In our Torah portion this week, it is written that Jacob "came to a certain place and stayed there that night" (Gen. 28:11). The Hebrew text, however, indicates that Jacob did not just happen upon a random place, but rather that "he came to the place" -- vayifga bamakom (וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם). The sages therefore wondered why the Torah states bamakom, "the place," rather than b'makom, "a place"? Moreover, the verb translated "he came" is yifga (from paga': פָּגַע), which means to encounter or to meet, suggesting that Jacob's stop was a divine appointment.
The Hebrew word makom ("place") comes from the verb kum (קוּם), meaning "to arise," and in Jewish tradition, ha-makom became a Name for God. The early sages therefore interpreted the verse to mean that Jacob actually had his dream while in Jerusalem rather than in Bethel... Indeed, the Talmud identifies "the place" Jacob encountered as Mount Moriah - the location of the Akedah - based on the language used in Genesis 22:4: "On the third day, Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place (הַמָּקוֹם) in the distance" (Sanhedrin 95b, Chulin 91b). If that is the case (i.e., if Jacob had been miraculously transported south from the mountains of Bet El to what would later be called Jerusalem), then Jacob's dream of the ladder would have functioned as a revelation of the coming glory of the resurrected Messiah - the Promised Seed whom Isaac foreshadowed and through whom all the families of the earth would be blessed. It was Yeshua, the Angel of the LORD, who came to "descend" (as the Son of Man) and to "rise" (as the resurrected LORD) to be our mediator before God (see John 1:47-51). Perhaps the Talmud makes the claim that Jacob's vision occurred in Jerusalem because Bethel later became the site for one of two idolatrous shrines (i.e., the golden calves at Bethel and Dan) established by King Jeroboam of the Northern Kingdom which he set up to discourage worship at Solomon's Temple in the City of Jerusalem (see 1 Kings 12:28-29).
At any rate, the Hebrew word for "intercessor" (i.e., mafgia: מַפְגִּיעַ) comes from the same verb (paga') mentioned in our verse. Yeshua is our Intercessor who makes "contact" with God on our behalf. Through His sacrifice for our redemption upon the cross (i.e., his greater Akedah), Yeshua created a meeting place (paga') between God and man. Therefore we see the later use of paga' in Isaiah 53:6, "...the Lord laid on him (i.e., hifgia bo: הִפְגִּיעַ בּוֹ) the iniquity of us all," indicating that our sins "fell" on Yeshua as He made intercession for us (i.e., yafgia: יַפְגִּיעַ) for us (Isa. 53:12). Because of Yeshua, God touches us and we are able to touch God... And today, our resurrected LORD "ever lives to make intercession (paga') for us" (Heb. 7:25). He is still touched by our need and sinful condition (Heb. 4:15).
כֻּלָּנוּ כַּצּאן תָּעִינוּ אִישׁ לְדַרְכּוֹ פָּנִינוּ
וַיהוָה הִפְגִּיעַ בּוֹ אֵת עֲוֹן כֻּלָּנוּ
kul·la·nu katz·on ta·i·nu, ish le·dar·ko pa·ni·nu
vadonai hif·gi·a bo, et a·von kul·la·nu
"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned each to his own way;
but the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all."
Paga' is also a term for warfare or violent meetings, and this alludes to the collision between the powers of hell and the powers of heaven in the outworking of God's plan of redemption: "... he (i.e., the Savior/Messiah) will crush your head (ראשׁ), and you (i.e., the serpent/Satan) will crush his heel (עָקֵב)." This was the original prophecy of redemption, an encounter with evil that would provide atonement and retribution (see the "Gospel in the Garden"). Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein, the mashgiach of Ponevezh, points out that the entire future of the Jewish people hinged on the vision given to Jacob - and in Jacob's response to it. Had he been prevented to return (i.e., through Laban's schemes to keep him in Charan), the Jewish people would have become enslaved and assimilated into the people of Aram, and ultimately the Messiah Himself would not have been born. Laban, then, embodied the desire of Satan to thwart the coming of the Promised Seed, and therefore he may be compared to Pharaoh, who likewise tried to enslave Israel in Egypt...
As I mentioned in my additional commentary on parashat Balak, Laban's worship of the serpent (nachash) led him to become one of the first enemies of the Jewish people (see "The Curses of Laban"). He tried to make Jacob a slave from the beginning, later claiming that all his descendants and possessions belonged to him (Gen. 31:43). After Jacob escaped from his clutches, Laban had a son named Beor (בְּעוֹר) who became the father of the wicked prophet Balaam (בִּלְעָם). In other words, the "cursing prophet" Balaam was none other than the grandson of diabolical Laban. Here is a diagram to help you see the relationships:
In Jewish tradition, Laban (the patriarch of Balaam) is regarded as even more wicked than the Pharaoh who enslaved the Jews in Egypt. This enmity is enshrined during the Passover Seder when we recall Laban's treachery as the one who "sought to destroy our father, Jacob." Spiritually understood, Laban's hatred of Jacob (i.e., Israel) was intended to eradicate the Jewish nation at the very beginning. Had Laban succeeded, Israel would have been assimilated and disappeared from history, and more radically, God's plan for the redemption of humanity through the Promised Seed would have been overturned....
Thankfully, Jacob was enabled by God's grace to overcome Laban and to return to the Promised Land, and even more thankfully, the Messiah was able to crush the rule of Satan through His atoning sacrifice and resurrection at Moriah. Yeshua, our ascended LORD, is ha-makom - the place where we encounter the Living God....
The authority and reign of Satan has been gloriously vanquished by Yeshua our Savior, blessed be He, though there is coming a time of judgment for all who dwell upon the earth. The time immediately preceding the appearance of the Messiah will be a time of testing in which the world will undergo various forms of tribulation, called chevlei Mashiach (חֶבְלֵי הַמָּשִׁיחַ) - the "birth pangs of the Messiah" (Sanhedrin 98a; Ketubot, Bereshit Rabbah 42:4, Matt. 24:8). Some say the birth pangs are to last for 70 years, with the last 7 years being the most intense period of tribulation -- called the "Time of Jacob's Trouble" / עֵת־צָרָה הִיא לְיַעֲקב (Jer. 30:7). The climax of the "Great Tribulation" (צָרָה גְדוֹלָה) is called the great "Day of the LORD" (יוֹם־יהוה הַגָּדוֹל) which represents God's wrath poured out upon a rebellious world system. On this fateful day, the LORD will terribly shake the entire earth (Isa. 2:19) and worldwide catastrophes will occur. "For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?" (Rev. 6:17). The prophet Malachi likewise says: "'Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire,' says the LORD Almighty. 'Not a root or a branch will be left to them'" (Mal. 4:1). Only after the nations of the world have been judged will the Messianic kingdom (מַלְכוּת הָאֱלהִים) be established upon the earth. Yeshua will return to Jerusalem to establish His glorious kingdom (as foretold by the prophets) and then "all Israel will be saved." The Jewish people will finally understand that Mashiach ben Yosef (the Suffering Servant) and Mashiach ben David (the anointed King of Israel) are one and the same... The 1,000 year reign of King Messiah will then commence (Rev. 20:4).
Presently our responsibility is to come to "the place" (ha-makom) where God's work of redemption was completed - that is, to the Cross of Yeshua. There we turn to God in repentance (teshuvah) and consign our sins to the judgment borne for us through Yeshua's sacrifice as our kapporah (atonement). By faith we understand that the resurrected Savior is forever ha-makom, "the place" where God meets with us, and we learn to abide in His gracious Presence by means of the Holy Spirit. We cease striving to justify ourselves (i.e., by virtue of works), but instead receive God's love and Spirit into our hearts. This means that we will study the Scriptures (truth), obey the Torah of Yeshua and His emissaries, and share the good message of God's redemption with a lost and dying world...
We are fast approaching, however, the prophesied "End of Days" (acharit hayamim), when the LORD will return to earth to "settle accounts" with its inhabitants (including those who profess to obey Him). We do not have much more time, chaverim. We must encourage people to call upon the LORD for salvation before it is too late...
כִּי־כֵן אהֵב אֱלהִים אֶת־הָעוֹלָם
עַד־אֲשֶׁר נָתַן בַּעֲדוֹ אֶת־בְּנוֹ אֶת־יְחִידוֹ
וְכָל־הַמַּאֲמִין בּוֹ לא־יאבַד
כִּי בוֹ יִמְצָא חַיֵּי עוֹלָם׃
ki-khen o·hev E·lo·him et-ha·o·lam,
ad-a·sher na·tan ba·a·do et-be·no et-ye·chi·do,
ve·khol-ha·ma·a·min bo, lo-yo·vad
ki vo yim·tza cha·yei o·lam
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only and unique Son,
so that whoever trusts in Him should not be destroyed, but have eternal life"
Hebrew Study Card


The Appalachian Mountain range is nearly 1,500 miles long stretching from the southeast corner of Canada to Alabama. The Cumberland Gap, a natural break in the range near the eastern borders of Kentucky and Tennessee, is now a paved highway known as US 25E. A section of US 25E that now passes through a tunnel underneath the mountain is called the Cumberland Gap Tunnel.
Cars and trucks have replaced Conestoga wagons, but the route, now a paved highway, still offered challenges to travelers. The steep grade and sharp turns of US 25E were the cause of many traffic accidents. So many, in fact, that the 2.3-mile stretch of highway earned the unfortunate nickname, “Massacre Mountain.”
To make the route safer, a section of US 25E was relocated under the mountain by constructing a tunnel. This also helped restore the appearance of the mountain to the way it looked in the late 1700s, in the days of Daniel Boone.
The Cumberland Gap Tunnel passes through a large limestone formation within the Cumberland Mountain. Limestone, made of the mineral calcite, is slightly soluble in water. When rainwater seeps through cracks and between layers of limestone, it dissolves some of the calcite it contacts. Bit by bit, the flowing water removes calcite and the cracks grow larger, eventually forming caves. The resulting cave system is a natural conduit for underground water flow.
Where the tunnel passed through a cavern, concrete was poured to form an artificial ceiling structure. This, of course, blocked the water flow. The cavern, which runs almost perpendicular to the tunnel, was kept in a nearly natural state by allowing the water flow to continue its normal course through a conduit five feet in diameter built under the roadway. There is also a passageway constructed above the tunnel to allow for air and water movement. Thus, the cave system continues to function as a natural drainage system.
Engineers designed an additional drainage system to collect percolating groundwater that hits the impervious tunnel walls. This system includes a manmade streambed parallel to the tunnel, running beneath the roadbed from end to end.
The streambed is made of limestone gravel, and water flows between and around these gravel particles. When groundwater percolates through limestone rock layers before reaching the gravel bed, that drainage water is already saturated with calcium carbonate (the chemical name for calcite) and does not dissolve calcite from the gravel. Without loss from dissolving, loss of gravel caused by abrasion and erosion occurs at a slow and predictable rate.
However, most of Cumberland Mountain is made of rock other than limestone, such as sandstone, shale, and siltstone. This means that much of the water entering the tunnel’s drainage system is not already saturated with calcium carbonate and does dissolve gravel material. Similar to the way the cave system developed long ago in the limestone formation within Cumberland Mountain, the artificial streambed is gradually washing away. During the first ten years of the tunnel’s existence, enough gravel matter was removed to cause the roadway above to sag and need repair. As of 2009, a long-term solution had not yet been determined.
To learn about the construction of a different kind of tunnel, one that went underwater, check out Building the Channel Tunnel.
For more information about the movement of plates in Earth's crust, check out Mountain Maker, Earth Shaker.


Wondering what to do with that dead cow in your backyard or those dead batteries in your flashlight?
The Center for the Development of Recycling—a partnership between San Jose State University’s Environmental Studies Department and Santa Clara County—has an online tool to guide you on how and where to recycle anything from the dead cow and batteries to painted or stained wood waste and everything in between.
Nov. 15 is America Recycles Day so take part in it and use the tool if you find one of the few materials the City of Milpitas does not accept. The tool is easy to use: Scroll the list of materials to find the one you wish to recycle, click on it and it will move to a box on the right. When you have your list complete fill in your ZIP code and click on the “find results” button.
It will return a list of companies that accept the specific material, the company's location and/or phone number, website links, whether the material can be picked up or dropped off, and other useful information.
Batteries, for example, are accepted at several places in and around Milpitas. That dead cow is a little trickier. Four places accept dead cows and two of them have restrictions on the cow’s age.
Recycling is something that can be embraced as a lifetime commitment. Think the three Rs—reduce, reuse and recycle.
One way to reduce is to stop junk mail from being delivered to your home. The Bay Area Outreach Coalition offers a stop junk mail kit (see the attached PDF for more detail or visit www.stopjunkmail.org) to get rid of those annoying catalogs, ads, promotional materials and other unwanted mail that winds up in your recycle bin.
America Recycle Day includes events such as the one at GreenMouse Recycling in San Jose that is hosting a three-day recycle-athon between Nov. 15 and 17 with a goal of recycling 25,000 pounds of electronic waste. Recycle something with a screen, such as a laptop, monitor, television or cell phone, and recieve a Starbucks gift card. Then take that Starbucks gift card and a friend to the nearest store and take advantage of the 2-for-1 offer going on. It's a win-win!


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Gardening in the Rainy Zone.
Pronounced: AL-lee-um ka-ra-tah-vee-EN-see
Sunset zones 1-24.
USDA zones: 5-9.
Heat zones: 9-5.
Height: 4-10 inches (10-25 cm).
Two to three-inch diameter spherical umbel of 50 or more, flowers on a 6-inch stem.
Just above ground level the thick, leathery, pleated, 6-inch long leaves. 'Ivory White' has a pale, pewter tone.
Full sun to partial shade.
Dry, well-drained, ordinary garden soil.
Remove offsets in autumn and plant.
Pests and Diseases:
Bulb rot can occur during our damp conditions of fall through spring. Onion fly and thrips may be a problem.
Rainy Side Notes
Allium karataviense is a spunky plant with a large flower globe. It is a dwarf ornamental onion compared to the giant species in the Melanocrommyum group of alliums, in which it belongs. It grows exceptionally well in our Mediterranean climate, as the plants go dormant by the time our annual drought comes around. Some gardeners grow the species and its cultivars because it has the most attractive foliage in the entire genus. Its horizontal, long, leathery, pleated foliage is green with a striking purple cast. As the blossom first opens, it is nestled on top of the attractive foliage; the flowering stems continue to grow. It pushes the large, spherical umbels up and away from the leaves as they begin to look shabby. When you plant bulbs en masse in a garden bed or container, use companion perennials that are late in filling out, or annuals to fill in any bare soil the bulb's dormant state leaves behind.
Sensitive to excess moisture, these alliums are prone to rot, so grow them in well-drained soil in the ground or in deep containers with excellent drainage. Some A. karataviense cultivars available are 'Ivory Queen', 'Lucky' and 'Red Globe'.
Photographed in author's garden.


Imprint training pioneer Dr. Robert Miller debunks some of the common misconceptions about this useful foal handling technique.
The technique of imprinting has been used to help train foals for more than 50 years, but common misconceptions about what it means to imprint young horses still exist. While recent years have seen more and more owners and trainers fully commit to properly using this valuable foal handling procedure, a few basic misunderstandings still remain that prevent those who attempt to apply imprint training techniques from achieving the results that they desire.
Photo by Megan Parks
Dr. Robert Miller, one of the pioneering practitioners of equine imprint training, believes that proper implementation of imprint training principles make a horse more trainable and easier to handle, but only if it is done correctly and completely—and only if the person performing the technique is realistic about exactly what the process is meant to achieve.
“You’re not going to change [a foal’s] personality,” Miller says. “Energetic will be energetic. Lazy will be lazy. Highly reactive will be highly reactive. Indifferent will be indifferent. Intelligent will be intelligent. But what [imprinting] does is, if you do it right after they are born, before any other learning goes in—you build a foundation.”
Understanding what that foundation is meant to support is the key to getting the long-term results that proper imprint training can provide.
“You’re not imprint training the body,” Miller says. “You’re imprint training the mind.”
In the wild, horse have always been prey animals and, therefore, a foal must be able to get to its feet within an hour after birth and run with its herd as a means of self defense. This history means that even domesticated horses are born with a healthy paranoia of just about everything. Fear is the natural first response a horse feels to new stimuli. They have to learn not to fear people, objects and even other animals.
It is almost impossible to teach a horse anything if his focus is on self preservation.
“It applies to us, too,” Miller says. “If we are preparing to take a test, and we’re really scared, our learning ability isn’t nearly as great as if we are laid back and relaxed and can think things out.”
Fear and anxiety interfere with the learning procedure because, in any animal, it increases the primary defensive behavior.
“In some species, [the defensive behavior] is to fight, so fear will precipitate an attack,” Miller explains. “But in the horse, fear usually precipitates flight or the desire for flight.
“In the horse—and this is only true in the horse and not dogs, cattle or people—control of the feet controls the mind. When you control the animal’s primary defense, you control the mind. In wolves, it’s control of the muzzle. In the human being, it’s control of the hands. In horses, it’s control of the feet. Every school of horsemanship has relied upon [this concept] even if they didn’t understand why it worked.”
The main goal of all imprint training is to minimize the fear responses that can keep a horse from learning.
“If we don’t have the fear, the horse isn’t thinking about running away,” Miller says. “Instead, the horse is paying attention and subject to quick learning.”
It is important to Miller that people understand that imprinting and training are two different things—a fact that he believes sometimes gets overlooked.
“Imprinting is a visual memorization of what the foal sees moving around it, and it triggers an instinct to trust and to follow,” Miller says. “Training is learning by reinforcement. The only reason I called the process Imprint Training is because it’s training during the imprint period.”
In nature, a foal imprints on its mother and the other members of its herd, serving to protect the foal against predators in the wild. However, foals can also imprint on a variety of other creatures, too.
“In domestication, it can be a human, or a dog or a piece of machinery,” Miller says. “Anything that moves, the foal will be imprinted upon it and tend to want to go to it and be near it and trust it.”
It is this inherent trust that Miller uses to teach the newborn foal that the world isn’t nearly as scary as it would otherwise believe it to be.
“In an hour to hour and a half, I can get so much done with a foal,” he says. “It’s a great time saver.”
Doing It Right
Miller often regrets calling the process Imprint Training because people confuse the meaning of term.
“I often have people come up to me and say, ‘I imprinted my horse when he was 6 months of age,’ or it was an 18 month old,” he says. “They don’t understand that imprinting only occurs in the horse [immediately after birth].
“It’s not that way with all species. Dogs, for example, imprint between 6 and 7 weeks of age. But that is a different species. They are not precocial. They are helpless as babies, just like humans. Whereas in the precocial species like horses, the ones who must be able to run from danger by the time they are one hour of age, the imprinting begins in the hour after birth.”
To Miller, the advantages of imprint training are that it happens very quickly, you don’t have to rely on or undo any previous negative learning, and since the foal is already down and has yet to stand, you can prepare a foal for most of what it needs to know for the rest of its life in about an hour.
During that time, Miller touches literally every part of the foal—from nose to tail and from ears to hooves—with the goal of habituating [making it comfortable with and unafraid of] common loud or frightening sounds or movements that can spook a horse, being touched in the areas that will be handled during farriery and during veterinary examinations of every body opening, as well as pressure in the saddle area. Teaching foals not to fear pressure in the girth area is usually saved for the second session when they are already on their feet.
“You remove the anxiety, the fear,” Miller says, “and they are quicker to learn other things.”
The mistake most people make when imprint training is that they don’t do enough at the right times, either during the first session when the foal has yet to stand, or during subsequent training sessions when the foal is on its feet.
“I poll every audience that I speak to,” Miller says, “and what I’ve learned from doing this over the last four decades is the two most common mistakes are rushing the training and failing to follow up after the first session.”
Miller says it is almost always men who make the mistake of rushing the first session of imprint training.
“They are usually working for a ranch or farm,” he says, “and they show them my video and tell them they want them to do this with their foals, and they rush it.”
For example, when Miller is habituating a foal to having his feet touched, he taps the bottom of each hoof with his hand 100 times to ensure that he’s tapping long enough for the foal’s initial fear response to the touch to wear off and he learns that having his foot touched isn’t something to be afraid of.
“Men will often tap the hoof 5-10 times and quit,” Miller says, “and what they’ve taught the foal to do is to fear that touch. They have failed to habituate by stopping during the fear and flight period in the foal’s mind.”
By doing this, they have actually sensitized the foal to fear of having its feet touched, and the next day, the person can’t get anywhere near them to continue the second phase of the training.
“Whereas the foals I do, you can touch them anywhere on their body the next day,” Miller says. “Women just love this part of the training because of the intimacy of it.”
Conversely, Miller states it is almost always women who fail to complete imprint training after the first session.
“They do the birth session, but they don’t do sessions two through seven when the foal is on its feet, which is where you get their respect,” he says of the sessions where the foal is habituated to a variety of body pressure and movement cues, as well as leading and tying.
“I ask them ‘Why didn’t you do it?’ and the answer is always the same. ‘He didn’t like it, so I didn’t do it.’ They often admit that they got bad results, but claim to know what they did wrong.”
The Lessons Transfer
While one of the major complaints about imprint training is that the foal will only respond to the person he imprinted upon, Miller doesn’t believe this to be the case. The foal may be slightly more responsive to that individual, but if that person imprint trains the foal properly, anyone who handles that horse in the future will have an easier time than if the horse had never received imprint training.
Miller admits that the trust an imprinted animal gains in its imprinter doesn’t transfer directly to all other humans. However, it does prepare them for what other people may do with them and makes the horse’s transition to the new handler’s style easier and faster.
“Say you have an individual sacking out a colt who has never been ridden with a blanket, and he stands perfectly happy while everything happens,” Miller says. “If a stranger comes along with a blanket, he’s going to react with fear to the stranger, but once he’s past that and the blanket begins, the attitude is, ‘Oh, I remember,’ and the horse relaxes.
“As far as their future talent on the racetrack, as a jumping horse, as a roping horse or a barrel horse, imprint training doesn’t interfere. It actually enhances it because you remove most of the fear factors [that can interfere with learning]. If a foal has learned to be unafraid of a human presence and being touched on any part of its body, and now you want to make a rope horse out of it, it’s not going to get all boogered when the rope drags on the ground beside it or you throw it out in front of him. I wouldn’t say it improves performance, but it enhances learning.”
The same basic principle applies to imprint training a young horse to be relaxed in a stall area around other horses, in your training pen and especially when approaching what some horses consider to be a scary object—a barrel. Once a horse is hauled to a show, the environment may be different and cause anxiety temporarily, but the similarity of the situation to what they’ve experienced before will help the horse relax and perform to the best of its ability faster.
Although imprint training doesn’t affect a horse’s personality, it will help more reactive horses become more handlable. A highly reactive individual will still remain flighty, but if you’ve de-sensitized him to the everyday things he might spook at—which interferes with what you’re trying to teach them at any point—it helps him learn what you’re teaching faster.
Respect, Not Fear
Imprint training has gained wide acceptance over the last 25 years, but there are still some trainers who object to the technique. Many object for a one primary reason—they believe that since imprinting lessens a horse’s fears, it makes the horse much harder for anyone who didn’t imprint that horse to control.
“The objective in training horses should be 100 percent respect and zero percent fear,” Miller states. “Some people think you’ve got to show them who’s boss. You’ve got to show a horse who’s the leader, but you don’t have to show them who’s boss, which infers fear of the boss. It’s not necessary to be able to control the horse.”
The idea that fear of humans is necessary to maintain control of a horse and to get it to do what you want it to do ignores a fact that practitioners of natural horsemanship have known for decades—if you really want your horse to want to work for you, fear can’t be part of the equation.
For Miller, the goal of imprint training is to get the horse to see the human as a herd leader and be submissive to his or her requests as a result. You don’t want a horse to fear you, but depend on you for leadership and guidance. When done correctly, imprint training enhances a horse’s relationship with all humans. All it takes is putting in the effort to achieve the results you want instead of looking for a quick, fear-based fix.
According to Miller, in wild mustang herds, the leader is most often the oldest mare, which indicates that physical strength has nothing to do with gaining the respect of the horse or achieving leadership. The stallion, who many would perceive as the natural choice to be the leader, runs in back and chases the stragglers to get them to keep up with the leading mare, serving as more of a guardian for the herd than a leader of it.
“There are still some trainers that object to [imprint training], and there are still trainers who do it improperly and criticize the technique,” Miller says. “Any training technique ever devised, if you don’t do them correctly, you can’t expect good results.
“I hear people say, ‘I did my colt Parelli style,’ or, ‘I did my colt Kurt Pate style, and it didn’t do any good.’ Well, they didn’t do it correctly because they are very good training techniques. They blame the technique rather than themselves.”
But as with any training program, in the end, you and your horse will get out of it what you put into it. After 50 years of teaching and practicing the techniques of imprint training, Miller believes that if it is done properly, it will absolutely make a difference in the teachability and overall confidence and happiness of the horse.
“Simply put, imprint training works,” Miller says emphatically. “It works consistently and very, very effectively.
“The foal respects the mare, but is also bonded to her and trusts her. We can get exactly the same thing, trust combined with respect.”
Dr. Robert Miller graduated from Colorado State University and settled in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where he founded the Conejo Valley Veterinary Clinic. He retired in 1987 after 31 years as a renowned veterinarian and expert in ethology (the study of animal behavior) in order to devote his full time to the teaching of equine behavior and to support the revolution in horsemanship that began in the Western United States in the late 20th Century and is now a worldwide phenomenon.
He is best known for his scientifically based system of training newborn foals, called imprint training, which is now in use all over the world. He has authored several books, including Imprint Training of the Newborn Foal, and has been on the editorial staff of several veterinary practice and horse industry magazines.


This article published by Yongyut Trisurat, Anak Pattanavibool, George A. Gale and David H. Reed in CSIRO Publishing. Wildlife Research. 2010, 37, 401-412, demonstrates how the CAP principles helped assess wildlife population viability for multiple species in the Western Forest Complex in Thailand. If you wish to request a copy of the article, please contact Yongyut Trisurat (email@example.com).
Context. Assessing the viability of animal populations in the wild is difficult or impossible, primarily because of limited data. However, there is an urgent need to develop methods for estimating population sizes and improving the viability of target species.
Aims. To define suitable habitat for sambar (Cervus unicolor), banteng (Bos javanicus), gaur (Bos gaurus), Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and tiger (Panthera tigris) in the Western Forest Complex, Thailand, and to assess their current status as well as estimate how the landscape needs to be managed to maintain viable populations.
Methods. The present paper demonstrates a method for combining a rapid ecological assessment, landscape indices, GIS-based wildlife-habitat models, and knowledge of minimum viable population sizes to guide landscape-management decisions and improve conservation outcomes through habitat restoration.
Key results. The current viabilities for gaur and elephant are fair, whereas they are poor for tiger and banteng. However, landscape quality outside the current distributions was relatively intact for all species, ranging from moderate to high levels of connectivity. In addition, the population viability for sambar is very good under the current and desired conditions.
Conclusions. If managers in this complex wish to upgrade the viabilities of gaur, elephant, tiger and banteng within the next 10 years, park rangers and stakeholders should aim to increase the amount of usable habitat by ~2170 km2 or 17% of existing suitable habitats. The key strategies are to reduce human pressures, enhance ungulate habitats and increase connectivity of suitable habitats outside the current distributions.
Implications. The present paper provides a particularly useful method for managers and forest-policy planners for assessing and managing habitat suitability for target wildlife and their population viability in protected-area networks where knowledge of the demographic attributes (e.g. birth and death rates) of wildlife populations are too limited to perform population viability analysis.


Mon 20 Jul 2009
As far as scary-looking fish go, the adult sea lamprey is right up there with the sharks. It’s about 3 feet long, with concentric rings of teeth inside a jawless, suction-cup mouth. After trapping its prey by sucking, the lamprey scrapes off the skin using a tooth at the end of its tongue, and then sucks out the blood. Since the lamprey has good taste in fish – preferring trout, salmon, bass –it’s the target of a federal lampricide program in the Great Lakes region, where it has nearly devoured some of these stocks.
But no creature is all bad. “The lamprey has a really beautiful spinal cord,” says Ona Bloom, an MBL Research Fellow from The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. Together with Jennifer Morgan (Univ. of Texas at Austin) and David Parker (Univ. of Cambridge), who are recipients of an MBL sponsored Albert and Ellen Grass Faculty Research Grant, Bloom and her colleagues are studying the lamprey’s remarkable ability to recover from severe spinal cord injury. “We have been talking for years about collaborating on these studies,” says Bloom. “ The MBL gives us a wonderful opportunity to do that.”
One of the most primitive of living vertebrates, the sea lamprey is a good animal in which to analyze the acute response to spinal cord injury, which is Bloom’s focus, and how the nervous system functions are restored, which interests Morgan and Parker. “We want to understand the differences between the robust recovery in lampreys and how that contrasts with what happens in humans with spinal cord injury,” says Morgan. “If we can understand processes in the lamprey that contribute to recovery, then we can see if those processes can promote better recovery in higher vertebrates.”


- Types of home dialysis
- Daily HHD
- Nocturnal HHD
- Standard HHD
- News & events
- Message boards
- For professionals
- About us
...everything you need to know about doing dialysis at home.
Here we present a chronological tour of dialysis from the beginning.
All photos by Jim Curtis; descriptions courtesy of Baxter.
The first practical artificial kidney was developed during World War II by the Dutch physician Willem Kolff. The Kolff kidney used a 20-meter long tube of cellophane sausage casing as a dialyzing membrane. The tube was wrapped around a slatted wooden drum. Powered by an electric motor, the drum revolved in a tank filled with dialyzing solution. The patient’s blood was drawn through the cellophane tubing by gravity as the drum revolved. Toxic molecules in the blood diffused through the tubing into the dialyzing solution. Complete dialysis took about six hours. The Kolff kidney effectively removed toxins from the blood, but because it operated at low pressure, it was unable to remove excess fluid from the patient’s blood. Modern dialysis machines are designed to filter out excess fluid while cleansing the blood of wastes.
Blood was drained from the patient into a sterile container. Anticlotting drugs were added, and the filled container was hung on a post above the artificial kidney and connected to the cellulose acetate tubing that was wound around the wooden drum. A motor turned the drum, pulling the blood through the tubing by gravity.
The tank underneath the drum was filled with dialyzing fluid. As the blood-filled tubing passed through this fluid, waste products from the blood diffused through the tubing into the dialyzing fluid. The cleansed blood collected in a second sterile container at the other end of the machine. When all of the blood had passed through the machine, this second container was raised to drain the blood back into the patient.
George Thorn, MD, of the Peter Bent Hospital in Boston, MA, invited Willem Kolff, MD, to meet with Carl Walters, MD, and John Merrill, MD, to redesign and modify the original Kolff Rotating Drum Kidney. The artificial kidney was to be used to support the first proposed transplant program in the United States. This device was built by Edward Olson, an engineer, who would produce over forty of these devices, which were shipped all over the world.
Cellulose acetate tubular membrane, the same type of membrane that is used as sausage casing, was wrapped around the drum and connected to latex tubing that would be attached to the patient’s bloodstream. The drum would be rotating in the dialyzing fluid bath that is located under the drum.
The patient’s blood was propelled through the device by the “Archimedes screw principle” and a pulsatile pump. A split coupling was developed to connect the tubing to the membrane, a component necessary to prevent the tubing and membrane from twisting. This connection is at the inlet and outlet of the rotating drum.
The membrane surface area could be adjusted by increasing or decreasing the number of wraps of tubing. The Plexiglas™ hood was designed to control the temperature of the blood. The cost of this device was $5,600 in 1950.
Murphy WP Jr., Swan RC Jr., Walter CW, Weller JM, Merrill JP. Use of an artificial kidney. III. Current procedures in clinical hemodialysis. J Lab Clin Med. 1952 Sep; 40(3): 436-44.
Leonard Skeggs, PhD, and Jack Leonards, MD, developed the first parallel flow artificial kidney at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, OH. The artificial kidney was designed to have a low resistance to blood flow and to have an adjustable surface area.
Two sheets of membrane are sandwiched between two rubber pads in order to reduce the blood volume and to ensure uniform distribution of blood across the membrane to maximize efficiency. Multiple layers were utilized. The device required a great deal of time to construct and it often leaked. This was corrected by the use of bone wax to stop the leak.
The device had a very low resistance to blood flow and it could be used without a blood pump. If more than one of these units were used at a time, a blood pump was required. Skeggs was able to remove water from the blood in the artificial kidney by creating a siphon on the effluent of the dialyzing fluid. This appears to be the first reference to negative pressure dialysis.
This technology was later adapted by Leonard Skeggs to do blood chemistries. It was called the SMA 12-60 Autoanalyzer.
This artificial kidney was developed to reduce the amount of blood outside of the body and to eliminate the need for pumping the blood through the device.
Guarino used cellulose acetate tubing. The dialyzing fluid was directed inside the tubing and the blood, entering the device from the top, cascading down the membrane. The metal tubing inside the membrane gave support to the membrane.
The artificial kidney ahd a very low blood volume, but it had limited use because there was concern regarding the possibility of the dialyzing fluid leaking into the blood.
Von Garrelts had constructed a dialyzer in 1948 by wrapping a cellulose acetate membrane around a core. The layers of membrane were separated by rods. It was very bulky and weighed over 100 pounds.
William Inouye, MD, took this concept and miniaturized it by wrapping the cellulose acetate tubing around a beaker and separating the layers with fiberglass screening. He placed this “coil” in a Presto Pressure Cooker in order to enclose it and control the temperature. In addition, he made openings in the pot for the dialyzing fluid. With the use of a vacuum on the dialysate leaving the pot, he was able to draw the excess water out of the patient’s blood. A blood pump was required to overcome resistance within the device.
This device was used clinically and when it was used in a closed circuit, the exact amount of fluid removed could be determined.
Inouye WY, Engelberg J. A simplified artificial dialyzer and ultrafilter. Surg Forum. Proceedings of the Forum Sessions, Thirty-ninth Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1953; 4: 438-42.
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- Historic Sites
History As A Cure
December 1956 | Volume 8, Issue 1
Not long ago two teen-age boys in New York City got into trouble with the law. The police laid hands on them as juvenile delinquents, and in due course the boys appeared in court. Judge J. Randall Creel, of Magistrates’ Court, faced the tough problem that confronts jurists in such cases: should he send the boys off to jail forthwith, or should he see whether they might not be able to straighten themselves out? He decided on the latter course, and in looking for a means of rehabilitation he selected an unusual instrument: American history.
He gave these high school youngsters a historical research job to do.
They should forthwith (he told them) make a study of the Battle of Long Island—an important struggle in the Revolutionary War, in which General Washington’s army narrowly escaped destruction when the British commander, General Howe, landed an overpowering force on Long Island late in August of 1776. They would find, he suggested, that utter disaster for the American cause was averted because of a valiant rear-guard action fought by a regiment of the Maryland line. Let them, therefore, go to the sources and find out all they could about this action; having done this, each boy must submit a paper, describing what had happened, citing his sources, and bringing out what the gallant stand of the embattled Marylanders meant to future generations of Americans. By the jobs they did he would determine whether or not they had reinstated themselves as reliable junior members of their community.
The boys went to work, and eventually they presented their papers. They had done a good deal of hard work. They had traced the movements of the different troops engaged. They had run down the historic markers which (largely ignored by present-day citizens) show where the actions took place. They had found out all they could about the gallant old Maryland battalion, and they had gone to the trouble of listing the names and ranks of all the Marylanders who were killed or captured in the fight. And it seems that this excursion into American history had been a powerful medicine for good. These boys learned something—about their own home city (for they live in Brooklyn, and the battle they investigated had been fought along what are now the familiar streets and squares and parks of their own neighborhood), about the price a former generation had to pay for American freedom and happiness, and about the way in which boys of their own age, long ago, met a profound challenge.
Specifically: in their research into the history of the Battle of Long Island, these boys learned that a spirited rear-guard action by a regiment of Maryland soldiers—the 5th Maryland Infantry, under Colonel William Smallwood—had kept the American defeat from becoming a complete, irremediable disaster. The Marylanders fought a delaying action which enabled the bulk of Washington’s army to get away. Four or five hundred of them charged a British strong point, losing more than half of their numbers and going down at last to bloody defeat, but gaining the important fragments of time that enabled the beaten Continental army to get away clean and live to fight another day.
They found out that the Maryland soldiers who saved the day were simply boys like themselves. They dug out the old muster rolls, which gave each man’s name and age. Down the long columns, in faded archaic script, were the scanty records of boys who dared everything and gave everything more than a century and a half ago—and most of them turned out to be lads of eighteen or nineteen. This probably meant that they were even younger than that; boys usually add a year or two to their ages when they enlist in wartime. The Marylanders, in other words, were early teen-agers, who faced up to something big before they had got out of adolescence simply because youth wants nothing in all the world so much as the chance to respond to a real challenge. Life was good to them; it gave them the challenge, they met it—and today, as a direct result, we have an American nation.
One of the two boys, writing about the battle, expressed himself like this:
“If the youth of today is not conscious of the historical background of Long Island, the battle I will now unfold will make him so. I will, therefore, endeavor to show you what today’s youth could and should be capable of as compared to those who fought to preserve their rights as individuals. … It was merely lads of seventeen and eighteen who fought and died making this supreme sacrifice in defense of the preservation of the American Army and their fight for independence.”
The other boy, carried away by the story of the fight, found himself writing in the best vein of the military historian:
”…Thrice again these brave young Marylanders charged upon the house, once driving the gunners from their pieces within its shadow; but numbers overwhelmed them, and for twenty minutes the fight was terrible. Washington, Putnam and other General Officers who witnessed it … saw the overwhelming force with which their brave compatriots were contending, and held their breath in suspense and fear.… Washington wrung his hands, in the intensity of his emotion, and exclaimed: ‘Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose!’”


A POTENTIALLY deadly and virulent bug that attacks the gut may soon be treated with the most stomach-churning of remedies.
A study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine has found transplanting human faeces into people with the superbug Clostridium difficile provided an almost universal cure for the condition - far outperforming traditional antibiotic treatment.
Faecal microbiota transplantation is thought to work by replacing the healthy bacteria in the gut that have been wiped out by antibiotics. For the past 20 years an Australian, Thomas Borody, has pioneered the treatment, although its use has been traced back thousands of years.
''This study is monumental,'' Professor Borody said.
The research found nearly 94 per cent of patients given the transplantation one or two times recovered, compared to only 30 per cent of the group given the antibiotic vancomycin.
The study was then stopped early by an ethics committee on the ground that it would be unethical not to offer all patients the transplants.
Professor Borody said C. difficile, which has ravaged the US, killing 30,000 people each year, was spreading to Australia, although no one could be sure how common it was as health departments did not routinely test for it.
''In Sydney we have had about 15 deaths that we know of … in the past year and a half,'' he said.
Just as people now donate blood, in future donors may be called on to give stools.
At present the faeces is inserted into the recipient using colonoscopy or nasal tube but researchers are developing a less off-putting method.
''The future of this FMT is filtered bacteria, washed, frozen and put in a capsule, which we lovingly call a 'crapsule','' said Professor Borody, from the Centre for Digestive Diseases and the University of Technology, Sydney.
The clinical associate dean at the St George Hospital clinical school at the University of NSW, Michael Grimm, said trying to find appropriate donors could be difficult.
''We are just starting now to grapple with the bacteria in the gut; it's an impossible soup to analyse,'' Professor Grimm said.
''What potential pathogens are in there that might not have been pathogenic to the host but could become pathogenic to the recipient, are really unknown.''


2. Physical Activity
Twenty-four RCT articles were reviewed for the effect of physical activity on weight loss, abdominal fat (measured by waist circumference), and changes in cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2 max). Thirteen articles were deemed acceptable (346, 363, 365, 369, 375, 401, 404, 406, 432, 434, 445-447). Only one of these RCTs compared different intensities and format with a control group, although the goal was to increase physical activity and not specifically to produce weight loss (401). Results from this trial were subsequently reported after 2 years, but these no longer included the control group (447). One additional study did not have a no-treatment control group but compared three active treatment groups with each other: diet only, exercise only, and combination exercise plus diet (448).
Most RCTs described the type of physical activity as cardiovascular endurance activities in the form of aerobic exercise such as aerobic dancing, brisk walking, jogging, running, riding a stationary bicycle, swimming, and skiing, preceded and followed by a short session of warmup and cool-down exercises. Some physical activity programs also included unspecified dynamic calisthenic exercises (363, 369, 406, 446).
The intensity of the physical activity was adapted to each individual and varied from 60 to 85 percent of the individual's estimated maximum heart rate, or was adjusted to correspond to approximately 70 percent of maximum aerobic capacity (VO2 max). The measure of physical fitness included VO2 max. The frequency of physical activity varied from three to seven sessions a week and the length of the physical activity session ranged from 30 to 60 minutes. Some physical activity programs were supervised, and some were home-based. Adherence to the prescribed physical activity program was recorded and reported in some studies and not mentioned in others. Most studies did not estimate the caloric expenditure from the physical activity or report calorie intake. The duration of the intervention varied from 16 weeks to 1 year; six articles reported on trials that lasted at least 1 year (346, 363, 375, 401, 406, 432).
Rationale: Twelve RCT articles examined the effects of physical activity, consisting primarily of aerobic exercise, on weight loss compared to controls (346, 363, 365, 369, 375, 401, 404, 406, 432, 434, 445, 446). Ten of the 12 RCT articles reported a mean weight loss of 2.4 kg (5.3 lb) (or 2.4 percent of weight) (363, 369, 375, 406, 419, 432, 434) or a mean reduction in BMI of 0.7 kg/m2 (2.7 percent reduction) (346, 365, 401) in the exercise group compared to the control group. In three of these ten studies, the weight loss was < 2 percent of body weight (< 2 kg) (4.4 lb) (369, 375, 434). In contrast, two RCTs showed no benefit on weight from exercise, reporting weight gain in the exercise group compared to the control group (445, 446). In one of these studies, the control group received only diet advice but nevertheless lost 9 kg (19.8 lb), whereas the exercise group lost only 7 kg (15.4 lb) (445). In the second study, there was a total of only 10 participants, all having noninsulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, and the control group lost 3 kg (6.6 lb) whereas the exercise group lost only 2 kg (4.4 lb) (446). A meta-analysis of 28 publications of the effect on weight loss of exercise compared to diet or control groups showed that aerobic exercise alone produces a modest weight loss of 3 kg (6.6 lb) in men and 1.4 kg (3.1 lb) in women compared to controls (449).
Ten articles reported on RCTs that had a diet-only group in addition to an exercise-only group (346, 363, 365, 369, 375, 406, 432, 434, 445, 448). In every case except one (365),the exercise-only group did not experience as much weight loss as the diet-only group. The diet-only group produced approximately 3 percent, or 3 kg (6.6 lb), greater weight loss than the exercise-only group.
No single study examined the length of the intervention in relation to the weight loss outcome. Only one study compared the effect on maximum oxygen uptake of different intensities and formats of physical activity over a 1-year follow-up (401) and 2-year follow-up period (447). Better adherence over 1 year was found if the exercise was performed at home rather than in a group setting, regardless of the intensity level. Subsequently, the different exercise groups were compared with each other over the longer term (2 years), and better long-term adherence was found in the higher intensity home-based exercise group compared to the lower intensity home-based or higher intensity group-based exercise groups (447).
The question of whether physical activity enhances long-term maintenance of weight loss has not been formally examined in RCTs. Examination of long-term weight loss maintenance produced by physical activity interventions compared with diet-only interventions cannot easily be compared between RCTs because of numerous differences between studies with respect to design, sample size, intervention content and delivery, and characteristics of the study population samples. However, a number of analyses of observational and post hoc analyses of intervention studies have examined whether physical activity has a beneficial effect on weight. Cross-sectional studies have generally shown that physical activity is inversely related to body weight (450-454) and rate of weight gain with age (455). Longitudinal studies with 2 to 10 years of follow-up results have observed that physical activity is related to less weight gain over time (456-459), less weight gain after smoking cessation in women (460), and weight loss over 2 years (461). In addition, post hoc analyses of several weight loss intervention studies reported that physical activity was a predictor of successful weight loss (454, 462, 463). The results of these RCTs showed that physical activity produces only modest weight loss and observational analyses from other studies suggest that physical activity may play a role in long-term weight control and/or maintenance of weight loss.
Rationale: Only three RCTs testing the effect of physical activity on weight loss also had measures of abdominal fat as assessed by waist circumference (365, 369, 375). One study demonstrated that physical activity reduced waist circumference compared with the control group (365), and another study showed a small effect on waist circumference (0.9 cm) in men but not women (375). One study in men showed a small increase in waist circumference (369). Weight loss was modest in all of these studies. These studies were not designed to test the effects of physical activity on abdominal fat independent of weight loss.
However, large studies in Europe (464), Canada (453), and the United States (465-468) reported that physical activity has a favorable effect on body fat distribution. These studies showed an inverse association between energy expenditure through physical activity and several indicators of abdominal obesity, such as waist circumference and waist-to-hip and waist-to-thigh circumference ratios.
Rationale: Eleven RCT articles testing the effect of physical activity alone on weight loss in men and women also included measures of cardiorespiratory fitness, as measured by maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max) (346, 363, 369, 375, 401, 404, 406, 432, 434, 445, 446). All 11 showed that physical activity increased maximum oxygen uptake in men and women in the exercise groups by an average of 14 percent (ml/kg body weight) to 18 percent (L/min). Even in studies with modest weight loss (< 2 percent), physical activity increased VO2 max by an average of 12 percent (L/min) to 16 percent (ml/kg) (369, 375, 434).
One study that compared different formats and intensities of physical activity on VO2 max reported that improvement in VO2 max was related to adherence to the physical activity regime. In that study, the lower intensity program was equally effective on VO2 max as a higher intensity program, largely as a result of different levels of adherence (401).
The results of the RCTs strongly demonstrate that physical activity increases cardiorespiratory fitness in overweight and obese individuals.


Source: The Pennsylvania Center for the Book
Date: Summer 2010
Byline: Jim Byrne
The Philadelphia Lazaretto: A Most Unloved Institution
In mid-July 1800, the U.S.S. Ganges, on the U.S. Navy’s earliest warships, encountered two American schooners, the Phebe and the Prudent, while navigating the Straits of Florida. These schooners held neither sugar cane nor corn but rather human cargo, 134 chained captives from West Africa to be exact, doomed for delivery to a notorious slave trader in Havana, Cuba. Commissioned with enforcing the newly-passed Federal Slave Trade Act that prohibited the transport of slaves by U.S. ships, Ganges Captain John Mullowny seized the Phebe and the Prudent, assigned prize crews to man both ships, and commanded them to sail north for Philadelphia. After a 1,500 mile, month long trip up the eastern coast of the United States, the crews arrived at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers with their recently confiscated cargo. Emaciated, exposed, and, surely disoriented, the scores of African survivors disembarked on Province Island, home to the Marine Hospital, a.k.a. the Philadelphia Lazaretto.
“The Ganges Africans” — the name bestowed upon them after many were given the surname Ganges — were part of one of the first slave trade violation cases confronted by the newly-established Federal judicial system. Their story exemplifies the ideological clashes that were occurring in the young nation and that would eventually boil over into the Civil War. Interestingly enough, at least two of the Ganges Africans would have extended stays in the Philadelphia area. One of them would become an indentured servant to Thomas Egger, the last quarantine master of the “old” Lazaretto on Province Island and the first one of the “new” Lazaretto in Tinicum Township, Delaware County. A second of the slaves was indentured to farmer Thomas Smith who had sold the property for the new facility to the Philadelphia Board of Health.
Moreover, their story reflects in miniature the history of the Philadelphia Lazaretto itself: integral to our nation’s demographic and political landscape and yet often overlooked. Stories like those of the Ganges Africans and the thousands of others who remain little-known or whose tales are untold are the reasons University of Pennsylvania historian David Barnes calls the Philadelphia Lazaretto a place “even rarer and more precious than New York’s [Ellis Island].”
Lazaretto seems an unusual name for a hospital in the American colonies. As it turns out, however, the word would become a common English term for isolation facilities and quarantine hospitals, ceasing to be a proper noun at all. As one might think, the term derives from the Italian, but its exact provenance is not completely clear. One theory holds that in 16th century Venice, the name of a local hospital, the Nazaretto, was combined with the name of Lazarus the Beggar from the New Testament. Professor Barnes notes that this theory is less plausible than the simpler, and generally accepted, thought isolation wards and quarantines came to be named for Lazarus the Beggar, patron saint of lepers. Regardless of its origin, it started to be applied to the “old” facility on Province Island built in 1743, though it was still referred to the Marine Hospital. The “new” Lazaretto, however, would never be called anything else.
At the end of the 18th century, politicians and doctors throughout the United States were passionately debating public health and quarantine issues, much as members of those same two professions debate health care policy today.
Thousands were falling victim to the effects of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and yellow fever. The issue came to a head in 1793 after futile attempts to quarantine all ships arriving at the port of Philadelphia failed. A yellow fever epidemic of calamitous proportions broke out throughout the city. Within two months, the nation’s largest city and political and economic capital, lost more than a quarter of its population. Approximately 10% perished from yellow fever and another 17% fled the city.
After the 1793 epidemic, the city created a Board of Health to oversee conditions in the city. It found, among other things, that the old quarantine facility had failed terribly in preventing the propagation of yellow fever and other infectious diseases. Many authorities blamed this failure on its location only a few miles from the most densely populated parts of the city and thu, facilitating the interaction between infected patients and residents. Determined to prevent another calamity, The Board of Health constructed a new lazaretto ten miles south of Philadelphia in the isolated, uninhabited marshlands of Tinicum Township, Delaware County.
Construction of the Philadelphia Lazaretto finished in 1801, almost a century before the building of New York’s Ellis Island and San Francisco’s Angel Island. Upon completion, the Lazaretto was the first of its kind. It was a complex — both stately and state of the art — that, as The Philadelphia Public Ledger said in 1879, “might be mistaken for [the grounds of a] wealthy country gentleman....were it not for the yellow Quarantine flag.”
The central figure of the ten acre campus was the main hospital, an august Georgian, double-brick building that could house upwards of 200 patients at a given time. The campus also included the following: the Dutch hospital which was added in 1805 and was primarily used to house German immigrants afflicted with smallpox; the dead-house which was used for incinerating infected patients’ belongings; the barge houses which served as the waiting and sleeping quarters of the bargemen on duty during quarantine season; the residences of the chief physician and the quarantine master; and the government warehouse which stored the goods and merchandise of the quarantined vessels. These facilities and the sheer size of the campus made the Philadelphia Lazaretto a state-of-the-art hospital in comparison to its contemporaries. Remarkably, more than two centuries after their construction, the main hospital building and several other buildings remain intact and are rather well preserved.
During its years of operation from 1801 to 1893, the Philadelphia Lazaretto was certainly neither revered nor loved. As a matter of fact, sailors, merchants, and newly arriving immigrants dreaded and abhorred the sight of its flag — a yellow banner. It was, as University of Pennsylvania professor and the Philadelphia Lazaretto’s de facto historian David Barnes calls it, a most unloved institution. During the hospital’s near century of operation, the Philadelphia Lazaretto’s staff inspected and quarantined hundreds of thousands of merchant ships, much to the chagrin of businessmen and sailors. The hours, days, or even months at the Lazaretto meant the spoiling or confiscation of cargo and, in turn, the loss of significant capital. In addition to the loss of the merchants’ cargo, the Philadelphia Lazaretto was also the site at which sailors and immigrants perished. Many immigrants, much like the “Ganges Africans,” took their first steps on American soil. According to various estimates, a thirst of all Americans have an ancestor whose first contact with the New World was at the Lazaretto.
After closing its doors as a quarantine station in 1893, the site and the buildings went through several transformations. The Philadelphia Athletic Club purchased the site and renamed it the Orchard Club. The Orchard Club was a summer get-away for wealthy Philadelphians who used its prime waterfront location for leisure and recreation. There were several athletic clubs whos sponsored baseball teams during this era, and some even played their games on the grounds of the Lazaretto. These were not, however, the forerunners of the American League’s Philadelphia Athletics. After the closing of the Orchard Club, Colonel Robert Edward Glendinning — a substantial contributor to wartime aviation in the First World War — and George C. Thomas opened the Essington School of Flying in 1913. It was the state’s first water flying school and one of the first in the world.
Sadly, today the Philadelphia Lazaretto lies, mostly forgotten, in the same marshlands of Tinicum Township, Delaware County. Were it not for the tireless lobbying of a group of hard-working activists, the site may well have been destroyed. Though a township firestation was recently build on the northern half of the Lazaretto site, there is still much worthy of preservation. Similar projects, like New York’s restored Ellis Island and San Francisco’s Angel Island (in process), have given voice to the thousands and hundreds of thousands who came to these shores. The Friends of the Lazaretto and others are working hard to ensure that the rest of the site will stand as testament to the immigrants who landed in Philadelphia.


Mount Desert Rock
About 20 miles southeast of Mount Desert Island, this is one of the most remote and lonely lights. Even mild storms scour the island, denuding it of anything not firmly secured, and frequently submerge it entirely. Yet each spring keepers transported soil from the mainland, tucking it into crevices on this otherwise barren rock in hopes of cultivating flowers and vegetables. For a few months in summer and early fall, the rock became a colorful garden in the middle of the sea. But late fall and winter storms always washed it all away. It's a challenge to see this lighthouse, even from a boat, but whale-watching cruises from Bar Harbor sometimes pass by.
Mount Desert Rock Lighthouse was built in 1830.


CNY - 中國元，人民幣
最常用 CNY 交叉匯率
為什麼您對 CNY 感興趣？
Early Currency in China
With a history of over 3000 years, Chinese currency existed in both Ancient and Imperial China. In 1914, the Silver Dollar was established as the official currency of the Republic of China, with copper, fen, and nickel coins being added in the 1930s. During this time silver appreciated in value, and China could no longer retain the silver standard. In 1935, a new currency known as Fǎbì, was issued.
Introduction of the Gold Yuan and Chinese Yuan Renminbi
The Gold Yuan replaced the Fǎbì in 1948 at a rate of 1 Gold Yuan to 3 million Yuan Fǎbì. That same year, the Yuan Renminbi (often called RMB) was introduced as a way to help stabilize the Communist held areas of mainland China. In 1955, a re-evaluation took place and a new Yuan Renminbi was introduced at a rate of 1 new Yuan to 10,000 old Yuan.
The Renminbi in Foreign Exchange
During the command economy, the Chinese Yuan Renminbi was set to unrealistic exchange values and as a result, severe currency guidelines were put in place. When China's economy opened in 1978, the Yuan Renminbi was only used domestically and foreigners used exchange certificates; this led to a powerful black market. From 1997 to 2005, the Chinese government pegged the Chinese Yuan Renminbi to the US Dollar at approximately 8.3 CNY to 1 USD. In 2005, a flexible mechanism of exchange rates was phased in, with the RMB being re-evaluated to 8.1 Renminbi per US dollar. The Chinese government launched a pilot program in 2009, allowing some businesses in Guangdong and Shanghai to execute business and trade transactions with counterparties in Hong Kong, Macau, and select nations. The program has since expanded to all areas of China and all international counterparties. China has also made agreements with Australia, Japan, Thailand, Russia, and Vietnam to allow for direct currency trade, instead of converting to the US Dollar. As a managed float, the Renminbi's value is determined by a basket of foreign currencies.
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- German minister calls EU move on China solar 'grave mistake'


Protractors - Innovation
While only one patent model for a protractor survives in the Smithsonian collections—from an inventor with a colorful personal history—several of the other objects also provide examples of technical innovation. For instance, some are manufactured versions of patented inventions. Others were named for the person with whom they were associated, even if that engineer or craftsman laid no claim to designing that protractor.
"Protractors - Innovation" showing 1 items.
- This brass semicircular protractor is divided by single degrees and marked by tens from 10° to 90° to 10°. It is attached with metal screws to a set of brass parallel rules. Brass S-shaped hinges connect the rules to each other. The bottom left screw on the parallel rules does not attach to the bottom piece. A rectangular brass arm is screwed to the center of the protractor. A thin brass piece screwed to the arm is marked with a small arrow for pointing to the angle markings. The protractor is stored in a wooden case, which also contains a pair of metal dividers (5-1/4" long).
- The base of the protractor is signed: L. Dod, Newark. Lebbeus Dod (1739–1816) manufactured mathematical instruments in New Jersey and is credited with inventing the "parallel rule protractor." He served as a captain of artillery during the Revolutionary War, mainly by making muskets. His three sons, Stephen (1770–1855), Abner (1772–1847), and Daniel (1778–1823), were also noted instrument and clock makers. The family was most associated with Mendham, N.J. (where a historic marker on N.J. Route 24 indicates Dod's house), but Dod is known to have also lived at various times in Newark.
- ID number MA*310890 is a similar protractor and parallel rule.
- References: Bethuel Lewis Dodd and John Robertson Burnet, "Biographical Sketch of Lebbeus Dod," in Genealogies of the Male Descendants of Daniel Dod . . . 1646–1863 (Newark, N.J., 1864), 144–147; Alexander Farnham, "More Information About New Jersey Toolmakers," The Tool Shed, no. 120 (February 2002), http://www.craftsofnj.org/Newjerseytools/Alex%20Farnham%20more%20Jeraey%20Tools/Alex%20Farnham.htm; Deborah J. Warner, “Surveyor's Compass,” National Museum of American History Physical Sciences Collection: Surveying and Geodesy, http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/surveying/object.cfm?recordnumber=747113; Peggy A. Kidwell, "American Parallel Rules: Invention on the Fringes of Industry," Rittenhouse 10, no. 39 (1996): 90–96.
- date made
- late 1700s
- Dod, Lebbeus
- ID Number
- accession number
- catalog number
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center


Philippa Ryan, Scientist, British Museum
Archaeobotany is the study of ancient plant remains, and I joined the field team at Amara West in Sudan earlier this year to collect samples for archaeobotanical analysis. Charred plant materials were retrieved on-site from sediments through dry-sieving and flotation. These samples were subsequently brought back to the British Museum for further sorting and identification.
At the moment I am analysing the charred seeds and fruits with Caroline Cartwright, who is also analysing the wood charcoal. The macroscopic plant remains are analysed using both a stereo microscope and a SEM (scanning electron microscope). Charred remains found so far include cereal grains (wheat and barley) and crop-processing waste, fruits such as figs and a wide range of wild plants.
I am also processing sediment samples to extract phytoliths (microscopic plant remains), which are formed when soluble silica taken up in groundwater by plants is deposited within and between certain plant cells. These silicified cells are found within many different plant families such as grasses (which include cereals), sedges and palms.
Phytoliths are difficult to identify, but have the advantage of surviving in both charred and non-charred contexts, so we can learn about the presence and use of plants in areas where seeds and grains don’t survive.
At the moment, I am processing sediments to extract phytoliths, which includes the removal of carbonates, clays, organics, other remaining non-siliceous material through heavy liquid flotation, and finally mounting dried phytoliths onto slides. Phytoliths are then identified and counted using an optical (light) microscope.
Analysis of these different types of plant remains helps us learn about the past uses of plants at Amara West in day-to-day life, such as for food, fuel and animal fodder. I am also looking at the distributions of seeds and phytoliths across the site to examine locations of plant based activities such as food processing, as well as whether there are any differences in diet between poorer and richer households, or across the history of the site.
Plant remains can also help to provide information about the nearby vegetation, for instance the types of grasses, wetland plants and trees that grew near the ancient town.


Many of us are inclined not to talk about things that upset us. We try to put a lid on our feelings and hope that saying nothing will be for the best. But not talking about something doesnt mean we arent communicating. Children are great observers. They read messages on our faces and in the way we walk or hold our hands. We express ourselves by what we do, by what we say, and by what we do not say.
When we avoid talking about something that is obviously upsetting, children often hesitate to bring up the subject or ask questions about it. To a child, avoidance can be a message - If Mummy and Daddy cant talk about it, it really must be bad, so I better not talk about it either. In effect, instead of protecting our children by avoiding talk, we sometimes cause them more worry and also keep them from telling us how they feel.
On the other hand, it also isnt wise to confront children with information that they may not yet understand or want to know. As with any sensitive subject, we must seek a delicate balance that encourages children to communicate - a balance that lies somewhere between avoidance and confrontation, a balance that isnt easy to achieve. It involves:
- trying to be sensitive to their desire to communicate when theyre ready
- trying not to put up barriers that may inhibit their attempts to communicate
- offering them honest explanations when we are obviously upset
- listening to and accepting their feelings
- not putting off their questions by telling them they are too young
- trying to find brief and simple answers that are appropriate to their questions; answers that they can understand and that do not overwhelm them with too many words.
Perhaps most difficult of all, it involves examining our own feelings and beliefs so that we can talk to them as naturally as possible when the opportunities arise.
Not Having All the Answers
When talking with children, many of us feel uncomfortable if we dont have all the answers. Young children, in particular, seem to expect parents to be all knowing - even about death. But death, the one certainty in all life, if lifes greatest uncertainty. Coming to terms with death can be a lifelong process. We may find different answers at different stages of our lives, or we may always feel a sense of uncertainty and fear. If we have unresolved fears and questions, we may wonder how to provide comforting answers for our children.
While not all our answers may be comforting, we can share what we truly believe. Where we have doubts, an honest, I just dont know the answer to that one, may be more comforting than an explanation which we dont quite believe. Children usually sense our doubts. White lies, no matter how well intended, can create uneasiness and distrust. Besides, sooner, or later, our children will learn that we are not all knowing, and maybe we can make that discovery easier for them if we calmly and matter-of-factly tell them we dont have all the answers. Our non-defensive and accepting attitude may help them feel better about not knowing everything also.
It may help to tell our children that different people believe different things and that not everyone believes as we do, e.g., some people believe in an afterlife; some do not. By indicating our acceptance and respect for others beliefs, we may make it easier for our children to choose beliefs different from our own but more comforting to them.
Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 26 Aug 2010
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt


WebMD Medical News
Brenda Goodman, MA
Laura J. Martin, MD
Oct. 3, 2011 -- Children who are overweight compared to their peers are nearly three times more likely to have high blood pressure, a new study shows.
The study, published in the journal Hypertension, followed 1,111 school-aged children in Indiana for an average of four years.
Twice each year, researchers visited schools to take blood pressure measurements and record the kids’ heights and weights.
About 40% of the children in the study were above the 85th percentile on growth charts for their height and weight. When children are above the 85th percentile, doctors consider them to be overweight.
Among the overweight kids, 14% had blood pressure that was higher than normal, while only 5% of normal-weight kids had elevated blood pressure.
The study also found that extra pounds are especially dangerous for kids who are already big.
"For an overweight and obese child, if you increase your BMI [body mass index] percentile a little bit, that would increase your blood pressure strongly,"says researcher Wanzhu Tu, PhD. Tu is a research scientist at Regenstrief Institute and professor of biostatistics at Indiana University School of Medicine, both in Indianapolis.
"In the same way," Tu says, for just a little bit of weight loss "you could benefit greatly in terms of blood pressure."
The risks of overweight were the same, regardless of the child’s sex or race. About 42% of the kids in the study were black.
Pediatricians say the study is wake-up call.
"We’ve tended to look at the overweight category as a lower-risk category," says Stephen R. Daniels, MD, PhD, chairman of the department of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. He was not involved in the research.
"This suggests to me that we really need to worry about kids who are in that overweight category," says Daniels, who is also pediatrician-in-chief at Colorado Children’s Hospital.
Other experts say the findings are concerning because having high blood pressure has been shown to set kids up for health complications.
Not only are children with high blood pressure much more likely to turn into adults who have high blood pressure, but newer studies have shown that kids can get the same kinds of organ damage -- to the heart, blood vessels, and kidneys -- that doctors once thought was only a problem for adults with the condition.
One study even found that kids with high blood pressure have subtle changes in the brain area that controls attention, problem solving, and working memory.
"For physicians, we have to take much more seriously this concept of the childhood origins of adult diseases and look beyond the weight and beyond the blood pressure level because we’re finding more evidence, subtle evidence, of injury," says Bonita Falkner, MD, professor of medicine and pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
"So it’s not going to be a risk that’s going to be in the future. It’s a risk that’s now," says Falkner, who wrote an editorial on the study, but was not involved in the research.
"It jacks up the concern about preventing childhood obesity and also not waiting until they are obese," she tells WebMD. "Even overweight can be problematic for children."
SOURCES:Tu, W. Hypertension, November 2011.Falkner, B. Hypertension, November 2011.Wanzhu Tu, PhD, research scientist, Regenstrief Institute; professor of biostatistics, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis.Stephen R. Daniels, MD, PhD, chairman, department of pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine; pediatrician-in-chief, Colorado Children’s Hospital, Denver.Bonita Falkner, MD, professor of medicine and pediatrics, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.
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Viator,Vol. 37 (2006)
In 772, shortly after annexing his brother’s share of the Frankish kingdom, Charlemagne launched his first campaign against the Saxons. “No war taken up by the Frankish people was ever longer, harder or more dreadful,” wrote Einhard almost half a century later. For more than three decades (from 772 until 804) Charlemagne and his army were occupied with a bloody and protracted attempt to pacify and subdue the Saxons.
A standard textbook narrative of the Saxon wars would go roughly like this: Charlemagne’s successful raid into Saxony in 772 opened the first phase of the Saxon wars. The reasons behind it are not at all clear. The so-called Annales regni Francorum, that is, the supposedly official court-based Frankish history, simply state that from Worms, where Charlemagne had held an assembly, he marched into Saxony. No Saxon rebellion or any other Saxon aggression are mentioned in connection with the Frankish attack, and it seems that once Charlemagne had managed to pacify Aquitaine, he decided to finish the job his father had already started in Saxony. Following the capture of Eresburg, Charlemagne and his army continued northwards, destroying on their way the enigmatic Irminsul. Charlemagne would have liked to continue his campaign in Saxony, but a desperate call for help from the pope forced him to leave Saxony and head southwards. The Saxon reaction was not late in coming. When Charlemagne and the Frankish army were busy in Italy, the Saxons invaded Hesse, plundering and destroying everything on their way.


Table of Contents Image Captions
1. "Minnehaha Falls"|
Floral home; or, First years of Minnesota. Early sketches, later settlements, and further developments, by Harriet E. Bishop (New York, 1857).
Bibliographic Information | Page Image Viewer (Viewer linked to image 152)
2. "Chief Little Crow"
3. "Henry Belland, Voyageur"
4. "Fort Mackinac in 1905: Photograph from pasture southwest of the fort, between
the village and the Grand Hotel"
5. "Jefferson's Plan, 1784"|
Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Volume 11 (1888): 452-61.
Bibliographic Information | Page Image Viewer (Viewer linked to image 470)
6. "This drawing by John T. McCutcheon appeared when Battle Creek was booming wheat flakes and cereal stocks. W. K. Kellogg liked the cartoon so much that he reproduced it later in a cornflake advertisement. The building in the background was the Sanitas food factory."
7. "Men of the Red Underground"
8. "The morning milk lunch for under-nourished school children, in an elementary school kitchen. Movement started in 1916"
The History of the Upper Midwest: An Overview


Fracking is short for ‘hydraulic fracturing,’ a term used to describe the process of pumping millions of gallons of pressurized water, sand and chemicals down a newly drilled well to blast out the surrounding shale rock and gas.
It’s a relatively new technique that‘s made shale gas more popular in recent years. For a long time, shale gas — a natural gas that’s embedded in ancient rocks known as shale — was deemed as being not worth the trouble by drilling companies because it was so difficult to recover. The gas is embedded in rocks and the best way to get it out is to drill in sideways, which only became possible in the 1980s and 1990s as the gas industry improved its directional drilling technology. Later, technological advances that let drillers use more water pressure made fracking into an economically viable option for obtaining shale gas from the rocks.
Read more about 'fracking'
Shale is scattered throughout the United States. The two hottest shale sites in America right now are the Barnett Shale in Texas and the Marcellus shale, which is buried beneath seven states and part of Lake Erie. Other large shale deposits are located in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming.
Despite its potential, though, a movement has welled up lately to block the shale gas boom. Some critics say embracing natural gas so heartily will slow the rise of renewable energy, but the biggest beef with shale isn't as much about its gas — it's about how we get it out of the ground. Shale gas would likely still be a novelty fuel without modern advances in hydraulic fracturing, yet the need for fracking is also starting to seem like it could be shale's fatal flaw. The practice has sparked major environmental and public heath concerns near U.S. gas fields, from diesel fuel and unidentified chemicals in groundwater to methane seeping out of sink faucets and even blowing up houses.


The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 9, Issue 7
, Page 401, July 2009
doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(09)70162-8Cite or Link Using DOI
Swine-origin influenza A H1N1 update
As swine-origin influenza A H1N1 continues to spread through the world, with cases in Asia and Africa, WHO is now debating whether to declare a pandemic.
Since the start of May, the number of H1N1 cases has risen from fewer than 3000 to over 20 000. As of June 8, 25 288 people had been infected, of whom 139 have died.
A key concern was the spread of the virus to developing countries, which will struggle to contain the virus. Africa's first infection was in a young girl travelling back to Egypt fro ...
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I am trying to understand what is the difference between TCP Half Open Connection and TCP Half closed connection can any one tell what exactly are they?
When TCP establishes a connection, it is considered guaranteed since there is a handshake that takes place:
At that point the connection is established, and data begins to flow. In contrast, a UDP packet is not guaranteed, and is just sent in the hopes it gets there.
Officially, according to the RFC's, a half-open TCP connection is when one side of the established connection has crashed, and did not send notification that the connection was ending. This is not the common usage today.
Unofficially, if can refer to an embryonic connection, which is a connection in the process of being established.
Half-closed is the opposite of that unofficial definition. It is a state somewhere in the middle where the computers are tearing down the established connection.


|A tamarin rock star |
(photographed by Ltshears at Wikimedia)
Our moods change when we hear music, but not all music affects us the same way. Slow, soft, higher-pitched, melodic songs soothe us; upbeat classical music makes us more alert and active; and fast, harsh, lower-pitched, dissonant music can rev us up and stress us out. Why would certain sounds affect us in specific emotional ways? One possibility is because of an overlap between how we perceive music and how we perceive human voice. Across human languages, people talk to their babies in slower, softer, higher-pitched voices than they speak to adults. And when we’re angry, we belt out low-pitched growly tones. The specific vocal attributes that we use in different emotional contexts are specific to our species… So what makes us so egocentric to think that other species might respond to our music in the same ways that we do?
|A serene tamarin ponders where he placed |
his smoking jacket (photographed by
Michael Gäbler at Wikimedia)
Cotton-top tamarins are squirrel-sized monkeys from northern Colombia that are highly social and vocal. As in humans (and pretty much every other vocalizing species studied), they tend to make higher-pitched tonal sounds when in friendly states and lower-pitched growly sounds when in aggressive states. But tamarin vocalizations have different tempos and pitch ranges than our tempos and pitch ranges.
Chuck and David musically analyzed recorded tamarin calls to determine the common attributes of the sounds they make when they are feeling friendly or when they are aggressive or fearful. Then they composed music based on these attributes, essentially creating tamarin happy-music and tamarin death metal. They also composed original music based on human vocal attributes. They played 30-second clips of these different music types to pairs of tamarins and measured their behavior while the song was being played and for the first 5 minutes after it had finished. They compared these behavioral measures to the tamarins’ behavior during baseline periods (time periods not associated with the music sessions).
An example of happy tamarin music (Copyright by David Teie and available through Biology Letters) can be found here.
An example of aggressive tamarin music (Copyright by David Teie and available through Biology Letters) can be found here.As the researchers had predicted, tamarins were much more affected by tamarin music than by human music. Happy tamarin music seemed to calm them, causing the tamarins to move less and eat and drink more in the 5 minutes after the music stopped. Compared to the happy tamarin music, the aggressive tamarin music seemed to stress them out, causing the tamarins to move more and show more anxious behaviors (like bristling their fur and peeing) after the music stopped.
The tamarins also showed lesser reactions to the human music. They showed less anxious behavior after the happy human music played and moved less after the aggressive human music played. So, human voice-based music also affected the tamarins to some degree, but not as strongly. This may be because there are some aspects of how we communicate emotions with our voice that are the same in tamarins. (How did the tamarin music make you feel?)
Can you imagine what we could do with this idea of species-specific music? Well, David and Chuck did! They have since developed music for cats using similar techniques. Although they're still working on the paper, they have said that the cats prefered and were more calmed by cat music compared to human music. You can find samples and get your own copies here.
We often think of vocal signals conveying messages in particular sounds, like words and sentences. But calls seem to do much more than that, making the emotions and behaviors of those listening resemble the emotions of those calling.
Want to know more? Check this out:
Snowdon, C., & Teie, D. (2009). Affective responses in tamarins elicited by species-specific music Biology Letters, 6 (1), 30-32 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2009.0593


The Edupunks' Guide: How to Do Research Online
It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a learner. College tuition has doubled in the past decade, while the options for learning online and independently keep expanding. Anya Kamenetz's new free ebook The Edupunks’ Guide is all about the many paths that learners are taking in this new world, and we're running excerpts from the book all week. We're also asking GOOD readers to doodle your learning journey and submit the result by Sunday, September 11.
There’s been a revolution in the way people spread knowledge. Sharing information openly over the Internet is way cheaper than purchasing it commercially in dead-tree format, and often the learning that happens this way is faster, more up-to-date, and more relevant to our immediate needs. A simple example is learning to make pizza. A few years ago, you may have had to take a class or at least buy a cookbook. Today you can put “how to make a pizza” into YouTube and within minutes, you’re watching a video that shows you how to fling the dough!
More and more people around the world are building on this knowledge revolution to explore new modes of learning and to transform what we mean by “education.”
For many, the first step in an online learning journey is a simple Google search.
- Start with Google, the most-used search engine on the web. Put your phrase in quotes to return pages with the exact words, like this: “African-American history”
- Search on Wikipedia to get an overview of the topic. Follow the links to an article’s sources at the bottom of the page.
- Google Scholar will give you scholarly journal articles and other verified sources of information.
- An online archive like The Internet Archive may offer original source material.
- YouTube is good for videos—a quick entry into a topic. Or just Google your phrase and the word “video.”
- For news stories, try Google News
- For links on news, trends, and up-to-the-minute happenings, you can search Twitter with a hashtag, like this: #americanidol.
- Try posting your question to a site like OpenStudy or WikiAnswers.
- Put in your search terms plus the word “forum” or “blog” to see what ideas other people have discussed on message boards or on blogs.
A successful online research session will leave you with 20 open tabs or windows at the top of your screen. Follow your curiosity, but keep track of the links you’re following in an email draft, Word document, or an application like Evernote or Diigo so you can consult them later.
Top Free Learning Resources Online
Europeana: A digital library with 4.6 million items from libraries, archives, museums and other institutions across Europe. Read Charles Darwin’s letters or listen to Pavarotti singing Verdi.
The Internet Archive: A vast nonprofit digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts—video, audio, texts, and live music.
Khan Academy: The Khan Academy has over 2000 videos covering basic math through calculus and trigonometry, physics, biology, chemistry, banking, finance, and statistics. The videos are short—5 to 15 minutes long—simple, and entertaining. They’re all made by Sal Khan, a 33-year-old former hedge fund analyst who started making them to help tutor his young cousins.
LearnFree: 750 free lessons on basic computer skills, reading and math.
Library.nu: Half a million free books. May not be exactly legal. Browse at your own risk.
MIT Open Courseware: The oldest open courseware site, with 1,900 courses on everything from history to physics. A favorite for science and math.
OpenCulture: A well-edited blog and site chronicling “the best” cultural and educational media on the web. They have lists of free online courses from top universities and free language lessons.
Open Learning Initiative: The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon has 13 free complete courses in topics ranging from physics to logic to French. The courses are highly interactive, using video, animations, and lots of embedded quizzes and assessments so you know how you’re doing. The site requires a signup and sometimes you may have to download some software.
Open Textbooks: A catalog of open textbooks that are free to read online.
Quia: On Quia, you can create your own games and quizzes to test yourself, or take thousands of quizzes—flashcards, matching games, word searches—that other students and teachers have created for the ultimate study guide.
Saylor Foundation: Saylor lists 241 original courses on the site, for which the material comes from around the web.
Scribd: Scribd is a place to find free books and presentations on almost any topic, uploaded and shared by the authors.
Slideshare: Slideshare is a collection of free PowerPoint presentations, sometimes with audio. It’s a good place to learn about up-to-date topics like design, technology, and music.
TED: TED (for Technology, Entertainment, Design) has an excellent collection of 300-plus short video lectures by scientists, authors, artists, political figures, and more. Browsing the site is sure to be enlightening and can give you clues about fields you might want to study, like behavioral economics or biophysics.
Textbook Revolution: A student-run site with links and reviews to textbooks and other educational resources. Many are available free as PDFs, viewable online as ebooks, or websites containing course materials. You can also use the site to find descriptions of books that aren’t free, and find where they may be cheaper.
Wikiversity: Wikiversity has a wide variety of multimedia course materials. Courses are run through the site, meaning students at universities create and publish course modules for other students’ use. Like Wikipedia, you can participate in the community by editing course material (a great way to test and expand your own knowledge) or by joining discussions in the “Colloquium” section.
YouTube and YouTube EDU: Don’t forget to search YouTube for lectures and presentations on any topic you find interesting. YouTube EDU contains content that’s been tagged “education,” which may include quirky things like Tina Fey’s 2011 book talk at Google.