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How do you evolve Munchlax in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon?
How do you evolve Munchlax in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon?
Walk your Munchlax. Take Munchlax along on your adventures and gain +1 or +2 to your friendship stat for every 128 or 256 steps.
When should I evolve Munchlax?
Munchlax will evolve into Snorlax when they level up with a friendship level is 220 or higher. This value cannot be seen in-game, but NPCs can analyze the player's Pokémon to see how much they love or trust their trainer.
Why won't my Munchlax evolve BDSP?
In Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Munchlax can only evolve into Snorlax once it had a high enough Friendship, then you level it up.
How do I raise my Munchlax happiness?
Munchlax is one of these, and its evolution requires a high level of happiness. This friendship level can increase in a number of ways. Feed the Munchlax food it likes and walk it long distances. The assistance of the Soothe Bell item will speed the process up.
How many hearts does it take to evolve Munchlax?
220
Once Munchlax's happiness is high enough (at a value of 220), it will evolve into Snorlax upon leveling up.
How do you get Munchlax in Pokémon 2021?
Munchlax was introduced in Generation IV as the baby form of the Normal-type Pokemon Snorlax. Players used to have to search honey trees in the Sinnoh region for Munchlax, but it can now be caught in the Underground in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.
How do you get a shiny Munchlax?
How do you get a Munchlax in Pokemon GO?
Munchlax is only obtainable from eggs, however, if it ever appeared in the wild it would receive a weather boost from Partly Cloudy weather. Any Munchlax with a CP of 1623 or over would have been boosted beyond level 30 by the weather and would have a maximum capture CP of 1757 when boosted. | eng | c2ed1859-01e3-4ab0-853f-6d95c1d5fd35 | https://thegrandparadise.com/uncategorized/how-do-you-evolve-munchlax-in-pokemon-mystery-dungeon/ |
When epidemiology PhD student Jean-Paul Soucy checked his email while munching on lunch with his fellow graduate students on a Monday afternoon, he fell silent.
It was the first day of what was supposed to be a usual workweek, and an email with the words "Letter of Offer'' could have applied to a mundane range of things. He passed his laptop to a colleague. "See if it says what I think it says," he remarked.
It said just that. He had become part of the newest selection of Canadian doctoral students to be named Vanier Scholars. The Vanier scholarship is a highly prestigious award for doctoral students that is granted by the Government of Canada.
The award will provide Soucy with $50,000 per year for three years while he works with his colleagues at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health to conduct research and develop community-based solutions to rein in the excessive prescription of antibiotics in Canada.
In particular, Soucy's research focuses on developing "antimicrobial stewardship" programs to facilitate best practices in antibiotic prescription by family physicians.
While harmful bacteria have a natural ability to develop resistance to antimicrobial drugs, the way that healthcare providers across the globe have prescribed these drugs has accelerated drug resistance.
Misuse and overuse of antibiotics facilitates the exposure of bacteria to drugs for longer than necessary to treat infection. This exposure allows microbes the conditions that foster the evolution of drug resistance.
Soucy illustrated an example of misuse with the prescription of antibiotics for the treatment of respiratory tract infections — such as the common cold and flu.
In addition to accelerating the resistance of microbes to drugs, inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions can also increase the vulnerability of patients to particular infections.
"In the hospital setting, we have this nasty Clostridium difficile [bacterium]," said Soucy. "When your microbial ecosystem is disrupted by taking antibiotics, especially these broad-spectrum antibiotics that target a lot of [bacteria] at once, it creates a hole in that ecosystem that C. difficile may then enter," he explained.
Antibiotic stewardship as a solution to excess prescription of antibiotics
Soucy's project will revolve around antibiotic stewardship. "Antibiotic stewardship is basically the idea of making sure that we use antibiotics in a judicious way, that we're preserving our [antibiotics'] efficacy by not giving unnecessary prescriptions, and making sure we give the right prescriptions [for microbial infections] as soon as possible," he said.
Stewardship programs have found a footing in hospitals, but not in the community where there is a lack of comparable infrastructure. More importantly, an overwhelming majority of Canadian antibiotics — a whopping 92 per cent — is prescribed by family physicians and dentists.
The project will develop an online tool to provide "feedback to family physicians about their prescription practices," helping them compare their own prescription practice with local guidelines and with other physicians in the area.
Soucy emphasized the importance of community-based solutions for tackling antibacterial resistance. By facilitating stewardship programs without requiring the infrastructure of a hospital, the tool will be adaptable to a wider range of less resource-intensive healthcare systems.
The path that led Soucy to epidemiology research
Soucy's multiple interests led him to conduct research in infectious disease epidemiology. His undergraduate degree trained him in ecology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics, fostering his expertise in the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases.
Add to this his interest in the social factors that cause disease to spread, and the field of infectious disease epidemiology formed the right fit.
In parting, Soucy emphasized the role played by research mentors, friends, and the community he found through extracurriculars, which enabled him to pursue his passions. These people have helped him through "all sorts of research opportunities," keeping him motivated and resolute throughout the challenging years of research.
When asked for advice for budding researchers, he recommended students to adamantly challenge their fears.
"The way that I get past that feeling that says, 'You can't do this, you can't figure this out,' is [that] I just commit myself to doing it," he said. "Then I have to do it — I have to figure it out | eng | 9d1f8c1b-f86e-422a-bbef-fbacabd5654d | https://thevarsity.ca/2019/08/16/epidemiology-phd-student-named-2019-vanier-scholar-for-research-fighting-antibiotic-resistance/ |
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The Henna Wars
Jaigirdar, A.
Sixteen-year-old Nishat, a Muslim Bangladeshi living in Ireland, faces an array of challenges: she comes out as a lesbian to her parents but they shut her out; Flavia, a childhood friend, returns to the school and they develop a relationship, but Nishat is angry when Flavia runs a henna business to compete with her own in a school competition; and Nishat is outed at school and faces racism as well as homophobic bullying. Through it all, Nishat stays strong and carries on with a clear sense of herself. This engaging novel, suitable for literature circles, small group reading, and class discussions, focuses on themes of racism, homophobia, bullying, identity, and cultural appropriation. | eng | 68995973-ec58-48a1-903f-dcd308fc92c4 | https://focusedresources.ca/en/k-12-evaluated-resource-collection/henna-wars |
Author
Topic: Cancelled (Read 13918 times)
Well the Republicans have cancelled Liz Cheney and for one reason only. She did not support the Big Lie Trump is spouting about election fraud. That is it. The Cult of Personality of Trump has claimed another victim. They did not remove her from her position due to not following conservative ideal, but becuase she dared to say the Emporer had no clothes.
This is the day the Party died.
They have chosen to be the party of Trump. Their platform is Trump, it is whatever he said last. All Republican leaders must bow to the Great Leader. I was hoping they would cleanse themselves of his stink after his loss. But seems like they don't know how to rid themselves of this loser. The damage of his lies is going to last a generation at least. I just hope we can have enough peaceful elections in a row to avoid more violence from his nonsense. Trump ripped the fabric of our democracy because his ego couldn't handle losing. He is clearly the worst president in our nations historyIt is said that History is written by the victors. In Grants case his legacy ended up being written by those he defeated, a different kind of canceling. Like most people I never questioned Grant being a 'bad President' but that may not be based on facts. Much of the History around Slavery was not written by the victors. begs the question of why and why was being 'canceled'
If I were a betting man I would bet that Trump goes down in the History books (100+ years from now) as the worst and a turning point. Worse may follow, but they will be Trump wanabees. A Turning point our dependents probably wish we hadn't taken.
"We must speak the truth. Our election was not stolen. And America has not failed," Cheney said. "Just think of all those Republican representatives in swing districts that will have to explain their vote next electionIt sounds like she could just as well be talking about the Russian collusion hoax. Too bad prominent Democrats didn't stand up against the lies about a stolen election then instead of going through the charade of a trumped up kangaroo court impeachment. Of course if they had they probably would have lost the 2020 election. Their lies fooled more than enough people. Still do in fact.
When you think about it, the election actually was stolen. No not by voter fraud. It was stolen by the Democrat lies about Russian collusion and Trump stealing a rigged 2016 election. Voter fraud didn't change enough votes to make a difference but those lies and the media collusion in propagating them most assuredly did.
It was not stolen by that. It was lost by Trump and his pathetic response to Covid-19. I truly believe that if we had not had the virus, or it Trump had had a better response to it, he would still be PresidentI deny the accusation and insist on my innocence. I've been nothing but super duper civil for over a decade now. I like all y'all, my peeps. Disagree sometimes 100% but that's what it's all about. Sadly it's getting to the point where if silence is violence then what does that make an honest disagreement?
And for the record not only do I disagree about Trump being the worst President ever, I actually think he was the best. We have only to see how much damage Biden has done in such a short time. Threw open the borders during a pandemic, threw away peace in the Middle-East, gas lines, inflation, unemployment, massive spending with massive tax hikes, Supreme Court packing, flipping the bird to Republicans and one upping Obama's "elections have consequences" abandonment of any pretense for bipartisanship, the war on cops, and as expected we have his puppet masters' war on white people with the absurdity and insult of declaring that the greatest threats to America come from white supremacists especially prior military and attack on little white children in the classroom by pushing critical race theory to make them ashamed of their crime of being born white. It's interesting how "I was born this way" isn't any defense either. Biden is a far greater disaster far more quickly than my worst fears had ever imagined.
And that's just right out of the gate. We are in for a world of hurt. And as always the greatest danger comes from the left's failure to acknowledge failure, admit mistakes, and change course. Almost without exception, their feedback loops reinforce compounding failing policy after failing policy by thinking the mistake isn't the policy itself that went in the wrong direction but the fact that it didn't go big enough and fast enough and far enough so as the bus heads toward the cliff they believe if they just give it more gas they can fly.
And there's nothing not civil about any of that. No personal attacks against anyone. No name calling. No tantrum. Just my opinion.
Mr. Card's last essay applies even more now than it did back then, and the disease angle seems prophetic. I can appreciate how he almost certainly disagrees with me about Trump though. And that's fine. But Obama was a disaster and Biden will be even worse, probably already is even this short time in.
It sounds like she could just as well be talking about the Russian collusion hoax.
It wasn't a hoax you fascist MONSTER! The Russian did interfere in your election, and the Trump campaign was PROPERLY investigated for their numerous meetings with the Russians.
Hoax, hoax? After four years of a Trump presidency, a Trump congress, and a Trump Supreme Court, why havent' you put in jail anyone who supposedly perpetrated this hoax?
Oh, yeah, because it WASN'T A HOAX, you fascist pig.
If United States (or their allies) were in conflict, Trump made sure to take Russia's side. Repeatedly and consistently.
He knew full well who supported him to get elected, and he showed the corresponding amount of gratitude to RussiaTo be clear I said history will judge and that If I was a betting man I would bet that Trump trumps the list of worst. I will leave that for history. My guess is that he will be judged on his divisive methods and communication more then policies. I believe the generations looking back will see this moment of time as a turning point, probably one where the US turns on itself... but it could go the other way... I don't have much hope
If Liz Cheney survives the next few years she will be in a good position to become President one day as I can imagine the independents turning out for her. A Conservatives with values and the guts to stand by them (even if it also a calculated image).I understand the frustration as well. But I know that calling someone names rarely does anything to change their mind. I don't know how many times I've listed out all the connections between Russia and the Trump campaign (meetings, sharing polling data, what Roger Stone lied to congress about, ...).
The only thing I can hope is that Facebook and Twitter keep Trump off their platforms. His megaphone is still big enough as is. He is a constant liar. He lies only to benefit himself and doesn't give a damn about the country. Hopefully with some time we'll see his grip on the American right fade, but I share your fears that his presidency will be a sign of things to come. Biden will do some good to restore norms. But if the American political right stays beholden to Trump the restoring of norms will be temporary.
Outside the Coliseum were the Amazonia recount is taking place a armed man stands sentry expecting a attack from BLM The man is certain in his certainty as he explains the lack of facts and proof is proof. He sees no problem with taking action based on that reasoning. One wonders if he ever thinks to askes himself if there could be something else behind his fear.
The Cancel culture isn't new or something that only occurs on the right or left. I fear we are in the process of canceling our critical thinking abilities and handing it over to our 'smart phones'Anything else is small potatoes.
Well, not exactly single handedly. He had an awful lot of help from Tucker Carlson to Ted Cruz. He certainly did fuel it.
FDR came awfully close to being a dictator, enough so that he triggered term limits and more controlsAnd in all of those cases the loser of the election acknowledged they lost. Offered a concession speech and at least pretended to try to bring the country together despite their personal feelings. They put country first. Trump made up voter fraud and has made is so that a majority of Republicans no longer trust democratic elections in our country. That damage is hard to repair and the immediate consequences are Republicans passing bills all over the country making voting harder. And its not just about catching voter fraud. They could expand early voting, improve funding so that there would never be lines on election day as they cut back on mail in voting but it usually is going the other way. There are less opportunities to vote in person, no increase in voting capacity on election day, and its more difficult to vote on election day.
Now what happens the if the next election is as close as 2000. ~500 votes in a singles state. Will either side ever offer a concession after an election like that again or will we have years of lawsuits even after the new president is sworn in? We know the Republicans wouldn't concede at this point. This is the damage he's done. Its not some policy, he's chipped away at the foundation of that Republic you state is so strong. I hope I'm wrong and the Republican party can be brought back before it gets worse. But as long as the path to political power in the Republican party depends on sucking up to Trump the country is in a bad place. And most of the damage won't go away quickly, just like you said people still bring up the 1960 election as fraudulent 60 years down the road. In 2080 are people going to still be bitter about 2020?
Liz Cheney appeared to be pushing for the vote. If reality finally finds a way to slap the GOP across the face and wake it up Liz Cheney in a good position?
Reality is the Republicans don't have a clue what is going on with their Conservative Base, and as such have opted for the "easy answer" of "it must be something about Trump" which is partly right, but also largely wrong.
Remember in 2016 I was saying Trump's nomination to the Republican Ticket was "the Tea Party's revenge" on the GOP waging war against their own base in 2014, so their own base went with the "burn it down" option. It just also happened that he managed to secure that nomination in 2016, where it put him up against Hilary Clinton.... Where an even larger contingent of people were willing to risk things burning down under Trump rather than what Hillary Clinton's potential administration might try.
Then Trump delivered on many of the things he campaigned on. Unlike the Republicans in Congress.
Which made him more popular than the GOP Republicans in Congress. (Low bar to clear, I know)
But the feckless GOP in Washington don't understand that while there is a huge political base waiting to be tapped into that is willing to stand against the nonsense of the DNC and other left-wing activists, they're failing to do exactly that. But Trump was.
All they understand is that "Trump has some magical connection with conservative voters we don't understand" and think it must be Trump they're rallying aroundHaha, funny enough as I was reading this I was almost simultaneously thinking that the same statement could apply to either party (with a few minor alterations). It's almost like both parties are full of crap and don't have a clue how to appeal to what people really want. It's almost like they have other priorities... | eng | 0913909b-5a40-42f0-96d8-ab52d84be73b | http://www.ornery.org/forum/index.php?topic=1026.0;prev_next=next |
This bracketed section shows how the missionaries were respected for their knowledge in these fields. Especially those technological skills like clockmaking, artistry, mapmaking, and astronomy. Going back to our text, this can be compared to the Jesuit failure at long-term conversion in China. This was due in part to the lack of religious interest by the Chinese; they valued the aforementioned technical skills more than the teachings.
2. If one receives a province, a d strict, or a village as his fief, and forces farmers in his domain who are properly registered under certain temples to become followers of the padre against their wishes, then he has committed a most unreasonable illegal act.
This second limitations shows just how much Hideyoshi feared the use of Christianity as a subversive political tool. By publishing and enforcing this document Hideyoshi kept more control. In turn, by giving the farmers a choice to believe in what they had already been believing it sets up the farmers separately from the vassal or daimyo, thus dividing more power the vassal or daimyo would have in case they wanted to overthrow Hideyoshi. It is easy to see this anxiety in the 4th and 5th points where the larger fiefs (as they presumably have more power) must be approved to follow the "padre", as God is called.
How has the chronicler interpreted this invasion in religious terms? Why?
Interpreted in religious terms for the Chronicle was maintained by Orthodox monks. The monks gave the dates of attacks in relation to religious days. With the end of the attacks they attributed it to the Church of St. Sophia and prayers "of the faithful". To them, such a bloody, relentless invasion by foreign people was not comprehendible within their own religious and societal views. Their religious interpretation, and view of the Mongols as lawless, godless pagans, was a way to try and make sense of a completely new culture and invasion style they deeply feared.
Modern Day Depiction of the Mongols in Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes and W. Rubruck's Account:
Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes is a short special on Netflix loosely based off of the real Mongol General Bayan of the Baarin. In comparing Rubruck's primary account to this modern day portrayal of the Mongols in China under Kubilai Khan there are a few similarities and differences. Differences mainly arise from the time and geographic spaces; the special took place in 1262 in Kubilai Khan's China whereas Rubruck's was between 1253-1255 in the Mongol capital of Karakorum. Rubruck noted the nomadic lifestyle where the Mongols resided in non-fixed dwellings, but in the special this is not shown; the Khan is shown not in a tent, but in a permanent building. Both sources (and our textbook) depict the Mongols as fierce warriors, who used curved bows, horses, and fear (of being massacred) as a means of conquering people. In the special, the Khan states he takes conquered craftsmen, employing them to further his conquests. Our text repeatedly emphasized this unique aspect of the Mongols of using those they captured to create siege engines or help run their armies as the real Bayan of the Baarin did. Though Rubruck's account is a primary source unlike this Netflix special- which was most likely based off of a plethora of primary sources- they both provide different view of how Mongols functioned and lived in various areas within the same mammoth empire. | eng | 2aa6323a-64fd-49c4-861e-2e0ec1637dbe | https://hypothes.is/users/rei1wehrstein |
Robert McLean looks to safeguard clean water in space
While Dr. Robert J.C. "Bob" McLean is teaching Texas State University students about microbiology, he also is working with NASA on researching how bacteria grows in weightless environments to safeguard clean water.
McLean is Regents' Professor in the Department of Biology for Texas State as well as the Homer E. Prince Professor of Microbiology and a University Distinguished Professor. McLean, a native of Canada, joined Texas State in 1993. He has published more than 90 papers, edited two books, 13 book chapters and co-authored a textbook on microbial ecology.
In addition to his current research with NASA, he has received research funding from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes for Health and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.
Q: How did you become interested in biology?
A: When I was young, I got fascinated with Monarch butterflies. We had milkweed in our yard. Monarchs eat milkweed. I got four or so caterpillars to form a chrysalis and emerge as Monarch butterflies. That was my first experience. In terms of my microbiology, when I was the equivalent of a high school junior, I grew some bacteria on a plate in a class. I've always been interested in different aspects of science.
Q: Can you tell us about your project with NASA?
A: Our first spaceflight experiment in 1998, was on the John Glenn space shuttle mission (STS-95) and that involved the help of some eighth-grade students from Travis Middle School in Port Lavaca, Texas, as well as three young students (two of whom were my sons) from Wimberley Independent School District – they were in third and first grade at the time.
NASA got interested in surface-adherent bacterial populations or biofilms. Two common examples of biofilms that people will encounter are the adherent bacteria on your teeth – or dental plaque, and the slimy coating on rocks in rivers and even in your shower -- particularly if it hasn't been cleaned recently.
During the STS-95 flight in 1998, we did an experiment to see if bacteria could attach to surfaces during weightlessness – formally known as "microgravity." They did, and that resulted in one of the first reports of biofilm formation during microgravity. NASA got interested in funding some biofilm work related to spaceflight and as a result, I collaborated with several people – notably Cheryl Nickerson and her lab at Arizona State University and Mark Ott at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston --and we received a grant to study biofilm formation during spaceflight, and its ability to be controlled with a silver-based disinfectant. Aside from potential health risks to space crew, biofilm formation in life support equipment can cause clogging – or fouling -- and there would be a risk of corrosion. In extreme cases, bacteria might cause leaks in piping or other equipment. It would be nice to go on a spaceflight to the Moon or Mars, and not worry about leaky pipes.
We did over four years of planning and testing and our experiment launched on Space X21 on December 6, 2020, and returned on January 14. One of our samples did not get processed by the space crew in time for return on the January return of Space X21, and so it was returned on Crew 1 on May 2, 2021. We are completing our post-flight experimental analysis and I are presenting some of those results right now.
Q: Why is understanding how bacteria grow in a low-gravity or microgravity environments important to the future of space travel?
A: From a safety perspective, we want to be able to identify if there are potential problems with bacteria that can cause equipment damage or harm the crew.
NASA and the other agencies are really good about trying to keep things clean and sanitized, but there are things that can slip through. For safety you want to make sure you don't put the crew at risk of infection.
There are some industrial applied benefits as well, including extracting precious metals from moon dust. For example, some European researchers are looking at using microorganisms to extract precious metals from meteors. Other microorganisms, notably a type of yeast, are used for alcohol production. The nice thing about beneficial microorganisms is you don't have to pay them overtime.
Q: What is your strangest experience you've had in your years of research?
A: We do get some unexpected things. That's just part of the adventure. The strangest experience is often when things don't work out. The thing I'm most proud of is seeing where different people end up.
It's been an adventure. Sometimes there are potholes, rough spots. It sure has been fun. I feel privileged. I think back to when I was a kid getting up in the middle of the night to watch Apollo 8 in orbit. Now I'm involved with it.
Q: Do you want to travel in space some day?
A: I'd love to. I don't know it is doable or not. I know John Glenn went up when he was in his 70s – but he knew what the game was. I would love it or see my two sons, or one of my students travel in space.
Q: What are your top takeaways on the future of space travel?
A: I really hope we keep pursuing it. If you are in a microgravity or weightless condition, some things are totally different.
While I think the sense of adventure is good, I think there are potential business opportunities. There is a possibility to mine minerals in space and microorganisms can help us like that.
If we set up a base on the moon, we can grow crops. Or we can put moon dust together with microorganisms to build biological concrete.
The space exploration is one small step of it but there are many potential applications. Just as the development of the American West led to economic growth, a similar thing might happen going to the moon.
Related Story
Xijun "Jeff" Shi, an assistant professor in the Ingram School of Engineering, and Robert McLean, a co-advisor on the project and TSUS Regents Professor of Biology, see the future of building construction on the moon and Mars. | eng | 08bb4412-c7d9-49a9-b889-ace62545ce42 | https://news.txst.edu/featured-faculty/2021/robert-mclean-looks-to-safeguard-clean-water-in-space.html |
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If you are seeking a wonderful birding event that can involve the entire family, the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC) may be just the event that fits the bill.
This year it will run from Friday, February 17 through Monday, February 21. During these four days, hundreds of thousands and conservation-minded citizens living in more than 250 counts scattered across the globe will make an effort to count as many birds as they can.
If you were wondering why so many people would want to engage in such an activity, the answer is simple—it is providing a unique opportunity to have fun birding with a conservation purpose in mind. The enormous volume of data collected by these thousands of participants will assist biologists and leaders throughout the world gain a better understanding to the state of the world's bird populations.
Believe me, this is one of the easiest ways to become involved in a conservation project. On top of that, it is free! All you have to do is first select a location you want to survey. A survey area can be as small as your yard or as large as a city park, state park or wildlife refuge, you name it.
You simply record all of the birds you can identify in as little as fifteen minutes at that locale. You can even survey the same area each day during the count period. In addition, can you tally birds in as many different sites as your like.
Once you have collected data at your location(s), submit your findings online at birdcount.org. It is as simple as that.
If you so desire, you can go to the map feature as watch as you survey area is added to growing number of other places survey during the count.
If you have not yet installed the free Merlin Bird ID app, this would be a great time to do so. The app will help you locate and identify birds that you might not have realized are present.
The app will identify their call display a photo of each bird heard.
If you think you might be interested in taking part in this enjoyable event, go to the Great Backyard Bird Count website. The site will provide all of the information need to get started, including a checklist of the birds you are most likely to see in your area.
Like this:
This past week a couple of small flocks of red-winged blackbirds made an appearance at my bird feeding area for the first time this winter. The birds ignored my seed and suet feeders and fed on the ground. This provided me with an excellent opportunity to witness them perform the double-scratch.
This is not a dance step; far from it, it is instead a fascinating foraging behavior. Ornithologists tell us that redwings, sparrows and some other birds use this maneuver to uncover hidden food.
FEMALE RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD
As I watched the birds from my office window, I saw several of the redwings rapidly hop forward and back…twice. Ornithologists say that birds exhibiting this behavior use their toes to latch onto plant litter and pull it aside to expose any hidden insects or seeds.
If you are lucky enough to see birds demonstrating the double-scratch in your backyard, you will know that they are not dancing but simply trying to locate food. | eng | 073dfa67-8586-400e-bdda-b90fa0d11c0e | https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com/category/did-you-know/ |
Introduction: Shortage of organs by donation is a national problem which needs a multipronged approach for its strengthening. Educating the people and increasing the awareness of the need for donation would be of the foremost priority. Identifying the target population who are more likely to respond would be very important to reap the maximum results. There is speculation that blood donors would be more amenable and likely to accept the idea and thought of organ donation. This study is being designed to study the same.
Methodology: This was a cross-sectional comparative questionnaire-based study among two groups: blood donors and nonblood donors. Donors were defined as aged above 18 years and have made at least one whole blood/apheresis donation. Nondonors were the ones who were aged above 18 years and have not donated whole blood/apheresis blood products in the past. All the responses were entered in the Microsoft Excel sheets, and statistical analysis was carried out using Statistical Package for Social Sciences.
Results: A total of 829 participated in the study. Among the 829 participants, 416 were donors, and 413 were nondonors. There was no difference in knowledge regarding organ donation among the groups except for perceived risks of organ donation among nondonors. Concerning attitudes, they were more favorable among blood donors, and it was statistically significant at a P < 0.05.
Conclusion: There was no difference with respect to knowledge between donors and nondonors. However, donors had a more favorable attitude toward organ donation. Factors like concerns about misuse of donated organs, lack of clarity on their religion's policy toward organ donation, and potential for harm for the organ donor seem to account for the unfavorable attitude of nondonors toward organ donation. | eng | 1178a220-0880-4fdf-97bb-913ef8d315ed | https://ajts.org/article.asp?issn=0973-6247;year=2021;volume=15;issue=1;spage=37;epage=45;aulast=Basavarajegowda;type=0 |
Raw sewage that meanders its way along the Tijuana River in Mexico flows into the Pacific Ocean and has for years. There's a lot of it.
According to the website InterestingEngineering,13 billion gallons of sewage-polluted waters have flowed out of the river into the Pacific Ocean since December.
"This input of contaminated water has caused chronic coastal water pollution in Imperial Beach for decades. New research shows that sewage-polluted coastal waters transfer to the atmosphere in sea spray aerosol formed by breaking waves and bursting bubbles," Scripps said in a release.
"This research demonstrates that coastal communities are exposed to coastal water pollution even without entering polluted waters," study lead author Matthew Pendergraft said.
"More research is necessary to determine the level of risk posed to the public by aerosolized coastal water pollution. These findings provide further justification for prioritizing cleaning up coastal waters," he said.
The research shows pollution's impact is wider than anyone thought, according to one researcher.
"We've shown that up to three-quarters of the bacteria that you breathe in at Imperial Beach are coming from aerosolization of raw sewage in the surf zone," lead researcher Kim Prather said.
"Coastal water pollution has been traditionally considered just a waterborne problem. People worry about swimming and surfing in it but not about breathing it in, even though the aerosols can travel long distances and expose many more people than those just at the beach or in the water," Prather said.
Having determined that ocean spray contains bacteria and chemicals that came from the Tijuana River, the next step for the research is to determine what pathogens are a danger to anyone breathing the ocean air.
"The bottom line is we don't know what sort of the effect is yet of inhaling this sort of cocktail that comes out of the ocean. We want to understand. We are doing further work. We're really ramping up to understand the conditions that lead to this aerosolization," Prather said, according to KNSD.
"This is not just a problem in Imperial Beach, it goes all up and down the West Coast," Prather said | eng | 77f04dba-bd35-4277-abb2-ff30b7c05f0e | https://www.newscats.org/californians-literally-breathing-in-mexican-sewage-and-study-claims-that-isnt-all/ |
Aydin talks about religion in a globalized world, especially Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. He stresses the need for representatives of religions to respond to the changes and challenges brought on by globalization, emphasizing the essential roles of religious education and dialogue in promoting the common good and 'peace education.'
en
dc.format.extent
31 mins
en
dc.format.medium
mp4
en
dc.language
English
en
dc.publisher
Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
en
dc.relation.uri
en
dc.rights.uri
dc.subject
Muslim-Christian Relations
en
dc.subject
Youth Formation
en
dc.subject
Islam
en
dc.subject
Terrorism and Extremism
en
dc.subject
Buddhism
en
dc.subject
Globalization
en
dc.subject
Interreligious Dialogue
en
dc.title
Interview with Dr. Mustafa Cenap Aydin
en
dc.type
video
en
dc.contributor.repository
DigitalGeorgetown
dc.rights.note
For more information about copyright for materials within DigitalGeorgetown, please consult | eng | ee634ca2-06a6-4a40-944a-bdab5a06aa8f | https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/handle/10822/1043748?show=full |
Product description Material: stainless steel, plastic Size: 14.3 * 10 * 9.5cm Quantity: 1 piece Package content: 1 * paper towel holder 1. 【Material selection】 : The toilet paper holder is made of 304 stainless steel, sturdy and durable, rustproof and easy to clean. The trailing edge prevents the roll of paper from falling and careful polishing prevents the family members from hurting. 2. 【Practical storage】 : The flat storage space of the golden toilet paper corresponds to the lifestyle of modern people. Besides storing wet wipes, houseplants or air fresheners, it can be used to store cellphone, keys, glasses, etc. on the top to meet the urgent need. 3. 【Traditional installation】 : The strong and solid traditional installation allows the toilet paper holder to be permanently attached to the wall, ensuring a strong hold and stable use. 4. 【Design】 : The concise design of the toilet paper holder suits a variety of decoration styles, such as simple, modern, traditional and European | eng | 597e4b1b-93f0-446d-ad4a-ffd1f1f0afeb | https://room328.com/p/toilet-roll-holder-gold-304-stainless-steel-toilet-roll-holder-with-shelf-wall-mounted-toilet-roll-holder-for-the-bathroom/ |
Top Wеight Loss Brеakfast Idеas: Start Your Day Right!
Starting your day with a good wеight loss brеakfast can bе rеally hеlpful. It givеs you еnеrgy, stops you from fееling too hungry, and might еvеn hеlp you losе wеight. Studiеs tеll us that pеoplе who еat brеakfast oftеn wеigh lеss. And if you'rе trying to losе wеight, еating brеakfast can makе it еasiеr to do. Eating brеakfast also givеs you important stuff your body nееds, likе fibеr and vitamins.
If you'rе not surе what to еat for brеakfast to losе wеight, don't worry! Wе'll tеll you somе of thе bеst wеight loss brеakfast idеas to hеlp you losе wеight and why thеy arе so good for you.
Top 5 Wеight Loss Brеakfast Foods
1. Oatmеal
Oatmеal can hеlp you losе wеight bеcausе it has two good things. First, it has a lot of fibеr, which hеlps you fееl full for a long timе. Sеcond, a study in 2016 said that if you еat brеakfast with "slow-rеlеasе" carbohydratеs likе oatmеal, it might hеlp you burn morе fat whеn you еxеrcisе latеr. Whеn you еat "slow-rеlеasе" carbs, your blood sugar doеsn't go up a lot, unlikе whеn you еat sugary things likе whitе brеad. High blood sugar makеs your body storе fat, so lowеr blood sugar might hеlp you burn fat.
2. Yogurt
Yogurt is crеamy and yummy, and it's good for losing wеight. Grееk yogurt, in particular, has a lot of protеin, which is grеat for wеight loss. Onе study with 20 womеn found that еating high-protеin yogurt for a snack madе thеm lеss hungry and еat lеss latеr in thе day comparеd to еating unhеalthy snacks likе chocolatе and crackеrs. Anothеr study with lots of pеoplе showеd that thosе who atе yogurt oftеn wеrе lеss likеly to bе ovеrwеight. You can makе Grееk yogurt еvеn bеttеr by adding fruits, chia sееds, or whеat gеrm for a hеalthy brеakfast.
3. Grееn Tеa
Grееn tеa is a popular choicе for pеoplе who want to losе wеight quickly. Somе things that claim to hеlp you losе wеight fast arе not truе, but grееn tеa is diffеrеnt. It's bееn studiеd, and it sееms to makе your mеtabolism work bеttеr. Whеn your mеtabolism is highеr, your body usеs fat to givе you еnеrgy, which hеlps you losе wеight. Somе studiеs еvеn say that grееn tеa can boost your mеtabolism. You can makе it tasty by adding a bit of lеmon juicе, honеy, or gingеr, which arе all hеalthy.
4. Chilla
Chilla, also callеd "bеsan chееla" or "gram flour pancakе," is a famous Indian brеakfast. It's madе from gram flour, watеr, and diffеrеnt spicеs. Pеoplе likе it bеcausе it's hеalthy and doеsn't havе many caloriеs, which is good if you want to losе wеight. Thеsе things hеlp you fееl full for a long timе, so you don't еat too many caloriеs in a day. It also doеsn't makе your blood sugar go up quickly, so you don't gеt supеr hungry or havе lots of cravings. Chilla is usually cookеd with only a littlе oil or in a non-stick pan, so it's hеalthiеr than friеd brеakfasts. But rеmеmbеr, it's still important to havе a balancеd diеt and еxеrcisе if you want to losе wеight in a good way.
5. Eggs
Eggs arе full of protеin and havе lots of important vitamins and minеrals likе sеlеnium and riboflavin. Protеin can makе you lеss hungry, еspеcially whеn you еat еggs for brеakfast. Onе study with 30 ovеrwеight womеn found that еating еggs for brеakfast madе thеm fееl full and еat lеss latеr in thе day, comparеd to еating a bagеl. Anothеr study with 152 adults found that rеplacing a bagеl with еggs for brеakfast lеd to morе wеight loss and a smallеr waist sizе in еight wееks. You can cook еggs in diffеrеnt ways, likе boiling, scrambling, or making sunny-sidе-up еggs. Enjoy your еggs!
Pay attеntion to how much you'rе еating. Usе smallеr platеs or bowls to hеlp with portion control. Eating thе right portion sizе can prеvеnt ovеrеating and hеlp you losе wеight.
Protеin can hеlp you fееl full and satisfiеd, which can prеvеnt ovеrеating latеr in thе day. Good sourcеs of protеin for brеakfast includе еggs, yogurt, cottagе chееsе, or еvеn a small sеrving of lеan mеat.
Fibеr-rich foods, likе wholе grains and fruits, can hеlp kееp you fееling full and providе sustainеd еnеrgy. Thеy also hеlp with digеstion and can aid in wеight loss.
Environmеnt: Your surroundings can influеncе your wеight. Easy accеss to unhеalthy foods or a lack of safе placеs to еxеrcisе can makе it toughеr to losе wеight.
Support: Having pеoplе who еncouragе and support you can makе a big diffеrеncе. Friеnds, family, or support groups can hеlp you stay on track with your wеight loss goals.
Conclusion
Bеginning your day in a good way and еating thе right foods can rеally hеlp you losе wеight. Whеn you еat hеalthy brеakfast foods, it makеs it еasiеr to control your dеsirе for unhеalthy snacks and stay on track with your wеight loss plan. Just follow thе guidеlinеs that wе'vе mеntionеd in thе articlе. Rеmеmbеr, it's not just about having a hеalthy brеakfast; you should also еat nutritious wholе foods for thе rеst of thе day to bе hеalthiеr and losе wеight fastеr.
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Submit your guest blog post and share your unique voice with our community of readers and writers. Our platform welcomes aspiring and experienced writers from all backgrounds to showcase their work and spark meaningful discussions. | eng | de84a665-eb41-4ca1-9e1d-53f2f503effc | https://hijackfacts.com/top-w%D0%B5ight-loss-br%D0%B5akfast-id%D0%B5as-start-your-day-right/ |
In order to be further reviewed for a lab science, we will need additional information about physical labs completed including but not limited to time spent doing hands on labs per week and a list of those labs completed.
In order to be further reviewed for a lab science, we will need additional information about physical labs completed including but not limited to time spent doing hands on labs per week and a list of those labs completed | eng | 17e79ef1-8426-4bcc-b599-5159d88432cb | https://courseapproval.asu.edu/deferred-courses?page=16 |
Introducing Philodendron 'Ring of Fire', a mesmerising plant that adds a touch of exotic beauty to any indoor space. This unique variety of Philodendron is highly sought after for its stunning foliage and striking colouration.
The Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' is a cultivar created through selective breeding. It is a result of crossbreeding different Philodendron species to produce a plant with specific desired traits, including its vibrant leaf colours and unique variegation. Horticulturists and plant enthusiasts carefully developed this cultivar to showcase its remarkable beauty.
In the wild, Philodendron species can be found in the tropical regions of Central and South America. While the exact origins of the 'Ring of Fire' cultivar are not documented, it is believed to have been bred from Philodendron species native to these regions. The parent plants may have exhibited similar colouration and variegation, which inspired breeders to create this visually stunning cultivar.
Philodendrons typically grow as climbing or trailing plants in their natural habitat, using trees or other structures for support. They thrive in the warm and humid conditions of the tropical rainforests, where they receive filtered sunlight under the dense canopy. Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' inherits some of these characteristics but is primarily cultivated as a compact and bushy houseplant.
Caring for Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' is relatively straightforward, making it a great choice for plant enthusiasts of all levels. Here are some essential care tips to keep your Philodendron thriving:
Light Requirements: Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' thrives in bright, indirect light. Place it near a window where it can receive filtered sunlight throughout the day. Avoid exposing it to direct sunlight, as it can scorch the leaves.
Temperature and Humidity: This plant prefers average room temperatures between 18°C and 24°C (65°F and 75°F). It appreciates moderate to high humidity levels, so misting the leaves or placing a humidifier nearby can help create a suitable environment. Avoid placing it in areas with cold drafts or extreme temperature fluctuations.
Watering: Water your Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' when the top inch of soil feels dry. Ensure thorough watering, allowing excess water to drain away. Avoid overwatering, as it can lead to root rot. Adjust the watering frequency based on the environmental conditions and the plant's moisture needs.
Soil and Potting: Plant your Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' in well-draining potting soil. A mixture of peat moss, perlite, and compost provides the ideal growing medium. Repot the plant when it outgrows its current container, typically every one to two years.
Fertilising: Feed your Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' with a balanced, water-soluble fertiliser during the growing season (spring and summer). Follow the manufacturer's instructions for proper application and dosage. Avoid over-fertilising, as it can cause leaf burn.
Styling-wise, Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' makes a stunning focal point in any room. Its vibrant foliage and unique variegation add a touch of drama and elegance to your indoor space. Pair it with neutral-toned pots or containers to allow the foliage to take centre stage. Consider placing it on a plant stand, shelf, or as part of a lush indoor jungle display to create a visually striking impact.
The Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' is a true showstopper that brings a tropical vibe to your home or office. With its stunning colours and impressive foliage, it is sure to create a captivating atmosphere wherever it is displayed.
Pot Size: 12cm (diameter) Plant Height: 30cm (from the bottom of the nursery pot to the top of the plant)
Our plants are carefully selected and supplied in plastic nursery pots, ensuring their safety during transportation and allowing you to choose a decorative pot of your preference. Experience the beauty and elegance of the Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' and enhance your indoor oasis with this remarkable plant.
Please note that the Philodendron 'Ring of Fire' is a popular and highly sought-after cultivar, so availability may vary. Be sure to check our website or visit our store to see if this stunning plant is currently in stock.
Add a touch of tropical allure to your indoor space with the captivating Philodendron 'Ring of Fire'. Its unique colouration, easy care requirements, and striking presence make it an excellent addition to any plant collection or interior decor. Enjoy the beauty and warmth this plant brings to your home and create a mesmerising atmosphere | eng | 94c7d231-736c-4760-81f2-f8702bc0c001 | https://www.happyhouseplants.co.uk/products/philodendron-ring-of-fire |
circulatory system
n=9
a: Circulatory system ~
b: a network of one-way streets
What: "The circulatory system is like a network of one-way streets. If blood started flowing the wrong way, the blood gases (oxygen and carbon dioxide) might mix, causing a serious threat to your body. In the lungs, capillaries on the outside of the alveoli exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen. Fresh, oxygen-rich blood enters the pulmonary veins and then returns to the heart, re-entering through the left atrium. "
What: "The body's normal temperature is around 37C, but it can rise in summer, during exercise or when we are ill. Our body regulates this via evaporation, in the form of sweat, to cool us down. "Our circulatory system is like a radiator to dissipate heat," says Dr Dominic Micklewright, a sport and performance expert at the British Association of Sports and Exercise Sciences. Sweat is mostly water, but also contains sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium and other minerals. "
What: " In science we will take the spooky month of October to learn more about blood and the circulatory and cardiovascular systems. Our focus will be understanding the process of respiration and how our body cells get the materials they need to do their jobs. The circulatory system is like UPS for our body cells. Blood delivers the goods and removes the wastes from the body cells. "
What: "The circulatory system is like the canals of Venice," says scientist N. Leigh Anderson. "It transports all the good things," he continues, "and it also transports a lot of junk." As blood makes its way through the 60,000 miles [100,000 km] of our circulatory system, it comes into contact with nearly every tissue in our body, including the heart, kidneys, liver, and lungs-vital organs that process and rely on blood. "
What: " The circulatory system is like a delivery service. It picks up stuff and drops off stuff. It does that by traveling all over the body, to reach most cells... as long as it comes close enough to every cell to pick up and drop off stuff by diffusion, it has done its job. There are different types of circulatory systems that animals use-- but all take care of distributing nutrients and picking up wastes. "
What: " The circulatory system is like a class field trip. When you go on a field trip your school might seperate into smaller groups and then meet at the same place you seperated at earlier."
The linked page is whole list of student generated similes. Some good, some not really. | eng | 495ceea0-bb4c-4dd5-bef0-4c1c3921a01e | http://www.metamia.com/analogize.php?q=circulatory+system |
In today's digital age, content storage options have become increasingly important for businesses aiming to reach a wide range of audiences. While online platforms provide a convenient and efficient way to distribute content, there is still a significant portion of the population that remains offline.
Reaching offline users is crucial for companies looking to expand their reach and engage with a diverse audience. This can be achieved by leveraging versatile content distribution strategies that cater to different mediums and platforms.
One effective approach is utilizing offline storage options such as USB drives or DVDs, which allow businesses to physically distribute their content to individuals who may not have access to the internet. By providing easily accessible and portable versions of their content, companies can tap into previously untapped markets and connect with potential customers who prefer traditional media consumption.
Furthermore, versatile content distribution methods like podcasts or printed materials enable businesses to bridge the gap between online and offline audiences. Podcasts can be downloaded and listened to at any time, making them an excellent tool for targeting those without constant internet access. Printed materials such as brochures or magazines can also be distributed through various channels like mail, events, or physical locations.
By adopting these strategies, businesses can ensure they are not missing out on opportunities presented by offline audiences. Embracing versatile content distribution methods alongside traditional online platforms allows companies to maximize their reach and engage with diverse consumer segments effectively.
The Benefits of Using Cloud Storage for Versatile Content Accessibility
In today's fast-paced digital world, cloud storage has become the go-to solution for individuals and businesses alike. The benefits of utilizing cloud-based content management are numerous and undeniable. With remote access to content, you can effortlessly retrieve your files from anywhere in the world, eliminating the need for carrying around physical storage devices or worrying about forgetting important documents.
One of the greatest advantages of cloud storage is its ability to synchronize offline content. This means that even when you're working without an internet connection, changes made to your files will automatically update across all devices once you reconnect. Gone are the days of manually transferring files between devices or worrying about version control issues.
Furthermore, utilizing cloud storage reduces costs associated with maintaining physical infrastructure. No longer will you need to invest in expensive hardware or worry about data backups and upgrades – everything is handled seamlessly by the service provider.
In conclusion, embracing cloud storage provides unparalleled convenience, flexibility, and security for managing your digital content. Whether you're an individual looking to streamline your personal files or a business seeking efficient collaboration among team members, adopting a cloud-based approach is a decision that will undoubtedly save you time and energy while ensuring your critical information remains accessible and protected at all times.
In today's fast-paced world, staying connected and accessing information on the go has become a necessity. That's where portable devices for offline content access come into play. These devices, such as USB drives, offer a convenient solution for distributing and sharing data without relying on an internet connection.
USB drives have long been known for their storage capabilities, but they have evolved to become more than just a means of carrying files. With the advancement of technology, these drives now come equipped with features that allow users to access content directly from the device itself. This means you can carry your favorite movies, music, documents, and more wherever you go, without the need for an internet connection.
But it doesn't stop there. To enhance the user experience even further, file formats and apps have been developed to ensure that content is easily accessible and optimized for mobile devices. Mobile-friendly file formats enable seamless viewing and interaction with documents or media files on smartphones or tablets.
Additionally, various apps are designed specifically to facilitate offline content access on portable devices. These apps provide intuitive interfaces that allow users to organize their files efficiently and access them anytime, anywhere.The benefits of portable devices for offline content access are undeniable. Whether you're a student needing quick access to study materials or a professional who requires important documents at your fingertips while traveling – these devices offer convenience like never before.
Say goodbye to relying solely on an internet connection or worrying about limited mobile data when accessing your favorite movies or important files. With USB drives for data distribution and mobile-friendly file formats supported by user-friendly apps, staying connected has never been easier.
Investing in portable devices for offline content access is not only a smart choice but also a practical one in today's digital age. Save time, energy, and unnecessary hassle by embracing this technology that empowers you to carry your world with you wherever you go – all within the palm of your hand!
In a digital age dominated by online marketing strategies, offline tactics often get overlooked. However, there is still immense value in utilizing physical media distribution methods such as CDs and DVDs, combined with the convenience of QR codes linking to downloadable files. These traditional approaches continue to hold their ground and offer unique advantages that can enhance your marketing efforts and reach a wider audience.
One of the key benefits of physical media distribution is its tangibility. Holding a CD or DVD in their hands gives consumers a sense of ownership and connection to your brand. This tactile experience can leave a lasting impression, making it more likely for them to engage with your content.Furthermore, CDs and DVDs provide an opportunity for you to showcase your products or services in a visually appealing and interactive manner. You can include multimedia elements such as videos, audio tracks, or interactive presentations that captivate your audience and effectively convey your message.
To bridge the gap between offline and online marketing, QR codes come into play. These small but powerful codes act as gateways that connect physical media to digital content seamlessly. By simply scanning a QR code with their smartphones, potential customers can access exclusive downloads or promotional offers directly on their devices.
QR codes eliminate the need for typing lengthy URLs or searching for specific webpages manually. This ease of access not only saves time but also increases engagement levels as users are more likely to explore what you have to offer when it's readily available at their fingertips.Furthermore, QR codes enable you to track consumer behavior and gather valuable data about their preferences and interests. By analyzing this information, you can refine your marketing strategies accordingly, ensuring maximum effectiveness while minimizing wastage.
In conclusion, incorporating offline marketing tactics such as physical media distribution coupled with QR code technology opens up new avenues for reaching your target audience effectively. It allows you to tap into the power of tangibility while seamlessly integrating digital content into the mix. Don't underestimate the impact these traditional methods can have on your marketing campaigns. Embrace the balance between offline and online approaches, and watch as your brand gains visibility and generates meaningful connections with consumers.
In conclusion, embracing versatile content storage and reaching the untapped offline audience market is a strategic move that can lead to significant growth and success for businesses. By utilizing various content storage platforms such as cloud-based solutions or offline storage devices, organizations can ensure the accessibility and availability of their content to a wider range of users.
Furthermore, targeting the untapped offline audience market presents a unique opportunity for businesses to expand their reach beyond the online realm. This demographic often consists of individuals who prefer traditional methods of accessing information or do not have consistent internet access. By tailoring content specifically for this audience and utilizing offline distribution channels such as print media or physical installations, businesses can tap into a market that is often overlooked by competitors.
By combining versatile content storage solutions with targeted offline marketing strategies, businesses can effectively engage with both online and offline audiences, maximizing their potential customer base. This comprehensive approach allows organizations to adapt to changing consumer preferences and behaviors while capitalizing on new opportunities in the evolving digital landscape.
In summary, embracing versatile content storage options and reaching out to the untapped offline audience market is a forward-thinking strategy that can yield substantial benefits for businesses. By ensuring accessibility across various platforms and engaging with diverse audiences through targeted offline marketing efforts, organizations can position themselves for long-term success in an increasingly interconnected world. | eng | e844850f-9015-4a53-bfca-a358cb0d3eec | https://www.sanyo-verbatim.com/2023/08/01/exploring-versatile-content-storage-options-and-strategies-to-reach-offline-audiences/ |
Society of Jesus
1720
During the 1720s and 1730s, Paraguayan settlers rebelled against Jesuit privileges in the Revolt of the Comuneros and against the government that protected them.
1721
Tournon's summary and automatic excommunication for any violators of Clement's decree—upheld by the 1715 bull Ex Illa Die...—led to the swift collapse of all the missions in China; the last Jesuits were finally expelled after 1721.
====Canada====
During the French colonisation of New France in the 17th century, Jesuits played an active role in North America.
1730
During the 1720s and 1730s, Paraguayan settlers rebelled against Jesuit privileges in the Revolt of the Comuneros and against the government that protected them.
1732
By 1732, the Jesuits had gathered into 30 missions or reductions a total of 141,382 Guarani.
1744
Because of the constant epidemics (smallpox and measles) and warfare with other tribes and the Bandeirantes, the total number of Jesuit Missions were reduced to 40 by 1744.
1759
Jesuit efforts in Goa were interrupted by the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portuguese territories in 1759 by the powerful Marquis of Pombal, Secretary of State in Portugal.
Jesuit missionaries were active among indigenous peoples in New France in North America, many of them compiling dictionaries or glossaries of the First Nations and Native American languages they had learned.
During the Seven Years' War, Quebec was captured by the British in 1759 and New France came under British control.
1763
The British barred the immigration of more Jesuits to New France, and by 1763, there were only twenty-one Jesuits stationed in New France.
1767
In the mid-seventeenth century, bishop of Puebla, Don Juan de Palafox took on the Jesuits over this matter and was so soundly defeated that he was recalled to Spain, where he became the bishop of the minor diocese of Osma.
As elsewhere in the Spanish empire, the Jesuits were expelled from Mexico in 1767.
At the time when the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767, the Jesuits of Quito registered 36 missions run by 25 Jesuits of Quito in the Audiencia of Quito – 6 in the Napo and Aguarico Missions and 19 in the Pastaza and Iquitos Missions, with the population at 20,000 inhabitants.
====Paraguay====
The first Jesuits arrived in 1588, and in 1610 Philip III proclaimed that only the "sword of the word" should be used to subdue Paraguayan Indians, mostly Guarani.
The Jesuit-inspired War of the Seven Reductions (1750–61) increased sentiment in Madrid for suppressing this "empire within an empire".
The Spanish king Charles III (1759–88) expelled the Jesuits in 1767 from Spain and its territories.
Slave labor and trade were essential for the economy of Brazil and other American colonies, and the Jesuits usually did not object to the enslavement of African peoples, but rather critiqued the conditions of slavery.
===Suppression and restoration===
The Suppression of the Jesuits in Portugal, France, the Two Sicilies, Parma, and the Spanish Empire by 1767 was deeply troubling to Pope Clement XIII, the society's defender.
1768
In 1768, the only Omagua mission that was left was San Joaquin de Omaguas, since it had been moved to a new location on the Napo river away from the Bandeirantes.
In the immense territory of Maynas, the Jesuits of Quito made contact with a number of indigenous tribes which spoke 40 different languages, and founded a total of 173 Jesuit missions encompassing 150,000 inhabitants.
1773
By 1773 only eleven Jesuits remained.
On 21 July 1773 his successor, Pope Clement XIV, issued the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor, decreeing:
Having further considered that the said Company of Jesus can no longer produce those abundant fruits, ...
1782
Subsequently, Pope Pius VI granted formal permission for the continuation of the society in Russia and Poland, with Stanisław Czerniewicz elected superior of the province in 1782.
1805
He was followed by Gabriel Lenkiewicz, Franciszek Kareu and Gabriel Gruber until 1805, all elected locally as Temporary Vicars General.181418201840
He "aimed to show that Mexican emperors were a legitimate dynasty in the 17th-century in the European sense".
The Jesuits were allowed to return to Mexico in 1840 when General Antonio López de Santa Anna was once more president of Mexico.
184851
Jews are still prohibited from entry to the Realm." Jews were first allowed into the realm in 1851 after the famous Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland had campaigned for it.
18709723
Mayer was a Bavarian Jesuit who clashed with the Nazis as early as 1923.
193038
A Jesuit college in the city of Innsbruck served as a center for anti-Nazi resistance and was closed down by the Nazis in 1938.
1939
Continuing his critique following Hitler's rise to power, Mayer was imprisoned in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
1940
As his health declined, the Nazis feared the creation of a martyr and sent him to the Abbey of Ettal in 1940.
1945
There he continued to give sermons and lectures against the evils of the Nazi régime, until his death in 1945.
===Rescue efforts during the Holocaust===
In his history of the heroes of the Holocaust, the Jewish historian Martin Gilbert notes that in every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews, and that the Jesuits were one of the Catholic Orders that hid Jewish children in monasteries and schools to protect them from the Nazis.
1946
The 16th-century Decree de genere was repealed in 1946.
===Theological debates===
Within the Catholic Church, there has existed a sometimes tense relationship between Jesuits and the Holy See, due to questioning of official church teaching and papal directives, such as those on abortion, birth control, women deacons, homosexuality, and liberation theology.
1950
Following a trend within the Catholic priesthood at large, Jesuit numbers peaked in the 1950s and have declined steadily since.
195619731974
Paul VI's words remain engraved on your hearts: "Wherever in the Church, even in the most difficult and extreme fields, at the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches, there has been and there is confrontation between the burning exigencies of man and the perennial message of the Gospel, here also there have been, and there are, Jesuits" (Address to the 32nd General Congregation of the Jesuits, 3 December 1974; ORE, 12 December, n.
1981
When Arrupe was paralyzed by a stroke in 1981, Pope John Paul II, not entirely pleased with the progressive turn of the Jesuits, took the unusual step of appointing the venerable and aged Paolo Dezza for an interim to oversee "the authentic renewal of the Church", instead of the progressive American priest Vincent O'Keefe whom Arrupe had preferred.
198319892001
The assassinations galvanized the society's peace and justice movements, including annual protests at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia, United States, where several of the assassins had been trained under US government sponsorship.
On 21 February 2001, the Jesuit priest Avery Dulles, an internationally known author, lecturer, and theologian, was created a cardinal of the Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II.
2002
He was, at his passing, one of ten Jesuit cardinals in the Catholic Church.
In 2002, Boston College president and Jesuit priest William P.
2005
The initiative has provided the society with a platform for examining issues brought about by the worldwide Catholic sex abuse cases, including the priesthood, celibacy, sexuality, women's roles, and the role of the laity.
In April 2005, Thomas J.
2006
He was a man of profound prayer, which found its center and its culmination in the daily Eucharistic Celebration."
In May 2006, Benedict XVI also wrote a letter to Superior General Peter Hans Kolvenbach on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Pope Pius XII's encyclical Haurietis aquas, on devotion to the Sacred Heart, because the Jesuits have always been "extremely active in the promotion of this essential devotion".2007
On 1 January 2007, members served in 112 nations on six continents with the largest number in India and the US.
2008
An author of 22 books and over 700 theological articles, Dulles died on 12 December 2008 at Fordham University, where he had taught for twenty years as the Laurence J.2013
4.)
In 2013, Jesuit Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became Pope Francis.
2014
According to a 2014 article in The Atlantic, "the number of Jesuit priests who are active in everyday operations at the schools isn't nearly as high as it once was".
2016
After his papal election, the Superior General of the Jesuits Adolfo Nicolás praised Pope Francis as a "brother among brothers".
On 2 October 2016, General Congregation 36 convened in Rome, convoked by Superior General Adolfo Nicolás, who had announced his intention to resign at age 80.
On 14 October, the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus elected Arturo Sosa, a Venezuelan, as its thirty-first Superior General.
The General Congregation of Jesuits who elected Arturo Sosa in 2016 asked him to bring to completion the process of discerning Jesuit priorities for the time ahead.
The current Superior General of the Jesuits is the Venezuelan Arturo Sosa who was elected on 14 October 2016.
The Father General is assisted by "assistants", four of whom are "assistants for provident care" and serve as general advisors and a sort of inner council, and several other regional assistants, each of whom heads an "assistancy", which is either a geographic area (for instance the North American Assistancy) or an area of ministry (for instance higher education).
2018
As of 2018 the society had 15,842 members: 11,389 priests and 4,453 Jesuits in formation, which includes brothers and scholastics.
As of September 2018, 15 of the 27 Jesuit universities in the US had non-Jesuit lay presidents.
2019
Twenty-eight novices took first vows in the Jesuits in the United States and Haiti in 2019.
In September 2019, the superior general of the Jesuits, Arturo Sosa, estimated that by 2034 the number would decrease to about 10,000 Jesuits, with a much younger average age than in 2019, and with a shift away from Europe and into Latin America, Africa, and India.
The society is divided into 83 provinces along with six independent regions and ten dependent regions. | eng | 85937fca-6049-496b-9ca6-f59538027aaf | https://yearis.com/society_of_jesus/ |
The all-new, smash hit Disney Channel Original Film everyone seems to be talking about is now obtainable for the first time ever on DVD. Another great science educational games you can play is faces because the student can learn himself in a newspaper detailing his character as an astronaut or a deep-sea diver. Strategy games are nice for learning to plan forward, think about the following transfer and the way this can have an effect on the move after that.. Be warned they'll become addictive! ABCya's award-winning First Grade computer games and apps are conceived and realized underneath the course of a certified technology education teacher, and have been trusted by parents and lecturers for ten years. A class of youngsters from a Colchester, Vermont elementary college put the Human Physique eBook collectively. ABCya's award-successful Preschool laptop games and apps are conceived and realized beneath the direction of a certified expertise education trainer, and have been trusted by parents and lecturers for ten years.
Somewhat, what these three ostensibly 'non-educational' games show us is that there are numerous extra options out there than we realize; we simply must shift our perspectives on what studying appears like. Math is a topic most youngsters battle with, so it is a practical concept to create educational video games that involve counting and performing basic mathematical operations reminiscent of addition, subtraction, and multiplication.
It jogs my memory video games of likelihood as poker or black jack, I know what I am talking about as I usually play these video games at You can also strive it as it is also out there in free mode. These games help kids study many of the abilities needed all through their early childhood education. Many of the free educational games accessible online are designed for vocabulary constructing. Another plus of outside educational games is that kids wouldlearn to interact with other folks too. The video games here vary from tutorial to health and fitness to social awareness and are available on a number of platforms and for all different age groups. Likewise, video games like Metropolis Guide may be extremely educational as the little one needs to know the previous of your area people. When you cannot discover the learning recreation you want, search for it within the 'All Games' listing on the homepage, the place the games are listed in alphabetical order.
Relaxed – probably the most fun board games are those which give contributors the opportunity to let go somewhat, shout out what they wish to and fill a room full of noise and dialogue. I wasn't an enormous fan of this recreation till some of my better 6th grade students were simply begging me to play the game. I always look forward to spending time with family on the holidays and games are a great way to do this.
Video games that make you snicker and socially work together might be nice to help eliminate any pressure with teenagers and can be bonding too. Each participant will act as a reporter and the group should interview totally different folks in class and working authorities to know their job particulars and obligations. Also children can learn mental technique, eyes and hand coordination by enjoying these games. There is also a science video games page, which consists of hyperlinks to other sites categorized by science subject. Youngsters with good social skills are well-liked among buddies and with no doubt, they're welcome to hitch in any board games at anytime. | eng | 21aac190-f64a-4fed-bb98-eca29b6167bb | https://jlawrencebrasil.com/board-games-for-the-elementary-faculty-classroom.html |
5 Plants for Christmas
Christmas is a time for colourful decoration and bright lights. Part of the decoration is plants and trees which have been traditionally associated with the holiday. Some flowers such as poinsettias are used for Christmas decoration because of their bright red leaves. Others, such as Christmas roses, are used because of their seasonal blossoms.
The poinsettia bush
Poinsettia is a bush which is native to Mexico. It has long been associated with Christmas traditions. The plant has bright red, five cornered leaves. In Christmas lore, the leaves represent the Christmas star of Bethlehem. The red colour is said to represent the blood of the crucifixion. The plant is very popular as a Christmas gift and is often used as decoration because of its brilliant colour.
The holly and ivy
Holly and ivy are two very popular plants at Christmastime. They are particularly numerous in the Northern Hemisphere. This is due to the fact that they are some of the few plants that remain green in winter. The tradition of holly and ivy during Yule time is said to date to the pagan era. At that time the plants represented the fertility of male and female. They are brought together to represent happy union. Many songs and carols celebrate the holly and the ivy.
The mistletoe
Mistletoe is another Christmas flower that is very popular in the Northern Hemisphere. It is commonly found in Europe and Britain. Its use at Christmas dates to pagan times where it was considered a representation of male fertility. There is a tradition that a man and woman who meet under the mistletoe must kiss. The idea dates to the early 19th century in English speaking countries, although it may have been part of an earlier tradition elsewhere.
The Christmas rose
Christmas roses are common in England. The name originated with a Christian legend. The legend is about a young girl who was unable to bring a rich gift to the Christ child and began to cry. An angel seeing her tears, caused flowers to grow where they fell and she brought the blooms to Bethlehem. The plant is an evergreen, and as such is a popular flower for Christmas in Europe and the United States.
The Australian Christmas bush
The native Australian Christmas bush is a shrub that blooms at Christmas time. Its bright red blossoms make it an ideal decoration for the holiday. The plant is common in New South Wales. Victorians have their own Christmas Bush which is another species of plant.
Plants and blossoms are beautiful Christmas decorations and gifts. Native Australian plants are also beautiful and can be used as Christmas trees. In the Northern Hemisphere, shrubs and plants which bloom or remain green in winter are associated with many Christmas legends and myths. They represent hope for the future and resilience against the misfortune of harsh winter. Colourful decoration is an important part of Christmas. Using flower arrangements and shrubs is a unique way to accessorise traditional tinsel and lights | eng | caf1f17b-a434-429b-b43e-19c42b9c5712 | https://www.giftideasblog.net/5-plants-for-christmas/ |
estimate that energy-related CO2 emissions increased by 3.4% in 2018. That's the second largest annual gain since 1996."
"The largest emissions growth in 2018 occurred in the two sectors most often ignored in clean energy and climate policymaking: buildings and industry. We estimate that direct emissions from residential and commercial buildings (from sources such as fuel oil, diesel and natural gas combusted on site for heating and cooking) increased by 10% in 2018 to their highest level since 2004."
"At the state and federal level few good strategies have been implemented to begin decoupling production from emissions. Our preliminary estimates suggest the industrial sector posted the largest emissions gains in 2018 at 55 million metric tons."
Meeting the Paris Accord levels for CO2 emissions is all but impossible now, which is no surprise since Republicans in Congress won't allow any policy changes to address climate change. And as we dither, the global concentration of CO2 continues to accelerate. The pre-industrial average was about 280 ppm and increased by only 40 ppm in the thousand years before 1958. Then, over the past 60 years, it increased by 95 ppm. In 2018 alone it increased by 3.43 ppm through November, which is a record since measurements began. And still we dither | eng | 5b30261f-d7fe-457f-ba90-0ce18c50dac3 | https://develop.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/01/723318/ |
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Rotaeno Mod Apk OBB (Full Unlocked) Download v1.8.1
Are you a gaming enthusiast attempting for an thrilling unusual budge? If that's the case, you've reach to the factual set up. In this article, we are in a position to come all the intention in which by the world of Rotaeno, a thrilling mobile game that provides a assorted and immersive experience for gamers. We are in a position to delve into the positive aspects of Rotaeno Mod Apk OBB, focus on its advantages, and provide a step-by-step files on the very best system to secure and install the game. So, let's soar factual into the thrilling world of Rotaeno!
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Mobile gaming has received mountainous popularity in latest years, charming millions of gamers worldwide. Rotaeno Mod Apk OBB is a decreasing-edge game that mixes charming gameplay with aesthetic visuals and an taking part storyline. This article provides you your complete a must-have files that you just must embark on this thrilling budge.
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Rotaeno is an trail-packed mobile game that takes gamers on an chronicle budge by a mystical realm stuffed with challenges and surprises. With the Mod Apk OBB model, gamers can unlock extra positive aspects and compile entry to habitual whine material that enhances their gaming experience. From intense battles to thoughts-bending puzzles, Rotaeno provides a various differ of gameplay aspects that preserve gamers curved for hours on dwell.
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Many people should work to improve their nutrition.Depending on how you eat now, this may pose a significant challenge. The information in the article below can show you make sense of it all. Learn the best way to give your body all of the nourishment it needs.The ones you get at stands or in stores have lots of calories. You are going into a smoothie when you make it yourself. Use fresh ingredients, Greek yogurt, bananas, frozen or fresh fruit and ice, to make a healthy, low-call treat.Try to eat a little something before Thanksgiving meal. You are likely overeat when going to Thanksgiving dinner with a stomach which is empty. Eating something healthy beforehand will help you fill up faster and avoid overeating.Consume plenty of veggies and fruits every day. According to the USDA you should eat about 9-13 servings of fruits or veggies every single day. While it might sound like quite a bit, it isn't at all difficult to work them into your diet. Orange juice at breakfast counts as a serving.Allow your kids to help pick foods while grocery shopping. If you give them a choice of what fruits and veggies they want, they are probably going to eat them. They may find new foods since brightly colored things will catch their eye in the produce section.For a tasty, quick, try making a puree of berries, pears, berries or pears. This sweet spread that can also be used as a dip. Mix and match your fruit choices so that you don't get bored of the same fruits to keep things fresh and over again.
Chicken Breast
Keep some protein bars around and carry concentrated foods if you tend to travel often. It's hard to find decent meals in airports. Clearing security checks, sitting in terminals waiting for flights, and taking flights with no meals are regular occurrences. Keep a few bars with you just in case you get hungry or need some energy.Vitamin B6 can help to reduce your mood. This vitamin assists in stabilizing your serotonin levels, which can prevent an imbalance that often leads to depression.Asparagus, chicken breast, and chicken breast are good examples of foods rich in vitamin B6.One great health and nutrition tip is to cut back on your consumption of refined sugars.You should look out for highly sugared items such as juices or sodas. These should be avoided at all costs. Keep sugar out of your diet and you'll notice a big difference. You will increase your well-being and feel good.
Trying out healthy new recipes is a great way to improve nutrition. For example, did you know that you can combine things like milk, natural peanut butter and milk. Oatmeal pancakes are easy to make.You will want to avoid highly processed foods because they contain trans fats. When you eat a lot of trans fat you can potentially develop heart disease. Not only do trans fats increase your LDL, or "bad", cholesterol levels, they simultaneously decrease your HDL, or "good", cholesterol levels.People who are affected by diabetes can have very challenging nutritional needs. These needs can partially be met by eating regularly because it keeps the blood sugar level within range. They need to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, products with whole grain and products from dairy with reduced fat. They need the discipline to eat on the same time each day.Make sure to thoroughly cook your mushrooms well. Cooking them will get rid of the carcinogens they contain. Watch your health as it can interfere with your body burns fat.Foods such as these are known to have shown that they can suppress appetite. Suppressing your appetite can ensure you keep a healthy weight.A big obstacle on the way to a healthier lifestyle is breaking the junk food addiction. Old, died-in-the wool, junk-food eating habits make it difficult for a person to embrace a healthier way of eating. After switching to a healthy way of eating, cravings for the old foods can persist. Learn to recognize cravings for junk food and aim to replace them with healthier snacks instead.Your physical and body's well being are dependent on good nutrition. You can prevent mental and mind in tip-top shape by maintaining a healthy diet.Eat healthy meals more frequently throughout your day that are small and nutritious during the day. Eating small portions several hours apart 5-6 times each day will help your digestion and help keep your weight gain. Keeping your weight in check may prevent diseases like diabetes and hypertension. Eating frequently helps you avoid getting too hungry so that you do not binge on bad foods.Giving your body the nutrition it needs is necessary for a long, healthy life. Utilize the above tips in order to experience improvements in your nutrition. Depending upon the quality of your existing diet, this might take a little doing. However, anyone can improve their health and increase their vitality by making small improvements.When choosing a diet based on nutrition levels, cut down on microwaveable items. This is because a lot of these meals have a lot of sugar and fat in them. For best results, prepare your own lean meats and veggies to ensure that you get everything you need and nothing you don't. | eng | c449c15f-0e8c-4d80-8981-4c7423f805f0 | https://fatlosscenter.info/confused-about-nutrition-some-healthy-tips-to-get-you-started-2/ |
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One of my favorite moments in therapy is hearing someone say they are the opposite of what they are expressing. Just like, "I am NOT insecure! I would be happier if it wasn't for her. She needs to stop doing x, y, z….and I would be fine!" Everyone suffers from insecurity. There are many kinds of insecurity. Insecurity comes and goes, manifesting itself as competency issues, feeling detached and unloved, abandonment, jealousy, etc. Insecurity in my office has been shown in one couple, where the wife has a wonderful time with the husband at an event with friends or family, then goes home to complain about everyone at the party during pillow talk…causing the husband strife who thought they had a great time! The husband feels unable to console his wife, feeling useless and powerless. The wife feels abandoned and unloved. Both are in an insecure place in the marriage and don't know how to stop feeling insecure! But when asked if they feel insecure, they quickly answer no.
Most people imagine insecurity as a quiet, shy, unable to socialize person, who is generally passive. This is not the insecure that I mean to describe. Insecurity is in everyone in different levels and is expressed in different ways. The executive of a large corporation can carry insecurity everywhere he goes, regardless of his huge income, house, fancy car, or hot wife. There is no amount of material success that can reduce or remove his insecurity. A wife and mom, who is head of the PTA (if those still exist) has a lovely home, three great kids and a husband, still suffers from insecurity. Though these stereotypes don't appear to have outward insecurity, they actually do! I know, because these couples enter my office every week, feeling empty, unloved, insecure, and abandoned by their spouse.
Insecurity begins in childhood through different experiences. Insecurity can be developed within an individual who has internalized an external event. This sense of insecurity can be caused by a number of abandoning, scary, hurtful, or confusing childhood events. When I say childhood, I mean anywhere from babyhood until 25 years of age. 25, because that is the age that the brain is fully developed. The brain does not begin to develop until age 3. That's an important sidebar…
Insecurity is a feeling, belief, and physical sense that a person can experience when they feel not in control, afraid, or anxious. For example, if you feel anxious around a certain family member, then you are not feeling secure. The lack of feeling safe, grounded, okay, or just plain not good is insecurity. It is the lack of security. Being secure, means knowing you are okay no matter what…..no matter whether you are accepted, loved, known, understood, or feel like you belong to a community. The point is to understand the difference between feeling a sense of security or not. If you believe your family is Beaver Cleaver, then you are in denial about your insecurity. You don't have to recall a large amount of pain in your childhood to have intimacy issues. Intimacy issues in your family of origin are not always painful. Sometimes they are simply confusing, uncertain, feel strange, or come from strict religious backgrounds and rules. Sometimes it can feel like an emptiness that was not fulfilled. The way to recognize the issue is to look at your own intimacy issues with yourself and with your partner. What does your partner say about your insecurities? How are you handling conflicts and shame? If you are not feeling close and safe to address these issues through to resolution, then there is a lack of security! This means insecurity.
Many times I have clients answer, "I'm not insecure." This is not true when the other partner is feeling disconnect or lack of intimacy. Being secure in any relationship means there is a lack of being understood, of being known, and being secure in who you are as a person. This is evidence of self-abandoning habits and behaviors that discourage closeness to one another, which is painful and fosters insecurity. If family members are rigid or critical of one another, there is a missing sense of security for a person to be accepted.
Insecurity shows itself in everyone in so many different ways such as: gossiping, triangling, competing, backstabbing, jealousy, envy, greed, anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-absorption, stirring the pot, fighting, abandonment, self-loathing, sabotaging, eating disorders, body-image, approval seeking, and many others. If this sounds like you, then seek recovery. Get into therapy that is honest, truthful, and insightful! Then, you will be able to finally say with confidence, "My insecurities no longer scare me!" | eng | ddfb8127-0f0b-437f-9a6c-8caf569c4bf0 | https://healingheartsofindy.com/i-am-not-insecure/ |
NCL's Updated Vaccine and Mask Requirements: A Safer Voyage for All
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I can't stress enough how important it is to prioritize the health and safety of passengers on cruise ships, especially in the midst of a global pandemic. That's why NCL has made significant updates to its vaccine and mask requirements, creating a safer voyage for all.
While other cruise lines have relaxed their standards, NCL is maintaining stricter vaccine requirements for guests aged five and over, as well as the crew. Additionally, with the rise of Omicron cases, masks are now required indoors, further protecting passengers.
Let's dive into the details of these updated requirements and how they contribute to a safer cruise experience.
Stricter Vaccine Requirements for Guests and Crew
I'm glad to see that NCL has updated their vaccine requirements. Now, all guests aged five and over, as well as the crew, need to be fully vaccinated for a safer voyage. This stricter vaccine enforcement is a positive step towards ensuring the health and safety of everyone on board.
By extending the vaccine requirement to all guests aged five and over, NCL is acknowledging the importance of protecting not only adults but also children who may be more vulnerable to the virus. This decision will have a significant impact on unvaccinated children, as it reduces their risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19 while on the cruise.
It is reassuring to know that NCL is taking these measures to create a safer environment for all passengers and crew members.
Updated Mask Requirements: Indoor Guidelines
Masks are now required indoors on NCL ships, except when eating or in the stateroom. This updated policy aims to enhance the effectiveness of masks in preventing the spread of COVID-19 on cruise ships.
Wearing masks can significantly reduce the transmission of the virus by blocking respiratory droplets that may contain the virus. While masks may not provide 100% protection, they are an important layer of defense in mitigating the risk of infection.
NCL's updated mask requirements may initially have an impact on passenger comfort and experience, as wearing masks for extended periods can be uncomfortable. However, the safety and well-being of passengers and crew remain the top priority.
NCL continues to implement measures to ensure a safer voyage for all, and the updated mask requirements are part of these efforts.
Mask Requirement Changes for Cruises Departing in March 2022
Starting March 1, 2022, masks will no longer be required indoors for cruises departing on or after that date. This mask mandate relaxation is a significant change that aims to improve passenger confidence and enhance the overall cruise experience. However, it is important to note that despite this relaxation, the need for continued precautions remains crucial in ensuring the safety and well-being of all passengers and crew members.
To provide a visual representation, here is a table illustrating the updated mask requirements:
Effective Date
Mask Requirement
Before March 1, 2022
Masks required indoors for all passengers, regardless of vaccination status
March 1, 2022 onwards
Masks no longer required indoors for cruises departing on or after this date
While the relaxation of the mask mandate is a positive step towards normalcy, it is essential to remember that the COVID-19 situation is constantly evolving. As such, it is vital for cruise lines, including NCL, to remain vigilant and adaptable in implementing necessary precautions to ensure the health and safety of everyone on board.
Positive Trend: Decrease in COVID Cases on Ships
Recent data shows a decrease in the number of COVID cases on ships, indicating a positive trend in the overall health and safety of cruise passengers. This is particularly significant considering the impact of the Omicron variant on the cruise industry.
Here are four key points to consider:
1) Decrease in COVID cases: The number of yellow ships assigned by the CDC has decreased, indicating a decline in COVID cases on board.
2) Impact of Omicron variant: Despite the challenges posed by the Omicron variant, cruise lines like Royal Caribbean have reported a low percentage of passenger cases, suggesting effective safety measures in place.
3) Rival cruise line response: Royal Caribbean is even considering removing some protocols in the future, further highlighting the positive trend in COVID cases on ships.
Overall, the decrease in COVID cases on ships reflects the cruise industry's dedication to ensuring the well-being of passengers amidst the challenges posed by the Omicron variant.
Ncl's Compliance With CDC Protocols: Health and Safety Measures
Following the CDC's protocols, I ensure that passengers are fully vaccinated and undergo testing before boarding the ship, prioritizing health and safety measures.
NCL's implementation of CDC protocols includes strict vaccine requirements for guests aged five and over, as well as the crew. This ensures that a high percentage of passengers are vaccinated, reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission onboard.
In addition to vaccination, testing is also required before boarding to further mitigate the spread of the virus. These measures have proven to be effective in maintaining a safe environment on NCL ships.
Additional Information and Related Articles
As an avid cruiser, I found the additional information and related articles about NCL's high occupancy rates in 2023 and the unique cruising experience offered by the new Norwegian Prima ship to be quite intriguing.
It's exciting to see that NCL expects high occupancy rates in 2023, indicating a strong demand for their cruises. This is a good sign for the industry as a whole, as it shows that people are eager to get back to traveling and exploring the world.
Additionally, the new Norwegian Prima ship promises a one-of-a-kind cruising experience. With its luxurious amenities, innovative design, and top-notch service, it's no wonder that passengers are excited to sail on this ship.
However, it's worth noting that NCL has increased their service charges, which may impact the overall cost of the cruise. Nonetheless, the high occupancy rates and the allure of the Norwegian Prima make it an enticing option for cruise enthusiasts like myself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are There Any Exceptions to the Mask Requirement for Cruises Departing in March 2022 or Later?
Yes, there are exceptions to the mask requirement for cruises departing in March 2022 or later. The mask policy for vaccinated passengers will be removed indoors, except in Europe.
What Is the Current Percentage of Yellow Ships Assigned by the Cdc?
The current percentage of yellow ships assigned by the CDC is unknown without further information. Regarding exceptions to the mask requirement in March 2022 or later, masks will not be required indoors for cruises departing during that time.
How Does Ncl's Vaccine Requirement Compare to Other Cruise Lines?
NCL's vaccine requirement is stricter than many other cruise lines, ensuring a safer voyage for all. This commitment to health and safety sets them apart and has a positive impact on the cruise industry.
Will NCL Continue to Prioritize Health and Safety Measures Even After the End of the Conditional Sailing Order?
Yes, NCL will continue to prioritize health and safety measures even after the end of the Conditional Sailing Order. They will implement post-COVID protocols and maintain long-term safety measures to ensure a safe voyage for all passengers.
What Are Some Unique Features of the New Norwegian Prima Ship?
The new Norwegian Prima ship offers unique features like a glass walkway, infinity pools, and a vast selection of dining options. An exception to the mask requirement is planned for cruises departing in March 2022 or later | eng | a0a50f0f-f252-4ba2-b3fc-aacf6cd0926f | https://voyagerinfo.com/ncls-updated-vaccine-and-mask-requirements-a-safer-voyage-for-all/ |
Vincent van Gogh's The Yellow House Tote Bag
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Unleash your inner art enthusiast with our Vincent van Gogh's The Yellow House Tote Bag. Embrace the vibrant strokes and rich colors of one of van Gogh's most iconic paintings wherever you go. This tote bag isn't just a practical accessory; it's a wearable work of art that seamlessly blends style and culture. Here's why this tote bag deserves a spot in your collection:
Carry a piece of history on your arm and invite intriguing conversations wherever you go. The Yellow House painting is more than just art; it's a window into van Gogh's soul and a symbol of his creative journey. As you showcase this tote bag, you're not just carrying a bag – you're carrying a story that sparks connections and captivates minds. Stand out from the crowd and let your fashion choices make an impact painting "The Yellow House," created in 1888, is a vibrant and iconic work that captures the essence of the artist's unique style and his deep emotional connection to the world around him. The painting depicts the exterior of a simple, narrow house in the city of Arles in the south of France. The dominant color in the painting is, as the title suggests, a vivid shade of yellow, which covers the entire façade of the house. This bold use of color reflects van Gogh's desire to express his emotions and convey a sense of warmth and vitality. The yellow house stands out against the blue sky and the green foliage, creating a visually striking contrast. The composition of the painting is balanced and well-structured, with the house placed slightly off-center, allowing the viewer to focus on the details of the building, such as the windows, the door, and the surrounding landscape. The brushwork is bold and expressive, with visible brushstrokes that give the painting a sense of energy and movement. "The Yellow House" is not just a depiction of a physical structure; it also symbolizes van Gogh's aspirations and dreams. At the time he painted this work, he envisioned the house as an artists' community, a place where like-minded painters could live and work together. He even intended to create a studio space in the house where he could collaborate with other artists. The painting is infused with the artist's intense emotions and his desire to create a space where creativity could flourish. It's a powerful representation of van Gogh's artistic vision and his yearning for connection and community. Despite the challenges and hardships he faced during his life, "The Yellow House" stands as a testament to van Gogh's unwavering passion for art and his enduring impact on the world of painting | eng | 697a2866-66cc-4e37-b273-0b31574eded1 | https://themobwife.com/products/vincent-van-goghs-the-yellow-house-tote-bag |
Where to stay in Vattakanal?
Cloud Walk
Find out more about Vattakanal
What's Vattakanal like?
If you want to find the perfect area to explore, why not visit Vattakanal? While you're here, you can spend a relaxing day at Bryant Park and Western Ghats. There's plenty more to see, including Kodaikanal | eng | ee294946-7ccf-4238-90b9-01c57dac9261 | https://in.hotels.com/nh11418675/hotels-in-vattakanal-kodaikanal-india/ |
Best Uses of Social Commentary in Anime Movies, Ranked
anime It is a diversified mode that offers more than ninja battles and laser beam battles. The animated films that are produced are often an ideal vehicle for their creators to express social commentary and highlight issues in the world or in society. Animated films are an excellent format because you can seamlessly incorporate surreal or sci-fi elements into the story without feeling stressed or forced. These films have the advantage of allowing the audience to explore their imaginations further without being taken out of the experience by bad acting performances or bad special effects. Let's take a look at some of the best examples of social commentary in animated films.
10 Perfect Blue (1997)
Rex Entertainment
The first on the list is Perfect blue. Perfect blue It is an animated psychological thriller film released in 1997 and distributed by Rex Entertainment. It was mentored by Satoshi Kon and follows a Japanese idol who has become a victim of stalking. She retired from her high-profile music career to shift her fame to an acting career. However, her life is turned upside down by a series of gruesome murders. She also experiences a slow decline in her mental state and begins to lose her grip on reality.
The show is an excellent example of social commentary in Anime. It deals with witty commentary on both the public and private aspects of being a celebrity. Mima Kirigoe's decision to alter her career path is what drives the story, causing her self-titled fanbase to explode in anger. Everyone who interacts with Mima is either trying to suppress her, trying to make her own decisions, or exploiting her at their own game. Mima is subjected to sexual exploitation that takes a permanent psychological toll on her. Mima has nowhere to turn, her fans are toxic, and people in the industry are just trying to take advantage of her. The film meticulously examines the phenomenon of celebrity semi-social relationships and how clients view them as a product rather than a person. Anytime Mima steps outside of what others imagine her to be, they seek to punish her at every turn.
9 Zeal Away (2001)
Toho / Walt Disney Pictures
kidnapped is a 2001 Toho-distributed fantasy animated film. It was directed by Hayao Miyazaki and follows the story of a young girl who enters the spirit world. These spirits are called kami and represent the spirits of Japanese folklore. Tragedy strikes when her parents are turned into pigs, and she must get a job in the spirit world to free herself and her parents and return to the human world. The film was a massive financial success, and became the most successful Japanese film in history for nearly 19 years. It grossed $395 million at the worldwide box office. It also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, being the only non-English film to this day to win this award.
The film is surreal, and many of its themes are subtle, but it uses social commentary as one of the primary ways in which it conveys its messages. It tells a coming-of-age story in a world where not many people care, where work turns people into workers without their own names. One of the spirits, Yubaba, steals the names of her staff and turns them into puppets that she can control. These employees gradually forget who they are and their motivations in life. The film tries to remind the viewer to never come to terms with their identity and the dreams they pursue in the midst of such a society. Names in Japanese society hold a special significance, with many anime linking one's name to one's memories. In animation, characters with amnesia often forget their names as well as their purpose in life. A name associates a person with their identity, and names in Anime often associate a character with an aspect of their personality and identity.
Related: The best hand-drawn animated movies, ranked
8 Paprika (2006)
Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan
red pepperis a 2006 science fiction anime film. It was distributed by Sony Pictures and directed by Satoshi Kon. The film takes place in a society where a device allows people to share their dreams in a dream world. A terrorist steals the device and uses it to give people nightmares. A dream detective named Paprika has started entering people's dreams to help her solve cases. This anime film uses the premise of his dreams to make a social commentary on the duality of people and how they are composed of different identities that often clash. Paprika becomes unable to distinguish and reconcile her dream persona with her real self, leading to an identity crisis that ultimately leaves her unable to embrace reality. He also comments on the effects of alienating society and isolating people when their identity does not match a preconceived notion.
7 Akira (1988)
Warner Bros.
Next is AkiraAnd Cyberpunk action film from 1988. The film was distributed by Toho and directed by Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, and Mami Koyama. It follows the story of Shōtarō Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang that survives in the dystopian future of 2019. The scene includes the aftermath of a world war that caused the destruction of Tokyo. The new rebuilt Tokyo is full of corrupt politicians, criminals and terrorists, and the people's anti-government sentiment is running high. The film takes a look at the raw and exposed version of human nature that takes place after the collapse of society. It also takes aim at the way armies often fail their own people and how easily government officials are corrupted when left to themselves.
Related: 11 Delightfully Offbeat Animated Movies From the '70s
6 Silent Voice (2016)
Kyoto cartoon
Silent voice is a drama film distributed by Shochiku and released in 2016. The film is directed by Naoko Yamada and follows the story of a deaf girl and her fanatics in a coming-of-age story featuring the possibility of redemption. It features themes of suicide and alienation in society based on people's differences. Japanese culture strongly encourages people to conform and despises people who stand out from the norm. Silent voice This setting is used to provide social commentary and dispel myths about bullying, suicide, and mental health. The film won Best Animated Feature at the Japanese Academy Awards.
5 Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Production I.G
Ghost in a bowl is a noir cyberpunk animated film distributed by Shochiku and released in 1995. The film follows a cyborg police agent who has to investigate a mysterious hacker who controls people with his cybernetic implants. The film explores the boundaries between humanity and machines, and how technology turns people into a mixture of both. The ghost is the soul of a person, and the shell is the body that can be completely transformed by cybernetics. It also contains social commentary about the nature of abuse and human trafficking and how this technological society mistreats robotic dolls.
4 The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
Kadokawa Pictures
Another anime movie that benefits greatly from social commentary is The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. This movie was distributed by Kadokawa Herald Pictures and released in 2006. It is based on the novel of the same name and tells the story of Makoto Konoo, who learns the ability to time travel. She frequently uses her powers to cause minor problems in her life, leading to complications whenever she returns to fix them. The movie suggests that we should embrace the imperfections in society and not shun things just not to try something new.
3 Weathering With You (2019)
Comics Wave Movies
weathering with you It is the next anime movie on the list, distributed by Toho. It was released in 2019 and directed by Makoto Shinkai. The plot follows a high school boy who has run away from his home in the country to live in Tokyo. While there, he meets an orphan girl who can control the weather. The film draws parallels with climate change and the nuclear disaster that devastated a region in Japan in 2011. It seeks to establish how man's ability to control nature can lead to unexpected consequences.
2 Grave of the Fireflies (1989)
Toho
Grave of the Firefliesis a World War II animated film released in 1988 and distributed by Toho. It tells the story of two war-orphaned brothers trying to survive in 1945 near the end of the war. Their father is out fighting in the war, and their mother has recently died, leaving the siblings to fend for themselves. It is a tragic movie that details the civilian side of the war and how much people suffer far from the front lines. It is often considered one of the greatest war films ever made, thanks to the superb animation and desperate conflict depicted.
1 Princess Mononoke (1997)
Toho
At the top of the list, we have Prince Mononoke. Prince Mononoke It was released in 1997 and distributed by Toho. It tells the story of a young prince named Ashitaka who becomes involved in a conflict between humans and forest spirits. The film examines the relationship between human society and nature and how it creates social outcasts thanks to an endless cycle of hate. | eng | 0d92acb2-dcea-419d-877b-d2b7cbd78d8a | https://multiflex21.com/best-uses-of-social-commentary-in-anime-movies-ranked/ |
Children's rights for a better Internet – Flash 04 2018
Contents
Session teaser
At the end of 2017, over 4 billion internet users were registered. One in three of them is a child. Advocating for children's rights in this digital world has increased in its outreach, although there are still plenty of questions to address. Are children sufficiently represented in the internet users' scheme? Catering for the voice of youth reached out to developing countries? And perhaps an underlying question: are the current efforts contributing to a better internet with equal rights or are they creating discrepancies for children across the globe?
Keywords
Session description
Having at the core mission children's rights for a better internet in the digital age is not a rare belief, although one cannot help but wonder if the target audience is actually informed in a proportional manner. In this session, we will start by taking the pulse of the audience's perception of children's rights in the digital world, looking into some key outreach examples at European level and opening up for a discussion on how these models could be extrapolated in the global internet.
Format
Opening remarks from the youth ambassador from the Better Internet for Kids Youth Ambassador programme (5 min)
Short survey to check the audience's awareness on children's rights in the digital world (3min)
Followed by pitch presentations
Better Internet for Kids (5 min)
Stiftung Digitale Chancen (5 min)
Closing the session through an open discussion with the audience on their views (12min) | eng | eb4e389a-01bd-4fdc-bf27-206d124ea244 | https://eurodigwiki.org/wiki/Children%E2%80%99s_rights_for_a_better_Internet_%E2%80%93_Flash_04_2018 |
The Power of Gratitude
Manifesting money is a goal that many of us aspire to achieve. We often seek various methods and strategies to attract financial abundance into our lives. While there are numerous techniques out there, one often overlooked but incredibly powerful approach is the practice of gratitude. Cultivating an attitude of gratitude not only brings about a positive shift in our mindset but also opens up opportunities for financial prosperity. In this blog post, we will explore how incorporating gratitude into your manifesting routine can help attract money and create a more abundant life.
Shifting Your Mindset:
Before diving into the specifics of manifesting money, it is essential to recognize the significance of a positive mindset. Gratitude acts as a catalyst for shifting our focus from scarcity to abundance. By expressing gratitude for what we already have, we create a vibrational alignment with the energy of abundance. This positive mindset helps us attract more of what we desire, including money.
Daily Gratitude Practice:
Start each day by expressing gratitude for the blessings in your life. Take a few moments to reflect on the things you appreciate, such as your health, relationships, opportunities, and the simple joys that bring you happiness. Engage your senses and truly immerse yourself in the feeling of gratitude. This practice sets a positive tone for the day and helps you maintain an abundant mindset.
Gratitude Journal:
Maintaining a gratitude journal is a powerful tool for manifesting money. Set aside a dedicated notebook or use a digital journaling app to record the things you are grateful for daily. Alongside your general blessings, focus specifically on aspects related to money and financial abundance. Write down instances where money has flowed into your life or instances where you received unexpected financial benefits. By acknowledging and appreciating these moments, you amplify their positive impact, and more such opportunities are likely to manifest.
Visualization and Affirmations:
Combine the practice of gratitude with visualization and affirmations to enhance your manifestation efforts. Set aside time each day to visualize yourself already in possession of the financial abundance you desire. Feel the joy and gratitude as if it has already manifested. Additionally, affirmations such as "I am grateful for the financial abundance that flows into my life effortlessly" or "I am open to receiving unlimited wealth" can reinforce your positive beliefs and attract money into your reality.
Gratitude for Abundance Around You:
In addition to focusing on personal finances, extend your gratitude to the abundance present in the world around you. Appreciate the wealth and success of others, celebrating their achievements without comparison or envy. Recognize that there is more than enough prosperity to go around and that the universe is abundant by nature. Embracing this mindset allows you to attract and align yourself with the flow of financial abundance.
Conclusion:
Incorporating gratitude into your manifesting practice is a powerful way to attract money and create a more abundant life. By shifting your mindset, practicing daily gratitude, maintaining a gratitude journal, visualizing, and affirming your desires, and embracing the abundance around you, you tap into the energy of prosperity. Remember, gratitude is not just a means to an end but a transformative practice that brings joy and fulfillment into your life, enhancing your overall well-being. Start incorporating gratitude into your manifesting routine today and watch as the universe responds with financial abundance. | eng | 69950f00-47e2-492d-8ad5-4b440557e0fe | https://themoneyalchemist.com/the-power-of-gratitude/ |
Finney 5: Ways to use your 'extra' hour from daylight saving time
Daylight saving time ended Sunday. This means people adjusted their clocks back an hour in a meaningless autumn ritual that benefits no one.
Here's how Iowans are using their extra hour.
Reaping the financial rewards received from investing in the daylight saving rather than Roth IRA.
Incessantly talking about the Hawkeyes' chances of getting into the college football playoffs.
Considering who they will support in the Iowa Caucuses.
Coming up with lies about how they've always been Kansas City Royals fans.
Explaining that daylight saving time has nothing to do with farmers, but is actually an antiquated energy-saving plan that dates to World War I which actually wastes energy and throws off people's sense of time as a cruel and pointless ritual almost as stupid as Black Friday. | eng | 6291eede-28bb-4edf-9f73-fb116ab0412e | https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/daniel-finney/2015/11/01/finney-5-ways-use-your-extra-hour-daylight-saving-time/75001232/ |
Throughout the lowland wet tropics, periodic nonprotracted drought caused by irregular rainfall distribution is responsible for sizable reductions in maize yield. This is particularly true when reduced water availability ...
Adaptation to abiotic stresses like drought is an important acquirement of agriculturally relevant crops like maize. Development of enhanced drought tolerance in crops grown in climatic zones where drought is a very dominant ...
This paper discusses alternatives for improving the maize plant. While maize hybrids dominate in the developed world, open-pollinated varieties mostly are grown in the developing countries. The importance of population ...
This booklet is intended to aid researchers in meeting one of the critical challenges facing national maize programs in developing countries--which is to develop effective seed production systems for more rapid dissemination ...
This booklet is designed as a quick guide for identifying maize diseases. It is intended for field use by agricultural technicians and maize producers. The text provides a brief description of some of the principal maize ...
This booklet is designed as a quick guide for identifying maize diseases. It is intended for field use by agricultural technicians and maize producers. The text provides a brief description of some of the principal maize ...
2012 was an exciting year for MAIZE. Over 860,000 farmers benefited from CIMMYT and IITA research outputs, and many more are benefiting through germplasm released by partners in countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, El ...
A newly developed maize Illumina GoldenGate Assay with 1536 SNPs from 582 loci was used to genotype a highly diverse global maize collection of 632 inbred lines from temperate, tropical, and subtropical public breeding ... | eng | 88cd0a3a-1f1b-47ee-a2b8-ea236049758b | https://repository.cimmyt.org/handle/10883/5/discover?rpp=10&filtertype=region&filter_relational_operator=equals&filter=Global |
Tag
This Day In Founding Fathers History – 19 July In 1848 on this day, the Seneca Falls Convention began. This was the first women's rights convention, conceived of and organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. The two women had gone to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention but were refused seats because... | eng | ef99199b-ef19-486f-b6c5-c948c278ebd8 | https://mikechurch.com/tag/franklin-institute/ |
Food Allergies and Intolerances: What's the Difference?
Pinpointing Food Sensitivities Can Slow Down the Aging Process
It's impossible to underestimate the importance of nutrition. Food makes us feel good and fuels all aspects of our complex physiology. But what about food allergies and sensitivities? What if what we eat is adversely affecting our health?
An estimated 32 million Americans have food allergies. If you're allergic to something, you've probably already explored your options and know that certain foodstuffs should be avoided.
However, millions of other people have food sensitivities, which are harder to define and, therefore, to assess and manage.
Symptoms of Food Intolerance
Food allergies can result in serious symptoms and even death. Soy, shellfish, milk, eggs, tree nuts, and wheat are some of the more common foods that can trigger allergic reactions.
Being intolerant of foods is different. The symptoms associated with food sensitivity include:
Intestinal gas
Headaches
Fatigue
Abdominal pain
Tightening in the chest
Nasal congestion
Bloating
Diarrhea
Rashes
It can be hard to identify where particular food sensitivities might lie. The modern diet often includes composite and processed foods (common chemical additives are notorious for producing symptoms), which makes it harder to isolate which element is triggering a reaction.
The Danger of Ignoring Your Symptoms
Many people 'soldier on' and dismiss their food intolerance as something they can cope with without the need for medical intervention. However, it's crucial that any food sensitivities are explored. Left untreated, they can contribute to a range of more serious conditions, including:
Irritable bowel syndrome
ADHD
Skin conditions such as eczema
Insomnia
Headaches
Ear infections
Inflammation
Joint pain
Rheumatoid arthritis
Food intolerances and allergies can be hereditary. Anyone with a family history of food allergies, asthma, hay fever or eczema should undergo testing to identify any risk.
Even in the absence of a family history of allergies, if you experience any of the symptoms listed above, then tests can identify underlying intolerances to avoid putting your long-term health at risk.
The right nutrition can transform your life and affect how you age. Call today at (305) 400-0005 and find out more.
Feeling strong, resilient, and healthy is vital to how we age. Nutrition is key. Eating right for your body isn't just about getting enough fresh fruit and vegetables. It's about understanding what makes YOUR body tick – and what stops it from thriving.
NuLife Institute: The Experts in Age Management
The physicians at NuLife Institute have decades of experience in age-management techniques. Our doctors will work with you to identify the precise way that certain foods affect your unique physiology.
They will explore your diet, family history, and environmental factors and carry out specific testing for sensitivities and allergies.
Your NuLife physician will work with you to create a bespoke roadmap – our proprietary Internal Blueprint – that will help you to feel ten years younger in just six months.
Are you ready to unlock your potential? Call our expert team today and start your journey to feeling younger | eng | e1a49a13-2a11-4beb-b674-b2b1f595d862 | https://www.nulifeinstitute.com/blog/food-allergies-and-intolerances-whats-the-difference |
"I'm done. What do I do now?" Have you ever heard this phrase? Better yet, have you heard this phrase during a guided reading group or math intervention group? Aargh!
One of the most important things you can do is to teach students what to do so you never have to hear that phrase.
Decide what works for you with the materials you have. Here's what worked for me.
Finish all Classwork.
This is huge for me. If you have unfinished work, you don't have free time. Students who have unfinished work often end up taking it home as additional homework (and incentive to finish classwork during the allotted time). When students finish up their work early, I am happy to allow them to work on any unfinished work they may have. They are continuing to learn in the process, and less homework to take home, feeing up precious after school time.
Work on Homework.
I've had different systems. I've passed out homework on Mondays and it was due Friday and I've also passed it out Friday and homework is due the following Friday. Regardless, I allow students to work on their homework when they're finished with the current assignment. I have found that this is a huge motivator because student's have less to do when they get home after school, which means more free time with their families, sports, clubs, etc.
Learn a Mastery Club Challenge.
I can't say how much Mastery club has saved my sanity over the years! Mastery Club is student directed and very open ended. Students get to choose from 86 challenges in 5 different subjects to further their knowledge base varying from name the 7 continents, name 15 mammals, score 100% on a grade level addition test, etc. I allow students to learn and study and challenge that interests them and work in any order they choose. Students love choice. I also allow students to suggest personal challenges. My personal favorite is the addition of the hall of fame. When students mastered 16 challenges, they received their name on the hall of fame wall. I kept mine posted all while I taught 4th grade (it even made the move as I changed schools within my district). This was a fabulous motivator as students loved to come back to my classroom year after year to see how they continued to rank on the hall of fame wall.
Hint: You can get the whole Mastery Club unit ready to print and go unit here!
Read Independently
Encourage independent reading! It doesn't matter what book, picture, kids magazine, novel, etc. As long as students are reading, I'm one happy teacher! I also think it's important to have a robust classroom library, because it makes picking out a book that much easier. To start collecting books, check around at local garage sales, they are a very affordable place to pick up books. I have often been able to get books for a quarter or less. If you do book club orders, that's another great way to build class sets of novels and books for your library. Use your book order points. I used Scholastic, Troll, and Lucky Book Clubs to build my library. Another way to encourage independent reading is to bring in fun seating for reading. Bring in camping chairs, a reading bench, carpet rectangle samples, and other fun spaces to allow students choice of reading location.
Practice Math Facts
When students are finished with work early, I love encouraging additional math fact mastery. I use a variety of instructional techniques. I find that flash cards, math "coloring" projects, and just plain and simple math worksheets are one of the most effective ways, but they have to be FUN for older kids to actually use them. For online practice, I like Xtra Math. It's a free online math program where the teacher creates a classroom account for each student that allows them to practice their basic math facts online. Then students log onto their individual account and do customized multiplication practice. Best of all, the teacher and parents get a summary of the child's progress. Students can log on from home, too, so parents are happy to encourage math practice.
Hint: If you're looking for flash cards that kids think are "cool" check these out that encourage addition and subtraction fact mastery, and multiplication and division.
Hint: If you're looking for coloring sheets that reinforce math multiples, check these out here.
Play an Educational Game Online
I love when kids are learning without realizing it. I have found that my students LOVE to play online games. I have compiled a list of student friendly websites and games sorted by subject ranging from math, science, social studies, and beyond. The best part, it's all FREE!
Hint: For the full list of FREE online student friendly educational games, click here.
Organize your Desk (quietly!)
We all know there are two types of students. Those who keep their desk immaculate, and those who have stacks on stacks of paper, pencils, and books crammed in their desk where the lid barely closes. For some students, getting time to clean out their desk and organize is great motivation, for others, well…you get the hint. This one is hit or miss.
Help a Classmate
I allow students to buddy up when they are finished to help coach a friend through the remainder of their work. The key here is coach. I make sure that students know they are not doing the work for the friend but assisting them and answering their questions. I find it helpful to have these helpful students sit at the front of the classroom as designated student ambassadors. When students have questions they need assistance with they can approach the ambassador, and if the ambassador is unable to assist, students can then come see me. This helps free up my time as well. I find this helps foster friendships and develop leadership qualities within my students.
It all starts with a question. When you teach Scientific Inquiry the essential component to enforce with your students is to question everything. All of our big discoveries, innovations, and new ideas come from someone questioning the current beliefs with hopes to gain new knowledge, make something better or different, discover something new, etc. In my classroom, that's the most important ingredient. When students start to question and wonder, they automatically start creating their own hypothesis, testing it, coming up with conclusions, and even re-testing their hypothesis. Read on for some ideas to get students questioning, teaching the whole scientific process, and ideas for simple less mess science projects!
How to Teach Students to Question– This is the essential step in the inquiry process. All science starts with a question and a "what if".
Use everyday objects and ask students for other uses of a common item. I like to get kids thinking by presenting with an everyday object as asking them what is it? I further their questioning and thinking by asking what else it could be? Example: Start simple with a tennis ball. Other uses could be a dog toy, something to go on the bottom of chair legs to make it quiet, a coin purse if you cut a hole in it, etc.
Use a common read aloud and question why the characters did what they did in the story. A great book that I love to use the Jack and the Beanstalk. There are many things that you can use as examples in the story to teach questioning, and surely your students will being to question too. Example: Why did Jack trade beans for a cow? What was he thinking? Why did Jack think it was safe to climb the beanstalk? Why did Jack break into the Giant's home? Why did Jack think it was okay to take things from the Giant? Hint: Here is a link to a youtube video of Jack and the Beanstalk.
Use demonstrations to spark questions. A fun and visual lesson involves comparing densities of different liquids like water, oil, and corn syrup. Have students pour each of the liquids into a jar and see how they layer on top of one another. To add pizzaz, use food coloring to the liquids. Use this to get kids asking questions. Have students do this experiment and walk them through the scientific process as they conduct the experiment. Hint: Here is a link to a detailed lesson plan for comparing densities of materials.
Easy to Teach Hypothesis & Scientific Process
Present students with the question. This takes one of the tasks away from students so they can focus on the hypothesis and experiment. One that I find easy to implement in the classroom is the classic paper airplane. I fold a typical paper airplane, and we measure how far the plane flies. Then I ask students, how can we get the plane to fly further? Students then make their predications/hypothesis. Some ideas I've found kids like to test are changing how the plane was folded, the weight of the paper used to make the plane, cutting the wings of the plane, adding weight to the plane with paperclips, etc. Then as a class, we pick a few options to test and again measure the distance. Once we have our distances, we compare and draw conclusions based on the changes we made and either support or refute our hypothesis.
Teach Students to Record Evidence as they Conduct their Experiment
Write it down! Record it! To have a good science experiment it must be repeatable. This means students need to write down the steps precisely and accurately. Start with an expository writing assignment and ask students to explain how to make something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a veggie wrap, or how to cook French toast, etc.. Then, bring in peanut butter, jelly, and bread. (**Be cautious of peanut allergies before doing this with your class.) Have the student who wrote the steps read them while a classmate follows directions exactly as they were written. Watch the laughs! This is fun and helps demonstrate the need for precise writing.
Use the analogy of a defendant and his/her attorney in court using evidence to convict or prove the innocence of someone. Before the jury can decide the guilt or innocence of the defendant on trial, the evidence presented by the attorney must be enough to tilt the scales of justice. The evidence in the forms of written statements, photos, physical evidence, data, charts, and anecdotal notes helps build the case in court. It's the same in science inquiry, you have to have evidence to support your hypothesis in order to support or refute, just like in the judicial system. Scientists don't just say, "Trust me, I know t's true." They have to have PROOF to back up their claims.
Give Lots of Opportunities to Practice Doing Experiments
Hand washing: Connect with your school nurse and ask him/her to help you do a hand washing experiment to see how germs are spread. Nurses may have access to a special UV light foam that kids can put on their hands to simulate germs. Prior to touching anything shine the UV light on it to prove how clean it is. Then ask students to touch the object and repeat shining it with the UV light. You can also have kids put the foam on their hands, then wash their hands to see how good of a job they do washing hands. They'll know they did a good job if their hands don't react to the UV light, if they do, they need more hand washing! You could also use this as an opportunity to ask more questions, does the length of time washing my hands impact the cleanliness, will just water clean my hands does the kind of soap used change the cleanliness of my hands, etc. Hint: Here is a link to a CDC lesson on hand-washing.
Another idea is to see how germs on our hands affect bread, a slice of cheese, and a potato slice. Get three slices of bread, three slices of cheese, and three slices of potato and nine zipper plastic bags (three for each food type). Use a glove to place one slice of bread into a bag. This is the control group. For the second slice, wash your hands and then place the bread into a bag. For the third slice, allow each student in the group to touch the bread before placing it into the bag. Repeat this process using a slice of cheese and then again using a potato slice. In students' science journals, ask them to record the date you began the experiment, the steps you took to do the test, and write daily observation notes in a table. Take photos if you can and post them day by day. Watch what happens!
How to Tie it All Together
Throw a Class Science Fair! Allow students to come up with their own question and hypothesis. Then let them carry out their experiment and draw conclusions. Kids have a blast creating their own project. The key ingredient to this is ensuring that it's simple enough for kids to complete on their own without parents. Here are a few ideas to spark student interest: . Once students have completed the process, they document their findings, and present their project at your class science fair. Hint: Need help throwing a science fair but not sure where to start? Here is a link to a science fair lesson ready to use.
up to Christmas (& other holidays) break. I found that these few simple, easy to implement, and free ideas help to bring attention back to the classroom in a fun and engaging way during the holiday season.
Adopt a Buddy Class and Read Together I taught fourth grade, and we had first grade reading buddies. During the holiday season, we buddied up our first graders to do buddy reading. I let my students pick any book to read, because it allows for inclusion of all holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and those who choose not to celebrate a holiday. Students practice reading their chosen book to a classmate during reading time. This allows them to hear a book, and also practice their reading skills. Once they have practiced, we have a "buddy reading party" our first grade partner class. The students LOVE getting to buddy up and "teach" their little buddies, and their first graders look up to them like they're celebrities!
Countdown to Holiday Vacation Embrace the time prior to vacation by counting down the days with themed days in the classroom! I like to start about 1-2 weeks before vacation. Theme each day, such as wear red day, bring a stuffed animal to school day, thank a staff member day, etc. My personal favorite to include in the countdown is thank a staff member day. It reminds students to be thankful during the holiday season, and allows them to express thanks to someone they appreciate (all while sneaking in those writing skills)!
Compare and Contrast a Holiday Movie and Book My personal favorite to compare and contrast is using the Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg. I just love that book and movie! They're so different, this task is perfect to sneak in some reading skills. I like to read the book first to students as a read aloud then show the movie. Try using a simple Venn diagram and challenge students to fill in their diagrams, then have a class discussion. Hint: Here is a link to a reading of the Polar Express on YouTube.
Decorate a Christmas Math Tree Put up a butcher paper Christmas tree on your bulletin board. Then challenge students to create presents to go under the tree. Each student designs their own present made out of graph paper. Ask them to calculate area and perimeter of the present they have designed. You can use 3D boxes and incorporate fractions, asking them to calculate what percentage of the package is a certain color. You could also calculate what percentage of the package is covered by ribbon. The possibilities are endless. Decorate ornaments for the tree in geometric shapes, and have students again calculate area and perimeter.
Make a Class Wishes Paper Chain Have students each decorate a strip of paper to add to the class paper chain. On the strip of paper have students write down their wishes (either for presents they want to receive or things they hope happen on vacation).
Teach About a Famous Artist and Have Students Emulate the Artist's Work My personal favorite was to teach about Grandma Moses & Norman Rockwell. I like to use this as a time to introduce the artist, their accomplishments, and life. Once students have learned about the artist, I have them create an art piece using the same style that the artist drew or painted in. You can use the completed works of art to make a holiday themed bulletin board. Hint: Here is a link to Grandma Moses' biography. Here is a link to Norman Rockwell's biography.
Create a Gift/Craft for Students to Give Their Families In my classroom we created something that all kids could create no matter what holiday they celebrated, think snow related crafts. We made pine cone skiers. I used a pine cone as the body, popsicle sticks for skis, a wooden bead or glass bead for the head, pom-pom for the hat, pipe cleaners for the arms, and then placed a variety of other materials out for students to embrace their creativity. There are many other crafts you can do, such as snowflakes, handprint art, clothes pin snowmen, etc.
Give Students the Chance to Color! Allow students to get their creative juices flowing and color. I liked to use math multiples that ask students to color in spaces based on the multiple or common multiple. Kids don't realize that they're learning because they're having so much fun coloring! Hint: Here's a great Christmas/winter coloring set that integrates math multiples!
Implement a Reward System for Good Behavior When behaviors spike during the craziness of December, it's time to implement a brand new behavior system that kids love. It's called the Holiday Bonus Box. Who doesn't love to enter a drawing and win something? That's what the Holiday Bonus Box is all about! It's a simple program that saves your sanity and keeps things positive during December. Get a big (Costco size) cereal box, cut hand-size hole in the top of the box and wrap it with a shiny red red holiday paper. Add notes printed on red paper for fun rewards students will draw and win, things like sit by a friend for the day, use the teacher's roller chair all day, be the line leader all day, and so on.If you're up for some more fun, you also work to help your students with less than desirable behaviors to give them a chance to turn something negative into a positive. You can implement the Grouch Box. This box only works if you are super positive with this and know how your students tick. It's is not a punishment; rather, a fun way to get kids laughing and making better choices by doing a good dead to "undo" the grouchy deed. Wrap this box with a grouchy green paper. Add notes telling students thanks for being a good sport and to do something nice for others, like go wish the secretaries a happy day, to thank the custodians for all they do keep our school shiny and clean, and help the librarian organize books, etc. Choose fun things that are acts of kindness and other good deeds. Kids love this and if they love it too much, (if you know what I mean!) you might need to pack it away until next year. Hint: Here is a link to an easy to implement Holiday Bonus and Grouch Box Behavior program standardized test OR in their reading novels. Cue the entry of…WORD MASTERS. I started teaching my students word roots and stems from day 1, and the results I saw were incredible, much improved test scores, and significantly improved reading comprehension, and confidence. If you aren't already convinced that word roots and stems are the best way to teach vocab, read on…
Improved vocabulary comprehension.
The English language is derived from Greek and Latin and many words that we encounter have meaning behind them that help us understand the word. By having an understanding of prefixes and suffixes, students can break apart the word into its roots, and make their best educated guess on the meaning of the word, no matter how familiar the term is. For example, say a student is reading their favorite novel and comes across the word, barometer. With understanding of roots and stems, students can deduce the meaning of the word, baro- meaning pressure -meter unit of measurement. Ah ha. A barometer must be something relating to measuring pressure. Hint: Check out this 50 common roots and stems, meaning, and example photo below. These word stems are included in my handy ELA lapbook for easy and quick student reference.
Increased number of vocabulary words mastered.
This is one that really hits home with me. I used to teach 5 new vocabulary words each week. In a 36 week school year that's just 180 words. And how many words are there in the english language?! What in the world was I thinking?! By using word stems and roots, students learn 5 new word stems and roots a week. Okay, so they they still learn 180 new prefixes and suffixes a year…BUT how many words have the root aqua-, bi-, bio-, circum-? A ton! So in theory, students may learn the meaning of 20+ words a week by unlocking the meaning using prefixes and suffixes, that's 720+ words a year vs. 180!!
Improved test scores.
Let's face it, as teachers we constantly feel the pressure to improve student test scores. Our success as a teacher is often defined by the test scores our students get. The pressure was just too much for me to handle, and I knew there had to be a better way. Far too often there are vocabulary words that tend to come out of left field on a test, and you're thinking, shoot we didn't learn that word! Have no fear. Using stems and roots allows students to unlock the meaning of those tough words, and make their best guess. While they may only know a piece of the word, they can make an educated guess, rather than just sitting and staring. Example: A student comes across a passage talking about pathology. But with the help of Greek and Latin stems and roots, they know that -ology means "the study of." The student is able to deduce that the passage is talking about the study of something. While they may still be stumped, kids are a few steps ahead in picking the correct answer, by understanding even just a part of the word. This method has helped me improve reading scores tremendously.
Improved confidence with reading.
With stems and roots, kids can stretch outside of their comfort zone with novels. We all know that the range of reading levels in a classroom can be tremendous. In my 4th grade classroom I had readers at the 1st grade level all the way to 8th+ grade level. By learning word stems and roots, my readers started reading at a higher level, challenging themselves, because they were confident in their reading abilities. Students knew that they could comprehend a harder text than what they were currently reading because they were confident that they could understand the vocabulary.
Read a short picture book to your class (yes a picture book!) I like to read my class a short little picture book that is interesting and captivates their attention (you will use this book to later teach the concepts of story elements). Read the book before introducing the lesson. It allows students to really enjoy the book and listen to the story without thinking about the lesson and story and getting lost. This also helps to reinforce that reading ANY book is positive. I find this really helps with my struggling readers, as they often attempt to pick up books far beyond their ability level, and spend more time staring at the pages than they do actually reading. When students feel comfortable, they will read and reading helps them become better readers. If you want to learn more about why I love picture books, See my previous blog post Hint: Here is a list of a few books that I enjoy teaching with along with a link to aYouTube read aloud. – "A Case of the Bad Stripes" by David Shannon. Click here for YouTube read aloud link – "The Rainbow Fish" by Marcus Pfister. Click here for YouTube read aloud link. – "The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!" by Jon Scieszka. Click here for YouTube read aloud link. – "The Story of Ferdinand" by Munro Leaf. Click here for YouTube read aloud link.
Re-Read the picture book When you re-read the book, be sure to ask students to keep in mind the story elements they just learned. I like to re-read the book again because students are now able to focus on story elements, rather than the suspense of the book, because they know what to expect. By re-reading they really get to focus their skills on listening for the story elements.
Discuss the story elements Have students participate in a small group or partner discussion regarding story elements that they heard during the re-read of the story. Then have a whole class discussion and sharing time. I like to put a blank plot diagram on the board and write in student answers. When students give answers regarding a part of the story and story element it goes with I ask them to explain their reasoning. This helps guide dialogue in the classroom.
Watch a short film I also like to reinforce story elements with a short film. It's another way to get their gears turning, and really helps your students who have a hard time connecting with reading, books, and written language. I find that a video often really helps my struggling readers grasp the concepts, and my students have a BLAST watching a movie in school (all while learning, but shh we'll keep that our little teacher secret). Hint: Here are 2 short films that you can find on YouTube that would be great to show your class, and have a good message behind them, "Soar" and "The Present"
Give students book buddy partners and plot diagram a new book Buddy up students of varying reading levels. I prefer to buddy up my low readers with middle level and my middle level with high level. This allows my students to mentor each other through the process. I encourage students to pick out a second picture book to plot diagram. At this point, students have had 2 chances to diagram out a story, and have improved confidence. They also have a buddy to assist and help fill in the pieces they might be missing. It also allows for a great opportunity for students to lead and guide others who may be struggling.
Start a novel study Now that students have a good grasp on how to use a plot diagram and really understand story elements, they are ready to give it a try with a book that's a little longer and more challenging. Always remember to keep the novel within each students reading ability level to decrease frustration level and help foster the love of reading. Hint: If you're looking a good way to start novel studies, check out this resource.
It's the dreaded call over the loudspeaker…rainy day recess.All sense of being productive, a moment to breathe, and a second to scarf down my lunch, out the window.Or is it??Here are few tips and tricks to make the most of rainy day / indoor recess to keep kids busy and give you back a few seconds of your precious time.
Put on an educational video. My personal favorite is Bill Nye the Science Guy.It's a wonderful show that teaches kids to love science and sparks their interest.It also helps to keep their attention.By the end of the year, I have kids begging for indoor recess to watch Bill Nye.So much so that we started watching Bill Nye during lunch hour in our classroom! I also really like the Schoolhouse Rock series and there's tons of PBS Kids videos that sneak in some science, too! **Hint: Bill Nye Episodes are on Netflix if you have an account!
Pull out your math manipulatives. Why not make indoor recess an educational moment?I love pulling out the base 10 blocks, tangrams, snap cubes, fake money, etc. I find that kids get really excited about free play with the manipulatives. After all, they are unlike any other "toy" they might have at home, and with a little luck, they are even learning and reinforcing math skills! It's a win-win for all.
Allow kids to access online math games. I was fortunate enough to have classroom with multiple classroom computers, and my students loved the opportunity to play "games" on the computer.Again, squeezing in so much education during the rainy day recess.How perfect is that?! **Hint: I have compiled a list of my favorite student friendly sites, check them out here.
Allow silent reading in reading corner. I find rainy day recess a great excuse to let kids curl up with a good book and read away.I let kids pick any book, picture book, short story, novel, etc. because it helps build their confidence and curiosity with reading. **Hint: Interested in my favorite picture books to read? Check out this post.
Put on a just move video. Losing time to run and play, kids often get squirley in the afternoon and have a hard time paying attention. I typically notice more behavior issues in the afternoon after indoor recess. How do I combat that? Before we start work again, I find that kids like to move around. I love putting on a video that kids can move and dance to. **Hint: Check out "The Learning Station" on youtube for lots of kid friendly song and dance. **Hint: Check out "Go Noodle – Get Moving" on youtube for more kid friendly song and dance.
Allow students to be creative. Letting students be creative is the best way to nurture their growing minds. I let kids use colored paper and white computer paper, crayons, markers, etc. I try to limit the use of scissors during craft time, as my room looks like someone threw confetti all over at the end of the day if I let kids use scissors as they please. Seriously, why do they love cutting paper into the tiniest of bits?! If you do allow use of scissors, I try to create a very small "craft station" to limit the mess, and I set a timer 5 minutes before recess is over to ensure everything is cleaned up.
Encourage Independent Learning. Indoor recess is a great time to let kids take charge of their own learning, however, try not to use indoor recess as a punishment to catch up on late or missing work. So how do I get kids to use their time wisely and independently choose to catch up on late work? I use Mastery Club in my classroom which allows students to learn about 86 different topics of their choosing. Once they have researched and learned about the topic they can demonstrate their mastery. Students love using the extra free time at recess to master their topic and add their name to the hall of fame. Most students are so motived to participate! If a student has late work or missing work, they must finish that before they can "master" a challenge in Mastery Club. I won't ever stop a child from learning and researching, but the motivation is there to finish their late work to earn mastery of a challenge. **Hint: Interested in learning more about Mastery Club? Check it out here.
I'm going out on a limb with a message I feel is super important. Don't read a novel to your upper elementary students the first week of school. Yes, really! Don't do it!
Instead, read picture books! Read lots of them! Picture books are fun! They aren't just for little kids. Picture books are for big kids and adults, too. Your school year together is going to be fun so shout it out by reading fun books (keep reading to find out my top 10 favorite picture books). Model it by doing it.
The real reason to read picture books is to encourage students to read independently at their reading level. Some of your students are not going to be good readers. Some of your new students are excited for the new year but scared because they're not good readers. They know it, but they don't want their friends to know it. By reading picture books you take the focus off individual reading skills by asking ALL of your students to read picture books the first few weeks of school. Silent reading can be silent torture for students who hold a novel of a much higher reading level than they are capable of reading. It helps them "look" like a reader. But silently, they are staring at pages of words without meaning. They are just waiting for the time to turn the page, timing it with their peers. Silent reading is torture for struggling readers trying to save face.
During the first week of school, take all of your students to the library to check out and read picture books. Tell them that's their homework for the first week of school. Have students fill out a story elements planner (get yours free here). Picture books are a great way to teach and reinforce story elements. Have kids record reading minutes in a reading log. Back at school, don't do "sharing", do book reviews and let students tell their friends what their favorite picture books are, and why.Next, use picture books to teach literary story elements. As you read, have students identify the setting, plot, characters, theme, conflict, resolution. Discuss these when you're finished. Finding story elements will become second nature in no time. (Click play to see inside the flip book.)
You can teach character traits through the use of picture books. Picture book authors describe their characters in a short time period, so as you read aloud, have students identify the character traits and point to them on your character traits word wall. This is a great way for you to point out the traits you expect for your year together.
As you read, connect the text and pictures, and ask students to relate the story to their lives (text to self). Relate the story with other texts (text to text), and with the world (text to world). Connecting deepens comprehension.
Save a spot on your bulletin board to post an, "Our Top Picks Books List." Allow students to nominate, review and rate their books. Have students fill out a short book review which they sign and rate from 1-10. Students complete the information on the wall chart and add their rating sheet to the ring so others can flip through and find the written review. Students LOVE to add their name to the wall and you will find that students read each others' reviews to get book suggestions. This gives struggling readers to great reason to read more books.
Keep reading to find out what books are my favorite and WHY!
Here's my top picture books to read aloud to your third, fourth, and fifth graders the first few weeks of school. NOTE: I have links to Amazon. I am not an Amazon Affiliate and receive no compensation. I am offering the links to help.
1) Math Curse, by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith. Math lovers will enjoy this book. At the beginning of the year, I always poll my students on their feelings about math. I'm always discouraged to hear that many students either don't like math or it is their least favorite subject. I accept that as a personal challenge to turn that attitude around. This book helps. Math Curse is a fun story where a boy wakes up and sees math problems in everything he does. Read it and point out real world math problems as you read it!
2) Bad Case of Stripes, by David Shannon. This book tells of a girl who worries what others think of her as she picks out her first day of school outfit and later develops a case of the stripes. This story has a great theme, and in the end, she learns to be herself and not worry what others think. You can talk about fitting in, being embarrassed, and trying to impress others.
3) The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, by Jon Scieszka & Lane Smith. This book is just plain fun. Students love the title. I love it! What kind of author says stuff like this? I think it's important as a teacher to have fun with your students. You can accomplish a lot and gain trust with your students using laughter and by having fun. Point out the writer's use of voice. If you're teaching reading genres, read this when you're studying fairy tales, folk takes, and fables. Read the traditional stories and then read the versions in Stinky Cheese Man for a fun comparison. See the book Amazon.
4) Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka. This book has very few words but the message is big; be a friend! After reading the book, have a community circle talk about the message and its importance to a developing a positive classroom climate and culture. Have students write a journal entry about what how to offer friendship to someone new. See the book on Amazon.
5) Thank You Mr. Falker, by Patrica Polacco. This book tells the story of the author as a struggling reader. At the height of the her struggle, the girl is a fifth grader and other kids are making fun of her. Mr. Falker, her fifth grade teacher, works with her and helps her become a good reader. The theme is never give up and hard work pays off. The book is written from the third person point of view, but the story is actually about the author herself (first person), Patricia Polacco. I love the message of this book. You will have many students who can relate to the girl's struggle. Listen and Watch at Storyline Online (16:50):
6) One, by Kathryn Otoshi. This is a great book that highlights the importance of friends standing up to bullies. The characters in the book are colors, with blue being be main character and red being the bully. The colors stand up and count. This is a fun book with a great message. Listen to Kathryn Otoshi read her book, One, while students act it out.
7) That is NOT a Good Idea! by Mo Willems. This book is another simple, fun book that you will catch you off guard as it doesn't end like you think! Will the fox catch the hen? It is great for making inferences. Be sure to have students predict how the book will end before reading it aloud. You can have thoughtful discussions about assumptions of book. Relate it to making assumptions about new classmates as well. Amazon link so you can see more of the book.
8) What Do You Do With An Idea? by Koki Yamada. I suggest this book for the important message it sends. You can change the world with an idea. It teaches students to listen to their inner self and believe in their own ideas. Our students have great ideas if we encourage them. We don't know it all, and can learn a lot from the students we teach. See the book on Amazon.
9) Salt in His Shoes, Michael Jordon in Pursuit of a Dream, by Delores Jordan with Roslyn M. Jordan. Michael Jordan's mom and his sister tell this great story of Michael's hard work, determination and courage to achieve his goal of being a great basketball player. Michael's mom puts salt in his shoes and has faith that Michael will grow taller and be a great player. Definitely relate this book to the struggles students may encounter during your year together. Stress the importance of never giving up and continuing to work even though things may get difficult. Winners never quit! See more of the book on Amazon.
10) The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. Shel Silverstein is a great writer. I like the theme of this book. The tree loves the boy in the story unconditionally. The boy takes from the tree until the tree has nothing left to give. You can talk about the tree being generous and selfless and what it means to give to another in this manner. Talk about point of view from the boy's perspective and how it is different from the tree's point of view. Discuss the boy's motives and discuss how he takes and takes from the tree and isn't the best friend to the tree that he could be, yet the tree is truly happy in the end. Again, good discussion to be had with your students. Excerpt and short video from Shel Silverstein's website.
~ What to Read Week Three and Beyond ~
After a few weeks of reading picture books, begin reading novels. I like to read novels that students won't typically pick up and read. I like to assign novels that build background knowledge for science or social studies units. A favorite is Bound for Oregon, by Jane Van Leeuwen, teaching about westward expansion and the Oregon Trail. It teaches of life and difficulties along the trail and talks about trail landmarks so when we study the unit, students have a great foundation.
Periodically throughout the year, reintroduce picture books. As you read great picture books, make note of what you could teach using the book and repeat it next year, too. You will soon have a great read aloud program interspersed with picture books.
~ Accountability for Reading ~
Be sure to stress the importance of reading for fun and lifetime enjoyment. Ask students to read at home and fill out a monthly reading log. Students record the number of minutes they spent reading or the number of pages (your choice). You can incorporate math skills by having students graph their results. These reading logs also make great data collection tools!
What are your favorite picture books for reading to upper elementary students?
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Are you wondering what's on sale?! Check it out. 🙂
Featured U.S. History and Presidential items are 20% off! (Click on the thumbnail to see the full product, including one of my top 10 bestsellers,the 50 States Research Project).
Are your students having a tough time grasping multiplication? Do you find that your students are struggling to understand the basics? I've watched far too many students walk through the door of my classroom saying,"I hate math" or "math is my least favorite subject", which just broke my heart. Math is near and dear to my heart and something that I find…dare I say, FUN? Math is all around us, and multiplication is an essential skill that all kids should know. Without multiplication, how are you going to tell how much you save from that spectacular sale at your favorite store? Or how much you're going to tip the waiter at dinner? Or how much sales tax you're paying?
Without the basic and fundamental skills to master multiplication, students get frustrated, defeated, shut down, and in turn dislike learning and school. NOT in this teacher's classroom!! When students understand how to use their skills, they begin to feel confident, excited, and motived to continue learning. And they too start to think math is FUN!!
So…I'm sure you're asking HOW do I make math fun?! HOW do I get students to understand multiplication?
Teach the basics. Yes, students do need to learn their times tables! My best advice, practice, practice practice! Paper and pencil, task cards, online math multiplication games, Boom Learning games, etc. One of my favorites is giving students a pair of dice, rolling, and completing the multiplication fact based on the numbers on the face of the dice. You can also do this with dominos! Flash cards also work great to help students master their facts. It's also imperative that students understand their basic addition and subtraction facts prior to moving on to mastering multiplication as addition and subtraction play a role in multiplication with borrowing and carrying. Try spinner addition and subtraction flash cards to help those struggling students master their facts (and it helps when the flash cards look the same so they fit in with their classmates)
Connect math to real life!! Help students make sense of WHY they are learning multiplication. Motivation increases 2 fold when students understand the real life connection.
Examples: Calculating how much an item is on sale, how much sales tax you are paying, how much to tip your waitresses
Don't teach tricks to get an easy answer. Teach the math! Tricks will be forgotten. Logic will remain so students can reason out the task at hand.
Put easily accessible references at their fingertips. Help students become independent with their learning and take ownership rather than constantly asking for help, such as multiplication charts. I also strongly believe in posting math vocabulary words on my wall. This helps students understand the language of math. If they understand what they are reading and being asked they are much more likely to be successful. I LOVE my math word wall for this reason, and I know my students do too. I constantly catch my students looking up at them and referring to them. Ahh the beauty of allowing students to be independent learners. 🙂 Another great reference tool to put at the fingertips of your students is a math reference chart. It is jam packed with all kinds of math reference tips. This will help your students become more independent. I also like sending reference charts home with students, so that parents can help their child with math skills that they may be more uncomfortable with.
Provide students with ample opportunities to practice their skills in a non-graded way. This helps provide students with the ability to practice without the associated pressure. Math centers are a great way to do this. Students receive a task card at the center, solve, and self check using the answer key.
Teach multiplication with body movements, visuals, stories, and manipulatives. Teach area when you teach the times tables. You can relate words like 7 "by" 8 as 7 x 8. For great visuals and stories, I love using Times Tables the Fun Way! It's a visual program with stories that students can relate to and remember the math facts.
These FREE half page memory books are ready to print and go. Students will reflect on the last year (and you get in some last minute writing practice!) and look back on their academic improvements, best memories, and can get signatures from their classmates. As the year winds down, we know that teachers have so much to do with tons of things to do to get ready for report cards, end of year records, and readying your classroom for summer. When you hand out memory books, students start busily writing down all of their memories and filling out all of the pages, which gives you so previous time to prepare for the summer!
Teacher Tip: Does your school do a yearbook signing day? Do you have students who didn't get a yearbooks and feel left out? Problem solved! I have found that when yearbooks come out there are always a few students who didn't get to purchase a yearbook. I printed off some of these memory books, and handed them to the students who didn't have a yearbook. On yearbook signing day, these kids felt included and were excited even though they didn't get the official school yearbook. They had their memory book that were able to ask their classmates to sign, and still had a great keepsake from the school year.Teacher Tip: Budgets running low at the end of the year? Paper supply running low? We were always under a paper or copier count shortage at the end of the year so the smaller size was a fun size and helped our school budget! I used whatever paper was left in the copy room, random color papers, and students loved that their book was multi colored | eng | 05bad451-9b83-4019-8d5f-aa0f12ac028b | https://mrsrenz.com/blog/page/2/ |
Smarter Medical Care
ABC's Signs of Melanoma
Melanoma is the considerably the most serious type of cancer that develops in the melanocytes. Melanocytes are the pigment cells that are responsible in giving color to the skin. Aside from the skin, melanoma may also develop in the eyes and in rare cases, in the intestines.
Melanoma is the most common type of cancer that affects people. Â In United States alone, around fifty thousand new cases are reported each year.
The exact cause of melanoma is not really clear but studies show that severe exposure to ultraviolet rays from direct sunlight, tanning beds and lamps may increase the risk of developing skin cancer. Â Though genetic factors also play a major role.
Minimizing your exposure to tanning beds may lessen the risk of developing melanoma. Â Likewise, detecting the early signs of melanoma is very important. Early detection may make way for successful treatment.
Knowing the signs of melanoma and skin changes related to it is part of early detection. Â If you observe the changes, it is important that you visit your healthcare provider immediately.
What are the signs of melanoma?
Melanoma can develop to any part of the body, though the most common area are the face, arms, back and legs. Â It may also appear in the fingernail beds and palms.
The first sign of melanoma may include:
Notably physical change in the appearance of existing mole
Development of unusual growth in the skin
Moles can grow in any part of the body and some individuals may have more than 25 moles. Â Some may turn bigger while some may disappear later on. But not all changes that accompany moles may mean melanoma but it is recommended that you see your dermatologist. Â It is better to detect early than to be sorry later.
Accordingly, the American Academy of Dermatology had made guidelines of signs of melanoma. Â Here are the ABC's signs of melanoma.
A for asymmetry. See if the first half of the mole appears the same as the second half.
B for border irregularity. The border of the moles may appear irregular, notched and uneven. Â This is an alarming sign of melanoma.
C for color changes. Spots that may appear in different pattern and irregular color than the rest of the mole.
D for diameter. See if there is new growth in the mole which may appear larger than a pencil eraser.
E for evolving. Observed if the mole is evolving into something bigger or may become itchy or if bleeding develops over time.
Nobody can really diagnose oneself. Â It is important that you see your healthcare provider to know if your condition is melanoma or just another type of skin problem.
What are the causes of melanoma?
Melanoma develops when the melanocytes is damaged. Â In a normal process, the skin cells are formed in a very controlled manner. Â The healthy skin cells are form and will push the old cells outwardly to the surface of the skin where eventually it is discarded, however, when the new cells encounter damage, they may have excessive growth that may lead to skin growths or changes in moles that may carry cancerous cells.
The exact reasons why the skin cells are damaged are not really known. However, several factors may lead to the development of melanoma. Â The first factor that doctors held responsible for melanoma is severe exposure to ultraviolet rays. Â Genetics and environment also play a great deal in melanoma.
What is the risk factors affecting melanoma?
Risk factors related to melanoma are:
Those having a fair skin are more susceptible in having melanoma because they have less melanin in the skin. Â Lesser melanin means lesser protection to ultraviolet rays. However, melanoma can also develop to those who have dark complexion.
Severe sunburn
If you frequently goes under tanning beds and lamps
Those people who various normal moles or have several unusual moles
Those who have family members that have melanoma are at higher risk of developing it too.
What are the Treatments for Melanoma?
1. Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is used to boosts the immune system and to aid in fighting the cancer cells. Â These treatments are typically made of the substances that the body produces. Â This is recommended by doctors to melanoma that had metastasized though some side effects like fever and muscle aches are reported.
2. Surgery
If melanoma had affected the nearest lymph node, your doctor may recommend surgery. Â Your doctor will monitor your condition after the surgery. | eng | 70769f22-a932-43c2-afc7-669c0538924a | https://www.webdicine.com/abcs-signs-of-melanoma.html |
News
The Eco-Friendly Benefits of Using an In-Sink Food Waste Disposer
13 April, 2023 By BigbathIn News
As we celebrate Earth Month, it's important to remember the small changes we can make in our everyday lives to protect the environment. One such change is the use of an in-sink food waste disposer. This device grinds food waste into tiny particles that can be safely sent down the drain and into the sewage treatment system. Here are some of the eco-friendly benefits of using an in-sink food waste disposer during Earth Month.
Reduces food waste By using an in-sink food waste disposer, you can significantly reduce the amount of food waste that ends up in landfills. This not only benefits the environment but also reduces the amount of methane gas produced by food waste in landfills, which contributes to climate change.
Saves water When food waste is sent down the drain with the help of an in-sink food waste disposer, it can be treated along with other sewage. This can save water that would otherwise be used to transport and dispose of food waste separately.
Helps with composting If you have a compost pile, an in-sink food waste disposer can help to break down food waste faster and more efficiently. This can result in high-quality compost that can be used to nourish plants and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.
Energy-efficient Many in-sink food waste disposers are designed to be energy-efficient, which can help to reduce your energy bills and your overall carbon footprint. Some models also feature noise-reducing technology, so you don't have to worry about disturbing your family or neighbors.
Easy to install and use In-sink food waste disposers are relatively easy to install and use, and they don't take up much space under your sink. They are also designed to be safe and reliable, so you don't have to worry about clogs or other issues.
In conclusion, using an in-sink food waste disposer is an easy and eco-friendly way to reduce food waste and protect the environment during Earth Month and beyond. By reducing the amount of food waste in landfills and saving water, energy, and resources, you can make a positive impact on the planet. So why not make the switch to an in-sink food waste disposer today and do your part for the environment? | eng | 000155b3-0c99-48e6-9d30-752afd7f5317 | https://www.bigbath.com.my/blogs/news/the-eco-friendly-benefits-of-using-an-in-sink-food-waste-disposer |
Tower Bridge and Exhibition
Tower Bridge, one of London's most famous landmarks, was opened in 1894 by The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. At that time London was fast expanding east towards the Thames estuary and required a river crossing closer than the congested London Bridge.
Tower Bridge opening for an original Thames sailing barge.
Pool of London
Designed by Sir Horace Jones, the architect of London's Smithfield, Billingsgate and Leadenhall markets, Tower Bridge is a two sided suspension bridge combined with a spectacular drawbridge (bascule). The bascules open to the virtical allowing unrestricted access for the tall-masted ships of the time, and still today, to enter the upper Pool of London.
The two 65m steel framed towers, decorated in Cornish granite and Portland stone, are built on huge concrete piers sunk into River Thames. The top of the towers are linked by two public walkways. In the 19th century the walkways were open to the elements and the haunt of thieves and prostitutes.
London's famous landmark, Tower Bridge is floodlit at night.
Today, covered over, the walk-ways are a major tourist attraction, containing an exhibition about the history of the bridge and offering unique views of London. The 1,000 ton bascules, which can be opened in less than 5 minutes, were originally driven by pressurised river water, pumped into hydraulic 'rams' by coal-burning steam engines.
Today, driven by oil and electricity, the hydraulic system is still used over 1000 times a year for passing vessels. With river traffic taking priority over road traffic, the daily flow of 40,000 people is often disrupted. The original steam engines are part of the Towers Exhibition. | eng | d3826802-43aa-468e-9f6e-3d591a34f28f | https://walklondon.com/london-attractions/tower-bridge.htm |
Affiliate Marketing – Frequently Asked Questions
Are you evaluating which form of monetization you want to use for your blog? If so, affiliate marketing might be a great option. Affiliate marketing allows bloggers to get paid for recommending and promoting products and services. However, before diving into this monetized model, some questions need answering: What is affiliate marketing? How does it work? Is it profitable or effective? This post serves as an answer guide with frequently asked questions about affiliate marketing. It should point you in the right direction when considering using this monetization method for your blog.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's marketing efforts. Affiliates can be webmasters who have incorporated banner ads, product links, or even text links on their websites to promote the company's products. They can also be bloggers or content creators who advertise on their websites or through email campaigns. Affiliate marketing is an effective way for businesses to reach new customers and drive more sales without having to invest in additional advertising costs.
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing can provide businesses with several key benefits, including:
• Increased visibility and exposure: Affiliates can help spread the word about the business and product you are promoting to new customers who may not have been aware of it. This increased visibility can result in more website traffic and leads, which can be converted into sales.
• Cost-effective: Affiliate marketing is a low-cost form of advertising that doesn't require a significant investment in expensive ad campaigns. You can create content at a low cost and get paid when readers take action and make purchases.
• Performance-based: The success of an affiliate marketing program depends on how well you promote the affiliate products or services. You can monitor how successful each affiliate program you belong to is and be rewarded accordingly, giving you control over your income levels.
• Global reach: Affiliate programs can be located worldwide, enabling you to reach customers in various countries and build an international customer base. This makes it easier for businesses to expand their reach and tap into new markets.
• Flexible: Most affiliate programs are easy to apply to, set up, and manage, so you can tailor your niche site to spotlight your approved programs.
How do I find a niche for my affiliate marketing website?
When starting an affiliate marketing website, one of the most important things to consider is your niche. Finding the right niche can make or break your success – it needs to be something that has a large enough audience to draw traffic but is not so saturated that it's difficult to stand out from the competition.
To start finding a good niche for your affiliate marketing site, ask yourself these questions:
What topics am I interested in and knowledgeable about?
What products or services are currently popular and in demand?
Who are some of my potential customers/competitors?
Are there any specific keywords I want to target?
Look into what products or services are offered in each niche, their popularity among consumers, and any other factors that could influence your success. Once you have identified potential niches, you can further research to determine which would be the best fit for your affiliate marketing website. It's also a good idea to make sure there is enough interest in the niche – if it's too small, you won't have much success with affiliate marketing.
You can make affiliate marketing a successful part of your business with the right niche and tactics. Once you've chosen a niche and done your research, focus on creating content that will draw readers to your site and ultimately convert them into customers. It would be best if you also looked into setting up an effective tracking system to measure the performance on your niche site of different affiliates and adjust your strategy as needed.
How do I research keywords for my affiliate marketing website?
Researching and targeting the right keywords for your affiliate marketing website is essential for boosting your visibility in search engines and driving more traffic to your site. Start by making a list of relevant topics related to your niche along with potential keywords that you want to target. Then, use keyword research tools such as Google's Keyword Planner or Moz's Keyword Explorer to identify the most popular and valuable search terms for those topics.
Once you have identified some high-value keywords, begin optimizing your content to include these terms. This means using them in page titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt tags, product descriptions, and other areas where they can be used effectively. Additionally, ensure to include long-tail keywords and specific phrases that contain multiple words and are more likely to rank in search engines.
Finally, it would be best if you also looked into setting up tracking for your affiliate marketing website so that you can accurately measure the performance of different keywords. This will help you identify the most successful terms and adjust your strategy accordingly. With the proper research and optimization tactics, you can increase your visibility in search engines and drive more traffic to your site – ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
How do I choose the right products to promote on my affiliate marketing website?
Choosing the right products to promote on your affiliate marketing website is essential for maximizing profits and ensuring that customers are satisfied with their purchases. Start by researching potential products or services related to your niche and evaluating them based on overall quality, customer reviews, compatibility with other products, pricing, availability, and other factors influencing a customer's decision.
Once you have identified some good options, look into what type of commission each product offers and compare it to other similar offerings. You should also consider how the product fits into your overall strategy – if it doesn't align with your goals or values as an affiliate marketer, you may want to avoid promoting it.
Finally, make sure that you fully understand the terms of any affiliate program you're working with. This includes details such as what types of customers and regions they accept, any restrictions on how you can promote their products or services, and how often payments are made. By taking the time to research potential products and programs, you can ensure that your efforts will be rewarded with higher commissions and more satisfied customers.
These tips should help you start setting up an effective affiliate marketing website. With the right strategies in place, you can enjoy higher traffic levels, increased conversions, and better overall profits.
How do I create content for my affiliate marketing website?
Creating content for your affiliate marketing website is one of the best ways to draw in new visitors, boost conversions, and ultimately increase your profits. Start by researching keywords related to your niche that would be valuable to target on your site. Then use those keywords to create content such as blog posts, product reviews, videos, infographics, and other content that will appeal to potential customers.
It's also important to make sure that your content is well-written and engaging – if it's not interesting or informative enough, readers won't stick around very long. Additionally, include calls to action throughout so that visitors are encouraged to take further action, such as subscribing to a newsletter or making a purchase.
Lastly, promote your content by leveraging social media and other channels to spread the word about what you have to offer. The more visibility your site has, the more likely customers will find you online and make purchases through your affiliate links. With the right content strategy in place, you can maximize profits and ensure continued success with your website.
How do I drive traffic to my affiliate marketing website?
Driving traffic to your affiliate marketing website is essential for success. Start by optimizing your site for search engines to get organic visibility in the search results. This includes techniques such as keyword research, creating high-quality content, improving page loading speed, and optimizing meta tags and titles.
You should also explore other traffic sources, such as social media, email marketing, and paid advertising. Each of these channels can help you reach a larger audience and bring more visitors to your site – potentially leading to more conversions and profits. Additionally, consider working with influencers in your niche who can help promote your products or services to their followers.
Finally, make sure that your website is user-friendly since this will help to encourage more conversions. Simple navigation, easy-to-read content, and an attractive design are all critical elements that will allow visitors to stick around longer and be more likely to make purchases. With these tips in mind, you'll be able to drive traffic and generate more profits with your affiliate marketing website.
What are the best practices for starting an affiliate marketing business?
Starting an affiliate marketing business can be a great way to earn money online, but there are certain best practices you should follow in order to maximize your success. First off, research potential products or services that have the potential to generate significant commissions, so you know which ones to promote.
Next, create a website optimized for search engine ranking and user experience, which will help you increase visibility and draw in more visitors. It would be best if you also took the time to build relationships with other online influencers who can help promote your products or services to their followers.
Additionally, leverage social media, email marketing, and even paid advertising to drive more website traffic. And finally, keep track of your campaigns so that you can analyze which ones are working best for you and adjust accordingly. By following these tips and practices, you can make sure that your affiliate business is flourishing and profitable.
How do I convert visitors into buyers on my affiliate marketing website?
Converting visitors into buyers on your affiliate marketing website can be challenging, but there are some best practices you can follow to increase your chances of success. First off, make sure that your website is optimized for user experience and designed in such a way as to encourage visitors to stay longer. This could include using attractive visuals, writing engaging content, and ensuring that navigation is easy to understand.
It would help if you also used calls to action throughout the site so that visitors know their next step–whether subscribing to an email list or making a purchase. Additionally, consider offering discounts or special offers on products or services in order to entice potential customers. And finally, don't forget to use persuasive language in your copywriting that encourages visitors to take the next step and convert into buyers. By following these tips, you can make sure that your affiliate marketing website is more successful at converting visitors into buyers.
What are some mistakes I should avoid when starting an affiliate marketing business?
When starting an affiliate marketing business, it's essential to be aware of common mistakes so that you can avoid them. First off, don't jump into promoting products or services without doing adequate research – this will help ensure that you select ones with the potential to generate significant profits for your business.
Next, don't just focus on driving traffic to your website; also, make sure that your content is relevant and engaging so that visitors stick around longer. Additionally, avoid overselling or exaggerating the benefits of the products or services you are promoting – this will hurt your reputation in the long run. And finally, don't forget to track the performance of each campaign so that you can adjust accordingly. By avoiding these mistakes, you'll be able to ensure success for your affiliate marketing business.
How do I measure the success of my affiliate marketing campaigns?
When measuring the success of an affiliate marketing campaign, several key metrics should be tracked in order to get a comprehensive view of its performance. First off, look at how many new visitors were driven to your website and how long they stayed – this will indicate the campaign's overall reach and engagement. Additionally, track conversion rates to see how many visitors purchase a product or service after clicking through your website.
You should also measure bounce rate (how quickly someone leaves the site) and average order value (how much each customer spends). And finally, track ROI (return on investment) to ensure that you profit from each affiliate marketing campaign. By following these key metrics, you'll be able to gauge the success of your campaigns and adjust accordingly accurately.
What are some affiliate marketing success stories?
There are countless success stories of individuals and businesses that have built successful affiliate marketing businesses. One example is Pat Flynn, who started his blog "Smart Passive Income" in 2008 and has since generated over $3 million in affiliate sales.
Another success story is Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents, which earned her over $1 million in just one year due to affiliate commissions from Amazon. Many other affiliates worldwide have also built profitable businesses by promoting products or services on their websites. These successes prove that anyone can build a successful affiliate marketing business with dedication and hard work.
What type of income can I realistically expect to make from my affiliate marketing website?
The amount of income you can expect to make from an affiliate marketing website will vary depending on a number of factors, including the type and quality of products you are promoting and the level of traffic your site receives. Generally speaking, most affiliates expect to make anywhere from a few hundred dollars per month to several thousand dollars per month with more established websites.
In addition, many affiliates have also been able to make six-figure incomes or even more with their affiliate businesses. However, it is important to note that these results are not guaranteed and may take some time and effort before they start rolling in. Therefore, it's best to set realistic expectations when entering into affiliate marketing so that you can achieve success
How long does it take to start seeing results from affiliate marketing?
The time it takes to start seeing results from affiliate marketing depends on various factors, such as the type of product or service you are promoting and the amount of traffic your website receives. Generally speaking, most affiliates will see some returns within a few weeks to a few months if they actively promote their products or services.
However, it is essential to note that more established websites may take longer before generating income. It is also vital for new affiliates to remember that affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme – instead, it requires dedication and hard work to succeed. Therefore, setting realistic expectations when starting can help you stay focused and motivated throughout your journey.
How much time and effort does affiliate marketing require?
Affiliate marketing requires a considerable amount of time and effort to succeed. Depending on the product or service you promote, you may have to spend time creating content such as blog posts, videos, or email campaigns. Additionally, you will need to monitor your affiliate links and ensure they are working correctly.
Finally, it is also important to track key metrics such as conversions and sales so that you can measure your success and make any necessary changes or adjustments. Overall, affiliate marketing requires dedication and consistency for it to be profitable, but with hard work, it can be a great way to earn passive income from your website.
What are some common myths about affiliate marketing?
There are several common myths about affiliate marketing that can be dispelled. First, it is important to note that you do not have to be an expert in the field to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Additionally, while many affiliates have built substantial incomes through their businesses, it is not a get-rich-quick scheme and requires dedication and hard work.
Finally, affiliate marketing does not require significant setup or upfront costs – most affiliate programs are free and easy to join. Overall, there are many great opportunities for those who wish to enter this industry, but it is important to remember that success does not come overnight. With dedication and perseverance, anyone can build a profitable affiliate business with time and effort.
What are some tips for becoming a successful affiliate marketer?
Several tips can help you become a successful affiliate marketer. First, it is important to research and understand the different types of products or services you can promote and any relevant laws or regulations. It is also important to create quality content that will attract potential customers to your website and keep them engaged with what you offer.
It would be best if you also were consistent in promoting your products or services while tracking key metrics such as conversions and sales so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly. Finally, it is also helpful to build relationships with other affiliates and influencers to increase your business's exposure.
What are some helpful affiliate marketing resources?
There are many helpful affiliate marketing resources available online. Many top affiliate networks, such as ClickBank and ShareASale, offer tutorials and guides to help affiliates get started. Additionally, there are several blogs dedicated to providing helpful tips and advice for those looking to enter this industry, such as Affiliate Marketing Blogger or ShoutMeLoud.
Finally, it is also helpful to join online forums where you can connect with other affiliates and influencers in the field who can provide invaluable insight into best practices and strategies. Access to various sources can help you stay on top of the latest trends and techniques, which is vital for success in affiliate marketing.
What are some helpful tips for affiliate marketing beginners?
For those just starting in affiliate marketing, there are a few helpful tips to keep in mind. First, it is important to set realistic expectations and understand that success does not happen overnight. Additionally, you should read up on the different types of products or services you can promote and any relevant laws or regulations.
Creating quality content for your websites, such as blog posts and videos, is also beneficial to attract potential customers and build a following. Finally, tracking key metrics such as conversions and sales is important to determine what strategies are working best for you. With these tips in mind, anyone can become a successful affiliate marketer with time and effort!
What are some advanced affiliate marketing strategies?
Several advanced affiliate marketing strategies can help you increase your profits. First, it is important to deeply understand your target audience and create content tailored to their needs to build trust and engagement. Additionally, it is helpful to use SEO techniques such as keyword research in order to optimize your website for increased visibility.
You should also take advantage of email marketing by creating newsletters or special offers for subscribers in order to keep them engaged with your business. Finally, leveraging influencer marketing through collaborations with well-known industry figures or social media personalities can effectively promote products or services. By utilizing these strategies, affiliates can maximize their long-term profits and success!
How can I be successful with affiliate marketing?
Success with affiliate marketing requires dedication, hard work, and perseverance. First, it is important to do your research and understand the different types of products or services you can promote and any relevant laws or regulations. Additionally, affiliates must create quality content that will attract potential customers and keep them engaged with what you offer.
It is also beneficial to build relationships with other affiliates and influencers to increase your business's exposure. Finally, it is important to track key metrics such as conversions and sales so that you can adjust your strategies accordingly. With these tips in mind, anyone can become a successful affiliate marketer!
What are some affiliate marketing scams to watch out for?
There are several scams that affiliates should watch out for regarding affiliate marketing. The first is known as the "get rich quick" scheme, which promises unrealistic financial rewards and income potential. Other scams include pyramid schemes, which require you to recruit others in order to make money, and bait-and-switch tactics, where affiliates promote a product but then switch customers to a higher-priced item.
You can avoid any potential affiliate marketing scams by staying alert and doing your due diligence! It is also important to be aware of hidden fees or commissions that may not be disclosed upfront. Finally, it is essential to always research companies before partnering with them in order to ensure they are reputable and trustworthy | eng | 1484e772-e83f-41ee-960a-8140e73d9026 | https://earlsguide.com/affiliate-marketing-frequently-asked-questions/ |
6 Tips to Help Grow Your Baby's Cognitive Development
Cognitive development entails how a child thinks, figures things out, and explore the world around them. It involves the development of knowledge and skills that boosts a child's ability to understand the world. Stimulating your child's cognitive development as early as possible creates the perfect foundation for success later in life. So, how do you foster their cognitive development? Here is how:
Bring out the books
Reading books with your children exposes them to new words and languages, enriching their cognitive skills. Hearing the stories and observing images in the books helps them form a mental picture and encourages them to use their visual memory skills. Get into it when reading your child's books. Reading will enhance their visual memory, vocabulary, and cognitive flexibility.
Encourage games that call for strategy
Games like chess are great for promoting logical thinking and problem-solving. Teach your child the rules of the game and play with them. As they learn to employ strategy to play the games, their cognitive skills will be immensely enriched. They will grow not just their problem-solving skills. But also, cognitive flexibility, visual memory, and logical thinking.
Allow them to explore the world on their own
One way of helping your child grow their cognitive skills is to allow them to learn through self-exploration. They will soak in loads of information using their sense of smell, touch, sight, and taste. Let the child touch leaves, sticks, and other harmless things they find outside. The tactile sensation will help to improve their cognitive ability.
Offer them a variety of toys
Get your child toys that have different textures. The textures can run from soft stuffed animals to smooth wooden blocks. When they are very young, you could limit the toys to a few color choices to encourage the child to focus. Modify the toys and activities as the child grows. Purchase infant development toys that can challenge cognitive abilities without leaving them frustrated. Supervise them as they play so that they do not harm themselves. The toys should not be too small lest they end up swallowing them.
Ask questions
When you ask questions, you encourage the child to think for themselves. Asking them questions encourages them to take the time to understand the environment and improve their analysis. When playing with them, engage them with open-ended questions. That expands their verbal comprehension, language skills, and inferential reasoning.
Visit interesting places
Take trips to museums, science centers, and farmer's markets to help your child acquire new knowledge. Visiting fascinating places stimulates their curiosity and piques their interest in the world. Learning about the different places impacts their cognitive skills positively. Ask them questions as you explore and recognize their reactions and responses. These adventures enhance their visualization skills, logical thinking, and cognitive flexibility.
Wrapping up
When babies feel cared for, it boosts their emotional-development milestones. That, in turn, encourages them to take risks and learn. Reassuring your child when they are trying new will give them the confidence to explore the world around them. You, therefore, have to be their number one cheerleader. | eng | 9ac6362f-b357-480f-ba31-199eeae7ec35 | https://www.iamnotthebabysitter.com/6-tips-to-help-grow-your-babys-cognitive-development/ |
Avast VPN Compared to NordVPN
When it comes to secureness, Avast VPN and NordVPN both provide strong security. Both use 256-bit AES security to keep your data secure. When info is protected, it is screwed up, so the particular owner of the encryption main can read it.
NordVPN offers faster internet connections than Avast, thanks to it is larger component network. The VPN firm has more than five thousand hosts spread around 59 countries. In comparison, Avast VPN offers seventy-five machines in thirty-four countries. So , you're more likely to be able to connect to a local server if you choose NordVPN.
However , the quantity of servers that Avast and Nord have is restricted, which can reduce content for downloading and communicate. Additionally , the two services use distinct protocols, which can prolong connection time. If you're using the VPN for a long time, you'll be wanting a high speed service.
Luckily, Avast VPN has a trial offer period and an incredibly easy-to-use user interface. You can use that on up to 5 products simultaneously. NordVPN also helps split tunneling, which can help you avoid the hassle of switching between different VPNs. Both products and services also have Opera and Opera extensions, which can make connecting and streaming a cinch.
NordVPN is also compatible with routers. While Avast is certainly not compatible with routers, NordVPN supports many operating systems and can be attached to many of them. | eng | db00d67f-b7b9-4262-9a6b-062098b70530 | https://www.elektrosystems.nl/uncategorized/avast-vpn-compared-to-nordvpn/ |
I've been encountering an issue where I experience popping and delayed audio start when playing sound through a digital stereo output. The issue is similar to when powersave is enabled in Pulseaudio and while disabling powersave fixes the popping/delay for analog outputs, the issue persists in the digital output. I'm unsure if there are different configuration files for digital audio but the issue makes it seem like powersaving does not get disabled for digital audio whatsoever.
I have tested this with both Pulseaudio and Pipewire-pulse and the issue is the exact same in both. | eng | e495afe9-26f2-4474-aec1-3087b6709a2f | https://forum.manjaro.org/t/popping-and-delay-when-playing-audio-through-digital-stereo/58451 |
Category: Family Dental CareAfter a good night's sleep, waking up to bad breath, though nothing uncommon, is frustrating. We experience foul breath in the morning because saliva naturally decreases while we're sleeping and this increases odor-causing bacteria. Poor oral hygiene, snoring at night, breathing through the mouth, and smoking are also some other causes of halitosis. Here are some preventive measures you can take to sustain a less odorous breath.
Practice Good Oral Hygiene
Since bacteria activity is the cause of bad breath, practicing good oral hygiene is key to warding off bacterial growth. Start with flossing everyday. The food stuck between your teeth can create a breeding ground for bacteria, so it's important to get into those hard-to-reach areas as well! Brush twice a day, especially once at night, and don't forget to clean your tongue. The tongue is another hotbed for bacteria, so it's best to brush your tongue thoroughly with your toothbrush or a tongue scraper for fresher breath.
Drink Water
Breathing or snoring through the mouth while sleeping can cause dry mouth, leading to sour breath. As a result, staying hydrated by drinking enough water throughout the day, starting in the morning and before bedtime, can help produce the saliva necessary to combat halitosis. A general rule of thumb according to Harvard Health Publishing is to drink 2-3 cups of water per hour, and more if you're sweating.
Don't Miss Your Dental Appointments
Regular checkups and cleanings are important for overall dental health, but they're also key preventive measures to curb bad breath. A dentist can identify any serious issues that might contribute to bad breath, clean your teeth thoroughly, and provide more personalized tips for eliminating the stink. It's suggested to visit your dentist twice a year or as recommended.
Preventive Care in Elk Grove, CA
Dr. Ricky Tin and our team at Villa Vista Dental value preventive care, and we're devoted to bringing unrushed, comprehensive consultations to meet your dental needs. If you're up for your regular exam or have any concerns you'd like to address, we'd love for you to contact us! relaxed smileDuring your annual dental appointments, you may get X-rays taken to give your dentist a full picture of your oral health. In the past, dentists used film X-rays to get the job done. But today, many are opting for sleeker, quicker digital X-rays for their patients. Which one is better?
Why Do I Get X-Rays at the Dentist?
When it comes to your dental health, there's plenty more than what meets the eye. You might have a crack in a tooth, a hard-to-see cavity, or impacted wisdom teeth that might not be growing straight. Or perhaps you might have a tumor or abscess or some sinus issues caused by dental problems. Dr. Ricky Tin can determine these and more by taking full X-rays of your teeth, gums and jaws to get a full picture of your dental health.
What Are Film X-Rays?
Film X-rays are traditional X-rays that are taken with a camera and developed on sheets of film afterwards. Film X-rays expose patients to small amounts of radiation.
What Are Digital X-Rays?
Digital x-rays use X-ray sensors instead of traditional photo film to generate detailed images of a patient's body. Digital X-rays live on a computer or other device, allowing them to create more detailed, clear images versus film x-rays.
What Is the Difference Between Digital & Film X-Rays?
Digital X-rays produce more detailed, sharper images than film X-rays, allowing your dentist to detect even more from a single image than they could from a film X-ray. They also produce less radiation than film X-rays, making them safer. Plus, they take up less storage space (since they're completely digital) and don't require the use of environmentally unsafe chemicals to produce.
Comprehensive Dentistry in Elk Grove, CA
At Villa Vista Dental, we use low radiation digital X-rays to deliver even more powerful, accurate care to our patients! If you're looking for a dental office that offers top-notch, state-of-the-art technology and comprehensive treatment plans, look no further than Villa Vista Dental! We offer general, cosmetic, and restorative dental treatments for the whole family. Contact us to schedule your visit today and check out our financing page to learn more about our affordable treatment plans!From cavities to gum disease, many common dental issues can be avoided with preventive care. Today, we want to provide you with some information about how cavities develop along with some tips to avoid dental cavities. With this new knowledge, you'll put yourself on the path for a lifetime of oral health.
What Is a Cavity?
Dental cavities are damage in your tooth enamel that gradually develop into tiny holes, or cavities, if left untreated. If cavities aren't addressed, they keep growing into the sensitive inner layers of your tooth. This can result in toothache, infection, and even tooth loss.
What Causes Cavities?
There are several things that can contribute to cavity development: oral bacteria, a diet high in sugar, and poor oral hygiene. As the bacteria in your mouth feeds on sugar that you eat, it produces acid. Over time, this acid wears away on tooth enamel. Without good dental cleaning habits, this can result in cavities.
What Are Tips to Avoid Dental Cavities?
Now for some good news: cavities are often preventable. Here are some tips for keeping your smile free from cavities.
1. At-Home Oral Hygiene
The best thing you can do to protect your pearly whites is to have an at-home oral hygiene routine. This means brushing your teeth twice daily for two minutes each time and flossing each day.
2. A Healthy Diet
Another way to avoid cavities is to limit your sugar intake. If oral bacteria have less sugar to feed on, they'll produce less acid. Combined with regular brushing and flossing, this can keep your teeth cavity-free.
3. Regular Dental Checkups
Our final tip to avoid dental cavities is to keep up with your dental checkups. At Villa Vista Dental, we recommend that our patients receive a professional cleaning every six months or so. This allows our team to spot and treat any potential cavities or other issues before they become a more serious problem.
Cavity Prevention in Elk Grove, CA
Dr. Tin is a big proponent of preventive care! We offer many preventive treatments that can keep your smile healthy including dental sealants, fluoride treatments, custom mouthguards and oral cancer screenings. To ask our team any questions about these services or to schedule your next appointment, call our office today!
Pregnancy changes the body in more ways than just appearance. Pregnancy can also rapidly change oral health! Did you know that some women may be more prone to periodontal disease and cavities during pregnancy due to constantly changing hormones? If you didn't, read to learn how you can best care for your teeth while pregnant.
Brush Twice & Floss Once
While hormone changes during pregnancy can easily lead to exhaustion, stay consistent in your oral hygiene routine! Brush twice a day and be sure to floss at least once a day. If you skip brushing and flossing, plaque and bacteria build up slowly and can result in decay or an increased risk of periodontal disease.
Rinse Your Mouth After Morning Sickness
Morning sickness may or may not be experienced during pregnancy. However, morning sickness can place expecting mothers at risk for cavities and decay. If you experience morning sickness, the American Dental Association recommends rinsing with a teaspoon of baking soda and water to help stop stomach acid from attacking your teeth.
Select Nutritious Snacks
Eating habits can change during pregnancy, and each pregnancy may present an expecting mother with a new craving. With frequent snacking, teeth are in constant contact with acid in food. Making a conscious effort to eat nutritious snacks like fruits, yogurt, and vegetables with less sugar can be healthy for you, your baby, and your smile!
Family Dentistry in Elk Grove
Regular visits to Villa Vista Dental in Elk Grove during your pregnancy will allow us to help you maintain optimal oral health. Routine exams are critical in helping to find and treat dental problems early. Dr. Tin and our team at Villa Vista Dental are happy to provide comprehensive dental care, including exams, to the Elk Grove community. Whether you need dental care for yourself or for the entire family, our skilled team would be happy to help you achieve the best oral health. Contact our friendly team to schedule your appointment for a healthy smile | eng | aa656e85-3d0c-4957-b925-ced91846fa75 | https://www.elkgrovedentist.com/blog/category/family-dental-care/ |
Screen Flow UI Design Tips
Last week we did one session with Andy Engin Utkan to share tips to make your screen flows look better and easier to navigate. Join us for a quick review of tips such as screen alignment and conditional visibility of components, custom error messages, menu choices, data table components and different Screen Flow UI Design Tips.
Screen Flow UI Design Tips
1. Screen Flow Appearance and Attributes
Screen Flows are displayed differently based on the launch method. Keep it simple and easily readable/digestable.
2. Placement of Components and Label Formatting
Here are some best practice for Placement of Components and Label Formatting.
Drag components onto the screen element
Most components have previews, some don't
Use sections with up to 4 columns to help organize fields on the screen
Some components don't align very well vertically
Consider using a single column for these components
Use of html tags, variables and emojis in the label
3. Preview and Debug
See how things look
Test visual elements
Test functionality
Design the journey
4. Conditional Visibility
Show Other Text Component when Other is selected in the Picklist Component. Show images and reaction messages immediately.
5. Validations
Add validations.
Length validation
Number/Currency validation > or <
Relative comparison: Start time, end time
Format validation: Email, SSN, ZIP/Postal
6. Display Text, Templates and Read-Only
Display text is a rich text component that can show:
Static text
Field and variable values
Images
Color, bold, italic, underline and etc
Text templates
Contents of the Display Text components are not editable
Alternative read-only text component: Email and Phone
7. Menus and Choice Components
Menus can be created using radio choice components. For alternative visual elements see quick choice and similar installable packages. Relabel buttons when necessary to create tailored experiences.
8. Error Handling and Messages
Use fault paths, but aim to eliminate them by replacing them with logic elements and additional paths.
Use targeted error screens that not only have a fault message for the user, but also have related information for the admin such as current date/time, recordId and/or record name.
Use a catch-all error screen to capture all unforeseeable errors.
Error screens should include clear instructions for the user.
Remember to include a message outlining what has been committed what has been rolled back.
9. Fields (Dynamic Forms for Flow)
Use dynamic forms for flow for all use cases supported
Mix and match these with standard input components: E.g. add currency for the opportunity amount
Fields does not support selective/on-demand required
Fields does not support label change
Fields does not support user-defined/on-demand validations
10. Custom Validations
When standard validations do not support your use case, use a display text component with and error message variable. Send back the user to the same screen after assigning an error message to the variable. The experience is very close to the standard validation.
11. Go to Record and Unofficial-SF/AppExchange
Many use cases require that the user is sent to a specific record or URL at the end of the screen flow: E.g. send the user to the record that has just been created.
Use Unofficial-SF or AppExchange solutions.
Remember that these solutions are not for everybody
Plan on maintaining installed packages.
12. New: Datatable and Choice Lookup
Datatable is very capable now. For editable datatable component go to UnofficialSF.
13. Reactive Components and LWC
Until now the only thing that was reactive – sort of – was conditional visibility
Everything else required the user to click next
Now we started getting components that can react to each other:
Move a slider and update a number on the screen in real time
Pick a picklist and choose another choice as a result immediately
Build a custom LWC that can react to other components and vice versa | eng | 28e74615-d8ce-4130-8004-6b1ed3ebafcf | https://www.apexhours.com/screen-flow-ui-design-tips/ |
It is Mental Health Awareness Week. The theme for the week is Anxiety. Although most people deal with anxiety on some level, I wish to focus on anxiety in the military which often leads to further complications such as PTSD. The following is an article by my husband, Martin Green, which became the introduction for the book Into the Valley of the Shadow: A Soldier's Military Journey and His Battle With PTSD by Joseph William Haynes (Hellgate, 2019). From his personal experience as a soldier who spent his entire career in US Army Special Operations based in the United States and in Germany, Green offers a very insightful look at the anxiety faced by many combat veterans as a result of their chosen profession.
Anxiety and Combat Veterans: Telling the Story
The memoirs of a military veteran are very special to both the veteran who writes them and the unit with which he served. Even the shortest of military tours evokes a feeling of pride and honor within the veteran. Every veteran has a unique story to tell, and with over 18.2 million military veterans still alive, that's a lot of stories. Most will never be written down. Perhaps the individual does not have the opportunity or the necessary literary skills, or they lack a publicist who is willing to assist them in this process. So how will these stories be told?
The real problem here is not how to tell the story, but that the veterans do not always feel there is an audience to whom they can tell their stories, especially if that individual is a combat veteran. How is this a problem, you ask? Despite all the books and movies about war, the average citizen who has never experienced war can not relate, understand, or accept the agony, shame, and atrocities our soldiers face. They can not fully appreciate the amount of training and sacrifice the soldier must endure just to get to combat. Furthermore, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men, "words like duty, honor, country, commitment, patriotism, and brotherhood" do not register in the hearts of the average civilian the way they do to a veteran. Unless you fully understand the concept of those ideals, you can't understand what drives and motivates a soldier to be able to endure what he must in combat.
Combat Veterans' Stories and Many Issues to Consider
As a combat veteran myself, I hear this all the time: "Why don't you like to talk about your combat experiences?" I don't because unless you walked in my boots on the same terrain with the same load under the same conditions, you could not understand exactly what I would tell you. It could not have the same meaning to you that it does to me. It also sets me (or any other veteran) up for your judgment, and if you weren't there, you have not earned the right to make judgments. That does not make me a better person than you, or you a lesser person than me. It just means that to truly understand combat, you must experience it, and most combat veterans are happier not to expose you, or someone else for that matter, to the rigors and horrors of combat action.
Also, not all military experiences are meant for public knowledge due to Operational Security (OPSEC) protocol. I, personally, would not feel comfortable relating certain details of my military experience even though I have been retired for over twenty years because not everyone has a need to know. This is embedded in me. So the dilemma is that our veterans must carry many of their experiences within themselves, even though they would prefer to be able to tell their stories and be properly understood. This makes the average combat veteran particularly susceptible to anxiety disorders such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Our armed forces have been given the task to take sweet, innocent boys and girls and transform them into integral components of the most devastating war machine on this planet. They leave their homes and enter a world that is totally foreign to them. The cadre tear the recruits down and rebuild them to be lethal weapons; however, upon graduation from basic training, they don't have all the skills they need to master proficiency in their chosen area of expertise. They are sent to their units where they are drilled night and day until their particular job skills become second nature. Both the officers and the non-commissioned officers (NCOs) of their units enact this with precision. Only then are the new soldiers sent out into the most hostile environments imaginable to meet the enemies of our country.
Combat Veterans and Many Battles to Fight
The climate and terrain alone would be hardship enough on the average person. Added to that is the weight and bulk of individual equipment that must be worn or carried. In addition, they must learn the customs of the host nation along with some basic language skills. Then there is the fact of seeing civilian populations living in the most disgusting conditions imaginable, in constant physical danger from both hostile and friendly forces, with minimal food, water, shelter, and medical supplies–true poverty. Daily, they encounter civilians and children who beg and plead for candy or pocket change or just a little attention; daily, the civilians and children, some of whom have become familiar, turn and attack with small arms or improvised explosive devices (TEDs). They hear of the attacks on their comrades and of the friendly casualties and deaths, always, always, always knowing somewhere deep inside that today could be their last day alive.
Gathering up the courage to get up every day and face these facts of life could challenge even the strongest of service men and women, but they do it willingly and with pride. They do it for love of country and for the love of their brothers and sisters in arms. Living this life for months at a time (six to twelve months on average), would be enough to scar them permanently. Add actual combat actions into the mix and you have the perfect recipe to ruin one's emotional well-being.
It has been said that combat brings out the very worst and the very best of the individual, and at times, simultaneously. Fortunately for most, their training takes control of their minds and bodies, and with the heightened awareness brought on by adrenaline, the world begins to move in slow motion as their bodies continue on auto-pilot, responding to what was rigorously trained into them until the combat action is over.
Imagine, If You Dare
Imagine, if you can, the fear you would experience with all that fire power aimed at you. Imagine the shame you would feel for just feeling afraid when so many others are depending on your strength and courage. Imagine the loneliness you would feel at times with the weight of that responsibility on your shoulders because you are not only responsible for your own life, but the lives of your comrades, as well. Imagine the guilt you would feel over taking another human's life–someone you never met or had a personal issue with, possibly someone you could have actually been friends with in another situation. Imagine the loss and sadness you would feel over the casualties taken by your unit. Imagine the horror you would feel as you contemplated becoming one of those casualties–Who will take care of my family? Who will console my loved ones? What will become of me if I am permanently disabled?
Combat Veterans and the Old Crisis
Does the average combat veteran have an outlet on which to unload this? Not always. Our combatants are trained to be "hard core." Sometimes they are ashamed to admit to their brothers and sisters that they are afraid. They don't want to let them down or leave doubts in their team members' minds as to their reliability. They dare not show any weakness, so they learn to be "stuffers." They stuff those "unacceptable" feelings away into their inner psyche where they wear away at the individual's internal stability, making it hard to function at times.
Some, however, find positive outlets into which they can release this negative energy (coping skills), hopefully finding balance. Others may be lucky enough to have a sympathetic ear to hear them out without judgment or disapproval and without fear of being "ratted out" to their peers.
Unfortunately, some have no other choice than to continue to stuff until they can't stuff any more, at which time they either mentally explode or shut down and become combat casualties because of their mental health.
In years past, PTSD did not receive the attention that it is receiving now. Combat veterans suffering from "shell shock" or "combat fatigue" were viewed as cowards or weaklings and were whisked away unceremoniously so they would not contaminate their brothers and sisters in arms. In most cases, they did not receive adequate care and were sent home for their families and communities to deal with them.
Combat Veterans and the Current Crisis
Today, psychiatrists and psychologists are able to treat this disorder with medications and counseling, treatments designed specifically to restore the patient's quality of life, but it is up to the combat veteran to choose whether they want to be treatment warriors and learn ways to go on with their lives or to be victims and become emotionally crippled. The best advice I was given came from a VietNam veteran who told me, "You have to learn to live despite the baggage you carry. You choose to get on with your life or become permanently disabled."
Some are ashamed of the stigma that used to be attached to mental health treatment and refuse to seek the help that is available to them. Others may not realize that they have a disorder or may try to ignore it, putting themselves and others at risk. Still others may be afraid of the cost of treatment. Sadly, some consider suicide their only option.
Hope!
There is hope. The Veterans Administration, community mental health facilities or hospitals, and organizations such as Wounded Warriors are available to provide services for veterans. They only need to seek out this help or be assisted to get to these services by their family members or support network.
Help is available both medically and financially. We must learn to protect our own and to aid and encourage them to get the help they need. | eng | 213ff53a-257c-4193-8278-48da210c53e6 | https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ichasesunsets/2023/10/anxiety-and-combat-veterans/ |
How to Become a Photographer – Professional Photographer
Intro:
Today, we're going to teach you how to become a photographer, everything you need to know as a beginner, so let's begin…
How To Become A Photographer
Those days are gone. When photography was considered a hobby with the rapid development of media, advertising, and fashion industries. I'm here with detailed information about professions that involve equipment such as cameras, lenses, computer software to image processing and editing, etc.
Q1:Who is a photographer?
Photography is an art and sign of taking photos and process them. So the photographer is an artist who is an expert in manipulating the effects of life and shadows to capture the various moments of life to cherish in the future. Once used as a hobby, only photography in its variety of cars has acquired the status of a multimillion-dollar industry.
Q2:What are the eligibility conditions to become a photographer?
Photography is an obtained art. As such, the photographer profession doesn't require any specific academic requirement. However, candidates who have cleared that tends plus to exam are eligible for the diploma or certificate courses in photography.
Q3:Which qualities are required to become a photographer?
To become a photographer, one must be passionate about photography.
He should have the capability to travel and work at a timing.
He should have good computer software and communication skills.
He must be patient and creative.
Above all, he should have good concentration and should be an expert in his or her technical work.
Q4:How to become a photographer?
To become a photographer, you should be academically eligible. First, you should be tenseless to pass in any stream from a recognized for and second, you have to choose a relevant course. Some of the best degree Diploma and ITI Photography courses are:
BA Photography
BA Visual Art and Photography
BSc Photography
Video Visual Production Diploma in Digital Photography
PG Diploma in Photography
Diploma in Fashion Photography
Diploma in Photography
Advertising Cinematography Diploma
Commercial Photography Diploma in Digital Cinematography
ITI Photography course
Your city may have a different degree diploma and courses. Once you have decided to do a particular course, you have to secure admissions, as most of the reputed institutes rely on merit basis admission process. However, some institutes may take some kind of attitude or interest. Deserving candidates are a locked see based on the mask scored by them in a relevant entrance test or both exams are a combination of both. After that, all you need to do is to complete your academic program.
Q5:What is the average fee for photography courses?
The average fee of photography courses varies from institute to institutes and course to course. It also depends on in which city you are leaving. To become a photographer, you may have to pay less fee in government Institute as compared to private Institute.
Q6:What are the career prospects of a photographer?
The advent of mass media has open flood gates of job opportunities for professional photographers, and winds have been provided to eight by the digitalization of the images and equipment using it. Professional photographers can work independently or under the supervision of others. Based on specialization, a photographer could play any of the many rules, like:
Fashion photographer
Product and commercial photographer
Wildlife photographer
Sports photographer
Event photographers
Fine art photographer
Automobile photographer
Photojournalists
Forensic photographer
For photographers, entrepreneurship is also a good opportunity.
Q7:What is the average salary of a photographer?
Your salary varies based on your city and the place you are working in and the creativity you bring into your work along with your experience in this field. In your own business, you can go anywhere, it largely depends upon the assignment you're working on as well as your business acumen. So once established as a re-known photographer, the sky is a limit for your work's minute value.
Hope so guys you liked reading this article. I tried my best as much as possible ways to make you understand everything clearly so hopefully, this article is gonna be helpful for you in how to become a photographer. Keep visiting us to learn many more things. Have a nice day! | eng | 90cf096f-64dc-4fc2-9ee5-0dd229c94f83 | https://howtories.com/2021/08/how-to-become-a-photographer.html |
when will fashion police be back on
Post navigation
Dear NF, I love that you say, "May I have…please" we worked on this for about 20 minutes before you were saying "please I have…" … let's see what you say today.
Plow guy, I don't know you yet, because there's been no snow… but I hope that you're incredible and reliable and I think you're totally worth it because… you're necessary.
Dear Joe Anglim, YESSS keep winning those immunity challenges… (did anyone else notice that his and Kelly Wigglesworth's buns were very similar Wednesday night… ugh I wish I had a photo.) OH, and where do I buy Joe Anglim's jewelry???
Patti Labelle's sweet potato pie, I NEED YOU.
Dear 2016, You are looking fantastic!
Dear Christmas decorations, I know you're dying to come out of the shed.
Dear Oprah's book, What I Know For Sure, I am totally loving you.
Dear heartburn, WTFFFFFFFFFF.
Dear Maalox, are you off the market or what… what can I take instead? A pharmacist said ask my doctor, my doctor said uhhh tums? (THAT IS NOT THE SAME) and I said should I just ask a pharmacists? and he said oh yes try that… UGHH NO one wants to give suggestions to a pregnant person in fear that they'll be wrong, well thank you for being cautious but my chest is on FIRE.
Dear Yasso Greek Yogurt Mint Chocolate Chip, I am out of you. If I go to wegmans tonight and you're not there it is possible I might cry.
Dear winter finales, UGHH why do you exist… I need my shows new each week. | eng | a2664df6-ce61-4f29-a4be-921bb68f9380 | https://alisonblogg.wordpress.com/tag/when-will-fashion-police-be-back-on/ |
News
Breaking Ground on New Toddler Garden
In early December, ground was broken for the start of the installation of the new toddler garden at Welsh Park-DeKalb. The "Basics Toddler Garden" is a collaborative project between Basics DeKalb County, DeKalb County Community Gardens, DeKalb County Regional Office of Education, DeKalb Park District, and University of Illinois Extension Master Gardeners along with various community volunteers.
The Basics Toddler Garden project underway is in conjunction with the Welsh Park improvements spearheaded by the DeKalb Park District. The park district project includes a new playground, splash pad, and basketball courts. The Basics Toddler Garden is open to the public but will also be used year-round as a space for programming by various community organizations.
"This garden, located in a community park, will provide a constructive space for families with young children to do the '5 Basics' and engage in ways that promote optimal brain development while having fun and spending time outdoors. Our youngest learners, as young as infants, will benefit from this community project." said Courtney Hill, Coordinator for Basics DeKalb County.
The Basics are a set of five evidence-based, nurturing practices that help all infants and toddlers thrive cognitively, socially and emotionally. Every child from every background can benefit. For more detailed information on this early childhood brain development approach go to Basics DeKalb County website: (
The Basics Toddler Garden at Welsh Park (651 Russell Road, DeKalb) when completed in the Spring of 2021, will include the following hands-on features:
dirt digging site
sensory and an edible garden
musical flower sculptures
obstacle paver path
seating for story and reading times
View a 3D rendering of the Basics Toddler Garden at Welsh Park below! A week-long planting party involving community organizations and residents is planned for May 15th-21st leading up to the grand opening on May 22, 2021. Stay tuned for more details on
"DeKalb County Community Gardens was very happy to be involved in making this Toddler Garden available to the Annie Glidden North community. Numerous studies show that gardens and contact with nature provide multiple benefits to children of all ages. The toddler garden is an excellent opportunity for parents and children to be together in nature. It is a healthy and educational activity that benefits children in their development cognitively, emotionally, and socially." said Dan Kenney, Executive Director of DeKalb County Community Gardens.
Basics DeKalb County is currently investigating locations for a second toddler garden within DeKalb County. Community members are encouraged to share potential locations with the organization. This project is possible only through the generosity community partnerships and donors. All contributors will have a special place of honor at the garden. For more questions or more information, please contact Amanda Christensen achristensen@dekalbcounty.org or 815-217-0460. | eng | e4371c71-ca0f-4a50-bc3e-d41509306f47 | https://basicsdekalbcounty.org/breaking-ground-on-new-toddler-garden/ |
Emirates Careers 2023
Emirates is seeking a highly motivated and customer-focused Customer Service Specialist to join our dynamic team and provide exceptional customer service to our passengers across various touchpoints. As a Customer Service Specialist, you will be responsible for handling inquiries, resolving issues, and ensuring that our passengers have a positive experience with Emirates. The ideal candidate will possess strong communication and interpersonal skills, a passion for customer service, and a willingness to go the extra mile to exceed customer expectations. | eng | cf96da6d-cba0-4dc2-937e-c993d3f123f0 | https://jobs.govhelp.in/job/emirates-careers-2023-job-search-customer-service-specialist-post/ |
TCM | The Inclusion of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the ICD-11 Classification System
TCM emphasizes the role of qi, the vital force flowing through the body, connecting the organs, veins, nerves, atoms, and consciousness. It consists of twelve major meridians that connect the major organs and are related to seasonal and planetary movements. The body's qi flows in different directions according to its condition, the season, and the time of day. TCM also takes into account the body's openculture.
The inclusion of TCM in the ICD-11 classification system is a huge step forward in the spread of this ancient system. It is expected to speed up the adoption of TCM throughout the world. The decision has been welcomed by both Western doctors and practitioners of TCM. Professor Ryan Abbott, a TCM practitioner and faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles Center for East-West Medicine, is optimistic that the inclusion of TCM in the ICD-11 will result in widespread acceptance.
Despite the fact that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is largely unregulated in the United States, the government of China has pushed for greater global recognition of this healing system. This move by the country is laudable, as it could yield a $50 billion annual profit. However, it is important to note that TCM is still far from a regulated medicine, and there are several factors that make it dangerous. One ingredient in traditional remedies, aristolochic acid, has been linked to fatal kidney damage and cancers of the urinary tractDuring a TCM visit, practitioners will examine the tongue, pulse points, and the general state of the patient. In addition to analyzing tongue shape and tension, they will also evaluate the color and coating of the tongue. Patients are often told not to brush their tongues before their appointments. Practitioners will also palpate the pulses in the wrist in three different locations of the radial artery to determine whether there are any blocked meridians in the citizennews. | eng | fe671a20-52a0-432b-a99f-b58db669026d | https://tutflix.co/the-inclusion-of-traditional-chinese-medicine-in-the-icd-11-classification-system/ |
Exploring Eau Fraiche: A Comprehensive Overview
When it comes to cologne, Eau Fraiche is an increasingly popular choice. With its unique scent, its refreshing aroma, and its long-lasting effects, it's no wonder why this type of cologne has been a hit amongst men for years. But what exactly is Eau Fraiche and what makes it different from other types of cologne? In this comprehensive overview, we'll explore all aspects of Eau Fraiche and how it may be the perfect cologne for you. We'll examine its origins, its scent, its effects, and more, so you can make an informed decision as to whether or not it's the perfect fragrance for you. Eau Fraiche is a type of cologne for men, and is a light and refreshing fragrance that is often described as a cross between an Eau de Toilette and an Eau de Parfum.
It contains a lower concentration of perfume oils than other types of cologne, and has a lighter scent that won't overpower the wearer. The main ingredients of Eau Fraiche are alcohol, water, and fragrant oils. The oils used in Eau Fraiche are typically citrus, herbal, and woodsy in nature. These oils combine to create a unique scent that can be both delicate and refreshing.
The scent of Eau Fraiche will change over time as the oils evaporate, and the scent will usually last for up to four hours. When it comes to choosing Eau Fraiche, there are a number of popular brands available. Some of the most popular include Calvin Klein's Eternity Aqua for Men, Hugo Boss' Hugo Element, and Dior's Eau Sauvage. These brands are popular for their ability to provide a light and refreshing scent that won't overpower the wearer.
They also tend to have good longevity, making them great for those who want their cologne to last for longer periods of time. When applying Eau Fraiche, it should be sprayed onto the pulse points such as the wrists, neck, and chest. This will allow the scent to be released gradually throughout the day. When applying Eau Fraiche, it's important to remember that less is more.
It's best to start with one spray and add more if desired. Applying too much could result in an overpowering scent that could be unpleasant. In conclusion, Eau Fraiche is a type of cologne for men that offers a light and refreshing scent. It contains a lower concentration of perfume oils than other types of cologne, which makes it perfect for those who want a subtle and delicate scent.
It typically has a good longevity, making it great for those who want their cologne to last for long periods of time. And when it comes to choosing an Eau Fraiche, there are a number of popular brands available, such as Calvin Klein's Eternity Aqua for Men, Hugo Boss' Hugo Element, and Dior's Eau Sauvage.
Popular Brands of Eau Fraiche
Eau fraiche is a popular type of cologne for men, and there are many brands that offer their own versions. Some of the most popular brands of eau fraiche are Dior, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Hugo Boss, and Paco Rabanne. These brands are so popular because they offer quality scents that are long-lasting and distinctive.
They also come in a variety of fragrances and sizes to suit any man's needs. Dior offers a wide range of eau fraiche colognes, all of which have a classic yet modern scent. Givenchy offers a selection of scents that range from fresh and fruity to woody and musky. Yves Saint Laurent has a selection of eau fraiche colognes that feature hints of citrus, spices, and herbs. Hugo Boss also offers a selection of eau fraiche colognes with different notes, such as citrus, woodsy, and leathery.
Finally, Paco Rabanne offers a selection of eau fraiche colognes that feature an array of different scents.
Ingredients Used in Eau Fraiche
Eau fraiche is a type of cologne for men that is known for its light, refreshing, and long-lasting scent. The ingredients used in eau fraiche are carefully chosen to create a unique and subtle blend of fragrance notes. Common ingredients used in eau fraiche colognes include citrusy notes, such as bergamot and lemon, as well as floral notes, such as jasmine and rose. Additionally, other ingredients such as musk, sandalwood, and woody notes are often used to create a more masculine scent.
Each of these ingredients plays an important role in the overall scent of the eau fraiche cologne. Citrusy notes provide a light and refreshing top note while floral notes add a hint of sweetness. The woody and musky notes provide depth and complexity to the scent. Together, these ingredients create a unique and subtle fragrance that is perfect for any occasion. When selecting an eau fraiche cologne, it is important to take into account the individual ingredients used in the product.
Some colognes contain more citrusy or floral notes than others, which can create a more intense scent. Additionally, some colognes contain stronger musky or woody notes, creating a more masculine aroma. Taking the time to research the individual ingredients used in each product can help you find the perfect eau fraiche cologne for your needs.
Notes Found in Eau Fraiche
Eau fraiche is a type of cologne for men, and it is known for its unique scent. The fragrance of eau fraiche is made up of a combination of notes, which contribute to the overall scent.
These notes can be divided into three categories: top notes, middle notes, and base notes. Top notes are the ones that you smell first when you apply the fragrance. They are usually light, fresh, and citrusy, and they tend to fade away quickly. Examples of top notes found in eau fraiche include bergamot, lemon, grapefruit, and lime.
Middle notes are the heart of the fragrance and they are usually warm and spicy. Examples of middle notes found in eau fraiche include jasmine, lavender, geranium, cardamom, and nutmeg. Base notes are the ones that linger after the top notes have faded away. Base notes are usually rich and woody, and they help to bring out the other notes in the fragrance.
Examples of base notes found in eau fraiche include sandalwood, oakmoss, amber, cedarwood, and musk. The combination of all these notes is what gives eau fraiche its unique scent. Each note contributes to the overall fragrance in its own way, creating a scent that is both light and refreshing as well as deep and complex.
What Makes Eau Fraiche Unique?
Eau fraiche is a type of cologne for men that has become increasingly popular in recent years. While it may look similar to other colognes, it has some unique properties that set it apart. One of the primary differences between eau fraiche and other colognes is its concentration.
Eau fraiche has a lower concentration of fragrance oils than other colognes, typically ranging from 1-3%. This makes it a lighter scent, often described as "fresh" or "clean".Another key characteristic of eau fraiche is its longevity. Unlike other colognes which may last for several hours, eau fraiche generally only lasts a few hours before fading away. This makes it an ideal choice for people who want a light scent but do not want it to be overpowering.
Additionally, eau fraiche is often less expensive than other colognes, making it a great option for those on a budget. Finally, eau fraiche is often considered to be more versatile than other types of cologne. It can be used by both men and women, and can be worn during the day or night depending on the occasion. Moreover, its light scent makes it suitable for almost any situation, from casual to formal. In short, eau fraiche offers an attractive combination of affordability, versatility, and lightness that make it a popular choice for many people. Its low concentration of fragrance oils and limited longevity make it an ideal choice for those looking for a subtle scent that won't overwhelm the senses.
How to Apply Eau Fraiche
Eau fraiche is a light, refreshing cologne for men that has a subtle, pleasant scent.
Applying it is relatively simple and straightforward, with just a few steps to follow.
Start by cleansing your skin:
Before applying eau fraiche, it's important to wash your face and body with a mild cleanser to remove any dirt, oil, or sweat from your skin. This will help the cologne last longer and provide the best scent.
Apply to pulse points:
After cleansing, spray the cologne onto your pulse points, such as your neck, wrists, and chest.
Pulse points are areas of your body that generate heat and will help the scent last longer.
Spray lightly:
When spraying the cologne onto your pulse points, make sure to do it lightly; a few sprays should do the trick. Too much cologne can be overwhelming and may be unpleasant for those around you.
Wait for it to dry:
After spraying the cologne onto your pulse points, wait a few minutes for it to dry before getting dressed or going outside.
This will help prevent the scent from transferring onto your clothes or dissipating into the air.
Reapply throughout the day:
As the day goes on, you may want to reapply eau fraiche to keep your scent fresh. A few sprays should do the trick. Eau fraiche is an ideal fragrance choice for men who are looking for something light but long-lasting. It is made up of unique ingredients such as fragrant oils and alcohols that create a signature scent.
Popular brands of eau fraiche include Acqua di Parma, L'Eau d'Issey, and Dolce & Gabbana. When applying eau fraiche, it is important to follow the instructions on the bottle to ensure the best results.
Eau Fraiche
is a light yet long-lasting cologne that offers a unique and signature scent, making it a popular choice among men. | eng | a9d5de5b-8f50-4ee5-983d-320e1afba71f | https://www.perfumeformen.co.za/types-of-cologne-eau-fraiche |
School Safety
Page Navigation
A safe and secure school environment is essential to learning.At School #12 a number of measures are in place to ensure the safety of our students each and every day.Some of these include:our building being secure (requiring visitors to be buzzed in and report to the Main Office to sign-in); both the RCSD Code of Conduct and School 12's own Code of Conduct are in place and followed; and an Emergency Response Plan that is revised each year.For more information on any of these procedures, please use the links in the left column of this page | eng | 8d6650a1-8790-407c-8307-74b50b7b8a19 | https://www.rcsdk12.org/domain/1060 |
Business Process Automation: What is & How it works - Guide
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, staying ahead of the competition requires organizations to continuously innovate and optimize their operations. One area that has gained significant attention is process automation. Through the utilization of technology and digital tools, businesses can streamline repetitive tasks, minimize manual effort, and enhance overall efficiency. Moreover, process automation holds the promise of increased productivity, cost savings, and enhanced customer experiences. In this article, we will delve into the world of process automation, exploring its definition, benefits, including various tools and strategies that enable businesses to automate their processes effectively.
What is Process Automation?
Process automation refers to the implementation of technology and digital tools to automate and streamline repetitive and manual tasks within business operations. Furthermore, it involves the use of software, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation (RPA) to replace or augment human involvement in executing specific processes. Automating these tasks allows organizations to eradicate errors, shorten completion timeframes, and attain heightened levels of consistency and precision. Process automation not only increases operational efficiency but also allows employees to focus on more strategic and value-added activities. It empowers businesses to optimize their workflows, improve productivity, and allocate resources more effectively, ultimately driving better outcomes and facilitating business growth.
Benefits and Advantages of Automation
1. Enhanced Productivity
Automating mundane and repetitive tasks allows employees to focus on higher-value activities, boosting overall productivity. With automation handling time-consuming tasks, employees can dedicate their time to strategic initiatives, innovation, and relationship-building, leading to improved business outcomes.
3. Improved Accuracy
Automation guarantees consistency and accuracy by eliminating the possibility of human error and reducing manual data entry. Automated systems follow predefined rules and algorithms, minimizing the risk of mistakes at work, such as data entry errors, miscalculations, or overlooked steps.
4. Faster Turnaround Time
Automated processes are typically faster, enabling organizations to respond promptly to customer demands and gain a competitive edge. The reduction of manual interventions, the streamlining of workflows, and the automation of task handovers enable organizations to expedite their response time, leading to improved customer satisfaction and expanded potential for business growth.
5. Scalability
Automation provides the flexibility to scale operations without adding significant resources, accommodating business growth and increasing efficiency. Whether it is handling an increased volume of customer inquiries, processing higher transaction volumes, or managing larger datasets, automation can seamlessly adapt to changing business needs.
What is Needed to Automate a Process?
To embark on process automation, organizations need to consider several key elements:
1. Process Analysis
Identify and evaluate existing processes to determine which ones are suitable for automation. Conduct a thorough analysis of the process flow, inputs, outputs, dependencies, and pain points to understand the automation potential and expected benefits.
3. Technological Infrastructure
Make sure that the organization has the necessary hardware, software, and network infrastructure to support automation initiatives. Assess existing systems, identify any technological gaps, and invest in the appropriate automation tools and platforms that align with the organization's requirements.
4. Stakeholder Buy-in
Obtain support from key stakeholders, including executives, department heads, and employees, to foster a culture of automation adoption. Communicate the benefits of automation, address concerns, and involve stakeholders in the process to ensure a smooth transition and successful implementation.
What Types of Processes Can be Automated?
A wide range of processes can benefit from automation, such as:
1. Data Entry and Management
Automating data entry tasks can significantly reduce mistakes and improve data accuracy. Through the extraction of data from diverse sources, such as forms, emails, or documents, and the automated population of relevant fields in databases or systems, organizations can reduce manual data entry efforts and elevate the quality of data.
3. Financial Processes
Automating invoice generation, payment processing, and financial reporting can streamline accounting operations. Extracting data from different sources, such as forms, emails, or documents, and automatically populating the appropriate fields in databases or systems allows organizations to unify data entry processes and enhance the accuracy and reliability of their data.
10 Tools for Process Automation
1. UiPath
UiPath is a leading Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform that empowers organizations to automate repetitive tasks, data entry, and rule-based processes. Its visual designer and drag-and-drop functionality make it accessible to both technical and non-technical users.
3. Zapier
Zapier is an integration platform that enables users to connect and automate workflows between hundreds of web applications. With its wide range of pre-built integrations and customizable workflows, Zapier simplifies data transfer and task automation.
4. IFTTT
IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a web-based service that connects different apps and devices to create standardized actions based on predefined triggers and conditions. It allows users to create custom automation recipes, known as applets, to simplify various aspects of their digital life.
5. Microsoft Power Automate
Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate is a cloud-based service that enables users to streamline workflows across various Microsoft applications and third-party services. It offers a rich set of connectors and templates to simplify the automation process.
6. Airtable
Airtable is a collaborative work management platform that combines the functionalities of a spreadsheet and a database. With its automation features, users can create processes that trigger actions, send notifications, and update records based on predefined conditions.
7. Jira
Jira is a popular project management software known for its agility and flexibility. It offers automation capabilities through its Jira Automation feature, allowing users to digitize repetitive tasks, status updates, and notifications within their project operations.
8. HubSpot
HubSpot is a CRM platform that provides automation capabilities for marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Its automation features include lead nurturing, email marketing, task assignments, and personalized customer interactions.
9. Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to manage tasks and projects. While not primarily an automation tool, Trello offers automation capabilities through integrations with third-party services like Butler, enabling users to automate repetitive actions and create custom workflows.
10. Uphint
Uphint records the processes executed by users on their computer and transforms them into step-by-step guides. It captures user actions, such as mouse clicks and keystrokes, and generates comprehensive instructions that can be shared via multiple formats (PDF, HTML, link or even embed it into other tools) and replicated easily.
Besides, once the how-to guide is created, users will be able to customize it by adding extra text, circles, deleting or adding steps or even blurring confidential information.
How to Automate Processes? Step by Step
1. Identifying Processes
Analyzing existing processes and prioritizing those that are most suitable for automation based on complexity, volume, and potential ROI. Evaluating the workflows in terms of their potential benefits, automation feasibility, and alignment with organizational goals.
2. Defining Objectives
Clearly articulating the goals and outcomes companies aim to achieve through system automation. Whether it is reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, or enhancing customer satisfaction, clearly defining objectives helps organizations stay focused and measure the success of their automation efforts.
3. Mapping the Process
Creating a visual representation of the current process flow, including inputs, outputs, decision points, and dependencies. This helps in understanding the existing workflow, identifying bottlenecks, and visualizing how automation can streamline the sequence.
4. Identifying Automation Opportunities
Identifying specific tasks within the process that can be automated, such as data entry, report generation, or email notifications. Assessing the tasks based on their frequency, complexity, and potential for human error. Starting with tasks that are repetitive, rule-based, and require minimal human judgment.
5. Selecting Automation Tools
Evaluating and choosing the proper systematic tools based on the nature of the process and desired outcomes. Considering factors such as compatibility with existing systems, ease of integration, scalability, and vendor support. Pilot testing tools can help assess their effectiveness before full implementation.
6. Designing Automation Workflow
Using the chosen tools, design the automated workflow, specifying triggers, actions, and decision points. Defining the sequence of tasks, rules for decision-making, and system interactions. Exploiting the capabilities of the selected tools to create efficient and effective automated operations.
7. Testing and Validating
Thoroughly testing the automated process to ensure it performs as intended and meets the desired objectives. Conducting testing in a controlled environment, simulating different scenarios, and validating the outputs. Engaging relevant stakeholders, gathering feedback, and making necessary adjustments before deploying the automation.
8. Deployment and Monitoring
Implementing the automated process, closely monitoring its performance, and making adjustments as needed. Setting up monitoring mechanisms to track key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure the effectiveness of the automated process. Continuously monitoring the process for any issues or areas for improvement.
9. Employee Training
Providing necessary training and support to employees who will interact with or oversee the automated processes. Guaranteeing that employees understand the know-how to operate within the new automated environment, and addressing any concerns or questions they may have. Encouraging feedback and creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
2. Employee Onboarding
Automating the employee onboarding process, including document collection, system access setup, and orientation scheduling. Through the utilization of digital forms, automated notifications, and predefined workflows, organizations can optimize onboarding processes, minimize paperwork, and facilitate a seamless transition for new employees.
12. Social Media Scheduling
Automating the scheduling and publishing of social media posts, ensuring consistent engagement and saving time. Social media management tools can help schedule posts in advance, analyze engagement metrics, and automate repetitive tasks like posting across multiple platforms.
Conclusion
Process automation offers organizations a powerful toolkit to optimize operations, increase efficiency, and drive growth. With the utilization of automation tools and technologies, businesses can optimize workflows, minimize costs, and improve accuracy, resulting in a competitive advantage in the market. Through meticulous planning, appropriate tool adoption, and a step-by-step approach, organizations can successfully embrace the automation journey and unleash the full potential of their business processes. Embracing automation today is a strategic investment that can position businesses for sustained success in the ever-evolving business landscape of tomorrow. By harnessing the power of process automation, organizations can transform their operations, achieve operational excellence, and drive meaningful results. | eng | 40345d1b-c7ac-4e60-a582-741e02b700c5 | https://www.uphint.com/post/business-process-automation-what-it-is-how-it-works-guide |
Fibonacci Levels in Technical Analysis
Every technical trader heard of the Fibonacci numbers. In a way, it is impossible not to. The most famous trading theories use these ratios.
Before the personal computer (PC), technical traders tracked the movement of a security on a piece of paper. Even then, the Fibonacci levels played an important role.
Today, any trading platform offers a special Fibonacci tool. There are multiple, separate Fibonacci tools to use, like Fibonacci retracement, expansion, arcs, fan, time zones, and so on.
In fact, for trading purposes, it depends very much what your technical setup is. Some may use the Fibonacci retracement only, others will base their entries on the time zones, and so on.
No matter the trading theory, the Fibonacci sequence is the same. Out of the tools mentioned above, the Fibonacci retracement and Fibonacci expansion levels are the most popular ones.
Traders use technical analysis tools to find out places to buy or sell a currency pair. The more visible the setup is, the more likely traders will use it again. Either on a different currency pair or on a different time frame.
However, diversification matters too. For example, if you open a chart and draw ten different Fibonacci retracement tools on the screen, the result is worthless.
The idea is to combine the strength of the Fibonacci ratios with othertechnical analysis tools. Or, with other trading theories. Or, both! The more reasons or arguments for a trade.
The Most Important Fibonacci Levels
It all starts with the golden ratio. That's the 61.8% retracement level. Any move, swing or dip, will see some unusual activity around the 61.8% level.
Just look at any currency pair you want. Pick one from the Forex dashboard. Next, drag the Fibonacci retracement. Finally, find the 61.8% level.
If the market can retrace to it, it will have a hard time to break it from the first time. Everyone using Fibonacci's focuses on the 61.8% level.
Elliott Waves traders use the golden ratio to hunt the most powerful wave in an impulsive move. The 3rd wave.
For this, they wait for a five-wave structure to complete. Furthermore, they wait for a pullback in the 61.8% area and then enter a trade.
As a target, they use the Fibonacci extension of 161.8% of the previous five-wave structure. Again, without Fibonacci levels, technical analysis would not exist.
In the chart above, because of it refers to current levels, the USDJPY bounced right from the 61.8% area. Again, bulls respected the golden ratio.
The first assumption is that the 3rd wave in an impulsive move will follow. Because traders don't know for a fact if the 2nd wave ended here, they look for the possibility of the 2nd wave to form a running correction.
Only when the price moves much higher and the structure unveils, they'll know the correct count. Yet, the golden ratio gave a nice bounce for the short to medium-term traders. Besides the golden ratio and its derived levels, other levels have important meanings in different trading theories:
6%, 38.2%, 123.6%, 138.2%, 161.8% and 261.8% in Elliott Waves Theory;
2% and 78.6% in harmonic trading.
How to Draw the Fibonacci Retracement Tool
One of the major problems traders face is not knowing how to drag the Fibonacci retracement tool. This matters, because:
Important: The main use of a Fibonacci level is to find important support and resistance levels.
The key comes from the technical approach used. Look at the previous chart. The Fibonacci tool isn't dragged from top to bottom. Yet, the 61.8% area proves to be correct. How come?
The answer comes from the Elliott Waves Theory rules: drag the Fibonacci tool from the start of a move until its end.
However, there's a catch. The end of a wave is not always its lowest or highest point. Hence, the derived Fibonacci levels differ.
A similar example comes from the EURUSD daily chart. Note that this chart is zoomed out, so the actual time frame is even bigger.
The drop you see on the left side of it started from the 1.40 level. The ECB (European Central Bank) just announced it will cut rates to fight inflation.
As such, Euro bears sold the common currency in a frenzy. For whatever the reason, after an almost four-thousand pip fall, the pair bounced.
How do we know the bounce is for real? It reached the 23.6% level. And, it was rejected.
This validates the way to drag the Fibonacci tool. However, after the first rejection, the price tried again for the 23.6% level.
As a rule of thumb, the more it tests it, the bigger the chances it will break it.
Side Note: Don't use any level more than two times for a trade in the same direction.
Next, traders focus on finding other clues to help with the new direction. In this case, the EURUSD formed a possible double bottom and now broke the 23.6% retracement level.
Look for Confluence Areas
In the previous chart, the double bottom's measured move points to the 50% retracement level. Obviously, until then, the 38.2% may act the same way the 23.6% did.
A confluence area has two meanings. One is to look for different Fibonacci levels to form around the same place. Everyone knows that.
However, another one is to look for different currency pair to point to the same scenario/direction. In doing that, traders favor alternation between the confirmation factors.
Above is the AUDUSD daily chart. The moment Governor Stevens said the Aussie dollar is overvalued against its American counterpart, the AUDUSD pair collapsed.
Using the same logic like in the EURUSD case, the pair found a bottom and jumped to the 23.6% level. Moreover, in doing that, it formed a head and shoulders pattern.
That's the alternation in patterns: double bottom in the first case,head and shoulders in the second one. It is like the market screams in your face the two pairs want to move to the next Fibonacci level.
Conclusion
The examples used here have the purpose of showing a few ways to use the Fibonacci tools. Because the retracement tool is the one used in most trading theories and concepts, we focused on it.
However, especially in the Elliott Waves Theory, things go from simple to complicated in a blink of an eye. Complex retracement and expansion levels confirm a pattern or not.
They only come to confirm the importance of the Fibonacci sequence in technical analysis. | eng | 7d373130-8b91-4a53-892e-edea6098cf8a | https://www.newtraderu.com/2017/08/22/fibonacci-levels-technical-analysis/ |
Description
A longtime professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, Ronald Takaki was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity. When the first edition of ADifferent Mirror was published in 1993, Publishers Weekly called it "a brilliant revisionist history of America that is likely to become a classic of multicultural studies" and named it one of the ten best books of the year. Now Rebecca Stefoff, who adapted Howard Zinn's best-selling A People's History of the United States for younger readers, turns the updated 2008 edition of Takaki's multicultural masterwork into A Different Mirror forYoung People.
Drawing on Takaki's vast array of primary sources, and staying true to his own words whenever possible, ADifferent Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems. Like Zinn's A People's History, Takaki's ADifferent Mirror offers a rich and rewarding "people's view" perspective on the American story.
Product Details
Price
$22.95$21.34
Publisher
Triangle Square
Publish Date
October 16, 2012
Pages
384
Dimensions
5.3 X 7.8 X 1.2 inches | 1.02 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781609804169
BISAC Categories:
Earn by promoting books
About the Author
RONALD TAKAKI (1939-2009) was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity. He is the author of the multiple award-winning books Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of AsianAmericans and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.
REBECCA STEFOFF specializes in writing nonfiction for young readers, with a focus on scientific, historical, and literary subjects. She previously explored the subject of evolution in Charles Darwin and the Evolution Revolution(Oxford University Press, 1996) and the four-volume series Humans: An Evolutionary History (Marshall Cavendish Benchmark, 2010). Stefoff has also written on exploration, forensic investigation, and archaeology, among other topics. In addition to writing her own books, Stefoff has adapted several important nonfiction works for young audiences: A Young People's History of the United States, based on Howard Zinn's bestselling classic of progressive history; Before Columbus: The Americas in 1491, based on Charles C. Mann's ground-breaking new look at the archaeology of the pre-Columbian Americas; and A Different Mirror for Young People, based on a major work of scholarship by ethnic historian Ronald Takaki.
Reviews
"This 375-page book would be an excellent way to include multi-ethnic materials in the classroom as a way to ensure that your students see their unique identities reflected in their coursework." -- Skipping Stones
"The 'mirror' that Ronald Takaki holds up to the United States reflects a multicultural history of oppression and exploitation, but also struggle, solidarity, and community. In the most profound sense, this is a people's history of our country. Takaki shows what has torn us apart, yet what knits us together. This young people's version of A Different Mirror will introduce a new generation to Takaki's pathbreaking scholarship." --Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools and codirector, Zinn Education Project
"This is a great introduction to Takaki's path-breaking scholarship." -- Good | eng | 1c1d9c26-fa7e-4f04-a937-a3bbf8b61714 | https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-different-mirror-for-young-people-a-history-of-multicultural-america-ronald-takaki/7404599?ean=9781609804169 |
If there's one thing I've discovered working in a growing field like content design, I have a knack for stealing from one discipline and mixing it with another. (I come by this honestly, after convincing not one but two college advisors that I could use literary theory to analyze video games for my thesis instead of reading a bunch of books). And as someone who loved writing research papers in school, combining research methods with content was a great experiment for me.
There are many tools, terms, and best practices you can load up on before diving in (the UXCC has a great content research course to help you get started). One thing I was really drawn to from usability research was the concept of using heuristics.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, there are some great resources out there (check out this guide from Bobbie Wood) for reviewing your content through a heuristic lens. But, taking a page from the research playbook, I've found it useful to do heuristic evaluations on product content.
What is a heuristic evaluation?
A heuristic evaluation tests the usability of a product by asking a panel of 3 to 5 experts to perform a task and note any concerns they have based on their areas of expertise.
If you've never done a heuristic evaluation before, the process is relatively simple. The researcher gives you a task (or sequence of tasks) to perform alongside a list of heuristics, which are a set of standards your product should ideally meet. This could be a commonly used list, like Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics or Shneiderman's 8 Golden Rules, or your researcher may have written their own list based on your specific product.
You'll be in charge of performing the task and writing down any areas that don't adhere to that list of rules. This could be helper text that doesn't make sense, lack of documentation—really, anything you feel goes against that list of heuristics. Afterward, you'll rank the severity of each issue to prioritize your solutions.
Content designers are great experts to include on an evaluation panel, but you can also use these heuristics in your own inventories or audits.
For a content heuristic evaluation, I like to evaluate each piece of copy on the page and determine whether or not it breaks one or more of those rules. Tooltips, modal headers, and even button text can have a remarkably wide range of heuristic issues.
Why evaluate content with a set of heuristics?
Depending on your product's issues, heuristics can be a great way to align your team on what to address first.
It helps you narrow down the issue. You know something's off, but it can be hard to explain what. Assigning a heuristic to a problem makes you focus on where the problem really lies. Feel like your issue fits into more than one category? Maybe you're dealing with more than one problem!
It gives quantitative data to an otherwise qualitative exercise. Metrics are crucial when it comes to advocating to improve an experience. Use these heuristics to analyze trends or even tally what percentage of your issues fall into each category to find areas your team should focus on.
It's cross-disciplinary. Evaluating your content is great, but tracking these issues using the same list a UI or interaction designer does is even better. You have a unified metric by which you're grading the entire interaction.
It creates a consistent experience for evaluators and, in turn, your users. Ensuring everyone uses the same set of heuristics keeps the analysis and recommendations consistent, creating a smoother user experience overall.
The ten usability heuristics applied to content
There are several standardized heuristic lists to choose from—Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics, Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules, and Gerhardt-Powals' principles are some of the most common—but here's my content-focused way of using Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics.
Visibility of system status
Your user should know what's happening and never be left questioning an interaction. For content, this might mean a friendly toast notification when loading something takes longer than usual.
Google Docs uses a toast notification to let you know when something takes a while and prompts a reload.
Questions to consider:
Is there content in this interaction that lets the user know the status of their action?
Do you alert users when a process is complete?
Match between system and the real world
Speaking your user's language is perhaps one of the most important rules of content design. Use familiar terms in your products and remove any potentially isolating jargon.
Are there any unfamiliar words in this interaction, or words that have a different meaning than when commonly used?
Do you utilize metaphors? Do they match the real-world/familiar meaning?
Can these metaphors be localized for different languages and cultures if you work on a global product?
Are you matching the user's vocabulary?
User control and freedom
We all make mistakes. Users should be able to back out or undo an action quickly and easily if needed. Clearly labeled Cancel buttons and explaining how to change an action in progress helps your users not feel trapped.
The Target app explains how to cancel your order or even place an additional order for items you forgot to add.
Error prevention
While we want to make sure users can recover from errors, the ideal course of action is to prevent errors in the first place. Tell users what an action does, especially a destructive one.
This modal warns users that an action is irreversible and explains an alternative path that might better suit their needs.
Questions to consider
Do you provide adequate content for explaining destructive actions? Is it clearly placed in the interaction path?
Is critical information repeated in relevant places, not just in one location?
Recognition rather than recall
Sometimes, users have to go through several steps to complete an action. Present information when a user needs it without forcing them to remember content from a previous step.
In this confirmation modal, Mailchimp reminds you what you've selected in previous steps.
Questions to consider
Are instructions broken into digestible pieces or presented all at once?
Does the copy provide adequate help within the UI, or do users have to rely on external resources (like a support site)?
Do users need to remember a lot of options from one step to the next?
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Your audience has differing comfort levels with using your product or technology. Give your users the option to approach your product in the way that best makes sense to them, not siloed into a single flow.
This pop-up lets users opt into a product tour or skip it, depending on their needs.
Questions to consider
Are there any screens that a user can skip in this interaction? Does the content still make sense if you remove that screen?
Is the experience personalized to specific users?
Does your content make their experience more streamlined and enjoyable?
Aesthetic and minimalist design
The more things you try to cram on a page, the more complex the page becomes to use. Removing extraneous information helps the user focus on the task at hand, rather than being distracted by extra stuff.
Short helper copy moves the user in the right direction. Adding a hyperlink to a detailed list helps avoid a long string of file extensions on the page.
Questions to consider
Is your copy concise and scannable?
Is there any irrelevant or rarely used content that could be offloaded into another view or moved to a lighter UI element?
Does the important content stand out, like being placed in a more prominent spot?
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Accidents happen—servers break, and interactions fail. As content designers, we want to not only let users know something isn't right but also help them fix it.
Text near a disabled button lets the user know what actions to perform before this one.
Questions to consider
Are errors explained in plain language? (No error codes or jargon)
Do you have instructions to help users resolve an error? If the error isn't related to the user's interaction, do you have a way to help them get an answer (like a support email or a status page link)?
Are errors placed in the context of how to resolve them, like near a form field with missing information?
Help and documentation
This heuristic ensures your user has extra help or information when needed Helper text, in-app help widgets, and support documentation are typically the most common for this.
Google introduces new features with in-app visuals and links to documentation.
Questions to consider
Is the documentation related to this interaction up to date (if this is an existing product) or planned/outlined (if this is a new product)?
Is the help provided just in time, or do users have to leave your product and search for it manually?
Is the documentation broken into discrete, scannable steps that are easy to replicate?
What's next?
You know what's wrong—so what do you do about it?
Like a severity ranking in a regular evaluation, I divide the listed issues into three categories: content issue, content + design issue, and overall usability issue.
A content issue is something that I, as the content designer, can tackle, like updating a sentence that doesn't match our style guide.
A content + design issue is typically a UI issue I'd need to collaborate with my designer to solve, like moving critical text out of a tooltip and onto the main page.
A usability issue stems from a content issue that needs to be addressed on a larger scale. Tackling this might take several members of the design team.
Now, it's time to present your findings! Outline which heuristics appeared most frequently to highlight areas that need improvement. If you're doing this alongside a content inventory or audit, you can create recommendations based on which heuristics appeared the most in your evaluation.
Don't forget to reach out to your teams. Chat with designers, PMs, and researchers to strategize on addressing these issues. If you did the categorization step, you can prioritize your list based on who needs to be involved (i.e. you can get started on those content-only issues at any time.)
Go forth and heuristically evaluate!
Rachel Wood is a Senior Content Designer at Procore. Connect with her on LinkedIn. | eng | efa9e3fc-6890-4d15-ad1f-4e4c24e27de9 | https://deptofux.com/2023/03/23/10-heuristic-evaluations-for-better-content-design-ux-content-collective/ |
Tham Keo Brewery
Tham Keo's logo and label design are driven by a deep commitment to preserving Laos heritage. The blue circle in the design references the full moon over the Mekong River, symbolizing the rich Buddhist culture in Asia whilst sporting the flag's colours. Circles are artfully used to represent unity, forming the foundation of the logo.
The illustration style proudly maintains Laos heritage, drawing inspiration from the colors of traditional fabrics, evoking nostalgia in Asian homes where family gatherings involve drinks and dance adorned in such attire. Tham Keo's design seamlessly merges tradition and modern aesthetics, embracing the past while captivating the present. | eng | 1b53aff9-10e5-4c90-8409-fcae8074c981 | https://www.edisoncortes.xyz/projects/tham-keo-brewery |
Learning outcomes
On completion of the course the student is expected to
with some degree of competence discuss and work with development research problems
have formed a considered judgement of his own in both theoretical and empirical questions concerning the democratic rule and, in this respect, be able to analyse and discuss ideas and empirical research findings about democracy at a fairly advanced level
actively participate in seminar discussions and make presentations of articles and of his own work.
Content
The course is divided into three parts.
The first sub-course deals with the problems of democracy. Normative questions concerning the concept of democracy, arguments for and against democracy, the relationship between democracy, constitutionalism and efficiency, and the relationship between democracy and feminism, are brought up here. In the second part mainly empirical questions about the prerequisites for democracy as well as its spread, causes and effects are treated.
The second sub-course is called Development Policy in Practice. It focuses on different development goals and seeks to trace their theoretical starting-points as well as their implementation at the national and local level. The course deals with policy formulation and project phases, focusing on different policy areas such as democracy support, humanitarian aid after disasters, and the agenda for women, peace and security. Practitioners working with these issues will participate in the course. The course language is English.
The third sub-part offers basic knowledge in scientific method. The students get a first introduction to empirical research and to the way in which different choices of method affect the realisation and results of a research project. The focus of the course is on basic methodological concepts and qualitative methods.
1. Problems of Democracy 7.5 hp
Learning outcomes
The course introduces some fundamental problems of democracy from political science and development studies perspectives. The aim is to equip students with the ability to independently analyse the central theoretical and empirical questions regarding democratic government. The course builds on themes introduced in previous courses in political science and development studies, such as the concept of democracy and theories of democratization. The ambition is to equip students with the ability to discuss ideas about democracy as well as empirical research at a fairly advanced level. In practice, this means that the students - aided by the course topics described below - make the leap from arguing from a limited and personal point of view, to constructing more general, systematic and well-founded arguments. More precisely, at the end of the course the students should:
be able to describe and compare various conceptions of democracy.
be able to mention and evaluate the historically most important arguments for and against democracy.
know, and be able to employ and critically review some of the most common explanations of democratisation.
know, and be able to compare different regime types
know how democracy in general, and its constitutional structure in particular, affects various political and economic outcomes.
be able to argue for or against ideas and theses in a systematic and well-founded manner, orally as well as in writing.
Content
The course consists of three parts:
The first part deals with normative democratic theory. It covers conceptual issues concerning the meaning of democracy, normative questions about the justification of democracy, and the problems and solutions that have been offered within different traditions in democratic theory. We cover issues such as: How do we define democracy? Is democracy and populism the same thing? What is good about democracy? What is the main critique of democracy? What is the significance of granting various interests and groups political representation? Should the ideals of democracy be reformulated in the light of contemporary processes of globalisation and migration?
The second part of the course deals with the political and economic preconditions as well as consequences of democracy: Why are some countries democratized while others are not? What characterizes different authoritarian regimes? Does democracy matter for welfare and equality? What are its distributive consequences?
The third part combines the normative and the empirical dimensions by studying the constitutional design of democracy. What is meant by "constitutional democracy", and what are the political and economic consequences of different normative principles? Can one combine popular rule and rule of law? How should a democracy defend itself against those groups and persons who seek to exploit democracy to undermine it? In addition, we focus on the building of a democratic regime, such as the possiblity (and desirability) of imposing democracy from without.
Instruction
This course consists of lectures and seminars. Attendance at all seminars is mandatory, while attendance at lectures is voluntary. The course is divided into three parts. Course lectures aim to introduce the main points covered in each part. The seminars aim to develop the students' analytical skills through discussion in smaller groups. Before each seminar, all students will be required to prepare answers to a set of questions, individually and/or in groups. These prepared answers will be discussed during the seminars. This way, the seminars should provide opportunities for the students to continuously reflect on the content of the course, and work together to highlight the practical importance of theoretical ideas that are introduced throughout the course.
Assessment
The course ends with an exam, which serves both as basis for grading, and an opportunity for the student to rehearse the content of the course.
The grading system is VG Pass with distinction', G Pass' and U Fail'.
To pass' the class, the student is required to
-participate actively in the seminars and get a pass on the assignments
-pass' the final exam
2. Development Policy in Practice 7.5 hp
Learning Outcomes
The course focuses on different central development goals and trace their theoretical background as well as their practical implications when they are implemented at local and national levels. The aim is that students will deepen their theoretical understanding of the themes that were introduced in the different subcourses at the A-level and use these as a startingpoint to improve their capacity to critically examine and analyze policy processes at international, national and local levels as well as practical development cooperation in project form.
The course should improve the students' knowledge about practical development cooperation by mapping actors, policy processes and project phases as well as by shedding light on different policy areas and their content. The overarching aim with the course is to make students capable of critically examining practical development cooperation from a theoretical basis and with knowledge of relevant tools. More precisely, at the end of the course the students should:
know about the most important actors in international development cooperation and how they relate to each other
be able to apply relevant research and theories in a critical examination and analysis of development policy
be able to describe and identify the distinguishing phases of a development project
be able to discuss development cooperation from a practical as well as theoretical perspective, and to be able to compare the two perspectives
be able to present central development goals and identify challenges with reaching them, orally as well as in writing
Content
The course takes its starting point in different development goals and policy formulations on the global arena. These development goals are analyzed from two perspectives: their theoretical relevance and background are illustrated with relevant research in the field, and their practical implications are exemplified with the help of analyses of practical development projects. The course begins with an introduction to the development policy process and the different phases of a development project. A gender mainstreaming perspective is applied throughout the course. We also endeavor to include practitioners' perspectives throughout the course as a contrast to the theoretical approaches.
The first development goal that is analyzed is democracy support and the part of the development project that is discussed in relation to this is project planning. Examples of questions that are treated include how democratic processes can be supported by actions like election observation or technical assistance in connection with elections. Gender aspects of electoral violence are given particular attention.
The second development goal is disaster relief, with a particular focus on climate change and humanitarian aid. The part of the development project that is discussed here is implementation. The implementation of humanitarian relief after disasters in development contexts is examined, but there is also a focus on the relationship between urgent humanitarian aid and achieving more long-term societal resilience.
The third development goal is peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. The part of the development project that is discussed here is monitoring and evaluation. Questions that are discussed deal with "DDR" – disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants in post-conflict societies as well as the UN Security Council's Resolution 1325 about women, peace, and security.
In the concluding part of the course, the students independently carry out an analysis of a development project.
Instruction
The student's own reading is supported by lectures and compulsory seminars, and there are also examples of other types of teaching methods (e.g. guest lectures, documentary films, exhibitions, study tours etc. – that will vary between semesters).
The lectures bring up the central themes of the course and relate them to the literature. They introduce theories in the field and give practical examples of development projects.
The seminars aim to be platforms for practicing oral presentation of prepared tasks. They should also develop the analytical skills of the students by offering opportunities for discussion in smaller groups.
Assessment
Examination is based on active participation in seminars, an oral presentation and supporting written documentation, as well as a concluding home exam where students are to independently analyze a development project. For the seminars, the following grades will be applied: Passed (G) and Failed (U). For the home exam, the following grades will be applied: Passed with distinction (VG), Passed (G) and Failed (U).
In order to pass the course, the following is required:
that the student has reached the learning outcomes
that the student has prepared for and participated in the compulsory seminars that the student has carried out an oral presentation and turned in supporting written documentation and that these tasks are approved
that the home exam is turned in before the deadline and given at least the grade Pass (G)
3. Methods 15.0 hp
Learning Outcomes
The purpose of the course is to give the students a theoretical understanding of the basic concepts in social science research and methodological choices, and be able to apply this. The focus of the course is on qualitative methods as they are used in Political Science and Development Studies. After completion of the course, students are expected to have acquired the following abilities:
To formulate a research question relevant for political science or development studies
To connect a research question to relevant previous research
To understand the how to define and operationalise concepts
To have a basic knowledge of methods in the analysis of ideas, normative analysis, and process tracing
To have a basic knowledge about data collection and analysis based on texts, questionnaires, focus groups, experiments, and observation
To have a basic understanding of how to design a study in political science or development studies
Content
The course is on methods in social science, with a focus on qualitative methods. Its core idea is that scientific method is best understood when applied. Therefore each part in the course will be applied in exercises by the students. The knowledge and understanding gained this way will also facilitate the students' critical review of previous research.
The course emphasises the pivotal role for research and investigations of a clear and well formulated question. The question should steer the study and the methodological choices made by the author. The course will focus on several qualitative methods: analysis of ideas, normative critique and argumentation, and process tracing. The students will also acquaint themselves with different kinds of data material – from texts, interviews, focus groups, experiments, and observations. In the last part and exercise in the course the student shall make an appropriate design of a study based on her/his own research question. The aim in the last part is thus also to tie the different parts of the course together. By training the students systematically in the different core components of a scientific study the course's aim is also to prepare the students well for their BA thesis.
The training of these skills will be continuously examined during the course. The idea is to give the students opportunities to exercise in a rather concrete way the different components in social science research, and in this way to make it possible to deepen their understanding. Active participation, critical discussions, and feedback from the teacher in the seminars will enhance learning.
Instruction
The course will be introduced by lectures on the research process. Then each part of the course consists of lectures and a seminar when the students' papers will be discussed.
The language of teaching is Swedish.
Assessment
The course is examined by means of a written exam in the beginning of the course plus the seminar papers. Grades are awarded according to the scale "failed", "pass" or "pass with distinction". Examination is based on the written seminar assignment as well as on active participation in the seminars. For the grade "pass" it is required that the student will have handed in all assignments, acquired the grade "pass" and actively participated in all the seminars, and acquired "pass" in the written exam.
Instruction
The instruction is done in the form of lectures and seminars of varying content and disposition.
Additional information regarding instruction and examination will be handed out before each sub-course.
Assessment
The course is examined by means of course papers, exams, assignments, and active participation in the seminars. Grades are awarded according the scale "failed", "pass" or "pass with distinction". If | eng | 53ef8fd7-992e-4e8f-9e63-95aa8c3b001b | https://www.uu.se/en/admissions/freestanding-courses/course-syllabus/?kpid=36636&lasar=19%2F20&typ=1 |
Trails showing their age
Observers say more money is needed to repair and maintain an antiquated network of hiking routes.
By MIKE LYNCH
When many of the High Peaks' trails were cut more than a century ago, the work was done by guides and hired hands. Keene Valley's Orson "Old Mountain" Phelps created the first trail up Mount Marcy in 1861; Verplanck Colvin's survey workers cut routes up Algonquin and Dix in the late 1800s; and Henry Van Hoevenberg developed a trail system for the Adirondack Lodge (as it was then spelled).
The state pays the Adirondack Mountain Club and other groups to maintain trails. PHOTO BY SETH JONES
The early trails opened up the High Peaks to more people and laid the groundwork for today's trail system, but some of the original trails continue to cause maintenance problems.
"When trails were originally cut about a hundred years ago, there wasn't anything called trail design," said Adirondack Mountain Club Trails Coordinator Andrew Hamlin. "It was basically just a way to get to the mountain summits, so there's a lot of erosion taking place on trails, especially in the High Peaks region. That's pretty much why our crews exist: to try to mitigate and minimize that erosion."
Modern trails tend to switchback up mountains and employ trail hardening techniques to minimize erosion. In the old days, however, trails were cut straight up steep slopes. Such trails can turn into streams during rainstorms. Due to erosion, the walking surface is often characterized by rocks, roots, and loose soil.
Given the poor design and increasing number of hikers, many people argue that more money is needed to maintain and redesign trails in the High Peaks as well as on other popular peaks, such as Baker Mountain in Saranac Lake.
This isn't a new idea. For decades, leaders around the Park have said the state needs to do a better job maintaining the Forest Preserve—a view often espoused when the state is looking to acquire new land. The issue is in the public eye now because of problems created by the growth in hiking in the High Peaks in recent years. In online forums and on social media, people have been debating whether hikers should pay fees to fund such projects and whether hiking permits should be required to limit usage.
When the Explorer questioned trail-maintenance organizations about whether more work could be done in the High Peaks, the answer was a resounding yes.
"We could easily double size of our [twenty-member] trail crew," said Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK). "The work is out there to justify a much larger ADK trail crew."
A worker puts the finishing touches on a bridge over Marcy Brook in 2012. PHOTO BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
Tony Goodwin, head of the Adirondack Trail Improvement Society, which maintains trails in the St. Huberts area, agreed. "If ATIS had the budget, I would try to field a crew of a dozen, and we usually have five or six," he said. "When the state did have a real trail crew, they were still not big enough to maintain what was there and not really do any major improvements. When ADK started building a professional trail crew in 1979, that was the first time that any real improvements were being made on the trails."
As recently as the 1990s, the state had four trail crews of about four people each in the northern Adirondacks, including two focused on the High Peaks. Interior caretakers at Lake Colden and Johns Brook also worked on trails and continue to do so. But over recent years, DEC's crews have shrunk while their responsibilities have grown as the state has acquired more land.
Discussions about trail maintenance seem to surface whenever usage spikes. Sandra Weber wrote about similar issues in the High Peaks in her 2001 book Mount Marcy: The High Peak of New York. She noted ADK's magazine, Adirondac, published an article in 1971 that raised concerns about increasing usage marring the "wilderness experience" and causing trail erosion.
"In 1975, some 28,000 people registered at Marcy Dam, and it was estimated that over 35,000 people visited Mount Marcy that year," Weber wrote. "Hikers becoming Adirondack Forty-Sixers grew from 15 in 1960 to 70 to 126 in 1975. The membership of ADK grew from about 2,000 in 1960 to almost 9,000 in 1975. Today, it has nearly 35,000 members.
"The new Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which took over the duties of the old Conservation Department, had limited staff and budget; it could not handle the increased usage. Fortunately, volunteer organizations contributed more help. The Forty-Sixers, ADK, and ATIS assisted with trail maintenance, rehabilitation, and rerouting, and offered educational programs."
Today DEC faces the same budget and staff problems and continues to rely on the same organizations for work, paying for some of it and relying on volunteer work for the rest. However, the pressure put on the High Peaks today is substantially greater than it was a few decades ago. Instead of 126 people a year finishing the forty-six High Peaks in 1975, there are now more than six hundred finishers a year. And popular summits such as Cascade Mountain and Mount Marcy might see that number of hikers in a single day. The number of hikers signing the register at Cascade rose from 16,091 in 2006 to 33,149 in 2015. The Van Hoevenberg Trail, which leads to Mount Marcy from Adirondak Loj, has seen a similar large increase in people signing the register: 53,423 last year, a 62 percent increase from 2005.
DEC relies on money from the Environmental Protection Fund to pay for trail work when it contracts with outside trail crews. In addition, the Adirondack Forty-Sixers and other groups have donated money for trails. The Forty-Sixers have given more than $350,000 in the past sixteen years to various Adirondack causes, including $169,000 for ADK's professional trail crew.
The department provided the Explorer with a list of work accomplished this year: more than two hundred miles of trail patrolled for blowdown; more than seventy-five miles of trail patrolled for drainage issues; more than forty privies relocated, and more than a hundred new signs installed. Other projects included installing at least nine box privies at high-elevation sites; improving trails on Cascade Mountain, Hurricane Mountain, and Mount Colden, and restoring campsites at Roaring Brook Falls.
Nevertheless, many observers say trails need more regular maintenance and some should be rerouted. "We need to provide the human resources necessary to maintain and upgrade backcountry trails, bridges, tent sites, outhouses, et cetera," said Jack Drury, an outdoor guide who is developing a hut-to-hut network in the Adirondacks. "We need trail maintenance raised to world quality."
Some say herd paths like this one should be marked and maintained. PHOTO BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
Goodwin said damage is especially noticeable on herd paths—unmarked routes on the so-called trail-less High Peaks, such as the Sewards and the Santanonis. These trails were created by use, not design, and lack the erosion-control features of modern trails. Also, they don't receive as much maintenance as officially designated trails do, and they are showing the consequences of the increase in foot traffic.
"It definitely has had a significant impact on herd paths like Seymour, Seward, Cliff, Marshall, Tabletop," Goodwin said. "The other marked trails—Cascade, Algonquin, Marcy, Giant—those seem to have been improved [by trail crews] as the numbers have increased and have at least not deteriorated significantly. …I've looked at the Cascade trail and, yeah, I can see it's gotten a little bit wider. It's deteriorated. It could use some more work to refresh some of the structures that were built twenty-five to thirty years ago, but when you think about the number of people that go up and down Cascade, that trail has stayed in pretty good shape."
Should the herd paths be marked, maintained, and perhaps redesigned? That is another recurring question. About twenty-five years ago, the Citizens Advisory Committee that worked on the High Peaks management plan grappled with the issue of herd paths. Barbara McMartin wrote about the discussions in her book Perspectives on the Adirondacks. She said the committee did well by closing off many herd paths and channeling traffic to one route on each peak. But McMartin was disappointed that the committee did not recommend that herd paths be redesigned "with minimal grades using switchbacks to minimize erosion." Several people interviewed for this article said the herd paths should be marked and rerouted.
The Adirondack Forty-Sixers have been working with DEC to improve herd paths. But Adirondack 46er president Brian Hoody said the paths don't necessarily have to become marked trails, suggesting that doing so would diminish their wild character. "They are definitely getting more use, but as long as you have an adopter [who takes responsibility for a trail] and you deal with the problems, they should be all right for a while," he said.
However, Goodwin, who represented the Forty-Sixers on the High Peaks Citizen's Advisory Committee but isn't officially part of the organization now, said it's time for the organization to recognize that herd paths are not holding up to increased use. "They're just going to have to accept the fact that these trails are going to become much more evident and need to be laid out strategically and maybe not marked as heavily as some of the state trails, but they need to become real trails," he said.
Add that to the list of work that Goodwin and others believe needs to be done in the High Peaks. "One of my sayings has been that if you're in the trail business in the Adirondacks, in this era, you've inherited about 125 years of poor design and maintenance, and it might take another 125 years to fix it all," Goodwin said.
Trails are becoming more degraded as more people flock to the High Peaks. PHOTO BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
Disturbing the wild
By MIKE LYNCH
A trail weaving its way through the woods to a summit takes up just a minuscule fraction of the wild lands it traverses, which may leave the impression that trails have little impact on wildlife. Research in recent years by the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests that is not the case.
"You'd be surprised by the ripples left by a day hiker's ramble through the woods," wrote Christopher Solomon in the New York Times in 2015. "In 2008 Sarah Reed, an associate conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and her colleagues found fivefold declines in detections of bobcats, coyotes and other midsize carnivores in protected areas in California that allowed quiet recreation activities like hiking, compared with protected areas that prohibited those activities."
The Wildlife Conservation Society is now working on similar studies in the Adirondacks to determine recreation's impact on wildlife. Although the studies are not finished, WCS biologist Michale Glennon believes there are impacts along some popular trails.
"This is my gut feeling. Birds and other species that are living adjacent to the Cascade Trail, where six hundred people might go up on a given day, are going to perceive that number of people that go up on the trail that day," she said.
Scarlet tanager PHOTO BY JEFF NADLER
Potential impacts can vary. Some species might leave the area to avoid people. Black bears, however, might get used to people and become emboldened to steal food.
Given that the High Peaks Wilderness is crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of trails, the cumulative impact on wildlife could be quite large. In addition, there are leantos, tent sites, privies, and summits where the human presence is conspicuous. Keep in mind, too, that animals can sense people from a long distance.
Glennon compared the presence of hikers in the wilderness to a house in the woods. Homeowners typically see robins, blue jays, and doves in their backyards. What they don't see are birds that live in the interior of the forest and are sensitive to development, such as scarlet tanagers and some woodpeckers. "So it's not so much that you've created a dead zone, but you have sort of changed the dynamic of who is there," she remarked.
Alpine plants in jeopardy
By MIKE LYNCH
The growing number of hikers in the High Peaks in recent years has heightened concern for the fragile alpine vegetation found on many of the summits.
If the number continues to increase, summit stewards charged with educating hikers may find themselves overwhelmed, said Julia Goren, the Adirondack Mountain Club's education director.
"I don't think we've lost ground yet," said Goren, who heads the summit-steward program. "But I do think it's not hyperbolic that we're kind of at a tipping point where there's not much more we can take before there's going to be some kind of loss. One summit steward can't talk to six hundred people in a day and make sure that people are respecting every patch of alpine vegetation."
To prevent a loss of flora, Goren said there needs to be a "great investment" in infrastructure or personnel.
Fragile alpine flora is found on only sixteen Adirondack summits, including Wright Peak. PHOTO BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA
There are about 175 acres of alpine habitat, which harbors some rare plants, on the tops of sixteen Adirondack mountains. Summit stewards spend most of their time on Mount Marcy and Algonquin Peak, two very popular peaks where much of the alpine flora grows, but they do visit other peaks.
In recent years, the program expanded to Cascade Mountain, a summit popular with hikers new to the High Peaks. The idea is to educate hikers before they head to other mountains.
Besides educating hikers, stewards perform trail work on and near the summits, building scree walls around the vegetation. They also offer advice to hikers and even assist in search-and-rescue missions.
On busy days, stewards might talk to hundreds of hikers. Over Labor Day weekend, for example, 2,563 hikers signed the Van Hoevenberg Trail register, the starting point for hikes to Marcy and Algonquin, and 1,577 people signed the Cascade register.
In fact, the summit-steward program has been setting records for interactions each of the five years leading up to 2016. Last year, summit stewards talked to 31,440 hikers for an average of ninety-one hikers per day. Just three years ago, stewards talked to an average of seventy-eight people per day; five years ago they talked to seventy per day.
And yet funding for the summit stewards has fluctuated over the years. Prior to last season, the program lost roughly one-third of its funding, or about $24,000. The Adirondack Forty-Sixers stepped in to fill that gap, but Goren doesn't expect the organization to be able to do that every year.
"Having lost about a third of the program funding, every single year we are in the process of closing that gap," Goren said. "A lot of people just don't know the summit-steward program isn't fully funded."
Goren said the program receives about a third of its money from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and a third from the Adirondack Mountain Club. For the rest, it relies on the Adirondack High Peaks Foundation and other donors. It's also in the process of starting an endowment fund.
A quote from "Mount Marcy: The High Peaks of New York" by Sandra Weber was corrected after three words were accidently omitted from the original article. The quote now reflects that the Adirondack Mountain Club's "membership grew from about 2,000 in 1960 to almost 9,000 in 1975" to 35,000 members at the time of the book's publication in 1991 | eng | 59df61b0-41ee-4684-8b3e-c4a168dc810b | https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/trails-showing-age |
Kiln-Dried Vs Seasoned Firewood – Is There a Difference?
So, you've decided to upgrade your go-to firewood to high-quality, extra dry logs and briquettes, and as you start delving deeper into the ins and outs of efficient fire-burning, there's two types of firewood that seem to pop up time and time again: seasoned firewood and kiln-dried firewood.
When it comes to finding the perfect fuel for your wood-burning stove, having good working knowledge of the different types of woods available and understanding what they're best suited for is fundamental for maintaining a healthy stove and get the most out of your fire.
It may be easy to say that picking between kiln-dried firewood or seasoned is mostly a matter of personal preference – and yet, the kiln-dried vs seasoned firewood debate is still as much of a hot-button topic as ever.
Here's a handy guide that will clarify what the main differences between the two types of wood are, and give you some extra insight on which is best suited to your specific needs!
Kiln-Dried Firewood
Let us preface the conversation by saying this: technically, there shouldn't be much of a difference between seasoned and kiln-dried firewood.
Both types refer to wood that has achieved a moisture content below 25% (a requirement that jumps to at least 20% for kiln-dried wood), a necessary feature for a fire that's easier to light and safe for your home and appliances.
However, many types of wood marketed as seasoned firewood will contain excessive moisture going slightly (or greatly!) above the 25% prerequisite, making for firewood that is inefficient, frustratingly hard to light, and - most importantly - hazardous for your stove and our planet's air quality.
With kiln-dried firewood, on the other hand, you are pretty much guaranteed a low moisture content (from 20% to as low as 9%). This makes it ideal for getting a fire going for hours with minimal tending and ensures a "clean", safe burn each time.
Kiln-dried firewood is a great choice for both indoor and outdoor fires, as it can burn long and bright in pizza ovens, open fires, wood burners, and firepits – while ensuring minimal smoke and ash.
Seasoned Firewood
Circling back to our kiln-dried vs seasoned firewood debate, the main difference between kiln-dried and seasoned wood is how they are dried, or "seasoned". Seasoned firewood is dried naturally through an open-air process instead of relying on a specialised kiln, resulting in air-dried logs. That is the reason why the moisture content of naturally seasoned logs tends to vary so much and can't be fully guaranteed by manufacturers.
On top of that, you'll find that seasoned firewood has to fit very specific size requirements in order to be thoroughly dried: seasoned logs should be cut into 25cm lengths with a diameter of between 5 – 15cm.
Kiln-Dried Vs Seasoned – Which One Is Best?
It's clear that the biggest benefit of kiln-drying wood comes down to efficiency: you can burn fewer logs while ensuring a higher heat output and a cleaner fire free of dangerous creosote. At the same time, however, seasoned wood still has a key benefit going for it – it is cheaper than wood that has been kiln-dried.
If sticking to a low budget is what fits your priorities best, seasoned logs may be a better option, though you will have to consider the hazards of regularly burning higher moisture firewood and the lower heat output you're likely to get out of it. While there's no doubt that both have their pros and cons, if we had to pick then kiln-dried would win every time. It is simply the best option on the market if you are looking for a reliable, safe, and efficient fire, and we would say that justifies the higher price tag.
With that said, if you are fully equipped with a moisture meter and have plenty of time to dedicate to measuring each seasoned log before burning it, then you're likely going to be just safe using seasoned firewood.
When measuring the pros and cons of both, it's quite unsurprising to see that more and more wood fuel manufacturers are offering kiln-dried wood as the preferred choice over air-dried logs – and we're proud to say we are part of this camp too!
At Lekto Wood Fuels, we offer two types of kiln-dried firewood, Kiln-Dried Oak Logs and Kiln-Dried Birch Logs. Both come in 100% plastic-free cardboard packaging to ensure they're as environmentally sustainable as they can be, making them the best option for eco-conscious consumers looking for wood that is as kind to their stove as it is to the planet.
Ultimately, the choice between kiln-dried and seasoned firewood is yours – but if you are leaning towards the former, you know what door to knock on! | eng | 6112f710-9e7d-492c-9338-a914e5616f6e | https://www.lektowoodfuels.co.uk/blogs/news/kiln-dried-vs-seasoned-firewood-is-there-a-difference |
WHAT IS YOUR CREDIT SCORE?
Most consumers are afraid of finding out there credit score for fear of it being bad. To understand what drives your credit score take this short quiz. This will help you understand your credit profile.
1. To have a credit score you must have at least one creditor reporting activity on your credit report for :
a) 3 months b) 12 months c) 6 months
2. What is the top contributing factor to a good credit score?
a) Amount you owe b) Payment history c) Length of credit history
3. What can a credit score tell a lender?
a) Tell if I make my payments b) Predict the likeliness that I will repay my loan on time
c) Compare me to other
4. To have the best credit profile impact what is the maximun amount of your monthly credit line you should use?
It's never to late to improve your credit score. With the proper knowledge and understanding how the systems works you can improve your credit in just a few short months. If you take one point from this is to make your payments on time.!
Click on the link Community Housing Initiative for more information on Credit Score and how to improve your score. There is also information about down payment assistance that is available in each city of Brevard | eng | 755951c9-3f93-4a8a-9825-986b78214705 | https://activerain.com/blogsview/1150616/what-is-your-credit-score- |
Introduction
Biological Science Fundamentals and Systematics is a component of Encyclopedia of Biological, Physiological and Health Sciences in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias.
The Theme on Biological Science Fundamentals and Systematics provides the essential aspects and a myriad of issues of great relevance to our world such as: History and Scope of Biological Sciences; The Origin and Evolution of Early Life; Evolution; Classification and Diversity of Life Forms; Systematics of Microbial Kingdom (s) and Fungi; Systematic Botany; Systematic Zoology: Invertebrates; Systematic Zoology: Vertebrates which are then expanded into multiple subtopics, each as a chapter. These four volumes are aimed at the following five major target audiences: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.
Editor(s) Biography
Alessandro Minelli, born 1948, is full Professor of Zoology at the University of Padova (Italy), and President (1995-2001) of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. His major research interests are the evolution of arthropods and the evolutionary developmental biology of segmentation, together with theoretical and historical aspects of systematic biology.
Giancarlo Contrafatto, born 1948, is a graduate in Biological Sciences from the University of Turin (Italy) and has obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Natal Durban (South Africa). His research interests are isolation mechanisms related to speciation of small mammals. Recipient of the 1976 British Association Medal, from the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, G. Contrafatto has been on the staff of the University of Natal since 1983, and is responsible for the courses of Microbiology, Immunology, Comparative Immunology, Systematics and Evolution. | eng | dafcc748-7d55-45a6-a61d-a26c0531fcd6 | https://www.eolss.net/ebooklib/bookinfo/biological-science-fundamentals-systematics.aspx |
60 Dollars an Hour Is How Much a Year? (Example Budget Included)
How Much Is 60 Dollars an Hour per Year?
To calculate the total income you would make each year on an hourly rate of $60, let us assume you are working 40 hours a week. This means you will receive 2 weeks of paid time off.
Now to calculate your total yearly income, your first step is to multiply 40 hours a week into 52 which is the number of weeks in a year. This is a total of 2,080 working hours every year.
Now to find what 60 dollars an hour annually is, you need to multiply 2,080 working hours into your hourly wage which is $60. Your $60 per hour annual salary is $124,800. ($60 into 2,080 hours)
What if you do not have paid leave?
If you do not get the normal 2 weeks of paid leave, you will be working an average of 50 hours a week.
So, to calculate your gross income per year, you need to multiply 50 (weeks) into 40 (working hours per week) first to get your total number of working hours for the year. This will be 2,000 working hours.
So, your income per year if you work 52 weeks at $60 an hour would be 2000 (working hours) multiplied by hourly wage ($60) which is = $120,000.
60 Dollars an Hour Is How Much a Year After Taxes?
If you want to calculate your total income after tax, take your yearly income (which in this case is $124,800) and subtract any deductibles you may be eligible for. These could be itemized deductibles or the standard tax-deductible.
After you have done this, calculate the total percentage of tax you are going to need to pay on the remaining amount depending on which tax bracket you fall into.
In the United States, the tax system is of a progressive type which means the more you earn, the more taxes you pay. Your taxable income also depends on your status on the form- single, married, or head of household.
So, to answer the question, 'What is 60 an hour annually after taxes?', take this example-
In the state of South Carolina, your income after tax (assuming a single status filling) would be $86,688.
So, 60 dollars an hour is how much a year after taxes in South Carolina? Yearly Take Home Salary = $86,688 and Monthly Take Home Salary= $7,224Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. You can read the full disclosure here.
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To calculate your 60-hour workweek salary, let us assume you are working 40 hours a week.
Now multiply the number of hours you are working by your hourly wage. So, 40 hours into $60 is = $2,400.
In short, your gross weekly income at a $60 hourly wage is $2,400.
How much do I make per minute calculator
If you would like to take it a step further and calculate how much you make per minute, you can simply divide your hourly wage by 60 (number of minutes in an hour).
So, if you have a $60 hourly wage, you will make $1 per minute since $60 divided by 60 minutes is = 1.
How Much Is $60 an Hour per Month?
If you want to calculate what $60 an hour is monthly, you need to multiply the number of hours you are working every month by $60.
So, assuming you work 40 hours a week, you will be working 2,080 hours every year. That is an average of 174 hours a month.
So, to calculate what $60 an hour is per month, you need to multiply 174 by $60 (hourly wage) which is = $10,440 gross income before taxes.
60 Dollars an Hour Is How Much a Week?
To calculate your weekly income at $60 an hour, you need to multiply 40 by $60 which is your hourly wage. (assuming you are working a 40 hour week)
So, your weekly income would be $2,400.
60 Dollars an Hour 20 Hours a Week?
To calculate your weekly income working 20 hours a week on a $60 hourly wage, multiply 20 by 60 which is $1,200 in weekly income.
How Much Is $60 an Hour per Day?
$60 an hour per day would be approximately $480 if you are working 8 hours a day. If you are working a 12-hour shift, this would be $720 which is amazing.
60 an Hour Is How Much Biweekly?
If you are looking for a biweekly pay period calculator or want to know much $60 an hour is biweekly, let us assume you are working 40 hours a week which is 80 hours every 2 weeks.
Multiply the number of hours you are working (80 hours) by $60 which is= $4,800. You can use this same formula as a biweekly pay period calculator.
60 an Hour Is How Much a Month After Taxes?
We have finished calculating the monthly income of anyone who earns $60 an hour which is $10,440 as gross income before taxes.
If you want to calculate your income after tax, you can use this tool that allows you to input your filing status (single, married, head of household), location, and gross income so that they can give you a complete breakdown of your tax.
For example, in South Carolina, your income after tax per month would be $7,224 on a $60 hourly wage.
How Much Does a $60 Salary pay per Paycheck?
This depends on when you receive your paycheck. If you receive it on a biweekly basis, your paycheck would be $4,800 on average.
If you receive a monthly paycheck, it would be for $10,440 on average.
Is 60 Dollars an Hour Good?
$60 is an extremely good salary. You will be making more than $100,000 which means being part of a very small and rich minority.
This comes down to the question 'What percentage of Americans make more than $100,000 a year?' which according to various studies and surveys is between 7-9% which in itself is really good.
You can contribute more than $2000 to your savings every month, have a comfortable 401(k), a nice car, and also live in a great neighborhood.
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Lower bills with BillShark– Lowering bills is not a way to make money but it can certainly save you some. People have saved hundreds with BillShark and the people behind this awesome program only charge you if they succeed in lowering your bills. (The charge is a one-time of 35% of the savings)
Can You Live off 60 Dollars an Hour?
No doubt about it! 60 dollars an hour is an above-average salary and you should be extremely comfortable living off of this amount whether you are single or the primary breadwinner of a family.
60 Dollars an Hour (Summary Table of Calculations)
Time Period
Income
Year (52 weeks)
$124,800
Year (50 weeks)
$120,000
Month
$10,440
Biweekly
$4,800
Week (40 hour week)
$2,400
Week (20 hour week)
$1,200
Day (8 hours)
$480 | eng | 98f8c658-340d-4659-99eb-c04ba7e0470a | https://collectingcents.com/60-dollars-an-hour-is-how-much-a-year/ |
I am still trying to figure it out because when my computer starts judge does not start automatically and I want to try setting everything is good everything looks OK I don't understand why it's
I am still trying to figure it out because when my computer starts judge does not start automatically and I want to try setting everything is good everything looks OK I don't understand why it's
By
Amir Shah
·
#879 | eng | 96642124-f4d9-4e36-bf02-8dd1bd333b38 | https://jfw.groups.io/g/main/messages?msgnum=87976 |
The morality of the gaps
Harris is nothing if not self-confident. There is a voluminous philosophical literature that stretches back almost to the origins of the discipline on the relationship between facts and values. Harris chooses to ignore most of it…It is one thing to want to "start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and can find helpful", something that many of us, including many of those boring moral philosophers, seek to do. It is quite another to imagine that you can engage in any kind of conversation, with any kind of audience, by wilfully ignoring the relevant scholarship because it is "boring".
I share that view. (I agree with Polly-O!) The breeziness of the attempt to settle complicated issues while ignoring the existing scholarship is grating.
"How does Harris establish that values are facts?" He describes an utterly crappy life, and an utterly blissful one. See? Facts.
It is a kind of argument that suggests that Harris might have done well to spend a bit more time immersed in all the boring stuff…The insistence that because it seems obvious that rape and murder are bad, and that wealth and security are good, so there must be objective values, seems about as plausible as the argument that because there are gaps in the fossil record, so God must have created Adam and Eve.
Kenan sums up:
Creating a distinction between facts and values is neither to denigrate science nor to downgrade the importance of empirical evidence. It is, rather, to take both science and evidence seriously. It is precisely out of the facts of the world, and those of human existence, that the distinction between is and ought arises, as does the necessity for humans to take responsibility for moral judgement.
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123 Responses to "The morality of the gaps"
I think if Harris had overcome his antipathy to philosophy he'd find that he could get what he wants without a theory that falls apart rather quickly. Facts and values have different subjects, what things are (including us-things) and what we want as individuals and society. The latter is a negotiation among the parties, with community standards and individual choices frequently colliding. The best we can do is guide values with factual assumptions. Having done that, though, you still have choices to make individually and collectively.
Having more of the relevant facts available makes for better choices but the facts can't be the choices. That why the value/fact distinction can never be erased. They fill different niches in the conceptual toolkit, describing different operations. You can't add more science or more/better facts and then use less values. They don't substitute for each other. You can most easily see this by understanding that it's a value to use facts. It can't be a fact to use facts, can it? Having better nouns, or even perfect nouns, doesn't mean you don't need verbs.
Everyone could agree on all the scientific facts and yet not agree about what is right to do. Harris has not explained why he is right and, say, deep ecologists are wrong when they say that maximising ecosystem well-being should be a higher priority than the suffering of sentient beings.
The whole point of the is-ought distinction is that there's no obvious criterion; neuroscience cannot resolve this by identifying scientific facts about how brains work.
Kenan Malik's review is a good one, and I am also not impressed by Sam Harris' attempt to derive an 'ought' from an 'is' (not that it can't be done, just that one would have to do better than Harris to succeed).
However, I don't agree with this line: "It is precisely out of the facts of the world, and those of human existence, that the distinction between is and ought arises, as does the necessity for humans to take responsibility for moral judgement."
Is it out of the facts of the world that this distinction arises, or out of our metaphysical intuitions? I don't see how the facts can entail this distinction any more than the facts can entail morality.
Yes, I think that's what he says here: The significance of the Euthyphro dilemma is that it embodies a deeper claim: that concepts such as goodness, happiness and wellbeing only have meaning in a world in which conscious, rational, moral agents exist that themselves are capable of defining moral right and wrong and acting upon it.
The whole point of the is-ought distinction is that there's no obvious criterion; neuroscience cannot resolve this by identifying scientific facts about how brains work.
Caryn, I think that's correct. Choices involve a multiplicity of facts, intuitions, fears and hopes. What tells you how to weigh each element? Wouldn't that be a value, too? I think there's plenty of "fuzzy logic" here, where conscious beings with limited information and resources bring all the emotional and rational tools to bear. What we can do is look for places where facts and rationality can improve the choices (though what constitutes improvement will itself be intuitionally derived, at least in part).
Reasoning about facts while having intuitions and emotions is an irreducible complex of ingredients, no substitutions allowed. The values decision can't be broken down to more primitive parts while still doing what it does. You might say values are emergent properties of conscious minds, what we do with the extra degree of freedom we have. When a property emerges it usually means you don't know what happens at the lower levels, like a thought which contains no information about all the billions of neurons firing away to produce it.
Sam Harris has been doing a lot for gnuism recently, with his appearance on BBC's Newsnight on the topic of banning the wearing of tents, and his debate with Robert Winston in the Guardian, all good stuff. He's attempted to bring up morality for debate and discussion, and that's fair enough. I think he went wrong by telling us–rather like an authority on the subject–how we ought to do morality. I think its a rather large blindspot within an otherwise intelligent and informed mind.
And the problem is, as I've mentioned several times, is that we haven't done our project on morality, and instead we're relying on a less than conscious judgement based on experience or sentiment to 'judge' topics which are obviously moral. This means that we're not reaching consensus on more nuanced discussions (as we've no theory on morality). I also think morality has less of a place in such discussions, because to be honest, our freedoms come before moral refinement. Plenty of people spend their lives living a less than perfect moral life, and it's not really such a problem compared to tyranny, persecution and the other horrors that we're all very much attempting to rid our world from.
And so I think we're doomed to complexity whenever having refined moral discussions, until we accept a unified theory on the subject that is clearly based on scientific evidence.
There is a huge philosophical project that's been in the works for a very long time on how to naturalize ethics. As Ophelia perfectly puts it, The breeziness of the attempt to settle complicated issues while ignoring the existing scholarship is grating.
Sam Harris is not the first person to look at morality through the prism of neuroscience, not even the first to write for the popular audience about it. Putting "morals neuroscience" into Amazon's search box returns 86 hits, most of which are pop science books.
Also, there is a big difference between Dawkins ignoring a lot of theology and Harris ignoring a lot of philosophy. If one rejects the foundations of theology (as Dawkins et al do) then there is no reason to examine every thinker who based their work on those foundations. I actually went and looked at the theologians that Terry Eagleton complained Dawkins had ignored, and every single one of them had assumed the truth of their own theologies and had written nothing that would challenge the standard atheist arguments. It was, in fact, a Gish Gallop played by Eagleton. It was no different to defending homeopathy on the basis of a beautiful poem using metaphors from homeopathy.
Harris, on the other has has ignored a large and important body of work at the very core of the subject he is attempting to popularise. If he is allergic to philosophy, then he should not wade into a subject area that requires philosophising — because neuroscience, for all its amazing recent progress, is nowhere near capable of answering all the questions Harris would like it to answer…and probably never will be.
And he could have written an interesting book on how the latest findings in neuroscience can add to the discussion of morality, if he'd done it in a careful, modest way, instead of just announcing that he'd Fixed the whole thing. The grandiosity of it is really annoying – as if nobody'd ever thought to take well-being into account before.
Should Harris be expected to be any more interested in all these writings than Dawkins is in writings on Christianity?
I think the situations are different. With theology, do you think theologians would waste so much time with the horrible solutions they come up with if they could come up with even one good answer? That's why dipping into the subject quickly convinces a sentient being that it's all like that. Though it's good to know from people who have explored in depth that it is all just as bad as the early returns indicate, it isn't necessary to punish yourself with superfluous expertise.
Moral philosophers tackle good questions, and have decided that everyone must decide what the answers are, without an appeal to a moral authority beyond human experience, whatever that's supposed to be. It's not a cop out, because the choices are a condition of being human. Caryn mentioned the Euthyphro, still one of the greatest statement about moral choice. I wouldn't trade that for all the theology ever producedAre people living entities? Of course. Hence, objective good.
This is exactly what Harris said with his "health" analogy. We all know what health means, in a general sense, and we all agree that it is good. Anybody who argues that we don't know that being healthy is better than being unhealthy simply isn't being serious, even if health is not formally definable.
What I find truly ironic is Ophelia's injured tone. Harris is ignoring important and serious scholarly traditions! He's making light of things he knows nothing about, making us all look foolish, and pissing people off. Why, one might even say he's not helping.
100% of theology is bunk. 90% of moral philosophy is bunk. There's a lot of bunk in the world, and anybody who stands up says, "forget that old bunk," is going to get attacked by somebody. I don't think Harris is overly concerned about it.
The grandiosity of it is really annoying
Oh, for crying out loud. Harris didn't say he invented the concept; he simply said, "And now we know where the answer will come from, even if we don't know what it is." This is exactly what Crick said about consciousness in the opening paragraph of "The Astonishing Hypothesis." Crick got a lot of backlash from injured philosophers who were suddenly rendered rendundant, too. And I don't think Crick was terribly concerned about it, eitherWhat is objective good? That which would produce the highest average standard of living? That which would produce the longest average lifespan? or the longest peak lifespan? How about happiness? Animals live longer in zoos, but they aren't necessarily happier there.
There is no single objective good. Is it better to be free with risk, or tightly controlled with safety? Is it better to allow people to seek out maximum quality of education for their children, or should all education be equalized?
There is no single objective 'good'. There are certainly plenty of 'bads' but 'good' is and always will be too subjective a term to achieve any universal agreement.
Certainly Dr. Harris is not an originator when it comes to moral theory, but I think he is playing an important role as an advocate. The glory of science is revealing how complex things can result from simple mechanisms. They don't need to be handed down by even more complex beings who happen to have very specific views on what you should be doing with your genitals. We should consider the possibility that the question of morals may be quite simple in the end. Put another way, I don't know of any advanced scientific field in which the practitioners still need to know or care about what philosophers had to say about their subject matter. Do we need to study moral philosophy just because we haven't started getting the real answers yet, or should we just try to start the process?
Harris could have also written a stellar book arguing against moral relativism and for a rational, more/somewhat objective morality. Or he could have hedged his claim and said "How science can help determine human values." But these books would not have sold as well as one subtitled "How science can determine human values."
Now, as wrong as I think Harris is about the fact-value distinction, I think much of the debate over his claim that science can determine human values is mistaken. Harris writes in his first endnote, and has said over and over again, that he basically equates the word "science" with "reason." Read that way, his claim is still controversial, but much less so (which, again, means less books sold).
I have to object to some of the tone of this discussion. This rush to condemn Harris is more than a little unjustified.
For example the oft-quoted "didn't read moral philosophy". This is as blatant a bit of quote mining as is imaginable and more than a little perverse given that I'm only three chapters in and already he's engaged with Hume, Kant, Rawls, Nozick, William Casebeer, Owen Flanegan, Daniel Dennett, Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt. By the second chapter he's already fully and explicitly committed himself as a Consequentialist and he's biting all the philosophical bullets he needs to to hold that position. Is it too much to ask that we read that footnote with the minimal amount of charity needed to see that what he's saying is:
1. He came to his arguments from thinking about the mind, not about morals. This doesn't mean he didn't read any moral philosophers, he very obviously has, only that they weren't where he started.
2. He is not writing a book of academic philosophy.
As for Malik's review, he falls into the same trap while perpetrating some others. He certainly hasn't engaged with the core metaphysics as you can see by his discussion of Harris' comparison of the two women's lives. The first step of Harris' argument is to say that any morally relevant feature of the world has an affect on human consciousness. He gets lambasted for this but really this is no different to the assumption all of the Is-Ought criticism is grounded on. The point appears to be then that any question of consciousness can be examined through neuroscience but I'm not sure it succeeds with that. More importantly we need to note, this hasn't escaped the objection of "how do we tell which state is better" and that's precisely the side of Harris' argument that Malik hasn't acknowledged. The second step of his argument is a straight forward possible worlds metaphysics: conceive of the most terrible world imaginable and any act or feature of the world that takes us away from that is moral. Now I'm not in a position to say one way or the other whether or not I am convinced by possible worlds talk, one of my projects over the summer is going to be reading David Lewis on cognitive content to find out, but this isn't a philosophically naive argument. On the other hand, the constant reaching for Is-Ought as if it's the end of the discussion certainly is.
The statement We should consider the possibility that the question of morals may be quite simple in the end is a perfect example. Perhaps – just perhaps – philosophers have in fact *already done this*.
As for Put another way, I don't know of any advanced scientific field in which the practitioners still need to know or care about what philosophers had to say about their subject matter, might I say that the past tense is sufficient to unmask the problem?
Philosophers invented empiricism and science and, for that matter, computers. Might be worth considering that philosophers are actually still really doing stuff in the real world that is relevant to various disciplines. I believe I mentioned Richard Healey in a recent post on the topic of quantum mechanics and the realism/instrumentalism debate; look up his papers and explain, again, how philosophers are irrelevant to the practice of modern science. Dennett, the Churchlands, Ramachandran, John Pollock and the Oscar project… and I could keep going for hours.
I'm not sure I'd consider Jonathan Haidt a moral philosopher. In fact, I'm almost sure I wouldn't. Probably the same with Joshua Greene. I'm not lessening the importance of their work, it's just not philosophy.
The first step of Harris' argument is to say that any morally relevant feature of the world has an affect on human consciousness… The second step of his argument is a straight forward possible worlds metaphysics: conceive of the most terrible world imaginable and any act or feature of the world that takes us away from that is moral.
Right, and the *problem* is the assumption that things that have what we'd personally call bad effects on human conscisousness are necessarily morally wrong. A deep ecologist might be perfectly happy with the extinction of humans, and might in fact advocate that as a *better* outcome than our survival. Why is the deep ecologist wrong about this?
Alright, alright. I'm not trying to say philosophy is worthless. I know I love Dan Dennett. But I don't think there are many problems that are best solved by reading a bunch of philosophy. I think most here would agree. Science is philosophy plus. Why should we fault Harris for suggesting that we start working on the "plus"?
Well, because we have to get the groundwork right as well. It took us a while to hit on empiricism and there are still significant philosophical issues surrounding it. Try defining the difference between science and pseudoscience – the "demarcation problem" – or take a look at Chisholm's problem of the criterion.
It seems like some of the objections to Harris are that optimizing well-being is fine, but who is to say that that is "morality"? OK, lets call it morality*. Morality* is the field concerned with optimizing the communal well-being of conscious creatures. Now, can we all agree that morality* is a very worthy field of study, and one that is fully accessible to scientific practice? If so, I say to hell with morality. I'll take morality* any day. And would you want to live with people who don't see why following the precepts of morality* is important?
I actually think most moral philosophers — and most people — would agree that, broadly speaking, morality is about maximizing well-being (for conscious creatures, societies, and perhaps even Earth). The problem is that there are many different conceptions of what well-being being entails, and how to get there.
In a way, I think that everyone can get his or her own definition of well-being, as long as their quest for well-being does not unduly interfere with the same quest in other conscious beings. Intense exercise is a big part of well-being for some, but certainly not for me. But we could still live ethically together, as long as my relaxation doesn't interfere with their exercise and vice versa. Maybe the real problem isn't defining well being, but figuring out the appropriate way to resolve conflicts in interest. This is no simple problem in itself, of course. But if we could solve that problem, it seems like we could all be moral even if no one agreed on the meaning of "well being."
Well, and maximising well-being for any given individual/ society/ planet depends a lot on the fitness landscape and is of a necessity flexible. :)
However, this is precisely the derivation of the conflict with religious forms of morality, as many of them weight well-being somewhat lower than obedience to God. Post-Enlightenment societies usually say that's fine, as long as you don't interfere with the decision-making of other people and only sacrifice your *own* well-being in the interests of your *own* obedience to God. That's why us Gnus are widely castigated for "wanting to take other people's children away because of their religious faith" when we suggest that maybe withholding vaccinations from one's children is immoral.
Well, putting a child into the equation changes things entirely. Now it is not just the parent's own conception of well-being at stake. So you've probably hit on one of the most difficult questions to resolve. The child is in no position to pick his or her own definition of well-being, and we would certainly call it wrong for the parent to choose certain definitions and impose them on the child. So maybe we do have to agree on a definition of well-being that everyone can accept But with a 99% overlap in our genetic code, reaching consensus should be easy!
Ah, but of course they'd say that raising their child to obey their supernatural and un-empirically confirmable God is more important to the well-being of their child than whatever secular modern scientistic society might say about that child's wellbeing. Which is where the whole normative philosophical tradition of individual rights bumps into this problem. :)
Why is it *better*? Whose well-being are you maximising? In which conditions? Who gets to say what counts as well-being?
People who work on naturalizing ethics are usually up to their eyeballs in philosophy of biology and epistemology. Go figure.
I do think there is a lot to Harris' point that an inability to answer difficult questions shouldn't stop us from answering more tractable ones. I'm sure most religious parents expose their child to religion because they think this is the best bet for making a happy and successful child. If they could be convinced that it was actually harmful to their child (no easy task, surely), I'd bet a lot of them would opt out of a religious upbringing. If being religious is not defined as well-being, but simply thought of as a way to achieve well-being, then there is no reason why we couldn't talk about moral issues on common ground with religious people. And the definition of "well-being" might be one of those things that everybody really knows until a philosopher comes along. No we don't have perfect terms and definitions. Let's start using what we have. Science was never about getting things right, just about getting things better.
What if it's more harmful to the parents to vaccinate the child than it is to not vaccinate the child on some measures? What if we could even determine with an fMRI scan that the relevant bits of the brain are more active than whatever threshold we've set for "bad" in the parent because of the pseudoscientific beliefs the parent holds about vaccination? Does that mean we don't vax the kid?
What we have is contradictory or incomplete; that's the whole problem. Well, and your last sentence is a problem. Science was never about getting things right, just about getting things better presupposes a criterion for "better". Science is about mapping the world; it's empirical because we check the map against the world and the map gets more and more accurate. There's a lot of confusion, I think, because we tend to elide between an epistemic and a moral sense of the term "should". if you want an accurate map, there's a way you should – epistemic should – go about drawing it, with empirical tests and peer review and repetition. That process will get you the most accurate map of any of the processes we've thought of up until now, and if we think of a way to enhance that process, it will be adopted by science. But it doesn't lead you to moral truths; it leads you to a more accurate map of the world than the one you used to have.
If letting sentient life survive on this planet in the long run requires our absence, why not just go ahead with the deep ecologist views? Most of us probably have an intuition that the deep ecologists are wrong. But *why are they wrong*?
I can no more define what "better" theories are in science than I can define "better" moral actions, in the sense of a valueless definition. You are exactly right about that. We have no letter from the universe saying that we should prefer the explanations that account for phenomena in the simplest terms possible and can be potentially refuted by observations. This does not bother me in the least bit as a scientist (OK, a cognitive psychologist, so kind of a scientist). I guess that is the analogy I was drawing. It doesn't bother me for morality, either. Science is achieved by a group of people willing to accept the terms without absolute justification, and thank goodness for it. If we had a group of people willing to accept the task of optimizing well-being without absolute justification, maybe we could have morality's moon landing someday. Thanks for the discussion!
Harris's book is better than a lot of this criticism indicates, although the discrepancy is largely Harris's fault.
I think Harris is basically staking out a quite respectable philosophical position—one I mostly agree with—but seriuously fumbling the rhetoric in some important ways. It's very disappointing that Harris is so uncharacteristically bad at explaining himself in TML when he gets pithy–that's usually what he's uncommonly good at—but if you ignore a lot of the confusing pithy stuff, and follow his arguments and examples, I think he's mostly making quite good points. His high-level rhetoric doesn't really convey they picture he's painting with his arguments, which is much better.
With respect to the Hume is/ought thing, specifically, what most people are missing—and this is very much Harris's fault—is that HARRIS AGREES WITH HUME. His high level rhetoric makes it sound like he doesn't, but his actual arguments and the picture he's painting makes it quite clear he does.
The kind of morality he's talking about is "objective" in a descriptive sense—you can identify the natural kind in question—and it's "prescriptive," in that it's about what one ought or ought not do, but it is NOT "objectively prescriptive" in the sense (Mackie's) that just knowing the facts about such oughts will actually, in itself, make anyone care.
It's disappointing to me that Harris fumbles the summaries of his own position so badly, but it's also disappointing to me that so many people can't see what he's actually saying, which is really pretty good.
I wish more philosophers would take it as a teachable moment and emphasize the stuff that they think is right about what Harris is saying, which IMO is not only pretty mostly good, but mostly not unusual among professional philosophers.
Philosophers of science can, actually, define what theories are better maps of the world, because they can just go check against the world.
But how are we going to check to see if the wellbeing of sentient creatures is the right measure, and which ones trump the other ones? (This is where Bentham, and utilitarianism, come in. Lots of people have intuitions that it would be wrong to kill an innocent man to in order to stop mob violence that would kill 100 people. But it would minimize human suffering, wouldn't it?)
Well, I couldn't resist one more comment. Caryn, I agree that the analogy between science and morality does break down. In science, we have very effective ways to determine which explanations meet the agreed upon standard for a "better" explanation. For morality, we do not have systematic techniques to determine which actions optimize well-being. This may be a difference of degree, however, and not a difference in kind. Our ideas about what makes a better theory in science have developed and are developing, but we have been making breathtaking scientific progress all the while. When theories are expressed as formal models, we still do not have a consensus on "the" way balance model complexity and fit to data when selecting the best model. Selecting theories is not a simple matter of mapping them onto reality. The literature on model selection techniques is anything but simple! So people have long done and are now doing science without some of the foundations completely worked out. In fact, jumping in and getting started is largely what has helped us better define those foundations. We all have a vague sense of what "well-being" means, and I'm sure that – outside of creative examples – you would find broad agreement on which actions improve or impair well-being. It ain't perfect, but I'll take it. Thanks again!
In connexion with killing an innocent someone to save 100 (or more), is not that what in the end Christianity is about? And there is of course Sam Harris's unattractive and post-911 ideas about torture: perhaps if an innocent gets tortured, that may be dismissed as 'collateral damage'?
1. We are not *condemning* Harris, we are disagreeing with the way he went about arguing one thread in one of his books. Nobody has accused him of "not helping," and I certainly didn't detect any "wounded tone" in Ophelia's thread. Pretty much everyone here is a friend of Harris's; it's just that some of us think he is wrong on this one particular point.
2. I think it behooves some of us to be a little more respectful to philosophy as an intellectual discipline. And say this as a lecturer who teaches young doctors in big letters that EMPIRICISM BEATS PATHOPHYSIOLOGY (i.e. evidence trumps theory) every time. Ophelia started this blog mainly to oppose the faddishness of structuralism and postmodernism in academia. So we're hardly fans of philosophers who undermine science. But it seems to me that some people are more or less dismissing philosophy a priori and, to my eye, with prejudice. Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" was certainly not astonishing to me — it pretty much agreed with what I have believed since I was about 12 — and although it received a lot of criticism from anti-materialists, the idea that he should have just dismissed those criticisms because they came from philosophers rather than on their merits seems unsupportable.
If we assume the most optimistic outcome of neuroscience's forays into morality, then it is possible that in the future we will have a very good understanding of the neurological basis of human morality, right down to the neural networking and the transmitters. And this would be an epochal scientific achievement. But it still wouldn't decide what was the most moral outcome in a given situation. Imagine that, armed with our new-found knowledge of human morality, we develop the capacity to prevent humans from committing murder by raising their moral consciousness either by genetic engineering or pharmacology. In all other respects, these modified/augmented humans are exactly the same. They have the same emotions, the same basic thought processes, they just have a greater recognition of the moral implications of murder. NowThe basic problem with morality is that empiricism cannot arrive at moral values, so we are pretty much forced to negotiate our moral values on a philosophical level. Rejecting philosophy outright is like starting to build a house by throwing away your tools.
I think the prejudice works both ways. Analytic philosophers have no problem (often rightly) in rejecting continental philosophers and visa versa. Which particular philosopher or philosophy is the right philosophy? Clearly science is doing philosophy right, and that is why many of us reject 'bad' philosophy.
The problem is, I don't think Sam Harris is doing good science (good philosophy) here, I think he's doing bad philosophy. I think his moral ideas are influenced by his fascination in eastern religions such as Buddhism. I don't see him in a lab coat doing experiments and writing papers on scientific morality. It's bad philosophy.
Well-being can't possible be an adequate theory of morality. For example, how is imprisoning anyone for a crime improving their well-being?
Who said it was? Societies punish crimes (in whatever way) not to maintain the well-being of the criminal, but to maintain that of everybody else.
NowThat's not what Harris is arguing at all. The argument "we should do X because our evolved instincts tell us to do X" is the fallacy of equating "is" with "ought"; Harris does not claim that, instead he argues that we can derive at least some "ought" statements by starting with facts. It's quite possible to argue "our evolved instincts tell us to do X; doing X reduces the well-being of everyone; therefore we should not do X". Examples of this are not hard to find.
Who said it was? Societies punish crimes (in whatever way) not to maintain the well-being of the criminal, but to maintain that of everybody elseI'll object to denying that Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene are philosophers. Maybe they are just a psychologist and a neuroscientist, but the fact that Haidt feels his psychology justifies Aristotelianism and that Russell Blackford has described Joshua Greene as doing some of the most important modern work in Error Theory kind of implies that their work is philosophical. Maybe a brief gesture to Elizabeth Anscombe could count as a further hint and certainly let's not forget the Churchlands either here.
Caryn:
You don't think it's a bit unfair that despite all the complexities in Science, you allow them to have a normative concept in order to aid observation, fits the world, while denying that morality can have the same? I'm not sure whether or not you've heard of Sellars Myth of the Given, the denial that there's any non-conceptual part to observation, but trying to bridge the gap this seems to create between the world and our observations is a very important theme in epistemology. Please note, this is no different to the kinds of problems we face in moral philosophy. In fact, it's so similar that you have philosophers like Huw Price mustering arguments from ethics in order to provide answers in epistemology. The point is that the overlap between our ethical and our epistemological concerns is so complete that the objections to science and epistemology's involvement in ethics is either perverse or nakedly dogmatic.
Actually that suggests a challenge to me. Given how important a lot of the debates in ethics are, can you explain to me why we cannot or must not use the human faculty of reason at its absolute best expression as it is in science?
Chris:
As a slightly obsessed philosophy student, one who kind of lives philosophy, I find your comment just a touch odd. It's even more odd when if you read my comment I'm actually arguing that Harris takes philosophy very seriously. His entire book is steeped in philosophy at every step of the way. His "denial" of moral philosophy is nothing more complicated than saying "those particular questions aren't the ones I started with." Hardly a rejection of the field and even less of one when you see all the philosophical arguments he engages with and the philosophers he references.
As for your objection I can only say that you clearly haven't read the book because it is in fact one of the objections he tries to deal with, right down to the thought experiment. I'm not saying whether or not he's succeeded, I've mixed feelings on how effective Harris' arguments are, but please don't act as if it's obvious he hasn't at least engaged with them.
Montag, yes, I am familiar with Sellars, and yes, the questions about how to ground ethics and epistemology have substantial similarities (that's actually why I noted that people working on naturalizing ethics are usually epistemologists with evolutionary biology backgrounds.) I'd say something along these lines: science gets to be normative because it isn't all of epistemology. One has to switch to using human reason philosophically while thinking about epistemology *because* science cannot tell us what counts as knowledge. Science is only for mapping the world. Science also cannot tell us what counts as moralWho said anything about abstracts? Real, concrete, people set up real, concrete law enforcement, judicial and penal systems, and the people whose well-being increases as a result are equally concrete.
Now, maybe we can't measure everyone's well-being and apply a universally-agreed function to produce a single result. But to use a variation of an example that Harris uses, we also can't measure the 'health' of every individual cell in someone's body and apply a function to produce a single result, and yet we have no hesitation in declaring that some people are healthier than others, and even that in at least some cases some people are objectively healthier. So we can't abandon or dismiss the possibility of objective definitions of well-being simply because of the lack of a single measurement.
It's quite possible to argue "our evolved instincts tell us to do X; doing X reduces the well-being of everyone; therefore we should not do X". Examples of this are not hard to find.
Quite right. The objection is to the assumption that reducing the well-being of everyone is what we'd need to evaluate in order to determine whether or not an action is immoral. It's also quite easy to produce examples where doing X reduces the well-being of everyone alive now, but improves the well-being of future generations, or improves the compliance to the commands of a group's accepted God, or improves the health of the ecosystem.
Thanks for the reply. From your comments I suspected you had philosophical training but I wasn't certain so I didn't want to make any assumption.
I'm not sure if I buy your reply however. There's a significant assumption to the idea that science can just be about mapping the world which would revolve around problems of content: Sellars is just one example of several; Quine and Davidson have from what I can tell have slightly different ways of looking at the same problem. In any case, what all of the positions have in common is that you need quite a lot of normative grunt just to get content going whether in language or mind.
Now I'm coming into this debate as someone who strongly self-identifies with the Skeptic community on the internet more generally. One of the more interesting basic subjects when getting involved in this community are quite explicitly norms of reason in the forms of conceptual clarity, epistemic humility, respect for evidence and a thorough grounding in the psychology of cognitive bias through fallacies. I have yet to see a discussion in ethics that wouldn't benefit from applying the same norms. Once you start accepting all of these norms, what's left to distinguish ethics from science apart from a dogmatic assertion about content that applies just as much to science? Worse yet as I pointed out above, we have more than a little reason to doubt there is such a sharp line to be drawn between norms and content.
The only point I need to make from there is that none of this implies any kind of pessimism about whether science is possible, though I have had some error theorists tell me that it should. I simply cannot see any reason why we should think that human beings reasoning to their best ability can't surpass their own cognitive failings in much the same way as they surpass their physical failings. There is no contradiction in saying "I can see where my reasoning went wrong" and yet the only way to sustain that kind of pessimism is by assuming there is.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for moral relativism, but I do think that some are arguing that the concept of well-being does not truly escape moral relativism (unless I am misunderstanding). So if morals aren't purely relative, and well-being doesn't work, what does work? What alternative way forward is being offered?
"So if morals aren't purely relative, and well-being doesn't work, what does work? What alternative way forward is being offered?"
I think it might be helpful if we recognised that morality only extends so far in practice, among social equals. It does not operate between unequals, nor with enemies external to society.
Moral people can't solve immorality, all they can do is teach morality and recognise its limits. One of the most important ways of improving morality within society is to understand the importance of teaching knowledge and reason, to make people wise. It is through ignorance and unreason that greater immoralities prevail. And inequality is death to morality.
Of course, such teachers are so open to corruption and inequalities, that the entire enlightenment process is constantly undermined by the very people who are supposed to be enlightened.
Egbert. I strongly agree with everything in your comment. But is a statement like "inequality is death to morality" any more objectively grounded than a statement like "well-being is the goal of morality." What do we say to someone who just doesn't see what is wrong with inequality? Anyway, I think we would both say that we have to work with heuristics and impressions, and that will probably be true for a long time to come. I just think that "does this affect the well-being of a conscious agent?" is a heuristic that takes us a long way in answering moral questions. I don't really want to defend any claim bolder than that. And the fact that well-being is extremely difficult to define in cases does not impugn its general usefulness. Equality is difficult to define (should it be equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? should people be prevented from giving their children/relatives special advantages if they have the ability to?) but remains an extremely valuable moral concept.
I think a lot of people do argue for a sort of relativism, but it's generally not the stereotypical relativism that results in things like crude cultural relativism.
IMHO, Harris is himself a "relativist" in a weak sense, as am I, and so are most error theorists, as well as
We agree with Hume that you can't get from a bunch of nonmotivating facts to motivating facts by sheer reason. You have to start somewhere, and for Harris and me and most philosophers who talk about "morality" at all, that has to include at least a minimal benign concern for the welfare of others. No amount of truth and reason is going to keep a sociopath from being a sociopath.
(That's in contrast to "moral rationalists," if I understand the term, who want to make being basically moral part of rationality, and claim that sociopaths are irrational. Harris would say that sociopaths are broken moral units—not good examples of the category "moral agent," which the rest of us care about—-but not ipso facto irrational.)
A lot of reviewers seem to miss the fact that the metaethical argument is not mainly about that sort of thing, and is largely about how to correctly talk about the generalization that moral people share a benign concern for others—e.g., is it absolutely necessary, or sufficient, for being a moral agent?
Moral philosophers (except for moral rationalists) generally recognize that normative reasons are something like reasons that an agent would have after fully informed and flawless reflection on the actions under consideration, and that there's a big differences between
1. being morally wrong because you don't understand the facts or don't reason them through correctly and
2. being morally wrong because you don't understand a fundamental moral principle, or
3. doing moral because you do understand a moral principle but just don't care (like a sociopath), or don't care enough, (like an overly selfish person).
Harris agrees with the large majority of moral philosophers on these basic distinctions, and a lot of his critics (like Malik) don't seem to understand when he's making absolutely normal moral arguments that any moral philosopher should recognize, and most would agree with.
For example, he uses Taliban acid-throwing as an example of the first category—even in Taliban culture, nobody'd think it's morally right to throw acid in little girls' faces for no very good reason. Even in very different cultures, rationalizing such acts as "moral" depends on a web of beliefs, many of which are crucially false. (E.g., that there's a god who made women in such a way as to serve certain roles well and others badly, that uppity girls who dare to go to school like boys are setting a bad example for other girls, that if such things get out of hand they'll have disastrous consequences for society in this life, and for people's fates in the afterlife.)
A very interesting fact about ethical philosophers is that even when they disagree on metaethics, they often agree on ethics.
For example, if you ask random moral realists, moral relativists, and error theorists whether Taliban acid throwing still seems wrong on reflection, they'll generally say yes, and even of course.
(Even error theorists will agree that it's stupid and harmful and that they too don't like that sort of thing, even if they wouldn't call such judgments literally moral judgments, because they've abandoned normal first-order moral terminology as involving incoherent presuppositions. E.g., Richard Joyce would say that it's "wrong" in a "fictive" sense that he nonetheless cares about—he's an error theorist, not an asshole or a sociopath.)
Likewise, if you ask philosophers of all those metaethical stripes whether gay marriage is wrong, they'll generally say no. The intuition that there's something especially wrong with gay love systematically goes away on fully informed, rational reflection. All the arguments against it are ultimately based on falsehoods—e.g., that being gay is a choice, or that there's good reason to condemn that choice, or that there's a morally authoritative God who can tell us it's wrong, or that it's socially destructive in a serious way. It's just a load of crap that doesn't survive informed, rational scrutiny. Ultimately, pretty much everybody who isn't hung up on religious delusions or profoundly confused about morality comes around to the idea that gay marriage is okay, and that opposing it, in lieu of reasons that actually make sense, is not.
One of Harris's main and most important points is that there's a whole lot of convergence in morality, on informed, rational reflection. A lot of bullshit just goes away, and certain basic intuitions remain. Crude cultural relativists are just wrong—the most basic principles of morality are not just something you get from your particular culture, and morality is generally not beyond rational criticism.
That doesn't necessarily mean that we all converge to a fairly straight utilitarian account like Harris's own. Whether he's right or wrong about that claim, or about his metaethical framework, I think he's pretty clearly right about the claim that there is a very useful degree of convergence in informed and rational moral reasoning.
For his mostly philosophically untutored audience, that's the most important point in the book, and most philosophically sophisticated reviewers don't seem to notice that or point it out—that they agree with Harris's most important point, which most of his intended audience doesn't understand.
That's sorta understandable, because Harris has enormous brass gonads to go writing a book about that sort of thing and make himself sound like God's gift to moral philosophy, when his most important point isn't novel at all—it's rather pedestrian in academic moral philosophy.
Still, it's unfortunate, because a lot of philosophically sophisticated critics are missing a chance to say what's right and important in TML that most people really do need to understand, and also the further things that are at least sorta right and interesting, which more people do need to think and talk about.
Another example is Harris's Utilitarianism. You don't have to agree with Harris on his fairly straight Utilitarianism to agree that there's something very right about it, at least up to an important point, at some level, which most moral philosophers do agree with, even if they disagree about how such concerns come into play in moral reasoning.
For example, Benthamites and Rule Utilitarians and Kantians would all agree that what makes actions right typically has something to do with whether that sort of action typically helps or harms others, or would if everybody behaved that way, even if they disagree about whether that concern applies to individual actions (to justify individual acts) or classes of actions (to justify rules), and exactly how that justification works.
What Harris doesn't make clear enough is that even if you don't buy his apparently fairly straight Utilitarian story, and there's considerable disagreement at middle levels of moral reasoning, such shared concerns do give us considerable useful moral agreement. So, for example, a Benthamite might think that gay marriage is fine because a particular gay couple wants to get married, it's likely to make them happier to do so, and nobody's paticularly likely to be particularly hurt by it. A Rule Utilitarian or Kantian might apply the same sort of reasoning at the level of moral rules, rather than individual actions, but all three are likely to agree that gay marriage should be legal.
The Benthamite might see no use for moral rules in between the level of individual, situational judgements and the heuristic level of legal rules, and the Rule Utilitarian and Kantian might disagree on the exact moral rules and their exact justification, but when it comes to agreeing on crude heuristic rules like workable laws, they're all going to be in favor of gay marriage rights. Of course they are.
You don't have to agree with Harris on, say, whether torture is ever justified, to agree with the main and most important points in TML.
Maybe Harris is wrong about the extent to which morality converges under informed reflection, but that doesn't mean he's just wrong—maybe it converges some, and very usefully, but not to the even more useful extent he thinks.
Likewise, maybe it does converge more than is obvious to most people, or even most philosophers, but not to what Harris currently thinks it does. So for example, maybe it converges as much as Harris thinks, or almost as much, and he's simply mistaken about whether torture is ever justified.
Harris leaves that option open when he talks about moral mistakes and moral expertise, when talking about rational moral convergence. He just doesn't make it clear enough that it applies to him too, and that his major points do not depend on whether you agree with his particulars about the magnitude of the dangers of Islam, or about the justifiability of torture.
That's what bugs me about reviews like Malik's—they mostly ignore the fact that Harris is making several important basic points, in boldly painting a big picture, but flaws in that picture are not necessarily fatal to the overall picture.
Harris's book is ballsy and flawed—he sets himself up for that treatment by failing to make clear enough how the various parts of his ambitious project do or don't depend on each other—but it's still very disappointing to me how many critics are prone to running his different arguments together and dismissing them as just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Sorry, I was lumping a few responses together to save time. My defence of philosophy was directed at Yahzi. I should have taken that time to address individual comments individually. Mea culpa.
You're quite correct that I haven't read the book yet, so please feel free to correct me on any particulars, but I do feel reasonably confident in the nature of Harris's problem given the same flaw has been identified by several reviewers whose track record I find compelling (Ophelia, Russell Blackford, Malik) and from excerpts I've read. I don't want to have to read every single book that gets discussed here before joining in — but I am correspondingly open to being corrected.
Having said that…I still think Harris has failed to address the problem. He only *thinks* he has avoided the problem by asserting that facts on well-being are objective and can therefore form the basis of an objective morality. I didn't say he hasn't engaged with the arguments, but that he's done so inadequately. He's still going to be unable to define well-being in an objective moral sense, and then he's going to be unable to decide how to go about making practical policies to increase well-being in an objective moral framework.
Montag, after reading your post twice to determine that you weren't claiming to be a Cartesian skeptic :) I'd point out that epistemic norms are things everyone adopts because they already have an interest in getting a set of answers about the world right. If you want to find your car keys, there are better and worse ways of going about it, and the epistemic *should*s derive from a set of norms everyone holds because of their interests – they want to know things about where they left their car keys. But they are not categorical norms.
Unlike epistemology, where we're all in the same boat (even the religious have to accept the evidence of their senses in order to read their holy books, listen to their preachers, etc.) with morality it simply isn't obvious that *there is a boat*. Everyone doesn't hold the same norms. Two thousand year old thought experiments into what the norms should be remain unanswered.
Moral norms, if there are any, would be ones that applied to you regardless of your interests, or, at any rate, so goes the usual narrative about moral realism. So the fact that we can know epistemic norms, which are a different kind of norms, isn't relevant to whether or not we can know moral norms. The egoist would say things like, "You ought not to murder people if you don't want to go to prison." Scientific investigation could tell you whether or not it's true that, given that you don't want to go to prison, you ought not to murder people. The *moral* norm "You ought not to murder people" is supposed to apply to *everyone*.
You can't get out of morality by saying it isn't relevant to your interests. But as far as I can tell, if you don't care about believing true things, then you don't have any epistemic duties. You might actually have a moral duty to care about the truth (that's Clifford) but that would be another hypothetical. :)
Jeffy Joe, the argument is that it isn't even obvious that Harris (who is staking out a moral realist stance) has identified the only relevant set of moral facts, or even a set of moral facts. But there are stances that require neither accepting moral realism nor accepting moral relativism, like noncognitivism. That's one of the terms he didn't want to use because it would be too boring, IIRC.
Yours is a fascinating comment, seeing as it draws out numerous flaws in Harris's arguments while still defending him overall. I'm not sure I could defend him with all that, but it does make for an interesting read.
One thing I would like to argue out, though, is that I don't think convergence is as good a marker of objective morality as one would like. I wish it was. It would make moral thinking a lot easier and it would imply that social norms do tend to converge on morally beneficent outcomes.
But I've just been writing about the history of medical ethics for students. And in the numerous codes of medical ethics throughout history there is convergence on some important and IMO morally justifiable positions: keeping confidentiality, not exploiting the vulnerabilities of one's patients, treating people of all walks of life equally. Excellent convergence. But they also tend to converge on one very significant bad point: many codes of ethics discouraged medical practitioners from discussing their knowledge with others, especially rival schools of medicine; one even forbids giving public lectures. These codes were written in order to preserve the secret knowledge of the school, not to increase the well-being of the public. And yet they converge.
Unalloyed convergence would also imply that women should be subject to the whims of the males in their lives (historically speaking, equal rights is a massive outlier). And then there's slavery, homophobia, animal cruelty, etc., etc.
This is not to say that convergence is a useless concept, but that by itself it does not establish objective morality.
I don't get the motivation to defend Harris's book despite admitted flaws. I don't have that. The flaws get on my nerves from the outset, and I think that makes the book not useful – I'm just not motivated to find reasons to say it's useful anyway. I do think there's a lot of interesting and useful material in it, but I think the book as a whole just muddies the waters.
Harris's book is a good deal too "ballsy." That's part of what's wrong with it.
I agree. One of the things that I find most frustrating in all this is that Harris goes all ballsy, and predictably gets smacked down hard largely for being too ballsy, without much enlightening consideration of Harris's several (mostly-separate) important points.
I think there's a better book in TML trying to get out; there are several babies in there, and not as much bathwater as a lot of people think.
His footnote about metaethics and boredom ensured that most philosophers would not cut him the slack he needs and focus the babies, and reveal the extent to which they agree with him on the major points that would be most interesting to other people. (And it really doesn't help that his own high-level rhetoric is partly just wrong, e.g., about the basic is-ought thing, which he's not denying, just doing an end-run around—a good end run, IMO, but an end run he ought to acknowledge.)
The picture he paints with his major arguments is much better than what he says about it, but it's not surprising if people notice what's wrong with the former and fail to see what's right with the latter. They'll naturally notice that he's not delivering what he says he's delivering, even if what he's actually delivering is quite good—or even if they notice, they may feel unable to endorse the meat of the book, because of Harris's false advertising; the discussion often stops right there. Nice job of foot-shooting on Harris's part.
Well, I love Stephen Colbert so maybe I'm too desensitized to ballsyness to be bothered by Harris. Paul W. – thanks for the long post, that was a very clear summary of the issues. For morality, it is much too tempting to focus on the disputed details and not the broad areas where all the (reasonable) voices in the debate agree.
Jeffy Joe, careful, or you'll end up with a tyranny of the majority. All the reasonable voices in the debate agree on accomodationism and the Gnus are being unreasonable. And of course the existence of those broad areas where all reasonable people agree might even be some evidence for the idea that there are actually facts that we're converging on, but unless you can say *where the convergence is coming from* I don't think you've really got an answer to the question. No one's denying that you can make progress in applied ethics without completely nailing down questions about ethical theory; even moral skeptics can agree that the systematically false (because they don't think there are moral facts) moral judgments that they and others are inclined to make have certain commonalities. Even thinking that there's no such thing as a moral fact doesn't stop people from doing applied ethics.
Pawl W, re:They'll naturally notice that he's not delivering what he says he's delivering, even if what he's actually delivering is quite good – well, but also, as you note, quite pedestrian. Applied utilitarianism is not exactly novel. The first three minutes of the TED talk were enough for professional philosophers to say, oh, so *if* you endorse this particular metaethical view, *then* what Harris is about to say follows… and notice that the complaints are not about the conclusions he draws, generally. He didn't say he was just going to be doing applied ethics.
Actually Cartesian Sceptic might be a step up; right now I have to struggle very hard not to sound like Richard Rorty. ;)
My problem is that your point about what a real moral fact needs to look like isn't going to motivate me because I don't think you or I or anyone is in a position to say a priori what a moral fact looks like in exactly the same way that we don't get to declare that god exist without first doing the hard graft needed to show that it does. In order for us to be in a position to be able to say anything one way or another about ontology we need to do work to turn our imperfect senses into something that can do the job. In science we do that through theoretical frame works and instruments; in morals we need to do the same.
Now the kind of objection that should be thrown against this sort of a view is the problem of moral disagreement. This at least has the virtue of being about the same subject (is ought isn't.) The problem is it's hard to see how disagreement is even surprising. Disagreements about knowledge are about as everyday as it gets.
I just want to quickly mention how my earlier talk of norms and content fits in because there's a good chance I wasn't as clear as I could be about it. Hopefully by now it's clear that the kind of talk that I'm trying to get to grip with is the kind that's concerned with how we hold beliefs about the world. The only things that will interest me in terms of norms therefore will be norms that help us know when beliefs come into contact with the world. The thing is it's never been entirely clear to me how our beliefs can have content if they're not about the world so that it seems to me there is a very blurry line between the methods we use to ensure that we are in a state that responds to the world and whatever it is that constitutes the meaning of the beliefs that we come to hold.
First off major kudos on accepting the criticism. I would have responded earlier but I managed to do myself an injury trying to make myself as clear as I could about my interest in moral perception in response to Caryn. I'm pretty sure I failed but damn it I had to try.
As for whether or not you're committed to actually reading the book, I certainly agree that life's too short and the list of books that need to get read too long to commit yourself to reading everything that's being commented on. Thing is I'm a bit torn here. On the one hand I don't want to say this is a revolutionary book. I'm not sure it is and I'm certainly not sure if its arguments convince me, and I'm broadly on Harris' side here. On the other hand this particular debate appears to have become very polarised and some of the criticisms fall far short of fair. That inclines me towards saying that it's probably a good idea to read the book before taking too strong a stand but I can't say that unreservedly deduced from first principles; it is definitional. It is a categorical statement derived from empirical observation.
Are people living entities? Of course. Hence, objective good.
Does Harris actually argue that existence is an objective good? The way you summarized it, abortion and euthanasia would be objectively bad.
Does Harris actually argue that existence is an objective good? The way you summarized it, abortion and euthanasia would be objectively bad.
Harris does not say that sort of thing, and goes out of his way to make it clear that evolution's "goals" are not and can't be our goals—you can't read psychological-level goals off of general principles of evolution. He quotes a Pinkerism about how if people were psychologically motivated toward inclusive fitness above all else, men would think that making daily deposits at the sperm bank would be their highest calling.
As I read him, Harris makes it pretty clear that evolution is mainly important to ethics in that it did in fact create the kind of human nature it contingently did—what counts as moral on informed reflection is grounded in human nature, and in particular on which things we value depend on factual errors and which ones don't.
For example, evolution seems to have programmed us with a large dose of selfishness plus a capacity for benign concern for others. No amount of facts and reasoning can rationally give you those things, or rationally take them away.
Evolution may also have programmed us with some other relatively free-floating evaluative tendencies, e.g., to see obedience or purity as a good thing, without any real idea how they relate to the others.
Harris thinks that in informed reflection, those things turn out not to be fundamental, and either get subsumed as instrumental goals that advance more basic ones (especially benign concern for others), or get rendered impotent, or fade away.
(For example, it's hard to sustain a valuing of blind obedience to moral authority, if you realize there's no good authority to be obedient to, and/or that such obedience doesn't generally work out well. People's valuing of obedience to God is generally implicitly contingent on God existing and being Good in some noncircular way. Likewise concerns about "purity" and "sacredness" tend to collapse or fade when the underlying metaphysics is undermined.)
That's a large part of what his discussion of Haidt and Greene is about. Harris doesn't think that conservative and liberal morality are just different, with conservative morality being irreducibly and stably being more weighted toward obedience, purity, and sacredness. He thinks that conservative morality isn't reflectively stable. (I.e., it can be undermined by facts such as nonexistence of God, the Euthyphro Dilemma, disutility of obedience, etc., because it depends on lack of reflection and/or persistent erroneous beliefs about such things.) People may start out with significantly different weightings of relatively free-floating moral principles, but given the right facts and enough serious reflection, the differences mostly tend to go away.
I think that Harris is roughly right about that, and also right that it's an empirical claim about moral psychology, not an a priori assertion of a purely "philosophical" claim.
He's saying that it's a necessary truth of human morality, but an a posteriori one, like the necessary truth that water is H20—it turns out that's what water actually is, definitionally—but by discovery, not by a priori definition.
That's the kind of point that Harris makes that I don't think is "pedestrian," even among professional moral philosophers. He's putting forth a serious and well-motivated view about how morality works, which goes beyond the usual. It may not be totally novel—I think a lot of philosophers think roughly similarly—but it's an important idea. He's saying that relativism about liberal vs. conservative moral foundations is false, and that it's an empirical ("scientific") question.
That's the kind of central and important issue that seems to escape critics like Malik, who skip over the central theoretical ideas and make it sound like Harris isn't saying anything deep or interesting—or isn't sophisticated enough to know when he's making an empirical claim that might be falsified vs. simply insisting that morality equals utilitarianism, without an interesting argument.
That's also the kind of thing that's generally left out when people complain about his Utilitarianism.
I actually agree that Harris doesn't justify his strong Utilitarianism well enough. He doesn't make a good case that people's concerns about well-being and their concerns for fairness fall out in a similar way—with fairness turning out, on reflection, to be an instrumental means for increasing utility.
I think Harris should be clearer about that, both making a better case—and I think there is one—and saying that even if that issue is never fully resolvable, there's still a whole lot of moral convergence to be had. The natural kind of "unmistaken" (informed and reflectively stable) morality may always admit of considerable variation on certain axes, but several other axes are pruned out.
I think Harris would agree with me that we're "lucky" in a funny sense that our psychological goals converge as much as they do in reflective equilibrium. If we'd evolved a little differently, there might not be as much reflective convergence of morality. (E.g., if we were simply instinctively satisfied to absorb our cultures' goals, like a duck being imprinted on either its mother or Konrad Lorenz.)
Montag, when you say I don't think you or I or anyone is in a position to say a priori what a moral fact looks like then isn't this a problem for Harris? Harris, after all, says that we know what moral facts look like. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.
First things first there's a lot in Paul's last comment that I thoroughly support. He's also making the sort of comments I would want to keep in mind if I reread the Moral Landscape. I certainly think the metaphysical point about morality being necessarily true a posteriori is I think an important insight and part of the reason I wish moral philosophers would spend more time paying attention to other branches of philosophy. (Another big one I'd put in here is I wish moral philosophers would stop thinking that counterfactual reasoning counts as evidence against moral realism considering all the work by logicians and metaphysicians showing that our models of truth break down when we try to apply them to counterfactuals.) It should also tip you that that's part of the reason motivating me to look at thinkers such as Sellars, Quine and Davidson all of whom if I understand them right make broadly similar claims though with different emphasis.
On your point about Harris you're right that it should mean that I disagree with him. I think though that some of his arguments make more sense if we see him making a similar point. First off there's the strong emphasis he places throughout on drawing a distinction between not answerable in principle and not answerable in practice. The way I read this is as an argument against the very strong ontological commitment that Is Ought demands of us. It's also very telling that so much of what I've read after that is very openly epistemological in its outlook though I've not got to his later discussions which might make all of this moot.
The final reason that I don't think I'm that much in disagreement with Harris is really the way he sets out his claim about the well-being of conscious creatures. I'll bite this bullet and say that I'm not sure how to render this 100% consistent with a denial of metaphysics, but I'll try and scetch out what motivates me here. I guess the place to start is the kind of thinking that most makes me sound like Richard Rorty, my sense that we don't have access to general principles that will do the job and that all we can do is appeal to the kind of principles that will do the work we need for the problem at hand. In case this helps, it's problems with this position that lead to me saying the things I do about norms because I'm not (wholly) a pragmatist and definitely not a relativist. In any case even with all of these caveats and all this contingency flying around, my sense is that at the other end whatever it is that comes out of this process necessarily has to have some sort of impact on consciousness. It is I'll admit a contradiction. Maybe some day I'll see my way out of it.
Harris does not say that sort of thing, and goes out of his way to make it clear that evolution's "goals" are not and can't be our goals
Thanks – I suspected as much, just wanted to check because the argument was attributed to Harris.
He quotes a Pinkerism about how if people were psychologically motivated toward inclusive fitness above all else, men would think that making daily deposits at the sperm bank would be their highest calling"Well-being" is actually a mishmash of emotions that were and are evolutionary heuristics to keep us doing things that increase our inclusive fitness. I'm not saying you or Sam Harris disagree with this, but given how cobbled-together it is, maybe it deserves more examination before we declare it as the fundamental goal of morality. It may be what we ultimately settle on, but as I understand it, Harris hasn't really made the case.
Presumably then you believe that your own internal perception of red is the end of the discussion about colour? Being motivated to stop at traffic lights is just a heuristic instilled by evolution and that science has nothing further to say about the conscious whatever that constitutes the "intrinsic redness" of red objects. There's a reason why people get tired of having to deal with is-ought objections and it's not necessarily that it's right.
Montag, that exchange with Windy pretty much illuminates what I was going to say. :) Harris says a lot of interesting things, but as I read it did *not* really get into the sorts of things he'd need to get into to do a good job of naturalizing ethics. You're right that one way to do this is via phil mind and that as a neuroscientist with a philosophy background that's the path Harris might be expected to take, but he doesn't make the case and when he publishes on that sort of philosophy we'll all sit up and take notice.
But in the meantime he's asserting moral facts without naturalizing ethics, and this is a problem You come to a "reflective equilibrium" where no amount of facts and reasoning changes your basic values, e.g., that causing gratuitious harm is generally bad, and that promoting well-being is generally good, and that not much else ultimately matters. (For example, maintaining sexual purity ceases to seem like a particularly worthy goal independent of some way that it helps anyone in either the short term by making them happy, or more importantly, in the long run by making people better able to make themselves and others happy.)
When you come to reflective equilibrium, one thing you typically realize is that you're not a very nice person, and you don't value others' good as much as your own. You have mixed drives, mostly selfish, but with a certain concern for others, too, and most people are actually like that, too. Once you realize that, you can begin to think about what general kinds of things you want for yourself and for others, and what to do about it, in light of the way the world is, and how you reason that it could be different.
Doing moral philosophy doesn't turn you into a selfless altruist, because no amount of reasoning is going to change your basic reflectively stable selfishness.
What it can do is reveal that you also want to help others, and that even your admittedly modest degree of altruism can be put to good use, because there are a lot of things that you can do that are of minor cost to you but major benefit to others, even numerous others.
It can also reveal that you've been attentionally blind—that your altruism is there, but mostly as a latent capacity because you haven't noticed things that would "excite your moral passions"—you haven't noticed the consequences of your actual actions, or the likely consequences of your potential actions, and on reflection, you do care.
That might be enough to get you to go work in that soup kitchen, or it might not, but that's not the most important function of moral philosophy. It is not mostly good for getting individuals to go act altruistically, as individuals.
It's much more important politically. When you realize that you're a fairly selfish person, and that others like you are too, you may not be able to overcome your own selfishness, or even to want to—on reflection you may prefer going to a baseball game to going to work in a soup kitchen, every time. But you don't like the idea of everybody else who's as well-of as you doing that sort of thing too, and leaving the less well-off to suffer. You may not want to change yourself, or be able to want that, but you may nonetheless want to change the world, so that most other people treat most other people better.
So, for example, it's way easier for me to vote for somebody who'll raise my taxes a certain amount, if I think the money will be well-spent to improve the lives of others, than to voluntarily part with the same amount of money to improve the lives of less well-off people by the amount that my donated money can buy. Raising taxes on me and millions of similarly well-off people, to improve the lives of millions of worse-off people, is a very different proposition. It only costs me a certain amount, but it benefits others tremendously. To oversimplify, I may value my own well-being 100 times as much as random poor people's, but I don't value the well being of other members of my well-off socioeconomic class 100 times as much as members of the poorer class. I'm nowhere close to as classist as I am selfish. I'm happy to take a whole lot of money from my class (including a modest amount from me), and invest it in doing a whole lot more good for a whole lot of people.
I think Harris thinks similarly. HePaul, youMaybe so, but that is not "science determining human values". In science, you should question even those things that seem more convincing the more you think about them. Morality might not work that way, but Harris claims he is doing something different from the norm.
HeAnd if progressive morality is more stable, why does Harris himself espouse somewindy:
Maybe so, but that is not "science determining human values".
In a sense, it is, but the word "determining" is very ambiguous, and it applies in very different ways at different levels. (I do think it is a stupid thing for Harris to say that pithy way, because of ambiguities in "determining" and in "science," too—and he's compounded that with some misstatements about "philosophy" that support the wrong interpretation, i.e., not what he's actually arguing for.)
Keep in mind that when Harris talks about "science," he's talking about rational evidence-based enquiry very generally, and in his view there really is no boundary between moral philosophy and the cognitive science of morality. I think he's right about that. When moral philosophers use thought experiments and arguments to tease out what are fundamental values vs. instrumental ones, they're doing very much the same sort of thing that cognitive psychologists do when trying to figure out how people think. They're doing experiments that reveal unconscious dependencies on beliefs, etc. In his view, and mine, there should be literally no difference between that sort of "moral philosophy" and "moral cognitive psychology," because they're studying the same problem and whatever the appropriate methods are, they're appropriate whether you call yourself a philosopher or call yourself a cognitive scientist.
There are two different applications of different senses of "determining" here:
1. Can science "determine," i.e., find out, what people do in fact fundamentally value in reflective equilibrium. Harris claims that's an empirical scientific question, and I agree with that. A lot of people would say no, it's a philosophical question, not a scientific one, but I'd agree with Harris that the distinction is meaningless. Philosophy done right and science done right are a seamless garment, and in this area especially there's no good reason to say it's a philosophical question rather than a scientific one. The usual disciplinary boundaries not only should collapse when it comes to this subject, but they have to, and to a large extent already have.
2. Given what "science" (rightly broadly construed) can "determine" (find out) about fundamental values, can science "determine" (tell you) what is right and wrong? Harris thinks that in principle, the answer is often yes—in reflective equilibrium about basic values, and drawing on all sorts of knowledge about the world, very many answers are determinable in principle (though we might not have all the required knowledge) and many answers are determinable in practice, to a sufficiently high precision and degree of confidence as to be useful. (Especially since we don't have any plausible sources of better guidance.)
One thing Harris does that is audacious but I think right is to talk of "science" as an extremely inclusive, seamless garment, which includes everything from properly done philosophical thought experiments to historical facts like the JFK assassination. Its all grist for the scientific worldview, and scientific principles apply throughout.
Unfortunately, he seriously shoots himself in the foot, and goes all loose cannon and shoots at a lot of people who should be his allies about that, by dissing philosophy as a discipline. That's just stupid and wrong and undermines his message. He should acknowledge that what good moral philosophers do, when they do it right, is the kind of thing he's talking about. They're doing armchair cognitive science, and that's an important part of the overall process.
For example, when he criticizes Haidt and Greene about their simplistic analyses of their experimental data, he says the very same things I'd expect a good moral philosopher to say, and for the very same reasons—he's pointing out that Haidt and Greene's conceptual and motivational dependency analyses are superficial, and that they stop at what seems like the wrong level. (When they assume that the thing they're measuring are basic, when there's excellent reason to think they're not reflectively stable.) That's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect any good expert on the subject to point out, whether they're "philosophers" or "cognitive scientists," because there's just no difference at all between the philosophical and scientific questions. The subject is what it is, and when you realize what kind of subject it is, no disciplinary boundary makes any sense.
In science, you should question even those things that seem more convincing the more you think about them. Morality might not work that way, but Harris claims he is doing something different from the norm.
I'm not sure what you mean by these things, or especially the connection between the first sentence and the second one. Could you unpack it a bit?
(I do of course agree with the first one, but in realistic situations of scientific theory confirmation, there's only so much you can do—think of all the plausible alternative theories you can, do differential diagnoses, etc. I'm not sure how you think Harris is failing to do due diligence, as you seem to. I'm also not sure how that relates to whether he acknowledges the similarities between what he's promoting and what others actually do.)I'm not sure what you mean by "such a system" or lacking "respect for authority" but…
The claim is that people who continue to think of religious obedience, purity and sacredness as very morally important–especially irreducibly important—generally do so by maintaining false beliefs. They're not in reflective equilbrium, and are making mistakes of fact that prevent them from working things through. (And IMO that's a major function of religion, as it socially evolves to be part of a stable status quo—it erects barriers that prevent people from working things through, and keep them making the same mistakes that support the religious and social status quo.
Harris is saying that Haidt may have in fact identified different interesting clusters of attributes of existing moral systems, but that his relativistic interpretation of them—that people just naturally differ in those ways, and their differences in values are therefore inarguable—is wrong. (And that whether or not Haidt is wrong, that's an empirical question, not a particularly "philosophical" one, as though there was a difference. It needs to be properly scientifically studied, whether you call that moral cognitive psychology or experimental moral philosophy.)
And if progressive morality is more stable, why does Harris himself espousesome sense of liberal and conservative values in question doesn't map neatly onto political liberalism and conservatism—and if Harris is right that most religious people are nowhere near reflective equilibrium about values, you wouldn't expect it to. Religions evolve to keep people away from reflective equilibrium and accept a lot of inconsistencies, which are convenient for the particular religion and its survival "strategy" in its particular cuture, so you get way more variation in religious morality than you would in properly reflective irreligious morality. Irreligious morality isn't generally in reflective equilbrium either, partly because religion tends to derail any sensible moral talk in largely religious societies.
Given all that, and the complexities of the general subject of morality, I'd expect that even if Harris is right about all of his major theses, (a) he'd disagree with liberals about some things, and (b) he'd be wrong about some "details" (however important those "details" are in concrete terms) himself, some of which would be "liberal" mistakes, and some of which would be typically non-"liberal" mistakes.
I'm not sure what you mean by these things, or especially the connection between the first sentence and the second one. Could you unpack it a bit?
They were actually meant to relate to the sentence before them, which you took out of context to go off on a 700-word tangent. I think that's rather bad form.
In a sense, it is, but the word "determining" is very ambiguous, and it applies in very different ways at different levels.
I don't think I'm the only one who finds it annoying when Harris's defenders start equivocating on the meaning of 'determine'. Of course we agree that science and reason can study what values people actually hold, and that is not what is being criticized!
The meaning of my 3 sentences in context was: if you claim that your choice of values is scientific, you have to give us a better method than "I thought about this in the light of the facts and I continue to care about it". We wouldn't accept the argument that theism is scientific because many people continue to strongly care about it and because science can study facts about theismI also don't think that the desirability of a "reflective equilibrium" with fewer free-floating moral principles has been adequately supported. Suppose that I value the discovery of truths about the world as a more or less independent moral goal, but I'm not sure how to reconcile this with my desire to promote general wellbeing. Person B has stably decided that they value truth only to the extent that it can be used to further the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Is the second view automatically better?
There's no need to be so self-deprecating it's been very good having you to discuss this with and if there is a misunderstanding I'm going to be the first to assert it's not that you've not done a good job of making your case, it's that I'm not doing a very effective job of showing where my objections are coming from.
Simon Blackburn actually might be a good way I hope for me to start making my position clear. The way this goes is that he's an expressivist so from the get go we're working with different premises. Just so that we're clear on the terminology he talks about morality as if the direction is from internal desires and these in turn get impressed onto the world. The assumption is that I, as a realist, have to hold the opposite view, that morality is the world impressing itself on me. This is as far as I'm concerned another way of conceiving of Is Ought. This issue starts to get difficult with Blackburn's Quasi-realism which as I read it tries to show how you start with this expressivism and that that in turn explains how we start making the truth apt claims that make up our normal moral talk, and that this talk really is truth apt. Simon Blackburn is essentially an expressivist who doesn't deny cognitivism. The point is that what makes Blackburn's moral philosophy distinctive is already a blurring of the lines between the various distinctions between direction of fit.
Here's my view:
1) Something like Simon Blackburn's expressivist story is a plausible story of moral motivation.
2) It's possible to create a plausible story of moral motivation that passes in the opposite direction so that we start with facts about the world and end with genuinely motivating statements.
3) If we can create perfectly equivalent theories that go in both directions then we have good reason to doubt that there's a distinction to be drawn in either direction.
4) There is no meaningful (necessary) distinction between fact and value: each implies the other.
2 in particular needs a bit of extra work to become clear. What I need for this argument to really take hold is a theory of perception and this needs two things.
The first thing we need us a theory of what it is like to perceive. I'm still trying to get clear on what is needed to argue this but I think I'm probably not on bad ground thinking that being motivated to act will probably do everything I need here. A rough sketch of my argument will probably go that motivation forms a part of our everyday experience of reasoning but that it's hard to see anything other than the reasons themselves doing the motivating. I can try and expand on that in a separate comment if you're interested but there's not much there yet.
The second thing we need is a way to deal with familiar, old fashioned skepticism: How do I know I really am perceiving facts about the world. I'm only just starting on reading about perception, at least anywhere past the odd Pinkerism about cheesecake and the familar scheme rationalism of say Locke, but what I've read so far suggests that an account of when our perceptions are genuine is necessary. It's precisely here that I therefore see science fitting because as I've pointed out previously, the first step in science training is teaching a person to recognise genuinely perceiving. What this will involve are pretty standard tests like: how clear are your concepts, do they change regularly to fit the data, are they suitably clear of bias Etc. I think this is one place where Paul W for instance will agree with me because in many ways this looks just like what moral philosophers get up to anyway.
I still don't get what you are saying such that my response was an irrelevant tangent. Your three crucial sentences are no clearer to me than taking the first one first, and the second and third later. In context, I didn't get quite what you meant, and to the extent I thought I did, I thought what I said was likely relevant.
Here's all three sentences:
Maybe so, but that is not "science determining human values". In science, you should question even those things that seem more convincing the more you think about them. Morality might not work that way, but Harris claims he is doing something different from the norm.
Let me address your first sentence more directly this time. I don't know if that will help, and I'm still not sure how the other two sentences relate. It is not clear to me that you understand Harris's project and (if it's succesful) its significance.
I do think that it is, in an interesting and quite important sense, science determining human values. If people are wondering whether to look to the scientific worldview to tell them what's good, as opposed to, say, religion, the answer is yes.
Even if they're wondering whether to look to the scientific worldview as opposed to philosophy, the answer is a qualified yes—"Yes, but they're not distinct, so the "as opposed to" part is a false presupposition."
(More than that, to the extent that there is a bunch of philosophy that presupposes that philosophy of such things is distinct from science of such things, that philosophy is missing the boat, and is the wrong place to look.)
Of course we agree that science and reason can study what values people actually hold, and that is not what is being criticized!
A lot of the criticism misses the point that what Harris claims to be identifying is not just a consensus that just happens to exist, or to be able to exist, but one which is a "natural kind"—a natural, scientifically explicable phenomenon with a particular structure, and a distinctive internal logic, which has some definite consequences.
He's saying that morality isn't just a matter of opinion that science can't tell you about, as most people think, including most scientists. There are strong constraints on what makes morality morality, and what makes unmistaken morality not mistaken.
(An analogy I used in an earlier thread is money. Whether something counts as money is in a sense "a matter of opinions"—if nobody thinks it's money, it isn't. That doesn't mean that there aren't definite objective facts about what is or isn't money, and more interestingly, non-obvious facts about what makes money money, which are independent of any consensus on whether a particular thing is money. Money is a natural kind that was more discovered than invented, which has some very objectively identifiable properties that most people don't know. If you ask "can science determine moneyness?" the answer is clearly yes in the most important sense.)
Consider the awkwardly-phrased question "Can science work out, in advance, what your values will be be if you know all the relevant stuff and work it through rationally?"
In other words, can it determine (in the sense of figure out) what moral values you will come to hold if you work it all out for yourself?
If morality is strongly convergent, as Harris thinks it is, the answer to that question is basically yes, in principle, and often in practice—science (broadly construed) can determine what you will morally value with a fairly high probability and a fair degree of specificity. There are some basic principles of morality wired into human nature, and they have a lot of consequences.
Should you be interested in that—should you take seriously what science implies about human values, and very likely what you personally would also value,if you knew enough and worked it through? Yes, definitely.
The idea is that science does have the ability, at least in principle, and to to some useful degree in practice, to be something like an oracle about moral issues, and nothing else does. Not religion, and not philosophy that isn't part of the seamless garment of rational thought, indistinguishable from other sciences. The idea that science doesn't have anything to say about morality is wrong—morality is a natural phenomenon entirely within the scope of science—and the idea that there's anywhere else to look is wrong, too.
That claim might be empirically false—e.g., if it turns out that most people's moral values do not strongly converge in reflective equilibrium, and there really are reflectively stable liberal morality and conservative morality, and/or other sorts of inarguably different moralities. It might turn out, scientifically, that human morality is more plastic and flexible and culturally programmed than Harris thinks. Cultural relativism could be empirically true, and other relativisms too.
In that case, morality would still be entirely within the scope of science, but science would not be able to determine answers to moral questions—the answers it gave would be more fundamentally conditional, and less "determinate.")
If Harris is right, though, there are determinate answers to many important moral questions, and science can determine what those answers are, usually in principle, and quite usefully often in practice.
(As it figures out the answers to many other kinds of complicated questions—often we don't have all the facts, or haven't thought of and worked through all the plausible theories, or just don't have the sheer computational power to solve intractable problems. None of that means that science is the wrong tool for the job. Generally it's the only tool for the job—if science can't figure it out, nothing can—and Harris thinks that's true of morality as well.)
When you realize that's what Harris is actually selling, you might think he's wrong, but it doesn't seem as much like a bait-and-switch when he says it's about science "determining human values." He's saying that science (broadly construed) can determine answers to questions of value in much the same way that it can determine answers to other questions, and I think he's basically right. It can't answer all questions of value, but it can't answer all other questions, either. Even it sometimes can't give an answer, or can sometimes only give an approximate answer, or can only constrain the space of answers, it's still the only game in town, and gives a whole lot of very useful answers. Nothing else does.
Paul, you may be right about what Harris thinks, but it's not what he wrote. Your version is much better than his. I don't see why you bother trying to tell us what he would have said if…he had managed it.
I think a lot of what I'm saying is fairly explicit in what Harris says, but not brought out enough, and a lot more is implicit. I don't think I'm making most of it up, or reading him much more charitably than many other people are reading him uncharitably. (Not that he didn't give people lots of reasons to be uncharitable.)
And if I'm wrong, and reading him too charitably, and my ideas are all that much better than his, then I think they're worth putting out for their own sake.
II think that there's more good stuff in there, which isn't just pedestrian, and is actually quite valuable, than a lot of his critics see, even if it's not the last word on the subject.
I'd feel less compelled to defend Harris if I didn't think his best ideas were getting bad rap along with his fuckups. I largely share those ideas, more or less, so that matters to me, irrespective of the quality of Harris's presentation, and whether he deserves a good spanking. (Which he does.)
And I'm personally annoyed with Harris for putting me in this position. He really should have done the work to engineer the secret decoder ring, rather than leaving it up to people like me. But he did.
And by the way, if anybody knows of a book that already says all this stuff clearly—and for all I know, there may be one, because I don't think what I'm saying is that weird—I'd very much like to know about it.
Ah what's implicit – well yes – there's a hell of a lot that's implicit – but that's the problem!
I really really disagree that he gets a pass because he relies on a mass of unargued assumptions. The unargued part is what makes the book so irritating and unhelpful.
You're annoyed with him for putting you in this position – well to paraphrase Kingsley Amis's reaction to Gerard Manley Hopkins's saying he had the habit of doing something or other in his poetry ("well get out of the habit then!") – get out of the position then!
Really. The book has to stand or fall on its own, not on your translation of it. And I refuse to think better of Harris on the strength of your supplying the bits that he should have.
I'm not saying I could have done a better job of arguing it than he did – but I am saying I damn well wouldn't have written a book on the subject if I couldn't! I would have pared down the subject until I thought I could manage it (E.g., I was recently reading Richard Joyce's The Myth of Morality. where he talks about "reflectively stable" intuitions and "fully-informed flawless reflection" in those words or something very close.) He does make it pretty clear that's what he's talking about when he talks about various thought experiments, Rawls's "Veil of Ignorance" / "original position" framework, etc.
(It's not uncommon for ethical philosophers to appeal to the idea of reflective equilibrium without naming it or making it explicit—it's standard operating procedure. You're more likely to see it named and discussed clearly in metaethics, where arguments at different levels must be carefully delineated and connected.)
One example of reflective non-equilibrium is the belief that homosexuality is bad because God created penises and vaginas with a particular plan in mind, and homosexual sex is a sinful tendency due to the Dark Side of your Soul, which is perversely disobedient, and giving in makes Baby Jesus cry, or any roughly similar story.
If we assume for this discussion that in fact there's no such God, and no such Soul, and homosexuality is just a difference that can't be cashed out in terms remotely like that, then people who believe that homosexuality is wrong for those reasons are not in reflective equilibrium—they maintain a negative valuation of homosexuality that depends on falsehoods and/or ungrounded preferences that would evaporate on sustained close inspection.
Now suppose somebody becomes an atheist and ditches all that stuff, but still thinks homosexuality is bad, because they haven't realized the extent to which that value depended on those beliefs (or on unreflectively absorbing it from their culture in a free-floating way). They're generally not in reflective equilibrium, either—factual evidence and thought experiments can change their minds. E.g., if you get them to seriously imagine if they were gay, and couldn't help wanting gay sex and romantic love, and enjoying it, and not finding it icky as they currently do, and so on, they'll generally come around to the idea that there's no good reason for people with that sort of tendency not to do that sort of thing, if it doesn't hurt somebody in some non-circular sense, especially if it's a net benefit to them in some non-circular sense.
In general, homophobes are not reflectively stable with respect to homosexuality, for one reason or another—there's false stuff they think that they rationally shouldn't, true stuff they should know which they don't, or stuff they just haven't worked through. (E.g., putting themselves in the other person's place, and realizing what they would do, too, in that situation, and why, and why it would be stupid to expect any similarly placed person to do otherwise.)
A reflectively stable moral intuition is one that doesn't change when you think about evidence and examples—
The assumption that there is such a thing as reflective stability underlies most most ethical philosophy, and most metaethics. IMO actually properly an empirical psychological claim, though, not an a priori principle of "philosophy."
It could in principle be the case that people have no reflectively stable moral intuitions—that there's no sense of rightness or wrongness that can't be undermined by leading people through a cleverly designed sequence of thought experiments, pumping up certain intuitions and generating new ones, without ever introducing a false "fact" or hiding a relevant actual fa
That possibility is almost never discussed, and I agree with most moral philosophers and cognitive scientists that it's apparently untrue, but it is an empirical assumption I thought I'd make explicit. It's the basis of some atheists' fears about relativism—a really radical relativism could in principle be scientifically true, and moral philosophy could reduce to nonrational persuasion—but it does not appear to be scientifically true.
I wouldn't be surprised if accommodationists tend to think that more than gnus. If you don't think there's a fundamental basis in human nature for moral argument, it's more reasonable to be afraid of anything that rocks the moral boat—best to stick with persuasive rhetoric than to go head-to-head arguing who's morally right.
I suspect that's part of Harris's motivation for writing TML—he thinks too many atheists back down and evade a fight they could win, and assume that the best they can do is frame.
Let me address your first sentence more directly this time. I don't know if that will help, and I'm still not sure how the other two sentences relate.
Look, that criticism was meant to apply to what you called "the basic idea Harris is pushing". I don't think the process described therein can be called scientific. I think it's very problematic to go around saying that you can measure the validity of an idea by the degree of unwavering conviction that you have in it. You responded by quoting various ideas that Harris is pushing that allegedly conform to the definition "how science determines moral values", but those were not exactly the ideas that I was criticizing. Whatever the merits of Harris's "project" in entirety, this at least looks like a stumbling block given what we normally tell people about the workings of science.
It is not clear to me that you understand Harris's project and (if it's succesful) its significance.
Normally I like your comments, but I don't think this Courtier's reply-type attitude is at all productive unless you can identify some specific misunderstandings, like I've tried to do. I'm all for the project of naturalizing ethics but from what I've read, Harris hasn't really done any heavy lifting in that regard
Yes, I already gathered what you mean by it from previous comments. I didn't ask you to explain it, I asked for examples from the book where you think Harris is arguing for this. This is pretty thin gruel:
He does make it pretty clear that's what he's talking about when he talks about various thought experiments, Rawls's "Veil of Ignorance" / "original position" framework, etc.
I know about the Veil of Ignorance, and I disagree that it makes it "pretty clear" that Harris is talking about reflective equilibrium within a person, rather than the best ways to organize society. Of course, a consistency of principles is generally recommendable in any kind of thinking, so I have no doubt that Harris supports it wrt morality. But I hesitate to continue this discussion if it's going to lead to more patronizing lectures in lieu of actual responses.
Suppose that I tried to convince you that although the Origin of Species doesn't explicitly deal with the subject of its title, it does so implicitly (there's a case to be made either way). Would you be satisfied if I told you it's "pretty clear" from "various examples" that it's in the book and insinuated that "it's not clear to me that you understand Darwin's project or it's significance" and told you at length about my preferred theories of speciation?
Chapter 1 is quick and dirty and polemical, but basically doing what it seems everybody usually does, if they bother—showing that when people make moral claims, a little probing shows that they're always related to the interests of some conscious creature(s) or other. (E.g., other people who'd get hurt if people behaved a certain way, or offense given to a God whose interests are more important than human interests, or something that somehow matters to someone else.)
Harris certainly doesn't do a good, careful, clearly structured, or thorough job of that—he's basically painting a picture and hoping people will think about it and "get it," and moving on. (esp. pp. 32-38) It almost seems like an argument from obviousness, but it's not that. There's more real argument in there than it seems, but the structure isn't as clear as it should be, partly because he interleaves discussions of different basic issues.
I think this link will work to access that section in preview on Google Books
In a quick-and-dirty way he's establishing that when we talk about morality, what it turns out on reflection to mean is in fact caring about the interests of conscious creatures—and if his brisk discussion doesn't convince you, try it, you'll see.
That is actually a pretty standard move in the professional literature on ethics. It's often simply assumed that readers already know that morality is basically about adjudicating conflicts of interest, typically between different persons, but sometimes between persons and non-persons (e.g., animals capable of suffering) or between a person and later states of that person. (To the extent that taking care of your "future selves" is regarded as a moral issue.) And if any argument is given, it's generally a quick, intuitive one that gets the idea across, and a claim that nobody's ever made sense of the word "morality" in any other way. On reflection, it turns out to be essential to what the word "morality" means—apparently necessary, and maybe sufficient, on reflection.
Interleaved with that attempt to establish what moral terms presuppose (concern for others well-being), Harris is addressing other issues. In particular p. 32 starts with seeming to address the issue about why we ought to care about the well being of others, anyhow.
The answer that Harris gives is the right one, but looks suspiciously like a bait-and-switch evasion of the question, in the way he says it and structures his interleaved arguments.
That answer, plainly put, is that Harris can't give you reasons to have a basic concern for others, if that's just not the sort of thing you care about on informed reflection. He can only tell you that if you're a moral person, you do, or will in reflective equilibrium—-and consequences of such a concern, if you have it, which you can recognize in reflective equilibrium.
Just before launching into what he can say, Harris says
While I do not think anyone sincerely believes that this kind of moral skepticism makes sense, there is no shortage of people who will press this point with a ferocity that often passes for sincerity.
That's a tremendously stupid thing to say at that point, even though I think it's true in the sense he means it. It makes it sound like he's disagreeing with philosophers who call themselves "moral skeptics," but he's not. What he's disagreeing with is a certain extreme sort of naive moral relativist, which again is not what "moral relativist" generally means among professional philosophers who call themselves relativists. Serious foot-shooting there.
He also screws up similarly on p. 38, in discussing Hume's is/ought distinction. Again what's wrong is not that what he's saying is wrong, but that he says it so stupidly and confusinglyUnfortunately, he bashes "many moral skeptics" who take the is/ought thing way too far, but what he really means is naive relativists and outright Dumptyists who think they can be the masters of the word "moral," and make it mean whatever they mean it to mean. That's not what "moral skeptics" and "relativists" in philosophy generally do; it's the kind of crap you're way more likely to get from a certain kind of postmodernists in English or anthro departments, or a certain kind of physical scientists who don't know shit about moral philosophy, or common-or-garden dumbasses on the internet who think philosophers are simply wanking.
It's simply amazing how much stuff Harris can say that I think is extremely interesting and probably true, while simultaneously coming off as saying naive and obnoxious shit.
About my Courtierly style—I didn't mean it to sound (or be) that way. I honestly haven't quite understood what you do or don't quite understand about what Harris is up to, and what exactly you're asking for. If you haven't yet read the book, it would be entirely understandable if you don't know what Harris is really up to. (And given that it's far from his best-written book, not entirely surprising even if you have. IMO, it does take some decoding to realize what he doesn't mean, but may seem to mean, if you don't "get" where he's coming from.)
If my last note was more longwinded shit that's not what you're asking for, too, I am sincerely sorry. It was a sincere try to show how Harris uses the idea of reflective equilibrium, in a way that is "obviously" reasonable when you see it done, without explicitly naming or justifying the idea. If that's just more longwinded not what you're asking for, I'm sincerely sorry.
BTW, windy, one of the things that you've said that I actually haven't known what to make of is:
I think it's very problematic to go around saying that you can measure the validity of an idea by the degree of unwavering conviction that you have in it.
I honestly don't know what you mean by that, in a way that applies to something specific we're discussing.
I don't know if you're talking about coming to reflective equilibrium about basic values, or clarifying moral concepts, or whether you really mean validity, or actually mean truth. I actually don't know how to give you a more focused answer than to show the kind of several-page argument Harris is making, and what I think its basic structure is, and let you pick something more specific and concrete to object to.
But I probably should have just said that first, before volunteering the multipage example and gloss, and I'm sorry if that was a fuckup, tooYou know who's a utilitarian? Hume. He agrees that it's good to promote the general welfare, as he puts it. He just denies that facts about the general welfare *logically entail*, on their own, any facts about morality. To be a utilitarian in terms of normative theory is just to say that actions are good if and only if they maximize utility. But claiming that claims about goodness *mean the same thing* as claims about utility goes beyond that. Refusing to carve a healthy patient up for his organs in order to save five other people – is this good? does this maximize utility?
Hey, that a lot of people on the project does't stop me from developing my thinking on it. If anything it just spurs me on more: see, I'm on the right track! Actually, if you could throw some names at me it could help make feel more comfortable. I feel a bit naked out in the wilderness amongst all these moral dualists.
About the only thing I can add is that I think there are independent psychological reason to think that a naturalised ethics is the way to go and this is where I think Harris has the most weight on his side. In particular I think that there are elements of belief and accepting reasons that Is Ought fails to capture.
In what you quoted from me, I didn't say anything about Utilitarianism, and in the section of Harris I was discussing, neither did he. (Though clearly that's the direction he wants to go, and I'm personally pretty sympathetic with going pretty far that way.)
The argument was that morality is about conflicts of interest, and some kind of "due concern" for (self and) others' interests. It doesn't establishing that the right way to arbitrate conflicts of interest is to maximize total or average utility. You could get pretty Kantian if you want, or Rule Utilitarian, or go with a straight Utilitarianish thing but with a very different weighting function, like Rawlsian minimaxing.
It's even consistent with God's interests being paramount, and humans' interests being much less important, so that you could agree with Aquinas that blasphemy is a more serious immorality than murder, because "due consideration" of God's interests is different from "due consideration" of a human's. (But that evaporates when you realize that no such God is plausible, on reflection in light of facts.)
The argument that far mainly serves to show that the Dumptyists / extreme naive relativists are wrong—morality isn't just any damn thing you say it is, and does clearly have something to do with advancing well-being or limiting harm or something like that, for somebody.
That's a very good summation of what I've always read Harris as saying about this. It's not that any particular wellbeing or kind of wellbeing counts as morality, rather that if you strip wellbeing out of the discussion it's not clear you're talking about anything that could count as morals.
I'll also point out I'm officially a fan. A significant part of me is hoping that you wouldn't mind inserting a plug for your own work if it's available.
Caryn:
I feel compelled to add that naturalising ethics isn't ultimately my goal here. I've come here because I've a goal to try to redeem the Logical Positivists for my dissertation and one of the reasons why is that I think there's something to be said about the intuition that meaning fundamentally is about the world. One of the conclusions is that it's just strange for some people to say that there could be anything we could meaningfully talk about that didn't respond to the methods of science and so bang head on I need to engage with the expressivists in order to properly grasp the question: where better than in ethics?
Here's my question: what do you think Harris said that somehow Hume left out? Hume agrees that it's good to promote the general welfare. He agrees that science can and does inform our understanding of well-being (though of course Hume didn't have access to fMRIs.)
Using modern scientific equipment might make what individuals value more clear than, say, asking them what they value. The majority of people might well cohere on similar values. But what it is that people value is not an identity map with what is moral, and nor is well-being. This is *precisely Hume's point*.
Montag, any number of people are also working on salvaging logical positivism. :) Check the most recent papers from the Montreal conference when they come out, and start trawling philpapers. You've seen Timmons and Horgan?
Oh Lordy me Moore! I've been curious about where Intuitionism sits with me. Certainly that Timmons and Horgan seems to have all the usual suspects. In particular I'm eyeing up the Thompson and the Schafer-Landau essays so I'll see if I can get a copy out.
As for trawling Philpapers you know not once did it dawn on me to put Logical Positivisim in there! I've actually been desperate to find a decent account of when and why it was supposed to have been put to bed. The best I've got so far was from a tutor and it roughly seemed to go "Quine and his ilk raised some issues with the project and then everyone just quietly went out and did something different". There certainly wasn't a great collapse, or even much of an argument against it, despite what Mary Midgeley says. Buggery as if my bloody summer weren't looking squeezed already. :)
I actually don't know how to give you a more focused answer than to show the kind of several-page argument Harris is making
I thought that was what you were doing in this thread until now- trying to clarify what Harris had explained so "uncharacteristically badly" in TML, now you say it can't really be done? :)
I don't know if you're talking about coming to reflective equilibrium about basic values, or clarifying moral concepts, or whether you really mean validity, or actually mean truth.
Truth is perhaps a too loaded concept, but Harris says moral ideas can be 'facts' or 'valid' like other scientific facts, right? I don't think I was saying anything especially interesting or controversial, just the basic Saganite idea that we should be careful about implying that strong feelings or the 'obviousness' of an idea or a popular consensus have something to do with validity. (yes, I know that's not the entirety of Harris's argument about morality)
I honestly haven't quite understood what you do or don't quite understand about what Harris is up to
Excuse me, but if I tell you a criticism applies to something specific in this thread (hint: if there's a blockquote immediately above a paragraph, that's usually it), stop trying to make it about whether I "understand what Harris is up to". You seem to be hell-bent on interpreting everything I say as some particular naive criticism of Harris's entire "project". (Like in #85, where you quoted my answer to the "Pinkerism", and the whole thing about the "basic idea"). I think you have now poisoned the well to the extent that it's useless to continue this discussion.
» Ophelia (#86):You don't care what he really thinks? *rubs his eyes* I would have expected that kind of statement about somebody you have a certain personal aversion towards. Did I miss a memo?
And about this "lot of people": who and where are they again exactly? I seem to remember that you said it wasn't anonymous commenters on blogs, but I'm a bit foggy about names or other particulars. ;> InI watched it last time Caryn linked to it and I was pretty disappointed.
I was especially disappointed when Blackburn skated over the issue of whether middle-class people spending money on family vacations was immoral when the same money could save several lives in the third world, and went on to say that its actually a good thing that people do that.
It sounded a whole lot like an unreflective defense of unreflective self-serving middle class values, entirely missing the point of Singer's Utilitarian critique and just denying it had any real force or any useful implications.
I don't think Blackburn actually thinks what it sounded like he was saying; I'd guess that he was so intent on distancing himself from Singer's more radical conclusions, and on emphasizing how it's not that simple, that he sounded like something he isn't, defending something he's not.
I got the same sense (IIRC) from some of the stuff he said that seemed directed more at Harris.
I sorta expected Blackburn to agree with Harris on basic issues up to an interesting point, and make it reasonably clear where he thinks Harris goes wrong. I was particularly interested to hear what that of divergence would be.
I don't think either made the right distinctions clearly—e.g., what does Harris mean by science, and what does Blackburn mean by philosophy that's distinct from what he means by "science"—and I thought they were mostly talking past each other. I wasn't surprised that Harris did that, but I was disappointed that Blackburn did, too, with babies and bathwater flying both ways.
I think Harris has largely wrong-footed the science vs. philosophy thing, but I'm disappointed when philosophers don't straighten it out and make their disagreements with him clearer.
I have a lot of respect for Blackburn, but I haven't been much impressed with his responses to Harris so far.
Paul, I said this on the Harris and Pigliucci thread: it's not so much that Blackburn's talk was disappointing, it's that it was lazy and mostly glaringly wrong. BTW: Blackburn has a review of TML in which he goes off the rails right at the start, pretty much making as little sense as Pigliucci. He asserts that Harris is "triumphalist", conveniently failing to mention that Harris repeatedly puts on the dampers by talking about "in principle" and "this is only the beginning"; and the Brave New World jibe that was just as ignorant when Pigliucci made it. Which is when I stopped reading; if he cannot be bothered to get these simple things right, I cannot be bothered to put up with his review.
You don't care what he really thinks? *rubs his eyes* I would have expected that kind of statement about somebody you have a certain personal aversion towards. Did I miss a memo?
Come on. I don't care what he really thinks as opposed to what he wrote in the book. That was the issue, obviously. That was clear enough in what I said:
you
Of course I don't care what he "really" thinks! Why would I? It's not about him, it's about the book. If he doesn't successfully say it, then he doesn't – what's really in his head is totally beside the point.
InNo, you certainly have not seen me saying the book's ballsiness gets on my nerves – I don't equate confidence or courage with testicles, and I'm regularly irritated by people who do. I would never say such a dopy self-hating thing.
What do you mean continued flogging? What do you mean justifies? "Continued flogging" could be an alternate name for this site, and I don't consider that I need justification, since I don't force anyone to read it, and no one pays me for the privilege.
Peter, I'd say that Blackburn, very carefully and in clear language, lays out the distinction between facts (which are about the way the world is) and values (which are about the way we think the world ought to be.) Science can't tell us how we think the world ought to be; it can only tell us whether or not there's a better approximation to the way we've already decided we'd like for it to be.
The well-known critiques of utilitarianism are glossed nicely into the talk as well, but in a way that doesn't require the audience to have done any prior reading about the well-known critiques of utilitarianism. Harris could have done this as well, but didn't.
Paul, since Blackburn isn't a utilitarian, he's going to focus on the points where he has a metaethical difference with Harris and Singer. The interesting parts aren't where everyone reaches consensus, but where we don't. Disagreements help us locate where the *problems* with getting at the truth actually lie.
I would say this is precisely correct and addresses your complaint about middle-class values: …if Bentham's hedonist is in one brain state and Aristotle's active subject is in another, as no doubt they would be, it is a moral, not an empirical, problem to say which is to be preferred. Even if this were solved, how are we to balance my right to pursue my wellbeing against the demand to help maximise that of everyone? Striving to maximise the sum of human wellbeing is making oneself a servant of the world, and it cannot be science that tells me to do that…
Oops: should read Science can't tell us how we *should* think the world ought to be; it can only tell us whether or not there's a better approximation to the way we've already decided we'd like for it to be.
» Ophelia (#120): Come on. I don't care what he really thinks as opposed to what he wrote in the book
Yes, and I got that the first time around. My surprise persists, though. I would have thought that the issues themselves are much more important that whether Sam Harris was Right™ in his book. And if one is interested in the issues, then one would be tempted to spend more time talking about the issues than about how misguided the book is. My impression had been that you are more interested in the issues than the book, hence my surprise.
One reason you might think the book deserves this much attention is that there is a kind of cult following that could use some antidote—but then I would again respectfully ask who and where these lots of people that you mentioned actually are. | eng | 2bb20ea9-cc29-4ea7-8a31-4b784245f9a6 | https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/the-morality-of-the-gaps/ |
This is how Spain celebrates Halloween (a festival invented in Galicia)
The Halloween holiday is celebrated across Spain not least because it involves a national bank holiday tagged onto a weekend which is known as a puente and ensures that everyone has three days off.
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But of course this is Spain which means that things are done their own way, so don't expect carved pumpkins and trick or treating to done in the same way as it is in America.
Three, four or even five day celebration
Friday is a bank holiday across all of Spain to mark All Saints Day.
Some regions of Spain (Madrid, Galicia) close the schools on Thursday October 31st and in Galicia it is also a day off on Monday November 3rd.
Photo: AFP
Dressing up
Children are expected to dress up in spooky costumes for their last day of school before the Halloween long weekend, oh and the teachers too, and things generally focus on the creepy. Think witches, zombies and devils rather than superheroes, TV stars and literary favourites.
Some towns stage community trick or treating events inviting children in dress-up to visit a circuit of shops where they will be given candy and treats culminating in a costume party in a local square.
At night pubs, clubs and restaurants will be staging Halloween themed events – there's no work the next day remember so it's an excuse to party.
You might also come across an organised zombie march taking place in a plaza near you.
Galicia: The birthplace of Halloween
In Galicia, the northwestern region famous for its rich Gaelic folklore and ghost legends, Halloween is a seriously big deal. In fact, some argue that it was invented here.
Known as Samaín the ancient autumn festival celebrated in Galicia was a precursor of America's Halloween.
In Galician villages such as Cedeira, O Vicedo and Narón, kids and adults have for centuries dressed up as spirits and magical beings, organised death marches, carved scary faces in pumpkins and gone trick or treating.
It starts on October 31st with the Noite dos Calacús (Night of the Pumpkins) involving as pumpkin carving, costume parties, bonfires, rituals.
Look out for the queimada – a hot punch made from orujo mixed with herbs, sugar, lemon peel, apple and coffee beans. It is brewed in a special clay pot and stirred with a ladle while incantations banishing evil are chanted over it as it burns with a blue flame.
Photo: AFP
Catalonia, chestnuts and witches
Across Catalonia, towns stage the traditional Castanyada – the traditions of which date back hundreds of years and involve a funereal feast of vegetables, nuts, chestnuts and small bread rolls known as panallets.
Halloween is also known in Spain as Dia de las Brujas and you'll see creepy decorations of witches propped up all over the place.
The small town of Sant Feliu Sasserra near Bages in Catalonia really celebrates the witch cult honouring 23 women sentenced to death for witchcraft during the Inquisition.
All Saints Day
A man tends the grave of a loved on in Almudena cemetery in Madrid. Photo: Lynn Spreadbury/The Local
November 1st is the Día de Todos los Santos when families gather in cemeteries to tend to their loved ones' graves taking fresh flowers and special pastries.
These include the peculiarly named buñuelos de viento – nun's farts – which are bite-sized donuts filled wih cream; huesos de santo - bones of the holy - which are finger sized tubes of marzipan; and panellets, nutty pasties.
HolyWin
It's not all about ghouls and ghosties.
Suggested outfits from the Bishopric of Cadiz and Ceuta. Photo: Shower of Roses
The Spanish Catholic Church has been fighting back against the popularity of the "satanic festival" of Halloween by urging good Christian children to forgo zombie, ghost and devil outfits and instead dress up as "saints, virgins and apostles".
You may come across one of the "Holywins" parties thrown by churches or catholic schools with children dressing up their favourite saint, a monk or nun, or even one of the apostles.
"With Holywins, which stands for Holiness Wins, one can avoid the pagan festival and reclaim the meaning of the Catholic feast day of All Saints," reads a statement from the Diocese of Cartagena. | eng | c4b4e320-73e8-46f4-b209-9f55314d60bc | https://www.thelocal.es/20191031/how-spain-celebrates-halloween |
The French Revolution
French Revolution
French Minister Wakes Up!
On 22 February 1787, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, the minister of finances, convened an Assembly of Notables to deal with the financial situation - that France was going broke.
Jul 13, 1787
Assembly Wakes Up!
On 13 July, the assembly demanded that Louis XVI call the States General to discuss the issue.
Dec 18, 1787
King Yawns.
On the 18th of December, the king promised to call the Estates General - within five years.
Aug 8, 1788
King says "Okay, Fine!"
After being continuously poked by a new Minister of Finances, Jacques Necker, who was sympathetic to the Third Estate, the King, on 8 August 1788, agreed to call the Estates-General on 5 May of 1789.
May 5, 1789
The Estates General Convenes.
On 5 May 1789 amidst general festivities, the Estates-General convened in an elaborate but temporary Salle des États set up in one of the courtyards of the official Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs in the town of Versailles.
May 6, 1789
Uh-oh, something's wrong.
The Third Estate (the bourgeoisie and commoners), who had been led to think that the meeting of the Estates General would be fair and democratic, realise that (1) they have been seated in such a way they are literally dwarfed by the First and Second Estates, and (2) that they still do not have an equal and fair vote in any decisions made.
Jun 17, 1789
Grumble grumble!
On 17 June 1789 the Third Estate group, led by Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, began to call themselves the National Assembly.
Jun 20, 1789
Omg! What?! The Tennis Court Oath.
On the morning of 20 June, the Third Estate (now called the National Assembly were shocked to discover that the doors to their chamber were locked and guarded by soldiers. Immediately fearing the worst and anxious that a royal attack by King Louis XVI was imminent, the deputies congregated in a nearby indoor real tennis court where they took a solemn collective oath.
Jul 11, 1789
Necker gets fired!
On 11 July 1789, with troops at Versailles, Sèvres, the Champ de Mars, and Saint-Denis, Louis XVI, acting under the influence of the conservative nobles of his privy council, dismissed and banished his finance minister, Jacques Necker, who had been sympathetic to the Third Estate.
Jul 12, 1789
News Reaches Paris. Demonstrations.
News of Necker's dismissal reached Paris in the afternoon of Sunday, 12 July. The Parisians generally presumed that the dismissal marked the start of a coup by conservative elements. Demonstrations begin. Then people start plundering places wherever food, guns, and supplies were held - places belonging to the First and Second Estate.
Jul 13, 1789
Rumours Spread.
The next day, on 13 July, rumours spread that supplies were being hoarded at Saint-Lazare, a huge property of the clergy, which functioned as convent, hospital, school and even as a jail. An angry mob broke in and plundered the property, seizing 52 wagons of wheat which were taken to the public market.
Jul 14, 1789
Storming of the Bastille
The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. The medieval fortress and prison in Paris known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris. | eng | 3c286579-cb20-47ac-81bb-25c814f6e8f7 | https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/63408 |
Why Are Cafes So Expensive
Ever wonder why grabbing a coffee or a snack at cafes can feel like you're emptying your wallet? You're not alone. Why do these spots seem so pricey, especially when you're aiming for those healthier options? Let's dive into why and share some hacks on enjoying cafe goodies without feeling broke.
Yeah, cafes can make your wallet cry sometimes, but there are reasons, and ways to be smart about it. Once you get the lowdown on cafe prices, you'll know when and where to get the best deals. Plus, there are some sneaky ways to make your money stretch further. Keep reading!
What's Up With Cafe Prices?
Okay, so cafes get the rap for being on the pricey side, but let's break it down. Location is a biggie. City cafes? They've got higher bills to pay like rent and paying their crew, not to mention stiff competition. They might feel pricier, but often you're paying for a vibe or experience that's one of a kind.
Also, some cafes serve up fancy stuff, like top-notch coffee and unique pastries, which can be a bit more than grabbing a coffee at the gas station or a snack at a fast food joint. And sometimes, that extra cost is totally worth it if you're after the good stuff. Another thing to keep in mind: prices can shuffle around depending on the season, so that favorite iced latte might be cheaper when it's less in demand.
Is The Food Worth It?
Flavor is king, right? If it doesn't hit the taste buds right, why bother? Fresh and quality ingredients? A big must-have. And let's not forget about nutrition. You don't want to munch on something that's all fluff and no substance. With all these boxes to tick, it's no surprise cafes might charge a bit more. Just make sure you feel it's worth the dough you're shelling out.
All About The Taste
When we talk about cafe food, flavor is front and center. Cafes have to nail it, whether it's a killer coffee, a perfect tea, or mouth-watering pastries. And yeah, they've got to be fresh and made with the good stuff. But while we all love tasty treats, no one wants to feel ripped off. So, cafes, give us that yummy experience without emptying our pockets! Bottom line: when you hit up a cafe, you're hoping for a treat that feels worth it, not just a fancy price tag.
Freshness
When we're talking good food, it's all about that fresh vibe. Cafes should totally get their stuff from local farmers and go for what's ripe and ready right now. This tells us they actually care about the food they're serving up. And, if it's from just around the corner, you know it's fresher than something that's been on a long trip. Besides tasting better, it's cool for the planet too – less travel means it's eco-friendly. So, cafes gotta keep it real and make their dishes super fresh – it's like a hug on a plate!
Nutrition
Now that we're on the fresh track, let's chat about the healthy stuff. Checking out how big the serving is and what's in the food can help you eat better when you're out. Cafes should serve up dishes that are both yummy and good for you. Having different healthy options gives everyone a choice, and who doesn't love trying something new? In short, cafes gotta know their nutrition facts so we know what we're diving into.
Examining The Service Level
Food's dope, but that's not the only thing. How a cafe treats you is a big deal too. Baristas need to know their stuff. A good one can whip up a drink in no time and still have a chat. They gotta know their brews, especially if you're kinda lost on what to order.
And good vibes don't stop there. Little extras, like a free cookie or a drink on the house, make us feel special. That's why sometimes cafes might seem pricey. Some even have live bands or fun stuff to do. It's all about getting more than just a cuppa!
Researching Cafe Deals
Okay, so cafes can be a bit pricey, but you don't always gotta empty your wallet. Do some digging online, and you might score some sweet deals.
Some places drop discounts online to get new faces in the door. So, give it a quick Google before you head out. And don't be shy – sometimes just asking for a deal works. Also, look out for cheaper menu stuff like a lunch deal or half-off drinks. And keep an ear out for deals like "Taco Tuesday" – total game-changer.
Making Smart Choices To Save Money
Chillin' at a cafe is the best. Who doesn't love the smell of coffee and pastries? But yeah, it can hit the wallet hard. But with some planning and savvy choices, you can still hang without spending a ton.
Look for deals or loyalty cards. Many places have stuff like discounted drinks or points for every visit. And always shop around. A little look-see online can find you the best deals in town. So, keep it smart with your cafe spending, and you'll be hanging out more without stressing about the bill.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Much Does a Coffee Cost at Cafes, on Average?
The price tag for a coffee can be all over the place, based on where the beans come from and how they brew it. Like, a fancy espresso made with top-notch beans that are roasted right there might set you back more than one from some regular pre-ground stuff. And those pour-over coffees that need all the precise pouring? Usually pricier than your basic drip coffee. So, you might be paying anywhere from $2 to over $6, depending on where you're at.
How's a Cafe Different From a Restaurant?
Sure, cafes and restaurants have a bunch in common, but they've got their differences too. A cafe's usually cozier than a restaurant, and they're big on the whole barista skill thing – think special coffees like lattes or cappuccinos. The menu? Usually shorter and straight to the point. Even though cafes are smaller, they can be pretty pricey, especially since they're all about that coffee magic and sometimes they're in those expensive city spots.
What's Everyone Ordering at Cafes?
Every cafe's got its own vibe and specialties, but there's stuff you'll see everywhere. Local bites like sandwiches and salads are big hits. And on the drink side? Lattes, cappuccinos, mochas, and smoothies get a lot of love. Plus, those fresh pastries made with local stuff? They fly off the shelves.
Any Deals Going On at Cafes?
Cafes can put a dent in your wallet, but you can catch some deals. Loads of cafes have these loyalty things where you rack up points or get a discount on that special drink after you've been there a bunch of times. And hey, watch out for those special deals they throw out now and then. If you wanna save a bit, keep your eyes peeled for these cool offers.
Do Cafes Burn a Bigger Hole in the Pocket Than Other Food Places?
Cafes can be on the pricier side compared to other food joints. They're all about those unique ingredients and fancy drinks, and that kinda bumps up the price. Plus, with cafes serving up stuff like sandwiches and salads, prices can go up because of all the effort to make 'em.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it's clear that cafes are more expensive than other types of food establishments. This is likely due to the wide range of items on their menus, which offer customers a variety of choices from coffee and pastries to sandwiches and salads. Many cafes also provide discounts for loyal customers or for large orders, so be sure to ask about any specials when you visit your favorite cafe. All in all, despite the higher prices, many people still choose to frequent cafes because they enjoy the atmosphere as well as the quality of food and drinks available there. | eng | 141d08de-6edb-4911-b3f5-a7bd26a83eb6 | https://breadwinnerscafe.net/why-are-cafes-so-expensive/ |
What Did Twitch Suicide Note Say? Understanding the Impact and Response
In recent years, the issue of mental health and its relation to social media platforms has gained significant attention. One particular incident that shook the online community involved a Twitch streamer's alleged suicide note, which was shared on Reddit. The incident sparked widespread concern and raised questions about the responsibility of platforms like Twitch in safeguarding their users' well-being. In this article, we will delve into the details of the incident, examine the impact of Twitch on mental health, explore community responses, and discuss the importance of mental health resources and responsible platform management.
Introduction
Social media platforms have become an integral part of our lives, providing spaces for connection, entertainment, and self-expression. However, the rise of these platforms has also brought to light the potential negative effects they can have on mental health. The incident involving a Twitch suicide note exemplifies the delicate balance between freedom of expression and ensuring the safety and well-being of individuals within online communities.
Twitch Suicide Note Incident: Background Information
The Twitch suicide note incident refers to an event where a streamer posted a distressing message on Reddit, suggesting thoughts of self-harm. The post quickly gained attention, triggering a response from the online community, concerned about the person's safety and well-being. The incident exposed the vulnerability and emotional struggles that some individuals may face, even within the seemingly glamorous world of live streaming.
The Impact of Twitch on Mental Health
Twitch, as one of the leading live streaming platforms, has a vast and diverse user base. While the platform offers opportunities for content creators to connect with their audience, it also exposes them to various challenges. The pressure to maintain a consistent online presence, deal with online harassment, and cope with the unpredictability of live interactions can have a significant impact on mental well-being.
Understanding the Power of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms like Twitch have immense power to influence the lives of individuals. They can shape perceptions, trigger emotions, and amplify both positive and negative experiences. As users, it is crucial to recognize the impact of these platforms on our mental health and take proactive measures to maintain a healthy relationship with them.
The Controversy Surrounding Twitch Suicide Note
The Twitch suicide note incident sparked controversy within the online community. Some individuals questioned the authenticity of the message, while others expressed concern for the well-being of the streamer. The incident raised important discussions about the responsibility of platforms like Twitch in promptly addressing mental health concerns and providing appropriate support.
Community Response and Support
In response to the incident, the Twitch community rallied together to show support and concern for the individual involved. Many users reached out with messages of encouragement and resources for seeking help. This collective response highlighted the power of a supportive community and the potential positive impact it can have on individuals struggling with mental health issues.
Mental Health Resources and Awareness
The incident served as a reminder of the importance of mental health resources and awareness within the online community. Platforms like Twitch can play a significant role in promoting mental well-being by providing resources and raising awareness about mental health issues. It is crucial for platforms to collaborate with mental health professionals and organizations to develop comprehensive resources and guidelines that can support individuals in need. These resources can include information on helplines, mental health websites, and strategies for self-care.
The Importance of Responsible Platform Management
The Twitch suicide note incident shed light on the responsibility that platforms have in managing the content and interactions within their communities. While it is essential to prioritize freedom of expression, it is equally important to implement safety measures to protect users from harm. This incident prompted a reevaluation of moderation policies and the need for more proactive measures to identify and address potential mental health crises.
Balancing Free Expression and Safety Measures
Achieving a balance between free expression and safety measures is a complex task for platforms like Twitch. It requires a careful approach that considers the well-being of individuals while still allowing for open and honest communication. Striking this balance involves implementing content moderation systems, training moderators on mental health issues, and providing clear guidelines for user behavior.
Strategies for Building a Supportive Community
Creating a supportive community on platforms like Twitch is crucial for promoting positive mental health outcomes. Streamers and viewers alike can contribute to fostering a safe and inclusive environment. This can be achieved through open dialogue, empathy, and the promotion of healthy coping mechanisms. Encouraging users to share their experiences, seek support, and provide encouragement can go a long way in creating a compassionate community.
Lessons Learned from the Twitch Suicide Note Incident
The Twitch suicide note incident served as a wake-up call for both Twitch and its users. It highlighted the need for improved mental health support, better communication channels, and stronger crisis intervention protocols. It reminded us of the fragility of individuals and the importance of prioritizing their well-being over popularity or engagement metrics.
Steps Taken by Twitch to Address Mental Health Concerns
In response to the incident, Twitch took several steps to address mental health concerns within its community. The platform partnered with mental health organizations to provide resources and support to users. They implemented features such as safety checks, automated moderation tools, and clearer reporting mechanisms for users to flag concerning content. These proactive measures aim to create a safer environment for users and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
The Role of Individuals in Creating a Positive Online Environment
While platforms like Twitch have a responsibility to manage their communities, individuals also play a crucial role in shaping the online environment. It is essential for users to educate themselves about mental health, practice empathy, and treat others with respect and kindness. By actively participating in creating a positive online culture, individuals can contribute to a healthier and more supportive community.
The Need for Continued Discussion and Action
The Twitch suicide note incident should not be forgotten or brushed aside. It should serve as a catalyst for continued discussions about mental health, responsible platform management, and the well-being of online communities. By engaging in open conversations, sharing personal experiences, and advocating for change, we can work towards a future where mental health is prioritized and supported on all social media platforms.
Conclusion
The Twitch suicide note incident shed light on the complexities of mental health in the online world. It emphasized the importance of platforms like Twitch taking proactive measures to address mental health concerns and provide support to their users. By fostering a supportive community, raising awareness, and implementing responsible platform management, we can create a safer and more empathetic online environment. Let us remember that behind every screen, there is a real person with real struggles, and together, we can make a positive difference.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Q: Can platforms like Twitch monitor all user interactions to prevent incidents like the Twitch suicide note?
A: While platforms can implement moderation systems, it is challenging to monitor every interaction in real-time.
Q: What can individuals do to support someone who may be struggling with mental health on Twitch or other platforms?
A: Individuals can reach out with messages of support, encourage seeking professional help, and provide resources for mental health support. It's essential to listen, show empathy, and avoid judgment.
Q: How can Twitch improve its response to mental health concerns in the future?
Q: Are there any initiatives or campaigns addressing mental health awareness on Twitch?
A: Yes, Twitch has launched initiatives like Mental Health Awareness Week, where streamers and viewers come together to discuss mental health, share personal experiences, and promote support and understanding.
Q: What are some signs that someone may be struggling with their mental health while streaming on Twitch?
A: Signs can vary, but common indicators may include sudden changes in behavior, expressing feelings of hopelessness, or talking about self-harm. It is crucial to take such signs seriously and encourage seeking professional help.
Q: How can individuals take care of their mental well-being while engaging with Twitch or other social media platforms?
A: It's important to set healthy boundaries, take breaks when needed, engage in offline activities, and prioritize self-care. Connecting with supportive communities and seeking professional help when necessary can also contribute to positive mental well-being.
These FAQs aim to address common concerns and provide guidance on how to navigate mental health issues within the context of Twitch and other social media platforms | eng | 9aaad618-adbd-40dc-9bca-5f232b551c7b | https://quordletoday.net/what-did-twitch-suicide-note-say-understanding-the-impact-and-response/ |
Rhino Blinds R75-RTE 2 Person Hunting Ground Blind
Ginsco Woodland Camouflage Netting
The Rhino Blinds R75-RTE 2 Person Hunting Ground Blind is a reasonably good Hunting Blind for people with about $110 to spend.
The Ginsco Woodland Camouflage Netting Rhino Blinds R75-RTE 2 Person Hunting Ground Blind and Ginsco Woodland Camouflage Netting, here's a summary of what we know:
No sources that do their own in-depth testing have considered the Rhino Blinds R75-RTE 2 Person Hunting Ground Blind to be a good enough purchase for it to earn a spot in their Hunting Blind roundups, which is typically a bad sign.
Moving on to the Ginsco Woodland Camouflage Netting: no sources that perform reliable and objective hands-on testing have included it in their Hunting Blind roundups, which usually means that a product doesn't make for a good purchase.
As a last step, we wanted to do a head-to-head Rhino Blinds R75-RTE 2 Person Hunting Ground Blind vs. Ginsco Woodland Camouflage Netting comparison of their review performance but, unfortunately, weren't able to find any review ratings on either product. | eng | 318da5de-506a-449b-82bd-69dfb8ec1903 | https://www.slant.co/ai/rhino-blinds-r75-rte-2-person-hunting-ground-blind-vs-ginsco-woodland-camouflage-netting |
How To Get Rid Of Mold From A Basement
For a lot of families, the basement is one of those out-of-sight-out-of-mind places where seemingly tiny problems can fester up into a major issue. Especially if you are talking about an unfinished basement with low airflow and plenty of ambient moisture.
In warm conditions, naturally-occurring mold spores that float around in the air around us can find a moist, warm place to germinate into an active mold colony. Once this starts the presence of mycotoxins and second-generation mold spores can start to make people sick. Especially those family members with respiratory health conditions, the elderly, and family members who are prone to inflammatory conditions. Not to mention, an unaddressed mold problem can even start to gradually damage the structure of your house.
Unfortunately, eliminating mold in a basement can be a challenging task. Many homeowners are unsure of when to call in the professional, or whether they can deal with a mold problem themselves. If you've discovered mold in your basement, and you aren't sure how to handle it, the following article can help answer some important questions.
How Did Mold Get Into My Basement?
Microscopic mold spores exist everywhere in nature. They float through the air looking for a warm, moist place to germinate. They have the potential to grow vigorously in certain porous substances like woodwork, drywall, fabric upholstery, and old carpet.
Some mold strains are relatively benign, but some can be very dangerous to your health. Especially the so-called "Toxic Black Mold" known as Stachybotrys chartarum. Though even if the mold in your home isn't "Toxic" the mold spores and mycotoxins removed by seemingly benign mold colonies can still cause increased respiratory irritation and other health problems.
Some mold spores can germinate into an active colony in less than 48 hours, under the right conditions. In a basement that is seldom seen by human eyes, a mold colony can grow out of control.
Common Strains Of Mold Found In Basements
The NIEHS (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences) has identified five different strains of mold that are commonly found in basements.
Cladosporium
This mold colony can be shades of brown, black, or gray. It is relatively slow-growing and is most common in soil. It is a likely type of mold in basements with a dirt floor.
Penicillium
Oddly enough this is the same type of mold used as the basis for the antibiotic penicillin. It is a generally fast-growing mold that usually looks green or white.
Aspergillus
This is a relatively benign form of mold. Though in some rare cases, it can cause an infection called Aspergillosis. This condition can be very damaging to individuals with a weakened immune system or respiratory conditions such as asthma.
Alternaria
This is another relatively fast-growing type of mold that produces active colonies that appear in shades of brown, olive, and black. Just like Aspergillus, it can cause health problems in sensitive individuals.
Stachybotrys Chartarum
This is the fearsome "Toxic Black Mold, Stachybotrys chartarum which appears black to greenish in color. These mold colonies tend to be very fast-growing and are known for thriving on building materials such as drywall, wood, gypsum board, and wallpaper. It can cause significant symptoms in sensitive individuals as well as affect perfectly healthy adults and pets.
How Do I Detect Mold In My Basement?
Some signs of mold are easy to spot and some can be more challenging. If you have noticed one or more of the following things in your basement, you should be strongly suspicious of a mold problem.
Discolored blotches on walls and porous materials
A pervasive "Earthy" or "Musty" odor
Family members coughing & sneezing
Family members with persistent headaches
Vulnerable family members having increased health problems
Noticeable odors when the HVAC system turns onYou might also notice sensitive or vulnerable family members' health symptoms going away when they are on vacation, only to have them reoccur shortly after returning home.
Can I Test For Mold In My Basement?
Some at-home mold testing kits are sold online and inbox hardware stores, but most of the time a comprehensive mold test will help find hard-to-reach colonies that might be lurking in crawlspaces and ventilation ducts.
How To Eliminate Mold From Your Basement
Once you have identified all the active mold colonies in your basement, you can start to put together a plan for removing them.
Mold-infested drywall and badly affected woodwork typically need to be removed from the basement and replaced with clean structurally sound materials. The problem here is that simply removing them can disturb the colony, causing it to release mold spores and mycotoxins into the air. These fresh spores then land somewhere to recolonize in a few days or a few weeks.
Before you attempt to remove mold-infested materials, you first need to clean them, to kill as much of the mold as possible. If possible, try to implement measures to prevent any accidentally released mold spores from migrating through the air of your home.
You also need to go the extra mile to protect yourself with high-quality air masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment.
Best Products For Killing Mold
You might first reach for a bleach-based cleaning solution. Though while bleach will certainly kill surface mold, it works too quickly to kill the deep-down microscopic roots of an active mold colony. To truly kill the mold growing on a porous surface like wood, you need an oxygen-based cleaning solution or a solution that uses a volatile form of oxygen like hydrogen peroxide.
Preventing Mold From Recurring In Your Basement
It's important to note that even the CDC, recognizes that you cannot completely eliminate 100% of the mold spores in your basement. Though removing the source of moisture and removing the mold colonies will go a long way toward preventing a recurrence of basement mold.
This means that even after you have killed active mold colonies and removed any severely mold-damaged materials, you will still need to take measures to stop the humidity and water problems that promoted mold growth in the first place.
This starts with any necessary repairs such as:
Sealing cracks in walls
Sealing leaky windows
Repairing any roof leaks
Addressing any & all gutter problems
Repairing any roof leaks and gutter problems
Once the repairs are done, you might also want to consider implementing a mold prevention strategy. This might call for things like using a basement dehumidifier in the summer months to keep ambient basement humidity levels as low as possible. You might want to also consider applying mold prevention solutions to vulnerable areas and areas that previously had active mold colonies.
When To Call In The Professionals
Knowing when to call in the professionals can be understandably challenging for some homeowners. Though it's a good idea if:You are unsure of the severity of the mold problem
You suspect there is mold in hard to reach places
You don't have access to high-quality personal protective equipment
There are sensitive family members who might react to accidentally released mold spores
The mold problem is severeWhen you bring in a professional cleaning and mold remediation specialist like Building Services, you can trust that all active mold colonies will be identified and strategically eliminated. Our highly trained and experienced mold remediation specialists have access to commercial-grade cleaning solutions and the equipment necessary to safely eliminate the presence of mold in your basement. We will also safely dispose of all severely mold-damaged materials following all pertinent regulations.
We can also help you understand what caused the mold problem in the first place, so you can affect the necessary repairs to prevent future moisture issues. Then we can advise you on the best steps you can adopt as part of a highly effective mold preventing strategy. | eng | 867910cf-f953-46ab-afa4-b1494ac28232 | https://buildingservicesinc.com/how-to-get-rid-of-mold-from-a-basement/ |
2022 Pocket Vocab - Essential for early childhood teaching
Start Learning in Seconds! 1. Press the power button and the welcome message will play. 2. Insert any card to hear the word's pronunciation and sound effect! 3. Vocab Fun: Pronouncing each word and its associated sound effect, Pocket Vocab makes learning new words exciting and fun!
Why Kids Need This! Using great sound effects and colorful pictures, the Early education card machine teaches both audio and visual recognition of essential words, perfect for preschoolers and early readers.
Outstanding Design The early education card machine has no screen! Your little ones will have reduced screen time while learning new words and having loads of fun! Additionally, there are built-in buttons to adjust volume and repeat the sounds | eng | 83c021ca-6e24-4622-87c0-845c8e5b24dc | https://tddtoy.com/products/pocket |
Irregular sleep patterns associated with harmful gut bacteria
Irregular Sleep Patterns and Harmful Gut Bacteria
Irregular Sleep Patterns and Harmful Gut Bacteria
It is well-known that sleep is essential for good health. However, recent studies have shown that irregular sleep patterns can have a negative impact on gut health. In particular, irregular sleep patterns have been associated with an increase in harmful gut bacteria.
The Gut Microbiome
The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem of microorganisms that live in our digestive tract. These microorganisms play a crucial role in our overall health, including digestion, immune function, and even mental health. However, when the balance of these microorganisms is disrupted, it can lead to a range of health problems.
The Link Between Sleep and Gut Health
Studies have shown that irregular sleep patterns can disrupt the balance of the gut microbiome. Specifically, irregular sleep patterns have been linked to an increase in harmful gut bacteria, such as Clostridium difficile and Enterococcus faecalis.
One study found that people who slept irregularly had a less diverse gut microbiome, which is associated with a range of health problems. Another study found that people who slept less than six hours a night had a higher abundance of harmful gut bacteria.
The Importance of Regular Sleep
These findings highlight the importance of regular sleep for good gut health. It is recommended that adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. Additionally, maintaining a regular sleep schedule can help to regulate the gut microbiome and promote overall health.
Conclusion
Irregular sleep patterns can have a negative impact on gut health by disrupting the balance of the gut microbiome. To promote good gut health, it is important to maintain a regular sleep schedule and get enough sleep each night | eng | f0e4a4d4-b5b5-40f7-bfde-2aed56da2cf2 | https://www.lifetechnology.com/blogs/life-technology-medical-news/irregular-sleep-patterns-associated-with-harmful-gut-bacteria |
MYCO ECO MYTHO
MYCO ECO MYTHO
Reposting this essay Myco Eco Mytho Storytellingthat was originally posted to social media spring of 2021 while I was writing The Flowering Wand and explaining how I approached "rewilding myths". The image above is by illustrator Tom Adams.
From where does a story sprout? What specific land did it grow from? What ecology is it seeking to tend to, respond to, root into? How does this story "tell" me into greater intimacy with the kin outside my door? When I tell stories, read stories, analyze stories, I am guided by three tenets: MYCO, ECO, and MYTHO. MYCO invokes fungal intelligence: cognition and aliveness as a non-solitary experience. Nothing exists in a vacuum. We are understanding more and more that symbiosis is the dominant theme in biology. We mutually constitute each other. Fungi, seem to me, to best represent the importance of mutualism, as they cycle nutrients, blend with algae to create mineral munching lichen, sew forests together, generate soil, and collaborate with a diversity of species. The MYCO perspective reminds me that stories live interstitially. They happen between people and beings and events. How do my stories center relationships over individuals? How do my stories happen in conversation with other people? How can I understand that storytelling isn't a monologue? It's consanguinity. A flowing into another being's experience. How can I approach every person, animal, fungi, and plant with a keen eye for the complex system they are flowering from and into? Even as human beings - human artists and writers and thinkers -- we must trouble our ideas of individuality. We are walking Matryoshka dolls, nested swarms of being, skin-silhouetted Towers of Babel. ECO comes from the Greek word Oikos for household or "place to live". The word ecology was first coined by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel to explain the relationships between animals and both their organic and inorganic environments. Eco reminds me that every story arrives from a specific ecology, a specific assemblage of stones, animals, fungi, and histories. ECO encourages rootednesss and curiosity about the ground below your own feet. How can I honor the home of every word and idea and story? Does a novel incorporate the textures and smells and animacy of the environment from which it erupts? Do I, personally, know the names and habits of the ecologies just outside my door? Ecology brings me home, into the present landscape of my local environment. It asks me to participate in the specific world that provides me with soil, air, water, and beauty. ECO orients me towards the specifics of my own lived experience and reminds me not to appropriate cultures and landscapes whole oceans away. ECO shows me that no character, no story, no song or poem, should ever evaporate into abstraction. Does your philosophy have a landscape and community? If someone mentions a bird, ask them what kind of bird. If you write a story about a character that lives in the countryside, make sure you know the name of every tree that shadows their plotline. Honor the texture of your ecosystem. Enter into dialogue with the Animate Everything that is your home. Finally, MYTHO, derived from the Greek word for story, saying, or narrative, reminds me that we live inside stories. In order to live better, we must tell better. We must dream up different plots. We must root old plots back in the healing nourishment of their original ecological contexts. How can I honor older narratives by updating them? How can I decenter human narratives in favor of landscape stories, weather stories, insect stories? How have my stories become rigid? Telling new stories can mean honoring, composting, and fertilizing older narrative traditions. Nothing gets thrown out. Everything gets thrown into the compost heap to decompose, melt, connect, fruit, and flow. The realm of myth also reminds me to honor the dream world, the world of intuition, and non-traditional modes of knowledge. MYTHO reminds me that that stories can trap us if we let them ossify. But if we keep them oral, keep them interrogative and participatory, keep them evolving to suit our changing needs, our changing relationships and ecologies, they can root us back into our world. They can teach us that the most important part about storytelling is asking for the story from another being. Go to the oak tree and ask for its story. Go to the river and ask for its story. Go to the goldenrod and ask without saying anything. Ask with your nose, your belly, your eyes. The answer won't always be words. Won't always be sound. Sometimes it will be a feeling in your body. Sometimes it will be a smell. Stories don't belong to human beings. But human beings belong to stories. Let's enter back into the complex, tangled work of letting go of authorship and letting ourselves be told.
I am thrilled to announce that I'll be giving an in person talk at Saint John's campus in Santa Fe on April 22nd for Earth Day! The details are below and you can sign up here
"Myth and Mycelium," has been made possible by the Carol J. Worrell Annual Lecture Series on Literature Eco-philosopher, Sophie Strand, will present a talk, "Myth and Mycelium," to celebrate Earth Day. What does it mean to understand myths as the "fruiting body mushrooms" of underground mycelial mythic systems? Tracking the vegetal gods of the Mediterranean as a case study, we use modern advances in biology, mycology, and forest ecology to resurrect the forgotten root-system of earth-reverent mythologies suppressed by current paradigms of domination. 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm April 22nd MT Great Hall, Pritzker Student Center"
My first novel The Madonna Secret is up for pre-order and comes out this August! | eng | 0f3fe862-ffa8-4a1e-bbeb-ce5081353251 | https://sophiestrand.substack.com/p/myco-eco-mytho |
Arts Integration Project
Art and Design with Perri Lynch Howard
Art and Design: Lesson Plan2021-08-06T18:30:02-07:00
The NCESD Early Learning team has prepared a lesson plan for you to use in your classroom that was inspired by Perri's work. You can view the document below or click the "pop out" button in the top right corner to open it in a new tab to download the PDF file. | eng | 9156afde-1486-45fd-9578-a050bfab6d0d | https://www.ncesd.org/arts-integration/art-design-lesson/ |
Does Redshift Support BLOB Data Type?
If you are working with Amazon Redshift and dealing with large binary objects (BLOBs), you might be wondering whether Redshift supports the BLOB data type. In this article, we will explore this topic in detail and provide you with all the information you need.
What is a BLOB Data Type?
A BLOB, which stands for Binary Large Object, is a data type used to store large binary data such as images, videos, audio files, or any other type of non-textual data. It allows you to store and retrieve binary data in its original format without any modifications or conversions.
Redshift and BLOB Data Type
Unlike some other database systems, such as MySQL or Oracle, Amazon Redshift does not have a specific BLOB data type. Instead, it relies on other data types to store binary data.
1. BYTEA Data Type:
In Amazon Redshift, the BYTEA data type is commonly used to store binary data. It is a variable-length binary string that can hold up to 64 KB of data.
To use the BYTEA data type in Redshift, you need to define a column with the VARCHAR(MAX) or TEXT data type. Then, you can insert binary data into that column using appropriate encoding techniques like Base64 encoding.
Note: When using the BYTEA data type in Redshift, it's important to keep in mind that there is an upper limit of 64 KB on the size of individual values stored in this column.
2. VARCHAR(MAX) Data Type:
Another approach to store binary data in Redshift is to use the VARCHAR(MAX) data type. Although VARCHAR is typically used for storing character strings, it can also be used to store binary data as long as it is properly encoded.
By using the VARCHAR(MAX) data type, you can store binary data up to a maximum length of 64 KB. Again, you would need to encode the binary data using techniques like Base64 encoding before inserting it into the column.
Best Practices for Handling BLOB Data in Redshift
When working with BLOB data in Amazon Redshift, it's important to follow some best practices to ensure optimal performance and efficient storage.
1. Choose the Right Encoding Technique:
Depending on the nature of your binary data and its usage patterns, you should choose an appropriate encoding technique. Base64 encoding is commonly used as it allows binary data to be represented as ASCII characters.
2. Compress Large Binary Data:
If your binary data is too large, consider compressing it before storing it in Redshift. Compression can significantly reduce storage requirements and improve query performance.
3. Use COPY Command:
The COPY command in Redshift is designed for efficient bulk loading of data. When inserting BLOB data into Redshift, it's recommended to use the COPY command instead of individual INSERT statements for better performance.
Conclusion
In summary, while Amazon Redshift does not have a specific BLOB data type, you can still store and retrieve binary data using other available options such as BYTEA or VARCHAR(MAX) with proper encoding techniques. By following best practices and considering factors like encoding and compression, you can efficiently handle BLOB data in Redshift.
Remember to always choose the appropriate data type and encoding technique based on the characteristics of your binary data and its intended use within your Redshift environment.
8 Related Question Answers Found
Is Blob a Data Type? When working with databases and web development, you might have come across the term "Blob." But what exactly is Blob, and is it considered a data type? In this article, we will explore the concept of Blob and its role in data storage.
HTML Tutorial: Is BLOB a Data Type in Java? In Java, the BLOB (Binary Large Object) is not a native data type. However, it is commonly used to store large binary data such as images, audio files, and videos in databases.
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Abstract
Childhood trauma is a significant concern in Australia and internationally. Professionals working in the early childhood education sector (i.e., providing early childhood education and care to infants, toddlers, and children from birth to age eight) are positioned to provide valuable support for children affected by trauma. However, there is less research on early childhood professionals' perspectives and experiences of supporting trauma-exposed children compared to other education professionals (e.g., primary and secondary school teachers). This study explored early childhood professionals' perspectives and experiences in relation to supporting children exposed to trauma. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 early childhood professionals in Victoria, Australia, and data were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings illustrate that while educators develop valuable skills and experience growth from supporting trauma-exposed children and their families, they also experience emotional distress and challenges. Educators noted that there are limited professional development opportunities to learn about childhood trauma, and limited access to qualified and knowledgeable staff who can help them when supporting these learners. Implications from this study emphasise the importance of designing and delivering trauma-based professional learning opportunities and policies for early childhood educators.
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Introduction
Trauma in childhood is extremely common, however measuring the prevalence of childhood trauma is challenging due to the many different types of trauma and methods for measuring these events. The types of potentially traumatic events experienced in childhood include child abuse, neglect, and maltreatment, parent mental illness, substance abuse, or incarceration, exposure to disasters or family violence, and other events that can lead to psychological, physical, or other harms for children. Children and adolescents (pre-kindergarten to grade 12) exposed to traumatic events have been found to experience a range of emotional, behavioural, social, and academic problems (Perfect et al., 2016). Children exposed to trauma early in life can experience psychological disorders, including anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and conduct disorders (Graham-Bermann et al., 2012; Kramer & Landolt, 2014). The prevalence of trauma exposure has been found to be higher in the earlier developmental period compared to children and youth of other age groups (United States Department of Health & Human Services, 2022).
Early childhood is defined as the time of life between birth and age eight (Early Childhood Australia., n.d.). It is well known that the most critical developmental changes, in terms of neurobiology and development, occur in utero and the early years of life (Shonkoff, 2003; Tierney & Nelson, 2009). Trauma in early childhood can physically alter and adversely affect the neurological structures and pathways of a child's developing brain (Harden et al., 2016). Austin et al. (2020) suggest that younger children can be at greater risk of child abuse compared to older children due to their greater reliance on caregivers for survival. Data from the USA in 2020 revealed that the highest rates of child abuse were found in children under one (i.e., 25 per 1,000), and rates tended to decline as age increased (United States Department of Health & Human Services, 2022). Nevertheless, exact rates of trauma exposure in early childhood are difficult to measure and may be higher due to incidents that go undetected or are not reported (Saunders & Saunders, 2014).
Education Professionals Trauma Training and Knowledge
Educators and schoolteachers in early education, primary/elementary, and secondary schools play a crucial role in identifying and supporting trauma-exposed children and young people. Due to their frequent contact with students, educators are in a valuable position to identify behavioural changes in children that may indicate exposure to trauma, and to respond, preventing further harm for these children (Alisic, 2012). Despite this, educators and school staff report that they lack appropriate training and knowledge, and experience symptoms of emotional burnout and secondary trauma in response to traumatised students (Alisic, 2012; Berger, 2019 Berger et al., 2021a, b; Berger & Meltzer, 2021; Barrett & Berger, 2021).
Research with primary/elementary educators suggests they experience ambivalence in response to the needs of children exposed to trauma (Alisic, 2012; Alisic et al., 2012). Bergeret al. (2021a) examined Australian primary and secondary teachers' trauma knowledge and perceived skills to support trauma-exposed students, and found the majority of teachers report a lack of trauma experience and training (e.g., behavioural management skills). Although the effects of trauma exposure on children have been researched extensively, and there is growing literature on the experiences of primary/elementary teachers when supporting trauma-exposed children, less research has explored the experiences of early childhood professionals in this area. Research on the perceptions and experiences of teachers in primary and secondary schools in relation to traumatised students has shed light on important interventions and trauma-informed programs in schools. Similar research is required with early childhood educators to enable researchers to make similar recommendations suitable for the early childhood sector.
Early childhood professionals are defined as individuals providing education and care to infants, toddlers, and young children (Nicholson et al., 2018). The early childhood sector in Australia involves multiple services, including "long day care, kindergarten, preschool, family day care, in-home care, mobile services, occasional care, and outside school hours care" (Early Childhood Australia, n.d., p. 2). Professionals working in early childhood include educators, early childhood teachers, coordinators, directors/managers of early childhood services, education leaders, nominated supervisors, trainee/apprentices, Australian school-based trainees, ancillary staff (e.g., supports), and field officers (Early Childhood Australia., n.d.). Preschool field officers support early childhood educators by connecting them with support, resources, and information, including coaching and providing educators with strategies for supporting learners, and suggesting program adaptions for children with a variety of needs (Department of Education & Training, 2021).
Professionals working in early education in Australia are mandated by law to report any suspected instances of childhood physical abuse or neglect to child protection authorities. For example, in the state of Victoria, educators are required to report if they witness an incident of abuse against a child (e.g., physical, sexual, grooming, family violence, emotional abuse, or neglect), receive a disclosure that a child is being abused, or if they form a reasonable belief that a child is experiencing abuse or neglect (e.g., through their observations of a child's play or changes in the child's physical or emotional state) (State Government of Victoria, 2021).
There are several reasons why it is important to research the experiences of early childhood educators in response to children exposed to trauma. Early childhood professionals differ from primary and secondary educators as they educate and care for children during the earliest developmental stages. This stage of development and early childhood education is a time of rapid learning of personal, social, and emotional skills, development of communication and language skills, and motor and physical development (Ali et al., 2018; Thomas et al., 2011). Early childhood educators also differ from schoolteachers in that they provide care and education to children through play-based experiences driven by the child's interests, child-centred activities that are adapted to the needs of the child, and collaborate more closely with parents and caregivers of children in their care. Research has found that educators working in preschools tend to have more regular contact with parents and caregivers of young children compared to schoolteachers (Murphy et al., 2021; Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 2005). The different roles and ethos of early childhood educators compared to schoolteachers may result in different experiences, needs, and challenges of these educators when managing childhood trauma and dynamics with parents compared to teachers in primary and secondary schools.
Trauma-Informed Practice and Programs
Internationally, several trauma-informed models and programs have been developed. These models provide professional learning for educators on the prevalence of trauma, the effects of trauma on development, the signs and how to identify behaviours associated with trauma, and practical strategies for educators regarding how to support and respond to trauma-exposed children (Berger, 2019). Berger (2019) conducted a systematic review of studies on trauma-informed care in education settings, including early education, primary/elementary schools, and secondary schools. Results suggested trauma-informed programs result in better academic, emotional, and behavioural outcomes for students, and increased educators' knowledge and confidence in response to children with trauma exposure (Berger, 2019). However, only five of the thirteen studies examined trauma-informed programs in early childhood or preschool settings, with the remainder conducted in primary/elementary and secondary school settings.
Programs that have evaluated trauma-informed programs in the early education sector include research by Holmes et al. (2015) through an evaluation of the Head Start Trauma Smart (HSTS) program in the USA. This program is designed to "decrease the stress of chronic trauma, foster age-appropriate social and cognitive development, and create an integrated, trauma-informed culture for young children, parents, and staff" (Holmes et al., p. 1652). Following this program, teachers and parents noted that children's attention and behaviour (internalising and externalising behaviours) improved at both preschool and home (Holmes et al., 2015). Whitaker et al. (2019) examined the outcomes of the Enhancing Trauma Awareness course on US preschool teachers' perceptions and conflict with children from low-income families. Although the program was not found to reduce teacher reports of conflicts with children, educators reported improved relationships with preschool children. Saint Gilles and Carlson (2020) examined the HSTS program in a US preschool setting and found slight improvements in trauma-exposed children's social-emotional wellbeing. This study also found that preschool educators reported greater trauma-informed knowledge after participation in the program.
McConnico et al. (2016) evaluated the implementation and outcomes of the trauma-informed STRIVE model for children and early childhood professionals in the USA. This model involves training programs for early childhood professionals, curriculum to develop children's self-esteem and emotional wellbeing, and ongoing staff consultation for early childhood professionals. An evaluation revealed that the STRIVE program increased early childhood professionals' confidence and self-efficacy when supporting trauma-exposed children (McConnico et al., 2016). Similarly, Lipscomb et al. (2019) evaluated a trauma-informed online professional development program for US early childhood educators and results indicated this program supported and enhanced early childhood educators' "knowledge and application of practices consistent with trauma-responsive care (p. 9)." While these programs provide resources for early childhood professionals to help them support trauma-exposed children, there is little research exploring educators' experiences and recommendations for trauma programs and policy development. Research with early childhood educators is essential to ensure that existing and new trauma-informed programs are suitable and sustainable in the early childhood sector.
Chudzik et al. (2022) recently conducted interviews with early childhood educators in the USA on their experiences supporting learners exposed to trauma and delivery of trauma-informed practices in a special education environment for children with disability. Participants reported that they required greater trauma training and support to address the needs of trauma-exposed children. Barriers to utilising trauma-informed care according to participants included insufficient trauma-informed training, insufficient support from organisations and co-workers, and high turnover of educators (Chudzik et al., 2022). Chudzik et al. suggested that trauma-informed policies and professional development may improve educators' trauma knowledge and the support they are able to provide to traumatised children in early childhood settings.
An Ecological Approach to Trauma
An ecological trauma-informed care approach was used to frame this research (DeCandia & Guarino, 2015). Specifically, the interview schedule developed for this study was designed to address different aspects of an educator's role supporting trauma-impacted children (e.g., working with children, parents, early childhood policies, and education regulations). This approach is informed by earlier theoretical work from Bronfenbrenner (1977), suggesting a child's development is influenced by multiple systems (e.g., health services, early education services, school, and family). More recently, this model has been applied to educator professional development and wellbeing (Berger, 2019; Berger et al., 2022). In the area of trauma-informed practice, DeCandia and Guarino (2015) discuss an ecological approach of trauma-informed care that involves three pillars: (1) the impacts of environmental factors on human health; (2) that health is impacted by social factors; and (3) trauma responses and interventions need to consider and target multiple systems, including the individual affected by trauma, their interpersonal relationships, and broader community structures. Community structures include not only government systems, but also community organisations, such as early education services. In the case of the current paper, we shine light on the importance of early childhood organisations and services in providing trauma-informed care to children.
Aim and Research Questions of the Current Research
The literature indicates that early childhood professionals play a crucial role in supporting children exposed to trauma, and trauma-informed programs in early childhood settings support both children exposed to trauma and educators. Given early childhood educators are working with children in a pivotal developmental phase, where intervention can impact developmental trajectories, it is essential to examine early educators' experiences working with trauma-exposed children to provide recommendations for policy development. This research is essential to ensure early childhood professionals are equipped to identify and support trauma-exposed children to improve their emotional, social, behavioural, and learning outcomes. While research has started to explore early educators' experiences with trauma and trauma-informed practices (e.g., Chudzik et al., 2022), the research is far too limited.
To the authors' knowledge, there is no research examining early childhood educators' experiences and recommendations for supporting children exposed to trauma in an Australian context. There is also no known research which has evaluated the benefits of trauma-informed programs in the Australian early childhood education sector. The aim of the current study was to explore the perspectives and recommendations of Australian early childhood professionals regarding their role supporting trauma-exposed children. For the purpose of this study, we focused on early childhood professionals of children aged zero to five years. This research is critical for developing recommendations and policies to better support early childhood professionals working with trauma-exposed children. The research questions for the current paper were: 1) What are the perspectives of early childhood professionals in relation to their role supporting trauma-exposed children?; and 2) What recommendations do early childhood professionals have for supporting children exposed to trauma?
Method
Research designed to capture the experiences and perceptions of individuals and groups is best conducted using a qualitative approach. This study extends on earlier research by the researchers (e.g., Davies & Berger, 2019; Berger, 2021a, b; Berger & Meltzer, 2021; Barrett & Berger 2021) on the experiences of primary and secondary teachers and school staff when supporting trauma-exposed students. This work also extends research by Chudzik et al. (2022) with early childhood special education teachers in the USA through exploring the experiences of Australian early childhood professionals when supporting trauma-exposed children. This research is critical for developing recommendations and policies to better support early childhood professionals working with trauma-exposed children.
Participants
Fourteen professionals working in Victorian early education services participated in the current study (refer to Table 1 for participant demographics). Participants' ages ranged from 35 to 60 years of age (M age = 49.43, SD = 8.36). The number of years of early education professionals' experience ranged from six to 38 years (M years = 20, SD = 11.48). Participants identified themselves as educators (n = 11), ancillary staff/supporters (n = 2), and director of an early childhood centre (n = 1). Participants were provided with pseudonym names to protect their identity.
Measures
A semi-structured interview schedule was created to explore the perspectives of early childhood professionals working with trauma-exposed children. The interview schedule was developed based the authors' extensive research with schoolteachers regarding their trauma-informed knowledge and professional development (e.g., Davies & Berger, 2019). Participants were not provided with a definition of trauma by the researchers as the aim of the study was to capture educators' varying experiences of responding to trauma-exposed children. The interview schedule was organised into multiple sections including: (1) Experiences with trauma-exposed children (e.g., can you tell me about the experiences that you have had with regard to children that may have been exposed to trauma, if any?); (2) Trauma conceptualisations (e.g., what would you say are the most common types of trauma that you have seen, if any?); (3) Early education centre organisational protocols, resources, and support from colleagues (e.g., how do you talk about the topic of children and trauma with your colleagues, if at all?); (4) Involvement with parents (e.g., what can you tell me about your experience of parents or families who may experience trauma, if any?); and (5) Training needs (e.g., to what extent would you like to be more informed than you are now about children and trauma?).
Procedure
Ethical approval was provided by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (approval number: 7983), and consent was obtained from the management teams of Victorian early childhood education centres approached for this research study. The research team approached centres who had expressed interest following the researchers' work on trauma-informed practice in primary and secondary schools. A snowballing approach was then used to recruit early childhood professionals in Victoria. Consent was obtained from individual staff prior to the interviews. Early childhood professionals who agreed to participate attended a semi-structured interview conducted over the phone at a time that was convenient. Educators were told that the study was about their experiences, perspectives, and recommendations when working with trauma-exposed children. Interviews were conducted in 2018 by research assistants trained in qualitative interviewing and analysis. The duration of interviews varied between approximately 20 min to 50 min. All interviews were recorded with consent from participants and were transcribed by a professional transcription company.
Analysis
The current study used thematic analysis, which involves identifying themes and subthemes in qualitative data (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Clarke & Braun, 2013). Thematic analysis was chosen as the method to analyse the data because this analysis technique is appropriate when exploring new topics. Thematic analysis is also suitable for finding patterns and themes in semi-structured interview data (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Clarke & Braun, 2013). While an ecological approach was used to frame the study aims and interpret the findings, the interview data were analysed using an inductive and exploratory approach. The initial analysis of themes was conducted by the third author and 20% of the data (three transcripts) were cross-checked by another researcher. These two researchers met to discuss the themes and reach consensus on the final themes and subthemes. The final theme structure was then reviewed in multiple meetings between all researchers until agreement was achieved. Member checking of the data was conducted, which involved participants being sent their transcripts to make changes or add further information. No participant requested any changes to their original interview. All data were retained for analysis and write up of the results.
Results
Four themes emerged from the analysis, with subthemes also identified (see Table 2). The themes have been organised under each research question to articulate the findings of the study.
Research Question One – What are the Perspectives of Early Childhood Professionals in Relation to their Role in Supporting Trauma-Exposed Children?
Role Responsibilities and Challenges
Early childhood professionals reported daily role challenges when supporting trauma-exposed children in early education services. Participants discussed that their daily roles expanded beyond traditional teaching roles and involved emotionally supporting trauma-exposed children. Subthemes were identified that highlight the role responsibilities and associated challenges for early childhood professionals when supporting these children and included: (1) Responding to trauma-related behaviour; (2) Creating a safe environment; (3) Supporting families; and (4) Working within organisational and government policies.
Responding to Trauma-Related Behaviour
Participants discussed role challenges of responding to and managing trauma-related behaviours of children exposed to trauma, such as behavioural escalations. Early childhood professionals discussed their experiences in behavioural management, including identifying triggers for problematic behaviours and trialling alternative strategies (e.g., redirection using play items) to reduce problematic behaviours. Anne reported strategies such as: "…moving them away from the situation or having sensory fidget toys and stuff like that or a special mat to sit on or if they've got a favourite toy; anything like that that can calm them down…".
Participants commented on additional safety monitoring requirements of their role, including ensuring the safety of all children when responding to problematic behaviour. For example, Anne reported feeling concern for other children affected by the child's trauma-related behaviour, however, also felt concern for the trauma-exposed child: "You just feel worried for the other children that are getting injured, but then you feel concerned for the traumatised children because what is going on in their head…".
Creating a Safe Environment
Early childhood professionals expressed the importance of creating a safe learning environment for all children, especially for trauma affected children to feel protected, comforted and have a sense of belonging. Kate reported: "Giving them a place to be, knowing that they're safe, that you're there to comfort them, you know, that their friends are there to comfort them."
Early childhood professionals also discussed trying to enhance the child's experience in the school environment to promote their wellbeing. For example, Linda commented: "So, you're always constantly trying to find different ways to try and keep them happy and keep them enjoying what's going on."
Supporting Families
Participants emphasised the importance of working with family members of trauma-exposed children and of rapport building with parents to develop trusting relationships, where parents feel comfortable disclosing their child's trauma history. Early childhood professionals reported that it is valuable to know the trauma history from families to improve support for the child in the learning environment. Vanessa noted: "…you first have to develop the right type of relationship with the family before they might divulge to you and talk to you about it."
However, participants also spoke about challenges of working with and gathering children's background information from parents. Participants highlighted parents of trauma-exposed children were often in denial regarding the impact of trauma exposure on their child. Further, early childhood professionals commented that parents were not always responsive to their attempts to communicate with them regarding their child's behaviour (especially if parents were separated). Participants reported that parents often limit contact with them when they attempt to collaborate to help address their child's trauma-related behaviours. For example, Jill commented: "If it is a situation say where there's two parents not getting along, I'm not going to get much information, so that's a bit of a barrier, if the parents aren't seeing what we're seeing". Other participants reported requiring education and skills to work with parents. Gina said this would be particularly helpful when working with young mothers: "I'd like to learn more about young people having children…what the difference is, like with working with those mums, or how to tackle working with mums and helping them…".
Additional comments made by participants included the role of working with families to connect them with health professionals and childhood support services. Lina stated: "…our role in that is like I say we're sort of the first contact for a lot of parents, so our role would be like I said have the meetings, find out all the information we can and then bring in our field officer and from there, they're the people that would make the decisions of where to go…" Ruth reported "…it's my role to give the families some direction on where to go next and to put that care team in place to provide them with a team of professionals who could better support them."
Early childhood professionals reported barriers of working with parents, including parents not always following through on their recommendations and referrals to support and health services. They commented on significant gaps in the referral process, with limited systems in place for early childhood educators to follow up with parents after making a referral. Denise reported: "If you don't follow it up and because the system has changed now and it's left entirely to the parents, if they don't follow it up nothing happens…" Denise continued by explaining, "when parents know about it but can't get over the fact that it's my child that has a problem…parents that will say yes we understand there is a problem and you give them all the information and you even assist them and you help them phone and get support and stuff and then nothing happens…".
Working within Organisational and Government Policies
Early childhood professionals commented on their role of working within organisational and government policies in relation to mandatory reporting of actual or suspected incidents of child abuse, maltreatment, or neglect. They reported that mandatory reporting laws in Australia required them to protect the safety of children by making a report to child protection if they identify signs of child maltreatment. Lisa reported: "We've got sort of child protection policies, so, which is more talking about abuse or family violence, or those things that we have to report." Gina discussed her role as being more reflective of a psychologist in relation to documenting and reporting trauma-related incidents and concerns: "I think I'm a psychologist more than a kinder teacher now. Very methodical with recording."
Role Effects on Personal Wellbeing
Early childhood professionals reported both positive and negative impacts of their job on their wellbeing. These included emotional exhaustion (e.g., emotional burnout from supporting traumatised children's needs and behaviour), role fulfilment (e.g., growth and positive aspects of supporting children exposed to trauma), and social networks (e.g., using professional and personal resources to help protect their psychological health).
Emotional Exhaustion
Early childhood professionals discussed that supporting trauma-exposed children with high behavioural needs can be emotionally exhausting and hearing details of a child's trauma can be personally confronting and traumatising. This, in turn, affects their emotional wellbeing outside of their professional role. Participants expressed feeling frustrated about not being able to adequately respond to challenging, aggressive behaviours from trauma-exposed children, and feeling responsible for the safety of both traumatised children and other children. This sense of responsibility can lead to feelings of inadequacy and emotional burnout. For instance, Silvia noted: "sometimes I feel frustrated and exhausted, and sometimes I feel sadness because I'm just like, I can see that you really want to enjoy as much, but they just can't break through those barriers or the learning to get there and you can really see that…". Similarly, Florence reported experiencing burnout, which lead to personal turmoil: "That year completely burnt me out and I needed to move, I was just starting to really lose all faith in humanity, I was, it was too dark…And was affecting my mental health and my lifestyle and so I needed to move on."
On the other hand, some participants discussed having adequate support offered through government organisations and local government councils, which prevented them from experiencing mental health difficulties. Gina said: "…we know where to get the support we need through [council name redacted], and they're pretty good. So, we have counselling, we have mental health days, and yeah."
Role Fulfilment
Despite the psychological challenges of their role, participants recognised that responding to trauma-related behaviours and working with trauma-exposed children helped them grow professionally. Mila commented that: "it's been challenging but rewarding and also, I think, professionally a growth process too for me." Early childhood professionals also discussed a feeling of fulfilment with being able to provide a safe and stable environment for trauma-exposed children. Silvia expressed: "But no, I think – I'm happy with what I'm doing and I'm – I think we've made a difference and that's it. Made these little people feel safer and they know what's going to happen and yeah."
Social Networks
Early childhood professionals discussed the importance of connecting with their social networks to help them cope with the psychological challenges of their role and to alleviate emotional burnout. They highlighted the benefits of debriefing and venting on their personal wellbeing. Vanessa highlighted: "I have a very supportive husband, so some days I can debrief with him." Silvia reported on the catharsis of debriefing with their friends: "For me a lot as well is my friends that I can – I'll go oh god I can't believe what got [sic] said today – and it's just – you need to verbalise it because otherwise it will eat you inside."
Research Question Two – What Recommendations do Early Childhood Professionals have for Supporting Children Exposed to Trauma?
Professional Competencies and Training Recommendations
Participants discussed their professional skills and competencies in relation to responding and working with trauma-exposed children. Early childhood professionals recommended more trauma knowledge and training to understand and respond to trauma-related behaviours in their educational context. They expressed a lack of knowledge of trauma, including how trauma may manifest in a child's behaviours. Participants commented that more education would be helpful for them to understand trauma and trauma-related behaviours. Ruth noted: "…I feel like we have a very limited acknowledge [sic] until such a time as a child presents with some form of trauma…I don't feel like I had anywhere near enough education about trauma prior to this year…" In the absence of training, early childhood professionals reported using a trial-and-error approach when responding to behavioural escalations. For example, Denise expressed: "We realise that sometimes we will even maybe after 10 min if we have tried to work with a child and it's not happening, we will turn around and say I think it might be a different approach…".
Early childhood professionals also reported uncertainty on how to best support trauma-exposed children in learning environments. Despite participants reporting they received some professional development on trauma, they expressed a need for practical training in behavioural management to assist them in responding to challenging behaviours in the education services. Ruth reported apprehension and a lack of knowledge when responding to trauma-related behaviour: "Concerned that we're not able to help in those situations, not able to modify the challenging behaviour, overwhelmed sometimes by the lack of knowledge…". Vanessa suggested training to develop a tool kit to use when responding to trauma-related behaviours: "Yes, just to make sure you're on the right track and maybe a few guidance skills, practical skills, that you can use, behaviour skills that you can use, strategies that you can use with children."
Participants also reported feeling uncertain on how to address specific incidents of trauma appropriately, such as sexual abuse. For example, Lisa reported: "yeah, they'd definitely be situations where I'd feel fairly confronted and not, I'm pretty unsure about what I could do. I, so I, pretty sure I haven't, like I guess for an example, a child who's experienced sexual abuse."
Lisa also provided suggestions on types of training she thought was important to help respond to children affected by trauma: "…getting an overview of what trauma is and different types, so like I guess case studies or just examples."
Professional Support from Colleagues and Managers
Early childhood professionals discussed the importance of receiving support when working with trauma-exposed children. They spoke about receiving support within their educational service and from external organisations and health professionals.
Organisational and External Support
Early childhood professionals discussed the crucial role of professional support within their organisations from preschool field officers when responding to trauma-related behaviours. Participants tended to report positive experiences when collaborating with preschool field officers and other government and health services, as this helped staff acquire understanding and skills when responding to trauma-related behaviours. Denise expressed: "…our field officer [supervisor] is amazing…she has come in quite a bit and given us quite a lot of information and different strategies on how to help children…" Silvia expressed the benefit of having external agencies provide support, knowledge, and assistance: "…we've had a child psychologist come in, we've had a behavioural therapist come in, we've had a play specialist just to see how they plan, and the paediatricians… Yeah that was helpful because they then, send us some documentation, some information…".
On the other hand, others discussed lacking support in behavioural intervention and reported that connecting families with support services was a complicated process. Early childhood professionals expressed requiring support as they can be unsure where to refer trauma-exposed children for intervention. Vanessa reported: "A lot of staff don't get support on how to deal with children. Actually, the thing I find hard is that sometimes there's nowhere to send children or get children help." Lisa reported wanting more support for staff, the child, and families: "…more support as to what to do with, if a child is experiencing trauma, so where, support for the child themselves, support for the families, strategies that could be used for us, like in the classrooms…".
Comments were also made by early childhood professionals in relation to lacking resources, time, and additional staff. They commented on the lack of government funding and finances to provide extra support to traumatised children without formal diagnoses. Emilia expressed: "And coz [sic] you've only got 2 staff coz [sic] you can't get any extra funding, you really can't, you struggle to provide all that time and support you need to give them…" However, Theresa reported educators do their best to manage the demands and support all children with limited staff and time: "With five good quality staff members, we've actually got some in the pool learning to float, no-one's drowning, everyone's going home safe. Six quality staff members – everybody has learnt to swim."
Lisa provided a recommendation to improve staff resourcing to support trauma-exposed children: "I guess demographics or areas where there's known to be high levels of trauma or disadvantage or that sort of thing. That maybe those services could be funded with extra staff, or even specialist staff like with a speech person [speech therapist] in those services, rather than relying on the current sort of model…".
Support from Colleagues
Early childhood professionals reported receiving support from their fellow colleagues and helping each other with behavioural challenges, debriefing on trauma-related incidents and strategies to address behaviours. Lisa reported: "…we just work as a team, like we always sort of, we'll back each other up and if some, you know if we're working with a child and the behaviour is, they're not responding to the person who's working with that child, then we'll swap out…" Support also included coping by using humour. For example, Silvia mentioned: "At the end of the day you've got to laugh at it. You've just got to go – you know he's not, doesn't meant [sic] it – and we'll make some jokes and things, just trying to keep it light-hearted that, we've all done an amazing job."
Discussion
This study explored the perspectives of early childhood educators regarding their role supporting trauma-exposed children. This research is important because there is a lack of research addressing this topic with early childhood educators. Early childhood professionals highlighted positive aspects of their role working with trauma-exposed children, including learning from these experiences and being able to help children exposed to trauma. However, educators also reported experiences of emotional burnout when supporting learners exposed to trauma. Participants commented that their role includes educating and supporting children exposed to trauma, comparing their work to mental health professionals (e.g., psychologists). However, early childhood professionals suggested they have insufficient training to identify and support trauma-exposed children and their families, and reported that the early childhood sector requires greater access to mental health professionals and services to better support traumatised children and their families. Early childhood professionals also identified the importance of support from colleagues when working with trauma-exposed children. The findings of this research support the results of earlier work from primary and secondary schools (Alisic, 2012; Berger et al., 2021a, b; Berger & Meltzer, 2021; Barrett & Berger, 2021), and Chudzik et al.'s (2022) results in the early childhood special education sector in the USA. Together, these results highlight the need for trauma-informed professional learning and training for early childhood educators. Trauma-informed professional development could expand early education professionals' competencies and confidence when working with trauma-exposed children.
In a systematic review of trauma-informed programs in schools and early childhood settings, Berger (2019) found few evidence-based trauma-informed professional development programs for early childhood educators. Programs with early childhood professionals include the Roots of Resilience program (Lipscomb et al., 2019), the STRIVE program (McConnico et al., 2016), HSTS (Holmes et al., 2015; Saint Gilles & Carlson, 2020), and the Enhancing Trauma Awareness Program (Whitaker et al., 2019). These trauma-informed programs have been shown to enhance early childhood educators' trauma knowledge (Saint Giles & Carlson, 2020; Lipscomb et al., 2019) and self-efficacy when responding to trauma-exposed children (Whitaker et al., 2019). The results of this study indicate that it is imperative for researchers to continue to develop and evaluate trauma-informed programs for early childhood professionals. This research can be used to inform which program components may be most beneficial and suitable for professionals in early education services. Results of this study show that early childhood professionals may benefit from professional development opportunities with behavioural therapists and child psychologists to learn behavioural management techniques, and practice skills and strategies to address trauma-related behaviour. Educators also suggested that they require training on ways to support families and how to work within complex systems of support for children exposed to trauma.
The themes identified in this research support the ecological approach of trauma-informed care, professional development, and support for educators (Berger et al., 2022; Berger, 2019; DeCandia & Guarino, 2015). Participants recommended that multiple systems need to work collectively to identify and support trauma-exposed children, families, and support the wellbeing of early education professionals. First, educators require professional development to understand trauma and the impacts on students' behaviour, and require skills and strategies to manage their own self-care. Educators also require training to work with parents, support colleagues, and manage any critical incidents that might increase or lead to trauma in children. Finally, to address the needs of educators at the ecosystem level of the ecological framework, broader organisational and Government policies and resources on trauma-informed practice are required. A recent policy published for schools on trauma-informed practice has been developed by Berger and Martin (2021), however no known policy is available for early childhood educators.
In addition, informal support from colleagues and social networks, as well as formal support from organisations and Governments, through training and personal support (e.g., counselling), are required to help educators to best support children impacted by trauma and prevent secondary distress. Personal support, including psychological counselling, peer consultation with experienced senior staff, and education on self-care strategies are essential to prevent emotional burnout in education professionals (Davies & Berger, 2019). Results from the current research indicate that early educators experience emotion exhaustion and burnout from role demands associated with supporting traumatised children (e.g., managing challenging behaviours). However, educators also experience fulfilment from their careers and have many strengths to combat burnout, including connection with their formal and informal social networks (Berger et al., 2021a, b, ; Berger & Meltzer, 2021; Barrett & Berger, 2021). The benefits of professional support and development have been documented in research by Lipscomb et al. (2022).
Limitations
This paper was one of the first to explore early childhood professionals' experiences of supporting trauma-exposed children. This study builds on earlier work on the experiences of primary and secondary school teachers by focusing on Australian early childhood professionals' experiences of responding to trauma-exposed children. Nevertheless, this paper is not without limitations. The current research did not define trauma for participants or ask for their definition of trauma. Therefore, it is recommended future research asks early education professionals to define trauma or provides educators with a definition of trauma prior to interviews. However, the nature of the interview questions and responses from educators ensured that the types of experiences reported by educators related to different types of traumatic events in childhood. Further, the current study examined the experiences of early childhood professionals and included those in different roles within the early childhood sector. Future research may consider exploring the specific experiences of early childhood educators compared to early childhood leaders and support staff. This research could help educational policymakers to target training and programs based on the specific role requirements of early education staff. For example, educators may benefit from training addressing behavioural strategies for children exposed to trauma, while leaders may require training on ways to support the emotional wellbeing of staff.
Consistent with recommendations made by Davies and Berger (2019), further research may also consider exploring early childhood pre-service educators' experiences of supporting children exposed to trauma. Similarly, quantitative research is recommended to explore the relationship between educator exposure to traumatised children, educator trauma-informed professional learning, and educators' knowledge and skills to identify and support trauma-exposed children. This research increases understanding on how prepared educators are to support children exposed to trauma and potential gaps in their professional learning. This research also provides valuable recommendations for policymakers on how to better prepare early childhood educators with the skills required to support trauma-exposed children and their families. A limitation of the current research is the results are only specific to one Australian state (i.e., Victorian early childhood educators and services), and this research should be replicated in other Australian states and countries. Currently, the majority of research and trauma-informed programs have been delivered in the USA. Finally, the sample consisted of 14 early childhood educators and contained educators aged over 35 years of age with six or more years of experience in early childhood education. Prior research by Berger et al. (2021a, b; Berger & Meltzer 2021; Barrett & Berger 2021) suggests that teachers with more years of experience are more confident in response to trauma-impacted children compared to educators with less experience. Therefore, future research may benefit from conducting a similar study with younger early childhood educators and those with less years of experience, or a quantitative study to explore the association between educators' age, years of experience in early childhood, and knowledge and confidence to respond to trauma-exposed children.
Conclusion
This research documented the experiences and recommendations of early childhood professionals when supporting children exposed to trauma. Early childhood professionals emphasised their demanding role responsibilities, aspects of role fulfilment, impacts of their role on their emotional wellbeing, and the mental health benefits of supportive colleagues and informal support networks. A key finding from this paper is that more training and support to improve early childhood professionals' competencies and ability to cope with the role demands related to supporting trauma-exposed children is warranted. More specifically, early education professionals suggested that as a sector, they require more knowledge and training on trauma and how to support children impacted by traumatic events. This study has critical implications for future research and education policy for the implementation of professional development and trauma-informed programs within early childhood education services more broadly.
Bartlett, J. D., & Smith, S. (2019). The role of early care and education in addressing early childhood trauma. American Journal of Community Psychology,64(3–4), 359–372.
Saint Gilles, M. P., & Carlson, J. S. (2020). A pilot study on the effects of a supplemental trauma intervention within a head start preschool program. Research and Practice in the Schools,7(1), 49–69 | eng | 2b084193-9afd-4b79-aab6-660ecb089a4e | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12310-022-09551-0 |
Girls' Day – Boys' Day
As part of the annual nationwide Boys' Day/Girls' Day event at Mainz University of Applied Sciences, girls and boys have the chance to sample degree programs that currently do not have many female or male students in them respectively. For girls, these are primarily technical, mechanical, and scientific degree programs. Boys have the opportunity to get to know the artistic and creative degree programs of the School of Design.
Additional information and registration
Girls' Day – What we offer girls on 04/28/2022
Model building // Architecture
In the workshop we create a model of an actual existing building. With the help of a construction kit, we will create a miniature for you to take home. You will learn the basics of model building within the discipline of architecture.
The programming of software is exciting and complex. While you often see programmers portrayed in movies as nerds sitting in dark rooms in front of screens and all the exciting action seems to take place elsewhere, the reality of programmers is quite different. We show you how exciting coding actually is and what is hidden behind the source code. Using fun examples, we will teach you the basics of coding. After a short time you will see your first successes!
Grades 9-10
Location Lucy-Hillebrand-Straße 2, 55128 Mainz
Time 9 am–12 pm
Stop-Motion Animation // Time-Based Media
Let's dive into the world of stop-motion animation: Together we'll explore the stop-motion film technique – the original form of animation. Then, in small groups, we will create a stop-motion animation out of paper.
Grades 5-7
Location Lucy-Hillebrand-Str. 2, 55128 Mainz
Time 9 am–1 pm
Who to contact | eng | b36dadec-5a30-4a5a-b52b-b58ebefc1153 | https://www.hs-mainz.de/en/academics/before-your-studies/kennenlernangebote/translate-to-english-girlsday-boysday/ |
Become a Legal Nurse Consultant…
LNC Resources…
In order to become a legal nurse consultant, you will first need to be licensed as a registered nurse in one or more municipalities. (If your primary residence is in one of the 24 Nurse Compact states, you are able to practice in any of them.) Licensure requires graduating from an board of nursing approved program and passing the NCLEX-RN exam. When you have completed course requirements, you will receive an Authorization To Test.
After you have been practicing a couple years, you can begin earning professional certifications. Certification is not a legal requirement in the sense that licensing is. However; this is a testament to your professional skill and can help you move up the career ladder, earning promotions and taking on more advanced roles. Many nurses pursue specialty certifications like legal nurse consulting after having worked in medical-surgical nursing. You can earn certification in just about any area you find yourself working in — it takes a couple years of practice to earn most specialty certifications.
Certification as a legal nurse consultant is available through the American Legal Nurse Consultant Certification Board. It's not necessary to have the certification in hand to begin work as a legal nurse consultant; in fact, you need 2,000 hours of experience to receive the certification. It may, however, help you along your career path.
60 contact hours of credit should be earned each renewal period. You may earn contact hours through continuing education or college classes or by professional | eng | 9d6890ae-79f6-4c10-b72d-3cffec220286 | https://www.healthcarepathway.com/certification/legal-nurse-consultant-certification/ |
Affiliation
Abstract
The finding that viruses with RNA and DNA genomes can recombine to produce chimeric entities provides valuable insights into the origin and evolution of viruses. It also substantiates the hypothesis that certain groups of DNA viruses could have emerged from plasmids via acquisition of capsid protein-coding genes from RNA viruses. | eng | da5ae22d-3dec-4269-96ac-a9c1901ba2f0 | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22886750/ |
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How to Handle Your Angry Child
Dealing with meltdowns can be difficult, but it's during these times your angry child NEEDS you. Here are strategies to help you handle it.
My kids had been so excited to work on the school garden. You couldn't peel them away from digging and turning the soil. Other than the occasional snack, they wanted to keep shoveling and pulling weeds.
And then it happened: One of them didn't want to leave.
Whereas the other two were ready to go home, he wanted to stay and dig. So, my husband and I did the typical moves: we showed empathy and tried to make the transition light. We even gave him an incentive ("We'll have lunch right when we get home").
He finally followed us to the van, but once we got there, he burst into an epic meltdown. It was clear—I had an angry child on my hands.
He was kicking the chair, crying, and trying to hit us. It didn't get better when we finally got home and my husband had to carry him all the way to the door. I wish I could say we kept our cool, but this isn't a success story. Rather, it's a learning moment.
Because this is what I learned, in hindsight:
My son needed me.
After the tears dried and I'm sorry's said from both sides, I thought about what happened. Why did I still let his temper affect me? Why wasn't I calm this time? What could I have told myself to better handle this situation?
Instead, remind yourself that he needs you at this moment. The inability to manage his angry behavior is something he needs to work on—with your help.
Below are a few more tips I've since learned about how handle angry kids:
1. Contain unsafe or hurtful behaviors
Anger is normal and allowed, but the goal is to help your child regulate big emotions so he doesn't escalate to explosive anger over every little thing. Don't allow him to continue to hurt, hit, or break things around him.
Describe physical sensations he might feel so he can be more aware of the signs of anger before he explodes. You might say that when we get angry, we tend to feel our hearts beating faster, shaking in our bodies, and any other cues he might have.
In the future, he'll know to look out for these cues and hopefully pause before he reacts.
Free resource: Modeling correct behavior can be a challenge when kids don't listen. Join my newsletter and discover the ONE effective word to get them to listen and follow instructions. Grab your PDF below—at no cost to you:
2. Stay calm
Keeping our cool is hard, especially when we feel attacked, when our day feels ruined, or when we struggle with anger management ourselves.
But staying calm helps you think clearly. You're more likely to stick to positive reinforcement and be the supportive parent your child needs you to be. Staying calm also models the kind of behavior she can copy. You're showing her the anger management skills she needs to learn and develop to manage her rage.
3. Accept your child's emotions as real and normal
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
At his most difficult times, your child just needs to feel heard. He wants to know that his feelings are valid and aren't "childish" (even if to you it can seem like it). All these emotions and temper tantrums are normal, for every person and certainly for every child.
If he's receptive, reach out and connect. Don't lecture or give facts—instead, describe what you see. Let him know he seems upset that he lost a game, can't find his toys, or has to leave a fun outing. Remind him that you're here and will always love him, regardless of his temperament.
And if he allows it, embrace or put your hand on his back—the physical, non-verbal communication is a good reminder that you're still here. As psychologist Ethan Kross wrote in Chatter:
"Research shows that when people feel the welcome, affectionate touch or embrace of those they are close to, they often interpret that as a sign that they are safe, loved, and supported. Caring physical contact from people we know and trust lowers our biological threat response, improves our ability to deal with stress, promotes relationship satisfaction, and reduces feelings of loneliness."
But if he isn't in the mood, then acknowledge that he isn't, that you respect his space, and that you're here when he's ready.
4. Don't diminish the reason your child got upset
We parents can say pretty insensitive stuff throughout our kids' childhood, like, "Don't worry—we'll just get another one."
As logical as that may seem to us, it's not what our young children need to hear. They experienced an emotion about something meaningful enough to draw that kind of anger out of them.
To brush it aside as petty not only takes away the value of the reason they cried but of their emotions and feelings as well. This won't help decrease his anger, but might even cause him to blame his frustration on you. Your child needs you to understand the depth of his frustration and that you take it seriously.
5. Only teach once your child is calm
Fair warning: trying to talk to an angry child will get you nowhere. At this stage, he's too angry to listen to what you're saying, much less process the lessons you're trying to teach.
Once your child is calm, only then should you talk about what happened. Ask him to share what led to his anger, or talk about what he can do about it moving forward. Have him tell you what you can do that would help as well.
Give constructive feedback and suggestions if he's willing to listen to them. He can take a deep breath, say "I'm mad," run to you for a hug, or write or draw about it. These can become his toolbox of things to do to express anger in a better way.
And when everyone is calm, remind him that it's okay to be mad. We all feel mad sometimes (even though it doesn't feel good) but the mad feelings go away after a while.
6. Evaluate within yourself what happened
Think about how you interact with your child. Have you been saying "no" too often that this was her last straw from not having a say? What triggered her anger? Could you have transitioned to the next activity better?
Then, think about what sets you off and makes you angry right back at her. Perhaps you lose your temper when she does something you'd just told her not to. With this awareness, you know you're better off ignoring her deliberate defiance than feeding into that trigger.
Or ask yourself if the issue is that big of a deal. I'd wanted to leave the school garden, but we technically didn't have to, at least not right at that moment. I wanted to make it home in time to prepare lunch, but I didn't have to follow the schedule so closely if it meant helping my son transition better.
Waiting a little bit would've been all he needed to accept the situation and leave. Maybe he would've walked away much calmer if we had given him five more minutes.
7. Prevent anger in the first place
Most of what we've discussed deals with anger after the fact, but we can do plenty to prevent it in the first place. Speak with empathy to any of your child's emotions so he feels understood and heard, even if you're disciplining.
"Fill his bucket" and give him your full attention even for just 10 minutes a day. And make him laugh, which can also release some of the tension he may be feeling.
8. Model anger management
If we want our kids to have self-control and exhibit appropriate behavior, then we need to be a good role model. Simple as that. It's hard not to get sucked into the emotional pull of an angry child. You feel angry, inconvenienced, or disappointed.
But the best way to teach her how to handle anger is to do it yourself.
That might mean pausing before you lash out at her behavior. Saying "I'm going to my room because I feel too angry right now." Or even apologizing after the fact to show that you've also made a mistake.
Conclusion
As normal as it is for kids to experience intense anger issues, responding to them can be difficult. But with the right steps, you can use these moments to teach your child how to manage his emotions.
The first step is to contain unsafe or aggressive behavior so he doesn't continue to harm himself or others. Do your best to stay calm so you're better able to think clearly and not feed the fire. Accept his emotions as real and valid, and don't diminish the reason he got upset.
Talk about his angry outbursts only once he's calm, and see what caused you to get angry and upset. Prevent his anger from flaring up in the first place, and lastly, model the behavior you want to see in him.
That day in the garden wasn't the last time I dealt with an angry child or lost my temper, but I've since learned better ways to manage it. And that day taught me an important lesson: Sometimes, our kids simply need us. Beneath the tantrum, anxiety, or aggression, they need our help to get them through it | eng | d7d915b9-4b54-4b76-9ef9-80c602662b51 | https://sleepingshouldbeeasy.com/angry-child/ |
Virtual support systems can make it simpler to look after your mental health. Book Dana Brouca Betterhelp Therapist LCSW now with a discount off your first session!
They can be practical and personal Certified Medical Social Worker Do?
A licensed medical social worker offers treatment to customers with psychological and psychological issuesExternal link: open_in_new that are affecting their daily lives. They deal with their customers to listen to their requirements and provide the support and resources needed to deal with those problems.
LCSWs likewise have the ability to identify and treat the problems of their clients, although this might differ by state. This can be in the form of offering treatment, offering recommendations, and working with other specialists like physicians to come up with a reliable treatment plan for their customer.
Where do LCSWs work?
LCSWs can work in a range of settings. Some work in workplaces for research study purposes, and others might visit their clients in schools, their house, recreation center, medical facilities licensed medical social worker in your state. Among those resources offers information on how to end up being a LCSW in your state which enables you to select your state and evaluation education requirements and LCSW test requirements (if appropriate).
Is a LCSW considered a doctor?
Unlike a doctor, an LCSW can not prescribe medication. LCSWs have the ability to supply psychiatric therapy to their customers, however, their training focuses on linking their customers with the resources and abilities required to satisfy their needs. LCSWs can easily collaborate with psychiatrists and medical professionals to establish comprehensive treatment prepare for clients. In those medical professionals sophisticated standing. Usually, it takes 2 years to finish an MSW; the LSW does not require post-degree experience. A social worker can gain LSW licensure in six shortage of professionals, stresses training in therapy and therapy. Psychologists with either degree can practice treatment but are required to complete a number of years of supervised practice before becoming licensed.
A psychologist will identify a mental disorder or issue and identify what's finest for the patient's care. A psychologist typically works in tandem with a psychiatrist, who is also a medical physician and can prescribe medication if it is determined that medication is required for a patient's treatment. Psychologists can do research study, which is a really important contribution academically and clinically, to the profession.
Therapists can be psychoanalysts, marital relationship therapists, social employees and life coaches, among other specializeds. Therapists supply assistance Dana Brouca Betterhelp Therapist LCSW and guidance, while assisting clients make reliable choices within the overall structure of assistance.
The profile of each therapist on Talkspace includes a brief scores, with customers mentioning problems around long waits to hear from a therapist and unfavorable experiences with private therapists. | eng | 16a37d80-d04a-4e9a-841c-c29fe43909bd | https://www.forhandbagstore.com/dana-brouca-betterhelp-therapist-lcsw/ |
EU is now the second largest cause of mining-related deforestation, reports shows
14 percent of the global forest destruction associated with mining is attributable to the EU.
Between 2000 and 2020, raw materials imported into the EU consumed an area of forest twice the size of Germany.
WWF calls for more circular economy and due diligence obligations for companies.
From 2000 to 2020, over 755,861 square kilometers of forest were cleared in the vicinity of raw material mines – an area more than twice the size of the Federal Republic of Germany. This is shown in a report published today by WWF Germany and the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
According to the report, the EU is one of the biggest drivers of forest destruction by mining for raw materials such as coal, gold and copper: 14 percent of global forest destruction in connection with mining can be attributed to the EU. This puts the EU behind China (18 percent) and ahead of the U.S. (12 percent).
"Our hunger for raw materials is destroying forests elsewhere, poisoning groundwater and robs people and animals of their livelihoods. Companies in whose production raw materials are relevant need to do much more to create transparency in their supply chain and opt for raw materials that are mined in an environmentally compatible manner. The German government must also urgently drive forward circular economy. It is the key to stemming the climate crisis and biodiversity loss at the same time,"Tobias Kind-Rieper, Global Lead on Mining and Metals at WWF Germany.
Between 2000 and 2020, the raw materials imported into Germany consumed an area of forest as large as Malta. Within the EU, Germany is the largest importer of mining-related forest destruction: 19 percent of this was accounted for by the Federal Republic, closely followed by Great Britain (also 19 percent) and Spain (11 percent). The largest deforestation footprint for resources within Germany is the automotive industry (17 percent), followed by mechanical and plant engineering (11 percent) and lignite mining (9 percent). lignite mining (9 percent). Globally, the construction sector is responsible for most of the deforestation caused by mining (18 percent).
While the demand for resources is concentrated primarily in industrialized countries in the global North and emerging economies in Asia, the extraction of these resources is destroying forests in a few countries, primarily in the global South. Over 80 percent of deforestation for extraction of raw materials in the last 20 years has taken place in just ten countries, most notably in Indonesia (3537 km²), Brazil (1654 km²) and Russia (1276 km²). The countries with the highest proportion of mining-related deforestation in the country's total deforestation are. Suriname (29 percent), Guyana (21 percent), and New Caledonia (six percent).
According to the study by WWF and the Vienna University of Economics and Business, coal and gold caused the greatest destruction: 71 percent of all direct deforestation caused by mining worldwide can be traced back to these two raw materials. The indirect deforestation caused by the construction of roads, settlements and energy infrastructure far exceeded the direct deforestation caused by the mine itself. WWF is therefore calling for the environmental impact assessment of mining activities to also consider the indirect consequences of the projects in the future.
"The dimensions of forest destruction caused by global mining are alarming. Due to the growing demand for raw materials, the loss of rainforests in particular has accelerated rapidly. Mainly responsible for this are our unsustainable production and consumption patterns." Stefan Giljum, Professor of Ecological Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration | eng | fb9b93f9-6b2e-4498-a5e1-38b2c15a3197 | https://eutoday.net/eu-is-now-the-second-largest-cause-of-mining-related-deforestation-reports-shows/ |
Mindful Movement, Breath & Play
Welcome to movement, breath, play and other health and wellbeing offerings. As new videos are created they will be added to the library and available for viewing.
**Please ensure you always work with how your body is feeling at the time and work within your own limits.
Pilates Breath and Breathing Meditation
In this video I take you through a breath focused practice, diaphragmatic (belly breathing) and meditation and Pilates bucket handle, intercostal breathing technique.
Why Breath is such an important part of Pilates practice
'Breathing is the first act of life and the last. Our very life depends on it.'
Joseph Pilates
Mr Pilates felt very strongly about the quality of breath. In his words.
'Before any real benefit can be derived from physical exercises, one must first learn how to breath properly. Our very life depends on it.'
Joseph Pilates believed that focusing on breathing was vital.
'It is tragically deplorable,' he once said, 'to contemplate the millions who have never mastered the art of correct breathing.'
He was a very passionate man.
Pilates teaches various breathing techniques to enhance relaxation, lower blood pressure, and to activate specific muscles that help improve posture. Pilates gives us an opportunity to focus on our breath in a dedicated time and space. We learn to connect our breath to our movement and practice so that it becomes second nature and becomes a part of how we breath and move instinctively.
PS the choreographer I can't remember the name of in the video is Bob Fosey 😁
Skateboard Pilates Reformer - part 1
This video is an overview of how you can use a skateboard as a Pilates reformer for footwork and bridging exercises.
Short Simple Skateboard Pilates Reformer workout
Footwork 10-12 repetitions of each variation
- heels (hip distance apart)
- balls of the feet (hip distance apart)
- balls of the feet with heels in Pilates V; knees tracking second to middle toes, no wider than your shoulders
Note: Begin with a heavy theraband allowing more control of the skateboard and stabilising your core. Once you are comfortable with your setup play with reducing the strength of the theraband - the lighter the theraband the harder it is to stabilise through your core, control the skateboard and draw the skateboard back to the start position. A lighter theraband also makes keeping the skateboard still while bridging much more challenging.
Pilates Fundamentals
In this video I take you through pelvic floor and core activation, combining your breath with movement and some of the core fundamental Pilates exercises.
Pilates fundamentals are an important foundation for your Pilates practice.
In this video you will practice
- breath
- pelvic tilts
- finding neutral spine
- leg floats
- bridging
- chest lift
- assisted roll up
Breath Awareness and Body Scan Meditation
A short soothing meditation designed for professionals and students with busy minds or someone who are new to meditation and needs something to focus on. The meditation has some pace to give a point of focus throughout and avoids giving too much space for your mind to wonder off and think of a million things.
This easy to follow meditation is short enough to easily slot into your day and can be downloaded onto your device to listen to even in flight mode.
Digestion Support
In this video I take you through a fusion of breath, Pilates and yoga to support digestion.
Activating the parasympathetic nervous system to activate the rest and digest response along with gentle movement that massage the stomach and intestines while also moving your body with mobility and stability,
This practice may help with stomach and intestinal discomfort and bloating, is good when feeling discomfort and to maintain optimal digestion health.
Please always listen to your body each and every practice. What felt good yesterday or last week may be different today. Work with where your body and mind is at in the moment | eng | 84ba1fd0-500a-4416-83a7-d639443029ba | https://www.pixicatoplay.com/subscription-login |
Students create eco-graphics
Students from the College of Visual and Performing Arts,L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, School of Architecture, Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the College of Arts and Sciences, the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the School of Information Studiescame together in September for the Creative Climate, an intensive weekend eco-graphics design workshop sponsored by SU Showcase. Led by Tara DePorte, director of the Human Impacts Institute in New York City, and Andrea Buckvold, an instructor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, the students researched the effects of climate disruption and brainstormed and experimented with ways to communicate the danger to others.
Using collage, silkscreen or computer graphics, they produced posters, which are now on display on the fourth floor of the Hall of Languages and the first floor of Bird Library. Following are some of their | eng | 09b5ec52-9d68-4c46-9473-a22ffd4dccee | https://news.syr.edu/blog/2012/10/09/students-create-eco-graphics/ |
UFC 136 does estimated 250K buys
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OG Light Heavyweight
I am not surprised in the least. The difference is promotion. 135 did well because they promoted the s--- out of that card. Bones & Rampage were on Jimmy Kimmel and the promo was on TV left and right. Also Jones isn't known that well and is still being built up. Couldn't say the same for UFC 136. Imagine if UFC 135 was stacked liked 136 it would have done much better then 450K.
Sheesh that's bad. With the PPV buy rates of 2011 and the buy rate of UFC 125, I didn't expect too much, but I thought at least 350k. Don't know why Frankie is not a draw especially Frankie-Maynard fighting again after the fight at UFC 125. I can understand Aldo not being a huge draw but still it was a title fight with Florian. Finally there was Stann vs Sonnen...
Can't see with just those three alone that it didn't do significantly better plus the rest of the card was filled out nicely.
Nothing wrong with being optimistic, but UFC cannot be pleased with these numbers. They probably weren't excepting anything crazy, giving the previous numbers for Gray/Maynard two previous fights, but 250k is down right bad and they are going to continue to take a hit with Georges/Condit fight being off for the time being. | eng | 302577cb-a778-4003-b24b-f29acdd4dea5 | https://forum.mmajunkie.com/threads/ufc-136-does-estimated-250k-buys.42784/page-2#post-1127832 |
Tag: gratitude | eng | 5d251199-8819-4652-b7b7-647856ea2dfd | https://nammyfit.com/tag/gratitude/ |
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Project 2 Artist Research: Dadaism & Surrealism
Within this post, I will share my findings and research by going over the general movements of Dadaism and Surrealism as well as the specific artists that contributed and are associated with them.
This post will cover the following content in the order mentioned below:
What is Dadaism?
Short Biography, Association & Works of…
Marcel Duchamp
Hannah Hoch
Hans Arp
What is Surrealism?
Short Biography, Association & Works of…
Salvador Dali
René Magritte
Max Ernst
———————-
{ What is Dadaism?
One interesting thing to note about the word Dada is that it is more of a nonsense word with a literal meaning of 'hobby horse.' This term was meant to describe a particular movement that took place during the 20th century (1916 – 1925) in Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, Paris and New York. The Dadaists were disillusioned that useless manslaughter was the consequence of World War I and soon began to reject conventional ways in the representation and exhibition of art as well as rational thoughts. The use of oil and canvas became abandoned. Dadaists became drawn towards ready-mades as forms of art. Readymades are the selection of already manufactured, common place objects taken, selected, and classified as art. The name was established by Marcel Duchamp, a French artist who was a part of the Dadaism movement. Artists of this period would often challenge the relationships between elements such as words and images, with words as a main factor of prominence within their work. Meanings in relation to the works of this movement were often dependent on accident or location.
Ideals regarding this movement originated from activities of a small group of artists and poets that were based in Zurich. A revolutionary set of strategies and philosophies soon became adopted after by different artists worldwide that did not really share a common style. Forms of Dada art came in visual art, performances as well as poetry. The aesthetics of their works usually came in second as opposed to the conveying of the message or idea they attempted to portray. Dadaists surrounded their interest with modernity as they both embraced and critiqued the theme itself — their works are often referenced with subject matters surrounding; technology, newspaper, film and advertisement. One thing to take note about Dada artists was that they were fused with inspiration for experimentation. The Dada movement brought along the innovation of photomontage and collage.
[ Dada Artists ]
Marcel Duchamp
Birth: July 28, 1887 — Blainville, France
Death: October 2, 1968 — Neuilly, France
Marcel Duchamp.
George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
[ Short Biography ]
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist who became known for breaking down the barrier between what 'makes up an artwork or is considered one' and everyday objects. Marcel Duchamp studied at Académie Julian in 1904 – 1905. He worked with figure paintings during the early stages of his career which were inspired by Fauvism, another artistic movement prior to Dadaism, and Matisse; an artist belong to the Fauvism period. Duchamp did not have much of a care for the standards of aesthetics within his works of art which actually allowed him to transition towards his readymades (1913) as he slowly drifted away from painting. The artist can be well associated with the term and concept of readymades even today. These readymades had shocked the public since he challenged the notion of what may be considered art. Duchamp was also rather fond of wordplay within his works, tying his work in similarity to those of the Surrealists. However, the French artist had no intentions of being categorised, and therefore, refused to be tied down to a specific movement. With the mindset of pursuing concept and ideology before anything else, Duchamp is generally labelled as the Father of Conceptual Art. The man refused to follow a conventional artistic path which led him to produce very little work during his career and consequently, his withdrawal from the art world.
[ Works ]
Duchamp is well known for his readymades which are daily conventional objects we use in our everyday lives that the artist takes out of original context and puts them together in whatever way he wishes. He thereby, promotes their status and classify them as art. The artist highly rejected artworks with only one intention; to provide aesthetic beauty and retinal pleasure. Pictured below are some of his most well-known works during his career.
"In 1913… I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn."
– Marcel Duchamp
The Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp was the first of his collection of readymades. This was an example of what the artist did best; repositioning objects in his own arrangement, signing the composition, and calling it art. Duchamp mentioned that the work was an 'assisted readymade', meaning that it involved the combination of more than one already mass produced object to form this work of his.
Fountain (1917)
Fountain, original (lost) ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, 1917
Marcel Duchamp/Alfred Stieglitz
Porcelain. replica 1964
'Fountain' was another of Marcel Duchamp's widely known readymades and is often seen as an iconic representative of the 20th century. The concept for 'Fountain' was influenced by a discussion between Duchamp, Walter Arensberg (Collector), and Joseph Stella (Artist). The French artist purchased the urinal from a sanitary ware supplier and arranged for it to be submitted under the name of R.Mutt. Duchamp did not sign the work under his own name but instead was influenced by a daily cartoon strip published during his time, 'Mutt and Jeff.' The artist claimed to want 'any old name' and therefore settled upon R.Mutt. The original urinal was placed with its backing lying against the ground to cover up its position in which the typical usage took place in. Photographs of a 1918 show in Duchamp's studio has shown the readymade being placed in his doorway in a hanging manner making the loss of the sculpture after a mystery.
Hannah Hoch
Birth: November 1, 1889 — Gotha, Thuringia, Germany
Death: May 31, 1978 — West Berlin, West Germany
[ Short Biography ]
Hannah Hoch was a German artist and the only woman who became a part of the Berlin Dada movement. She was known for her photomontage/collage compositions in which she would often explore perceptions of differing ethnicities and genders. Hoch's training began in 1912 at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenberg with the study of glass design before it became disrupted for a momentary time due to the outbreak of World War I. After, during 1920, Hoch went back to the school and reenrolled for the study of painting and graphic design (woodcut/linoleum block printing). Soon in 1915, she became associated with Raoul Hausmann, an Austrian artist who belonged to the Berlin Dada group. Hoch then entered as a member of this group and thus began her exploration with non-objective and non-representational works of art. Her medium primarily consisted of photomontages and collages in which she collected from images within newspapers and magazines. To help pay for her tuition fees as well as support herself financially, Hannah Hoch began to work as a part-time employee at a Berlin magazine publishing house, 'Ullstein Verlag.' Her position in the company gave her access to an abundance of imagery and text she used within the works she created.
Even though artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque played their part to help elevate collage art into a form of fine art, it was Hoch and the Dadaists that were the pioneer innovators that decided to incorporate photography as the dominant medium of collages. Together, Hannah Hoch and her partner Raoul Hausmann, disoriented cutout photographic imagery while at the same time juxtaposing and overlapping to reflect the consequential effects of post war. They reacted to the confusion and chaos caused, through subversion of all conventional ways of artistic thinking and concepts. Their photomontage works were an initial reaction against the violence and war of World War I and were supposed to portray as anti-art. Having no need for academic artistic training and reliance on only mass produced imagery, collaging was intended to oppose the ongoing German aesthetics of that era. However in the 1920s, photomontage became adapted into the art world and was appreciated by numerous fine art connoisseurs.
[ Works ]
Dada Puppen — Dada Dolls (1916)
These sculptures made by Hoch were small-scaled in size. They were also a suggestion of her knowledge of Dada ideas derived from Zurich rather than the Berlin circle since that was only formed during the year 1917. She was believed to have been influenced by writer Hugo Ball, founder of Dada from Zurich since the costumes dressed upon Hoch's own sculptural dolls were similar to that of Ball's costume which he wore at a Dada performance at a Swiss nightclub. It was there that Ball recited poetry while wearing a costume composed of geometric shapes. The costume may possibly be a commentary on feelings toward the developing technology of that era. Technology was both feared and likened since it aided in the progress of areas such as social and economics yet it also posed as a threat to humanity through its use of destructive power.
Dadaists would often portray man as manufactured, mutilated and mechanical as a conveyer of the message that technology was causing humans to become more machine-like. Here, Hoch has used satire within her work to critique elements of culture during that time making her sculptures appear intimidating and absurd.
Heads of State (1918 – 1919/20)
Staatshäupter (Heads of State), 1918-1919, Photomontage.
Here, Hoch introduces the subjects of German president Friedrich Ebert and Minister of Defense, Gustav Noske through the use of a newspaper photograph within her montage. The two men are supposed to appear foolish and out of context with their bathing suits on while at the same time their placement is on a background of iron-on embroidery pattern of flowers and pattern that seem to surround a woman. The imagery is both powerful and comical and is based upon a recent event during that time when the president and minister had placed the Spartacist Rebellion down ruthlessly. In the image, they are seen in some fantasy land, without acknowledging the problems of politics and finance facing Germany and its population during this time period. The patterned background is meant to contrast the roles of both women and men especially the lower wages gained from occupations worked by women. The montage is arranged in this particular manner to show how the two subject matters have been caught within the embroidery at the back demonstrating ridicule as well as the stripping of masculinity. Alongside all these messages, the composition questions values and criticises patriarchy.
Hans Arp
Birth: September 16, 1886 — Strasbourg, Alsace
Death: June 7, 1996 — Berlin, Germany
[ Short Biography ]
Hans Arp was a French-German-American artist who specialised with sculpture, painting as well as collaging. He created sculptures out of plaster, stone, bronze and expressed himself in the form of paintings, drawings, collages as well as poems. The approach that Arp went with form was considered organic abstraction and was consistent in manner. The wavy lines within his works demonstrated natural motifs such as plants and body parts while at the same time portraying them as entire abstraction. Dominant themes within his works are transformation, growth, fecundity and metamorphosis.
Born in Strasbourg, Arp was considered an enemy by Germany when the war broke out in the year 1914 which resulted in him having to had take refuge in Switzerland the year after. Arp contributed to Zurich Dada from the outset and had talent within areas of literature and visual arts just like many of his other Dadaist artists. Hans collaborated with many other artists after leaving schools ranging from Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, the Weimar Academy of Art, the Académie Julian in Paris since he was not satisfied with the instructions and teachings conducted at the respective places. Arp created works that were non-representational and his abstracted artworks represented organic forms. He was also one of the first artists to allow chance as part of his work and to create randomness. The artist was also transitional between movements since he was one of the founders of Dadaism yet he became an active participant in Surrealism.
[ Works ]
Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance (1916-1917)
1917. Torn-and-pasted paper and colored paper on colored paper
19 1/8 x 13 5/8″ (48.5 x 34.6 cm)
This is one of Hans Arp's earliest 'chance collages' displaying his stylistic technique of simply tearing paper into rough shapes, dropping them onto a large piece of paper and sticking them down wherever they happen to land. However, chances that the paper would fall so harmoniously spaced and in line with one another would probably be little to none. This was one of the first attempts in the history of art where chance was used within an artwork and also demonstrated the chaos Dadaists were trying to portray within their works as a reaction to the World War.
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{ What is Surrealism?
Surrealism was inspired by the psychological studies by Freud and Jung and artists within this movement sought to create works that had typical themes surrounding dreams, subconscious thoughts and unspoken communication. It all began in 1924 with the theories of Andre Breton, particularly when he drafted Surrealist Manifesto and declared Surrealism as 'pure psychic automatism' which later affected methodology and movements such as Abstract Expressionism. The Surrealist movement went into two directions consequently; one being abstract traditions of biomorphic (organic shapes are stressed and hint at natural forms) and suggestive forms while the other; tradition of using reality based subjects and putting them together in an odd manner. Surrealism challenges and fascinates through sources of mysticism, psychology and symbolism. Artworks within this movement are not to be clearly understood and are meant to puzzle you.
[ Surrealism Artists ]
Salvador Dali
Birth: May 11, 1904 — Figueras, Catalonia, Spain
Death: January 23, 1989 — Figueras, Catalonia, Spain
[ Short Biography ]
Salvador Dali was a Spanish artist who specialised in painting, sculpture, filmmaking, printmaking and performance art. He is one of the most versatile artists of the 20th century and is probably the most famous Surrealist artist. Dali attempts to create his artworks based on his dreams and hallucinations which till today are iconic, achieving fame during his lifetime and even after his death. Reflecting with psychoanalytical theories during his time, Dali majorly portrays themes within his work with elements such as eroticism, death, and decay. He created his own system of tapping the unconscious which he labelled as 'paranoiac critical.' This is where one can conjure delusion while maintaining sanity. The method has since been applied by his contemporaries whom are mostly Surrealists to mediums that vary from cinema, poetry to fashion.
[ Works ]
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
1931. Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13″ (24.1 x 33 cm)
The theme portrayed in one of Dali's most iconic paintings, shown above, is time. Subject matters included within the oil painting range from ants, melting clocks as well as what is believed to be a self portrait of the artist himself. He attempts to introduce confusion to the audience and shifting their mindsets away from reality. Dali has placed conventional subjects in an unfamiliar context or placed them in an unfamiliar way within the painting.
Lobster Telephone (1936)
Téléphone – Homard. Steel, plaster, rubber, resin and paper.
Object: 178 x 330 x 178 mm.
Lobster Telephone is one of the most famous sculptural work of Dali's. It is also famously attributed to Surrealism as it is one of the most surrealist objects created in history. Salvador Dali combines the use of a telephone and a large sharp clawed lobster together. The telephone is an object meant to be held close to one's ear yet in this case, the lobster's genitalia is placed along the mouth piece area. Here, Dali has placed two items with one another that are not usually associated with one another. The artist often use telephones and lobsters to imply sexual connotations in a playful manner. This sculpture is an example of this.
René Magritte
Birth: November 21, 1898 — Lessines, Belgium
Death: August 15, 1967 — Brussels, Belgium
[ Short Biography ]
Rene Magritte is a Belgian artist who has supported himself throughout his life by working as a commercial artist while producing advertisements as well as book designs. Magritte had a middle class existence and his earlier commercial artistic portion of his life helped influence his route into the fine arts. His life as a middle classed man is typically symbolised by a bowler-hatted man that is used consistently within his artworks which would often be repeated in a pattern of sorts. Conceptual artists have since been inspired by his use of text and imagery while painters from the 1980s admired the provocative kitsch seen in his work which were done in the later stages of his life.
Magritte worked with a rather illustrative style that showed the message he was trying to portray in a clear method. Repetition is a stronghold in Magritte's work and he is believed to have been inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis with repetition being a sign of trauma. His works are clear and simple which also provoke unsettling thoughts without hiding any of the mystery with elements in his artwork being strange.
[Works]
Golconda (1953)
René Magritte, Golconda, 1953, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Golconda is an example of many of Magritte's work dealing with repetition. The scene depicted shows nearly identical men topped and dressed in the same dark overcoats and bowler hats. They appear to be floating in midair against a backdrop of blue sky and buildings, with no signs of motion involved. The painting is believed to be a reflection of the suburban environment in which Magritte lived in and the dressing of the men is similar to that of his own.
The Lovers II (1928)
1928. Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 x 28 7/8″ (54 x 73.4 cm)
This oil painting of Magritte's does not demonstrate repetition but instead, portrays a common theme that the artist generally surrounds his work with. Here, Magritte wanted to send the message across about frustrated desires. The fabric appears to act as a barrier, thereby opposing the intimacy between the couple. Instead of embracing one another, the fabric leads them toward the path of isolation and frustration.
Enshrouded faces are seen as a common motif in the artist's works due to a traumatic incident he witnessed as a child. When Magritte was just at the age of 14, his mother committed suicide by drowning herself. Her body was fished out of the water with the wet nightgown she was wearing wrapped around her face.
Max Ernst
Birth: April 2, 1891 — Bruhl, Germany
Death: April 1, 1976 — Paris, France
[ Short Biography ]
Max Ernst was an innovative artist that mocked social conventions and looked for dreamlike imagery within his unconscious states which he used within his works. Ernst was a soldier in World War I and the effects of the war had traumatised him greatly. Since then, he had been highly critical of western culture. His vision of the modern world then became irrational, with this idea becoming the basis of his artworks. The artist worked both in Dadaism and Surrealism and his humour showed greatly within his works. He wanted to locate his own creativity and therefore attempted to portray his primal emotions and personal traumas, them eventually becoming the subject of his collages and paintings. Max Ernst painted from his subconscious, known as automatic painting, which later influenced Abstract Expressionists.
Cut and pasted printed paper and pencil on printed paper on card stock.
6 1/2 x 8 1/4″ (16.5 x 21 cm)
This work was composed through 3 photomechanical reproductions. Here Everything Is Floating demonstrates an environment that is upended with an image of an aerial chemical bomb attack Ernst had cut from a book with content surrounding German military aviation. Alongside this, he glued a bisected beetle as well as a cross section of a fish. The image demonstrates an intimidating pairing of technology and biology in a single composition.
In this work, Ernst displays his common technique of reusing found images, removing or even adding something else to the original in order to create a new reality. The work title is derived from a childish German rhyme that goes: 'The elephant from Celebes has sticky, yellow bottom grease…' Ernst has used strange, peculiar combinations of conventional subject matters to create an unconventional world. The weird-like combinations suggest a dream-like state with the Freudian technique of free association in use. | eng | 069a0e9b-6b96-420f-a2fe-88461a0f4c66 | https://oss.adm.ntu.edu.sg/bcheng005/project-2-artist-research-dadaism-surrealism/ |
Collection:
Basil Hayden's
Basil Hayden's is a premium bourbon whiskey brand known for its smooth, rich taste and distinctive spicy finish. It is made using a high-rye mash bill, which gives it a spicy kick and unique flavor profile. The brand is named after Basil Hayden Sr., a pioneer in the bourbon industry who began distilling whiskey in the late 18th century.
Basil Hayden's is aged for a minimum of eight years in charred oak barrels, giving it a deep amber color and notes of caramel, vanilla, and oak. It has a subtle sweetness that is complemented by a peppery, spicy finish that lingers on the palate.
The brand is characterized by its attention to detail and commitment to quality, with each bottle being carefully crafted and hand-labeled. It is a favorite among whiskey connoisseurs and is often enjoyed neat or on the rocks, as well as in classic cocktails like the Old Fashioned. Overall, Basil Hayden's is a refined and sophisticated bourbon whiskey that offers a unique and unforgettable drinking experience. | eng | 7a73b22c-0f25-478b-867a-431f81723091 | https://www.folsomwinespirits.com/collections/basil-haydens |
1. Video
Transcription
Concerning learning environments, we can define them as spaces where educational activities take shape. To innovate educational environments we can suggest to teachers various opportunities. The first one is Broken Up Class based on Bardi's method which is described in our guidebook. The second one is Disciplinary Laboratory Classrooms and the third one is Laboratory Teaching, intended as active, constructivist and experiential teaching, with a disciplinary and interdisciplinary orientation.
You can find the description of this methodologies in the next chapter.
To rethink environments, methods and approaches represent for us an important opportunity to contribute in the teachers' training to encourage the use in school of non-formal education methods that can lead also young people with fewer opportunities to create their projects step by step, feeling responsible for their growth actions.
Another exciting aspect of using non-formal education is that beneficiaries can, as a result of their experience, become multipliers, turning into "more experienced peers" than their friends, motivating and supporting them in a "horizontal" way.
Non-formal education could be a tool for the inclusion of all, especially those who have not been fortunate with the formal education system, thus ensuring a second chance for the social reintegration of young people with fewer opportunities.
2. The Didactics of being with
In this article is described the importance of innovation in educational environments. | eng | 7851a58e-a2c2-45dd-98d6-3d260cfc9bde | https://youth-mooc.eu/topic/lesson-1-2-introduction-innovation/ |
Primary menu
Brain functions explained
See the below image for the Brain functions explained diagram. The brain is made up of many parts, each with a specific and important function. It controls our ability to balance, walk, talk, and eat. It coordinates and regulates our breathing, blood circulation, and heart rate.
The frontal lobe is involved with the main executive functions of the brain, which include: Judgment, that is, the ability to recognize future consequences resulting from ongoing actions. This activity mostly occurs in the pre-frontal area.
This amazing organ acts as a control center by receiving, interpreting, and directing sensory information throughout the body. The brain and spinal cord are the two main structures of the central nervous system. There are three major divisions of the brain. They are the forebrain, the midbrain, and the hindbrain. | eng | 78bf6be8-50de-4dc2-bca1-c016c9210b73 | https://ygraph.com/chart/brain-functions-explained |
Chapter 4: Questions and Answers
Study Questions
1. How does Logan treat Janie differently in the months that follow Nanny's death?
2. What does Janie do when Logan threatens not to chop any wood for her?
3. Why does Logan want an extra mule?
4. Describe Joe as Janie first sees him.
5. As Joe walked down the road, "he acted like Mr. Washburn or somebody like that to Janie." What does this imply?
6. Why does Joe want Janie to shake her head?
7. What does Janie mean when she says to Logan, "you don't take nothin' to count but sow-belly and cornbread"?
8. Why does Logan ask Janie to come to the barn while she is in the middle of cooking breakfast?
9. What does Logan look like with a shovel in his hand?
10. According to Janie, why is Logan mad at her words?
Answers
1. Logan has stopped talking in rhyme to her, and he no longer plays with her hair.
2. Janie tells Logan that if he stops chopping wood, she won't make him any dinner.
3. He wants to have a large potato crop, and expects Janie to help him plow with one of the mules.
4. Joe was "seal-brown," "cityfied," and "stylish dressed." He had on a silk shirt, with his coat hanging from his arm. His hat was worn at an angle, which indicated that he "didn't belong in these parts."
5. Joe's confident stride is something that Janie has seen only in Mr. Washburn, and in her mind, that confidence is only in people who possess some sort of power. She is immediately interested in Joe because she has never seen a black man act with such confidence.
6. Joe loves to see Janie's long hair move back and forth when she shakes her head.
7. Logan is concerned more with his crops and his farm than with his wife. As long as his dinner is made every night, it seems to Janie that anyone could be his wife.
8. Logan wants Janie to help him move a pile of manure into the barn.
9. Logan looks like "a black bear doing a clumsy dance on his hind legs" with a shovel in his hand.
10. Janie says that Logan is mad at her because he already knows that she doesn't consider him or his land important. She also doesn't feel the gratitude that he apparently expected from her. As she tells him how she feels, she also tells him that he shouldn't be so mad because he already knew all of this | eng | bcb83585-1afd-4df4-bf20-ddc6b6feb299 | https://www.enotes.com/topics/their-eyes/quiz/chapter-4-questions-answers |
How Horror Movie Actors Looks Like Without Makeup, Check Out
Horror Movie Actors Look Like Without Makeup: Horror movie actors are the ones who scared the hell out of you with their terrifying looks. If you have watched movies like IT, THE CONJURING, and INSIDIOUS then you can't my word easily. but to make such an outstanding movie, it takes a lot of effort and time.
Horror movies are something which people enjoy a lot to watch but also get scared of hell. It also made outstanding because of the many different effects and sounds and horrifying scenes. These frightening scenes can make a person scream with fear. | eng | 2c8122f7-8622-485c-b061-0eb43563c060 | https://www.theemergingindia.com/how-horror-movie-actors-looks-like-without-makeup/ |
Are we playing a losing game?
Updated: Jan 18
Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts a victim's files and demands a ransom payment in exchange for the decryption key. It has become an increasingly prevalent threat in recent years, with many organizations falling victim to this type of attack.
One of the biggest challenges associated with ransomware is the lack of control that organizations have once their files have been encrypted. Once the malware has infiltrated a system, there is often little that can be done to regain access to the encrypted files without paying the ransom. This puts organizations in a difficult position, as they are often forced to choose between paying the ransom and losing access to their critical data or refusing to pay and potentially losing that data permanently.
Another challenge associated with ransomware is the difficulty of preventing these attacks in the first place. Ransomware can be delivered through a variety of methods, including email phishing scams, infected software downloads, and unsecured remote access. This makes it difficult for organizations to defend against the threat, as they must be vigilant against multiple attack vectors.
Another challenge is that even if the organization has a backup of the encrypted files, the process of restoring the backup and reconfiguring the system can be time-consuming and costly. In addition, some ransomware variants are designed to infect backups as well, making them useless.
Finally, there is the reputational and legal risk that organizations face if they fall
victim to a ransomware attack. In some cases, the attackers may threaten to release sensitive data if the ransom is not paid, which could cause significant damage to an organization's reputation and could also lead to legal action.
In conclusion, ransomware is a serious threat that can have a devastating impact on organizations. It is important that businesses take steps to protect themselves against this type of attack by implementing robust security measures, educating employees about the threat, and having a plan in place to respond to an attack quickly and effectively. | eng | 6aa431bf-8c93-46f8-9463-ced9549b5d39 | https://www.securicom.co.za/post/are-we-playing-a-losing-game |
Streaming harms middle class artists the most
The streaming mechanisms make it impossible to massively increase the payout per stream
Why this affects the middle class artists the most
Why you should still not turn away from streaming
The conflict with the streaming system and especially with the payout for musicians has been going on for a while now and the pandemic has only put fuel to the fire. Many artists are protesting, some are actively engaging in various movements, and in the UK, the question of whether payouts are fair is even being discussed on a parliamentary level. A recently published analysis by MIDiA shows which musicians are suffering the most under the low payouts from streaming services.
The mechanisms of streaming
The analysis agrees that labels, publishers, and streaming services should be handing over a bigger portion of the revenues to their artists, but it also reveals that this is not the main problem. That lies within the mechanism of streaming itself. It would never be possible to increase the payout per stream to such a degree that middle-class artists could live off it without the entire streaming structure collapsing on itself.
Middle class hit hardest
It is Spotify's declared goal to have more and more artists able to make a living off their streaming revenues alone. But even though this number is sure to increase further, MIDiA's analysts do not believe that the broad middle class will be able to generate enough revenues. If a musician earned USD 35,000 per year from CD sales in the past, he might make 7,000 from their streams today. Even if the payout per stream were to double, the revenues would still be strikingly lower than those from the sales-based model. In order to get the same amount, you would actually need to quintuplicate the payout, which would cause the entire streaming system to collapse.
Since the top artists still make a significant amount from streaming, as well, and those who were already making little to nothing prior to streaming will continue to do so, this means that those most affected are the middle class. In the old, sales-based model, you made more revenues with fewer fans. In the streaming model, you reach a bigger audience, which can lead to more revenues from live performances, merch sales, etc.
Conclusion
For most artists at the moment, it is not realistic to live off streaming revenues alone unless they make it into the superstar league. What middle-class artists need to do is find their niche and focus on their biggest fans. These are the ones who go to the concerts, buy merch and NFTs, or support the artist on Patreon. These revenues plus the streaming might enable middle-class artists to live off their art, as well.
Turning away from streaming entirely because you're frustrated by the low payouts would be a big mistake. That would mean losing one of the most important platforms for gaining new fans. You should not view streaming services primarily as a source of income but rather a tool, just like radio, for instance. You can use it to reach new listeners and have other monetization avenues that your now larger audience can use to support you. iGroove Magazine provides regularly posted tips on what other tools you can use so that your most loyal fans can also bring you some financial gain and stability. | eng | 7aaa161f-6407-41b9-8b5f-445ff8596557 | https://www.igroovemusic.com/blog/streaming-harms-middle-class-artists-the-most.html |
What do you need to know about the concept of semicircle in the world of mathematics?
Semicircle is one of the most common shapes which have been observed by individuals in the modern-day world. Semicircle is generally known as half of the circle and some of the real-life examples overhear include the railway tunnel, igloo, half of the watermelon, protractor and several other kinds of related things. All these kinds of shapes will perfectly resemble the semicircle whenever it will be drawn on the two-dimensional plane.
Whenever the arc of the circle with the endpoints on the diameter will be cut the circle into two equal parts those two equal parts will be known as semi-circles. This is one of the most common shapes which people will be found in their normal life for example a taco, speedometer and several other kinds of related things. It is very much important for people to be clear about the basic technicalities of the semicircle like area of semicircle and some of the basic things are:
The area of the circle will be referring to the inner space or the region of the circle since the semi-circle is half of the circle and the semi-circle area will be perfectly represent the area of the circle in terms of half dimensions. Hence, people need to note down that area of the circle is the value of pi into the square of the radius and on the other hand, the area of semicircle will be the value of pi into the square of radius/2. The value of pi over here can be perfectly taken as 22/7 or 3.142 approximately.
It is also very much vital for people to be clear about the perimeter of the semicircle to avoid any kind of chaos and for that make sure that people will be able to indulge in proper calculations without any kind of doubt. To calculate the area of semicircle it is very much vital for people to note down that radius or diameter of the circle has to be studied very well so that everybody will be clear about the basic dimensions and formulations in this case.
Since the circumference of the circle is two into the value of pi into the value of radius and on the other hand the circumference of the semi-circle will be the circumference of the complete circle divided by two which will come out to be the value of pi into the value of radius and it will also include the diameter. So, the formula, in this case, will be the value of pi into radius +2 into a radius or the value of radius into the value of pi +2. The circumference of the semi-circle is also considered to be the perimeter of a semicircle and it is very much important for people to note down that this particular calculation has to be perfectly carried out by them to avoid any kind of chaos.
The inscribed angle will be a line that will be drawn from each end of the time to any kind of the point of a semicircle and no matter where the line will be touching the semi-circle the angle will be perfectly inscribed as 90°. Hence, it is very much important for people to be clear about the basic technicalities in this particular field to avoid any kind of chaos and further make sure that people will be able to score well in the mathematics exam without any kind of doubt. Apart from this having a clear idea about the area of circle formula with the help of experts at Cuemath is very much important so that one will be able to deal with things very successfully without any kind of second thought in their minds | eng | 0dc88ac0-ef33-4d56-aeab-7a4ead97ac76 | https://www.fakazahits.com/what-do-you-need-to-know-about-the-concept-of-semicircle-in-the-world-of-mathematics/ |
Soundwaves opening at Moody
The Moody Center for the Arts is hosting their latest exhibition, "Soundwaves: Experimental Strategies in Art + Music," to celebrate the history of artistic and musical experimentation, paying homage to visual and performing artists that blend the two together into a melting pot of visual and sonic elements.
This exhibition incorporates the experimental strategies in art and music to illustrate the threads that connect these two seemingly disparate mediums together. The exhibit tackles an array of themes, including perception, memory, passage of time, relationships between technology and the environment and the struggle for social change.
Alison Weaver, the executive director of the Moody Center, said that the exhibit is particularly meaningful this year.
"The exhibit was inspired by the fifth anniversary of the Moody Center for the Arts and the 10th anniversary of the Turrell Skyspace, the first [Skyspace] in the world to feature an embedded speaker system," Weaver said. "As we celebrate this anniversary year, our hope is that the experimental spirit inspired by the Skyspace will continue to resonate through the next decade of arts at Rice."
The exhibition will be accompanied by performances in the galleries and in the blackbox theater located in the Moody Center.
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"We're looking forward to a season of programs and performances in collaboration with Rice faculty and Shepherd School of Music students, as well as visiting artists and musicians," Weaver said. "The first is Feb. 17 at 7 p.m. led by conductor Jerry Hou of the Shepherd School, and the second [is] on Apr. 14 by visiting Navajo artist Raven Chacon."
The student opening will have music provided by KTRU, food and drinks and is intended to be student-focused.
"We're planning on having free boba tea for the first 50 students attending as a treat to open the new semester," Marc Armena, the co-chair of the Moody Student Collaborative that is hosting the student opening, said.
Because of the exhibition's focus, The Moody Student Collaborative is reversing the flow of inspiration of art from music by launching "The Soundwaves Playlist."
"We launched an open call for suggestions on our Instagram page. There'll be six posts, each featuring a different piece from the exhibition where students can comment music suggestions," Armena said. "Each post is another way to increase their chances to win a $25 Coffeehouse gift card. The finished playlist will be featured by the KTRU DJ at the opening where the winner will be announced."
[1/29/2022 11:15 a.m.] This article has been updated to reflect that the student opening is on Jan. 29.
[1/29/2022 2:46 p.m.] This article has been updated to reflect that the student opening will not feature student performances | eng | 23f587f2-113c-4c1c-81ce-6bb9d40fe539 | https://www.ricethresher.org/article/2022/01/soundwaves-opening-at-moody |
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.\
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-- John Keats
I. Senior year of high school was one of the most nerve-racking times for me. Not that I was worried about my academic success, which I'm glad I wasn't because no boss has ever asked what I got in English that year. But because what seemed like the rest of my life hung on one fateful decision: what my plans were for after high school.
The uncertainty most people face their senior year of high school as they consider which college to attend, where to live, or where to work is undeniable. And for some, it's almost overbearing. But as I've come to learn in the few short years since I've graduated, that uncertainty was only a glimpse of what will come the rest of life.
The ability to not just deal with but thrive with uncertainties is what the young poet John Keats calls *Negative Capability -- *one's ability to remain in uncertainties and mysteries. Cultivating Negative Capability for those tough life decisions is important, but Keats was alluding to a much more creative use of the term, saying that Negative Capability "went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously.1"
II. Shakespeare's ability to put himself in the life and minds of each of his characters, even those that were evil, without judging them is what Keats so admired about his writings.
But Shakespeare wasn't the only creative who could do so. Mozart's ability to utilize different styles of music without forming opinions that some were better than others was how he practiced Negative Capability. Robert Greene points out in his book, Mastery, that Bach's music was very different from that of Mozart's. But instead of dismissing Bach's compositions as less than his own, he studied Bach's music and intertwined the two styles for a new, different style of music.
That's where the benefit of practicing Negative Capability pays off. If you're quick to dismiss an idea, philosophy, book, or person, you don't allow yourself to explore those mysteries waiting to be discovered. Greene explains in order to practice Negative Capability:
"You must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path...You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth."
Read books from authors you haven't heard of.\
Watch YouTube videos from channels to which you're not subscribed.\
Look at problems in fields unrelated to the one in which you work.
But most importantly, be okay with the mystery that comes with asking questions about why things are the way they are.
"The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces."\
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-- Robert Greene
III. With anything in life, there's a caveat to this. Although practicing Negative Capability is important, it becomes dangerous if you never get out of that mindset. Once you've evaluated all the options and considered all angles for how to solve a problem, make a decision and run with it. Sitting around and pondering ideas is an important practice, but if it's all you do you'll never create anything inspiring or original.
Doing that just reminds me of this scene from Good Will Hunting:
With that, I leave you to have an inspiring, thought-provoking, curiosity-filled Monday and hope that spirit continues throughout the week.
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Every Friday, I send an email with insights, ideas, and stories from the books and articles I read. I promise you'll find something new and interesting to read every week. | eng | f6cdbc4e-047c-4a94-841a-eead2234e999 | https://www.dltn.io/posts/being-okay-with-negative-capability |
If you've ever been pulled underwater at the beach and came up sputtering with a mouthful of salt water, you might wonder where the ocean picked up that briny flavor. Read on to learn just where all that salt comes from.
Early explorers drove flags into the ground to claim territories. But no one bothered to float a flag in the oceans. For the most part, we peaceably shared the oceans until we realized what valuable goods could be found in their dark and murky depths.
Seventy percent of the Earth's fresh water is in polar ice caps, the those caps calve icebergs all the time. So why can't we use those icebergs to provide fresh water that so many countries are in desperate need of?
There's still a lot we don't know about the world. A thousand years ago, we thought we could literally sail off the edge of the planet. Good thing we're quick learners. But while space may be the final frontier, the ocean may be the greater mystery.
There's no denying it: "Anomaly" is a great word, full of danger and mystery. So when an underwater object is declared a bona fide anomaly, it's no surprise our ears perk up a bit. But is the Baltic Sea anomaly worth the hype or just a big old dud?
Desalination has long been considered too expensive and too energy-intensive to make much sense. But with newer technologies, that line of thinking is changing. What are some of the most interesting desalination projects on the planet?
Without water, Earth would be a barren and lifeless planet. But did you know the Earth's water supply has not increased or decreased for billions of years? No wonder hydrologists are so fascinated by water. | eng | 37f220f6-f9f7-4718-a42c-fcdfdc0cd14e | https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography |