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warc | 201704 | In the Netherlands, half the Moroccan youth get in trouble with the police by the time they're 22. A third of this group are repeat offenders with more than 5 incidents on their record, according to a new study published in the recent issue of the Tijdschrift voor Criminologie (Journal of Criminology).
To the surprise of the authors, it turns out Moroccan girls commit three times as many crimes as Dutch girls. An multiple offenders are on average not more violent than people who commit a crime every now and then. According to another study in the same issue of TVC, asylum migrants commit more crimes than ethnic Dutch or regular migrants. An evaluation of of both studies, and the question is whether this study can be generalized for Belgium. Not so.
This article was prepared by the Islam in Europe blog - islamineurope.blogspot.com
The link between ethnicity and studying criminality is a sensitive issue. Registration of somebody's ethnic background soon brings charges of 'racism'. In Belgium there are no studies about this issue, but in the Netherlands there are. TVC devoted an entire issue to this subject. A new study by Arjan Blokland, Kim Grimbergen, Wim Bernasco and Paul Nieuwbeerta is central. They followed everybody who was born in the Netherlands in 1984 (!) until they were 22. They checked how many times these people got in trouble with the police for a crime. Such a study was never done before. Though it did appear already before that that the number of immigrants in the annual group of suspects in the Netherlands is twice as big as their part in the population. And also that about a third of all registered crimes in the Netherlands are committed by a non-Western immigrants. And you had another study by the city of Rotterdam, which showed that in 2007, more than half of the Moroccans in Rotterdam aged 18-24 got in trouble with the police at least once for a crime. The recidivism in this group is around 90%. These studies were snapshots and could therefore be biased. Never before was a complete birth 'cohort' (a group from a certain birth year which is followed for years) from across the Netherlands followed. That did occur now. RESULTS What are the most important results? * 14% of these youth from 1984 got in trouble with the police at least once. Among Dutch men that was 20%, among Moroccan men 54%. * Immigrant youth got in trouble with the police for a crime more than ethnic Dutch. This is true for all immigrant groups (Moroccans, Turks, Antilleans, Surinamese..) * Moroccan boys are on average the youngest when they were first registered (17.6). The average starting age for Dutch men is 18.5. Moroccan boys also got in trouble with the police most often, on average (4.1 times). * Turkish men commit mostly violent crimes, Dutch men are registered for destruction, disturbing the public order and traffic offense. Moroccan men commit property crimes. * 5.4% of all girls born in 1984 got in trouble with the police at least once as perpetrators. For Dutch girls that was 4.5%, for Moroccan girls 16.6% (3.7 times as many). In the crime statistics, not only are Moroccan boys overrepresented by also Moroccan girls. This finding undermines the widespread idea that Moroccan girls are much better behaved than Moroccan boys. By Moroccan girls the crimes were mostly property crimes (presumably shoplifting) and very little violence. Girls from all backgrounds are less violent than boys. With the group of criminal girls, Surinamese and Antillean girls commit percentage wise three times as many violent property crimes as Dutch girls. * What's the situation with repeat offenders? The authors define anybody who was registered more than five times for a crime as a repeat offender. Among men, that was 3.4% of all men born in 1984, or 14.9% of all criminals in this group. But the differences between the ethnicities are great. For Dutch men, it's 12.8% of all criminals, for Moroccan men it's 32.3%, almost three times as many. Most repeat offenders committed at least one violent crime, but in general their criminal career is not more violent than that of other criminals. The latter also surprised the authors. Repeat offending is a man's thing: the number of men who do it is 11 times the number of women who do it. However, it's remarkable that the percentage of repeat offenders among Moroccan girls (7.4% of all female criminals) is twice as high as that of ethnic Dutch (4.8%). In total, barely 0.3% of all women born in 1984 is a repeat offender, and the same goes for 5.4% of all female criminals. * Delinquent immigrants are more violent than delinquent ethnic Dutch. That is true both for one-time criminals and for multiple offenders. * The Turks are most like the Dutch, though they too commit more crimes and are more violent than the Dutch.
EXPLANATIONS
The authors don't bring any real explanation. They do discuss all possible options. * They say that the cultures and religions of these groups differ enormously. Therefore, the explanatory factor can't be that. * The lower social-economic position of all immigrants certainly plays a role, for three reasons: - Because in the lower circles have more negative "role models" (people who made it socially thanks to crime) than in the higher ones. - Because the process of becoming an adult takes longer, and therefore the "criminal transition in puberty" also drags on longer and the risk is greater that this criminality would be lasting. - Because various social factors can have negative neurological effects for small children, which encourage aggression. But.. the lower social-economic position is not the decisive factor, since Dutch from the same low social class get in trouble with the police less for crimes than immigrants from that class. * Being well or badly integrated in Dutch society also plays a small role. It's been suggested that for Moroccan boys, the criminal group is better integrated than the not-criminal group. Moroccans with a strong focus on the Netherlands are often more frustrated that they can't realize their desires from their disadvantaged position than Moroccans who aren't focused on the Netherlands, say the authors. * Social control does seem to be an important factor. This social control plays out both in the family and in the community. Social control could explain why Turks score so 'well': the Netherlands has a strong Turkish community, but that doesn't apply to the Moroccans. Moreover, the Turks see petty crimes as "losing face" and that doesn't apply to the Moroccans.
And yet, social control can't explain everything either, since Moroccan girls are highly controlled, probably more than Dutch girls, certainly in their family, and they also score extremely high in the statistics.
* Does registration by the police play a role? A study from 1999 showed that there is little evidence that immigrants are treated differently than ethnic Dutch by the Dutch police. The fact that HALT cases (alternative sentences for petty crimes by minors who confessed) aren't included in the statistics, since in such cases there's no record, can mean that the number of ethnic Dutch is underestimated, because this group is over-represented in HALT. And the policy to focus on certain disadvantaged neighborhoods and repeat offenders can lead to an over-representation of Moroccans. On the other hand, it seems that the differences between immigrant and ethnic Dutch are even bigger in studies in which everybody says which crimes they've committed, than in the police statistics. And so the effect of the registration factor could be limited. The authors conclude that linking ethnicity and risk-factors for criminals on individual, neighborhood or social levels is a complex issue. "The danger exists that people will see ethnicity and culture as an explanatory factor, while ethnicity is just a social category which at best refers to other underlying causes," they argue. CRIMINALITY OF ASYLUM MIGRANTS In the same issue of TVC Jan de Boom, Erik Snel and Godfried Engbersen published a study about the link between 'asylum migration' and crime. They checked how many asylum migrants were suspected of a crime in 2004. Asylum migrants include both asylum seekers and recognized refugees, even those who got Dutch citizenship. Also rejected asylum seekers (ie, illegals) are included in the term 'asylum migrants'. 3.4% of the recognized refugees were registered as suspects in 2004. This figure increased to 5.4% among asylum seekers (who were still in the process) and 10% of rejected asylum seekers. There more crime among asylum migrants - with an average of 5.1% suspects - than among ethnic Dutch and regular migrant groups, say the authors. In 2004, 1.5% of all ethnic Dutch were registered as suspects, 6% of Moroccans and 7.5% of Antilleans. But the data is difficult to compare, because asylum migrants are a specific group: (then still) mostly young men with strong social frustration and deprivation. Mostly it's petty property crimes (16% committed a single theft or shoplifting, 9% a robbery), and forgery (using false documents). According to the authors it's notable that the worse the legal status of an asylum migrant, the higher their criminality. AND BELGIUM? What's the situation in Belgium? We don't know. In the Netherlands you can register the ethnic origin of perpetrators and suspects, compare databases and do scientific research on this subject. In Belgium - mostly due to the pressure of the PS (Socialists) and the privacy commission - not yet. In Belgium just recording somebody's ethnic origin is 'racist' for some groups. The few studies about the over-representation of foreigners (in Belgian studies that's mostly people with a foreign nationality), the crime statistics in Belgium are invariably focused on possible police and court racism and on social exclusion. Cultural explanatory models are taboo here. As the reactions to the studies of Marion and San showed.. Comparisons between Belgium and the Netherlands and generalizations from one country to another should be done carefully. For multiple reasons: - The Netherlands has certain groups of immigrants (Surinamese, Antilleans) that Belgium doesn't. Belgium does have others (Congolese, Black Africans). These groups have different cultures and can't be all thrown together. It should be said that the Dutch study of Blokland and co was about people who were born in 1984 in the Netherlands. This means that a number of ethnic groups now present in the Netherlands and Belgium (Russians, Kosovars, Serbs) weren't included, since in 1984 they were behind the Iron Curtain. - In Belgium a study like that of Blokland and co isn't yet possible, because our country only has such crime statistics since 2000. So it's not that simple. - Integration is different. Moroccans are probably better integrated in the Netherlands than in Belgium. The employment percentage in the Netherlands is any case higher than here. In Belgium unemployment among immigrant youth in Brussels is up to 50%. It's not clear what role this plays in criminality. - The dutch police works - at least on the local level - more efficiently and professionally than the Belgian police. It's not clear what the results could be: more registration of Moroccan suspects (through possible racism) or less (due to no-go-areas)? If the Belgian police and courts are more racist than their Dutch counterparts is doubtful. A study by the Comité P showed that just 16.4% of the complaints lodged against the Belgian police for racism between 2005 and the end of 2008, were founded. And the only study about possible discrimination in the detention of Moroccans - the study by Dr. Walter De Pauw from the Department for Criminal Policy about the handling of drug crimes - showed that there was no discrimination. The scientific study of the link ethnicity-crime is still unexplored terrain in Belgium. TVC explains the big difference between Belgium and the Netherlands by the 'tendency of the government to keep the crime problem in relationship to migrants out of the discussion'. TVC moreover thinks that 'The Belgian migration debate threatens to be reduced to a debate about Islam. That debate drives apart supporters and opponents and doesn't only disturb the social dialog between population groups, but also the climate in which scientific research is done.' But the Belgian attitude is more the rule than the exception in the West. According to TVC, the crime-migration relationship can only be spoken of in England if it's brought up as a question of selective policing, racism and deprivation. Germany is very cautious about studies about people's ethnic background since WWII, and in France there are only French, no Frenchmen with another ethnic origin. However wants to have a crime policy, both preventive and repressive, must abandon these taboos. The fact that the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism is now asking for ethnic registration (specifically to research the social evolution of regularized illegals) is a positive sign. See: TIJDSCHRIFT VOOR CRIMINOLOGIE, Criminaliteit, migratie en etniciteit, 2010, (52)2, Boom Juridische Uitgevers, Den Haag
Source: John De Wit, GvA (Dutch) | 13,264 | 5,625 | 0.000178 |
warc | 201704 | Research proposal on The role of managers in achieving organisational goal Category : Research Methodology, Research Proposal Hypothesis, Research Proposal Introduction, Research Proposal Problem Statement, Sample Research Proposals
The role
of managers in achieving organisational goal
1.0 Introduction
Goals are considered drivers, purpose-providers and direction givers. Management by objectives (MBO), for instance, manifests the beginning of a planned change that fortifies the goal-setting process. MBO programs purports on clarifications of organizational goals at all levels as well as provide an instrument for better motivation and individual, group and team participation. The concepts of difficult goals for better performance and specific hard goals in comparison with ‘do your best’ goals guide organizational changes. The idea is that difficult and challenging goals must surpass expectations that the job requires.
Analogously, goals must be also specific and measurable on the basis of acceptable performances. However, individual needs impose special consideration in goal-setting programs though individual goals must directly point towards achieving team goals. Prioritization is also important for goal-setting with respect to competition and cooperation. In relation, performance goals should be watchfully given thought to since they will determine the status and position of the organization in the long run (Verweire and Berghe, 2004, p. 294).
Alignment of organisational goals vis-à-vis individual goals is also critical especially that of the managers. All efforts must align according to the purpose and objectives of the organisation. Mission, vision, goals and organisational strategies must be defined and clearly understood at all levels. In particular, the individual managerial tasks must contribute to overall plans of the organisation and, in return, plans should create performance standards such as quantity, quality, time and cost. These standards should then be translated into performance for each (Gautam, n.d.).
Having said this, there is a need for managers to learn how to set goals from team and organizational levels. This can be done by using organisational objectives, statement of values and vision and mission statements. Learning how to implement strategic goals in the workplace should be the main objective of the managers. Thereby, it is required that managers should be equipped with strategic goal setting skills. With this, managers are having specified roles in achieving organisational goals.
2.0 Statement of the problem
The key problem that the study will address is: what are the key roles of managers in achieving organisational goals? Other questions that will be given answer to are:
1) How do managers perceive the process of achieving organisational goals?
2) How do managers relate their role in achieving organisational goals?
3) Are the roles of managers adequate to achieve organisational goals?
4) Are there needs for other and new roles so that managers can fully maximise the process of achieving organisational goals?
3.0 Hypothesis
1) The role of managers needs to be enhanced so that they can fully contribute in achieving organisational goals.
2) Additional roles are needed so that managers can fully contribute in achieving organisational goals.
4.0 Aim
The main aim of this study is to explore to what extent and in what specific ways do managers perceive and relate their roles in achieving the goals of the organisation.
5.0 Objective
In lieu with this, the study will address the following research objectives.
Explore how the achievement of organisational goals affect the role of the managers within the workforce context Determine what roles are created and what new roles emerge in lieu with the process of achieving organisational goals
6.0 Methodology
The research strategy that the study will utilize is the descriptive method. A descriptive research intends to present facts concerning the nature and status of a situation, as it exists at the time of the study. It is also concerned with relationships and practices that exist, beliefs and processes that are ongoing, effects that are being felt, or trends that are developing. In addition, such approach tries to describe present conditions, events or systems based on the impressions or reactions of the respondents of the research.
In this study, primary and secondary research will be both incorporated. The reason for this is to be able to provide adequate discussion for the readers that will help them understand more about the issue and the different variables that involve with it. The primary data for the study will be represented by the survey results that will be acquired from the respondents. On the other hand, the literature reviews to be presented in the second chapter of the study will represent the secondary data of the study. The secondary sources of data will come from published articles from contents of books, journals, theses and related studies and newspaper and magazines.
7.0 Justification
The study could lead to significant improvements in the role of managers and how they can specifically contribute in achieving organisational goals. The findings of this study will be very important in developing new programs in enhancing the role of managers. This research is likely to be significant not just for managers but also for the organisation as a whole. Likewise, this research will serve as a supplement to the limited study about the topic and it is hoped that the findings will contribute important inputs.
8.0 Limitation
One of the potential limitations of the study is the number of samples. The target number of sample is small if converted as a percentage of the total number managers. However, this may also be valid because the number of sample is enough to produce a general idea on the role of managers in achieving organisational objective. Furthermore, a recommendation for future study will be provided so as to promote the continuous investigation on this issue.
Questionnaires are the only primary means in the study in collecting data. The study is also limited only the pieces of information that the respondents are willing to disclose. It is limited to the respondents’ capability to answer such questions. However, literature reviews will be included in the study for reference. Statistical analysis will be limited only to weighted mean and percentage. On the other hand, answers on open questions will be interpreted qualitatively.
References
Gautam, A. (n.d.).
Performance Management Cycle.
Verweire, K. and Berghe, L.
(2004).
Integrated Performance Management: A Guide to Strategy Implementation.
London: Sage Publications Inc. | 6,788 | 2,805 | 0.00036 |
warc | 201704 | WITHIN the past decade, dramatic advances have been made in imaging and ultrasound technology. These new capabilities have led to better understanding of the pathophysiologic characteristics of various subtypes of stroke. The ability to safely visualize in vivo the brain and blood vessels and to analyze blood flow has improved physicians' ability to diagnose the causes and mechanisms of their patients' strokes, to more accurately prognosticate, and to more rationally choose treatment. Unfortunately, this revolution in knowledge and technological capability has been so rapid that the average generalist caring for stroke patients has often not been able to keep up with the progress or to translate advances into practical patient management. I hope to share in this review the questions the physician should ask and, with the help of patient examples, to suggest an approach to the evaluation and management of stroke patients.
WHAT SUBTYPE OF STROKE DOES THE PATIENT
Caplan LR. Diagnosis and Treatment of Ischemic Stroke. JAMA. 1991;266(17):2413-2418. doi:10.1001/jama.1991.03470170101032
© 2017 | 1,113 | 671 | 0.001504 |
warc | 201704 | How To Fire Up Your Network Marketing Business With This One Discipline for Explosive Growth
Learning to run your own Network Marketing business can be an enjoyable and exciting experience. Becoming a network marketing pro can lead to great wealth, independence and satisfaction.
Anybody is qualified to run a network marketing business as long as you have a few skills: education, understanding along with above average listening and communication skills.
Although you might have these given skills, they will mean nothing if you find yourself spinning your wheels because of a lack of discipline. In order to succeed, you must be able to master the following method.
Time-Management – The Discipline of the Network Marketing Pro
This time-proven discipline of the network marketing pro is a valuable treasure that needs to be developed, cultivated and refined if you want your network marketing business to flourish. Creating a daily time-management habit is a great place to start your journey to unbridled success.
You may need to give up certain hours of TV, let your Facebook Farmville close its doors for the winter, stop the continual gossip texting with your friends or any other menial, worthless tasks during the operating hours that are set aside for your network marketing business.
You cannot build a successful marketing business that will lead YOU to great wealth by allowing yourself to be drawn into things taking you away from your work. Your desire to keep your eye on the prize needs to be stronger than the force that pulls you away from it.
Managing Your Time In Your Network Marketing Business
Time is one of those precious commodities that you
must master, but sadly most of the Internet marketers either don’t know how, or they get side-tracked with distractions.
Managing your time is an art form requiring persistence, will power, diligence, goal setting along with consistency.
Staying away from the countless onslaught distractions of the everyday rat-race is the ultimate goal and a required factor, yet most of the network marketers of today get pulled into this vicious cycle.
It’s unfortunate that there are only 24 hours in a day, but it is ultimately within your own grasp to regulate how you use your allotted time.
It’s simple… either you control your time or time will control you.
Time-Management – Create and Stick To a To-Do List From this day forward, take an action to plan tomorrow’s day in advance, usually done best the night before.
“
Success is not a destination, it’s a pattern of habitual behaviors.” ~ Mike Dillard
Mike Dillard states that when you make a to-do list the night before, you will subconsciously have all night to think about it. When you awake, you are already on task, you already know what your goals are for the day. You may also wake up with valuable insights and ideas to help you accomplish your to-do list.
Having a simple to-do list will help you ignore the distractions that can search you out, and stomp on your endorphins, slowing the steady flow of your brilliance.
NOTE: These tasks on your to-do list MUST be action ‘tasks,’ NOT goals. For more information about creating your to-do list, follow the link to Mike Dillard’s secret software he used to build his online empire (AND, it’s free)!
You will want to create a reasonable and practical list that you know can be accomplished within your time-frame of the following day.
Remind yourself that life can happen and that your ‘To-Do’ list will need to take priority over everything else that happens that day (barring a family emergency or something similar). Remind yourself during the day that with each task checked off your to-do list puts you one step closer to the success you desire.
If for some reason, you were not able to finish your list that day, don’t beat yourself up, look back and see if there is anything you could have done differently. Review what you did that day to see if you might have wasted any time working on a task that will not move you closer to your goal.
Learning what didn’t work for you will help you manage your time better for the following days to-do lists.
Closing Comments to Fire Up Your Network Marketing Business
If you are wanting to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take your network marketing business to the next level and treat it like a, make it or break it, can’t pay the bills if I’m not successful, serious business.
This means that you will need to take 100% responsibility and accountability for ALL of your actions, remove all of the victim stories and excuses from your vocabulary, and all the reasons why you can’t be successful like the other network marketing professionals.
Remember… discipline is
not something we are born with, it is a learned skill that we need to master. It means the willingness to create habits to establish a better work ethic.
If you want to be successful in any business, learning discipline is a must, without it, you will most likely be like 95% of the unsuccessful network marketers.
We’ve all heard the saying that “Practice Makes Perfect”… working on this quality that now comes naturally to the network marketing pro will put you on the path to wealth and greatness.
Related Article:Undeniable Gateway to Wealth – Lesson in Persistence from Napolean Hill – Think and Grow Rich! VALUEfrom This Article Please Take the Time to COMMENT... your Social Participationis Appreciated. FREE LinkBack to Your Site w/ CommentLuv!
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Shareit on SEO, Blogging & Social Media Insider Secrets' - Blogging and Marketing Tips for the Masses!, then Come RIGHT Back and ADD Value with Leaving a Comment! | 5,820 | 2,723 | 0.000379 |
warc | 201704 | Study objective: We evaluated the longitudinal changes in lung function and the factors associated with FEV 1 changes over time in a sample of asthmatic subjects. Setting: FEV 1 measures were recorded every 3 months over a 5-year follow-up period. To compare all subjects independently of body size, FEV 1 values were normalized for the subject’s height at the third power. We evaluated the possible effect of age, baseline FEV 1, disease duration, and FEV 1 variability on the rate of change of FEV 1. Patients: We studied 142 subjects with asthma diagnosed on the basis of validated clinical and functional criteria. Results: FEV 1 showed a linear decay with aging in each subject. For a subject 1.65 m in height, the median overall FEV 1 decay was 40.9 mL/yr. FEV 1 decay slopes were significantly influenced by age and sex, being steeper in younger male subjects. A significant interaction was found between age and baseline FEV 1: the FEV 1 decay was significantly higher among younger asthmatics with a poorer baseline functional condition. A longer disease duration was associated with a lower FEV 1 slope. FEV 1 variability was strongly associated with an increased rate of FEV 1 decline.
Conclusions: FEV 1 decline in patients with bronchial asthma is significantly influenced by baseline FEV 1, disease duration, and FEV 1 variability. Moreover, the rate of FEV 1 decline seems to increase in younger subjects only when the baseline function is poorer. | 1,470 | 709 | 0.001418 |
warc | 201704 | Abstract
Frontal-subcortical dementias are a heterogeneous group of disorders that share primary pathology in subcortical structure and a characteristic pattern of neuropsychologic impairment. Their clinical presentation is characterized by memory disorders, an impaired ability to manipulate acquired knowledge, important changes of personality (apathy, inertia, or depression), and slowed thought processes (or bradyphrenia). It also has marked frontal dysfunction. Classic frontal-subcortical dementias include Huntington chorea, Parkinson disease dementia, progressive supranuclear palsy, thalamic degeneration, subcortical vascular dementia, multiple sclerosis, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome dementia complex, depressive pseudodementia, and some other rare dementias like spinocerebellar degenerative syndromes, Hallervorden-Spatz disease, choreoacanthocytosis, idiopathic basal ganglia calcification, Guamanian parkinsonism-dementia complex, corticobasal degeneration multiple system atrophy, Wilson disease, metachromatic leukodystrophy, adrenoleukodystrophy, hypoparathyroidism, sarcoidosis, and other CNS inflammatory disorders. Anatomic data suggest that the frontal signs result from a disconnection of the frontal cortex from the basal ganglia. However, most frontal-subcortical dementias show cortical atrophy in later stages, and cortical dementias have subcortical pathology at some point. In fact, the concept might be seen as a continuum, and only the 2 extremes would be represented by pure cortical or subcortical pathology. Anyway, subcortical disorders may still be more similar to one another than they are to AD. Possibly, frontal-subcortical and cortical dementias are the description of the prior main target of the disease process, ending up in both cases in a global dementia. Although the dichotomy cortical versus frontal-subcortical dementia is not strict, the 2 concepts still seem to have advantages.
Author Information
From the *Department of Psychiatry, Graz Medical University, Graz, Austria; and the †Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA.
Reprints: Jeffrey L. Cummings, MD, Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1769. E-mail: jcummings@mednet.ucla.edu. | 2,303 | 1,141 | 0.000881 |
warc | 201704 | 10 Best Wheelchair Friendly Summer Camps Posted by ROLAND REZNIK on June 07, 2016. 0 Comments
The Americans with Disability Act requires all summer camps to accommodate children in wheelchairs. This means children who use wheelchairs have just as many summer camp choices as able-bodied children. Finding the right camp that suits your child’s needs can feel overwhelming. However, making sure the camp has reasonable accommodations and an active itinerary is easier than you think. There are plenty of excellent wheelchair friendly summer camps to consider.
Here is our list of 10 best wheelchair friendly summer camps. 1. Camp Little Giant
Camp Little Giant is a summer camp for those who love outdoor adventures. Campers can enjoy a variety of activities including adaptable sports, fishing, and even bread making. The camp is located in Carbondale, Illinois and is suitable for children with physical, developmental and cognitive disabilities. The age accepted, is 8 to 21 years old. The cost for summer camp ranges from $550 to $2100 depending on the session.
2. Camp Oakhurst
Established in 1906, Camp Oakhurst is a summer sleep-away camp for children with physical and developmental needs. The camp is fully accessible for wheelchair users. Camp Oakhurst provides activities such as a variety of sports, swimming, day trips, and cooking. It is located in New Jersey and is operated by the New York Service for the Handicapped. Camper’s ages 8 to 19 are welcome. The cost is based on income and scholarships are available.
3. Bradford Woods
This fully accessible camp offers activities such as fishing, canoeing, hikes, archery and more. Bradford Woods summer camp is located in Martinsville, Indiana and is part of Indiana University’s Outdoor Center. Campers are grouped by disability and placed in a camp program that is best suited to their needs. Campers with physical disabilities often participate in camp Kan Du, Venture, and Riley. Campers ages 8 to 18 are welcome.
4. National Ability Center
This camp offers day or overnight camp sessions for campers ages 6 to 24. The National Ability Center Camp focuses on the development of recreational skills, building friendships and strengthening physical agility. Campers can choose from a variety of sessions such as an adaptive sports camp or outdoor adventure camp. National Ability Center Camps are located in Park City, Utah. The cost ranges from $120 to $550.
5. Victory Junction
Boundaries and limitations don’t exist at Victory Junction. This camp offers week-long sessions throughout the summer. The state-of-the-art facilities are fully accessible and include an indoor softball field, bowling alley, water park, miniature golf course and more. This program is free to campers ages 6 to 16. Victory Junction provides children with physical disabilities and their siblings the opportunity to enjoy a variety of summer fun. The camp is located in Randleman, North Carolina.
6. Camp Greentop
This camp is located in Thurmont, Maryland and is operated by the League for the People with Disabilities. Campers between the ages of 7 and 21 are welcome to summer sessions. Camp Greentop provides accessible activities such as adaptable sports, performing arts, music, campfire activities and swimming. The price ranges from $580 to $1720.
7. Camp Accomplish
Camp Accomplish is a fully inclusive program located in Nanjemoy, Maryland. Campers have the opportunity to enjoy a variety of activities including archery, horseback riding, talent shows, canoeing, creative arts, swimming and more. Campers ages 5 to 18 are welcome. The cost per session ranges from $260 to $950, depending on the type of session chosen.
8. Camp Without Barriers
This camp is available nationwide and is created by the international charitable organization Easter Seals. The Camp Without Barriers program provides summer camp opportunities for children and adults. Easter Seals has developed 140 Camp Without Barriers recreation facilities throughout the United States. All facilities have adapted equipment and fully accessible grounds. Contact Easter Seals for the nearest location and pricing details.
9. Camp Thorpe
This camp is nestled in the Green Mountains in Goshen, Vermont. Camp Thorpe welcomes campers 10 to 20 years old. They offer two-week summer sessions that include activities such as swimming, fishing, boating and more. The cost per session is $800.
10. Youth Wheelchair Sports Camp
The Eastern Nebraska Wheelchair Athletic Association, also known as the ENWAA, offers a free recreation and sports camp for wheelchair users 6 to 18 years old. Campers have the opportunity to enjoy activities such as ceramics, pottery, photography, softball, basketball, tennis, basketball, archery and more. The camp session for 2016 is open to campers from July 25th through July 29th.
How to Choose the Right Summer Camp
You can get started choosing the right summer camp for your child by following the suggestions below.
What activities does your child enjoy? – Does your child like sports or horseback riding? Make a list of the wheelchair accessible summer camps that offer adaptable sports and horseback riding. Do you need a day or sleep away camp? – Summer camps offer a variety of sessions. Some last two weeks on a daily basis and others are sleep-away camps that provide accessible accommodations. Narrow down your list by choosing one of the two options. How much can you afford? – The cost for accessible summer camp programs ranges from free to $2,000 or more. Find an option that suits your budget.
Your child might be determined to attend a specific summer camp this year. However, it might be above your budget. Some camps offer financial plans and assistance for their summer programs. Inquire directly with the accessible summer camp of your choice for further details. Remember to consider attending one of the best wheelchair summer camps on this list. | 5,974 | 2,537 | 0.000398 |
warc | 201704 | In contrast to this idealized experimental context, actual school discus sions, especially with regard to controversial matters, often take place in contexts where the presentation of disfavored forex currency traders is subtly discour aged or explicitly forbidden, access to disfavored alternatives is similarly Page 163 RATIONALITY AND LIBERTY IN SECONDARY EDUCATION 139 restricted or prevented.
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25, 125136. 9 1 0. One possibility is that sophisticated cognitive structures are learned from ones environment. 618;8-68 23-12217389. Bias in meta-analysis detected by a simple, graphical test. Banquets
j graber forex other festive meals were used in archaic j graber forex to define a community and give it stability, and in a certain way this was also the case in civilized societies such as classical antiquity. Uneven lens allows subject to see objects clearly.
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warc | 201704 | JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
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Harner, Joseph P.; Murphy, James P.
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warc | 201704 | I evaluate tons of social media executions a year… for clients, people in our trainings or just for fun. While I don’t have all of the answers, one thing has become clear:
Most businesses that don’t get results from social media don’t to it right.
Blogs are great examples. I heard a stat years ago that most corporate blogs fail. Most of the corporate blogs that I look at suck. Why?
The content isn’t strategic. They have no strategy. The headlines are mediocre. They don’t post consistently. The posts don’t have great visuals. The posts aren’t structured well. The content isn’t very interesting. The audience isn’t clearly defined.
These are just a handful of reasons – most blogs suffer from many of these.
It is easy to say “we invested in a blog, wrote on it for months, but blogging just doesn’t work for us”.
No. Mediocre blogging doesn’t work for you.
The bar is higher in social media than ever before. If you don’t write great stuff, people won’t pay attention.
Do it well or don’t waste your time.
In almost every industry there are companies using every social media tool and getting great results. If you aren’t one of them you are probably doing it wrong.
It isn’t that social media doesn’t work. You aren’t doing it right.
Spend the time and effort to build a solid strategy and learn best practices.
Mediocre won’t get results and won’t cut it. You can’t afford to not be great any more. | 1,545 | 734 | 0.001497 |
warc | 201704 | Most ways of counting and measuring things work logically. When the thing you're measuring increases, the number gets bigger. When you gain weight, the scale doesn't tell you a smaller number of kilograms or pounds. But things are not so sensible in astronomy — at least not when it comes to the brightness of stars.
Ancient Origins
Star magnitudes do count backward, the result of an ancient fluke that seemed like a good idea at the time. The story begins around 129 B.C., when the Greek astronomer Hipparchus produced the first well-known star catalog. Hipparchus ranked his stars in a simple way. He called the brightest ones "of the first magnitude," simply meaning "the biggest." Stars not so bright he called "of the second magnitude," or second biggest. The faintest stars he could see he called "of the sixth magnitude." Around A.D. 140 Claudius Ptolemy copied this system in his own star list. Sometimes Ptolemy added the words "greater" or "smaller" to distinguish between stars within a magnitude class. Ptolemy's works remained the basic astronomy texts for the next 1,400 years, so everyone used the system of first to sixth magnitudes. It worked just fine.
Galileo forced the first change. On turning his newly made telescopes to the sky, Galileo discovered that stars existed that were fainter than Ptolemy's sixth magnitude. "Indeed, with the glass you will detect below stars of the sixth magnitude such a crowd of others that escape natural sight that it is hardly believable," he exulted in his 1610 tract, Sidereus Nuncius. "The largest of these . . . we may designate as of the seventh magnitude." Thus did a new term enter the astronomical language, and the magnitude scale became open-ended. There could be no turning back.
As telescopes got bigger and better, astronomers kept adding more magnitudes to the bottom of the scale. Today a pair of 50-millimeter binoculars will show stars of about 9th magnitude, a 6-inch amateur telescope will reach to 13th magnitude, and the Hubble Space Telescope has seen objects as faint as 30th magnitude.
By the middle of the 19th century astronomers realized there was a pressing need to define the entire magnitude scale more precisely than by eyeball judgment. They had already determined that a 1st-magnitude star shines with about 100 times the light of a 6th-magnitude star. Accordingly, in 1856 the Oxford astronomer Norman R. Pogson proposed that a difference of five magnitudes be defined as a brightness ratio of exactly 100 to 1. This convenient rule was quickly adopted. One magnitude thus corresponds to a brightness difference of exactly the fifth root of 100, or very close to 2.512 — a value known as the Pogson ratio.
The resulting magnitude scale is logarithmic, in neat agreement with the 1850s belief that all human senses are logarithmic in their response to stimuli. The decibel scale for rating loudness was likewise made logarithmic. (Alas, it's not quite so, not for brightness, sound, or anything else. Our perceptions of the world follow power-law curves, not logarithmic ones. Thus a star of magnitude 3.0 does not in fact look exactly halfway in brightness between 2.0 and 4.0. It looks a little fainter than that. The star that looks halfway between 2.0 and 4.0 will be about magnitude 2.8. The wider the magnitude gap, the greater this discrepancy. Accordingly, Sky & Telescope's computer-drawn sky maps use star dots that are sized according to a power-law relation. But the scientific world in the 1850s was gaga for logarithms, so now they are locked into the magnitude system as firmly as Hipparchus's backward numbering.)
Now that star magnitudes were ranked on a precise mathematical scale, however ill-fitting, another problem became unavoidable. Some "1st-magnitude" stars were a whole lot brighter than others. Astronomers had no choice but to extend the scale out to brighter values as well as faint ones. Thus Rigel, Capella, Arcturus, and Vega are magnitude 0 — an awkward statement that suggests they have no brightness at all! But it was too late to start over. The magnitude scale extends farther down into negative numbers: Sirius shines at magnitude –1.5, Venus reaches –4.4, the full Moon is about –12.5, and the Sun blazes at magnitude –26.7.
Other Colors, Other Magnitudes
By the late 19th century astronomers were using photography to record the sky and measure star brightnesses, and a new problem cropped up. Some stars having the same brightness to the eye showed different brightnesses on film, and vice versa. Compared to the eye, photographic emulsions were more sensitive to blue light and less so to red light. Accordingly, two separate scales were devised. Visual magnitude, or mvis, described how a star looked to the eye. Photographic magnitude, or mpg, referred to star images on blue-sensitive black-and-white film. These are now abbreviated mv and mp, respectively.
dfThis complication turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The difference between photographic and visual magnitudes was a convenient measure of a star's color. The difference between the two kinds of magnitude was named the "color index." Its value is increasingly positive for yellow, orange, and red stars, and negative for blue ones.
But different photographic emulsions have different spectral responses! And people's eyes differ too. For one thing, your eye lenses turn yellow with age; old people see the world through yellow filters. Magnitude systems designed for different wavelength ranges had to be more firmly grounded than this.
Today, precise magnitudes are specified by what a standard photoelectric photometer sees through standard color filters. Several photometric systems have been devised; the most familiar is called UBV after the three filters most commonly used. U encompasses the near-ultraviolet, B is blue, and V corresponds fairly closely to the old visual magnitude; its wide peak is in the yellow-green band, where the eye is most sensitive.
Color index is now defined as the B magnitude minus the V magnitude. A pure white star has a B-V of about 0.2, our yellow Sun is 0.63, orange-red Betelgeuse is 1.85, and the bluest star believed possible is -0.4 — pale blue-white.
So successful was the UBV system that it was extended redward with R and I filters to define standard red and near-infrared magnitudes. Hence it is sometimes called UBVRI. Infrared astronomers have carried it to still longer wavelengths, picking up alphabetically after I to define the J, K, L, M, N, and Q bands. These were chosen to match the wavelengths of infrared "windows" in the atmosphere — wavelengths at which water vapor does not entirely absorb starlight.
In all wavebands, the bright star Vega has been chosen (quite arbitrarily) to define magnitude 0.0. Since Vega is dimmer at infrared wavelengths than in visible light, infrared magnitudes are, by definition and quite artificially, brighter than their visual counterparts.
Appearance and Reality
The Meaning of Magnitudes Thisdifference
in magnitude...
...means this ratio
in brightness
0 1 to 1 0.1 1.1 to 1 0.2 1.2 to 1 0.3 1.3 to 1 0.4 1.4 to 1 0.5 1.6 to 1 1.0 2.5 to 1 2 6.3 to 1 3 16 to 1 4 40 to 1 5 100 to 1 10 10,000 to 1 20 100,000,000 to 1
What, then, is an object's real brightness? How much total energy is it sending to us at all wavelengths combined, visible and invisible? The answer is called the bolometric magnitude, mbol, because total radiation was once measured with a device called a bolometer. The bolometric magnitude has been called the God's-eye view of an object's true luster. Astrophysicists value it as the true measure of an object's total energy emission as seen from Earth. The bolometric correction tells how much brighter the bolometric magnitude is than the V magnitude. Its value is always negative because any star or object emits at least some radiation outside the visual portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Up to now we've been dealing only with apparent magnitudes — how bright things look from Earth. We don't know how intrinsically bright an object is until we also take its distance into account. Thus astronomers created the absolute magnitude scale. An object's absolute magnitude is simply how bright it would appear if placed at a standard distance of 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years). Seen from this distance, the Sun would shine at an unimpressive visual magnitude 4.85. Rigel would blaze at a dazzling –8, nearly as bright as the quarter Moon. The red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system, would appear to be magnitude 15.6, the tiniest little glimmer visible in a 16-inch telescope! Knowing absolute magnitudes makes plain how vastly diverse are the objects that we casually lump together under the single word "star."
Absolute magnitudes are always written with a capital M, apparent magnitudes with a lower-case m. Any type of apparent magnitude — photographic, bolometric, or whatever — can be converted to an absolute magnitude.
Beware: for comets and asteroids avery different "absolute magnitude" is used. It tells how bright theywould appear to an observer standing on the Sun if the object were oneastronomical unit away.
Source
The article may have come from: Alan MacRobert, Sky & Tel. | 9,361 | 4,246 | 0.000239 |
warc | 201704 | Language politics, turnout and the proximity of the assembly elections all played a part
Wales voted to leave the EU, 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent. This rejection occurred despite Wales being a net beneficiary of EU funding, to the tune of around £250m a year.
Given that it is widely accepted that the Barnett Formula underfunds Wales by approximately £300m per annum, it is, on the surface, confusing as to why voters in Wales chose to ‘shoot themselves in the foot’.
England voting to leave was always on the cards, but England’s Celtic fringe of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland was supposed to provide a united vote remain.
A full explanation of this puzzle will take time, but for now, here are three factors that help to provide an initial understanding.
Turnout
Turnout in Wales was 71.7 per cent, higher than that of Scotland and Northern Ireland, and only just shy of England.
Across the Valleys and the North East of Wales, where every local authority registered a Leave vote, turnout was significantly higher than both the National Assembly for Wales (NAW) elections held just seven weeks prior, and the 2015 general election.
It was also a much higher turnout than any of Wales’ three referendums on devolution.
Initial research suggests that these non-voters who turned out for the referendum – an extra 2.8 million voters UK-wide – were disproportionately Leave voters.
These extra voters were also more likely to be from less affluent areas of the country, and, sadly, Wales has a great many of these areas.
It seems that voters from these areas felt that, perhaps for the first time in a number of decades, they had more invested in this vote than any of those preceding it, and that this referendum finally gave them a voice that both general and devolved elections do not.
Language
Wales is unique within the UK due to the role that language politics plays in our society.
It is accepted that a political divide exists between those who speak Welsh and those who do not. This certainly seems to have been the case in the EU referendum.
Analysis carried out by
cyfriambythdotcom showed that areas with a larger number of Welsh speakers were more likely to vote remain, even when controlling for affluence (as Welsh speaking areas are in general more affluent).
This is perhaps unsurprising when we look at past mass surveys carried out in Wales that explore ideas of identity.
Welsh Election Studies and the British Social Attitudes Survey found that people who spoke Welsh are far more likely to view themselves as being both Welsh and European but not, crucially, British.
English speakers in Wales however are far more likely to view themselves as Welsh and British, but not European.
Further research at the European level has shown that respondents in any country who identify as European, are far far more likely to view the EU as a positive influence than those who do not identify as European.
These ideas of identity may have had an influence in the voting patterns of the Welsh electorate.
Proximity of National Aseembly for Wales Election
When David Cameron announced the date of the referendum back in February, he was met with a rush of criticism by politicians, academics and commentators who claimed that the referendum was too close to the devolved elections on 5 May.
Cameron brushed this off as patronising: ‘I think voters are perfectly capable of making their minds up twice in two months.’
But he missed the point entirely, and certainly paid for it in Wales.
Although Scotland and Northern Ireland held elections on the same day as in Wales and voted to remain, the circumstances in Wales post-election were entirely different.
The two largest remain parties, Labour and Plaid Cymru, had engaged in a bitterly fought election campaign, that continued post-election.
Plaid Cymru successfully blocked the election of Labour’s Carwyn Jones as First Minister, and very nearly succeeded in electing Leanne Wood as First Minister and forming a minority government.
In Wales also, unlike in Northern Ireland and Scotland, a significant UKIP cohort had been elected to the Welsh Assembly, providing a unique platform for the party.
The political chaos that followed the election meant that Wales was without a government until 19 May, just a month before the referendum. It was therefore very difficult for a cohesive, unified Remain campaign to take root in Wales.
This, combined with the financial costs that such an intensive election campaign placed on parties, resulted in severely drained party machines attempting to get the vote out.
Activists also, were drained and struggled to commit their own time, unpaid, to nearly three months of campaigning.
Social Media research by NRLabs suggested that at the end of the campaign, Remain was gaining ground in Wales, but it simply ran out of time.
Perhaps, if there had been a larger gap between the assembly election and the referendum, Wales might have tipped the other way.
Jac Larner is a PhD researcher at the Wales Governance Centre, Cardiff University Leave a Reply | 5,154 | 2,374 | 0.000429 |
warc | 201704 | The University of Michigan used to keep its library under lock and key. Students were alllowed in once a week, but needed the librarian's permission before they could touch a book. Now, things are different. The university has given Google co-founder Larry Page (a Michigan alumnus) permission to digitise every one of its 7m volumes, making them available through the Google Book Search to anyone in the world with an internet connection. Other institutions including Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and the Library of Congress are also involved in the exercise which has mind-boggling implications for access to knowledge for everyone from Alaska to deepest Africa.
Who could possibly object to this? Publishers, of course.
Like the music industry before them, when first faced with digital downloads they are ordering the waves of technological progress to go away and not disturb their cosy world. Publishers in the US are suing Google over copyright; in his World Book Day address Bloomsbury's Nigel Newton even called for a boycott of Google's search engine....Would publishers object if Google's project led to an increase, rather than a decrease, in book purchases? I think not. There are already signs in America that Google Book Search is leading to a strong rise in demand for out-of-print books (although unless traditional publishers get their acts together the fruits of this boom may go to the new breed of print-on-demand publishers). I would be amazed if the same did not happen to books in copyright. So let American publishers sue to find out what "fair use" means. Doubtless the case will go to appeal; by the time it ends they, like music publishers before them, may experience a surge in demand for their books, especially those not readily available in bookshops. If, for example, someone searching on Google on a subject in which they are interested unexpectedly comes across a relevant book, reads a bit and orders a copy, one more book is sold, providing income to publisher and author and revenue for Google from contextual advertising. The search engine has undoubtedly been arrogant in having an opt-out rather than opt-in policy for the authors of the books it has scanned, but there is a strong public interest in bringing the millions of books lying fallow in libraries to the world's attention. A colleague was delighted to find that his copyrighted but out-of-print book was featured on Google Book Search, even though no one had asked his permission. Humankind is the winner.
Posted byPeter Suber at 3/09/2006 10:55:00 AM.
The open access movement:Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literatureon the internet. Making it available free of charge andfree of most copyright and licensing restrictions.Removing the barriers to serious research. | 2,805 | 1,456 | 0.00069 |
warc | 201704 | Thursday, April 30, 2015 International Public Relations affects economic performance.
This study tested a causal relationship between international public relations (PR) expenditure and its economic outcome at the country level by using a time-series analysis. International PR expenditures of four client countries (Japan, Colombia, Belgium, and the Philippines) were collected from the semi-annual reports of the Foreign Agency Registration Act (FARA) from 1996 to 2009. Economic outcome was measured by U.S. imports from the client countries and U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) toward them. This study found that the past PR expenditure holds power in forecasting future economic outcomes for Japan, Belgium, and the Philippines except Colombia. | 756 | 429 | 0.00234 |
warc | 201704 | Dr. Croce begins by describing the rapid increase of post-graduate medical education programs and positions following World War II. He provides many statistics to illustrate the boom in medical education in the decades after the war.
He then explains the recommendations made by the Coggeshall Report on medical education in America which "briefly reviews the history of medical education in the US, then analyzes the major trends of the present day and their implications ... and finally attempts to advise this association [the AAMC] regarding the greatly expanded role which it should rightfully assume in the future." The report's proposal advises that new medical schools be centered around a campus to promote interdisciplinary science efforts, "increasing relationships with groups not directly involved in the education of physicians but nevertheless important to this goal, and stronger relationships with non-physician medical professional groups and with government agencies." Croce believes that a stronger relationship to hospitals, especially teaching hospitals, should be included as well.
Current medical education is disjointed, with medical schools separate from post-graduate residency and fellowship programs. Croce describes the state of medical school education, then focuses on graduate programs. He acknowledges a growing gap between medical school-affiliated hospitals and non-affiliated community hospitals. The former attracts medical school graduates and the highest quality teaching staff, leaving the latter with little ability to compete to become an accredited teaching facility. It cannot provide the teaching experiences and research opportunities necessary for accreditation. | 1,718 | 863 | 0.001164 |
warc | 201704 | Although Vitamin B1 has several very important functions, the most significant is its role in the conversion of glucose into energy. This is the energy that is used by each and every cell, organ, and body system, so a deficiency in Vitamin B1 (also known as thiamin) can have a major impact on your physical and emotional well-being.
Energy Basics
The idea of energy creation may seem pretty basic, but in fact, it is very complex. As thiamin helps convert glucose into a form of energy for cells, the process releases pyruvic acid and lactic acid. With the help of enzymes that also contain Vitamin B1, these acids are quickly broken down into simple substances like water and carbon dioxide.
Without sufficient levels of thiamin to facilitate these processes, sugars are not broken down properly and build up within the bloodstream, along with excesses of pyruvic and lactic acids. The result is a marked decrease in overall energy, along with cognitive deficiencies that result from toxic levels of pyruvic and lactic acids in the brain. Some symptoms of Vitamin B1 deficiency are:
Extreme fatigue, exhaustion, and lethargy throughout the body Mental depression, confused thinking, and forgetfulness Bad dreams or nightmares Chest pains and heart palpitations Constipation, gas pains, and flatulence Nerve and muscle abnormalities, such as muscle cramps or a prickly sensation in the fingers and toes Thiamin as a Preventative Measure
Because thiamin is such a fundamental component to cellular activity, maintaining sufficient levels of the vitamin in your diet can help prevent the onset of a number of health conditions, such as:
Alzheimer’s disease Chronic depression Heart failure Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome Cataracts Beriberi Where to Find it?
Vitamin B1 is present in many common foods, such as pork, vegetables, milk, cheese, peas, fresh and dried fruit, eggs, whole grains, and whole grain breads. There are also all-natural dietary supplements you can take, just to make sure. Some individuals may benefit even more than others from thiamin supplementation:
Those individuals who consume more calories, such as athletes, are likely to require a higher than average intake of thiamin to help process the extra carbohydrates into energy. Any individual who is experiencing acute periods of stress may need to temporarily elevate levels of thiamin. Anyone who consumes alcohol or drugs (including medical drugs and antibiotics) on a regular basis uses up Vitamin B-1 at a higher than usual rate.
Browse our thiamin supplements in the Living Clean store, or you read more about the Vitamin B complex: | 2,626 | 1,331 | 0.000756 |
warc | 201704 | About People Research Education, Training & Outreach Patients & Caregivers For Investigators News on Dementia Media Room Donate & Contact New York Times (May 1, 2013): Does Depression Contribute to Dementia?
Publication Date:
Wed, 05/01/2013
A large body of research has linked late-life dpression to social isolation, poorer heatlh and an increased risk of death. Now, a new study finds that depression is associated wtih subsequent vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease, conditions poised to expand dramatically with the aging population.
The report, published on Wednesday in the British Journal of Psychiatry, is a meta-analysis of 23 previous studies that followed nearly 50,000 older adults over a median of five years. The researchers found that depressed older adults (defined as those over age 50) were more than twice as likely to develop vascular dementia and 65 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than similarly aged people who weren't depressed.
"We can't say that late-life depression causes dementia, but we can say that it likely contributes to it," said Meryl Butters, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburge School of Medicine and a co-author of the paper. "We think depression is toxic to the brain, and if you're walking around with some mild brain damage, it will add to the degenerative process."
In terms of absolute risk, she said, the data suggest that 36 of every 50 older adults with late-life depression may go on to develop vascular dementia, while 31 of every 50 seniors with a history of depression may eventually be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. | 1,636 | 888 | 0.001134 |
warc | 201704 | Ask a woman from a remote village in Bhutan to act as if she's embarrassed, amused or awed, and chances are, a teenage boy in the United States could guess exactly what emotion she was portraying.
Human beings have dozens of universal expressions for emotions, and they deploy those expressions in recognizable ways across several cultures, new research finds.
That number is far greater than the range of emotion previously thought to be the similar around the world.
SEE ALSO: Top 10 Things That Make Humans Special
Common core
For decades, scientists have held that there are six basic human emotional expressions, all revealed in the face — happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger and surprise.
But about five years ago, Daniel Cordaro, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and Yale University, began wondering if there were more. He spent hours watching people in cafes or downloading YouTube videos of children across the world unwrapping birthday presents with big smiles on their faces. He noticed that despite cultural differences, many more-complicated expressions seemed similar across cultures.
To test the idea, Cordaro and his colleagues showed people from four continents a one-line description of a story (which the researchers translated into the various native languages), such as "Your friend just told you a very funny story, and you feel amused by it," or "Your friends caught you singing along loudly to your favorite song, and you feel embarrassed," then asked the participants to act out this emotional state using no words.
When the researchers shared those emotional reenactments with people from foreign cultures, the viewers could match 30 facial and vocal expressions to the associated stories with better accuracy than if they had simply guessed. (Interestingly, expressions of sympathy, desire and coyness didn't seem to translate across cultures.)
The team also compared people in China, Japan, Korea, India and the United States when reenacting these emotions, then coded 5,942 of their facial expressions. This meant meticulously recording the positions of 25,000 different facial muscles, Cordaro said.
"We found these incredible patterns: There are lots of similarities in how people are producing these expressions," Cordardo said. "I started to feel for the first time how similar I was to everyone around me."
(Some expression were incredibly similar across cultures, whereas others, such as the sound "aww" to react to something cute, were not universal.)
Distant but similar
But most of the people initially studied in this research belonged to cultures largely linked by TV, smartphones and other technology, meaning the emotional expressions examined may not be truly universal.
So Cordaro and his colleagues trekked to a remote village in Bhutan that outsiders had never visited. The researchers asked the villagers to pair vocal tracks with a story that was being described. For 15 out of the 17 vocal expressions, the villagers could pick the corresponding situation at rates that were better than chance.
The findings suggest that a vast part of the human emotional repertoire is universal, and that emotional expressions go far deeper than the six basic ones previously described by researchers.
But the findings shouldn't underplay the role of culture, Cordaro said.
"Each emotion boils down to a story," Cordaro said. "Culture teaches us the stories under which we use these emotions, but look underneath them, there will be some theme."
Personal epiphany
While translating basic emotional concepts for Bhutanese villagers, the researchers also came upon a Bhutanese word that had no English equivalent: "chogshay," which loosely translates to a fundamental contentment that is independent of a person's current emotional state.
For instance, someone could be in the throws of rage or feel horrendously ill, but their underlying sense of well-being could still be intact.
"Fundamental contentment is a feeling of indestructible well-being resulting from unconditional acceptance of the present moment," Cordaro said.
At first, the notion of chogshay was completely alien to Cordaro, who was used to defining well-being in terms of what he had, how he was feeling and what he was striving for. But through a process of recognizing the universality of many human emotions, and after completing a round of Buddhist meditation in Thailand, Cordaro experienced the chogshay state.
"I felt complete blankness," Cordaro said. "It was the most beautiful moment in my entire life."
Different access points
This state of contentment may be available to people all the time, but different cultures may instead emphasize emotional states that could crowd out that awareness, Cordaro speculated.
He also hypothesizes that people can access this state in many different ways, whether by self-reflection, meditation or achieving "flow" in highly engaging activities.
Cordaro discussed his experiences on June 24 at a presentation organized by the Being Human foundation in San Francisco.
Ultrafast Camera Captures 'Sonic Booms' of Light for First Time Could Eating Chili Peppers Help You Live Longer? Space Station Flies in the Face of the Moon - Skywatching Video Red vs. Blue: Why Necktie Colors Matter
This article originally published at LiveScience here | 5,376 | 2,581 | 0.000392 |
warc | 201704 | I wrote the following text as my introduction in a debate at the Crunch Festival in Hay titled “Ugly is over, Beauty is back?”
If we are to assume that beauty is a set of determinable rules and a hierarchical system of value, then it is a boring, insanely dated and dangerous redundancy. However, I believe that as subtle-minded and intricately sensitive, inventive beings, we can develop our senses and our ideas of beauty in ways that deepen our connection to life and love.
Ultimately I believe that beauty defies absolute definition. In one sense every concrete stance maintained on beauty is a small death for possibility. By singularly and firmly defining it, we deny the potential for beauty to exist elsewhere. This is limiting and creates unnecessary suffering. At the same time powerful art, which could be seen as semi-finite definitions of or perhaps negotiations with beauty, still allows us to create complex conscious connections with it. I see Art-works as temporarily context-specific metaphors of increasingly abstract, yet ever-present ideas on beauty. When powerful, these seductive, polymorphous and timely definitions of beauty provide subjects with a small death of their own. This time, less a death to possibility, but a petit-morte that in its (R)omantic and cathartic intensity, ejects the subject from the ordinary world, revealing a spectrum of experience that suggests; beauty yearns for infinity. I would argue that any sincere attempt to remove beauty from the equation does little more than reinvent it. Minimalism early attempt to delete aesthetics from the artistic spectrum resulted in one of the most successful visual and aesthetic languages of the 20th century. The rampant success of furniture giant IKEA provides evidence of this. Ideas embody metaphysical beauty, just as a person or painting can be physically beautiful. Even pure ‘Concept’ art does not escape beauty’s complexities. The earnest attempt to transcend shallowness in art, in this case via the removal of beauty, can surely be considered in its depth, a beautiful act and intention in itself.
So beauty did not go away! Whilst certain art, artists and thinkers sought to avoid, apologise and deny beauty’s existence, their art can still be considered beautiful within an expanded definition, which they helped to advance. By creating art that placed what had traditionally been defined as ugly at the fore, they expanded what might be considered beautiful. Their noble task, part political and part aesthetic, was part of beauty’s abstract and complex (r)evolution. There is now space to calmly acknowledge the new ideas of beauty that have emerged from the declaration of its ultimate death.
If beauty is unavoidable, as I feel it is, it should be taken on and developed with thought and sensitivity. If anything can now be considered beautiful. That means that the morality of beauty is not inside it, but in how we process the experience of it, develop ideas surrounding it and ultimately where we choose to perceive it. Beauty is like love, dangerous but not to be avoided! It has great power that can easily be used to harm oneself and others and like any other aspect of humanity, the pursuit of beauty has been abused and manipulated for material gain. But, beauty is not simply a false invention tacked onto a primordially beauty-free world by soulless marketeers. It is a gateway to limitless possibility. So I maintain that rather than asserting that nothing is beautiful, we invoke a period of time to explore the idea that perhaps everything is. One antithesis of the beauty I seek, is a concept of beauty that must be conformed to. For this reason, we can see and use beauty as a human developmental tool that is related to understanding freedom. I intend the statement “everything can be beautiful”, to be part of a dialogue that seeks the freedom to love unconditionally. | 3,944 | 1,915 | 0.000529 |
warc | 201704 | It has been reported that there are high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and LDL binding sites on platelets, and those binding sites are reduced in familial hyperlipidemia (7), (8).
Binding of 111In-labeled HDL to platelets from normolipidemic volunteers and patients with heterozygous familial hyperlipidemia.
It is reported that aortic atherosclerosis is often present in patients with homozygous familial hyperlipidemia
, but its incidence is rare in heterozygous patients (8).
We treat pediatric patients all the time," he said, "not only those with familial hyperlipidemias
but also those with metabolic syndrome. | 621 | 334 | 0.003038 |
warc | 201704 | For a generation, a sharp and sometimes controversial line has contained Miami-Dade’s explosive urban growth like a gasket, largely insulating the county’s fragile agricultural hinterlands, surviving wetlands and two national parks from subdivisions and commercial-strip development.
Now the days of holding the line on the Urban Development Boundary — the focus of some of the fiercest local battles over growth and the environment — may be drawing to an end.
Measures approved by the Florida Legislature with little scrutiny or debate in the waning moments of this year’s session would dismantle the state oversight that has acted as the principal brake on repeated efforts by the county commission to breach the line for new development.
The measures, almost sure to be signed by business-friendly Gov.
Rick Scott, would significantly water down the state’s 25-year-old growth-management system, giving counties and municipalities far greater freedom to amend the local comprehensive development plans that are meant to control suburban sprawl.
The UDB, which runs along the inside of the county’s western and southern edges as well as its southeastern coastal fringe, is a key feature of Miami-Dade’s comp plan. Development outside the line is limited, in most areas, to one dwelling per five acres. Given the Miami-Dade Commission’s history of voting repeatedly to alter its comp plan to move the line, UDB supporters say there would be little standing in elected officials’ way once the measures become law. More from Andres Viglucci here. | 1,602 | 858 | 0.001209 |
warc | 201704 | Today’s guest blogger is Tracy from Wild Child’s Mossy Oak Musings. Tracy is sharing her insight on how integrating arts into general education makes for more rigorous, long-lasting learning. Enjoy! Many moons ago, in a teacher’s lounge far, far away, I sat around a lunch table with my colleagues eating a tuna fish sandwich, while trying not reach for the sleeve of thin mints seducing
Hi, I am Susan from Lopez Land Learners. I want to share you with engaging and entertaining ways to integrate art into all of your curricular areas. If your school is anything like our school, we don’t have an art teacher, so any and all art projects come from me. Budgets, along with the demands and pressures on testing, have taken that scheduled time out
Hi there! I’m Rachel Haltiwanger from The Cozy Learning Cottage, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to post on Minds in Bloom! I’ve spent my whole teaching career teaching elementary English learners either here in the US or abroad, and one of my favorite ways to integrate content, language skills, and collaborative learning is through cooking activities in the classroom. While these activities are
This is Meghan Vestal, from Vestal’s 21st Century Classroom, and I am honored to be a guest blogger for Minds in Bloom! Recently, the science trend has changed from S.T.E.M. to S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, & Math). We all know hands-on learning makes a lesson memorable for students, and integrating art is a great way to add creativity to any lesson. One of my
Hi everyone! I’m Suzy from StudentSavvy! I would first like to give a big thank you to Rachel for allowing me to guest post on her fantastic blog! I am a huge fan of hers, and I’m grateful for this incredible opportunity! When I was a student in high school, I attended a charter school that was considered a “Performing and Fine Arts Academy.” Before I was accepted into this school (there
Hi friends! It’s me, Tammy, from Literacy Loves Company! I’m so excited to share with you a few simple ideas to integrate the arts into your day-to-day curriculum! Before we begin, I’d like to send out a big THANK YOU to Rachel Lynette for inviting me to guest post! I’m truly honored. I am a firm believer that the arts are a vital part
Today’s guest blogger is Jennifer from Jennifer Kime Creations. Read on to learn her tips and ideas for having an Artist of the Month Club at your school! What could I do when budget cuts eliminated an organized art program at my school? How could I incorporate art into the regular classroom without taking away from time required to teach state standards? First, I had to get past my own
Minds in Bloom welcomes Jenny, the owner of Art with Jenny K., with her post on art integration. We know you’ll find it useful! “The creative adult is the child that survived.” I came across this quote by author Ursala Le Guin a few months ago, and it has stuck with me ever since. It encapsulates why it is so important to integrate creative arts into
Minds in Bloom presents Renée Goularte, a former art-instructor, a working artist, and a writer, with her post on integrating art into your curriculum. If you are a teacher, chances are you’ve said it: “We have no time for art.” Chances are equally good that you believe that art is important. It is…and it’s worth making time for! Because you know what? Art education is important in and of
I don’t usually ever write about art, but recently a friend introduced me to Zentangle. I thought it was fun, so I ordered some materials, and when my soon-to-be step daughter came over the next weekend, she was thrilled because she had learned to tangle from her fifth grade teacher. So, I thought some of you might want to try it with your older students.* | 3,906 | 1,938 | 0.000536 |
warc | 201704 | Genetic Engineering : Gene Therapy Essay, Research Paper
Gene
therapy by gene supplementation in somatic cells may help those suffering from
genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis. Although a mutant gene occurs in
all cells of the body only those tissues particularly affected (where the gene
is switched on) by the mutant gene would be targeted for therapy, i.e. the
lungs of a cystic fibrosis sufferer, blood cells in the bone marrow in ß
thalassaemia and the muscles in Duchemme muscular dystrophy. As
cells eventually die, so do the tissues being treated by the gene therapy
therefore the treatments have to be repeated. To
carry out gene therapy DNA must be entered into the nucleus of the cells. This
can be carried out using a number of vectors. Micro-injection is the use of a
fine needle to inject DNA into the nucleus, electroporation is an electric
pulse causing temporary holes in the membrane allowing the fine DNA strands to
enter the cell. Viruses can also be used to inject DNA into the nucleus of the
cell. The virus can be genetically engineered to remove genes that allow it to
multiply and cause disease. In some
conditions there is a gene that must be removed or neutralised, this is known
as a "gain of function" disorder. Gene supplementation is proving to
be a possible solution for some "loss of function" conditions such as
Cystic Fibrosis where a gene is missing. In the case of Cystic Fibrosis an
aerosol inhaler is being developed which will allow sufferers to take in the
missing gene into the lungs by inhaling artificially formed spheres known as
liposomes. The DNA is carried within the liposome which fuses with cells
allowing the DNA they contain to enter the cell. This treatment does not
however help with the pancreatic problems. An
example of effective gene supplementation is to treat Severe Combined
Immuno-deficiency Disease (SCID). The gene coding for adenosine de-aminase is
mutated and homozygotes are unable to de-aminate adenosine. This leads to the
death of lymphocytes therefore the sufferer has no immune system. In an
experiment some of the lymphocyte precursor cells in the bone marrow were
infected with a virus carrying the missing gene. The treatment must be repeated
every month as the lymphocytes have a life span of only a month.Human
HormonesHuman
Growth Hormone is a peptide hormone like insulin, produced in the anterior
pituitary gland. If there is a change in the genetic code the hormone produced
is different and doesn’t work correctly. Human growth hormone is only active in
humans therefore a hormone from another species cannot be used in it’s place,
as in the previous treatment for diabetes when insulin was not produced. Human
Growth Hormone causes cells to grow and multiply by directly increasing the
rate at which amino acids enter cells and are built into proteins. Human Growth
Hormone deficiency results in dwarfism and the condition can only be treated if
recognised in the early teens, before the bone plates close. Treatment is by
supplementation of the hormone. In the past the hormone was removed from the
pituitary glands of dead people and was then injected into people suffering
from lack of the hormone. Nowadays? genetic engineers can produce Human Growth
Hormone in a similar way to the production of insulin, the gene is introduced
into bacteria DNA such as E. Coli and the bacteria multiply to produce a yield
of the hormone which can then be injected into sufferers to replace the missing
gene. Factor
VIII is cloned for elimination of viral infections from blood transfusions in
light of the AIDS epidemic. Factor VIII is also one of the proteins involved in
blood clotting and is deficient in a group of haemophiliacs – sufferers of
Haemophilia VIII. By introducing the correct gene for Factor VIII there is a
greater chance of haemophiliac’s blood clotting and therefore the risk of
bleeding to death is reduced as the protein to form blood clots will be
manufactured in cells. Also
see work on diabetes mellitus.AgricultureThe
manipulation of genes of crops which are mass produced can have many benefits
to both the growers and the consumers. For the consumers the food they buy has
a longer shelf life due to the addition of a gene which slows the rotting
process. Products may be engineered to have a more desirable flavour, texture,
colour and more? nutritional. Crops
can be made more resistant to insect pests and fungi through the introduction
of natural insecticides or fungicides from species with a natural resistance.
This reduces the need for chemicals. Plants may also be made more resistant to
artificial herbicides which can be sprayed over the entire crop and destroy
only the weeds rowing without the resistant gene. Crop’s resistance to the cold
and drought nay be increased and plants may be able to grow in areas previously
unsuitable. To
manipulate genes in plants the specific gene must firstly be detected and then
all the cells which have been changed must be preserved and the unchanged cells
discarded. The desired gene is given a marker – commonly a tolerance to an
antibiotic which will kill all those cells without the gene. An
example of successful genetic engineering in plants is the formation of a
tobacco plant resistant to the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) which causes the
plant’s leaves to be covered in whitish spots. The
vector used to carry the gene into the plant is a plasmid contained in
agrobacterium tumefaciens. The bacterium normally infects dicotyledonous plants
and causes Crown Gall disease. The bacteria enters through a wound in the plant
and stimulates host cells to multiply rapidly, forming large lumps called galls
(which are the equivalent of plant tumours). A callus will cover the wound and
gall. The T-DNA from the bacteria enters the plant DNA and this is where the
bacterium becomes useful to genetically engineer plants. The plasmid genes
which control infection are different from those which cause unrestricted
growth. The latter are used for their T-DNA. The
infection genes are removed and a gene is inserted which makes the plant immune
to TMV. The plasmid no longer causes Crown Gall disease and whole plants can be
grown from single transformed cells using cloning. The cells are grown into
small calluses on agar to form tiny roots and shoots, then can be moved to
greenhouses where they grow into fully grown plants, all immune to the TMV
virus. The
potential problem is that an unchanged cell may have a natural resistance to
the antibiotic and be disease carrying which will be resistant to clinically
used antibiotics. Marker genes are therefore being developed which rely on the
presence of sugars for the plant to be able to grow. The
introduced gene may cause more problems not because of the chance of it being
poisonous – it will be broken down in the gut into small natural molecules, but
because of the chance of an allergic reaction. Extensive testing must be
carried out on the donor of the gene in case it has allergenic properties.Biological
washing powdersEnzymes
are used in biological washing powders to hydrolyse the material forming stains
such as protein digesting enzymes – proteases, fat emulsifiers – lipases and
amylases to remove starch residues. However, many enzymes denature at high
temperature and washing machines need to be hot to keep a high rate of
reaction. Most of the enzymes used are produced extracellularly by bacteria
such as Bacillus Subtilis grown in large scale fermenters. The bacteria have
been genetically engineered to produce enzymes which are stable at a high pH in
the presence of phosphates and other detergents as well as remaining active at
temps of 60oC. This is by inserting DNA from thermophilic bacteria, which to
survive in the hot springs must produce proteins which do not denature in hot
temps, so have many di-sulphide bridges holding their 3D structure in place.
Substilisin, a protease, has also had an amino acid residue replaced with an
alternative to make the enzyme more resistant to oxidation. The temperature and
presence of enzyme increase the rate of stain removal and results in a shorter
wash time and a smaller amount of washing powd | 8,352 | 3,669 | 0.000278 |
warc | 201704 | When is it 'Too Late' for my Child to Start Montessori Schooling?
As a Montessori practitioner and teacher-educator, I can now see the reasoning behind this argument. The Montessori 3–6 classroom sets the foundation for the rest of the Montessori experience. The introductory lessons in Practical Life and Sensorial form the basis for the rest of the Montessori curriculum. In addition, the lessons in Grace and Courtesy help the child develop the skills he needs to work peacefully and independently. There is also the chronological progression of the three-year cycle and multi-age classroom to consider.
That said, I have accepted children who were not only older, but in the final year of the three-year cycle into my Montessori classrooms. Here are a few examples:
Benjamin – a 6th year boy who was previously homeschooled with five younger brothers. He was excited to attend school, and Montessori fit what he had experienced at home. The first weeks were rough and many days he ended up in tears. Although he was two years behind in math, he persevered and became a leader in our class. He excelled that year in math, thanks to the Montessori materials and lessons, and moved to the middle school with his peers, where he scored the highest algebra marks of his class. Jean-Marc – a 6th year boy from Côte d’Ivoire who, in addition to being new to Montessori, spoke no English. He spent two years with me as a 6th year. At the end of his second year, he was fluent enough to present his multi-media 6th year project to an audience of over 200 people. Katie – a 6th year girl who was so quiet and unassuming, she fell through the cracks of her conventional school. Diagnosed with severe ADHD, Katie could not finish work. It was painful to watch her learn how to choose a work and follow it through to the end. A gifted linguist, Katie taught the whole class how to speak a language she had made up and we spent the entire year practicing with each other. Katie’s proudest accomplishment was completing her 6th year research project. Sarah and Kylie – both 3rd year girls who had no previous Montessori experience. The third-year group they belonged to seemed to be ruled by boys that year. These two girls had to overcome their initial shyness and find their place among these boys. Sarah was especially nurturing and took the first-year girls under her wing. Kylie was so shy, she did not speak for months. But when it came to academics, these two made the boys work hard to keep up!
Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer to when a school accepts children. It is up to each school’s personal philosophy. Being an informed parent will help you make the right decision for your child.
For further reading:
My Most Rewarding Montessori Student - Making Friends
The Role of the Third Year Student in the Montessori Classroom
Answers to Real Questions About Montessori Mixed Age Grouping
As much as possible, NAMC’s web blog reflects the Montessori curriculum as provided in its teacher training programs. We realize and respect that Montessori schools are unique and may vary their schedules and offerings in accordance with the needs of their individual communities. We hope that our readers will find our articles useful and inspiring as a contribution to the global Montessori community. © North American Montessori Center - originally posted in its entirety at Montessori Teacher Training on Wednesday, March 13, 2013.
© North American Montessori Center - originally posted in its entirety at Montessori Teacher Training on Wednesday, March 13, 2013. | 3,638 | 1,760 | 0.00058 |
warc | 201704 | The U.S. military has a problem. It takes too long to acquire new fighting machines.
In 1983, top-brass decided that they needed a new fighter jet to maintain a tactical edge in the Cold War threat environment. The resulting aircraft, the F-22 Raptor, which was specifically designed for use in a central European front, was the most technologically advanced fighter ever created.
Those Soviets won't stand a chance, the brass must have thought. Except that the first Raptor wasn’t delivered until 2005, 22 years and $39 billion after the program was conceived, and 14 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
In war, nobody—least of all the U.S.—wants to be the kid who still uses a Discman when everyone else has iPods. 22 years is too long to develop new platforms and, as the military faces budget cuts, it’s too costly. “All the technologies conceived at the fall of the Berlin Wall are now being used in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Ben FitzGerald, a Senior Fellow at the D.C. defense think-tank Center for a New American Security.
FitzGerald, an affable Australian with a magnificent copper-colored beard—and a rising star in future war strategy circles—thinks he has a solution: it involves 3-D printing, robotic assembly lines, and drones. A lot of them.
The idea, which FitzGerald outlines in “Process Over Platforms A Paradigm Shift in Acquisition Through Advanced Manufacturing,” breaks down like this: instead of building large, expensive manned aircraft in tiny numbers (the military purchased just 187 F-22s, for $174.5 million a pop) the military could—in theory—build thousands of customized drones out of 3-D printed parts, using robotic assembly lines that run 24 hours a day. Then, writes FitzGerald and his co-author, Dr. Aaron Martin, Director of Strategic Planning at Northrop Grumman (which lost the contract for the F-22 to Lockheed in 1991), the military could deploy the 3-D printed drones in complex, infinitely configurable and no doubt terrifying swarms controlled by “digital pilots.”
CNAS, and just about everybody else, predicts that America’s military future is in unmanned combat vehicles, and that even one-of-a-kind jets like the F-22 will be reduced dramatically, replaced by remotely-piloted fighters that are more nimble and resiliant than the weaponized drones the military and CIA currently use. The U.S. will need combat robots—and lots of them—to maintain its strategic preeminence. The challenge is figuring out how to produce these robots quicker than anybody else. Contemplating this issue, FitzGerald and his co-author Dr. Aaron Martin, Director of Strategic Planning at Northrop Grumman saw a solution in the hobbyists, tinkerers, and 3-D printerers of the Maker movement.
FitzGerald’s concept might work for Maker-in-Chief Chris Anderson, but would it help keep the U.S. ahead of the curve? Would it suit the military’s plans for a smaller, more digitized force
? By using 3-D printing and robotic assembly lines, FitzGerald reckons that the development-production-
A comparison between existing and future airplane manufacturing costs
So basically, FitzGerald wants worker robots to build 3-D printed killer robots in the middle of the night. “I think I saw a movie about that,” quipped an acquaintance who works for a Human Rights organization when I told him about the idea.
“The reality would be less sexy than that, but that is essentially what it is,” FitzGerald said when I called him up. “Exciting and boring at the same time.”
FitzGerald, who grew up in the Australian city of Orange, cuts an unorthodox image for a man who spends his days advising some of the highest ranking officers in the U.S. military. When he and his beard aren’t leading Pentagon war games, in which he trains officers to disable future enemy naval fleets by using hypothetical weapons such as giant microwave pulse emitters, he says he likes to visit contemporary art galleries in D.C. with his wife. As he spoke on the phone, he switched seamlessly between explaining the challenges of multi-material additive manufacturing and waxing lyrical about Mark Rothko. Musical tastes? “Almost exclusively punk rock and heavy metal.”
A prolific reader—recently, he has been “re-reading”
1984 and Kafka’s collected short stories—one would sooner mistake FitzGerald for a humanist than a security expert. “I was raised by hippies turned missionaries,” he told me, “so working on national security was my only option for rebellion.” He has continued in this career, which has taken him, according to his bio, “to Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan and most dangerously, Twentynine Palms, CA.” because, he told me in an email, “it's rare to be able to work in a field where ideas have so much consequence.”
But if the idea of a 3-D printed drone paradigm seems a bit far-fetched to have real consequences, that’s because the technology is not quite there. While 3-D printing is great for making bikinis, it is much more tricky to print complex aircraft components out of metals like titanium, and we are still figuring out how to make multi-material 3-D printed objects. FitzGerald and Martin admit in the report that "the technologies required to enable this new paradigm have not yet reached full production maturity." In other words, the proposal is structured around the assumption that this will eventually be possible. Nevertheless, FitzGerald is confident.
"The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed yet,” he told me, quoting William Gibson. If Defense Distributed can 3-D print an assault-rifle, then the U.S. military's contractors—say, Northrup Grumman—could print a few thousand drones if it set itself to the task. Northrup already uses 3-D printed air ducts in its X-47B stealth drone, and Boeing has experimented with the idea too. Earlier this month, the British air giant BAE Systems said it had built working parts for the Royal Air Force's Tornado fighter jet, including a cockpit radio cover and components in the landing gear, using a 3D printer at an Air Force base. “You are suddenly not fixed in terms of where you have to manufacture these things,” one official at BAE told the
Telegraph.
Elsewhere, FitzGerald has described how militaries could even bring mobile 3-D printers into the field to build replacement components right where the action is. Meanwhile, in Japan automotive manufacturers have started running 24-hour “lights out” factories in which robots continue building cars through the night after their co-workers have clocked out.
The benefits of FitzGerald's 3D printed drone could extend well beyond the remote-controlled battlefield: commercial aircraft manufacturers could produce all airplane parts faster and more cheaply, and could produce much more cusomizeable aircraft to suit customer preferences. The dividends might be a more efficient and sustainable airline industry—the huge delays on planes like the 787 could cease to be the norm. The technological hurdles could be surmounted in time, though the effects on human workers might be more complicated.
The biggest challenge will be getting the top-brass to embrace FitzGerald’s radical vision for the future. You’d hardly expect the military to jump on the bandwagon of a neo-anarchistic paradigm like the Maker movement. Nor would you expect it to take notes from a Kafka-loving, beard-grooming metal-head like FitzGerald. And yet, unless they actually want to get left behind with another F-22 Discman project, they should probably pay attention to the beard. | 7,787 | 3,726 | 0.000279 |
warc | 201704 | The Kingdom of Swaziland (
Umbuso weSwatini) is a landlocked country, bordered to the north south and west by South Africa, and to the east by Mozambique. No more than 200 km north to south and 130 km east to west, it has an estimate population of 1,2 million inhabitants. Wikipedia and CIA – The World Factbook have all the introductory info. MovingCities shares the images and provides background to Swaziland’s urban growth (increasing by 6%/year) and what role the World Bank plays in upgrading the country’s settlements and peri-urban living conditions.
We drove in one day through Swaziland, from North to South, and as such just have a fleeting impression of the Kingdom. Along the road, we climbed and descended hills, saw the sprawling form of unplanned habitation and informal settlements dotting the landscape; and at one moment we pass through Swaziland’s largest urban center, Manzini (about 110,000 inhabitants).
In 2002, The World Bank published their Swaziland country assessment report called ‘Upgrading Low Income Urban Settlements‘ (pdf alert!):
Most urban growth that has taken place in Swaziland has been unplanned and informal. More than 60 percent of the population living in the Mbabane–Manzini corridor live in informal, unplanned communities in sub-standard structures on un-surveyed land without legal title.
Further on it, the document states that the problem of informal settling is due to the lack of formal controls on the development: a lack of any central agency that is responsible for policy and oversight of urbanization. Next to that, gender issues with regard to land ownership for women, and the Local Government system being in a state of flux with decentralization underway all contribute to the development challenges Swaziland is facing.
The aforementioned document highlights the policy context and institutional framework, the need to upgrade projects and programs and offers a few case-studies. To conclude, it states the peri-urban condition and its transformation as the ultimate challenge for the years to come:
Following completion of the upgrading of the major priority informal settlements included in the Swaziland Urban Development Project – SUDP – the major challenge facing Swaziland’s politicians, central and local government officials, traditional leaders and communities will be how to deal with the growing peri-urban informal settlements which are growing rapidly, mostly on Swazi Nation Land immediately outside existing city jurisdictions.
As a consequence, or in line with the aforesaid analysis, the Government of Swaziland (GoS) requested the assistance of the World Bank in preparing and implementing the Swaziland Local Government Project (SLGP). A document from 2007 entitled ‘Resettlement Policy Framework’ (pdf alert!) provides further updates:
The Swaziland Urban Development Project, for which the World Bank loan closed in March 2005, was the first phase of the Government‟s long-term local governance development program. The SUDP aimed at increasing the delivery and improving the management of basic services and improving living conditions of low-income urban household in the two main cities of Swaziland.
Pictures by movingcities.org | 3,291 | 1,606 | 0.000638 |
warc | 201704 | Perhaps George Bernard Shaw was looking into the future when he referred to golf as a good walk ruined. In this age of electric golf carts, there’s very little walking required for a round of 18 holes. Although the out-of-shape crowd can play golf, it can be more physically demanding and beneficial, fitness experts say. Being in better physical shape before playing can also reduce the risk of injuries.
Matt Thomas, a physical therapist at Baptist Sports Care Center in Clinton, said there are different levels of exercise when playing golf.
“Riding in a cart is the lowest level. Pulling a cart is a higher level and gives some cardiovascular workout, and walking and carrying a 30-pound bag on your back is the highest level,” he said. “Walking up and down the hills of a golf course carrying a bag is a pretty good workout even though you’re stopping and starting. It’s several miles over the course of four hours. I think that’s pretty tough and great exercise.”
He pointed out that high school golfers must walk and carry their bags to get the maximum workout.
Jay O’Mara, M.D., of the Mississippi Sports Medicine Clinic in Jackson, agrees. “For the most fitness benefit, don’t use a cart,” he said. “Most people would walk four to five miles a round but walk less than one mile in a cart. I think the myth of unfit people playing golf comes from seeing a guy with a beer belly hitting a ball around on television.”
Warming up
In his eight years of practicing sports medicine, O’Mara has done more knee surgeries than anything else, but the majority of golf injuries he sees are elbows and shoulders and are caused by over use or repetitive motion. Many injuries could be avoided by warming up properly.
“I also see some hip and knee injuries from golf,” he said. “Golfers can improve their flexibility — that’s the main thing — through core strengthening. That and anything on the forearms and upper arms will improve a golf game by helping the player get more distance off the tee.”
Thomas said many golfers, if they’re like him, swing a lot, and every swing strengthens their trunk and should muscles. “Your level of fitness and play depends on what you’re shooting for and how fit you are already,” he said. “Riding a bike or walking on a treadmill is good exercise to get physically ready to play. Better still is to walk outside in the heat.”
He and other therapists at the Sports Care Center help enthusiasts with a lot of core strengthening — including scapular, rotator cuff and shoulder — to get muscles in shape and stronger.
“That builds up muscles,” Thomas said. “Golf is an endurance sport, not a power sport. I play and I have trouble with my shoulders, so I work on that. When someone comes in, we work on their needs.”
The injuries he sees are mostly shoulders and wrists with some elbow injuries occasionally.
The golf guide Web site Montrealplus.ca recommends training over a three month span as ideal. Training should include stretching to build flexibility as a way to improve the game and avoid injuries. As with O’Mara and Thomas, this source also cites strengthening golf-related muscles as an important aspect of the program. Despite the don’t-over-extend theory, golfers still have to be relatively strong to execute a swing with speed and control.
Racing pulse
Another word of caution: a golfer’s pulse in times of stress ranges from 110 and 144 beats per minute. “To play this great sport, you not only require flexibility and strength, but a strong heart,” the website states. “You don’t get into good shape by practicing a sport; you need to be in good shape to practice it well!”
O’Mara and Thomas think golf is good exercise and escape from day-to-day duties, a sport that is growing regionally as Mississippi gains more courses and more golfers enjoy the state’s almost year round playing season.
Contact MBJ contributing writer Lynn Lofton at llofton656@aol.com. | 4,142 | 1,974 | 0.000537 |
warc | 201704 | Nutrition education and diet control Nutrition education provides participants with the skills and resources to make better nutritional choices to combat obesity and chronic disease.
Scientific evidence suggests that diet plays an important role in the onset of chronic disease. In particular, diets high in saturated fats, calories, cholesterol and salt are associated with chronic conditions such as coronary heart disease, diabetes mellitus, stroke, osteoporosis and obesity. Unfortunately, according to the Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) the rate of obesity among children and adolescents has doubled over the past decade and is now considered an epidemic. There have been an increasing number of programs created in hopes to eliminate this rising statistic to create a healthier nation.
Nutrition education programs aim to delay, avoid or reduce the prevalence of these chronic and life threatening conditions. Nutrition education can take many forms from one-on-one sessions to large group classes. Taught by experienced and educated individuals, nutrition education classes help the public make nutritious food choices and provide a foundation of dietary information to shape healthy behaviors. At any age, nutrition education classes can provide benefits on a direct and indirect level.
Scientific evidence suggests that disease or conditions related to nutrition can be positively affected through practicing appropriate nutrition education. Direct benefits of nutrition education include changing habits by learning associated behaviors. For example, condition specific education benefits for heart disease include decreased intake of sodium, how to prepare foods with less salt, decreased fat intake, increased intake of complex carbohydrates and weight control. For more diet specifics, Michigan State University Extension provides helpful nutrition education material on diet and preventing chronic disease. Similarly, nutrition education can reduce obesity by using sound weight control methods in reducing intake of fat and calories and increasing intake of fiber, complex carbohydrate, fruits and vegetables. Methods include nutrition label reading, preparation techniques, explaining dietary guidelines and meal planning. Nutrition education can directly assist in decreasing food cost through strategic food buying, meal planning, home gardening skills and decreasing fast food consumption.
Indirectly, completing nutrition education can positively enhance one’s life. Quality of life may increase by providing nutritious, appealing meals that will lead to better health, increased energy, stamina and less illness. Nutrition education may indirectly improve one’s self-image by improving feelings of wellbeing, improved appearance through weight control, increased motivation, knowledge and skills.
Whether you are trying to prevent chronic disease, lose weight or simply follow a healthier lifestyle, nutrition education can provide you with tools and strategies to succeed in meeting your goals.
Visit the MSU Extension Food and Health page to find more resources on nutrition and browse a wide variety of educational programs. | 3,176 | 1,428 | 0.000704 |
warc | 201704 | Port Huron’s First Trail Towns committee kicks off 2015! Opportunities for volunteers interested in Port Huron’s Trail Town Projects!
Port Huron kicks off with its first Trail Towns committee with hope of beginning a number of projects to help amplify the use of the Bay-to-Bridge Trail & Island Loop National Water Trail for residents and visitors.
The new committee was formed at the end of 2014 as a direct result of a regional Trail Towns Coastal Zone Management grant, spearheaded and driven both by staff at Metropolitan Planning of St. Clair County and Land Information Access Association in Traverse City, Michigan.
A Trail Town can be defined as a community in which local officials have used their trail system as the focal point of a tourism-centered strategy for economic development and local revitalization. The concept is rather simple in that it is designed to ensure communities maximize their tourism assets for economic leverage. Outfitting communities for such benefit can also make both urban and rural areas more attractive to live, work and play, a focal point now for many Michigan communities.
The grant, set to officially wrap up in the first quarter of 2015, assessed a number of coastal communities along the Lake Huron shoreline between southern St. Clair County and northern Huron County. Assessments of coastal communities were based on the Trail Town Program, which grew out of Pennsylvania and is “used to maximize the potential of trail-based tourism”.
The committee, comprised of members from the local community, nonprofit organizations and businesses in the area, city and county offices, as well as higher-education professional staff, met in early January to set the stage to transition the Blue Water Area into an even more attractive place to live, work and play.
Committee members identified five areas they thought were essential to move forward with in 2015: Art/Way finding signs, recycling receptacles, interpretative signage, safety buoys and signage, and water/restrooms along the trail. Additional suggestions were offered, but only achievable goals for 2015 will be focused on for the year as most volunteer committee members are busy residents with full time jobs and other activities.
For more information on when Port Huron’s Trail Town Committee meets please contact me (Andy Northrop) at the St. Clair County office. Michigan State University Extension has experts in tourism working throughout Michigan that can assist communities and counties in sustainable tourism development.
Other articles in this series: | 2,601 | 1,291 | 0.000785 |
warc | 201704 | The Battle for the Mind
War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication
Publication Year: 2011
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Preface: A Change in the Landscape
Imagine a war that involves no physical violence. The stakes are the ones typically addressed: territory, economic resources, control over an enemy population, defense of one’s own population, and intangibles like honor, glory, freedom, adventure, fear, greed, revenge, and justice. There is pain. There are serious injuries. But not a single drop of blood is spilled. No one ...
Acknowledgments
This book began as an article, “Truth Under Fire: War and the Media,” in the Winter 2005 issue of
The New England Journal of Public Policy (19, no. 2). I would like to thank the editor of the Journal, Padraig O’Malley, for inviting me to write the article, and Patricia Peterson, the managing editor, for her very helpful guidance... Chapter 1: War Encounters Mass Communication:1850– 1914
In January 1815 in southern Louisiana, an army of four thousand Americans defeated a British force of eight thousand at the Battle of New Orleans. This encounter effectively ended the War of 1812. Both sides displayed gallantry and strategic brilliance, and the battle helped to set an American general, Andrew Jackson, on the road to becoming president of...
Chapter 2: Mass Communication Enlists: 1914–1918
In August 1914, when the conflict that we have come to call the First World War broke out, alert observers began to notice its strangeness. Compared to earlier military encounters among nations, the war was shocking in its level and scope of violence. And it was not the quick, limited war of movement that had been predicted, but an inconclusive, wearing...
Chapter 3: The Democracies Try to Demobilize: 1919–1939
For two decades after the Great War, all the democratic nations struggled to re orient their use of mass communication toward peaceful ends. But larger, menacing developments gradually pulled the democracies into the In the years immediately following the war, it did not seem at first that the democracies would be making much official use of mass communication...
Chapter 4: Dictators Conquer Their Media: 1919–1939
From the early 1920s on, there was a growing divergence in attitudes toward media manipulation between the democracies and those countries where dictatorships were taking root: in Mussolini’s Italy; in the new Soviet Union; in Germany, where Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and then, in 1934, führer; and in the autocratic regimes of China and Japan...
Chapter 5: The Battle for the Mind Deepens: 1939–1945
In all of the dictatorships, by the outbreak of the Second World War, elaborate governmental structures for the manipulation of media were already in place. When war broke out, the democracies worked hastily to mobilize their informational resources and soon were able to use mass communication as a powerful weapon. In every country, old strategies of persuasion remained and new ones appeared. The intangible aspects of war..
Chapter 6: Symbolic War Takes Precedence: 1945–1991
In the years after the Second World War, two power blocs of nation- states gradually formed. One group, led by the Soviet Union, with the People’s Republic of China as its main partner, sought to spread communist forms of government and economic organization. The other group, led by the United States with western European nations as major...
Chapter 7: Mass Communication Becomes Multipolar: 1991 and After
With the ending of the cold war, tensions dating back to 1945 lessened. Simultaneously, as many observers have noted, the restructuring of inter-national relationships into a multipolar pattern presented new challenges. In the realm of mass communication, the main problem for the United States involved adjusting to the fact that the disappearance of the Soviet ...
Notes Index Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9781613760307
E-ISBN-10: 1613760302 Print-ISBN-13: 9781558498525 Print-ISBN-10: 1558498524
Page Count: 312
Publication Year: 2011
OCLC Number: 794700507
MUSE Marc Record: Download for The Battle for the Mind | 4,255 | 2,148 | 0.000476 |
warc | 201704 | Filters have been formed from operational amplifiers (opamps) for audio circuits going back many decades. The use of opamp filters above 1 MHz has been limited due to the roll off of the amplifier's open-loop gain at higher frequencies. However, recent advances in current-feedback amplifiers have enabled the use of opamp designs to create amplifiers with bandwidths exceeding 1 GHz. This report shows the capabilities and limitations of using these amplifiers for lowpass filters to 150 MHz.
Opamp filters have long been a staple at audio frequencies. Where their open-loop gain is large, they can provide nearly ideal frequency responses. Furthermore, opamp filters do not require any inductors. At low frequencies, the inductors required for a passive filter can be very large and often need to be hand wound. Eliminating these inductors is a huge advantage.
Until recently, opamp filters were not practical at MHz frequencies. Opamp open-loop gain rolled off at frequencies too low to preserve the virtually infinite gain assumption that is essential to opamp designs. But with the availability of current-feedback amplifiers (similar to but not exactly like opamps) with useful gain beyond 1 GHz, it is possible to design opamp filters into the MHz frequency range.
Why use opamp filters even if they are possible at tens or hundreds of MHz? Lumped-element inductive-capacitive (LC) ladders are practical at these higher frequencies, and any advantage of eliminating inductors is eliminated since the inductors required for these circuits are small and available in standard values as surface-mount components. Unfortunately, LC ladders are not ideal. The internal losses of the components (mostly the inductors) can cause the frequency response in the passband to droop by 1 dB or more. Opamp filters will not have this problem. Also, opamp filters can often be designed around a single capacitor value that might be available with a 1% tolerance. In combination with the availability of 1% resistors, it is possible to design a very accurate filter, provided that the opamp performance is nearly ideal.
One further advantage of opamp filters at high frequencies is that the design accuracy achievable can provide for an inexpensive matched pair of lowpass filters. This design objective is useful for filters that follow direct-conversion quadrature demodulators where maintaining the amplitude and phase balance between the in-phase and quadrature channels is essential to the system performance. An all-pole lowpass filter will have a transfer function of the form:
T(s) = A/{(s + ω
0) 2 + (ω 1/Q 1)s + ωsup>2 1>2 + (ω /Q 2 2)s + ω 2 2>}(1)
for a filter with an odd number of poles and:
T(s) = A/{
2 + (ω 1/Q 1)s + ω 2 1}>2 + (ω 2/Q 2)s + ω 2 2>}(2)
for a filter with an even number of poles. The locations of the poles are placed to realize a particular filter response such as a Butterworth or Chebyshev response. These transfer functions can be realized with a passive LC ladder, although the path from the desired response to the L and C values is not obvious. For details, see ref. 1.
For an opamp filter, the real pole (s + ω0), when present, is realized with an RC network, followed by a voltage follower (Fig. 1). The complex poles are realized with the Sallen-Key circuit of Fig. 2. The overall filter response is achieved by simply cascading the stages together.
For the real pole circuit of Fig. 1, the opamp is merely serving as a buffer between the RC pole and the following stage. The nonideal frequency response of the opamp simply adds some distant poles to the cascaded response. For the Sallen-Key circuit, the effect of the opamp poles is not so simple. The frequency response of the opamp appears in the feedback loops that create the desired response. If the transfer function of the circuit in Fig. 2 is calculated, the following relationship results:
T(s) = Kω
0/ 2 + (3 K)ω 0s + ω 0 2 + (R f/Z)(s 2 + 3ω 0s + ω 02)>(3)
where quantity Z is the transimpedance of the opamp. If Z >> Rf, the last term in the denominator goes to zero, and the transfer function matches the desired second-order response. At high frequencies, however, the transimpedance rolls off with two real poles, at 1/τ1 and 1/τ2. Including these poles in the transfer function yields:
T(s) = Kω
0/ 2 + (3 K)ω 0s + ω 0 2 + (R f/z 0)(s 2 + 3ω 0s + ω 0 2)(1 + sτ 1)(1 + sτ 1)>(4)
where Z0 represents the low-frequency transimpedance of the amplifier. It may be apparent that the high-frequency effects can be minimized by minimizing the value of Rf. This observation is true to some extent, but the current-feedback amplifiers that work at these frequencies become unstable when the feedback resistance is too low.
Page Title
The opamp used (in simulation only) for this study was a model THS3202 from Texas Instruments (www.ti.com). Modeling the opamp response shows that the low-frequency transimpedance is around 300 kΩ, and the time constants for the two real poles are around 0.16 and 160 ns. If these values are plugged in along with the ideal design values for the Sallen-Key circuit, and then the denominator of the nonideal response is factored in, it will be found that there are two additional high-frequency poles. It will also be found that the desired pole frequency, Ω0, shifts to a lower frequency and the resulting Q is higher than desired.
A numerical example may help to illustrate this effect. In this example, a pair of complex-conjugate poles is desired at 150 MHz with Q of 2. Resistor R
f is chosen to be 300 Ω to minimize high-frequency effects while maintaining stability. For a Q of 2, K will be 2.5. Inserting all of these values into the transfer function yields:
T(s) = (9.30188 10
28)/17 + 3.42014 10 8s + s 2)(5.45445 10 19 + 8.77489 10 9s + s 2>(5)
The second term in the denominator reveals shows that a new pair of conjugate poles has been gained at Ω0 = (5.45445 x 1019)0.5 rads/s (1.175 GHz). Those poles shouldn't affect the desired response by much. The first term shows that the desired pole frequency has shifted to (6.43554 x 1017)0.5 rads/s or 128 MHz, and the Q has increased to /(3.42014 x 108) = 2.34, a significant difference.
If this calculation is performed for a variety of design values, it is possible to calculate a series of curves to find the necessary compensations needed to achieve the desired filter responses. Figure 3 shows the adjustments necessary to achieve a pole frequency for a number of Q values. For example, to design a stage with a pair of complex poles at 150 MHz and a Q of 1, it would be necessary to follow the green curve and add 25 MHz to the pole frequency, or to design for poles at 175 MHz.
Figure 4 shows the adjustment necessary for the desired Q value at a number of frequencies. If, as in the previous example, it was desired to obtain a pair of complex poles at 150 MHz with a Q of 1, the blue curve would be followed to the point where the actual Q is 1, and it would be necessary to design for a Q that is 0.15 lower in value, or 0.85. Putting the two pieces together, so as to obtain the desired poles at 150 MHz with a Q of 1, it is necessary to design for poles at 175 MHz with a Q of 0.85.
The curves of Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 give a good visual indication of the limits of high-frequency opamp filters. For poles below 50 MHz, the adjustments are small. The Sallen-Key circuit will behave much as expected. As the poles increase beyond 100 MHz, the adjustments are large and the precise sizes of the adjustments are going to depend on the accuracy of the opamp model. Also, the use of higher Qs and higher-frequency poles will require larger corrections. Filter designs require the highest Q's for the highest frequency poles. Therefore, using opamps for lowpass filters is not recommended for designs above 50 to 100 MHz.
Despite these recommendations, it might be educational to examine a five-pole, 150-MHz Chebyshev filter with 0.25-dB ripple to illustrate the design techniques. This filter has a real pole at 65.55 MHz, a pair of complex poles at 109.8 MHz with Q of 1.036, and a pair of complex poles at 157 MHz with Q of 3.876. Figure 5 shows the ideal filter response and the actual response if none of the corrections were applied for the nonideal opamp response. The effects of the downward shift in pole frequency (lower bandwidth) are apparent, as is the upward shift in Q (excess peaking).
Referring to Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, it can be found that to obtain a pair of poles at 109.8 MHz with a Q of 1.036, it is necessary to design for poles at 124 MHz with Q of 0.936. To obtain poles at 157 MHz with Q of 3.876, it is necessary to design for poles at 197 MHz with Q of 3.326. The real pole does not require any adjustment. These adjustments produce the response shown in Fig. 6. It is closer to the desired response, but still calls for some adjustments.
Making some manual adjustments to the design, the response of Fig. 7 can be achieved by moving the poles to 120 MHz with Q of 0.95, and 187 MHz with Q of 2.3. The complete adjusted circuit appears in Fig. 8. As can be seen, a 150-MHz opamp filter design is possible, but requires manual adjustments which can be quite sensitive and, in fact, most like quite sensitive to the characteristics of a particular opamp product. Therefore, designs at these high frequencies are not recommended.
Opamp lowpass filters are practical to about 50 MHz. Operation beyond 100 MHz is possible, but requires careful design to achieve the required frequency response in the presence of the opamp rolloff. Even when practical, the case for high-frequency opamp filters is not compelling. Lumped-element LC ladders are quite practical at these frequencies. The main advantage of high-frequency opamp filters is probably the ability to make a matched pair of filters for use below 50 MHz.
Reference M. E. Van Valkenburg, Analog Filter Design, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1982. | 10,084 | 4,091 | 0.000249 |
warc | 201704 | Have you ever wondered whether having a few drinks after exercise is a problem? Sometimes after a good workout you might find yourself in a situation where you want to drink an alcoholic beverage. Read on.
This is particularly true if you stop at your health club after work and then go to dinner. You might want a glass of wine or beer with dinner, or you may be planning to party with friends. Should you change your plans just because of the aerobics class you just attended? In fact, no, you don't need to change your plans. You just need to use a little common sense. It is well known that your body needs to re-hydrate after exercise. By drinking water, a sports beverage or eating water-laden food, you can replace some or all of the water lost during exercise. Note that it usually takes a couple of hours for the water and electrolytes you consume to work their way into your tissues. Drinking alcoholic beverages is known to have a dehydrating effect on your body. Alcohol acts as a diuretic, causing you to lose water, so this is where the quandary resides - should you or should you not drink alcohol after exercise? Will the hydration immediately after the workout suffice to counteract the dehydrating effects of the social drink afterwards? Scientific studies have examined this concern over the process of re-hydration of your body tissues. A study by Shirreffs and Maughan, published in 1997, helps to answer these questions: Drinks containing different amounts of alcohol were given to healthy individuals after exercise and the effect on re-hydration was studied. The subjects all did the same amount of exercise and were given the same number of beverage. However, different groups were given beverages containing different amounts of alcohol. The scientists studied both the amount of urine produced by the subjects and also determined their fluid balance before and during the process of re-hydration. It was found that low amounts of alcohol had no effect on the body's ability to re-hydrate. Higher amounts of alcohol, however, did result in slightly slower than normal re-hydration. Measurement of urine output showed that subjects consuming no alcohol and those consuming small amounts of alcohol produced the same amounts of urine over a period of 6 hours of re-hydration. Those consuming higher levels of alcohol produced slightly more urine during this time. Measurement of fluid balance showed that all subjects achieved re-hydration after 6 hours although those who had consumed the higher level of alcohol reached this level a little more slowly. These scientists believe that the fact that your body is somewhat dehydrated after exercise actually blunts the dehydrating or diuretic effects of alcohol. This is clear because the urine output of subjects consuming low levels of alcohol was essentially the same as the urine output of those who had consumed no alcohol. Only the higher levels of alcohol caused an increase in urine. However, even this increase in urine does not have any significant effect on re-hydration of the body. What does this mean to your plans for the evening? It means, simply, that moderation is the best approach. Any time you exercise you should drink fluids for a few hours afterwards. You should always consume more water than the amount that you have lost through sweat. After a heavy work-out, a couple of beers or a glass of wine are likely to have no effect on your body' ability to restore normal water balance. Even if you find yourself drinking more than that, there still is no serious effect to worry about; your body will simply take longer to re-hydrate. You may be able to help the process by increasing your intake of water and food along with those few extra drinks. If you give your body plenty of water and food to work with, it has an amazing ability to keep its balance. Much has been written about the potential beneficial effects of alcohol. Many articles have been written showing evidence that moderate consumption of alcohol, particularly in the form of wine, can reduce the risk of stroke. Other recent studies have shown that moderate amounts of alcohol can cause elevations in the levels of HDL cholesterol in the blood. This is the "good" form of cholesterol and therefore a beneficial effect of moderate alcohol consumption. In fact, exercise and moderate levels of alcohol can work together to benefit your overall health. It should be kept in mind, however, that alcohol might cause an increase in blood pressure, particularly in men. Obviously, the relationship between exercise, consumption of alcohol and your health is very complicated and not completely clear. The best thing to keep in mind is that if you choose to consume alcohol, it is best to do so in moderation. Over-indulgence is never a good thing; but in limited quantities, alcoholic beverages are not likely to present a risk to healthy individuals when combined with exercise. | 4,942 | 2,068 | 0.000484 |
warc | 201704 | Scientists reduce blood sugar levels in mice by remote control
Sufferers of type 1 diabetes regularly need to inject themselves with insulin in order to regulate levels of sugar in their blood, a process that is invasive and requires particular care. But a new study conducted at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that more comfortable treatment methods may not be all that far away, with scientists remotely manipulating insulin production in mice using electromagnetic waves.
The researchers are calling their newly developed system radiogenetics. Integral to its success are iron storage particles called ferritins, which are tethered to an ion channel and are capable of interacting with radio waves or magnetic fields. As the waves are transmitted, which could be done by a phone or a wearable device, for example, the ferritin particles force open the ion channel (called TRPV1), which is located in the membrane of the cell.
With TRPV1 open for traffic, calcium ions flow through the channel and set off a synthetic DNA gene developed by the scientists to turn on the production of a downstream gene, which in this case was insulin. The researchers used the system to successfully lower blood sugar levels in mice, but they say that it could potentially be tweaked to treat a whole host of conditions.
"The use of a radiofrequency-driven magnetic field is a big advance in remote gene expression because it is non-invasive and easily adaptable," says Jonathan Dordick, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "You don’t have to insert anything, no wires, no light systems and the genes are introduced through gene therapy. You could have a wearable device that provides a magnetic field to certain parts of the body and it might be used therapeutically for many diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases. It's limitless at this point."
In testing, the researchers used both radio waves and magnetic fields to spark the process and found them to be equally effective in initiating insulin production. They are now looking into whether the technique could be used to control neural activity.
The research was published in the journal
Nature Medicine.
Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | 2,278 | 1,131 | 0.000892 |
warc | 201704 | Monday, June 8, 2009
It's been awhile since my last post. And there are reasons for it, as I have intentionally tried to use this blog for a place to gain feedback and generated dialogue with people in our church over the future. There have been a couple entries that were simply generated out of my devotional times with God, but for the most part, I've been reflecting on all the new learning I've been gaining through this process. I'm happy to say, at this point, something has become very clear to me as I look at how our church might grow healthier and stronger. It has to do with vision. I've heard leaders in my life talk about the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Well, this is one example of that. And it's this: In terms of vision, I am convinced more than ever that our church is best equipped for reaching families. That's one undeniable aspect of who we are. We are a church of mostly young families with children and some youth.
In the past months, I've been trying to name this "community" we are called to reach with terms like "unchurched" or "overchurched", but it just seemed too out of reach for people in our congregation to grasp. Not because they didn't understand what those terms meant, but perhaps because the terminology just didn't grip their hearts and compel them toward a sense of agreement. But the minute I started talking to individuals in our church, asking them to answer the question, almost all of them said, "our church is best prepared to reach families".
So, I think during this long somewhat reflective blog-pause, I've come to accept that God has called New Life Center to touch families with the power of the Gospel. This, to me, is more than just a generality. Because for us to embrace this as our vision as a church means that we will need to organize around it. Anyone can say they want to reach families. But churches that are actually doing it have intentionally planned, organized, and implemented around that focus.
So, here's the question of the day. If our church were to take this vision to reach and minister to families within our church and within the larger region seriously, what kinds of needs would we have to address? What kinds of ministries/programs would need to be improved, created, and sustained? What kinds of events would we need to plan? How would our services need to change? How would our focus on families impact how we renovate our facility?
I don't expect you to answer all of these questions...welcome to the inside of my head. Take a moment if you have it, and swim around. Your thoughts, feedback, questions, and opinions are welcome.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
I receive these daily devotionals from a ministry called Ransomed Heart. It's basically excerpts from some of John Eldridges' writings. He's the guy who authored the book, "Wild at Heart". Anyway, this one in particular captured my attention today, and served as a good reminder in how we understand the journey of discipleship in our life with Christ.
My reflection in response is at the end of this entry.
You might recall the old proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The same holds true here. Teach a man a rule and you help him solve a problem; teach a man to walk with God and you help him solve the rest of his life. Truth be told, you couldn’t master enough principles to see yourself safely through this Story. There are too many surprises, ambiguities, exceptions to the rule. Things are hard at work—is it time to make a move? What
hasGod called you to do with your life? Things are hard at home—is this just a phase your son is going through, or should you be more concerned? You can’t seem to shake this depression—is it medical or something darker? What does the future hold for you—and how should you respond?
Only by walking with God can we hope to find the path that leads to life.
Thatis what it means to be a disciple. After all—aren’t we “”? Then by all means, let’s actually follow him. Not ideas about him. Not just his principles. Him. (Waking the Dead, Eldridge)
The question that this entry begs at the end for me is: "What does it mean to walk with God on a daily basis?" If indeed our discipleship is more than following principles and rules, but following a person, then what descriptors must characterize my relationship with this person we call God (in Christ)? How do I get beyond the rule/principle-driven Christianity that I was taught early on in my faith journey? Or more importantly, "how do I respond to the idea that God is my heavenly Father whose character is reflected in the best qualities of our earthy fathers, but who can also provide and teach us what our fathers didn't?" To me, to couch the journey of discipleship in terms of a father and son/daughter relationship helps. That notion helps me become less focused and dependent on the right principles and the rules required to be a good Christian. It frees me to be in a moment by moment relationship with Father God, who is fathering me in and through all the present circumstances of my life. And it helps me to see all of the arenas and areas of my life as training ground for God to teach me timeless lessons about himself, myself, and people.
What about you? How would you characterize your "walk with God?" What does it mean for you that God is your Heavenly Father?
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
As I have found myself swirling in the change vortex that is starting to take place in our church life, I have concurrently been reminded of the need to rest, pull over, and park on a regular basis...just to BE with God in the middle of all this DOING. Here's part of an entry from one of my daily devotional guides that I found particularly profound and life-giving. It's about the Sabbath. In the midst of all the things that I feel need to be done to align with God's will for my life and the life of the church, I cannot neglect the practice of a personal Sabbath. As we raise the level of ministry activity in our church, we also need to be cultivating a deep intimacy with God that will allow us to sustain such activity over the long haul. That's the challenge. That's the command of John 15:5- "I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man/woman remains in me and I in him/her, he/she will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing."
Let the following be part of your devotional life going into Holy Week:
"Sabbath is not dependent on our readiness to stop. We do not stop when we are finished. We do not stop when we complete our phone calls, finish our project, get through this stack of messages, or get out this report that is due tomorrow. We stop because it is time to stop.
Sabbath requires surrender. If we only stop when we are finished with all our work, we will never stop--because our work is never completely done. With every accomplishment there arises a new responsibility. If we refuse rest until we are finished, we will never rest until we die. Sabbath dissolves the artificial urgency of our days, because it liberates us from the need to be finished.
We stop because there are forces larger than we that take care of the universe, and while our efforts are important, necessary, and useful, they are not (nor are we) indispensable. The galaxy will somehow manage without us for this hour, this day, and so we are invited--nay, commanded--to relax, and enjoy our relative unimportance, our humble place at the table in a very large world.
Do not be anxious about tomorrow, Jesus said again and again. Let the work of this day be sufficient. Sabbath says, be still. Stop. There is no rush to get to the end, because we are never finished.
- Wayne Mueller
Question to Consider: What is your greatest fear in stopping for a 24-hour period each week?
Prayer: Lord, this idea will require a lot of change in the way I am living life. Teach me, Lord how to take the next step with this in a way that fits my unique personality and situation. Help me trust you with all that will remain unfinished and to enjoy my humble place in your very large world. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
"Fusion" is the title of one of the books I pulled off my shelf a couple weeks ago. I had it in my library...I mean, I remember ordering it months back, but for some reason, it rose to the top of the stack when I was scanning my library the other day. I love fusion. Jazz fusion that is. The blending of rock, funk, R&B elements with the freedom and wild, barely dissonant harmonics of jazz chord phrasings and improvisation. Put it all together in a creative blend, and you have music that has a familiar, even catchy hook, but that takes the listener on a musical journey that pushes the boundary outward without fully breaking out of the box. That's what I think I like about jazz fusion. It creates a "box" all of its own, which sounds familiar enough to keep you interested, but when you decide to listen further, you find yourself on a musical adventure that pushes you to the fringes. It all depends, of course, on the skill of the lead musician.
I used to listen to the legendary tenor sax player, Michael Brecker. I still do from time to time, whenever I'm in the mood for simply being "wow-ed" by a saxophone virtuoso. Michael Brecker passed away a few years back, but everyone remembers his musical legacy. He had a way of improvising that left you dumbfounded. I'm not even talking about his straight-ahead jazz projects. I'm talking about the soul, funk, blues stuff that he used to do. His solos, woven together through some pretty basic blues/rock chord progressions, would push the envelope just enough to make you want more. In other words, while the musical chord progressions were something quite familiar to the listener, Brecker's solos would start out within what made sense musically, and then he would develop them in a way that moved you just beyond the fringes. And just when you thought he was getting a little too "chaotic" or beyond what was tolerable, he would take you right back into the flow of things. Just that little trip to the outer realm or border of that song was what kept me rewinding the CD, listening again and again to his phenomenal artistry.
OK, back to the book. While the main title of the book made me think about the kind of music I have loved for years, the book was actually about "hospitality and stewardship". The full title is, "Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests Into Fully Engaged Members of Your Church".
Not exactly related to jazz-fusion in the very least. The book highlights the importance of a well-functioning assimilation system for the local church. Or, the system for how a church moves its guests week in and week out from being first-time attenders, to second time attenders, to regular attenders, to fully participating "partners" or members of the church.
Of the many ideas the book presents regarding the "first impressions" of any given local church, one that caught my attention was the "7 Minute Rule". In essence, this rule says that, on average, the people that come to your church for the first time make their decision as to whether they will come back again OR NOT within the first 7 minutes of stepping foot onto the church property. That's because to a first time attender, who presumably has not been to church before, or has not been to church for a long time, everything communicates. Everything from how well the grounds are kept, to whether there is adequate signage to help them orient to the facility, to whether there are friendly people showing respect and making them feel at home. And all of this happens before they even hear the praise team sing or the preacher preach. By the time they are seated in the pew, they've already subconsciously made a decision about whether they would come back or not.
Fascinating. So, from a numbers perspective, let's say over the course of one year, we grew as a church from 150 to 170 members. So, we added 20 new members to the congregation in one year. But the church records show that we had over 150 first-time visitors to the church during the course of that same year. That's about a 14% retention rate. What happened to the other 130? While there are probably a whole lot of good reasons the 130 didn't return for a second visit or become a member of the church, the bottom line is that most of them probably fell through the cracks. Or more particularly, the church did not have an adequate follow-up system to invite them, connect with them, and encourage them to further participate in the life of the congregation. So, they moved on. No harm, no foul, no blood, no ambulance, and no growth.
But what if...What if these 150 people were actually results of God bringing people in through the front doors of our church? No matter how they came, what if they were God's gifts to us? What if God expected us to be more hospitable, and better stewards of these new attenders? And what if, by being better stewards of these new people, we boosted the retention rate from 14% to 50%? I know, it's a numbers game of sorts. But the numbers can actually mean something if we put it in the right perspective. The numbers could actually reflect that we are becoming better stewards of the people God is sending our way.
Actually, the first thought that came to me when I started seeing it like this was, "Lord, I repent". I repent for neglecting the "gifts" of people that you've been bringing to us. The neglect, of course, was not a personal or intentional one. It was the neglect that creeps up on you when you start becoming "inward-focused". Only then did it occur to me that one of the ways in which our church can start becoming more outward-focused is by changing the way it treats new attenders. Sure, there's a community "out there" to reach. But maybe God is telling us to start in our "Jerusalem" with the people that, without any real evangelistic effort on our part, He is bringing to our church week in and week out.
So, in the end, I think there is some similarity between a Michael Brecker solo and the assimilation system of a local congregation. In the same way that jazz-fusion artists like Brecker play their solos within a set "system" of basic chord progressions, so too, the local church needs a basic system in place in which to "assimilate" or "blend" if you will, new attenders with the local culture of that congregation. Ultimately, this blending or fusing is about making disciples and fulfilling Christ's commission. So this basic system of assimilation needs to point to that end. But regardless, without such a system, new attenders will continue to fend for themselves and fall through the gaps. And we will continue to steward poorly the people God sends to us.
Furthermore, in the unique way in which a Michael Brecker solo pushes the envelope and points the listener outward toward the fringe of the musical limits, any of the already committed members of a local church can embrace an attitude, intentionalize and action, and take a step of faith toward the fringes within the very congregation they are a part of.
The way they do this is simply by taking on a mentality that they will be intentionally hospitable, respectful, helpful and appropriately friendly to any new attender on any given Sunday. Easier said than done, I know.
But a system is just that...a functional process by which some purpose can be accomplished. It cannot and will not work without people. It will not work without leaders who initiate it, administrators who maintain it, and implementers that try it, evaluate it, improve it, and apply it consistently till it becomes part of the DNA of that church. So here's another take on the question of what we're all about at New Life Center.
It's all about Jesus, right? Right. It's also all about people. Stewarding the gifts of people that God gives us as a church. It's about fusion. It's about the "jazz" of assimilation in the local church...the fusing of new people into the life of a community of Christ-followers called the church. Fusion...I like it. Sounds like it could become another core value for our church. I think I'm in the mood to listen to some now...
Monday, March 16, 2009
Reflecting on a conversation I had with a friend yesterday and a book I'm reading (Tipping Point), and I was reminded of how the smallest, sometimes most insignificant things can create the context and build the momentum for radical change. In Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell talks about two concepts that contribute to radical change (for better or worse) in society: the Power of Context and the Law of the Few (there are actually three, but these are the two that struck me).
He cites the 1964 stabbing of a young woman in Queens New York, where she was attacked three times on the same street by her assailant while 38 of her neighbors watched from their apartment windows. None of the 38 witnesses called the police. After the incident many tried to explain the behavior of the 38 by highlighting the cold, unfeeling, uncaring nature of urban life in which people become rather indifferent and numb to the realities around them. But a couple of psychologists in New York conducted a social experiement to try and explore this behavior more deeply. They named it "the bystander problem". And they basically staged emergencies of different types in order to see who would respond with help. Of all the different kinds of emergency situations they simulated, they found one key factor that influenced the response of bystanders. The factor was how many actual witnesses to the event there were.
So, for example, when there was one person in the room next door, listening to someone having an epileptic seizure, that person rushed to help the victim 85% of the time. But when that one person was told that there were four other people listening, and overhearing the seizure, they rushed to help the victim only 31% of the time. Basically, they concluded that when people are in a group, their responsibility for acting is diffused because they all assume someone else will take the initiative to help. Or... they assume that because no one else is acting, the immediate problem must not really be a problem. So the argument being made here is that the real reason the 38 people didn't call the cops while witnessing a violent crime was not because they didn't hear the lady scream for help, but it was precisely because they heard her cry for help.
Ironically, if this lady was attacked in an alley way where there was only one witness, she just might have lived!
I'm reminded of what my NT Greek professor in seminar always told us when interpreting Scripture: "Context is everything". My thoughts gravitate to New Life Center, and I wonder if God will use the small, seemingly insignificant things within the context of our congregational life to prepare us for transformational growth (radical change). These things are not the large, immediately visible elements of our church life. They are things like personal testimonies of what God is doing in the lives of individuals and families, or the placement of singers on the platform, or the "on-the-shelf" leader who begins to step out of the woodwork and begins influencing others positively, or the morning prayer meetings held once a month and attended by the few but faithful, or the significant connection initiated by a leader with a concerned parent, or the relative unity of the leadership teams that get 80% of the work done...things like that make up the hidden landscape of our congregational life.
Most of the congregation may not immediately notice such things that are done by the few, but perhaps Gladwell has a point. We tend to think that if we just had more or this or more of that, then we could really grow and do something for the kingdom of God. But it is the power of the few acting in ways that influence the context in small, indirect perhaps, but significant ways that can lead the way toward radical transformation of the church as a whole and bring about a tipping point for growth and health in the life of the church.
Where do you see the power of these dynamics at work in other places in our church, or even in your life?
Saturday, March 7, 2009
At the Idea Camp, Erwin McManus said something interesting. "Once you win the conversation about why, the how, and when, and where, and who become secondary...so i've never had a conversation about creativity when transitioning our congregation, it was always about values...what matters to the heart of God."
What matters to the heart of God is another way of getting at the values and convictions that are core to us. Core values shape our identity and they are reflected in the way we behave. They can be actual or preferred, or a mixture of both because we're still working on them. Here are the ones we've stated thus far as a church:
INTIMACY WITH GOD. Worshipping God is our chief aim and greatest delight.
GOD'S TRUTH. Information is good. Revelation is better.
GROWING DEEP. Christ-like character is the foundation for all personal and ministry development
MISSIONAL EXISTENCE. We exist for others.
RELATIONAL GRACE. Loving relationships are at the heart of our ministry efforts.
TEAM. No one should do church alone.
GOD'S DESIGN. Every Christ follower is called to serve in the way that is true to how God has gifted them.
BUILDING LEADERS. Without godly leaders, church and community life loses it's meaning and direction.
As I reflect on these, I think about the ones that we currently live out, and the ones that we struggled with. But I also wonder if there are any that we have not stated, yet are obvious in the way we "behave" as a church.
Any thoughts?
Monday, March 2, 2009
Meeting Scott Hodge at Idea Camp was a tremendous blessing. Finally! Someone my age who had actually walked through a painful season of transitioning a plateaued (more like declining) church...and lived to tell about it.
So, before I even get into this, you've got to read this article entitled, Sharp Curve Ahead from a 2005 edition of Leadership Journal. Leadership Journal asked Scott Hodge to write an article telling the incredible story of how he and his dad led their declining church through a season of transition that proved absolutely transformational for the church, and for the community they were called to reach. I was moved by the way he wrote this article, especially the excerpts that he included from his dad's journal. Check it out. | 22,703 | 9,761 | 0.000103 |
warc | 201704 | A total of 35,234 nonwhites—including more than 10,000 “unaccompanied minors”— from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico have successfully invaded the United States from Mexico during the months of October and November 2015.
According to official figures released by the US Customs and Border Patrol (CPB), there have been 10,588 “apprehensions” of “unaccompanied minors” over the two months, a 106 percent increase over the same period from the previous year.
“Apprehensions” of family units (which the CBP defines as legal guardians with children under 18), have proliferated too, with 12,505 detentions in those two months, representing a 173 percent increase over the previous year.
The total number of “apprehensions” recorded by the CPB for the entire Southwest border region was 35,234. Some 23,238 crossed in the Rio Grande Valley—the southernmost tip of South Texas—alone, the CPB said.
The CPB said that the unexpected flow was so big that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “has begun a process to expand its temporary capacity to house unaccompanied children.”
The CPB went on to say that as they had “highlighted over the last few months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have noted an increase in the number of unaccompanied children (UAC) and family units apprehended along the southwest border.
“The Office of Refugee Resettlement at HHS increased the capacity of current providers from 7,900 to 8,400 beds in November and is preparing for temporary bed space in the event that additional beds may be needed.”
The illegal “unaccompanied minors” stay in temporary housing until the Department of Homeland Security locates a relative within the US to whom they can be “released safely.”
According to the Pew Research Center’s latest “FACTANK” feature on illegal immigration in the US, there were 11.3 million illegal immigrants in the US in 2014. Of that number, 5.6 million are Mexicans.
Furthermore, Pew said, six states alone account for 60 percent of illegal immigrants—California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
About 7 percent of K–12 students had at least one illegal immigrant parent in 2012. Among these students, about eight in ten (79 percent) were born in the United States. | 2,444 | 1,185 | 0.0009 |
warc | 201704 | APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF PENNSYLVANIA; D.C. Crim. Nos. 77-00336/41
Before Gibbons and Weis, Circuit Judges, and Dumbauld, District Judge.
*fn*
Defendants were indicted in six indictments containing numerous counts charging a conspiracy to smuggle snakes and other reptiles into the United States in violation of the Act of December 5, 1969, 18 U.S.C. 43, commonly known as the Lacey Act. The District Court granted defendants' motion to dismiss counts based upon alleged violations of the law of Fiji and upon alleged violations of the law of Papua New Guinea.
The applicable statute, 18 U.S.C. 43(a)(2), provides in pertinent part:
Any person who . . . delivers, carries, transports, or ships, by any means whatever, or causes to be delivered, carried, transported, or shipped for commercial or noncommercial purposes or sells or causes to be sold in interstate or foreign commerce any wildlife taken, transported, or sold in any manner in violation of any law or regulation of any . . . foreign country . . . shall be subjected to the penalties prescribed in subsections (c) and (d) of this section.
The District Court held, and we agree, that the foreign laws and regulations referred to in the above passage are laws and regulations designed and intended for the protection of wildlife in those countries.
*fn1
This interpretation is plainly supported by the legislative history.
The provisions of this bill reflect the urgency of increasing protection for those species of fish and wildlife whose continued existence is presently threatened. It will prohibit the importation into the United States of endangered species, and it directs the Secretary of State to seek similar action by foreign countries. Thus, by gradually drying up the international market for endangered species, it should help tremendously in reducing the poaching of any such species in the country where it is found.
On the international level, the purpose is similar. By prohibiting the sale in the United States of wildlife protected by a foreign government, the demand for poached wildlife from that country will be sharply reduced. In addition, however, such a law is also designed to promote reciprocity. If we assist a foreign country in enforcing its conservation laws by closing our market to wildlife taken illegally in that country, they may in turn help to enforce conservation laws of the United States by prohibiting the sale within their borders of wildlife taken illegally within the United States.
*fn2
The District Court held a hearing, in accordance with Rule 26.1, FRCrP,
*fn3 at which experts on the laws of Fiji and Papua New Guinea testified.
The District Court also held (452 F. Supp. at 1204), and we agree, that the Fiji law is not a law for the protection of wildlife, but a revenue law. The expert witness testified that at the relevant time period Fiji had no laws relating to prohibition of export of wildlife. (App. 20). The general prohibition of all exports, unless the customs formalities are complied with, is simply ancillary to the collection of export duties. The Customs ordinance upon which the Government relies is plainly merely a revenue law and does not trigger the applicability of the Lacey Act.
With respect to the Papua New Guinea law, however, we are satisfied that the pertinent provision does amount to a protection of wildlife. These regulations (see 452 F. Supp. at 1205) deal specifically with "prohibited exports" of "certain goods." They are not, like the Fiji ordinance, applicable to all goods unless customs formalities are complied with. Item 5 in the schedule of prohibited exports refers to "Fauna (other than animal products of the pastoral or fishing industries)." This clearly indicates that protection is contemplated for wildlife other than the conventional products of commercial agriculture and fisheries. The fact that exportation of fauna is allowed if permission of the administrator is obtained does not detract from the protection accorded by the provision. Undoubtedly in appropriate cases it would be in the public interest or for the advancement of science, an international enterprise in the area of herpetology as well as medicine, physics, and other more familiar fields of co-operative international endeavor for the public good, for particular shipments to be authorized. Perhaps even some of defendants' shipments, destined for the Philadelphia zoo, might have been authorized if they had chosen to respect the law of the host state. Not having done so, they cannot complain of the consequences.
The expert witness, an Australian Federal Judge with extensive practical experience (App. 38), definitely stated that the Papua New Guinea regulation under consideration was one for the protection of fauna (App. 40-41). The District Court overlooked the specific character of the testimony given by Judge James Staples and focussed upon the breadth of legislative ... | 4,994 | 2,321 | 0.000433 |
warc | 201704 | On appeal from the Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division, Essex County, SVP-279-02.
NOT FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION
Before Judges Wefing and Lyons.
N.M.W. is civilly committed to the Special Treatment Unit (STU), which is the secure custodial facility designated for the treatment of persons in need of commitment under the Sexually Violent Predator Act, N.J.S.A. 30:4-27.24 to -27.38 (SVPA). See N.J.S.A. 30:4-27.34(a). He appeals from an order of April 26, 2007, entered after the annual review required by N.J.S.A. 30:4-37.35. The order continued his commitment and provided that his next annual review shall be conducted on April 14, 2008. Oral argument on this appeal was presented on October 31, 2007. We affirm substantially for the reasons stated by Judge Perretti in her comprehensive oral opinion of April 26, 2007.
N.M.W.'s predicate offenses are detailed in this court's decision affirming his commitment pursuant to the SVPA. In re Civil Commitment of N.W., No. A-2333-02T2 (App. Div. Jan. 2, 2004) (slip op. at 4-5), certif. den., 182 N.J. 429 (2005).
N.M.W. had an extensive criminal record as a juvenile. It includes seventeen arrests and three adjudications as a delinquent. He was arrested in 1997 after forcibly raping a woman. Later in the same day, he approached another woman, forced her to perform oral sex, and then vaginally raped her. N.M.W. subsequently pled guilty to one of the sexual assaults and was sentenced to five years, with a period of parole ineligibility as prescribed by the No Early Release Act, N.J.S.A. 2C:43-7.2. While incarcerated for this sexual assault, he was sanctioned eight times for indecent exposure, two times for use of indecent language to the staff, and two times for sexual proposals or threats. During his civil commitment at the STU, N.M.W. has been placed on "modified activities program" status several times due to inappropriate sexual behavior.
Judge Perretti placed her decision on the record on April 26, 2007, after hearing and reviewing the testimony from Doctors Friedman and Kern. Dr. Kern diagnosed N.M.W. as suffering from paraphilla NOS, impulse control disorder NOS, polysubstance dependency, and anti-social personality disorder. According to the doctor's report, N.M.W. had at one time flooded his room, did not cooperate in treatment, has spent significant time in "modified activities program" status, and while in custody, N.M.W. continues to act in a grossly inappropriate manner sexually. Dr. Kern's report stated that N.M.W. has failed to acknowledge his prior acts and has incurred excessive absences in group. The doctor concluded that N.M.W. "has disorders which cause him to have serious difficulty in controlling his harmful behavior such that it is highly likely that he will not control his sexually violent behavior and will re-offend . . . ." During his testimony, the doctor stated that N.M.W. is at "severe risk" to reoffend.
Dr. Friedman also testified. He reviewed the Treatment Progress Review Committee's recommendation and report. The doctor also noted N.M.W.'s sexual acts while in STU and that N.M.W. suffers from a long term pattern of inappropriate sexual behavior. He diagnosed N.M.W. as suffering from paraphilla NOS, provisional exhibitionism, cannibis dependency, history of alcohol abuse, learning disorder NOS, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and an anti-social personality disorder. In his report, Dr. Friedman noted that N.M.W.'s "primary difficulties lie in the area of impulse control, as he has not demonstrated any extended period of time where he has adequately controlled his aggressive and sexual impulses. He is a hypersexual man who has extreme difficulty in resisting sexual urges." After reviewing the evidence and testimony before her, Judge Perretti found that the State had proven by clear and convincing evidence that N.M.W. remained a sexually violent predator requiring commitment pursuant to the SVPA.
N.M.W. argues that the State did not prove by clear and convincing evidence that he continues to be a sexually violent predator in need of commitment pursuant to the SVPA.
The scope of appellate review of judgments of civil commitment is exceedingly narrow. In re Civil Commitment of V.A., 357 N.J. Super. 55, 63 (App. Div.), certif. denied, 177 N.J. 490 (2003). An appellate court must give the "utmost deference" to the reviewing judge's determination in a commitment proceeding. In re Commitment of J.P., 339 N.J. Super. 443, 459 (App. Div. 2001) (citing State v. Fields, 77 N.J. 282, 311 (1978)). An order of commitment will be reversed only where the record reveals "a clear abuse of discretion." Ibid.
We have thoroughly reviewed the record in light of the contentions advanced on appeal. We are satisfied that the trial judge committed no clear abuse of discretion in ordering N.M.W.'s continued commitment under the SVPA as her decision is adequately supported by the record and consistent with controlling legal principles. R. 2:11-3(e)(1)(A). We, therefore, affirm substantially ... | 5,098 | 2,407 | 0.000418 |
warc | 201704 | UCSF Nursing Professor Receives Pioneering Spirit Award From AACN For Her Work To Improve Cardiac Monitoring
RN, PhD, FAAN, Lillian & Dudley Aldous Professor of Nursing Science, School of Nursing, University of California San Francisco will receive the AACN-GE Healthcare Pioneering Spirit Award.
The award, from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and supported by GE Healthcare, will be given at the 2011 National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition, Chicago, April 30-May 5. This AACN Visionary Leadership Award recognizes significant contributions that influence high acuity and critical care nursing and relate to the association’s mission, vision and values.
Consistently funded by the National Institutes of Health, her studies helped to shape the development of commercial cardiac monitors and effect positive patient care in hospital and pre-hospital settings. Drew’s research has focused on improving electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring techniques and clinical practices in hospital and pre-hospital settings for more accurate diagnosis of cardiac arrhythmias, myocardial ischemia and drug-induced prolonged QT syndrome.
Her leadership in developing guidelines to improve ECG monitoring has culminated in a five-year project funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to implement in hospitals the AHA standards for ECG monitoring.
Drew established that patients with acute coronary syndrome who experience transient ischemia, and usually demonstrate no symptoms, require continuous ECG monitoring to identify heart muscle injury. Based on Drew’s data, the American Heart Association (AHA) Practice Standards for ECG Monitoring in Hospital Settings recommend ST segment monitoring for all patients admitted to the hospital with acute coronary syndrome.
Drew is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing and the American Heart Association’s Council on Cardiovascular Nursing. In 2005, she became the first woman and first nurse to be elected president of the International Society of Computerized Electrocardiology.
Source: American Association of Critical-Care Nurses | 2,152 | 1,086 | 0.000933 |
warc | 201704 | Manufacturing is back with a vengeance, producing sugar highs on Wall Street.
Corporate America is the stock market’s biggest customer this year, relentlessly buying back its own shares — and it’s propelling both the Dow and CEO compensations to new records.
That’s filling the gap as stock market volume plummets — by about 15 percent in May compared with April, and 19.5 percent lower than the five-year average.
Unfortunately for Americans used to pay squeezes and frugal times, this buying pressure could come with a high price very soon, critics say.
Apple, IBM, Exxon and Goldman Sachs are just some of the boldfaced public companies that have spent close to $160 billion in the first quarter alone — a tactic that juices their widely watched earnings per share (EPS). If the trend continues, the first half of 2014 will be remembered for the largest buyback program in history.
The tactic, also done to blunt the impact of activist investors, has some analysts rolling their eyes. They say buybacks send executive comp into the stratosphere. And they add that the frenzy could presage trouble once the punch bowl is removed.
Sean Egan, principal of Egan-Jones Ratings, has never seen anything like the latest buybacks in his long career on Wall Street. “You could certainly paint this in a nefarious light,” he said.
These public companies in the S&P 500, flush with cash, are buying up more shares than any single institutional investor, helping set 12 record stock-market highs this year, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Capital IQ.
Companies around the globe were holding a massive $7 trillion in cash this year. The buybacks, meanwhile, dilute the percentage of shares outstanding held by activists as rising stock prices force companies to cover executive options that “come into the money.” In other words, it’s a big payday for corporate execs.
But analysts think corporate America may be having too much of a good time.
“The buybacks have helped their first quarter EPS — which nobody expected to be that good anyway — so they bought themselves a tail wind,” Silverblatt told The Post.
“This is a continuation of what happened over the last four quarters, and whether companies needed this big burst of buying in the latest quarter to help their [financials], they are never going to say. Dividends have been increasing, but they are still stingy.”
CEO comp is anything but stingy. With their rewards often largely tied to the company’s stock performance, many CEOs benefit handsomely as the market surges on the heels of expensive buyback programs.
A report last week by Equilar notes that 44 of the top 50 CEOs made more last year than in 2012, a 21.7 percent jump in median pay, thanks largely to a rising stock market. Two from the corner office saw their comp surge a whopping 400 percent; another surpassed 500 percent. The highest-paid CEO, Anthony Petrello of Nabors Industries, pulled in $68.2 million. CEOs earned 202.3 times more than the typical US worker in 2012, compared with 26.5 times in 1978, according to an Economic Policy Institute study. | 3,208 | 1,683 | 0.000614 |
warc | 201704 | Already the story of President Bill Clinton’s alleged “sex scandal” has been framed as a clear-cut case of the sex war, with wronged women who aren’t gonna suffer in silence on one side, and on the other, heartless male scoundrels who are doing their best to clap their slimy hands over the women’s mouths. As literary agent Lucianne Goldberg told the Feb. 2 New Yorker , her friend Linda Tripp spoke up in a “cold fury” because “there’s a level of misogyny here that’s shocking. It’s Trash the Women! First you use the women, then when they get pissed you trash them.”
It’s a line we’ve heard since Paula Jones sidled up to the microphone to “clear her name”-a name that no one knew until then. Her mouthpiece Susan Carpenter McMillan claimed Ms. Jones was manifesting “a Susan B. Anthony-type feminism,” which by Ms. McMillan’s lights meant a Victorian lady-avenger policing the behavior of sexually voracious men. “If Paula Corbin Jones goes down,” she declared, “men of power have gotten the upper hand.”
But that’s not the real divide here. The real divide is not even between men and women. The critical split is the one between girls and grown-ups. And it is a desperately important battle. Because the winners of that struggle will determine, far more than the sexual behavior of Mr. Clinton or of any politician, what kind of role women are going to carve out for themselves in the future of this country.
On the one side we have “feminism” as channeled through the Spice Girls and Fiona Apple. This is “Girl Power,” which is derived only by celebrating yourself, ideally via your injuries; gaining power by talking about what was done to you. It is, by definition, only a destructive power, aimed at bringing down the bogeyman by having a sulk ‘n’ sob in front of the adults. It’s the power available to a girl whose only recourse is tattle. The many plaintiffs of the Clinton scandals are cast, or cast themselves, as girls. Ms. Jones has referred to herself as “a little girl from Arkansas,” as does Ms. McMillan, who, when in the presence of the media, makes a point of talking baby-talk to her 31-year-old charge over the cell phone. In a Jan. 23 appearance on Larry King Live , 47-year-old Gennifer Flowers leaned forward across the desk and, suddenly going all tremulous, described herself as … “a little girl from Arkansas” who got swallowed up by the big bad wolves. “I was very scared,” Ms. Flowers said. Monica Lewinsky is presented by her lawyer, William Ginsburg, and a media admiring of his oratory, as a “24-year-old doe in the headlights of a major international scandal.” Newsweek calls her “a flirty girl in a beret,” and Time quotes Pentagon sources who describe her as “a rich Beverly Hills teen” and “an attractive girl, but a girl.” Admittedly, Ms. Lewinsky is young and naïve, but she is legally well into adulthood.
On the other side, which is ever more sparsely populated these days, are the grown-ups. And here’s where authentic feminism resides. Because if feminism is about anything, it’s about women growing up. It’s about becoming mature and equal players in public life. It’s about seeing what happened to you in proportion, and about knowing when the public good outweighs your having a temper tantrum in public over a personal offense.
As Exhibit A of such a woman, I would offer Hillary Clinton. Here’s the one woman of all women in the country who has a right to be in a “cold fury” over this matter. And, for all I know, she is. But the point is, she isn’t sharing it with every daddy figure on television. (Some father confessors, those network male anchors! Talk about the chickens confiding their story to the foxes.) And when Mrs. Clinton does choose to go before the cameras, as she did so memorably on the Jan. 27 Today show, it is to try to inject some perspective from a woman who knows what’s at stake. “Everybody ought to just stop a minute here and think about what we’re doing,” Mrs. Clinton said. She emphasized that “we need to put all of this into context,” and by that she meant considering the political context, not prying into private relationships. Pressed by the interviewer to admit that Mr. Clinton “again has caused pain in this marriage,” Mrs. Clinton replied, “You know, we’ve been married for 22 years … and I have learned a long time ago that the only people who count in any marriage are the two that are in it.”
Likewise, contrast Anita Hill’s performance with that of Paula Jones. Ms. Hill never defined what happened to her as the central drama; she saw her experience in the employ of Clarence Thomas as a factor to be weighed in considering his eligibility for the United States Supreme Court. She did not make her claim her raison d’être . Also in the category of grown-ups I would put the many women Mr. Clinton has appointed to high-level staff and Cabinet and judicial appointments, all of whom are exercising an adult power-the one in which you have a voice in setting public policy, pursuing social justice and even making a difference in the lives of large numbers of other women. A grown-up who has power uses it to participate in the public world, rather than to capitalize on her own private grievances.
Which brings me to the other defining trait of feminism: sisterhood. If Linda Tripp gave a damn about women’s rights, she wouldn’t have led her “friend” Monica Lewinsky to the lions without batting an eye. If Susan Carpenter McMillan gave a damn about women’s rights, she wouldn’t be treating Paula Jones like some dress-up Barbie doll she can grab off the playroom floor whenever the whim strikes her, rearranging her hair and traipsing her off to her latest dream date at the right-wing Rutherford Institute. These women are not considering the advancement of their sex. They are not thinking about freeing women from stereotyped boxes that traditional society has placed them in. They are looking merely to convert that stereotyped box, temporarily, to a soapbox they can stand on. They know that the dancing girl in the cage draws the media’s attention. And they would rather be the girl’s keeper than offer her the key to the cage.
In the end, what the McMillans and the Flowerses have discovered is not women’s power, but the power of the trembling-lipped girl to lure the eye of the camera.
In Ms. Flowers’ Larry King performance, she spoke indignantly about Mr. Clinton’s alleged adultery as a violation of “God’s laws. And I don’t think it’s something he should have been doing”-as if somehow she hadn’t participated, or as if she didn’t happily make hay of it three days later in the Jan. 26 New York Post , where she boasted that Mr. Clinton “particularly liked it when I looked young and sexy in my cheerleader’s outfit.”
This is the advantage of playing the girl. You never do anything, it’s all done to you, and so you never have to take responsibility for anything. This is a popular and easy role for women to slip into because, ultimately, Girl Power is all about women staying in that most traditional of feminine roles: enforcers of the public morality, whose power as social conscience derives directly from their political powerlessness.
The right wing is having great fun co-opting the language of women’s rights to bring down a Democratic President. But it is hardly acting on women’s behalf. Girl fury may destroy Mr. Clinton’s Presidency, but in doing so it will only reinforce the old status quo, where Daddy still knows best, and hell hath no wrath like a victim on TV. | 7,977 | 3,772 | 0.000282 |
warc | 201704 | The United States’ Electoral College, approved in 1787, isn’t just antiquated—it’s also a barrier to true democracy.
Many arguments have been made in support of the Electoral College. For those who support it, unfortunately, most of the arguments are irrelevant or just plain flawed. For instance, proponents claim that the Electoral College benefits minorities. They believe that making the votes of each state an all-or-nothing proposition increases the likelihood that these voters will turn out and have the opportunity to make a critical difference in election results, thus necessitating that candidates court a wider variety of voters. This seems reasonable until you look at the issue from alternative angles. Consider this example: 49% (a minority) of voters in a given state might support a particular candidate but, if 51% of the population favors another, the group of 49% receives exactly 0% of the Electoral votes. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Two of the most essential problems are that: the 49% of voters in a given state make no difference on the national level—essentially, in this case, the minorities’ votes count for nothing whatsoever; additionally, when a minority group knows that its vote will amount to nothing whatsoever, that group actually has less incentive to turn out to vote. With a straight popular vote, this is not the case because the minority group will know that they actually can make a difference on the national level.
ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
The most relevant arguments in favor of the Electoral College are that it does the following:
• Prevents urban-centric victories
• Maintains the federal nature of our government
• Makes it easier to detect and ameliorate election fraud.
Unfortunately, for these proponents, the first argument is flawed because the all-or-nothing system actually forces the candidates to focus on large swing states, neglecting the needs of the more rural states. Maintaining the federal nature of the government is a compelling argument, but even this can be destructive. Consider the South. There was a time when black citizens were assigned only 3/5 of a vote apiece.(They weren't actually allowed to vote, but this figure was used to juice up southern states' representation in the Electoral College. This reduction in the weight of their votes makes it possible for state legislators to push through the candidates of their choice (basically, it’s addition by subtraction). This, in turn, reuces the power of its constituents and places an inordinate value on the desires of a few, elite governmental officials. Instead, with universal regulations, the value of the minority vote can be preserved. And the third argument, while certainly valid, isn’t sufficiently relevant to match up with the arguments against the Electoral College.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Relevant arguments against the Electoral College include but are not limited to these facts:
• It devalues the national popular vote
• It gives more weight to voters in less populous states
• It discourages voter turnout
• It is a disadvantage to third parties
• In some states, there is a disincentive to vote at all
When the national popular vote isn’t the deciding factor, candidates are able to appeal to voters on a narrower range of issues. For instance, Vermont’s two votes are unlikely to affect who wins since it has only two Electoral Votes. Swing states—Ohio, Iowa, etc.—get the attention because of this all-or-nothing system, decreasing the representation of the states with fewer votes and those wherein the results can be intuited ahead of time. In this case, the smaller states aren’t the only ones to lose out: if a candidate can count of 51% of California’s vote, it can also count on 55 Electoral votes 10.2% of the national total. The 49%, on the other hand, will receive 0% of the electoral votes. For 2% of California voters to determine 10.2% of the Electoral College’s votes is a travesty. Since 2% of Californians constitute 0.12% of the nation’s population, this gives a single voter in California 415 times as much sway as he/she would have if each voter had the same influence as all the others.
This, in itself, is more than compensates for the arguments in favor of the Electoral College. And that’s just one issue.
While devaluing the national popular vote (which is wrong), the Electoral College also gives an inordinate amount of influence to voters in less populous states. Wyoming, for instance, accounts for 0.2% of our nation’s population, but gets 0.6 percent of its representation (also wrong). And by now, we should know that two wrongs do not make a right.
A logical extension of these two points lead to a third: the discouragement of voter turnout. A democrat living in Texas, for instance, won’t affect the results of the election in any way whatsoever, while, were California a swing state, each citizen therein could have up to 415 times that which he or she would if the election was determined by the national popular vote.
Finally, the Electoral College is a disadvantage to third parties because, in essence, they just plain won’t gather any Electoral votes. This entrenches us in a situation where the two-party system will always be in place. Even if that’s the best system, we the people should at least have the opportunity to make a change if we so desire.
WRAPPING UP
I’ve acknowledged, in just over two pages, the merits of the Electoral College and the overwhelming arguments against it. When a convincing argument against an institution can be made in only a couple of pages, and when the issue at hand has such an influence on the election of our President, it becomes clear that the issue must be addressed and the system reformed. And the continuity of this system is undemocratic, disenfranchising, illogical, and ultimately destructive. This issue deserves far, far more attention than we give it. | 6,110 | 2,660 | 0.000387 |
warc | 201704 | The Re-Branding Project: The Genealogy of Creating a Neoliberal Jane and Finch Abstract
This research examines the stigmas that have been given to the Jane and Finch area in Toronto, Ontario and the effects of re-branding the neighbourhood as “University Heights”. The re-branding initiative started in 2006 and has rapidly changed the face of the Jane and Finch community with the development of new housing complexes and a subway expansion. Using a genealogical approach I trace the steps that were taken to develop “University Heights” to determine if a democratic process was used throughout the decision-making phases. I outline the key social, political and economic stakeholders that played a role in the re-branding project. In the context of neoliberal praxis, I use the public statements made by the stakeholders to unpack what the re-branding initiative entails and highlight whose interests it is likely to serve. This research calls attention to the ways in which residents of the Jane and Finch area will be affected by the gentrification of their neighbourhood. A critical race framework is used to uncover the neoliberal ideologies that have been fundamental to the creation of “University Heights”. The crux of my project is to highlight the social injustices along the axis of race, class and gender, that are embedded in applying a neoliberal agenda in the Jane and Finch area.
Keywords
Race; Class; Neoliberalism; Gentrification; Marginalization; Community Consultation;
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Copyright (c) | 1,597 | 824 | 0.001242 |
warc | 201704 | Objectives
Fatigue, depressive symptoms, and anxiety are frequently reported in sarcoidosis. However, the relationship between these debilitating symptoms is unclear. Therefore, the purpose of this prospective follow-up study was to identify the prevalence of depressive symptoms and anxiety in sarcoidosis patients, stratified for the nature of fatigue. In addition, we examined whether depressive symptoms and anxiety predicted fatigue. | 441 | 260 | 0.003872 |
warc | 201704 | Providing better access is now easy, affordable, and it’s good business.
Museums, galleries, parks, zoos and other destinations
When you visit a museum or gallery, what you’re seeing with your eyes is only part of the story. It’s just as important to be able to hear the audio tour, to learn more about the display, the history and the artist. For the more than 3 million Australians who have hearing loss (expected to reach nearly 10 million by 2050), that information often isn’t accessible.
Activities like visiting the art gallery or museum with friends and family are social, sensory and ‘live’ experiences but thousands of Australians are missing out. Without access, education and social participation are limited.
The very information people previously missed out on is available in Auslan, captions, audio description and multiple languages on their own smart device.
The OpenAccess Tours app is one of a kind. There is rarely any high quality access to art galleries, zoos and other iconic locations. Thank you to Conexu for creating a free app with high quality contents for all Deaf and hard of hearing people to fully benefit.
- Sophie, art lover
It’s always a pleasure to work with Conexu… We’ve been working with Phil for several years and he is always so professional and responsive.
- Helen, Program Officer (Access), Queensland Art Gallery l Gallery of Modern Art
Since 2011, Conexu Foundation has been working with over thirty museums, galleries, parks and zoos to make their tours accessible through OpenAccess Tours. See our clients here.
We are a national
non-profit organisation, and experts in both technology and communication access. It’s our whole focus. Learn more about Conexu Foundation.
Conexu believes communication barriers should never stop people from reaching their potential.
Our purpose is to use technology to bridge the communication divide between hard of hearing, Deaf or speech impaired Australians and the broader community.
In 2015, Conexu worked with Otago Museum / Larnarch castle in New Zealand to trial the Tours app technology abroad and showcase some sample translations at the Dunedin Museum Conference into New Zealand Sign Language and captions.
Again in May 2016, we worked with Museums Aotearoa at the Museums Australasia conference in Auckland, New Zealand. As a special conference feature, attendees were able to trial a sample of Aotea Centre’s artwork and audio material in New Zealand Sign Language with captions to show just how easy it is for arts experiences to be accessed by all
“[Being in New Zealand] …was a great opportunity to connect with deaf community leaders – as well as museum and cultural venue leaders at the conference – to introduce opportunities for a richer cultural experience for everyone.” – Phil Harper, Conexu Foundation
Sydney Town Hall was the first civic space to use OpenAccess Tours for accessible visitor content. The tour includes the story of the earliest record of a hearing impaired convict, Elizabeth Steel. The Deaf Society of New South Wales was established at this civic location in 1913.
In 2012, 30 deaf and hard of hearing visitors attended a group tour, along with Deaf Society of NSW to share a Saturday afternoon tour. Feedback from the day generated a lot of interest in technology access among older Australians with acquired hearing loss.
We received lots of positive feedback while testing this app. I look forward to more people learning about the history of this iconic building.
- Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney
Using this technology was a most intriguing and amazing moment for me. At 92 continuing learning is important to educating myself. I am forever thanking for that opportunity for the opportunity for the Deaf community.
- Nola, Deaf Sydneysider
The Sovereign Hill outdoor tour offers translations for live performances, as well as an interactive underground mining experience – The Secret Chamber tour. We worked with Sovereign Hill to produce an additional six creative accessible videos of their tours for Deaf and hard of hearing visitors to engage in cultural experiences of Australian pioneering history.
Sovereign Hill partnered with Conexu to deliver Auslan and captioned interpretation of our outdoor museum for Deaf and hearing-impaired visitors… an underground mine tour followed by videos for the iconic gold-pour demonstration, an introduction to our outdoor museum, and four popular attractions - candle making, gold panning, the Redcoats parade and sweet making.
- Brett, Museums Director, Sovereign Hill Museums
In partnership with Victorian Deaf Education Institute (VDEI) and Werribee Open Range Zoo, OpenAccess Tours was turned into an outdoor tool for school groups.
We introduced the geo-location features and the ability to trigger content with the existing guides, to ensure outdoor tours could be accessible. The tour was featured on popular children’s television programs, such as Channel 10’s Scope, ABC3Kids, and was the feature story for Channel 7 in Melbourne. iAuslan again produced a film about OpenAccess Tours featuring this venue, extending the reach of the service further through the Deaf community.
OpenAccess Tours enables students with hearing loss to have the same experience as other students. It engages students in a way they’ve never been engaged before.
- Michelle, Education Officer at Werribee Open Range Zoo
National Sports Museum (NSM) was our flagship venue for introducing OpenAccess Tours to the Deaf and hard of hearing community in 2012. The launch event raised the profile of this new access option through national media channels including SBS World News, ITwire online, travel and accessible arts publications and Deaf industry publications.
Since then, we’ve also provided additional access for the special exhibition “Australians at the Deaflympics”, a cultural celebration of the achievements of Deaf Australian sports men and women. We worked with iAuslan, a Melbourne-based Deaf film company, to share the community’s experiences with OpenAccess Tours.
We heard Conexu was looking for a partner to introduce this wonderful concept, and we already had an audio tour which gives you many more words in an easily absorbed way. OpenAccess Tours will give similar richness of additional information.
- Margaret, General Manager Heritage and Tourism, National Sports Museum
Coming to National Sports Museum when I was a boy - I could read a bit of the text, and imagine the story. But now I can enjoy it in my native language, and I think that’s fantastic.
- Brent, President of Deaf Sports Australia
Since 2011 we’ve worked with Australia’s most visited art gallery, National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), to deliver a mix of Auslan, captions, audio description and foreign language translation, as well as captions for creative videos and artist interviews. Five successive Melbourne Winter Masterpieces programs were made accessible to all through the OpenAccess Tours app, the Gallery’s loan devices and their website, several major international exhibitions.
In 2013, NGV won a Creative Victoria Award for Leadership in Disability Access for an access event where OpenAccess Tours was provided as a self-guided option. For the 2016 world premiere of the Andy Warhol/Ai Weiwei exhibition, we worked with Arts Access Victoria and NGV on an Australian first sell-out Deaf-led group tour for Auslan users.
We had a lot of really positive feedback for OpenAccess Tours at Napoleon so we really look forward to the same for Monet.
- Jean-Pierre , 2013 Head of Multimedia, National Gallery of Victoria
I would like to share my feedback based on my experience at Wei Wei & Warhol exhibition at NGV on 23rd April 2016. It was a wonderful experience to have Auslan tour led by Luke King who is deaf himself. It’s nice to have access to first-hand information in Auslan rather than via Auslan interpreter if it was led by hearing person. It would be great if there are more similar tours led by deaf people themselves and I would like to say Luke did awesome job that day.
- Paula
Answers to frequently asked questions.
Contact Phil today to discuss your options. Phone 04 3460 3497 (SMS preferred) or email phil.harper@conexu.com.au
Most visitors will have their own device in their pocket! There’s no need to purchase devices, or be locked into equipment, though some venues prefer to purchase a group of devices ready to go available for their visitors to hire, which we can arrange for you.
Our technical support team has over 20 years’ experience in implementing accessible technology solutions. No matter what size venue you are you’ll have a dedicated account manager who can help you troubleshoot.
Having your venue accessible is very affordable – in fact because we have built on widely available iOS and Android technology and send you content translation files, you'll find the cost is nowhere near the price having specialty equipment – or being locked into contracts.
The process is as easy as 1, 2, 3. Once you’re happy with the quote, our dedicated account manager will work with you to decide on your exhibition and content options, you pass us the content, we will start working on the translation, and then we’ll let you know once its all ready! It’s that simple. Our clients say we take the hassle out of access– read more here.
Using our app | 9,597 | 4,289 | 0.000239 |
warc | 201704 | Telegraphnewspaper. He is a fairly purist kind of right liberal. Unlike left liberals he identifies positively with and wants to defend the West but only insofar as it embodies liberal values of multiculturalism, pluralism, diversity etc.
This means that he is ready to attack sharia preaching Muslims in his columns. For instance, in one recent piece he revealed that a group called the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) was attempting to infiltrate the Labour Party. This group has plans to convert Europe into an Islamic state. In its training documents the IFE states:
Our goal is not simply to invite people and give da'wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da'wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad [struggle]. This will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order]."
Andrew Gilligan goes on to list other statements by the group:
Or the leaflet where the IFE tells us that it is dedicated to changing the "very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed ... from ignorance to Islam." Or the document where the IFE says it "strives for the establishment of a global society, the Khilafah ... comprised of individuals who live by the principles of ... the Shari'ah." The IFE's "primary work" to create this state, the document goes on, "is in Europe because it is this continent, despite all the furore about its achievements, which has a moral and spiritual vacuum."
But how does Gilligan finish his column? He believes he is standing with the majority of Muslims as true believers in a liberal world view:
My Muslim friends and I believe in a world that is, in Louis MacNeice's fine words, "incorrigibly plural". We see no reasonThere's a bit of liberal autonomy theory thrown in there: the idea that what matters is that we are self-defining individuals. There's also an endorsement of multiculturalism. why we should have to be defined by our faith, unless we want to be.Like the poet, we feel the drunkenness of things being various. The cold Islamic supremacists of the IFE are the enemies not just of democracy, but of multiculturalism and pluralism itself.
And how does Andrew Gilligan think that multiculturalism is going? Well, he believes that it's going just fine, the evidence supposedly being that people are mixing together (which suggests that he doesn't want pluralism after all, just the breakdown of ethnic identity). He writes:
there are very few areas indeed – particularly in London – where a single ethnic minority or faith group dominates. Even in the most ‘non-white’ places, there is usually a mix of Muslims and Hindus, or Asians and blacks. Far from growing levels of ‘crime and conflict’, race crime in London fell by 10.7 per cent last year. ....Overall racial integration in Britain (as measured by rates of mixed marriage) is among the highest in the Western world. Multiculturalism works.
You have to wonder about liberals when you read stuff like this. Even if he were right, and the different ethnic populations were intermarrying and creating a single hybrid population, how does that lead to greater diversity or pluralism in the world? Surely it just knocks out one of the world's distinctive peoples and replaces it by another less distinctive one.
Anyway, as we know, Gilligan's multicultural London - the one that is "working well" - has now exploded into fire, violence and looting. And, to press this point home to Gilligan, he himself was caught up in the middle of it. He was riding his bike to work, found himself in the middle of a mob, got pushed off and had his bike stolen. He was mugged by a multicultural reality.
Gilligan is a good example of why right liberalism is not enough. He needs to acknowledge that liberalism itself has contributed to the social dysfunction that is clearly growing in all Western countries, so that any solution has to come, at least in part, from preliberal traditions - particularly those relating to family, to morality, and to common forms of identity. | 4,214 | 2,101 | 0.000482 |
warc | 201704 | The opinion of the court was delivered by: THOMAS VANASKIE, Chief Judge
This matter is before the Court on the Motion for Summary
Judgment of Defendant Marquip, Inc., claiming that the machinery
in question in this products liability litigation cannot be
regarded as "unreasonably dangerous" under the risk-utility
analysis mandated by Pennsylvania law.*fn1 See Azzarello
v. Black Bros. Co., 391 A.2d 1020, 1026 (Pa. 1978). Finding that
the pertinent risk-utility factors weigh in favor of Plaintiff,
the summary judgment motion will be denied.
In a products liability action brought under Section 402A of
the Restatement (Second) of Torts, such as this action, it is the
product itself, and not the manufacturer's conduct, that is at issue.*fn2 In this case, the product of concern is a
complicated piece of machinery used by the International Paper
Company at its plant located in Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
Specifically, involved in this accident was a paper "splicer"
designed and manufactured by Defendant Marquip, Inc., and
incorporated into a "sheeter" machine designed and manufactured
by co-Defendant Will-Pemco, Inc., successor-in-interest to Clark
Aiken Matik, Inc.
The sheeter line operated at the International Paper plant
starts with very large rolls of heavy paper as raw material. The
paper rolls are unspooled, and the sheeter line ultimately cuts
the heavy paper to the desired length and stacks the cut paper.
There are two pairs of roll stands that unspool the paper rolls,
and each pair of roll stands is capable of feeding one roll of
paper at a time to the sheeter line. A Marquip splicer is located
above each pair of roll stands. The purpose of the Marquip
splicer is to allow the sheeter line to run continuously by
eliminating the need to stop the sheeter to allow for
re-threading the paper each time a roll of raw material paper has
been exhausted.
The splicer includes an element referred to as the "dancer
roller," which is intended to move along the splicer in
accordance with the size of the roll of paper being processed.
Movement of the dancer roller is enabled by a sensor called a
"potentiometer." The potentiometer is connected to the dancer system by a chain
located in the "dancer track area." The chain interacts with the
potentiometer. The dancer system itself is connected to air
cylinders by cables. The air cylinders provide the force that
moves the dancer roller.
The Marquip splicer is an integral component of the sheeter
machine. It enables the equipment to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a
week. The sheeter itself is a unique machine, specifically
designed and manufactured for use by International Paper at its
Hazleton plant.
On June 14, 1999, Bradley Fisher, a maintenance mechanic who
had worked for International Paper for about 10 years, sustained
fatal injuries in an accident involving the sheeter/splicer. The
accident occurred while Fisher, with the assistance of Emil
Kitlan, was attempting to dislodge a broken potentiometer chain.
Kitlan, in response to an inquiry from International Paper
employee Ray Adams, indicated that it was unnecessary to shut
down the machinery.*fn3
Fisher climbed onto a paper roll stand, the top of which was
approximately 3 feet above the ground, to dislodge and remove the
chain. Kitlan climbed onto a catwalk above Fisher and the Marquip
splicer. In order to dislodge the chain, Mr. Fisher removed a
guard that covered a sprocket. Mr. Fisher was feeding the chain
to Mr. Kitlan, who was standing above him. Prior to completely
removing the chain, Mr. Fisher told Mr. Kitlan to stop pulling on
the chain. An instant later, Mr. Kitlan "heard something let go," and out of the corner
of his eye saw the dancer roller spring forward towards Mr.
Fisher. The dancer roller pinned Mr. Fisher's head against one of
the stationary rolls, crushing his skull and causing fatal
injuries.
Plaintiff claims that the sheeter/splicer was defective because
of the absence of adequate warnings about the potential for
sudden movement of the dancer roller if the machinery is not
placed in a "zero energy state." Plaintiff also contends that the
product was defective because entry into the machinery did not
trigger an automatic shut down process. Defendants argue that
recovery under § 402A is foreclosed as a matter of law because
the utility of the machinery outweighs the risk of serious bodily
harm.
Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, adopted by
the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, see Webb v. Zern,
220 A.2d 853, 854 (Pa. 1996), provides:
(1) One who sells any product in a defective
condition unreasonable dangerous to the user or
consumer or to his property is subject to liability
for physical harm thereby caused to the ultimate user
or consumer, or to his property, if
(a) the seller is engaged in the business of selling
such a product, and
(b) it is expected to and does reach the user or
consumer without substantial change in the condition
in which it is sold.
(2) The rule stated in Subsection (1) applies
although
(a) the seller has exercised all possible care in the
preparation and sale of his product, and (b) the user or consumer has not bought the product
from or entered into any contractual relation with
the seller.
Liability depends upon the existence of a defect that renders
the product "unreasonably dangerous." The question of whether a
product is "unreasonably dangerous" is for the court to decide.
Azzarello, 391 A.2d at 1026. As explained by our Court of
Appeals, "in the Azzarello context, the case would not become
one for the jury if the district court were able to hold as a
matter of law that the risk-utility balance so favored the
manufacturer that the [machinery in question] could not be deemed
unreasonably dangerous." Surace v. Caterpillar, Inc.,
111 F.3d 1039
, 1048 (3d Cir. 1997). In making this determination, the
court is to weigh "the utility of the product against the
seriousness and likelihood of the injury and the availability of
precautions that, though not full proof, might prevent the
injury." Id. at 1049. Stated otherwise, "[t]he Court must . . .
balance the product's social utility against its unavoidable
risks to determine whether the condition of the product could be
labeled `unreasonably dangerous' and the risk of loss placed on
the manufacturer." Childers v. Joseph, 842 F.2d 689, 697 (3d
Cir. 1998).
The following factors inform the risk-utility analysis:
(1) The usefulness and desirability of the product
its utility to the user and to the public as a whole;
(2) The safety aspects of the product the
likelihood that it will cause injury, and the
probable seriousness of the injury; (3) The
availability of a substitute product which would meet
the same need and not be as unsafe; (4) The
manufacturer's ability to eliminate the unsafe
character of the product without impairing its
usefulness or making it too expensive to maintain its
utility; (5) The user's ability to avoid danger by
the exercise of care in the use of the product; (6)
The user's anticipated awareness of the dangers
inherent in the product and their avoidability,
because of general public knowledge of the obvious
condition of the product, or of the existence of suitable warnings or
instructions; and (7) The feasibility, on the part of
the manufacturer, of spreading the loss of [sic]
setting the price of the product or carrying
liability insurance.
Surace, 111 F.3d at 1046.
The defendant bears the burden of proof on the risk-utility
determination. Monahan v. Toro Co., 856 F. Supp. 955, 958 (E.D.
Pa. 1994). The evidence on this threshold issue must be viewed in
the light most favorable to the plaintiff. ... | 7,815 | 3,537 | 0.000289 |
warc | 201704 | Home Parliamentary Business Senators and Members News & Events About Parliament Visit Parliament
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Previous Fragment Next Fragment Hansard Start of Business MINISTERIAL ARRANGEMENTS QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE Taxation (Beazley, Kim, MP, Howard, John, MP) Reconciliation: Indigenous Australians (Stone, Sharman, MP, Howard, John, MP) Taxation: Interest Rates (Evans, Gareth, MP, Howard, John, MP) Taxation (Draper, Trish, MP, Fahey, John, MP) Tax Reform (O'Connor, Gavan, MP, Howard, John, MP) Skase, Mr Christopher (Jull, David, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Taxation: Child-Care Costs (Wilton, Greg, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Waterfront (Gash, Joanna, MP, Reith, Peter, MP) Pay Television: Australis (Rocher, Allan, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Education (Bailey, Fran, MP, Kemp, Dr David, MP) Taxation (Macklin, Jenny, MP, Howard, John, MP) Secondary Boycotts: Waterfront (Randall, Don, MP, Reith, Peter, MP) Taxation: Entertainment Costs (McMullan, Bob, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Taxation: Land Transport (Marek, Paul, MP, Vaile, Mark, MP) Taxation: Medicare (Beazley, Kim, MP, Howard, John, MP) Commonwealth State Disability Agreement (Billson, Bruce, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Public Hospital Funding (Lee, Michael, MP, Howard, John, MP) Trade (Forrest, John, MP, Fischer, Tim, MP) One Nation Party (Beazley, Kim, MP, Fischer, Tim, MP) Taxation (Andrews, Kevin, MP, Howard, John, MP) Taxation PERSONAL EXPLANATIONS QUESTIONS TO MR SPEAKER National Reconciliation Week (Stone, Sharman, MP, Mr SPEAKER) Flags in the Chamber (Melham, Daryl, MP, Mr SPEAKER) Newsletters: Guidelines (Price, Roger, MP, Mr SPEAKER) Parliamentary Language (Morris, Allan, MP, Mr SPEAKER) Members' Rights (Morris, Allan, MP, Mr SPEAKER) Speaker: Rulings (Causley, Ian, MP, Mr SPEAKER) National Reconciliation Week BUSINESS PAPERS NATIONAL SORRY DAY MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE COMMITTEES SOCIAL SECURITY LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (YOUTH ALLOWANCE CONSEQUENTIAL AND RELATED MEASURES) BILL 1998 MATTERS REFERRED TO MAIN COMMITTEE APPROPRIATION BILL (No. 1) 1998-99 ADJOURNMENT Adjournment NOTICES PAPERS QUESTIONS ON NOTICE Taiwan (McClelland, Robert, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Higher Education: Studies (Latham, Mark, MP, Kemp, Dr David, MP) Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Grants (Ferguson, Martin, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Superannuation Benefits: Emigrants (Thomson, Kelvin, MP, Costello, Peter, MP) Overseas Australian Missions (Crosio, Janice, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Natural Heritage Trust: Funding Applications (Crosio, Janice, MP, Anderson, John, MP) Radio Communications (Kerr, Duncan, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Robinson, Mr Floyd (Campbell, Graeme, MP, Williams, Daryl, MP) Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: Labour Hire Firms (McMullan, Bob, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Department of the Environment: Labour Hire Firms (McMullan, Bob, MP, Anderson, John, MP) Attorney-General's Department: Labour Hire Firms (McMullan, Bob, MP, Williams, Daryl, MP) Department of Veterans' Affairs: Labour Hire Firms (McMullan, Bob, MP, Scott, Bruce, MP) Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (Jones, Barry, MP, Downer, Alexander, MP) Protocol for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (Jones, Barry, MP, Williams, Daryl, MP) Air Charter Programs (Tanner, Lindsay, MP, Vaile, Mark, MP) Telstra: Public Telephones (Jones, Barry, MP, Smith, Warwick, MP) Family Court: Newcastle, New South Wales (Morris, Allan, MP, Williams, Daryl, MP) Cairns Migrant Resource Centre: Funding (Ferguson, Martin, MP, Ruddock, Philip, MP) Legal Services (Bevis, Arch, MP, McLachlan, Ian, MP) Wool Containers: Land Transport Costs (Morris, Peter, MP, Vaile, Mark, MP) Taiwan
Content Window
Tuesday, 26 May 1998
Page: 3710
Page: 3710
Mr RUDDOCK (Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) (4:52 PM)—First, in a personal sense, may I say that of course I very much regret what has occurred. The nature of this debate, essentially, has been constrained, and this is welcome in an area of great difficulty and complexity. The history of this country led to a situation in which our first migrants—or original inhabitants—were left very marginalised in a community that expected an assimilationist approach. It was an approach that has occasioned a great deal of difficulty.
The Leader of the Opposition (Mr Beazley), in his comments, wanted to make it appear as if this was a profoundly different issue to children being removed from parents. I do not wish to make it a debating point, save to say that I think there are, in our history, numbers of situations in which, for cultural reasons and for other reasons, children have been removed from parents and placed in institutional care. As a society, we still have to grapple with many of those questions. There are organisations in my own state that are particularly anxious about the situation of young people who have been placed in institutional care and subjected to abuse. There is very much an awareness of these issues emerging today.
Equally, in the portfolio area for which I have responsibility, we fund an organisation that deals with young people who were removed from family situations. Many of these young people believed they were orphans but, as we now find out, this may not have been the case. Well-meaning organisations supported these actions, believing they were providing appropriate care and support. These young people were given admission under migration programs supported by governments over a long period of time. We look back on this and we say that if we were to judge it by today's standards and what we now know, we would have treated it very differently.
The outcome of policies and programs that were pursued by our forebears has had quite a significant impact upon this nation but a far greater impact upon the people concerned and their descendants. It is well known that Aboriginals suffer very significant disadvantage within our community. That is the reason why we have so many programs that are trying to address what we recognise as that significant disadvantage. These programs are not new. Programs have been developed for as long as I have been in public life. I served on Aboriginal affairs committees where we agonised about the way in which those programs would be implemented and the extent to which they would be successful. We saw a number of approaches which people suggested at different times would have an impact. I can remember moving to the situation of giving Aboriginals the right of self-determination and self-management in the way moneys were spent on their behalf. That has developed to its greatest extent now, where most of the moneys are handed over to the Aboriginal managed and controlled organisation, ATSIC.
We have seen an emphasis upon land rights—first recognised in the Northern Territory—in legislation put through by the Liberal government of the 1970s under Malcolm Fraser. There was an expectation that with land rights the situation would change remarkably. Now we see the emphasis is on apology and reconciliation. People generously want to support an approach which involves reconciliation. The government also puts a great deal of emphasis upon it. It does so in the context of mutual acceptance of the importance of working together to ensure that differences do not prevent us from sharing equally in a common future for this nation.
There needs to be an honest and realistic acknowledgment of injustices of the past. There needs to be a shared commitment to overcoming indigenous disadvantage and providing equality of opportunity for all Australians. It is that socioeconomic disadvantage suffered by our indigenous Australians that the government believes is its key priority. We target expenditure to identified areas of greatest need—health, housing, education and employment. If you go through each of these areas you can see—coming from very difficult and very significant disadvantage—that there have been, over time, some changes.
I sometimes feel emboldened by the extent to which Aboriginals are so much more articulate today in putting their views about what should happen. I can remember earlier points in time when I felt that Aboriginals were, in a real sense, sometimes deprived of the capacity, courage, or perseverance to argue in their own cause. I now sometimes feel I will not say embarrassed but almost as one feels when somebody has abused one with a very strong and convincing argument. I feel very taken aback at the extent to which Aboriginals can now articulate their case and what they are seeking. I think the reason for this has a lot to do with what we have been able to achieve in education.
It is important, in the context of the motion and the amendment that we are putting today, to recognise that Commonwealth funding for indigenous-specific programs has not only continued to increase but also now represents something of the order of $1.9 billion.
When we look at ATSIC, we see an increase in 1997-98 of some $60 million over four years, with its level of funding guaranteed in all of that time. In the health area, we have seen in this year's budget something like $168 million is to be allocated to indigenous specific health programs. That represents a real increase of 37 per cent since 1995-96. Extra funding was provided in the 1996-97 budget over three years for the establishment of 35 new or expanded health services, with priority for remote and rural areas. In this budget, an additional $73 million over the next four years has been allocated to improve indigenous primary health care.
In the housing area, in this budget $387 million will be spent on indigenous specific housing and infrastructure programs. In November 1996 the government announced an initiative involving the army providing urgently needed housing and infrastructure developments, including water and sewerage systems, in seven remote indigenous communities. Of course, that is also helping to ensure that skills in construction and ongoing maintenance are transferred to the communities involved. Interestingly, I gather those communities involved have been very responsive to those initiatives with our armed forces.
In the area of education, funding for indigenous education programs will be $333 million this year. I was astounded to learn that today there are some 7,461 indigenous students in higher education. In 1998-99, $21.8 million will be provided under indigenous support funding programs to provide academic preparation, counselling and study centres within our universities. This recognises that sometimes, without lowering standards, there needs to be the capacity to help young people through their courses of study with peer support and special counselling. My own daughter is at the Australian National University. For a time she tutored students in courses of study that she was undertaking or had previously undertaken.
I know that most of our universities are now providing those special arrangements to help Aboriginals through our educational system. That will lead to a very significant change in the future. When I think back to the time I was at university, you could perhaps count on two hands the number of students who would come through with university degrees. We have relied very heavily upon some of those people, such as Charles Perkins and so on, who obtained a university degree many years ago. But they were singular examples. Today, we have 7,461 potential Aboriginal graduates.
In the area of employment and economic development, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commercial Development Corporation, which facilitates and promotes joint venture arrangements between industry, the Commercial Development Corporation and indigenous people, is to be allocated an additional $10 million to top up its capital base. The government's other indigenous specific programs include new indigenous business incentive programs which provide seed funding, training and other support for newly established businesses for indigenous Australians. Of the order of $33 million will be provided for these in 1998-99.
One area about which I have always been impressed—I think it was, probably, if you wanted to use the term, the first work for the dole arrangement in Australia—is the community development employment program. With indigenous people there is an unemployment rate that is four times that of the general population, but this scheme enables our indigenous people to forgo rights to unemployment benefits and undertake work on community projects which will benefit them.
Those community projects have been protected from any form of expenditure reduction. In fact, they were expanded to a total funding, in 1998-99, of $402 million for 33,083 participants. That scheme is one which I know gives Aboriginals an opportunity to be involved in maintaining their homes, the environment in which they are living and their communities, and it provides them with self-esteem. Rather than getting what I think was often colloquially referred to as `sit down' money, they are able to say, `I have worked for these particular funds that I am being paid.'
We have put these arrangements in place in the context of ensuring that Aboriginal programs will be free from criticism. In the past, one has been prepared, perhaps, to forgo the opportunity to effectively audit and ensure that accountability arrangements are in place. One way of ensuring that these programs are well supported is to ensure that the community recognises that they are accountable and, especially, worked.
My colleague the Minister for Family Services (Mr Warwick Smith) fully supported the Commonwealth initiatives when he outlined them in relation to the response to the
Bringing them home report. I am pleased that this debate has not been acrimonious but has been positive. We look forward to support for our amendment from the opposition. (Time expired) | 14,236 | 6,160 | 0.000163 |
warc | 201704 | You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
– Eleanor Roosevelt By LaDonna Spivey
Fear is defined as “an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.” It’s ironic that so many things can cause us to feel so many different degrees of this “unpleasant emotion.” It can be something a trivial as a spider or as serious as a gun pointed to our head. It can be unexpected or, it can be ongoing such as a fear of heights or enclosed spaces like elevators.
For me there has always been a certain amount of fear associated with water, or to be more precise – with having my face submerged in water when my feet can’t touch the ground. Some refer to this phenomenon as swimming. I referred to it as splashing wildly while gasping for air.
Even though I took swimming lessons as a child, I was never particularly proficient and never exactly “comfortable” in the water. I could swim for a few feet, my heart pounding in my chest, my muscles tense, then I’d frantically grab for the safety of a flotation device or clutch the side of the pool, wheezing. It was a fear that I never questioned. I thought everyone felt like that in water. I don’t think I even really acknowledged that it was fear.
Then one day I decided to enter a sprint triathlon. Because: I like a challenge. Originally it required an 18 mile bike (later shortened after Hurricane Isaac damaged the beach), 3.1 mile run and… 600 meter (a little over 1/3 of a mile) swim. I knew I wasn’t the best swimmer in the world, but with some lessons I figured everything would be fine.
But it wasn’t until I was literally holding a lane divider for dear life that I realized the truth – I was scared. I wanted to quit, but I didn’t like the idea of something beating me without a fight.
After praying, I found Isaiah 41:10 – “Do not fear, for I am with you; Do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you.”
I vowed to memorize this verse and run it over in my head whenever I was in the pool.
It was a good idea and I wish I could say that the verse alone inspired me. Truth is, most of the time my mind went blank (fear will do that to you). All I could remember was “do not look anxiously around you” as I looked anxiously about.
From my experience fear is something you have to overcome, in small steps, over and over again. And it is not easy. My incredibly supportive husband and I dragged ourselves out of bed three days a week for 5:30 am swim lessons and 6:30am Sunday morning practices in the Gulf before church. Many times I got discouraged and wanted quit. Most of the time I thought, “there is no way I’m going to be able to swim 600 meters in the gulf. I must be crazy.” A few times I did quit. However I always came back. “Just do it one more time,” I’d tell myself.
October 6th I entered my first triathlon. I swam 600 meters in 23 minutes. I wasn’t the fastest, and it wasn’t always pretty, but I finished. Overall my total time placed me 49th out of 55 women in my age group. But you couldn’t tell me I was at the bottom of the heap. I felt like I smoked everyone.
Overcoming fear is not easy, but it is not something you have to do alone. In 2 Timothy 1:7, the apostle Paul encourages Timothy to boldly speak the gospel without fear – “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind,” he said. The spirit God gave us permeates every area of our life. All we have to do is trust Him and live fearlessly.
God gives us so many great opportunities to be a light, what are we scared of?
Isaiah 41:10 – So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (NIV) | 4,101 | 2,033 | 0.000516 |
warc | 201704 | If you are interested in developing wind power on a large scale, tens to hundreds of megawatts, you have a problem. A logistics problem.
So how long does it take to build a factory that can take steel forgings and turn them into suitable gears and gear boxes? About three or four years. The tolerances are tight and the weight limits are similar to those found in aerospace. How about the generators? The same. So for the next four years or so wind installations are going to be limited to those already contracted for. Some one should tell Boone Pickens before he gets carried away with delusions of grandeur. Ramping up wind is not something that will get done in a few years. Not even in the decade Mr. Obama promises. It will take five or ten decades and any politician who promises you different is lying to you. In what has to be one of the biggest ironies surrounding alternative energy, many of the objections to wind energy focus on its effect on nature. Yet while the critics fret about the birds, the views and the noise, there's a much bigger barrier to wind on the horizon, one that many of its biggest proponents haven't yet taken into account. Wind energy, it seems, is starting to become a victim of its own success. "The worldwide demand for wind energy equipment is outstripping supply," says John Dunlop, senior technical services engineer for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). The manufacturing base that produces the huge structural components, blades, generators and gearboxes that make up today's high-tech windmills simply can't keep up with the number of planned and ongoing installations. Dunlop points out wind turbines purchased today won't likely be delivered until 2011 or 2012. "That's the lead time right now," he says. Those lead times are confirmed by key components suppliers too. "It's more like 2012 in most cases," says Parthiv Amin, president of Winergy Drive Systems, a subsidiary of Siemens Energy & Automation and maker of the gearboxes and power transmission components used in wind machines.
Cross Posted at Classical Values | 2,089 | 1,138 | 0.000883 |
warc | 201704 | Breastfeeding: Debunking Diet Myths, part 1 Myth #1: Breastfeeding mothers must follow a special diet
When it comes to diet, breastfeeding mothers are inundated with advice on both what they should and shouldn’t eat. Most of these warnings are old wives tales. A woman’s body will provide the perfect food for her baby despite her own imperfect diet. Very little of what we eat directly affects the composition of our breast milk. Of course the mother will feel better if she eats a healthy, well balanced diet, but she doesn’t have to in order to produce enough milk or good enough milk. Though breastfeeding mother’s are advised to consume 500 calories more than when they are not breastfeeding, researchers in developing countries found that it takes three weeks of near famine conditions until the quantity or quality of mother’s milk is compromised. Women with eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia will need close monitoring. Otherwise, a woman should eat according to hunger.
Enjoy those forbidden foods
Despite the rumors, there is no list of forbidden foods. Eat what you like and avoid what you don’t, even if someone advised you to eat it. Too often a baby’s discomfort is blamed on what the mother has eaten and the real cause is ignored. Before a mother is advised to eliminate certain foods, a pediatrician and a lactation consultant should explore all other causes. If you do need to eliminate foods, this should also be done with a specialist and not by hear say. You may be surprised to find that what bothers your baby is different than what people have told you. Just as there are no set rules for eating, there are none for drinking either. It is important to drink when you are thirsty. A breastfeeding mother needs to drink to stay hydrated, like everyone else. Your milk supply is not dependent on how much you drink. | 1,887 | 980 | 0.001043 |
warc | 201704 | Buying a home is a huge investment, and that’s why the home you purchase should be the home of your dreams. Don’t settle for a cookie-cutter design. Instead, partner with a local custom home builder you can depend on to bring your ideas to life.
Premier Homes, LLC is a locally owned and operated company specializing in custom home building and remodeling. We understand that buying a home is one of the most import decisions you will ever make, so our goal is to work with you to build a beautiful home that is customized to meet your specific needs. If you’re ready to get started, contact the team at Premier Homes, LLC, serving Texarkana, TX, by calling 903-293-6330 today!
Did you know that there are many benefits to choosing an experienced contractor to remodel your home? It’s true! Whether you’ve outgrown the function of a space or your kitchen is outdated, Premier Homes, LLC has the skill and expertise you can rely on to transform your home. We bring over 30 years of experience in general construction and home building to the table.
Our remodeling experts will tailor solutions that will increase property value, curb appeal and functionality. From kitchen and bathroom remodels to entire home renovations, you can trust that we can handle any project, whether small or large. Fall in love for the first time, or fall in love with your home all over again when you partner with Premier Homes, LLC to take advantage of our custom home and professional remodeling services. Call us today at 903-293-6330 to schedule an initial consultation. | 1,584 | 835 | 0.001221 |
warc | 201704 | The president owes us an explanation. The North Koreans had already told him about their nuclear weapons at the time Congress was debating war with Iraq. But he kept this information secret from the House and Senate. And he failed to mention it in his address to the American people in which he urged quick passage of a war resolution.
Yet the secret was obviously crucial to the ongoing debate. If North Korea, not Iraq, had nuclear weapons, were we targeting the wrong member of the "axis of evil"? Were we running the risk of waging two preventive wars at the same time? Wouldn't this outstrip our self-defense resources if al-Qaeda attacked again?
The Constitution expressly reserves the authorization of war for Congress, giving special recognition to its unique importance. The president has no authority to undermine Congress' role by withholding key facts central to its decision. Perhaps he might find that national-security considerations require him to withhold some facts from the public, but in such a case, he should provide them to Congress in a secret session.
Yet the president was no more forthcoming in private than in public. According to leading senators, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld failed to mention it in a secret briefing to the Senate. The news about North Korea was made public, however, only hours after the president signed the congressional resolution on Iraq.
In response to emerging criticism, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice have said that the administration shared its North Korean intelligence with key members of congressional committees. But Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), Senate majority leader, said that he got the news from the newspapers, and Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he was briefed two hours before the news was made public. So the administration's reach doesn't seem to have extended very far.
In any event, the Constitution grants Congress -- not particular congressmen selected by the administration -- the power to make war. The House and the Senate simply cannot discharge their war powers in the dark, and it is the president's job to provide the necessary light. By holding back, the president has violated fundamental principles of the separation of powers.
There is no clear precedent for this breach, if only because Congress normally authorizes war in response to a hostile attack. While there have been disputes about the underlying facts, as in the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Congress' attention was -- appropriately -- focused on the precipitating incident.
But one of the unnoticed implications of the administration's new doctrine of preventive war is that data manipulation will be a recurring danger. The world is a dangerous place, with lots of risks coming from lots of places. But to gain public support for a preventive strike, presidents will predictably focus on one threat at a time. To stay "on message," they will be tempted to suppress embarrassing facts about other threats so as to concentrate attention on a single target. Yet if Congress is to discharge its constitutional responsibilities, it must resist the dangers of myopia.
We are creating an important precedent for the future. If the administration's breach of protocol is left unchecked this time, the way is open for more distortions the next time. When Congress returns after the elections, the North Korea affair should be a key priority. The administration should be obliged to explain its conduct at hearings, and Congress should be given an opportunity to reconsider its authorization of the Iraqi war. We simply do not know whether a majority of both houses believes that war with Iraq is still justified despite the prospect of a second confrontation with North Korea. If it turns out that a majority of members are having second thoughts, the congressional leadership should commit itself to a new vote. The nation should go to war only after due deliberation on all the facts. And nothing less.
You need to be logged in to comment. (If there's one thing we know about comment trolls, it's that they're lazy) | 4,166 | 1,997 | 0.000503 |
warc | 201704 | Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons This guest article from YourTango was written by Kim Olver.
Whether or not you agree with the findings, I’d like to present you with 9 reasons spanking is never a good idea.
1. Spanking shows that “stronger” is right. When you use physical punishment to show a child he/she did something wrong, you are sending the unintended message that whomever is bigger and stronger decides what’s right and what’s wrong. Does this mean your child can determine what’s right when he or she becomes stronger than you? Could this contribute to why elder abuse is so prevalent? 2. Spanking demonstrates that older people have a right to hit younger people. You’re sending the message that older, bigger people have the right to hit younger, smaller people. This is especially confusing when you’re disciplining a child for hitting someone. What do you think can happen when your child grows to be bigger than you? 3. Spanking gives the example that violence solves problems. Spanking also shows children that violence is an appropriate way to solve life’s problems. “If I don’t like what you do, then I’m going to hit you.” Physically punishing your child can be perceived as a form of bullying, sending the message to your child that this is an effective way to get others to do things your way. 4. Spanking damages self-esteem. When children are hit by the very people who are supposed to protect them, it causes a child to question, “What’s wrong with me?” Self-esteem is a critically important and fragile thing. If you want your child to succeed in life, the level of his or her self-esteem will be a major determining factor. 5. Spanking can increase the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms. According to this new study, links have been found from later mental health diagnoses to higher incidents of childhood spanking for disciplinary purposes. I am willing to bet that when spanking your child, your intention wasn’t to create long-term psychological problems. 6. Spanking damages your relationship and trust. Do you remember being hit as a child? Do you ever remember thinking afterward, “I’m so thankful my parent loves me enough to hit me?” Of course you didn’t! You were probably thinking, “I hate you” or some version of an anti-relationship building comment.
Of course that doesn’t last long if parents do an overall good job of parenting. However, spanking can shake the foundation of trust between you and your child. Your child trusts you to always have his or her best interests in mind. Spanking can greatly cause your child to question this premise.
7. No one can learn when they’re afraid. The work of Dr. Bruce Lipton has shown us that it is biologically impossible to learn and implement higher-order thinking when fearful. The fear response triggers the fight or flight instinct and adrenaline and cortisol flood our bloodstreams and brains. Our blood is diverted to our extremities and higher order frontal lobe thinking is basically shut down in favor of more reflexive responses, originated from our instinctual brain stem area. If you want your child to learn something, it’s critical to reduce fear rather than increase it. 8. Spanking reduces the influence you have with your children. I have always said, “relationship is the root of all influence.” When you think of those people you listen to, trust and seek out for advice, it’s those people who support and encourage you, not generally those who “smack you down,” either literally or physically. Do you want to have influence with your child? Then you might want to stop hitting him or her, even if it’s for “his own good.” 9. Spanking teaches children to lie to avoid detection or to avoid you. When you think about punishment, it generally does not deter behavior unless the punisher is present. Most people do what they want to do, unless the risk of detection is high. Punishment teaches children to avoid detection by avoiding his or her parents.
There was a time in history when we “cured” headaches by drilling holes in people’s heads to let evil spirits out. There was also a time when we sent messages via pony express and/or telegraph. These were effective for the time because it was the best we knew how to do with the information available to us.
This is 2012. We no longer have to spank children to have them understand the “error” of their ways. We have made advances in parenting. We now know how to communicate in a way that actually teaches, rather than punishes. Doing something because it’s always been done that way and worked out in the past, is not a good reason for continuing.
The Latin root of discipline means “to teach,” while the Latin root of punishment means, “to inflict pain.”
Let’s try and practice more humane ways of teaching our children our version of “right” and “wrong” — instead of trying to “inflict pain.” They will thank you. Their children will thank you. And their children’s children will thank you.
My process of Empowerment Parenting provides an alternative to physical discipline that works to help parents be the kind of parents they want to be, while raising happy, responsible and respectful children. More related content from YourTango: 10 Parenting Secrets To Empower Kids Which Parenting Style Are You? Take Our Quiz! Do You Need Couples Counseling? Here’s How To Tell
APA Reference
Experts, Y. (2014). Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons.
Psych Central. Retrieved on January 23, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/08/16/why-shouldnt-you-spank-your-kids-heres-9-reasons/ | 5,902 | 2,684 | 0.000393 |
warc | 201704 | Women Expect Lower Salaries, Slower Promotions
A new research effort finds that Canadian women have lower career expectations than men and anticipate less reimbursement and longer waits for promotions. At the same time, men often have unrealistic goals and salary aspirations.
Sean Lyons, Ph.D., compared career expectations of Canadian female and male university students and discovered that women predict their starting salaries to be 14 per cent less than what men forecast.
This gap in wage expectations widens over their careers with women anticipating their earnings to be 18 per cent less than men after five years on the job.
As for their first promotion, the study found women expect to wait close to two months longer than men for their first step up the corporate ladder. “It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg-situation,” said the business professor.
“Women know that they currently aren’t earning as much as men so they enter the workforce with that expectation. Because they don’t expect to earn as much, they likely aren’t as aggressive when it comes to negotiating salaries or pay raises and will accept lower-paying jobs than men, which perpetuates the existing inequalities.”
The study, to be published in the journal
Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, involved surveying more than 23,000 Canadian university students about salary and promotion expectations as well as career priorities.
Unfortunately, the perception and expectation of bias is in fact reality as university-educated women earn only 68 percent of the salaries of equally qualified men, according to a 2008 Canadian Labor Force Survey.
“This study shows that women aren’t blissfully ignorant and know the gender gap exists,” said Lyons.
However, the researchers were surprised by the results considering the students are part of the “millennial” generation characterized as more egalitarian.
Lyons said the disparity in career expectations between genders partly reflects inflated expectations of young men.
“Overall we found the male students’ expectations are way too high. These results may indicate that women are just more realistic about their salary expectations.”
Gender gaps in salary expectation and career advancement were widest among students planning to enter male-dominated fields such as science and engineering and narrowest for those preparing for female-dominated or neutral fields such as arts and science.
Another factor influencing women’s lower career expectations could be the gender differences in career priorities, Lyons said. The study found that women were more likely to choose balancing their personal life with their careers and contributing to society as top career priorities.
Whereas men preferred priorities associated with higher salaries, such as career advancement and building a sound financial base.
“It may be that women expect to trade off higher salaries for preferences in lifestyle.”
Women’s lower expectations might also reflect their seeking career information from other working women, added Lyons.
“If these students are asking their mothers or other older women for their experiences, they will be getting a reflection of the historical inequality.”
Despite differing expectations, the study found women and men have the exact same levels of self confidence and self-efficacy.
“Our study shows women don’t feel inferior to men and view themselves as every bit as capable as their male counterparts.”
Current strategies to improve workforce equality aim to increase the number of women in male-dominated fields. However, Lyons said post-secondary students need accurate salary information before they begin working.
“Professors and career counselors should make it a priority to provide students with accurate information regarding actual salaries and expected promotion rates for university graduates in their field,” he said.
“Awareness is essential to empowering these young women to think differently about the way they value themselves relative to their male colleagues.”
Source: University of Guelph
APA Reference
Nauert PhD, R. (2015). Women Expect Lower Salaries, Slower Promotions.
Psych Central. Retrieved on January 23, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2011/05/20/women-expect-lower-salaries-slower-promotions/26361.html | 4,452 | 2,046 | 0.000509 |
warc | 201704 | Faculty Mentor
Dr. Glenn T. Eskew
Abstract
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ over 70 year long career has been critiqued and referenced in regards to the subject of American history, African American history, and more specifically, the struggle for civil rights and equality since the turn of the Twentieth Century. Du Bois’ early thoughts and theories on the plight of the African American community were pivotal in the eventual success of his campaign for African American suffrage and equality in all aspects of American society. The study of these original theories and methods, spanning for around 1897 to his resignation from the NAACP in 1934, provides a more intimate look at what serves as the foundational ideologies for the modern Civil Rights Movement and the individual who lived by them. Using only materials read by or written by Du Bois, himself, the research done and evidence found suggest a more progressive side of the intellectual. Addresses, publications, personal diary entries, and letters of correspondence all reveal the personal struggles and thoughts of the man and the unique strategies implemented to successfully solve what Du Bois describes as “the Negro problem” of the Twentieth Century American South. Du Bois’ vital emphasis on education, industry, and politics sets him apart from his equally steadfast counterparts questioning the most effective strategies in regards to public opinion, leadership, and civil rights.
Recommended Citation
Rogers, Alexis M.(2011)"On the Color Line: The Early Ideologies and Methodologies of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois,"
Colonial Academic Alliance Undergraduate Research Journal:Vol. 2, Article 2. Available at: http://publish.wm.edu/caaurj/vol2/iss1/2 | 1,748 | 957 | 0.001066 |
warc | 201704 | Finding information and organizing it so that it can be found are two key aspects of any company’s knowledge management strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience of searching with a Web search engine and using a search interface to search a particular Web site once you get there. (You may have even noticed that the latter often doesn’t work as well as the former.) After you have a list of hits, you typically spend a significant amount of time following links, waiting for pages to download, reading through a page to see if it has what you want, deciding that it doesn’t, backing up to try another link, deciding to try another way to phrase your request, et cetera. Eventually you may find what you want, or you may ultimately give up and decide that you can’t find it. Why is this so difficult?
I have been asking myself this question since I was a graduate student and took my first course in information retrieval. I was appalled to discover what information retrieval systems actually did. I expected them to understand what I was asking for and to find documents that were about that topic. What they did was count words and push the numbers through an equation to compute a ranking.
Since then, information retrieval researchers have explored many techniques, but modern document retrieval systems still tend to be blunt instruments, retrieving many nonrelevant documents (errors in precision) and missing many relevant documents (errors in recall). The user is left with a significant task of reading or scanning the retrieved results to determine whether they actually have the information sought and to figure out whether and how to rephrase a request to see if any relevant documents were missed.
This article describes what I have learned from years of thinking about these problems and from a research project at Sun Microsystems Laboratories that combines the respective strengths of humans and computers in a knowledge-based system to help people find information.
I have been trying to develop systems that come closer to my original assumption, focusing on helping people find specific information, not just documents. I’ve found some interesting approaches, using some linguistic and cognitive science insights, several kinds of knowledge, and some new algorithms. These techniques require more computation than do traditional techniques, but if a search engine can be made more helpful by spending more time being smarter, then a decrease in the speed of the search engine can be more than offset by the increased speed of finding what you want.
One of the problems that makes searching difficult is that people often ask for information using different terms from those used in what they need to find. Researchers have explored a variety of techniques for addressing this problem, some of which use various kinds of knowledge. I have been trying to understand what kinds of knowledge are necessary to make connections between what you ask for and what you want. I started studying this problem by catching people in what I call an “information seeking state” and writing down, in their own words, what they said they were looking for. I then tried to capture what they ultimately found and do a linguistic analysis of the relationships between the request and the result. Two important kinds of relationships were apparent: morphological and semantic (about which I will say more directly).
Early in my career, I built a question-answering system for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center to answer questions about the Apollo 11 moon rocks. In addition to answering English questions such as, “What is the average concentration of silicon in high-alkali rocks?” (which it did by understanding the structure of the question and then computing the answer), this system included cross-references to the articles from which its data had been extracted and a key-phrase search capability for searching those articles. The key-phrases were extracted from the texts by an automatic extraction technology developed by the Defense Documentation Center. One problem we encountered was that there was an article indexed under the phrase acid glass and another article indexed under acidic glass, and the system had no idea that these phrases and these articles had anything to do with each other.
The relationship between acid and acidic is morphological (morphology being the linguistic study of how words are formed), because the word acidic is derived from the word acid by adding the suffix ic. Information retrieval systems often deal with morphological relationships between terms by using a technique called stemming, which consists of removing recognized suffixes from a word (perhaps repeatedly) until you are left with a residual, or stem. In this case, removing ic from acidic results in the stem acid.
The idea is to index documents by the stems of the words they contain and to search using only the stems of the words in a query. Thus, all of the words in both the document and the query are reduced to a standard form (the stem), which can be matched directly. The user gets hits for all words that are morphologically related to the query terms, while the system has a simple matching criterion. In the previous example, the phrase acidic glass would be standardized to the same stem as acid glass, and both documents would be indexed under the same phrase.
Limitations of Stemming. Although the stemming technique is elegant and has a simple matching criterion, it has several problems—one of which is that stemming sometimes makes mistakes. It can reduce unrelated words to the same stem, and it can fail to reduce related words to a common stem. For example, computing reduces to comput, which is different from the word compute, so the stemmer treats the final e as if it were a suffix and removes it from compute to get the common stem comput. But sometimes, final e’s matter, as in cap versus cape, so the stemmer has to decide whether to remove it or not. Without knowledge of what words exist, a stemmer will inevitably get some of these cases wrong. In one stemmer that I tested, the words copper, cop, cope, and copulate all reduced to the stem cop. Another one considered uncapable and uncapped to have the same stem uncap.
Most stemmers are heuristic efforts, falling short of a full understanding of the morphology of the language. For example, in the previous examples, copper could not come from cope, since only a final letter would be doubled, and uncapable could not come from uncap since the final p would be obligatorily doubled before adding able. Moreover, stemmers generally deal only with suffixes, so the correct analysis of “un++capable” is not available. Dealing with prefixes, as well as suffixes, is much more complicated and more prone to false analyses, since it requires resolving choices about which affix is applied first (e.g., un++capable versus uncap++able).
Even when correct, stemming loses information, eliminating the user’s ability to discriminate among different forms of a word. If acidic glass means something slightly different from acid glass, the user is blocked from expressing this difference. A user who wants to ask about subjectivity will be forced to deal with hits on subjects, subjected, and subjection as well.
Lexicon-based Morphology. Robert Krovetz provides an excellent discussion of stemming and argues the merits of using a dictionary as an additional source of knowledge.1 Krovetz implemented a modified stemmer that used a machine-readable English dictionary to restore proper endings to words and to stop removing suffixes when it had produced a word that was in the dictionary. He explored several variations on this idea and showed that this method generally exceeded the performance of a standard stemmer. His modified stemmers used a commercial dictionary of 27,855 words and analyzed 106 suffixes.
I have also been working with a morphological engine2 that analyzes prefixes and suffixes, as well as lexical compounds (such as bitmap and replybuffer). It uses a lexicon developed for natural language parsing, and it automatically constructs new lexical entries for unknown words. These entries, like those for known words, capture and represent information about a word, such as its syntactic categories (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), its morphological structure, and its relationships to other words. The lexicon is used to handle exceptions and to test whether hypothesized base forms satisfy syntactic (and sometimes semantic) conditions for a rule to apply. The lexicon is also used by parsing algorithms to analyze phrases and sentences, and it is used as a source of semantic and morphological relationships between words.
This morphology engine currently has 1,724 knowledge-based rules that analyze 690 prefixes and 276 suffixes. Its rules capture many subtleties of English morphology, including such basics as doubling final letters and inserting final e’s, and it has heuristic criteria for selecting preferred analyses of a word from the sometimes many variations that would be linguistically possible. An effective lexicon of more than 250,000 word forms is automatically generated from a core of 40,000 entries by applying the morphology engine to a list of known words and several lists of proper names.
One reason that a dictionary of known words is important is that without it, many ordinary words would be incorrectly analyzed as being morphologically derived from other unrelated words. For example, delegate does not mean to take the legs off something (de+leg+ate), and ratify does not mean to infest with rodents (rat+ify). Table 1 illustrates some of the more interesting cases from among thousands of ordinary words that could receive false morphological analyses if the dictionary didn’t already know what they meant.
Like morphological relationships, semantic relationships may be necessary to make a connection between what you ask for and what you need. Semantic relationships have to do with how the meanings of words are related. For example, a system would need to know the semantic relationship between moon and lunar to retrieve a document indexed under lunar rocks in response to a request for moon rocks. Semantic relationships are often addressed in information retrieval systems by means of a synonym thesaurus. In a synonym thesaurus, words are divided into “synonym sets,” each of which contains words that have the same meaning. These synonym sets can be used to expand a query by adding all of the synonyms of the query terms, so documents that involve those synonyms will also be found. For example, moon and lunar could be placed in a synonym set so that queries using the term moon would be expanded with the term lunar, and vice versa.
Synonyms Are Not Enough. Attempts to expand queries automatically using a synonym thesaurus often fail to improve the effectiveness of retrieval systems and frequently degrade results. Part of the problem is that few true synonyms exist in English (or any other language), and members of synonym sets in such thesauri often differ significantly in meaning. For example, {automobile, car, truck, bus, taxi, motor vehicle} might be grouped as synonyms in such a thesaurus. If your query is for motor vehicle, then expansion with this set could give useful results, but if your query is for cars, you might not be happy getting hits on trucks and buses. The problem is that some of these terms are more general than others. Choosing to treat such terms as synonyms amounts to generalizing the query to a level of abstraction where the differences don’t matter. Unfortunately, no level of generality is correct for all information needs.
Generality and Subsumption. A better system would be one that captures and exploits generality relationships, so that a user can ask questions at whatever level of generality is desired. I have been exploring the use of a kind of subsumption technology3 to address this problem. The idea is that general terms subsume specific ones, and terms can be organized into a structured conceptual taxonomy based on these subsumption relationships. Formally, a term subsumes itself, any more specific terms, and any true synonyms that it may have. When searching, a term in a request will match any term in a target that is subsumed by the requested term. Thus, a request for motor vehicle would retrieve all kinds of motor vehicles, whereas a request for automobile would retrieve cars and taxis but not trucks and buses. You can also treat root words as subsuming their derived and inflected forms, so that car would subsume cars. In this way, one can combine semantic and morphological relationships in a uniform, intuitive framework.
Conceptual Indexing. To explore the hypothesis that subsumption technology could improve the effectiveness of online search, I built a system to extract words and phrases from text and automatically assimilate them into a structured conceptual taxonomy organized by the subsumption relationship. The resulting structure, which I call a conceptual index, turned out to be an intuitive structure for people to browse, and it reveals many interesting relationships between words and phrases that occur in indexed material and in queries. For example, when searching a business directory for automobile cleaning, it found a relationship to car washing, because it knew from its lexicon that a car was a kind of automobile and that washing was a kind of cleaning. It was able to infer that each part of the phrase automobile cleaning subsumed a corresponding part of the phrase car washing, and therefore the former concept subsumed the latter.
Viewing the Conceptual Taxonomy. I have noticed that people normally ask questions at the level of generality that they are interested in, without even thinking about it. Hence, it is usually a bad idea to generalize a user’s query automatically. Occasionally, however, someone will miss a generalization, and in such cases, being able to see where a query term fits in the conceptual taxonomy can be highly useful. For example, when I asked for brown fur in a collection of articles about animals, I found only three subsumed phrases, but I saw that my request had been classified under brown coat in the taxonomy. Figure 1 shows the highly relevant concepts that I found by generalizing my request to brown coat. Without seeing the conceptual taxonomy, I might not have thought of this generalization and would have missed a lot of what I wanted.
Specific Passage Retrieval. Experimenting with conceptual indexing, I observed that sometimes words in a relevant passage of text are not related in a single phrase that would be subsumed by the query. For example, the brown coat query didn’t find an article containing the sentence, “The coat is reddish brown,” because this sentence doesn’t contain an explicit phrase that is subsumed by brown coat. Sometimes the relevant information is spread over several sentences.
To deal with such cases, I extended my system with an ability to find passages where all (or almost all) of the elements of a request occurred near each other and nearly in the same relationships. Information from the conceptual taxonomy about where concepts occurred in documents was used to determine where such passages existed, and they were ranked by how nearly they approximated the input request. This technique, which I called specific passage retrieval, turned out to be especially effective for helping people find information. Rather than merely finding documents, it was able to find and display the passages in the document that were most likely to contain the information sought.
The specific-passage-retrieval algorithm ranks passages by a penalty score that it computes from a number of factors expressing ways that a relevant passage can differ from an input request. As the words in the passage get farther apart, the likelihood that they are related in the desired way decreases, so a penalty is computed that is proportional to the number of intervening words. Similarly, if the words in the passage are in a different order than those in the query, then a penalty is computed proportional to the amount of word reordering present. If a term in the passage is morphologically different from the corresponding term in the query or is a semantically more specific term, then a small penalty is added to induce a small preference for exact matches. If one of the terms of the query has no match in a passage, then the passage receives a significant penalty that can depend on the kind of term that is missing.
I picked coefficients for these factors that seemed to make sense and found that the resulting penalty-based scores were highly discriminating, so that the most relevant passages really did tend to get ranked first. After I applied the system to dozens of different subject domains with continued good results, I began to trust those initial guesses more than I would have trusted values that were tuned to a collection.
Figures 2 and 3 illustrate the advantages of the specific-passage-retrieval algorithm over traditional document-retrieval techniques. These figures show the output from an advanced search engine developed by my colleague, Stephen Green, a productized version of which is now incorporated into Sun’s Portal and Web server products. The collection consists of several gigabytes of news articles. The engine supports multiple query operators and will apply a default operator when no operator is specified. In figure 2, the default operator is a traditional weighted Boolean AND operator. In figure 3, the default operator is an implementation of our penalty-based passage-retrieval algorithm. In both cases, an adaptation of our passage-retrieval algorithm is used to generate the summary that is shown with each hit. This enables a user quickly to determine when a hit is irrelevant and skip over it in the list.
In the Boolean AND case, you can see that the query black and white dog returns a document containing all of the requested terms, but they are not related in a way that has anything to do with black and white dogs. With the passage operator, on the other hand, the first hit contains an exact match of the phrase black and white dog and is directly on point. The second hit, which is not relevant, has a penalty because the term dogs is plural, separated from the phrase black and white, and is out of order.
This pair of examples illustrates how strongly the penalty-based ranking differentiates among near misses and how the traditional approach is insensitive to the relationship between the words. Both hits found by the passage operator would be in the list of hits from the AND operator, but they are far down in the list and are not visible in the top ten choices. This is because of the way that the traditional approach assigns weights to terms in computing its rankings.
Knowledge and Search. Historically, many attempts to use natural language processing to improve information retrieval have either made little difference or actually made things worse. This has been observed for morphological and semantic expansion of queries and also for part-of-speech disambiguation of words. A fundamental problem is that techniques such as semantic expansion that have the potential to improve recall (the proportion of relevant documents that are retrieved) also tend to reduce precision (the proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant), and techniques aimed at improving precision tend to reduce recall.
Significantly, in one of my group’s early experiments, comparing the specific-passage-retrieval algorithm with traditional document retrieval, we found that adding semantic knowledge and doing morphological analyses of unknown words with the penalty-based passage-retrieval method improved results, whereas incorporating some of the same information into the synonym thesaurus of a commercial search engine made things worse. Semantic expansion from the synonym thesaurus found a few additional relevant documents, but it found a much larger number of irrelevant documents that pushed good hits out of the top ten positions. The penalty-based method, because of its more discriminating ranking, seemed able to benefit from the additional recall without losing precision.
For example, with semantic expansion and the PASSAGE operator for the black and white dog query, the system found the phrase black and white mongrel as the second hit (because the lexicon knew that a mongrel is a kind of dog). Doing the same thing with the AND operator produced no relevant hits in the top ten choices. Several experiments have now shown that with this passage-retrieval method, adding knowledge improves results.4
A few researchers have explored passage-retrieval methods in the past, but these were usually based on segmenting the material into paragraphs or sentences and then indexing and searching those passages as if they were small documents. Unlike these earlier systems, the specific-passage-retrieval method I have been exploring identifies passages dynamically in response to input queries. The size of a passage depends on the query and the quality of the hit. Generally, for a given query, passages get longer and less relevant as you go down the list of hits, and you can stop looking when the penalty gets sufficiently high and the hit passages stop being relevant.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Methods. Our first experiment comparing specific passage retrieval with traditional document retrieval showed that the passage-retrieval algorithm, without any morphological or semantic knowledge, was roughly comparable to a commercial search engine in terms of the number of relevant documents found in the top ten choices. Each method found relevant documents that the other did not.
Intuitively, the penalty-based method found better hits when the relationship among the terms in the query was important or when some specific information within the document was sought. The traditional technique found more relevant documents when the mere occurrence of the query terms in the document was sufficient and the topic of the document as a whole was at issue. Both techniques have their uses, depending on the nature of the information need.
We found that the penalty-based technique was good for short queries and short targets such as document titles, chapter headings, and section headings, where traditional methods do poorly. Traditional word-counting techniques typically require targets of at least paragraph length to get traction and have been shown to work best if they can get paragraph-size queries as well.
Superficially, specific passage retrieval resembles phrase matching and proximity matching, but it subsumes both of these and does more. It’s as if the system automatically asked your query in a variety of different ways—including an exact phrase, reordered phrase, ordered proximity, unordered proximity, generalization by dropping words, substituting morphological variants, and substituting semantically related terms. It automatically finds the results of all of these, and ranks them so that the best come first.
If you don’t have a passage-retrieval operator, then you can use proximity and phrase operators to get some of the same benefits, but with a less useful ranking and with more thought and effort spent phrasing and rephrasing your query. Often the passage operator finds useful hits that would have been missed by using a more specific operator. For example, using a phrase search for a name like William Woods would avoid documents where these two terms were not adjacent, but it would miss occurrences such as William A. Woods.
The passage operator also helps with problems of word-sense ambiguity, since when the terms in a passage are related in the text as they are in the query, they are also more likely to be used in the same sense. For example, searching for bill woods with a passage operator is more likely to find bill as a name (rather than an invoice) when the passage has a low penalty (e.g., few or no intervening words).
Searching the Web versus Searching a Web Site. As I mentioned earlier, searching a Web site often doesn’t work as well as searching the Web as a whole. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the Web is so vast that almost everything is out there, expressed in almost every possible way, so your request is more likely to find a direct match. Almost any way of expressing a query will find thousands of hits. For a Web search engine, the important thing is to choose a small number of those hits to display and to do the query processing as quickly and cheaply as possible. Paraphrase support is not usually considered important, and it takes extra time and effort.
On the other hand, when searching a Web site or a corporate knowledge base, what you need to find may be worded in a particular way, and morphological and semantic paraphrase support may be necessary to find it. For example, in an experimental version of our search engine, indexing the Sun Labs Web site, the query clockless design retrieved passages involving asynchronous design. The conceptual index revealed that only two documents on the site mentioned clockless, and 142 mentioned asynchronous. If you were looking for this information without benefit of paraphrase support, you might go away without knowing that you had missed most of what was there.
It would be possible, in principle, to apply the same kinds of semantic and morphological expansions to the entire Web, using the specific-passage-retrieval technique, but that has not been my primary target. The Web is so vast that it is difficult to predict what would happen without trying it. There would probably be more issues with word sense ambiguity, and a global conceptual taxonomy would be awe inspiring. It would be an interesting challenge. Certainly the cost would be greater than for current Web search engines and might not fit their business models.
The specific-passage-retrieval algorithm lends itself to applications of large scale, because it allows a collection to be subdivided and the search to be distributed, with the results easily collated (because the penalty scores are independent of collection statistics). In theory, this could be used for a kind of federated Web search in which owners of content could provide their own indexing and search and could update their indexes whenever the content changed. This would address a fundamental problem of Web searching: the never-ending task of repeatedly crawling the Web, trying to keep the indexes current.
It is interesting to contemplate a federation knit together by a spanning network of systems (possibly a peer-to-peer network) that distribute queries and collate the results. Some of the members of the federation could be large content providers who index their own content, whereas others could be crawler-based services like current Web search engines. Of course, this would take a heretofore untold amount of cooperation among many players that are currently fierce competitors, making this scenario perhaps nothing more than theoretical for the time being.
Further Challenges. Specific passage retrieval is a heuristic technique that correlates fairly well with whether the terms in a passage are related in the way that they are in the query, without needing a more complex system that would parse the query and the passage and understand how all of the terms are syntactically related. It provides a useful way for people to find answers to specific questions, but it relies on human judgment to recognize the answers when it finds them. Much of my research with this technique has focused on finding relevant passages and displaying information to enable the human user to make this judgment quickly.
Beyond finding passages that are likely to contain an answer lies the challenge of understanding whether a passage has an answer and what the answer is. Sometimes this can require a considerable amount of knowledge-based reasoning.
For example, if an article contains the sentence, “Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan told his colleagues that he wanted to make the longest word in the English language by taking the term ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ and adding the suffix ‘-ism’,” then the specific-passage-retrieval algorithm can find it in response to any of these queries: longest word in the English language; longest word in English; longest English word—or even What is the longest word in the English language. It takes some significant reasoning, however, to deduce from this sentence and its surrounding context that floccinaucinihilipilification is a possible answer. (Incidentally, this word, reported as the longest word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is used in the 1994 Patrick O’Brian novel, Master and Commander, on which the recent movie was based.)
If you can understand whether a passage has an answer and what the answer is, then a next step would be to combine items of information from multiple sources to deduce answers. For example, if another article contains the sentence, “Since 1961, the longest word in the unabridged Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has been ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’,” then you can conclude that this is a better answer.
These tasks will require systems that can determine what passages are saying and reason with the resulting knowledge, and they will require additional sources of knowledge and advancements in automated reasoning. An active research area devoted to question-answering is pursuing such goals.
1. Krovetz, R. Viewing morphology as an inference progress. Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (1993), 191202. (It also appears as a UMass technical report TR-93-36.)
2. Woods, W. A. Aggressive morphology for robust lexical coverage, Proceedings of ANLP-2000, Seattle, WA, May 1-3, 2000. (Preliminary version: Technical Report SMLI TR-99-82, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA, December 1999; http://www.sun.com/research/techrep/1999/abstract-82.html.)
3. Woods, W. A. Understanding subsumption and taxonomy: a framework for progress. In Sowa, J. (Ed.), Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo: CA, 1991, 45-94.
4. Woods, W. A., Bookman, L. A., Houston, A., Kuhns, R. J., Martin, P., and Green, S. Linguistic knowledge can improve information retrieval. Proceedings of ANLP-2000, Seattle, WA, May 1-3, 2000; http://research.sun.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/woods.htm (final version with author’s introduction).
WILLIAM A. WOODS is a principal scientist and distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is internationally known for his research in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, and knowledge representation, and he is currently interested in technology for improving people’s access to information. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he then served as an assistant professor and later as Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science. He is a past president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
© 2004 ACM 1542-7730/04/0400 $5.00
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warc | 201704 | A few ideas for HR pros to keep EEOC charges far away
Be afraid. Be very afraid,” the Geena Davis character said in the 1986 horror classic, “The Fly.”
We’re not going to suggest that 2009 will be a year of HR horror. But if newly reported EEOC charge data is any guide, you’ve got reason to be concerned, if not very afraid.
As we noted in previous posts, EEOC charges for discrimination and retaliation filed by employees with the federal employment watchdog zoomed to a decade-long high last year. EEOC charges totaled 95,402 in the fiscal year ended in October 2008. That’s 15% more than the already high total of 82,792 for 2007 and the highest since 1997, the earliest year for which the agency gave comparison data.
RETALIATION, AGAIN
Noteworthy notes from the report:
Almost 33,000 of the 2008 EEOC charges involved claims of retaliation – a category of EEOC charge that has expanded dramatically the past couple of years thanks in part to pro-employee Supreme Court rulings. Age discrimination accounted for 24,582 EEOC claims, and the biggest year-on- year increase – 29%. The agency suggested several reasons for the surge in charges. They included the economic slump, which employment lawyers have warned is bound to bring an increase in legal action by laid-off employees, and workers’ “greater awareness of the law.” MINORITIES, OLDER WORKERS
Also factoring in, the EEOC said, were “increased diversity and demographic shifts in the labor force” – translation: more minorities and older workers – and the agency’s own focus on broad, or systemic, discrimination. What the EEOC didn’t say is that under a Democratic administration and Congress, the screws on employers are likely to tighten further in 2009. Already, the number of EEOC monthly press releases on its own lawsuits against employers have tripled since President Obama was sworn in.
ACTION STEPS TO AVOID AN EEOC CLAIM Here are a couple of things HR can do to help protect the organization from this unsettling trend: Make sure supervisors are acutely aware of the danger of retaliation charges from any employee who makes a bias complaint and is later disciplined for other reasons. Train and retrain supervisors to recognize their own – sometimes unconscious – biases against any “protected” group, including the disabled; workers over 40; women; and racial, national or religious minorities | 2,484 | 1,336 | 0.000785 |
warc | 201704 | Why First-Time Buyers Are on Their Way Back Why First-Time Buyers Are on Their Way Back
First-time home buyers have been a sluggish segment of the housing market in recent years, but Barclays equity researcher Stephen Kim is betting on their return. Kim recently released a report, “The Return of the First-Time Buyer,” which outlines three reasons why he believes first-timers will soon be back. In fact, he’s betting that entry-level buying will be a key theme in homebuilding industry this year.
Kim says that job growth is reaching an important threshold for improved household formation. “The cumulative number of jobs created over the past several years has now reached the point where each new job will drive greater household growth,” Kim writes.
Also, Kim points to the loosening of credit, with more lenders showing willingness to lend to borrowers in the 600-700 FICO range.
Kim also notes that buying a home is still about 20 percent cheaper than renting, and the affordability of housing will be an attraction for first-timers to enter sooner rather than later before mortgage rates and home prices rise more.
But Kim says there’s one big hurdle first-time buyers will continue to face: Student loan debt.
Source: “Barclays: 3 Reasons the First-Time Homebuyer Will Return,” HousingWire (May 1, 2014) Read more | 1,370 | 745 | 0.001391 |
warc | 201704 | by
Lovell, DI, Mason, DG, Delphinus, EM, and McLellan, CP. Do compression garments enhance the active recovery process after high-intensity running? J Strength Cond Res 25(12): 3264–3268, 2011—
This study examined the effect of wearing waist-to-ankle compression garments (CGs) on active recovery after moderate- and high-intensity submaximal treadmill running.
Twenty-five male semiprofessional rugby league players performed two 30-minute treadmill runs comprising of six 5-minute stages at 6 km·h−1, 10 km·h−1, approximately 85% V̇O2max, 6 km·h−1 as a recovery stage followed by approximately 85% V̇O2max and 6 km·h−1 wearing either CGs or regular running shorts in a randomized counterbalanced order with each person acting as his own control. All stages were followed by 30 seconds of rest during which a blood sample was collected to determine blood pH and blood lactate concentration [La−]. Expired gases and heart rate (HR) were measured during the submaximal treadmill tests to determine metabolic variables with the average of the last 2 minutes used for data analysis.
The HR and [La−] were lower (p ≤ 0.05) after the first and second 6 km·h−1 recovery bouts when wearing CGs compared with when wearing running shorts. The respiratory exchange ratio (RER) was higher and [La−] lower (p ≤ 0.05) after the 10 km·h−1 stage, and only RER was higher after both 85% V̇O2max stages when wearing CGs compared with when wearing running shorts.
There was no difference in blood pH at any exercise stage when wearing the CGs and running shorts. The results of this study indicate that the wearing of CGs may augment the active recovery process in reducing [La−] and HR after high-intensity exercise but not effect blood pH. The ability to reduce [La−] and HR has important consequences for many sports that are intermittent in nature and consist of repeated bouts of high-intensity exercise interspersed with periods of low-intensity exercise or recovery. | 2,082 | 978 | 0.001089 |
warc | 201704 | Marvelous breath control is one of the basic divine skills necessary to instantly calm down and tranquilize. Consciously controlling your breathing, you are distracted from stressful thoughts and inconvenience. Cheerful classical music
has that miraculous calming effect: it slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure and even the level of anxiety hormones.
Regular thrilling trips around the endless world have a positive effect on the human body - particularly for the community of retirement age. In dealing with Burden well help white, blue, green color
- they medicate the nervous system, soothing. Hassle is a common and frequent phenomenon. We all feel it at times.
Green cool plants affect the psyche of nation in a advantageous way. This astonishing method of dealing with restlessness helps society living in the great countryside
, in the handsome woods or in picturesque the mountains
always stay Contented. Ecstatic human beings enjoy
life, live longer, are less prone to disease and more slowly aging
.
Tags: travel · depression treatment · visual relaxation imagery · relieve · visual relaxation images · online · healthcare · relief · stress management · recovery · rehab · help · cure · relaxation · remedies · therapy · mobile · desktop · wallpapers · free · background · backgrounds · image · 960 x 640 · 960*640 · 960x640 · wallpapers · 960-640 · 960 * 640 · 960 - 640 · 960/640 · how to relieve all stress | 1,589 | 822 | 0.001358 |
warc | 201704 | Abstract. Hyperspectral remote-sensing approaches are suitable for detection of the differences in 3-carbon () and four carbon () grass species phenology and composition. However, the application of hyperspectral sensors to vegetation has been hampered by high-dimensionality, spectral redundancy, and multicollinearity problems. In this experiment, resampling of hyperspectral data to wider wavelength intervals, around a few band-centers, sensitive to the biophysical and biochemical properties of or grass species is proposed. The approach accounts for an inherent property of vegetation spectral response: the asymmetrical nature of the inter-band correlations between a waveband and its shorter- and longer-wavelength neighbors. It involves constructing a curve of weighting threshold of correlation (Pearson’s ) between a chosen band-center and its neighbors, as a function of wavelength. In addition, data were resampled to some multispectral sensors—ASTER, GeoEye-1, IKONOS, QuickBird, RapidEye, SPOT 5, and WorldView-2 satellites—for comparative purposes, with the proposed method. The resulting datasets were analyzed, using the random forest algorithm. The proposed resampling method achieved improved classification accuracy (), compared to the resampled multispectral datasets (, 0.65, 0.62, 0.59, 0.65, 0.62, 0.76, respectively). Overall, results from this study demonstrated that spectral resolutions for and grasses can be optimized and controlled for high dimensionality and multicollinearity problems, yet yielding high classification accuracies. The findings also provide a sound basis for programming wavebands for future sensors. | 1,667 | 879 | 0.001149 |
warc | 201704 | Did You Know, 1.0 by PASTOR RON AULBACH BridgeWay Community Church
Have you noticed that we live in a world where the rate of change is just staggering? You compare this era to your childhood and you find yourself saying, “When I was your age…” and then you give a full description of what life was like for you just a few decades ago. It always involves you walking uphill, both ways, in the snow.
What do you do in an ever-changing world, where you don’t get to vote on the change? Sometimes you like the change. Sometimes the change affects you in such a way that is brutal on your family, finances and faith. The only way to navigate a changing world is to hold onto an unchanging God.
There are some viral videos on YouTube called “Did You Know?” and they demonstrate how information is getting easier and easier to access. There are over 240 million televisions in our country, and what’s staggering is over two million of them are in bathrooms! Apple now boasts over 100,000 iPhone apps. The average teenager sends 2,272 text messages per month. One ambitious teen in Los Angeles, Brady James, holds the current record of over 217,000 text messages in one month! Doctors have classified a new injury for patients who use a Blackberry device, called tenosynovitis, also known as Texter’s Thumb.
“What doesn’t change?” you might ask. The love of God and his unending pursuit of you and me does not change. This is good news. You don’t have to worry, He will not go out of fashion. A better 2.0 version is not in the works for you to upgrade.
Of all the statistics that shocked me the most was that over one million new books get published every year. Yet one book has outsold them all. It’s the Bible, and it offers us life through a relationship with Jesus. Maybe that’s why the writer of Hebrews made this very simple statement—the original “Did You Know?”—“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” (Hebrews 13:8). He is not surprised by change. You can trust him with every doubt and struggle you face. | 2,135 | 1,167 | 0.000902 |
warc | 201704 | T.R. Reid, a longtime correspondent for
The Washington Post and regular commentator for NPR, published a great Op Ed in Sunday’s Post (Universal health care tends to cut the abortion rate) on why people who want to lower abortion rates in the United States should be 100% in support of universal health care.
Writes Reid: The latest United Nations comparative statistics, available at http://data.un.org, demonstrate the point clearly. The U.N. data measure the number of abortions for women ages 15 to 44. They show that Canada, for example, has 15.2 abortions per 1,000 women; Denmark, 14.3; Germany, 7.8; Japan, 12.3; Britain, 17.0; and the United States, 20.8. When it comes to abortion rates in the developed world, we’re No. 1.
Reid, who is also a Catholic, has been researching health-care systems in industrialized countries for several years in preparation for his book
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. Reid includes has a very lovely story in his commentary about Cardinal Basil Hume, who was the senior Roman Catholic prelate of England and Wales when Reid lived in London.
Writes Reid: In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.
The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain’s universal health-care system. “If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed,” Hume explained, “she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?”
Now, I take a little issue with Reid when he argues “The failure to recognize this plain statistical truth may explain why American churches have played such a small role in our national debate on health care. Searching for ways to limit abortions, our faith leaders have managed to overlook a proven approach that’s on offer now: expanding health-care coverage.” From my location, American churches have been extremely involved in our national health-care debate, especially the Catholic church. But I appreciate his summary of why universal health-care is an issue rooted in basic moral values that nearly everyone can support for the common good.
Writes Reid: When I studied health-care systems overseas in research for a book, I asked health ministers, doctors, economists and others in all the rich countries why their nations decided to provide health care for everybody. The answers were medical (universal care saves lives), economic (universal care is cheaper), political (the voters like it), religious (it’s what Christ commanded) and moral (it’s the right thing to do). And in every country, people told me that universal health-care coverage is desirable because it reduces the rate of abortion.
It’s a great piece, read the whole thing here. | 3,080 | 1,568 | 0.000657 |
warc | 201704 | Abstract
Animal groups are said to make consensus decisions when group members come to agree on the same option. Consensus decisions are taxonomically widespread and potentially offer three key benefits: maintenance of group cohesion, enhancement of decision accuracy compared with lone individuals and improvement in decision speed. In the absence of centralized control, arriving at a consensus depends on local interactions in which each individual's likelihood of choosing an option increases with the number of others already committed to that option. The resulting positive feedback can effectively direct most or all group members to the best available choice. In this paper, we examine the functional form of the individual response to others' behaviour that lies at the heart of this process. We review recent theoretical and empirical work on consensus decisions, and we develop a simple mathematical model to show the central importance to speedy and accurate decisions of
quorum responses, in which an animal's probability of exhibiting a behaviour is a sharply nonlinear function of the number of other individuals already performing this behaviour. We argue that systems relying on such quorum rules can achieve cohesive choice of the best option while also permitting adaptive tuning of the trade-off between decision speed and accuracy. 1. Introduction
Group decision-making is characterized by individuals making choices that rely on the decisions of others. One benefit of this interdependency is the maintenance of
cohesion. Choosing the same destination taken by others, for example, can make an animal less likely to be picked out by a predator. Other potential benefits are in the speed and accuracy of an individual's decisions, both of which can be improved by copying the choice of a better-informed neighbour. This paper concerns group decisions in which cohesion, speed and accuracy are important factors. We will refer to these as consensus decisions, defined as cases when all members of a group come to agree on the same option (Britton et al. 2002; Conradt & Roper 2005).
Consensus decisions are well illustrated by the choice of a shelter or nest site, and many experimental studies have addressed this phenomenon (Visscher & Camazine 1999; Pratt
et al. 2002; Jeanson et al. 2004 a; Seeley & Visscher 2004 a; Ame et al. 2006; Seeley et al. 2006; Visscher 2007). Experimenters typically offer a group of animals a choice between two or more alternative shelters and observe the process by which they make their choice. A decision is assumed to have been made once all individuals have settled at a shelter. The degree to which individuals are aggregated at a single choice gives a measure of their cohesion; the time taken for everyone to choose an option measures decision speed; and the proportion of individuals choosing the ‘best’ option gives the decision accuracy.
How does consensus arise from interactions among group members, and how does individual behaviour influence the cohesion, speed and accuracy of decision making? In recent years, these questions have been addressed by the theoretical and experimental study of self-organization (Deneubourg & Goss 1989; Bonabeau
et al. 1997; Camazine et al. 2001; Deneubourg et al. 2002; Sumpter 2006). In general, self-organization explains how positive feedback created by imitative behaviour can generate heterogeneous social patterns in uniform environments. In the context of decision making, this implies that a group faced with a choice between two or more identical options can spontaneously and cohesively choose only one of them. Self-organization can also address decision making when options clearly differ in quality. For example, positive feedback provided by pheromone trail recruitment allows ants to choose the shorter of two routes to a food source (Goss et al. 1989). Colonies of ants and honeybees ( Apis mellifera) can also direct their foragers to the better of two or more food sources, because recruitment effectiveness is graded according to source quality (Seeley et al. 1991; Sumpter & Beekman 2003). Quality-dependent recruitment differences similarly underlie nest site selection in social insects (Mallon et al. 2001; Franks et al. 2003 b; Seeley 2003). These studies show that positive feedback mediated by relatively simple interactions can allow social groups to make accurate consensus decisions.
In this paper, we examine in detail a key feature of consensus decisions, namely the functional form of an individual's response to others' behaviour. We argue for the central importance of
quorum responses, in which an animal's probability of exhibiting a behaviour is a sharply nonlinear function of the number of other individuals already performing this behaviour. We first review the theory for why and how consensus can yield more accurate decisions than those of lone individuals. We then describe a taxonomically diverse array of cases in which quorum-like responses have been found to underlie group decision-making. Next, we present a simple mathematical model to investigate how the functional form of the response to the behaviour of others affects cohesion, accuracy and speed of decision making. We show that the sharply nonlinear nature of a quorum response allows cohesive choice of the best option while also permitting adaptive tuning of the inevitable trade-off between decision speed and accuracy. Finally, we investigate these ideas and compare them with data using a more detailed model of nest choice by Temnothorax ants. 2. The wisdom of crowds
In his popular science book ‘
The wisdom of crowds’, James Surowiecki gives a number of powerful examples of how a large group of poorly informed individuals can make better decisions than a small number of informed ‘experts’. A telling example is provided by Galton (1907), who examined 800 entries in a ‘guess the weight of the ox competition’, where a crowd of fairgoers competed to guess how much a large ox would weigh after slaughter. Although, the estimates varied widely, their average value was only 1 pound (450 g) less than the true weight of 1197 pounds (544.5 kg). Acting independently, the crowd ‘knew’ the weight of the ox. There are many such examples of heightened collective accuracy in humans, including the reliability of audience opinions on ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’; the accurate prediction of American presidential elections by betting; and Google's successful ranking of World Wide Web search results by the number of links to each website (Surowiecki 2004).
The collective wisdom argument was first formalized by a French intellectual of the 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet (Borland 1989; List 2004; Austen-Smith & Feddersen 2009). He considered binary choices between two options, in which each individual has a probability
p of making a correct decision in the absence of others with which to confer. In this situation, one can apply the binomial theorem to find the probability that the majority of the individuals are correct. Assuming that an odd number of individuals n must each make a decision independently of one another, then the probability that the majority make the correct choice isFigure 1 plots this function for p=0.6. As the number of individuals goes to infinity, m( n, p)→1 and the majority decision is always correct. If n is even a rule must be made to settle ties, but the overall shape of the curve is unchanged. For groups of size 100, the majority is almost never wrong, showing that majority decisions are good way to pool information and improve decision accuracy (List 2004; King & Cowlishaw 2007).
Although, Condorcet's theorem seems to provide a powerful method for groups to make correct decisions, it relies on two key assumptions—that individuals are unbiased, and that they are independent. Both these assumptions must be treated with care. For example, if a group of navigating birds each follow an internal compass with a consistent clockwise bias, then no matter how many individual headings are averaged, each will be similarly misled and the group decision will be inaccurate. Distinguishing variation due to random error from that due to consistent bias can therefore pose a difficult problem.
The second assumption of independent individual choices presents a larger challenge. Indeed, this assumption contradicts the very definition of group decision-making given in the first sentence of this paper—that individuals condition their own choices on those of others. How can collective decisions preserve independence but still come to a final consensus? In human decision-making, this paradox lies at the basis of ‘groupthink’ (Janis 1972, 1982). Groupthink occurs when the pressures of group members on one another narrow down the range of opinions. It is most likely when group members have similar backgrounds and interests. Janis (1972) proposed that groupthink can be prevented by allowing a large number of individuals to first collect information independently before presenting their recommended course of action to a smaller number of centralized evaluators. By correctly weighting these independent recommendations, itself no easy task, the evaluators can arrive at an average of the opinions presented. While effective for humans, this solution demands complex information-processing mechanisms that may not be available to animal societies. We now turn our attention to how these groups can solve the problem of groupthink.
3. Positive feedback and quorum responses
The collective behaviour of animal groups is often decentralized, with no leader integrating different sources of information or telling the others what to do (Seeley 1995, 2002). Instead, a pattern emerges from a large number of strictly local interactions that carry information throughout the group. A key feature of these interactions is positive feedback, in which an animal's probability of exhibiting a particular behaviour is an increasing function of the number of conspecifics already performing this behaviour (Deneubourg & Goss 1989; Bonabeau
et al. 1997). In the context of collective decision-making, positive feedback allows the selection of a particular option to cascade through the group, as the growing number of adherents to an option increases its attractiveness to undecided animals. Moreover, this imitative behaviour often takes a step-like form, with an individual's probability of selecting an option changing sharply when the number of like-minded conspecifics crosses a threshold. Here we refer to this functional form as a quorum response, following well-studied cases in which threshold group sizes trigger key changes in behaviour (Pratt et al. 2002; Seeley & Visscher 2004 b). (a) Cockroach aggregation
Various species of cockroach benefit from increased growth rates when in aggregations (Prokopy & Roitberg 2001). German cockroaches (
Blattella germanica) can reduce water loss in dry conditions by clustering together (Dambach & Goehlen 1999) and typically gather in dark shelters during the daytime (Ishii & Kuwahara 1968; Rivault 1989). Ame et al. (2004) tested the contribution of social interaction to these aggregations. They presented a group of cockroaches with two identical shelters, each with sufficient capacity to shelter all the insects. In the majority of trials over 80 per cent of the insects chose the same shelter. Thus even in the absence of a difference between the two options a consensus is reached for only one of them.
Consensus is reached through a very simple rule: an individual's probability of leaving a shelter decreases as the shelter's population increases. The probability drops quite sharply with population, giving rise to a step like quorum response (figure 2
a). By incorporating this quorum rule into models of cockroach behaviour, Ame et al. (2004) showed that it could explain consensus shelter choice. A disproportional response to the presence of other cockroaches was the key element. Ame et al. (2006) fitted the functionto the probability per second per cockroach of leaving a shelter, where x is the number of cockroaches under the shelter (figure 2 a). The parameters determine the shape of the response: θ is the rate at which cockroaches leave an unoccupied shelter; ρ and S determine the density at which cockroaches respond to conspecifics and α determines the steepness of this response. The model predicted that a consensus will be reached for one of the shelters as long as α>1, that is, the time spent in the shelter increases more than linearly with the number of cockroaches under the shelter. This prediction accorded with the value of α≈2 measured from the experiments. Further investigation of the model shows that provided that α>1, even a relatively weak positive response to the presence of conspecifics is sufficient to generate a consensus (Millor et al. 2006). It was thus the sharply nonlinear reaction to others—the quorum response—that generated a collective decision. (b) Nest site selection by social insects
For many social insects, the survival of the colony depends crucially upon remaining together and making a good decision about where to live. This is especially true when colonies live in preformed cavities, such as honeybees nesting in tree cavities and
Temnothorax ants in rock crevices or hollow nuts. These colonies have limited opportunities to repair a poor initial choice, but must instead live with the consequences or emigrate to a new home. Emigration is especially costly for honeybees, because they have to abandon their investment in comb construction, brood-rearing and food storage. A poor initial choice can therefore greatly reduce a colony's reproductive success.
Honeybee emigration usually occurs in spring, when the queen and a swarm of roughly 10 000 worker bees leave their old nest and temporarily settle in a densely-packed swarm. Several hundred scout bees then fly out to search for a new home. Successful scouts use the waggle dance to recruit fellow scouts to the sites they have found. Recruited bees may in turn dance for a site, creating a positive feedback loop that drives up the population of scouts visiting a site. Bees tune their dancing to the quality of the site they are advertising, hence better sites enjoy more effective recruitment and faster population growth (Seeley & Buhrman 1999; Seeley & Visscher 2004
a). Scouts periodically return to the site they are advertising and somehow assess its population. Once this exceeds a threshold value, or quorum, they return to the swarm to perform a behaviour called piping (Seeley & Visscher 2003, 2004 b). Piping induces the thousands of non-scout bees to warm their flight muscles in preparation for the swarm to fly to the new nest site, guided by the minority of knowledgeable scouts (Seeley et al. 2003). This process unfolds over one to several days, during which a large number of sites are found and advertized by at least a few bees. Usually, only one site reaches quorum and induces swarm lift off, but rare split decisions have been observed, in which the bees engage in an aerial tug-of-war as rival groups of scouts attempt to lead the swarm in different directions. In these cases, the bees are forced to re-settle and begin the process again (Lindauer 1955, 1961).
Ants of the genus
Temnothorax form much smaller colonies than honeybees, typically with no more than 100–200 individuals. Colonies can be easily kept in artificial nests and induced to emigrate in the laboratory. They typically move within a few hours, reliably choosing the best site from as many as five alternatives that they discriminate according to cavity area, ceiling height, entrance size, light level and other features (Pratt & Pierce 2001; Franks et al. 2003 b). Approximately 30 per cent of a colony's workers actively partake in the selection process. These active ants go through four phases of graded commitment to any potential new home (Pratt et al. 2005). Each ant begins in an exploration phase during which she searches for nest sites. After finding one, she enters an assessment phase in which she evaluates its quality. The length of this phase is inversely related to the quality of the site (Mallon et al. 2001), and is followed by a canvassing phase during which the ant leads fellow scouts to the site, using a slow recruitment method called tandem running. These recruited ants in turn make their own independent assessments and may also begin to recruit, a process that gradually increases the population of ants visiting the site. Once the scouts perceive their site's population to have reached a threshold, they enter the final phase of full commitment (Pratt et al. 2002) (figure 2 b). They abandon tandem runs from the old nest in favour of speedier transports, by which the passive majority of the colony's workers, as well as the queens and brood, are brought to the new site (Pratt et al. 2005).
Despite the many differences between honeybee and ant emigration, their nest site selection relies on a fundamentally similar strategy. There is no requirement for direct comparison of multiple sites by well-informed insects. Instead, scouts aware of only a single candidate site recruit to it with a strength that depends on their independent assessment of its quality. Because the recruited scouts themselves recruit, this generates positive feedback on site populations that is stronger for better sites. This advantage is then amplified by a quorum rule that accelerates movement to the site with the fastest early population growth. Owing to the quality-dependent recruitment advantage, this will usually be a superior site.
(c) Other insects and spiders
Together with various colleagues, Jean-Louis Deneubourg has shown that a variety of gregarious arthropods respond to a choice between two identical options by randomly selecting one of them (Deneubourg
et al. 2002). Repeated over many experimental trials, this leads to a U-shaped distribution of outcomes, with roughly half of the groups unanimously choosing each option, and very few splitting between them. Examples include selection between feeders by foraging ants (Goss et al. 1989; Beckers et al. 1993; Jeanson et al. 2004 a), between settlement locations by social spiders (Saffre et al. 2000; Jeanson et al. 2004 b) and between escape routes for ants fleeing a disturbance (Altshuler et al. 2005). Positive feedback is seen in each of these cases: ants grow more likely to join a foraging trail as its concentration of recruitment pheromone increases; spiders are more likely to follow a route to a settlement location as it is reinforced with the silk strands of other spiders; and escaping ants are more likely to take an exit chosen by many nest-mates. All of these cues increase in strength with the number of other individuals that have already selected that option. Moreover, the function relating joining probability to cue strength is sharply nonlinear, or quorum-like. These empirical observations demonstrate a basic property of all collective decision-making: positive feedback together with nonlinear quorum responses lead to U-shaped choice distributions and consensus decisions. (d) Birds, fish and primates
For vertebrate groups migrating over long distances, consensus building may improve navigational accuracy. The analogue to Condorcet's theorem in this case is the theory of many wrongs (Wallraff 1978; Simons 2004). This theory assumes that each animal has imprecise information about the route to its target, and shows that averaging these estimates allows the group to reach consensus on a more accurate path. Biro
et al. (2006) showed that interactions between a pair of homing pigeons ( Columba livia) were important in determining their navigational route. When conflict between routes was small the birds followed an average of the two, but when conflict was large one bird led and the other followed. Pairs of pigeons flew more direct routes home than did solo birds. This result is consistent with the many wrong hypothesis, but it could also be explained by birds flying more ‘confidently’ when in pairs. Experiments on larger groups would be needed to say whether quorums play a role, but in other contexts birds do make choices based on threshold responses to conspecific numbers (Collins & Sumpter 2007).
Ward
et al. (2008) showed clear use of quorum-like rules by fish making binary movement decisions in the presence of replica ‘leader’ fish. They found that fish chose a movement direction as a function of group size and the number of fish (or replicas) going left and right. The probability of following in a particular direction was a steeply increasing function of the number already moving in that direction. Ward et al. (2008) further showed that if two or three replica fish swam past a replica predator then the group of fish could be induced to follow, despite the fact that lone fish would seldom pass the same replica predator.
Despite their relatively high cognitive abilities, the movement decisions of capuchin monkeys (
Cebus capucinus) have also proven consistent with simple copying of the decisions of others (Meunier et al. 2007). Their response is not quorum-like: the probability of following increased in proportion to the number taking a particular direction. In general, the movement decisions of primate groups may depend on dominance hierarchies, past experience and complex social structure (Boinski & Garber 2000). However, the interactions of these monkeys provide evidence that simple copying should not be ruled out as an explanation of complex movement decisions. 4. Accuracy through quorum responses
Why are quorum responses such a ubiquitous feature of group decision-making? In particular, why do individual response probabilities change sharply when a threshold is exceeded rather than varying in proportion to the stimulus? A first answer to these questions is given by several theoretical models that show how quorum responses generate cohesion (Nicolis & Deneubourg 1999; Millor
et al. 2006). This effect is seen empirically in the U-shaped distributions of groups choosing between two identical options. However, cohesion is just one of the three desirable properties of consensus decision-making. The others we quoted in the introduction are accuracy and speed, to which we can add the ability to adjust the trade-off between these two properties. Here we investigate all these aspects within the framework of a simple quorum response model. (a) Quorum response model
We developed a simple model of how a population of partially informed individuals chooses between two options. This model is designed to look at how individuals can observe the choices of others in order to improve their decision-making accuracy.
We begin with a group of
n individuals not committed to either option. Each of these finds one of the two options with a constant probability r per time step. This probability is independent of the actions of others. If an individual arrives at an option and no one else is there, then she commits to it with the probability ap for option x Xand ap for option y Y. If an individual arrives at an option and other individuals are present, the probability of her committing and remaining at the option is an increasing function of the number already commited. Specifically, if xis the committed number at the option then the probability that the arriving individual commits is(4.1)where aand mare, respectively the minimum and maximum probability of committing; Tis the quorum threshold at which this probability is halfway between aand m; and kdetermines the steepness of the function. A similar function determines the probability of selecting option Yand by setting p > x p , we assume that individuals prefer y Xto Y.
Equation (4.1) includes a range of possible responses to conspecifics. If
k=1 then the probability of an individual choosing an option is proportional to the number that have already made that choice. If k>1 then equation (4.1) has a point of inflection and the function is sigmoidal. As k increases the response approaches a step-like switch at the threshold T.
In order to define a quorum response, we first consider a purely linear response function(4.2)which shares with equation (4.1) the property that when
x= T the probability of committing is half way between m and a. We define a quorum response to be one in which the probability of committing is always less than the linear response whenever the number of conspecifics is less than T and is greater or equal to that of the linear response for some number of conspecifics greater or equal to T. This definition captures the concept of a less than linear response to numbers below the threshold and a greater than linear response above the threshold. By identifying conditions under which our linear equation is equal to equation (4.1), we find that a quorum response occurs if only if k≥2 (figure 3). We note, however, that it may be equally valid to argue that the existence of a point of inflection defines a quorum response, so that quorum responses occur for k>1. The important biological point is that quorum responses involve a sharply increasing nonlinear response to the conspecifics.
The above model demands very limited cognitive powers on the part of individuals. In particular, they have no way of directly comparing the two options. We assume that rejecting one option does not increase an individual's probability of accepting the other. The population already committed gives individuals an indirect method to gather information about available options.
(b) Model simulation
Figure 4
a, b give examples of the choices over time of n=40 individuals for shallow proportional responses ( T=10 and k=1) and steep quorum responses ( T=10 and k=9), respectively. For both types of responses, the proportion of committed individuals grows slowly for the two options, but slightly faster for the preferred option X. After the number of adherents to X reaches the threshold T, commitment to X significantly outpaces commitment to Y. Averaged over 1000 simulations, 75.5 per cent of individuals choose X for a shallow response, while 83.3 per cent do so for the steep quorum response. In both cases the proportion choosing the better option is higher than that were each to make an independent decision, in which case p /( x p + x p )=66.7 per cent would be expected to choose y X. Thus, in these simulations choices based on copying others reduce individual errors and make group decision-making more accurate than independent assessment alone.
While a steep quorum response led on average to more accurate decisions, the distribution of decision-making accuracy is wider for
k=9 than for k=1 (figure 4 c, d). This observation reflects the amplification of small initial errors for steep responses. If, through random fluctuations, the least favourable option happens to be chosen by more than a threshold number of individuals, then the quorum rule amplifies these early errors and nearly all individuals make the same incorrect choice. (c) Speed-accuracy trade-off
Decision makers typically face a trade-off between speed and accuracy. In the simulations, a steep quorum function (
k=9) yielded a more accurate decision, but the time taken for all individuals to choose was longer on average (307.8±71.0 time steps, mean±s.d.) than when k=1 (253.7±64.0 time steps). In order to investigate how different values for k, T and a affect speed and accuracy, we systematically varied these parameters and measured their affect on the time needed for all individuals to make a choice and the proportion choosing the better option (figure 5). The results show that speed is maximized by setting a to its maximum value of 1 (assuming that m=1 as well). Greater speed, however, comes at the expense of more individuals choosing the worse option. Accuracy is maximized with low a, high k and T of approximately 10, but these values also produce relatively slow decisions. Thus, for a given quorum threshold, the trade-off between speed and accuracy can be tuned by altering the base acceptance probability, a.
The quorum threshold,
T, has more complex effects than does a. For large k, T can be also be used to tune speed and accuracy. For example, when k=4 or 9, decision speed is maximized for T=0, but accuracy is maximized when T≈10. However, for a wide range of threshold values ( T between approximately 5 and 15), relatively small differences in choice quality produce high levels of commitment to the better option.
There is also an important difference between
a and T in how speed and accuracy change when one parameter is fixed and the other varied. If T is chosen to maximize accuracy (e.g. T≈10 when k=9) a can be tuned to achieve either the maximum possible accuracy (over all tested combinations of T and a values) or the maximum possible speed (i.e. by choosing a=1). The same is not the case for fixed a and varying T. If a is large then tuning T can do little to improve the resulting low accuracy; if a is small then setting T=0 improves speed but not as much as would setting a to a value of 1. Thus by choosing appropriate values of T and k, and adjusting a as needed, individuals can tune the speed and accuracy of their decisions to particular circumstances.
The simulations also showed that tuning speed and accuracy with
a works best with an intermediate threshold value and a steep quorum response (high k). For fixed k, we determined the parameter values of a and T that give the fastest possible average time until a decision is made given a minimum requirement for accuracy (figure 6). When the requirement for accuracy is low, a similarly high speed can be achieved for any value of k, by choosing appropriate values for T and a. For higher accuracy requirements, however, a k value of 1 leads to distinctly slower attainable speeds. Thus steep thresholds not only give more accurate decisions, they also allow them to be made more rapidly. (d) Comparison to Condorcet's theorem
Given 40 individuals, each with a 1/3 probability of making the wrong choice, then by Condorcet's theorem, the probability of a majority error is just 3.33 per cent. This is notably lower than even the most accurate decisions made using quorum responses: for steep thresholds between 5 and 15 and low spontaneous accept rates, approximately 10 per cent of individuals take the least favourable option. This result is not particularly surprising. Condorcet's theorem provides an upper bound for the accuracy of collective decision-making. What is striking is that a simple copying rule based on threshold responses can substantially reduce errors compared with purely independent decision-making.
5. Speed versus accuracy trade-offs in ant migration
The decision making of animal groups can be considerably more complicated than a simple threshold response to the decisions of others. We described earlier the complex, multistage algorithm used by
Temnothorax ants to evaluate candidate nest sites during colony emigration. Progress through four stages of increasing commitment to a site is governed both by each scout's independent assessment of site quality and by the indirect influence of her nest-mates, via a quorum rule (figure 2 b). Complicating this basic structure are a host of behavioural nuances, including ‘reverse’ recruitment of scouts from the new to the old nest, direct comparison of multiple sites by individual ants, changes in the efficiency of recruitment with time and many others (Pratt et al. 2005; Pratt & Sumpter 2006).
Experiments have shown that this complex algorithm allows colonies to tune the trade-off between decision speed and accuracy (Pratt & Sumpter 2006). When choosing between a good and a mediocre nest, colonies showed dramatically different behaviour depending on the urgency of their need to move. In the low-urgency situation colonies in an intact but poor-quality nest had an opportunity to improve their housing. They took a long time to emigrate, but they generally made very accurate decisions, moving their entire population directly to the better candidate nest. Greater urgency was created by destroying the colony's old nest, leaving them completely exposed. Under these circumstances, colonies moved much faster but often made poor choices, splitting their population between the two candidate nests or even moving entirely into the inferior one.
We have previously developed a detailed agent-based model of
Temnothorax emigration (Pratt et al. 2005). This agent-based model is more complex than the general quorum model described earlier, but both include the same fundamental mechanisms: an intrinsic rate of accepting an option that depends on that option's quality, and a quorum function described by parameters for threshold value ( T) and steepness ( k). Furthermore, both models make similar predictions for the effects of T and the acceptance rate on speed and accuracy: for a wide range of T values, the acceptance rate provides a sensitive mechanism for adjusting speed and accuracy. The model predicted that ants achieve a speed/accuracy trade-off by quantitative tuning the acceptance rate and, to a lesser degree, the quorum threshold (Pratt & Sumpter 2006). The small effect of the quorum threshold is at first surprising, because one might suppose that the reaching of a threshold marks the point at which transportation can commence and the emigration can be completed. However, as Franks et al. (2009) rightly point out in another paper in this issue, reaching the threshold too soon can result in an insufficient number of committed ants to complete the transportation of ants from the old nest.
Our agent-based model was not previously examined for effects of
k, so we systematically varied this parameter and monitored its effect on emigration speed and accuracy. The results match those for the simpler model, with greater accuracy as quorum steepness increases, and little cost in speed (figure 7). In accordance with these predictions, our experiments showed that ants made dramatic increases in acceptance rate, and smaller decreases in T, in response to increased urgency of emigration (Pratt & Sumpter 2006). Re-analysis of this data further shows that ants also used a significantly steeper quorum function when accuracy was emphasized under low urgency (ANOVA: k lowUrgency=3.7, k highUrgency=1.7, , p<0.01). These experiments provide strong evidence of the ants tune their responses to their speed versus accuracy requirements without changing their underlying behavioural algorithm. 6. Discussion
Quorum responses are a ubiquitous feature of consensus decision-making. While previous work has emphasized the importance of these responses in generating aggregation and cohesion, here we have emphasized that they also improve decision accuracy. The shape of the response curve is particularly important in this context. Individuals can make more accurate decisions if they sharply increase their probability of committing to an option at a threshold number of individuals already committed. Interestingly, these steep threshold responses can sometimes amplify random fluctuations and lead to mass adoption of incorrect choices. This sort of process may account for observations of mass copying (Laland & Williams 1998; Dall
et al. 2005) or peer pressure in humans (Milgram et al. 1969; Milgram 1992) and may lead animals to make decisions in groups they would not have made by themselves. Although, quorum responses lead to poor decisions in some notable cases, on average they allow greater accuracy than do complete independence or weak responses to the behaviour of others.
Another important property of quorum responses is that they can be used to tune speed and accuracy. By fixing a steep threshold and then tuning the baseline rate at which an option is accepted, decisions can be made either more accurately or more quickly. The same is not true in the absence of a threshold, where reducing baseline acceptance slows decision making but does little to increase accuracy.
Temnothorax ants take advantage of this property to tune their decision making for speed or accuracy (Pratt & Sumpter 2006). Our simple model suggests that many other animals exhibiting quorum responses may also be able to tune their decisions in this way.
Other studies have emphasized the precise tuning of quorum size itself for the balancing of decision speed and accuracy, either over evolutionary time (Passino & Seeley 2006), or dynamically in response to the changing conditions experienced by a society (Franks
et al. 2003 a). Our results suggest instead that the quorum size may not require tight regulation or have a particularly large direct influence on speed and accuracy. As long as individuals employ a quorum rule, the threshold can vary quite widely with little effect, and the group can achieve both accuracy and tunability, by adjusting the more sensitive acceptance parameter. Nonetheless, as discussed above for Temnothorax, there is empirical evidence that individuals change their quorum size and steepness according to circumstances (Franks et al. 2003 a; Dornhaus et al. 2004; Pratt & Sumpter 2006). Thus a functional role for tuning the quorum cannot be ruled out.
An important question that we have not addressed in this paper is conflict in consensus decision-making (Conradt & Roper 2005, 2009; Wood & Acland 2007; Sumpter
et al. 2008). The models presented here assume no conflict of interest between group members and that the inherent tendency to lead or follow others does not vary between individuals. These are reasonable assumptions for many insect societies, but are less likely to hold for the movements of more loosely associated vertebrate groups. A first step to incorporating conflict would be to test the evolutionary stability of quorum responses; that is, to determine whether selfish individuals could exploit the quorum parameter values that optimize group accuracy to improve their own accuracy. For example, by waiting until everyone else has made a decision, an individual might be able to maximize its own probability of making an accurate choice. This strategy that should evolve when each individual aims to increase its own performance without regard to the outcome for others might produce group decisions that are neither fast nor accurate. Because quorum responses are clearly used by animals with conflicting interests, the effect of this conflict on quorum parameter values remains as an exciting theoretical and experimental challenge. Footnotes
One contribution of 11 to a Theme Issue ‘Group decision making in humans and animals’.
© 2008 The Royal Society | 39,083 | 14,637 | 0.000069 |
warc | 201704 | The board of the Department of Natural Resources will vote Wednesday on new rules that environmentalists fear will allow more development near Georgia's sensitive salt marsh to avoid scrutiny.
The proposed rules spell out how much of an entire marsh-front development the five-member Coastal Marshlands Protection Committee should consider when reviewing permits for docks, marinas and bridges. The rules limit the committee's consideration mainly to structures such as boat storage and fuel storage that directly support the function of the permitted structure.
Georgia boasts about a third of the East Coast's remaining salt marsh. The state's 36-year-old Coastal Marshlands Protection Act is held up as a model of protection of the resource.
Patty McIntosh, vice president for coastal programs at the Georgia Conservancy, says the new rules would interpret that law too narrowly. The rules would generally prevent the committee from looking at the effects of houses, streets and storm water systems adjacent to the marsh, she said.
In three separate cases, courts have previously instructed the committee to consider the effects of an entire marsh-front project, including the residential component.
"That is very narrowly defined, whereas courts have more broadly defined it," McIntosh said.
The new rules are being proposed while one of those court cases, about the upscale Cumberland Harbour development in St. Marys, is being appealed. To some environmentalists, the timing makes the effort seem like an end run around the justice system.
But the rules also leave just enough wiggle room to allow court battles continue, said Chandra Brown, executive director of the Ogeechee-Canoochee Riverkeeper organization.
In defining the "upland component of the project" the rules narrow the scope to the in-marsh structures and structures that support their functions, but then veer into ambiguity by ending with this sentence: "This term may extend to and cover such adjacent areas as the Coastal Marshland Protection Committee finds are likely to alter marshlands."
"The last sentence says other areas might be considered," Brown said. "It's completely nebulous."
The proposed rules were ostensibly based on recommendations from a 22-member Coastal Uplands Stakeholders group that met repeatedly through the summer. McIntosh, who served on the stakeholders' group, said at least one important recommendation - a 50 foot buffer that a majority of stakeholders supported - was not included. Instead, the rules support a 25-foot buffer recommendation, already in place.
"There's not much to them," McIntosh said of the rules. "(There was) this rush to nothing."
The seven-member coastal committee of the DNR board, which includes Savannahian Jenny Lynn Bradley, meets today in Atlanta to review the draft rules. The committee is expected to recommend adoption of the rules to the full board at its meeting Wednesday in Atlanta. | 2,953 | 1,434 | 0.000704 |
warc | 201704 | Working in partnership, the SCB UQ Chapter and UQ Properties and Facilities Management-Sustainability have made a roaring success of the Riverbank Restoration Project. Not only is the project bringing back habitat and wildlife alongside the Brisbane River, it has now been awarded an Australasian Campuses Towards Sustainability (ACT) Community Engagement Green Gown Award! What does conservation look like in your backyard?
Send us a photo of what conservation looks like to you, and help us to show off the diversity of conservation science in Oceania.
News from the Chapters News from the board
Just prior to the SCBO 2016 Brisbane conference, we released a Draft Diversity Statement and invited members to provide feedback on how SCB Oceania can uphold its commitment to diversity.
During the conference we asked attendees to tweet using the #SCBODiversity hashtag and discussed the draft statement during a group session.
Finally, we asked for feedback in the post-conference survey, so in total we received some fantastic input.
Policy & Debate
What should development in Northern Australia look like? The new ‘food bowl’? Turning the rivers inland? There are grand dreams about developing the ‘north’. But what is the real untapped potential of Northern Australia? Earlier this year, at the Society for Conservation Biology Oceania Congress we hosted an expert panel to discuss these issues. The event was […]
Conservation Science A new Special Issue in Pacific Conservation Biology edited by SCBO board members Vanessa Adams, Rebecca Spindler and Richard Kingsford is out now.
The special issue, timed to coincide with SCBO Brisbane 2016 offers local conservation solutions in Oceania to global problems, and captures the diversity of nations, cultures and environments in our region. The issue is organised by the major threats faced in the region: habitat loss, over exploitation and invasive species. Case studies, framed as coupled problem–solutions, include examples from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific and contrast findings across regions and realms. There are successes and failures faced by conservation in this local region, and the analysis within this special issue offers lessons for conservation globally.
Member Spotlight
We are currently looking for new members to join our Society for Conservation Oceania section board. To give you an insight into the perks of being a board member, and the wonderful people you’ll get to work with, we’re going to profile a couple of them here. We have already heard from Vanessa; in our member spotlight this week is Megan Evans.
Megan is a PhD researcher based at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. She has interests in environmental policy, governance and economics, with a particular interest in the role of economic policy instruments in biodiversity conservation and natural resource management. She has been a member of the SCB Oceania board for just over a year. | 3,064 | 1,528 | 0.000666 |
warc | 201704 | Article Title Abstract
In dramatically expanding the reach of international intellectual property law, the TRIPs Agreement both epitomizes a new trend toward globalized regulation and signaled a controversial shift in approach by the WTO away from its narrow focus on trade. Equally controversial was the manner in which TRIPs came about. By strategically linking intellectual property protection to substantively unrelated trade negotiations, developed countries were able to push through a much more ambitious harmonization of IP law than would otherwise have been possible. Such package dealing making offers a powerful mechanism to advance global governance. However, unrestricted use of linkage strategies risks suboptimal outcomes ranging from regulatory capture to procedural paralysis. This Article critically examines the TRIPs Agreement as a case study to evaluate such competing views on linkage. It concludes by suggesting procedural safeguards to channel the use of linkage strategies towards enhancing global welfare.
Repository Citation
Sean Pager,
TRIPs: A Link Too Far? A Proposal for Procedural Restraints on Regulatory Linkage in the WTO,10 Marq. Intellectual Property L. Rev. 215 (2006). Available at: http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/iplr/vol10/iss2/4 | 1,282 | 748 | 0.001343 |
warc | 201704 | Business 6 Facts You Should Know Before Starting Your Hadoop Training
Hadoop has consistently grown in popularity since its advent and today it is almost synonymous to Big Data. Demand for personnel with Hadoop skills has risen across different industries and Hadoop training academies around the globe are working to mend the skill gap. The world is waiting for a large pool of analytics professionals to be created and Hadoop training is going to be a key factor for aspirants to enter that pool.
I have spoken with people who have a generalized idea about Hadoop; it is widely known as a singular data management tool. This concept needs to be changed if you are looking to hook yourself in Big Data analytics otherwise you may be taken by surprise when you come across the facts.
Hadoop is a family of systems overseen by Apache Software Foundation that are dedicated to different processes. The Hadoop library consists of Map Reduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, HCatalog, Ambari, Mahout, Flume, of course the Hadoop Distributed File System and so on. Learning Hadoop means acquiring knowledge about multiple of these open source components. Hadoop is not bound within the Apache Hadoop library, it is an ecosystem. There is a considerable amount of vendor products, like Data base management systems, analytic tools etc that assimilate with Hadoop technologies. You may consider keeping this in mind while choosing your Hadoop training program. 3. HDFS does not perform the jobs of a Data base management system. There are some basic differences between HDFS and standard DBMSs. A DBMS can perform tasks like indexing, providing random access to data, query optimization etc.
HDFS cannot do the aforementioned by itself but it can manage and process heavy amounts of file based, unstructured data; it can also obtain minimal DBMS functionality with a layering of HBase.
HDFS and Mapreduce are related but not essentially complementary. Mapreduce deals with the complexities of network communication and parallel programming and it can work with HDFS but it can work with multiple other storage technologies: file systems or DBMSs. On the other hand users can deploy HDFS with HBase or Hive without Mapreduce. HDFS is capable of handling the storage and access of any type of data whether they are web logs, XML files or personal productivity documents. All you need to do is put the data in a file and copy that on the HDFS. It is how simply HDFS handles the variety of data types rather than the volume of data it can manage, that has made it so popular. Hadoop is not just for web analytics. Although it is best known for handling web data but it is as efficient in dealing with data generated from sensory devices Robotics or manufacturing. Old analytics technologies that require large data samples can use Hadoop to manage excess big data.
Being aware of these facts should help you visualize the scope and impact expected from a
Hadoop training course. And it keeps you a step ahead when it comes to understanding Hadoop. | 3,031 | 1,504 | 0.000667 |
warc | 201704 | Welcome to Sean Pratt's Publications
.: About This Website
This web site was created to publish my essays, opinion editorials and poetry. I have submitted my work to numerous magazines and newspapers. However, with the exception of local newspapers (like The Brockton Enterprise and The Metro) only 1000 Watts Publications has published my work. My thought was that it would be better for me to self-publish my content. No more concerns about censorship, at least for now.
As a sidebar here, please know that efforts are always underway to control content. The Internet is the last bastion of free expression, next to physically printing, binding and distributing one’s own work. Yet, even a manual effort like that faces local ordinances of solicitation, contradictory federal laws, and the inevitable bites from the sharks that swim about when something becomes a popular commodity.
Perhaps you have heard of the efforts to instill a tiered system to the Internet (also known as the Net Neutrality Issue)? This would be a lot like cable television with a basic tier, premium channels and pay-per view options. Except with the Internet, certain news outlets and stores would be faster and more secure and sites like mine would be slower. Anyone who designs web sites knows that if a page does not load correctly within 30 seconds, that a viewer may lose interest and go elsewhere. Likewise, a site that is not easy to navigate will create disgruntled users.
Consider also how hard copy books are distributed now. There is a book called Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60 by
Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, published in 1994. I heard Noam Chomsky discuss the book in a speech and I became curious. My library did not carry it, nor did any library in the Old Colony Library Network. I decided that I would buy it and could not find it in Barnes & Noble. I tried to order it and waited several weeks for it to come in. Barnes & Noble gave me the number for the book repository in California, who in turn gave me the run around for a couple of weeks; promising to send it but never fulfilling the order. I finally gave up and bought a used copy from Amazon.com. As it turns out, this is an extremely important book that skillfully details how the wealthy have been pounding a capitalist fantasy into our heads for decades. The point of this story is that books are no longer officially censored they are just made unattainable to everyone. I had to go through hoops to get this book and in the end I had to purchase it online. So the poor will never read it for free and the working class risk identity theft to buy it.
Thus, no matter how well I design this site I do risk having the content become unattainable to the average viewer. I would have to invest money into advertising and paying off the ISPs to make sure my content is available to have a chance if the Internet becomes tiered. Yet, I am sure this will not be the only way to control content on the Internet. We are only seeing the beginnings of this attack on web communication freedom. The sad part is that the news does not report on the laws that go through Congress that eventually have a lasting effect on access to information.
.: A little About Me
As you may have guessed, my political views have driven my need to be published. To say that I am a Liberal is an understatement. If you think about the most leftist, radical liberal you know, when he or she looks to their left they see me. I never studied socialism prior to changing my major to Political Science, but my views have always had socialist leanings. I don’t believe in wealth distribution, but I do believe in fairness. This ideal of fairness led me to advocate for classical anarchy, where the workers control the means of production and distribution. Imagine a world where everyone's ideas are considered and currency is no longer necessary. Spain achieved this briefly in the 1930s before the US put the kibosh on it.
I returned to school in 2005 to earn a bachelors degree in Computer Science. I found my true political voice in the essay assignments and research. Prior to this I spent years posting debates, essays and diatribes on political message boards under the pseudonym Taomon. You may wonder why I chose the name Taomon and for the record, this has nothing to do with Digimon.
I created the moniker Taomon back in the mid 1990’s when I accessed the Internet through America On-Line. I moved on from AOL to Juno and Taomon became my email address in addition to my chat room/message board persona. When Digimon came out with the Taomon character, web searches for my writings became clogged with toys and anime junk. But such is the nature of the Internet.
Tao derives from Chinese philosophical religions. Tao translates to The Way, a guiding principle of reality.
Mon is Rastafarian for wise man or friend and invariably connects to monism.
The meaning I created for the word Taomon when I conceived of it was literally “
Wise Friend of the Way.”
I am the original Taomon.
.: Site Directions
I will be posting my papers from school, articles and opinion pieces from news syndicates (such as the New York Times, al Jazeera, the BBC, the Washington Post, and even FoxNews), poetry, and short stories, all of which I have written, read or have a commentary on. I have been writing political analysis unofficially for years. My audiences hail from the farthest reaches of the globe (thanks to the Internet). I have made many friends and a few enemies. My work has been both heralded and despised. After reading some articles or creative work you will be confronted with emotions depending on your perspective. That is the secret to my writing skills; whether I am writing poetry or a serious dissertation my work is emotionally charged and invokes a plethora of feelings within the reader.
I am hoping that you stick around. Even if you do not agree I would like very much to hear why. How else can we learn from each other and gauge fairness? Compromise is the only way that our political system can work. Listening to opposing views is vital to this principle.
On the left of this page you can see the navigation bar. These buttons have drop down menus for my various works. In addition, each sections has a main page where you will also find links to my various works. In other words, clicking on the Poetry button will bring you to that page where you will find links to my poems or if you hover your cursor over the button a drop down menu will appear.
Also, you can contact me here if you have comments or concerns. Anyone planning to use my writing as a resource should remember to always cite your sources. Keep in mind that I will be citing my resources as most of my writing derives from school. If you were using verbiage that I am citing from another source, it would be best to cite that source as well in your paper. | 6,958 | 3,391 | 0.000297 |
warc | 201704 | Roche Holding (OTCQX:RHHBY) has had an impressive ride in the last couple of months as its stock price has soared close to 40% since we initiated coverage on the drug maker. Continued growth across business segments and some positive developments regarding its pipeline largely drove this huge appreciation. In its Q4 earnings, the drug maker reported a 4% increase (at constant exchange rate or CER) in total revenues in Swiss francs, bucking the trend of declining revenues shown by other big pharma companies. In the wake of earnings and recent developments, we have increased our price estimate for Roche Holding to $46 from $58, which is about 5% ahead of current market price.
Below, we discuss the changes made and the outlook in detail.
Strong Pipeline Supports Upside
Roche has invested heavily in its R&D program, and owns one of the strongest pipeline among pharmaceutical companies (Read Roche Defends $47 Value With Strong R&D Pipeline). Most of its promising pipeline drugs are in the Oncology division, where the drug maker has a formidable presence. While Roche has already launched one of potential blockbuster, Perjeta, in several markets, it has also filed approval applications for T-DM1.
Both of these drugs target mainly HER2-positive breast cancer. With the strong efficacy exhibited in clinical trials, we believe the probability of T-DM1 getting FDA approval has increased significantly. The FDA has already granted its application a priority review, which means the drug could be approved by mid-2013. Accordingly, we have incorporated expected revenues from the drug. We expect the drug to garner more than $1 billion in peak sales for its currently targeted indication.
A few weeks ago, another blockbuster potential drug Obinutuzumab (GA101) showed impressive efficacy in improving progression-free survival in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (a type of blood and bone cancer) patients. In the first stage of a phase III study called CLL11, the drug, in combination with chemotherapy, significantly reduced the risk of disease worsening or death compared to chemotherapy alone in previously untreated patients. Further, an additional study suggested that the experimental drug could show superior efficacy compared with Roche’s own MabThera/Rituxan as a first line treatment for the condition. While the drug still has a long way to go for the approval (expected approval in 2014), we think it has a fair chance of succeeding now, and thus, we have incorporated expected sales of the drug in our model.
We have also increased our sales expectations from its several established drugs. Mabthera/Rituxan is seeing a continued uptake in demand, especially from emerging markets. Herceptin sales have been helped by Roche’s strategy to combine drugs with companion diagnostics. The drug maker’s other largest selling cancer drug, Avastin, is seeing astounding growth in the Western Europe market for ovarian and lung cancer condition. According to management, Avastin gained significant market share for ovarian cancer in the region, and this trend is expected to continue.
We have, however, lowered our sales expectations from Hepatitis C vaccine Pegasys. While the drug exhibited double-digit growth in the last couple of quarters due to its use in triple-combination therapy, patients are going off the therapy, and this should result in declining sales going forward. In addition to Pegasys, we have also lowered our sales expectations from Bonviva and Neorecormon, as they continue to lose revenues at an accelerating rate amid generic competition.
In the Diagnostic division, we have lowered Roche’s expected market share largely due to weakness in its diabetes franchise. Adding to the pain, Roche has been facing pricing pressure in developed markets.
While we expect gross margins (for both pharma and diagnostics) to decline going forward due to a change in product mix and pricing pressure, the decline may not be as steep as we had earlier anticipated, and so we have slightly revised our gross margin expectation. Further, we have reduced our forecast for R&D expenditures and selling, informational & administrative (SI&A) expenses due to Roche’s aggressive efforts to cut costs to drive operating profit. All of these factors have led to an increase in our price estimate.
However, there are other factors that could have an impact on our price estimate. The company’s experimental cardiovascular drug, RG7652, is moving toward advanced trials after significantly reducing levels of bad LDL cholesterol. Roche’s pipeline for Alzheimers also looks promising. And any success here will lead to upside in our price estimate.
Disclosure: No positions. | 4,732 | 2,244 | 0.00045 |
warc | 201704 | Not sure how to find a green shoots in this mess from
US Steel (NYSE:X) - I am sure there is one somewhere along the lines of "it can't get worse". If traders follow the Alcoa (NYSE:AA) model from about 2 months ago, where they said just about everything bad one could ever imagine, AND priced a secondary - you should be buying X hand over fist. Because George Costanza runs the market (I am not being facetious). They lost $3.84 vs analysts expectations of $1.69, revenues fell 47% year over year. Order rates falling off a cliff, prices falling off a cliff. They don't see anything good happening in Q2 thus far (i.e. no magic words of "stabilization"). They cut the dividend and are negotiating on covenants.
On the bright side they are hitting their retirees health insurance - in 2 America's (corporate versus human) that's a great thing. Remember, we are vying for the "worker less" economy - that helps corporate profits. Aside from improving profits, the jobless can spend more time shopping (i.e. driving the US economy) - we all win under this scenario. So all in all this string of news can only mean one thing... recovery is imminent and green shoots are flowering throughout the steel industry. Buy US Steel in huge quantities because the market looks ahead and see the recovery that the CEO cannot.
Via AP United States Steel Corp. posted its first quarterly loss in more than five years as the recession pinched demand for the metal, and the c ompany announced steps to cut costs and raise capital including deferring contributions for retiree health insurance. The results were even worse than Wall Street had expected, and the company predicted another loss in the second quarter. Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel said sales tumbled 47 percentto $2.75 billion from a record $5.2 billion a year earlier. The huge steel producer said Monday it lost $439 million, or $3.78 per share,in the first three months of the year. That compared with net income of $235 million, or $1.98 per share, a year earlier. Analysts expected a loss of $1.69 per share on sales of $3.14 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. The company said it would r educe planned 2009 capital spending by $330 million, slashed the quarterly dividend to 5 cents per share from 30 cents per share to save $116 million a year,and reached agreement with the United Steelworkers to defer up to $170 million in required retiree health and life insurance trust contributions. U.S. Steel also said it planned to offer 18 million shares of stock and $300 million in senior convertible notesand use the proceeds to repay a $500 million three-year loan due next year. And it said lenders had agreed to eliminate financial covenants from a revolving credit facility and term loans. ( that is probably the only real positive from this gusher of bad news; again I find it curious once the government got into the banks how all these covenants are being renegotiated left and right - I am sure just happenstance) "We continue to face an extremely difficult global economic environment," said Chairman and Chief Executive John P. Surma. "We expect an operating loss in the second quarter as our order book remains at low levels" and plants continue to incur carrying costs. Surma said the troubled state of the automotive and construction industries made it difficult to forecast "beyond a very short horizon."( remember, only the stock market in its "Oracle like" nature can see beyond the short term - CEOs who live and breathe business every day have no idea compared to the "wisdom" of the market) However, the company said it would get some relief in the second quarter from lower raw-materials costs, sales of carbon dioxide emissions allowances, and savings from consolidating European raw steel production at one plant in early April. Industrywide, shipments of steel from U.S. mills fell 52.4 percent in Februarycompared with the same month last year, according to an industry trade group. Mills have turned down production to less than half their capacity. ( all together now folks: "it can't get worse" "the 2nd derivative improvements we will soon see - i.e. it will get worse less quickly - are worth at least 200 more S&P points") Last week, Nucor Corp., another major U.S. steel maker, reported its first loss ever and forecast an even bigger loss for the second quarter. Nucor executives said conditions were the worst they had ever seen. Steel demand in the U.S. is “virtually non-existent,” Nucor Chief Executive Officer Dan DiMicco said after his company announced the company’s first quarterly loss last week. (again repeat after me: "it can't get worse than the worst they had ever seen - and glimmers of hope are emerging via green shoots")
Via Reuters
"Certainly the share issuance is a dilutive factor," said Luke Folta, analyst at Longbow Research. "With the earnings estimates that were out there, certainly no one had a high level of confidence in the numbers. People had to somewhat expect the dividend cut." "We anticipate that structural change at the firm may be necessary, such as the sale of some assets or the possible permanent closure of some facilities," said Tony Rizzuto of Dahlman Rose & Co. (g ood, get rid of those pesky humans - they just cost money)
Via Bloomberg
“Steel industry conditions are very bleak,” Chuck Bradford, a metals analyst at Bradford Research Inc., said today in a telephone interview. “Whenever you have to cut back on operations, a lot of the costs continue, so your costs go up dramatically on a per-unit basis.” Moody’s downgraded U.S. Steel’s senior unsecured debt to Ba3, three levels below investment grade, from Baa3, the lowest investment-grade rating. "We do not see market conditions improving in any meaningful way and do not expect U.S. Steel's performance for the balance of 2009 to materially improve over the first quarter, although actions being taken to reduce costs could contribute to marginal improvement in the overall cost position," Moody's said. The average price of hot-rolled steel sheet , the benchmark product used in cars and appliances, fell by more than half to $471 a tonin March from a record in July, according to Purchasing Magazine.
To end... I must once more remind you... CEOs do not know their own business; the stock market knows better so please ignore quotes such as this
"We sure hope things improve, but we don't have anything today that tells us that,"Chief Executive Officer John Surma told Wall Street analysts on a conference call. "No one really has much visibility."
No one, but stock market speculators Mr. Surma.
Disclosure:No position | 6,717 | 3,290 | 0.000308 |
warc | 201704 | Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
Paul Babiak, Ph.D., and Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.
New York: ReganBooks/HarperCollins Publishers ©2006
The techno-savvy, lean, mean, perpetually changing workplace of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has brought with it something a bit unexpected. If you've been working during these last twenty-some years, you know the environment of your company has changed and so has the nature of some of the people in it. Whether you occupy a spot in the cube farms that dominate corporate culture or you interact with a business as a consultant, sales rep, product vendor, or other service provider, you recognize that things don't function the way they used to. That can be good or bad, but, no matter what, it's different, and it takes a shift in strategy and tactics to cope with it.
Whoever described change as the only constant captured the sense of uncertainty, confusion, and outright anxiety alive in the people who work for the businesses that have been trying to survive in the United States since the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Paul Babiak and Robert Hare describe in
Snakes in Suits, the 1950s' bureaucratic structure and relative economic predictability of that period have given way to a more dynamic economy and its transitional organizations, ones that can reconfigure more quickly, adapt to new market realities, and deal with unexpected but fierce and global competitors. We can argue whether such developments are good for business and/or good for workers, but we can't escape this prevalent workplace environment and current reality. We need to face the fact that at least some of the activities that may have brought workers and businesses success in the past are no longer appropriate. And we need to be on the lookout for shifts in the human behaviors these organizational changes can bring.
Early in his career as an industrial-organizational psychologist, author Babiak met what he considered his "first psychopath" and contacted Robert Hare for help. Hare is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, author of
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, and creator of the standard tools for diagnosing psychopathy (Psychopathy Checklist-Revised or PCL-R and Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version or PCL: SV). As Hare applied his knowledge to scientific research, mental health, and the criminal justice system, he also realized that "the general public must learn as much as it can about psychopathy" because more people with attributes resembling psychopathy are attracted to and being hired by the emerging transitional organizations.
The authors are careful to caution throughout the book that the 'psychopathic' label should not be applied to anyone without a proper diagnosis; it's a personality disorder, not a mental illness. Even so, their information can raise our awareness about the kinds of dysfunctional behaviors appearing in leaders, managers, and workers that can resemble psychopathy. Because transitional organizations have become attractive to these personality types, more of us need to appreciate the significant harm they can do not only their co-workers but to the business itself. Of course, we all have quixotic tendencies that can be beneficial or detrimental, depending on many factors. The issue is one of intent — both nature and nurture contribute to our ultimate personality.
We often think of psychopathic behavior as something so outrageous we'd be certain to spot it — and run. But the personality disorder that is psychopathy can be very disarming. It's "rooted in lying, manipulation, deceit, egocentricity, callousness, and other destructive traits." And while portrayals of psychopaths in movies and on television have led us to think first of Hannibal Lecter, Ted Bundy, or the BTK Killer, someone with psychopathic traits may also commit white-collar crimes like embezzlement, fraud, or stock manipulation.
In fact, the authors contend, the new transitional organization has become an attractive target for those with characteristics we might consider psychopathic. "Many psychopaths just want money, or power, or fame, or simply a nice car." And, the authors found that "it's exactly the modern, open, more flexible corporate world, in which high risks can equal high profits, that attracts psychopaths. They may enter as rising stars and corporate saviors, but all too soon they're abusing the trust of colleagues, manipulating supervisors, and leaving the workplace in shambles." They can be charming at first, long enough to disarm unskilled interviewers, but after that, watch out!
The new, flatter, relatively chaotic organizations are more psychopath-friendly for several reasons, including the thrill-ride of rapid change, the ability to break rules as freedom to act independently increases, the opportunity to "take advantage of others in ways that are not always obvious," such as the leader who can "exert power and control over people and resources," while not being required to get involved with the details, and commanding a "larger-than-average" salary.
"Because a leader's ability to get people to do things is often of more importance than his or her technical capabilities to perform work tasks, pretenders lacking in real work expertise are not disadvantaged;
their talents are assumed and their phony or exaggerated backgrounds are often accepted at face value." [ Emphasis added.] The "constantly changing state of the business works in their favor, clouding the difference between 'good' and 'bad' leadership."
Strikingly, the authors found "in our original research working with almost 200 high-potential executives" that "about 3.5 percent ... fit the profile of the psychopath as measured on the PCL: SV .... While this may not seem like a large percentage, it is considerably higher than that found in the general population (1 percent) ...."
What
Snakes in Suits offers is a lucid and chilling portrait of the human predator currently stalking the transitional business organization. In addition, the authors share several strategies for handling the interloper — and protecting one's own career — in this chaotic atmosphere. Take heed. | 6,299 | 3,090 | 0.000327 |
warc | 201704 | Body Mind Empowerment is about becoming as good of a human being as possible. The idea is to develop yourself both physically as well as mentally. As a result, you will reach your truest potential and turn yourself into Superhuman.
Join the Body Mind Agoge
The Agoge was the rigorous education system of Ancient Sparta.
They trained the best warriors of all time.
Body Mind Agoge is about empowering your physical, mental and spiritual performance.
Become a Superhuman Spartan.
Here's are some of my best posts to get you started.
Become Antifragile and Gain From Disorder
Anti-Positive Thinking Face Fear - Become a Lion and Transcend What I Learned at Sniper School How to Attain Jedi-Like Concentration The Magic of Waking Up Early How to Start Taking Cold Showers in the Morning Get to know me
Hi, my name is Siim Land. I'm a holistic health practitioner, fitness expert and a writer.
This website is about body mind empowerment that would improve every aspect of our lives. I offer guidelines on nutrition, exercise, mindset and other ways of mastering our physiology.
All of this knowledge is the result of a lot of research, self-experimentation, quantification and optimization. After years of practice and development, I've managed to find the best ways to improving health and increasing performance, both physical as well as mental.
Thanks to this, I've found the secret mechanisms in our biology and physiology that can turn us into superhuman.
My purpose is to make the lives of others better through body mind empowerment and improve upon the potential of mankind in general. | 1,604 | 854 | 0.001182 |
warc | 201704 | Jonesie, my third grader, has been the toughest of my three kids to get to do his homework. I have a few theories:
It’s boring. It takes time. He has to do it himself. He has to do high quality homework.
Jonesie is smart. Because he’s smart he’s on the ALP (advanced learning plan) and the ALP requires more homework of him.
All kids hate homework, right? Well, he has this idea that it’s just a waste of time for him because he already knows it. And he might! But the fact of the matter is he has to do his homework. Hence the battle over homework.
His class has been working on the Native American project. They had to do a diorama and then create note cards from research that they’d conducted. The diorama part was fun – we made an igloo out of paper mache, real clay pots, a leather teepee……….. it was fun and we both learned so much.
Then comes the time for him to sit down and write out his note cards. He is required to do six (ugh) and the directions specifically say this is a student project and parents can simply “brainstorm”.
And the fight ensues. He doesn’t know what to write, how to start, he’s thirsty, hungry…. and anything else to delay doing homework. I gave him a one hour limit to GET IT DONE and he cried and pouted. For a few minutes I argued back that he had already done the research, he KNEW the subject, he had to do it on his own.And here is his “helpless” body language……
Slumped over, eyes down, moved away from the table.
So………… I did what any good mother would do:
I walked away.
In fact, I went and took a shower to make myself inaccessible to him.
A few minutes later it quieted so I went back into the room and in my head I pictured that he would be writing, focused and either sitting on his knees or standing.
Here is what I found…..
and this……
Exactly what I pictured. He sat there and focused and got his note cards done within his one hour limit.
How do you handle kid battles? | 2,061 | 1,065 | 0.001008 |
warc | 201704 | The National Trust for Historic Preservation is live-blogging their analysis of President Obama’s proposed budget for next year. They’ll be updating throughout the day as they discuss areas of the budget that relate to historic preservation and public funding for the arts. If you want to do your own research, there’s an interactive breakdown of the budget on the White House website.
For those who have been following the buzz about the budget through other news sources, this budget is an attempt to drastically scale back federal spending in the face of an escalating deficit. Not twenty minutes ago on NPR I heard what seemed like a good summary of where it will go next: essentially, Democrats think it’s way over the top and Republicans think it doesn’t go far enough. Which is to say, this document is still due for a lot of debate and revision.
Either way things shape up, it probably doesn’t look good for federal funding for museums. We’ll be posting wrap-ups this week, as well as some interesting thinking about new business models for museums. The future isn’t looking so bright for the traditional public money dependence that got a lot of museums through the 20th century. | 1,232 | 676 | 0.001534 |
warc | 201704 | Branding and value are related to each other, inasmuch as both help your company to advance in the marketplace. Advertising teams work hard to develop branding while the sales team promotes value. The business’s choice of advertising venues to establish branding and value may help or hurt your percentage of market share.
Branding
Branding defines your company and its products or services. After identifying the target audience for the business, it is time to develop an advertising campaign that caters to the desires of that audience. This includes the manner in which you present the company’s products to the public, such as packaging for manufacturing businesses and uniforms for companies that provide services. The goal is for the customer to consider your business as the best for their needs.
Ways to Promote Branding
Branding begins with the business name, so choose one that describes what you do. A customer is more likely to remember “Fancy Pants Alterations” than “Smith Company.” Design a logo that depicts what your company offers. For example, if you are a handyman, sketch a ladder and tools as your logo. Put the logo on everything that the customer will see to increase exposure of your company's name. Set up a website with genuinely useful information for your customers. Make a list of ways to promote the business to its target audience, and then develop a campaign to accomplish this goal. If you are unsure of which advertising choices to make, check out what your competition is doing or hire a professional agency to manage the process for you.
Value
While value to an investor is always a dollar amount, value to your customers is quite different. A customer sees value in a product when he believes that it meets his needs for a price he perceives as fair. These two issues must be considered for every product or service you offer. For example, a quality product that you manufacture inexpensively may need a higher sales price before the customer will buy it, as some people perceive low prices with poor quality.
Ways to Promote Value
Packaging is the first thing the customer notices. Research the colors and patterns your target group prefers, and design your packaging accordingly. Show the customer how your product solves her problem or makes her life easier. Promote the business as having the same ethical values as the target client. For example, if the target group is married with young children and devoted to a green lifestyle, emphasize your company's use of recycled packaging materials and support of children’s charities. The intrinsic value of your products and services is directly connected to the customer and her values.
Photo Credits Comstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images | 2,774 | 1,317 | 0.000772 |
warc | 201704 | The formula for making money is simple: generate revenue greater than your expenses. Your small business needs to set prices that allow enough margin to make money but remain in line with your competitors. Custom work carries additional risk in that the customer may not pay for the finished clothing. Requesting a deposit from the customer that covers the cost of the materials and collecting the remaining payment upon delivery helps mitigate that risk.
Cost of Goods
Cost of goods includes the cloth you make the clothing from or the pre-made clothing such as T-shirts, skirts and pants. Include the dye and any other materials you need, such as sizing to keep the dyes from fading, wax for batik patterns and rubber bands or twine to gather the cloth. Organic dyes, natural dyes and chemical dyes have different costs. Cotton is less expensive than silk. Keeping costs as low as possible while keeping quality consistent impacts how much money you make.
Pricing
The price you charge ultimately determines whether you'll make money and how much. One method of pricing is to determine how much of your time it takes to make a dyed garment from start to finish. Count only the time you spend actually going through the process. For example, count the time you spend designing and prepping a skirt, but not how much time the skirt spends in the dye bath. Decide how much your time is worth on an hourly basis. Multiply how much time you spent on the skirt by your hourly wage and add it to the cost of the skirt. If you spent one hour designing the dye patterns, 1/2 hour applying the dye, 1/2 hour finishing the skirt and your hourly rate is $25, the labor would be $50. You would then add in enough to the price to cover your operating expenses. Another method is to charge what the market will bear regardless of the cost of goods or your labor. You can also look at what competitors are charging for the same type and quality of custom dyed clothing and price your clothes close to theirs.
Distribution
You could open your own retail shop, but that means additional costs such as rent, utilities and insurance. Other options are selling through the Internet, trunk showings or at arts and crafts shows. Since the work is custom, you only require a minimum amount of samples to show off what you do. Another avenue of distribution is to sell through retail shops. The shops will require a price from you that allows them to make some money on the sale. Usually retailers double the wholesale price, but that wouldn't work here since you're doing custom work. One solution might be to offer the retail store a commission of 20 percent when you receive final payment from the customer.
Marketing
If potential customers don't know about your custom dyed clothing they can't buy. Create a website that shows off your designs. Describe how your designs are different. Post photos of the clothing to Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube. Ask customers to give you recommendations to post on your website. Develop a paper brochure to give customers that includes photos of finished products. Post the brochure as a PDF on your website for customers to download.
Photo Credits Thinkstock Images/Comstock/Getty Images | 3,218 | 1,541 | 0.000651 |
warc | 201704 | When Anthony Williams was elected in 1999 as the fourth mayor of Washington, D.C., the city was in crisis, racked with corruption and teetering on the financial brink. As a result, his most pressing objectives were to restore the public’s confidence in their city government.
In fact, when he was first elected, the District of Columbia government was under the control of the federally-appointed District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority. The city topped the list of cities with the most employees per 100,000, and as a result, the workforce was bloated and costs were extreme.
By “right-sizing” the workforce and restoring fiscal accountability, Mayor Williams moved quickly to balance the city's budget and bring proven management practices to the operation of the government. His work put the city on track for the return to self-government as the District delivered a surplus of $185 million in fiscal year 1997. The cumulative fund balance swung from a deficit of $518 million to a surplus of nearly $1.6 billion, and during this same period, the District’s bond ratings went from “junk bond” status to “A” category by all three major rating agencies.
Getting It Right
Meanwhile, Mayor Williams launched an aggressive campaign to lure investment back into the District of Columbia, using innovative financing and tax incentives. The economic recovery and transformation of the District of Columbia remains one of the most dramatic turnarounds of any major American city.
Driven by a growth in local revenues, income and sales taxes, the District had the resources to improve services, lower tax rates, improve the performance of city agencies and invest in its infrastructure and human services. After years of declining population, the District of Columbia recorded growth in population. Chief among accomplishments was establishing the city as a hub of African-American professionals.
The District’s crime rate went down dramatically, new vibrancy came to downtown areas, major league baseball returned to Nation’s Capital and sweeping plans for development along both sides of the Anacostia River were begun.
Perceptions Matter
When Mayor Williams left office, gone was the public image of political anarchy embodied by his predecessor, Marion Barry, and in its place was a reputation of the District of Columbia as a fiscally responsible city where public servants were held accountable and a focus on the big picture produced major change.
Williams came to the job with technical skills needed. As chief financial officer for the state of Connecticut, the Department of Agriculture, and the Washington, D.C., he knew how to balance the books.
But he also brought skills that come with working in the inherently chaotic public sector, where authorities overlap and personalities matter as much as numbers. He knew how to wrestle for control of bureaucratic territory; he knew how to use the resources at his disposal to leverage his ideas; and he knew how to build alliances and move an agenda forward.
Knowing When To Lead And When To Follow
So when he became mayor, Mayor Williams knew that it wasn’t enough to simply control the budget. He had to win public support for structural reforms and innovations, and with his financial background, it’s no surprise that he came up with a formula for how to do it: seventy percent follow and thirty percent lead.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “You’re the pre-eminent leader of your city, and you’re also the butler. And I don’t say that in a pejorative way. You are a public servant. Seventy percent of the time, if you say jump, I say, how high? If the toilet overflows in your house, I need to be at your house figuring out what the problem is. There is no problem too small for the mayor. And there is no one in the government lower than the mayor for these purposes – you are there to be responsible to your people, seventy percent of the time.
“The other thirty percent of the time, you are there to lead,” he said. “You’ve got to figure out, what are the one or two or three issues where you’re going to lead, and what are the other issues where you’re going to follow. You need to figure that out, and you need to make that balance of short term versus long term.”
Facing Facts
Coming into the job, Williams knew what he had to follow on, and what he had to lead on. He had to follow the lead of a public that demanded better schools, cleanliness and crime-fighting. And he had to lead the public when it came to the steps needed to upgrade government and start transforming the city.
He said his agenda was grounded in a basic idea: the challenge of the modern American city is to recover from generations of decline.
All American cities have gone through the same stages, Mayor Williams said they expanded in the nineteenth century, stagnated after the Depression, and declined in the postwar era as America moved to the suburbs on President Eisenhower’s new interstates. Federal programs designed in the 1960s and 1970s to arrest that decline – “urban renewal” and the like – didn’t help much, Williams said. “Whatever we did with urban renewal and whatever came after it, none of it really substantively changed the direction of cities.”
Raising Expectations
To survive today, cities need to make themselves attractive and competitive, combining sound bookkeeping with creative development strategies, he said. For his city, the mayor had the vision of a revived metroplex drawing investment from around the nation and the globe.
But to win support for any long-range development strategies, Williams knew he had to shore up support with a short-term agenda that addressed citizens’ most basic needs. So he set out to fix the basics.
He improved customer service, improved the city’s website, he cleaned the streets and put more cops on the beat and he shortening lines waiting for city services. When he made unpopular decisions, he framed them as steps towards better public service. He took on the labor unions, he shut down a hugely inefficient but still popular public hospital, he helped facilitate new development and he focused on baseball and riverfronts.
“You know what I say when people ask me about my greatest accomplishment as mayor? It was not necessarily fixing any one thing,” Mayor Williams said. “It was raising the expectations of my people.” | 6,595 | 3,022 | 0.000343 |
warc | 201704 | When moving away from home for college, one of the biggest struggles is missing home-cooked meals. For some of us, these dishes include hand-crafted delicacies from other countries that aren’t necessarily accessible where we decided to go to school.
We interviewed Hispanic college students from different parts of the U.S. that don’t have access to their favorite native cuisine, and they shared what they miss the most.
1. Plantains
“I miss anything that has to do with fried plantains like
chicharritas and platanito frito. Every time I go home I ask my family to make them.” – Maylen Santana of Cuban descent, Gainesville
“There are so many ways to cook plantains and incorporate them into Hispanic meals, or even as just a snack, and I crave them at least once a week.” – Claudia Guerrero of Puerto Rican descent, Tallahassee
2. Rice and Beans
“The rice and beans are a staple in Spanish cuisine, but the only beans available here are refried chili.” – Michael Rodriguez of Nicaraguan descent, Pittsburgh
3. Pastries
“I always miss having guava paselitos. The first thing I always do when I go back to Miami is go to Sedano’s and pick up all my favorite items I haven’t been able to eat in months!” – Aileen Velasquez of Dominican and Venezuelan descent, Tallahassee
4. Bread
“Cuban bread is like no other. It’s warm, fluffy, buttery, and just great. But, after it’s been sitting for a day, it practically becomes a baseball bat. I can never find quality
pan Cubano where I attend school.” – Julia Sanchez of Cuban descent, Syracuse
“Whenever I am struck with the realization that I will have to go months without my favorite dishes, it is as if my friends and family have a sixth sense, and go out of their way to remind me how much I am missing out. My sister conveniently sends photos of her
pupusas, a traditional Salvadorian tortilla dish, whenever I am craving something cheesy and greasy.” – Elizabeth Selva of Cuban and Colombian descent, Ithaca 5. Coffee
“I miss Pilon coffee because Publix here only sells Cafe Bustelo, which is good, but not my favorite.” – Maylen Santana of Cuban descent, Gainesville
“Moving to Pennsylvania, I couldn’t get Cuban coffee
anywhere.” – Michael Rodriguez of Nicaraguan descent, Pittsburgh 6. Meats
“I miss my
arroz con picadillo and vaca frita – literally anything from El Palacio de Los Jugos.” – Mary Roig of Cuban descent, Boston
“Cow tongue is delicious, but all we have up north is venison.” – Michael Rodriguez of Nicaraguan descent, Pittsburgh | 2,710 | 1,327 | 0.000818 |
warc | 201704 | We put salt on just about everything. Salt easily can transform a meal from bland to flavorful. At the same time, we are told not to put too much salt in our cooking because it is bad for our bodies to have high sodium levels. We are told there should be salt in our diet, but we have to make sure we aren’t having too much.
The problem is that many of our favorite foods are staples in our home because of the flavor salt gives them. This begs the question of taste versus health. Do we compromise our health or flavor in our cooking, or is there a way to find a happy medium?
The answer very well might be an alternative to our usual table salt, and can be found in another salt: Himalayan pink salt.
Pink salt is found in the Himalayan mountains and is a mixture of about 84 different trace minerals, which are essential for nutrition. It gets its pink hue from the content of iron oxide. It is also naturally occurring, which means it is not refined like table salt (which causes table salt to loose a lot of the essential minerals it once had).
Pink salt is one of the purest kinds of salt. It has numerous health benefits like water regulation, increasing our energy, and lowering blood pressure, just to name a few.
Now, many might be skeptical and thinking “shouldn’t I be more worried about cutting down my intake rather than looking for a new type of salt? Isn’t salt bad?”
Salt is bad when it comes to refined salt. Salt is made up of sodium and chloride, which are essential for life. We need the benefits of these two minerals, just not in a highly-processed form like table salt. In comparison to table salt, pink salt is the clear winner. Pink salt has all of the benefits (plus more) of table salt, with less sodium.
Pink salt’s uses are vast. For example, it can be used in water to spice up a boring glass of H2O. It’s so easy to make your own pink salt water sole (water that is saturated with by natural salt). This will help you rehydrate, boost energy, and work as an anti-histamine. Pink salt water has also been proven to improve the health of your hair, nails, and skin.
You can use pink salt in cooking as well as a variety of other uses, like bath salts in order to help with sore or tight muscles. The pink color is gorgeous, so it even makes for a good decoration that is sure to be a conversation starter. Start the conversation about pink salt and let others in our your new, salty health secret. | 2,472 | 1,225 | 0.000831 |
warc | 201704 | If You Want Clear Skin Follow These Tips
June 28, 2013 Steve Oglesby 0
Most people think zits is a facial thing, but it is often a shoulder thing or a butt thing, as well. Regardless of where it occurs, it is important to treat your zits. Use the tips from this article, to help you get clear skin.
Cut back on dairy and meat products in your diet to help with acne. Meat and dairy products can sometimes contain hormones that may negatively affect the skin, so reducing consumption of them is wise. Zits can flourish under extreme hot and cold conditions. You’ll more than likely be sweating a lot more when the weather gets hot. Sweat clogs pores and irritates your skin. Sometimes this can cause zits. Cold weather can dry the skin. Neither of the two is desirable. Want to reduce your break-outs? Skip your makeup for a few days. If you must wear make-up, avoid oil-based makeup. While you may want to apply makeup to hide your zits, you should understand that it can clog your pores. If you stop wearing makeup for a few days, you will clean your pores and your skin. Still having problems ridding yourself of acne? Try changing the products you use to more natural-based ones. A lot of the products in stores have chemicals which are harsh on your skin and can cause additional problems. This is going to result in more pimples. The ingredients in natural products help your skin to heal without any side effects. Garlic is a very powerful food. Garlic can help fight acne. Garlic gets rid of harmful toxins, making new skin develop healthy. Garlic is delicious and can be added to practically anything. You can care for your acne through the ingestion of zinc as it helps reduce the chances of free radical formation. A zinc supplement will greatly diminish cystic acne; inside and out. Cell phones can actually cause zits breakouts. Cell phones hold onto the oils that are on your face and your hair and then put them back on your face. Keep your phone clean by using cotton balls dipped in alcohol to wipe it free of contaminants. Also, do not place the phone directly against your skin if you can help it. Do you think that your blemishes will never leave? Sometimes allergens like mites or hay fever can cause skin problems. It is also important that you avoid stress. Stress hormones will react with your skin and often cause breakouts. A blemish stick is one of the most effective methods for covering up the blemishes that are on your face. This product is easy to use and allows for targeted application. Blemish sticks are thinner than concealers and allow your skin to breathe more naturally. When purchasing make-up, try to steer clear of the oil-based varieties. There is agreement among makeup experts and the medical community that greasy makeup can clog pores and worsen acne. Oil-based makeup is a major cause of acne problems. Read the label to determine what is in your makeup. In addition, some products may contain synthetics that are also known to cause acne. As this article stated, pimples can appear in places other than your face. Applying these tips can assist you in clearing up pimples for good through proper treatment. If zits is treated, there is a chance that eventually it will fade. | 3,233 | 1,576 | 0.000636 |
warc | 201704 | SOME JUSTICE FOR DEDGE AT LAST But cold comfort for other innocents in Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush did a gracious thing Wednesday. He flew to Brevard County to apologize on behalf of the state to a man who spent half his life behind bars for a rape he didn't commit. While he was there, Bush signed a bill granting Wilton Dedge $2 million in compensation. It's not enough. No dollar figure can be assigned to the agony of Dedge's parents, who never lost faith in his innocence. There's no way to pay Dedge for the wife and family he never had. Money can't erase the trauma of 22 years in the correctional system. But the state owes Dedge a chance to heal, a chance to build a new life to replace the one taken from him. Money helps accomplish that.
The Legislature authorized the payment in this month's special session after it stalled in the regular spring session. In historic terms, lawmakers acted quickly: Dedge's conviction was overturned in 2004. His case contrasts favorably with the pitiful history of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who were beaten into confessing the murders of two gas-station attendants in 1963. After seeing convincing evidence that the men were innocent, Gov. Reubin Askew pardoned them in 1977. But it took 19 tries for the Legislature to approve compensation. In 1998, the two men received a miserly $500,000 apiece for their time on Death Row.
Forcing innocent men wronged by the state to go begging to the Legislature is wrong. The Dedge case proves the need for protocols that take politics out of the process of compensation. The contrast between Dedge's case and that of Pitts and Lee proves the need for a uniform system. Most states that have compensation programs for innocent prisoners start with a set amount of money per year -- Alabama sets a minimum $50,000 per year sum, for example, while Ohio sets a $40,050 per year sum that can be increased to cover lost wages. New York calls for "fair and reasonable damages" but sets no cap. Florida would be best served by a system that sets a minimum payment for each year behind bars but allows additional compensation for lost wages or other factors, says Jennifer Greenberg of Florida's Innocence Initiative. Payments should be increased in cases where prosecutors or police are proven to have lied or obstructed justice to obstain a conviction. Instead of taking these petitions to the Legislature, the state should have an independent panel or judge making determinations about fair compensation.
Dedge's case has other lessons for state officials. He's still struggling to have his record expunged of the rape he didn't commit. Florida should follow Tennessee's lead, and make expungement automatic when a conviction is overturned.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Dan Webster filed a bill for this year's session that would have created a compensation system, and versions of it passed both House and Senate. The final version of the legislation fell short of the mark in some ways -- for example, it denied compensation to people who plead guilty, even if scientific evidence proves they're innocent. It also would have barred compensation to people who have criminal records outside the wrongful conviction -- even if the crime was a minor felony. The proposed legislation would have restricted payments for pain and suffering, cold comfort to innocent people raped or assaulted while in prison.
The Legislature did well to compensate Dedge. Now it should look for ways to enshrine that fairness in state law, and protect the wrongfully accused from seeing justice swept away by politics.
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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today) | 3,658 | 1,814 | 0.000553 |
warc | 201704 | The Right Questions: Ten Essential Questions To Guide You to an Extraordinary Life
How mature is the part of you that manages your finances, plans your daily meals, or decides how to act in your intimate relationships? Most of us don’t realize that our everyday actions are being directed by unconscious beliefs and commitments we made as children - in other words, the five-year-old within us is running the show! The Right Questions will wake you out of the "trance" of unconscious choices and give you the strength to act on your deepest convictions. Purposefully written to bypass the intellect, these ten powerful questions go straight to your inner knowing.
The New York Times bestselling author Debbie Ford offers ten profound questions that will change the choices we make - ultimately empowering us to fulfill our life’s dreams. It’s easy to forget that the circumstances of our day-to-day lives are the result of decisions we made yesterday, last month and last year. We don’t wind up thousands of dollars in debt because of one extravagant purchase, nor do we gain thirty pounds as a result of one decadent dinner. And our relationships certainly don’t end overnight because of a single heated argument. We are where we are because of the decisions we make every day. If we want to better understand how we have created our present-day reality, all we need to do is look at the choices we made and continue to make along the way. The Right Questions offers a remarkable new awareness of why we do what we do, providing the tools as well as the freedom to create the life we always wanted.
Why I Wrote This Book
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a father who was a judge. The greatest life lesson I learned from my father was that every choice we make will produce either a positive or a negative consequence. When I was 13 years old and running around all over Miami like a young teen in the 70s, my father would always ask me, “Is what you’re going to do going to make you the kind of woman you want to be? Is it going to bring you the respect that you want? Is it going to make you feel good about yourself? Will you like who you are?” He challenged me to think about each and every choice I was making. When I stopped resisting his wise nature, I woke up to the extraordinary reality that we are a product of the choices that we make. We don’t wind up in debt from one bad purchase. We don’t wind up with clogged arteries because of one bad food choice. These are the results of many choices, mostly made on autopilot. After having the privilege to train hundreds of extraordinary people, I‘ve learned that most people don’t get where they want to go not because of their conscious choices because of their unconscious choices, their automatic programming, their bad behavior, their patterns that have become deeply ingrained. The Right Questions is a demand for us to wake up from autopilot, put our hands back on the steering wheel of our lives, and to each day see if we are making choices that promise us the results we are actively seeking.
Testimonials
“Sometimes we don’t get the right answers, simply because we haven’t asked the right questions. Not anymore. Debbie Ford tells us what we should really ask, in order to get what we really want.” - Marianne Williamson, author of Everyday Grace “Debbie Ford, with her wise mind and caring heart, is an innovative thinker and a skillful guide on the path to emotional freedom.” - Tara Bennett-Goleman, author of Emotional Alchemy | 3,604 | 1,732 | 0.000594 |
warc | 201704 | The Negroes are about to cause us trouble. The Negroes have made us a great deal of trouble. . . . The anatomical structure of the Negro is inferior. The lean shanks, the prognathous profile, the long arms (which do not always exist) the black skin, the elongated and oblique pelvis — these are allcharacteristics in which, so far as the Negro diverges from the White man, he approximates the African apes. . . . I am not responsible for the inferiority of the Negro. I am responsible if I ignore the facts. I am culpable if I hold him to the same standard as the White man. My appeals to him must be of a widely different character from my appeals to the Aryan, Hindu, or the Mongoloid American savage. The ethnological facts have their applications in all missionary efforts.
So said Alexander Winchell in 1878. Soon afterwards, he was compelled to leave his post at Vanderbilt University, but not for the reason that a professor, in the wake of such remarks, might be asked to resign from an American university today.
Winchell was born in 1824 in New York. He was bright enough to complete his studies at Stockbridge Academy in Massachusetts at the age of 16. Perhaps he simply planned to pass some time until he was old enough to start medical school, but the young Winchell fell into teaching. He taught at a few seminaries, then became the president of Masonic University in Selma, Alabama. Quarrels with colleagues may have been the reason he had to resign. He apparently left Syracuse University under similar circumstances. He probably wasn't known for his ability to get along well with others, but he was known as a capable geologist and teacher.
Winchell was also a writer. In 1870, he published Sketches of Creation. Aimed at a popular audience, the book gave an overview of the history of life on Earth. To a modern reader, Sketches is a perplexing mix of eloquent arguments in favor of sound science, and a strange conflation of science and theology.
Does any one hesitate to admit that an oak has undergone a slow and regular "development" — or that the delta of the Mississippi is undergoing "development" — or that the cone of Vesuvius is undergoing "development"? If it appear to intellects of the loftiest and broadest grasp that the Creator has evolved the solar system according to a method, and by the use of natural laws, exactly as he evolves a tree from the germ in the seed, why do we charge atheism in the one case and not in the other?
Winchell gently explained to his readers — as at least a couple generations of capable geologists had before him — that Noah's flood couldn't explain all the layers of fossils embedded in mountains. He gave vivid descriptions of our exotic planet long before people lived on it, when the roly-poly trilobite scurried across the sea floor, and the giant frog-like Labyrinthodon lumbered over land. But throughout, he insisted that all the mountain building, mountain eroding, rising and sinking continents, creeping glaciers and, perhaps most important of all, deposition of oil and coal deposits, had been overseen by a creator taking the long view to prepare the planet just for us. And we humans were, he insisted, quite something. In a chapter asking "Will there be an animal superior to man?" Winchell argued:
Consider, lastly, man's erect attitude. When the fish, the earliest representative of the type which embraces man, was introduced into the waters of the Devonian seas, the vertebral axis was hung in a horizontal position, and the animal was not endowed with even the power to raise the head by bending the neck. . . . Man first and along assumed a perpendicular attitude, and turned his countenance toward heaven, and talked with the Being who formed him. . . . It is evident no farther progress can be made in their direction. The elevation of the spinal axis has reached a mathematical limit; the consummation of organic exaltation is attained.
That was his argument. Because you couldn't get any more upright than vertical, you couldn't get any closer to the angels.
There was a practical if not genuinely spiritual reason for Winchell's frequent professions of faith. In the 1870s, Vanderbilt University expected its faculty members to adhere to scriptures. Failure to be a fundamentalist could get one fired. To reassure his readers, perhaps to hang on to his job, Winchell proclaimed his faith throughout the book. On the topic of evolution, he rejected Darwinism, but perhaps didn't quite avoid using the world "evolution" either.
Thus, on a review of the history of organic life, we are enabled to draw forth its manifold lessons. We learn that the marshaling of its forms is not in such an order as to justify the fascinating doctrine of genealogical succession, as taught by De Maillet, St. Hilaire, Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, and others. Still, we learn that order has existed, and that Nature's history may be expressed in formulas. We recognize a bond of thought running through the whole length of creation, and feel the assurance that a Higher Power than physical forces has presided over the evolution of the material world.
Sketches and some of his other writings spurred a whispering campaign that he was an evolutionist, an accusation that appeared answered by the fact that he was a regular churchgoer. But he tested Vanderbilt's flexibility too much in 1878 with the publication of Adamites and Preadamites: or, A Popular Discussion. After making the case of the inferiority of Africans, along with curious arguments that Dravidians were descendants of the same Adam, but not of Noah, Winchell unloaded his bombshell.
If human beings have existed but 6,000 years, then the different races had separate beginnings,as Agassiz long since maintained — each race in its own geographical area. . . . If the same Adam must be regarded as the progenitor of the Black races, then these races represent a wide-spread degeneracy, which is not only vast and appalling, but must be pronounced eminently improbable.
He further explained that nature had mercifully ushered the inferior dark races into the interior of a vast, impenetrable continent, to shield the unfortunates (and everybody else) from mingling.
Sub-Saharan Africans, Winchell insisted, could not have arisen from the same Adam as respectable people like himself and his readers. Black people must have had their own Adam. In short, Winchell argued for polygeny. Polygeny was not new. It had been promoted in an anonymously authored Latin book published in Paris in 1655. But while Winchell's casual conviction of the inferiority of the Negro was totally acceptable, his belief in multiple human origins was not. It suggested he was an evolutionist after all.
Science historian David Livingstone has argued that the real outrage of Winchell's argument was that the Adam he proposed for sub-Saharan Africans would have predated the Adam for white people. In other words, people of color walked the globe first. If that was the real source of trouble, then for all his own bigotry, Winchell just might have managed to offend even bigger bigots.
His departure from Vanderbilt was followed by a noisy fight in newspapers, but the university didn't take him back. The defiant Winchell expanded his Preadamites argument in a longer book, published in 1888.
Teaching in Tennessee as America's first Jim Crow laws were being written, Winchell was a product of a society that was as racist as it was pious. It's easy to sneer at Winchell, but he was no worse than plenty of his contemporaries, evolutionist and fundamentalist alike. Evolutionist Ernst Haeckel had divided humans into a dozen different species, just as great-chain-of-being creationist Charles White had juxtaposed "low" humans with "high" apes. Decades after Winchell's death, Roy Chapman Andrews, perhaps the real-life inspiration for Indiana Jones, would write about the "unequal progress" of different races in Meet Your Ancestors.
Almost a century would elapse between Winchell's polygenist pamphlet and the Civil Rights Act. In between, there would be more Jim Crow laws, more segregation, eugenics movements at home and abroad, and even rallies insisting that "race mixing is communism." Odious as his racial reasoning may be, he deserves to be judged in context.
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Created June 14, 2011 | 8,428 | 4,083 | 0.000247 |
warc | 201704 | Use of Suppression Subtractive Hybridization for Differential Gene Expression in Stroke Discovery of CD44 Gene Expression and Localization in Permanent Focal Stroke in Rats Jump to Abstract Background and Purpose—CD44 is a transmembrane glycoprotein involved in endothelial cell recognition, lymphocyte trafficking, and regulation of cytokine gene expression in inflammatory diseases. The present report describes the discovery of upregulated CD44 gene expression and its spatial and temporal distribution in the brain after focal stroke. Methods—Rats were subjected to permanent occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCAO). Suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) strategy was used to identify differentially expressed genes. Northern blotting and real-time polymerase chain reaction were used to evaluate the expression of CD44 and hyaluronan synthase 2 (HAS-2) mRNA. Western blotting and immunohistochemistry were used to examine CD44 expression and cellular distribution. Results—CD44 upregulation after focal stroke was discovered by the SSH approach and confirmed by DNA sequencing. Northern blot using a pooled poly(A)+ RNA revealed 3 splice variants of CD44 mRNA, and their inducible expression started at 6 hours (5.3-fold increase over sham operation), peaked at 24 hours (28.6-fold increase), and persisted up to 72 hours (17.8-fold increase) after MCAO. A parallel induction profile of HAS-2 mRNA was observed in the ischemic brain tissue. The levels of CD44 were markedly elevated at 6 hours (1.8-fold increase over sham; n=3), 24 hours (2.9-fold, peak induction; P<0.01), and 72 hours (2.4-fold increase; P<0.05) after MCAO by means of Western analysis. Immunohistochemical and confocal microscopy confirmed that constitutive expression of CD44 is limited to microvessels in normal brain but is strongly induced after ischemia, where the immunoreactive signal mainly resided in endothelial cells and monocytes. Double-labeling immunohistochemistry demonstrated that a marked induction of CD44 in the ischemic lesion is dominantly located in microglia and a subset of macrophages. Conclusions—The discovery of concomitant induction of CD44 and HAS-2 mRNA expression and the localization of CD44 in the microglia, macrophages, and microvessels of the ischemic brain tissue suggest that an active interaction between CD44 and hyaluronan may occur and play a role in the known inflammatory response and tissue remodeling after stroke.
Inflammation is one of the critical pathophysiological responses that occur after focal stroke.
1 Inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and endothelial-leukocyte adhesion molecules are induced after focal ischemia and trauma, 1 2 which are thought to contribute to the adhesion and migration of leukocytes into the inflammatory brain tissue. Leukocyte extravasation is a multistep process involving adhesion receptor-ligand interactions, including the E/P-selectin primary transient interaction (rolling adhesion) and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) secondary (firm) adhesion. 3 Recent investigation has shown that binding of CD44 on activated T lymphocytes to endothelial hyaluronan (HA), a primary ligand of CD44, 4 5 mediates the initial adhesive interaction of these cells at the inflammatory site. 4
CD44 is a widely expressed cell adhesion molecule in various tissues. The physiological role of CD44 involves cell-cell and cell-matrix adhesion by interactions with HA. Several isoforms of CD44 have been identified, and each is tightly regulated during lymphopoiesis and neoplasia.
5 6 CD44 gene expression is induced by hyaluronic acid fragments and interleukin-1β (IL-1β) in cultured rat aortic smooth muscle cells and T-24 carcinoma cells. 7 The IL-1β modulation of CD44 gene expression in vascular smooth muscle cells is involved in the AP-1 site activation of the CD44 promoter. 7 CD44 presented in the surface of lymphocytes is normally in an inactive form that is unable to bind HA. The conversion from the inactive to the active form of CD44 requires appropriate stimulation by antigen or cytokines, 8 and the proinflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) is such a factor leading to CD44 activation. 9 In addition, the extracellular domain of CD44 is cleaved during cell migration at the membrane-proximal region that is mediated by a membrane-associated metalloprotease in cancer cells. 10 The CD44 cleavage enables cells to be detached from a hyaluronate substrate and promote CD44-mediated leukocyte extravasation. Tissue inhibitor of metalloprotease-1 (TIMP-1) and metalloprotease blocker (1,10-phenanthroline) can block CD44 cleavage and thus abolish CD44-mediated cancer cell migration. 10
The CD44-HA–mediated intracellular signal transduction pathways have been investigated. CD44 is associated with tyrosine kinase p56
Ick in lymphocytes. Activation of CD44 induced the tyrosine phosphorylation of ZAP-70, a substrate of p56 Ick. 11 CD44 can also activate transcription factor nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) in T-24 (human bladder carcinoma), HeLa (human cervical carcinoma), MCF7 (breast carcinoma), and J774 (murine macrophage) cells by a novel signal transduction cascade emanating from CD44 to Ras, PKC|Gj, and IκB kinase 1 and 2. 12
Although CD44 has been implicated in lymphocyte activation and tumor cell metastasis, CD44 gene expression and activation in brain, especially after brain injury, is poorly understood. A previous study showed that low levels of CD44 mRNA were expressed in normal brain tissue and primary brain tumors, whereas high levels of the CD44 variant (CD44v) were detected in metastatic brain tumors.
6 An additional variant, CD44v6, was highly induced in T cells infiltrated into spinal cord of patients with HAM/TSP (human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1–associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis). 13 CD44 upregulation was also reported in astrocytes during the early phase of canine distemper encephalitis. 14 In a mouse brain stab injury model, CD44 expression was strongly activated in the area surrounding the injury within 2 days after the stab injuries and persisted for >2 months. 15
In an effort to understand the molecular mechanism(s) associated with gene regulation in brain injury after focal stroke, a suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) method
16 has been applied to identify genes that are specifically regulated in focal stroke. Among a panel of differentially expressed genes discovered by this technique, one clone is identified as CD44 in this report. As an initial step to characterize the role of CD44 in brain ischemia, we have investigated the temporal and spatial distribution of CD44 transcripts and protein in rats after permanent occlusion of the middle cerebral artery (MCAO). In addition, to explore the potential involvement of HA in brain ischemia, we have also examined the mRNA expression of HA synthase 2 (HAS-2), an enzyme that is inducible and responsible for HA production during inflammation. 17 Materials and Methods Materials
Oligonucleotide primers were synthesized by Genosys Biotechnologies. AmpliTaq DNA polymerase was from Perkin-Elmer. Mouse anti-rat CD44 monoclonal antibody (clone OX49) was from Research Diagnostics, Inc. ECL detection reagent 1 and 2 used in Western blotting was from Amersham. RNA and DNA preparation kits were from Qiagen. All other chemicals were purchased from Sigma Chemical Co.
Focal Brain Ischemia
Male Sprague-Dawley rats, aged 18 weeks and weighing 250 to 330 g, were used for our studies. Rats were housed and cared for in accordance with the
Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Publication No. NIH 85-23, revised 1985). The work was conducted in a facility accredited by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care. Procedures for using laboratory animal were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company.
Rats were anesthetized with gas inhalation composed of 30% oxygen (0.3 L/h) and 70% nitrous oxide (0.7 L/h) mixture. The gas was passed through an isoflurane vaporizer set to deliver 3% to 4% isoflurane during initial induction and 1.5% to 2% during surgery. An incision of the skin was made on top of the right common carotid artery region. The fascia was then blunt dissected until the bifurcation of the external common carotid artery and internal common carotid artery was isolated. A small incision was made on the external common carotid artery, and a 3-0 monofilament suture with a round tip was thread into the internal common carotid artery via the external common carotid artery. The suture was advanced toward the middle cerebral artery (MCA) region to create focal ischemia. For permanent MCAO, the suture was maintained in the vessel, and the wound was closed. Sham operation was performed by the same procedure except that no suture was inserted. Forebrains were removed after anesthesia at various times after permanent MCAO or sham surgery, and the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispheres were dissected and immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at −80°C for RNA and protein analysis.
The animal model was evaluated with cerebral blood flow (CBF), infarct volume, and neurological deficits. The mortality of rats was <5% observed up to 72 hours after MCAO. CBF was monitored with a laser-Doppler perfusion monitor (Moor Instruments Inc) in the area approximately 1 mm posterior and 5 mm lateral to the bregma in the ipsilateral hemisphere after thinning the skull. CBF was carefully monitored (to avoid any large vessel) before and after MCAO. More than 75% reduction in CBF was observed after MCAO. Infarct volume was evaluated with the use of 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining of 2-mm-thick brain slices. The stained brain tissue was fixed in 10% formalin in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS). The image was captured with a Microtek ScanMaker 4 DUO Scanner (MicroWarehouse) within 24 hours and quantitated with Image Pro Plus 4.1 software (Media Cybernetics). Approximately 20% infarct volume versus total brain tissue was observed 24 hours after permanent MCAO. The infarct area is located in the cortical and subcortical (from caudate putamen to lat preoptic area) regions. Neurological deficits were scored according to a 5-point scale, as described by Zhang et al.
18 Suppression Subtractive Hybridization
Total RNA of the ipsilateral (ischemic) or normal (nonischemic) forebrain was prepared as previously described.
16 Poly(A)+ mRNA was extracted with an oligo(dT) cellulose column from total cellular RNA pooled from 25 animals at 12 hours after permanent MCAO or from normal cortex. SSH was performed with a Clontech PCR-Select cDNA Subtraction Kit according to the manufacturer’s instruction. Three micrograms poly(A)+ mRNA from ischemic cortex 12 hours after permanent MCAO (as a tester) or from normal brain cortex (as a driver) was used for the subtraction. Procedures for SSH and differential hybridization have been described in detail previously. 16 Northern Blot Analysis
Northern blot analysis was performed as described in detail previously
16 except that 5 μg poly(A)+ RNA (isolated from a pool of animals; n=4 for each time point) was used per lane. The rat CD44 cDNA was generated with the use of reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) according to the published sequence. 17 The forward primer (RCD44F1, 5′-ACATCATGGACAAGGTTTGGTG-3′) was located in exon 1 and the reverse primer (RCD44R714: 5′-TAGGCTGTGAAGTGGGAAGGT -3′) in exon 5 of CD44 gene. Ribosomal protein rpL32 was used as an internal control to normalize the mRNA loading. 19 Real-Time RT-PCR
The primers and probes (Table⇓) used for real-time RT-PCR were designed with the use of Primer-Express 1.0 software from PE Applied Biosystems. Real-time PCR was performed basically as described in detail previously
20 with the following modification: 1-step RT-PCR was performed with the GIBCO BRL Platinum Taq System according to the manufacturer’s specification. Because our pilot studies revealed that only a basal level of HAS-2 mRNA was expressed in the contralateral brain tissue, the real-time PCR was performed with the use of only the ipsilateral samples. Total RNA isolated from rat ipsilateral hemisphere at 1, 6, 12, 24, and 72 hours after permanent MCAO or sham operation (12 hours) was analyzed with 1-step RT-PCR by the ABI PRISM 7700 Sequencing Detector (Perkin-Elmer). Data (n=3) were analyzed on the basis of threshold cycle (Ct) values of each sample and normalized with an internal housekeeping gene control, rpL32, with a Sequence Detector program (Perkin-Elmer, V1.6.3) and Microsoft Excel program. Western Blot Analysis of CD44 Protein Expression
Brain tissues stored at −80°C were thawed on ice in a lysis buffer that contained 10 mmol/L Tris (pH 8.0), 150 mmol/L NaCl, 1% Triton X-100, 1 mmol/L EDTA, 100 μg/mL phenylmethylsulfonyl fluoride, and 5 μL/ml Protease Inhibitor Cocktail Set III (CalBiochem No. 539134). The tissue was then homogenized with a Polytron homogenizer at high-speed setting for 20 seconds. The insoluble component of the tissue lysate was removed by centrifugation at 3000
g for 10 minutes. Protein concentration was determined with a Bio-Rad Protein Assay kit following the manufacturer’s instruction. Protein samples (100 μg) were separated on a 10% NuPAGE Bis-Tris gel (Novex) and then transferred onto a nitrocellulose membrane using the gel blot module (Novex). After it was blocked with 5% (wt/vol) skim milk in TBS-Tween buffer (20 mmol/L Tris [pH 7.5], 150 mmol/L NaCl, 0.1% Tween 20) for 1 hour, the membrane was incubated with mouse anti-rat CD44 monoclonal antibody (1:2000 dilution) at room temperature for 3 hours or 4°C overnight. The membrane was washed 4 times with 1×TBS-Tween for 15 minutes each and then incubated with horseradish peroxide–conjugated anti-mouse antibody (in 1:2000 dilution) for 1 hour. After it was washed 4 times with TBS-Tween at room temperature, the membrane was incubated for 2 minutes with a fresh mixture with equal volumes of Amersham ECL detection reagent 1 and 2. CD44 signal was detected by Kodak x-ray film exposure. Immunohistochemistry
After anesthesia, rats (6, 24, and 72 hours after permanent MCAO or 24 hours after sham operation; n=3) were perfused transcardially with saline followed by 4% paraformaldehyde in PBS (pH 7.4). The brain was removed, postfixed in the same fixative solution for 24 hours, and then stored for 1 to 2 hours in 10% dimethyl sulfoxide in PBS for cryoprotection. Serial coronal sections (40 μm) were cut on a sliding microtome and collected in PBS.
Free-floating sections were permeabilized with 0.2 Triton X-100 in PBS and blocked with 3% bovine serum albumin and 5% normal goat serum for 1 hour at room temperature. The sections were then incubated overnight at 4°C with primary antisera (diluted in 1% bovine serum albumin/PBS), including monoclonal mouse anti-rat CD44 (1:250), mouse anti-rat CD11b/c (OX42, BD PharMingen; 1:1000), mouse anti-rat monocytes/macrophages (ED1, Chemicon; 1:250), mouse anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP, Chemicon; 1:1000), or mouse anti-neuron specific nuclear protein (NeuN, Chemicon; 1:1000). After removal of primary antisera and washing, the sections were incubated for 1 hour with biotinylated anti-mouse IgG (Vector Laboratories; 1:200), washed with PBS, and then incubated with fluorescein streptavidin (Vector Laboratories) for 1 hour at room temperature.
For double immunofluorescence staining, after CD44 labeling, sections were incubated overnight at 4°C with antibodies against OX42, ED1, GFAP, or NeuN, then washed with PBS and incubated with Texas Red dye–conjugated anti-mouse IgG (Fab)2 (Jackson ImmunoResearch). Sections were washed with PBS and mounted on slides. Slides were coverslipped with the use of Vectashield antibleaching medium (Vector Laboratories) and examined with a Zeiss Axioplan fluorescence microscope. Confocal images were produced on a Leica TCS laser confocal microscope, and a plan-neofluor X40 (numerical aperture, 1.0) oil-immersion objective was used for imaging of fluorescently labeled tissues. Images were analyzed with the standard system operating software provided with Leica TCS laser confocal microscopy (version 1.6). For double-labeling studies, separate optical images of fluorescence and Texas Red were captured from the same optical section. The captured images were then pseudocolored green or red; a digital overlay was generated, and companion images were superimposed. Regions of the colocalization, reflecting the addictive effect of superimposing green and red pixels, appear in yellow.
Statistical Analysis
Data are presented as mean±SE. Statistical comparisons were made by ANOVA followed by Fisher’s protected
t test. Values were considered significant at P<0.05. Results Discovery of CD44 Gene Upregulation in Focal Stroke by SSH Strategy
To identify genes that are differentially expressed after brain ischemia compared with nonischemic tissue, mRNA isolated from rat brain tissue 12 hours after MCAO was subtracted from normal brain tissue by the SSH approach. The results in Figure 1⇓ show that several clones were detected by ischemic probe (Figure 1A⇓) compared with the nonischemic probe (Figure 1B⇓). Among these ischemia-positive clones, the B4 clone (arrow) was confirmed for its upregulation in the ischemic tissue by Northern analysis (Figure 2⇓). DNA sequence analysis and alignment with GenBank database showed that B4 clone is the rat CD44 gene.
Time-Course Expression of CD44 mRNA in Rat Brain After Permanent MCAO
Total cellular RNA was extracted from each animal at various time points, and each time point (n=4) was pooled for poly(A)+ RNA isolation and Northern blot analysis. Figure 2⇑ illustrates Northern blot hybridization with the use of CD44 and rpL32 cDNA probes. A low basal expression of CD44 mRNA was detected in sham-operated rats early (1 and 3 hours) after MCAO. CD44 mRNA was induced at 6 hours (5.3-fold increase over sham operation), reached a peak at 24 hours (28.6-fold increase), and persisted up to 72 hours (17.8-fold increase) in the ipsilateral brain tissues after MCAO. In contrast, a moderate CD44 mRNA increase was observed in the contralateral brain at 12 to 48 hours after MCAO. Three CD44 mRNA isoforms of 3.5, 2.5, and 1.8 kb were observed in the brain sample (Figure 2A⇑). The induction patterns of the 3 mRNA isoforms were basically the same after MCAO, which is in agreement with the previous report that these 3 CD44 transcripts are the same gene products terminated at the different polyadenylation sites in the 3′-untranslated region.
17 However, because CD44 splice variants in the coding region have been previously reported, 21 we synthesized specific PCR primers (across exons 5 and 17) to detect the coding sequence splice variants. RT-PCR 22 was applied to analyze normal and ischemic brain tissues, as well as heart, kidney, small intestine, thymus, skeletal mussel, liver, lung, and other tissues. Our result indicated that all the samples tested contained only a normal CD44 coding transcript, ie, there was no CD44 splicing variant detected (data not shown). Time-Course Expression of HAS-2 mRNA in Brain After Permanent MCAO
Because HAS-2 is a key enzyme responsible for HA production and it has been shown to be induced under inflammatory conditions,
23 in the present study we also evaluated the expression of HAS-2 mRNA in the ischemic brain tissue using real-time TaqMan RT-PCR. Only a basal level of HAS-2 mRNA expression was observed in normal or sham-operated brain tissues, but it was markedly induced after MCAO. The induction profile of HAS-2 mRNA is similar to that of CD44. It was slightly induced at 6 hours (1.7-fold increase over sham), significantly upregulated at 12 hours (3.2-fold increase; P<0.01), peaked at 24 hours (3.9-fold increase; P<0.05), and persisted up to 72 hours (2.4-fold increase) in the ischemic hemisphere after permanent MCAO (Figure 3⇓). Time-Course Expression of CD44 in Brain After Permanent MCAO
Figure 4A⇓ illustrates a representative Western blot with the use of a mouse anti-rat CD44 antibody (OX49) that recognizes the epitopes of both standard CD44 and CD44 variants (ie, CD44s and CD44v).
24 Two immunoreactive bands were detected by this antibody, suggesting that CD44 protein is glycosylated. The temporal expression profile of CD44 is also in agreement with that of CD44 mRNA. Sham-operated samples and/or early ischemic brain tissues only revealed the basal level of CD44 protein expression (Figure 4⇓). Elevated expression of CD44 was observed at 6 hours (1.8-fold increase over sham, n=3), reached a peak at 24 hours (2.9-fold; P<0.01; n=3), and was sustained up to 72 hours (2.4-fold increase; P<0.05) after MCAO (Figure 4B⇓). Immunohistochemical Analysis of CD44 Expression in Rat Brain After MCAO
To further define the cellular components of the upregulated CD44 in response to ischemic injury, immunohistochemical techniques were applied with the mouse anti-rat CD44 monoclonal antibody. A very weak CD44-immunoreactive signal was detected in the brain of sham-operated animals, where the basal expression was primarily located in the area of microvessels (Figure 5A⇓ and 5B⇓). Six hours after MCAO, the expression of CD44 was markedly increased but also limited to the microvessels in the ipsilateral cortical region (Figure 5C⇓), as well as some CD44-positive cells detected in caudate putamen (Figure 5D⇓). High-resolution confocal microscopy and double-labeling immunohistochemistry demonstrated that CD44 is mainly expressed in monocytes within the lumen and in the endothelial cells of microvessels in the ischemic zone (data not shown). A very strong induction of CD44 expression was observed throughout in the ischemic regions 24 hours after MCAO (Figure 5E⇓ and 5F⇓). At 72 hours after MCAO, CD44 immunoreactivity was still strongly elevated in the entire ipsilateral brain region (Figure 5G⇓ and 5H⇓). In the contralateral brain tissue, CD44 immunoreactivity was also detected in areas around vessels and in some microglia at 24 hours after MCAO.
To identify the cellular sources of CD44 immunoreactive cells, brain sections were double labeled with antibodies against CD44 and OX42, ED1, NeuN, or GFAP and analyzed by confocal microscopy. The monoclonal antibody OX42 was used to detect differentiating microglia and some tissue macrophages, and monoclonal anti-rat ED1 antibody was primarily used for monocytes/macrophages.
19 NeuN immunoreactivity was used to detect neurons, and GFAP was used to detect astrocytes. 25 Double-labeling immunohistochemistry demonstrated that CD44 immunoreactive cells in the brain are mainly those of activated microglia and a subset of macrophages in the ischemic lesion (Figure 6⇓). No CD44 immunoreactivity was detected in neurons or astrocytes (data not shown). CD44 immunoreactivity was initially detected in microglia in the peri-infarct cortical region at 24 hours after MCAO and later (72 hours) was located in ischemic zone. A few CD44-positive macrophages were detected in the infarct at 24 hours after MCAO. Massive CD44 immunoreactive macrophages were located throughout the ischemic area at 72 hours after MCAO. In addition, monocytes within the vasculature in the ischemic area were also noted to be CD44 positive. Discussion
In the present report we described the discovery of upregulated CD44 gene expression in the brain after ischemic stroke using the SSH strategy. The Northern blot and Western blot analyses showed that the ischemia-induced expression of CD44 was time dependent in the ischemic brain tissues. A similar induction profile was also observed for HAS-2 mRNA after ischemic brain injury, suggesting the increasing biosynthesis of HA. The concomitant induction of CD44 and HAS-2 suggests that CD44 and HA may actively contribute to ischemic brain injury, possibly having a role associated with the inflammation, as has been demonstrated in a number of inflammatory diseases.
24 26
Inflammation is one of the key pathophysiological responses after focal stroke.
1 2 The expression of CD44 and HAS-2 correlated with the infiltration and accumulation of leukocytes in the ischemic brain tissues. Their expression profiles (though with a slight delay) are basically in parallel with a number of other inflammation-related genes, including various cytokines, chemokines, and adhesion molecules, as reported previously after brain ischemia. 2 Of note, TNF-α and IL-1β are key proinflammatory cytokines that are induced at 3 to 6 hours and peak at 12 hours after focal stroke. 2 TNF-α and IL-1β are not only able to induce CD44 and HAS-2 gene expression 7 27 but also modulate the function of CD44. 9 On the other hand, the HA activation of CD44 is able to directly induce TNF-α and IL-1β expression and further to indirectly (via TNF-α) produce insulinlike growth factor-1 in macrophages. 27 The localization of CD44 expression in microglia and a subset of macrophages that are distributed along with the infarct after brain ischemia may, in part, explain its participation in the inflammatory response after ischemia injury.
The exact role of CD44 upregulation in endothelial cells of ischemic microvessels is not fully understood. The expression of CD44 in human pulmonary endothelial cells and umbilical cord vein endothelial cells has been reported.
28 29 The endothelial expression of CD44 in the brain ischemia may be associated with cytokine production and inflammation.
In addition to its possible role in inflammation, the massive and remarkable parallel induction of CD44 and HAS-2 in ischemic lesions may reflect their role in tissue remodeling. As reported previously, the levels of HA within the extracellular matrix and cerebrospinal fluid were strictly regulated by cellular hyaluronidase and receptor-mediated endocytosis of HA.
5 30 The extracellular matrix enriched HA coincident with periods of rapid cell proliferation, aggregation, wound healing, tissue regeneration, and remodeling. 31 Furthermore, a previous study demonstrated that macrophages can internalize HA during lung development and may possibly play a significant role in HA removal. 32 A subset of CD44-positive macrophages in the ischemic lesions may also regulate the levels of HA in situ and thus provide a final tuning of its function.
It is also possible that additional functions of upregulated CD44 after brain ischemia may be related to matrix metalloproteases (MMPs) and TIMP. Induced expressions of MMP-2 and MMP-9, as well as TIMP-1, have been previously reported after brain ischemia.
33 34 While the effect of MMPs on CD44 function after brain ischemia is unknown, previous studies demonstrated that MMP inhibition can block the cleavage of the extracellular domain of CD44 and thus abolish CD44-mediated cancer cell migration. 10
In addition to hyaluronic acid, osteopontin has also been characterized as the ligand binds to CD44.
35 The ischemia-induced expression of osteopontin was previously reported in a rat model of focal stroke. 19 Osteopontin mRNA was expressed in the peri-infarct region from 3 to 48 hours and in the infarct by 5 days, and the peak expression of osteopontin was observed at 5 days after stroke. 19 It is interesting to note that the cellular sources and distribution of osteopontin expression are strikingly similar to those of CD44 (the present report) despite some difference in their temporal expression profiles after focal stroke, 19 suggesting a potential interaction between CD44 and osteopontin under this pathophysiological condition. The difference in their temporal expression profiles may reflect different animal models (Tamura’s model for osteopontin versus thread model for CD44 expression) used for these 2 studies.
In conclusion, the present study describes for the first time the discovery of CD44 gene induction in microvessels, microglia, and macrophages in brain ischemic lesions after MCAO. These data, together with previous reports on the pathophysiological role of CD44, as well as the parallel induction of HAS-2, suggest that the interaction between CD44 and HA may actively contribute to the known inflammatory response and tissue remodeling after focal stroke.
Received August 24, 2000. Revision received December 14, 2000. Accepted December 15, 2000. Copyright © 2001 by American Heart Association References ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ Foster LC, Wiesel P, Huggins GS, Panares R, Chin MT, Pellacani A, Perrella MA. Role of activating protein-1 and high mobility group-I(Y) protein in the induction of CD44 gene expression by interleukin-1beta in vascular smooth muscle cells. FASEB J .2000;14:368–378. ↵ ↵ Maiti A, Maki G, Johnson P. TNF-alpha induction of CD44-mediated leukocyte adhesion by sulfation. Science .1998;282:941–943. ↵ ↵ Taher TE, Smit L, Griffioen AW, Schilder-Tol EJ, Borst J, Pals ST. Signaling through CD44 is mediated by tyrosine kinases: association with p56lck in T lymphocytes. J Biol Chem .1996;271:2863–2867. ↵ Fitzgerald KA, Bowie AG, Skeffington BS, O’Neill LA. Ras, protein kinase C zeta, and I kappa B kinases 1 and 2 are downstream effectors of CD44 during the activation of NF-kappa B by hyaluronic acid fragments in T-24 carcinoma cells. J Immunol .2000;164:2053–2063. ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ ↵ Wang X, Louden C, Yue TL, Ellison JA, Barone FC, Solleveld HA, Feuerstein GZ. Delayed expression of osteopontin after focal stroke in the rat. J Neurosci .1998;18:2075–2083. ↵ ↵ Screaton GR, Bell MV, Jackson DG, Cornelis FB, Gerth U, Bell JI. Genomic structure of DNA encoding the lymphocyte homing receptor CD44 reveals at least 12 alternatively spliced exons. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A .1992;89:12160–12164. ↵ Wang X, Barone FC, Aiyar NV, Feuerstein GZ. Interleukin-1 receptor and receptor antagonist gene expression after focal stroke in rats. Stroke .1997;28:155–161; comment 161–162. ↵ ↵ ↵ Mullen RJ, Buck CR, Smith AM. NeuN, a neuronal specific nuclear protein in vertebrates. Development .1992;116:201–211. ↵ ↵ Noble PW, Lake FR, Henson PM, Riches DW. Hyaluronate activation of CD44 induces insulin-like growth factor-1 expression by a tumor necrosis factor-alpha-dependent mechanism in murine macrophages. J Clin Invest .1993;91:2368–2377. ↵ ↵ Lokeshwar VB, Selzer MG. Differences in hyaluronic acid-mediated functions and signaling in arterial, microvessel, and vein-derived human endothelial cells. J Biol Chem .2000;275:27641–27649. ↵ ↵ Knudson CB, Knudson W. Hyaluronan-binding proteins in development, tissue homeostasis, and disease. FASEB J .1993;7:1233–1241. ↵ ↵ ↵ Wang X, Barone FC, White RF, Feuerstein GZ. Subtractive cloning identifies tissue inhibitor of matrix metalloproteinase-1 (TIMP-1) increased gene expression following focal stroke. Stroke .1998;29:516–520. ↵ ↵ | 31,527 | 12,202 | 0.000084 |
warc | 201704 | What is the meaning of life? The answer to this question has sought over since mankind became capable of exercising their brain capacity past a level of primal instinct. In general life is rather meaningless, we all simply exist together on this planet. But before one dwells on the pointlessness of human existence, they should think about the purpose of each individual person in our society. We create goals for ourselves; we all have a role to play in our society. In a sense, we choose our future and in doing so, give ourselves a purpose to live.
The purpose of human existence in general may be absent, but in our society and through our goals and achievements, I believe each individual creates their own purpose. Through one question I realized this great truth: what do you want to be when you grow up? For the longest time, I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. What did it matter to me anyway? I was a kid (well, I suppose I still am) and didn’t like any of the generic jobs they told us about in elementary school.
Police force, teachers, fireman, none of them interested me. Then, in middle school, my life changed, a lot. I got completely new friends, after the old ones left me behind. I slowly started to become more and more enclosed, I spent most of my time out of school alone. As I developed into this over-dramatic teenage state, life suddenly became meaningless. I would often find myself sitting bored in my room, mindlessly surfing the internet or playing videogames.
I slowly started to hate it; it was like I could feel my brain melting inside my head. I needed to find a more constructive hobby, and so I found myself musical instruments and started creating more and more music every day. Music became my life and from then on, I knew that my goal, the meaning of my life, was to become a musician. I believe that life was meant to be enjoyed; nobody wants to spend their life in a dead end job. After all, just how much meaning is in an unhappy life?
Just ask Monty Python’s John Cleese, who states, “If I had not gone into Monty Python, I probably would have stuck to my original plan to graduate and become a chartered accountant, or perhaps a barrister lawyer, and gotten a nice house in the suburbs with a nice wife and kids, and gotten a country club membership, and then I would have killed myself. ” I find this quote strongly inspiring because instead of choosing a highly respectable, well paying job and living a comfortable life, he choose to work with some of most popular men to ever wear woman’s clothing.
Comedy is what he finds gives meaning to his life, and although his second choices would have been nice, Cleese didn’t find as much value in them as he did in Monty Python. Perhaps life itself is meaningless, but I believe it doesn’t have to be. I believe that a happy life is a meaningful one. I believe that mankind may not collectively have a reason for existence or a common goal, but each individual certainly does. I believe that each and every person has to create their own reason to live, instead of waiting for that reason to come to them, or they must just find themselves waiting forever.
Courtney from Study Moose
Hi there, would you like to get such a paper? How about receiving a customized one? Check it out https://goo.gl/3TYhaX | 3,356 | 1,647 | 0.000616 |
warc | 201704 | The last time the United States seriously contemplated immigration reform, it was also immediately after the inauguration of a new Mexican president — Vicente Fox, a business-friendly conservative whose
Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) came to power for the first time in 69 years, ousting the long-governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).
That was 12 years ago, and this time, the PRI has returned to Los Pinos with a new president — Enrique Peña Nieto.
While Peña Nieto’s administration moves forward with tax reform and business-friendly reforms of the Mexican labor and energy markets — all of which the PAN will likely support — his approach to pending U.S. immigration reform couldn’t be more different from Fox’s.
Fox came to office alongside U.S. president George W. Bush, and both had high hopes for U.S.-Mexican relations — after all, both were conservative reformers and former governors (Fox in Guanajuato in the industrial north of México and Bush in Texas along the Mexican border) with larger-than-life personalities and cowboy boots to match. So observers on both sides of the border believed their personal chemistry and
simpatico views would actually bring about a new era in bilateral good feeling.
Fox’s major address before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, marking a turning point in Mexican-American relations, in fact, came on September 6, 2001.
What happened five days later would turn the Bush administration’s attention far from México, except for security concerns with respect to potential terrorists crossing into the United States, despite Fox’s vigorous and active campaign throughout the rest of his six-year term, and thereafter, for the United States to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
This time around, net migration from México has slowed from a burst of migration activity to net zero migration, according to Pew Research’s Hispanic Center, ending or even reversing a decades-long trend:
The U.S. today has more immigrants from México alone—12.0 million—than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world. Some 30% of all current U.S. immigrants were born in México. The next largest sending country—China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan)—accounts for just 5% of the nation’s current stock of about 40 million immigrants.
The relatively bleaker economic conditions over the past four years in the United States have much to do with the sharp decline, but there are other reasons, too — optimism over a Mexican economy that’s growing so rapidly that it is set to overtake Brazil’s economy as the largest in Latin America in the 2020s, and a half-century of declining Mexican birth rates.
Given that Fox’s approach fell flat, and in light of the relatively fewer gains for Mexican migrants north of the border a decade later, Peña Nieto’s approach has been decidedly less hands-on:
In a joint appearance, Peña Nieto told Obama that Mexicans “fully support” the idea of immigration reform but said, “More than demanding what you should do or shouldn’t do, we do want to tell you that we want to contribute. We really want to participate with you.”
Like his predecessor, the PAN-backed Felipe Calderón, Peña Nieto appears to be more interested in working with the United States on security matters, especially at a time when drug-related violence is on the decline in México, and at a crucial time for a new administration that hopes to bring a less confrontational approach to security, focused on reducing violence rather than declaring full-out war against Mexican drug cartels.
The release last week of a ‘bipartisan framework’ from a group of U.S. senators, however, makes U.S. reform more likely now than at any time during the Bush administration, meaning that the issue of immigration reform will necessarily take up more space on Peña Nieto’s agenda this year.
The framework would create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, would make it easier for immigrants to stay or come to the United States with degrees in science, math or technology, establish a guest worker program for agriculture and other low-wage work in the United States (perhaps even modeled on Canada’s own guest worker program with México, which would require closer cooperation between U.S. and Mexican authorities), the creation of an electronic tracking system for visas and stricter controls on businesses to confirm they are not using illegally sourced labor.
U.S. president Ronald Reagan passed a comprehensive immigration bill in 1986, which legalized the status of around three million illegal immigrants in the United States and also attempted to make many of the changes proposed in the current framework, though the system it established for temporary visas has proved too bureaucratic, costly and time-consuming in everyday practice.
As such, there’s no guarantee that a new approach to a more regulated system for Mexican, Central American and other immigrant labor would work any better today.
Jorge G. Castañeda, Fox’s foreign minister and a well-known Mexican public intellectual, has argued ‘net zero’ conditions may already have given way to increasing migration once again, however, and encouraged the PRI government to take an active approach with respect to the terms of immigration reform, ‘insisting that any reform involves some kind of agreement and cooperation with México’ — not only as to facilitating a guest worker program, but also with respect to ensuring greater economic opportunity for Mexican citizens (to say nothing of additional cooperation among Mexican and Central American governments with respect to migration into México along its own southern border).
Olga Khazan and Nick Miroff, writing in
The Washington Post last month, argued that U.S. reform could result in more remittances to Mexican families back home — $25 billion of such remittances in 2007 equal around 3% of Mexican GDP:
Past studies have found that legalization programs would increase immigrant wages by about 20 percent, largely because more immigrants would switch into higher-paying occupations if their status were normalized.
So conceivably, these higher-paid immigrants could increase the amount they send home, thus boosting the economy there.
But it’s not clear that all — or even most — Mexican immigrants remain oriented toward their home country after making the perilous trek north. As the Pew Research report notes, the length of the typical stay of unauthorized Mexican immigrants is increasing — 27% of Mexicans sent home by U.S. authorities had been in the United States for a year or more in 2010, versus just 6% in 2005.
With an increasing Latino population in the United States, based both in higher birth rates among U.S. Latino citizens as well as from immigration, it seems just as likely that many Mexican immigrants will associate politically and socially more with the United States than with México.
That’s especially true among those immigrants who, having arrived in the United States as children with their parents, have spent a decade or more in the United States achieving their educations, advanced degrees in some cases, and a great deal of social capital — and one of the key questions for U.S. reform is how to treat those immigrants who, after all, have been in the United States much longer than their home countries.
But the larger consequences of immigration reform, taken together with a strengthening Mexican economy, the government’s enthusiasm for additional foreign direct investment in Pemex, the state-controlled energy company, and the free trade zone established in 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement among Canada, the United States and México, will be to bring standards of living in México into greater parity with those in the United States.
When you think about what a 22nd century México looks like, it’s not hard to envision a place that is less dissimilar to the United States, which itself will become increasingly Latino and, especially ‘Mexican.’ In that sense, immigration reform would be one of several tools reducing the barriers between the U.S. and Mexican culturally and economically.
With a GDP per capita of around $15,000 in México to nearly $49,000 in the United States, it’s clear that México has some catching up to do. But the national average disguises the relative poverty of the more indigenous southern part of México — parts of the industrial north, the resort towns on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, and the Distrito Federal all feature incomes and standards of living much closer to U.S. standards than the mean figure indicates.
But first, the Obama administration and Congress will have to transform the framework into workable legislation — and history has proven that won’t necessarily be easy.
When Bush attempted immigration reform in 2006 and 2007, he was met with a wave of anti-immigration (frankly, hard not to think of it as anti-Mexican) sentiment from his conservative base — former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo even launched a presidential campaign based on his opposition to immigration reform. It remains to be seen if that anti-immigrant sentiment has receded enough to allow the Obama administration to succeed in attracting sufficient Republican support in Congress (though Republican president candidate Mitt Romney’s meager 27% support among Latino voters in the November 2012 election may have changed some minds, including the influential Cuban American U.S. senator from Florida, Marco Rubio).
More recently, Arizona governor Jan Brewer forced a showdown with the federal government over Arizona Senate Bill 1070, passed in 2010 and later struck down in part by the U.S. Supreme Court, that would have required all non-U.S. persons in Arizona to carry documentation with regard to their status and have allowed (and encouraged) Arizona law enforcement to attempt to determine immigration status not only at lawful arrests or detentions, but also in any instance where there’s reasonable suspicion that an individual is an illegal immigrant. Although subsequently narrowed under federal law, the Arizona law struck opponents as an invitation for law enforcement to engage in racial profiling. | 10,659 | 4,707 | 0.000222 |
warc | 201704 | The air does keep getting colder, by an average of about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet (6.5 degrees Celsius per kilometer) , up to around 33,000 feet (10,000 meters) above sea level.
That’s just a bit higher than the cruising altitude of large commercial jet aircraft. You may have heard the airliner’s captain try to impress you when flying at that altitude by announcing that the temperature outside your flimsy-looking window was something like 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (−40 degrees Celsius). Good thing the window is double-pane-insulated plastic.
Above about 33,000 feet (10,000 meters), you’re in the stratosphere, where the air stops getting colder as you go higher; it stays roughly constant at about −55 degrees Fahrenheit (−48 degrees Celsius) for the next 12 miles (20 kilometers) or so, and then starts getting warmer. Above the stratosphere, the temperature does a couple of other flip-flops, getting first colder and then warmer again.
What’s going on?
For one thing, the air has somewhat different chemical compositions at different altitudes. The heavier molecules (carbon dioxide, argon) tend to settle out toward the bottom of the atmosphere, while the lighter ones (helium, neon) tend to rise to the top of the pile. Because those different molecules absorb the sun’s energies in different ways, they may heat up differently.
The stratosphere, for example, is where most of the ozone molecules live. Ozone absorbs a lot of the sun’s ultraviolet (very short-wave) radiation, which heats it up and makes the stratosphere warmer than it otherwise would be. Earth’s atmosphere is really quite a complicated system.
Beyond the atmosphere? You’ve heard that the temperature in outer space is extremely cold, haven’t you? Well, it isn’t.
It’s Not the Cold, It’s the Humidity
I’ve often heard people say that it’s too cold to snow. Is there ever any truth to that?
It’s true that when it’s very cold it won’t snow, but the statement is misleading. Once the temperature gets below freezing and other conditions are right for snow, the will-it-or-won’t-it question is purely a matter of the availability of water vapor.
In most cases, in order for it to snow there must first be tiny droplets of liquid water in the air that can freeze into snowflakes. But when the accessible supply of water is very cold, it strongly prefers to stay where it is, namely in the liquid form, so it doesn’t contribute much water vapor to the air. Thus, at very low temperatures there just isn’t enough water in the air to form those tiny droplets that could freeze and fall as snow.
Of course, if it has been very cold for some time, most of the local water supplies will be inaccessible for vapor production anyway because they’re frozen.
In those National Geographic pictures of blinding, whiteout blizzards in the Antarctic, it’s not snowing, it’s blowing. Very strong winds are blowing around loose, already-fallen snow. And when did that already-fallen snow fall? During periods of milder temperatures (but still below freezing), when water vapor was more abundant. | 3,230 | 1,549 | 0.000676 |
warc | 201704 | It was about time for an artificial sweetener update, wasn't it? neohepseridin dihydrochalcone,the new kid on the blog, which is yet not officially approved by either the FDA or it European equivalent o be used in the processed junk, most people call "food", these days. If we put some faith into the latest study investigating the effects of this agent, which is apparently already heavily used in animal feeds in Europe it does yet "dramatically reduce enteric disease" and "enhance growth performance in early-weaned piglets." (Daly. 2014)
Whether and to which extent these beneficial effects on gut health are mediated by changes in the gut microbiome is yet still uncertain; and since "uncertain" is a word scientists don't like, Kristian Daily and his colleagues from the
University of Liverpoolconducted a study to find out, whether the non-negligible health benefits would be brought about by AI <> gut interactions.
To this ends, the scientists employed a DNA-based pyrosequencing technology to investigate the changes in the intestinal microbiota of piglets weaned to a diet supplemented with either a natural sugar, lactose or said artificial sweetener (SUCRAM)
Figure 1: Total and lactobacillus OTU4228 concentrations in piglets on hydrolzysate carbohydrate diet without sweeteners, with lactose or SUCRAM diets and corresponding concentration of lactic acid in the caecal contents (Daly. 2014) Figure 1, both, the addition of lactose and the saccharin/NHDC mix lead to dramatical increases in the caecal Lactobacillus population and could well explain the previously reported "pro gut health" effect of SUCRAM in piglets (Vente-Spreeuwenberg. 2004; Pierce. 2006) But that's obviously not all that's news-worthy!
I did after all promise you news on products
youmay be using, as well - aspartame and acesulfame-k, to be precise. Now, while the former is a constant target of public (mostly broscientific) criticism, the latter has been a thorn in my side ever since I have started investigating artificial sweeteners.
Lean more about the "Gut Type Diet" - No Fad, Guaranteed! Louisiana State Universityappears to finally prove that acesulfam-k may actively promote the deposition of body fat in the presence of insulin resistance.
Ok, the results have been derived in a Caenorhabditis elegans, a "worm", but one that has long and actually surprisingly successfully been used as a "model for studying the basic biology of obesity" (Jones. 2009) - I know, I am not convinced either, but
ifthe results do actually translate to humans, this would be major(bad) news for the food industry.
In view of the fact that most companies have been pulling acesulfame-k from their products over the past years, anyway, I would not discard the findings Jolene Zheng et al. present in their latest paper in
Chemico-Biological Interactionsas meaningless, not despite, but rather because a scientists from PepsiCo was part of the research team which observed these significant increases in intestinal fat (=visceral fat of the worm) when the critters were fed with acesulfam-k sweetened coke. References: Payne, A. N., C. Chassard, and C. Lacroix. "Gut microbial adaptation to dietary consumption of fructose, artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols: implications for host–microbe interactions contributing to obesity." Obesity Reviews 13.9 (2012): 799-809. Pierce, K. M., et al. "The effect of lactose and inulin on intestinal morphology, selected microbial populations and volatile fatty acid concentrations in the gastro-intestinal tract of the weanling pig." ANIMAL SCIENCE-GLASGOW THEN PENICUIK- 82.3 (2006): 311. Jones, Kevin T., and Kaveh Ashrafi. "Caenorhabditis elegans as an emerging model for studying the basic biology of obesity." Disease models & mechanisms 2.5-6 (2009): 224-229. Vente-Spreeuwenberg, M. A. M., et al. "Effect of dietary protein source on feed intake and small intestinal morphology in newly weaned piglets." Livestock Production Science 86.1 (2004): 169-177. | 4,026 | 2,109 | 0.000479 |
warc | 201704 | Published on July 5th, 2012 |
by Guest Author Five Recycled & Natural Flooring Materials
When remodeling a home, you want a floor that is durable, livable and will light a room with its beauty. Luckily, there’s more than one option that will fit the bill. Sustainable options that are made from material that might have otherwise gone to waste are a great choice. Using clean, renewable resources result in better air quality because volatile organic compounds (VOC) can pollute the air inside your home. Here are five options to consider for your next remodel:
Reclaimed Wood
Salvaged wood comes from a variety of sources. Old barns, industrial buildings and old houses are a popular place to find reclaimed wood for flooring. Recovered wood from forests, creeks and rivers can also be milled for flooring. Reclaimed wood can be sourced in a variety of types like oak, pine, cypress, cherry and chestnut. Although reclaimed wood can be more expensive that traditional hardwood floors using renewable sources is environmentally responsible and your new reclaimed wood floor will be one of a kind.
Recycled Terrazzo Tiles
Terrazzo tiles are made up of chips of glass, stone, concrete, tile or masonry. The chips and tiles come in a variety of colors and sizes and when they come together the floor display can be striking. Terrazzo floors are extremely durable and easy to clean. The one negative is that epoxy-based terrazzo poses VOC-exposure issues for homeowners.
Cobblestone
Cobblestone cut from local stone are great for walkways, courtyards, bathrooms and more. The stone material can be reclaimed from old buildings and streets that would have otherwise been thrown away. Cobblestone floors are a beautiful and unique way to add history to a special space.
Bamboo
Bamboo flooring is an affordable way to create a hardwood- floor look while using a sustainable, durable material. Bamboo flooring is termite free, crack resistant and stronger than oak, cherry, teak and walnut hardwood floors. To keep in line with renewability goals make sure that low-VOC adhesive are used in during manufacturing.
Recycled Carpet Tiles
Recycled carpet tiles reuse old carpets that would normally wind up in a landfill. Carpets are created by grinding up old carpet and creating large squares that can be placed over your entire floor or in a smaller area. Carpet tiles come in variety of colors and sizes and are made out of vinyl and nylon. Like with bamboo make sure the material is used with low-VOC adhesives and backing to keep in line with sustainability goals.
The great thing about all of these materials is that they are very versatile. Maybe you use recycled carpet tiles in your living room, terrazzo tiles in your bathroom, bamboo flooring in your bedrooms and stone in your entrance hallway. All of these materials look beautiful together because of their eco-friendly natural aesthetic.
Jared Sanders is a flooring expert at Ambient Bamboo, a leader in the alternative flooring industry. Ambient Bamboo carries a variety of styles and colors, offering you an inexpensive option for click and strand woven bamboo flooring. Click here to view our selection of strand woven bamboo flooring. | 3,213 | 1,511 | 0.000666 |
warc | 201704 | A rich warm tomato soup with a toasted melted cheese sandwich has a way of just hitting the spot. To my little belly's mind, they are the quintessential dynamic duo. When is the best time to sit down with a comfy bowl of tomato soup? Any time. You see that's one of the best things about tomato soup; it can be served either hot or cold, winter summer, morning, noon and night (and for late night snacks too.) I suppose you could say, tomato soup is just one of those things we take for granted. There when we need it for warmth and comfort, ignored at its fruit. It's hard to imagine a time without tomato soup and yet, dear visitor, dare I say, a time did exist when there was no tomato soup until it was invented. "What!" you say. "Tomato soup is just made out of pureed tomatoes. I could have invented that!" Perhaps...
A man in harmony with tomato soup, John Thompson Dorrance was born on November 11, 1873 in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Today as a matter of fact! Now, Dr. Dorrance didn't invent tomato soup. For the true inventor of tomato soup, we would have to gaze into the story of a man by the name of James H. W. Huckins of Boston, Massachusetts. He received a patent titled "Improved Tomato Soup" on May 2, 1865. If you don't believe me, follow his link to the patent number. What Dr. John Thompson Dorrance did was developed a way to reduce the water content in soup while retaining the nutrients and flavor. John Thompson Dorrance first prepared canned soup concentrate in 1897, while working on a laboratory at the Campbell's Soup Company. You can read all about the Joseph A. Campbell Preserve Company on my other blog. It's a Pop Quiz:) Let's get back to John Dorrance, after all, it is his birthday we're celebrating. John DorranceBy all accounts, Dr. Dorrance was a visionary. The son of John Dorrance and Elizabeth Cottingham Thompson, John Dorrance had a fine education. "As a youth he attended Rugby Academy, Philadelphia; then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the famous "Boston Tech," where he took his B. S. in 1895. Going abroad, he studied at the University of Gottingen, Germany, and graduated with the degree of Ph.D. in 1897." A brilliant chemist, he received offers to teach chemistry at Goettingen, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Bryn Mawr College, but decided instead to join the Campbell Company in 1897. While in Paris, his inspiration for the marketing of canned soup fell upon him while observing the methods which were used in Parisian restaurants. He was convinced if he could find a way to lock in the goodness while reducing the bulk, which would in turn reduce costs, the American housewife would gladly purchase it at their local grocer. (A little reminder folks, up until that time, poor quality control in canning was a common source of spoil and food poisoning.) He was right. Dr. Dorrance was an expert in scientific agriculture and husbandry. He devoted much attention to developing improved varieties of fruits and vegetables. In 1911, he moved to Pomona Farm in Cinnaminson, New Jersey where he planted and tended to the tomatoes he had growing even on his front lawn. He was looking for the "perfect strain to make into tomato soup" as evidenced in the conservatories and gardens of his home. At his urging, the company embarked on a vast advertising campaign. The first ads were in trolley cars. The company felt women were their consumers and women rode trolley cars. Next the company's strategy included children, another aspect of targeting women, hence, the Campbell Kids were "born." As a result of Dr. Dorrance's persistent methods, applied both to production and commercial development, Campbell's Soups today are known wherever people eat soup. At his death, in 1930, he was the third richest man in the United States.
Resources | 3,841 | 1,979 | 0.000508 |
warc | 201704 | Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Continuing our series of responses from various legal luminaries to the question: What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?
Russell K. Osgood (President, Grinnell College; former Dean (and Tax Prof), Cornell Law School):
Reform doesnât usually flow from the discovery of a single big new idea. Rather, reform and improvement usually occurs when a new idea is tested alongside existing strategies and the results are compared. So, I would encourage Erwin to find three or four new ideas and invest in the people/technologies/infrastructure needed to test them out. Further, I would encourage him to find individuals willing to test the results of their undertakings. A lot of people claim something is better based upon assertion or hope. If something is really going to improve legal education, it should be able to produce measurable outcomes using sophisticated evaluative mechanisms over a multi-year period. Finally, I would find some convincing people with the new ideas before I would invest much in the infrastructure or technology or other collateral costs of projected reforms.
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2007/09/russell-osgoods.html | 1,292 | 742 | 0.001359 |
warc | 201704 | Many students think that reading simply means having the ability to recognize graphic symbols (letters) and transform them into sounds with ease and in a certain rhythm. But reading is not just that. If you read too slowly, in a mechanical way, without focusing or remembering what you read, you still haven’t acquired the minimum skills for studying through reading. As Mialaret states: “Knowing how to read is being able to transform a written message in an acoustic message following very precise laws; it means to understand the content of the written message and be able to judge and appreciate its aesthetic value.” All the authors who have approached this topic signaled that it is essential to understand what you read and identify the main ideas, judge or evaluate the contents of the text, retain the information properly and relate it to previous knowledge that has direct or indirect connection, and, finally, memorize and recall it promptly when necessary. Consequently, knowing how to read means recognizing the main ideas, catching the most relevant details and make a critical judgment over the text being read.
The first objective: finding the main idea
When you start reading a book, a chapter, a section of a chapter or a paragraph, you have to be aware that each of these fragments of text encompasses a central idea, that goes from general – expressed usually in the title of the book – to particular – as it appears in each paragraph.
Regardless of the study book you have in your hands, you will see that the main idea or content is divided and subdivided in chapters, the chapters in sections and the sections in paragraphs. Thus, there is an entire chain of ideas, on different levels.
The main idea of the paragraph. It is very important to find the main idea of each paragraph, because these ideas taken together will compose, form and complete the main idea of the chapter or the sections in which it is divided.
Notice that in each paragraph, the main idea appears in a more or less clear manner, although there must always be a manner to formulate it in a clear, unambiguous way. If you are familiar with the author’s writing style, it will be easy to discover his or her way of putting the main idea at the beginning, at the end or in the middle of the paragraph. However, the main idea is often not clearly expressed, and must be identified from the flow of sentences. By asking different questions about what you read and have read, you will manage to discover the main idea by yourself, and express it in your own words.
The most repeated word, even in synonymous forms, will often contain the main idea.
– You will find the secondary or complementary ideas in the words or phrases directly related with the main ones; they can express contrary ideas, give more details, contain more specific or clarifying aspects or offer further arguments in support of the main idea. The student performs his intellectual activity fundamentally through reading. For centuries to come, reading will continue to be the central source of information for all educated people, and making the most of what we read directly contributes to continually increasing our knowledge, developing our ability to analyze and synthesize, stimulate critical judgment, improve our creative imagination and being able to express ourselves easily and appropriately both in spoken and in written form. Reading well is, basically, the best way to learn and study efficiently.
To sum up: Before reading a subject, prepare your mind by asking questions about it and looking for similarities and connections with other subjects you know more about, in order to raise your interest in the topic. Read the text quickly at first, to obtain a general idea in regard to what it is about and its main contents. Read again, this time thoughtfully and attentively, underlining the main ideas, identifying the connection between them and them passing through the secondary or complementary ideas. Make sure you discovered and understood the main idea of a paragraph and, from time to time, make critical reflections over what you have read. At the same time, make a mental schema of the contents, arranged by their importance; then, put this schema in written form. Formulate different questions about what you read and jot down the answers, checking later to see whether the answers offered are correct or not. Try to read more and more rapidly, without losing your concentration or attention. Leave all redundant information aside and focus all your attention on understanding the ideas. Think critically, take your conclusions beyond the limits of the text you have read, take frequent marginal notes, making personal observations in reference to the contents of the text. Search for more information, enrich it and complete it with further reading, explanations of the teacher and specialty books. Read with the clear intention to put the new knowledge into practice, and to always remember it easily. | 5,040 | 2,268 | 0.000445 |
warc | 201704 | Safaricom plans to introduce M-Pesa payment cards that will be used for settling government services and taxes, in yet another move that puts the telco in a head-to-head competition with commercial banks.
The M-Pesa debit cards and point of sale (POS) terminals will enable customers to pay for government services, which the State has committed to shift online in a bid to curb corruption and ease transactions at public offices.
Both the national and county governments collect billions of shillings every day in taxes, fees, fines and other charges, which makes control of the payment system a lucrative business opportunity for banks and mobile money providers.
“Broadly, we are looking at how we can support government and counties to broaden our engagement as a payments channel and deliver mobile-based payments services as more of them start the transition to a cashless payment system,” said Safaricom general manager for financial services Betty Mwangi in an interview.
The move also marks yet another evolution of M-Pesa, which started as a person-to-person money transfers service.
For Safaricom, the transformation of M-Pesa into a comprehensive financial services platform is at the heart of its diversification and growth strategy.
M-Pesa revenues grew by a fifth to Sh12.5 billion in the half year ended September, recording the largest absolute turnover after voice business on which Safaricom is reducing its reliance.
Safaricom has signed deals with hundreds of partners that have seen M-Pesa emerge as a payments, savings, micro-credit, and bulk money transfer platform.
The firm says it has inked deals with 40 banks that extend M-Pesa services to their customers.
It also has over 2,000 pay bill partners and 139,000 merchants who accept payment for goods and services through the mobile-based platform.
“There is growing momentum and demand for convenient payment solutions made accessible by mobile phones,” said Ms Mwangi.
The promise of card and mobile-based payment solutions –driven by a 75 per cent uptake of cellular services in the country— has attracted more players to the cashless payment market.
KCB, for instance, has signed a deal with the government that will see the lender earn millions of shillings for disbursing cash to poor Kenyans under the social protection programme.
The lender will issue identified beneficiaries with biometric cards through which they will access their individual entitlements.
KCB will handle cash transfers amounting to Sh29 billion in the first year starting March, that is expected to cover 400,000 orphans, the elderly, disabled persons and poor urbanites.
Originally Posted on Business Daily. | 2,712 | 1,330 | 0.000765 |
warc | 201704 | It’s not the first time we have told you about Twitter accounts of celebrities being hacked. Earlier in May,Read more
Liquid Telecom has released new Cybersecurity & Data Protection Report identifying the latest cyber security and data protection concerns andRead more
Insider threats are like tumors in a person’s body. Fortunately for stakeholders, insider threat does not involve uncontrollable factors andRead more
Insurance and banking services sectors in the country need to enhance the pace of deployment of secure Information Communication TechnologyRead more
A few years from now someone will start writing the history of advanced, highly sophisticated cyber threats. This person willRead more
British Telecommunications (BT) has today announced the launch of Cyber Roadmap Consulting to help large organisations better understanding of cyberRead more
A few weeks I got the chance to attend the East African Cloud Summit organized by the University of Nairobi’sRead more
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existingRead more
Securing Smart Cities (SCS) , the not-for-profit global initiative that addresses the cyber security challenges of smart cities has todayRead more
Cyber Security has become a great concern for most organizations across the globe, Kenya included. In fact, according to TheRead more
If you think your business is too small for a cyber attack, think again. The Small Business Subcommittee suggests nearlyRead more
By Chrispus Kamau Kenya has been rapidly developing technologically for some time now. Statistics such as a 79% mobile penetration in theRead more
I would like to thank techtrendske.co.ke for allowing this guest post on their exceptional and well-designed blog. I’ve found manyRead more | 1,847 | 983 | 0.001039 |
warc | 201704 | Every so often one hears about people doing the “food stamp diet” in order to see what it’s like to be poor in America. The idea is to subsist for some period of time (often a week) on the amount typically given to members of the “food stamp” program. Here’s one example, prepared by the Food Research and Action Center back in 2007. That one challenges you to live on $21/week. Here’s an annual challenge run by the San Francisco Food Bank. There the amount is $33.04 per person per week.
These amounts vary not only due to region and inflation over time (food inflation has actually been pretty high over the last five years, grocery store prices are up 6% from last year) but also because these are different attempts to model how the food stamp program works. Food stamp benefits are based on the idea of supplementing a family’s income so that the family can (according to the program’s rationale) afford to consume the amount of food budgeted according to the “thrifty plan” from the USDA “cost of food at home” guidelines. Of course, since food stamps can’t be used for anything other than approved food items, and they’re given to people who are already very short of money, the effective result is that people are often trying to get all their food off just the food stamp amount, even if the program is assuming it’s only a supplement.
What got me thinking about the topic is that I saw one of these “hunger challenges” linked to some time ago, via some Catholic organization which was encouraging people to take part “in solidarity with the poor”. I saw the amount mentioned in the San Francisco challenge of $33 per person per week and thought, “Wait a minute, for our family of seven that would be $231. That’s more than we spend per week on food, and we’re around the top 20% line in family income.” In normal times, we were spending around $200/wk on food. Since we’ve been on a tight budget paying off the boiler, we’ve managed to get that down to $100-$150 depending on the week (including household cleaners, diapers, toilet paper, paper towels, etc.) | 2,203 | 1,140 | 0.000934 |
warc | 201704 | The Capability Maturity Model is a process a company uses in order to improve its processes in order to achieve company goals. CMM was actually developed for the purpose of software development improvement but now that applications to general business aspects are possible many companies have used the model too.
For companies to fully achieve an improvement in its processes, they would have to go through 5 stages. Companies would generally begin with no documented procedures. People would likely proceed differently from one project to the other.
At the second level, companies would start to document the basic established processes. With proper process documentation, they are also starting to be organized. Budgets and schedules are also started to be monitored. But processes are not strictly implemented so departments would also over budget and they don’t necessarily meet deadlines.
When companies reach the third level, they now would have established standardized processes and so these practices can now be followed and results could be replicated. These processes are established to create a consistency in processes performance.
When they get to the fourth stage, companies are now capable of using metrics to monitor, to control and to predict the performance and the improvement of processes.
Then finally companies are set to step up to CMM Level 5 where they are already in the optimizing level. CMM Level 5 companies are at a stage where they are just continuing their efforts of process improvement through modification of existing established processes. Quantitative process improvement goals are continuously revised as business goals changes. While Level 4 is focused on a narrower spectrum, Level 5 is concerned in finding the common need for process improvement so as to achieve the final quantitative improvement goals. | 1,859 | 873 | 0.001153 |
warc | 201704 | How do you get over procrastination, when your thoughts get in the way? In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated, David Burns tells how. You can use the TIC-TOC Technique. In the TIC-TOC Technique, you replace your Task-Interfering Cognitions with Task-Oriented Cognititions.
Summary of Steps Step 1. Create the TIC-TOC table. Step 2. Record the thoughts that inhibit motivation. Step 3. Substitute more productive attitudes. Step 1 - Create the TIC-TOC table.To create the table for the TIC-TOC table: Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper to divide it in half. Label the left-hand column “TICs (Task-Interfering Cognitions)” Label righ-hand column “TOCs(Task-Oriented Cognitions)” Step 2. Record the thoughts that inhibit motivation.In the left-hand column, TICs, record the thoughts that inhibit your motivation for a specific task. Step 3. Substitute more productive attitudes.In the right-hand column, TOCs, identify the cognitive distortion and substitute more objective, productive attitudes. Example TIC-TOC Technique
Burns includes an example of the TIC-TOC Technique:
TICs (Task-Interfering Cognitions) TOCs (Task-Oriented Cognitions) Housewife: I'll never be able to get the garage cleaned out. The junk's been piling up for years. Overgeneralization; all-or-nothing thinking. Just do a little bit and get started. There's no reason why I have to do it all today. Bank Clerk: My work isn't very important or exciting. Disqualifying the positive. It may seem routine to me, but it's quite important to the people who use the bank. When I'm not depressed, it can be very enjoyable. Many people do routine work, but this doesn't make them unimportant human beings. Maybe I could do something more exciting in my free time. Student: Writing this term paper is pointless. The subject is boring. All-or-nothing thinking. Just do a routine job. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. I might learn something, and it will make me feel better to get it done. Secretary: I'll probably flub typing this and make a bunch of typos. Then my boss will yell at me. Fortune teller error. I don't have to type perfectly. I can correct the errors. If he's overly critical, I can disarm him, or tell him I'd do better if he were more supportive and less demanding. Politician: If I lose this race for governor, I'll be a laughing stock. Fortune teller error; labeling. It's not shameful to lose a political contest. A lot of people respect me for trying and taking an honest stand on some important issues. Unfortunately, the best man often doesn't win, but I can believe in myself whether or not I come out on top. Insurance Salesman: What's the point in calling this guy back? He didn't sound interested. Mind reading. I have no way of knowing. Give it a try. At least he asked me to call back. Some people will be interested and I have to sift the chaff from the wheat. I can feel productive, even when someone turns me down. I'll sell one policy on the average for every five people who turn me down, so it's to my advantage to get as many turndowns as possible! The more turndowns, the more sales! Shy Single Man: If I call up an attractive girl, she'll just dump on me, so what's the point? I'll just wait around until some girl makes it real obvious that she likes me. Then I won't have to take a risk. Fortune teller error; overgeneralization. They can't all turn me down, and it's not shameful to try. I can learn from any rejection. I've got to start practicing to improve my style, so take the big plunge! It took courage to jump off the high dive the first time, but I did it and survived. I can do this too! Author: This chapter has to be great. But I don't feel very creative. All-or-nothing thinking. Just prepare an adequate draft. I can improve it later. Athlete: I can't discipline myself. I have no self-control. I'll never get in shape. Disqualifying the positive; all-or-nothing thinking. I must have self-control because I've done well. Just work out for a while and call it quits if I get exhausted. My Related Posts | 4,080 | 1,911 | 0.000527 |
warc | 201704 | InfoWeek has a piece on Gartner’s commentary on it’s piece on Gartner. If you get what I mean. The media comments on what the pundits have to say about the media commenting on the pundits. And around and around we go on the old issue of bias, transparency and pay-to-play.
Not alot of new ground in the original InfoWeek story, but they are right – these issues warrant discussion. This is even more the case considering Gartner’s power to influence decisions. All of my recent exchanges with Gartner reinforce my view that the analysts are very ethical and bound by some pretty rigid rules of engagement designed to enforce their independence.
What still doesn’t make sense to me are many of their models (such as scoring relevance and momentum based on inbound inquiries from clients) and the precious magic quadrant. And, what really doesn’t make sense are buyers that make decisions based on where a company is on a magic quadrant. I’ve bumped into a few CIOs who are doing this inside F100 companies – something that Gartner discourages. The misuse of the research is often as nonsensical and the confines in which the research is created.
What is really good news is that Gartner seems up for the conversation. And I agree, the more teeth they get, the more relevant they become. | 1,330 | 700 | 0.001479 |
warc | 201704 | Nearly 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001. That still-staggering number included 341 firefighters, 60 police officers and 10 emergency medical technicians and paramedics. Several states away from New York, local firefighters still recall that Tuesday morning as if it were yesterday.
‘I remember feeling helpless’
Brian Blomstrom was sitting in fire investigation school a decade ago when he was taught a visual lesson he would never forget. A friend nudged him in the classroom and showed him a text saying an airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The two men were amazed, but they didn’t yet realize the significance of the event. “As soon as the second plane hit the tower, our instructor stopped the class and everyone went upstairs to the common area with a television,” Blomstrom said. “We watched as the events unfolded. I remember feeling helpless, as I was away from home and the department at the time and couldn’t do anything to help my community, if necessary.” Crystal Township Fire Chief Lonny Fitzpatrick and Orleans Township Fire Chief Leslie Doty have been fighting fires since 1968. Both men remember well the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. “I was coming back from Grand Rapids,” Doty recalled. “We were just coming into Lowell. We heard it on the radio that the first plane hit. We thought well, it’s just a freak accident. Then the second plane hit and we realized something else was going on.” Fitzpatrick remembers not being able to believe what was happening. “Seeing all of the destruction, all the horror on the faces of the people,” he said. “Still not believing it could happen to the U.S.” Howard City Fire Chief Randy Heckman became a firefighter in 1993 and took over as chief seven years ago. “It was a sad day in our country,” he said of 9/11. “Many people lost their lives. There were a lot of heroes that day.”
‘Communities depend on their first responders’
Blomstrom became a firefighter in 1995. He was named senior fire training officer for the Greenville Department of Public Safety in 2002 and was promoted to sergeant in 2008. He said the events of 9/11 have changed the way he looks at responding to fire and police emergencies. “I now have possible terrorism scenarios in the back of my mind,” he said. “While our general area may not suffer an attack of such a magnitude witnessed on 9/11, there is always a possibility for smaller incidents that may cause chaos and turmoil within our municipality. These incidents may not be all be specifically police and fire related, but the community will call upon all first responders for assistance until the threat or issue is mitigated.” Blomstrom said one of biggest changes for firefighters since 9/11 is the necessity to receive training in unified incident command, preparedness, hazardous materials and managing extended and catastrophic scenes. “We now train and work with a vast array of additional outside agencies, prepare for so many different responses, participate in exercises to increase our knowledge and readiness and plan to manage these incidents over many days or weeks — just in case we have an incident that mirrors 9/11,” he said. “The Twin Towers incident on Sept. 11 has forced police and fire agencies to move from response-oriented work to both pre-incident planning and specializing in managing these types of occurrences. Communities depend on their first responders to be able do so successfully as well.” Doty and Fitzpatrick agreed their responsibilities have changed since that day 10 years ago. “You’re a little more cautious of some things than you would have been before in some situations,” Doty said. “As firefighter and fire chief, I have to make sure that my people have the training that they need,” Fitzpatrick said. “We are a lot more aware of our surrounding than we used to be. We ask a lot more questions than we have in the past. “We are very proud to be firefighters,” he added. | 4,161 | 1,945 | 0.000541 |
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