Interview with Avinash Tyagi: Water and Climate Change
Avinash Tyagi is the Director of the Climate and Water Department (CLW) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). We asked him about the Task Force’s work and the upcoming major climate events: the World Climate Conference -3 (WCC-3) and the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
What is the greatest priority in the area of water and climate change?
“According to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report, water resources will be affected the most by potential climate change. Therefore, first and foremost, we need to gain a better understanding of the impact of climate change on the factors that may influence water management practices. We have some general ideas about how climate change may affect water availability, but we have very little understanding about how other global changes combined with climate change will affect water demands and influence different sectors.”
Curt Carnemark/World Bank “Gaining a better understanding of these relationships is especially important at the national, basin and local levels, where most of the water-related actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change will be carried out. At the moment, most countries do not have the means for understanding or making quantitative assessments of how water availability and water quality will change and how other changes, such as shifting land use patterns, will influence each other. For example, how does increased forestation, which can be used to mitigate climate change, affect lean season run off; or how does it affect flood magnitudes? We need to gain greater understanding of these interactions before we can adapt water management practices effectively in response to climate change.”
“It is not only technical and scientific issues that require more certainty. Institutional matters also need to be addressed. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) provides the framework under which climate change adaptations can be initiated and sustained. We have made some progress on IWRM but we need to accelerate the process. We all recognize that we need to adopt a river basin approach to water resources management. But current institutional arrangements often don’t lend themselves to this approach. We need to better coordinate the actions among the different institutions responsible for managing water resources. It will help us better understand how different uses and different stakeholders influence each other as climate change and climate change policies affect water resources. Factoring climate change in water sector calls for accelerating the pace of institutional reforms to embrace adaptive management principles.”
What has the task force accomplished to date?
“Much of our recent work has focused on understanding how various agencies involved in water management issues can support Member countries in facing up to this new challenge. How should our activities, separately and jointly as UN-Water, be adjusted to incorporate yet another relatively uncertain factor? How should we work together on climate change issues so as to serve the mandate of each member agency more effectively?”
"As indicated in the Task Force’s terms of reference, we are carrying out a mapping exercise of UN-Water members and partners on their mandates and capacities related to water and climate issues. The initial outputs of this mapping exercise will be available at the COP 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark in December. We will hold the first full session of the Task Force at the UN-Water meeting in Stockholm in August."
"We are also preparing two white papers on the ‘needs’ and ‘capabilities’ of the water sector for climate information. They will be presented at the special session on Climate and Water at the WCC-3. We will be circulating drafts of these papers to Task Force members for their input. It is expected that members will circulate these drafts to their expert networks in different sub-sectors relevant to their respective organizations and channel their feedback."
How does water fit into the WCC-3 and COP15?
WCC-3 poster “The first World Climate Conference in 1979 essentially laid the foundations for a scientific understanding of climate change. In 1990, the second World Climate Conference sowed the seeds for political negotiations and collective actions. These seeds later sprouted in the form of UNFCCC. We have now reached a stage where we need to bridge the gap between the climate information providers on one hand and various sectoral users on the other. At the WCC-3 we are looking forward to establishing a framework for providing climate information and predictions that would make it possible to take concrete actions for mitigating and adapting to climate change in ways that improve social well-being. As water is one of the sectors most vulnerable to climate variability and change, a special session on ‘Climate and Water’ will be organized."
COP15 logo "We need to strengthen the capacity of users in the water sector to understand and apply available scientific information on climate variability and change. But this isn’t easy. Climate information consists of very heavy data sets. They can be difficult to download and difficult to process and analyse. So a whole series of intermediate steps need to be taken in order to make this information available to the various users working in the water sector, particularly in developing countries. Taking these necessary steps will require infrastructure development, transfer of technology, capacity building and financing."
"We also have to realize that bridges run both ways. Climate information providers need to understand the information needs and the information capacities of various users. The white papers being prepared for the WCC-3 will help articulate the climate change information needs for the water sector to the scientific community.”
"Climate adaptation depends on having the right information. How can we adapt if we don’t know what we have to adapt to? Despite advances in our understanding of climate, there are many questions related to climate change that are yet to be answered with required certainty. For effective adaptation strategies, we need seasonal to decadal predictions, which are still in the nascent stage of development and are mired with large uncertainties. To a certain extent, this uncertainty is influenced by the gaps in climate and hydrological monitoring and availability of data and information."
"In the water sector, we are aware of the importance of exchanging information for managing water resources at the basin level. Unfortunately, political considerations can make policy makers, particularly in transboundary river basins, very protective of the hydrological data. Sharing and exchange of hydrological data and information with the global research community is fundamental to the improvement in downscaling outputs of global climate change models to regional levels where they can be put to practical use."
“At the World Climate Conference - 3, we are hoping to establish a global framework for climate services, which would address issues related to the crucial observation gaps, climate research, provision of climate services and user interaction for application of these services."
"In the past, much of the focus at the COP sessions of the UNFCCC has been placed on the energy sector and on efforts to mitigate climate change. But as the reality of climate change has set in, adaptation has moved up on the political agenda and water management will be central to sustainable adaptive actions."
"At the COP 15 our efforts will be focused on building awareness among the Parties about the importance of water issues for adaptation strategies. We will stress the fundamental need for improving climate information to develop sustainable adaptation strategies; improving institutional framework for IWRM to facilitate adaptive management; increasing financing for water infrastructure; and facilitating the transfer of technology for bringing efficiency in water use.”


An article by Doctor Cheryl Reichert
Montana’s Priceless Blue Sky trumps the Highwood Coal Plant
Great Falls currently boasts the fourth cleanest air of any metropolitan area in the country. Growing up under the Big Sky, I assumed that clean air and blue skies were a birthright. It wasn’t until I left Montana to pursue my professional education that I appreciated the clean air that I had taken for granted.
As a pathologist and biochemist, I’m an advocate for public health. I’ve examined lung tissue from more than a thousand individuals. It’s easy to distinguish the pink healthy lung tissue of a newborn from the blackened lung of heavy smokers. More surprising is the gray lung tissue of non-smokers who simply breathe dirty air.
I returned to live in Great Falls two decades ago. I am reminded of the blessing of our clean air whenever I travel to other cities that are encased in haze of brown-tinged smog. Airborne contamination finds its way deep into the air sacs of our lungs, where it contributes to asthma and respiratory distress. Some of the particles are so small (particulate matter less than 2.5 microns) that they find their way into our circulatory system. These particles are a fraction of the diameter of a strand of hair and are so small several could fit inside a single red blood cell.
I’m sensitive to the practical concerns of those who would profit from jobs at the Highwood coal plant, and I certainly understand the growing electrical needs of our neighbors in southeastern Montana. However, I believe it’s reasonable to expect energy developers to give a hard look at non-polluting alternatives to coal, and if they must use coal to employ the latest technology to protect our air quality.
To its credit, Southern Montana Electric (SME) has listened to the community’s concerns about mercury emissions and promised to install activated carbon injection to improve the capture of this potent neurotoxin. However, SME has not given serious consideration to “clean coal” technology that is based upon coal gasification, which has greater potential to capture harmful pollutants and greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Highwood Generating Station (HGS) clearly doesn’t fall within the accepted definition of “clean coal technology”. It’s true HGS’s “circulating fluidized bed” is cleaner than Colstrip, but it’s still an old technology that burns rather than gasifies coal.
The annual combustion of 2.6 billion pounds of coal by HGS will add smog and acid rain to our Big Sky. The Highwood coal plant is permitted each day to release approximately one TON of breathable invisible particulate matter. This coal plant will also produce the greenhouse gas equivalent of more than 500,000 cars.
Due to the limited 400’ height of the proposed stack, variable local wind patterns, an upper air inversion cap that periodically prevents adequate dispersion of pollutants, and the baffle effect of the Highwood Mountains, a local meteorologist expects the air in our area will be degraded about 25% of the time. Why would we do this to our children, our planet, and ourselves when there are more modern, cleaner energy alternatives?
Are you and your family ready to be part of the “collateral damage” of Southern Montana Electric’s ambitions? If HGS is built, north-central Montana will experience an increased incidence of chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Infants, children, the elderly, and those with cardiopulmonary disease are among the most susceptible to adverse health effects from air pollutants. Children have increased exposure to air pollutants compared to adults because of higher ventilation rates, higher levels of physical activity, and because they spend more time outdoors. Children in communities with higher levels of air pollution (acid vapor, nitrogen dioxide, PM 2.5) have decreased lung function.
In 2006 area volunteers formed a grassroots organization, Citizens for Clean Energy Inc. (CCE). One of its missions was to partner with the Montana Environmental Information Center (MEIC) to legally challenge the Air Permit for HGS that was issued by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). The Air Permit did not specifically address PM 2.5, and this was a serious deficiency. By using a much larger and less dangerous particle (PM10) as a surrogate marker for PM2.5, DEQ didn’t ensure the maximum achievable reduction in PM2.5 emissions from a major polluting facility. By analogy, if SME’s proposed baghouse filter were a large kitchen strainer into which I poured a cup of flour (PM2.5) and a cup of marbles (PM 10), the strainer would very effectively retain the marbles, but not the particles of flour that are of much greater concern.
PM2.5 is a “pollutant subject to regulation” under the Federal Clean Air Act. Therefore “best available control technology” (“BACT”) requirements under state and federal law apply. SME and Montana DEQ should have undertaken a BACT analysis for PM2.5 and identified control technologies that have a greater potential for reducing PM2.5 emissions. On April 21, 2008, the Montana Board of Environmental Review acknowledged this deficiency in a landmark ruling. Additional studies will now be required before the Highwood coal plant can go forward.
Recent medical research expanded the list of health effects associated with fine particulate matter and identified health effects at lower exposure levels than previously reported. As a result, new federal air quality standards to safeguard human health took effect in December 2006. Under the revised standards, the 24-hour fine particle standard was nearly halved, from 65 micrograms per cubic meter to 35 micrograms.
An important recent study on the adverse effects of PM 2.5 air pollution was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Among a large group of middle age women, each increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM 2.5 was associated with a 76% increase in the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. The risk of stroke was also associated with increased levels of PM 2.5.
Unfortunately, current air permitting regulations by the Montana DEQ do not require specific measurements of some of the heavy metals that will come from the coal plant, (including 540 pounds of arsenic and 560 pounds of lead).
Our Montana Constitution not only guarantees its citizens a right to a “clean and healthful environment” (Art. II, Section 3) but also creates an obligation to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment ...for present and future generations” (Art. IX, Section 1). The proposed coal plant violates these tenets. Interference with the fundamental right to a clean and healthful environment receives the highest level of judicial scrutiny: state action may impede the right only if the state demonstrates a compelling interest.
In addition to important public health concerns, there is an economic risk that is more significant than the temporary construction boom and 65 permanent jobs that the coal plant will bring. By using up available transmission capacity for our area, HGS will impede future development of cleaner, sustainable energy alternatives and will discourage those who value clean air from locating or remaining in Great Falls.
A moratorium on construction of all new coal-fired power plants is currently working its way through Congress. How sad it would be for America’s last old-technology coal plant to be built in the middle of “the Last Best Place”.
Cheryl Reichert, M.D., Ph.D. is a Great Falls native. Contact her through Citizen for Clean Energy’s website, www.cce.mt.org.


A cluster of galaxies recently observed by three different telescopes now holds the record for the most distant ever seen: 10.2 billion light years, a solid billion light years farther away than the previous record holder!
[Click to embiggen.]
The cluster, called JKCS041 — evidently all the cool names have already been taken — was discovered in 2006 and subsequently observed by Chandra. The image above also includes observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the Digitized Sky Survey. In this image, the blue glow is from X-ray-emitting hot gas between galaxies, and the white galaxies are from the optical and infrared observations.
The image doesn’t look like much, but it’s scientifically amazing. When light left those galaxies, the Universe was only about 3.5 billion years old! Remember, for a long time the whole cosmos was just gas, and that took a long time to collect, clump up, and form stars and galaxies. It’s currently thought that it took a few billion years for clusters of galaxies to form after the Big Bang, so JKCS041 looks like it was an early bloomer. We may find even more distant clusters, but there probably aren’t too many more out there, and they almost certainly won’t be much farther away than this one.
Clusters are among the largest structures in the Universe (the only things bigger are superclusters; clusters of clusters if you like), so studying them tells us a lot about conditions in the early Universe. And, of course, the farther back we find them the more interesting things get! I suspect that the newly-refurbished Hubble may be pointed this way sometime soon, too, and I also imagine JKCS041 will be a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest space telescope ever launched. When it’s observed by these observatories, what secrets about dark matter, dark energy, and the early Universe will the cluster reveal?
And since I hate ending posts with rhetorical flourishes, I’ll take a stab at a generic answer: surprises. Whenever we probe deeper, look farther, the one thing we discover is that the Universe will always have something unexpected up its sleeve. That’s one reason science is so much fun!
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/S.Andreon et al Optical: DSS; ESO/VLT.
Links to this Post
- blue collar space – The Invention of Iron | October 22, 2009
- A Long, Long Time Ago … Galaxies Far, Far Away - Damned Connecticut | October 22, 2009
- Let’s take a trip back in time. « slumber-powered | October 23, 2009
- St. Pete Skeptics Society » Blog Archive » Hubble Bubble | October 29, 2009
- Damned Interview: Michael Faison - Damned Connecticut | November 8, 2009


This article uses the Irish tales Tochmarc Emire ('The Wooing of Emer'), Cú Chulainn's relationship with Scáthach, and the battle between Fer Diad and Cú Chulainn in Táin Bó Cúailnge to begin to examine the unique nature of Gaelic culture.
I began to read direct translations of ancient Irish myths and sagas in the 1970s. Up until that point, I had only read about these stories – summaries, impressions, third-party observations, essays, evaluations, reports - but not the real thing or even translations of the real thing. Boy, was I in for a shock!
Tochmarc Emer - The Wooing of Emer
It seems to me now that the first actual tale I read was Tochmarc Emire ('The Wooing of Emer'), which involves the ancient Irish hero Cú Chulainn. His name means ‘The Hound of (the blacksmith) Culann, but that’s another story. At any rate, Cú falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Emer. He visits her at her lios, a kind of fortress made of earthen walls surrounding the family’s home and farm buildings. But she won’t have anything to do with him. He is, as she points out, “a beardless boy” without martial fame and of uncertain parentage. Was his father a god or a human? No one is quite sure at this point in the story.
Embarrassed and angry, Cú goes off to what is now Scotland for additional training in the Celtic martial arts with the best teacher of them all, the beautiful warrior-woman Scáthach. When his training is nearly complete, she grants him the "friendship of her thighs".
Cú is now ready for anything. Returning to Ireland, he marches up to Emer’s lios but is attacked by the many warriors of her household including her father, her brothers, her warrior-mother, and 24 more.
It’s a battle to the death. He kills them all. At which point Emer basically says, “Wow, what a guy! I love you, Cú Chulainn. Take me, I’m yours.”
What? Come again? Are you kidding me? What kind of a culture could produce that kind of story? Why would that seem natural and acceptable to the people who heard it 2,000 years ago and continued to hear it regularly up to about 170 years ago?
Before I had recovered from my shock, I read my next story about Cú Chulainn.
Táin Bó Cúailnge
In the great Irish epic called Táin Bó Cúailnge, “The Cattle Raid of Cúailnge”, Cú Chulainn is left to single-handedly defend the Kingdom of the Ulaid, Cú Chulainn’s people, against the forces of the Kingdom of the Connachta, my ancestors.
According to the story, he kills my people ten at a time, by the score, by the hundred, and finally challenges the Connachta to send out their best champion for single combat. Our best champion was Fer Diad, a wonderful young man who had fostered with Cú Chulainn as a child and had even trained with Cú in Scáthach’s school of martial arts. In other words, for most of their lives since the time they were babies, Fer Diad and Cú Chulainn had been, for nearly all intents and purposes, brothers.
The only problem, of course, was that they were hereditary enemies. The Ulaid and the Connachta had been fighting each other for centuries.
Despite the entreaties of the Connachta and our Queen Medb, Fer Diad repeatedly refuses to fight his foster-brother Cú. Unfortunately, in the end, he is pressured and tricked into doing so.
Fer Diad and Cú meet on the field of battle for three days. Every day, they slice flesh and bone off each other. Every night they try to heal each other’s wounds and fall asleep next to each other mourning what the next day will bring.
Finally, on the last day, Cú Chulainn uses the gae bolga, a monstrous many-pointed spear, to kill Fer Diad. Fer Diad dies in Cú’s arms. Overcome with grief, weeping as if his heart would break, Cú refuses to leave the body of his foster-brother even as the army of my ancestors advances to kill him. At last, Láeg, Cú’s charioteer, drags Cú away just in time.
There’s little doubt that this is the most moving depiction of tragedy in all of Irish literature in either Irish or English. Yet, unlike the bulk of Western tragedy exemplified by the Greek tradition in which members of the same family kill each other, this is cut from completely different cloth. Somehow, the Irish found it natural and acceptable to make great tragedy out the death of an hereditary enemy - someone whose death, in other societies, would be celebrated rather than mourned!
Well, I was flabbergasted. But I think the hint, the clue, the solution, the key to the riddle is right there before us in the story of Fer Diad. Fosterage.
In Gaelic Ireland, fosterage was the custom of having your children raised by another family under a formal contract.
Often, in order to seal a peace agreement, or to try to keep the peace, you would foster the children of your enemies, and have your children fostered by your enemies.
If your children were still at home, unfostered, by the time they were twelve, it would indicate that your family were nobodies, that you weren’t dangerous enough or powerful enough to have any enemies. So, to maintain prestige in a society which sometimes measured greatness by the greatness of your enemies, there was tremendous pressure to engage in the custom of fosterage.
Impact on Gaelic Law and Psyche?
The side effect, of course, was that your children could wind up knowing and loving your hereditary enemies more than they knew or loved you. This appears to be the explanation of Cú Chulainn’s and Fer Diad’s behavior explicitly intended by the various versions of the tale which have come down to us.
It could also be a reasonable explanation for acceptance in Gaelic culture of Emer’s indifference to the fate of her immediate family and her willingness to marry their killer. In other words, the tale’s Gaelic audience would expect Emer not to know her family very well and not to love them very much.
Now, I realize that’s a harsh statement, but it also goes a long way to explain why the great sin, the greatest crime, in Gaelic society was fingal – the slaying of a member of your own family. In a society in which a strong love for one’s family often might not exist because of customary early removal of the child from the family, we might expect the creation of a law by which to protect the family from that child.
Using as examples only two tales, Tochmarc Emire and Táin Bó Cúailnge, you can see what I mean when I say that this was and is a unique culture, and one which has continued to amaze me ever since.
Copyright © 2015 by Gerald A. John Kelly
All Rights Reserved - No Reproduction Without Written Permission of the Author


A colon usually indicates a pause after a cue or suggestion, or indicates a hint for the following context or summarizes the anterior context.
A colon is used in the following cases:
Used after the general or suggestive words to prompt for the following context 用于总说性或提示性词语后
北京紫禁城有四座城门：武门、神武门、东华门、西华门。The Forbidden City in Beijing has four gates: Wu gate, north gate, Donghua gate, Xihua gate.
她高兴地说：“我们去好好庆祝一下吧”。She said happily, “let’s go and celebrate”.
Used to summarize the above-mentioned points 用于总结上文
张华考上了北京大学；李萍进了中等技术学校；我在百货公司当售货员：我们都有光明的前途。Zhang Hua admitted to Peking University; Li Pingjin went to a secondary technical school; I worked as a shop assistant in a department store: we all have a bright future.
Used after the words that need to be explained, introducing further details o explanations 用于需要解释的词语后边，表示引出解释或说明。
After the address forms of a letter or speech. 用在书信、讲话稿中称谓语或称呼语之后。
同志们，朋友们：现在开会了……Comrades, friends: We are meeting now.
A colon can not be used in a sentence in which there is already one. If the second colon is necessary, a new sentence must be made.


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Irving’s water abides by the recommended best practices endorsed by various U.S. public health organizations, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It has concluded that fluoride in water helps prevent tooth decay, improves oral health and helps maintain bone structure.
In addition, the fluoride concentration in Irving’s water is slightly below the recommended level of 0.7 parts per million (ppm) endorsed by the U.S. Public Health Services and is well below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's maximum level of 4.0 ppm. Community water fluoridation is recommended by nearly all public health, medical and dental organizations including the American Dental Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, U.S. Public Health Service and the World Health Organization.
The Texas Department of State Health Services suggests the following websites for information about community water fluoridation:
American Dental Association: ada.org/fluoride
Campaign for Dental Health: ilikemyteeth.org/
Fluoride for Texas: fluoridefortexas.txohc.org/
Texas Fluoridation Program: dshs.state.tx.us/epitox/fluoride.shtm


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Note: The following safety information is printed at the recommendation of Cheryl Rost, manager of Risk Management/Safety
Here’s a quiz from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Test your knowledge of sleep, then pass the test on to your workers – particularly those who drive as part of their job.
1. Everyone has a biological clock.
2. Drinking coffee cures drowsiness while driving.
3. I can tell when I'm going to fall asleep.
4. I'm a safe driver so it doesn't matter if I'm sleepy.
5. I am incapable of napping.
6. Nearly everyone gets enough sleep.
7. Being sleepy affects your perception.
8. Young people need less sleep (than older people).
9. If I sleep a lot now I won't need to sleep as much later.
10. Even people who sleep eight hours may not be well rested.
Answers and explanations
1. True. Your biological clock tells you when it's lunchtime, gives you pep at certain times of day and affects your body temperature. Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. there's a lull in the body clock, which can cause sleepiness and leave people at risk for injury. Another lull occurs between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. - a particularly dangerous time for drivers.
2. False. While coffee can temporarily reduce drowsiness, it is not a substitute for sleep. A coffee-fueled but sleep-deprived driver can lapse into micro-sleeps and crash (literally).
3. False. Eight in 10 people think they can predict when they are going to fall asleep. They are often wrong. If you are drowsy or sleep-deprived you can fall asleep and never know it. Signs that you are at risk for falling asleep include constant yawning, difficulty focusing your eyes, no memory of driving the past few miles and lane drifting or tailgating. Stop and nap.
4. False. The only safe driver is an alert driver.
5. False. Many people insist they cannot nap, yet even people who say they are not tired will quickly fall asleep in a darkened room if they have not been getting enough sleep. Stop your car and recline. You may be surprised at how easily you fall asleep.
6. False. One in two people report occasional sleeping problems. If you awaken rested you are getting enough sleep. If you have to drag yourself out of bed, you aren't getting enough shuteye.
7. True. Have you ever driven at night and seen something that you thought was an animal, but turned out to be a paper bag? That's one way sleepy drivers misjudge their surroundings.
8. False. Teenagers and young adults actually need more sleep than people 30 and older do, yet they are often sleep-deprived.
9. False. You can't save sleep up ahead of time and borrow it back later. When your sleep debt gets big enough you will fall asleep, no matter what you are doing.
10. True. If you wake up feeling tired and not rested you may have a sleep disorder. See your doctor.
By Barbara Manning Grimm,


This timeline details all Kings and Queens of the Netherlands from 1815 to present day.
In 1795, the Batavian Revolution had overthrown the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands which was led by a hereditory Stadtholder. The Batavian Republic ended in 1806 when Napoleon placed his brother on the throne as King Louis I. In 1810 the Kingdom of the Netherlands became part of the French Empire. When Napoleon fell in October 1813 the Netherlands became independent again. Willem Frederik, son of the last Stadtholder, William V, became Sovereign Prince. In 1815 He became King Willem I.


- What problems were germane to the decolonization process in the Malay Peninsula?
- The anti-colonial struggles in West Africa were led by the new elite of Western educated Africans. Examine.
- Why did the industrial revolution first occur in England? Discuss the quality of life of the people there during the industrialization. How does it compare with that in India at present?
- To what extent can Germany be held responsible for causing the two World Wars? Discuss critically
- What were the events that led to the Suez Crisis in 1956? How did it deal a final blow to Britain’s self-image as a world power?
- The New Economic Policy – 1921 of Lenin had influenced the policies adopted by India soon after independence. Evaluate.
- “‘Latecomer’ Industrial Revolution in Japan involved certain factors that were markedly different from what West had experienced.” Analyze.
- “Africa was chopped into States artificially created by accidents of European competition.” Analyze.
- “American Revolution was an economic revolt against mercantilism.” Substantiate.
- What policy instruments were deployed to contain the Great Economic Depression?


It’s important that all children find themselves and their beliefs reflected in the books they see around them. This blog post is showcasing two books based in the Muslim world.
‘Night of the Moon – a Muslim Holiday Story’ by Hena Khan, illustrated by Julie Paschkis (Chronicle Books)
This beautiful picture book follows the story of seven-year-old Pakistani-American girl, Yasmeen as she celebrates the Muslim holidays of Ramadan and Eid.
Each night, Yasmeen watches for the Moon’s first crescent, signalling the beginning of a new month in the Islamic calendar – the month of Ramadan which is celebrated by Muslim’s all over the world. She and her family begin a month of very special celebrations and helping other people. Yasmeen watches the moon fatten then disappear again, meaning the month of Ramadan’s over and it’s time to celebrate the Night of the Moon and the gift-giving holiday of Eid.
The vibrant illustrations capture the spirit of Islamic art and add a cocooning sense of warmth. The story perfectly captures the sense of family and giving which is central to Eid. It did not go unnoticed that food plays a central role in bringing families and communities together. The descriptions of shared meals were a highlight for me.
A fascinating insight into the modern celebration of ancient traditions. 3+
‘Crescent Moons and Pointed Minarets – a Muslim Book of Shapes’ by Hena Khan, illustrated by Mehrdokht Amini (Chronicle Books)
Set out on a shape treasure hunt in this celebration of the shapes and traditions of the Muslim world.
Readers travel through the town spotting new shapes and learning new vocabulary at every turn. The arch of the mihrab, the circle of the daft. Something interesting’s hiding around every corner.
When reading this with my own children, they had a lot of questions about some of the unusual words we encountered. Handily, there’s a glossary at the back of the book which explains their meanings and helps with pronunciation.
There’s also an author’s note at the end of the story which tells us why Muslim art focusses of shapes and motifs from nature rather than faces. And about the significant contributions to science that Muslim mathematicians and astronomers made, and how this influenced Islamic art.
Another fascinating book with so many different themes to explore. 3+
*Many thanks to Chronicle Books for sending me these titles to review*


A streamgraph is a type of stacked area chart. It is modified so that the streams are centered around the y-axis and often has a flowing organic shape which can be visually appealing. The size of each individual stream reflects the size of values in each category.
Don't forget you can easily create a free streamgraph using Displayr's streamgraph maker.
Creating a streamgraph
This chart is created by selecting Insert > Visualization > Streamgraphs. We can input data to the streamgraph in three different ways.
Option 1: Output in 'Pages' - select a table output. For instance, in the streamgraph above, we used the output from Google Trends. Note that for a streamgraph the rownames of the output must be dates or numeric.
Option 2: Variables in 'Data' - select two or more variables from an imported Data Set. The first variable, which will be used for the x axis, should be a date or numeric variable. The remaining variables will be used as y coordinates of different series on the streamgraph.
Option 3: Paste or type data - directly enter data into a spreadsheet object into Displayr. This input should be in a similar form as the first option, with date or numeric row names in the far left column.
Customizing the streamgraph
In most cases, the default settings will produce a useable chart. However, if you want to change the colors used in the streamgraph or to adjust the x or y axis ticks, additional controls can be found in the Chart tab of the Object Inspector.
In the streamgraph below, we have changed both the tick format for both the x and y axis. Note that you need to change the axis number type before you can specify formats. Depending on the number type, different format types will be offered. You can also set the format type to custom which will allow you to set any D3 format.
Because the streamgraph is so specialized, it is not as flexible as many of the other chart types. In particular, the margins do not adjust automatically. In the second example, changing the y axis type to scientific notion also increased the width of the tick labels. To account for this, we needed to increase the left margin from 30 to 45.
The streamgraph can be visually appealing, but it also suffers from a number of legibility issues. Specifically, its centering around the y-axis makes it difficult to judge the height of distinct series. You may instead want to try using an Area Chart. For instance, compare the streamgraphs above with the (stacked) area chart below.
Want to create your own streamgraph? Get started, for free!


The federal government’s announcement that it will ban asbestos has been met with acclaim by media commentators, who say it is long overdue.
On December 16 the Canadian Ministers of Science, Health and Environment and Climate Change and Public Services and Procurement jointly announced that the government will “move forward with a whole-of-government approach to fulfill its commitment to ban asbestos and asbestos-containing products by 2018.”
New regulations will ban the manufacture, use and importing of asbestos under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
The government said it already strictly conforms to the legislative requirements for health and safety, and has already banned asbestos from Public Services and Procurement Canada’s new construction and renovation projects. Now the government is going to create an expanded inventory of all federal buildings that already contain asbestos.
The government will also work with the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes to remove asbestos references from the National Building Code. The recently released 2015 code contained changes that prohibit the use of of asbestos cement drain pipes in large buildings, and prohibit the use of asbestos drain pipes and millwork in smaller buildings. The Commission is currently working to remove the remaining asbestos references from the code.
In the near future, said the government, it will propose amendments to the Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations to prescribe the maximum level of exposure to asbestos and the requirements for its storage, handling, education and labelling. However, if asbestos is tightly bound and left undisturbed there are no significant health risks, said the press release.
Asbestos is the common name for a group of naturally occurring minerals, all of which carry health risks. At the height of its use, asbestos was found in more than 3,000 applications worldwide, including roofing, thermal and electrical insulation, cement pipe and sheets, flooring, gaskets, friction materials (e.g. brake pads and shoes) and a variety of other materials. The production and use of asbestos have declined since 1970.
Asbestos was declared a human carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 1987. The inhalation of airborne asbestos fibres can cause lung damage, including lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis.
To read the government press release of December 16, click here.
To read an article in the Globe and Mail, click here.
Here is a link to the Mesothelioma + Asbestos Awareness Center


[Photo of Emma Marwedel gravestone by Michael Colbruno]
Emma Marwedel was born in Munden, Germany to a family of social standing. However, her parents died when she as young and she was left with limited means to support herself. She became an ardent feminist and in 1865 founded the first women’s right organization in Germany. She became committed to training women in the industrial arts.
She trained at the famed Froebel School in Hamburg, where the benefits of early childhood education were championed. In 1870, American feminist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody brought Marwedel to New York to found kindergartens and prepare women to become skilled industrial workers. From 1872-1876 she set up schools in Washington D.C. In 1876, famed suffragette Caroline Severance brought Marwedel to Los Angeles where she founded the California Model Kindergarten and the Pacific Model Training School for Kindergartners, both funded by Severance.
MVC docent Jane Leroe discusses Emma Marwedel:
Frustrated with her work in Los Angeles, Emma Marwedel moved to Oakland and then San Francisco where she helped found the San Francisco Kindergarten Society, which established the first free kindergarten on the West Coast. She was a founding member of the California Kindergarten Union and she opened an evening vocational training school for boys.
She was a well-known lecturer, author and advocate for educational reform. She trained many teachers who went on to become reformers in the kindergarten movement and her work helped establish kindergartens across the United States.
Marwedel was honored at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892 with a large oil portrait in the California Room. She died a year later at the German Hospital in San Francisco. Her gravestone reads, “She Loved Little Children.”
Subscribe to Michael Colbruno's Mountain View Cemetery Bio Tour by Email


Heartbeating is a common technique to check whether network connection is alive. The idea is that each end of the connection sends small packet od data called "hearetbeat" once in a while. If the peer doesn't receive a heartbeat for some time (typically a multiply of the interval between the heartbeats), the connection is considered broken.
Interestingly, TCP protocol doesn't provide heartbeats (there are optional keep-alives that are operating on scale of hours, but these are not really useful for swift dectection of network disruption). In short, if network connection is broken, TCP endpoints are not notified about the fact.
The problem is mitigated by the fact that if the application at the endpoint terminates or crashes, the peer is notified via FIN or RST packet and is thus aware of the connection failure. Therefore, you are going to experience the problem of missing failure notification only if the network itself is broken, e.g. if your router crashes, cable is cut, your ISP experiences a failure etc. In such case the TCP endpoint will live on forever, trying to communicate with the inaccessible peer.
For many applications, e.g. web browsers, this kind of behaviour makes sense. If the user feels the browser is stuck he can just hit the "reload" button. The browser will then try to open a new TCP connection. The attempt at the initial TCP handshake fails and user gets notified about the fact.
For other kind of applications — specifically those with high-availability requirements — the missing failure notification is a big deal. Imagine a critical application that has redundant access points to the network, for example via two different ISPs. The idea is to use one of the providers and fall back to the other one only if the first one becomes unaccessible. The idea is nice, but there's a catch: If TCP implementation doesn't let you know that the peer is inaccessible you have no reason to switch to the fall-back provider. You will continue using the failed provider, possibly missing some critical data.
That's why critical applications as well as tools intended to build such critical applications (e.g. message queuing systems) re-implement heartbeating on top of TCP over and over again. This article tries to explain the problems encountered when doing so.
Typically, business data (messages) are mixed with heartbeats within a single TCP bytestream. The main concern is thus to prevent one messing with the other. In other words, heartbeats shouldn't disrupt data transfer and data transfer should not cause hertbeating to misbehave, for example by reporting false connection failures or, coversely, not reporting actual connection failures.
The problem hits once the application stops reading data from the TCP connection. The heartbeats may be arriving, however, they cannot be read, because there are messages stuck in TCP receive buffer in front of them. Given that TCP doesn't provide a way to read data from the middle of the receive buffer, the application has no idea whether the heartbeats are arriving or not.
It's not immediately visible whether this is an actual problem or whether it can be solved by some clever trick. To get better understanding, consider the following questions and answers:
Q: Well, we can read those obnoxious business data, store it in a memory for a while and check whether heartbeats are still arriving, right?
A: The problem with that is that the application may be not reading data for a long time. For example, it may be processing some complex and lengthy task and ignore incoming messages while doing so. Or it may be waiting for user input and the user went out for luch. Whatever the reason, in the meantime all the data from the TCP connection have to be read to memory to be able to check whether heartbeats are arriving as expected. So, if there's a lot of incoming data, the application is ultimately going to exhaust all available memory and get killed by the operating system.
Q: A-ha! That's what we have message brokers for. They are supposed to have a big disk space available, and can store large amount of data without failing. Thus, if have a message broker in the middle, we are safe, no?
A: The problem is that heartbeats should flow in both ways. Even if message broker is able to deal with large amounts of data to store, the client application has to do the same thing to make sure that it receives heartbeats from the broker. And given that application is likely to run on a modest desktop, on a mobile phone or on a blade server with no local disk space, the memory is going to be exhausted pretty quickly.
Q: OK, but wait a second! If application is not receiving the data at the moment we don't care whether network failure is detected straight away. It should be sufficient to detect the failure once the application starts receiving data again and do all the failure handling, such as falling back to a different ISP, at that time.
A: Unfortunately, no. Imagine you want to send data instead of receiving them. In such case you won't detect the connection failure because you are not reading the data, including potential heartbeats, from the connection. Consequently, you will send the data to a broken connection. The data are not going to be delivered and — even worse — you are not going to be notified about the fact!
Taking the previous Q&A into account, there's only one way to deal with the problem: Preallocate a buffer at the endpoint to store any outstanding inbound data and introduce some kind of flow control to make sure that the buffer is never over-flowed. For example:
This kind of alorithm ensures that there are no intervening data in TCP buffers that would prevent heartbeats to be passed through the connection without being stuck in the middle.
Thus, when you are evaluating a solution that implements heartbeating on top of TCP here is a checklist to help you to find out whether it actually works:
The above being said, there is one subtler aspect of the problem, an aspect that hints at a more general problem with Internet stack itself.
In the case of heartbeats on top of TCP as well as in the case of multiplexing on top of TCP (read the related article here), one has to re-implement a big part of TCP (windowing and flow control) on top of TCP proper. It sounds almost like an engineering anti-pattern. The functionality should not be copy-pasted among the layers of the stack, rather, it should be localised at one well-defined layer. For example, routing is implemented by network layer. End-to-end relaibility is implemented by transport layer. And so on. However, what we are getting here is the same feature implemented redundantly at various layers of the stack.
Obviously, the right solution would be implement a new transport protocol directly on top of IP protocol, one that would provide desired functionality — failure detection and/or multiplexing — directly, without duplicating the features.
And, as a matter of fact, the above was already done. The protocol built directly on top of IP with both heartbeating and multiplexing is called SCTP and is available out of the box in most operating systems.
And here comes the problem: SCTP is not used, even for projects where those features are needed. Instead, they are lousily re-implemented on top of TCP over and over again.
What's going on here?
I mean, SCTP has all features necessary for networking business-critical applications. By now, 13 years since its standardisation, it should be used almost exclusively by banks and such.
Except that it's not.
What happens is that developers are not aware of SCTP. That admins are not fond of having non-TCP packets on the network. That firewalls are often configured to discard anything other than TCP or UDP. That NAT solutions sold by various vendors are not designed to work with SCTP. And so on, and so on.
In short, although designers of the Internet cleverly split the network layer (IP) from transport layer (TCP/UDP) to allow different transports for users with different QoS requirements, in reality — propelled by actions of multitude of a-bit-less-clever developers — the Internet stack have gradually fossilised, until, by now, there is no realistic chance of any new L4 protocol gaining considerable traction.
The process of fossilisation of the Internet stack seems to proceed even further. Gradually, HTTP traffic is becoming dominant (consider, for example, moving from traditional SMTP-based emailing to gmail) and at some point it can possibly turn any non-HTTP protocol into persona non grata in the Internet world.
Even further: With advance of WebSockets we now have a full-blown transport protocol, an equivalent to TCP, on top of HTTP!
And it's unlikely that that will be the end of the story.
So, while re-implementing TCP functionality on top of TCP may seem like a silly engineering solution when you look at it with narrow mindset, once you accept that Internet stack is formed by layers of gradually fossilising protocols, it may actually be the correct solution, one that takes political reality into consideration as well as technical details.
And hopefully, at some point, when everbody have already migrated to some future TCP-on-top-of-TCP-on-top-of-TCP-on-top-of-TCP-on-top-of-TCP protocol, we can create a shotcut and get rid of those good-for-nothing intermediate layers.
April 24th, 2013


An Urban Implosion
While many efforts toward conservation focus on making transportation more efficient, Paolo Soleri's urban laboratory, Arcosanti, demonstrates that biology holds the answer to our conservation woes. His alternative to urban sprawl is based on evolution and likens the cityscape to an evolving organism: "In nature, as an organism evolves, it increases complexity, and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. The city too . . . must follow the same process of complexification and miniaturization to become a more lively container for the social, cultural and spiritual evolution of humankind."


UT Southwestern Medical Center is one of a handful of top research institutions evaluating a promising new medication researchers hope can reduce the severity and frequency of asthma attacks in inner-city children, a population known to have a high prevalence of severe asthma.
“Children living in inner cities are exposed to higher allergen levels and tend to have more severe asthma than children living elsewhere,” said Dr. Rebecca Gruchalla, chief of allergy at UT Southwestern. “We want to see whether this new treatment can help children with allergic asthma, for which the environmental factors are more difficult to control.”
Indoor allergens commonly found in inner cities, such as dust mites, cockroaches, molds and animal dander, are significant allergens that may contribute to the severity of a child’s asthma. UT Southwestern, along with 10 other sites around the country, is participating in a National Institutes of Health-supported evaluation of anti-IgE therapy for children. This therapy is already being used successfully in adults and adolescents who have asthma.
“IgE antibodies are the fuel in the immune system that perpetuates the asthmatic reaction,” said Dr. Gruchalla, serves as principal investigator at the Dallas site. Some people are more genetically prone to develop IgE antibodies, which are molecules produced by white blood cells in response to exposure to allergens. IgE antibodies can make asthma worse in those people who are sensitive to particular allergens.
The Inner City Anti-IgE Therapy for Asthma (ICATA) study involves about 50 children at each site. It will evaluate Xolair (omalizumab), a drug that binds to and inactivates IgE antibodies.
“Xolair ‘sops up’ the IgE that’s there, decreases the receptors for IgE, and regulates many things that pertain to allergy and the asthmatic response,” Dr. Gruchalla said.
The two-year Dallas portion of the study targets children 6 to 20 years old who reside within the Dallas Independent School District. Individuals interested in participating should call 214-648-5436 for additional requirements and information.
Participating children will receive an injection every two or four weeks and medical care for their asthma for nearly two years. Laboratory analyses of biological and environmental samples from the home also will occur during the same time period.
The $15 million study is funded through the Inner-City Asthma Consortium (ICAC), an NIH-sponsored, $55.8 million, six-year contract to investigate treatments and causes of asthma in urban children. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. and Genentech, which are providing about $8 million toward the study, are also donating an additional $6 million in medication. The balance of funding will be provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The consortium is administered by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other research sites in addition to UT Southwestern are: the University of Arizona, Boston University, Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Johns Hopkins University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Gruchalla has led the Dallas arm of the Inner City Asthma Consortium for four years. She is also principal investigator of an asthma screening project in Dallas schools and project director for Community Leadership in Preventing Asthma, a study evaluating links between asthma-associated morbidity and allergen levels in schools and homes.
Other UT Southwestern investigators in the ICATA study are Dr. William Neaville, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics and internal medicine, and Dr. Vanthaya Gan, clinical professor of pediatrics.
About UT Southwestern Medical Center
UT Southwestern Medical Center, one of the premier medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. Its more than 1,400 full-time faculty members ? including four active Nobel prize winners, more than any other medical school in the world ? are responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and are committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide medical care in 40 specialties to nearly 89,000 hospitalized patients and oversee 2.1 million outpatient visits a year.


Why in News?
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has been merged with another central police organisation the Breau of Police Research (BPRD) by the government with an aim to improve the efficiency of development works related to policing.
Facts ( for prelims)
1.NCRB- The NCRB was established in 1986 with a mandate to empower Indian police with information technology solutions and criminal intelligence to enable them to enforce the law effectively.
2.It is also implementing the ambitious crime and criminal tracking network (CCTNS)
3.CCTNS- It is a project under Indian government for creating a comprehensive and integrated system for effective policing through e-Governance.The system includes nationwide online tracking system by integrating more than 14,000 police stations across the country.
4.BPRD- Created in 1970,it is the national police organisation to study, research and develop on subjects and issues related to policing.
5.Both the organisations function under the Union home ministry.
1.BPR&D will oversee all the data collection related to Crime in India, Suicides and Accidental Deaths, Prison Statistics and Fingerprints which was earlier done by NCRB.
2.The BPRD Director General (DG) will be the head of the merged new entity.
Rationale behind the merger–
1.The govt has stated that the merger will,”improve administrative efficiency and optimal utilisation of resources”.
2.It will boost crime data collection and research efforts of the two organisations.
The major criticsm is that, the two organisation have different functions-
The NCRB is responsible for collecting data related to crimes where as the BPRD primarily focuses on the study and research of development of policing .Hence it is unclear as to how they are expected to work together.


From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level : Nadaprabhu Kempegowda
Mains level : Not Much
A bronze statue of Nadaprabhu Kempegowda, credited to be the founder of Bengaluru, will be unveiled soon at the premises of the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA), Bengaluru.
Who was Nadaprabhu Kempegowda?
- Nadaprabhu Kempegowda, a 16th century chieftain of the Vijayanagara empire, is credited as the founder of Bengaluru.
- It is said that he conceived the idea of a new city while hunting with his minister, and later marked its territory by erecting towers in four corners of the proposed city.
- Kempegowda is also known to have developed around 1,000 lakes in the city to cater to drinking and agricultural needs.
- He was from the dominant agricultural Vokkaliga community in south Karnataka.
Political motives behind
- Kempegowda is an iconic figure among Karnataka’s second most dominant Vokkaliga community after Lingayats.
- Political parties plan to woo the Vokkaliga community by honouring Kempegowda.


Traditional weaving is an incredibly important component of identity in the high Andes, along with traditional alpaca herding and the use of the native Quechua language. Since Quechua was originally an oral language, weaving was the means by which people communicated their thoughts and feelings about the natural world, how stories were told, and histories recorded. Woven textiles were an important measure of wealth, and played a central role in civil and religious ceremonies. Everything from the spin of the yarn and the symbols woven into the textiles, to the colors used and techniques employed, conveys a wealth of meaning about the weaver and where she came from.
WHAT IS WEAVING?
Weaving is the interlacing of a set of warp with a set of weft, essentially creating a grid pattern of interlocking yarns. The warp is the “y” axis of the grid, or longitudinal yarns, which are kept under tension, and the weft is the “x” axis, or latitudinal yarns, which are passed over and under the warp.
A loom is used to facilitate the weaving process, by providing a means of tensioning the warp and creating space (the “shed”) through which to pass the weft. Looms can be highly complex or very simple, using a frame, the weaver’s body, or even gravity to provide the necessary tension.
The Backstrap Weaving Loom
In the Andes, traditional Quechua backstrap weaving uses the backstrap loom, the oldest form of loom in the world. An entirely non-mechanized instrument, it is constructed with wood, bone, and strings, and is easily portable from home to field, wrapped inside the traditional lliqlla or manta (carrying shawl) that every woman wears.
...it is the warp that determines the visible color, structure, and artistic character of the piece.
Left: A diagram of a simple backstrap loom, based on the wonderful illustration in the book Guatemalan Textiles Today, by Marylyn Anderson, page 52. Note that there are very few yarns here, and the heddles are greatly oversized for illustration purposes.
The backstrap weaving loom is an elegant tool in its simplicity, effectiveness, and portability. The loom is made up of nine core parts, with a certain amount of variation depending on region and the needs of the specific project. The warp is wound between two warp bars (B and H), one at each end, either singly, for plain areas, or in pairs, in areas of the weaving which will be patterned. A rope (A), is attached to both ends of one warp bar (B), which is simply a heavy piece of wood; the rope is secured to a post or other stationary object. The backstrap (I) is fastened to the other warp bar and passes around of the back of the weaver, who usually kneels on the ground to weave. By moving her body, the weaver can control the amount of tension in the warp yarns throughout the weaving process.
The t’oqoro or shed string (C) helps to keep the yarns of the loom from tangling when this portable loom is set up or taken down, and is also for changing the shed. The shed is created using the shed stick (D) and the heddle stick (E). The heddle stick (illawa in Quechua) is wound with string loops (heddles) that reach down through the top yarns and loop around each of the bottom yarns of the warp.
When the weaver lifts up on the heddle stick, the bottom yarns are pulled up above the top yarns, creating a shed. With the appropriate set of warp yarns raised, the weaver then, deftly and with incredible speed, picks up certain warp yarns and lets others drop, using either her fingers or a thin wooden tool. This selection of warp yarns creates one row of the woven pattern in the textile.
The weaver then passes the weft or mini through, using a shuttle or bobbin (G). Once the shuttle has passed through, the batten (F) is used to push the horizontal weft thread into place. The weft is further beaten into place using a small pointed bone tool called a r’uki (the beater (J). The beating process does a great deal to determine the density of the overall finished product.
At this point, the shed is changed by pulling the shed stick back toward the weaver, pushing the bottom yarns back down below the top yarns. The process is repeated, picking up and dropping warp yarns and securing them with the weft, as another line of the pattern is created. The warp bar closest to the weaver (H) is used to roll up the completed portion of the weaving, keeping it out of the way.
Four-Post LoomThe four-post loom is a form of a horizontal loom in which four stakes or posts are hammered into the ground in a rectangular arrangement.
The warp beams are secured to the posts across the short ends of the rectangle, using woven straps. The warp is thus suspended with tension, parallel to the earth, and the weaver sits at one end on the ground and works from there. The four post loom can be modified into a six post arrangement, which allows the weaver to set up two interlocking warps, each with a separate color design. Known as discontinuous warp weaving, this is an extremely difficult and little-practiced weaving technique. A combination of the four-post and backstrap techniques uses two posts to secure one end of the warp, while a back strap secures the other around the weaver, who sits on the ground and applies tension from there.
The Warping Process
Warping a textile involves two people. If the warp is being constructed horizontally, then four posts will be set in the ground: the corner posts of a rectangle. These will be placed at distances that reflect the intended size of the finished weaving. On the short ends of the rectangle, a warp bar will be secured horizontally, forming the ends of the warp. Balls of yarn are then tossed back and forth by the weavers sitting at either end. Each time a ball of yarn is passed, it is wrapped around the warping bar. For areas of design or pallay, two balls are tossed at a time in order to create the “pair” of warp yarns necessary for forming the design. This process is repeated until all the warp yarns are laid, in the correct order, and the weaving process is ready to begin.
If the warp is to be created vertically, then two posts will be placed in the ground at a distance that reflects the final length of the piece; the height of each post will determine the width of the warp. The warping is laid in essentially the same manner, tossing balls of yarn back and forth and wrapping them around each post.
Warping can take hours, but it is a social process which often involves a lot of conversation. Much of this conversation revolves around decisions of color and pallay. These decisions set the overall artistic palette for the weaving. Warping is generally a positive and animated activity - full of promise and anticipation!
The vast majority of Andean weaving is warp-faced, in which the weft yarns are completely hidden by the warp during the weaving process. As a result, it is entirely the warp which determines the visible color structure and artistic character of the piece. There are several warp-faced weaving techniques common in the Andes:
Complementary warp technique creates a pattern which appears as a positive on one side, and a negative on the other. For example, a black river on a white background on one side shows as a white river on a black background on the other side. This is the most common weaving technique in the high Andes.
Supplementary warp technique involves creating a pattern that sits on a background color and appears on only one side of the fabric. This technique involves the introduction of an additional set of warp yarns which are used to create the pattern but are not integral to the structure of the weaving itself. It is a more difficult and much less common technique.
Discontinuous warp technique allows a weaver to create patterns within the warp that change along the length of the fabric. One way to create such a warp is with a six-post horizontal loom (described above, under Looms). This allows the weaver to interlock two separate warps, each sharing the middle warp bar. Weavings produced with this technique are incredibly complex and beautiful. Currently, this technique is disappearing and is only commonly practiced in one region.
Weft-faced weaving techniques, such as tapestry (tapiz in Spanish), allow the weaver to create intricate patterns using the weft yarns. Tapestry is usually created on a fixed loom frame, with work proceeding from bottom to top. This is a technique often practiced by men, and is relatively uncommon in comparison to warp-faced techniques.
Weft-faced techniques are also employed in the creation of golón, the highly colorful trim seen adorning many of the women’s traditional skirts or polleras. This technique is very complex and time-consuming, and requires many small shuttles, each carrying different color yarns.
The way a weaving is finished can play an enormous role in the overall quality of the completed work. Finishing provides the final touches that communicate a sense of care and attention to detail. There are many finishing techniques for the different types of products: below we present just a few:
a. Chukay is the technique of stitching two smaller woven pieces together using embroidery stitches. b. This runner has gorgeous yarn fringe. c. This chuspa features a woven edge, which has been finished in a yarn fringe before being sewn onto the bag d. Another chuspa is finished in a wide yarn fringe. e. A runner with a diamond pattern edging (called ñawi awapa), which is woven separately, then sewn on. f. This bracelet is finished with beaded edges.


This guide is designed to be help with research in Professor Fregnanc-Clave's LIT 180 class in the Winter 2019 term.
Questions and comments about this guide can be directed to Senior Reference Librarian Dick Grefe.
Geographic origin of the European Romani samples (red dots) analyzed in the present study. Numbers in parentheses indicate sample sizes. Gray shades represent Romani population estimates by country according to the Council of Europe. Blue numbers indicate the approximate dates for the arrival of the Romani in each country.
[ From article in Current Biology : https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)01260-2 ]


Many people associate depression with a mental or emotional state of mind, but there are also a number of physical symptoms of depression. Headaches, digestive ailments, insomnia, muscle fatigue, loss of appetite or even an increased appetite can all be physical symptoms of depression. Some physical aspects of depression may appear at the onset, while others may be triggered after days of general listlessness or disinterest in the outside world.
Some physical symptoms of depression are considered warning flags for a deepening mental condition. General body aches may be mistaken for the first signs of influenza, but those who are susceptible to bouts of depression may recognize them as early warning signs of an impending slide. Moderate to severe headaches may also be one of the first physical symptoms of clinical depression to manifest themselves.
General feelings of fatigue and muscular pain can also accompany clinical depression, which makes it more difficult for sufferers to remain active or productive. Besides the emotional feelings of sadness and unworthiness associated with depression, the physical effects of fatigue and muscle ache can also cause sufferers to seek comfort in a darkened bedroom or other isolated area. The darkness may help alleviate headache pain, and the bed offers support of weakened muscles.
Some sufferers also report such physical symptoms of depression as sleep disorders. It is not uncommon for a depressed person to sleep at least 10-12 hours a day, nor is it uncommon for some sufferers to experience insomnia. Intrusive thoughts can interrupt a depressed person’s ability to fall asleep or remain asleep. The overwhelming sense of sadness or disinterest in life can also sap a sufferer of his or her motivation to get out of bed or begin his or her normal daily routine.
Eating disorders can also be physical symptoms of depression. Many sufferers find it difficult to eat regular meals at normal hours. Depression can suppress the usual pangs of hunger, as well as trigger excessive acid production through stress. It can also have the opposite effect on some with clinical depression, however. Some people who become emotionally depressed will become binge eaters as a way to self-medicate.
Other physical symptoms of depression could include self-mutilation as negative reinforcement, or a complete loss of interest in personal hygiene. While suicidal thoughts are common emotional manifestations of depression, some sufferers may indulge in self-destructive physical behavior as well. Binge drinking to excess or other destructive behavior may be considered side effects of a severe bout of depression. Professional counseling may be the best way to address both the mental and physical symptoms of depression.


Reviewed by Greg Burris (Florida State University)
We can put away the pitchforks and torches; David J. Staley is not a history heretic trying to convert us to cliometricians. This book, an address to his fellow historians, proposes a reexamination of visual methodologies. As Staley notes on several occasions, he sees the computer more like the telescope than the printing press, an instrument of visual inquiry more than a word processor. Staley is careful to be clear that he is not saying that visual history is better. It is simply another tool that historians can put into their repertoire. He calls on historians not to let past mistakes of particular historians prejudice us against useful visual and quantitative methods. However, he also gently tells digital historians not to fall into the same hubris as the cliometricians. Prose has been the medium of historians for 2,400 years, and history begins with the invention of the written word. Computers may add dynamite to our tools next to our mining picks, but that does not mean blowing things up is always appropriate, or that we should start throwing the dynamite at each other ... again.
When Staley uses the term “visualization,” he is not talking about the pretty pictures that we use to decorate a text or that our students use to try to take up some of the space on their term papers. He is using a definition akin to that used in science. A visualization is a method of efficiently displaying large amounts of information. A map is the most familiar type of visualization to historians. How long would it take to convey all the information of a map in prose? You would need to explain not only a list of countries and cities but also which bordered which; the shape of those borders; the direction, distance, and angle of each to every other country or city; and the kind of terrain that was between them. We use a map to convey spatial information, but there are many other types of visualizations that could be useful to historians.


The fabulous world of nutrients
Dominik Martin-Creuzburg describes his group's research: "We investigate the importance of essential nutrients for aquatic and terrestrial consumers - such as crustaceans, fish, spiders, bats, birds - and try to assess the consequences of nutrient deficiency for trophic interactions and ecosystem processes against the background of anthropogenic influences and global change. Our approach addresses fundamental, nutrient-related questions of physiology, ecology, and evolution, spans multiple levels of biological organization and complexity, encompasses a wide range of molecular and analytical methods, and includes laboratory, mesocosm, and field experiments."
The nutrition influences growth and reproduction of animals. In addition to elemental nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, animals depend on an adequate supply of essential biochemical nutrients, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), sterols, and certain amino acids. The availability of these essential biochemicals is highly dependent on the abundance and species diversity of primary producers and the efficiency of transfer to higher trophic levels. Nutrient deficiencies can have a significant impact on the growth and reproduction of an individual, thus affecting the dynamics of populations and the transfer of substances and energy in the food web.


Although there are countless facts within a scientific disciplines, and numerous theories for organizing or explaining those facts, there are very few approaches to constructing new theories. That is, most theories share a number of fundamental assumptions. In this class, we will learn the two core sets of assumptions -- or core models -- of perception: The computational approach and the ecological approach.
You can find this course on moodle
Over 60% of the human brain is dedicated to perceiving the world around us. Most philosophies of the mind explicitly state that no information can enter out mind, thoughts or brain without first having gone through the perceptual system. It would seem clear, then, that perception forms a critical aspect of what it means to be human. After 150 years of empirical research into perception, an overwhelming wealth of facts about perception have been accumulated. A vast array of theories have been formulated to explain the facts. Yet, all of the models share many fundamental assumptions. In fact, it can be argued that there are really just two models of perception -- the computational model and the ecological model -- and that all the other models are just refinements of these two "core" models. In this course, we will read and discuss the original forms of the two core models, as well as the difference between a scientific approach, theory, and model.


Chapter 42 - Sub-Saharan Africa
Natural Resources of Africa
Geography of Africa
The Story of Ebola
Irresponsible Ebola Coverage
The Fight Against Ebola
Crash Course: Mansa Musa
Is Africa really "rising"?
Africa is poor and 5 other myths
Democracy without election, is it possible in Africa?
Natural Resource Extraction - Overcoming the Resource Curse
The Lion of Zimbabwe - Robert Mugabe
10 Expensive Things Owned by Mugabe
Idi Amin Dada Autobiography
Burundi - Inside Story - Is there a threat of genocide in Burundi
Revolution in Burkina Faso: The Fall of Compaore
Do you know there are 1 billion problems in Africa?
Why Resource Rich Countries Grow Slowly
Botswana proves Africa can avoid the "resource curse"
Faces of Africa - Tumanka Goes to School
Africa Needs Jobs, Not Aid
World Poverty: Foreign Aid vs. Charity that Actually Works
Emerging African Entrepreneurs
Why Invest in Africa?
South Sudan may be heading towards genocide
South Sudan Faces Famine, Potential Genocide in Civil War
Fighting Aids on the Ground in South Africa
The Mango Tree: Living with HIV in Uganda
Stigma and ignorance about HIV in South Africa
Improving Healthcare in Africa


I have the truth vs. I am right
WRONG: You’re wrong.
I have the truth!
RIGHT: You’re wrong. I am right!
Being right is very important – both in conversation and when it comes to grammar! This week’s Czenglish error concerns the idea of truth.
To say, ‘I have the truth’ is a very Czech construction (‘Mam pravdu!’). But it is not commonly used in English. Perhaps we might say it if you have finally found out the true story behind some event or mystery. E.g. ‘My husband was lying to me for years about his work trips but now I have the truth.’ Or if you are religious and think you know the ‘true’ way of our divine path!
But generally, when you just want to say that you have the answer, or that you are not wrong, we simply say, ‘I am right.’
You can also use the word ‘correct’ but it is much more formal, like you are answering questions on a TV quiz show!