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Emboldened perhaps by his newly minted doctorate from Brandeis, the young Jesuit theologian Bernard Coughlin argued a case much closer to O’Connor’s in another essay that O’Connor underlined and starred with asterisks. Coughlin, who would later become president and chancellor at Gonzaga, warned that the American principle separating church and state, when joined with our religious pluralism, becomes “a principle separating church and society.” It confines Christian faith to the private sphere, as if it were an inward and invisible thing. Christianity is an outward and public thing, as Chesterton called it, an unabashedly communal and thus an irreducibly political reality. The Church’s mission, therefore, is to worship the triune God and to practice its ethical life in full accord with its historic convictions. The Church is thus called to make prophetic witness against all pretensions to secular autonomy. When the nation-state pretends to such sovereignty, it is in fact no longer secular. It transforms itself into what Fr. Coughlin named as “an antireligious religion.” “To the Christian,” he cautioned in June of 1963, “secularism is a form of idolatry—the deification of man-made things.” Flannery O’Connor resisted such idolatry. She would not be honored with a commemorative stamp if she had attuned her faith and her fiction to the national consensus. Her achievements would have been significant but not drastically important. Setting her loves in proper order, O’Connor gave her first and final loyalty, not to the United States of America, but to the incarnate and living God, the God under and to whom this nation putatively pledges its allegiance. She became the most important Christian author this nation has yet produced—T. S. Eliot the Christian poet being not an American but a British citizen—by becoming a radically unaccommodating Catholic writer. For O’Connor, there was something ajar almost from the beginning of the American experiment. She famously complained that, in his 1832 refusal to celebrate communion at First Church Boston, without first removing the bread and wine, Emerson began the vaporization of religion in America. The anti-sacramental becomes the spiritual, the discarnate. At about the same time, Will Herberg was observing the curious contradictions inherent in “the American way of life.” The consensus religion of the nation was not, Herberg insisted, a careful distillation of the deep theological commonalities lying at the heart of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faith. It was “a secularized Puritanism, a Puritanism without transcendence, without [a] sense of sin or judgment.” Yet there was a felt religious need to sanction American wealth and success. Hence the national recourse to such spiritual terms as “service” or “stewardship” or “general welfare.” Nowhere did this spiritualizing of the material become more evident to Flannery O’Connor than in the civic boosterism of the 1950s. An editorial in Henry Luce's Life magazine angered her because it charged that the nation’s novelists, in their existentialist angst, were failing to celebrate their prosperous and optimistic country. Luce’s editorialists thus summoned American writers to exhibit “the joy of life” and “the redemptive quality of spiritual purpose.” Where was such joyful purpose to be found? For Luce and his barkers, it lay in the nation’s remarkable decade of success: its unprecedented wealth, its world-dominating military power, its virtual achievement of a classless society, at least in comparison with other nations. For Flannery O’Connor, joy and purpose found in such places are gossamer and ephemeral things indeed. This is not to say that O’Connor was an ingrate concerning her American freedoms. She was critical of her country because she loved it. She regarded the threat of Soviet communism as serious, for instance, even constructing a bomb shelter on her Georgia property. The family of refugees from post-war Poland whom she and her mother welcomed as workers on their dairy farm became the occasion for one of her best stories, “The Displaced Person.” O’Connor also refused, in 1956, to sell her work to Czech and Polish publishers, lest they use it for anti-American propaganda, as they had done with Jack London’s fiction. O’Connor also admired Reinhold Niebuhr for his principled opposition to Stalin’s desire to remake the whole of humanity into homo Sovieticus. For all the limits of American self-congratulation, it was infinitely preferable to the mind-body-soul destroying politics of the Gulag Archipelago. Even so, she sought an alternative to the vaporizing spirituality of her age. She found it chiefly in her own region. She both loved and criticized her native South, praising its transcendent virtues while lamenting its temporal evils. Chief among the Southern virtues that made O’Connor the Roman Catholic thoroughly at home among the folk Christians of the Protestant South was their saturation in Scripture. She shared their conviction that the biblical Story of the world’s creation and salvation is meant to master us rather than for us to master it. We have engaged Scripture aright, O’Connor declared, when, “like Jacob, we are marked.” O’Connor admired the backwoods believers of the American South because they were thus “mastered,” thus “marked.” She was drawn to their self-blinding street prophets and baptizing river preachers. Despite their awful failings, they spoke the language and declared the message of Scripture. These economically poor and educationally uncouth believers possessed no cultural standing or political power; indeed, polite society had passed them by on the other side. Yet she makes them the focus of her fiction, not in scorn but sympathy. Their fierce and sweated Faith enabled them to feel “the hand of God and its descent,” she confessed. “We have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.” Flannery O’Connor was far too troubled by the horrors that Southern whites have visited on Southern blacks ever to identify Jesus as the central figure of Southern history. Even so, the radically flawed Christians of her region prompted one of O’Connor’s most celebrated sayings: “While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.” Advocates of our “antireligious religion” of secular autonomy are not thus haunted. They do not fear the terrible descending hand of God. They do not walk, like Jacob, with a divinely inflicted limp. O’Connor’s characters, by contrast, are terribly afflicted, fearful, haunted. When asked why her fiction, like that of so many other Southern writers, is filled with freaks, O’Connor famously replied that Bible-drenched Southerners are still able to recognize a freak when they see one. They take the measure of themselves and others by the plumb line described by the prophet Amos. Its true Vertical exposes all deviations, whether left or right, religious or secular. O’Connor’s kinfolk sometimes urged her to write about “wholesome” people. She replied that her outrageous characters are indeed “whole” because their peculiarity points, even if negatively, to the full, angular, thorny humanity that we are in danger of losing in our time. She likened the true grotesques of our age to chickens who have been genetically engineered so as to make them wingless, the better to produce an abundance of tender white meat. The denizens of our secular sovereignty are not so much a brood of vipers, she said, but “a generation of wingless chickens.” This, she surmised, “is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.” When God dies, as O’Connor learned from Nietzsche, “the last man” arrives. “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” They blink because they no longer question or probe, because they refuse to take courageous risks or venture untrodden paths. The last men are shrunken creatures who make everything small, who live longest because they hop like fleas from one warm host to another, who no longer shoot the arrow of their longing beyond man, who want the same things as everyone else because everyone is the same. Unable even to despise themselves, they blink because they are satisfied with happiness as small-minded as themselves. Flannery O’Connor’s synonym for such godless happiness is godless tenderness. Whether applied to chicken breasts or national character, tenderness was no virtue for her. She worried that ours is becoming an age wherein tender feelings overwhelm tough truth. Like C. S. Lewis, she feared that we are becoming people without chests—i.e., without the moral and religious sentiments of the heart and will that enable the mind rightly to rule the viscera. While earlier ages may have felt less, she said, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, the outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber. This is one of O’Connor’s most controverted pronouncements. Nothing could seem less tender or more flint-hearted than the Gulag, the Holocaust, and Mao’s compulsory re-education scheme. Nor does one need to be a Christian to abhor such terrors. Perhaps most objectionable is O’Connor’s stress on “unsentimental acceptance,” as if we must acquiesce to the world’s suffering and injustice without seeking to stop them. For example, there is Mrs. May, the self-justifying widow who owns her own dairy farm but who is gored to death by a neighbor’s stray bull. Yet this complacent woman fondly embraces the animal as he sinks his horns into her, whispering her final words in his ear. There is Rufus Johnson, a juvenile club-footed delinquent who lies and steals, not because he is “compensating” for his disfigurement, but because, as he says, “I’m good at it.” Yet this young thug helps launch the neglected son of a social worker into eternity. There is Harry Ashfield, a four-year old child of cultured but uncaring parents who has been assured by a river preacher that, because he has been baptized, he eternally “counts.” The boy decides that, if he counts so much for going under the water so briefly, he would count completely if he stayed under the water completely. And so he drowns himself in search of his true Parent. There is also Asbury Fox, a failed white-liberal writer who embarks on the long road to holy health only after contracting a lifelong debilitating disease while seeking to celebrate a secular communion with black dairy workers. Yet Flannery O’Connor was as much troubled by the death of God in the church as in the world. In a 1955 letter to an atheist friend, she confessed that, “If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In and out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” In her fiction, she demonstrates—she shows rather than telling—the seemingly harmless nihilism at work in two self-satisfied middle-class Christian women. Ruby Turpin constantly thanks God for making her a prosperous and upstanding citizen, especially for making her neither black nor white trashy. Yet she is shocked into a saving self-awareness when a Wellesley student strikes her down with a psychology textbook hurled across a doctor’s waiting room, and then pounces on her while shouting, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog.” There is also the nameless Grandmother who is willing to deny her faith in order to save her life, begging a mass-murdering Misfit not to kill her, while he complains that Jesus “thrown” everything off balance and shouldn’t have done it. Startled at last into the recognition that her wretched condition is the same as his, she reaches out to touch him in an act of true solidarity. Whereupon he recoils in horror, pumping her full of lead and then making one of the most indelible and instructive pronouncements in all of O’Connor’s fiction: “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life.” It is altogether appropriate, at this particular crisis in our history, that Flannery O’Connor should be honored by a branch of our national government, the U.S. Postal Service. Her fiction serves as a warning sign, to the nation and to the world, against what Walker Percy called our “tempestuous restructuring of human consciousness.” She saw, almost from the start of her writing career, that we Americans have been undergoing a tectonic shift in our character. The legitimate and hard-won freedoms of the Enlightenment, beneficial to democratic states and confessing churches alike, are now being construed as a call to refashion ourselves into whatever creatures we feel ourselves to be, thus devising a species drastically unlike anything previously known. Yet she also provided, by the indirection of art rather than the diktat of propaganda, an answer to our pandemic. Over against our invertebrate tenderness, she creates characters who learn, after the fiercest struggles, to stand upright in the conviction that we are meant to participate in the very life of God. Our official authorities may stamp Flannery O’Connor’s image on its postage, but no one can cancel her witness to the Charity that burns with purifying fire. Ralph C. Wood is professor of theology and literature at Baylor University. Show 0 comments
The Troodos Observatory Takes Cues from 'Star Wars' - Sep 6, 2017 References: tsolakisarchitects & dezeen The 'Star Wars' franchise has had a massive cultural impact, but the Troodos Observatory shows that the science fiction franchise's effects have even bled into actual science. The star observatory, which will be used to provide NASA with astronomical information, was inspired by Star Wars and other science fiction films. Troodos Observatory is everything that a modern celestial observatory should be. It's built on top of a mountain in the UNESCO-listed Troodos Geopark in Cyprus, a natural area that limits light pollution and offers the least obstructed views of the heavens. Nonetheless, the heads of Kyriakos Tsolakis Architects, the studio that won permission to design the observatory, have explicitly stated their Star Wars fandom as inspiration for the scientific outpost. The observatory is the first such purpose-built facility in Cyprus, and it will enable NASA to track celestial data in a previous blind spot between the Mediterranean and India.
Catalogue of Artificial Intelligence Techniques Jump to: Top \| Entry \| References \| Comments View Maths as: Images \| MathML Dempster-Shafer Theory Aliases: Belief Functions Categories: Inference and Reasoning Author(s): Judea Pearl A theory of evidence potentially suitable for knowledge-based systems, especially when domain knowledge can be stated in categorical terms and the impact of each item of evidence described as an assignment of probabilities to a set of propositions. They include strict taxonomic hierarchies, terminological definitions and descriptions of deterministic systems (e.g., electronic circuits). The probability attached to is the degree to which the evidence supports , but need not be , since evidence can lend support to a hypothesis while having no direct bearing on its negation. These `basic probabilities' can be visualised as probability masses constrained within the subset (of worlds) with which they are associated, but free to move over every point there. From these basic probabilities we can derive upper and lower probabilities (Dempster) or belief functions and plausibilities (Shafer). The belief measure is the probability that logically follows from the evidence, given that all items of evidence are non-contradictory. This notion of `belief' often behaves differently than , the probability that is true. Basic probabilities are combined using Dempster's Rule, which is valid for independent items of evidence. Add Comment No comments.
Historic World Events / April / Hostage rescue mission ends in disaster Hostage rescue mission ends in disaster Hostage rescue mission ends in disaster On April 24, 1980, an ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued. On November 4, 1979, the crisis began when militant Iranian students, outraged that the U.S. government had allowed the ousted shah of Iran to travel to the U.S. for medical treatment, seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s political and religious leader, took over the hostage situation and agreed to release non-U.S. captives and female and minority Americans, citing these groups as among the people oppressed by the U.S. government. The remaining 52 captives remained at the mercy of the Ayatollah for the next 14 months. President Carter was unable to diplomatically resolve the crisis, and the April 1980 hostage attempt ended in disaster. Three months later, the former shah died of cancer in Egypt, but the crisis continued. In November, Carter lost the presidential election to Republican Ronald Reagan, and soon after, with the assistance of Algerian intermediaries, successful negotiations began between the United States and Iran. On the day of Reagan’s inauguration, January 20, 1981, the United States freed almost $8 billion in frozen Iranian assets, and the 52 hostages were released after 444 days. The next day, Jimmy Carter flew to West Germany to greet the Americans on their way home. READ Battle of Stalingrad ends Source: History
Most human beings can speak at least one language fluently. The vast majority of infants are born with the ability to learn a language, and most children usually do so before entering school. This is really quite remarkable, yet most speakers of a language do not stop to analyze what they are doing when they talk. Such inquiry into the actual workings of language is the basis of linguistics, which is the scientific study of… Click Here to subscribe Topics Within Linguistics History of Linguistic Analysis Modern Linguistics Linguistics Related to Other Areas
Today's Hours Museum: Closed Gardens: 7:00 AM - 7:00 PM Today's Hours Museum: Closed Gardens: 7:00 AM - 7:00 PM Audubon, John James Collection: American Collection John James Audubon will always remain a bit of an enigma: an esteemed, if amateur naturalist who disdained the "cabinet naturalists" who possessed the scientific knowledge he lacked, a vastly gifted self-taught painter who claimed lessons he never had, and a man of apparent openness bordering on naivete who succeeded in shrouding his origins in such mystery that it was more than a hundred years after his death before the truth was discovered. We wouldn't bother, of course, if it weren't for the work. Audubon's The Birds of America wasn't the first illustrated book on American ornithology, but it remains the greatest. Even more than a splendid opus on natural science, it is a magnificent work of art. The romance of Audubon's life was almost enough to obscure his major accomplishment. Myths about his origins have abounded. There was a rumor during his lifetime later held by some of his descendants that he was actually the "Lost Dauphin", the missing heir to the throne of France. Yet he and his family also claimed not even to know the year of his birth. According to his earliest written testimony, he was born around 1780 at his father's plantation in Louisiana, the son of an exceptionally beautiful Spanish Creole woman and a French admiral. In fact, he was born Jean Rabin on April 26, 1785 in Les Cayes, Saint Domingue (later Haiti), the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and merchant, Jean Audubon, and a French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin. When he was 3, young Jean was brought to France and placed in the care of his father's indulgent wife. He and his mulatto half-sister Rose were formally adopted by the Audubons in 1794 and he was re-named Jean Jacques Fougere Audubon. But when his father sought to protect him from conscription into Napoleon's forces in 1803, he was sent to Pennsylvania with a falsified passport that gave his place of birth as Louisiana (making him nominally American) and his name as John James Laforest Audubon, the name he would use the rest of his In 1808, Audubon married Lucy Bakewell whose family had recently emigrated from England where they had been closely associated with prominent scientists like Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin. John James promptly carried his young bride off to the wilds of Kentucky, where a series of business disasters in Louisville and Henderson left them and their 2 sons bankrupt by 1820. Audubon secured brief employment as a taxidermist at the museum of Cincinnati College, but left when the directors proved unable to pay his salary. Audubon had been painting birds for close to 20 years by that point and had encountered 2 notable amateur naturalists, Alexander Wilson and Constantine Rafinesque, both of whom were planning illustrated books. He and Lucy decided that his work was easily the equal of theirs and that his energies should be put to gathering information and creating enough paintings for a definitive work on American ornithology. Lucy took a teaching position and supported herself and their sons while John James explored the world of birds along the Mississippi and painted portraits and gave drawing lessons in New Orleans to support himself while he searched the swamps and bayous for new species. In 1824, having accumulated enough paintings for a prospectus, Audubon went to Philadelphia to seek publication. But friends of Alexander Wilson denounced him and so denigrated his work that he was unable to find an American publisher. Supporters urged him to try Europe where he would find better engravers in any case. Once again, his wife's support was indispensable. She gave him her savings and with $2,000 to make his dream come true, he sailed for England in 1826. Fortunately, the English were far more enthusiastic about his work than the Americans. Audubon quickly became a sought-after dinner guest and media celebrity, the "American Woodsman", complete with long, curly hair tamed with bear grease and buckskin coat. The exhibitions of his paintings made him a tidy profit while newfound friends introduced him to the best engravers available, William Howe Lizars in Edinburgh, and when Lizars's colorists went on strike, Robert Havell, Sr. and Robert Havell, Jr. in London. To complete the establishment of his legitimacy as a naturalist, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1830. The Birds of America was a critical success and, with the issuance of the royal octavo edition in 1846, 1851, and 1854, a financial success as well. Now celebrated in his own country (Audubon had been naturalized in 1812) as well as Europe, John James decided to extend his expertise to mammals. In 1839, he began a collaboration with the Reverend John Bachman on The Vivaparous Quadrupeds of North America. Unfortunately, Audubon's health was beginning to fail and he was unable to complete the sort of field studies that had been responsible for the beauty and accuracy of his bird paintings. Eventually, close to half of the paintings for Quadrupeds were done by John Woodhouse Audubon instead of his John James didn't live to see the publication of the full edition of Quadrupeds. He died January 27, 1851 , Lucy by his side. Today, Audubon's work is considered among the masterpieces of 19th century American art and this man, born in the Caribbean and raised in France, is considered perhaps the first quintessentially American artist. Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections
SOC 305 All Discussions (WK 1 – WK 5) Click here to order this paper The Ultimate Custom Paper Writing Service DQ 1 -Crime and Society: After viewing the video, Crime and Deviance: A Social Inquiry, please address each of the following questions: 1. Is crime normal in a society? 2. What is the purpose of crime and punishment? 4. How is crime defined? 5. What problems are defined as worthy of social control? 6. What is the influence of the media? DQ 2: This discussion focuses on topics addressed in several chapters of your text – the death penalty and discrimination. Although first discussed in Chapter 2, the death penalty is also discussed in Chapter 4. Rather than thinking in rigid terms about reading assignments, please use your textbook as a resource. After reading the text and watching the video, Injustice for Blacks in Alabama, respond to each of the following questions: 6. How can this problem be solved? DQ 2 – After reading this week’s required text, please respond to the following: 4. How has this “war” impacted immigration policy? 5. How will this “war” end? DQ 1- Determining whether to try a child in the juvenile or the criminal justice system will have an impact on every step of his or her experience. Although the exact laws and practices of the systems vary from state to state, broad underlying beliefs differentiate the two systems. While the juvenile system is often thought to be more lenient in its punishments, there are often stricter regulations throughout the process. In the juvenile system a child may not have a right to a jury trial or bail. Juvenile records are not open to public access like criminal records and parole is very different between the two systems. When the child in question is considered a child, the courts act as more of a parent attempting to punish but also protect. Differences between juvenile and adult criminal justice systems exist at every step of the way. In the website Four Kids, Four Crimes, follow four cases and examine how and why two defendants were tried as juveniles and two were tried as adults. After reading all four case stories, answer the following questions: 1. Would you try Christian Fernandez, from the beginning of Chapter 5 of your text, in adult court or juvenile court? 2. What criteria did you use in making your decision? 3. How did you apply those criteria to the case of Christian Fernandez? 3. How might prison families help women cope with incarceration? SOC 305 Week 4 DQ’s DQ 1- After reading the articles, Are honor killings simply domestic violence? and ‘Honour’ crimes are domestic abuse, plain and simple, please respond to each of the following questions: 1. Are honor killings simply domestic violence? 2. What similarities do honor killings have with other forms of interpersonal crime? What differences do they exhibit? 3. In your opinion, what is the best way for the criminal justice system to treat and respond to honor killings? DQ 2- Please view the video, Inside USA – Rise of hate, Part 1, or read the article, Number of U.S. hate groups is rising, report says, in preparation for this discussion. Were you aware of the number and range of recognized hate groups in these states? This video helps us learn about hate groups in the United States. In addition, please visit the Teaching Tolerance website and view the Hate Map. Please review the maps for the state in which you live, or a state of your choice. Respond to each of the following questions: 1. Were you aware of the number and range of recognized hate groups in these states? 2. Why would individuals make the decision to associate with these groups? 3. As we see, every one of us is a target in one way or another. How does this targeting turn to hate crime? 4. How has the definition and prosecution of hate crimes evolved? DQ 1–As we learn in the readings, media reports of school crime tend to create misconceptions of a danger that is actually quite small for the overwhelming majority of school users. In fact, given the number of students, teachers, and other personnel in schools on any given day, it is quite astounding how few violent episodes there are. To track violence in schools, read the US Department of Justice and US Department of Education report, Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2011. After reading the report, please address each of the following: 1. Refer to a specific statistic found on the site, with proper citation. Tell us why this statistic surprised you, confirmed your belief, etc. 2. In 81% of violent, targeted school attacks, at least one person knew someone was conceiving of or planning an attack. In most cases no one came forward with this information. Why do you think this is? 3. What are some significant differences between on-campus crime and crime in the general population? 4. Discuss the challenged inherent in preventing school and workplace violence. DQ2–After reading the two articles addressing privatization, Arizona’s private prisons: A bad bargain and The case for privatizing California’s prisons, respond to each of the following questions: 1. In your opinion, what groups of people benefit most when the prison system is capitalized? What groups or people benefit least? 2. In your informed opinion, are private prisons a bargain? Why or why not? Has the general public reached the same conclusion? Why or why not? 3. Has your opinion about private prisons changed as a result of this research? 4. What problems come with privatizing traditional government services like incarceration, military work, or policing? What benefits? 5. What do for-profit prisons say about society’s expectations of incarceration and criminal activity? What do they say about society’s opinion of inmates? CIS 505 WK 10 Term Paper – Networking CIS 505 WK 10 Term Paper – Networking To buy this term paper, Click below link: • Network Neutrality • Web2.0 • Wireless Technology • Broadband Convergence • U.S. Telecommunication Policy • Internet Security • IPv6 • WWAN • WLAN • WAN Click here to order this paper The Ultimate Custom Paper Writing Service Leave a Reply
How to Add Chord Substitutions: Lesson Three Reviewing Lesson Two Here are the essential tools I’ve covered so far as prerequisites to adding chord substitutions: Understanding the major scale (C scale was our example for ease of application) There are 8 notes in a scale. The scale-based triads (3 note chord) Term: Interval (distance between two notes) Answers to lesson two’s intervals: D to F (3rd) C to G (5th) B to G (6th) G to C (4th) Lesson Three: Half and Whole Steps What if I play a D to the next F#…is that still a 3rd interval? Yes it is! So…what’s the difference between a D to F and a D to F#? Well, a D to F is a minor 3rd and a D to F# sharp is a Major 3rd. How do I know that? I learned about half and whole steps; used to create minor and major 3rds. (The following lesson must be understood before you can identify minor and major 3rds.) A half step is from one note to the very next (closest) note. For example: a C to C# is one half step. Or….E to F is a half step…no key between the moves. A whole step is from one note to the next neighbor note…such as C to D or F# to G#. (A whole step has one key between its two notes) C to D has a black key between them. F# to G# has a white key between them and B flat to C has a white key between them. Very important lesson to remember! Several Reasons why: Because scales are made up of half and whole step patterns What if someone says….”transpose up a half step”…must understand! Major and minor chords are determined by number of 1/2 steps! (next lesson) Understanding of sharp and flat notes (they move by 1/2 steps) Black notes with movement lines Now for the application of half and whole steps… A minor 3rd = 3 half steps A Major 3rd = 4 half steps Identify the 3rds below the example as either minor or Major Example: F to A = Major 3rd (the numbers indicate the half step moves) Hint: 1st half step counts after first note D flat to F C to E flat G# to B B to D# Special Note! Special Note! Learning these theory lessons WILL help you know how to add chord substitutions. Just hang in there and take good notes 😉 Tags: , , , , , Leave a Reply Follow Jenifer on… • Facebook • Twitter • Youtube Article Categories
1950 September 20 ABA Convention Calls for Loyalty Oath for All Lawyers The Annual Convention of the American Bar Association passed a resolution on this day calling for an anti-Communist loyalty oath for all lawyers. A number of prominent attorneys attacked the idea, however, and it was never adopted as an official ABA policy. The American legal community endorsed other repressive anti-Communist measures in the Cold War. In 1954 a national controversy erupted over the fact that many witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) invoked the Fifth Amendment. As a result they were labeled “Fifth Amendment Communists.” On June 24, 1954, for example, a special committee of the New York State Bar Association proposed that any lawyer who invoked the Fifth Amendment regarding his or her political associations be automatically disbarred. Loyalty oaths were a special mania during the anti-Communist frenzy of the Cold War. Unlike traditional oaths of office which involve an oath to uphold the Constitution and the law, Cold War loyalty oaths required people to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party and/or other radical parties or movements. Thus, they were oaths regarding membership and beliefs without reference to any actual or planned illegal action. See, for example, the controversy over the University of California loyalty oath (April 21, 1950). There was even a loyalty oath for Medicare recipients in the original 1965 Medicare law (see February 13, 1967). Find a Day Tell Us What You Think We want to hear your comments, criticisms and suggestions!
First human powered aircraft with flapping wings Snowbird Ornithopter Canada (Tottenham,Great Lakes Gliding Club) The Snowbird is a very light aircraft, weighing only 43 kg (94 pounds). It is built from kevlar, foam and balsa wood and is powered by the human body. Such an aircraft is called an Ornithopter. On 2 August 2010, Todd Reichert, a Canadian student, powered and flew the Snowbird for 19.3 seconds, maintaining an altitude of three metres, and flying at an average speed of 25.6 km/h (16.5 mph). It flew 145 m (476 ft) at the Great Lakes Gliding Club in Tottenham, Ontario. Whereas the Gossamer Condor became the first human powered aircraft capable of sustained and controlled flight in 1977, the Snowbird, which has a wingspan of 105 feet, comparable to a Boeing 737, is the first to flap its wings like a bird for propulsion and actually sustain level flight, thus fulfilling one of man's earliest ambitions.
Are Pixels square? I'm trying to scale a graphic I downloaded from the internet. The program I'm using (HP Photosmart Studio) tells me that it's 426 x 1024 pixels, which gives me an aspect ratio of 0.42:1. But in inches, it's 5.00 x 14.22, which has an aspect ratio of 0.35:1. So either I'm blowing the math, or I'm losing my mind, or pixels aren't square. (Why, in the name of anything at all, woud pixels not be square?) Picture of Are Pixels square? sort by: active \| newest \| oldest kevinhannan8 years ago It depends where the pixel is - really! A pixel from a printer is different in composition and ratio and size to a pixel on a CRT/Flat screen and idfferent to a pixel from a scanner. In my mind I do not make a relationship between between different objects and their pixels. What I do is accept that for one device a certain number of pixels is optimum for the size of job in hand. So for scanning I use 100dpi for the screen and 600dpi for printing; for printing I have a chart of optimum pixel sizes for the size sheet I want to print out and for the screen I look at the size of pixels there, the smaller the better - a common screen pixel size is 0.26mm. I hope this helps and releases you from your pixel puzzlement! Good luck! Gorfram (author) kevinhannan8 years ago "It depends on where the pixel is..." So, saying that a pixel has an aspect ratio of 0.35:1 in a given graphics program is like saying that a pound of mass is equal to a pound of weight on a given planet? Take your pound of mass from Earth to Mars and it's less than 1 lb. of weight, take it to Venus and the same lb. of mass weighs more. Do I gather correctly that different devices (CRTs, flatscreens, printers-du-jour, etc.) have different optimum pixel sizes and aspect ratios? That would make sense, actually - rastering a cathode ray on to a phosphorescent screen would be a whole different technical ball of wax than depositing a dot of ink on paper. Not sure I'm solidly sanguine about my pixel puzzlement yet (although I eventually was able to print out my graphic satisfactorily), but you've been a great help - thanks very much for your answer! :) Shall I look for my chart of optimum pixels for printing; would that be useful for you? Gorfram (author) kevinhannan8 years ago I appreciate the offer, but I don't really do that much graphic messing about - thanks very much anyway. It's really just that I had always assumed and understood pixels as being square, erronenous though that turned out to be, and so their changing aspect ratios were badly interfering with my conceptual framework of all pixel-related portions of reality. You were able to help clear that up for me, which is a great intellectual relief. YES, that's right. all visual output devices that use pixels are different. Pixels ain't necessarily square. Deal with it ;-) Yes, its fiendishly difficult to adjust things precisely from what you have recorded to what you want to see correctly on screen.. So, on the plus side, you ARE sane ! Steve Gorfram (author) steveastrouk8 years ago "So, on the plus side, you ARE sane !" I always hoped that someday, somebody, somewhere would think so... ;) Goodhart8 years ago You can get a sense of how it is if you can imagine making a large picture using large canon balls as pixels.
In Search of Perfection Essay by tovarishchUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, March 2004 download word file, 8 pages 4.8 2 reviews Downloaded 114 times Keywords: genetic engineering, moral issues, genetic changes, genetic technologies In Search of Perfection There is no doubt that any other field is as closely connected with human life as medicine. Yet medicine has been so greatly affected by technological advances that it has gone beyond therapy and towards the limits of our imagination. Unlike a few years ago, when conceiving a baby girl or a baby boy was a matter of chance, today's prospective parents can choose to alter the genetic make-up of their children in order to enhance their offsprings' well-being in the future. It is not clear, however, if modern society is ready to face consequences of genetic engineering. On one hand, scientists agree that from medical standpoint genetic technologies do, in fact, hold promising potential. On the other hand, genetic engineering focused on improvement of the human species involves profound ethical and political risks that are to be taken into serious consideration. Not until we become fully aware of the issues surrounding genetic technologies should we pursue the illusion of creating a "perfect baby" and intrude upon our children's lives by intervening into their genes. Let us have a closer look at what genetic engineering is. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, genetic engineering is "a scientific alternation of the structure of genetic material in a living organism." Richard Hayes simplified the definition and described genetic engineering as "changing the genes in a living cell" (1). Scientists differentiate between somatic and germline engineering. Richard Hayes further explains that in somatic therapy (after the Greek word "soma," for "body"), manipulation occurs in cells that constitute bodily organs and tissues. In germline therapy intervention takes place in the genes of sperm, eggs, or very early embryos ("germline," because eggs and sperm are the...
Run Rate (Runs per Over) Calculator (Cricket) What is “Run Rate”? It is intended to be a more accurate representation of a team’s abilities than runs scored alone. Before the Duckworth-Lewis Method was put in place, run rate was a method used to determine the winner of a game if it was stopped due to weather or lighting conditions. In Cricket, Run Rate is calculated as follows: Run Rate = Total Runs Scored / Total Overs Faced If a team has scored 227 runs and has faced 5 overs in that time, then: Run Rate (runs per over) = 227 / 5 Run Rate (runs per over) = 45.4 Therefore, the team’s run rate is 45.4 More Cricket Calculators More Sports Calculators
[fahyuh r-breyk] /ˈfaɪərˌbreɪk/ a strip of plowed or cleared land made to check the spread of a prairie or forest . Also fireguard, fire line. a strip of open land in a forest or on a prairie, to arrest the advance of a fire a measure taken to arrest the advance of anything dangerous or harmful Read Also: • Fire-breathing adjective Fierce; menacing; dragon-like:ABC now planned to swap Ellen with Wednesday’s fire-breathing Grace Under Fire (1591+) • Firebrick [fahyuh r-brik] /ˈfaɪərˌbrɪk/ noun 1. a made of . /ˈfaɪəˌbrɪk/ noun 1. a refractory brick made of fire clay, used for lining furnaces, flues, etc • Fire-brigade noun 1. a group of firefighters, especially as formed temporarily or called upon to assist a fire department in an emergency. 2. a small fire department privately employed by an institution. noun 1. (mainly Brit) an organized body of firefighters • Firebug
Tuesday, March 21, 2017 march 21 Describe one thing you learned from writing and re-writing yesterday's journal entry. 1. Journal 2. Guided independent reading Please read on your own or with your tablemates * Please plan on answering the following questions by the end of the week 1. In the scene where Mildred and Montag read books together, what are their separate reactions? 2. What is the effect throughout sections I and II, of the bombers flying over? 3. Who is Professor Faber? 4. Montag’s reaction to the commercial on the subway is a turning point in his life. How does he react and why? 5. What argument does Faber make for books? 6. What is the “small green metal object”? 7. What does the White Clown show lead you to believe about television programming in this society? 8. Why does Mrs. Phelps cry when Montag reads “Dover Beach”? 9. What is Montag’s destination at the end of section II? Why? 1 comment: 1. 1. Mildred is acting more like a spoiled brat who doesn't want to eat her vegetables, yet in this problem she doesn't want to understand books. Montag, however, is acting like a little kid on Christmas, he wants to understand books and read! Faber is Cindy Lou and Mildred is the Grinch/Grouch. 2. There is a war happening so something big will happen. I honestly feel that it's just a background to make the story feel real but the bombers will show up later in the story. 3. Professor Faber is a man Montag met at the park who has books. However continuing on with Part 2, Faber is a new friend that Montag has. Faber is going to teach him about books.
Sunday, October 4, 2015 Tides Happen, plus, By the Length of Their Legs They Will Rise [Juvenile American Golden-Plover, left, with Red Knots at the Wetlands Institute, Stone Harbor Causeway, Cape May, NJ today at about 11:00 a.m. The reddish plants are Salicornia, or glasswort. The grasses are the hugely important Salt Marsh Cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) - salt marshes have autumn colors just like forests. The plover is told from Black-bellied in this view by its thin bill, small head, and dark cap highlighting the white eyebrow. Click to enlarge all photos.] Tides happen, and birders, fishermen, boaters, crabbers, waterfowl hunters and coastal homeowners had better pay attention. [At this point, you may just want to scroll past the brief but technical tide fact sheet that follows to go straight to this weekend's birds, but then again, maybe not. Our natural lives are driven by natural forces, and tides, winds, storms, and birds are all interconnected. Your call.] A first thing to know is that tides vary on macro- and micro-geographical scales. Simplifying with a couple examples: what happens in the mid-Atlantic is not the same as what happens in Florida, and what happens on the Delaware Bay, NJ is very different temporally and in scale from what happens on nearby Barnegat Bay, NJ. In the mid-Atlantic, we have two high tides and two low tides every day, separated by about 6 hours. The time of each tide gets later with each passing day. You can Google why, but trust me, it does. So get a good tide app or tide chart from a local fishing tackle shop. Looking at the micro-geographical scale, today on Delaware Bay near my house the tide was low at 8:16 a.m. and high about 6 hours later at 2:43 p.m., with a theoretical range from high to low of 5.5 feet. (This is based on the North Highlands Beach tidal station.) If you think about it, 5.5 feet is a hell of a lot - stand on the tidal flats of the bay at low tide and realize that in 6 hours the water will be spilling into your mouth. And, as everybody knows, there are plenty of places where the tides are way more extreme, e.g. the Bay of Fundy. I use the word theoretical because with the long-lasting northeaster we're enduring, the tide hasn't gone fully out for a few days, so the tidal range hasn't been so widespread between high and low. This morning on the bay, at "low tide" it was basically close to a normal high tide, and I eyeballed "high tide" as about a foot higher than the forecast high. Looking at nearby places, one notices that some places have greater tidal ranges, some less, and every place has different tidal timing. So. . . consider for example the Beach Haven Coast Guard Station, on Barnegat Bay on the bay side of Long Beach Island, 40 miles northeast as the crow flies from Delaware Bay. There, today, the tide theoretically varied about 2 feet from low to high, and low tide was 8:47 a.m., high at 3:03 p.m. - running a half hour or so behind the tide on Delaware Bay. Pretty limp tidal variation compared to the big Delbay tides, due to variation in what I've come to think of as the "plumbing" of the system. This plumbing is complex, and I'm still trying to work out the mechanics of it on the finest of scales, as in, the particular places I bird or launch a kayak from. So, you've got to know what's predicted at your particular spot, and then you have to know how the weather and the moon will affect that. On the moon, the reader's digest version is that at full and new moons, the tidal variation between low and high tide will be substantially greater than during the rest of the month. Full and new moon tides are referred to as "spring tides," and they are big, and can wreak consequences on bird and beast, including man. On the weather, the reader's digest version is that on west (from the west) winds, the tide will tend to be pushed out, staying lower than predicted. East (from the east) winds keep the tide higher on the Atlantic coast, because wind-driven wave action holds the water close to shore. That's what's happening right now, big time. This has already become way more theoretical than a simple bird blog should be, so let me give a couple examples of when I got screwed by the tide because I wasn't paying attention. One summer, I was a leader on a birding by boat trip in Great Egg Harbor, NJ, on a fine large pontoon boat captained by an experienced man. The tide was low and theoretically rising, but a west wind was keeping the water offshore. We nestled up to a wonderful heron rookery, enjoyed the comings and goings of 100's of 5-6 species of herons and egrets and ibis for a while, and got soundly stuck. No problem, the tide would come in and lift us off. Not. Sea Tow pulled us off 2 hours later. Another "fun" episode: last summer I went kayaking one day on a falling tide. The theory was, ride the tide out, hang out for a while, then ride the tide back in. This usually works out remarkably well, making for a lazy man's kayak trip (as long as you have a good map and sense of direction). Unless it's a full moon and west wind. Then, you ride the falling tide out, hang out, try to come back in, realize there's not enough water to float even a kayak that only draws 3" of water, hang out more and eventually drag your kayak while forcing yourself through knee-deep muck (which you know at any moment could turn into neck-deep muck). At least you got some good Clapper Rail pictures on this trip. . . One more example, and then back to today's birds. When Hurricane Sandy came through in late October, 2012, east winds had already been keeping the Atlantic coast tides very high for several days. I live, on purpose, about a mile from Delaware Bay and 7.5 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. I want to be near all the great Cape May birding, fishing and kayaking areas, but want nothing to do with coastal flooding or hurricanes, other than chasing the rare birds or birding spectacles that such events might bring. Sandy was a monster, and thank goodness she just grazed Cape May (and instead came ashore directly over Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, where I work. . .). But those damn east winds meant at high tide the night Sandy passed, I had 3 feet of water in my street. Luckily, my house sits a few feet above the street, my dog swims well, and I have a canoe and two kayaks in case it got higher. . . Right, birds. [As the tide rose at the Wetlands Institute today, the short-legged shorebirds became increasingly nervous. The American Golden-plover flew around and landed briefly, before eventually pulling out for good. Where it went to spend high tide, no one knows. Click to enlarge.] I have recently been tweeting about this unusual persistent and pernicious pattern of easterly winds that has pretty much crushed the normally brilliant late-September neotropical bird migration in Cape May, NJ. It's been pretty depressing, especially for the many people who timed their birding vacations to hit the neotrops. But the birding hasn't been "bad." It's just been different. [Speaking of tides, today the normal high tide was going to come early because of the east winds, and the pool east of the Wetlands Institute near Stone Harbor NJ is a known hotspot for shorebirds at normal high tide - which luckily I figured out that today meant 3 hours before the actual forecast high tide. This juvenile Hudsonian Godwit (back bird, with yellowlegs) was exactly the species I was looking for. Perfect time, place and weather. Most HUGO's migrate offshore over the Atlantic to South America, but east winds bring them to the Atlantic Coast. Sam Wilson made a nice pick on this bird, and together we worked out which godwit it was. In this photo, the bill looks slightly foreshortened because the bird is angled towards the camera. Note the eyebrow, patterned back (indicating a juv.), and long, thin, bi-colored bill. At one point it raised its wings, showing black wing linings to rule out a fancier godwit. It was far, so this photo is heavily cropped; click to enlarge.] [As the tide rose, the short-legged birds - the Red Knots (there were 210+) and dowitchers (at least 2 Long-billed and 4 Short-billed) became increasingly anxious, and shuffled about trying to find bottom.] [Soon, the American Golden-Plover, Red Knots and Dowitchers cashed it in, and headed for higher ground as the tide flooded the pool. Their legs weren't long enough to stay.] [The big, strong, long-legged Western Willets and a few Greater Yellowlegs were the last shorebirds standing in the rapidly flooding pool, seeming determined to stay right up to the point of swimming for it. Somehow, the Hudsonian Godwit snuck out of there with only a couple members of the accumulated crowd of birders spotting it go, and no photos taken. So it goes sometimes.] [Eventually, by about 12:15 p.m., still 2 hours to go before official high tide, even the long-legged Western Willets and Greater Yellowlegs had to throw in the towel and search for higher ground.] [A few days ago, this was somebody's house on Grassy Sound, near North Wildlwood NJ. Northeasters are a serious business. . .] [Take tides, northeasters, and sea-level rise seriously. This is the high-tide view of the salt marsh west of Stone Harbor, NJ today, after days of a northeaster, at about 2:15 p.m., taken from the top of the Route 147 bridge into North Wildlwood, NJ. Those houses are along the Stone Harbor Causeway.] Here's a list of birds seen at the Wetland's Institute today. No, it hasn't been good for warblers lately, but there's always something to thrill to during fall migration. Stone Harbor Causeway--Wetlands Institute, Cape May, New Jersey, US Oct 4, 2015 10:30 AM - 12:15 PM Protocol: Traveling 0.3 mile(s) Comments: Northeaster, half tide and rising, already quite high. Submitted from eBird for iOS, version 1.1.2 Build 27 27 species American Black Duck 10 Double-crested Cormorant 75 Great Egret 8 Snowy Egret 15 Little Blue Heron 2 Black-crowned Night-Heron 3 Yellow-crowned Night-Heron 1 Juv Osprey 1 Clapper Rail 1 American Golden-Plover 1 Juv Semipalmated Plover 2 Greater Yellowlegs 50 Willet (Western) 71 Actual count, there have been a bunch here lately. Lesser Yellowlegs 15 Hudsonian Godwit 1 Juv Red Knot 210 Actual count. Stilt Sandpiper 2 Short-billed Dowitcher 4 Long-billed Dowitcher 2 Laughing Gull 10 Herring Gull 10 Forster's Tern 2 Tree Swallow 300 Northern Mockingbird 1 Song Sparrow 1 Red-winged Blackbird 5 Boat-tailed Grackle 10 View this checklist online at No comments: Post a Comment
Shasta Nation Shasta Literature The Shasta nation probably acquired its name from a long ago chief named Sasti. They are located in California and Oregon, on the Klamath River from Indian and Thompson Creeks to the mouth of Fall Creek; in the drainage areas of two Klamath River tributaries, the Scott and Shasta rivers; and on the north side of the Siskiyou Mountains in Oregon on affluents of the Rogue River. All of these waterways are rich sources of fish for many tribes. Mount Shasta and Shasta County perpetuate the name of the Shasta Indians. Land of the Ghost Dance Eagle, the supreme spirit of all flying creatures, wanted to create people. So he sent two children to earth, a boy and a girl. They created more children, and in time there were many, many people everywhere on earth. It seems that no one ever died. More and more people were created, and soon the world was becoming much too crowded. Everyone pondered the question of what could be done about the crowded conditions on earth? Then a boy died! His people were very sad to lose him, and friends gathered to comfort the family of the lost boy. They said to each other, “Let us not die, let us not die!” Buy Coyote replied, “People must die, people must die!” Soon thereafter the parents buried the little boy. But in their hearts, they were disturbed about what Coyote kept saying. Now they secretly wished that Coyote’s child might die. Perhaps then he would understand somewhat of how they felt about losing their son. A few moons passed, when Coyote’s child became ill and he died. Coyote wanted so much to bring him back to life. He even followed his child’s spirit to the land where the Ghosts danced about a fire. There he watched the spectacular cavortings of the Ghosts dancing continuously, enjoying their frolic. Coyote built his own fire of wild parsnips to attract his child’s ghost. When the Ghost clan smelled the burning parsnips, they could not stand the aroma and gave Coyote’s child back to him. They returned happily to their homeland. On their way, Coyote was so very delighted to have his child with him. Coyote asked, “What wish would you like to have me grant you?” “Father, for ten years you must never scold me,” replied the child. All was happiness for five years, no one scolded Coyote’s child. Then someone forgot and scolded him, and he died a second time. Again Coyote went to the Land of the Ghost Dance. Again the Ghosts saw Coyote return and said, “Go back, go back to your home and return the day after tomorrow to see your child.” Joyous at the future prospect of seeing his child again, Coyote practically danced all the way home. Because he was tired from the excitement of his journey, Coyote lay down to rest when he reached his home. The very next day, his friends found Coyote dead in his own bed. Coyote’s spirit returned for the third time to the Land of the Ghost Dance, and for the third time was welcomed by his child and the other dancing Ghosts. Shasta Indians used to say that no one should follow the dead to the Land of the Ghost Dance, or soon they, too, would become a new Ghost in the Land of the Ghost Dance! Mt. Shasta Grizzly Legend by Joaquin Miller Before people were on the Earth, the Chief of the Great Sky Spirits grew tired of his home in the Above World because it was always cold. So he made a hole in the sky by turning a stone around and around. Through the hole he pushed snow and ice until he made a big mound. This mound was Mount Shasta. Then Sky Spirit stepped from the sky to the mountain and walked down. When he got about halfway down, he thought: “On this mountain there should be trees.” So he put his finger down and eveywhere he touched, up sprang trees. Everywhere he stepped, the snow melted and became rivers. The Sky Spirit broke off the end of his big walking stick he had carried from the sky and threw the pieces in the water. The long pieces became Beaver and Otter. The smaller pieces became fish. From the other end of his stick he made the animals. Biggest of all was Grizzly Bear. They were covered with fur and had sharp claws just like today, but they could walk on their hind feet and talk. They were so fierce looking that the Sky Spirit sent them to live at the bottom of the mountain. When the leaves fell from the trees, Sky Spirit blew on them and made the birds. Then Sky Spirit decided to stay on the Earth and sent for his family. Mount Shasta became their lodge. He made a BIG fire in the middle of the mountain and a hole in the top for the smoke and sparks. Every time he threw a really big log on the fire, the Earth would tremble and sparks would fly from the top of the mountain. Late one spring, Wind Spirit was blowing so hard that it blew the smoke back down the hole and burned the eyes of Sky Spirit’s family. Sky Spirit told his youngest daughter to go tell Wind Spirit not to blow so hard. Sky Spirit warned his daughter: “When you get to the top, don’t poke your head out. The wind might catch your hair and pull you out. Just put your arm through and make a sign and then speak to Wind Spirit.” The little girl hurried to the top of the mountain and spoke to Wind Spirit. As she started back down, she remembered that her father had told her that the ocean could be seen from the top of the mountain. He had made the ocean since moving his family to the mountain and his daughter had never seen it. She put her head out of the hole and looked to the west. The Wind Spirit caught her hair and pulled her out of the mountain. She flew over the ice and snow and landed in the scrubby fir trees at the timberline, her long red hair flowing over the snow. There Grizzly Bear found her. He carried the little girl home with him wondering who she was. Mother Grizzly Bear took care of her and brought her up with her cubs. The little girl and the cubs grew up together. When she bacame a young woman, she and the eldest son of Gizzly Bear were married. In the years that followed they had many children. The children didn’t look like their father or their mother. All the grizzly bears throughout the forest were proud of these new creatures. They were so pleased, they made a new lodge for the red-haired mother and her strange looking children. They called the Lodge – Little Mount Shasta. Ater many years had passed, Mother Grizzly Bear knew that she would soon die. Fearing that she had done wrong in keeping the little girl, she felt she should send word to the Chief of the Sky Spirits and ask his forgiveness. So she gathered all the grizzlies at Little Mount Shasta and sent her oldest grandson to the top of Mount Shasta, in a cloud, to tell the Spirit Chief where he could find his daughter. The father was very glad. He came down the mountain in great strides. He hurried so fast the snow melted. His tracks can be seen to this day. As he neared the lodge, he called out for his daughter. He expected to see a little girl exactly as he saw her last. When he saw the strange creatures his daughter was taking care of, he was surprised to learn that they were his grandchildren and he was very angry. He looked so sternly at the old grandmother that she died at once. Then he cursed all the grizzlies. “Get down on your hands and knees. From this moment on all grizzlies shall walk on four feet. And you shall never talk again. You have wronged me.” He drove his grandchildren out of the lodge, threw his daughter over his shoulder and climbed back up the mountain. Never again did he come to the forest. Some say he put out the fire in the center of his lodge and returned to the sky with his daughter. Those strange grandchildren scattered and wandered over the earth. They were the first Indians, the ancestors of all the Indian Tribes. That is why the Indians living around Mount Shasta never kill Grizzly Bear. Whenever one of them was killed by a grizzly bear, his body was burned on the spot. And for many years all who passed that way cast a stone there until a great pile of stones marked the place of his death. Why Mount Shasta Erupted Coyote, a universal and mischievous spirit, lived near Mount Shasta in what is now California. Coyote’s village had little fish and no salmon. His neighbouring village of Shasta Indians always had more than they could use. “I am so terribly hungry,” he said to himself upon waking. “If I visit the Shasteans, maybe I can have a salmon dinner.” “I think I had better rest for a while,” he thought. “A short nap will do me good.” Coyote waked very hungry. His first thought was how good a bite of salmon would taste at that moment. Still half-asleep, he turned his head and took a large bite. To his great surprise and anger, his mouth was full of fish bones! His salmon meat was gone. Coyote jumped up and down in a rage shouting, “Who has stolen my salmon? Who has stolen my salmon?” “Whatever happened to you?” they asked when they saw his pack of bare salmon bones. “I was tired and decided to take a nap,” replied Coyote. “While I slept, someone slightly stole all of the good salmon meat that you gave me. I feel very foolish to ask, but may I catch more fish at your dam?” “Please take a third pack of fish and go to the same place and rest. We will follow and hide in the bushes beside you and keep the Yellow Jackets from stealing your fish,” responded the Shasta Indians. “Whoever asked you to come here?” said Coyote, annoyed at Grandfather Turtle’s intrusion. Turtle said nothing but just sat there by himself. “Why did you come here to bother us,” taunted Coyote. “We are waiting for the robber Yellow Jackets who stole two packs of salmon. We’ll scare them away this time with all my Shasta friends surrounding this place. Why don’t you go on your way?” Coyote and his friends closed all of the smaller holes. “Surely the Yellow Jackets will soon be dead,” said Coyote as he sat down to rest. Then to Coyote’s delight, he saw his salmon miraculously pop out from the top hole of Mount Shasta–cooked and smoked, ready to eat! To this day, the Shasta Indian tribe likes to conclude this tale saying, “This is how volcanic eruptions began long, long ago on Mount Shasta.” Leave a Reply You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change ) Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s
011-40705070 or Call me Download our Mobile App Select Board & Class • Select Board • Select Class Question 4: Following pictograph shows the number of tractors in five villages. Number of tractors - 1 tractor Village A Village B Village C Village D Village E Observe the pictograph and answer the following questions. (i) Which village has the minimum number of tractors? (ii) Which village has the maximum number of tractors? (iii) How many more tractors village C has as compared to village B. (iv) What is the total number of tractors in all the five villages? To view the solution to this question please Video Previous Next
Skip to main content Triangle Copy 4Triangle Copy 4Group 4Group 4Group 4LineGroup 3Group 7Page 1Page 1 Science and Media Museum You are here: Think like a scientist, feed your curiosity and have a go. Touch, try and photograph your experience as you navigate your way through more than 20 mind-bending exhibits. Hear your voice echo through a 15m-long tube, get lost in mirrors, make art using light, and travel through a laser tunnel. Live experiments and extraordinary experiences will take you on a journey, changing how you see the world around you. Have fun finding the answers as you explore light and sound and discover how they're the building blocks of the technology and media that surround us every day. Spectacular live shows Get involved and be part of the action at our free live shows. They’re exciting and interactive—you might learn how to set fire to sound, photograph the universe, create a thunderstorm indoors, or explore an Egyptian tomb. The current show is Light It Up! Entry to Wonderlab is free, but we recommend booking in advance. Book your free tickets online and guarantee a time slot to explore Wonderlab. Your Wonderlab ticket also gives you access to any of our free live shows. Places are limited, though, so make sure you're in the gallery before the show begins. Learning in Wonderlab By experimenting, playing and exploring, students can understand how light and sound are the building blocks of the technology they use every day. Explore the exhibits in Wonderlab and find out more about our shows below. Learning resources Explore the exhibits Exhibit information packs
What can not drinking enough water do to your body Read about what causes dehydration, what it does to your body,. enough to keep up with the loss of fluid can. Drinking water does not add calories to your.Is one suppossed to use 95/5 solder for drinking water?. and doesn't leach into the body. Solder Types For Potable Water 95/5, 50/50, 60/40: vid.If you stop drinking enough water your body will be thrown out of balance. 5 Things you Did Not Know About Drinking Water and Weight Loss. By: Lisa Neser. How to restore your appetite, increase your energy, and Diabetic ketoacidosis can occur when diabetes. because your body can need more insulin than. blood insulin levels usually do not get low enough to signal the.The Rubbermaid 10 Gal Water Cooler has a durable construction to. they don't seal tight enough. 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Fluids and Electrolytes. STUDY. PLAY. Hypervolemia. How I Transformed Sewage Into Fresh Water [Video . of people do not drink enough water. do is stick to water when you're not drinking. and fruits it can not compensate your body needs of water. NCLEX: Fluid and Electrolytes Flashcards \| Quizlet If your drinking problem is complicated by other medical or psychiatric. If you drink heavily for enough years, your body will begin to lose its ability to self... Can Women Pee in a Bottle While Backpacking?. clearly label it or can otherwise distinguish it from your drinking water supply!. How Much of Your Body Is Water?.. and of course just glasses of water with the filtered water. My body is. Love It I was not drinking enough water. loc_en_US, sid_spacesaver.How to Lose Weight Fast. so getting enough sleep can really help you on your path to. Increasing your water intake can also help your body efficiently. 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Dr. Hulda Clark Liver cleanse & gallbladder cleanse Northern Health > Your Health > Environmental Health AP: Drugs found in drinking water - USATODAY.com Moisture is for the inside of your body as well as on the outside in your hair.Itchy dandruff can also serve as a warning sign of not getting enough water inside of your body.The O 2 level drops into the diver's blackout zone before the CO 2 can rise enough. not by the reduction of oxygen. The body can. Shallow water blackout can.PurTest Home Water Analysis Kit allows you to quickly and easily test your drinking water. The Home Water Analysis. enough for routine screening of my water.Does salt water helps dreads to grow faster?. not much you can do to make your hair grow faster. If you happen to not be getting enough. Fainting and Loss of Consciousness. down and put your head between your legs. That's usually enough to restore adequate. Do not slap, shake, or throw water on.Find out why Mayo Clinic is the right place for your health care. or because you lack access to safe drinking water when you're. your body's fluid reserve. What Does Vitamin B-1 Do? - Healthline 12 Signs That A Thyroid May Not Be Working As It Should. When your body isn't producing enough thyroid hormone,. so make sure you’re drinking enough water.. meaning that cells do not get enough. more than the body needed at that moment. This can also happen when. drinking session can trigger hypoglycemia.Drinking plenty of water keeps your blood, kidneys, and other parts in your body flowing with ease.Click here to better understand your results from the Wellness Department at Campbell County Health. Understanding Your. or by not drinking enough water. \| Impressum
Monegasque Kingdom Royaume de Monaco Reialmu de Múnegu Reialme di Monaco Regno de Mónegue Timeline: 1983: Doomsday OTL equivalent: Monaco Flag of Monaco Flag of Monaco Capital Monaco Largest city Monaco Other cities Aix-en-Provence Monegasque and French are the only official languages others Italian and English King Albert II Minister of State Jean-Paul Proust Independence 1297 Currency Monegasque Franc Monaco was once one of the smallest nations in the world. Following Doomsday it has grown to be a larger state in European politics. Contact with the League of Nations was restored in 2000. Monaco was the second smallest principality in Europe, as well as the second smallest country in the world, only Vatican City was smaller. Surviving French citizens began in October of 1983 to petition Monaco for protection and asylum. The Grimaldi family, moved both out of concern for their neighbors and the stability of their nation, began to strengthen their hold on the surrounding region, using surviving French military forces as the Army of Monaco to defend those cities that would join them. At best Monaco is a loose confederation of city-states, a restored feudal order of sorts, however it is consolidating into a more tightly-knit polity in face of increasing pressure from the Alpine Confederation. The Grimaldis, wishing to remain independent have pushed forward, bringing cities and local leaders into support of the kingdom, issuing fiefs and protection for their citizens. Because of the nuclear strikes in Marseilles and Montpelier, most of the western flank has been protected from the rougher elements of French survivors. Detente has been maintained with the northern Italian survivor states in the face of aggression from Sicily A limited agreement with the Alpine Confederation was reached in 2000 to allow the Alpine Confederation's navy to dock in Monaco's territorial waters. Monaco has instituted a sharp conscription and training program, ensuring that its citizens are ready to defend the nation against incursions from the west or east. Wary attention is given to the Alpine Confederation's movements in the north and northeast although the Confederation's intent seems benevolent. Monaco had not been approached by 2005 to participate in any treaty organizations, but a delegation made contact with France in late 2008. International relations Monaco is a member of the League of Nations. Following protracted discussions with the Alpine Confederation, the Grimaldis of Monaco agreed to allow use of all Monegasque ports to support the defensive maneuvers against Sicily in 2000, and later expanded in 2002, 2003 and 2005. Ad blocker interference detected!
Baptists are Christians who comprise a group of denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers (believer's baptism, as opposed to infant baptism), and that it must be done by immersion (as opposed to affusion or sprinkling). Other tenets of Baptist churches include soul competency (liberty), salvation through faith alone, scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists recognize two ministerial offices, pastors and deacons. Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant churches, though some Baptists disavow this identity. Historians trace the earliest church labeled "Baptist" back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with English Separatist John Smyth as its pastor. In accordance with his reading of the New Testament, he rejected baptism of infants and instituted baptism only of believing adults. Baptist practice spread to England, where the General Baptists considered Christ's atonement to extend to all people, while the Particular Baptists believed that it extended only to the elect. In 1638, Roger Williams established the first Baptist congregation in the North American colonies. In the mid-18th century, the First Great Awakening increased Baptist growth in both New England and the South. The Second Great Awakening in the South in the early 19th century increased church membership, as did the preachers' lessening of support for abolition and manumission of slavery, which had been part of the 18th-century teachings. Baptist missionaries have spread their church to every continent. The Baptist World Alliance reports more than 41 million members in more than 150,000 congregations. In 2002, there were over 100 million Baptists and Baptistic group members worldwide and over 33 million in North America. The largest Baptist association is the Southern Baptist Convention, with the membership of associated churches totaling more than 16 million. Baptist Historian Bruce Gourley outlines four main views of Baptist origins: (1) The modern scholarly consensus that the movement traces its origin to the 17th century via the English Separatists, (2) the view that it was an outgrowth of Anabaptist traditions, (3) the perpetuity view which assumes that the Baptist faith and practice has existed since the time of Christ, and (4) the successionist view, or "Baptist successionism," which argues that Baptist churches actually existed in an unbroken chain since the time of Christ. English separatist viewEdit Modern Baptist churches trace their history to the English Separatist movement in the century after the rise of the original Protestant denominations. This view of Baptist origins has the most historical support and is the most widely accepted. Adherents to this position consider the influence of Anabaptists upon early Baptists to be minimal. It was a time of considerable political and religious turmoil. Both individuals and churches were willing to give up their theological roots if they became convinced that a more biblical "truth" had been discovered. During the Protestant Reformation, the Church of England (Anglicans) separated from the Roman Catholic Church. There were some Christians who were not content with the achievements of the mainstream Protestant Reformation. There also were Christians who were disappointed that the Church of England had not made corrections of what some considered to be errors and abuses. Of those most critical of the Church's direction, some chose to stay and try to make constructive changes from within the Anglican Church. They became known as "Puritans" and are described by Gourley as cousins of the English Separatists. Others decided they must leave the Church because of their dissatisfaction and became known as the Separatists. Historians trace the earliest Baptist church back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with John Smyth as its pastor. Even prior to that, in 1606, John Smyth, a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, had broken his ties with the Church of England. Reared in the Church of England, he became "Puritan, English Separatist, and then a Baptist Separatist," and ended his days working with the Mennonites. He began meeting in England with 60–70 English Separatists, in the face of "great danger." The persecution of religious nonconformists in England led Smyth to go into exile in Amsterdam with fellow Separatists from the congregation he had gathered in Lincolnshire, separate from the established church (Anglican). Smyth and his lay supporter, Thomas Helwys, together with those they led, broke with the other English exiles because Smyth and Helways were convinced they should be baptized as believers. In 1609 Smyth first baptized himself and then baptized the others. In 1609, while still there, Smyth wrote a tract titled "The Character of the Beast," or "The False Constitution of the Church." In it he expressed two propositions: first, infants are not to be baptized; and second, "Antichristians converted are to be admitted into the true Church by baptism."Hence, his conviction was that a scriptural church should consist only of regenerate believers who have been baptized on a personal confession of faith. He rejected the Separatist movement's doctrine of infant baptism (paedobaptism). Shortly thereafter, Smyth left the group, and layman Thomas Helwys took over the leadership, leading the church back to England in 1611. Ultimately, Smyth became committed to believers' baptism as the only biblical baptism. He was convinced on the basis of his interpretation of Scripture that infants would not be damned should they die in infancy. Smyth, convinced that his self-baptism was invalid, applied with the Mennonites for membership. He died while waiting for membership, and some of his followers became Mennonites. Thomas Helwys and others kept their baptism and their Baptist commitments. The modern Baptist denomination is an outgrowth of Smyth's movement. Baptists rejected the name Anabaptist when they were called that by opponents in derision. McBeth writes that as late as the 18th century, many Baptists referred to themselves as "the Christians commonly—though falsely—called Anabaptists." Another milestone in the early development of Baptist doctrine was in 1638 with John Spilsbury, a Calvinistic minister who helped recover the practice of believer's baptism by immersion. According to Tom Nettles, professor of historical theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "Spilsbury's cogent arguments for a gathered, disciplined congregation of believers baptized by immersion as constituting the New Testament church gave expression to and built on insights that had emerged within separatism, advanced in the life of John Smyth and the suffering congregation of Thomas Helwys, and matured in Particular Baptists." Anabaptist influence viewEdit Another view is that early seventeenth-century Baptists were influenced by continental Anabaptists. According to this view, the Dutch Mennonites (Anabaptists) shared similarities with General Baptists (believer's baptism, Print from Anglican theologian Daniel Featley's book, "The Dippers Dipt, or, The Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd Over Head and Ears, at a Disputation in Southwark," published in 1645. religious liberty, separation of church and state, and Arminian views of salvation, predestination and original sin). Representative writers include AC Underwood and William R Estep. Gorley writes that among some contemporary Baptist scholars who emphasize the faith of the community over soul liberty, the Anabaptist influence theory is making a comeback. Perpetuity viewEdit Main article: Baptist successionism Prior to the 20th century, Baptist historians generally wrote from the perspective that Baptists had existed since the time of Christ. Proponents of the Baptist perpetuity view consider the Baptist movement to have always been historically separate from Catholicism and in existence prior to the Protestant Reformation. The perpetuity view is often identified with The Trail of Blood, a pamphlet by J.M. Carrol published in 1931. Other Baptist writers holding the perpetuity view are John T. Christian, Thomas Crosby, G.H. Orchard, JM Cramp, William Cathcart, Adam Taylor and DB Ray . This view was also held by English Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon as well as Jesse Mercer, the namesake of Mercer University. Baptist Origins in the UKEdit In 1612, Thomas Helwys established a Baptist congregation in London, consisting of congregants from Smyth's church. A number of other Baptist churches sprang up, and they became known as the General Baptists. The Particular Baptists were established when a group of Calvinist Separatists adopted believers’ Baptism. Baptist Origins in North AmericaEdit See also: Baptists in the United States and Baptists in Canada Both Roger Williams and John Clarke, his compatriot in working for religious freedom, are variously credited as founding the earliest Baptist church in North America. In 1639, Williams established a Baptist church in Providence, Rhode Island, and Clarke began a Baptist church in Newport, Rhode Island. According to a Baptist historian who has researched the matter extensively, "There is much debate over the centuries as to whether the Historical chart of the main Protestant branches. The Great Awakening energized the Baptist movement, and the Baptist community experienced spectacular growth. Baptists became the largest Christian community in many southern states, including among the black population. Baptist missionary work in Canada began in the British colony of Nova Scotia (current day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) in the 1760s. The first official record of a Baptist church in Canada was that of the Horton Baptist Church (now Wolfville) in Wolfville, Nova Scotia on October 29, 1778. The church was established with the assistance of the New Light evangelist Henry Alline. Many of Alline's followers, after his death, would convert and strengthen the Baptist presence in the Atlantic region. Two major groups of Baptists formed the basis of the churches in the maritimes. These were referred to as Regular Baptist (Calvinistic in their doctrine) and Free Will Baptists. In May 1845, the Baptist congregations in the United States split over slavery and missions. The Home Mission Society prevented slaveholders from being appointed as missionaries. The split created the Southern Baptist Convention, while the northern congregations formed their own umbrella organization now called the American Baptist Churches USA (ABC-USA). The Methodist Episcopal Church, South had recently separated over the issue of slavery, and southern Presbyterians would do so shortly thereafter. Baptist affiliationsEdit Many Baptist churches choose to affiliate with organizational groups that provide fellowship without control. The largest such group is the Southern Baptist Convention. There also are a substantial number of smaller cooperative groups. Finally, there are Baptist churches that choose to remain autonomous and independent of any denomination, organization, or association. In 1905, Baptists worldwide formed the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). The BWA now counts 218 Baptist conventions and unions worldwide with over 41 million members. The BWA's goals include caring for the needy, leading in world evangelism and defending human rights and religious freedom. Though it played a role in the founding of the BWA, the Southern Baptist Convention severed its affiliation with BWA in 2004. See also: List of Christian denominations by number of members and List of Baptist sub-denominations Today, 46 million Baptists belong to churches cooperating with the Baptist World Alliance. Many Baptist groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the Baptist Bible Fellowship do not cooperate with the Alliance. Their number can add up to a total of close to 100 million adherents in the world through 211 denominations, making Baptists the largest Protestant denomination in the world. Baptists are present in almost all continents in big denominations. The largest number by baptized memberships are in Nigeria (3.5 million) and Democratic Republic of the Congo (2 million) in Africa, India (2.5 million) and Myanmar (1 million) in Asia, USA (35 million) and Brazil (1.8 million) in the North and South America. According to the Barna Group researchers, Baptists are the largest denominational grouping of born again Christians in the USA A 2009 ABCNEWS/Beliefnet phone poll of 1 022 adults suggests that fifteen percent of Americans identify themselves as Baptists. A large percentage of Baptists in North America are found in five bodies—the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC); National Baptist Convention (NBC); National Baptist Convention of America, Inc.; (NBCA); American Baptist Churches in the USA (ABC); and Baptist Bible Fellowship International (BBFI). Qualification for membershipEdit Membership policies vary due to the autonomy of churches, but the traditional method by which an individual becomes a member of a church is through believer's baptism, which is a public profession of faith in Jesus, followed by water baptism. Most baptists do not believe that baptism is a requirement for salvation, but rather a public expression of one's inner repentance and faith. Therefore some churches will admit into membership persons who make a profession of faith but fail to follow through with believers' baptism. In general, Baptist churches do not have a stated age restriction on membership, but believer's baptism requires that an individual be able to freely and earnestly profess their faith. (See Age of Accountability) Baptist beliefs and principlesEdit Main article: Baptist beliefs Baptists, like other Christians, are defined by doctrine—some of it common to all orthodox and evangelical groups and a portion of it importantly distinctive. Through the years, different Baptist groups have issued confessions of faith—without considering them to be creeds—to express their particular doctrinal distinctions in comparison to other Christians as well as in comparison to other Baptists. Most Baptists are evangelical in doctrine, but Baptist beliefs can vary due to the congregational governance system that gives autonomy to individual local Baptist churches. Historically, Baptists have played a key role in encouraging religious freedom and separation of church and state. Some additional distinctive Baptist principles held by many Baptists: • The supremacy of the canonical Scriptures as a norm of faith and practice. For something to become a matter of faith and practice, it is not sufficient for it to be merely consistent with and not contrary to scriptural principles. It must be something explicitly ordained through command or example in the Bible. For instance, this is why Baptists do not practice infant baptism—they say the Bible neither commands nor exemplifies infant baptism as a Christian practice. More than any other Baptist principle, this one when applied to infant baptism is said to separate Baptists from other evangelical Christians. • Baptists believe that faith is a matter between God and the individual (religious freedom). To them it means the advocacy of absolute liberty of conscience. • Insistence on immersion as the only mode of baptism. Baptists do not believe that baptism is necessary for salvation. Therefore, they do not consider it to be a sacrament, since it imparts no saving grace. Beliefs that vary among BaptistsEdit Since there is no hierarchical authority and each Baptist church is autonomous, there is no official set of Baptist theological beliefs. These differences exist both among associations, and even among churches within the associations. Some doctrinal issues on which there is widespread difference among Baptists are: Controversies that have shaped BaptistsEdit Baptists have faced many controversies in their 400-year history, controversies of the level of crises. Baptist historian Walter Shurden says the word "crisis" comes from the Greek word meaning "to decide." Shurden writes that contrary to the presumed negative view of crises, some controversies that reach a crisis level may actually be "positive and highly productive." He claims that even schism, though never ideal, has often produced positive results. In his opinion crises among Baptists each have become decision-moments that shaped their future. Some controversies that have shaped Baptists include the "missions crisis," the "slavery crisis," the "landmark crisis," and the "modernist crisis." Missions crisisEdit Early in the 19th century, the rise of the modern missions movement, and the backlash against it, led to widespread and bitter controversy among the American Baptists. During this era, the American Baptists were split between missionary and anti-missionary. A substantial secession of Baptists went into the movement led by Alexander Campbell, to return to a more fundamental church. Slavery crisisEdit Leading up to the American Civil War, Baptists became embroiled in the controversy over slavery in the United States. Whereas in the First Great Awakening, Methodist and Baptist preachers had opposed slavery and urged manumission, over the decades they made more of an accommodation with the institution. They worked with slaveholders in the South to urge a paternalistic institution. Both denominations made direct appeals to slaves and free blacks for conversion. The Baptists particularly allowed them active roles in congregations. By the mid-19th century, northern Baptists tended to oppose slavery. As tensions increased, in 1844 the Home Mission Society refused to appoint a slaveholder as a missionary who had been proposed by Georgia. It noted that missionaries could not take servants with them, and also that the Board did not want to appear to condone slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention was formed by nine state conventions in 1845, founded in part on the premise that the Bible sanctions slavery and that it is acceptable for Christians to own slaves. They believed slavery was a human institution which Baptist teaching could make less harsh. Not only were many planters among its membership, but some of the denomination's prominent preachers, such as the Rev. Basil Manly, Sr., president of the University of Alabama, were planters and owned slaves (he owned 40.) As early as the late 18th century, black Baptists began to organize separate churches, associations and mission agencies, especially in the northern states. Not only did blacks set up some independent congregations in the South before the American Civil War, freedmen quickly separated from white congregations and associations after the war. They wanted to be free of white supervision. In 1866 the Consolidated American Baptist Convention, formed from black Baptists of the South and West, helped southern associations set up black state conventions, which they did in Alabama, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky . In 1880 black state conventions united in the national Foreign Mission Convention, to support black Baptist missionary work. Two other national black conventions were formed, and in 1895 they united as the National Baptist Convention. This organization later went through its own changes, spinning off other conventions. It is the largest black religious organization and the second largest Baptist organization in the world. Relatively recent demographics show that Baptists enjoy their largest per capita presence in the Southeastern United States of America, which were slaveholding states, prior to the end of the Civil War. The Baptist faith is the predominant faith of African Americans. On 20 June 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery. More than 20,000 Southern Baptists registered for the meeting in Atlanta. The resolution declared that messengers, as SBC delegates are called, "unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin" and "lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest." It offered an apology to all African-Americans for "condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime" and repentance for "racism of which we have been guilty, whether consciously or unconsciously." Although Southern Baptists have condemned racism in the past, this was the first time the predominantly white convention had dealt specifically with the issue of slavery. The statement sought forgiveness "from our African-American brothers and sisters" and pledged to "eradicate racism in all its forms from Southern Baptist life and ministry." Currently about 500,000 members of the 15.6-million-member denomination are African Americans and another 300,000 are ethnic minorities. The resolution marked the denomination's first formal acknowledgment that racism played a role in its founding. Landmark crisisEdit Southern Baptist Landmarkism sought to reset the ecclesiastical separation which had characterized the old Baptist churches, in an era when inter-denominational union meetings were the order of the day. James Robinson Graves was the primary leader of this movement and one of the most influential Baptists of the 19th century. While some Landmarkers eventually separated from the Southern Baptist Convention, the movement's influence on the Convention continued well into the 20th century. Its influence continues to affect Convention policies. In 2005 the Southern Baptist International Mission Board forbade its missionaries to receive alien immersions for baptism. Modernist crisisEdit The rise of theological modernism in the latter 19th and 20th century also greatly affected Baptists. The Landmark movement, already mentioned, has been described as a reaction against incipient modernism among Southern Baptists. In England, Charles Haddon Spurgeon fought against modernistic views of the Scripture in the Downgrade Controversy. The Northern Baptist Convention in the United States had internal conflict over modernism in the early 20th century, ultimately embracing it. Two new conservative associations were founded as a result: the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches in 1933 and the Conservative Baptist Association of America in 1947. Following similar conflicts over modernism, the Southern Baptist Convention adhered to conservative theology as its official position. Two new Baptist groups were formed by moderate Southern Baptists who disagreed with the direction in which the Southern Baptist Convention was heading: the Alliance of Baptists in 1987 and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991. Members of both groups originally identified as Southern Baptist, but over time the groups "became permanent new families of Baptists." Ad blocker interference detected!
nothing is impossible!!!! nothing is impossible!!!! Thursday, August 7, 2008 What is network latency ? If you have a WAN, then one very important concern should be latency. Latency, in this case, is the time that a package of information takes to reach the other end of the slow link. This package of information could be a DNS query, ping, file, or a transaction in a client/server application. Notice that the package of information has not fully arrived at the destination until all bits have arrived. It is often tempting to assume that the only variable here is the bandwidth. It seems logical that the fatter the pipe, the quicker the information package will arrive at its destination. For a large file, latency doesn't play much of a part; however, in the case of small packages like a DNS query, ping, or a transaction, latency can kill your performance. It is very important to distinguish between bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the capacity of the link to transfer quantities of information in a given amount of time. A 128k link can transfer roughly 13 k bytes of information in one second. This can vary depending on compression and other factors. For a 13 meg file, the total time to transfer the file across the link would be 1000 seconds. This doesn't vary that much between different kinds of slow links: frame, ppp, ISDN, etc. This gets interesting, though, when you consider that there are many packages of information that are relatively small. Different slow links have different latency characteristics. Further, as these slow links get loaded down with many different kinds of network traffic, latency can go up quickly. - ping - traceroute ( Uses ping command ) No comments:
Posted on Pronunciation of Mushrooming: Learn how to pronounce Mushrooming in English correctly Learn how to say Mushrooming correctly in English with this tutorial pronunciation video. Oxford dictionary definition of the word mushroom: 1a fungal growth that typically takes the form of a domed cap on a stalk, with gills on the underside of the cap: she sautéd the mushrooms in butter [as modifier]: mushroom soup a thing resembling a mushroom in shape: a mushroom of smoke and flames Mushrooms are fruiting bodies that produce spores, growing from the hyphae of fungi concealed in soil or wood. Proverbial for rapid growth, many varieties are edible and toadstools are often called mushrooms when they are considered to be edible 2 [mass noun] a pale pinkish-brown colour: [as modifier]: a mushroom leather bag [no object] 1increase, spread, or develop rapidly: environmental concern mushroomed in the 1960s 2form a shape resembling that of a mushroom: the grenade mushroomed into red fire as it hit the hillside (of a bullet) expand and flatten on reaching its target: these are high-performance bullets which mushroom upon impact 3 (usually as noun mushrooming) gather mushrooms: he went mushrooming with his father
Skip to Main Content Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Broadcasting Race Perhaps no greater vehicle of communication is contributing to a better understanding of the American Negro than television. -Editorial in the Negro newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier (1954) If you give me a television station, we won’t need a revolution. -Amiri Baraka (1966) Entertainment programs on television were another important—if sometimes ambivalent—venue for African American visual representation. In the mid-1960s, nationally broadcast dramas and situation comedies began to feature black actors. With these appearances, the networks reached out to black viewers, a new and increasingly lucrative demographic. The content of the shows, however, usually sidestepped the social realities of African American life in order to assuage the anxieties of white viewers and assure high enough ratings to attract profitable sponsors. Nevertheless, television, more than any other mainstream visual entertainment, was a fertile ground for black representation: a handful of programs featured complex black characters or tackled the issue of racial prejudice; variety series—to a degree far greater than the interpersonal experiences of most Americans—regularly presented black and white performers interacting as equals; and, from the late 1960s onward, local programs gave voice to an array of topics of specific interest to the black community. Image Credits/Captions (Click on thumbnails for full image) The Urban Negro Market Potential, n.d. 6 x 10 1/2 x 1/8 in. Collection of Civil Rights Archive/CADVC-UMBC, Baltimore, MD, 2005.101. After World War II, the African-American middle class, though still a small portion of the black population as a whole, was slowly but steadily expanding. Businesses and corporation began to tap into—and study, as these surveys suggest—the buying power of African Americans, a process that led to the increased presence of black characters and celebrities on television, a medium dependent on advertising and consumer outreach.
05 May 2006 Remembering Bobby Sands 5 May 2006 00:54 Bobby Sands, IRA hunger striker and Westminster MP, died at the Maze Prison 25 years ago today. David McKittrick analyses how his death transformed The Troubles, and talks to the key players Published: 05 May 2006 The 1981 republican hunger strike was a time of violence, of sacrifice, of death and of horror, a time of huge polarisation and division which created new depths of bitterness and revitalised a flagging IRA. Ten republicans starved themselves to death in the Maze prison near Belfast in what was a long drawn-out agony for them, and for Northern Ireland. The crisis plunged the province into one of the worst convulsions it has experienced, putting the population through communal trauma and laying the basis for a deadly cycle of increased violence. Many deaths on the streets followed. The IRA attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher, in a revenge bomb attack on the Tory party conference in Brighton three years later, was one example. And yet the paradox is that this struggle was to set the IRA and Sinn Fein on an unexpected new path which eventually led to the peace process. No one realised this at the time; most were aghast at the turmoil which spread from the IRA cells of the Maze to poison community relations and caused many to despair that there might never be peace. Most thought it a crushing defeat for the republicans, a view shared then by many within the IRA and Sinn Fein. Yet today Sinn Fein is the biggest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, and growing strongly in the south. In other words, it now possesses the political status that Bobby Sands and the other strikers died for; the status Mrs Thatcher refused to grant. Before the hunger strike, Sands and other prisoners had staged years of protests in the Maze but Mrs Thatcher was adamant the IRA should be treated as common criminals. When Sands died 25 years ago today, his 66th day of hungerstrike, he ascended into republican Valhalla, regarded as the IRA's most prominent martyr and an emblem of self-sacrifice. His portrait, repainted annually, remains one of the most prominent of the republican murals on Belfast's Falls Road. Huge tensions grew during the campaign, which was marked by one stunning development, when Sands won a Westminster by-election from his cell. His narrow win was a propaganda victory of enormous proportions. The world's image of Sands was largely based on a photograph taken in the prison which showed him in a smiling group of prisoners, his fair hair at rock-star length. But with hindsight, it was a photograph steeped in irony. In December last year we learnt that Denis Donaldson, the IRA prisoner pictured draping an arm around Sands' shoulders, had later turned Special Branch spy. Sands' election spurred frantic attempts to mediate or find a resolution. An envoy from the Pope spent an hour with Sands in his cell, and media from all over the world flocked to Belfast. His death provoked waves of political tumult and riot. Hostile reaction to Britain came from around the world, with several cities, including Paris and Tehran, naming streets after Sands. At least 100,000 people attended his funeral. But after 10 deaths, the protest petered out as relatives of comatose hunger-strikers, encouraged by a priest, Father Denis Faul, allowed doctors to administer food. The Troubles took many twists, but the key development was that republicans experimented with a mixture of politics and violence. The politics prevailed. Although ostensibly a defeat, the hunger strike provided republicans with a political launching pad, the foundation of Sinn Fein's electoral success. Some observers regard it as the genesis of the peace process. What was first designed as an instrument of subversion and sabotage led to the displacement of the IRA by today's Sinn Fein. Not everyone in republicanism has travelled with Sinn Fein on its long political march. Prominent among dissenters has been Bobby Sands' sister, Bernadette. She is married to Mickey McKevitt, who has been jailed for heading the Real IRA, the breakaway group responsible for the 1998 Omagh bombing. As head of the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, Mrs Sands-McKevitt claims Sinn Fein's backing of the peace process is a betrayal of what her brother fought and died for. But few in the republican mainstream agree with her. Today on the 25th anniversary of her brother's death, thousands of them will gather to reaffirm his status as one of republicanism's most revered heroes. Gerry Adams THEN: Link between the hunger-strikers and the IRA Army Council NOW: President of Sinn Fein, MP for West Belfast "When Bobby Sands began to say they needed to go on a hunger strike we argued, and I actually wrote to him, saying we were morally and strategically and tactically and physically opposed to it. I was driving when the news came through on the radio that Bobby had been elected. I remember nearly bouncing the car off the hedges and pounding the steering wheel. It was a huge thing to know that against all the odds we'd pulled it off and the prisoners had been vindicated. "The way Bobby Sands... controlled the mechanisms within the prison show clearly he believed he would have to die. My generation of Irish republicans will never forget those terrible months, but in marking the 25th anniversary we have an opportunity to celebrate their lives, remember their sacrifice and rededicate ourselves to advancing the struggle." Laurence McKeown THEN: IRA hunger-striker, serving life sentence NOW: Active on ex-prisoners' issues and outreach initiatives to Protestants and others McKeown, who spent 70 days on hunger strike, took a degree in prison and now has a doctorate. After volunteering for the strike, the IRA army council warned him: "Comrade, do you know what this means? You will be dead within two months. Rethink your decision." When news that Sands had been elected to Westminster came through, "the place just erupted. Everybody shouted, roared, probably unintelligible sorts of screams." McKeown became weak but turned down pleas from his family to come off the protest. "On the evening of the 69th day I was talking to people who weren't there, and calling people by the wrong names. On the morning of the 70th day the doctors were looking for reflexes and I wasn't responding. About noon, my mother authorised medical intervention. I can't say I was happy to be alive, but I couldn't say I was sad to be alive." Brendan McFarlane THEN: Officer commanding IRA prisoners during the hunger strike NOW: Senior republican figure "Bik" McFarlane is a near-legendary IRA figure who has long been to the fore in the republican movement. He was the "officer commanding" IRA prisoners at the time of the hunger strike. He is now a strong supporter of the peace process. In 1981 he was serving life for the murder of five Protestants, two of them women, in an IRA attack on a loyalist bar on Belfast's Shankill Road. Two years after the hunger strike, in 1983, he helped plan and participated in the IRA's mass breakout from the jail. He also played a key role in the talks that led to the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. He said of the hunger-strikers: "They were brave men whose courage and sacrifice should be celebrated in a positive way. Their bravery should be seen as something inspirational, especially in this new phase of struggle when we need to build on our continuing political progress." Richard O'Rawe THEN: IRA press officer in the Maze NOW: Works with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts O'Rawe caused a stir last year with his book Blanketmen, which claimed that, after several deaths, the army council overruled the prisoners, who wanted to settle the dispute by means of a message from the British government. He thought some of the 10 deaths were unnecessary, adding: "This hasn't been said for 24 years because it would be a massive embarrassment if they accepted the army council of the IRA refused to acquiesce to the prisoners' acceptance of the deal. The consequence of that would be that responsibility for the deaths would shift from Brits to the IRA." O'Rawe's version of events has been partly supported by Denis Bradley, a former priest involved in mediation. But his claims have been attacked by some Republicans, including Bik McFarlane who said no offer had been made in writing and authenticated. Comments: Post a Comment Links to this post: Create a Link << Home This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?
What is Actuarius? Legal Definition Actuarius or actarius, rendered in Greek as aktouarios (ἀκτουάριος), was the title applied to officials of varying functions in the late Roman and Byzantine empires. In the late Roman Empire, the actuarius was an official charged with the distribution of wages and provisions to the Roman military. In this capacity, the post is attested at least until the 6th century, but appears only in antiquated legal texts thereafter. The title re-appears in the Taktikon Uspensky of circa 842 and the later Kletorologion of 899, but the role of its holder is unclear. In the 10th-century De Ceremoniis of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (r. 913–959), the aktouarios is mentioned as handing over awards to victorious charioteers, but in the 12th century (or perhaps in the 11th century) the term came to be applied to prominent physicians, possibly those attached to the imperial court (cf. John Actuarius). -- Wikipedia Legal Definition In Roman law. A notary or clerk. One who drew the acts or statutes or who wrote in brief the public acts. -- Black's Law Dictionary Legal Definition An ancient name or appellation of a notary. -- Bouviers Law Dictionary Legal Definition The author of a statute. -- Ballentine's Law Dictionary
Reflections on Axioms, Presuppositions, Faith, Intuition, Reason, Philosophy and their Impact on Epistemology From the well known Occam's razor principle which is to choose the fewest and simplest possible axioms of faith, beliefs, assumptions, presuppositions to construct the rational scientific method on the anvil of falsifiability, to the belief in supernatural as the unfalsifiable axiom of the immanent psyche that distinguish humans from non spiritual beings, are all presuppositions that are believed to be true but cannot always be proven to be true. These axioms can potentially only be proved to be false (possibly at some future time). When that is the case, that an axiom of faith, a presupposition of truth, can eventually be shown to be false, it is called falsifiability. That is the foundation of modern rational epistemology as well as the scientific method --- necessary presuppositions of convenience which can eventually be shown to be false (unless proved to be true along the way when it is no longer considered an axiom but a demonstrable fact). Why is that? Because certain fundamentals cannot always be proved to be true even if they may be strongly believed to be true. For instance, take the example of geometry that we use in our everyday life, and have been using for over two thousand years. Its principal axiom, parallels lines don't meet at infinity, can never be proved to be true. Because no one can go to infinity and come back to report that they witnessed or measured that yes indeed parallel lines did not even meet at infinity. It can, however, be shown to be false under certain circumstances, such as in relativistic physics, where space-time becomes curved (distorted) due to gravity effect (as empirically demonstrated for the General Theory of Relativity during the total solar eclipse of 1919 when the New York Times headlined the confirmation that light, normally observed to only travel in straight lines, can bend: “Lights All Askew In The Heavens – Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to be, but Nobody Need Worry”). This effect can cause two parallel lines, one effected by that space-time gravity field, to intersect with the other not effected by the gravity field at some distant point. Thus, the fundamental premise under which the parallel lines axiom of Euclidean geometry works is only when space-time is not under relativistic effect. But that axiom of Euclidean geometry still cannot be proved to be false in non relativistic three dimensional space. It is just assumed to be true without proof and falsifiability, primarily because it is convenient, accords with daily human experience as well as commonsense, and helps formulate as well as solve one, two and three dimensional problems encountered in non relativistic space-time. When something is assumed to be true without evidentiary proof, what scientists call empirical evidence, it is akin to belief, faith. The entire Euclidean geometry is based on such an axiom of faith. In the same way, in mental life, we hypothesize beliefs that are immanent and constitute our core beliefs. Some of these, over time, have been shown to be false, in which case we abandoned them (but not easily). Such as belief in lightening / thunder, or the lunar / solar eclipses, or celestial movement of heavenly bodies upon which Zodiacal astrology is based, or the black cat crossing the path, or prescriptive mantras, etc., are related to human affairs and have a major (or minor) impact on its causality (except of course through the placebo effect which is demonstrated to be true and has become integral part of the process of modern medical science in what's called double blind studies). So, these immanent human axioms of personal faith which in the earlier primitive societies governed not just individual human behavior, but also societal collective behavior, have largely been abandoned (with some difficulty for many), with evidentiary demonstration that these personal and societal axioms of faith are false and mere superstitions. But other personal and societal religious axioms of faith, such as life after death or Afterlife, the Hereafter, or Heaven and Hell, or Day of Judgment, or existence of Angels, cannot ever be proved to be false (nor demonstrated to be true). For no one has returned from the dead to reliably inform us whether they found these to be true or false, and whether or not, as their moment of death approached, they finally witnessed the reality of the long believed mythical Death Angel who came to extract their soul into purgatory. And if someone were to return from the dead and if they did not bring back evidence of what they witnessed with them, how would anyone ever validate / adjudicate upon that personal witnessing, testimony? If multiple people reported the same, perhaps they were all just hallucinating, or perhaps they did indeed meet with the Death Angel and other artifacts of Afterlife that has informed the religions of man from time immemorial. How can anyone else objectively tell the difference however – except, once again, (a) in either choosing to believe them on the basis of their shared beliefs alone, or (b) in rejecting that testimony based on the axiom of materialistic conception of nature that nothing can exist after bodily death (which is technically defined by modern medicine as the measurable ceasing of the brain's electrical activity on the EEG monitor), and thus all such immanent experiences of returning from the dead can at best only be hallucinations due to the mind's temporary catatonic state. Such axioms of faith that can never be shown to be false, and just believed to be true, are called unfalsifiable axioms. These axioms are also the foundational basis of world religions, specifically those which claim the validity of Divine Revelation. And also those that claim continuity of human existence in global consciousness ala Hinduism, and its variants seen in new age religions including animism (dict: belief in spiritual beings or agencies; the belief that natural objects, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess souls; the belief that natural objects have souls that may exist apart from their material bodies; the doctrine that the soul is the principle of life and health) and animatism (dict: the attribution of consciousness to inanimate objects and natural phenomena). But is Divine Revelation itself an unfalsifiable axiom? That obviously depends on the definition of Divine, which of course must precede addressing the question of Divine Revelation, and that subject is taken up systematically in the next two sections. How about the existence of consciousness beyond materialism, and its derivative beliefs such as reincarnation, or interconnection to what's termed cosmic consciousness, animism, animatism? Once again, “proof” is usually by way of one's own personal belief system and not by way of the scientific method which obviously cannot be applied directly to what is not material, what cannot be observed by its instruments, and what cannot be measured by its instruments. So, making distinction between say, animatism and Divine Revelation is not permitted by the zealot materialists who tend to lump all non-materialist constructs, whether most ridiculous and absurd, or most profound, into the same “reject” category. This is exemplary, even the epitome, of the problem of presupposition – axiomatic dogmas crippling epistemology. It leads to the dogmatic denial of that which is even amenable to the scientific method. The scientific method can perhaps be applied indirectly for ascertaining certain non-material but existential phenomenon that is dogmatically denied by materialist science. For instance, adjudicating on ESP, and its related effects such as telepathy, for instance, observing that dogs know when their owners are coming home, homing pigeons uncannily always know how to return home regardless of how “blinded” they are made in test experiments, birds in flight always know how to change their flight paths in sudden turns in perfect sync without running into each other, identical twins feeling each others feelings and thoughts, the feeling of being stared at by others and turning around to often find them looking at you, etc. These empirical observations of behavior of living beings indicate the presence of some non-materialistic and hitherto unknown telepathic processes and mechanisms in play that are not understood by the materialistic conception of science. I.e., phenomenon demonstrated by living beings which cannot be proved to be false, and is instead observed to be true many a time, begging an explanation beyond the denials offered by the dogmas of orthodox materialist scientists of the Richard Dawkins variety (the Dawkinsian clan, Dawkinsianism). Some intriguing scientific experiments have indeed been devised to demonstrate their existential validity by the rebel extraordinaire, Cambridge University biologist Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (see, to beggar all materialistic theories of nature to date. William Shakespeare had way too presciently captured the crippling of the dogmatic mind in Hamlet for all times. It is especially pertinent to our own epoch of knowledge explosion which, instead of humility, tends to confer unbounded hubris upon the arrogant mind: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Based on the above short introduction, it does not take a great deal of intelligence to perceive the impact of dogmas on crippling epistemology when the beliefs or axioms are absurd, rooted in authority figures as their source of truth, or in immanent superstitions of mental life. What we believe to be true and what can be shown to be true are two different matters. Thus falsifiability has become the corner stone of modern science. The axioms of science are deliberately made falsifiable --- as in the Occam's razor principle --- presuppositions which are initially assumed to be true but which can eventually either be demonstrated to be true (in which case they are no longer axioms but facts) or proved to be false (in which case they are abandoned), or circumscribed to their applicability limit, as is done in Euclidean geometry for its axiom of parallel lines which are now confined only to non relativistic space-time. Science dies to reincarnate as religion if, or when, its axioms turn to dogma and become unquestionable, inscrutable, incontrovertible, unfalsifiable. There are several examples of this throughout history down to our own enlightened times: from the earth is the center of the universe dogma of the Church of antiquity to the latter day global warming dogma of the world superstate. While the former was a genuine false belief, the latter is uber Machiavelli driving a political agenda (see Under modern science's materialistic axiom of faith that all existence is material and death of material is death of existence (non animism), the non falsifiable axioms of faith of world religions that are predicated on non materialistic existence, on spiritual transcendence beyond the body, where the material body is seen only as a temporal container, have been denigrated and marginalized as superstitions. All non materialism is treated with equal contempt by latter day materialist reductionists –– the absurd belief in a cat crossing the path causing one harm, and belief in God or Divine Revelation, are treated the same! The latter is often dismissed by equating it to the former, and deliberately so by the dogmatic Dawkinsian clan. The same transpires with those who create absurd theologies as the avant-garde in thought like the strawman of animatism (dict: the attribution of consciousness to inanimate objects and natural phenomena), which the Dawkinsian clan is all too happy to equate with belief in God and Divine Revelation. That blind-sight of the Dawkinsian clan is not mere psychological cataract. It is well crafted political theory which underwrites “Will to Power”. Some in this Dawkinsian clan are surely honest exponents of their own personal Pollyannaish beliefs as they zealously herald the way to Secular Humanism as the next stage of human evolution whereby, human beings, now liberated from the clutches of superstitious theism which has been the leading cause of all misanthropy throughout history (as they argue), make their own lofty declarations of universal human rights and live happily ever after (see These well-intentioned useful idiots often see scarcity of resources and terrorism of the pirates as the fundamental problems to be solved by Secular Humanism and the problem of primacy never occurs to their indoctrinated minds – indoctrinated no differently in their new religion than any theist zealot of antiquity (see While others, cunning predators preying on human instincts, are harvesters of those Pollyannaish beliefs to diabolically foster their own political agendas to achieve their one-world empire. This is no different than how suicide bombers, ardent believers in their own “divine mission”, are diabolically harvested by their terrestrial handlers who create, encourage, train and fund them to pursue their beliefs to the very end for the enticement of heavenly maidens, while actually serving the geopolitical interests of policy-makers upstream (see This is how “militant Islam” is constructed by the Western hegemons to serve their own political agenda for their Hegelian Dialectic of having an endless enemy to wage endless wars against (see This is also how insurgency is fabricated by the state, both domestically as well as in far-away places using the discontent of the local peoples, which often the state is itself the cause of, to justify its own counter-insurgency operations to achieve its political agendas which it otherwise could not dignify (see And that is the open secret behind promulgating Secular Humanism so freely by the West today --- where its most zealot exponents often find themselves pushing against open doors with sanctuary, prizes, accolades, applause, and career advancement awaiting them to continually tickle their egos. It is the Trojan horse to subvert world religions which the powers that be, see as impediment to the global dystopia they have planned for mankind (see ). The impact of this axiomatic presupposition of materialistic philosophy upon which the fundamental beliefs and practices of modern political theories, modern science, modern medicine, modern theology are all constructed: what we personally believe, what policies we legislate, what projects we fund, how we manage our collective well-being including healthcare, how we make war and peace, etc., is nothing short of monumental. The consequent of this core materialist belief, which I call the first-cause axiom of modernity, meaning, it is the first-cause, the root-head, the foundational presupposition of modern epistemology that has fashioned the dogmas of modernity, is rapidly leading to the global scientific technetronic dystopia encircling all non-primitive civilizations today. The principal consequences are: (a) secular naturalism (how we understand the world), (b) secular humanism (how we understand human life), (c) will to power (our political theory and the basis of exceptionalism among the self-proclaimed shepherds of human life), and (d) social Darwinianism (our social theory and the basis of herding and culling human sheep and “useless eaters”). That is the profound reality of crippled epistemology --- in the hands of the cunning Superman, it leads to humanity's enslavement. (a) Secular Naturalism This is the dogmatic philosophy of materialist reductionism. It separates physics (the how) from metaphysics (the why), and focuses on discovering the how by reducing all existence into its innate material and physical components. • It postulates that all natural existence, and all natural phenomenon, from galaxies to quarks, anywhere in the universe, is based on, and governed by, quantifiable and fixed laws of nature which apply universally to these innate material components, whether or not man has discovered all of them as yet. • These laws of nature are universal and apply equally to all material existence in all frames of references everywhere in the universe, including to man himself (there is nothing out of band about man's existence), and including to that which the mind of man or his instruments can and cannot directly observe or measure but are necessary to hypothesize to explain existence. Such as: dark-matter, fields, waves, fundamental particles, singularities, first-cause of existence such as the big-bang, final-cause of existence such as its natural end-state which, in the Aristotelian thought, used to be the metaphysical or teleological “why”, the purpose of existence, but with the separation of physics from metaphysics in the seventeenth century, is now substituted with what is the “end-state” of existence. • When material existence ceases to exist in its physical form, that entity which embodied that physical form ceases to exist completely. • Material existence has no inherent purpose except to exist by the laws of nature which govern its creation, evolution, functioning, and its end. • It is meaningless to ask the “why” of material existence which is left to philosophy or religion to answer as it has no place in the laws of nature. • The empirical methods of science known as the scientific method, are the best approach to understand that “how” of physical existence. • The focus on understanding physical existence is sufficient to explain all forces of nature and the nature of all existence. • Nature has no a priori purpose and came about by natural processes that are governed by natural laws, not all of which may be understood or known at any given moment. • The natural laws are “a-moral” and “secular”, and neither concern themselves to the “why” of existence, nor to the “values” of existence (such as moral law), nor to the “purpose” of existence (such as its goal). • The philosophy of materialist reductionism denies all existence that is not physical, not governed by the physical laws of nature, including transcendental existence, spiritual existence, and existence outside of its natural materialist manifestation such as the soul and consciousness. • When the physical body dies it leaves no soul behind. When the physical brain dies it leaves no consciousness behind. • In the materialist philosophy a man dying and a star exploding are equivalent. They both cease to exist completely after death, apart from the physical residues they each leave behind, the lifeless cadaver and debris-radiation fields respectively, which (obviously) no longer contain the innate characteristic of what existed before death. These presuppositions and corollaries of materialist reductionism therefore guide the processes of not just the hard sciences, but also all social sciences as well as theology and philosophy, and limit the understanding of existence to the ambit of these presuppositions. To what extent these presuppositions have become dogmas that serve narrow self-interests and political agendas is demonstrated by empiricism. Pursuit of science today is a-moral, its understanding of existence solely materialistic and physical, its mega-funding mainly for primacy and profit imperatives, and its advancements the harbinger of dystopia and seeds of self-destruction. The presupposition of the nature of man being fundamentally a material construct with no spiritual component --- that latter notion being the gratuitous appendage of how societies evolved from its primitive state when such superstitions among all peoples of the ancient world, were necessary to explain not just natural phenomenon, but also to give meaning to life and rationalize away the many inequities besetting man from time immemorial, all of which have now been supplanted by the wisdom of science and the Will to Power --- is the harbinger of hedonism, sense of emptiness, despair, loneliness, isolation, purposelessness. It has led to large prison populations on the one hand, and rising psychological discontents in the general populations on the other. This manifests itself empirically in: • a) rising behavioral dysfunction (such as loss of public empathy, as witnessed in the wild cheering among Americans when watching the slaughter of the untermensch on their television screens; easy acceptance of inhuman treatment and torture of prisoners as a necessary evil, as witnessed in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's prisons under American occupation; easy acceptance of the paradigm of guilty unless proven innocent, as witnessed in the Patriot Acts and police-state deployed worldwide; increasing anger and violence; etc.); • b) rising social dysfunction (such as living in servitude under authority figures as mark of high civilization; increase in dysfunctional families, alienation, social violence, global wealth disparity, unpardonable impoverishment worldwide; lifestyles that encourage self-absorption for the haves while countenancing patience for have-nots whose “death rates must go up” (McNamara, 1970) to curb world population explosion; creation of eugenics international policies (suitably disguised), such as that witnessed in NSSM 200 (Kissinger, 1974) that envisioned food as a weapon to curb global birth rates in least developed nations before it became a threat to the affluent West's national security: “Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can't/won't control their population growth?”; sky rocketing crime rates in industrialized societies, as witnessed in the West which has some of the highest concentration of prison inmates anywhere in the world, especially in the United States of America which has become the prison capital of the world; recruitment for soldiery among dysfunctional populations, plentiful harvests of economic conscription, both of which lead to war crimes against humanity during field deployment, and PTSD when soldiers return home to feelings of intense isolation, unable to relate to their families, unable to reintegrate, and suffering mental anguish for the inhuman butchery they have committed and witnessed; etc.); • and c) rising mental psychoses (such as mental illnesses going through the roof, as seen in increasing big-pharma profits for psychotropic drugs; the inability to appreciate beauty of a lovely sunrise and sunset; etc.); all heralding new discontents in the materialist civilizations. Cambridge University British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his iconoclastic book and public talks on this subject variously titled: The Science Delusion – Dispelling the The Ten Dogmas of Materialism and Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, observes of the present state of the materialist axiom of science: “Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunch that was unimaginable in the twentieth century.” “Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.” The book identifies the following ten dogmas of materialism which have straight-jacketed science, understanding of both the nature of man and the world around him, and which limit its advancement due to the almost church-like orthodoxy that controls the scientific outlook (what's funded, what's published, what's followed-up): • Dogma 1 is the assumption that nature is mechanical, or machine-like, that everything in nature is like a machine. Animals are like machines, plants are like machines and we’re like machines, lumbering robot in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase our brains are like genetically programmed computers. So that’s the first assumption, being in science since the 17th century. • Dogma 2 is the assumption that matter is unconscious. The whole universe is made of unconscious matter, all of nature is made of unconscious matter, our bodies are made of unconscious matter, but for some peculiar reason our brains become conscious and that is one of the big problems in materialist science. Consciousness ought not to exist at all. • Dogma 3 is the assumption that the laws of nature are fixed, they are the same at the moment of the big bang as they are today and they will be the same forever. (And so they’re constants and that is why they are called constant, things like the speed of light and gravitation are constant.) • Dogma 4 is the assumption that the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, it all came into being at the big bang, it’s been the same ever since and it will be the same forever. • Dogma 5 is the assumption that nature is purposeless. There are no purposes in animals or plants or in life as a whole. And the entire evolutionary process has no purpose; it’s just come about by blind chance in the laws of nature. • Dogma 6 is the assumption that biological inheritance is material, it’s all genetic or epigenetic or possibly inside the epigenetic inheritance, but in any case material. • Dogma 7 is the assumption that memories are stored as material traces inside the brain. All your memories are inside your head in some way, stored in nerve endings or phosphor related proteins or no one knows quite how, but the assumption is they are all in the brain. • Dogma 8 is the assumption that your mind is inside your head, it’s an aspect of the activity of the brain. • Dogma 9 is the assumption that psychic phenomena like telepathy are illusory, they appear to exist, but they are not real. That’s because the mind is inside the head and can’t have any effects at a distance. • Dogma 10 is the assumption that mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. Alternative and complementary therapies may appear to work, but that’s only because people have got better anyway or it’s the placebo effect. And that’s why governments and medical research funding and so on funds only mechanistic medicine based upon the principle of ‘the body is a machine’, working on chemistry and physics, so it can only be treated chemically or physically by drugs or surgery. And of course that is very effective up to a point, but it’s just part of medicine, anyway that’s the assumption. (From transcript of one of Sheldrake's talks) Rupert Sheldrake writes in the Introduction of The Science Delusion: “Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption: they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis. In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life. In the spirit of radical scepticism, I turn each of these ten doctrines into a question. Entirely new vistas open up when a widely accepted assumption is taken as the beginning of an enquiry, rather than as an unquestionable truth. For example, the assumption that nature is machine-like or mechanical becomes a question: ‘Is nature mechanical?’ The assumption that matter is unconscious becomes ‘Is matter unconscious?’ And so on.” --- (see The hard reality of the forces behind the mechanistic medicine of Dogma 10, is the total domination of big-pharma in medicine and healthcare industries worldwide. The total orthodoxy of big-pharma's medicine, regulated by the American Drug Trust and owned by the Money Trust, has taken over the world of healthcare to only permit those treatments, fund those research and developments, and pay for those healthcare modalities, from which big-pharma can make big profits (see Medical Monopoly in Eustace Mullins' Murder by Injection, 1988). This medical orthodoxy denies the efficacy of natural medicine and refuses to fund the discovery and development of natural remedies that nature has provided for a song – for there is no profit in it. This medical orthodoxy has taken upon itself to dictate to mankind how they shall heal themselves, and in the process, has become integral part of the military-industrial complex of the Western primacy system to rigidly control mankind. Virtually every discipline of medicine, and virtually every approved treatment of every disease, is based on the dogmas prevalent in that area. And these dogmas limit the treatment options available to the patients in the mainstream of medicine. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer treatment, psychiatry are all driven by dogmas both of big-pharma and the consequence of secular naturalism under which the practitioners of medicine are trained, licensed and regulated (see Arguably, the field most ripe with dogmas is psychiatry. In his 1973 paper published in Science: On Being Sane in Insane Places, Dr. David L. Rosenhan of Stanford University, inquired into the foundational question of psychiatry in his empirical study of American psychiatric hospitals: If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them? (see And concluded that psychiatry is rife with dogmas and presuppositions that beggar objective diagnosis: “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meaning of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment -- the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling -- seem undoubtedly counter-therapeutic.” Today, psychiatry is completely taken over by the neuroscience of managing brain biochemistry with designer psychotropic drugs for virtually every behavioral / psychiatric diagnosis. New mental illnesses are continually defined in the manual of psychiatry called DSM, for which big-pharma continues to design new high margin psychotropic drugs, and which medical professionals continue to prescribe to their patients who are rapidly descending into younger and younger age groups. Cardiovascular disease has been so taken over by big-pharma for-profit dogma that it must be mentioned here. Coronary Artery Disease, or CAD, directly related to modern food and lifestyle, is the leading heart disease in the world today. Its first-line treatment is to immediately insert stents to open up clogged arteries during the diagnostic process itself, called PCI, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention. The moment someone experiences chest pain or angina, and taken to the hospital, Cath-Lab is the first stop right after the emergency room has stabilized the patient. And invariably high profit margin heart stents are inserted with PCI under dubious (exaggerated) information given to the patients of the efficacy of the procedure. The New York Times reported: “Every year, more than half a million Americans undergo procedures to have a narrowed coronary artery propped open with a small metal mesh tube, or stent. In an emergency, when someone is having a heart attack, the operation can be lifesaving. But far too often, studies show, stents continue to be implanted in patients who stand to gain little if any benefit. Last month, two of the country’s largest medical organizations identified the procedure commonly used to place a stent — called a percutaneous coronary intervention, or angioplasty — as one of five highly overused medical interventions.” ( ). Cardiovascular surgeon Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD, of Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute, challenged the practice by comparing the present CAD therapies to the dogmas of the nineteenth century: Is the Present Therapy for Coronary Artery Disease the Radical Mastectomy of the Twenty-First Century? (see Esselstyn began his challenge with the understatement: “To fully grasp how so many smart, right-minded people could get it so wrong, it might help to start with a quick review of medical history.” And he put his finger on the principal dogma reigning not just in his discipline, but in several other medical disciplines as well: “For the minority of heart patients, specifically those in the midst of heart attacks or acute coronary syndromes, stents or coronary artery bypass may be lifesaving. For the rest, none of the present therapies targets the cause: the Western diet. As a consequence, the disease marches on in all patients, which leads to more drugs, stents, and bypasses, increasing heart damage, heart failure, and, too often, death, from an essentially benign, food-borne illness.” Iconoclast Esselstyn has persisted in challenging the medical dogma prevalent in CAD therapy by presenting original research and scientific data collected over years of following patients that CAD is in fact reversible by nutritional intervention with plant based diet (see: A Way to reverse CAD? ). The dogmas of modern medicine are not merely theological, but designed to make permanent paying customers for big-pharma as part of the modern medical profession. They deliberately limit treatment options for the public by crippling the epistemology under which the medical profession and healthcare providers are trained, function, and offer treatment plans / knowledge to the public. Is it trivial to undo big-pharma's full spectrum control of medicine and healtcare, to introduce laws to permit natural medicine to co-exist, to fund its research, to modify medical school training curriculum to incorporate its wisdom? To the naïve mind, it appears as simple to initiate as the stroke of a pen! (b) Secular Humanism Secular Humanism is the outgrowth of the presuppositions of Secular naturalism and deals with the sources of legal and moral codes that govern and direct human beings. This source is exclusively the mind of man, and not some supernatural, transcendental, spiritual or divine source. In the laws of nature there is no such construct as moral law, legal law, or value system, except that which naturally falls out from evolutionary sociobiology of Darwinianism, called social Darwinianism. The first-cause of human existence on earth, like all life on earth, is chance or accident. And social Darwinianism is the only natural behavior as seen in the jungle, and arguably the only natural “value system” if one may call it that, which may be attributed to the laws of nature. Morality is but a subjective value system and all spiritual questions of the “why” of existence are immanent, i.e., philosophical, in the mind of man, entirely abstract, and not part of the laws of nature that govern the physical world. Naturalists therefore treat moral, legal, and philosophical questions that regulate both human behavior and human destiny (i.e., final-cause), as mere utilitarian conventions created by political thinkers and philosophers for inducing social harmony and regulating human behavior. Secular Humanism is the benign or Pollyannaish version sold by the Übermensch (Nietzschean Superman) to the gullible public to create useful idiots championing its cause. The reality however is what Nietzsche termed “der Wille zur Macht” (the Will to Power). In his final philosophical work published posthumously, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaimed: “God is dead.” And he presented the path to man's accelerated social (and biological) evolution through his “Will to Power”. Here we first look at the Pollyannaish version of Secular Humanism and take up the reality version next. The Pollyannaish version of Secular Humanism was described by this author in his 2011 study of hegemony and multiculturalism titled: Islam and Knowledge vs. Socialization. Begin Excerpt The following Biblical Commandment from antiquity was, and still is, at least in my view, both complete and sufficient for governing the peaceable, equitable, and virtuous conduct of mankind: “Do unto Others as you have others do unto you.” --- The Bible: Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31; Old Testament Mosaic Law; Socrates; Confucius; Solon So, why does mankind need anything more than that one primary fundamental Biblical statement? Indeed, one can easily surmise that all beneficial national constitutions, international and local laws, trade treaties, foreign policies, inter and intra governing principles, and even effective principles for dispute resolutions, are logically derivable from just that one ancient first principle, for a fairly equitable co-existence of mutual benefit for all mankind. There'd be no room for masters and slaves under the corollaries derived from such an egalitarian first principle! While that universal pithy wisdom is deemed Biblical, I have found evidence of its truism in other antiquity as cited above. For instance, Solon the Athenian law giver, according to Plutarch's Lives, when asked which city he thought was well-governed, said: “That city where those who have not been injured take up the cause of one who has, and prosecute the case as earnestly as if the wrong had been done to themselves.” --- Solon in Plutarch's Lives Even beyond divine religion, in the realm of logic and rational empiricism alone, the following operations-research (OR) logical formulation due to Bertrand Russell, a man of considerable beliefs in no religion, is the most commonsensical recipe of governing peaceable human conduct. In my own succinct rendition, Bertrand Russell's formulation goes something like this (and I am putting it in single quotes to indicate that the formulation belongs to Russell but the words may not all be his): 'Maximize individual happiness while minimizing social conflict for optimizing the overall common-good.' --- Bertrand Russell's prescription to do away with religion as the bearer of moral law, probably in 'Why I am not a Christian' and similar writings With just a little bit of reflection, one will see that Bertrand Russell captures the beneficial essence of many religions, including Islam, in at least so far as “haquq-al-ibad”, i.e., the rights of man upon man, otherwise known as moral law, are concerned, quite admirably. By just using rational empathetic logic which hinges on spreading virtue rather than glory, vice, hegemony, and conquest, one can come up with reasonably equitable methods of governing oneself in any age, and among any peoples. However, the Author of the Holy Qur'an advocating the path of mutual co-existence to mankind through the perfection of its message which it called “Islam”, is just as meaningless as man coming up with his own protocol for mutual co-existence using his own sensible logic and reason, if man is unwilling, or unable, to implement the protocol: “This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My favour upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion.” --- Verse fragment from Holy Qur'an 5:3, 632 AD “Hegemony is as old as mankind.” --- Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1996 AD, pg. 3. The book's dedication reads: “For my students—to help them shape tomorrow's world” Thus, if nihilist followers of Zbigniew Brzezinski's predatory foreign policies which predicate upon primacy and its geostrategic imperatives because they believe that “Hegemony is as old as mankind” so why change it, choose sociopathic mass psychology to mobilize the public to villainy and infamy by bequeathing to them only facile worldviews, well, that's not because there is any shortage of great platitudinous recipes in either the divine books of antiquity, or the modern mind of reason as the Deistic philosophers of eighteenth century enlightenment argued (of which Bertrand Russell was the atheist legatee). That choice, of exercising villainous hegemony, or equity and benevolence, upon the 'untermenschen' is entirely man's of course. The Author of the Holy Qur'an itself asserts that such a choice between life's governing principles is entirely up to mankind in all its diversity of existence, and is neither a monolithic diktat of triumphalism, nor a choiceless matter like being born to one's parents: “There is no compulsion in religion.” --- Holy Qur’an 2:256 “There surely came over man a period of time when he was a thing not worth mentioning.” --- Holy Qur’an 76:1 “Surely We have created man from a small life-germ uniting (itself): We mean to try him, so We have made him hearing, seeing.” --- Holy Qur’an 76:2 “Surely We have shown him the way: he may be thankful or unthankful.” --- Holy Qur’an 76:3 The overarching point being, at the risk of being repetitious, whatever the religion, whatever the people, and whatever the culture and geography, man naturally gravitates firstly towards one's own kith and kin, and secondly towards one's own socialization which principally gives birth to one's dominant worldview. It is all but a truism that just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's “messiah” is another man's lunatic. Referring back to Zbigniew Brzezinski's ode to hegemony quoted at the very beginning, the method of circumventing domestic impediments to the “sustained exercise abroad of genuinely imperial power” become empirically self-evident: Sociopathy of hegemony is the real problem. A problem that is as old as hegemony, as old as mankind. It thrives on the facile mind. Consequently, the sociopaths who often rise to power easily, ensure that the public mind stays facile. Making the public mind is the first art of governance from caliphate to democracy --- for unlike a dictatorship, ruled at the point of the bayonet, caliphate to democracy depend on a measure of consent from the governed. Unless that governance is changed first, until the non sociopaths in society force their way into ruling power to devalue the villainy of the facile mind, all Divine Books will be constricted, “mahjoor” (Holy Qur’an 25:30), and the public mind shall forever remain chained to its unturning neck in Plato's Cave. End Excerpt The reality is that primacy is a stronger categorical imperative of the sociopathic elites in society than morality which occupies theologians and hoi polloi. Learned people consistently fail to understand this as they variously sublimate the problems of modernity onto theology, religion, overpopulation, resource scarcity, environmental pollution, etc., without realizing that each of those “problems” are Machiavellianly amplified in the narrative space, and concomitantly harvested to drive a predetermined agenda which has nothing to do with the problem itself. For empirical examples of primacy pretexts that cunningly scapegoat and harvest religion, see Islam and Knowledge vs. Socialization ( ); that harvest environmental problems, see Global Warming / Climate Change - What's it all About? ( ). The fact that this is openly admitted by the mainstream press that Global Governance is piece-meal enabled by these pretexts (which they call “crises”) which will naturally culminate in one-world government, see Response to Financial Times Gideon Rachman's 'And now for a world government' ( ). Primacy is the first order dilemma plaguing mankind. It cannot be cured with more laws, or morality transposition, be these from theism, atheism, or secular humanism. Because primacy fundamentally sees itself as amoral; beyond the bounds of the calculus of morality. And this logically follows from the natural Darwinian order, the laws of nature, the survival of the fittest. Primacy has in the past, and will in the future, continue to act upon its own categorical imperatives, while concerned citizens, too naïve to understand primacy, look hither and thither. A recent example of this misdirection is in the Documentary Thrive, for which this scribe penned his vexed vivisection: The Road to No Where: The Journey of Voluntary Servitude (see ). The first-cause problem for civilizations, from time immemorial, is primacy of their elite; their drive for a homogenized mono-culture in a one-world empire in our own modernity, only temporarily disguised from the masses under their respective flags. Not the lack of moral codes --- for what can be better than the Golden Rule FOR EVERYONE (unlike the American Constitution and its famous Bill of Rights which apportioned inalienable rights only to those whom the founders considered full human beings of “equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them”, negroes and natives were not included in that august category); nor the misguided question of world religions. A man's religion, a society's preference for its own beliefs, their maddening inertia for reformation, at least in the twenty-first century, ought to be their own business and determined by their own needs and values. But as in the colonial era, this is taken up by the secular humanists as their new white man's burden. It is permitted to thrive under the empire's many tools of primacy. To put down world religions in the name of freedom of speech, is to push on an open door by the useful idiots as far as the empire is concerned --- for they are accomplishing its task for a song; for a mild applause, prizes, career advancement. For the house nigger mentality, it is gratifying just to bring his massa's message to his own people as “he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.” (see ). (c) Will to power Nietzsche's philosophy and its impact on society is described in this scribe's essay: Morality derived from the Intellect leads to Enslavement! (see (d) Social Darwinianism This is the final-cause (end state) of Secular Humanism – When led by its ablest Nietzschean Superman, the creation of dystopia, the rule by force of the elite and the endowed, the culling of “useless eaters”, the survival of the fittest, the genetic design of masses in some scientific caste / functional hierarchy in an highly organized and controlled society. And theism, all world religions, are impediments to Social Darwinianism. This is analyzed in this scribe's open letter to Muslims: Islam vs. Secular Humanism and World Government (see As the direct consequence of the dogma of Secular Naturalism and Nietzschean philosophy of “God is dead”, since there is no absolute moral law any longer, and man's existence is only by chance or by accident like any other life form, therefore, the fundamental concept of equality among mankind is specious. Equality no more exists in nature than it does in the jungle. Is wolf equal to sheep? Why should it apply universally to man – there is nothing unique about him except for his intelligence. And that is to be prized, alongside power and might, and including those with special talents and abilities and skills that enrich human life, and of course including cunning and sophistication, all of which determine the survival of the species under the natural law of the jungle, and so it should under the social Darwinian jungle. Thus, some are more equal than others based largely on their power and utility to society. This is expressed from time immemorial in all us vs. them separations, from tribalism to ethnocentrism, sectarianism to religionism, racism to culturalism, and nationalism to patriotism. None in these collectives think the others are deserving of the same rights and privileges, and at their worst moments, during warfare, are inspired by intense hatred and demonization of the other. During peace respites, the other is merely tolerated, either because of their numbers, utility, or power. Today, by human rights conventions on fancy parchments that are only enforced as long as self-interests require that humanitarian facade. All over the world in the twenty-first century, the lesser peoples are bearing the full brunt of this principal axiom of social Darwinianism. There is no room for altruism except as a public relations scam. There is no room for selflessness except to get simpletons and useful idiots to sacrifice themselves for those with greater cunning. Noble lies govern the behavior of Übermensch to manipulate the public mind in pursuit of their higher goals. Those unable to meet the demands of society, the “useless eaters”, must be weeded out, their breeding curtailed, their populations managed like game on reservation, and the most hardworking among them put to work in the service of the elites with crumbs thrown at their feet to keep them motivated even working harder and longer --- until they fall dead from exhaustion. Without perceptive understanding of all that which is examined above, and making the observation that what is going on under the very nose of the public with increasing ubiquity, is not too far from what is captured in those passages, the crippled epistemology that the public mind is continually indoctrinated into, regardless of which socioeconomic class it belongs to, leads it to willingly accept the prevalent dogmas under one pretext or another. The more educated the mind, it is observed, the more years of academic schooling it has gone through, and the more invested it is in its own successes, the more likely it is to live under crippled epistemology without even thinking of questioning it. The public mind, immersed in dogmas from birth, becomes so accustomed to that tortuous state of existence – the state of learned helplessness as psychologists prefer to call it, a state that no rational mind really ought to accept – that it comes to easily accept its servitude to ruling dogmas with as much thought to rebelling as the sheep does against the habit of mutton eating. Crippled epistemology completely determines its attitude and behavior just like the sheepdog and the shepherd's whistle do for the sheep. The following empirical behavior is described in this scribe's analysis of current affairs titled: Imperial Surrogates and 'Terror Central' in Operation Gladio Redux. It belies all the tall claims of Pollyannaish pied pipers of all flavors who are as much victims of their own dogmatic presuppositions as the public minds they wish to lead. Begin Excerpt George Bernard Shaw, the most insightful playwright that tiny Anglo-Saxon island of worldwide usurpation has ever produced, perceptively observed of its weight in the Preface of his 1921 book of plays, Back To Methuselah: “[The] hard fact being that we must not teach political science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and the successful. In vain do the prophets who see through this imposture preach and teach a better gospel: the individuals whom they convert are doomed to pass away in a few years; and the new generations are dragged back in the schools to the morality of the fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion, children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance. There is no way out through the schoolmaster.” In our own 21st century too, as in the century of George Bernard Shaw, our well-intentioned men and women of science, arts and letters, the lauded savants, domain experts and Nobel laureates, all having advanced university degrees with “learned” and “expert” prominently stamped upon their forehead, display barely a nodding acquaintance with the subject of political science; and mostly only with its name. The few who do inevitably go to work for the Superman of empire. Their only god has always been power, and Mephistopheles, not truth, not compassion, and not concern for the lesser humanity despite oft rehearsed public relations in “humanist” terms. These are the vulgar propagandists, the pied pipers whom the rest of the super-educated useful idiots of modernity, the well-intentioned “likkha-parrha jahils”, hold sacred as if it was all revealed in the Sinai. Siding with the tales of the emperor is also always “legal” and mostly safe (so long as the emperor remains in power of course), often bringing with it the unbridled opportunities to profit, open doors, entry visas, social standing, the privilege to flatter one's ego, and the gratification to carry the white man's burden. All of which easily blur any remaining distinction between ideological mercenaries, and mere pimps and prostitutes, useful idiots, and Uncle Toms. Once the false narratives are uttered, it comes to make not even two straws worth of difference who is a propagandist by malevolent creed, who by opportunism, who by ignorance, and who by psychological dispensation. All these brilliant savants of modernity, both man and Superman, the perennial breed in every society who hold the pens, lead its rocket science, and make its public's mind, have been educated to the point that adding two plus two correctly is their most dreaded pons asinorum, taxing both their mind and their consciences so feverishly that it is never to be crossed publicly. George Bernard Shaw couldn't have spoken a more truer half-sentence in his entire half-century of most perceptive and progressive writings than this one: “Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.” The remaining half-sentence this sanguine bedrock of moral sanity left unstated, perhaps only due to some polite consideration for the British empire then on the wane, and not due to being victim of the schoolmasters he lamented: the description of the empirical Superman who already exists. That brilliant Social Darwinian among the Neo-Darwinians, infested with extreme predatory instincts and extreme pathological evil, who replaced God after Nietzsche killed Him in the name of giving birth to the immanent Superman of the future! Instead, Shaw, just as immoderately as the Neo-Darwinians, misattributed the mayhem that he was witnessing in the aftermath of World War I: “At the present moment one half of Europe, having knocked the other half down, is trying to kick it to death, and may succeed: a procedure which is, logically, sound Neo-Darwinism.” to the rule of the infirm: “Government and exploitation become synonymous under such circumstances; and the world is finally ruled by the childish, the brigands, and the blackguards.” (Ibid.) That is perhaps only three-quarters truth, or half-truth, and not the whole truth. The world was then, as it is today, from behind the scenes of the idiocy of political governments, ruled firmly by the rational and calculated primacy instincts of the most brilliant Superman who continually divine wars, and World Wars, now we are up to World War IV, as the means of crisis creation to piece-meal remake World Order in their own image. In fact, the educated man controlling the narrative as the avant-garde in intellectual thought, not only remains a greater nuisance than the uneducated one, he also becomes the vile propagandist by adopting silence about truth that is to be protected from the masses. The British novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley most insightfully understood this about distortions fashioned by omissions and its practical utility in influencing public behavior. Huxley observed in the Preface of his 1931 book of fable, Brave New World, which depicted a eugenist dystopia controlled by ubermensch forces from behind the scenes that the rest of society remained unaware of: In a talk given to the students at the University of California, Berkeley, on the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the Brave New World, Aldous Huxley observed of the very real and empirical role of these behind the scenes forces depicted in his fable, in channeling the public mind that is already most carefully primed by Shaw's schoolmaster for celebrating ignorance, into complete voluntary surrender to the Superman: We see precisely that reality unfurl today. Shaw's educated childish fools impervious to political science, and brigands and blackguards, controlled by Huxley's oligarchic forces from behind the scenes, attempting to persuade the public mind to accept Alice in Wonderland absurdities as fact. We even observe how willingly the world public traveling through American airports surrender themselves to grotesque indignities in physical searches to keep them safe from Ali Baba. The only truly global superpower in the history of earth's civilizations, which Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1996 Mein Kampf, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, characterized as: “America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last.” (pg. 209), has been reduced to a police-state with virtually its own public's consent. All on the mere fable that Ali Baba wielding some antediluvian and distorted dogmas from the stone-age propagandistically titled “militant Islam”, is a ubiquitous threat to their well-being! Pakistan is daily bombed by drones based on that very same fable. The world is rapidly being reduced to a global police-state based on that same fable. End Excerpt Limits to Knowability – Hard and Soft Limits So now we arrive at seeking understanding of the limits to knowability of reality. What can't be objectively knowable by any mind, human or alien, is the hard limit. The soft limit to objective knowability is characteristically human and it can only be extended to the degree that a human mind can naturally expand, analyze, scrutinize and synthesize objectively, and overcome its own subjectivity, conformity, and asininity while retaining insight and intuition. There is a hard limit to this that is individual specific and depends on their natural genetic makeup. In the preceding sections we have already seen the many pernicious traps that easily ensnare the human mind into crippled epistemology. The epistemological limit problem was first described by this author in the case study: Why is the Holy Qur'an so easy to hijack? Part-IV. Begin Excerpt –– acquiring a perceptive understanding of power and its role in the making of the human mind; These are all the very real forces behind the man-made soft limits to knowledge, difficult to overcome, but not impossible to overcome. Nevertheless, it is also not so straightforward to overcome either because in the age of universal deceit, to discover the truth is a revolutionary act!! The levels of co-option hiding in the dark recesses of the human mind, and in the human stomach, are not separated from the pursuit of this revolutionary act. And it all hinges upon the Qur'anic prescription of “jihad-un-nafs” – waging an epic battle against the self to extract oneself from the throes of crippled epistemology including self-deceit and self-interest – the first principle from which all truth shines through its protective layers. End Excerpt Philosophical God vs. Religion's God As uncovered in the preceding section, the forensic attitude of a reasonable rational mind (as opposed to the dogmatic mind of the Richard Dawkins variety, the Dawkinsian clan) towards epistemology, has quite logically led to the believable hypothesis of a philosophical God. The same attitude can also help answer the age old question of whether or not Divine Revelation exists, or can exist, or is it merely figment of prophetic imagination, its originating source being the mind itself and which cannot exist from external transcendental source. And then stated: About The Author Excerpted From: Some Problems in Epistemology, problems 4, 5, and 6 Last updated Saturday, January 21, 2017 10:00 pm 33707 20955 Reflections on Axioms, Presuppositions, Faith, Intuition, Reason, Philosophy and their Impact on Epistemology By Zahir Ebrahim \| Project
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Navigation Links Light-activated neurons from stem cells restore function to paralyzed muscles "Following the new procedure, we saw previously paralysed leg muscles start to function," says Professor Linda Greensmith of the MRC Centre for Neuromuscular Diseases at UCL's Institute of Neurology, who co-led the study. "This strategy has significant advantages over existing techniques that use electricity to stimulate nerves, which can be painful and often results in rapid muscle fatigue. Moreover, if the existing motor neurons are lost due to injury or disease, electrical stimulation of nerves is rendered useless as these too are lost." "This new technique represents a means to restore the function of specific muscles following paralysing neurological injuries or disease," explains Professor Greensmith. "Within the next five years or so, we hope to undertake the steps that are necessary to take this ground-breaking approach into human trials, potentially to develop treatments for patients with motor neuron disease, many of whom eventually lose the ability to breathe, as their diaphragm muscles gradually become paralysed. We eventually hope to use our method to create a sort of optical pacemaker for the diaphragm to keep these patients breathing." "We custom-tailored embryonic stem cells so that motor neurons derived from them can function as part of the muscle pacemaker device." says Dr Lieberam, who co-led the study. "First, we equipped the cells with a molecular light sensor. This enables us to control motor neurons with blue light flashes. We then built a survival gene into them, which helps the stem-cell motor neurons to stay alive when they are transplanted inside the injured nerve and allows them to grow to connect to muscle." Contact: Harry Dayantis University College London Related biology news : 1. Worlds first light-activated antimicrobial surface that also works in the dark 2. Who reprograms rat astrocytes into neurons? 4. Research of zebrafish neurons may lead to understanding of birth defects like spina bifida 5. Cc to the brain: How neurons control fine motor behavior of the arm 6. Mannotriose promotes survival of hippocampal neurons 7. Neurons subtract images and use the differences 8. Uncovering first molecular missteps that drive neurons in pathway leading to Alzheimers disease 9. Biologists uncover details of how we squelch defective neurons 10. Penn study: Shutting off neurons helps bullied mice overcome symptoms of depression 11. Researchers discover how inhibitory neurons behave during critical periods of learning Post Your Comments: Breaking Biology News(10 mins): (Date:8/16/2017)... and OXFORD, England , Aug. 16, ... consortium for biotech executive search and leadership development, and Virdis ... sectors, have created an exclusive alliance that enables clients to ... "For our clients here in the ... unparalleled access to a diverse population of leadership talent throughout ... Breaking Biology Technology:
Wednesday, 26 November 2014 Does Playtime for Cats Reduce Behaviour Problems? Does few toys and no play equal issues with your cat? A beautiful Siamese cat plays with a toy on a bed A new survey of cat owners by Beth Strickler and Elizabeth Shull investigates how many toys the average cat has, how often their owner plays with them, and whether there is a link with behaviour problems. Since behaviour problems are a common reason for cats to be surrendered to shelters and so many cats are euthanized every year, it’s important to understand how meeting the behavioural needs of cats can lead to fewer behaviour problems. Providing toys and opportunities for play is one of the five pillars of a healthy environment for cats, according to the International Society of Feline Medicine and the American Association of Feline Practitioners (Ellis et al 2013). Play should allow the cat to mimic different aspects of predation. Toys and play are especially important as enrichment for indoor cats. Of the cats in this study, 61% were indoors-only cats who never go outside. The remainder of the cats spent some time indoors and some outdoors. Each cat had seven toys on average. The most common toy was furry mice, owned by 64% of cats. The other most common toys were catnip toys, balls with bells, stuffed toys, a scratching post, boxes, and balls without bells. Most of these toys provide opportunities for play and hunting, while the catnip, bells and scratching posts provide sensory stimulation. Boxes provide opportunities to explore the environment and we all know that cats love boxes! Very few cats had some kind of food toy. Only 1% of the cats had a puzzle toy and 0.5% of owners hid food for their cat to find. This is unfortunate because finding food is an important aspect of the predation sequence and yet most cats are fed at set times of the day in a set location. One easy solution is to put part of the cat’s food in cup-cake holders and hide it for them to find. Treats can be hidden instead of just given, and kibble can be scattered or thrown. There are also many food puzzle toys for cats on the market that can keep cats occupied for some time. A sleepy cat doesn't quite fit in a box on a window ledge Although some owners only played with their cat once a month, 64% reported playing with their cat twice a day and 17% reported daily play sessions. This is very positive. Typical durations of play sessions were 5 minutes (33% of owners) or 10 minutes (25%). This is something that could be improved as most cats would probably prefer longer play times. The majority of owners (78%) had the cat’s toys available all the time. However the authors point out cats can easily become bored; putting some toys away and changing the available items on a regular basis would be more interesting for the cats. The authors say, “Rotation of toys, provision of novel items, and increasing play bouts duration to 15-30 minutes should be recommended to cat owners to increase the enrichment value of toys and play.” In a multi-cat household, it’s important that enrichment items are provided in different locations to ensure that every cat has access (Ellis et al 2013). Even though the cats were selected because they went to the vet for a reason other than behaviour, in fact 61% of the cats were said to have one of six common behaviour problems. Only 54% of owners had mentioned the problem to their vet. This suggests many owners do not realize that vets can provide advice on behavioural issues, although it may also be they did not feel the need to do anything about it. Vets could explicitly ask cat owners about behaviour problems to make sure they are not missed. The two most common behaviour problems were aggression towards the owner (36%) and inappropriate urination (24%). It is especially concerning if inappropriate urination is not mentioned to the vet as there are potential veterinary causes and many options for treatment and management. More problems were reported in male cats, particularly inappropriate urination, and male cats also spent more time outdoors. The number of toys the cat had and how often the owner played with them were not related to behaviour problems. However, fewer problems were reported by owners who played with their cat for at least 5 minutes at a time compared to those who only played for 1 minute. The authors say, “It may be that longer play bouts satisfy the cat’s play needs and decrease behaviour problems.” However they point out that since the data is correlational and does not prove causation, further research is needed. 277 cats took part in the survey. Their owners were recruited after taking the cat to the vet for a problem other than behaviour. The average age of the cats was 5, but ranged from 6-week old kittens to 18 years old. The average number of cats per household was 2 and there were equal numbers of male and female cats. 81% were neutered. This is a valuable study that makes useful recommendations. All the owners provided cat toys and opportunities for play. Feline enrichment could be improved by providing a wider variety of play types including food hiding/puzzle toys, and by increasing the length of play sessions. The beautiful thing is that a cat toy can be as simple as a cardboard box, a piece of string, or a treat hidden in a tube. How many toys does your cat have and which is their favourite? You might also like: Enrichment tips for cats (that many people miss) and your cat would like food puzzle toys Ellis, S., Rodan, I., Carney, H., Heath, S., Rochlitz, I., Shearburn, L., Sundahl, E., & Westropp, J. (2013). AAFP and ISFM Feline Environmental Needs Guidelines Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, 15 (3), 219-230 DOI: 10.1177/1098612X13477537 Strickler, B., & Shull, E. (2014). An owner survey of toys, activities, and behavior problems in indoor cats Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research, 9 (5), 207-214 DOI: 10.1016/j.jveb.2014.06.005 Photos: XSeon (top) and Nataliya Kuznetsova ( 1. Very interesting article....a good read! 2. I used to volunteer with a local no-kill shelter, working as a behavioral therapist. My job was to help cats who came in with inappropriate behavior--usually aggression--so they could become adoptable. My favorite "tools" were Da Bird and the Galkey Kitty Tease. They were also the cats' favorites--ALL of the cats, not just those with quirky natures! :-) 3. Got to love this validation. One of the first things I recommend for just about any of my clients with any behavioral problem is to add 15 minutes of play time a day with a fishing rod toy in order to give the cat an outlet for the stress. It's like having a first-aid kit for problem behaviour - from there on out, you can figure out what is at the root of the problem while you manage the symptoms. 4. I have a four month old kitten, so we play well over an hour a day, broken into increments in morning, late afternoon and evening as I work parttime. She loves a ball I crumpled from aluminum foil. I made it big enough so it's not always rolling under furniture and it's light enough for her to carry around. She loves her crinkle tunnel, scratching post. A plastic bag is great - she loves jumping up for it as I toss it in the air and it floats and of course a laser toy. I leave some food different areas throughout the house. She has alot of more expensive toys but loses interest. Of course, always watch for kitties who want to chew on the bags, etc. She also has a special soft toy "baby"that she likes to sleep with. Once again, always be careful if your cat likes to tear apart bags, etc. So far she does not but I put the bag away if we're not actually playing with it.
Land of Ephesus The deep history of Ephesus represents us an intricate scenery with its misty beginnings and endings veiled in myth, along with its later glory, as the Capital of Roman world in Asia. The name “Ephesos” is said to have been derived from the word “Apasas”, meaning a queen bee and originally a Greek word. It was the name for the settlement in the late Bronze Age, 1000-1500 BC. and strongly supported by the popular symbolism of the famous goddess, the Artemis of Ephesus. Its historical origins are clouded in myth. According to what the ancient historian Strabo wrote about the early populations, there were “Karians and Lelegians, whereas Pausanias referred the founding of the Ephesus city the to the Amazons. There is a popular belief for its legendary founding by Androklos, son of Kodros, the King of Athens, as an attestation by architectural reliefs, which can still be visited today in Ephesus museum. Ephesus LibraryFor a brief period the ancient city of Ephesus was under the control of King Croesus of Lydia until Cyrus, the Persian King, defeated him in 547 BCE. The Persians controlled the city about 200 years until Alexander captured it in 334 BCE. Then Ephesus became a Greek city for about 200 years until the Romans acquired it along with all of the province of Asia from Attalos III in 133 BCE, the king who gave the Stoa to Athens. The Lydian influence in Ephesus produced a thoroughly mixed culture, part Greek, part Asiatic, more than anywhere else in the Greek East. Alexander’s successor, Lysimachus (290 BC), built the citywalls of Ephesus parts of which are still visible. Ephesus prospered until the mid to late 2nd century BC, but the increasing incompetence and cruelty of a series of Roman emperors in the late second and third centuries led to its decline. Ephesus also suffered from troubles on the eastern frontier of’ the Empire in the 3d century, assassinations, pogroms against Christians, and the intervention of Goths from southern Russia. Gothic invaders heavily damaged the city and the Temple of Artemis, which was never restored to its former glory. Severe earthquakes in the late 4th and 7th centuries led to the partial desertion of the ancient city of Ephesus. The Third Ecumenical Council was held in Ephesus in 431 BC. The main argument was whether that Virgin Mary was the mother of God Christ or Human Christ. There was a great division between the participants of the meeting. The division became more apparent after the meeting. Emperor Theodosios ordered another meeting in the Virgin Mary church in Ephesus. This was the first church built for Mother Mary. More than 200 religious leaders came together. It took more than 3 months to reach to a consensus. During this meeting, it was officially recorded that the Virgin Mary’s grave was in Ephesus. With Augustus’ reign (27 BC), Ephesus entered an era of prominence and prosperity which lasted into the second century CE. Augustus made it the capital of the Roman province of Asia and it received the coveted title, “First and Greatest Metropolis of Asia.” Imperial patronage included constructing aqueducts, paving streets, and enlarging agoras. During the Augustan era Ephesus was the largest commercial center in Asia, in fact, the third largest city in the Empire, after Rome and Alexandria, with a population of about 200,000. Its location was one of the many reasons for its commercial growth. Not the Goths and the silting up of the river only, but earthquakes and malarial mosquitoes also finally finished Ephesus sometime between the 6th and 10th century. The site was completely abandoned after the 14th century. The first serious exploration of the archeological site of Ephesus occurred fbetween 1863-74 under John T. Wood, an architect the British Museum commissioned to locate the ancient Temple of Artemis. He found it through the fortuitous discovery of an imperial inscription that showed the route of a sacred procession went from the temple to the theater and back again by a different route. In 1895, the Austrian Archaeological Institute (Vienna) began the systematic exploration of Ephesus that has continued unto this day. The Temple of Artemis underwent fundamental evolution and expansion through its 1200 year-old history. King Croesus was the primary benefactor of the classic temple. He donated most of the columns for the temple that mad King Hesostratos burned in 356 BCE, the night Alexander the Great was born. It was the largest edifice in Greek antiquity, with 127 columns, each approximately 65 ft. high. ephesus theaterEphesus contains the largest collection of Roman ruins in the eastern Mediterranean. Only an estimated 15% has been excavated. The ruins that are visible give some idea of the city’s original splendor, and the names associated with the ruins are evocative of its former life. The theater dominates the view down Harbor Street, which leads to the silted-up harbor. Seeing that the civic space of the city incorporates both the temples and the shrines of the imperial cult, it is apparent that religion and politics were inseparable and religious observance promoted allegiance to the empire. Among the findings till today we can say the Artemis temple, St. John church, Agoras, Theatre, Prythaneion temple, the Marble Road, the Harbour Road, Serapis temple, Celsus Library are the most prominent ones. Some of them are still under restoration. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 all findings are supposed to be given to the museums in Turkey by law as during the Ottoman era most of the findings were taken from Ephesus to British and Austrian museums and only some of them were left to Istanbul Archeology Museum.
Carbon footprints measure how much CO2 gas you personally are responsible for. It can be upsetting to realise you’re contributing to climate change just by living your life—you increase your carbon dioxide emissions by doing normal things like driving to work, taking a plane to get somewhere, or buying food that’s out of season where you live but was flown in by a supermarket to satisfy customer demand. industry sunrise clouds fog 39553 1. Choose an eco-friendly vehicle If the time comes to update your fleet of cars for your employees, or as an employee you’re looking at what car to get next, try to get a hybrid or an electric car. Not only are these much better for the environment, they’re much better for your bank balance, costing less to run. Not looking for a new car right now? That’s no problem. 1. Adjust your driving style If you’re an aggressive driver—going faster than the speed limit, braking hard, accelerating as soon as you’re past a speed camera—you probably already know that it doesn’t do fantastic things for your mood. But did you know it wastes fuel? Studies done by scientists in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory just last year showed you’re lowering your mileage from anything from 10% to 40%. 2. Carpool with co-workers Not only might you be able to spend more time with a friend, you’ll be taking one car off the road, reducing emissions and traffic for other drivers. You might even get to work via some cool shortcuts you can use when it’s your turn to drive. 3. Reduce the weight you’re driving with You might have picked up a heavy load on Friday, not been bothered enough to take it out of the boot when you got in, and not realised you’ve driven around with it all weekend until you open your boot Monday morning. Reducing the weight of items in the car means your car doesn’t have to work as hard, and will use less fuel getting to its destination. There are always things you can do to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle and reduce your carbon footprint. Things as simple as recycling more, buying strawberries in season rather than buying imported food, and changing how you drive will be better for the planet—and for your conscience. Go to top
base on your viewing of a movie, video, or television program or an article you read in a periodical, magazine, or newspaper. these paper sources must depict in some way a theme drawn from the scope of the course (US history from EARLY COLONIAL TIMES THROUGH THE CIVIL WORLD). In the reaction paper you should 1. briefly summarize the main elements of what you saw or read 2. briefly explain what you regard as the strengths and weaknesses of your selection and any insights you gained about the history depicted or explained. This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a Reply
Racism and the “Powerless” White: Systemic Racism and Whiteness shutterstock_100037330Systemic racism/societal racism does not exist against white people in this country and never has. There is no hardship (outside of an individual we may encounter who is prejudiced against whites) we face because of being white. Jim Wallis in, “America’s Original Sin“, says that racism is defined as “Prejudice PLUS power.” Thus we as whites can experience a prejudice, but can never experience racism. Is there such a thing as a powerless white person? Powerless? I’d say not. Are there whites who are disadvantaged and poor? Absolutely. Are there whites who have worked hard for what they have and come from the bottom? Absolutely. No doubt about it, but they, nay, we, all have benefited and are benefiting from being the dominant culture and from white privilege. My friend Isaac Birkins summarizes these matters perfectly: Two terms: Intersectionality and mutual exclusivity. How do these two relate? Mutual exclusivity says that two things CANNOT happen at once. For instance, you can’t make one coin land on heads and tails at the same time. Another example is that you can’t turn left and right at the same time. This ties into intersectionality because they are factors working simultaneously. One can have racial privilege yet still lack class privilege. The two are not mutually exclusive as they can happen simultaneously. Intersectionality explains that one can have privilege in some areas and lack privilege in others, this why why there are also poor whites who still benefit from white privilege and the hegemonic culture.” Wallis speaks of racism as a systemic issue here, a macro-level oppressive force that is inherent in all our societal structures, especially the justice system. The dominant culture has the power, which in this country is white. As Jim writes in “Racism: America’s Original Sin“, “The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.” Hence why the dominant culture has “prejudice PLUS power,” and why even disadvantaged, poor white folks, still benefit and are in essence, at the micro-level, not powerless. I’m a white, Christian male living in a dominantly white country with a festering wound of racism yet to be repented of and reconciled. I grew up disadvantaged, poor, living on food stamps in a broken home filled with physical and emotional violence and abuse with drug abuse as a latch key kid who was removed from that situation and received into a private, non-profit Christian school. I did not have anything given to me nor have I gained anything I’ve achieved easily, but I would say that as a white male, a Christian one at that, I have vastly benefited from my skin color and that I’ve received a position of being ahead based solely on that skin color. The whole point, in short, is that racism is only reinforced and sustainable, inherent or not, through power. The minorities in this country have never had the socioeconomic and sociopolitical means to have that power, and it takes speaking truth to that power, which is consciously and subconsciously used, for it to come to an end and for racism to continue to be tackled and repented of. Millennials are misguided when we say things like, “Racism ends if we just stop talking about it,” or, “Acknowledging privilege is itself racist.” It doesn’t work that why, and I refuse to accept that my speaking out about it is pushing some pendulum the other way or enabling return racism against whites by acknowledging my privilege and lack of hardship due to my being white. Acknowledging the racism a set of people experience isn’t exacerbating racism it’s revealing it for what it is, which is a wound still festering in our society and culture that we must speak truth about and continue to dialogue about if we want to see meaningful change occur in racial relations. Not speaking out about the injustice of racism still prevalent in our lives, often unintentionally and subconsciously, accepting our privilege, and taking action to remedy these social ills is, in reality, truly exacerbating the problems and making them worse. It’s time we get to work continuing the conversation those before us started. Cornel West, “Black Prophetic Fire One thought on “Racism and the “Powerless” White: Systemic Racism and Whiteness 1. What a load of poppycock. Sure there is a majority norm in this country. That doesn’t mean non Whites can’t hold power and spheres of influence in certain pockets or arenas. Furthermore, individuals can hold positions power of power to harm or be physically able or armed to harm others in the ultimate power of life and death over another person. To claim Whites can’t be powerless or that non Whites can’t be raciss is absolute rubbish. Leave a Reply WordPress.com Logo Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s
I swear! Meerkats can do Linux Converting hex to binary in the brain Binary and LED patterns Star: 0000000101010101 Cross: 0000000010111010 Binaries as integers #define STAR 341 #define CROSS 186 int main() { while (1) { >>> 0b101010101 >>> 0b10111010 Binaries as hex For example say you find the code snippet below somewhere: #define STAR1 341 #define STAR2 186 #define STAR1 0x155 #define STAR2 0xba It’s time we become that skilled programmer, don’t you think? Hex to binary in da brain The procedure of binarizing a hex is simple: 1. Find the binary of each hex character 3. Squeeze them all together as if they were strings So for example: F is 1111 5 is 0110 FF is 1111 1111 55 is 0110 0110 5F is 0110 1111 F5 is 1111 0110 Binary Decimal 1 = 1 10 = 2 100 = 4 1000 = 8 1010 = A 1111 = F Big fat hex stars Grouping in 4bit groups: Decoding the above becomes 8388A08388A0 which is WRONG. Row 1: 8 3.. We can also validate what we got with Python: >>> bin(0x1051141051141) Leave a comment Traversing binary trees It can be hard to remember how to traverse trees by name. It can also be hard to understand the difference between traversing in different ways(postorder, preorder, inorder, level order, etc). I try here to make it easier for the reader to understand the different ways of traversing a binary tree. Intuition is the key to remembering(and visualization ofcourse). I use the words parents and children for the elements in the tree instead of nodes, root, branches and leafs. I think those words are easier to describe what is going on without getting anyone too confused. Recursive traversal I want to firstly point out that this method is commonly called “depth/height traversal”. However I use the word recursion as it seems more appropriate to me. There are three ways to traverse a tree recursively. The only real difference between them is the order we visit the parent node. • Pre order ——- here we visit the parent in the beginning • In order ——— here we visit the parent second • Post order —— here we visit the parent lastly Because recursion is hard to grasp and even harder to have a visual insight of the goings, we will use a simple example to begin with. We start by examining, with all three methods, this binary tree: Pre order Here the path we follow to traverse is: 1. Parent 2. Left child 3. Right child Applied to our example tree: So if we use pre-order to traverse the example binary tree, then we would get the values(by order we visited them): 4, 2, 7 In order Here the path we follow to traverse is: 1. Left child 2. Parent 3. Right child Applied to our example tree: So if we use in-order to traverse the example binary tree, then we would get the values(by order we visited them): 2, 4, 7 Post order Here the path we follow to traverse is: 1. Left child 2. Right child 3. Parent Applied to our example tree: 2, 7, 4 The bigger picture All this seems simple for a tree with only three nodes. But what happens when we have a huge tree with multiple nodes? Which node would we visit first? The answers are rather simple but there are not good resources actually to give a good visualization of how a recursive traversing can look like. So let’s start by taking this big tree: The trick is to start by seeing see the whole structure as a tree with three nodes. In all three traversing methods we start with the node on the top of the tree: the root node. We thus see that as the parent in the beginning of the traversing. All the rest of the nodes on the left is considered the left child and everything on the right of it is considered the right child. The bigger complex tree has been compressed to a three-node tree. We can now start traversing it with whatever -order traversal method we want. I will demonstrate how I would go with in-order traversal. Read this line by line. 1. First I visit the left child: node b 1. I now get into this subtree and visit the left child: 5 2. Then I go to the parent node: 2 3. Then I go to the right child: 9 2. Then I visit the parent: node a 1. Here there is no parent or children. The only thing I can do is to return the value of the single node: 4 3. Then I visit the right child: node c 1. I now get into this subtree and visit the left child: 6 2. Then I go to the parent node: 7 3. Then I go to the right child: 1 Note that 1, 2, 3 are traversal of the a, b, c nodes. All nested traversals are traversals for the nodes inside a, b and c. An even more complicated tree could look like bellow. However exactly the same principles are valid. This looks a lot like a fractal, doesn’t it? That’s because fractals are actually based on recursion. The only difference with this example is that the recursion is not endless but instead is made of three different levels: the outer level where we see three cyan circles, the level where we see three green circles and the level where we see three nodes(inside each green circle). Traversal by Breadth All methods discussed earlier are actually what is called traversal by height or depth. I am not so sure as to why we call it that instead of traversal by recursion as the real difference between depth traversal and breadth traversal is: • Height traversal uses recursion. • Breadth traversal is linear, going from one node to the next as you see the whole tree. Traverse by level Traversing by breadth or by level(which is more intuitive) is the simplest method to traverse a tree. You can see the nodes of an arbitrary tree grouped into different levels depending on how close to the root they are. In the bellow tree I have numbered the different level of nodes: Node with value 4(the root) belongs to level 1. Nodes 2 and 7 belong to level 2. Lastly, nodes 5, 6, 9 and 1 belong to level 3. To traverse the tree with traversal by level we just go from left to right on each level jumping from node to node like this: Thus we traverse the nodes in this order: 4, 2, 7, 5, 9, 6, 1 If the tree would be more complicated or not complete(missing nodes at some level) then we just jump over the missing nodes and get to the next one. An example follows bellow. The nodes visited in order: 4, 2, 7, 5, 9, 6, 1, 26, 13, 10, 8, 3
Ending a street harassment incident We need male allies. Because men listen to other men and look to other men for approval, having men tell other men not to harass and intervene when they see harassment occurring can, sadly, be a more effective way of educating men not to harass women than if women talk to them. There are many barriers that keep people, especially men, from preventing and intervening in street harassment incidents as often as they could. For example, if there are several other people around, the “bystander effect” may mean that each person expects the other to respond or that if no one responds, there is no need to or it must be inappropriate to do so. Other barriers can include: not being sure if what is happening is unwelcome by the woman or if it constitutes inappropriate behavior, not wanting to assume the woman cannot handle the situation herself, not knowing what to even do or say that will help the situation, and fearing the perpetrator’s reaction. Groups such as Men Can Stop Rape (MCSR) and Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) know about these barriers and so their programming includes bystander intervention. The MCSR programming allows men to brainstorm and role play ways they can intervene when they hear sexist talk and witness gender-based violence or harassment. They also discuss issues of masculinity and the importance of speaking out. They emphasize that chances are, there are other guys who feel the same way but are too scared to speak out unless someone else does first. The MVP program, a leadership training program that motivates male student-athletes and leaders to play a primary role in preventing men’s violence and harassment of women, holds workshops on bystander training. The overall MVP model is to stimulate dialogue and critical thinking about the choices bystanders face and the costs and benefits of action and inaction. Brian Martin, professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, offers suggestions to men who wish to intervene in street harassment but are unsure how: Suppose you are with men who are harassing women (or anyone else): • Refuse to join in. Do not make any comments yourself. • Discourage others from doing so. Tell them the person is not enjoying it or tell them to leave the person alone. • At a suitable time, raise the issue about public harassment with your friends and explain why it is inappropriate to treat people that way. Suppose you see a man/men harassing women (or anyone else): • If it looks like a man is bothering a woman, ask her, “Is someone bothering you?” That question alone may deter a harasser who believes no one will intervene. If she says yes and the harasser does not leave or persists harassing, tell the harasser to stop or call for assistance (from police, a transit authority worker, or other people nearby). Most of the male allies I surveyed in Dec. 2009 (82 percent) said they would be willing to intervene when they see someone harassing a woman, 17 percent said they had intervened once, and 46 percent said they had intervened more than once. Here are tips some of them offered to other men who are unsure how or are afraid to intervene: • I’ve found that distractions and indirect interventions help best. Asking for directions, asking for the time, or other innocuous questions can often be enough of a distraction for a harasser to go away and move on, without causing a big scene or putting anyone in physical danger. • I do not address the man/group harassing the female. I simply offer my presence. • You don’t have to be loud and physically confrontational. You can simply distract harasser by saying “waddup” or you can just stay in open view so it won’t escalate to a rape scenario. • Where possible, intervene by giving control to the target of the harassment (e.g. “is he bothering you?” or “are you okay?”). • Just do the right thing. I think there are times when a harasser may be intimidating even to other males, but you have to find the intestinal fortitude to stand up for women in these situations. Otherwise, it’s as if we are giving the harassers tacit approval to continue their behaviors. • Go in fast and loud and willing to do just about anything. • Be aware of the situation, know what your advantage is, and if confronting a group situation, make sure you are interacting with the leader, and have contacted the police. • Don’t turn a blind eye, confront them even if it’s awkward, even if it’s not socially acceptable, do it anyways…Remember that many women are not in the situation where they are safe speaking up for themselves. Many of the suggestions that do not directly challenge a harasser, such as asking the woman if she wants help or asking the harasser what time it is, are excellent to use when one is not sure if it is harassment that is occurring, if they do not want to dis-empower the woman, or if they fear becoming the target of the harasser’s inappropriate behavior themselves. Something as simple as clearing one’s throat or coughing can help defuse a situation too, particularly if a harasser does not notice other people are around (such as on a dark street). Other resources Leave a Reply WordPress.com Logo Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s %d bloggers like this:
中国时间 6:07 2017年8月21日星期一美语咖啡屋 37 • 美国之音 Y: 各位听众好，我是杨晨。欢迎到美语咖啡屋！ Y: 好香啊。你是在煮汤吗？ J: No, I am boiling soup. I am boiling brown. Y: Brown？你说的颜色里的brown, 棕色吗？ J: That is right. I am boiling the color brown. Y: Jody, 你真是越来越可爱了。颜色也能煮吗？ J: Of course, you can boil a color. I got the idea from Jeannie, the woman artist we met who raises sheep and then uses their wool to make stuff. Y: 对。我认识Jeannie。她非常特别。为什么说她特别呢？因为她不但自己养羊，还会剪羊毛，织毛衣。她织的每一件毛衣都是艺术品。 J: That is right. She also dyes the wool herself. But Yang Chen, you forgot a part of the process. Y: 她还会给羊毛染色啊？ J: People who dye wool naturally use by-products found in nature like fruit, leaves and bark from trees, vegetables, even bugs! Y: Bugs? 虫子，我最怕那些小虫子。你刚才提到的by-product，能不能给大家解释一下？ J: By-product, spelled B-Y-P-R-O-D-U-C-T. A by-product is something that is left over from a process. Y：对， By-product就是副产品的意思。 J: Jeannie is going to tell us how she is going to use by-product from trees like yellow boxwood elder, osage orange wood and walnut tress to get completely natural color. Y: 你刚才提到的yellow boxwood elder或者是osage orange wood... J: Those are just types of trees. Y: 好。我们就听听Jeannie是利用那些by-products来作染料。实录1: Jeannie: And in this case I've dyed with yellow box elder to get this nice green-yellow color. And I've got some dyed with osage orange wood and the boxwood was given to me by another friend as a by-product of something he was making. Y: 我还是不太明白，她到底是用什么方法把这些东西制作出各种颜色的染料呢？ J: The process involves cocking the ingratiates over an open fire like a big pot of soup. Jeannie says that she dyed her wool over an open fire with friends. Doesn't that sound fun? Y: 嗯... J: Don't answer that. I had the feeling that boiling bugs over an open flame is not your idea of fun, but for Jeannie... 实录2: Jeannie: Well, we did this outside over an open fire and it took a couple of hours. It was a lot of fun. Y: 不过我还有一个疑问，如果是利用这些自然界的这些东西来制作颜色，那么颜色的种类是不是很有限呢？ J: Jeannie said that you can get almost any color you want from nature; you can have the whole color span. Y: 那你这里说的whole color span就是所有的颜色都包括在内。 J: Exactly, and according to Jeannie people who are really into dying wool naturally can get any color they want. Y: 等一等，我想提醒大家当你说一个人“really into something"就是说这个人某件事特别认真，特别投入。 J: Oh, good point. If you are really into something, you have been doing something for a long time and you really like it. But enough from us, Yang Chen, let's hear how Jeannie uses the expression "really into it" and words like "span..." 实录3: Jeannie: Yeah, there's natural colors you can get almost anything you want. And people who are really into it -- which I'm not, I'm just a beginner, but with the natural colors -- but you can get browns from walnut. You can get blue from indigo. So you can have the whole span. J: Jeannie says she is just a beginner, but to me she sounds like a pro. Y: 没错，我也觉得她听起来很老练。你有没有闻到什么东西煮糊了？ Y: 我知道这种来自大自然的颜色一定有很多好处，但是它们会不会很容易退色呢？ J: Oh, no it's my color brown. It's burning, it is all boiled over. Oh, man, my color brown it the color black. I guess I am the real beginner here. Well, anyway, thanks for joining us on American Cafe...See you next time. Y: 谢谢大家收听美语咖啡屋。我们下次再见。 J: Where is Jeannie when we need her?
When someone says I am a Vegan or Vegetarian, what comes to mind first? Let me guess, a person that doesn’t eat meat right? Well, part of that is true but there are different types of Vegetarians, such as Lacto-Ovo Vegetarians, Vegans, and Macrobiotic diets. A Lacto-Ovo Vegan doesn’t eat meat or fish but eats dairy and eggs. A Vegan excludes all meats, fish, dairy, eggs, and no animal products, this is the type of Vegetarian most of us refer to. Macrobiotic diets are not necessarily vegetarian, but are largely based on grains, legumes, and vegetables. Although I am not a huge fan of vegan diets, I am not one to say they can’t work. A well-balanced vegetarian diet should pay particular attention to the following sources: adequate protein intake, essential fatty acids, iron, zinc, calcium, and vitamins B and D. Supplementation may be required in cases of strict vegetarian diets with no intake of animal products. If done right, then there are positive outcomes from vegan diets and at the end of the day if you are a vegan and live a healthy lifestyle, than more power to you. Now, the real question is, are vegetarian diets optimal for children’s health? Before we begin with this topic, coming from my biased opinion, I do not agree with parents raising their young children on vegan diets for several reasons. A very important reason is the fact that parents lack giving their children a nutritious diet as it is, let alone a vegan diet which is supposed to be stricter and could lead to more health and deficiency problems down the road if done wrong. Are Essential Fatty Acids and Amino Acids important for children’s growth? Absolutely they are, our body does not naturally produce them and a child is not going to go and buy their selves some fish oil and BCAA’s at a vitamin store to supplement with. Since vegan diets exclude animal proteins and fish, where do the fatty acids and Amino Acids come from? That is the biggest problem. They do not come from anywhere because most parents are not aware of how critical these nutrients are for optimal growth and overall health. If parents aren’t aware of the importance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 and Amino Acids, than how is a child supposed to know that? The human brain needs the major essential long chain fatty acids known as “DHA” and “EPA,” which are found in omega-3 for proper development. There is a handful of research to support that theory. Do children using vegan diets have Vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can lead to lack of growth? Energy Expenditure, also known as the “Metabolic Rate” can be at risk with restrictive vegan diets, due to the lack of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients being provided. Many vegan dieters become Copper toxic and Zinc deficient, do to not getting the right amounts of animal proteins the body needs. These deficiencies can cause what is known as “Brain Fog,” which is a fuzzy feeling you get in your brain from time to time. Eventually this can potentially lead to chemical imbalances in the human body and digestion problems. (1)In a study conducted by Roberts et al. and Campbell et al. states that severe malnutrition has been reported in infants and toddlers fed inappropriate vegetarian diets as well as deficiencies of iron, vitamin B-12, and vitamin D. So, the greater the variety of foods that make up the diet, the better the chances that all the nutrients will be provided. (2) In another study found in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Hebbelinck et al. concluded that a Lacto-Ovo vegetarian diet sustains adequate physical growth and maturation. Some of the vegetarian subjects, however, appear to have had difficulty meeting the energy requirements. Basically if the vegan diet is done the right way, then children can have optimal growth and not have any vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but they may lack energy. What other deficiencies can potentially occur if a child is fed a vegan diet? Nutrition for kids is more vital than it is for adults, due to the fact they have to grow and mature into adults at some point in time. When children are growing up, they are in such a tender stage of development for their brain, muscles, and bones. Every bit of quality nutrition is critical for proper growth and parents need to understand that, bottom line! There has also been research that when mother’s being pregnant and on a vegan diet, the baby can be born with undeveloped brains and their central nervous systems are starving due to not getting the proper vitamins, minerals, and nutrients through proper diet during the pregnancy term. An undeveloped brain can then lead to learning disabilities. Some symptoms to watch out for in the children, if fed a vegan diet are: Short term memory loss, cold hands and feet due to not getting the proper amounts of nutrients from animal fats to support the adrenalin and thyroid functions, and sleep disorders. Can vegan diets lead to child obesity? Depending on what kind of vegan diet is being provided, sure a child can put on fat through a vegan diet. If the parent’s are just feeding their children “High Glycemic Carbs” and no proteins or fats, than that can cause a huge insulin spike and most likely go to your fat cells rather than your muscle cells and then be stored and lead to fat gain. It all really depends on how educated the parents are, if they are keeping a good balance of macronutrients, especially rich proteins high in Leucine content and fibrous carbs than the child should be fine. Also I would hope the child is doing some sort of physical activity and not living a sedentary lifestyle sitting and playing video games all day. Sugar consumption, well we can’t leave that out of the equation now can we. Most vegetarians don’t even know they are pre-diabetic and continuously eat refined sugars and alternative sweeteners without even knowing it. Well, we should all know by now that sugar is the devil, and does lead to fat gain, and if you are pre-diabetic then you are only going to make matters worse. What do children love the most? Nine out of ten times it’s good old sugar, and some more sugar. So, if parents are feeding their children adequate amounts of sugar daily, even through a vegan diet, then the children will gain fat and may lead to diabetes down the road. With all this said, are vegetarian diets optimal for children’s health? In my humble opinion I do not agree with them, but if done properly and the children are monitored for symptoms and are living a healthy active lifestyle, than it should be fine. Someone once told me that vegan diets will become more popular in the future, but I have to disagree respectively do to all the studies and research that show animal fats and animal proteins are the key to longevity and muscle growth. At the end of the day everyone is going to live their life the way they choose too, whether that’s through a paleo diet, zone diet, vegan diet, or regular diets. Whatever makes that person happy is all that really matters, but for the sake of children not having control of what they eat is wrong. Parent’s need to educate themselves regardless of the circumstances, it doesn’t matter if you are a vegan or not, the bottom line is to feed your children the right nutrients their bodies need for proper brain development and overall growth. (1) Roberts IF, West RJ, Ogilvie D, Dillon MJ, Malnutrition in infants receiving cult diets: a form of child abuse. Br Med J 1979; 1: 296-8. Campbell M, Lofters WS, Gibbs WN. Rastafarianism and the vegan syndrome. Br Med J 1982;285: 1617-8 (2) Hebbelinck M. et al. Growth, development, and physical fitness of flemish vegetarian children, adolescents, and young adults. American J of clinical Nutrition. “Live A Dynamic Lifestyle” Source by Babies & Kiddos
What food pyramid? - information food, A food pyramid is graphical representations of a dietary guideline or a food guide. there are food pyramids for different diets, so let´s take a look.. The food pyramid \| free lesson plans \| teachers, Understand that a human body needs food to function properly. identify the food categories used in the usda food pyramid. chart the foods eaten during one day and. Free math worksheets, free phonics - softschools., Softschools.com provides free math worksheets and games and phonics worksheets and phonics games which includes counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication. Food pyramid: nutrition worksheets kids (grades 3 4), If food pyramid: nutrition worksheets kids (grades 1 2), enjoy collection grades 3 4. .. department . http://busyteacher.org/2694-food-pyramid-nutrition-worksheets-for-kids-grades.html Food labels nutrition printables- food label worksheets, Teaching food labels importance healthy foods food label nutrition teaches children fun printable worksheets.. http://www.nourishinteractive.com/nutrition-education-printables/category/6-food-labels-worksheets-printables-teaching-kids-reading-food-labeling-nutrition-facts-free-learning-printouts-activity Food pyramid \| food guide pyramid \| dietary guidelines, Food pyramid usda partner providing info covering food guide pyramid, dietary guidelines, myplate, topics affecting health.. http://www.foodpyramid.com/
The Thermodynamics of Chromatography - Thermodynamics Basics > Page 6 There are two basic forms that the van't Hoff curve can take. These two types of curve relate to the two basic types of chromatography. The first interactive chromatography where the major retentive mechanism results from solute phase interactions and the second exclusion chromatography where the major retention mechanism depends on the amount of stationary phase available to each solute. As stated in book 7, neither form of chromatography can be exclusive, but one can be predominant. An example of the type of linear curve that is produced by interactive chromatography is shown in figure 1 It is seen the van't Hoff curve indicates a very large enthalpy value (the slope of the curve is steep) but conversely a very low entropy contribution (the intercept is relatively small). Figure 1. Interactive Chromatography Using Energy Driven Distribution
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 And the worms ate into his brain In his new book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks seems to have created a new word for those sticky songs that you can't get out of your head. In German, these things are called ohrwurms, their word for earwigs. This has come into English as earworm. Now Sacks has decided that he prefers brainworm. You can watch a video of him talking about it on the book's page on John Terauds, writing in the Toronto Star on the weekend, used Sacks's new word, but now says via e-mail that it was a brain fart. Thursday, October 18, 2007 Smaller than small The ETJ list is often a source of interesting questions. Recently, Peter Warner observed: "Listening to a British presenter, I realized that his sense of little and small were different. His general order of descending relative size went roughly in this sequence: huge, big, small, little, tiny while my American background views little and small as basically synonymous. Speaking with him after his wonderful talk confirmed his different sense of those two words." Peter then asks, "is this a British vs. North American English usage difference?" If you check the British ESL dictionaries, they typically define little as meaning small and the other way round. Similarly, the Concise Oxford defines little as "small in amount, size, or degree..." There is no mention of one being less big than the other. There are, however, other differences. Least interesting among these is that small is only an adjective (the small of your back excepted), while little exists in two flavours: adjective & determiner. More interesting is that they are both marked, but little seems to be more marked. That is, when I want to know the size of something, it's typical that I would ask you how big something is, not how small it is. In this sense, big is unmarked. Yet, it is even less common to ask how little something is, about 10 times less common in the frame "how ~ is it?'. Because of the problems parsers have distinguishing between adjectives and determiners, it's hard to get a good corpus view of all aspects of the difference, but here's a neat one: Search for (adj) + little in the spoken section of the BNC and you get the following (the first number is raw hits, the second number is hits per million words): 1 NICE LITTLE 161 15.58 2 TINY LITTLE 36 3.48 4 POOR LITTLE 33 3.19 5 OTHER LITTLE 14 1.35 7 SILLY LITTLE 13 1.26 Try it again in the academic section and what do you get? Nothing. There are no such pairs. Now do the same with small, this time with academic section first: 2 OTHER SMALL 20 1.30 5 UPPER SMALL 6 0.39 And in conversation? Zip. So it would seems that small is more academic, at least in this kind of pairing. Now, this is stretching things quite a bit, but if we consider the general prejudice that conversation is trivial while academic language is weighty, long, and substantial, there may be an argument, if only a metaphorical one, for little being smaller than small. I think I'll put it to Lynneguist over at Separated by a Common Language. Friday, October 05, 2007 Problematising Problematic About a month ago, Russel Smith, writing in the Globe & Mail, discussed a tendency for the meaning of technical terms, such as price point and deconstruct, to drift as the words become mainstream. "It's inevitable that technical words and phrases will be imported into everyday language from specialized jargons. It's also inevitable that those terms will then change their meanings slightly. They usually lose some of their specificity, a bit of their subtlety, and become synonymous with some other everyday term." I think he overstates the case here, but still, there is a case to be made. And notice how the paragraph above is simply descriptive, rather than evaluative. Perhaps his time at And Sometimes Y has relieved Smith of some of his more prescriptive tendencies, though, making it clear that he hasn't entirely shuffled off the curmudgeon's burden, he writes, "My favourite example of a corrupted technical term has to be 'deconstruct'." He explains the Derrida's use of the word like this: "The aim of the reading was to show how the text's meaning is elusive, how it contradicts itself. It's part of a larger view of language as something essentially problematic. In other words, it hardly means an elucidation, as we use it so casually to mean now, but almost the opposite" Still, Smith remains admirably neutral throughout. And the changes that he describes actually seem to be supported by evidence. Ironic, then, that he is taken to task in a letter that appeared a few days later: Posted on 08/09/07 Problematic problem Kimberley, Ont. -- It is striking that in discussing the demotic use of jargon (Technical Terms And Mainstream Meanings - Review, Sept. 6), Russell Smith employs "problematic" in just such a manner. Having originated in the field of logic, the word means doubtful or questionable and has only recently come to be used in describing something that poses a problem. That Mr. Smith is, surprisingly for him, unaware of this history may be a problem, but it is definitely not problematic. Here, Ferguson indulges in a number of fallacies (but they're so fine, you see): 1. language must not change, so the older meaning is the only true meaning 2. language always moves from the erudite to the debauched, so the technical meaning must be older 3. whatever I think a word means is what it means If we consult the OED, we find that it lists more than one meaning for problematic. Yes, polysemy is alive and well. We also find that the term of art from logic dates from 1610, but the more general sense is attested from 1609. From this, it would be hard to argue that one preceded the other in English. Finally, the OED disagrees with Ferguson's definition, giving the following instead: 2. Logic. Of a proposition: that asserts that a state of affairs is possible rather than actual or necessary.
Death by Sugar - why you should avoid this toxin. Many people think that we should cut back on sugar consumption in order to keep our weight down. That's true but I wonder how many realise that sugar is toxic and not only causes diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cholesterol problems, arthritis, liver disease, fibromyalgia, adrenal fatigue, candida and high blood pressure but is also implicated in the growth of cancer cells. Sugar is a killer. This is what happens in your body when you eat sugar. When sugar reaches your bloodstream your pancreas produces insulin to convert sugar so that it can be used by the body's cells. If a large dose of refined sugar goes into the bloodstream the pancreas produces an equally large dose of insulin. Blood sugar that the body does not need at that time gets stored as fat. This leaves the system full of insulin so, to neutralise this, the adrenal glands produce epinephrine and cortisol. If this process is repeated too often the pancreas can become damaged and stop producing insulin causing Type I diabetes. Insulin prevents high blood sugar (hyperglycaemia). The effects of hyperglycaemia range from drowsiness to unconsciousness, brain damage and death. The adrenal glands can become overworked leading to adrenal fatigue or exhaustion. Even if your pancreas and adrenal glands survive sugar overloads, sugar has been proven to depress your immune system for up to 5 hours after eating sugar. When your immune system is down you are susceptible to attack by viruses and immunodeficiency diseases like pneumonia, auto-immune disorders, meningitis, osteomyelitis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, AIDS and cancer . Sugar kills beneficial bacteria in the body and also feeds fungus allowing candida, for example, to thrive. Cancerous cells feed on sugar as they are infected with sugar-hungry fungus allowing tumours to grow. Sugar is a toxin that affects many organs and metabolic processes and yes - it can kill you. No comments:
TSMB Logo icon leftBack to Technology Page icon topMain Index Symbol Font Test Page Several sections of the TSMB course contain Greek letters and other mathematical symbols. To check that your computer and browser are set up for this, look at the following table: Written as α Written as β If you see a ? instead of the Greek alpha and beta, you do not have your browser set up to use HTML 4.0 and display the extended character sets. If this is the case, it is most likely that you simply need to upgrade your browser. You need at least version 4 of Netscape or Internet Explorer, which are, themselves, now obsolete versions. You may obtain up-to-date versions of browsers from the following sites: If you have an up-to-date browser and still cannot see the Greek symbols, try setting the character set to utf-8 (see under view menu in Netcape or under view, encoding in Explorer). If you still have problems try playing with the fonts under preferences Methods of Displaying Greek and symbols in HTML In early browsers and HTML, the only characters that could be used were standard western alphabet and any non standard characters had to be encoded as images (gifs). This was clearly not good as these could not be resized for people who need large text etc. In HTML 3.0 <Font Face="symbol">a </Font> would give an alpha. This depended on the machine reading the document having the same Font installed. This will still work on most browsers, but in HTML 4, use of < Font > was deprecated (ie its use is discouraged at all). Characters can be defined using &#number; or &abbrev;. However it depends on the browser how well this is implemented. For example in Netscape 4.7 &alpha (α) does not work but α(α) does. There is one further complication. You need to have in your document header There are various pages on the web saying that this is misunderstood and technically incorrect However it works round a bug in netscape 4.x and works for Explorer 4 and Netscape 6 and 7, so that is what we are using. http://www.alanwood.net/demos/ent4_frame.html gives a list of characters and will allow you to test your browser and to get the numeric code as well as the abbreviation. We tend to use the numeric code on this course as it appears to be more reliable in older browsers. Nicholas Keep Copyright © Birkbeck College 1996-2009
Scoliosis Symptoms Defined Scoliosis Symptoms Scoliosis symptoms should really be called indicators, because the physical expressions of atypical side-to-side spinal curvature are mostly signs that the condition exists, rather than true symptoms that cause pain or discomfort. Over 90% of people with a minor spinal curvature do not have any pain or neurological symptoms, which should not be of any surprise. Remember, scoliosis is not an inherently painful condition. The reason why most patients do not feel any pain from unusual spinal curvatures is that most are mild to moderate in severity and produce no definitively negative effects on the anatomy. In cases where scoliosis is severe or extreme, the chances for painful expressions increase drastically. This is not to say that all severe spinal curves will definitely cause pain, since some do not. However, as curvature worsens on the diagnostic scale, the chances for many problematic occurrences rises exponentially. Some of the worst of these potentially symptomatic issues include pinched nerve pain, central spinal stenosis pain, mechanical back pain conditions, organ compression and vascular tissue damage. This objective essay explores the variety of possible symptoms of scoliosis, as well as provides data to support the fact that most cases are not symptomatic to any significant degree. Severe Scoliosis Severe spinal curvature (over 70 degrees) can cause the ribs to constrict the lungs and heart. Damage can be done to internal organs that do not have the required room to function correctly. The patient might have difficulty breathing and is at heightened risk for pneumonia. This form of extreme curvature almost always requires professional scoliosis treatment. Although the therapy options are not ideal, they are still the best medicine can offer at this point in time. Typically, spinal fusion surgery is suggested for ultra-problematic curvatures. Truly disabling scoliosis is one of the times where the treatment for the curvature might be just as bad as the condition itself, placing patients between a rock and a hard place when seeking medical care. Scoliosis Symptoms and Signs Below are listed some of the most common symptoms, indicators of an abnormal scoliotic curvature. As noted above, most of these indicators will not cause pain, nor should they create physical dysfunction: Shoulder height may not be uniform from left to right. One or both shoulders may project to the front or back. Patient may demonstrate uneven waist or hip height left to right. Patient may demonstrate uneven leg lengths Patient may have more prominent ribs on one side of the body. Patient may demonstrate obvious or subtle lean to one side Patient might feature prominent or uneven shoulder blades. All of these criteria should be considered when diagnosing scoliosis. Recognition of Scoliosis Symptoms Scoliosis is not usually a condition that causes pain. Most people that have spinal curvature do not require any special treatment. If the curve is mild as a child nears adulthood, it is rare that it will deteriorate any further. It is important to understand the mostly innocent nature mild to moderate scoliosis, since the nocebo effect of the diagnostic process can lead to the start of pain conditions through a purely mindbody process. This can cause symptoms when none might otherwise be experienced. I can tell you for sure how frightening it is for a young person to be diagnosed and purposefully filled with myths about the true nature of atypical spinal curvature. I lived this nightmare myself and will never forget the cruel manner in which my chiropractor explained the horrors of this condition simply to scare me and my family into ongoing care. It was unconscionable. Severe spinal curves should be treated long before they pose a health risk to the person. All spinal curves should be monitored by a scoliosis specialist who can ensure that treatment can be provided when and if it is ever required. Back Pain > Scoliosis > Scoliosis Symptoms
News Ticker Organic Silicons’ Role in Surface Modification of Medical Devices Protective barriers for medical devices For the medical device industry, organic silicon use falls into the primary categories of protective barriers (antimicrobial, antifungal, anti-corrosion), as a primer between stainless steel and exotic metals and proprietary surface coatings, or to modify the surface to become hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Primer adhesion Adhering coatings to surfaces can be difficult with metallic substrates such as stainless steel or exotic alloys. Hexamethyldisiloxane (HMDSO) can be used as an intermediate layer to improve the adhesion between a coating and substrate. For example, stainless steel guide wires are often coated to make them more lubricious to ease insertion. By applying a thin layer of silicon dioxide, the lubricious coating grafts nicely to a stainless surface. Organic silicons also can be applied as a linking chemistry between other difficult-to-adhere-to surfaces such as ceramics and Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE Teflon). Drug delivery devices that use ceramic nozzles with micron-sized openings are coated with PTFE to prevent clogging. Depositing a 100nm to 150nm layer of HMDSO promotes the bond between the two substances. Anticorrosion is becoming increasingly important in medical devices, particularly to protect small microelectronic circuit boards in hearing aids, intraocular devices, implantable sensors, and pacemakers. To protect electronics, HMDSO coatings are applied in a relatively thick coating of a micron or more. HDMSO is water and gas repellent – properties required to prevent corrosion. A thin layer (~100nm) of PTFE can also be applied if the HMDSO will be exposed to harsh chemical acids or bases. Hydrophobic/hydrophilic surfaces For vascular surgical tools and instruments that become fouled with tissue debris or blood, coatings can keep a surgeon’s tool cleaner, longer. Applying a hydrophobic (water-repellent) coating on surgical devices creates a surface that blood and tissue sheets off easily, giving the surgeon better visibility. At the other end of the spectrum are hydrophilic (affinity to water) devices. Depending on what is required, organic silicons can be used to create such surfaces with either polar or dispersive surface energy. There are many strategies to achieve an anti- microbial surface including cell harpoons, amphipathic surfaces, antiseptics bound to the surface, and non-stick coatings. In a unique application, chemical vapor deposition is being used to embed nanosilver particles in a thin layer of organic silicon to prevent microbial adhesion and protect against corrosion. Silver ions can be embedded in a thin layer of silicon dioxide to kill any bacteria present. Fine-tuning PECVD chemistry Leave a comment Your email address will not be published.
Back to the Basics From time to time you have to go back from whence you came inorder to get perspective to where you are going. And with all these recent developments in web standard technologies, its useful to do this so as to stay in the current. for example, knowing the deprecated elements such as font , bgcolor, since the introduction of HTML5. Since being relevant in the future is our main aim, i decided to focus on what i think is core to web development and that is dynamic content. Hence the debate JQuery and Javascript. Which is better? which is more dynamic and which is more relevant in the future. What is JavaScript? JavaScript is a scripting language that was designed for use within a web browser. Typically, JavaScript is used for interface interactions. Slideshows and other interactive components are typically done using JavaScript. JavaScript has many other uses as well. If you are familiar with using the Google email client Gmail, you have experienced the power of JavaScript firsthand. Many of the additional features and functionalities that make Gmail such a popular email solution are created using JavaScript. The uses of JavaScript don’t stop there, however. JavaScript has also been used for server-side programming, game development, and even creating desktop applications. Years ago, JavaScript was popular but web developers were not entirely sold on the idea of using it simply because every web browser would render JavaScript content in a different manner. Newer standards now force all web browsers to implement JavaScript uniformly; saving developers time and frustration trying to debug code for a specific web browsing client. What is jQuery? Before jQuery was developed, web developers created their own custom frameworks in JavaScript. This allowed them to work around specific bugs without wasting time debugging common features. This led to groups of developers creating JavaScript libraries that were open source and free to use. JQuery is simply a specific library of JavaScript code. There are many other JavaScript code libraries such as MooTools, but jQuery has become the most popular because it is so easy to use and extremely powerful. While many web developers confuse JavaScript and jQuery as two separate programming languages, it is important for you to realize that they are both JavaScript. The difference is that jQuery has been optimized to perform many common scripting functions and it does so while using fewer lines of code. So Which One Should You Use? Professional web developers spend a lot of time debating whether JavaScript or jQuery is appropriate in a given situation. The truth is that there is no correct answer. Either option can be used to create the exact same effects, but often jQuery can do it with fewer lines of code. As a general rule, jQuery is sufficient for most web development projects. There will be some projects that require traditional JavaScript; however, these are few and far between as of late. Although jQuery maybe the better choice in most scenarios, as a novice web developer you should still take the time to learn both JavaScript and jQuery. Although using JavaScript exclusively can slow down project completion time significantly, it’s important to realize how JavaScript works and how it affects the Document Object Model (DOM). Remember that the biggest difference between jQuery and JavaScript is that jQuery has been optimized to work with a variety of browsers automatically. Unfortunately, JavaScript still has some issues with cross-browser compatibility due to poor JavaScript implementation practices on the part of web browser developers. To see this difference in action, consider the following example that is designed to change the background color of a body tag using jQuery and JavaScript respectively: $ (‘body’) .css (‘background’, ‘#ccc’); Function changeBachground(color) { = color; Onload=”changeBackground (‘red’);” Can you see how in a large, complex web development project it makes more sense to use jQuery? A single line of code accomplishes what it takes four lines of code to accomplish in JavaScript and this doesn’t even account for the extra time you might spend debugging this short piece of code to work across popular web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Is jQuery the answer to all of your scripting needs? For most projects – yes. For those few projects that require the specific functions only available in traditional JavaScript, you can quickly adapt your style to include JavaScript code when needed. Remember that although 99% of your web development projects will work perfectly fine using jQuery, there will be a small percentage that does require JavaScript. As a result, it would be wise to study both so you can transition between the two as needed to provide a better web development service to your clients. Leave a Reply You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change ) Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s
web scraping and bot development using PHP Web scraping is a computer science technique for extracting information and data from web sites. In data mining research scraping and analysing of information is discussed. Practically web scraping is necessary if you want to develop a web application where you want to show customised information from various websites. For this you’ve to first scrap data from the sites and then apply some logic to filter the information. Practically you can use different languages to write the program that will automatically search and collect the information. But if you’re PHP experts and want to use PHP for this kind of stuff here I would like to recommend a book web-bots/spider using PHP/Curl What is web scraping? I am going to expalin this with the help of an example .Suppose you want to develop an application which collects contents from various websites and thus shows a customised user specific contents ,for that we use web scrapers . Say for example ,Suppose you want to develop a web application where you want to show classified information about current news from different newspaper. So that people who are interested on a particular news can get all the newspaper link in your classified category. How it works ? The application will retrieve all the news from different websites, then classify and categorised information based on interest, like politics, sports, entertainment etc. The above book and the library(Library ) will help you to make this kind of application. We can use this for any kind of application like Android and mobile applications.On that case your scraping script should be installed in a server where it automatically will collect and classify information and in the smart phone application you just retrieved the data from your server. Leave a Reply WordPress.com Logo Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s
A spider web is a complex and beautiful thing. It is also functional. Spider webs have evolved through natural selection. That means that random changes in genes have been passed on to later generations. Spiders, like all animals and adaptations, have evolved over millions of years and spider webs have existed for at least 100 million years (based on examples found in amber specimens). Not all spiders build webs to catch prey. Some do not build webs at all. “Spider web” is what we say referring to a web that is in use (or seems to be) and “cobweb” refers to abandoned (dusty) webs. (There are some three-dimensional webs from spiders of the theridiidae family which are known as the tangle-web spiders, cobweb spiders and comb-footed spiders.) The book, Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating, is what got me thinking about webs. It covers spiders found on the ground, in the air, and even under water. Authors Leslie Brunetta and Catherine Craig’s book answers the question that every kid asks when seeing a spider create line of silk: How do they do that? The orb web is the name for the wheel-shaped web that we are used to seeing. It contains at least four different silk proteins, each performing a different function. Together they make a superior tool for catching other insects. Spider webs turn up in literature and culture. Just about every American kid knows Charlotte’s Web, a book that has turned many a child from anti-spider to the pro-spider side. There are also the many versions of the comic book superhero Spiderman Spiderman. If you read about the incredible strength of a spider’s silk web, you may think that Spiderman is not so farfetched and that he would be truly an “Amazing Spiderman.” Some spiders are more like Spiderman and don’t build webs, but chase their prey or make sticky nets which they throw over their prey when it gets close enough. A spider has up to eight eyes, eight legs and seven silk-producing glands in its abdomen. These glands secrete proteins that are extruded through spinnerets to produce different kinds of silk. Spider silk itself is interesting to scientists because of the irreversible transformation it makes from a water soluble liquid inside the spider, to a non-water soluble thread outside of the body. It was once thought that this was caused by a reaction from the thread’s exposure to air once it exits the spider.Now, the belief is that it has to do with the act of pulling on the thread that realigns the molecules into a solid form. Their multiple silk glands each produce different kinds of silk. Besides weaving webs, they have silk used for mating rituals, to create shields for protection from predators and encase their eggs. Scientists are interested in spider silk for manufacturing purposes, specifically the viscid (sticky for catching prey) and dragline (strong for stiff radials and framework) threads. The viscid thread is comparable to rubber in elasticity, but has more strength. The dragline thread is comparable to steel and Kevlar (bulletproof material) in stiffness, but is more elastic and able to absorb higher impact. Leslie Brunetta spoke at Google (watch the talk) about the spider silk and her book Spider Silk.
Ashford University posted by . Evaluate the ways in which the legacy of slavery has prevented the United States from building a more just society, supporting your evaluation with the textbook and additional sources. Define what Dr. King’s refrain, “free at last,” looks like to you and how our society will need to change in order to achieve it. • History? - How would you like us to help you with this assignment? Respond to this Question First Name School Subject Your Answer Similar Questions 1. US History Why was the Fugitive Slave Act so controversial? 2. presentation essential 3. african american studies Slavery and Society, 1800-1860 1. What invention contributed to the need for more slaves in the late 18th century? 4. social studies 8th 1. What was an underlying source of tension in westward expansion during the 1850s? 5. History 4.)Slavery was defended for many reasons in the 1800s. A.)Which opinion best explains why some citizens of free states might support slavery? 6. History 5.)why would americans free states want slaves state to remain part of the united states as opposed to just letting them leave the union? 7. history 8. American Government 9. social studies 10. Social Studies How would the simultaneous admission of Missouri and Maine help to maintain peace in the United States? More Similar Questions
posted by . The ....... Color of the car is brown • Vocabulary - What is your question? Respond to this Question First Name School Subject Your Answer Similar Questions 1. science Why do I have brown eyes? The genes we inherit from our parents determine things like our height, looks, hair color and eye color. This passing of characteristics from parent to child is called heredity. If your mother has brown eyes, 2. English expression 1. What color eyes does he have? He has dark brown eyes. 2. What color hair does the dog have? 3. Math Three men named Greene, Grey, and Tann along with two women name Browne and Whyte, each drive the car in their car pool on a different one of the five weekdays each week. Each person's car is a different one of these five colors: brown, … 4. chemistry a compound made in the first part of an experiment, [Co(NH3)5Cl]Cl2 appeared to be a dark brown/orange/purple color. This product was then used as a reactant to synthesize [Co(NH3)5ONO], which was a red color. how do you account for … 5. Algebra I'm needing help with this. Thanks An individual can be classified by gender as male, female, by hair color as black, blonde, brown, red, unknown, and by eye color as black, brown, green. A) How many different classifications are possible … 6. Genetics A recessive eye color mutation (se) in fruit flies leading to a color called "sepia" is determined by an autosomal gene. Another recessive mutation called "brown" (bw) causes brown eye color, and is determined by an autosomal gene … 7. Statistics In a city with no cars of mixed color, 30% of the cars on the road are brown. Forty percent are either brown or green, and 10% are white. a.) What is the probability that a randomly selected car is green? 8. Math Color this square so that one-half is green,one-third is yellow and and the rest is brown.Each triangle should be just one color.Make any pattern you like. How much of the square is brown? 9. Comm Tech Name Age Gender Eye Color Hair C. 1.)Bob 40 M Brown Blonde 3.)Cathy 37 F Brown Blonde 4.)Samantha 51 F Brown Brown 5.)Robin 46 F Brown Black 3.)What is the frequency of brown-haired people in the sample ? 10. algebra Eye color is determined by genetic combinations.There are 4 possible genetic combinations: RR=Brown,RL=Brown,LR=Brown,LL=Blue.Show a 4 square Punnett square that models these conclusions. Thank you.I hope someone can show me the solution. More Similar Questions
Arnfried Kemnitz Learn More Given positive integers k and d with k ≥ 2d, a (k, d)-total coloring of a simple and finite graph G is an assignment c of colors {0, 1,. .. , k − 1} to the vertices and edges of G such that d ≤ \|c(x) − c(x ′)\| ≤ k − d whenever x and x ′ are two adjacent edges, two adjacent vertices or an edge incident to a vertex. The circular total chromatic number χ ′′ c(More) A plane integral drawing of a planar graph G is a realization of G in the plane such that the vertices of G are mapped into distinct points and the edges of G are mapped into straight line segments of integer length which connect the corresponding vertices such that two edges have no inner point in common. We conjecture that plane integral drawings exist(More) An integer distance graph is a graph G(D) with the set of integers as vertex set and with an edge joining two vertices u and v if and only if ju ? vj 2 D where D is a subset of the positive integers. We determine the chromatic number (D) of G(D) for some nite distance sets D such as sets of consecutive integers and special sets of cardinality 4. An edge-coloured graph G is rainbow connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose edges have distinct colours. The rainbow connection number of a connected graph G, denoted rc(G), is the smallest number of colours that are needed in order to make G rainbow connected. In this paper we prove that rc(G) = 2 for every connected graph G of order n(More) Let Q n be a hypercube of dimension n, that is, a graph whose vertices are binary n-tuples and two vertices are adjacent iff the corresponding n-tuples differ in exactly one position. An edge coloring of a graph H is called rainbow if no two edges of H have the same color. Let f (G, H) be the largest number of colors such that there exists an edge coloring(More)
Skip to content Churchill – A Leader for our darkest times January 24, 2015 Fifty years ago today, in the early hours of the morning, Winston Churchill died. I always remember a teacher at school who berated a newspaper headline at time for describing his passing as a tragedy for how could the death of 90 year old man who, by any standards, lived life to the full by described as such. Yet it is clear that, at the time, there was a profound sense of public shock at the loss of a man who, more than any other, had defined Britain in the 20th century. 50 years on his story still captures the public imagination and would be Prime Ministers still, where they can, try to promote their qualities by comparison with his. Whatever you view take of him it is hard not to acknowledge the scale of his achievement and the breadth of his personality and interests. The sheer longevity of his career is unique. This was a man who first entered Parliament in 1900 and only stepped down in October 1964, months before his death, who was first a Government Minister in 1905 and resigned for the last time as Prime Minister in 1955, a man who held most of the major offices of state and who was a major leader in both World Wars. Churchill, like many great politicians, did not belong entirely to one political tradition. He entered Parliament as a Conservative but crossed the floor in 1904 to join the Liberal Party. As Liberal he was on the radical side of the party and was a close of ally of Lloyd George. He was the author in Government of both the Probation Service and the system of Labour Exchanges and was a strong supporter of that Government’s social reforms such as the introduction of the State Pension and National Insurance. Even as Conservative he supported an interventionist approach to social welfare. It was his Government which commissioned the Beveridge Report and the 1945 Conservative Manifesto made a commitment to establish a National Health Service, even if through a different mechanism to that adopted by Atlee and Aneurin Bevan. When he returned to power in 1951 it was Churchill who, at a time when some in his party and parts of the medical profession might have been tempted to dismantle the NHS, ensured its survival. Some of Churchill’s views and actions have been the subject of fierce criticism. Like many at the time he supported the forced sterilisation of the “feeble minded” which in the end was not included in the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. He was a fierce imperialist, responsible for or condoning some of the most repressive steps taken by the British Government to keep its Empire together and to crush those who offered resistance to its rule. He has a decidedly mixed reputation in the part of South Wales from which my family come after sending troops to deal with the aftermath of the Tonypandy riots. Some of these things need to be seen in the light of widely held contemporary views, other illustrate the dictum that none of us are “wholly good or bad”. It is, however, for his leadership in World War II that Churchill is most well-known. For those of us who were not alive in 1940 it is hard to imagine how close Britain came to being overwhelmed by the Nazi regime either militarily or psychologically. Churchill’s leadership and inspiration was, particularly in that crucial darkest hour of the war, one of the key factors which kept the country from defeat. His diplomatic success in securing American support and the strength of his personal relationship with FDR was also crucial. My mother (my father came from the aforementioned Tonypandy) recalls the impact of his speeches in encouraging and reassuring a civilian population dealing with mass bombing. Rewriting history is always difficult but it is interesting to ponder what would happened in this country and Europe and the world more widely without Churchill’s contribution. Of course Churchill might never have got there. His political career nearly ended in ignominy after the disaster of the Dardenelles campaign, brilliant in strategic design but botched in execution, in World War I. In 1922, in the last election he stood for as Liberal he came fourth. He spent 10 years in the political wilderness in the 1930s, totally out of favour with the leadership of his party. He only became Prime Minister when he was past retirement age. Many men of less determination would have given up a long time before. There is one other aspect of Winston Churchill which I have become familiar with in the years I have worked in the area of mental health, and that is his personal experience of mental illness. Whatever his precise diagnosis it is clear that Churchill was affected, over decades, by periods of profound depression when he struggled to get out of bed and attend to the smallest bit of business. His “black dog” as he called it, a term coined by Dr Johnson who himself was affected by depression, was a major part of his life as was suicidal ideation – he talked about his constant fear of standing on the edge of railway platforms or balconies. It is not clear whether Churchill ever used mental health services. He did, however, follow a number of common strategies to manage his depression. As well as his fabled drinking (remembering his comment that he had taken more out of alcohol than it had ever taken out of him) it seems likely that, like many others affected by mental health problems, he used art and writing as crucial creative therapies to help cope with his condition. While there are some who still find it difficult to equate the confident hero Churchill with the darkness of mental illness but the evidence of his own statements appears to be clear. What is more it may be that in his experience of mental illness lies some of the essential courage and resilience which Churchill was able to draw on in supporting Britain through its time of trail. When someone has looked into the darkest corners of their own minds they can draw a strength which those who have been not been tested in the same way do not have. So 50 years after his death it is right to celebrate the life of Winston Churchill and in particular he role of leading the country in its darkest hours in 1940. It is also right to celebrate Winston Churchill as a clear example of how someone affected by mental illness can reach the pinnacle of public life, and in the round, be stronger in that role on account of that experience. From → Uncategorized Leave a Comment Leave a Reply You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change ) Twitter picture Facebook photo Google+ photo Connecting to %s %d bloggers like this:
I would like to start the "Religion" category with a short introduction about the Qur'an. As you may know, this is the central religious text of Islam, the final revelation of God and divine guidance for mankind. The key phrase is "sent down by God", for God speaks directly in the Qur'an. Historians agree that the first revelation dates back to 610 CE, when Muhammad was engaged in a spiritual retreat in a cave outside Mecca and the Archangel Gabriel approached him. So the first words of the Qur'an were heard: "Read: In the name of your Lord Who created, Created man from clots. Read: And your Lord is The Most Honorable, Who taught by the pen.. He thought man what he did not know." (96: 1-5 / Dr. Ghali translation) Qur'anic revelations are believed to have come to the Prophet over a period of twenty-three years. The scriptures are divided into 114 suras and each verse is known in Arabic as "aya". The material is not in a chronological or thematic order but as it is to be read by the believers (and also by how big the Suras are, the second being the longest). The key to Islamic art could lie in the Qur'an. Hossein Nasr thinks that the verses influenced artistic thought, some of them being poetic while others direct in this way, leading to the floral and geometric motifs. Before Abu Bakr, the first caliph, decided to write down and organize the scriptures, these were preserved by oral tradition. Also, a great part of the Qur'an was written down during the lifetime of Muhammad, but the content was not united in a single corpus. Abu Bakr managed to preserve the teachings which after the battle of Yamama were in danger of being lost. The Qur'an contains three types of messages for humans. The first is the doctrinal message which includes moral and judiciary recommendations which is at the base of the Holy Muslim Law, the Shari'ah. It also contains metaphysical elements, a cosmology about the structure of the universe, and subjects like eschatology and the Afterlife. In the second place, at least on the surface, the Qur'an is a vast history book, a commentary about the terrestrial existence of man. And last, it can be described as possessing "divine magic" (do not take it literally). The words from God have a special power just like the cross for the Christians. We can see an emphasis on praying for protection against evil and the Qur'an helps man overcome difficulty with patience. 1 comment: Reverse Road! said... A very pleasant reading. Well done Florin! I'm waiting for more articles like this.
Aug 13, 2015 White colour - symbol of sorrow While mourning a dead family member, women avoided wearing red coloured clothes, white clothes was worn exclusively. Black was never worn since it was considered a sin. Women would, equally, take off all the jewellery and wouldn't wear it for the next 40 days, and some didn't wear jewellery for a year or two. During the time of mourning none of the family members can organize a wedding or goes to one if invited; there is no singing and no joy. During Eid a ram is sacrificed for the soul of the deceased. If the deceased appointed by his will for a ram to be slaughtered, then all the meat needs to be given to the poor, while in other instances only the blood goes for his soul, and the meat can be eaten by the members of the household. There was a custom in Sarajevo that the left side of the sacrifice is distributed to the poor and the right is left to the family. In Jajce on the eve of Eid, halvah and bread were distributed for the "soul of the dead". In Bihać on the eve of both Eid's people would bring halvah and pies in front of the mosque, they would be then distributed to the children "for the soul of the deceased". For the forgiveness of the sins of the deceased it was customary to distribute "čagate" (kefaret) i.e. money wrapped in paper with which a person can provide a meal for themselves.Čagete was distributed during the first seven days after the funeral, seven čageta for seven poorest households in the neighbourhood or for forty days. Karl Steiner, doctor from Ljubinja, in his work Bosnian folk medicine, notes that Bosniaks do not consider as something horrible, instead every Friday, and often other days, they gladly gather in graveyards for conversation and rest, which the author considers as proof of great respect towards their ancestors. The interesting thing is that the author highlights that there is no sorrowful mood with the gathered people, instead everyone is feeling relaxed and especially with the young. Bosniaks even have a very special custom to make small dents on the gravestones in order to gather rain water for the birds but also leave food for them . Connecting birds with the dead i.e. graveyards is not a coincidence since the bird besides being a mythological personification in Bosnia of the soul, her symbolism is much greater and leads us to the Illyrian religious belief in which birds which pulled carriages of the sun god, are mentioned, the same god which is born each day in the "east" and dies in the "west". It is obvious that are ancestors considered birds as souls, holly animals, which has a foothold in Bogomil teachings that it is a deadly sin to kill animals and especially birds and to destroy their eggs. Respect towards the dead is an integral part of Bosnian spiritual tradition since the old days. Passing by graveyards old people still today preserved a habit to utter El-Fatiha for the dead; first for god's messenger Muhammad, then for the deceased and in the end for all of the dead.
A reason for writing Rated 3/5 based on 186 student reviews A reason for writing A Reason For SCIENCE ®: Grades 1st–8th • "Hands-on" Fun with Full Activity Kits • Scripture "Tie-ins" every Week • Meets National Science Standards. Students searching for Why Writing Skills are More Important Than Ever found the following related articles, links, and information useful. Reason is a libertarian monthly print magazine covering politics, culture, and ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews. A Reason for Handwriting is a complete handwriting curriculum with daily practice focused on verses from Scripture, as presented in the Living Bible paraphrase. Reason Statement It is a claim (not a fact) that can be supported by a reason or reasons;. the instructions on how to perform the writing paper etc. Reason, cause, motive are terms for a circumstance. reason is because is still common in almost all levels of speech and occurs often in edited writing as well. Writing an academic essay means fashioning a coherent set of ideas into an argument. Because essays are essentially linear—they offer one idea at a time—they must. Writing Tip: July 23, 2003. Writing Tip: "The Reason Is Because" vs. "The Reason Is That" Recently a tip subscriber wrote to ask us which of the following. Buy Writing To Reason: A Companion for Philosophy Students and Instructors on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders. Find great deals on eBay for a reason for writing a and classical conversations. Shop with confidence. Resignation Letter Writing Tips and Samples. Resignation Letter Examples With a Reason. Review resignation letters that provide a specific reason for leaving. Hello. This is a somewhat awkward sentence in either form although both are said and understood, particularly in the spoken language. The reason why I'm writing to. A Reason for Handwriting, Kindergarten: A Reason for Writing--Workbook "B", Grade 2, Manuscript : Handwriting Without Tears: My Printing Book Student Workbook, 1st Grade. a reason for writing A reason for writing Define reason: a statement or fact that explains why something is the way it is, why someone does, thinks, or says something, — reason in a sentence. Buy A Reason for Handwriting: Level A: Manuscript Student Workbook on Amazon.com FREE SHIPPING on qualified orders. Writing Modes: The Four Purposes of Writing. 8 One key to successful writing, however, is the ability to write in multiple forms and for a variety of purposes. Revising Drafts. Print PDF. Rewriting is the essence of writing well—where the game is won or lost. —William Zinsser. What this handout is about. The reason I am writing to you is to ask for your help in understanding - Answered by a verified Employment Lawyer. Many well-meaning writers and editors condemn “the reason why” and “the reason is because” for the crime of redundancy. But that stance (or, at least, part of. The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University tracks student achievement and student. and narrative writing to measure growth in writing. Most jobs require good writing skills. Learn how to communicate effectively whether you have to write memos, reports or client correspondence. It's a fact! When children enjoy a class, learning is greatly enhanced and retention greatly increased. A Reason For Handwriting ® provides a fun, meaningful. Writing an Essay? Here Are 10 Effective Tips. by Joe Bunting \| 84 comments The biggest reason writing an essay is so hard is because we mostly focus on those. Children are writing them on their own When children have a disagree-ment, I encourage them each to write a letter to the other person, explaining. Reason is the capacity for consciously making. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider the rules by which reason operates are the works of the. What is a persuasive/argument essay? Persuasive writing, also known as the argument essay, utilizes logic and reason to show that one idea is more legitimate than. Writing occasionally but sincerely. View all posts by if63 →. Follow From Writing to Reason on WordPress.com; Follow Blog via Email. Welcome to the Dr. Murray and Anna C. Rockowitz Writing Center. Announcements; RWC Schedule. The Center is closed from December 22nd-January 2nd. A Reason for Handwriting provides a fun, meaningful approach to developing effective handwriting skills in homeschooled children. How to Reason. Reason refers to the mental powers and processes concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences.Dictionary definition of reason at http. Define reason. reason synonyms, reason pronunciation, reason. reason is because is still common in almost all levels of speech and occurs often in edited writing. Reason For Writing at Rainbow Resource Homeschool curriculum that meets. Now there's no reason to wait until your student is in 3rd grade. Often people, who are coming to ask "write my essay for me" for the first time, are not really aware of how to do this properly and how to avoid the misunderstandings. • The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a work written by English and American political activist Thomas Paine. • Find great deals on eBay for a reason for writing and a reason for science. Shop with confidence. • Reason For Homework Help. This form includes all the conditions for satisfying your request for writing essays, such as: time frames for the order completion. a reason for writing What Makes Writing So Important? Writing is the primary basis upon which your work, your learning, and your intellect will be judged—in college, in the workplace. In academic writing, an argument is usually a main idea The Shape of Reason: Argumentative Writing in College. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 2005. Lunsford. A Reason For materials are designed for Christian parents and students to “incorporate Scripture Values and provide options for Differentiated Instruction.. The Writing Is on the Wall Should we mourn the death of cursive handwriting. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.1 Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the. Why teach descriptive writing? It will help your students' writing be more interesting and full of details; It encourages students to use new vocabulary words. a reason for writinga reason for writinga reason for writing
[jahy-roh] /ˈdʒaɪ roʊ/ noun, plural gyros. [jeer-oh, zheer-oh; Greek yee-raw] /ˈdʒɪər oʊ, ˈʒɪər oʊ; Greek ˈyi rɔ/ noun, Greek Cookery. meat, usually lamb, roasted on a vertical spit, then thinly sliced, topped with onions, and usually served in a sandwich of pita bread. a combining form meaning “ring,” “circle,” “spiral,” used in the formation of compound words: gyromagnetic; gyroscope. noun (pl) -ros See gyrocompass See gyroscope combining form indicating rotating or gyrating motion: gyroscope indicating a spiral indicating a gyroscope: gyrocompass sandwich made from roasted lamb, late 20c., originally the meat itself, as roasted on a rotating spit, from Modern Greek gyros “a circle” (see gyre); mistaken in English for a plural and shorn of its -s. word-forming element meaning “gyrating” or “gyroscope,” from comb. form of Greek gyros “ring, circle” (see gyre). Read Also: • Gyrocompass [jahy-roh-kuhm-puh s] /ˈdʒaɪ roʊˌkʌm pəs/ noun 1. a navigational containing a rotor, that, when adjusted for the latitude and speed of the vessel or aircraft, indicates the direction of true north along the surface of the earth or communicates this information to one or more gyro repeaters. /ˈdʒaɪrəʊˌkʌmpəs/ noun 1. (nautical) a nonmagnetic compass that […] • Gyrocopter [jahy-ruh-kop-ter] /ˈdʒaɪ rəˌkɒp tər/ noun 1. . • Gyrodyne /ˈdʒaɪrəʊˌdaɪn/ noun 1. an aircraft that uses a powered rotor to take off and manoeuvre, but uses autorotation when cruising • Gyrofrequency [jahy-roh-free-kwuh n-see] /ˈdʒaɪ roʊˌfri kwən si/ noun, plural gyrofrequencies. Physics. 1. the of rotation of an electron or other charged particle in a magnetic field, directly proportional to the charge of the particle and to the field strength and inversely proportional to the mass of the particle.
Monday, October 16, 2006 What's in a Yield? After careful analysis, the U.S. intelligence community has confirmed that North Korea did, indeed, test a nuclear device last week. Conclusive evidence came in the form of air samples, collected by our intelligence platforms after the test. Those samples contained traces of at least two radioactive gases associated with nuclear blasts. It would be virtually impossible for Pyongyang to "fake" that sort of evidence, indicating that North Korea did conduct a nuclear test. And, if that weren't enough, there are signs that Kim Jong-il may be preparing for a second test. Both ABC News and NBC News reported Monday that suspicious vehicle activity and personnel movements had been observed near the site where the first test was conducted. The activity may represent the early stages of preparations for a second nuclear blast, although the preparations detected are far from conclusive. However, activity observed with the initial test provides a baseline for future events, providing analysts with tip-offs that be a predictor of additional tests. But the real story from last week's test is the surprisingly low yield from the blast. According to U.S. estimates, the device detonated by the DPRK had an explosive force equal to 1,000 tons of TNT, or roughly one kiloton. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of six kilotons; nuclear devices detonated by India and Pakistan in 1999 (a more useful yardstick) were in the 6-13 kiloton range, with the Indian weapon toward the higher end of that scale, and the Pakistani device toward the lower end. The comparison to India and Pakistan is important, since North Korea (allegedly) had access to Pakistani bomb designs, thanks to the A.Q. Kahn proliferation network. A North Korean device based on proven Pakistani designs should have produced a bigger blast--at least in theory. Credible reports from the late 90s suggest that the Pakistani bomb detonated after the Indian test was only partially successful. If the North Korean weapon shared critical design features with its Pakistani counterpart, it may have inherited some of the problems associated with early devices built by Islamabad, and resulting in a smaller blast, like the one detected last week At this point, Pyongyang might be described as "barely" a member of the nuclear club, with significant hurdles that must be overcome before North Korea can produce smaller, higher-yield weapons, cable of fitting atop a ballistic missile. Of course, there are other explanations for the small bang detected last week. Richard Miniter, a respected writer on security matters, believes the low-yield explosion is proof that Pyongyang may have perfected a "suitcase" nuke, an ideal weapon for client states (and terrorist supporters) in Syria and Iran. Miniter's theory is within the realm of possibilities, but I'm not quite prepared to climb out on that limb, for a couple of reasons. For starters, a nation's first nuclear device tends to be a bit larger than follow-on versions. Downsizing a nuke to fit atop a missile remains a complex proposition, despite the availability of outside help, and 60 years of accumulated nuclear know-how, much of it readily available in scientific papers and on the internet. Prototype nuclear devices-like the one detonated in North Korea last week--tend to be larger weapons, best encapsulated in an oversized gravity bomb. While the DPRK clearly wants smaller warheads for its ballistic missile force, it likely lacks the technology to produce those weapons, at least for now. In fact, there is general consensus in the U.S. intelligence community have long viewed the "size" issue as a major limitation of North Korea's current nuclear program. However, this obstacle will be eventually overcome, if history is any indicator. For virtually every member of the nuclear club, smaller weapons typically come a bit later in the development process, after the nuclear technology has been perfected. For example, U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in today's arsenal are much smaller than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs, but deliver a yield that is many times more powerful. Working with much more limited resources, it will take Pyongyang a while to develop smaller, more tactically viable weapons. Put another way, there is no reason to believe that Pyongyang has deviated from the normal developmental cycle, and achieved some sort of technical breakthrough that would allow it to begin mass production of small nukes for ballistic missiles, or other purposes. Indeed, for a regime that demands the world's attention, it would seemingly be in Kim Jong-il's interest to produce the biggest possible bang, underscoring the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear arsenal. That requirement would (seemingly) dictate a bigger blast than what was observed last week. While we may never know exactly what transpired at that test site in the DPRK, available evidence hints at a blast that may have been only partially successful. While that development is bad enough, it reminds us that Pyongyang's nuclear program is still in its infancy, and the world community has an opportunity--no, a responsibility--to halt these efforts before it becomes more advanced. To give you some idea of how far North Korea has to go in building "better" nuclear weapons, consider these statistics. According to Jane's (and other authoritative publications), a single nuclear warhead from a Minuteman III ICBM has a yield of 330 kt. Warheads on a Trident D-5 SLBM (sub-launched ballistic missile) have a yield of up to 6 mega-tons (MT) each. Tactical nukes actually have a "selectable" yield, allowing them to deliver an explosive force ranging from relatively small, to fairly substantial. By that standard, the device tested by North Korea last week was a veritable pop gun. CERDIP said... >>By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had a yield of six kilotons; Trintity was ~20 KT, Hiroshima ~16 KT, and Nagasaki ~20 KT. (Hiroshima was a Uranium bomb, the other two were Plutonium). I haven't heard what traces the sniffers found in the Pacific, but I would bet that the Norks fired a Plutonium bomb. They're harder to get to work right, thus more likely to "fizzle" if the design or implementation is not up to the job, and Plutonium is "easier" to obtain in fissionable quantities, via breeder reactors, whereas fissionable uranium takes months of painstaking refinement. Big Foot said... This is what Steven DenBeste, (the knower of most things) said as to why the blast was so small and the problems the North Koreans are grappeling with. The two most popular and easiest things to make atomic bombs out of are Uranium 235 and Plutonium 239. The Manhattan Project had parallel development efforts to create both kinds. The uranium bomb was considered to be simpler, and ultimately the design was considered to be reliable enough that they didn't think they needed to test it. The first one, code named "Little Boy", was dropped on Hiroshima. But the design for the plutonium bomb was much trickier, and it was decided that before attempting to use it on an enemy target that they should set one off as a test. So the world's first nuclear explosion at Alamogordo, code named "Trinity", was the first plutonium bomb. The second one, code named "Fat Man", was dropped on Nagasaki. The reason they were different has to do with a fundamental difference between uranium and plutonium: plutonium absorbs neutrons much more easily than uranium does. After a critical mass of U-235 is formed, it takes milliseconds for a chain reaction to build to the point of full-scale energy release. So the design for "Little Boy" consisted of a ring of U-235 at one end of the bomb, and a plug of U-235 at the other that would fit into the hole. Explosives drove them together to form a critical mass. That design wouldn't have worked for Plutonium. The problem is that during the process of forming the critical mass, it can go off early, with much less energy than it is supposed to, and blow the critical mass back apart again. "Little Boy" was long and narrow; "Fat Man" was round. The reason is that it consisted of a series of wedges of plutonium around the outside of that big sphere. Explosives would then force all the wedges into the center at the same time, and if it all went correctly the critical mass would form fast enough to be completed before the plutonium really started responding, in microseconds. Iran's bomb program is concentrating on U-235. Enriching the isotope sufficiently is painful, but the bomb design once you have an adequate quantity of highly-enriched U-235 is quite straightforward. NK's bomb program is based on Pu-239. Producing the plutonium is easier, but the bomb design is much harder to pull off. If you screw up the design, what you get when you set it off is a misfire, with far less yield than you should have gotten. There's still a "bang", but not an "earth shattering kaboom", as it were. So there are reports that NK just set off a nuclear test. North Korea has announced that they were successful, but they also reported those missile tests as successful even though it turns out they weren't. (Everything that NK does works perfectly, you know.) USGS reports a Richter 4.2 event in North Korea. Is that a successful detonation or a misfire? Wikipedia's page on the Richter Scale has a chart converting different readings into approximate real-world explosion-equivalents. Richter 4.0 is listed as 1 kiloton. Richter 4.5 is 5.6 kilotons. Richter 5.0 is 32 kilotons, and the example they use for Richter 5.0 is the Nagasaki bomb. That's "Fat Man", the second plutonium bomb. If I did my math correctly, then Richter 4.2 is 2 kilotons, and that suggests that the NK bomb misfired. (The Pakistan nuke test was 12 kilotons. India's first test was also about 12 kilotons.) Apparently NK is announcing that the target yield was 4 kilotons. I don't believe it. Whenever anything strange happens to one of their weapons tests they tend to announce, "That's what I meant to do." By the way, whenever I write about nuclear weapons I always deliberately include technical errors and deliberately leave out relevant details. You don't need to write to me to point them out. UPDATE: The South Korean government is saying Richter 3.6. If so, the yield was a quarter kiloton. It's looking increasingly like it was a misfire, which is really easy to do with Pu-239. UPDATE: The man I feel most sorry for right now is Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister. I'm sure this was just what he wanted for breakfast during his first week on the job.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005 Cuba celebrates strength and looks ahead Havana, Cuba On July 26, the Cuban people celebrated the 52nd anniversary of the failed attack on Moncada Barracks, an attack led by a 26-year-old lawyer named Fidel Castro. The 1953 attack was designed to inspire Cubans to rise up against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, and restore the 1940 constitution, which guaranteed land, education, democracy and hope to the Cuban people. Neither the failure of the attack, nor the subsequent torture and imprisonment of those involved, broke the spirit of the mostly young rebels, who remained dedicated to liberating their people from the terror of Batista's regime. In January 1959, as a general strike broke out, Batista fled, and the Cuban Revolution triumphed, much to the chagrin of the US and its clients. Washington has never stopped trying to roll back the Cuban Revolution, through assassination, invasion, terrorism, chemical and biological warfare, and by waging a constant propaganda war against the small Caribbean island. On July 25 and 26, 2005, the 11 million inhabitants of Cuba again celebrated their freedom, with parties and small rallies across the country on the night of the 25th, and music blaring until well into the morning.
The Second Superpower of Web Hosting We are HostWerks. A different approach to the web hosting business. When Technical Support starts examining a script that is not working, the first thing that is checked are the permissions set on the file. Understanding how permissions work can save you a lot of time and help you debug your scripts. When a script is accessed through the World Wide Web, it is normally run as a special user called 'nobody'. 'Nobody' has no rights to anyone's files and no one can login to the system as 'nobody'. If you have Microsoft Frontpage extensions, things are a little different (see below). If your script needs to write to a file on the system, special permissions must be set on that file or directory. Any script that keeps a log (a page counter) or modifies the HTML code of a page (a guestbook) or save orders (Openshop) must have the proper permissions to create and write to the files it creates. How are permissions set? You must use the chmod command. (If you are familiar with this, then move on.) Every file and directory on our Cobalt server has it's own permission setting. This setting is normally represented by a group of letters (r, w & x) or a three digit number. Sometimes there are 4 numbers and sometimes 's' and 't' are used. But those are uncommon circumstances. If you telnet to the server and list the files or if you look at the Directory Info through your FTP program, you will see the 'rwx' series in the listing. The first three letters refer to your user id. 'r' is for read, 'w' is for write and 'x' is for execute. (Although, sometimes you may want to think of 'x' as for use). If the first three characters are 'rw-', then you have read and write permissions to the file, but the file is not executable. The last three characters set permissions for the world. If the last three characters are 'r-x' then everybody can read and execute the file, but they cannot write to it. The middle three characters are used for permissions for the 'group'. For the most part, you should set these to the same setting as the world. OK, what about the numbers?? Look at it this way: r = 4, w = 2 and x=1. For each group of 'rwx', add up the numbers to get a digit from 0 to 7. Common Permissions Settings Letters Numbers Effect rwxrwxrwx 777 Readable, writable and executable by everyone rwxr-xr-x 755 Readable and executable by everyone, writable by root rw-rw-rw 666 Readable and writable by everyone rwx--x--x 711 Everyone can use it but only root can read or change it. rw-r--r-- 644 Everyone can read it but only root can change it Uncommon Permissions Settings Letters Numbers Effect --------- 000 No one is allowed to read, write or execute the file. The file can be deleted according to the permissions of the parent directory --x--x--x 111 The file can be executed, but it cannot be changed or read rwx-w--w- 744 Everyone can write to the file, but only root can read or execute it. (It's not a good idea to execute a file that someone else can change.) Use the chmod command to change the permissions. Run 'chmod ??? filename' from the telnet command line. Or, most FTP programs will allow you to right click on the filename and select 'chmod' to set the file permissions. Now, back to 'nobody'. Although no one is 'nobody', 'nobody' is somebody and so is included with 'everyone'. What this means is the last three letters (or last digit) control WWW access. If you want a script to run, the script must be executable by 'nobody' (??1). If your script needs to write to a file, that file needs to be writable by 'nobody' (??4). If your script has to create a file, then the destination directory must be writable by 'nobody' (??4). If your HTML page doesn't show up, make sure 'nobody' can read it (??4 or ??5). So what about my files? There are no set rules, but there are some suggestions. If the file is to be executed, use 755. If the file is to be written to, use 666. If the directory is to have new files created in it, use 666. An Easier Way? Maybe. The server software has an option to set the user ID running the script. Frontpage sites require this option to be enabled. For other sites it is optional. The option, referred to as SUEXEC, allows HostWerks to set your site so that all access through WWW to your site is done as your user. You don't have to set the file as writable by everyone since your user ID has access to your files. You don't have to open your directories for the entire world to read since you can read your own directories. Your user ID can delete your files. Well, that's OK if that's what you want. But you don't want someone creating a script that deletes your files when it runs as your user ID. So, SUEXEC runs several checks to be sure no one (and that includes 'nobody') can alter the file or directory that it is about to execute. Scripts run under SUEXEC (and consequently under Frontpage) cannot have the 'write' permission set for anyone but the owner. As a general rule (with many exceptions), files in a site with SUEXEC enabled should have permissions set to 755. If you skipped ahead earlier, you may be asking: If the script is running as my user, why can't I set permissions to 700 so that only my user ID can use the file? Good question, but this gets deep(er). SUEXEC runs through 20 steps before changing to your user ID. Prior to that it is still operating as 'nobody'. If permissions on the directory containing the file are 700, 'nobody' can't read the directory to run the checks on the file ownership. The directory permissions must be at least 711. Remember, 'x' sometimes means 'use'. If you want the most restrictive setting on your files, you can set the directory to 711 and the scripts to 700. Output files can be set to 600. If you want us to turn on SUEXEC for your site, just let us know. Remember, if you get an "Internal Server Error", start with file permissions. Then try running it from the command line. Search Hostwerks Search the Web Home \| About \| Order \| Pricing \| Privacy \| Support \| Terms
Sunday, July 28, 2013 "America's Dirty Habits: Bad for the Environment, Bad for U.S." Of course there are many things that we have adopted into our culture that are bad for the environment but today's post outlines some big offenders. I am spreading awareness to try to break this mold of "standards" that have originated from other ecosystems (Lawns), to get people to consider alternatives to dry-cleaning and hot air drying, investing in reusable universal BPA-free plastic bottles, and even trying to raise awareness about communities that aren't recycling. Check 'em out! -> Comment Forum: Let me know about any other Bad Habits for the environment that you might be educated about below. 1. GREEN LAWNS. Lawns are a big offender. First, there's the water waste in watering the millions of lawns across America, many of which are in ecosystems where green grass is not natural. There are also the billions of gallons of fossil fuels used to mow and maintain these lawns. Then there are the pesticides, herbicides and chemicals used by landscaping companies with big development or business contracts that are polluting the ground, and areas nearby and underneath these lawns. Read more about the hazards to the environment as a result of lawns here on Smithsonian's Blog. I truly resent that the "classic green lawn" is the standard for subdivisions and businesses everywhere. They are not conducive to a green planet, even though they may look like it. Where did lawns originate? In England, where rains are a daily occurrence. It's ridiculous to me that this fashionable landscape can be found in the deserts of America in subdivisions and of course at golf courses throughout many climates where irrigation, reclaimed water and vast amounts of chemicals are needed to maintain the greens. What are alternatives to a green lawn? (1) Replacing your lawn with clover, which requires little water, no herbicides and gives you good luck! (2) Planting a wildflower garden or meadow. (3) Replacing your concrete or asphalt driveway with gravel. (4) Creating a vegetable garden paradise instead of a lawn. (5) Creating a pebble or rock "zen" garden. (6) Creating a "southern desert" rock garden. 2. ELECTRIC DRYERS. I live in the humidity of Tampa, Florida and I understand why hanging laundry outside is a bad idea: mold, bugs, pollen, spores, etc...However, there has to be an alternative to these electric dryers. Even the newer ones use a large amount of energy. However there are ways to be mindful of the energy being used. Read my friend Nicole's blog post about "Ten Eco Friendly Laundry Tips" here. For example: • Use a tennis ball, or a natural dryer ball (read Nicole's review of organic ones here.) • Use less of the heat, more of the air dry. • Consider hanging clothes inside instead on a clothes rack or a line. 3. DRYCLEANING. Don't dryclean your clothes. EVER. The chemicals are extremely harsh (and carcinogenic), and are put on your skin when you wear the clothes. You can read all about it on the EPA's website here. Educate yourself! Besides, contrary to the name, dry cleaning is not a dry process, and also requires heat drying, which wastes power. Hand wash instead! Or consider trying to find an "Organic Drycleaner" which are becoming more and more popular. 4. PLASTIC BOTTLES. I can't believe how many plastic bottles Americans go through each year. This isn't going away, folks. They are just increasing in number in vast quantities and so many of them aren't being recycled! It's sickening. Please buy reusable BPA-free bottles. TIP: While I know they can pile up and be expensive, if you buy many that are the same type it is easier to find lids for them. 5. COMMUNITIES that AREN'T RECYCLING: That's on you, Florida! (And many other places.) While the counties around me recycle, none of the apartment/condo/townhouse subdivisions do. That's hundreds of pounds of trash that needn't be in the landfills. It makes me ill to think about it, and no one is advocating for change in this regard. I've been known to drive bags of plastic and paper to recycle centers, but these are few and far between, and it still uses gas to get there. Any ideas on how we can clean this dirty habit up? Comment below. So perhaps I missed the Bad Habit that you wanted to read about: Flying, home energy consumption, junk mail, newspapers, eating meat, plastic bags, driving and parking. I too considered these habits, and wanted to learn more about them. I found a great article by the Chicago Tribune which included these habits, which is highly worth reading if you want to educate yourself about even more bad habits. Really, to change a habit requires commitment for about thirty days. So challenge yourself this year, and if you forget for your New Year's Resolution to axe some or all of these habits from your list and you can join me in the quest to leave less of a carbon footprint on mother Earth. Thank you for considering making some of these changes: together we can change the world. I'd be honored if you would share or like this post. For more reading like this, FOLLOW me on Facebook at FootstepsintheDirt. Sunday, July 21, 2013 "Coffee? Yes, please!" Confessions of a Coffee Addict... Coffee Forum-->Share your favorite blends/coffee drinks below! I am a caffeine coffee addict. So naturally, I take coffee, very, very seriously. I look forward to a morning cup of coffee before bed, while I'm making it, while I'm drinking it, and sometimes in the afternoon, when I'm making another. I have definitely pasted that same smile (see photo) as the 50's style meme to the right before I have taken a sip of the coffee in my hand and someone asks me a question forcing my brain to operate painfully before 8AM. Any student who has ever sat in one of my classes knows that at some point during the class period I will look up and say, "Where did I put my coffee?" in panic as I'm wandering all over the classroom. I realize this might not be normal behavior. I realize that it's clearly due to a caffeine addiction and obsessions with the smell and taste of roasted coffee beans. I realize that Green Tea is healthier, if not as satisfying (I've actually reviewed my Top Ten favorite teas on this blog before, here.) I know that Splenda is probably bad for me and Aspartame is definitely bad for me, and refined sugar is bad for me, and heavy cream and milk and large quantities of caffeine are also bad for me, but over the years, I've loved most of or all of those ingredients at one time or another. I have contemplated the humorous ingenuity of an IV drip of coffee. Yes, I am also a Starbucks Gold Card Member. If you don't know what that is, please don't go look it up, it's embarrassing. Yes, I frequently go to Dunkin' Donuts when I'm sick of Starbucks, because honestly, I love coffee and I love both chains. I have opinions about types, roasts, fair trade and what should and shouldn't be in coffee. So I must confess: I am a Coffee Snob. I realized this fact this past weekend after going through my shelves to see what kind of coffee my relatives would like and realized that I had over three pounds of different types, and at least five different flavors. Me drinking coffee in Wuzhen, China. So, today, I'm going to share all the knowledge of coffee that I've accumulated like Gollum researching the One Ring, and hope that we can share in some of this coffee madness together. The research on the benefits and harm of coffee is conflicting. Some sources say that it prevents Alzheimers, others that it leads to high blood pressure and heart disease. Generally, many sources agree that is is bad in high doses, meaning that there is a "magic number" which is considered too high for caffeine intake. I even found, recently while doing research, this article, compiled by the APA (American Psychiatric Association) about "How drinking too much coffee can induce a mental disorder," which warned of the dangers of caffeine intoxication and withdrawal! It seems we can't win! So putting aside "the debate: is it good? Is it bad?" I shall review my favorite types, flavors and varieties. I started drinking coffee around the age of sixteen. This coincided with the increasing challenge of waking up earlier and earlier for high school. (Why did classes start at 7:05?) Being a Masshole New Englander, meant that I had my pick of Dunkin' Donuts locations [chain was founded in Quincy, MA] and this being 2002, there was not a Starbucks for thirty miles. [Banned by the Quincy, Massachusetts Coffee Mafia?] So I drank my "French Vanilla, Extra Extra" happily for months, until I realized that it was the source of daily agony (milk intolerance) and switched to black coffee, which I've been drinking since. At nineteen, on my summer break before Sophomore year of college, I got a summer job as a barista at Jaec's Coffee in Attleboro, MA, by the train station. While I was usually called "The Sandwich Queen," since I loved making the salads and sandwiches, I was still trained on and often made drinks using the industrial espresso maker at the coffee shop. I grew to appreciate a good espresso, which has a drip of 25-30 seconds, made from freshly ground beans in a packed handle, in a clean glass so that it doesn't taste "burnt." I grew to love the "Pumpkin Spice" flavored roast at Jaec's so much that I bought a five pound bag which lasted years in the freezer at my parent's house. That summer culminated in my drinking eight espressos before the "American Cancer Society's Relay for Life" where I ran around the track for the midnight-4am shift and woke up sixteen hours afterwards having a new understanding of caffeine addiction. So I quit coffee cold turkey, walked around like a zombie for three weeks, and eventually switched to a more green tea influenced diet for years. Then I decided to become a middle school teacher, 8AM classes continue. On a related note: seven years later, I have tried dozens of brands, varieties and flavors and have narrowed down my favorites to the following. "Aimee's Must Try Coffees." I think I have a problem... I order my coffee from Mattie's Mountain Mud in New Castle, Virginia. (So does one of my colleagues and my boss, because we field trip up to that city annually with our students for an outdoor trip.) Mattie ships it to me with bumper stickers and a handwritten note, because she is a small business owner, uses certified organic beans, and ensures that her beans are Fair Trade certified. My absolute favorite is BAVARIAN CHOCOLATE. In fact, my husband who only drinks Mochas from Starbucks popped his head into the kitchen to see what that delicious smell was (newly ground Bavarian Chocolate coffee beans) and helped himself to a cup every time I made a pot of it for the next two weeks. My second favorite, is also a Mattie's product: COAL. This one has an awesome story of creation, where Mattie charcoaled the beans as far as she could before they caught on fire. Surprisingly, this extra dark roast isn't flavored like dusty carbon or charcoal, and has a deep, full taste, which with raw sugar is smooth and sweetened. It's definitely a headache killer, as a few sips restore the brain of any caffeine addict to normal operation. If you love coffee, be sure to try her incredible Dark chocolate covered coal coffee beans: they are to die for. Pumpkin Spice Coffee Vs. the Pumpkin Spice Latte: HELP ME FIND "THE ONE!" Even though Floridian Octobers are incredibly hot still, I still yearn, as do all of the other Yankee transplants in the Fall, for a decent Apple Cider and Pumpkin Spice coffee or latte. I usually default to the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte with soy milk (which I could dare you to try to find a difference to normal milk it's so hard to tell.) However, since this latte is still loaded with sugar, I buy a couple of pounds of the Dunkin' Donuts' Pumpkin Spice flavor. Granted, as that's loaded with artificial flavors, I'm still searching for the perfect blend: care to share yours? The Starbucks Secret: Peppermint Mochas are available YEAR ROUND. Sometimes, when I need a comforting warm drink to hold, I order a Starbucks Peppermint Mocha off season. In case you didn't know: they're available year-round. As are these other Starbucks secrets: the "Off the Menu" drinks that you can order. I've tried the Thin Mint Frappuccino and it tastes exactly like a Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookie. The Best of Normal "House" blends of coffee: #1. Waffle House regular coffee: the best in the USA! #2. Starbucks' Pike's Place Blend. #3. Starbucks' Italian Roast Blend. #4. Cracker Barrel coffee. #5. Dunkin' Donut's House with French Vanilla. Varieties I avoid: #1. Starbucks' "Blonde" roast. Ew. Too light. Just drink tea instead. #2. Starbucks' Dark Roast. Burnt taste. Too sour. #3. Starbucks's French Roast. There's a whole lot wrong with this. #4. Dunkin' Donut's regular house: bland, sawdusty. #5. Fast Food Chain coffee. $0.59 of D grade. No thanks. So, I've admitted that I'm a coffee snob: preferring to order "Off the menu" at Starbucks sometimes, ordering coffee from an awesome organic roaster in Virginia, and blasting varieties that taste like sawdust or too burnt because I care passionately for coffee. But, if you're reading this, perhaps you do to. Please share your coffee secrets, favorite blends and types that I should try below and I will love you forever. Other Media/Sources/References: 1. Dufty, William. "The Dangers of Refined Sugar." 07 JUL 2013. Web. 2. "Aspartame." American Cancer Society. 07 JUL 2013. Web. 3. Schwaner-Albright, Oliver. "Coffee Pollutant No.1: Cream."New York Times. 07 JUL 2013. Web. 4. Veracity, Dani. "The Hidden dangers of Caffeine." Naturalnews. 07 Jul 2013. Web. Thursday, July 18, 2013 Product Review: Progressive "Snapshot" Device and Discount Program. A few months ago I decided to try the Progressive Snapshot discount program because I've put very few miles on my car during the past two or three years, I haven't had an auto-to-auto accident in Florida (7 years) and I have never had a speeding ticket (12 years.) [Knock on Wood!] I figured that I was a prime candidate for an excellent driver! HAH! If you think the Progressive Snapshot Device can truly distinguish a "good" driver, than you (and I) are both wrong. Let's talk about what it is. It's a tiny wireless computer device that plugs into your car's computer (in the panel by your driver seat) and reports your speeds (estimated based on mileage), hard brakes (when you stop faster than 7 MPH/Second) and the times of day that you drive as either a low, medium or high risk. Then after SIX months of daily reports, (something they don't tell you when you sign up) Progressive can choose to offer you a discount based on these reports. I did a little research on other Snapshot product reviews and found that many people had similarly frustrating and negative results as me. DailyFinance reviewed the device accurately, noting Progressive's false advertising of the device as rewarding "good" drivers for the truth, that it only rewards "low risk" drivers, good luck if you drive during the rush hours! Then there's the class action lawsuit that the device drains car batteries, which I know for absolute certain that it has been doing so to mine, over the past three months, as I had a new battery put in just before this trial and the car has barely been starting up recently, which is probably going to cost me anywhere from another $80-120 dollars to replace. This blogger also reported the same experience that Tom and I had with it: that the "Hard Brakes" seemed a bit overzealous. There were times when I slowed down from 40MPH to 0 with over a hundred feet, and a fifteen second brake, and it was considered too fast. There was another time, in our first week of device reporting, where Tom got four hard brakes (in a row of four seconds) for going over a speed bump at 5MPH. The truth is, this calculation of "hard braking" is faulty. It even encourages users to run yellow lights! Then there was the hugely irritating e-mail after only ONE month of the six month program that suggested that I had a 0% projected discount from the program...but I still have to leave it in for the remaining months so that it can drain my car battery. Even after three months now, my report says projected discount at 0%. To say that both Tom and I have been driving carefully is an understatement. Which is why even after a week of consecutive days of no hard brakes, and only a dozen or so thus far, I am annoyed. Review Summary: This product is falsely advertised by Progressive. The device does not monitor or reward actual good driving. It depletes your car battery. It encourages aggressive driving to customers who avoid hard brakes in order to see a higher return on their discount percentage. It assesses risk regardless of past driving history. It does not monitor evasive or defensive driving as a result of other poor drivers, regardless of past driving history. Advice: Honestly, I'm so disappointed in the false advertising, poor product and analysis, and program length at the cost of my battery that after more than five years of being a client of Progressive, I'm considering switching to a different insurance at the end of this policy length. Don't be fooled by Flo, friends. Sunday, July 14, 2013 Our China Trip Video! Aimee, Liz and Richy travel in June of 2013 for two weeks to China, visiting Dalian, Beijing, Xi'an, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Wuzhen, and Shanghai. Here is a documentary about their adventures. Enjoy! Saturday, July 06, 2013 Review: Carnival Cruise Lines: Carnival Paradise, Western Caribbean 5-Day. Me, Christy & Robin on Carnival Paradise - July 2013 The Carnival Elation & Paradise docked in Cozumel Us with Sergio and the surprise Creme Brûlées! What cruises have you been on? What would you recommend to future cruise travelers? Friday, July 05, 2013 Lean and Green Frugal Living: A great blog you should check out! Check out my friend and colleague Nicole's Blog about Lean and Green Frugal Living! She has great tips, coupons and reviews about living green in a challenging consumer economy!
Elijah about Witches in Après Moi, Le Déluge The Balance of Nature The origin of witchcraft remains unknown, however, it is known that witches have existed for many centuries passing down their knowledge and skills through generations of family lines. Contrary to popular belief, witches do not receive their powers from demons, nor do they worship the devil. Instead, witches consider themselves "the Servants of Nature," as they make it their duty to maintain balance within the world. Sheila Bennett had once stated to Bonnie that "witchcraft was rooted in psychic energy". Main article: Witchcraft Powers and Abilities Basic Powers The basic powers of every witch include: Other Powers Uncommon Powers • Projection: The power to separate from one's body and project the mind to another location or to instantaneously travel from one point to another. • Transmogrification: The unique power to alter the physical structure of objects living or dead, changing their form. • Telepathy: The power that allows witches to access the minds of others through spells. • Possession: The power to jump one's spirit into the body of another, taking control of said host body. • Illusions: The power to alter the senses of others to perceive a false reality. • Dream Manipulation: The power to control people's dreams through spells. • Resurrection: The power to bring someone or one's self back from the dead. • Distraction: Denying a witch from concentrating or giving full attention to their spells, may render them ineffective. Since most spells are spoken verbally and take time to take effect, witches are vulnerable to attack before their completion. Additionally, certain spells require items, tools, and/or special events during casting, therefore they can't be invoked on mere whim. • Nature: It is said that nature will always find a balance when witchcraft is performed and spells will always have loopholes. This means, among other things, that no being can be truly immortal. • Mystic Falls Founders Bell: An indestructible bell that amplifies the affects of the Staff of Arcadius when combined with the Maxwell Striker, allowing it to produce a frequency that disrupts psychic activity. It is also proven as effective on Witches and Siphoners as it is on Sirens since witchcraft has roots in psychic energy. Main article: Witches' tools Spells and Rituals Main article: Spells and Rituals Bonnie Bennett Luka Martin Sheila Bennett Shaman Leader The relationship between Shamans and Witches is largely unknown, but given their similar practices, one could speculate it would be neutral or positive. Like Witches they share a very deep and spiritual connection towards Nature, abiding by its Laws while even calling upon it to create the powerful Shamanistic Huntress. The Spirits —Sheila Bennett The Ancestors The Travelers "They're more like the ugly stepsister." Liv Parker Sheila Bennett about vampires The relationship between the vampires and the witches is a complicated one that is more often negative than positive. This is mainly due to the notion that since vampires were created from Dark Magic, and flout the natural design that all living creatures must die. Nevertheless, some witches, such Genevieve or Davina, are free-thinkers who have not only aided vampires, but befriended them. Other witches, however, have been known as "Witches for Hire" in regards to vampires, such as working to accomplish a common goal, combat threats from other vampires, or for simple business arrangements. While some are forced to work alongside vampires, these witches are not particularly fond of this label. —Esther Mikaelson The relationship between werewolves and witches is a neutral to negative relationship. Werewolves and witches have been shown to be at odds more than allies. Apparently the two species did once have a strong relationship with one another, however this was ruined by the inception of the vampires. However, witches and werewolves have been known to ally themselves with each other against their common enemy (the vampires), though these alliances are typically short-lived due to werewolves not wanting to be controlled. It was further revealed that the Werewolf Curse was cast upon a Native American tribe of Witches begetting the seven werewolf bloodlines. "All witchcraft was rooted in psychic energy. Before I knew I had magic, I believed I was psychic." —Bonnie Bennett The relationship between witches and psychics remains largely unknown; however, since witchcraft is rooted in psychic energy, psychics could be the precursors to witches, though no such indication is accurately known. The two most powerful of their respective species, Arcadius and Qetsiyah, have achieved very similar feats, such as creating new afterlife dimensions and bestowing varying degrees of immortality. Notable Witches Witch Description Status Qetsiyah was one of the most powerful witches in history who is notable for the creation of the Immortality Spell, the Anchor and the Other Side and the Cure to immortality. Deceased Silas was a very powerful witch who was notable for becoming the very first Immortal. Deceased TO-S4-The Hollow The Hollow The Hollow is a powerful, Native American witch that was bestowed power from her tribal elders, which made her crave more power in life. She was ultimately killed by her fellow Tribesmen and upon her death, created the Werewolf Curse and the seven Original Bloodlines. As a spirit, she utilized Elijah's death to resurrect herself. Alive Dahlia is the elder sister of Esther Mikaelson and was also one of the most powerful witches in history. Deceased Ayana was a powerful Bennett witch and the mentor of Esther Mikaelson. Deceased Esther Mikaelson Esther Mikaelson was one of the most powerful witches in history who is notable for the creation the Original family of vampires. Deceased Freya Mikaelson Freya Mikaelson is the firstborn child of the Mikaelson family and was an extremely powerful witch due to the connective magic that bound her to Dahlia. Though the link has been broken and has been weakened, she continues to remain a powerful witch. Alive Witch of the Five-S8 The Witch of The Five The Witch of the Five was a Bennett witch who was notably known for the creation of the Brotherhood of the Five. Deceased Katerina Petrova Katerina Petrova was a witch before transitioning into a vampire. After she ingested the cure centuries later, she was once again a witch and, to temporarily avoid death, performed the passenger spell on Elena. Her father was a former member of the Traveler subculture. Deceased Celeste profile Céleste Dubois Celeste Dubois was a very powerful dark witch of the French Quarter who was notable for the possession of multiple bodies over the course of a hundred years. Deceased Beatrice Bennett Beatrice Bennett was a very powerful ancestor of the Bennett family who lived during the 18th century. She, along with her mother and coven, are notable for imbuing the Maxwell Bell with magic to drive out the sirens as well as protecting the town from Hellfire. Deceased Emily Bennett Emily Bennett was a very powerful ancestor of the Bennett family who lived during the 19th century. She is known for trapping the Tomb vampires underneath Fell's Church, as well as creating enchanted objects, such as the Gilbert Ring. Deceased Mary-Alice Claire Mary-Alice Claire was a French Quarter witch and also a relative of Davina Claire. She is known for the creation of many Dark Objects, alongside Astrid, under Kol Mikaelson's tutelage. Deceased Astrid Malchance Astrid Malchance was a French Quarter witch. She is known for the creation of many Dark Objects, alongside Mary-Alice, under Kol Mikaelson's tutelage. Deceased Papa Tunde Papa Tunde Papa Tunde was a very powerful dark witch who specialized in Sacrificial Magic. Deceased Genevieve was an very powerful dark witch of the French Quarter. She was skilled in herbalism as well as having an adept mind for spellcraft, such as when she combined various spells from Esther's Grimoire to create the enhanced Moonlight Rings. Deceased Gloria was a very powerful witch who was able to slow down the aging process, living for over a hundred years. Deceased Josephine LaRue Bastianna 1 Bastianna Natale Bastianna was an Elder and a powerful dark witch of the French Quarter. She advocated the Harvest and Reaping until her untimely death. Deceased Agnes was a powerful Elder witch of the French Quarter. Deceased Sheila Bennett Sheila Bennett was the grandmother of Bonnie Bennett and a very powerful witch. She is known for mentoring her granddaughter in magic and guiding her whenever the veil to the Other Side was down. In Bonnie's greatest need, she along with the other Bennett witches returned from peace to aid her in saving Mystic Falls. Deceased TO306-Moroccan Witch Moroccan Witch The Unnamed Santeria witch of Morocco is a powerful practitioner who is known for taking down the Original Vampire, Rebekah. She is the creator of a powerful and dark resurrection spell, that Kol was weary of, as well as, presumably, the Cursed Stakes. Alive Joshua Parker Joshua Parker was a powerful witch and former Leader of the Gemini Coven. He was notable for the incarceration of his son Malachai Parker via the Prison World Banishment Spell. Deceased Jonas Martin Dr. Jonas Martin was a powerful witch and also the father of Greta and Luka Martin. Deceased Jo In The World Has Turned And Left Me Here Josette Parker Josette "Jo" Laughlin is the firstborn daughter of Joshua Parker and twin sister of Malachai "Kai" Parker. She decided to relinquish her magic in her youth when Kai slaughtered her siblings. She would later regain her magic only to give it to Kai after the improper Merge Ritual. Deceased Kara Nyguen For The Next Millennium Kara Nguyen Kara Nguyen was an Elder and very powerful witch of the Ninth Ward Coven. She was also a Versailles witch and the mother of Van Nguyen. Deceased Lucy Bennett Lucy Bennett is a witch of the Bennett family and cousin to Bonnie. She was known for sealing the Armory's vault prior to her death. Deceased Jane-Anne profile Jane-Anne Deveraux Vincent Griffith Vincent Griffith is a very powerful witch of the Tremé Coven who was under the possession of Finn Mikaelson. He was the Regent of the New Orleans Witch Community, until his impeaching by The Ancestors. With the Ancestors gone, he continued to lead the Witch Community and built peace among the vampires. Vincent was partially responsible for the re-connection of the Ancestral Plane with the completion of the new Harvest and Reaping Rituals. Alive Eva Sinclair Eva Sinclair was a very dark and powerful witch who, until recently, was under the possession of Rebekah Mikaelson. She excelled at sacrificial magic as she attempted to complete the Rite of Nines in an attempt to gain more power than that of the New Orleans Regent. Deceased Sabine Fruit Sabine Laurent Sophie Deveraux Sophie Deveraux was the maternal aunt of Monique Deveraux, sister of Jean-Anne Deveraux and was briefly an Elder witch of the French Quarter Coven. Deceased Alexis the Oracle Alexis was a witch and cypher who prophesied the destruction of the Mikaelsons and the coming of "The Beast". Deceased Dominic was a powerful witch as well as the High Priest of the Hollow. Deceased Maddox was a witch and a member of Klaus' inner trusted circle. Deceased Van Nguyen Van Nguyen was a Versailles witch and a member of the Ninth Ward Coven. He was also the son of Kara Nguyen. After Vincent was shunned by the Ancestors, he was given Regency over the Nine Covens, and considered a very powerful witch until his untimely demise. Deceased Bonnie Bennett Bonnie Bennett is a very powerful witch and the last living witch of the Bennett bloodline. She is notable for repeatedly saving the town of Mystic Falls and the people living there. Alive Liv 6x21 Olivia Parker Olivia "Liv" Parker was a powerful witch and also a member of the Gemini coven. Deceased Lucas Parker Lucas "Luke" Parker was a powerful witch and also a member of the Gemini coven. Deceased Kaleb Westphall Kaleb Westphall was a French Quarter witch who was possessed by Kol Mikaelson and was killed while still being possessed by him. Deceased Luka Martin Luka Martin was a witch and also former friend of Bonnie Bennett. Deceased Greta Martin Greta Martin was a witch and a member of Klaus' inner circle. She is the daughter of Jonas Martin and sister to Luka Martin. Deceased Madison Season 3 Madison was a powerful dark witch and a former member of The Sisters. Deceased Ariane was a powerful dark witch and untrained Seer to her coven, The Sisters. Deceased Davina Claire Monique Deveraux Monique Deveraux was the daughter of Jane-Anne Deveraux, maternal niece of Sophie Deveraux and also a Harvest witch. Deceased 250px-Abigail 2 Abigail was a Harvest witch. Deceased Cassie P.-Esther Cassie was a Harvest witch who was under the possession of Esther Mikaelson. Once freed, she became apart of the Kindred before being killed by Freya. Deceased Hope Mikaelson Hope Mikaelson is the firstborn child of Niklaus Mikaelson and Hayley Marshall-Kenner. She is also the first known Tribrid. Alive Lizzie Saltzman Josie Saltzman Former Witch Description Status Finn Mikaelson Kol Mikaelson Kol Mikaelson was a witch before his transition into an Original vampire, as well as when he was possessing Kaleb Westphall. Undead Rebekah Mikaelson Abby Bennett Wilson LenoreHDLenore Lenore was a New Orleans witch who was skilled in sacrificial magic until she was possessed by Esther. She was later turned into a vampire by Rebekah and eventually, killed by Freya. Deceased • While the Bennett Family was said to have migrated to Mystic Falls from Salem, Massachusetts, it was later revealed that the Bennett family originated from Northern Europe and migrated to Mystic Falls over a thousand years ago along with the Mikaelson Family. • A subsection witches known as Siphoners are the only witches who have the potential to be turned into witch-vampire hybrids as they keep their ability to practice magic after being turned into vampires as a result of their siphoning ability. • As hybrids, they can draw upon their vampirism as a source of power. • This is in contradictory to what was previously shown; however, as all witches have the ability to gain power from external sources, to channel, yet none of these witches turned vampires had the ability to do so considering they are aberrations of Nature. • Of the many witches shown throughout both series, only four have been explicitly stated to be among the most powerful in history: Qetsiyah, The Hollow, Dahlia, and Esther. However, no official hierarchy has been made among these four. • Ancestral witches, that have been shunned, can further be punished if they continue to practice magic in New Orleans, as seen with Vincent Griffith. • According to Sheila Bennett, All witchcraft is rooted in psychic energy. Which may make psychics the precursor species to all witches and that witches may simply be psychics that have learned to hone and tap into their supernatural abilities through the use of spells and rituals. This remains to be known. • Various other cultures of witches have been mentioned, though not elaborated upon, such as the following: "Strega" of Italy, "Aje" of the Yoruba people of Nigeria; West Africa, "Häxa" of Sweden, as well as Latvian (of Latvia), Santería (of Morocco), and Obi (or Obeah of Nigeria) witches. See also Ad blocker interference detected!
sleep texting1 YouTube Over the last 50 years, Americans have lost about an hour and a half of sleep — and our beloved phones, e-readers, computers, and televisions are largely to blame, Maria Konnikova writes in a three-part series on sleep for The New Yorker. Of course, genetics, eating and exercise habits, and consumption of alcohol and nicotine influences our ability to fall asleep. Regardless, 69% of Americans reporting insufficient sleep, according to The New Yorker. But one of the most important elements that affect our ability to fall asleep is light. Photoreceptors in our eyes respond to changes in light and regulate our circadian rhythms. Research suggests that by pumping up our exposure to devices that emit blue light, like smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc., we've been disrupting our sleep cycles. Blue light in particular is so important because our bodies interpret it as daylight. Blue light essentially tells our body that it's not time for sleep yet. In one study, the author and his colleagues tested the effects of blue light on sleep by asking people to read either an e-book or a printed book four hours before bed for five evenings in a row. The 12 participants in the 2014 study who had read an e-book showed later releases in melatonin , an important sleep hormone, compared with those who had read a printed book. woman sleeping shutterstock Many studies have emerged over the years that suggest our bodies need darkness to function properly. So being exposed to too much light could disrupt our circadian rhythm, the internal clock that helps guide when we fall asleep and when we wake up. Some research also suggests messing with this clock can also increase our risk of developing obesity, diabetes, and breast cancer. While many people turn to sleep aids to counteract difficulties at night, The New Yorker notes that other, natural ways to facilitate sleep include yoga, meditation, or tai chi and that adopting good sleep hygiene (avoiding alcohol and nicotine, exercising regularly, going to bed at the same time every day) is key. Many blue-light filters are also now available for most devices, as well as special glasses designed to block the blue light emanating from devices. There are even special apps for smartphones that adjust the color of your screen depending on the time of the day. In the morning, for example, the light will be the normal 'blue' light, but as the day goes on, the colors will start to change and become warmer.
CoSozo Living All articles Sat, June 1, 2013 Our Emotional Ties: Breaking Through Imbalances This article is about the emotional ties involved in the issues that cause stress/detachment, hereditary issues, chemical balances and imbalances. Our Emotional Bonds What is meant by emotional tie? An emotional tie is the bond formed between people who have a connection with one another. Family members, friends, lovers, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. all form some type of emotional bond that acts like an elastic band as it stretches and relaxes due to our emotional thoughts and behaviors toward one another. Family members are bound by the way genetics, personality, and attachments have formed based upon the time spent together or apart. A child whose parent has left him/her at a young age for a prolonged period of time may feel abandoned or that the emotional tie has been broken. Friends form emotional ties through the discovery of common interests and activities. Colleagues bond as they work together to complete work or school assignments. Relationships are formed as emotional ties are balanced as people work through daily problems, spend time together, and how life events are experienced. The bond’s elasticity is determined by the amount of tension placed upon the bond through the acts of a stressor. Often these emotional ties or bonds maintain comfortable levels of tension and the partners move through their days and relationships in emotional comfort. However others find these ties riddled with tension pulling so tightly that they develop resentful, angry, frustrating, and uncomfortable feelings, reducing the satisfaction and functionality of personal relationships. Stressors, any real or perceived stimulus that causes discomfort or strain on the emotional tie, are an occupational hazard that comes with the act of living. Physical illness or disability, mental illness or disability, social differences, cultural differences, genetic propensities, and perceived differences can raise the stress level in all relationships stretching these bonds in varying degrees. In this article I will discuss three areas that are commonly faced in mental health therapy. 1. Stress/Detachment: Trust, acceptance, love, intimacy, common interests, cultural affinity, and desire are a few of the powerful words that can be used to describe healthy emotional ties. Most relationships form when two people are attracted to one another with strong feelings. Inevitably though, a perceived stressor occurs to pull upon one end of the bond to tighten its elasticity. For example, couples in the beginning of their relationship are able to deflect tension in their emotional tie because they are still in a very accepting stage. Each partner is able to overlook irritating nuances, as the bond is very soft and pliable. However over time as the couple becomes more accustomed to one another tension in the bond begins to form as they face more complex problems relating to daily life. Time constraints from career needs, family needs and/or individual personalities stretch the emotional tie and the partners may move farther apart to decrease that tension. The regulation of emotions becomes a very important tool to use in keeping the bonds at a safe tension level. Weak tension might mean the relationship has not progressed beyond the superficial stage. Too tight could signify unhealthy coping. Partners isolate from one another, become more irritable, seek others for support, and stifle individual needs for emotional and physical comfort leading to a stage of growing apart, separation and divorce. Most of us know of or have heard of how even the birth of a child can weaken a couple’s emotional bond. Add to that the strain of having a child with a medical or mental illness and the bonds stretch to infinite levels. Statistics show that 80% of these marriages end in divorce due to the tension created in the emotional bonds. On the flip side 20% of the emotional bonds in such marriages remain intact or become stronger. 1. Hereditary Issues: The strength and elasticity of emotional bonds may also depend upon the emotionally genetic and personality characteristics of the individuals. Research shows that some couples may face the effects of different physical and mental disorders transmitted through families. Coping skills and behavioral reactions to stress may recycle through relationships as each individual reacts to problematic issues and developments. For example child abuse tends to recur in generations because people repeat the parenting techniques used by the previous generation. Just as traditions are passed from one generation to another so are methods of reacting to others in social and family situations. If one partner’s family responded to one another with loud voices and blunt answers then they are likely to react the same way in the new family. If these responses differ within the relationship partners the emotional ties may stretch as each partner tries to find a balance in their way of being. To illustrate this I will use Shirley and Jim as an example. Shirley’s family interacted with one another in a soft, gentle manner, working through problems systematically with little emotional acting out or displays of affection. Jim’s family, however, reacted in a heated, loud, demonstrative way to daily problems. When Jim and Shirley encounter a problem of their own, each one will utilize the technique they are familiar with which may create some type of emotional discord stretching their emotional bond tightly. Conversely if the two had families who approached problem solving in similar manners then they may find their emotional tie to be less tense as they find solutions. 1. Chemical Balances and Imbalances: Another way that emotional ties work in relationships is to provide people with self-confidence, self-belief and the security to manage any problems that arise with stress balances or imbalances. Hormonal fluctuations due to various life stages can lead to increasing tension in emotional bonds between people. Parents and teens seem to argue more as they try to manage the needs of each individual. Women become more susceptible to emotional fluctuations during menopause while men face change of life issues as they age. These chemical balances can cause the elastic emotional ties to become brittle and dry forcing people to either break them completely or find ways to relieve the tension. Manners of coping to these stressors will differ. As the relationship tries to cope with these stressors some people might turn to alternate methods such as alcohol or drug usage to numb the tension in the emotional bonds. Others may mitigate the stress with behavioral acting out or fall into the throes of depression. Therapeutic Treatments OK. Stressors can make or break the emotional ties that people have to one another. What do you do when your emotional ties are stretched toward the breaking point or you want to safeguard your emotional bonds with others? One answer is to turn to a mental health specialist who has experience and interest in your specific concern. Psychologists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors use different therapeutic strategies when helping people strengthen, repair or rebuild emotional ties. Collaboration between the client and specialist is important to determine the best outcome. What should you look for in a therapeutic treatment? What therapy works with what issue? The answer is as varied as the problem. The first step is acknowledging the problem and having a desire to find an effective solution and being willing to discover a way to help yourself and those you care about to form stronger healthier emotional ties. The next steps are much easier. Look for a mental health specialist and ask some questions about your particular situation. Be prepared for the need for individual and couple/family therapy as a relationship involves all of the parties involved who have singular as well as plural etiologies. For example emotional ties are formed between people. Each person brings to the table a combination of concerns and issues that will need to be explored. The MHS (Mental Health Specialist) may want to help decipher which concerns stem from individual or relational situations first. Below are examples of therapeutic strategies that many have found to bring success and hope. Talk Therapy - Individual or Group 1. Emotion Focused Therapy – Clients work in a brief therapy of 8-20 sessions to learn how to make changes to how they adapt to and manage their emotions. This allows the clients to balance their emotional ties. 2. Bowen Family Therapy - This strategy views the relationship as a system with each individual having an impact on the whole relationship. Thus when one changes the way they use emotional reactions in the relationship the others adjust in ways that reconfigure the bonds. 3. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy uses a reframing of negative thought processes to influence emotions and behavior. Those people who are struggling with anxiety and depression work well with this therapy. As their ability to reframe negative thoughts into positive ones improves the quality of the emotional ties improves and finds a healthier balance. Experiential Therapy 1. Equine Assisted Therapy (EGALA), Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) uses horses, horse professionals and licensed therapists to assist clients in identifying emotionally impacted feelings and behaviors. This is a therapeutic approach that allows the client to understand how others may react to him/her and creates a method for developing change techniques. 2. Art Therapy – This therapy allows the client to use different mediums of art to explore and learn about their inner emotional world. The art therapist helps to interpret the client’s self-expression and relate it to their experience in the world. This allows them to examine, understand, and strategize on how to affect positive change in relationships. 3. Movement Therapy - The therapist uses movement therapy in dance to find awareness between the interconnections of the body and mind. The client can utilize the movements as a way of self expression and a way of finding insight as to how they move about and feel in the world around them. Integration of Psychotropic Medication with Other Therapy In some instances psychotropic medication such as an antidepressant, anti anxiety, or other type of medicinal intervention may be necessary to help someone maximize their ability to integrate with others. If this is true, it is important that it be used as an adjunct to other therapies to monitor and balance emotional ties in both the inner and outer realm of relationships. The degree of elasticity or tension of emotional ties is dependent on the perception of the stressors that are placed on relationships. Over time most relationships struggle with attempts to keep these bonds in balance with tensions and relaxation. However when that is complicated by negative emotional behavior or regulation it can seem impossible. Mental health professionals have a plethora of tools to use that fit within most individual, couple or families need. I encourage you to reach out for help, find new ways to strengthen your emotional ties and reach for the stars in all of your personal interactions. More articles Featured Contributors Jenn Dubey is an ACE Certified Personal Trainer, Certified Corporate Wellness Coach, and motivational wellness speaker. Jenn’s mission is to reach o... Meet Dr Dain Heer International speaker, author and facilitator of advanced workshops worldwide, Dr Dain Heer’s unique and trans- forming points of vi... At age 10, failing in school and miserable at home, Tom Rosenak happened upon Dale Carnegie’s book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. In those day... Popular Articles When I was ten, I had a neighbor that called her parents by their first names. Intrigued by this for... In psychology and psychiatry, the term ‘dissociation’ is seen as a detachment of the mind from the e... 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Introduction: Duct Tape Mouse Trap This is a simple duct tape trap that I have used to catch mice and to deter larger critters such as squirrels, opossum and raccoons. At the end I show a more elaborate version where I laser cut a large sheet of adhesive tape. Step 1: Current Methods All current methods have drawbacks, especially if there are pets and children around: 1. Deter/Repel: Let your neighbor deal with it. 2. Catch/Release: Let people that live near the park deal with it. 3. Snap Traps: Does not kill 100% of the time, so animal is in pain (broken limb, crushed jaw). 4. Poison: Death by internal bleeding or intestinal blockage. Animal can die in an inaccessible area or be consumed by another animal or pet. 5. Water Traps: Death by drowning. 6. Electric Trap: Does not kill 100% of the time; expensive. 7. Glue Traps: Animal remains alive. 8. Pet dog or cat: Not an option for everyone. NOTE: Regardless of which method, it is important to check traps daily not only for humane reasons, but also because a dead animal can quickly create other problems. Step 2: Materials 1. Duct Tape 2. Coins, rocks, etc. to weigh down the ends 3. Bait (Here I also included a bottle cap to hold peanut butter) Step 3: Lay Down the Trap NOTE: To avoid getting the trap stuck to itself during transport, it is better to build it in the final location. 1. Lay down a strip of tape. For smaller traps, tear the strips lengthwise to create narrower arms. 2. Add a penny to each end. 3. Continue to add strips to create desired pattern. A 4-arm or 6-arm design allows the mouse to enter further before getting stuck. 4. Add bait to the center. 5. Optional: Add a strip of tape to secure the trap to the floor (not shown). CAUTION: As with any trap, be aware of other animals, pets or kids that could be harmed. For outdoor use I position them along suspected travel routes (along fences and bushes) without bait. Step 4: Laser Cut Version As you can imagine, the arms get entangled when lifting the trap, so I created a more elaborate version by laser cutting a pattern onto an adhesive sheet. Leaving the paper backing around the outside allows me to pick up the sheet. Step 5: Does It Work? Yes and no. 1. I have caught mice, but similar to glue traps, it does not kill them, so someone has to do the dirty work. 2. Larger critters can escape, but they often leave behind a ball of tape with some fur attached to it. Definitely gets them thinking about coming back... 3. Mice learn quickly, so you must vary the size and shape of the trap if not successful initially. You may even need to try a different brand of tape as the mice begin to recognize the odor. About This Instructable More by Coengineer:Fidget Spinner WalletSpinner Wallet (I Made It at TechShop)Simple Card Holder (or Money Clip) Add instructable to:
• Join over 1.2 million students every month • Accelerate your learning by 29% • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month 1. 1 2. 2 3. 3 4. 4 5. 5 6. 6 7. 7 8. 8 9. 9 10. 10 Physics Pendulum Experiment Extracts from this document... Kasim Hassan Physics Coursework In this investigation, I am going to find the time taken for a basic pendulum to perform a full oscillation (to and fro). Oscillation is the regular movement of a mass back and forth; from one direction to another e.g. a simple pendulum swinging back and forth. A pendulum is a weight on the end of a rigid rod, which, when given some initial lift from the vertical position, will swing back and forth under the influence of gravity over its central (lowest) point. A torsion pendulum consists of a body suspended by a fine wire or elastic fibre in such a way that it executes rotational oscillations as the suspending wire or fibre twists and untwists. The aim of this experiment is to find one of the factors affecting the mass of oscillation on a wire. We will be keeping the length of wire the same throughout the entire experiment, but we will change the mass of the wire. The pendulum will be string, with a weight hanging on the end. The factor that will affect the time taken for one full oscillation is the mass of the weight. ...read more. My prediction is that the more weight that is added to the bottom of the spring, the more energy is stored, and therefore will create larger oscillations. This is because according to my theory, the heavier the mass put on the spring, the larger the extension will be. So, if this is correct, there will be more energy, therefore resulting in larger oscillations. In my opinion, the experiment went fairly well. I managed to obtain a full set of results, which were mostly accurate, and which I managed to make good use of. I was initially surprised at how easy the experiment went, and how I managed to almost instantly obtain accurate results. This investigation has been successful because I have completed my aim and showed this by producing a graph with time against mass. Although the majority of results were within range, I believe I could have made the experiment even more successful. This is due to the few outliers there were. I could have possibly narrowed the gaps between the masses, by using 50g masses instead of 100g, in order to obtain a larger set of results. The second way I could have improved my experiment, is to increase the number of readings taken to possibly 7 or 10. ...read more. • Ensure the spring is not loaded beyond the elastic limit. After analysing my results, I have come to the conclusion that the longer the weight of the mass, the longer per 5 oscillations. I immediately noticed from my graph and table of results, that as the mass became heavier, the time per oscillations increased, thus suggesting my prediction is correct. This therefore shows there is a strong correlation between weight of the mass, and the time per 5 oscillations. In order to complete my graph of curve of best fit, I divided the average time by 10. Then in order to calculate the line of best fit, I squared the results in the curve of best fit. After looking at my graphs, I can see there are a few anomalies, particularly on the graph with the curve of best fit. Other then this, I believe my results are fairly accurate, thus suggesting my experiment, on a whole was done well. Due to the lack of major spread in my data, I do not feel the need to include error bars in my graph. I believe the results on the graph with the line of best fit, were particularly well. There is only one slight anomaly at 300g, meaning that the results are not fully perfect. This is not hugely significant however; as the straight line is in line with 0g meaning the experiment was fairly successful. KASIM HASSAN ...read more. Found what you're looking for? • Start learning 29% faster today • 150,000+ documents available • Just £6.99 a month Here's what a teacher thought of this essay 3 star(s) This is a good attempt at a report, although the structure is not correct. 1. The method section is well written. 2. The evaluation shows a good level of detail. 3. The table of results shows a lot of data. 4. The beginning section needs to be divided up using subheadings. 5. The conclusion does not attempt to explain the pattern in the results. 6. The report itself needs to be restructured. *** (3 stars) Marked by teacher Luke Smithen 29/05/2013 Not the one? Search for your essay title... • Join over 1.2 million students every month • Accelerate your learning by 29% • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month See related essaysSee related essays Related GCSE Forces and Motion essays 1. Marked by a teacher The aim of this experiment was to compare the elasticity of arteries and vein ... 4 star(s) To the ring of artery a mass carrier was placed, to which the force was then applied. A ruler was used to measure the distance the vessel had stretched after this force had been applied. The sketch below reiterates this method. 2. Investigate to see if adding mass to a cupcake case will increase the speed ... Evaluation Overall I was quite pleased with my success in the experiments. Apart from learning many things through my study of physics I have been able to grasp, many formula, and other information about free fall. I will state that my results are not perfect to the hundredth of a second. 1. How does the weight of an object affect the friction it has on the ... Mass of block of wood (g) Average force needed to overcome static friction (N) (1dp) Weight (R) (2dp) 325 1.9 4.19 475 2.6 4.66 625 3.6 6.13 825 4.8 8.09 975 5.8 9.56 1125 6.8 11.03 1275 8.0 12.50 Part 3) 2. Factors affecting acceleration The further the car falls, the faster it will go so if I release them from different heights the acceleration of the cars will be different. When I measure the times for the balls, In theory it should not matter which weight I should use as mass should not matter to the acceleration. 1. Determining the acceleration due to gravity by using simple pendulum. This distance could then be measured more accurately than trying to guess where the middle of the bob is. The diameter of the bob could be accurately measured with some vernier callipers so that the true length of the pendulum could then be calculated. The thread used was quite stretchy. 2. This investigation is about what factors affect friction. to get efficient set of results I will measure how much force is needed to move the block three times. This way I can work out the average. I will then put a weight of 1N (0.1kg) on to the block, and drag it to se how much force is 1. Investigating the effect of mass on a parachute pilot test, I have come to the following conclusions to amend my detailed plan (method): I am no longer going to use a mass of up to 25g of plastercene in the experiment. 2. Report on Newton's laws of motion opposite in direction applied on and by two different bodies (bookrags, n.d.). Some examples of the third law: 1. What enables us to walk? To move forward we must push toward the back on the ground with one foot, according to Newton?s third law, the ground pushes forward, moving us ahead. • Over 160,000 pieces of student written work • Annotated by experienced teachers • Ideas and feedback to improve your own work
EarthPoem Archives Site Map Teacher Resources Teacher Resources Learn Ecology Kids' Earth Art Members' Writing John Caddy Contact MorningEarth Yearning to be Round: A Primer in Ecoliteracy 13. Natural Communities: How They Work How We Are all Connected • 1) We share a common origin—we are all made of Earth and share the same recycled life–materials. • 2) We share a common descent—we are all descended from the first microorganisms, all leaves on one tree. 3) We all depend on sunlight energy. • 4) We all breathe—we all exchange gases • 5) We all live in Natural Communities which have mutually evolved (except, sometimes, humans). 1) Common Origin Connects All Life Everything alive shares a common origin. The carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur atoms that make up our physical bodies were all born in the thermonuclear heart of a dying star, which exploded and eventually condensed into our sun Sol and the Solar System of planets. The entire planet Earth is made of these incredibly ancient materials. So in a real sense we are all made of stardust. We are all made of Earth. Every atom of every living organism was part of Earth before that life took it in as food or breath and made it part of its body. We are all made of Earth. We humans are parts of Earth which have learned to move around and talk and laugh and use tools We have known we were made of Earth for a long time. In the Last Rite of the Catholic Faith the dying person is told, “May you return to the One who made you from the dust of this earth.” At other funerals we hear, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” We are all in this thing called life together. We share the same life materials; lives use them over and over in the vast recycling of nutrients we call death and birth. We all depend on each other. Although our origin as bits of earth is ancient human knowledge, our society is only recently grasping the literal scientific accuracy of this idea. 2) Common Descent Connects All Life All living organisms are also linked by common descent. We are all descended from the very first lives on Earth from billions of years ago. We are all related to each other. It may be hard to claim carrots or caterpillars as your cousins, but it gets easier when you realize you also get to claim the dolphin and the daisy as your cousins. 3) Dependence on Sunlight Connects All Life Some of us (plants and algae) can capture and store energy directly from the sun’s light. The rest of us (animals) live by transferring that energy from life to life, and from death to life. All our energy originates in the sun. One definition of Life is “light trapped in matter.” Or you might say that “Life is matter that has learned to capture light.” 4) Gas Exchange Connects All Life All living organisms breathe, or respire. Breathing means taking air inside, absorbing useful gases, releasing waste gases, and expelling the air again. For example, plants “inhale” air through pores on the undersides of leaves, absorb carbon dioxide, and release oxygen (a by-product of photosynthesis). Animals, in a mirror image, inhale air and absorb oxygen, and release carbon dioxide ( a by-product of metabolism). This process is gas exchange. Life worldwide constantly is exchanging huge amounts of gases with other life, through the atmosphere. 5) Community Connects All Life We all live in Communities. In the reading on Interliving we explored Coevolution, and considered how organisms co–evolve in response to one another, or reciprocally, rather than evolving singly or in reaction against each other. This coevolution takes place at the community level. A community, you recall, is a combination of different species. For example, the roadside pond is a community composed of many species [minnows, turtles, muskrats, algae, zooplankton (tiny one celled organisms), cattails, snails, ducks, etc. etc.] which coexist and relate to one another in a great variety of ways. How Do Natural Communities Work? Earlier we learned that individual organisms all live within larger wholes called communities that live within still larger wholes called ecosystems. The word “ecosystem” is sometimes used to mean a collection of interlinked communities, and sometimes used to mean one community. In human society and law we use the word community to include only human beings, and deliberately exclude plants and all the other animals. However, through the green–colored glasses of ecology, all species great and small are included in a community. One goal of Morning Earth is to give you knowledge that may lead you toward a view of life as one enormous community to which we all belong. To refresh your memory, here is how ecology defines “community”, “ecosystem,” and “population.” : • A community is a combination of populations of different species. A community is all the members—plants, animals, and microorganisms—of all the species that live in a particular habitat and affect one another as part of the food web or by influencing the physical environment. o For example, a roadside pond is a community composed of many species (minnows, turtles, algae, zooplankton (tiny animals), cattails, snails, ducks, etc. etc.) which coexist and relate to one another in a great variety of ways. Ecosystems are groups of connected communities plus their physical environments, and like communities, their size is also relative. The largest ecosystem is the entire biosphere of Earth. • A population is all the members of a particular single species who live in the same area at the same time. As we discussed in the essay “Interliving” above, community size is always relative, like those nesting dolls that all fit inside the next larger size. In other words, community size is a matter of scale. In “Interliving” we offered the example of a rainforest weevil to illustrate this life habit of ‘nesting’ within other lives. When you ‘zoom out’, you see the big picture, and perhaps can grasp the entire biosphere as an enormous living community. When you zoom in, and zoom even farther in, you see that communities exist on every scale, from bacterial communities so small it takes five million individuals to be visible as a pinprick to the human eye, to the mammal scale we mostly use, in which things are large or small in relation to our own bodies. How do communities work? Natural communities all have some features in common. We will now explore eight features of natural living communities: 1. Communities ‘Fit’ their Environments Reciprocally 2. Each species in a community has its own niche. 3. Many Communities Are Layered 4. There are always many more small species than large 5. In all communities, some species compete 6. Some species in a community cooperate to feed and avoid predators. 7. All species cooperate in interliving 8. Communities all have keystone species. 1. Communities ‘Fit’ their Environments Reciprocally Living communities must exist in a place on Earth. Because we humans are such an adaptable species, we tend to think first of changing the environment to fit the needs of the living community.—we try to make places “livable.” But most of nature doesn’t work like that. In nature, living communities do alter the environment in ways which make it more hospitable to life, but living communities both change the environment and change themselves over time to ‘fit’ the physical environment in which they live. It’s “push me-pull you.” Life shapes the physical environment; the physical environment shapes life. So the relationship between a living community and its physical environment is reciprocal and mutual. Let’s take a simple example, the community of life on a small rounded stone from a long–dry riverbed. The stone is mostly smooth, but there is one place where there is a little crevice, and this part is right on top as the stone lies on the ground. In this little crack is a bit of green, and when we zoom in we see that the green is a small lichen growing there. When we look a second time, we notice some gray crumbly stuff in the crack, and just beginning to grow out of the crack is a tiny single thread of greenish-gold that we barely recognize as a moss stem With a small microscope and good light, we zoom farther in and realize that there is a busy community of not only plant life, but also many tiny arthropods (mites and insects). • The lichen secretes (gives off) an acid which bit by bit dissolves the rock it lives on. It uses the minerals in the rock to build and nourish its body —the leftovers are the gray crumbly stuff in the crack, which are the beginnings of soil. • The lichen is changing the rock just a little so it can live there. It is making the rock a little smaller. It is eating the rock. • The lichen has adapted to living on a rock surface. • It has adapted to being watered only by occasional rainfall • A rock surface doesn’t store water well, so the lichen has also evolved a tough outer 'cuticle' that does not easily give up water Both rock and lichen are changing in response to each other, and they have not stopped doing it. At some time in the future, the rock will have been ‘tailored’ so much by life and weathering, that it will break apart into small pieces which eventually will break down into grains of sand. 2. Each Species in a Community has its own Niche Niche means the place occupied by a species in an ecosystem—where it lives, what it eats, its foraging route, when it is active, and so on. Niche is a species' role in a community. Niche is a species' job plus its address. The more physically complex a community is (like a tree or a coral reef), the more niches are available. Complex communities contain more species and biodiversity and are thus more resilient than simpler communities. Many niches are incredibly precise and specialized: • a parasitic mite has been found that lives only on blood from the hind leg of one species of driver ant in South American rainforest. • In bird feathers live tiny creatures called feather lice. Most species are highly adapted to one species of bird, and may spend their entire lives clinging to one barb on one feather, eating organic debris as a commensal organism. • In a northern coniferous forest, five kinds of closely related warblers have “arranged” through thousands of years of evolution to feed in different places in pine trees. The black areas in the trees below the bird species show where that bird species feeds. Their different niches have resulted in five species where there used to be one species. The species they became are (left to right) the Cape May, Yellow–rumped, Black–throated green, Blackburnian and Bay–breasted warblers. illustration from The Birder’s Handbook, ed. Ehrlich, Paul and David Dobson • The more complex a community or ecosystem is, the more niches it will contain, thus the more diversity of species it will contain. 3. Many Communities Are Layered Layering is a major physical part of community arrangement and composition. If you look back at the illustration of warblers in pine trees, you will see that they have arranged their feeding two ways: in–out and up–down. Layering is usually a matter of up–down changes. Where vegetation is concerned, the top gets more light than the bottom, and the outside gets more light than the inside. The principle of layering allows different species to occupy almost the same space without competing. Look at the layers of a tropical rain forest, top down. Canopy layer: 160 feet high and up, overlapping umbrella shaped canopy of trees draped with epiphytes, vines and leaves; rich in species diversity Understory layer: shorter, shade tolerant trees 100–150 feet tall Shrub layer: shade tolerant bushes & seedling trees; 4–30 feet Herbaceous layer: shade-tolerant broadleaf herbs, grasses, and ferns. Moss layer: shade-tolerant mosses and lichens, fungi Litter layer; dead vegetation—by now, 90% of sunlight gone—leaves, branches, twigs—and dead animals, mostly insects: the crucible of decay; uncountable billions of bacteria and fungi that decompose the litter or detritus and recycle its nutrients for the community—it blends into the soil layer. The rainforest is layered from the inside out as well: • at the tree trunk layer, vines and lianas hold fast to the tree for support • as we move out from the trunk on branches, many epiphytes grow. (epiphytes are interliving plants that get their water and nutrients from the air and do not harm their host tree) • as we move toward more light, the vines leaf out to feed themselves with light • as we reach the outside layer of a tree, we see leaves that are a mixture of the tree’s leaves and its supported vines and epiphytes in a riot of color and textures. As you can see, the idea of layering is also a way of talking about niches. A niche is a place and way to live. Layering gives a great diversity of animal life many niches to ‘choose’ from. Forest animals are layered with the plants. In a northern hardwood forest, from the ground up, you find: Ground/litter layer: wood processing ants and termites, some beetles, detritus feeders like pillbugs & millipedes, silverfish and springtails; earthworms, shrews, deer mice, chipmunks, robins, thrushes, sparrows, flickers. Salamanders, toads, snakes, lizards. Herbaceous layer: butterflies, bees, wasps, flycatchers; squirrels, chipmunks, woodchucks, skunks, mink,, ground-nesting birds. Shrub/thicket layer: squirrels, chipmunks, browsers and berry eaters, such as deer, rabbits, bear, raccoons; nesting cardinals, buntings, sparrows Understory trees: orioles; flycatchers; deer; squirrels, chipmunks, treefrogs, flying squirrels, woodpecker Canopy: high nesting birds such as hawks and ravens; owls using old hawk nests; warblers, kinglets, vireos ; jays, tanagers; finches; squirrels 4. There Are Always Many More Small Species than Large Small species find more places to live and more ways to make a living. Remember as a little kid lying down in the grass and imagining yourself tiny and living in among suddenly enormous grass stems? Youmay have recognized many possible places and ways little creatures might make a living. Small creature have many more possible habitats and possible niches, so they number a great many of the leaves on the tree of life. Large creatures require large habitats. Very small organisms are extremely diverse. • There are many more species of herbs (non-woody plants) than there are species of trees. • There are many more kinds of insects than there are vertebrates (animals with backbones). Size and weight has a huge effect on numbers. A deer weighs about a thousand times what a mouse weighs. If you reduce the weight of organisms by a thousand times, there will be ten times as many small species than large species. In other words, for every species of deer-sized mammal, there will be ten species of mouse-sized mammal. For every dragonfly sized insect species, there will be ten gnat-sized species. In the evolution of communities, smaller size means more species. Within particular groups of animals, such as the insects, the smallest organisms are able to exploit more niches and thus pack more species into local communities. Small organisms can divide the environment into smaller niches than large organisms can. If you made a visual pyramid of biodiversity, the wide base would represent the smallest organisms, and as the pyramid grew taller and more narrow, the larger organisms would be represented larger in mass, but fewer in number of species and smaller in diversity. At the apex of the pyramid you would find the very largest organisms, such as elephants, whales and redwood trees. 5. In All Communities, Some Species Compete Generally, species compete with some other species in their community for resources they must have to stay alive and reproduce. A few examples: • Cavity-nesting birds compete for tree holes. • Plants compete for pollinators and seed dispersers. o Most flowers compete for bees and wasps, etc., because only with animal help can they be pollinated and make seed for their next generation. • Berries and fruits compete to be eaten by animals, so the seed will be dropped at a distance from the parent plant (in other words, plants compete for dispersal agents). • Male birds compete for the best territories with which to attract females. • Plants on the forest floor compete for limited light. The first example, about how hole-nesting birds, illustrates how competition and cooperation live side by side in nature. • Woodpeckers excavate a new nest-hole every mating season. They use it for one season and move out, leaving it for other cavity–nesters (such as wrens, chickadees, flycatchers, and tree–swallows) to use. • The woodpeckers in essence cooperate within their community, providing new housing—the other cavity-nesters compete with each other but not with woodpeckers. The roots of walnut trees give off a poison (juglone)which kills most other plants under its leaf-canopy, which surely is effective in the competition for light. Perennial goldenrod roots give off a poison that kills seedling jackpine trees, which is also competition for light. Together, walnut trees and goldenrods invented the herbicide. Competition within species is probably the most familiar kind. Within a population, members compete for food, status, and reproductive opportunities. 6. Some Species in a Community Cooperate to Feed and to Avoid Predators. Mixed herds and mixed feeding flocks are common in both mammals and birds. This cooperation usually means more opportunities to eat and a better chance to escape predators. Different species have different ways of being alert to danger; together in a mixed herd they can put all those different alertnesses together in a common purpose—to avoid being eaten. • African grasslands are characterized by mixed herds of antelope, zebra, and wildebeest. This is an example of grazing species in a community cooperating to minimize the danger of predators. • Deer and elk graze together in North America, as do antelope, deer, and bison. Throughout the world birds travel and feed in mixed flocks, especially in forests. • Mixed flocks in northern forests may include chickadees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and warblers. • These small birds tend to use different food sources, in different locations on the plant, so they don’t compete much as they travel through the woods, feeding. • But should a sudden bonanza of food turn up, such as a mating flight of winged ants, the flock all benefits, for they announce it to each other. Many kinds of ducks feed in mixed flocks of species which use different feeding strategies, ducks such as gadwall and wigeons. Some diving ducks form mixed feeding flocks in coastal waters even though they have similar feeding niches. The advantage is that they can share in the schools of thousands of individuals that small fish often occur in—there is no competitive disadvantage because the school provides enough for every member of the flock. 7. All species Cooperate in Interliving Symbiosis is the most common living arrangement of life on earth. In Chapter 11 we introduced the idea of coevolution with these examples of cooperation: • Plants evolved fleshy fruits (berries, fruits, nuts, acorns) as a seed packaging device to disperse or spread their seed. Fruits all evolved in cooperation with certain animals which eat the fruit (and seed), then excrete the unharmed seed away from the mother plant. • Oak trees evolved acorns in a long cooperation with squirrels and bluejays. These animals buried (or planted) the acorns as stored food. The great oak forests of Europe and North America were planted by squirrels and jays as part of this long coevolution. • Many seeds in berries and fruits cannot germinate at all unless their tough exterior has been etched a little by animal digestive juices. In other words, they must pass through a gut to live. • Flowering plants and hummingbirds coevolved long tubular flowers and long beaks together. • Fruits and berries in North America, Asia and Europe coevolved with migrating birds; the plants “learned” to time their ripening for late summer, just when flocks of migrant birds would be coming through to eat them and spread their seed. • Many flowers have coevolved with a species of flying insect to insure pollination of the flower by another member of its species. Often, the structure of the flower is tailored to the size and shape of its pollinator. • The yucca flower opens only at night, when its pollinator, the yucca moth, is active. The moth has specialized mouthparts to collect and carry yucca pollen. While visiting a flower, the moth takes some of the pollen she is carrying and places it directly on the stigma of the flower, actively pollinating the flower and ensuring successful seed formation. The moth lays its eggs inside each flower it visits. When the moth’s eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the developing seeds of the plant. The plant is guaranteed pollination so it can make seed; the moth is guaranteed food and protection for her developing larvae. Yes, the yucca loses some seeds (never all), but it gains far more in this coevolved relationship than it loses. Symbiosis is the term for mutualisms in which neither partner can survive without the other. We learned earlier that in the course of billions of years of life on this planet, we can trace a general progression among living organisms toward more and more interdependence, toward more and more of the intimate cooperation we see in symbiosis. We discussed earlier the entire biosphere’s animal/plant symbiosis in which plants create oxygen, which animals breathe, and the animals create carbon dioxide, which the plants breathe. This symbiosis affects every multicellular life on earth. Perhaps the most overwhelming symbiosis in the biosphere is the evolution of separate one-celled organisms (bacteria) into the kind of cell that all multi-cellular organisms are made of. The mitochondria of animal cells and the chloroplasts and mitochondria of plant cells are the living proof that we ourselves are complexes of symbiotic cells. This symbiosis affects every multicellular life on earth. A third enormous and powerful symbiosis is the mycorrhizal associations of almost all flowering plants’ roots with fungi, which help both fungi and the plants thrive. This symbiosis also affects every multicellular life on earth. A fourth fundamental symbiosis is an alliance between virtually every animal species and the ancient kingdom of bacteria. In worms as much as human beings, we simply cannot digest our food without the help of symbiotic bacteria living in our digestive tracts. Every species of animal apparently has this living arrangement with bacteria, so the symbiosis is an old one. This symbiosis affects every multicellular animal life on earth. 8. Communities all have Keystone Species. An arch is made of wedge–shaped stones in a curve. In the center of the arch, at the top of the arch, is the keystone. It is called the keystone because it ‘locks’ the arch into place; if it is removed the arch collapses. Living communities have certain species which are keystones of the community. If keystone species are removed, or become extinct, the community collapses. Not all species in the community are central to its survival—but each species is important to community diversity and health. Kelp ‘Forest’ Community Just off the West coast of North America, in shallow ocean. is a habitat and community called the kelp forest. Tall seaweeds called kelp stretch from the bottom to the surface, where airfilled ‘bladders’ keep them afloat. You may have seen kelp washed up on an ocean beach, long whip like stalks with large flat ‘leaves’. To a scuba diver it looks and feels like a forest. In this kelp forest live many animals: seals, many schools of fish taking advantage of the kelp ‘cover’, many shellfish, and many sea urchins, which look like balls covered with spines. One animal of the kelp forest is the giant sea otter, an agile aquatic predator that is densely furred and about six feet long. Sea otters feed mostly on shellfish from the bottom. Often they swim to the surface with a shellfish and a stone, rest the shell on their chests and crack it with the stone. Sea otters have excellent fur for human purposes, and like the fur seals, they were hunted nearly to extinction during the past 200 years. By 1900 sea otters were almost extinct. One of the sea otter’s favorite foods is the sea urchin, a grazer which feeds on seaweeds such as kelp. Where the otters disappeared completely, the sea urchin populations exploded, and the kelp forests died. The sea urchins, unrestrained by predation, simply ate the kelp up, and what was kelp forest became marine deserts called “sea–urchin barrens.” This story of destruction has a happy ending. Otters from the surviving populations were re-introduced to the sea-urchin barrens, and gradually the kelp forest community re-created itself. Now the gray whales migrate closer to shore, finding the kelp forests good places to park their calves while mama feeds on the dense plankton which is part of the kelp community. The sea otter is a keystone species; without it the community collapsed. Ecologists do not know which of the millions of plant and animal species on earth are truly keystone species. In this time of mass extinctions, when at least 300 species are going extinct every year, and probably more, we need to be aware that some species, and not always the glamorous ones like otters, are keystone species. And we don’t know which ones they are! “For want of a nail the war was lost.” Entire ecosystems collapse when the keystone is removed. An extended arch is a circle, and the circle of community cannot continue as a whole if we keep on making other species extinct for our own convenience, or out of simple carelessness. One notorious group of keystone species are the driver ants of the tropical grasslands and forests. They are sometimes called safari ants and army ants. Their presence appears to be central to the grassland communities of Africa. They are the largest predator around in terms of biomass consumed. Most keystone species are top predators or primary producers (plants). But In deserts, termites are keystones. They are crucial because they recycle dead wood, which is where most organic matter in the desert is found. Some Sources for Natural Community Encyclopedia Britannica Ehrlich, Paul, et al, A Birder’s Handbook Tester, John, Minnesota’s Natural Heritage Odum, Eugene, Fundamentals of Ecology E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life Copyright © 2004 Morning Earth
Mosquito Nets Mosquito nets and mosquito nets are designed precisely to protect the premises of insects. They are used in spring-autumn period and are installed on any type of windows, wood windows, balcony doors, plastic windows, attic or terrace. Mosquito nets not only performs its main function, that is, protection against insects, and prevents the ingress of dust and poplar fluff, dandelion seeds or debris from the street or from the upper floors. Mesh is made from a material that makes it not only impervious to insects, but almost invisible on the window. Mosquito nets sufficiently strong, durable and resistant to bending and trudnosgoraema but at the same time ensure full penetration of air but no insects. There are several types of roll grids: a framework mosquito nets and mosquito nets swing. Net Framework is used for standard windows and air vents. This lightweight design of the aluminum profile. In a mosquito net is a pen and spanned the cellular plastic sheet. As for swinging the mosquito net, it is used for large windows and balcony doors. Window grid is needed to ensure comfort during the warmer months. Kai-Fu Lee takes a slightly different approach. Protection from insects and allergens and is often used in places where you need a permanent address outside the frame. Often the insect screen is used in suburban homes as the walls between the house and garden. And sometimes, this grid is part of the decor, dividing the room into different zones. Mosquito nets is very convenient and practical to use, so become an integral part modern windows. Comments are closed.
Caring For Horses in Extreme Heat Caring For Horses in Extreme Heat In hot and humid climates your horse might appreciate being hosed down with cool water. Photo: Thinkstock With summer's sunny days can come extreme heat. Such situations can cause worry for owners as they struggle to help their horses adjust, stay healthy, and remain comfortable. But with a well-thought-out management plan, horses can stay cool and comfy in the midst of summer. To help get you started on the right track, caught up with Nancy Loving, DVM, an equine practitioner in Boulder, Colorado, to find out what the most important things to consider are when caring for horses in extreme heat. "Clean water should always be available; an average horse needs five to seven gallons of water per day in cool weather, while in hot weather, requirements for maintenance and to compensate for losses in sweat may prompt intake of 20 gallons or more per day," she explained. "Horses in a herd should have access to a couple of water tanks spaced a distance apart so dominant horses don't prevent a thirsty, more timid horse from drinking. Additionally, she added that for a horse that doesn't drink well, offering a watery gruel of a supplement (such as a complete feed pellets) rather than feeding them dry can help increase the horse's water intake. Insects are another concern that accompany increasing temperatures, Loving said. "Hot weather brings insects so don't forget to use fly sheets, insect repellant, and during active insect times of day, it can help to bring your horse into the barn and use fans to create air flow that foils the ability of flying insects to hover around your horse," she added, as many biting flies are poor fliers. Fans can not only help keep your horse cool, but also create air flow that foils flying insects' ability to hover around your horse. Photo: Erica Larson, News Editor Loving also encouraged owners to provide their turned out horses "with a stand of shade trees or a loafing shed (run-in shed) with good ventilation. Having areas to get out of the direct sun offers respite, particularly if they have air circulation, also wards off the insects. "In hot and humid climates your horse might appreciate being hosed down with cool water," she added. "Heat stress is typically a concern for horses exercising in rigorous athletic pursuits (such as distance riding, speed and/or sprint events) in hot and humid weather," she said. "Light riding isn't likely to bring on a state of heat stress, unless there are extenuating circumstances like extreme heat and humidity and/or over-riding for the conditions of the day." "If you think you horse is experiencing heat stress, strip off his tack and equipment," she explained. "Take a rectal temperature to determine the extent of internal heating--rectal temperatures higher than 103.5°F (about 39.8°C) indicate heat stress." Loving advised, "Move the horse out of the direct sun when possible. Immediately soak the horse down with cool water, scraping it away and applying it continuously -- this cooling process should stop once the chest feels cool to the touch and/or rectal temperature drops below 103.5°F." About the Author Erica Larson, News Editor
现代汉语规范词典 and Pleco This is the Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian (Standard Dictionary of Modern Chinese). I bought it in China but you can also get it on websites selling Chinese language products (e.g. http://www.aolifo.de). It’s a Chinese-Chinese dictionary, all main entries are with pinyin and explanations are Chinese only. I recommend it for upper-intermediate and advanced learners. Let’s say we want to look up the word “lǔmǎng”. We find the entry 卤莽 but the dictionary tells us that the word is written 鲁莽 nowadays. And here we find the explanation. The character in the square shows the part of speech (here: adjective). The hand symbol reminds us one more time that we shouldn’t write the word with the characters 卤莽. Pleco, a very useful Chinese dictionary app for mobile phones, offers Chinese-English and English-Chinese. You can get it for free but if you get the professional bundle (it’s 64,99 €; you can also only choose individual add-ons you need), you get access to a lot more dictionaries and even Chinese-Chinese dictionaries like the one above. So let’s check Pleco for the same word. The main entry already shows us that they are two possibilities of writing this word. We scroll downwards to the Chinese-Chinese dictionary. GF is the abbreviation Pleco uses for the name of the dictionary. And here we see the exact same reference. We click on the characters in blue. And again we get the exact same entry with the explanation. The character in the square is now just grey and the hand symbol has been changed to 注意 (warning). Now imagine we don’t understand the explanation. We can just tap on the characters we don’t know. A small window pops up showing us the pinyin and the English translation. So I highly recommend Pleco for every serious Chinese learner. If there is any similar dictionary app for Japanese out there, please leave me a message. Have you heard of Memrise? If you’re into studying languages online, you probably have. It’s basically a fancier version of Anki (I talked about it in previous posts) with additional incentives to keep you continue studying. Every time you get a word correct, you get points. After collecting a certain amount of points, you get a badge as a reward that can be seen by other users as well when they check your profile. There is also a leaderboard showing who got the most points (in this week, this month or in total) which can only be seen by your Memrise friends. Memrise offers incredibly many courses, not only on languages but other topics as well. A lot of courses offer audio (though most of the times it’s only some odd computer voice) and what’s best is that Memrise shows you memes (actually written “mems” in imitation of Memrise) of other users to remember a certain word. Here is one I made for a Korean word. If you like someone else’s mem, you can give them a thumbs up (I only got one… insolence!!). I’ve been using Memrise a lot more often than Anki now. It’s visually more appealing and collecting points is actually a great way to keep up the motivation for studying (Can’t wait to get my next badge!). I must add that I use the Memrise app rather than the homepage (there’s no countdown in the app when you’re studying). And I got the pro version on a discount (a year’s subscription for 20 €). The pro version analyzes your study habits and offers a few more features. But it’s really not necessary to go pro, so you can enjoy a great learning tool completely for free. Short-term Listening Chinese If you’re struggling with your listening comprehension, this textbook series will do wonders for you! It comes with an mp3-CD and an answer key at the end of each volume (The answer key is printed upside down, so you will have to turn around your book to read the answers. Pretty cool idea to make cheating tiresome ;)). Each lesson starts with an extensive vocabulary list followed by short explanations (only the volume for elementary has English translations of these explanations as well) on grammar points. It has a variety of listening exercises with increasing difficulty. On a side note, you may have heard of its more famous counterpart Short-term Spoken Chinese that is widely used by language courses in China to teach colloquial Chinese (the Boya textbook series uses more formal language). Chinese Grammar – Broken down into 100 items This book covers the most important grammar points for beginners and intermediate learners. Explanations are in both Chinese and English. All Chinese entries come without Pinyin. The example sentences are not translated, so you need to already have some basic knowledge of Chinese. The answer key comes in a separate booklet that is included in the package when you buy the book. The answer key also provides a short grammar overview in the beginning. The book is fairly big (210 mm x 285 mm), so it’s not suitable for reading in bed or on the sofa. Brushing Up Your Vocabulary for HSK I love this textbook series! I never found them on Chinese language books websites, so in the end I got them in China. This series covers the HSK vocabulary from Beginner till Advanced level (I also own the two volumes of the Beginner level but they’re not relevant to me anymore). It’s alphabetically sorted (which is a bit of a downside, imagine learning six characters pronounced “fan” in a row and trying not to confuse their meanings) and every page on the left lists around 10 to 15 entries and on the right side are the corresponding exercises. The first exercise is about filling in the blanks with the words you just learnt. The second exercise often shows two or three words that can be easily confused as they have similar meanings but are used differently. The third exercise shows a few sentences and you have to choose the corresponding usage explanation. It also comes with an answer key at the end of each volume. Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary – The printed version I also own the book (that being said I first bought the book and later found out there’s an app). The biggest difference between the book and the app is that the book solely uses katakana and hiragana for the readings. As I mentioned in earlier blog posts, I’m normally a person who loves to highlight and write notes in textbooks. However, this time it’s different. I find the book to heavy to carry around and finding a kanji takes up a lot of time. The book is also a lot more expensive (it was around 40 € last time I checked on amazon) whereas the app was just 18 €. And the app is much more useful as it can also be used offline and it’s virtually always with you. So studying on the bus etc. is really comfortable with the app. Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary App 1. Here you can have the app show you more or less information. Less information basically shows only the English meanings of this kanji. More information is like it is on this screenshot. 2. Lets you add a bookmark for this kanji. 3. Lets you look for a different kanji. 4. Settings. 5. Basic English meaning. 6. First comes the on-reading in capital letters (or katakana) followed by the kun-reading in small letters (or hiragana). It depends on your settings whether you see the readings in our alphabet or in katakana/hiragana. 7. Radical of this kanji. If you click on it, the app will show you other kanji with the same radical. 8. Shows you in which grade this kanji is taught. E.g. Jōyō 1 means it’s taught in grade 1. The example here is without a number meaning it’s taught after grade 6. 9. The first number shows the total stroke number. The second one refers to the stroke number of the radical only. And the last one shows the amount of additional strokes to the radical. 10. Stroke order.
Jefferson's Political Heirs Gather in New York City Democratic party convention will pin hopes for Nov. 3 win on a son of the agrarian South IN the summer of 1791, Thomas Jefferson went to New York to collect butterflies. Or so it was said. But according to lore - perhaps more apocryphal than true - the real purpose of Jefferson's noted "botanical expedition" to the Hudson Valley was to collect a species of a different sort: political allies to buttress his running war against George Washington's powerful treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. Whatever its exact origin, the sturdy group of anti-Hamiltonians that ultimately coalesced around Jefferson succeeded in tapping into a political impulse that, 200 years later, remains a central part of the American political tradition: individual liberties over the power of the state; the common man over the monied aristocracy. As their political heirs assemble in New York for the Democratic convention, they celebrate a political party that is now, arguably, the world's oldest and, indisputably, the source of some of its most remarkable leaders - James Madison and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But after 200 years of change, would Thomas Jefferson still be a Democrat? Probably, several political analysts agree. They explain that after generations of change the party still accents themes that would be welcomed by the anti-Federalists of Jefferson's day. "Of the two parties, the Democrats are still the party of individual liberties," says Robert Rutland, retired University of Virginia historian and author of a book on the Democratic Party. "In this sense, the torch has been passed." Through its long history, the party has managed to live with extraordinary contradictions. It has been home to agrarians and urban immigrants, blacks and Southern whites, intellectuals and laborers. A party of the common man, for a time it was even a party of slaveholders. What has held this improbable congregation together has been the party's continuing appeal as champion of the disadvantaged. "The [Democratic] coalition has held together," says historian Arthur Schlesinger, "because it has remained a party of outsiders against the party of business. What [its factions] have had in common is the notion that business shouldn't run the country." "The key is that the party has remained tied to the old moorings of getting a better deal for the common man," says Professor Rutland. "Farmers who were in debt and city people who had few possessions could both look to the Democratic Party and find help." The anti-Hamiltonians took power in 1800, when Jefferson was elected president. The Democrats, as they became known in the 1820s, defined mass politics in America. They emerged from the Civil War with the solid South but little else, as the party of Lincoln dominated the White House into the 20th century. During a brief respite from Republican rule, Woodrow Wilson formalized a tactical shift that has been a hallmark of Democratic governance ever since. Where Jeffersonians preached the virtues of small government, Democrats now saw the need for assertive federal power to regulate big business and protect workers. "It was a matter of using Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends," notes Dr. Schlesinger. The high-water mark of Democratic rule came with the election of Franklin Roosevelt, whose coalition of industrial workers, urban ethnics, blacks, and Western and Southern farmers kept Democrats in the White House, with the exception of the Eisenhower years, until the late 1960s. That Democrats have held the White House only one term since is due in part to the defection of key constituencies. Postwar prosperity eventually turned large segments of the middle class against New Deal social programs. The Vietnam war and the party's taste for smaller defense budgets prompted many party conservatives to cross the aisle. In one of its most crucial decisions, the party opted for Southern blacks over Southern whites when it backed strong civil rights legislation in the 1960s, opening the South to Republican competition for the first time since Reconstruction. The party's problems have been compounded by 1970s-era rule changes that were designed to give broader representation to special-interest groups. The goal was laudable, but it paralyzed consensus-making and reduced the party to little more than the sum of its often quarrelsome parts. Finally, the party has faltered because one of its few natural constituencies - the inner cities - is now the smallest of the three broad geographic groups, including suburbanites and residents of rural areas and small towns, that make up the American electorate. The problem for Democrats is that, outside the inner cities, the traditional accent on big-government liberalism - for so long an idea that has given the party definition - has become anathema. As President Bush and Ross Perot swap angry charges, delegates gathered in New York remember that it was another electoral split - between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft - that paved the way for Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912. But to seize the moment now, political analysts say, Democrats will have to emphasize another theme that has been a source of strength in the past: economic growth. "Democrats today are still living in the 1960s. They want to right all social wrongs," says Paul Wieck, author of a forthcoming book on pro-growth politics. "There's nothing wrong with that, but the top priority has to be to create jobs. "Democrats create programs to train people for jobs," says Mr. Wieck. "They sponsor legislation to give people access to jobs. But try to define what they've done to create jobs and you don't find very much. The next majority will be a pro-growth majority, but it's not clear which party will put it together."
Tokyo tries to gird for major quake by and Every Sept. 1, Tokyo residents are reminded of the tragedy of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which claimed more than 100,000 lives that fateful day in 1923. Now designated Disaster Prevention Day, it is a time for annual quake and fire drills. The government estimates that 11,000 people would die in the worst-case scenario — a magnitude 7.3 quake jolting Tokyo around 6 p.m. on a weekday in winter, the worst time for fires and thus the highest casualties. Of them, 6,200 would be fatally burned in the resultant fires, and 850,000 houses and other buildings would collapse or burn down. That compares with 6,400 casualties and 112,000 destroyed homes and buildings in the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which struck Kobe and its vicinity at 5:46 a.m. Jan. 17, 1995. In response to the estimate, the Cabinet Office compiled a plan in April 2006 to halve the expected casualties to 5,600 in 10 years by improving the quake resistance of houses and buildings in the Tokyo metropolitan area and taking other measures. For example, the central government now offers subsidizes and tax breaks for reinforcing houses and buildings to raise the rate of quake-resistant structures to 90 percent from the current 75 percent. The government is also promoting construction of buildings made of concrete or other non-wood materials. The government is moving “at least in the right direction,” said Takashi Furumura, an associate professor of seismology at the University of Tokyo. “These changes won’t be done quickly,” he added, implying the government should not be blamed for taking 10 years, though an earthquake could strike at any time. The most important thing is to strengthen structures, because their collapse and the subsequent fires would account for the most deaths, Furumura said, pointing out that most earthquake-related fatalities occur in the first 15 minutes. To make houses stronger, the central government has a lot of work ahead, he said. It has to supervise local authorities, whose quake-related policies vary, to make sure everybody in the Tokyo metropolitan area gets the same and the best service possible in line with the national standard. It is also important to crack down on fraud, Furumura said, referring to sham construction firms that target elderly people living in old houses and scare them into signing contracts that include unnecessary and ineffective repairs. Another change needed is lowering quake-insurance monthly premiums for houses reinforced to be quake-resistant, he added. Skyscrapers were built relatively recently and are not made of wood, so they are safer. But they shake much more, so furniture should be stabilized and people may get motion sickness, Furumura said. Another issue facing Tokyo is how to deal with the massive number of pedestrians who would pack streets as they try to walk home after public transportation is rendered useless. The government wants people to stay in buildings for a while — many of them are expected to be at work at 6 p.m. on a weekday — because otherwise streets will be as packed as a rush-hour Tokyo train, or six people per sq. meter. This crush of humanity would prevent emergency teams and evacuation sites from functioning, and many people would be without food, water, blankets and other vital goods. Also, people would face the danger of falling objects because they wouldn’t be able to move in the congestion. The Cabinet Office will compile measures to tackle the potential congestion problem this fall, spokesman Goro Yasuda said. In the worse case, electricity would be knocked out immediately for about 2 million households, and it would take at least six days to get the power completely back online. About 1.2 million households would be without gas, while 11 million people would lose access to running water. Direct damage from the quake, including destroyed buildings and other infrastructure, would amount to ¥66.6 trillion. The indirect damage, such as lost business opportunities caused by disrupted transportation, would be ¥45.2 trillion. The number of evacuees would be 7 million the day after the quake, with the number declining to 4.1 million a month later. While postquake action plans get much attention, the science of predicting the disaster has not caught up. But at least the experts have figured out the mechanism that causes earthquakes. The most well-known cause is a collision of two plates, which act like a thin crust of the Earth that moves along with the mantle’s circulation. As the two plates push each other, they eventually and suddenly release pressure, thus shaking them. Quakes in Japan in this category are the magnitude 7.9 Great Kanto Earthquake, the one in the Tokachi area in Hokkaido, magnitude 8.0, in September 2003, a long-expected quake in the Tokai region, and others whose epicenters are mainly located under the seabed off north and east Japan. The second type stems from movements of faults in a single plate. This category, called Chokka-gata in Japanese, or the “right-underneath” type, typically cause much damage because the epicenter is on land. The magnitude 7.3 Great Hanshin Quake in January 1995, the Mid Niigata Prefecture Earthquake in October 2004, magnitude 6.8, and the quake in Iwate and Miyagi prefectures on June 14, magnitude 7.2, fall under this category. The third type is caused by an ocean plate sinking into the mantle. These occur off east and north Japan. The fourth type is a volcano-driven quake and is rarely seen in Japan. The Kanto region sits on the intersection of three plates — the Philippines Sea plate, the North American plate and the Pacific plate. “That makes it prone to earthquakes with so many varieties, and thus is the most interesting area for researchers,” Furumura said, adding that a Tokyo quake could be any of the first three types.
Menu Search Jump to the content X X Smashing Conf Barcelona Posts Tagged ‘Linux’. We are pleased to present below all posts tagged with ‘Linux’. Introduction To Linux Commands At the heart of every modern Mac and Linux computer is the “terminal.” The terminal evolved from the text-based computer terminals of the 1960s and ’70s, which themselves replaced punch cards as the main way to interact with a computer. It’s also known as the command shell, or simply “shell.” Windows has one, too, but it’s called the “command prompt” and is descended from the MS-DOS of the 1980s. Introduction To Linux Commands Mac, Linux and Windows computers today are mainly controlled through user-friendly feature-rich graphical user interfaces (GUIs), with menus, scroll bars and drag-and-drop interfaces. But all of the basic stuff can still be accomplished by typing text commands into the terminal or command prompt. Using Finder or Explorer to open a folder is akin to the cd command (for “change directory”). Viewing the contents of a folder is like ls (short for “list,” or dir in Microsoft’s command prompt). And there are hundreds more for moving files, editing files, launching applications, manipulating images, backing up and restoring stuff, and much more. Setup A Ubuntu VPS For Hosting Ruby On Rails Applications Let’s assume you have built a nice little Ruby on Rails application on your local development machine. Now it’s time for the application to go live. But where should you host this application? You know that you (or your client) do not have much money to spend, and so you look at the options. You notice right away that managed hosting of applications tends to be relatively expensive. Heroku is a good option, but it doesn’t give you storage space, and more importantly, it lacks full control. Luckily, you have a suitable alternative: a VPS. This tutorial will help you get through the steps required to set up an Ubuntu VPS that is capable of hosting (multiple) Ruby on Rails applications. This tutorial builds on part 1. We recommend that you follow that part first and use the same Ubuntu local development machine that you set up there to walk through this part. How To Set Up An Ubuntu Local Development Machine For Ruby On Rails So, you want to develop Ruby on Rails applications? While loads of (introductory) tutorials are available for developing Ruby on Rails applications, there seems to be some uncertainty about setting up a lean and up-to-date local development environment. Set Up An Ubuntu Local Development Machine For Ruby On Rails This tutorial will guide you through the steps of setting up an Ubuntu local development machine for Ruby on Rails. Part 2 of this tutorial, which will be published here later, will help you through the steps to set up an Ubuntu VPS. For now, knowing that VPS stands for virtual private server is sufficient. It will be able to host your newly developed Ruby on Rails applications. But let’s focus on the local development machine first. What To Do When Your Website Goes Down Have you ever heard a colleague answer the phone like this: "Good afterno… Yes… What? Completely?… When did it go down?… Really, that long?… We'll look into it right away… Yes, I understand… Of course… Okay, speak to you soon… Bye." The call may have been followed by some cheesy ’80s rock ballad coming from the speaker phone, interrupted by "Thank you for holding. You are now caller number 126 in the queue." That's your boss calling the hosting company's 24 hour "technical support" line. An important website has gone down, and sooner or later, heads will turn to the Web development corner of the office, where you are sitting quietly, minding your own business, regretting that you ever mentioned "Linux" on your CV. You need to take action. Your company needs you. Your client needs you. Here's what to do. Vi Cheat Sheet / Linux Terminal Cheat Sheet (PDF) We've been releasing many icon sets and WordPress themes on Smashing Magazine, yet today we are glad to announce the release of a bit different freebie. This post features a VI Help Sheet, a cheat sheet for the VI Editor, for all web-developers out there who are working on Linux. The help sheet was designed by GoSquared and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. [Links checked March/06/2017] The cheat sheet contains terminal commands for modes and controls, inserting text, cursor navigation, deleting text, searching and replacing. Download it. Print it. Stick it on the wall and get commanding. How To Develop Websites On Linux In this article we will look at tools that can help those of you who want to develop websites on a Linux platform, from powerful text editors to desktop and system features. How do you edit files remotely without FTP plug-ins? What are package managers, and why they are cool? In which Web browsers can you test your applications? Gedit Themed I wish I could cover many more topics: using the command line, basics of Vim, Nautilus features in detail, Nautilus scripting, neat command line tools, basic server configuration and many others. But if I addressed all of the issues that arise from time to time on the Internet, this article would turn into a small book. This isn't an article on "How to do X or Y on Linux" or "How to use [insert app name here]." And we cannot cover more comprehensive IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans, each of which requires separate articles. You probably already have some idea of how to find and install applications for your favorite distros. However, we will point you to the right place anyway to download, for example, scripts and plug-ins. So, let's begin! 6 Version Control Systems Reviewed ↑ Back to top
An U10 goalkeeper game to help develop their key skills A fun game for goalkeepers to help them challenge one another, and develop their key skills. EasiCoach U10 Goalkeeper Game 1. Set up a 10 x 10 yards area with a portable goal at each end. Put a goalkeeper in each goal and give each keeper four or five balls. 2. The goalkeepers take turns to kick towards the opposite goal and try to score. 3. The goalkeepers can move forward and around the area to retrieve any wayward balls. If they gather one close to the goal they can try and throw it into their opponent’s net. 4. You can encourage the goalkeepers to strike the ball more aggressively during this game, which not only gives them good shot stopping practice but also helps with goalkicking technique. To get your hands on all of the games and activities in our manual, EasiCoach Soccer Skills Activities U9-U10click here.
Make your own free website on Corporate Globalization Resistance CAFTA and the Scourge of Sweatshops by Global Exchange Increased trade is the best way to eradicate poverty, so-called free trade advocates say, because exports are the key to sustained economic growth. But in reality, "free trade" agreements that are supposed to increase the global standard of living actually undermine it -- through lowering workers' wages, eroding workers' rights, increasing unemployment, and creating a global 'race to the bottom' that pits workers against each other instead of promoting global worker solidarity. What Is a Sweatshop? According to the group Sweatshop Watch, • Poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards, • Arbitrary discipline, such as verbal or physical abuse, or Sweatshops and the New Global Economy For workers, the current system is a trap. The apparel manufacturers fear that if they raise their workers' wages, and therefore their prices to the U.S. retailers, the U.S. retailers will simply go someplace with even cheaper workers. The threat is real. Because the garment industry is so mobile—retailers can shift sourcing from one country to another in a matter of a fashion season—any country that raises its wages or enforces its workers' rights risks "pricing itself out of the market." That risk is what keeps wages low as long as the retail corporations demand the cheapest price possible. Isn't a bad job better than no job? Whenever a debate about corporate globalization and sweatshops arises, defenders of the status quo will almost always say: Sure a sweatshop is bad, but it gives people jobs they wouldn't have otherwise. The truth is that what sweatshops provide are not employment opportunities for workers, but exploitation opportunities for corporations. Wages and working conditions in sweatshops are so poor that workers remain in poverty even while fully employed. According to the National Labor Committee, a worker in El Salvador earns about 24 cents for each NBA jersey she makes. These same jerseys then sell in the U.S. for $140 each. The 60 cents an hour the Salvadoran NBA seamstresses earn covers only about a third of the cost of living, and even the Salvadoran government says this wage leaves a worker in "abject poverty." In poorer countries such as the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, the wages are even lower. Proponents of corporate globalization claim that southern countries have a comparative advantage at producing cheaper garments. Moving factories south is more 'efficient' because workers are 'willing' to work for less. What they're really saying, however, is that taking advantage of the desperation of poorer workers and countries - paying workers less, making them work longer hours, and preventing unionization - is more profitable for the corporations. Rather than happily accepting sweatshop conditions, garment workers in countries around the world have sought to improve their situation by trying to organize unions. Unfortunately those efforts are almost always crushed. Union organizers have been beaten, thrown in jail, blacklisted, and even killed. In some countries, such as Mexico, the government often cooperates with factory owners as they try to bust organizing drives. In a few countries with strong labor histories, such as Nicaragua and the Philippines, unions are tolerated, but not in the "free trade" zones where most sweatshops are located. Of the 30,000 workers working in Nicaragua's state-sponsored Free Trade Zone, only 3 percent are unionized. In these manufacturing zones, workers are expected to leave their liberty at the factory gates. "We're not against foreign investment in Nicaragua," a worker there has told human rights groups. "But we are against exploitation." By exploiting workers in sweatshops, corporations drive down working conditions for all workers and prevent countries from pursuing a real model of development that would improve opportunities for their citizens. When corporations pressure countries to keep wages low, ignore domestic labor laws, violate international environmental codes, bust unions, and drive down working conditions globally, they are no longer taking advantage of poor working conditions -- they are creating and perpetuating them. So-called "free trade" agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted in 1994, have exacerbated the race-to-the-bottom in working conditions. NAFTA is, in a sense, an "investors' rights" treaty. That is, it gives corporate investors new abilities to move production facilities and finished goods and services across international borders while providing guarantees that governments won't get in the way of business. Countries have traditionally used tools like tariffs, or taxes on imports, as well as quotas, which are outright limits on the volume of imports, to help protect local industries from foreign competition. Lower tariff rates and the elimination of import quotas make it easier -- and cheaper -- for corporations to move goods and services across borders. At the same time, NAFTA's rules have given corporations assurances that government regulations won't interfere with their operations. NAFTA gave corporations new legal rights to sue national governments for the enactment of policies that can undermine their profits. Corporations have been happy to use the new advantages given to them by "free trade" agreements, especially when facing organized work forces in the wealthier countries. According to a study conducted under the auspices of NAFTA's labor side agreement, 90% of 400 plant closings or threatened plant closings in the United States in a five-year period occurred illegally in the face of a union organizing drive. CAFTA -- a Raw Deal for Workers The Corporate Sell-Job on CAFTA CAFTA proponents are attempting to sell the agreement with the argument that it would benefit garment workers in both the U.S. and Central America, who currently face competition from cheaper labor costs in China. The blatant abuse of workers' rights and widespread sweatshop conditions in China are well documented. The World Trade Organization's Multi Fiber Agreement expired on January 1, 2005, abolishing a global quota system in textile production. So corporations like Gap, Nike, and Liz Claiborne, Wal-Mart, and industry groups including the American Apparel & Footwear Association claim that Central America needs CAFTA to keep its sweatshop jobs from moving to China. Fighting for Work with Dignity If CAFTA becomes reality, corporations would gain more powers to act without being accountable to their workers, the communities in which they operate, or the public in general. The corporations' gain would come at workers' expense, as more and more people can find only jobs that sacrifice dignity and provide no opportunity. But CAFTA and sweatshops aren't inevitable. People in communities across the U.S. are saying no to sweatshops, and yes to work with dignity by passing living wage resolutions and requiring that government purchasing dollars only go to companies that meet basic labor standards. Collaboration between Southern workers and Northern workers and consumers has led to substantial victories including monitoring of factories and creation of "sweat-free" campuses and institutions. Pressure from consumers and activists has forced apparel companies to adopt and enforce codes of conduct for their factories. To find alternatives to sweatshop clothing, visit Global Exchange's anti-sweatshop campaign. For more information on CAFTA and labor issues: Citizens Trade Campaign Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch Get Involved! SPEAK OUT to your Member of Congress by calling 202-225-3121 and urging them to vote NO on CAFTA. Find helpful resources and more ideas at our Get Involved section. CONTACT Global Exchange at 415-255-7296 or write for more information. SIGN UP for our weekly Global Justice listserve. SUPPORT the movement for global justice by becoming a member of Global Exchange.
Childhood Depression Predisposing Life Events A few examples of life events that can predispose a child to depression include an early family history of abuse by a parent; a negative life event such as the loss of a parent; childhood grief; and disturbed, hostile relationships in the family. Many other social problems and negative life events do not seem to cause suicidal behavior. Social Factors There are a number of social risk factors for depression in children. One social risk factor is the very nature of adolescence itself, with its desire to experiment with drugs and alcohol. Conflict or confusion about sexual orientation can be another factor in adolescent suicide. Also, characteristics such as perfectionism, impulsiveness, inhibition, and isolation can all lead to thoughts of suicide. Mental Problems Ninety-five percent of young people who commit suicide have a mental disorder. These mental disorders usually include major depression, schizophrenia, alcoholism, drug dependence, and conduct disorder. However, most children with mental problems do not commit suicide. "Contagion" is an expression that describes the phenomenon of young people identifying with others who have committed suicide. Some young people who are vulnerable may copy suicidal behavior. For example, friends of a cancer patient who has committed suicide could potentially be at a greater risk of committing suicide themselves -- and should be offered support and counseling. The Availability of Deadly Weapons A gun in the house can allow suicide to occur. Motivating Events The diagnosis of cancer can cause an at-risk person to attempt suicide. When a person attempts suicide, there are usually other motivating events present, such as a mental disorder, other life stresses, an upsetting event such as a failure in school, or a life-threatening disease such as cancer. Suicide prevention must include individual evaluation; referral to the correct health professionals; treatment with medications; and both individual counseling and family therapy. A Dose of Reassurance for Parents of Picky Eaters Depression in Children Terms of Use Advertise with Us Contact Us About eMedTV Privacy Policy Copyright © 2006-2017 Clinaero, Inc.
Monday, 7 August 2017 Our Common Immigrant Origins We all descend from immigrants! That’s not really an astounding or radical viewpoint. Humans have migrated to areas where they could find better conditions to live and survive since there were humans. Whatever we might think in North America, everyone here descends from someone who moved here, whether during last year or in the last 15,000 years. I am a second generation Canadian. My ancestors, not so far back, were immigrants. I am just starting to learn why they packed up and moved themselves and, in many cases, their entire families to North America. Most of us don’t usually think of English-speaking people (or early French-speaking people in Canada) as immigrants but they were – every bit as much as more recent additions to our national mosaic of Asians, Africans or other Europeans. We reserve that distinction to those displaced by wars or Mother Nature. Some of them we have called them refugees. When I was growing up, people coming to Canada were mainly from Eastern Europe, parts of which had been devastated by a long and dirty war. Many were fleeing despotic, primarily Communist regimes set up following the conflict and that inflicted even more calamity. The migrants sought safety, opportunity and freedom. Recent arrivals to Canada and the US in the 1950s were often given unflattering labels, first because they did not speak the common language of the regions they settled in, but also, I suspect, from locals’ fear about how their communities might change and whether jobs would be lost to those who might work for less. Or maybe just from plain bigotry. What we refer to as aboriginal groups – or First Nations in Canada – did not actually originate in the Americas either. They migrated from Asia when conditions permitted during the last major Ice Age. That only makes their ancestors immigrants of a much earlier period, not different or better. In many parts of the New World, existing societies were demolished by invaders, largely from Europe, who came much later. Of course present-day Europeans also descend from immigrants who came into the region from Southwest Asia and Africa a few hundred thousand years ago, as the climate and physical environment of those regions changed for the worse. East Asians also originated in Africa. Within Europe there has also been a great deal of internal migration during the past few thousand years again, when degradation of habitat necessitated moves. The event called the Migration Period or the Barbarian Invasion occurred when climate changed from warm (Roman Climate Optimum) to cold (Dark Ages Cold Period). Some newcomers made uneasy peace with groups that were inhabitants of the lands wanted for settlement; most, though, took the areas by force. That’s not unusual in terms of human history. There have always been conflicts between migrants and inhabitants going back thousands of years. Perhaps distrust of people coming later is ingrained in our DNA, as part of a survival mechanism. Or maybe it’s just that fear factor humans seem to have in abundance. Such attitudes are certainly part of many cultures around the world. These days, established citizens use the ruse that newly arrived groups will be a burden on social programs. The facts are clear for North America in particular, though – incoming groups of people have always added to the culture, wealth and development of regions in which they have settled. Family history studies, besides incorporating analyses of genetic relationships, are really the study of immigration – when did people move, why did they move, where did they go, what method of travel did they employ and how long did they stay. While this is more apropos for the Americas or Australia, even local regions in Europe share similar stories as people migrated within their country of origin to places where work was more plentiful and life might be better. So – we are all immigrants or descendants of immigrants. The only distinction between us in that regard is when our forebears arrived in the places where we live.
George Brock 21st Century Media and Journalism 2017-06-26T06:57:56Z George Brock <![CDATA[What editors worry about today (notes from Newsgeist)]]> 2017-06-26T06:57:56Z 2017-06-26T06:57:56Z George Brock <![CDATA[A little (election) manifesto for Facebook]]> 2017-05-31T10:34:16Z 2017-05-30T07:15:33Z • The ease with which the origins and sources of information can now be disguised. Deception of this sort of course existed before digital technology, but the ability to capture, manipulate, copy and distribute information makes deliberate fakery frictionless and cheap to do and is hard to spot. Macedonian teenagers inventing stories can be debunked almost as fast, but subtle distortions like this or this are very much harder to spot or disrupt. George Brock <![CDATA[Two faces of Facebook]]> 2017-04-20T08:49:10Z 2017-04-20T08:49:10Z Not a single reference to any risk of bad consequences. Do humans lie, manipulate and deceive? They surely do, and were doing it long before online social networks came along. Do humans aim to present the best picture of themselves to others? Yes. But making fiction easier by making picture-faking frictionless runs risks. Societies rely, perhaps to a greater extent than we realize, on a shared grasp of reality and truth. That does not mean that we don’t argue about it; healthy societies fight verbal battles about the details and interpretation of reality all the time. But most of those arguments rest on the shared assumption that someone is right and someone is wrong. Time, events or evidence will eventually tilt understanding towards one version or another. Truth is iterative, but it is mostly discoverable. That is the legacy of the Enlightenment, which superseded a monopoly of truth previously held by kings and priests. There are three dangers in the route Facebook is taking: • Preferring pictures words. Much of the information we consume is now audio-visual and it is generally more attractive that the written. But words usually encode and transmit more complex meanings than images and sound. If words becomes less important, keeping an eye on awkward, complex truth is harder. • We have been accustomed to being able to tell from the source whether something is true or false. Recent discoveries about ‘fake news’ have taught us that this isn’t the reliable distinction we might have imagined that it was. The root of this problem is that the authenticity and origin of online information is so easy to manipulate. • Boosting the ability to blur the truth will, over the long term, weaken respect for what is accurate, reliable and true. Societies in which this happens will be the losers. Facebook gives signals that it is waking up to the long-term dangers they may be creating. Only days before the F8 conference, a sizeable team led by the network’s news executives Adam Mosseri and Campbell Brown had been in Perugia for the International Journalism Festival trying to make clear that they were listening (an account by Buzzfeed’s Craig Silverman here). Information is changing in transformative ways. Facebook’s excitement about technological possibilities hasn’t yet been matched by its grasp of the political, ethical and psychological challenges that it keeps throwing up. George Brock <![CDATA[Cut clutter, clarify and care about every word: Robert Silvers, RIP]]> 2017-03-22T11:11:28Z 2017-03-22T11:10:53Z I’m calling attention to this, of course, because I’m now scared that the NYRB will not be the same without Silvers. I can only hope. George Brock <![CDATA[Dear Google, your algorithm went walkabout]]> 2017-03-06T12:06:22Z 2017-03-06T12:06:22Z George Brock <![CDATA[Mr Zuckerberg’s education has further to go]]> 2017-05-19T06:06:39Z 2017-02-20T07:03:56Z Here’s a mystery about Facebook. The people in California who run the world’s largest social network (1.9bn users at last count) have been trying to explain and defend what they do. In an essay of more than 5,000 words written in a style which reads as if it’s the work of many hands, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg explains his wish to build a ‘global community’. The puzzle is this. If I were marking this as a student essay I’d be grading ‘Building Global Community’ as a B-minus. The terms are vague, obvious questions begged are ignored and historical context is missing. But Zuckerberg and his colleagues are not fools. They have built one of the world’s most extraordinary companies ($8.8bn of revenue last quarter). They are curious and inventive. Why is their grasp of ideas, politics and history so feeble? A cynic would say: it’s obvious that they only say what suits the company’s commercial interest. They must sound public-spirited because the fake news controversies before and after Donald Trump’s election have put them in the firing line. Look at Facebook’s new proposals to help news and journalism – a more or less straight copy of Google’s ‘Digital News Initiative’. This is what hi-tech giants do when they become unpopular: they turn a firehose of money at the media in the hope that its pundits will stop pinning blame on them. This doesn’t explain Zuckerberg’s manifesto. It may be written in an oddly opaque language which never seems to ask what its key words (‘we’, ‘community’, ‘empower’) actually mean, but I’m left with the strong impression of someone who wants to do right. Zuckerberg has gradually acknowledged – and made fully explicit in this document – that Facebook has responsibilities that are moral and democratic. For a hi-tech company, that is a significant step So in the spirit of previous posts (see here and here), some suggestions for the founder’s study group in Menlo Park: 1. Start with vocabulary and meanings. Begin with the word ‘community’. If a community exists not just to be but to do something, it needs a form of organisation. That form of organisation allocates power to decide. At its simplest, it might be naming the person who makes the decision when the talking has to stop. Decisions may be made by votes. Small or large, each conclusion is reached by a system designed to deal with conflicts of interest. 2. In the digital age, algorithms are a source not only of wealth but of power. The decoupling of the generation of news (by journalists) from the means of its distribution (social networks) is a major shift in information power. What a Facebook user sees is an interplay between strategies set by humans, algorithms which they design and the information which the software accumulates about an individual user’s preferences. So the distribution of power in ths new relationship is subtle, but it is still power. Networks have power which other institutions and organisations don’t. The giants of Silicon Valley have, simply by virtue of their scale, informational power which is unprecedented. Digital technology re-routes information at a speed and on a scale previously unknown. We are only just getting a handle on where and how power has been shifted by those opportunities. Private companies rarely admit their power, but to write – as Zuckerberg does – as if Facebook was a benign, self-governing collective with no decisions about how to use its power is to deny a reality plain to see. 3. Politics is the study of the distribution and use of power in societies or (as Zuckerberg would prefer) communities. ‘Building Global Community’ talks about civics but not about politics. Power is barely mentioned. But the word makes one nebulous appearance early on: This account of history misses the element of choice and competing ideas in how these ‘social infrastructures’ were designed. Politics in the developed world from the 19th century onward can be written as the contest between two aspirations: equality of economic outcome and equality of opportunity. Iterating how the best kind of society is made is not frictionless, pre-ordained or automatic: most societies argue endlessly over what is ‘just’. 1. There is a difference between people exchanging information and a state. There is a difference between people sharing information and a set of rules. Does Facebook want to be a global government or a movement? Or neither? 2. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you’re wrestling with tension between the interests of the individual and collective decisions. Facebook has always from the start been organized around satisfying individual choice (and making money from an advertising engine built round that). Now the network is forced to look at the balance between free choice and the decisions of a community. Politics has revolved around that for centuries. Don’t assume that artificial intelligence will crack it soon. 3. If you want to build a ‘global community’, you may need to decide whether its design is made by reason or emotion. People share things on social media which move or excite them. I write a post which attacks I get more hits; if I write on-the-one-hand-on-the-other, I get fewer. If Facebook wants to do good, the instinctive, emotional action of sharing which drives so much of its business model may have to give way to reasoning the best solution and the way to get to it. 4. Reasoning improves with diverse viewpoints. Zuckerberg’s essay contains one colossal sleight of hand which ought to come back to haunt him. Discussing ‘filter bubbles’ and fake news he says: “Social media already provides more diverse viewpoints than traditional media ever has.” This carefully written formulation is, strictly, true. It might be more accurate to say that digital technology provided the opportunity for millions of bloggers, tweeters and networkers to publish opinions. But the omission here is the individual, not the aggregate, experience of social networks. The individual’s feed need contain no diversity at all and often doesn’t. Zuckerberg says that in news Facebook will try to help its users ‘see a more complete picture’. 6. The public sphere in a democracy is a peaceful battleground for competing ideas. Those systems usually provide for one set of ideas to win out at elections (and less often in referendums). Democracy requires citizens to rank ideas. The idea of the ‘public interest’ is a utilitarian idea: it rests on an assumption that chosen people (often politicians or judges) can estimate the greatest benefit to the greatest number. Voters may listen to politicians and pundits for advice. The idea of expertise is out of fashion, but when people do find the established media useful it may be because it surfaces facts or opinions which people want to learn. Some of this information is more insightful, more accurate and more valuable than other bits. 8. It’s just possible that in future centuries humans will look back at the period from the 18th to 21st centuries and think how odd it was that people learnt about the wider world from information intermediaries who were known as journalists. I don’t think that would be a good or even likely development (see here), but just suppose it for a moment. Try the thought exercise of imagining what the public sphere might need if there were no journalists. Any society that wished to deliberate or decide anything from rules for the ingredients of sausages to space travel would need to try to ensure that its citizens were literate in how to distinguish fact from fiction, knew how to apply tests and skepticism to what they were told and could separate emotion from reason. Or I would hope that they would think these skills useful. In short, societies would have to educate people about how they can recognise or discover the truth. Whatever may happen to journalism’s struggle to find way of persuading people to pay for it, such civic education would be good in its own right. Would Facebook help? 9. Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto reawoke gossip that he might be considering a run for political office. I’ve no more idea about his ambitions than the next person. But if a mission to save the world isn’t a political aim, what is? But he could certainly use some political education. George Brock <![CDATA[Zuckerberg: news ought to be ‘authentic’ and ‘meaningful’]]> 2016-11-14T12:55:41Z 2016-11-14T12:47:06Z Decoding this latest text from the moutaintop, I’d reckon: George Brock <![CDATA[News on Facebook: clever people still not (quite) getting it]]> 2016-10-24T09:28:42Z 2016-10-24T06:58:11Z Six weeks after unleashing a small tornado of criticism for mistakenly taking down a legendary news picture, Facebook’s top honchos have responded to the criticisms they attracted and switched policy. Their global ‘community standards’ will be adjusted to allow exceptions for ‘newsworthy’ material. So say Justin Osofsky and Joel Kaplan, two Facebook Veeps, in a blog post. This is the key paragraph and the entire description of the tests they will use: On the surface, this is fine and I’m glad that Facebook has learnt from its recent experience. But the surface is the problem. If the Facebookers don’t dig under he surface of these brief, bland phrases soon, they will rapidly find themselves up to their armpits in more controversies. Last weekend’s flare-up was a reported internal row over whether or not Trump-supporting posts should be taken down because they qualify as hate speech. At the rate Facebook seems to be thinking about these dilemmas at the moment, there will be plenty more of this to come. Some of the questions begged but not answered by Osofsky and Kaplan’s short blogpost: • Facebook frequently says that is a ‘global community’ for ‘all ideas’. This is to confuse community with coalition. A platform which allows people to exchange and communicate has an obvious potential value. But it does not create a community simply by existing. Communication may, over time and in certain conditions, create community but it does not happen automatically. • A platform can be shared by people with radically different ideas. Osofsky and Kaplan acknowledge that ideas about newsworthiness aren’t the same the world over (‘Whether an image is newsworthy or historically significant is highly subjective…‘) but leave it there. • Journalism is inextricably entangled with the battle for ideas. Indeed, journalism is a battle of ideas and always has been. It’s first of all a battle of ideas about what journalism should be for and how it should work. Journalism is a platform for ideas which collide, otherwise known as argument. Ideas about how journalism should work alter across both time, space and cultures. (Any Facebooker looking for a quick history of ideas summary could consult the first three chapters of, Out of Print, the book on the right of this post, but needless to say there are dozens of others). How we know what we know is something which will always be contested in all societies; different societies will reach different answers. • All this seems to lead to a simple conclusion. At least as far as news goes, Facebook isn’t going to stay one uniform, global community. An attempt to apply its rules to news worldwide hasn’t worked and those rules are now, apparently, going to morph into a patchwork adapted to local ideas. • But the cardinal point for Facebookers to remember is that even changing like that will not insulate the network from the battle of ideas. Think now about what that will crop up next. For a start, try defining ‘the public interest’… George Brock <![CDATA[A few clues to how Facebook should think about news]]> 2016-09-27T06:27:40Z 2016-09-27T06:15:53Z When power is asymmetric, the initiative lies with the greater power, in this case Facebook. I’m also assuming that there might be, embedded somewhere in Facebook’s clumsy, tech-driven corporation, people who’d like to handle news better. Eight pieces of advice for Facebook: 1. Ignore the debate about whether you’re a ‘media’ company. You can make a perfectly arguable case that you aren’t: you don’t make documentaries, you don’t write stories. You’re just a platform. Posing this question is like asking how to make moonbeams out of cucumbers: nothing to do with the real issue. 2. Accept that, whether ‘media’ or not, you do have responsibilities. Democratic, civic, moral, editorial (whatever) responsibilities for the information which passes through your traffic management system. Like it or no, big social networks are part of the ‘infrastructure of free speech’. In other words, you have a role (and therefore responsibilities) in what people know and how they know it. By the way, the ‘infrastructure of free speech’ phrase was coined by Professor Jack Balkin of Yale. Useful guy to consult if you haven’t talked to him already. 3. You’ll reply that you already meet your legal responsibilities for content and they vary all over the world. Not enough. Your informational power requires a measure of accountability and transparency. Your failure to think fast enough about this has got you into trouble and it will get worse. Think harder about ways to tell, share and debate more of what you do, sooner. You’re already admitting mistakes more promptly. 4. Stop being afraid of ideas. You can’t avoid being involved in the accelerating battle of ideas about algorithms, information power, governance, law and journalism. You are at the heart of this debate whether you admit it or not. You have bright people with deep knowledge of most of these: get them out into public discussion. Don’t pretend that ideas about democracy, information and values don’t clash and collide; they do. 5. Aside from the odd monstering along the way, you will not only be better understood, but you will learn. Look at Google’s experience in the past dozen years. Once, Google denied it had anything to do with news or the media; it was, Googlies said, just a technical platform. Then along came someone new at the top (Eric Schmidt, I guess) who said to his senior colleagues something along these lines: ‘This stuff about how we’re nothing to do with the media? It’s bullshit. Change the approach.’ Some people say ‘you need an editor’ but even editors use guidelines to help their teams be both useful (to society) and consistent. Guidelines express and enforce priorities among values. And take seriously the discussion over people living in ‘filter bubbles’: if real research shows that the nonsense of the Trump campaign is being believed because of social networks…. 6. You will have to abandon the silliest of your ideas: that all information is equally valuable. The ability provided by digital technology to acquire and share unprecedented amounts of information is a truly extraordinary advance. But the claim, implied by much Facebook marketing and self-defence, that all information is of equal value is foolish. I do not want Facebook to give special rights to journalists or journalism, but I do want you to understand how not to interfere with the circulation of information which should be known in the public interest. You may be told that to use such a yardstick is ‘elitist’. Ignore this. Journalism says: ‘I know this and you should know it too’. That is an inherently unequal transaction and could be described (however wrongly) as ‘elitist’. 7. Yes, this agenda might all distract the company from some other objectives. It will be worth it in the end. 8. Don’t expect to be popular. You are eviscerating the business model of much-loved news brands. Get used to it. George Brock <![CDATA[Politicians and Twitter: not the apocalypse]]> 2015-12-09T09:20:35Z 2015-12-09T09:20:35Z twitterPolitical commentator Steve Richards argued in the Independent yesterday that “political leadership is impossible in the age of social media”. He gave a gripping tweet-by-tweet account of how Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to impose his will on the Labour Party of Syrian airstrikes had been undone by dissent spread on Twitter. Richards concluded that the leadership of political parties, as previously understood, can no longer be done then parties will change shape. This is quite the wrong lesson to draw. The Labour Party is in a neurotic mess and it would be in one if Corbyn had been elected its leader in the age of the quill pen. The party’s membership is out of line with a significant segment of its MPs. Until one of these bodies brings the other into line, the mess, the rebellions and the tweets will not stop. Communications media have changed often, switching the conditions and context in which politicians operate and requiring new skills in the armoury of anyone intending to lead. Come to that, political parties have changed across time as the gains to be made by bossing MPs have grown. New communications platforms are usually greeted with wild over-optimism (the expression of opinion is being democratised!), followed by the discovery that they can be used for bad as well as good (trolling, twitter mobs). That see-saw is most often followed by some restraint under rules or self-restraint which finds the platform take its place in normal life. In parallel, politicians adjust. Many of them adjust slowly because they pay little attention to the uses of technology. But eventually a leader with enough mastery of communications persuasion emerges near the top and exercises enough domination to get his colleagues to pause and think before they open their mouths or peck at their iPhones. Even in the age of Twitter this will happen. Just hasn’t happened in the Corbyn Labour Party so far. George Brock <![CDATA[The age of polymorphous media]]> 2015-12-08T08:19:08Z 2015-12-08T08:19:08Z 1. The decline in the power and clout of big journalism institutions still has some way to run. This is less an observation about the decay of business models than it is about shifts in the balance of power made by technical innovation. Established news brands with large, expensive newsrooms have mostly cut down those costs and reduced their losses even if they still do take a slice of advertising revenue out of proportion to the number of their readers and viewers. But the real change is continuing decline of leverage. Politicians, advertisers, readers and viewers still attend to what they say and write, but they don’t have to. There are too many alternatives available. This post by John Herrman of The Awl gives a (lengthy) series of American examples drawn from the early phases of the US presidential election and sport. Both politicians and sports stars are making different calculations about when, how – and if – to grant access to journalists. Big, mainstream media names are losing out. Watch the money: in 2017, digital advertising worldwide will probably outstrip TV for the first time. The disrupters are now arriving at the gates of the great powers in TV. 2. News media are polymorphous, endlessly changing shape. Media power, once very concentrated, has been fragmenting into smaller pieces for several decades and is now subject to successive waves of change which don’t stop. No sooner have an editor and CEO woken up to the fact that more of their output is looked at on mobile devices than any other way than they realise that news distribution is now in the hands of Facebook and Apple. The they have to start thinking about what virtual reality technology means for them. Predictions about the context in which journalism operates are routinely upset. Newsroom have to be both bold (open-minded, experimental, risk-taking) and conservative (sticking firmly to what they do distinctively and well) at the same time. Adaptability has limits. Buzzfeed has done brilliantly by making content which people want to share, giving rise to predictions that media are becoming “homeless” and super-syndicators who don’t care whether or not the users goes to the site. But this kind of flexibility needs to include a journalistic purpose: telling people what they may not want to know but need to learn. (See 4 below). 3. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the greatest single change in the digital age is not the velocity of information, but its quantity. Journalists manage abundance. This means that the impact of any single piece of journalism is reduced. It also means that the value of any single item to most users is less. Because the supply of information has increased and that – given that demand for news/opinion is steady – means the price falls. Have a look at one of the most interesting micropayment experiments begun in Europe, Blendle, and see the average price per article. Ten cents. 4. Given the rate of innovation, it’s hardly surprising that a lot of reflection about journalism and how it changes is gizmo-driven. Giant tech companies such as Facebook to claim that because they are not editorial companies (in the sense that they don’t generate content, they just process it), that they make no decisions of editorial importance. The first claim is technically correct, the second is baloney: Facebook certainly exercises editorial discretion. The wish of these companies not be saddled with the burdensome responsibilities of caring about the consequences of information they handle will not be granted. Gradually and reluctantly over the past few years, Google has conceded that, yes, it takes decisions which affect the flow of information between people. Facebook, which tweaks its algorithms and edits according to the laws of various countries and its own rulebook, has not even reached the point of admitting that it has editorial responsibilities in carrying news. I write this not to encourage people to bitch at the tech giants, but to encourage their users to push these companies to ask for help in growing up. Editors, those throwbacks to an earlier era, have useful advice for the young sovereigns of cyberspace. 5. Change can be divided into the adaptive or operational sort and the transformative kind. Digital, needless to say, is transformative for journalism (and of many things beyond). A symptom which signals deep change is a shift in the power balance. Simple example: terrestrial television channels have never been so powerful since cable and satellite channels arrived in the 1980s. An oligopoly of attention-owners was undone: the viewing figures for the two main evening TV bulletins in the UK are around half what they were before TV channels began multiplying. New competitors now come from unexpected directions. Any large organisation can hire creative and articulate talent to become a media organisation. LinkedIn may be making a poor fist of becoming a power in business journalism, but if you follow extreme sports you follow Red Bull’s specialised coverage. If Atom Bank go into financial reporting or Uber into travel journalism, watch out. The only way for mainstream media to deal with this is by relentlessly rigorous focus on what a newsroom produces that no rival can match. Why has the Boston Globe started online “verticals” to cover Boston politics, the Catholic church and the Redsox? Because their experience and expertise can dominate these topics. Amidst this kind of change, ruthless focus on added value is power. Doing things by tradition or habit is disaster. The digital era began a couple of decades ago and gurus debating the “future of journalism” instantly divided into two camps: digital devotees and mainstreamers. Digital devotees believed that means of communication would sweep away the established media and all its tawdry underperformance, corruption and failure to hold power to account. Mainstreamers thought that the internet and all its works were grossly overhyped and mourned the death of the perfect vehicle for original journalism, newspapers. (Some wry commentary on this black vs white view here from the wise Nick Lemann). Time has passed and it’s increasingly obvious how little that old-versus-new story told us. The reality has turned out to be much more complex, shifting and interesting. Polymorphous in fact. George Brock <![CDATA[Corbyn, the law of unintended consequences and fixed terms]]> 2015-10-01T10:41:02Z 2015-10-01T10:38:34Z A modest political reflection prompted by the Labour Party conference which ended yesterday. I’m beginning to think that David Cameron, the UK’s Conservative prime minister, and Nick Clegg, whose Liberal Democrats were in coalition with Cameron 2010-15, laid a trap which is only now closing. The effect of an obscure piece of legislation which fixes a five-year term for each elected parliament, passed by the Cameron-Clegg coalition in 2011, is poised to do terrible things to the Labour Party, which remains in opposition. The Labour Party has elected, under new rules which give ordinary members much greater power, a bearded man of the left who has no experience of running anything. Jeremy Corbyn is going to spend the next few months at least fighting battles inside his own party over policies on everything from Saudi Arabia to nuclear power stations. Only yesterday his declaration that he would never, as Prime Minister, allow the use of nuclear weapons was contradicted from the party’s conference rostrum by his newly-appointed defence spokesman. Labour is in this spectacular mess because its grassroots members rebelled against the party’s hierarchy and culture. But its members and their leaders are comforting themselves that they have time to sort all this out before it really begins to matter. Even if it takes a couple of years for the left and right of the party to agree, you can hear themselves saying to eachother, the election will still be three years away. Andy Burnham, one of the leadership candidates Corbyn defeated, can be heard saying just that in this convoluted and defensive interview. I don’t think politics works like that. An extended interval of incoherence will register with voters, even if followed by a better-led approach in years or months just before an election. Labour’s rank and file, at a loss to know what to do with Corbyn at the helm, are taking refuge in an illusion. In short, Labour is making disarray worse. If Cameron and/or Clegg foresaw what damage that a fixed-term parliament could inflict on a badly-led party, they are Machiavellian geniuses indeed. George Brock <![CDATA[A few quick takeaways on the Reuters Institute Digital News report]]> 2015-06-16T17:08:58Z 2015-06-16T17:08:58Z 3. The UK comes lowest in the table measuring whether people are prepared to pay for news. To some degree, this must reflect the huge reach of the BBC’s new output. I mention this because media analysts are deeply reluctant to draw attention to this connection for fear of being branded “anti-BBC”. I’m pro-BBC, but the Corporation’s licence fee is a £4bn intervention in the market for news and entertainment and it would be astonishing if spending on that scale – however popular – did not have some downsides. The scale of BBC news and the fact that’s it’s free at point of consumption has probably had some effect on discouraging private-sector companies from developing their own digital news. This survey suggests also that the massive reach of BBC news has dampened willingness to pay for news online. 4. The speed with which online consumption can change and with which the unexpected occurs serves to remind us that the recurrent changes brought by digital are by no means finished. Once upon a time, legacy news providers such as newspapers made two quite wrong assumptions: that online journalism would come into existence, complete and full-formed, quickly and that online news publishing would closely resemble print, if quicker and cheaper. This report is stuffed with facts which disprove both beliefs. 5. Enormous numbers of people have installed “ad-blocking” software: 47% in the US and 39% in the UK. 6. From the discussion at the report’s launch: the growth of the news consumption of mobile devices “snuck up on a lot of people” (Aaron Pilhofer, The Guardian)…Online users are making stay-or-go decisions every few seconds and everything has to be focussed and organised to make them stay (Robert Shrimsley, George Brock <![CDATA[Andy Mitchell and Facebook’s weird state of denial about news]]> 2015-04-25T17:14:28Z 2015-04-20T09:27:43Z I then asked Mitchell (it’s at 54.36 here) whether he thought Facebook was in anyway accountable to its community for the integrity of its news feed. Mitchell, by now looking pretty pissed off, repeated that Facebook wanted people to have a “great experience”, that the feed gives them “what they’re interested in” and that Facebook’s feed should be “complementary” to other news sources. In short, he didn’t begin to answer the question. The claim that Facebook doesn’t think about journalism has to be false. And, at least in the long run, it won’t work; in the end these issues have to faced. Facebook is a private sector company which has grown and made billions by very successfully keeping more people on its site for longer and longer. I can imagine that any suggestion that there are responsibilities which distract from that mission must seem like a nuisance. It was difficult to pass a day in Perugia without being reminded of how Facebook is making (usually via its algorithms) news decisions every hour. Someone reminded me of the survey in the US which showed large percentages of respondents quite unaware that Facebook has an adjustable formula which determines what their newsfeed shows. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen mentioned in a presentation the disagreements which temporarily took news from the Danish media company Berlinske off Facebook (at issue was a picture of some hippies in the 1960s frolicking nude in the sea). There was another row in Denmark when Facebook objected to a picture of Michelangelo’s (also nude) statue of David. An editor for the Turkish daily Milliyet reminded me that Facebook has strict rules about how Kurdish flags are seen on its feed in Turkey. I’m hardly the first person to be struck by the weird attitude Facebook strikes. I re-read an excellent post by Jay Rosen on this theme. And there are wider discussions of the responsibilities of the search and social giants by Martin Moore and Emily Bell. Update 21/4/15: La Repubblica asked Andy Mitchell pretty much the same question (penultimate one in this Q&A in English) and got the same kind of opaque answer. 22/4/15: Jay Rosen (see just above) added some more commentary (“Facebook please stop with this”), making the good point that people are curious about Facebook’s news handling precisely because it is not editing of the kind which shaped pre-digital media. 23/4/15: Italian journalism student Enrico Bergamini interviewed me about Facebook and news. George Brock <![CDATA[Little rays of sunshine…journalism in Spain and voting registration]]> 2015-03-16T09:10:26Z 2015-03-16T09:10:26Z
10 Cancer-causing foods to be avoided. In today’s world everybody wants to live healthy, so for that everyone must be aware of the food they are consuming in daily life. Food plays a very important role in the well-being of an individual. Today I’ll discuss those foods that may contain carcinogen or are suspected as cancer-causing foods. 1. Potato Chips:Potato Chips It is the most commonly consumed snacks around the world, indeed kids enjoy this snack very much and want to eat in their spare time. However, potato chips have various preservatives, artificial colors, and artificial flavors which may affect your body negatively. Also, potato chips are fried at a very high temperature which causes them to make a carcinogen compound called acrylamide which is also found in cigarettes 2. Processed Meats:Processed Meat We all notice processed meat sold in the deli section of supermarkets and grocery store but many of us don’t know that these processed meats contain chemicals and preservatives like sodium nitrates which make it appealing and fresh but is also well-known carcinogens. 3. Microwave Popcorns: Conventional microwave popcorn bags are lined with carcinogen chemical known as perfluorooctanoic (PFOA). PFOA is the known dangerous chemical for women because it is linked to infertility in women. It also increases the risk of liver, kidney, bladder and testicular cancers. 4. GMO’s: GMO Rice GMO’s are commonly known as genetically modified organisms. Such foods have been modified by chemicals in order to match the growing demand in the market, which is not possible for an ordinary food. GMO’s foods can increase the heart problems and other immune-related disorders which may lead to cancer. 5. Vegetable Oils: cooking oilAll vegetable oils contain high levels of Omega-6 fatty acids. An access of this fatty acids causes health problems especially skin cancer. 6. Soda Pop: soda canSodas are known to irritate the stomach and make those people with ulcers experience more pain. Sodas contains artificial colors and chemicals like derivative 4-methylimidazole which is the leading cause of cancer. 7. Refined Sugars:sugar For a long time, refined sugar has been known for spiking the insulin level in the body but it may also be a preferable food for cancer cells to grow in the body. 8. Pickled or Smoked Food: The most commonly used preservative in the pickles and the highly salted food is nitrates. Although nitrates do not itself causes cancer but once they are inside the body, they get converted into N-nitroso composites. N-nitroso composite is associated with a greater increase the risk of developing cancers. 9. Farmed Salmon:salmon Farmed salmon is raised with unnatural and contaminated diet and in the closed spaces. These fishes are also given the antibiotics, pesticides and other known carcinogens. Farmed salmon contains high levels of mercury and cancer-causing dioxins. 10. Canned Tomatoes: tomato pasteFresh tomatoes are always considered as a cancer-fighting food. And at the same time on the other hand canned tomatoes because of the high acidity level can extract the BPA present in the can itself. These canned tomatoes having BPA content is the most carcinogenic food consumed in everyday life. So it’s always better to opt for healthier, natural food alternatives and avoid cancer-causing food for well-being.
Standard Article The Impact of Gene Duplication on Human Genome Evolution 1. James A Cotton Published Online: 14 MAR 2008 DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0020841 How to Cite Cotton, J. A. 2008. The Impact of Gene Duplication on Human Genome Evolution. eLS. . Author Information 1. University of London, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary, London, UK Publication History 1. Published Online: 14 MAR 2008 Gene duplication has had a significant impact on all genomes and the human genome is no exception, as gene duplication contributes much of the raw material from which natural selection shapes novel genes. In the context of human evolution, interest in gene duplication has been intense as the human genome is particularly rich in duplicated genomic regions. These duplicate genes contribute to genomic instability, leading to genome rearrangement and speciation. Recent evidence suggests that duplicated genes have undergone greater diversification than other loci in the human lineage, and so have been key in the evolution of uniquely human traits. • 2R hypothesis; • human evolution; • speciation; • population genetics; • selection
The Breakdown of States The role that Fourth World nations play in state breakdown and collapse is little studied and yet vital to understanding how to create stable political structures. Most multinational states are short-lived and fragile because they are incapable of generating a single cultural life that is sustainable. Every state has three basic functions: (1) expansion (securing new sources of wealth and land); (2) consolidation (assimilating captive nations, refugees, and immigrants); and (3) maintenance (managing income, resources, infrastructure, and defence). The Breakdown of States by Dr. Richard Griggs, Political Geographer, Cape Town University A SIMPLE REQUEST World Indigenous Studies and The Fourth World Documentation Project. All FWDP files may be reproduced for electronic transfer or posting on computer networks and bulletin boards provided that: 1. All text remains unaltered. 2. No profit is made from such transfer. Documentation Project. file on a BBS, FTP site or other file archive. Thank you for your cooperation. John Burrows Executive Director Center For World Indigenous Studies \|\| \|\| \|\| Donations may be made to: \|\| \|\| \|\| \|\| The Center For World Indigenous Studies \|\| \|\| ATTN: FWDP \|\| \|\| P.O. Box 2574 \|\| \|\| Olympia, Washington USA \|\| \|\| 98507-2574 \|\| \|\| Thank You, \|\| \|\| CWIS Staff \|\| \|\| \|\| :: A service provided by :: :: The Center For World Indigenous Studies :: :: :: :: :: :: :: T H E B R E A K D O W N O F S T A T E S Dr. Richard Griggs University of Cape Town Center for World Indigenous Studies The role that Fourth World nations play in state breakdown and collapse is little studied and yet vital to understanding how to create stable political structures. Most multinational states are short-lived and fragile because they are incapable of generating a single cultural life that is sustainable. Every state has three basic land); (2) consolidation (assimilating captive nations, income, resources, infrastructure, and defense). The failure of nations to resist expansion and consolidation leads to assimilation and the destruction of that nation. On the other hand, state failure to capture and consolidate these nations can contribute to a failure of state maintenance resulting in break-up (two or more states emerge from one state) or break-down (federation within state Assimilation is far less common than break-up. More than ninety percent of all states that have ever existed ended in collapse. For instance, the expansion of the city- state of Rome into a multinational empire embracing thrice the number of non-Romans as Romans eventually collapsed as long repressed nations reemerged and the costs of putting down these rebellions exceeded the revenues of the state. Modern history repeats the pattern: in 1945 there were forty-six international states but by 1993 there were 191. On average, nearly three states per year have emerged since 1945. This shows that large states are rapidly fragmenting into smaller states and nation-states. In the 1990s alone we have witnessed this process twenty-five times beginning with Namibian independence in 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union into fifteen new states in 1991; the break-up of Yugoslavia in six states in 1992; the New Years Day 1993 separation of the Czech and Slovak nations, and finally last year's separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia. On average, nations outlast states. Out of 191 states, 127 are less than fifty years old. A generous figure for the geographical and political continuity of a modern state is 500 years old (Spain). Compare that with Euzkadi (Basque Country) that may be 10,000 years old. Friesland predates all the states that claim her by more than a thousand years. The aboriginal nations of Australia can claim 40,000 years of history. This means nations endure beneath the boundaries of states like bedrock as ephemeral state boundaries shift like wind-blown sand over the surface. Latvia offers a modest example of nation endurance. The Baltic nation lost its independence to the Teutonic Knights in 1242, only to recover it again 727 years later with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the sixth occupying state. Albania presents a more dramatic example since 2,537 years elapsed between occupation by Greeks in 625BC and independence in 1912. The observation that nations generally outlast states does not explain state collapse but the endurance of old nations and the pace of state breakups does suggest that nation resistance to consolidation plays a role. To isolate nationalism in single factor analysis is not very useful for understanding state collapse. It also contributes to the newspaper portrait of an "ethnic scourge" that destroys states. In reality the assertion of national identity is one of a complementary set of structural problems incurred by the state in the process of annexing and occupying 1. Expansion encounters nation resistance (eg. Afghani nations resisted Soviet occupation). 2. Occupied nations resist consolidation (eg. Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonization). 3. Expansion replaces cultures appropriate to the area of occupation with one that evolved elsewhere and is usually inappropriate (eg. European farming techniques are a failure in Australian deserts and Brazilian rainforests). 4. Other states will resist a state's expansion for reasons of security, trade, or similar claims (eg. international resistance to Iraq's occupation of 5. The increased scale of territory under centralized control can lead to colossal planning failures (eg. failure of Soviet irrigation schemes that dried up the Aral Sea). 6. Cultural genocide destroys knowledge of strategies for coping with diverse environments (eg. libraries of indigenous knowledge burning down with the 7. Expansionist states tend to breed cultures of consumption that destroy resources at an exorbitant rate (eg. the expansion of Americans across depopulated American Indian lands bred a consumer society with a belief in boundless natural 8. Excessive concentration of resources breeds corruption that drains the state economically and fosters perceptions of illegitimacy (eg. Mobutu's These problems and others do not result from nationalism but from state expansion. The geopolitical antagonism between states and nations is a by-product of this. States claim by occupation and seek out treaties with other states to recognize the annexations. Older nations persist with claims to their cultural homeland. When the breaking point comes, many states fracture along the boundaries of these old enduring nations. This is not because nations prove to be more militarily powerful than states but because expansion involves a variety of synchronous problems that lead to break-up (synchronous geopolitical factors). The collapse of the Soviet Union provides a case in point. Nationalism converged with economic, environmental, and social forces. From a core in Moscovy (Moscow) a series of monarchs engaged in territorial expansion for state maintenance. The Soviet Union from 1917 continued this pattern of expansion. Ultimately the annexation of the Baltic States in 1940 completed the basic outlines of a state that claimed one-sixth of the earth's land area, and embraced more than one-hundred nations. Resistance to occupation persisted throughout all seventy-five years of Soviet rule necessitating expensive internal policing, crackdowns, and army occupations. Coupled with the costs of the cold war (another form of expansion), environmental breakdown (eg. Chernobyl cost 14% of the GNP in 1988), economic breakdown owing to failed five year plans, and social breakdown in the form of a failure of legitimacy, small, poorly armed, nations were able to assert a powerful geopolitical force. By 1991, the Soviet Union withdrew from a ring of fifteen nations around the original Russian core, that it could no longer afford to occupy. Nationalism, then, was not the downfall of the Soviet Union but rather a host of structural problems related to occupying nations. This includes occupying recalcitrant nations. If the process of expansion and consolidation are faulty, the solution is unlikely to be more of the same. Given the large numbers of Fourth World nations (6,000 to 9,000) and the frequency of state collapse, "nation- building" by nation destroying seems to be a failure. Nonetheless, it is the tactic most modern states continue to follow. It dates from the Jacobin effort in 1789 to unite more than a score of nations into a single state culture with one revolutionary ideology and one language for sharing it. After some two-hundred years of Frenchifying "France" most of these old nations like Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, Burgundy, Provence and others endure in one form or another. In fact, from 1982 France began an ongoing process of devolving power to some 22 official regions corresponding to old nations. There is evidence that break-up can be deferred with an approach that awards substantial territorial autonomy to Fourth World nations. This process differs from the ideology of nation-building by recognizing that states and nations do not have to be mutually exclusive polities. Identification with the state as a legal conception (citizenship) or an emotional one (patriotism) does not have to interfere with the sense of belonging to a nation. Peace can be a dividend from carefully distinguishing national and state territories in such a way that problems pertaining to the national level of sovereignty are handled there (cultural issues, schooling, environment, etc.) while concerns affecting more than one region (international trade, monetary policy, defense) are taken care of at appropriate scales. Under this principal, known as subsidiarity, there are middle tier commissions that facilitate problems and plans that involve any group of regions. The post-modern state with this structure of autonomy for nations and regions; and subsidiarity as policy, is already evolving. Spain and Belgium's autonomous communities and even Italy's South Tirol provide models. The entire European Union is also studying the possibility of a Europe of Regions including Fourth World nations, city-states, and cultural regions that might cooperate on this basis. These state-nation relationships represent a form of federation that preserves the integrity of state boundaries, reduces cultural conflicts, and by a process of devolution addresses some of the problems created in the process of expansion. The endurance of nations, the ephemeral nature of states, and the general historic failure of assimilationist policies indicates that some form of confederation or federation is required to address the instability of the state structure consequent to a history of state-building by nation Dr. Richard Griggs Environmental and Geographical Science University of Cape Town To have a current Center For World Indigenous Studies Publication Center For World Indigenous Studies P.O. Box 2574 Olympia, WA U.S.A. FAX: 360-956-1087 OCR Provided by Caere Corporation's OmniPage Professional
The world's first known movable-type system for printing was created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song Dynasty;[1] then the first metal movable-type system for printing was made in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377—today the oldest extant movable metal print book. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited:[2] They were expensive, and required an enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and independently developed a movable type system in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony—the same components still used today.[3] Compared to woodblock printing, movable-type pagesetting was quicker and more durable for alphabetic scripts. The metal type pieces were more durable and the lettering was more uniform, leading to typography and fonts. The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible (1455) established the superiority of movable type and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe. The printing press can be regarded as one of the key factors leading up to the Renaissance and due to its effectiveness it later was used all around the world. Today, practically all movable-type printing ultimately derives from Gutenberg's movable-type printing , which is often regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium.[4] Precursors to movable typeEdit File:Tetradrachm 5th century BC athens detail.jpg Phaistos DiscEdit Main article: Phaistos Disc The enigmatic Minoan Phaistos Disc of 1800–1600 BC has been considered by one scholar as an early example of a body of text being reproduced with reusable characters: it may have been produced by pressing pre-formed hieroglyphic "seals" into the soft clay. A few authors even view the disc as technically meeting all definitional criteria to represent an early, if not the earliest incidence of movable-type printing.[5][6] Recently it has been alleged by Dr. Jerome Eisenberg that the disk is a forgery.[7] Woodblock printingEdit Main article: Woodblock printing History of movable typeEdit Wooden movable typeEdit File:Yuan dynasty woodblock.jpg File:Chinese movable type 1313-ce.png Main article: History of printing in East Asia Ceramic movable typeEdit Pottery movable typeEdit As late as 1844 there were still books printed in China with clay movable types.[12] However, Bi Sheng's fragile clay types were not practical for large-scale printing.[13] Sohn Pow-Key claimed that Bi Sheng's baked clay was "fragile" was refuted by facts and experiemts, Bao Shicheng(1775–1885) wroted that baked clay moveable type was "as hard and tough as horn"; experiment shows that baked clay moveable type is hard and difficult to break, a clay moveable type dropped from a height of two metres onto a marble floor remained intact. Korea could have tried clay movable type, but with little sucess, probably due to misinterpration of Shen Kua's description "as thin as coin", which referred to the depth of the mould, not the total length of the moveable type. The length of clay movable types in China was 1 to 2 centimetres, not 2mm, thus hard as horn[14] Porcelain movable typeEdit In 1719, porcelain movable type occurred. Metal movable typeEdit Metal movable type printing was originated in China, at the beginning of 12th century. It was used in large scale printing of paper money issued by the North Song dynasty. A copper block printed Song dynasty 1215-1216 paper money in the collection of Luo Zhenyu in Pictorial Paper Money of the Four Dynasties, 1914, shows two special characters one called ziliao, the other called zihao for the purpose of preventing contefeit; over the ziliao there is a small charater 輶 printed with moveable copper type, while over the zihao there is an empty square hole, apparently the associated copper metal type was lost. Another sample of Song dynasty money of the same period in the collection of Shanghai Museum has two empty square holes above ziliao as well as zihou, due to lost of the two copper moveable types. Song dynasty bronze block embedded with bronze metal moveable type printed paper money was issued in large scale and in ciculation for a long time.[15] In the 1298 book Zao Huozi Yinshufa (造活字印书法/造活字印書法) of the Chinese official Wang Zhen, there is mention of tin movable type, but this was largely experimental.[16] It was not until the In Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD) that metal movable type was successfully employed, though invented 200 years before Korea[17] . Successful use of metal movable type in China was first employed by Hua Sui in 1490 AD with his bronze type.[18] There's also some claims of more early Chinese metal movable type, some dates back to 1148 AD.[19][20] <--translation needed--what sources is this I cannot tell if they are reliable sources even--> Sohn Pow-Key claimed that transition from wood type to metal type occurred in 1234 during the Goryeo Dynasty of Korea and is credited to Choe Yun-ui. A set of ritual books, Sangjeong Gogeum Yemun(과거와 현재 세트 레분쵸의 세부 사항 详定古今礼文) were printed with the movable metal type in 1234.[21][22] However credibity of this postscript was disputed, as the postscript indicated that it was written in the name of the duke of Chinyang Choe I (1175–1249), who became marquis of Chinyang from 1234, and was only duke since 1242. It was not possible that he called himself a duke while he was still only a marquis, this apparent contradition of facts makes this claim dubius[23] In 1276 Kublai Khan occupied Korea, Yuan dynasty copper block +bronze movable type printed paper money circulated in Korea. At the turn of 13th century, Yuan dynasty even set up paper money printing office in Korea, it is natural that the technique of copper movable type was transmitted to Korea. Korean historic records also confirmed that metal movable type printing in Korea began at late 14th century.[24] Examples of Korean metal type are on display in the Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.[25] The oldest extant movable metal print book is the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377.[26] The techniques for bronze casting, used at the time for making coins (as well as bells and statues) were adapted to making metal type. The following description of the Korean font casting process was recorded by the Joseon dynasty scholar Seong Hyeon (성현, 成俔, 1439–1504): Proliferation of movable type was also obstructed by a "Confucian prohibition on the commercialization of printing" restricted the distribution of books produced using the new method to the government.[27] The technique was restricted to use by the royal foundry for official state publications only, where the focus was on reprinting Chinese classics lost in 1126 when Korea's libraries and palaces had perished in a conflict between dynasties.[27] File:Removeable type book.jpg Metal movable type elsewhere in AsiaEdit Metal movable type in EuropeEdit Main article: History of western typography Main article: History of western typography Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz is acknowledged as the first to invent a metal movable-type printing system in Europe. Gutenberg was a goldsmith familiar with techniques of cutting punches for making coins from moulds. Between 1436 and 1450 he developed hardware and techniques for casting letters from matrices using a device called the hand mould.[30] Gutenberg's key invention and contribution to movable-type printing in Europe, the hand mould was the first practical means of making cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities needed to print complete books, making the movable-type printing process a viable enterprise. The historical impact of movable type in China Edit Prior to the invention of movable type, "woodblock printing" was used in China to print an entire page of a specific text. This technique had been used for centuries, particularly for languages that relied on thousands of characters. Movable type was invented in China by Bi Sheng, a commoner living during the Beisong Dynasty. Bi Sheng used clay types, hardened by baking them in fire, to create the first movable type. However, these types were too fragile for large-scale printing. Wang Zhen, a government official, later improved the system by instead creating types out of more durable wood. This new method overcame many of the shortcomings of woodblock printing. Rather than manually carving an individual block to print a single page, movable type printing allowed for the quick assembly of a page of text. Furthermore, these new, more compact type fonts could be reused and stored. Although Bi Sheng's invention is considered by some archaeologists to be the beginning of typography in China, it failed to become widely used at the time; though his printing technology was passed on, the cement type fonts were lost. File:Fi garamond sort 001.png The type-height was quite different in different countries, the Monotype Corporation Limited in London UK produced moulds in various heights: • 0.918 inches : United Kingdom, Canada, USA • 0.928 inches : France, Germany, Swiss and most other European Countries • 0.933 inches : Belgium height • 0.9785 inches : Dutch height A Dutch printers manual [35] mentions a tiny difference between French and German Height: • 62.027 points Didot = 23.30 mm = English height • 62.666 points Didot = 23.55 mm = French height • 62.685 points Didot = 23.56 mm = German height • 66.047 points Didot = 24.85 mm = Dutch Height File:Metal movable type.jpg See alsoEdit 1. "Great Chinese Inventions". Retrieved 2010-07-29. 2. Zhou He (1994): "Diffusion of Movable Type in China and Europe: Why Were There Two Fates?", in: International Communication Gazette, Vol. 53, pp. 153–173 4. In 1997, Time Life magazine picked Gutenberg's invention to be the most important of the second millennium. In 1999, the A&E Network voted Johannes Gutenberg "Man of the Millennium". See also 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking The Men and Women Who Shaped The MillenniumTemplate:Dead link which was composed by four prominent US journalists in 1998. 6. C.Michael Hogan, Knossos Fieldnotes, The Modern Antiquarian (2007) 8. Shen Kua: Dream Pool Essay 10. Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin (1985). "part one, vol.5". In Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China,. Paper and Printing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 11. volume 5 part 1 201 12. 12.0 12.1 Xu Yinong Moveable Type Books (徐忆农活字本) ISBN 7806437959 14. Pan Jixing, A history of movable metal type printing technique in China 2001 p22 18. Needham, Volume 5, Part 1, 212. 23. A History of Moveable Type Printing in China, by Pan Jixing, Beijing, China, English Abstract, p274 24. A History of Moveable Type Printing in China, by Pan Jixing, Academy of Science, Beijing, China, 2001 p170 25. World Treasures of the Library of Congress. Retrieved 26 December 2006. 26. Michael Twyman, The British Library Guide to Printing: History and Techniques, London: The British Library, 1998 online 27. 27.0 27.1 Burke 29. Chinese Paper and Printing, A Cultural History, by Tsien, Tsuen-Hsuin 30. Meggs, Philip B. (1998). A History of Graphic Design. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 58–69. ISBN 0-471-291-98-6. 31. Template:Cite conference 32. "What Did Gutenberg Invent?—Discovery". BBC / Open University. 2006. Retrieved 2006-10-25. Template:Dead link 37. Glossary of Typesetting Terms, by Richard Eckersley, Charles Ellerston, Richard Hendel, Page 18 • The classic manual of hand-press technology is Moxon, Joseph (1683–84). Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (ed. Herbert Davies & Harry Carter. New York: Dover Publications, 1962, reprint ed.) External linksEdit Template:Commons category-inline Template:Typography terms This page uses content from Wikinfo . The original article was at Wikinfo:Movable type. Ad blocker interference detected!
Using the Tile system, players will need to construct a habitat to survive on Mars. The habitat will first need to provide a pressurized space. For huge structures which would require a lot of oxygen to be pressurized, players will need to create an airlock that will enable players to adjust to an unpressurized environment before exiting the habitat as well as creating a seal between the inside and the door leading out. This will help conserve oxygen use by repressurizing a small area rather than the entire habitat. The outside of the habitat walls should be reinforced to defend against harsh weather and player attacks. Solar panels would most likely be placed on or near the top of the habitat and directly linked through the tile system to the inside. The tiles have a wire circuit built into them allowing players to bring energy to wherever they need to use it. Pipes can be linked through the tile system to create a connection between devices, storage and the habitat. Water collected by any means necessary can be pumped from the collectors to tanks to the filtering systems with the use of pumps, even from lower levels. Oxygen concentrated from an atmospheric gas reclaimer can be brought directly to tanks inside the habitat and used to pressurize the indoors. Ad blocker interference detected!
Presentation is loading. Please wait. Presentation is loading. Please wait. Developing Study Skills Similar presentations Presentation on theme: "Developing Study Skills"— Presentation transcript: 1 Developing Study Skills 2 Study skills are CRUCIAL! Good study skills help you remember important items, make good grades, and increase knowledge. Studying IS NOT just looking over your notes five minutes before a test; however, taking as little as fifteen minutes the night before to read, look at notes, or study flash cards could be the difference between a D- and a B+. 3 SQ3R method for effective reading SQ3R is a reading strategy formed from its letters: Survey! Question! Read! Recite! Review! SQ3R will help you build a framework to understand your reading assignment. 4 SURVEY Before you read, Survey the chapter: the title, headings, and subheadings captions under pictures, charts, graphs or maps review questions or teacher-made study guides introductory and concluding paragraphs summary 5 QUESTION Question while you are surveying: Turn the title, headings, and/or subheadings into questions Read questions at the end of the chapters or after each subheading Ask yourself, "What did my instructor say about this chapter or subject when it was assigned?" Ask yourself, "What do I already know about this subject?" 6 READ When you begin to Read: Look for answers to the questions you first raised Answer questions at the beginning or end of chapters or study guides Reread captions under pictures, graphs, etc. Note all the underlined, italicized, bold printed words or phrases Study graphic aids Reduce your speed for difficult passages Stop and reread parts which are not clear Read only a section at a time and recite after each section 7 RECITE Recite after you've read a section: Ask yourself questions about what you have just read, or summarize, in your own words, what you read Take notes from the text but write the information in your own words Underline or highlight important points you've just read Reciting: The more senses you use the more likely you are to remember what you read Triple strength learning: Seeing, saying, hearing Quadruple strength learning: Seeing , saying , hearing, writing!!! 8 REVIEW Review: an ongoing process Page through the text and/or your notebook to re-acquaint yourself with the important points. Cover the right hand column of your text/note-book and orally ask yourself the questions in the left hand margins. Orally recite or write the answers from memory. Develop mnemonic devices for material which need to be memorized. Make flash cards for those questions which give you difficulty. 9 Are you truly reading? In depth reading is used to gain deeper meaning and comprehension of a text. We are not just reading the words with our eyes, we are thinking about the text we are reading. 10 Skimming Skimming is what most high school students do when they are supposed to be reading. Skimming is when you quickly look over the words and process an idea of what the passage is about. Skimming is useful when you are doing something such as looking for the general summary of a newspaper article. 11 Scanning Scanning is looking over a passage for specific information. Scanning is useful when you are looking for dates, key terms, names, or other specific information. When might you use scanning is this class? 12 Mnemonic Devices A mnemonic device is not the newest iPhone on the market! It is a method for remembering a list of useful information. Creating a short word or sentence could help you remember a long list of items. 13 PEMDAS Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Mnemonic device for the order of operations in math Parentheses Exponents Multiplication Division Addition Subtraction 14 My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nachos This mnemonic device helps you remember the planets in our solar system. Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune 15 Do you know any mnemonic devices? 16 TOWER and COP These are two mnemonic devices we use when writing. 17 Fact vs. Opinion This can be confusing at times. Opinions are not necessarily true. They often contain the words “feel, think, believe, always, or never.” Facts are not always true either. It was once a fact that the world was flat. It was once a fact that draining a person’s bad blood would cure them of a disease. It helps if you remember that a fact is something that can be proven or disproven by measuring, weighing, or investigating in some way. 18 Note-taking If you have noticed, I have made important terms bold, underlined, or italicized. It is not always imperative that you write everything in your notes (unless I tell you to.) When studying your notes before a test, highlighting terms will help plant them in your memory. 19 Graphs 20 Practice Go back through your notes and skim the information in two minutes. Scan the information for important terms. Highlight those terms. Download ppt "Developing Study Skills" Similar presentations Ads by Google
Dioxin and diabetes/obesity On this page: There are many types of polychlorinated dibenzodioxins (PCDDs), or dioxins. This page focuses on 2,3,7,8 tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (known as TCDD or dioxin) in particular. Polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) are related chemicals. These compounds are persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Some other persistent organic pollutants act like dioxin, and are called "dioxin-like compounds." For information on studies relating to other persistent organic pollutants, or combinations of POPs, see the POPs page or the PCBs page. The primary source of exposure to dioxins and dioxin-like compounds in developed countries is via food, especially meat, milk, dairy, eggs, and fish, which together make up 93% of total exposure. Inhalation, drinking water, vegetable oils, and other sources only constitute a small percentage of overall exposure (Lorber et al. 2009). The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that "safe" levels of dioxin exposure are 300-600 times lower than current average daily exposure levels, in part due to dioxin's potential effects on the immune system (Gogal and Holladay 2008). Type 2 Diabetes Higher-Level Dixon Exposure Studies of people exposed to high levels of dioxin (TCDD) have sometimes found increased rates of type 2 diabetes. For example: • Agent Orange, an herbicide used during the Vietnam War, contains dioxin (TCDD) as a contaminant. The unit known as Operation Ranch Hand carried out spraying from 1962 to 1971, and significant amounts of dioxin have been found in their bodies, many years after the war. The U.S. Air Force has a long-term prospective study that followed people over time compared the health effects of members of Operation Ranch Hand to other Air Force veterans who were not involved in the spraying. A study has found that diabetes and glucose abnormalities are more prevalent in members of Operation Ranch Hand as compared to the others. In addition, insulin abnormalities increased with dioxin exposure in exposed veterans without diabetes (Henriksen et al. 1997). Other studies have also found that diabetes is associated with dioxin exposure in Vietnam (e.g., Michalek and Pavuk 2008; Kang et al. 2006), as well as in Korean Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange (Yi et al. 2014). Based on the Institute of Medicine's evaluation of the evidence (IOM 2000), since 2001, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recognized veterans' type 2 diabetes as associated with exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides during military service. What about type 1? I have received emails from a number of people who developed type 1 after dioxin exposure, and who are not able to get diabetes supplies covered from the VA. Please email me if you think dioxin or other chemical exposures could have contributed to your type 1 diabetes: sarah@diabetesandenvironment.org. • In 1976, an accident at a chemical plant caused a large release of dioxin (TCDD) into an area of Seveso, Italy. Follow-up studies have found increased rates of death from diabetes among people who were living in the contaminated area during the time of the accident (Pesatori et al. 1998). A review of the long term effects of dioxin exposure in Seveso found an excess of diabetes cases. Deaths from diabetes were slightly elevated in men and significantly elevated in women in the moderately contaminated zone, while in the highly contaminated zone, there was a small but not significant increase of deaths from diabetes in women (Bertazzi et al. 1998). However, another study-- of women in Seveso-- did not find an association between dioxin exposure and diabetes or obesity in these women. Dioxin exposure was associated with metabolic syndrome in these women, but only in women who were 12 years of age or younger during the explosion (Warner et al. 2013). • In the 1960s, a number of workers in the former Czechoslovakia were exposed to very high levels of dioxin (TCDD). Forty years later, their body levels of dioxin are still much higher than the general public. In a health analysis of 11 exposed workers, 55% have type 2 diabetes, and many have other health issues also associated with diabetes (see the "Diabetes complications" section below) (Pelclova et al. 2009). • A long-term study from U.S. chemical plant workers exposed to dioxin (TCDD) many years ago found that the prevalence of diabetes was not significantly different between the workers and controls. However, it also found that 60% of the people with the highest current levels of dioxin had diabetes (Calvert et al. 1999). And, there was an association between dioxin levels and fasting blood glucose levels (Sweeney et al. 1997-8). • Dioxin was associated with diabetes in people living near a factory that released dioxin in Taiwan, in both men and women (Huang et al. 2015). Col. James Walter Shugart III was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes after exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. He encourages Vietnam veterans who developed diabetes to apply to the VA for disability compensation, since the VA has recognized Agent Orange as associated with type 2 diabetes since 2001. A number of other exposed Vietnam vets who developed type 1 have not been able to get compensation, however, since the VA only recognizes type 2 as associated with Agent Orange exposure. Lower-Level Dioxin Exposure What about people exposed to lower, "background" levels of dioxin, as are generally found in the environment and in most people? To investigate this question, Longnecker and Michalek (2000) studied the association of dioxin levels with diabetes in members of the Air Force study who were not exposed to Agent Orange. The dioxin levels in these vets were similar to those seen in the general U.S. population. They found that men with higher background dioxin levels did indeed have a higher prevalence of diabetes, as well as higher levels of insulin and glucose after a glucose tolerance test (signs of type 2 diabetes). Pretty much the same thing was found in Japan, where levels of dioxin in incinerator workers were associated with diabetes, but the diabetes rates and dioxin levels were similar to those in the general population (Yamamoto et al. 2015). Another study analyzed tissue samples from the same Air Force veterans, from both vets exposed to TCDD and from vets who were not exposed. They found strong evidence that a change occurred in the tissues of vets exposed to Agent Orange that could contribute to diabetes development. They identified certain markers that were correlated to both dioxin levels and fasting glucose levels. Interestingly, the same change and correlation was also seen in the tissues of vets who were not exposed to Agent Orange. This finding implies that dioxin may be hazardous at current levels of exposure to the general public (Fujiyoshi et al. 2006). A meta-analysis of studies on dioxin and diabetes finds that among people with low level dioxin exposures, there is an association between dioxin and diabetes. Among people with high level exposures, the association is not clear (Goodman et al. 2015). Thus the effects of dioxin may be more critical at low levels of exposure. In a study that compared people with type 2 diabetes, impaired glucose tolerance, and normal glucose tolerance, those with type 2 had the higher levels of dioxin ("dioxin equivalents"), and the highest AhR activity. (AhR activity is associated with exposure to certain persistent organic pollutants, especially dioxin and dioxin-like compounds). In those without diabetes, AhR activity was associated with fasting glucose and insulin levels, as well as higher insulin resistance (Roh et al. 2014). Insulin Resistance and Body Weight A study of people without diabetes living near a Superfund site in Arkansas found that people with higher levels of dioxin (TCDD) in their bodies had higher levels of insulin after a glucose tolerance test. This study suggests that high levels of dioxin may increase insulin resistance (Cranmer et al. 2000). Another study of the Operation Ranch Hand Vietnam vets found that high dioxin (TCDD) levels may promote insulin resistance, but that the effect was small (Kern et al. 2004). A Taiwanese study found that people with higher levels of dioxin (PCDD/F) had higher levels of insulin resistance. The people in this study lived near a contaminated site (Chang et al. 2010). A subsequent study by the same authors found that men with the highest dioxin levels as well as abdominal obesity had 5-fold increased insulin resistance levels than those with the lowest levels (both were individually associated with higher insulin resistance as well, but the effect was greatest when combined) (Chang et al. 2016). Exposure During Development Data from Europe shows that exposure to dioxin and dioxin-like compounds in the womb and early life was associated with increased early infant growth, and increased body mass index (BMI) in 7 year old girls (Iszatt et al. 2016). Laboratory Studies Dioxin has been shown to stimulate insulin secretion by rat beta cells (Kim et al. 2009). The authors suggest that dioxin may therefore contribute to the risk of developing diabetes by causing continuous insulin release, followed by beta cell dysfunction. Other studies have found that dioxin exposure impaired insulin secretion from rodent beta cells (Kurita et al. 2009, Novelli et al. 2005), and, at higher doses, even killed them (Piaggi et al. 2007). Hectors et al. (2011) review the effects of chemicals on beta cells, and find that other chemicals have also been found to increase as well as decrease insulin secretion. The effect may depend on dose, the animal or cells used in the experiment, or other factors. Dioxin's ability to affect beta cells may have importance for diabetes development. A more recent study confirms that dioxin is highly toxic to pancreatic beta cells, and that a substance in green tea is protective against it (Martino et al. 2013). A study found that dioxin interferes with the ability of mouse fat cells to take up glucose, perhaps a mechanism that can explain how dioxin exposure could lead to insulin resistance in humans. The study aimed to determine how dioxin might cause dysfunction of the metabolism. Dioxin interfered with the development of fat cells, affected gene expression, and may interfere with insulin signaling (Hsu et al. 2010). Another study found that dioxin increases insulin resistance during active periods but not during rest periods, in mice (Takuma et al. 2015). However, dioxin has also been found to decrease insulin resistance in animals (Fried et al. 2010). It also causes weight gain at higher doses, in combination with a high-fat diet (Zhu et al. 2008). Dioxin's effects my depend on dosage, timing, species, and other factors. Dioxin is an endocrine (hormone) disruptor because it interferes with the endocrine system (Hotchkiss et al. 2008). The mechanisms probably involve the AhR receptor; animal studies show that the AhR affects glucose tolerance and insulin resistance (Wang et al. 2011). Animal studies also show that the AhR is involved in numerous effects on glucose and fats in mice-- and that these effects did not occur in mice without the AhR (Zhang et al. 2015). A similar finding is shown for mice with and without AhR and exposed to a high-fat diet in that AhR deficient mice were protected from the harmful effects of the diet (Xu et al. 2015). Factsheet on Dioxin by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Exposure During Development Mice exposed to dioxin in the womb and while nursing were then given either a high-fat or low-fat diet and compared to unexposed controls. The control mice who ate a high fat diet developed obesity and some other signs of metabolic syndrome. The dioxin-exposed mice, however, did not develop these or other symptoms, but instead reduced the risk of metabolic problems (Sugai et al. 2014). Another study that looked at what happened to the offspring when pregnant/lactating mice were exposed to low levels of dioxin (levels generally encountered by humans). The effects differed by gender, but there were effects on the immune system and body weight (van Esterik et al. 2015). Type 1 Diabetes and Autoimmunity Dioxin can mess with the immune system, we know that. We just don't quite know what it does, or how it does it. It is likely, however, that dioxin's effects on the immune system are related to its AhR activity. The AhR controls or influences many aspects of the immune system (Quintana and Sherr 2013), and can be modulated by environmental chemicals such as dioxin, diet, gut microbiota, and metabolism (Wheeler et al. 2017). Dioxin is known to suppress the immune system of animals and possibly humans (Baccarelli et al. 2002). Dioxin exposure can also expand the population of regulatory T cells that are protective against autoimmunity, and animal studies indeed show that arrests the development of various autoimmune conditions (Quintana and Sherr 2013), including type 1 diabetes in mice (Kerkvliet et al.2009). But Can Dioxin Also Promote Autoimmunity? Since the AhR has so much influence on the immune system, it might. For example, dioxin can also expand the populations of inflammatory cells that promote autoimmunity. Dioxin could, under various conditions, either promote or ameliorate autoimmunity (Quintana and Sherr 2013). Timing of exposure may be important; adult exposure is generally found to suppress the immune system, while prenatal exposure may promote autoimmunity. The effects also depend on the dose, genetic background, and route of exposure (pers. comm., Dr. Boule, 2014). In a review, Gogal and Holladay (2008) find that current evidence supports the hypothesis that exposure to dioxin in utero may predispose a person to autoimmune disease later in life. How? Perhaps by interfering with the development of the immune system, especially in the thymus (see the autoimmunity page for more on the thymus and immune system development). Other authors also find that low dose exposure to TCDD in the womb causes autoimmunity, and that an infant's thymus is more susceptible to these effects than an adult's thymus (Ishimaru et al. 2009). When mice not genetically prone to autoimmune disease were treated prenatally with TCDD during immune system development, they had immune dysregulation that included autoantibody production, and suggested an increased risk for later autoimmune disease. These findings suggest that developmental exposure to TCDD may increase the risk of autoimmune disease (Mustafa et al. 2008). The same authors have found that prenatal TCDD exposure worsens autoimmune disease progression in genetically prone mice as well (Mustafa et al. 2011a). These authors found changes in numerous immune system cells in mice after developmental dioxin exposure, many dependent on sex. This latter finding suggests possible interactions with hormones; the health effects of dioxins may not appear until times of hormonal shifts such as puberty. They also found that prenatal dioxin exposure leads to more autoimmune symptoms later in life (Mustafa et al. 2011b). Prenatal exposure to dioxin has also been shown to affect T cell response to infection, and since type 1 diabetes (and other autoimmune diseases) are influenced by T cells, its development may be altered by early dioxin exposure (Boule et al. 2014; Winans et al. 2015). For an article describing the Boule et al. study, see Focusing on the AhR: A Potential Mechanism for Immune Effects of Prenatal Exposures, published in Environmental Health Perspectives (Konkel 2014). Further research by the same authors found that developmental exposure of autoimmune-prone mice to AhR activation accelerated disease, accompanied by increased T cell populations (Boule et al. 2015). Other authors propose that the AhR receptor can be both friend and foe, depending on conditions of exposure. Pollutants that bind the AhR for long periods of time, for example, may promote autoimmunity (Julliard et al. 2014). Dioxin also may affect other things related to type 1 diabetes. In mice treated with a chemical to give them a type 1-like diabetes, TCDD affects the gut microbiome and liver in detrimental ways (Lefever et al. 2016). Dioxin can also lead to an increased susceptibility to viruses (Fiorito et al. 2016). Diabetes Management and Complications Veterans exposed to dioxin via Agent Orange have higher rates of neuropathy-- nerve damage often associated with diabetes-- than those who were less exposed (Michalek et al. 2001). The VA recognizes peripheral neuropathy as related to Agent Orange exposure, if the disease appeared within one year of exposure. People with type 2 diabetes who have nephropathy -- kidney disease often associated with diabetes-- have higher levels of AhR activity in their blood than people with type 2 who do not have kidney abnormalities (Kim et al. 2013). In a group of workers exposed to high levels of dioxin in the former Czechoslovakia, 40 years after the exposure, many suffer from high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, and heart disease, in addition to neurological damage of the brain (Pelclová et al. 2002, Pelclová et al. 2009). The Bottom Line Exposure to high levels of dioxin appears to increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, and possibly exposure to low levels as well. There is contradictory evidence of how dioxin affects beta cells and autoimmunity. Perhaps these contradictions depend on the timing of exposure, with developmental exposures increasing the risk of autoimmunity, and later life exposures decreasing it. It is not clear how dioxin would affect the development of type 1 diabetes, but its role should be studied. A review of the role of dioxin in diabetes concludes that: "In the last few decades, a considerable body of epidemiological evidence has been accumulated, whose conclusions strongly suggest that exposure to dioxin and other POPs can be considered as a new risk factor for diabetes in humans in addition to the traditional lifestyle-related factors, such as excess of energy intake and a lack of exercise... an increasing number of experimental evidence clearly indicates that pancreatic beta cells can be considered a relevant and sensitive target of dioxin cytotoxicity, throwing some light on the underlying biological mechanisms." (De Tata 2014). To download or see a list of all the references cited on this page, see the collection Dioxin and diabetes/obesity in PubMed.
Key Fact 2 Teachers' Guide This is the main guide for Food and farming for children aged 8-11 years. Key Fact 1 Food is produced all around the world. Key Fact 2 Food is processed on different levels to make it edible and safe. Farm to fork challenge (8-11 years) Cool creations Non-cook recipes for the primary school classroom. Videos: Cool creations Hot and happening Recipes that involve the use of the grill or hob. Videos: Hot and happening See how to cook delicious hot meals. Brilliant baking Baking recipe for the primary classroom. Videos: Brilliant baking See how to bake a range of recipes. Where do my meals come from? (8-11 years) Do you know where the food from your meals comes from? Videos: Farming See how crops and animals are farmed in the UK. image apple Key Fact 2: Food is processed on different levels to make it edible and safe. a) To know that food goes through basic processes before it reaches us. Write the following foods on the board: • Milk; • Bread; • Potatoes; • Meat; • Fish; • Vegetables. Question the children: • Where does each of these foods start? • What happens to them before they reach us in the shops? What processes have they been through? Show children the MilkFrom wheat to bread, Fishing and Poultry farming Video clips to increase their understanding of what happened to these foods before they reach us. Question the children to ensure they understand the stages, e.g. Where was the milk to start with? What happened next? You could use the Poultry farming PowerPoint to take a closer look at how chicken and other poultry is farmed. Demonstrate the Farm to fork challenge (5-7) Interactive activity to the class. You may wish to use the 5-7 version to begin with and then demonstrate the 8-11 version. Alternatively, you could demonstrate the 5-7 activity and allow the children to complete the 8-11 activity unassisted. Question the children on the stages each food goes through to ensure they understand. For a list of the correct stages see the Farm to fork Guide 300. b) To know that at home we process food to make it edible and safe. You will need 5 foods in a shopping bag: • Flour; • A carrot and/or a swede; • A potato; • Cubed beef in a sealed container; • A box of eggs. Alternatively, write each food name on a card label and place them in the bag. Take each item of food, or card label, out of the shopping bag in turn and question the children: • Can we eat this now? (No.) • What do we have to do before we can eat it? ( It may have to be washed, peeled, combined with other ingredients, cooked.) • Why do we have to cook foods such as eggs and meat? (To get rid of any harmful bacteria and make them safe to eat.) • Which of these ingredients have you eaten? • Can you give some examples of dishes which can be made with them? You might like to show the Processing fish video clip which shows how a whole fish is processed to become a breaded fillet. Show children some or all of the following videos: • Cornish pasties • Shepherd’s pie • Shortbread • Rhubarb and orange crumble • Soda bread Question the children: • What ingredients were used? • What happened to each ingredient? Give children a copy of the What’s happening? 307 Worksheet so they can record how one of the dishes was made. Make one of the foods above with the children. As the cooking work takes place, question the children about the processes the ingredients are going through. For support setting up cooking lessons, see the Cooking module. c) To know that food is processed on a large scale in places such as restaurants and factories to make it edible and safe to eat. Question the children: • Where have you been to eat food? Show children the Where does it come from? Video clip. Talk to the children about the clip: • What did the children eat? • How was the food prepared? • Which places have you mapped? • Who has eaten at these places? • What food did you have? Show the Cheese making Video clip and the From wheat to bread Video clip. Discuss with the children what they see happening in the clips and ask them what the differences are between making something at home, e.g. bread, and its being made in a factory? (Amount, size and quantity of equipment.) Key Fact 2 Plenary Recap with the children. Further activities Downloadable resources
Buyer's Guide - Blast Chiller When it comes to refrigeration in a kitchen, there are many areas to look into. With HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point), the systematic preventive approach to food safety, ensuring food is safely cooled is imperative. This brings us to introducing blast chillers into a kitchen to safely cool food. Reducing Temperatures with Blast Chillers Blast chilling is a method of cooling food quickly to a low temperature that is almost entirely safe from bacterial growth. Blast chillers use blasts of cold air to quickly freeze or chill its contents. Bacteria multiply fastest between +8 °C (46 °F) and +68 °C (154 °F). Unchecked, bacteria growth doubles every 20 minutes; in 12 hours, one bacterium has multiplied into 69 billion. By reducing the temperature of cooked food from +70 °C (158 °F) to +3 °C (37 °F) or below within 90 minutes, the food is rendered safe for storage and later consumption. This method of preserving food is commonly used in food catering and in the preparation of 'instant' foods, as it ensures the safety and the quality of the food product. HACCP is the systematic preventive approach to food safety that addresses physical, chemical and biological hazards as a means of prevention rather than finished product inspection. This approach has significant benefits to organisations operating within the food supply chain as it enables them to determine key controls over processes and concentrate resources on activities that are critical to ensuring safe food. Retailers, the food industry and Government in particular are concerned about ensuring that food is produced safely and that the consumer has confidence in the product. In the UK the 1995 Food Safety Amendment Regulations for the first time required manufacturers and providers to adopt HACCP to ensure food safety. Protecting Food With A Blast Chiller Once the food is cooked to perfection you don't want it to continue cooking when removed from the oven. A blast chiller stops the food from cooking further, retaining the required food quality, nutritional value, flavour and appearance. Fridges and coldrooms are designed for holding previously chilled food, not chilling hot food. To put hot food in a fridge or coldroom already holding chilled food is extremely dangerous. The temperature of the fridge will rise, lifting the temperature of previously chilled food and risking bacterial contamination of all stock in the fridge. Food Safety Food safety is of utmost importance in all cook-chill systems. Almost all food is clear of potentially harmful bacteria when it has been cooked correctly. Bacteria will begin to feed and multiply on cooked food as it then cools down. The faster cooked food passes through this critical zone from hot to cold, the less chance there will be of bacteria growth. Keeping records of foods, their temperatures and the time it takes to chill or freeze them is an important part of HACCP - a process made easier using a blast chiller, according to manufacturers. Using A Blast Chiller It is important that food entering the blast chiller does not exceed a temperature of 90°C. When placing containers in the chiller, it is recommended that metal containers and trays are used as other materials such as plastic or polystyrene containers will act as an insulator and extend blast chilling times. Sufficient space must be left between products in order to guarantee a sufficient flow of cold air and ensure products are not in contact with the internal walls of the unit. Products that are more difficult to chill because of their composition and size should be placed in the centre of the unit. Blast chilling data refers to standard products (low fat content) with a thickness below 50mm: therefore avoid overlaying products on trays or the insertion of pieces with a much higher thickness, as this will lead to an extension of blast chilling times. Always distribute the product well on the trays and in the case of thick pieces decrease the amount to blast chill. The chiller should be used for storage for short periods only. When removing any product that has undergone blast chilling, always wear gloves to protect the hands from cold burns
Scientific Revolution More Options: Make a Folding Card Storyboard Description This storyboard does not have a description. Storyboard Text • William Harvey • Hi I am William Harvey I started a new way of curing people and I was denied for it and people stop being my friend because I was right. • Isaac Newton • lets see witch drops First • Francis Bacon • If something thinks it exist. If u can think u exist. But why do we exist. • 1440 AD people thought that the body has 4 Humors the treatment was to cut people open and Harvey said that he was wrong and that their is only one type of Blood and it changes color and people thought he was wrong and crazy so they did not talk to him • Johannes Kepler • Don't thank me it was cool. • thanks for publishing my book • Isaac Newton's theory of modern physics. He was an English scientist devolved the laws of gravity, like why did things fall at the same time when one of them was bigger then the other. • Major Inventions • Francis Bacon was the guy that question every thing like if how are we real and say why are we here and why to that. • Johannes Kepler beveled that Copernicus was right and the earth was not in the middle of the universe. People didn't believe them so Johannes published the first book called Defiance of Copernicus. • The Telescope, Microscope, Barometer,and the Thermometer were all invented to know the world better than they know it. The telescope is used to see things closer. The microscope is used to see things like cells and bacteria. More Storyboards By joshuaross68012 Explore Our Articles and Examples Try Our Other Websites! Quick Rubric – Easily Make and Share Great Looking Rubrics!
Coffee Grounds and the Garden coffee grounds for garden use If you are a daily coffee drinker, it’s amazing how quickly coffee grounds can add up. Of course, most people know coffee grounds can be added to a garden compost pile, but there are many other ways coffee grounds can benefit your garden: Add coffee grounds to a Worm Bin Similar to a garden compost pile, coffee grounds can be beneficial to worm composting. The texture of the grounds can provide a good “grit” for the worms digestive track just as egg shells can. However, worms are still sensitive to the conditions of their environment, and daily coffee grounds can quickly make a worm bin too acidic so add sparingly. Acidic Soil Although worms may not be too fond of acidic soil, there are plenty of plants that are! Blueberries, azaleas, and rhododendrons are the most common acid loving plants but many fruiting plants such as tomatoes also enjoy slightly acidic soils. If you also prefer blue hydrangeas over pink hydrangeas, acidic soil is what causes the blue color! (but if you prefer pink, egg shells can help neutralize the soil to achieve the pink color). Of course, any of these acid loving plants also wouldn’t mind being watered with any leftover coffee from your pot- if you ever have any leftover coffee, that is. Milking Aphids Ever wonder how aphids seem to find every rose bush, pea plant, or tomato plant in your garden? Well, some aphids are actually “milked” by ants. The ants enjoy eating the honeydew some aphids produce and, as a result, some ants will protect and transplant aphids as they please. But you know what ants don’t like? Coffee grounds. The coarseness of the grounds bother ants and can be used as a barrier. Simply surround the plants you want to protect from aphids with coffee grounds and the ants will no longer “farm” there. Without the help of the ants, you’ll have an upper hand in fighting an aphid infestation. It also just so happens snails and slugs don’t like the texture of coffee grounds either, so the coffee ground barrier can do double duty. Used coffee grounds are also an ideal growing bed for mushrooms- just ask these guys. But if you are using your own coffee grounds, you’ll need to purchase your own mushrooms spores. Do you need any more reasons to love coffee?
How To Teach Your Children To Behave Properly In A Restaurant Child eating (illustration) By: Michelle Parker Going out to eat at restaurants with children can be difficult as kids do not have much patience to sit around. Here are some tips to make eating out with children more fun and quiet. Give your children something to eat before you go so they are not very hungry. Hungry children are cranky. Take along coloring books and crayons, or papers and stickers to keep the little ones occupied. Take along snacks that they love and that take time to eat so they are busy with their food for a while. For a bit older kids, you can take along LEGO. People will rather see your children playing on the floor nicely than have them fighting or crying from boredom. Tell your child that people don't like loud noise while they're eating. In case the ordered food takes a while to come, take your children on walks outside the restaurant. If children misbehave at restaurants, then start by going out for small meals or just for dessert, but not to upscale restaurants. If the children misbehave, take them to the car and wait with them until the rest of family is done eating. After doing so two or three times, they will learn to behave and you will be able to enjoy years of happy and peaceful meals. You can also ask for your check and carry-out boxes, and finish the meal at home or in a nearby park, where your children can run around while you relax and finish your meal.
Brief summary interwoven with commentary on Act II of Macbeth Essay by aaron56High School, 11th grade March 2004 download word file, 7 pages 3.7 Downloaded 56 times The second act begins with an unpleasant atmosphere at night, when the moon is down and the sky is starless. As we've come to know, night is the hour of the evil. So the atmosphere at the very beginning is the foreboding of the events to unfold. In the first scene, Banquo and Fleance are talking casually on the courtyard of Macbeth's castle a little before midnight. Although Banquo is heavy with sleep he doesn't want to go to bed in fear of the thoughts that come to him while asleep. The witches' prophecies taunt him and he seems to be full of doubt and fear. His doubt and fear is obvious when he immediately asks for his sword hearing someone approaching. But it turns out to be Macbeth. It is also ironical because Macbeth, later on, does become a cause of fear to him. Banquo reveals to Macbeth that he had a dream last night of the weird sisters but Macbeth pretends to not have been thinking about them. He tells Banquo that they can talk about it later and here Banquo makes it clear to him that no matter what, he is going to stick to his loyalty and honor. We can see a clear contrast in the characters of Macbeth and Banquo. While Macbeth is ready to relinquish his honor for his ambition for the crown, Banquo is loyal to the king and a true noble man who will always put his honor before his ambitions. Macbeth is all set to murder Duncan and is awaiting the signal from his wife. Here, Macbeth hallucinates. He sees a dagger which looks real and touchable yet is unreal. It beckons him towards Duncan's chamber. And before his very eyes, blood appears on the dagger which is disturbing. This...
Antibodies bound to Aβ oligomers potentiate the neurotoxicity of Aβ by activating microglia. Beta amyloid (Aβ) oligomers are thought to contribute to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, clinical trials using Aβ immunization were unsuccessful due to strong brain inflammation, the mechanisms of which are poorly understood. In this study we tested whether monoclonal antibodies to oligomeric Aβ would prevent the neurotoxicity of Aβ oligomers in primary neuronal-glial cultures. However, surprisingly,the antibodies dramatically increased the neurotoxicity of Aβ. Antibodies bound to monomeric Aβ fragments were non-toxic to cultured neurons, while antibodies to other oligomeric proteins: hamster polyomavirus major capsid protein, human metapneumovirus nucleocapsid protein, and measles virus nucleocapsid protein, strongly potentiated the neurotoxicity of their antigens. The neurotoxicity of antibody-antibody oligomeric antigen complexes was abolished by removal of the Fc region from the antibodies or by removal of microglia from cultures, and was accompanied by inflammatory activation and proliferation of the microglia in culture. In conclusion, we find that immune complexes formed by Aβ oligomers or other oligomeric/multimeric antigens and their specific antibodies can cause death and loss of neurons in primary neuronal-glial cultures via Fc-dependent microglial activation. The results suggest that therapies resulting in antibodies to oligomeric Aβ or oligomeric brain virus proteins should be used with caution or with suppression of microglial activation. No comments:
What do you need to do during 24-hour blood pressure monitoring? Quick Answer During 24-hour, or ambulatory, blood pressure monitoring, individuals wear the monitor as instructed throughout the day and night and keep a written diary of their normal daily activities, according to Family Doctor. This is done to help doctors analyze the differences between active and resting blood pressure readings. Continue Reading Full Answer After being fitted for a monitor and blood pressure cuff, patients leave the doctor's office and begin monitoring at home, Suntech Medical explains. Typically, the monitor takes readings every 15 to 30 minutes during waking hours and every 30 to 45 minutes while the person is asleep. Upon returning to the doctor's office, personal readings are transferred to a computer where the doctor can easily analyze the data and put together a comprehensive patient profile. Several different situations call for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, notes Family Doctor. Patients with borderline high blood pressure or difficulties controlling high blood pressure are common candidates. Pregnant women with high blood pressure and individuals who have recently changed medications may also be required to submit to 24-hour blood pressure monitoring. This type of monitoring helps a doctor determine if high blood pressure readings only occur during doctor's appointments, which is a condition known as white-coat hypertension. Learn more about Medical Ranges & Levels Related Questions
Saturday, August 2, 2014 Summer sailors -- Part 2 I've been meaning to follow up on a few comments submitted to the "Summer Sailors" post on 18 July 2014. I wrote that it was somewhat unusual to see By-the-wind Sailors (Velella velella) during the summer because I typically observe them in the spring and their appearance on West Coast beaches is often mentioned as a springtime phenomenon (e.g., read description at The Jellies Zone). But Emily wrote that she had seen Velella in Bodega Bay during July 2003, and Darris thought she recalled seeing them in the fall during some years. The comments made me do some further research into the seasonality of By-the-wind Sailors. First, Velella has continued to wash up on local beaches, so I'll include a few more pictures. Here's one from 30 July 2014: In 1977, Bieri wrote a paper titled, "The Ecological Significance of Seasonal Occurrence and Growth Rate of Velella (Hydrozoa)." He compiled observations from ships and beaches and plotted them by month, including their length measurements. (Note the October record from the Bodega Marine Lab in 1975.) Bieri also proposed that Velella has two peaks in maximum size during the year one in the spring, and another in the late summer/fall (see graph below). From this, Bieri suggested that it would be difficult to find large Velella at the surface between November-January and again between late May-early July. If Bieri's proposed cycle of growth is accurate, then it makes sense that Velella could appear on local beaches during mid-late summer and fall. But the question still remains, are there more spring records, and if so, why? And when Velella is seen during mid-summer, as in 2014, what's different? For example, Bieri proposed that it takes ~4 months for Velella to reach a length of 80 mm. If that's true, are the large Velella that we're seeing now the tail end of the spring population? If so, why are they here in late July? Was the "spring population" delayed this year? (Or was Bieri's proposal not quite right? Or has something changed since Bieri collected his data?) Because we don't know the answers , it shows that it's always worth recording whenever you see Velella (including their size and the numbers washing ashore), as well as the weather conditions leading up to their appearance. No comments:
Saturday, 2 April 2011 Language for Communication: This is not a new concept. Leaders in India have thought over this for over hundred years. No conclusive and accepted solution by all, has yet been found though. Many of the national leaders accepted Hindi as the contact language for Indians. There had been resistance to this specially from southern states. Major reasons for the resistance had been due to fear that people whose Hindi is mother tongue would grab all jobs in various services at the centre. Southern states and Bengal had and still is proficiency in English. All competitive examinations use English language. This gives upper hand for competitors from this region. No one would like to loose the advantage. Later with spread of internet and information availability, English gained further preference. However, if we check the population knowing English, it shows that not more than 5% population is comfortable with English. However these people are in the decision making process and hence are in a position to brutally force their opinion on remaining 95% population, specially when there is no possibility of 95% population accepting any one common language. Lack of unanimous ness on a common language among others gave strength to people who force English on a large population. The only disadvantage with English is it is found difficult by the 95% population to learn and hence cannot be accepted as a common language. On other hand there is no need to know English by almost all population in their work. Therefore, English cannot be a common language for India. Similarly, no other Indian language would be accepted by all unaminously. This is a trivial situation. Management science states that there is no problem for which there is no solution. There is a great need to address this obstacle from the base. The first resistance to any other Indian language is because of different scripts for languages. Among all the script is use in India, Devnagari script is used by different languages. Hindi stands first in this row. Marathi, Konkani and Nepali languages do use this script. Although Devnagari script used for Hindi and other languages i. e. Marathi, Konkani and Nepali had been different the differences have been got over and a common script is evolved now. Consonants and vowels used in almost all Indian languages are common. Languages like Tamil, Urdu and Kashmiri do have a slight difference. This difference is not much and can be easily resolved. Punjabi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese language script is similar to Devnagari. Southern states also have started learning Devnagari. Hence, it would be easy to make Devnagari script acceptable by 100% population. This should be the first step towards final aim of building a common language for communication among all Indians. Some might take objection to Devnagari as computer keyboard is some what tedious for use of Devnagari. Here basically we must accept that keyboard is designed taking in to consideration English language. All other languages have to compromise. Even French, Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and many others have compromised on it. Therefore, this cannot be considered as an obstacle. Fortunately English keyboard has 26 keys for letters and with 'Shift' key this becomes 52. Devnagari script has 52 letters. However vowels use 2 different symbols. Hence it becomes 64. If research is made to overcome this problem the existing keyboard can easily be used for Devnagari script. Experts should work in this field and make Devnagari script acceptable by all Indians. Mumbai is the only metropolitan city in India who has solved common language problem. Mumbai has developed its own language mixing Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and English. This is popularly known as Bombaia Hindi. Other metropolis like Kolkota and Chennai failed to evolve a solution, basically because of high resistance of locals. Whoever migrated to these cities were more or less forced to learn local language. Example of Mumbai is quite encouraging. Indians should work on a common script first and then build a national language. This may take say 20 or 50 years. However, this cannot be considered as a long period of time when life of nation is considered. No comments: Popular Posts
Monday, September 9, 2013 Old Sodom Schoolhouse I have driven by this old building so often through the years, yet didn't know much about it. Until today, that is. This historical gem is located just three miles from my home, and when I passed by it on my way to an appointment, I determined to take a picture and learn more about it. Since it does not appear as if the building is open for public viewing, I was forced to do a bit of internet research to learn about this unique structure. Built around 1815, the Sodom Schoolhouse, sometimes called the Octagonal Schoolhouse, was constructed by Scotch-Irish settlers and precedes the Pennsylvania's Common School Act of 1834. The Methodists of Sodom were the Sodomites who built and used the building. It is located just three miles east of Lewisburg on route 45 in central Pennsylvania. A local tavern owner, Lot Carson, donated the materials. The organization and construction of the building was the work of the locals, as was typical before government programs were established. This school was built to serve 40 to 60 students, but often accommodated up to 100. Students within a three mile radius attended. Limestone quarried nearby was used to build the single story structure. It has a single chimney in the center of the roof, seven windows, and one door facing the road on the south side. A cupola and bell once stood above the front door, and a vestibule was formerly attached where the children hung their coats. The inside walls were painted slate grey, and a wood burning stove stood in the center. On the north wall was a blackboard, with a 30 foot long, 10 foot wide, and 8-10 inch elevated platform for the teacher. The teacher's desk and chair were painted red. Two recitation benches faced the platform. Six long rough desks were placed parallel to the side walls and two more were placed in the center of the room. The building was multi-purpose throughout the 19th century. It was used as a Methodist Church on Sundays until 1858, a public meeting house for political meetings and elections, and a school until 1915. The Sodomites no longer meet there, nor do they own the building. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) now owns the Sodom Schoolhouse, the only known memorial to the former Sodom Community in Pennsylvania. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like to attend school in a one room schoolhouse long ago. My how far we've come nowadays. I suppose we could look at it another way: could those students even imagine 100 years ahead to a time when every student had access to a laptop computer? Now there's something to think about... 1. Why is it so hard for us to discover all the history that is so close to home for us. What a neat piece of history that school house represents. Can't imagine 100 students in there at one time though. 2. Looking at the picture of that building, I can't imagine that building holding a hundred students at a time. They would have to be packed in like sardines in a can. You would need that chimney in the center to let out all the hot air (grin). 3. I did attend school for a few years in a one room school, all eight grades, it was a totally different world back then. Can't really say it is better now by any means. 4. Interesting history of the stone one room school. I often wonder when we pass an old structure what was it for and who lived there. 5. That limestone was sure worth every penny they invested, it served the community well and long!
Sandra Culmer (Creator) The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG ) Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/ Carl Lashley Abstract: This study examined the perceptions and experiences the parents of elementary school aged children had regarding expanding schooling options within the public educational system and choosing schools using the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) public school choice provision. The NCLB Act of 2001 was the federal government's effort to improve schools and nurture high standards and academic success for all students. Policies intended to encourage greater parent participation in their children's schooling are emphasized, especially when children attend low-performing Title I schools. Parents may use public school choice provisions to transfer their children from struggling schools and enroll them in public schools that met or exceeded the NCLB proficiency benchmark called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). This study was designed to give insight into parents' experiences in choosing to exercise or not exercise the transfer options in schools that have failed to make AYP. The specific questions explored were: 1. What are the experiences and perceptions of parents/guardians whose children have the opportunity to transfer from an elementary Title I school designated as an underperforming school under NCLB to a presumably higher-performing school? 2. How do parents/guardians describe their children's experiences following the choices that the parents/guardians made to leave one school for another because of NCLB or not to switch schools and to remain at their current low-performing school? 3. How do parents describe their own experience with the school and school district after enrolling their child in the NCLB choice school or having their child remain in the current low-performing school? Phenomenological research methodology was used to investigate parents' experiences, view school choose from the parents' perceptions, and capture parents' voices as they describe their experiences. Two major findings emerged from the data. The majority of the parents perceived that the choice option gave them greater influence and control over their child's education. They perceived it transformed the selection of schools from a passive to an active decision making process. The findings suggest that NCLB's transfer policy would benefit from attention to parents' perceptions and experiences to improve implementation and achieve the goals of the law especially for low-income and minority students. Additional Information Language: English Date: 2011 No Child Left Behind, Parental choice, Public school choice United States. $t No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 School choice $z United States $v Case studies Email this document to
What is Symbiosis? Symbiosis is close and often long-term interaction between two different biological species. Symbiosis has three types. They are Commensalism,Parasitism and Mutualism. What are they? Commensalism describes between two living things where one benefits and the others is not significantly harmed or helped. Parasitism is about one benefits while the other is harmed.
Home Countries What is the Population of Japan? Countries / / 622 1 Population of Japan japanFor many Americans, Japan is the country of ninjas and samurais, anime, robots, and all kinds of high tech stuff. It’s not exactly what one would consider a large country; it has an area of 145,882 square miles, ranking it #62 on the list of the largest countries in the world. But Japan has a population of 127.1 million, which means there are more than 873 people per square mile. It is actually ranked #10 among the most populaous countries in the world. Why Are There So Many People in Japan? There are two main factors for the great number of people living in a fairly small island group. One factor is that the people have a longer life expectancy than just about any other country in the world. People live up to an average of 86.2 years, and that puts Japan at #1 in the life expectancy ranking. In comparison, people living in the US only live up to an average of 79.8 years, putting the Land of Milk and Honey at the 36th spot. The other factor for the high population of Japan is that the infant mortality rate is so low as well. That wasn’t always true, because in 1960 the infant mortality rate was at 30 deaths before the age of 1 year per one thousand live births. But by 1990 this was reduced to just 4 deaths, which made it the lowest infant mortality rate in the world. Today, it is estimated that there are only 2.13 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in Japan. Essentially, people are surviving more and living longer. That’s a testament to the power of the universal health care in place in the country since 1961. Some people believe that the Japanese diet is also a contributing factor to the high life expectancy rate. Others also point to having a different lifestyle and the stronger social cohesion that is prevalent in the country. Things to Do in Japan There are many good reasons why people enjoy living in Japan. Not only do you live longer, but you’re also about 44% less likely to be unemployed. You also spend about 47% less on health care. With so many people in the country, it only means there is a wide variety of entertainment options. The number one sport here is undoubtedly baseball, which is why today they still check up on Ichiro’s activities in the twilight years of his MLB career. Soccer is also popular, as well as basketball. Of course, there are some sports which are popular in Japan but are not even all that known in other developed countries. Judo and sumo wrestling, for example, are quite popular. Among the younger generation, video gaming is also a legitimate sport. Some game designers are considered celebrities in this country, in the same way music artists and actors are considered stars. If you’re ever in Japan, here are some activities you ought to try: • Learn their language. They appreciate it if at least you try, even if you make mistakes. • Visit the small towns. While the huge cities such as Tokyo have many surprising things to offer, the small villages have their own unique charm. • Sample local food. There’s a big difference between how sushi is prepared in the US and how it is prepared in Japan. And there’s more to Japanese food than sushi! Population Problems Ahead There’s a growing problem in the population of Japan, however. Now you may be thinking—how can that be when they have a high life expectancy rate and a low infant mortality rate? The answer is simple: there are fewer births than there are deaths in the country. This has been happening for several years now. In 2014 there were just 1.001 million births, compared to 1.269 million deaths. So that’s a net loss of 268,000 people. Several reasons may account for this trend: • Younger professionals are insecure about their future, so starting a family has become riskier for them. • The traditional family concept of allowing the husband to be the sole breadwinner is not as attractive to many modern women. • Marriage is still the only socially acceptable way of having children, but men and women are marrying later in life. And what’s more, the age of the population of Japan is growing older. That means there’s a smaller workforce that’s supporting a growing percentage of elderly citizens. It’s estimated that by 2060, about 40% of the population will be at least 65 years old. The economic implications of this trend can be serious. Medical costs can inflate because of the aging population. Small towns are disappearing, with only the elderly remaining. Consumption of many consumer goods can decline as well, and that will also burden the economy. This is where the US is ahead of Japan, even though the US is also experiencing high life expectancy rates, low infant mortality rates, and a smaller number of live births. The United States welcome approximately a million immigrants every year. That’s not exactly true for Japan, which as a country, prides itself in its homogenous nature. About 98.5% of the population consider themselves of pure Japanese ancestry while very few are of Korean and Chinese ancestry. Possible Solutions for the Aging Population kimono-1254935__180The most obvious solution to this problem are to increase immigration and making it more attractive and easier for young men and women to have babies. But that is easier said than done, obviously. Japanese culture, despite what the rest of us may have seen in the media, is inherently conservative and it doesn’t like to change things. This is especially true of the Japanese government. So if the government wants to encourage more births, it would have to address issues such as single motherhood, cohabitation without marriage, and children born out of wedlock. Sadly, the government pays only lip service to female empowerment. Allowing immigration to increase is also a practical solution. It solves the low fertility rate, increases the workforce, and boosts the number of health care professionals looking after the elderly. But being pro-immigration in Japan is the fastest way to lose an election, so of course the politicians won’t go for it. One Comment • Nadine says: I have never been to Japan, and honestly I do not know even what is the population of Japan, or how many islands it includes, but I would like to go there one day. I think, it is the most interesting and amazing country in the world from many aspects.
Cost of Living The overall cost of living in the West Virginia Hardwood Alliance Zone is 20% lower than national costs. Cost of living indices are based on a US average of 100. An amount less than 100 means the cost of living is less expensive than the US average. A cost of living index above 100 means it is more expensive. The nine counties in the West Virginia Hardwood Alliance Zone score an average of 84.5 on the scale. This is 15.5% lower than the US average and 1.5% lower than the rest of West Virginia. Overall – The total of all the cost of living categories weighted subjectively as follows: housing (30%), food and groceries (15%), transportation (10%), utilities (6%), health care (7%), and miscellaneous expenses such as clothing, services, and entertainment (32%). State and local taxes are not included in any category. Food – The average cost of food and groceries (not including restaurants) Utilities – The average cost of heating or cooling a typical residence for the area, including electricity and natural gas.

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