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Design and Architecture of CockroachDb
Updated 3 years ago
Cockroach DB
A scalable, transactional, geo-replicated database
Cockroach is a distributed key:value datastore which supports ACID transactional semantics and versioned values as first-class features. The primary design goal is global consistency and survivability, hence the name. Cockroach aims to tolerate disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention. Cockroach nodes are symmetric; a design goal is homogeneous deployment (one binary) with minimal configuration.
Cockroach implements a single, monolithic sorted map from key to value where both keys and values are byte strings (not unicode). Cockroach scales linearly (theoretically up to 4 exabytes (4E) of logical data). The map is composed of one or more ranges and each range is backed by data stored in RocksDB (a variant of leveldb), and is replicated to a total of three or more cockroach servers. Ranges are defined by start and end keys. Ranges are merged and split to maintain total byte size within a globally configurable min/max size interval. Range sizes default to target 64M in order to facilitate quick splits and merges and to distribute load at hotspots within a key range. Range replicas are intended to be located in disparate datacenters for survivability (e.g. { US-East, US-West, Japan }, { Ireland, US-East, US-West}, { Ireland, US-East, US-West, Japan, Australia }).
Single mutations to ranges are mediated via an instance of a distributed consensus algorithm to ensure consistency. We’ve chosen to use the Raft consensus algorithm. All consensus state is stored in RocksDB.
A single logical mutation may affect multiple key/value pairs. Logical mutations have ACID transactional semantics. If all keys affected by a logical mutation fall within the same range, atomicity and consistency are guaranteed by Raft; this is the fast commit path. Otherwise, a non-locking distributed commit protocol is employed between affected ranges.
Cockroach provides snapshot isolation (SI) and serializable snapshot isolation (SSI) semantics, allowing externally consistent, lock-free reads and writes--both from a historical snapshot timestamp and from the current wall clock time. SI provides lock-free reads and writes but still allows write skew. SSI eliminates write skew, but introduces a performance hit in the case of a contentious system. SSI is the default isolation; clients must consciously decide to trade correctness for performance. Cockroach implements a limited form of linearizability, providing ordering for any observer or chain of observers.
Similar to Spanner directories, Cockroach allows configuration of arbitrary zones of data. This allows replication factor, storage device type, and/or datacenter location to be chosen to optimize performance and/or availability. Unlike Spanner, zones are monolithic and don’t allow movement of fine grained data on the level of entity groups.
A Megastore-like message queue mechanism is also provided to 1) efficiently sideline updates which can tolerate asynchronous execution and 2) provide an integrated message queuing system for asynchronous communication between distributed system components.
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The 'New American Economy' (1997)
CPDS Home Contact
This document briefly outlines literature which identifies the growth of a 'new' style of economy in the United States, and suggests implications for Queensland. No attempt has been made to fully analyse the information which has been assembled.
The key themes addressed are as follows:
October 1997
1. What is the 'New Economy'?
Some characteristics of the (so called) 'new economy' are: emphasis on knowledge based (rather than manufacturing) activities; global orientation; and an organisation style using telecommunications and networks of enterprises, rather than hierarchy in large firms
Overview: Big companies and 'economies of scale' succeeded in the slow moving four decades to the mid 1980s. But now only small companies, and large companies which have restyled themselves as networks of entrepreneurs, will survive. Fifty percent of US exports are from companies with less than 20 employees. Big companies are de-constructing themselves as networks of autonomous units. Economies of scale have been replaced by economies of scope. Global businesses are collections of local businesses, with intense global coordination, limited central headquarters, and a search for small company benefits of quick time to market and elimination of bureaucracy. As the world economy integrates, the component parts are becoming smaller. Computer and telecommunications systems are vital to allowing network organisations to operate. Strategic alliances are needed for strong performance. This is an alternative to companies getting bigger. (Naisbitt J. Global Paradox, 1994).
Big Companies: Major companies such as GM and IBM typify changes which occurred in large US companies which had long had market dominance. They found themselves as high cost producers with centralised / high cost management structures, with declining market share, and were obliged to shut many facilities. In recovering, individual business units (even administrative units) were given the autonomy to operate as separate businesses. This allowed better understanding of profitability, as well as removing centralised administration which had impeded change in fast moving markets. Autonomy allows costs to be cut, and technology to be introduced more readily; though it does reduce the scope for centralised strategy. (Peers M. 'Tough times for American titans', Australian Financial Review, 2/9/92)
Contributing Changes: In 1995, the USA looks back on 5 years of growth whilst Japan has been struggling. Industry has changed its structure, gone on a diet and become more quick witted. Many companies have been radically transformed, and the US is on the ground floor of new information businesses. Significant changes include: shift from domestic to global market focus; big companies have learned to behave like middle sized companies; short term financial approach has been able (in venture capital) to be replaced by long term approaches; business and universities have begun to take manufacturing more seriously; people are treated as company's most valuable resource; and barriers to cooperation between organisations have been removed (with firms seeing everything as being in their supply chain). ('American Business: back on Top?", Economist, 16/9/95)
Impact on Cities: A new information based economy has changed the economic dynamic of metropolitan regions. A second key element is globalisation (which has led to both growth and restructuring). In the new economy, information and technology are used to build newer high quality products. This requires innovation at all stages. Metropolitan regions are the centre of the new economy. They now demonstrate greater specialisation by firms, flexibility and diversification of activities within a centre. Clusters of complementary firms are important. There are 18 major clusters in US economy, in each of which a number of technology based firms are rapidly growing. (US HUD, America's New economy and the Challenge of the Cities, October 1996)
Attachment A outlines some other sources, whose major themes are similar, namely:
2. Why Change was Needed
The need for change in the US economy appeared essential as a consequence of the competitive challenge which had emerged in the 1970s and 1980s.
Because of improved transport and communications, industries involving mass production manufacturing (which until the 1960s had been the major basis for the high productivity of developed economies in Europe and North America) were increasingly transferred to newly industrialised countries (NICs) with lower wage rates, and sufficient skills to deal with mature technologies.
This transfer occurred through the agency of multinational enterprises, and the development of strategies in NICs, especially those in East Asia which (following Japan's example) focused on the capital intensive strengths of the developed economies - rather than pursuing their comparative advantages in labour intensive production.
This transfer led to the phenomenon of 'de-industrialisation' in Europe and North America, and to the need for economic restructuring. Generally it seems that innovative and knowledge intensive industries would offer the best prospects for diversification whilst achieving the high value added required to support comparatively high incomes.
For example, the rate of return to successful innovators (who capture temporary quasi-monopoly profits) is traditionally greater than that obtained in mature production where competition bids prices down to near costs.
However, in seeking new opportunities, the US economy initially generated large numbers of jobs in low productivity, low wage service industries. In manufacturing, the US seemed unable to cope with Japanese competition (see Section 3). However US performance in job creation was seen as vastly better than Europe's (where there was no net job creation at all over a long period) though it was poor in creating 'good' (ie high wage) employment.
The problem which USA experienced in the 1980s also had a macro-economic dimension.
The USA has both high trade deficits, and high budget deficits - which can not be sustained especially with a strong currency and low interest rates ('Why America cannot pay its way', Economist, 13/7/85). This situation had emerged partly because of the 'supply side' economic theories under President Reagan in the early 1980s; whereby an unbalanced budget (involving large additional 'Star Wars' military spending) drove rapid growth - and hence rapidly increased imports at a time when US competitiveness was declining.
Soaring deficits will quickly make the USA the world's biggest debtor economy ('Uncle sam's deep dive into debt', ICC Business World, April-June 1985)
3. Explaining the 'New Economy'
This section speculates about the significance and implications of the (so-called) 'new economy', though doing so is necessarily superficial and premature.
First: At the most obvious level, the phenomenon can be regarded as a cyclical recovery in the US economy. However there is more to it than this, as in the 1980s the US economy was seen to be in decline, and incapable of responding to Japanese competition.
For most of the 1960s and 1970s the US lost out economically to Japan. Manufacturing capacity was wrecked. When Japan was forced to re-value in the mid 1980s, this provided financial power (which was used to acquire financial assets) and also to invest in new production capacity. It did not lead to growth in Japanese consumption, but to increased strength to penetrate export markets. For the past 5 years US firms have [in 1990] responded with financial re-engineering, anything but making a serious attempt to match Japanese competitiveness. Even in the US, Japanese firms are proving superior competitors. Japan's economy is driven by market share, not by a search for profits. This change is needed (Clark G. 'The wages of American Free spending is annihilation', Australian, 19/1/90)
Furthermore Japan's competitiveness involved the use of methods which were quite different to those deployed in Western societies, for example:
Now the US economy is not only growing but also, apparently, its firms are regaining competitiveness.
Second: Since rapid economic growth first emerged in history with the start of the industrial revolution, growth has appeared to run in 'long waves' (of about 60 years duration) first identified by Kondratief in the 1920s; and associated with the emergence of new batches of technological innovations by Schumpter in the 1930s. Thus the phenomenon can be seen as the consolidation of a new long wave - associated with micro-electronic, communication and other technologies. The US, which happened to have strong position in those technologies, could thus benefit (and be much less likely to make technology available to imitative competitors).
Third: International trade is a major factor in economic growth, because (under the theory of comparative advantage) all countries can be better off by specialising in the areas in which they have greatest productivity, and trading with others. As a result of the economic failure of communism, there has been a major increase in the number of persons worldwide living in market economies, and hence in potential for trade. The global market strategies of 'new' economy firms, help in explaining the strengthening US performance.
Fourth: Suggestions have been offered that the US economic performance has improved because Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board pursued a policy for financial strength in the USA in the 1990s, by pursuit of 'sound money' principles - which resulted in declining money supplies (Newton M. 'The Marvellous Miracle of the Disappearing Greenback', Australian, 6/12/88)
Fifth: It may be that the organisation of production, which appears to have been fundamentally altered towards a more networked (rather than hierarchical) style partly through the use of information and communication technologies, has provided a new basis for productivity. Historically it has not been technologies alone which have allowed rapid growth, but also innovations in the organisation of production.
For example: the industrial revolution was associated not only with the deployment of steam power, but also with development of organisational arrangements required for mobilising capital (joint stock companies, and non-usurious financing). And the growth cycle associated with motor vehicles, was also attributable to Ford's 1920 techniques for mass production.
Analysis of economic growth, shows that a substantial portion of growth is attributable to productivity (ie to factors which are not just due to increased inputs of labour and capital). Productivity is largely a consequence of the use of knowledge, which allows transient competitive advantages to be obtained (eg from reducing costs, from better quality or market focus, or from new products). Such competitive advantages allow prices to exceed costs (until competitors catch up). Achieving high productivity requires a constant stream of competitive advantages.
Japan's competitiveness had been based on a superior ability to 'learn'. The 'networked' style of the 'new economy' may also allow a much better learning capability - because it: allows more scope for initiative to link 'thinking' and 'action'; relies less on a few 'big' ideas (ie the plans of central management of large firms); and is also less susceptible to those 'big' ideas being 'reverse engineered'.
Sixth: contributions to improved performance may have been made by techniques for regional economic development, through private / public partnerships which have deployed the new techniques for organisational learning across the economy as a whole, including the public sector. The application of such techniques to leading industries, and also to rural regions, is outlined in Attachment B.
4. Assessing the 'New Economy'
4.1 Negative Views
Despite the appearance of new competitive strengths and productivity in the US economy, not all are convinced.
For example, Fingleton E., in Blindside (1994), argued that Japan's strategy for gaining dominance of global natural monopolies is still on track.
These is more-over evidence of substantially improving original technological capability (eg Japan set to come out winner', Nature, 18/9/86; Head B. 'Research Points to Japan as world's best at innovation', Australian Financial Review, 8/3/88; and Johnstone B. 'Japan's creative Catalyst', Far Eastern Economic Review, 23/2/89). And Japan is (reportedly) now positioned to launch many new innovative consumer products - possibly demonstrating that 1980s programs designed to develop creativity in Japanese society were successful.
Problems for Japan
Despite this, Japan appears to be encountering significant difficulties - partly a consequence of the losses incurred after the collapse of the 1980s 'bubble' economy, and partly due to the emergence of stronger competition from East Asia (eg Korea, Taiwan and increasingly China). However it may also be that the centrally orchestrated processes which were so efficient in accelerating Japan's catch up, are a fundamental constraint on the flexibility to get ahead. [President Clinton it is noted recently offered US help in deregulation of Japan's 'high-tech' markets (Wilson P. 'US economy the model for all, Clinton lectures his G7 guests', Weekend Australian,21-22/6/97). Such help would be of little use as, despite the Strategic Impediments Initiative, the USA does not appear to understand Japan's economy]
However: the USA still runs large trade deficits with Japan - though these are influenced by Japan's typical East Asian (communitarian) style of market economy, where commercial relations are based on social connections, rather than on price / quality criteria. Also it is noteworthy that Japan's solution to its fiscal losses in the 1980s, was to make credit available to financial institutions at 0.5% interest, which they lent on (often to USA) at higher interest rates. Thus not only did the USA pay towards the losses incurred by the Japanese financial institutions (by borrowing to finance expansion and a stock-market boom), but the US has become more exposed (economically and therefore politically) to decisions made by Japan.
A concern which many have expressed about economic changes over the past two decades is that they have been accompanied by a decline in real incomes for many, and a growing inequality of wealth.
The US economy has recovered from the recession of 1990-91, with many indicators showing great strength as a result of restructuring and downsizing. Investment has risen quickly, with inflation low. Productivity has risen rapidly, which is supposed to indicate benefits to the community. However average US living standards have not risen. Average weekly earning of lower 80% of workforce fell 18% in real terms since 1973. Growing inequality of wealth is thus a threat to society. Gains have been made by owners of capital, and the new technical aristocracy. 'Lean' production technologies developed by Japan have been deployed worldwide in manufacturing - whose main gains come from simplification of production process (simplification discovered through teamwork) which permits use of less skilled employees. Out-sourcing allows costs to be reduced by purchases from companies where employees do not receive traditional benefits. In services, re-engineering has allowed information technology to be used to re-organise work, and employees require less skills and education. Retraining can help displaced employees to some extent, but the economy of lean production has no need for large numbers with technical skills. (Head S. 'The New, Ruthless Economy', Prometheus, V14, N2, Dec 1996)
[Comment: the above suggestion that changes have been accompanied by reduced requirements for employee skills, does not accord (a) with the competitive reality that activities with only a requirement for low skills will tend to migrate to low labour cost countries (b) with observations of the rapid growth of employment in knowledge intensive categories in OECD countries. The problem of inequality is real; the explanation of it in the above article is probably not]
Social Stresses
There is now a gun for every person in the USA, though some do not yet have theirs. 15m live in a poverty which is unknown in other first world countries. The income of the middle class (65% of population) has fallen 13% since 1973. People take many jobs but are still broke. The government is no longer seen to represent people. Officially the US: has less unemployment than Europe; pays less taxes; and has faster growth. But the permanently unemployed are no longer counted; and there are fewer services from taxes. Accumulated provisions for social security were spent on the cold war, and replaced by IOUs (Treasury bonds). (Vidal. G 'The United States of Clinton', Weekend Australian Review, 1997).
Similar conclusions emerge in other items referenced in Attachment A.
And concern about the gap between those who have done well from the 'new economy' (the effective 'symbol analysts') and others is a cause for concern. It was a fundamental factor in critique of the 'elite' for having pursued their own self interest, rather than providing leadership to others in their communities (see Lasch P. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, 1994).
4.2 Positive Views
However there is also a view that the overall situation is now more positive.
The US is enjoying the best economic and social conditions in 25 years. People are living longer, are breathing cleaner air, drinking cleaner water. Crime is in free fall, and down town areas once given up for dead are bristling with life. New York had the sharpest drop in crime, and a budget surplus. Houses are more valuable, marriages more solid, and teenagers better at math. The economy is solid. Unemployment is 5%, inflation is low, productivity is growing rapidly; though job insecurity and income inequality remain high. Major changes behind this include: end of cold war; consequent new global markets; major improvement in competitiveness from restructuring in early 1990s; and significant advance over competitors in computers and communication systems (Pooley E., 'Too good to be true?', Time, 19/5/97)
US success in lowering unemployment seems to be based on an ability to exploit the information economy, not just putting workers into low wage jobs. The US has created 12m new jobs since 1992. There are still insecurities and inequalities, but also a new wave of optimism. The European criticism that, while the US creates jobs those jobs are poorly paid, is now being discredited. The flexibility of US labour markets suits new information age economy (with small start ups and volatile industries). Workers are becoming better off. The nature of new technological industries (niche markets; requiring flexibility) places US in strong position. Information technologies have dramatically reshaped US economy. Around 1980s two events occurred with massive implications - deployment of personal computers, and breakup of 'Bell' system. These technological changes (together with biotechnology) will fuel a new long boom. Concerns by some that growth has occurred only in low paying jobs is disputed. Such jobs have grown, but not as fast as the number of high paying jobs (with those in the middle disappearing). Education is increasingly the most important factor in the labour market. While unskilled workers will suffer from the creative destruction of new technologies - the solution is education. (Ryan C. 'How the US has licked unemployment', Australian Financial Review, 20/6/97)
In the USA, confidence is the highest in a generation. This reflects more than just a cyclical turn around, but rather positioning for leadership in new industries, which is like US positioning early in the 20th century in industries like cars, steel and aviation. Slowing growth in 1980s disguised the fact that a lot of change was occurring. Technological change associated with computers (through transforming the nature of work) has improved productivity ('US Confidence keeps on rocking as good times roll', Australian, 26/7/97)
The perceived existence of a 'new economy' has been one of the factors which has supported the rise to high levels by US stock markets, with some views that a new higher level of economic performance is now a permanent phenomenon. Others are cautious.
The belief in the 'new paradigm' (ie that new technology and globalisation has rendered old economic rules redundant) could have dangerous consequences. Belief in the new economy has spread because it has some reality ie: trade has increased; information technology has altered the nature of US production, as well as the way firms operate. And traditional economic models do not explain this; so theories about the effect of information technology and globalisation are used. However serious academic economists are not convinced. Global competition does not alter the rate at which an economy can grow, which still depends on productivity (Economist. 'Old dangers lurk for US New Economy', Australian, 18/9/97)
[Comment: there seems to be a serious deficiency in the view that competitiveness is not linked to productivity. The ability to capture high value added (ie to achieve high productivity) seems crucially dependent on the ability of firms to create competitive advantages. Certainly growth is limited by productivity, but productivity depends on competitiveness]
Similarly there is a debate about whether the emergence of a 'new economy' in US has really allowed faster growth without igniting inflation (see Attachment A [2])
US economic anxiety was high in late 1980s as budget and trade deficits placed US in further debt to Japanese and European investors. This is no longer a concern, due to booming output, low unemployment and fiscal prudence. Yet US foreign debts are highest in the world and still rising. Borrowing is fuelled by the current account deficit, which is in turn driven by the economic boom. (Economist, 'US harnesses debt to power economy'., Australian, 7/8/97)
4.3 The Importance of Education
One consequence which seems generally accepted is that the 'new economy' makes education even more important than in the past.
A new global economy emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It is characterised by:
Thus, new strategies for investment in education are needed, and changes in the process of education (Carnoy M. 'The new global economy, information technology and restructuring education', International Journal of Technology Management, V9, N3/4, Dec 1994)
Similarly in Attachment A articles suggest that: education, training, the ability to learn and access to relevant information are now vital to success [3] and that the current education system in the USA can not provide the skills required for success in the new economy [7]
5. Implications for Queensland
In assessing the developments outlined in this paper, it seems important to recognise that recent history suggests that it is unsafe to project trends such as those outlined above very far into the future.
Thus care is essential in responding to such trends. An incremental response which takes account of other emerging trends, is more likely to be effective than a plan based on historical experience. The latter would result in 'catching up with the past', rather than with the future.
Also the motivation which may exist for presenting 'propaganda' about the US economy from various different viewpoints should not be forgotten.
Despite this, some implications for Queensland can be suggested, on the assumptions that the 'new economy' is a significant phenomenon:
5.1 Queensland's Positioning
A need for restructuring of Australia's economy was identified in the 1980s, when the long term decline in relative income levels was seen to be associated with Australia's trade specialisation on commodities, which experienced relatively slow growth rates, and declining terms of trade over a long period. However this need for diversification was recognised at the same time that the standards required to do so successfully increased enormously - and too little progress has yet been made.
Queensland's 1997 State Economic Development Strategy contains a commitment to increasing the productivity of Queensland's economy.
With Queensland's preponderance of smaller enterprises, and its high engagement with information technologies, the state may wish to adapt to operating in a 'new economy' style. If so, there could (perhaps) be large productivity benefits - which could translate into higher growth, higher real incomes, more rapid growth to reduce unemployment, and a potential for higher savings to reduce current account deficits.
This would not be automatic, but would require significant adjustments and decisions, eg:
Furthermore Queensland's existing characteristics and values would require that any such arrangements be adapted to suit. For example:
Australian managers are different to those in the USA, and want to keep it this way because this fits into Australian history, culture and values. They object to people from other countries telling them what to do. The Karpin report of Australian management was an abstract study, which compared Australian managers with those in the US, but did not place them in context. A major factor in Australia is the 'tall poppy' syndrome. People in Australia who survive the 'tall poppy' syndrome, and become prominent, are those who have worked quietly behind the scenes in a self effacing modest way. This is the complete opposite of the way Americans celebrate success. (Moodle 'Australians reject US model', Australian Financial Review, 27/6/97, quoting Professor Robert Spillane)
Egalitarian ideals have traditionally been more influential in Australia than in many other countries (even amongst those who view society from an individualistic and entrepreneurial point of view) (Dorrence G and Hughes H., Divided nation: Employment and Unemployment in Australia, Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, No 8/96, September 1996)
5.2 Regional Development
Techniques devised for private sector led partnerships with government could be considered. Difficulties in deploying such partnerships in Queensland's regional development arise from the lack of strong companies to take the lead. However techniques which encourage / allow the private sector to play a major role in taking initiatives in such frameworks can probably be devised.
Regional Queensland could consider opportunities which might flow from developing competitive advantages (and thus productivity) in areas oriented towards global markets, rather than reliance on comparative advantages (eg in resources). This is significant as a well placed observer recently commented on the continued inability of regions to focus on opportunities other than those linked to natural resources.
Traditional strategies based only on resource comparative advantages are limited because:
5.3 Investment Priorities
Infrastructure investment linked to the 'knowledge' economy, may be more valuable than those linked to capital intensive production. At present, little of the infrastructure investment by Queensland government flows towards the knowledge economy.
Investment might be needed, for example, in:
In considering such investment there is a need to differentiate between information technology (IT), and the information economy. It is knowledge which is of most significance in creating competitive advantages, and there is nothing intrinsically significant about information technology except perhaps that:
5.4 Education
If growth in future is linked to knowledge based sectors, then the ability to learn is vital to individuals and communities. Those individuals and communities which do not maximise their ability to acquire and use knowledge seem unlikely to prosper under such a regime.
Thus the debate about reform of education and training needs to focus more on whether the essential outcomes are being achieved, than on whether service costs are being reduced. In particularly, the debate about 'literacy' needs to be conducted in the light of recognition of its importance to individuals and communities.
5.5 Public Sector Reform
Current direction in public sector reform involve fragmenting the sector into a large number of 'business units'. The scope which this provides for initiative and learning may be more important to increasing the productivity of government than any scope it provides to centrally manage or measure performance.
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Grange Primary
Jan 05
Your task:
To list the 10 items you want to take with you and to identify their use in helping you survive.
20 comments so far
1. Natasha
3:22 pm - 1-5-2016
In my survival kit I would bring…
7)-pocket knife
8)-books (to keep me calm
9)-3 jackets
• Mr Highton
3:29 pm - 1-5-2016
Explain what you would need each item for please.
2. Jack s
3:26 pm - 1-5-2016
1. The first object I would take to the mountains would be a back pack because it could store all of my other objects.
2. The next object I would take would be a first aid kit so, if I get wounds/cuts I would deal with it with the equipment rather than making it infected and dirty.
3. The third object I would take would be tinned food/rations so I don’t starve.
4. The fourth object I would take would be a Swiss Army knife because it has equipment for hunting and cutting.
5. Next, I would take a survival blanket for a shelter.
6. Then I would get a ball of string to tie around branches and to support the blanket.
7. The final object I would take would be a plastic bottle to collect the stream water or to collect little bugs to eat instead of the rations.
3. angel
3:38 pm - 1-5-2016
The 10 different things I would put in My Survival Kit are a ……..
.Fire flint
• Mr Highton
3:57 pm - 1-5-2016
Explain what you would use each item for – please.
• Ruby
5:33 pm - 1-5-2016
Thanks for the compass idea .
4. Joshua moreton
3:46 pm - 1-5-2016
You will need for your survival kit: knife, torch, rope, pocketknife, food, coat, radio, compass, clothes, matches
5. lucy
3:57 pm - 1-5-2016
1.MRE, so you don’t starve to death.
2.10 packets of matches, so you can start a fire and so you have extra
3.Bottle, so you don’t have to be thirsty and you can get water from lakes near by and other things.
4.Spare warm clothes, if you get your clothes wet or dirt then you can wear the clothes.
5.Bag, so you can put your things in so you don’t have to carry them.
6.Blankets, so you can be warm at night or use it to cover your tent/shelter.
7.Tent, so you wont have to stay up all night and so you can hide.
8.Knife collection, so u can kill animals for food.
9.Camera, then I can take picture of the mountain and other things.
10.First aid kit, encase there is an injury.
6. Natasha
4:00 pm - 1-5-2016
I would use food to keep me keep and so tat I would not starve to death and water to keep me hydrated a lighter to light a fire binoculars to see what’s coming from far away a torch to have light a backpack to carry all my stuff a pocket knife for hunting books to keep me calm 3 jackets to stay warm and cotton to use to make a den.
7. Natasha
4:02 pm - 1-5-2016
I would use food to keep me going
8. Leo
4:02 pm - 1-5-2016
1. Camping knife. 10. Food
2. String
3. Blankit
4. Backpack
5. Flint and steel
6. Clothes
7. Book
8. Radio
9. Jacket
9. berfin
4:16 pm - 1-5-2016
1.Firstly, I would take with me a plenty of food to survive up on the mountains.
2.Next, I would bring with me a backpack to place my supplies in.
3.Thirdly, I would bring with me is a ball of string to support my tent.
4.Next, I would bring along with me is a flare to make fire and, to cook my food I hunted for.
5.Then, I would bring with me would be a knife to hunt my food and, to protect my self.
6. I also would bring Is something that’s flammable like cotton.
7.Next, I would bring along would be, a mini first aid kit to not make weight on me and to help me when I get a really bad cut!
8.Addition to that, I would bring a canteen to put my water In.
9.I would bring 1 or 2 jumpers to keep me warm.
10.Finally, I would bring with me is a flashlight to go hunting at night time.
10. Ruby
5:31 pm - 1-5-2016
The first thing I would bring in my survival kit would be a bow and arrow so i don’t need to bring food with me ,instead i can kill animals to eat .
I would also take a survival knife which is knife that can do seven different things and can also be used if the bow and arrow doesn’t work .
Two very important things you needed to bring would be a torch including a spear battery tray to use to see and if the light goes out you can just change the battery’s and a first aid kit incase you get hurt .
It would be a grate idea to bring a back pack to put every thing in .
To keep you warm i would bring two or three sweaters / jumpers .
To make sure I didn’t get sick i would bring a water bottle that changes dirty water into clean water .
To be safe i would bring rope to throe to the top of the mountain so I could climb up.
A good thing to bring would be a compass so you know witch way to go .
I would also bring a hammer and nails to support my shelter .
11. angel
5:33 pm - 1-5-2016
I chose a knife because it’s handy for hunting an animal down for food.
I chose a compass so I wouldn’t get lost, I would always find the way.
I chose a fire flint so I could make a fire, cook and keep warm.
I chose a rope because it would help me build a shelter.
I chose food and water to keep me up and alive.
I chose a backpack to store all the things I need.
I chose a pan so I can boil water and cook food.
I chose a blanket for shelter or warmth then finally I chose a cup so I can make nettle tea and drink water.
12. Megan
5:53 pm - 1-5-2016
The first object I would take to the mountains is a pocket knife so I can hunt for my food and slice and cook the food. The second thing i would take would be a first aid kit so if I happen to cut or slice my self I can deal with it there and then with my plasters so it won’t get infected. The next object that I would take would be my three layered jacket that can turn into less jackets so I don’t get cold and don’t get to warm. The fourth thing I would take is my survival blanket so that when I make my shelters I will be nice and warm. Next I would take a backpack to store my stuff in when there not being used or being eaten. Also I would take a flint so it’s easier for me to light fires to help me get warm and to cook some of my food. The final object I would take is a ball of string so my shelters are more safer for me to stay in. One more thing I would take a medium sized cup to collect my drinks and to drink them.
13. connor
5:56 pm - 1-5-2016
9.multi pack pack
14. Matt
6:52 pm - 1-5-2016
1) I would take some matches because when you need a fire for warmth or shelter you will be able to light it.
2) You need a torch for dark nights and hunting
3) Also you need to take a sharp pocket knife for hunting and animal encounters
4) You’ll need to take some suitable clothing for cold snowy mountains and many a waterproof coat
5) For life and death situations, you’ll need a radio to contact SOS.
6) Aswell you’ll need to take some rationed food for starving situations
7) To transport all this equipment you will need a back-pack
8) If you build a shelter you will need some rope to tie it together
9) For the meat you collect, you will need some brown paper bags to keep it fresh
10) Finally you will need some boots that have allot of grip to climb the steep mountains
15. Jack D
7:34 pm - 1-5-2016
I would take:
1.) Flint
2.) food / water
3.) thermal clothing
4.) survival blanket
5.) Swiss army knife
6.) backpack
7.) 2 way ranger radio
8.) all terrain boots
9.) string
10.) empty milk cartons / bottles
I would take these items because they are very helpful and if I could only take 5 of these items I would take the Swiss army knife, string empty milk cartons/ bottles, boots.
16. Alex
7:53 pm - 1-5-2016
Firstly I would take a Flint To start a fire
Then I would take some string for any needs
Third I would take some food to eat
Fourth I would take some water
17. lilly
5:10 pm - 1-6-2016
If I went on a trip up a mountain I would take ….
1. Tin food so it is easy to carry and easy to cook.
2. Compass so I know which direction to go.
3. Pocket knife so I can cut wood up (for a fire).
4. Flint so I can light the fire.
5. Backpack to put all my supplies in.
6. Three thermal jackets/jumpers.
7. Walking stick so it can help me up the mountain meaning something to
lean on.
8. Bottle to put my water in (from the natural spring).
9. A torch to help me see in the dark.
10. First aid kit in case I get injured.
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Natural resources (economically referred to as land or raw materials) occur naturally within environments that exist relatively undisturbed by mankind, in anatural form. A natural resource is often characterized by amounts of biodiversity existent in various ecosystems. Natural resources are derived from the environment. This is currently restricted to the environment of Earth yet the theoretical possibility remains of extracting them from outside the planet, such as the asteroid belt.[1] Many of them are essential for our survival while others are used for satisfying our wants. Natural resources may be further classified in different ways.
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ecology & environment
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Medical Cartoons Calendars
Medical Cartoons Calendars
The Illustrated Portfolio of Human Anatomy And Pathology Anatomical Wall Chart: The Definitive Collection of 30 Anatomical Charts of the Human Body
The Illustrated Portfolio of Human Anatomy and Pathology Anatomical Wall Chart:
The Definitive Collection of 30 Anatomical Charts
of the Human Body
Control of Communicable Diseases Manual
Control of Communicable Diseases Manual
New Eating Right for a Bad Gut
The New Eating Right for a Bad Gut: The Complete Nutrition Guide to Ileitis, Colitis, Crohn's Disease, and Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Teacher's Best - The Creative Process
Diseases & Disorders Posters & Charts, pg 2 of 4
for science classrooms, rehabilitation, physical therapy, and medical professionals reference.
health > 1 | DISEASES & DISORDERS pg 2 | 3 | 4 < anatomy < biology < science
Educational anatomy posters illustrate organs and promote understanding diabetes, diphtheria, epilepsy, migraine headaches, hearing, middle ear, eye, and heart diseases.
Understanding Allergies 2nd Edition Anatomical Chart
Understanding Allergies
Anatomical Chart
Understanding Allergies 2nd Edition
Who gets allergies, what are common allergens, anaphylaxis and managing allergies. 10 visual images depict the most common allergies: hay fever, sinusitis, eczema, hives, asthma, contact dermatitis, allergic conjunctivitis, and food, drug & household allergies.
Arthritis Poster
Arthritis Poster
Arthritis Poster
Gray's Anatomy artworks with text content written by the specialists in the given therapy areas.
muscular system posters
skeletal system posters
The Respiratory System and Asthma Anatomical Chart Laminated
Respiratory System & Asthma
Anatomical Chart, Laminated
The Respiratory System and Asthma
Large illustration of the conducting system which is comprised of all the pathways through which the air travels to reach the lungs. Shows ventilation and gas exchange. Illustrates common asthma triggers and compares normal bronchioles to asthmatic bronchioles.
• more respiratory system posters
Understanding Diabetes Anatomical Chart Laminated
Understanding Diabetes Anatomical Chart
Understanding Diabetes
Defines both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Lists symptoms of both types of the disease. Describes insulin and illustrates its role in the body and shows the steps in glucose metabolism. Briefly describes hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia. Discusses long-term health problems and healthy lifestyle changes.
endocrine system posters
FYI ~ Healthy food habits thought to avoid diabetes (type 2) choose foods that digest slowly releasing blood sugars into system steadily - get one serving per day of greens (spinach, arugula, roaine, kale) per day; keeping overall fat intake to under 30% of total daily calories; eat nuts high in alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) - walnuts, flaxseeds, almonds, – to improve insulin sensitivity. Also “divide” your plate - half should be produce, a quarter for protein and a quarter for high-fiber starches.
Understand Epilepsy Anatomical Chart Laminated
Understand Epilepsy
Anatomical Chart
Understand Epilepsy
Defines epilepsy, discusses causes and illustrates how the brain works. Defines seizures including the phases of a seizure. Discusses the symptoms and what to do if someone has a seizure. Shows brain activity for generalized and partial seizures and defines the main forms of these types of seizures. Discusses diagnosing epilepsy and the various tests used in the process.
nervous system posters
Epilepsy Explained Wall Chart
Epilepsy Explained
Wall Chart
The Diseases Explained: Epilepsy
An illustrated patient education poster describing Epilepsy, the causes, recognizing the symptoms, diagnosis, drug treatment, and self-care recommendations. Information is written in as easy-to-read level for patients and family members.
Migraine Explained Wall Chart
Migraine Explained
Wall Chart
The Diseases Explained: Migraine -
What is a Migraine?, What Causes a Migraine?, Recoginizing the Symptoms, Diagnosing Migraines, Treatment, Self-Help
female anatomy posters
Hearing Loss Poster
Hearing Loss
Hearing Loss
Sound vibrations travel through the outer ear canal to the eardrum, then through the bones of the middle ear to the cochlea. Deep in the inner ear, the spinal-shaped cochlea turns vibrations into nerve impulses which are sent to the brain for interpretation as sound. The conversion of physical vibrations to electrical impulses is accomplished in the cochlea by two sets of hair cells along the organ of Corti.
Damage to the hair cells and cochlea is the most common cause of hearing loss. This damage is usually caused by genetic factors, or by overexposure to sound. Excessive sound exposure damages hearing by over stimulating the tiny hair cells. When these cells are damaged, they no longer transmit sound impulses to the brain. The best way to avoid this kind of damage is to wear adequate hearing protection when exposed to loud noises.
Sound intensity is measured in decibels (dB). A normal conversation measures 50-60 dB, while a lawn mower enging is 90 dB. Sterio headphones can range from 105 to 110 dB. the loudest sounds that can be tolerated by the human ear are around 120 to 130 dB.
hearing & ears posters
Helen Keller posters
Harriet Martineau print
Alexander Graham Bell print
Middle Ear Conditions Anatomical Chart Laminated
Middle Ear Conditions
Anatomical Chart
Middle Ear Conditions
Shows photo of normal right eardrum and illustration of ear anatomy. Discusses and shows classifications and common complications of otitis media, such as Acute Otitits Media, Otitits Media with Effusion, Atelectasis, Perforation, and Cholesteatoma. Also shows middles ear development and drainage tube insertion.
Eye Disorders Poster
Eye Disorders
Eye Disorders
The eyeball has an internal pressure, which keeps the eye spherically shaped. This pressure is produced and maintained by intraocular bluid, which nourishes the lens, iris, and cornea.
The eye constantly replenishes this fluid. Excess fluid is automatically drained from within the ye by ducts located near the iris.
Glaucoma is an eye condition characterized by loss of vision due to damage of the optic nerve. It is usually caused when the jellylike fluid inside the eye is produced faster that it drains away, causing excessive pressure. This pressure can compress the optic nerve or interrupt blood flow to the nerve. In either case theresult is nerve damage, shich causes loss of vision. Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of blindness.
Since most types of glaucoma do not cause pain or readness of the eye, it can be difficult to diagnose. Glaucoma causes loss of peripheral, or side, vision firs. Central vision is only affected when the disease has progressed significantly.
Cataract is the clouding of the lens in the middle of the eye, which prevents light rays from passing into the retina. The image received by the retina becomes dull and fuzzy. This condition can cause partial or complete blindness, but is much more readily treated than glaucoma.
• more eye posters
Nearsightedness and Farsightedness Poster
Nearsightedness and Farsightedness
Nearsightedness & Farsightedness
Poster Text: Three components determine the eye's ability to focus. the cornea and lens are responsible for most of the focusing. The third factor is the length of the eyeball. Although this is the least significant element of the eye's focusing behavior, it can cause farsightedness and nearsightedness.
Farsightedness (Hyperopia) - If you are farsighted, it means you have difficulty seeing things that are close. This is caused by a cornea that doesn't have enough curve, or an eyeball that is too short.
In an eye that is too short, light entering through the cornea and lens at the front of the eye comes into focus behind the retina at the back of the eye. This results in blurry images.
Normal Sight - In a normal eye light passes through the cornea and lens at the front of the eye, and is delivered perfectly to the retina. If the cornea is curved properly and the eyeball is the right length, then the object being seen is aligned directly on the retina.
Nearsightedness (Myopia) - If you are nearsighted, it means you have difficulty seeing things that are far away.
Nearsightedness is usually caused by an eyeball that is too long or a cornea that is too curved, causing images to be focused short of the retina in the back of the eye. When the focal point is in front of the retina, images at a distance appear blurry by the time they reach the retina.
Disorders of the Eye 2nd Edition Anatomical Chart - Laminated
Disorders of the Eye
2nd Edition Anatomical Chart - Laminated
Disorders of the Eye
Shows normal eye anatomy and normal optic disc. Illustrates blepharitis, conjunctivitis, corneal ulcers, cataract, vitreous floaters, retinal tear and detachment, macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, melanoma, and glaucoma. Also shows esotropia and exotropia.
Heart Disease Anatomical Chart Laminated
Heart Disease Anatomical Chart
Heart Disease
Chart illustrates the progression of heart disease in atherosclerosis. Shows heart disease in hypertension, congestive heart failure, and mitral valve prolapse. Also contains an illustration of the aging heart.
• more circulatory heart posters
Cardiovascular Disease Poster
Cardiovascular Disease Poster
Cardiovascular Disease
Illustrates the cardiac cycle, conduction system, and electrocardiogram (ECG) and shows anterior, posterior, and cutaway view of the heart as well as the location of coronary arteries. It also illustrates and explains the following diseases: coronary heart disease, polyarteritis nodosa (PAN), Kawasaki's disease, angina, myocardial infarction (heart attack), cerebrovascular accident (stroke), aortic aneurysm, left ventricular hypertrophy, and congestive heart failure.
February : American Heart Month
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last updated 12/27/13
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Chapter 8: Inter-process Communication
In our discussion about the difference between Human applications and their Houyhnhnm counterparts (I often pronounce “Houyhnhnm” as “Hunam”), I was intrigued by claims Ngnghm made (I usually call her “Ann”) that communication was much easier between activities of a Houyhnhnm computing system than between applications of a Human computer system. I asked Ann to elaborate on this topic.
It was easy to agree that Human computer systems made communication something much lower level than it could be. But Ann also argued that Humans had very poor algebras and interfaces for users to combine processes. Just what kinds of communication could there even exist besides the ones that already existed on Human computer systems?
Implicit Communication
From my discussions with Ann emerged the notion communications being explicit or implicit.
In the case of explicit communication, a process specifically names another process, whether an existing one or a new one to be started; it then opens a communication channel with that other process, and proceeds to exchange data. Explicit communication does exactly what the programmers want (or at least say: even Houyhnhnms have no AI strong enough to DWIM); thus programmers control how much complexity they will afford; but it requires tight coupling between the programs (and thus programmers) on all sides of the communication, and is difficult to extend or adapt to suit the dynamic needs of the end-user.
Conversely, communication with other processes can be implicit: something outside some process grabs data from it, and makes it available to some other process. This is the case with copy-pasting, or with piping the standard output of one process into the standard input of another. Implicit communication is controlled by the users of a program rather than by the programmers who write it, and is therefore adapted to their needs. It sometimes require complex support from the programs that partake in it (or, we’ll argue, their meta-programs); but programmers don’t have to worry about programs on the other side, as long as they abide by some general protocol (and keep up with its updates).
Note that implicit vs explicit is a continuum rather than a clear cut distinction: every communication is partly explicit, because it necessarily involves grabbing data that was somehow published by the first process, the publishing of which wasn’t optimized away; and every communication is partly implicit, because it always relies on something in its context to effect that communication, at the meta level (as known from famous paradoxes, no consistent formal system is perfectly self-contained). Another name for this dimension of software design is declarative vs procedural programming: In the declarative approach, programmers describe what is being computed, without specifying how it is going to be computed or how it will be further processed, which will be determined by strategies at the meta level. In the procedural approach, programmers describe the steps of the computation without specifying what is going to be computed, and all the operational semantics remains at the base level.
Houyhnhnms recognize the importance of both aspects of communication, implicit and explicit; meanwhile Humans tend to be blind about the implicit aspect, because they are habitually reluctant to seriously consider anything at the meta level. When Humans tackle implicit communication (and they cannot not do it), they advance reluctantly into a topic about which they are blind; and thus they end up with implicit communication systems simultaneously quite complex and costly for programmers to implement, yet extremely limited in expressive power for the end-user.
The Case of Copy-Paste
The kind of implicit communication most visible to end-users in Human computer systems is copy-paste: applications interact with a graphical interface, and may allow the user to either copy or cut part of a document being displayed; the clipping is then stored in a global clipboard (with space for a single clip). Another application interacting with the graphical interface may then allow the user to paste the clipping currently in the clipboard into its own document. The two programs may know nothing of each other; as long as they properly partake in the protocol, they will have communicated with each other as per the desires of the end-user. Copy-pasting alone provides user-controllable implicit communication between most applications, and is an essential feature in Human computer systems.
Now, on Human computer systems, copy-paste requires every participating application to specially implement large chunks of graphical interface support. Every application then becomes somewhat bloated, having to include large graphical libraries (which in modern systems can happily be shared between applications); but also having to properly initialize them, follow their protocols, abide by the strictures of their event loop, etc. They have to be able to negotiate with the clipboard server the kinds of entities they can copy and paste, and/or convert between what the server supports and what they can directly handle. This architecture where all features are implemented at the same level of abstraction contributes significantly to the complexity of applications; applications are therefore hard to reason about, brittle and insecure. The overall graphical environment will in turn inherit the unreliability of the applications that partake in it. And despite all this complexity, often some application will fail to support copying for some of the information it displays (e.g. an error message); the feature is then sorely missed as the user needs to copy said information by hand, or falls back to some low-level means of information capture such as screen copy (or memory dump, for more advanced developers).
An interesting exception to the rule of the above paragraph is the case of “console” applications: these applications display simple text to a “terminal emulator” straight out of the 1970s, at which point all the output can be copied for further pasting. The terminal emulator thus serves as the meta-program responsible for presentation of the application output, and handling copy-paste. This comes with many limitations: only plain text is supported, not “rich text”, not images; lines longer than the terminal size may or may not be clipped, or have an end-of-line marker or escape character inserted; selecting more than a screenful may be an issue, though you can sometimes work around it by resizing the terminal or by switching to tiny fonts; standard output and error output may be mixed, and interspersed with output from background programs; layout artefacts may be included (such as spaces to end-of-line, or graphic characters that draw boxes in which text is displayed); etc. Still, the principle of a meta-program to handle display already exists in some Human computer systems; its protocol is just limited, baroque and antiquated.
Houyhnhnm computing systems generalize the idea that presenting data to the end-user is the job of a meta-program separate from the activity that displays the data; this meta-program is part of a common extensible platform, rather than of the self-contained “application” that underlies each activity. The display manager will thus manage a shared clipboard; this clipboard may contain more than just one clip; it may contain an arbitrarily long list of clips (like the Emacs kill-ring). Also, clips can include source domain information, so that the user can’t unintentionally paste sensitive data into untrusted activities, or data of an unexpected kind. The platform manages interactive confirmations, rejection notifications, and content filters, that are activated when users copy or paste data. In these aspects as in all others, the platform can be extended by modules and customized by end-users. Other meta-programs beside the display manager can reuse the same infrastructure: they can use their own criteria to select data from a program’s output; they can use the selected data for arbitrary computations, and store the results into arbitrary variables or data structures, not just a common clipboard; they may consult the history of the selected data, or watch the data continuously as it changes, instead of merely extracting its current value. And the base program doesn’t have to do anything about it, except properly organize its data so that the external meta-programs may reliably search that data.
Smoke on Your Pipe and Put That in
As another instance of implicit communication, one of the great successful inventions of (the Human computer system) Unix was the ability to combine programs through pipes: regular “console” applications possess a mode of operation where they take input from an implicit “standard input” and yield output into an implicit “standard output”, with even a separate “error output” to issue error messages and warnings, and additional “inherited” handles to system-managed entities. A process usually does not know and does not care where the input comes from and where the output is going to: it may be connected to a communication stream with another process, to a terminal, or to a file; the parent process setup the connections before the program started to run.
The parent here plays a bit of the role of a meta level, but this role is very limited and only influences the initial program configuration. (Actually, advanced tools may use ptrace, but it is very unwieldy, non-portable, and inefficient, which may explain why it remains uncommon outside its intended use as a debugging tool.) Still, even within this limitation, Unix pipes revolutionized the way software was written, by allowing independent, isolated programs to be composed, and the resulting compositions to be orchestrated into scripts written in some high-level programming language.
Houyhnhnm computing systems very much acknowledge the power of composing programs; but they are not so restricted as with Unix pipes. They enable composition of programs of arbitrary types, with arbitrary numbers of inputs and outputs all of them properly typed according to some high-level object schema, rather than always low-level sequences of bytes. (Note that low-level sequences of bytes do constitute an acceptable type; they are just rarely used in practice except in a few low-level programs.) These typed inputs and outputs all provide natural communication points that can be used to compose programs together.
Unlike the typical parent processes of Human computer systems, the meta-programs of Houyhnhnm computing systems can control more than the initial configuration of applications. They can at all time control the entire behavior of the base-level program being evaluated. In particular, side-effects as well as inputs and outputs are typed and can be injected or captured. Virtualization is a routine operation available to all users, not just an expensive privileged operation reserved to system administrators.
Explicit Communication
There are many obstacles to explicit communication in Human computer systems.
A first obstacle, that we already mentioned in a previous chapter, is the low-level nature of the data that is exchanged with their communication protocols, which constitutes a uniform obstacle to all communications by making them complex, error-prone, and insecure. But these protocols are not low-level only with respect to the data; they are also low-level with respect to communication channels. Human programming languages do not support reflection, and communication channels are selected by passing around handles, low-level first-class objects (typically small integers); this makes it harder to define and enforce invariants as to how channels may or may not be used within a given process: any function having a handle can do anything with it, and handles are often easy to forge; thus you can’t reason about security locally. Houyhnhnm programming languages instead support reflection; thus while they can express the same low-level protocols as above, they tend to (fully) abstract over them and instead expose higher-level protocols, where the channel discipline as well as the data discipline are expressed as part of the types of the functions that exchange data. Communication channel names become regular identifiers of the programming language; the language lets programmers use dynamic binding to control these identifiers; and the usual type-checking and verification techniques apply to enforce protocol invariants not limited to data format.
A second obstacle specific to explicit communication is that to be a legitimate target to such communication, a program must specifically implement a server that listens on a known port, or that registers on a common “data bus”; where this becomes really hard is that to process the connections, the server must either possess some asynchronous event loop, or deal with hard concurrency issues. Unhappily, Human mainstream programming languages have no linguistic support for decentralized event loops, and make concurrency really hard because of side-effects in threads can all too easily mess things up. Libraries that implement a centralized event loop are ipso facto incompatible with each other; those that rely on concurrency and a locking discipline are still hard to mix and match, and to avoid deadlocks they require an improbable global consensus on lock order when used by multiple other libraries.
Houyhnhnm programming languages, like the more advanced Human programming languages (including Erlang, Racket, Haskell, OCaml, etc.) both support decentralized event loops (the crucial feature being proper tail calls, and for even more advanced support, first-class delimited continuations), and make it easier by supporting well-typed concurrency abstractions on top of a functional programming core, which is a big improvement. But Houyhnhnm computing systems also make it possible to move these servers completely to a separate meta-program that controls the process you communicate with; thus the base-level process can be written as a simple program, with a very simple semantics, easy to reason about, without any pollution by the server and its complex and possibly incompatible semantics; yet it is possible to tell it to invoke exported functions or otherwise run transactions on its state, by talking to the meta-program that controls it.
A third obstacle specific to explicit communication in Human computer systems is the difficulty of locating and naming one of those target processes available to communicate with. Indeed, inasmuch as communication is explicit, it requires some way to name the party you want to communicate with: a named process (in e.g. Erlang), a numbered port or a named pipe or socket on the current machine (in e.g. Unix), a remote port on a named machine (using TCP/IP), etc. Implicit communication only needs to distinguish between local ports: “standard input”, “standard output”, “file descriptor number 9”, “the graphical display manager” (including its cut-and-paste manager), etc., without having to know what or whom is connected to it on the other side. Reading (or writing to) a file is intermediate between the explicit and implicit: you know the name of the file, but not the identity of who wrote the file (or will read it). Naming a port can also be considered more implicit and less explicit than naming a process.
Now, Human computer systems do not have object persistence, so all their connections and all their names are transient entities that must be reestablished constantly. Human computer systems also have no notion of dynamic environment; there is a static environment, set at the start of a process, but it doesn’t adapt to dynamic changes; or to track dynamic changes, programs can query servers, but then the behavior is either completely unconstrained or highly non-local. You can try to automate this communication, but every program has to handle a vast array of error cases. In any case, local reasoning about dynamic properties is nearly impossible.
Houyhnhnm computing systems have persistence, which means you can give a stable name to a stable activity, and establish a stable connection; they also feature dynamic binding as a language feature that can be used to control the behavior of programs or groups of programs in a structured way. How do they deal with transience, reconnection and unreliability at lower levels of the system? They abstract issues away by introducing a clear distinction between base level and meta level: the base level program is written in an algebra that can assume these problems are solved, with persistent naming and dynamic reconnection both implicitly solved; the meta level program takes care of these issues. Local reasoning on small simple programs (whether at the base or meta level) keeps the overall complexity of the system in check while ensuring robustness.
What’s in a Name?
At the extreme end, opposite to implicit communication, the communication is so explicit that the system knows exactly what’s on the other side of a communication portal. The inter-process communication can then be reduced to a static function call, and the listening function on the other side can often itself be inlined. And in a Houyhnhnm computing system, this may indeed happen, automatically.
Indeed, when it doesn’t change very frequently, whatever is on the other side of any communication channel can be considered locally constant; then, whichever meta-program handles connecting the communicating parties, whether a linker or JIT, can optimize all communication into function calls, and function calls into more specific instructions; it can then reduce all higher-order functions and indirections to efficient loops, until a change in the connection or in the code invalidates these optimizations.
Of course, sometimes the optimization that makes sense goes the other way, transforming function calls into communication with another process: a process on a CPU might delegate computations to a GPU; an embedded device, including a mobile phone, might rather query a server than compute itself, etc. Thus local CPU cycles can be saved whenever cheaper, faster and/or more energy-efficient resources are available. And there again, a more declarative approach allows meta-programs to automatically pick a better strategy adapted to the dynamic program context.
In the end, factoring the code in terms of base-level and meta-level is an essential tool for division of programming labor: The base-level programmer can focus on expressing pertinent aspects of the program semantics; he can write smaller programs that are simpler, easier to reason about, easier to compose; they can be written in a domain-specific language, or, equivalently, in a recognizable subset of his general-purpose language with well-defined patterns of function calls. The meta-level programmer can focus on implementation strategies and optimizations; he has a relatively simple, well-defined framework to prove their correctness, whether formally or informally; and he can focus on the patterns he is interested in, while leveraging the common platform for all other evaluation patterns, instead of having to reinvent the wheel. Thus, whether the source code for some part of an application is modular or monolithic is wholly independent of whether the implementation will be modular or monolithic at runtime. The former is a matter of division of labor and specialization of tasks between programmers at coding-time; the latter is a matter of division of labor and specialization of tasks between hardware components at runtime.
At every level, each programmer can and must use explicit names each implicitly bound to a value, to abstract any process, function or object that belongs to another programmer. By hypothesis, the programmer never knows for sure what the name will be bound to — though often that other programmer may well be the same programmer in a different role at a different time. Yet the overall system in time can always see all the bindings and statically or dynamically reduce them, efficiently combining all parts of a programs into one. Names allow to express fixed intent in an ontology where the extent will change (the extent being the value of a variable, or the text of a function, etc.); they are superfluous from the perspective of a computer system, because for a computer system any name beside memory addresses and offsets is but a costly indirection that is better done away with; names are important precisely because programming is part of a computing system, where the activities of programmers require abstraction and communication across programmers, across time, across projects, etc.
Activity Sandboxing
In Houyhnhnm computing systems, proper sandboxing ensures that activities may only share or access data according to the rules they have declared and that the system owner agreed to. In particular, purported autistic applications are ensured to actually be autistic. Proper sandboxing also means that the system owner isn’t afraid of getting viruses, malware or data leaks via an activity.
Unlike Human computer systems, Houyhnhnm computing systems always run all code in a fully abstract sandbox, as controlled by a user-controlled meta-program. There is no supported way for code to distinguish between “normal” and “virtualized” machines. If the system owner refuses to grant an application access rights to some or all requested resources, the activity has no direct way to determine that the access was denied; instead, whenever it will access the resource, it will be suspended, or get blank data, or fake data from a randomized honeypot, or a notification of network delay, or whatever its meta-level is configured to provide; the system owner ultimately controls all configuration. If the application is well-behaved, many unauthorized accesses may be optimized away; but even if it’s not, it has no reliable way of telling whether it’s running “for real”, i.e. whether it’s connected to some actual resource.
Allowing code to make the difference would be a huge security failure; and any time a monitor in a production system recognizes the attempt by a process to probe its environment or otherwise break the abstraction, a serious security violation is flagged; upon detection, the process and all its associated processes are suspended, up to the next suitably secure meta-level; also the incident is logged, an investigation is triggered, and the responsible software vendor is questioned. — Unless of course, the people responsible for the break in attempt are the system’s owners themselves, or penetration testers they have hired to assess and improve their security, which is a recommended practice among anyone hosting computations controlling any important actual resources.
Note that proper sandboxing at heart has nothing whatsoever to do with having “kernel” support for “containers” or hardware-accelerated “virtual machines”; rather it is all about providing full abstraction, i.e. abstractions that don’t leak. For instance, a user-interface should make it impossible to break the abstraction without intentionally going to the meta-level. You shouldn’t be able to accidentally copy and paste potentially sensitive information from one sandbox to the next; instead, copy and pasting from one sandbox to another should require extra confirmation before any information is transferred; the prompt is managed by a common meta-level below the sandboxes, and provides the user with context about which are the sandboxes and what is the considered content; that the user may thus usefully confirm based on useful information — or he may mark this context or a larger context as authorized for copying and pasting without further confirmations.
Protocols as Meta-level Business
Houyhnhnm computing systems resolutely adopt the notion that some tasks are generally the responsibility of a series of (meta)programs that are separate from the ones computing the results; i.e. presenting computation results, combining communicating processes, choosing an implementation strategy for a declarative program, etc. Factoring out the interface at the meta level means that each level can be kept conceptually simple. The system remains “reasonable”, that is susceptible to be reasoned about. It’s enough to assess the security properties only once, abstracting away the specifics of programs using the features.
Thus, in Houyhnhnm computing systems, unlike in Human computer systems, the robustness and timeliness of the system don’t have to depend on every application partaking in the protocol being well-behaved, nor on every programmer working on any such application being steadfast at all times and never making any mistake. There can be no bugs in all the lines of code that the programmers don’t have to write anymore. And updating or extending the protocol is much easier, since it only involves updating or extending the according meta-programs, without having to touch the base-level applications (unless they want to explicitly take advantage of new features).
Moving features from base-level applications to meta-level layers can be justified with all the same arguments why “preemptive multitasking” beats “cooperative multitasking” as an interface offered to programmers: sentient programmers are intrinsically unreliable, any kind of “cooperation” that relies on manually written code to abide by non-trivial invariants in all cases will result in massive system instability. At the same time, “cooperative” beats “uncooperative” as far as implementation is concerned; cooperation is (and actually must be) used under the hood to preserve any non-trivial system invariants — but it can be used automatically and correctly, through a meta-program’s code-generator.
Embracing or Fearing The Meta
In Human computer systems, there are few features implemented as meta-programs; software libraries are strictly runtime entities, and programmers must manually follow the “design patterns” required to properly implement the protocols supported by those libraries. In Houyhnhnm computing systems, there are plenty of meta-programs; and though they may have a runtime component like libraries, they most importantly include compile-time and/or link-time entities; and they ensure that all runtime code strictly follows all supported protocols by construction. The meta-programs, that display, select, extract, or watch data, use introspection of the program’s state, types and variables; and for reasons of efficiency, they do not re-do it constantly at runtime; yet they do keep enough information available at runtime to recompute whatever is needed when programs change.
Changes in these meta-programs may involve recompiling or otherwise reprocessing every base program that uses them. This meta-processing is deeply incompatible with the traditional Human notion of “binary-only” or “closed source” distribution of software; but that notion doesn’t exist for Houyhnhnms: Houyhnhnms understand that metaprogramming requires free availability of sources. For similar reasons, Humans who sell proprietary software see a platform based on meta-programming as the Antichrist.
A program that comes without source is crippled in terms of functionality; it is also untrusted, to be run in a specially paranoid (and hence slower) sandbox. Houyhnhnms may tolerate interactive documents that behave that way; they may accept black box services where they only care about the end-result of one-time interactions, at the periphery of their computing systems. But they have little patience for integrating a black-box program into critical parts of their regular platforms; they won’t put it in a position where it has access to critical information, or make it part of any process the failure of which could threaten the integrity of the system. If they care about what a black-box program does, they will spend enough time to reimplement it openly.
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You like and death of stars in the Andromeda galaxy: "Two ESA telescopes have joined forces to observe the Andromeda galaxy from a new perspective.Herschel is able to distinguish the rings where new stars form , while XMM-Newton captures the X-rays that throw space the stars in agony.
During Christmas 2010, ESA's Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes pointed to the nearest spiral galaxy, the M31, which is similar to our Milky Way galaxy: both contain several hundred This is the most detailed image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy in the infrared band, where you can clearly distinguish regions where new stars are forming.
The Herschel space telescope , capable of and capture the light in the far infrared band, has revealed the clouds of gas and cold dust inside the stars. Within these great clouds, the new stars begin to form in the bosom of clusters of dust that are nourished in a slow gravitational process that can last hundreds of millions of years. Once the new star has acquired sufficient density, it will begin to glow in the wavelengths of visible light, emerging from its natal cloud and showing itself before ordinary telescopes.
The X-ray image taken almost simultaneously by the ESA XMM-Newton telescope is superimposed over the infrared image. While infrared wavelengths allow observing stars in formation, X-rays usually reveal stars that are reaching the end of their life.
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XMM-Newton shows a large number of X-ray sources in the Andromeda galaxy, many of them grouped around the center of the galaxy, where normally the star density is higher. These emissions reveal shockwaves or fragments of a star bursting across interstellar space, others indicate pairs of stars engaged in a gravitational fight to the death.
In this peculiar dance, one of the stars has already dead and dragging the gas of his still active partner. As the gas passes through interstellar space, it heats up and begins to emit X-rays. The active star can become exhausted, stripped of much of its mass by the strong gravitational field of its companion, of greater density. The dead star, wrapped in a stolen gas mantle, may explode.
Both the infrared and X-ray images show information that would be impossible to collect from the ground, since these wavelengths Are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. The flickering stars we see from Earth is beautiful, but it hides much of the information. The visible light shows us the adult stars, while the infrared reveals those in formation and the X-rays that have reached their final agony.
In order to study the life cycle of stars, it is necessary to observe all its stages, and it is precisely here where the contribution of Herschel and XMM-Newton is fundamental.
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• Adam Floyd
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Acad Pediatr. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 1.
Published in final edited form as:
PMCID: PMC2746871
Color-coding Improves Parental Understanding of Body Mass Index Charting
To assess parental understanding of body mass index (BMI) and BMI percentiles using standard versus color-coded charts and investigate how parental literacy and/or numeracy (quantitative skills) impacts that understanding.
A convenience sample of 163 parents of children aged 2–8 years at two academic pediatric centers completed a demographics questionnaire, the mathematics portion of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-3R), the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA), and an “Understanding BMI” questionnaire, which included parallel BMI charting questions to compare understanding of standard versus color-coded BMI charting. Outcomes included parental-reported versus actual understanding of BMI, the odds (obtained by generalized estimating equations) of answering parallel questions correctly using standard versus color-coded charting, and odds of answering questions correctly based on numeracy and literacy.
Many parents (60%) reported knowing what BMI was, but only 30% could define it even roughly correctly. Parents using color-coded charts had greater odds of answering parallel BMI charting questions correctly than parents using standard charts (mean 88% vs. 65% correct; pooled AOR=4.32, 95% CI: 3.14–5.95; p<.01). Additionally, parents with lower numeracy (K-5 level) benefited more from color-coded charts (increased from 51% to 81% correct) than did higher numeracy parents (≥ high school level), who performed well using both charts (89% vs. 99% correct).
Parents consistently performed better using color-coded than standard BMI charts. Color-coding was particularly helpful for lower numeracy parents. Future studies should investigate whether these results translate into offices and whether understanding motivates parents toward important lifestyle change.
Keywords: Body Mass Index, Overweight, Obesity, Literacy, Numeracy
Childhood obesity in the United States is increasing at an alarming rate, creating challenges for healthcare providers. Early treatment can prevent worsening weight status.1 Although best strategies for preventing and treating obesity continue to evolve, national policy statements urge pediatricians to discuss behavioral changes with parents (e.g., limiting television, limiting sweetened drinks, and increasing physical activity), particularly for children at higher risk.2 While pediatricians and parents seem well-positioned to help children reverse unhealthy weight patterns,2, 3 initiating these or other behavioral prescriptions requires parental motivation. One of the barriers to motivation may be that both providers and parents under-recognize the problem for individual children.
Parents often fail to recognize when their children are overweight; this is particularly true for young children.47 Additionally, prior studies have demonstrated that fewer than 20% of pediatric physicians routinely use recommended Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) age- and gender-specific Body Mass Index (BMI; BMI= kg/m2) charts, explicitly designed to screen for unhealthy weight trajectories.8, 9 In one study of health supervision visits, only 6% of visits had BMIs plotted.10 Pediatrics providers also report low self-efficacy in managing obesity, citing multiple barriers including poor patient and parent motivation.1113 One study noted that 65% of pediatricians believed “caregiver does not perceive weight as a problem” to be a frequent barrier to optimal care.14 Furthermore, according to focus group study, concern about parents not understanding BMI’s complexity deters some pediatricians from discussing it.15
Few data exist to indicate whether or not parents do, in fact, understand BMI. Literacy and numeracy skills are likely required to understand and review BMI charting with health professionals. How literacy and numeracy affect understanding of BMI charting, though, has not been previously reported. Assessing whether parents understand BMI and developing effective tools for conveying children’s BMI status to parents in pediatricians’ offices could facilitate improved parental BMI understanding and motivation. Such understanding and motivation would allow pediatricians to partner with parents to implement recommended obesity prevention and treatment strategies.
One potentially helpful communication tool is a color-coded BMI chart. Color-coding assigns “stop light” green, yellow, and red colors to increasingly concerning zones of weight status, analogous to the frequently-used “Asthma Action Plan.”16, 17 It has been previously described as helpful to primary care pediatricians’ efforts.18, 19 Whether color-coding the BMI chart facilitates understanding for parents, however, has not been investigated.
The goals of this study were as follows: to assess parental understanding of BMI charting using both currently available, standard BMI charts20 and color-coded BMI charts; and to determine the relationship between health literacy and numeracy skills and the ability to comprehend standard and color-coded BMI charting. We hypothesized that parents would interpret color-coded BMI charts more accurately than standard charts, and parents with lower health literacy and numeracy skills would be especially helped by color-coding.
A convenience sample of parents or caregivers was recruited from the waiting room of the University of North Carolina primary care and subspecialty pediatrics clinic and the Vanderbilt University primary care clinic waiting room at varying times of the day and week for this cross-sectional study. Individuals were approached as they entered the waiting room after checking into clinic and asked if they were interested in participating in the study. Those who agreed to participate received a small ($10.00) monetary honorarium on completion of the study. This study was approved by the UNC IRB (#06-0978) and the Vanderbilt IRB (#071014).
Caregivers were deemed eligible if they had a child aged 2–8, spoke English, had sufficient vision (visual acuity >20/50 using the Rosenbaum Pocket Vision Screener), and did not have a neurologic or mental illness that would interfere with their ability to complete the questionnaire. Parents were considered to speak English if they were planning to communicate with their child’s doctor in English during their clinic visit (without the use of an interpreter) so as to simulate a real clinic experience and level of understanding. All caregivers were screened for colorblindness using the Neitz test of color vision; however, colorblindness was not an exclusion criterion.
Data collection
All questionnaires were administered to the caregiver on a one-to-one basis in a confidential manner and took approximately 20–30 minutes to complete. Participants completed a short demographic questionnaire assessing race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and insurance status (Medicaid, TennCare, private insurance, or none). They were then given the previously validated Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA) to assess health literacy,21 followed by part I of the “Understanding BMI” questionnaire, described below. After Part I, the participants completed the mathematics portion of the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-3R), a previously validated measure,22 to assess numeracy or quantitative skills (this was placed in between Parts I and II of the Understanding BMI questionnaire to distract participants). Finally, they completed Part II of the Understanding BMI questionnaire.
Understanding BMI questionnaire
Part I of the Understanding BMI questionnaire included: 1) a question asking the ages of all children in the household; 2) a question as follows: “During any of your child(ren)’s last regular check ups, did the doctor talk to you about Body Mass Index (BMI)?”; 3) assessment of parents’ baseline understanding of BMI by an open-ended question where parents were asked to provide a definition in open-ended format that was transcribed verbatim; 4) a question asking parents to identify the weight status of a hypothetical child using a reference table but no BMI chart; 5) four closed-ended, multiple choice questions requiring interpretation of standard BMI charts (see Figure 1), and 6) two closed ended, multiple choice “control” questions whose answers were not dependent on color-coding (see Figure 1). Part II of the Understanding BMI questionnaire included the same multiple choice BMI charting questions from Part I (see Figure 1), except color-coded BMI charts were used instead of standard ones for interpretation. Questions in Parts I and II requiring interpretation of BMI charts will be subsequently referred to as “parallel BMI charting questions.” To minimize the effect of question order on participant response, the parallel BMI charting questions were randomized to a different order for Part II versus Part I.
Figure 1Figure 1
Parallel BMI charting questions asked using standard and color-coded BMI charting.
On the color-coded charts, areas were shaded green indicating “healthy weight” (5th to < 85th percentile), yellow indicating “at risk for overweight” (85th to < 95th percentile), or red indicating either “overweight” or “underweight” (≥95th or <5th percentiles, respectively) (see Figure 2). Each question using a BMI chart included a key, explaining the significance of each color for color-coded charts (e.g., “on this chart, green indicates healthy weight,” etcetera) or the percentile lines for standard charts (e.g., “on this chart, between the 5th percentile and 85th percentile indicates healthy weight,” See Figure 1). All BMI questions were worded and read to caregivers by the research assistant in a way intended to simulate how clinicians present information about BMI. On questions requiring BMI chart interpretation, the research assistant also pointed to the “X” on the chart for each question, when applicable, in order to further simulate clinician communication.
Figure 2
Example of color-coded BMI chart. Green indicates healthy weight (BMI 5th–<85th percentile), yellow indicates at risk for overweight (now called overweight; BMI 85th to <95th percentile), and red indicates underweight (<5 ...
Of note, the recommended terminology for obesity changed during the study period, with the previous “at-risk” category now “overweight” and the previous “overweight” category now “obese.”2 For consistency, the initial terminology and BMI categories were used for the “Understanding BMI” questionnaire throughout the project and will be reported as such here.
Data Analysis
Descriptive statistics were calculated for the combined sample and for each of the two sites. Comparisons between the sites were made using Fisher’s exact test for categorical variables and the two-sample t-test for continuous variables. Fisher’s exact test was also used to compare parents’ understanding of BMI using the standard charts among those who had discussed BMI with their physicians at a prior regular check ups and those who had not.
The correctness of parents’ open-ended BMI definition was determined using a 2 out of 3 consensus amongst co-authors (EP, MO, and JF) blinded to other parent data. A BMI definition was considered “correct” if the caregiver included the notion that BMI is the way medical personnel determine whether a child is at a healthy weight and/or if the caregiver described that BMI accounts for differences in weight by height. The correct mathematical equation was not necessary. The agreement of “correctness” of the three researchers was assessed using kappa as a measure of inter-rater reliability. Logistic regression was employed to calculate the odds ratio (OR) of understanding BMI (the ability to correctly define BMI in an open-ended short-answer format) based on WRAT-3R, S-TOFHLA scores, education, income, race, and insurance, adjusting for site.
The proportion of parents correctly answering each of the four multiple choice parallel BMI charting questions requiring interpretation of standard and color BMI charts and two control questions was calculated. The individual proportion for each question, in addition to a pooled estimate of the overall percent correct, was obtained for each of the BMI chart types. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) with an exchangeable correlation matrix, logistic link function and individual clusters were used to calculate ORs for answering a question correctly using the color-coded versus standard chart. Models were run for each combined individual question pair of parallel BMI charting questions (standard and color-coded) adjusted for site, and by site, and for the pooled data (excluding control questions), adjusting for question since there was variability in response to the different questions, for both the combined sample (adjusted for site) and by site. The pooled data were used to explore the association between answering a question correctly and each of the following variables independently adjusting for chart type (standard versus color-coded), question, and site (for combined sample): continuous standardized WRAT-3R score or raw S-TOFHLA score, years of education, income, type of insurance (public, including Medicaid, AccessCare, North Carolina’s Medicaid managed care, and Tenncare, Tennessee’s Medicaid managed care, or private), mean age of youngest child, number of children, and race/ethnicity (black/African American, white, “other”, Hispanic). Due to the extremely small number in the “no insurance” group, we excluded those individuals (2 total) rather than arbitrarily assign them since they could not be in their own group due to model convergence issues.
Individuals were then stratified into three groups based on their WRAT-3R scores: K-5; Middle School; or High School and greater. Due to sample size constraints, only combined data were used to explore the relationship between a parent’s numeracy level and the difference in performance using standard versus color-coded charts on the parallel BMI charting questions; analyses were completed for each individual question as well as the pooled sample. Since 94% of the sample classified as “adequate” health literacy based on S-TOFHLA score,21 conducting a similar stratified analysis for health literacy was not possible. Statistical significance was established at a p<0.05. All analyses were conducted using SAS version 9.1 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC).
The majority of individuals approached for the study participated (66 refused, 54 were ineligible, and 2 did not complete the study). Demographic characteristics of the final sample (N=163) are summarized in Table 1. Differences between sites were noted and accounted for in subsequent analyses. The majority of parents identified as either black/African American (48%) or white (38%). Nearly 40% had an annual income less than $20,000; 66% were publicly insured. A large majority (84%) had WRAT-3R scores at or below middle school numeracy.22 Most (94%) parents had “adequate” health literacy.23 None screened as colorblind.
Table 1
Demographic characteristic
On average, both groups answered 65% of the standard BMI charting questions correctly. Less than a third (27%) said their child’s doctor had discussed BMI at a prior regular check-up with their child(ren). However, these parents did not differ from parents who reported not discussing BMI at a prior check-ups in their ability to correctly interpret BMI charts.
Sixty percent of parents responded that they knew what BMI was, but only 30% could correctly define BMI in open-ended format (in 89% of cases where some answer was provided, all reviewers agreed as to its correctness; kappa = 0.85). The odds of providing a correct definition of BMI were 1.06 (95% CI 1.00–1.13; p=0.04) and 1.18 (95% CI 1.02–1.37; p=0.03) times greater for each point higher an individual scored on the WRAT-3R and S-TOFHLA, respectively. The odds of providing a correct definition of BMI were 1.28 (95% CI 1.11–1.47; p=0.0005) times greater for each additional year increase in education, 6.53 (95% CI 1.59–26.73) times greater for those in the $40,000–60,000 income range and 4.83 (95% CI 1.50–15.50) times greater for those earning $60,000 or greater, both compared to those earning <$10,000. Those who were white were 2.71 times (95%CI 1.25–5.87) times greater than those who were black/African American to be correct (Hispanics and “other” were not significantly different than black/African American). Finally, those with public insurance were 0.37 (95%CI 0.18–0.76) times as likely as those with private insurance to provide a correct definition.
On pooled parallel BMI charting questions, parents were correct 65% of the time using standard charting compared to 88% using the color-coded charting. After adjusting for site and question variability, this translates into over four times greater odds of answering a question correctly using the color-coded charting compared to the standard charting (OR 4.32, 95% CI 3.14–5.95) (Table 2). This significant difference was similar for both sites. When individual parallel BMI charting questions were assessed separately, parents from the combined sample scored better using the color-coded than the standard BMI charts on every question (all p values <0.01) (Table 2). In contrast, for two control questions, where interpretation of the questions were independent of the charting’s color-coding scheme, the odds of answering a question correctly were not significantly greater using color-coded compared to standard charts (p=0.62 for Control Question 1 and p=0.53 for Control Question 2). This reflects the specificity of the color-coding “intervention” as well as arguing against a learning effect of having the standard chart questions first.
Table 2
Parent performance on parallel BMI charting questions using standard versus color-coded charts
Higher continuous S-TOFHLA and WRAT-3R scores, greater number of years of education, being at the highest compared to lowest income bracket, having private versus public insurance, and being white or of “other race” rather than Black or African American were all associated with greater odds of answering a parallel BMI charting question correctly regardless of whether the question was asked using a standard or color-coded chart. Neither number of children nor age of the youngest child was related to correct answers of parallel BMI charting. All odds ratios are shown in Table 3. Analyses done by site revealed similar results, though data are not shown.
Table 3
Association between covariates and parent performance on four parallel BMI charting questions
While color-coding was associated with higher scores on the BMI charting questions for all numeracy levels, the greatest benefit was experienced by those with lower numeracy. Parents with K-5 level numeracy increased from an average of 51% correct on the standard charts to 81% on the color-coded charts (30% difference, p <0.0001), those with middle school numeracy went from averages of 70% to 90% (23% difference, p<0.0001), and those with high school or greater numeracy went from 89% to 99%) (10% difference, p=0.011).
Our study assessed parental understanding of BMI, investigated demographic factors associated with BMI chart understanding, and tested differentials in parental understanding using standard versus color-coded BMI charts. Previous studies have shown that pediatricians hesitate to show BMI charts to parents, believing that parents will not be able to understand their complexity.15 With standard BMI charts, parents answered less than two-thirds of the questions correctly, even when they reported their child(ren)’s doctor had previously discussed BMI. However, parents universally demonstrated greater understanding using the color-coded BMI charts. Parents demonstrated more than four times greater odds of answering questions correctly using color-coded charts than standard charts. Furthermore, parents with the lowest numeracy demonstrated the largest increases with color-coded charts, suggesting color-coding could help reduce numeracy disparities in understanding BMI charting.
It makes sense that parental numeracy skills would be highly correlated with understanding of BMI and BMI charts since BMI and graphs in general are numerical entities. Previous studies have also shown a link between numeracy and adult understanding of health information that is reliant on numerical skills, such as understanding of food labels,24 anticoagulation management,25 interpretation of glucose meter readings and insulin adjustment in patients with diabetes,26 and asthma management.27 Similar to our study, several studies found a stronger relationship between comprehension and numeracy than comprehension and literacy.
There are several important limitations of this study. First, our study population had relatively high health literacy, with almost all participants scoring in the “adequate” range on the S-TOFHLA as in other recent studies.28 Despite this “ceiling effect,” we did find an association between literacy level and the ability to both provide a correct definition of BMI in open-ended format and interpret BMI charts in general. However, we were unable to assess the impact of color-coded BMI charting on parents with inadequate health literacy, which had been one of our initial goals. Second, although our “Understanding BMI” questionnaire was designed to assess parental understanding of BMI charting, there is, as yet, no validated tool to test this. Therefore, it is unclear whether correctly interpreting BMI charting on this questionnaire translates to understanding of a child’s weight status in a real office setting, or, more importantly, whether the ability to interpret a BMI chart would contribute to parental motivation to make recommended lifestyle changes. Third, our study was completed using a convenience sample derived from two large academic centers’ pediatrics clinics. While those participating in this study reflected a diverse sample similar demographics to the clinics from which they were recruited, those demographics may or may not be generalizable to other settings. Similarly, due to the non-random nature of recruitment and lack of prior data regarding our population’s children’s BMIs, it is not possible to confirm that our participants’ responses regarding BMI experience and knowledge are typical for the clinic populations in general. However, given that the demographics of our sample are consistent with our clinic populations, there is no particular reason to expect selection bias. Fourth, in one clinic, patients visiting specialty physicians as well as general pediatricians were included, which may account for differences in demographics between sites. To reduce the impact of these between-site differences, such differences were adjusted for in all analyses. Fifth, surprisingly, our study population included no participants with colorblindness on our screen, so it was not possible to assess the interpretability of color-coded BMI charts for those individuals. If color-coded BMI charting (or other color-coded interventions) were to be implemented in practice, categories should be easily distinguishable, even to those who are so-called “red-green” colorblind. Also, our data only allowed the exploration of potential factors associated with understanding BMI; they did not allow for predictive modeling. Therefore, we were unable to ascertain, for example, whether higher education was a proxy for higher numeracy ability, or if higher education itself was an independent predictor of a parents’ ability to understand BMI charting. This leaves remaining questions about which parents are most likely to find which type of BMI charting most helpful in discussions about BMI. Finally, the terminology of BMI categories changed during our study, and it is hard to know how much of a role new terminology of BMI categories would help or hinder BMI charting understanding.
Despite these limitations, our findings have important implications. If color-coding helps improve parents’ understanding of BMI, doctors may be able to use the color-coded BMI chart as a tool in their practice to communicate weight status to parents more effectively. In one study, when asked what resources would be most helpful, 90% of pediatricians endorsed better tools to communicate weight problems to patients.14 We also know that parental readiness to make changes is affected by parents’ perceptions of their children’s weight. One study noted that if parents perceived their children were overweight, they were twice as likely to fall into the preparation/action stage of change to help their children lose weight.29 In another study, most (68%) parents of obese children who thought their children’s weight was unhealthy were told this by a doctor, and more parents whose doctors explained their children’s weight as unhealthy were preparing to make lifestyle changes compared with those whose doctors never stated this (75% vs. 25%, p<0.05).30 In a recent British study of the effects of a structured weight communication program, half the parents of young obese children who were told their children’s weight was unhealthy reported positive health behavior change, and most wanted such weight-based communication regularly.31 Finally, when doctors fail to take obesity seriously at younger ages, parents perceive this as a barrier to change health habits.32 Color-coded BMI charts could be one way to communicate early problems in the universally-understood stop light motif. Whether better communication of BMI to parents leads to increased recognition of their children’s weight status and whether such understanding then leads to improved lifestyle or weight trajectories are projects deserving further research, and we have begun to study these important questions.
To our knowledge, our study is the first to evaluate whether use of color-coded charts aids parental understanding of BMI charting. Our results suggest that color-coded BMI charts increase the number of parents who will understand BMI charting, particularly those with lower numeracy. Color-coded BMI charting may be one element in the growing repertoire of tools to assist pediatricians in effectively communicating with parents and may help start a conversation of therapeutic lifestyle change in an era of a childhood obesity epidemic.
Funding was provided by the Short-Term Research Training grant from the NIH-National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (#5 T35DK007386-29; PI: Sandler). Dr. Perrin is supported by an NICHD Career Development Award (#3 K23 HD051817; PI: Perrin). Dr. Rothman is supported by an NIDDK Career Development Award (#5 K23 DK065294; PI: Rothman). Dr. Esserman is supported by the UNC Clinical Translational Science Award (#1 UL1RR025747-01, PI: Pisano).
We would like to acknowledge medical student, Kate Scott, for help with data collection and Drs. Michael Steiner and Andrew Perrin for manuscript draft review. Dr. Eliana Perrin had full access to all the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Body Mass Index
Wide Range Achievement Test
Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults
Conflicts of Interest: There are no conflicts of interest to report.
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19. Perrin EM, Finkle JP, Benjamin JT. Obesity prevention and the primary care pediatrician’s office. Curr Opin Pediatr. 2007;19:354–361. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
20. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Body Mass Index. [Accessed May 15, 2009].
21. Parker RM, Baker DW, Williams MV, Nurss JR. The test of functional health literacy in adults: A new instrument for measuring patients’ literacy skills. J Gen Intern Med. 1995;10:537–541. [PubMed]
22. Wilkinson GS. Wide Range Acheivement Test: Administration Manual. Wilmington, Delaware: Wide Range Inc; 1993.
24. Rothman RL, Housam R, Weiss H, et al. Patient understanding of food labels: The role of literacy and numeracy. Am J Prev Med. 2006;31:391–398. [PubMed]
25. Estrada CA, Martin-Hryniewicz M, Peek BT, Collins C, Byrd JC. Literacy and numeracy skills and anticoagulation control. Am J Med Sci. 2004;328:88–93. [PubMed]
26. Cavanaugh K, Huizinga MM, Wallston KA, et al. Association of numeracy and diabetes control. Ann Intern Med. 2008;148:737–746. [PubMed]
27. Apter AJ, Cheng J, Small D, et al. Asthma numeracy skill and health literacy. J Asthma. 2006;43:705–710. [PubMed]
28. Lokker N, Sanders L, Perrin EM. Parental misinterpretations of over-the-counter pediatric cough and cold medication labels. Pediatrics . 2008 (in press) [PMC free article] [PubMed]
29. Rhee KE, De Lago CW, Arscott-Mills T, Mehta SD, Davis RK. Factors associated with parental readiness to make changes for overweight children. Pediatrics. 2005;116:e94–101. [PubMed]
30. DeLago C, Arscott-Mills T, Rhee K, Chanoine P, Krysko R. Communicating the obesity problem to the parents [abstract] Pediatr Res. 2004;55:224A. Abstract 1268. [PubMed]
31. Grimmett C, Croker H, Carnell S, Wardle J. Telling parents their child’s weight status: Psychological impact of a weight-screening program. Pediatrics. 2008;122:e682–8. [PubMed]
32. Borra ST, Kelly L, Shirreffs MB, Neville K, Geiger CJ. Developing health messages: Qualitative studies with children, parents, and teachers help identify communications opportunities for healthful lifestyles and the prevention of obesity. J Am Diet Assoc. 2003;103:721–8. [PubMed]
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LearnLineWeb.com
Webz Marketing
Chester Lee stree
New Castle . UK
What is a Domain Name?
It needs proper registration process through the internet and after getting a domain name, your visitors can access to your online platform. You are given an email with the same initials of this domain name of your website so that the customers can contact you and ask you relevant questions.
As an example, say the domain name of your website is www. website.com, then the email account of your staff will contain the extension of …..@website.com
As you know, every system has a separate and unique IP address, on the same lines; the domain name is compatible with the Internet Protocol Address of your device. This address is used to transmit data and it consists of a group of four digits from 0-255. It is in fact a necessary requirement of the web server.
The number of domain names across the internet is increasing day by day and according to an estimate, it has reached more than eleven million. It is rather hard to find the availability of your desired domain name most of the time because it is already taken by some other website. When you check the availability of the domain name you choose for your website, it coincides the name with the IP. Now the question arises in one’s mind, why is must be distinct?
The answer is that if two or more websites have the same domain names, the computer network will not be able to differentiate between the two and so communication and transmission of the packets cannot be established over the network.
There is a proper DNS database, i.e. Domain Name System that has all the information of the names and IPs as the identity of the websites. Domain Names are easy to remember and recognize the nature of your business as compared to any numeric name.
You can spell it from right to left as you read any English name. There are 3 levels of a domain name, i.e.
Parent Domain (on the very right side “com)
Mid Domain (in the center) and
Machine Name (on the very left side “www”)
These names are combined with dot in between such as www.diplomapk.com
Educational institutions use “.edu” with the domain name, short name of a country is also added with some names, e.g. www.englishclub.pk
Also note the difference between the domain name and the URL (Uniform Resource Link). The former is rather a part of the latter. A URL can be an address of a website as a combination of domain name, computer language and machine name, etc. For example, www.diplomapk.com/softwares_dilpoma/index.php
How to promote a website?
read more
How to Design a Website?.
What is Web Hosting?
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FROM a cerebro-vascular, genito-urinary, gastro-intestinal, psycho-therapeutic or mortuary point of view, the rich and famous have never had it so good. Yes, their children are more prone to acne and allergies. Nevertheless, during the last half of the 20th century, people in the developed world with an elevated social status have been producing health, well-being and longevity at a faster rate than those with lower social standing.
Physical and mental health run parallel to social rank. In England, commoners die sooner than aristocrats. In the military, sergeants have more heart attacks than generals. Blue-collar workers -- and not only those working in mines, construction sites and chemical plants -- have more respiratory infections and hacking coughs than white-collar workers. Office clerks are more anxious and depressed than office managers. Lower-middle-class Americans are more mortal, morbid, symptomatic and disabled than upper-middle-class Americans. With each little step down on the educational, occupational and income ladders comes an increased risk of headaches, varicose veins, hypertension, sleepless nights, emotional distress, heart disease, schizophrenia and an early visit to the grave.
The funny thing is, no one knows why.
Of course, people who are socially well placed have not always been spared the ravages of disease. Mythic images of wounded elites come to mind: gout-endamaged royalty, wan and hysterical Victorian ladies, ascetic malnourished Brahman widows, Mandarins eating vitamin-deficient polished rice and bearing beriberi. In the 1920's and 30's, coronary heart disease was apparently a mark of social distinction among men in England. In the 1940's and 50's, the polio virus crippled those at the top in the United States. And even today there are a few afflictions, like breast cancer and malignant melanomas, that seem to prevail among citizens of high station.
On the whole, though, the upper- crust neuroses and illnesses have all but disappeared from Europe and the United States. During the last 50 years, Western men and women of higher status have lived longer and have been healthier and saner than the people they outclass.
The study of ''social inequalities in health'' is today one of the hottest areas in epidemiology, medical sociology and health psychology. Only last December, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation established a research network on socioeconomic status and health, under the direction of Nancy Adler, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Much of the excitement dates from the 1980 publication of the ''Black Report,'' when Sir Douglas Black (a former president of the Royal College of Physicians) and his medical, social science and public policy associates showed the statistical association between illness and social class in England and Wales. The Conservative Government detested the Black Report, viewing it as a trespass of social medicine into politics, an ideological tract produced by welfare-state advocates longing to redistribute wealth and level the social class system. Liberal egalitarians, just as predictably, took the study as proof that social hierarchy is a public health problem.
Politics aside, no one knows precisely why people with high status are more healthy and less crazy.
It is not primarily because they have better access to health care. Socioeconomic differences exist for diseases that are not amenable to treatment. In fact, since the advent of the British National Health Service in 1948, the gap in health between occupational statuses in England has widened. (Perhaps this confirms the dismal economic principle that publicly financed institutions -- hospitals, schools, highways and courts -- always benefit the well-to-do most.)
The health gap cannot be blamed mostly on hazardous work or living conditions, either. Social status differences in health persist even when members of different social classes are exposed to similar levels of pollutants and carcinogens in their environment.
Nor is poverty itself the prime reason. Consider, for example, the famous ''Whitehall Studies,'' an investigation of the tidy, hierarchically graded world of relatively well-off white-collar British civil servants, conducted by the epidemiologist Michael Marmot and his public health colleagues at University College, London.
The Whitehall study showed that with each tiny descent in civil service rank, from senior executive officer down to executive officer, comes more angina, more diabetes and more rough cough with phlegm. In this securely employed population, the mortality gap between senior administrators and clerical workers is even greater than the health divide in the general population. Moreover, as comparisons between richer and poorer countries in Europe have shown time and again, greater national wealth does not readily translate into greater national health. A 45-year-old Greek male can expect to live longer than his English peer.
The health gap cannot be blamed primarily on life style differences, either. It's true that clean living (no smoking, alcohol or fatty foods and lots of exercise) is a high-status religious activity (though professional women probably drink more liquor than working-class women). Nevertheless, it turns out that most of the social inequality in coronary heart disease remains even after such life-style differences are taken into account.
Could the health gap exist because unhealthy people are downwardly mobile or because healthy women marry up? Those things do happen. Some people rise in status because they are vigorous and others are ''selected'' for demotion because they are disabled or out of their minds. But social migration isn't enough of a stampede to explain all the health effects.
Neo-conservatives believe that both health and high social rank are jointly produced and justly earned by hard-working, intelligent people who avoid reckless risks, educate themselves and take a long view of life. And liberal-minded egalitarians believe that health is a common good that ought to be provided and regulated by the government (just like highways, schools, courts and national defense). But neither side has explained how the health divide is actually produced.
Perhaps it is karma. Perhaps it is in the genes. Perhaps it is all of the reasons above. Perhaps it is a statistical artifact. Perhaps the safest thing one can say is that the socioeconomic health gradient is a ''multiple complex synergistic non-linear incremental cumulative threshold-bound lag effect.'' Social scientists like to talk like that when they think they are looking at something important but don't really know what is going on.
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What are Shin Splints? No Your Shin Hasn’t Broken
What are Shin Splints?
Shin splints is a painful injury in the shin or lower front part of the leg. Medically known as medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS), it is attributed to 15-30 percent of leg injuries among aggressive atheletes who are excessively using leg power including runners, jumpers, swimmers, cyclers, gymnasts etc. It is under the umbrella of overuse injuries.
It's also important to take note that not all lower leg injury are shin splints. Some of them can either be shin soreness or stress fracture. Shin splints also appears to be a commonly misunderstood term as people associate it with fracture or breaking of the bone. It's understandable though considering that it happens to the muscles attached to the bone, to the bone itself, or the way the muscle is attached to the bone, and it gets pretty difficult to distinguish where the pain is coming from. For the record, your bone is not broken. It just feels broken because something around it hurts.
The lower leg is composed of two bones and many interweaving muscles. The part affected by shin splints is the tibia and fibula, and the muscles around it. Tibia is the medial bone or bone inside the lower leg, while fibula is the lateral bone, or bone outside the lower leg.
Shin splints happen as legs are recurrently applied pressure on and thus, strain the lower leg's tibia and its surrounding muscles. The muscles often affected by shin splints are soleus, flexor, digitorum longus and deep crural fascia. The muscle slightly detaches from the bone and tendons are strained as the legs are pound on hard surfaces. It can also lead to flattening of a foot's arch, a painful condition known as over pronation or "flat feet", as well as supination.
When shin splints occur, it is normally always painful even if the legs are not used.
Unlike other injuries in which exercise can help, shin splints gets worse when applied even the tiniest stress, causing it to inflame and get even more painful. The best way to initially deal with it is to sit down and apply ice packs around in order to reduce inflammation and stop the straining.
Click here for Shin Splints Treatment
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Why Indonesia matters
October-December 2014
By: Amitav Acharya
Indonesia is an emerging power of the 21st century, in both Asia and the world, but it is not moving that way in the traditional manner of other powers. The term “emerging powers” recognizes the growing status – primarily economic but also political and strategic – of a specific group of nations. Most, if not all of them, were once categorized (and in some cases still are) as part of the “third world” or “global south.”
Indonesia belongs in this category. It is the fourth-most populous country in the world, after China, India and the United States. It is also the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and the third-largest democracy. Its economy is currently the 16th largest in the world (although one more recent estimate puts it at number 10), and McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm, has estimated that it could become the seventh largest by 2030. Since the fall of the Soeharto dictatorship in 1998, Indonesia has held three direct presidential elections, all of which were judged to be free and fair. Between 2000 and 2010, its economic growth surpassed all other emerging economies except China and India, and was ahead of Russia, Brazil, and South Africa, which make up the other BRICS countries.
But the Indonesian story suggests it is taking a different path to emerging-power status than other nations. This path is not based so much on military strength or economic resources; rather, it lies in the ability of a country to develop a positive, virtuous correlation of three factors: democracy, development and stability, while pursuing a foreign policy of restraint toward neighbors and active engagement with the world at large. This is the key lesson from the story of Indonesia that this essay seeks to present.
Indonesia has achieved its growing status in global affairs in a very different manner than other emerging powers in the developing world, including the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Two things set Indonesia apart. First, while the rise of other BRICS countries was related to, first and foremost, economic growth and military spending, Indonesia came in on the back of democratization and regional engagement. Each of the BRICS is a significant military power, some regionally and others such as China and Russia globally.
Even non-BRICS emerging powers such as South Korea, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia had acquired significant regional economic and military clout before their diplomatic and political contributions came to be recognized. Indonesia is sometimes compared with the Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, or with Australia and Canada, which are called “middle powers.” But these are wealthy Western nations, and some, such as Sweden and Australia, possess significant military power.
By contrast, Indonesia is still militarily and economically a weak state, in particular compared to some of its neighbors. Yet it enjoys comparable or even greater regional leadership and clout than any of the other emerging powers in the developing world. For a country that is neither the strongest military nor economic power even in its own immediate region, (even tiny Singapore scores better on both counts), Indonesia has done more as a mediator and facilitator of Asian conflicts than the region’s major powers – China, Japan and India – combined.
The second point of difference relates to the position of an emerging power within its own region. The Indonesian story suggests that the key to global status and recognition lies in good regional relations. Marty Natalegawa, Indonesia’s foreign minister, likes to describe Indonesia as a “regional power with global interests and concerns.” We can modify this description slightly to say that Indonesia pursues a “regionalist path to its global role.” According to Natalegawa, many rising powers suffer from a “regional trust deficit” with their neighbors. Indonesia is different.
There is much truth to this. Relations between powers such as India, China, Japan, South Africa and Brazil with their respective neighbors are marked by considerable mistrust and conflict. Indonesia, on the other hand, is universally acknowledged as a regional “elder” and enjoys far more cordial relations with all its neighbors. Thus, a distinctive feature of Indonesia’s role as an emerging power is that while it is not the dominant military or economic power in its own region, it is respected and expected to play the role of mediator and facilitator in regional crises and conflicts.
Some have argued that the BRICS should be expanded to include Indonesia. But one does not find too much enthusiasm within Jakarta’s foreign policy circles for this idea. As Hassan Wirajuda, who served as Indonesian foreign minister from 2001 to 2009 and is Strategic Review’s editor-in-chief, told me: “We don’t bother much about it ... We have our own game, ASEAN, [and] East Asia.” He pointed out that while Indonesia is not part of the grouping, “the growth of BRICS has declined, while Indonesia’s is growing more rapidly. What is the meaning of BRICS, or not being included in the BRICS?” Noting that Indonesia was projected to have the world’s seventh-largest economy by 2030, Wirajuda said that “it is more important to be part of East Asia – the center of gravity of the world; the region of the 21st century.”
Although pitched at the global level, Indonesia’s focus has remained very much on developments in Southeast Asia. Not all emerging powers are counted as regional powers, however. Are South Korea and Argentina, while recognized as emerging powers, true regional powers? These uncertain and contested categorizations are important, as they affect discussions about the global order.
Managing great-power relations
While Indonesia does not see itself as a global power, it does seek to influence the relationships among the major global powers through its role in the Asia-Pacific region (now being extended to the Indo-Pacific, which signifies the inclusion of India). This is because the region is home to some of the most materially powerful actors in the contemporary international system.
But how can Jakarta approach strategic relationships in this region? Obviously, it cannot do this as an individual actor. But being a regional multilateral player gives it an advantage that great-power status would not. Multilateralism would be fruitless if it simply gave primacy to great powers. That would marginalize ASEAN, and thus Indonesia as ASEAN’s anchor. Indonesia’s preferred approach to this issue is “dynamic equilibrium.”
The idea of dynamic equilibrium is a powerful example of Indonesia’s regionally based approach to the global order. The term is of recent origin but has been frequently mentioned in speeches by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as well as Natalegawa. In a speech in Tokyo in December 2013, Natalegawa described the idea in these words:
“Dynamic,’ because change is a constant and indeed inherent in the region. The region’s architecture must therefore be constantly adaptive. ‘Equilibrium,’ because such a state of constant change does not suggest a permanent state of anarchy or the uncertainty common to a diffuse multipolar system. Nor, on the other hand, of the imposed order of an unchecked preponderance of a single power. Instead, countries of the region develop norms and principles, codes of conduct and as the case may be, legal frameworks, to build a spirit of partnership and cooperation in addressing issues of common interest.”
Natalegawa, who is generally associated with the “dynamic equilibrium” idea, said it was inspired by acute tensions within the relationships among the major powers, especially the United States and China, and China and Japan. In addressing such tensions, the approach not only rejects hegemony by any single power in the region, be it the United States or China, it also departs from the conventional balance of power approach. Unlike policy makers in neighboring Singapore, Indonesians do not like to use the term balance; equilibrium is their preferred concept. The goal is not to create order through military buildups, alliances and arms races, but by keeping ASEAN in the middle, like the “conductor in an orchestra.”
Democracy and foreign policy
Any framework to understand and explain Indonesia’s foreign policy and role in the world has to appreciate the impact of its democratization. Indonesia also offers an important and reassuring example of how democratization can affect and reshape a country’s foreign policy. As Natalegawa put it, democracy’s impact on Indonesia’s foreign policy has been in both process and substance. In terms of process, he said, foreign policy decision-making is now “more diffuse, there is a more diverse constituency for foreign policy, a sense of public ownership and participation in the policy-making, even in the post-decision [implementation] phase. It is much more important for foreign policy makers during the dissemination phase to earn the support of the public, to get feedback, sell the policy. So overall, the system is much more inclusive.”
In terms of substance, the impact of democratization can be seen in Indonesia’s support for democracy and human rights, including placing support for and recognition of democracy and human rights within the ASEAN Political-Security Community and the ASEAN Charter. Indonesia was a main backer of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, and the creation of the Bali Democracy Forum.
Ketut Erawan, executive director of the Institute of Peace and Democracy at Udayana University in Bali, which is the implementing agency for the Democracy Forum’s agenda, said democracy has two main functions in foreign policy: “It can be instrumental, and it can also promote identity change.” A country’s democratic credentials can be used to address foreign policy and security challenges. For Indonesia, this has been important in persuading the United States to remove sanctions against its armed forces for human rights abuses during the Soeharto era, which in turn has normalized defense relations with the US and enabled the purchase of advanced weapons systems to help modernize the Indonesian military.
Democratization can furthermore attract more international development assistance and support for economic programs. At the same time, being a “democratic country” has dramatically altered Indonesia’s image in the world, according to Wirajuda. “Democracy has made Indonesia accepted by the international community, both developed and developing countries – especially with the developed world.”
Indonesia’s future challenges
Why does Indonesia matter to the world? Why does the rest of the world care about Indonesia? To be sure, the country’s size, population, strategic location and economic potential are important. Also important is its traditional reputation as a society that tolerates and accommodates religious and ethnic diversity (recent indications of growing intolerance notwithstanding). Yet the nature and purpose of its political system, which informs and shapes its foreign policy, is also crucial. That foreign policy and role – Indonesia’s participation in international affairs, in ASEAN, and in the Asia Pacific – has a major bearing on how the world looks at Indonesia and how much it matters in regional and world affairs.
Despite its promise and achievements, Indonesia faces crucial challenges in realizing its role as an emerging power, especially its “dynamic equilibrium” approach. First, Indonesia’s external environment is becoming more complex and challenging. The early post-Cold War sense of optimism about the regional order has dissipated, and China’s recent assertiveness in the South China Sea has sparked anxieties in Asian capitals, including Jakarta. Indonesia now accepts that China’s with Indonesia’s Natuna Islands chain, thereby setting the stage for a more confrontational relationship with China. While Indonesia continues to stress its role as a moderator and facilitator in the South China Sea disputes, a further deterioration of the Natuna situation would negatively affect this role.
Another challenge to Indonesian’s position as a regional mediator comes from the US policy of rebalancing, also known as the “pivot,” toward the Asia-Pacific. The US has been careful in seeking defense ties with Indonesia, partly because there are plenty of other countries willing to provide it with military access. Moreover, the Obama administration has been careful to not force its agenda on ASEAN and in ASEAN-led regional forums, where Indonesia plays a central role. Washington continues to adhere to the principle of ASEAN centrality. But if relations between America and China deteriorate further, it will test Indonesia’s stance. Hence, much depends on Jakarta’s ability to secure a code of conduct in the South China Sea, which is by no means assured. If it is unable to do so, it will call into question the viability of Indonesia’s “million friends and zero enemies” policy, which its critics already regard as “only dreaming.”
A third challenge relates to foreign policy capacity and leadership. Natalegawa admitted to this challenge, saying disarmingly: “I fear we are not firing on all cylinders.” With democratization, and the consequent advent of multiple domestic stakeholders, ownership and participation in foreign policy-making, the instantaneousness of social media, and a 24-hour news cycle, he said he has little time to think and has gotten use to “making policy on the run.” The Indonesian Foreign Ministry needs more than diplomats; it needs broader expertise on complex transnational issues that increasingly confront the country and Southeast Asia.
Fourth, Indonesia’s role as an emerging power is affected by domestic politics. Until now, a good deal of the country’s international reputation and credibility has rested on its ability to make progress on three fronts: democracy, development and stability. Indeed, Indonesia serves as a striking example of how these three elements, which are often in conflict in developing countries, can be made into a virtuous cycle. But none of the three can be taken for granted. It is possible that Indonesia under the guidance of a future leader will go from strength to strength, or it might become less active and more inward looking in its foreign policy and its domestic politics might take an authoritarian turn.
There are many domestic challenges that can potentially derail the country’s recent achievements, including its democratic vitality, economic performance, domestic stability and international role. Corruption remains a major problem, although there has recently been growing vigilance and prosecution of corrupt officials. There remain pockets of internal strife in regions such as Papua, as well as the potential for terrorist attacks.
A fifth challenge is leadership style. Western nations not familiar with Indonesia’s low-key and impartial approach are sometimes exasperated by its refusal to speak loud and clear and tendency to take a balanced position on contentious issues such as humanitarian intervention. As one senior Western diplomat, who did not want to be identified, told me: “To play a global leadership role, you sometimes need to take sides.” This was in reference to Indonesia’s overly cautious approach to Western military intervention in Libya. In this view, Indonesia’s neutral approach can sometimes be a handicap in global governance.
A related issue is presidential leadership. There are concerns within the country, but perhaps more internationally, about how leadership change will affect Indonesia’s foreign policy and regional role. It can only be expected that some presidents of Indonesia will be more active in foreign policy than others. This may not only be due to domestic preoccupations and constraints, as happened immediately after the fall of Soeharto, but also a matter of personal preference and interest. But President Yudhoyono’s very active engagement in foreign policy makes the issue more moot. Will Joko Widodo, who will be sworn in as Indonesia’s seventh president on Oct. 20, be as interested and involved in foreign policy, and in pushing Indonesia’s profile around the world? Much depends on the team the president will assemble, including his foreign minister, to run and conduct foreign policy.
Indonesia’s ability to avoid collapse and rebuild itself is one of the most impressive stories of the early 21st century. Its journey since Soeharto resigned is all the more inspiring at a time when the world was witnessing failing nations, recurring economic crises and growing radicalism and terrorism. The course charted by Indonesia in foreign policy seems well set to continue to guide its regional and global roles.
Observing Indonesia at different levels does create the sense, however, that while there were too few expectations for the country in 1999, now there are too many. No one can dismiss the possibility that Indonesia might not be able to live up to them. But it also seems reasonable to believe that Indonesia’s leadership is likely to continue to receive international recognition and support as long as its democracy continues to progress alongside development and stability. Ultimately, these domestic factors will decide Indonesia’s regional and global role as an emerging power.
Armitav Acharya is a professor of international relations at American University in Washington. This essay was adapted from his new book, "Indonesia matters: Asia's Emerging Democratic Power.''
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Why S.T.E.M. at Frey?
At Frey Elementary School our mission is to lay the foundation for success. It is clearly evident that the jobs of tomorrow are rooted in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. In order to ensure the success of our students we want to lay a solid STEM foundation.
Why STEM in elementary school?
Too often, STEM education begins with a disjoined introduction to engineering and technology concepts starting in middle school. And while any exposure to STEM is good, research studies on STEM education has shown that kids who experience STEM early through hands-on learning are the ones who will be best equipped to develop a strong understanding of STEM concepts as they get older.
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Educational Products Catalog
The History Timeline gives the student the big picture and context of all his future Torah education by taking him on a visual journey through the 6,000 years of World History based on 43 key events. As the child contemplates this all-encompassing view of history, he can answer to himself: 'Where am I in time?' 'Where do I come from?' 'What happened before me?' 'Where is the world leading?' 'Why am I frum?'
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The goal of the Lashon Hatorah program is to give children the ability to become independent translators of the Hebrew language of the Torah. It does this by focusing on the 2 key elements of Lashon Hakodesh:
1. Key Vocabulary Words
2. Prefixes and Suffixes
Key Vocabulary Words:
Of the 16,000 words in Chumash Bereishis, 80% are variations of the same 303 shoresh words.
The workbooks and flashcards in the vocabulary section all focus on these 303 key shoresh words.
It is not necessary for a child to know every shoresh in Chumash. Let them focus on the most frequently appearing words, the 303 key shoresh words. With this pool of vocabulary words as a base, the child's real reading independence will come from proficiency in the Prefixes and Suffixes.
Prefixes and Suffixes:
The secret to mastering Hebrew lies in understanding how the meaning of shoresh words change when Prefixes and Suffixes are attached to them.
We divide the Prefixes and Suffixes into 4 simple, logical and color-coded categories:
1. The Brown banner contains the major prefixes.
2. The Yellow banner contains the major suffixes (including orange for the "more than one" group).
3. The Red banner contains the prefixes for future tense.
4. The Blue banner contains the suffixes for past tense.
Okay got it. Now where do I start?
We recommend starting with the Climbing Har Sinai Workbook and Vocabulary Cards for vocab, and Prefixes/Suffixes Bookmark, Flashcards, and Rabbi Winder's Workbooks for Prefix/Suffixes. These materials will give your child a solid foundation for achieving true reading independence in Hebrew.
Lashon Hatorah Prefixes/Suffixes
Lashon Hatorah Vocabulary
Lashon Hatorah Activities
The Chumash Memory-System is a simple system for memorizing all the chapters in Chumash, along with the essential information of each chapter. This system is an excellent complement to actual Chumash learning, boosting the student's self-esteem and confidence in his own memory as he learns the outline of the entire Chumash.
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This program builds the student's confidence by giving him the tools to teach himself the Taryag Mitzvot -- the skeleton of the Torah.
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Friday, February 29, 2008
The Six Senses in Science Class
Science is another subject, along with math, that I was completely convinced had no right-brain qualities at all. Once I read AWNM, my mind was opened, however. Design is highly prevalent, primarily in the design of experiments. Experiments must be extremely well-designed in order to run smoothly and gather optimal results. If not carefully planned out, they could herald faulty results, or, even worse, end in disaster. This is yet another example that material objects are not the only things which must be designed. There is also story in science. Some branches of science deal with the study of how the Earth formed, and from there, how life formed and the specifics of this, such as atoms, ecosystems, environmental studies, and so on. Science basically attempts to answer the question of how the Earth formed and studies various aspects of life on Earth. In this way it reveals the story of the Earth and everything on it. This is a rather monumental story!
Science is, in essence, a symphony because all of the individual branches of science come together in some way. Study of atoms and molecules leads to chemistry. Studies of ecosystems and environmental issues mesh together. As students progress, science builds upon itself, and one must have prior knowledge in order to understand and comprehend what is being taught. All ideas in science intertwine to create a scientific symphony!
Empathy and play can aid the study of science, because science can sometimes be difficult because of the many concepts one must grasp. If students have empathy for each other and help each other, yet at the same time have fun with what they are learning, the process becomes painless.
Because science attempts to pinpoint how Earth formed, it has great meaning. Humans want to know how our planet formed, and from this, how we got here. Because science tries to answer this and a great many people listen to these answers, science holds meaning for them.
Science is yet another subject that is left-brained, but with right-brain aptitudes mixed in. And if I had never read AWNM, my eyes never would have been opened to see this.
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Humanism and the Classical Tradition
Written by Christopher S. Celenza
Two approaches can be employed and synthesized to understand the problem of humanism and its complex roots and origins in the ancient western world (Giustiniani; Buck; Blum, 21-43). The first approach is source-based: through etymology and history one can come to an understanding of what western thinkers have believed about terms like “humanity,” “human,” and so on. The second approach is more explicit about the commitments of the present-day interpreter but necessarily less precise when it comes to sources. That is, if one believes in the existence of something we can locate as “human” (beyond biological differentiation); that this human factor is a motivating force for action in the world; and that this conception of what is “human” is something worth defending, then it makes sense to look retrospectively and find earlier adumbrations, even implicit ones, of what one currently takes to be characteristic and defensible about humanity.
Until recently, one would not have needed to state the seemingly self-evident proposition that something called “human” exists. Now, however, one is presented with a world in which the use of psychotropic drugs to manipulate serotonin levels in the brain is a widely accepted practice, and the increasingly frequent de facto genetic selection occurring among certain segments of the population is carried out through artificial fertilization. In short, the existence of a stable human “self” has been called into question by an ethically neutral, evolving natural science, to such a point that some current thinkers are speaking of “our post-human future” (Fukuyama) and others can find no clear dividing line between human beings and animals (Singer). It may be the case that reaching back into the classical past to find the deep roots of a tradition that proclaims, unashamedly, the existence of and respect for the human is not only useful but also necessary.
The word “humanism” was first used in 1808 when the German educator Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766-1848) employed it to argue for the importance of a secondary educational system based on the Greek and Roman classics (Niethammer; Campano; and Kristeller). A contemporary and colleague of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (himself so important for the practical implementation of the Humboldt university program), Niethammer believed it was necessary to set forth why an education based only on the seemingly more useful technical disciplines (engineering, natural science) would be insufficient for the development of a fully informed, humane citizenry. His adoption of the term “humanism” and his defense of the ideals he believed implicit in it invite us to return to its ancient roots, and to two Latin words, “humanitas” (humanity) and “humanus” (human). Writing once an age of classicism had been completed in the late second century CE, Aulus Gellius discussed the term “humanitas” in his miscellanistic work, the Attic Nights (13.17). There he wrote that those who use Latin correctly (as opposed to the crowd) distinguish the word “humanitas” from the Greek philanthropia, which means a benevolent love toward all men. The truer meaning of the Latin word, he suggests, is closer to the Greek paideia, what “we,” he continues, “call learning and education in the liberal arts…. In fact, the devotion to this kind of knowledge and the method that results from it has been given to man alone, out of all living creatures.” He then offers an example from Varro (116-26 BCE), who had written that the famous Greek sculptor “Praxiteles is unknown to no one who is in the least bit humane.” Gellius then comments, concluding this chapter, that “humane” here means someone who is well instructed and learned, who knows who Praxiteles was through books and through history.
It is clear from this citation that one principal meaning of the term “humanitas” in antiquity was bound up primarily with learning, a sphere admittedly proper to human beings but not one, equally clearly, in which all human beings partook. To be “humane” (humanus) meant not only to be a human being but also to have exercised one’s capacity as a human being to the fullest through learning. This meaning of the word “humane” was lost in the Latin Middle Ages and recovered only much later. Gellius’s historical position, toward the end of the classical period, suggests that one needs to return to certain key ancient authors who formed his background to flesh out these diverse themes related to the human.
“Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.” Protagoras (c.490-420BCE), a traveling and highly respected teacher of rhetoric (or “sophist”), is reported by Plato to have made this statement. On the face of things Protagoras seems to remove the possibility of objective knowledge by reducing knowledge to individual perception. It was in his key dialogue on epistemology, the Theaetetus, that Plato had the interlocutor Socrates attribute this statement to Protagoras (Theaetetus, 152a). Protagoras’s sentiment and Plato’s report together tell us much about the emerging trajectory of thought on the human in the ancient world. For in the fifth century BCE, in the world of the polis, it became apparent that, in these small, face-to-face societies, the power to persuade one’s fellow citizens represented a key to worldly success and glory; and indeed, rhetoric, the art of persuasion, became a cornerstone of ancient education, which remained predominantly rhetorical until late antiquity. Sophists like Protagoras purported to be able to teach their students not only how to persuade people, but also to speak on any possible topic, “to make,” as Protagoras is also reported to have said, “the weaker argument the stronger.” (DK80b6) This connection between the sphere of language and what was considered proper to humanity remained a strong one from classical times onward. However, since it is possible to persuade people of things that are not only not salutary but even, at times, seemingly immoral, the sophists naturally provoked reactions, even if those reactions did not, at the time, decisively change the oratorical character of ancient society.
The most influential reaction to these relativistic ideas was that of Plato. Plato wrote in the inherently ambiguous genre of dialogue, and he did not set forth what to a later age might seem a “systematic” philosophy. He did, however, maintain throughout his dialogues a powerfully influential notion: that a doctrine or set of practices that assumed that the purely human represented a guideline for morally productive truth could never be satisfactory. Since opinions, perceptions, and judgments varied from person to person, if no standard beyond what we individually perceive could be found, then human beings were doomed to perpetual strife, guided as they must be by the ungrounded opinions of a capricious crowd. In his Republic (514a-520a), Plato presented, in his celebrated myth of the cave, a description of humanity radically opposed to the one seemingly implicit in Protagoras’s view. Plato asks his readers, again through Socrates, to imagine people in a cave. Its inhabitants sit with their backs to the entryway facing the interior wall opposite the cave’s opening. They see in front of them only shadows of the real beings who are acting and moving around outside the cave. They “believe reality to be nothing other than the shadows of the artificial objects” (515c), since the shadows projected on the wall in front of them imitate only imperfectly the realities dwelling outside.
Plato’s confrontation with the sophists reminds us of one very important point, if we are discussing “humanism,” especially as it is grounded in the classical tradition. No ancient figure held as axiomatic the notion that human beings and the human world alone provide a sufficient grounding for the determination of absolute (as opposed to practical or plausible) truth. The sophists were concerned with technique and with what “worked:” whether the gods existed or not was not, typically, a question they asked. Persuasion and the vagaries of everyday human life could indeed be successfully based on the contingencies of human language. It was not, however, until very recently that this rhetorically based model of truth-acquisition in ethical matters – that is, focusing on the human shorn of any exterior referent – became associated with a style of thought that we can term “humanism.” In short, proponents of the classical tradition hold almost universally that a reality greater than ours exists and that, in some measure, the measurement of truth for us must, however diversely, correspond to that greater reality.
Plato’s most important student, Aristotle (384-322BCE), presented one of the most lasting guides to human behavior and conduct in his Nicomachean Ethics. There he established that human excellence (arête in Greek, what would become “virtus” in Latin and either “virtue” or “excellence” in English) consisted, in one fundamental respect, in action. One of Aristotle’s key notions was that of hexis (“habitus” in Latin, “habit,” “disposition,” or even “capacity” in English). For Aristotle a hexis is a trained and trainable capacity brought from potentiality to actuality by action. Human “virtue” (arete) is a hexis: we are not born naturally brave, but we become brave by the repeated performance of brave acts, even as we all possess the hexis for bravery. Similarly with justice: “it is in the course of our dealing with our fellow-men that we become just or unjust.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1).
Aristotle’s doctrine of the virtues entails activity on the part of a human being, and it is important to note that this activity can be as much intra-mental as externalized. Aristotle essentially concludes the Nicomachean Ethics by arguing that, of all the possible lives that one can pursue, the happiest will be the life of contemplation: action, but action of the mind. It is this life that makes one wise, and the wise man (provided he lives a complete life, that is, into old age) is the happiest man: he alone is self-sufficient, he alone can continue to practice his own proper activity (contemplation) long after the possibility for physical action has worn itself thin, and he alone, finally, possesses the ability to engage in an activity that is practiced for its own sake (10.7-8).
Concerning certain fundamental questions, then, the two fountainheads of ancient philosophy agreed: the realm of the divine and the realm of the human are different, and one of the best tasks for the human being was “to become like a god” as Plato would have it (Theaetetus, 176b1-2) or, with Aristotle, “to put on immortality.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7.1177b33) The realm of the divine exists, and human beings can partake of it to a greater or lesser degree depending on their conduct. It was impossible to imagine a cosmos without the divine. Plato, disillusioned with the phenomenological world, wrote literary works in many of which he seems to devalue certain worldly pursuits or to suggest that the practitioners of those pursuits, living unreflectively, did not understand the subsistent truths with which they engaged as they practiced their activities. Aristotle by contrast was not so dour about the day-to-day world. He sketched in his Nicomachean Ethics a vision of the ethical life in which, though he deemed the contemplative way of life best, it was clear that worldly pursuits could and should be carried out well, that is, with a concern for the other human beings with whom the individual interacted both in private and in public.
After Plato and Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics all contributed in their own way to defining the realm of the human with respect to the divine. The Stoics grounded their ethics in the practice of virtues, which were thought of as interlinked, so that one could not really possess one virtue without possessing them all. The Stoics conceived of an exemplary figure, the “sage” (spoudaios or sophos) who practiced perfect virtue and whose soul was free of disturbance. This sort of figure could not be found in the daily world, so the “philosopher” was conceived as one who attempted to live “coherently” (homologoumenos), balancing a concern for the virtues with philosophical inquisitiveness. Epicureans conceived of pleasure as the highest human good and object of striving, but pleasure was regarded in a particular way, as having one’s desires satisfied. The fewer desires one had, the more easily one could satisfy them, and the more one could experience true pleasure. Self-discipline allowed one to reduce desire. Skeptics believed that the central problem of human life lay in the difficulty of finding an adequate criterion of truth: the human senses are deceptive, satisfactory answers to life’s most difficult questions are hard to find, and opinions vary endlessly. Given these factors, they strongly affirmed that one could and should doubt almost everything on the level of absolute truth, to be contented instead with the realm of the plausible.
All three Hellenistic schools of philosophy contributed to defining what is proper to human activity; and they had as a major focus of their ethical doctrines a conception of human life that functioned independently of the divine. Yet again, members of all three schools did not deny that there existed truths higher than human truths. For the Stoics, the cosmos was ruled by an ineluctable fate. For the Epicureans, the divine existed, though as one of the school’s most famous exponents, Lucretius (c.99-c.55 BCE), put it (On the Nature of Things, 2.646-51), “without any pain or danger, strong with its own resources and needing nothing of ours, that very divine nature is enticed by no prize and untouched by anger.” For the Skeptics, an absolute truth was assumed to exist; it was simply not our province to know it.
This multifaceted Greek philosophical inheritance found its way in to classical Latin sources, especially through Cicero (106-43 BCE), who synthesized and culturally translated Greek ideas for his Roman audience. Through different philosophical works, usually dialogues held among a number of interlocutors and set dramatically over more than one day, basic doctrines associated with Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism became available to the Roman world. Cicero also brought to the fore the rhetorical concern that had been a part of the Greek inheritance, explicitly in the case of the sophists and implicitly in Plato’s carefully dialogical strategies for guiding his readers’ and listeners’ appropriation of his messages. Cicero saw language and the ability to persuade one’s fellow citizens as the distinguishing mark of humanity. As he wrote in On the Orator (1.8.31-33), “it is in this one respect that we stand out most markedly from beasts, that we converse among ourselves and that we can explain what we have felt by means of speech.” Here and elsewhere Cicero echoes a commonplace found in Greek authors, such as Isocrates (Nicocles, 5-6) and Aristotle (Politics, 1253a9) that although other animate beings may supersede humans in strength, swiftness, and so on, it is the power of language that distinguishes humanity.
Still, although these sentiments were relative commonplaces, Cicero’s appropriation of them is notable for two reasons. First, Cicero’s function as a cultural mediator between the Greek and Latin worlds meant that he consolidated the notion, inherited from the Greeks, that there was a realm of activity separate from the divine that was proper to humans, even as human beings needed to recognize their obligations to the divine. Second, owing to the Latin language’s subsequent domination in western history as a language of culture, it was through Cicero that much of ancient philosophy was known to the west until the fifteenth century. In Cicero, too, we see the use of the word “humanus” (“humane”) to signify learning and culture (cf. Cicero, Div., 1.1.2, Verr., 2.4.44), so that we are reminded again of the ancient determination that the propensity to focus on intellectual cultivation is what makes one most fully human.
One perceives a balance in the pre-Christian ancient world between regard for a properly human sphere and respect toward the divine; to the divine human beings owed allegiance but not constant devotion. This balance shifted in the early Christian era, as the legatees of the classical tradition took what they had inherited from the ancients (a concern for ethical human action combined with the notion of a supreme being who stood above all divinity) and combined these elements with the teachings of an important figure, the Jewish sage Jesus of Nazareth. Believed by his followers to be divine, Jesus represented the wonder-working sage well known to classical antiquity but with a difference: in his teachings he emphasized the merits of the downtrodden, creating an ethics of humility rarely glimpsed in the ancient world. He preached a supreme being who was at once an omnipotent arbiter of justice as well as a personal god, interested in individuals who, even the humblest among them, would be rewarded in the afterlife according to their conduct on earth. Though Jesus himself did not consciously weave into his thought elements from the classical tradition, one of his followers in the Jesus movement, Paul of Tarsus, did. The Platonic notion of our world being only a reflection of a greater, truer one that transcends earthly reality was given famous expression in Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians. There, as Paul wrote of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, he suggested that human beings in their earthly lives would only experience one of those divine gifts, “love,” (agape) as if it were reflected “in a mirror, darkly,” but that someday, released from the body’s prison, one would experience divine love “face to face.” (1 Cor. 13) To experience this love and divine beatitude, however, one needed also to have divine grace, itself another gift from God. One could never be certain one had received this gift.
Various writings of one of the foremost exponents of the Pauline position in the early Christian world, Augustine (354-430CE), set the tone for how western thinkers might approach this issue in centuries to come. If, that is, one posited God as absolutely omnipotent, omniscient, and infinite, it was difficult to see how human beings, finite as they were, could earn the gift of grace. A shift had occurred: the worlds of transcendence that had been part of the classical heritage, whether adumbrated through myth (Plato) or extrapolated on the plane of logic and deductive reasoning (Aristotle), had now been theorized extensively and anchored in the notion of a supremely powerful being who was in charge of the world He had created. From the unarticulated but powerfully functional assumption that human beings were, basically, in control of what happened to them in the world of their day to day existence, a new notion arose: not by any means that one should be irresponsible, that wickedness could be excused, or even that human beings lacked free will on a day to day basis. Rather, this shift implied that, while the human world mattered, there was a larger world that mattered more; from Augustine on, one could view one’s life as a pilgrimage toward eternity rather than as an end in itself. In the west, importantly, this shift also became institutionalized, as Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, definitively by the end of the fourth century and the reign of Theodosius.
The vestiges of what we can call humanism were thenceforth preserved in texts. Monasteries did the vital work of copying and transmitting these texts, with major centers emerging in the era of Charlemagne (742/7CE-814). During the early middle ages, much of Greek literature and philosophy was lost, and the number of thinkers who were skilled in both classical languages declined dramatically. In the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, one sees the translation into Latin of many of Aristotle’s works (Minio-Paluello, ed.). The rise of medieval cathedral schools and eventually universities, along with the communities of intellectuals that naturally gathered around those institutions, meant that in Western Europe there ensued a rediscovery of the “auctores,” or “authors,” through which the canon of Latin classical texts was increased. Certain intellectuals of this period, most notably John of Salisbury (1115-76), demonstrated a lively interest in classical texts. In addition, one feature of humanism that would become particularly important in fifteenth-century Italy emerged: the tendency to question established canons of texts and to add to them in the service of a notionally better human life. Human life could be, and in most cases was, conceived as Christian in outlook, but the ability to theorize aspects particular to humanity as goods in themselves grew in this period.
Evolving humanism lacked a key element, however, until intellectuals began to be conscious of the language they used for their major works, Latin. The late thirteenth century saw a group of thinkers centered in northern Italy, especially the city of Padua, who consciously attempted to imitate classical Latin (Witt). Spurred on by the enthusiasm for classical texts present in the world of the French schools and universities, they derived contacts to that world both through travel to the University of Paris and by traveling poets. These early humanists were the direct ancestors of those more commonly considered Renaissance humanists. Comparatively little known today, thinkers such as Albertino Mussato and Lovato dei Lovati wrote poetic works in Latin in which they consciously attempted to reproduce ancient Latin style. Beyond stylistics they focused their enthusiasms largely on secular matters: for example Lovato “discovered” the location of the tomb of the ancient Trojan hero Antenor in Padua, mining classical sources as he did so. These thinkers and their direct heirs provided the essential background for the figure who made humanism a European phenomenon in the fourteenth century, Petrarch.
Francesco Petrarca (1304-74) possessed Florentine family origins, though he was raised in southern France in the environment of the papal court, which by the year 1308 was located in Avignon. His father, a notary, had gone there after having been exiled in the same series of political purges that drove Dante Alighieri from Florence. From his youth Petrarch possessed a conflicted sense of exile: not literal of course, but, perhaps because of his deracinated upbringing, for the first time we see a figure who, as Michel de Montaigne would do two centuries later, unabashedly took his own life as his subject matter. Petrarch united two passions without which no contemporary intellectual movement could hope to thrive, given prevailing social norms; and he added a third, which became a hallmark of the best Renaissance humanists. First, he engaged without reservation the contemporary, growing fascination with classical antiquity. Petrarch became an excellent Latinist, and in doing so, he saw distinctly that the Latin then in use, in the Church and in universities, did not seem to match in style the Latin he found in classical Roman sources. As he did pioneering philological work (on the text of Livy, for example), he also allowed this passion for antiquity to fuel a new historical sense. He realized the great distance between himself and the ancients, sometimes lamented it, but never allowed that distance to go unrecognized.
The second factor that fueled Petrarch’s humanism was his preoccupation with religion. Intellectuals of the two intellectual generations before Petrarch had been fascinated with the classical world; they had embraced a precise and classicizing Latinity, and they had shared in the evolving historical sense that grew along with this love of classical sources. Petrarch, however, took these engagements and redirected them. Drawing inspiration from classical sources, he used these sources and others in his constant, self-directed quest to become a better person and a better Christian. He derided contemporary scholastic philosophers (with the rhetorical exaggeration characteristic of his age) not only for their un-classical Latin style, but also because, in focusing, he claimed, too exclusively on non-Christian sources of philosophy, they actually veered dangerously close to rejecting true Christianity.
Petrarch’s religiosity was related directly and inevitably to his historical sense, and it teaches an important lesson to anyone who might un-historically equate humanism with anti-religiosity. If there is anything permanent and enduring about humanism, it is this: its leading figures, in whatever epoch, have always had the ability to situate themselves convincingly, effectively, and unflinchingly in the present. In Petrarch’s day, an integral part of this “present” was, in the west, Christianity. This is not to say that Petrarch necessarily supported institutional Christianity or its various epiphenomena, such as the papal court (which Petrarch lambasted in his letter-collection entitled Sine nomine, “Without a Name” as having abandoned its true mission) or certain segments of contemporary universities leading to the teaching of theology, the “Queen of the sciences.”
This anti- or extra-institutional bent represents the third formative aspect of Petrarch’ humanism and the one that lasted most durably throughout humanism’s history. Petrarch’s life was marked by itinerancy. He tended to travel where patronage was available, working at different times for a Cardinal, the Visconti despots of Milan, the Carrara of Padua, and the republic of Venice; clearly he had various institutional affiliations, and yet he still managed to express his own viewpoints in his writings. He expressed his identity as an intellectual from a deliberately extra-institutional vantage point. Petrarch served as the first humanist in Renaissance Europe to point out the dangerous sterility of intellectual orthodoxies, the way that intellectuals, gathered in groups and institutionally enfranchised, allowed themselves to reproduce in a social sense, stifling creativity. Renaissance humanists after Petrarch did not, by and large, cause by their writings great changes in institutional structures – the methods of elementary and secondary education, those of university learning, or the morality of the papal court – but they did serve as a voice advocating critique of fixed ideas. In one important respect, too, humanists did make an inroad: in their reform of the official language of education, Latin, a reform whose consequences for the life of humanism thereafter were momentous. In the five intellectual generations after Petrarch in Italy, humanists succeeded in fundamentally changing the way Latin was employed (Celenza[b]). First, from Petrarch’s day to the early fifteenth century and a thinker named Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), in recognizing that the Latin currently in use did not match ancient Latin, humanists developed some of the toolkit we associate with historical thinking. Then, by the middle of the fifteenth century, humanists successfully imitated ancient Ciceronian Latin to such an extent that it became the gold standard of elite educations. In their dialogues, histories, orations, and letters, humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) turned humanism’s sharp critical eye on contemporary society and made Latin an acceptable vehicle for a new kind of literature.
Italian humanism took a turn toward the philological in the mid to late fifteenth century, as its two most brilliant exponents, Lorenzo Valla (1405/7-57) and Angelo Poliziano (1454-94) went beyond the now achieved objective of successful imitation of classical Latin. Both wrote outstanding pieces of creative philosophical literature in Latin, with Valla concentrating much of his energy on what he perceived to be a Christianity gone astray. His penetrating dialogues, like his On Free Will or his On the Profession of the Religious ask some of early modern Christianity’s most penetrating questions: How can it be that a supremely good being, God, seems to allow people, his creations, freely to choose to perform evil acts, when with His omnipotence He could easily prevent them from doing so? What is the nature of the status of those who have taken religious vows? Does their vow count as a meritorious work and therefore bring them closer ipso facto to heaven, or are Christians who have not taken a vow equally rewarded if they have lived a just life? Since these works are true dialogues and thus at points strategically ambiguous, Valla’s messages, his powerful and controversial questioning, come through in a fashion that is more subterraneous than direct (Celenza[a], 85-100). Poliziano, an accomplished Tuscan poet, taught at the University of Florence, and he enjoyed at the same time Medici patronage. As he taught he wrote some of his most scintillating Latin works to accompany or to aid his teaching: sometimes these took the form of poetic introductions to the texts he was to teach in his courses, other times small but virtuosic solutions to textual problems in classical works which he then collected into his masterpiece of scholarship, the Miscellanies, still other times lengthier introductions, or praelectiones to the texts of his course, written in precise, elegant, and highly individualistic Latin.
Finally, by the late fifteenth century the ability to write acceptably classical Latin became routine among educated elites. Thereafter, the historical sense, the irony, the propensity to take the (sometimes imagined) position of the outsider in relation to existing intellectual institutions, all of these made their way outside of Italy, even as, within Italy, many of those inherently humanistic traits were transferred to the vernacular.
Part of the success of Italian Renaissance humanists had also to do with a factor that was, loosely speaking, curricular. In 1440, in a suggested library acquisitions list prepared for Cosimo de’ Medici, for the first time we see mentioned together a group of five, verbally oriented academic subjects. These subjects (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, known together as the studia humanitatis or “the humanities”) had been at the unarticulated center of the humanist movement since Petrarch (Kristeller; Kohl). They were at the center in the sense that it was these subjects that humanists cared about most, the ones in which and through which they discovered, learned, and employed their new Latin style. They were the subjects to which humanists referred obliquely when they talked about “these studies of ours” (haec nostra studia), as did so many in correspondence with one another. Humanists, especially in the early phases of the movement, were not always able to implement this new curricular and stylistic ideal in their practical, day-to-day work as educators, secretaries to princes or cardinals, or governmental bureaucrats. Still, these verbal arts represented an important thread that remained woven deep within humanism’s genetic texture from this point onward.
Humanism as a movement for stylistic reform of Latin succeeded completely on the level of education. From the era of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who wrote a definitive work on the Italian vernacular in 1525, Latin and the vernacular came to have clearly defined places, both within Italy and without. The vernacular, evaluated on classicizing lines, became a language suitable for serious intellectual work, in a way that only Latin previously had been. At the same time the basic language of western education was Latin, and the Latin in use from the early sixteenth century onward in education was basically Ciceronian. It is an easy, relatively uncontroversial thing to trace the progress of certain subjects, the studia humanitatis, for example. It is more difficult but no less useful to attempt to delineate how this verbal turn among certain intellectuals adumbrated what would turn out to be humanism’s greatest triumph: the definition and celebration of the individual human person, as a being in whom certain rights inhere precisely by virtue of being human. The full realization of this complex group of factors did not come to fruition until the eighteenth century.
In the meantime, Italian humanism’s main scholarly thrusts – a purified Latinity, a delight in the recovery of ancient classical texts, a concern for source criticism, a dialogical, sometimes ambiguous irony fueled by history, and an occasional propensity to take the posture of the iconoclastic outsider – took hold throughout early modern Europe in different ways. The most famous humanist of the early sixteenth century, Erasmus (1466-1536), performed numerous works of scholarship, not least his editing of the New Testament in Greek and his providing, quite controversially, a new Latin translation, a corrective to the Vulgate then in use, on which his Italian forbear Lorenzo Valla had earlier worked with acuity. In his own Latin writings he provided beautifully written short works, his Colloquies, designed to help schoolboys learn their Latin. Erasmus combined creativity and scholarship in one of his bestselling works, the Adages – a collection, which grew with every new edition, of proverbs annotated and explained by Erasmus with scholarly virtuosity. His fame was diffused throughout the learned world by constant letter writing, as he wrote letters that today illuminate the intellectual world of Renaissance humanism invaluably. His most lasting work, the Praise of Folly, served as a summing up of earlier Renaissance humanism. In it, Erasmus recapitulated Italian humanism’s penchant for a deliberately dialogical type of philosophizing, whereby the reader is made into a silent but powerful interlocutor: the narrator, “Folly,” is as such inherently unreliable, but she skewers mercilessly and humorously institutionalized learning and religion in a way that would have been familiar to Erasmus’s fifteenth-century Italian forebears. The work looks forward as well, in the sense that its boldness highlights a freedom of thought and expression soon to be extinguished by the forces of religious ideology. Most of Erasmus’s works were placed on the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books, a phenomenon that signals that the broader intellectual underpinnings of Italian humanism would be transformed decisively.
Vernacular early modern literature took some of the tendencies of Italian humanism and made them more broadly available. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), who “never saw a greater monster or miracle” than himself, wrote his Essays to express his innermost feelings and predilections even as he was well aware of the impressions these would foster in the world of possible elite readers, accustomed as many were to norms of social restraint which had taken hold of elite Europe in the growing age of sovereign states. Montaigne’s self-scrutiny represented one result of the occasional focus on the individual person that reached back to the days of Petrarch. Another result of humanism’s growth was the continued interest in the kind of philological scholarship at which Poliziano had been adept. Figures like Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) and Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) brought their immense erudition to bear on a variety of Greek and Latin texts and produced definitive, lasting critical editions of them. In doing so they and others like them laid the groundwork for the encyclopedic scholarship characteristic of the Enlightenment. In turn, Enlightenment thinkers of various stripes, informed by ancient sources and having fully assimilated what was then available, went on to provide the foundations of modern humanism by coming to certain conclusions about the nature of the human person. The late eighteenth century saw the theory of the individual take shape effectively, for it was only then that the concept of the individual was buttressed in practice by being included, eventually, in law. One can add that thinkers such as John Locke (1632-1704), Voltaire (1694-1778), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), differed in many respects, but in one they were united: they agreed that many of the social structures that evolve as people gather into groups can become stale, stultifying, intellectually sterile, and even patently immoral in their effects. Since there were limits to human understanding, it was important to come to an understanding of what those limits were and then base one’s theories and actions on the limits of that sphere.
These notions tended naturally to a lack of respect for traditional religion and a corresponding fear that the place of the transcendent would be erased from human life. In response to the seemingly anti-religious tendencies of British empiricism and French Enlightenment anti-religiosity, German thinkers such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), and others, all in their own way stressed the human but in a larger context. Themselves not lovers of traditional religion (in most cases Lutheranism), these thinkers drew inspiration from the ancient Greek world, finding there a love of harmony and beauty that they idealized. Early nineteenth-century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) helped to translate these predispositions into a pedagogical program, and it was out of this environment that the word “humanism,” Humanismus, has its origin. The centrality of the classical Hellenic world meant largely an idealization of Plato and the creation of Plato as predominantly a metaphysical rather than a dialogical thinker. Secure in the knowledge of the eternal transcendent forms, humankind could dedicate itself to the pursuit of beauty and virtue without the structures of organized religion but grounded in the knowledge that transcendence existed. Another way to put this, and one from which many German thinkers drew inspiration, was related to the philosophy of the infinite, represented by Immanuel Kant (1722-1804). Humankind could be logically sure that infinity existed but could never fully know it in this world, even as the existence of the infinite provided mystery and inspiration to those pursuing truth. It was on this trajectory that the modern research university was set in the early nineteenth century, in the 1810 reform of the University of Berlin.
At the same time a radical change in the discipline of “philosophy” -- so implicated in the question of humanism -- occurred. Philosophy became professionalized in university settings, and as the first modern histories of philosophy were written, it was the metaphysical style of philosophy, associated with the idealization of Platonism, which received most emphasis (Celenza[c]). Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “Humanism,” or what is sometimes known as “neohumanism” (Neuhumanismus) became, in effect, idealism. Yet the encyclopedic, canon-expanding, and philological style of humanist thinking never died. One saw this style of thought in Valla and Poliziano, in the great early modern philologists, and even in the propensity toward encyclopedism that so entranced Enlightenment thinkers of all philosophical bents. Detail-oriented, this type of scholarship is inherently anti-metaphysical, suspicious of large umbrella-like theories which tend to obscure individual counter-examples, and is best seen in its modern form in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). With respect to the classical tradition, Nietzsche presents the beginnings of a problem that would bedevil humanist thinking in the twentieth century. Before writing his Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had received one of the best classical educations available in the neohumanist mode, at a classically oriented high school known as the Schulpforta in Naumburg, relatively near Leipzig and Halle. From his graduation onward, Nietzsche began publishing precise philological articles, and though the Birth of Tragedy signaled a departure in style, in substance throughout his career he remained a devotee of philology (Porter). For example, in his Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche demolishes the notion that the ancient, pre-Socratic Greeks believed in an idealized transcendent world. For Homeric Greeks, he suggests, an action that they might have designated with the word “good” (agathos) did not mean that they believed that action somehow corresponded to a transcendent realm of “goodness” (a staple of the Platonic tradition, especially as this was refracted through German idealist interpretations). Instead, the Good, Nietzsche argued, represented no more than this: what the “good people,” the agathoi – in effect, the power-wielding nobility – did or deemed acceptable (Gen. Mor., 1).
The case of Nietzsche indicates the twin face of classically influenced humanism and the propensity its proponents have often shown to veer off into extremes. On the one hand, the dignity of humankind can sometimes be raised, rhetorically, to such a metaphysical level that it becomes anti-historical. Celebratory “humanists” of this orientation idealize humanity to such an extent that they are forced to find and ultimately bow before transcendent realms unable to be accessed in the world of day-to-day life. The danger is that one forgets the power of culture and history to shape events and becomes instead enamored of absolute ideas. One leaves people out. On the other hand, the philological side of humanism – the side whose representatives want to count every example and counter-example, to leave no text out, and to expand canons ever outward – tends when taken to extremes to set no limits and to veer off into nihilistic destructiveness. Here the danger is that, with no idealism of any sort, nothing is left unscathed, so that there is no persuasive way to make a case for any rules whatsoever: socially reproduced power rules all, and one realizes one has arrived at this point only after it is too late.
Reflecting on the classical tradition and its relation to humanism, one might wonder whether we have reached that point now. Most of our current laws and public ethical frameworks are based on the notion of a stable human person. This “person” is conceived as a being in whom certain rights reside and from whom certain obligations, conditioned by learning and culture, are expected. Yet it now seems that the value of learning and culture (with its accompanying social disciplining effects, both good and ill) has been deemphasized in favor of the seemingly more predictable controlling mechanisms of natural science. One wonders whether the classical virtues of historically informed moderation might help in returning meaningful discussion of the human to the forefront, or whether, because of the inexorable march of natural science, the human – as one of Nietzsche’s most destructive spiritual children, Michel Foucault, put it – will be “erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault, 387)
Bibliography and abbreviations:
Paul Richard Blum, Philosophieren in der Renaissance (Stuttgart, 2004). August Buck, ed., Humanismus: Seine europäische Entwicklung in Dokumenten und Darstellungen (Freiburg and Munich, 1987). A. Campana, “The Origin of the Word ‘Humanist,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insititutes 9 (1946): 60-73. Celenza(a) = Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore, 2004). Celenza(b) = idem, “Petrarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005): 509-36. Celenza(c) = idem, “Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2005): 483-506. DK = Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1952). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, English tr. of Les mots et les choses (1966) (New York, 1994). Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York, 2002). Vito Giustiniani, “Homo, Humanus, and the Meanings of ‘Humanism’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 167-95. Benjamin Kohl, “The Changing Concept of the Studia Humanitatis in the Early Renaissance,” Renaissance Studies 6 (1992): 185-209. Paul O. Kristeller, “Humanism and Scholasticism in Renaissance Italy,” Byzantion 17 (1944-45): 346-74, now in Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, v.1:553-83. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, ed., Aristoteles Latinus (Bruges, 1953-). James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Palo Alto, 2000). Friedrich I. Niethammer, Der Streit des Philanthropinismus und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts Unserer Zeit (Jena, 1808). Peter Singer, The Animal Liberation Movement: Its Philosophy, Its Achievements, and its Future (Nottingham, 1985). Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden, 2000).
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Home > Ip Address > IP Address Automatically Written Into Index.html
IP Address Automatically Written Into Index.html
This plain-English guide demystifies configuring and using wireless networks-everything from shopping for parts to securing your network. Learn how to:* Select and configure hardware and software for your Wi-Fi network and configure There is a vulnerability, but it is quite limited and easily prevented. ( Share that code! ) Perishable Post authorOctober 28, 2007 at 5:32 pm Ahh, very nice.. For example, if you used the same folder names I did, your HTML would look like this (note the hrefattribute inthe tag and thesrcattribute in the tag): http://htmltemplatesfree.net/ip-address/redirect-ip-address-to-another-ip-address-windows.html
Please advise that this method will also block services such as FeedBurner from accessing your images. # stop hotlinking and serve alternate content RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond Here's a few reasons why I think GitHub Pages is a good idea:It requires that you learn Git, a popular version control system (though not the only one out there) that This might help you, anyway. Something like this: Typically, what ends up happening is the following:All of your site's files are put into a single folder.
Comments in .htaccess code are fashioned on a per-line basis, with each line of comments beginning with a pound sign #. RFC 2616 "Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP/1.1", 1999 @ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt. Access control can be based on the client's identity, which is called authentication (discussed in "HTTP Authentication"). The command will therefore generate a public-private key pair and certificate request in a .csr file, but not a certificate (.crt file).
When checking the redirect live, the old domain may appear in the browser’s address bar. However, it's simply not useful to enumerate most or even many of these combinations at the skill level you are at if you're reading this. Difficult not impossible.You have two broad optionsThe first one is making the html doc accessible directly from your personal computer. Important Notes for .htaccess Noobs ^ As a configuration file, .htaccess is very powerful.
I have…Jeff Starr: Yeah that explains how to grant rights to contributors/translators, but what I don't understand is how plugin authors are supposed… Perishable Press Books The Tao of WordPress Digging The relevant directives to enable .htaccess in "httpd.conf" are: # AccessFileName specifies the name of the file to look for # in each directory for access control information. each line of comments requires it’s own #. https://perishablepress.com/stupid-htaccess-tricks/ It will also make you vulnerable to security attacks, specially if you are not hundred percent sure about what you are doing.The second one is to host the file in a
Join them; it only takes a minute: Sign up Detecting a change of IP address in Linux up vote 5 down vote favorite 2 Does anyone know a way to detect All rights reserved. For testing virtual host without access to DNS server: You can create a few hostnames pointing to your own IP address (or localhost) in your local DNS lookup table "hosts". Aadd a new widget and put a histats code there and save the template.
The browser decodes www.example.com into a ip address like and it understands that you want the doc named index.html located in the computer with that ip address.3 - the browser http://www.jonhmchan.com/blog/2014/4/28/finally-a-guide-to-hosting-your-website This is what I’m using so far: AuthType Basic AuthName "password" AuthUserFile "/home/usernamehere/.htpasswds/public_html/passwd" require valid-user DirectoryIndex "/mywiki/index.php" Options All -Indexes # permanently redirect from www domain to non-www domain RewriteEngine on So here's a (lengthy) guide about how to write static web pages on your computer then put it on the Internet.One important note before we begin: this covers a very large shadowstalker replied Feb 13, 2017 at 1:57 AM Broken Image on Site (Wix) Stefischer replied Feb 13, 2017 at 1:28 AM Can add files to microSD card... :z: replied Feb 13,
Edit the "subdomain", "domain", and "tld" to match your subdomain, domain, and top-level domain respectively: # send visitors to a subdomain RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^subdomain\.domain\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://subdomain.domain.tld/$1 check over here I would like to make attempts to load a file type (flv) from a certain folder re-direct the user to an error doc or ugly gif. I set to 100 years. -newkey rsa:2048: generate a new key-pair, using RSA of bit-length 2048. -nodes: no passphrase is to be used for the private key file. -keyout and -out: This should be in the folder that contains all your HTML, CSS, JavaScript that you want as part of your page.
However, it is able to get notified by the kernel of various events, such as changes of assigned IPs, routing tables and link status (e.g. used for including comments. In most cases, you're better off just choosing another domain name.Once you actually get a domain that you're happy with, you'll have to change some settings to point to the servers his comment is here But the plugin is fully internationalized and…Pecetowicz: Its a Polish Language?
Read "Virtual Host - How-to" in "htdocs\manual\programs\vhosts\index.html.html" Apache support (a) Name-based virtual hosts, (b) IP-based virtual hosts, and (c) Port-based virtual host. A comparison is made between the captured ip (gotip.txt) and the current working ip (workingip.txt). Typically, browsers will attempt to play or stream such files when direct links are clicked.
Why is it important for hackers and security professionals? What is an IP address? Basically an IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique numerical value that is assigned to
But wireless networking can be a bit geeky and nerve-wracking without a proper guide. Nonetheless, you can customize you own error response using directive ErrorDocument as follows: Produce a short message by providing a text string after a ("). I've deleted all but one of my themes, ie, the theme I'm…Jeff Starr: Theme Switcha is brand new so currently there is only one translation (Russian). e.g., [a-zA-Z] matches all lowercase and uppercase letters from a to z.
You've done the interactivetutorials, watched YouTube videos, and even picked up a few books. Lots of great info…but I have a question I hope someone can answer: I am using a password-protected copy of wordpress as a data entry tool for our editors, behind a Example 2 Order Deny,Allow Deny from all Allow from test101.com access is allowed by default; all hosts are denied; those in the domain "*.test101.com" are allowed. weblink You could even buy a domain, make it point at your website and have your own public website with your html doc.Both this options are hard for a begginer.
This rule must exist in the htaccess files of the root directory for which you wish to replace the default index file (e.g., “index.html”): # serve alternate default index page DirectoryIndex Extended regular expression (regexe) can be used, which begins with a "~". Let's face it: Networking can be hard.If you're one of the last holdouts still connected to the Internet by a wire, The Book of Wireless, 2nd Edition is the book for He is the author of Internet Power Tools (Random House), Connecting with Windows (Sybex), It's Never Done That Before (No Starch), and numerous other titles.Bibliografisk informationTitelThe Book of Wireless: A Painless
a{n,} specifies n or more of the preceding character. Can be "None", "All", or any # combination of "Options", "FileInfo", "AuthConfig", and "Limit". If the ip addresses are different, I get an email sent by send mail of the new ip, and the new working ip is written into the workingip.txt file. again, amazing!
This text should be blue because of the CSS I wrote in css/index.css!
If for some reason you needed to reference a file that was one levelabovethe current folder This file also needs to be in the same directory as yourindex.htmlfile andindex.cssfile (in this case, the Desktop).Finally, change yourindex.htmlfile with the following code and save it.
For example, if you are protecting your htaccess file via FilesMatch, remember to inform it of the renamed files: # protect renamed htaccess files Order deny,allow Deny from all
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Improve Your Memory Instantly
If I asked you to go grocery shopping without writing a list, how would you attempt to remember it? Let’s say you needed:
1. Chicken
2. Eggs
3. Milk
4. Ketchup
5. Laundry Detergent
6. Toothpaste
7. Bread
8. Mushrooms
9. Lettuce
10. Peas
Most people would use rote memorization, constantly repeating the list over and over until they thought they had it, painful stuff. Here’s a better way, which shows the power of visual memory.
First memorize these rhyming objects:
1 = Bun
2 = Shoe
3 = Tree
4 = Door
5 = Hive
6 = Sticks
7 = Heaven
8 = Gate
9 = Wine
10 = Pen
Now I’d like you to link, in as crazy way as possible, the 10 item-shopping list, to these new images representing the numbers from 1-10. I’ll start you off with the first three.
Bun to Chicken. See a gigantic Chicken sitting between the two halves of a hamburger bun, perhaps wearing the top half as a hat, see it pecking at the bottom half and the top half keeps falling off, so it keeps picking it up and placing it back on its head.
Shoe to Eggs. Imagine yourself cracking eggs into your favorite shoes. See yourself sliding your feet into your shoes and breaking the yolks. They spray out from your shoes covering the whole area with a thick yellow gooey mess.
Tree to Milk. Imagine tipping over a huge Oak tree with your hands, as it topples, gallons and gallons of Milk gush from the ground like an oil geyser. It’s a milk geyser. See yourself covered in dripping milk.
Okay, go ahead and do the same with the remaining list. Remember, the more ridiculous the image the better. Once you finish, see how many you can remember. Then come back.
So how did you do? If your images were crazy, you should not only have been able to remember all ten in order, but you should also be able to recall them out of order. If I say 3, what do you see? 3/Tree, uprooting the tree and the geyser of milk. How about 5, 8, 7? Easy isn’t it?
This is an easy demonstration of the power of visualization. The next time you go grocery shopping or go to write down a to-do list, try this method, your brain will thank you.
Bob’s book Right Brain Rapid Recall which covers this system (The Peg) in more depth is available here
Download my new app for remembering names BOB’S APP
Funny, unique and interactive in his entertaining conference keynotes and workshops, Bob Gray reveals the untapped potential in each of us. His empowering systems and their many applications in the business world give participants immediate ‘walk away’ value. Book Bob Gray today as your next conference keynote speaker.
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the test of truth and time
No amount of logic or evidence can erase the image of unmatched ineptitude sloths have in the minds of the public and biologists alike. . . they are simply too different. Weirdness at this level prompted titters and contempt from the moment tree sloths were discovered. Buffon, naturalist to King Louis XV of France, suggested sloths were an experiment by The Creator to test the limits of life by piling one flaw upon another. . . one more and sloths could not exist at all (Martin et al., 1961). So it was with some surprise and no little delight that I read a recent paper by Vizcaíno (2009) that takes sloths’ greatest flaw–their lack of tooth enamel, and suggests it might in fact be their great evolutionary innovation.
upper caniniforms, i.e. tusks (L); molariforms (R)
Megalonyx upper caniniforms(L); molariforms (R)
Despite all evidence of their enduring success, the traditional view of sloths has long been that their simple ever-growing pegs of soft dentine imposed a serious constraint on their evolution. Even the scientists who acknowledge ground sloth achievements in South America discount the significance by pointing to their long isolation on the continent, supposedly inferior competition, and extinction after the Great American Biotic Interchange. They disregard sloths like Megalonyx and Paramylodon which successfully invaded the homeland of the allegedly superior mammals, dispersed widely, and competed successfully for millions of years, showing considerable adaptability in a wide range of habitats–faulty teeth and all (McDonald, 2005). Now Vizcaíno (2009) says scientists have overlooked some significant advantages of dentine teeth, and enamel isn’t something sloths lost but dumped to escape its limitations–opening the door for them to exploit niches unavailable to regular herbivores.
Abandoning enamel, Vizcaino says, and evolving ever-growing dentine teeth 60+ million years ago was the key innovation that allowed Xenarthrans to become abundant and widespread. The simple peg-like teeth that their earliest sloth ancestors evolved proved to be a remarkably flexible innovation. The enamel teeth of other herbivores wear out with age. Older animals have to adapt to the decline in their oral processing ability by altering what they eat and the way they eat it–selecting less fibrous leaves, chewing faster, spending more time chewing and eating greater quantities. They get less nutrition from their food because less of the interior of the cells is exposed to digestion by intestinal microbes and enzymes. The animals aren’t as well nourished so they suffer more stress due to disease, parasites and plant toxins. They spend more time in habitats providing less concealment and are more exposed to predators. Some herbivores simply starve to death because their teeth wear out, but most die for other reasons. Predation, parasites or disease may be the proximal cause of death, but theyare all the inevitable outcome of being born with enamel. Ever-renewing, self-sharpening teeth made of dentine, like sloths’, stay in optimal condition for life. [more about sloth teeth]
Top notch teeth are vital for adult females “eating for two” (or more). Poor maternal condition—all too often traceable to her teeth–is a frequent cause of juvenile mortality in regular herbivores. Under-nourished mothers have smaller litters and young with lower birth weights. Young mothers may be healthier but they are also inexperienced, contributing to increased juvenile mortality. The replacement of milk teeth with permanent ones and weaning are significant causes of stress for the juveniles of regular mammals. Two–toed sloths, on the other hand, acquire their permanent teeth early and add solid food to their diets when just 1-2 weeks old, reducing the stress of making the transition to solid food that occurs in regular herbivores, and the nutritional burden on the mother (Meritt, 2008). This allows for extended care and no delay between offspring. The lower maternal demands may be responsible for tree sloths breeding 20+ years with no decline in fecundity (Nowak, 1991).
Were dentine teeth and their concomitant breeding advantages the evolutionary tools ground sloths used to conquer North America? An aging female Megalonyx with two healthy juveniles in tow, such as we may have in the Tarkio Valley would be compelling support for Vizcaíno’s theory. First, we need to prove our adult sloth was female, and then that the indications of arthritis we see come from old age and not an injury or a different disorder. . . ever-growing teeth aren’t much help when paleontologists need to determine a sloth’s age propecia canada online. If our adult was truly elderly you would expect more signs of the arthritis (McDonald, pers. com.). . . on the other hand, we shouldn’t expect zoo animal-age arthritis symptoms. . . life is hard, and relatively short, even in the Tarkio Valley. In any case, Vizcaíno presents an exciting new perspective. Maybe Buffon was right after all and sloths are a test. . . for us, to learn more about the wonders of life. . . . Dave
Martin, P. S., Sabels, B. E. and Shutler, D. 1961. Rampart Cave coprolite and ecology of the Shasta ground sloth. American Journal of Science 259: 102-127.
McDonald, H. G. 2005. Paleoecology of extinxt xenarthrans and the great American Biotic Interchange. Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History 45: 313-333.
Meritt, D. A. 2008. Xenarthrans of the Paraguayan Chaco. In The biology of the Xenarthra, S. F. Vizcaino and W. J. Loughry (eds.). University Press of Florida. pp. 294-299.
Nowak, R. M. 1991. Walker’s mammals of the world. Vol.1. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
Vizcaíno, S. F. 2009 The teeth of “toothless”: novelties and key innovations in the evolution of xenarthrans (mammalia, Xenarthra). Paleobiology 35: 343-366.
1. Robert McAfee’s avatar
I feel slightly like I’ve been ripped off after seeing the adaptation of the Sistine Chapel picture…. There is a key slide from my Dissertation defense where God is reaching out toward a ground sloth.
Guess we all think sloths are a little bit of the divine!
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How Jesus Was Nailed to the Cross
Though my blog deals with mainly political subjects, my medical curiousity does drive me to write on other subjects. The following is an edited version of an article that has been submitted for publication:
Could the Catholic gesture known as the “Hand of Benediction” (Figure 1) provide anatomical insight into the crucifixion of Jesus?
Figure 1
A common symbol of both piety and blessing is known as the “Hand of Benediction”. It occurs when lateral digits of the hand (4 and 5) are flexed at the IP (interphalangeal) joints as noted in Figure 1. Though still seen today, the Christian origin of this gesture has been lost to history but may relate back to the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross.
Crucifixion was utilized by the ancient Romans as a slow, demoralizing means of death meant to both punish the guilty, dissuade others from committing the same crime or just to set an example. The cause of death from such torture has been conjectured to be due asphyxiation. However, blood loss, dehydration, infection or shock have also been suspected contributing factors.
There has been ongoing speculation as to where Jesus’s hands were nailed to the cross. Anatomically, a nail piercing the ulnar nerve at the wrist, possibly at Guyan’s canal (Figure 3), could not only explain the origin of the “Hand of Benediction” but also possibly elucidate ancient Roman crucifixion techniques. The ulnar nerve passing through the canal innervates the third and fourth lumbricals, dorsal interossei, palmar interossei, hypothenar muscles and the adductor pollicis. As result of a traumatic lesion to the nerve at this site the most noticeable outcome would be the flexion of digits 4 and 5 at the IP joints of the effected hand due to lack of innervation of their corresponding lumbrical muscles. Did those who witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion see this physiologic hand gesture while he was on the cross and interpret it as a holy sign? Is this final gesture of Jesus what the Catholic clergy of today are emulating with the “Hand of Benediction” gesture?
Plus, a nail piercing Guyan’s canal and securing a person’s hand to the wooden crossbeam of a cross may also be anatomically logical. Because the carpal bones are held firmly together by a dense and interlocking array of ligaments, this anatomical area may be able to provide enough structural integrity for a nail to secure the crucified person’s hand tightly against the wooden beam. Plus, it may also provide enough support to keep the crucified person’s arms elevated throughout the entirety of their agonizing ordeal.
Crucifixion has been shrouded in mystery for many centuries. However, by reexamining the possible origin of the “Hand of Benediction” both an anatomical explanation for this gesture and insight into the methodology of Roman crucifixions emerge.
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Famine in Yemen is considered a "real possibility" this year. More than three million people - including 460,000 children - are acutely malnourished and the situation is deteriorating every day.
The UN says 7.3 million Yemenis do not know where their next meal is coming from. The crisis has been brought on by nearly two years of civil war. Iran-backed Houthis have been fighting a Saudi-led coalition.
At least 10,000 people have been killed. The death toll from hunger and disease is much greater. A child under the age of five is dying every five minutes.
The international community is being urged to find $2.1bn to help ease the situation. The majority of the population has only limited access to food and medicine. The UN has described the crisis as "catastrophic" and rapidly deteriorating.
What does it take to help millions of helpless people in a country ravaged by war?
Presenter: Sohail Rahman
Mahjoob Zweiri - associate professor in contemporary history of the Middle East at Qatar University
Ahmed Alibrahim - Saudi affairs specialist
Emma O'Leary - humanitarian access adviser in Yemen for the Norwegian Refugee Council
Source: Al Jazeera
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On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Civil Disobedience
― Henry David Thoreau
Obedience is the connective tissue of oppression.
In other words, any form of control on a collective level can only be carried out through obedience. A dictator can’t arrest or kill an entire population himself; he needs mindless minions to do the dirty work. This principle applies across all forms and degrees of systematic control, even the most subtle.
The desires of any wannabe controller can only come to fruition through the compliance of others. And that’s been the case throughout recorded history (his-story). The desire for control becomes a virus, driven by fear and infecting more and more people, until there are enough drones to oppress an entire population.
This phenomenon isn’t just the case with large-scale atrocities; it applies to anything which is an impediment to freedom or love; be it a person, group, system or idea.
Everything is held up by belief. Laws are merely words written on paper, only legitimized by collective acquiescence. Laws need people to enforce them. And if laws are unjust (as most are), those who carry them out must unquestioningly submit to authority and go against their own inner knowing.
The only way control or oppression works on any scale is through compliance. Too many people do the work of ‘the man’ for ‘the man.’ That’s the problem. The solution lies in civil disobedience.
Freedom Cannot Be Granted
“Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.”
― Max Stirner
Asking for freedom is oxy-moronic. If you have to ask for freedom, you’re already a slave.
How is freedom taken? The simple decision to be the master of your own body and mind.
It really is as simple as that, though difficult to apply. It’s easy to blame problems on others, it’s easy to neglect our health and think “the doctor can fix me.” We’ve been conditioned to externalize our power since childhood. We’ve been taught to not trust ourselves. We’ve been taught to submit to authority without question.
This is a recipe for a control system to stealthily and slowly permeate society (the totalitarian tiptoe).
When you attain a degree of self-mastery, you do not acquiesce to the will of destructive people or disharmonious institutions. Which leads to the next point…
Fear-Based Programming
― Albert Einstein
The covert means by which oppression takes over is through fear-based programming.
If you have people in fear, you can easily control them. Fear activates the part of the brain known as the amygdala (the center for emotional behavior/motivation) and inhibits neocortex function (our “thinking brain”). This means that rationality and intellect are thrown out the window, the perfect storm for brainwashing. There’s even a term for this fear response; amygdala hijack.
The media is one big amygdala hijack, perpetually programming the population with which boogeyman to fear next. This is a massive ritual of fear-based programming that insidiously shifts entire populations into thinking and acting irrationally out of fear. Television is called programming for a reason.
Remember the whole weapons of mass destruction fiasco with Iraq in 2003? US military action in Iraq and massive destabilization of the middle east (which continues to this day) was predicated on that lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. But lingering fear from 9/11 resulted in a string of irrational behavior and many people blindly believing the hype.
The holocaust took place because German soldiers were thoroughly conditioned to carry out orders. They didn’t carry out orders because they liked doing it, but because they feared the wrath of their higher ranking officers, or even because they were conditioned to fear jewish people. These abominations only occur when fear is the driving force.
Fear is hard to pin down. It’s slippery, and ultimately illusory (False Evidence Appearing Real). Yet it’s the undercurrent of all “negative” emotions. Fear is what stops us from saying no to evil. Fear might actually distort our perceptions to support evil. That’s why it’s so dangerous.
When you cultivate self-mastery, you’re able to break the cycle. The spread of fear stops before you and is transmuted by the omnipotent force of unyielding love.
Love Over Fear
― John Lennon
Strive to choose love over fear in every situation. You can never go wrong if you act from a place of compassion. This is the fulcrum of change, and it starts within you.
The change we all yearn to see in the world will only happen in the wake of a fundamental change in consciousness. Everything we see in this world starts in the realms of imagination before coming into manifestation.
The change begins within and ripples outward. Embodying the change is the first step, the prerequisite. Without inner transformation, humanity will be stuck on the same merry-go-round of madness.
When a critical mass of people create positive inner changes, it will open up doors we never could’ve imagined before and will provide possibilities far beyond our current limited perspective. Solutions will spontaneously emerge.
Go within and stop the momentum of fear. Learn to listen to and trust your intuition. Have the courage to follow your heart instead of cowardly bowing to fear.
― Brene Brown
Compliance with destruction, hatred, oppression, violence and fear is cowardice, while noncompliance is courageous. In the depths of your being, in your heart of hearts, you know what is right.
Choose love over fear.
Have the courage of heart and freedom of mind to disobey oppressive forces.
Be the change.
– Stevie P
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About Bhutan
about BhutanThe Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan lies along the lofty ridges of the eastern Himalayas, bordering the Tibetan Autonomous region of China in the North and North-West and the Indian states of Sikkim in the West and South-West, Assam in the south, Arunachal Pradesh in the East and South-East and West Bengal in South and South-West. The country within these borders forms a giant staircase, from a narrow strip of land in the south to some of the highest unclimbed Himalayan peaks on earth. With an area of 38,394 square kilometers, Bhutan is comparable to Switzerland both in its size and topography, being largely mountainous.
With a relatively small population of 6,97,335, people in Bhutan enjoy a sustainable lifestyle which they inherited from their forefathers. About 70% population of country still live in small villages sparsely scattered over rugged mountain land. Buddhism, prevalent in the country since the 7th century and continues to play important role in their peaceful lives.
For centuries, Bhutanese have treasured the natural environment and have looked upon it as the source of all life. This traditional reverence for nature has delivered Bhutan into the 21st century with an environment still richly intact. More than 72% of the land area is still under forest cover. The country has been identified as one of the ten bio-diversity hot spots in the world and as one of the 221 global endemic bird areas. Its Eco-system harbors some of the most exotic species of the eastern Himalayas with an estimated 770 species of birds and 50 species of rhododendrons, besides an astonishing variety of medicinal plants and orchids. Many parts of the country which have been declared as wildlife reserves, are the natural habitat of rare species of both flora and fauna.
Druk Yul or the ‘Land of Thunder Dragon’, the country as called by locals, is a land replete with myths and legends. This country of rolling hills and towering crags certainly exudes charm. The mountains are magnificent, the forest are dense, the people are delightful, the air is pure, the architecture inspiring, the religion exciting and the art superb. Like timeless images from the past, the traveler encounters the full glory of this ancient land through its strategic fortresses known as Dzongs, numerous ancient temples, monasteries and stupas which dot the countryside, prayer flags which flutter along the high ridges, wild animals which abound in dense forests, foamy white waterfalls which are the ethereal showers, and the warm smile of its friendly people. Each moment is special as one discovers a country which the people have choose to preserve in its magical purity.
About BhutanWith its beautiful and largely unspoiled Himalayan setting, its rich flora and fauna and its vibrant Buddhist culture, Bhutan has become an increasingly popular destination for international tourists. The Royal Government of Bhutan recognizes that tourism is a world-wide phenomenon and an important means of achieving socio-economic development particularly for developing countries like Bhutan. It also recognizes that tourism, in affording the opportunity to travel, can help in promoting understanding among peoples and building closer ties of friendship based on appreciation and respect for different cultures and lifestyles.
Towards achieving this objective, the Royal Government, since inception of tourism in the year 1974, has adopted a very cautious approach to growth and development of the tourism. The Bhutanese tourism industry is based on principle of sustainability that is ‘tourism must be environmentally and ecologically friendly, socially and culturally acceptable and economically viable’. Endowed with a rich living culture and pristine natural environment complemented by a development philosophy that espouses balanced growth, Bhutan continues to gain momentum as an emerging high-end destination in South-Asia.
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In honor of Crufts, let’s extract ourselves from our myopic viewpoint and explore how Conformation works in other parts of the world shall we?
The Kennel Club is to England what the AKC is to the US. The first organized dog show was held in 1859 consisting of 60 Pointers and Setters. It wasn’t until 1870 that an organization formed. In 1880 the Kennel Club introduced registrations for dogs. In 1884, the AKC was formed in the US following many of the rules already set forth by the Kennel Club.
Each breed recognized by the Kennel Club has a defined breed standard and is judged against that standard, the same as here. The Kennel Club recognizes many of the same breeds as the AKC, however, they include many different breeds as well.Â
There are 209 recognized breeds which are classified into 7 groups. The 7 groups are Hound, Gundog, Terrier, Utility, Working, Pastoral, and Toy. The Hound group includes breeds used for hunting by sight and scent. The Gundog groupincludes breeds of Retrievers, Spaniels, Hunt/Point/Retrieve, and Setters. These are breeds that field live game or retrieve game. The Gundog group is comparable to the AKC Sporting group. The Terrier group includes breeds that hunt vermin above and below ground. The Utility group includes dogs bred for a very specific purpose although not in the sporting or working categories. This group consists of many of the breeds defined as the AKC Non-Sporting group. The Working group consists of guard and search and rescue breeds. The Pastoral group is comparable to the AKC Herding group. The Toy group is small breeds bred for companionship.
Although the groups can be compared for similarities there are also differences as to how the breeds are categorized into groups. For example, the AKC categorizes Poodles of the Miniature and Standard variety into the Non-Sporting group and Toy Poodles into the Toy group. The Kennel Club lists all three varieties in the Utility group. Generally the logic can be followed for the categorization in either country even if the result differs. Airedales are categorized as Terrier in both clubs.
The Kennel Club also has a process for recognizing new breeds. New breedsare added first to the Imported Breed Register before being transferred to the Breed Register. After recognition and establishment in the Breed Register a breed standard is written. The breed is not eligible for CCs until after a breed standard is approved.
Feel free to share an explanation of conformation in your country by emailing Dogged Dogdom.
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Today’s post is brought to you by the letter ‘E’
…for Education, evolution, equality and emerging.
Postman wrote: “…We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.”
Upon some digging, I discovered that this quote appears in Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” from 1985. While he may have re-used the idea in a later context, I am going to examine the quote from that ‘historical’ context and bring it into today.
Evolution of Education
If we consider Education ‘historically’ (from 1985 going forward) there are many layers of schools, and how they ‘were’ versus how they are.
If we look at it from an Administrative standpoint – that was when principals were the ‘boss’ of the schools, they subscribed to a different style (Instructional approach to leadership) in which they were in charge of the teachers and were responsible for the success (or not) of the school based on how they ‘directed’ their teachers and punished the students. (so glad my other class is enabling me to make these connections!)
We’ve made a shift into “transformational leadership” (in theory) where more admin is focused on the inspiring, team building perspective of working together, and utilizing the strengths in our buildings to achieve a vision.
We’ve also experienced a shift in the teacher realm (in theory), that we are no longer on an ‘island’ alone and unsupported in achieving curricular outcomes and success for the students in our room. Not only do we have an increase in the other professionals (SLPs, psychologists, OTs), we have seen an increase in collaboration and team teaching (enter my biased plug for teacher-librarians).
In addition to these shifts and how schools are run, we have seen an increase in technology development, an increase in availability in schools, and (in theory) an increase in the use of these things within our schools.
Emerging Equality
“Empirical research has indeed shown that exposure to prosocial programs can result in beneficial effects on children’s attitudes and behaviours in areas such as cooperation and the reduction of stereotypes” Shalom M. Fisch
This is an example of how the evolution of technology, especially in Education can be used to bring people together. This is it’s potential, and whether we are considering television programs, movies, software or allowing our students to connect on a global front, we are using technology in education to expand horizons and garner a better understanding of others and for others. But are there negative repercussions as well?
CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay
Postman’s Edict
So what of Postman’s assertion that Sesame Street undermines traditional schooling?
To me, I think he is referring to the need to re-examine how ‘school’ is done, and to think in different ways to engage and educate students. While I don’t think Postman was a complete luddite, there is a chance that he said Sesame Street undermines traditional school in the sense that he felt traditions were being threatened.
Currently, I believe Postman would feel as though Education was unduly falling into the technology ‘trend’ without considering implications of using technology. He would likely question what the downside of using this technology is, how children are being affected by the use of technology.
That being said, how would Postman react to the shifting philosophies mentioned in the other areas of education? As a whole our society has shifted, especially in the Educational realm with technology, and as such, we need to be questioning the appropriate use as well as considering the implications of technology use within schools.
What benefits do students garner from this technology? What are the downfalls with technology? Who benefits, and who is left behind? Does BYOD mean equality for all? Who’s ‘voice’ are we limiting with these things?
While you consider these things, another thing to ponder is: how does the introduction of technology affect our thought patterns and the ‘evolution’ of humans?
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Aim higher, reach further.
The Short Answer
First Nations Clash With Enbridge Over Northern Gateway
• Indigenous communities in Canada are fighting Enbridge Inc.’s plans to build Northern Gateway, a 730-mile pipeline to ship Canadian oil to a West Coast port for export to Asia. The company, Ottawa and oil producers see the pipeline as key to helping the country lessen its almost total dependence on U.S. demand for oil. But the aboriginal groups say the environmental and cultural risks are too great.
• What’s at stake?
Canada, which is also contending with delays to another, better known pipeline, TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL, which would carry oil south across the U.S. to the Gulf Coast, has pledged to sell more oil outside the U.S. market, where surging supply means Canadian oil trades at a discount. And as a series of fiery oil-train derailments has brought scrutiny and tougher regulations on rail shipments, oil sands producers and policy makers have made finishing the Gateway pipeline a priority.
• What’s the legal landscape?
By law, native groups must be consulted prior to proposed resource development to try to accommodate their concerns, but around half the 50 First Nations along the route have yet to back the pipeline, according to the company. Centuries of thorny legal issues surrounding aboriginal land rights became more complex in June, when a ruling from Canada’s top court gave natives new leverage over companies operating on their traditional lands. Aboriginal groups have filed seven separate lawsuits in the Federal Court of Appeal that aim to stop the pipeline.
• Why do the native groups oppose the project?
For many indigenous people, who see themselves as custodians of the land, the pipeline represents a threat to their way of life. In the Tl’azt’en First Nation, for example, many blame the last major piece of infrastructure—a road built in the late 1960s that connects them to a local highway and ended centuries of relative isolation—for bringing drugs, alcohol and welfare, underscoring a long-rooted mistrust of what they see as “encroaching Canada.” They also point to a British Columbia copper mine that recently spilled more than a billion gallons of waste material, including arsenic, into waterways as an example of the environmental risks of resource development.
• Are other resource projects affected?
Native and environmental protesters have thrown into doubt an expansion of Kinder Morgan Inc.’s Trans Mountain Pipeline outside of Vancouver, and object to a proposed TransCanada pipeline that would ship crude from Alberta to Atlantic Canada. Last fall, McEwen Mining Inc. pulled out of exploring for gold in northern Ontario after local First Nations demanded consultation and a confidential agreement on giving them a share of any find, the company said. And in December, the government of New Brunswick introduced a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas after months of protests from aboriginal groups.
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Crystal Cave of Giants
The Crystal Cave of Giants is one of the most extreme places on the planet. The Crystal Cave of Giants was accidentally found in 2000 by miners working in the silver and lead mine at Naica, Mexico. It lies almost 300 meters below the surface of the Earth. The largest crystals are over 11 meters long and weigh 55 tons.
The crystals themselves are made of selenite used in drywall construction. Except these crystals formed over a span of about half a million years in a hot water solution, saturated with minerals. The temperature inside the cave remained very consistently hot for the entire time the crystals were growing.
It is still incredibly hot in the cave due its proximity to a magma chamber, deep underground. The air temperature is 50C with a relative humidity of over 90%, making the air feel like an unbearable 105C (228F) Entering the cave without special protective suits can be fatal in 15 minutes.
In extreme heat, the body begins to lose higher brain functions which made the expedition much more difficult with the risk of falling into deep pits, or being impaled on a sharp crystal. All the camera gear needs to be slowly brought up to temperature beforehand by pre-heating it and most cameras with moving parts and tape mechanisms simply will not work at all.
It is not only beautiful, it is also dangerous.
This entry was posted in News, Places, Traveling and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.
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The Vampire Tapestry Critical Essays
Suzy McKee Charnas
In the same way that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) can be read as a patriarchal response to the “New Woman” movement of the 1890’s, so can Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Vampire Tapestry be read as a response to the women’s movement of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Charnas uses literary vampire conventions established by Stoker (such as the vampire’s sexual attractiveness, pride, and sense of prey as little more than cattle) with more modern conventions (skepticism about the existence of vampires) for ideological purposes, allowing The Vampire Tapestry to function as a text about gender relationships and patriarchal repressive gender ideology.
Weyland is presented as a complex, vulnerable human being who undergoes a series of changes through each of the novel’s five parts. In part 1, Mrs. de Groot identifies the power and strength of the vampire—an outsider— with the power and strength of a black woman in a repressive society, allowing her to defend herself. In vanquishing Weyland, she refuses her conventional role as woman/victim and becomes woman/hunter.
In part 2, the erotic element of the vampire is foregrounded. Weyland is placed on display and manhandled by Reese, who exposes the vampire’s bloodsucking apparatus in a scene that can be read as a displaced representation of the exposure of female genitalia to male gaze, which characterizes the gender power relationships of contemporary society....
(The entire section is 437 words.)
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The Surgical Suite
The Surgical Suite
The Surgical Suite can be found in hospitals, outpatient surgery centers, physician offices, or clinics. The surgical suite is located in a restricted traffic area of the facility to limit the microbial contamination of the air, floors, and unit. A prime concern is infection control and the prevention of surgical related complications. As we enter the area, hats are worn to limit hair contaminants. Clothing worn is selected with the intention of limiting the number of microbes introduced into the area.
As we move forward into the next century, we base our practices on research and statistics to remove old practices that have no value, maintain practices that have a proven value, or improve practices to increase their value.
The operating schedule assigns a team including the surgeon and patient to a specific operating room. Surgeries in that room for the day may be grouped by specialty such as open heart or the type of surgeon such as a general surgeon.
The team begins their day with the case schedule, but it can change with a phone call about the motor vehicle accident or a gunshot wound downtown. Flexibility is a must, but excitement and satisfaction can be the reward as you respond quickly to the challenge and send a critical patient to the intensive care unit and eventually home.
Blood contamination and "the sight of blood" is another area of concern for new people to the operating room. We employ all techniques to prevent hazardous exposure to both the patient and surgical team. Each person who enters the sterile field scrubs their hands with an antimicrobial and puts on a sterile gown and gloves. Meticulous hemostasis is employed to limit blood loss for the patient. Blood loss is actually minimal for a large number of cases. Masks, goggles, gowns, and gloves are worn as protective equipment to prevent exposure.
Surgical techniques such as no pass zones limit hazards from sharp injuries. The team member must be organized with a satisfactory level of core knowledge regarding anatomy and physiology, microbiology, instrumentation, tissue handling techniques, surgical procedures, and wound closure.
Equipment and monitoring devices are positioned strategically for efficient patient care. Sterile drapes are used to establish a sterile field that minimizes the microbial contamination to the absolute irreducible minimum. Movement within the sterile field is accomplished in a quick and efficient manner.
The surgical suite has access to sterile supplies, sterilizing devices such as a flash autoclave, fluid and blanket warmers, pharmacy, scrub sinks, and emergency equipment.
Each patient is interviewed and assessed multiple times to ensure the correct patient receives the correct surgical care. Wrong site surgery has received a lot of media attention lately. During the case, just after draping but just prior to incision, the entire team pauses to verify the patient data.
Another area requiring meticulous attention to detail is the counting of sponges, sharps, and instruments used inside the patient during the procedure to prevent foreign body retention.
Anesthesia is responsible for pain control, anesthesia administration, and monitoring/stabilizing the patient's condition during the procedure. The surgeon performs the procedure. Each member has a specific role to play with duties to perform and as a member of the team; each plays an integral part in the process. The surgical suite is very similar to a theater production. We start the procedure by setting the stage ... turning up the lights ... and have plenty of action. If you like drama, you'll love the Surgical Suite.
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Democracy is adopted by most states and its thought-about one among the best governance buildings. Social justice is emphasized inside of a democracy and participation of all citizens in state affairs enables improvement of regulations that will be quickly recognized because of the greater part. On the other hand, you will discover obstacles to democracy seeing that its implementation is influenced by external reasons that limit its relevance. Direct and agent democracies utilize bulk rule in choice creating but trendy democracies are influenced by team dynamics that include groupthink whereby the end result of a group determination creating construction is flawed. Growing disparities around the rich additionally, the inadequate are an rising problem in democracies as elective mechanisms favor the passions in the loaded. The rising issues to democratic governments limit its performance.
From anarchy to communisms, numerous forms of governing administration have been completely examined. Winston Churchill labeled democracy as the worst process of governance as it is uncovered to influences that modification the nature in the proposed judgement building channels. Theoretically, democracy solves current challenges most notably changeover of energy and economic disparities between the citizens. All the same its application in modern views is confronted with consultant issues whereby the pursuits of a couple of are propelled by means of elections that appear reasonable but are rigged to serve the interests of a selective writing Throughout the late nineties there were primary advancement to world-wide democracy including the abolition of apartheid process in South Africa and removal of your authoritarian army mechanisms witnessed in Latin The us.
The breakthroughs were but the truth is short-lived as social-economic concepts triggered ever-increasing gaps between the prosperous as well as the poor. Bulk rule as applied in democratic states usually requires implementation of trendy ideologies but exactly where elected representatives propel their very own agendas, democracy seizes to exist. Currently worldwide politics is dominated by rich unique with influential companions that can finance election strategies due to this fact the citizens of any state have candidates chosen for them. The illusion of preference is clear whereby citizens have to decide on involving the candidates supplied for them. The elected representatives in modern democracies often fulfill the interests of formidable groups principal to climbing gaps among the wealthy and bad.
Apart from flaws within the agent construction, things of group dynamics restrict the reliability of conclusion generating structures that benefit from greater part rule in formulation of regulations. Groupthink is often a present-day problem to team determination earning domains and it can be a major problem to progression of democratic campaigns. Groupthink is often a psychological dysfunction that is characterised by a need to maintain harmony in determination producing and ideas that contradict the favored ones are repressed. The result is development of policies which have been not always just. Emerging worries that include terrorism can be a world wide issue and intervention techniques differ from point out to condition.
The America makes use of aggressive intervention procedures to threats of terror. Terror suspects never acquire human legal rights that other regulation offenders are entitled to. Ethical dilemmas exist in administration of terror attacks. Legislation offenders inside of the homeland are entitled to Miranda warning when arrests are on progress but terror suspects are not guarded by these types of rights exactly where rapid threats which include bomb attacks are considered to exist. Torture really is a wide-spread resource utilized while in the interrogation of torture suspects and unique citizens believe that deprivation of rights to terror suspects really is a necessity while in the war from terror. Instances that compel procedures imposed by well known judgment will probably infringe in the legal rights of the little group of folks exhibiting features of mob rule and that’s worse than anarchy.
Though democracy has its features, manipulation of consultant constructions boundaries its effectiveness. Worldwide democratic organizations like the Planet Motion for Democracy participate in an active job in evaluation and sustaining democracy. Social financial perspectives that figure out candidates for election bring on variety of incompetent leaders accordingly there is have to have for advertising and marketing ideology since the fundamental range standards. Psychological dysfunctions linked with group judgement earning along the lines of groupthink trigger flawed determination making buildings. The obstacles to modern-day democracy necessitate effective intervention systems.
Birch, Anthony Harold. The concepts and theories of recent Democracy. Taylor & Francis e-library ed. London: Routledge, 2002.
Kuzelewska, Elzbieta. The difficulties of modern democracy European integration. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Aspra-Jr ;, 2012.
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Speaking Your Mind, Minding Your Speech
I’m about a third of the way through Michel Foucault’s The Courage of Truth. It makes me sorry Foucault didn’t live a few more decades—he was getting interested in some quite interesting things. This book is about the Greek concept of “parrhesia,” roughly translated as “complete,” which is to say, bold, open, uncompromising speech. Parrhesia seemed to have its origins in the rough and tumble of democratic Greek politics, where any citizen could speak freely in the assembly, criticizing the rich, the generals, and the rulers, without restraint. Foucault examines the various forms parrhesia takes—“wisdom,” teaching, prophecy—while ultimately being most interested in the philosophical version exemplified by Socrates. Foucault associates philosophical parrhesia with the “care of the self,” Foucault’s own abiding concern in the last decade of his life, with “care of the self” involving esthetic self-creation out of moral and social, if not chaos, then decadence and disorder. Philosophical parrhesia involves critically examining and distancing yourself from the passions, interests and prejudices that make care for our “self,” or, for Socrates, our “soul,” or immortal part, impossible.
A revival of political parrhesia would not only be very welcome today, it is starting to emerge. Parrhesia is not just a question of speaking the truth as you see it—it is a matter of speaking the truth that needs to be spoken to those whom and in the way that it needs to be spoken. One could say that that is really what we mean by “truth”: truth must resist some pressing falsehood, which means, paradoxically, it must be widely accused of falsehood itself. There is what I consider a still chastening description of parrhesia by Jonathan Swift in the “Preface” to his Tale of a Tub:
But though the matter for panegyric were as fruitful as the topics of satire, yet would it not be hard to find out a sufficient reason why the latter will be always better received than the first; for this being bestowed only upon one or a few persons at a time, is sure to raise envy, and consequently ill words, from the rest who have no share in the blessing. But satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others, and very wisely removes his particular part of the burden upon the shoulders of the World, which are broad enough and able to bear it. To this purpose I have sometimes reflected upon the difference between Athens and England with respect to the point before us. In the Attic commonwealth it was the privilege and birthright of every citizen and poet to rail aloud and in public, or to expose upon the stage by name any person they pleased, though of the greatest figure, whether a Creon, an Hyperbolus, an Alcibiades, or a Demosthenes. But, on the other side, the least reflecting word let fall against the people in general was immediately caught up and revenged upon the authors, however considerable for their quality or their merits; whereas in England it is just the reverse of all this. Here you may securely display your utmost rhetoric against mankind in the face of the world; tell them that all are gone astray; that there is none that doeth good, no, not one; that we live in the very dregs of time; that knavery and atheism are epidemic as the pox; that honesty is fled with Astræa; with any other common-places equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the splendida bilis; and when you have done, the whole audience, far from being offended, shall return you thanks as a deliverer of precious and useful truths. Nay, further, it is but to venture your lungs, and you may preach in Covent Garden against foppery and fornication, and something else; against pride, and dissimulation, and bribery at Whitehall. You may expose rapine and injustice in the Inns-of-Court chapel, and in a City pulpit be as fierce as you please against avarice, hypocrisy, and extortion. It is but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man carries a racket about him to strike it from himself among the rest of the company. But, on the other side, whoever should mistake the nature of things so far as to drop but a single hint in public how such a one starved half the fleet, and half poisoned the rest; how such a one, from a true principle of love and honour, pays no debts but for wenches and play; how such a one runs out of his estate; how Paris, bribed by Juno and Venus, loath to offend either party, slept out the whole cause on the bench; or how such an orator makes long speeches in the Senate, with much thought, little sense, and to no purpose;—whoever, I say, should venture to be thus particular, must expect to be imprisoned for scandalum magnatum, to have challenges sent him, to be sued for defamation, and to be brought before the bar of the House.
I’ll leave aside the opening counter-intuitive but very illuminating assertion that “panegyrics” might be more “marginal” and “critical” than satire, other than to note that it might help explain why supporters of “charismatic” politicians may refuse to brook even the most seemingly harmless criticisms of their candidate, allowing for nothing other than panegyrics that implicitly insult all the other contenders. More important for my purposes is the contrast between Athens and England, between parrhesia directed at the people as a whole and parrhesia as directed at individuals. Or, rather, the question here is what counts as parrhesia. Swift explains very well the paradox whereby the furthest reaching and most inclusive criticisms of a country, a civilization, an “age,” a “generation,” etc., can be applauded by all of its putative targets. Insofar as you applaud the criticism you have “plausible deniability” regarding the accusations. Apparent self-hatred is really self-love, even while it takes its toll. It is inspiring to imagine what public discourse might look like if anyone who dared venture such unaccountable criticism of some “”us” were to be “immediately caught up and revenged upon.” No doubt the author of this blog post, like so many of us (did I just do it?), would have been far more than a few times the victim of such “revenge.” Swift provides us social and political critics, as well as generative anthropologists and mimetic theorists, a useful constraint.
While virulent criticism of particular individuals that everyone else also criticizes requires no great courage, that is obviously not what Swift has in mind in his “Athenian” example. He is defining true parrhesia, pointing to malefactors whose misdeeds spread their effects across the commonwealth, and supplying a complete itemization of those verifiable misdeeds. We might identify this with the kind of work associated with investigative reporters, but I think the point here is less discovering what is hidden than speaking of what everyone already knows, or at least senses, but is afraid to say. It has a lot in common with the “emperor has no clothes” phenomenon, but in that tale the emperor is himself hoodwinked. What defines true parrhesia, then, is the thin line between itself and scapegoating: the ostensive gesture present in both cases, meaning that scapegoating can easily, and no doubt often does, mask itself as parrhesia. Even more, the practitioner of parrhesia risks the fingers being turned back on himself and becoming the victim of scapegoating. The line between the two is maintained only by the truth of the putative exposure.
Still this is somewhat unsatisfactory. Think of the fierce debates over some of Donald Trump’s recent statements, which, while no exactly truthful, were not exactly lies either. The Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto has been developing an interesting analysis of these statements, most famously Trump’s claim that he saw “many thousands” of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey. Taranto has pointed out that, strictly speaking, there are no reports, much less video evidence, of the “many thousands,” so taken literally Trump’s account must be deemed false—a mistaken memory, if not a lie. Yet, in their haste to tag Trump as a liar, many media outlets covered up, or were revealed to have earlier concealed, evidence of some celebrating of 9/11 by Muslims in NJ and elsewhere in the US. Indeed, the more trouble one went through to determine the falsity of Trump’s statement, the more likely you were to stumble on a much more disturbing picture of Muslim responses to 9/11 than we had been provided previously. If you see the media outlets as the more persistent, systematic and dangerous liars, then Trump’s sin is venial, or even no sin at all, because there would have been no other way to expose the dishonesty of those media outlets other than by baiting them as Trump did. In that case, Trump’s false statements are true parrhesia, making it possible for him, his supporters, and others in their wake to (as the current phrase goes) “call out” those media outlets for what really would be virtually treasonous acts on behalf of America’s enemies.
Even more, if we give Trump the benefit of the doubt, and assume a faulty memory rather than deliberate deceit, we can make yet a stronger case for his speech as true parrhesia. His memory would be a kind of “screen memory”: a re-composition of an actual memory out of material provided by an ex posteriori revelation of that memory’s meaning. It has been pointed out that there were some contemporary reports of police in NJ looking into some Muslim celebrations of 9/11; and there were videos from the Middle East, most infamously, I believe, from the Palestinian territories, showing mass celebrations. We can imagine Trump conflated the two in his mind, prompted by the widespread denial in the post-9/11 West that there is any connection between Islam or the vast majority of Muslim people, and the atrocities so regularly carried out in the name of Islam. Trump responded in the unstudied way of someone whose first response to fabricated claims that violate one’s own experience is to say “no way! I remember it!” What is true in Trump’s statement (is this sounding like a panegyric? If so, should I be concerned, or take comfort in Swift’s implicit defense?), then, is his spontaneous defense of an intuition that is true and under assault and could not, in that moment, be defended any other way. The proof of this mode of truthfulness would be that cutting down Trump’s statement to the size and shape of the actual event would yield up that intuition and restore it to our public memories.
This unapologetic and artless defense of an embattled and genuine intuition is what, I think, we mean by “speaking your mind.” In opposition I would place the minding of our speech that is so central to victimary thinking. Nothing terrifies the speech minders more than the possibility of people speaking their minds, a fear which, in the US, goes back to Nixon’s “silent majority” and which took caricatural form in the malapropisms of Archie Bunker (to whom Trump has, inevitably, been compared). Of course, what made “All in the Family” entertainment and not (just) propaganda was that Mike Stivic, Archie’s son-in-law and liberal nemesis, also spoke his mind and, to the credit of the show’s creator and writers, was regularly shown to be wrong, stubborn, egotistical and self-defeating. Indeed, there was a brief moment, in the late sixties and early seventies, when there was public space for both left and right to speak their mind without fear of consequences, and the search for specifically American modes of parrhesia would do well to start there. We might find that much of what was said on both sides looks to us like BS now, but, like Trump’s BS, allowed for the surfacing of fundamental intuitions in conflict.
One very good explanation for the Trump phenomenon is that in speaking his mind he reminds us of how much we are all minding our speech. The contrast between his way of speaking and normal, “mainstream” political BS is striking. It has become a cliché to say that no politician lets loose a single word that hasn’t been focus group tested and lawyer vetted a dozen different ways, and yet it still seems to be taken for granted that any other mode of politics is simply unimaginable. The reason no other candidate, even the more right wing ones who are “tough on terrorism” and conscious of salient distinctions between Christianity and Islam (like, say, Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee), would have ever proposed a suspension of Muslim travel to the US as Trump has is simply that the received political discourse has no grammar or vocabulary for it. There is no way of putting “Muslim” and “come to this country” in the same sentence (much less with a negation in there): the very thought would have to be processed through references to State Department procedures, Supreme Court precedents, gestures to the glory of previous generations of immigrants, etc. The idea would be chopped up into timid proposals for modifications in this or that vetting process. Speech minding goes way beyond the victimary; or, perhaps, the victimary reaches far deeper into our culture than we realize—either way, to return to that passage from Swift, it seems as if everyone (there I go again!) is constrained by a mode of discourse modeled on the universal denunciation with private exemptions for everyone who signs on built in. We are destroying the planet, we are insufficiently welcoming of others, we are materialist and consumerist, we have become weak, we are belligerent, we are not democratic enough etc., and by “we” I mean everyone but me and couple of my friends who have this great idea to turn things around as soon as we can get everyone on board. The fright Republicans and conservatives have taken at Trump’s proposal demonstrates their own enslavement to this model: only proposals that single out no one in particular, but point to a general deficiency in our collective institutional consciousness, are intelligible.
New forms of speaking one’s mind are proliferating, in particular (here and abroad) on the nationalist right, in ways that I have pointed out in many recent posts and so won’t return to here (except to mention that Vox Day, the author of SJWs Always Lie, has now come out the equally “mind speaking” Cuckservative). Instead, I’ll take up a theoretical point, one I have made previously but not applied to my recent discussions of nationalism and the war with SJWs. The reason we fear speaking your mind is, as I suggested before, its indeterminate proximity to scapegoating. Scapegoating is particularly alarming today, with the weapons of mass destruction at our disposal and the ways instantaneous media facilitate mob-like reactions to events. The assumption seems to be that, unlike Archie and Meathead, we will not scream our guts out at each other and then sit down to dinner; rather, the Archies will overwhelm the Meatheads or vice versa, and simply wipe them out, that we will “battle to the end.” Such fears are deeply rooted in our political unconscious, and reflect the kind of anthropological intuition that inhibits speaking your mind. The frankness of the alternative right (and the ever evolving Breitbart website deserves special mention here for very deliberately pushing the boundaries of what kinds of confrontation can be openly engaged) is currently testing this assumption, and I’d like to provide a theoretical endorsement.
I would like to return, in this context, to the notion of the “violent imaginary” I advanced some time ago, and have used intermittently since. The basic claim here is that originary scene, and the sign in which it issues, results from an imaginary extrapolation to an “apocalyptic” denouement to the emergence of rivalries on the scene which is, in fact, extremely unlikely. If we devote to Girard’s or Gans’s analysis of the structure of the originary scene the same scrutiny many have given to Trump’s memory of celebrating New Jerseyean Muslims, we would have to say that while it would appear completely reasonable from the standpoint of each participant in the mounting mimetic crisis that “this is the end,” almost certainly the melee would break up on its own accord with many if not most of the group’s members still standing (even if just barely, due to exhaustion). At the very least, one person would have to be left, in which case “total destruction” is unimaginable. The fortunate mistake of the originary scene is that such total destruction seemed imminent, as each sees his fear and aggression mirrored in all the others, making the sign the only apparent salvation.
Speaking your mind becomes possible insofar as you realize that after the apocalypse will come—tomorrow. There will always be some form of social association impermeable to the latest mimetic break out. Such an insight is itself a mode of resistance to mimetic contagion. The sign is both the invention and the memory of that insight, an insight which must have been available on the scene to someone positioned so as to witness a simultaneous escalation and de-escalation in different “sectors” of the scene. At a certain point, those de-escalating would be able to direct their shared attention to those still escalating, making that escalation a more mundane, treatable, matter. All this would be forgotten with the closure of the scene and the initiation of the sparagmos, in which process the unity of the sign and unanimity of the group would be paramount and hence the most extreme form of motivation (the violent imaginary) necessary, but any event takes on the same structure, and we could always find those who “keep their heads” in even the most frantic situations.
Keeping your head is part of speaking your mind. You do not obey the imperative to mind what you say because anything could happen. Rather, you let yourself be guided by resentment towards everyone’s refusal to say whatever it is they are refusing to say because anything can happen. We can criticize and even insult without lynching; we can argue fiercely without going to war. Or, if it turns out that we can’t, then we were really already at war, so let’s get on with it and find out where we stand. Yes, anything can happen, but in the end it will be something. There can always be a “worse,” but you make it more likely by making preventing it your highest priority. There are margins of better and less bad right now and that is all we ever have access to and, paradoxically, it is the more open, insistent, unvarnished and exact naming of the violent imaginary making things worse, and its bearers, that make attention to those margins or increments more likely. Someone had to say we have no need for more Muslims in the United States. And someone else has to call that someone a fascist. And that first someone need not back down, meaning that someone else needs to come up with a somewhat different approach. And he will, and will be rebuffed again, and we will all see the world not end. In the end, perhaps our intuitions will be more sharply formulated, and brought more precisely to bear on the more pressing threats of violent contagion. Let those who would nominate Islam, and those who would nominate Islamophobia, make their respective cases. Speak your mind so as to provoke others to do the same.
We do need to think about what is entailed in speaking your mind, in more careful, Foucauldian ways. It’s not just a question of saying whatever pops into your head. Trump, as Eric Gans pointed out in a recent Chronicle, can say what he is saying because he doesn’t need anyone else (unlike every other candidate he need not worry about the donor spigot being turned off once he becomes “unviable”)—that’s one formula for liberating yourself to conduct war against the SJWs, but a limited one. If you spew forth what will be perceived as an outburst at a faculty gathering, or in a letter to the student newspaper, and get fired so that everyone will forget it ever happened, then the restoration of a repressed intuition to public memory will not take place. Well, maybe the possibilities of such outbursts shouldn’t be dismissed altogether, but it is better to be cognizant of the space one occupies, because you speak your mind in defense of some space. It is faith in the durability of that space that makes speaking your mind possible. In Trump’s case, it’s the national space; in communications with one’s fellow faculty members, it’s a space of free inquiry into the truth that needs to be defended, and such inquiry cannot be defended with Trumpian insults. A subtle, suggestive neutralization of some politically correct commonplace that interferes with reasonable lines of inquiry might be more to the point, and far more unwelcome—but also harder to do anything about. You speak your mind in order, to refer to the Eastern European dissidents like Vaclev Havel, to “live in truth,” and, as I said before, the truth is on the borderline where scapegoating is as difficult to resist as it is to carry out, with the emphasis on “live” suggesting that it’s better to make the scapegoating ever so slightly the more difficult . And that borderline is always shifting. A good place to identify it in any particular circumstance, though, is to notice when you start to feel like you should be minding your speech—there is little doubt that therein lies some matter on which you should speak your mind.
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The Coffea state is brought on by emotions or violent excitement of the mind, but especially by joy or “pleasant surprise.” The result is sleeplessness, nervous excitement, neuralgia, twitching of muscles, toothache, face ache, red face and hot head.
You may be called to the bedside of a woman who has been laboring for some great cause. She works persistently, is successful, but goes to bed with weeping, delirium, neuralgia, sleeplessness. Her heart palpitates, her pulse flickers, she has fainting spells, and without Coffea she may die. Coffee drinkers who kept up through some ordeal and then break down are similarly affected.
The Coffea patient is sensitive to wine. A small amount of wine intensifies the nervousness, produces sleeplessness, flushed face, feverishness, great excitement. Not necessarily intoxication, but nervous excitement. Coffea has a painful sensitiveness of the skin beyond comprehension. I remember one particular case. A woman had her lower limb out of bed and it was as red as fire down one side. I walked toward it to put my hand on it But she said, “Oh, don’t touch it, I can’t bear to have it touched; I can’t touch it myself.” l asked how long this had been coming on. She said, “Oh, it all came on within an hour.” Such a symptom is common in coffee drinkers. There was no fever. Intense stinging, burning pains in the skin with the redness and heat with coarse rash coming on suddenly, leaving just as suddenly. The sensitive part is aggravated by cold air, aggravated by any wind or from fanning, from motion, yet aggravated by warmth. aggravated from any one walking across the floor. The woman I referred to scowled when l was walking toward the bed. A number of times I have seen such things relieved within a few minutes by Coffea.
With all these nervous states the patient dreads the fresh air. He is extremely sensitive to cold, sensitive to the wind and cold weather. Complaints come on in the cold weather, from the cold air. Pain in the mouth and jaws, better from holding ice-cold water in the mouth. This applies to toothache and face ache where it is deep in the jaws. Hot head; inflamed condition of the gums. Pain in the teeth; rending, tearing pain in the teeth, brought on from exposure to cold, from emotions, from excitement, from joy; aggravated from motion; ameliorated by ice or ice cold things; aggravated by warm food. Cannot drink warm tea, it so intensifies the pain. That is a particular. The particulars contrast with the generals. In one place you may see “better from cold” in black-faced type, but it relates to the face and jaws. Worse from cold is a general. Aversion to cold air, aversion to the open air unless it is very warm and still. Aversion to wind. “Neuralgic toothache entirely relieved by holding cold water in the mouth, returning as it becomes warm. Toothache during the menstrual period. Complaints of anemic children during dentition.” Those nervous, excitable children that talk to the nurse and the mother very rapidly with brilliant eyes, red face, cannot go to sleep. It will quiet the patient and actually favor the growth of the tooth in a painless manner. That is the description of a nervous child with many nervous brain and mental troubles. This child is extremely sensitive; it takes cold. The routine prescriber gives Belladonna to a child who has hot head, hot face and throbbing carotids, and when it does not help he gives more Belladonna and increases the size of his dose until the child has a proving. He makes a Belladonna child out of it when Coffea would have cured it. In most instances where Belladonna is indicated the child is sluggish and stupid, and would like to sleep. With Coffea there is excitement. The child hears things its mother cannot hear; sees things; imagines things. Wakes up in fright. Sees this, that and the other thing in the room. Wakes up excited as if it had visions. Looks for things, and finally sees they are not there. Such things are strong features of Coffea.
At times the head is hot, the face is flushed and the eyes so brilliant that one fears apoplexy. Patients will often tell you that they hear a “noise” in the head, a ringing and roaring in the occiput. The ear is the one organ capable of registering sounds. But strange to say, the ears are sometimes very deceiving. Roaring in the ears sometimes seems as if it were in the occiput. Sometimes it is accompanied with a sensation of tingling or bubbling in the head. When patients say, “I have a roaring in the head,” you know that means in the ear; many times accompanying roaring, ringing in the ears, buzzing in the ears, is a peculiar sensation of vibration in the head that is mistaken by the patient for a sound. I mention that because the Coffea patient feels a crackling or a bubbling in the occiput. The head feels badly; it feels too small. Headache, as of something pressing hard upon the surface of the brain. You would naturally suppose there was a pressing because of the congestive state heretofore described. “Headache as if the whole brain were torn and bruised, or dashed to pieces. Worse from motion, noise or light.” The eye and the head symptoms are worse from noise and light. “Headache intolerable. Head feels small, and as if filled with fluid. Nervous hysterical headache. One-sided headache.” There is another head symptom which is quite common. A feeling as if a nail were driven into the head Coffea headaches are worse from walking, from motion; from the mere moving across the floor, he says he feels a draft of air on his head. And that is true of the pain in any part of the body. If a Coffea patient should have a pain in the hand, swinging of the hand through the air will aggravate. It is worse both from the motion and from the air. I want to illustrate that in this way in order to show how sensitive he is to air, and especially the painful part to cold air; when he moves against the air, against even still air he feels it. But the amelioration of the toothache from cold is an exception, is a particular.
The neuralgia of the face is a common feature of old coffee drinkers. Sensitive persons take coffee and finally become habituated to it. They say they cannot get along without it. They must have coffee. Such individuals should stop coffee. When coffee furnishes a crutch it is a sure indication that drinking it must be stopped. So it is with tea or any beverage. Such persons sometimes become sensitive to coffee, and they drink it in great quantities; the face becomes red; headaches come on, and other symptoms of Coffea. Stopping coffee brings out quite a proving, and you have to study Cham. and Nux for an antidote. In all these remedies you get opposite effects. Now Opium will illustrate that. The first effect of Opium is to constipate. Let several doses be given, and as the effects of the Opium wear off he may have diarrhea. Opium eaters can seldom stop because a diarrhea comes on. If you should ever have an Opium case and diarrhea comes on Puls. will nearly always control it. But there are individuals who reverse that. Often small doses of Opium will bring on dysentery, and if it is increased, bloody dysentery and inflammation of the bowels come on. Of course, one is action and the other the reaction.
A woman who is a confirmed coffee drinker will have menses too soon and lasting too long. Uterine hemorrhage is not uncommon. Another feature of Coffea is that the woman can scarcely wear the napkin during menstruation (Platinum). The parts are in a state of hyperaesthesia. The vagina is hot and sensitive, often preventing coition. In the text it reads “Great sensitiveness of female genital organs, with general excitability. She is in a state of ecstasy. Uterine hemorrhage with excessive sensitiveness of organs and voluptuous itching. Metrorrhagia; large black lumps.” Sometimes large bright red lumps. “Worse from every motion, with violent pain in the groins, and fear of death.” Excessive sensitiveness about the vulva with voluptuous itching, is a strong feature of Coffea, and you will often find such symptoms in coffee drinkers.
During and after labor we also see this great excitement, all these nervous manifestations The nervous system is in a fret, and such a mental state as described comes on with after-pains; extremely sensitive to pain, cries out; sees visions; hears all sorts of noises. Pains aggravated from motion; aggravated from noise. Wants everybody to keep still in the house.
Convulsions of children. “Puerperal convulsions. Extreme excitability.” “Palpitation of the heart, pulse fluttering.” “Strong, quick palpitation of the heart with extreme nervousness, sleeplessness and cerebral erethism caused by unexpected news of great good fortune.” Let a woman about to go into confinement hear suddenly some unusually good news and she becomes almost ecstatic; carries the symptom all through confinement. The child is affected, the milk is affected. The milk flows away. Hemorrhage is likely to come on. Great nervousness, excitability, fear.
Dr. James Tyler Kent
by ( Author at Homeopathic Books )
Posted on at 10:11 am.
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From new electric vehicles to eco-friendly renovated factories, Ford Motors is doing a lot to green its business. Just last week, the company flipped the switch on its newly installed 500 kWh solar power system at its Michigan Assembly Plant. What’s really cool about the new system is that it includes a 50 kWh facility where Ford is testing how they can reuse EV batteries for energy storage. If the system proves successful, it will become the basis for Ford’s expansion of solar power to other facilities.
ford, ford motors, ford ev, ford ev battery, ford solar power, ford michigan assembly plant, electric vehicle battery
Installed and created by Xtreme Power, the battery system will provide 750 kWh of energy storage. It will be combine with the Xtreme’s dynamic energy storage management system. The batteries have a chemical capacitor that makes them better than lithium ion batteries in terms of energy storage, efficiency, life cycle, and cost.
Solar power storage is necessary to ensure a constant stream of electricity, and batteries are one of the simplest ways to do so. EV batteries have a lot of life left in them after they’re no longer usable in a vehicle, so it makes perfect sense to reuse them for stationary storage. In 2003, the Sandia National Laboratory studied the potential for using old EV batteries as storage and they found that there are no technical barriers to using the batteries a second time.
The authors also noted that, at the time, there was a used battery solar energy storage system currently running in Mexico. Given how far clean technologies have come in the last eight years, it’s hard to believe that Ford won’t find success with its EV battery storage system.
Via Clean Technica
Photo credits: Ford Motor Company
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joreth: (dance)
They didn’t. Latin dances originated in a lot of different places in South America and are heavily influenced by Afro-Caribbean rhythms from the booming slave trade and trans-Atlantic travel of the 1500’s-1800s.
Samba originated in Brazil in the very early 1900s: Samba - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal
Salsa doesn’t have a single point of origin but Cuba likes to take the credit for it: Salsa - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal Salsa includes influences from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Africa, and even a little bit of European country dance styles. Mambo is also Cuban, but today’s Mambo is basically the Salsa on a different beat.
Tango comes from Argentina: Tango - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal
Merengue hails from the Dominican Republic but Haiti likes to claim credit for it: Merengue - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal
Cha Cha is genuinely a Cuban dance, having been created by a Cuban composer who invented the music that people eventually developed a dance for: Cha Cha - What Is it? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal
Bachata comes from the Dominican Republic: Bachata (dance) - Wikipedia
Rumba is a Cuban dance, but it also has some differences with today’s rumba/rhumba in the US. The *music* came from Cuba, and a dance was made up to go with the music, but the 2 versions danced today are American Standard (which was invented in the US) and International Standard (which was invented by a French instructor in London). Rhumba - Wikipedia
Bolero is a dance that has two separate styles and two completely separate and independent origins - Cuba, and Spain, with the Cuban version being heavily influenced by other countries like Puerto Rico and Mexico: Bolero - Wikipedia
Paso Doble is usually categorized as a “Latin dance” when you watch the TV competitions, but, ironically, the partner dance is French (based on Spanish military marches & bullfights), and then adopted by Spain and Portugal: Pasodoble - Wikipedia
And then there’s Jive, which is classified as a “Latin dance” under International dancesport categories, but Jive originated as Lindy Hop in New York at the Savoy Theater by a primarily black community and was later codified by Arthur Murray and other ballroom studios to make it easier to teach, and also to compete in. This led to the development of several different sub-categories of Lindy, and the competition version which is classified as a “Latin dance” is called Jive: Swing Dance - What Is It? - Orlando Ballroom Dance Party Portal
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The Way to Slavery (1939) German Propaganda Archive Calvin College
Background: The following editorial by Julius Streicher comes from Der Stürmer. It appeared in August 1939, just before the outbreak of the war. For more information on the Stürmer and its editor, see my book on Julius Streicher.
The source: Julius Streicher, “Weg zur Versklavung,” Der Stürmer, #34/1939.
The Way to Slavery
by Julius Streicher
After the World War, no nation in Europe would have dared to deny the Jews a role in leading peoples and nations. So sure were they of their power that they dared to put full-blooded Jews at the head of German provincial governments, and even placed Jews in the position of Reich minister. The Jew Walter Rathenau was the embodiment of the Jewish drive for world domination in those days when Germany was betrayed and enslaved.
National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy have put an end to Jewish domination. In other nations, Jewry rules from behind the mask of democracy. What one calls democracy today is concealed Jewish domination. Jews determine what happens in the democratic states, and Jewish bank hyenas and government ministers are working for a new world war that will re-subject Germany and Italy to renewed and final Jewish domination. In England, the Jew Hore Belisha as war minister is preparing to send the English people to the battlefields of a European war. This is necessary if Jewry’s hopes are to be fulfilled. These hopes are: the defeat of the National Socialist and Fascist led peoples and their final enslavement under the yoke of the world criminal Pan-Jewry.
Go to the 1933-1945 Page.
Go to the German Propaganda Archive Home Page.
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Print Course View Syllabus Textbooks
AMST 731 01 (22128) /HIST747/AFAM763
Methods and Practices in U.S. Cultural History
Matthew Jacobson
T 1.30-3.20 WALL81 401
Spring 2016
This sampling of U.S. cultural history from the early national period to the present is designed to unfold on two distinct planes. The first is a rendering of U.S. culture itself—a survey, however imperfect, of the major currents, themes, and textures of U.S. culture over time, including its contested ideologies of race and gender, its organization of productivity and pleasure, its media and culture industries, its modes of creating and disseminating "information" and "knowledge," its resilient subcultures, and its reigning nationalist iconographies and narratives. The second is a sampling of scholarly methods and approaches, a meta-history of "the culture concept" as it has informed historical scholarship in the past few decades. The cultural turn in historiography since the 1980s has resulted in a dramatic reordering of "legitimate" scholarly topics, and hence a markedly different scholarly landscape, including some works that seek to narrate the history of the culture in its own right (Kasson's history of the amusement park, for instance), and others that resort to cultural forms and artifacts to answer questions regarding politics, nationalism, and power relations (Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters). In addition to providing a background in U.S. culture, then, this seminar seeks to trace these developments within the discipline, to understand their basis, to sample the means and methods of "the cultural turn," and to assess the strengths and shortcomings of culture-based historiography as it is now constituted.
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Multiple Meanings
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Heart of Darkness
What conclusion does Marlow draw?
***PART TWO***
Marlow observes that the crew, being hungry cannibals, could easily overpower the whites and eat them, but they do not. What conclusion does Marlow draw?
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Last updated by Aslan
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At first Marlow thinks the pilgrims and himself just don't look appetizing. Their pink flesh and sickly demeanour might be unappetizing. Later Marlow develops another theory,
"Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear -or some kind of primitive honor? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul -than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these chaps, too, had no earthly reason for any kind of scruple. Restraint! I would just as soon have expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield. "
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Introduction: Homemade Rocket With Rocket Fuel and Engine
Picture of Homemade Rocket With Rocket Fuel and Engine
Step 1: Material for the Fuel
Picture of Material for the Fuel
At first lets make a fuel of our rocket.
What we will need:
1. Ammonium nitrate (how to get described in the next step)
2. Baking soda
3. Water
4. Sugar
5. Jar/bucket
6. Measuring cup
7. Newspaper
Step 2: How to Get Ammonuim Nitrate
Picture of How to Get Ammonuim Nitrate
Ammonium nitrate is commonly used in agriculture as a high-nitrogen fertilizer. It is also used in instant cold packs, as hydrating the salt is an endothermic process.
So, the easiest way to get it is to buy a cold pack. Open it and remove water from it.
I am pretty sure you could also order it online, but for me the cold pack seems the easiest way.
Step 3: Mix
Picture of Mix
Use the measuring cup to add 2 cups of ammonium nitrate and 2 cups of baking soda.
In this step it is important to keep the proportion. 1:1. The size of measuring cup may
slightly vary, but its important to use the same one for adding everything. My cup was about 200 mL
Step 4: Mix
Picture of Mix
Add 17 measuring cups of water into soda and ammonium nitrate.
Use the same cup you used in step 3.
Mix everything together.
Step 5: Boiling
Picture of Boiling
Boil the solution for about 30 minutes. Stir gently while boiling. After 8-10 minutes ammonia gas is going to produce, after 15 minutes there is going to be a lot of gas producing, after about 25-30 minutes the reaction is going to stop, and no ammonia gas is going to be producing, that's how you know you are done.
It very important that you boil this OUTSIDE.
DO NOT boil it inside, because as you boil, ammonia gas is going to produce. Ammonia gas is very toxic if inhaled, so try not to breather it in, and its good to wear a mask as you are doing this.
Please before you do it, read this article -
Step 6: Cooling
Picture of Cooling
After you are done with boiling, let the solution cool for 5-7 minutes.
Then add one cup of sugar and mix.
Step 7: Dunk
Picture of Dunk
Put newspaper in the solution and let it soak in there for 3-5 minutes
Step 8: Dry
Picture of Dry
When you newspaper is fully impregnated with the solution, take it out and let it completely dry.
Your rocket fuel is finished.
Step 9: Rocket Engine
Picture of Rocket Engine
1. Fuel (newspaper made in previous steps)
2. Paper
3. Tape
4. Pen
5. Scissors
Step 10: Folding
Picture of Folding
Take half of the newspaper sheet.
Fold it twice in half.
Then in half one more time.
Roll it up.
Step 11: Tape
Picture of Tape
Tape the newspaper you rolled.
Tape one end completely, and leave another untapped.
Step 12: Folding
Picture of Folding
Take a piece of paper.
Fold it in half.
Then roll the tapped newspaper in it.
Step 13: Tape
Picture of Tape
Tape the newspaper inside the paper.
Leave about 0.5 inch gap on one side.
Cut the left over part on the other side and tape it.
Step 14: Hole for a Wick
Picture of Hole for a Wick
At the side you left a 0.5 inch gap put the rod from the pen inside.
Fold the sides and tape them.
Step 15: Wick
Picture of Wick
Roll the newspaper and insert it into the previously made hole.
Your engine is ready.
Step 16: Rocket
Picture of Rocket
Now there is different ways you could launch it.
1. Tape a stick to an engine and launch it just like that (step 17)
2. Make a rocket yourself (step 18)
3. Insert this engine into estes rockets and launch it.
Step 17: Launching the Engine
Picture of Launching the Engine
Take a stick, preferably really light one and tape it to the engine.
Put the end of the stick into the ground, light up the wick and enjoy.
Step 18: Homemade Rocket
Picture of Homemade Rocket
1. Bottle
2. Cardboard
3. "Airborn" or "M&M" flask, or anything with that round, "rocket" shape.
Step 19: Rocket
Picture of Rocket
Cut cardboard into triangle shape and glue these "triangles" around the body of the rocket.
Make another hole at the other end of the rocket body.
Cut off the top of the bottle, roll it, and glue it inside the rocket body.
Also, if you are going to launch it from the estes launching platform, take a little piece of paper roll it and tape to the side of the rocket. (Thats how you will secure your rocket on the platform)
Step 20: Lauch
Picture of Lauch
Now go out and launch your rocket.
I will soon upload the videos.
KedarP6 (author)2017-06-21
superb very innovative
Rocketere (author)2017-06-17
Use: potassium Nitrate. (found in stump remover) and sugar then blend it up.
that can create nice fuel
C.S.Aswini (author)2014-12-06
other than explosive items like potassium nitrate&ammonium nitrate can we use someother.please suggest some
There is no way to make rocket fuel without something that explodes. It wouldn't work at all if there was no explosions.
Alex_T (author)rorypmasterson2016-02-03
*pressure, as made from explosions. I cite rocket balloons.
Also, combustion, not explosions, if I can nitpick without looking like a nerd. Explosions powerful enough to send up anything would do it in pieces. Even solid gunpowder from Estes is packed extremely tight so it burns very slowly (what with limited O2 for burning)
Al Hamshari (author)Alex_T2017-05-11
ALex, gunpowder contains plenty of O2, so packing it makes it much more powerful, rather than slow cumbustion. Btw , there will be no explosion as long as there is an escape way for the gases. Dont ask Newton, ask yourself.
Alex_T (author)Al Hamshari2017-05-11
Packing gunpowder gives less space for each piece of gunpowder to burn, and it needs space for the exhaust gases to go, so it doesn't burn when there's no space for gases to escape, aka when it's packed. It only burns on exposed sides, meaning it burns slower. There won't be an explosion without a way for gases to escape because it won't burn.
Mipy (author)Alex_T2016-09-13
Exactly, NERDS FOR THE WIN!!!(upbeat musical crescendo)
AlixxS (author)Alex_T2016-09-09
Be proud of your nerdyness. It means youve been at least somewhat properly educated
AlixxS (author)rorypmasterson2016-09-09
Rocket fuel doesnt explode if used properly. It combusts, much like the gasoline or diesel fuel in your engine. But instead of pushing a piston head, it applies the thrust directly out its jet
You don't always need explosives to propel a rocket, for example, if you have ever seen a bottle rocket, it just shoots straight up from fuel, that's why it makes a" swoosh" sound when it takes off
LisaB182 (author)C.S.Aswini2016-02-06
Try using a baking soda and vinegar rocket. The kids and I had one years ago and it launched pretty well...had to ask the neighbors to retrieve it from their yard!
AlixxS (author)LisaB1822016-09-09
While those rockets are fun, you cant (safely) get them up more than about 50 feet. To achieve any real altitude, true pyrotechnic rockets are needed
AlixxS (author)C.S.Aswini2016-09-09
Potassium nitrate isnt inherintly explosive. In fact, its sold in bulk at hardware stores under the name "stump remover"
HoraceO (author)C.S.Aswini2015-11-03
water rockets, compressed gas rockets(vinegar and hydrogen peroxide), even Co2 rockets ...use your imagination and experiment and have fun just ALWAYS REMEMBER SAFETY IS MOST IMPORTANT
Alex_T (author)HoraceO2016-02-03
You mean vinegar and baking soda? There's little reaction from that and hydro perox.
Pyromaniac88 (author)C.S.Aswini2015-02-01
In case you didn't know, rocket fuel needs combustion to create thrust. If you don't want to use chemicals like KNO3 and (NH4)(NO3), then try a bottle rocket. They run on water but they are not as fantastic as a fire propelled rocket.
joshadkisson (author)C.S.Aswini2015-01-12
just an fyi, not sure, about ammonium nitrate, but potassium nitrate is an oxidizer, meaning that by itself, it is not flammable. if you add the other ingredient you needed to make the propellant (powdered sugar), then it becomes dangerous and flammable. the potassium nitrate and powdered sugar is a better and less hazardous way to make rocket fuel anyways, no production of ammonia gas.
Redrocketman (author)2016-08-30
waste of time. I'll make sugar motors that will KILL them
rebeccaz4 (author)Redrocketman2017-03-13
This recipe uses sugar..
cw9806 (author)2017-02-28
It was too weak when I made it. Barely got off the ground. too much water maybe?
Aaritra (author)2017-02-26
Hey,guys I launched it from my building roof,it nearly went out of the sight.superb!!!!!!!!!!!!
Roman Dolewa (author)2017-02-26
How much thrust, in newtons or pounds, does this engine produce?
Banamana (author)2016-12-11
it was awesome
Banamana (author)2016-12-11
cool steps broooo
quatzecoatl (author)2013-07-01
I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure you need an LEP to make rocket fuel
AlixxS (author)quatzecoatl2016-09-09
It depends on what type of fuel, how much per batch, and how big of a rocket engine you make. If you poke around, you can find the legal guidelines.
fishik (author)quatzecoatl2013-07-06
ImageMaker (author)fishik2013-07-10
I think he means "Low Explosive User Permit" or LEUP. It's certain you need one to store homemade rocket motors or propellant; whether you need one to make propellant is open to a certain level of interpretation, but the commonest reading appears to be that you can make non-detonating materials (like rocket propellant) without a Federal permit as long as they're used the same day they're made, i.e. not stored. State and local restrictions may cause you some heartburn, however.
As noted below, there are also some Federal restrictions on purchase of certain chemicals that are precursors or process ingredients in making methamphetamine -- for instance, I found recently that I can no longer buy "strike anywhere" matches, not because they're hazardous (no more so than they've been for 150 years or so) but because the tiny amount of phosphorus in the heads was being used in making meth. If ammonium nitrate is in that category, American farming is on its way out...
The phosphorus is in the striking pad and not the head of the match.
Alex_T (author)MobileCasinoBoy2016-02-03
that's sandpaper, otherwise it would be engulfed in flames. It's not, though, because while I don't know where this person is, but I can still buy them in bulk from the local walmart.
ImageMaker (author)Alex_T2016-02-09
The big difference between strike anywhere and "safety" matches is that safety matches have the phosphorus only in the striking surface, while strike anywhere have it in the white tip of the head. The striker isn't "engulfed in flames" because the phosphorus is too thinly distributed to sustain combustion (fire triangle -- you must have fuel, oxidizer *and heat*), but in combination with the chlorate in the match head, it can start the match head mix burning.
just so you know strike anywhere matches light anywhere the phosphorus is in the math head or it wouldn't light lol lol
yea... thats why they have to put the phosphorous in the match head in strike it anywhere matches.
That's true of safety matches (the kind you can only strike on the striking pad) but not of classic strike-anywhere type. It's the tiny bit of phosphorus in the head that lets you strike them on a zipper, shoe sole, even a particularly coarse five o'clock shadow.
ImageMaker (author)quatzecoatl2015-12-08
As I understand the BATFE regs relative to rocket fuel (and even explosives), for federal compliance, as long as you're not legally disabled from possessing explosives you can make rocket fuel, as long as you either consume it the same day, or meet legal storage requirements -- which don't always require a Low Explosives User Permit. State and local laws, however, may completely prohibit rocketry outside NAR- and Tripoli-sanctioned model and high power rocket activity; making your own motors is completely prohibited by NAR, and sanctioned by Tripoli only after you're certified to a high enough level.
TruthHunter (author)2015-08-24
Cold packs in the USA no longer contain ammonium nitrate. Instead they
are made with a salt solution.
JackM39 (author)TruthHunter2015-09-23
Ammonium Nitrate is a salt.
HoraceO (author)JackM392015-11-03
no it is iodized sodium chlorate
AlixxS (author)HoraceO2016-09-09
A salt, by definition, is the molecular bonding of a metal or meteloid to a nonmetal. Ie, sodium chloride, potassium chlorate, etc
1piemanpie (author)HoraceO2016-04-13
umm isn't that salt :/
AlixxS (author)TruthHunter2016-09-09
Yes, and that solution is called Ammonium Nitrate. I just bought a box yesterday, and it says it right on it
pnahar (author)2016-07-27
Can any other fuel be used and if I go outside and buy Ammonium Nitrate what's the concentration that should be used?
Cward553 (author)2016-06-03
I made it but the solution was to weak. maybe 7 cups of water instead of 17?
jayden squire (author)2016-04-20
If i do this in Australia where i live and get cought i will probly go to jail for 20 years or so
AmmarJ (author)2013-06-30
I tried this launching just the engine, and mine started smoking and hissing but did not take off, would you know why?
Alex_T (author)AmmarJ2016-02-03
If the chemicals are old it won't work. the papers should be loose. Oh, and a little funny tidbit: Baking soda is a great thing to put out fire. It releases CO2, which is what's in fire extinguishers.
fishik (author)AmmarJ2013-07-06
I don't really know, but it could've been because the wick wasn't installed correctly. It should be deep inside the engine, so everything ignites at once and it takes off.
theegghead (author)2015-04-27
do you know about what size roll makes which rating (the commercially sold ones have ratings such as A-8, C-6 so on so forth). Also, with the estes rockets, will the parachutes be able to deploy? And one last question, can this be ignited electronically? (just wondering because this looks awesome and I may try it...)
HoraceO (author)theegghead2015-11-03
3/4'' x 2 3/4'' of Kno3 is equivalent to an E45 booster engine
About This Instructable
More by fishik:Homemade rocket with rocket fuel and engineEco-friendly Oil Candle
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Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS
SynTESK (Syntax Testing Kit) is a toolkit for testing parsers of formal languages. SynTESK facilitates validation of correspondence of a parser implementation to a specification of a given formal language. In fact, the tool checks that the parser recognizes the given formal language.
There are many reliable systems of automated parser generation now. However complexity of real languages is such that even application of systems of automated generation to parsers development demands writing of addition hand-held code, mostly for resolution of conflicts at syntactical analysis - so-called look-ahead procedures. SynTESK tool allows finding errors in such manually written procedures.
At usage of SynTESK toolkit, tests are created completely automatically on the basis of the description of grammar in BNF (Backus-Naur form). Given description of the formal language grammar, SynTESK allows producing tests of the following sorts:
• Sentences inhering to the target language;
• Sentences not inhering to the target language.
Software Engineering
Back to the list of technologies of ISP RAS
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Promising New Strategy To Halt Pancreatic Cancer Metastasis
Promising New Strategy To Halt Pancreatic Cancer Metastasis
These images show the high expression levels of IL-17B and its
receptor (brown) in pancreatic cancer (left) compared with
normal tissue (right). (Credit: Wu et al., 2015)
Pancreatic cancer and its metastases might have their days numbered, according to a study published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.
Despite substantial progress in treating pancreatic cancer, this disease is still considered largely incurable. The poor prognosis is mostly due to metastases to other vital organs, a process driven by soluble factors present in the tumor environment.
A secreted immune protein called interleukin(IL)-17 has been associated with cancer progression, and receptors for IL-17 are expressed in the pancreas. Researchers now show that one type of IL-17 (IL-17B) and its receptor are highly expressed in pancreatic cancer, and their levels correlate with poor patient survival. In mice, secretion of IL-17B promoted the growth and metastasis of pancreatic cancer cells and enhanced the recruitment of inflammatory cells to the tumor site. Treating tumor-bearing mice with a drug that prevented IL-17B from binding to its receptor halted tumor growth and spread, resulting in increased survival.
Since metastases are the leading cause of death in pancreatic cancer patients, this drug might represent a novel therapeutic approach to defeat pancreatic cancer and prolong patient survival.
Based on material originally posted by Rockefeller University Press.
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Politician and Diplomat Talleyrand Full Name: Talleyrand [Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord]
Nationality: French
Profession: Politician and Diplomat
Why Famous: While Talleyrand's career began as a bishop, he quickly worked his way to the highest levels of the French government. Under Louis XVI, the French Revolution, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Louis-Philippe, he typically served as the foreign minister or in other diplomatic roles. He was Napoleon's chief diplomat during his conquest of Europe.
Even those who saw him as a traitor couldn't deny the skill with which he carried out his office. Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister and chancellor, once described him as a "sharp edged instrument, with which it is dangerous to play", and his name has since become a metaphor for a particularly resourceful and masterful statesman.
Born: February 13, 1754
Star Sign: Aquarius
Birthplace: Paris, France
Died: May 17, 1838 (aged 84)
Cause of Death: Natural causes
Historical Events in the Life of Talleyrand
• 1815-07-09 Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord takes office as the first Prime Minister of France
• 1815-09-26 Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord resigns as Prime Minister of France
Famous People who Died of Natural Causes
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Maypole ( Festa do Mastro ) *Ongoing
Maypole (or Festa do Mastro ) is an ancient tradition of pagan origin, originally celebrated in several countries of Europe, symbolizing strength and male fertility.The celebration begins with the cutting down of a tree by the men of the village and then carried through the village to the top of the S.Domingos hill.The tree is taken down by ax, passing from hand to hand. The size of the trunk is usually larger than 30 meters. After that, it is carried on the backs of 70 or more men, crossing the entire village so that every man in town can touch it.The ritual of the raising of the mast represents male fertility, the men in the region believe that by touching the trunk it will help them retain vigorous sexual faculties.On top of the hill, before being erected,the mast is festooned with hydrangeas caught by women (stewards) and children of the village, and then raised with the aid of ropes that are woven into the trunk and loosened with a simple tug without dismantling the ornament flowers.
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Why bots are important for Wikipedia
A robot built to write the Bible – image by Mirko Tobias Schaefer
The Guardian recently picked up on a piece of research about the behaviour of bots on Wikipedia in the first 10 years of its history. The research noted that as bots became more common, their rules sometimes came into conflict with each other, resulting in some bots changing or reverting thousands of edits by other bots.
Bots can be incredibly useful. They do a lot of the repetitive and mundane edits that would take humans ages and can be automated reasonably easily. One of the most notable examples is Lsjbot, which has created millions of Wikipedia stub pages in Swedish and Cebuano (a Philippine language and the mother tongue of the Swedish bot creator’s wife).
This has resulted in Swedish and Cebuano punching far above their weight in terms of the number of articles in their respective languages. The Welsh language Wicipedia has also expanded considerably using automated stub creation. Aside from this, one of the major uses of bots is to protect against vandalism, for example by reverting edits containing swear words.
Of course, the work of bots has not gone without criticism. The large-scale creation of articles (on the English language Wikipedia at least) has been restricted and a bot policy has been implemented to regulate the kinds of tasks that bots are allowed to perform. The Wikipedia page about bots states that:
Bots perform mundane but vital tasks such as:
The way in which Wikipedia operates can be seen as labyrinthine; a trait which is somewhat unavoidable in large, open source communities like the Wikimedia projects. So perhaps it’s not surprising that journalists often write about ‘murky and opaque’ underbelly of Wikipedia without capturing the full complexity of how the websites work. Once you get involved and see how it works, it’s usually not as complex or strange as it might seem at first glance.
Editing Wikipedia and its sister projects is great for anyone who wants to become more IT literate and understand how the complex series of relationships and data flows that we call the internet works. Curating the largest store of information and the biggest human project in the history of the world isn’t easy, and it takes a lot of people a lot of time to make Wikipedia as good as it is. We think it’s worth it, and can bring a lot of personal development and satisfaction to the people who do it.
So why not join in? To get started, read our recent blog post on starting to edit Wikipedia here.
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Servius Tullius
The 6th King of Rome
Woodcut illustration of Tullia driving over the body of her husband, Servius Tullius
POP/Flickr/CC0 1.0
During the legendary period, when kings ruled Rome, the future sixth king was born in Rome. He was Servius Tullius, the son of a leading man from the Latin town of Corniculum, or perhaps King Tarquinius Priscus, the first Etruscan king of Rome, or more wishfully than likely, the god Vulcan/Hephaestus.
Before Servius Tullius was born, Tarquinius Priscus seized Corniculum. According to Livy (59 B.C. - A.D. 17), the Etruscan-born queen of Rome, Tanaquil, took the pregnant captive mother (Ocrisia) into the Tarquin household where her son would be raised. Tanaquil was well-versed in Etruscan divination practices which led her to interpret omens about Servius Tullius very favorably. An alternative tradition, attested by the Emperor Claudius, makes Servius Tullius an Etruscan.
Women taken in ancient battles were generally slaves, so Servius Tullius was taken by some to be the son of a slave, although Livy is at pains to explain that his mother did not act as a servant, which is also why he stresses that the Latin father of Servius Tullius was a leader of his community. Later, Mithradates was to mock the Romans who had a slave as king. The name Servius may refer to his servile status.
Servius Tullius succeeded Tarquin as king of Rome (r. 578-535) in some unclear illegal manner. As king, he did many things to improve the city, including enlarging it and building monuments. He also took the first census, re-ordered the military and fought against neighboring Italic communities. T. J. Cornell says he is sometimes called the second founder of Rome.
He was murdered by Tarquinius Superbus or his ambitious wife, Tullia, Servius Tullius' daughter. [See Livy on the Death.]
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Servius Tullius According to Livy
Livy provides a short, detailed story of the personal and political life of Servius Tullius, including how Tanaquil helped Servius Tullius to the throne and his relationship with the sons of King Ancus Marcius (Martius) and the Tarquins.
This timeline provides the sequence and dates of the 7 kings of Rome. There is also a brief description of each of the kings. More »
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Servius Tullius Reforms
Servius Tullius is credited with making constitutional reforms and performing a census, increasing the number of tribes, and adding many people to the category of those eligible to participate in the voting assemblies.
The Servian reform of the citizen body affected the military as well, since Servius added a number of new bodies to the count. Servius divided the men into centuries, which were military units. The familiar centurion figure in the Roman legions is associated with these centuries. He divided the centuries into older and younger divisions so that there would be about half the number of men to stay and guard the home front while the other half went off to fight the almost incessant Roman wars. More »
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The Roman Tribes
We don't know whether Servius Tullius created more than the four urban tribes, but his re-alignment of the citizens into geographic rather than family-based units led to the creation of 35 tribes. The tribes voted in the tribal assembly. After the number 35 was set as the final figure, new citizens were added to those groups, and the geographic character of the affiliation was diminished. Some tribes became relatively more crowded which meant that individuals' votes counted for proportionately less since only the vote of the group counted.
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The Servian Wall
Servian Wall Segment
A portion of the Servian wall of Rome, near Temini railway station. CC Flickr User Panairjdde
Servius Tullius is credited with enlarging the city of Rome, and building the Servian Wall connecting the Palatine, Quirinal, Coelian, and Aventine hills, and the Janiculum. He is credited with building the Temple of Diana on the Aventine (Diana Aventinensis) to serve as a center for the cult of Diana for the Latin League. Sacrifices for the Secular Games were made to Diana Aventinensis. Archaeologists believe the walls and temple were built somewhat later. Servius Tullius also associated with the goddess Fortuna to whom he built several shrines, including the one on the Forum Boarium.
See: Chapter "Enlargement of the City Of Rome -- Servian Wall," from .
Servius put in place the Comitia Centuriata, the voting assembly based on the the division of the people of Rome into centuries based on their economic class. More »
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Brain Vs Artificial Intelligence
Brain Vs Artificial Intelligence
Brain Vs Artificial Intelligence
Brain is a vital organ of human nervous system protected by the skull. Brain is a source of human intelligence. Human Intelligence is completely God gifted. Intelligence is differently perceived and differently acquired. Human Intelligence is natural Blessing of Almighty. Here is a comparison between Brain Vs Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence Helps Find Software Bugs
However Artificial Intelligence (AI) is designed by the humans to incorporate human qualities into machines. It is based on making a robot or machine that behaves like human. It is also concerned with giving the decision making power to machine. E.g. Decision Support Systems, Expert Systems and Intelligent Systems.
AI Agreement
Sometime ago, researchers studying AI came up with an agreement that an intelligent computer should be intelligent enough to interconnect with humans without being known as a machine. Many tests have been performed on computer and humans in a room. The performance of computer programmers is getting enhanced, and computers have been getting broader communication, but no computer has passed this test.
How to distinguish between ChatBot or Human
It is challenging to tell whether a human or a computer generates genuine messages. Before this issue is explored in detail, it is convenient to consider common answers we get. Telephone call can be handled by a person or by a computer. After dialing the corporate number, what happens when the call is answered by a person:
Conversation Between Computer and Human
"Assalam O Alaikum” Sir?"
"Welcome to PTCL customer care services."
"Good Morning. This is Ahmad. Sir, How Can I help you?
"Your status is being check. Hold the line, please."
"Your issue is Resolved Allah Hafiz."
What happens, when our call is handled by a machine or computer, the common responses are these:
“Welcome to PTCL Customer Services.…"
“Urdu ke liya 1 dabain. For English press two …”
"Make your choice from the following menu …”
"Press 3 for Landline, Press 4 for wireless Services…. "
"Your complain has been recorded thanks."
So a computer is easily judged and can be deceived. Researchers need to study the actual happenings of events and their origin in the brain. Many aspects of brain are yet unknown and if people would explore them, it will come up with a new world of knowledge and wisdom.
• Human Intelligence is analogue and works in the foam of signals while Artificial Intelligence is digital and works in the form of numbers.
• Human brain use its own schema and content memory But A.I use only built-in memory designed by scientist.
• Human brain does have body but their Brain is no body.
• Human Intelligence is greater and wider but A.I is little and temporary as it is named Artificial.
• Human Intelligence more reliable as compared to A.I.
• Sensible reasoning and critical thinking but in A.I fast response. The ability to perform large calculations quickly.
There is a huge dissimilarity between true Intelligence and A.I. Scientists are trying their best to make best Artificial Intelligence devices and technologies and it is really a big world of science.
Facebook Open Sources Its AI Servers
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Friday, August 16, 2013
The str2num function and decimal numbers
There seems to be an issue with the str2num function when what you want is a real value. This matters because it can be used to convert from a string to an int or a real.
In order to successfully convert from a string representation of a decimal value to an actual real type on X++, you can't have any formats on your string. That means that the string has to be representing a double exactly as the real variable does: no thousand separator, and the dot ('.') character for the decimal separator.
It does not consider AX's region when performing the conversion.
Consider the following job:
static void Job1(Args _args)
str val1, val2, val3, val4;
real real1, real2, real3, real4;
val1 = '100,000.000';
val2 = '100.000,000';
val3 = '100000,005';
val4 = '100000.056405';
real1 = str2num(val1);
real2 = str2num(val2);
real3 = str2num(val3);
real4 = str2num(val4);
The only valid conversion is the last one, from the variable val4. The real variables have the following values after the assignment:
So just remember to be very careful when converting from a string representing a decimal value to a real X++ type when using the str2num function.
You can always use the .NET Framework instead. If you do, then you'll be able to set a specific culture when converting the double value, like the following valid X++ code:
System.Globalization.CultureInfo cultureInfo = System.Globalization.CultureInfo::CreateSpecificCulture("pt-Br");
real parsedDouble = System.Double::Parse("1.200,99", cultureInfo);
print parsedDouble;
Monday, August 12, 2013
Displaying a SysInfoAction button on the Infolog
Actioning it
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the Infolog keeps throwing up the same error / warning at you and you have no idea how to resolve it?
For example: "The field Foo must be set to Y to perform this action". That's a pretty clear message: you just have to set the Foo field to Y and you're good to proceed with what you were doing, except that you have no idea where the Foo field is! When I started working with AX, I found myself in this situation more than I'd like to, and it always annoyed me to have to call someone and ask where the damn Foo field was.
But sometimes, the Infolog would show me a magic button that would take me exactly to wherever I had to go to fix the error it was showing me. That magic button is called a SysInfoAction. For the example I have given above, if the good guy programmer had put a SysInfoAction on the Infolog, you could just click on a button and a form with the Foo field would pop up.
So how do you do it? Well, there are some different SysInfoAction types. Just to list a few of them:
• SysInfoAction_CostSheetValidate
• SysInfoAction_Editor
• SysInfoAction_Formrun
• SysInfoAction_MenuFunction
• SysInfoAction_newWindow
• SysInfoAction_Properties
• SysInfoAction_Showplan
• SysInfoAction_TableField
As you'd expect, each one of these classes exposes a different behavior when the user interacts with the button on the Infolog.
Let's take a look at the SysInfoAction_MenuFunction for example.
It does what the name suggests: adds a menu item on the Infolog. And it can be of any type: Action, Display or Output.
Suppose we want to redirect the user to a form so that he can fill in the "Foo" field:
SysInfoAction_MenuFunction sysInfoAction;
sysInfoAction = SysInfoAction_MenuFunction::newMenuItem(menuitemDisplayStr(FooFormMenuItem), MenuItemType::Display);
warning('The field Foo must be set to Y to perform this action', '', sysInfoAction);
Just by creating that object and passing it to the warning() method, you made the user's life a lot easier. There's also a constructor available to the SysInfoAction_MenuFunction where you can pass in the control's name of the form you're opening, and the framework will set the focus to that control if it's found on the form. Although it helps even more, the call to the method should be ugly, and easy to break, since there is no compile-time checking if the control actually exists on the form.
The good part though is that if the control isn't found, it just doesn't do anything.
But what about security?
I have to say that the security framework team did a tremendous job overall, and it's just the same with the SysInfoAction feature.
The SysInfoAction, in this case, is nothing more than a menu item. Menu items are bound with security objects in various ways, so it's kind of easy to get the related roles or duties. That being said, guess what happens if the user doesn't have the permission to run the MenuItem you have added to the SysInfoAction? The user doesn't see the button.
So if you're worrying that you might accidentally redirect a user to an important parameters form which he shouldn't have access to, don't worry, because you wont: the security framework will take care of that for you.
That all being said, I'd advise to always use SysInfoActions where it really improves the user experience.
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“The spiral is the pattern of all things in the universe that move and grow.” With those words, Dr. John Waskom would take his audience through time and space, through cosmos and microcosm, through human anatomy, and finally through the stages of our lives. And it all fit together with an elegance that was both surprising and comforting. John Waskom could indeed sense and demonstrate the “magic of design” as it expressed through numbers, patterns of nature, and human proportions. But then he turned to deeper matters. “Do you suppose…?” he would begin to ask, over and over. And now he would lead his audience through speculations on child-rearing and education: What would it mean to raise and educate children in a way that respected what was inherent in their natural design? What would it mean to give young people experiences rather than answering their questions? What would it mean to be parents and teachers who were more concerned with observing patterns than with following habit and tradition? Norman Rose was in such an audience, and it inspired him to make natural human development his life work. This book is a culmination of that work, beginning with the ideas of his mentor and expanding them into a unified view of the entire human lifespan–and the parental, educational, and therapeutic approaches that could make natural development a reality.
Publication Date
Westphalia Press
Washington, D.C.
Developmental Psychology | Education | Pre-Elementary, Early Childhood, Kindergarten Teacher Education
The Design of Life: Human Development from a Natural Perspective
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Grow Your Own Fruit. Set Out Container Fruit Trees and Berries This Week.
Home Depot
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Difficulty: Beginner
Garden tips by region grow-fruit
Years ago, every home had a few fruit trees and berry bushes for baking or preserving. Today more and more home gardeners are adding fruits and berries back into their landscape and gardens for the same reason.
To make it easier and faster, grapes, blueberries, raspberries, and small fruit trees are available in large containers ready to be planted. When selecting plants, be sure to check whether the type of fruit you’re growing is self-fruiting or whether you need to plant two different varieties to produce fruit. If you’re unsure, ask your Garden Center associate for help.
Fruit trees and berries like lots of sun and well-drained soil. Be sure to allow ample room for growth.
How to Plant Small Fruit Trees and Berry Bushes:
1. Dig holes 2-3’ in diameter, depending on the size of the pot, and 18-24” deep. Remove any rocks from the soil and amend with organic matter.
2. Fill the hole halfway with a mix of peat moss and soil.
3. Use a hoe to mix the peat and the soil well and score the sides of the hole to encourage roots to move outward.
4. Pull plants out of pots, center in holes, spread roots outward and then fill holes with the removed soil. Position trees so that the bump on lower trunk, called the graft, is above ground level.
5. First, fill in around the roots with topsoil and pat firmly. Then, fill about half the hole with soil and add water until the soil gets muddy.
6. Fill the hole with the remaining soil, making sure to leave a “dish” impression so the water runs toward the tree or bush.
7. Water and mulch with 2” of compost. Follow the contours of the dish; do not mulch up the tree like a volcano or you risk killing the plant.
8. Don’t fertilize at planting. Wait 4 weeks.
9. If planting fruit trees, drive 1 or 2 stakes into the ground outside the root zone. Stake the tree using flexible tubing or strong twine.
Tip #1:
Blueberries require acidic soil, high in organic matter, which is well-drained and moist. Test soil to be sure the pH level is 5 or lower. If not, lower the pH by digging ammonium sulfate or soil sulfur into the top 3” of soil. (See more on soil testing.) Mulch with 2” of wood chips or pine needles to keep shallow blueberry roots moist. Apply 2” of water a week.
Tip #2:
Fruit trees require lots of water the first month, 5-10 gallons per day. Then water 2-3 times a week for another couple of months or during dry weather.
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Module 4
Almost Done with JavaScript!
WNM 601-OL2 : MS Inside Programming
• Assignment 4.1: Guess the Number (Easy)
Using HTML and JavaScript examples from this module create a simple "guess the number" game in which the computer picks a number from 1-100. The user then enters guesses with the computer answering "higher" or "lower" until the user has picked the number.
• Assignment 4.2: Guess the Number (Medium)
This assignment is OPTIONAL (ungraded) but if you get Assignment 4.1 to work, try changing the logic around so that you, the user, are picking the number that the computer has to guess. You’ll need to add two buttons to let the number know if its guess is "higher" or "lower" than the number you’ve picked. You should also add a field showing how many guesses the computer has taken before finding the right number. Consider working with a partner if you find this assignment challenging.n
• assignment link
• Assignment 4.3: Guess the Number (Hard)
Again, this is an OPTIONAL assignment. If you get 4.1 and 4.2 to work, create an application where the computer guesses against itself. You’ll have to come up with a way to keep the functions separate so the computer doesn’t just look up the answer. Once you’ve got it working, run the game 10,000 times. How many times does it take more than seven guesses to execute? Don’t worry if you don’t get this far with this exercise. It’s not expected most students will. Do your best!
• assignment link
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Solar Energy Collecting: Environmentalists Employ It As An Alternative Energy Source
Alternative energy continues to become popular among many people due to the fact that the cost of using it has fallen. That is one reason why you will observe more solar panels on more houses and businesses. Solar cells, the black squares of a solar panel, are not only becoming less costly, but also much more efficient. As the design is made better, the photovoltaic cells are able to gather energy from the sun in a much smaller area than the older cells could. The solar cells have become more productive, as they have become smaller and less expensive to create. The cost per watt to make solar energy has been cut back by 50% fifty percent over the last twenty years.
Energis Melbourne
The great thing about solar power that environmentalists love is that it doesn't cause pollution. For others, the fact that they can save costs on their electricity bills with this energy source is the top reason. Since most people are more interested in saving moneyhow much money they can save than the environment, it has taken the lowering of costs to get them to utilize solar power. Also setting these solar batteries on your rooftop is no longer very difficult to do, which also helped in the rapid growth.
The way hot water is made is the water moves through an encasement of the solar cells, the water is heated then sent through the pipes. These cells, even on sunless days, are collecting enough radiation from the sun much more efficiently. A company knowns as Uni-Solar has come up with solar collection arrays that can capture energy during inclement weather. This system has been advanced more technologically to allow more energy to be collected during the days with sunlight. There is another solar energy system known as PV that a lot of people are using. The PV System allows a home to share its extra power to the electrical grid in a residential area. The reason for this is to decrease the dependence of the grid on electricity from hydro-electric plants.
The benefits of the PV System are taking pressure off of the grid system, along with cutting down on pollution, and reducing your costs too. Several small towns and suburbs have created centralized solar collection arrays areas. Furthermore, many major companies are employing solar energy as their primary source of power now. Google has been utilizing a 1.6 megawatt system to power its offices and Wal Mart is trying to develop their own 100 megawatt solar energy system to power their stores.
Governments in countries like Japan, Germany, Switzerland and the United States are providing people tax benefits to utilize solar power for their houses or businesses. Investors also discover the value in advancing environmentally friendly technology and will keep on investing money into it. As this occurs, the price will continue going down, benefiting the local owner.
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Monday, April 29, 2013
As posted by Dr. Mahathir Mohamad at Che Det on April 28, 2013
This article appeared in the New Straits Times of April 25, 2013
1. In Malaysia there is not a single political party which can claim to be truly multiracial. All of them are strongly dominated by one race or another.
2. The only party which is nearest to being multi-racial is the National Front. Although it is a coalition of parties but it functions as a single party with every race in Malaysia represented equally in its central council irrespective of the size of the component. In addition the component parties all use the same symbol during elections.
3. Its policies are accepted by all the component parties, unlike the Pakatan where each party has its own objectives and policies. The BN has a distinct leader acknowledged by every party and the Governments it forms have Ministers and Deputy Ministers from all the component parties.
4. There are other symbols of the unity of the Barisan Nasional such as the BN song and BN manifestoes.
5. Although the original coalition is between race-based parties as are some who joined later, a number are non-racial constitutionally.
6. The original coalition was enlarged when parties from Sabah and Sarawak joined it upon the formation of Malaysia. It is noteworthy that the PAP of Singapore did not join the coalition.
7. After the riots of 1969 opposition parties such as Gerakan, SUPP of Sarawak, PPP of Perak and even PAS joined the coalition. PAS later left the BN. At one time the BN had 14 parties representing every race and tribe in Malaysia.
8. Obviously it was difficult to get every party to accept all the policies or objectives of the coalition all the time. PAS and Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS) left because of disagreement with the decisions made by the centre. Still a majority of the parties stayed with the coalition, and continued cooperating in the Governments and during elections.
9. The basis of this cooperation is the principle of sharing; of give and take and of a willingness to sacrifice and concede so as to stay together. This willingness to sacrifice and to share is what makes the BN unique.
10. In the BN no party is able to get all that it considers its entitlement. Consequently no party is absolutely happy with the BN. This is good because all have to make some sacrifice.
11. If any party in the coalition is absolutely happy then one can be sure that something is wrong, that that party has not made the required sacrifice.
12. By the same token as the parties in the coalition represent the different races or tribes, then under BN rule no race will be completely satisfied. It is here that the opposition finds a chink in the BN armour. They will point out and play up the dissatisfaction of the particular race, completely ignoring the sacrifices made by the other races.
13. The attack by the opposition parties is usually racist in character, trying to shame the component racial party for not demanding and getting everything for their race. That each race must make some sacrifice so as to keep the coalition viable is ignored.
14. They also ignore the balanced provisions in the Federal Constitution. When Malay is made the national language, the other languages can be spoken and used except in official documents. When Islam is made the State religion, the constitution provides for the other religions to be practised freely.
15. The so-called Malay privileges are balanced by privileges given to the other races to retain their cultures and languages and use their own languages as medium of instructions in state-supported schools. This has never been found in other countries, developed or developing. In all these countries only the national language is official and is the medium of instruction in schools and in universities. In fact in a neighbouring country with a largely Chinese population, Chinese language schools and universities were disallowed. So this support for non-national languages and schools constitute a privilege not accorded by any other country in the world.
16. In the affairs of the BN, the willingness to share and sacrifice has enabled it to keep the many parties representing the different races together for more than half a century. The racial riot in 1969 convinced many that the coalition would break up. Some even suggested that the Malays would seize power and install a totalitarian Government. But instead the Malays and other members of the Alliance invited all the opposition parties regardless of race or principles to join the new coalition named the Barisan Nasional or National Front. This new and bigger coalition went on to win every federal election with good majorities and was able to maintain peace and stability and develop the country beyond the dream of most Malaysians.
17. Although the BN stayed in power at the national level, it lost many Parliamentary state seats to the opposition. The 2008 Election saw five states falling into opposition hands. Had the BN cheated at elections this would not be the result. As we all know in totalitarian states, the Government party invariably won 99 per cent of the seats every time. This has never happened in Malaysian elections.
18. It is clear that in Malaysia, even though multi-racial parties cannot truly be formed, but multiracial cooperation through a coalition of race-based parties is possible, viable and sustainable. In fact the opposition finally decided to copy the BN formula. However, the cooperation among the opposition partners does not amount to a true coalition. It is only meant to avoid their parties from contesting against each other during elections. The parties retain their identities and their symbols. There is no common platform or objectives. The cooperation is friable and indeed in the present elections they are not able to avoid contesting against each other. Should the opposition Pakatan win, the Government they form would not be stable and would be incapable of deciding on the numerous unpopular policies and laws that a Government is expected to adopt or enact.
19. For as long as the different races in Malaysia insist on their identification with the different countries they came from, a non-racial party cannot be viable or accepted in Malaysia. The BN pre-election coalition model is the only sustainable model until such time when the different races identify themselves completely and exclusively with Malaysia.
20. Looking at the many countries in the world where democracy has brought only divisiveness and violence Malaysia is lucky to have found a formula for the different races to work together, to be stable and to achieve remarkable progress.
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Probability Theory and Everyday Issues
Professor Burt Rodin
This talk tries to make the case that familiarity with probability theory can make life more interesting. The presentation will be descriptive rather than mathematical. We will examine the concept of probability theory by giving examples of everyday issues that are familiar, sometimes by different names. For example, we will discuss the law of large numbers, the St. Petersburg paradox, the gambler’s fallacy, coincidences (the birthday problem), updating of estimates (the Monty Hall game), the false positive paradox, the sleeping beauty problem, quantum mechanics, and many universes.
Instructor: Burt Rodin is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at UC San Diego. He received his PhD from UCLA. He was a faculty member at Harvard, University of Minnesota, and Stanford before becoming a professor at UCSD, where he served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 1977 to 1981. In 2012 he was elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Coordinators: Jerry Kent
Course Number: OSHR-70015 Credit: 0 units
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Dates Class Type Section ID Fee
10/24/2017 In-class 127472 $0.00
Day and Time: Tuesday, 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
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Specifics of persuasive essay writing: a set of advice for students
There several types of essay writings in the world. However, writing a persuasive essay is the most difficult job because here you have to convince the other party that your point of view is correct and their (opposes) argument is invalid. Over here you have to change the thinking of the opposing party by bringing forward logical and rational logic. Not everyone is good at persuading, and only a handful people in the world are able to possess this rare talent. That being said, persuasive writing is very much part of our everyday life- you can find it in advertisement, newspapers, politics, etc. So there is no doubt that persuading someone is a skill that is highly demanded nowadays, and that’s why I will be telling you on how to write a strong persuasive write-up by enlightening you with the steps you should take before and during your writing process.
The Process:
First and foremost, it is important to pick a side. You are either supporting an argument or against it. There is no room for doubt that’s why you have to maintain strong conviction and in your argument because if you are not convinced then how do you expect to convince others?
Secondly, you should conduct a thorough research on points supporting and challenging your argument. Make a list of things that will strengthen your argument and try to find out any flaws in the counter argument so that when the time comes you’re not found dumbstruck.
Thirdly, back your claims with proper evidence and research. If you quote a popular person or anyone who is well-known for his expertise, then the chances are that people will think of you as a credible source. Otherwise, no one would pay any heed even if you have a strong argument.
Lastly, you should conclude by further emphasizing your point made in the introductory, and the main body of the write-up and the articulation should be in such a way that it compels the reader to think and act.
In the end, I would like to conclude by saying that if you follow the guidelines mentioned above, then it is a guarantee that you will end up with a strong and compelling argument that will leave your readers awestruck, and they will come to the conclusion that you were right all along.
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Monday, 26 January 2015
The Roti Canai Story
Roti Canai.
Roti Canai is a very popular dish in Malaysia. We Malaysians just love it. We even have various versions of Roti Canai. Roti Bom, Roti Pisang, Roti Sardin, Roti Telur, Roti Planta etc.
It is generally assumed that Roti Canai got its name from Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu.
So did Roti Canai really get its name from Chennai?
Roti Canai is actually the modified Parotta. This dish is quite popular in South India. However, it is not a native South Indian dish. The dish is said to come from North India. Some claim that it was introduced by those from Middle East.
Parotta may have entered India via North India or via Kerala. Because Kerala is exposed to the Arabian Sea and many traders from Middle East used to trade in Kerala.
There is also another theory that suggest that the main ingredient to make Parotta, the Maida flour, was introduced to South India only during WW2. Maida flour is a wheat flour and wheat was first cultivated in the Middle East.
I am not very sure about the authenticity of such theories but the Middle East-Kerala theory makes more sense.
We are not sure who introduced Parotta in Malaya (now Malaysia). It could have been the Tamils or Malayalees, it could have also been others from India or even someone from the Middle East.
The Malays had several words for metal works. When working on the metal, the blacksmith will hammer the metal, flatten it, then cut into half, forge it, hammer it, flatten it, then cut into half....the process is repeated.
This process is known as canai in the Malay language.
Similarly, the cook who prepares the Roti Canai will smash the dough, spread it, fold it into half, smash it, spread it, fold it into half.....the dough takes a beating similar to the metal in a blacksmith's workshop.
This is how Parotta became Roti Canai in Malaysia. Instead of a layered piece of round bread like the Parotta, we made our Roti Canai appear folded.
This is the story of Roti Canai and it has got nothing to do with Chennai because back in the olden days, Chennai was known as Madras.
(The origin of Madras or Chennai can be read at the links below)
Dr.Jayabarathi's input on the word Canai having a Tamil origin. As mentioned, it is not a corrupt form of Chennai. It is the process of beating the dough.
- Comments
1. Good to read about its sources n origins... though in India we do say Parotta as Parantha!! Like Aloo Parantha (Aloo= Potato!) , Gobi Parantha (Gobi= Cabbage!) And many more...
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Tuesday, September 27, 2011
On Musical Talent
Anonymous said...
Character? Bach was possessed with an urge to please God -- sounds a little pokey to us now, but that gave him supreme self-confidence. Bach, like Mozart, didn't have the slightest doubt that he was the world's greatest musician. He was also a workaholic, doing in one week singlehandedly what rock bands take years to do collectively. Finally, his curiosity was insatiable, always on the lookout for new musical ideas from any direction.
Culture? Like Renaissance painters, Bach absorbed (through his upbringing and his work ethics) an enormously rich musical repertoire. As you pointed out, his time (and especially Mozart's) were golden ages of music, which attracted all the top artistic talents in Europe.
If innate ability is 1/10K but supreme greatness is 1/1billion, this means that genes account for only for a fraction (1/100K)/(1/10K)= 1/10. In other words genes are 10% of the story and the rest is 90%.
Conclusion: every year New York City produces a baby with the DNA of a Bach. And most likely that kid will be turned off music or will be too poor to pursue her talent or too greedy to give up a banking career, and will grow up to be a complete mediocrity.
In other words many many stars need to line up to produce Bach and genes are only 1 star in a 10-star constellation.
Or something like that.
** Numbers used for illustration and not for scientific purposes...
Anonymous said...
Clarification: I reread my comment and see an ambiguity. "this number is unlikely to be much bigger" refers to the number 10,000. Top-notch genes cannot be that rare or Florence could not have produced so much talent.
Bryan Townsend said...
This comment is so brilliant that instead of discussing here I am going to start a new post...
Rickard Dahl said...
I agree that there are alot of other factors involved in becoming good or great at music than talent. But what is musical talent in reality? Is it really a combination of genes which are good for music? And how do you measure talent (if it can be measured)? And if so, are there degrees of talent? Does a lack of musical talent (however it is defined) mean that you can't become great at music? Or is it in reality just a case bad practice methods and lack of motivation which prevents people from being referred to as talented (i.e. is it in fact non-genetic, talent being just a label thrown around to explain the "mystical" part of learning music)? And isn't for example J.S. Bach and Mozart perfect examples of raised geniuses rather than born? Sure they were very smart/had high IQ but their parent/s were musical and encouraged and taught them many of the things like composition, great playing from early age. Maybe their parents were simply great teachers and J.S. Bach & Mozart great students.
Bryan Townsend said...
I spent over twenty years in an effort to demonstrate that good teaching can be decisive in the development of young musicians--translation, I taught classical guitar in private lessons in both conservatory and university settings. There are thousands of music teachers working on the same practical problem every day with hundreds of thousands of students. Actually, that number is probably low as there are, I hear, millions of piano and violin students in China alone these days.
Now, as I have posted a lot of times here, I am unimpressed with the scientific research on these questions so I tend to rely on my own experience and that of other teachers I have spoken to.
Here is how an outstanding teacher turns out accomplished students: he gets a highly-gifted class of students to work with from the beginning. And then guides and inspires them. The truth is that the vast majority of people who take up a musical instruments are not going to become great players. I don't think anyone collects the numbers, but most students, when they discover how much work they have to do, will at some point simply drop out. Of the ones that are left, who can do the work, most of them will have little or only a modest 'feel' for the instrument. A tiny minority will become accomplished players and this tiny minority are the ones who will be accepted as students by the famous teachers at the famous schools.
I don't know how much genetics is involved, maybe the scientists can figure that out. But a really great musician appears when the natural ability is there, plus being born into a musical family, plus being born in a time and place that is supportive.
Christine Lacroix said...
It was interesting to read about your experience discovering music throughout your childhood, Bryan.
I guess that just because we can't define exactly what talent is, or quantify it's role, it doesn't make it any less important.Someone once said that we are attracted to the activities that we have an aptitude for because of the enjoyment we get using those aptitudes. If there's no aptitude the effort required overrides the pleasure factor so we drop out. I've often wondered about that. I suppose it could account to some degree for motivation.
Bryan Townsend said...
That makes perfect sense. And also seems to be a bit like Aristotle's view. The proper task of humans is to develop their capacities.
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stat counter What amount do modern innovations in sociological theory need to pay to your remarks of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim? | Aceh Online Magazine
Most sociologists acknowledge the fact that financial state could be the driving force driving the modern-day our society. All of the fundamental components of a society for an essay online national politics; religion, learning, and perhaps ethical realms are typically affected by the financial state of their land. The bourgeoisie and also proletariats also known as the Haves and also Have nots attempt to coexist yet it is the bourgeoisie that can determine exactly how the world will execute its attributes. New sociological concepts for instance universal capitalism, which refers to the continuous development of the international techniques of development, ingestion and financial swap, all get their developmental elements linked to traditional theorists as Marx, Weber and Durkheim.
The essential exploration of modern society, and that is a full manifestation in the happenings in the world today, is enormously caused by sociologists for instance Karl Marx. Being a sociable theorist, Marx singled the financial structure, wherein services and goods are produced by persons, as the best part of a country. Most associations that style a modern society have its qualities depending on the person’s situation in terms of exactly what they own. Inequality and oppression come about resulting from exactly how the home owners respond to the needs of the inadequate. He decide to put increased exposure of section of labor which brought about a category within the wealthy along with the inadequate and also this still remains to be a huge cause of discord in any presented modern society.
Durkheim however believed that social problems have been outweighed by many people variables besides especially being that brought about by division of work. However, he recognized that labour division creates specialty area and interdependence which for optimum production to take place, people have to engage in special defined tasks. Distinctive assignments would inevitably cause sociable solidarity. Our establishments these days are extremely streamlined and human being information are classified into many disciplines and capacities that most work at the optimizing of services and goods. An effectively maintained and coordinated system contributes to financial wealth. Durkheim owes adjustments in modern society to a selection of aspects for instance increase in populace. Maximum Weber related people’s habits and mentality thus to their religion which similar qualities interpreted their attitudes for economics. Calvinism, as an illustration, would be to him a powerful method of morals which had been very well likely to growth given that it would define the positioning of the bourgeoisie as well as the rise of capitalism (Hamilton, 2000). He singled the development of human being associations that surrounded the present day capitalist modern society. Just as Marx, Weber seemed to be focused on the problems of category techniques regardless that he chose to think that classism had been a culmination of more makes than richness of residence.
In conclusion The progression and transformational processes that force existing economies of level absolutely are a modernization from the practices taken ahead by classical sociologists as shown earlier mentioned. Marx, Weber and Durkheim all presented division of labour into that which was customarily understood in traditional period of time which is today’ executed in modern day societies. Nowadays, manufacturing capitalism has transformed the total globe into world wide capitalism. A state for example the United States of America determines how are you affected to the other text and it is known as a world superb energy. Diversity, advancement and superior quality all figure out how wealth a place will be and describes the living standards of the inhabitants.
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Modular Server
(Understanding URIs)
“A common mistake, responsible for many HTTP implementations problems, is to think this is equivalent to a filename within a computer system. This is wrong. URIs have, conceptually, nothing to do with a file system. One should remember that at all times when dealing with the World Wide Web.”
So why do most HTTP servers still heavily rely on the filesystem dictating URL’s?
This not only tends to create Uncool URI’s, but also makes it seem logical for filebased dynamic content (more on that in my previous post).
A http server, actually every server should be nothing more then a wrapper for modules which handle requests of clients.
The server would only limit itself to a very selected amount of functions
• Handling connections
• Exposing an API for the protocol which the modules can us
• Hosting modules
On startup the server loads modules and binds them to certain URL. Modules remain persistant in the memory and are just signalled a request is made passing the module an API to handle the request.
I’ll be busy exploring the posibilities to implement this.. there will be more about this.
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Go Green or Go Home
The Plastic Predicament September 22, 2013
Plastic is a menace to all ecosystems it comes in contact with. Non-biodegradable, toxic, petroleum-based, and easily mistaken for an ocean animal’s prey, it’s ruining our seas and filling up our landfills. The approximated amount of plastic recycled, out of the total plastic produced is almost certainly less than 10%. And do you know what happens to the rest of it? It sits around in a dump for thousands of
English: Ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA...
years, or is taken to the ocean to become yet another drifting patch of garbage. Plastic is not a biodegradable substance. It will break down over many years, but it will never fully go away. The molecules will simply divide and become smaller and more spaced out, until they are spread to other parts of the ocean and the Earth to become more pollution. It takes so many years for even a slight breakdown to occur that there is no difference made, and the plastic continues to pile up. Worse yet, even if the plastic does start to ‘decompose’- though I shouldn’t be calling it that, because it will never fully break down- the particles are then microscopic and harder to locate, especially harder to remove. They go into the water that many sea animals live in and breathe.
Sending the plastic to be destroyed isn’t a much better choice. The incineration of trash releases toxins and chemicals into the air, which create pollution in the air. So no matter where the plastic goes, it’s always a problem. Did you know that breathing the air in Mumbai for just one day is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes? That’s how polluted it is. Plastic and other petroleum-based substances are not only ruining the Earth, but also the creatures living in it. Turtles in the ocean often think that plastic bags are jellyfish and consume the bags, which clogs the airways in their throat and eventually kills them.
Recent developments are being made to create plant based plastics, rather than petroleum based ones. While this will certainly help to stop creating trouble for the ocean, it won’t decrease what’s already there. Thankfully, inventions are being made, and it’s believed that they can help. Take Dutch teenager Boyan Slat’s robotic ocean cleaning invention: it gleans its energy from ocean currents, so it’s sustainable, and it directs plastic particles to collection platforms. The plastic particles will then be recycled in a way that people can profit from it.Dutch Ocean Clean Up Device
Will this fix every plastic problem our oceans face? No. In fact, it’s estimated that only a third will be collected, but it’s a revolutionary solution that’s still going to change a lot for ocean wildlife. However, the robot cleaning devices are just an experiment, say the team of engineers working on them, though they also say that it looks promising. It’s not clear when these cleaning platforms will be put into use, or even if they will be put into use. So what can we do to help?
Ways to Help:
• Bring a reusable grocery bag to the store with you, and make sure the rest of your family does as well.
• Recycle as much of your plastic as you can- preferably all of it.
• Bring a reusable water bottle everywhere. Stop buying plastic ones! If you’re in desperate need of water, and plastic is the only option, recycle that bottle, or reuse it for another day.
• Talk to your local grocery store about stopping the usage of plastic bags altogether. Be sure to remind them that it will boost their profit because they can also sell reusable cloth bags.
• If you have a lot of plastic grocery bags already, use them to line small bathroom trashcans. You can also iron a couple of bags together to create a reusable grocery bag.
If we could outlaw the dumping of plastic into our oceans and landfills, companies might be able to sell it to other organizations, such as Terracycle, and they could turn it into recycled products. What do you think? Got any ideas to help?
Jar of Turquoise Sunshine
A blog of creative stuff, updated monthly in all categories!
I n f u s i o n
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Adventures of an Unfortunate Fangirl
I fangirled and couldn't get up.
Crafty little Coco
DIY, Gluten-free Recipes and Life on Oahu
Lark McLane
Poignant books, interesting theories and other thoughts
Cyan Attributes
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Explore BrainMass
Trigonometry Application Word Problems and Pythagorean Theorem
A radio station is going to construct a 12 foot tower for a new antenna on top of a tall building. The tower will be supported by three cables, each attached to the top of the tower and to points on the roof of the building which are 5 feet from the base of the tower. What is the total length of these three cables? 39 feet
Can you explain how I get this answer by taking me though every step?
Solution Summary
The Pythagorean theorem is used to solve a word problem.
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The Cariñosa (meaning “loving” or “affectionate one”), is the national dance, and is part of the María Clara suite of Philippine folk dances. It is notable for use of the fan and handkerchief in amplifying romantic gestures expressed by the couple performing the traditional courtship dance. The dance is similar to the Mexican Jarabe Tapatío, and is related to the Kuracha, Amenudo and Kuradang dances in the Visayas and Mindanao Area.
History and Emergence
The dance originated in Panay Island in the Visayan Islands and was introduced by the Spaniards during their colonization of the Philippines. It is related to some of the Spanish dances like the bolero and the Mexican dance Jarabe Tapatio or the Mexican Hat Dance.
Bicolano Cariñosa
According to the book of Francisca Reyes-Aquino, Philippine Folk Dances, Volume 2, there is a different version of the dance in the region of Bicol. In the Bicol Region Carinosa, hide and seek movement is different. In the original version, the dancers used the Fan and handkerchief as the way to do the hide and seek movement, in Bicol they used two handkerchiefs holding the two corners of the handkerchief and doing the hide and seek movement as they point their foot forward and their hands go upward together with their handkerchiefs following the movement. It is a complicated step however it is still used in Bicol Region during festivals and social gatherings.
Originally, the Cariñosa was danced with Maria Clara dress and Barong Tagalog for it is a Maria Clara Spanish Dance when it was introduced. However as the Filipino people saw and imitated this dance, they wore the patadyong kimona and camisa de chino to reveal their nationalism to their country and other steps were revised or Filipinized but the music did not change at all and reveals a Spanish Influence to the Filipinos. As stated by the book of Francisca Reyes-Aquino, dancers may wear balintawak style (a native dress of the Tagalog regions), camisa (a white sleeve) or patadyong kimona (a dress of the Visayan of people) and for boys, a barong Tagalog and colored pants. Because it is the national dance, the dancers may wear any Filipino costumes.
The music of Carinosa shows a great Spanish influence to the Filipinos. It is 3/4 in rhythm like some of the Spanish dances. The Philippine Rondalla are playing this music of the dance where it is an ensemble or an orchestra of string instruments in the Philippines similar to the Spanish musicians in Spain that comprises bandurrias, mandolins, guitar, basses, drums, and banjos. Mostly men are playing rondalla instruments but women may also take part.
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Blessed Are the Peacemakers: A Veterans Day Tribute
They came from the east and from the west; from the north and from the south. Dish washers, cattle rustlers, pencil pushers, street sweepers, ditch diggers, bank tellers, school teachers, moonshiners, coal miners, potato farmers, pan handlers, and every other profession imaginable and at least half a dozen unimaginable ones. They came from mountain top towns and timber-strewn hamlets, from noisy cities with their overcrowded streets, and from meadows and marshes populated more by bugs and beasts than men. A few came from old money or newfound success, but most were privileged only to have come from the type of good fortune that is measured more accurately by homespun happiness than by dollars and cents.
They were all free men, some even carefree, but they came because that hard-won liberty of conscience now constrained them—if not completely enslaved them—to do their duty as free men. They didn’t come because they were made to come, they came because they had to come. Honor called and humility, however imperfect, swiftly answered.
They were men who loved peace. So they came to fight for it. They understood that peace was a precious but fragile commodity that, if not preserved even at the price of their lives, would be stripped from them just as it had been torn from the hands of so many other men and would leave them to exist in a world not fit for the living. Malice was as far from their hearts as the morning dew is from the evening sun. They didn’t so much hate the enemies before them as much as they loved the men, women, and children behind them. So now they rose to stand in the bitter between.
The world was at war. Their respective worlds, however remote they might have seemed at the time, could not continue forever untouched by the increasing tumult abroad. A plague had settled upon the peoples of the east and was spreading like a wildfire breathed out by the mighty Hephaestus. For these men, that smoke rising on the distant horizon was more than a dark omen; it was a foreshadow of things to come. Just as it was not invisible to them, they were not invincible to it. So sure and steady were the signs of impending conflict that they may as well have been the thundering hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse. They knew that they must either rally together—ten million men as one man—and defeat the dread dragon in his lair, or else litter the languid earth like so many embers of Vesuvian ash to be trampled under its serpentine feet.
And so they came. White men, with skin baked and blackened by the perpetual gaze of the relentless sun, left their farms and fields to shoulder this burden with black men whose skin was now ashen and white from wear and many hard winters. Red men joined hands with those who were once their natural-born adversaries in order to defend a shared, native soil. The petty rivalries between their ancestors now halted in pursuit of the mutually enjoyed hope for their descendants. Men of every shade and hue hitched themselves to a common cause, a common code, a common creed—libertas. This multicolored company was not colorblind, but rather colorbound. They stood united in the belief that all men were inextricably tied together by the same crimson cord. When any of their number was struck by the clenched fist of oppression, the same erubescent stream rushed forth. It was the conviction that the Ship of Freedom sails on a ruddy sea into which tributaries from every tongue and tribe issue that compelled them to give their latest breath, and if need be their collective blood, to keep it afloat.
Freedom is such an expensive thing. And we will never know anything of its true value until we understand something of its true cost. Fathers gave sons and sons gave fathers. Even though they were somewhat aware of the potential price that they might be forced to pay they were completely ignorant of the certain cost. Most of them were prepared for death. So few of them were prepared for living in the wake of so much dying. They bore, and still bear, the weight of war upon their shoulders. All of this to lighten the load of their fellows.
Men make war. That is the awful reality that exists in our fallen world. Abel is dead and Cain still lives. We have not yet beaten our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks. But it is also true that war has made men. Good men. Noble men. Honorable men. Men of whom the world is not worthy. Such men are gracious gifts given in order to make the rest of us better men. Grateful men. Men who know that the least that we can do is say, “thank you.”
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Kirkus Reviews QR Code
DOES A SEAL SMILE? by Fred Ehrlich
by Fred Ehrlich & illustrated by Emily Bolam
Age Range: 4 - 6
Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 2006
ISBN: 1-59354-168-6
Publisher: Blue Apple
Does a seal smile? How about a mandrill, a coyote and a chimpanzee? In a question-and-answer format, Ehrlich asks readers whether these animals smile (they don’t) and shows how they recognize and greet each other through body language, facial expressions and sound. He then moves on to people; beginning with babies, he introduces the basics of human communication. Last, he provides examples of how people from different cultures greet one another. Bolam’s appealing and wry illustrations will charm; however, there is a lot of information here. While the text is straightforward, the human-animal parallels and some of the vocabulary may not be entirely clear to the youngest children and will likely require explanation. With some help, though, children will come to appreciate the differences and similarities between human and animal behavior and understand the basics of how members of different cultures greet one another as well. (Picture book. 4-6)
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Time of Titan Odie
Titan Arum
Amorphophallus titanium or the Titan Arum, which is native to Sumatra, is considered one of the rock stars of the plant world,” said Paula Gross, interim director of the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens.
The budding titan was christened Odoardo following a Facebook naming contest, and will be called “Odie” for short. Odie is one of two Titan Arums the Botanical Gardens purchased from California in 2008; at that time, the plants were roughly five years old.
In 2007, Bella, the University’s initial Titan Arum bloomed, a first for the Carolinas. The plant is known not only for the size of its bloom but its odious smell that has been described as rotting flesh. Bella bloomed a second time in 2010 before it expired.
“In captivity, Titan Arums usually bloom two or three times, and this bloom will definitely attract lots of people to the Botanical Gardens as it did with Bella,” Gross stated.
When Odie will actually bloom is a mystery, but Gross said when it does, the window to experience it is small, usually on 12 to 24 hours. Cultivating the plant in captivity requires proper care and attention to temperature, humidity, fertilization and water.
Keep up with Odie’s daily progress on the botanical garden’s Facebook page.
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Monday, March 14, 2011
Massive Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan
Japan was hit by a massive earthquake the measured 8.9 on the Richter scale, on March 11. This was followed by a 10 meters high Tsunami wave that washed away Northern Japan. The nearest city to the epicenter is the coastal city of Honshu, 130 km (80 miles) from the quake center. Japan's capital city Tokyo is situated 373 km (231 miles) away.
1 comment:
llq said...
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SOTOZEN-NET > Library > Glossary > field of merit
field of merit (fukuden 福田)
The recipient of any gift or offering, who is likened to a field that is cultivated. The planting of seeds is a stock metaphor in Buddhist literature for performing actions (karma), all of which will necessarily have some result in the future. The act of giving always bears positive karmic fruit or "merit" (fuku 福), but the yield of merit is said to be greater or lesser depending on the worthiness of the recipient, just as seeds planted in fertile field will yield a more bountiful crop than the same seeds planted in a field with poor soil. The two richest fields of merit are the Buddha and the sangha: offerings and donations to them are said to produce the most merit for worshippers and donors. The reasoning behind this idea is that the Buddha and the monks who follow his teachings are the primary sources of merit, which they produce by the good deeds of maintaining moral precepts, practicing meditation, and developing wisdom. Lay followers who make donations of food, clothing, or shelter in support of those activities can gain a share of the merit accumulated by the monks. →"merit."
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Skiathos (Greek: Σκιάθος), Latin forms: Sciathos and Sciathus is a city on an island of the same name in the Aegean Sea belonging to Greece. Skiathos town has a school, a lyceum, a gymnasium, many churches, banks, a post office, and a square (plateia). Skiathos town is a port which shelters small boats and from where ferry services connect to Skopelos, Volos, Agios Konstantinos and the rest of Greece.
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In Ancient times, the island played a minor role during the Persian Wars. In 480 BC, the fleet of the Persian king Xerxes was hit by a storm and was badly damaged on the rocks of the Skiathos coast. Following this the Greek fleet was held to stalemate with the Persian fleet at Artemisium but finally managed to destroy the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis. Skiathos remained in the Delian League until it lost its independence. The city was destroyed by Philip V of Macedon in 200 BC.
Venetian Era
In 1207 the Gyzi brothers captured the island and built the Bourtzi, a small Venetian-styled fortress similar to the Bourtzi in Nafplio, on an islet just out of Skiathos town, to protect the capital from the pirates. But the Bourtzi was ineffective in protecting the population and in the middle 14th century the inhabitants moved the capital from the ancient site that lay where modern Skiathos town is to Kastro (the Greek word for castle), located on a high rock, overlooking a steep cliff above the sea at the northernmost part of the island. Kastro remained the only settlement of the island until the end of the Greek War of Independence, when the island's capital was relocated to the original site - where it still remains.
Σκιάθος (*)
Mikri Aselinos
Ottoman Era
In 1704 monks from Athos built the Evangelistria monastery which played a part on the Greek War of Independence as a hide-out for Greek rebels.
The first flag of Greece was created and hoisted in the Evangelistria monastery in Skiathos in 1807. Several prominent military leaders (including Theodoros Kolokotronis and Andreas Miaoulis) had gathered there for consultation concerning an uprising, and they were sworn to this flag by the local bishop.
During the 19th century Skiathos became an important shipbuilding centre in the Aegean due to the abundance of pine forests on the island. The pine woods of the island were then almost obliterated. This was brought to a halt though, due to the emergence of steamboats. A small shipwright remains north of Skiathos town, which still builds traditional Greek caiques.
Modern Skiathos
A snapshot from Skiathos.
Lalaria beach.
In 1964 Skiathos was designated by the Greek National Tourism Organisation as a development zone for tourism. The results of this decision have largely transformed the island, due to tourist-orientated construction projects. These include the construction of the coast road from Skiathos town to Koukounaries, the construction of Skiathos Airport in 1984 and the construction of the first large hotel over Koukounaries beach. Along the coast road many hotels have been constructed since the island became an important tourist destination.
There were have been protests in the early-2000s, one against mining in September 2002 as they were pushing away mining trucks which was owned by the municipality and another in 2004, a power line which would have connect hydro with the rest of the Sporades was also being protested due to the plan being in a forested area.
The area around the villages and Skiathos Town are farmland. The island of Skopelos can be seen from Skiathos with the more distant islands of Euboea and Scyros also visible in clearer conditions.
There is frequent bus connection from Koukounaries to Skiathos town with buses stopping approximately every 20 minutes, costing €1.50 to travel from one end of the island to the other. Taxis are also very cheap.
Historical Population
Year Town[1]
1981 4,129
1991 5,096
2001 6,160
^ www.statistics.gr
Municipalities and communities of the Magnesia Prefecture
Afetes | Agria | Aisonia | Almyros | Alonnisos | Argalasti | Artemida | Feres | Iolkos | Karla | Milies | Mouresi | Nea Anchialos | Nea Ionia | Portaria | Pteleos | Sipiada | Skiathos | Skopelos | Sourpi | Volos | Zagora
Anavra | Keramidi | Makrinitsa | Trikeri
Ancient Greece
Medieval Greece / Byzantine Empire
Modern Greece
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/"
Hellenica World
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Advanced Placement
Are you intellectually curious? The Advanced Placement (AP) program is challenging and rewarding, and will help you to make the most of your high school experience by getting a head start on your post-secondary plans. The AP program helps you to develop an inquiring mind, a sound base of knowledge, a higher level understanding, and appreciation of concepts and an excellent work ethic. Most Canadian universities compete for AP students and may be eligible for transfer credits! An AP student is one who enjoys enrichment, accepts challenges, and is driven to succeed at a higher level. What are you waiting for?
At J. Percy Page we offer AP in the following courses:
AP Biology
Take a trip through the human experience like never before. From Mendel genetics, through the building blocks of cells, to how body systems work together to shape our sensory and physiological systems, the hand-on approach of AP Biology changes how you see our human forms. AP Biology exposes students to unique opportunities for connecting concepts, then gaining invaluable experience through the writing of a postsecondary level exam.
AP Chemistry
In the leading-edge worlds of pharmaceuticals, fuels, and materials design, tomorrow needs today’s innovators to have a specific knowledge and skills, but also training in mental modelling and inquiry-based labs. Many of the students at J. Percy Page are heading to university where Chemistry is a mandatory course requirement. In the AP program, students will begin their university-level chemistry to give them an edge in their post-secondary careers.
AP Physics
Blending Newtonian Mechanics, Kinematics, and thermal, fluid, and electricity dynamics, AP Physics is where students explore the forces that govern the world around them. Through insightful lecture, interaction, and a strong emphasis on exploratory labs, practical inquiries and discovery is fosters in a classroom of like-minded peers.
AP Calculus
AP Calculus at J. Percy Page represents college-level mathematics for which most colleges grant advanced placement and/or credit . Most colleges and universities offer a sequence of several courses in calculus, and entering students are placed within this sequence according to the extent of their preparation, as measured by the results of an AP Exam or other criteria. Learn problem solving methods that you can apply across real-world problems involving theorems, definitions, and functions represented in different ways. Use technology to explore, experiment, interpret results, and support your conclusions. Take your passion for Math to new heights at Page.
AP English Literature
The AP English classroom is lively place that offers fantastic opportunities for like-minded students to engage in meaningful and thoughtful discussion. Through rigorous and detailed looks at modern and classic genres, student risks and investments are celebrated as we journey through the rich tapestry that is English literature.
AP European History
Covering 1350 to the present, this two-year course dives into major developments in society, politics, ideas, culture, economics, and technology. Using historical knowledge as a guide to present understanding, students will survey all realms of behavior so that they can develop a sophisticated understanding of the human experience.
AP French
Students who are enrolled in AP French build on their already strong command of French grammar and vocabulary to take their learning to new heights in listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Students who are enrolled in this course should expect a full immersion experience, not only in language but also in exposure to French culture and norms. The teacher will exclusively be using French throughout the duration of this course, including lectures, tasks, group projects and assessments.
AP Spanish
The Spanish AP classroom is a place where students are immersed in an environment where they can confidently engage in conversation both formally and informally, use their grasp of the language for inventive and entertainment purposes, and simultaneously learn about and participate in Hispanic traditions and customs!
AP Studio Art
AP Studio Art is a 2 year program for students who are seriously interested in the practical experience of Art. The program is designed to encourage creative and systematic investigation of conceptual issues. Students will be guided to sustain ongoing art-making processes that involve constant evolution of ideas and critical decision-making.
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Project management
The science and technology industry is made up of a huge number of workers in a huge number of different roles. The skillset required to work in one scientific sector (biotechnology, for instance) may bear no resemblance whatsoever to the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in another sector (like medical affairs). Science is a massively diverse field that relies on all kinds of different people and their unique abilities.
That being said, there are some roles that can be found across almost all scientific sectors, one obvious example being the role of the project manager.
Project Manager - Role & Responsibilites
A project manager is responsible for planning projects and ensuring that each one is executed to a high standard on time and on budget. Project managers can be found in a wide array of different industries, including IT, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, construction, transport, and countless others.
The precise nature of a project manager's duties will depend on what sector they're in, but common responsibilities include:
• Communicating with clients, acting as their primary point of contact for the duration of the project
• Delegating tasks to the appropriate member(s) of staff
• Overseeing project progress and ensuring high-quality outcomes
• Making plans and ensuring that everyone follows them
• Procuring whatever resources are necessary to the project's success
Generally speaking, it is not the project manager's job to actually carry out the work involved in any given project - rather, they will divide up the work between different parts of their workforce and ensure that the project progresses as planned from start to finish. However, a project manager will usually be expected to have a strong understanding of the work they are overseeing.
Click here to browse the latest project manager jobs from Hyper Recruitment Solutions.
Why Are Project Managers Important?
The project manager's role is a critical one because they keep everything running smoothly throughout each project. While talented workers are of course crucial to the success of any organisation, a talented project manager can be just as valuable because they will ensure that all workers are operating in harmony while sticking to the overarching plan. Without a capable project manager at the helm, projects can lapse into chaos and end up missing their deadlines and exceeding their budgets.
Project Manager - Job Requirements
While different fields require different things of their project managers, every good project manager should:
• Have good communication skills
• Work well under pressure
• Know how to co-ordinate and motivate members of a team
• Be able to work to a strict schedule
• Have strong organisational skills
Looking for a job in project management? Browse project manager vacancies >
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Graduating from university is a great feeling, but tossing your mortarboard in the air is also the precursor to one of the biggest and scariest steps you'll ever have to take: the step away from student life and into the world of work.
Searching for your first full-time job can be a gruelling and demoralising task. If you've just left university, you probably don't have a whole lot of relevant work experience just yet, and as a result you may feel that you're at a significant disadvantage as you struggle to get a foot on that all-important first rung of the career ladder. But rest assured that there are many employers out there who are desperate to recruit talented graduates like yourself - you just have to make sure they know about you!
With that in mind, here - courtesy of science job specialists Hyper Recruitment Solutions - are 5 top tips for graduates who are looking for jobs:
1) Before you apply for anything, Google yourself.
No matter what sort of role you're looking to land, you can bet that the person who receives your job application will pop your name into a search engine before deciding whether or not to offer you an interview. This is the 21st century, and these days, potential employers will often scrutinise your online presence just as much as your CV. So make sure you're not showing them anything you don't want them to see!
Before you begin your job search, you should:
• Type your name into Google to see what comes up on the first page of results. (If you have a common name, or if you share your name with somebody famous, you may want to try including your location in the search - e.g. 'daniel radcliffe sunderland' - to find pages that are specifically about you.) Is there anything in there that might damage a potential employer's opinion of you? A Twitter account, a news story, something you wrote years ago that you're not particularly proud of? It may not be possible to erase every piece of information about yourself, but if you're able to eliminate any red flags then you absolutely should.
• You should also use Facebook's 'View As...' feature to find out how much of your profile is visible to the public. If necessary, adjust your privacy settings so that only your friends can view the things you post. You don't want your future boss to see those drunk photos of you from your graduation party, do you?
2) Make your CV shine.
Composing an impressive CV can be tough when you're fresh out of uni, especially if you haven't previously held a role that's similar to the one you're applying for. But don't assume that the experience you do have is worthless - just because you've never worked in an office before doesn't mean that you've never exercised the skills needed to succeed in that environment.
The key is to think outside the box a little bit. Let's say you're applying for a marketing job at an FMCG company - sure, you've never occupied a marketing post before, but you completed a degree, and perhaps you even worked a part-time job or two while you were studying. These and other experiences will have equipped you with:
• The ability to work as part of a team
• The ability to approach tasks creatively
• Strong communication skills
• The ability to meet deadlines and work under pressure
• An understanding of how to behave when dealing with customers/clients
All of these things are highly valued by employers in all sorts of different sectors, so don't be reluctant to include them on your curriculum vitae. Don't think in terms of experience - think in terms of skills!
3) Cast your net wide.
Different employers advertise their vacancies in all sorts of different places, so don't limit yourself to a single website or job listings board. By all means sign up with big names like Monster and Indeed, but bear in mind that there are lots of specialist recruiters out there too - recruiters like Aspire for the digital / media sector and HRS for science jobs. Some organisations, having a limited budget for this sort of thing, will exclusively recruit via these more specialised portals, so don't kid yourself that you'll see every available vacancy just because you check Reed every day.
4) Don't go back into higher education without a good reason.
Postgraduate courses are great, and in some cases, you'll need a master's or a PhD to get the career you really want. However, far too many graduates sleepwalk into postgraduate programmes simply because they don't feel ready to compete for full-time employment.
That's usually a bad decision. Higher education is expensive, as you're no doubt already aware, and while you might tell yourself that a more advanced qualification will lead to better career prospects, the evidence on that front is somewhat ambiguous.
Yes, entering the world of work can feel like jumping into an abyss, but you shouldn't go back to university just because you're cosily familiar with academic life and scared of sampling the alternative. If you have a clear goal in mind (e.g. 'I need additional qualification X in order to be considered for job Y') then by all means go for it, but otherwise, you're probably better off taking the leap into full-time employment.
5) Remember - you're not committing to a career for life.
When searching for jobs to apply for, try to bear in mind that your first post-university job doesn't necessarily have to lead to the career of your dreams. Many people don't even decide on a career until quite a bit later in life, so don't feel pressured to apply exclusively for jobs that are directly linked to whatever you think you'd like to be doing in ten or twenty years' time. You might only stay in this first job for a year or two - and that's okay, because it will still give you a lot of extra experience and a lot of new things to add to that CV of yours.
So those are our top 5 tips for gradaute jobseekers, and we hope they'll come in handy! Of course, there's no secret formula or trick for landing any job you apply for, but it's important to stay positive and keep striving for success even if you suffer a setback or two. Just because your first few applications didn't lead anywhere doesn't mean that you should give up - keep going, and you'll be starting your new job before you know it!
Searching for jobs in the science/technology sector? Click here to create a candidate account and browse the latest vacancies from Hyper Recruitment Solutions!
Have you considered a career in recruitment?
Here at HRS, we are looking for talented individuals who want to make a difference to the science and technology sectors through recruitment. We have a number of positions available for trainee Recruitment Consultants / Graduate Sales Executives to join our growing sales teams.
The recruitment industry is one of the most rewarding and desirable sectors to work in. If you have an outgoing personality, are good with people, and happy to work hard to succeed in life, then you are perfect for a job in recruitment. We will train you to the highest possible standards and develop your skills and knowledge of the recruitment industry. If you have a passion and enthusiasm for doing the job right, this position offers great rewards.
Apply now >
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FMCG stands for fast-moving consumer goods. An FMCG company is any company that produces these goods. Well-known FMCG companies include Unilever, Nestlé and The Coca-Cola Company.
Examples of fast-moving consumer goods
The definition of FMCG is very broad - any items that are sold at relatively low prices and consumed relatively quickly may be considered examples of 'fast-moving consumer goods'. Most of the products in your local supermarket probably qualify.
Common FMCGs include:
• Fruit and veg
• Meat
• Soft drinks
• Dairy products
• Bread and other baked goods
• Toiletries (e.g. toothpaste, deodorant)
• Alcohol and tobacco
• Confectionery
• Batteries
• Some forms of medication
FMCGs are sold in high volumes at low prices and used up rapidly (as opposed to durable goods - such as cars, appliances and furnishings - which are purchased less frequently and expected to last much longer).
Challenges for FMCG companies
There's a lot of money to be made in the FMCG industry, but these goods tend to have a small profit margin and - in many cases - a short shelf life. This means that, in order to thrive, FMCG companies must strive to sell as many units as they can as quickly and as consistently as they can. This requires shrewd marketing (to get people to make an initial purchase) and high product quality (to keep people coming back for more purchases going forward).
Other challenges for FMCG companies include:
• Extending shelf life of perishable goods
• Reducing impact on the environment (e.g. from discarded packaging)
• Keeping costs low enough to compete on price
Roles within the FMCG industry
The FMCG industry is very large and extremely varied, with all sorts of roles available for all sorts of different skill sets. Talented workers from STEM fields are highly sought-after in this sector, as these are the people who can help FMCG companies to:
• Improve product quality / effectiveness
• Drive down costs via technological advancements
• Boost shelf life by delaying product expiration
• Create more environmentally-friendly products and packaging solutions
The ingenuity, expertise and creativity of skilled scientists have long been crucial to the success of the world's largest FMCG companies, and there's no shortage of roles for gifted science/technology workers in this particular sector.
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Telephone Interview
So you've just heard back from that job you applied for, and it's good news: they were impressed with your CV, and you've made it through to the interview stage. However, this won't be a traditional, face-to-face job interview - as it turns out, this particular employer prefers to do things over the phone.
You might be pleased to hear this at first. On paper, a telephone interview sounds quite a bit easier than the alternative: no need to get a haircut, no need to iron your interview suit, no need to worry about how you're going to get there on time. All you have to do is pick up the phone and have a conversation. Simple, right?
But being interviewed over the phone rather than meeting your potential employer in the flesh does have its disadvantages. For example...
• The employer won't be able to connect with you in quite the same way as if you were right there in front of them. Facial expressions and body language are important when you're trying to get someone to warm to you, but you can't rely on them during a phone interview - instead, you're forced to present yourself well and get your points across using speech alone.
• Similarly, you won't be able to use the interviewer's physical cues to assess how well (or not) the interview is going. It can be difficult to give a relaxed and confident performance when you don't know whether the person you're talking to is smiling or frowning.
• Telephone interviews tend to be shorter and less in-depth than traditional job interviews, which leaves you with a significantly smaller window of opportunity. Less time means fewer chances to talk yourself up and persuade the interviewer of your suitability for the role.
• While it can be nice to conduct a job interview from the comfort of your own living room, the home environment can be distracting and detrimental to the professional image you're trying to project. Many a remote interview has been interrupted by a child or pet wandering into the room at an inopportune moment, and even if you're home alone, there's still a chance that the doorbell will ring, or that you'll get sidetracked by one of the many other things vying for your attention.
By now, you should be beginning to realise that telephone interviews aren't necessarily the walk in the park that they may resemble at first glance. There are a lot of obstacles to overcome, and we haven't even mentioned the fact that some people genuinely struggle to talk on the phone (even if they're perfectly outgoing and eloquent in person).
But don't despair - you can still ace your phone interview and land the job of your dreams without a hitch. To help you do so, here are five top telephone interview tips from the experts here at Hyper Recruitment Solutions:
1. Choose the right space.
Our phones go everywhere we go nowadays, which means that it's possible to take calls in the park, the car, the supermarket, and just about anywhere else you fancy. However, if at all possible, you should avoid conducting a job interview while on the go; instead, find a quiet, secluded room where you can be fairly certain you won't be interrupted. Try to choose somewhere with as few distractions and diversions as possible.
2. Focus on the task at hand.
Ideally, you shouldn't be doing anything else while you're being interviewed. You wouldn't doodle or surf the web or watch TV during a face-to-face job interview, so you should absolutely avoid those activities when on the phone. And don't eat anything during the call - it's impolite, and the person on the other end might have a hard time understanding you with your mouth full.
3. Make notes beforehand.
It never hurts to prepare. Keep your CV handy throughout the call (along with your cover letter, the company's details, and anything else that might prove useful) so that you can quickly refer to key information as necessary. Before the interview, you may also wish to draft answers to common questions so that you won't 'um' and 'ah' too much when you're in the hot seat. If you don't think it will be too much of a distraction, it might even be worth keeping a pen and some paper handy during the call itself so that you can make notes on the fly.
4. Don't speak too quickly.
During any sort of interview, it's easy to let your nerves get the better of you and speak too quickly to be understood. Before responding to each question, take a breath and remind yourself to answer slowly, steadily, and clearly. You'll come off a lot better for it, and the interviewer won't have to ask you to repeat yourself.
5. Be concise.
Just as it's important to try not to talk too fast, it's also important not to talk too much. Waffling on needlessly won't endear you to your potential employer - it's never fun to sit through a long, rambling answer, and it's even worse when you're on the phone and the physical cues we discussed earlier aren't present to make the monologue more engaging. If you really want to impress, answer each question in as few words as possible (while still making your point clear each time).
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Friday, May 18, 2007
Web Scavenger Hunt Example
The Baroque Period
Subject Matter: Music
Grade Level: High School Orchestra (9-12)
Lesson Objective: Learners will demonstrate knowledge of Baroque musical style and the relationship between Baroque dance through performance of the Baroque Dance Suite by J.S. Bach.
Subject Matter Content Standard:
Processing, Analyzing, and Responding to Sensory Information Through the Language and Skills Unique to Music
Listen to, Analyze, and Describe Music1.4 Analyze and describe the use of musical elements and expressive devices (e.g., articulation, dynamic markings) in aural examples in a varied repertoire of music representing diverse genres, styles, and cultures.
Background: The dates for the Baroque period are 1600-1750. We will examine some of the websites that will provide you with some background information on significant composers, artists, and performers during this period. We will examine the Baroque dances and the relationships of the musical rhythms to the popular dance steps of the Baroque period.
Use the following websites to help you answer questions in your scavenger hunt.
Essential Question:
How did musicians and dancers express their cultural ideals through performing arts during the Baroque period?
1. What were the historical, social, and political influences during the Baroque period?
2. What are the general characteristics of Baroque visual art, music, dance, drama, and architecture?
3. What is the difference between secular music and sacred music?
4. Who was the most famous composer from the Baroque period?
5. What kind of sacred and secular music did he compose?
6. What are the characteristics of Baroque music?
7. What are the names of the dances popular during the Baroque period?
8. How did the Baroque dance forms influence the musical style?
9. What new form of art was first developed in the Baroque period?
10. Where can you go to hear Baroque music today?
11. What influence did Baroque dancing have on dance of today?
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Condensed Matter
Terahertz Graphene Absorbers
Authors: George Rajna
Graphene Flagship researches from CNR-Istituto Nanoscienze, Italy and the University of Cambridge, UK have shown that it is possible to create a terahertz saturable absorber using graphene produced by liquid phase exfoliation and deposited by transfer coating and ink jet printing. [25] By finely tuning the distance between nanoparticles in a single layer, researchers have made a filter that can change between a mirror and a window. [24] Scientists from the University of Basel's Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute have succeeded in dramatically improving the quality of individual photons generated by a quantum system. [23] Physicists from the University of Basel have developed a memory that can store photons. [22] Scientists at the University of Sydney are entering a new phase of development to scale up the next generation of quantum-engineered devices. [21] Engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales have invented a radical new architecture for quantum computing, based on novel 'flip-flop qubits', that promises to make the large-scale manufacture of quantum chips dramatically cheaper-and easier-than thought possible. [20] A team of researchers from the U.S. and Italy has built a quantum memory device that is approximately 1000 times smaller than similar devices— small enough to install on a chip. [19] The cutting edge of data storage research is working at the level of individual atoms and molecules, representing the ultimate limit of technological miniaturisation. [18] This is an important clue for our theoretical understanding of optically controlled magnetic data storage media. [17] A crystalline material that changes shape in response to light could form the heart of novel light-activated devices. [16]
Comments: 42 Pages.
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Country List | World Factbook Home
CIA Seal World Factbook Seal Cape Verde
Flag of Cape Verde
Map of Cape Verde
Introduction Cape Verde
Geography Cape Verde
Geographic coordinates:
16 00 N, 24 00 W
Map references:
Political Map of the World
total: 4,033 sq km
land: 4,033 sq km
water: 0 sq km
Area - comparative:
slightly larger than Rhode Island
Land boundaries:
0 km
965 km
Maritime claims:
measured from claimed archipelagic baselines
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
temperate; warm, dry summer; precipitation meager and very erratic
steep, rugged, rocky, volcanic
Elevation extremes:
lowest point: Atlantic Ocean 0 m
Natural resources:
Land use:
arable land: 11.41%
permanent crops: 0.74%
other: 87.85% (2005)
Irrigated land:
30 sq km (2003)
Natural hazards:
Environment - current issues:
soil erosion; deforestation due to demand for wood used as fuel; desertification; environmental damage has threatened several species of birds and reptiles; illegal beach sand extraction; overfishing
Environment - international agreements:
signed, but not ratified: none of the selected agreements
Geography - note:
People Cape Verde
420,979 (July 2006 est.)
Age structure:
0-14 years: 37.9% (male 80,594/female 79,126)
15-64 years: 55.3% (male 113,450/female 119,423)
65 years and over: 6.7% (male 10,542/female 17,844) (2006 est.)
Median age:
total: 19.8 years
male: 19 years
female: 20.7 years (2006 est.)
Population growth rate:
0.64% (2006 est.)
Birth rate:
24.87 births/1,000 population (2006 est.)
Death rate:
6.55 deaths/1,000 population (2006 est.)
Net migration rate:
-11.91 migrant(s)/1,000 population (2006 est.)
Sex ratio:
at birth: 1.03 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.02 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 0.95 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.59 male(s)/female
total population: 0.95 male(s)/female (2006 est.)
Infant mortality rate:
total: 46.52 deaths/1,000 live births
male: 51.63 deaths/1,000 live births
female: 41.26 deaths/1,000 live births (2006 est.)
Life expectancy at birth:
total population: 70.73 years
male: 67.41 years
female: 74.15 years (2006 est.)
Total fertility rate:
3.38 children born/woman (2006 est.)
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate:
0.035% (2001 est.)
HIV/AIDS - people living with HIV/AIDS:
775 (2001)
HIV/AIDS - deaths:
225 (as of 2001)
noun: Cape Verdean(s)
adjective: Cape Verdean
Ethnic groups:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 76.6%
male: 85.8%
female: 69.2% (2003 est.)
Government Cape Verde
Country name:
conventional long form: Republic of Cape Verde
conventional short form: Cape Verde
local long form: Republica de Cabo Verde
local short form: Cabo Verde
Government type:
name: Praia
geographic coordinates: 14 55 N, 23 31 W
Administrative divisions:
17 municipalities (concelhos, singular - concelho); Boa Vista, Brava, Maio, Mosteiros, Paul, Praia, Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande, Sal, Santa Catarina, Santa Cruz, Sao Domingos, Sao Filipe, Sao Miguel, Sao Nicolau, Sao Vicente, Tarrafal
5 July 1975 (from Portugal)
National holiday:
Independence Day, 5 July (1975)
Legal system:
derived from the legal system of Portugal
18 years of age; universal
Executive branch:
chief of state: President Pedro Verona PIRES (since 22 March 2001)
elections: president elected by popular vote for a five-year term (eligible for a second term); election last held 12 February 2006 (next to be held in February 2011); prime minister nominated by the National Assembly and appointed by the president
election results: Pedro PIRES reelected president; percent of vote - Pedro PIRES (PAICV) 51.2%, Carlos VIEGA (MPD) 48.8%
Legislative branch:
unicameral National Assembly or Assembleia Nacional (72 seats; members are elected by popular vote to serve five-year terms)
elections: last held 22 January 2006 (next to be held in January 2011)
election results: percent of vote by party - PAICV 52.3%, MPD 44%, UCID 2.7%; seats by party - PAICV 41, MPD 29, ADM 2
Judicial branch:
Supreme Tribunal of Justice or Supremo Tribunal de Justia
Political parties and leaders:
African Party for Independence of Cape Verde or PAICV [Jose Maria Pereira NEVES, chairman]; Democratic Alliance for Change or ADM [Dr. Eurico MONTEIRO] (a coalition of PCD, PTS, and UCID); Democratic Christian Party or PDC [Manuel RODRIGUES, chairman]; Democratic Renovation Party or PRD [Victor FIDALGO, president]; Democratic and Independent Cape Verdean Union or UCID [Antonio MONTEIRO]; Movement for Democracy or MPD [Agostinho LOPES, president]; Party for Democratic Convergence or PCD [Dr. Eurico MONTEIRO, president]; Party of Work and Solidarity or PTS [Isaias RODRIGUES, president]; Social Democratic Party or PSD [Joao ALEM, president]
Political pressure groups and leaders:
International organization participation:
Diplomatic representation in the US:
chief of mission: Ambassador Jose BRITO
chancery: 3415 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20007
telephone: [1] (202) 965-6820
FAX: [1] (202) 965-1207
consulate(s) general: Boston
Diplomatic representation from the US:
chief of mission: Ambassador Roger D. PIERCE
embassy: Rua Abilio Macedo n6, Praia
mailing address: C. P. 201, Praia
telephone: [238] 2-60-89-00
FAX: [238] 2-61-13-55
Flag description:
three horizontal bands of light blue (top, double width), white (with a horizontal red stripe in the middle third), and light blue; a circle of 10 yellow five-pointed stars is centered on the hoist end of the red stripe and extends into the upper and lower blue bands
Economy Cape Verde
Economy - overview:
GDP (purchasing power parity):
$3.129 billion (2006 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate):
$1.128 billion (2005 est.)
GDP - real growth rate:
5.5% (2005 est.)
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$6,000 (2006 est.)
GDP - composition by sector:
agriculture: 12.1%
industry: 21.9%
services: 66% (2004 est.)
Labor force:
120,600 (1990)
Unemployment rate:
21% (2000 est.)
Population below poverty line:
30% (2000)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
lowest 10%: NA%
highest 10%: NA%
Inflation rate (consumer prices):
4.7% (2006 est.)
Investment (gross fixed):
25.5% of GDP (2006 est.)
revenues: $324.6 million
expenditures: $370.4 million; including capital expenditures of $NA (2006 est.)
Agriculture - products:
Industrial production growth rate:
Electricity - production:
44 million kWh (2004)
Electricity - production by source:
fossil fuel: 100%
hydro: 0%
nuclear: 0%
other: 0% (2001)
Electricity - consumption:
40.92 million kWh (2004)
Electricity - exports:
0 kWh (2004)
Electricity - imports:
0 kWh (2004)
Oil - production:
0 bbl/day (2004)
Oil - consumption:
1,150 bbl/day (2004 est.)
Oil - exports:
NA bbl/day
Oil - imports:
NA bbl/day
Natural gas - production:
0 cu m (2004 est.)
Natural gas - consumption:
0 cu m (2004 est.)
Current account balance:
$-44.43 million (2006 est.)
$96.71 million f.o.b. (2006 est.)
Exports - commodities:
fuel, shoes, garments, fish, hides
Exports - partners:
Spain 38.2%, Portugal 33.3%, US 9.2%, Morocco 5.4% (2005)
$495.1 million f.o.b. (2006 est.)
Imports - commodities:
foodstuffs, industrial products, transport equipment, fuels
Imports - partners:
Portugal 40.8%, Italy 7.8%, Netherlands 7.2%, Spain 5.4%, Brazil 5.3%, France 4.7%, Belgium 4.6% (2005)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold:
$166.4 million (2006 est.)
Debt - external:
$325 million (2002)
Economic aid - recipient:
$136 million (1999)
Currency (code):
Cape Verdean escudo (CVE)
Currency code:
Exchange rates:
Cape Verdean escudos (CVE) per US dollar - 87.946 (2006), 88.67 (2005), 88.808 (2004), 97.703 (2003), 117.168 (2002)
Fiscal year:
calendar year
Communications Cape Verde
Telephones - main lines in use:
71,400 (2005)
Telephones - mobile cellular:
81,700 (2005)
Telephone system:
domestic: major service provider is Cabo Verde Telecom (CVT); fiber optic ring, completed in 2001, links all islands providing Internet access and ISDN services; cellular service introduced in 1998
international: country code - 238; 2 coaxial submarine cables; HF radiotelephone to Senegal and Guinea-Bissau; satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean)
Radio broadcast stations:
AM 0, FM 22 (plus 12 repeaters), shortwave 0 (2002)
100,000 (2002 est.)
Television broadcast stations:
1 (plus 7 repeaters) (2002)
15,000 (2002 est.)
Internet country code:
Internet hosts:
234 (2006)
Internet Service Providers (ISPs):
1 (2002)
Internet users:
25,000 (2005)
Transportation Cape Verde
7 (2006)
Airports - with paved runways:
total: 7
over 3,047 m: 1
1,524 to 2,437 m: 1
914 to 1,523 m: 4
under 914 m: 1 (2006)
total: 1,350 km
paved: 932 km
unpaved: 418 km (2000)
Merchant marine:
total: 7 ships (1000 GRT or over) 12,300 GRT/7,726 DWT
by type: cargo 2, chemical tanker 1, passenger/cargo 4
foreign-owned: 2 (Spain 1, UK 1) (2006)
Ports and terminals:
Mindelo, Praia, Tarrafal
Military Cape Verde
Military branches:
People's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARP): Army, Coast Guard (includes maritime air wing) (2007)
Manpower available for military service:
males age 18-49: 84,641
females age 18-49: 87,310 (2005 est.)
Manpower fit for military service:
males age 18-49: 65,614
females age 18-49: 73,662 (2005 est.)
Military expenditures - dollar figure:
$7.18 million (2005 est.)
Military expenditures - percent of GDP:
0.7% (2006 est.)
Transnational Issues Cape Verde
Disputes - international:
Illicit drugs:
used as a transshipment point for Latin American cocaine destined for Western Europe; the lack of a well-developed financial system limits the country's utility as a money-laundering center
This page was last updated on 15 March, 2007
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Analysis of Philip Larkin's "For Sidney Bechet"
Analysis of Philip Larkin's For Sidney Bechet
Philip Larkin had a deep passion for jazz music, which had been fostered from childhood by his parents, who purchases both a drum kit and a saxophone. Between 1961 and 1971, Larkin served as the jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph. Larkin wanted was a huge fan of Sidney Bechet, who was an American jazz clarinetist and saxophonist. Bechet was born in New Orleans, and spent his teen years playing in dance halls and brothels in Storyville. In "For Sidney Bechet," Larkin wanted the poem to function like a jazz song; as the song/poem progresses the listener/reader imagines different scenarios. The poem had a jazz-like rhythm, and a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefghggh. "For Sidney Bechet" was written in 1954, and published in Larkin's collection of thirty-poems entitled The Whitsun Weddings, which was published in 1964.
The first stanza sets up the poem as a cause and effect; the music causes people to imagine different scenarios. The musical note, that Bechet is playing, narrows and rises causing New Orleans reflection in the water to shake (ripples). This is a beautiful simile. The verb "shakes" is put at the end of line one, in order to stretch the action onto the second line. "And in all ears appropriate falsehood wakes" meaning that the audience gets lost in the music, and drifts off into various day-dreams. "Wakes" stems from the word 'awaken,' but it also a pun on water-a wake is the track left by a ship in the water-which keeps with the water theme of the first stanza.
The first imagined scenario (lines 3 to 6) is one of beauty and love. Some people imagine the "legendary Quarter," which refers to the French Quarter. The French Quarter is the oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, and is now a National Historic Landmark. They also imagine balconies, flower-baskets, and quadrilles, which are square dances for couples. Everyone is "making love" and "going shares," which means taking it easy. This first scenario seems very relaxing and fun.
The second scenario that is imagined (lines 7 to 10) is about the dark, seedy side of New Orleans. "Oh, play that thing!" is a common cry that you would hear at a jazz concert; it means the audience is particularly moved by a part of the song. "Mute glorious Storyvilles" means that the music mutes out the sounds of Storyville and has the audience "grouping round their chairs." Storyville is the red-light district of New Orleans, and is often referred to just as the District. It was set up to limit prostitution to just one area, so that the government could monitor and regulate it. "License" refers to the government giving prostitutes the permission to engage is prostitution. "Sporting-house girls" is another term for prostitutes. The simile: "sporting-house girls like circus tigers (priced far above rubies)" refers to the Proverbs 31.10 of the King James Bible, which states: "Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies." Comparing a prostitute to a circus tiger is the equivalent of saying that the prostitute is now tame due to the fact that they are controlled by government regulations; whereas, before the governments interference they were wild, dangerous, and erotic creatures. "Priced far above rubies" can also mean that the prostitutes were very expensive.
The fourth stanza describes the wannabes, who sit in the audience. "Manqués" are would-be scholars. They sit in the audience nodding along with the music, unnoticed. Larkin uses another simile to describe the wannabes: they are so engrossed with the "personnels," which are the band members that they are like "old plaids." Plaids are a rectangular length of tartan worn especially over the left shoulder as part of the Scottish national costume.
Stanza five (lines 13 to 15) describes how the music affects Larkin himself. We know that Larkin is talking about himself because he uses the two personal pronouns: "me" and "my." The music makes him feel the way love is said to make people feel. The music "is orgasmic, hitting all the right notes, and [gives] a sense of affirmation" (Level Up). "Crescent City" refers to New Orleans. Larkin says that New Orleans is the only place where Bechet's "speech" (meaning his music) is understood, because New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz.
The last two lines of the poem are abstract. Bechet's music is "the natural noise of good," which scatters "long-haired grief and scored pity" (lines 16-17). Listening to Bechet's music and sharing or "scattering" it with others somehow dispels the long-harbored grief that African Americans feel. The origin of Jazz comes from African music, which consisted of a single-line melody and a call-and-response pattern. When slaves were brought to America they brought with them the work songs of their people, which coupled with European instruments became jazz music. "Scored pity" is a pun on a musical score. It also refers to the pity we feel when listening to Sidney Bechet's music.
Ferguson, Margaret, ed. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2005.
Level Up:
French Quarter: Wikipedia contributors. "French Quarter." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Mar. 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2012.
Storyville, New Orleans: Wikipedia contributors. "Storyville." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 8 Mar. 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2012.
Brothel: Wikipedia contributors. "Brothel." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 16 Mar. 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2012.
Jazz: Wikipedia contributors. "Jazz." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 Mar. 2012. Web. 19 Mar. 2012.
Philip Larkin: Wikipedia contributors. "Philip Larkin." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 Mar. 2012. Web. 16 Mar. 2012.
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Dr. Richard Sauerheber
(B.A. Biology, Ph.D. Chemistry, University of CA, San Diego)
College, San Marcos, CA
December 23, 2012
Comments on Toxicologic Mechanisms of Arsenic, Lead and Fluoride
Arsenic is a certain human carcinogen, and lead is a probable (EPA), or a reasonably anticipated to be (NTP), human carcinogen. Indeed, lead and arsenic both inhibit enzymes that synthesize and repair DNA. Arsenic and lead both incorporate into all organ systems to produce toxic effects, and both accumulate in bone and teeth. Each exhibits many distinct toxicologic features, and the sizes of these ions are much different, but both arsenic and lead as metal ions irreversibly bind sulfhydryl groups on proteins, including both structural and enzymatic proteins. Sulfhydryl groups that are affected can vary in importance depending on location and the importance of the enzyme. The EPA MCL for each metal ion has been set at 10 ppb, but this is 0.21 microMolar for arsenic and 0.05 microMolar for lead.
The two forms of inorganic arsenic, reduced (trivalent As (III)) and oxidized (pentavalent As(V)), can be absorbed, and accumulate in tissues and body fluids. Arsenite, As(III), binds with higher affinity to sulfhydryl groups. Numerous studies have shown that arsenic is cytotoxic at micromolar concentrations. Micromolar arsenic can induce chromosomal damage and inhibit DNA repair. Cells lacking telomerase are paradoxically prone to genomic instability and carcinogenesis. Studies conducted at Johns Hopkins describe arsenic as a potent inhibitor of human telomerase expression at 0.7 micromolar (50 ppb) []. Arsenite inhibits succinate dehydrogenase at micromolar concentrations:
[]. Arsenic inhibits pyruvate dehydrogenase at 0.25 micromolar (18 ppb).
Lead severely inhibits creatine kinase and pyryuvate kinase
[]. Lead causes neurobehavioral abnormality in children with blood levels below 50 ppb
[] . Lead lines occur in bone on Xray exams in 3 year old children with 100 ppb blood lead levels. Enzymes responsible for the synthesis of blood cell hemoglobin are directly and immediately substantially inhibited by lead at only 50 ppb.
Under the Lead Copper Rule (LCR), EPA requires testing of public water systems, and if more than 10% of the samples at residences contain lead levels over 15 ppb, actions must be taken to lower these levels [].
Unfortunately, the combined effects of arsenic and lead dual exposure have not been evaluated. No MCL has been developed for either substance when the other is also known to be present. The effects of lead at 10 ppb together with arsenic at 10 ppb, typical of water supplies and the EPA MCL’s for lead and arsenic separately, during lifelong exposure are unknown. Many municipal water supplies in the U.S. now contain over 10 ppb total of lead plus arsenic.
Industrial fluoride ingestion from 1 ppm treated water supplies in conjunction with fluoridated toothpaste use averages 0.21 ppm in blood and most soft tissues (National Research Council, 2006, p. 70). Fluoride accumulates in bone to thousands of mg/kg over lifelong drinking. Fluoride is also alters protein structure and is a general enzyme inhibitor, but by a mechanism entirely distinct from that for arsenic and lead. Fluoride disrupts hydrogen bonds that normally exist between water molecules, between water and biological molecules, and within individual macromolecules. Fluoride inhibits glutamine synthase, a DNA repair enzyme, at only 0.2 ppm, but unlike enzyme inhibition due to metal ions, fluoride enzyme inhibition is reversed after reduction of the fluoride concentration in the media. This is because hydrogen bonds are not actual bonds but rather are associations, regions where molecules become attracted temporarily. Hydrogen bonding is merely a dipolar interaction between polar groups where opposite charges attract and is strong enough when between hydrogen and nitrogen, oxygen or fluoride, to then be referred to as hydrogen bonding. Hydrogen bonding determines many unique characteristics of water as the exclusive solvent forming the bulk matrix of all living organisms. The EPA MCL for fluoride is currently set at 2 ppm in drinking water without consideration of the amount of fluoride ingested from toothpaste use or from foods. Based on fluoride exposure studies reviewed by the NRC, if fluoride were not present in drinking water, then blood levels of fluoride would average approximately 0.1 ppm in the U.S. Indeed, this is a typical fluoride blood level for those residing in non-fluoridated regions (NRC).
From James:
NSF International, the sham agency which regulates fluoridation materials, admits that 43 percent of silicofluoride shipments contain arsenic, and the contamination level is up to .6 ppb.
Arsenic is a known human carcinogen. See Toxicological Profile for Arsenic – Public Health Service, p. 7.
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1. 难度：中等
Letter One
Dear Editor,
After I finish my homework, I often go online and chat with my friends. Sometimes I play Internet games. But my parents hate to see me playing games on the computer. Maybe they have heard too much news about how QQ and Internet games harm children. Once I went to a net bar to play games after school. But after that I told my parents that I was playing basketball at school. I said so because I didn’t want to make them unhappy. I feel bad about it. However, I need to rest for a while by playing computer games after studying for a long time. I really want my parents to understand that. Do foreign parents do the same to their children? Please help me.
Li Ping, Nantong
Letter Two
Dear Li Ping,
I think it’s not strange for parents to keep their children away from anything bad. Foreign parents will do the same as your parents! They may not let their children watch TV for too long a time, or like your parents, they don’t want their children to play computer games.
Talk to your parents and be honest to them, I think. Tell them what you are doing and why you are doing so to make them understand you. It’s never good to do things behind your parents’ backs. They aren’t fools as you think sometimes! Our parents seem to know what is the best for us. Remember: to be honest is the best way.
Good luck,
1.From the passage we can learn that Li Ping often ________.
A．talks to his friends on the Internet
B．plays basketball after school
C．plays computer games at home
D. chats online before doing his homework
2.The boy goes online _____.
A. to get news about QQ
B. just to have a rest
C. to show that he hates study
D. just to find some friends
3.The underlined sentence in Letter Two means “ _____ ”.
A. You must do everything in front of your parents
B. You must always listen to your parents carefully
C. You should tell your parents what you do before or after doing it
D. You should not do anything to make your parents worry about you
4.The editor thinks _____.
A. children should play computer games secretly
B. playing computer games can be very helpful to children’s studies
C. children should be honest and try to make their parents understand them
D. foreign parents don’t care for their children as much as Chinese parents
2. 难度：中等
On Nov.18th,1908, three men went up in a balloon. They started early in London. The headman was Augusta Gaudron, and the other two men were Tannar and Maitland. They had a big balloon and they were ready for a long way.
Soon they heard the sea. They were carrying the usual rope, and it was hanging down from the basket of the balloon. At the end of the rope they had tied a metal box. This could hold water, or it could be empty. So they were able to change its weight. It was for use over the sea. They were also carrying some bags of sand.
After the sun rose, the balloon went higher. It went up to 3,000 metres, and the air was very cold. The water in the balloon became ice. Snow fell past the men's basket, and they could see more snow on the ground. The men tried to throw out some more sand; but it was hard. They tried to break the icy sand with their knives, but it was not easy. The work was slow and they were still falling, so they had to drop some whole bags of sand. One of them fell on an icy lake and made a black hole in the ice.
At last they pulled the box into the basket. It was still snowing; so they climbed to get away from the snow. They rose to 5,100 metres! Everything became icy. They were so cold that they decided to land. They came down in Poland heavily but safely. They had travelled 1,797 kilometers from London!
1.Three men flew in balloon ________.
A. for nearly 1,800 kilometers
B. to another city
C. to visit Poland
D. more than a century ago
2.The metal box was used for ________.
A. carrying the bags of sand
B. keeping drinking-water
C. carrying ropes of the basket
D. changing weight
3.When the balloon went up higher, ________.
A. the temperature of the balloon began to fall
B. They saw the sun go down
C. They made a hole in the basket with their knives
D. They could see a black hole on the ground
4.Which of the following is NOT true?________
A. The three men started their journey before the sun rose.
B. The balloon began to go up when they threw bags of sand out of the basket.
C. When they pulled the box into the basket, the balloon began to climb up.
D. The three men had to land because they felt cold.
3. 难度：简单
People can be addicted to(沉溺于) different things — e.g. alcohol, drug, certain foods, or even television. People who have such an addiction are compulsive(强迫的):They have a very powerful psychological（心理上的）need that they feel they must satisfy. According to psychologists, many people are compulsive spenders. They feel that they must spend money. This compulsion, like most others, is impossible to explain reasonably. For compulsive spenders who buy on credit(以赊欠方式), charge accounts are even more exciting than money. In other words, compulsive spenders feel that with credit, they can do anything. Their pleasure in spending large amounts is actually greater than the pleasure that they get from the things they buy.
There is even a special psychology of bargain hunting. To save money, of course, most people look for sales, low prices, and discounts. Compulsive bargain hunters, however, often buy things that they don’t need just because they are cheap. They want to believe that they are helping their budgets(预算), but they are really playing an exciting game. When they can buy something for less than other people, they feel that they are winning. Most people, experts claim, have two reasons for their behavior: a good reason for the things that they do and the real reason.
It is not only scientists, of course, who understand the psychology of spending habits, but also business people. Stores, companies, and advertisers use psychology to increase business. They consider people’s needs for love, power, or influence, their basic values, their beliefs and opinions, and so on in their advertising and sales methods. Psychologists often use a method called “behavior therapy(疗法)” to help individuals solve their personality problems. In the same way, they can help people who feel that they have problems with money.
1.According to the psychologists, a compulsive spender is one who spends large amounts of money___.
A. and takes great pleasure from what he or she buys
B. in order to satisfy his or her basic needs in life
C. just to meet his or her strong psychological need
D. and feels he or she is cheated
2.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the text?
A. People spend money for exactly the same reason that they need to buy things.
B. Business people and advertisers can use the psychology of people’s spending habits to increase sales.
C. Business people understand the psychology of compulsive buying better than scientists do.
D. Compulsive bargain hunters do not have problems with money.
3.What is the text mainly about?
A. The psychology of money-spending habits.
B. The habits of compulsive spenders.
C. A special psychology of bargain hunting.
D. The use of the psychology of spending habits in business.
4.From the text we may safely conclude that compulsive spenders or compulsive bargain hunters _____.
A. are really unreasonable
B. need special treatment
C. are really beyond drugs
D. can never get any help to solve their problems with money
4. 难度：中等
Wonderful Museum
Monday – Thursday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Friday: 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
Saturday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Sunday: 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.
The Museum Shop is open during regular museum hours.
The Museum Library
The Skyliner Restaurant
Monday - Saturday: during regular museum hours
Sunday: 11:30 am – 5:00 pm
The aged and students with ID: $6.00
Wonderful Museum offers a 50% discount to groups of 20 or more.
1.Wonderful Museum usually opens ____ except on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.
A. from Monday to Thursday B. every day
C. every day of the week D. on weekdays
2. If a group of 30 students with ID visit Wonderful Museum, how much should they pay for the admission?
A. $105. B. $90. C. $210. D.$180.
3.If you want to invite your friends to dinner on Friday, you have to reach the Skyliner Restaurant ____.
A. after 8:00 pm B. at 6:00 am
C. after 10:00 pm D. before 8:00 pm
5. 难度：中等
Everyone can’t live without money. ____1.__ However, money cannot buy everything. You can’t buy the following things only relying on money you have.
Money is a tool for trade. We spend most of our time on this earth getting, spending, worrying and fantasying about money. __2._ Instead, money takes away your time that could have been spent playing with your children or having a long walk with your friends. When the sun sets, a day goes away from our life forever. No money has power to bring that back to life.
There are a lot of examples to prove that no money can buy self-respect. __3.__ If you are your worst enemy, gods of money can’t save you from the self-destruction you add to yourself.
As I write this, I found out that one of my best friends has brain cancer, and it is in the last period. __4.__ But no money can buy insurance for his life. We buy insurance for just about everything including our life but money can never bring life back.
This is controversial(有争议的). Money can buy happiness if it is spent bringing greater financial safety for the family. __5._ Going after money every day can never find its destination with frequent eagerness to get more .
A. Show your respect for others.
B. Self-respect is got from within.
C. Money can buy a lot of things.
D. You can’t buy the time or save it in your storeroom.
E. Of course money can get him the best health care possible.
F. So you should not try your best to earn money without caring about your health.
G. But money can’t buy happiness if the purpose is to make money to make other people happy.
6. 难度：中等
Each of us has goals for life. Some of these may be long-term (长期的) or_________ lifetime ones, and other dreams or wishes for more immediate satisfaction.
Just as you _________ great pleasure when you’re trying to _________ short-term goals, there’s also power in having long-term and lifetime goals. Both _________ are valuable and serve each other. In order to be_________ in achieving a short- or long-term wish or goal, you must place your focus on the _________ result and train your mind on either a moment-to-moment, day-to-day, month-to-month, or year-to-year level.
For example, _________ a farmer is to plow (耕地) a straight line, he must keep his eye on a faraway point. If his attention is _________ just a few feet in front of him, he will not plow straight. So, in order for his field to be plowed straight, he must _________ and focus on his long-term goal.
Focusing on a long-term goal can _________ the energy to get things done in the_________. For instance, when a runner sets a(n) _________to run a mile, he’ll _________ be tired when he _________ the one-mile mark. _________ if this same runner sets a goal to run ten miles, he probably won’t even be sweating (出汗) upon _________ this same one-mile mark. If this very same runner was to set a goal to run 26 miles and keep his mind on the completion of this long _________ , not only wouldn’t he be sweating, but most likely he wouldn’t even be out of breath as he ran by the _________ mark.
Long-term goals, _________ , can’t be achieved without first achieving _________goals. We may have a goal to climb a ladder (梯子), but we have to take one step at a time in order to reach the top.
1.A. even B. just C.also D.rather
2.A. understand B. experience C. explain D. welcome
3.A. set B. keep C. prevent D. achieve
4.A. terms B. dreams C. types D. thoughts
5.A. successful B. special C. interested D. different
6.A. important B. certain C. final D. happy
7.A. if B. when C. although D.because
8.A. received B. attracted C. directed D. paid
9.A. correct B. forget C. believe D. know
10.A. choose B. influence C. report D. provide
11.A. dark B. present C. end D. future
12.A. date B. story C. goal D. example
13.A. probably B. personally C. partly D. quietly
14.A. remembers B. reaches C. discovers D. records
15.A. And B. But C. So D. Or
16.A. waiting for B. searching for C. preparing D. passing
17.A. race B. game C. drive D. flight
18.A. twenty-six-mile B. thirteen-mile C. ten-mile D. one-mile
19.A. however B. besides C. instead D. therefore
20.A. lifetime B. short-term C. common D. big
7. 难度：中等
I’m 1. only child of my parents, so they are worried 2. everything I do. For example, 3. I ride my bike, my parents won’t let me 4. (ride) by myself. They are afraid I might fall off my bike and hurt 5. . They are taking great trouble to support the bike, with my mother even 6. (carry) a first-aid box. I’m not free to ride and I often say 7. (angry), “why not let me ride alone?”
Now, most families have one child. Parents want to do everything for their children. This does no good 8. them. Too much love from parents may prevent children from9. (be) independent. In my opinion, parents should let their children do__10.__they should do alone.
8. 难度：中等
People are not so honest that they once were. The temptation to steal is greater than ever before ---- especial in large shops. A detective recently watched a well-dressed woman who always went into a large store on Monday mornings. One Monday, there was fewer people in the shop than usual when the woman came in, but it was easier for the detective to watch her. The woman first bought for a few small articles. After a little time, she chose one of the most expensive dressed in the shop and hand it to an assistant who wrapped it up for him as quickly as possible. Then the woman simply took the parcel and walked out to the shop with paying. When she was arrested, the detective found that the shop assistant was her daughter. The girl ‘gave’ her mother the free dress once a week!
9. 难度：中等
1.龙舟节，也叫端午节，是在中国的农历五月初五这一天庆祝。它是中国一个传统的节日.多数中国家庭都庆祝这个节日; 2. 端午节节日起源； 3.庆祝活动：赛龙舟、吃粽子等。
农历 calendar 粽子 rice dumpling
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Biscuit nutrition facts, 80% of people do not know
Sweet and crisp cookies have been very popular with girls, but there are so many cookies in the market, and you know what the nutritional value of different cookie? Here, nutrition facts about 10 types of common biscuit.
No1: soda biscuit
Cellulose is very low, vitamin B disappeared
Soda biscuit containing sugar, less oil, added yeast, fermentation products with unique flavor, which is often considered as the most nutritious biscuits, has also been taken as breakfast for a lot of people. But the fact is not so, as to make cookie achieves layer effect will add baking soda, and baking soda will reduce the vitamin B in the flour, even to disappear.
Biscuit nutrition facts, 80% of people do not know
No2: cookies
High sugar, high fat, low protein
Cookies contains higher sugar and fat than other kinds of biscuit. A small piece of the cookie heat is often more than a cup of strawberry juice. It sounds impossible, but it is real truth. A crisp cookies choice of raw materials is the protein less wheat powder.
No3: wafer
The structure of high calorie, low density, eat much imperceptible
Unlike other biscuit, wafer is a small Rice noodles (rice flour), starch as the main raw material, slightly higher than white flour nutrition. But the butter fat content is very high of wafer, the average 60 calories in each block. In fact, three pieces of chocolate wafer heat had more than 200 calories.
No4: sandwich biscuit
“Heart” is the additive synthesis, and there is no raw fruit materials
Sandwich biscuit is a variety of sandwich material between two pieces of biscuit, add sugar or jam oil as the main raw material of sandwich baking food. Sandwich cookies “heart” for the pursuit of taste and color, it will use additives, and generally is the flavor and color, very few really add with raw fruits. For example the oranges taste biscuit, only add some orange additives, although not necessarily bad, but it will not bring nutrition. Therefore, no matter how delicious cookies are, they are only snacks.
Biscuit nutrition facts, 80% of people do not know
No5: whole wheat crackers
When improve the nutrition, also increase the amount of fat
Cellulose high content of whole wheat crackers, because cellulose taste is bad, in order to make up the taste, producers tend to join a lot of oil in the biscuit, resulting in a higher fat content.
No6: tough biscuit
Relative to other biscuits, this biscuits contains less fat tenacity. The high tenacity biscuits with egg and sugar, nutrition has improved, the taste will be better.
No7: crisp biscuit
Nutritious, but more oil
Tough biscuit nutrition crisp biscuit relatively ordinary improved, generally adding proper amount of supplementary material, such as dairy products, eggs, honey and other nutrients, but more oil.
No8: compressed biscuits
The texture is dense, highly hungry resistance
Compressed biscuits especially suitable for travel, sailing, climbing the storage of food. Although the same is flour cookies, but because of relatively close texture, the use of expanding agent to reduce the moisture content, and not easy to absorb water, the effective constituents in biscuits more content in the same volume, so as to make it more resistant to hungry.
No9: roughage biscuit
Biscuit nutrition facts, 80% of people do not know
More crisp, the more oil
There are a lot of roughage biscuit, fiber biscuits on the market today, such as mixed grains bread, whole wheat bread, corn treasures digestive biscuits and so on, these biscuits prices is higher than the common biscuit on the market. However, grain and beans contain mainly insoluble fiber, which is rougher, many people don’t like the rough sense. For them, the crude fiber food content of 3% is hard to swallow, and some high fiber biscuit fiber content can be as high as 6% or even more than 10%.
Experts stressed that the high fiber food if you can taste good and also not rough, the only reason will be adding more oil inside, the fiber will become soft in later oil. So the higher fibre products, usually the higher fat content will be together. Moreover, because saturated fat softening effect on the fiber is more outstanding, so manufacturers usually use containing large amounts of saturated fat, such as hydrogenated vegetable oil or butter, lard, butter and other animal oil processing of these products, to make them taste crisp. So, the more crisp cookies means that more oil is particularly high in saturated fat.
No10: the fortified biscuits
The relative nutritional supplement, but not too much take.
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Intro Notes: Diwali and Lakshmi
Welcome to Perfect Paradise everyone! I’m so thrilled to have you all with me today. Please make yourselves comfortable on a mat, or if you’d prefer not to do yoga let me know and I can rezz a cushion for you.
On Sunday, Nov 3 millions of people all over the world celebrated Diwali, an annual five day festival in honour of the good in the world.
“Diwali, the festival of lights, celebrates the victory of good over evil, light over darkness, and knowledge over ignorance. Lamps are lit on this day not just to decorate homes, but also to communicate a profound truth about life — when the darkness within is dispelled through the light of wisdom; the good in us wins over the evil.”
Diwali (pron. divali) is a short word for “deepavali” which literally means, “row of lamps.”
During this festival the goddess Lakshmi is worshiped. Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth and prosperity. This festival marks the end of the harvest in most of India. Throughout history, farming was one of the only ways to make a living, and to feed those you care about. Because of this, wealth took on more meaning than what it means today.
It is said that on this day, many years ago, Vishnu returned home, where Lakshmi, his wife, was waiting. Those who worship her receive the benefit of her benevolent mood and are therefore blessed with mental, physical, and material well-being.
Spiritually, this is the day Lakshmi-panchayatan entered the Universe. Panchayatan means a group of five. This group was composed of five elements:
-Vishnu: happiness and satisfaction
-Kubera: wealth and generosity
-Indra: opulence
-Gajendra: carries the wealth
-Saraswati: knowledge
Lakshmi provides the Divine Energy (Shakti) which provides the environment necessary for these activities.
Lighting the candles during this festival is a kind of metaphor for shedding light on parts of our life that we typically don’t notice.
“Life has many facets and stages to it. It is important that we throw light on all of them, for if one aspect of our life is in darkness, we cannot express life in its totality.”
In Hindu philosophy, which is where this festival comes from, it is believed that there is “something beyond the physical body and mind which is pure, infinite, and eternal, called the Atman.” Diwali, celebrating good over evil, refers to the “light of higher knowledge dispelling all ignorance, the ignorance that masks one’s true nature, not as the body, but as the unchanging, infinite, immanent and transcendent reality. With this awakening comes compassion and the awareness of the oneness of all things.”
The following is an excellent article from the Huffington Post on Diwali, if you are interested in learning more about the festival:
Let us explore the aspect of ourselves related to beauty and prosperity.
The wealth mentioned when speaking of Lakshmi is a wealth of both material and spiritual prosperity. She is also known as the embodiment of beauty, grace, and charm. Other sources have referred to her as the goddess of light, wisdom, fortune, fertility, generosity, and courage. She is often represented as a “beautiful woman of golden complexion, with four hands, sitting or standing on a full-bloomed lotus and holding a lotus bud, which stands for beauty, purity and fertility. Her four hands represent the four ends of human life: dharma or righteousness, “kama” or desires, “artha” or wealth, and “moksha” or liberation from the cycle of birth and death.”
What does wealth mean to you?
It seems to me that through wisdom, generosity, and courage one cultivates wealth of all kinds. If one has these three things then they have a great sense of spiritual wealth – the sense of selflessness. If one has the courage to step out of their ego’s, letting their heart, wisdom and generosity lead the way (compassion), then they have achieved a level of spirituality that most cannot say they have. To me, this is the greatest wealth one can accumulate – a wealth of love.
Lakshmi is the counterpart to Vishnu. Vishnu is the masculine energy (shiva) while Lakshmi is the feminine energy (shakti). The Vishnu Sahasranama describes “Vishnu as the all-pervading essence of all beings, the master of—and beyond—the past, present and future, the creator and destroyer of all existences, one who supports, preserves, sustains and governs the universe and originates and develops all elements within.”
This relationship of Shiva and Shakti exists in all things, in every one of us. It is like the interplay of yin and yang, or inyo in Japanese. Most often we sit with the part of ourselves that is most similar to Vishnu, also known as the supreme soul or God. It is the part of us that creates the idea of ego, of individuality and separateness. Through moving to the other side of the room, shall we say, and sitting with Lakshmi every so often, we have the ability to tap into the compassion and one-ness that exists within all of us.
What does oneness mean to you, and why do you think it is important?
It is important to have both energies within us – the creating and destroying, as well as the balancing. To create something but leave it out of harmony with itself and everything else, we are only asking for chaos. Only through balance is it possible to exist in peace and wealth with everyone and everything. What is wealth if it cannot be shared? If there is no one to share it with?
To the ancients, the balance is found through the feminine aspect, the Lakshmi or Shakti power that exists in all of us and in all of the universe. The keeper of the home and the mother to all beings is who is always there for others, and themselves, when they fall, and always keeps things in order. What are some ways we can embody this in our own lives?
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Purpose of a Meal
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2012/05/16 by nikkiledford
Eat these
Food is a tricky thing. It’s most basic function is to fuel and nourish our bodies. We eat because we need to live. And in order to live well, we must eat things that are good for our bodies. A secondary function is taste. We eat things that taste good. Food is used as fuel, but it also is used as a reward. Our brain sends out “pleasure” signals when we eat something yummy! We often get in trouble when we prioritize the reward function over the fueling function. For this reason, it’s important to eat food that is both delicious and nutritious. Food’s third function is a social one. Meals, traditionally, have been used to join people together. For centuries, a meal was a communal practice from killing the animal, to preparation, and into the actual consumption. Our food culture has shifted away from the communal aspect of the meal; i.e. eating in the car, at the kitchen counter, at your desk, etc.
It’s not difficult to see that our society has it ALL WRONG, when it comes to our food culture. We eat things that taste good but don’t provide us with adequate food. We eat fast and alone most of the time. Our food supply is greatly deficient in quality. It’s no wonder we’re all fat and sick.
1. Food is fuel
2. Healthy food can be delicious
3. Food is social
Food is Fuel
And we’re not just talking mere calories. Nutrient density is a big portion of the fueling process. Eat a bunch of cereal; you are not fueling yourself properly. Same if you eat apples all day. Our body needs a variety of healthy natural foods in specific amounts. There is a balance. Just because it’s good for you doesn’t mean you should over consume it. We also need quality foods instead of crappy ones as well as restraint to stop eating when we are full. Overeating healthy foods is still overeating.
Food is Delicious
It doesn’t have to be this way!
Sure, a piece of cake may sound tasty right now, but have you ever given your taste buds a chance to change? Try this for 30 days: no processed food and no sugar (including honey, dates, maple syrup, etc.). I’m not even talking about a Paleo challenge, just take out the really basic stuff. Watch how your tastes change. Carrots become incredibly sweet, berries and other fruits even more so. And once you finish… go ahead and try that cake. Chances are you’ll spin-off into a sugar coma. That stuff is no good. The point is, if we give our bodies a chance to actually feel good by removing toxic foods from our diet, our tastes will change. Healthy food is delicious. Check out some of my recipes. They don’t suck. I promise.
Food is Social
Ah, those crazy Romans
If not social, at least it’s meant to be enjoyed (even if you’re by yourself). Scarfing down every meal at the counter or in your car is no way to enjoy food. I’m just as guilty as the next person of this. I chew like a duck… meaning, I don’t. So I have to consciously make an effort to chew my food and avoid malabsorption and gut irritation from huge chunks of food hitting my digestive tract. If you do have other people in your life (like family, friends, coworkers), try your hardest to enjoy your meals with them. Sit down. Have a conversation. This will automatically slow down your eating (unless you’re one of those people who likes to talk with your mouth full… not recommended). Invite people over for dinner. Share your food. Expose yourself and others to new types of foods. Go out for ethnic food once a week and see how people eat around the world!
This is meant to encourage you to not only fuel yourself properly, but also to start enjoying the food you eat. We need to start making time for our health; physical and emotional. By prioritizing the food you eat, where you eat it, and how you prepare it, you will see your health improve in all areas.
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INGREDIENTS // one of my favorite activities is going out for coffee. For me, the sights, sounds, and smells of a coffee shop signal rest and I enter into a state of slowing down, more observing and less doing. Lately, I haven't been out to coffee too often because 1. It's expensive and 2. I don't tolerate dairy and I'm not much of a black coffee drinker so at most shops I'm limited to their dairy-free options. While it's nice to have nut milks available, I have discovered that all the other ingredients in these alternative drinks do NOT do my body any good.
A solution to would be to bring my own homemade milk, but I don't always have some ready or I forget to put a bit in a small container (which then gives me the fun task of toting around a dirty jar in my car all day). These smaller bottles of almond milk are perfect for adding to my coffee when I'm out as most dairy-free milks come in huge cartons and are inconvenient for a coffee outing. @popandbottle only uses basic, real food ingredients for their almond milk. They even sweeten it with a bit of date!
I like to think that I always have a choice about what I put in my body. Sometimes I'll have to settle for black coffee, but if I plan a bit, I can still enjoy my coffee outings without ultimately compromising on what is best for me in the long run. SNACKS // kept it really simple today during meal prep. This is a tasty bowl of yams, banana, almond butter, and coconut flakes. FAST FOOD// Roasted all these veggies last night for a tasty quick lunch. Added a new find from Whole Foods. @goodlovinfoods lemon garlic dip. If you like bitchen sauce, you'll like this (!! bonus, they don't use any soy ingredients either !!) ROUTINE// Who else is meal prepping today? It's a small step that has big impact on your health... body and mind. One less stress to consider in a week full of choices and obstacles. #paleomealprep #sandiegoprivatechef #sandiegopaleo
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Towards an Understanding of the Macro and Micro Implications of the Sino-Tibet Conflict
The Sino-Tibetan conflict continues to affect hundreds of lives and the Tibetan people have continued with their peaceful movements in response. China and Tibet have tried to win the west over for support, which may have a significant impact on future ties between the western countries and the opposing side. In light of all of China’s oppression, several Tibetans have fled to India through the Himalayas and to seek refuge in Dharamsala, India.
After I produced a documentary on the Sino-Tibet conflict, I traveled to the Tibetan government, interviewed the Prime Minister (where I learned about the Central Tibetan Administration’s direct action to resolve the conflict with China, the subsidies that the Indian government is providingfor Tibetan education in India, and Tibetan progress towards establishing a democratic charter), visited the parliament, and got the opportunity to explore rooms full of preserved Buddhist scriptures. The trip helped me crystallize several ideas regarding Tibet that had come up during my research.
Perhaps the most eye-opening experience of the trip was when I visited a Tibetan refugee camp and stupas (Tibetan temples). As residents in the US, so far away from the situation, we are unable to fully grasp the impact these events have on the Tibetan people. Like I mentioned earlier, the media informs us of the global implications: how ties may be affected and what particular events insinuate about China and Tibet’s future – a macro perspective. However, only through my journey did I start to understand the micro perspective – the trajectory of so many Tibetans’ lives has drastically changed in the recent past.
In the Tibetan Children’s Village, where 15,000 Tibetan refugee children are housed and educated, I got the chance to talk to young adults and children, understand their living conditions and see their progress. The diversity of backgrounds was incredible: I met children who had just arrived at the organization a few weeks back after traveling from Tibet through the Himalayas on their own, and I also met graduates of the organization who completed coursework and had jobs in the nearby city. Despite the great odds against these people, they have demonstrated their strength and perseverance. I feel so fortunate to have received that opportunity, as it has helped me broaden my perspective when reading about Sino-Tibet affairs and consider the implications on the people as well as the consequences on the country as a whole.
Anoushka Shahane is a junior majoring in Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Biopyschology
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Japan Marks A-Bomb Anniversary
Japan is commemorating the victims of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima 65 years ago. The attack by the United States in 1945 was instrumental in ending World War II. Since then on each on August 6, a somber echo of a temple bell reverberates through Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park.
Japan is the only nation ever to have been attacked with atomic bombs. More than 140,000 people were killed instantly in Hiroshima or died in the days and weeks after the U.S. attack. Three days later, a U.S. plane dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, killing more than 70,000 people. Japan surrendered on August 14.
"Their dreams, hopes and bodies were all killed by the bomb,” said Sadae Kasaoka, a 77-year-old survivor of the Hiroshima blast. "When the remaining dead bodies were being burned, Kasaoka said “I felt like I could see their spirits. I want to live my life to make up for the part of theirs they couldn't. I feel that my role has become to live and tell everyone what a tragic and miserable situation it actually was."
Unique Ceremony
Japan sees itself as a victim of the U.S. decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States has never apologized for the bombings, and U.S. domestic public opinion holds that it was a necessary step to end the war.
Stephen Leeper is the chairperson of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation. He says no future use of atomic weapons should ever occur.
"By any definition, they were a war crime, so I am down on those bombings,” Leeper said. “However, I am not going to make an issue of that with any American or ambassador or government official or anybody else because that is not the point. The point is how do we keep it from happening again."
The ceremony this year stood out from past memorial events with the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos. He is the first official U.S. representative ever to attend the peace ceremony in Hiroshima. The U.S. State Department simply said Mr. Roos was representing the United States "to express regret for all of the victims of World War II." Also at this year's ceremony was Ban Ki-moon, the first U.N. Secretary-General to attend.
Ban said he hoped his attendance would "send a strong message to the world and also give some opportunity of addressing the sufferings and concerns of many of hundreds of thousands of whose admiration and dream is to see the world free of nuclear weapons."
Leeper said he was thrilled the attention the 65th anniversary is receiving.
"Having Ambassador Roos here, and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon come here for the first time ever. This is the first Secretary-General ever to come to this ceremony,” he said. “This is a tremendous event for us, and we are very excited about it not because of the prestige it gives us, but because we think this is a change in how the world is thinking about nuclear weapons,” Leeper said.
Boost to Relations
Tokyo has often asked Washington to send an envoy to the annual ceremony. The ambassador's attendance at Hiroshima has caused some controversy in the United States. Japan had first attacked the United States with an aerial assault on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As the war progressed, many in the United States felt the decisive use of nuclear weapons actually saved lives by preventing a bloody invasion of Japan.
U.S. President Harry Truman gave the order to drop the bombs. Since then, U.S. presidents have not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons, but only as a last resort. Now, President Barack Obama has called for a world free of the weapons.
"The United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons,” the president said. “To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urge others to do the same. Make no mistake, as long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary,” Mr. Obama said.
The visit by Ambassador Roos Friday also provides a much-needed boost to U.S.-Japan relations in the wake of a tense period between the two allies that stemmed from the previous Japanese government's wavering over an agreement to relocate a controversial U.S. Marine airbase in Okinawa.
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how to fold a coin roll
Fast forward about 300 years, and Jiaozi became the first official paper currency in the Sichuan capital of Chengdu. These notes were stamped with official seals to ensure that no one made false copies. Even in the tenth century, counterfeiting was a concern.
Today, the word jiaozi is more likely to be associated with delicious Chinese dumplings. but paper money is still used in many countries. Even so, with the widespread use of debit cards and the rising popularity of digital wallets. it may not be long before the dollar bill has had its day.
So, what are we going to do with all that worthless paper when we finally become a cashless society? Dollar bills are quite useful
when it comes to bar tricks. and you can use one to crack open a cold one or even roll a cigarette. If you want to do something more artsy, there's always monigami .
Origami has been around since the 17th century, but the art of folding money, or monigami for those who are in the in, is relatively new. You can fold money into hundreds of shapes, like a tiny box or shirt and tie. but flowers are some of the most popular projects, especially when Mother's Day comes around.
What mom wouldn't like a flower made of cold hard cash?
So, here are ten different types of flowers you can origami out of a few bucks, for Mother's Day, Valentine's Day, or pretty much any other day of the year.
The Plumeria Flower
In Asian folklore, the plumeria is believed to house ghosts and demons, and in Malaysia it's associated with vampires. It also happens to be one of the simplest flowers to fold since it only requires one bill.
Check out the video below to see how to fold a plumeria blossom (the tutorial starts around 2:25). Just make sure you have a clove of garlic or some holy water nearby.
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How To Follow A Whole Foods Diet For Top Health
Good nutrition is a topic everyone aims for in their lives. When you know what to do, you can make menus full of nutritious foods for all three meals. Use the following advice to help you develop proper nutrition.
A healthy digestive tract will benefit your overall health.Drink as much water as you get enough fiber every day.
TIP! Look at the whole nutrition label before you eat something. Double check all foods because some foods that are labeled “reduced-fat” are actually higher in salt, sugar and a variety of other unhealthy additives.
Most fast foods and other junk foods are full of salt in them. If you start pulling back on how much salt you eat each day, you’ll probably start to be able to taste salt easier. Unhealthy foods might start to taste too salty for you after this. You won’t want it as often.
Red Meat
TIP! Get more nutrition in your life by eating organic products. Organic food are thought to have more nutrients and less nitrates than other foods.
Do you want to eat a lot less red meat in your diet? Use red meat to add more flavor to your vegetables and vegetables. The Chinese and Mediterranean people do this and they have lower chances of experiencing heart-related diseases.
Salmon is an excellent food to include in your healthy diet. Salmon has a healthy dose of both niacin and omega-3. Omega-3 fatty acids have reduced risk for a lot of diseases like heart disease, cancer, and niacin might help avoid Alzheimer’s disease.
TIP! Keep tabs that you are getting the right amount of selenium in your current diet. Selenium is a mineral that serves as an antioxidant.
Canned salmon is great meal. Canned salmon is rich in minerals without many carbohydrates or fat. Try varying meals as much as you want to experience the most from your diet.
If you suffer from sleeping disorders, your nutrition may be part of the problem. Some foods can help you relax; however, while other foods give you energy. It is also helpful to refrain from eating just prior to going to sleep.
Nuts make a very nutritious part of your diet if you know which types to choose. A handful of organic almonds adds fiber to your diet for a crunchy and really delicious.
Corn syrup is considered a condensed form of sugar and you should avoid these products when trying to lose weight.
Wheat Flour
TIP! When trying to teach children about good nutrition, do not make a big deal out of dessert. Instead of eating dessert every night, only eat it a few nights.
Grill kabobs for a fun dinner. This meal is fun for children because they can choose the veggies and meats are added to their kabob. Make the colors bright and cheerful so they will eat more veggies.
Let each of your months have a few cheat days monthly. This will let you have more freedom with the diet and help you to enjoy a social life.
This can be any individual that has already gone through what you are going through or may be someone who is in a position similar to your own. The most important thing is that you have someone to share your thoughts and encouragement.
TIP! Most foods that are cooked in a microwave are just not healthy. Anything that comes pre-packaged and just needs a quick zap is filled with a lot of preservatives that can keep weight on.
Eat smaller meals that are nutritious. Eating small meals several hours apart 5-6 times each day helps digestion and helps prevent weight gain. Keeping your weight down can prevent diseases like hypertension and diabetes. Eating frequently helps you feel less hungry so that you do not binge on bad foods.
Nutrition is not only important for physical health. It’s also important for mental health. By learning what your body needs, you’ll be able to create a diet that will let your body work to its full potential. Use the tips from this article to become healthier than you have ever been.
TIP! Everyone can benefit from a good diet. A great nutritional tip to use is to reduce your refined sugar intake.
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The Past, Present, and Future of U.S. Income and Wealth Inequality
Professor Valerie Ramey
This talk discusses trends in inequality in America, possible explanations, and possible solutions. It highlights the special circumstances that led to a "Golden Age" for the average U.S. worker in the 1950s and 1960s and the economic changes that subsequently led to rising income and wealth inequality. It assesses the roles of globalization, technological progress, and educational trends in the slowdown of the growth of median living standards and how those forces might shape the future. It discusses investment in education and skills as a way to reduce inequality, but also confronts the challenges involved.
Instructor: Valerie Ramey is Professor of Economics at UC San Diego and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on macroeconomics and the impact of government policy on economic prosperity. She received her PhD from Stanford University.
Coordinator: Candace Gietzen
Course Number: OSHR-70067 Credit: 0 units
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Upcoming Sections
Dates Class Type Section ID Fee
10/30/2017 In-class 127484 $0.00
Day and Time: Monday, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
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Marooned in the Desert
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Ghafra dreams of rain. Not the brief bursts of precipitation that mix with the desert dust here a few times a year, but real rain, the kind that makes the worms come out and the watermelons grow, the kind that only falls on one place on God’s Earth: Palestine.
The last time Ghafra saw that kind of rain, she was 13. It was just before the soldiers came, droves of them from the north, west, and south. They left only one path open for Ghafra’s people to escape: west. West to safety, West to Egypt. They planned to only stay a few months, waiting out the end of the fighting.
This month marks 67 years since the war with Israel—and for Ghafra and her people, 67 years of waiting to return home.
Ghafra, now an 80-year-old grandmother, is one of 40 members of the Abu Hussun tribe who fled Beersheba, an oasis in the Negev desert in what is now Israel, in 1948. They journeyed 13 days on camelback across the Rafah border, along the Mediterranean coastline of the Sinai, and southwest to the Nile Delta governorate of Sharqeya. There, they settled on a piece of land they called Jeziret el Fadl—“Island of Favor.” Nearly seven decades later, 3,000 Palestinians remain marooned on the figurative and largely forgotten island.
“Under President Abdel Nasser, we were granted equal status with Egyptians, so nobody set up specific services for us,” says Said el Namudi, the community leader. “But now, they classify us as foreigners and nobody knows about us. International charities don’t know about us.”
Even neighboring Egyptians don’t know about Jeziret el Fadl. The village is invisible from the road, surrounded by a 9-foot wall of mud and brick. Inside the wall is a maze of one-story houses and dirt paths lined by children. Their distinctive light eyes, dulled by malnutrition, watch me with lethargic indifference as I pass by. These children make up 75 percent of the village’s population today, the result of three generations of relentless reproduction aimed at increasing Palestine’s future population, Namudi explains to me.
I first learned of this village’s existence from an Egyptian journalism student. When she told me she had plans to visit the village for a class assignment, I asked if a photographer and I could come along. Four hours and four modes of transportation later, the driver of a motorcycle taxi known as a tuk-tuk pulls up to the one painted structure in the village: the diwan, a community center gifted to them from the Palestinian Authority. There, Namudi greets me, immaculately dressed in a snow-white thawb—a traditional ankle-length Arab dress—and a scarf with a picture of Yasser Arafat pinned to it hanging around his neck. Over coffee, he spends the next hour honestly but diplomatically answering my questions, coating his answers with a veneer of requisite gratitude to the Egyptian state and the Palestinian Authority.
“Egypt has been a gracious host to us,” he says, speaking in slow, elegant Arabic. “All we want from the Egyptian government is for someone who lives in Egypt and was born in Egypt to be treated like an Egyptian. … Today, our poor pay the prices of Egypt’s wealthiest. All we want is for our poor to be treated as the Egyptian poor.” As foreigners, the Palestinians don’t have access to the state subsidies provided to poor Egyptians.
Said el Namudi is the mayor of Jezerit el Fadl and the one responsible for dealing with the media. He is honest about challenges the village faces, but is careful to coat everything in a veneer of gratefulness toward their Egyptian hosts. Photo: Nicholas Linn
Sixty-year-old Maliha remembers well the days when she could pick up bread, sugar, oil, and rice for mere pennies. Growing up, she never worried about having the right papers—why should she? She was born in Egypt and had never thought to question whether she had the right to be there. But suddenly, about 30 years ago, something changed, she tells me as she swings her scythe at knee-high clovers with gusto disproportionate to her age and frame.
“God knows why, but suddenly, we had to pay for everything,” she tells me. “Everything costs money now.”
Maliha’s husband passed away 17 years ago, leaving her with nine children to care for. She gets by as a modern-day feudal farmer, working a small plot of land for a man from the north who comes by once a season to collect half of whatever she grows.
“I rent the land from him and he takes the final product,” she says, standing up and placing a hand on my shoulder to steady herself. I can feel her pulse pounding through her fingertips as she draws in short, weary breaths. “I have to do everything: plant, water, harvest. But work is good. Work is a gift from God.” She smiles and bends back down again. “Just pray for me that God gives me strength.”
What Maliha doesn’t know is that 37 years ago, after extended discussions in a place called Camp David, her host country signed a treaty that began U.S. military aid to Egypt—and the end of equal status for Palestinians. With the swish of a pen, the state’s allegiances shifted toward the power and wealth of the West and away from the stateless Palestinians, who had become a political nuisance and a drain on the country’s resources.
The situation had already been gradually getting worse throughout the 1970s, but the nail in the coffin came with Camp David and then later that year when a Palestinian assassinated the Egyptian culture minister, Yusuf Sibai, according to Oroub el Abed, a post-doctoral research fellow at the British Institute of Amman. “They started changing laws. During the days of Abdel Nasser, the laws used to say things like, ‘Education is to be free for all citizens, including Palestinians,’ ” Abed says. “But after the killing of [the minister], the words changed to ‘except for Palestinians.’”
As these laws began to be implemented in the ’80s under President Hosni Mubarak, people like Maliha gradually lost access to food subsidies, free education, and free health care—and they were then required to obtain and maintain legal residency as foreigners. Failure to do so could mean fines or even jail time, Abed says.
“They live in prison, literally,” Abed says. “Often, the state turns a blind eye because they know they cannot run after everyone. But when they do catch them without the right permits, what do they do? Deport them where? Nowhere. They cannot deport them. They simply put them in prison.”
Palestinians in Egypt now find themselves at the epicenter of a perfect political storm. Egypt classifies them as foreigners, but shies away from calling them refugees and placing them under the mandate of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the branch of the U.N. tasked with assisting and relocating asylum-seekers.
“Even though they technically are under UNHCR, the Egyptian government keeps intervening in the Palestinian case,” says former UNHCR Statelessness Fellow Paavo Savolainen. “UNHCR Egypt is under Egyptian law and if a Palestinian were to show up with a UNHCR document, UNHCR would be in big trouble. Usually the argument is that they’re trying to preserve the nationalized entity of Palestinians. So to a certain degree, the Egyptian government agrees that Palestinians are refugees from their own country but they don’t want Palestinians to fall under the mandate of UNHCR. So they created their own national refugee program.”
UNCHR in turn does not classify Palestinians as stateless because to do so would be to tacitly acknowledge that the state of Palestine does not exist. Politics and principles aside however, the hard fact is that Beersheba is now under the ownership and governance of a state called Israel, a state that acknowledges no Palestinian right of return. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ interpretation of international conventions, they are under no obligation to help Palestinians in exile return to their land or find a new home in the West Bank, nor do they have any intention of doing so.
This small schoolhouse was a gift from the Palestinian Authority. On its walls are portraits of famous Palestinians; including Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Darwish. Photo: Nicholas Linn
“Once again it comes down to international politics and the very vague status of the Palestinian state, which in practice, doesn’t exist, but to certain theoretical amounts, it does,” Savolainen says. “Last year, UNHCR started a 10-year campaign to eradicate statelessness, but Palestinians, who are actually the biggest stateless population in the world are excluded from the scope of this campaign.”
What’s more, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency—the U.N. branch specifically tasked with serving Palestinians—is not allowed to operate in Egypt. “And that’s why Palestinians are in big trouble,” Savolainen says. To the Egyptian government, Palestinians are foreigners. To UNHCR, they are a political minefield best left alone. And to UNRWA, they just fall on the wrong side of a border.
As a result, for Palestinians in Egypt the only hope for documentation and legal recognition lies with the Egyptian government. The state issues them travel documents (recognized by only Sudan and Saudi Arabia), but it is up to them to keep them stamped with the proper residency permits, issued by the Egyptian office for Palestinian affairs in the mogamaa—the country’s stronghold of bureaucracy in central Cairo. To obtain this vital stamp once they turn 18, Palestinians must either prove that they are studying or working in Egypt, or that they are married to an Egyptian.
“Five percent of our students have gone on to university,” Namudi says, “but they have to pay 10 times what Egyptians pay and they have to pay in foreign currency so it is very difficult.”
Working is also not a likely option; under Egyptian law, businesses are only allowed to open up 10 percent of their jobs to foreigners. As a result, these jobs typically go to highly skilled foreign hires—not uneducated Palestinians. This leaves young Palestinians with two options: marry an Egyptian or hide. In Jeziret el Fadl, most can get by as day laborers or sharecroppers and live out their days in peace and poverty inside the village walls.
But those with dreams of traveling beyond the village—or beyond Egypt—are best off letting them go. In the old days, 65-year-old Abu Yasser, a handsome man with a thick, white mustache, fathered 17 children with two wives and kept them all fed with frequent work trips to Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan, and Iraq.
“But the laws changed in the ’80s and I haven’t been able to travel since,” Yasser says with a shrug. “Who knows why? Political reasons, economic reasons. Only God knows.”
Abu Yasser holds his only ID, a “travel document” issued by Egypt for Palestinians. This ID is only recognized by Saudi Arabia and Sudan.Photo: Nicholas Linn
Today, Yasser and his sons feed the family by working as day laborers for nearby farmers, helping them bring in the harvest and sell it at the market. He is grandfather to around 70 children—he lost count a while ago, he tells me, laughing. He keeps his travel document stamped with a special agricultural stamp from Egypt’s ministry of the interior, but he holds onto hope that soon, he won’t need it anymore.
“We’ll return, inshallah, God willing, we’ll return,” he says.
I sit with Ghafra in the cool of her mud-brick house. She looks down at me from one seeing eye, her cracked hands folded daintily in her lap, her long, black hair tucked modestly behind a colorful scarf. Flies buzz around the thatched roof overhead; grandchildren and great-grandchildren hover around her feet.
At 80, Ghafra’s memory is beginning to fade. She no longer knows how many grandchildren she has or who is president of Egypt. But she knows what home is, and she dreams of it still. Home is the smell of camels, soil, and freshly cut watermelon, starry nights, tall grass, and the wild rains from the skies over Beersheba.
Emily Crane
Emily Crane is a freelance journalist based in Cairo reporting on social justice issues in post-revolution Egypt. She is currently conducting research on a narrative non-fiction book project.
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tricks for writing better essays
The Foolproof Formula For A Great Rhetorical Analysis Essay
The rhetorical essay is making a resurgence in classrooms. Now that standardized tests are requesting that students analyze this type of essay, students need to learn how to write them. Fortunately, it is easy to find what you need when you check out this service. The formula for writing a rhetorical essay is rather easy to learn and remember.
Necessary Components
Like all analysis essays, the rhetorical paper requires the use of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The necessary pieces of this style of paper are relatively similar to other forms, too. The biggest difference lies in the introduction. In a regular essay, the reader assumes it is a regular essay; but with a rhetorical paper, the reader needs to be informed of the nature of the project. It is vital that the reader know what you are analyzing, whether it is a document, piece of art, or other medium. Some introductions will describe the medium by explaining the document and the situation.
What to Put in the Thesis Statement
The introduction should also include a thesis statement. It should be placed at the end of the thesis, just like in a traditional essay. The thesis should explain the focus and why it deserves to be analyzed. You could make an argument that is unexpected, which would explain the rhetorical aspect of the paper.
Organize the Body Paragraphs
The body of the paper should analyze the document. It is important to decide what order you want your paragraphs to be in and you can choose from either spatial or chronological, unless you want to analyze it persuasively. If you organize it spatially, you look at the document from one direction to another, eventually ending up in the center. With chronological order, you explain the document from beginning to end. If you choose to write a persuasive piece, you will want to look at the different types of logic used in the document. These include logos, pathos, and ethos.
End Successfully
At the end of the paper, you do need to include a conclusion. This part of the paper is just like a traditional essay. It is best to restate the thesis, then to remind the readers of the main points of your essay. At the very end, you wrap it up in the most interesting way possible.
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Bill Gates Funding Drone Technology to Deliver Vaccines
We have—or soon will have—needle-free vaccines. Vaccines with micro needles. Sublingual vaccines. Vaccine patches. Inhalable powder vaccines. The old Star Trek type of vaccines. Even mail-order vaccines. Vaccines that are easier and faster to produce.
When it comes to money and imagination, Bill Gates seems to have an endless supply of both. That man is a tough act to follow. In 2010 he announced a $10 billion pledge over the next decade, saying, “We must make this the decade of vaccines.” [1]
Thanks to a sizable grant from the Gates Foundation (with oversight from WHO and UNICEF), $100,000 is being provided to 17 different initiatives, for a total of $1.7 million. [2] The purpose is—and I quote Michel Zaffran, Director of project Optimize and Senior Adviser for WHO’s Department of Immunization, Vaccines, and Biologicals—“to ensure new vaccines reach the millions of people in the poorest countries. The time for ‘business as usual’ has passed—it’s time for bold ideas.” [3]
One “bold idea” is unmanned aerial vehicles to quickly and inexpensively deliver vaccines to hard-to-reach areas. The vehicles will be deployed remotely by healthcare workers. The winner of this project is the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Division, with five students under the direction of Professor George Barbastathis. [4] Projects that are successful may be eligible for another grant of $1 million. [5]
Military drones
Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. has been using modern drones that are operated by a remote control and monitored through a live-streaming screen thousands of miles away from the target area. The vehicles hover silently, undetectable by radar. For more information on the use of drones and their controversy, see Michael Hastings’ article in Rolling Stone. [6]
Rabies bait
The oral rabies vaccine is nothing new. In this country, 12+ million doses of Raboral V-RG are dropped from unmanned aircraft every year. Worldwide, more than 100 million doses since the late 1980s. [7] The cost? In the U.S. and Canada, approximately $130 million in a decade. [8]
If you poke around the Internet a little, you’ll find some “safety” instructions. Basically, the claim is that the bait isn’t harmful for humans or pets (although wildlife is less likely to eat a packet that’s been touched by humans). A few precautions for pet owners: Keep pets inside or tied in the backyard for a week after the bait is dropped. If a domestic animal like a cat or dog eats the bait, avoid coming in contact with the saliva for 24 hours. [10] If you handle the bait, use paper towels or wear gloves. If the vaccine liquid gets on your skin, wash with soap and water, and call the local health department (or the number on the packet). [11]
Sounds relatively safe, right? I thought so, too—until I read the Merial Material “Safety” Data Sheet. It states that the RABORAL V-RG is “potentially hazardous to health if any of the following should occur: ingestion, parenteral inoculation, droplet or aerosol exposure of mucous membranes or if broken skin is exposed to infectious fluids or tissues. All people should avoid contact, but young children, pregnant women, individuals with immune deficiencies or those on steroids should avoid contact with this vaccine.” It also says: “Do not allow undiluted product or large quantities of it to reach ground water, water course or sewage system.” [12]
If you’ve read my story, you know that the RabAvert rabies vaccine given to my grandson in 2006 wasn’t safe. (Actually, several batches used in that same year were recalled because of a partially inactivated virus.) Many people think “it’s just a rabies vaccine.” My daughter and I know from personal experience that there’s no such thing.
• How long does the vaccine last?
• Can the vaccine create resistance to the rabies virus?
West Nile Virus spray
All the pesticides, even though they come in different combinations, contain known toxins that don’t just kill mosquitoes. They cause serious damage to fish and other aquatic animals and pets. They’ve been linked to breast and liver cancer and endocrine disruption. They’ve been blamed for the “die off” of bees and potentially disrupting “our natural ecosystem.” [21]
I can’t help but think of one of the recently proposed causes of autism. Household dust while the baby is in the womb—a cause that is the subject of an NIH-funded research study. I don’t understand how that can possibly be a concern to a government that maintains it’s perfectly safe to inhale aerial pesticides that are sprayed into the environment.
• Is a 60 percent effectiveness rateif that’s indeed true“effective?” That leaves almost half of the mosquitoes alive and potentially spreading the virus.
• What does the spray do to our crops?
• Could the WNV spraying be responsible for pertussis outbreaks? [24] After all, cases have doubled in the last year—a year in which a lot of spraying has been going on. [25]
I’m certainly not minimizing rabies, but why spend all that money and go to so much trouble for a disease that kills one or two humans a year? It just doesn’t make sense. Not coming from a government that claims far more deaths from childhood diseases, like measles and whooping cough—not to mention the flu.
Would they really do this for rabies for almost 20 years and not have already come up with a similar scheme for these other diseases? I can’t believe that their concern is for wildlife, livestock, and domestic animals. There has to be another reason, another explanation. Maybe …
Where’s the quality control? I realize those are words we don’t usually connect with vaccines, but who will be in charge of this program? We all remember past problems—failed freezers, reused syringes, accidental needle sticks, and, of course, the time Baxter Pharmaceuticals shipped live avian flu virus (mixed with vaccine material) to medical distributors in 18 countries. [27] So many opportunities for dangerous, if not fatal, mistakes.
Could this be about power? Control? It’s so easy to scare people. Fear is powerful and controlling. You know, we have this deadly pertussis outbreak. Everybody better get a pertussis vaccine. That is, if they don’t decide to spray them on us. Or maybe they’ll encourage both methods of delivery.
If you do as much research as I’ve done, you’ll end up with your head spinning. Some of my thoughts are unthinkable. Not impossible. Just unthinkable. I used to think that people who suggested vaccines as a means to population control were crazy. Now I’m not so sure.
Help me out here. What do you think is behind the aerial spraying of vaccines?
[contentbox headline=”REFERENCES” type=”normal”]
1. http://forumblog.org/2010/01/bill-and-melinda-gates-pledge-us-10-billion…
2. http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveVaccines/Topics/Pages/…
3. www.who.int/immunization/newsroom/newsstory_grants_optimize_imm_systems/en/index.html
4. www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health/Pages/gce-round8-winners.aspx#image=4
5. www.grandchallenges.org/Explorations/Pages/GrantsAwarded.aspx
7. http://preventdisease.com/news/12/011712_Look-Up-The-New-Age…
8. http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/15/8/08-1061_article.htm
9. http://remixxworld.blogspot.com/2012/01/texas-department-of-state-health.html
10. www.cleveland.com/sun/all/index.ssf/2012/08/distribution_of_oral_rabies_va.html
11. http://www.hurherald.com/cgi-bin/db_scripts/articles?…
12. www.raboral.com/pdf/RABORAL_V_RG_w_bait_2005%28USA%29.pdf
13. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5843a2.htm
14. http://preventdisease.com/news/12/011712_Look-Up-The-New…
15. www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5902a1.htm
16. www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/dallas-west-nile-virus_n_1791551.html
17. www.abctlc.com/courses/aerialapplication.pdf
19. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/pesticide-spray-west-nile-mosquitoes_n_1895014.html
20. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/16/nation/la-na-nn-dallas-west-nile-spray-20120816
21. www.naturalnews.com/036877_aerial_spraying_West_Nile_virus_chemicals.html
22. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/14/pesticide-spraying-west-nile-toxic…
24. www.omsj.org/blogs/whooping-con-outbreak
25. http://www.wfaa.com/news/health/State-issues-advisory-after-Dallas-whooping…
26. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57495136/dallas-begins-aerial-assault-on-west-nile-virus/
27. www.naturalnews.com/025760.html#ixzz2A2kOorS4
28. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9vZLlJhI7o&feature=related
Photo Credit
Jennifer Hutchinson
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Coding a simple Web API with CodeIgniter – Part 2
Now that we have a working installation of CodeIgniter let’s take a closer look at the core of our Web API functionality: the controller.
In CodeIgniter we define a controller as a file inside the controller directory by using the following template.
You can find all the code in this GitHub repository.
Note that the class name must match the file name and the first letter must be uppercase. Also take in account the reserved names used by the framework.
In the previous post we saw how to call methods of the API via URL’s and we also implemented a simple way to output data via echo in the fake db controller. The next step is to know how to pass parameters to these methods.
You can do so by:
• Using URI segments as parameters
• Including POST parameters in an http request
• Including get information in the URL
Let’s see these in action. Make a new subfolder inside controllers/ called examples/, inside create a inputs.php file, and place the following code.
As you see the input class is a CodeIgniter library that allows us to do easily grab parameters. This library, among others, is initialized automatically by CodeIgniter. Then you have helpers, helpers differ from libraries in that a helper is just a set of functions with no access to the caller context ($this). Lastly you have drivers, which is a convenient way of relating classes.
For the next example let’s test the inputs controller we just created. As you can see in the following code we are leveraging on the unit testing CodeIgniter library which we need to load manually. Also the url helper will allow us to access the $config['base_url'] configuration that we specified in the previous post. Now create a controllers/test/ folder, place the .php and just call the controller name in your browser. The index method will be automagically executed and you should see a nice unit testing report telling you that, hopefully, everything is okay.
Let’s create our own helper. A custom helper has to be located in the php/helpers directory and needs to be prefixed with ‘my_’. Let’s call it my_helper.php and copy the following code.
For convenience let’s refactor some configuration parameters, create a myConfig.php file and place it inside php/config/ with the following content changing the database constants accordingly.
And here is the code for the controller.
As you can see we are loading our helper and expecting that tableName, dbName, primaryKey and data are supplied as POST parameters. It shouldn’t be too troublesome to understand how the code is doing its stuff.
Last but not least, if you are an Ext JS or Touch guy you should have an idea about how to leverage an Web API in your application. In the dynamic grid post you can now see clearly how this API is used; CRUD operations mapped inside the proxy and getTableMetadata as the url of an Ext.Ajax request.
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RADON ACT: Braley Proposes Legislation
Congressman Bruce Braley is introducing a new act aimed at protecting students and teachers from a danger in schools they may not even know is there.
Braley introduced the End Radon in Schools Act Thursday. The legislation would provide grants to states giving them funds to work with districts to test radon levels in school buildings.
Radon is an invisible gas produced by the decay of uranium in soil and water. It is the second leading cause of lung cancer. The entire state of Iowa is in Zone 1, which means it has the highest potential for exposure to the gas.
Braley worked with the Iowa-based Radon Coalition to craft the legislation. One of its members, retired teacher Gail Orcutt, had her left lung removed because of cancer believed to be linked to radon. She was in Washington, D.C. Thursday for the introduction of the legislation.
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Bon Bibi Legend and 'Ethnic Cleansing' of India's Forests
Amitav Ghosh
(Photo A: Cburnett)
Tiger from the Sundarbans
The world famous Indian writer Amitav Ghosh likes to tell the Bon Bibi story of the Sundarbans mangrove forests from West Bengal and Bangladesh: "The jungles of 'the country of eighteen tides' were then the realm of Dokkhin Rai, a powerful demon king, who held sway over every being that lived in the forest - every animal as well as every ghoul, ghost and malevolent spirit. Towards mankind he harboured a hatred that was coupled with insatiable desires; he had a limitless craving for the pleasures of human flesh, and when overcome by desire he would take the form of a tiger in order to hunt human beings.
(..) Alone and disconsolate, the boy went into the forest to collect an armful of firewood. On his return he found his misgivings confirmed: the ships were gone. It was in that moment of abandonment, as he stood alone on the riverbank, that he caught a glimpse of an enormous body covered with shimmering stripes of black and gold. The animal was none other than Dokkhin Rai, in tiger's guise."
More effective than anti-littering laws
According to Ghosh uses "the Bon Bibi legend the power of fiction to create and define a relationship between human beings and the natural world. Nowhere does a term equivalent to 'Nature' figure in the legend of Bon Bibi, yet nowhere is its consciousness absent.
(..) Take for instance the belief that the wild parts of the forest are the domain of Dokkhin Rai: the corollary of this is the idea that to leave signs of human penetration is to invite retribution from the demon. So powerful is this prohibition that villagers will not urinate, defecate or spit while collecting honey or firewood. And let there be no doubt that the fear of the demon's wrath is far more effective than secular anti-littering laws - for in the order of preventive sanctions, a municipal fine can scarcely be counted the equal of the prospect of death by agency of storms and floods, tigers and crocodiles."
"In the 19th century, the generally accepted view among academically trained European foresters was that the presence of people was always a threat and never an asset to forests: it was thought that where woodlands survived it was despite rather than because of the people who lived in and around them.
(..) Although the Forest Department has now been subsumed under the Ministry of Forests and Environment, it continues to wield a near-imperial authority over its vast dominions: this is indeed a veritable inland empire, whose authority weighs upon a hundred million people - and on none more heavily than those who live in the vicinity of national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
(..) In effect, over many decades, there has been a kind of 'ethnic cleansing' of India's forests: indigenous groups have been evicted or marginalised and hotel chains and urban tourists have moved in.
(..) The Forest Department is no different from any other arm of government, in that some of its officers are idealistic and competent while others are corrupt and inefficient. But it so happens that the Forest Department holds sway in areas where there is little oversight, which means, unfortunately, that there is often greater scope for the abuse of bureaucratic power.
(..) The consequences of this exclusivist approach have been harmful not just for the 'ecosystem people' but also for the very environment it sought to protect."
Choose between 'tigers and tribals'
About the Forest Rights Act Ghosh writes: "Modest though these proposals are, the Act has been stalled by a coalition that includes the forest bureaucracy, some members of Parliament and a few well-intentioned conservationists whose experience and idealism are beyond question. This group has turned the Forest Rights Bill into an issue where the state must choose between 'tigers and tribals'. (..) Their proposals for the rectification of the situation are, in effect, of a paramilitary nature."
"(..) While political disempowerment may have been more the rule then the exception in Asia and Africa of the late 20th century, it would be a mistake to imagine that this will continue forever. Soon refugees displaced by forest reserves will learn to organise; many will join those who have already taken to arms; others will form vote blocs and elect representatives who will carry their grievances to Parliament."
(Photo C: Bri Vos)
Mangrove forest.
(Photo E: Anirban Biswas)
(Photo F: V. Malik from New Delhi and Pune, India)
The Bon Bibi deity.
(Photo G: Frances Voon)
(Photo B: Joiseyshowaa)
Sunset at Sundarbans.
Read more: 'Wild Fictions', 7 page article from Amitav Ghosh in Word, 7 photos; 400 KB.
Go to next page: Mother Earth - a new future for small farners; documentary
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How to design writing intensive assignments
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How To Design Writing Intensive Assignments - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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How To Design Writing Intensive Assignments. Workshop Purpose. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce faculty members to some of the foundation issues associated with designing assignments for writing intensive courses.
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Presentation Transcript
Workshop purpose
Workshop Purpose
With participants’ assistance, we will try to identify course specific assignments during the workshop and ensuing discussion.
Identify the assignment purpose
Identify the Assignment Purpose
What is the purpose of the assignment? Do you want students to:
• define and apply a word or term?
• understand and describe a procedure?
• evaluate the effectiveness of an approach?
• take a position about a controversy and provide evidence to support that position?
Identify the intended audience
Identify the Intended Audience
The instructor can share information to help students identify and learn who are typical audience groups in the discipline. The instructor can also help students learn about the various needs and expectations of these different audience groups.
Doing so can help students better understand what forms of writing are appropriate and why.
Identify the assignment goal s
Identify the Assignment Goal(s)
Do you want students to achieve practice and improved information literacy because they have to incorporate information from multiple credible sources and correctly cite information?
Do you want students to be able to identify relevant information and correctly quote, summarize, or paraphrase this information?
Do you want students to know the difference between a peer reviewed article and a general periodical article?
Attach value to the assignment
Attach Value to the Assignment
If students perceive or attach value to an assignment, they are more likely to be engaged.
Can the assignment be designed to reflect “real life” in terms or context students can relate to?
Example: Having students discuss and write about the textbook market, helps them to understand (if not appreciate) why their textbook costs as much as it does.
Consider enlisting assistance from others
Consider Enlisting Assistance From Others
The instructor does not have to know everything. Call upon others with specialized knowledge who can complement your skill or content knowledge.
Example: UHH Librarians routinely visit classes and tailor research presentations to students. They can demonstrate library tools that students can use to organize and manage research material necessary to complete the assignment.
Typical writing intensive assignments
Typical Writing Intensive Assignments
There is no such thing.
It is true that there are typical assignment forms, but some assignments are more appropriate in one discipline than others.
What follows are some suggestions. Consider adopting these assignments if these are appropriate to the discipline you teach in.
The term paper is not the only assignment
The Term Paper Is Not the Only Assignment
While the term paper (aka research paper) is a common assignment, it does not have to be the only writing assignment students work on.
If it is the typical assignment for the course/discipline, then consider doing the following:
• provide students with a clear purpose
• help them identify the intended audience
• break the assignment into several shorter tasks with clearly stated (and reasonable) deadlines
• provide opportunities for instructor feedback and revision throughout the assignment
General suggestions
General Suggestions
• Provide students with a range of assignments and activities which are informal and formal
• Provide students with a range of assignments that vary in length
• You do not have to grade (or score) every piece of writing. Even on informal writing like journal entries, however, consider writing at least one comment about a statement or idea so students see you are paying attention to what they write
• Students must learn to accept their responsibility for achieving error-free writing. You do not have to accept writing which is full of errors.
• If you are going to identify errors for students, focus on one paragraph or section only. Use that as an example of the type and amount of errors the student now has to examine the rest of his or her paper for.
Other resources
Other Resources
As I work to build a UH-Hilo inventory of examples of Writing Intensive assignments, faculty are welcome to view the resources provided to members of the UH system on the Manoa Writing Program website:
Additionally, here are some Teacher Resource links to other detailed handouts and examples:
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Also found in: Thesaurus, Acronyms, Idioms, Wikipedia.
n. Informal
1. A living creature.
3. A person.
[Alteration of creature.]
Word History: In many American regional dialects, the word bull, meaning "adult male bovine," was once highly taboo. When speaking in mixed company, people would substitute a variety of words and call the bull a booman, brute, gentleman cow, or surly. In the Northeast in particular, critter was a common word used to avoid saying bull, both by itself and in combinations like beef critter and cross critter. The most common meaning of critter is "a living creature," whether wild or domestic; it also can mean "a child" when used as a term of sympathetic endearment, or it can mean "an unfortunate person." But in old-fashioned speech, critter and beast denoted a large domestic animal. The more restricted senses "a cow," "a horse," or "a mule" are still characteristic of the speech in specific regions of the United States. Critter itself originates as a dialectal variant of creature, but owing to the pronunciation spelling critter, the term has taken on something of a life of its own as a separate word. The American regional word also has its own variants, including creeter and cretter. In some ways, the pronunciation of critter would have been very familiar to Shakespeare: 16th- and 17th-century English had not yet begun to pronounce the -ture suffix with its modern (ch) sound. This archaic pronunciation survives not only in American critter, but also in Irish English creature, pronounced (krā′tŭr) and used in the same senses as the American word.
US and Canadian a dialect word for creature
(ˈkrɪt ər)
n. Dial.
1. a domesticated animal.
2. any creature.
[1815–20; variant of creature]
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.critter - a regional term for `creature' (especially for domestic animals)critter - a regional term for `creature' (especially for domestic animals)
[ˈkrɪtər] (US) n (= creature) → créature f
References in classic literature ?
Elizabeth Russell was a nice, clever little critter, and Mrs.
There, that'll fix you fool critters," Bill said with satisfaction that night, standing erect at completion of his task.
The beloved characters, gentle humor, and solid family values emphasized in Mercer's Little Critter book series remain the same, and now kids can extend that book experience by engaging with the characters and story in ways that they could not have before.
1 -- color) Mountain lions and other critters are expected to be out in force in coming weeks.
Continuing a tradition of corporate philanthropy started in 2008, Michigan Critter Catchers - an OBC partner - is donating $3,500 in 2013 to fund a grant enabling OBC staff to host 14 events at various nature centers in five counties across Michigan.
The series will cover areas of behavior, character building and life lessons in humorous, entertaining and comforting ways only the world-famous and best-selling Little Critter character could share and emulate.
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4.700 speakers
2 language specific characters
ISO 639 code: mus
Creek is a Muskogean language with about 4,700 speakers in the US states of Oklahoma and Florida. It is spoken by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The language is also known as Muskogee, Muscogee or Seminole.
Creek first appeared in writing in 1736. Laws were being written in Creek from 1849, and a standard alphabet, the 'National Alphabet', was adopted in 1853. By the 1870s newpaper articles in Creek were being published.
source, &
Definitely endangered
older brothers
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Impact of Human Capital on the Economy
Human capital is one of the foundations of a modern economy. Without well-educated people working, innovating, and generating wealth, an economy will not grow. Even if the nation is sitting on top of a massive amount of mineral wealth, without human capital the economy will only grow as far as other nations invest in extracting that wealth. The critical thing to keep in mind when thinking of human capital’s relationship to the economy is that the relative size and quality of a nation’s workforce determines the baseline for the size and efficiency of the nation’s economy.
America’s workforce was extremely well-adapted to the economic conditions of the mid-20th century. From the end of WWII to the mid-80s we had one of the most efficient and productive workforces in the world. Even better, we had a population explosion in the fifties and sixties; because the basic formula for GDP is “production = labor x productivity,” a rapidly increasing and highly productive labor force meant that we could maintain a very healthy growth rate for the rest of the 20th Century.
However, the size of our labor force will never grow at the same rate as it did in the baby-boom generation, and if we ever again want to see sustained growth rates for real GDP much higher than 2% we will need to drastically increase our productivity in order to accommodate our much lower workforce growth rate. Worse still, our labor force participation rate has been dropping and our workforce has noticeably failed to adapt to the more recent changes in the global economic reality, becoming substantially less competitive with respect to technology and trade. Our educational system has failed to keep up with the needs of the economy, producing too few high school graduates, lower-quality high school graduates, too few skilled specialists with post-secondary training, and too few college graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math. This seriously undermines our ability to compete in the global economy.
Threatening demographic trends, a dysfunctional immigration system, an increasing mismatch between the skills needed by the economy and those provided by our educational system, a growing and increasingly unproductive underclass, and a ridiculously expensive and ineffective healthcare system have all combined to distort the nation’s economic performance downwards, and will continue to do so unless we fix the way we deal with human capital within our nation.
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Describe The Battle Of The Cowshed
3 Answers
readerofbooks's profile pic
readerofbooks | College Teacher | (Level 2) Educator Emeritus
Posted on
The Battle of Cowshed occurred because Mr. Jones finally was able to get a group of men together to attempt to take back his farm. At first, no one wanted to help Jones. In fact, Orwell states that people wanted to take advantage of Jones's situation. However, when the rebellion seemed to be going well, others were afraid that this rebellion might spread.
Snowball got wind of this and he was ready. He studied the battle tactics of no one less than Julius Caesar. Snowball's tactic was threefold.
First, he sent the pigeons to create disorder among the attackers. Then he sent the geese to peck at the legs of the people. All of this was diversionary. Second, Snowball sent bigger animals like Muriel, Benjamin, and the sheep. After this initial attack, Snowball ordered them to retreat. The humans thought they won. They even rejoiced. However, this retreat, too, was all a part of his plan. Third, as the men came closer, the horses and cows moved into the battle and surprised and overwhelmed Jones and his men. Here is the text:
The battle was successful.
The animals rejoiced. Surprisingly, there was only one casualty - a sheep. The animals gave him honors. Also they decided to call the battle, "Battle of Cowshed," because that was where the battle was fought. At this point, Snowball was also recognized for his heroic role in the battle. Perhaps more importantly, October 12th, the date of the battle, would become a lasting memory for the animals.
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durbanville | High School Teacher | (Level 2) Educator Emeritus
Posted on
In Animal Farm, George Orwell, reveals the weaknesses of man and how the abuse of power has devastating results. He also shows how history repeats itself and how man, depicted in Animal Farm as simple animals, makes the same mistakes repeatedly. The farm animals have long been abused by Jones and other farmers and have eventually been able to take control of what was Manor Farm. This marks the turning point in the animals' attempt to retake control of their lives and ensure a promising future for everyone in an equal society. The animals, under the guidance of the more intelligent pigs, are motivated to work hard but, from the beginning, there are disputes and disagreements about the definition of being "equal," as it seems that, unfortunately, some, "are more equal than others."
Jones does attempt to retake the farm but Snowball's strategies, which include letting Jones believe he has usurped the animals, and Boxer's sheer strength, ensure that the animals remain in control and Jones and his men hastily withdraw, despite their superior fire-power, amidst biting, pushing and kicking. This event is known as The Battle of The Cowshed and both Snowball and Boxer are heralded as heroes, even being rewarded for their valiant efforts. It is a significant event as Napoleon, who prefers brute force to reasoned debate, does not want to share power with the well-organized Snowball. He will later use Snowball's apparent heroic deeds to suggest that, in fact, he is a traitor, confusing the easily-led animals until the farm, actually, returns to its former name of Manor Farm and there is little difference between the men and the pigs, as "already it was impossible to say which was which."
pohnpei397's profile pic
pohnpei397 | College Teacher | (Level 3) Distinguished Educator
Posted on
You can find this described in Chapter 4.
The people come on to the farm to try to drive the animals off.
The animals start off with small attacks. First pigeons and geese, then sheep and Benjamin the donkey. Then Snowball gives an order and they all retreat.
At that, the men think they are winning and they charge. When the men are well inside the yard, the big animals -- horses, cows and pigs -- come out of ambush and surround and attack them. Snowball, for example, attacks Jones and (even though he gets shot a bit) butts Jones into a dungheap.
The men get kicked and bitten and such until the see a way out and run away.
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Gassy Baby
Created: November 14, 2003. - Reviewed: January 19, 2016.
As a new parent you might be surprised by how much gas your newborn baby passes. If your baby has crying attacks, you might worry that the two are connected. Discover why your baby is gassy, if gas discomfort is likely to cause crying, and how to prevent and relieve any discomfort.
Gassy Baby
Rowena Bennett
Rowena Bennett
• Registered Nurse
• Registered Midwife
• Child Health Nurse
• Mental Health Nurse
View Profile
What causes gas in infants?
1. Swallowed air
Swallowed air is the most common cause of gas in the stomach and is the major reason for burping or belching. Swallowing some air is unavoidable. Big and small alike, we all swallow air. Infants swallow air...
• During breast and bottle feeding.
• While eating solid foods. (Eating or drinking quickly greatly increases the amount of air swallowed.)
• During episodes of intense crying.
• When swallowing saliva.
• While vigorously sucking on a pacifier.
In a breastfed infant, swallowing large amounts of air may be linked to poor latch-on and/or a fast and plentiful supply of breast milk. In a bottle fed infant swallowing large amounts of air may be due to an unsuitable feeding nipple which is too small, too short and/or too fast for the baby.
MYTH: A common belief is that babies will swallow air if they are taken outside on windy days or travel in the car with the window down. Both of these are untrue.
2. Normal digestion
Acid produced in the stomach, is neutralized by digestive secretions as it passes into the intestines (bowel) and the resulting reaction creates gas as a by-product. Some of this gas is absorbed into the blood stream and exhaled out of the lungs. The rest of the gas will continue through the intestines/bowel and is passed out as flatus.
Where bowel movements are 'normal', most likely the amount of gas is also normal. (See diarrhea for more on what normal infant bowel movements look like.)
3. Incomplete breakdown of food or milk
An incompletely breakdown of food and/or milk can result in excessive gas and diarrhea. In infants these symptoms are commonly due to...
• Immaturity of the digestive system.
• Digestive disorders.
• Malabsorption problems.
A small number of babies may experience excessive gas and diarrhea due to an inability to adequately digest one or more of the proteins, carbohydrates (sugars and starches) or fats found in milk (including infant formula), juices and some foods. This is due to insufficient production of necessary digestive enzymes, believed to be related to immaturity of an infant's digestive tract.
Both breast and formula fed babies may continue to display gastric symptoms, such as excessive gas and diarrhea, following a gastro-intestinal infection, due to secondary lactose intolerance. Often mistaken for lactose intolerance is . Lactose overload (also known as 'functional lactase deficiency') commonly occurs in healthy, thriving breastfed babies under the age of 5 months. Although the symptoms are almost identical to lactose intolerance, the management of these two conditions is quite different.
A tiny number of formula fed babies may experience gastric symptoms due to milk protein allergy or intolerance. Although rare, similar symptoms can also develop in breastfed babies, as a result of an allergy or intolerance to proteins, from cow's milk or other foods, which are transferred through breast milk from the mother's diet.
Gastric symptoms may also occur when a child starts on solid foods or juice. Symptoms may develop due to carbohydrate malabsorption, where carbohydrates are not completely digested (broken down). These foods include sugars such as raffinose in beans; lactose in milk and dairy products (as mentioned above); fructose in onions, artichokes, pears and wheat; sorbitol in fruits such as apples, pears, peaches and prunes; and starches found in potatoes, corn, noodles, oats and wheat.
The amount and type of fiber contained in a food impacts on the amount of gas produced. Not all fiber causes gas. Some fiber is soluble and other insoluble, describing whether it can be absorbed or not. Fibers found in oat bran, beans, peas, and fruits may cause gas, whereas fiber found in many other foods may not. It depends on what is eaten and how much is eaten. A high fiber diet will generally produce more than a diet containing less fiber.
Vegetables - carrot, eggplant, broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, onions, artichokes and asparagus; and legumes - beans, peas, chickpeas, soybeans and nuts, can increase the amount of gas produced.
• Many of these foods provide an excellent source of vitamins and essential nutrients and it is not recommended to exclude them from a child's diet, simply to find a balance.
• It is known that babies lack sufficient digestive enzymes to adequately digest solid foods before the age of 4 months (or older for some babies). Recent recommendations for starting solids, for both breast and bottle fed babies in now 6 months.
• This information relates to a child's diet not a nursing mother's diet. 'Gas producing foods' eaten by a nursing mother has little impact on her breastfed infant.
4. Gastro-intestinal infections
Gastric symptoms, including excessive gas and diarrhea, can be due to a gastro-intestinal infection (also known as gastroenteritis, a tummy bug, bowel infection, stomach flu or infectious diarrhea) are common in infancy. A gastro-intestinal infection can be caused by a virus, bacteria, yeast/fungus or parasites (protozoa, roundworms, tapeworms or flukes).
IMPORTANT: See a doctor if you suspect your baby has a gastro-intestinal infection. Do not give any medication, including intestinal worm medications (anthelmintics) to infants or children unless specifically advised to do so by your child's doctor.
5. Medications and over-the-counter drugs
Many medications given to children to treat...
• infant colic
• reflux
• constipation
• pain
• fever
• infections
...have side effects which can include gastro-intestinal upsets, abdominal cramping, excessive gas, diarrhea or constipation. If your child is currently on medication or an over-the-counter drug, discuss the possibility of these side effects with your doctor or pharmacist.
Herbal therapies are not without similar side effects. Talk to a herbalist personally before using any herbal remedies with infants or children.
Symptoms often linked with gas in infants
1. Burping/belching
A burp or belch is the process of expelling air from the stomach; air which has been swallowed. (Gas is rarely produced in a baby's stomach.) Burping large amounts of air is due to swallowing large amounts. Babies swallow air when they are...
• eating
• drinking
• crying
• swallowing saliva; and
• sucking on a pacifier.
2. Flatulence (passing gas)
Passing gas (out the other end) is the result of swallowed air and gas produced in your baby's intestines (bowel), due to one or more of the following...
• Normal digestion.
• An incomplete break-down of food or milk.
• A gastro-intestinal infection.
• A side effect of medications (prescribed or over-the-counter) or herbal therapies.
In the majority of babies, where parents complain of excessive flatus, there are no recognizable disorders of the intestinal tract. Often what can seem like large amounts of gas is in fact very normal! Most parents don't realize that a baby can pass gas up to 20 times a day and without other gastric symptoms this is considered normal. (Crying and gas are most often not related to the same cause.)
3. Abdominal bloating or distension
Excessive amounts of gas can cause distension of the abdomen or a bloated feeling. More commonly in babies, abdominal distension is the result of a full stomach from normal feeding, or possibly over-feeding. (See our article on hungry baby for information on why some babies over-feed.)
4. Abdominal pain or cramps
Abdominal pain can range from mild to severe and can last anywhere from a few minutes to days, depending on the cause. Cramping can be continuous or it can present in waves or spasms.
It's not easy to tell when a baby has pain. Parents often become concerned when they observe normal infant behavior. For example, young babies regularly fuss, grunt, groan, pull faces and strain as they pass gas or a bowel movement. This is due to the gastro-colic reflex and not necessarily a sign a baby has pain.
It is a common belief that when a baby draws up his legs while crying that this is a sign of abdominal pain, but this is not always the case. Young babies naturally pull up their legs (into a fetal position) when they become distressed - for any reason.
What can appear like pain may simply be a sign a baby is distressed. Babies often become distressed, and scream inconsolably for long periods of time, for reasons that have nothing to do with pain or discomfort. (See Crying baby and Infant colic for examples of why babies become distressed.)
5. Vomiting
Vomiting is not the same as spitting up (also known as spilling or posseting). Spitting up, which is associated with gastro-esophageal reflux, occurs spontaneously and unlike vomiting is effortless.
Vomiting is associated with a gastro-intestinal infection; a food or milk allergy or intolerance; or a side effect from medication. Diarrhea is also frequently linked to conditions that cause vomiting. (Diarrhea and/or excess gas are not symptoms of gastro-esophageal reflux.)
6. Diarrhea
Excessive gas and diarrhea present together when a baby experiences...
Digestive disorders, such as food or milk allergies or intolerances, which also present with symptoms of excessive gas and diarrhea, often involve other symptoms such as wheezing, rash, nasal congestion, eczema, vomiting, bloody stools and failure to grow.
Without diarrhea it is likely the amount of gas your baby passes is normal and any distress due to other reasons.
PLEASE NOTE: Frequent, watery bowel movements are normal for a breastfed baby and not necessarily diarrhea. However, a breastfed baby can also have diarrhea. (See Diarrhea for more information.)
7. Constipation
Excess gas can be a symptom of constipation. A baby is considered to be constipated when they have dry, pebbly stools. Parents often become concerned because the frequency of their baby's bowel movement decreases; this alone is not a sign of constipation. Parents also become concerned about constipation when their baby appears to be straining and yet passes normal stools. This is most often due to the gastro-colic reflex. (See Infant reflexes for more information.)
8. Crying
Infant gas is often considered to be the same as infant colic; however they are not the same. Although a baby with infant colic may also have gas (possibly due to swallowing air while crying), a baby with gas does not necessarily have colic. Studies have shown that gas alone does not cause the level of distress and/or discomfort experienced by a 'colicky' baby.
9. Sleep disturbances
Understandably, a baby with a tummy ache will have trouble sleeping; either falling asleep or staying asleep. However, there are many, more common reasons for a baby to have a disturbed sleep pattern other than abdominal discomfort. (See Why babies become over-tired.)
MYTH: A common belief is a baby will become "blue around the lips" when he has wind/gas. This is not true. A bluish tinge around a baby's lips is due to increased blood circulation... which is often more obvious when a baby is crying (for any reason).
Why medications don't work!
There is a huge array of medications (prescribed, over-the-counter and herbal remedies) on the market which are used to 'treat infant gas' and/or colic. The majority of these products aim to reduce the amount of gas in a baby's stomach by helping to facilitate a big burp.
Some medications act as muscle relaxants to "aid the passage of gas through the bowel". Of concern is that many of these medications contain alcohol or drugs that provide a sedative effect. In theory, these medications claim to relax the bowel, but in practice their effectiveness in the treatment of gas in infants remains unproven. What is often perceived as an improvement from their use may be due to the fact that they make the child sleepy.
Whatever these products aim to achieve, they are limited in their effectiveness in treating gas in infants by the fact that they do nothing to correct the cause of excessive gas and/or a baby's distress (which as mentioned previously, is not always due to the same cause). Medications do little to resolve the problem of a distressed, crying baby other than to provide exhausted parents with some relief by sedating the child.
Almost all medications (prescribed, over-the-counter and herbal remedies) have side effects. The side effects may outweigh any benefits of using medications to treat infant gas or infant colic. See Colic medications for more on the effects and side effects of commonly used medications.
Relieving gas symptoms naturally
The following methods aim to provide temporary relief from tummy troubles related to gas. Unless the underlying cause of excessive gas is discovered and corrected, it's likely you will be faced with the same problem again and again. If gas in not the real reason for a baby's distress (as is often the case) these method may not provide much help at all!
1. Burping your baby
2. Water
Babies often seek to feed for comfort and not necessarily because of hunger. Offering a small amount of water (1 oz or 30 ml) can often help to satisfy your baby's unsettled tummy, when you feel he's not really hungry.
3. A warm bath
This may help your baby to relax. Also the warmth (body temperature only) may help the gas in his bowel to expand and be expelled.
4. A warm compress on baby's tummy
Warm a cloth diaper or towel in the microwave, then place it over your knee and lie your baby face down across the towel. (Make sure it's not too hot!)
5. Tummy massage
A tummy massage may help to relieve discomfort due to abdominal gas. Put some oil on your hands and gently massage your baby's abdomen in a clockwise direction using long stroking actions, alternate this with lifting his knees (by holding his ankles) and using a 'bicycle' movement.
• Choose either a bath or a massage not both, as it can be over-stimulating. For babies younger than 5 months of age, massage and bath time need to be separated by a nap or night time sleep.
• Do not massage your baby's abdomen if he has hiccups or has just been fed.
6. Soothing methods
You may find some additional tips on soothing methods helpful.
Reducing the amount of air your baby swallows
1. While breastfeeding
• Make sure your baby latches-on correctly , a poorly latched on baby will swallow more air. (See breastfeeding basics for more information about latch-on). If you are experiencing difficulties with latching your baby to your breast, seek the hands-on support of a qualified lactation consultant.
• Where supply is plentiful and your baby is gaining large amounts of weight, offer only one breast at each feeding (alternate breasts at each feed).
• If your milk supply is plentiful and let-down is strong and provides a rush of breast milk, which your baby experiences difficulty coping with, pump off approx an ounce of milk before latching your baby to the breast. (Freeze pumped breast milk for future use).
2. While bottle feeding
• Read how long bottle feeding should take for different age groups and slow feeding down to the recommended time, by using a slower nipple and/or tightening the nipple ring.
• If feeding continues to be too fast, encourage your baby to take a couple of brief breaks during feeding.
• Experiment with different shaped nipples. For more information on choosing a suitable nipple see feeding equipment.
• For additional tips on bottle feeding, see How to bottle feed your baby.
3. When your baby is eating solid food
• If your baby is younger than 9 months of age, offer milk (breast or formula) 15 - 20 minutes before offering solids.
• If your baby is older than 9 months, offer solids before milk (breast or formula). Offer small healthy snacks approximately mid way between main meals.
4. While using a pacifier
Unfortunately, both vigorous sucking on a pacifier and crying can cause a baby to swallow air. To remove your baby's pacifier may result in further crying, so you will need to weigh up the benefit.
5. While crying
Babies cry! Crying is essential for a baby's survival. Crying doesn't necessarily mean your baby has pain. Babies cry to communicate their needs. (Unfortunately sometimes they don't know exactly what it is they need.) It's not possible to avoid all crying.
Try to establish a flexible feeding and sleeping routine for your baby, where both you and he can learn to predict what the next step will be.
Making changes to your baby's diet
1. Breastfed infants
You may have already received advice to eliminate certain foods from your diet. This rarely makes a difference, because contrary to popular belief, what a mother eats is not often the cause of her baby's distress.
• See our article on lactose overload for tips to reduce gastric symptoms related to frequent feeding patterns.
• Exclude the many other, more common reasons, for gastric discomfort, irritability and wakeful behavior (they may not be due the same cause) before going down the path of dietary restrictions.
• If you suspect a food or milk allergy or intolerance seek professional advice from a doctor or dietician who specializes in this field.
2. Formula fed infants
Changing formula rarely helps, particularly if there are no significant gastric symptoms, such as diarrhea. Prolonged use of an inappropriate nfant formula may negatively affect your baby's development. (See Soy infant formula - Is it the best choice?)
If you suspect a food or milk protein allergy or intolerance see your doctor for advice on suitable formula.
3. When your baby is on solids
• If your baby is less than 6 months old, stop solids completely or restrict solids to 'low risk' foods.
• If you are offering fruit juice to your baby on a regular basis, try ceasingthis for a period of time. Offer water at these times instead.
• Offer only cereal specifically designed for babies. Some cereals are too high in fiber (and low in iron) for a young baby's digestive system to cope with.
• High fiber foods should be introduced slowlyto allow your baby's bowel sufficient time to adjust.
When to see a doctor
• Any sudden change in your baby's behavior.
• If your baby experiences prolonged periods of distress.
• If your baby has frequent, watery bowel movements*
• Before starting on medications or over-the-counter drugs - ask him/her to explain about potential side effects.
• Before changing infant formula
• If your baby develops any unusual symptoms.
* It is very normal for an exclusively breastfed baby to pass frequent watery bowel motions.
Written by Rowena Bennett
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Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Expanding Waistlines lead to Smaller Brains
Source: (HealthDay)
According to new research out of UCLA, for every excess pound of weight a person carries around on their frame, their brains get a little bit smaller.
The authors of the study explain that the mass of brain tissue in elderly individuals who were obese or overweight was markedly reduced compared to normal weight individuals. In fact, the brains of the overweight or obese individuals resembled those of individuals far older than they were, up to a whopping 16 years older, with significant tissue loss, especially in the frontal lobes which are responsible for decision making and memory functions.
Dr. Mitchell Roslin, chief of obesity surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, warns that this can have many serious and frightening consequences including the prospect of Alzheimer's disease. He explains, "Obesity affects every system in your body. The body can't be splintered. It's completely linked. We are what we eat and we eat too much,". "The bottom line is that an obese, sedentary person is going to have a breakdown of every organ system, and that includes a greater chance of impotence and infertility and other things that people don't generally think are directly related to obesity."
Read the entire article "As Waistlines Widen, Brains Shrink" from HealthDay (August 26, 2009)
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Computer Forensics - What Is It Used For And Who Uses It?
in Computer-forensics
As crime rates increase, it doesn't only occur in your neighborhood but in the cyber world too. As digital data gets lost, corrupted, protected and tampered with, it is important to have computer forensics around to work the job and help solve problems. If you've had your eye on studying computer forensics and wanted to know about it a little more, such as who uses it and what is it used for, then read on.
For starters, you must understand that this area of study is pretty complex and requires a lot of skills. It's used to extract digital data that has been lost, deleted or corrupted. Files that are important that have been protected by firewalls, passwords or those that have been removed from the database can e recovered with the right skills. What's more, these forensics can do all of the above without tampering with the evidence too.
This is used by basically any company that has a computer database to keep things in order, particularly when they need to recover something. However, computer forensics skills are more commonly used under the order of court to solve cyber crimes. It's used by all the different law enforcement agencies that are working on crime cases and so on.
In addition to that, a few specific sectors that use this great service would be insurance companies to uncover hoax and illegal doings, criminal prosecutors to solve online crimes, private companies and citizens who may have accidentally lost their data or information.
Not just anybody can do this job as you would really need to have the passion, dedication, patience and interest. Whatever evidence that you would need to work with must be carefully handled and you would have to follow a certain set of guidelines as well.
All in all, computer forensics is an important career in today's world, so if you've got the interest for it, go ahead and live your dreams.
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This article was published on 2010/03/26
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Consolation of the Righteous Painting
Daily Bible Reading Devotional [Luke 20:27-39]-April 8, 2017
Scripture Reading(s)
Luke 20:27-39
Justin-Holmes1.jpgThere were 3 main classifications of religious leaders in Judea, during Jesus’ time. The Pharisees were the keepers of dogma and they were the holy rollers, always offended by others inability to keep the law, even though they often only kept the law when it benefited themselves. They were formed after the Maccabean revolt some 160 years or so earlier. The second group were the scribes. They transmitted and litigated the laws. They were also in charge of interpreting the laws in many cases. The third group was the Sadducees. They were formed much earlier than the Pharisees. They dated back to the days of Zadok the high priest. They were in charge of temple maintenance and priestly duties. Given their status in the post-exile world, the Sadducees gained great wealth and power, even after the Jews were overrun by the Greeks and Romans.
The Sadducees are relevant to this passage because they asked Jesus about the afterlife. One reason why they wanted to gain wealth was because they did not believe in the afterlife, like the Pharisees did. They believed whatever blessings they had on this earth was given to them by God and once they died that was the end. The Pharisees believed that sacrifice in this life would result in blessings in the next life. As a result, the early Pharisees were very pious and poor, much like the early Catholic monks.
But the trick question about the afterlife from the Sadducees to Jesus was hardly a difficult one. Jesus not only answered the question in a way that they were not expecting but he provided an answer that they had not previously thought of. This is why they left him alone after Jesus answered. It is here that the reader of the gospel of Luke should take notice of Jesus’ authority. He speaks with truth that most do not see coming. As a result, He is able to cause the Sadducees to reconsider their task. In fact, nearly every interaction Jesus had with the ruling elites He spoke truth to them that they were not prepared for. Some were angered but some saw the light.
We will encounter the same thing if we are speaking the truth of the gospel to people. We may anger some. We may offend others. But a certain amount will have their eyes and ears opened to receive the word of the gospel. This is the harvest that Jesus came for and sent His disciples out to reap. Do not grow weary in doing the work of preaching the truth, even in the face of tough opposition.
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Wind Power: Requirements
The development of wind farms requires the following principal conditions.
At Least 6.5m/sec of Wind Speed
For wind power generation, it is desirable to have an average wind speed of at least 6.5m/sec.
Visual indications of approximate wind speed are given below.
Expansive Area of Land
Eurus Tomamae Wind Farm (20MW capacity; twenty 1MW turbines) currently operating in Tomamae-cho, Hokkaido, sits on 100 hectares of land. Large-scale wind power projects require an expansive area of land similar in size as the above. It should be noted that development of a wind farm can entail the acquisition of approvals, such as the change of designated use of agricultural land, the release of area designation for agriculture promotion and the development of a forest land. It is, therefore, necessary to confirm land ownership, leaseholds and any other rights attaching to a prospective site.
Roads At Least 5mWide
To transport turbine blades from a port facility to a site, roads at least 5m wide are necessary. Building new roads or widening existing roads is extremely costly.
Transmission Lines Located Nearby
Transmission of electricity from a large-scale (10-30MW) wind power generation facility requires that 60,000-volt transmission lines (or a transformer station or generation plant) be located nearby. If the distance from the wind power generation site to an electric power company’s transmission lines (approx. 60,000-volt) is too long, necessitating the installation of transmission lines and huge costs to do so, the economic viability of the project can be threatened.
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Sinusitis and Sinus Ear Problems
Sinusitis and Sinus Ear Problems
Cold, coughing, sneezing and allergies can just about all always be causes of sinusitis. Nevertheless, the fact that these types of can be the causes of a sinus ear problem is often unknown. The reason between the connection of sinusitis and nose ear canal problems is that the sinuses tend to be connected to the ear through a tube which is known as the Eustachian pipe.
When you are suffering from a common chilly, flu or allergies, there is a huge opportunity that you will experience stuffiness in your sinuses. This is due to the fact that your sinuses generate mucus trying to clean the sinus tissue from all of the dirt and bacteria which you happen to be able to breathe in. whenever your sinuses sense a presence of microorganisms, these people will start producing mucous. At times this may always be disadvantageous, because bacteria in the sinuses takes up residence in and leads to the actual sinuses in order to enlarge. The particular mucous which can be stuck inside of, instead of getting rid of bacteria, invites bacteria to grow in it.
• After going swimming, playing in the snow, bathing, or carrying out any other water action, water may collect in the ears accidentally.
• Due to the fact that the Eustachian tube is slightly slanted, the liquid will then work out in the tube and eventually develop into an ear infection.
• Just like sinusitis, an ear infection can get bigger and block further drainage.
• This may then result to wooziness, ear pain, headaches as well as other ailments.
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You are suffering from sinusitis and you also blow your nose, sneezes or coughs, much of the environment goes through your nose and mouth, but most of the pressure will go straight in the direction of the ears. This will then push the infection towards the ears producing sinus ear problems. It may also work the other way around. This is where the infection in the ears drains down into the actual sinuses, causing the sinus tissues to get bigger and lead to sinusitis.
Sinus Ear Problems are Very Easy to Avoid
Using Q-tips and regular cleaning of the head can prevent the liquid from going down into the inner ear, and helps prevent welcoming infections to settle in the Eustachian tube or in any other near cells. Washing the hands throughout the day can assist in preventing bacteria as well as other conditions to result in sinusitis and sinus ear issues. Aside from this kind of, clearing your own nasal passages on a regular basis, using a nasal spray, can help you cure the symptoms of sinusitis as well as the sinus ear problems. Keeping a proper hygiene can assist you avoid germs from getting into the body through the mouth or nose. When working with nasal sprays, find the ingredient xylitol as this is a natural bacteria repellant and can be very helpful especially if the sinusitis and sinus ear problems are due to bacterial infection.
You could also seek advice from an ENT professional to find out the best treatment for sinusitis and sinus ear problems, if you think natural remedies tend to be no longer working.
Stephanie is principal factor as well as co-creator of the new Sinusitis info based web-site: http://natural-sinus-relief.com. Get plenty more info there on Nose Ear Issues and also check out the free 10-part mini-eCourse, "Natural Secrets and techniques to be able to Effective Sinus Relief", it might be all you are going to ever need (and did i mention it was free!!)
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