq, where Saul-Josephus appeared to be pointing. In fact, Saul-Josephus was being ingeniously duplicitous here, as he was in all his other works, in concealing the true location for his semi-mythical land called Adiabene. In reality Saul-Josephus' character called King Monobazus-Izas of Adiabene was a delightful hypocorism or nickname for King Abgarus of Edessa. And we know the conflation between these two kings is correct, because the Syriac historians say that Queen Helena, the wife of King Monobazus-Izas, married King Abgarus of Edessa. This does mean, of course, that the semi-mythical kingdom commonly known as Adiabene was actually the Osrhoene, the real kingdom of the kings of Edessa.
Edessa, citadel
Fig 2.
The once wealthy and influential city of Edessa, looking from the citadel above the city.
Abgar who? - readers might exclaim. Precisely. Readers are probably unaware, but King Abgarus of Edessa was a central character within 1st century Syrio-Judaean history and within the biblical accounts, and so they must ask themselves why they have never heard of this king or this city. Why is this so? Because both Saul-Josephus and the Catholic Church did not want anyone to know anything about King Abgar, and so he has been deleted from history. Saul-Josephus, for instance, writes an entire history of 1st century Judaeo-Syria, but never once mentions King Abgar or the powerful and influential city of Edessa - a city that became the first and the greatest center of early Nazarene Christianity.
But how can this be? It is inconceivable that Saul-Josephus did not know of Abgar and the exploits of his famous wife and sons, and their many connections to the biblical story, so how it is possible that he does not mention them? Well he does mention them, on numerous occasions, but he calls this Edessan monarch King Monobazus-Izas of Adiabene. Why? Because the true history of King Abgar was deeply troubling for the new fairy-story that Saul-Josephus was peddling to the gullible faithful: the disingenuous and mendacious fable that we now call the New Testament.
Edessan king
Fig 3.
An image of a son of King Abgar, based upon numismatic and sculptural artifacts.
This is exactly what this prince looked like, and how he dressed. This, therefore, is an image of the biblical Jesus.
Crown of Thorns
And how do we know that these Edessan monarchs were connected with the biblical family and with Jesus himself? In fact, readers of this new book will find that the evidence is both comprehensive and overwhelming, for once we start making this comparison a veritable Niagara of information pours forth from that region to confirm this connection. Ralph had no idea, before starting this investigation, how prolific and authoritative the Armenian and Syriac Christian chroniclers were. Forget the PC claims that Islam maintained the enlightenment through the Dark Ages, in reality the science, astronomy and philosophy of Greece was maintained by the Syriac intellectuals who lived as dhimmi serfs under their Muslim overlords. And so this identification for Jesus is not merely an interesting possibility, this will be an incontrovertible proof that Jesus was a son of King Abgar - a prince of Edessa. Indeed, the biblical Jesus and this prince-king of Edessa even share the same name.
But this radical new identification gives us so much more information about the biblical Jesus, including contemporary coins and even a contemporary statue that show exactly what he looked like. And one of the interesting aspects of this new pictorial evidence, is the astonishing fact that the Edessan monarchs always wore a ceremonial Crown of Thorns.
Thus the famous crucifixion scene for Jesus was not a simple mockery of a carpenter who claimed to be a king, it was actually a mockery of an Edessan monarch who had lost a battle with Rome. And to emphasize who was right and who was wrong in this dispute, the Romans dressed Jesus up as a defeated Edessan monarch, complete with his rather peculiar-looking Crown of Thorns - a crown that is central to the true theology and beliefs of this Edesso-biblical family, and is intimately linked to the Scottish Stone of Scone. This is why this crown was being denigrated in this fashion, it was not simply because it looked strange, it was because it was symbolic of an ancient belief system that had emerged from Egypt thousands of years ago and had matured in Greece for hundreds more years. This was a creed that was envied and feared in equal measure, and has left its mark on lands as remote as Ireland and Scotland.
Abgar coin
Fig 4.
The King of Edessa wearing his plaited Crown of Thorns,
just as Mk 15:17 and Joh 19:2 describe.
As we can see, the gospels were not wrong in what they recorded. In fact, the revised history of this region demonstrates that they are almost entirely correct - it is simply our perception of these events that is wrong. In reality, all of the gospel events happened in the turbulent AD 60s, and not during the comparative tranquil of the AD 30s. More importantly, Jesus was not a pauper-carpenter he was a king, for that is what the titles 'christ' and 'messiah' mean: they refer to an anointed king of Israel, which is why this great leader was called the King of the Jews. In reality, Jesus was an Edessan prince who was taking advantage of turmoil within the Roman Empire, to advance his claim to rule the world.
The Star Prophesy
In AD 65 Nero had kicked his wife Poppaea to death, and so from that time on he was a dead man walking and everyone knew it; and so many influential and powerful Romans began jostling for power and for the Throne of Rome. One of those contenders for the imperial throne was Jesus-Izas, the prince of Edessa. How do we know this? Because the great oracle that was being spread in the corridors of power in Rome at that time was the Star Prophesy, which foretold that a star from the east would become the Emperor of Rome. The Roman chroniclers report this oracle rather more soberly, and the following is a conflation of the reports by Suetonius and Tacitus.
In most (Jews) there was a firm persuasion, that in the ancient records of their priests was contained a prediction of how at this very time the East was to grow powerful, and rulers coming from Judaea were to acquire a universal empire. This prediction referred to a Roman Emperor, as events showed, but the Jews applying it to themselves broke out into rebellion. (Tacitus, The Histories, 5:13) (Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Vespasian IV)
The rebellion mentioned here is the great Jewish Revolt of the late AD 60s, the revolt that was led by both Jesus of Gamala and by King Izas of Adiabene-Edessa (who were, in reality, the same person). And the 'universal empire' that this quote refers to, is the vast pan-national empire that Jesus wanted to establish. Remember that this princely Jesus-Izas was directly related to the royal lines of Egypt, Rome and Parthia, and could potentially have united the entire known world into one vast empire. And who would be the leader of this great empire? Well, in Judaic traditions this same prophesy was known as the Star Prophesy of the East; but who was born under the Eastern Star at this very time? The gospels say of these same events:
There came Magi from Parthia to Jerusalem, saying: 'Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.' Math 2:1-2
The unmistakable conclusion to this ground-breaking book will be that Jesus was a king of Edessa in the AD 60s, who very nearly became the emperor of Rome.
Roman propaganda
But this historical truth undermines everything the Church has been trying to peddle over the last 2,000 years, about their pauper prince of peace. In reality, Jesus-Izas was was warrior prince of great wealth and even greater ambitions. And so the New Testament's distorted version of Judaean history was not simply a parody of the true history of this region, devised for literary amusement, it was also Roman propaganda. Rome was exasperated with Judaeo-Nazarene agitation in its eastern provinces, and having comprehensively wiped Judaea off the map it decided to give the surviving populations in that region a political double-punch - courtesy of Emperor Vespasian's quicksilver-quilled wordsmith, Saul-Josephus (the biblical Saul, or St Paul).
In a triumph of mendacity over honesty, Saul-Josephus produced the Jewish War; a secular history of Judaea which basically said that Rome was grievously provoked and was therefore just in destroying Judaea. But there were also the divisive creeds of Orthodox and Nazarene Judaism to tame and quell. Thus Saul-Josephus also wrote and edited a religio-spiritual history of 1st century Judaea, which eventually became Judaism Lite or Simple Judaism - a new Rome-friendly version of Judaism that any Roman Gentile could join, which is now known as Christianity. And who could Saul-Josephus employ as the hero figure of Judaism Lite? Well, this just had to be the infamous hero-villain of the Jewish Revolt, who we know from the historical record was called King Jesus-Izas and who we now know was an ambitious king of Edessa.
But to counter any further thoughts of revolution, Saul-Josephus ensured that this spiritual hero-villain had been deliberately detached from his homeland and emasculated from his imperious role. The true history of a warrior king had become a fallacious cult of a prince of peace, and Emperor Vespasian must have been very pleased with the successful propaganda that Saul-Josephus had so expertly crafted.
Edessa jacket
Fig 5.
The cover image for Jesus, King of Edessa.
This is an image of the biblical Jesus, taken from contemporary coins and a contemporary statue, with Jesus wearing his ceremonial Crown of Thorns.
Book: Jesus, King of Edessa
By: Ralph Ellis
Content: 560 pages, colour images
World release: Mar 2013 - on iPad, Nook and Kindle |
Fifty years after American planes first sprayed Vietnam's thick jungles with Agent Orange to destroy enemy cover, the United States began for the first time cleaning up dioxin left from the chemical defoliant.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held Thursday at a former U.S. air base in Danang.
Dioxin, a chemical linked to cancer, birth defects and other disabilities, has seeped into Vietnam's soils and watersheds, creating a war legacy that remains a thorny issue between the former foes nearly four decades after the Vietnam War ended.
Washington has been slow to respond. Since 2007 it has given about $60 million for environmental restoration and social services in Vietnam, but this is its first direct involvement in dioxin cleanup. |
Troop Increases and the Irony of Afghanistan
• Kit Gallant High school French teacher in Jackson, Mississippi
In 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that "our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history." But what exactly did Niebuhr mean by "irony" and to what end did he use the term?
"If strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it," there is irony, according to Niebuhr. In his seminal work The Irony of American History, Niebuhr argued that the "whole meaning" of international politics could be ascertained only with the help of a hefty dose of irony. In some respects, the content of his analysis now feels dated. For example, Niebuhr argued that the success of American capitalism was due in large part to the "recognition of American capitalists (what French capitalists, for instance, have not learned) that high wages for workers make mass production efficiency possible." Overall, however, Niebuhr's analytical framework of irony feels as insightful and fresh as ever.
In today's geopolitical landscape, nowhere does irony seem more brutally apparent than in Afghanistan. Can we safely say that it is ironic for the United States, slowly coming to accept its imperial role in the world, to insist that military victory is possible in the graveyard of empires? Is that really any different than strength becoming weakness because of the vanity strength may incite?
Today, the ratio of Allied to Taliban soldiers stands at 12:1. A recent report by the Associated Press noted that since many of those Allied forces are recently trained Afghan security forces compared to the more experienced Taliban, the true military ratio stands closer to 5:1 - still a significant numerical disparity which does not even begin to account for the United States' technological superiority. Yet these advantages seem to be less important than those possessed by the Taliban; so much so that General McChrystal has said that barring a significant troop increase, the war in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure."
The Taliban are certainly a formidable adversary, and the US military under General McChrystal is certainly beginning to make some appropriate changes (we now use such metrics as the frequency of local cooperation with allied and Afghan forces and the growth of Afghanistan's legitimate economy to measure the success of the counter-insurgency, rather than the infamous "insurgent body count"), but is it not ludicrous to imagine that adding soldiers is the appropriate method for achieving our (vague) goals, given that our problems clearly don't stem from a military inferiority? Is it not ironic that because the United States refuses to acknowledge the limitations of its military, the military's capabilities stand poised to become even more limited?
At its essence, our troubling situation in Afghanistan stems precisely from this irony. If we cannot see the conflict in Afghanistan for what it is, a political struggle, then we may find ourselves handed a military defeat. If the conflict were purely a military matter of numbers (and technology), would the military situation not appear less grave? Or, if numbers don't make as much of a military difference as we thought, why aren't we considering new military strategies that don't hinge on numerical superiority? And do our Generals consider the great extent to which additional forces may engender proportionately greater bitterness among the Afghan population, who want nothing more than for their thirty years' war to end? It seems highly probable that foreign troop increases will only lend weight to the growing notion among Afghans that the Taliban are essentially winning. Such an impression would be dangerously potent propaganda for the Taliban's own "hearts and minds" campaign directed at the Afghan people.
If past failures go unappreciated, if might becomes weakness, and if weakness begets strength among our enemies, a troop increase in Afghanistan would assuredly be the acme of irony in international politics. It is time to turn out attentions away from military matters and toward political ones: if the United States cannot beat the cabal of hateful fanatics known as the Taliban politically then we are in the midst of a crisis in our fundamental ideological concepts. I sincerely doubt that, if we move swiftly, such a crisis will come to pass. But if we continue to linger any longer over a misconceived political debate regarding troop increases, the current irony of Afghanistan may well morph into the tragedy of defeat. |
I am going to tell you how to grow apple trees from seed. This is a lot more complicated than just throwing a few seeds in the ground, but with my help I can show you how.
Step 1: Materials needed
You will need:
An apple
Paper towel
plastic bag
Later On:
Grafting tape or Cling film
Grafting Wax or Masking tape
Step 2: Getting the seeds
Now, Carefully cut down the middle of an apple and take out the seeds. You may need a few apples always remember on average only 30% of your seeds will germinate.
Step 3: Getting the seeds to germinate
Now we need to get our or paper towel and wrap our seeds in them. Wet the paper towel and put it in the plastic bag. Make sure the plastic bag is sealed tight, and put it in the fridge. Your seeds should take about a month to germinate but check every few weeks and wet again if dry. Your seeds will start to have little white sprouts coming out of them soon enough thats when you know there ready for planting.
Step 4: Planting seeds
Once the seeds have germinated just drop them into any pots about 1 - 2" deep and cover in good compost. Then just watch them grow.
Step 5: The most important step: Grafting
This step is vital or you apple trees will not produce any apples.
First wait until your apple trees are about 30-60 cm high.(Like in picture)
Now there are many different methods of grafting apple trees but the one I use and find most helpful is the "Whip and Tongue" graft.
Use pictures to help with the graft. Pictures used on random pieces of wood for an example.
Firstly you get a piece of wood (Scion wood) from the variety of apple you want.
Then you cut down at an angle on wood.
Now make an identical cut on the apple tree.
Then cut downwards on the sliced wood. Do this on both tree and scion wood.
Then push together and wrap with cling film and then masking tape.
Step 6: Watch for results some will be unsuccessful.
Watch closely for results if you graft is growing leaves then it is successful if it isn't it probably isn't successful, After 1-3 months take off the grafting tape.
Step 7: Watch your lovely apple tree grow.
Thanks for reading my instructable.
<p>Can you please let me know followings things?</p><p>1. Temperature </p><p>2. Soil Type</p><p>3. Which kind of fertilizer can we use to. </p><p>Thanks.</p>
I didnt have to do all this fancy stuff in order to get the sproutings. Just go to your nearest walmart or garden atore and get some fertiized soil and a pot, moiaten the soil and take an apple, cut it in half, ge two seeds and pace them together ( you may also do this with two different kinds of apples its called a hybrid) if you place them sde by side they reproduce and that will give you a bettwr chance of having fruit on your tree. Any way , plant your seeds and just water it once a week or make sure tue soil is moist by sticking your finger close to the side of the plant and go down into the soil. Thata really all you need to do not any of this fancy stuff. Good luck guys
My apple sproutlings
My daughter threw a seed in my pot with my red lion and i didnt onow until it sprouted so i transplanted tht sprout when it got a bit bigger into its own little contaner ( a water bottle cut a little lower than the middle) with treated oil and it is still growing and fast so i took abfew more seeds and planted thwm in another pot with fresh clean soild and i now have two sprouta. It takes a couple of weeks but if you keep the soil moist, you will have apple sprouts soon enough. Dont water everybday maybe just once a week.
do you think it will be successful in the Philippines?
<p>Hey I Realised Something If You Want To Wet You Cant Just Put It Under The Tap As That Can Break Your Paper Towel So I Wet A Towel And Wrapped The Paper Towel With The Towel... Its Logical Really...</p>
<p>Sounds Awesome! Thanks for Sharing your Info on how to Start an Apple Tree from Seeds. Almost all my Apple Seeds Sprouted already so, this is my First Time I gonna Plant an Apple Tree. So, Wish me Luck :))</p>
<p>It works!!</p>
I wanted made it
Seems easy enough I want a McAntoish apple
<p>There are a lot of misconceptions and errors in this thread, and some good stuff too. The article is really about growing apple root stock from seeds in order to graft on a variety that you like, such as pink lady, Wickson, etc...... Nothing wrong with that. People used to do this all the time. If these seeds were allowed to grow out and produce fruit instead of grafting them to another variety, each one would produce a unique new variety of apple, which may or may not be good and may or may not resemble the original parent.</p><p>Most of what you read or hear about growing new varieties from seed is very negative. Michael Pollan in particular has done a great disservice by blugeoning home the message in his book Botany of Desire that it is almost impossible to grow really good apples from seed . The experience of many people disproves that notion though. For instance, my friend Freddy Menge has been growing seedlings and says that more of the apples he grows from seed are worth eating than not... and he's a picky apple collector. My very first open pollinated apple seedling to fruit is quite promising and I happily ate all of them. I named it BITE ME! for all the people that say it can't be done. I have over 100 intentionally cross pollinated seedlings growing and more coming this year. If you want to know more about growing apples from seed intentionally to produce new varieties, I'm producing a youtube video series that follows my efforts and shows how I do everything. I hope to start getting fruit from those this year.</p><p>In short, I think more people should be growing fruit from seed and a little intention in selection of parents can probably go a long way toward skewing results in our favor.</p><p>Apple Breeding video playlist:</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60FnyEY-eJAMOPvU-yyF4JfuW5ocJvC4">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL60FnyEY-eJ...</a></p><p>Bite me!<br></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/OAFH-IafysQ" width="500"></iframe></p><br>
I live in Calgary , Alberta I have 2 seedlings which if they come back this spring will have survived 3 winters 1 is putting on growth 1 which mostly dies back each year (both with protection) 2 more on their 2 winter , and 2 more on their first winter. Fun experiment.
I think you should read or perhaps reread Michael Pollans' book Botany of Desire he actually credits John Chapman or people like him with spreading and nurturing apple seeds which have led to most known American varieties.Every garden/Hort/herbal/plant book that I have read that talks about planting seeds mentions 1in 50000 apple seeds will produce an apple as good as either parent. Pollan does not walk that line in his book.As a side note it I have spent a lot of time looking for someone that has actually run the experiment. Gathering 50,000 apple seeds grown and collected under the same growing conditions then planted and germinated under the same conditions and then waited the 3-15 years for the trees to fruit etc,etc. Does anyone actually have that much time, money and land to perform this experiment? I would love to see the results.
<p>Trying to remain positive and constructive: There are so many wrong pieces of information on this thread that no one has corrected. First of all,</p><p>1. A "honeycrisp" apple seed does not grow a tree that will produce "honeycrisp" apples. Apple seeds do not grow true to their cultivars, which are usually propagated by live tissue. Therefore, it would be unnecessary to grow a "honeycrisp" from seed to graft it onto any other rootstock. Secondly, there is a PATENT on honeycrisp apples, and most other recently commercially developed, that makes it illegal to use them as scion wood!</p><p>2. This means that the seeds from the prized 51 year old Macintosh may grow seedlings that revert back to any combination of its ancestors that were cross-bred to produce a "Macintosh" apple. It's fine as rootstock, but no reason to use it as scion wood.</p><p>3. "Lets get one thing straight, the procedure of grafting is used to stunt the growth of the scion?"</p><p>Grafting is not done to "stunt the growth" or "dwarf" the resulting tree, unless you are grafting onto specially-bred rootstock for this purpose that you have to buy. Grafting any apple onto a seedling-grown rootstock will produce a full size (think 20 feet mature) tree.</p>
It should be interesting to know that however unlikely you CAN create a new variety of hardy or dwarfing root stock from planting a seed just like you can a new apple. The very first rootstocks were found by someone noticing that trees of the same age were definately smaller or some other characteristic. Had nothing to do with magic or fairys. So give it a try. Other that perhaps some "lab" work pretty much every known variety of fruit/ rootstock originated from a seed .<br>
I have some black twig apples that I have saved out the seeds. I'm letting them dry in a cup in my window. When do I wet with towel and refrigerate?
is it possible to transport a scion from one country to a next? will it die? sorry if i sound like a novice but i am from the caribbean and on my island we dont have apple tress...so its a first time venture. i have seeds i got from some apples at the local supermarket but no other trees to obtain a scion from.
<p>Pink Lady is good for hot climates (and cold too). Try those seeds first, but you won't know if the parent was suitable for hot climate, may not do so well. If you can order a pink lady tree, that would be better.</p>
<p>You might order an already grafted apple tree from Kuffel Creek Nursery. Also I highly recommend you order their e-book "Apple Trees for Hot Climates and the Tropics". (I have no financial interest in this company - I'm just a local Master Gardener, and we know that Kevin Hauser of Kuffel Creek knows his stuff).</p><p>http://www.kuffelcreek.com/</p>
<p>I moved to Greece and had a Pink Lady apple with the seeds already germinating inside. I have planted hem and have 5 healthy little shoots. I don't understand grafting! I have tow olive trees on my land that I have cropped back to the trunk and 3 stump branches, can I graft the Pink Lady trees onto the olive trees, or do I have to grow a different variety from seed and then graft the Pink Lady onto them?</p>
<p>The seeds that you have plant will not be pink lady apple even if they came from it. it will be a random apple most likely bad in taste. So you let those seedling grow a little bit and then you take a small branch of an apple tree that you know that produce good fruit and connect it with the seedlings that you have. of course you must cut a part of each seedling in order for your branch to connect. Try plant nectarine peach apricot or cherries most likely they produce good fruit sometimes little worst from what they came from sometimes even better. Personally i have great success with apricots the taste is 100% better than the mother plant but they are so easy to break and must handle very careful.</p>
Many thanks for your reply, I live on the island of Kefalonia and we have very few garden centres, unfortunately friends that have bought apple trees have ended up with fruit that is very Woolley and not crisp or sweet. The trees are also expensive here as they have to be shipped in. Can you recommend a good variety that is crisp and sweet that I could perhaps order on line.
<p>Top rated for crisp and sweet = Honeycrisp. I personally like a little more tartness though, my favorites are Jonagold, Pink Lady, and Ginger Gold. Empire is another one that is sweet but not tart, tastes like common apple juice from the store. Gale Gala is another good choice for sweet. But for crisp, nothing really beats the crunch of Honeycrisp.</p>
<p>Order benchgrafted bare root trees. They are very small (about a foot long), and easy to mail. When you get them, soak them in a bucket of tepid water for a few hours before planting.</p>
I really love apple tree, I grow some apple trees from seed, and I know it will take a long time to bear fruit and the taste is not like mother plant. So I want to buy some benchgrafted bare root tree. I live in Viet Nam. Can I buy them online? And how to plant and take care of them? Please give me some advice
<p>Here is the same reply I gave below to another: </p><p>You might order an already grafted apple <br> tree from Kuffel Creek Nursery. Also I highly recommend you order their <br> e-book "Apple Trees for Hot Climates and the Tropics". (I have no <br>financial interest in this company - I'm just a local Master Gardener, <br>and we know that Kevin Hauser of Kuffel Creek knows his stuff).</p><p>http://www.kuffelcreek.com/</p>
But the Nursery need import permit from Ministry of Agriculture. It is not easy for me to have this. Do you have an other way? Please tell me!!!
<p>You need to graft onto an apple tree. Or maybe a cherry or plum. But not an olive. It must be closely related. This article discusses what types of trees can be grafted onto which types of rootstock. </p><p>http://homeguides.sfgate.com/compatible-fruit-tree-grafting-62200.html</p>
<p>also fruit trees in Greece are very very cheap you can find most bare root fruit trees like fugi apple for 2,50 euros and if in a pot for 5 euros. </p>
<p>I like an apple tree down the road. I have lemon, pomegranate, almond, and crab apple trees established. What time of year and area of the tree do I take the cutting from of the tree I like ? Do you soak the cuttings in something like B-1 transplanting liquid? Also can I graft on any of the trees I mentioned. Or all of them?</p>
<p>You take your cutting in Winter, when the buds are completely closed (dormant), take from new growth only (1 year old) from a branch that produced fruit in the prior season, best to go about pencil thick, but you want to match the size of whatever rootstock you are grafting it onto. Also best to take the middle section of a branch, not the tip or base. You can only graft from like species, meaning only graft an apple to your apple seedling or rootstock (a pear or a lemon is not going to work with an apple rootstock). Do the grafting in late Winter or early Spring.</p>
<p>you could graft onto the crab apple tree.</p>
<p>Scion wood is best harvested before the tree leafs out in Spring. We usually harvest out scion wood around MLK Day (mid Jan.). Take cuttings about the thickness of a pencil, and then store in a ziplock gallon baggie in the fridge (spritz a little water into the bag first). Now wait until the buds on the trees start swelling and are about to leaf and flower out. This shows that the sap is running in the trees and it's about to experience an explosion in growth. Then make your grafts. Cut sections of your scion wood with only one or two buds, to graft on. The whip and tongue method shown above is a good method. I soak the cuttings overnight in room temp water before grafting. You could use growth hormones, but I just use my own saliva on the cut as a growth hormone (learned this from the Dirt Doctor www.dirtdoctor.com)</p>
<p>Someone told me they wouldn't grow edible apples/ why I'm here. I was able to get; Crab , St Lawrence, Golden delicious, Granny Smith, and Wine Sapps to germinate and grow. They are all about 3' tall now and I'm finding out I have to go Back to the parent plants(abandoned orchard) and get grafts........Looks like a fun day out w/ the dogs. Thanks for the 411.</p>
<p>"Common knowledge" is not always right. It is possible that an apple seedling will produce excellent fruit, but it may not be that likely. It depends on a lot of factors, most important of which would be the two parent trees. If one of the parents was a crab apple, you probably won't get fruit that you will want to eat. That said, I doubt that most apples today are cross pollinated with crab apples (I rarely even see a crab apple tree). Many people also say you won't get fruit for 8-10 years from an apple seedling - this too is in fact a myth. I have seen seedlings fruit after 3 years - at that point you can decide if you want to keep it, or graft a known variety onto your tree. But if you don't feel like taking a gamble, just go graft a known variety onto your seedling. That said, I would't graft anything onto a seedling tree, better to go get a proper dwarfting rootstock to graft with (M111 for big tree with deep strong roots, or M7 for a smaller tree that might blow over one day, or M9 for a tiny tree that requires staking for its whole life). If you know someone that grows apple trees, you can probably get a free rootstock from them, or order them. In eastern PA you can buy rootstocks for $1 (http://byfg.org/)</p>
I also grow some apple trees from seed(red delicious). They are about one year. But now I don't know what to do next because nobody grow apple here, so have no apple scion wood to graft onto my tree.
<p>HELP!!! A few weeks ago I found a sprouted apple seed that I bought at a grocery store. Put it in a damp paper towel, then in a ziploc. Blew in the bag and then forgot about it. I looked at it today and it actually is growing. Removed it from the bag and towel due to what looked like mold growing on the towel. Trimmed off the mold. Seed, and sprout are unharmed. Transplanted it into a small terracotta pot with potting soil and coffee grounds. The sprout is about 2.5" tall. I don't know how to care for it from here. </p>
<p>You can either go plant it outside now, or leave it in a pot until next spring to plant outside. You want to make sure the trunk is nice and straight, stake it if you need to.</p>
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BROOKFIELD -- A handful of parents, educators and mental health professionals are the first in the area to learn an approach to children's discipline that offers a new set of tools.
The training aims to help children and students learn self-control, responsibility, cooperation and problem solving.
Carol Dores, of Brookfield, and Robin Eckstein founded the training group Positive Discipline of Western Connecticut.
Dores said parents or caregivers need to be firm, set boundaries, but be kind, which means to do it in a respectful way.
"I'm hearing about children who come to school with no discipline or believe the world is owed to them. I've observed parents and friends who are overly strict and sometimes nasty, or overly kind and permissive," Dores said.
"We are raising a generation of kids who don't have the skills they need to be successful. We're overparenting them and doing our kids a disservice."
The approach is based on Jane Nelsen's "Positive Discipline" books and has been around for 30 years, Dores said, but is expanding exponentially now.
"This thinking is a way of looking at kids. It's really the way the mental-health field is moving, away from negative or punitive punishment or behavior modification," said Charles Manos, a psychologist and director of special services for Brookfield schools.
"The point is that if you understand the basic drives and needs of a child, and not just react to the behavior, it will be more effective than if you just deal with the behaviors," Manos said.
"It's a more thoughtful, mindful and reflective approach."
For instance, parents are typically told to ignore a child having a temper tantrum, but this model would have a parent hug the child instead, he said, because obviously the child needs something.
Dores said she learned about a nursery school child with behavioral issues. His teacher gave him a carpet square where he could stand to stamp his feet until he regained his self-control and was allowed rejoin the group.
"When you lose control, you flip your lid, and your logic and emotions disconnect," she said. "He's learned self-control."
She said he learned to recognize that he was angry and to take himself away from the group until he was in control of his feelings.
Two principal tenets of the program are responding in an empathetic way to a child and asking questions without reacting negatively, Manos said.
Asking and empathy show a child you understand, which helps build trust and mutual respect and lowers his defenses, Manos said.
The foundation of this approach comes from psychologist Alfred Adler's work, Manos said.
It was the direction the Brookfield schools were moving, but this training will offer other people ways to reinforce it, he said.
Allison Fulton, executive director of the Housatonic Valley Coalition Against Substance Abuse, was among 28 community members, including 10 public school educators, who took the two-day training last month.
Positive Discipline of Western Connecticut will provide child-raising classes to parents, caregivers, educators and youth development workers using Positive Discipline skills.
"Philosophically, our organization is always looking for ways to help kids stay away from drugs and alcohol and ways to keep the communication open between parents and their children," Fulton said.
"We want to teach healthy boundaries and expectations."
Instead of trying to change behaviors, the goal is to teach children to do the right thing, Fulton said. "This is an important approach to learn about."
Visit; 203-731-3333 |
Common Household Fish Food?
Are there any common household foods that you can feed to goldfish?
NO..why? can't afford a tin of fish food?? come on.
Oh, yes, there are lots of them.
Think cooked veggies.
Peas, carrot, squash, green beans, and so on. You can either boil fresh ones (until they're tender but not mushy), or just open a can (preferably the ones teeming without salt, sugar, or seasonings), rinse them off, and nurture them. Greens like spinach, chard, or collards are good, too.
Also canned tuna, can shrimp, sardines, and so on (cut them up small enough for your fish to eat them).
Some people speak if you feed peas, you should cut them up or mash them first, because goldfish own been known to choke on peas (seriously).
Feed very sparingly. Never nurture a fish more than it will eat in about five minutes.
However, your fish should be fine going lacking food until Monday. Fish can last for a couple of weeks without food and suffer no harm at adjectives. I'm just saying you CAN feed these foods whether you want to.
People kept fish before there ever were commercial fish foods.
Answers: Always fresh never boiled or steamed. (Canned is ok even whether it has a bit of salt. Just don't use these as staple)
Goldfish need a fair diet. When choosing a fish food choose one with high protein (48% or better) and low fat (5% or less)
You can supplement their diet next to things like Lettuce, mustard greens, turnip greens, collard greens, spinach, peas, Watersprite, seaweed, cukes, kale, chard, broccoli, lima beans, green beans, etc. and feed aquatic plants (e.g. duckweed, azolla, salvenia, etc) or pelt algae daily.
For their Carotenoids which are a family of pigments the fish can't make themselves and are obtain as part of the diet. These pigments result in red, yellow and red colors. Fish have cells called chromataphores. Those cell convert lutein and carotenes into astaxanthin which is the red pigment.
sources include, brine shrimp, krill, spirulina, marigold flowers, paprika, sweet red peppers, yams, carrots, pumpkin
Watermellons and oranges are also good as capably as proteins like chicken (chicken livers) beef (livers and parts) and pork as well as worms and bugs.
defrost a pea and wait till it cools, then squeeze benignly between your fingers so that the inside pops out and your left with the shell, throw the shell away and offer them the pea, my fish love it!
Dead people from your adjectives freeze
Just chop it up chum sized
He'll be ok for two days without food. Don't throw regular food within there, you don't know what's going to harm him.
once a month nurture it blood worms for a treat if it likes them or find out what it likes the best.mostley nurture it canned fish perfer tetracolor.boil lettice is one of the favorite treats for fish but dont leave it in for more than 24 hours contained by the tank
veggies, crickets, buggs/insects (NEVER spiders), and bread with work great also.
As mentioned, fresh vegetables and insects are good. But do not feed your fish insects if you use pesticides or any other benign of chemicals in your yard.
What is the best aquarium filter and plants for my community aquarium (75 gallon)? What are the requisites of setting up a saltwater reservoir? A sound out going on for Betta fish? 3 fish limp contained by 2 days- please give support to? |
There was great excitement on Broad Street that evening.
Local men dressed in fine suits congregated on Charleston's busiest thoroughfare, their voices carrying along the dirt street, their shadows dancing on the walls of three-story storefronts, most of which had been closed for hours.
It was Nov. 6, 1860, and the "enthusiastic" gentlemen of the Holy City had gathered in front of the telegraph offices and the headquarters of the Charleston Mercury to await news of the nation's presidential election.
Years of strife, decades of conflict, had all come down to one vote. Nothing less than the future of the country rested on the electorate's decision.
Although the mood outside the newspaper office was festive, there was a palpable anxiety running through Charleston. For decades, the South -- and South Carolina in particular -- had grown increasingly restless with the state of the Union.
In 1832, South Carolina had nearly brought the country to war over tariffs that state politicians considered unfair. Two decades later, the Legislature declared that the state had the right to secede, although lawmakers stopped short of following through on the threat.
These politicians claimed the federal government was growing too powerful, infringing on the rights of states to control their own destinies. Much of this was a response to limitations that Congress had put on slavery and the actions of Northern states, which often refused to return fugitive slaves to their owners.
It was, to Southern politicians of the day, largely an issue of economics. While the North was marching into the Industrial Age, the South clung to an agrarian economy, one that was almost wholly dependent on slave labor. To the men who controlled South Carolina, it seemed the federal government wanted to put that most "peculiar institution" out of business.
And that would cripple the South's economy.
The intricacies of the situation eluded most Southerners. They knew only what they were told by firebrand politicians: the sectional strife was an issue of states' rights and that the North was trying to establish a permanent subjugation of the South.
The man who had come to personify the villainy of the North, the symbol of what Southerners considered wrong with the country, was an Illinois Republican named Abraham Lincoln. And it appeared that the country lawyer had a good chance of becoming the next president of the United States.
For much of the year, South Carolina politicians had claimed that if Lincoln were elected, the state would have no choice but to secede. These men had promoted Kentuckian John Breckinridge for the presidency, promising the Union would remain intact if he were elected. They likely offered such bold pronouncements with their minds made up: Breckinridge was the longest of long shots, the nominee only of Southern Democrats.
All of this consternation culminated on election night in Charleston.
The first dispatch to arrive that evening came from Connecticut. The telegraph reported that the state had gone for Lincoln by a majority of several thousand votes.
Soon after that, the telegraph operator received word that North Carolina had chosen Breckinridge.
It was the third dispatch that finally stirred the crowd into a frenzy. The Associated Press sent out a bulletin that declared, according to the Mercury, "Lincoln's election was certain, and that trifling details were unnecessary."
The reaction of the men on Broad Street might have seemed odd at first. The Mercury reported that when the Associated Press story was read, "a long and continued cheering" went up. This was not, the paper felt compelled to clarify, a celebration of Lincoln, but for "a Southern Confederacy."
"The greatest excitement prevailed, and the news spread with lightning rapidity over the city," the Mercury reported.
Decades of discontent
Robert Barnwell Rhett had anticipated the moment for decades.
A lifelong politician, Rhett had served as South Carolina's attorney general, a state legislator and a member of Congress, both in the House and the Senate. For much of that time, he had been one of the country's most extreme proponents of secession. His position had become so strident that it long ago had caused him to break with his political mentor, John C. Calhoun.
The late Calhoun, former vice president and father of South Carolina politics, had been an outspoken proponent of nullification, limited government and slavery. But the old man had not been willing to go far enough on secession to suit Rhett.
Rhett had so zealously promoted his idea of a separate Southern nation that he -- like other secessionists, such as Edmund Ruffin -- had been dubbed a "fire-eater" by Northerners. He once had tried to stir sentiment for secession at a convention of Southern states in Nashville. When he failed, Rhett had receded from public view somewhat.
For a long time, most politicians distanced themselves from his rhetoric.
In the decade since his appearance in Nashville, he had continued to push his views in the Charleston Mercury, the newspaper he owned and that was edited by his son, R.B. Rhett Jr. Now, after years in the political desert and countless papers editorializing his positions, Rhett's views were fashionable once again.
He had become a local hero of sorts. Earlier that fall, he had been honored with a life-size transparency of himself in the window of the Charleston Restaurant. The city had even named its new militia the Rhett Guard.
As his biographer, William C. Davis, later would write, Rhett "could hardly help being immensely satisfied with all these expressions that he had been right all along and that at last South Carolina had caught up to him."
Of course, the long discourses on secession published in the Mercury were largely preaching to the choir. No place in the United States was more ripe for revolution than South Carolina, and Charleston in particular.
Charleston had become a world left behind by much of the country. In 1800, it had been the fifth-largest city in the country -- a city nearly the equal of New York or Philadelphia. But times were changing and, as the decades of the 19th century began melting away, Charleston's standing -- and population -- failed to keep pace.
By 1860, Charleston's influence was on the wane. Harper's Weekly declared that one of the oldest cities in the country was "once one of the greatest cities on this continent."
Part of the reason for this seemed to be the state's political leaders and their fierce devotion to the agrarian economy, an economy fueled by slave labor. In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in the United States -- and 10 percent of them were in South Carolina, where they made up 57 percent of the population. More than 400,000 African-Americans in South Carolina were enslaved while a mere 10,000 of them were "free."
In Charleston, 36 percent of the city's 48,409 people were slaves, which represented a decline from past decades. Michael Allen, a historian with the National Park Service, would later note that the city had one of the most complicated class systems in the country.
The wealthy elite, largely made up of plantation owners who lived in the city part time, mingled in exclusive clubs and societies. But downtown was also the home of working- class whites -- bakers, cobblers, blacksmiths, artisans. Just below them on the social ladder were free African-Americans (a large portion of the state's free black population lived in Charleston). And then there were the slaves.
Some of these enslaved African-Americans worked as servants in the city's mansions, but just as many could be seen on any given day in the city market, selling their own wares or produce from their owners' farms. Many even worked as artisans or laborers, although their pay went to their owners. There were restrictions on where these slaves could be in the city at any particular time, and they had to carry papers or tags so that they were easily identified (free blacks also had to carry papers to avoid confusion or arrest).
The men who owned these slaves were among South Carolina's most powerful politicians. No other state had such a large contingent of slave owners in its Legislature. From the point of view of many politicians in Washington, the city's -- and much of the South's -- ways had passed. This was never more evident than in April 1860, when Charleston had hosted the Democratic National Convention at Institute Hall.
It was a disaster of sectional rivalry.
Massachusetts politician Caleb Cushing, a former U.S. attorney general and congressman, was elected presiding officer of the convention, and his opening remarks seemed to take aim at the men of the convention's host city.
"Ours, gentlemen, is the motto inscribed on that scroll in the hands of the monumental statue of the great statesman of South Carolina -- 'Truth, Justice and the Constitution,' " Cushing said to raucous applause.
"Opposed to us are those who labor to overthrow the Constitution, under the false and insidious pretence of supporting it; those who are aiming to produce in this country a permanent sectional conspiracy of one-half of the states of the union against the other half -- those who, impelled by a stupid and half insane spirit of faction and fanaticism, would hurry our land on to revolution and civil war."
He said this to somewhat lighter applause.
Cushing had set the tone for a divisive meeting. The Democrats argued over a nominee for a week, going through more than 100 ballots without agreeing on their presidential candidate. The Northerners wanted Stephen Douglas, who had defeated Lincoln for his Senate seat two years earlier; the Southerners wanted Breckinridge, at that time the vice president. Neither side would relent. At an impasse, the delegates finally gave up and returned to their home states.
The Northern Democrats later reconvened in Baltimore and nominated Douglas. The Southerners, including Rhett, held a separate convention in Richmond that summer, where they nominated Breckinridge. In effect, they split the national ticket, providing a boost to Lincoln's candidacy.
Two years earlier, in the speech that alerted Southerners to Lincoln's politics, the candidate -- paraphrasing the New Testament -- had said, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."
The Democrats themselves were fulfilling that prophecy: dividing themselves, and dividing the country.
'At all hazards'
In the days following Lincoln's victory, the Mercury beat the drums of secession through Charleston. On Thursday, Nov. 8, the paper's lead headline declared that, as a result of the election, "The States Rights Flag Thrown to the Breeze."
This warning was the talk of Charleston. In conversations around town, locals swore they would resist Lincoln's rule "at all hazards." The Mercury gleefully reported many such overheard conversations and idle threats.
No doubt, Rhett's seeds of discontent had taken root. The newspaper reported that most people think "the South would soon govern the South."
"The tea of 1860 has been thrown overboard -- the revolution of 1860 has been initiated," the Mercury opined.
For the rest of the week, Charleston was overwhelmed by impromptu meetings, strategy sessions and even a rally outside City Hall. The wife of one United States senator, who arrived in town the day after the election, later wrote that she could hear the men's excited conversations one floor below her hotel room.
"The noise of the speaking and cheering was pretty hard on a tired traveler," Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote. "Suddenly, I found myself listening with pleasure. Voice, tone, temper, sentiment, language -- all were perfect."
On Nov. 10, the state Legislature called for a convention Dec. 17 "to take into consideration ... their relations with the Federal Government." At a ceremony to ratify the convention a few days later, a triumphant Robert Barnwell Rhett set the tone for the meeting.
In his speech, Rhett outlined the numerous sins the North had perpetuated against the South: It had invited foreigners to settle the territories bought in the Louisiana Purchase to dilute the power of the Southern states in Congress. It had initially declined to admit Missouri to the Union because it "tolerated slavery." It had imposed tariffs on the South that exclusively benefited Northern interests.
For all those reasons, Rhett declared, the South should withdraw from the Union much as the United States had withdrawn from Britain.
The South could form its own nation, Rhett said, and three principles should guide the new country: slavery should be permitted, powers of taxation should be limited and "the forts and fortresses in our bay should never again be surrendered to any power on earth."
"My friends, the Union is dissolved," Rhett said. "The long weary night of our humiliation, oppression and danger is passing away, and the glorious dawn of a Southern Confederacy breaks on our view. With the blessing of God, we will soon be a great people -- happy, prosperous and free."
All that remained was for one state to take the first step.
Next week: The Secession Convention. |
Money isn't everything
Adults who take numeracy classes often do so for reasons that have nothing to do with improving their job prospects, reveals Jon Swain
What prompts an adult to return to the classroom to study the basic arithmetic that, for whatever reason, he or she failed to acquire as a child? The motivations behind such decisions are many and complex. It would be reasonable to assume, though, that the hope that numeracy will open up better job prospects is one of the more common impulses.
Reasonable, but not actually the case. Rather surprisingly, few of these motivations are related to perceived needs in employment, or to people's feelings that they have a deficit of skills in their everyday life.
This is one of the main findings that will come from a 20-month project we have been running at King's College London when it reports later this summer. The research was carried out in three further education colleges in different parts of England with learners working at a range of levels from entry 1 to level 2 (the equivalent to the top three grades at GCSE). Most of them are working at entry 3.
Making the decision to return to formal education can be a daunting experience for many adults. This is because many who return to study numeracy view themselves as failures. They often carry various types of emotional baggage that they have acquired from the previous "failure" at school.
The majority of learners in the study, "Making numeracy teaching meaningful to adult learners", speak of their poor experience of schooling, in the sense that they were unhappy, bullied or felt they were "written off" by maths teachers, usually at an early stage. Many learners have feelings of anxiety, or even fear, when they return to the classroom, which they see as another institution similar to school. This is particularly so for those who have been away from education for some years. However, many are determined to seize the chance and change their lives.
"It was daunting," said Clara. "It really terrified me, but I thought, well, I can't stay this way because I want to get out of the rut I'm in, I want my life to change."
Many contrast their experiences of school with their current experience of maths and numeracy teaching, highlighting the smaller numbers, the individual attention they receive, the relaxed atmosphere, their feelings of security and of not being afraid to make a mistake, the lack of pressure from teachers and peers, and the generally stimulating level of work.
Some adults come to study maths because they require a specific qualification, perhaps to gain a place on an access course for nursing or teaching; others come to revise and improve their knowledge and skills in order to support their own children.
A few of the learners in our research - funded by the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC), set up by the government as part of its Skills for Life strategy to improve adult literacy and numeracy in England - say the maths they have learned has helped them in their lives.
This generally refers to transactions involving money: they are able to work out their change; estimate how much they will save in, say, a 20% sale; pay their bills and so on. Although they could usually "get by" before, their higher level of mathematics has given them a deeper understanding of the world, and enabled them to participate more fully.
Some learners told us how they used to be embarrassed at their lack of mathematical knowledge and skills. "I tell you the most embarrassing thing," said Beryl, "is when I had to send my children to the shop, or they came with me, and I used to say to them ... how much have I got to give them? I had to ask them and that's embarrassing for a mother, let alone an adult, asking a seven-year-old how much money do I give them, how much change do I get back? I'm not so bad now, I can near enough do it, but it was very embarrassing."
"I feel a lot more confident with my maths now, keeping budgets, knowing what bill to pay, the amount and how much I will have left," said Rija. "I do it more fluently; I'm not fantastic but a lot better than I used to be."
However, the majority of this group of learners comes from classes working at the lower end of the ability range in this sample. Most learners working at entry 3 and above tell us they do not come to learn maths in order to use it in their lives. By and large most feel they are able to function quite well already, which corresponds with evidence from the recent Skills for Life survey that adults with poor skills do not perceive themselves as having problems in these areas.
It seems likely that adults develop survival strategies for day-to-day competency. This may involve them developing their own strategies for common procedures, or using other non-mathematical resources, such as asking other people or reading labels.
So, what is the most common reason for going back to maths? The majority say the principal reason is that, as many have failed at maths at school, they want to prove something to themselves, that they have the intellectual capacity. They see mathematics as a signifier of intelligence, and they want to be able to enter, and gain access to, an esoteric and privileged practice. Almost without exception, they want to understand the mathematical system, its principles and underlying relationships.
"I'm not really sure that I can use maths but I just want to learn it for me, it's just something that I want to achieve for myself," said Selena. "I never thought that I might be able to use maths in something ... I just want to teach myself something."
The type of mathematics they request is often mainstream school maths rather than vocational, utilitarian mathematics. Many, moreover, enjoy learning the pure and logical aspect of maths, such as algebra, which they see as being "proper maths". Algebra is not included in the adult numeracy core curriculum.
We have found it is the quality of engagement with the activity that makes the mathematics seem "real" or meaningful and worthwhile to the learner, rather than its supposed usefulness and application in their lives outside the classroom. The implication of this finding for policy-makers is that promoting narrowly utilitarian mathematics may turn away some potential learners.
· Jon Swain is research officer in the department of education and professional studies at King's College London |
Explore BrainMass
Stop Smoking: Motivations Explored
Information to address the following items is given:
A. Analyze the brain structures and functions associated with the motivation to engage in my selected behavior above.
B. Evaluate the impact of extrinsic and intrinsic factors, including heredity and the environment, on the motivation to engage in smoking
Solution Preview
Below is a suggested outline that you could consider for your paper.
I. Introduction
A. You will probably want to begin your paper with something to catch the readers' attention. Ideas you may consider:
1. Statistics about how many people smoke today.
2. Statistics about the age people start smoking and/or the reasons why they began.
3. Quotes from actual smokers on why they started, if they have tried to quit, how they've tried to quit, what caused them to start smoking, and the like.
4. Here's a couple of websites with some smoking statistics that you might want to use: and
B. Thesis Idea: With all the factors that motivate people to smoke, quitting can be quite a challenge.
C. Thesis Idea # 2: Neurological factors, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are all obstacles smokers must face when trying to quit.
II. Neurological Factors:
A. Neurons - Brain cells that pass messages via electrical impulses and neurotransmitters (messengers).
B. Nicotine - the main addictive compound in cigarettes
C. Dopamine - a type of neurotransmitter that makes us feel good emotionally and experience pleasure (among other things)
D. When nicotine enters the body, it tricks the neurons into releasing more dopamine than normal into your brain, causing the smoker to feel extreme pleasure and a natural craving to want to repeat this ...
Solution Summary
An outline for a paper on smoking cessation is provided. |
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What is a Carbon Footprint?
Carbon Footprint (CF) – also named Carbon profile - is the overall amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (e.g. methane, laughing gas, etc.) associated with a product, along its supply-chain and sometimes including from use and end-of-life recovery and disposal.
Causes of these emissions are, for example, electricity production in power plants, heating with fossil fuels, transport operations and other industrial and agricultural processes.
The carbon footprint is quantified using indicators such as the Global Warming Potential (GWP). As defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a GWP is an indicator that reflects the relative effect of a greenhouse gas in terms of climate change considering a fixed time period, such as 100 years (GWP100). The GWPs for different emissions can then be added together to give one single indicator that expresses the overall contribution to climate change of these emissions.
Carbon Footprint & LCA
The Carbon Footprint is a sub-set of the data covered by a more complete Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
LCA is an internationally standardized method (ISO 14040, ISO 14044) for the evaluation of the environmental burdens and resources consumed along the life cycle of products; from the extraction of raw materials, the manufacture of goods, their use by final consumers or for the provision of a service, recycling, energy recovery and ultimate disposal.
One of the key impact categories considered in an LCA is climate change, typically using the IPCC characterization factors for CO2 equivalents. Hence, a carbon footprint is a life cycle assessment with the analysis limited to emissions that have an effect on climate change.
Suitable background data sources for the footprint are therefore those available in existing LCA databases. These databases contain the life cycle profiles of the goods and services that you purchase, as well as of many of the underlying materials, energy sources, transport and other services.
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Plant a Tree
Plant a Tree
A fun activity that's also great for the planet is tree planting. If you have space in your yard for a tree or you know someone who does, why not give a young tree the chance to grow there? Trees clean our air, they provide living space and food for birds and other wild animals, and they give us shade in the summer. There are so many great reasons to plant a tree!
To get started, you'll need a shovel (or two), a helper, a hose or other watering system, and a sapling. A sapling is a young tree with a trunk that's only about as thick as a grown-up's finger.
When you pick your sapling, be sure to ask what kind of tree it will grow up to be. Some trees get very tall--as tall as 80 feet or more! Other trees spread into a wide canopy and need a lot of space to grow. Big trees like these might seem perfect when they're saplings, but when they grow up they might not fit in your space. If that's true, don't worry. Trees come in hundreds of varieties, including dwarf types that never grow taller than five or six feet.
The first thing you need to do is to dig a hole. If you bought your tree from a nursery or plant store, ask them if there are any specific directions for planting your tree. As a general rule, you'll want to plant your tree as deep in the ground as it was set in soil at the nursery or in the pot it comes in. So, if the soil in the pot is about a foot and a half deep, your hole will need to be at the least that deep. Use a ruler to measure the depth.
Once your hole is deep enough, you'll need to keep digging to make it wide enough. Your hole should be three times the width of the container your tree came in. So if your tree came in a pot that's six inches wide, your hole will need to be eighteen inches wide.
When your hole is finished, have someone help you remove it from the container and set it in the hole. Take your time placing the tree, making sure the trunk is straight. You might have to look at your tree from several different angles to be sure! Then have one person hold the tree steady while the other shovels the loose dirt back into the hole.
Use your hands to gently compress the soil around the tree. Don't push the soil too hard; just pack it down nicely, then give your tree a nice, long drink of water. Your tree is now safely planted, but because it's a young tree, you'll still need to check on it from time to time. Depending on the temperature, you'll need to give your tree a long watering with a hose every few weeks.
If you go through a very hot and dry spell, check the moisture level of your tree by pushing your finger into the soil near its trunk. If the soil is damp, your tree is fine. However, if it's very dry, it's time to give your tree another drink. After a year, your tree will be old enough to live on its own without being watered, except during very hot and dry periods in the summer.
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What does Great Depression mean?
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Cause of the great depression
What was the cause of the Great Depression, the worst economic depression in US history? It was not just one factor, but instead a combination of domestic and worldwide conditions that led to the Great Depression. As such, there is no agreed upon list of all its causes. Here instead is a list of the top reasons that historians and economists have cited as causing the Great Depression.
As you will see, the cause of the great depression in the past is not really the same as the cause of the next great depression... the greatest depression we've ever known!
I HIGHLY RECOMEND YOU BUY ONE (OR BOTH) OF THE BOOKS SHOWN TO YOUR LEFT to learn some of the skills that will help your survive the coming greatest depression!
The effects of the Great Depression was huge across the world. Not only did it lead to the New Deal in America but more significantly, it was a direct cause of the rise of extremism in Germany leading to World War II.
1. Was the Stock Market Crash of 1929 the cause of the great depression?
2. Were Bank Failures the cause of the great depression?
3. Was Reduction in Purchasing Across the Board the cause of the great depression ?
4. American Economic Policy with Europe the cause of the great depression?
5. Drought Conditions - cause of the great depression? |
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As I have understood it, the Standard Model includes particles that carry the different forces, e.g. the electromagnetic (EM) force, the gravitational (G) force. When talking about EM fields such as visible light or microwaves, the associated particle is said to be the photon. But what about a static EM field without any electricity, like a common household magnet? How does that magnet communicate its force? Via photons?
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Yes -- the carrier for any electromagnetic interaction is a photon. Including ordinary magnets.
You might ask: "Why then can't I see those photons?" Well, even from classical point view, the photons can have different wavelenghts. And with the magnet you deal with really large wavelenghts, while one cannot "see" radiowaves. While also I think that one cannot even use the concept of "interaction carrier" without working in a context of quantum field theory anyway.
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so photons of really large wavelengths means photons of really low energies? Is the magnet constantly loosing energy by emitting these photons or does it also absorb photons of the same wavelength? Are the photons emitted isotropically or do they follow the field lines in some way? Should I include these questions in the question rather than in a comment? – Dirty Harry Jan 19 '11 at 11:27
edit your question at your leasure, be sure to follow the faq – Argus Jul 10 '12 at 0:12
@DirtyHarry The energy is conserved by quantum uncertainty and i read that the field lines are caused by the visualization particles sticking together, kinda like how planets clear their orbits while the Sun's gravity is a continuum. – Cees Timmerman Apr 7 at 14:15
Amplifying the fine answer of Kostya, to address Dirty Harry's question. Static forces, such as slow moving magnets, like the one you mention involve extraordinarily low energy photons, so, since these are massless, extraordinarily long wavelength photons: their technical name in relativistic Quantum Field Theory, where the carrier notion is most useful, is "infrared" photons.
In macroscopic, classical settings, they don't add much intuition to the picture, and, as the questions suggest, they confuse the landscape more than illuminate it. Nevertheless, they connect seamlessly with our low energy, small $\hbar$, normally non relativistic world.
Indeed, technically, the infrared limit of the tree-level ("Born") amplitude of particle interactions yields the Coulomb potential, as detailed in, e.g. Peskin and Schroeder's book (M. Peskin and D. Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Ch 6.6.1, eqn 6.97) or this answer; (for a n.r. treatment, see this answer here ), and the associated Maxwell's equations, and so all the phenomena the question would contemplate. These amplitudes conserve energy and momentum, except for ultra-short times not of relevance here, so, no, the magnet is not constantly losing or gaining energy by emitting and absorbing these zero energy limit photons, unless the test object moves... infinite wavelength photons... they are a limit. A roiling sea of nothings.
Nevertheless, this sea of nothings informs the very active and responsive vacuum of QFT. If, however, there is movement of the test body subject to the magnet, yes, the force at a distance is carried by gadzillions of such photons that take energy and momentum from the magnet and transfer it to the object, anisotropically, and collectively shaping what we perceive as the classical force.
Mind you, even in non-relativistic quantum mechanics, most of the time one need not consider them, in calculating energy spectra, and one works with a semiclassical Coulomb field of, e.g., an atomic nucleus, the 1/r potential of the Schroedinger eqn. Only in subtle cases of relativistic corrections, like the celebrated Lamb shift (1947, that started utilization of QFT) would one see subtle correctional effects to energy levels due to this picture.
Nevertheless, smoothing out the correspondence limit of QFT has been, historically, sufficiently intriguing to have Feynman suggest to a student to calculate planetary motions through (hypothetical) massless graviton exchanges (it actually works!), in Newton's gravity, not EM. (see WP article. )
As indicated above, however, intuition is tricky with delocalized (λ⟶∞) entities such as these: so, when you think you can describe repulsion of two particles with a metaphor of two boats where a boat throws a basketball at the other, you run into deep perplexity when you consider that the two boats could also attract each other, by the very same exchange of a basketball!! I suspect the wisest attitude is to leave particle mediation to QFT, where it was born, and where it does most good.
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But field lines return to the source, so a boomerang would fit better than a basketball. – Cees Timmerman Apr 7 at 14:00
Well, the energy-momentum transfer goes one way, and the boomerang interacts with the air/medium---it would not work in vacuum... In any case, I brought these imperfect analogies up to discourage their use, as they tend to confuse the actual crystal-clear mathematical situation, not as a challenge for seeking better ones! – Cosmas Zachos Apr 7 at 14:23
Didn't even Einstein use visual analogies? Can toroidal vortices deflect each other? – Cees Timmerman Apr 7 at 14:36
Indeed, E did, and so did Maxwell, but only kept those that made sense... So did Feynman, who introduced much of this picture of particle mediation... So, had a metaphor worked half-decently, he would be sure to have used it... He did use the bombardier analogy for positrons, but stayed away from boats on a lake... He appreciated the delocalization involved is at the heart of the uncertainty principle, and few good metaphors for that have shed more light than confusion... – Cosmas Zachos Apr 7 at 14:54
As a consolation prize, for EM radiation, you may think of real photons, instead of virtual ones. In that case, you can estimate that a typical microwave oven producing about 700 W of microwaves of λ~3cm is spewing out about $10^{26}$ real photons of that wavelength per second. – Cosmas Zachos Apr 8 at 22:44
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Google Honors Madame Marie Curie With A Doodle On Her Birthday
She is the epitome of true grit, all packaged in a gentle feminine form. A scientist par excellence, a double Nobel Prize winner, a pioneer on many fronts and an exemplary human being, Madame Marie Curie showed how much a human can endure and still succeed! Today is her birthday and Google duly honours her with a doodle.
Madame Curie
The doodle is a simple image of Curie holding up a flask with a fixed chemical apparatus on the table in front of her. Her work, involving the extraction of minute quantities of radium and polonium from uranium ores, must have involved more complicated apparatus setups. Click on the doodle and you’ll be redirected to a page returning the search results to her name. The doodle is a simple one, a humble offering of respect, just like Marie Curie might have wanted to be.
Her Life
Born in Poland on this day in 1867, she was the fifth and youngest child. Tragedies in her life started early, when she lost her mother at an early age, followed by her elder sister. Jolted twice, she renounced her faith (Catholicism) and became agnostic. Her academic pursuits would take her to Sorbonne; there she would obtain a degree in math. She would also start working with magnetism, which would eventually prove a great source of attraction between her (then Marie Sklodowska) and her future husband Pierre Curie.
The Physics and Chemistry that she did
The physics world was rocked by the discovery of unknown rays given off by certain substances in the late 1890’s. It was Becquerel’s seminal discovery of radioactivity that set Marie and Pierre on a hunt for a new element radium! Nothing was known about radioactivity not even the harm that it does.
Madame Marie Curie and Pierre Curie together in the lab
From a ton of pitch blende (Uranium dioxide – ore from which Uranium is extracted), less than one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride was extracted. This was 1898. Polonium, discovered by the Curies in the previous year, was easier to extract. Both were much more radioactive than Uranium. Madame Curie wrote a characteristically tepid sentence, which was immensely insightful:
Becquerel was her doctoral advisor; she obtained her DSc from the University of Paris in 1903. In the same year, she received her first Nobel Prize – in Physics and with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.
Her struggle restarted in 1906 with the death of her husband. She continued her work, but failed to get a position at the University of Paris, just because women were disallowed from such a position. She was, however, received with honour at Sorbonne, the first woman to hold the post of a professor.
She was attacked by her detractors and there were many when news about her alleged affair with Paul Langevin surfaced in 1910-11. In 1911, she received her second Nobel Prize this time in Chemistry and alone!
The 1911 Solvay conference, one of the most prestigious meetings of scientists in history. Seated, second from right is Madame Curie. Note the young Einstein standing on the right.
She would die in 1936 due to the very radiation that made her a celebrity. She campaigned widely for more funding for radium research. She founded the Curie Institute, which produced more Nobel Laureates, including her daughter Irene Joliet-Curie and son-in law Frederic Joliot-Curie.
Madame Marie Curie is a symbol today, a reminder that science is not merely a great idea occurring inside the head of a genius. It’s a body of knowledge, requiring immense dedication, sometimes even courage, to acquire.
Madame Marie Curie, on your birthday, we salute you!
Typhoon Roke Hits Japan, Moving Towards Fukushima And Tokyo
Typhoon Roke has just hit Japan! The first few news reports and photos are just coming out. Typhoon Roke made landfall at Hamamatsu, just south east of the industrial city of Aichi, and this is its current location. It is on course for Fukushima, the city housing the troubled Daichi nuclear power plant. Tokyo might be hit too. Roke is expected to reach Fukushima in another two days time. The wind speed is 100 mph.
We had warned about the approach of this storm in a previous post here.
Landfall and destruction
Unlike Irene, which fizzled out as it made landfall, Roke did not die. It has caused heavy rains on the coastal region. High speed winds have caused enough destruction on their own. All operations at sea have been discontinued for the coming days.
Sea surge caused due to Typhoon Roke (Courtesy: The Telegraph, Associated Press)
Initial reports indicate that at least 4 people have died in this initial spell of rain. This number, no doubt, will rise as more is known of the storm’s devastation. Aichi has been largely evacuated. The overflowing of the river that flows over Aichi has caused widespread flooding in the city.
Photos from the first few hours:
The current position of the eye of Typhoon Roke, just south of the main island of Honshu. (Courtesy: The Weather Channel)
Fukushima and the Nuclear Worry
The biggest worry is Fukushima and the damaged nuclear power plant. Radioactive material will over flow into the sea and the surrounding areas due to the heavy downpour. Officials had begun preparations for the approach of the storm a few days back and are continuing to reinforce the defences of the nuclear power plant. Cables have been tied down and maximum effort is being put to ensure that no radioactive water leaks onto the habitable areas.
Dai’chi Plant Was Dumping Radioactive Waste Into Sea:
Measuring Radiation: How Much Radiation is Too Much? :
The Japanese Meteorological Department has advised the highest level of caution to be used due to heavy rains, strong winds and high waves. Very heavy rains are expected in the coming days with as much as 5 cm in one hour!
These are just initial reports. We’ll continue tracking the storm, as it makes its way towards Fukushima with no expected loss in intensity.
We wish our beloved Japan the very best. It has been through worse in history, and it could fight back every single time. We know that this will be no exception.
Link to a previous post:
Japan’s Nuclear Problem: Fukushima Situation Worse Than Thought, But It’s Not Chernobyl
The situation at the Fukushima Dai’chi nuclear power plant of Japan has just been reported to be worse than previously estimated, but still nowhere close to Chernobyl. A couple of days back, on 12th April, the Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency reviewed the situation and updated their previous rating of 5 to a maximum of 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INRES). The only incident in history to get the rating of 7 is Chernobyl.
Nuclear Danger Symbol
What is INRES?
The INRES scale is a scale used by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to gauge and compare the different incidents of radioactive spillage or similar disasters. A low rating on the scale involves the misplacement of small doses of lightly radioactive substances and small radioactive doses, which can be easily washed off’. A high rating, like that of Chernobyl, involves a widespread spillage or release of high amounts of radioactive substances into the air or into the sea. The rating can be done for an entire disaster site or for certain specific areas of the site.
Ratings since the tsunami
The INRES ratings have changed a number of times since the tsunami struck the plant. Earlier each of the cores had been rated with a 5, meaning that they posed a danger of emitting large amounts of radioactive material, if not handled with utmost care. The recent ratings were given for the entire plant, and not just of the reactors, adjusting to the spread of radioactive materials in the air and the dumping of the same into the neighbouring sea. It also recognises the fact that the entire area needs to be treated with considerable caution and not just the reactor cores.
Comparisons with Chernobyl
Given that, before Fukushima, Chernobyl was the only incident to score a 7 on this scale, the comparisons are inevitable, but, many experts feel, unfair. Most of the radioactive material released has been towards the Pacific Ocean, where it has no chances of poisoning human habitat areas. Further, the radioactive wastes that have been dumped into the ocean pose quite little threat due to the high degree of dilution. This has called into question the validity and the use of the rating system, especially when it has high potential of misleading the public.
Workers at Fukushima
Cleaning up the mess
Cleaning up the Fukushima mess may take more than 10 years, experts feel. The immediate concern is cooling the core with sufficient water, all the while keeping it submerged. This involves pumping water in and out periodically, and then disposing the lightly radioactive water into the sea. The core is kept under about 20 feet of water, which also helps in shielding the radiations from the core. Japanese authorities are also considering using robots for cleanup of the innermost parts of the reactors, but nothing has been implemented as yet.
The situation is more stable than a few days back and the reactors are no longer throwing up new surprises. The cooling system is being repaired and should be operational soon. |
A Leg to Stand On Test | Final Test - Medium
Buy the A Leg to Stand On Lesson Plans
Name: _________________________ Period: ___________________
Multiple Choice Questions
(a) Philosophy.
(b) Education.
(c) Science.
(d) Experience.
2. The day that Sacks moved out of his first hospital room, how far did he walk?
(a) A mile.
(b) He could not walk at all.
(c) Half a mile.
(d) Three blocks.
3. What colors were the Head books which Sacks bought?
(a) Yellow and purple.
(b) Black and white.
(c) Green and red.
(d) Red and white.
4. What color did Head attribute to neurology?
(a) Black.
(b) White.
(c) Green.
(d) Grey.
5. What was the name of the convalescent home where Sacks recovered?
(a) Because his frame of reference has also shrunk.
(b) Because he is caught up in the intricacies of his disease.
(c) Because, if he has strong familial support, the world's shrinking does not matter.
(d) Because his mental faculties are not engaged in the world around him.
Short Answer Questions
1. While in limbo, what feeling did Sacks have to allow, which he first found humiliating?
2. What word does Nietzsche use to describe the feeling that convalescence brings?
3. In the convalescent home, what did Sacks's first breakfast partner find amusing?
4. How does a person suffering from alienation of a limb think about that part of his body?
5. Once the cast was removed, Sacks gingerly touched his leg. How did it feel?
(see the answer keys)
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A term used in real estate transactions to indicate multi-family or multi-unit dwellings. An attached home is a structure which shares a common wall or walls with another unit. Some examples of attached dwellings are; townhomes, condominiums, row houses, apartment buildings and high-rise residential towers. Many of this style of dwelling features common grounds, either shared or jointly owned.
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What is Poe's tone in the short story, "The Masque of the Red Death?" What effect did the ebony clock have on the guests every time it chimed?I am writing a paper about this story for my English...
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Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death takes on a Gothic and dark natured tone throughout the short story. The effect of the ebony clock on the guests is one of fear. Each time the clock sounds; everyone is motionless and does not speak. The band does not play.
The ebony clock is also located in the seventh or black and red room. Oddly enough, when the clock does not sound, the rooms take on a beautiful glow and there is not a sense of fear among the guests. The guests feel like they are in dreamland. They are content.
The clock alerts people to their mortality. This notion goes along with the belief that each room represents a stage of life. It also explains why the black and red room is where the events at the end of the story take place.
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Public Release: Cellular cues identified for stroke recovery
New insight into how the brain regenerates after stroke
University of California - Los Angeles
When a stroke strikes, the supply of blood to the part of the brain affected is interrupted, starving it of oxygen. Brain cells can be seriously damaged or die, impairing local brain function.
But the brain is a battler. Within weeks of a stroke, new blood vessels begin to form, and, like marching ants, newly born neurons migrate long distances to the damaged area to aid the regeneration process. What's not known is what the right cellular environment is, and what the cellular cues are for this process of regeneration and migration to take place.
Now, in the Journal of Neuroscience, currently online, S. Thomas Carmichael, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, and colleagues report that in the mouse model, this neuron march is the direct result of signaling from the newly blooming blood vessels, thus casually linking angiogenesis the development of new blood vessels and neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons. Further, they have identified what these molecular signals are. The results hold promise for eventual clinical applications that may spur brain repair after stroke.
Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability, said Carmichael. And while much is known about the mechanisms of cell death in stroke, little is known about the mechanisms of neurological recovery after a stroke. His lab studies the mechanisms of brain repair and the recovery of function after a stroke.
Recent research has revealed that in the adult brain, new neurons form in a region of the forebrain known as the subventricular zone (SVZ). In mice, after a stroke was initiated in a part of the brain located far from the SVZ, the researchers, using a combination of mitotic, genetic, and viral labeling, tracked newly formed neuroblasts (immature brain cells from which mature adult neurons form) as they traveled through healthy brain tissue to the stroke area. Once there, these immature neurons wrapped themselves around the immature vascular cells that were in the process of forming new blood vessels in the damaged area. The neurons were found to arrive at the site within the first two to four weeks after the stroke.
Further, the researchers found that two proteins, stromal-derived factor 1 (SDF1) and angiopoietin 1 (Ang1), that are given off by these newly-forming blood vessels, are what trigger the thousands of immature neurons to the site of damage.
"The SDF1 and Ang1 proteins are what link the two processes of neurogenesis and angiogenesis together by promoting post-stroke neuroblast migration," said Carmichael. They also appear to effect behavioral recovery as well, he noted. The researchers produced the stroke in an area of the brain that controls the mouse's facial whiskers. When the mouse was infused by the researchers with Ang1 and SDF1, improvement in the function of the whisker's was seen to the same levels as the control (non-stroke) mice.
If harnessed properly, said Carmichael, the molecular mechanisms for neuronal regeneration hold the promise of regenerating and reconnecting brain cells near the area where stroke occurs. While the process may vary between mice and humans, he said, it's known that neurogenesis occurs in humans. "We're hopeful that we can take advantage of the brain's plasticity," said Carmichael. "This work could lead to the development of new therapies that will promote brain repair after stroke."
Other authors of the paper were John J. Ohab, Sheila Fleming, and Amin Blesch. The research was supported by a grant from the American Heart Association, and a distinguished scholar award from the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation.
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How to Take Pictures in Shadow
Frustrated by tricky shadows and softer light? These steps make shooting in the shade a breeze.
You will need
• A camera
• Subject in the shade or shadow
• A tripod
Step 1 Pick a subject Identify a subject.
Step 2 Pick up camera and set to lowest ISO Pick up your camera and for digital camera users, select the lowest possible ISO for the current lighting conditions.
Step 3 Steady your camera Steady your camera by propping your camera on a sturdy object, or by using a tripod, to reduce any unwanted camera shake.
Step 4 Compose your shot Compose your shot.
Step 5 Focus on subject Focus on the subject.
Step 6 Take a light reading Take a light reading by metering the subject.
Step 7 Set camera mode to “spot” for correct exposure Set your camera’s metering mode to ‘spot’ or ‘center weighted’ in order to get the correct exposure of the main subject.
Step 8 Select shutter speed and aperture Select your shutter speed and aperture, based on your readings.
Step 9 Shoot pictures Shoot until you run out of disk space, film or your subject’s patience.
Step 10 Shoot variations in stops With each pose, bracket 1- to 2 stops in either direction to ensure you nailed the correct exposure of your main subject. |
Five Natural Sites Where Humans Threaten Biodiversity (PHOTOS)
04/29/2012 08:30 pm ET
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s list of World Heritage sites contains over 900 of the most important natural and cultural locations in world. Sadly, 35 of 200+ sites designated as natural World Heritage properties are considered in danger and face threats such as pollution, human armed conflict, poaching, uncontrolled urbanization, and unchecked tourism and development.
Here are five locations where humans have left their mark, perhaps irreversibly damaging some of the world's most biodiverse sites.
Belize Barrier Reef
The largest barrier reef in North America, this World Heritage site comprises a diverse range of coastal lagoons, mangrove forests and estuaries. It is home to many threatened species -- such as marine turtles, manatees and the American marine crocodile -- as well as over 425 species of plants and more than 500 species of fish. Dangers to the site include heavy tourism and other human development in coastal areas.
Kahuzi-Biega National Park
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Comprising mostly tropical forest, Kahuzi-Biega National Park is named for its two extinct volcanoes: Kahuzi and Biega. The park is home to one of the last groups of eastern lowland gorillas, of which only about 150 individuals remain, according to UNESCO. Kahuzi-Biega National Park is situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, placing its flora and fauna - including many endangered species - under constant threat.
Rainforests of the Atsinanana
This World Heritage site comprises six national parks in eastern Madagascar, one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. The African island is home to over 12,000 endemic plant species and several primate groups, including several species of lemurs. Madagascar's Atsinanana Rainforests are a critical to the island's unique ecosystem and biodiversity, but they continue to be threatened by deforestation.
Garamba National Park
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Located in the northeastern part of the Congo, near the Sudanese border, Garamba National Park lies between the Nile and Zaire rivers. Savannahs, grasslands, woodlands, forests and swamps make up the landscape, which is home to animals such as elephants, giraffes, hippos, chimpanzees, leopards, lions, antelope and the extremely rare white rhino. (According to UNESCO, only about 30 white rhinos remain in the wild). Despite local conservation efforts, poaching remains a significant concern for this World Heritage site.
Everglades National Park
United States
This South Florida World Heritage site is the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere, the longest continuous stand of sawgrass prairie, and the most important breeding ground for wading birds in North America. Comprising freshwater marshes, tropical wetlands and seagrass ecosystems, the Everglades are home to more than 400 species of birds, 275+ species of fish, and over 800 species of land and water vertebrates. Some of these species include the Florida panther, snail kite, alligator, crocodile and manatee. However, these animals are threatened by a loss of marine habitat, and the site remains in danger due to the degradation of the entire ecosystem, thanks to agricultural and urban development, and pollution.
Five Natural Sites Where Humans Threaten Biodiversity |
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